“What of it?”
“Just this.... He wandered around among his old and new friends and kept looking for the train.... He disgusted every one.... The thing for which he had given his own life and another’s was unintelligible; it’s just like losing a finger when you don’t know what for. You understand,—various, respectable affairs like a ‘people’s home’ or a paper or an ‘ideal book store’ don’t satisfy a seventy-year-old man.... He’s ready then to give up interest and capital....”
“But at six per cent you can live modestly.... You can live!”
“Of course.... But if you want to do something.... This was an act of heroism.... He gave his life as others do theirs.... And not only his.... Would you do that for a little miserly interest?... And there was no reason for his heroism.... To sum up, one fine day they found him in a lonely room in a hotel with a bullet in his head.... And he had gotten rid of his money somehow, quickly and quietly.... I saw him the day before at a meeting of some society. No one noticed him especially. They greeted him and passed on; he was but a respectable man. Of a strong character and the best of intentions. But unusually dull!”
“H-m, yes!” said the mathematician. “There are such cranks.” And he lay down to sleep. His face, with its fat, clipped mustache, again disappeared in the shadow, and you could see only his feet and his checkered trousers. “I think,” he growled from his corner, “that Budnikov is more interesting. You’re not through with him....”
“Yes.... I ... excuse me,—it was all due to chance.... I sat up all night recently.... I was reading Budnikov’s correspondence with his ‘distant’ friend. Believe me, I could not tear myself away, and you never would think that it was written by that same Semen Nikolayevich Budnikov, who drank tea and rum in my rooms, sent Gavrilo downtown, and whose soul imperceptibly, but almost before my eyes, dried up and grew barren in our little house.... And it remained, so to speak, without reverence for anything.”
IV
He stopped and looked at me bashfully and questioningly, as if he felt that he had said something which was not proper for a railroad conversation. He was somewhat startled when the mathematician exhaled a thick cloud of smoke from his dark corner and said:
“Pavel Semenovich, I see you really are a crank. Isn’t that so?... Wonderful!... A man has a hundred thousand and shoots himself! Another lives as he likes, so to speak, healthy and ruddy.... A quiet soul.... Safe.... Is that strange?... By heavens, it’s impossible.... Good night.... It’s time to go to sleep. Nothing, nothing!... You won’t disturb me by talking.... I won’t listen....”