"Never mind if it does. As regards myself, no spectre would touch me."
Here I moved in the direction of the gates.
"Who comes there?" Seraphim inquired as he thrust a hairy and uncouth, but infinitely kindly, face close to mine. "Oh, it is the young fellow from Nizhni Novgorod! You are wasting your time, my good sir, for the women have all gone to bed."
With which he laughed and chuckled like a bear.
Beyond the wall of the forecourt the stillness of the autumn night was the languid inertia of a world exhausted by summer, and the withered grass and other objects of the season were exhaling a sweet and bracing odour, and the trees looking like fragments of cloud where motionless they hung in the moist, sultry air. Also, in the darkness the half-slumbering sea could be heard soughing as it crept towards the shore while over the sky lay a canopy of mist, save at the point where the moon's opal-like blur could be descried over the spot where that blur's counterfeit image glittered and rocked on the surface of the dark waters.
Under the trees there was set a bench whereon I could discern there to be resting a human figure. Approaching the figure, I seated myself beside it.
"Whence, comrade?" was my inquiry.
"From Voronezh. And you?"
A Russian is never adverse to talking about himself. It would seem as though he is never sure of his personality, as though he is ever yearning to have that personality confirmed from some source other than, extraneous to, his own ego. The reason for this must be that we Russians live diffused over a land of such vastness that, the more we grasp the immensity of the same, the smaller do we come to appear in our own eyes; wherefore, traversing, as we do, roads of a length of a thousand versts, and constantly losing our way, we come to let slip no opportunity of restating ourselves, and setting forth all that we have seen and thought and done.
Hence, too, must it be that in conversations one seems to hear less of the note of "I am I" than of the note of "Am I really and truly myself?"