I am intentionally placing this long tirade about laughter here, even sacrificing the flow of the story, for I consider it one of the most serious conclusions of my life. And I especially recommend it to those would-be brides who are ready to marry their chosen man, but keep scrutinizing him with hesitation and mistrust, and can’t make the final decision. And let them not laugh at the pathetic adolescent for poking with his moral admonitions into the matter of marriage, of which he doesn’t understand the first thing. But I understand only that laughter is the surest test of a soul. Look at a child: only children know how to laugh perfectly—that’s what makes them seductive. A crying child is repulsive to me, but a laughing and merry child is a ray from paradise, a revelation from the future, when man will finally become as pure and simplehearted as a child. And so something childlike and incredibly attractive also flashed in the fleeting laughter of this old man. I went up to him at once.
III
“SIT, SIT A WHILE, must be your legs don’t stand firm yet,” he invited me affably, pointing to the place next to him and continuing to look into my face with the same radiant gaze. I sat down next to him and said:
“I know you, you’re Makar Ivanovich.”
“So I am, dear heart. And it’s a fine thing that you got up. You’re a young man, it’s a fine thing for you. An old man looks towards the grave, but a young man must live.”
“But are you ill?”
“I am, my friend, the legs mostly; they brought me as far as the doorstep, but once I sat down here, they got swollen. It came over me last Thursday, when the degrees set in” (N.B.—that is, when the frost set in). “I’ve been rubbing them with ointment so far, you see; two years ago Lichten, the doctor, Edmund Karlych, prescribed it to me in Moscow, and the ointment helped, oh, it helped; well, but now it’s stopped helping. And my chest is blocked up, too. And since yesterday it’s the back as well, like dogs nipping at me . . . I don’t sleep nights.”
“How is it I haven’t heard you here at all?” I interrupted. He looked at me as if he was trying to figure something out.
“Just don’t wake your mother,” he added, as if recalling something. “She fussed around me all night here, and so inaudibly, like a fly; but now I know she’s lying down. Ah, it’s bad for a sick old man,” he sighed. “Not much for the soul to hang on to, it seems, but still it holds on, but still it’s glad of the world; and, it seems, if you were to begin your whole life over again, the soul mightn’t fear even that; though maybe such a thought is sinful.”
“Why sinful?”
“It’s a dream, this thought, and an old man ought to depart in a handsome way. Again, if you meet death with murmuring or displeasure, it’s a great sin. Well, but if you love life out of spiritual mirth, then I suppose God will forgive, even if you’re an old man. It’s hard for a man to know about every sin, what’s sinful and what’s not; there’s a mystery here that passes human reason. An old man should be pleased at all times, and he should die in the full flower of his mind, blessedly and handsomely, full of days, sighing at his last hour and rejoicing, departing like the ear to its sheaf, and fulfilling his mystery.”
“You keep saying ‘mystery’; what is this ‘fulfilling his mystery’?” I asked, and looked back at the door. I was glad that we were alone and that there was undisturbed silence around us. The sun was shining brightly through the window before sunset. He spoke somewhat grandiloquently and imprecisely, but very sincerely and with some strong excitement, as if he was indeed so glad of my coming. But I noticed that he was undoubtedly in a feverish condition and even a strong one. I was also sick, also in a fever, from the moment I went in to him.
“What is a mystery? Everything is a mystery, my friend, there is God’s mystery in everything. Every tree, every blade of grass contains this same mystery. Whether it’s a small bird singing or the whole host of stars shining in the sky at night—it’s all one mystery, the same one. And the greatest mystery of all is what awaits the human soul in the other world. That’s how things are, my friend!”
