§7
My colleague in the editorship had taken his degree at Moscow University and in the same faculty as myself. The end of his life was too tragical for me to speak of him with a smile; but, down to the day of his death, he was an exceedingly absurd figure. By no means stupid, he was excessively clumsy and awkward. His exceptional ugliness had no redeeming feature, and there was an abnormal amount of it. His face was nearly twice as large as most people’s and marked by small-pox; he had the mouth of a codfish which spread from ear to ear; his light-grey eyes were lightened rather than shaded by colourless eye-lashes; his scalp had a meagre covering of bristly hair; he was moreover taller by a head than myself,[[118]] with a slouching figure and very slovenly habits.
[118]. Herzen himself was a very tall, large man.
His very name was such that it once caused him to be arrested. Late one evening, wrapped up in his overcoat, he was walking past the Governor’s residence, with a field-glass in his hand. He stopped and aimed the glass at the heavens. This astonished the sentry, who probably reckoned the stars as Government property: he challenged the rapt star-gazer—“Who goes there?” “Nebába,”[[119]] answered my colleague in a deep bass voice, and gazed as before.
[119]. The word means in Russian “Not a woman.”
“Don’t play the fool with me—I’m on duty,” said the sentry.
“I tell you that I am Nebába!”
The soldier’s patience was exhausted: he rang the bell, a serjeant appeared, the sentry handed the astronomer over to him, to be taken to the guard-room. “They’ll find out there,” as he said, “whether you’re a woman or not.” And there he would certainly have stayed till the morning, had not the officer of the day recognised him.