I got through the evening somehow, and charging my coachman to have my carriage ready at five o'clock next morning, I went to my room. But I was destined, in the course of that same day, to make the acquaintance of a remarkable man.
In consequence of the great number of guests staying in the house, no one had a bedroom to himself. In the small, greenish, damp room to which I was conducted by Alexandr Mihalitch's butler, there was already another guest, quite undressed. On seeing me, he quickly ducked under the bed-clothes, covered himself up to the nose, turned a little on the soft feather-bed, and lay quiet, keeping a sharp look-out from under the round frill of his cotton night-cap. I went up to the other bed (there were only two in the room), undressed, and lay down in the damp sheets. My neighbour turned over in bed.... I wished him good-night.
Half-an-hour went by. In spite of all my efforts, I could not get to sleep: aimless and vague thoughts kept persistently and monotonously dragging one after another on an endless chain, like the buckets of a hydraulic machine.
'You're not asleep, I fancy?' observed my neighbour.
'No, as you see,' I answered. 'And you're not sleepy either, are you?'
'Oh! I go to sleep--I don't know what for. I lie in bed, and lie in bed, and so get to sleep.'
'Why do you go to bed before you feel sleepy?'
I made no answer to my neighbour's question.
'I wonder,' he went on, after a brief silence, 'how it is there are no fleas here? Where should there be fleas if not here, one wonders?'
'No, I don't regret them; but I like everything to be consecutive.'
'Would you like to make a bet with me?' he said again, rather loudly.
'Hm... what about? Why, about this: I'm certain you take me for a fool.'
'For an ignoramus, for a rustic of the steppes.... Confess....'
'I haven't the pleasure of knowing you,' I responded. 'What can make you infer?...'
'Why, the sound of your voice is enough; you answer me so carelessly.... But I'm not at all what you suppose....'
'No, you allow me. In the first place, I speak French as well as you, and German even better; secondly, I have spent three years abroad--in Berlin alone I lived eight months. I've studied Hegel, honoured sir; I know Goethe by heart: add to that, I was a long while in love with a German professor's daughter, and was married at home to a consumptive lady, who was bald, but a remarkable personality. So I'm a bird of your feather; I'm not a barbarian of the steppes, as you imagine.... I too have been bitten by reflection, and there's nothing obvious about me.'