The Adolescent

“My dear,” he suddenly broke off with a smile, “this is all a fantasy, even quite an incredible one; but I have imagined it only too often, because all my life I’ve been unable to live without it and not to think of it. I’m not talking about my faith: I have no great faith, I’m a deist, a philosophical deist, like all the thousand of us, as I suppose, but . . . but it’s remarkable that I’ve always ended my picture with a vision, as in Heine, of ‘Christ on the Baltic Sea.’³⁵ I couldn’t do without him, I couldn’t help imagining him, finally, amidst the orphaned people. He would come to them, stretch out his arms to them, and say, ‘How could you have forgotten me?’ And here it would be as if a veil fell from everyone’s eyes, and the great exultant hymn of the new and last resurrection would ring out . . .

“Let’s drop it, my friend; and my ‘chains’ are nonsense; don’t worry about them. And here’s another thing: you know that I’m modest and sober of speech; if I fell to talking now, it’s . . . from various feelings, and because it’s with you; I’ll never say it to anyone else. I add that to reassure you.”

But I was even touched; the falseness I had feared wasn’t there, and I was especially glad, because it became clear to me that he really was yearning and suffering and really, undoubtedly, had loved much—and for me that was the most precious thing of all. I told him so with enthusiasm.

“But you know,” I suddenly added, “it seems to me that despite all your yearning, you must have been extremely happy then.”

He laughed gaily.

“You’re particularly apt in your observations today,” he said. “Well, yes, I was happy, and how could I be unhappy with such yearning? There’s no one freer and happier than a Russian European wanderer from our thousand. I say it, truly, without laughing, and there’s much that’s serious here. Yes, I wouldn’t exchange my yearning for any other happiness. In this sense I’ve always been happy, my dear, all my life. And out of happiness I came to love your mama then for the first time in my life.”

“How, for the first time in your life?”

“Precisely so. In my wandering and yearning, I suddenly came to love her as never before, and sent for her at once.”

“Oh, tell me about that, too, tell me about mama!”

“But that’s why I invited you, and, you know,” he smiled gaily, “I was afraid you’d forgiven me mama on account of Herzen or some sort of little conspiracy . . .”

Chapter Eight

I

SINCE WE WENT on talking all evening then and sat till it was night, I won’t quote the whole conversation, but will just set down something that explained to me, finally, one mysterious point in his life.

I’ll begin by saying that for me there’s no doubt that he loved mama, and if he abandoned her and “unmarried” her when he went away, it was, of course, because he had become too bored or something of the sort, which, however, happens with everyone in the world, but which is always hard to explain. Abroad, however, after a long while, he suddenly began to love mama again from afar, that is, in thought, and sent for her. “Whimsicality,” they may say, but I say something else: in my opinion, here was all that can possibly be serious in human life, despite the apparent slip-slop, which I, perhaps, partly make allowances for. But I swear that I put this European yearning of his beyond question and not only on a par with, but incomparably higher than, any contemporary practical activity in the building of railroads. His love for mankind I acknowledge as a most sincere and profound feeling, without any tricks; and his love for mama as something completely unquestionable, though maybe a bit fantastic. Abroad, “in yearning and happiness,” and, I’ll add, in the strictest monastic solitude (this particular information I received later through Tatyana Pavlovna), he suddenly remembered mama—remembered precisely her “sunken cheeks”—and sent for her at once.

“My friend,” escaped him, among other things, “I suddenly realized that my serving the idea did not free me, as a moral and reasonable being, from the duty of making at least one person happy in practice during the course of my life.”

“Can such a bookish thought really have been the cause of it all?” I asked in perplexity.