“You just said ‘the Kingdom of God.’ I’ve heard you preached God there, and wore chains?”
“Let my chains be,” he smiled, “that’s something else entirely. I was not yet preaching anything then, but I was yearning for their God—that’s true. They proclaimed atheism then . . . a small bunch of them, but that makes no difference; these were only the front-runners, but this was their first executive step—that’s the important thing. Here again it’s their logic; but there is always anguish in logic. I was of a different culture, and my heart couldn’t accept it. The ingratitude with which they parted with the idea, the whistling and mudslinging were unbearable to me. The bootishness of the process alarmed me. However, reality always smacks of the boot, even with the brightest striving towards the ideal, and I, of course, should have known that. But even so, I was a man of a different type: I was free in choosing, but they were not—and I wept, wept for them, wept over the old idea, and maybe wept real tears, without any pretty words.”
“You believed so strongly in God?” I asked mistrustfully.
“My friend, that question is perhaps superfluous. Let’s suppose I didn’t believe very much, but still I couldn’t help yearning for the idea. I couldn’t help imagining to myself at times how man was going to live without God and whether it would ever be possible. My heart always decided it was impossible; but a certain period was perhaps possible . . . For me, there is even no doubt that it will come; but here I’ve always imagined another picture to myself . . .”
“Which?”
True, he had said earlier that he was happy; of course, there was a good deal of rapturousness in his words; that is how I take much of what he said then. Without doubt, respecting this man as I do, I will not venture now to set down on paper all that we talked about then; but I will present here several strokes from the strange picture I managed to coax out of him. Above all, always and all the time before then, I had been tormented by these “chains,” and I wanted to clear them up—that was why I persisted. Several fantastic and extremely strange ideas that he uttered then have remained in my heart forever.
“I imagine to myself, my dear,” he began with a pensive smile, “that the battle is over and the fighting has subsided. After the curses, the mudslinging and whistling, a calm has come, and people are left alone, as they wished: the great former idea has left them; the great source of strength that had nourished and warmed them till then is departing, like that majestic, inviting sun in Claude Lorrain’s painting, but it already seemed like the last day of mankind. And people suddenly realized that they remained quite alone, and at once felt a great orphancy. My dear boy, I’ve never been able to imagine people ungrateful and grown stupid. The orphaned people would at once begin pressing together more closely and lovingly; they would hold hands, understanding that they alone were now everything for each other. The great idea of immortality would disappear and would have to be replaced; and all the great abundance of the former love for the one who was himself immortality, would be turned in all of them to nature, to the world, to people, to every blade of grass. They would love the earth and life irrepressibly and in the measure to which they gradually became aware of their transient and finite state, and it would be with a special love now, not as formerly. They would begin to observe and discover such phenomena and secrets in nature as they had never supposed before, because they would look at nature with new eyes, the eyes with which a lover looks at his beloved. They would wake up and hasten to kiss each other, hurrying to love, conscious that the days were short, and that that was all they had left. They would work for each other, and each would give all he had to everyone, and would be happy in that alone. Every child would know and feel that each person on earth was like a father and mother to him. ‘Tomorrow may be my last day,’ each of them would think, looking at the setting sun, ‘but all the same, though I die, they will all remain, and their children after them’—and this thought that they would remain, loving and trembling for each other in the same way, would replace the thought of a meeting beyond the grave. Oh, they would hasten to love, in order to extinguish the great sadness in their hearts. They would be proud and brave for themselves, but would become timorous for one another. Each would tremble for the life and happiness of each. They would become tender to each other and would not be ashamed of it, as now, and would caress each other like children. Meeting each other, they would exchange deep and meaningful looks, and there would be love and sadness in their eyes . . .
“My dear,” he suddenly broke off with a smile, “this is all a fantasy, even quite an incredible one; but I have imagined it only too often, because all my life I’ve been unable to live without it and not to think of it. I’m not talking about my faith: I have no great faith, I’m a deist, a philosophical deist, like all the thousand of us, as I suppose, but . . . but it’s remarkable that I’ve always ended my picture with a vision, as in Heine, of ‘Christ on the Baltic Sea.’ 35I couldn’t do without him, I couldn’t help imagining him, finally, amidst the orphaned people. He would come to them, stretch out his arms to them, and say, ‘How could you have forgotten me?’ And here it would be as if a veil fell from everyone’s eyes, and the great exultant hymn of the new and last resurrection would ring out . . .
“Let’s drop it, my friend; and my ‘chains’ are nonsense; don’t worry about them. And here’s another thing: you know that I’m modest and sober of speech; if I fell to talking now, it’s . . . from various feelings, and because it’s with you; I’ll never say it to anyone else. I add that to reassure you.”
But I was even touched; the falseness I had feared wasn’t there, and I was especially glad, because it became clear to me that he really was yearning and suffering and really, undoubtedly, had loved much—and for me that was the most precious thing of all. I told him so with enthusiasm.
“But you know,” I suddenly added, “it seems to me that despite all your yearning, you must have been extremely happy then.”
He laughed gaily.
“You’re particularly apt in your observations today,” he said. “Well, yes, I was happy, and how could I be unhappy with such yearning? There’s no one freer and happier than a Russian European wanderer from our thousand. I say it, truly, without laughing, and there’s much that’s serious here. Yes, I wouldn’t exchange my yearning for any other happiness. In this sense I’ve always been happy, my dear, all my life. And out of happiness I came to love your mama then for the first time in my life.”
“How, for the first time in your life?”
“Precisely so. In my wandering and yearning, I suddenly came to love her as never before, and sent for her at once.”
“Oh, tell me about that, too, tell me about mama!”
“But that’s why I invited you, and, you know,” he smiled gaily, “I was afraid you’d forgiven me mama on account of Herzen or some sort of little conspiracy . . .”
Chapter Eight
I
SINCE WE WENT on talking all evening then and sat till it was night, I won’t quote the whole conversation, but will just set down something that explained to me, finally, one mysterious point in his life.
I’ll begin by saying that for me there’s no doubt that he loved mama, and if he abandoned her and “unmarried” her when he went away, it was, of course, because he had become too bored or something of the sort, which, however, happens with everyone in the world, but which is always hard to explain. Abroad, however, after a long while, he suddenly began to love mama again from afar, that is, in thought, and sent for her. “Whimsicality,” they may say, but I say something else: in my opinion, here was all that can possibly be serious in human life, despite the apparent slip-slop, which I, perhaps, partly make allowances for. But I swear that I put this European yearning of his beyond question and not only on a par with, but incomparably higher than, any contemporary practical activity in the building of railroads. His love for mankind I acknowledge as a most sincere and profound feeling, without any tricks; and his love for mama as something completely unquestionable, though maybe a bit fantastic. Abroad, “in yearning and happiness,” and, I’ll add, in the strictest monastic solitude (this particular information I received later through Tatyana Pavlovna), he suddenly remembered mama—remembered precisely her “sunken cheeks”—and sent for her at once.