“Kraft, shall you go to them again?” I asked him suddenly.
He turned slowly to me as though hardly understanding me. I sat down on a chair.
“Forgive them,” said Kraft suddenly.
I fancied, of course, that this was a sneer, but looking attentively at him, I saw such a strange and even wonderful ingenuousness in his face that I positively wondered at his asking me so earnestly to “forgive” them. He brought up a chair and sat down beside me.
“I know that I am perhaps a medley of all sorts of vanities and nothing more,” I began, “but I’m not apologizing.”
“And you’ve no need to apologize to anyone,” he said, quietly and earnestly. He talked all the time quietly and very slowly.
“I may be guilty in my own eyes. . . . I like being guilty in my own eyes. . . . Kraft, forgive me for talking nonsense. Tell me, surely you don’t belong to that circle? That’s what I wanted to ask.”
“They are no sillier than other people and no wiser; they are mad like every one else. . . .”
“Why, is every one mad?” I asked, turning towards him with involuntary curiosity.
“All the best people are mad nowadays; it’s the carnival of mediocrity and ineptitude and nothing else. . . . But it’s not worth talking about.”
As he talked he looked away into the air and began sentences and broke off without finishing them. I was particularly struck by a note of despondency in his voice.
“Surely Vassin is not one of them, Vassin has a mind, Vassin has a moral idea!” I cried.
“There are no moral ideas now. It suddenly appears that there is not one left and, what’s worse, that there never have been any.”
“Never have been any in the past?”
“Let us leave that!” he brought out with unmistakable weariness.
I was touched by his sorrowful earnestness. Ashamed of my own egoism I began to drop into his tone.
“The present day,” he began after a pause lasting two minutes, looking away into space, “the present day is the golden age of mediocrity and callousness, of a passion for ignorance, idleness, inefficiency, a craving for everything ready-made. No one thinks; it’s rare for anyone to work out an idea for himself.”
He broke off again and paused for a while; I listened. “Nowadays they are stripping Russia of her forests, and exhausting her natural wealth, turning the country into a waste and making it only fit for the Kalmucks. If a man looks forward and plants a tree every one laughs at him, and tells him he won’t live to enjoy it. On the other hand those with aspirations discuss nothing but what will be in a thousand years. The idea that sustained men has utterly gone. It’s as though they were all at an hotel and were leaving Russia to-morrow. They are alive if they could only. . . .”
“Excuse me, Kraft, you said they worried their heads about what would happen in a thousand years. But you despair about the future of Russia . . . isn’t that an anxiety of the same sort?”
“It — it’s the most essential question in the world!” he said irritably, and jumped up quickly from his seat.
“Ah, yes! I forgot,” he said suddenly in quite a different voice, looking at me in perplexity. “I asked you to come for something special and meanwhile . . . for heaven’s sake excuse me.”
He seemed suddenly to wake up from a sort of dream, and was almost disconcerted; he took a letter out of a portfolio on the table and gave it to me.
“This is what I have to give you. It’s a document of some importance,” he began, speaking collectedly and with a businesslike air. Long afterwards, when I recalled it, I was struck by this faculty in him (at an hour such as this was — for him!) of turning such wholehearted attention on another person’s affairs and going into them with such firmness and composure.
“It is a letter of Stolbyeev’s, that is of the man whose will gave rise to Versilov’s lawsuit with the Princes Sokolsky. The case is just being decided in the court, and will certainly be decided in Versilov’s favour; the law is on his side. Meanwhile, in this letter, a private letter written two years ago, the deceased sets forth his real dispositions, or more accurately his desires, and expresses them rather in favour of the Sokolskys than of Versilov. At any rate the points on which the Sokolskys rest their case in contesting the will are materially strengthened by this letter. Versilov’s opponents would give a great deal for this letter, though it really has no positive legal value. Alexey Nikanoritch (Andronikov), who managed Versilov’s affairs, kept this letter and not long before his death gave it to me, telling me to ‘take care of it’; perhaps he had a presentiment that he was dying and was anxious about his papers. I was unwilling to judge of Alexey Nikanoritch’s intentions in the case, and I must confess that at his death I found myself in disagreeable uncertainty what to do with this document, especially as the case was so soon to be concluded. But Marie Ivanovna, in whom Alexey Nikanoritch seems to have put great confidence in his lifetime, helped me out of the difficulty. She wrote to me three weeks ago telling me that I was to give the letter to you, as this would, she BELIEVED (her own expression) be in accordance with the wishes of the deceased, and I am very glad that I can at last give it to you.”
“Tell me,” I said, dumbfoundered at this new and unexpected information, “what am I to do with this letter now? How am I to act?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
“Impossible; my hands are tied, you must admit that! Versilov is so reckoning on this fortune . . . and, you know, he’ll be utterly lost without it; and it suddenly appears that a document like this exists!”
“It only exists here in this room.”
“Is that really so?” I looked at him attentively.
“If you can’t decide how to act in this case, what can I advise you?”
“But I can’t give it to the Sokolskys either. I should ruin all Versilov’s hopes, and be a traitor to him besides. . . . On the other hand if I give it to Versilov I plunge the innocent into poverty, and I should put Versilov in a hopeless dilemma too; he would either have to give up the fortune or become a thief.”
“You exaggerate the importance of the matter.”
“Tell me one thing: is this letter decisive, conclusive?”
“No, it isn’t. I’m not much of a lawyer. A lawyer on the other side would, no doubt, know how to make use of such a document and to turn it to account; but Alexey Nikanoritch considered positively that if this letter were put forward it would have no great legal value, so that Versilov’s case might be won all the same. This letter is more a matter of conscience, so to say. . . .”
“But that’s what matters most of all,” I interrupted, “just because it would put Versilov in a hopeless dilemma.”
“He may on the contrary destroy the document, and so escape all danger.”
“Have you any grounds for supposing such a thing of him, Kraft? That’s what I want to know; that’s why I’m here.”
“I believe every one would do the same in his place.”
“Would you behave so, yourself?”
“I’m not going to receive a fortune, so I can’t tell about myself.”
“Very well,” I said, putting the letter in my pocket. “The matter’s settled for the present. Listen, Kraft. Marie Ivanovna, who has, I assure you, told me a great deal, said to me that you and only you could tell me the truth of what happened at Ems a year and a half ago between Versilov and Mme. Ahmakov. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you as a sun that would throw light on everything. You don’t know my position, Kraft. I beseech you to tell me the whole truth. What I want to know is what kind of man He is, and now — now I need to know it more than ever.”
“I wonder Marie Ivanovna did not tell you all about it herself; she might have heard it all from Andronikov, and of course she has heard it and very likely knows more than I do.”
“Andronikov was not clear about it himself, so Marie Ivanovna told me. It seems a maze to which no one has the clue. The devil himself would be lost in it. I know that you were at Ems yourself at the time.”