Yama, Aleksandr Kuprin [grave mercy TXT] 📗

but merely generalizing on the first source of emotion. I might have brought out as an example the self-denying love of animal-mothers as well. But I see that I have started on a tedious matter. Better let’s drop it.”

“No, you finish,” protested Likhonin. “I feel that you have a massive thought.”

“And a very simple one. The other day a professor asked me if I am not observing the life here with some literary aims. And all I wanted to say was, that I can see, but precisely can not observe. Here I have given you Simeon and the bawd for example. I do not know myself why, but I feel that in them lurks some terrible, insuperable actuality of life, but either to tell it, or to show it, I can not. Here is necessary the great ability to take some picayune trifle, an insignificant, paltry little stroke, and then will result a dreadful truth, from which the reader, aghast, will forget that his mouth is agape. People seek the terrible in words, in cries, in gestures. Well, now, for example, I am reading a description of some pogrom or of a slaughter in jail, or of a riot being put down. Of course, the policemen are described, these servants of arbitrariness, these myrmidons of contemporaneousness, wading up to their knees in blood, or how else do they write in such cases? Of course, it is revolting and it hurts, and is disgusting, but all this is felt by the mind, and not the heart. But here I am walking along Lebyazhia Street, and see that a crowd has collected, a girl of five years in the centre⁠—she has lagged behind the mother and has strayed, or it may be that the mother had abandoned her. And before the girl, squatting down on his heels, is a roundsman. He is interrogating her, how she is called, and where is she from, and how do they call papa, and how do they call mamma. He has broken out into sweat, the poor fellow, from the effort, the cap is at the back of his neck, the whiskered face is such a kindly and woeful and helpless one, while the voice is gentle, so gentle. At last, what do you think? As the girl has become all excited, and has already grown hoarse from tears, and is shy of everybody⁠—he, this same ‘roundsman on the beat,’ stretches out two of his black, calloused fingers, the index and the little, and begins to imitate a nanny goat for the girl and reciting an appropriate nursery rhyme!⁠ ⁠… And so, when I looked upon this charming scene and thought that half an hour later at the station house this same patrolman will be beating with his feet the face and chest of a man whom he had not till that time seen once, and whose crime he is entirely ignorant of⁠—then⁠—you understand!⁠—I began to feel inexpressibly eerie and sad. Not with the mind, but the heart. Such a devilish muddle is this life. Shall we drink some cognac, Likhonin?”

“What do you say to calling each other thou?” suddenly proposed Likhonin.

“All right. Only, really, without any of this business of kissing, now. Here’s to your health, old man⁠ ⁠… Or here is another instance⁠ ⁠… I read a certain French classic, describing the thoughts and sensations of a man condemned to capital punishment. He describes it all sonorously, powerfully, brilliantly, but I read and⁠ ⁠… well, there is no impression of any sort; neither emotion nor indignation⁠—just ennui. But then, within the last few days I come across a brief newspaper notice of a murderer’s execution somewhere in France. The Procureur, who was present at the last toilet of the criminal, sees that he is putting on his shoes on his bare feet, and⁠—the blockhead!⁠—reminds him: ‘What about the socks?’ But the other gives him a look and says, sort of thoughtfully: ‘Is it worth while?’ Do you understand, these two remarks, so very short, struck me like a blow on the skull! At once all the horror and all the stupidity of unnatural death were revealed to me⁠ ⁠… Or here is something else about death⁠ ⁠… A certain friend of mine died, a captain in the infantry⁠—a drunkard, a vagabond, and the finest soul in the world. For some reason we called him the Electrical Captain. I was in the vicinity, and it fell to me to dress him for the last parade. I took his uniform and began to attach the epaulettes to it. There’s a cord, you know, that’s drawn through the shank of the epaulette buttons, and after that the two ends of this cord are shoved through two little holes under the collar, and on the inside⁠—the lining⁠—are tied together. Well, I go through all this business, and tie the cord with a slipknot, and, you know, the loop won’t come out, nohow⁠—either it’s too loosely tied, or else one end’s too short. I am fussing over this nonsense, and suddenly into my head comes the most astonishingly simple thought, that it’s far simpler and quicker to tie it in a knot⁠—for after all, it’s all the same, no one is going to untie it. And immediately I felt death with all my being. Until that time I had seen the captain’s eyes, grown glassy, had felt his cold forehead, and still somehow had not sensed death to the full, but I thought of the knot⁠—and I was all transpierced, and the simple and sad realization of the irrevocable, inevitable perishing of all our words, deeds, and sensations, of the perishing of all the apparent world, seemed to bow me down to the earth⁠ ⁠… And I could bring forward a hundred such small but staggering trifles⁠ ⁠… Even, say, about what people experienced in the war⁠ ⁠… But I want to lead my thought up to one thing. We all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under