This new life of his surprised him by the richness of its shifting impression.
In days gone by he would never have even dared to entertain a notion of what pure and calm joy, what potency and secret depths, lie hidden in something so simple and common as human thought.
Romashov had already determined irrevocably not to remain on active service, but to join the reserves as soon as his period of service as an officer by examination had expired, but he did not yet know where he would find suitable employment and an income on which he might exist.
He went over in his mind all possible occupations—post-office, customs, telegraph service, railway, etc., etc.
He pondered on whether he might seek the post of estate-manager, or enter the Civil Service.
And now he was astounded at the thought of all the innumerable different trades and professions that exist in the world.
“How have they arisen,” thought he, “all these absurd, comical, wonderful and more or less repulsive occupations—prison-warders, acrobats, chiropodists, professors, actors, dog-barbers, policemen, jugglers, prostitutes, bath-men, veterinary surgeons, grave-diggers, beadles, etc., etc?
And perhaps there’s not a human invention or caprice, however idiotic, paradoxical, barbarous, and immoral it may be, that does not at once find ready and willing hands to bring it to completion and realization.”
So, too, in meditating more profoundly, it struck him what a countless number of “intelligent” means of bread-winning there are, which are all based on mistrust of the honour and morality of mankind—supervisors and officials of all sorts, controllers, inspectors, policemen, custom-house officers, bookkeepers, revising-officers, etc., whose existence has, without exception, found justification in man’s weakness for or lack of resistance against crime and corruption.
He also called to mind priests, schoolmasters, lawyers and judges—in short, all those persons who, according to the nature of their work, are in continual and intimate contact with other men’s ideas, strivings, sorrows, and sufferings.
At the thought of these, Romashov came to the tragic conclusion that these individuals become more quickly than others hard, heartless egoists, who, wrapping themselves in the dressing-gown of selfishness, very soon grow frozen for ever in dead formalism.
He knew that there also exists another class, i.e. those who create and look after the external conditions of human luxury and enjoyment—engineers, architects, inventors, manufacturers, and all those who, by their united efforts, can render mankind inestimable temporal services, and place themselves solely at the disposal of the rich and powerful.
They think only of their own skin, of their own nest, of their own brood, and they become, in consequence of this, the slaves of gold and tyranny.
Who is there then to raise up, instruct, and console the brutally used slave, Khliabnikov, and say to him,
“Shake hands with me, brother”?
Pondering over similar subjects, Romashov certainly probed slowly and fumblingly, but more and more deeply, into the great problem of life.
Formerly everything seemed to him as simple as simple could be.
The world was divided into two categories very different in size and importance. The one, the guild of officers, constituting the military caste, which alone attains power, honour, and glory, the fine uniform of which confers an uncontested monopoly of bravery, physical strength, and unbounded contempt for all other living creatures; the other, the civilian element of society—an enormous number of indeterminable petty insects; another race, a pariah class hardly worthy to live, obscure individuals to be thrashed and insulted without rhyme or reason, whose nose every little gilded popinjay may tweak, unless he prefers, to the huge delight of his comrades, to crush their tall silk hats over his victims’ ears.
When Romashov thought, he stood apart from reality; when he viewed military life, as it were, from a secret corner through a chink in the wall, he gradually began to understand that the army and all that pertains to it, with its false glamour and borrowed plumes, came into the world through a mad, cruel confusion of ideas in mankind.
“How,” Romashov asked himself, “can so large a class of society, in profound peace, and without doing the country the least good, be suffered to exist, to eat the bread of others, to walk in other men’s clothes, to dwell in other men’s houses, only with the obligation, in the event of war, to kill and maim living creatures of the same race as themselves?”
And more and more clearly it dawned on his mind that only the two following domains of activity are worthy of man, viz. science and art and free manual labour.
And with new force the old dreams and hopes of a future literary career arose in him.
Now and again, when Chance put into his hand a valuable book rich in noble and fructifying ideas, he thought with bitter melancholy of himself:
“Good gracious, how simple, clear and true all this is which I myself, moreover, have known and experienced!
Why cannot I, too, compose something similar?”
He wished he could write a novel or a great romance, the leitmotiv of which should be his contempt and disgust for military life.
In his imagination everything fell so excellently into groups, his descriptions of scenery became true and splendid, his puppets woke to life, the story developed, and his treatment of it made him so boisterously cheerful and happy.
But when he sat down to write, everything suddenly became so pale and feeble, so childish, so artificial and stereotyped.
As long as his pen ran quickly and boldly over the paper he noticed none of these defects; but directly he compared his own work with that of some of the great Russian authors—if only with a small, detached piece from them—he was seized at once by a deep despair, and by shame and disgust at his own work.
He often wandered, harassed by such thoughts, about the streets in the balmy nights of the latter part of May.
Without noticing it himself, he invariably selected for these promenades the same way—i.e. from the Jewish cemetery to the great dam, and thence to the high railway bank.
It happened occasionally that, entirely absorbed in his dreams, he failed to notice the way he took, and, suddenly waking up, he found himself, much to his astonishment, in a wholly different part of the town.
Every night he passed by Shurochka’s window. With stealthy steps, bated breath, and beating heart, he prowled along the opposite side of the street. He felt like a thief who, in shame and anguish, tries hard to leave the scene of his crime as unobserved as possible.
When the lamp was extinguished in the Nikolaiev’s drawing-room, in the black window-panes of which there was only a weak reflection of the moon’s faint rays, Romashov hid himself in the deep shade of the high hoarding, pressed his crossed arms convulsively against his breast, and uttered in a hot whisper—
“Sleep, sleep, my beloved one, my queen!
I am here watching over you.”
In such moments he felt tears in his eyes, but in his soul stirred, besides love, tenderness and self-sacrificing affection, and also the human animal’s blind jealousy and lust.
One evening Nikolaiev was invited to a whist party at the commander’s.
Romashov was aware of this.
When, as usual of a night, he passed Nikolaiev’s dwelling, he smelt, from the little flower-bed behind the hoarding, the fragrant, disturbing perfume of daffodils.
He jumped over the hedge, soiled his hands with the sticky mould of the bed, and plucked a whole armful of soft, moist, pale flowers.
The window of Shurochka’s bedroom was open. It was dark within, and not a sound could be heard from it.
With a boldness that astonished himself, Romashov approached the wall, and threw the flowers into the room.
Still the same mysterious silence.
He stood quite still for three minutes, listening and waiting. His heart-beats, so it seemed to him, echoed along the whole of the long, dead-silent street; but no answer.
Not the faintest sound reached the listener’s ears. With bent back, and blushing for shame, he stole away on tip-toe.
The next day he received the following curt and angry letter from Shurochka—
Never dare to repeat what you did yesterday.
Courting in the Romeo and Juliet style is always absurd, particularly in this little hole of a place.
In the daytime Romashov tried to obtain a distant glimpse of Shurochka in the street, but he never succeeded.