February 1878.
A young man goes skipping and bounding along a street
in the capital. His movements are gay and alert;
there is a sparkle in his eyes, a smirk on his lips,
a pleasing flush on his beaming face.... He is
all contentment and delight.
What has happened to him? Has he come in for
a legacy? Has he been promoted? Is he hastening
to meet his beloved? Or is it simply he has had
a good breakfast, and the sense of health, the sense
of well-fed prosperity, is at work in all his limbs?
Surely they have not put on his neck thy lovely, eight-pointed
cross, O Polish king, Stanislas?
No. He has hatched a scandal against a friend,
has sedulously sown it abroad, has heard it, this
same slander, from the lips of another friend, and—has
himself believed it!
Oh, how contented! how kind indeed at this minute
is this amiable, promising young man!
February 1878.
‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly,
and even to harm him,’ said a crafty old knave
to me, ’you reproach him with the very defect
or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be
indignant ... and reproach him!
’To begin with, it will set others thinking
you have not that vice.
’In the second place, your indignation may well
be sincere.... You can turn to account the pricks
of your own conscience.
If you, for instance, are a turncoat, reproach your
opponent with having no convictions!
’If you are yourself slavish at heart, tell
him reproachfully that he is slavish ... the slave
of civilisation, of Europe, of Socialism!’
‘One might even say, the slave of anti-slavishness,’
I suggested.
‘You might even do that,’ assented the
cunning knave.
February 1878.
A DREAM
I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds,
in a simple country house.
The room big and low pitched with three windows; the
walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house
a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches
into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over
it, like the canopy of a bed.
I am not alone; there are some ten persons in the
room with me. All quite plain people, simply
dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as
it were stealthily. They avoid one another, and
yet are continually looking anxiously at one another.
Not one knows why he has come into this house and
what people there are with him. On all the faces
uneasiness and despondency ... all in turn approach
the windows and look about intently as though expecting
something from without.
Then again they fall to wandering up and down.
Among us is a small-sized boy; from time to time he
whimpers in the same thin voice, ’Father, I’m
frightened!’ My heart turns sick at his whimper,
and I too begin to be afraid ... of what? I don’t
know myself. Only I feel, there is coming nearer
and nearer a great, great calamity.
