What is that man to do? Go on working; not try to justify himself, and not even look forward to a fairer judgment.
At one time the tillers of the soil cursed the traveller who brought the potato, the subst.i.tute for bread, the poor man"s daily food.... They shook the precious gift out of his outstretched hands, flung it in the mud, trampled it underfoot.
Now they are fed with it, and do not even know their benefactor"s name.
So be it! What is his name to them? He, nameless though he be, saves them from hunger.
Let us try only that what we bring should be really good food.
Bitter, unjust reproach on the lips of those you love.... But that, too, can be borne....
"Beat me! but listen!" said the Athenian leader to the Spartan.
"Beat me! but be healthy and fed!" we ought to say.
_February 1878._
A CONTENTED MAN
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._
A RULE OF LIFE
"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 p.r.i.c.ks 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," a.s.sented the cunning knave.
_February 1878._
THE END OF THE WORLD
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.
The boy keeps on and on with his wail. Oh, to escape from here! How stifling! How weary! how heavy.... But escape is impossible.
That sky is like a shroud. And no wind.... Is the air dead or what?
All at once the boy runs up to the window and shrieks in the same piteous voice, "Look! look! the earth has fallen away!"
"How? fallen away?" Yes; just now there was a plain before the house, and now it stands on a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone down, and from the very house drops an almost overhanging, as it were scooped-out, black precipice.
We all crowded to the window.... Horror froze our hearts. "Here it is ...
here it is!" whispers one next me.
And behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth, something began to stir, some sort of small, roundish hillocks began heaving and falling.
"It is the sea!" the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. "It will swallow us all up directly.... Only how can it grow and rise upwards?
To this precipice?"
And yet, it grows, grows enormously.... Already there are not separate hillocks heaving in the distance.... One continuous, monstrous wave embraces the whole circle of the horizon.
It is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an icy hurricane it flies, swirling in the darkness of h.e.l.l. Everything shuddered--and there, in this flying ma.s.s--was the crash of thunder, the iron wail of thousands of throats....
Ah! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth howling for terror....
The end of it! the end of all!
The child whimpered once more.... I tried to clutch at my companions, but already we were all crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that pitch-black, icy, thundering wave! Darkness ... darkness everlasting!