“‘As soon as I can, I shall set off--but not to Europe. Heaven forfend! I shall go to America, to Arabia, to India--perchance I shall die somewhere on the way. At any rate, I am convinced that, thanks to storms and bad roads, that last consolation will not quickly be exhausted!’
“For a long time he went on speaking thus, and his words have remained stamped upon my memory, because it was the first time that I had heard such things from a man of five-and-twenty--and Heaven grant it may be the last. Isn’t it astonishing? Tell me, please,” continued the staff-captain, appealing to me. “You used to live in the Capital, I think, and that not so very long ago. Is it possible that the young men there are all like that?”
I replied that there were a good many people who used the same sort of language, that, probably, there might even be some who spoke in all sincerity; that disillusionment, moreover, like all other vogues, having had its beginning in the higher strata of society, had descended to the lower, where it was being worn threadbare, and that, now, those who were really and truly bored strove to conceal their misfortune as if it were a vice. The staff-captain did not understand these subtleties, shook his head, and smiled slyly.
“Anyhow, I suppose it was the French who introduced the fashion?”
“Aha, there you are!” he answered. “They always have been arrant drunkards, you know!”
Involuntarily I recalled to mind a certain lady, living in Moscow, who used to maintain that Byron was nothing more nor less than a drunkard. However, the staff-captain’s observation was more excusable; in order to abstain from strong drink, he naturally endeavoured to convince himself that all the misfortunes in the world are the result of drunkenness.
MEANWHILE the staff-captain continued his story.
“Kazbich never put in an appearance again; but somehow--I don’t know why--I could not get the idea out of my head that he had had a reason for coming, and that some mischievous scheme was in his mind.
“Well, one day Pechorin tried to persuade me to go boar-hunting with him. For a long time I refused. What novelty was a wild boar to me?
“However, off he dragged me, all the same. We took four or five soldiers and set out early in the morning. Up till ten o’clock we scurried about the reeds and the forest--there wasn’t a wild beast to be found!