'When seeking truth, people take two steps forward to one step back. Sufferings, mistakes and world-weariness throw them back, but passion for truth and stubborn will-pO\ver drive them onwards, ever onwards. And—who knows ?—perhaps they will reach real truth in the end.'
'Good-bye,' shouted Samoylenko.
'Out of sight and out of hearing,' said the deacon. 'Happy journey!'
It began to drizzle.
A HARD CASE
At the edge of Mironositskoye village, in Prokofy's—the village elder's—bam, two men were bivouacking after a long day's hunting: Ivan Ivanovich, a veterinary surgeon, and Burkin, a grammar-school teacher.
The vet had a rather odd and quite unsuitable double-barrelled surname (Chimsha-Gimalaysky), but answered to plain Ivan Ivanovich in the neighbourhood. He lived at a suburban stud farm and had made this hunting trip just for the sake of an outing—whereas Burkin, the schoolmaster, was the regular summer guest of a local county family, being very much at home in these parts.
They were still awake. Ivan Ivanovich—a tall, thin old man with a long moustache—sat outside the doorway smoking his pipe in the moonlight, while Burkin lay inside on the hay, invisible in the gloom.
They talked about this and that, incidentally remarking that the elder's wife—a healthy, intelligent woman called Mavra—had never been outside her native village in her life, had never seen a town or railway, had spent the last ten years sitting over her stove, and would venture out of doors only at night.
'What's so odd about that?' asked Burkin.
These solitary types (Burkin continued), these snails, these hermit crabs who seek refuge inside their o^ .shells . .. there are plenty of them about. Perhaps such types represent throw-backs to an epoch when man's ancestors hadn't yet become social animals, but lived alone in their lairs. Or perhaps it's just a quirk ofhuman nature. Who knows? I'm ftot a scientist myself, that sort of thing isn't my line. All I say is, the Mavras aren't all that rare. Well, you take an instance close at hand: someone who died in to^wn a couple of months ago^^ne Belikov, classics master at my o^ school. You've heard of him of course. His great feat was to sport galoshes and an umbrella even on the finest days, and he always wore a warm, padded greatcoat. He kept his umbrella in a holder, his watch in a grey chamois-leather bag. When he took out a penknife to sharpen a pencil, that knife was also in a little holder. His face seemed to be encapsulated, too, because he kept it hidden behind an upturned collar. He wore dark glasses and a pullover, he kept cotton wool in his ears, and when he took a cab he always had the top put up. The man evinced, in short, a persistent obsessive drive to envelop himself in a membrane, creating a sort of carapace to isolate him and protect him from outside influences. The real world irritated him, scared him, kept him permanently on edge. It was to justify this nervousness, perhaps—this abhorrence of the actual—that he always praised things past, things which have never existed. The ancient languages which he taught were, in effect, the same old galoshes and umbrella in another form: his refuge from real life.
'The Greek language . . . oh, how melodious, how beautiful it is!' he would say with a sugary cxpression. And, as if to prove his words, he would screw up his eyes, hold up a finger and pronounce the word anthropos.
His thoughts also Belikov tried to confme within a framework. Nothing made sense to him except official regulations and newspaper articles condenming something or other. A school rule forbidding pupils to appear in the streets after nine in the evening, an article censuring sexual intercourse . . . he foWld clarity and precision in such matters. The thing was banned. That was that. In permissions and concessions, though, he always sensed a lurking sinister quality: some- thing incomplete and vague. When a to^ drama club was licensed— or a reading room, or a tea-shop—he would shake his head.
'That's all very well ofcourse and so on,' he would say. 'But what of the repercussions?'
All offences, all deviations, all infringements of the rules made him despondent^^ne might have wondered, though, what business they were ofhis. Ifa colleague was late for church, ifrumour reached him of some schoolboy prank, if a schoolmistress was seen out late at night with an officer, he would take it very much to heart and keep worrying about those repercusaons. At staff meetings he really depressed us with his misgivings, his pemicketiness, his utterly hideboWld observations on how badly the boys and girls behaved in school, on their rowdiness in class. ('Dear, oh dear, what if the authorities get wind ofit? Oh dear, what of the repercussions? And what a good idea it would be to expel Petrov of the Second Form and Yegorov of the Fourth.')
Well, what with his moa.ning and groaning, what with the dark glasses on his pale and—you know—ferrety little face, he so got us downwn that we yielded, we gave Petrov and Yegorov bad conduct marks, we put them in detention, and in the end we expelled them both.
He had the odd habit ofvisiting our lodgings. He would call on some teacher, sit down, say nothing, and seem to be on the look-out for something. He would sit there for an hour or two without a word, and then he would go. Maintaining good relations with his col- leagues, he called it. This calling and sitting obviously irked him, and he only did it because he felt it his duty to his colleagues. We teachers were afraid of him. So was the headmaster, even. Fantastic, isn't it? Our teachers were all thoroughly decent, right-thinking folk brought up on their Turgenev and their Shchedrin—and yet this little galoshes- and-umbrella man kept the entire school under his thumb for fifteen whole years! And not the school only. The whole town! Our ladies gave up their Saturday amateur theatricals lest he should hear of them. The clergy feared to eat meat and play cards in his presence. Thanks to the Belikovs of this world our townsfolk have begun to fear every- thing during the last ten or fifteen years. They fear to speak aloud, send letters, meet people, read books. They fear to help the poor, they fear to teach anyone to read.
Wishing to say something, Ivan Ivanovich coughed, then lit his pipe and looked at the moon.
'Yes, they're decent, right-thinking folk,' said he, enunciating care- fully. 'They've read their Shchedrin, their Turgenev, their Henry Buckles and all that. But they caved in, you see, they did nothing about it—my point, precisely.'
Belikov and I lived in the same house (Burkin went on). We were on the same floor, his door opposite mine. We often met, and I knew his. domestic circunstances. It was just the same at home. Dressing- gown, nightcap, shutters, bolts, a whole gamut of sundry bans and restrictions, and all this what-about-the-repercussions stuff: To diet was bad for the health—but you couldn't eat what you liked, or people might say that Belikov didn't keep his fasts. So he ate fresh-water fish fried in butter: food which was neither one thing nor the other. He kept no female servants in case people got the wrong ideas, but he had a cook: one Afanasy, a tipsy, half-witted old boy of about sixty, who had been an army batman in his time and could put together a meal of sorts. This Afanasy usually stood by the door with his arms folded.
'There's been a lot of it about lately,' he was for ever muttering with an oracular sigh.
Beli.kov's bedroom was like a little box, and he slept in a four-poster. When he went to bed he would pull a blanket over his head. It was hot and stuffy, the wind rattled the closed door and whined in the chimney. Sighs drifted in from the kitchen, sighs of evil portent.
He was scared, too, under that blanket. He was afraid ofthe repercus- sions, afraid of Afanasy cutting his throat, afraid of burglars. Then he would have nightmares all night, and when we went to school to- gether in the morning he would be dispirited and pale. The crowded school for which he was bound . .. it terrifted him, revolted his whole being, that was obvious. And walking by my side was an ordeal for so solitary a type.