XVIII
A policeman in a sheepskin coat and huge goloshes—the exact counterpart of the one who had been there in the morning—stood stolidly near the church; a dog, the precise image of the cur I had seen at the same time, was running along the same road, only in the opposite direction. Everything—the square and the building and the sky, were just the same as they had been early in the day. But everything appeared profoundly uninteresting and simply annoyed me unspeakably. All that I saw seemed to be there purposely to remind me that an entire day had not yet passed since the events of the morning. Nonetheless, I knew in my own mind that a whole eternity had passed.
“A letter for you, sir.”
The Academy porter handed me a letter, which I stuffed into my pocket without opening. The handwriting seemed familiar to me; it was no doubt an answer from the friend to whom I had written in my time of enthusiasm. What was it I had written? … Ah! yes …
“How stupid!” I said aloud and angrily.
The porter, who had been looking at me expectantly, turned away grumbling, with an offended air.
“Sh—sh—sh—sh!” hissed the sub-inspector, leaning over the top landing of the staircase.
The fat little old man, with his comic shaven face, did not look happy. The calm voice of a professor could be heard from the lecture-room close by; and from the other end of the corridor resounded a mingled hum of discordant voices. The sub-inspector strained anxiously his accustomed ear, listening to these sounds, in which an experienced man could catch a peculiar tone, for when a hundred young voices are raised a third above their ordinary pitch, the din resembles the angry buzzing of a disturbed hive.
The old man came up to me and took my arm; still straining his ears and looking anxiously towards the lecture-room. He had known my father, and as we were natives of the same province, he was rather partial to me. We often chatted together; and he had told me expansively of his youthful days, and how he had once “been in trouble.” This ruined his career; and now he was thankful for his present situation, which he had obtained with great difficulty. He valued the post highly, and I sometimes felt towards him as I felt towards Titus. The “crust-of-bread” question—for himself and his family—was a perpetual cause of anxiety for the old man. For this he would agitate and worry himself, even to the extent of equivocating and twisting his mind inside out, assuming an air of pedagogic severity, and trying to hide his inborn good-nature. “Ah!” he would say at times, sighing deeply, “it is difficult to get on with you students; I tell you so, in confidence, truthfully;” and then we would both smile sympathetically.
Just now he had an official and careworn expression.
“Look here, Mr. Gavrilov,” he said, “what’s going on among you in there?” And as he spoke he listened again.
“Do you hear that noise?”
I, too, listened; and then answered:—
“Yes, they are making a terrible row.”
“What tricks are you up to? Tell an old man honestly.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“What is it to me? However, I can tell you … Don’t be anxious. It is because something unpleasant has happened to one of them—to Urmánov.”
“Why, what on earth do you mean? How unpleasant? They mean to hiss the Bohemian; that is it, nothing more.”
“Yes; it is true. Have you ever been to a slaughterhouse? Have you heard when the butcher kills an ox what a row the other beasts kick up?”
The old man edged away from me, drew his arm from mine and looked at me with astonished eyes, even putting out his lips with a startled expression.
At that moment the figure of Professor Byelichka appeared on the landing; and as the old man hurried up to him, I burst out laughing and went into the lecture-hall.
Several students surrounded me at once, pouring out confused questions; some asking what I knew about Urmánov; others speaking of the Bohemian. I stood looking at them all; and I felt that I was smiling in a strange way. I had, somehow, completely lost the power of hearing the din with understanding, and the once familiar excitement seemed strange to me and incomprehensible. I only saw moving lips and gesticulating arms, and again laughed.
To my delight, the door opened again and the Professor appeared on the threshold, the subinspector’s anxious face peeping in after him.
The students went to their benches. The Professor, going to his place, stood leaning with two fingers on the table, and waiting composedly for the noise to cease. Then his rich, even voice began:—
“The last time, gentleman, we stopped at—”
At the first sounds of this fine, passionless, and rather oily baritone I felt a certain sense of relief. The Bohemian was a first-rate lecturer; but it was all the same to me; I was quite indifferent to the subject of the lecture. Lately, there had been dark rumors concerning Byelichka. People talked of certain reform projects of his, of a character so utterly obscurantist as to render them incapable of adoption, and proposed merely to prove the author’s servile devotion to those in power. There were other vague rumors of like import. None of the students had any authentic information, for the Reports of the Council-meetings were kept secret, and the Professors knew how to hold their tongues. Hence, there were only dim conjectures, quite sufficient, however, to rouse angry discussions; some taking the Bohemian’s part; others vehemently attacking him.
To me, in my then mood, all this was utterly indifferent: but I could not help admiring the sangfroid with which the Bohemian began his lecture. Though he must have known of the incipient hostility of his audience, yet he began at the point where he had previously left off and lectured as calmly as if nothing had happened. Only on entering, he raised his long, thick eyelashes, and cast from under them a rapid and watchful glance.
“… Thus the monad of the species previously described may be defined as a simple sac devoid of even the most elementary organs. Taking up its abode in the stomach of a higher animal, it becomes completely surrounded with a nutritive environment.”
“In this nutritive environment, gentlemen,” proceeded the Bohemian meditately and in a singularly dulcet tone, raising his eyes to the ceiling as though seeking for better and still more dulcet words, “In this nutritive environment its existence is in many respects highly satisfactory. For it receives from Nature the utmost possible good, with the least possible expenditure of energy; and is not this the aim of many aspirations?”
Having made this slight excursion into the domain of generalization the Bohemian again glanced at the students. A low murmur, expressive of awakening interest, ran through the lecture-room, slight digressions from a dry exposition having always the effect of enlivening an audience.
The Bohemian’s voice flowed on still more smoothly, like a stream of oil. Rolling out his rounded periods, he mounted gradually higher and higher till, towards the end of the lecture, he passed from individual facts to broad generalizations. I believe he really loved science; he worked hard too, and was now himself carried away by his exposition. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling; the wording of his phrases became more and more flowing; the peculiar, unctuous notes of his voice grew more pronounced.
On the walls hung pictures, representing anatomical sections and cells, “leading a satisfactory existence.” Two skeletons stood, one on each side of the platform, with hanging arms, bent knees, and skulls drooping on one side, listening, as it were, with piteous attention, while the Professor knocked down one after another the barriers between the traditional “Kingdoms,” and placed a mere nutriment-absorbing cell in a recognized place among other “satisfactory existences.”
The audience had long since been carried away. I looked back and saw rows of eager faces and dilated eyes. Of the two contending influences—science on the one hand and indignation on the other—the former had obviously got the best of it; and the Bohemian, as representing science, held for the moment, not alone the attention but the hearts of his hearers.
But I felt myself equally a stranger to both these influences. While listening to the full, vibrating voice with its soft, rich tones, I had gone off into a dream. And in the only sounds which filled the lecture-hall, my fancy saw, floating and swimming, the contented cells described by the Professor, elementary and blessed prototypes of universal life.
Yes, it is quite true; this is the formula of life, simple and clear. … But why is he so pleased with it? What is there in this to kindle either enthusiasm or indignation? …
The lecture hour passed rapidly and imperceptibly. Towards the end I was suddenly seized with a feeling of intolerable depression and boredom, as though I had penetrated into the most secret essence of life and found therein only filthy and nauseous dregs. I rose and went out. As I closed the door a round of applause rang out in the lecture-hall. I listened to it through the door with surprise and annoyance. The noise of clapping resounding along the corridor frightened the old sub-inspector, who came running with a troubled face. On learning what it was all about he drew a long breath of relief.
“That is all right! That is all right! Heaven be praised! They have just clapped a little; that is much better … They have not hissed.”
I could not get rid of my feeling of amazement. Was it possible that only yesterday, I, too, should have clapped? Yes, I should, and I reflected with a glow of self-satisfaction, that I was now above suchlike frivolities. In there they shift about between enthusiasm and indignation, not knowing that to be impervious alike to enthusiasm and indignation is to understand Truth.
At the door was a two-seated droshky, waiting for a return fare to Moscow. The miserable jades in the shafts stood, with their heads bent and their legs wide apart, as if meditating on their dismal fate. I went down the steps and got into the droshky. Then, suddenly remembering that I did not want to go to Moscow, I got out and walked as usual to a restaurant frequented by the students.
The idea suggested in Byelichka’s lecture seemed to grow wider and wider. “Elementary processes”—this is the final summing up of everything. And everyone has his own fashion of carrying on these processes; Byelichka acts one way, someone else another way, what does it matter?