Short Stories
lies swollen out to the size of a mountain, awaiting death in insufferable
agonies. In Europe persons guilty of inhumanity towards domestic animals
have long been punished by law. But in spite of our European enlightenment,
in spite of our European pavements, in spite of the European architecture
of our houses, we are still far from shaking off our time-honoured
traditions.
"Though the houses are new, the conventions are old."
And, indeed, the houses are not new, at least the staircases in them are
not. We have more than once in our paper alluded to the fact that in the
Petersburg Side in the house of the merchant Lukyanov the steps of the
wooden staircase have decayed, fallen away, and have long been a danger for
Afimya Skapidarov, a soldier's wife who works in the house, and is often
obliged to go up the stairs with water or armfuls of wood. At last our
predictions have come true: yesterday evening at half-past eight Afimya
Skapidarov fell down with a basin of soup and broke her leg. We do not know
whether Lukyanov will mend his staircase now, Russians are often wise after
the event, but the victim of Russian carelessness has by now been taken to
the hospital. In the same way we shall never cease to maintain that the
house-porters who clear away the mud from the wooden pavement in the
Viborgsky Side ought not to spatter the legs of passers-by, but should
throw the mud up into heaps as is done in Europe," and so on, and so on.
"What's this?" I asked in some perplexity, looking at Prohor Savvitch.
"What's the meaning of it?"
"How do you mean?"
"Why, upon my word! Instead of pitying Ivan Matveitch, they pity the
crocodile!"
"What of it? They have pity even for a beast, a _mammal_. We must be up to
Europe, mustn't we? They have a very warm feeling for crocodiles there too.
He-he-he!"
Saying this, queer old Prohor Savvitch dived into his papers and would not
utter another word.
I stuffed the _Voice_ and the _News-sheet_ into my pocket and collected as
many old copies of the newspapers as I could find for Ivan Matveitch's
diversion in the evening, and though the evening was far off, yet on this
occasion I slipped away from the office early to go to the Arcade and look,
if only from a distance, at what was going on there, and to listen to the
various remarks and currents of opinion. I foresaw that there would be a
regular crush there, and turned up the collar of my coat to meet it. I
somehow felt rather shy--so unaccustomed are we to publicity. But I feel
that I have no right to report my own prosaic feelings when faced with this
remarkable and original incident.
BOBOK
FROM SOMEBODY'S DIARY
Semyon Ardalyonovitch said to me all of a sudden the day before yesterday:
"Why, will you ever be sober, Ivan Ivanovitch? Tell me that, pray."
A strange requirement. I did not resent it, I am a timid man; but here they
have actually made me out mad. An artist painted my portrait as it
happened: "After all, you are a literary man," he said. I submitted, he
exhibited it. I read: "Go and look at that morbid face suggesting
insanity."
It may be so, but think of putting it so bluntly into print. In print
everything ought to be decorous; there ought to be ideals, while instead of
that....
Say it indirectly, at least; that's what you have style for. But no, he
doesn't care to do it indirectly. Nowadays humour and a fine style have
disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit. I do not resent it: but God
knows I am not enough of a literary man to go out of my mind. I have
written a novel, it has not been published. I have written articles--they
have been refused. Those articles I took about from one editor to another;
everywhere they refused them: you have no salt they told me. "What sort of
salt do you want?" I asked with a jeer. "Attic salt?"
They did not even understand. For the most part I translate from the French
for the booksellers. I write advertisements for shopkeepers too: "Unique
opportunity! Fine tea, from our own plantations ..." I made a nice little
sum over a panegyric on his deceased excellency Pyotr Matveyitch. I
compiled the "Art of pleasing the ladies," a commission from a bookseller.
I have brought out some six little works of this kind in the course of my
life. I am thinking of making a collection of the _bon mots_ of Voltaire,
but am afraid it may seem a little flat to our people. Voltaire's no good
now; nowadays we want a cudgel, not Voltaire. We knock each other's last
teeth out nowadays. Well, so that's the whole extent of my literary
activity. Though indeed I do send round letters to the editors gratis and
fully signed. I give them all sorts of counsels and admonitions, criticise
and point out the true path. The letter I sent last week to an editor's
office was the fortieth I had sent in the last two years. I have wasted
four roubles over stamps alone for them. My temper is at the bottom of it
all.
I believe that the artist who painted me did so not for the sake of
literature, but for the sake of two symmetrical warts on my forehead, a
natural phenomenon, he would say. They have no ideas, so now they are out
for phenomena. And didn't he succeed in getting my warts in his
portrait--to the life. That is what they call realism.
And as to madness, a great many people were put down as mad among us last
year. And in such language! "With such original talent" ... "and yet, after
all, it appears" ... "however, one ought to have foreseen it long ago."
That is rather artful; so that from the point of view of pure art one may
really commend it. Well, but after all, these so-called madmen have turned
out cleverer than ever. So it seems the critics can call them mad, but they
cannot produce any one better.
The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call
himself a fool--a faculty unheard of nowadays. In old days, once a year at
any rate a fool would recognise that he was a fool, but nowadays not a bit
of it. And they have so muddled things up that there is no telling a fool
from a wise man. They have done that on purpose.
I remember a witty Spaniard saying when, two hundred and fifty years ago,
the French built their first madhouses: "They have shut up all their fools
in a house apart, to make sure that they are wise men themselves." Just so:
you don't show your own wisdom by shutting some one else in a madhouse. "K.
has gone out of his mind, means that we are sane now." No, it doesn't mean
that yet.
Hang it though, why am I maundering on? I go on grumbling and grumbling.
Even my maidservant is sick of me. Yesterday a friend came to see me. "Your
style is changing," he said; "it is choppy: you chop and chop--and then a
parenthesis, then a parenthesis in the parenthesis, then you stick in
something else in brackets, then you begin chopping and chopping again."
The friend is right. Something strange is happening to me. My character is
changing and my head aches. I am beginning to see and hear strange things,
not voices exactly, but as though some one beside me were muttering,
"_bobok, bobok, bobok_!"
What's the meaning of this _bobok_? I must divert my mind.
* * * * *
I went out in search of diversion, I hit upon a funeral. A distant
relation--a collegiate counsellor, however. A widow and five daughters, all
marriageable young ladies. What must it come to even to keep them in
slippers. Their father managed it, but now there is only a little pension.
They will have to eat humble pie. They have always received me
ungraciously. And indeed I should not have gone to the funeral now had it
not been for a peculiar circumstance. I followed the procession to the
cemetery with the rest; they were stuck-up and held aloof from me. My
uniform was certainly rather shabby. It's five-and-twenty years, I believe,
since I was at the cemetery; what a wretched place!
To begin with the smell. There were fifteen hearses, with palls varying in
expensiveness; there were actually two catafalques. One was a general's and
one some lady's. There were many mourners, a great deal of feigned
mourning and a great deal of open gaiety. The clergy have nothing to
complain of; it brings them a good income. But the smell, the smell. I
should not like to be one of the clergy here.
I kept glancing at the faces of the dead cautiously, distrusting my
impressionability. Some had a mild expression, some looked unpleasant. As a
rule the smiles were disagreeable, and in some cases very much so. I don't
like them; they haunt one's dreams.
During the service I went out of the church into the air: it was a grey
day, but dry. It was cold too, but then it was October. I walked about
among the tombs. They are of different grades. The third grade cost thirty
roubles; it's decent and not so very dear. The first two grades are tombs
in the church and under the porch; they cost a pretty penny. On this
occasion they were burying in tombs of the third grade six persons, among
them the general and the lady.
I looked into the graves--and it was horrible: water and such water!
Absolutely green, and ... but there, why talk of it! The gravedigger was
baling it out every minute. I went out while the service was going on and
strolled outside the gates. Close by was an almshouse, and a little further
off there was a restaurant. It was not a bad little restaurant: there was
lunch and everything. There were lots of the mourners here. I noticed a
great deal of gaiety and genuine heartiness. I had something to eat and
drink.
Then I took part in the bearing of the coffin from the church to the grave.
Why is it that corpses in their coffins are so heavy? They say it is due to
some sort of inertia, that the body is no longer directed by its owner ...
or some nonsense of that sort, in opposition to the laws of mechanics and
common sense. I don't like to hear people who have nothing but a general
education venture to solve the problems that require special knowledge; and
with us that's done continually. Civilians love to pass opinions about
subjects that are the province of the soldier and even of the
field-marshal; while men who have been educated as engineers prefer
discussing philosophy and political economy.
I did not go to the requiem service. I have some pride, and if I am only
received owing to some special necessity, why force myself on their
dinners, even if it be a funeral dinner. The only thing I don't understand
is why I stayed at the cemetery; I sat on a tombstone and sank into
appropriate reflections.
I began with the Moscow exhibition and ended with reflecting upon
astonishment in the abstract. My deductions about astonishment were these:
"To be surprised at everything is stupid of course, and to be astonished at
nothing is a great deal more becoming and for some reason accepted as good
form. But that is not really true. To my mind to be astonished at nothing
is much more stupid than to be astonished at everything. And, moreover, to
be astonished at nothing is almost the same as feeling respect for nothing.
And indeed a stupid man is incapable of feeling respect."
"But what I desire most of all is to feel respect. I _thirst_ to feel
respect," one of my acquaintances said to me the other day.
He thirsts to feel respect! Goodness, I thought, what would happen to you
if you dared to print that nowadays?
At that point I sank into forgetfulness. I don't like reading the epitaphs
of tombstones: they are everlastingly the same. An unfinished sandwich was
lying on the tombstone near me; stupid and inappropriate. I threw it on the
ground, as it was not bread but only a sandwich. Though I believe it is not
a sin to throw bread on the earth, but only on the floor. I must look it up
in Suvorin's calendar.