Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

no one. His mother, father, friends, did not love him, and must wish he were dead; but whom did he himself love? His friends? He was conscious that he did not love anyone. All were rivals of his, all were pitiless toward him, now that he was in disgrace. “His father?” he asked himself, and horror seized him when at this question he looked into his heart. Not only did he not love him, but he hated him for his stinginess, for the affront he had put on him. He hated him, and, moreover, he saw plainly that for his own happiness his father’s death was essential.

“Yes,” Julius asked to himself, “and supposing I knew that no one would see it or ever find it out, what would I do if I could with one blow, once and for all, deprive him of life and set myself free?”

And Julius replied to this question:⁠—

“Yes, I should kill him!”

He replied to this question, and was horror-struck at himself.

“My mother? Yes, I pity her, but I do not love her; It makes no difference to me what happens to her⁠—all I need is her help.⁠ ⁠… Yes, I am a wild beast! and a wild beast beaten and tracked to its lair, and the only distinction is that I am able, if I choose, to quit this false, wicked life; I can do what the wild beast cannot⁠—I can kill myself. I hate my father, there is no one I love⁠ ⁠… neither my mother, nor my friends⁠—but how about Pamphilius?”

And again he remembered his one friend. He began to recall the last interview, and their conversation, and Pamphilius’ words, how, according to their teaching, Christ had said: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Can that be true?

As he went on with his thoughts and recollections, he recalled Pamphilius’ sweet, joyous, passionless face, and he felt inclined to believe in what Pamphilius said.

“What am I, in reality?” he asked himself. “Who am I? A man seeking well-being. I have sought for it in animal pleasures, and have not found it. And all living beings, like myself, also failed to find it. All are evil, and suffer. If any man is always happy, it is because he is seeking for nothing. He says that there are many such, and that all men will be such if they obey their Master’s teachings. What if this is the truth? Whether it is the truth or not, it attracts me to it, and I am going.”

Thus said Julius to himself, and he left the grove resolved never again to return home, and he bent his steps to the town where the Christians lived.

III

Julius went on boldly and cheerfully, and the farther he went and the more vividly he represented to himself the life of the Christians, remembering all to himself that Pamphilius had said, the more joyous he became in spirit.

The sun was already descending toward the west, and he felt the need of rest, when he fell in with a man who was resting and taking his nooning. This man was of middle age, and had an intellectual face. He was sitting and eating olives and cakes. When he saw Julius, he smiled and said:⁠—

“How are you, young man? The way is still long. Sit down and rest.”

Julius thanked him, and sat down.

“Where are you going?” asked the stranger.

“To the Christians,” said Julius; and he gave a truthful account of his life and his decision.

The stranger listened attentively, and though he asked him about certain details, he did not express his opinion; but when Julius had finished, the stranger stowed away in his wallet the remains of his luncheon, arranged his attire, and said:⁠—

“Young man, do not carry out your intention; you are making a mistake. I know life, and you do not. I know the Christians, and you do not know them. Listen, and I will explain your whole life and your ideas; and when you hear me you shall adopt the decision that seems to you the wiser. You are young, rich, handsome, strong; your passions are boiling in you. You wish to find a quiet refuge in which your passions would not disturb you, and you would not suffer from their consequences; and it seems to you that you might find such a refuge among the Christians.

“There is no such place, my dear young man, because what troubles you is not peculiar to Cilicia or to Rome, but to yourself. In the quiet of a village solitude the same passions will torment you⁠—only a hundred times more violently. The fraud of the Christians, or their mistake⁠—for I don’t care to judge them⁠—consists simply in this⁠—that they don’t wish to understand the nature of man. The only person who can perfectly carry out their teachings is an old man who has outlived all his passions. A man in his prime, or a youth like you who has not yet learned life or himself, cannot submit to their law, because this law has for its basis, not the nature of man, but an idle philosophy. If you go to them, you will suffer what you suffer now, only in a far higher degree. Now, your passions entice you along false paths; but having once made a mistake in your direction, you can rectify it. Now, you still have the satisfaction of passion freed⁠—in other words⁠—of life.

“But, in their midst, controlling your passions by main force, you will make precisely the same mistakes, if not worse ones; and, besides that suffering, you will also have the incessant anguish of the unsatisfied human longings. Let the water out of a dam, and it will irrigate the soil and the meadows, and quench the thirst of animals; but if you keep it back it will tear away the earth and trickle away in mud. It is the same with the passions. The teachings of the