XVIII
But on the following day he returned.
Ivan Michailovitch told him the story of his life. He offered him a simple hospitality, made tea, and even had the room heated. He spoke rather disconnectedly, with half-closed eyes and a morbid, suffering smile. Now he would relate episodes of his youth, now of his later years. The burden was always the same: oppression, need, persecution, suffering—suffering without measure. Wherever one went, one saw crushed hearts, happiness stamped out, and personalities destroyed. His parents had gone under in poverty, his brothers and sisters had drifted away and were lost, his friends had fallen in wars or died in exile. It was a life without centre or light or hope—a world of hate and malevolence, cruelty and darkness.
Christian sat there and listened until late into the night.
Next they met in a coffee house, an ugly place which Christian would once not have endured, and sat until far into the night. Often they sat in silence; and this silence tormented Christian, and kept him in a state of unbearable tension. But his expression was a gentle one.
They took walks along the river, or through the streets and parks in the snow. Ivan Michailovitch spoke of Pushkin and Byelinsky, of Bakunin and Herzen, of Alexander I and the legend of his translation to heaven, and of the peasants—the poor, dark folk. He spoke of the innumerable martyrs of forgotten names, men and women whose actions and sufferings beat at the heart of mankind, and whose blood, as he said, was the red dawn of the sunrise of a new and other age.
So Christian kept disappearing from his home, and no one knew where he went.
Once Ivan Michailovitch said: “I am told that a workingman made a murderous assault on your father. The man was condemned to seven years in the penitentiary yesterday.”
“Yes, it is true,” Christian replied. “What was his name? I have forgotten it.”
It turned out that the man’s name was neither Schmidt nor Müller, but Roderick Kroll. Ivan Michailovitch knew it. “There’s a wife and five little children left in extreme distress,” he said. “Have you ever tried for a moment to grasp imaginatively what that means—real distress? Is your imagination powerful enough to realize it? Have you ever seen the countenance of a human being that suffered hunger? There is this woman. She bore five children, and loves these children just as your mother loves hers. Very well. The drawers are empty, the hearth is cold, the bedding is in pawn, their clothes and shoes are in rags. These children are human, each one, just as you and I are. They have the same instinctive expectation of content, bread, quiet sleep, and pure air, that you have or Herr von Crammon or countless others, who never realize reflectively that all these things are theirs. Very well. Now the world does not only feign to know nothing of all this, not only resents being reminded of it, but actually demands of these beings that they are to be silent, that they accept and endure hunger, nakedness, cold, disease, the theft of their natural rights, and the insolent injustice of it all, as something quite natural and inevitable. Have you ever thought about that?”
“It seems to me,” Christian replied, softly, “that I have never thought at all.”
“This man,” Ivan Michailovitch continued, “this Roderick Kroll, so far as I have been able to learn, was systematically exasperated to the very quick. He was an enthusiastic socialist, but somewhat of an annoyance even to his own party on account of his extreme views and his violent propaganda. The masters dug the ground from under his feet. They embittered him by the constant sting of small intrigues, and drove him to despair. The intention was to render him harmless and to force him to silence. But tell me this: is there an extreme on the side of the oppressed that is so unfair, so insolent, so damnable as the extreme on the other side—the arrogance, luxury, revelling, the hardness of heart, and the insensate extravagance of every day and every hour? You did not even know the name of that man!”
Christian stood still. The wind blew the snow into his face, and wet his forehead and cheeks. “What shall I do, Ivan Michailovitch?” he asked, slowly.
Ivan Michailovitch stopped too. “What shall I do?” he cried. “That is what they all ask. That is what Prince Jakovlev Grusin asked, one of our chief magnates and marshal of the nobility in the province of Novgorod. After he had starved his peasants, plundered his tenants, sent his officials to Siberia, violated girls, seduced women, driven his own sons to despair, spent his life in gluttony, drunkenness, and whoring, and heaped crime upon crime—he went into a monastery in the seventy-fourth year of his age, and day after day kneeled in his cell and cried: ‘What shall I do? My Lord and Saviour, what shall I do?’ And no one, naturally, had an answer for him. I have heard the question asked softly by another, whose soul was clean and white. He was going to his death, and his age was seventeen. Nine men with their rifles stood by the trench of the fortress. He approached, reeling a little, and his guiltless soul asked: ‘Father in Heaven, what shall I do? What shall I do?’”
Ivan Michailovitch walked on, and Christian followed him. “And we poor men, we terribly poor men,” Ivan Becker said, “what shall we do?”