“Perhaps not,” said the abbot. “If he does, it’s nobody’s fault but his own. That man should have ended it all long since. The older he gets the more surely he must see that he’s detestable.”
“I really do doubt that he thinks that way,” the prince said.
“Perhaps not, perhaps not,” the abbot agreed, nodding. “Yet he’s a master imitator, we’re given to understand. Surely he’s imitated good men, from time to time, and accidentally picked up at least a touch of decent conscience. Imitate anything long enough — gaze at anything long enough with a careful eye — and you have a tendency to become it, or at very least a tendency to respect it. I might take the case of painting. There was a time, you’ll remember, when people hated Nature. When they found Nature unavoidable, in a particular painting, they transmuted all that garish green to brown. Forced to live in the country, they transformed lawless Nature into formal gardens. Then an outlaw generation of young painters came along and painted mountains ‘as they are’; and a gasping generation of young poets came along and wrote sweet love-songs to Mont Blanc. Rich merchants with big houses in the centers of their villages learned the subtle art of turning half an acre to a forest—‘natural’ pools, concrete reindeer. What had happened? Exactly! Painters had begun imitating the world as they saw it, a world of — incredible! — fat ladies with their clothes off, green mountains, majestic bears — and the world began to imitate the paintings. Make no mistake, make no mistake! The mimic is doomed to become what he mimics, or doomed unless a miracle of good fortune intervenes. It’s like the story of the miser.”
“Miser?” said the prince.
Armida sighed.
Chapter Fourteen. The Abbot’s Last Tale
There was once a wealthy merchant named Nikita the Mean. One day as the world rolled on he went out for a walk and on his way saw an old beggar who was asking for alms. ‘For Christ’s sweet sake, good merchant, give me at least a little pittance!’ cried the beggar. Nikita the Mean tipped his nose up and passed him by.
“But a poor peasant who followed behind him felt pity for the beggar and gave him a kopek. Rich Nikita saw that everyone was watching and felt horribly ashamed; so he stopped and said to the peasant, ‘Listen, little brother, lend me a kopek. I want to give something to the beggar but I have no small change.’ The peasant gave Nikita a kopek and asked: ‘When shall I come to collect my loan?’ ‘Come tomorrow.’
“The next day the poor man went to the rich man for his kopek; he entered the broad courtyard. ‘Is Nikita the Mean at home?’ ‘He is,’ said Nikita’s wife. ‘What do you want of him?’ ‘I have come for my kopek.’ Nikita the Mean heard this and went and hid under the bed and told his wife to tell the peasant that now that she looked she found he wasn’t home after all, the peasant should come tomorrow. ‘Come tomorrow,’ said Nikita’s wife; ‘now that I look I find he’s gone.’ So the following day the peasant came again, and this time he came upon Nikita himself, standing by the gate, for there was no time for Nikita to run away. ‘I have come for my kopek,’ said the peasant. ‘Ah, little brother,’ said Nikita, ‘come and see me some other time. I have no small change just now.’ The poor man bowed low and said: ‘I will come next week.’ The following week he came a third time and was told: ‘Forgive me, dear brother, but again I have no small change. If you have change for a hundred rubles, I can give you a kopek. If not, come next month.’ A month later, the poor man went again to the rich man. When Nikita the Mean saw him through the window, he said to his wife: ‘Listen, wife, I will undress completely and lie under the ikons; and you cover me with a shroud and sit down and lament me as though I were dead. When the peasant comes for his loan, tell him that I died today.’
“The wife did as her husband commanded; she sat down and shed burning tears. The peasant came into the room and she asked, ‘What is it, dear brother?’ ‘I have come to collect my loan from Nikita the Mean,’ answered the peasant. ‘Ah, little peasant, Nikita the Mean wished you a long, happy life! He has just died.’ ‘May angels carry him to heaven!’ said the peasant. ‘And since he was a good man and gave money to beggars, let me do something for him. Permit me to wash his body.’ Before the wife could object, the peasant snatched a kettle of boiling water and poured it over Nikita the Mean. Nikita could hardly stand it; he gritted his teeth and jerked his feet. The peasant pretended not to notice and washed the body and prepared it for burial. To the wife he said, ‘Buy a coffin and bring it here, and we will put the body in it. And if I know anything at all about my friend Nikita he would not want to be buried without his money, so we will also put all Nikita’s money in the coffin, packed around his body, and then we will bear it to the church.’ The wife had no choice but to go and get a coffin, and the peasant did as he had said he would. He crammed in Nikita’s gold and jewels and his ivory boxes and silver clasps, and he placed Nikita’s golden saber over the body, and closed the lid. They carried the coffin to the church and the peasant began to groan and read the psalter over him. And Nikita’s wife stood beside him and wept burning tears.
‘Dark night came. Suddenly a window opened and thieves broke in, bringing with them all that evening’s loot, silver coins and gold coins, silver and gold candlesticks, and cups of solid amber, treasure enough to keep a king. The thieves ran straight to the casket to use it for a counting table. The peasant and Nikita’s wife ducked down quickly behind the altar while the thieves counted their treasure and put it all in sacks. Then the thieves opened the casket and discovered, to their surprise, the wealth of Nikita the Mean, all packed around the body. ‘This is a lucky night for us,’ they cried. ‘Praise God!’ And they sent out for more bags and began putting into them all Nikita’s treasure. Nikita gritted his teeth in agony, but he would not cry out because there was always the chance that the thieves might be taken and the treasure recovered, whereas that kopek would be gone forever if that peasant got ahold of it. Soon the treasure was all bagged and tied except for Nikita’s golden saber, and this the thieves began to quarrel about. The peasant suddenly jumped out and cried, ‘Let me settle this dispute! Whoever cuts off the dead man’s head shall have the saber!’
’At this Nikita the Mean jumped up, beside himself with fear, and just in the nick of time, too! If he’d played dead another half second he would have been deader than he wanted. The thieves, too, were frightened, and abandoning the money, both Nikita’s and their own, they took to their heels. ‘Now, little peasant,’ said Nikita, ‘let us share the robbers’ money, and since I worked the harder for it, I shall have the most.’ They shared it as Nikita the Mean thought right, and even so, both of them got a great deal. ‘And how about my kopek?’ said the poor man. ‘Ah, dear brother,’ said Nikita, ‘you can see for yourself I have no small change.’ And Nikita the Mean never did return the kopek, but lived happily ever after.”
Chapter Fifteen
It’s an interesting story”, said the prince, after a nod from Armida, “but I’m not sure why you tell it.”
“Well, not solely for the moral,” said the abbot with a smile. “As the world rolls on, I grow less and less interested in the moral. But it’s true, as the story teaches us, there’s a curious rigidity in human nature, especially when we get older. It’s easier to heal the sick or give blind men sight than it is to part a miser from his kopek — or a murderer from his knife. The miser may hate himself, as did Nikita the Mean; the murderer, if he has any sensitivity at all, may become, in his own eyes, so thoroughly repugnant that he spends half his days and nights out at the edges of cliffs, praying to God for the nerve to jump. Nevertheless, you know, a habit’s hard to break. You get a vision, one way or another, of what you’d like to be — perhaps a vision of yourself as the world’s greatest monster, if you happen to encounter the right books and friends. If you decide, for one reason or another, you don’t like that, you discover to your sorrow, if you’ve worked very long at becoming what you are, the new vision’s impotent to change you.”