" That's a story from a different opera," said Burkin.
" After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for half a minute, " my brother began looking out for an estate for himself. Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed of. My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mort- gaged estate of three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family, with servants' quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no gooseberry-bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay Ivano- vitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty goose- berry-bushes, planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.
" Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate ' Tchumbaroklov Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached ' alias Himalaiskoe ' in the afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges, fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the yard, where to put one's horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all stuck ou^ — he looked as though he might begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.
" We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to show me the estate.
" ' Well, how are you getting on here? ' I asked.
" ' Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.'
" He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a gentleman. He was already accus- tomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked it. He ate a great deal, went to the bath-house, was grow- ing stout, was already at law with the village com- mune and both factories, and was very much offended when the peasants did not call him ' Your Honour.' And he concerned himself with the salvaoion of his soul in a substantial, gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with an air of consequence. And what deeds of charity! He treated the peasants for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the village, and then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka — he thought that was the thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka I One day the fat landowner hauls the peasants up before the district captain for tres- pass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to a gallon of vodka, and they drink and shout ' Hurrah I ' and when they are drunk bow down to his feet. A change of life for the better, and being well-fed and idle develop in a Russian the most in- solent self-conceit. Nikolay Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid to have any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth, and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister. ' Education is essential, but for the peasants it is premature.' ' Corporal punish- ment is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is nothing to take its place.'
" ' I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,' he would say. ' The peasants like me. I need only to hold up my little finger and the peas- ants will do anything I like.'
" And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He repeated twenty times over ' We noblemen,' ' I as a noble '; obviously he did not remember that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father a soldier. Even our surname Tchimsha- Himalaisky, in reality so incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and very agreeable.
" But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell you about the change that took place in me during the brief hours I spent at his country place. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, but his own goosberries, gath- ered for the first time since the bushes were planted. Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has at last received his fa- vourite toy, and said : " ' How delicious 1 '
" And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, 1 Ah, how delicious 1 Do taste them! '
" They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:
" ' Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts Than hosts of baser truths.'
11 I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously fulfilled, who had attained his object in life, who had gained what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this oc- casion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the inso- lence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance a'nd brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us. overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hy- pocrisy, lying. . . . Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . . Every- thing is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this or- der of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of gen- eral hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him — disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree — and all goes well.