I was angry, and, taking her by the shoulders, pushed her away from the gate; but she broke away and, facing me, quickly undid her dress, lifted up her chemise, and shouted:--
Then I lost my temper. I took her by the neck, turned her round, and struck her with my shovel below the back, so that she skipped out of the gate and ran across the yard, crying out three times in great surprise: "O! O! O!"
After that, I got my passport from her confidant, Pauline--also a drunken but very wily woman--took my bundle under my arm, and left the place; and the General's widow, standing at the window with a red shawl in her hand, shouted:--
"I won't call the police--it's all right--listen--come back--don't be afraid."
I asked him: "Do you agree with Poznyshiev[1] when he says that doctors have destroyed and are destroying thousands and hundreds of thousands of people?"
I remember in one of his stories he makes a comparison between a quack village vet. and a doctor of medicine:--
"The words 'giltchak,' 'potchetchny,' bloodletting,'[2] are they not precisely the same as nerves, rheumatism, organisms, etc.?"
And this was written after Jenner, Behring, Pasteur. It is perversity!
[Footnote 2: Words used by quack vets, for the diseases of horses.]
How strange that he is so fond of playing cards. He plays seriously, passionately. His hands become nervous when he takes the cards up, exactly as if he were holding live birds instead of inanimate pieces of cardboard.
"Dickens said a very clever thing: 'Life is given to us on the definite understanding that we boldly defend it to the last.' On the whole, he was a sentimental, loquacious, and not very clever writer, but he knew how to construct a novel as no one else could, certainly better than Balzac. Someone has said: 'Many are possessed by the passion for writing books, but few are ashamed of them afterwards.' Balzac was not ashamed, nor was Dickens, and both of them wrote quite a number of bad books. Still, Balzac is a genius. Or at any rate the thing which you can only call genius...."
[Someone brought Leo Tikhomirov's book, _Why I Ceased to be a Revolutionary_: Leo Nicolayevitch took the book from the table, waved it in the air, and said: "What he says here about political murder is good, that there is no clear idea in that method. The idea, says a frenzied murderer, can only be anarchical sovereignty of the individual and contempt for society and for mankind. That is true, but 'anarchical sovereignty 'is a slip of the pen, it should have been 'monarchical.' That is a good and true idea; all the terrorists will trip up over it--I mean the honest ones. The man who naturally loves killing won't trip up. There is nothing for him to trip up over. He's just a plain murderer, and has only accidentally become a terrorist."]