We embrace, we shed a tear ofjoy—and at the sad thought that we were once young but are both grey-haired now, and that our lives are nearly over. He dresses and begins showing me round his estate.
'Well, how's life?' I ask.
'Oh, pretty good, thank God. Can't complain.'
No longer was he the poor, timid little clerk. He was a rcal squire now, a man of property. He'd scttled here, he'd put down his roots, he was in his element. He was eating a lot, taking steam-baths, putting on weight. He was already suing the parish council and both factories, and he took umbrage when the locals wouldn't call him 'sir'. His spiritual welfare ... that too he cultivated with the dignity bcfitting a proprietor. He couldn't just do good. he had to be so pompous about it! And what did his charity add up to? He dosed all the villagers with bicarbonate of soda and castor oil, no matter what might be wrong with them. On his name-day he would hold a thanksgiving service in the village, then stand the lads vodka all round because he thought it the done tlung. Oh, those awful bumpers of vodka! One day your fat lando^er takes the villagers to court for trespass, and on the next day —some festival—he treats them all to vodka. They drink, they cheer him and they make their drunken salaams.
Improving one's living standards, eating too much, laziness . . . these things develop the most blatant arrogance in us Russians. Back at the office Nicholas had been scared even to hold views ofhis o^, but here he was pronouncing eternal verities in magisterial stylc about education being 'essential, but inopportune for the lower orders', and about corporal punishment being 'detrimental, generally speaking, but in certain cases useful and indispensable'.
'I know the working I can get on with him,' he would say. 'I'm popular with the ordinary common chap. I need only move a finger and the lads will do anything for me.'
And aU this, mark you, with a good-natured, knowing smile. A score of times he'd say 'we landowners' or 'speaking as one of the gentry'. He'd evidently forgotten that our grandfather had been a farm labourer and our father a private in the army. Even our surname Chimsha-Gimalaysky, so essentially absurd, now seemed to him melodious, illustrious and highly agreeable.
It's not Nicholas I'm concerned with, though, it's myself. I want to tell you how I changed during my few hours on his estate. At tea that afternoon the cook served a full bowl of gooseberries. These were no bought gooseberries, they were his own crop: the fmt to be picked since the planting. Nicholas chuckled, contemplated the gooseberries for a minute in silence and tears—his feelings too deep for words. Then, placing a lone berry in his mouth, he surveyed me with the glee of a child who has at last been given a longed-for toy.
'Delicious.'
He ate them greedily.
'Ah, delicious indeed,' he kept saying. 'You try them.'
They were sour and unripe. Still,
To hosts of petty truths man much prefers A single edifying lie,
as Pushkin has put it. Before me was a happy man whose most cherished dream had come true for all to see, who had attained his object in life, who had realized his ambitions, who was content with his fate and with himself. In my reflections on human happiness there had always been an element of sadness, but now the spectacle of a happy man plunged me into a despondency akin to despair. I felt particularly low that night. They had made up a bed for me in the room next to my brother's, and I could hear that he was still awake: he was getting up, going to that bowl and taking out one gooseberry at a time. Really, what a lot of contented, happy people there are, I reflected! What a crushing force they represent! What a life, though! Look at the impudence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, look at the grotesque poverty everywhere, the overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness and hypocrisy, the silly talk.
And yet. . . . In all the houses and streets there is peace and quiet. Out of fifty thousand townsfolk there's not one ready to scream or protest aloud. We see people shopping for food in the market, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their nonsense, marrying their wives, growing old, complacently dragging off their dead to the cemetery. But we have no eyes or ears for those who suffer. Life's real tragedies are enacted off stage. All is peace and quiet, the only protest comes from mute statistics: so many pcoplc drivcn mad, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children starved to death.
Oh yes, the need for such a system is obvious. Quitc obviously, too, the happy man only feels happy because the unhappy man bears his burden in silence. And without that silence happincss would be im- possible. It's collective hypnosis, this is. At the door ofevery contented, happy man there should be someone standing with a little hammer, someone to keep dinning into his head that unhappy pcople do exist —and that, happy though he may be, life will round on him sooner or later. Disaster will strike in the shape of sickness, poverty or bercave- ment. And no one will see him or hear him—-just as he now has neithcr eyes nor ears for others. But there is no ond with a hammer, and so the happy man lives happily away, while life's petty tribulations stir him gently, as the breeze stirs an aspen. And everything in the garden is lovely.
'That night I realized that I too was happy and contented,' Ivan Ivanovich went on, standing up. 'I too had laid down the law—at dinner, out hunting—about how to live, what to believe, how to handle the lower classes. I too had said that learning is a boon, that education is essential—but that plain reading and writing are enough for the common herd to be going on with. Freedom is a blessing, said I, we need it as the air we breathe—but we must wait for it. Yes, such were my words. But now I want to know what on earth we're waiting for?
'What are we waiting for, I ask you?' Ivan Ivanovich demanded, glaring at Burkin. 'What are we trying to prove? We can't have everything at once, I'm told, every idea takes shape gradually, in its o^ good time. But who says so? Where's the evidence that he's right? You refer me to the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect. But is there any law, any order which says that a vigorous, right- thinking man like me should stand by a ditch and wait for it to become overgrown or covered with mud—when all the time I might be able to jump across it or bridge it? Again I ask, what are we waiting for? To wait while we don't have the guts to live, yet need and long so much to be alive!
'I left my brother's early next morning, since when I've found town life unbearable. The peace and quiet . .. they get me down. I fear to look through windows because I know no spectacle more depressing than a happy family having tea round a table. I'm old, I'm past fighting,
I can't even hate any more. I'm just deeply grieved, I'm exasperated, I'm indignant. Thc thoughts which crowd upon me at night ... they make my head burn and I can't sleep. Oh, ifl were only young!'
Ivan Ivanovich paced up and down excitedly, repeating 'if I were only young!'
Suddenly going up to Alyokhin, he took him by one hand, and then by the other.
'Never give up, my dear Alyokhin,' he pleaded. 'Never let them drug you. While you're still young, strong and in good heart, never tire of doing good. There's no such thing—there need be no such thing —as happiness. And iflife has any meaning and purpose, that meaning and purpose certainly aren't in our happiness, but in something higher and more rational. Do good.'
All this Ivan Ivanovich said with a pathetic, pleading smile, as if asking a personal favour.
Then all thret: sat in arm-chairs in different comers of the drawing- room and said nothing. Ivan Ivanovich's story had satisfied neither Burkin nor Alyokhin. To hear about an impoverished clerk eating gooseberries while those generals and ladies looked down from their gilt frames, seeming alive in the twilight . . . it was a bore. Somehow one would rather have talked about women, about persons ofelegance. To be. sitting in this drawing-room, where the covered chandelier, the arm-chairs, the carpets under foot, all proclaimed that the watchers in those frames had once walked, sat and had tea here themselves ... to have the fair Pelageya moving noiselessly about—all that was better any story.