Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/113

 such nonsense that a serious person would be ashamed to talk about it. It seemed to me that he looked upon me as a sort of child, almost a baby, who did not understand the simplest things in the world. If I began, for instance, on any subject not a learned or bookish one, he would answer me, indeed, but apparently only from politeness, confining himself to the briefest reply. I often wondered what the book knowledge about which he usually questioned me meant to him. I sometimes happened to look sideways at him during our conversations to see whether he were laughing at me. But no; usually he was listening seriously and even with some attention, though often so little that I felt annoyed. He asked exact and definite questions, but showed no great surprise at the information he got from me, and received it indeed rather absent-mindedly. I fancied, too, that he had made up his mind once for all without bothering his head about it, that it was no use talking to me as one would to other people, that apart from talking of books I understood nothing and was incapable of understanding anything, so there was no need to worry me.

I am sure that he had a real affection for me, and that struck me very much. Whether he considered me undeveloped, not fully a man, or felt for me that special sort of compassion that every strong creature instinctively feels for some one, weaker, recognizing me as such—I don’t know. And although all that did not prevent him from robbing me, I am sure he felt sorry for me as he did it. “Ech!” he may have thought as he laid hands on my property, “what a man, he can’t even defend his own property.” But I fancy that was what he liked me for. He said to me himself one day, as it were casually, that I was “a man with too good a heart” and “so simple, so simple, that it makes one feel sorry for you. Only don’t take it amiss, Alexandr Petrovitch,” he added a minute later, “I spoke without thinking, from my heart.”

It sometimes happens that such people come conspicuously to the front and take a prominent position at the moment of some violent mass movement or revolution, and in that way achieve all at once their full possibilities. They are not men of words and cannot be the instigators or the chief leaders of a movement; but they are its most vigorous agents and the first to act. They begin simply, with no special flourish, but they are the first to surmount the worst obstacles, facing every danger without reflection, without fear—and all rush after, blindly