Part 30 (1/2)

'Nothing done! What is there to do?'

'What is there to do! To keep an old blind woman and all her family by one's work, as, do you remember, Mihail, Pryazhentsov did... That's doing something.'

'Yes, but a good word--is also something done.'

Rudin looked at Lezhnyov without speaking and faintly shook his head.

Lezhnyov wanted to say something, and he pa.s.sed his hand over his face.

'And so you are going to your country place?' he asked at last

'Yes.'

'There you have some property left?'

'Something is left me there. Two souls and a half. It is a corner to die in. You are thinking perhaps at this moment: ”Even now he cannot do without fine words!” Words indeed have been my ruin; they have consumed me, and to the end I cannot be free of them. But what I have said was not mere words. These white hairs, brother, these wrinkles, these ragged elbows--they are not mere words. You have always been hard on me, Mihail, and you were right; but now is not a time to be hard, when all is over, when there's no oil left in the lamp, and the lamp itself is broken, and the wick is just smouldering out. Death, brother, should reconcile at last...'

Lezhnyov jumped up.

'Rudin!' he cried, 'why do you speak like that to me? How have I deserved it from you? Am I such a judge, and what kind of a man should I be, if at the sight of your hollow cheeks and wrinkles, ”mere words”

could occur to my mind? Do you want to know what I think of you, Dmitri?

Well! I think: here is a man--with his abilities, what might he not have attained to, what worldly advantages might he not have possessed by now, if he had liked!... and I meet him hungry and homeless....'

'I rouse your compa.s.sion,' Rudin murmured in a choked voice.

'No, you are wrong. You inspire respect in me--that is what I feel. Who prevented you from spending year after year at that landowner's, who was your friend, and who would, I am fully persuaded, have made provision for you, if you had only been willing to humour him? Why could you not live harmoniously at the gymnasium, why have you--strange man!--with whatever ideas you have entered upon an undertaking, infallibly every time ended by sacrificing your personal interests, ever refusing to take root in any but good ground, however profitable it might be?'

'I was born a rolling stone,' Rudin said, with a weary smile. 'I cannot stop myself.'

'That is true; but you cannot stop, not because there is a worm gnawing you, as you said to me at first.... It is not a worm, not the spirit of idle restlessness--it is the fire of the love of truth that burns in you, and clearly, in spite of your failings; it burns in you more hotly than in many who do not consider themselves egoists and dare to call you a humbug perhaps. I, for one, in your place should long ago have succeeded in silencing that worm in me, and should have given in to everything; and you have not even been embittered by it, Dmitri. You are ready, I am sure, to-day, to set to some new work again like a boy.'

'No, brother, I am tired now,' said Rudin. 'I have had enough.'

'Tired! Any other man would have been dead long ago. You say that death reconciles; but does not life, don't you think, reconcile? A man who has lived and has not grown tolerant towards others does not deserve to meet with tolerance himself. And who can say he does not need tolerance? You have done what you could, Dmitri... you have struggled so long as you could... what more? Our paths lay apart,'...

'You were utterly different from me,' Rudin put in with a sigh.