What was the precise function of the important personage remains unknown to this day. One point should be made clear: that this particular important personage only recently had become an important personage, and that until quite lately he had been an unimportant personage. And aside from that, his position was not even now considered important when compared with that of other more important personages. There will always be, however, a circle of people to whom what is unimportant to other people is sufficiently important. Then, again, he bent all his efforts to increase his importance through numerous other means, as, for instance, he instituted the custom of having his inferiors lined up on the stairway to greet his arrival at the department; he also insisted that no one should venture to appear before him directly, but that everything should follow in most unrelenting order: the collegiate registrar should report to the government secretary, the government secretary to the titular councillor, or to whoever was the proper official, and that in this manner the business should finally come to him.
This habit of imitation has infected all of Holy Russia: every one imitates and mimics his superiors. It is even said that a certain titular councillor, when promoted to the head of some small separate office, immediately partitioned off a private room, calling it the “audience chamber;” he placed at the door two attendants in red collars and braid, whose sole duty consisted in taking the door by the handle and opening it to every comer, although the “audience chamber” had barely room enough to contain an ordinary writing-table.
The ways and manners of the important personage were impressive and imposing, but somewhat overdone. The main principle of his system was strictness. “Strictness, strictness—and strictness,” he used to say generally: and always when pronouncing the last word looked significantly at the person whom he was addressing; although this was altogether unnecessary, because the ten officials, constituting the entire mechanism of his office, were afraid of him; and, seeing him even from afar, they would stop all work and assume a respectful attitude until their chief had passed through the room. His usual conversation with his inferiors consisted almost entirely of three phrases: “How dare you? Do you know to whom you are speaking? Do you realize who stands before you?” Otherwise, he was a good-natured man and solicitous towards his comrades; but the rank of general unhinged his mind completely. Upon receiving this rank, he lost his head, and did not know what to do with himself. When he happened to be in the company of his equals he still managed to do the proper thing, to be a gentleman, and in many respects quite a clever fellow; but once in the company of folk even a single rank below him, he simply became helpless; he was silent, and his condition aroused sympathy, the more so as he himself felt that he could have passed the time incomparably happier. At times the desire to join in some conversation or circle was strongly evident in his eyes; but the following thought always arrested him: would it not be regarded as a familiarity, and would it not detract from his importance? In consequence of such reasoning, he remained in the same eternal mood of silence, uttering only rarely some monosyllabic sounds; and thereby earning the name of a most wearisome person.
Before an important personage of this type appeared our Akaki Akakievich, and at a most inopportune moment—that is to say, for himself, but opportune for the important personage. The important personage was in his cabinet, conversing very cheerfully with an old acquaintance and friend of his youth, whom he had not seen for many years. It was at such a time that they told him of a certain Bashmachkin who wished to see him. He asked abruptly, “Who is he?” They answered him, “Some sort of official.” “Ah, let him wait, now is not the time,” said the important personage. It is necessary to mention here that the important personage simply lied: he had the time to spare; he had already talked over everything with his friend, and the conversation had begun some time ago to lag with long silences; and they merely continued to tap each other on the leg, and exclaim, “That’s how it is, Ivan Abramovich!” “That’s so, Stephen Varlamovich!” Nevertheless, he caused the official to wait, in order to show his friend, a man some time out of the service and living in a village, how long he compelled officials to wait for him in the anteroom.
Finally, having conversed to his heart’s content, and having had also his fill of silence and smoked a cigar in a very comfortable chair with an easy back, he bethought himself all of a sudden, as it were, and said to the secretary who stood at the door with papers needing his signature, “Oh, yes, I believe an official is waiting to see me; tell him to come in.” On seeing Akaki Akakievich’s humble aspect and his shabby uniform, he suddenly turned to him and said, “What is it you wish?” He put this question abruptly and in a hard voice, which he had practised in his own room, when alone, and before the mirror, a full week before receiving his present position and rank.
Akaki Akakievich, who already felt a certain timorousness, became somewhat confused, and, so far as his power of speech would permit, explained, with an even more frequent employment than usual of the word “that,” that his cloak was quite new, and had been stolen in a most inhuman manner, and that he was now applying to him to use his influence with the chief of police or some one else to find his cloak.
The general, for some reason or other, regarded such conduct as familiar. “What, dear sir,” said he in his abrupt manner, “are you ignorant of the rules? Why do you come to me? Do you not know how such matters are managed? You should have first presented a petition to the office; it would have then gone to the chief clerk, then to the clerk of the division, then to the secretary, and the secretary would have reported it to me——”
“But, Your Excellency,” said Akaki Akakievich, gathering together his final remnant of courage, and breaking out into a terrible perspiration, “I, Your Excellency, have presumed to trouble you because, you see, the secretaries are that—an untrustworthy race——”
“What! what! what!” ejaculated the important personage. “Where do you get the courage? Where did you get such ideas? What a spirit of impertinence has spread among the young generation against their chiefs and superiors!”
The important personage, apparently, had not noticed that Akaki Akakievich was already a man of about fifty, and that if he could be called a young person, it was only in comparison with one who was seventy.