He would appear suddenly in my room, stand by the door and talk—­but talk with the ignorance, naivete, brutal simplicity of an utterly abandoned baby.  Nothing mystical or beautiful about the Rat.  He did not disguise from me in the least that there was no crime that he had not committed—­murder, rape, arson, immorality of the most hideous, sacrilege, the basest betrayal of his best friends—­he was not only savage and outlaw, he was deliberate anarchist and murderer.  He had no redeeming point that I could anywhere discover.  I did not in the least mind his entering my room when he pleased.  I had there nothing of any value; he could take my life even, had he a mind to that....  The naive abysmal depths of his depravity interested me.  He formed a kind of attachment to me.  He told me that he would do anything for me.  He had a strange tact which prevented him from intruding upon me when I was occupied.  He was as quick as any cultured civilised cosmopolitan to see if he was not wanted.  He developed a certain cleanliness; he told me, with an air of disdainful superiority, that he had been to the public baths.  I gave him an old suit of mine and a pair of boots.  He very seldom asked for anything; once and again he would point to something and say that he would like to have it; if I said that he could not he expressed no disappointment; sometimes he stole it, but he always acknowledged that he had done so if I asked him, although he would lie stupendously on other occasions for no reason at all.

“Now you must bring that back,” I would say sternly.

“Oh no, Barin....  Why?  You have so many things.  Surely you will not object.  Perhaps I will bring it—­and perhaps not.”

“You must certainly bring it,” I would say.

“We will see,” he would say, smiling at me in the friendliest fashion.

He was the only absolutely happy Russian I have ever known.  He had no passages of despair.  He had been in prison, he would be in prison again.  He had spasms of the most absolute ferocity.  On one occasion I thought that I should be his next victim, and for a moment my fate hung, I think, in the balance.  But he changed his mind.  He had a real liking for me, I think.  When he could get it, he drank a kind of furniture polish, the only substitute in these days for vodka.  This was an absolutely killing drink, and I tried to prove to him that frequent indulgence in it meant an early decease.  That did not affect him in the least.  Death had no horror for him although, I foresaw, with justice as after events proved, that if he were faced with it he would be a very desperate coward.  He liked very much my cigarettes, and I gave him these on condition that he did not spit sunflower seeds over my floor.  He kept his word about this.

He chatted incessantly, and sometimes I listened and sometimes not.  He had no politics and was indeed comfortably ignorant of any sort of geography or party division.  There were for him only the rich and the poor.  He knew nothing about the war, but he hoped, he frankly told me, that there would be anarchy in Petrograd, so that he might rob and plunder.