Oh, well do I know all his ways. Closing my eyes I see him. He strikes me on the shoulder, on the back, on the knees. He gesticulates so closely to my eyes and nose that I wince, as if about to be struck. Catching hold of the lappet of my coat, he draws himself up to me and breathes in my face. When he visits me he allows his foot to tremble on the floor Under the table, so that the shade of the lamp tinkles. At an “at home” he thrums on the back of my chair with his fingers, and in pauses of the conversation drawls, “y-e-s, y-es.” At cards he calls out, knocks on the table and quacks as he loses: “What’s that? What? What?”
Start him in an argument, and he always begins by:
“Eh, neighbour, it’s humbug you’re talking.”
“Why humbug?” you ask timidly.
“Because it is nonsense.”
What evil have I done to this man? I don’t know. He set himself to spoil my existence, and he spoiled it. Thanks to him, I now feel a great aversion from the sea, the moon, the air, poetry, painting, music.
“Tolstoy”—he bawled orally, and in print—“made his estate over to his wife, and he himself.... Compared with Turgenief, he.... He sewed his own jack-boots ... great writer of the Russian earth.... Hurrah!...
“Pushkin? He created the language, didn’t he? Do you remember ‘Calm was the Ukraine night, clear was the sky’? You remember what they did to the woman in the third act. Hsh! There are no ladies present, do you remember?
“‘In our little boat we go,
Under the little boat the water.’
“Dostoevsky ... have you read how he went one night to Turgenief to confess ... Gogol, do you know the sort of disease he had?”