The place where I first saw him was a tavern wherein, ensconced in the chimney-corner, and facing a table, he was exclaiming stutteringly, "Oh, I know the truth about you all! Yes, I know the truth about you!" while standing in a semicircle in front of him, and unconsciously rendering him more and more excited with their sarcastic interpolations, were some tradesmen of the superior sort--five in number. One of them remarked indifferently:
"How should you NOT know the truth about us, seeing that you do nothing but slander us?"
Shabby, in fact in rags, Gubin at that moment reminded me of a homeless dog which, having strayed into a strange street, has found itself held up by a band of dogs of superior strength, and, seized with nervousness, is sitting back on its haunches and sweeping the dust with its tail; and, with growls, and occasional barings of its fangs, and sundry barkings, attempting now to intimidate its adversaries, and now to conciliate them.
Meanwhile, having perceived the stranger's helplessness and insignificance, the native pack is beginning to moderate its attitude, in the conviction that, though continued maintenance of dignity is imperative, it is not worthwhile to pick a quarrel so long as an occasional yelp be vented in the stranger's face.
"To whom are you of any use?" one of the tradesmen at length inquired.
"Not a man of us but may be of use."
"To whom, then?" . . .
I had long since grown familiar with tavern disputes concerning verities, and not infrequently seen those disputes develop into open brawls; but never had I permitted myself to be drawn into their toils, or to be set wandering amid their tangles like a blind man negotiating a number of hillocks. Moreover, just before this encounter with Gubin, I had arrived at a dim surmise that when such differences were carried to the point of madness and bloodshed. Really,they constituted an expression of the unmeaning, hopeless, melancholy life that is lived in the wilder and more remote districts of Russia--of the life that is lived on swampy banks of dingy rivers, and in our smaller and more God-forgotten towns. For it would seem that in such places men have nothing to look for, nor any knowledge of how to look for anything; wherefore, they brawl and shout in vain attempts to dissipate despondency. . . .
I myself was sitting near Gubin, but on the other side of the table. Yet, this was not because his outbursts and the tradesmen's retorts thereto were a pleasure to listen to, since to me both the one and the other seemed about as futile as beating the air.
"To whom are YOU of use?"
"To himself every man can be useful."
"But what good can one do oneself?" . . .
The windows of the tavern were open, while in the pendent, undulating cloud of blue smoke that the flames of the lamps emitted, those lamps looked like so many yellow pitchers floating amid the waters of a stagnant pond. Out of doors there was brooding the quiet of an August night, and not a rustle, not a whisper was there to be heard. Hence, as numbed with melancholy, I gazed at the inky heavens and limpid stars I thought to myself:
"Surely, never were the sky and the stars meant to look down upon a life like this, a life like this?"
Suddenly someone said with the subdued assurance of a person reading aloud from a written document:
"Unless the peasants of Kubarovo keep a watch upon their timber lands, the sun will fire them tomorrow, and then the Birkins' forest also will catch alight."
For a moment the dispute died down. Then, as it were cleaving the silence, a voice said stutteringly:
"Who cares about the significance of the word 'truth'?"
And the words-- heavy, jumbled, and clumsy-- filled me with despondent reflections. Then again the voices rose--this time in louder and more venomous accents, and with their din recalled to me, by some accident, the foolish lines:
The gods did give men water To wash in, and to drink;
Yet man has made it but a pool In which his woes to sink.
Presently I moved outside and, seating myself on the steps of the veranda, fell to contemplating the dull, blurred windows of the Archpriest's house on the other side of the square, and to watching how black shadows kept flitting to and fro behind their panes as the faint, lugubrious notes of a guitar made themselves heard. And a high-pitched, irritable voice kept repeating at intervals: "Allow me. Pray, permit me to speak," and being answered by a voice which intermittently shot into the silence, as into a bottomless sack, the words: "No, do you wait a moment, do you wait a moment."
Surrounded by the darkness, the houses looked stunted like gravestones, with a line of black trees above their roofs that loomed shadowy and cloud-like. Only in the furthest corner of the expanse was the light of a solitary street lamp bearing a resemblance to the disk of a stationary, resplendent dandelion.
Over everything was melancholy. Far from inviting was the general outlook. So much was this the case that, had, at that moment, anyone stolen upon me from behind the bushes and dealt me a sudden blow on the head, I should merely have sunk to earth without attempting to see who my assailant had been.
Often, in those days, was I in this mood, for it clave to me as faithfully as a dog--never did it wholly leave me.
"It was for men like THOSE that this fair earth of ours was bestowed upon us!" I thought to myself.
Suddenly, with a clatter, someone ran out of the door of the tavern, slid down the steps, fell headlong at their foot, quickly regained his equilibrium, and disappeared in the darkness after exclaiming in a threatening voice:
"Oh, I'LL pay you out! I'LL skin you, you damned... !"
Whereafter two figures that also appeared in the doorway said as they stood talking to one another:
"You heard him threaten to fire the place, did you not?"
"Yes, I did. But why should he want to fire it? "
"Because he is a dangerous rascal."
