"I wouldn"t trust you with a halfpenny, and I don"t care. I simply want to kiss you, dear old man, but luckily I can"t. Do you know, gentlemen, what this _grand-pere"s_ little game was? He died three or four days ago, and would you believe it, he left a deficit of four hundred thousand government money from the fund for widows and orphans. He was the sole person in control of it for some reason, so that his accounts were not audited for the last eight years. I can fancy what long faces they all have now, and what they call him. It"s a delectable thought, isn"t it? I have been wondering for the last year how a wretched old man of seventy, gouty and rheumatic, succeeded in preserving the physical energy for his debaucheries--and now the riddle is solved! Those widows and orphans--the very thought of them must have egged him on! I knew about it long ago, I was the only one who did know; it was Julie told me, and as soon as I discovered it, I attacked him in a friendly way at once in Easter week: "Give me twenty-five thousand, if you don"t they"ll look into your accounts to-morrow." And just fancy, he had only thirteen thousand left then, so it seems it was very apropos his dying now. _Grand-pere, grand-pere_, do you hear?"
"_Cher_ Klinevitch, I quite agree with you, and there was no need for you ... to go into such details. Life is so full of suffering and torment and so little to make up for it ... that I wanted at last to be at rest, and so far as I can see I hope to get all I can from here too."
"I bet that he has already sniffed Katiche Berestov!"
"Who? What Katiche?" There was a rapacious quiver in the old man"s voice.
"A-ah, what Katiche? Why, here on the left, five paces from me and ten from you. She has been here for five days, and if only you knew, _grand-pere_, what a little wretch she is! Of good family and breeding and a monster, a regular monster! I did not introduce her to any one there, I was the only one who knew her.... Katiche, answer!"
"He-he-he!" the girl responded with a jangling laugh, in which there was a note of something as sharp as the p.r.i.c.k of a needle. "He-he-he!"
"And a little blonde?" the _grand-pere_ faltered, drawling out the syllables.
"He-he-he!"
"I ... have long ... I have long," the old man faltered breathlessly, "cherished the dream of a little fair thing of fifteen and just in such surroundings."
"Ach, the monster!" cried Avdotya Ignatyevna.
"Enough!" Klinevitch decided. "I see there is excellent material. We shall soon arrange things better. The great thing is to spend the rest of our time cheerfully; but what time? Hey, you, government clerk, Lebeziatnikov or whatever it is, I hear that"s your name!"
"Semyon Yevseitch Lebeziatnikov, lower court councillor, at your service, very, very, very much delighted to meet you."
"I don"t care whether you are delighted or not, but you seem to know everything here. Tell me first of all how it is we can talk? I"ve been wondering ever since yesterday. We are dead and yet we are talking and seem to be moving--and yet we are not talking and not moving. What jugglery is this?"
"If you want an explanation, baron, Platon Nikolaevitch could give you one better than I."
"What Platon Nikolaevitch is that? To the point. Don"t beat about the bush."
"Platon Nikolaevitch is our home-grown philosopher, scientist and Master of Arts. He has brought out several philosophical works, but for the last three months he has been getting quite drowsy, and there is no stirring him up now. Once a week he mutters something utterly irrelevant."
"To the point, to the point!"
"He explains all this by the simplest fact, namely, that when we were living on the surface we mistakenly thought that death there was death. The body revives, as it were, here, the remains of life are concentrated, but only in consciousness. I don"t know how to express it, but life goes on, as it were, by inertia. In his opinion everything is concentrated somewhere in consciousness and goes on for two or three months ... sometimes even for half a year.... There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite senseless of course, about some _bobok_,[1] "Bobok, bobok," but you see that an imperceptible speck of life is still warm within him."
[Footnote 1: _i. e._ small bean.]
"It"s rather stupid. Well, and how is it I have no sense of smell and yet I feel there"s a stench?"
"That ... he-he.... Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy.
It"s apropos of smell, he said, that the stench one perceives here is, so to speak, moral--he-he! It"s the stench of the soul, he says, that in these two or three months it may have time to recover itself ... and this is, so to speak, the last mercy.... Only, I think, baron, that these are mystic ravings very excusable in his position...."
"Enough; all the rest of it, I am sure, is nonsense. The great thing is that we have two or three months more of life and then--bobok! I propose to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange everything on a new basis. Gentlemen! I propose to cast aside all shame."
"Ah, let us cast aside all shame, let us!" many voices could be heard saying; and strange to say, several new voices were audible, which must have belonged to others newly awakened. The engineer, now fully awake, boomed out his agreement with peculiar delight. The girl Katiche giggled gleefully.
"Oh, how I long to cast off all shame!" Avdotya Ignatyevna exclaimed rapturously.
"I say, if Avdotya Ignatyevna wants to cast off all shame...."
"No, no, no, Klinevitch, I was ashamed up there all the same, but here I should like to cast off shame, I should like it awfully."
"I understand, Klinevitch," boomed the engineer, "that you want to rearrange life here on new and rational principles."
"Oh, I don"t care a hang about that! For that we"ll wait for Kudeyarov who was brought here yesterday. When he wakes he"ll tell you all about it. He is such a personality, such a t.i.tanic personality! To-morrow they"ll bring along another natural scientist, I believe, an officer for certain, and three or four days later a journalist, and, I believe, his editor with him.
But deuce take them all, there will be a little group of us anyway, and things will arrange themselves. Though meanwhile I don"t want us to be telling lies. That"s all I care about, for that is one thing that matters.
One cannot exist on the surface without lying, for life and lying are synonymous, but here we will amuse ourselves by not lying. Hang it all, the grave has some value after all! We"ll all tell our stories aloud, and we won"t be ashamed of anything. First of all I"ll tell you about myself. I am one of the predatory kind, you know. All that was bound and held in check by rotten cords up there on the surface. Away with cords and let us spend these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked!"
"Let us be naked, let us be naked!" cried all the voices.
"I long to be naked, I long to be," Avdotya Ignatyevna shrilled.
"Ah ... ah, I see we shall have fun here; I don"t want Ecke after all."
"No, I tell you. Give me a taste of life!"
"He-he-he!" giggled Katiche.
"The great thing is that no one can interfere with us, and though I see Pervoyedov is in a temper, he can"t reach me with his hand. _Grand-pere_, do you agree?"
"I fully agree, fully, and with the utmost satisfaction, but on condition that Katiche is the first to give us her biography."
"I protest! I protest with all my heart!" General Pervoyedov brought out firmly.
"Your Excellency!" the scoundrel Lebeziatnikov persuaded him in a murmur of fussy excitement, "your Excellency, it will be to our advantage to agree.
Here, you see, there"s this girl"s ... and all their little affairs."
"There"s the girl, it"s true, but...."
"It"s to our advantage, your Excellency, upon my word it is! If only as an experiment, let us try it...."
"Even in the grave they won"t let us rest in peace."
"In the first place, General, you were playing preference in the grave, and in the second we don"t care a hang about you," drawled Klinevitch.
"Sir, I beg you not to forget yourself."
"What? Why, you can"t get at me, and I can tease you from here as though you were Julie"s lapdog. And another thing, gentlemen, how is he a general here? He was a general there, but here is mere refuse."
"No, not mere refuse.... Even here...."
"Here you will rot in the grave and six bra.s.s b.u.t.tons will be all that will be left of you."
"Bravo, Klinevitch, ha-ha-ha!" roared voices.
"I have served my sovereign.... I have the sword...."
"Your sword is only fit to p.r.i.c.k mice, and you never drew it even for that."