To this rule the boy was a bitter and painful exception. His mainspring remained a sense of care, and no feeling of unconcern lightened or ennobled it. He knew he had this inherited trait and with self-conscious alertness caught signs of it in himself. It upset him. Its presence humiliated him.
For as long as he could remember, he had never ceased to marvel at how, with the same arms and legs and a common language and habits, one could be not like everyone else, and besides that, be someone who was liked by few, someone who was not loved. He could not understand a situation in which, if you were worse than others, you could not make an effort to correct yourself and become better. What did it mean to be a Jew? Why was there such a thing? What could reward or justify this unarmed challenge that brought nothing but grief?
When he turned to his father for an answer, he said that his starting points were absurd and one could not reason that way, but he did not offer anything instead that would attract Misha by its profound meaning and oblige him to bow silently before the irrevocable.
And, making an exception for his father and mother, Misha gradually became filled with scorn for adults, who had cooked a pudding they were unable to eat. He was convinced that when he grew up, he would untangle it all.
Now, too, no one would dare to say that his father had acted wrongly in rushing after that madman when he ran out onto the platform, and that there was no need to stop the train, when, powerfully shoving Grigory Osipovich aside and throwing open the door of the car, the man had hurled himself headlong off the speeding express onto the embankment, as a diver throws himself off the deck of a bathing house into the water.
But since the brake handle had been turned not by just anyone, but precisely by Grigory Osipovich, it came out that the train went on standing there so unaccountably long thanks to them.
No one really knew the cause of the delay. Some said that the sudden stop had damaged the air brakes, others that the train was standing on a steep slope and the engine could not get up it without momentum. A third opinion spread that, since the man who had killed himself was an eminent person, his attorney, who was traveling with him on the train, had demanded that witnesses be summoned from the nearest station, Kologrivovka, to draw up a report. That was why the assistant engineer had climbed the telephone pole. The handcar must already be on its way.
In the car there was a bit of a whiff from the toilets, which they tried to ward off with eau de cologne, and it smelled of roast chicken gone slightly bad, wrapped in dirty greased paper. The graying Petersburg ladies, powdering themselves as before, wiping their palms with handkerchiefs, and talking in chesty, rasping voices, all turned into jet-black Gypsy women from the combination of engine soot and greasy cosmetics. As they passed by the Gordons’ compartment, wrapping the corners of their shoulders in shawls and turning the narrowness of the corridor into a source of fresh coquetry, it seemed to Misha that they hissed, or, judging by their compressed lips, meant to hiss: “Ah, just imagine, such sensitivity! We’re special! We’re intelligentsia! We simply can’t!”
The body of the suicide lay on the grass by the embankment. A streak of dried blood made a sharp black mark across the forehead and eyes of the broken man, as if crossing out his face. The blood seemed not to be his blood, flowing from him, but a stuck-on, extraneous addition, a plaster, or a spatter of dried mud, or a wet birch leaf.
The little bunch of curious and sympathizing people around the body kept changing all the time. Over him, frowning, expressionless, stood his friend and compartment companion, a stout and arrogant lawyer, a purebred animal in a sweat-soaked shirt. He was weary from the heat and fanned himself with a soft hat. To all questions, he replied ungraciously through his teeth, shrugging and without even turning: “An alcoholic. Can’t you understand? The most typical consequence of delirium tremens.”
A thin woman in a woollen dress and lace fichu approached the body two or three times. This was old Tiverzina, a widow and the mother of two engineers, who was traveling free in third class with her two daughters-in-law on a company pass. The quiet women, their kerchiefs drawn low, silently followed behind her, like two nuns behind their mother superior. The group inspired respect. People made way for them.
Tiverzina’s husband had been burned alive in a railroad accident. She stopped a few steps from the corpse, so that she could see it through the crowd, and sighed as if making the comparison. “To each as it’s set down at birth,” she seemed to say. “Some die by God’s will, but this one, see what a notion took him—from rich living and a fuddled brain.”
All the passengers on the train came in turn to see the body and went back to their cars only for fear that something might be stolen from them.
When they jumped down on the tracks, stretched their limbs, picked flowers, and took a little run, they all had the feeling that the place had just emerged only thanks to the stop, and that the swampy meadow with its knolls, the wide river, with a beautiful house and a church on the high bank opposite, would not be there had it not been for the accident that had taken place.
Even the sun, which also seemed like a local accessory, shone upon the scene by the rails with an evening shyness, approaching as if timorously, as a cow from the herd grazing nearby would if it were to come to the railway and start looking at the people.
Misha was shaken by all that had happened and for the first moments wept from pity and fright. In the course of the long journey the suicide had come to their compartment several times and had sat talking for hours with Misha’s father. He had said that his soul felt relaxed in the morally pure quiet and comprehension of their world, and he had questioned Grigory Osipovich about various legal subtleties and cavils to do with promissory notes and donations, bankruptcies and frauds. “Ah, is that so?” he kept being surprised at Gordon’s explanations. “You dispose of a much more merciful set of statutes. My attorney has different information. He takes a much darker view of these things.”
Each time this nervous man calmed down, his lawyer and compartment companion came from first class and dragged him off to drink champagne in the dining car. This was the stout, insolent, clean-shaven fop of an attorney who now stood over the body, not surprised at anything in the world. It was impossible to rid oneself of the feeling that his client’s constant agitation had somehow played into his hands.
The father said that this was a well-known rich man, kindly and wayward, already half out of his mind. Unembarrassed by Misha’s presence, he had told of his son, the same age as Misha, and of his late wife, and had then gone on to his second family, which he had also abandoned. Then he remembered something new, paled with terror, and began talking nonsense and forgetting himself.
Towards Misha he showed an inexplicable tenderness, probably reflected, and perhaps not destined for him. He kept giving him things, for which he got out at the biggest stations and went to the first-class waiting rooms, where there were book stalls and they sold games and local curiosities.
He drank incessantly and complained that he had not slept for three months and, when he sobered up even for a short time, suffered torments of which a normal man could have no notion.