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Title: Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov
Author: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich
Language: English
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THE TALES OF CHEKHOV
233 Stories
By Anton Tchekhov
CONTENTS OF EACH BOOK
THE HORSE-STEALERS
WARD NO. 6
THE PETCHENYEG
A DEAD BODY
A HAPPY ENDING
THE LOOKING-GLASS
OLD AGE
DARKNESS
THE BEGGAR
A STORY WITHOUT A TITLE
IN TROUBLE
FROST
A SLANDER
MINDS IN FERMENT
GONE ASTRAY
AN AVENGER
THE JEUNE PREMIER
A DEFENCELESS CREATURE
AN ENIGMATIC NATURE
A HAPPY MAN
A TROUBLESOME VISITOR
AN ACTOR’S END The Schoolmaster and Other Stories
THE SCHOOLMASTER
ENEMIES
THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE
BETROTHED
FROM THE DIARY OF A VIOLENT-TEMPERED MAN
IN THE DARK
A PLAY
A MYSTERY
STRONG IMPRESSIONS
DRUNK
THE MARSHAL’S WIDOW
A BAD BUSINESS
IN THE COURT
BOOTS
JOY
LADIES
A PECULIAR MAN
AT THE BARBER’S
AN INADVERTENCE
THE ALBUM
OH! THE PUBLIC
A TRIPPING TONGUE
OVERDOING IT
THE ORATOR
MALINGERERS
IN THE GRAVEYARD
HUSH!
IN AN HOTEL
IN A STRANGE LAND
THE PARTY
TERROR
A WOMAN’S KINGDOM
A PROBLEM
THE KISS
‘ANNA ON THE NECK’
THE TEACHER OF LITERATURE
NOT WANTED
TYPHUS
A MISFORTUNE
A TRIFLE FROM LIFE
THE COOK’S WEDDING
SLEEPY
CHILDREN
THE RUNAWAY
GRISHA
OYSTERS
HOME
A CLASSICAL STUDENT
VANKA
AN INCIDENT
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
BOYS
SHROVE TUESDAY
THE OLD HOUSE
IN PASSION WEEK
WHITEBROW
KASHTANKA
A CHAMELEON
THE DEPENDENTS
WHO WAS TO BLAME?
THE BIRD MARKET
AN ADVENTURE
THE FISH
ART
THE SWEDISH MATCH
THE BISHOP
THE LETTER
EASTER EVE
A NIGHTMARE
THE MURDER
UPROOTED
THE STEPPE
INTRODUCTION
BEST RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES
THE QUEEN OF SPADES
THE CLOAK
THE DISTRICT DOCTOR
THE CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE WEDDING
GOD SEES THE TRUTH, BUT WAITS
HOW A MUZHIK FED TWO OFFICIALS
THE SHADES, A PHANTASY
THE SIGNAL
THE DARLING
THE BET
VANKA
HIDE AND SEEK
DETHRONED
THE SERVANT
ONE AUTUMN NIGHT
HER LOVER
LAZARUS
THE REVOLUTIONIST
THE OUTRAGE—A TRUE STORY
THE DUEL
EXCELLENT PEOPLE
MIRE
NEIGHBOURS
AT HOME
EXPENSIVE LESSONS
THE PRINCESS
THE CHEMIST’S WIFE
THE SCHOOLMISTRESS
A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
MISERY
CHAMPAGNE
AFTER THE THEATRE
A LADY’S STORY
IN EXILE
THE CATTLE-DEALERS
SORROW
ON OFFICIAL DUTY
THE FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER
A TRAGIC ACTOR
A TRANSGRESSION
SMALL FRY
THE REQUIEM
IN THE COACH-HOUSE
PANIC FEARS
THE BET
THE HEAD-GARDENER’S STORY
THE BEAUTIES
THE SHOEMAKER AND THE DEVIL
THE WIFE
DIFFICULT PEOPLE
THE GRASSHOPPER
A DREARY STORY
THE PRIVY COUNCILLOR
THE MAN IN A CASE
GOOSEBERRIES
ABOUT LOVE
THE LOTTERY TICKET
THE WITCH
PEASANT WIVES
THE POST
THE NEW VILLA
DREAMS
THE PIPE
AGAFYA
AT CHRISTMAS TIME
GUSEV
THE STUDENT
IN THE RAVINE
THE HUNTSMAN
HAPPINESS
A MALEFACTOR
PEASANTS
THE CHORUS GIRL
VEROTCHKA
MY LIFE
AT A COUNTRY HOUSE
A FATHER
ON THE ROAD
ROTHSCHILD'S FIDDLE
IVAN MATVEYITCH
ZINOTCHKA
BAD WEATHER
A GENTLEMAN FRIEND
A TRIVIAL INCIDENT
LOVE
LIGHTS
A STORY WITHOUT AN END
MARI D’ELLE
A LIVING CHATTEL
THE DOCTOR
TOO EARLY!
THE COSSACK
ABORIGINES
AN INQUIRY
MARTYRS
THE LION AND THE SUN
A DAUGHTER OF ALBION
CHORISTERS
NERVES
A WORK OF ART
A JOKE
A COUNTRY COTTAGE
A BLUNDER
FAT AND THIN
THE DEATH OF A GOVERNMENT CLERK
A PINK STOCKING
AT A SUMMER VILLA
THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE
TYPHUS
GOOSEBERRIES
IN EXILE
THE LADY WITH THE TOY DOG
GOUSSIEV
MY LIFE
THE BET
A TEDIOUS STORY
THE FIT
MISFORTUNE
AFTER THE THEATRE
THAT WRETCHED BOY
ENEMIES
A TRIFLING OCCURRENCE
A GENTLEMAN FRIEND
OVERWHELMING SENSATIONS
EXPENSIVE LESSONS
A LIVING CALENDAR
OLD AGE
THE DARLING
ARIADNE
POLINKA
ANYUTA
THE TWO VOLODYAS
THE TROUSSEAU
THE HELPMATE
TALENT
AN ARTIST'S STORY
THREE YEARS
IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
[ A ]
ABORIGINES
ABOUT LOVE
ACTOR’S END
ADVENTURE
AFTER THE THEATRE
AFTER THE THEATRE
AGAFYA
ALBUM
ANNA ON THE NECK
ANYUTA
ARIADNE
ART
ARTIST'S STORY
AUTUMN NIGHT
AVENGER [ B ]
BAD BUSINESS
BAD WEATHER
BARBER’S
BEAUTIES
BEGGAR
BET
BET
BET
BETROTHED
BIRD MARKET
BISHOP
BLUNDER
BOOTS
BOYS [ C ]
CATTLE-DEALERS
CHAMELEON
CHAMPAGNE
CHEMIST’S WIFE
CHILDREN
CHORISTERS
CHRISTMAS TIME
CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE WEDDING
CLASSICAL STUDENT
CLOAK
COACH-HOUSE
COOK’S WEDDING
COSSACK
COUNTRY COTTAGE
COUNTRY HOUSE
COURT [ D ]
DARK
DARKNESS
DARLING
DARLING
DAUGHTER OF ALBION
DAY IN THE COUNTRY
DEAD BODY
DEATH OF A GOVERNMENT CLERK
DEFENCELESS CREATURE
DEPENDENTS
DETHRONED
DIARY OF A VIOLENT-TEMPERED MAN
DIFFICULT PEOPLE
DISTRICT DOCTOR
DOCTOR
DREAMS
DREARY STORY
DRUNK
DUEL [ E ]
EARLY!
EASTER EVE
ENEMIES
ENEMIES
ENIGMATIC NATURE
EXAMINING MAGISTRATE
EXCELLENT PEOPLE
EXILE
EXILE
EXPENSIVE LESSONS
EXPENSIVE LESSONS [ F ]
FAT AND THIN
FATHER
FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER
FISH
FROST [ G ]
GENTLEMAN FRIEND
GENTLEMAN FRIEND
GOD SEES THE TRUTH, BUT WAITS
GONE ASTRAY
GOOSEBERRIES
GOOSEBERRIES
GOUSSIEV
GRASSHOPPER
GRAVEYARD
GRISHA
GUSEV [ H ]
HAPPINESS
HAPPY ENDING
HAPPY MAN
HEAD-GARDENER’S STORY
HELPMATE
HER LOVER
HIDE AND SEEK
HOME
HOME
HORSE-STEALERS
HOTEL
HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE
HUNTSMAN
HUSH! [ I ]
INADVERTENCE
INCIDENT
INQUIRY
IVAN MATVEYITCH [ J ]
JEUNE PREMIER
JOKE
JOY [ K ]
KASHTANKA
KISS [ L ]
LADIES
LADY WITH THE TOY DOG
LADY’S STORY
LAZARUS
LETTER
LIGHTS
LION AND THE SUN
LIVING CALENDAR
LIVING CHATTEL
LOOKING-GLASS
LOTTERY TICKET
LOVE [ M ]
MALEFACTOR
MALINGERERS
MAN IN A CASE
MARI D’ELLE
MARSHAL’S WIDOW
MARTYRS
MINDS IN FERMENT
MIRE
MISERY
MISFORTUNE
MISFORTUNE
MURDER
MUZHIK FED TWO OFFICIALS
MY LIFE
MY LIFE
MYSTERY [ N ]
NEIGHBOURS
NERVES
NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
NEW VILLA
NIGHTMARE
NOT WANTED [ O ]
OFFICIAL DUTY
OLD AGE
OLD AGE
OLD HOUSE
ON THE ROAD
OUTRAGE—A TRUE STORY
OVERDOING IT
OVERWHELMING SENSATIONS
OYSTERS [ P ]
PANIC FEARS
PARTY
PASSION WEEK
PEASANT WIVES
PEASANTS
PECULIAR MAN
PETCHENYEG
PINK STOCKING
PIPE
PLAY
POLINKA
POST
PRINCESS
PRIVY COUNCILLOR
PROBLEM
PUBLIC [ Q ]
QUEEN OF SPADES [ R ]
RAVINE
REQUIEM
REVOLUTIONIST
ROTHSCHILD'S FIDDLE
RUNAWAY [ S ]
SCHOOLMASTER
SCHOOLMISTRESS
SERVANT
SHADES, A PHANTASY
SHOEMAKER AND THE DEVIL
SHROVE TUESDAY
SIGNAL
SLANDER
SLEEPY
SMALL FRY
SORROW
STEPPE
STORY WITHOUT A TITLE
STORY WITHOUT AN END
STRANGE LAND
STRONG IMPRESSIONS
STUDENT
SUMMER VILLA
SWEDISH MATCH [ T ]
TALENT
TEACHER OF LITERATURE
TEDIOUS STORY
TERROR
THAT WRETCHED BOY
THE CHORUS GIRL
THE FIT
THE ORATOR
THREE YEARS
TRAGIC ACTOR
TRANSGRESSION
TRIFLE FROM LIFE
TRIFLING OCCURRENCE
TRIPPING TONGUE
TRIVIAL INCIDENT
TROUBLE
TROUBLESOME VISITOR
TROUSSEAU
TWO VOLODYAS
TYPHUS
TYPHUS [ U ]
UPROOTED [ V ]
VANKA
VANKA
VEROTCHKA [ W ]
WARD NO. 6
WHITEBROW
WHO WAS TO BLAME?
WIFE
WITCH
WOMAN’S KINGDOM
WORK OF ART [ Z ]
ZINOTCHKA
THE HORSE-STEALERS
A HOSPITAL assistant, called Yergunov, an empty-headed fellow, known
throughout the district as a great braggart and drunkard, was returning
one evening in Christmas week from the hamlet of Ryepino, where he had
been to make some purchases for the hospital. That he might get home in
good time and not be late, the doctor had lent him his very best horse.
At first it had been a still day, but at eight o’clock a violent snow-
storm came on, and when he was only about four miles from home Yergunov
completely lost his way.
He did not know how to drive, he did not know the road, and he drove on
at random, hoping that the horse would find the way of itself. Two hours
passed; the horse was exhausted, he himself was chilled, and already
began to fancy that he was not going home, but back towards Ryepino. But
at last above the uproar of the storm he heard the far-away barking of a
dog, and a murky red blur came into sight ahead of him: little by
little, the outlines of a high gate could be discerned, then a long
fence on which there were nails with their points uppermost, and beyond
the fence there stood the slanting crane of a well. The wind drove away
the mist of snow from before the eyes, and where there had been a red
blur, there sprang up a small, squat little house with a steep thatched
roof. Of the three little windows one, covered on the inside with
something red, was lighted up.
What sort of place was it? Yergunov remembered that to the right of the
road, three and a half or four miles from the hospital, there was Andrey
Tchirikov’s tavern. He remembered, too, that this Tchirikov, who had
been lately killed by some sledge-drivers, had left a wife and a
daughter called Lyubka, who had come to the hospital two years before as
a patient. The inn had a bad reputation, and to visit it late in the
evening, and especially with someone else’s horse, was not free from
risk. But there was no help for it. Yergunov fumbled in his knapsack for
his revolver, and, coughing sternly, tapped at the window-frame with his
whip.
“Hey! who is within?” he cried. “Hey, granny! let me come in and get
warm!”
With a hoarse bark a black dog rolled like a ball under the horse’s
feet, then another white one, then another black one—there must have
been a dozen of them. Yergunov looked to see which was the biggest,
swung his whip and lashed at it with all his might. A small, long-legged
puppy turned its sharp muzzle upwards and set up a shrill, piercing
howl.
Yergunov stood for a long while at the window, tapping. But at last the
hoar-frost on the trees near the house glowed red, and a muffled female
figure appeared with a lantern in her hands.
“Let me in to get warm, granny,” said Yergunov. “I was driving to the
hospital, and I have lost my way. It’s such weather, God preserve us.
Don’t be afraid; we are your own people, granny.”
“All my own people are at home, and we didn’t invite strangers,” said
the figure grimly. “And what are you knocking for? The gate is not
locked.”
Yergunov drove into the yard and stopped at the steps.
“Bid your labourer take my horse out, granny,” said he.
“I am not granny.”
And indeed she was not a granny. While she was putting out the lantern
the light fell on her face, and Yergunov saw black eyebrows, and
recognized Lyubka.
“There are no labourers about now,” she said as she went into the house.
“Some are drunk and asleep, and some have been gone to Ryepino since the
morning. It’s a holiday. . . .”
As he fastened his horse up in the shed, Yergunov heard a neigh, and
distinguished in the darkness another horse, and felt on it a Cossack
saddle. So there must be someone else in the house besides the woman and
her daughter. For greater security Yergunov unsaddled his horse, and
when he went into the house, took with him both his purchases and his
saddle.
The first room into which he went was large and very hot, and smelt of
freshly washed floors. A short, lean peasant of about forty, with a
small, fair beard, wearing a dark blue shirt, was sitting at the table
under the holy images. It was Kalashnikov, an arrant scoundrel and
horse-stealer, whose father and uncle kept a tavern in Bogalyovka, and
disposed of the stolen horses where they could. He too had been to the
hospital more than once, not for medical treatment, but to see the
doctor about horses—to ask whether he had not one for sale, and whether
his honour would not like to swop his bay mare for a dun-coloured
gelding. Now his head was pomaded and a silver ear-ring glittered in his
ear, and altogether he had a holiday air. Frowning and dropping his
lower lip, he was looking intently at a big dog’s-eared picture-book.
Another peasant lay stretched on the floor near the stove; his head, his
shoulders, and his chest were covered with a sheepskin—he was probably
asleep; beside his new boots, with shining bits of metal on the heels,
there were two dark pools of melted snow.
Seeing the hospital assistant, Kalashnikov greeted him.
“Yes, it is weather,” said Yergunov, rubbing his chilled knees with his
open hands. “The snow is up to one’s neck; I am soaked to the skin, I
can tell you. And I believe my revolver is, too. . . .”
He took out his revolver, looked it all over, and put it back in his
knapsack. But the revolver made no impression at all; the peasant went
on looking at the book.
“Yes, it is weather. . . . I lost my way, and if it had not been for the
dogs here, I do believe it would have been my death. There would have
been a nice to-do. And where are the women?”
“The old woman has gone to Ryepino, and the girl is getting supper ready
. . .” answered Kalashnikov.
Silence followed. Yergunov, shivering and gasping, breathed on his
hands, huddled up, and made a show of being very cold and exhausted. The
still angry dogs could be heard howling outside. It was dreary.
“You come from Bogalyovka, don’t you?” he asked the peasant sternly.
“Yes, from Bogalyovka.”
And to while away the time Yergunov began to think about Bogalyovka. It
was a big village and it lay in a deep ravine, so that when one drove
along the highroad on a moonlight night, and looked down into the dark
ravine and then up at the sky, it seemed as though the moon were hanging
over a bottomless abyss and it were the end of the world. The path going
down was steep, winding, and so narrow that when one drove down to
Bogalyovka on account of some epidemic or to vaccinate the people, one
had to shout at the top of one’s voice, or whistle all the way, for if
one met a cart coming up one could not pass. The peasants of Bogalyovka
had the reputation of being good gardeners and horse-stealers. They had
well-stocked gardens. In spring the whole village was buried in white
cherry-blossom, and in the summer they sold cherries at three kopecks a
pail. One could pay three kopecks and pick as one liked. Their women
were handsome and looked well fed, they were fond of finery, and never
did anything even on working-days, but spent all their time sitting on
the ledge in front of their houses and searching in each other’s heads.
But at last there was the sound of footsteps. Lyubka, a girl of twenty,
with bare feet and a red dress, came into the room. . . . She looked
sideways at Yergunov and walked twice from one end of the room to the
other. She did not move simply, but with tiny steps, thrusting forward
her bosom; evidently she enjoyed padding about with her bare feet on the
freshly washed floor, and had taken off her shoes on purpose.
Kalashnikov laughed at something and beckoned her with his finger. She
went up to the table, and he showed her a picture of the Prophet Elijah,
who, driving three horses abreast, was dashing up to the sky. Lyubka put
her elbow on the table; her plait fell across her shoulder—a long
chestnut plait tied with red ribbon at the end—and it almost touched the
floor. She, too, smiled.
“A splendid, wonderful picture,” said Kalashnikov. “Wonderful,” he
repeated, and motioned with his hand as though he wanted to take the
reins instead of Elijah.
The wind howled in the stove; something growled and squeaked as though a
big dog had strangled a rat.
“Ugh! the unclean spirits are abroad!” said Lyubka.
“That’s the wind,” said Kalashnikov; and after a pause he raised his
eyes to Yergunov and asked:
“And what is your learned opinion, Osip Vassilyitch—are there devils in
this world or not?”
“What’s one to say, brother?” said Yergunov, and he shrugged one
shoulder. “If one reasons from science, of course there are no devils,
for it’s a superstition; but if one looks at it simply, as you and I do
now, there are devils, to put it shortly. . . . I have seen a great deal
in my life. . . . When I finished my studies I served as medical
assistant in the army in a regiment of the dragoons, and I have been in
the war, of course. I have a medal and a decoration from the Red Cross,
but after the treaty of San Stefano I returned to Russia and went into
the service of the Zemstvo. And in consequence of my enormous
circulation about the world, I may say I have seen more than many
another has dreamed of. It has happened to me to see devils, too; that
is, not devils with horns and a tail—that is all nonsense—but just, to
speak precisely, something of the sort.”
“Where?” asked Kalashnikov.
“In various places. There is no need to go far. Last year I met him
here—speak of him not at night—near this very inn. I was driving, I
remember, to Golyshino; I was going there to vaccinate. Of course, as
usual, I had the racing droshky and a horse, and all the necessary
paraphernalia, and, what’s more, I had a watch and all the rest of it,
so I was on my guard as I drove along, for fear of some mischance. There
are lots of tramps of all sorts. I came up to the Zmeinoy
Ravine—damnation take it—and was just going down it, when all at once
somebody comes up to me—such a fellow! Black hair, black eyes, and his
whole face looked smutted with soot . . . . He comes straight up to the
horse and takes hold of the left rein: ‘Stop!’ He looked at the horse,
then at me, then dropped the reins, and without saying a bad word,
‘Where are you going?’ says he. And he showed his teeth in a grin, and
his eyes were spiteful-looking.
“‘Ah,’ thought I, ‘you are a queer customer!’ ‘I am going to vaccinate
for the smallpox,’ said I. ‘And what is that to you?’ ‘Well, if that’s
so,’ says he, ‘vaccinate me. He bared his arm and thrust it under my
nose. Of course, I did not bandy words with him; I just vaccinated him
to get rid of him. Afterwards I looked at my lancet and it had gone
rusty.”
The peasant who was asleep near the stove suddenly turned over and flung
off the sheepskin; to his great surprise, Yergunov recognized the
stranger he had met that day at Zmeinoy Ravine. This peasant’s hair,
beard, and eyes were black as soot; his face was swarthy; and, to add to
the effect, there was a black spot the size of a lentil on his right
cheek. He looked mockingly at the hospital assistant and said:
“I did take hold of the left rein—that was so; but about the smallpox
you are lying, sir. And there was not a word said about the smallpox
between us.”
Yergunov was disconcerted.
“I’m not talking about you,” he said. “Lie down, since you are lying
down.”
The dark-skinned peasant had never been to the hospital, and Yergunov
did not know who he was or where he came from; and now, looking at him,
he made up his mind that the man must be a gypsy. The peasant got up
and, stretching and yawning loudly, went up to Lyubka and Kalashnikov,
and sat down beside them, and he, too, began looking at the book. His
sleepy face softened and a look of envy came into it.
“Look, Merik,” Lyubka said to him; “get me such horses and I will drive
to heaven.”
“Sinners can’t drive to heaven,” said Kalashnikov. “That’s for
holiness.”
Then Lyubka laid the table and brought in a big piece of fat bacon,
salted cucumbers, a wooden platter of boiled meat cut up into little
pieces, then a frying-pan, in which there were sausages and cabbage
spluttering. A cut-glass decanter of vodka, which diffused a smell of
orange-peel all over the room when it was poured out, was put on the
table also.
Yergunov was annoyed that Kalashnikov and the dark fellow Merik talked
together and took no notice of him at all, behaving exactly as though he
were not in the room. And he wanted to talk to them, to brag, to drink,
to have a good meal, and if possible to have a little fun with Lyubka,
who sat down near him half a dozen times while they were at supper, and,
as though by accident, brushed against him with her handsome shoulders
and passed her hands over her broad hips. She was a healthy, active
girl, always laughing and never still: she would sit down, then get up,
and when she was sitting down she would keep turning first her face and
then her back to her neighbour, like a fidgety child, and never failed
to brush against him with her elbows or her knees.
And he was displeased, too, that the peasants drank only a glass each
and no more, and it was awkward for him to drink alone. But he could not
refrain from taking a second glass, all the same, then a third, and he
ate all the sausage. He brought himself to flatter the peasants, that
they might accept him as one of the party instead of holding him at
arm’s length.
“You are a fine set of fellows in Bogalyovka!” he said, and wagged his
head.
“In what way fine fellows?” enquired Kalashnikov.
“Why, about horses, for instance. Fine fellows at stealing!”
“H’m! fine fellows, you call them. Nothing but thieves and drunkards.”
“They have had their day, but it is over,” said Merik, after a pause.
“But now they have only Filya left, and he is blind.”
“Yes, there is no one but Filya,” said Kalashnikov, with a sigh. “Reckon
it up, he must be seventy; the German settlers knocked out one of his
eyes, and he does not see well with the other. It is cataract. In old
days the police officer would shout as soon as he saw him: ‘Hey, you
Shamil!’ and all the peasants called him that—he was Shamil all over the
place; and now his only name is One-eyed Filya. But he was a fine
fellow! Lyuba’s father, Andrey Grigoritch, and he stole one night into
Rozhnovo—there were cavalry regiments stationed there—and carried off
nine of the soldiers’ horses, the very best of them. They weren’t
frightened of the sentry, and in the morning they sold all the horses
for twenty roubles to the gypsy Afonka. Yes! But nowadays a man
contrives to carry off a horse whose rider is drunk or asleep, and has
no fear of God, but will take the very boots from a drunkard, and then
sAlinks off and goes away a hundred and fifty miles with a horse, and
haggles at the market, haggles like a Jew, till the policeman catches
him, the fool. There is no fun in it; it is simply a disgrace! A paltry
set of people, I must say.”
“What about Merik?” asked Lyubka.
“Merik is not one of us,” said Kalashnikov. “He is a Harkov man from
Mizhiritch. But that he is a bold fellow, that’s the truth; there’s no
gainsaying that he is a fine fellow.”
Lyubka looked slily and gleefully at Merik, and said:
“It wasn’t for nothing they dipped him in a hole in the ice.”
“How was that?” asked Yergunov.
“It was like this . . .” said Merik, and he laughed. “Filya carried off
three horses from the Samoylenka tenants, and they pitched upon me.
There were ten of the tenants at Samoylenka, and with their labourers
there were thirty altogether, and all of them Molokans . . . . So one of
them says to me at the market: ‘Come and have a look, Merik; we have
brought some new horses from the fair.’ I was interested, of course. I
went up to them, and the whole lot of them, thirty men, tied my hands
behind me and led me to the river. ‘We’ll show you fine horses,’ they
said. One hole in the ice was there already; they cut another beside it
seven feet away. Then, to be sure, they took a cord and put a noose
under my armpits, and tied a crooked stick to the other end, long enough
to reach both holes. They thrust the stick in and dragged it through. I
went plop into the ice-hole just as I was, in my fur coat and my high
boots, while they stood and shoved me, one with his foot and one with
his stick, then dragged me under the ice and pulled me out of the other
hole.”
Lyubka shuddered and shrugged.
“At first I was in a fever from the cold,” Merik went on, “but when they
pulled me out I was helpless, and lay in the snow, and the Molokans
stood round and hit me with sticks on my knees and my elbows. It hurt
fearfully. They beat me and they went away . . . and everything on me
was frozen, my clothes were covered with ice. I got up, but I couldn’t
move. Thank God, a woman drove by and gave me a lift.”
Meanwhile Yergunov had drunk five or six glasses of vodka; his heart
felt lighter, and he longed to tell some extraordinary, wonderful story
too, and to show that he, too, was a bold fellow and not afraid of
anything.
“I’ll tell you what happened to us in Penza Province . . .” he began.
Either because he had drunk a great deal and was a little tipsy, or
perhaps because he had twice been detected in a lie, the peasants took
not the slightest notice of him, and even left off answering his
questions. What was worse, they permitted themselves a frankness in his
presence that made him feel uncomfortable and cold all over, and that
meant that they took no notice of him.
Kalashnikov had the dignified manners of a sedate and sensible man; he
spoke weightily, and made the sign of the cross over his mouth every
time he yawned, and no one could have supposed that this was a thief, a
heartless thief who had stripped poor creatures, who had already been
twice in prison, and who had been sentenced by the commune to exile in
Siberia, and had been bought off by his father and uncle, who were as
great thieves and rogues as he was. Merik gave himself the airs of a
bravo. He saw that Lyubka and Kalashnikov were admiring him, and looked
upon himself as a very fine fellow, and put his arms akimbo, squared his
chest, or stretched so that the bench creaked under him. . . .
After supper Kalashnikov prayed to the holy image without getting up
from his seat, and shook hands with Merik; the latter prayed too, and
shook Kalashnikov’s hand. Lyubka cleared away the supper, shook out on
the table some peppermint biscuits, dried nuts, and pumpkin seeds, and
placed two bottles of sweet wine.
“The kingdom of heaven and peace everlasting to Andrey Grigoritch,” said
Kalashnikov, cAlinking glasses with Merik. “When he was alive we used to
gather together here or at his brother Martin’s, and—my word! my word!
what men, what talks! Remarkable conversations! Martin used to be here,
and Filya, and Fyodor Stukotey. . . . It was all done in style, it was
all in keeping. . . . And what fun we had! We did have fun, we did have
fun!”
Lyubka went out and soon afterwards came back wearing a green kerchief
and beads.
“Look, Merik, what Kalashnikov brought me to-day,” she said.
She looked at herself in the looking-glass, and tossed her head several
times to make the beads jingle. And then she opened a chest and began
taking out, first, a cotton dress with red and blue flowers on it, and
then a red one with flounces which rustled and crackled like paper, then
a new kerchief, dark blue, shot with many colours—and all these things
she showed and flung up her hands, laughing as though astonished that
she had such treasures.
Kalashnikov tuned the balalaika and began playing it, but Yergunov could
not make out what sort of song he was singing, and whether it was gay or
melancholy, because at one moment it was so mournful he wanted to cry,
and at the next it would be merry. Merik suddenly jumped up and began
tapping with his heels on the same spot, then, brandishing his arms, he
moved on his heels from the table to the stove, from the stove to the
chest, then he bounded up as though he had been stung, clicked the heels
of his boots together in the air, and began going round and round in a
crouching position. Lyubka waved both her arms, uttered a desperate
shriek, and followed him. At first she moved sideways, like a snake, as
though she wanted to steal up to someone and strike him from behind. She
tapped rapidly with her bare heels as Merik had done with the heels of
his boots, then she turned round and round like a top and crouched down,
and her red dress was blown out like a bell. Merik, looking angrily at
her, and showing his teeth in a grin, flew towards her in the same
crouching posture as though he wanted to crush her with his terrible
legs, while she jumped up, flung back her head, and waving her arms as a
big bird does its wings, floated across the room scarcely touching the
floor. . . .
“What a flame of a girl!” thought Yergunov, sitting on the chest, and
from there watching the dance. “What fire! Give up everything for her,
and it would be too little . . . .”
And he regretted that he was a hospital assistant, and not a simple
peasant, that he wore a reefer coat and a chain with a gilt key on it
instead of a blue shirt with a cord tied round the waist. Then he could
boldly have sung, danced, flung both arms round Lyubka as Merik did. . .
.
The sharp tapping, shouts, and whoops set the crockery ringing in the
cupboard and the flame of the candle dancing.
The thread broke and the beads were scattered all over the floor, the
green kerchief slipped off, and Lyubka was transformed into a red cloud
flitting by and flashing black eyes, and it seemed as though in another
second Merik’s arms and legs would drop off.
But finally Merik stamped for the last time, and stood still as though
turned to stone. Exhausted and almost breathless, Lyubka sank on to his
bosom and leaned against him as against a post, and he put his arms
round her, and looking into her eyes, said tenderly and caressingly, as
though in jest:
“I’ll find out where your old mother’s money is hidden, I’ll murder her
and cut your little throat for you, and after that I will set fire to
the inn. . . . People will think you have perished in the fire, and with
your money I shall go to Kuban. I’ll keep droves of horses and flocks of
sheep. . . .”
Lyubka made no answer, but only looked at him with a guilty air, and
asked:
“And is it nice in Kuban, Merik?”
He said nothing, but went to the chest, sat down, and sank into thought;
most likely he was dreaming of Kuban.
“It’s time for me to be going,” said Kalashnikov, getting up. “Filya
must be waiting for me. Goodbye, Lyuba.”
Yergunov went out into the yard to see that Kalashnikov did not go off
with his horse. The snowstorm still persisted. White clouds were
floating about the yard, their long tails clinging to the rough grass
and the bushes, while on the other side of the fence in the open country
huge giants in white robes with wide sleeves were whirling round and
falling to the ground, and getting up again to wave their arms and
fight. And the wind, the wind! The bare birches and cherry-trees, unable
to endure its rude caresses, bowed low down to the ground and wailed:
“God, for what sin hast Thou bound us to the earth and will not let us
go free?”
“Wo!” said Kalashnikov sternly, and he got on his horse; one half of the
gate was opened, and by it lay a high snowdrift. “Well, get on!” shouted
Kalashnikov. His little short-legged nag set off, and sank up to its
stomach in the drift at once. Kalashnikov was white all over with the
snow, and soon vanished from sight with his horse.
When Yergunov went back into the room, Lyubka was creeping about the
floor picking up her beads; Merik was not there.
“A splendid girl!” thought Yergunov, as he lay down on the bench and put
his coat under his head. “Oh, if only Merik were not here.” Lyubka
excited him as she crept about the floor by the bench, and he thought
that if Merik had not been there he would certainly have got up and
embraced her, and then one would see what would happen. It was true she
was only a girl, but not likely to be chaste; and even if she were—need
one stand on ceremony in a den of thieves? Lyubka collected her beads
and went out. The candle burnt down and the flame caught the paper in
the candlestick. Yergunov laid his revolver and matches beside him, and
put out the candle. The light before the holy images flickered so much
that it hurt his eyes, and patches of light danced on the ceiling, on
the floor, and on the cupboard, and among them he had visions of Lyubka,
buxom, full-bosomed: now she was turning round like a top, now she was
exhausted and breathless. . . .
“Oh, if the devils would carry off that Merik,” he thought.
The little lamp gave a last flicker, spluttered, and went out. Someone,
it must have been Merik, came into the room and sat down on the bench.
He puffed at his pipe, and for an instant lighted up a dark cheek with a
patch on it. Yergunov’s throat was irritated by the horrible fumes of
the tobacco smoke.
“What filthy tobacco you have got—damnation take it!” said Yergunov. “It
makes me positively sick.”
“I mix my tobacco with the flowers of the oats,” answered Merik after a
pause. “It is better for the chest.”
He smoked, spat, and went out again. Half an hour passed, and all at
once there was the gleam of a light in the passage. Merik appeared in a
coat and cap, then Lyubka with a candle in her hand.
“Do stay, Merik,” said Lyubka in an imploring voice.
“No, Lyuba, don’t keep me.”
“Listen, Merik,” said Lyubka, and her voice grew soft and tender. “I
know you will find mother’s money, and will do for her and for me, and
will go to Kuban and love other girls; but God be with you. I only ask
you one thing, sweetheart: do stay!”
“No, I want some fun . . .” said Merik, fastening his belt.
“But you have nothing to go on. . . . You came on foot; what are you
going on?”
Merik bent down to Lyubka and whispered something in her ear; she looked
towards the door and laughed through her tears.
“He is asleep, the puffed-up devil . . .” she said.
Merik embraced her, kissed her vigorously, and went out. Yergunov thrust
his revolver into his pocket, jumped up, and ran after him.
“Get out of the way!” he said to Lyubka, who hurriedly bolted the door
of the entry and stood across the threshold. “Let me pass! Why are you
standing here?”
“What do you want to go out for?”
“To have a look at my horse.”
Lyubka gazed up at him with a sly and caressing look.
“Why look at it? You had better look at me . . . .” she said, then she
bent down and touched with her finger the gilt watch-key that hung on
his chain.
“Let me pass, or he will go off on my horse,” said Yergunov. “Let me go,
you devil!” he shouted, and giving her an angry blow on the shoulder, he
pressed his chest against her with all his might to push her away from
the door, but she kept tight hold of the bolt, and was like iron.
“Let me go!” he shouted, exhausted; “he will go off with it, I tell
you.”
“Why should he? He won’t.” Breathing hard and rubbing her shoulder,
which hurt, she looked up at him again, flushed a little and laughed.
“Don’t go away, dear heart,” she said; “I am dull alone.”
Yergunov looked into her eyes, hesitated, and put his arms round her;
she did not resist.
“Come, no nonsense; let me go,” he begged her. She did not speak.
“I heard you just now,” he said, “telling Merik that you love him.”
“I dare say. . . . My heart knows who it is I love.”
She put her finger on the key again, and said softly: “Give me that.”
Yergunov unfastened the key and gave it to her. She suddenly craned her
neck and listened with a grave face, and her expression struck Yergunov
as cold and cunning; he thought of his horse, and now easily pushed her
aside and ran out into the yard. In the shed a sleepy pig was grunting
with lazy regularity and a cow was knocking her horn. Yergunov lighted a
match and saw the pig, and the cow, and the dogs, which rushed at him on
all sides at seeing the light, but there was no trace of the horse.
Shouting and waving his arms at the dogs, stumbling over the drifts and
sticking in the snow, he ran out at the gate and fell to gazing into the
darkness. He strained his eyes to the utmost, and saw only the snow
flying and the snowflakes distinctly forming into all sorts of shapes;
at one moment the white, laughing face of a corpse would peep out of the
darkness, at the next a white horse would gallop by with an Amazon in a
muslin dress upon it, at the next a string of white swans would fly
overhead. . . . Shaking with anger and cold, and not knowing what to do,
Yergunov fired his revolver at the dogs, and did not hit one of them;
then he rushed back to the house.
When he went into the entry he distinctly heard someone scurry out of
the room and bang the door. It was dark in the room. Yergunov pushed
against the door; it was locked. Then, lighting match after match, he
rushed back into the entry, from there into the kitchen, and from the
kitchen into a little room where all the walls were hung with petticoats
and dresses, where there was a smell of cornflowers and fennel, and a
bedstead with a perfect mountain of pillows, standing in the corner by
the stove; this must have been the old mother’s room. From there he
passed into another little room, and here he saw Lyubka. She was lying
on a chest, covered with a gay-coloured patchwork cotton quilt,
pretending to be asleep. A little ikon-lamp was burning in the corner
above the pillow.
“Where is my horse?” Yergunov asked.
Lyubka did not stir.
“Where is my horse, I am asking you?” Yergunov repeated still more
sternly, and he tore the quilt off her. “I am asking you, she-devil!” he
shouted.
She jumped up on her knees, and with one hand holding her shift and with
the other trying to clutch the quilt, huddled against the wall . . . .
She looked at Yergunov with repulsion and terror in her eyes, and, like
a wild beast in a trap, kept cunning watch on his faintest movement.
“Tell me where my horse is, or I’ll knock the life out of you,” shouted
Yergunov.
“Get away, dirty brute!” she said in a hoarse voice.
Yergunov seized her by the shift near the neck and tore it. And then he
could not restrain himself, and with all his might embraced the girl.
But hissing with fury, she slipped out of his arms, and freeing one
hand—the other was tangled in the torn shift—hit him a blow with her
fist on the skull.
His head was dizzy with the pain, there was a ringing and rattling in
his ears, he staggered back, and at that moment received another
blow—this time on the temple. Reeling and clutching at the doorposts,
that he might not fall, he made his way to the room where his things
were, and lay down on the bench; then after lying for a little time,
took the matchbox out of his pocket and began lighting match after match
for no object: he lit it, blew it out, and threw it under the table, and
went on till all the matches were gone.
Meanwhile the air began to turn blue outside, the cocks began to crow,
but his head still ached, and there was an uproar in his ears as though
he were sitting under a railway bridge and hearing the trains passing
over his head. He got, somehow, into his coat and cap; the saddle and
the bundle of his purchases he could not find, his knapsack was empty:
it was not for nothing that someone had scurried out of the room when he
came in from the yard.
He took a poker from the kitchen to keep off the dogs, and went out into
the yard, leaving the door open. The snow-storm had subsided and it was
calm outside. . . . When he went out at the gate, the white plain looked
dead, and there was not a single bird in the morning sky. On both sides
of the road and in the distance there were bluish patches of young
copse.
Yergunov began thinking how he would be greeted at the hospital and what
the doctor would say to him; it was absolutely necessary to think of
that, and to prepare beforehand to answer questions he would be asked,
but this thought grew blurred and slipped away. He walked along thinking
of nothing but Lyubka, of the peasants with whom he had passed the
night; he remembered how, after Lyubka struck him the second time, she
had bent down to the floor for the quilt, and how her loose hair had
fallen on the floor. His mind was in a maze, and he wondered why there
were in the world doctors, hospital assistants, merchants, clerks, and
peasants instead of simple free men? There are, to be sure, free birds,
free beasts, a free Merik, and they are not afraid of anyone, and don’t
need anyone! And whose idea was it, who had decreed that one must get up
in the morning, dine at midday, go to bed in the evening; that a doctor
takes precedence of a hospital assistant; that one must live in rooms
and love only one’s wife? And why not the contrary—dine at night and
sleep in the day? Ah, to jump on a horse without enquiring whose it is,
to ride races with the wind like a devil, over fields and forests and
ravines, to make love to girls, to mock at everyone . . . .
Yergunov thrust the poker into the snow, pressed his forehead to the
cold white trunk of a birch-tree, and sank into thought; and his grey,
monotonous life, his wages, his subordinate position, the dispensary,
the everlasting to-do with the bottles and blisters, struck him as
contemptible, sickening.
“Who says it’s a sin to enjoy oneself?” he asked himself with vexation.
“Those who say that have never lived in freedom like Merik and
Kalashnikov, and have never loved Lyubka; they have been beggars all
their lives, have lived without any pleasure, and have only loved their
wives, who are like frogs.”
And he thought about himself that he had not hitherto been a thief, a
swindler, or even a brigand, simply because he could not, or had not yet
met with a suitable opportunity. ——
A year and a half passed. In spring, after Easter, Yergunov, who had
long before been dismissed from the hospital and was hanging about
without a job, came out of the tavern in Ryepino and sauntered aimlessly
along the street.
He went out into the open country. Here there was the scent of spring,
and a warm caressing wind was blowing. The calm, starry night looked
down from the sky on the earth. My God, how infinite the depth of the
sky, and with what fathomless immensity it stretched over the world! The
world is created well enough, only why and with what right do people,
thought Yergunov, divide their fellows into the sober and the drunken,
the employed and the dismissed, and so on. Why do the sober and well fed
sleep comfortably in their homes while the drunken and the hungry must
wander about the country without a refuge? Why was it that if anyone had
not a job and did not get a salary he had to go hungry, without clothes
and boots? Whose idea was it? Why was it the birds and the wild beasts
in the woods did not have jobs and get salaries, but lived as they
pleased?
Far away in the sky a beautiful crimson glow lay quivering, stretched
wide over the horizon. Yergunov stopped, and for a long time he gazed at
it, and kept wondering why was it that if he had carried off someone
else’s samovar the day before and sold it for drink in the taverns it
would be a sin? Why was it?
Two carts drove by on the road; in one of them there was a woman asleep,
in the other sat an old man without a cap on.
“Grandfather, where is that fire?” asked Yergunov.
“Andrey Tchirikov’s inn,” answered the old man.
And Yergunov recalled what had happened to him eighteen months before in
the winter, in that very inn, and how Merik had boasted; and he imagined
the old woman and Lyubka, with their throats cut, burning, and he envied
Merik. And when he walked back to the tavern, looking at the houses of
the rich publicans, cattle-dealers, and blacksmiths, he reflected how
nice it would be to steal by night into some rich man’s house!
WARD NO. 6 I
IN the hospital yard there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect
forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the
chimney is tumbling down, the steps at the front-door are rotting away
and overgrown with grass, and there are only traces left of the stucco.
The front of the lodge faces the hospital; at the back it looks out into
the open country, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence
with nails on it. These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence,
and the lodge itself, have that peculiar, desolate, God-forsaken look
which is only found in our hospital and prison buildings.
If you are not afraid of being stung by the nettles, come by the narrow
footpath that leads to the lodge, and let us see what is going on
inside. Opening the first door, we walk into the entry. Here along the
walls and by the stove every sort of hospital rubbish lies littered
about. Mattresses, old tattered dressing-gowns, trousers, blue striped
shirts, boots and shoes no good for anything—all these remnants are
piled up in heaps, mixed up and crumpled, mouldering and giving out a
sickly smell.
The porter, Nikita, an old soldier wearing rusty good-conduct stripes,
is always lying on the litter with a pipe between his teeth. He has a
grim, surly, battered-looking face, overhanging eyebrows which give him
the expression of a sheep-dog of the steppes, and a red nose; he is
short and looks thin and scraggy, but he is of imposing deportment and
his fists are vigorous. He belongs to the class of simple-hearted,
practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who
like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced
that it is their duty to beat people. He showers blows on the face, on
the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first, and is convinced that
there would be no order in the place if he did not.
Next you come into a big, spacious room which fills up the whole lodge
except for the entry. Here the walls are painted a dirty blue, the
ceiling is as sooty as in a hut without a chimney—it is evident that in
the winter the stove smokes and the room is full of fumes. The windows
are disfigured by iron gratings on the inside. The wooden floor is grey
and full of splinters. There is a stench of sour cabbage, of smouldering
wicks, of bugs, and of ammonia, and for the first minute this stench
gives you the impression of having walked into a menagerie.
There are bedsteads screwed to the floor. Men in blue hospital dressing-
gowns, and wearing nightcaps in the old style, are sitting and lying on
them. These are the lunatics.
There are five of them in all here. Only one is of the upper class, the
rest are all artisans. The one nearest the door—a tall, lean workman
with shining red whiskers and tear-stained eyes—sits with his head
propped on his hand, staring at the same point. Day and night he
grieves, shaking his head, sighing and smiling bitterly. He takes a part
in conversation and usually makes no answer to questions; he eats and
drinks mechanically when food is offered him. From his agonizing,
throbbing cough, his thinness, and the flush on his cheeks, one may
judge that he is in the first stage of consumption. Next to him is a
little, alert, very lively old man, with a pointed beard and curly black
hair like a negro’s. By day he walks up and down the ward from window to
window, or sits on his bed, cross-legged like a Turk, and, ceaselessly
as a bullfinch whistles, softly sings and titters. He shows his childish
gaiety and lively character at night also when he gets up to say his
prayers—that is, to beat himself on the chest with his fists, and to
scratch with his fingers at the door. This is the Jew Moiseika, an
imbecile, who went crazy twenty years ago when his hat factory was burnt
down.
And of all the inhabitants of Ward No. 6, he is the only one who is
allowed to go out of the lodge, and even out of the yard into the
street. He has enjoyed this privilege for years, probably because he is
an old inhabitant of the hospital—a quiet, harmless imbecile, the
buffoon of the town, where people are used to seeing him surrounded by
boys and dogs. In his wretched gown, in his absurd night-cap, and in
slippers, sometimes with bare legs and even without trousers, he walks
about the streets, stopping at the gates and little shops, and begging
for a copper. In one place they will give him some kvass, in another
some bread, in another a copper, so that he generally goes back to the
ward feeling rich and well fed. Everything that he brings back Nikita
takes from him for his own benefit. The soldier does this roughly,
angrily turning the Jew’s pockets inside out, and calling God to witness
that he will not let him go into the street again, and that breach of
the regulations is worse to him than anything in the world.
Moiseika likes to make himself useful. He gives his companions water,
and covers them up when they are asleep; he promises each of them to
bring him back a kopeck, and to make him a new cap; he feeds with a
spoon his neighbour on the left, who is paralyzed. He acts in this way,
not from compassion nor from any considerations of a humane kind, but
through imitation, unconsciously dominated by Gromov, his neighbour on
the right hand.
Ivan Dmitritch Gromov, a man of thirty-three, who is a gentleman by
birth, and has been a court usher and provincial secretary, suffers from
the mania of persecution. He either lies curled up in bed, or walks from
corner to corner as though for exercise; he very rarely sits down. He is
always excited, agitated, and overwrought by a sort of vague, undefined
expectation. The faintest rustle in the entry or shout in the yard is
enough to make him raise his head and begin listening: whether they are
coming for him, whether they are looking for him. And at such times his
face expresses the utmost uneasiness and repulsion.
I like his broad face with its high cheek-bones, always pale and
unhappy, and reflecting, as though in a mirror, a soul tormented by
conflict and long-continued terror. His grimaces are strange and
abnormal, but the delicate lines traced on his face by profound, genuine
suffering show intelligence and sense, and there is a warm and healthy
light in his eyes. I like the man himself, courteous, anxious to be of
use, and extraordinarily gentle to everyone except Nikita. When anyone
drops a button or a spoon, he jumps up from his bed quickly and picks it
up; every day he says good-morning to his companions, and when he goes
to bed he wishes them good-night.
Besides his continually overwrought condition and his grimaces, his
madness shows itself in the following way also. Sometimes in the
evenings he wraps himself in his dressing-gown, and, trembling all over,
with his teeth chattering, begins walking rapidly from corner to corner
and between the bedsteads. It seems as though he is in a violent fever.
From the way he suddenly stops and glances at his companions, it can be
seen that he is longing to say something very important, but, apparently
reflecting that they would not listen, or would not understand him, he
shakes his head impatiently and goes on pacing up and down. But soon the
desire to speak gets the upper hand of every consideration, and he will
let himself go and speak fervently and passionately. His talk is
disordered and feverish like delirium, disconnected, and not always
intelligible, but, on the other hand, something extremely fine may be
felt in it, both in the words and the voice. When he talks you recognize
in him the lunatic and the man. It is difficult to reproduce on paper
his insane talk. He speaks of the baseness of mankind, of violence
trampling on justice, of the glorious life which will one day be upon
earth, of the window-gratings, which remind him every minute of the
stupidity and cruelty of oppressors. It makes a disorderly, incoherent
potpourri of themes old but not yet out of date. II
Some twelve or fifteen years ago an official called Gromov, a highly
respectable and prosperous person, was living in his own house in the
principal street of the town. He had two sons, Sergey and Ivan. When
Sergey was a student in his fourth year he was taken ill with galloping
consumption and died, and his death was, as it were, the first of a
whole series of calamities which suddenly showered on the Gromov family.
Within a week of Sergey’s funeral the old father was put on trial for
fraud and misappropriation, and he died of typhoid in the prison
hospital soon afterwards. The house, with all their belongings, was sold
by auction, and Ivan Dmitritch and his mother were left entirely without
means.
Hitherto in his father’s lifetime, Ivan Dmitritch, who was studying in
the University of Petersburg, had received an allowance of sixty or
seventy roubles a month, and had had no conception of poverty; now he
had to make an abrupt change in his life. He had to spend his time from
morning to night giving lessons for next to nothing, to work at copying,
and with all that to go hungry, as all his earnings were sent to keep
his mother. Ivan Dmitritch could not stand such a life; he lost heart
and strength, and, giving up the university, went home.
Here, through interest, he obtained the post of teacher in the district
school, but could not get on with his colleagues, was not liked by the
boys, and soon gave up the post. His mother died. He was for six months
without work, living on nothing but bread and water; then he became a
court usher. He kept this post until he was dismissed owing to his
illness.
He had never even in his young student days given the impression of
being perfectly healthy. He had always been pale, thin, and given to
catching cold; he ate little and slept badly. A single glass of wine
went to his head and made him hysterical. He always had a craving for
society, but, owing to his irritable temperament and suspiciousness, he
never became very intimate with anyone, and had no friends. He always
spoke with contempt of his fellow-townsmen, saying that their coarse
ignorance and sleepy animal existence seemed to him loathsome and
horrible. He spoke in a loud tenor, with heat, and invariably either
with scorn and indignation, or with wonder and enthusiasm, and always
with perfect sincerity. Whatever one talked to him about he always
brought it round to the same subject: that life was dull and stifling in
the town; that the townspeople had no lofty interests, but lived a
dingy, meaningless life, diversified by violence, coarse profligacy, and
hypocrisy; that scoundrels were well fed and clothed, while honest men
lived from hand to mouth; that they needed schools, a progressive local
paper, a theatre, public lectures, the co-ordination of the intellectual
elements; that society must see its failings and be horrified. In his
criticisms of people he laid on the colours thick, using only black and
white, and no fine shades; mankind was divided for him into honest men
and scoundrels: there was nothing in between. He always spoke with
passion and enthusiasm of women and of love, but he had never been in
love.
In spite of the severity of his judgments and his nervousness, he was
liked, and behind his back was spoken of affectionately as Vanya. His
innate refinement and readiness to be of service, his good breeding, his
moral purity, and his shabby coat, his frail appearance and family
misfortunes, aroused a kind, warm, sorrowful feeling. Moreover, he was
well educated and well read; according to the townspeople’s notions, he
knew everything, and was in their eyes something like a walking
encyclopedia.
He had read a great deal. He would sit at the club, nervously pulling at
his beard and looking through the magazines and books; and from his face
one could see that he was not reading, but devouring the pages without
giving himself time to digest what he read. It must be supposed that
reading was one of his morbid habits, as he fell upon anything that came
into his hands with equal avidity, even last year’s newspapers and
calendars. At home he always read lying down. III
One autumn morning Ivan Dmitritch, turning up the collar of his
greatcoat and splashing through the mud, made his way by side-streets
and back lanes to see some artisan, and to collect some payment that was
owing. He was in a gloomy mood, as he always was in the morning. In one
of the side-streets he was met by two convicts in fetters and four
soldiers with rifles in charge of them. Ivan Dmitritch had very often
met convicts before, and they had always excited feelings of compassion
and discomfort in him; but now this meeting made a peculiar, strange
impression on him. It suddenly seemed to him for some reason that he,
too, might be put into fetters and led through the mud to prison like
that. After visiting the artisan, on the way home he met near the post
office a police superintendent of his acquaintance, who greeted him and
walked a few paces along the street with him, and for some reason this
seemed to him suspicious. At home he could not get the convicts or the
soldiers with their rifles out of his head all day, and an unaccountable
inward agitation prevented him from reading or concentrating his mind.
In the evening he did not light his lamp, and at night he could not
sleep, but kept thinking that he might be arrested, put into fetters,
and thrown into prison. He did not know of any harm he had done, and
could be certain that he would never be guilty of murder, arson, or
theft in the future either; but was it not easy to commit a crime by
accident, unconsciously, and was not false witness always possible, and,
indeed, miscarriage of justice? It was not without good reason that the
agelong experience of the simple people teaches that beggary and prison
are ills none can be safe from. A judicial mistake is very possible as
legal proceedings are conducted nowadays, and there is nothing to be
wondered at in it. People who have an official, professional relation to
other men’s sufferings—for instance, judges, police officers, doctors—in
course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if
they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this
respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and
calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood. With this
formal, soulless attitude to human personality the judge needs but one
thing—time—in order to deprive an innocent man of all rights of
property, and to condemn him to penal servitude. Only the time spent on
performing certain formalities for which the judge is paid his salary,
and then—it is all over. Then you may look in vain for justice and
protection in this dirty, wretched little town a hundred and fifty miles
from a railway station! And, indeed, is it not absurd even to think of
justice when every kind of violence is accepted by society as a rational
and consistent necessity, and every act of mercy—for instance, a verdict
of acquittal—calls forth a perfect outburst of dissatisfied and
revengeful feeling?
In the morning Ivan Dmitritch got up from his bed in a state of horror,
with cold perspiration on his forehead, completely convinced that he
might be arrested any minute. Since his gloomy thoughts of yesterday had
haunted him so long, he thought, it must be that there was some truth in
them. They could not, indeed, have come into his mind without any
grounds whatever.
A policeman walking slowly passed by the windows: that was not for
nothing. Here were two men standing still and silent near the house. Why
were they silent? And agonizing days and nights followed for Ivan
Dmitritch. Everyone who passed by the windows or came into the yard
seemed to him a spy or a detective. At midday the chief of the police
usually drove down the street with a pair of horses; he was going from
his estate near the town to the police department; but Ivan Dmitritch
fancied every time that he was driving especially quickly, and that he
had a peculiar expression: it was evident that he was in haste to
announce that there was a very important criminal in the town. Ivan
Dmitritch started at every ring at the bell and knock at the gate, and
was agitated whenever he came upon anyone new at his landlady’s; when he
met police officers and gendarmes he smiled and began whistling so as to
seem unconcerned. He could not sleep for whole nights in succession
expecting to be arrested, but he snored loudly and sighed as though in
deep sleep, that his landlady might think he was asleep; for if he could
not sleep it meant that he was tormented by the stings of
conscience—what a piece of evidence! Facts and common sense persuaded
him that all these terrors were nonsense and morbidity, that if one
looked at the matter more broadly there was nothing really terrible in
arrest and imprisonment—so long as the conscience is at ease; but the
more sensibly and logically he reasoned, the more acute and agonizing
his mental distress became. It might be compared with the story of a
hermit who tried to cut a dwelling-place for himself in a virgin forest;
the more zealously he worked with his axe, the thicker the forest grew.
In the end Ivan Dmitritch, seeing it was useless, gave up reasoning
altogether, and abandoned himself entirely to despair and terror.
He began to avoid people and to seek solitude. His official work had
been distasteful to him before: now it became unbearable to him. He was
afraid they would somehow get him into trouble, would put a bribe in his
pocket unnoticed and then denounce him, or that he would accidentally
make a mistake in official papers that would appear to be fraudulent, or
would lose other people’s money. It is strange that his imagination had
never at other times been so agile and inventive as now, when every day
he thought of thousands of different reasons for being seriously anxious
over his freedom and honour; but, on the other hand, his interest in the
outer world, in books in particular, grew sensibly fainter, and his
memory began to fail him.
In the spring when the snow melted there were found in the ravine near
the cemetery two half-decomposed corpses—the bodies of an old woman and
a boy bearing the traces of death by violence. Nothing was talked of but
these bodies and their unknown murderers. That people might not think he
had been guilty of the crime, Ivan Dmitritch walked about the streets,
smiling, and when he met acquaintances he turned pale, flushed, and
began declaring that there was no greater crime than the murder of the
weak and defenceless. But this duplicity soon exhausted him, and after
some reflection he decided that in his position the best thing to do was
to hide in his landlady’s cellar. He sat in the cellar all day and then
all night, then another day, was fearfully cold, and waiting till dusk,
stole secretly like a thief back to his room. He stood in the middle of
the room till daybreak, listening without stirring. Very early in the
morning, before sunrise, some workmen came into the house. Ivan
Dmitritch knew perfectly well that they had come to mend the stove in
the kitchen, but terror told him that they were police officers
disguised as workmen. He slipped stealthily out of the flat, and,
overcome by terror, ran along the street without his cap and coat. Dogs
raced after him barking, a peasant shouted somewhere behind him, the
wind whistled in his ears, and it seemed to Ivan Dmitritch that the
force and violence of the whole world was massed together behind his
back and was chasing after him.
He was stopped and brought home, and his landlady sent for a doctor.
Doctor Andrey Yefimitch, of whom we shall have more to say hereafter,
prescribed cold compresses on his head and laurel drops, shook his head,
and went away, telling the landlady he should not come again, as one
should not interfere with people who are going out of their minds. As he
had not the means to live at home and be nursed, Ivan Dmitritch was soon
sent to the hospital, and was there put into the ward for venereal
patients. He could not sleep at night, was full of whims and fancies,
and disturbed the patients, and was soon afterwards, by Andrey
Yefimitch’s orders, transferred to Ward No. 6.
Within a year Ivan Dmitritch was completely forgotten in the town, and
his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in the shed, were
pulled to pieces by boys. IV
Ivan Dmitritch’s neighbour on the left hand is, as I have said already,
the Jew Moiseika; his neighbour on the right hand is a peasant so
rolling in fat that he is almost spherical, with a blankly stupid face,
utterly devoid of thought. This is a motionless, gluttonous, unclean
animal who has long ago lost all powers of thought or feeling. An acrid,
stifling stench always comes from him.
Nikita, who has to clean up after him, beats him terribly with all his
might, not sparing his fists; and what is dreadful is not his being
beaten—that one can get used to—but the fact that this stupefied
creature does not respond to the blows with a sound or a movement, nor
by a look in the eyes, but only sways a little like a heavy barrel.
The fifth and last inhabitant of Ward No. 6 is a man of the artisan
class who had once been a sorter in the post office, a thinnish, fair
little man with a good-natured but rather sly face. To judge from the
clear, cheerful look in his calm and intelligent eyes, he has some
pleasant idea in his mind, and has some very important and agreeable
secret. He has under his pillow and under his mattress something that he
never shows anyone, not from fear of its being taken from him and
stolen, but from modesty. Sometimes he goes to the window, and turning
his back to his companions, puts something on his breast, and bending
his head, looks at it; if you go up to him at such a moment, he is
overcome with confusion and snatches something off his breast. But it is
not difficult to guess his secret.
“Congratulate me,” he often says to Ivan Dmitritch; “I have been
presented with the Stanislav order of the second degree with the star.
The second degree with the star is only given to foreigners, but for
some reason they want to make an exception for me,” he says with a
smile, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity. “That I must confess I did
not expect.”
“I don’t understand anything about that,” Ivan Dmitritch replies
morosely.
“But do you know what I shall attain to sooner or later?” the former
sorter persists, screwing up his eyes slyly. “I shall certainly get the
Swedish ‘Polar Star.’ That’s an order it is worth working for, a white
cross with a black ribbon. It’s very beautiful.”
Probably in no other place is life so monotonous as in this ward. In the
morning the patients, except the paralytic and the fat peasant, wash in
the entry at a big tab and wipe themselves with the skirts of their
dressing-gowns; after that they drink tea out of tin mugs which Nikita
brings them out of the main building. Everyone is allowed one mugful. At
midday they have soup made out of sour cabbage and boiled grain, in the
evening their supper consists of grain left from dinner. In the
intervals they lie down, sleep, look out of window, and walk from one
corner to the other. And so every day. Even the former sorter always
talks of the same orders.
Fresh faces are rarely seen in Ward No. 6. The doctor has not taken in
any new mental cases for a long time, and the people who are fond of
visiting lunatic asylums are few in this world. Once every two months
Semyon Lazaritch, the barber, appears in the ward. How he cuts the
patients’ hair, and how Nikita helps him to do it, and what a
trepidation the lunatics are always thrown into by the arrival of the
drunken, smiling barber, we will not describe.
No one even looks into the ward except the barber. The patients are
condemned to see day after day no one but Nikita.
A rather strange rumour has, however, been circulating in the hospital
of late.
It is rumoured that the doctor has begun to visit Ward No. 6. V
A strange rumour!
Dr. Andrey Yefimitch Ragin is a strange man in his way. They say that
when he was young he was very religious, and prepared himself for a
clerical career, and that when he had finished his studies at the high
school in 1863 he intended to enter a theological academy, but that his
father, a surgeon and doctor of medicine, jeered at him and declared
point-blank that he would disown him if he became a priest. How far this
is true I don’t know, but Andrey Yefimitch himself has more than once
confessed that he has never had a natural bent for medicine or science
in general.
However that may have been, when he finished his studies in the medical
faculty he did not enter the priesthood. He showed no special
devoutness, and was no more like a priest at the beginning of his
medical career than he is now.
His exterior is heavy—coarse like a peasant’s, his face, his beard, his
flat hair, and his coarse, clumsy figure, suggest an overfed,
intemperate, and harsh innkeeper on the highroad. His face is surly-
looking and covered with blue veins, his eyes are little and his nose is
red. With his height and broad shoulders he has huge hands and feet; one
would think that a blow from his fist would knock the life out of
anyone, but his step is soft, and his walk is cautious and insinuating;
when he meets anyone in a narrow passage he is always the first to stop
and make way, and to say, not in a bass, as one would expect, but in a
high, soft tenor: “I beg your pardon!” He has a little swelling on his
neck which prevents him from wearing stiff starched collars, and so he
always goes about in soft linen or cotton shirts. Altogether he does not
dress like a doctor. He wears the same suit for ten years, and the new
clothes, which he usually buys at a Jewish shop, look as shabby and
crumpled on him as his old ones; he sees patients and dines and pays
visits all in the same coat; but this is not due to niggardliness, but
to complete carelessness about his appearance.
When Andrey Yefimitch came to the town to take up his duties the
“institution founded to the glory of God” was in a terrible condition.
One could hardly breathe for the stench in the wards, in the passages,
and in the courtyards of the hospital. The hospital servants, the
nurses, and their children slept in the wards together with the
patients. They complained that there was no living for beetles, bugs,
and mice. The surgical wards were never free from erysipelas. There were
only two scalpels and not one thermometer in the whole hospital;
potatoes were kept in the baths. The superintendent, the housekeeper,
and the medical assistant robbed the patients, and of the old doctor,
Andrey Yefimitch’s predecessor, people declared that he secretly sold
the hospital alcohol, and that he kept a regular harem consisting of
nurses and female patients. These disorderly proceedings were perfectly
well known in the town, and were even exaggerated, but people took them
calmly; some justified them on the ground that there were only peasants
and working men in the hospital, who could not be dissatisfied, since
they were much worse off at home than in the hospital—they couldn’t be
fed on woodcocks! Others said in excuse that the town alone, without
help from the Zemstvo, was not equal to maintaining a good hospital;
thank God for having one at all, even a poor one. And the newly formed
Zemstvo did not open infirmaries either in the town or the
neighbourhood, relying on the fact that the town already had its
hospital.
After looking over the hospital Andrey Yefimitch came to the conclusion
that it was an immoral institution and extremely prejudicial to the
health of the townspeople. In his opinion the most sensible thing that
could be done was to let out the patients and close the hospital. But he
reflected that his will alone was not enough to do this, and that it
would be useless; if physical and moral impurity were driven out of one
place, they would only move to another; one must wait for it to wither
away of itself. Besides, if people open a hospital and put up with
having it, it must be because they need it; superstition and all the
nastiness and abominations of daily life were necessary, since in
process of time they worked out to something sensible, just as manure
turns into black earth. There was nothing on earth so good that it had
not something nasty about its first origin.
When Andrey Yefimitch undertook his duties he was apparently not greatly
concerned about the irregularities at the hospital. He only asked the
attendants and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and had two cupboards
of instruments put up; the superintendent, the housekeeper, the medical
assistant, and the erysipelas remained unchanged.
Andrey Yefimitch loved intelligence and honesty intensely, but he had no
strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and
honest life about him. He was absolutely unable to give orders, to
forbid things, and to insist. It seemed as though he had taken a vow
never to raise his voice and never to make use of the imperative. It was
difficult for him to say “Fetch” or “Bring”; when he wanted his meals he
would cough hesitatingly and say to the cook, “How about tea?. . .” or
“How about dinner? . . .” To dismiss the superintendent or to tell him
to leave off stealing, or to abolish the unnecessary parasitic post
altogether, was absolutely beyond his powers. When Andrey Yefimitch was
deceived or flattered, or accounts he knew to be cooked were brought him
to sign, he would turn as red as a crab and feel guilty, but yet he
would sign the accounts. When the patients complained to him of being
hungry or of the roughness of the nurses, he would be confused and
mutter guiltily: “Very well, very well, I will go into it later . . . .
Most likely there is some misunderstanding. . .”
At first Andrey Yefimitch worked very zealously. He saw patients every
day from morning till dinner-time, performed operations, and even
attended confinements. The ladies said of him that he was attentive and
clever at diagnosing diseases, especially those of women and children.
But in process of time the work unmistakably wearied him by its monotony
and obvious uselessness. To-day one sees thirty patients, and to-morrow
they have increased to thirty-five, the next day forty, and so on from
day to day, from year to year, while the mortality in the town did not
decrease and the patients did not leave off coming. To be any real help
to forty patients between morning and dinner was not physically
possible, so it could but lead to deception. If twelve thousand patients
were seen in a year it meant, if one looked at it simply, that twelve
thousand men were deceived. To put those who were seriously ill into
wards, and to treat them according to the principles of science, was
impossible, too, because though there were principles there was no
science; if he were to put aside philosophy and pedantically follow the
rules as other doctors did, the things above all necessary were
cleanliness and ventilation instead of dirt, wholesome nourishment
instead of broth made of stinking, sour cabbage, and good assistants
instead of thieves; and, indeed, why hinder people dying if death is the
normal and legitimate end of everyone? What is gained if some shop-
keeper or clerk lives an extra five or ten years? If the aim of medicine
is by drugs to alleviate suffering, the question forces itself on one:
why alleviate it? In the first place, they say that suffering leads man
to perfection; and in the second, if mankind really learns to alleviate
its sufferings with pills and drops, it will completely abandon religion
and philosophy, in which it has hitherto found not merely protection
from all sorts of trouble, but even happiness. Pushkin suffered terrible
agonies before his death, poor Heine lay paralyzed for several years;
why, then, should not some Andrey Yefimitch or Matryona Savishna be ill,
since their lives had nothing of importance in them, and would have been
entirely empty and like the life of an amoeba except for suffering?
Oppressed by such reflections, Andrey Yefimitch relaxed his efforts and
gave up visiting the hospital every day. VI
His life was passed like this. As a rule he got up at eight o’clock in
the morning, dressed, and drank his tea. Then he sat down in his study
to read, or went to the hospital. At the hospital the out-patients were
sitting in the dark, narrow little corridor waiting to be seen by the
doctor. The nurses and the attendants, tramping with their boots over
the brick floors, ran by them; gaunt-looking patients in dressing-gowns
passed; dead bodies and vessels full of filth were carried by; the
children were crying, and there was a cold draught. Andrey Yefimitch
knew that such surroundings were torture to feverish, consumptive, and
impressionable patients; but what could be done? In the consulting-room
he was met by his assistant, Sergey Sergeyitch—a fat little man with a
plump, well-washed shaven face, with soft, smooth manners, wearing a new
loosely cut suit, and looking more like a senator than a medical
assistant. He had an immense practice in the town, wore a white tie, and
considered himself more proficient than the doctor, who had no practice.
In the corner of the consulting-room there stood a large ikon in a
shrine with a heavy lamp in front of it, and near it a candle-stand with
a white cover on it. On the walls hung portraits of bishops, a view of
the Svyatogorsky Monastery, and wreaths of dried cornflowers. Sergey
Sergeyitch was religious, and liked solemnity and decorum. The ikon had
been put up at his expense; at his instructions some one of the patients
read the hymns of praise in the consulting-room on Sundays, and after
the reading Sergey Sergeyitch himself went through the wards with a
censer and burned incense.
There were a great many patients, but the time was short, and so the
work was confined to the asking of a few brief questions and the
administration of some drugs, such as castor-oil or volatile ointment.
Andrey Yefimitch would sit with his cheek resting in his hand, lost in
thought and asking questions mechanically. Sergey Sergeyitch sat down
too, rubbing his hands, and from time to time putting in his word.
“We suffer pain and poverty,” he would say, “because we do not pray to
the merciful God as we should. Yes!”
Andrey Yefimitch never performed any operation when he was seeing
patients; he had long ago given up doing so, and the sight of blood
upset him. When he had to open a child’s mouth in order to look at its
throat, and the child cried and tried to defend itself with its little
hands, the noise in his ears made his head go round and brought tears to
his eyes. He would make haste to prescribe a drug, and motion to the
woman to take the child away.
He was soon wearied by the timidity of the patients and their
incoherence, by the proximity of the pious Sergey Sergeyitch, by the
portraits on the walls, and by his own questions which he had asked over
and over again for twenty years. And he would go away after seeing five
or six patients. The rest would be seen by his assistant in his absence.
With the agreeable thought that, thank God, he had no private practice
now, and that no one would interrupt him, Andrey Yefimitch sat down to
the table immediately on reaching home and took up a book. He read a
great deal and always with enjoyment. Half his salary went on buying
books, and of the six rooms that made up his abode three were heaped up
with books and old magazines. He liked best of all works on history and
philosophy; the only medical publication to which he subscribed was The
Doctor, of which he always read the last pages first. He would always go
on reading for several hours without a break and without being weary. He
did not read as rapidly and impulsively as Ivan Dmitritch had done in
the past, but slowly and with concentration, often pausing over a
passage which he liked or did not find intelligible. Near the books
there always stood a decanter of vodka, and a salted cucumber or a
pickled apple lay beside it, not on a plate, but on the baize table-
cloth. Every half-hour he would pour himself out a glass of vodka and
drink it without taking his eyes off the book. Then without looking at
it he would feel for the cucumber and bite off a bit.
At three o’clock he would go cautiously to the kitchen door; cough, and
say, “Daryushka, what about dinner? . .”
After his dinner—a rather poor and untidily served one—Andrey Yefimitch
would walk up and down his rooms with his arms folded, thinking. The
clock would strike four, then five, and still he would be walking up and
down thinking. Occasionally the kitchen door would creak, and the red
and sleepy face of Daryushka would appear.
“Andrey Yefimitch, isn’t it time for you to have your beer?” she would
ask anxiously.
“No, it’s not time yet . . .” he would answer. “I’ll wait a little . . .
. I’ll wait a little. . .”
Towards the evening the postmaster, Mihail Averyanitch, the only man in
town whose society did not bore Andrey Yefimitch, would come in. Mihail
Averyanitch had once been a very rich landowner, and had served in the
calvary, but had come to ruin, and was forced by poverty to take a job
in the post office late in life. He had a hale and hearty appearance,
luxuriant grey whiskers, the manners of a well-bred man, and a loud,
pleasant voice. He was good-natured and emotional, but hot-tempered.
When anyone in the post office made a protest, expressed disagreement,
or even began to argue, Mihail Averyanitch would turn crimson, shake all
over, and shout in a voice of thunder, “Hold your tongue!” so that the
post office had long enjoyed the reputation of an institution which it
was terrible to visit. Mihail Averyanitch liked and respected Andrey
Yefimitch for his culture and the loftiness of his soul; he treated the
other inhabitants of the town superciliously, as though they were his
subordinates.
“Here I am,” he would say, going in to Andrey Yefimitch. “Good evening,
my dear fellow! I’ll be bound, you are getting sick of me, aren’t you?”
“On the contrary, I am delighted,” said the doctor. “I am always glad to
see you.”
The friends would sit on the sofa in the study and for some time would
smoke in silence.
“Daryushka, what about the beer?” Andrey Yefimitch would say.
They would drink their first bottle still in silence, the doctor
brooding and Mihail Averyanitch with a gay and animated face, like a man
who has something very interesting to tell. The doctor was always the
one to begin the conversation.
“What a pity,” he would say quietly and slowly, not looking his friend
in the face (he never looked anyone in the face)—“what a great pity it
is that there are no people in our town who are capable of carrying on
intelligent and interesting conversation, or care to do so. It is an
immense privation for us. Even the educated class do not rise above
vulgarity; the level of their development, I assure you, is not a bit
higher than that of the lower orders.”
“Perfectly true. I agree.”
“You know, of course,” the doctor went on quietly and deliberately,
“that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except
the higher spiritual manifestations of the human mind. Intellect draws a
sharp line between the animals and man, suggests the divinity of the
latter, and to some extent even takes the place of the immortality which
does not exist. Consequently the intellect is the only possible source
of enjoyment. We see and hear of no trace of intellect about us, so we
are deprived of enjoyment. We have books, it is true, but that is not at
all the same as living talk and converse. If you will allow me to make a
not quite apt comparison: books are the printed score, while talk is the
singing.”
“Perfectly true.”
A silence would follow. Daryushka would come out of the kitchen and with
an expression of blank dejection would stand in the doorway to listen,
with her face propped on her fist.
“Eh!” Mihail Averyanitch would sigh. “To expect intelligence of this
generation!”
And he would describe how wholesome, entertaining, and interesting life
had been in the past. How intelligent the educated class in Russia used
to be, and what lofty ideas it had of honour and friendship; how they
used to lend money without an IOU, and it was thought a disgrace not to
give a helping hand to a comrade in need; and what campaigns, what
adventures, what skirmishes, what comrades, what women! And the
Caucasus, what a marvellous country! The wife of a battalion commander,
a queer woman, used to put on an officer’s uniform and drive off into
the mountains in the evening, alone, without a guide. It was said that
she had a love affair with some princeling in the native village.
“Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother...” Daryushka would sigh.
“And how we drank! And how we ate! And what desperate liberals we were!”
Andrey Yefimitch would listen without hearing; he was musing as he
sipped his beer.
“I often dream of intellectual people and conversation with them,” he
said suddenly, interrupting Mihail Averyanitch. “My father gave me an
excellent education, but under the influence of the ideas of the sixties
made me become a doctor. I believe if I had not obeyed him then, by now
I should have been in the very centre of the intellectual movement. Most
likely I should have become a member of some university. Of course,
intellect, too, is transient and not eternal, but you know why I cherish
a partiality for it. Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man
reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help
feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, he
is summoned without his choice by fortuitous circumstances from non-
existence into life . . . what for? He tries to find out the meaning and
object of his existence; he is told nothing, or he is told absurdities;
he knocks and it is not opened to him; death comes to him—also without
his choice. And so, just as in prison men held together by common
misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not
notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and
generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of
proud and free ideas. In that sense the intellect is the source of an
enjoyment nothing can replace.”
“Perfectly true.”
Not looking his friend in the face, Andrey Yefimitch would go on,
quietly and with pauses, talking about intellectual people and
conversation with them, and Mihail Averyanitch would listen attentively
and agree: “Perfectly true.”
“And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?” he would ask
suddenly.
“No, honoured Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no
grounds for believing it.”
“I must own I doubt it too. And yet I have a feeling as though I should
never die. Oh, I think to myself: ‘Old fogey, it is time you were dead!’
But there is a little voice in my soul says: ‘Don’t believe it; you
won’t die.’”
Soon after nine o’clock Mihail Averyanitch would go away. As he put on
his fur coat in the entry he would say with a sigh:
“What a wilderness fate has carried us to, though, really! What’s most
vexatious of all is to have to die here. Ech! . .” VII
After seeing his friend out Andrey Yefimitch would sit down at the table
and begin reading again. The stillness of the evening, and afterwards of
the night, was not broken by a single sound, and it seemed as though
time were standing still and brooding with the doctor over the book, and
as though there were nothing in existence but the books and the lamp
with the green shade. The doctor’s coarse peasant-like face was
gradually lighted up by a smile of delight and enthusiasm over the
progress of the human intellect. Oh, why is not man immortal? he
thought. What is the good of the brain centres and convolutions, what is
the good of sight, speech, self-consciousness, genius, if it is all
destined to depart into the soil, and in the end to grow cold together
with the earth’s crust, and then for millions of years to fly with the
earth round the sun with no meaning and no object? To do that there was
no need at all to draw man with his lofty, almost godlike intellect out
of non-existence, and then, as though in mockery, to turn him into clay.
The transmutation of substances! But what cowardice to comfort oneself
with that cheap substitute for immortality! The unconscious processes
that take place in nature are lower even than the stupidity of man,
since in stupidity there is, anyway, consciousness and will, while in
those processes there is absolutely nothing. Only the coward who has
more fear of death than dignity can comfort himself with the fact that
his body will in time live again in the grass, in the stones, in the
toad. To find one’s immortality in the transmutation of substances is as
strange as to prophesy a brilliant future for the case after a precious
violin has been broken and become useless.
When the clock struck, Andrey Yefimitch would sink back into his chair
and close his eyes to think a little. And under the influence of the
fine ideas of which he had been reading he would, unawares, recall his
past and his present. The past was hateful—better not to think of it.
And it was the same in the present as in the past. He knew that at the
very time when his thoughts were floating together with the cooling
earth round the sun, in the main building beside his abode people were
suffering in sickness and physical impurity: someone perhaps could not
sleep and was making war upon the insects, someone was being infected by
erysipelas, or moaning over too tight a bandage; perhaps the patients
were playing cards with the nurses and drinking vodka. According to the
yearly return, twelve thousand people had been deceived; the whole
hospital rested as it had done twenty years ago on thieving, filth,
scandals, gossip, on gross quackery, and, as before, it was an immoral
institution extremely injurious to the health of the inhabitants. He
knew that Nikita knocked the patients about behind the barred windows of
Ward No. 6, and that Moiseika went about the town every day begging
alms.
On the other hand, he knew very well that a magical change had taken
place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When he was
studying at the university he had fancied that medicine would soon be
overtaken by the fate of alchemy and metaphysics; but now when he was
reading at night the science of medicine touched him and excited his
wonder, and even enthusiasm. What unexpected brilliance, what a
revolution! Thanks to the antiseptic system operations were performed
such as the great Pirogov had considered impossible even in spe.
Ordinary Zemstvo doctors were venturing to perform the resection of the
kneecap; of abdominal operations only one per cent. was fatal; while
stone was considered such a trifle that they did not even write about
it. A radical cure for syphilis had been discovered. And the theory of
heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur and of Koch, hygiene
based on statistics, and the work of Zemstvo doctors!
Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases, methods of
diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in comparison with what
had been in the past. They no longer poured cold water on the heads of
lunatics nor put strait-waistcoats upon them; they treated them with
humanity, and even, so it was stated in the papers, got up balls and
entertainments for them. Andrey Yefimitch knew that with modern tastes
and views such an abomination as Ward No. 6 was possible only a hundred
and fifty miles from a railway in a little town where the mayor and all
the town council were half-illiterate tradesmen who looked upon the
doctor as an oracle who must be believed without any criticism even if
he had poured molten lead into their mouths; in any other place the
public and the newspapers would long ago have torn this little Bastille
to pieces.
“But, after all, what of it?” Andrey Yefimitch would ask himself,
opening his eyes. “There is the antiseptic system, there is Koch, there
is Pasteur, but the essential reality is not altered a bit; ill-health
and mortality are still the same. They get up balls and entertainments
for the mad, but still they don’t let them go free; so it’s all nonsense
and vanity, and there is no difference in reality between the best
Vienna clinic and my hospital.” But depression and a feeling akin to
envy prevented him from feeling indifferent; it must have been owing to
exhaustion. His heavy head sank on to the book, he put his hands under
his face to make it softer, and thought: “I serve in a pernicious
institution and receive a salary from people whom I am deceiving. I am
not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing, I am only part of an
inevitable social evil: all local officials are pernicious and receive
their salary for doing nothing. . . . And so for my dishonesty it is not
I who am to blame, but the times.... If I had been born two hundred
years later I should have been different. . .”
When it struck three he would put out his lamp and go into his bedroom;
he was not sleepy. VIII
Two years before, the Zemstvo in a liberal mood had decided to allow
three hundred roubles a year to pay for additional medical service in
the town till the Zemstvo hospital should be opened, and the district
doctor, Yevgeny Fyodoritch Hobotov, was invited to the town to assist
Andrey Yefimitch. He was a very young man—not yet thirty—tall and dark,
with broad cheek-bones and little eyes; his forefathers had probably
come from one of the many alien races of Russia. He arrived in the town
without a farthing, with a small portmanteau, and a plain young woman
whom he called his cook. This woman had a baby at the breast. Yevgeny
Fyodoritch used to go about in a cap with a peak, and in high boots, and
in the winter wore a sheepskin. He made great friends with Sergey
Sergeyitch, the medical assistant, and with the treasurer, but held
aloof from the other officials, and for some reason called them
aristocrats. He had only one book in his lodgings, “The Latest
Prescriptions of the Vienna Clinic for 1881.” When he went to a patient
he always took this book with him. He played billiards in the evening at
the club: he did not like cards. He was very fond of using in
conversation such expressions as “endless bobbery,” “canting soft soap,”
“shut up with your finicking. . .”
He visited the hospital twice a week, made the round of the wards, and
saw out-patients. The complete absence of antiseptic treatment and the
cupping roused his indignation, but he did not introduce any new system,
being afraid of offending Andrey Yefimitch. He regarded his colleague as
a sly old rascal, suspected him of being a man of large means, and
secretly envied him. He would have been very glad to have his post. IX
On a spring evening towards the end of March, when there was no snow
left on the ground and the starlings were singing in the hospital
garden, the doctor went out to see his friend the postmaster as far as
the gate. At that very moment the Jew Moiseika, returning with his
booty, came into the yard. He had no cap on, and his bare feet were
thrust into goloshes; in his hand he had a little bag of coppers.
“Give me a kopeck!” he said to the doctor, smiling, and shivering with
cold. Andrey Yefimitch, who could never refuse anyone anything, gave him
a ten-kopeck piece.
“How bad that is!” he thought, looking at the Jew’s bare feet with their
thin red ankles. “Why, it’s wet.”
And stirred by a feeling akin both to pity and disgust, he went into the
lodge behind the Jew, looking now at his bald head, now at his ankles.
As the doctor went in, Nikita jumped up from his heap of litter and
stood at attention.
“Good-day, Nikita,” Andrey Yefimitch said mildly. “That Jew should be
provided with boots or something, he will catch cold.”
“Certainly, your honour. I’ll inform the superintendent.”
“Please do; ask him in my name. Tell him that I asked.”
The door into the ward was open. Ivan Dmitritch, lying propped on his
elbow on the bed, listened in alarm to the unfamiliar voice, and
suddenly recognized the doctor. He trembled all over with anger, jumped
up, and with a red and wrathful face, with his eyes starting out of his
head, ran out into the middle of the road.
“The doctor has come!” he shouted, and broke into a laugh. “At last!
Gentlemen, I congratulate you. The doctor is honouring us with a visit!
Cursed reptile!” he shrieked, and stamped in a frenzy such as had never
been seen in the ward before. “Kill the reptile! No, killing’s too good.
Drown him in the midden-pit!”
Andrey Yefimitch, hearing this, looked into the ward from the entry and
asked gently: “What for?”
“What for?” shouted Ivan Dmitritch, going up to him with a menacing air
and convulsively wrapping himself in his dressing-gown. “What for?
Thief!” he said with a look of repulsion, moving his lips as though he
would spit at him. “Quack! hangman!”
“Calm yourself,” said Andrey Yefimitch, smiling guiltily. “I assure you
I have never stolen anything; and as to the rest, most likely you
greatly exaggerate. I see you are angry with me. Calm yourself, I beg,
if you can, and tell me coolly what are you angry for?”
“What are you keeping me here for?”
“Because you are ill.”
“Yes, I am ill. But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking
about in freedom because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing
them from the sane. Why am I and these poor wretches to be shut up here
like scapegoats for all the rest? You, your assistant, the
superintendent, and all your hospital rabble, are immeasurably inferior
to every one of us morally; why then are we shut up and you not? Where’s
the logic of it?”
“Morality and logic don’t come in, it all depends on chance. If anyone
is shut up he has to stay, and if anyone is not shut up he can walk
about, that’s all. There is neither morality nor logic in my being a
doctor and your being a mental patient, there is nothing but idle
chance.”
“That twaddle I don’t understand. . .” Ivan Dmitritch brought out in a
hollow voice, and he sat down on his bed.
Moiseika, whom Nikita did not venture to search in the presence of the
doctor, laid out on his bed pieces of bread, bits of paper, and little
bones, and, still shivering with cold, began rapidly in a singsong voice
saying something in Yiddish. He most likely imagined that he had opened
a shop.
“Let me out,” said Ivan Dmitritch, and his voice quivered.
“I cannot.”
“But why, why?”
“Because it is not in my power. Think, what use will it be to you if I
do let you out? Go. The townspeople or the police will detain you or
bring you back.”
“Yes, yes, that’s true,” said Ivan Dmitritch, and he rubbed his
forehead. “It’s awful! But what am I to do, what?”
Andrey Yefimitch liked Ivan Dmitritch’s voice and his intelligent young
face with its grimaces. He longed to be kind to the young man and soothe
him; he sat down on the bed beside him, thought, and said:
“You ask me what to do. The very best thing in your position would be to
run away. But, unhappily, that is useless. You would be taken up. When
society protects itself from the criminal, mentally deranged, or
otherwise inconvenient people, it is invincible. There is only one thing
left for you: to resign yourself to the thought that your presence here
is inevitable.”
“It is no use to anyone.”
“So long as prisons and madhouses exist someone must be shut up in them.
If not you, I. If not I, some third person. Wait till in the distant
future prisons and madhouses no longer exist, and there will be neither
bars on the windows nor hospital gowns. Of course, that time will come
sooner or later.”
Ivan Dmitritch smiled ironically.
“You are jesting,” he said, screwing up his eyes. “Such gentlemen as you
and your assistant Nikita have nothing to do with the future, but you
may be sure, sir, better days will come! I may express myself cheaply,
you may laugh, but the dawn of a new life is at hand; truth and justice
will triumph, and—our turn will come! I shall not live to see it, I
shall perish, but some people’s great-grandsons will see it. I greet
them with all my heart and rejoice, rejoice with them! Onward! God be
your help, friends!”
With shining eyes Ivan Dmitritch got up, and stretching his hands
towards the window, went on with emotion in his voice:
“From behind these bars I bless you! Hurrah for truth and justice! I
rejoice!”
“I see no particular reason to rejoice,” said Andrey Yefimitch, who
thought Ivan Dmitritch’s movement theatrical, though he was delighted by
it. “Prisons and madhouses there will not be, and truth, as you have
just expressed it, will triumph; but the reality of things, you know,
will not change, the laws of nature will still remain the same. People
will suffer pain, grow old, and die just as they do now. However
magnificent a dawn lighted up your life, you would yet in the end be
nailed up in a coffin and thrown into a hole.”
“And immortality?”
“Oh, come, now!”
“You don’t believe in it, but I do. Somebody in Dostoevsky or Voltaire
said that if there had not been a God men would have invented him. And I
firmly believe that if there is no immortality the great intellect of
man will sooner or later invent it.”
“Well said,” observed Andrey Yefimitch, smiling with pleasure; “its a
good thing you have faith. With such a belief one may live happily even
shut up within walls. You have studied somewhere, I presume?”
“Yes, I have been at the university, but did not complete my studies.”
“You are a reflecting and a thoughtful man. In any surroundings you can
find tranquillity in yourself. Free and deep thinking which strives for
the comprehension of life, and complete contempt for the foolish bustle
of the world—those are two blessings beyond any that man has ever known.
And you can possess them even though you lived behind threefold bars.
Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the
earth.”
“Your Diogenes was a blockhead,” said Ivan Dmitritch morosely. “Why do
you talk to me about Diogenes and some foolish comprehension of life?”
he cried, growing suddenly angry and leaping up. “I love life; I love it
passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a continual agonizing
terror; but I have moments when I am overwhelmed by the thirst for life,
and then I am afraid of going mad. I want dreadfully to live,
dreadfully!”
He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and said, dropping his
voice:
“When I dream I am haunted by phantoms. People come to me, I hear voices
and music, and I fancy I am walking through woods or by the seashore,
and I long so passionately for movement, for interests . . . . Come,
tell me, what news is there?” asked Ivan Dmitritch; “what’s happening?”
“Do you wish to know about the town or in general?”
“Well, tell me first about the town, and then in general.”
“Well, in the town it is appallingly dull. . . . There’s no one to say a
word to, no one to listen to. There are no new people. A young doctor
called Hobotov has come here recently.”
“He had come in my time. Well, he is a low cad, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is a man of no culture. It’s strange, you know. . . . Judging
by every sign, there is no intellectual stagnation in our capital
cities; there is a movement—so there must be real people there too; but
for some reason they always send us such men as I would rather not see.
It’s an unlucky town!”
“Yes, it is an unlucky town,” sighed Ivan Dmitritch, and he laughed.
“And how are things in general? What are they writing in the papers and
reviews?”
It was by now dark in the ward. The doctor got up, and, standing, began
to describe what was being written abroad and in Russia, and the
tendency of thought that could be noticed now. Ivan Dmitritch listened
attentively and put questions, but suddenly, as though recalling
something terrible, clutched at his head and lay down on the bed with
his back to the doctor.
“What’s the matter?” asked Andrey Yefimitch.
“You will not hear another word from me,” said Ivan Dmitritch rudely.
“Leave me alone.”
“Why so?”
“I tell you, leave me alone. Why the devil do you persist?”
Andrey Yefimitch shrugged his shoulders, heaved a sigh, and went out. As
he crossed the entry he said: “You might clear up here, Nikita . . .
there’s an awfully stuffy smell.”
“Certainly, your honour.”
“What an agreeable young man!” thought Andrey Yefimitch, going back to
his flat. “In all the years I have been living here I do believe he is
the first I have met with whom one can talk. He is capable of reasoning
and is interested in just the right things.”
While he was reading, and afterwards, while he was going to bed, he kept
thinking about Ivan Dmitritch, and when he woke next morning he
remembered that he had the day before made the acquaintance of an
intelligent and interesting man, and determined to visit him again as
soon as possible. X
Ivan Dmitritch was lying in the same position as on the previous day,
with his head clutched in both hands and his legs drawn up. His face was
not visible.
“Good-day, my friend,” said Andrey Yefimitch. “You are not asleep, are
you?”
“In the first place, I am not your friend,” Ivan Dmitritch articulated
into the pillow; “and in the second, your efforts are useless; you will
not get one word out of me.”
“Strange,” muttered Andrey Yefimitch in confusion. “Yesterday we talked
peacefully, but suddenly for some reason you took offence and broke off
all at once. . . . Probably I expressed myself awkwardly, or perhaps
gave utterance to some idea which did not fit in with your convictions.
. . .”
“Yes, a likely idea!” said Ivan Dmitritch, sitting up and looking at the
doctor with irony and uneasiness. His eyes were red. “You can go and spy
and probe somewhere else, it’s no use your doing it here. I knew
yesterday what you had come for.”
“A strange fancy,” laughed the doctor. “So you suppose me to be a spy?”
“Yes, I do. . . . A spy or a doctor who has been charged to test me—it’s
all the same ——”
“Oh excuse me, what a queer fellow you are really!”
The doctor sat down on the stool near the bed and shook his head
reproachfully.
“But let us suppose you are right,” he said, “let us suppose that I am
treacherously trying to trap you into saying something so as to betray
you to the police. You would be arrested and then tried. But would you
be any worse off being tried and in prison than you are here? If you are
banished to a settlement, or even sent to penal servitude, would it be
worse than being shut up in this ward? I imagine it would be no worse. .
. . What, then, are you afraid of?”
These words evidently had an effect on Ivan Dmitritch. He sat down
quietly.
It was between four and five in the afternoon—the time when Andrey
Yefimitch usually walked up and down his rooms, and Daryushka asked
whether it was not time for his beer. It was a still, bright day.
“I came out for a walk after dinner, and here I have come, as you see,”
said the doctor. “It is quite spring.”
“What month is it? March?” asked Ivan Dmitritch.
“Yes, the end of March.”
“Is it very muddy?”
“No, not very. There are already paths in the garden.”
“It would be nice now to drive in an open carriage somewhere into the
country,” said Ivan Dmitritch, rubbing his red eyes as though he were
just awake, “then to come home to a warm, snug study, and . . . and to
have a decent doctor to cure one’s headache. . . . It’s so long since I
have lived like a human being. It’s disgusting here! Insufferably
disgusting!”
After his excitement of the previous day he was exhausted and listless,
and spoke unwillingly. His fingers twitched, and from his face it could
be seen that he had a splitting headache.
“There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,”
said Andrey Yefimitch. “A man’s peace and contentment do not lie outside
a man, but in himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“The ordinary man looks for good and evil in external things—that is, in
carriages, in studies—but a thinking man looks for it in himself.”
“You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it’s warm and
fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to
the climate. With whom was it I was talking of Diogenes? Was it with
you?”
“Yes, with me yesterday.”
“Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it’s hot there
without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring
him to Russia to live: he’d be begging to be let indoors in May, let
alone December. He’d be doubled up with the cold.”
“No. One can be insensible to cold as to every other pain. Marcus
Aurelius says: ‘A pain is a vivid idea of pain; make an effort of will
to change that idea, dismiss it, cease to complain, and the pain will
disappear.’ That is true. The wise man, or simply the reflecting,
thoughtful man, is distinguished precisely by his contempt for
suffering; he is always contented and surprised at nothing.”
“Then I am an idiot, since I suffer and am discontented and surprised at
the baseness of mankind.”
“You are wrong in that; if you will reflect more on the subject you will
understand how insignificant is all that external world that agitates
us. One must strive for the comprehension of life, and in that is true
happiness.”
“Comprehension . . .” repeated Ivan Dmitritch frowning. “External,
internal. . . . Excuse me, but I don’t understand it. I only know,” he
said, getting up and looking angrily at the doctor—“I only know that God
has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue
is capable of life it must react to every stimulus. And I do! To pain I
respond with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth
with loathing. To my mind, that is just what is called life. The lower
the organism, the less sensitive it is, and the more feebly it reacts to
stimulus; and the higher it is, the more responsively and vigorously it
reacts to reality. How is it you don’t know that? A doctor, and not know
such trifles! To despise suffering, to be always contented, and to be
surprised at nothing, one must reach this condition”—and Ivan Dmitritch
pointed to the peasant who was a mass of fat—“or to harden oneself by
suffering to such a point that one loses all sensibility to it—that is,
in other words, to cease to live. You must excuse me, I am not a sage or
a philosopher,” Ivan Dmitritch continued with irritation, “and I don’t
understand anything about it. I am not capable of reasoning.”
“On the contrary, your reasoning is excellent.”
“The Stoics, whom you are parodying, were remarkable people, but their
doctrine crystallized two thousand years ago and has not advanced, and
will not advance, an inch forward, since it is not practical or living.
It had a success only with the minority which spends its life in
savouring all sorts of theories and ruminating over them; the majority
did not understand it. A doctrine which advocates indifference to wealth
and to the comforts of life, and a contempt for suffering and death, is
quite unintelligible to the vast majority of men, since that majority
has never known wealth or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering
would mean to it despising life itself, since the whole existence of man
is made up of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, and a Hamlet-like
dread of death. The whole of life lies in these sensations; one may be
oppressed by it, one may hate it, but one cannot despise it. Yes, so, I
repeat, the doctrine of the Stoics can never have a future; from the
beginning of time up to to-day you see continually increasing the
struggle, the sensibility to pain, the capacity of responding to
stimulus.”
Ivan Dmitritch suddenly lost the thread of his thoughts, stopped, and
rubbed his forehead with vexation.
“I meant to say something important, but I have lost it,” he said. “What
was I saying? Oh, yes! This is what I mean: one of the Stoics sold
himself into slavery to redeem his neighbour, so, you see, even a Stoic
did react to stimulus, since, for such a generous act as the destruction
of oneself for the sake of one’s neighbour, he must have had a soul
capable of pity and indignation. Here in prison I have forgotten
everything I have learned, or else I could have recalled something else.
Take Christ, for instance: Christ responded to reality by weeping,
smiling, being sorrowful and moved to wrath, even overcome by misery. He
did not go to meet His sufferings with a smile, He did not despise
death, but prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that this cup might pass
Him by.”
Ivan Dmitritch laughed and sat down.
“Granted that a man’s peace and contentment lie not outside but in
himself,” he said, “granted that one must despise suffering and not be
surprised at anything, yet on what ground do you preach the theory? Are
you a sage? A philosopher?”
“No, I am not a philosopher, but everyone ought to preach it because it
is reasonable.”
“No, I want to know how it is that you consider yourself competent to
judge of ‘comprehension,’ contempt for suffering, and so on. Have you
ever suffered? Have you any idea of suffering? Allow me to ask you, were
you ever thrashed in your childhood?”
“No, my parents had an aversion for corporal punishment.”
“My father used to flog me cruelly; my father was a harsh, sickly
Government clerk with a long nose and a yellow neck. But let us talk of
you. No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one has scared
you nor beaten you; you are as strong as a bull. You grew up under your
father’s wing and studied at his expense, and then you dropped at once
into a sinecure. For more than twenty years you have lived rent free
with heating, lighting, and service all provided, and had the right to
work how you pleased and as much as you pleased, even to do nothing. You
were naturally a flabby, lazy man, and so you have tried to arrange your
life so that nothing should disturb you or make you move. You have
handed over your work to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while
you sit in peace and warmth, save money, read, amuse yourself with
reflections, with all sorts of lofty nonsense, and” (Ivan Dmitritch
looked at the doctor’s red nose) “with boozing; in fact, you have seen
nothing of life, you know absolutely nothing of it, and are only
theoretically acquainted with reality; you despise suffering and are
surprised at nothing for a very simple reason: vanity of vanities, the
external and the internal, contempt for life, for suffering and for
death, comprehension, true happiness—that’s the philosophy that suits
the Russian sluggard best. You see a peasant beating his wife, for
instance. Why interfere? Let him beat her, they will both die sooner or
later, anyway; and, besides, he who beats injures by his blows, not the
person he is beating, but himself. To get drunk is stupid and unseemly,
but if you drink you die, and if you don’t drink you die. A peasant
woman comes with toothache . . . well, what of it? Pain is the idea of
pain, and besides ‘there is no living in this world without illness; we
shall all die, and so, go away, woman, don’t hinder me from thinking and
drinking vodka.’ A young man asks advice, what he is to do, how he is to
live; anyone else would think before answering, but you have got the
answer ready: strive for ‘comprehension’ or for true happiness. And what
is that fantastic ‘true happiness’? There’s no answer, of course. We are
kept here behind barred windows, tortured, left to rot; but that is very
good and reasonable, because there is no difference at all between this
ward and a warm, snug study. A convenient philosophy. You can do
nothing, and your conscience is clear, and you feel you are wise . . . .
No, sir, it is not philosophy, it’s not thinking, it’s not breadth of
vision, but laziness, fakirism, drowsy stupefaction. Yes,” cried Ivan
Dmitritch, getting angry again, “you despise suffering, but I’ll be
bound if you pinch your finger in the door you will howl at the top of
your voice.”
“And perhaps I shouldn’t howl,” said Andrey Yefimitch, with a gentle
smile.
“Oh, I dare say! Well, if you had a stroke of paralysis, or supposing
some fool or bully took advantage of his position and rank to insult you
in public, and if you knew he could do it with impunity, then you would
understand what it means to put people off with comprehension and true
happiness.”
“That’s original,” said Andrey Yefimitch, laughing with pleasure and
rubbing his hands. “I am agreeably struck by your inclination for
drawing generalizations, and the sketch of my character you have just
drawn is simply brilliant. I must confess that talking to you gives me
great pleasure. Well, I’ve listened to you, and now you must graciously
listen to me.” XI
The conversation went on for about an hour longer, and apparently made a
deep impression on Andrey Yefimitch. He began going to the ward every
day. He went there in the mornings and after dinner, and often the dusk
of evening found him in conversation with Ivan Dmitritch. At first Ivan
Dmitritch held aloof from him, suspected him of evil designs, and openly
expressed his hostility. But afterwards he got used to him, and his
abrupt manner changed to one of condescending irony.
Soon it was all over the hospital that the doctor, Andrey Yefimitch, had
taken to visiting Ward No. 6. No one—neither Sergey Sergevitch, nor
Nikita, nor the nurses—could conceive why he went there, why he stayed
there for hours together, what he was talking about, and why he did not
write prescriptions. His actions seemed strange. Often Mihail
Averyanitch did not find him at home, which had never happened in the
past, and Daryushka was greatly perturbed, for the doctor drank his beer
now at no definite time, and sometimes was even late for dinner.
One day—it was at the end of June—Dr. Hobotov went to see Andrey
Yefimitch about something. Not finding him at home, he proceeded to look
for him in the yard; there he was told that the old doctor had gone to
see the mental patients. Going into the lodge and stopping in the entry,
Hobotov heard the following conversation:
“We shall never agree, and you will not succeed in converting me to your
faith,” Ivan Dmitritch was saying irritably; “you are utterly ignorant
of reality, and you have never known suffering, but have only like a
leech fed beside the sufferings of others, while I have been in
continual suffering from the day of my birth till to-day. For that
reason, I tell you frankly, I consider myself superior to you and more
competent in every respect. It’s not for you to teach me.”
“I have absolutely no ambition to convert you to my faith,” said Andrey
Yefimitch gently, and with regret that the other refused to understand
him. “And that is not what matters, my friend; what matters is not that
you have suffered and I have not. Joy and suffering are passing; let us
leave them, never mind them. What matters is that you and I think; we
see in each other people who are capable of thinking and reasoning, and
that is a common bond between us however different our views. If you
knew, my friend, how sick I am of the universal senselessness,
ineptitude, stupidity, and with what delight I always talk with you! You
are an intelligent man, and I enjoyed your company.”
Hobotov opened the door an inch and glanced into the ward; Ivan
Dmitritch in his night-cap and the doctor Andrey Yefimitch were sitting
side by side on the bed. The madman was grimacing, twitching, and
convulsively wrapping himself in his gown, while the doctor sat
motionless with bowed head, and his face was red and look helpless and
sorrowful. Hobotov shrugged his shoulders, grinned, and glanced at
Nikita. Nikita shrugged his shoulders too.
Next day Hobotov went to the lodge, accompanied by the assistant. Both
stood in the entry and listened.
“I fancy our old man has gone clean off his chump!” said Hobotov as he
came out of the lodge.
“Lord have mercy upon us sinners!” sighed the decorous Sergey
Sergeyitch, scrupulously avoiding the puddles that he might not muddy
his polished boots. “I must own, honoured Yevgeny Fyodoritch, I have
been expecting it for a long time.” XII
After this Andrey Yefimitch began to notice a mysterious air in all
around him. The attendants, the nurses, and the patients looked at him
inquisitively when they met him, and then whispered together. The
superintendent’s little daughter Masha, whom he liked to meet in the
hospital garden, for some reason ran away from him now when he went up
with a smile to stroke her on the head. The postmaster no longer said,
“Perfectly true,” as he listened to him, but in unaccountable confusion
muttered, “Yes, yes, yes . . .” and looked at him with a grieved and
thoughtful expression; for some reason he took to advising his friend to
give up vodka and beer, but as a man of delicate feeling he did not say
this directly, but hinted it, telling him first about the commanding
officer of his battalion, an excellent man, and then about the priest of
the regiment, a capital fellow, both of whom drank and fell ill, but on
giving up drinking completely regained their health. On two or three
occasions Andrey Yefimitch was visited by his colleague Hobotov, who
also advised him to give up spirituous liquors, and for no apparent
reason recommended him to take bromide.
In August Andrey Yefimitch got a letter from the mayor of the town
asking him to come on very important business. On arriving at the town
hall at the time fixed, Andrey Yefimitch found there the military
commander, the superintendent of the district school, a member of the
town council, Hobotov, and a plump, fair gentleman who was introduced to
him as a doctor. This doctor, with a Polish surname difficult to
pronounce, lived at a pedigree stud-farm twenty miles away, and was now
on a visit to the town.
“There’s something that concerns you,” said the member of the town
council, addressing Andrey Yefimitch after they had all greeted one
another and sat down to the table. “Here Yevgeny Fyodoritch says that
there is not room for the dispensary in the main building, and that it
ought to be transferred to one of the lodges. That’s of no
consequence—of course it can be transferred, but the point is that the
lodge wants doing up.”
“Yes, it would have to be done up,” said Andrey Yefimitch after a
moment’s thought. “If the corner lodge, for instance, were fitted up as
a dispensary, I imagine it would cost at least five hundred roubles. An
unproductive expenditure!”
Everyone was silent for a space.
“I had the honour of submitting to you ten years ago,” Andrey Yefimitch
went on in a low voice, “that the hospital in its present form is a
luxury for the town beyond its means. It was built in the forties, but
things were different then. The town spends too much on unnecessary
buildings and superfluous staff. I believe with a different system two
model hospitals might be maintained for the same money.”
“Well, let us have a different system, then!” the member of the town
council said briskly.
“I have already had the honour of submitting to you that the medical
department should be transferred to the supervision of the Zemstvo.”
“Yes, transfer the money to the Zemstvo and they will steal it,” laughed
the fair-haired doctor.
“That’s what it always comes to,” the member of the council assented,
and he also laughed.
Andrey Yefimitch looked with apathetic, lustreless eyes at the fair-
haired doctor and said: “One should be just.”
Again there was silence. Tea was brought in. The military commander, for
some reason much embarrassed, touched Andrey Yefimitch’s hand across the
table and said: “You have quite forgotten us, doctor. But of course you
are a hermit: you don’t play cards and don’t like women. You would be
dull with fellows like us.”
They all began saying how boring it was for a decent person to live in
such a town. No theatre, no music, and at the last dance at the club
there had been about twenty ladies and only two gentlemen. The young men
did not dance, but spent all the time crowding round the refreshment bar
or playing cards.
Not looking at anyone and speaking slowly in a low voice, Andrey
Yefimitch began saying what a pity, what a terrible pity it was that the
townspeople should waste their vital energy, their hearts, and their
minds on cards and gossip, and should have neither the power nor the
inclination to spend their time in interesting conversation and reading,
and should refuse to take advantage of the enjoyments of the mind. The
mind alone was interesting and worthy of attention, all the rest was low
and petty. Hobotov listened to his colleague attentively and suddenly
asked:
“Andrey Yefimitch, what day of the month is it?”
Having received an answer, the fair-haired doctor and he, in the tone of
examiners conscious of their lack of skill, began asking Andrey
Yefimitch what was the day of the week, how many days there were in the
year, and whether it was true that there was a remarkable prophet living
in Ward No. 6.
In response to the last question Andrey Yefimitch turned rather red and
said: “Yes, he is mentally deranged, but he is an interesting young
man.”
They asked him no other questions.
When he was putting on his overcoat in the entry, the military commander
laid a hand on his shoulder and said with a sigh:
“It’s time for us old fellows to rest!”
As he came out of the hall, Andrey Yefimitch understood that it had been
a committee appointed to enquire into his mental condition. He recalled
the questions that had been asked him, flushed crimson, and for some
reason, for the first time in his life, felt bitterly grieved for
medical science.
“My God. . .” he thought, remembering how these doctors had just
examined him; “why, they have only lately been hearing lectures on
mental pathology; they had passed an examination—what’s the explanation
of this crass ignorance? They have not a conception of mental
pathology!”
And for the first time in his life he felt insulted and moved to anger.
In the evening of the same day Mihail Averyanitch came to see him. The
postmaster went up to him without waiting to greet him, took him by both
hands, and said in an agitated voice:
“My dear fellow, my dear friend, show me that you believe in my genuine
affection and look on me as your friend!” And preventing Andrey
Yefimitch from speaking, he went on, growing excited: “I love you for
your culture and nobility of soul. Listen to me, my dear fellow. The
rules of their profession compel the doctors to conceal the truth from
you, but I blurt out the plain truth like a soldier. You are not well!
Excuse me, my dear fellow, but it is the truth; everyone about you has
been noticing it for a long time. Dr. Yevgeny Fyodoritch has just told
me that it is essential for you to rest and distract your mind for the
sake of your health. Perfectly true! Excellent! In a day or two I am
taking a holiday and am going away for a sniff of a different
atmosphere. Show that you are a friend to me, let us go together! Let us
go for a jaunt as in the good old days.”
“I feel perfectly well,” said Andrey Yefimitch after a moment’s thought.
“I can’t go away. Allow me to show you my friendship in some other way.”
To go off with no object, without his books, without his Daryushka,
without his beer, to break abruptly through the routine of life,
established for twenty years—the idea for the first minute struck him as
wild and fantastic, but he remembered the conversation at the Zemstvo
committee and the depressing feelings with which he had returned home,
and the thought of a brief absence from the town in which stupid people
looked on him as a madman was pleasant to him.
“And where precisely do you intend to go?” he asked.
“To Moscow, to Petersburg, to Warsaw. . . . I spent the five happiest
years of my life in Warsaw. What a marvellous town! Let us go, my dear
fellow!” XIII
A week later it was suggested to Andrey Yefimitch that he should have a
rest—that is, send in his resignation—a suggestion he received with
indifference, and a week later still, Mihail Averyanitch and he were
sitting in a posting carriage driving to the nearest railway station.
The days were cool and bright, with a blue sky and a transparent
distance. They were two days driving the hundred and fifty miles to the
railway station, and stayed two nights on the way. When at the posting
station the glasses given them for their tea had not been properly
washed, or the drivers were slow in harnessing the horses, Mihail
Averyanitch would turn crimson, and quivering all over would shout:
“Hold your tongue! Don’t argue!”
And in the carriage he talked without ceasing for a moment, describing
his campaigns in the Caucasus and in Poland. What adventures he had had,
what meetings! He talked loudly and opened his eyes so wide with wonder
that he might well be thought to be lying. Moreover, as he talked he
breathed in Andrey Yefimitch’s face and laughed into his ear. This
bothered the doctor and prevented him from thinking or concentrating his
mind.
In the train they travelled, from motives of economy, third-class in a
non-smoking compartment. Half the passengers were decent people. Mihail
Averyanitch soon made friends with everyone, and moving from one seat to
another, kept saying loudly that they ought not to travel by these
appalling lines. It was a regular swindle! A very different thing riding
on a good horse: one could do over seventy miles a day and feel fresh
and well after it. And our bad harvests were due to the draining of the
Pinsk marshes; altogether, the way things were done was dreadful. He got
excited, talked loudly, and would not let others speak. This endless
chatter to the accompaniment of loud laughter and expressive gestures
wearied Andrey Yefimitch.
“Which of us is the madman?” he thought with vexation. “I, who try not
to disturb my fellow-passengers in any way, or this egoist who thinks
that he is cleverer and more interesting than anyone here, and so will
leave no one in peace?”
In Moscow Mihail Averyanitch put on a military coat without epaulettes
and trousers with red braid on them. He wore a military cap and overcoat
in the street, and soldiers saluted him. It seemed to Andrey Yefimitch,
now, that his companion was a man who had flung away all that was good
and kept only what was bad of all the characteristics of a country
gentleman that he had once possessed. He liked to be waited on even when
it was quite unnecessary. The matches would be lying before him on the
table, and he would see them and shout to the waiter to give him the
matches; he did not hesitate to appear before a maidservant in nothing
but his underclothes; he used the familiar mode of address to all
footmen indiscriminately, even old men, and when he was angry called
them fools and blockheads. This, Andrey Yefimitch thought, was like a
gentleman, but disgusting.
First of all Mihail Averyanitch led his friend to the Iversky Madonna.
He prayed fervently, shedding tears and bowing down to the earth, and
when he had finished, heaved a deep sigh and said:
“Even though one does not believe it makes one somehow easier when one
prays a little. Kiss the ikon, my dear fellow.”
Andrey Yefimitch was embarrassed and he kissed the image, while Mihail
Averyanitch pursed up his lips and prayed in a whisper, and again tears
came into his eyes. Then they went to the Kremlin and looked there at
the Tsar-cannon and the Tsar-bell, and even touched them with their
fingers, admired the view over the river, visited St. Saviour’s and the
Rumyantsev museum.
They dined at Tyestov’s. Mihail Averyanitch looked a long time at the
menu, stroking his whiskers, and said in the tone of a gourmand
accustomed to dine in restaurants:
“We shall see what you give us to eat to-day, angel!” XIV
The doctor walked about, looked at things, ate and drank, but he had all
the while one feeling: annoyance with Mihail Averyanitch. He longed to
have a rest from his friend, to get away from him, to hide himself,
while the friend thought it was his duty not to let the doctor move a
step away from him, and to provide him with as many distractions as
possible. When there was nothing to look at he entertained him with
conversation. For two days Andrey Yefimitch endured it, but on the third
he announced to his friend that he was ill and wanted to stay at home
for the whole day; his friend replied that in that case he would stay
too—that really he needed rest, for he was run off his legs already.
Andrey Yefimitch lay on the sofa, with his face to the back, and
clenching his teeth, listened to his friend, who assured him with heat
that sooner or later France would certainly thrash Germany, that there
were a great many scoundrels in Moscow, and that it was impossible to
judge of a horse’s quality by its outward appearance. The doctor began
to have a buzzing in his ears and palpitations of the heart, but out of
delicacy could not bring himself to beg his friend to go away or hold
his tongue. Fortunately Mihail Averyanitch grew weary of sitting in the
hotel room, and after dinner he went out for a walk.
As soon as he was alone Andrey Yefimitch abandoned himself to a feeling
of relief. How pleasant to lie motionless on the sofa and to know that
one is alone in the room! Real happiness is impossible without solitude.
The fallen angel betrayed God probably because he longed for solitude,
of which the angels know nothing. Andrey Yefimitch wanted to think about
what he had seen and heard during the last few days, but he could not
get Mihail Averyanitch out of his head.
“Why, he has taken a holiday and come with me out of friendship, out of
generosity,” thought the doctor with vexation; “nothing could be worse
than this friendly supervision. I suppose he is good-natured and
generous and a lively fellow, but he is a bore. An insufferable bore. In
the same way there are people who never say anything but what is clever
and good, yet one feels that they are dull-witted people.”
For the following days Andrey Yefimitch declared himself ill and would
not leave the hotel room; he lay with his face to the back of the sofa,
and suffered agonies of weariness when his friend entertained him with
conversation, or rested when his friend was absent. He was vexed with
himself for having come, and with his friend, who grew every day more
talkative and more free-and-easy; he could not succeed in attuning his
thoughts to a serious and lofty level.
“This is what I get from the real life Ivan Dmitritch talked about,” he
thought, angry at his own pettiness. “It’s of no consequence, though. .
. . I shall go home, and everything will go on as before . . . .”
It was the same thing in Petersburg too; for whole days together he did
not leave the hotel room, but lay on the sofa and only got up to drink
beer.
Mihail Averyanitch was all haste to get to Warsaw.
“My dear man, what should I go there for?” said Andrey Yefimitch in an
imploring voice. “You go alone and let me get home! I entreat you!”
“On no account,” protested Mihail Averyanitch. “It’s a marvellous town.”
Andrey Yefimitch had not the strength of will to insist on his own way,
and much against his inclination went to Warsaw. There he did not leave
the hotel room, but lay on the sofa, furious with himself, with his
friend, and with the waiters, who obstinately refused to understand
Russian; while Mihail Averyanitch, healthy, hearty, and full of spirits
as usual, went about the town from morning to night, looking for his old
acquaintances. Several times he did not return home at night. After one
night spent in some unknown haunt he returned home early in the morning,
in a violently excited condition, with a red face and tousled hair. For
a long time he walked up and down the rooms muttering something to
himself, then stopped and said:
“Honour before everything.”
After walking up and down a little longer he clutched his head in both
hands and pronounced in a tragic voice: “Yes, honour before everything!
Accursed be the moment when the idea first entered my head to visit this
Babylon! My dear friend,” he added, addressing the doctor, “you may
despise me, I have played and lost; lend me five hundred roubles!”
Andrey Yefimitch counted out five hundred roubles and gave them to his
friend without a word. The latter, still crimson with shame and anger,
incoherently articulated some useless vow, put on his cap, and went out.
Returning two hours later he flopped into an easy-chair, heaved a loud
sigh, and said:
“My honour is saved. Let us go, my friend; I do not care to remain
another hour in this accursed town. Scoundrels! Austrian spies!”
By the time the friends were back in their own town it was November, and
deep snow was lying in the streets. Dr. Hobotov had Andrey Yefimitch’s
post; he was still living in his old lodgings, waiting for Andrey
Yefimitch to arrive and clear out of the hospital apartments. The plain
woman whom he called his cook was already established in one of the
lodges.
Fresh scandals about the hospital were going the round of the town. It
was said that the plain woman had quarrelled with the superintendent,
and that the latter had crawled on his knees before her begging
forgiveness. On the very first day he arrived Andrey Yefimitch had to
look out for lodgings.
“My friend,” the postmaster said to him timidly, “excuse an indiscreet
question: what means have you at your disposal?”
Andrey Yefimitch, without a word, counted out his money and said:
“Eighty-six roubles.”
“I don’t mean that,” Mihail Averyanitch brought out in confusion,
misunderstanding him; “I mean, what have you to live on?”
“I tell you, eighty-six roubles . . . I have nothing else.”
Mihail Averyanitch looked upon the doctor as an honourable man, yet he
suspected that he had accumulated a fortune of at least twenty thousand.
Now learning that Andrey Yefimitch was a beggar, that he had nothing to
live on he was for some reason suddenly moved to tears and embraced his
friend. XV
Andrey Yefimitch now lodged in a little house with three windows. There
were only three rooms besides the kitchen in the little house. The
doctor lived in two of them which looked into the street, while
Daryushka and the landlady with her three children lived in the third
room and the kitchen. Sometimes the landlady’s lover, a drunken peasant
who was rowdy and reduced the children and Daryushka to terror, would
come for the night. When he arrived and established himself in the
kitchen and demanded vodka, they all felt very uncomfortable, and the
doctor would be moved by pity to take the crying children into his room
and let them lie on his floor, and this gave him great satisfaction.
He got up as before at eight o’clock, and after his morning tea sat down
to read his old books and magazines: he had no money for new ones.
Either because the books were old, or perhaps because of the change in
his surroundings, reading exhausted him, and did not grip his attention
as before. That he might not spend his time in idleness he made a
detailed catalogue of his books and gummed little labels on their backs,
and this mechanical, tedious work seemed to him more interesting than
reading. The monotonous, tedious work lulled his thoughts to sleep in
some unaccountable way, and the time passed quickly while he thought of
nothing. Even sitting in the kitchen, peeling potatoes with Daryushka or
picking over the buckwheat grain, seemed to him interesting. On
Saturdays and Sundays he went to church. Standing near the wall and half
closing his eyes, he listened to the singing and thought of his father,
of his mother, of the university, of the religions of the world; he felt
calm and melancholy, and as he went out of the church afterwards he
regretted that the service was so soon over. He went twice to the
hospital to talk to Ivan Dmitritch. But on both occasions Ivan Dmitritch
was unusually excited and ill-humoured; he bade the doctor leave him in
peace, as he had long been sick of empty chatter, and declared, to make
up for all his sufferings, he asked from the damned scoundrels only one
favour—solitary confinement. Surely they would not refuse him even that?
On both occasions when Andrey Yefimitch was taking leave of him and
wishing him good-night, he answered rudely and said:
“Go to hell!”
And Andrey Yefimitch did not know now whether to go to him for the third
time or not. He longed to go.
In old days Andrey Yefimitch used to walk about his rooms and think in
the interval after dinner, but now from dinner-time till evening tea he
lay on the sofa with his face to the back and gave himself up to trivial
thoughts which he could not struggle against. He was mortified that
after more than twenty years of service he had been given neither a
pension nor any assistance. It is true that he had not done his work
honestly, but, then, all who are in the Service get a pension without
distinction whether they are honest or not. Contemporary justice lies
precisely in the bestowal of grades, orders, and pensions, not for moral
qualities or capacities, but for service whatever it may have been like.
Why was he alone to be an exception? He had no money at all. He was
ashamed to pass by the shop and look at the woman who owned it. He owed
thirty-two roubles for beer already. There was money owing to the
landlady also. Daryushka sold old clothes and books on the sly, and told
lies to the landlady, saying that the doctor was just going to receive a
large sum of money.
He was angry with himself for having wasted on travelling the thousand
roubles he had saved up. How useful that thousand roubles would have
been now! He was vexed that people would not leave him in peace. Hobotov
thought it his duty to look in on his sick colleague from time to time.
Everything about him was revolting to Andrey Yefimitch—his well-fed face
and vulgar, condescending tone, and his use of the word “colleague,” and
his high top-boots; the most revolting thing was that he thought it was
his duty to treat Andrey Yefimitch, and thought that he really was
treating him. On every visit he brought a bottle of bromide and rhubarb
pills.
Mihail Averyanitch, too, thought it his duty to visit his friend and
entertain him. Every time he went in to Andrey Yefimitch with an
affectation of ease, laughed constrainedly, and began assuring him that
he was looking very well to-day, and that, thank God, he was on the
highroad to recovery, and from this it might be concluded that he looked
on his friend’s condition as hopeless. He had not yet repaid his Warsaw
debt, and was overwhelmed by shame; he was constrained, and so tried to
laugh louder and talk more amusingly. His anecdotes and descriptions
seemed endless now, and were an agony both to Andrey Yefimitch and
himself.
In his presence Andrey Yefimitch usually lay on the sofa with his face
to the wall, and listened with his teeth clenched; his soul was
oppressed with rankling disgust, and after every visit from his friend
he felt as though this disgust had risen higher, and was mounting into
his throat.
To stifle petty thoughts he made haste to reflect that he himself, and
Hobotov, and Mihail Averyanitch, would all sooner or later perish
without leaving any trace on the world. If one imagined some spirit
flying by the earthly globe in space in a million years he would see
nothing but clay and bare rocks. Everything—culture and the moral
law—would pass away and not even a burdock would grow out of them. Of
what consequence was shame in the presence of a shopkeeper, of what
consequence was the insignificant Hobotov or the wearisome friendship of
Mihail Averyanitch? It was all trivial and nonsensical.
But such reflections did not help him now. Scarcely had he imagined the
earthly globe in a million years, when Hobotov in his high top-boots or
Mihail Averyanitch with his forced laugh would appear from behind a bare
rock, and he even heard the shamefaced whisper: “The Warsaw debt. . . .
I will repay it in a day or two, my dear fellow, without fail. . . .”
XVI
One day Mihail Averyanitch came after dinner when Andrey Yefimitch was
lying on the sofa. It so happened that Hobotov arrived at the same time
with his bromide. Andrey Yefimitch got up heavily and sat down, leaning
both arms on the sofa.
“You have a much better colour to-day than you had yesterday, my dear
man,” began Mihail Averyanitch. “Yes, you look jolly. Upon my soul, you
do!”
“It’s high time you were well, dear colleague,” said Hobotov, yawning.
“I’ll be bound, you are sick of this bobbery.”
“And we shall recover,” said Mihail Averyanitch cheerfully. “We shall
live another hundred years! To be sure!”
“Not a hundred years, but another twenty,” Hobotov said reassuringly.
“It’s all right, all right, colleague; don’t lose heart. . . . Don’t go
piling it on!”
“We’ll show what we can do,” laughed Mihail Averyanitch, and he slapped
his friend on the knee. “We’ll show them yet! Next summer, please God,
we shall be off to the Caucasus, and we will ride all over it on
horseback—trot, trot, trot! And when we are back from the Caucasus I
shouldn’t wonder if we will all dance at the wedding.” Mihail
Averyanitch gave a sly wink. “We’ll marry you, my dear boy, we’ll marry
you. . . .”
Andrey Yefimitch felt suddenly that the rising disgust had mounted to
his throat, his heart began beating violently.
“That’s vulgar,” he said, getting up quickly and walking away to the
window. “Don’t you understand that you are talking vulgar nonsense?”
He meant to go on softly and politely, but against his will he suddenly
clenched his fists and raised them above his head.
“Leave me alone,” he shouted in a voice unlike his own, blushing crimson
and shaking all over. “Go away, both of you!”
Mihail Averyanitch and Hobotov got up and stared at him first with
amazement and then with alarm.
“Go away, both!” Andrey Yefimitch went on shouting. “Stupid people!
Foolish people! I don’t want either your friendship or your medicines,
stupid man! Vulgar! Nasty!”
Hobotov and Mihail Averyanitch, looking at each other in bewilderment,
staggered to the door and went out. Andrey Yefimitch snatched up the
bottle of bromide and flung it after them; the bottle broke with a crash
on the door-frame.
“Go to the devil!” he shouted in a tearful voice, running out into the
passage. “To the devil!”
When his guests were gone Andrey Yefimitch lay down on the sofa,
trembling as though in a fever, and went on for a long while repeating:
“Stupid people! Foolish people!”
When he was calmer, what occurred to him first of all was the thought
that poor Mihail Averyanitch must be feeling fearfully ashamed and
depressed now, and that it was all dreadful. Nothing like this had ever
happened to him before. Where was his intelligence and his tact? Where
was his comprehension of things and his philosophical indifference?
The doctor could not sleep all night for shame and vexation with
himself, and at ten o’clock next morning he went to the post office and
apologized to the postmaster.
“We won’t think again of what has happened,” Mihail Averyanitch, greatly
touched, said with a sigh, warmly pressing his hand. “Let bygones be
bygones. Lyubavkin,” he suddenly shouted so loud that all the postmen
and other persons present started, “hand a chair; and you wait,” he
shouted to a peasant woman who was stretching out a registered letter to
him through the grating. “Don’t you see that I am busy? We will not
remember the past,” he went on, affectionately addressing Andrey
Yefimitch; “sit down, I beg you, my dear fellow.”
For a minute he stroked his knees in silence, and then said:
“I have never had a thought of taking offence. Illness is no joke, I
understand. Your attack frightened the doctor and me yesterday, and we
had a long talk about you afterwards. My dear friend, why won’t you
treat your illness seriously? You can’t go on like this . . . . Excuse
me speaking openly as a friend,” whispered Mihail Averyanitch. “You live
in the most unfavourable surroundings, in a crowd, in uncleanliness, no
one to look after you, no money for proper treatment. . . . My dear
friend, the doctor and I implore you with all our hearts, listen to our
advice: go into the hospital! There you will have wholesome food and
attendance and treatment. Though, between ourselves, Yevgeny Fyodoritch
is mauvais ton, yet he does understand his work, you can fully rely upon
him. He has promised me he will look after you.”
Andrey Yefimitch was touched by the postmaster’s genuine sympathy and
the tears which suddenly glittered on his cheeks.
“My honoured friend, don’t believe it!” he whispered, laying his hand on
his heart; “don’t believe them. It’s all a sham. My illness is only that
in twenty years I have only found one intelligent man in the whole town,
and he is mad. I am not ill at all, it’s simply that I have got into an
enchanted circle which there is no getting out of. I don’t care; I am
ready for anything.”
“Go into the hospital, my dear fellow.”
“I don’t care if it were into the pit.”
“Give me your word, my dear man, that you will obey Yevgeny Fyodoritch
in everything.”
“Certainly I will give you my word. But I repeat, my honoured friend, I
have got into an enchanted circle. Now everything, even the genuine
sympathy of my friends, leads to the same thing—to my ruin. I am going
to my ruin, and I have the manliness to recognize it.”
“My dear fellow, you will recover.”
“What’s the use of saying that?” said Andrey Yefimitch, with irritation.
“There are few men who at the end of their lives do not experience what
I am experiencing now. When you are told that you have something such as
diseased kidneys or enlarged heart, and you begin being treated for it,
or are told you are mad or a criminal—that is, in fact, when people
suddenly turn their attention to you—you may be sure you have got into
an enchanted circle from which you will not escape. You will try to
escape and make things worse. You had better give in, for no human
efforts can save you. So it seems to me.”
Meanwhile the public was crowding at the grating. That he might not be
in their way, Andrey Yefimitch got up and began to take leave. Mihail
Averyanitch made him promise on his honour once more, and escorted him
to the outer door.
Towards evening on the same day Hobotov, in his sheepskin and his high
top-boots, suddenly made his appearance, and said to Andrey Yefimitch in
a tone as though nothing had happened the day before:
“I have come on business, colleague. I have come to ask you whether you
would not join me in a consultation. Eh?”
Thinking that Hobotov wanted to distract his mind with an outing, or
perhaps really to enable him to earn something, Andrey Yefimitch put on
his coat and hat, and went out with him into the street. He was glad of
the opportunity to smooth over his fault of the previous day and to be
reconciled, and in his heart thanked Hobotov, who did not even allude to
yesterday’s scene and was evidently sparing him. One would never have
expected such delicacy from this uncultured man.
“Where is your invalid?” asked Andrey Yefimitch.
“In the hospital. . . . I have long wanted to show him to you. A very
interesting case.”
They went into the hospital yard, and going round the main building,
turned towards the lodge where the mental cases were kept, and all this,
for some reason, in silence. When they went into the lodge Nikita as
usual jumped up and stood at attention.
“One of the patients here has a lung complication.” Hobotov said in an
undertone, going into the yard with Andrey Yefimitch. “You wait here,
I’ll be back directly. I am going for a stethoscope.”
And he went away. XVII
It was getting dusk. Ivan Dmitritch was lying on his bed with his face
thrust unto his pillow; the paralytic was sitting motionless, crying
quietly and moving his lips. The fat peasant and the former sorter were
asleep. It was quiet.
Andrey Yefimitch sat down on Ivan Dmitritch’s bed and waited. But half
an hour passed, and instead of Hobotov, Nikita came into the ward with a
dressing-gown, some underlinen, and a pair of slippers in a heap on his
arm.
“Please change your things, your honour,” he said softly. “Here is your
bed; come this way,” he added, pointing to an empty bedstead which had
obviously recently been brought into the ward. “It’s all right; please
God, you will recover.”
Andrey Yefimitch understood it all. Without saying a word he crossed to
the bed to which Nikita pointed and sat down; seeing that Nikita was
standing waiting, he undressed entirely and he felt ashamed. Then he put
on the hospital clothes; the drawers were very short, the shirt was
long, and the dressing-gown smelt of smoked fish.
“Please God, you will recover,” repeated Nikita, and he gathered up
Andrey Yefimitch’s clothes into his arms, went out, and shut the door
after him.
“No matter . . .” thought Andrey Yefimitch, wrapping himself in his
dressing-gown in a shamefaced way and feeling that he looked like a
convict in his new costume. “It’s no matter. . . . It does not matter
whether it’s a dress-coat or a uniform or this dressing-gown.”
But how about his watch? And the notebook that was in the side-pocket?
And his cigarettes? Where had Nikita taken his clothes? Now perhaps to
the day of his death he would not put on trousers, a waistcoat, and high
boots. It was all somehow strange and even incomprehensible at first.
Andrey Yefimitch was even now convinced that there was no difference
between his landlady’s house and Ward No. 6, that everything in this
world was nonsense and vanity of vanities. And yet his hands were
trembling, his feet were cold, and he was filled with dread at the
thought that soon Ivan Dmitritch would get up and see that he was in a
dressing-gown. He got up and walked across the room and sat down again.
Here he had been sitting already half an hour, an hour, and he was
miserably sick of it: was it really possible to live here a day, a week,
and even years like these people? Why, he had been sitting here, had
walked about and sat down again; he could get up and look out of window
and walk from corner to corner again, and then what? Sit so all the
time, like a post, and think? No, that was scarcely possible.
Andrey Yefimitch lay down, but at once got up, wiped the cold sweat from
his brow with his sleeve and felt that his whole face smelt of smoked
fish. He walked about again.
“It’s some misunderstanding . . .” he said, turning out the palms of his
hands in perplexity. “It must be cleared up. There is a
misunderstanding.”
Meanwhile Ivan Dmitritch woke up; he sat up and propped his cheeks on
his fists. He spat. Then he glanced lazily at the doctor, and apparently
for the first minute did not understand; but soon his sleepy face grew
malicious and mocking.
“Aha! so they have put you in here, too, old fellow?” he said in a voice
husky from sleepiness, screwing up one eye. “Very glad to see you. You
sucked the blood of others, and now they will suck yours. Excellent!”
“It’s a misunderstanding . . .” Andrey Yefimitch brought out, frightened
by Ivan Dmitritch’s words; he shrugged his shoulders and repeated: “It’s
some misunderstanding.”
Ivan Dmitritch spat again and lay down.
“Cursed life,” he grumbled, “and what’s bitter and insulting, this life
will not end in compensation for our sufferings, it will not end with
apotheosis as it would in an opera, but with death; peasants will come
and drag one’s dead body by the arms and the legs to the cellar. Ugh!
Well, it does not matter. . . . We shall have our good time in the other
world. . . . I shall come here as a ghost from the other world and
frighten these reptiles. I’ll turn their hair grey.”
Moiseika returned, and, seeing the doctor, held out his hand.
“Give me one little kopeck,” he said. XVIII
Andrey Yefimitch walked away to the window and looked out into the open
country. It was getting dark, and on the horizon to the right a cold
crimson moon was mounting upwards. Not far from the hospital fence, not
much more than two hundred yards away, stood a tall white house shut in
by a stone wall. This was the prison.
“So this is real life,” thought Andrey Yefimitch, and he felt
frightened.
The moon and the prison, and the nails on the fence, and the far-away
flames at the bone-charring factory were all terrible. Behind him there
was the sound of a sigh. Andrey Yefimitch looked round and saw a man
with glittering stars and orders on his breast, who was smiling and
slyly winking. And this, too, seemed terrible.
Andrey Yefimitch assured himself that there was nothing special about
the moon or the prison, that even sane persons wear orders, and that
everything in time will decay and turn to earth, but he was suddenly
overcome with desire; he clutched at the grating with both hands and
shook it with all his might. The strong grating did not yield.
Then that it might not be so dreadful he went to Ivan Dmitritch’s bed
and sat down.
“I have lost heart, my dear fellow,” he muttered, trembling and wiping
away the cold sweat, “I have lost heart.”
“You should be philosophical,” said Ivan Dmitritch ironically.
“My God, my God. . . . Yes, yes. . . . You were pleased to say once that
there was no philosophy in Russia, but that all people, even the
paltriest, talk philosophy. But you know the philosophizing of the
paltriest does not harm anyone,” said Andrey Yefimitch in a tone as if
he wanted to cry and complain. “Why, then, that malignant laugh, my
friend, and how can these paltry creatures help philosophizing if they
are not satisfied? For an intelligent, educated man, made in God’s
image, proud and loving freedom, to have no alternative but to be a
doctor in a filthy, stupid, wretched little town, and to spend his whole
life among bottles, leeches, mustard plasters! Quackery, narrowness,
vulgarity! Oh, my God!”
“You are talking nonsense. If you don’t like being a doctor you should
have gone in for being a statesman.”
“I could not, I could not do anything. We are weak, my dear friend . . .
. I used to be indifferent. I reasoned boldly and soundly, but at the
first coarse touch of life upon me I have lost heart. . . . Prostration.
. . . . We are weak, we are poor creatures . . . and you, too, my dear
friend, you are intelligent, generous, you drew in good impulses with
your mother’s milk, but you had hardly entered upon life when you were
exhausted and fell ill. . . . Weak, weak!”
Andrey Yefimitch was all the while at the approach of evening tormented
by another persistent sensation besides terror and the feeling of
resentment. At last he realized that he was longing for a smoke and for
beer.
“I am going out, my friend,” he said. “I will tell them to bring a
light; I can’t put up with this. . . . I am not equal to it. . . .”
Andrey Yefimitch went to the door and opened it, but at once Nikita
jumped up and barred his way.
“Where are you going? You can’t, you can’t!” he said. “It’s bedtime.”
“But I’m only going out for a minute to walk about the yard,” said
Andrey Yefimitch.
“You can’t, you can’t; it’s forbidden. You know that yourself.”
“But what difference will it make to anyone if I do go out?” asked
Andrey Yefimitch, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t understand. Nikita,
I must go out!” he said in a trembling voice. “I must.”
“Don’t be disorderly, it’s not right,” Nikita said peremptorily.
“This is beyond everything,” Ivan Dmitritch cried suddenly, and he
jumped up. “What right has he not to let you out? How dare they keep us
here? I believe it is clearly laid down in the law that no one can be
deprived of freedom without trial! It’s an outrage! It’s tyranny!”
“Of course it’s tyranny,” said Andrey Yefimitch, encouraged by Ivan
Dmitritch’s outburst. “I must go out, I want to. He has no right! Open,
I tell you.”
“Do you hear, you dull-witted brute?” cried Ivan Dmitritch, and he
banged on the door with his fist. “Open the door, or I will break it
open! Torturer!”
“Open the door,” cried Andrey Yefimitch, trembling all over; “I insist!”
“Talk away!” Nikita answered through the door, “talk away. . . .”
“Anyhow, go and call Yevgeny Fyodoritch! Say that I beg him to come for
a minute!”
“His honour will come of himself to-morrow.”
“They will never let us out,” Ivan Dmitritch was going on meanwhile.
“They will leave us to rot here! Oh, Lord, can there really be no hell
in the next world, and will these wretches be forgiven? Where is
justice? Open the door, you wretch! I am choking!” he cried in a hoarse
voice, and flung himself upon the door. “I’ll dash out my brains,
murderers!”
Nikita opened the door quickly, and roughly with both his hands and his
knee shoved Andrey Yefimitch back, then swung his arm and punched him in
the face with his fist. It seemed to Andrey Yefimitch as though a huge
salt wave enveloped him from his head downwards and dragged him to the
bed; there really was a salt taste in his mouth: most likely the blood
was running from his teeth. He waved his arms as though he were trying
to swim out and clutched at a bedstead, and at the same moment felt
Nikita hit him twice on the back.
Ivan Dmitritch gave a loud scream. He must have been beaten too.
Then all was still, the faint moonlight came through the grating, and a
shadow like a net lay on the floor. It was terrible. Andrey Yefimitch
lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to be struck
again. He felt as though someone had taken a sickle, thrust it into him,
and turned it round several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the
pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and all at once through the
chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible unbearable thought that
these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight, had to
endure such pain day by day for years. How could it have happened that
for more than twenty years he had not known it and had refused to know
it? He knew nothing of pain, had no conception of it, so he was not to
blame, but his conscience, as inexorable and as rough as Nikita, made
him turn cold from the crown of his head to his heels. He leaped up,
tried to cry out with all his might, and to run in haste to kill Nikita,
and then Hobotov, the superintendent and the assistant, and then
himself; but no sound came from his chest, and his legs would not obey
him. Gasping for breath, he tore at the dressing-gown and the shirt on
his breast, rent them, and fell senseless on the bed. XIX
Next morning his head ached, there was a droning in his ears and a
feeling of utter weakness all over. He was not ashamed at recalling his
weakness the day before. He had been cowardly, had even been afraid of
the moon, had openly expressed thoughts and feelings such as he had not
expected in himself before; for instance, the thought that the paltry
people who philosophized were really dissatisfied. But now nothing
mattered to him.
He ate nothing; he drank nothing. He lay motionless and silent.
“It is all the same to me,” he thought when they asked him questions. “I
am not going to answer. . . . It’s all the same to me.”
After dinner Mihail Averyanitch brought him a quarter pound of tea and a
pound of fruit pastilles. Daryushka came too and stood for a whole hour
by the bed with an expression of dull grief on her face. Dr. Hobotov
visited him. He brought a bottle of bromide and told Nikita to fumigate
the ward with something.
Towards evening Andrey Yefimitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first
he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something
revolting as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his
finger-tips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes
and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefimitch
understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitritch,
Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And
what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality—and he
thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily
beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran
by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a
registered letter . . . . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all
vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion for ever.
The hospital porters came, took him by his arms and legs, and carried
him away to the chapel.
There he lay on the table, with open eyes, and the moon shed its light
upon him at night. In the morning Sergey Sergeyitch came, prayed piously
before the crucifix, and closed his former chief’s eyes.
Next day Andrey Yefimitch was buried. Mihail Averyanitch and Daryushka
were the only people at the funeral.
THE PETCHENYEG
IVAN ABRAMITCH ZHMUHIN, a retired Cossack officer, who had once served
in the Caucasus, but now lived on his own farm, and who had once been
young, strong, and vigorous, but now was old, dried up, and bent, with
shaggy eyebrows and a greenish-grey moustache, was returning from the
town to his farm one hot summer’s day. In the town he had confessed and
received absolution, and had made his will at the notary’s (a fortnight
before he had had a slight stroke), and now all the while he was in the
railway carriage he was haunted by melancholy, serious thoughts of
approaching death, of the vanity of vanities, of the transitoriness of
all things earthly. At the station of Provalye—there is such a one on
the Donetz line—a fair-haired, plump, middle-aged gentleman with a
shabby portfolio stepped into the carriage and sat down opposite. They
got into conversation.
“Yes,” said Ivan Abramitch, looking pensively out of window, “it is
never too late to marry. I myself married when I was forty-eight; I was
told it was late, but it has turned out that it was not late or early,
but simply that it would have been better not to marry at all. Everyone
is soon tired of his wife, but not everyone tells the truth, because,
you know, people are ashamed of an unhappy home life and conceal it.
It’s ‘Manya this’ and ‘Manya that’ with many a man by his wife’s side,
but if he had his way he’d put that Manya in a sack and drop her in the
water. It’s dull with one’s wife, it’s mere foolishness. And it’s no
better with one’s children, I make bold to assure you. I have two of
them, the rascals. There’s nowhere for them to be taught out here in the
steppe; I haven’t the money to send them to school in Novo Tcherkask,
and they live here like young wolves. Next thing they will be murdering
someone on the highroad.”
The fair-haired gentleman listened attentively, answered questions
briefly in a low voice, and was apparently a gentleman of gentle and
modest disposition. He mentioned that he was a lawyer, and that he was
going to the village Dyuevka on business.
“Why, merciful heavens, that is six miles from me!” said Zhmuhin in a
tone of voice as though someone were disputing with him. “But excuse me,
you won’t find horses at the station now. To my mind, the very best
thing you can do, you know, is to come straight to me, stay the night,
you know, and in the morning drive over with my horses.”
The lawyer thought a moment and accepted the invitation.
When they reached the station the sun was already low over the steppe.
They said nothing all the way from the station to the farm: the jolting
prevented conversation. The trap bounded up and down, squeaked, and
seemed to be sobbing, and the lawyer, who was sitting very
uncomfortably, stared before him, miserably hoping to see the farm.
After they had driven five or six miles there came into view in the
distance a low-pitched house and a yard enclosed by a fence made of
dark, flat stones standing on end; the roof was green, the stucco was
peeling off, and the windows were little narrow slits like screwed-up
eyes. The farm stood in the full sunshine, and there was no sign either
of water or trees anywhere round. Among the neighbouring landowners and
the peasants it was known as the Petchenyegs’ farm. Many years before, a
land surveyor, who was passing through the neighbourhood and put up at
the farm, spent the whole night talking to Ivan Abramitch, was not
favourably impressed, and as he was driving away in the morning said to
him grimly:
“You are a Petchenyeg,* my good sir!”
* The Petchenyegs were a tribe of wild Mongolian nomads who made
frequent inroads upon the Russians in the tenth and eleventh
centuries.—Translator’s Note.
From this came the nickname, the Petchenyegs’ farm, which stuck to the
place even more when Zhmuhin’s boys grew up and began to make raids on
the orchards and kitchen-gardens. Ivan Abramitch was called “You Know,”
as he usually talked a very great deal and frequently made use of that
expression.
In the yard near a barn Zhmuhin’s sons were standing, one a young man of
nineteen, the other a younger lad, both barefoot and bareheaded. Just at
the moment when the trap drove into the yard the younger one flung high
up a hen which, cackling, described an arc in the air; the elder shot at
it with a gun and the hen fell dead on the earth.
“Those are my boys learning to shoot birds flying,” said Zhmuhin.
In the entry the travellers were met by a little thin woman with a pale
face, still young and beautiful; from her dress she might have been
taken for a servant.
“And this, allow me to introduce her,” said Zhmuhin, “is the mother of
my young cubs. Come, Lyubov Osipovna,” he said, addressing her, “you
must be spry, mother, and get something for our guest. Let us have
supper. Look sharp!”
The house consisted of two parts: in one was the parlour and beside it
old Zhmuhin’s bedroom, both stuffy rooms with low ceilings and
multitudes of flies and wasps, and in the other was the kitchen in which
the cooking and washing was done and the labourers had their meals; here
geese and turkey-hens were sitting on their eggs under the benches, and
here were the beds of Lyubov Osipovna and her two sons. The furniture in
the parlour was unpainted and evidently roughly made by a carpenter;
guns, game-bags, and whips were hanging on the walls, and all this old
rubbish was covered with the rust of years and looked grey with dust.
There was not one picture; in the corner was a dingy board which had at
one time been an ikon.
A young Little Russian woman laid the table and handed ham, then
beetroot soup. The visitor refused vodka and ate only bread and
cucumbers.
“How about ham?” asked Zhmuhin.
“Thank you, I don’t eat it,” answered the visitor, “I don’t eat meat at
all.”
“Why is that?”
“I am a vegetarian. Killing animals is against my principles.”
Zhmuhin thought a minute and then said slowly with a sigh:
“Yes . . . to be sure. . . . I saw a man who did not eat meat in town,
too. It’s a new religion they’ve got now. Well, it’s good. We can’t go
on always shooting and slaughtering, you know; we must give it up some
day and leave even the beasts in peace. It’s a sin to kill, it’s a sin,
there is no denying it. Sometimes one kills a hare and wounds him in the
leg, and he cries like a child. . . . So it must hurt him!”
“Of course it hurts him; animals suffer just like human beings.”
“That’s true,” Zhmuhin assented. “I understand that very well,” he went
on, musing, “only there is this one thing I don’t understand: suppose,
you know, everyone gave up eating meat, what would become of the
domestic animals—fowls and geese, for instance?”
“Fowls and geese would live in freedom like wild birds.”
“Now I understand. To be sure, crows and jackdaws get on all right
without us. Yes. . . . Fowls and geese and hares and sheep, all will
live in freedom, rejoicing, you know, and praising God; and they will
not fear us, peace and concord will come. Only there is one thing, you
know, I can’t understand,” Zhmuhin went on, glancing at the ham. “How
will it be with the pigs? What is to be done with them?”
“They will be like all the rest—that is, they will live in freedom.”
“Ah! Yes. But allow me to say, if they were not slaughtered they would
multiply, you know, and then good-bye to the kitchen-gardens and the
meadows. Why, a pig, if you let it free and don’t look after it, will
ruin everything in a day. A pig is a pig, and it is not for nothing it
is called a pig. . . .”
They finished supper. Zhmuhin got up from the table and for a long while
walked up and down the room, talking and talking. . . . He was fond of
talking of something important or serious and was fond of meditating,
and in his old age he had a longing to reach some haven, to be
reassured, that he might not be so frightened of dying. He had a longing
for meekness, spiritual calm, and confidence in himself, such as this
guest of theirs had, who had satisfied his hunger on cucumbers and
bread, and believed that doing so made him more perfect; he was sitting
on a chest, plump and healthy, keeping silent and patiently enduring his
boredom, and in the dusk when one glanced at him from the entry he
looked like a big round stone which one could not move from its place.
If a man has something to lay hold of in life he is all right.
Zhmuhin went through the entry to the porch, and then he could be heard
sighing and saying reflectively to himself: “Yes. . . . To be sure. . .
. “ By now it was dark, and here and there stars could be seen in the
sky. They had not yet lighted up indoors. Someone came into the parlour
as noiselessly as a shadow and stood still near the door. It was Lyubov
Osipovna, Zhmuhin’s wife.
“Are you from the town?” she asked timidly, not looking at her visitor.
“Yes, I live in the town.”
“Perhaps you are something in the learned way, sir; be so kind as to
advise us. We ought to send in a petition.”
“To whom?” asked the visitor.
“We have two sons, kind gentleman, and they ought to have been sent to
school long ago, but we never see anyone and have no one to advise us.
And I know nothing. For if they are not taught they will have to serve
in the army as common Cossacks. It’s not right, sir! They can’t read and
write, they are worse than peasants, and Ivan Abramitch himself can’t
stand them and won’t let them indoors. But they are not to blame. The
younger one, at any rate, ought to be sent to school, it is such a
pity!” she said slowly, and there was a quiver in her voice; and it
seemed incredible that a woman so small and so youthful could have
grown-up children. “Oh, it’s such a pity!”
“You don’t know anything about it, mother, and it is not your affair,”
said Zhmuhin, appearing in the doorway. “Don’t pester our guest with
your wild talk. Go away, mother!”
Lyubov Osipovna went out, and in the entry repeated once more in a thin
little voice: “Oh, it’s such a pity!”
A bed was made up for the visitor on the sofa in the parlour, and that
it might not be dark for him they lighted the lamp before the ikon.
Zhmuhin went to bed in his own room. And as he lay there he thought of
his soul, of his age, of his recent stroke which had so frightened him
and made him think of death. He was fond of philosophizing when he was
in quietness by himself, and then he fancied that he was a very earnest,
deep thinker, and that nothing in this world interested him but serious
questions. And now he kept thinking and he longed to pitch upon some one
significant thought unlike others, which would be a guide to him in
life, and he wanted to think out principles of some sort for himself so
as to make his life as deep and earnest as he imagined that he felt
himself to be. It would be a good thing for an old man like him to
abstain altogether from meat, from superfluities of all sorts. The time
when men give up killing each other and animals would come sooner or
later, it could not but be so, and he imagined that time to himself and
clearly pictured himself living in peace with all the animals, and
suddenly he thought again of the pigs, and everything was in a tangle in
his brain.
“It’s a queer business, Lord have mercy upon us,” he muttered, sighing
heavily. “Are you asleep?” he asked.
“No.”
Zhmuhin got out of bed and stopped in the doorway with nothing but his
shirt on, displaying to his guest his sinewy legs, that looked as dry as
sticks.
“Nowadays, you know,” he began, “all sorts of telegraphs, telephones,
and marvels of all kinds, in fact, have come in, but people are no
better than they were. They say that in our day, thirty or forty years
ago, men were coarse and cruel; but isn’t it just the same now? We
certainly did not stand on ceremony in our day. I remember in the
Caucasus when we were stationed by a little river with nothing to do for
four whole months—I was an under-officer at that time—something queer
happened, quite in the style of a novel. Just on the banks of that
river, you know, where our division was encamped, a wretched prince whom
we had killed not long before was buried. And at night, you know, the
princess used to come to his grave and weep. She would wail and wail,
and moan and moan, and make us so depressed we couldn’t sleep, and
that’s the fact. We couldn’t sleep one night, we couldn’t sleep a
second; well, we got sick of it. And from a common-sense point of view
you really can’t go without your sleep for the devil knows what (excuse
the expression). We took that princess and gave her a good thrashing,
and she gave up coming. There’s an instance for you. Nowadays, of
course, there is not the same class of people, and they are not given to
thrashing and they live in cleaner style, and there is more learning,
but, you know, the soul is just the same: there is no change. Now, look
here, there’s a landowner living here among us; he has mines, you know;
all sorts of tramps without passports who don’t know where to go work
for him. On Saturdays he has to settle up with the workmen, but he
doesn’t care to pay them, you know, he grudges the money. So he’s got
hold of a foreman who is a tramp too, though he does wear a hat. ‘Don’t
you pay them anything,’ he says, ‘not a kopeck; they’ll beat you, and
let them beat you,’ says he, ‘but you put up with it, and I’ll pay you
ten roubles every Saturday for it.’ So on the Saturday evening the
workmen come to settle up in the usual way; the foreman says to them:
‘Nothing!’ Well, word for word, as the master said, they begin swearing
and using their fists. . . . They beat him and they kick him . . . you
know, they are a set of men brutalized by hunger—they beat him till he
is senseless, and then they go each on his way. The master gives orders
for cold water to be poured on the foreman, then flings ten roubles in
his face. And he takes it and is pleased too, for indeed he’d be ready
to be hanged for three roubles, let alone ten. Yes . . . and on Monday a
new gang of workmen arrive; they work, for they have nowhere to go . . .
. On Saturday it is the same story over again.”
The visitor turned over on the other side with his face to the back of
the sofa and muttered something.
“And here’s another instance,” Zhmuhin went on. “We had the Siberian
plague here, you know—the cattle die off like flies, I can tell you—and
the veterinary surgeons came here, and strict orders were given that the
dead cattle were to be buried at a distance deep in the earth, that lime
was to be thrown over them, and so on, you know, on scientific
principles. My horse died too. I buried it with every precaution, and
threw over three hundredweight of lime over it. And what do you think?
My fine fellows—my precious sons, I mean—dug it up, skinned it, and sold
the hide for three roubles; there’s an instance for you. So people have
grown no better, and however you feed a wolf he will always look towards
the forest; there it is. It gives one something to think about, eh? How
do you look at it?”
On one side a flash of lightning gleamed through a chink in the window-
blinds. There was the stifling feeling of a storm coming, the gnats were
biting, and Zhmuhin, as he lay in his bedroom meditating, sighed and
groaned and said to himself: “Yes, to be sure ——” and there was no
possibility of getting to sleep. Somewhere far, far away there was a
growl of thunder.
“Are you asleep?”
“No,” answered the visitor.
Zhmuhin got up, and thudding with his heels walked through the parlour
and the entry to the kitchen to get a drink of water.
“The worst thing in the world, you know, is stupidity,” he said a little
later, coming back with a dipper. “My Lyubov Osipovna is on her knees
saying her prayers. She prays every night, you know, and bows down to
the ground, first that her children may be sent to school; she is afraid
her boys will go into the army as simple Cossacks, and that they will be
whacked across their backs with sabres. But for teaching one must have
money, and where is one to get it? You may break the floor beating your
head against it, but if you haven’t got it you haven’t. And the other
reason she prays is because, you know, every woman imagines there is no
one in the world as unhappy as she is. I am a plain-spoken man, and I
don’t want to conceal anything from you. She comes of a poor family, a
village priest’s daughter. I married her when she was seventeen, and
they accepted my offer chiefly because they hadn’t enough to eat; it was
nothing but poverty and misery, while I have anyway land, you see—a
farm—and after all I am an officer; it was a step up for her to marry
me, you know. On the very first day when she was married she cried, and
she has been crying ever since, all these twenty years; she has got a
watery eye. And she’s always sitting and thinking, and what do you
suppose she is thinking about? What can a woman think about? Why,
nothing. I must own I don’t consider a woman a human being.”
The visitor got up abruptly and sat on the bed.
“Excuse me, I feel stifled,” he said; “I will go outside.”
Zhmuhin, still talking about women, drew the bolt in the entry and they
both went out. A full moon was floating in the sky just over the yard,
and in the moonlight the house and barn looked whiter than by day; and
on the grass brilliant streaks of moonlight, white too, stretched
between the black shadows. Far away on the right could be seen the
steppe, above it the stars were softly glowing—and it was all
mysterious, infinitely far away, as though one were gazing into a deep
abyss; while on the left heavy storm-clouds, black as soot, were piling
up one upon another above the steppe; their edges were lighted up by the
moon, and it looked as though there were mountains there with white snow
on their peaks, dark forests, the sea. There was a flash of lightning, a
faint rumble of thunder, and it seemed as though a battle were being
fought in the mountains.
Quite close to the house a little night-owl screeched monotonously:
“Asleep! asleep!”
“What time is it now?” asked the visitor.
“Just after one.”
“How long it is still to dawn!”
They went back to the house and lay down again. It was time to sleep,
and one can usually sleep so splendidly before rain; but the old man had
a hankering after serious, weighty thoughts; he wanted not simply to
think but to meditate, and he meditated how good it would be, as death
was near at hand, for the sake of his soul to give up the idleness which
so imperceptibly swallowed up day after day, year after year, leaving no
trace; to think out for himself some great exploit—for instance, to walk
on foot far, far away, or to give up meat like this young man. And again
he pictured to himself the time when animals would not be killed,
pictured it clearly and distinctly as though he were living through that
time himself; but suddenly it was all in a tangle again in his head and
all was muddled.
The thunderstorm had passed over, but from the edges of the storm-clouds
came rain softly pattering on the roof. Zhmuhin got up, stretching and
groaning with old age, and looked into the parlour. Noticing that his
visitor was not asleep, he said:
“When we were in the Caucasus, you know, there was a colonel there who
was a vegetarian, too; he didn’t eat meat, never went shooting, and
would not let his servants catch fish. Of course, I understand that
every animal ought to live in freedom and enjoy its life; only I don’t
understand how a pig can go about where it likes without being looked
after. . . .”
The visitor got up and sat down. His pale, haggard face expressed
weariness and vexation; it was evident that he was exhausted, and only
his gentleness and the delicacy of his soul prevented him from
expressing his vexation in words.
“It’s getting light,” he said mildly. “Please have the horse brought
round for me.”
“Why so? Wait a little and the rain will be over.”
“No, I entreat you,” said the visitor in horror, with a supplicating
voice; “it is essential for me to go at once.”
And he began hurriedly dressing.
By the time the horse was harnessed the sun was rising. It had just left
off raining, the clouds were racing swiftly by, and the patches of blue
were growing bigger and bigger in the sky. The first rays of the sun
were timidly reflected below in the big puddles. The visitor walked
through the entry with his portfolio to get into the trap, and at that
moment Zhmuhin’s wife, pale, and it seemed paler than the day before,
with tear-stained eyes, looked at him intently without bAlinking, with
the naïve expression of a little girl, and it was evident from her
dejected face that she was envying him his freedom—oh, with what joy she
would have gone away from there!—and she wanted to say something to him,
most likely to ask advice about her children. And what a pitiable figure
she was! This was not a wife, not the head of a house, not even a
servant, but more like a dependent, a poor relation not wanted by
anyone, a nonentity . . . . Her husband, fussing about, talking
unceasingly, was seeing his visitor off, continually running in front of
him, while she huddled up to the wall with a timid, guilty air, waiting
for a convenient minute to speak.
“Please come again another time,” the old man kept repeating
incessantly; “what we have we are glad to offer, you know.”
The visitor hurriedly got into the trap, evidently with relief, as
though he were afraid every minute that they would detain him. The trap
lurched about as it had the day before, squeaked, and furiously rattled
the pail that was tied on at the back. He glanced round at Zhmuhin with
a peculiar expression; it looked as though he wanted to call him a
Petchenyeg, as the surveyor had once done, or some such name, but his
gentleness got the upper hand. He controlled himself and said nothing.
But in the gateway he suddenly could not restrain himself; he got up and
shouted loudly and angrily:
“You have bored me to death.”
And he disappeared through the gate.
Near the barn Zhmuhin’s sons were standing; the elder held a gun, while
the younger had in his hands a grey cockerel with a bright red comb. The
younger flung up the cockerel with all his might; the bird flew upwards
higher than the house and turned over in the air like a pigeon. The
elder boy fired and the cockerel fell like a stone.
The old man, overcome with confusion, not knowing how to explain the
visitor’s strange, unexpected shout, went slowly back into the house.
And sitting down at the table he spent a long while meditating on the
intellectual tendencies of the day, on the universal immorality, on the
telegraph, on the telephone, on velocipedes, on how unnecessary it all
was; little by little he regained his composure, then slowly had a meal,
drank five glasses of tea, and lay down for a nap.
A DEAD BODY
A STILL August night. A mist is rising slowly from the fields and
casting an opaque veil over everything within eyesight. Lighted up by
the moon, the mist gives the impression at one moment of a calm,
boundless sea, at the next of an immense white wall. The air is damp and
chilly. Morning is still far off. A step from the bye-road which runs
along the edge of the forest a little fire is gleaming. A dead body,
covered from head to foot with new white linen, is lying under a young
oak-tree. A wooden ikon is lying on its breast. Beside the corpse almost
on the road sits the “watch”—two peasants performing one of the most
disagreeable and uninviting of peasants’ duties. One, a tall young
fellow with a scarcely perceptible moustache and thick black eyebrows,
in a tattered sheepskin and bark shoes, is sitting on the wet grass, his
feet stuck out straight in front of him, and is trying to while away the
time with work. He bends his long neck, and breathing loudly through his
nose, makes a spoon out of a big crooked bit of wood; the other—a little
scraggy, pock-marked peasant with an aged face, a scanty moustache, and
a little goat’s beard—sits with his hands dangling loose on his knees,
and without moving gazes listlessly at the light. A small camp-fire is
lazily burning down between them, throwing a red glow on their faces.
There is perfect stillness. The only sounds are the scrape of the knife
on the wood and the crackling of damp sticks in the fire.
“Don’t you go to sleep, Syoma . . .” says the young man.
“I . . . I am not asleep . . .” stammers the goat-beard.
“That’s all right. . . . It would be dreadful to sit here alone, one
would be frightened. You might tell me something, Syoma.”
“You are a queer fellow, Syomushka! Other people will laugh and tell a
story and sing a song, but you—there is no making you out. You sit like
a scarecrow in the garden and roll your eyes at the fire. You can’t say
anything properly . . . when you speak you seem frightened. I dare say
you are fifty, but you have less sense than a child. Aren’t you sorry
that you are a simpleton?”
“I am sorry,” the goat-beard answers gloomily.
“And we are sorry to see your foolishness, you may be sure. You are a
good-natured, sober peasant, and the only trouble is that you have no
sense in your head. You should have picked up some sense for yourself if
the Lord has afflicted you and given you no understanding. You must make
an effort, Syoma. . . . You should listen hard when anything good’s
being said, note it well, and keep thinking and thinking. . . . If there
is any word you don’t understand, you should make an effort and think
over in your head in what meaning the word is used. Do you see? Make an
effort! If you don’t gain some sense for yourself you’ll be a simpleton
and of no account at all to your dying day.”
All at once a long drawn-out, moaning sound is heard in the forest.
Something rustles in the leaves as though torn from the very top of the
tree and falls to the ground. All this is faintly repeated by the echo.
The young man shudders and looks enquiringly at his companion.
“It’s an owl at the little birds,” says Syoma, gloomily.
“Why, Syoma, it’s time for the birds to fly to the warm countries!”
“To be sure, it is time.”
“It is chilly at dawn now. It is co-old. The crane is a chilly creature,
it is tender. Such cold is death to it. I am not a crane, but I am
frozen. . . . Put some more wood on!”
Syoma gets up and disappears in the dark undergrowth. While he is busy
among the bushes, breaking dry twigs, his companion puts his hand over
his eyes and starts at every sound. Syoma brings an armful of wood and
lays it on the fire. The flame irresolutely licks the black twigs with
its little tongues, then suddenly, as though at the word of command,
catches them and throws a crimson light on the faces, the road, the
white linen with its prominences where the hands and feet of the corpse
raise it, the ikon. The “watch” is silent. The young man bends his neck
still lower and sets to work with still more nervous haste. The goat-
beard sits motionless as before and keeps his eyes fixed on the fire. .
. .
“Ye that love not Zion . . . shall be put to shame by the Lord.” A
falsetto voice is suddenly heard singing in the stillness of the night,
then slow footsteps are audible, and the dark figure of a man in a short
monkish cassock and a broad-brimmed hat, with a wallet on his shoulders,
comes into sight on the road in the crimson firelight.
“Thy will be done, O Lord! Holy Mother!” the figure says in a husky
falsetto. “I saw the fire in the outer darkness and my soul leapt for
joy. . . . At first I thought it was men grazing a drove of horses, then
I thought it can’t be that, since no horses were to be seen. ‘Aren’t
they thieves,’ I wondered, ‘aren’t they robbers lying in wait for a rich
Lazarus? Aren’t they the gypsy people offering sacrifices to idols? And
my soul leapt for joy. ‘Go, Feodosy, servant of God,’ I said to myself,
‘and win a martyr’s crown!’ And I flew to the fire like a light-winged
moth. Now I stand before you, and from your outer aspect I judge of your
souls: you are not thieves and you are not heathens. Peace be to you!”
“Good-evening.”
“Good orthodox people, do you know how to reach the Makuhinsky
Brickyards from here?”
“It’s close here. You go straight along the road; when you have gone a
mile and a half there will be Ananova, our village. From the village,
father, you turn to the right by the river-bank, and so you will get to
the brickyards. It’s two miles from Ananova.”
“God give you health. And why are you sitting here?”
“We are sitting here watching. You see, there is a dead body. . . .”
“What? what body? Holy Mother!”
The pilgrim sees the white linen with the ikon on it, and starts so
violently that his legs give a little skip. This unexpected sight has an
overpowering effect upon him. He huddles together and stands as though
rooted to the spot, with wide-open mouth and staring eyes. For three
minutes he is silent as though he could not believe his eyes, then
begins muttering:
“O Lord! Holy Mother! I was going along not meddling with anyone, and
all at once such an affliction.”
“What may you be?” enquires the young man. “Of the clergy?”
“No . . . no. . . . I go from one monastery to another. . . . Do you
know Mi . . . Mihail Polikarpitch, the foreman of the brickyard? Well, I
am his nephew. . . . Thy will be done, O Lord! Why are you here?”
“We are watching . . . we are told to.”
“Yes, yes . . .” mutters the man in the cassock, passing his hand over
his eyes. “And where did the deceased come from?”
“He was a stranger.”
“Such is life! But I’ll . . . er . . . be getting on, brothers. . . . I
feel flustered. I am more afraid of the dead than of anything, my dear
souls! And only fancy! while this man was alive he wasn’t noticed, while
now when he is dead and given over to corruption we tremble before him
as before some famous general or a bishop. . . . Such is life; was he
murdered, or what?”
“The Lord knows! Maybe he was murdered, or maybe he died of himself.”
“Yes, yes. . . . Who knows, brothers? Maybe his soul is now tasting the
joys of Paradise.”
“His soul is still hovering here, near his body,” says the young man.
“It does not depart from the body for three days.”
“H’m, yes! . . . How chilly the nights are now! It sets one’s teeth
chattering. . . . So then I am to go straight on and on? . . .”
“Till you get to the village, and then you turn to the right by the
river-bank.”
“By the river-bank. . . . To be sure. . . . Why am I standing still? I
must go on. Farewell, brothers.”
The man in the cassock takes five steps along the road and stops.
“I’ve forgotten to put a kopeck for the burying,” he says. “Good
orthodox friends, can I give the money?”
“You ought to know best, you go the round of the monasteries. If he died
a natural death it would go for the good of his soul; if it’s a suicide
it’s a sin.”
“That’s true. . . . And maybe it really was a suicide! So I had better
keep my money. Oh, sins, sins! Give me a thousand roubles and I would
not consent to sit here. . . . Farewell, brothers.”
The cassock slowly moves away and stops again.
“I can’t make up my mind what I am to do,” he mutters. “To stay here by
the fire and wait till daybreak. . . . I am frightened; to go on is
dreadful, too. The dead man will haunt me all the way in the darkness. .
. . The Lord has chastised me indeed! Over three hundred miles I have
come on foot and nothing happened, and now I am near home and there’s
trouble. I can’t go on. . . .”
“It is dreadful, that is true.”
“I am not afraid of wolves, of thieves, or of darkness, but I am afraid
of the dead. I am afraid of them, and that is all about it. Good
orthodox brothers, I entreat you on my knees, see me to the village.”
“We’ve been told not to go away from the body.”
“No one will see, brothers. Upon my soul, no one will see! The Lord will
reward you a hundredfold! Old man, come with me, I beg! Old man! Why are
you silent?”
“He is a bit simple,” says the young man.
“You come with me, friend; I will give you five kopecks.”
“For five kopecks I might,” says the young man, scratching his head,
“but I was told not to. If Syoma here, our simpleton, will stay alone, I
will take you. Syoma, will you stay here alone?”
“I’ll stay,” the simpleton consents.
“Well, that’s all right, then. Come along!” The young man gets up, and
goes with the cassock. A minute later the sound of their steps and their
talk dies away. Syoma shuts his eyes and gently dozes. The fire begins
to grow dim, and a big black shadow falls on the dead body.
A HAPPY ENDING
LYUBOV GRIGORYEVNA, a substantial, buxom lady of forty who undertook
matchmaking and many other matters of which it is usual to speak only in
whispers, had come to see Stytchkin, the head guard, on a day when he
was off duty. Stytchkin, somewhat embarrassed, but, as always, grave,
practical, and severe, was walking up and down the room, smoking a cigar
and saying:
“Very pleased to make your acquaintance. Semyon Ivanovitch recommended
you on the ground that you may be able to assist me in a delicate and
very important matter affecting the happiness of my life. I have, Lyubov
Grigoryevna, reached the age of fifty-two; that is a period of life at
which very many have already grown-up children. My position is a secure
one. Though my fortune is not large, yet I am in a position to support a
beloved being and children at my side. I may tell you between ourselves
that apart from my salary I have also money in the bank which my manner
of living has enabled me to save. I am a practical and sober man, I lead
a sensible and consistent life, so that I may hold myself up as an
example to many. But one thing I lack—a domestic hearth of my own and a
partner in life, and I live like a wandering Magyar, moving from place
to place without any satisfaction. I have no one with whom to take
counsel, and when I am ill no one to give me water, and so on. Apart
from that, Lyubov Grigoryevna, a married man has always more weight in
society than a bachelor. . . . I am a man of the educated class, with
money, but if you look at me from a point of view, what am I? A man with
no kith and kin, no better than some Polish priest. And therefore I
should be very desirous to be united in the bonds of Hymen—that is, to
enter into matrimony with some worthy person.”
“An excellent thing,” said the matchmaker, with a sigh.
“I am a solitary man and in this town I know no one. Where can I go, and
to whom can I apply, since all the people here are strangers to me? That
is why Semyon Ivanovitch advised me to address myself to a person who is
a specialist in this line, and makes the arrangement of the happiness of
others her profession. And therefore I most earnestly beg you, Lyubov
Grigoryevna, to assist me in ordering my future. You know all the
marriageable young ladies in the town, and it is easy for you to
accommodate me.”
“I can. . . .”
“A glass of wine, I beg you. . . .”
With an habitual gesture the matchmaker raised her glass to her mouth
and tossed it off without winking.
“I can,” she repeated. “And what sort of bride would you like, Nikolay
Nikolayitch?”
“Should I like? The bride fate sends me.”
“Well, of course it depends on your fate, but everyone has his own
taste, you know. One likes dark ladies, the other prefers fair ones.”
“You see, Lyubov Grigoryevna,” said Stytchkin, sighing sedately, “I am a
practical man and a man of character; for me beauty and external
appearance generally take a secondary place, for, as you know yourself,
beauty is neither bowl nor platter, and a pretty wife involves a great
deal of anxiety. The way I look at it is, what matters most in a woman
is not what is external, but what lies within—that is, that she should
have soul and all the qualities. A glass of wine, I beg. . . . Of
course, it would be very agreeable that one’s wife should be rather
plump, but for mutual happiness it is not of great consequence; what
matters is the mind. Properly speaking, a woman does not need mind
either, for if she has brains she will have too high an opinion of
herself, and take all sorts of ideas into her head. One cannot do
without education nowadays, of course, but education is of different
kinds. It would be pleasing for one’s wife to know French and German, to
speak various languages, very pleasing; but what’s the use of that if
she can’t sew on one’s buttons, perhaps? I am a man of the educated
class: I am just as much at home, I may say, with Prince Kanitelin as I
am with you here now. But my habits are simple, and I want a girl who is
not too much a fine lady. Above all, she must have respect for me and
feel that I have made her happiness.”
“To be sure.”
“Well, now as regards the essential. . . . I do not want a wealthy
bride; I would never condescend to anything so low as to marry for
money. I desire not to be kept by my wife, but to keep her, and that she
may be sensible of it. But I do not want a poor girl either. Though I am
a man of means, and am marrying not from mercenary motives, but from
love, yet I cannot take a poor girl, for, as you know yourself, prices
have gone up so, and there will be children.”
“One might find one with a dowry,” said the matchmaker.
“A glass of wine, I beg. . . .”
There was a pause of five minutes.
The matchmaker heaved a sigh, took a sidelong glance at the guard, and
asked:
“Well, now, my good sir . . . do you want anything in the bachelor line?
I have some fine bargains. One is a French girl and one is a Greek. Well
worth the money.”
The guard thought a moment and said:
“No, I thank you. In view of your favourable disposition, allow me to
enquire now how much you ask for your exertions in regard to a bride?”
“I don’t ask much. Give me twenty-five roubles and the stuff for a
dress, as is usual, and I will say thank you . . . but for the dowry,
that’s a different account.”
Stytchkin folded his arms over his chest and fell to pondering in
silence. After some thought he heaved a sigh and said:
“That’s dear. . . .”
“It’s not at all dear, Nikolay Nikolayitch! In old days when there were
lots of weddings one did do it cheaper, but nowadays what are our
earnings? If you make fifty roubles in a month that is not a fast, you
may be thankful. It’s not on weddings we make our money, my good sir.”
Stytchkin looked at the matchmaker in amazement and shrugged his
shoulders.
“H’m! . . . Do you call fifty roubles little?” he asked.
“Of course it is little! In old days we sometimes made more than a
hundred.”
“H’m! I should never have thought it was possible to earn such a sum by
these jobs. Fifty roubles! It is not every man that earns as much! Pray
drink your wine. . . .”
The matchmaker drained her glass without winking. Stytchkin looked her
over from head to foot in silence, then said:
“Fifty roubles. . . . Why, that is six hundred roubles a year. . . .
Please take some more. . . With such dividends, you know, Lyubov
Grigoryevna, you would have no difficulty in making a match for
yourself. . . .”
“For myself,” laughed the matchmaker, “I am an old woman.”
“Not at all. . . . You have such a figure, and your face is plump and
fair, and all the rest of it.”
The matchmaker was embarrassed. Stytchkin was also embarrassed and sat
down beside her.
“You are still very attractive,” said he; “if you met with a practical,
steady, careful husband, with his salary and your earnings you might
even attract him very much, and you’d get on very well together. . . .”
“Goodness knows what you are saying, Nikolay Nikolayitch.”
“Well, I meant no harm. . . .”
A silence followed. Stytchkin began loudly blowing his nose, while the
matchmaker turned crimson, and looking bashfully at him, asked:
“And how much do you get, Nikolay Nikolayitch?”
“I? Seventy-five roubles, besides tips. . . . Apart from that we make
something out of candles and hares.”
“You go hunting, then?”
“No. Passengers who travel without tickets are called hares with us.”
Another minute passed in silence. Stytchkin got up and walked about the
room in excitement.
“I don’t want a young wife,” said he. “I am a middle-aged man, and I
want someone who . . . as it might be like you . . . staid and settled
and a figure something like yours. . . .”
“Goodness knows what you are saying . . .” giggled the matchmaker,
hiding her crimson face in her kerchief.
“There is no need to be long thinking about it. You are after my own
heart, and you suit me in your qualities. I am a practical, sober man,
and if you like me . . . what could be better? Allow me to make you a
proposal!”
The matchmaker dropped a tear, laughed, and, in token of her consent,
cAlinked glasses with Stytchkin.
“Well,” said the happy railway guard, “now allow me to explain to you
the behaviour and manner of life I desire from you. . . . I am a strict,
respectable, practical man. I take a gentlemanly view of everything. And
I desire that my wife should be strict also, and should understand that
to her I am a benefactor and the foremost person in the world.”
He sat down, and, heaving a deep sigh, began expounding to his bride-
elect his views on domestic life and a wife’s duties.
THE LOOKING-GLASS
NEW YEAR’S EVE. Nellie, the daughter of a landowner and general, a young
and pretty girl, dreaming day and night of being married, was sitting in
her room, gazing with exhausted, half-closed eyes into the looking-
glass. She was pale, tense, and as motionless as the looking-glass.
The non-existent but apparent vista of a long, narrow corridor with
endless rows of candles, the reflection of her face, her hands, of the
frame—all this was already clouded in mist and merged into a boundless
grey sea. The sea was undulating, gleaming and now and then flaring
crimson. . . .
Looking at Nellie’s motionless eyes and parted lips, one could hardly
say whether she was asleep or awake, but nevertheless she was seeing. At
first she saw only the smile and soft, charming expression of someone’s
eyes, then against the shifting grey background there gradually appeared
the outlines of a head, a face, eyebrows, beard. It was he, the destined
one, the object of long dreams and hopes. The destined one was for
Nellie everything, the significance of life, personal happiness, career,
fate. Outside him, as on the grey background of the looking-glass, all
was dark, empty, meaningless. And so it was not strange that, seeing
before her a handsome, gently smiling face, she was conscious of bliss,
of an unutterably sweet dream that could not be expressed in speech or
on paper. Then she heard his voice, saw herself living under the same
roof with him, her life merged into his. Months and years flew by
against the grey background. And Nellie saw her future distinctly in all
its details.
Picture followed picture against the grey background. Now Nellie saw
herself one winter night knocking at the door of Stepan Lukitch, the
district doctor. The old dog hoarsely and lazily barked behind the gate.
The doctor’s windows were in darkness. All was silence.
“For God’s sake, for God’s sake!” whispered Nellie.
But at last the garden gate creaked and Nellie saw the doctor’s cook.
“Is the doctor at home?”
“His honour’s asleep,” whispered the cook into her sleeve, as though
afraid of waking her master.
“He’s only just got home from his fever patients, and gave orders he was
not to be waked.”
But Nellie scarcely heard the cook. Thrusting her aside, she rushed
headlong into the doctor’s house. Running through some dark and stuffy
rooms, upsetting two or three chairs, she at last reached the doctor’s
bedroom. Stepan Lukitch was lying on his bed, dressed, but without his
coat, and with pouting lips was breathing into his open hand. A little
night-light glimmered faintly beside him. Without uttering a word Nellie
sat down and began to cry. She wept bitterly, shaking all over.
“My husband is ill!” she sobbed out. Stepan Lukitch was silent. He
slowly sat up, propped his head on his hand, and looked at his visitor
with fixed, sleepy eyes. “My husband is ill!” Nellie continued,
restraining her sobs. “For mercy’s sake come quickly. Make haste. . . .
Make haste!”
“Eh?” growled the doctor, blowing into his hand.
“Come! Come this very minute! Or . . . it’s terrible to think! For
mercy’s sake!”
And pale, exhausted Nellie, gasping and swallowing her tears, began
describing to the doctor her husband’s illness, her unutterable terror.
Her sufferings would have touched the heart of a stone, but the doctor
looked at her, blew into his open hand, and—not a movement.
“I’ll come to-morrow!” he muttered.
“That’s impossible!” cried Nellie. “I know my husband has typhus! At
once . . . this very minute you are needed!”
“I . . . er . . . have only just come in,” muttered the doctor. “For the
last three days I’ve been away, seeing typhus patients, and I’m
exhausted and ill myself. . . . I simply can’t! Absolutely! I’ve caught
it myself! There!”
And the doctor thrust before her eyes a clinical thermometer.
“My temperature is nearly forty. . . . I absolutely can’t. I can
scarcely sit up. Excuse me. I’ll lie down. . . .”
The doctor lay down.
“But I implore you, doctor,” Nellie moaned in despair. “I beseech you!
Help me, for mercy’s sake! Make a great effort and come! I will repay
you, doctor!”
“Oh, dear! . . . Why, I have told you already. Ah!”
Nellie leapt up and walked nervously up and down the bedroom. She longed
to explain to the doctor, to bring him to reason. . . . She thought if
only he knew how dear her husband was to her and how unhappy she was, he
would forget his exhaustion and his illness. But how could she be
eloquent enough?
“Go to the Zemstvo doctor,” she heard Stepan Lukitch’s voice.
“That’s impossible! He lives more than twenty miles from here, and time
is precious. And the horses can’t stand it. It is thirty miles from us
to you, and as much from here to the Zemstvo doctor. No, it’s
impossible! Come along, Stepan Lukitch. I ask of you an heroic deed.
Come, perform that heroic deed! Have pity on us!”
“It’s beyond everything. . . . I’m in a fever . . . my head’s in a whirl
. . . and she won’t understand! Leave me alone!”
“But you are in duty bound to come! You cannot refuse to come! It’s
egoism! A man is bound to sacrifice his life for his neighbour, and you
. . . you refuse to come! I will summon you before the Court.”
Nellie felt that she was uttering a false and undeserved insult, but for
her husband’s sake she was capable of forgetting logic, tact, sympathy
for others. . . . In reply to her threats, the doctor greedily gulped a
glass of cold water. Nellie fell to entreating and imploring like the
very lowest beggar. . . . At last the doctor gave way. He slowly got up,
puffing and panting, looking for his coat.
“Here it is!” cried Nellie, helping him. “Let me put it on to you. Come
along! I will repay you. . . . All my life I shall be grateful to you. .
. .”
But what agony! After putting on his coat the doctor lay down again.
Nellie got him up and dragged him to the hall. Then there was an
agonizing to-do over his goloshes, his overcoat. . . . His cap was lost.
. . . But at last Nellie was in the carriage with the doctor. Now they
had only to drive thirty miles and her husband would have a doctor’s
help. The earth was wrapped in darkness. One could not see one’s hand
before one’s face. . . . A cold winter wind was blowing. There were
frozen lumps under their wheels. The coachman was continually stopping
and wondering which road to take.
Nellie and the doctor sat silent all the way. It was fearfully jolting,
but they felt neither the cold nor the jolts.
“Get on, get on!” Nellie implored the driver.
At five in the morning the exhausted horses drove into the yard. Nellie
saw the familiar gates, the well with the crane, the long row of stables
and barns. At last she was at home.
“Wait a moment, I will be back directly,” she said to Stepan Lukitch,
making him sit down on the sofa in the dining-room. “Sit still and wait
a little, and I’ll see how he is going on.”
On her return from her husband, Nellie found the doctor lying down. He
was lying on the sofa and muttering.
“Doctor, please! . . . doctor!”
“Eh? Ask Domna!” muttered Stepan Lukitch.
“What?”
“They said at the meeting . . . Vlassov said . . . Who? . . . what?”
And to her horror Nellie saw that the doctor was as delirious as her
husband. What was to be done?
“I must go for the Zemstvo doctor,” she decided.
Then again there followed darkness, a cutting cold wind, lumps of frozen
earth. She was suffering in body and in soul, and delusive nature has no
arts, no deceptions to compensate these sufferings. . . .
Then she saw against the grey background how her husband every spring
was in straits for money to pay the interest for the mortgage to the
bank. He could not sleep, she could not sleep, and both racked their
brains till their heads ached, thinking how to avoid being visited by
the clerk of the Court.
She saw her children: the everlasting apprehension of colds, scarlet
fever, diphtheria, bad marks at school, separation. Out of a brood of
five or six one was sure to die.
The grey background was not untouched by death. That might well be. A
husband and wife cannot die simultaneously. Whatever happened one must
bury the other. And Nellie saw her husband dying. This terrible event
presented itself to her in every detail. She saw the coffin, the
candles, the deacon, and even the footmarks in the hall made by the
undertaker.
“Why is it, what is it for?” she asked, looking blankly at her husband’s
face.
And all the previous life with her husband seemed to her a stupid
prelude to this.
Something fell from Nellie’s hand and knocked on the floor. She started,
jumped up, and opened her eyes wide. One looking-glass she saw lying at
her feet. The other was standing as before on the table.
She looked into the looking-glass and saw a pale, tear-stained face.
There was no grey background now.
“I must have fallen asleep,” she thought with a sigh of relief.
OLD AGE
UZELKOV, an architect with the rank of civil councillor, arrived in his
native town, to which he had been invited to restore the church in the
cemetery. He had been born in the town, had been at school, had grown up
and married in it. But when he got out of the train he scarcely
recognized it. Everything was changed. . . . Eighteen years ago when he
had moved to Petersburg the street-boys used to catch marmots, for
instance, on the spot where now the station was standing; now when one
drove into the chief street, a hotel of four storeys stood facing one;
in old days there was an ugly grey fence just there; but nothing—neither
fences nor houses—had changed as much as the people. From his enquiries
of the hotel waiter Uzelkov learned that more than half of the people he
remembered were dead, reduced to poverty, forgotten.
“And do you remember Uzelkov?” he asked the old waiter about himself.
“Uzelkov the architect who divorced his wife? He used to have a house in
Svirebeyevsky Street . . . you must remember.”
“I don’t remember, sir.”
“How is it you don’t remember? The case made a lot of noise, even the
cabmen all knew about it. Think, now! Shapkin the attorney managed my
divorce for me, the rascal . . . the notorious cardsharper, the fellow
who got a thrashing at the club. . . .”
“Ivan Nikolaitch?”
“Yes, yes. . . . Well, is he alive? Is he dead?”
“Alive, sir, thank God. He is a notary now and has an office. He is very
well off. He has two houses in Kirpitchny Street. . . . His daughter was
married the other day.”
Uzelkov paced up and down the room, thought a bit, and in his boredom
made up his mind to go and see Shapkin at his office. When he walked out
of the hotel and sauntered slowly towards Kirpitchny Street it was
midday. He found Shapkin at his office and scarcely recognized him. From
the once well-made, adroit attorney with a mobile, insolent, and always
drunken face Shapkin had changed into a modest, grey-headed, decrepit
old man.
“You don’t recognize me, you have forgotten me,” began Uzelkov. “I am
your old client, Uzelkov.”
“Uzelkov, what Uzelkov? Ah!” Shapkin remembered, recognized, and was
struck all of a heap. There followed a shower of exclamations,
questions, recollections.
“This is a surprise! This is unexpected!” cackled Shapkin. “What can I
offer you? Do you care for champagne? Perhaps you would like oysters? My
dear fellow, I have had so much from you in my time that I can’t offer
you anything equal to the occasion. . . .”
“Please don’t put yourself out . . .” said Uzelkov. “I have no time to
spare. I must go at once to the cemetery and examine the church; I have
undertaken the restoration of it.”
“That’s capital! We’ll have a snack and a drink and drive together. I
have capital horses. I’ll take you there and introduce you to the
church-warden; I will arrange it all. . . . But why is it, my angel, you
seem to be afraid of me and hold me at arm’s length? Sit a little
nearer! There is no need for you to be afraid of me nowadays. He-he! . .
. At one time, it is true, I was a cunning blade, a dog of a fellow . .
. no one dared approach me; but now I am stiller than water and humbler
than the grass. I have grown old, I am a family man, I have children.
It’s time I was dead.”
The friends had lunch, had a drink, and with a pair of horses drove out
of the town to the cemetery.
“Yes, those were times!” Shapkin recalled as he sat in the sledge. “When
you remember them you simply can’t believe in them. Do you remember how
you divorced your wife? It’s nearly twenty years ago, and I dare say you
have forgotten it all; but I remember it as though I’d divorced you
yesterday. Good Lord, what a lot of worry I had over it! I was a sharp
fellow, tricky and cunning, a desperate character. . . . Sometimes I was
burning to tackle some ticklish business, especially if the fee were a
good one, as, for instance, in your case. What did you pay me then? Five
or six thousand! That was worth taking trouble for, wasn’t it? You went
off to Petersburg and left the whole thing in my hands to do the best I
could, and, though Sofya Mihailovna, your wife, came only of a merchant
family, she was proud and dignified. To bribe her to take the guilt on
herself was difficult, awfully difficult! I would go to negotiate with
her, and as soon as she saw me she called to her maid: ‘Masha, didn’t I
tell you not to admit that scoundrel?’ Well, I tried one thing and
another. . . . I wrote her letters and contrived to meet her
accidentally—it was no use! I had to act through a third person. I had a
lot of trouble with her for a long time, and she only gave in when you
agreed to give her ten thousand. . . . She couldn’t resist ten thousand,
she couldn’t hold out. . . . She cried, she spat in my face, but she
consented, she took the guilt on herself!”
“I thought it was fifteen thousand she had from me, not ten,” said
Uzelkov.
“Yes, yes . . . fifteen—I made a mistake,” said Shapkin in confusion.
“It’s all over and done with, though, it’s no use concealing it. I gave
her ten and the other five I collared for myself. I deceived you both. .
. . It’s all over and done with, it’s no use to be ashamed. And indeed,
judge for yourself, Boris Petrovitch, weren’t you the very person for me
to get money out of? . . . You were a wealthy man and had everything you
wanted. . . . Your marriage was an idle whim, and so was your divorce.
You were making a lot of money. . . . I remember you made a scoop of
twenty thousand over one contract. Whom should I have fleeced if not
you? And I must own I envied you. If you grabbed anything they took off
their caps to you, while they would thrash me for a rouble and slap me
in the face at the club. . . . But there, why recall it? It is high time
to forget it.”
“Tell me, please, how did Sofya Mihailovna get on afterwards?”
“With her ten thousand? Very badly. God knows what it was—she lost her
head, perhaps, or maybe her pride and her conscience tormented her at
having sold her honour, or perhaps she loved you; but, do you know, she
took to drink. . . . As soon as she got her money she was off driving
about with officers. It was drunkenness, dissipation, debauchery. . . .
When she went to a restaurant with officers she was not content with
port or anything light, she must have strong brandy, fiery stuff to
stupefy her.”
“Yes, she was eccentric. . . . I had a lot to put up with from her . . .
sometimes she would take offence at something and begin being
hysterical. . . . And what happened afterwards?”
“One week passed and then another. . . . I was sitting at home, writing
something. All at once the door opened and she walked in . . . drunk.
‘Take back your cursed money,’ she said, and flung a roll of notes in my
face. . . . So she could not keep it up. I picked up the notes and
counted them. It was five hundred short of the ten thousand, so she had
only managed to get through five hundred.”
“Where did you put the money?”
“It’s all ancient history . . . there’s no reason to conceal it now. . .
. In my pocket, of course. Why do you look at me like that? Wait a bit
for what will come later. . . . It’s a regular novel, a pathological
study. A couple of months later I was going home one night in a nasty
drunken condition. . . . I lighted a candle, and lo and behold! Sofya
Mihailovna was sitting on my sofa, and she was drunk, too, and in a
frantic state—as wild as though she had run out of Bedlam. ‘Give me back
my money,’ she said, ‘I have changed my mind; if I must go to ruin I
won’t do it by halves, I’ll have my fling! Be quick, you scoundrel, give
me my money!’ A disgraceful scene!”
“And you . . . gave it her?”
“I gave her, I remember, ten roubles.”
“Oh! How could you?” cried Uzelkov, frowning. “If you couldn’t or
wouldn’t have given it her, you might have written to me. . . . And I
didn’t know! I didn’t know!”
“My dear fellow, what use would it have been for me to write,
considering that she wrote to you herself when she was lying in the
hospital afterwards?”
“Yes, but I was so taken up then with my second marriage. I was in such
a whirl that I had no thoughts to spare for letters. . . . But you were
an outsider, you had no antipathy for Sofya. . . why didn’t you give her
a helping hand? . . .”
“You can’t judge by the standards of to-day, Boris Petrovitch; that’s
how we look at it now, but at the time we thought very differently. . .
. Now maybe I’d give her a thousand roubles, but then even that ten-
rouble note I did not give her for nothing. It was a bad business! . . .
We must forget it. . . . But here we are. . . .”
The sledge stopped at the cemetery gates. Uzelkov and Shapkin got out of
the sledge, went in at the gate, and walked up a long, broad avenue. The
bare cherry-trees and acacias, the grey crosses and tombstones, were
silvered with hoar-frost, every little grain of snow reflected the
bright, sunny day. There was the smell there always is in cemeteries,
the smell of incense and freshly dug earth. . . .
“Our cemetery is a pretty one,” said Uzelkov, “quite a garden!”
“Yes, but it is a pity thieves steal the tombstones. . . . And over
there, beyond that iron monument on the right, Sofya Mihailovna is
buried. Would you like to see?”
The friends turned to the right and walked through the deep snow to the
iron monument.
“Here it is,” said Shapkin, pointing to a little slab of white marble.
“A lieutenant put the stone on her grave.”
Uzelkov slowly took off his cap and exposed his bald head to the sun.
Shapkin, looking at him, took off his cap too, and another bald patch
gleamed in the sunlight. There was the stillness of the tomb all around
as though the air, too, were dead. The friends looked at the grave,
pondered, and said nothing.
“She sleeps in peace,” said Shapkin, breaking the silence. “It’s nothing
to her now that she took the blame on herself and drank brandy. You must
own, Boris Petrovitch . . . .”
“Own what?” Uzelkov asked gloomily.
“Why. . . . However hateful the past, it was better than this.”
And Shapkin pointed to his grey head.
“I used not to think of the hour of death. . . . I fancied I could have
given death points and won the game if we had had an encounter; but now.
. . . But what’s the good of talking!”
Uzelkov was overcome with melancholy. He suddenly had a passionate
longing to weep, as once he had longed for love, and he felt those tears
would have tasted sweet and refreshing. A moisture came into his eyes
and there was a lump in his throat, but . . . Shapkin was standing
beside him and Uzelkov was ashamed to show weakness before a witness. He
turned back abruptly and went into the church.
Only two hours later, after talking to the churchwarden and looking over
the church, he seized a moment when Shapkin was in conversation with the
priest and hastened away to weep. . . . He stole up to the grave
secretly, furtively, looking round him every minute. The little white
slab looked at him pensively, mournfully, and innocently as though a
little girl lay under it instead of a dissolute, divorced wife.
“To weep, to weep!” thought Uzelkov.
But the moment for tears had been missed; though the old man bAlinked
his eyes, though he worked up his feelings, the tears did not flow nor
the lump come in his throat. After standing for ten minutes, with a
gesture of despair, Uzelkov went to look for Shapkin.
DARKNESS
A YOUNG peasant, with white eyebrows and eyelashes and broad cheekbones,
in a torn sheepskin and big black felt overboots, waited till the
Zemstvo doctor had finished seeing his patients and came out to go home
from the hospital; then he went up to him, diffidently.
“Please, your honour,” he said.
“What do you want?”
The young man passed the palm of his hand up and over his nose, looked
at the sky, and then answered:
“Please, your honour. . . . You’ve got my brother Vaska the blacksmith
from Varvarino in the convict ward here, your honour. . . .”
“Yes, what then?”
“I am Vaska’s brother, you see. . . . Father has the two of us: him,
Vaska, and me, Kirila; besides us there are three sisters, and Vaska’s a
married man with a little one. . . . There are a lot of us and no one to
work. . . . In the smithy it’s nearly two years now since the forge has
been heated. I am at the cotton factory, I can’t do smith’s work, and
how can father work? Let alone work, he can’t eat properly, he can’t
lift the spoon to his mouth.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Be merciful! Let Vaska go!”
The doctor looked wonderingly at Kirila, and without saying a word
walked on. The young peasant ran on in front and flung himself in a heap
at his feet.
“Doctor, kind gentleman!” he besought him, bAlinking and again passing
his open hand over his nose. “Show heavenly mercy; let Vaska go home! We
shall remember you in our prayers for ever! Your honour, let him go!
They are all starving! Mother’s wailing day in, day out, Vaska’s wife’s
wailing . . . it’s worse than death! I don’t care to look upon the light
of day. Be merciful; let him go, kind gentleman!”
“Are you stupid or out of your senses?” asked the doctor angrily. “How
can I let him go? Why, he is a convict.”
Kirila began crying. “Let him go!”
“Tfoo, queer fellow! What right have I? Am I a gaoler or what? They
brought him to the hospital for me to treat him, but I have as much
right to let him out as I have to put you in prison, silly fellow!”
“But they have shut him up for nothing! He was in prison a year before
the trial, and now there is no saying what he is there for. It would
have been a different thing if he had murdered someone, let us say, or
stolen horses; but as it is, what is it all about?”
“Very likely, but how do I come in?”
“They shut a man up and they don’t know themselves what for. He was
drunk, your honour, did not know what he was doing, and even hit father
on the ear and scratched his own cheek on a branch, and two of our
fellows—they wanted some Turkish tobacco, you see-began telling him to
go with them and break into the Armenian’s shop at night for tobacco.
Being drunk, he obeyed them, the fool. They broke the lock, you know,
got in, and did no end of mischief; they turned everything upside down,
broke the windows, and scattered the flour about. They were drunk, that
is all one can say! Well, the constable turned up . . . and with one
thing and another they took them off to the magistrate. They have been a
whole year in prison, and a week ago, on the Wednesday, they were all
three tried in the town. A soldier stood behind them with a gun . . .
people were sworn in. Vaska was less to blame than any, but the gentry
decided that he was the ringleader. The other two lads were sent to
prison, but Vaska to a convict battalion for three years. And what for?
One should judge like a Christian!”
“I have nothing to do with it, I tell you again. Go to the authorities.”
“I have been already! I’ve been to the court; I have tried to send in a
petition—they wouldn’t take a petition; I have been to the police
captain, and I have been to the examining magistrate, and everyone says,
‘It is not my business!’ Whose business is it, then? But there is no one
above you here in the hospital; you do what you like, your honour.”
“You simpleton,” sighed the doctor, “once the jury have found him
guilty, not the governor, not even the minister, could do anything, let
alone the police captain. It’s no good your trying to do anything!”
“And who judged him, then?”
“The gentlemen of the jury. . . .”
“They weren’t gentlemen, they were our peasants! Andrey Guryev was one;
Aloshka Huk was one.”
“Well, I am cold talking to you. . . .”
The doctor waved his hand and walked quickly to his own door. Kirila was
on the point of following him, but, seeing the door slam, he stopped.
For ten minutes he stood motionless in the middle of the hospital yard,
and without putting on his cap stared at the doctor’s house, then he
heaved a deep sigh, slowly scratched himself, and walked towards the
gate.
“To whom am I to go?” he muttered as he came out on to the road. “One
says it is not his business, another says it is not his business. Whose
business is it, then? No, till you grease their hands you will get
nothing out of them. The doctor says that, but he keeps looking all the
while at my fist to see whether I am going to give him a blue note.
Well, brother, I’ll go, if it has to be to the governor.”
Shifting from one foot to the other and continually looking round him in
an objectless way, he trudged lazily along the road and was apparently
wondering where to go. . . . It was not cold and the snow faintly
crunched under his feet. Not more than half a mile in front of him the
wretched little district town in which his brother had just been tried
lay outstretched on the hill. On the right was the dark prison with its
red roof and sentry-boxes at the corners; on the left was the big town
copse, now covered with hoar-frost. It was still; only an old man,
wearing a woman’s short jacket and a huge cap, was walking ahead,
coughing and shouting to a cow which he was driving to the town.
“Good-day, grandfather,” said Kirila, overtaking him.
“Good-day. . . .”
“Are you driving it to the market?”
“No,” the old man answered lazily.
“Are you a townsman?”
They got into conversation; Kirila told him what he had come to the
hospital for, and what he had been talking about to the doctor.
“The doctor does not know anything about such matters, that is a sure
thing,” the old man said to him as they were both entering the town;
“though he is a gentleman, he is only taught to cure by every means, but
to give you real advice, or, let us say, write out a petition for
you—that he cannot do. There are special authorities to do that. You
have been to the justice of the peace and to the police captain—they are
no good for your business either.”
“Where am I to go?”
“The permanent member of the rural board is the chief person for
peasants’ affairs. Go to him, Mr. Sineokov.”
“The one who is at Zolotovo?”
“Why, yes, at Zolotovo. He is your chief man. If it is anything that has
to do with you peasants even the police captain has no authority against
him.”
“It’s a long way to go, old man. . . . I dare say it’s twelve miles and
may be more.”
“One who needs something will go seventy.”
“That is so. . . . Should I send in a petition to him, or what?”
“You will find out there. If you should have a petition the clerk will
write you one quick enough. The permanent member has a clerk.”
After parting from the old man Kirila stood still in the middle of the
square, thought a little, and walked back out of the town. He made up
his mind to go to Zolotovo.
Five days later, as the doctor was on his way home after seeing his
patients, he caught sight of Kirila again in his yard. This time the
young peasant was not alone, but with a gaunt, very pale old man who
nodded his head without ceasing, like a pendulum, and mumbled with his
lips.
“Your honour, I have come again to ask your gracious mercy,” began
Kirila. “Here I have come with my father. Be merciful, let Vaska go! The
permanent member would not talk to me. He said: ‘Go away!’”
“Your honour,” the old man hissed in his throat, raising his twitching
eyebrows, “be merciful! We are poor people, we cannot repay your honour,
but if you graciously please, Kiryushka or Vaska can repay you in work.
Let them work.”
“We will pay with work,” said Kirila, and he raised his hand above his
head as though he would take an oath. “Let him go! They are starving,
they are crying day and night, your honour!”
The young peasant bent a rapid glance on his father, pulled him by the
sleeve, and both of them, as at the word of command, fell at the
doctor’s feet. The latter waved his hand in despair, and, without
looking round, walked quickly in at his door.
THE BEGGAR
“KIND sir, be so good as to notice a poor, hungry man. I have not tasted
food for three days. I have not a five-kopeck piece for a night’s
lodging. I swear by God! For five years I was a village schoolmaster and
lost my post through the intrigues of the Zemstvo. I was the victim of
false witness. I have been out of a place for a year now.”
Skvortsov, a Petersburg lawyer, looked at the speaker’s tattered dark
blue overcoat, at his muddy, drunken eyes, at the red patches on his
cheeks, and it seemed to him that he had seen the man before.
“And now I am offered a post in the Kaluga province,” the beggar
continued, “but I have not the means for the journey there. Graciously
help me! I am ashamed to ask, but . . . I am compelled by
circumstances.”
Skvortsov looked at his goloshes, of which one was shallow like a shoe,
while the other came high up the leg like a boot, and suddenly
remembered.
“Listen, the day before yesterday I met you in Sadovoy Street,” he said,
“and then you told me, not that you were a village schoolmaster, but
that you were a student who had been expelled. Do you remember?”
“N-o. No, that cannot be so!” the beggar muttered in confusion. “I am a
village schoolmaster, and if you wish it I can show you documents to
prove it.”
“That’s enough lies! You called yourself a student, and even told me
what you were expelled for. Do you remember?”
Skvortsov flushed, and with a look of disgust on his face turned away
from the ragged figure.
“It’s contemptible, sir!” he cried angrily. “It’s a swindle! I’ll hand
you over to the police, damn you! You are poor and hungry, but that does
not give you the right to lie so shamelessly!”
The ragged figure took hold of the door-handle and, like a bird in a
snare, looked round the hall desperately.
“I . . . I am not lying,” he muttered. “I can show documents.”
“Who can believe you?” Skvortsov went on, still indignant. “To exploit
the sympathy of the public for village schoolmasters and students—it’s
so low, so mean, so dirty! It’s revolting!”
Skvortsov flew into a rage and gave the beggar a merciless scolding. The
ragged fellow’s insolent lying aroused his disgust and aversion, was an
offence against what he, Skvortsov, loved and prized in himself:
kindliness, a feeling heart, sympathy for the unhappy. By his lying, by
his treacherous assault upon compassion, the individual had, as it were,
defiled the charity which he liked to give to the poor with no
misgivings in his heart. The beggar at first defended himself, protested
with oaths, then he sank into silence and hung his head, overcome with
shame.
“Sir!” he said, laying his hand on his heart, “I really was . . . lying!
I am not a student and not a village schoolmaster. All that’s mere
invention! I used to be in the Russian choir, and I was turned out of it
for drunkenness. But what can I do? Believe me, in God’s name, I can’t
get on without lying—when I tell the truth no one will give me anything.
With the truth one may die of hunger and freeze without a night’s
lodging! What you say is true, I understand that, but . . . what am I to
do?”
“What are you to do? You ask what are you to do?” cried Skvortsov, going
close up to him. “Work—that’s what you must do! You must work!”
“Work. . . . I know that myself, but where can I get work?”
“Nonsense. You are young, strong, and healthy, and could always find
work if you wanted to. But you know you are lazy, pampered, drunken! You
reek of vodka like a pothouse! You have become false and corrupt to the
marrow of your bones and fit for nothing but begging and lying! If you
do graciously condescend to take work, you must have a job in an office,
in the Russian choir, or as a billiard-marker, where you will have a
salary and have nothing to do! But how would you like to undertake
manual labour? I’ll be bound, you wouldn’t be a house porter or a
factory hand! You are too genteel for that!”
“What things you say, really . . .” said the beggar, and he gave a
bitter smile. “How can I get manual work? It’s rather late for me to be
a shopman, for in trade one has to begin from a boy; no one would take
me as a house porter, because I am not of that class . . . . And I could
not get work in a factory; one must know a trade, and I know nothing.”
“Nonsense! You always find some justification! Wouldn’t you like to chop
wood?”
“I would not refuse to, but the regular woodchoppers are out of work
now.”
“Oh, all idlers argue like that! As soon as you are offered anything you
refuse it. Would you care to chop wood for me?”
“Certainly I will. . .”
“Very good, we shall see. . . . Excellent. We’ll see!” Skvortsov, in
nervous haste; and not without malignant pleasure, rubbing his hands,
summoned his cook from the kitchen.
“Here, Olga,” he said to her, “take this gentleman to the shed and let
him chop some wood.”
The beggar shrugged his shoulders as though puzzled, and irresolutely
followed the cook. It was evident from his demeanour that he had
consented to go and chop wood, not because he was hungry and wanted to
earn money, but simply from shame and amour propre, because he had been
taken at his word. It was clear, too, that he was suffering from the
effects of vodka, that he was unwell, and felt not the faintest
inclination to work.
Skvortsov hurried into the dining-room. There from the window which
looked out into the yard he could see the woodshed and everything that
happened in the yard. Standing at the window, Skvortsov saw the cook and
the beggar come by the back way into the yard and go through the muddy
snow to the woodshed. Olga scrutinized her companion angrily, and
jerking her elbow unlocked the woodshed and angrily banged the door
open.
“Most likely we interrupted the woman drinking her coffee,” thought
Skvortsov. “What a cross creature she is!”
Then he saw the pseudo-schoolmaster and pseudo-student seat himself on a
block of wood, and, leaning his red cheeks upon his fists, sink into
thought. The cook flung an axe at his feet, spat angrily on the ground,
and, judging by the expression of her lips, began abusing him. The
beggar drew a log of wood towards him irresolutely, set it up between
his feet, and diffidently drew the axe across it. The log toppled and
fell over. The beggar drew it towards him, breathed on his frozen hands,
and again drew the axe along it as cautiously as though he were afraid
of its hitting his golosh or chopping off his fingers. The log fell over
again.
Skvortsov’s wrath had passed off by now, he felt sore and ashamed at the
thought that he had forced a pampered, drunken, and perhaps sick man to
do hard, rough work in the cold.
“Never mind, let him go on . . .” he thought, going from the dining-room
into his study. “I am doing it for his good!”
An hour later Olga appeared and announced that the wood had been chopped
up.
“Here, give him half a rouble,” said Skvortsov. “If he likes, let him
come and chop wood on the first of every month. . . . There will always
be work for him.”
On the first of the month the beggar turned up and again earned half a
rouble, though he could hardly stand. From that time forward he took to
turning up frequently, and work was always found for him: sometimes he
would sweep the snow into heaps, or clear up the shed, at another he
used to beat the rugs and the mattresses. He always received thirty to
forty kopecks for his work, and on one occasion an old pair of trousers
was sent out to him.
When he moved, Skvortsov engaged him to assist in packing and moving the
furniture. On this occasion the beggar was sober, gloomy, and silent; he
scarcely touched the furniture, walked with hanging head behind the
furniture vans, and did not even try to appear busy; he merely shivered
with the cold, and was overcome with confusion when the men with the
vans laughed at his idleness, feebleness, and ragged coat that had once
been a gentleman’s. After the removal Skvortsov sent for him.
“Well, I see my words have had an effect upon you,” he said, giving him
a rouble. “This is for your work. I see that you are sober and not
disinclined to work. What is your name?”
“Lushkov.”
“I can offer you better work, not so rough, Lushkov. Can you write?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then go with this note to-morrow to my colleague and he will give you
some copying to do. Work, don’t drink, and don’t forget what I said to
you. Good-bye.”
Skvortsov, pleased that he had put a man in the path of rectitude,
patted Lushkov genially on the shoulder, and even shook hands with him
at parting.
Lushkov took the letter, departed, and from that time forward did not
come to the back-yard for work.
Two years passed. One day as Skvortsov was standing at the ticket-office
of a theatre, paying for his ticket, he saw beside him a little man with
a lambskin collar and a shabby cat’s-skin cap. The man timidly asked the
clerk for a gallery ticket and paid for it with kopecks.
“Lushkov, is it you?” asked Skvortsov, recognizing in the little man his
former woodchopper. “Well, what are you doing? Are you getting on all
right?”
“Pretty well. . . . I am in a notary’s office now. I earn thirty-five
roubles.”
“Well, thank God, that’s capital. I rejoice for you. I am very, very
glad, Lushkov. You know, in a way, you are my godson. It was I who
shoved you into the right way. Do you remember what a scolding I gave
you, eh? You almost sank through the floor that time. Well, thank you,
my dear fellow, for remembering my words.”
“Thank you too,” said Lushkov. “If I had not come to you that day, maybe
I should be calling myself a schoolmaster or a student still. Yes, in
your house I was saved, and climbed out of the pit.”
“I am very, very glad.”
“Thank you for your kind words and deeds. What you said that day was
excellent. I am grateful to you and to your cook, God bless that kind,
noble-hearted woman. What you said that day was excellent; I am indebted
to you as long as I live, of course, but it was your cook, Olga, who
really saved me.”
“How was that?”
“Why, it was like this. I used to come to you to chop wood and she would
begin: ‘Ah, you drunkard! You God-forsaken man! And yet death does not
take you!’ and then she would sit opposite me, lamenting, looking into
my face and wailing: ‘You unlucky fellow! You have no gladness in this
world, and in the next you will burn in hell, poor drunkard! You poor
sorrowful creature!’ and she always went on in that style, you know. How
often she upset herself, and how many tears she shed over me I can’t
tell you. But what affected me most—she chopped the wood for me! Do you
know, sir, I never chopped a single log for you—she did it all! How it
was she saved me, how it was I changed, looking at her, and gave up
drinking, I can’t explain. I only know that what she said and the noble
way she behaved brought about a change in my soul, and I shall never
forget it. It’s time to go up, though, they are just going to ring the
bell.”
Lushkov bowed and went off to the gallery.
A STORY WITHOUT A TITLE
IN the fifth century, just as now, the sun rose every morning and every
evening retired to rest. In the morning, when the first rays kissed the
dew, the earth revived, the air was filled with the sounds of rapture
and hope; while in the evening the same earth subsided into silence and
plunged into gloomy darkness. One day was like another, one night like
another. From time to time a storm-cloud raced up and there was the
angry rumble of thunder, or a negligent star fell out of the sky, or a
pale monk ran to tell the brotherhood that not far from the monastery he
had seen a tiger—and that was all, and then each day was like the next.
The monks worked and prayed, and their Father Superior played on the
organ, made Latin verses, and wrote music. The wonderful old man
possessed an extraordinary gift. He played on the organ with such art
that even the oldest monks, whose hearing had grown somewhat dull
towards the end of their lives, could not restrain their tears when the
sounds of the organ floated from his cell. When he spoke of anything,
even of the most ordinary things—for instance of the trees, of the wild
beasts, or of the sea—they could not listen to him without a smile or
tears, and it seemed that the same chords vibrated in his soul as in the
organ. If he were moved to anger or abandoned himself to intense joy, or
began speaking of something terrible or grand, then a passionate
inspiration took possession of him, tears came into his flashing eyes,
his face flushed, and his voice thundered, and as the monks listened to
him they felt that their souls were spell-bound by his inspiration; at
such marvellous, splendid moments his power over them was boundless, and
if he had bidden his elders fling themselves into the sea, they would
all, every one of them, have hastened to carry out his wishes.
His music, his voice, his poetry in which he glorified God, the heavens
and the earth, were a continual source of joy to the monks. It sometimes
happened that through the monotony of their lives they grew weary of the
trees, the flowers, the spring, the autumn, their ears were tired of the
sound of the sea, and the song of the birds seemed tedious to them, but
the talents of their Father Superior were as necessary to them as their
daily bread.
Dozens of years passed by, and every day was like every other day, every
night was like every other night. Except the birds and the wild beasts,
not one soul appeared near the monastery. The nearest human habitation
was far away, and to reach it from the monastery, or to reach the
monastery from it, meant a journey of over seventy miles across the
desert. Only men who despised life, who had renounced it, and who came
to the monastery as to the grave, ventured to cross the desert.
What was the amazement of the monks, therefore, when one night there
knocked at their gate a man who turned out to be from the town, and the
most ordinary sinner who loved life. Before saying his prayers and
asking for the Father Superior’s blessing, this man asked for wine and
food. To the question how he had come from the town into the desert, he
answered by a long story of hunting; he had gone out hunting, had drunk
too much, and lost his way. To the suggestion that he should enter the
monastery and save his soul, he replied with a smile: “I am not a fit
companion for you!”
When he had eaten and drunk he looked at the monks who were serving him,
shook his head reproachfully, and said:
“You don’t do anything, you monks. You are good for nothing but eating
and drinking. Is that the way to save one’s soul? Only think, while you
sit here in peace, eat and drink and dream of beatitude, your neighbours
are perishing and going to hell. You should see what is going on in the
town! Some are dying of hunger, others, not knowing what to do with
their gold, sink into profligacy and perish like flies stuck in honey.
There is no faith, no truth in men. Whose task is it to save them? Whose
work is it to preach to them? It is not for me, drunk from morning till
night as I am. Can a meek spirit, a loving heart, and faith in God have
been given you for you to sit here within four walls doing nothing?”
The townsman’s drunken words were insolent and unseemly, but they had a
strange effect upon the Father Superior. The old man exchanged glances
with his monks, turned pale, and said:
“My brothers, he speaks the truth, you know. Indeed, poor people in
their weakness and lack of understanding are perishing in vice and
infidelity, while we do not move, as though it did not concern us. Why
should I not go and remind them of the Christ whom they have forgotten?”
The townsman’s words had carried the old man away. The next day he took
his staff, said farewell to the brotherhood, and set off for the town.
And the monks were left without music, and without his speeches and
verses. They spent a month drearily, then a second, but the old man did
not come back. At last after three months had passed the familiar tap of
his staff was heard. The monks flew to meet him and showered questions
upon him, but instead of being delighted to see them he wept bitterly
and did not utter a word. The monks noticed that he looked greatly aged
and had grown thinner; his face looked exhausted and wore an expression
of profound sadness, and when he wept he had the air of a man who has
been outraged.
The monks fell to weeping too, and began with sympathy asking him why he
was weeping, why his face was so gloomy, but he locked himself in his
cell without uttering a word. For seven days he sat in his cell, eating
and drinking nothing, weeping and not playing on his organ. To knocking
at his door and to the entreaties of the monks to come out and share his
grief with them he replied with unbroken silence.
At last he came out. Gathering all the monks around him, with a tear-
stained face and with an expression of grief and indignation, he began
telling them of what had befallen him during those three months. His
voice was calm and his eyes were smiling while he described his journey
from the monastery to the town. On the road, he told them, the birds
sang to him, the brooks gurgled, and sweet youthful hopes agitated his
soul; he marched on and felt like a soldier going to battle and
confident of victory; he walked on dreaming, and composed poems and
hymns, and reached the end of his journey without noticing it.
But his voice quivered, his eyes flashed, and he was full of wrath when
he came to speak of the town and of the men in it. Never in his life had
he seen or even dared to imagine what he met with when he went into the
town. Only then for the first time in his life, in his old age, he saw
and understood how powerful was the devil, how fair was evil and how
weak and faint-hearted and worthless were men. By an unhappy chance the
first dwelling he entered was the abode of vice. Some fifty men in
possession of much money were eating and drinking wine beyond measure.
Intoxicated by the wine, they sang songs and boldly uttered terrible,
revolting words such as a God-fearing man could not bring himself to
pronounce; boundlessly free, self-confident, and happy, they feared
neither God nor the devil, nor death, but said and did what they liked,
and went whither their lust led them. And the wine, clear as amber,
flecked with sparks of gold, must have been irresistibly sweet and
fragrant, for each man who drank it smiled blissfully and wanted to
drink more. To the smile of man it responded with a smile and sparkled
joyfully when they drank it, as though it knew the devilish charm it
kept hidden in its sweetness.
The old man, growing more and more incensed and weeping with wrath, went
on to describe what he had seen. On a table in the midst of the
revellers, he said, stood a sinful, half-naked woman. It was hard to
imagine or to find in nature anything more lovely and fascinating. This
reptile, young, longhaired, dark-skinned, with black eyes and full lips,
shameless and insolent, showed her snow-white teeth and smiled as though
to say: “Look how shameless, how beautiful I am.” Silk and brocade fell
in lovely folds from her shoulders, but her beauty would not hide itself
under her clothes, but eagerly thrust itself through the folds, like the
young grass through the ground in spring. The shameless woman drank
wine, sang songs, and abandoned herself to anyone who wanted her.
Then the old man, wrathfully brandishing his arms, described the horse-
races, the bull-fights, the theatres, the artists’ studios where they
painted naked women or moulded them of clay. He spoke with inspiration,
with sonorous beauty, as though he were playing on unseen chords, while
the monks, petrified, greedily drank in his words and gasped with
rapture. . . .
After describing all the charms of the devil, the beauty of evil, and
the fascinating grace of the dreadful female form, the old man cursed
the devil, turned and shut himself up in his cell. . . .
When he came out of his cell in the morning there was not a monk left in
the monastery; they had all fled to the town.
IN TROUBLE
PYOTR SEMYONITCH, the bank manager, together with the book-keeper, his
assistant, and two members of the board, were taken in the night to
prison. The day after the upheaval the merchant Avdeyev, who was one of
the committee of auditors, was sitting with his friends in the shop
saying:
“So it is God’s will, it seems. There is no escaping your fate. Here to-
day we are eating caviare and to-morrow, for aught we know, it will be
prison, beggary, or maybe death. Anything may happen. Take Pyotr
Semyonitch, for instance. . . .”
He spoke, screwing up his drunken eyes, while his friends went on
drinking, eating caviare, and listening. Having described the disgrace
and helplessness of Pyotr Semyonitch, who only the day before had been
powerful and respected by all, Avdeyev went on with a sigh:
“The tears of the mouse come back to the cat. Serve them right, the
scoundrels! They could steal, the rooks, so let them answer for it!”
“You’d better look out, Ivan Danilitch, that you don’t catch it too!”
one of his friends observed.
“What has it to do with me?”
“Why, they were stealing, and what were you auditors thinking about?
I’ll be bound, you signed the audit.”
“It’s all very well to talk!” laughed Avdeyev: “Signed it, indeed! They
used to bring the accounts to my shop and I signed them. As though I
understood! Give me anything you like, I’ll scrawl my name to it. If you
were to write that I murdered someone I’d sign my name to it. I haven’t
time to go into it; besides, I can’t see without my spectacles.”
After discussing the failure of the bank and the fate of Pyotr
Semyonitch, Avdeyev and his friends went to eat pie at the house of a
friend whose wife was celebrating her name-day. At the name-day party
everyone was discussing the bank failure. Avdeyev was more excited than
anyone, and declared that he had long foreseen the crash and knew two
years before that things were not quite right at the bank. While they
were eating pie he described a dozen illegal operations which had come
to his knowledge.
“If you knew, why did you not give information?” asked an officer who
was present.
“I wasn’t the only one: the whole town knew of it,” laughed Avdeyev.
“Besides, I haven’t the time to hang about the law courts, damn them!”
He had a nap after the pie and then had dinner, then had another nap,
then went to the evening service at the church of which he was a warden;
after the service he went back to the name-day party and played
preference till midnight. Everything seemed satisfactory.
But when Avdeyev hurried home after midnight the cook, who opened the
door to him, looked pale, and was trembling so violently that she could
not utter a word. His wife, Elizaveta Trofimovna, a flabby, overfed
woman, with her grey hair hanging loose, was sitting on the sofa in the
drawing-room quivering all over, and vacantly rolling her eyes as though
she were drunk. Her elder son, Vassily, a high-school boy, pale too, and
extremely agitated, was fussing round her with a glass of water.
“What’s the matter?” asked Avdeyev, and looked angrily sideways at the
stove (his family was constantly being upset by the fumes from it).
“The examining magistrate has just been with the police,” answered
Vassily; “they’ve made a search.”
Avdeyev looked round him. The cupboards, the chests, the
tables—everything bore traces of the recent search. For a minute Avdeyev
stood motionless as though petrified, unable to understand; then his
whole inside quivered and seemed to grow heavy, his left leg went numb,
and, unable to endure his trembling, he lay down flat on the sofa. He
felt his inside heaving and his rebellious left leg tapping against the
back of the sofa.
In the course of two or three minutes he recalled the whole of his past,
but could not remember any crime deserving of the attention of the
police.
“It’s all nonsense,” he said, getting up. “They must have slandered me.
To-morrow I must lodge a complaint of their having dared to do such a
thing.”
Next morning after a sleepless night Avdeyev, as usual, went to his
shop. His customers brought him the news that during the night the
public prosecutor had sent the deputy manager and the head-clerk to
prison as well. This news did not disturb Avdeyev. He was convinced that
he had been slandered, and that if he were to lodge a complaint to-day
the examining magistrate would get into trouble for the search of the
night before.
Between nine and ten o’clock he hurried to the town hall to see the
secretary, who was the only educated man in the town council.
“Vladimir Stepanitch, what’s this new fashion?” he said, bending down to
the secretary’s ear. “People have been stealing, but how do I come in?
What has it to do with me? My dear fellow,” he whispered, “there has
been a search at my house last night! Upon my word! Have they gone
crazy? Why touch me?”
“Because one shouldn’t be a sheep,” the secretary answered calmly.
“Before you sign you ought to look.”
“Look at what? But if I were to look at those accounts for a thousand
years I could not make head or tail of them! It’s all Greek to me! I am
no book-keeper. They used to bring them to me and I signed them.”
“Excuse me. Apart from that you and your committee are seriously
compromised. You borrowed nineteen thousand from the bank, giving no
security.”
“Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Avdeyev in amazement. “I am not the
only one in debt to the bank! The whole town owes it money. I pay the
interest and I shall repay the debt. What next! And besides, to tell the
honest truth, it wasn’t I myself borrowed the money. Pyotr Semyonitch
forced it upon me. ‘Take it,’ he said, ‘take it. If you don’t take it,’
he said, ‘it means that you don’t trust us and fight shy of us. You take
it,’ he said, ‘and build your father a mill.’ So I took it.”
“Well, you see, none but children or sheep can reason like that. In any
case, signor, you need not be anxious. You can’t escape trial, of
course, but you are sure to be acquitted.”
The secretary’s indifference and calm tone restored Avdeyev’s composure.
Going back to his shop and finding friends there, he again began
drinking, eating caviare, and airing his views. He almost forgot the
police search, and he was only troubled by one circumstance which he
could not help noticing: his left leg was strangely numb, and his
stomach for some reason refused to do its work.
That evening destiny dealt another overwhelming blow at Avdeyev: at an
extraordinary meeting of the town council all members who were on the
staff of the bank, Avdeyev among them, were asked to resign, on the
ground that they were charged with a criminal offence. In the morning he
received a request to give up immediately his duties as churchwarden.
After that Avdeyev lost count of the blows dealt him by fate, and
strange, unprecedented days flitted rapidly by, one after another, and
every day brought some new, unexpected surprise. Among other things, the
examining magistrate sent him a summons, and he returned home after the
interview, insulted and red in the face.
“He gave me no peace, pestering me to tell him why I had signed. I
signed, that’s all about it. I didn’t do it on purpose. They brought the
papers to the shop and I signed them. I am no great hand at reading
writing.”
Young men with unconcerned faces arrived, sealed up the shop, and made
an inventory of all the furniture of the house. Suspecting some intrigue
behind this, and, as before, unconscious of any wrongdoing, Avdeyev in
his mortification ran from one Government office to another lodging
complaints. He spent hours together in waiting-rooms, composed long
petitions, shed tears, swore. To his complaints the public prosecutor
and the examining magistrate made the indifferent and rational reply:
“Come to us when you are summoned: we have not time to attend to you
now.” While others answered: “It is not our business.”
The secretary, an educated man, who, Avdeyev thought, might have helped
him, merely shrugged his shoulders and said:
“It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have been a sheep.”
The old man exerted himself to the utmost, but his left leg was still
numb, and his digestion was getting worse and worse. When he was weary
of doing nothing and was getting poorer and poorer, he made up his mind
to go to his father’s mill, or to his brother, and begin dealing in
corn. His family went to his father’s and he was left alone. The days
flitted by, one after another. Without a family, without a shop, and
without money, the former churchwarden, an honoured and respected man,
spent whole days going the round of his friends’ shops, drinking,
eating, and listening to advice. In the mornings and in the evenings, to
while away the time, he went to church. Looking for hours together at
the ikons, he did not pray, but pondered. His conscience was clear, and
he ascribed his position to mistake and misunderstanding; to his mind,
it was all due to the fact that the officials and the examining
magistrates were young men and inexperienced. It seemed to him that if
he were to talk it over in detail and open his heart to some elderly
judge, everything would go right again. He did not understand his
judges, and he fancied they did not understand him.
The days raced by, and at last, after protracted, harassing delays, the
day of the trial came. Avdeyev borrowed fifty roubles, and providing
himself with spirit to rub on his leg and a decoction of herbs for his
digestion, set off for the town where the circuit court was being held.
The trial lasted for ten days. Throughout the trial Avdeyev sat among
his companions in misfortune with the stolid composure and dignity
befitting a respectable and innocent man who is suffering for no fault
of his own: he listened and did not understand a word. He was in an
antagonistic mood. He was angry at being detained so long in the court,
at being unable to get Lenten food anywhere, at his defending counsel’s
not understanding him, and, as he thought, saying the wrong thing. He
thought that the judges did not understand their business. They took
scarcely any notice of Avdeyev, they only addressed him once in three
days, and the questions they put to him were of such a character that
Avdeyev raised a laugh in the audience each time he answered them. When
he tried to speak of the expenses he had incurred, of his losses, and of
his meaning to claim his costs from the court, his counsel turned round
and made an incomprehensible grimace, the public laughed, and the judge
announced sternly that that had nothing to do with the case. The last
words that he was allowed to say were not what his counsel had
instructed him to say, but something quite different, which raised a
laugh again.
During the terrible hour when the jury were consulting in their room he
sat angrily in the refreshment bar, not thinking about the jury at all.
He did not understand why they were so long deliberating when everything
was so clear, and what they wanted of him.
Getting hungry, he asked the waiter to give him some cheap Lenten dish.
For forty kopecks they gave him some cold fish and carrots. He ate it
and felt at once as though the fish were heaving in a chilly lump in his
stomach; it was followed by flatulence, heartburn, and pain.
Afterwards, as he listened to the foreman of the jury reading out the
questions point by point, there was a regular revolution taking place in
his inside, his whole body was bathed in a cold sweat, his left leg was
numb; he did not follow, understood nothing, and suffered unbearably at
not being able to sit or lie down while the foreman was reading. At
last, when he and his companions were allowed to sit down, the public
prosecutor got up and said something unintelligible, and all at once, as
though they had sprung out of the earth, some police officers appeared
on the scene with drawn swords and surrounded all the prisoners. Avdeyev
was told to get up and go.
Now he understood that he was found guilty and in charge of the police,
but he was not frightened nor amazed; such a turmoil was going on in his
stomach that he could not think about his guards.
“So they won’t let us go back to the hotel?” he asked one of his
companions. “But I have three roubles and an untouched quarter of a
pound of tea in my room there.”
He spent the night at the police station; all night he was aware of a
loathing for fish, and was thinking about the three roubles and the
quarter of a pound of tea. Early in the morning, when the sky was
beginning to turn blue, he was told to dress and set off. Two soldiers
with bayonets took him to prison. Never before had the streets of the
town seemed to him so long and endless. He walked not on the pavement
but in the middle of the road in the muddy, thawing snow. His inside was
still at war with the fish, his left leg was numb; he had forgotten his
goloshes either in the court or in the police station, and his feet felt
frozen.
Five days later all the prisoners were brought before the court again to
hear their sentence. Avdeyev learnt that he was sentenced to exile in
the province of Tobolsk. And that did not frighten nor amaze him either.
He fancied for some reason that the trial was not yet over, that there
were more adjournments to come, and that the final decision had not been
reached yet. . . . He went on in the prison expecting this final
decision every day.
Only six months later, when his wife and his son Vassily came to say
good-bye to him, and when in the wasted, wretchedly dressed old woman he
scarcely recognized his once fat and dignified Elizaveta Trofimovna, and
when he saw his son wearing a short, shabby reefer-jacket and cotton
trousers instead of the high-school uniform, he realized that his fate
was decided, and that whatever new “decision” there might be, his past
would never come back to him. And for the first time since the trial and
his imprisonment the angry expression left his face, and he wept
bitterly.
FROST
A “POPULAR” fête with a philanthropic object had been arranged on the
Feast of Epiphany in the provincial town of N——. They had selected a
broad part of the river between the market and the bishop’s palace,
fenced it round with a rope, with fir-trees and with flags, and provided
everything necessary for skating, sledging, and tobogganing. The
festivity was organized on the grandest scale possible. The notices that
were distributed were of huge size and promised a number of delights:
skating, a military band, a lottery with no blank tickets, an electric
sun, and so on. But the whole scheme almost came to nothing owing to the
hard frost. From the eve of Epiphany there were twenty-eight degrees of
frost with a strong wind; it was proposed to put off the fête, and this
was not done only because the public, which for a long while had been
looking forward to the fête impatiently, would not consent to any
postponement.
“Only think, what do you expect in winter but a frost!” said the ladies
persuading the governor, who tried to insist that the fête should be
postponed. “If anyone is cold he can go and warm himself.”
The trees, the horses, the men’s beards were white with frost; it even
seemed that the air itself crackled, as though unable to endure the
cold; but in spite of that the frozen public were skating. Immediately
after the blessing of the waters and precisely at one o’clock the
military band began playing.
Between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, when the festivity was
at its height, the select society of the place gathered together to warm
themselves in the governor’s pavilion, which had been put up on the
river-bank. The old governor and his wife, the bishop, the president of
the local court, the head master of the high school, and many others,
were there. The ladies were sitting in armchairs, while the men crowded
round the wide glass door, looking at the skating.
“Holy Saints!” said the bishop in surprise; “what flourishes they
execute with their legs! Upon my soul, many a singer couldn’t do a twirl
with his voice as those cut-throats do with their legs. Aie! he’ll kill
himself!”
“That’s Smirnov. . . . That’s Gruzdev . . .” said the head master,
mentioning the names of the schoolboys who flew by the pavilion.
“Bah! he’s all alive-oh!” laughed the governor. “Look, gentlemen, our
mayor is coming. . . . He is coming this way. . . . That’s a nuisance,
he will talk our heads off now.”
A little thin old man, wearing a big cap and a fur-lined coat hanging
open, came from the opposite bank towards the pavilion, avoiding the
skaters. This was the mayor of the town, a merchant, Eremeyev by name, a
millionaire and an old inhabitant of N——. Flinging wide his arms and
shrugging at the cold, he skipped along, knocking one golosh against the
other, evidently in haste to get out of the wind. Half-way he suddenly
bent down, stole up to some lady, and plucked at her sleeve from behind.
When she looked round he skipped away, and probably delighted at having
succeeded in frightening her, went off into a loud, aged laugh.
“Lively old fellow,” said the governor. “It’s a wonder he’s not
skating.”
As he got near the pavilion the mayor fell into a little tripping trot,
waved his hands, and, taking a run, slid along the ice in his huge
golosh boots up to the very door.
“Yegor Ivanitch, you ought to get yourself some skates!” the governor
greeted him.
“That’s just what I am thinking,” he answered in a squeaky, somewhat
nasal tenor, taking off his cap. “I wish you good health, your
Excellency! Your Holiness! Long life to all the other gentlemen and
ladies! Here’s a frost! Yes, it is a frost, bother it! It’s deadly!”
Winking with his red, frozen eyes, Yegor Ivanitch stamped on the floor
with his golosh boots and swung his arms together like a frozen cabman.
“Such a damnable frost, worse than any dog!” he went on talking, smiling
all over his face. “It’s a real affliction!”
“It’s healthy,” said the governor; “frost strengthens a man and makes
him vigorous. . . .”
“Though it may be healthy, it would be better without it at all,” said
the mayor, wiping his wedge-shaped beard with a red handkerchief. “It
would be a good riddance! To my thinking, your Excellency, the Lord
sends it us as a punishment—the frost, I mean. We sin in the summer and
are punished in the winter. . . . Yes!”
Yegor Ivanitch looked round him quickly and flung up his hands.
“Why, where’s the needful . . . to warm us up?” he asked, looking in
alarm first at the governor and then at the bishop. “Your Excellency!
Your Holiness! I’ll be bound, the ladies are frozen too! We must have
something, this won’t do!”
Everyone began gesticulating and declaring that they had not come to the
skating to warm themselves, but the mayor, heeding no one, opened the
door and beckoned to someone with his crooked finger. A workman and a
fireman ran up to him.
“Here, run off to Savatin,” he muttered, “and tell him to make haste and
send here . . . what do you call it? . . . What’s it to be? Tell him to
send a dozen glasses . . . a dozen glasses of mulled wine, the very
hottest, or punch, perhaps. . . .”
There was laughter in the pavilion.
“A nice thing to treat us to!”
“Never mind, we will drink it,” muttered the mayor; “a dozen glasses,
then . . . and some Benedictine, perhaps . . . and tell them to warm two
bottles of red wine. . . . Oh, and what for the ladies? Well, you tell
them to bring cakes, nuts . . . sweets of some sort, perhaps. . . .
There, run along, look sharp!”
The mayor was silent for a minute and then began again abusing the
frost, banging his arms across his chest and thumping with his golosh
boots.
“No, Yegor Ivanitch,” said the governor persuasively, “don’t be unfair,
the Russian frost has its charms. I was reading lately that many of the
good qualities of the Russian people are due to the vast expanse of
their land and to the climate, the cruel struggle for existence . . .
that’s perfectly true!”
“It may be true, your Excellency, but it would be better without it. The
frost did drive out the French, of course, and one can freeze all sorts
of dishes, and the children can go skating—that’s all true! For the man
who is well fed and well clothed the frost is only a pleasure, but for
the working man, the beggar, the pilgrim, the crazy wanderer, it’s the
greatest evil and misfortune. It’s misery, your Holiness! In a frost
like this poverty is twice as hard, and the thief is more cunning and
evildoers more violent. There’s no gainsaying it! I am turned seventy,
I’ve a fur coat now, and at home I have a stove and rums and punches of
all sorts. The frost means nothing to me now; I take no notice of it, I
don’t care to know of it, but how it used to be in old days, Holy
Mother! It’s dreadful to recall it! My memory is failing me with years
and I have forgotten everything; my enemies, and my sins and troubles of
all sorts—I forget them all, but the frost—ough! How I remember it! When
my mother died I was left a little devil—this high—a homeless orphan . .
. no kith nor kin, wretched, ragged, little clothes, hungry, nowhere to
sleep—in fact, ‘we have here no abiding city, but seek the one to come.’
In those days I used to lead an old blind woman about the town for five
kopecks a day . . . the frosts were cruel, wicked. One would go out with
the old woman and begin suffering torments. My Creator! First of all you
would be shivering as in a fever, shrugging and dancing about. Then your
ears, your fingers, your feet, would begin aching. They would ache as
though someone were squeezing them with pincers. But all that would have
been nothing, a trivial matter, of no great consequence. The trouble was
when your whole body was chilled. One would walk for three blessed hours
in the frost, your Holiness, and lose all human semblance. Your legs are
drawn up, there is a weight on your chest, your stomach is pinched;
above all, there is a pain in your heart that is worse than anything.
Your heart aches beyond all endurance, and there is a wretchedness all
over your body as though you were leading Death by the hand instead of
an old woman. You are numb all over, turned to stone like a statue; you
go on and feel as though it were not you walking, but someone else
moving your legs instead of you. When your soul is frozen you don’t know
what you are doing: you are ready to leave the old woman with no one to
guide her, or to pull a hot roll from off a hawker’s tray, or to fight
with someone. And when you come to your night’s lodging into the warmth
after the frost, there is not much joy in that either! You lie awake
till midnight, crying, and don’t know yourself what you are crying for.
. . .”
“We must walk about the skating-ground before it gets dark,” said the
governor’s wife, who was bored with listening. “Who’s coming with me?”
The governor’s wife went out and the whole company trooped out of the
pavilion after her. Only the governor, the bishop, and the mayor
remained.
“Queen of Heaven! and what I went through when I was a shopboy in a
fish-shop!” Yegor Ivanitch went on, flinging up his arms so that his
fox-lined coat fell open. “One would go out to the shop almost before it
was light . . . by eight o’clock I was completely frozen, my face was
blue, my fingers were stiff so that I could not fasten my buttons nor
count the money. One would stand in the cold, turn numb, and think,
‘Lord, I shall have to stand like this right on till evening!’ By
dinner-time my stomach was pinched and my heart was aching. . . . Yes!
And I was not much better afterwards when I had a shop of my own. The
frost was intense and the shop was like a mouse-trap with draughts
blowing in all directions; the coat I had on was, pardon me, mangy, as
thin as paper, threadbare. . . . One would be chilled through and
through, half dazed, and turn as cruel as the frost oneself: I would
pull one by the ear so that I nearly pulled the ear off; I would smack
another on the back of the head; I’d glare at a customer like a ruffian,
a wild beast, and be ready to fleece him; and when I got home in the
evening and ought to have gone to bed, I’d be ill-humoured and set upon
my family, throwing it in their teeth that they were living upon me; I
would make a row and carry on so that half a dozen policemen couldn’t
have managed me. The frost makes one spiteful and drives one to drink.”
Yegor Ivanitch clasped his hands and went on:
“And when we were taking fish to Moscow in the winter, Holy Mother!” And
spluttering as he talked, he began describing the horrors he endured
with his shopmen when he was taking fish to Moscow. . . .
“Yes,” sighed the governor, “it is wonderful what a man can endure! You
used to take wagon-loads of fish to Moscow, Yegor Ivanitch, while I in
my time was at the war. I remember one extraordinary instance. . . .”
And the governor described how, during the last Russo-Turkish War, one
frosty night the division in which he was had stood in the snow without
moving for thirteen hours in a piercing wind; from fear of being
observed the division did not light a fire, nor make a sound or a
movement; they were forbidden to smoke. . . .
Reminiscences followed. The governor and the mayor grew lively and good-
humoured, and, interrupting each other, began recalling their
experiences. And the bishop told them how, when he was serving in
Siberia, he had travelled in a sledge drawn by dogs; how one day, being
drowsy, in a time of sharp frost he had fallen out of the sledge and
been nearly frozen; when the Tunguses turned back and found him he was
barely alive. Then, as by common agreement, the old men suddenly sank
into silence, sat side by side, and mused.
“Ech!” whispered the mayor; “you’d think it would be time to forget, but
when you look at the water-carriers, at the schoolboys, at the convicts
in their wretched gowns, it brings it all back! Why, only take those
musicians who are playing now. I’ll be bound, there is a pain in their
hearts; a pinch at their stomachs, and their trumpets are freezing to
their lips. . . . They play and think: ‘Holy Mother! we have another
three hours to sit here in the cold.’”
The old men sank into thought. They thought of that in man which is
higher than good birth, higher than rank and wealth and learning, of
that which brings the lowest beggar near to God: of the helplessness of
man, of his sufferings and his patience. . . .
Meanwhile the air was turning blue . . . the door opened and two waiters
from Savatin’s walked in, carrying trays and a big muffled teapot. When
the glasses had been filled and there was a strong smell of cinnamon and
clove in the air, the door opened again, and there came into the
pavilion a beardless young policeman whose nose was crimson, and who was
covered all over with frost; he went up to the governor, and, saluting,
said: “Her Excellency told me to inform you that she has gone home.”
Looking at the way the policeman put his stiff, frozen fingers to his
cap, looking at his nose, his lustreless eyes, and his hood covered with
white frost near the mouth, they all for some reason felt that this
policeman’s heart must be aching, that his stomach must feel pinched,
and his soul numb. . . .
“I say,” said the governor hesitatingly, “have a drink of mulled wine!”
“It’s all right . . . it’s all right! Drink it up!” the mayor urged him,
gesticulating; “don’t be shy!”
The policeman took the glass in both hands, moved aside, and, trying to
drink without making any sound, began discreetly sipping from the glass.
He drank and was overwhelmed with embarrassment while the old men looked
at him in silence, and they all fancied that the pain was leaving the
young policeman’s heart, and that his soul was thawing. The governor
heaved a sigh.
“It’s time we were at home,” he said, getting up. “Good-bye! I say,” he
added, addressing the policeman, “tell the musicians there to . . .
leave off playing, and ask Pavel Semyonovitch from me to see they are
given . . . beer or vodka.”
The governor and the bishop said good-bye to the mayor and went out of
the pavilion.
Yegor Ivanitch attacked the mulled wine, and before the policeman had
finished his glass succeeded in telling him a great many interesting
things. He could not be silent.
A SLANDER
SERGE KAPITONICH AHINEEV, the writing master, was marrying his daughter
to the teacher of history and geography. The wedding festivities were
going off most successfully. In the drawing room there was singing,
playing, and dancing. Waiters hired from the club were flitting
distractedly about the rooms, dressed in black swallow-tails and dirty
white ties. There was a continual hubbub and din of conversation.
Sitting side by side on the sofa, the teacher of mathematics,
Tarantulov, the French teacher, Pasdequoi, and the junior assessor of
taxes, Mzda, were talking hurriedly and interrupting one another as they
described to the guests cases of persons being buried alive, and gave
their opinions on spiritualism. None of them believed in spiritualism,
but all admitted that there were many things in this world which would
always be beyond the mind of man. In the next room the literature
master, Dodonsky, was explaining to the visitors the cases in which a
sentry has the right to fire on passers-by. The subjects, as you
perceive, were alarming, but very agreeable. Persons whose social
position precluded them from entering were looking in at the windows
from the yard.
Just at midnight the master of the house went into the kitchen to see
whether everything was ready for supper. The kitchen from floor to
ceiling was filled with fumes composed of goose, duck, and many other
odours. On two tables the accessories, the drinks and light
refreshments, were set out in artistic disorder. The cook, Marfa, a red-
faced woman whose figure was like a barrel with a belt around it, was
bustling about the tables.
“Show me the sturgeon, Marfa,” said Ahineev, rubbing his hands and
licking his lips. “What a perfume! I could eat up the whole kitchen.
Come, show me the sturgeon.”
Marfa went up to one of the benches and cautiously lifted a piece of
greasy newspaper. Under the paper on an immense dish there reposed a
huge sturgeon, masked in jelly and decorated with capers, olives, and
carrots. Ahineev gazed at the sturgeon and gasped. His face beamed, he
turned his eyes up. He bent down and with his lips emitted the sound of
an ungreased wheel. After standing a moment he snapped his fingers with
delight and once more smacked his lips.
“Ah-ah! the sound of a passionate kiss. . . . Who is it you’re kissing
out there, little Marfa?” came a voice from the next room, and in the
doorway there appeared the cropped head of the assistant usher, Vankin.
“Who is it? A-a-h! . . . Delighted to meet you! Sergei Kapitonich!
You’re a fine grandfather, I must say! Tête-à -tête with the fair
sex—tette!”
“I’m not kissing,” said Ahineev in confusion. “Who told you so, you
fool? I was only . . . I smacked my lips . . . in reference to . . . as
an indication of . . . pleasure . . . at the sight of the fish.”
“Tell that to the marines!” The intrusive face vanished, wearing a broad
grin.
Ahineev flushed.
“Hang it!” he thought, “the beast will go now and talk scandal. He’ll
disgrace me to all the town, the brute.”
Ahineev went timidly into the drawing-room and looked stealthily round
for Vankin. Vankin was standing by the piano, and, bending down with a
jaunty air, was whispering something to the inspector’s sister-in-law,
who was laughing.
“Talking about me!” thought Ahineev. “About me, blast him! And she
believes it . . . believes it! She laughs! Mercy on us! No, I can’t let
it pass . . . I can’t. I must do something to prevent his being
believed. . . . I’ll speak to them all, and he’ll be shown up for a fool
and a gossip.”
Ahineev scratched his head, and still overcome with embarrassment, went
up to Pasdequoi.
“I’ve just been in the kitchen to see after the supper,” he said to the
Frenchman. “I know you are fond of fish, and I’ve a sturgeon, my dear
fellow, beyond everything! A yard and a half long! Ha, ha, ha! And, by
the way . . . I was just forgetting. . . . In the kitchen just now, with
that sturgeon . . . quite a little story! I went into the kitchen just
now and wanted to look at the supper dishes. I looked at the sturgeon
and I smacked my lips with relish . . . at the piquancy of it. And at
the very moment that fool Vankin came in and said: . . . ‘Ha, ha, ha! .
. . So you’re kissing here!’ Kissing Marfa, the cook! What a thing to
imagine, silly fool! The woman is a perfect fright, like all the beasts
put together, and he talks about kissing! Queer fish!”
“Who’s a queer fish?” asked Tarantulov, coming up.
“Why he, over there—Vankin! I went into the kitchen . . .”
And he told the story of Vankin. “. . . He amused me, queer fish! I’d
rather kiss a dog than Marfa, if you ask me,” added Ahineev. He looked
round and saw behind him Mzda.
“We were talking of Vankin,” he said. “Queer fish, he is! He went into
the kitchen, saw me beside Marfa, and began inventing all sorts of silly
stories. ‘Why are you kissing?’ he says. He must have had a drop too
much. ‘And I’d rather kiss a turkeycock than Marfa,’ I said, ‘And I’ve a
wife of my own, you fool,’ said I. He did amuse me!”
“Who amused you?” asked the priest who taught Scripture in the school,
going up to Ahineev.
“Vankin. I was standing in the kitchen, you know, looking at the
sturgeon. . . .”
And so on. Within half an hour or so all the guests knew the incident of
the sturgeon and Vankin.
“Let him tell away now!” thought Ahineev, rubbing his hands. “Let him!
He’ll begin telling his story and they’ll say to him at once, ‘Enough of
your improbable nonsense, you fool, we know all about it!’”
And Ahineev was so relieved that in his joy he drank four glasses too
many. After escorting the young people to their room, he went to bed and
slept like an innocent babe, and next day he thought no more of the
incident with the sturgeon. But, alas! man proposes, but God disposes.
An evil tongue did its evil work, and Ahineev’s strategy was of no
avail. Just a week later—to be precise, on Wednesday after the third
lesson—when Ahineev was standing in the middle of the teacher’s room,
holding forth on the vicious propensities of a boy called Visekin, the
head master went up to him and drew him aside:
“Look here, Sergei Kapitonich,” said the head master, “you must excuse
me. . . . It’s not my business; but all the same I must make you
realize. . . . It’s my duty. You see, there are rumors that you are
romancing with that . . . cook. . . . It’s nothing to do with me, but .
. . flirt with her, kiss her . . . as you please, but don’t let it be so
public, please. I entreat you! Don’t forget that you’re a schoolmaster.”
Ahineev turned cold and faint. He went home like a man stung by a whole
swarm of bees, like a man scalded with boiling water. As he walked home,
it seemed to him that the whole town was looking at him as though he
were smeared with pitch. At home fresh trouble awaited him.
“Why aren’t you gobbling up your food as usual?” his wife asked him at
dinner. “What are you so pensive about? Brooding over your amours?
Pining for your Marfa? I know all about it, Mohammedan! Kind friends
have opened my eyes! O-o-o! . . . you savage!”
And she slapped him in the face. He got up from the table, not feeling
the earth under his feet, and without his hat or coat, made his way to
Vankin. He found him at home.
“You scoundrel!” he addressed him. “Why have you covered me with mud
before all the town? Why did you set this slander going about me?”
“What slander? What are you talking about?”
“Who was it gossiped of my kissing Marfa? Wasn’t it you? Tell me that.
Wasn’t it you, you brigand?”
Vankin bAlinked and twitched in every fibre of his battered countenance,
raised his eyes to the icon and articulated, “God blast me! Strike me
blind and lay me out, if I said a single word about you! May I be left
without house and home, may I be stricken with worse than cholera!”
Vankin’s sincerity did not admit of doubt. It was evidently not he who
was the author of the slander.
“But who, then, who?” Ahineev wondered, going over all his acquaintances
in his mind and beating himself on the breast. “Who, then?”
Who, then? We, too, ask the reader.
MINDS IN FERMENT (FROM THE ANNALS OF A TOWN)
THE earth was like an oven. The afternoon sun blazed with such energy
that even the thermometer hanging in the excise officer’s room lost its
head: it ran up to 112.5 and stopped there, irresolute. The inhabitants
streamed with perspiration like overdriven horses, and were too lazy to
mop their faces.
Two of the inhabitants were walking along the market-place in front of
the closely shuttered houses. One was Potcheshihin, the local treasury
clerk, and the other was Optimov, the agent, for many years a
correspondent of the Son of the Fatherland newspaper. They walked in
silence, speechless from the heat. Optimov felt tempted to find fault
with the local authorities for the dust and disorder of the market-
place, but, aware of the peace-loving disposition and moderate views of
his companion, he said nothing.
In the middle of the market-place Potcheshihin suddenly halted and began
gazing into the sky.
“What are you looking at?”
“Those starlings that flew up. I wonder where they have settled. Clouds
and clouds of them. . . . If one were to go and take a shot at them, and
if one were to pick them up . . . and if . . . They have settled in the
Father Prebendary’s garden!”
“Oh no! They are not in the Father Prebendary’s, they are in the Father
Deacon’s. If you did have a shot at them from here you wouldn’t kill
anything. Fine shot won’t carry so far; it loses its force. And why
should you kill them, anyway? They’re birds destructive of the fruit,
that’s true; still, they’re fowls of the air, works of the Lord. The
starling sings, you know. . . . And what does it sing, pray? A song of
praise. . . . ‘All ye fowls of the air, praise ye the Lord.’ No. I do
believe they have settled in the Father Prebendary’s garden.”
Three old pilgrim women, wearing bark shoes and carrying wallets, passed
noiselessly by the speakers. Looking enquiringly at the gentlemen who
were for some unknown reason staring at the Father Prebendary’s house,
they slackened their pace, and when they were a few yards off stopped,
glanced at the friends once more, and then fell to gazing at the house
themselves.
“Yes, you were right; they have settled in the Father Prebendary’s,”
said Optimov. “His cherries are ripe now, so they have gone there to
peck them.”
From the garden gate emerged the Father Prebendary himself, accompanied
by the sexton. Seeing the attention directed upon his abode and
wondering what people were staring at, he stopped, and he, too, as well
as the sexton, began looking upwards to find out.
“The father is going to a service somewhere, I suppose,” said
Potcheshihin. “The Lord be his succour!”
Some workmen from Purov’s factory, who had been bathing in the river,
passed between the friends and the priest. Seeing the latter absorbed in
contemplation of the heavens and the pilgrim women, too, standing
motionless with their eyes turned upwards, they stood still and stared
in the same direction.
A small boy leading a blind beggar and a peasant, carrying a tub of
stinking fish to throw into the market-place, did the same.
“There must be something the matter, I should think,” said Potcheshihin,
“a fire or something. But there’s no sign of smoke anywhere. Hey!
Kuzma!” he shouted to the peasant, “what’s the matter?”
The peasant made some reply, but Potcheshihin and Optimov did not catch
it. Sleepy-looking shopmen made their appearance at the doors of all the
shops. Some plasterers at work on a warehouse near left their ladders
and joined the workmen.
The fireman, who was describing circles with his bare feet, on the
watch-tower, halted, and, after looking steadily at them for a few
minutes, came down. The watch-tower was left deserted. This seemed
suspicious.
“There must be a fire somewhere. Don’t shove me! You damned swine!”
“Where do you see the fire? What fire? Pass on, gentlemen! I ask you
civilly!”
“It must be a fire indoors!”
“Asks us civilly and keeps poking with his elbows. Keep your hands to
yourself! Though you are a head constable, you have no sort of right to
make free with your fists!”
“He’s trodden on my corn! Ah! I’ll crush you!”
“Crushed? Who’s crushed? Lads! a man’s been crushed!
“What’s the meaning of this crowd? What do you want?”
“A man’s been crushed, please your honour!”
“Where? Pass on! I ask you civilly! I ask you civilly, you blockheads!”
“You may shove a peasant, but you daren’t touch a gentleman! Hands off!”
“Did you ever know such people? There’s no doing anything with them by
fair words, the devils! Sidorov, run for Akim Danilitch! Look sharp!
It’ll be the worse for you, gentlemen! Akim Danilitch is coming, and
he’ll give it to you! You here, Parfen? A blind man, and at his age too!
Can’t see, but he must be like other people and won’t do what he’s told.
Smirnov, put his name down!”
“Yes, sir! And shall I write down the men from Purov’s? That man there
with the swollen cheek, he’s from Purov’s works.”
“Don’t put down the men from Purov’s. It’s Purov’s birthday to-morrow.”
The starlings rose in a black cloud from the Father Prebendary’s garden,
but Potcheshihin and Optimov did not notice them. They stood staring
into the air, wondering what could have attracted such a crowd, and what
it was looking at.
Akim Danilitch appeared. Still munching and wiping his lips, he cut his
way into the crowd, bellowing:
“Firemen, be ready! Disperse! Mr. Optimov, disperse, or it’ll be the
worse for you! Instead of writing all kinds of things about decent
people in the papers, you had better try to behave yourself more
conformably! No good ever comes of reading the papers!”
“Kindly refrain from reflections upon literature!” cried Optimov hotly.
“I am a literary man, and I will allow no one to make reflections upon
literature! though, as is the duty of a citizen, I respect you as a
father and benefactor!”
“Firemen, turn the hose on them!”
“There’s no water, please your honour!”
“Don’t answer me! Go and get some! Look sharp!”
“We’ve nothing to get it in, your honour. The major has taken the fire-
brigade horses to drive his aunt to the station.”
“Disperse! Stand back, damnation take you! Is that to your taste? Put
him down, the devil!”
“I’ve lost my pencil, please your honour!”
The crowd grew larger and larger. There is no telling what proportions
it might have reached if the new organ just arrived from Moscow had not
fortunately begun playing in the tavern close by. Hearing their
favourite tune, the crowd gasped and rushed off to the tavern. So nobody
ever knew why the crowd had assembled, and Potcheshihin and Optimov had
by now forgotten the existence of the starlings who were innocently
responsible for the proceedings.
An hour later the town was still and silent again, and only a solitary
figure was to be seen—the fireman pacing round and round on the watch-
tower.
The same evening Akim Danilitch sat in the grocer’s shop drinking
limonade gaseuse and brandy, and writing:
“In addition to the official report, I venture, your Excellency, to
append a few supplementary observations of my own. Father and
benefactor! In very truth, but for the prayers of your virtuous spouse
in her salubrious villa near our town, there’s no knowing what might not
have come to pass. What I have been through to-day I can find no words
to express. The efficiency of Krushensky and of the major of the fire
brigade are beyond all praise! I am proud of such devoted servants of
our country! As for me, I did all that a weak man could do, whose only
desire is the welfare of his neighbour; and sitting now in the bosom of
my family, with tears in my eyes I thank Him Who spared us bloodshed! In
absence of evidence, the guilty parties remain in custody, but I propose
to release them in a week or so. It was their ignorance that led them
astray!”
GONE ASTRAY
A COUNTRY village wrapped in the darkness of night. One o’clock strikes
from the belfry. Two lawyers, called Kozyavkin and Laev, both in the
best of spirits and a little unsteady on their legs, come out of the
wood and turn towards the cottages.
“Well, thank God, we’ve arrived,” says Kozyavkin, drawing a deep breath.
“Tramping four miles from the station in our condition is a feat. I am
fearfully done up! And, as ill-luck would have it, not a fly to be
seen.”
“Petya, my dear fellow. . . . I can’t. . . . I feel like dying if I’m
not in bed in five minutes.”
“In bed! Don’t you think it, my boy! First we’ll have supper and a glass
of red wine, and then you can go to bed. Verotchka and I will wake you
up. . . . Ah, my dear fellow, it’s a fine thing to be married! You don’t
understand it, you cold-hearted wretch! I shall be home in a minute,
worn out and exhausted. . . . A loving wife will welcome me, give me
some tea and something to eat, and repay me for my hard work and my love
with such a fond and loving look out of her darling black eyes that I
shall forget how tired I am, and forget the burglary and the law courts
and the appeal division . . . . It’s glorious!”
“Yes—I say, I feel as though my legs were dropping off, I can scarcely
get along. . . . I am frightfully thirsty. . . .”
“Well, here we are at home.”
The friends go up to one of the cottages, and stand still under the
nearest window.
“It’s a jolly cottage,” said Kozyavkin. “You will see to-morrow what
views we have! There’s no light in the windows. Verotchka must have gone
to bed, then; she must have got tired of sitting up. She’s in bed, and
must be worrying at my not having turned up.” (He pushes the window with
his stick, and it opens.) “Plucky girl! She goes to bed without bolting
the window.” (He takes off his cape and flings it with his portfolio in
at the window.) “I am hot! Let us strike up a serenade and make her
laugh!” (He sings.) “The moon floats in the midnight sky. . . . Faintly
stir the tender breezes . . . . Faintly rustle in the treetops. . . .
Sing, sing, Alyosha! Verotchka, shall we sing you Schubert’s Serenade?”
(He sings.)
His performance is cut short by a sudden fit of coughing. “Tphoo!
Verotchka, tell Aksinya to unlock the gate for us!” (A pause.)
“Verotchka! don’t be lazy, get up, darling!” (He stands on a stone and
looks in at the window.) “Verotchka, my dumpling; Verotchka, my poppet .
. . my little angel, my wife beyond compare, get up and tell Aksinya to
unlock the gate for us! You are not asleep, you know. Little wife, we
are really so done up and exhausted that we’re not in the mood for
jokes. We’ve trudged all the way from the station! Don’t you hear? Ah,
hang it all!” (He makes an effort to climb up to the window and falls
down.) “You know this isn’t a nice trick to play on a visitor! I see you
are just as great a schoolgirl as ever, Vera, you are always up to
mischief!”
“Perhaps Vera Stepanovna is asleep,” says Laev.
“She isn’t asleep! I bet she wants me to make an outcry and wake up the
whole neighbourhood. I’m beginning to get cross, Vera! Ach, damn it all!
Give me a leg up, Alyosha; I’ll get in. You are a naughty girl, nothing
but a regular schoolgirl. . . Give me a hoist.”
Puffing and panting, Laev gives him a leg up, and Kozyavkin climbs in at
the window and vanishes into the darkness within.
“Vera!” Laev hears a minute later, “where are you? . . . D—damnation!
Tphoo! I’ve put my hand into something! Tphoo!”
There is a rustling sound, a flapping of wings, and the desperate
cackling of a fowl.
“A nice state of things,” Laev hears. “Vera, where on earth did these
chickens come from? Why, the devil, there’s no end of them! There’s a
basket with a turkey in it. . . . It pecks, the nasty creature.”
Two hens fly out of the window, and cackling at the top of their voices,
flutter down the village street.
“Alyosha, we’ve made a mistake!” says Kozyavkin in a lachrymose voice.
“There are a lot of hens here. . . . I must have mistaken the house.
Confound you, you are all over the place, you cursed brutes!”
“Well, then, make haste and come down. Do you hear? I am dying of
thirst!”
“In a minute. . . . I am looking for my cape and portfolio.”
“Light a match.”
“The matches are in the cape. . . . I was a crazy idiot to get into this
place. The cottages are exactly alike; the devil himself couldn’t tell
them apart in the dark. Aie, the turkey’s pecked my cheek, nasty
creature!”
“Make haste and get out or they’ll think we are stealing the chickens.”
“In a minute. . . . I can’t find my cape anywhere. . . . There are lots
of old rags here, and I can’t tell where the cape is. Throw me a match.”
“I haven’t any.”
“We are in a hole, I must say! What am I to do? I can’t go without my
cape and my portfolio. I must find them.”
“I can’t understand a man’s not knowing his own cottage,” says Laev
indignantly. “Drunken beast. . . . If I’d known I was in for this sort
of thing I would never have come with you. I should have been at home
and fast asleep by now, and a nice fix I’m in here. . . . I’m fearfully
done up and thirsty, and my head is going round.”
“In a minute, in a minute. . . . You won’t expire.”
A big cock flies crowing over Laev’s head. Laev heaves a deep sigh, and
with a hopeless gesture sits down on a stone. He is beset with a burning
thirst, his eyes are closing, his head drops forward. . . . Five minutes
pass, ten, twenty, and Kozyavkin is still busy among the hens.
“Petya, will you be long?”
“A minute. I found the portfolio, but I have lost it again.”
Laev lays his head on his fists, and closes his eyes. The cackling of
the fowls grows louder and louder. The inhabitants of the empty cottage
fly out of the window and flutter round in circles, he fancies, like
owls over his head. His ears ring with their cackle, he is overwhelmed
with terror.
“The beast!” he thinks. “He invited me to stay, promising me wine and
junket, and then he makes me walk from the station and listen to these
hens. . . .”
In the midst of his indignation his chin sinks into his collar, he lays
his head on his portfolio, and gradually subsides. Weariness gets the
upper hand and he begins to doze.
“I’ve found the portfolio!” he hears Kozyavkin cry triumphantly. “I
shall find the cape in a minute and then off we go!”
Then through his sleep he hears the barking of dogs. First one dog
barks, then a second, and a third. . . . And the barking of the dogs
blends with the cackling of the fowls into a sort of savage music.
Someone comes up to Laev and asks him something. Then he hears someone
climb over his head into the window, then a knocking and a shouting. . .
. A woman in a red apron stands beside him with a lantern in her hand
and asks him something.
“You’ve no right to say so,” he hears Kozyavkin’s voice. “I am a lawyer,
a bachelor of laws—Kozyavkin—here’s my visiting card.”
“What do I want with your card?” says someone in a husky bass. “You’ve
disturbed all my fowls, you’ve smashed the eggs! Look what you’ve done.
The turkey poults were to have come out to-day or to-morrow, and you’ve
smashed them. What’s the use of your giving me your card, sir?”
“How dare you interfere with me! No! I won’t have it!”
“I am thirsty,” thinks Laev, trying to open his eyes, and he feels
somebody climb down from the window over his head.
“My name is Kozyavkin! I have a cottage here. Everyone knows me.”
“We don’t know anyone called Kozyavkin.”
“What are you saying? Call the elder. He knows me.”
“Don’t get excited, the constable will be here directly. . . . We know
all the summer visitors here, but I’ve never seen you in my life.”
“I’ve had a cottage in Rottendale for five years.”
“Whew! Do you take this for the Dale? This is Sicklystead, but
Rottendale is farther to the right, beyond the match factory. It’s three
miles from here.”
“Bless my soul! Then I’ve taken the wrong turning!”
The cries of men and fowls mingle with the barking of dogs, and the
voice of Kozyavkin rises above the chaos of confused sounds:
“You shut up! I’ll pay. I’ll show you whom you have to deal with!”
Little by little the voices die down. Laev feels himself being shaken by
the shoulder. . . .
AN AVENGER
SHORTLY after finding his wife in flagrante delicto Fyodor Fyodorovitch
Sigaev was standing in Schmuck and Co.‘s, the gunsmiths, selecting a
suitable revolver. His countenance expressed wrath, grief, and
unalterable determination.
“I know what I must do,” he was thinking. “The sanctities of the home
are outraged, honour is trampled in the mud, vice is triumphant, and
therefore as a citizen and a man of honour I must be their avenger.
First, I will kill her and her lover and then myself.”
He had not yet chosen a revolver or killed anyone, but already in
imagination he saw three bloodstained corpses, broken skulls, brains
oozing from them, the commotion, the crowd of gaping spectators, the
post-mortem. . . . With the malignant joy of an insulted man he pictured
the horror of the relations and the public, the agony of the traitress,
and was mentally reading leading articles on the destruction of the
traditions of the home.
The shopman, a sprightly little Frenchified figure with rounded belly
and white waistcoat, displayed the revolvers, and smiling respectfully
and scraping with his little feet observed:
“. . . I would advise you, M’sieur, to take this superb revolver, the
Smith and Wesson pattern, the last word in the science of firearms:
triple-action, with ejector, kills at six hundred paces, central sight.
Let me draw your attention, M’sieu, to the beauty of the finish. The
most fashionable system, M’sieu. We sell a dozen every day for burglars,
wolves, and lovers. Very correct and powerful action, hits at a great
distance, and kills wife and lover with one bullet. As for suicide,
M’sieu, I don’t know a better pattern.”
The shopman pulled and cocked the trigger, breathed on the barrel, took
aim, and affected to be breathless with delight. Looking at his ecstatic
countenance, one might have supposed that he would readily have put a
bullet through his brains if he had only possessed a revolver of such a
superb pattern as a Smith-Wesson.
“And what price?” asked Sigaev.
“Forty-five roubles, M’sieu.”
“Mm! . . . that’s too dear for me.”
“In that case, M’sieu, let me offer you another make, somewhat cheaper.
Here, if you’ll kindly look, we have an immense choice, at all prices. .
. . Here, for instance, this revolver of the Lefaucher pattern costs
only eighteen roubles, but . . .” (the shopman pursed up his face
contemptuously) “. . . but, M’sieu, it’s an old-fashioned make. They are
only bought by hysterical ladies or the mentally deficient. To commit
suicide or shoot one’s wife with a Lefaucher revolver is considered bad
form nowadays. Smith-Wesson is the only pattern that’s correct style.”
“I don’t want to shoot myself or to kill anyone,” said Sigaev, lying
sullenly. “I am buying it simply for a country cottage . . . to frighten
away burglars. . . .”
“That’s not our business, what object you have in buying it.” The
shopman smiled, dropping his eyes discreetly. “If we were to investigate
the object in each case, M’sieu, we should have to close our shop. To
frighten burglars Lefaucher is not a suitable pattern, M’sieu, for it
goes off with a faint, muffled sound. I would suggest Mortimer’s, the
so-called duelling pistol. . . .”
“Shouldn’t I challenge him to a duel?” flashed through Sigaev’s mind.
“It’s doing him too much honour, though. . . . Beasts like that are
killed like dogs. . . .”
The shopman, swaying gracefully and tripping to and fro on his little
feet, still smiling and chattering, displayed before him a heap of
revolvers. The most inviting and impressive of all was the Smith and
Wesson’s. Sigaev picked up a pistol of that pattern, gazed blankly at
it, and sank into brooding. His imagination pictured how he would blow
out their brains, how blood would flow in streams over the rug and the
parquet, how the traitress’s legs would twitch in her last agony. . . .
But that was not enough for his indignant soul. The picture of blood,
wailing, and horror did not satisfy him. He must think of something more
terrible.
“I know! I’ll kill myself and him,” he thought, “but I’ll leave her
alive. Let her pine away from the stings of conscience and the contempt
of all surrounding her. For a sensitive nature like hers that will be
far more agonizing than death.”
And he imagined his own funeral: he, the injured husband, lies in his
coffin with a gentle smile on his lips, and she, pale, tortured by
remorse, follows the coffin like a Niobe, not knowing where to hide
herself to escape from the withering, contemptuous looks cast upon her
by the indignant crowd.
“I see, M’sieu, that you like the Smith and Wesson make,” the shopman
broke in upon his broodings. “If you think it too dear, very well, I’ll
knock off five roubles. . . . But we have other makes, cheaper.”
The little Frenchified figure turned gracefully and took down another
dozen cases of revolvers from the shelf.
“Here, M’sieu, price thirty roubles. That’s not expensive, especially as
the rate of exchange has dropped terribly and the Customs duties are
rising every hour. M’sieu, I vow I am a Conservative, but even I am
beginning to murmur. Why, with the rate of exchange and the Customs
tariff, only the rich can purchase firearms. There’s nothing left for
the poor but Tula weapons and phosphorus matches, and Tula weapons are a
misery! You may aim at your wife with a Tula revolver and shoot yourself
through the shoulder-blade.”
Sigaev suddenly felt mortified and sorry that he would be dead, and
would miss seeing the agonies of the traitress. Revenge is only sweet
when one can see and taste its fruits, and what sense would there be in
it if he were lying in his coffin, knowing nothing about it?
“Hadn’t I better do this?” he pondered. “I’ll kill him, then I’ll go to
his funeral and look on, and after the funeral I’ll kill myself. They’d
arrest me, though, before the funeral, and take away my pistol. . . .
And so I’ll kill him, she shall remain alive, and I . . . for the time,
I’ll not kill myself, but go and be arrested. I shall always have time
to kill myself. There will be this advantage about being arrested, that
at the preliminary investigation I shall have an opportunity of exposing
to the authorities and to the public all the infamy of her conduct. If I
kill myself she may, with her characteristic duplicity and impudence,
throw all the blame on me, and society will justify her behaviour and
will very likely laugh at me. . . . If I remain alive, then . . .”
A minute later he was thinking:
“Yes, if I kill myself I may be blamed and suspected of petty feeling. .
. . Besides, why should I kill myself? That’s one thing. And for
another, to shoot oneself is cowardly. And so I’ll kill him and let her
live, and I’ll face my trial. I shall be tried, and she will be brought
into court as a witness. . . . I can imagine her confusion, her disgrace
when she is examined by my counsel! The sympathies of the court, of the
Press, and of the public will certainly be with me.”
While he deliberated the shopman displayed his wares, and felt it
incumbent upon him to entertain his customer.
“Here are English ones, a new pattern, only just received,” he prattled
on. “But I warn you, M’sieu, all these systems pale beside the Smith and
Wesson. The other day—as I dare say you have read—an officer bought from
us a Smith and Wesson. He shot his wife’s lover, and-would you believe
it?—the bullet passed through him, pierced the bronze lamp, then the
piano, and ricochetted back from the piano, killing the lap-dog and
bruising the wife. A magnificent record redounding to the honour of our
firm! The officer is now under arrest. He will no doubt be convicted and
sent to penal servitude. In the first place, our penal code is quite out
of date; and, secondly, M’sieu, the sympathies of the court are always
with the lover. Why is it? Very simple, M’sieu. The judges and the jury
and the prosecutor and the counsel for the defence are all living with
other men’s wives, and it’ll add to their comfort that there will be one
husband the less in Russia. Society would be pleased if the Government
were to send all the husbands to Sahalin. Oh, M’sieu, you don’t know how
it excites my indignation to see the corruption of morals nowadays. To
love other men’s wives is as much the regular thing to-day as to smoke
other men’s cigarettes and to read other men’s books. Every year our
trade gets worse and worse—it doesn’t mean that wives are more faithful,
but that husbands resign themselves to their position and are afraid of
the law and penal servitude.”
The shopman looked round and whispered: “And whose fault is it, M’sieu?
The Government’s.”
“To go to Sahalin for the sake of a pig like that—there’s no sense in
that either,” Sigaev pondered. “If I go to penal servitude it will only
give my wife an opportunity of marrying again and deceiving a second
husband. She would triumph. . . . And so I will leave her alive, I won’t
kill myself, him . . . I won’t kill either. I must think of something
more sensible and more effective. I will punish them with my contempt,
and will take divorce proceedings that will make a scandal.”
“Here, M’sieu, is another make,” said the shopman, taking down another
dozen from the shelf. “Let me call your attention to the original
mechanism of the lock.”
In view of his determination a revolver was now of no use to Sigaev, but
the shopman, meanwhile, getting more and more enthusiastic, persisted in
displaying his wares before him. The outraged husband began to feel
ashamed that the shopman should be taking so much trouble on his account
for nothing, that he should be smiling, wasting time, displaying
enthusiasm for nothing.
“Very well, in that case,” he muttered, “I’ll look in again later on . .
. or I’ll send someone.”
He didn’t see the expression of the shopman’s face, but to smooth over
the awkwardness of the position a little he felt called upon to make
some purchase. But what should he buy? He looked round the walls of the
shop to pick out something inexpensive, and his eyes rested on a green
net hanging near the door.
“That’s . . . what’s that?” he asked.
“That’s a net for catching quails.”
“And what price is it?”
“Eight roubles, M’sieu.”
“Wrap it up for me. . . .”
The outraged husband paid his eight roubles, took the net, and, feeling
even more outraged, walked out of the shop.
THE JEUNE PREMIER
YEVGENY ALEXEYITCH PODZHAROV, the jeune premier, a graceful, elegant
young man with an oval face and little bags under his eyes, had come for
the season to one of the southern towns of Russia, and tried at once to
make the acquaintance of a few of the leading families of the place.
“Yes, signor,” he would often say, gracefully swinging his foot and
displaying his red socks, “an artist ought to act upon the masses, both
directly and indirectly; the first aim is attained by his work on the
stage, the second by an acquaintance with the local inhabitants. On my
honour, parole d’honneur, I don’t understand why it is we actors avoid
making acquaintance with local families. Why is it? To say nothing of
dinners, name-day parties, feasts, soirées fixes, to say nothing of
these entertainments, think of the moral influence we may have on
society! Is it not agreeable to feel one has dropped a spark in some
thick skull? The types one meets! The women! Mon Dieu, what women! they
turn one’s head! One penetrates into some huge merchant’s house, into
the sacred retreats, and picks out some fresh and rosy little peach—it’s
heaven, parole d’honneur!”
In the southern town, among other estimable families he made the
acquaintance of that of a manufacturer called Zybaev. Whenever he
remembers that acquaintance now he frowns contemptuously, screws up his
eyes, and nervously plays with his watch-chain.
One day—it was at a name-day party at Zybaev’s—the actor was sitting in
his new friends’ drawing-room and holding forth as usual. Around him
“types” were sitting in armchairs and on the sofa, listening affably;
from the next room came feminine laughter and the sounds of evening tea.
. . . Crossing his legs, after each phrase sipping tea with rum in it,
and trying to assume an expression of careless boredom, he talked of his
stage triumphs.
“I am a provincial actor principally,” he said, smiling condescendingly,
“but I have played in Petersburg and Moscow too. . . . By the way, I
will describe an incident which illustrates pretty well the state of
mind of to-day. At my benefit in Moscow the young people brought me such
a mass of laurel wreaths that I swear by all I hold sacred I did not
know where to put them! Parole d’honneur! Later on, at a moment when
funds were short, I took the laurel wreaths to the shop, and . . . guess
what they weighed. Eighty pounds altogether. Ha, ha! you can’t think how
useful the money was. Artists, indeed, are often hard up. To-day I have
hundreds, thousands, tomorrow nothing. . . . To-day I haven’t a crust of
bread, to-morrow I have oysters and anchovies, hang it all!”
The local inhabitants sipped their glasses decorously and listened. The
well-pleased host, not knowing how to make enough of his cultured and
interesting visitor, presented to him a distant relative who had just
arrived, one Pavel Ignatyevitch Klimov, a bulky gentleman about forty,
wearing a long frock-coat and very full trousers.
“You ought to know each other,” said Zybaev as he presented Klimov; “he
loves theatres, and at one time used to act himself. He has an estate in
the Tula province.”
Podzharov and Klimov got into conversation. It appeared, to the great
satisfaction of both, that the Tula landowner lived in the very town in
which the jeune premier had acted for two seasons in succession.
Enquiries followed about the town, about common acquaintances, and about
the theatre. . . .
“Do you know, I like that town awfully,” said the jeune premier,
displaying his red socks. “What streets, what a charming park, and what
society! Delightful society!”
“Yes, delightful society,” the landowner assented.
“A commercial town, but extremely cultured. . . . For instance, er-er-er
. . . the head master of the high school, the public prosecutor . . .
the officers. . . . The police captain, too, was not bad, a man, as the
French say, enchanté, and the women, Allah, what women!”
“Yes, the women . . . certainly. . . .”
“Perhaps I am partial; the fact is that in your town, I don’t know why,
I was devilishly lucky with the fair sex! I could write a dozen novels.
To take this episode, for instance. . . . I was staying in Yegoryevsky
Street, in the very house where the Treasury is. . . .”
“The red house without stucco?”
“Yes, yes . . . without stucco. . . . Close by, as I remember now, lived
a local beauty, Varenka. . . .”
“Not Varvara Nikolayevna?” asked Klimov, and he beamed with
satisfaction. “She really is a beauty . . . the most beautiful girl in
the town.”
“The most beautiful girl in the town! A classic profile, great black
eyes . . . . and hair to her waist! She saw me in ‘Hamlet,’ she wrote me
a letter à la Pushkin’s ‘Tatyana.’ . . . I answered, as you may guess.
. . .”
Podzharov looked round, and having satisfied himself that there were no
ladies in the room, rolled his eyes, smiled mournfully, and heaved a
sigh.
“I came home one evening after a performance,” he whispered, “and there
she was, sitting on my sofa. There followed tears, protestations of
love, kisses. . . . Oh, that was a marvellous, that was a divine night!
Our romance lasted two months, but that night was never repeated. It was
a night, parole d’honneur!”
“Excuse me, what’s that?” muttered Klimov, turning crimson and gazing
open-eyed at the actor. “I know Varvara Nikolayevna well: she’s my
niece.”
Podzharov was embarrassed, and he, too, opened his eyes wide.
“How’s this?” Klimov went on, throwing up his hands. “I know the girl,
and . . . and . . . I am surprised. . . .”
“I am very sorry this has come up,” muttered the actor, getting up and
rubbing something out of his left eye with his little finger. “Though,
of course . . . of course, you as her uncle . . .”
The other guests, who had hitherto been listening to the actor with
pleasure and rewarding him with smiles, were embarrassed and dropped
their eyes.
“Please, do be so good . . . take your words back . . .” said Klimov in
extreme embarrassment. “I beg you to do so!”
“If . . . er-er-er . . . it offends you, certainly,” answered the actor,
with an undefined movement of his hand.
“And confess you have told a falsehood.”
“I, no . . . er-er-er. . . . It was not a lie, but I greatly regret
having spoken too freely. . . . And, in fact . . . I don’t understand
your tone!”
Klimov walked up and down the room in silence, as though in uncertainty
and hesitation. His fleshy face grew more and more crimson, and the
veins in his neck swelled up. After walking up and down for about two
minutes he went up to the actor and said in a tearful voice:
“No, do be so good as to confess that you told a lie about Varenka! Have
the goodness to do so!”
“It’s queer,” said the actor, with a strained smile, shrugging his
shoulders and swinging his leg. “This is positively insulting!”
“So you will not confess it?”
“I do-on’t understand!”
“You will not? In that case, excuse me . . . I shall have to resort to
unpleasant measures. Either, sir, I shall insult you at once on the
spot, or . . . if you are an honourable man, you will kindly accept my
challenge to a duel. . . . We will fight!”
“Certainly!” rapped out the jeune premier, with a contemptuous gesture.
“Certainly.”
Extremely perturbed, the guests and the host, not knowing what to do,
drew Klimov aside and began begging him not to get up a scandal.
Astonished feminine countenances appeared in the doorway. . . . The
jeune premier turned round, said a few words, and with an air of being
unable to remain in a house where he was insulted, took his cap and made
off without saying good-bye.
On his way home the jeune premier smiled contemptuously and shrugged his
shoulders, but when he reached his hotel room and stretched himself on
his sofa he felt exceedingly uneasy.
“The devil take him!” he thought. “A duel does not matter, he won’t kill
me, but the trouble is the other fellows will hear of it, and they know
perfectly well it was a yarn. It’s abominable! I shall be disgraced all
over Russia. . . .”
Podzharov thought a little, smoked, and to calm himself went out into
the street.
“I ought to talk to this bully, ram into his stupid noddle that he is a
blockhead and a fool, and that I am not in the least afraid of him. . .
.”
The jeune premier stopped before Zybaev’s house and looked at the
windows. Lights were still burning behind the muslin curtains and
figures were moving about.
“I’ll wait for him!” the actor decided.
It was dark and cold. A hateful autumn rain was drizzling as though
through a sieve. Podzharov leaned his elbow on a lamp-post and abandoned
himself to a feeling of uneasiness.
He was wet through and exhausted.
At two o’clock in the night the guests began coming out of Zybaev’s
house. The landowner from Tula was the last to make his appearance. He
heaved a sigh that could be heard by the whole street and scraped the
pavement with his heavy overboots.
“Excuse me!” said the jeune premier, overtaking him. “One minute.”
Klimov stopped. The actor gave a smile, hesitated, and began,
stammering: “I . . . I confess . . . I told a lie.”
“No, sir, you will please confess that publicly,” said Klimov, and he
turned crimson again. “I can’t leave it like that. . . .”
“But you see I am apologizing! I beg you . . . don’t you understand? I
beg you because you will admit a duel will make talk, and I am in a
position. . . . My fellow-actors . . . goodness knows what they may
think. . . .”
The jeune premier tried to appear unconcerned, to smile, to stand erect,
but his body would not obey him, his voice trembled, his eyes bAlinked
guiltily, and his head drooped. For a good while he went on muttering
something. Klimov listened to him, thought a little, and heaved a sigh.
“Well, so be it,” he said. “May God forgive you. Only don’t lie in
future, young man. Nothing degrades a man like lying . . . yes, indeed!
You are a young man, you have had a good education. . . .”
The landowner from Tula, in a benignant, fatherly way, gave him a
lecture, while the jeune premier listened and smiled meekly. . . . When
it was over he smirked, bowed, and with a guilty step and a crestfallen
air set off for his hotel.
As he went to bed half an hour later he felt that he was out of danger
and was already in excellent spirits. Serene and satisfied that the
misunderstanding had ended so satisfactorily, he wrapped himself in the
bedclothes, soon fell asleep, and slept soundly till ten o’clock next
morning.
A DEFENCELESS CREATURE
IN spite of a violent attack of gout in the night and the nervous
exhaustion left by it, Kistunov went in the morning to his office and
began punctually seeing the clients of the bank and persons who had come
with petitions. He looked languid and exhausted, and spoke in a faint
voice hardly above a whisper, as though he were dying.
“What can I do for you?” he asked a lady in an antediluvian mantle,
whose back view was extremely suggestive of a huge dung-beetle.
“You see, your Excellency,” the petitioner in question began, speaking
rapidly, “my husband Shtchukin, a collegiate assessor, was ill for five
months, and while he, if you will excuse my saying so, was laid up at
home, he was for no sort of reason dismissed, your Excellency; and when
I went for his salary they deducted, if you please, your Excellency,
twenty-four roubles thirty-six kopecks from his salary. ‘What for?’ I
asked. ‘He borrowed from the club fund,’ they told me, ‘and the other
clerks had stood security for him.’ How was that? How could he have
borrowed it without my consent? It’s impossible, your Excellency. What’s
the reason of it? I am a poor woman, I earn my bread by taking in
lodgers. I am a weak, defenceless woman . . . I have to put up with ill-
usage from everyone and never hear a kind word. . .”
The petitioner was bAlinking, and dived into her mantle for her
handkerchief. Kistunov took her petition from her and began reading it.
“Excuse me, what’s this?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “I can make
nothing of it. Evidently you have come to the wrong place, madam. Your
petition has nothing to do with us at all. You will have to apply to the
department in which your husband was employed.”
“Why, my dear sir, I have been to five places already, and they would
not even take the petition anywhere,” said Madame Shtchukin. “I’d quite
lost my head, but, thank goodness—God bless him for it—my son-in-law,
Boris Matveyitch, advised me to come to you. ‘You go to Mr. Kistunov,
mamma: he is an influential man, he can do anything for you. . . .’ Help
me, your Excellency!”
“We can do nothing for you, Madame Shtchukin. You must understand: your
husband served in the Army Medical Department, and our establishment is
a purely private commercial undertaking, a bank. Surely you must
understand that!”
Kistunov shrugged his shoulders again and turned to a gentleman in a
military uniform, with a swollen face.
“Your Excellency,” piped Madame Shtchukin in a pitiful voice, “I have
the doctor’s certificate that my husband was ill! Here it is, if you
will kindly look at it.”
“Very good, I believe you,” Kistunov said irritably, “but I repeat it
has nothing to do with us. It’s queer and positively absurd! Surely your
husband must know where you are to apply?”
“He knows nothing, your Excellency. He keeps on: ‘It’s not your
business! Get away!’—that’s all I can get out of him. . . . Whose
business is it, then? It’s I have to keep them all!”
Kistunov again turned to Madame Shtchukin and began explaining to her
the difference between the Army Medical Department and a private bank.
She listened attentively, nodded in token of assent, and said:
“Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . I understand, sir. In that case, your
Excellency, tell them to pay me fifteen roubles at least! I agree to
take part on account!”
“Ough!” sighed Kistunov, letting his head drop back. “There’s no making
you see reason. Do understand that to apply to us with such a petition
is as strange as to send in a petition concerning divorce, for instance,
to a chemist’s or to the Assaying Board. You have not been paid your
due, but what have we to do with it?”
“Your Excellency, make me remember you in my prayers for the rest of my
days, have pity on a lone, lorn woman,” wailed Madame Shtchukin; “I am a
weak, defenceless woman. . . . I am worried to death, I’ve to settle
with the lodgers and see to my husband’s affairs and fly round looking
after the house, and I am going to church every day this week, and my
son-in-law is out of a job. . . . I might as well not eat or drink. . .
. I can scarcely keep on my feet. . . . I haven’t slept all night. . .
.”
Kistunov was conscious of the palpitation of his heart. With a face of
anguish, pressing his hand on his heart, he began explaining to Madame
Shtchukin again, but his voice failed him.
“No, excuse me, I cannot talk to you,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“My head’s going round. You are hindering us and wasting your time.
Ough! Alexey Nikolaitch,” he said, addressing one of his clerks, “please
will you explain to Madame Shtchukin?”
Kistunov, passing by all the petitioners, went to his private room and
signed about a dozen papers while Alexey Nikolaitch was still engaged
with Madame Shtchukin. As he sat in his room Kistunov heard two voices:
the monotonous, restrained bass of Alexey Nikolaitch and the shrill,
wailing voice of Madame Shtchukin.
“I am a weak, defenceless woman, I am a woman in delicate health,” said
Madame Shtchukin. “I look strong, but if you were to overhaul me there
is not one healthy fibre in me. I can scarcely keep on my feet, and my
appetite is gone. . . . I drank my cup of coffee this morning without
the slightest relish. . . .”
Alexey Nikolaitch explained to her the difference between the
departments and the complicated system of sending in papers. He was soon
exhausted, and his place was taken by the accountant.
“A wonderfully disagreeable woman!” said Kistunov, revolted, nervously
cracking his fingers and continually going to the decanter of water.
“She’s a perfect idiot! She’s worn me out and she’ll exhaust them, the
nasty creature! Ough! . . . my heart is throbbing.”
Half an hour later he rang his bell. Alexey Nikolaitch made his
appearance.
“How are things going?” Kistunov asked languidly.
“We can’t make her see anything, Pyotr Alexandritch! We are simply done.
We talk of one thing and she talks of something else.”
“I . . . I can’t stand the sound of her voice. . . . I am ill . . . . I
can’t bear it.”
“Send for the porter, Pyotr Alexandritch, let him put her out.”
“No, no,” cried Kistunov in alarm. “She will set up a squeal, and there
are lots of flats in this building, and goodness knows what they would
think of us. . . . Do try and explain to her, my dear fellow. . . .”
A minute later the deep drone of Alexey Nikolaitch’s voice was audible
again. A quarter of an hour passed, and instead of his bass there was
the murmur of the accountant’s powerful tenor.
“Re-mark-ably nasty woman,” Kistunov thought indignantly, nervously
shrugging his shoulders. “No more brains than a sheep. I believe that’s
a twinge of the gout again. . . . My migraine is coming back. . . .”
In the next room Alexey Nikolaitch, at the end of his resources, at last
tapped his finger on the table and then on his own forehead.
“The fact of the matter is you haven’t a head on your shoulders,” he
said, “but this.”
“Come, come,” said the old lady, offended. “Talk to your own wife like
that. . . . You screw! . . . Don’t be too free with your hands.”
And looking at her with fury, with exasperation, as though he would
devour her, Alexey Nikolaitch said in a quiet, stifled voice:
“Clear out.”
“Wha-at?” squealed Madame Shtchukin. “How dare you? I am a weak,
defenceless woman; I won’t endure it. My husband is a collegiate
assessor. You screw! . . . I will go to Dmitri Karlitch, the lawyer, and
there will be nothing left of you! I’ve had the law of three lodgers,
and I will make you flop down at my feet for your saucy words! I’ll go
to your general. Your Excellency, your Excellency!”
“Be off, you pest,” hissed Alexey Nikolaitch.
Kistunov opened his door and looked into the office.
“What is it?” he asked in a tearful voice.
Madame Shtchukin, as red as a crab, was standing in the middle of the
room, rolling her eyes and prodding the air with her fingers. The bank
clerks were standing round red in the face too, and, evidently harassed,
were looking at each other distractedly.
“Your Excellency,” cried Madame Shtchukin, pouncing upon Kistunov.
“Here, this man, he here . . . this man . . .” (she pointed to Alexey
Nikolaitch) “tapped himself on the forehead and then tapped the table. .
. . You told him to go into my case, and he’s jeering at me! I am a
weak, defenceless woman. . . . My husband is a collegiate assessor, and
I am a major’s daughter myself!”
“Very good, madam,” moaned Kistunov. “I will go into it . . . I will
take steps. . . . Go away . . . later!”
“And when shall I get the money, your Excellency? I need it to-day!”
Kistunov passed his trembling hand over his forehead, heaved a sigh, and
began explaining again.
“Madam, I have told you already this is a bank, a private commercial
establishment. . . . What do you want of us? And do understand that you
are hindering us.”
Madame Shtchukin listened to him and sighed.
“To be sure, to be sure,” she assented. “Only, your Excellency, do me
the kindness, make me pray for you for the rest of my life, be a father,
protect me! If a medical certificate is not enough I can produce an
affidavit from the police. . . . Tell them to give me the money.”
Everything began swimming before Kistunov’s eyes. He breathed out all
the air in his lungs in a prolonged sigh and sank helpless on a chair.
“How much do you want?” he asked in a weak voice.
“Twenty-four roubles and thirty-six kopecks.”
Kistunov took his pocket-book out of his pocket, extracted a twenty-five
rouble note and gave it to Madame Shtchukin.
“Take it and . . . and go away!”
Madame Shtchukin wrapped the money up in her handkerchief, put it away,
and pursing up her face into a sweet, mincing, even coquettish smile,
asked:
“Your Excellency, and would it be possible for my husband to get a post
again?”
“I am going . . . I am ill . . .” said Kistunov in a weary voice. “I
have dreadful palpitations.”
When he had driven home Alexey Nikolaitch sent Nikita for some laurel
drops, and, after taking twenty drops each, all the clerks set to work,
while Madame Shtchukin stayed another two hours in the vestibule,
talking to the porter and waiting for Kistunov to return. . . .
She came again next day.
AN ENIGMATIC NATURE
ON the red velvet seat of a first-class railway carriage a pretty lady
sits half reclining. An expensive fluffy fan trembles in her tightly
closed fingers, a pince-nez keeps dropping off her pretty little nose,
the brooch heaves and falls on her bosom, like a boat on the ocean. She
is greatly agitated.
On the seat opposite sits the Provincial Secretary of Special
Commissions, a budding young author, who from time to time publishes
long stories of high life, or “Novelli” as he calls them, in the leading
paper of the province. He is gazing into her face, gazing intently, with
the eyes of a connoisseur. He is watching, studying, catching every
shade of this exceptional, enigmatic nature. He understands it, he
fathoms it. Her soul, her whole psychology lies open before him.
“Oh, I understand, I understand you to your inmost depths!” says the
Secretary of Special Commissions, kissing her hand near the bracelet.
“Your sensitive, responsive soul is seeking to escape from the maze of
—— Yes, the struggle is terrific, titanic. But do not lose heart, you
will be triumphant! Yes!”
“Write about me, Voldemar!” says the pretty lady, with a mournful smile.
“My life has been so full, so varied, so chequered. Above all, I am
unhappy. I am a suffering soul in some page of Dostoevsky. Reveal my
soul to the world, Voldemar. Reveal that hapless soul. You are a
psychologist. We have not been in the train an hour together, and you
have already fathomed my heart.”
“Tell me! I beseech you, tell me!”
“Listen. My father was a poor clerk in the Service. He had a good heart
and was not without intelligence; but the spirit of the age—of his
environment—vous comprenez?—I do not blame my poor father. He drank,
gambled, took bribes. My mother—but why say more? Poverty, the struggle
for daily bread, the consciousness of insignificance—ah, do not force me
to recall it! I had to make my own way. You know the monstrous education
at a boarding-school, foolish novel-reading, the errors of early youth,
the first timid flutter of love. It was awful! The vacillation! And the
agonies of losing faith in life, in oneself! Ah, you are an author. You
know us women. You will understand. Unhappily I have an intense nature.
I looked for happiness—and what happiness! I longed to set my soul free.
Yes. In that I saw my happiness!”
“Exquisite creature!” murmured the author, kissing her hand close to the
bracelet. “It’s not you I am kissing, but the suffering of humanity. Do
you remember Raskolnikov and his kiss?”
“Oh, Voldemar, I longed for glory, renown, success, like every—why
affect modesty?—every nature above the commonplace. I yearned for
something extraordinary, above the common lot of woman! And then—and
then—there crossed my path—an old general—very well off. Understand me,
Voldemar! It was self-sacrifice, renunciation! You must see that! I
could do nothing else. I restored the family fortunes, was able to
travel, to do good. Yet how I suffered, how revolting, how loathsome to
me were his embraces—though I will be fair to him—he had fought nobly in
his day. There were moments—terrible moments—but I was kept up by the
thought that from day to day the old man might die, that then I would
begin to live as I liked, to give myself to the man I adore—be happy.
There is such a man, Voldemar, indeed there is!”
The pretty lady flutters her fan more violently. Her face takes a
lachrymose expression. She goes on:
“But at last the old man died. He left me something. I was free as a
bird of the air. Now is the moment for me to be happy, isn’t it,
Voldemar? Happiness comes tapping at my window, I had only to let it
in—but—Voldemar, listen, I implore you! Now is the time for me to give
myself to the man I love, to become the partner of his life, to help, to
uphold his ideals, to be happy—to find rest—but—how ignoble, repulsive,
and senseless all our life is! How mean it all is, Voldemar. I am
wretched, wretched, wretched! Again there is an obstacle in my path!
Again I feel that my happiness is far, far away! Ah, what anguish!—if
only you knew what anguish!”
“But what—what stands in your way? I implore you tell me! What is it?”
“Another old general, very well off——”
The broken fan conceals the pretty little face. The author props on his
fist his thought-heavy brow and ponders with the air of a master in
psychology. The engine is whistling and hissing while the window
curtains flush red with the glow of the setting sun.
A HAPPY MAN
THE passenger train is just starting from Bologoe, the junction on the
Petersburg-Moscow line. In a second-class smoking compartment five
passengers sit dozing, shrouded in the twilight of the carriage. They
had just had a meal, and now, snugly ensconced in their seats, they are
trying to go to sleep. Stillness.
The door opens and in there walks a tall, lanky figure straight as a
poker, with a ginger-coloured hat and a smart overcoat, wonderfully
suggestive of a journalist in Jules Verne or on the comic stage.
The figure stands still in the middle of the compartment for a long
while, breathing heavily, screwing up his eyes and peering at the seats.
“No, wrong again!” he mutters. “What the deuce! It’s positively
revolting! No, the wrong one again!”
One of the passengers stares at the figure and utters a shout of joy:
“Ivan Alexyevitch! what brings you here? Is it you?”
The poker-like gentleman starts, stares blankly at the passenger, and
recognizing him claps his hands with delight.
“Ha! Pyotr Petrovitch,” he says. “How many summers, how many winters! I
didn’t know you were in this train.”
“How are you getting on?”
“I am all right; the only thing is, my dear fellow, I’ve lost my
compartment and I simply can’t find it. What an idiot I am! I ought to
be thrashed!”
The poker-like gentleman sways a little unsteadily and sniggers.
“Queer things do happen!” he continues. “I stepped out just after the
second bell to get a glass of brandy. I got it, of course. Well, I
thought, since it’s a long way to the next station, it would be as well
to have a second glass. While I was thinking about it and drinking it
the third bell rang. . . . I ran like mad and jumped into the first
carriage. I am an idiot! I am the son of a hen!”
“But you seem in very good spirits,” observes Pyotr Petrovitch. “Come
and sit down! There’s room and a welcome.”
“No, no. . . . I’m off to look for my carriage. Good-bye!”
“You’ll fall between the carriages in the dark if you don’t look out!
Sit down, and when we get to a station you’ll find your own compartment.
Sit down!”
Ivan Alexyevitch heaves a sigh and irresolutely sits down facing Pyotr
Petrovitch. He is visibly excited, and fidgets as though he were sitting
on thorns.
“Where are you travelling to?” Pyotr Petrovitch enquires.
“I? Into space. There is such a turmoil in my head that I couldn’t tell
where I am going myself. I go where fate takes me. Ha-ha! My dear
fellow, have you ever seen a happy fool? No? Well, then, take a look at
one. You behold the happiest of mortals! Yes! Don’t you see something
from my face?”
“Well, one can see you’re a bit . . . a tiny bit so-so.”
“I dare say I look awfully stupid just now. Ach! it’s a pity I haven’t a
looking-glass, I should like to look at my counting-house. My dear
fellow, I feel I am turning into an idiot, honour bright. Ha-ha! Would
you believe it, I’m on my honeymoon. Am I not the son of a hen?”
“You? Do you mean to say you are married?”
“To-day, my dear boy. We came away straight after the wedding.”
Congratulations and the usual questions follow. “Well, you are a
fellow!” laughs Pyotr Petrovitch. “That’s why you are rigged out such a
dandy.”
“Yes, indeed. . . . To complete the illusion, I’ve even sprinkled myself
with scent. I am over my ears in vanity! No care, no thought, nothing
but a sensation of something or other . . . deuce knows what to call it
. . . beatitude or something? I’ve never felt so grand in my life!”
Ivan Alexyevitch shuts his eyes and waggles his head.
“I’m revoltingly happy,” he says. “Just think; in a minute I shall go to
my compartment. There on the seat near the window is sitting a being who
is, so to say, devoted to you with her whole being. A little blonde with
a little nose . . . little fingers. . . . My little darling! My angel!
My little poppet! Phylloxera of my soul! And her little foot! Good God!
A little foot not like our beetle-crushers, but something miniature,
fairylike, allegorical. I could pick it up and eat it, that little foot!
Oh, but you don’t understand! You’re a materialist, of course, you begin
analyzing at once, and one thing and another. You are cold-hearted
bachelors, that’s what you are! When you get married you’ll think of me.
‘Where’s Ivan Alexyevitch now?’ you’ll say. Yes; so in a minute I’m
going to my compartment. There she is waiting for me with impatience . .
. in joyful anticipation of my appearance. She’ll have a smile to greet
me. I sit down beside her and take her chin with my two fingers.”
Ivan Alexyevitch waggles his head and goes off into a chuckle of
delight.
“Then I lay my noddle on her shoulder and put my arm round her waist.
Around all is silence, you know . . . poetic twilight. I could embrace
the whole world at such a moment. Pyotr Petrovitch, allow me to embrace
you!”
“Delighted, I’m sure.” The two friends embrace while the passengers
laugh in chorus. And the happy bridegroom continues:
“And to complete the idiocy, or, as the novelists say, to complete the
illusion, one goes to the refreshment-room and tosses off two or three
glasses. And then something happens in your head and your heart, finer
than you can read of in a fairy tale. I am a man of no importance, but I
feel as though I were limitless: I embrace the whole world!”
The passengers, looking at the tipsy and blissful bridegroom, are
infected by his cheerfulness and no longer feel sleepy. Instead of one
listener, Ivan Alexyevitch has now an audience of five. He wriggles and
splutters, gesticulates, and prattles on without ceasing. He laughs and
they all laugh.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, don’t think so much! Damn all this analysis! If
you want a drink, drink, no need to philosophize as to whether it’s bad
for you or not. . . . Damn all this philosophy and psychology!”
The guard walks through the compartment.
“My dear fellow,” the bridegroom addresses him, “when you pass through
the carriage No. 209 look out for a lady in a grey hat with a white bird
and tell her I’m here!”
“Yes, sir. Only there isn’t a No. 209 in this train; there’s 219!”
“Well, 219, then! It’s all the same. Tell that lady, then, that her
husband is all right!”
Ivan Alexyevitch suddenly clutches his head and groans:
“Husband. . . . Lady. . . . All in a minute! Husband. . . . Ha-ha! I am
a puppy that needs thrashing, and here I am a husband! Ach, idiot! But
think of her! . . . Yesterday she was a little girl, a midget . . . it s
simply incredible!”
“Nowadays it really seems strange to see a happy man,” observes one of
the passengers; “one as soon expects to see a white elephant.”
“Yes, and whose fault is it?” says Ivan Alexyevitch, stretching his long
legs and thrusting out his feet with their very pointed toes. “If you
are not happy it’s your own fault! Yes, what else do you suppose it is?
Man is the creator of his own happiness. If you want to be happy you
will be, but you don’t want to be! You obstinately turn away from
happiness.”
“Why, what next! How do you make that out?”
“Very simply. Nature has ordained that at a certain stage in his life
man should love. When that time comes you should love like a house on
fire, but you won’t heed the dictates of nature, you keep waiting for
something. What’s more, it’s laid down by law that the normal man should
enter upon matrimony. There’s no happiness without marriage. When the
propitious moment has come, get married. There’s no use in shilly-
shallying. . . . But you don’t get married, you keep waiting for
something! Then the Scriptures tell us that ‘wine maketh glad the heart
of man.’ . . . If you feel happy and you want to feel better still, then
go to the refreshment bar and have a drink. The great thing is not to be
too clever, but to follow the beaten track! The beaten track is a grand
thing!”
“You say that man is the creator of his own happiness. How the devil is
he the creator of it when a toothache or an ill-natured mother-in-law is
enough to scatter his happiness to the winds? Everything depends on
chance. If we had an accident at this moment you’d sing a different
tune.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” retorts the bridegroom. “Railway accidents only
happen once a year. I’m not afraid of an accident, for there is no
reason for one. Accidents are exceptional! Confound them! I don’t want
to talk of them! Oh, I believe we’re stopping at a station.”
“Where are you going now?” asks Pyotr Petrovitch. “To Moscow or
somewhere further south?
“Why, bless you! How could I go somewhere further south, when I’m on my
way to the north?”
“But Moscow isn’t in the north.”
“I know that, but we’re on our way to Petersburg,” says Ivan
Alexyevitch.
“We are going to Moscow, mercy on us!”
“To Moscow? What do you mean?” says the bridegroom in amazement.
“It’s queer. . . . For what station did you take your ticket?”
“For Petersburg.”
“In that case I congratulate you. You’ve got into the wrong train.”
There follows a minute of silence. The bridegroom gets up and looks
blankly round the company.
“Yes, yes,” Pyotr Petrovitch explains. “You must have jumped into the
wrong train at Bologoe. . . . After your glass of brandy you succeeded
in getting into the down-train.”
Ivan Alexyevitch turns pale, clutches his head, and begins pacing
rapidly about the carriage.
“Ach, idiot that I am!” he says in indignation. “Scoundrel! The devil
devour me! Whatever am I to do now? Why, my wife is in that train! She’s
there all alone, expecting me, consumed by anxiety. Ach, I’m a motley
fool!”
The bridegroom falls on the seat and writhes as though someone had
trodden on his corns.
“I am un-unhappy man!” he moans. “What am I to do, what am I to do?”
“There, there!” the passengers try to console him. “It’s all right . . .
. You must telegraph to your wife and try to change into the Petersburg
express. In that way you’ll overtake her.”
“The Petersburg express!” weeps the bridegroom, the creator of his own
happiness. “And how am I to get a ticket for the Petersburg express? All
my money is with my wife.”
The passengers, laughing and whispering together, make a collection and
furnish the happy man with funds.
A TROUBLESOME VISITOR
IN the low-pitched, crooked little hut of Artyom, the forester, two men
were sitting under the big dark ikon—Artyom himself, a short and lean
peasant with a wrinkled, aged-looking face and a little beard that grew
out of his neck, and a well-grown young man in a new crimson shirt and
big wading boots, who had been out hunting and come in for the night.
They were sitting on a bench at a little three-legged table on which a
tallow candle stuck into a bottle was lazily burning.
Outside the window the darkness of the night was full of the noisy
uproar into which nature usually breaks out before a thunderstorm. The
wind howled angrily and the bowed trees moaned miserably. One pane of
the window had been pasted up with paper, and leaves torn off by the
wind could be heard pattering against the paper.
“I tell you what, good Christian,” said Artyom in a hoarse little tenor
half-whisper, staring with unbAlinking, scared-looking eyes at the
hunter. “I am not afraid of wolves or bears, or wild beasts of any sort,
but I am afraid of man. You can save yourself from beasts with a gun or
some other weapon, but you have no means of saving yourself from a
wicked man.”
“To be sure, you can fire at a beast, but if you shoot at a robber you
will have to answer for it: you will go to Siberia.”
“I’ve been forester, my lad, for thirty years, and I couldn’t tell you
what I have had to put up with from wicked men. There have been lots and
lots of them here. The hut’s on a track, it’s a cart-road, and that
brings them, the devils. Every sort of ruffian turns up, and without
taking off his cap or making the sign of the cross, bursts straight in
upon one with: ‘Give us some bread, you old so-and-so.’ And where am I
to get bread for him? What claim has he? Am I a millionaire to feed
every drunkard that passes? They are half-blind with spite. . . . They
have no cross on them, the devils . . . . They’ll give you a clout on
the ear and not think twice about it: ‘Give us bread!’ Well, one gives
it. . . . One is not going to fight with them, the idols! Some of them
are two yards across the shoulders, and a great fist as big as your
boot, and you see the sort of figure I am. One of them could smash me
with his little finger. . . . Well, one gives him bread and he gobbles
it up, and stretches out full length across the hut with not a word of
thanks. And there are some that ask for money. ‘Tell me, where is your
money?’ As though I had money! How should I come by it?”
“A forester and no money!” laughed the hunter. “You get wages every
month, and I’ll be bound you sell timber on the sly.”
Artyom took a timid sideway glance at his visitor and twitched his beard
as a magpie twitches her tail.
“You are still young to say a thing like that to me,” he said. “You will
have to answer to God for those words. Whom may your people be? Where do
you come from?”
“I am from Vyazovka. I am the son of Nefed the village elder.”
“You have gone out for sport with your gun. I used to like sport, too,
when I was young. H’m! Ah, our sins are grievous,” said Artyom, with a
yawn. “It’s a sad thing! There are few good folks, but villains and
murderers no end—God have mercy upon us.”
“You seem to be frightened of me, too. . . .”
“Come, what next! What should I be afraid of you for? I see. . . . I
understand. . . . You came in, and not just anyhow, but you made the
sign of the cross, you bowed, all decent and proper. . . . I understand.
. . . One can give you bread. . . . I am a widower, I don’t heat the
stove, I sold the samovar. . . . I am too poor to keep meat or anything
else, but bread you are welcome to.”
At that moment something began growling under the bench: the growl was
followed by a hiss. Artyom started, drew up his legs, and looked
enquiringly at the hunter.
“It’s my dog worrying your cat,” said the hunter. “You devils!” he
shouted under the bench. “Lie down. You’ll be beaten. I say, your cat’s
thin, mate! She is nothing but skin and bone.”
“She is old, it is time she was dead. . . . So you say you are from
Vyazovka?”
“I see you don’t feed her. Though she’s a cat she’s a creature . . .
every breathing thing. You should have pity on her!”
“You are a queer lot in Vyazovka,” Artyom went on, as though not
listening. “The church has been robbed twice in one year. . . To think
that there are such wicked men! So they fear neither man nor God! To
steal what is the Lord’s! Hanging’s too good for them! In old days the
governors used to have such rogues flogged.”
“However you punish, whether it is with flogging or anything else, it
will be no good, you will not knock the wickedness out of a wicked man.”
“Save and preserve us, Queen of Heaven!” The forester sighed abruptly.
“Save us from all enemies and evildoers. Last week at Volovy
Zaimishtchy, a mower struck another on the chest with his scythe . . .
he killed him outright! And what was it all about, God bless me! One
mower came out of the tavern . . . drunk. The other met him, drunk too.”
The young man, who had been listening attentively, suddenly started, and
his face grew tense as he listened.
“Stay,” he said, interrupting the forester. “I fancy someone is
shouting.”
The hunter and the forester fell to listening with their eyes fixed on
the window. Through the noise of the forest they could hear sounds such
as the strained ear can always distinguish in every storm, so that it
was difficult to make out whether people were calling for help or
whether the wind was wailing in the chimney. But the wind tore at the
roof, tapped at the paper on the window, and brought a distinct shout of
“Help!”
“Talk of your murderers,” said the hunter, turning pale and getting up.
“Someone is being robbed!”
“Lord have mercy on us,” whispered the forester, and he, too, turned
pale and got up.
The hunter looked aimlessly out of window and walked up and down the
hut.
“What a night, what a night!” he muttered. “You can’t see your hand
before your face! The very time for a robbery. Do you hear? There is a
shout again.”
The forester looked at the ikon and from the ikon turned his eyes upon
the hunter, and sank on to the bench, collapsing like a man terrified by
sudden bad news.
“Good Christian,” he said in a tearful voice, “you might go into the
passage and bolt the door. And we must put out the light.”
“What for?”
“By ill-luck they may find their way here. . . . Oh, our sins!”
“We ought to be going, and you talk of bolting the door! You are a
clever one! Are you coming?”
The hunter threw his gun over his shoulder and picked up his cap.
“Get ready, take your gun. Hey, Flerka, here,” he called to his dog.
“Flerka!”
A dog with long frayed ears, a mongrel between a setter and a house-dog,
came out from under the bench. He stretched himself by his master’s feet
and wagged his tail.
“Why are you sitting there?” cried the hunter to the forester. “You mean
to say you are not going?”
“Where?”
“To help!”
“How can I?” said the forester with a wave of his hand, shuddering all
over. “I can’t bother about it!”
“Why won’t you come?”
“After talking of such dreadful things I won’t stir a step into the
darkness. Bless them! And what should I go for?”
“What are you afraid of? Haven’t you got a gun? Let us go, please do.
It’s scaring to go alone; it will be more cheerful, the two of us. Do
you hear? There was a shout again. Get up!”
“Whatever do you think of me, lad?” wailed the forester. “Do you think I
am such a fool to go straight to my undoing?”
“So you are not coming?”
The forester did not answer. The dog, probably hearing a human cry, gave
a plaintive whine.
“Are you coming, I ask you?” cried the hunter, rolling his eyes angrily.
“You do keep on, upon my word,” said the forester with annoyance. “Go
yourself.”
“Ugh! . . . low cur,” growled the hunter, turning towards the door.
“Flerka, here!”
He went out and left the door open. The wind flew into the hut. The
flame of the candle flickered uneasily, flared up, and went out.
As he bolted the door after the hunter, the forester saw the puddles in
the track, the nearest pine-trees, and the retreating figure of his
guest lighted up by a flash of lightning. Far away he heard the rumble
of thunder.
“Holy, holy, holy,” whispered the forester, making haste to thrust the
thick bolt into the great iron rings. “What weather the Lord has sent
us!”
Going back into the room, he felt his way to the stove, lay down, and
covered himself from head to foot. Lying under the sheepskin and
listening intently, he could no longer hear the human cry, but the peals
of thunder kept growing louder and more prolonged. He could hear the big
wind-lashed raindrops pattering angrily on the panes and on the paper of
the window.
“He’s gone on a fool’s errand,” he thought, picturing the hunter soaked
with rain and stumbling over the tree-stumps. “I bet his teeth are
chattering with terror!”
Not more than ten minutes later there was a sound of footsteps, followed
by a loud knock at the door.
“Who’s there?” cried the forester.
“It’s I,” he heard the young man’s voice. “Unfasten the door.”
The forester clambered down from the stove, felt for the candle, and,
lighting it, went to the door. The hunter and his dog were drenched to
the skin. They had come in for the heaviest of the downpour, and now the
water ran from them as from washed clothes before they have been wrung
out.
“What was it?” asked the forester.
“A peasant woman driving in a cart; she had got off the road . . .”
answered the young man, struggling with his breathlessness. “She was
caught in a thicket.”
“Ah, the silly thing! She was frightened, then. . . . Well, did you put
her on the road?”
“I don’t care to talk to a scoundrel like you.”
The young man flung his wet cap on the bench and went on:
“I know now that you are a scoundrel and the lowest of men. And you a
keeper, too, getting a salary! You blackguard!”
The forester slunk with a guilty step to the stove, cleared his throat,
and lay down. The young man sat on the bench, thought a little, and lay
down on it full length. Not long afterwards he got up, put out the
candle, and lay down again. During a particularly loud clap of thunder
he turned over, spat on the floor, and growled out:
“He’s afraid. . . . And what if the woman were being murdered? Whose
business is it to defend her? And he an old man, too, and a Christian .
. . . He’s a pig and nothing else.”
The forester cleared his throat and heaved a deep sigh. Somewhere in the
darkness Flerka shook his wet coat vigorously, which sent drops of water
flying about all over the room.
“So you wouldn’t care if the woman were murdered?” the hunter went on.
“Well—strike me, God—I had no notion you were that sort of man. . . .”
A silence followed. The thunderstorm was by now over and the thunder
came from far away, but it was still raining.
“And suppose it hadn’t been a woman but you shouting ‘Help!’?” said the
hunter, breaking the silence. “How would you feel, you beast, if no one
ran to your aid? You have upset me with your meanness, plague take you!”
After another long interval the hunter said:
“You must have money to be afraid of people! A man who is poor is not
likely to be afraid. . . .”
“For those words you will answer before God,” Artyom said hoarsely from
the stove. “I have no money.”
“I dare say! Scoundrels always have money. . . . Why are you afraid of
people, then? So you must have! I’d like to take and rob you for spite,
to teach you a lesson! . . .”
Artyom slipped noiselessly from the stove, lighted a candle, and sat
down under the holy image. He was pale and did not take his eyes off the
hunter.
“Here, I’ll rob you,” said the hunter, getting up. “What do you think
about it? Fellows like you want a lesson. Tell me, where is your money
hidden?”
Artyom drew his legs up under him and bAlinked. “What are you wriggling
for? Where is your money hidden? Have you lost your tongue, you fool?
Why don’t you answer?”
The young man jumped up and went up to the forester.
“He is bAlinking like an owl! Well? Give me your money, or I will shoot
you with my gun.”
“Why do you keep on at me?” squealed the forester, and big tears rolled
from his eyes. “What’s the reason of it? God sees all! You will have to
answer, for every word you say, to God. You have no right whatever to
ask for my money.”
The young man looked at Artyom’s tearful face, frowned, and walked up
and down the hut, then angrily clapped his cap on his head and picked up
his gun.
“Ugh! . . . ugh! . . . it makes me sick to look at you,” he filtered
through his teeth. “I can’t bear the sight of you. I won’t sleep in your
house, anyway. Good-bye! Hey, Flerka!”
The door slammed and the troublesome visitor went out with his dog. . .
. Artyom bolted the door after him, crossed himself, and lay down.
AN ACTOR’S END
SHTCHIPTSOV, the “heavy father” and “good-hearted simpleton,” a tall and
thick-set old man, not so much distinguished by his talents as an actor
as by his exceptional physical strength, had a desperate quarrel with
the manager during the performance, and just when the storm of words was
at its height felt as though something had snapped in his chest. Zhukov,
the manager, as a rule began at the end of every heated discussion to
laugh hysterically and to fall into a swoon; on this occasion, however,
Shtchiptsov did not remain for this climax, but hurried home. The high
words and the sensation of something ruptured in his chest so agitated
him as he left the theatre that he forgot to wash off his paint, and did
nothing but take off his beard.
When he reached his hotel room, Shtchiptsov spent a long time pacing up
and down, then sat down on the bed, propped his head on his fists, and
sank into thought. He sat like that without stirring or uttering a sound
till two o’clock the next afternoon, when Sigaev, the comic man, walked
into his room.
“Why is it you did not come to the rehearsal, Booby Ivanitch?” the comic
man began, panting and filling the room with fumes of vodka. “Where have
you been?”
Shtchiptsov made no answer, but simply stared at the comic man with
lustreless eyes, under which there were smudges of paint.
“You might at least have washed your phiz!” Sigaev went on. “You are a
disgraceful sight! Have you been boozing, or . . . are you ill, or what?
But why don’t you speak? I am asking you: are you ill?”
Shtchiptsov did not speak. In spite of the paint on his face, the comic
man could not help noticing his striking pallor, the drops of sweat on
his forehead, and the twitching of his lips. His hands and feet were
trembling too, and the whole huge figure of the “good-natured simpleton”
looked somehow crushed and flattened. The comic man took a rapid glance
round the room, but saw neither bottle nor flask nor any other
suspicious vessel.
“I say, Mishutka, you know you are ill!” he said in a flutter. “Strike
me dead, you are ill! You don’t look yourself!”
Shtchiptsov remained silent and stared disconsolately at the floor.
“You must have caught cold,” said Sigaev, taking him by the hand. “Oh,
dear, how hot your hands are! What’s the trouble?”
“I wa-ant to go home,” muttered Shtchiptsov.
“But you are at home now, aren’t you?”
“No. . . . To Vyazma. . . .”
“Oh, my, anywhere else! It would take you three years to get to your
Vyazma. . . . What? do you want to go and see your daddy and mummy? I’ll
be bound, they’ve kicked the bucket years ago, and you won’t find their
graves. . . .”
“My ho-ome’s there.”
“Come, it’s no good giving way to the dismal dumps. These neurotic
feelings are the limit, old man. You must get well, for you have to play
Mitka in ‘The Terrible Tsar’ to-morrow. There is nobody else to do it.
Drink something hot and take some castor-oil? Have you got the money for
some castor-oil? Or, stay, I’ll run and buy some.”
The comic man fumbled in his pockets, found a fifteen-kopeck piece, and
ran to the chemist’s. A quarter of an hour later he came back.
“Come, drink it,” he said, holding the bottle to the “heavy father’s”
mouth. “Drink it straight out of the bottle. . . . All at a go! That’s
the way. . . . Now nibble at a clove that your very soul mayn’t stink of
the filthy stuff.”
The comic man sat a little longer with his sick friend, then kissed him
tenderly, and went away. Towards evening the jeune premier, Brama-
Glinsky, ran in to see Shtchiptsov. The gifted actor was wearing a pair
of prunella boots, had a glove on his left hand, was smoking a cigar,
and even smelt of heliotrope, yet nevertheless he strongly suggested a
traveller cast away in some land in which there were neither baths nor
laundresses nor tailors. . . .
“I hear you are ill?” he said to Shtchiptsov, twirling round on his
heel. “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you, really? . . .”
Shtchiptsov did not speak nor stir.
“Why don’t you speak? Do you feel giddy? Oh well, don’t talk, I won’t
pester you . . . don’t talk. . . .”
Brama-Glinsky (that was his stage name, in his passport he was called
Guskov) walked away to the window, put his hands in his pockets, and
fell to gazing into the street. Before his eyes stretched an immense
waste, bounded by a grey fence beside which ran a perfect forest of last
year’s burdocks. Beyond the waste ground was a dark, deserted factory,
with windows boarded up. A belated jackdaw was flying round the chimney.
This dreary, lifeless scene was beginning to be veiled in the dusk of
evening.
“I must go home!” the jeune premier heard.
“Where is home?”
“To Vyazma . . . to my home. . . .”
“It is a thousand miles to Vyazma . . . my boy,” sighed Brama-Glinsky,
drumming on the window-pane. “And what do you want to go to Vyazma for?”
“I want to die there.”
“What next! Now he’s dying! He has fallen ill for the first time in his
life, and already he fancies that his last hour is come. . . . No, my
boy, no cholera will carry off a buffalo like you. You’ll live to be a
hundred. . . . Where’s the pain?”
“There’s no pain, but I . . . feel . . .”
“You don’t feel anything, it all comes from being too healthy. Your
surplus energy upsets you. You ought to get jolly tight—drink, you know,
till your whole inside is topsy-turvy. Getting drunk is wonderfully
restoring. . . . Do you remember how screwed you were at Rostov on the
Don? Good Lord, the very thought of it is alarming! Sashka and I
together could only just carry in the barrel, and you emptied it alone,
and even sent for rum afterwards. . . . You got so drunk you were
catching devils in a sack and pulled a lamp-post up by the roots. Do you
remember? Then you went off to beat the Greeks. . . .”
Under the influence of these agreeable reminiscences Shtchiptsov’s face
brightened a little and his eyes began to shine.
“And do you remember how I beat Savoikin the manager?” he muttered,
raising his head. “But there! I’ve beaten thirty-three managers in my
time, and I can’t remember how many smaller fry. And what managers they
were! Men who would not permit the very winds to touch them! I’ve beaten
two celebrated authors and one painter!”
“What are you crying for?”
“At Kherson I killed a horse with my fists. And at Taganrog some roughs
fell upon me at night, fifteen of them. I took off their caps and they
followed me, begging: ‘Uncle, give us back our caps.’ That’s how I used
to go on.”
“What are you crying for, then, you silly?”
“But now it’s all over . . . I feel it. If only I could go to Vyazma!”
A pause followed. After a silence Shtchiptsov suddenly jumped up and
seized his cap. He looked distraught.
“Good-bye! I am going to Vyazma!” he articulated, staggering.
“And the money for the journey?”
“H’m! . . . I shall go on foot!”
“You are crazy. . . .”
The two men looked at each other, probably because the same thought—of
the boundless plains, the unending forests and swamps—struck both of
them at once.
“Well, I see you have gone off your head,” the jeune premier commented.
“I’ll tell you what, old man. . . . First thing, go to bed, then drink
some brandy and tea to put you into a sweat. And some castor-oil, of
course. Stay, where am I to get some brandy?”
Brama-Glinsky thought a minute, then made up his mind to go to a
shopkeeper called Madame Tsitrinnikov to try and get it from her on
tick: who knows? perhaps the woman would feel for them and let them have
it. The jeune premier went off, and half an hour later returned with a
bottle of brandy and some castor-oil. Shtchiptsov was sitting
motionless, as before, on the bed, gazing dumbly at the floor. He drank
the castor-oil offered him by his friend like an automaton, with no
consciousness of what he was doing. Like an automaton he sat afterwards
at the table, and drank tea and brandy; mechanically he emptied the
whole bottle and let the jeune premier put him to bed. The latter
covered him up with a quilt and an overcoat, advised him to get into a
perspiration, and went away.
The night came on; Shtchiptsov had drunk a great deal of brandy, but he
did not sleep. He lay motionless under the quilt and stared at the dark
ceiling; then, seeing the moon looking in at the window, he turned his
eyes from the ceiling towards the companion of the earth, and lay so
with open eyes till the morning. At nine o’clock in the morning Zhukov,
the manager, ran in.
“What has put it into your head to be ill, my angel?” he cackled,
wrinkling up his nose. “Aie, aie! A man with your physique has no
business to be ill! For shame, for shame! Do you know, I was quite
frightened. ‘Can our conversation have had such an effect on him?’ I
wondered. My dear soul, I hope it’s not through me you’ve fallen ill!
You know you gave me as good . . . er . . . And, besides, comrades can
never get on without words. You called me all sorts of names . . . and
have gone at me with your fists too, and yet I am fond of you! Upon my
soul, I am. I respect you and am fond of you! Explain, my angel, why I
am so fond of you. You are neither kith nor kin nor wife, but as soon as
I heard you had fallen ill it cut me to the heart.”
Zhukov spent a long time declaring his affection, then fell to kissing
the invalid, and finally was so overcome by his feelings that he began
laughing hysterically, and was even meaning to fall into a swoon, but,
probably remembering that he was not at home nor at the theatre, put off
the swoon to a more convenient opportunity and went away.
Soon after him Adabashev, the tragic actor, a dingy, short-sighted
individual who talked through his nose, made his appearance. . . . For a
long while he looked at Shtchiptsov, for a long while he pondered, and
at last he made a discovery.
“Do you know what, Mifa?” he said, pronouncing through his nose “f”
instead of “sh,” and assuming a mysterious expression. “Do you know
what? You ought to have a dose of castor-oil!”
Shtchiptsov was silent. He remained silent, too, a little later as the
tragic actor poured the loathsome oil into his mouth. Two hours later
Yevlampy, or, as the actors for some reason called him, Rigoletto, the
hairdresser of the company, came into the room. He too, like the tragic
man, stared at Shtchiptsov for a long time, then sighed like a steam-
engine, and slowly and deliberately began untying a parcel he had
brought with him. In it there were twenty cups and several little
flasks.
“You should have sent for me and I would have cupped you long ago,” he
said, tenderly baring Shtchiptsov’s chest. “It is easy to neglect
illness.”
Thereupon Rigoletto stroked the broad chest of the “heavy father” and
covered it all over with suction cups.
“Yes . . .” he said, as after this operation he packed up his
paraphernalia, crimson with Shtchiptsov’s blood. “You should have sent
for me, and I would have come. . . . You needn’t trouble about payment.
. . . I do it from sympathy. Where are you to get the money if that idol
won’t pay you? Now, please take these drops. They are nice drops! And
now you must have a dose of this castor-oil. It’s the real thing. That’s
right! I hope it will do you good. Well, now, good-bye. . . .”
Rigoletto took his parcel and withdrew, pleased that he had been of
assistance to a fellow-creature.
The next morning Sigaev, the comic man, going in to see Shtchiptsov,
found him in a terrible condition. He was lying under his coat,
breathing in gasps, while his eyes strayed over the ceiling. In his
hands he was crushing convulsively the crumpled quilt.
“To Vyazma!” he whispered, when he saw the comic man. “To Vyazma.”
“Come, I don’t like that, old man!” said the comic man, flinging up his
hands. “You see . . . you see . . . you see, old man, that’s not the
thing! Excuse me, but . . . it’s positively stupid. . . .”
“To go to Vyazma! My God, to Vyazma!”
“I . . . I did not expect it of you,” the comic man muttered, utterly
distracted. “What the deuce do you want to collapse like this for? Aie .
. . aie . . . aie! . . . that’s not the thing. A giant as tall as a
watch-tower, and crying. Is it the thing for actors to cry?”
“No wife nor children,” muttered Shtchiptsov. “I ought not to have gone
for an actor, but have stayed at Vyazma. My life has been wasted,
Semyon! Oh, to be in Vyazma!”
“Aie . . . aie . . . aie! . . . that’s not the thing! You see, it’s
stupid . . . contemptible indeed!”
Recovering his composure and setting his feelings in order, Sigaev began
comforting Shtchiptsov, telling him untruly that his comrades had
decided to send him to the Crimea at their expense, and so on, but the
sick man did not listen and kept muttering about Vyazma . . . . At last,
with a wave of his hand, the comic man began talking about Vyazma
himself to comfort the invalid.
“It’s a fine town,” he said soothingly, “a capital town, old man! It’s
famous for its cakes. The cakes are classical, but—between
ourselves—h’m!—they are a bit groggy. For a whole week after eating them
I was . . . h’m! . . . But what is fine there is the merchants! They are
something like merchants. When they treat you they do treat you!”
The comic man talked while Shtchiptsov listened in silence and nodded
his head approvingly.
Towards evening he died.
The Schoolmaster and Other Stories
THE SCHOOLMASTER
FYODOR LUKITCH SYSOEV, the master of the factory school maintained at
the expense of the firm of Kulikin, was getting ready for the annual
dinner. Every year after the school examination the board of managers
gave a dinner at which the inspector of elementary schools, all who had
conducted the examinations, and all the managers and foremen of the
factory were present. In spite of their official character, these
dinners were always good and lively, and the guests sat a long time over
them; forgetting distinctions of rank and recalling only their
meritorious labours, they ate till they were full, drank amicably,
chattered till they were all hoarse and parted late in the evening,
deafening the whole factory settlement with their singing and the sound
of their kisses. Of such dinners Sysoev had taken part in thirteen, as
he had been that number of years master of the factory school.
Now, getting ready for the fourteenth, he was trying to make himself
look as festive and correct as possible. He had spent a whole hour
brushing his new black suit, and spent almost as long in front of a
looking-glass while he put on a fashionable shirt; the studs would not
go into the button-holes, and this circumstance called forth a perfect
storm of complaints, threats, and reproaches addressed to his wife.
His poor wife, bustling round him, wore herself out with her efforts.
And indeed he, too, was exhausted in the end. When his polished boots
were brought him from the kitchen he had not strength to pull them on.
He had to lie down and have a drink of water.
“How weak you have grown!” sighed his wife. “You ought not to go to this
dinner at all.”
“No advice, please!” the schoolmaster cut her short angrily.
He was in a very bad temper, for he had been much displeased with the
recent examinations. The examinations had gone off splendidly; all the
boys of the senior division had gained certificates and prizes; both the
managers of the factory and the government officials were pleased with
the results; but that was not enough for the schoolmaster. He was vexed
that Babkin, a boy who never made a mistake in writing, had made three
mistakes in the dictation; Sergeyev, another boy, had been so excited
that he could not remember seventeen times thirteen; the inspector, a
young and inexperienced man, had chosen a difficult article for
dictation, and Lyapunov, the master of a neighbouring school, whom the
inspector had asked to dictate, had not behaved like “a good comrade”;
but in dictating had, as it were, swallowed the words and had not
pronounced them as written.
After pulling on his boots with the assistance of his wife, and looking
at himself once more in the looking-glass, the schoolmaster took his
gnarled stick and set off for the dinner. Just before the factory
manager’s house, where the festivity was to take place, he had a little
mishap. He was taken with a violent fit of coughing . . . . He was so
shaken by it that the cap flew off his head and the stick dropped out of
his hand; and when the school inspector and the teachers, hearing his
cough, ran out of the house, he was sitting on the bottom step, bathed
in perspiration.
“Fyodor Lukitch, is that you?” said the inspector, surprised. “You . . .
have come?”
“Why not?”
“You ought to be at home, my dear fellow. You are not at all well to-
day. . . .”
“I am just the same to-day as I was yesterday. And if my presence is not
agreeable to you, I can go back.”
“Oh, Fyodor Lukitch, you must not talk like that! Please come in. Why,
the function is really in your honour, not ours. And we are delighted to
see you. Of course we are! . . .”
Within, everything was ready for the banquet. In the big dining-room
adorned with German oleographs and smelling of geraniums and varnish
there were two tables, a larger one for the dinner and a smaller one for
the hors-d’oeuvres. The hot light of midday faintly percolated through
the lowered blinds. . . . The twilight of the room, the Swiss views on
the blinds, the geraniums, the thin slices of sausage on the plates, all
had a naïve, girlishly-sentimental air, and it was all in keeping with
the master of the house, a good-natured little German with a round
little stomach and affectionate, oily little eyes. Adolf Andreyitch
Bruni (that was his name) was bustling round the table of hors-d’oeuvres
as zealously as though it were a house on fire, filling up the wine-
glasses, loading the plates, and trying in every way to please, to
amuse, and to show his friendly feelings. He clapped people on the
shoulder, looked into their eyes, chuckled, rubbed his hands, in fact
was as ingratiating as a friendly dog.
“Whom do I behold? Fyodor Lukitch!” he said in a jerky voice, on seeing
Sysoev. “How delightful! You have come in spite of your illness.
Gentlemen, let me congratulate you, Fyodor Lukitch has come!”
The school-teachers were already crowding round the table and eating the
hors-d’oeuvres. Sysoev frowned; he was displeased that his colleagues
had begun to eat and drink without waiting for him. He noticed among
them Lyapunov, the man who had dictated at the examination, and going up
to him, began:
“It was not acting like a comrade! No, indeed! Gentlemanly people don’t
dictate like that!”
“Good Lord, you are still harping on it!” said Lyapunov, and he frowned.
“Aren’t you sick of it?”
“Yes, still harping on it! My Babkin has never made mistakes! I know why
you dictated like that. You simply wanted my pupils to be floored, so
that your school might seem better than mine. I know all about it! . .
.”
“Why are you trying to get up a quarrel?” Lyapunov snarled. “Why the
devil do you pester me?”
“Come, gentlemen,” interposed the inspector, making a woebegone face.
“Is it worth while to get so heated over a trifle? Three mistakes . . .
not one mistake . . . does it matter?”
“Yes, it does matter. Babkin has never made mistakes.”
“He won’t leave off,” Lyapunov went on, snorting angrily. “He takes
advantage of his position as an invalid and worries us all to death.
Well, sir, I am not going to consider your being ill.”
“Let my illness alone!” cried Sysoev, angrily. “What is it to do with
you? They all keep repeating it at me: illness! illness! illness! . . .
As though I need your sympathy! Besides, where have you picked up the
notion that I am ill? I was ill before the examinations, that’s true,
but now I have completely recovered, there is nothing left of it but
weakness.”
“You have regained your health, well, thank God,” said the scripture
teacher, Father Nikolay, a young priest in a foppish cinnamon-coloured
cassock and trousers outside his boots. “You ought to rejoice, but you
are irritable and so on.”
“You are a nice one, too,” Sysoev interrupted him. “Questions ought to
be straightforward, clear, but you kept asking riddles. That’s not the
thing to do!”
By combined efforts they succeeded in soothing him and making him sit
down to the table. He was a long time making up his mind what to drink,
and pulling a wry face drank a wine-glass of some green liqueur; then he
drew a bit of pie towards him, and sulkily picked out of the inside an
egg with onion on it. At the first mouthful it seemed to him that there
was no salt in it. He sprinkled salt on it and at once pushed it away as
the pie was too salt.
At dinner Sysoev was seated between the inspector and Bruni. After the
first course the toasts began, according to the old-established custom.
“I consider it my agreeable duty,” the inspector began, “to propose a
vote of thanks to the absent school wardens, Daniel Petrovitch and . . .
and . . . and . . .”
“And Ivan Petrovitch,” Bruni prompted him.
“And Ivan Petrovitch Kulikin, who grudge no expense for the school, and
I propose to drink their health. . . .”
“For my part,” said Bruni, jumping up as though he had been stung, “I
propose a toast to the health of the honoured inspector of elementary
schools, Pavel Gennadievitch Nadarov!”
Chairs were pushed back, faces beamed with smiles, and the usual
cBlinking of glasses began.
The third toast always fell to Sysoev. And on this occasion, too, he got
up and began to speak. Looking grave and clearing his throat, he first
of all announced that he had not the gift of eloquence and that he was
not prepared to make a speech. Further he said that during the fourteen
years that he had been schoolmaster there had been many intrigues, many
underhand attacks, and even secret reports on him to the authorities,
and that he knew his enemies and those who had informed against him, and
he would not mention their names, “for fear of spoiling somebody’s
appetite”; that in spite of these intrigues the Kulikin school held the
foremost place in the whole province not only from a moral, but also
from a material point of view.”
“Everywhere else,” he said, “schoolmasters get two hundred or three
hundred roubles, while I get five hundred, and moreover my house has
been redecorated and even furnished at the expense of the firm. And this
year all the walls have been repapered. . . .”
Further the schoolmaster enlarged on the liberality with which the
pupils were provided with writing materials in the factory schools as
compared with the Zemstvo and Government schools. And for all this the
school was indebted, in his opinion, not to the heads of the firm, who
lived abroad and scarcely knew of its existence, but to a man who, in
spite of his German origin and Lutheran faith, was a Russian at heart.
Sysoev spoke at length, with pauses to get his breath and with
pretensions to rhetoric, and his speech was boring and unpleasant. He
several times referred to certain enemies of his, tried to drop hints,
repeated himself, coughed, and flourished his fingers unbecomingly. At
last he was exhausted and in a perspiration and he began talking
jerkily, in a low voice as though to himself, and finished his speech
not quite coherently: “And so I propose the health of Bruni, that is
Adolf Andreyitch, who is here, among us . . . generally speaking . . .
you understand . . .”
When he finished everyone gave a faint sigh, as though someone had
sprinkled cold water and cleared the air. Bruni alone apparently had no
unpleasant feeling. Beaming and rolling his sentimental eyes, the German
shook Sysoev’s hand with feeling and was again as friendly as a dog.
“Oh, I thank you,” he said, with an emphasis on the oh, laying his left
hand on his heart. “I am very happy that you understand me! I, with my
whole heart, wish you all things good. But I ought only to observe; you
exaggerate my importance. The school owes its flourishing condition only
to you, my honoured friend, Fyodor Lukitch. But for you it would be in
no way distinguished from other schools! You think the German is paying
a compliment, the German is saying something polite. Ha-ha! No, my dear
Fyodor Lukitch, I am an honest man and never make complimentary
speeches. If we pay you five hundred roubles a year it is because you
are valued by us. Isn’t that so? Gentlemen, what I say is true, isn’t
it? We should not pay anyone else so much. . . . Why, a good school is
an honour to the factory!”
“I must sincerely own that your school is really exceptional,” said the
inspector. “Don’t think this is flattery. Anyway, I have never come
across another like it in my life. As I sat at the examination I was
full of admiration. . . . Wonderful children! They know a great deal and
answer brightly, and at the same time they are somehow special,
unconstrained, sincere. . . . One can see that they love you, Fyodor
Lukitch. You are a schoolmaster to the marrow of your bones. You must
have been born a teacher. You have all the gifts —innate vocation, long
experience, and love for your work. . . . It’s simply amazing,
considering the weak state of your health, what energy, what
understanding . . . what perseverance, do you understand, what
confidence you have! Some one in the school committee said truly that
you were a poet in your work. . . . Yes, a poet you are!”
And all present at the dinner began as one man talking of Sysoev’s
extraordinary talent. And as though a dam had been burst, there followed
a flood of sincere, enthusiastic words such as men do not utter when
they are restrained by prudent and cautious sobriety. Sysoev’s speech
and his intolerable temper and the horrid, spiteful expression on his
face were all forgotten. Everyone talked freely, even the shy and silent
new teachers, poverty-stricken, down-trodden youths who never spoke to
the inspector without addressing him as “your honour.” It was clear that
in his own circle Sysoev was a person of consequence.
Having been accustomed to success and praise for the fourteen years that
he had been schoolmaster, he listened with indifference to the noisy
enthusiasm of his admirers.
It was Bruni who drank in the praise instead of the schoolmaster. The
German caught every word, beamed, clapped his hands, and flushed
modestly as though the praise referred not to the schoolmaster but to
him.
“Bravo! bravo!” he shouted. “That’s true! You have grasped my meaning! .
. . Excellent! . . .” He looked into the schoolmaster’s eyes as though
he wanted to share his bliss with him. At last he could restrain himself
no longer; he leapt up, and, overpowering all the other voices with his
shrill little tenor, shouted:
“Gentlemen! Allow me to speak! Sh-h! To all you say I can make only one
reply: the management of the factory will not be forgetful of what it
owes to Fyodor Lukitch! . . .”
All were silent. Sysoev raised his eyes to the German’s rosy face.
“We know how to appreciate it,” Bruni went on, dropping his voice. “In
response to your words I ought to tell you that . . . Fyodor Lukitch’s
family will be provided for and that a sum of money was placed in the
bank a month ago for that object.”
Sysoev looked enquiringly at the German, at his colleagues, as though
unable to understand why his family should be provided for and not he
himself. And at once on all the faces, in all the motionless eyes bent
upon him, he read not the sympathy, not the commiseration which he could
not endure, but something else, something soft, tender, but at the same
time intensely sinister, like a terrible truth, something which in one
instant turned him cold all over and filled his soul with unutterable
despair. With a pale, distorted face he suddenly jumped up and clutched
at his head. For a quarter of a minute he stood like that, stared with
horror at a fixed point before him as though he saw the swiftly coming
death of which Bruni was speaking, then sat down and burst into tears.
“Come, come! . . . What is it?” he heard agitated voices saying. “Water!
drink a little water!”
A short time passed and the schoolmaster grew calmer, but the party did
not recover their previous liveliness. The dinner ended in gloomy
silence, and much earlier than on previous occasions.
When he got home Sysoev first of all looked at himself in the glass.
“Of course there was no need for me to blubber like that!” he thought,
looking at his sunken cheeks and his eyes with dark rings under them.
“My face is a much better colour to-day than yesterday. I am suffering
from anemia and catarrh of the stomach, and my cough is only a stomach
cough.”
Reassured, he slowly began undressing, and spent a long time brushing
his new black suit, then carefully folded it up and put it in the chest
of drawers.
Then he went up to the table where there lay a pile of his pupils’
exercise-books, and picking out Babkin’s, sat down and fell to
contemplating the beautiful childish handwriting. . . .
And meantime, while he was examining the exercise-books, the district
doctor was sitting in the next room and telling his wife in a whisper
that a man ought not to have been allowed to go out to dinner who had
not in all probability more than a week to live.
ENEMIES
BETWEEN nine and ten on a dark September evening the only son of the
district doctor, Kirilov, a child of six, called Andrey, died of
diphtheria. Just as the doctor’s wife sank on her knees by the dead
child’s bedside and was overwhelmed by the first rush of despair there
came a sharp ring at the bell in the entry.
All the servants had been sent out of the house that morning on account
of the diphtheria. Kirilov went to open the door just as he was, without
his coat on, with his waistcoat unbuttoned, without wiping his wet face
or his hands which were scalded with carbolic. It was dark in the entry
and nothing could be distinguished in the man who came in but medium
height, a white scarf, and a large, extremely pale face, so pale that
its entrance seemed to make the passage lighter.
“Is the doctor at home?” the newcomer asked quickly.
“I am at home,” answered Kirilov. “What do you want?”
“Oh, it’s you? I am very glad,” said the stranger in a tone of relief,
and he began feeling in the dark for the doctor’s hand, found it and
squeezed it tightly in his own. “I am very . . . very glad! We are
acquainted. My name is Abogin, and I had the honour of meeting you in
the summer at Gnutchev’s. I am very glad I have found you at home. For
God’s sake don’t refuse to come back with me at once. . . . My wife has
been taken dangerously ill. . . . And the carriage is waiting. . . .”
From the voice and gestures of the speaker it could be seen that he was
in a state of great excitement. Like a man terrified by a house on fire
or a mad dog, he could hardly restrain his rapid breathing and spoke
quickly in a shaking voice, and there was a note of unaffected sincerity
and childish alarm in his voice. As people always do who are frightened
and overwhelmed, he spoke in brief, jerky sentences and uttered a great
many unnecessary, irrelevant words.
“I was afraid I might not find you in,” he went on. “I was in a perfect
agony as I drove here. Put on your things and let us go, for God’s sake.
. . . This is how it happened. Alexandr Semyonovitch Paptchinsky, whom
you know, came to see me. . . . We talked a little and then we sat down
to tea; suddenly my wife cried out, clutched at her heart, and fell back
on her chair. We carried her to bed and . . . and I rubbed her forehead
with ammonia and sprinkled her with water . . . she lay as though she
were dead. . . . I am afraid it is aneurism . . . . Come along . . . her
father died of aneurism.”
Kirilov listened and said nothing, as though he did not understand
Russian.
When Abogin mentioned again Paptchinsky and his wife’s father and once
more began feeling in the dark for his hand the doctor shook his head
and said apathetically, dragging out each word:
“Excuse me, I cannot come . . . my son died . . . five minutes ago!”
“Is it possible!” whispered Abogin, stepping back a pace. “My God, at
what an unlucky moment I have come! A wonderfully unhappy day . . .
wonderfully. What a coincidence. . . . It’s as though it were on
purpose!”
Abogin took hold of the door-handle and bowed his head. He was evidently
hesitating and did not know what to do—whether to go away or to continue
entreating the doctor.
“Listen,” he said fervently, catching hold of Kirilov’s sleeve. “I well
understand your position! God is my witness that I am ashamed of
attempting at such a moment to intrude on your attention, but what am I
to do? Only think, to whom can I go? There is no other doctor here, you
know. For God’s sake come! I am not asking you for myself. . . . I am
not the patient!”
A silence followed. Kirilov turned his back on Abogin, stood still a
moment, and slowly walked into the drawing-room. Judging from his
unsteady, mechanical step, from the attention with which he set straight
the fluffy shade on the unlighted lamp in the drawing-room and glanced
into a thick book lying on the table, at that instant he had no
intention, no desire, was thinking of nothing and most likely did not
remember that there was a stranger in the entry. The twilight and
stillness of the drawing-room seemed to increase his numbness. Going out
of the drawing-room into his study he raised his right foot higher than
was necessary, and felt for the doorposts with his hands, and as he did
so there was an air of perplexity about his whole figure as though he
were in somebody else’s house, or were drunk for the first time in his
life and were now abandoning himself with surprise to the new sensation.
A broad streak of light stretched across the bookcase on one wall of the
study; this light came together with the close, heavy smell of carbolic
and ether from the door into the bedroom, which stood a little way open.
. . . The doctor sank into a low chair in front of the table; for a
minute he stared drowsily at his books, which lay with the light on
them, then got up and went into the bedroom.
Here in the bedroom reigned a dead silence. Everything to the smallest
detail was eloquent of the storm that had been passed through, of
exhaustion, and everything was at rest. A candle standing among a crowd
of bottles, boxes, and pots on a stool and a big lamp on the chest of
drawers threw a brilliant light over all the room. On the bed under the
window lay a boy with open eyes and a look of wonder on his face. He did
not move, but his open eyes seemed every moment growing darker and
sinking further into his head. The mother was kneeling by the bed with
her arms on his body and her head hidden in the bedclothes. Like the
child, she did not stir; but what throbbing life was suggested in the
curves of her body and in her arms! She leaned against the bed with all
her being, pressing against it greedily with all her might, as though
she were afraid of disturbing the peaceful and comfortable attitude she
had found at last for her exhausted body. The bedclothes, the rags and
bowls, the splashes of water on the floor, the little paint-brushes and
spoons thrown down here and there, the white bottle of lime water, the
very air, heavy and stifling—were all hushed and seemed plunged in
repose.
The doctor stopped close to his wife, thrust his hands in his trouser
pockets, and slanting his head on one side fixed his eyes on his son.
His face bore an expression of indifference, and only from the drops
that glittered on his beard it could be seen that he had just been
crying.
That repellent horror which is thought of when we speak of death was
absent from the room. In the numbness of everything, in the mother’s
attitude, in the indifference on the doctor’s face there was something
that attracted and touched the heart, that subtle, almost elusive beauty
of human sorrow which men will not for a long time learn to understand
and describe, and which it seems only music can convey. There was a
feeling of beauty, too, in the austere stillness. Kirilov and his wife
were silent and not weeping, as though besides the bitterness of their
loss they were conscious, too, of all the tragedy of their position;
just as once their youth had passed away, so now together with this boy
their right to have children had gone for ever to all eternity! The
doctor was forty-four, his hair was grey and he looked like an old man;
his faded and invalid wife was thirty-five. Andrey was not merely the
only child, but also the last child.
In contrast to his wife the doctor belonged to the class of people who
at times of spiritual suffering feel a craving for movement. After
standing for five minutes by his wife, he walked, raising his right foot
high, from the bedroom into a little room which was half filled up by a
big sofa; from there he went into the kitchen. After wandering by the
stove and the cook’s bed he bent down and went by a little door into the
passage.
There he saw again the white scarf and the white face.
“At last,” sighed Abogin, reaching towards the door-handle. “Let us go,
please.”
The doctor started, glanced at him, and remembered. . . .
“Why, I have told you already that I can’t go!” he said, growing more
animated. “How strange!”
“Doctor, I am not a stone, I fully understand your position . . . I feel
for you,” Abogin said in an imploring voice, laying his hand on his
scarf. “But I am not asking you for myself. My wife is dying. If you had
heard that cry, if you had seen her face, you would understand my
pertinacity. My God, I thought you had gone to get ready! Doctor, time
is precious. Let us go, I entreat you.”
“I cannot go,” said Kirilov emphatically and he took a step into the
drawing-room.
Abogin followed him and caught hold of his sleeve.
“You are in sorrow, I understand. But I’m not asking you to a case of
toothache, or to a consultation, but to save a human life!” he went on
entreating like a beggar. “Life comes before any personal sorrow! Come,
I ask for courage, for heroism! For the love of humanity!”
“Humanity—that cuts both ways,” Kirilov said irritably. “In the name of
humanity I beg you not to take me. And how queer it is, really! I can
hardly stand and you talk to me about humanity! I am fit for nothing
just now. . . . Nothing will induce me to go, and I can’t leave my wife
alone. No, no. . .”
Kirilov waved his hands and staggered back.
“And . . . and don’t ask me,” he went on in a tone of alarm. “Excuse me.
By No. XIII of the regulations I am obliged to go and you have the right
to drag me by my collar . . . drag me if you like, but . . . I am not
fit . . . I can’t even speak . . . excuse me.”
“There is no need to take that tone to me, doctor!” said Abogin, again
taking the doctor by his sleeve. “What do I care about No. XIII! To
force you against your will I have no right whatever. If you will, come;
if you will not—God forgive you; but I am not appealing to your will,
but to your feelings. A young woman is dying. You were just speaking of
the death of your son. Who should understand my horror if not you?”
Abogin’s voice quivered with emotion; that quiver and his tone were far
more persuasive than his words. Abogin was sincere, but it was
remarkable that whatever he said his words sounded stilted, soulless,
and inappropriately flowery, and even seemed an outrage on the
atmosphere of the doctor’s home and on the woman who was somewhere
dying. He felt this himself, and so, afraid of not being understood, did
his utmost to put softness and tenderness into his voice so that the
sincerity of his tone might prevail if his words did not. As a rule,
however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent,
and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why
dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or
unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent,
and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches
outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold
and trivial.
Kirilov stood in silence. When Abogin uttered a few more phrases
concerning the noble calling of a doctor, self-sacrifice, and so on, the
doctor asked sullenly: “Is it far?”
“Something like eight or nine miles. I have capital horses, doctor! I
give you my word of honour that I will get you there and back in an
hour. Only one hour.”
These words had more effect on Kirilov than the appeals to humanity or
the noble calling of the doctor. He thought a moment and said with a
sigh: “Very well, let us go!”
He went rapidly with a more certain step to his study, and afterwards
came back in a long frock-coat. Abogin, greatly relieved, fidgeted round
him and scraped with his feet as he helped him on with his overcoat, and
went out of the house with him.
It was dark out of doors, though lighter than in the entry. The tall,
stooping figure of the doctor, with his long, narrow beard and aquiline
nose, stood out distinctly in the darkness. Abogin’s big head and the
little student’s cap that barely covered it could be seen now as well as
his pale face. The scarf showed white only in front, behind it was
hidden by his long hair.
“Believe me, I know how to appreciate your generosity,” Abogin muttered
as he helped the doctor into the carriage. “We shall get there quickly.
Drive as fast as you can, Luka, there’s a good fellow! Please!”
The coachman drove rapidly. At first there was a row of indistinct
buildings that stretched alongside the hospital yard; it was dark
everywhere except for a bright light from a window that gleamed through
the fence into the furthest part of the yard while three windows of the
upper storey of the hospital looked paler than the surrounding air. Then
the carriage drove into dense shadow; here there was the smell of
dampness and mushrooms, and the sound of rustling trees; the crows,
awakened by the noise of the wheels, stirred among the foliage and
uttered prolonged plaintive cries as though they knew the doctor’s son
was dead and that Abogin’s wife was ill. Then came glimpses of separate
trees, of bushes; a pond, on which great black shadows were slumbering,
gleamed with a sullen light—and the carriage rolled over a smooth level
ground. The clamour of the crows sounded dimly far away and soon ceased
altogether.
Kirilov and Abogin were silent almost all the way. Only once Abogin
heaved a deep sigh and muttered:
“It’s an agonizing state! One never loves those who are near one so much
as when one is in danger of losing them.”
And when the carriage slowly drove over the river, Kirilov started all
at once as though the splash of the water had frightened him, and made a
movement.
“Listen—let me go,” he said miserably. “I’ll come to you later. I must
just send my assistant to my wife. She is alone, you know!”
Abogin did not speak. The carriage swaying from side to side and
crunching over the stones drove up the sandy bank and rolled on its way.
Kirilov moved restlessly and looked about him in misery. Behind them in
the dim light of the stars the road could be seen and the riverside
willows vanishing into the darkness. On the right lay a plain as uniform
and as boundless as the sky; here and there in the distance, probably on
the peat marshes, dim lights were glimmering. On the left, parallel with
the road, ran a hill tufted with small bushes, and above the hill stood
motionless a big, red half-moon, slightly veiled with mist and encircled
by tiny clouds, which seemed to be looking round at it from all sides
and watching that it did not go away.
In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The
earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not
to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer
and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one
looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold
pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could
escape. . . .
The nearer the carriage got to its goal the more impatient Abogin
became. He kept moving, leaping up, looking over the coachman’s
shoulder. And when at last the carriage stopped before the entrance,
which was elegantly curtained with striped linen, and when he looked at
the lighted windows of the second storey there was an audible catch in
his breath.
“If anything happens . . . I shall not survive it,” he said, going into
the hall with the doctor, and rubbing his hands in agitation. “But there
is no commotion, so everything must be going well so far,” he added,
listening in the stillness.
There was no sound in the hall of steps or voices and all the house
seemed asleep in spite of the lighted windows. Now the doctor and
Abogin, who till then had been in darkness, could see each other
clearly. The doctor was tall and stooped, was untidily dressed and not
good-looking. There was an unpleasantly harsh, morose, and unfriendly
look about his lips, thick as a negro’s, his aquiline nose, and
listless, apathetic eyes. His unkempt head and sunken temples, the
premature greyness of his long, narrow beard through which his chin was
visible, the pale grey hue of his skin and his careless, uncouth
manners—the harshness of all this was suggestive of years of poverty, of
ill fortune, of weariness with life and with men. Looking at his frigid
figure one could hardly believe that this man had a wife, that he was
capable of weeping over his child. Abogin presented a very different
appearance. He was a thick-set, sturdy-looking, fair man with a big head
and large, soft features; he was elegantly dressed in the very latest
fashion. In his carriage, his closely buttoned coat, his long hair, and
his face there was a suggestion of something generous, leonine; he
walked with his head erect and his chest squared, he spoke in an
agreeable baritone, and there was a shade of refined almost feminine
elegance in the manner in which he took off his scarf and smoothed his
hair. Even his paleness and the childlike terror with which he looked up
at the stairs as he took off his coat did not detract from his dignity
nor diminish the air of sleekness, health, and aplomb which
characterized his whole figure.
“There is nobody and no sound,” he said going up the stairs. “There is
no commotion. God grant all is well.”
He led the doctor through the hall into a big drawing-room where there
was a black piano and a chandelier in a white cover; from there they
both went into a very snug, pretty little drawing-room full of an
agreeable, rosy twilight.
“Well, sit down here, doctor, and I . . . will be back directly. I will
go and have a look and prepare them.”
Kirilov was left alone. The luxury of the drawing-room, the agreeably
subdued light and his own presence in the stranger’s unfamiliar house,
which had something of the character of an adventure, did not apparently
affect him. He sat in a low chair and scrutinized his hands, which were
burnt with carbolic. He only caught a passing glimpse of the bright red
lamp-shade and the violoncello case, and glancing in the direction where
the clock was ticking he noticed a stuffed wolf as substantial and
sleek-looking as Abogin himself.
It was quiet. . . . Somewhere far away in the adjoining rooms someone
uttered a loud exclamation:
“Ah!” There was a clang of a glass door, probably of a cupboard, and
again all was still. After waiting five minutes Kirilov left off
scrutinizing his hands and raised his eyes to the door by which Abogin
had vanished.
In the doorway stood Abogin, but he was not the same as when he had gone
out. The look of sleekness and refined elegance had disappeared —his
face, his hands, his attitude were contorted by a revolting expression
of something between horror and agonizing physical pain. His nose, his
lips, his moustache, all his features were moving and seemed trying to
tear themselves from his face, his eyes looked as though they were
laughing with agony. . . .
Abogin took a heavy stride into the drawing-room, bent forward, moaned,
and shook his fists.
“She has deceived me,” he cried, with a strong emphasis on the second
syllable of the verb. “Deceived me, gone away. She fell ill and sent me
for the doctor only to run away with that clown Paptchinsky! My God!”
Abogin took a heavy step towards the doctor, held out his soft white
fists in his face, and shaking them went on yelling:
“Gone away! Deceived me! But why this deception? My God! My God! What
need of this dirty, scoundrelly trick, this diabolical, snakish farce?
What have I done to her? Gone away!”
Tears gushed from his eyes. He turned on one foot and began pacing up
and down the drawing-room. Now in his short coat, his fashionable narrow
trousers which made his legs look disproportionately slim, with his big
head and long mane he was extremely like a lion. A gleam of curiosity
came into the apathetic face of the doctor. He got up and looked at
Abogin.
“Excuse me, where is the patient?” he said.
“The patient! The patient!” cried Abogin, laughing, crying, and still
brandishing his fists. “She is not ill, but accursed! The baseness! The
vileness! The devil himself could not have imagined anything more
loathsome! She sent me off that she might run away with a buffoon, a
dull-witted clown, an Alphonse! Oh God, better she had died! I cannot
bear it! I cannot bear it!”
The doctor drew himself up. His eyes bBlinked and filled with tears, his
narrow beard began moving to right and to left together with his jaw.
“Allow me to ask what’s the meaning of this?” he asked, looking round
him with curiosity. “My child is dead, my wife is in grief alone in the
whole house. . . . I myself can scarcely stand up, I have not slept for
three nights. . . . And here I am forced to play a part in some vulgar
farce, to play the part of a stage property! I don’t . . . don’t
understand it!”
Abogin unclenched one fist, flung a crumpled note on the floor, and
stamped on it as though it were an insect he wanted to crush.
“And I didn’t see, didn’t understand,” he said through his clenched
teeth, brandishing one fist before his face with an expression as though
some one had trodden on his corns. “I did not notice that he came every
day! I did not notice that he came today in a closed carriage! What did
he come in a closed carriage for? And I did not see it! Noodle!”
“I don’t understand . . .” muttered the doctor. “Why, what’s the meaning
of it? Why, it’s an outrage on personal dignity, a mockery of human
suffering! It’s incredible. . . . It’s the first time in my life I have
had such an experience!”
With the dull surprise of a man who has only just realized that he has
been bitterly insulted the doctor shrugged his shoulders, flung wide his
arms, and not knowing what to do or to say sank helplessly into a chair.
“If you have ceased to love me and love another—so be it; but why this
deceit, why this vulgar, treacherous trick?” Abogin said in a tearful
voice. “What is the object of it? And what is there to justify it? And
what have I done to you? Listen, doctor,” he said hotly, going up to
Kirilov. “You have been the involuntary witness of my misfortune and I
am not going to conceal the truth from you. I swear that I loved the
woman, loved her devotedly, like a slave! I have sacrificed everything
for her; I have quarrelled with my own people, I have given up the
service and music, I have forgiven her what I could not have forgiven my
own mother or sister . . . I have never looked askance at her. . . . I
have never gainsaid her in anything. Why this deception? I do not demand
love, but why this loathsome duplicity? If she did not love me, why did
she not say so openly, honestly, especially as she knows my views on the
subject? . . .”
With tears in his eyes, trembling all over, Abogin opened his heart to
the doctor with perfect sincerity. He spoke warmly, pressing both hands
on his heart, exposing the secrets of his private life without the
faintest hesitation, and even seemed to be glad that at last these
secrets were no longer pent up in his breast. If he had talked in this
way for an hour or two, and opened his heart, he would undoubtedly have
felt better. Who knows, if the doctor had listened to him and had
sympathized with him like a friend, he might perhaps, as often happens,
have reconciled himself to his trouble without protest, without doing
anything needless and absurd. . . . But what happened was quite
different. While Abogin was speaking the outraged doctor perceptibly
changed. The indifference and wonder on his face gradually gave way to
an expression of bitter resentment, indignation, and anger. The features
of his face became even harsher, coarser, and more unpleasant. When
Abogin held out before his eyes the photograph of a young woman with a
handsome face as cold and expressionless as a nun’s and asked him
whether, looking at that face, one could conceive that it was capable of
duplicity, the doctor suddenly flew out, and with flashing eyes said,
rudely rapping out each word:
“What are you telling me all this for? I have no desire to hear it! I
have no desire to!” he shouted and brought his fist down on the table.
“I don’t want your vulgar secrets! Damnation take them! Don’t dare to
tell me of such vulgar doings! Do you consider that I have not been
insulted enough already? That I am a flunkey whom you can insult without
restraint? Is that it?”
Abogin staggered back from Kirilov and stared at him in amazement.
“Why did you bring me here?” the doctor went on, his beard quivering.
“If you are so puffed up with good living that you go and get married
and then act a farce like this, how do I come in? What have I to do with
your love affairs? Leave me in peace! Go on squeezing money out of the
poor in your gentlemanly way. Make a display of humane ideas, play (the
doctor looked sideways at the violoncello case) play the bassoon and the
trombone, grow as fat as capons, but don’t dare to insult personal
dignity! If you cannot respect it, you might at least spare it your
attention!”
“Excuse me, what does all this mean?” Abogin asked, flushing red.
“It means that it’s base and low to play with people like this! I am a
doctor; you look upon doctors and people generally who work and don’t
stink of perfume and prostitution as your menials and mauvais ton; well,
you may look upon them so, but no one has given you the right to treat a
man who is suffering as a stage property!”
“How dare you say that to me!” Abogin said quietly, and his face began
working again, and this time unmistakably from anger.
“No, how dared you, knowing of my sorrow, bring me here to listen to
these vulgarities!” shouted the doctor, and he again banged on the table
with his fist. “Who has given you the right to make a mockery of another
man’s sorrow?”
“You have taken leave of your senses,” shouted Abogin. “It is
ungenerous. I am intensely unhappy myself and . . . and . . .”
“Unhappy!” said the doctor, with a smile of contempt. “Don’t utter that
word, it does not concern you. The spendthrift who cannot raise a loan
calls himself unhappy, too. The capon, sluggish from over-feeding, is
unhappy, too. Worthless people!”
“Sir, you forget yourself,” shrieked Abogin. “For saying things like
that . . . people are thrashed! Do you understand?”
Abogin hurriedly felt in his side pocket, pulled out a pocket-book, and
extracting two notes flung them on the table.
“Here is the fee for your visit,” he said, his nostrils dilating. “You
are paid.”
“How dare you offer me money?” shouted the doctor and he brushed the
notes off the table on to the floor. “An insult cannot be paid for in
money!”
Abogin and the doctor stood face to face, and in their wrath continued
flinging undeserved insults at each other. I believe that never in their
lives, even in delirium, had they uttered so much that was unjust,
cruel, and absurd. The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both.
The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of
understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people
together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people
should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice
and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.
“Kindly let me go home!” shouted the doctor, breathing hard.
Abogin rang the bell sharply. When no one came to answer the bell he
rang again and angrily flung the bell on the floor; it fell on the
carpet with a muffled sound, and uttered a plaintive note as though at
the point of death. A footman came in.
“Where have you been hiding yourself, the devil take you?” His master
flew at him, clenching his fists. “Where were you just now? Go and tell
them to bring the victoria round for this gentleman, and order the
closed carriage to be got ready for me. Stay,” he cried as the footman
turned to go out. “I won’t have a single traitor in the house by to-
morrow! Away with you all! I will engage fresh servants! Reptiles!”
Abogin and the doctor remained in silence waiting for the carriage. The
first regained his expression of sleekness and his refined elegance. He
paced up and down the room, tossed his head elegantly, and was evidently
meditating on something. His anger had not cooled, but he tried to
appear not to notice his enemy. . . . The doctor stood, leaning with one
hand on the edge of the table, and looked at Abogin with that profound
and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt only to be found in the eyes of
sorrow and indigence when they are confronted with well-nourished
comfort and elegance.
When a little later the doctor got into the victoria and drove off there
was still a look of contempt in his eyes. It was dark, much darker than
it had been an hour before. The red half-moon had sunk behind the hill
and the clouds that had been guarding it lay in dark patches near the
stars. The carriage with red lamps rattled along the road and soon
overtook the doctor. It was Abogin driving off to protest, to do absurd
things. . . .
All the way home the doctor thought not of his wife, nor of his Andrey,
but of Abogin and the people in the house he had just left. His thoughts
were unjust and inhumanly cruel. He condemned Abogin and his wife and
Paptchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued light among sweet
perfumes, and all the way home he hated and despised them till his head
ached. And a firm conviction concerning those people took shape in his
mind.
Time will pass and Kirilov’s sorrow will pass, but that conviction,
unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain
in the doctor’s mind to the grave.
THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE
A DISTRICT doctor and an examining magistrate were driving one fine
spring day to an inquest. The examining magistrate, a man of five and
thirty, looked dreamily at the horses and said:
“There is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature; and even
in everyday life, doctor, one must often come upon phenomena which are
absolutely incapable of explanation. I know, for instance, of several
strange, mysterious deaths, the cause of which only spiritualists and
mystics will undertake to explain; a clear-headed man can only lift up
his hands in perplexity. For example, I know of a highly cultured lady
who foretold her own death and died without any apparent reason on the
very day she had predicted. She said that she would die on a certain
day, and she did die.”
“There’s no effect without a cause,” said the doctor. “If there’s a
death there must be a cause for it. But as for predicting it there’s
nothing very marvellous in that. All our ladies—all our females, in
fact—have a turn for prophecies and presentiments.”
“Just so, but my lady, doctor, was quite a special case. There was
nothing like the ladies’ or other females’ presentiments about her
prediction and her death. She was a young woman, healthy and clever,
with no superstitions of any sort. She had such clear, intelligent,
honest eyes; an open, sensible face with a faint, typically Russian look
of mockery in her eyes and on her lips. There was nothing of the fine
lady or of the female about her, except—if you like— her beauty! She was
graceful, elegant as that birch tree; she had wonderful hair. That she
may be intelligible to you, I will add, too, that she was a person of
the most infectious gaiety and carelessness and that intelligent, good
sort of frivolity which is only found in good-natured, light-hearted
people with brains. Can one talk of mysticism, spiritualism, a turn for
presentiment, or anything of that sort, in this case? She used to laugh
at all that.”
The doctor’s chaise stopped by a well. The examining magistrate and the
doctor drank some water, stretched, and waited for the coachman to
finish watering the horses.
“Well, what did the lady die of?” asked the doctor when the chaise was
rolling along the road again.
“She died in a strange way. One fine day her husband went in to her and
said that it wouldn’t be amiss to sell their old coach before the spring
and to buy something rather newer and lighter instead, and that it might
be as well to change the left trace horse and to put Bobtchinsky (that
was the name of one of her husband’s horses) in the shafts.
“His wife listened to him and said:
“‘Do as you think best, but it makes no difference to me now. Before the
summer I shall be in the cemetery.’
“Her husband, of course, shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“‘I am not joking,’ she said. ‘I tell you in earnest that I shall soon
be dead.’
“‘What do you mean by soon?’
“‘Directly after my confinement. I shall bear my child and die.’
“The husband attached no significance to these words. He did not believe
in presentiments of any sort, and he knew that ladies in an interesting
condition are apt to be fanciful and to give way to gloomy ideas
generally. A day later his wife spoke to him again of dying immediately
after her confinement, and then every day she spoke of it and he laughed
and called her a silly woman, a fortune-teller, a crazy creature. Her
approaching death became an idée fixé with his wife. When her husband
would not listen to her she would go into the kitchen and talk of her
death to the nurse and the cook.
“‘I haven’t long to live now, nurse,’ she would say. ‘As soon as my
confinement is over I shall die. I did not want to die so early, but it
seems it’s my fate.’
“The nurse and the cook were in tears, of course. Sometimes the priest’s
wife or some lady from a neighbouring estate would come and see her and
she would take them aside and open her soul to them, always harping on
the same subject, her approaching death. She spoke gravely with an
unpleasant smile, even with an angry face which would not allow any
contradiction. She had been smart and fashionable in her dress, but now
in view of her approaching death she became slovenly; she did not read,
she did not laugh, she did not dream aloud. What was more she drove with
her aunt to the cemetery and selected a spot for her tomb. Five days
before her confinement she made her will. And all this, bear in mind,
was done in the best of health, without the faintest hint of illness or
danger. A confinement is a difficult affair and sometimes fatal, but in
the case of which I am telling you every indication was favourable, and
there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Her husband was sick of
the whole business at last. He lost his temper one day at dinner and
asked her:
“‘Listen, Natasha, when is there going to be an end of this silliness?’
“‘It’s not silliness, I am in earnest.’
“‘Nonsense, I advise you to give over being silly that you may not feel
ashamed of it afterwards.’
“Well, the confinement came. The husband got the very best midwife from
the town. It was his wife’s first confinement, but it could not have
gone better. When it was all over she asked to look at her baby. She
looked at it and said:
“‘Well, now I can die.’
“She said good-bye, shut her eyes, and half an hour later gave up her
soul to God. She was fully conscious up to the last moment. Anyway when
they gave her milk instead of water she whispered softly:
“‘Why are you giving me milk instead of water?’
“So that is what happened. She died as she predicted.”
The examining magistrate paused, gave a sigh and said:
“Come, explain why she died. I assure you on my honour, this is not
invented, it’s a fact.”
The doctor looked at the sky meditatively.
“You ought to have had an inquest on her,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why, to find out the cause of her death. She didn’t die because she had
predicted it. She poisoned herself most probably.”
The examining magistrate turned quickly, facing the doctor, and screwing
up his eyes, asked:
“And from what do you conclude that she poisoned herself?”
“I don’t conclude it, but I assume it. Was she on good terms with her
husband?”
“H’m, not altogether. There had been misunderstandings soon after their
marriage. There were unfortunate circumstances. She had found her
husband on one occasion with a lady. She soon forgave him however.”
“And which came first, her husband’s infidelity or her idea of dying?”
The examining magistrate looked attentively at the doctor as though he
were trying to imagine why he put that question.
“Excuse me,” he said, not quite immediately. “Let me try and remember.”
The examining magistrate took off his hat and rubbed his forehead. “Yes,
yes . . . it was very shortly after that incident that she began talking
of death. Yes, yes.”
“Well, there, do you see? . . . In all probability it was at that time
that she made up her mind to poison herself, but, as most likely she did
not want to kill her child also, she put it off till after her
confinement.”
“Not likely, not likely! . . . it’s impossible. She forgave him at the
time.”
“That she forgave it quickly means that she had something bad in her
mind. Young wives do not forgive quickly.”
The examining magistrate gave a forced smile, and, to conceal his too
noticeable agitation, began lighting a cigarette.
“Not likely, not likely,” he went on. “No notion of anything of the sort
being possible ever entered into my head. . . . And besides . . . he was
not so much to blame as it seems. . . . He was unfaithful to her in
rather a queer way, with no desire to be; he came home at night somewhat
elevated, wanted to make love to somebody, his wife was in an
interesting condition . . . then he came across a lady who had come to
stay for three days—damnation take her— an empty-headed creature, silly
and not good-looking. It couldn’t be reckoned as an infidelity. His wife
looked at it in that way herself and soon . . . forgave it. Nothing more
was said about it. . . .”
“People don’t die without a reason,” said the doctor.
“That is so, of course, but all the same . . . I cannot admit that she
poisoned herself. But it is strange that the idea has never struck me
before! And no one thought of it! Everyone was astonished that her
prediction had come to pass, and the idea . . . of such a death was far
from their mind. And indeed, it cannot be that she poisoned herself!
No!”
The examining magistrate pondered. The thought of the woman who had died
so strangely haunted him all through the inquest. As he noted down what
the doctor dictated to him he moved his eyebrows gloomily and rubbed his
forehead.
“And are there really poisons that kill one in a quarter of an hour,
gradually, without any pain?” he asked the doctor while the latter was
opening the skull.
“Yes, there are. Morphia for instance.”
“H’m, strange. I remember she used to keep something of the sort . . . .
But it could hardly be.”
On the way back the examining magistrate looked exhausted, he kept
nervously biting his moustache, and was unwilling to talk.
“Let us go a little way on foot,” he said to the doctor. “I am tired of
sitting.”
After walking about a hundred paces, the examining magistrate seemed to
the doctor to be overcome with fatigue, as though he had been climbing
up a high mountain. He stopped and, looking at the doctor with a strange
look in his eyes, as though he were drunk, said:
“My God, if your theory is correct, why it’s. . . it was cruel, inhuman!
She poisoned herself to punish some one else! Why, was the sin so great?
Oh, my God! And why did you make me a present of this damnable idea,
doctor!”
The examining magistrate clutched at his head in despair, and went on:
“What I have told you was about my own wife, about myself. Oh, my God! I
was to blame, I wounded her, but can it have been easier to die than to
forgive? That’s typical feminine logic—cruel, merciless logic. Oh, even
then when she was living she was cruel! I recall it all now! It’s all
clear to me now!”
As the examining magistrate talked he shrugged his shoulders, then
clutched at his head. He got back into the carriage, then walked again.
The new idea the doctor had imparted to him seemed to have overwhelmed
him, to have poisoned him; he was distracted, shattered in body and
soul, and when he got back to the town he said good-bye to the doctor,
declining to stay to dinner though he had promised the doctor the
evening before to dine with him.
BETROTHED I
IT was ten o’clock in the evening and the full moon was shining over the
garden. In the Shumins’ house an evening service celebrated at the
request of the grandmother, Marfa Mihalovna, was just over, and now
Nadya—she had gone into the garden for a minute—could see the table
being laid for supper in the dining-room, and her grandmother bustling
about in her gorgeous silk dress; Father Andrey, a chief priest of the
cathedral, was talking to Nadya’s mother, Nina Ivanovna, and now in the
evening light through the window her mother for some reason looked very
young; Andrey Andreitch, Father Andrey’s son, was standing by listening
attentively.
It was still and cool in the garden, and dark peaceful shadows lay on
the ground. There was a sound of frogs croaking, far, far away beyond
the town. There was a feeling of May, sweet May! One drew deep breaths
and longed to fancy that not here but far away under the sky, above the
trees, far away in the open country, in the fields and the woods, the
life of spring was unfolding now, mysterious, lovely, rich and holy
beyond the understanding of weak, sinful man. And for some reason one
wanted to cry.
She, Nadya, was already twenty-three. Ever since she was sixteen she had
been passionately dreaming of marriage and at last she was engaged to
Andrey Andreitch, the young man who was standing on the other side of
the window; she liked him, the wedding was already fixed for July 7, and
yet there was no joy in her heart, she was sleeping badly, her spirits
drooped. . . . She could hear from the open windows of the basement
where the kitchen was the hurrying servants, the clatter of knives, the
banging of the swing door; there was a smell of roast turkey and pickled
cherries, and for some reason it seemed to her that it would be like
that all her life, with no change, no end to it.
Some one came out of the house and stood on the steps; it was Alexandr
Timofeitch, or, as he was always called, Sasha, who had come from Moscow
ten days before and was staying with them. Years ago a distant relation
of the grandmother, a gentleman’s widow called Marya Petrovna, a thin,
sickly little woman who had sunk into poverty, used to come to the house
to ask for assistance. She had a son Sasha. It used for some reason to
be said that he had talent as an artist, and when his mother died
Nadya’s grandmother had, for the salvation of her soul, sent him to the
Komissarovsky school in Moscow; two years later he went into the school
of painting, spent nearly fifteen years there, and only just managed to
scrape through the leaving examination in the section of architecture.
He did not set up as an architect, however, but took a job at a
lithographer’s. He used to come almost every year, usually very ill, to
stay with Nadya’s grandmother to rest and recover.
He was wearing now a frock-coat buttoned up, and shabby canvas trousers,
crumpled into creases at the bottom. And his shirt had not been ironed
and he had somehow all over a look of not being fresh. He was very thin,
with big eyes, long thin fingers and a swarthy bearded face, and all the
same he was handsome. With the Shumins he was like one of the family,
and in their house felt he was at home. And the room in which he lived
when he was there had for years been called Sasha’s room. Standing on
the steps he saw Nadya, and went up to her.
“It’s nice here,” he said.
“Of course it’s nice, you ought to stay here till the autumn.”
“Yes, I expect it will come to that. I dare say I shall stay with you
till September.”
He laughed for no reason, and sat down beside her.
“I’m sitting gazing at mother,” said Nadya. “She looks so young from
here! My mother has her weaknesses, of course,” she added, after a
pause, “but still she is an exceptional woman.”
“Yes, she is very nice . . .” Sasha agreed. “Your mother, in her own way
of course, is a very good and sweet woman, but . . . how shall I say? I
went early this morning into your kitchen and there I found four
servants sleeping on the floor, no bedsteads, and rags for bedding,
stench, bugs, beetles . . . it is just as it was twenty years ago, no
change at all. Well, Granny, God bless her, what else can you expect of
Granny? But your mother speaks French, you know, and acts in private
theatricals. One would think she might understand.”
As Sasha talked, he used to stretch out two long wasted fingers before
the listener’s face.
“It all seems somehow strange to me here, now I am out of the habit of
it,” he went on. “There is no making it out. Nobody ever does anything.
Your mother spends the whole day walking about like a duchess, Granny
does nothing either, nor you either. And your Andrey Andreitch never
does anything either.”
Nadya had heard this the year before and, she fancied, the year before
that too, and she knew that Sasha could not make any other criticism,
and in old days this had amused her, but now for some reason she felt
annoyed.
“That’s all stale, and I have been sick of it for ages,” she said and
got up. “You should think of something a little newer.”
He laughed and got up too, and they went together toward the house. She,
tall, handsome, and well-made, beside him looked very healthy and
smartly dressed; she was conscious of this and felt sorry for him and
for some reason awkward.
“And you say a great deal you should not,” she said. “You’ve just been
talking about my Andrey, but you see you don’t know him.”
“My Andrey. . . . Bother him, your Andrey. I am sorry for your youth.”
They were already sitting down to supper as the young people went into
the dining-room. The grandmother, or Granny as she was called in the
household, a very stout, plain old lady with bushy eyebrows and a little
moustache, was talking loudly, and from her voice and manner of speaking
it could be seen that she was the person of most importance in the
house. She owned rows of shops in the market, and the old-fashioned
house with columns and the garden, yet she prayed every morning that God
might save her from ruin and shed tears as she did so. Her daughter-in-
law, Nadya’s mother, Nina Ivanovna, a fair-haired woman tightly laced
in, with a pince-nez, and diamonds on every finger, Father Andrey, a
lean, toothless old man whose face always looked as though he were just
going to say something amusing, and his son, Andrey Andreitch, a stout
and handsome young man with curly hair looking like an artist or an
actor, were all talking of hypnotism.
“You will get well in a week here,” said Granny, addressing Sasha. “Only
you must eat more. What do you look like!” she sighed. “You are really
dreadful! You are a regular prodigal son, that is what you are.”
“After wasting his father’s substance in riotous living,” said Father
Andrey slowly, with laughing eyes. “He fed with senseless beasts.”
“I like my dad,” said Andrey Andreitch, touching his father on the
shoulder. “He is a splendid old fellow, a dear old fellow.”
Everyone was silent for a space. Sasha suddenly burst out laughing and
put his dinner napkin to his mouth.
“So you believe in hypnotism?” said Father Andrey to Nina Ivanovna.
“I cannot, of course, assert that I believe,” answered Nina Ivanovna,
assuming a very serious, even severe, expression; “but I must own that
there is much that is mysterious and incomprehensible in nature.”
“I quite agree with you, though I must add that religion distinctly
curtails for us the domain of the mysterious.”
A big and very fat turkey was served. Father Andrey and Nina Ivanovna
went on with their conversation. Nina Ivanovna’s diamonds glittered on
her fingers, then tears began to glitter in her eyes, she grew excited.
“Though I cannot venture to argue with you,” she said, “you must admit
there are so many insoluble riddles in life!”
“Not one, I assure you.”
After supper Andrey Andreitch played the fiddle and Nina Ivanovna
accompanied him on the piano. Ten years before he had taken his degree
at the university in the Faculty of Arts, but had never held any post,
had no definite work, and only from time to time took part in concerts
for charitable objects; and in the town he was regarded as a musician.
Andrey Andreitch played; they all listened in silence. The samovar was
boiling quietly on the table and no one but Sasha was drinking tea. Then
when it struck twelve a violin string suddenly broke; everyone laughed,
bustled about, and began saying good-bye.
After seeing her fiancé out, Nadya went upstairs where she and her
mother had their rooms (the lower storey was occupied by the
grandmother). They began putting the lights out below in the dining-
room, while Sasha still sat on drinking tea. He always spent a long time
over tea in the Moscow style, drinking as much as seven glasses at a
time. For a long time after Nadya had undressed and gone to bed she
could hear the servants clearing away downstairs and Granny talking
angrily. At last everything was hushed, and nothing could be heard but
Sasha from time to time coughing on a bass note in his room below. II
When Nadya woke up it must have been two o’clock, it was beginning to
get light. A watchman was tapping somewhere far away. She was not
sleepy, and her bed felt very soft and uncomfortable. Nadya sat up in
her bed and fell to thinking as she had done every night in May. Her
thoughts were the same as they had been the night before, useless,
persistent thoughts, always alike, of how Andrey Andreitch had begun
courting her and had made her an offer, how she had accepted him and
then little by little had come to appreciate the kindly, intelligent
man. But for some reason now when there was hardly a month left before
the wedding, she began to feel dread and uneasiness as though something
vague and oppressive were before her.
“Tick-tock, tick-tock . . .” the watchman tapped lazily. “. . . Tick-
tock.”
Through the big old-fashioned window she could see the garden and at a
little distance bushes of lilac in full flower, drowsy and lifeless from
the cold; and the thick white mist was floating softly up to the lilac,
trying to cover it. Drowsy rooks were cawing in the far-away trees.
“My God, why is my heart so heavy?”
Perhaps every girl felt the same before her wedding. There was no
knowing! Or was it Sasha’s influence? But for several years past Sasha
had been repeating the same thing, like a copybook, and when he talked
he seemed naïve and queer. But why was it she could not get Sasha out
of her head? Why was it?
The watchman left off tapping for a long while. The birds were
twittering under the windows and the mist had disappeared from the
garden. Everything was lighted up by the spring sunshine as by a smile.
Soon the whole garden, warm and caressed by the sun, returned to life,
and dewdrops like diamonds glittered on the leaves and the old neglected
garden on that morning looked young and gaily decked.
Granny was already awake. Sasha’s husky cough began. Nadya could hear
them below, setting the samovar and moving the chairs. The hours passed
slowly, Nadya had been up and walking about the garden for a long while
and still the morning dragged on.
At last Nina Ivanovna appeared with a tear-stained face, carrying a
glass of mineral water. She was interested in spiritualism and
homeopathy, read a great deal, was fond of talking of the doubts to
which she was subject, and to Nadya it seemed as though there were a
deep mysterious significance in all that.
Now Nadya kissed her mother and walked beside her.
“What have you been crying about, mother?” she asked.
“Last night I was reading a story in which there is an old man and his
daughter. The old man is in some office and his chief falls in love with
his daughter. I have not finished it, but there was a passage which made
it hard to keep from tears,” said Nina Ivanovna and she sipped at her
glass. “I thought of it this morning and shed tears again.”
“I have been so depressed all these days,” said Nadya after a pause.
“Why is it I don’t sleep at night!”
“I don’t know, dear. When I can’t sleep I shut my eyes very tightly,
like this, and picture to myself Anna Karenin moving about and talking,
or something historical from the ancient world. . . .”
Nadya felt that her mother did not understand her and was incapable of
understanding. She felt this for the first time in her life, and it
positively frightened her and made her want to hide herself; and she
went away to her own room.
At two o’clock they sat down to dinner. It was Wednesday, a fast day,
and so vegetable soup and bream with boiled grain were set before
Granny.
To tease Granny Sasha ate his meat soup as well as the vegetable soup.
He was making jokes all through dinner-time, but his jests were laboured
and invariably with a moral bearing, and the effect was not at all
amusing when before making some witty remark he raised his very long,
thin, deathly-looking fingers; and when one remembered that he was very
ill and would probably not be much longer in this world, one felt sorry
for him and ready to weep.
After dinner Granny went off to her own room to lie down. Nina Ivanovna
played on the piano for a little, and then she too went away.
“Oh, dear Nadya!” Sasha began his usual afternoon conversation, “if only
you would listen to me! If only you would!”
She was sitting far back in an old-fashioned armchair, with her eyes
shut, while he paced slowly about the room from corner to corner.
“If only you would go to the university,” he said. “Only enlightened and
holy people are interesting, it’s only they who are wanted. The more of
such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come on earth.
Of your town then not one stone will be left, everything will be blown
up from the foundations, everything will be changed as though by magic.
And then there will be immense, magnificent houses here, wonderful
gardens, marvellous fountains, remarkable people. . . . But that’s not
what matters most. What matters most is that the crowd, in our sense of
the word, in the sense in which it exists now—that evil will not exist
then, because every man will believe and every man will know what he is
living for and no one will seek moral support in the crowd. Dear Nadya,
darling girl, go away! Show them all that you are sick of this stagnant,
grey, sinful life. Prove it to yourself at least!”
“I can’t, Sasha, I’m going to be married.”
“Oh nonsense! What’s it for!”
They went out into the garden and walked up and down a little.
“And however that may be, my dear girl, you must think, you must realize
how unclean, how immoral this idle life of yours is,” Sasha went on. “Do
understand that if, for instance, you and your mother and your
grandmother do nothing, it means that someone else is working for you,
you are eating up someone else’s life, and is that clean, isn’t it
filthy?”
Nadya wanted to say “Yes, that is true”; she wanted to say that she
understood, but tears came into her eyes, her spirits drooped, and
shrinking into herself she went off to her room.
Towards evening Andrey Andreitch arrived and as usual played the fiddle
for a long time. He was not given to much talk as a rule, and was fond
of the fiddle, perhaps because one could be silent while playing. At
eleven o’clock when he was about to go home and had put on his
greatcoat, he embraced Nadya and began greedily kissing her face, her
shoulders, and her hands.
“My dear, my sweet, my charmer,” he muttered. “Oh how happy I am! I am
beside myself with rapture!”
And it seemed to her as though she had heard that long, long ago, or had
read it somewhere . . . in some old tattered novel thrown away long ago.
In the dining-room Sasha was sitting at the table drinking tea with the
saucer poised on his five long fingers; Granny was laying out patience;
Nina Ivanovna was reading. The flame crackled in the ikon lamp and
everything, it seemed, was quiet and going well. Nadya said good-night,
went upstairs to her room, got into bed and fell asleep at once. But
just as on the night before, almost before it was light, she woke up.
She was not sleepy, there was an uneasy, oppressive feeling in her
heart. She sat up with her head on her knees and thought of her fiancé
and her marriage. . . . She for some reason remembered that her mother
had not loved her father and now had nothing and lived in complete
dependence on her mother-in-law, Granny. And however much Nadya pondered
she could not imagine why she had hitherto seen in her mother something
special and exceptional, how it was she had not noticed that she was a
simple, ordinary, unhappy woman.
And Sasha downstairs was not asleep, she could hear him coughing. He is
a queer, naïve man, thought Nadya, and in all his dreams, in all those
marvellous gardens and wonderful fountains one felt there was something
absurd. But for some reason in his naïveté, in this very absurdity
there was something so beautiful that as soon as she thought of the
possibility of going to the university, it sent a cold thrill through
her heart and her bosom and flooded them with joy and rapture.
“But better not think, better not think . . .” she whispered. “I must
not think of it.”
“Tick-tock,” tapped the watchman somewhere far away. “Tick-tock . . .
tick-tock. . . .” III
In the middle of June Sasha suddenly felt bored and made up his mind to
return to Moscow.
“I can’t exist in this town,” he said gloomily. “No water supply, no
drains! It disgusts me to eat at dinner; the filth in the kitchen is
incredible. . . .”
“Wait a little, prodigal son!” Granny tried to persuade him, speaking
for some reason in a whisper, “the wedding is to be on the seventh.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You meant to stay with us until September!”
“But now, you see, I don’t want to. I must get to work.”
The summer was grey and cold, the trees were wet, everything in the
garden looked dejected and uninviting, it certainly did make one long to
get to work. The sound of unfamiliar women’s voices was heard downstairs
and upstairs, there was the rattle of a sewing machine in Granny’s room,
they were working hard at the trousseau. Of fur coats alone, six were
provided for Nadya, and the cheapest of them, in Granny’s words, had
cost three hundred roubles! The fuss irritated Sasha; he stayed in his
own room and was cross, but everyone persuaded him to remain, and he
promised not to go before the first of July.
Time passed quickly. On St. Peter’s day Andrey Andreitch went with Nadya
after dinner to Moscow Street to look once more at the house which had
been taken and made ready for the young couple some time before. It was
a house of two storeys, but so far only the upper floor had been
furnished. There was in the hall a shining floor painted and parqueted,
there were Viennese chairs, a piano, a violin stand; there was a smell
of paint. On the wall hung a big oil painting in a gold frame—a naked
lady and beside her a purple vase with a broken handle.
“An exquisite picture,” said Andrey Andreitch, and he gave a respectful
sigh. “It’s the work of the artist Shismatchevsky.”
Then there was the drawing-room with the round table, and a sofa and
easy chairs upholstered in bright blue. Above the sofa was a big
photograph of Father Andrey wearing a priest’s velvet cap and
decorations. Then they went into the dining-room in which there was a
sideboard; then into the bedroom; here in the half dusk stood two
bedsteads side by side, and it looked as though the bedroom had been
decorated with the idea that it would always be very agreeable there and
could not possibly be anything else. Andrey Andreitch led Nadya about
the rooms, all the while keeping his arm round her waist; and she felt
weak and conscience-stricken. She hated all the rooms, the beds, the
easy chairs; she was nauseated by the naked lady. It was clear to her
now that she had ceased to love Andrey Andreitch or perhaps had never
loved him at all; but how to say this and to whom to say it and with
what object she did not understand, and could not understand, though she
was thinking about it all day and all night. . . . He held her round the
waist, talked so affectionately, so modestly, was so happy, walking
about this house of his; while she saw nothing in it all but vulgarity,
stupid, naïve, unbearable vulgarity, and his arm round her waist felt
as hard and cold as an iron hoop. And every minute she was on the point
of running away, bursting into sobs, throwing herself out of a window.
Andrey Andreitch led her into the bathroom and here he touched a tap
fixed in the wall and at once water flowed.
“What do you say to that?” he said, and laughed. “I had a tank holding
two hundred gallons put in the loft, and so now we shall have water.”
They walked across the yard and went out into the street and took a cab.
Thick clouds of dust were blowing, and it seemed as though it were just
going to rain.
“You are not cold?” said Andrey Andreitch, screwing up his eyes at the
dust.
She did not answer.
“Yesterday, you remember, Sasha blamed me for doing nothing,” he said,
after a brief silence. “Well, he is right, absolutely right! I do
nothing and can do nothing. My precious, why is it? Why is it that the
very thought that I may some day fix a cockade on my cap and go into the
government service is so hateful to me? Why do I feel so uncomfortable
when I see a lawyer or a Latin master or a member of the Zemstvo? O
Mother Russia! O Mother Russia! What a burden of idle and useless people
you still carry! How many like me are upon you, long-suffering Mother!”
And from the fact that he did nothing he drew generalizations, seeing in
it a sign of the times.
“When we are married let us go together into the country, my precious;
there we will work! We will buy ourselves a little piece of land with a
garden and a river, we will labour and watch life. Oh, how splendid that
will be!”
He took off his hat, and his hair floated in the wind, while she
listened to him and thought: “Good God, I wish I were home!”
When they were quite near the house they overtook Father Andrey.
“Ah, here’s father coming,” cried Andrey Andreitch, delighted, and he
waved his hat. “I love my dad really,” he said as he paid the cabman.
“He’s a splendid old fellow, a dear old fellow.”
Nadya went into the house, feeling cross and unwell, thinking that there
would be visitors all the evening, that she would have to entertain
them, to smile, to listen to the fiddle, to listen to all sorts of
nonsense, and to talk of nothing but the wedding.
Granny, dignified, gorgeous in her silk dress, and haughty as she always
seemed before visitors, was sitting before the samovar. Father Andrey
came in with his sly smile.
“I have the pleasure and blessed consolation of seeing you in health,”
he said to Granny, and it was hard to tell whether he was joking or
speaking seriously. IV
The wind was beating on the window and on the roof; there was a
whistling sound, and in the stove the house spirit was plaintively and
sullenly droning his song. It was past midnight; everyone in the house
had gone to bed, but no one was asleep, and it seemed all the while to
Nadya as though they were playing the fiddle below. There was a sharp
bang; a shutter must have been torn off. A minute later Nina Ivanovna
came in in her nightgown, with a candle.
“What was the bang, Nadya?” she asked.
Her mother, with her hair in a single plait and a timid smile on her
face, looked older, plainer, smaller on that stormy night. Nadya
remembered that quite a little time ago she had thought her mother an
exceptional woman and had listened with pride to the things she said;
and now she could not remember those things, everything that came into
her mind was so feeble and useless.
In the stove was the sound of several bass voices in chorus, and she
even heard “O-o-o my G-o-od!” Nadya sat on her bed, and suddenly she
clutched at her hair and burst into sobs.
“Mother, mother, my own,” she said. “If only you knew what is happening
to me! I beg you, I beseech you, let me go away! I beseech you!”
“Where?” asked Nina Ivanovna, not understanding, and she sat down on the
bedstead. “Go where?”
For a long while Nadya cried and could not utter a word.
“Let me go away from the town,” she said at last. “There must not and
will not be a wedding, understand that! I don’t love that man . . . I
can’t even speak about him.”
“No, my own, no!” Nina Ivanovna said quickly, terribly alarmed. “Calm
yourself—it’s just because you are in low spirits. It will pass, it
often happens. Most likely you have had a tiff with Andrey; but lovers’
quarrels always end in kisses!”
“Oh, go away, mother, oh, go away,” sobbed Nadya.
“Yes,” said Nina Ivanovna after a pause, “it’s not long since you were a
baby, a little girl, and now you are engaged to be married. In nature
there is a continual transmutation of substances. Before you know where
you are you will be a mother yourself and an old woman, and will have as
rebellious a daughter as I have.”
“My darling, my sweet, you are clever you know, you are unhappy,” said
Nadya. “You are very unhappy; why do you say such very dull, commonplace
things? For God’s sake, why?”
Nina Ivanovna tried to say something, but could not utter a word; she
gave a sob and went away to her own room. The bass voices began droning
in the stove again, and Nadya felt suddenly frightened. She jumped out
of bed and went quickly to her mother. Nina Ivanovna, with tear-stained
face, was lying in bed wrapped in a pale blue quilt and holding a book
in her hands.
“Mother, listen to me!” said Nadya. “I implore you, do understand! If
you would only understand how petty and degrading our life is. My eyes
have been opened, and I see it all now. And what is your Andrey
Andreitch? Why, he is not intelligent, mother! Merciful heavens, do
understand, mother, he is stupid!”
Nina Ivanovna abruptly sat up.
“You and your grandmother torment me,” she said with a sob. “I want to
live! to live,” she repeated, and twice she beat her little fist upon
her bosom. “Let me be free! I am still young, I want to live, and you
have made me an old woman between you!”
She broke into bitter tears, lay down and curled up under the quilt, and
looked so small, so pitiful, so foolish. Nadya went to her room,
dressed, and sitting at the window fell to waiting for the morning. She
sat all night thinking, while someone seemed to be tapping on the
shutters and whistling in the yard.
In the morning Granny complained that the wind had blown down all the
apples in the garden, and broken down an old plum tree. It was grey,
murky, cheerless, dark enough for candles; everyone complained of the
cold, and the rain lashed on the windows. After tea Nadya went into
Sasha’s room and without saying a word knelt down before an armchair in
the corner and hid her face in her hands.
“What is it?” asked Sasha.
“I can’t . . .” she said. “How I could go on living here before, I can’t
understand, I can’t conceive! I despise the man I am engaged to, I
despise myself, I despise all this idle, senseless existence.”
“Well, well,” said Sasha, not yet grasping what was meant. “That’s all
right . . . that’s good.”
“I am sick of this life,” Nadya went on. “I can’t endure another day
here. To-morrow I am going away. Take me with you for God’s sake!”
For a minute Sasha looked at her in astonishment; at last he understood
and was delighted as a child. He waved his arms and began pattering with
his slippers as though he were dancing with delight.
“Splendid,” he said, rubbing his hands. “My goodness, how fine that is!”
And she stared at him without bBlinking, with adoring eyes, as though
spellbound, expecting every minute that he would say something
important, something infinitely significant; he had told her nothing
yet, but already it seemed to her that something new and great was
opening before her which she had not known till then, and already she
gazed at him full of expectation, ready to face anything, even death.
“I am going to-morrow,” he said after a moment’s thought. “You come to
the station to see me off. . . . I’ll take your things in my
portmanteau, and I’ll get your ticket, and when the third bell rings you
get into the carriage, and we’ll go off. You’ll see me as far as Moscow
and then go on to Petersburg alone. Have you a passport?”
“Yes.”
“I can promise you, you won’t regret it,” said Sasha, with conviction.
“You will go, you will study, and then go where fate takes you. When you
turn your life upside down everything will be changed. The great thing
is to turn your life upside down, and all the rest is unimportant. And
so we will set off to-morrow?”
“Oh yes, for God’s sake!”
It seemed to Nadya that she was very much excited, that her heart was
heavier than ever before, that she would spend all the time till she
went away in misery and agonizing thought; but she had hardly gone
upstairs and lain down on her bed when she fell asleep at once, with
traces of tears and a smile on her face, and slept soundly till evening.
V
A cab had been sent for. Nadya in her hat and overcoat went upstairs to
take one more look at her mother, at all her belongings. She stood in
her own room beside her still warm bed, looked about her, then went
slowly in to her mother. Nina Ivanovna was asleep; it was quite still in
her room. Nadya kissed her mother, smoothed her hair, stood still for a
couple of minutes . . . then walked slowly downstairs.
It was raining heavily. The cabman with the hood pulled down was
standing at the entrance, drenched with rain.
“There is not room for you, Nadya,” said Granny, as the servants began
putting in the luggage. “What an idea to see him off in such weather!
You had better stop at home. Goodness, how it rains!”
Nadya tried to say something, but could not. Then Sasha helped Nadya in
and covered her feet with a rug. Then he sat down beside her.
“Good luck to you! God bless you!” Granny cried from the steps. “Mind
you write to us from Moscow, Sasha!”
“Right. Good-bye, Granny.”
“The Queen of Heaven keep you!”
“Oh, what weather!” said Sasha.
It was only now that Nadya began to cry. Now it was clear to her that
she certainly was going, which she had not really believed when she was
saying good-bye to Granny, and when she was looking at her mother. Good-
bye, town! And she suddenly thought of it all: Andrey, and his father
and the new house and the naked lady with the vase; and it all no longer
frightened her, nor weighed upon her, but was naïve and trivial and
continually retreated further away. And when they got into the railway
carriage and the train began to move, all that past which had been so
big and serious shrank up into something tiny, and a vast wide future
which till then had scarcely been noticed began unfolding before her.
The rain pattered on the carriage windows, nothing could be seen but the
green fields, telegraph posts with birds sitting on the wires flitted
by, and joy made her hold her breath; she thought that she was going to
freedom, going to study, and this was just like what used, ages ago, to
be called going off to be a free Cossack.
She laughed and cried and prayed all at once.
“It’s a-all right,” said Sasha, smiling. “It’s a-all right.” VI
Autumn had passed and winter, too, had gone. Nadya had begun to be very
homesick and thought every day of her mother and her grandmother; she
thought of Sasha too. The letters that came from home were kind and
gentle, and it seemed as though everything by now were forgiven and
forgotten. In May after the examinations she set off for home in good
health and high spirits, and stopped on the way at Moscow to see Sasha.
He was just the same as the year before, with the same beard and unkempt
hair, with the same large beautiful eyes, and he still wore the same
coat and canvas trousers; but he looked unwell and worried, he seemed
both older and thinner, and kept coughing, and for some reason he struck
Nadya as grey and provincial.
“My God, Nadya has come!” he said, and laughed gaily. “My darling girl!”
They sat in the printing room, which was full of tobacco smoke, and
smelt strongly, stiflingly of Indian ink and paint; then they went to
his room, which also smelt of tobacco and was full of the traces of
spitting; near a cold samovar stood a broken plate with dark paper on
it, and there were masses of dead flies on the table and on the floor.
And everything showed that Sasha ordered his personal life in a slovenly
way and lived anyhow, with utter contempt for comfort, and if anyone
began talking to him of his personal happiness, of his personal life, of
affection for him, he would not have understood and would have only
laughed.
“It is all right, everything has gone well,” said Nadya hurriedly.
“Mother came to see me in Petersburg in the autumn; she said that Granny
is not angry, and only keeps going into my room and making the sign of
the cross over the walls.”
Sasha looked cheerful, but he kept coughing, and talked in a cracked
voice, and Nadya kept looking at him, unable to decide whether he really
were seriously ill or whether it were only her fancy.
“Dear Sasha,” she said, “you are ill.”
“No, it’s nothing, I am ill, but not very . . .”
“Oh, dear!” cried Nadya, in agitation. “Why don’t you go to a doctor?
Why don’t you take care of your health? My dear, darling Sasha,” she
said, and tears gushed from her eyes and for some reason there rose
before her imagination Andrey Andreitch and the naked lady with the
vase, and all her past which seemed now as far away as her childhood;
and she began crying because Sasha no longer seemed to her so novel, so
cultured, and so interesting as the year before. “Dear Sasha, you are
very, very ill . . . I would do anything to make you not so pale and
thin. I am so indebted to you! You can’t imagine how much you have done
for me, my good Sasha! In reality you are now the person nearest and
dearest to me.”
They sat on and talked, and now, after Nadya had spent a winter in
Petersburg, Sasha, his works, his smile, his whole figure had for her a
suggestion of something out of date, old-fashioned, done with long ago
and perhaps already dead and buried.
“I am going down the Volga the day after tomorrow,” said Sasha, “and
then to drink koumiss. I mean to drink koumiss. A friend and his wife
are going with me. His wife is a wonderful woman; I am always at her,
trying to persuade her to go to the university. I want her to turn her
life upside down.”
After having talked they drove to the station. Sasha got her tea and
apples; and when the train began moving and he waved his handkerchief at
her, smiling, it could be seen even from his legs that he was very ill
and would not live long.
Nadya reached her native town at midday. As she drove home from the
station the streets struck her as very wide and the houses very small
and squat; there were no people about, she met no one but the German
piano-tuner in a rusty greatcoat. And all the houses looked as though
they were covered with dust. Granny, who seemed to have grown quite old,
but was as fat and plain as ever, flung her arms round Nadya and cried
for a long time with her face on Nadya’s shoulder, unable to tear
herself away. Nina Ivanovna looked much older and plainer and seemed
shrivelled up, but was still tightly laced, and still had diamonds
flashing on her fingers.
“My darling,” she said, trembling all over, “my darling!”
Then they sat down and cried without speaking. It was evident that both
mother and grandmother realized that the past was lost and gone, never
to return; they had now no position in society, no prestige as before,
no right to invite visitors; so it is when in the midst of an easy
careless life the police suddenly burst in at night and made a search,
and it turns out that the head of the family has embezzled money or
committed forgery—and goodbye then to the easy careless life for ever!
Nadya went upstairs and saw the same bed, the same windows with naïve
white curtains, and outside the windows the same garden, gay and noisy,
bathed in sunshine. She touched the table, sat down and sank into
thought. And she had a good dinner and drank tea with delicious rich
cream; but something was missing, there was a sense of emptiness in the
rooms and the ceilings were so low. In the evening she went to bed,
covered herself up and for some reason it seemed to her to be funny
lying in this snug, very soft bed.
Nina Ivanovna came in for a minute; she sat down as people who feel
guilty sit down, timidly, and looking about her.
“Well, tell me, Nadya,” she enquired after a brief pause, “are you
contented? Quite contented?”
“Yes, mother.”
Nina Ivanovna got up, made the sign of the cross over Nadya and the
windows.
“I have become religious, as you see,” she said. “You know I am studying
philosophy now, and I am always thinking and thinking. . . . And many
things have become as clear as daylight to me. It seems to me that what
is above all necessary is that life should pass as it were through a
prism.”
“Tell me, mother, how is Granny in health?”
“She seems all right. When you went away that time with Sasha and the
telegram came from you, Granny fell on the floor as she read it; for
three days she lay without moving. After that she was always praying and
crying. But now she is all right again.”
She got up and walked about the room.
“Tick-tock,” tapped the watchman. “Tick-tock, tick-tock. . . .”
“What is above all necessary is that life should pass as it were through
a prism,” she said; “in other words, that life in consciousness should
be analyzed into its simplest elements as into the seven primary
colours, and each element must be studied separately.”
What Nina Ivanovna said further and when she went away, Nadya did not
hear, as she quickly fell asleep.
May passed; June came. Nadya had grown used to being at home. Granny
busied herself about the samovar, heaving deep sighs. Nina Ivanovna
talked in the evenings about her philosophy; she still lived in the
house like a poor relation, and had to go to Granny for every farthing.
There were lots of flies in the house, and the ceilings seemed to become
lower and lower. Granny and Nina Ivanovna did not go out in the streets
for fear of meeting Father Andrey and Andrey Andreitch. Nadya walked
about the garden and the streets, looked at the grey fences, and it
seemed to her that everything in the town had grown old, was out of date
and was only waiting either for the end, or for the beginning of
something young and fresh. Oh, if only that new, bright life would come
more quickly—that life in which one will be able to face one’s fate
boldly and directly, to know that one is right, to be light-hearted and
free! And sooner or later such a life will come. The time will come when
of Granny’s house, where things are so arranged that the four servants
can only live in one room in filth in the basement—the time will come
when of that house not a trace will remain, and it will be forgotten, no
one will remember it. And Nadya’s only entertainment was from the boys
next door; when she walked about the garden they knocked on the fence
and shouted in mockery: “Betrothed! Betrothed!”
A letter from Sasha arrived from Saratov. In his gay dancing handwriting
he told them that his journey on the Volga had been a complete success,
but that he had been taken rather ill in Saratov, had lost his voice,
and had been for the last fortnight in the hospital. She knew what that
meant, and she was overwhelmed with a foreboding that was like a
conviction. And it vexed her that this foreboding and the thought of
Sasha did not distress her so much as before. She had a passionate
desire for life, longed to be in Petersburg, and her friendship with
Sasha seemed now sweet but something far, far away! She did not sleep
all night, and in the morning sat at the window, listening. And she did
in fact hear voices below; Granny, greatly agitated, was asking
questions rapidly. Then some one began crying. . . . When Nadya went
downstairs Granny was standing in the corner, praying before the ikon
and her face was tearful. A telegram lay on the table.
For some time Nadya walked up and down the room, listening to Granny’s
weeping; then she picked up the telegram and read it.
It announced that the previous morning Alexandr Timofeitch, or more
simply, Sasha, had died at Saratov of consumption.
Granny and Nina Ivanovna went to the church to order a memorial service,
while Nadya went on walking about the rooms and thinking. She recognized
clearly that her life had been turned upside down as Sasha wished; that
here she was, alien, isolated, useless and that everything here was
useless to her; that all the past had been torn away from her and
vanished as though it had been burnt up and the ashes scattered to the
winds. She went into Sasha’s room and stood there for a while.
“Good-bye, dear Sasha,” she thought, and before her mind rose the vista
of a new, wide, spacious life, and that life, still obscure and full of
mysteries, beckoned her and attracted her.
She went upstairs to her own room to pack, and next morning said good-
bye to her family, and full of life and high spirits left the town—as
she supposed for ever.
FROM THE DIARY OF A VIOLENT-TEMPERED MAN
I AM a serious person and my mind is of a philosophic bent. My vocation
is the study of finance. I am a student of financial law and I have
chosen as the subject of my dissertation—the Past and Future of the Dog
Licence. I need hardly point out that young ladies, songs, moonlight,
and all that sort of silliness are entirely out of my line.
Morning. Ten o’clock. My maman pours me out a cup of coffee. I drink it
and go out on the little balcony to set to work on my dissertation. I
take a clean sheet of paper, dip the pen into the ink, and write out the
title: “The Past and Future of the Dog Licence.”
After thinking a little I write: “Historical Survey. We may deduce from
some allusions in Herodotus and Xenophon that the origin of the tax on
dogs goes back to . . . .”
But at that point I hear footsteps that strike me as highly suspicious.
I look down from the balcony and see below a young lady with a long face
and a long waist. Her name, I believe, is Nadenka or Varenka, it really
does not matter which. She is looking for something, pretends not to
have noticed me, and is humming to herself:
“Dost thou remember that song full of tenderness?”
I read through what I have written and want to continue, but the young
lady pretends to have just caught sight of me, and says in a mournful
voice:
“Good morning, Nikolay Andreitch. Only fancy what a misfortune I have
had! I went for a walk yesterday and lost the little ball off my
bracelet!”
I read through once more the opening of my dissertation, I trim up the
tail of the letter “g” and mean to go on, but the young lady persists.
“Nikolay Andreitch,” she says, “won’t you see me home? The Karelins have
such a huge dog that I simply daren’t pass it alone.”
There is no getting out of it. I lay down my pen and go down to her.
Nadenka (or Varenka) takes my arm and we set off in the direction of her
villa.
When the duty of walking arm-in-arm with a lady falls to my lot, for
some reason or other I always feel like a peg with a heavy cloak hanging
on it. Nadenka (or Varenka), between ourselves, of an ardent temperament
(her grandfather was an Armenian), has a peculiar art of throwing her
whole weight on one’s arm and clinging to one’s side like a leech. And
so we walk along.
As we pass the Karelins’, I see a huge dog, who reminds me of the dog
licence. I think with despair of the work I have begun and sigh.
“What are you sighing for?” asks Nadenka (or Varenka), and heaves a sigh
herself.
Here I must digress for a moment to explain that Nadenka or Varenka (now
I come to think of it, I believe I have heard her called Mashenka)
imagines, I can’t guess why, that I am in love with her, and therefore
thinks it her duty as a humane person always to look at me with
compassion and to soothe my wound with words.
“Listen,” said she, stopping. “I know why you are sighing. You are in
love, yes; but I beg you for the sake of our friendship to believe that
the girl you love has the deepest respect for you. She cannot return
your love; but is it her fault that her heart has long been another’s?”
Mashenka’s nose begins to swell and turn red, her eyes fill with tears:
she evidently expects some answer from me, but, fortunately, at this
moment we arrive. Mashenka’s mamma, a good-natured woman but full of
conventional ideas, is sitting on the terrace: glancing at her
daughter’s agitated face, she looks intently at me and sighs, as though
saying to herself: “Ah, these young people! they don’t even know how to
keep their secrets to themselves!”
On the terrace with her are several young ladies of various colours and
a retired officer who is staying in the villa next to ours. He was
wounded during the last war in the left temple and the right hip. This
unfortunate man is, like myself, proposing to devote the summer to
literary work. He is writing the “Memoirs of a Military Man.” Like me,
he begins his honourable labours every morning, but before he has
written more than “I was born in . . .” some Varenka or Mashenka is sure
to appear under his balcony, and the wounded hero is borne off under
guard.
All the party sitting on the terrace are engaged in preparing some
miserable fruit for jam. I make my bows and am about to beat a retreat,
but the young ladies of various colours seize my hat with a squeal and
insist on my staying. I sit down. They give me a plate of fruit and a
hairpin. I begin taking the seeds out.
The young ladies of various colours talk about men: they say that So-
and-So is nice-looking, that So-and-So is handsome but not nice, that
somebody else is nice but ugly, and that a fourth would not have been
bad-looking if his nose were not like a thimble, and so on.
“And you, Monsieur Nicolas,” says Varenka’s mamma, turning to me, “are
not handsome, but you are attractive. . . . There is something about
your face. . . . In men, though, it’s not beauty but intelligence that
matters,” she adds, sighing.
The young ladies sigh, too, and drop their eyes . . . they agree that
the great thing in men is not beauty but intelligence. I steal a glance
sideways at a looking-glass to ascertain whether I really am attractive.
I see a shaggy head, a bushy beard, moustaches, eyebrows, hair on my
cheeks, hair up to my eyes, a perfect thicket with a solid nose sticking
up out of it like a watch-tower. Attractive! h’m!
“But it’s by the qualities of your soul, after all, that you will make
your way, Nicolas,” sighs Nadenka’s mamma, as though affirming some
secret and original idea of her own.
And Nadenka is sympathetically distressed on my account, but the
conviction that a man passionately in love with her is sitting opposite
is obviously a source of the greatest enjoyment to her.
When they have done with men, the young ladies begin talking about love.
After a long conversation about love, one of the young ladies gets up
and goes away. Those that remain begin to pick her to pieces. Everyone
agrees that she is stupid, unbearable, ugly, and that one of her
shoulder-blades sticks out in a shocking way.
But at last, thank goodness! I see our maid. My maman has sent her to
call me in to dinner. Now I can make my escape from this uncongenial
company and go back to my work. I get up and make my bows.
Varenka’s maman, Varenka herself, and the variegated young ladies
surround me, and declare that I cannot possibly go, because I promised
yesterday to dine with them and go to the woods to look for mushrooms. I
bow and sit down again. My soul is boiling with rage, and I feel that in
another moment I may not be able to answer for myself, that there may be
an explosion, but gentlemanly feeling and the fear of committing a
breach of good manners compels me to obey the ladies. And I obey them.
We sit down to dinner. The wounded officer, whose wound in the temple
has affected the muscles of the left cheek, eats as though he had a bit
in his mouth. I roll up little balls of bread, think about the dog
licence, and, knowing the ungovernable violence of my temper, try to
avoid speaking. Nadenka looks at me sympathetically.
Soup, tongue and peas, roast fowl, and compôte. I have no appetite, but
eat from politeness.
After dinner, while I am standing alone on the terrace, smoking,
Nadenka’s mamma comes up to me, presses my hand, and says breathlessly:
“Don’t despair, Nicolas! She has such a heart, . . . such a heart! . .
.”
We go towards the wood to gather mushrooms. Varenka hangs on my arm and
clings to my side. My sufferings are indescribable, but I bear them in
patience.
We enter the wood.
“Listen, Monsieur Nicolas,” says Nadenka, sighing. “Why are you so
melancholy? And why are you so silent?”
Extraordinary girl she is, really! What can I talk to her about? What
have we in common?
“Oh, do say something!” she begs me.
I begin trying to think of something popular, something within the range
of her understanding. After a moment’s thought I say:
“The cutting down of forests has been greatly detrimental to the
prosperity of Russia. . . .”
“Nicolas,” sighs Nadenka, and her nose begins to turn red, “Nicolas, I
see you are trying to avoid being open with me. . . . You seem to wish
to punish me by your silence. Your feeling is not returned, and you wish
to suffer in silence, in solitude . . . it is too awful, Nicolas!” she
cries impulsively seizing my hand, and I see her nose beginning to
swell. “What would you say if the girl you love were to offer you her
eternal friendship?”
I mutter something incoherent, for I really can’t think what to say to
her.
In the first place, I’m not in love with any girl at all; in the second,
what could I possibly want her eternal friendship for? and, thirdly, I
have a violent temper.
Mashenka (or Varenka) hides her face in her hands and murmurs, as though
to herself:
“He will not speak; . . . it is clear that he will have me make the
sacrifice! I cannot love him, if my heart is still another’s . . . but .
. . I will think of it. . . . Very good, I will think of it . . . I will
prove the strength of my soul, and perhaps, at the cost of my own
happiness, I will save this man from suffering!” . . .
I can make nothing out of all this. It seems some special sort of
puzzle.
We go farther into the wood and begin picking mushrooms. We are
perfectly silent the whole time. Nadenka’s face shows signs of inward
struggle. I hear the bark of dogs; it reminds me of my dissertation, and
I sigh heavily. Between the trees I catch sight of the wounded officer
limping painfully along. The poor fellow’s right leg is lame from his
wound, and on his left arm he has one of the variegated young ladies.
His face expresses resignation to destiny.
We go back to the house to drink tea, after which we play croquet and
listen to one of the variegated young ladies singing a song: “No, no,
thou lovest not, no, no.” At the word “no” she twists her mouth till it
almost touches one ear.
“Charmant!” wail the other young ladies, “Charmant!”
The evening comes on. A detestable moon creeps up behind the bushes.
There is perfect stillness in the air, and an unpleasant smell of
freshly cut hay. I take up my hat and try to get away.
“I have something I must say to you!” Mashenka whispers to me
significantly, “don’t go away!”
I have a foreboding of evil, but politeness obliges me to remain.
Mashenka takes my arm and leads me away to a garden walk. By this time
her whole figure expresses conflict. She is pale and gasping for breath,
and she seems absolutely set on pulling my right arm out of the socket.
What can be the matter with her?
“Listen!” she mutters. “No, I cannot! No! . . .” She tries to say
something, but hesitates. Now I see from her face that she has come to
some decision. With gleaming eyes and swollen nose she snatches my hand,
and says hurriedly, “Nicolas, I am yours! Love you I cannot, but I
promise to be true to you!”
Then she squeezes herself to my breast, and at once springs away.
“Someone is coming,” she whispers. “Farewell! . . . To-morrow at eleven
o’clock I will be in the arbour. . . . Farewell!”
And she vanishes. Completely at a loss for an explanation of her conduct
and suffering from a painful palpitation of the heart, I make my way
home. There the “Past and Future of the Dog Licence” is awaiting me, but
I am quite unable to work. I am furious. . . . I may say, my anger is
terrible. Damn it all! I allow no one to treat me like a boy, I am a man
of violent temper, and it is not safe to trifle with me!
When the maid comes in to call me to supper, I shout to her: “Go out of
the room!” Such hastiness augurs nothing good.
Next morning. Typical holiday weather. Temperature below freezing, a
cutting wind, rain, mud, and a smell of naphthaline, because my maman
has taken all her wraps out of her trunks. A devilish morning! It is the
7th of August, 1887, the date of the solar eclipse. I may here remark
that at the time of an eclipse every one of us may, without special
astronomical knowledge, be of the greatest service. Thus, for example,
anyone of us can (1) take the measurement of the diameters of the sun
and the moon; (2) sketch the corona of the sun; (3) take the
temperature; (4) take observations of plants and animals during the
eclipse; (5) note down his own impressions, and so on.
It is a matter of such exceptional importance that I lay aside the “Past
and Future of the Dog Licence” and make up my mind to observe the
eclipse.
We all get up very early, and I divide the work as follows: I am to
measure the diameter of the sun and moon; the wounded officer is to
sketch the corona; and the other observations are undertaken by Mashenka
and the variegated young ladies.
We all meet together and wait.
“What is the cause of the eclipse?” asks Mashenka.
I reply: “A solar eclipse occurs when the moon, moving in the plane of
the ecliptic, crosses the line joining the centres of the sun and the
earth.”
“And what does the ecliptic mean?”
I explain. Mashenka listens attentively.
“Can one see through the smoked glass the line joining the centres of
the sun and the earth?” she enquires.
I reply that this is only an imaginary line, drawn theoretically.
“If it is only an imaginary line, how can the moon cross it?” Varenka
says, wondering.
I make no reply. I feel my spleen rising at this naïve question.
“It’s all nonsense,” says Mashenka’s maman. “Impossible to tell what’s
going to happen. You’ve never been in the sky, so what can you know of
what is to happen with the sun and moon? It’s all fancy.”
At that moment a black patch begins to move over the sun. General
confusion follows. The sheep and horses and cows run bellowing about the
fields with their tails in the air. The dogs howl. The bugs, thinking
night has come on, creep out of the cracks in the walls and bite the
people who are still in bed.
The deacon, who was engaged in bringing some cucumbers from the market
garden, jumped out of his cart and hid under the bridge; while his horse
walked off into somebody else’s yard, where the pigs ate up all the
cucumbers. The excise officer, who had not slept at home that night, but
at a lady friend’s, dashed out with nothing on but his nightshirt, and
running into the crowd shouted frantically: “Save yourself, if you can!”
Numbers of the lady visitors, even young and pretty ones, run out of
their villas without even putting their slippers on. Scenes occur which
I hesitate to describe.
“Oh, how dreadful!” shriek the variegated young ladies. “It’s really too
awful!”
“Mesdames, watch!” I cry. “Time is precious!”
And I hasten to measure the diameters. I remember the corona, and look
towards the wounded officer. He stands doing nothing.
“What’s the matter?” I shout. “How about the corona?”
He shrugs his shoulders and looks helplessly towards his arms. The poor
fellow has variegated young ladies on both sides of him, clinging to him
in terror and preventing him from working. I seize a pencil and note
down the time to a second. That is of great importance. I note down the
geographical position of the point of observation. That, too, is of
importance. I am just about to measure the diameter when Mashenka seizes
my hand, and says:
“Do not forget to-day, eleven o’clock.”
I withdraw my hand, feeling every second precious, try to continue my
observations, but Varenka clutches my arm and clings to me. Pencil,
pieces of glass, drawings—all are scattered on the grass. Hang it! It’s
high time the girl realized that I am a man of violent temper, and when
I am roused my fury knows no bounds, I cannot answer for myself.
I try to continue, but the eclipse is over.
“Look at me!” she whispers tenderly.
Oh, that is the last straw! Trying a man’s patience like that can but
have a fatal ending. I am not to blame if something terrible happens. I
allow no one to make a laughing stock of me, and, God knows, when I am
furious, I advise nobody to come near me, damn it all! There’s nothing I
might not do! One of the young ladies, probably noticing from my face
what a rage I am in, and anxious to propitiate me, says:
“I did exactly what you told me, Nikolay Andreitch; I watched the
animals. I saw the grey dog chasing the cat just before the eclipse, and
wagging his tail for a long while afterwards.”
So nothing came of the eclipse after all.
I go home. Thanks to the rain, I work indoors instead of on the balcony.
The wounded officer has risked it, and has again got as far as “I was
born in . . .” when I see one of the variegated young ladies pounce down
on him and bear him off to her villa.
I cannot work, for I am still in a fury and suffering from palpitation
of the heart. I do not go to the arbour. It is impolite not to, but,
after all, I can’t be expected to go in the rain.
At twelve o’clock I receive a letter from Mashenka, a letter full of
reproaches and entreaties to go to the arbour, addressing me as “thou.”
At one o’clock I get a second letter, and at two, a third . . . . I must
go. . . . But before going I must consider what I am to say to her. I
will behave like a gentleman.
To begin with, I will tell her that she is mistaken in supposing that I
am in love with her. That’s a thing one does not say to a lady as a
rule, though. To tell a lady that one’s not in love with her, is almost
as rude as to tell an author he can’t write.
The best thing will be to explain my views of marriage.
I put on my winter overcoat, take an umbrella, and walk to the arbour.
Knowing the hastiness of my temper, I am afraid I may be led into
speaking too strongly; I will try to restrain myself.
I find Nadenka still waiting for me. She is pale and in tears. On seeing
me she utters a cry of joy, flings herself on my neck, and says:
“At last! You are trying my patience. . . . Listen, I have not slept all
night. . . . I have been thinking and thinking. . . . I believe that
when I come to know you better I shall learn to love you. . . .”
I sit down, and begin to unfold my views of marriage. To begin with, to
clear the ground of digressions and to be as brief as possible, I open
with a short historical survey. I speak of marriage in ancient Egypt and
India, then pass to more recent times, a few ideas from Schopenhauer.
Mashenka listens attentively, but all of a sudden, through some strange
incoherence of ideas, thinks fit to interrupt me:
“Nicolas, kiss me!” she says.
I am embarrassed and don’t know what to say to her. She repeats her
request. There seems no avoiding it. I get up and bend over her long
face, feeling as I do so just as I did in my childhood when I was lifted
up to kiss my grandmother in her coffin. Not content with the kiss,
Mashenka leaps up and impulsively embraces me. At that instant,
Mashenka’s maman appears in the doorway of the arbour. . . . She makes a
face as though in alarm, and saying “sh-sh” to someone with her,
vanishes like Mephistopheles through the trapdoor.
Confused and enraged, I return to our villa. At home I find Varenka’s
maman embracing my maman with tears in her eyes. And my maman weeps and
says:
“I always hoped for it!”
And then, if you please, Nadenka’s maman comes up to me, embraces me,
and says:
“May God bless you! . . . Mind you love her well. . . . Remember the
sacrifice she is making for your sake!”
And here I am at my wedding. At the moment I write these last words, my
best man is at my side, urging me to make haste. These people have no
idea of my character! I have a violent temper, I cannot always answer
for myself! Hang it all! God knows what will come of it! To lead a
violent, desperate man to the altar is as unwise as to thrust one’s hand
into the cage of a ferocious tiger. We shall see, we shall see!
And so, I am married. Everybody congratulates me and Varenka keeps
clinging to me and saying:
“Now you are mine, mine; do you understand that? Tell me that you love
me!” And her nose swells as she says it.
I learn from my best man that the wounded officer has very cleverly
escaped the snares of Hymen. He showed the variegated young lady a
medical certificate that owing to the wound in his temple he was at
times mentally deranged and incapable of contracting a valid marriage.
An inspiration! I might have got a certificate too. An uncle of mine
drank himself to death, another uncle was extremely absent-minded (on
one occasion he put a lady’s muff on his head in mistake for his hat),
an aunt of mine played a great deal on the piano, and used to put out
her tongue at gentlemen she did not like. And my ungovernable temper is
a very suspicious symptom.
But why do these great ideas always come too late? Why?
IN THE DARK
A FLY of medium size made its way into the nose of the assistant
procurator, Gagin. It may have been impelled by curiosity, or have got
there through frivolity or accident in the dark; anyway, the nose
resented the presence of a foreign body and gave the signal for a
sneeze. Gagin sneezed, sneezed impressively and so shrilly and loudly
that the bed shook and the springs creaked. Gagin’s wife, Marya
Mihalovna, a full, plump, fair woman, started, too, and woke up. She
gazed into the darkness, sighed, and turned over on the other side. Five
minutes afterwards she turned over again and shut her eyes more firmly
but she could not get to sleep again. After sighing and tossing from
side to side for a time, she got up, crept over her husband, and putting
on her slippers, went to the window.
It was dark outside. She could see nothing but the outlines of the trees
and the roof of the stables. There was a faint pallor in the east, but
this pallor was beginning to be clouded over. There was perfect
stillness in the air wrapped in slumber and darkness. Even the watchman,
paid to disturb the stillness of night, was silent; even the
corncrake—the only wild creature of the feathered tribe that does not
shun the proximity of summer visitors—was silent.
The stillness was broken by Marya Mihalovna herself. Standing at the
window and gazing into the yard, she suddenly uttered a cry. She fancied
that from the flower garden with the gaunt, clipped poplar, a dark
figure was creeping towards the house. For the first minute she thought
it was a cow or a horse, then, rubbing her eyes, she distinguished
clearly the outlines of a man.
Then she fancied the dark figure approached the window of the kitchen
and, standing still a moment, apparently undecided, put one foot on the
window ledge and disappeared into the darkness of the window.
“A burglar!” flashed into her mind and a deathly pallor overspread her
face.
And in one instant her imagination had drawn the picture so dreaded by
lady visitors in country places—a burglar creeps into the kitchen, from
the kitchen into the dining-room . . . the silver in the cupboard . . .
next into the bedroom . . . an axe . . . the face of a brigand . . .
jewelry. . . . Her knees gave way under her and a shiver ran down her
back.
“Vassya!” she said, shaking her husband, “Basile! Vassily Prokovitch!
Ah! mercy on us, he might be dead! Wake up, Basile, I beseech you!”
“W-well?” grunted the assistant procurator, with a deep inward breath
and a munching sound.
“For God’s sake, wake up! A burglar has got into the kitchen! I was
standing at the window looking out and someone got in at the window. He
will get into the dining-room next . . . the spoons are in the cupboard!
Basile! They broke into Mavra Yegorovna’s last year.”
“Wha—what’s the matter?”
“Heavens! he does not understand. Do listen, you stupid! I tell you I’ve
just seen a man getting in at the kitchen window! Pelagea will be
frightened and . . . and the silver is in the cupboard!”
“Stuff and nonsense!”
“Basile, this is unbearable! I tell you of a real danger and you sleep
and grunt! What would you have? Would you have us robbed and murdered?”
The assistant procurator slowly got up and sat on the bed, filling the
air with loud yawns.
“Goodness knows what creatures women are!” he muttered. “Can’t leave one
in peace even at night! To wake a man for such nonsense!”
“But, Basile, I swear I saw a man getting in at the window!”
“Well, what of it? Let him get in. . . . That’s pretty sure to be
Pelagea’s sweetheart, the fireman.”
“What! what did you say?”
“I say it’s Pelagea’s fireman come to see her.”
“Worse than ever!” shrieked Marya Mihalovna. “That’s worse than a
burglar! I won’t put up with cynicism in my house!”
“Hoity-toity! We are virtuous! . . . Won’t put up with cynicism? As
though it were cynicism! What’s the use of firing off those foreign
words? My dear girl, it’s a thing that has happened ever since the world
began, sanctified by tradition. What’s a fireman for if not to make love
to the cook?”
“No, Basile! It seems you don’t know me! I cannot face the idea of such
a . . . such a . . . in my house. You must go this minute into the
kitchen and tell him to go away! This very minute! And to-morrow I’ll
tell Pelagea that she must not dare to demean herself by such
proceedings! When I am dead you may allow immorality in your house, but
you shan’t do it now! . . . Please go!”
“Damn it,” grumbled Gagin, annoyed. “Consider with your microscopic
female brain, what am I to go for?”
“Basile, I shall faint! . . .”
Gagin cursed, put on his slippers, cursed again, and set off to the
kitchen. It was as dark as the inside of a barrel, and the assistant
procurator had to feel his way. He groped his way to the door of the
nursery and waked the nurse.
“Vassilissa,” he said, “you took my dressing-gown to brush last
night—where is it?”
“I gave it to Pelagea to brush, sir.”
“What carelessness! You take it away and don’t put it back—now I’ve to
go without a dressing-gown!”
On reaching the kitchen, he made his way to the corner in which on a box
under a shelf of saucepans the cook slept.
“Pelagea,” he said, feeling her shoulder and giving it a shake,
“Pelagea! Why are you pretending? You are not asleep! Who was it got in
at your window just now?”
“Mm . . . m . . . good morning! Got in at the window? Who could get in?”
“Oh come, it’s no use your trying to keep it up! You’d better tell your
scamp to clear out while he can! Do you hear? He’s no business to be
here!”
“Are you out of your senses, sir, bless you? Do you think I’d be such a
fool? Here one’s running about all day long, never a minute to sit down
and then spoken to like this at night! Four roubles a month . . . and to
find my own tea and sugar and this is all the credit I get for it! I
used to live in a tradesman’s house, and never met with such insult
there!”
“Come, come—no need to go over your grievances! This very minute your
grenadier must turn out! Do you understand?”
“You ought to be ashamed, sir,” said Pelagea, and he could hear the
tears in her voice. “Gentlefolks . . . educated, and yet not a notion
that with our hard lot . . . in our life of toil”—she burst into tears.
“It’s easy to insult us. There’s no one to stand up for us.”
“Come, come . . . I don’t mind! Your mistress sent me. You may let a
devil in at the window for all I care!”
There was nothing left for the assistant procurator but to acknowledge
himself in the wrong and go back to his spouse.
“I say, Pelagea,” he said, “you had my dressing-gown to brush. Where is
it?”
“Oh, I am so sorry, sir; I forgot to put it on your chair. It’s hanging
on a peg near the stove.”
Gagin felt for the dressing-gown by the stove, put it on, and went
quietly back to his room.
When her husband went out Marya Mihalovna got into bed and waited. For
the first three minutes her mind was at rest, but after that she began
to feel uneasy.
“What a long time he’s gone,” she thought. “It’s all right if he is
there . . . that immoral man . . . but if it’s a burglar?”
And again her imagination drew a picture of her husband going into the
dark kitchen . . . a blow with an axe . . . dying without uttering a
single sound . . . a pool of blood! . . .
Five minutes passed . . . five and a half . . . at last six. . . . A
cold sweat came out on her forehead.
“Basile!” she shrieked, “Basile!”
“What are you shouting for? I am here.” She heard her husband’s voice
and steps. “Are you being murdered?”
The assistant procurator went up to the bedstead and sat down on the
edge of it.
“There’s nobody there at all,” he said. “It was your fancy, you queer
creature. . . . You can sleep easy, your fool of a Pelagea is as
virtuous as her mistress. What a coward you are! What a . . . .”
And the deputy procurator began teasing his wife. He was wide awake now
and did not want to go to sleep again.
“You are a coward!” he laughed. “You’d better go to the doctor to-morrow
and tell him about your hallucinations. You are a neurotic!”
“What a smell of tar,” said his wife—“tar or something . . . onion . . .
cabbage soup!”
“Y-yes! There is a smell . . . I am not sleepy. I say, I’ll light the
candle. . . . Where are the matches? And, by the way, I’ll show you the
photograph of the procurator of the Palace of Justice. He gave us all a
photograph when he said good-bye to us yesterday, with his autograph.”
Gagin struck a match against the wall and lighted a candle. But before
he had moved a step from the bed to fetch the photographs he heard
behind him a piercing, heartrending shriek. Looking round, he saw his
wife’s large eyes fastened upon him, full of amazement, horror, and
wrath. . . .
“You took your dressing-gown off in the kitchen?” she said, turning
pale.
“Why?”
“Look at yourself!”
The deputy procurator looked down at himself, and gasped.
Flung over his shoulders was not his dressing-gown, but the fireman’s
overcoat. How had it come on his shoulders? While he was settling that
question, his wife’s imagination was drawing another picture, awful and
impossible: darkness, stillness, whispering, and so on, and so on.
A PLAY
“PAVEL VASSILYEVITCH, there’s a lady here, asking for you,” Luka
announced. “She’s been waiting a good hour. . . .”
Pavel Vassilyevitch had only just finished lunch. Hearing of the lady,
he frowned and said:
“Oh, damn her! Tell her I’m busy.”
“She has been here five times already, Pavel Vassilyevitch. She says she
really must see you. . . . She’s almost crying.”
“H’m . . . very well, then, ask her into the study.”
Without haste Pavel Vassilyevitch put on his coat, took a pen in one
hand, and a book in the other, and trying to look as though he were very
busy he went into the study. There the visitor was awaiting him—a large
stout lady with a red, beefy face, in spectacles. She looked very
respectable, and her dress was more than fashionable (she had on a
crinolette of four storeys and a high hat with a reddish bird in it). On
seeing him she turned up her eyes and folded her hands in supplication.
“You don’t remember me, of course,” she began in a high masculine tenor,
visibly agitated. “I . . . I have had the pleasure of meeting you at the
Hrutskys. . . . I am Mme. Murashkin. . . .”
“A. . . a . . . a . . . h’m . . . Sit down! What can I do for you?”
“You . . . you see . . . I . . . I . . .” the lady went on, sitting down
and becoming still more agitated. “You don’t remember me. . . . I’m Mme.
Murashkin. . . . You see I’m a great admirer of your talent and always
read your articles with great enjoyment. . . . Don’t imagine I’m
flattering you—God forbid!—I’m only giving honour where honour is due. .
. . I am always reading you . . . always! To some extent I am myself not
a stranger to literature— that is, of course . . . I will not venture to
call myself an authoress, but . . . still I have added my little quota .
. . I have published at different times three stories for children. . .
. You have not read them, of course. . . . I have translated a good deal
and . . . and my late brother used to write for The Cause.”
“To be sure . . . er—er—er——What can I do for you?”
“You see . . . (the lady cast down her eyes and turned redder) I know
your talents . . . your views, Pavel Vassilyevitch, and I have been
longing to learn your opinion, or more exactly . . . to ask your advice.
I must tell you I have perpetrated a play, my first-born —pardon pour
l’expression!—and before sending it to the Censor I should like above
all things to have your opinion on it.”
Nervously, with the flutter of a captured bird, the lady fumbled in her
skirt and drew out a fat manuscript.
Pavel Vassilyevitch liked no articles but his own. When threatened with
the necessity of reading other people’s, or listening to them, he felt
as though he were facing the cannon’s mouth. Seeing the manuscript he
took fright and hastened to say:
“Very good, . . . leave it, . . . I’ll read it.”
“Pavel Vassilyevitch,” the lady said languishingly, clasping her hands
and raising them in supplication, “I know you’re busy. . . . Your every
minute is precious, and I know you’re inwardly cursing me at this
moment, but . . . Be kind, allow me to read you my play . . . . Do be so
very sweet!”
“I should be delighted . . .” faltered Pavel Vassilyevitch; “but, Madam,
I’m . . . I’m very busy . . . . I’m . . . I’m obliged to set off this
minute.”
“Pavel Vassilyevitch,” moaned the lady and her eyes filled with tears,
“I’m asking a sacrifice! I am insolent, I am intrusive, but be
magnanimous. To-morrow I’m leaving for Kazan and I should like to know
your opinion to-day. Grant me half an hour of your attention . . . only
one half-hour . . . I implore you!”
Pavel Vassilyevitch was cotton-wool at core, and could not refuse. When
it seemed to him that the lady was about to burst into sobs and fall on
her knees, he was overcome with confusion and muttered helplessly.
“Very well; certainly . . . I will listen . . . I will give you half an
hour.”
The lady uttered a shriek of joy, took off her hat and settling herself,
began to read. At first she read a scene in which a footman and a house
maid, tidying up a sumptuous drawing-room, talked at length about their
young lady, Anna Sergyevna, who was building a school and a hospital in
the village. When the footman had left the room, the maidservant
pronounced a monologue to the effect that education is light and
ignorance is darkness; then Mme. Murashkin brought the footman back into
the drawing-room and set him uttering a long monologue concerning his
master, the General, who disliked his daughter’s views, intended to
marry her to a rich kammer junker, and held that the salvation of the
people lay in unadulterated ignorance. Then, when the servants had left
the stage, the young lady herself appeared and informed the audience
that she had not slept all night, but had been thinking of Valentin
Ivanovitch, who was the son of a poor teacher and assisted his sick
father gratuitously. Valentin had studied all the sciences, but had no
faith in friendship nor in love; he had no object in life and longed for
death, and therefore she, the young lady, must save him.
Pavel Vassilyevitch listened, and thought with yearning anguish of his
sofa. He scanned the lady viciously, felt her masculine tenor thumping
on his eardrums, understood nothing, and thought:
“The devil sent you . . . as though I wanted to listen to your tosh!
It’s not my fault you’ve written a play, is it? My God! what a thick
manuscript! What an infliction!”
Pavel Vassilyevitch glanced at the wall where the portrait of his wife
was hanging and remembered that his wife had asked him to buy and bring
to their summer cottage five yards of tape, a pound of cheese, and some
tooth-powder.
“I hope I’ve not lost the pattern of that tape,” he thought, “where did
I put it? I believe it’s in my blue reefer jacket. . . . Those wretched
flies have covered her portrait with spots already, I must tell Olga to
wash the glass. . . . She’s reading the twelfth scene, so we must soon
be at the end of the first act. As though inspiration were possible in
this heat and with such a mountain of flesh, too! Instead of writing
plays she’d much better eat cold vinegar hash and sleep in a cellar. . .
.”
“You don’t think that monologue’s a little too long?” the lady asked
suddenly, raising her eyes.
Pavel Vassilyevitch had not heard the monologue, and said in a voice as
guilty as though not the lady but he had written that monologue:
“No, no, not at all. It’s very nice. . . .”
The lady beamed with happiness and continued reading:
ANNA: You are consumed by analysis. Too early you have ceased to live in
the heart and have put your faith in the intellect.
VALENTIN: What do you mean by the heart? That is a concept of anatomy.
As a conventional term for what are called the feelings, I do not admit
it.
ANNA (confused): And love? Surely that is not merely a product of the
association of ideas? Tell me frankly, have you ever loved?
VALENTIN (bitterly): Let us not touch on old wounds not yet healed. (A
pause.) What are you thinking of?
ANNA: I believe you are unhappy.
During the sixteenth scene Pavel Vassilyevitch yawned, and accidently
made with his teeth the sound dogs make when they catch a fly. He was
dismayed at this unseemly sound, and to cover it assumed an expression
of rapt attention.
“Scene seventeen! When will it end?” he thought. “Oh, my God! If this
torture is prolonged another ten minutes I shall shout for the police.
It’s insufferable.”
But at last the lady began reading more loudly and more rapidly, and
finally raising her voice she read “Curtain.”
Pavel Vassilyevitch uttered a faint sigh and was about to get up, but
the lady promptly turned the page and went on reading.
ACT II.—Scene, a village street. On right, School. On left, Hospital.
Villagers, male and female, sitting on the hospital steps.
“Excuse me,” Pavel Vassilyevitch broke in, “how many acts are there?”
“Five,” answered the lady, and at once, as though fearing her audience
might escape her, she went on rapidly.
VALENTIN is looking out of the schoolhouse window. In the background
Villagers can be seen taking their goods to the Inn.
Like a man condemned to be executed and convinced of the impossibility
of a reprieve, Pavel Vassilyevitch gave up expecting the end, abandoned
all hope, and simply tried to prevent his eyes from closing, and to
retain an expression of attention on his face. . . . The future when the
lady would finish her play and depart seemed to him so remote that he
did not even think of it.
“Trooo—too—too—too . . .” the lady’s voice sounded in his ears.
“Troo—too—too . . . sh—sh—sh—sh . . .”
“I forgot to take my soda,” he thought. “What am I thinking about? Oh—my
soda. . . . Most likely I shall have a bilious attack. . . . It’s
extraordinary, Smirnovsky swills vodka all day long and yet he never has
a bilious attack. . . . There’s a bird settled on the window . . . a
sparrow. . . .”
Pavel Vassilyevitch made an effort to unglue his strained and closing
eyelids, yawned without opening his mouth, and stared at Mme. Murashkin.
She grew misty and swayed before his eyes, turned into a triangle and
her head pressed against the ceiling. . . .
VALENTIN No, let me depart.
ANNA (in dismay): Why?
VALENTIN (aside): She has turned pale! (To her) Do not force me to
explain. Sooner would I die than you should know the reason.
ANNA (after a pause): You cannot go away. . . .
The lady began to swell, swelled to an immense size, and melted into the
dingy atmosphere of the study—only her moving mouth was visible; then
she suddenly dwindled to the size of a bottle, swayed from side to side,
and with the table retreated to the further end of the room . . .
VALENTIN (holding ANNA in his arms): You have given me new life! You
have shown me an object to live for! You have renewed me as the Spring
rain renews the awakened earth! But . . . it is too late, too late! The
ill that gnaws at my heart is beyond cure. . . .
Pavel Vassilyevitch started and with dim and smarting eyes stared at the
reading lady; for a minute he gazed fixedly as though understanding
nothing. . . .
SCENE XI.—The same. The BARON and the POLICE INSPECTOR with assistants.
VALENTIN: Take me!
ANNA: I am his! Take me too! Yes, take me too! I love him, I love him
more than life!
BARON: Anna Sergyevna, you forget that you are ruining your father . . .
.
The lady began swelling again. . . . Looking round him wildly Pavel
Vassilyevitch got up, yelled in a deep, unnatural voice, snatched from
the table a heavy paper-weight, and beside himself, brought it down with
all his force on the authoress’s head. . . .
“Give me in charge, I’ve killed her!” he said to the maidservant who ran
in, a minute later.
The jury acquitted him.
A MYSTERY
ON the evening of Easter Sunday the actual Civil Councillor, Navagin, on
his return from paying calls, picked up the sheet of paper on which
visitors had inscribed their names in the hall, and went with it into
his study. After taking off his outer garments and drinking some seltzer
water, he settled himself comfortably on a couch and began reading the
signatures in the list. When his eyes reached the middle of the long
list of signatures, he started, gave an ejaculation of astonishment and
snapped his fingers, while his face expressed the utmost perplexity.
“Again!” he said, slapping his knee. “It’s extraordinary! Again! Again
there is the signature of that fellow, goodness knows who he is!
Fedyukov! Again!”
Among the numerous signatures on the paper was the signature of a
certain Fedyukov. Who the devil this Fedyukov was, Navagin had not a
notion. He went over in his memory all his acquaintances, relations and
subordinates in the service, recalled his remote past but could
recollect no name like Fedyukov. What was so strange was that this
incognito, Fedyukov, had signed his name regularly every Christmas and
Easter for the last thirteen years. Neither Navagin, his wife, nor his
house porter knew who he was, where he came from or what he was like.
“It’s extraordinary!” Navagin thought in perplexity, as he paced about
the study. “It’s strange and incomprehensible! It’s like sorcery!”
“Call the porter here!” he shouted.
“It’s devilish queer! But I will find out who he is!”
“I say, Grigory,” he said, addressing the porter as he entered, “that
Fedyukov has signed his name again! Did you see him?”
“No, your Excellency.”
“Upon my word, but he has signed his name! So he must have been in the
hall. Has he been?”
“No, he hasn’t, your Excellency.”
“How could he have signed his name without being there?”
“I can’t tell.”
“Who is to tell, then? You sit gaping there in the hall. Try and
remember, perhaps someone you didn’t know came in? Think a minute!”
“No, your Excellency, there has been no one I didn’t know. Our clerks
have been, the baroness came to see her Excellency, the priests have
been with the Cross, and there has been no one else. . . .”
“Why, he was invisible when he signed his name, then, was he?”
“I can’t say: but there has been no Fedyukov here. That I will swear
before the holy image. . . .”
“It’s queer! It’s incomprehensible! It’s ex-traordinary!” mused Navagin.
“It’s positively ludicrous. A man has been signing his name here for
thirteen years and you can’t find out who he is. Perhaps it’s a joke?
Perhaps some clerk writes that name as well as his own for fun.”
And Navagin began examining Fedyukov’s signature.
The bold, florid signature in the old-fashioned style with twirls and
flourishes was utterly unlike the handwriting of the other signatures.
It was next below the signature of Shtutchkin, the provincial secretary,
a scared, timorous little man who would certainly have died of fright if
he had ventured upon such an impudent joke.
“The mysterious Fedyukov has signed his name again!” said Navagin, going
in to see his wife. “Again I fail to find out who he is.”
Madame Navagin was a spiritualist, and so for all phenomena in nature,
comprehensible or incomprehensible, she had a very simple explanation.
“There’s nothing extraordinary about it,” she said. “You don’t believe
it, of course, but I have said it already and I say it again: there is a
great deal in the world that is supernatural, which our feeble intellect
can never grasp. I am convinced that this Fedyukov is a spirit who has a
sympathy for you . . . If I were you, I would call him up and ask him
what he wants.”
“Nonsense, nonsense!”
Navagin was free from superstitions, but the phenomenon which interested
him was so mysterious that all sorts of uncanny devilry intruded into
his mind against his will. All the evening he was imagining that the
incognito Fedyukov was the spirit of some long-dead clerk, who had been
discharged from the service by Navagin’s ancestors and was now revenging
himself on their descendant; or perhaps it was the kinsman of some petty
official dismissed by Navagin himself, or of a girl seduced by him. . .
.
All night Navagin dreamed of a gaunt old clerk in a shabby uniform, with
a face as yellow as a lemon, hair that stood up like a brush, and
pewtery eyes; the clerk said something in a sepulchral voice and shook a
bony finger at him. And Navagin almost had an attack of inflammation of
the brain.
For a fortnight he was silent and gloomy and kept walking up and down
and thinking. In the end he overcame his sceptical vanity, and going
into his wife’s room he said in a hollow voice:
“Zina, call up Fedyukov!”
The spiritualistic lady was delighted; she sent for a sheet of cardboard
and a saucer, made her husband sit down beside her, and began upon the
magic rites.
Fedyukov did not keep them waiting long. . . .
“What do you want?” asked Navagin.
“Repent,” answered the saucer.
“What were you on earth?”
“A sinner. . . .”
“There, you see!” whispered his wife, “and you did not believe!”
Navagin conversed for a long time with Fedyukov, and then called up
Napoleon, Hannibal, Askotchensky, his aunt Klavdya Zaharovna, and they
all gave him brief but correct answers full of deep significance. He was
busy with the saucer for four hours, and fell asleep soothed and happy
that he had become acquainted with a mysterious world that was new to
him. After that he studied spiritualism every day, and at the office,
informed the clerks that there was a great deal in nature that was
supernatural and marvellous to which our men of science ought to have
turned their attention long ago.
Hypnotism, mediumism, bishopism, spiritualism, the fourth dimension, and
other misty notions took complete possession of him, so that for whole
days at a time, to the great delight of his wife, he read books on
spiritualism or devoted himself to the saucer, table-turning, and
discussions of supernatural phenomena. At his instigation all his clerks
took up spiritualism, too, and with such ardour that the old managing
clerk went out of his mind and one day sent a telegram: “Hell.
Government House. I feel that I am turning into an evil spirit. What’s
to be done? Reply paid. Vassily Krinolinsky.”
After reading several hundreds of treatises on spiritualism Navagin had
a strong desire to write something himself. For five months he sat
composing, and in the end had written a huge monograph, entitled: My
Opinion. When he had finished this essay he determined to send it to a
spiritualist journal.
The day on which it was intended to despatch it to the journal was a
very memorable one for him. Navagin remembers that on that never-to-be-
forgotten day the secretary who had made a fair copy of his article and
the sacristan of the parish who had been sent for on business were in
his study. Navagin’s face was beaming. He looked lovingly at his
creation, felt between his fingers how thick it was, and with a happy
smile said to the secretary:
“I propose, Filipp Sergeyitch, to send it registered. It will be safer.
. . .” And raising his eyes to the sacristan, he said: “I have sent for
you on business, my good man. I am putting my youngest son to the high
school and I must have a certificate of baptism; only could you let me
have it quickly?”
“Very good, your Excellency!” said the sacristan, bowing. “Very good, I
understand. . . .”
“Can you let me have it by to-morrow?”
“Very well, your Excellency, set your mind at rest! To-morrow it shall
be ready! Will you send someone to the church to-morrow before evening
service? I shall be there. Bid him ask for Fedyukov. I am always there.
. . .”
“What!” cried the general, turning pale.
“Fedyukov.”
“You, . . . you are Fedyukov?” asked Navagin, looking at him with wide-
open eyes.
“Just so, Fedyukov.”
“You. . . . you signed your name in my hall?”
“Yes . . .” the sacristan admitted, and was overcome with confusion.
“When we come with the Cross, your Excellency, to grand gentlemen’s
houses I always sign my name. . . . I like doing it. . . . Excuse me,
but when I see the list of names in the hall I feel an impulse to sign
mine. . . .”
In dumb stupefaction, understanding nothing, hearing nothing, Navagin
paced about his study. He touched the curtain over the door, three times
waved his hands like a jeune premier in a ballet when he sees her, gave
a whistle and a meaningless smile, and pointed with his finger into
space.
“So I will send off the article at once, your Excellency,” said the
secretary.
These words roused Navagin from his stupour. He looked blankly at the
secretary and the sacristan, remembered, and stamping, his foot
irritably, screamed in a high, breaking tenor:
“Leave me in peace! Lea-eave me in peace, I tell you! What you want of
me I don’t understand.”
The secretary and the sacristan went out of the study and reached the
street while he was still stamping and shouting:
“Leave me in peace! What you want of me I don’t understand. Lea-eave me
in peace!”
STRONG IMPRESSIONS
IT happened not so long ago in the Moscow circuit court. The jurymen,
left in the court for the night, before lying down to sleep fell into
conversation about strong impressions. They were led to this discussion
by recalling a witness who, by his own account, had begun to stammer and
had gone grey owing to a terrible moment. The jurymen decided that
before going to sleep, each one of them should ransack among his
memories and tell something that had happened to him. Man’s life is
brief, but yet there is no man who cannot boast that there have been
terrible moments in his past.
One juryman told the story of how he was nearly drowned; another
described how, in a place where there were neither doctors nor chemists,
he had one night poisoned his own son through giving him zinc vitriol by
mistake for soda. The child did not die, but the father nearly went out
of his mind. A third, a man not old but in bad health, told how he had
twice attempted to commit suicide: the first time by shooting himself
and the second time by throwing himself before a train.
The fourth, a foppishly dressed, fat little man, told us the following
story:
“I was not more than twenty-two or twenty-three when I fell head over
ears in love with my present wife and made her an offer. Now I could
with pleasure thrash myself for my early marriage, but at the time, I
don’t know what would have become of me if Natasha had refused me. My
love was absolutely the real thing, just as it is described in
novels—frantic, passionate, and so on. My happiness overwhelmed me and I
did not know how to get away from it, and I bored my father and my
friends and the servants, continually talking about the fervour of my
passion. Happy people are the most sickening bores. I was a fearful
bore; I feel ashamed of it even now. . . .
“Among my friends there was in those days a young man who was beginning
his career as a lawyer. Now he is a lawyer known all over Russia; in
those days he was only just beginning to gain recognition and was not
rich and famous enough to be entitled to cut an old friend when he met
him. I used to go and see him once or twice a week. We used to loll on
sofas and begin discussing philosophy.
“One day I was lying on his sofa, arguing that there was no more
ungrateful profession than that of a lawyer. I tried to prove that as
soon as the examination of witnesses is over the court can easily
dispense with both the counsels for the prosecution and for the defence,
because they are neither of them necessary and are only in the way. If a
grown-up juryman, morally and mentally sane, is convinced that the
ceiling is white, or that Ivanov is guilty, to struggle with that
conviction and to vanquish it is beyond the power of any Demosthenes.
Who can convince me that I have a red moustache when I know that it is
black? As I listen to an orator I may perhaps grow sentimental and weep,
but my fundamental conviction, based for the most part on unmistakable
evidence and fact, is not changed in the least. My lawyer maintained
that I was young and foolish and that I was talking childish nonsense.
In his opinion, for one thing, an obvious fact becomes still more
obvious through light being thrown upon it by conscientious, well-
informed people; for another, talent is an elemental force, a hurricane
capable of turning even stones to dust, let alone such trifles as the
convictions of artisans and merchants of the second guild. It is as hard
for human weakness to struggle against talent as to look at the sun
without winking, or to stop the wind. One simple mortal by the power of
the word turns thousands of convinced savages to Christianity; Odysseus
was a man of the firmest convictions, but he succumbed to the Syrens,
and so on. All history consists of similar examples, and in life they
are met with at every turn; and so it is bound to be, or the intelligent
and talented man would have no superiority over the stupid and
incompetent.
“I stuck to my point, and went on maintaining that convictions are
stronger than any talent, though, frankly speaking, I could not have
defined exactly what I meant by conviction or what I meant by talent.
Most likely I simply talked for the sake of talking.
“‘Take you, for example,’ said the lawyer. ‘You are convinced at this
moment that your fiancée is an angel and that there is not a man in the
whole town happier than you. But I tell you: ten or twenty minutes would
be enough for me to make you sit down to this table and write to your
fiancée, breaking off your engagement.
“I laughed.
“‘Don’t laugh, I am speaking seriously,’ said my friend. ‘If I choose,
in twenty minutes you will be happy at the thought that you need not get
married. Goodness knows what talent I have, but you are not one of the
strong sort.’
“‘Well, try it on!’ said I.
“‘No, what for? I am only telling you this. You are a good boy and it
would be cruel to subject you to such an experiment. And besides I am
not in good form to-day.’
“We sat down to supper. The wine and the thought of Natasha, my beloved,
flooded my whole being with youth and happiness. My happiness was so
boundless that the lawyer sitting opposite to me with his green eyes
seemed to me an unhappy man, so small, so grey. . . .
“‘Do try!’ I persisted. ‘Come, I entreat you!
“The lawyer shook his head and frowned. Evidently I was beginning to
bore him.
“‘I know,’ he said, ‘after my experiment you will say, thank you, and
will call me your saviour; but you see I must think of your fiancée
too. She loves you; your jilting her would make her suffer. And what a
charming creature she is! I envy you.’
“The lawyer sighed, sipped his wine, and began talking of how charming
my Natasha was. He had an extraordinary gift of description. He could
knock you off a regular string of words about a woman’s eyelashes or her
little finger. I listened to him with relish.
“‘I have seen a great many women in my day,’ he said, ‘but I give you my
word of honour, I speak as a friend, your Natasha Andreyevna is a pearl,
a rare girl. Of course she has her defects—many of them, in fact, if you
like—but still she is fascinating.’
“And the lawyer began talking of my fiancée’s defects. Now I understand
very well that he was talking of women in general, of their weak points
in general, but at the time it seemed to me that he was talking only of
Natasha. He went into ecstasies over her turn-up nose, her shrieks, her
shrill laugh, her airs and graces, precisely all the things I so
disliked in her. All that was, to his thinking, infinitely sweet,
graceful, and feminine.
“Without my noticing it, he quickly passed from his enthusiastic tone to
one of fatherly admonition, and then to a light and derisive one. . . .
There was no presiding judge and no one to check the diffusiveness of
the lawyer. I had not time to open my mouth, besides, what could I say?
What my friend said was not new, it was what everyone has known for
ages, and the whole venom lay not in what he said, but in the damnable
form he put it in. It really was beyond anything!
“As I listened to him then I learned that the same word has thousands of
shades of meaning according to the tone in which it is pronounced, and
the form which is given to the sentence. Of course I cannot reproduce
the tone or the form; I can only say that as I listened to my friend and
walked up and down the room, I was moved to resentment, indignation, and
contempt together with him. I even believed him when with tears in his
eyes he informed me that I was a great man, that I was worthy of a
better fate, that I was destined to achieve something in the future
which marriage would hinder!
“‘My friend!’ he exclaimed, pressing my hand. ‘I beseech you, I adjure
you: stop before it is too late. Stop! May Heaven preserve you from this
strange, cruel mistake! My friend, do not ruin your youth!’
“Believe me or not, as you choose, but the long and the short of it was
that I sat down to the table and wrote to my fiancée, breaking off the
engagement. As I wrote I felt relieved that it was not yet too late to
rectify my mistake. Sealing the letter, I hastened out into the street
to post it. The lawyer himself came with me.
“‘Excellent! Capital!’ he applauded me as my letter to Natasha
disappeared into the darkness of the box. ‘I congratulate you with all
my heart. I am glad for you.’
“After walking a dozen paces with me the lawyer went on:
“‘Of course, marriage has its good points. I, for instance, belong to
the class of people to whom marriage and home life is everything.’
“And he proceeded to describe his life, and lay before me all the
hideousness of a solitary bachelor existence.
“He spoke with enthusiasm of his future wife, of the sweets of ordinary
family life, and was so eloquent, so sincere in his ecstasies that by
the time we had reached his door, I was in despair.
“‘What are you doing to me, you horrible man?’ I said, gasping. ‘You
have ruined me! Why did you make me write that cursed letter? I love
her, I love her!’
“And I protested my love. I was horrified at my conduct which now seemed
to me wild and senseless. It is impossible, gentlemen, to imagine a more
violent emotion than I experienced at that moment. Oh, what I went
through, what I suffered! If some kind person had thrust a revolver into
my hand at that moment, I should have put a bullet through my brains
with pleasure.
“‘Come, come . . .’ said the lawyer, slapping me on the shoulder, and he
laughed. ‘Give over crying. The letter won’t reach your fiancée. It was
not you who wrote the address but I, and I muddled it so they won’t be
able to make it out at the post-office. It will be a lesson to you not
to argue about what you don’t understand.’
“Now, gentlemen, I leave it to the next to speak.”
The fifth juryman settled himself more comfortably, and had just opened
his mouth to begin his story when we heard the clock strike on Spassky
Tower.
“Twelve . . .” one of the jurymen counted. “And into which class,
gentlemen, would you put the emotions that are being experienced now by
the man we are trying? He, that murderer, is spending the night in a
convict cell here in the court, sitting or lying down and of course not
sleeping, and throughout the whole sleepless night listening to that
chime. What is he thinking of? What visions are haunting him?”
And the jurymen all suddenly forgot about strong impressions; what their
companion who had once written a letter to his Natasha had suffered
seemed unimportant, even not amusing; and no one said anything more;
they began quietly and in silence lying down to sleep.
DRUNK
A MANUFACTURER called Frolov, a handsome dark man with a round beard,
and a soft, velvety expression in his eyes, and Almer, his lawyer, an
elderly man with a big rough head, were drinking in one of the public
rooms of a restaurant on the outskirts of the town. They had both come
to the restaurant straight from a ball and so were wearing dress coats
and white ties. Except them and the waiters at the door there was not a
soul in the room; by Frolov’s orders no one else was admitted.
They began by drinking a big wine-glass of vodka and eating oysters.
“Good!” said Almer. “It was I brought oysters into fashion for the first
course, my boy. The vodka burns and stings your throat and you have a
voluptuous sensation in your throat when you swallow an oyster. Don’t
you?”
A dignified waiter with a shaven upper lip and grey whiskers put a
sauceboat on the table.
“What’s that you are serving?” asked Frolov.
“Sauce Provençale for the herring, sir. . . .”
“What! is that the way to serve it?” shouted Frolov, not looking into
the sauceboat. “Do you call that sauce? You don’t know how to wait, you
blockhead!”
Frolov’s velvety eyes flashed. He twisted a corner of the table-cloth
round his finger, made a slight movement, and the dishes, the
candlesticks, and the bottles, all jingling and clattering, fell with a
crash on the floor.
The waiters, long accustomed to pot-house catastrophes, ran up to the
table and began picking up the fragments with grave and unconcerned
faces, like surgeons at an operation.
“How well you know how to manage them!” said Almer, and he laughed. “But
. . . move a little away from the table or you will step in the
caviare.”
“Call the engineer here!” cried Frolov.
This was the name given to a decrepit, doleful old man who really had
once been an engineer and very well off; he had squandered all his
property and towards the end of his life had got into a restaurant where
he looked after the waiters and singers and carried out various
commissions relating to the fair sex. Appearing at the summons, he put
his head on one side respectfully.
“Listen, my good man,” Frolov said, addressing him. “What’s the meaning
of this disorder? How queerly you fellows wait! Don’t you know that I
don’t like it? Devil take you, I shall give up coming to you!”
“I beg you graciously to excuse it, Alexey Semyonitch!” said the
engineer, laying his hand on his heart. “I will take steps immediately,
and your slightest wishes shall be carried out in the best and speediest
way.”
“Well, that’ll do, you can go. . . .”
The engineer bowed, staggered back, still doubled up, and disappeared
through the doorway with a final flash of the false diamonds on his
shirt-front and fingers.
The table was laid again. Almer drank red wine and ate with relish some
sort of bird served with truffles, and ordered a matelote of eelpouts
and a sterlet with its tail in its mouth. Frolov only drank vodka and
ate nothing but bread. He rubbed his face with his open hands, scowled,
and was evidently out of humour. Both were silent. There was a
stillness. Two electric lights in opaque shades flickered and hissed as
though they were angry. The gypsy girls passed the door, softly humming.
“One drinks and is none the merrier,” said Frolov. “The more I pour into
myself, the more sober I become. Other people grow festive with vodka,
but I suffer from anger, disgusting thoughts, sleeplessness. Why is it,
old man, that people don’t invent some other pleasure besides
drunkenness and debauchery? It’s really horrible!”
“You had better send for the gypsy girls.”
“Confound them!”
The head of an old gypsy woman appeared in the door from the passage.
“Alexey Semyonitch, the gypsies are asking for tea and brandy,” said the
old woman. “May we order it?”
“Yes,” answered Frolov. “You know they get a percentage from the
restaurant keeper for asking the visitors to treat them. Nowadays you
can’t even believe a man when he asks for vodka. The people are all
mean, vile, spoilt. Take these waiters, for instance. They have
countenances like professors, and grey heads; they get two hundred
roubles a month, they live in houses of their own and send their girls
to the high school, but you may swear at them and give yourself airs as
much as you please. For a rouble the engineer will gulp down a whole pot
of mustard and crow like a cock. On my honour, if one of them would take
offence I would make him a present of a thousand roubles.”
“What’s the matter with you?” said Almer, looking at him with surprise.
“Whence this melancholy? You are red in the face, you look like a wild
animal. . . . What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s horrid. There’s one thing I can’t get out of my head. It seems as
though it is nailed there and it won’t come out.”
A round little old man, buried in fat and completely bald, wearing a
short reefer jacket and lilac waistcoat and carrying a guitar, walked
into the room. He made an idiotic face, drew himself up, and saluted
like a soldier.
“Ah, the parasite!” said Frolov, “let me introduce him, he has made his
fortune by grunting like a pig. Come here!” He poured vodka, wine, and
brandy into a glass, sprinkled pepper and salt into it, mixed it all up
and gave it to the parasite. The latter tossed it off and smacked his
lips with gusto.
“He’s accustomed to drink a mess so that pure wine makes him sick,” said
Frolov. “Come, parasite, sit down and sing.”
The old man sat down, touched the strings with his fat fingers, and
began singing:
“Neetka, neetka, Margareetka. . . .”
After drinking champagne Frolov was drunk. He thumped with his fist on
the table and said:
“Yes, there’s something that sticks in my head! It won’t give me a
minute’s peace!”
“Why, what is it?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret. It’s something so private that I could
only speak of it in my prayers. But if you like . . . as a sign of
friendship, between ourselves . . . only mind, to no one, no, no, no, .
. . I’ll tell you, it will ease my heart, but for God’s sake . . .
listen and forget it. . . .”
Frolov bent down to Almer and for a minute breathed in his ear.
“I hate my wife!” he brought out.
The lawyer looked at him with surprise.
“Yes, yes, my wife, Marya Mihalovna,” Frolov muttered, flushing red. “I
hate her and that’s all about it.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know myself! I’ve only been married two years. I married as you
know for love, and now I hate her like a mortal enemy, like this
parasite here, saving your presence. And there is no cause, no sort of
cause! When she sits by me, eats, or says anything, my whole soul boils,
I can scarcely restrain myself from being rude to her. It’s something
one can’t describe. To leave her or tell her the truth is utterly
impossible because it would be a scandal, and living with her is worse
than hell for me. I can’t stay at home! I spend my days at business and
in the restaurants and spend my nights in dissipation. Come, how is one
to explain this hatred? She is not an ordinary woman, but handsome,
clever, quiet.”
The old man stamped his foot and began singing:
“I went a walk with a captain bold, And in his ear my secrets told.”
“I must own I always thought that Marya Mihalovna was not at all the
right person for you,” said Almer after a brief silence, and he heaved a
sigh.
“Do you mean she is too well educated? . . . I took the gold medal at
the commercial school myself, I have been to Paris three times. I am not
cleverer than you, of course, but I am no more foolish than my wife. No,
brother, education is not the sore point. Let me tell you how all the
trouble began. It began with my suddenly fancying that she had married
me not from love, but for the sake of my money. This idea took
possession of my brain. I have done all I could think of, but the cursed
thing sticks! And to make it worse my wife was overtaken with a passion
for luxury. Getting into a sack of gold after poverty, she took to
flinging it in all directions. She went quite off her head, and was so
carried away that she used to get through twenty thousand every month.
And I am a distrustful man. I don’t believe in anyone, I suspect
everybody. And the more friendly you are to me the greater my torment. I
keep fancying I am being flattered for my money. I trust no one! I am a
difficult man, my boy, very difficult!”
Frolov emptied his glass at one gulp and went on.
“But that’s all nonsense,” he said. “One never ought to speak of it.
It’s stupid. I am tipsy and I have been chattering, and now you are
looking at me with lawyer’s eyes—glad you know some one else’s secret.
Well, well! . . . Let us drop this conversation. Let us drink! I say,”
he said, addressing a waiter, “is Mustafa here? Fetch him in!”
Shortly afterwards there walked into the room a little Tatar boy, aged
about twelve, wearing a dress coat and white gloves.
“Come here!” Frolov said to him. “Explain to us the following fact:
there was a time when you Tatars conquered us and took tribute from us,
but now you serve us as waiters and sell dressing-gowns. How do you
explain such a change?”
Mustafa raised his eyebrows and said in a shrill voice, with a sing-song
intonation: “The mutability of destiny!”
Almer looked at his grave face and went off into peals of laughter.
“Well, give him a rouble!” said Frolov. “He is making his fortune out of
the mutability of destiny. He is only kept here for the sake of those
two words. Drink, Mustafa! You will make a gre-eat rascal! I mean it is
awful how many of your sort are toadies hanging about rich men. The
number of these peaceful bandits and robbers is beyond all reckoning!
Shouldn’t we send for the gypsies now? Eh? Fetch the gypsies along!”
The gypsies, who had been hanging about wearily in the corridors for a
long time, burst with whoops into the room, and a wild orgy began.
“Drink!” Frolov shouted to them. “Drink! Seed of Pharaoh! Sing! A-a-ah!”
“In the winter time . . . o-o-ho! . . . the sledge was flying . . .”
The gypsies sang, whistled, danced. In the frenzy which sometimes takes
possession of spoilt and very wealthy men, “broad natures,” Frolov began
to play the fool. He ordered supper and champagne for the gypsies, broke
the shade of the electric light, shied bottles at the pictures and
looking-glasses, and did it all apparently without the slightest
enjoyment, scowling and shouting irritably, with contempt for the
people, with an expression of hatred in his eyes and his manners. He
made the engineer sing a solo, made the bass singers drink a mixture of
wine, vodka, and oil.
At six o’clock they handed him the bill.
“Nine hundred and twenty-five roubles, forty kopecks,” said Almer, and
shrugged his shoulders. “What’s it for? No, wait, we must go into it!”
“Stop!” muttered Frolov, pulling out his pocket-book. “Well! . . . let
them rob me. That’s what I’m rich for, to be robbed! . . . You can’t get
on without parasites! . . . You are my lawyer. You get six thousand a
year out of me and what for? But excuse me, . . . I don’t know what I am
saying.”
As he was returning home with Almer, Frolov murmured:
“Going home is awful to me! Yes! . . . There isn’t a human being I can
open my soul to. . . . They are all robbers . . . traitors . . . . Oh,
why did I tell you my secret? Yes . . . why? Tell me why?”
At the entrance to his house, he craned forward towards Almer and,
staggering, kissed him on the lips, having the old Moscow habit of
kissing indiscriminately on every occasion.
“Good-bye . . . I am a difficult, hateful man,” he said. “A horrid,
drunken, shameless life. You are a well-educated, clever man, but you
only laugh and drink with me . . . there’s no help from any of you. . .
. But if you were a friend to me, if you were an honest man, in reality
you ought to have said to me: ‘Ugh, you vile, hateful man! You
reptile!’”
“Come, come,” Almer muttered, “go to bed.”
“There is no help from you; the only hope is that, when I am in the
country in the summer, I may go out into the fields and a storm come on
and the thunder may strike me dead on the spot. . . . Good-bye.”
Frolov kissed Almer once more and muttering and dropping asleep as he
walked, began mounting the stairs, supported by two footmen.
THE MARSHAL’S WIDOW
ON the first of February every year, St. Trifon’s day, there is an
extraordinary commotion on the estate of Madame Zavzyatov, the widow of
Trifon Lvovitch, the late marshal of the district. On that day, the
nameday of the deceased marshal, the widow Lyubov Petrovna has a requiem
service celebrated in his memory, and after the requiem a thanksgiving
to the Lord. The whole district assembles for the service. There you
will see Hrumov the present marshal, Marfutkin, the president of the
Zemstvo, Potrashkov, the permanent member of the Rural Board, the two
justices of the peace of the district, the police captain, Krinolinov,
two police-superintendents, the district doctor, Dvornyagin, smelling of
iodoform, all the landowners, great and small, and so on. There are
about fifty people assembled in all.
Precisely at twelve o’clock, the visitors, with long faces, make their
way from all the rooms to the big hall. There are carpets on the floor
and their steps are noiseless, but the solemnity of the occasion makes
them instinctively walk on tip-toe, holding out their hands to balance
themselves. In the hall everything is already prepared. Father Yevmeny,
a little old man in a high faded cap, puts on his black vestments.
Konkordiev, the deacon, already in his vestments, and as red as a crab,
is noiselessly turning over the leaves of his missal and putting slips
of paper in it. At the door leading to the vestibule, Luka, the
sacristan, puffing out his cheeks and making round eyes, blows up the
censer. The hall is gradually filled with bluish transparent smoke and
the smell of incense.
Gelikonsky, the elementary schoolmaster, a young man with big pimples on
his frightened face, wearing a new greatcoat like a sack, carries round
wax candles on a silver-plated tray. The hostess, Lyubov Petrovna,
stands in the front by a little table with a dish of funeral rice on it,
and holds her handkerchief in readiness to her face. There is a profound
stillness, broken from time to time by sighs. Everybody has a long,
solemn face. . . .
The requiem service begins. The blue smoke curls up from the censer and
plays in the slanting sunbeams, the lighted candles faintly splutter.
The singing, at first harsh and deafening, soon becomes quiet and
musical as the choir gradually adapt themselves to the acoustic
conditions of the rooms. . . . The tunes are all mournful and sad. . . .
The guests are gradually brought to a melancholy mood and grow pensive.
Thoughts of the brevity of human life, of mutability, of worldly vanity
stray through their brains. . . . They recall the deceased Zavzyatov, a
thick-set, red-cheeked man who used to drink off a bottle of champagne
at one gulp and smash looking-glasses with his forehead. And when they
sing “With Thy Saints, O Lord,” and the sobs of their hostess are
audible, the guests shift uneasily from one foot to the other. The more
emotional begin to feel a tickling in their throat and about their
eyelids. Marfutkin, the president of the Zemstvo, to stifle the
unpleasant feeling, bends down to the police captain’s ear and whispers:
“I was at Ivan Fyodoritch’s yesterday. . . . Pyotr Petrovitch and I took
all the tricks, playing no trumps. . . . Yes, indeed. . . . Olga
Andreyevna was so exasperated that her false tooth fell out of her
mouth.”
But at last the “Eternal Memory” is sung. Gelikonsky respectfully takes
away the candles, and the memorial service is over. Thereupon there
follows a momentary commotion; there is a changing of vestments and a
thanksgiving service. After the thanksgiving, while Father Yevmeny is
disrobing, the visitors rub their hands and cough, while their hostess
tells some anecdote of the good-heartedness of the deceased Trifon
Lvovitch.
“Pray come to lunch, friends,” she says, concluding her story with a
sigh.
The visitors, trying not to push or tread on each other’s feet, hasten
into the dining-room. . . . There the luncheon is awaiting them. The
repast is so magnificent that the deacon Konkordiev thinks it his duty
every year to fling up his hands as he looks at it and, shaking his head
in amazement, say:
“Supernatural! It’s not so much like human fare, Father Yevmeny, as
offerings to the gods.”
The lunch is certainly exceptional. Everything that the flora and fauna
of the country can furnish is on the table, but the only thing
supernatural about it, perhaps, is that on the table there is everything
except . . . alcoholic beverages. Lyubov Petrovna has taken a vow never
to have in her house cards or spirituous liquors —the two sources of her
husband’s ruin. And the only bottles contain oil and vinegar, as though
in mockery and chastisement of the guests who are to a man desperately
fond of the bottle, and given to tippling.
“Please help yourselves, gentlemen!” the marshal’s widow presses them.
“Only you must excuse me, I have no vodka. . . . I have none in the
house.”
The guests approach the table and hesitatingly attack the pie. But the
progress with eating is slow. In the plying of forks, in the cutting up
and munching, there is a certain sloth and apathy. . . . Evidently
something is wanting.
“I feel as though I had lost something,” one of the justices of the
peace whispers to the other. “I feel as I did when my wife ran away with
the engineer. . . . I can’t eat.”
Marfutkin, before beginning to eat, fumbles for a long time in his
pocket and looks for his handkerchief.
“Oh, my handkerchief must be in my greatcoat,” he recalls in a loud
voice, “and here I am looking for it,” and he goes into the vestibule
where the fur coats are hanging up.
He returns from the vestibule with glistening eyes, and at once attacks
the pie with relish.
“I say, it’s horrid munching away with a dry mouth, isn’t it?” he
whispers to Father Yevmeny. “Go into the vestibule, Father. There’s a
bottle there in my fur coat. . . . Only mind you are careful; don’t make
a clatter with the bottle.”
Father Yevmeny recollects that he has some direction to give to Luka,
and trips off to the vestibule.
“Father, a couple of words in confidence,” says Dvornyagin, overtaking
him.
“You should see the fur coat I’ve bought myself, gentlemen,” Hrumov
boasts. “It’s worth a thousand, and I gave . . . you won’t believe it .
. . two hundred and fifty! Not a farthing more.”
At any other time the guests would have greeted this information with
indifference, but now they display surprise and incredulity. In the end
they all troop out into the vestibule to look at the fur coat, and go on
looking at it till the doctor’s man Mikeshka carries five empty bottles
out on the sly. When the steamed sturgeon is served, Marfutkin remembers
that he has left his cigar case in his sledge and goes to the stable.
That he may not be lonely on this expedition, he takes with him the
deacon, who appropriately feels it necessary to have a look at his
horse. . . .
On the evening of the same day, Lyubov Petrovna is sitting in her study,
writing a letter to an old friend in Petersburg:
“To-day, as in past years,” she writes among other things, “I had a
memorial service for my dear husband. All my neighbours came to the
service. They are a simple, rough set, but what hearts! I gave them a
splendid lunch, but of course, as in previous years, without a drop of
alcoholic liquor. Ever since he died from excessive drinking I have
vowed to establish temperance in this district and thereby to expiate
his sins. I have begun the campaign for temperance at my own house.
Father Yevmeny is delighted with my efforts, and helps me both in word
and deed. Oh, ma chère, if you knew how fond my bears are of me! The
president of the Zemstvo, Marfutkin, kissed my hand after lunch, held it
a long while to his lips, and, wagging his head in an absurd way, burst
into tears: so much feeling but no words! Father Yevmeny, that
delightful little old man, sat down by me, and looking tearfully at me
kept babbling something like a child. I did not understand what he said,
but I know how to understand true feeling. The police captain, the
handsome man of whom I wrote to you, went down on his knees to me, tried
to read me some verses of his own composition (he is a poet), but . . .
his feelings were too much for him, he lurched and fell over . . . that
huge giant went into hysterics, you can imagine my delight! The day did
not pass without a hitch, however. Poor Alalykin, the president of the
judges’ assembly, a stout and apoplectic man, was overcome by illness
and lay on the sofa in a state of unconsciousness for two hours. We had
to pour water on him. . . . I am thankful to Doctor Dvornyagin: he had
brought a bottle of brandy from his dispensary and he moistened the
patient’s temples, which quickly revived him, and he was able to be
moved. . . .”
A BAD BUSINESS “WHO goes there?”
No answer. The watchman sees nothing, but through the roar of the wind
and the trees distinctly hears someone walking along the avenue ahead of
him. A March night, cloudy and foggy, envelopes the earth, and it seems
to the watchman that the earth, the sky, and he himself with his
thoughts are all merged together into something vast and impenetrably
black. He can only grope his way.
“Who goes there?” the watchman repeats, and he begins to fancy that he
hears whispering and smothered laughter. “Who’s there?”
“It’s I, friend . . .” answers an old man’s voice.
“But who are you?”
“I . . . a traveller.”
“What sort of traveller?” the watchman cries angrily, trying to disguise
his terror by shouting. “What the devil do you want here? You go
prowling about the graveyard at night, you ruffian!”
“You don’t say it’s a graveyard here?”
“Why, what else? Of course it’s the graveyard! Don’t you see it is?”
“O-o-oh . . . Queen of Heaven!” there is a sound of an old man sighing.
“I see nothing, my good soul, nothing. Oh the darkness, the darkness!
You can’t see your hand before your face, it is dark, friend. O-o-oh. .
.”
“But who are you?”
“I am a pilgrim, friend, a wandering man.”
“The devils, the nightbirds. . . . Nice sort of pilgrims! They are
drunkards . . .” mutters the watchman, reassured by the tone and sighs
of the stranger. “One’s tempted to sin by you. They drink the day away
and prowl about at night. But I fancy I heard you were not alone; it
sounded like two or three of you.”
“I am alone, friend, alone. Quite alone. O-o-oh our sins. . . .”
The watchman stumbles up against the man and stops.
“How did you get here?” he asks.
“I have lost my way, good man. I was walking to the Mitrievsky Mill and
I lost my way.”
“Whew! Is this the road to Mitrievsky Mill? You sheepshead! For the
Mitrievsky Mill you must keep much more to the left, straight out of the
town along the high road. You have been drinking and have gone a couple
of miles out of your way. You must have had a drop in the town.”
“I did, friend . . . Truly I did; I won’t hide my sins. But how am I to
go now?”
“Go straight on and on along this avenue till you can go no farther, and
then turn at once to the left and go till you have crossed the whole
graveyard right to the gate. There will be a gate there. . . . Open it
and go with God’s blessing. Mind you don’t fall into the ditch. And when
you are out of the graveyard you go all the way by the fields till you
come out on the main road.”
“God give you health, friend. May the Queen of Heaven save you and have
mercy on you. You might take me along, good man! Be merciful! Lead me to
the gate.”
“As though I had the time to waste! Go by yourself!”
“Be merciful! I’ll pray for you. I can’t see anything; one can’t see
one’s hand before one’s face, friend. . . . It’s so dark, so dark! Show
me the way, sir!”
“As though I had the time to take you about; if I were to play the nurse
to everyone I should never have done.”
“For Christ’s sake, take me! I can’t see, and I am afraid to go alone
through the graveyard. It’s terrifying, friend, it’s terrifying; I am
afraid, good man.”
“There’s no getting rid of you,” sighs the watchman. “All right then,
come along.”
The watchman and the traveller go on together. They walk shoulder to
shoulder in silence. A damp, cutting wind blows straight into their
faces and the unseen trees murmuring and rustling scatter big drops upon
them. . . . The path is almost entirely covered with puddles.
“There is one thing passes my understanding,” says the watchman after a
prolonged silence—“how you got here. The gate’s locked. Did you climb
over the wall? If you did climb over the wall, that’s the last thing you
would expect of an old man.”
“I don’t know, friend, I don’t know. I can’t say myself how I got here.
It’s a visitation. A chastisement of the Lord. Truly a visitation, the
evil one confounded me. So you are a watchman here, friend?”
“Yes.”
“The only one for the whole graveyard?”
There is such a violent gust of wind that both stop for a minute.
Waiting till the violence of the wind abates, the watchman answers:
“There are three of us, but one is lying ill in a fever and the other’s
asleep. He and I take turns about.”
“Ah, to be sure, friend. What a wind! The dead must hear it! It howls
like a wild beast! O-o-oh.”
“And where do you come from?”
“From a distance, friend. I am from Vologda, a long way off. I go from
one holy place to another and pray for people. Save me and have mercy
upon me, O Lord.”
The watchman stops for a minute to light his pipe. He stoops down behind
the traveller’s back and lights several matches. The gleam of the first
match lights up for one instant a bit of the avenue on the right, a
white tombstone with an angel, and a dark cross; the light of the second
match, flaring up brightly and extinguished by the wind, flashes like
lightning on the left side, and from the darkness nothing stands out but
the angle of some sort of trellis; the third match throws light to right
and to left, revealing the white tombstone, the dark cross, and the
trellis round a child’s grave.
“The departed sleep; the dear ones sleep!” the stranger mutters, sighing
loudly. “They all sleep alike, rich and poor, wise and foolish, good and
wicked. They are of the same value now. And they will sleep till the
last trump. The Kingdom of Heaven and peace eternal be theirs.”
“Here we are walking along now, but the time will come when we shall be
lying here ourselves,” says the watchman.
“To be sure, to be sure, we shall all. There is no man who will not die.
O-o-oh. Our doings are wicked, our thoughts are deceitful! Sins, sins!
My soul accursed, ever covetous, my belly greedy and lustful! I have
angered the Lord and there is no salvation for me in this world and the
next. I am deep in sins like a worm in the earth.”
“Yes, and you have to die.”
“You are right there.”
“Death is easier for a pilgrim than for fellows like us,” says the
watchman.
“There are pilgrims of different sorts. There are the real ones who are
God-fearing men and watch over their own souls, and there are such as
stray about the graveyard at night and are a delight to the devils. . .
Ye-es! There’s one who is a pilgrim could give you a crack on the pate
with an axe if he liked and knock the breath out of you.”
“What are you talking like that for?”
“Oh, nothing . . . Why, I fancy here’s the gate. Yes, it is. Open it,
good man.”
The watchman, feeling his way, opens the gate, leads the pilgrim out by
the sleeve, and says:
“Here’s the end of the graveyard. Now you must keep on through the open
fields till you get to the main road. Only close here there will be the
boundary ditch—don’t fall in. . . . And when you come out on to the
road, turn to the right, and keep on till you reach the mill. . . .”
“O-o-oh!” sighs the pilgrim after a pause, “and now I am thinking that I
have no cause to go to Mitrievsky Mill. . . . Why the devil should I go
there? I had better stay a bit with you here, sir. . . .”
“What do you want to stay with me for?”
“Oh . . . it’s merrier with you! . . . .”
“So you’ve found a merry companion, have you? You, pilgrim, are fond of
a joke I see. . . .”
“To be sure I am,” says the stranger, with a hoarse chuckle. “Ah, my
dear good man, I bet you will remember the pilgrim many a long year!”
“Why should I remember you?”
“Why I’ve got round you so smartly. . . . Am I a pilgrim? I am not a
pilgrim at all.”
“What are you then?”
“A dead man. . . . I’ve only just got out of my coffin. . . . Do you
remember Gubaryev, the locksmith, who hanged himself in carnival week?
Well, I am Gubaryev himself! . . .”
“Tell us something else!”
The watchman does not believe him, but he feels all over such a cold,
oppressive terror that he starts off and begins hurriedly feeling for
the gate.
“Stop, where are you off to?” says the stranger, clutching him by the
arm. “Aie, aie, aie . . . what a fellow you are! How can you leave me
all alone?”
“Let go!” cries the watchman, trying to pull his arm away.
“Sto-op! I bid you stop and you stop. Don’t struggle, you dirty dog! If
you want to stay among the living, stop and hold your tongue till I tell
you. It’s only that I don’t care to spill blood or you would have been a
dead man long ago, you scurvy rascal. . . . Stop!”
The watchman’s knees give way under him. In his terror he shuts his
eyes, and trembling all over huddles close to the wall. He would like to
call out, but he knows his cries would not reach any living thing. The
stranger stands beside him and holds him by the arm. . . . Three minutes
pass in silence.
“One’s in a fever, another’s asleep, and the third is seeing pilgrims on
their way,” mutters the stranger. “Capital watchmen, they are worth
their salary! Ye-es, brother, thieves have always been cleverer than
watchmen! Stand still, don’t stir. . . .”
Five minutes, ten minutes pass in silence. All at once the wind brings
the sound of a whistle.
“Well, now you can go,” says the stranger, releasing the watchman’s arm.
“Go and thank God you are alive!”
The stranger gives a whistle too, runs away from the gate, and the
watchman hears him leap over the ditch.
With a foreboding of something very dreadful in his heart, the watchman,
still trembling with terror, opens the gate irresolutely and runs back
with his eyes shut.
At the turning into the main avenue he hears hurried footsteps, and
someone asks him, in a hissing voice: “Is that you, Timofey? Where is
Mitka?”
And after running the whole length of the main avenue he notices a
little dim light in the darkness. The nearer he gets to the light the
more frightened he is and the stronger his foreboding of evil.
“It looks as though the light were in the church,” he thinks. “And how
can it have come there? Save me and have mercy on me, Queen of Heaven!
And that it is.”
The watchman stands for a minute before the broken window and looks with
horror towards the altar. . . . A little wax candle which the thieves
had forgotten to put out flickers in the wind that bursts in at the
window and throws dim red patches of light on the vestments flung about
and a cupboard overturned on the floor, on numerous footprints near the
high altar and the altar of offerings.
A little time passes and the howling wind sends floating over the
churchyard the hurried uneven clangs of the alarm-bell. . . .
IN THE COURT
AT the district town of N. in the cinnamon-coloured government house in
which the Zemstvo, the sessional meetings of the justices of the peace,
the Rural Board, the Liquor Board, the Military Board, and many others
sit by turns, the Circuit Court was in session on one of the dull days
of autumn. Of the above-mentioned cinnamon-coloured house a local
official had wittily observed:
“Here is Justitia, here is Policia, here is Militia—a regular boarding
school of high-born young ladies.”
But, as the saying is, “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” and probably
that is why the house strikes, oppresses, and overwhelms a fresh
unofficial visitor with its dismal barrack-like appearance, its decrepit
condition, and the complete absence of any kind of comfort, external or
internal. Even on the brightest spring days it seems wrapped in a dense
shade, and on clear moonlight nights, when the trees and the little
dwelling-houses merged in one blur of shadow seem plunged in quiet
slumber, it alone absurdly and inappropriately towers, an oppressive
mass of stone, above the modest landscape, spoils the general harmony,
and keeps sleepless vigil as though it could not escape from burdensome
memories of past unforgiven sins. Inside it is like a barn and extremely
unattractive. It is strange to see how readily these elegant lawyers,
members of committees, and marshals of nobility, who in their own homes
will make a scene over the slightest fume from the stove, or stain on
the floor, resign themselves here to whirring ventilation wheels, the
disgusting smell of fumigating candles, and the filthy, forever
perspiring walls.
The sitting of the circuit court began between nine and ten. The
programme of the day was promptly entered upon, with noticeable haste.
The cases came on one after another and ended quickly, like a church
service without a choir, so that no mind could form a complete picture
of all this parti-coloured mass of faces, movements, words, misfortunes,
true sayings and lies, all racing by like a river in flood. . . . By two
o’clock a great deal had been done: two prisoners had been sentenced to
service in convict battalions, one of the privileged class had been
sentenced to deprivation of rights and imprisonment, one had been
acquitted, one case had been adjourned.
At precisely two o’clock the presiding judge announced that the case “of
the peasant Nikolay Harlamov, charged with the murder of his wife,”
would next be heard. The composition of the court remained the same as
it had been for the preceding case, except that the place of the
defending counsel was filled by a new personage, a beardless young
graduate in a coat with bright buttons. The president gave the
order—“Bring in the prisoner!”
But the prisoner, who had been got ready beforehand, was already walking
to his bench. He was a tall, thick-set peasant of about fifty-five,
completely bald, with an apathetic, hairy face and a big red beard. He
was followed by a frail-looking little soldier with a gun.
Just as he was reaching the bench the escort had a trifling mishap. He
stumbled and dropped the gun out of his hands, but caught it at once
before it touched the ground, knocking his knee violently against the
butt end as he did so. A faint laugh was audible in the audience. Either
from the pain or perhaps from shame at his awkwardness the soldier
flushed a dark red.
After the customary questions to the prisoner, the shuffling of the
jury, the calling over and swearing in of the witnesses, the reading of
the charge began. The narrow-chested, pale-faced secretary, far too thin
for his uniform, and with sticking plaster on his check, read it in a
low, thick bass, rapidly like a sacristan, without raising or dropping
his voice, as though afraid of exerting his lungs; he was seconded by
the ventilation wheel whirring indefatigably behind the judge’s table,
and the result was a sound that gave a drowsy, narcotic character to the
stillness of the hall.
The president, a short-sighted man, not old but with an extremely
exhausted face, sat in his armchair without stirring and held his open
hand near his brow as though screening his eyes from the sun. To the
droning of the ventilation wheel and the secretary he meditated. When
the secretary paused for an instant to take breath on beginning a new
page, he suddenly started and looked round at the court with lustreless
eyes, then bent down to the ear of the judge next to him and asked with
a sigh:
“Are you putting up at Demyanov’s, Matvey Petrovitch?”
“Yes, at Demyanov’s,” answered the other, starting too.
“Next time I shall probably put up there too. It’s really impossible to
put up at Tipyakov’s! There’s noise and uproar all night! Knocking,
coughing, children crying. . . . It’s impossible!”
The assistant prosecutor, a fat, well-nourished, dark man with gold
spectacles, with a handsome, well-groomed beard, sat motionless as a
statue, with his cheek propped on his fist, reading Byron’s “Cain.” His
eyes were full of eager attention and his eyebrows rose higher and
higher with wonder. . . . From time to time he dropped back in his
chair, gazed without interest straight before him for a minute, and then
buried himself in his reading again. The council for the defence moved
the blunt end of his pencil about the table and mused with his head on
one side. . . . His youthful face expressed nothing but the frigid,
immovable boredom which is commonly seen on the face of schoolboys and
men on duty who are forced from day to day to sit in the same place, to
see the same faces, the same walls. He felt no excitement about the
speech he was to make, and indeed what did that speech amount to? On
instructions from his superiors in accordance with long-established
routine he would fire it off before the jurymen, without passion or
ardour, feeling that it was colourless and boring, and then—gallop
through the mud and the rain to the station, thence to the town, shortly
to receive instructions to go off again to some district to deliver
another speech. . . . It was a bore!
At first the prisoner turned pale and coughed nervously into his sleeve,
but soon the stillness, the general monotony and boredom infected him
too. He looked with dull-witted respectfulness at the judges’ uniforms,
at the weary faces of the jurymen, and bBlinked calmly. The surroundings
and procedure of the court, the expectation of which had so weighed on
his soul while he was awaiting them in prison, now had the most soothing
effect on him. What he met here was not at all what he could have
expected. The charge of murder hung over him, and yet here he met with
neither threatening faces nor indignant looks nor loud phrases about
retribution nor sympathy for his extraordinary fate; not one of those
who were judging him looked at him with interest or for long. . . . The
dingy windows and walls, the voice of the secretary, the attitude of the
prosecutor were all saturated with official indifference and produced an
atmosphere of frigidity, as though the murderer were simply an official
property, or as though he were not being judged by living men, but by
some unseen machine, set going, goodness knows how or by whom. . . .
The peasant, reassured, did not understand that the men here were as
accustomed to the dramas and tragedies of life and were as blunted by
the sight of them as hospital attendants are at the sight of death, and
that the whole horror and hopelessness of his position lay just in this
mechanical indifference. It seemed that if he were not to sit quietly
but to get up and begin beseeching, appealing with tears for their
mercy, bitterly repenting, that if he were to die of despair—it would
all be shattered against blunted nerves and the callousness of custom,
like waves against a rock.
When the secretary finished, the president for some reason passed his
hands over the table before him, looked for some time with his eyes
screwed up towards the prisoner, and then asked, speaking languidly:
“Prisoner at the bar, do you plead guilty to having murdered your wife
on the evening of the ninth of June?”
“No, sir,” answered the prisoner, getting up and holding his gown over
his chest.
After this the court proceeded hurriedly to the examination of
witnesses. Two peasant women and five men and the village policeman who
had made the enquiry were questioned. All of them, mud-bespattered,
exhausted with their long walk and waiting in the witnesses’ room,
gloomy and dispirited, gave the same evidence. They testified that
Harlamov lived “well” with his old woman, like anyone else; that he
never beat her except when he had had a drop; that on the ninth of June
when the sun was setting the old woman had been found in the porch with
her skull broken; that beside her in a pool of blood lay an axe. When
they looked for Nikolay to tell him of the calamity he was not in his
hut or in the streets. They ran all over the village, looking for him.
They went to all the pothouses and huts, but could not find him. He had
disappeared, and two days later came of his own accord to the police
office, pale, with his clothes torn, trembling all over. He was bound
and put in the lock-up.
“Prisoner,” said the president, addressing Harlamov, “cannot you explain
to the court where you were during the three days following the murder?”
“I was wandering about the fields. . . . Neither eating nor drinking . .
. .”
“Why did you hide yourself, if it was not you that committed the
murder?”
“I was frightened. . . . I was afraid I might be judged guilty. . . .”
“Aha! . . . Good, sit down!”
The last to be examined was the district doctor who had made a post-
mortem on the old woman. He told the court all that he remembered of his
report at the post-mortem and all that he had succeeded in thinking of
on his way to the court that morning. The president screwed up his eyes
at his new glossy black suit, at his foppish cravat, at his moving lips;
he listened and in his mind the languid thought seemed to spring up of
itself:
“Everyone wears a short jacket nowadays, why has he had his made long?
Why long and not short?”
The circumspect creak of boots was audible behind the president’s back.
It was the assistant prosecutor going up to the table to take some
papers.
“Mihail Vladimirovitch,” said the assistant prosecutor, bending down to
the president’s ear, “amazingly slovenly the way that Koreisky conducted
the investigation. The prisoner’s brother was not examined, the village
elder was not examined, there’s no making anything out of his
description of the hut. . . .”
“It can’t be helped, it can’t be helped,” said the president, sinking
back in his chair. “He’s a wreck . . . dropping to bits!”
“By the way,” whispered the assistant prosecutor, “look at the audience,
in the front row, the third from the right . . . a face like an actor’s
. . . that’s the local Croesus. He has a fortune of something like fifty
thousand.”
“Really? You wouldn’t guess it from his appearance. . . . Well, dear
boy, shouldn’t we have a break?”
“We will finish the case for the prosecution, and then. . . .”
“As you think best. . . . Well?” the president raised his eyes to the
doctor. “So you consider that death was instantaneous?”
“Yes, in consequence of the extent of the injury to the brain substance.
. . .”
When the doctor had finished, the president gazed into the space between
the prosecutor and the counsel for the defence and suggested:
“Have you any questions to ask?”
The assistant prosecutor shook his head negatively, without lifting his
eyes from “Cain”; the counsel for the defence unexpectedly stirred and,
clearing his throat, asked:
“Tell me, doctor, can you from the dimensions of the wound form any
theory as to . . . as to the mental condition of the criminal? That is,
I mean, does the extent of the injury justify the supposition that the
accused was suffering from temporary aberration?”
The president raised his drowsy indifferent eyes to the counsel for the
defence. The assistant prosecutor tore himself from “Cain,” and looked
at the president. They merely looked, but there was no smile, no
surprise, no perplexity—their faces expressed nothing.
“Perhaps,” the doctor hesitated, “if one considers the force with which
. . . er—er—er . . . the criminal strikes the blow. . . . However,
excuse me, I don’t quite understand your question. . . .”
The counsel for the defence did not get an answer to his question, and
indeed he did not feel the necessity of one. It was clear even to
himself that that question had strayed into his mind and found utterance
simply through the effect of the stillness, the boredom, the whirring
ventilator wheels.
When they had got rid of the doctor the court rose to examine the
“material evidences.” The first thing examined was the full-skirted
coat, upon the sleeve of which there was a dark brownish stain of blood.
Harlamov on being questioned as to the origin of the stain stated:
“Three days before my old woman’s death Penkov bled his horse. I was
there; I was helping to be sure, and . . . and got smeared with it. . .
.”
“But Penkov has just given evidence that he does not remember that you
were present at the bleeding. . . .”
“I can’t tell about that.”
“Sit down.”
They proceeded to examine the axe with which the old woman had been
murdered.
“That’s not my axe,” the prisoner declared.
“Whose is it, then?”
“I can’t tell . . . I hadn’t an axe. . . .”
“A peasant can’t get on for a day without an axe. And your neighbour
Ivan Timofeyitch, with whom you mended a sledge, has given evidence that
it is your axe. . . .”
“I can’t say about that, but I swear before God (Harlamov held out his
hand before him and spread out the fingers), before the living God. And
I don’t remember how long it is since I did have an axe of my own. I did
have one like that only a bit smaller, but my son Prohor lost it. Two
years before he went into the army, he drove off to fetch wood, got
drinking with the fellows, and lost it. . . .”
“Good, sit down.”
This systematic distrust and disinclination to hear him probably
irritated and offended Harlamov. He bBlinked and red patches came out on
his cheekbones.
“I swear in the sight of God,” he went on, craning his neck forward. “If
you don’t believe me, be pleased to ask my son Prohor. Proshka, what did
you do with the axe?” he suddenly asked in a rough voice, turning
abruptly to the soldier escorting him. “Where is it?”
It was a painful moment! Everyone seemed to wince and as it were shrink
together. The same fearful, incredible thought flashed like lightning
through every head in the court, the thought of possibly fatal
coincidence, and not one person in the court dared to look at the
soldier’s face. Everyone refused to trust his thought and believed that
he had heard wrong.
“Prisoner, conversation with the guards is forbidden . . .” the
president made haste to say.
No one saw the escort’s face, and horror passed over the hall unseen as
in a mask. The usher of the court got up quietly from his place and
tiptoeing with his hand held out to balance himself went out of the
court. Half a minute later there came the muffled sounds and footsteps
that accompany the change of guard.
All raised their heads and, trying to look as though nothing had
happened, went on with their work. . . .
BOOTS
A PIANO-TUNER called Murkin, a close-shaven man with a yellow face, with
a nose stained with snuff, and cotton-wool in his ears, came out of his
hotel-room into the passage, and in a cracked voice cried: “Semyon!
Waiter!”
And looking at his frightened face one might have supposed that the
ceiling had fallen in on him or that he had just seen a ghost in his
room.
“Upon my word, Semyon!” he cried, seeing the attendant running towards
him. “What is the meaning of it? I am a rheumatic, delicate man and you
make me go barefoot! Why is it you don’t give me my boots all this time?
Where are they?”
Semyon went into Murkin’s room, looked at the place where he was in the
habit of putting the boots he had cleaned, and scratched his head: the
boots were not there.
“Where can they be, the damned things?” Semyon brought out. “I fancy I
cleaned them in the evening and put them here. . . . H’m! . . .
Yesterday, I must own, I had a drop. . . . I must have put them in
another room, I suppose. That must be it, Afanasy Yegoritch, they are in
another room! There are lots of boots, and how the devil is one to know
them apart when one is drunk and does not know what one is doing? . . .
I must have taken them in to the lady that’s next door . . . the
actress. . . .”
“And now, if you please, I am to go in to a lady and disturb her all
through you! Here, if you please, through this foolishness I am to wake
up a respectable woman.”
Sighing and coughing, Murkin went to the door of the next room and
cautiously tapped.
“Who’s there?” he heard a woman’s voice a minute later.
“It’s I!” Murkin began in a plaintive voice, standing in the attitude of
a cavalier addressing a lady of the highest society. “Pardon my
disturbing you, madam, but I am a man in delicate health, rheumatic . .
. . The doctors, madam, have ordered me to keep my feet warm, especially
as I have to go at once to tune the piano at Madame la Générale
Shevelitsyn’s. I can’t go to her barefoot.”
“But what do you want? What piano?”
“Not a piano, madam; it is in reference to boots! Semyon, stupid fellow,
cleaned my boots and put them by mistake in your room. Be so extremely
kind, madam, as to give me my boots!”
There was a sound of rustling, of jumping off the bed and the flapping
of slippers, after which the door opened slightly and a plump feminine
hand flung at Murkin’s feet a pair of boots. The piano-tuner thanked her
and went into his own room.
“Odd . . .” he muttered, putting on the boots, “it seems as though this
is not the right boot. Why, here are two left boots! Both are for the
left foot! I say, Semyon, these are not my boots! My boots have red tags
and no patches on them, and these are in holes and have no tags.”
Semyon picked up the boots, turned them over several times before his
eyes, and frowned.
“Those are Pavel Alexandritch’s boots,” he grumbled, squinting at them.
He squinted with the left eye.
“What Pavel Alexandritch?”
“The actor; he comes here every Tuesday. . . . He must have put on yours
instead of his own. . . . So I must have put both pairs in her room, his
and yours. Here’s a go!”
“Then go and change them!”
“That’s all right!” sniggered Semyon, “go and change them. . . . Where
am I to find him now? He went off an hour ago. . . . Go and look for the
wind in the fields!”
“Where does he live then?”
“Who can tell? He comes here every Tuesday, and where he lives I don’t
know. He comes and stays the night, and then you may wait till next
Tuesday. . . .”
“There, do you see, you brute, what you have done? Why, what am I to do
now? It is time I was at Madame la Générale Shevelitsyn’s, you
anathema! My feet are frozen!”
“You can change the boots before long. Put on these boots, go about in
them till the evening, and in the evening go to the theatre. . . . Ask
there for Blistanov, the actor. . . . If you don’t care to go to the
theatre, you will have to wait till next Tuesday; he only comes here on
Tuesdays. . . .”
“But why are there two boots for the left foot?” asked the piano-tuner,
picking up the boots with an air of disgust.
“What God has sent him, that he wears. Through poverty . . . where is an
actor to get boots? I said to him ‘What boots, Pavel Alexandritch! They
are a positive disgrace!’ and he said: ‘Hold your peace,’ says he, ‘and
turn pale! In those very boots,’ says he, ‘I have played counts and
princes.’ A queer lot! Artists, that’s the only word for them! If I were
the governor or anyone in command, I would get all these actors together
and clap them all in prison.”
Continually sighing and groaning and knitting his brows, Murkin drew the
two left boots on to his feet, and set off, limping, to Madame la
Générale Shevelitsyn’s. He went about the town all day long tuning
pianos, and all day long it seemed to him that everyone was looking at
his feet and seeing his patched boots with heels worn down at the sides!
Apart from his moral agonies he had to suffer physically also; the boots
gave him a corn.
In the evening he was at the theatre. There was a performance of
Bluebeard. It was only just before the last act, and then only thanks to
the good offices of a man he knew who played a flute in the orchestra,
that he gained admittance behind the scenes. Going to the men’s
dressing-room, he found there all the male performers. Some were
changing their clothes, others were painting their faces, others were
smoking. Bluebeard was standing with King Bobesh, showing him a
revolver.
“You had better buy it,” said Bluebeard. “I bought it at Kursk, a
bargain, for eight roubles, but, there! I will let you have it for six.
. . . A wonderfully good one!”
“Steady. . . . It’s loaded, you know!”
“Can I see Mr. Blistanov?” the piano-tuner asked as he went in.
“I am he!” said Bluebeard, turning to him. “What do you want?”
“Excuse my troubling you, sir,” began the piano-tuner in an imploring
voice, “but, believe me, I am a man in delicate health, rheumatic. The
doctors have ordered me to keep my feet warm . . .”
“But, speaking plainly, what do you want?”
“You see,” said the piano-tuner, addressing Bluebeard. “Er . . . you
stayed last night at Buhteyev’s furnished apartments . . . No. 64 . . .”
“What’s this nonsense?” said King Bobesh with a grin. “My wife is at No.
64.”
“Your wife, sir? Delighted. . . .” Murkin smiled. “It was she, your good
lady, who gave me this gentleman’s boots. . . . After this gentleman—”
the piano-tuner indicated Blistanov—“had gone away I missed my boots. .
. . I called the waiter, you know, and he said: ‘I left your boots in
the next room!’ By mistake, being in a state of intoxication, he left my
boots as well as yours at 64,” said Murkin, turning to Blistanov, “and
when you left this gentleman’s lady you put on mine.”
“What are you talking about?” said Blistanov, and he scowled. “Have you
come here to libel me?”
“Not at all, sir—God forbid! You misunderstand me. What am I talking
about? About boots! You did stay the night at No. 64, didn’t you?”
“When?”
“Last night!”
“Why, did you see me there?”
“No, sir, I didn’t see you,” said Murkin in great confusion, sitting
down and taking off the boots. “I did not see you, but this gentleman’s
lady threw out your boots here to me . . . instead of mine.”
“What right have you, sir, to make such assertions? I say nothing about
myself, but you are slandering a woman, and in the presence of her
husband, too!”
A fearful hubbub arose behind the scenes. King Bobesh, the injured
husband, suddenly turned crimson and brought his fist down upon the
table with such violence that two actresses in the next dressing-room
felt faint.
“And you believe it?” cried Bluebeard. “You believe this worthless
rascal? O-oh! Would you like me to kill him like a dog? Would you like
it? I will turn him into a beefsteak! I’ll blow his brains out!”
And all the persons who were promenading that evening in the town park
by the Summer theatre describe to this day how just before the fourth
act they saw a man with bare feet, a yellow face, and terror-stricken
eyes dart out of the theatre and dash along the principal avenue. He was
pursued by a man in the costume of Bluebeard, armed with a revolver.
What happened later no one saw. All that is known is that Murkin was
confined to his bed for a fortnight after his acquaintance with
Blistanov, and that to the words “I am a man in delicate health,
rheumatic” he took to adding, “I am a wounded man. . . .”
JOY IT was twelve o’clock at night.
Mitya Kuldarov, with excited face and ruffled hair, flew into his
parents’ flat, and hurriedly ran through all the rooms. His parents had
already gone to bed. His sister was in bed, finishing the last page of a
novel. His schoolboy brothers were asleep.
“Where have you come from?” cried his parents in amazement. “What is the
matter with you?
“Oh, don’t ask! I never expected it; no, I never expected it! It’s . . .
it’s positively incredible!”
Mitya laughed and sank into an armchair, so overcome by happiness that
he could not stand on his legs.
“It’s incredible! You can’t imagine! Look!”
His sister jumped out of bed and, throwing a quilt round her, went in to
her brother. The schoolboys woke up.
“What’s the matter? You don’t look like yourself!”
“It’s because I am so delighted, Mamma! Do you know, now all Russia
knows of me! All Russia! Till now only you knew that there was a
registration clerk called Dmitry Kuldarov, and now all Russia knows it!
Mamma! Oh, Lord!”
Mitya jumped up, ran up and down all the rooms, and then sat down again.
“Why, what has happened? Tell us sensibly!”
“You live like wild beasts, you don’t read the newspapers and take no
notice of what’s published, and there’s so much that is interesting in
the papers. If anything happens it’s all known at once, nothing is
hidden! How happy I am! Oh, Lord! You know it’s only celebrated people
whose names are published in the papers, and now they have gone and
published mine!”
“What do you mean? Where?”
The papa turned pale. The mamma glanced at the holy image and crossed
herself. The schoolboys jumped out of bed and, just as they were, in
short nightshirts, went up to their brother.
“Yes! My name has been published! Now all Russia knows of me! Keep the
paper, mamma, in memory of it! We will read it sometimes! Look!”
Mitya pulled out of his pocket a copy of the paper, gave it to his
father, and pointed with his finger to a passage marked with blue
pencil.
“Read it!”
The father put on his spectacles.
“Do read it!”
The mamma glanced at the holy image and crossed herself. The papa
cleared his throat and began to read: “At eleven o’clock on the evening
of the 29th of December, a registration clerk of the name of Dmitry
Kuldarov . . .”
“You see, you see! Go on!”
“. . . a registration clerk of the name of Dmitry Kuldarov, coming from
the beershop in Kozihin’s buildings in Little Bronnaia in an intoxicated
condition. . .”
“That’s me and Semyon Petrovitch. . . . It’s all described exactly! Go
on! Listen!”
“. . . intoxicated condition, slipped and fell under a horse belonging
to a sledge-driver, a peasant of the village of Durikino in the
Yuhnovsky district, called Ivan Drotov. The frightened horse, stepping
over Kuldarov and drawing the sledge over him, together with a Moscow
merchant of the second guild called Stepan Lukov, who was in it, dashed
along the street and was caught by some house-porters. Kuldarov, at
first in an unconscious condition, was taken to the police station and
there examined by the doctor. The blow he had received on the back of
his head. . .”
“It was from the shaft, papa. Go on! Read the rest!”
“. . . he had received on the back of his head turned out not to be
serious. The incident was duly reported. Medical aid was given to the
injured man. . . .”
“They told me to foment the back of my head with cold water. You have
read it now? Ah! So you see. Now it’s all over Russia! Give it here!”
Mitya seized the paper, folded it up and put it into his pocket.
“I’ll run round to the Makarovs and show it to them. . . . I must show
it to the Ivanitskys too, Natasya Ivanovna, and Anisim Vassilyitch. . .
. I’ll run! Good-bye!”
Mitya put on his cap with its cockade and, joyful and triumphant, ran
into the street.
LADIES
FYODOR PETROVITCH the Director of Elementary Schools in the N. District,
who considered himself a just and generous man, was one day interviewing
in his office a schoolmaster called Vremensky.
“No, Mr. Vremensky,” he was saying, “your retirement is inevitable. You
cannot continue your work as a schoolmaster with a voice like that! How
did you come to lose it?”
“I drank cold beer when I was in a perspiration. . .” hissed the
schoolmaster.
“What a pity! After a man has served fourteen years, such a calamity all
at once! The idea of a career being ruined by such a trivial thing. What
are you intending to do now?”
The schoolmaster made no answer.
“Are you a family man?” asked the director.
“A wife and two children, your Excellency . . .” hissed the
schoolmaster.
A silence followed. The director got up from the table and walked to and
fro in perturbation.
“I cannot think what I am going to do with you!” he said. “A teacher you
cannot be, and you are not yet entitled to a pension. . . . To abandon
you to your fate, and leave you to do the best you can, is rather
awkward. We look on you as one of our men, you have served fourteen
years, so it is our business to help you. . . . But how are we to help
you? What can I do for you? Put yourself in my place: what can I do for
you?”
A silence followed; the director walked up and down, still thinking, and
Vremensky, overwhelmed by his trouble, sat on the edge of his chair, and
he, too, thought. All at once the director began beaming, and even
snapped his fingers.
“I wonder I did not think of it before!” he began rapidly. “Listen, this
is what I can offer you. Next week our secretary at the Home is
retiring. If you like, you can have his place! There you are!”
Vremensky, not expecting such good fortune, beamed too.
“That’s capital,” said the director. “Write the application to-day.”
Dismissing Vremensky, Fyodor Petrovitch felt relieved and even
gratified: the bent figure of the hissing schoolmaster was no longer
confronting him, and it was agreeable to recognize that in offering a
vacant post to Vremensky he had acted fairly and conscientiously, like a
good-hearted and thoroughly decent person. But this agreeable state of
mind did not last long. When he went home and sat down to dinner his
wife, Nastasya Ivanovna, said suddenly:
“Oh yes, I was almost forgetting! Nina Sergeyevna came to see me
yesterday and begged for your interest on behalf of a young man. I am
told there is a vacancy in our Home. . . .”
“Yes, but the post has already been promised to someone else,” said the
director, and he frowned. “And you know my rule: I never give posts
through patronage.”
“I know, but for Nina Sergeyevna, I imagine, you might make an
exception. She loves us as though we were relations, and we have never
done anything for her. And don’t think of refusing, Fedya! You will
wound both her and me with your whims.”
“Who is it that she is recommending?”
“Polzuhin!”
“What Polzuhin? Is it that fellow who played Tchatsky at the party on
New Year’s Day? Is it that gentleman? Not on any account!”
The director left off eating.
“Not on any account!” he repeated. “Heaven preserve us!”
“But why not?”
“Understand, my dear, that if a young man does not set to work directly,
but through women, he must be good for nothing! Why doesn’t he come to
me himself?”
After dinner the director lay on the sofa in his study and began reading
the letters and newspapers he had received.
“Dear Fyodor Petrovitch,” wrote the wife of the Mayor of the town. “You
once said that I knew the human heart and understood people. Now you
have an opportunity of verifying this in practice. K. N. Polzuhin, whom
I know to be an excellent young man, will call upon you in a day or two
to ask you for the post of secretary at our Home. He is a very nice
youth. If you take an interest in him you will be convinced of it.” And
so on.
“On no account!” was the director’s comment. “Heaven preserve me!”
After that, not a day passed without the director’s receiving letters
recommending Polzuhin. One fine morning Polzuhin himself, a stout young
man with a close-shaven face like a jockey’s, in a new black suit, made
his appearance. . . .
“I see people on business not here but at the office,” said the director
drily, on hearing his request.
“Forgive me, your Excellency, but our common acquaintances advised me to
come here.”
“H’m!” growled the director, looking with hatred at the pointed toes of
the young man’s shoes. “To the best of my belief your father is a man of
property and you are not in want,” he said. “What induces you to ask for
this post? The salary is very trifling!”
“It’s not for the sake of the salary. . . . It’s a government post, any
way . . .”
“H’m. . . . It strikes me that within a month you will be sick of the
job and you will give it up, and meanwhile there are candidates for whom
it would be a career for life. There are poor men for whom . . .”
“I shan’t get sick of it, your Excellency,” Polzuhin interposed. “Honour
bright, I will do my best!”
It was too much for the director.
“Tell me,” he said, smiling contemptuously, “why was it you didn’t apply
to me direct but thought fitting instead to trouble ladies as a
preliminary?”
“I didn’t know that it would be disagreeable to you,” Polzuhin answered,
and he was embarrassed. “But, your Excellency, if you attach no
significance to letters of recommendation, I can give you a testimonial.
. . .”
He drew from his pocket a letter and handed it to the director. At the
bottom of the testimonial, which was written in official language and
handwriting, stood the signature of the Governor. Everything pointed to
the Governor’s having signed it unread, simply to get rid of some
importunate lady.
“There’s nothing for it, I bow to his authority. . . I obey . . .” said
the director, reading the testimonial, and he heaved a sigh.
“Send in your application to-morrow. . . . There’s nothing to be done. .
. .”
And when Polzuhin had gone out, the director abandoned himself to a
feeling of repulsion.
“Sneak!” he hissed, pacing from one corner to the other. “He has got
what he wanted, one way or the other, the good-for-nothing toady! Making
up to the ladies! Reptile! Creature!”
The director spat loudly in the direction of the door by which Polzuhin
had departed, and was immediately overcome with embarrassment, for at
that moment a lady, the wife of the Superintendent of the Provincial
Treasury, walked in at the door.
“I’ve come for a tiny minute . . . a tiny minute. . .” began the lady.
“Sit down, friend, and listen to me attentively. . . . Well, I’ve been
told you have a post vacant. . . . To-day or to-morrow you will receive
a visit from a young man called Polzuhin. . . .”
The lady chattered on, while the director gazed at her with lustreless,
stupefied eyes like a man on the point of fainting, gazed and smiled
from politeness.
And the next day when Vremensky came to his office it was a long time
before the director could bring himself to tell the truth. He hesitated,
was incoherent, and could not think how to begin or what to say. He
wanted to apologize to the schoolmaster, to tell him the whole truth,
but his tongue halted like a drunkard’s, his ears burned, and he was
suddenly overwhelmed with vexation and resentment that he should have to
play such an absurd part—in his own office, before his subordinate. He
suddenly brought his fist down on the table, leaped up, and shouted
angrily:
“I have no post for you! I have not, and that’s all about it! Leave me
in peace! Don’t worry me! Be so good as to leave me alone!”
And he walked out of the office.
A PECULIAR MAN
BETWEEN twelve and one at night a tall gentleman, wearing a top-hat and
a coat with a hood, stops before the door of Marya Petrovna Koshkin, a
midwife and an old maid. Neither face nor hand can be distinguished in
the autumn darkness, but in the very manner of his coughing and the
ringing of the bell a certain solidity, positiveness, and even
impressiveness can be discerned. After the third ring the door opens and
Marya Petrovna herself appears. She has a man’s overcoat flung on over
her white petticoat. The little lamp with the green shade which she
holds in her hand throws a greenish light over her sleepy, freckled
face, her scraggy neck, and the lank, reddish hair that strays from
under her cap.
“Can I see the midwife?” asks the gentleman.
“I am the midwife. What do you want?”
The gentleman walks into the entry and Marya Petrovna sees facing her a
tall, well-made man, no longer young, but with a handsome, severe face
and bushy whiskers.
“I am a collegiate assessor, my name is Kiryakov,” he says. “I came to
fetch you to my wife. Only please make haste.”
“Very good . . .” the midwife assents. “I’ll dress at once, and I must
trouble you to wait for me in the parlour.”
Kiryakov takes off his overcoat and goes into the parlour. The greenish
light of the lamp lies sparsely on the cheap furniture in patched white
covers, on the pitiful flowers and the posts on which ivy is trained. .
. . There is a smell of geranium and carbolic. The little clock on the
wall ticks timidly, as though abashed at the presence of a strange man.
“I am ready,” says Marya Petrovna, coming into the room five minutes
later, dressed, washed, and ready for action. “Let us go.”
“Yes, you must make haste,” says Kiryakov. “And, by the way, it is not
out of place to enquire—what do you ask for your services?”
“I really don’t know . . .” says Marya Petrovna with an embarrassed
smile. “As much as you will give.”
“No, I don’t like that,” says Kiryakov, looking coldly and steadily at
the midwife. “An arrangement beforehand is best. I don’t want to take
advantage of you and you don’t want to take advantage of me. To avoid
misunderstandings it is more sensible for us to make an arrangement
beforehand.”
“I really don’t know—there is no fixed price.”
“I work myself and am accustomed to respect the work of others. I don’t
like injustice. It will be equally unpleasant to me if I pay you too
little, or if you demand from me too much, and so I insist on your
naming your charge.”
“Well, there are such different charges.”
“H’m. In view of your hesitation, which I fail to understand, I am
constrained to fix the sum myself. I can give you two roubles.”
“Good gracious! . . . Upon my word! . . .” says Marya Petrovna, turning
crimson and stepping back. “I am really ashamed. Rather than take two
roubles I will come for nothing . . . . Five roubles, if you like.”
“Two roubles, not a kopeck more. I don’t want to take advantage of you,
but I do not intend to be overcharged.”
“As you please, but I am not coming for two roubles. . . .”
“But by law you have not the right to refuse.”
“Very well, I will come for nothing.”
“I won’t have you for nothing. All work ought to receive remuneration. I
work myself and I understand that. . . .”
“I won’t come for two roubles,” Marya Petrovna answers mildly. “I’ll
come for nothing if you like.”
“In that case I regret that I have troubled you for nothing. . . . I
have the honour to wish you good-bye.”
“Well, you are a man!” says Marya Petrovna, seeing him into the entry.
“I will come for three roubles if that will satisfy you.”
Kiryakov frowns and ponders for two full minutes, looking with
concentration on the floor, then he says resolutely, “No,” and goes out
into the street. The astonished and disconcerted midwife fastens the
door after him and goes back into her bedroom.
“He’s good-looking, respectable, but how queer, God bless the man! . .
.” she thinks as she gets into bed.
But in less than half an hour she hears another ring; she gets up and
sees the same Kiryakov again.
“Extraordinary the way things are mismanaged. Neither the chemist, nor
the police, nor the house-porters can give me the address of a midwife,
and so I am under the necessity of assenting to your terms. I will give
you three roubles, but . . . I warn you beforehand that when I engage
servants or receive any kind of services, I make an arrangement
beforehand in order that when I pay there may be no talk of extras,
tips, or anything of the sort. Everyone ought to receive what is his
due.”
Marya Petrovna has not listened to Kiryakov for long, but already she
feels that she is bored and repelled by him, that his even, measured
speech lies like a weight on her soul. She dresses and goes out into the
street with him. The air is still but cold, and the sky is so overcast
that the light of the street lamps is hardly visible. The sloshy snow
squelches under their feet. The midwife looks intently but does not see
a cab.
“I suppose it is not far?” she asks.
“No, not far,” Kiryakov answers grimly.
They walk down one turning, a second, a third. . . . Kiryakov strides
along, and even in his step his respectability and positiveness is
apparent.
“What awful weather!” the midwife observes to him.
But he preserves a dignified silence, and it is noticeable that he tries
to step on the smooth stones to avoid spoiling his goloshes. At last
after a long walk the midwife steps into the entry; from which she can
see a big decently furnished drawing-room. There is not a soul in the
rooms, even in the bedroom where the woman is lying in labour. . . . The
old women and relations who flock in crowds to every confinement are not
to be seen. The cook rushes about alone, with a scared and vacant face.
There is a sound of loud groans.
Three hours pass. Marya Petrovna sits by the mother’s bedside and
whispers to her. The two women have already had time to make friends,
they have got to know each other, they gossip, they sigh together. . . .
“You mustn’t talk,” says the midwife anxiously, and at the same time she
showers questions on her.
Then the door opens and Kiryakov himself comes quietly and stolidly into
the room. He sits down in the chair and strokes his whiskers. Silence
reigns. Marya Petrovna looks timidly at his handsome, passionless,
wooden face and waits for him to begin to talk, but he remains
absolutely silent and absorbed in thought. After waiting in vain, the
midwife makes up her mind to begin herself, and utters a phrase commonly
used at confinements.
“Well now, thank God, there is one human being more in the world!”
“Yes, that’s agreeable,” said Kiryakov, preserving the wooden expression
of his face, “though indeed, on the other hand, to have more children
you must have more money. The baby is not born fed and clothed.”
A guilty expression comes into the mother’s face, as though she had
brought a creature into the world without permission or through idle
caprice. Kiryakov gets up with a sigh and walks with solid dignity out
of the room.
“What a man, bless him!” says the midwife to the mother. “He’s so stern
and does not smile.”
The mother tells her that he is always like that. . . . He is honest,
fair, prudent, sensibly economical, but all that to such an exceptional
degree that simple mortals feel suffocated by it. His relations have
parted from him, the servants will not stay more than a month; they have
no friends; his wife and children are always on tenterhooks from terror
over every step they take. He does not shout at them nor beat them, his
virtues are far more numerous than his defects, but when he goes out of
the house they all feel better, and more at ease. Why it is so the woman
herself cannot say.
“The basins must be properly washed and put away in the store cupboard,”
says Kiryakov, coming into the bedroom. “These bottles must be put away
too: they may come in handy.”
What he says is very simple and ordinary, but the midwife for some
reason feels flustered. She begins to be afraid of the man and shudders
every time she hears his footsteps. In the morning as she is preparing
to depart she sees Kiryakov’s little son, a pale, close-cropped
schoolboy, in the dining-room drinking his tea. . . . Kiryakov is
standing opposite him, saying in his flat, even voice:
“You know how to eat, you must know how to work too. You have just
swallowed a mouthful but have not probably reflected that that mouthful
costs money and money is obtained by work. You must eat and reflect. . .
.”
The midwife looks at the boy’s dull face, and it seems to her as though
the very air is heavy, that a little more and the very walls will fall,
unable to endure the crushing presence of the peculiar man. Beside
herself with terror, and by now feeling a violent hatred for the man,
Marya Petrovna gathers up her bundles and hurriedly departs.
Half-way home she remembers that she has forgotten to ask for her three
roubles, but after stopping and thinking for a minute, with a wave of
her hand, she goes on.
AT THE BARBER’S
MORNING. It is not yet seven o’clock, but Makar Kuzmitch Blyostken’s
shop is already open. The barber himself, an unwashed, greasy, but
foppishly dressed youth of three and twenty, is busy clearing up; there
is really nothing to be cleared away, but he is perspiring with his
exertions. In one place he polishes with a rag, in another he scrapes
with his finger or catches a bug and brushes it off the wall.
The barber’s shop is small, narrow, and unclean. The log walls are hung
with paper suggestive of a cabman’s faded shirt. Between the two dingy,
perspiring windows there is a thin, creaking, rickety door, above it,
green from the damp, a bell which trembles and gives a sickly ring of
itself without provocation. Glance into the looking-glass which hangs on
one of the walls, and it distorts your countenance in all directions in
the most merciless way! The shaving and haircutting is done before this
looking-glass. On the little table, as greasy and unwashed as Makar
Kuzmitch himself, there is everything: combs, scissors, razors, a
ha’porth of wax for the moustache, a ha’porth of powder, a ha’porth of
much watered eau de Cologne, and indeed the whole barber’s shop is not
worth more than fifteen kopecks.
There is a squeaking sound from the invalid bell and an elderly man in a
tanned sheepskin and high felt over-boots walks into the shop. His head
and neck are wrapped in a woman’s shawl.
This is Erast Ivanitch Yagodov, Makar Kuzmitch’s godfather. At one time
he served as a watchman in the Consistory, now he lives near the Red
Pond and works as a locksmith.
“Makarushka, good-day, dear boy!” he says to Makar Kuzmitch, who is
absorbed in tidying up.
They kiss each other. Yagodov drags his shawl off his head, crosses
himself, and sits down.
“What a long way it is!” he says, sighing and clearing his throat. “It’s
no joke! From the Red Pond to the Kaluga gate.”
“How are you?”
“In a poor way, my boy. I’ve had a fever.”
“You don’t say so! Fever!”
“Yes, I have been in bed a month; I thought I should die. I had extreme
unction. Now my hair’s coming out. The doctor says I must be shaved. He
says the hair will grow again strong. And so, I thought, I’ll go to
Makar. Better to a relation than to anyone else. He will do it better
and he won’t take anything for it. It’s rather far, that’s true, but
what of it? It’s a walk.”
“I’ll do it with pleasure. Please sit down.”
With a scrape of his foot Makar Kuzmitch indicates a chair. Yagodov sits
down and looks at himself in the glass and is apparently pleased with
his reflection: the looking-glass displays a face awry, with Kalmuck
lips, a broad, blunt nose, and eyes in the forehead. Makar Kuzmitch puts
round his client’s shoulders a white sheet with yellow spots on it, and
begins snipping with the scissors.
“I’ll shave you clean to the skin!” he says.
“To be sure. So that I may look like a Tartar, like a bomb. The hair
will grow all the thicker.”
“How’s auntie?”
“Pretty middling. The other day she went as midwife to the major’s lady.
They gave her a rouble.”
“Oh, indeed, a rouble. Hold your ear.”
“I am holding it. . . . Mind you don’t cut me. Oy, you hurt! You are
pulling my hair.”
“That doesn’t matter. We can’t help that in our work. And how is Anna
Erastovna?”
“My daughter? She is all right, she’s skipping about. Last week on the
Wednesday we betrothed her to Sheikin. Why didn’t you come?”
The scissors cease snipping. Makar Kuzmitch drops his hands and asks in
a fright:
“Who is betrothed?”
“Anna.”
“How’s that? To whom?”
“To Sheikin. Prokofy Petrovitch. His aunt’s a housekeeper in
Zlatoustensky Lane. She is a nice woman. Naturally we are all delighted,
thank God. The wedding will be in a week. Mind you come; we will have a
good time.”
“But how’s this, Erast Ivanitch?” says Makar Kuzmitch, pale, astonished,
and shrugging his shoulders. “It’s . . . it’s utterly impossible. Why,
Anna Erastovna . . . why I . . . why, I cherished sentiments for her, I
had intentions. How could it happen?”
“Why, we just went and betrothed her. He’s a good fellow.”
Cold drops of perspiration come on the face of Makar Kuzmitch. He puts
the scissors down on the table and begins rubbing his nose with his
fist.
“I had intentions,” he says. “It’s impossible, Erast Ivanitch. I . . . I
am in love with her and have made her the offer of my heart . . . . And
auntie promised. I have always respected you as though you were my
father. . . . I always cut your hair for nothing. . . . I have always
obliged you, and when my papa died you took the sofa and ten roubles in
cash and have never given them back. Do you remember?”
“Remember! of course I do. Only, what sort of a match would you be,
Makar? You are nothing of a match. You’ve neither money nor position,
your trade’s a paltry one.”
“And is Sheikin rich?”
“Sheikin is a member of a union. He has a thousand and a half lent on
mortgage. So my boy . . . . It’s no good talking about it, the thing’s
done. There is no altering it, Makarushka. You must look out for another
bride. . . . The world is not so small. Come, cut away. Why are you
stopping?”
Makar Kuzmitch is silent and remains motionless, then he takes a
handkerchief out of his pocket and begins to cry.
“Come, what is it?” Erast Ivanitch comforts him. “Give over. Fie, he is
blubbering like a woman! You finish my head and then cry. Take up the
scissors!”
Makar Kuzmitch takes up the scissors, stares vacantly at them for a
minute, then drops them again on the table. His hands are shaking.
“I can’t,” he says. “I can’t do it just now. I haven’t the strength! I
am a miserable man! And she is miserable! We loved each other, we had
given each other our promise and we have been separated by unkind people
without any pity. Go away, Erast Ivanitch! I can’t bear the sight of
you.”
“So I’ll come to-morrow, Makarushka. You will finish me to-morrow.”
“Right.”
“You calm yourself and I will come to you early in the morning.”
Erast Ivanitch has half his head shaven to the skin and looks like a
convict. It is awkward to be left with a head like that, but there is no
help for it. He wraps his head in the shawl and walks out of the
barber’s shop. Left alone, Makar Kuzmitch sits down and goes on quietly
weeping.
Early next morning Erast Ivanitch comes again.
“What do you want?” Makar Kuzmitch asks him coldly.
“Finish cutting my hair, Makarushka. There is half the head left to do.”
“Kindly give me the money in advance. I won’t cut it for nothing.”
Without saying a word Erast Ivanitch goes out, and to this day his hair
is long on one side of the head and short on the other. He regards it as
extravagance to pay for having his hair cut and is waiting for the hair
to grow of itself on the shaven side.
He danced at the wedding in that condition.
AN INADVERTENCE
PYOTR PETROVITCH STRIZHIN, the nephew of Madame Ivanov, the colonel’s
widow—the man whose new goloshes were stolen last year,—came home from a
christening party at two o’clock in the morning. To avoid waking the
household he took off his things in the lobby, made his way on tiptoe to
his room, holding his breath, and began getting ready for bed without
lighting a candle.
Strizhin leads a sober and regular life. He has a sanctimonious
expression of face, he reads nothing but religious and edifying books,
but at the christening party, in his delight that Lyubov Spiridonovna
had passed through her confinement successfully, he had permitted
himself to drink four glasses of vodka and a glass of wine, the taste of
which suggested something midway between vinegar and castor oil.
Spirituous liquors are like sea-water and glory: the more you imbibe of
them the greater your thirst. And now as he undressed, Strizhin was
aware of an overwhelming craving for drink.
“I believe Dashenka has some vodka in the cupboard in the right-hand
corner,” he thought. “If I drink one wine-glassful, she won’t notice
it.”
After some hesitation, overcoming his fears, Strizhin went to the
cupboard. Cautiously opening the door he felt in the right-hand corner
for a bottle and poured out a wine-glassful, put the bottle back in its
place, then, making the sign of the cross, drank it off. And immediately
something like a miracle took place. Strizhin was flung back from the
cupboard to the chest with fearful force like a bomb. There were flashes
before his eyes, he felt as though he could not breathe, and all over
his body he had a sensation as though he had fallen into a marsh full of
leeches. It seemed to him as though, instead of vodka, he had swallowed
dynamite, which blew up his body, the house, and the whole street. . . .
His head, his arms, his legs—all seemed to be torn off and to be flying
away somewhere to the devil, into space.
For some three minutes he lay on the chest, not moving and scarcely
breathing, then he got up and asked himself:
“Where am I?”
The first thing of which he was clearly conscious on coming to himself
was the pronounced smell of paraffin.
“Holy saints,” he thought in horror, “it’s paraffin I have drunk instead
of vodka.”
The thought that he had poisoned himself threw him into a cold shiver,
then into a fever. That it was really poison that he had taken was
proved not only by the smell in the room but also by the burning taste
in his mouth, the flashes before his eyes, the ringing in his head, and
the colicky pain in his stomach. Feeling the approach of death and not
buoying himself up with false hopes, he wanted to say good-bye to those
nearest to him, and made his way to Dashenka’s bedroom (being a widower
he had his sister-in-law called Dashenka, an old maid, living in the
flat to keep house for him).
“Dashenka,” he said in a tearful voice as he went into the bedroom,
“dear Dashenka!”
Something grumbled in the darkness and uttered a deep sigh.
“Dashenka.”
“Eh? What?” A woman’s voice articulated rapidly. “Is that you, Pyotr
Petrovitch? Are you back already? Well, what is it? What has the baby
been christened? Who was godmother?”
“The godmother was Natalya Andreyevna Velikosvyetsky, and the godfather
Pavel Ivanitch Bezsonnitsin. . . . I . . . I believe, Dashenka, I am
dying. And the baby has been christened Olimpiada, in honour of their
kind patroness. . . . I . . . I have just drunk paraffin, Dashenka!”
“What next! You don’t say they gave you paraffin there?”
“I must own I wanted to get a drink of vodka without asking you, and . .
. and the Lord chastised me: by accident in the dark I took paraffin. .
. . What am I to do?”
Dashenka, hearing that the cupboard had been opened without her
permission, grew more wide-awake. . . . She quickly lighted a candle,
jumped out of bed, and in her nightgown, a freckled, bony figure in
curl-papers, padded with bare feet to the cupboard.
“Who told you you might?” she asked sternly, as she scrutinized the
inside of the cupboard. “Was the vodka put there for you?”
“I . . . I haven’t drunk vodka but paraffin, Dashenka . . .” muttered
Strizhin, mopping the cold sweat on his brow.
“And what did you want to touch the paraffin for? That’s nothing to do
with you, is it? Is it put there for you? Or do you suppose paraffin
costs nothing? Eh? Do you know what paraffin is now? Do you know?”
“Dear Dashenka,” moaned Strizhin, “it’s a question of life and death,
and you talk about money!”
“He’s drunk himself tipsy and now he pokes his nose into the cupboard!”
cried Dashenka, angrily slamming the cupboard door. “Oh, the monsters,
the tormentors! I’m a martyr, a miserable woman, no peace day or night!
Vipers, basilisks, accursed Herods, may you suffer the same in the world
to come! I am going to-morrow! I am a maiden lady and I won’t allow you
to stand before me in your underclothes! How dare you look at me when I
am not dressed!”
And she went on and on. . . . Knowing that when Dashenka was enraged
there was no moving her with prayers or vows or even by firing a cannon,
Strizhin waved his hand in despair, dressed, and made up his mind to go
to the doctor. But a doctor is only readily found when he is not wanted.
After running through three streets and ringing five times at Dr.
Tchepharyants’s, and seven times at Dr. Bultyhin’s, Strizhin raced off
to a chemist’s shop, thinking possibly the chemist could help him.
There, after a long interval, a little dark and curly-headed chemist
came out to him in his dressing gown, with drowsy eyes, and such a wise
and serious face that it was positively terrifying.
“What do you want?” he asked in a tone in which only very wise and
dignified chemists of Jewish persuasion can speak.
“For God’s sake . . . I entreat you . . .” said Strizhin breathlessly,
“give me something. I have just accidentally drunk paraffin, I am
dying!”
“I beg you not to excite yourself and to answer the questions I am about
to put to you. The very fact that you are excited prevents me from
understanding you. You have drunk paraffin. Yes?”
“Yes, paraffin! Please save me!”
The chemist went coolly and gravely to the desk, opened a book, became
absorbed in reading it. After reading a couple of pages he shrugged one
shoulder and then the other, made a contemptuous grimace and, after
thinking for a minute, went into the adjoining room. The clock struck
four, and when it pointed to ten minutes past the chemist came back with
another book and again plunged into reading.
“H’m,” he said as though puzzled, “the very fact that you feel unwell
shows you ought to apply to a doctor, not a chemist.”
“But I have been to the doctors already. I could not ring them up.”
“H’m . . . you don’t regard us chemists as human beings, and disturb our
rest even at four o’clock at night, though every dog, every cat, can
rest in peace. . . . You don’t try to understand anything, and to your
thinking we are not people and our nerves are like cords.”
Strizhin listened to the chemist, heaved a sigh, and went home.
“So I am fated to die,” he thought.
And in his mouth was a burning and a taste of paraffin, there were
twinges in his stomach, and a sound of boom, boom, boom in his ears.
Every moment it seemed to him that his end was near, that his heart was
no longer beating.
Returning home he made haste to write: “Let no one be blamed for my
death,” then he said his prayers, lay down and pulled the bedclothes
over his head. He lay awake till morning expecting death, and all the
time he kept fancying how his grave would be covered with fresh green
grass and how the birds would twitter over it. . . .
And in the morning he was sitting on his bed, saying with a smile to
Dashenka:
“One who leads a steady and regular life, dear sister, is unaffected by
any poison. Take me, for example. I have been on the verge of death. I
was dying and in agony, yet now I am all right. There is only a burning
in my mouth and a soreness in my throat, but I am all right all over,
thank God. . . . And why? It’s because of my regular life.”
“No, it’s because it’s inferior paraffin!” sighed Dashenka, thinking of
the household expenses and gazing into space. “The man at the shop could
not have given me the best quality, but that at three farthings. I am a
martyr, I am a miserable woman. You monsters! May you suffer the same,
in the world to come, accursed Herods. . . .”
And she went on and on. . . .
THE ALBUM
KRATEROV, the titular councillor, as thin and slender as the Admiralty
spire, stepped forward and, addressing Zhmyhov, said:
“Your Excellency! Moved and touched to the bottom of our hearts by the
way you have ruled us during long years, and by your fatherly care. . .
.”
“During the course of more than ten years. . .” Zakusin prompted.
“During the course of more than ten years, we, your subordinates, on
this so memorable for us . . . er . . . day, beg your Excellency to
accept in token of our respect and profound gratitude this album with
our portraits in it, and express our hope that for the duration of your
distinguished life, that for long, long years to come, to your dying day
you may not abandon us. . . .”
“With your fatherly guidance in the path of justice and progress. . .”
added Zakusin, wiping from his brow the perspiration that had suddenly
appeared on it; he was evidently longing to speak, and in all
probability had a speech ready. “And,” he wound up, “may your standard
fly for long, long years in the career of genius, industry, and social
self-consciousness.”
A tear trickled down the wrinkled left cheek of Zhmyhov.
“Gentlemen!” he said in a shaking voice, “I did not expect, I had no
idea that you were going to celebrate my modest jubilee. . . . I am
touched indeed . . . very much so. . . . I shall not forget this moment
to my dying day, and believe me . . . believe me, friends, that no one
is so desirous of your welfare as I am . . . and if there has been
anything . . . it was for your benefit.”
Zhmyhov, the actual civil councillor, kissed the titular councillor
Kraterov, who had not expected such an honour, and turned pale with
delight. Then the chief made a gesture that signified that he could not
speak for emotion, and shed tears as though an expensive album had not
been presented to him, but on the contrary, taken from him . . . . Then
when he had a little recovered and said a few more words full of feeling
and given everyone his hand to shake, he went downstairs amid loud and
joyful cheers, got into his carriage and drove off, followed by their
blessings. As he sat in his carriage he was aware of a flood of joyous
feelings such as he had never known before, and once more he shed tears.
At home new delights awaited him. There his family, his friends, and
acquaintances had prepared him such an ovation that it seemed to him
that he really had been of very great service to his country, and that
if he had never existed his country would perhaps have been in a very
bad way. The jubilee dinner was made up of toasts, speeches, and tears.
In short, Zhmyhov had never expected that his merits would be so warmly
appreciated.
“Gentlemen!” he said before the dessert, “two hours ago I was
recompensed for all the sufferings a man has to undergo who is the
servant, so to say, not of routine, not of the letter, but of duty!
Through the whole duration of my service I have constantly adhered to
the principle;—the public does not exist for us, but we for the public,
and to-day I received the highest reward! My subordinates presented me
with an album . . . see! I was touched.”
Festive faces bent over the album and began examining it.
“It’s a pretty album,” said Zhmyhov’s daughter Olya, “it must have cost
fifty roubles, I do believe. Oh, it’s charming! You must give me the
album, papa, do you hear? I’ll take care of it, it’s so pretty.”
After dinner Olya carried off the album to her room and shut it up in
her table drawer. Next day she took the clerks out of it, flung them on
the floor, and put her school friends in their place. The government
uniforms made way for white pelerines. Kolya, his Excellency’s little
son, picked up the clerks and painted their clothes red. Those who had
no moustaches he presented with green moustaches and added brown beards
to the beardless. When there was nothing left to paint he cut the little
men out of the card-board, pricked their eyes with a pin, and began
playing soldiers with them. After cutting out the titular councillor
Kraterov, he fixed him on a match-box and carried him in that state to
his father’s study.
“Papa, a monument, look!”
Zhmyhov burst out laughing, lurched forward, and, looking tenderly at
the child, gave him a warm kiss on the cheek.
“There, you rogue, go and show mamma; let mamma look too.”
OH! THE PUBLIC
“HERE goes, I’ve done with drinking! Nothing. . . n-o-thing shall tempt
me to it. It’s time to take myself in hand; I must buck up and work. . .
You’re glad to get your salary, so you must do your work honestly,
heartily, conscientiously, regardless of sleep and comfort. Chuck taking
it easy. You’ve got into the way of taking a salary for nothing, my
boy—that’s not the right thing . . . not the right thing at all. . . .”
After administering to himself several such lectures Podtyagin, the head
ticket collector, begins to feel an irresistible impulse to get to work.
It is past one o’clock at night, but in spite of that he wakes the
ticket collectors and with them goes up and down the railway carriages,
inspecting the tickets.
“T-t-t-ickets . . . P-p-p-please!” he keeps shouting, briskly snapping
the clippers.
Sleepy figures, shrouded in the twilight of the railway carriages,
start, shake their heads, and produce their tickets.
“T-t-t-tickets, please!” Podtyagin addresses a second-class passenger, a
lean, scraggy-looking man, wrapped up in a fur coat and a rug and
surrounded with pillows. “Tickets, please!”
The scraggy-looking man makes no reply. He is buried in sleep. The head
ticket-collector touches him on the shoulder and repeats impatiently:
“T-t-tickets, p-p-please!”
The passenger starts, opens his eyes, and gazes in alarm at Podtyagin.
“What? . . . Who? . . . Eh?”
“You’re asked in plain language: t-t-tickets, p-p-please! If you
please!”
“My God!” moans the scraggy-looking man, pulling a woebegone face. “Good
Heavens! I’m suffering from rheumatism. . . . I haven’t slept for three
nights! I’ve just taken morphia on purpose to get to sleep, and you . .
. with your tickets! It’s merciless, it’s inhuman! If you knew how hard
it is for me to sleep you wouldn’t disturb me for such nonsense. . . .
It’s cruel, it’s absurd! And what do you want with my ticket! It’s
positively stupid!”
Podtyagin considers whether to take offence or not—and decides to take
offence.
“Don’t shout here! This is not a tavern!”
“No, in a tavern people are more humane. . .” coughs the passenger.
“Perhaps you’ll let me go to sleep another time! It’s extraordinary:
I’ve travelled abroad, all over the place, and no one asked for my
ticket there, but here you’re at it again and again, as though the devil
were after you. . . .”
“Well, you’d better go abroad again since you like it so much.”
“It’s stupid, sir! Yes! As though it’s not enough killing the passengers
with fumes and stuffiness and draughts, they want to strangle us with
red tape, too, damn it all! He must have the ticket! My goodness, what
zeal! If it were of any use to the company—but half the passengers are
travelling without a ticket!”
“Listen, sir!” cries Podtyagin, flaring up. “If you don’t leave off
shouting and disturbing the public, I shall be obliged to put you out at
the next station and to draw up a report on the incident!”
“This is revolting!” exclaims “the public,” growing indignant.
“Persecuting an invalid! Listen, and have some consideration!”
“But the gentleman himself was abusive!” says Podtyagin, a little
scared. “Very well. . . . I won’t take the ticket . . . as you like . .
. . Only, of course, as you know very well, it’s my duty to do so. . . .
If it were not my duty, then, of course. . . You can ask the station-
master . . . ask anyone you like. . . .”
Podtyagin shrugs his shoulders and walks away from the invalid. At first
he feels aggrieved and somewhat injured, then, after passing through two
or three carriages, he begins to feel a certain uneasiness not unlike
the pricking of conscience in his ticket-collector’s bosom.
“There certainly was no need to wake the invalid,” he thinks, “though it
was not my fault. . . .They imagine I did it wantonly, idly. They don’t
know that I’m bound in duty . . . if they don’t believe it, I can bring
the station-master to them.” A station. The train stops five minutes.
Before the third bell, Podtyagin enters the same second-class carriage.
Behind him stalks the station-master in a red cap.
“This gentleman here,” Podtyagin begins, “declares that I have no right
to ask for his ticket and . . . and is offended at it. I ask you, Mr.
Station-master, to explain to him. . . . Do I ask for tickets according
to regulation or to please myself? Sir,” Podtyagin addresses the
scraggy-looking man, “sir! you can ask the station-master here if you
don’t believe me.”
The invalid starts as though he had been stung, opens his eyes, and with
a woebegone face sinks back in his seat.
“My God! I have taken another powder and only just dozed off when here
he is again. . . again! I beseech you have some pity on me!”
“You can ask the station-master . . . whether I have the right to demand
your ticket or not.”
“This is insufferable! Take your ticket. . . take it! I’ll pay for five
extra if you’ll only let me die in peace! Have you never been ill
yourself? Heartless people!”
“This is simply persecution!” A gentleman in military uniform grows
indignant. “I can see no other explanation of this persistence.”
“Drop it . . .” says the station-master, frowning and pulling Podtyagin
by the sleeve.
Podtyagin shrugs his shoulders and slowly walks after the station-
master.
“There’s no pleasing them!” he thinks, bewildered. “It was for his sake
I brought the station-master, that he might understand and be pacified,
and he . . . swears!”
Another station. The train stops ten minutes. Before the second bell,
while Podtyagin is standing at the refreshment bar, drinking seltzer
water, two gentlemen go up to him, one in the uniform of an engineer,
and the other in a military overcoat.
“Look here, ticket-collector!” the engineer begins, addressing
Podtyagin. “Your behaviour to that invalid passenger has revolted all
who witnessed it. My name is Puzitsky; I am an engineer, and this
gentleman is a colonel. If you do not apologize to the passenger, we
shall make a complaint to the traffic manager, who is a friend of ours.”
“Gentlemen! Why of course I . . . why of course you . . .” Podtyagin is
panic-stricken.
“We don’t want explanations. But we warn you, if you don’t apologize, we
shall see justice done to him.”
“Certainly I . . . I’ll apologize, of course. . . To be sure. . . .”
Half an hour later, Podtyagin having thought of an apologetic phrase
which would satisfy the passenger without lowering his own dignity,
walks into the carriage. “Sir,” he addresses the invalid. “Listen, sir.
. . .”
The invalid starts and leaps up: “What?”
“I . . . what was it? . . . You mustn’t be offended. . . .”
“Och! Water . . .” gasps the invalid, clutching at his heart. “I’d just
taken a third dose of morphia, dropped asleep, and . . . again! Good
God! when will this torture cease!”
“I only . . . you must excuse . . .”
“Oh! . . . Put me out at the next station! I can’t stand any more . . .
. I . . . I am dying. . . .”
“This is mean, disgusting!” cry the “public,” revolted. “Go away! You
shall pay for such persecution. Get away!”
Podtyagin waves his hand in despair, sighs, and walks out of the
carriage. He goes to the attendants’ compartment, sits down at the
table, exhausted, and complains:
“Oh, the public! There’s no satisfying them! It’s no use working and
doing one’s best! One’s driven to drinking and cursing it all . . . . If
you do nothing—they’re angry; if you begin doing your duty, they’re
angry too. There’s nothing for it but drink!”
Podtyagin empties a bottle straight off and thinks no more of work,
duty, and honesty!
A TRIPPING TONGUE
NATALYA MIHALOVNA, a young married lady who had arrived in the morning
from Yalta, was having her dinner, and in a never-ceasing flow of babble
was telling her husband of all the charms of the Crimea. Her husband,
delighted, gazed tenderly at her enthusiastic face, listened, and from
time to time put in a question.
“But they say living is dreadfully expensive there?” he asked, among
other things.
“Well, what shall I say? To my thinking this talk of its being so
expensive is exaggerated, hubby. The devil is not as black as he is
painted. Yulia Petrovna and I, for instance, had very decent and
comfortable rooms for twenty roubles a day. Everything depends on
knowing how to do things, my dear. Of course if you want to go up into
the mountains . . . to Aie-Petri for instance . . . if you take a horse,
a guide, then of course it does come to something. It’s awful what it
comes to! But, Vassitchka, the mountains there! Imagine high, high
mountains, a thousand times higher than the church. . . . At the
top—mist, mist, mist. . . . At the bottom —enormous stones, stones,
stones. . . . And pines. . . . Ah, I can’t bear to think of it!”
“By the way, I read about those Tatar guides there, in some magazine
while you were away . . . . such abominable stories! Tell me is there
really anything out of the way about them?”
Natalya Mihalovna made a little disdainful grimace and shook her head.
“Just ordinary Tatars, nothing special . . .” she said, “though indeed I
only had a glimpse of them in the distance. They were pointed out to me,
but I did not take much notice of them. You know, hubby, I always had a
prejudice against all such Circassians, Greeks . . . Moors!”
“They are said to be terrible Don Juans.”
“Perhaps! There are shameless creatures who . . . .”
Natalya Mihalovna suddenly jumped up from her chair, as though she had
thought of something dreadful; for half a minute she looked with
frightened eyes at her husband and said, accentuating each word:
“Vassitchka, I say, the im-mo-ral women there are in the world! Ah, how
immoral! And it’s not as though they were working-class or middle-class
people, but aristocratic ladies, priding themselves on their bon-ton! It
was simply awful, I could not believe my own eyes! I shall remember it
as long as I live! To think that people can forget themselves to such a
point as . . . ach, Vassitchka, I don’t like to speak of it! Take my
companion, Yulia Petrovna, for example. . . . Such a good husband, two
children . . . she moves in a decent circle, always poses as a saint—and
all at once, would you believe it. . . . Only, hubby, of course this is
entre nous. . . . Give me your word of honour you won’t tell a soul?”
“What next! Of course I won’t tell.”
“Honour bright? Mind now! I trust you. . . .”
The little lady put down her fork, assumed a mysterious air, and
whispered:
“Imagine a thing like this. . . . That Yulia Petrovna rode up into the
mountains . . . . It was glorious weather! She rode on ahead with her
guide, I was a little behind. We had ridden two or three miles, all at
once, only fancy, Vassitchka, Yulia cried out and clutched at her bosom.
Her Tatar put his arm round her waist or she would have fallen off the
saddle. . . . I rode up to her with my guide. . . . ‘What is it? What is
the matter?’ ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I am dying! I feel faint! I can’t go any
further’ Fancy my alarm! ‘Let us go back then,’ I said. ‘No, Natalie,’
she said, ‘I can’t go back! I shall die of pain if I move another step!
I have spasms.’ And she prayed and besought my Suleiman and me to ride
back to the town and fetch her some of her drops which always do her
good.”
“Stay. . . . I don’t quite understand you,” muttered the husband,
scratching his forehead. “You said just now that you had only seen those
Tatars from a distance, and now you are talking of some Suleiman.”
“There, you are finding fault again,” the lady pouted, not in the least
disconcerted. “I can’t endure suspiciousness! I can’t endure it! It’s
stupid, stupid!”
“I am not finding fault, but . . . why say what is not true? If you rode
about with Tatars, so be it, God bless you, but . . . why shuffle about
it?”
“H’m! . . . you are a queer one!” cried the lady, revolted. “He is
jealous of Suleiman! as though one could ride up into the mountains
without a guide! I should like to see you do it! If you don’t know the
ways there, if you don’t understand, you had better hold your tongue!
Yes, hold your tongue. You can’t take a step there without a guide.”
“So it seems!”
“None of your silly grins, if you please! I am not a Yulia. . . . I
don’t justify her but I . . . ! Though I don’t pose as a saint, I don’t
forget myself to that degree. My Suleiman never overstepped the limits.
. . . No-o! Mametkul used to be sitting at Yulia’s all day long, but in
my room as soon as it struck eleven: ‘Suleiman, march! Off you go!’ And
my foolish Tatar boy would depart. I made him mind his p’s and q’s,
hubby! As soon as he began grumbling about money or anything, I would
say ‘How? Wha-at? Wha-a-a-t?’ And his heart would be in his mouth
directly. . . . Ha-ha-ha! His eyes, you know, Vassitchka, were as black,
as black, like coals, such an amusing little Tatar face, so funny and
silly! I kept him in order, didn’t I just!”
“I can fancy . . .” mumbled her husband, rolling up pellets of bread.
“That’s stupid, Vassitchka! I know what is in your mind! I know what you
are thinking . . . But I assure you even when we were on our expeditions
I never let him overstep the limits. For instance, if we rode to the
mountains or to the U-Chan-Su waterfall, I would always say to him,
‘Suleiman, ride behind! Do you hear!’ And he always rode behind, poor
boy. . . . Even when we . . . even at the most dramatic moments I would
say to him, ‘Still, you must not forget that you are only a Tatar and I
am the wife of a civil councillor!’ Ha-ha. . . .”
The little lady laughed, then, looking round her quickly and assuming an
alarmed expression, whispered:
“But Yulia! Oh, that Yulia! I quite see, Vassitchka, there is no reason
why one shouldn’t have a little fun, a little rest from the emptiness of
conventional life! That’s all right, have your fling by all means—no one
will blame you, but to take the thing seriously, to get up scenes . . .
no, say what you like, I cannot understand that! Just fancy, she was
jealous! Wasn’t that silly? One day Mametkul, her grande passion, came
to see her . . . she was not at home. . . . Well, I asked him into my
room . . . there was conversation, one thing and another . . . they’re
awfully amusing, you know! The evening passed without our noticing it. .
. . All at once Yulia rushed in. . . . She flew at me and at Mametkul
—made such a scene . . . fi! I can’t understand that sort of thing,
Vassitchka.”
Vassitchka cleared his throat, frowned, and walked up and down the room.
“You had a gay time there, I must say,” he growled with a disdainful
smile.
“How stu-upid that is!” cried Natalya Mihalovna, offended. “I know what
you are thinking about! You always have such horrid ideas! I won’t tell
you anything! No, I won’t!”
The lady pouted and said no more.
OVERDOING IT
GLYEB GAVRILOVITCH SMIRNOV, a land surveyor, arrived at the station of
Gnilushki. He had another twenty or thirty miles to drive before he
would reach the estate which he had been summoned to survey. (If the
driver were not drunk and the horses were not bad, it would hardly be
twenty miles, but if the driver had had a drop and his steeds were worn
out it would mount up to a good forty.)
“Tell me, please, where can I get post-horses here?” the surveyor asked
of the station gendarme.
“What? Post-horses? There’s no finding a decent dog for seventy miles
round, let alone post-horses. . . . But where do you want to go?”
“To Dyevkino, General Hohotov’s estate.”
“Well,” yawned the gendarme, “go outside the station, there are
sometimes peasants in the yard there, they will take passengers.”
The surveyor heaved a sigh and made his way out of the station.
There, after prolonged enquiries, conversations, and hesitations, he
found a very sturdy, sullen-looking pock-marked peasant, wearing a
tattered grey smock and bark-shoes.
“You have got a queer sort of cart!” said the surveyor, frowning as he
clambered into the cart. “There is no making out which is the back and
which is the front.”
“What is there to make out? Where the horse’s tail is, there’s the
front, and where your honour’s sitting, there’s the back.”
The little mare was young, but thin, with legs planted wide apart and
frayed ears. When the driver stood up and lashed her with a whip made of
cord, she merely shook her head; when he swore at her and lashed her
once more, the cart squeaked and shivered as though in a fever. After
the third lash the cart gave a lurch, after the fourth, it moved
forward.
“Are we going to drive like this all the way?” asked the surveyor,
violently jolted and marvelling at the capacity of Russian drivers for
combining a slow tortoise-like pace with a jolting that turns the soul
inside out.
“We shall ge-et there!” the peasant reassured him. “The mare is young
and frisky. . . . Only let her get running and then there is no stopping
her. . . . No-ow, cur-sed brute!”
It was dusk by the time the cart drove out of the station. On the
surveyor’s right hand stretched a dark frozen plain, endless and
boundless. If you drove over it you would certainly get to the other
side of beyond. On the horizon, where it vanished and melted into the
sky, there was the languid glow of a cold autumn sunset. . . . On the
left of the road, mounds of some sort, that might be last year’s stacks
or might be a village, rose up in the gathering darkness. The surveyor
could not see what was in front as his whole field of vision on that
side was covered by the broad clumsy back of the driver. The air was
still, but it was cold and frosty.
“What a wilderness it is here,” thought the surveyor, trying to cover
his ears with the collar of his overcoat. “Neither post nor paddock. If,
by ill-luck, one were attacked and robbed no one would hear you,
whatever uproar you made. . . . And the driver is not one you could
depend on. . . . Ugh, what a huge back! A child of nature like that has
only to move a finger and it would be all up with one! And his ugly face
is suspicious and brutal-looking.”
“Hey, my good man!” said the surveyor, “What is your name?”
“Mine? Klim.”
“Well, Klim, what is it like in your parts here? Not dangerous? Any
robbers on the road?”
“It is all right, the Lord has spared us. . . . Who should go robbing on
the road?”
“It’s a good thing there are no robbers. But to be ready for anything I
have got three revolvers with me,” said the surveyor untruthfully. “And
it doesn’t do to trifle with a revolver, you know. One can manage a
dozen robbers. . . .”
It had become quite dark. The cart suddenly began creaking, squeaking,
shaking, and, as though unwillingly, turned sharply to the left.
“Where is he taking me to?” the surveyor wondered. “He has been driving
straight and now all at once to the left. I shouldn’t wonder if he’ll
take me, the rascal, to some den of thieves . . . and. . . . Things like
that do happen.”
“I say,” he said, addressing the driver, “so you tell me it’s not
dangerous here? That’s a pity. . . I like a fight with robbers. . . . I
am thin and sickly-looking, but I have the strength of a bull . . . .
Once three robbers attacked me and what do you think? I gave one such a
dressing that. . . that he gave up his soul to God, you understand, and
the other two were sent to penal servitude in Siberia. And where I got
the strength I can’t say. . . . One grips a strapping fellow of your
sort with one hand and . . . wipes him out.”
Klim looked round at the surveyor, wrinkled up his whole face, and
lashed his horse.
“Yes . . .” the surveyor went on. “God forbid anyone should tackle me.
The robber would have his bones broken, and, what’s more, he would have
to answer for it in the police court too. . . . I know all the judges
and the police captains, I am a man in the Government, a man of
importance. Here I am travelling and the authorities know . . . they
keep a regular watch over me to see no one does me a mischief. There are
policemen and village constables stuck behind bushes all along the road.
. . . Sto . . . sto . . . . stop!” the surveyor bawled suddenly. “Where
have you got to? Where are you taking me to?”
“Why, don’t you see? It’s a forest!”
“It certainly is a forest,” thought the surveyor. “I was frightened! But
it won’t do to betray my feelings. . . . He has noticed already that I
am in a funk. Why is it he has taken to looking round at me so often? He
is plotting something for certain. . . . At first he drove like a snail
and now how he is dashing along!”
“I say, Klim, why are you making the horse go like that?”
“I am not making her go. She is racing along of herself. . . . Once she
gets into a run there is no means of stopping her. It’s no pleasure to
her that her legs are like that.”
“You are lying, my man, I see that you are lying. Only I advise you not
to drive so fast. Hold your horse in a bit. . . . Do you hear? Hold her
in!”
“What for?”
“Why . . . why, because four comrades were to drive after me from the
station. We must let them catch us up. . . . They promised to overtake
us in this forest. It will be more cheerful in their company. . . . They
are a strong, sturdy set of fellows. . . . And each of them has got a
pistol. Why do you keep looking round and fidgeting as though you were
sitting on thorns? eh? I, my good fellow, er . . . my good fellow . . .
there is no need to look around at me . . . there is nothing interesting
about me. . . . Except perhaps the revolvers. Well, if you like I will
take them out and show you. . . .”
The surveyor made a pretence of feeling in his pockets and at that
moment something happened which he could not have expected with all his
cowardice. Klim suddenly rolled off the cart and ran as fast as he could
go into the forest.
“Help!” he roared. “Help! Take the horse and the cart, you devil, only
don’t take my life. Help!”
There was the sound of footsteps hurriedly retreating, of twigs
snapping—and all was still. . . . The surveyor had not expected such a
dénouement. He first stopped the horse and then settled himself more
comfortably in the cart and fell to thinking.
“He has run off . . . he was scared, the fool. Well, what’s to be done
now? I can’t go on alone because I don’t know the way; besides they may
think I have stolen his horse. . . . What’s to be done?”
“Klim! Klim,” he cried.
“Klim,” answered the echo.
At the thought that he would have to sit through the whole night in the
cold and dark forest and hear nothing but the wolves, the echo, and the
snorting of the scraggy mare, the surveyor began to have twinges down
his spine as though it were being rasped with a cold file.
“Klimushka,” he shouted. “Dear fellow! Where are you, Klimushka?”
For two hours the surveyor shouted, and it was only after he was quite
husky and had resigned himself to spending the night in the forest that
a faint breeze wafted the sound of a moan to him.
“Klim, is it you, dear fellow? Let us go on.”
“You’ll mu-ur-der me!”
“But I was joking, my dear man! I swear to God I was joking! As though I
had revolvers! I told a lie because I was frightened. For goodness sake
let us go on, I am freezing!”
Klim, probably reflecting that a real robber would have vanished long
ago with the horse and cart, came out of the forest and went
hesitatingly up to his passenger.
“Well, what were you frightened of, stupid? I . . . I was joking and you
were frightened. Get in!”
“God be with you, sir,” Klim muttered as he clambered into the cart, “if
I had known I wouldn’t have taken you for a hundred roubles. I almost
died of fright. . . .”
Klim lashed at the little mare. The cart swayed. Klim lashed once more
and the cart gave a lurch. After the fourth stroke of the whip when the
cart moved forward, the surveyor hid his ears in his collar and sank
into thought.
The road and Klim no longer seemed dangerous to him.
THE ORATOR
ONE fine morning the collegiate assessor, Kirill Ivanovitch Babilonov,
who had died of the two afflictions so widely spread in our country, a
bad wife and alcoholism, was being buried. As the funeral procession set
off from the church to the cemetery, one of the deceased’s colleagues,
called Poplavsky, got into a cab and galloped off to find a friend, one
Grigory Petrovitch Zapoikin, a man who though still young had acquired
considerable popularity. Zapoikin, as many of my readers are aware,
possesses a rare talent for impromptu speechifying at weddings,
jubilees, and funerals. He can speak whenever he likes: in his sleep, on
an empty stomach, dead drunk or in a high fever. His words flow smoothly
and evenly, like water out of a pipe, and in abundance; there are far
more moving words in his oratorical dictionary than there are beetles in
any restaurant. He always speaks eloquently and at great length, so much
so that on some occasions, particularly at merchants’ weddings, they
have to resort to assistance from the police to stop him.
“I have come for you, old man!” began Poplavsky, finding him at home.
“Put on your hat and coat this minute and come along. One of our fellows
is dead, we are just sending him off to the other world, so you must do
a bit of palavering by way of farewell to him. . . . You are our only
hope. If it had been one of the smaller fry it would not have been worth
troubling you, but you see it’s the secretary . . . a pillar of the
office, in a sense. It’s awkward for such a whopper to be buried without
a speech.”
“Oh, the secretary!” yawned Zapoikin. “You mean the drunken one?”
“Yes. There will be pancakes, a lunch . . . you’ll get your cab-fare.
Come along, dear chap. You spout out some rigmarole like a regular
Cicero at the grave and what gratitude you will earn!”
Zapoikin readily agreed. He ruffled up his hair, cast a shade of
melancholy over his face, and went out into the street with Poplavsky.
“I know your secretary,” he said, as he got into the cab. “A cunning
rogue and a beast—the kingdom of heaven be his—such as you don’t often
come across.”
“Come, Grisha, it is not the thing to abuse the dead.”
“Of course not, aut mortuis nihil bene, but still he was a rascal.”
The friends overtook the funeral procession and joined it. The coffin
was borne along slowly so that before they reached the cemetery they
were able three times to drop into a tavern and imbibe a little to the
health of the departed.
In the cemetery came the service by the graveside. The mother-in-law,
the wife, and the sister-in-law in obedience to custom shed many tears.
When the coffin was being lowered into the grave the wife even shrieked
“Let me go with him!” but did not follow her husband into the grave
probably recollecting her pension. Waiting till everything was quiet
again Zapoikin stepped forward, turned his eyes on all present, and
began:
“Can I believe my eyes and ears? Is it not a terrible dream this grave,
these tear-stained faces, these moans and lamentations? Alas, it is not
a dream and our eyes do not deceive us! He whom we have only so lately
seen, so full of courage, so youthfully fresh and pure, who so lately
before our eyes like an unwearying bee bore his honey to the common hive
of the welfare of the state, he who . . . he is turned now to dust, to
inanimate mirage. Inexorable death has laid his bony hand upon him at
the time when, in spite of his bowed age, he was still full of the bloom
of strength and radiant hopes. An irremediable loss! Who will fill his
place for us? Good government servants we have many, but Prokofy
Osipitch was unique. To the depths of his soul he was devoted to his
honest duty; he did not spare his strength but worked late at night, and
was disinterested, impervious to bribes. . . . How he despised those who
to the detriment of the public interest sought to corrupt him, who by
the seductive goods of this life strove to draw him to betray his duty!
Yes, before our eyes Prokofy Osipitch would divide his small salary
between his poorer colleagues, and you have just heard yourselves the
lamentations of the widows and orphans who lived upon his alms. Devoted
to good works and his official duty, he gave up the joys of this life
and even renounced the happiness of domestic existence; as you are
aware, to the end of his days he was a bachelor. And who will replace
him as a comrade? I can see now the kindly, shaven face turned to us
with a gentle smile, I can hear now his soft friendly voice. Peace to
thine ashes, Prokofy Osipitch! Rest, honest, noble toiler!”
Zapoikin continued while his listeners began whispering together. His
speech pleased everyone and drew some tears, but a good many things in
it seemed strange. In the first place they could not make out why the
orator called the deceased Prokofy Osipitch when his name was Kirill
Ivanovitch. In the second, everyone knew that the deceased had spent his
whole life quarelling with his lawful wife, and so consequently could
not be called a bachelor; in the third, he had a thick red beard and had
never been known to shave, and so no one could understand why the orator
spoke of his shaven face. The listeners were perplexed; they glanced at
each other and shrugged their shoulders.
“Prokofy Osipitch,” continued the orator, looking with an air of
inspiration into the grave, “your face was plain, even hideous, you were
morose and austere, but we all know that under that outer husk there
beat an honest, friendly heart!”
Soon the listeners began to observe something strange in the orator
himself. He gazed at one point, shifted about uneasily and began to
shrug his shoulders too. All at once he ceased speaking, and gaping with
astonishment, turned to Poplavsky.
“I say! he’s alive,” he said, staring with horror.
“Who’s alive?”
“Why, Prokofy Osipitch, there he stands, by that tombstone!”
“He never died! It’s Kirill Ivanovitch who’s dead.”
“But you told me yourself your secretary was dead.”
“Kirill Ivanovitch was our secretary. You’ve muddled it, you queer fish.
Prokofy Osipitch was our secretary before, that’s true, but two years
ago he was transferred to the second division as head clerk.”
“How the devil is one to tell?”
“Why are you stopping? Go on, it’s awkward.”
Zapoikin turned to the grave, and with the same eloquence continued his
interrupted speech. Prokofy Osipitch, an old clerk with a clean-shaven
face, was in fact standing by a tombstone. He looked at the orator and
frowned angrily.
“Well, you have put your foot into it, haven’t you!” laughed his fellow-
clerks as they returned from the funeral with Zapoikin. “Burying a man
alive!”
“It’s unpleasant, young man,” grumbled Prokofy Osipitch. “Your speech
may be all right for a dead man, but in reference to a living one it is
nothing but sarcasm! Upon my soul what have you been saying?
Disinterested, incorruptible, won’t take bribes! Such things can only be
said of the living in sarcasm. And no one asked you, sir, to expatiate
on my face. Plain, hideous, so be it, but why exhibit my countenance in
that public way! It’s insulting.”
MALINGERERS
MARFA PETROVNA PETCHONKIN, the General’s widow, who has been practising
for ten years as a homeopathic doctor, is seeing patients in her study
on one of the Tuesdays in May. On the table before her lie a chest of
homeopathic drugs, a book on homeopathy, and bills from a homeopathic
chemist. On the wall the letters from some Petersburg homeopath, in
Marfa Petrovna’s opinion a very celebrated and great man, hang under
glass in a gilt frame, and there also is a portrait of Father Aristark,
to whom the lady owes her salvation —that is, the renunciation of
pernicious allopathy and the knowledge of the truth. In the vestibule
patients are sitting waiting, for the most part peasants. All but two or
three of them are barefoot, as the lady has given orders that their ill-
smelling boots are to be left in the yard.
Marfa Petrovna has already seen ten patients when she calls the
eleventh: “Gavrila Gruzd!”
The door opens and instead of Gavrila Gruzd, Zamuhrishen, a neighbouring
landowner who has sunk into poverty, a little old man with sour eyes,
and with a gentleman’s cap under his arm, walks into the room. He puts
down his stick in the corner, goes up to the lady, and without a word
drops on one knee before her.
“What are you about, Kuzma Kuzmitch?” cries the lady in horror, flushing
crimson. “For goodness sake!”
“While I live I will not rise,” says Zamuhrishen, bending over her hand.
“Let all the world see my homage on my knees, our guardian angel,
benefactress of the human race! Let them! Before the good fairy who has
given me life, guided me into the path of truth, and enlightened my
scepticism I am ready not merely to kneel but to pass through fire, our
miraculous healer, mother of the orphan and the widowed! I have
recovered. I am a new man, enchantress!”
“I . . . I am very glad . . .” mutters the lady, flushing with pleasure.
“It’s so pleasant to hear that. . . Sit down please! Why, you were so
seriously ill that Tuesday.”
“Yes indeed, how ill I was! It’s awful to recall it,” says Zamuhrishen,
taking a seat. “I had rheumatism in every part and every organ. I have
been in misery for eight years, I’ve had no rest from it . . . by day or
by night, my benefactress. I have consulted doctors, and I went to
professors at Kazan; I have tried all sorts of mud-baths, and drunk
waters, and goodness knows what I haven’t tried! I have wasted all my
substance on doctors, my beautiful lady. The doctors did me nothing but
harm. They drove the disease inwards. Drive in, that they did, but to
drive out was beyond their science. All they care about is their fees,
the brigands; but as for the benefit of humanity—for that they don’t
care a straw. They prescribe some quackery, and you have to drink it.
Assassins, that’s the only word for them. If it hadn’t been for you, our
angel, I should have been in the grave by now! I went home from you that
Tuesday, looked at the pilules that you gave me then, and wondered what
good there could be in them. Was it possible that those little grains,
scarcely visible, could cure my immense, long-standing disease? That’s
what I thought—unbeliever that I was!—and I smiled; but when I took the
pilule—it was instantaneous! It was as though I had not been ill, or as
though it had been lifted off me. My wife looked at me with her eyes
starting out of her head and couldn’t believe it. ‘Why, is it you,
Kolya?’ ‘Yes, it is I,’ I said. And we knelt down together before the
ikon, and fell to praying for our angel: ‘Send her, O Lord, all that we
are feeling!’”
Zamuhrishen wipes his eyes with his sleeve gets up from his chair, and
shows a disposition to drop on one knee again; but the lady checks him
and makes him sit down.
“It’s not me you must thank,” she says, blushing with excitement and
looking enthusiastically at the portrait of Father Aristark. “It’s not
my doing. . . . I am only the obedient instrument . . It’s really a
miracle. Rheumatism of eight years’ standing by one pilule of
scrofuloso!”
“Excuse me, you were so kind as to give me three pilules. One I took at
dinner and the effect was instantaneous! Another in the evening, and the
third next day; and since then not a touch! Not a twinge anywhere! And
you know I thought I was dying, I had written to Moscow for my son to
come! The Lord has given you wisdom, our lady of healing! Now I am
walking, and feel as though I were in Paradise. The Tuesday I came to
you I was hobbling, and now I am ready to run after a hare. . . . I
could live for a hundred years. There’s only one trouble, our lack of
means. I’m well now, but what’s the use of health if there’s nothing to
live on? Poverty weighs on me worse than illness. . . . For example,
take this . . . It’s the time to sow oats, and how is one to sow it if
one has no seed? I ought to buy it, but the money . . . everyone knows
how we are off for money. . . .”
“I will give you oats, Kuzma Kuzmitch. . . . Sit down, sit down. You
have so delighted me, you have given me so much pleasure that it’s not
you but I that should say thank you!”
“You are our joy! That the Lord should create such goodness! Rejoice,
Madam, looking at your good deeds! . . . While we sinners have no cause
for rejoicing in ourselves. . . . We are paltry, poor-spirited, useless
people . . . a mean lot. . . . We are only gentry in name, but in a
material sense we are the same as peasants, only worse. . . . We live in
stone houses, but it’s a mere make-believe . . . for the roof leaks. And
there is no money to buy wood to mend it with.”
“I’ll give you the wood, Kuzma Kuzmitch.”
Zamuhrishen asks for and gets a cow too, a letter of recommendation for
his daughter whom he wants to send to a boarding school, and . . .
touched by the lady’s liberality he whimpers with excess of feeling,
twists his mouth, and feels in his pocket for his handkerchief . . . .
Marfa Petrovna sees a red paper slip out of his pocket with his
handkerchief and fall noiselessly to the floor.
“I shall never forget it to all eternity . . .” he mutters, “and I shall
make my children and my grandchildren remember it . . . from generation
to generation. ‘See, children,’ I shall say, ‘who has saved me from the
grave, who . . .’”
When she has seen her patient out, the lady looks for a minute at Father
Aristark with eyes full of tears, then turns her caressing, reverent
gaze on the drug chest, the books, the bills, the armchair in which the
man she had saved from death has just been sitting, and her eyes fall on
the paper just dropped by her patient. She picks up the paper, unfolds
it, and sees in it three pilules—the very pilules she had given
Zamuhrishen the previous Tuesday.
“They are the very ones,” she thinks puzzled. “. . . The paper is the
same. . . . He hasn’t even unwrapped them! What has he taken then?
Strange. . . . Surely he wouldn’t try to deceive me!”
And for the first time in her ten years of practice a doubt creeps into
Marfa Petrovna’s mind. . . . She summons the other patients, and while
talking to them of their complaints notices what has hitherto slipped by
her ears unnoticed. The patients, every one of them as though they were
in a conspiracy, first belaud her for their miraculous cure, go into
raptures over her medical skill, and abuse allopath doctors, then when
she is flushed with excitement, begin holding forth on their needs. One
asks for a bit of land to plough, another for wood, a third for
permission to shoot in her forests, and so on. She looks at the broad,
benevolent countenance of Father Aristark who has revealed the truth to
her, and a new truth begins gnawing at her heart. An evil oppressive
truth. . . .
The deceitfulness of man!
IN THE GRAVEYARD
“THE wind has got up, friends, and it is beginning to get dark. Hadn’t
we better take ourselves off before it gets worse?”
The wind was frolicking among the yellow leaves of the old birch trees,
and a shower of thick drops fell upon us from the leaves. One of our
party slipped on the clayey soil, and clutched at a big grey cross to
save himself from falling.
“Yegor Gryaznorukov, titular councillor and cavalier . .” he read. “I
knew that gentleman. He was fond of his wife, he wore the Stanislav
ribbon, and read nothing. . . . His digestion worked well . . . . life
was all right, wasn’t it? One would have thought he had no reason to
die, but alas! fate had its eye on him. . . . The poor fellow fell a
victim to his habits of observation. On one occasion, when he was
listening at a keyhole, he got such a bang on the head from the door
that he sustained concussion of the brain (he had a brain), and died.
And here, under this tombstone, lies a man who from his cradle detested
verses and epigrams. . . . As though to mock him his whole tombstone is
adorned with verses. . . . There is someone coming!”
A man in a shabby overcoat, with a shaven, bluish-crimson countenance,
overtook us. He had a bottle under his arm and a parcel of sausage was
sticking out of his pocket.
“Where is the grave of Mushkin, the actor?” he asked us in a husky
voice.
We conducted him towards the grave of Mushkin, the actor, who had died
two years before.
“You are a government clerk, I suppose?” we asked him.
“No, an actor. Nowadays it is difficult to distinguish actors from
clerks of the Consistory. No doubt you have noticed that. . . . That’s
typical, but it’s not very flattering for the government clerk.”
It was with difficulty that we found the actor’s grave. It had sunken,
was overgrown with weeds, and had lost all appearance of a grave. A
cheap, little cross that had begun to rot, and was covered with green
moss blackened by the frost, had an air of aged dejection and looked, as
it were, ailing.
“. . . forgotten friend Mushkin . . .” we read.
Time had erased the never, and corrected the falsehood of man.
“A subscription for a monument to him was got up among actors and
journalists, but they drank up the money, the dear fellows . . .” sighed
the actor, bowing down to the ground and touching the wet earth with his
knees and his cap.
“How do you mean, drank it?”
That’s very simple. They collected the money, published a paragraph
about it in the newspaper, and spent it on drink. . . . I don’t say it
to blame them. . . . I hope it did them good, dear things! Good health
to them, and eternal memory to him.”
“Drinking means bad health, and eternal memory nothing but sadness. God
give us remembrance for a time, but eternal memory—what next!”
“You are right there. Mushkin was a well-known man, you see; there were
a dozen wreaths on the coffin, and he is already forgotten. Those to
whom he was dear have forgotten him, but those to whom he did harm
remember him. I, for instance, shall never, never forget him, for I got
nothing but harm from him. I have no love for the deceased.”
“What harm did he do you?”
“Great harm,” sighed the actor, and an expression of bitter resentment
overspread his face. “To me he was a villain and a scoundrel—the Kingdom
of Heaven be his! It was through looking at him and listening to him
that I became an actor. By his art he lured me from the parental home,
he enticed me with the excitements of an actor’s life, promised me all
sorts of things—and brought tears and sorrow. . . . An actor’s lot is a
bitter one! I have lost youth, sobriety, and the divine semblance. . . .
I haven’t a half-penny to bless myself with, my shoes are down at heel,
my breeches are frayed and patched, and my face looks as if it had been
gnawed by dogs. . . . My head’s full of freethinking and nonsense. . . .
He robbed me of my faith—my evil genius! It would have been something if
I had had talent, but as it is, I am ruined for nothing. . . . It’s
cold, honoured friends. . . . Won’t you have some? There is enough for
all. . . . B-r-r-r. . . . Let us drink to the rest of his soul! Though I
don’t like him and though he’s dead, he was the only one I had in the
world, the only one. It’s the last time I shall visit him. . . . The
doctors say I shall soon die of drink, so here I have come to say good-
bye. One must forgive one’s enemies.”
We left the actor to converse with the dead Mushkin and went on. It
began drizzling a fine cold rain.
At the turning into the principal avenue strewn with gravel, we met a
funeral procession. Four bearers, wearing white calico sashes and muddy
high boots with leaves sticking on them, carried the brown coffin. It
was getting dark and they hastened, stumbling and shaking their burden.
. . .
“We’ve only been walking here for a couple of hours and that is the
third brought in already. . . . Shall we go home, friends?”
HUSH!
IVAN YEGORITCH KRASNYHIN, a fourth-rate journalist, returns home late at
night, grave and careworn, with a peculiar air of concentration. He
looks like a man expecting a police-raid or contemplating suicide.
Pacing about his rooms he halts abruptly, ruffles up his hair, and says
in the tone in which Laertes announces his intention of avenging his
sister:
“Shattered, soul-weary, a sick load of misery on the heart . . . and
then to sit down and write. And this is called life! How is it nobody
has described the agonizing discord in the soul of a writer who has to
amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears at the word of
command when his heart is light? I must be playful, coldly unconcerned,
witty, but what if I am weighed down with misery, what if I am ill, or
my child is dying or my wife in anguish!”
He says this, brandishing his fists and rolling his eyes. . . . Then he
goes into the bedroom and wakes his wife.
“Nadya,” he says, “I am sitting down to write. . . . Please don’t let
anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying or cooks
snoring. . . . See, too, that there’s tea and . . . steak or something.
. . . You know that I can’t write without tea. . . . Tea is the one
thing that gives me the energy for my work.”
Returning to his room he takes off his coat, waistcoat, and boots. He
does this very slowly; then, assuming an expression of injured
innocence, he sits down to his table.
There is nothing casual, nothing ordinary on his writing-table, down to
the veriest trifle everything bears the stamp of a stern, deliberately
planned programme. Little busts and photographs of distinguished
writers, heaps of rough manuscripts, a volume of Byelinsky with a page
turned down, part of a skull by way of an ash-tray, a sheet of newspaper
folded carelessly, but so that a passage is uppermost, boldly marked in
blue pencil with the word “disgraceful.” There are a dozen sharply-
pointed pencils and several penholders fitted with new nibs, put in
readiness that no accidental breaking of a pen may for a single second
interrupt the flight of his creative fancy.
Ivan Yegoritch throws himself back in his chair, and closing his eyes
concentrates himself on his subject. He hears his wife shuffling about
in her slippers and splitting shavings to heat the samovar. She is
hardly awake, that is apparent from the way the knife and the lid of the
samovar keep dropping from her hands. Soon the hissing of the samovar
and the spluttering of the frying meat reaches him. His wife is still
splitting shavings and rattling with the doors and blowers of the stove.
All at once Ivan Yegoritch starts, opens frightened eyes, and begins to
sniff the air.
“Heavens! the stove is smoking!” he groans, grimacing with a face of
agony. “Smoking! That insufferable woman makes a point of trying to
poison me! How, in God’s Name, am I to write in such surroundings,
kindly tell me that?”
He rushes into the kitchen and breaks into a theatrical wail. When a
little later, his wife, stepping cautiously on tiptoe, brings him in a
glass of tea, he is sitting in an easy chair as before with his eyes
closed, absorbed in his article. He does not stir, drums lightly on his
forehead with two fingers, and pretends he is not aware of his wife’s
presence. . . . His face wears an expression of injured innocence.
Like a girl who has been presented with a costly fan, he spends a long
time coquetting, grimacing, and posing to himself before he writes the
title. . . . He presses his temples, he wriggles, and draws his legs up
under his chair as though he were in pain, or half closes his eyes
languidly like a cat on the sofa. At last, not without hesitation, he
stretches out his hand towards the inkstand, and with an expression as
though he were signing a death-warrant, writes the title. . . .
“Mammy, give me some water!” he hears his son’s voice.
“Hush!” says his mother. “Daddy’s writing! Hush!”
Daddy writes very, very quickly, without corrections or pauses, he has
scarcely time to turn over the pages. The busts and portraits of
celebrated authors look at his swiftly racing pen and, keeping stock
still, seem to be thinking: “Oh my, how you are going it!”
“Sh!” squeaks the pen.
“Sh!” whisper the authors, when his knee jolts the table and they are
set trembling.
All at once Krasnyhin draws himself up, lays down his pen and listens. .
. . He hears an even monotonous whispering. . . . It is Foma
Nikolaevitch, the lodger in the next room, saying his prayers.
“I say!” cries Krasnyhin. “Couldn’t you, please, say your prayers more
quietly? You prevent me from writing!”
“Very sorry. . . .” Foma Nikolaevitch answers timidly.
After covering five pages, Krasnyhin stretches and looks at his watch.
“Goodness, three o’clock already,” he moans. “Other people are asleep
while I . . . I alone must work!”
Shattered and exhausted he goes, with his head on one side, to the
bedroom to wake his wife, and says in a languid voice:
“Nadya, get me some more tea! I . . . feel weak.”
He writes till four o’clock and would readily have written till six if
his subject had not been exhausted. Coquetting and posing to himself and
the inanimate objects about him, far from any indiscreet, critical eye,
tyrannizing and domineering over the little anthill that fate has put in
his power are the honey and the salt of his existence. And how different
is this despot here at home from the humble, meek, dull-witted little
man we are accustomed to see in the editor’s offices!
“I am so exhausted that I am afraid I shan’t sleep . . .” he says as he
gets into bed. “Our work, this cursed, ungrateful hard labour, exhausts
the soul even more than the body. . . . I had better take some bromide.
. . . God knows, if it were not for my family I’d throw up the work. . .
. To write to order! It is awful.”
He sleeps till twelve or one o’clock in the day, sleeps a sound, healthy
sleep. . . . Ah! how he would sleep, what dreams he would have, how he
would spread himself if he were to become a well-known writer, an
editor, or even a sub-editor!
“He has been writing all night,” whispers his wife with a scared
expression on her face. “Sh!”
No one dares to speak or move or make a sound. His sleep is something
sacred, and the culprit who offends against it will pay dearly for his
fault.
“Hush!” floats over the flat. “Hush!”
IN AN HOTEL
“LET me tell you, my good man,” began Madame Nashatyrin, the colonel’s
lady at No. 47, crimson and spluttering, as she pounced on the hotel-
keeper. “Either give me other apartments, or I shall leave your
confounded hotel altogether! It’s a sink of iniquity! Mercy on us, I
have grown-up daughters and one hears nothing but abominations day and
night! It’s beyond everything! Day and night! Sometimes he fires off
such things that it simply makes one’s ears blush! Positively like a
cabman. It’s a good thing that my poor girls don’t understand or I
should have to fly out into the street with them. . . He’s saying
something now! You listen!”
“I know a thing better than that, my boy,” a husky bass floated in from
the next room. “Do you remember Lieutenant Druzhkov? Well, that same
Druzhkov was one day making a drive with the yellow into the pocket and
as he usually did, you know, flung up his leg. . . . All at once
something went crrr-ack! At first they thought he had torn the cloth of
the billiard table, but when they looked, my dear fellow, his United
States had split at every seam! He had made such a high kick, the beast,
that not a seam was left. . . . Ha-ha-ha, and there were ladies present,
too . . . among others the wife of that drivelling Lieutenant Okurin. .
. . Okurin was furious. . . . ‘How dare the fellow,’ said he, ‘behave
with impropriety in the presence of my wife?’ One thing led to another .
. . you know our fellows! . . . Okurin sent seconds to Druzhkov, and
Druzhkov said ‘don’t be a fool’ . . . ha-ha-ha, ‘but tell him he had
better send seconds not to me but to the tailor who made me those
breeches; it is his fault, you know.’ Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha. . . .”
Lilya and Mila, the colonel’s daughters, who were sitting in the window
with their round cheeks propped on their fists, flushed crimson and
dropped their eyes that looked buried in their plump faces.
“Now you have heard him, haven’t you?” Madame Nashatyrin went on,
addressing the hotel-keeper. “And that, you consider, of no consequence,
I suppose? I am the wife of a colonel, sir! My husband is a commanding
officer. I will not permit some cabman to utter such infamies almost in
my presence!”
“He is not a cabman, madam, but the staff-captain Kikin. . . . A
gentleman born.”
“If he has so far forgotten his station as to express himself like a
cabman, then he is even more deserving of contempt! In short, don’t
answer me, but kindly take steps!”
“But what can I do, madam? You are not the only one to complain,
everybody’s complaining, but what am I to do with him? One goes to his
room and begins putting him to shame, saying: ‘Hannibal Ivanitch, have
some fear of God! It’s shameful! and he’ll punch you in the face with
his fists and say all sorts of things: ‘there, put that in your pipe and
smoke it,’ and such like. It’s a disgrace! He wakes up in the morning
and sets to walking about the corridor in nothing, saving your presence,
but his underclothes. And when he has had a drop he will pick up a
revolver and set to putting bullets into the wall. By day he is swilling
liquor and at night he plays cards like mad, and after cards it is
fighting. . . . I am ashamed for the other lodgers to see it!”
“Why don’t you get rid of the scoundrel?”
“Why, there’s no getting him out! He owes me for three months, but we
don’t ask for our money, we simply ask him to get out as a favour . . .
. The magistrate has given him an order to clear out of the rooms, but
he’s taking it from one court to another, and so it drags on. . . . He’s
a perfect nuisance, that’s what he is. And, good Lord, such a man, too!
Young, good-looking and intellectual. . . . When he hasn’t had a drop
you couldn’t wish to see a nicer gentleman. The other day he wasn’t
drunk and he spent the whole day writing letters to his father and
mother.”
“Poor father and mother!” sighed the colonel’s lady.
“They are to be pitied, to be sure! There’s no comfort in having such a
scamp! He’s sworn at and turned out of his lodgings, and not a day
passes but he is in trouble over some scandal. It’s sad!”
“His poor unhappy wife!” sighed the lady.
“He has no wife, madam. A likely idea! She would have to thank God if
her head were not broken. . . .”
The lady walked up and down the room.
“He is not married, you say?”
“Certainly not, madam.”
The lady walked up and down the room again and mused a little.
“H’m, not married . . .” she pronounced meditatively. “H’m. Lilya and
Mila, don’t sit at the window, there’s a draught! What a pity! A young
man and to let himself sink to this! And all owing to what? The lack of
good influence! There is no mother who would. . . . Not married? Well .
. . there it is. . . . Please be so good,” the lady continued suavely
after a moment’s thought, “as to go to him and ask him in my name to . .
. refrain from using expressions. . . . Tell him that Madame Nashatyrin
begs him. . . . Tell him she is staying with her daughters in No. 47 . .
. that she has come up from her estate in the country. . . .”
“Certainly.”
“Tell him, a colonel’s lady and her daughters. He might even come and
apologize. . . . We are always at home after dinner. Oh, Mila, shut the
window!”
“Why, what do you want with that . . . black sheep, mamma?” drawled
Lilya when the hotel-keeper had retired. “A queer person to invite! A
drunken, rowdy rascal!”
“Oh, don’t say so, ma chère! You always talk like that; and there . . .
sit down! Why, whatever he may be, we ought not to despise him. . . .
There’s something good in everyone. Who knows,” sighed the colonel’s
lady, looking her daughters up and down anxiously, “perhaps your fate is
here. Change your dresses anyway. . . .”
IN A STRANGE LAND
SUNDAY, midday. A landowner, called Kamyshev, is sitting in his dining-
room, deliberately eating his lunch at a luxuriously furnished table.
Monsieur Champoun, a clean, neat, smoothly-shaven, old Frenchman, is
sharing the meal with him. This Champoun had once been a tutor in
Kamyshev’s household, had taught his children good manners, the correct
pronunciation of French, and dancing: afterwards when Kamyshev’s
children had grown up and become lieutenants, Champoun had become
something like a bonne of the male sex. The duties of the former tutor
were not complicated. He had to be properly dressed, to smell of scent,
to listen to Kamyshev’s idle babble, to eat and drink and sleep—and
apparently that was all. For this he received a room, his board, and an
indefinite salary.
Kamyshev eats and as usual babbles at random.
“Damnation!” he says, wiping away the tears that have come into his eyes
after a mouthful of ham thickly smeared with mustard. “Ough! It has shot
into my head and all my joints. Your French mustard would not do that,
you know, if you ate the whole potful.”
“Some like the French, some prefer the Russian. . .” Champoun assents
mildly.
“No one likes French mustard except Frenchmen. And a Frenchman will eat
anything, whatever you give him—frogs and rats and black beetles. . .
brrr! You don’t like that ham, for instance, because it is Russian, but
if one were to give you a bit of baked glass and tell you it was French,
you would eat it and smack your lips. . . . To your thinking everything
Russian is nasty.”
“I don’t say that.”
“Everything Russian is nasty, but if it’s French—o say tray zholee! To
your thinking there is no country better than France, but to my mind. .
. Why, what is France, to tell the truth about it? A little bit of land.
Our police captain was sent out there, but in a month he asked to be
transferred: there was nowhere to turn round! One can drive round the
whole of your France in one day, while here when you drive out of the
gate—you can see no end to the land, you can ride on and on. . .”
“Yes, monsieur, Russia is an immense country.”
“To be sure it is! To your thinking there are no better people than the
French. Well-educated, clever people! Civilization! I agree, the French
are all well-educated with elegant manners. . . that is true. . . . A
Frenchman never allows himself to be rude: he hands a lady a chair at
the right minute, he doesn’t eat crayfish with his fork, he doesn’t spit
on the floor, but . . . there’s not the same spirit in him! not the
spirit in him! I don’t know how to explain it to you but, however one is
to express it, there’s nothing in a Frenchman of . . . something . . .
(the speaker flourishes his fingers) . . . of something . . . fanatical.
I remember I have read somewhere that all of you have intelligence
acquired from books, while we Russians have innate intelligence. If a
Russian studies the sciences properly, none of your French professors is
a match for him.”
“Perhaps,” says Champoun, as it were reluctantly.
“No, not perhaps, but certainly! It’s no use your frowning, it’s the
truth I am speaking. The Russian intelligence is an inventive
intelligence. Only of course he is not given a free outlet for it, and
he is no hand at boasting. He will invent something—and break it or give
it to the children to play with, while your Frenchman will invent some
nonsensical thing and make an uproar for all the world to hear it. The
other day Iona the coachman carved a little man out of wood, if you pull
the little man by a thread he plays unseemly antics. But Iona does not
brag of it. . . . I don’t like Frenchmen as a rule. I am not referring
to you, but speaking generally. . . . They are an immoral people!
Outwardly they look like men, but they live like dogs. Take marriage for
instance. With us, once you are married, you stick to your wife, and
there is no talk about it, but goodness knows how it is with you. The
husband is sitting all day long in a café, while his wife fills the
house with Frenchmen, and sets to dancing the can-can with them.”
“That’s not true!” Champoun protests, flaring up and unable to restrain
himself. “The principle of the family is highly esteemed in France.”
“We know all about that principle! You ought to be ashamed to defend it:
one ought to be impartial: a pig is always a pig. . . . We must thank
the Germans for having beaten them. . . . Yes indeed, God bless them for
it.”
“In that case, monsieur, I don’t understand. . .” says the Frenchman
leaping up with flashing eyes, “if you hate the French why do you keep
me?”
“What am I to do with you?”
“Let me go, and I will go back to France.”
“Wha-at? But do you suppose they would let you into France now? Why, you
are a traitor to your country! At one time Napoleon’s your great man, at
another Gambetta. . . . Who the devil can make you out?”
“Monsieur,” says Champoun in French, spluttering and crushing up his
table napkin in his hands, “my worst enemy could not have thought of a
greater insult than the outrage you have just done to my feelings! All
is over!”
And with a tragic wave of his arm the Frenchman flings his dinner napkin
on the table majestically, and walks out of the room with dignity.
Three hours later the table is laid again, and the servants bring in the
dinner. Kamyshev sits alone at the table. After the preliminary glass he
feels a craving to babble. He wants to chatter, but he has no listener.
“What is Alphonse Ludovikovitch doing?” he asks the footman.
“He is packing his trunk, sir.”
“What a noodle! Lord forgive us!” says Kamyshev, and goes in to the
Frenchman.
Champoun is sitting on the floor in his room, and with trembling hands
is packing in his trunk his linen, scent bottles, prayer-books, braces,
ties. . . . All his correct figure, his trunk, his bedstead and the
table—all have an air of elegance and effeminacy. Great tears are
dropping from his big blue eyes into the trunk.
“Where are you off to?” asks Kamyshev, after standing still for a
little.
The Frenchman says nothing.
“Do you want to go away?” Kamyshev goes on. “Well, you know, but . . . I
won’t venture to detain you. But what is queer is, how are you going to
travel without a passport? I wonder! You know I have lost your passport.
I thrust it in somewhere between some papers, and it is lost. . . . And
they are strict about passports among us. Before you have gone three or
four miles they pounce upon you.”
Champoun raises his head and looks mistrustfully at Kamyshev.
“Yes. . . . You will see! They will see from your face you haven’t a
passport, and ask at once: Who is that? Alphonse Champoun. We know that
Alphonse Champoun. Wouldn’t you like to go under police escort somewhere
nearer home!”
“Are you joking?”
“What motive have I for joking? Why should I? Only mind now; it’s a
compact, don’t you begin whining then and writing letters. I won’t stir
a finger when they lead you by in fetters!”
Champoun jumps up and, pale and wide-eyed, begins pacing up and down the
room.
“What are you doing to me?” he says in despair, clutching at his head.
“My God! accursed be that hour when the fatal thought of leaving my
country entered my head! . . .”
“Come, come, come . . . I was joking!” says Kamyshev in a lower tone.
“Queer fish he is; he doesn’t understand a joke. One can’t say a word!”
“My dear friend!” shrieks Champoun, reassured by Kamyshev’s tone. “I
swear I am devoted to Russia, to you and your children. . . . To leave
you is as bitter to me as death itself! But every word you utter stabs
me to the heart!”
“Ah, you queer fish! If I do abuse the French, what reason have you to
take offence? You are a queer fish really! You should follow the example
of Lazar Isaakitch, my tenant. I call him one thing and another, a Jew,
and a scurvy rascal, and I make a pig’s ear out of my coat tail, and
catch him by his Jewish curls. He doesn’t take offence.”
“But he is a slave! For a kopeck he is ready to put up with any insult!”
“Come, come, come . . . that’s enough! Peace and concord!”
Champoun powders his tear-stained face and goes with Kamyshev to the
dining-room. The first course is eaten in silence, after the second the
same performance begins over again, and so Champoun’s sufferings have no
end.
The Party and Other Stories
THE PARTY I
AFTER the festive dinner with its eight courses and its endless
conversation, Olga Mihalovna, whose husband’s name-day was being
celebrated, went out into the garden. The duty of smiling and talking
incessantly, the clatter of the crockery, the stupidity of the servants,
the long intervals between the courses, and the stays she had put on to
conceal her condition from the visitors, wearied her to exhaustion. She
longed to get away from the house, to sit in the shade and rest her
heart with thoughts of the baby which was to be born to her in another
two months. She was used to these thoughts coming to her as she turned
to the left out of the big avenue into the narrow path. Here in the
thick shade of the plums and cherry-trees the dry branches used to
scratch her neck and shoulders; a spider’s web would settle on her face,
and there would rise up in her mind the image of a little creature of
undetermined sex and undefined features, and it began to seem as though
it were not the spider’s web that tickled her face and neck caressingly,
but that little creature. When, at the end of the path, a thin wicker
hurdle came into sight, and behind it podgy beehives with tiled roofs;
when in the motionless, stagnant air there came a smell of hay and
honey, and a soft buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature
would take complete possession of Olga Mihalovna. She used to sit down
on a bench near the shanty woven of branches, and fall to thinking.
This time, too, she went on as far as the seat, sat down, and began
thinking; but instead of the little creature there rose up in her
imagination the figures of the grown-up people whom she had just left.
She felt dreadfully uneasy that she, the hostess, had deserted her
guests, and she remembered how her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and her
uncle, Nikolay Nikolaitch, had argued at dinner about trial by jury,
about the press, and about the higher education of women. Her husband,
as usual, argued in order to show off his Conservative ideas before his
visitors—and still more in order to disagree with her uncle, whom he
disliked. Her uncle contradicted him and wrangled over every word he
uttered, so as to show the company that he, Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch,
still retained his youthful freshness of spirit and free-thinking in
spite of his fifty-nine years. And towards the end of dinner even Olga
Mihalovna herself could not resist taking part and unskilfully
attempting to defend university education for women—not that that
education stood in need of her defence, but simply because she wanted to
annoy her husband, who to her mind was unfair. The guests were wearied
by this discussion, but they all thought it necessary to take part in
it, and talked a great deal, although none of them took any interest in
trial by jury or the higher education of women. . . .
Olga Mihalovna was sitting on the nearest side of the hurdle near the
shanty. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. The trees and the air were
overcast as before rain, but in spite of that it was hot and stifling.
The hay cut under the trees on the previous day was lying ungathered,
looking melancholy, with here and there a patch of colour from the faded
flowers, and from it came a heavy, sickly scent. It was still. The other
side of the hurdle there was a monotonous hum of bees. . . .
Suddenly she heard footsteps and voices; some one was coming along the
path towards the beehouse.
“How stifling it is!” said a feminine voice. “What do you think— is it
going to rain, or not?”
“It is going to rain, my charmer, but not before night,” a very familiar
male voice answered languidly. “There will be a good rain.”
Olga Mihalovna calculated that if she made haste to hide in the shanty
they would pass by without seeing her, and she would not have to talk
and to force herself to smile. She picked up her skirts, bent down and
crept into the shanty. At once she felt upon her face, her neck, her
arms, the hot air as heavy as steam. If it had not been for the
stuffiness and the close smell of rye bread, fennel, and brushwood,
which prevented her from breathing freely, it would have been delightful
to hide from her visitors here under the thatched roof in the dusk, and
to think about the little creature. It was cosy and quiet.
“What a pretty spot!” said a feminine voice. “Let us sit here, Pyotr
Dmitritch.”
Olga Mihalovna began peeping through a crack between two branches. She
saw her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and Lubotchka Sheller, a girl of
seventeen who had not long left boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitritch, with
his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from having drunk
so much at dinner, slouched by the hurdle and raked the hay into a heap
with his foot; Lubotchka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever, stood
with her hands behind her, watching the lazy movements of his big
handsome person.
Olga Mihalovna knew that her husband was attractive to women, and did
not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of the way in Pyotr
Dmitritch’s lazily raking together the hay in order to sit down on it
with Lubotchka and chatter to her of trivialities; there was nothing out
of the way, either, in pretty Lubotchka’s looking at him with her soft
eyes; but yet Olga Mihalovna felt vexed with her husband and frightened
and pleased that she could listen to them.
“Sit down, enchantress,” said Pyotr Dmitritch, sinking down on the hay
and stretching. “That’s right. Come, tell me something.”
“What next! If I begin telling you anything you will go to sleep.”
“Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like yours
are watching me?”
In her husband’s words, and in the fact that he was lolling with his hat
on the back of his head in the presence of a lady, there was nothing out
of the way either. He was spoilt by women, knew that they found him
attractive, and had adopted with them a special tone which every one
said suited him. With Lubotchka he behaved as with all women. But, all
the same, Olga Mihalovna was jealous.
“Tell me, please,” said Lubotchka, after a brief silence—“is it true
that you are to be tried for something?”
“I? Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my charmer.”
“But what for?”
“For nothing, but just . . . it’s chiefly a question of politics,”
yawned Pyotr Dmitritch—“the antagonisms of Left and Right. I, an
obscurantist and reactionary, ventured in an official paper to make use
of an expression offensive in the eyes of such immaculate Gladstones as
Vladimir Pavlovitch Vladimirov and our local justice of the peace—Kuzma
Grigoritch Vostryakov.”
Pytor Dmitritch yawned again and went on:
“And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun
or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching
the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the poisonous dry fungus
which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with
your finger.”
“What happened to you?”
“Nothing particular. The whole flare-up started from the merest trifle.
A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations, hands to
Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging him with
insulting language and behaviour in a public place. Everything showed
that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper were drunk as cobblers, and
that they behaved equally badly. If there had been insulting behaviour,
the insult had anyway been mutual. Vostryakov ought to have fined them
both for a breach of the peace and have turned them out of the
court—that is all. But that’s not our way of doing things. With us what
stands first is not the person—not the fact itself, but the trade-mark
and label. However great a rascal a teacher may be, he is always in the
right because he is a teacher; a tavern-keeper is always in the wrong
because he is a tavern-keeper and a money-grubber. Vostryakov placed the
tavern-keeper under arrest. The man appealed to the Circuit Court; the
Circuit Court triumphantly upheld Vostryakov’s decision. Well, I stuck
to my own opinion. . . . Got a little hot. . . . That was all.”
Pyotr Dmitritch spoke calmly with careless irony. In reality the trial
that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga Mihalovna
remembered how on his return from the unfortunate session he had tried
to conceal from his household how troubled he was, and how dissatisfied
with himself. As an intelligent man he could not help feeling that he
had gone too far in expressing his disagreement; and how much lying had
been needful to conceal that feeling from himself and from others! How
many unnecessary conversations there had been! How much grumbling and
insincere laughter at what was not laughable! When he learned that he
was to be brought up before the Court, he seemed at once harassed and
depressed; he began to sleep badly, stood oftener than ever at the
windows, drumming on the panes with his fingers. And he was ashamed to
let his wife see that he was worried, and it vexed her.
“They say you have been in the province of Poltava?” Lubotchka
questioned him.
“Yes,” answered Pyotr Dmitritch. “I came back the day before yesterday.”
“I expect it is very nice there.”
“Yes, it is very nice, very nice indeed; in fact, I arrived just in time
for the haymaking, I must tell you, and in the Ukraine the haymaking is
the most poetical moment of the year. Here we have a big house, a big
garden, a lot of servants, and a lot going on, so that you don’t see the
haymaking; here it all passes unnoticed. There, at the farm, I have a
meadow of forty-five acres as flat as my hand. You can see the men
mowing from any window you stand at. They are mowing in the meadow, they
are mowing in the garden. There are no visitors, no fuss nor hurry
either, so that you can’t help seeing, feeling, hearing nothing but the
haymaking. There is a smell of hay indoors and outdoors. There’s the
sound of the scythes from sunrise to sunset. Altogether Little Russia is
a charming country. Would you believe it, when I was drinking water from
the rustic wells and filthy vodka in some Jew’s tavern, when on quiet
evenings the strains of the Little Russian fiddle and the tambourines
reached me, I was tempted by a fascinating idea—to settle down on my
place and live there as long as I chose, far away from Circuit Courts,
intellectual conversations, philosophizing women, long dinners. . . .”
Pyotr Dmitritch was not lying. He was unhappy and really longed to rest.
And he had visited his Poltava property simply to avoid seeing his
study, his servants, his acquaintances, and everything that could remind
him of his wounded vanity and his mistakes.
Lubotchka suddenly jumped up and waved her hands about in horror.
“Oh! A bee, a bee!” she shrieked. “It will sting!”
“Nonsense; it won’t sting,” said Pyotr Dmitritch. “What a coward you
are!”
“No, no, no,” cried Lubotchka; and looking round at the bees, she walked
rapidly back.
Pyotr Dmitritch walked away after her, looking at her with a softened
and melancholy face. He was probably thinking, as he looked at her, of
his farm, of solitude, and—who knows?—perhaps he was even thinking how
snug and cosy life would be at the farm if his wife had been this
girl—young, pure, fresh, not corrupted by higher education, not with
child. . . .
When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Olga Mihalovna came out
of the shanty and turned towards the house. She wanted to cry. She was
by now acutely jealous. She could understand that her husband was
worried, dissatisfied with himself and ashamed, and when people are
ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are
unreserved with strangers; she could understand, also, that she had
nothing to fear from Lubotchka or from those women who were now drinking
coffee indoors. But everything in general was terrible,
incomprehensible, and it already seemed to Olga Mihalovna that Pyotr
Dmitritch only half belonged to her.
“He has no right to do it!” she muttered, trying to formulate her
jealousy and her vexation with her husband. “He has no right at all. I
will tell him so plainly!”
She made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him all about
it: it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he was attractive to
other women and sought their admiration as though it were some heavenly
manna; it was unjust and dishonourable that he should give to others
what belonged by right to his wife, that he should hide his soul and his
conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face he came
across. What harm had his wife done him? How was she to blame? Long ago
she had been sickened by his lying: he was for ever posing, flirting,
saying what he did not think, and trying to seem different from what he
was and what he ought to be. Why this falsity? Was it seemly in a decent
man? If he lied he was demeaning himself and those to whom he lied, and
slighting what he lied about. Could he not understand that if he
swaggered and posed at the judicial table, or held forth at dinner on
the prerogatives of Government, that he, simply to provoke her uncle,
was showing thereby that he had not a ha’p’orth of respect for the
Court, or himself, or any of the people who were listening and looking
at him?
Coming out into the big avenue, Olga Mihalovna assumed an expression of
face as though she had just gone away to look after some domestic
matter. In the verandah the gentlemen were drinking liqueur and eating
strawberries: one of them, the Examining Magistrate—a stout elderly man,
blagueur and wit—must have been telling some rather free anecdote, for,
seeing their hostess, he suddenly clapped his hands over his fat lips,
rolled his eyes, and sat down. Olga Mihalovna did not like the local
officials. She did not care for their clumsy, ceremonious wives, their
scandal-mongering, their frequent visits, their flattery of her husband,
whom they all hated. Now, when they were drinking, were replete with
food and showed no signs of going away, she felt their presence an
agonizing weariness; but not to appear impolite, she smiled cordially to
the Magistrate, and shook her finger at him. She walked across the
dining-room and drawing-room smiling, and looking as though she had gone
to give some order and make some arrangement. “God grant no one stops
me,” she thought, but she forced herself to stop in the drawing-room to
listen from politeness to a young man who was sitting at the piano
playing: after standing for a minute, she cried, “Bravo, bravo, M.
Georges!” and clapping her hands twice, she went on.
She found her husband in his study. He was sitting at the table,
thinking of something. His face looked stern, thoughtful, and guilty.
This was not the same Pyotr Dmitritch who had been arguing at dinner and
whom his guests knew, but a different man—wearied, feeling guilty and
dissatisfied with himself, whom nobody knew but his wife. He must have
come to the study to get cigarettes. Before him lay an open cigarette-
case full of cigarettes, and one of his hands was in the table drawer;
he had paused and sunk into thought as he was taking the cigarettes.
Olga Mihalovna felt sorry for him. It was as clear as day that this man
was harassed, could find no rest, and was perhaps struggling with
himself. Olga Mihalovna went up to the table in silence: wanting to show
that she had forgotten the argument at dinner and was not cross, she
shut the cigarette-case and put it in her husband’s coat pocket.
“What should I say to him?” she wondered; “I shall say that lying is
like a forest—the further one goes into it the more difficult it is to
get out of it. I will say to him, ‘You have been carried away by the
false part you are playing; you have insulted people who were attached
to you and have done you no harm. Go and apologize to them, laugh at
yourself, and you will feel better. And if you want peace and solitude,
let us go away together.’”
Meeting his wife’s gaze, Pyotr Dmitritch’s face immediately assumed the
expression it had worn at dinner and in the garden—indifferent and
slightly ironical. He yawned and got up.
“It’s past five,” he said, looking at his watch. “If our visitors are
merciful and leave us at eleven, even then we have another six hours of
it. It’s a cheerful prospect, there’s no denying!”
And whistling something, he walked slowly out of the study with his
usual dignified gait. She could hear him with dignified firmness cross
the dining-room, then the drawing-room, laugh with dignified assurance,
and say to the young man who was playing, “Bravo! bravo!” Soon his
footsteps died away: he must have gone out into the garden. And now not
jealousy, not vexation, but real hatred of his footsteps, his insincere
laugh and voice, took possession of Olga Mihalovna. She went to the
window and looked out into the garden. Pyotr Dmitritch was already
walking along the avenue. Putting one hand in his pocket and snapping
the fingers of the other, he walked with confident swinging steps,
throwing his head back a little, and looking as though he were very well
satisfied with himself, with his dinner, with his digestion, and with
nature. . . .
Two little schoolboys, the children of Madame Tchizhevsky, who had only
just arrived, made their appearance in the avenue, accompanied by their
tutor, a student wearing a white tunic and very narrow trousers. When
they reached Pyotr Dmitritch, the boys and the student stopped, and
probably congratulated him on his name-day. With a graceful swing of his
shoulders, he patted the children on their cheeks, and carelessly
offered the student his hand without looking at him. The student must
have praised the weather and compared it with the climate of Petersburg,
for Pyotr Dmitritch said in a loud voice, in a tone as though he were
not speaking to a guest, but to an usher of the court or a witness:
“What! It’s cold in Petersburg? And here, my good sir, we have a
salubrious atmosphere and the fruits of the earth in abundance. Eh?
What?”
And thrusting one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of the
other, he walked on. Till he had disappeared behind the nut bushes, Olga
Mihalovna watched the back of his head in perplexity. How had this man
of thirty-four come by the dignified deportment of a general? How had he
come by that impressive, elegant manner? Where had he got that vibration
of authority in his voice? Where had he got these “what’s,” “to be
sure’s,” and “my good sir’s”?
Olga Mihalovna remembered how in the first months of her marriage she
had felt dreary at home alone and had driven into the town to the
Circuit Court, at which Pyotr Dmitritch had sometimes presided in place
of her godfather, Count Alexey Petrovitch. In the presidential chair,
wearing his uniform and a chain on his breast, he was completely
changed. Stately gestures, a voice of thunder, “what,” “to be sure,”
careless tones. . . . Everything, all that was ordinary and human, all
that was individual and personal to himself that Olga Mihalovna was
accustomed to seeing in him at home, vanished in grandeur, and in the
presidential chair there sat not Pyotr Dmitritch, but another man whom
every one called Mr. President. This consciousness of power prevented
him from sitting still in his place, and he seized every opportunity to
ring his bell, to glance sternly at the public, to shout. . . . Where
had he got his short-sight and his deafness when he suddenly began to
see and hear with difficulty, and, frowning majestically, insisted on
people speaking louder and coming closer to the table? From the height
of his grandeur he could hardly distinguish faces or sounds, so that it
seemed that if Olga Mihalovna herself had gone up to him he would have
shouted even to her, “Your name?” Peasant witnesses he addressed
familiarly, he shouted at the public so that his voice could be heard
even in the street, and behaved incredibly with the lawyers. If a lawyer
had to speak to him, Pyotr Dmitritch, turning a little away from him,
looked with half-closed eyes at the ceiling, meaning to signify thereby
that the lawyer was utterly superfluous and that he was neither
recognizing him nor listening to him; if a badly-dressed lawyer spoke,
Pyotr Dmitritch pricked up his ears and looked the man up and down with
a sarcastic, annihilating stare as though to say: “Queer sort of lawyers
nowadays!”
“What do you mean by that?” he would interrupt.
If a would-be eloquent lawyer mispronounced a foreign word, saying, for
instance, “factitious” instead of “fictitious,” Pyotr Dmitritch
brightened up at once and asked, “What? How? Factitious? What does that
mean?” and then observed impressively: “Don’t make use of words you do
not understand.” And the lawyer, finishing his speech, would walk away
from the table, red and perspiring, while Pyotr Dmitritch; with a self-
satisfied smile, would lean back in his chair triumphant. In his manner
with the lawyers he imitated Count Alexey Petrovitch a little, but when
the latter said, for instance, “Counsel for the defence, you keep quiet
for a little!” it sounded paternally good-natured and natural, while the
same words in Pyotr Dmitritch’s mouth were rude and artificial. II
There were sounds of applause. The young man had finished playing. Olga
Mihalovna remembered her guests and hurried into the drawing-room.
“I have so enjoyed your playing,” she said, going up to the piano. “I
have so enjoyed it. You have a wonderful talent! But don’t you think our
piano’s out of tune?”
At that moment the two schoolboys walked into the room, accompanied by
the student.
“My goodness! Mitya and Kolya,” Olga Mihalovna drawled joyfully, going
to meet them: “How big they have grown! One would not know you! But
where is your mamma?”
“I congratulate you on the name-day,” the student began in a free-and-
easy tone, “and I wish you all happiness. Ekaterina Andreyevna sends her
congratulations and begs you to excuse her. She is not very well.”
“How unkind of her! I have been expecting her all day. Is it long since
you left Petersburg?” Olga Mihalovna asked the student. “What kind of
weather have you there now?” And without waiting for an answer, she
looked cordially at the schoolboys and repeated:
“How tall they have grown! It is not long since they used to come with
their nurse, and they are at school already! The old grow older while
the young grow up. . . . Have you had dinner?”
“Oh, please don’t trouble!” said the student.
“Why, you have not had dinner?”
“For goodness’ sake, don’t trouble!”
“But I suppose you are hungry?” Olga Mihalovna said it in a harsh, rude
voice, with impatience and vexation—it escaped her unawares, but at once
she coughed, smiled, and flushed crimson. “How tall they have grown!”
she said softly.
“Please don’t trouble!” the student said once more.
The student begged her not to trouble; the boys said nothing; obviously
all three of them were hungry. Olga Mihalovna took them into the dining-
room and told Vassily to lay the table.
“How unkind of your mamma!” she said as she made them sit down. “She has
quite forgotten me. Unkind, unkind, unkind . . . you must tell her so.
What are you studying?” she asked the student.
“Medicine.”
“Well, I have a weakness for doctors, only fancy. I am very sorry my
husband is not a doctor. What courage any one must have to perform an
operation or dissect a corpse, for instance! Horrible! Aren’t you
frightened? I believe I should die of terror! Of course, you drink
vodka?”
“Please don’t trouble.”
“After your journey you must have something to drink. Though I am a
woman, even I drink sometimes. And Mitya and Kolya will drink Malaga.
It’s not a strong wine; you need not be afraid of it. What fine fellows
they are, really! They’ll be thinking of getting married next.”
Olga Mihalovna talked without ceasing; she knew by experience that when
she had guests to entertain it was far easier and more comfortable to
talk than to listen. When you talk there is no need to strain your
attention to think of answers to questions, and to change your
expression of face. But unawares she asked the student a serious
question; the student began a lengthy speech and she was forced to
listen. The student knew that she had once been at the University, and
so tried to seem a serious person as he talked to her.
“What subject are you studying?” she asked, forgetting that she had
already put that question to him.
“Medicine.”
Olga Mihalovna now remembered that she had been away from the ladies for
a long while.
“Yes? Then I suppose you are going to be a doctor?” she said, getting
up. “That’s splendid. I am sorry I did not go in for medicine myself. So
you will finish your dinner here, gentlemen, and then come into the
garden. I will introduce you to the young ladies.”
She went out and glanced at her watch: it was five minutes to six. And
she wondered that the time had gone so slowly, and thought with horror
that there were six more hours before midnight, when the party would
break up. How could she get through those six hours? What phrases could
she utter? How should she behave to her husband?
There was not a soul in the drawing-room or on the verandah. All the
guests were sauntering about the garden.
“I shall have to suggest a walk in the birchwood before tea, or else a
row in the boats,” thought Olga Mihalovna, hurrying to the croquet
ground, from which came the sounds of voices and laughter.
“And sit the old people down to vint. . . .” She met Grigory the footman
coming from the croquet ground with empty bottles.
“Where are the ladies?” she asked.
“Among the raspberry-bushes. The master’s there, too.”
“Oh, good heavens!” some one on the croquet lawn shouted with
exasperation. “I have told you a thousand times over! To know the
Bulgarians you must see them! You can’t judge from the papers!”
Either because of the outburst or for some other reason, Olga Mihalovna
was suddenly aware of a terrible weakness all over, especially in her
legs and in her shoulders. She felt she could not bear to speak, to
listen, or to move.
“Grigory,” she said faintly and with an effort, “when you have to serve
tea or anything, please don’t appeal to me, don’t ask me anything, don’t
speak of anything. . . . Do it all yourself, and . . . and don’t make a
noise with your feet, I entreat you. . . . I can’t, because . . .”
Without finishing, she walked on towards the croquet lawn, but on the
way she thought of the ladies, and turned towards the raspberry-bushes.
The sky, the air, and the trees looked gloomy again and threatened rain;
it was hot and stifling. An immense flock of crows, foreseeing a storm,
flew cawing over the garden. The paths were more overgrown, darker, and
narrower as they got nearer the kitchen garden. In one of them, buried
in a thick tangle of wild pear, crab-apple, sorrel, young oaks, and
hopbine, clouds of tiny black flies swarmed round Olga Mihalovna. She
covered her face with her hands and began forcing herself to think of
the little creature . . . . There floated through her imagination the
figures of Grigory, Mitya, Kolya, the faces of the peasants who had come
in the morning to present their congratulations.
She heard footsteps, and she opened her eyes. Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch
was coming rapidly towards her.
“It’s you, dear? I am very glad . . .” he began, breathless. “A couple
of words. . . .” He mopped with his handkerchief his red shaven chin,
then suddenly stepped back a pace, flung up his hands and opened his
eyes wide. “My dear girl, how long is this going on?” he said rapidly,
spluttering. “I ask you: is there no limit to it? I say nothing of the
demoralizing effect of his martinet views on all around him, of the way
he insults all that is sacred and best in me and in every honest
thinking man—I will say nothing about that, but he might at least behave
decently! Why, he shouts, he bellows, gives himself airs, poses as a
sort of Bonaparte, does not let one say a word. . . . I don’t know what
the devil’s the matter with him! These lordly gestures, this
condescending tone; and laughing like a general! Who is he, allow me to
ask you? I ask you, who is he? The husband of his wife, with a few
paltry acres and the rank of a titular who has had the luck to marry an
heiress! An upstart and a junker, like so many others! A type out of
Shtchedrin! Upon my word, it’s either that he’s suffering from
megalomania, or that old rat in his dotage, Count Alexey Petrovitch, is
right when he says that children and young people are a long time
growing up nowadays, and go on playing they are cabmen and generals till
they are forty!”
“That’s true, that’s true,” Olga Mihalovna assented. “Let me pass.”
“Now just consider: what is it leading to?” her uncle went on, barring
her way. “How will this playing at being a general and a Conservative
end? Already he has got into trouble! Yes, to stand his trial! I am very
glad of it! That’s what his noise and shouting has brought him to—to
stand in the prisoner’s dock. And it’s not as though it were the Circuit
Court or something: it’s the Central Court! Nothing worse could be
imagined, I think! And then he has quarrelled with every one! He is
celebrating his name-day, and look, Vostryakov’s not here, nor Yahontov,
nor Vladimirov, nor Shevud, nor the Count. . . . There is no one, I
imagine, more Conservative than Count Alexey Petrovitch, yet even he has
not come. And he never will come again. He won’t come, you will see!”
“My God! but what has it to do with me?” asked Olga Mihalovna.
“What has it to do with you? Why, you are his wife! You are clever, you
have had a university education, and it was in your power to make him an
honest worker!”
“At the lectures I went to they did not teach us how to influence
tiresome people. It seems as though I should have to apologize to all of
you for having been at the University,” said Olga Mihalovna sharply.
“Listen, uncle. If people played the same scales over and over again the
whole day long in your hearing, you wouldn’t be able to sit still and
listen, but would run away. I hear the same thing over again for days
together all the year round. You must have pity on me at last.”
Her uncle pulled a very long face, then looked at her searchingly and
twisted his lips into a mocking smile.
“So that’s how it is,” he piped in a voice like an old woman’s. “I beg
your pardon!” he said, and made a ceremonious bow. “If you have fallen
under his influence yourself, and have abandoned your convictions, you
should have said so before. I beg your pardon!”
“Yes, I have abandoned my convictions,” she cried. “There; make the most
of it!”
“I beg your pardon!”
Her uncle for the last time made her a ceremonious bow, a little on one
side, and, shrinking into himself, made a scrape with his foot and
walked back.
“Idiot!” thought Olga Mihalovna. “I hope he will go home.”
She found the ladies and the young people among the raspberries in the
kitchen garden. Some were eating raspberries; others, tired of eating
raspberries, were strolling about the strawberry beds or foraging among
the sugar-peas. A little on one side of the raspberry bed, near a
branching appletree propped up by posts which had been pulled out of an
old fence, Pyotr Dmitritch was mowing the grass. His hair was falling
over his forehead, his cravat was untied. His watch-chain was hanging
loose. Every step and every swing of the scythe showed skill and the
possession of immense physical strength. Near him were standing
Lubotchka and the daughters of a neighbour, Colonel Bukryeev—two anaemic
and unhealthily stout fair girls, Natalya and Valentina, or, as they
were always called, Nata and Vata, both wearing white frocks and
strikingly like each other. Pyotr Dmitritch was teaching them to mow.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “You have only to know how to hold the
scythe and not to get too hot over it—that is, not to use more force
than is necessary! Like this. . . . Wouldn’t you like to try?” he said,
offering the scythe to Lubotchka. “Come!”
Lubotchka took the scythe clumsily, blushed crimson, and laughed.
“Don’t be afraid, Lubov Alexandrovna!” cried Olga Mihalovna, loud enough
for all the ladies to hear that she was with them. “Don’t be afraid! You
must learn! If you marry a Tolstoyan he will make you mow.”
Lubotchka raised the scythe, but began laughing again, and, helpless
with laughter, let go of it at once. She was ashamed and pleased at
being talked to as though grown up. Nata, with a cold, serious face,
with no trace of smiling or shyness, took the scythe, swung it and
caught it in the grass; Vata, also without a smile, as cold and serious
as her sister, took the scythe, and silently thrust it into the earth.
Having done this, the two sisters Clinked arms and walked in silence to
the raspberries.
Pyotr Dmitritch laughed and played about like a boy, and this childish,
frolicsome mood in which he became exceedingly good-natured suited him
far better than any other. Olga Mihalovna loved him when he was like
that. But his boyishness did not usually last long. It did not this
time; after playing with the scythe, he for some reason thought it
necessary to take a serious tone about it.
“When I am mowing, I feel, do you know, healthier and more normal,” he
said. “If I were forced to confine myself to an intellectual life I
believe I should go out of my mind. I feel that I was not born to be a
man of culture! I ought to mow, plough, sow, drive out the horses.”
And Pyotr Dmitritch began a conversation with the ladies about the
advantages of physical labour, about culture, and then about the
pernicious effects of money, of property. Listening to her husband, Olga
Mihalovna, for some reason, thought of her dowry.
“And the time will come, I suppose,” she thought, “when he will not
forgive me for being richer than he. He is proud and vain. Maybe he will
hate me because he owes so much to me.”
She stopped near Colonel Bukryeev, who was eating raspberries and also
taking part in the conversation.
“Come,” he said, making room for Olga Mihalovna and Pyotr Dmitritch.
“The ripest are here. . . . And so, according to Proudhon,” he went on,
raising his voice, “property is robbery. But I must confess I don’t
believe in Proudhon, and don’t consider him a philosopher. The French
are not authorities, to my thinking—God bless them!”
“Well, as for Proudhons and Buckles and the rest of them, I am weak in
that department,” said Pyotr Dmitritch. “For philosophy you must apply
to my wife. She has been at University lectures and knows all your
Schopenhauers and Proudhons by heart. . . .”
Olga Mihalovna felt bored again. She walked again along a little path by
apple and pear trees, and looked again as though she was on some very
important errand. She reached the gardener’s cottage. In the doorway the
gardener’s wife, Varvara, was sitting together with her four little
children with big shaven heads. Varvara, too, was with child and
expecting to be confined on Elijah’s Day. After greeting her, Olga
Mihalovna looked at her and the children in silence and asked:
“Well, how do you feel?”
“Oh, all right. . . .”
A silence followed. The two women seemed to understand each other
without words.
“It’s dreadful having one’s first baby,” said Olga Mihalovna after a
moment’s thought. “I keep feeling as though I shall not get through it,
as though I shall die.”
“I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. One has all sorts of
fancies.”
Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked down a little on
her mistress from the height of her experience and spoke in a rather
didactic tone, and Olga Mihalovna could not help feeling her authority;
she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her
sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naïve and
trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.
“Olya, we are going indoors,” Pyotr Dmitritch called from the
raspberries.
Olga Mihalovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara. She
would have been ready to stay like that till night without speaking or
having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had hardly left the
cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her. The
sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubotchka ran
right up to her and flung herself on her neck.
“You dear, darling, precious,” she said, kissing her face and her neck.
“Let us go and have tea on the island!”
“On the island, on the island!” said the precisely similar Nata and
Vata, both at once, without a smile.
“But it’s going to rain, my dears.”
“It’s not, it’s not,” cried Lubotchka with a woebegone face. “They’ve
all agreed to go. Dear! darling!”
“They are all getting ready to have tea on the island,” said Pyotr
Dmitritch, coming up. “See to arranging things. . . . We will all go in
the boats, and the samovars and all the rest of it must be sent in the
carriage with the servants.”
He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm. Olga Mihalovna had a
desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting,
even about her dowry perhaps—the crueller the better, she felt. She
thought a little, and said:
“Why is it Count Alexey Petrovitch hasn’t come? What a pity!”
“I am very glad he hasn’t come,” said Pyotr Dmitritch, lying. “I’m sick
to death of that old lunatic.”
“But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!” III
Half an hour later all the guests were crowding on the bank near the
pile to which the boats were fastened. They were all talking and
laughing, and were in such excitement and commotion that they could
hardly get into the boats. Three boats were crammed with passengers,
while two stood empty. The keys for unfastening these two boats had been
somehow mislaid, and messengers were continually running from the river
to the house to look for them. Some said Grigory had the keys, others
that the bailiff had them, while others suggested sending for a
blacksmith and breaking the padlocks. And all talked at once,
interrupting and shouting one another down. Pyotr Dmitritch paced
impatiently to and fro on the bank, shouting:
“What the devil’s the meaning of it! The keys ought always to be lying
in the hall window! Who has dared to take them away? The bailiff can get
a boat of his own if he wants one!”
At last the keys were found. Then it appeared that two oars were
missing. Again there was a great hullabaloo. Pyotr Dmitritch, who was
weary of pacing about the bank, jumped into a long, narrow boat hollowed
out of the trunk of a poplar, and, lurching from side to side and almost
falling into the water, pushed off from the bank. The other boats
followed him one after another, amid loud laughter and the shrieks of
the young ladies.
The white cloudy sky, the trees on the riverside, the boats with the
people in them, and the oars, were reflected in the water as in a
mirror; under the boats, far away below in the bottomless depths, was a
second sky with the birds flying across it. The bank on which the house
and gardens stood was high, steep, and covered with trees; on the other,
which was sloping, stretched broad green water-meadows with sheets of
water glistening in them. The boats had floated a hundred yards when,
behind the mournfully drooping willows on the sloping banks, huts and a
herd of cows came into sight; they began to hear songs, drunken shouts,
and the strains of a concertina.
Here and there on the river fishing-boats were scattered about, setting
their nets for the night. In one of these boats was the festive party,
playing on home-made violins and violoncellos.
Olga Mihalovna was sitting at the rudder; she was smiling affably and
talking a great deal to entertain her visitors, while she glanced
stealthily at her husband. He was ahead of them all, standing up punting
with one oar. The light sharp-nosed canoe, which all the guests called
the “death-trap”—while Pyotr Dmitritch, for some reason, called it
Penderaklia—flew along quickly; it had a brisk, crafty expression, as
though it hated its heavy occupant and was looking out for a favourable
moment to glide away from under his feet. Olga Mihalovna kept looking at
her husband, and she loathed his good looks which attracted every one,
the back of his head, his attitude, his familiar manner with women; she
hated all the women sitting in the boat with her, was jealous, and at
the same time was trembling every minute in terror that the frail craft
would upset and cause an accident.
“Take care, Pyotr!” she cried, while her heart fluttered with terror.
“Sit down! We believe in your courage without all that!”
She was worried, too, by the people who were in the boat with her. They
were all ordinary good sort of people like thousands of others, but now
each one of them struck her as exceptional and evil. In each one of them
she saw nothing but falsity. “That young man,” she thought, “rowing, in
gold-rimmed spectacles, with chestnut hair and a nice-looking beard: he
is a mamma’s darling, rich, and well-fed, and always fortunate, and
every one considers him an honourable, free-thinking, advanced man. It’s
not a year since he left the University and came to live in the
district, but he already talks of himself as ‘we active members of the
Zemstvo.’ But in another year he will be bored like so many others and
go off to Petersburg, and to justify running away, will tell every one
that the Zemstvos are good-for-nothing, and that he has been deceived in
them. While from the other boat his young wife keeps her eyes fixed on
him, and believes that he is ‘an active member of the Zemstvo,’ just as
in a year she will believe that the Zemstvo is good-for-nothing. And
that stout, carefully shaven gentleman in the straw hat with the broad
ribbon, with an expensive cigar in his mouth: he is fond of saying, ‘It
is time to put away dreams and set to work!’ He has Yorkshire pigs,
Butler’s hives, rape-seed, pine-apples, a dairy, a cheese factory,
Italian bookkeeping by double entry; but every summer he sells his
timber and mortgages part of his land to spend the autumn with his
mistress in the Crimea. And there’s Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch, who has
quarrelled with Pyotr Dmitritch, and yet for some reason does not go
home.”
Olga Mihalovna looked at the other boats, and there, too, she saw only
uninteresting, queer creatures, affected or stupid people. She thought
of all the people she knew in the district, and could not remember one
person of whom one could say or think anything good. They all seemed to
her mediocre, insipid, unintelligent, narrow, false, heartless; they all
said what they did not think, and did what they did not want to.
Dreariness and despair were stifling her; she longed to leave off
smiling, to leap up and cry out, “I am sick of you,” and then jump out
and swim to the bank.
“I say, let’s take Pyotr Dmitritch in tow!” some one shouted.
“In tow, in tow!” the others chimed in. “Olga Mihalovna, take your
husband in tow.”
To take him in tow, Olga Mihalovna, who was steering, had to seize the
right moment and to catch bold of his boat by the chain at the beak.
When she bent over to the chain Pyotr Dmitritch frowned and looked at
her in alarm.
“I hope you won’t catch cold,” he said.
“If you are uneasy about me and the child, why do you torment me?”
thought Olga Mihalovna.
Pyotr Dmitritch acknowledged himself vanquished, and, not caring to be
towed, jumped from the Penderaklia into the boat which was overful
already, and jumped so carelessly that the boat lurched violently, and
every one cried out in terror.
“He did that to please the ladies,” thought Olga Mihalovna; “he knows
it’s charming.” Her hands and feet began trembling, as she supposed,
from boredom, vexation from the strain of smiling and the discomfort she
felt all over her body. And to conceal this trembling from her guests,
she tried to talk more loudly, to laugh, to move.
“If I suddenly begin to cry,” she thought, “I shall say I have
toothache. . . .”
But at last the boats reached the “Island of Good Hope,” as they called
the peninsula formed by a bend in the river at an acute angle, covered
with a copse of old birch-trees, oaks, willows, and poplars. The tables
were already laid under the trees; the samovars were smoking, and
Vassily and Grigory, in their swallow-tails and white knitted gloves,
were already busy with the tea-things. On the other bank, opposite the
“Island of Good Hope,” there stood the carriages which had come with the
provisions. The baskets and parcels of provisions were carried across to
the island in a little boat like the Penderaklia. The footmen, the
coachmen, and even the peasant who was sitting in the boat, had the
solemn expression befitting a name-day such as one only sees in children
and servants.
While Olga Mihalovna was making the tea and pouring out the first
glasses, the visitors were busy with the liqueurs and sweet things. Then
there was the general commotion usual at picnics over drinking tea, very
wearisome and exhausting for the hostess. Grigory and Vassily had hardly
had time to take the glasses round before hands were being stretched out
to Olga Mihalovna with empty glasses. One asked for no sugar, another
wanted it stronger, another weak, a fourth declined another glass. And
all this Olga Mihalovna had to remember, and then to call, “Ivan
Petrovitch, is it without sugar for you?” or, “Gentlemen, which of you
wanted it weak?” But the guest who had asked for weak tea, or no sugar,
had by now forgotten it, and, absorbed in agreeable conversation, took
the first glass that came. Depressed-looking figures wandered like
shadows at a little distance from the table, pretending to look for
mushrooms in the grass, or reading the labels on the boxes—these were
those for whom there were not glasses enough. “Have you had tea?” Olga
Mihalovna kept asking, and the guest so addressed begged her not to
trouble, and said, “I will wait,” though it would have suited her better
for the visitors not to wait but to make haste.
Some, absorbed in conversation, drank their tea slowly, keeping their
glasses for half an hour; others, especially some who had drunk a good
deal at dinner, would not leave the table, and kept on drinking glass
after glass, so that Olga Mihalovna scarcely had time to fill them. One
jocular young man sipped his tea through a lump of sugar, and kept
saying, “Sinful man that I am, I love to indulge myself with the Chinese
herb.” He kept asking with a heavy sigh: “Another tiny dish of tea more,
if you please.” He drank a great deal, nibbled his sugar, and thought it
all very amusing and original, and imagined that he was doing a clever
imitation of a Russian merchant. None of them understood that these
trifles were agonizing to their hostess, and, indeed, it was hard to
understand it, as Olga Mihalovna went on all the time smiling affably
and talking nonsense.
But she felt ill. . . . She was irritated by the crowd of people, the
laughter, the questions, the jocular young man, the footmen harassed and
run off their legs, the children who hung round the table; she was
irritated at Vata’s being like Nata, at Kolya’s being like Mitya, so
that one could not tell which of them had had tea and which of them had
not. She felt that her smile of forced affability was passing into an
expression of anger, and she felt every minute as though she would burst
into tears.
“Rain, my friends,” cried some one.
Every one looked at the sky.
“Yes, it really is rain . . .” Pyotr Dmitritch assented, and wiped his
cheek.
Only a few drops were falling from the sky—the real rain had not begun
yet; but the company abandoned their tea and made haste to get off. At
first they all wanted to drive home in the carriages, but changed their
minds and made for the boats. On the pretext that she had to hasten home
to give directions about the supper, Olga Mihalovna asked to be excused
for leaving the others, and went home in the carriage.
When she got into the carriage, she first of all let her face rest from
smiling. With an angry face she drove through the village, and with an
angry face acknowledged the bows of the peasants she met. When she got
home, she went to the bedroom by the back way and lay down on her
husband’s bed.
“Merciful God!” she whispered. “What is all this hard labour for? Why do
all these people hustle each other here and pretend that they are
enjoying themselves? Why do I smile and lie? I don’t understand it.”
She heard steps and voices. The visitors had come back.
“Let them come,” thought Olga Mihalovna; “I shall lie a little longer.”
But a maid-servant came and said:
“Marya Grigoryevna is going, madam.”
Olga Mihalovna jumped up, tidied her hair and hurried out of the room.
“Marya Grigoryevna, what is the meaning of this?” she began in an
injured voice, going to meet Marya Grigoryevna. “Why are you in such a
hurry?”
“I can’t help it, darling! I’ve stayed too long as it is; my children
are expecting me home.”
“It’s too bad of you! Why didn’t you bring your children with you?”
“If you will let me, dear, I will bring them on some ordinary day, but
to-day . . .”
“Oh, please do,” Olga Mihalovna interrupted; “I shall be delighted! Your
children are so sweet! Kiss them all for me. . . . But, really, I am
offended with you! I don’t understand why you are in such a hurry!”
“I really must, I really must. . . . Good-bye, dear. Take care of
yourself. In your condition, you know . . .”
And the ladies kissed each other. After seeing the departing guest to
her carriage, Olga Mihalovna went in to the ladies in the drawing-room.
There the lamps were already lighted and the gentlemen were sitting down
to cards. IV
The party broke up after supper about a quarter past twelve. Seeing her
visitors off, Olga Mihalovna stood at the door and said:
“You really ought to take a shawl! It’s turning a little chilly. Please
God, you don’t catch cold!”
“Don’t trouble, Olga Mihalovna,” the ladies answered as they got into
the carriage. “Well, good-bye. Mind now, we are expecting you; don’t
play us false!”
“Wo-o-o!” the coachman checked the horses.
“Ready, Denis! Good-bye, Olga Mihalovna!”
“Kiss the children for me!”
The carriage started and immediately disappeared into the darkness. In
the red circle of light cast by the lamp in the road, a fresh pair or
trio of impatient horses, and the silhouette of a coachman with his
hands held out stiffly before him, would come into view. Again there
began kisses, reproaches, and entreaties to come again or to take a
shawl. Pyotr Dmitritch kept running out and helping the ladies into
their carriages.
“You go now by Efremovshtchina,” he directed the coachman; “it’s nearer
through Mankino, but the road is worse that way. You might have an
upset. . . . Good-bye, my charmer. Mille compliments to your artist!”
“Good-bye, Olga Mihalovna, darling! Go indoors, or you will catch cold!
It’s damp!”
“Wo-o-o! you rascal!”
“What horses have you got here?” Pyotr Dmitritch asked.
“They were bought from Haidorov, in Lent,” answered the coachman.
“Capital horses. . . .”
And Pyotr Dmitritch patted the trace horse on the haunch.
“Well, you can start! God give you good luck!”
The last visitor was gone at last; the red circle on the road quivered,
moved aside, contracted and went out, as Vassily carried away the lamp
from the entrance. On previous occasions when they had seen off their
visitors, Pyotr Dmitritch and Olga Mihalovna had begun dancing about the
drawing-room, facing each other, clapping their hands and singing:
“They’ve gone! They’ve gone!” But now Olga Mihalovna was not equal to
that. She went to her bedroom, undressed, and got into bed.
She fancied she would fall asleep at once and sleep soundly. Her legs
and her shoulders ached painfully, her head was heavy from the strain of
talking, and she was conscious, as before, of discomfort all over her
body. Covering her head over, she lay still for three or four minutes,
then peeped out from under the bed-clothes at the lamp before the ikon,
listened to the silence, and smiled.
“It’s nice, it’s nice,” she whispered, curling up her legs, which felt
as if they had grown longer from so much walking. “Sleep, sleep . . . .”
Her legs would not get into a comfortable position; she felt uneasy all
over, and she turned on the other side. A big fly blew buzzing about the
bedroom and thumped against the ceiling. She could hear, too, Grigory
and Vassily stepping cautiously about the drawing-room, putting the
chairs back in their places; it seemed to Olga Mihalovna that she could
not go to sleep, nor be comfortable till those sounds were hushed. And
again she turned over on the other side impatiently.
She heard her husband’s voice in the drawing-room. Some one must be
staying the night, as Pyotr Dmitritch was addressing some one and
speaking loudly:
“I don’t say that Count Alexey Petrovitch is an impostor. But he can’t
help seeming to be one, because all of you gentlemen attempt to see in
him something different from what he really is. His craziness is looked
upon as originality, his familiar manners as good-nature, and his
complete absence of opinions as Conservatism. Even granted that he is a
Conservative of the stamp of ‘84, what after all is Conservatism?”
Pyotr Dmitritch, angry with Count Alexey Petrovitch, his visitors, and
himself, was relieving his heart. He abused both the Count and his
visitors, and in his vexation with himself was ready to speak out and to
hold forth upon anything. After seeing his guest to his room, he walked
up and down the drawing-room, walked through the dining-room, down the
corridor, then into his study, then again went into the drawing-room,
and came into the bedroom. Olga Mihalovna was lying on her back, with
the bed-clothes only to her waist (by now she felt hot), and with an
angry face, watched the fly that was thumping against the ceiling.
“Is some one staying the night?” she asked.
“Yegorov.”
Pyotr Dmitritch undressed and got into his bed.
Without speaking, he lighted a cigarette, and he, too, fell to watching
the fly. There was an uneasy and forbidding look in his eyes. Olga
Mihalovna looked at his handsome profile for five minutes in silence. It
seemed to her for some reason that if her husband were suddenly to turn
facing her, and to say, “Olga, I am unhappy,” she would cry or laugh,
and she would be at ease. She fancied that her legs were aching and her
body was uncomfortable all over because of the strain on her feelings.
“Pyotr, what are you thinking of?” she said.
“Oh, nothing . . .” her husband answered.
“You have taken to having secrets from me of late: that’s not right.”
“Why is it not right?” answered Pyotr Dmitritch drily and not at once.
“We all have our personal life, every one of us, and we are bound to
have our secrets.”
“Personal life, our secrets . . . that’s all words! Understand you are
wounding me!” said Olga Mihalovna, sitting up in bed. “If you have a
load on your heart, why do you hide it from me? And why do you find it
more suitable to open your heart to women who are nothing to you,
instead of to your wife? I overheard your outpourings to Lubotchka by
the bee-house to-day.”
“Well, I congratulate you. I am glad you did overhear it.”
This meant “Leave me alone and let me think.” Olga Mihalovna was
indignant. Vexation, hatred, and wrath, which had been accumulating
within her during the whole day, suddenly boiled over; she wanted at
once to speak out, to hurt her husband without putting it off till to-
morrow, to wound him, to punish him. . . . Making an effort to control
herself and not to scream, she said:
“Let me tell you, then, that it’s all loathsome, loathsome, loathsome!
I’ve been hating you all day; you see what you’ve done.”
Pyotr Dmitritch, too, got up and sat on the bed.
“It’s loathsome, loathsome, loathsome,” Olga Mihalovna went on,
beginning to tremble all over. “There’s no need to congratulate me; you
had better congratulate yourself! It’s a shame, a disgrace. You have
wrapped yourself in lies till you are ashamed to be alone in the room
with your wife! You are a deceitful man! I see through you and
understand every step you take!”
“Olya, I wish you would please warn me when you are out of humour. Then
I will sleep in the study.”
Saying this, Pyotr Dmitritch picked up his pillow and walked out of the
bedroom. Olga Mihalovna had not foreseen this. For some minutes she
remained silent with her mouth open, trembling all over and looking at
the door by which her husband had gone out, and trying to understand
what it meant. Was this one of the devices to which deceitful people
have recourse when they are in the wrong, or was it a deliberate insult
aimed at her pride? How was she to take it? Olga Mihalovna remembered
her cousin, a lively young officer, who often used to tell her,
laughing, that when “his spouse nagged at him” at night, he usually
picked up his pillow and went whistling to spend the night in his study,
leaving his wife in a foolish and ridiculous position. This officer was
married to a rich, capricious, and foolish woman whom he did not respect
but simply put up with.
Olga Mihalovna jumped out of bed. To her mind there was only one thing
left for her to do now; to dress with all possible haste and to leave
the house forever. The house was her own, but so much the worse for
Pyotr Dmitritch. Without pausing to consider whether this was necessary
or not, she went quickly to the study to inform her husband of her
intention (“Feminine logic!” flashed through her mind), and to say
something wounding and sarcastic at parting. . . .
Pyotr Dmitritch was lying on the sofa and pretending to read a
newspaper. There was a candle burning on a chair near him. His face
could not be seen behind the newspaper.
“Be so kind as to tell me what this means? I am asking you.”
“Be so kind . . .” Pyotr Dmitritch mimicked her, not showing his face.
“It’s sickening, Olga! Upon my honour, I am exhausted and not up to it.
. . . Let us do our quarrelling to-morrow.”
“No, I understand you perfectly!” Olga Mihalovna went on. “You hate me!
Yes, yes! You hate me because I am richer than you! You will never
forgive me for that, and will always be lying to me!” (“Feminine logic!”
flashed through her mind again.) “You are laughing at me now. . . . I am
convinced, in fact, that you only married me in order to have property
qualifications and those wretched horses. . . . Oh, I am miserable!”
Pyotr Dmitritch dropped the newspaper and got up. The unexpected insult
overwhelmed him. With a childishly helpless smile he looked desperately
at his wife, and holding out his hands to her as though to ward off
blows, he said imploringly:
“Olya!”
And expecting her to say something else awful, he leaned back in his
chair, and his huge figure seemed as helplessly childish as his smile.
“Olya, how could you say it?” he whispered.
Olga Mihalovna came to herself. She was suddenly aware of her passionate
love for this man, remembered that he was her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch,
without whom she could not live for a day, and who loved her
passionately, too. She burst into loud sobs that sounded strange and
unlike her, and ran back to her bedroom.
She fell on the bed, and short hysterical sobs, choking her and making
her arms and legs twitch, filled the bedroom. Remembering there was a
visitor sleeping three or four rooms away, she buried her head under the
pillow to stifle her sobs, but the pillow rolled on to the floor, and
she almost fell on the floor herself when she stooped to pick it up. She
pulled the quilt up to her face, but her hands would not obey her, but
tore convulsively at everything she clutched.
She thought that everything was lost, that the falsehood she had told to
wound her husband had shattered her life into fragments. Her husband
would not forgive her. The insult she had hurled at him was not one that
could be effaced by any caresses, by any vows. . . . How could she
convince her husband that she did not believe what she had said?
“It’s all over, it’s all over!” she cried, not noticing that the pillow
had slipped on to the floor again. “For God’s sake, for God’s sake!”
Probably roused by her cries, the guest and the servants were now awake;
next day all the neighbourhood would know that she had been in hysterics
and would blame Pyotr Dmitritch. She made an effort to restrain herself,
but her sobs grew louder and louder every minute.
“For God’s sake,” she cried in a voice not like her own, and not knowing
why she cried it. “For God’s sake!”
She felt as though the bed were heaving under her and her feet were
entangled in the bed-clothes. Pyotr Dmitritch, in his dressing-gown,
with a candle in his hand, came into the bedroom.
“Olya, hush!” he said.
She raised herself, and kneeling up in bed, screwing up her eyes at the
light, articulated through her sobs:
“Understand . . . understand! . . . .”
She wanted to tell him that she was tired to death by the party, by his
falsity, by her own falsity, that it had all worked together, but she
could only articulate:
“Understand . . . understand!”
“Come, drink!” he said, handing her some water.
She took the glass obediently and began drinking, but the water splashed
over and was spilt on her arms, her throat and knees.
“I must look horribly unseemly,” she thought.
Pyotr Dmitritch put her back in bed without a word, and covered her with
the quilt, then he took the candle and went out.
“For God’s sake!” Olga Mihalovna cried again. “Pyotr, understand,
understand!”
Suddenly something gripped her in the lower part of her body and back
with such violence that her wailing was cut short, and she bit the
pillow from the pain. But the pain let her go again at once, and she
began sobbing again.
The maid came in, and arranging the quilt over her, asked in alarm:
“Mistress, darling, what is the matter?”
“Go out of the room,” said Pyotr Dmitritch sternly, going up to the bed.
“Understand . . . understand! . . .” Olga Mihalovna began.
“Olya, I entreat you, calm yourself,” he said. “I did not mean to hurt
you. I would not have gone out of the room if I had known it would have
hurt you so much; I simply felt depressed. I tell you, on my honour . .
.”
“Understand! . . . You were lying, I was lying. . . .”
“I understand. . . . Come, come, that’s enough! I understand,” said
Pyotr Dmitritch tenderly, sitting down on her bed. “You said that in
anger; I quite understand. I swear to God I love you beyond anything on
earth, and when I married you I never once thought of your being rich. I
loved you immensely, and that’s all . . . I assure you. I have never
been in want of money or felt the value of it, and so I cannot feel the
difference between your fortune and mine. It always seemed to me we were
equally well off. And that I have been deceitful in little things, that
. . . of course, is true. My life has hitherto been arranged in such a
frivolous way that it has somehow been impossible to get on without
paltry lying. It weighs on me, too, now. . . . Let us leave off talking
about it, for goodness’ sake!”
Olga Mihalovna again felt in acute pain, and clutched her husband by the
sleeve.
“I am in pain, in pain, in pain . . .” she said rapidly. “Oh, what
pain!”
“Damnation take those visitors!” muttered Pyotr Dmitritch, getting up.
“You ought not to have gone to the island to-day!” he cried. “What an
idiot I was not to prevent you! Oh, my God!”
He scratched his head in vexation, and, with a wave of his hand, walked
out of the room.
Then he came into the room several times, sat down on the bed beside
her, and talked a great deal, sometimes tenderly, sometimes angrily, but
she hardly heard him. Her sobs were continually interrupted by fearful
attacks of pain, and each time the pain was more acute and prolonged. At
first she held her breath and bit the pillow during the pain, but then
she began screaming on an unseemly piercing note. Once seeing her
husband near her, she remembered that she had insulted him, and without
pausing to think whether it were really Pyotr Dmitritch or whether she
were in delirium, clutched his hand in both hers and began kissing it.
“You were lying, I was lying . . .” she began justifying herself.
“Understand, understand. . . . They have exhausted me, driven me out of
all patience.”
“Olya, we are not alone,” said Pyotr Dmitritch.
Olga Mihalovna raised her head and saw Varvara, who was kneeling by the
chest of drawers and pulling out the bottom drawer. The top drawers were
already open. Then Varvara got up, red from the strained position, and
with a cold, solemn face began trying to unlock a box.
“Marya, I can’t unlock it!” she said in a whisper. “You unlock it, won’t
you?”
Marya, the maid, was digging a candle end out of the candlestick with a
pair of scissors, so as to put in a new candle; she went up to Varvara
and helped her to unlock the box.
“There should be nothing locked . . .” whispered Varvara. “Unlock this
basket, too, my good girl. Master,” she said, “you should send to Father
Mihail to unlock the holy gates! You must!”
“Do what you like,” said Pyotr Dmitritch, breathing hard, “only, for
God’s sake, make haste and fetch the doctor or the midwife! Has Vassily
gone? Send some one else. Send your husband!”
“It’s the birth,” Olga Mihalovna thought. “Varvara,” she moaned, “but he
won’t be born alive!”
“It’s all right, it’s all right, mistress,” whispered Varvara. “Please
God, he will be alive! he will be alive!”
When Olga Mihalovna came to herself again after a pain she was no longer
sobbing nor tossing from side to side, but moaning. She could not
refrain from moaning even in the intervals between the pains. The
candles were still burning, but the morning light was coming through the
blinds. It was probably about five o’clock in the morning. At the round
table there was sitting some unknown woman with a very discreet air,
wearing a white apron. From her whole appearance it was evident she had
been sitting there a long time. Olga Mihalovna guessed that she was the
midwife.
“Will it soon be over?” she asked, and in her voice she heard a peculiar
and unfamiliar note which had never been there before. “I must be dying
in childbirth,” she thought.
Pyotr Dmitritch came cautiously into the bedroom, dressed for the day,
and stood at the window with his back to his wife. He lifted the blind
and looked out of window.
“What rain!” he said.
“What time is it?” asked Olga Mihalovna, in order to hear the unfamiliar
note in her voice again.
“A quarter to six,” answered the midwife.
“And what if I really am dying?” thought Olga Mihalovna, looking at her
husband’s head and the window-panes on which the rain was beating. “How
will he live without me? With whom will he have tea and dinner, talk in
the evenings, sleep?”
And he seemed to her like a forlorn child; she felt sorry for him and
wanted to say something nice, caressing and consolatory. She remembered
how in the spring he had meant to buy himself some harriers, and she,
thinking it a cruel and dangerous sport, had prevented him from doing
it.
“Pyotr, buy yourself harriers,” she moaned.
He dropped the blind and went up to the bed, and would have said
something; but at that moment the pain came back, and Olga Mihalovna
uttered an unseemly, piercing scream.
The pain and the constant screaming and moaning stupefied her. She
heard, saw, and sometimes spoke, but hardly understood anything, and was
only conscious that she was in pain or was just going to be in pain. It
seemed to her that the nameday party had been long, long ago—not
yesterday, but a year ago perhaps; and that her new life of agony had
lasted longer than her childhood, her school-days, her time at the
University, and her marriage, and would go on for a long, long time,
endlessly. She saw them bring tea to the midwife, and summon her at
midday to lunch and afterwards to dinner; she saw Pyotr Dmitritch grow
used to coming in, standing for long intervals by the window, and going
out again; saw strange men, the maid, Varvara, come in as though they
were at home. . . . Varvara said nothing but, “He will, he will,” and
was angry when any one closed the drawers and the chest. Olga Mihalovna
saw the light change in the room and in the windows: at one time it was
twilight, then thick like fog, then bright daylight as it had been at
dinner-time the day before, then again twilight . . . and each of these
changes lasted as long as her childhood, her school-days, her life at
the University. . . .
In the evening two doctors—one bony, bald, with a big red beard; the
other with a swarthy Jewish face and cheap spectacles—performed some
sort of operation on Olga Mihalovna. To these unknown men touching her
body she felt utterly indifferent. By now she had no feeling of shame,
no will, and any one might do what he would with her. If any one had
rushed at her with a knife, or had insulted Pyotr Dmitritch, or had
robbed her of her right to the little creature, she would not have said
a word.
They gave her chloroform during the operation. When she came to again,
the pain was still there and insufferable. It was night. And Olga
Mihalovna remembered that there had been just such a night with the
stillness, the lamp, with the midwife sitting motionless by the bed,
with the drawers of the chest pulled out, with Pyotr Dmitritch standing
by the window, but some time very, very long ago. . . . V
“I am not dead . . .” thought Olga Mihalovna when she began to
understand her surroundings again, and when the pain was over.
A bright summer day looked in at the widely open windows; in the garden
below the windows, the sparrows and the magpies never ceased chattering
for one instant.
The drawers were shut now, her husband’s bed had been made. There was no
sign of the midwife or of the maid, or of Varvara in the room, only
Pyotr Dmitritch was standing, as before, motionless by the window
looking into the garden. There was no sound of a child’s crying, no one
was congratulating her or rejoicing, it was evident that the little
creature had not been born alive.
“Pyotr!”
Olga Mihalovna called to her husband.
Pyotr Dmitritch looked round. It seemed as though a long time must have
passed since the last guest had departed and Olga Mihalovna had insulted
her husband, for Pyotr Dmitritch was perceptibly thinner and hollow-
eyed.
“What is it?” he asked, coming up to the bed.
He looked away, moved his lips and smiled with childlike helplessness.
“Is it all over?” asked Olga Mihalovna.
Pyotr Dmitritch tried to make some answer, but his lips quivered and his
mouth worked like a toothless old man’s, like Uncle Nikolay
Nikolaitch’s.
“Olya,” he said, wringing his hands; big tears suddenly dropping from
his eyes. “Olya, I don’t care about your property qualification, nor the
Circuit Courts . . .” (he gave a sob) “nor particular views, nor those
visitors, nor your fortune. . . . I don’t care about anything! Why
didn’t we take care of our child? Oh, it’s no good talking!”
With a despairing gesture he went out of the bedroom.
But nothing mattered to Olga Mihalovna now, there was a mistiness in her
brain from the chloroform, an emptiness in her soul. . . . The dull
indifference to life which had overcome her when the two doctors were
performing the operation still had possession of her.
TERROR My Friend’s Story
DMITRI PETROVITCH SILIN had taken his degree and entered the government
service in Petersburg, but at thirty he gave up his post and went in for
agriculture. His farming was fairly successful, and yet it always seemed
to me that he was not in his proper place, and that he would do well to
go back to Petersburg. When sunburnt, grey with dust, exhausted with
toil, he met me near the gates or at the entrance, and then at supper
struggled with sleepiness and his wife took him off to bed as though he
were a baby; or when, overcoming his sleepiness, he began in his soft,
cordial, almost imploring voice, to talk about his really excellent
ideas, I saw him not as a farmer nor an agriculturist, but only as a
worried and exhausted man, and it was clear to me that he did not really
care for farming, but that all he wanted was for the day to be over and
“Thank God for it.”
I liked to be with him, and I used to stay on his farm for two or three
days at a time. I liked his house, and his park, and his big fruit
garden, and the river—and his philosophy, which was clear, though rather
spiritless and rhetorical. I suppose I was fond of him on his own
account, though I can’t say that for certain, as I have not up to now
succeeded in analysing my feelings at that time. He was an intelligent,
kind-hearted, genuine man, and not a bore, but I remember that when he
confided to me his most treasured secrets and spoke of our relation to
each other as friendship, it disturbed me unpleasantly, and I was
conscious of awkwardness. In his affection for me there was something
inappropriate, tiresome, and I should have greatly preferred commonplace
friendly relations.
The fact is that I was extremely attracted by his wife, Marya
Sergeyevna. I was not in love with her, but I was attracted by her face,
her eyes, her voice, her walk. I missed her when I did not see her for a
long time, and my imagination pictured no one at that time so eagerly as
that young, beautiful, elegant woman. I had no definite designs in
regard to her, and did not dream of anything of the sort, yet for some
reason, whenever we were left alone, I remembered that her husband
looked upon me as his friend, and I felt awkward. When she played my
favourite pieces on the piano or told me something interesting, I
listened with pleasure, and yet at the same time for some reason the
reflection that she loved her husband, that he was my friend, and that
she herself looked upon me as his friend, obtruded themselves upon me,
my spirits flagged, and I became listless, awkward, and dull. She
noticed this change and would usually say:
“You are dull without your friend. We must send out to the fields for
him.”
And when Dmitri Petrovitch came in, she would say:
“Well, here is your friend now. Rejoice.”
So passed a year and a half.
It somehow happened one July Sunday that Dmitri Petrovitch and I, having
nothing to do, drove to the big village of Klushino to buy things for
supper. While we were going from one shop to another the sun set and the
evening came on—the evening which I shall probably never forget in my
life. After buying cheese that smelt like soap, and petrified sausages
that smelt of tar, we went to the tavern to ask whether they had any
beer. Our coachman went off to the blacksmith to get our horses shod,
and we told him we would wait for him near the church. We walked,
talked, laughed over our purchases, while a man who was known in the
district by a very strange nickname, “Forty Martyrs,” followed us all
the while in silence with a mysterious air like a detective. This Forty
Martyrs was no other than Gavril Syeverov, or more simply Gavryushka,
who had been for a short time in my service as a footman and had been
dismissed by me for drunkenness. He had been in Dmitri Petrovitch’s
service, too, and by him had been dismissed for the same vice. He was an
inveterate drunkard, and indeed his whole life was as drunk and
disorderly as himself. His father had been a priest and his mother of
noble rank, so by birth he belonged to the privileged class; but however
carefully I scrutinized his exhausted, respectful, and always perspiring
face, his red beard now turning grey, his pitifully torn reefer jacket
and his red shirt, I could not discover in him the faintest trace of
anything we associate with privilege. He spoke of himself as a man of
education, and used to say that he had been in a clerical school, but
had not finished his studies there, as he had been expelled for smoking;
then he had sung in the bishop’s choir and lived for two years in a
monastery, from which he was also expelled, but this time not for
smoking but for “his weakness.” He had walked all over two provinces,
had presented petitions to the Consistory, and to various government
offices, and had been four times on his trial. At last, being stranded
in our district, he had served as a footman, as a forester, as a
kennelman, as a sexton, had married a cook who was a widow and rather a
loose character, and had so hopelessly sunk into a menial position, and
had grown so used to filth and dirt, that he even spoke of his
privileged origin with a certain scepticism, as of some myth. At the
time I am describing, he was hanging about without a job, calling
himself a carrier and a huntsman, and his wife had disappeared and made
no sign.
From the tavern we went to the church and sat in the porch, waiting for
the coachman. Forty Martyrs stood a little way off and put his hand
before his mouth in order to cough in it respectfully if need be. By now
it was dark; there was a strong smell of evening dampness, and the moon
was on the point of rising. There were only two clouds in the clear
starry sky exactly over our heads: one big one and one smaller; alone in
the sky they were racing after one another like mother and child, in the
direction where the sunset was glowing.
“What a glorious day!” said Dmitri Petrovitch.
“In the extreme . . .” Forty Martyrs assented, and he coughed
respectfully into his hand. “How was it, Dmitri Petrovitch, you thought
to visit these parts?” he asked in an ingratiating voice, evidently
anxious to get up a conversation.
Dmitri Petrovitch made no answer. Forty Martyrs heaved a deep sigh and
said softly, not looking at us:
“I suffer solely through a cause to which I must answer to Almighty God.
No doubt about it, I am a hopeless and incompetent man; but believe me,
on my conscience, I am without a crust of bread and worse off than a
dog. . . . Forgive me, Dmitri Petrovitch.”
Silin was not listening, but sat musing with his head propped on his
fists. The church stood at the end of the street on the high river-bank,
and through the trellis gate of the enclosure we could see the river,
the water-meadows on the near side of it, and the crimson glare of a
camp fire about which black figures of men and horses were moving. And
beyond the fire, further away, there were other lights, where there was
a little village. They were singing there. On the river, and here and
there on the meadows, a mist was rising. High narrow coils of mist,
thick and white as milk, were trailing over the river, hiding the
reflection of the stars and hovering over the willows. Every minute they
changed their form, and it seemed as though some were embracing, others
were bowing, others lifting up their arms to heaven with wide sleeves
like priests, as though they were praying. . . . Probably they reminded
Dmitri Petrovitch of ghosts and of the dead, for he turned facing me and
asked with a mournful smile:
“Tell me, my dear fellow, why is it that when we want to tell some
terrible, mysterious, and fantastic story, we draw our material, not
from life, but invariably from the world of ghosts and of the shadows
beyond the grave.”
“We are frightened of what we don’t understand.”
“And do you understand life? Tell me: do you understand life better than
the world beyond the grave?”
Dmitri Petrovitch was sitting quite close to me, so that I felt his
breath upon my cheek. In the evening twilight his pale, lean face seemed
paler than ever and his dark beard was black as soot. His eyes were sad,
truthful, and a little frightened, as though he were about to tell me
something horrible. He looked into my eyes and went on in his habitual
imploring voice:
“Our life and the life beyond the grave are equally incomprehensible and
horrible. If any one is afraid of ghosts he ought to be afraid, too, of
me, and of those lights and of the sky, seeing that, if you come to
reflect, all that is no less fantastic and beyond our grasp than
apparitions from the other world. Prince Hamlet did not kill himself
because he was afraid of the visions that might haunt his dreams after
death. I like that famous soliloquy of his, but, to be candid, it never
touched my soul. I will confess to you as a friend that in moments of
depression I have sometimes pictured to myself the hour of my death. My
fancy invented thousands of the gloomiest visions, and I have succeeded
in working myself up to an agonizing exaltation, to a state of
nightmare, and I assure you that that did not seem to me more terrible
than reality. What I mean is, apparitions are terrible, but life is
terrible, too. I don’t understand life and I am afraid of it, my dear
boy; I don’t know. Perhaps I am a morbid person, unhinged. It seems to a
sound, healthy man that he understands everything he sees and hears, but
that ‘seeming’ is lost to me, and from day to day I am poisoning myself
with terror. There is a disease, the fear of open spaces, but my disease
is the fear of life. When I lie on the grass and watch a little beetle
which was born yesterday and understands nothing, it seems to me that
its life consists of nothing else but fear, and in it I see myself.”
“What is it exactly you are frightened of?” I asked.
“I am afraid of everything. I am not by nature a profound thinker, and I
take little interest in such questions as the life beyond the grave, the
destiny of humanity, and, in fact, I am rarely carried away to the
heights. What chiefly frightens me is the common routine of life from
which none of us can escape. I am incapable of distinguishing what is
true and what is false in my actions, and they worry me. I recognize
that education and the conditions of life have imprisoned me in a narrow
circle of falsity, that my whole life is nothing else than a daily
effort to deceive myself and other people, and to avoid noticing it; and
I am frightened at the thought that to the day of my death I shall not
escape from this falsity. To-day I do something and to-morrow I do not
understand why I did it. I entered the service in Petersburg and took
fright; I came here to work on the land, and here, too, I am frightened.
. . . I see that we know very little and so make mistakes every day. We
are unjust, we slander one another and spoil each other’s lives, we
waste all our powers on trash which we do not need and which hinders us
from living; and that frightens me, because I don’t understand why and
for whom it is necessary. I don’t understand men, my dear fellow, and I
am afraid of them. It frightens me to look at the peasants, and I don’t
know for what higher objects they are suffering and what they are living
for. If life is an enjoyment, then they are unnecessary, superfluous
people; if the object and meaning of life is to be found in poverty and
unending, hopeless ignorance, I can’t understand for whom and what this
torture is necessary. I understand no one and nothing. Kindly try to
understand this specimen, for instance,” said Dmitri Petrovitch,
pointing to Forty Martyrs. “Think of him!”
Noticing that we were looking at him, Forty Martyrs coughed
deferentially into his fist and said:
“I was always a faithful servant with good masters, but the great
trouble has been spirituous liquor. If a poor fellow like me were shown
consideration and given a place, I would kiss the ikon. My word’s my
bond.”
The sexton walked by, looked at us in amazement, and began pulling the
rope. The bell, abruptly breaking upon the stillness of the evening,
struck ten with a slow and prolonged note.
“It’s ten o’clock, though,” said Dmitri Petrovitch. “It’s time we were
going. Yes, my dear fellow,” he sighed, “if only you knew how afraid I
am of my ordinary everyday thoughts, in which one would have thought
there should be nothing dreadful. To prevent myself thinking I distract
my mind with work and try to tire myself out that I may sleep sound at
night. Children, a wife—all that seems ordinary with other people; but
how that weighs upon me, my dear fellow!”
He rubbed his face with his hands, cleared his throat, and laughed.
“If I could only tell you how I have played the fool in my life!” he
said. “They all tell me that I have a sweet wife, charming children, and
that I am a good husband and father. They think I am very happy and envy
me. But since it has come to that, I will tell you in secret: my happy
family life is only a grievous misunderstanding, and I am afraid of it.”
His pale face was distorted by a wry smile. He put his arm round my
waist and went on in an undertone:
“You are my true friend; I believe in you and have a deep respect for
you. Heaven gave us friendship that we may open our hearts and escape
from the secrets that weigh upon us. Let me take advantage of your
friendly feeling for me and tell you the whole truth. My home life,
which seems to you so enchanting, is my chief misery and my chief
terror. I got married in a strange and stupid way. I must tell you that
I was madly in love with Masha before I married her, and was courting
her for two years. I asked her to marry me five times, and she refused
me because she did not care for me in the least. The sixth, when burning
with passion I crawled on my knees before her and implored her to take a
beggar and marry me, she consented. . . . What she said to me was: ‘I
don’t love you, but I will be true to you. . . .’ I accepted that
condition with rapture. At the time I understood what that meant, but I
swear to God I don’t understand it now. ‘I don’t love you, but I will be
true to you.’ What does that mean? It’s a fog, a darkness. I love her
now as intensely as I did the day we were married, while she, I believe,
is as indifferent as ever, and I believe she is glad when I go away from
home. I don’t know for certain whether she cares for me or not —I don’t
know, I don’t know; but, as you see, we live under the same roof, call
each other ‘thou,’ sleep together, have children, our property is in
common. . . . What does it mean, what does it mean? What is the object
of it? And do you understand it at all, my dear fellow? It’s cruel
torture! Because I don’t understand our relations, I hate, sometimes
her, sometimes myself, sometimes both at once. Everything is in a tangle
in my brain; I torment myself and grow stupid. And as though to spite
me, she grows more beautiful every day, she is getting more wonderful. .
. I fancy her hair is marvellous, and her smile is like no other
woman’s. I love her, and I know that my love is hopeless. Hopeless love
for a woman by whom one has two children! Is that intelligible? And
isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it more terrible than ghosts?”
He was in the mood to have talked on a good deal longer, but luckily we
heard the coachman’s voice. Our horses had arrived. We got into the
carriage, and Forty Martyrs, taking off his cap, helped us both into the
carriage with an expression that suggested that he had long been waiting
for an opportunity to come in contact with our precious persons.
“Dmitri Petrovitch, let me come to you,” he said, bClinking furiously
and tilting his head on one side. “Show divine mercy! I am dying of
hunger!”
“Very well,” said Silin. “Come, you shall stay three days, and then we
shall see.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Forty Martyrs, overjoyed. “I’ll come today, sir.”
It was a five miles’ drive home. Dmitri Petrovitch, glad that he had at
last opened his heart to his friend, kept his arm round my waist all the
way; and speaking now, not with bitterness and not with apprehension,
but quite cheerfully, told me that if everything had been satisfactory
in his home life, he should have returned to Petersburg and taken up
scientific work there. The movement which had driven so many gifted
young men into the country was, he said, a deplorable movement. We had
plenty of rye and wheat in Russia, but absolutely no cultured people.
The strong and gifted among the young ought to take up science, art, and
politics; to act otherwise meant being wasteful. He generalized with
pleasure and expressed regret that he would be parting from me early
next morning, as he had to go to a sale of timber.
And I felt awkward and depressed, and it seemed to me that I was
deceiving the man. And at the same time it was pleasant to me. I gazed
at the immense crimson moon which was rising, and pictured the tall,
graceful, fair woman, with her pale face, always well-dressed and
fragrant with some special scent, rather like musk, and for some reason
it pleased me to think she did not love her husband.
On reaching home, we sat down to supper. Marya Sergeyevna, laughing,
regaled us with our purchases, and I thought that she certainly had
wonderful hair and that her smile was unlike any other woman’s. I
watched her, and I wanted to detect in every look and movement that she
did not love her husband, and I fancied that I did see it.
Dmitri Petrovitch was soon struggling with sleep. After supper he sat
with us for ten minutes and said:
“Do as you please, my friends, but I have to be up at three o’clock
tomorrow morning. Excuse my leaving you.”
He kissed his wife tenderly, pressed my hand with warmth and gratitude,
and made me promise that I would certainly come the following week. That
he might not oversleep next morning, he went to spend the night in the
lodge.
Marya Sergeyevna always sat up late, in the Petersburg fashion, and for
some reason on this occasion I was glad of it.
“And now,” I began when we were left alone, “and now you’ll be kind and
play me something.”
I felt no desire for music, but I did not know how to begin the
conversation. She sat down to the piano and played, I don’t remember
what. I sat down beside her and looked at her plump white hands and
tried to read something on her cold, indifferent face. Then she smiled
at something and looked at me.
“You are dull without your friend,” she said.
I laughed.
“It would be enough for friendship to be here once a month, but I turn
up oftener than once a week.”
Saying this, I got up and walked from one end of the room to the other.
She too got up and walked away to the fireplace.
“What do you mean to say by that?” she said, raising her large, clear
eyes and looking at me.
I made no answer.
“What you say is not true,” she went on, after a moment’s thought. “You
only come here on account of Dmitri Petrovitch. Well, I am very glad.
One does not often see such friendships nowadays.”
“Aha!” I thought, and, not knowing what to say, I asked: “Would you care
for a turn in the garden?”
I went out upon the verandah. Nervous shudders were running over my head
and I felt chilly with excitement. I was convinced now that our
conversation would be utterly trivial, and that there was nothing
particular we should be able to say to one another, but that, that
night, what I did not dare to dream of was bound to happen—that it was
bound to be that night or never.
“What lovely weather!” I said aloud.
“It makes absolutely no difference to me,” she answered.
I went into the drawing-room. Marya Sergeyevna was standing, as before,
near the fireplace, with her hands behind her back, looking away and
thinking of something.
“Why does it make no difference to you?” I asked.
“Because I am bored. You are only bored without your friend, but I am
always bored. However . . . that is of no interest to you.”
I sat down to the piano and struck a few chords, waiting to hear what
she would say.
“Please don’t stand on ceremony,” she said, looking angrily at me, and
she seemed as though on the point of crying with vexation. “If you are
sleepy, go to bed. Because you are Dmitri Petrovitch’s friend, you are
not in duty bound to be bored with his wife’s company. I don’t want a
sacrifice. Please go.”
I did not, of course, go to bed. She went out on the verandah while I
remained in the drawing-room and spent five minutes turning over the
music. Then I went out, too. We stood close together in the shadow of
the curtains, and below us were the steps bathed in moonlight. The black
shadows of the trees stretched across the flower beds and the yellow
sand of the paths.
“I shall have to go away tomorrow, too,” I said.
“Of course, if my husband’s not at home you can’t stay here,” she said
sarcastically. “I can imagine how miserable you would be if you were in
love with me! Wait a bit: one day I shall throw myself on your neck. . .
. I shall see with what horror you will run away from me. That would be
interesting.”
Her words and her pale face were angry, but her eyes were full of tender
passionate love. I already looked upon this lovely creature as my
property, and then for the first time I noticed that she had golden
eyebrows, exquisite eyebrows. I had never seen such eyebrows before. The
thought that I might at once press her to my heart, caress her, touch
her wonderful hair, seemed to me such a miracle that I laughed and shut
my eyes.
“It’s bed-time now. . . . A peaceful night,” she said.
“I don’t want a peaceful night,” I said, laughing, following her into
the drawing-room. “I shall curse this night if it is a peaceful one.”
Pressing her hand, and escorting her to the door, I saw by her face that
she understood me, and was glad that I understood her, too.
I went to my room. Near the books on the table lay Dmitri Petrovitch’s
cap, and that reminded me of his affection for me. I took my stick and
went out into the garden. The mist had risen here, too, and the same
tall, narrow, ghostly shapes which I had seen earlier on the river were
trailing round the trees and bushes and wrapping about them. What a pity
I could not talk to them!
In the extraordinarily transparent air, each leaf, each drop of dew
stood out distinctly; it was all smiling at me in the stillness half
asleep, and as I passed the green seats I recalled the words in some
play of Shakespeare’s: “How sweetly falls the moonlight on yon seat!”
There was a mound in the garden; I went up it and sat down. I was
tormented by a delicious feeling. I knew for certain that in a moment I
should hold in my arms, should press to my heart her magnificent body,
should kiss her golden eyebrows; and I wanted to disbelieve it, to
tantalize myself, and was sorry that she had cost me so little trouble
and had yielded so soon.
But suddenly I heard heavy footsteps. A man of medium height appeared in
the avenue, and I recognized him at once as Forty Martyrs. He sat down
on the bench and heaved a deep sigh, then crossed himself three times
and lay down. A minute later he got up and lay on the other side. The
gnats and the dampness of the night prevented his sleeping.
“Oh, life!” he said. “Wretched, bitter life!”
Looking at his bent, wasted body and hearing his heavy, noisy sighs, I
thought of an unhappy, bitter life of which the confession had been made
to me that day, and I felt uneasy and frightened at my blissful mood. I
came down the knoll and went to the house.
“Life, as he thinks, is terrible,” I thought, “so don’t stand on
ceremony with it, bend it to your will, and until it crushes you, snatch
all you can wring from it.”
Marya Sergeyevna was standing on the verandah. I put my arms round her
without a word, and began greedily kissing her eyebrows, her temples,
her neck. . . .
In my room she told me she had loved me for a long time, more than a
year. She vowed eternal love, cried and begged me to take her away with
me. I repeatedly took her to the window to look at her face in the
moonlight, and she seemed to me a lovely dream, and I made haste to hold
her tight to convince myself of the truth of it. It was long since I had
known such raptures. . . . Yet somewhere far away at the bottom of my
heart I felt an awkwardness, and I was ill at ease. In her love for me
there was something incongruous and burdensome, just as in Dmitri
Petrovitch’s friendship. It was a great, serious passion with tears and
vows, and I wanted nothing serious in it—no tears, no vows, no talk of
the future. Let that moonlight night flash through our lives like a
meteor and—basta!
At three o’clock she went out of my room, and, while I was standing in
the doorway, looking after her, at the end of the corridor Dmitri
Petrovitch suddenly made his appearance; she started and stood aside to
let him pass, and her whole figure was expressive of repulsion. He gave
a strange smile, coughed, and came into my room.
“I forgot my cap here yesterday,” he said without looking at me.
He found it and, holding it in both hands, put it on his head; then he
looked at my confused face, at my slippers, and said in a strange, husky
voice unlike his own:
“I suppose it must be my fate that I should understand nothing. . . . If
you understand anything, I congratulate you. It’s all darkness before my
eyes.”
And he went out, clearing his throat. Afterwards from the window I saw
him by the stable, harnessing the horses with his own hands. His hands
were trembling, he was in nervous haste and kept looking round at the
house; probably he was feeling terror. Then he got into the gig, and,
with a strange expression as though afraid of being pursued, lashed the
horses.
Shortly afterwards I set off, too. The sun was already rising, and the
mist of the previous day clung timidly to the bushes and the hillocks.
On the box of the carriage was sitting Forty Martyrs; he had already
succeeded in getting drunk and was muttering tipsy nonsense.
“I am a free man,” he shouted to the horses. “Ah, my honeys, I am a
nobleman in my own right, if you care to know!”
The terror of Dmitri Petrovitch, the thought of whom I could not get out
of my head, infected me. I thought of what had happened and could make
nothing of it. I looked at the rooks, and it seemed so strange and
terrible that they were flying.
“Why have I done this?” I kept asking myself in bewilderment and
despair. “Why has it turned out like this and not differently? To whom
and for what was it necessary that she should love me in earnest, and
that he should come into my room to fetch his cap? What had a cap to do
with it?”
I set off for Petersburg that day, and I have not seen Dmitri Petrovitch
nor his wife since. I am told that they are still living together.
A WOMAN’S KINGDOM I
Christmas Eve
HERE was a thick roll of notes. It came from the bailiff at the forest
villa; he wrote that he was sending fifteen hundred roubles, which he
had been awarded as damages, having won an appeal. Anna Akimovna
disliked and feared such words as “awarded damages” and “won the suit.”
She knew that it was impossible to do without the law, but for some
reason, whenever Nazaritch, the manager of the factory, or the bailiff
of her villa in the country, both of whom frequently went to law, used
to win lawsuits of some sort for her benefit, she always felt uneasy
and, as it were, ashamed. On this occasion, too, she felt uneasy and
awkward, and wanted to put that fifteen hundred roubles further away
that it might be out of her sight.
She thought with vexation that other girls of her age—she was in her
twenty-sixth year—were now busy looking after their households, were
weary and would sleep sound, and would wake up tomorrow morning in
holiday mood; many of them had long been married and had children. Only
she, for some reason, was compelled to sit like an old woman over these
letters, to make notes upon them, to write answers, then to do nothing
the whole evening till midnight, but wait till she was sleepy; and
tomorrow they would all day long be coming with Christmas greetings and
asking for favours; and the day after tomorrow there would certainly be
some scandal at the factory—some one would be beaten or would die of
drinking too much vodka, and she would be fretted by pangs of
conscience; and after the holidays Nazaritch would turn off some twenty
of the workpeople for absence from work, and all of the twenty would
hang about at the front door, without their caps on, and she would be
ashamed to go out to them, and they would be driven away like dogs. And
all her acquaintances would say behind her back, and write to her in
anonymous letters, that she was a millionaire and exploiter —that she
was devouring other men’s lives and sucking the blood of the workers.
Here there lay a heap of letters read through and laid aside already.
They were all begging letters. They were from people who were hungry,
drunken, dragged down by large families, sick, degraded, despised . . .
. Anna Akimovna had already noted on each letter, three roubles to be
paid to one, five to another; these letters would go the same day to the
office, and next the distribution of assistance would take place, or, as
the clerks used to say, the beasts would be fed.
They would distribute also in small sums four hundred and seventy
roubles—the interest on a sum bequeathed by the late Akim Ivanovitch for
the relief of the poor and needy. There would be a hideous crush. From
the gates to the doors of the office there would stretch a long file of
strange people with brutal faces, in rags, numb with cold, hungry and
already drunk, in husky voices calling down blessings upon Anna
Akimovna, their benefactress, and her parents: those at the back would
press upon those in front, and those in front would abuse them with bad
language. The clerk would get tired of the noise, the swearing, and the
sing-song whining and blessing; would fly out and give some one a box on
the ear to the delight of all. And her own people, the factory hands,
who received nothing at Christmas but their wages, and had already spent
every farthing of it, would stand in the middle of the yard, looking on
and laughing—some enviously, others ironically.
“Merchants, and still more their wives, are fonder of beggars than they
are of their own workpeople,” thought Anna Akimovna. “It’s always so.”
Her eye fell upon the roll of money. It would be nice to distribute that
hateful, useless money among the workpeople tomorrow, but it did not do
to give the workpeople anything for nothing, or they would demand it
again next time. And what would be the good of fifteen hundred roubles
when there were eighteen hundred workmen in the factory besides their
wives and children? Or she might, perhaps, pick out one of the writers
of those begging letters— some luckless man who had long ago lost all
hope of anything better, and give him the fifteen hundred. The money
would come upon the poor creature like a thunder-clap, and perhaps for
the first time in his life he would feel happy. This idea struck Anna
Akimovna as original and amusing, and it fascinated her. She took one
letter at random out of the pile and read it. Some petty official called
Tchalikov had long been out of a situation, was ill, and living in
Gushtchin’s Buildings; his wife was in consumption, and he had five
little girls. Anna Akimovna knew well the four-storeyed house,
Gushtchin’s Buildings, in which Tchalikov lived. Oh, it was a horrid,
foul, unhealthy house!
“Well, I will give it to that Tchalikov,” she decided. “I won’t send it;
I had better take it myself to prevent unnecessary talk. Yes,” she
reflected, as she put the fifteen hundred roubles in her pocket, “and
I’ll have a look at them, and perhaps I can do something for the little
girls.”
She felt light-hearted; she rang the bell and ordered the horses to be
brought round.
When she got into the sledge it was past six o’clock in the evening. The
windows in all the blocks of buildings were brightly lighted up, and
that made the huge courtyard seem very dark: at the gates, and at the
far end of the yard near the warehouses and the workpeople’s barracks,
electric lamps were gleaming.
Anna Akimovna disliked and feared those huge dark buildings, warehouses,
and barracks where the workmen lived. She had only once been in the main
building since her father’s death. The high ceilings with iron girders;
the multitude of huge, rapidly turning wheels, connecting straps and
levers; the shrill hissing; the clank of steel; the rattle of the
trolleys; the harsh puffing of steam; the faces—pale, crimson, or black
with coal-dust; the shirts soaked with sweat; the gleam of steel, of
copper, and of fire; the smell of oil and coal; and the draught, at
times very hot and at times very cold—gave her an impression of hell. It
seemed to her as though the wheels, the levers, and the hot hissing
cylinders were trying to tear themselves away from their fastenings to
crush the men, while the men, not hearing one another, ran about with
anxious faces, and busied themselves about the machines, trying to stop
their terrible movement. They showed Anna Akimovna something and
respectfully explained it to her. She remembered how in the forge a
piece of red-hot iron was pulled out of the furnace; and how an old man
with a strap round his head, and another, a young man in a blue shirt
with a chain on his breast, and an angry face, probably one of the
foremen, struck the piece of iron with hammers; and how the golden
sparks had been scattered in all directions; and how, a little
afterwards, they had dragged out a huge piece of sheet-iron with a
clang. The old man had stood erect and smiled, while the young man had
wiped his face with his sleeve and explained something to her. And she
remembered, too, how in another department an old man with one eye had
been filing a piece of iron, and how the iron filings were scattered
about; and how a red-haired man in black spectacles, with holes in his
shirt, had been working at a lathe, making something out of a piece of
steel: the lathe roared and hissed and squeaked, and Anna Akimovna felt
sick at the sound, and it seemed as though they were boring into her
ears. She looked, listened, did not understand, smiled graciously, and
felt ashamed. To get hundreds of thousands of roubles from a business
which one does not understand and cannot like—how strange it is!
And she had not once been in the workpeople’s barracks. There, she was
told, it was damp; there were bugs, debauchery, anarchy. It was an
astonishing thing: a thousand roubles were spent annually on keeping the
barracks in good order, yet, if she were to believe the anonymous
letters, the condition of the workpeople was growing worse and worse
every year.
“There was more order in my father’s day,” thought Anna Akimovna, as she
drove out of the yard, “because he had been a workman himself. I know
nothing about it and only do silly things.”
She felt depressed again, and was no longer glad that she had come, and
the thought of the lucky man upon whom fifteen hundred roubles would
drop from heaven no longer struck her as original and amusing. To go to
some Tchalikov or other, when at home a business worth a million was
gradually going to pieces and being ruined, and the workpeople in the
barracks were living worse than convicts, meant doing something silly
and cheating her conscience. Along the highroad and across the fields
near it, workpeople from the neighbouring cotton and paper factories
were walking towards the lights of the town. There was the sound of talk
and laughter in the frosty air. Anna Akimovna looked at the women and
young people, and she suddenly felt a longing for a plain rough life
among a crowd. She recalled vividly that far-away time when she used to
be called Anyutka, when she was a little girl and used to lie under the
same quilt with her mother, while a washerwoman who lodged with them
used to wash clothes in the next room; while through the thin walls
there came from the neighbouring flats sounds of laughter, swearing,
children’s crying, the accordion, and the whirr of carpenters’ lathes
and sewing-machines; while her father, Akim Ivanovitch, who was clever
at almost every craft, would be soldering something near the stove, or
drawing or planing, taking no notice whatever of the noise and
stuffiness. And she longed to wash, to iron, to run to the shop and the
tavern as she used to do every day when she lived with her mother. She
ought to have been a work-girl and not the factory owner! Her big house
with its chandeliers and pictures; her footman Mishenka, with his glossy
moustache and swallowtail coat; the devout and dignified Varvarushka,
and smooth-tongued Agafyushka; and the young people of both sexes who
came almost every day to ask her for money, and with whom she always for
some reason felt guilty; and the clerks, the doctors, and the ladies who
were charitable at her expense, who flattered her and secretly despised
her for her humble origin— how wearisome and alien it all was to her!
Here was the railway crossing and the city gate; then came houses
alternating with kitchen gardens; and at last the broad street where
stood the renowned Gushtchin’s Buildings. The street, usually quiet, was
now on Christmas Eve full of life and movement. The eating-houses and
beer-shops were noisy. If some one who did not belong to that quarter
but lived in the centre of the town had driven through the street now,
he would have noticed nothing but dirty, drunken, and abusive people;
but Anna Akimovna, who had lived in those parts all her life, was
constantly recognizing in the crowd her own father or mother or uncle.
Her father was a soft fluid character, a little fantastical, frivolous,
and irresponsible. He did not care for money, respectability, or power;
he used to say that a working man had no time to keep the holy-days and
go to church; and if it had not been for his wife, he would probably
never have gone to confession, taken the sacrament or kept the fasts.
While her uncle, Ivan Ivanovitch, on the contrary, was like flint; in
everything relating to religion, politics, and morality, he was harsh
and relentless, and kept a strict watch, not only over himself, but also
over all his servants and acquaintances. God forbid that one should go
into his room without crossing oneself before the ikon! The luxurious
mansion in which Anna Akimovna now lived he had always kept locked up,
and only opened it on great holidays for important visitors, while he
lived himself in the office, in a little room covered with ikons. He had
leanings towards the Old Believers, and was continually entertaining
priests and bishops of the old ritual, though he had been christened,
and married, and had buried his wife in accordance with the Orthodox
rites. He disliked Akim, his only brother and his heir, for his
frivolity, which he called simpleness and folly, and for his
indifference to religion. He treated him as an inferior, kept him in the
position of a workman, paid him sixteen roubles a month. Akim addressed
his brother with formal respect, and on the days of asking forgiveness,
he and his wife and daughter bowed down to the ground before him. But
three years before his death Ivan Ivanovitch had drawn closer to his
brother, forgave his shortcomings, and ordered him to get a governess
for Anyutka.
There was a dark, deep, evil-smelling archway under Gushtchin’s
Buildings; there was a sound of men coughing near the walls. Leaving the
sledge in the street, Anna Akimovna went in at the gate and there
inquired how to get to No. 46 to see a clerk called Tchalikov. She was
directed to the furthest door on the right in the third story. And in
the courtyard and near the outer door, and even on the stairs, there was
still the same loathsome smell as under the archway. In Anna Akimovna’s
childhood, when her father was a simple workman, she used to live in a
building like that, and afterwards, when their circumstances were
different, she had often visited them in the character of a Lady
Bountiful. The narrow stone staircase with its steep dirty steps, with
landings at every story; the greasy swinging lanterns; the stench; the
troughs, pots, and rags on the landings near the doors,—all this had
been familiar to her long ago. . . . One door was open, and within could
be seen Jewish tailors in caps, sewing. Anna Akimovna met people on the
stairs, but it never entered her head that people might be rude to her.
She was no more afraid of peasants or workpeople, drunk or sober, than
of her acquaintances of the educated class.
There was no entry at No. 46; the door opened straight into the kitchen.
As a rule the dwellings of workmen and mechanics smell of varnish, tar,
hides, smoke, according to the occupation of the tenant; the dwellings
of persons of noble or official class who have come to poverty may be
known by a peculiar rancid, sour smell. This disgusting smell enveloped
Anna Akimovna on all sides, and as yet she was only on the threshold. A
man in a black coat, no doubt Tchalikov himself, was sitting in a corner
at the table with his back to the door, and with him were five little
girls. The eldest, a broad-faced thin girl with a comb in her hair,
looked about fifteen, while the youngest, a chubby child with hair that
stood up like a hedge-hog, was not more than three. All the six were
eating. Near the stove stood a very thin little woman with a yellow
face, far gone in pregnancy. She was wearing a skirt and a white blouse,
and had an oven fork in her hand.
“I did not expect you to be so disobedient, Liza,” the man was saying
reproachfully. “Fie, fie, for shame! Do you want papa to whip you—eh?”
Seeing an unknown lady in the doorway, the thin woman started, and put
down the fork.
“Vassily Nikititch!” she cried, after a pause, in a hollow voice, as
though she could not believe her eyes.
The man looked round and jumped up. He was a flat-chested, bony man with
narrow shoulders and sunken temples. His eyes were small and hollow with
dark rings round them, he had a wide mouth, and a long nose like a
bird’s beak—a little bit bent to the right. His beard was parted in the
middle, his moustache was shaven, and this made him look more like a
hired footman than a government clerk.
“Does Mr. Tchalikov live here?” asked Anna Akimovna.
“Yes, madam,” Tchalikov answered severely, but immediately recognizing
Anna Akimovna, he cried: “Anna Akimovna!” and all at once he gasped and
clasped his hands as though in terrible alarm. “Benefactress!”
With a moan he ran to her, grunting inarticulately as though he were
paralyzed—there was cabbage on his beard and he smelt of vodka—pressed
his forehead to her muff, and seemed as though he were in a swoon.
“Your hand, your holy hand!” he brought out breathlessly. “It’s a dream,
a glorious dream! Children, awaken me!”
He turned towards the table and said in a sobbing voice, shaking his
fists:
“Providence has heard us! Our saviour, our angel, has come! We are
saved! Children, down on your knees! on your knees!”
Madame Tchalikov and the little girls, except the youngest one, began
for some reason rapidly clearing the table.
“You wrote that your wife was very ill,” said Anna Akimovna, and she
felt ashamed and annoyed. “I am not going to give them the fifteen
hundred,” she thought.
“Here she is, my wife,” said Tchalikov in a thin feminine voice, as
though his tears had gone to his head. “Here she is, unhappy creature!
With one foot in the grave! But we do not complain, madam. Better death
than such a life. Better die, unhappy woman!”
“Why is he playing these antics?” thought Anna Akimovna with annoyance.
“One can see at once he is used to dealing with merchants.”
“Speak to me like a human being,” she said. “I don’t care for farces.‘’
“Yes, madam; five bereaved children round their mother’s coffin with
funeral candles—that’s a farce? Eh?” said Tchalikov bitterly, and turned
away.
“Hold your tongue,” whispered his wife, and she pulled at his sleeve.
“The place has not been tidied up, madam,” she said, addressing Anna
Akimovna; “please excuse it . . . you know what it is where there are
children. A crowded hearth, but harmony.”
“I am not going to give them the fifteen hundred,” Anna Akimovna thought
again.
And to escape as soon as possible from these people and from the sour
smell, she brought out her purse and made up her mind to leave them
twenty-five roubles, not more; but she suddenly felt ashamed that she
had come so far and disturbed people for so little.
“If you give me paper and ink, I will write at once to a doctor who is a
friend of mine to come and see you,” she said, flushing red. “He is a
very good doctor. And I will leave you some money for medicine.”
Madame Tchalikov was hastening to wipe the table.
“It’s messy here! What are you doing?” hissed Tchalikov, looking at her
wrathfully. “Take her to the lodger’s room! I make bold to ask you,
madam, to step into the lodger’s room,” he said, addressing Anna
Akimovna. “It’s clean there.”
“Osip Ilyitch told us not to go into his room!” said one of the little
girls, sternly.
But they had already led Anna Akimovna out of the kitchen, through a
narrow passage room between two bedsteads: it was evident from the
arrangement of the beds that in one two slept lengthwise, and in the
other three slept across the bed. In the lodger’s room, that came next,
it really was clean. A neat-looking bed with a red woollen quilt, a
pillow in a white pillow-case, even a slipper for the watch, a table
covered with a hempen cloth and on it, an inkstand of milky-looking
glass, pens, paper, photographs in frames— everything as it ought to be;
and another table for rough work, on which lay tidily arranged a
watchmaker’s tools and watches taken to pieces. On the walls hung
hammers, pliers, awls, chisels, nippers, and so on, and there were three
hanging clocks which were ticking; one was a big clock with thick
weights, such as one sees in eating-houses.
As she sat down to write the letter, Anna Akimovna saw facing her on the
table the photographs of her father and of herself. That surprised her.
“Who lives here with you?” she asked.
“Our lodger, madam, Pimenov. He works in your factory.”
“Oh, I thought he must be a watchmaker.”
“He repairs watches privately, in his leisure hours. He is an amateur.”
After a brief silence during which nothing could be heard but the
ticking of the clocks and the scratching of the pen on the paper,
Tchalikov heaved a sigh and said ironically, with indignation:
“It’s a true saying: gentle birth and a grade in the service won’t put a
coat on your back. A cockade in your cap and a noble title, but nothing
to eat. To my thinking, if any one of humble class helps the poor he is
much more of a gentleman than any Tchalikov who has sunk into poverty
and vice.”
To flatter Anna Akimovna, he uttered a few more disparaging phrases
about his gentle birth, and it was evident that he was humbling himself
because he considered himself superior to her. Meanwhile she had
finished her letter and had sealed it up. The letter would be thrown
away and the money would not be spent on medicine—that she knew, but she
put twenty-five roubles on the table all the same, and after a moment’s
thought, added two more red notes. She saw the wasted, yellow hand of
Madame Tchalikov, like the claw of a hen, dart out and clutch the money
tight.
“You have graciously given this for medicine,” said Tchalikov in a
quivering voice, “but hold out a helping hand to me also . . . and the
children!” he added with a sob. “My unhappy children! I am not afraid
for myself; it is for my daughters I fear! It’s the hydra of vice that I
fear!”
Trying to open her purse, the catch of which had gone wrong, Anna
Akimovna was confused and turned red. She felt ashamed that people
should be standing before her, looking at her hands and waiting, and
most likely at the bottom of their hearts laughing at her. At that
instant some one came into the kitchen and stamped his feet, knocking
the snow off.
“The lodger has come in,” said Madame Tchalikov.
Anna Akimovna grew even more confused. She did not want any one from the
factory to find her in this ridiculous position. As ill-luck would have
it, the lodger came in at the very moment when, having broken the catch
at last, she was giving Tchalikov some notes, and Tchalikov, grunting as
though he were paraylzed, was feeling about with his lips where he could
kiss her. In the lodger she recognized the workman who had once clanked
the sheet-iron before her in the forge, and had explained things to her.
Evidently he had come in straight from the factory; his face looked dark
and grimy, and on one cheek near his nose was a smudge of soot. His
hands were perfectly black, and his unbelted shirt shone with oil and
grease. He was a man of thirty, of medium height, with black hair and
broad shoulders, and a look of great physical strength. At the first
glance Anna Akimovna perceived that he must be a foreman, who must be
receiving at least thirty-five roubles a month, and a stern, loud-voiced
man who struck the workmen in the face; all this was evident from his
manner of standing, from the attitude he involuntarily assumed at once
on seeing a lady in his room, and most of all from the fact that he did
not wear top-boots, that he had breast pockets, and a pointed,
picturesquely clipped beard. Her father, Akim Ivanovitch, had been the
brother of the factory owner, and yet he had been afraid of foremen like
this lodger and had tried to win their favour.
“Excuse me for having come in here in your absence,” said Anna Akimovna.
The workman looked at her in surprise, smiled in confusion and did not
speak.
“You must speak a little louder, madam . . . .” said Tchalikov softly.
“When Mr. Pimenov comes home from the factory in the evenings he is a
little hard of hearing.”
But Anna Akimovna was by now relieved that there was nothing more for
her to do here; she nodded to them and went rapidly out of the room.
Pimenov went to see her out.
“Have you been long in our employment?” she asked in a loud voice,
without turning to him.
“From nine years old. I entered the factory in your uncle’s time.”
“That’s a long while! My uncle and my father knew all the workpeople,
and I know hardly any of them. I had seen you before, but I did not know
your name was Pimenov.”
Anna Akimovna felt a desire to justify herself before him, to pretend
that she had just given the money not seriously, but as a joke.
“Oh, this poverty,” she sighed. “We give charity on holidays and working
days, and still there is no sense in it. I believe it is useless to help
such people as this Tchalikov.”
“Of course it is useless,” he agreed. “However much you give him, he
will drink it all away. And now the husband and wife will be snatching
it from one another and fighting all night,” he added with a laugh.
“Yes, one must admit that our philanthropy is useless, boring, and
absurd. But still, you must agree, one can’t sit with one’s hand in
one’s lap; one must do something. What’s to be done with the Tchalikovs,
for instance?”
She turned to Pimenov and stopped, expecting an answer from him; he,
too, stopped and slowly, without speaking, shrugged his shoulders.
Obviously he knew what to do with the Tchalikovs, but the treatment
would have been so coarse and inhuman that he did not venture to put it
into words. And the Tchalikovs were to him so utterly uninteresting and
worthless, that a moment later he had forgotten them; looking into Anna
Akimovna’s eyes, he smiled with pleasure, and his face wore an
expression as though he were dreaming about something very pleasant.
Only, now standing close to him, Anna Akimovna saw from his face, and
especially from his eyes, how exhausted and sleepy he was.
“Here, I ought to give him the fifteen hundred roubles!” she thought,
but for some reason this idea seemed to her incongruous and insulting to
Pimenov.
“I am sure you are aching all over after your work, and you come to the
door with me,” she said as they went down the stairs. “Go home.”
But he did not catch her words. When they came out into the street, he
ran on ahead, unfastened the cover of the sledge, and helping Anna
Akimovna in, said:
“I wish you a happy Christmas!” II
Christmas Morning
“They have left off ringing ever so long! It’s dreadful; you won’t be
there before the service is over! Get up!”
“Two horses are racing, racing . . .” said Anna Akimovna, and she woke
up; before her, candle in hand, stood her maid, red-haired Masha. “Well,
what is it?”
“Service is over already,” said Masha with despair. “I have called you
three times! Sleep till evening for me, but you told me yourself to call
you!”
Anna Akimovna raised herself on her elbow and glanced towards the
window. It was still quite dark outside, and only the lower edge of the
window-frame was white with snow. She could hear a low, mellow chime of
bells; it was not the parish church, but somewhere further away. The
watch on the little table showed three minutes past six.
“Very well, Masha. . . . In three minutes . . .” said Anna Akimovna in
an imploring voice, and she snuggled under the bed-clothes.
She imagined the snow at the front door, the sledge, the dark sky, the
crowd in the church, and the smell of juniper, and she felt dread at the
thought; but all the same, she made up her mind that she would get up at
once and go to early service. And while she was warm in bed and
struggling with sleep—which seems, as though to spite one, particularly
sweet when one ought to get up—and while she had visions of an immense
garden on a mountain and then Gushtchin’s Buildings, she was worried all
the time by the thought that she ought to get up that very minute and go
to church.
But when she got up it was quite light, and it turned out to be half-
past nine. There had been a heavy fall of snow in the night; the trees
were clothed in white, and the air was particularly light, transparent,
and tender, so that when Anna Akimovna looked out of the window her
first impulse was to draw a deep, deep breath. And when she had washed,
a relic of far-away childish feelings—joy that today was
Christmas—suddenly stirred within her; after that she felt light-
hearted, free and pure in soul, as though her soul, too, had been washed
or plunged in the white snow. Masha came in, dressed up and tightly
laced, and wished her a happy Christmas; then she spent a long time
combing her mistress’s hair and helping her to dress. The fragrance and
feeling of the new, gorgeous, splendid dress, its faint rustle, and the
smell of fresh scent, excited Anna Akimoyna.
“Well, it’s Christmas,” she said gaily to Masha. “Now we will try our
fortunes.”
“Last year, I was to marry an old man. It turned up three times the
same.”
“Well, God is merciful.”
“Well, Anna Akimovna, what I think is, rather than neither one thing nor
the other, I’d marry an old man,” said Masha mournfully, and she heaved
a sigh. “I am turned twenty; it’s no joke.”
Every one in the house knew that red-haired Masha was in love with
Mishenka, the footman, and this genuine, passionate, hopeless love had
already lasted three years.
“Come, don’t talk nonsense,” Anna Akimovna consoled her. “I am going on
for thirty, but I am still meaning to marry a young man.”
While his mistress was dressing, Mishenka, in a new swallow-tail and
polished boots, walked about the hall and drawing-room and waited for
her to come out, to wish her a happy Christmas. He had a peculiar walk,
stepping softly and delicately; looking at his feet, his hands, and the
bend of his head, it might be imagined that he was not simply walking,
but learning to dance the first figure of a quadrille. In spite of his
fine velvety moustache and handsome, rather flashy appearance, he was
steady, prudent, and devout as an old man. He said his prayers, bowing
down to the ground, and liked burning incense in his room. He respected
people of wealth and rank and had a reverence for them; he despised poor
people, and all who came to ask favours of any kind, with all the
strength of his cleanly flunkey soul. Under his starched shirt he wore a
flannel, winter and summer alike, being very careful of his health; his
ears were plugged with cotton-wool.
When Anna Akimovna crossed the hall with Masha, he bent his head
downwards a little and said in his agreeable, honeyed voice:
“I have the honour to congratulate you, Anna Akimovna, on the most
solemn feast of the birth of our Lord.”
Anna Akimovna gave him five roubles, while poor Masha was numb with
ecstasy. His holiday get-up, his attitude, his voice, and what he said,
impressed her by their beauty and elegance; as she followed her mistress
she could think of nothing, could see nothing, she could only smile,
first blissfully and then bitterly. The upper story of the house was
called the best or visitors’ half, while the name of the business
part—old people’s or simply women’s part —was given to the rooms on the
lower story where Aunt Tatyana Ivanovna kept house. In the upper part
the gentry and educated visitors were entertained; in the lower story,
simpler folk and the aunt’s personal friends. Handsome, plump, and
healthy, still young and fresh, and feeling she had on a magnificent
dress which seemed to her to diffuse a sort of radiance all about her,
Anna Akimovna went down to the lower story. Here she was met with
reproaches for forgetting God now that she was so highly educated, for
sleeping too late for the service, and for not coming downstairs to
break the fast, and they all clasped their hands and exclaimed with
perfect sincerity that she was lovely, wonderful; and she believed it,
laughed, kissed them, gave one a rouble, another three or five according
to their position. She liked being downstairs. Wherever one looked there
were shrines, ikons, little lamps, portraits of ecclesiastical
personages—the place smelt of monks; there was a rattle of knives in the
kitchen, and already a smell of something savoury, exceedingly
appetizing, was pervading all the rooms. The yellow-painted floors
shone, and from the doors narrow rugs with bright blue stripes ran like
little paths to the ikon corner, and the sunshine was simply pouring in
at the windows.
In the dining-room some old women, strangers, were sitting; in
Varvarushka’s room, too, there were old women, and with them a deaf and
dumb girl, who seemed abashed about something and kept saying, “Bli,
bli! . . .” Two skinny-looking little girls who had been brought out of
the orphanage for Christmas came up to kiss Anna Akimovna’s hand, and
stood before her transfixed with admiration of her splendid dress; she
noticed that one of the girls squinted, and in the midst of her light-
hearted holiday mood she felt a sick pang at her heart at the thought
that young men would despise the girl, and that she would never marry.
In the cook Agafya’s room, five huge peasants in new shirts were sitting
round the samovar; these were not workmen from the factory, but
relations of the cook. Seeing Anna Akimovna, all the peasants jumped up
from their seats, and from regard for decorum, ceased munching, though
their mouths were full. The cook Stepan, in a white cap, with a knife in
his hand, came into the room and gave her his greetings; porters in high
felt boots came in, and they, too, offered their greetings. The water-
carrier peeped in with icicles on his beard, but did not venture to come
in.
Anna Akimovna walked through the rooms followed by her retinue— the
aunt, Varvarushka, Nikandrovna, the sewing-maid Marfa Petrovna, and the
downstairs Masha. Varvarushka—a tall, thin, slender woman, taller than
any one in the house, dressed all in black, smelling of cypress and
coffee—crossed herself in each room before the ikon, bowing down from
the waist. And whenever one looked at her one was reminded that she had
already prepared her shroud and that lottery tickets were hidden away by
her in the same box.
“Anyutinka, be merciful at Christmas,” she said, opening the door into
the kitchen. “Forgive him, bless the man! Have done with it!”
The coachman Panteley, who had been dismissed for drunkenness in
November, was on his knees in the middle of the kitchen. He was a good-
natured man, but he used to be unruly when he was drunk, and could not
go to sleep, but persisted in wandering about the buildings and shouting
in a threatening voice, “I know all about it!” Now from his beefy and
bloated face and from his bloodshot eyes it could be seen that he had
been drinking continually from November till Christmas.
“Forgive me, Anna Akimovna,” he brought out in a hoarse voice, striking
his forehead on the floor and showing his bull-like neck.
“It was Auntie dismissed you; ask her.”
“What about auntie?” said her aunt, walking into the kitchen, breathing
heavily; she was very stout, and on her bosom one might have stood a
tray of teacups and a samovar. “What about auntie now? You are mistress
here, give your own orders; though these rascals might be all dead for
all I care. Come, get up, you hog!” she shouted at Panteley, losing
patience. “Get out of my sight! It’s the last time I forgive you, but if
you transgress again—don’t ask for mercy!”
Then they went into the dining-room to coffee. But they had hardly sat
down, when the downstairs Masha rushed headlong in, saying with horror,
“The singers!” And ran back again. They heard some one blowing his nose,
a low bass cough, and footsteps that sounded like horses’ iron-shod
hoofs tramping about the entry near the hall. For half a minute all was
hushed. . . . The singers burst out so suddenly and loudly that every
one started. While they were singing, the priest from the almshouses
with the deacon and the sexton arrived. Putting on the stole, the priest
slowly said that when they were ringing for matins it was snowing and
not cold, but that the frost was sharper towards morning, God bless it!
and now there must be twenty degrees of frost.
“Many people maintain, though, that winter is healthier than summer,”
said the deacon; then immediately assumed an austere expression and
chanted after the priest. “Thy Birth, O Christ our Lord. . . .”
Soon the priest from the workmen’s hospital came with the deacon, then
the Sisters from the hospital, children from the orphanage, and then
singing could be heard almost uninterruptedly. They sang, had lunch, and
went away.
About twenty men from the factory came to offer their Christmas
greetings. They were only the foremen, mechanicians, and their
assistants, the pattern-makers, the accountant, and so on—all of good
appearance, in new black coats. They were all first-rate men, as it were
picked men; each one knew his value—that is, knew that if he lost his
berth today, people would be glad to take him on at another factory.
Evidently they liked Auntie, as they behaved freely in her presence and
even smoked, and when they had all trooped in to have something to eat,
the accountant put his arm round her immense waist. They were free-and-
easy, perhaps, partly also because Varvarushka, who under the old
masters had wielded great power and had kept watch over the morals of
the clerks, had now no authority whatever in the house; and perhaps
because many of them still remembered the time when Auntie Tatyana
Ivanovna, whose brothers kept a strict hand over her, had been dressed
like a simple peasant woman like Agafya, and when Anna Akimovna used to
run about the yard near the factory buildings and every one used to call
her Anyutya.
The foremen ate, talked, and kept looking with amazement at Anna
Akimovna, how she had grown up and how handsome she had become! But this
elegant girl, educated by governesses and teachers, was a stranger to
them; they could not understand her, and they instinctively kept closer
to “Auntie,” who called them by their names, continually pressed them to
eat and drink, and, cClinking glasses with them, had already drunk two
wineglasses of rowanberry wine with them. Anna Akimovna was always
afraid of their thinking her proud, an upstart, or a crow in peacock’s
feathers; and now while the foremen were crowding round the food, she
did not leave the dining-room, but took part in the conversation. She
asked Pimenov, her acquaintance of the previous day:
“Why have you so many clocks in your room?”
“I mend clocks,” he answered. “I take the work up between times, on
holidays, or when I can’t sleep.”
“So if my watch goes wrong I can bring it to you to be repaired?” Anna
Akimovna asked, laughing.
“To be sure, I will do it with pleasure,” said Pimenov, and there was an
expression of tender devotion in his face, when, not herself knowing
why, she unfastened her magnificent watch from its chain and handed it
to him; he looked at it in silence and gave it back. “To be sure, I will
do it with pleasure,” he repeated. “I don’t mend watches now. My eyes
are weak, and the doctors have forbidden me to do fine work. But for you
I can make an exception.”
“Doctors talk nonsense,” said the accountant. They all laughed. “Don’t
you believe them,” he went on, flattered by the laughing; “last year a
tooth flew out of a cylinder and hit old Kalmykov such a crack on the
head that you could see his brains, and the doctor said he would die;
but he is alive and working to this day, only he has taken to stammering
since that mishap.”
“Doctors do talk nonsense, they do, but not so much,” sighed Auntie.
“Pyotr Andreyitch, poor dear, lost his sight. Just like you, he used to
work day in day out at the factory near the hot furnace, and he went
blind. The eyes don’t like heat. But what are we talking about?” she
said, rousing herself. “Come and have a drink. My best wishes for
Christmas, my dears. I never drink with any one else, but I drink with
you, sinful woman as I am. Please God!”
Anna Akimovna fancied that after yesterday Pimenov despised her as a
philanthropist, but was fascinated by her as a woman. She looked at him
and thought that he behaved very charmingly and was nicely dressed. It
is true that the sleeves of his coat were not quite long enough, and the
coat itself seemed short-waisted, and his trousers were not wide and
fashionable, but his tie was tied carelessly and with taste and was not
as gaudy as the others’. And he seemed to be a good-natured man, for he
ate submissively whatever Auntie put on his plate. She remembered how
black he had been the day before, and how sleepy, and the thought of it
for some reason touched her.
When the men were preparing to go, Anna Akimovna put out her hand to
Pimenov. She wanted to ask him to come in sometimes to see her, without
ceremony, but she did not know how to—her tongue would not obey her; and
that they might not think she was attracted by Pimenov, she shook hands
with his companions, too.
Then the boys from the school of which she was a patroness came. They
all had their heads closely cropped and all wore grey blouses of the
same pattern. The teacher—a tall, beardless young man with patches of
red on his face—was visibly agitated as he formed the boys into rows;
the boys sang in tune, but with harsh, disagreeable voices. The manager
of the factory, Nazaritch, a bald, sharp-eyed Old Believer, could never
get on with the teachers, but the one who was now anxiously waving his
hands he despised and hated, though he could not have said why. He
behaved rudely and condescendingly to the young man, kept back his
salary, meddled with the teaching, and had finally tried to dislodge him
by appointing, a fortnight before Christmas, as porter to the school a
drunken peasant, a distant relation of his wife’s, who disobeyed the
teacher and said rude things to him before the boys.
Anna Akimovna was aware of all this, but she could be of no help, for
she was afraid of Nazaritch herself. Now she wanted at least to be very
nice to the schoolmaster, to tell him she was very much pleased with
him; but when after the singing he began apologizing for something in
great confusion, and Auntie began to address him familiarly as she drew
him without ceremony to the table, she felt, for some reason, bored and
awkward, and giving orders that the children should be given sweets,
went upstairs.
“In reality there is something cruel in these Christmas customs,” she
said a little while afterwards, as it were to herself, looking out of
window at the boys, who were flocking from the house to the gates and
shivering with cold, putting their coats on as they ran. “At Christmas
one wants to rest, to sit at home with one’s own people, and the poor
boys, the teacher, and the clerks and foremen, are obliged for some
reason to go through the frost, then to offer their greetings, show
their respect, be put to confusion . . .”
Mishenka, who was standing at the door of the drawing-room and overheard
this, said:
“It has not come from us, and it will not end with us. Of course, I am
not an educated man, Anna Akimovna, but I do understand that the poor
must always respect the rich. It is well said, ‘God marks the rogue.’ In
prisons, night refuges, and pot-houses you never see any but the poor,
while decent people, you may notice, are always rich. It has been said
of the rich, ‘Deep calls to deep.’”
“You always express yourself so tediously and incomprehensibly,” said
Anna Akimovna, and she walked to the other end of the big drawing-room.
It was only just past eleven. The stillness of the big room, only broken
by the singing that floated up from below, made her yawn. The bronzes,
the albums, and the pictures on the walls, representing a ship at sea,
cows in a meadow, and views of the Rhine, were so absolutely stale that
her eyes simply glided over them without observing them. The holiday
mood was already growing tedious. As before, Anna Akimovna felt that she
was beautiful, good-natured, and wonderful, but now it seemed to her
that that was of no use to any one; it seemed to her that she did not
know for whom and for what she had put on this expensive dress, too,
and, as always happened on all holidays, she began to be fretted by
loneliness and the persistent thought that her beauty, her health, and
her wealth, were a mere cheat, since she was not wanted, was of no use
to any one, and nobody loved her. She walked through all the rooms,
humming and looking out of window; stopping in the drawing-room, she
could not resist beginning to talk to Mishenka.
“I don’t know what you think of yourself, Misha,” she said, and heaved a
sigh. “Really, God might punish you for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Excuse my meddling in your affairs. But it seems
you are spoiling your own life out of obstinacy. You’ll admit that it is
high time you got married, and she is an excellent and deserving girl.
You will never find any one better. She’s a beauty, clever, gentle, and
devoted. . . . And her appearance! . . . If she belonged to our circle
or a higher one, people would be falling in love with her for her red
hair alone. See how beautifully her hair goes with her complexion. Oh,
goodness! You don’t understand anything, and don’t know what you want,”
Anna Akimovna said bitterly, and tears came into her eyes. “Poor girl, I
am so sorry for her! I know you want a wife with money, but I have told
you already I will give Masha a dowry.”
Mishenka could not picture his future spouse in his imagination except
as a tall, plump, substantial, pious woman, stepping like a peacock,
and, for some reason, with a long shawl over her shoulders; while Masha
was thin, slender, tightly laced, and walked with little steps, and,
worst of all, she was too fascinating and at times extremely attractive
to Mishenka, and that, in his opinion, was incongruous with matrimony
and only in keeping with loose behaviour. When Anna Akimovna had
promised to give Masha a dowry, he had hesitated for a time; but once a
poor student in a brown overcoat over his uniform, coming with a letter
for Anna Akimovna, was fascinated by Masha, and could not resist
embracing her near the hat-stand, and she had uttered a faint shriek;
Mishenka, standing on the stairs above, had seen this, and from that
time had begun to cherish a feeling of disgust for Masha. A poor
student! Who knows, if she had been embraced by a rich student or an
officer the consequences might have been different.
“Why don’t you wish it?” Anna Akimovna asked. “What more do you want?”
Mishenka was silent and looked at the arm-chair fixedly, and raised his
eyebrows.
“Do you love some one else?”
Silence. The red-haired Masha came in with letters and visiting cards on
a tray. Guessing that they were talking about her, she blushed to tears.
“The postmen have come,” she muttered. “And there is a clerk called
Tchalikov waiting below. He says you told him to come to-day for
something.”
“What insolence!” said Anna Akimovna, moved to anger. “I gave him no
orders. Tell him to take himself off; say I am not at home!”
A ring was heard. It was the priests from her parish. They were always
shown into the aristocratic part of the house—that is, upstairs. After
the priests, Nazaritch, the manager of the factory, came to pay his
visit, and then the factory doctor; then Mishenka announced the
inspector of the elementary schools. Visitors kept arriving.
When there was a moment free, Anna Akimovna sat down in a deep arm-chair
in the drawing-room, and shutting her eyes, thought that her loneliness
was quite natural because she had not married and never would marry. . .
. But that was not her fault. Fate itself had flung her out of the
simple working-class surroundings in which, if she could trust her
memory, she had felt so snug and at home, into these immense rooms,
where she could never think what to do with herself, and could not
understand why so many people kept passing before her eyes. What was
happening now seemed to her trivial, useless, since it did not and could
not give her happiness for one minute.
“If I could fall in love,” she thought, stretching; the very thought of
this sent a rush of warmth to her heart. “And if I could escape from the
factory . . .” she mused, imagining how the weight of those factory
buildings, barracks, and schools would roll off her conscience, roll off
her mind. . . . Then she remembered her father, and thought if he had
lived longer he would certainly have married her to a working man—to
Pimenov, for instance. He would have told her to marry, and that would
have been all about it. And it would have been a good thing; then the
factory would have passed into capable hands.
She pictured his curly head, his bold profile, his delicate, ironical
lips and the strength, the tremendous strength, in his shoulders, in his
arms, in his chest, and the tenderness with which he had looked at her
watch that day.
“Well,” she said, “it would have been all right. I would have married
him.”
“Anna Akimovna,” said Mishenka, coming noiselessly into the drawing-
room.
“How you frightened me!” she said, trembling all over. “What do you
want?”
“Anna Akimovna,” he said, laying his hand on his heart and raising his
eyebrows, “you are my mistress and my benefactress, and no one but you
can tell me what I ought to do about marriage, for you are as good as a
mother to me. . . . But kindly forbid them to laugh and jeer at me
downstairs. They won’t let me pass without it.”
“How do they jeer at you?”
“They call me Mashenka’s Mishenka.”
“Pooh, what nonsense!” cried Anna Akimovna indignantly. “How stupid you
all are! What a stupid you are, Misha! How sick I am of you! I can’t
bear the sight of you.” III
Dinner
Just as the year before, the last to pay her visits were Krylin, an
actual civil councillor, and Lysevitch, a well-known barrister. It was
already dark when they arrived. Krylin, a man of sixty, with a wide
mouth and with grey whiskers close to his ears, with a face like a lynx,
was wearing a uniform with an Anna ribbon, and white trousers. He held
Anna Akimovna’s hand in both of his for a long while, looked intently in
her face, moved his lips, and at last said, drawling upon one note:
“I used to respect your uncle . . . and your father, and enjoyed the
privilege of their friendship. Now I feel it an agreeable duty, as you
see, to present my Christmas wishes to their honoured heiress in spite
of my infirmities and the distance I have to come. . . . And I am very
glad to see you in good health.”
The lawyer Lysevitch, a tall, handsome fair man, with a slight
sprinkling of grey on his temples and beard, was distinguished by
exceptionally elegant manners; he walked with a swaying step, bowed as
it were reluctantly, and shrugged his shoulders as he talked, and all
this with an indolent grace, like a spoiled horse fresh from the stable.
He was well fed, extremely healthy, and very well off; on one occasion
he had won forty thousand roubles, but concealed the fact from his
friends. He was fond of good fare, especially cheese, truffles, and
grated radish with hemp oil; while in Paris he had eaten, so he said,
baked but unwashed guts. He spoke smoothly, fluently, without
hesitation, and only occasionally, for the sake of effect, permitted
himself to hesitate and snap his fingers as if picking up a word. He had
long ceased to believe in anything he had to say in the law courts, or
perhaps he did believe in it, but attached no kind of significance to
it; it had all so long been familiar, stale, ordinary. . . . He believed
in nothing but what was original and unusual. A copy-book moral in an
original form would move him to tears. Both his notebooks were filled
with extraordinary expressions which he had read in various authors; and
when he needed to look up any expression, he would search nervously in
both books, and usually failed to find it. Anna Akimovna’s father had in
a good-humoured moment ostentatiously appointed him legal adviser in
matters concerning the factory, and had assigned him a salary of twelve
thousand roubles. The legal business of the factory had been confined to
two or three trivial actions for recovering debts, which Lysevitch
handed to his assistants.
Anna Akimovna knew that he had nothing to do at the factory, but she
could not dismiss him—she had not the moral courage; and besides, she
was used to him. He used to call himself her legal adviser, and his
salary, which he invariably sent for on the first of the month
punctually, he used to call “stern prose.” Anna Akimovna knew that when,
after her father’s death, the timber of her forest was sold for railway
sleepers, Lysevitch had made more than fifteen thousand out of the
transaction, and had shared it with Nazaritch. When first she found out
they had cheated her she had wept bitterly, but afterwards she had grown
used to it.
Wishing her a happy Christmas, and kissing both her hands, he looked her
up and down, and frowned.
“You mustn’t,” he said with genuine disappointment. “I have told you, my
dear, you mustn’t!”
“What do you mean, Viktor Nikolaitch?”
“I have told you you mustn’t get fat. All your family have an
unfortunate tendency to grow fat. You mustn’t,” he repeated in an
imploring voice, and kissed her hand. “You are so handsome! You are so
splendid! Here, your Excellency, let me introduce the one woman in the
world whom I have ever seriously loved.”
“There is nothing surprising in that. To know Anna Akimovna at your age
and not to be in love with her, that would be impossible.”
“I adore her,” the lawyer continued with perfect sincerity, but with his
usual indolent grace. “I love her, but not because I am a man and she is
a woman. When I am with her I always feel as though she belongs to some
third sex, and I to a fourth, and we float away together into the domain
of the subtlest shades, and there we blend into the spectrum. Leconte de
Lisle defines such relations better than any one. He has a superb
passage, a marvellous passage. . . .”
Lysevitch rummaged in one notebook, then in the other, and, not finding
the quotation, subsided. They began talking of the weather, of the
opera, of the arrival, expected shortly, of Duse. Anna Akimovna
remembered that the year before Lysevitch and, she fancied, Krylin had
dined with her, and now when they were getting ready to go away, she
began with perfect sincerity pointing out to them in an imploring voice
that as they had no more visits to pay, they ought to remain to dinner
with her. After some hesitation the visitors agreed.
In addition to the family dinner, consisting of cabbage soup, sucking
pig, goose with apples, and so on, a so-called “French” or “chef’s”
dinner used to be prepared in the kitchen on great holidays, in case any
visitor in the upper story wanted a meal. When they heard the clatter of
crockery in the dining-room, Lysevitch began to betray a noticeable
excitement; he rubbed his hands, shrugged his shoulders, screwed up his
eyes, and described with feeling what dinners her father and uncle used
to give at one time, and a marvellous matelote of turbots the cook here
could make: it was not a matelote, but a veritable revelation! He was
already gloating over the dinner, already eating it in imagination and
enjoying it. When Anna Akimovna took his arm and led him to the dining-
room, he tossed off a glass of vodka and put a piece of salmon in his
mouth; he positively purred with pleasure. He munched loudly,
disgustingly, emitting sounds from his nose, while his eyes grew oily
and rapacious.
The hors d’oeuvres were superb; among other things, there were fresh
white mushrooms stewed in cream, and sauce provençale made of fried
oysters and crayfish, strongly flavoured with some bitter pickles. The
dinner, consisting of elaborate holiday dishes, was excellent, and so
were the wines. Mishenka waited at table with enthusiasm. When he laid
some new dish on the table and lifted the shining cover, or poured out
the wine, he did it with the solemnity of a professor of black magic,
and, looking at his face and his movements suggesting the first figure
of a quadrille, the lawyer thought several times, “What a fool!”
After the third course Lysevitch said, turning to Anna Akimovna:
“The fin de siècle woman—I mean when she is young, and of course
wealthy—must be independent, clever, elegant, intellectual, bold, and a
little depraved. Depraved within limits, a little; for excess, you know,
is wearisome. You ought not to vegetate, my dear; you ought not to live
like every one else, but to get the full savour of life, and a slight
flavour of depravity is the sauce of life. Revel among flowers of
intoxicating fragrance, breathe the perfume of musk, eat hashish, and
best of all, love, love, love . . . . To begin with, in your place I
would set up seven lovers—one for each day of the week; and one I would
call Monday, one Tuesday, the third Wednesday, and so on, so that each
might know his day.”
This conversation troubled Anna Akimovna; she ate nothing and only drank
a glass of wine.
“Let me speak at last,” she said. “For myself personally, I can’t
conceive of love without family life. I am lonely, lonely as the moon in
the sky, and a waning moon, too; and whatever you may say, I am
convinced, I feel that this waning can only be restored by love in its
ordinary sense. It seems to me that such love would define my duties, my
work, make clear my conception of life. I want from love peace of soul,
tranquillity; I want the very opposite of musk, and spiritualism, and
fin de siècle . . . in short”—she grew embarrassed—“a husband and
children.”
“You want to be married? Well, you can do that, too,” Lysevitch
assented. “You ought to have all experiences: marriage, and jealousy,
and the sweetness of the first infidelity, and even children. . . . But
make haste and live—make haste, my dear: time is passing; it won’t
wait.”
“Yes, I’ll go and get married!” she said, looking angrily at his well-
fed, satisfied face. “I will marry in the simplest, most ordinary way
and be radiant with happiness. And, would you believe it, I will marry
some plain working man, some mechanic or draughtsman.”
“There is no harm in that, either. The Duchess Josiana loved Gwinplin,
and that was permissible for her because she was a grand duchess.
Everything is permissible for you, too, because you are an exceptional
woman: if, my dear, you want to love a negro or an Arab, don’t scruple;
send for a negro. Don’t deny yourself anything. You ought to be as bold
as your desires; don’t fall short of them.”
“Can it be so hard to understand me?” Anna Akimovna asked with
amazement, and her eyes were bright with tears. “Understand, I have an
immense business on my hands—two thousand workmen, for whom I must
answer before God. The men who work for me grow blind and deaf. I am
afraid to go on like this; I am afraid! I am wretched, and you have the
cruelty to talk to me of negroes and . . . and you smile!” Anna Akimovna
brought her fist down on the table. “To go on living the life I am
living now, or to marry some one as idle and incompetent as myself,
would be a crime. I can’t go on living like this,” she said hotly, “I
cannot!”
“How handsome she is!” said Lysevitch, fascinated by her. “My God, how
handsome she is! But why are you angry, my dear? Perhaps I am wrong; but
surely you don’t imagine that if, for the sake of ideas for which I have
the deepest respect, you renounce the joys of life and lead a dreary
existence, your workmen will be any the better for it? Not a scrap! No,
frivolity, frivolity!” he said decisively. “It’s essential for you; it’s
your duty to be frivolous and depraved! Ponder that, my dear, ponder
it.”
Anna Akimovna was glad she had spoken out, and her spirits rose. She was
pleased she had spoken so well, and that her ideas were so fine and
just, and she was already convinced that if Pimenov, for instance, loved
her, she would marry him with pleasure.
Mishenka began to pour out champagne.
“You make me angry, Viktor Nikolaitch,” she said, cClinking glasses with
the lawyer. “It seems to me you give advice and know nothing of life
yourself. According to you, if a man be a mechanic or a draughtsman, he
is bound to be a peasant and an ignoramus! But they are the cleverest
people! Extraordinary people!”
“Your uncle and father . . . I knew them and respected them . . .”
Krylin said, pausing for emphasis (he had been sitting upright as a
post, and had been eating steadily the whole time), “were people of
considerable intelligence and . . . of lofty spiritual qualities.”
“Oh, to be sure, we know all about their qualities,” the lawyer
muttered, and asked permission to smoke.
When dinner was over Krylin was led away for a nap. Lysevitch finished
his cigar, and, staggering from repletion, followed Anna Akimovna into
her study. Cosy corners with photographs and fans on the walls, and the
inevitable pink or pale blue lanterns in the middle of the ceiling, he
did not like, as the expression of an insipid and unoriginal character;
besides, the memory of certain of his love affairs of which he was now
ashamed was associated with such lanterns. Anna Akimovna’s study with
its bare walls and tasteless furniture pleased him exceedingly. It was
snug and comfortable for him to sit on a Turkish divan and look at Anna
Akimovna, who usually sat on the rug before the fire, clasping her knees
and looking into the fire and thinking of something; and at such moments
it seemed to him that her peasant Old Believer blood was stirring within
her.
Every time after dinner when coffee and liqueurs were handed, he grew
livelier and began telling her various bits of literary gossip. He spoke
with eloquence and inspiration, and was carried away by his own stories;
and she listened to him and thought every time that for such enjoyment
it was worth paying not only twelve thousand, but three times that sum,
and forgave him everything she disliked in him. He sometimes told her
the story of some tale or novel he had been reading, and then two or
three hours passed unnoticed like a minute. Now he began rather
dolefully in a failing voice with his eyes shut.
“It’s ages, my dear, since I have read anything,” he said when she asked
him to tell her something. “Though I do sometimes read Jules Verne.”
“I was expecting you to tell me something new.”
“H’m! . . . new,” Lysevitch muttered sleepily, and he settled himself
further back in the corner of the sofa. “None of the new literature, my
dear, is any use for you or me. Of course, it is bound to be such as it
is, and to refuse to recognize it is to refuse to recognize —would mean
refusing to recognize the natural order of things, and I do recognize
it, but . . .” Lysevitch seemed to have fallen asleep. But a minute
later his voice was heard again:
“All the new literature moans and howls like the autumn wind in the
chimney. ‘Ah, unhappy wretch! Ah, your life may be likened to a prison!
Ah, how damp and dark it is in your prison! Ah, you will certainly come
to ruin, and there is no chance of escape for you!’ That’s very fine,
but I should prefer a literature that would tell us how to escape from
prison. Of all contemporary writers, however, I prefer Maupassant.”
Lysevitch opened his eyes. “A fine writer, a perfect writer!” Lysevitch
shifted in his seat. “A wonderful artist! A terrible, prodigious,
supernatural artist!” Lysevitch got up from the sofa and raised his
right arm. “Maupassant!” he said rapturously. “My dear, read Maupassant!
one page of his gives you more than all the riches of the earth! Every
line is a new horizon. The softest, tenderest impulses of the soul
alternate with violent tempestuous sensations; your soul, as though
under the weight of forty thousand atmospheres, is transformed into the
most insignificant little bit of some great thing of an undefined rosy
hue which I fancy, if one could put it on one’s tongue, would yield a
pungent, voluptuous taste. What a fury of transitions, of motives, of
melodies! You rest peacefully on the lilies and the roses, and suddenly
a thought —a terrible, splendid, irresistible thought—swoops down upon
you like a locomotive, and bathes you in hot steam and deafens you with
its whistle. Read Maupassant, dear girl; I insist on it.”
Lysevitch waved his arms and paced from corner to corner in violent
excitement.
“Yes, it is inconceivable,” he pronounced, as though in despair; “his
last thing overwhelmed me, intoxicated me! But I am afraid you will not
care for it. To be carried away by it you must savour it, slowly suck
the juice from each line, drink it in. . . . You must drink it in! . .
.”
After a long introduction, containing many words such as dæmonic
sensuality, a network of the most delicate nerves, simoom, crystal, and
so on, he began at last telling the story of the novel. He did not tell
the story so whimsically, but told it in minute detail, quoting from
memory whole descriptions and conversations; the characters of the novel
fascinated him, and to describe them he threw himself into attitudes,
changed the expression of his face and voice like a real actor. He
laughed with delight at one moment in a deep bass, and at another, on a
high shrill note, clasped his hands and clutched at his head with an
expression which suggested that it was just going to burst. Anna
Akimovna listened enthralled, though she had already read the novel, and
it seemed to her ever so much finer and more subtle in the lawyer’s
version than in the book itself. He drew her attention to various
subtleties, and emphasized the felicitous expressions and the profound
thoughts, but she saw in it, only life, life, life and herself, as
though she had been a character in the novel. Her spirits rose, and she,
too, laughing and clasping her hands, thought that she could not go on
living such a life, that there was no need to have a wretched life when
one might have a splendid one. She remembered her words and thoughts at
dinner, and was proud of them; and when Pimenov suddenly rose up in her
imagination, she felt happy and longed for him to love her.
When he had finished the story, Lysevitch sat down on the sofa,
exhausted.
“How splendid you are! How handsome!” he began, a little while
afterwards in a faint voice as if he were ill. “I am happy near you,
dear girl, but why am I forty-two instead of thirty? Your tastes and
mine do not coincide: you ought to be depraved, and I have long passed
that phase, and want a love as delicate and immaterial as a ray of
sunshine—that is, from the point of view of a woman of your age, I am of
no earthly use.”
In his own words, he loved Turgenev, the singer of virginal love and
purity, of youth, and of the melancholy Russian landscape; but he loved
virginal love, not from knowledge but from hearsay, as something
abstract, existing outside real life. Now he assured himself that he
loved Anna Akimovna platonically, ideally, though he did not know what
those words meant. But he felt comfortable, snug, warm. Anna Akimovna
seemed to him enchanting, original, and he imagined that the pleasant
sensation that was aroused in him by these surroundings was the very
thing that was called platonic love.
He laid his cheek on her hand and said in the tone commonly used in
coaxing little children:
“My precious, why have you punished me?”
“How? When?”
“I have had no Christmas present from you.”
Anna Akimovna had never heard before of their sending a Christmas box to
the lawyer, and now she was at a loss how much to give him. But she must
give him something, for he was expecting it, though he looked at her
with eyes full of love.
“I suppose Nazaritch forgot it,” she said, “but it is not too late to
set it right.”
She suddenly remembered the fifteen hundred she had received the day
before, which was now lying in the toilet drawer in her bedroom. And
when she brought that ungrateful money and gave it to the lawyer, and he
put it in his coat pocket with indolent grace, the whole incident passed
off charmingly and naturally. The sudden reminder of a Christmas box and
this fifteen hundred was not unbecoming in Lysevitch.
“Merci,” he said, and kissed her finger.
Krylin came in with blissful, sleepy face, but without his decorations.
Lysevitch and he stayed a little longer and drank a glass of tea each,
and began to get ready to go. Anna Akimovna was a little embarrassed. .
. . She had utterly forgotten in what department Krylin served, and
whether she had to give him money or not; and if she had to, whether to
give it now or send it afterwards in an envelope.
“Where does he serve?” she whispered to Lysevitch.
“Goodness knows,” muttered Lysevitch, yawning.
She reflected that if Krylin used to visit her father and her uncle and
respected them, it was probably not for nothing: apparently he had been
charitable at their expense, serving in some charitable institution. As
she said good-bye she slipped three hundred roubles into his hand; he
seemed taken aback, and looked at her for a minute in silence with his
pewtery eyes, but then seemed to understand and said:
“The receipt, honoured Anna Akimovna, you can only receive on the New
Year.”
Lysevitch had become utterly limp and heavy, and he staggered when
Mishenka put on his overcoat.
As he went downstairs he looked like a man in the last stage of
exhaustion, and it was evident that he would drop asleep as soon as he
got into his sledge.
“Your Excellency,” he said languidly to Krylin, stopping in the middle
of the staircase, “has it ever happened to you to experience a feeling
as though some unseen force were drawing you out longer and longer? You
are drawn out and turn into the finest wire. Subjectively this finds
expression in a curious voluptuous feeling which is impossible to
compare with anything.”
Anna Akimovna, standing at the top of the stairs, saw each of them give
Mishenka a note.
“Good-bye! Come again!” she called to them, and ran into her bedroom.
She quickly threw off her dress, that she was weary of already, put on a
dressing-gown, and ran downstairs; and as she ran downstairs she laughed
and thumped with her feet like a school-boy; she had a great desire for
mischief. IV
Evening
Auntie, in a loose print blouse, Varvarushka and two old women, were
sitting in the dining-room having supper. A big piece of salt meat, a
ham, and various savouries, were lying on the table before them, and
clouds of steam were rising from the meat, which looked particularly fat
and appetizing. Wine was not served on the lower story, but they made up
for it with a great number of spirits and home-made liqueurs.
Agafyushka, the fat, white-skinned, well-fed cook, was standing with her
arms crossed in the doorway and talking to the old women, and the dishes
were being handed by the downstairs Masha, a dark girl with a crimson
ribbon in her hair. The old women had had enough to eat before the
morning was over, and an hour before supper had had tea and buns, and so
they were now eating with effort—as it were, from a sense of duty.
“Oh, my girl!” sighed Auntie, as Anna Akimovna ran into the dining-room
and sat down beside her. “You’ve frightened me to death!”
Every one in the house was pleased when Anna Akimovna was in good
spirits and played pranks; this always reminded them that the old men
were dead and that the old women had no authority in the house, and any
one could do as he liked without any fear of being sharply called to
account for it. Only the two old women glanced askance at Anna Akimovna
with amazement: she was humming, and it was a sin to sing at table.
“Our mistress, our beauty, our picture,” Agafyushka began chanting with
sugary sweetness. “Our precious jewel! The people, the people that have
come to-day to look at our queen. Lord have mercy upon us! Generals, and
officers and gentlemen. . . . I kept looking out of window and counting
and counting till I gave it up.”
“I’d as soon they did not come at all,” said Auntie; she looked sadly at
her niece and added: “They only waste the time for my poor orphan girl.”
Anna Akimovna felt hungry, as she had eaten nothing since the morning.
They poured her out some very bitter liqueur; she drank it off, and
tasted the salt meat with mustard, and thought it extraordinarily nice.
Then the downstairs Masha brought in the turkey, the pickled apples and
the gooseberries. And that pleased her, too. There was only one thing
that was disagreeable: there was a draught of hot air from the tiled
stove; it was stiflingly close and every one’s cheeks were burning.
After supper the cloth was taken off and plates of peppermint biscuits,
walnuts, and raisins were brought in.
“You sit down, too . . . no need to stand there!” said Auntie to the
cook.
Agafyushka sighed and sat down to the table; Masha set a wineglass of
liqueur before her, too, and Anna Akimovna began to feel as though
Agafyushka’s white neck were giving out heat like the stove. They were
all talking of how difficult it was nowadays to get married, and saying
that in old days, if men did not court beauty, they paid attention to
money, but now there was no making out what they wanted; and while
hunchbacks and cripples used to be left old maids, nowadays men would
not have even the beautiful and wealthy. Auntie began to set this down
to immorality, and said that people had no fear of God, but she suddenly
remembered that Ivan Ivanitch, her brother, and Varvarushka—both people
of holy life—had feared God, but all the same had had children on the
sly, and had sent them to the Foundling Asylum. She pulled herself up
and changed the conversation, telling them about a suitor she had once
had, a factory hand, and how she had loved him, but her brothers had
forced her to marry a widower, an ikon-painter, who, thank God, had died
two years after. The downstairs Masha sat down to the table, too, and
told them with a mysterious air that for the last week some unknown man
with a black moustache, in a great-coat with an astrachan collar, had
made his appearance every morning in the yard, had stared at the windows
of the big house, and had gone on further— to the buildings; the man was
all right, nice-looking.
All this conversation made Anna Akimovna suddenly long to be married
—long intensely, painfully; she felt as though she would give half her
life and all her fortune only to know that upstairs there was a man who
was closer to her than any one in the world, that he loved her warmly
and was missing her; and the thought of such closeness, ecstatic and
inexpressible in words, troubled her soul. And the instinct of youth and
health flattered her with lying assurances that the real poetry of life
was not over but still to come, and she believed it, and leaning back in
her chair (her hair fell down as she did so), she began laughing, and,
looking at her, the others laughed, too. And it was a long time before
this causeless laughter died down in the dining-room.
She was informed that the Stinging Beetle had come. This was a pilgrim
woman called Pasha or Spiridonovna—a thin little woman of fifty, in a
black dress with a white kerchief, with keen eyes, sharp nose, and a
sharp chin; she had sly, viperish eyes and she looked as though she
could see right through every one. Her lips were shaped like a heart.
Her viperishness and hostility to every one had earned her the nickname
of the Stinging Beetle.
Going into the dining-room without looking at any one, she made for the
ikons and chanted in a high voice “Thy Holy Birth,” then she sang “The
Virgin today gives birth to the Son,” then “Christ is born,” then she
turned round and bent a piercing gaze upon all of them.
“A happy Christmas,” she said, and she kissed Anna Akimovna on the
shoulder. “It’s all I could do, all I could do to get to you, my kind
friends.” She kissed Auntie on the shoulder. “I should have come to you
this morning, but I went in to some good people to rest on the way.
‘Stay, Spiridonovna, stay,’ they said, and I did not notice that evening
was coming on.”
As she did not eat meat, they gave her salmon and caviare. She ate
looking from under her eyelids at the company, and drank three glasses
of vodka. When she had finished she said a prayer and bowed down to Anna
Akimovna’s feet.
They began to play a game of “kings,” as they had done the year before,
and the year before that, and all the servants in both stories crowded
in at the doors to watch the game. Anna Akimovna fancied she caught a
glimpse once or twice of Mishenka, with a patronizing smile on his face,
among the crowd of peasant men and women. The first to be king was
Stinging Beetle, and Anna Akimovna as the soldier paid her tribute; and
then Auntie was king and Anna Akimovna was peasant, which excited
general delight, and Agafyushka was prince, and was quite abashed with
pleasure. Another game was got up at the other end of the table—played
by the two Mashas, Varvarushka, and the sewing-maid Marfa Ptrovna, who
was waked on purpose to play “kings,” and whose face looked cross and
sleepy.
While they were playing they talked of men, and of how difficult it was
to get a good husband nowadays, and which state was to be preferred—that
of an old maid or a widow.
“You are a handsome, healthy, sturdy lass,” said Stinging Beetle to Anna
Akimovna. “But I can’t make out for whose sake you are holding back.”
“What’s to be done if nobody will have me?”
“Or maybe you have taken a vow to remain a maid?” Stinging Beetle went
on, as though she did not hear. “Well, that’s a good deed. . . . Remain
one,” she repeated, looking intently and maliciously at her cards. “All
right, my dear, remain one. . . . Yes . . . only maids, these saintly
maids, are not all alike.” She heaved a sigh and played the king. “Oh,
no, my girl, they are not all alike! Some really watch over themselves
like nuns, and butter would not melt in their mouths; and if such a one
does sin in an hour of weakness, she is worried to death, poor thing! so
it would be a sin to condemn her. While others will go dressed in black
and sew their shroud, and yet love rich old men on the sly. Yes, y-es,
my canary birds, some hussies will bewitch an old man and rule over him,
my doves, rule over him and turn his head; and when they’ve saved up
money and lottery tickets enough, they will bewitch him to his death.”
Varvarushka’s only response to these hints was to heave a sigh and look
towards the ikons. There was an expression of Christian meekness on her
countenance.
“I know a maid like that, my bitterest enemy,” Stinging Beetle went on,
looking round at every one in triumph; “she is always sighing, too, and
looking at the ikons, the she-devil. When she used to rule in a certain
old man’s house, if one went to her she would give one a crust, and bid
one bow down to the ikons while she would sing: ‘In conception Thou dost
abide a Virgin . . . !’ On holidays she will give one a bite, and on
working days she will reproach one for it. But nowadays I will make
merry over her! I will make as merry as I please, my jewel.”
Varvarushka glanced at the ikons again and crossed herself.
“But no one will have me, Spiridonovna,” said Anna Akimovna to change
the conversation. “What’s to be done?”
“It’s your own fault. You keep waiting for highly educated gentlemen,
but you ought to marry one of your own sort, a merchant.”
“We don’t want a merchant,” said Auntie, all in a flutter. “Queen of
Heaven, preserve us! A gentleman will spend your money, but then he will
be kind to you, you poor little fool. But a merchant will be so strict
that you won’t feel at home in your own house. You’ll be wanting to
fondle him and he will be counting his money, and when you sit down to
meals with him, he’ll grudge you every mouthful, though it’s your own,
the lout! . . . Marry a gentleman.”
They all talked at once, loudly interrupting one another, and Auntie
tapped on the table with the nutcrackers and said, flushed and angry:
“We won’t have a merchant; we won’t have one! If you choose a merchant I
shall go to an almshouse.”
“Sh . . . Sh! . . . Hush!” cried Stinging Beetle; when all were silent
she screwed up one eye and said: “Do you know what, Annushka, my birdie
. . . ? There is no need for you to get married really like every one
else. You’re rich and free, you are your own mistress; but yet, my
child, it doesn’t seem the right thing for you to be an old maid. I’ll
find you, you know, some trumpery and simple-witted man. You’ll marry
him for appearances and then have your fling, bonny lass! You can hand
him five thousand or ten maybe, and pack him off where he came from, and
you will be mistress in your own house—you can love whom you like and no
one can say anything to you. And then you can love your highly educated
gentleman. You’ll have a jolly time!” Stinging Beetle snapped her
fingers and gave a whistle.
“It’s sinful,” said Auntie.
“Oh, sinful,” laughed Stinging Beetle. “She is educated, she
understands. To cut some one’s throat or bewitch an old man— that’s a
sin, that’s true; but to love some charming young friend is not a sin at
all. And what is there in it, really? There’s no sin in it at all! The
old pilgrim women have invented all that to make fools of simple folk.
I, too, say everywhere it’s a sin; I don’t know myself why it’s a sin.”
Stinging Beetle emptied her glass and cleared her throat. “Have your
fling, bonny lass,” this time evidently addressing herself. “For thirty
years, wenches, I have thought of nothing but sins and been afraid, but
now I see I have wasted my time, I’ve let it slip by like a ninny! Ah, I
have been a fool, a fool!” She sighed. “A woman’s time is short and
every day is precious. You are handsome, Annushka, and very rich; but as
soon as thirty-five or forty strikes for you your time is up. Don’t
listen to any one, my girl; live, have your fling till you are forty,
and then you will have time to pray forgiveness—there will be plenty of
time to bow down and to sew your shroud. A candle to God and a poker to
the devil! You can do both at once! Well, how is it to be? Will you make
some little man happy?”
“I will,” laughed Anna Akimovna. “I don’t care now; I would marry a
working man.”
“Well, that would do all right! Oh, what a fine fellow you would choose
then!” Stinging Beetle screwed up her eyes and shook her head. “O—o—oh!”
“I tell her myself,” said Auntie, “it’s no good waiting for a gentleman,
so she had better marry, not a gentleman, but some one humbler; anyway
we should have a man in the house to look after things. And there are
lots of good men. She might have some one out of the factory. They are
all sober, steady men. . . .”
“I should think so,” Stinging Beetle agreed. “They are capital fellows.
If you like, Aunt, I will make a match for her with Vassily Lebedinsky?”
“Oh, Vasya’s legs are so long,” said Auntie seriously. “He is so lanky.
He has no looks.”
There was laughter in the crowd by the door.
“Well, Pimenov? Would you like to marry Pimenov?” Stinging Beetle asked
Anna Akimovna.
“Very good. Make a match for me with Pimenov.”
“Really?”
“Yes, do!” Anna Akimovna said resolutely, and she struck her fist on the
table. “On my honour, I will marry him.”
“Really?”
Anna Akimovna suddenly felt ashamed that her cheeks were burning and
that every one was looking at her; she flung the cards together on the
table and ran out of the room. As she ran up the stairs and, reaching
the upper story, sat down to the piano in the drawing-room, a murmur of
sound reached her from below like the roar of the sea; most likely they
were talking of her and of Pimenov, and perhaps Stinging Beetle was
taking advantage of her absence to insult Varvarushka and was putting no
check on her language.
The lamp in the big room was the only light burning in the upper story,
and it sent a glimmer through the door into the dark drawing-room. It
was between nine and ten, not later. Anna Akimovna played a waltz, then
another, then a third; she went on playing without stopping. She looked
into the dark corner beyond the piano, smiled, and inwardly called to
it, and the idea occurred to her that she might drive off to the town to
see some one, Lysevitch for instance, and tell him what was passing in
her heart. She wanted to talk without ceasing, to laugh, to play the
fool, but the dark corner was sullenly silent, and all round in all the
rooms of the upper story it was still and desolate.
She was fond of sentimental songs, but she had a harsh, untrained voice,
and so she only played the accompaniment and sang hardly audibly, just
above her breath. She sang in a whisper one song after another, for the
most part about love, separation, and frustrated hopes, and she imagined
how she would hold out her hands to him and say with entreaty, with
tears, “Pimenov, take this burden from me!” And then, just as though her
sins had been forgiven, there would be joy and comfort in her soul, and
perhaps a free, happy life would begin. In an anguish of anticipation
she leant over the keys, with a passionate longing for the change in her
life to come at once without delay, and was terrified at the thought
that her old life would go on for some time longer. Then she played
again and sang hardly above her breath, and all was stillness about her.
There was no noise coming from downstairs now, they must have gone to
bed. It had struck ten some time before. A long, solitary, wearisome
night was approaching.
Anna Akimovna walked through all the rooms, lay down for a while on the
sofa, and read in her study the letters that had come that evening;
there were twelve letters of Christmas greetings and three anonymous
letters. In one of them some workman complained in a horrible, almost
illegible handwriting that Lenten oil sold in the factory shop was
rancid and smelt of paraffin; in another, some one respectfully informed
her that over a purchase of iron Nazaritch had lately taken a bribe of a
thousand roubles from some one; in a third she was abused for her
inhumanity.
The excitement of Christmas was passing off, and to keep it up Anna
Akimovna sat down at the piano again and softly played one of the new
waltzes, then she remembered how cleverly and creditably she had spoken
at dinner today. She looked round at the dark windows, at the walls with
the pictures, at the faint light that came from the big room, and all at
once she began suddenly crying, and she felt vexed that she was so
lonely, and that she had no one to talk to and consult. To cheer herself
she tried to picture Pimenov in her imagination, but it was
unsuccessful.
It struck twelve. Mishenka, no longer wearing his swallow-tail but in
his reefer jacket, came in, and without speaking lighted two candles;
then he went out and returned a minute later with a cup of tea on a
tray.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked, noticing a smile on his face.
“I was downstairs and heard the jokes you were making about Pimenov . .
.” he said, and put his hand before his laughing mouth. “If he were sat
down to dinner today with Viktor Nikolaevitch and the general, he’d have
died of fright.” Mishenka’s shoulders were shaking with laughter. “He
doesn’t know even how to hold his fork, I bet.”
The footman’s laughter and words, his reefer jacket and moustache, gave
Anna Akimovna a feeling of uncleanness. She shut her eyes to avoid
seeing him, and, against her own will, imagined Pimenov dining with
Lysevitch and Krylin, and his timid, unintellectual figure seemed to her
pitiful and helpless, and she felt repelled by it. And only now, for the
first time in the whole day, she realized clearly that all she had said
and thought about Pimenov and marrying a workman was nonsense, folly,
and wilfulness. To convince herself of the opposite, to overcome her
repulsion, she tried to recall what she had said at dinner, but now she
could not see anything in it: shame at her own thoughts and actions, and
the fear that she had said something improper during the day, and
disgust at her own lack of spirit, overwhelmed her completely. She took
up a candle and, as rapidly as if some one were pursuing her, ran
downstairs, woke Spiridonovna, and began assuring her she had been
joking. Then she went to her bedroom. Red-haired Masha, who was dozing
in an arm-chair near the bed, jumped up and began shaking up the
pillows. Her face was exhausted and sleepy, and her magnificent hair had
fallen on one side.
“Tchalikov came again this evening,” she said, yawning, “but I did not
dare to announce him; he was very drunk. He says he will come again
tomorrow.”
“What does he want with me?” said Anna Akimovna, and she flung her comb
on the floor. “I won’t see him, I won’t.”
She made up her mind she had no one left in life but this Tchalikov,
that he would never leave off persecuting her, and would remind her
every day how uninteresting and absurd her life was. So all she was fit
for was to help the poor. Oh, how stupid it was!
She lay down without undressing, and sobbed with shame and depression:
what seemed to her most vexatious and stupid of all was that her dreams
that day about Pimenov had been right, lofty, honourable, but at the
same time she felt that Lysevitch and even Krylin were nearer to her
than Pimenov and all the workpeople taken together. She thought that if
the long day she had just spent could have been represented in a
picture, all that had been bad and vulgar—as, for instance, the dinner,
the lawyer’s talk, the game of “kings” —would have been true, while her
dreams and talk about Pimenov would have stood out from the whole as
something false, as out of drawing; and she thought, too, that it was
too late to dream of happiness, that everything was over for her, and it
was impossible to go back to the life when she had slept under the same
quilt with her mother, or to devise some new special sort of life.
Red-haired Masha was kneeling before the bed, gazing at her in mournful
perplexity; then she, too, began crying, and laid her face against her
mistress’s arm, and without words it was clear why she was so wretched.
“We are fools!” said Anna Akimovna, laughing and crying. “We are fools!
Oh, what fools we are!”
A PROBLEM
THE strictest measures were taken that the Uskovs’ family secret might
not leak out and become generally known. Half of the servants were sent
off to the theatre or the circus; the other half were sitting in the
kitchen and not allowed to leave it. Orders were given that no one was
to be admitted. The wife of the Colonel, her sister, and the governess,
though they had been initiated into the secret, kept up a pretence of
knowing nothing; they sat in the dining-room and did not show themselves
in the drawing-room or the hall.
Sasha Uskov, the young man of twenty-five who was the cause of all the
commotion, had arrived some time before, and by the advice of kind-
hearted Ivan Markovitch, his uncle, who was taking his part, he sat
meekly in the hall by the door leading to the study, and prepared
himself to make an open, candid explanation.
The other side of the door, in the study, a family council was being
held. The subject under discussion was an exceedingly disagreeable and
delicate one. Sasha Uskov had cashed at one of the banks a false
promissory note, and it had become due for payment three days before,
and now his two paternal uncles and Ivan Markovitch, the brother of his
dead mother, were deciding the question whether they should pay the
money and save the family honour, or wash their hands of it and leave
the case to go for trial.
To outsiders who have no personal interest in the matter such questions
seem simple; for those who are so unfortunate as to have to decide them
in earnest they are extremely difficult. The uncles had been talking for
a long time, but the problem seemed no nearer decision.
“My friends!” said the uncle who was a colonel, and there was a note of
exhaustion and bitterness in his voice. “Who says that family honour is
a mere convention? I don’t say that at all. I am only warning you
against a false view; I am pointing out the possibility of an
unpardonable mistake. How can you fail to see it? I am not speaking
Chinese; I am speaking Russian!”
“My dear fellow, we do understand,” Ivan Markovitch protested mildly.
“How can you understand if you say that I don’t believe in family
honour? I repeat once more: fa-mil-y ho-nour fal-sely un-der-stood is a
prejudice! Falsely understood! That’s what I say: whatever may be the
motives for screening a scoundrel, whoever he may be, and helping him to
escape punishment, it is contrary to law and unworthy of a gentleman.
It’s not saving the family honour; it’s civic cowardice! Take the army,
for instance. . . . The honour of the army is more precious to us than
any other honour, yet we don’t screen our guilty members, but condemn
them. And does the honour of the army suffer in consequence? Quite the
opposite!”
The other paternal uncle, an official in the Treasury, a taciturn, dull-
witted, and rheumatic man, sat silent, or spoke only of the fact that
the Uskovs’ name would get into the newspapers if the case went for
trial. His opinion was that the case ought to be hushed up from the
first and not become public property; but, apart from publicity in the
newspapers, he advanced no other argument in support of this opinion.
The maternal uncle, kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch, spoke smoothly,
softly, and with a tremor in his voice. He began with saying that youth
has its rights and its peculiar temptations. Which of us has not been
young, and who has not been led astray? To say nothing of ordinary
mortals, even great men have not escaped errors and mistakes in their
youth. Take, for instance, the biography of great writers. Did not every
one of them gamble, drink, and draw down upon himself the anger of
right-thinking people in his young days? If Sasha’s error bordered upon
crime, they must remember that Sasha had received practically no
education; he had been expelled from the high school in the fifth class;
he had lost his parents in early childhood, and so had been left at the
tenderest age without guidance and good, benevolent influences. He was
nervous, excitable, had no firm ground under his feet, and, above all,
he had been unlucky. Even if he were guilty, anyway he deserved
indulgence and the sympathy of all compassionate souls. He ought, of
course, to be punished, but he was punished as it was by his conscience
and the agonies he was enduring now while awaiting the sentence of his
relations. The comparison with the army made by the Colonel was
delightful, and did credit to his lofty intelligence; his appeal to
their feeling of public duty spoke for the chivalry of his soul, but
they must not forget that in each individual the citizen is closely
Clinked with the Christian. . . .
“Shall we be false to civic duty,” Ivan Markovitch exclaimed
passionately, “if instead of punishing an erring boy we hold out to him
a helping hand?”
Ivan Markovitch talked further of family honour. He had not the honour
to belong to the Uskov family himself, but he knew their distinguished
family went back to the thirteenth century; he did not forget for a
minute, either, that his precious, beloved sister had been the wife of
one of the representatives of that name. In short, the family was dear
to him for many reasons, and he refused to admit the idea that, for the
sake of a paltry fifteen hundred roubles, a blot should be cast on the
escutcheon that was beyond all price. If all the motives he had brought
forward were not sufficiently convincing, he, Ivan Markovitch, in
conclusion, begged his listeners to ask themselves what was meant by
crime? Crime is an immoral act founded upon ill-will. But is the will of
man free? Philosophy has not yet given a positive answer to that
question. Different views were held by the learned. The latest school of
Lombroso, for instance, denies the freedom of the will, and considers
every crime as the product of the purely anatomical peculiarities of the
individual.
“Ivan Markovitch,” said the Colonel, in a voice of entreaty, “we are
talking seriously about an important matter, and you bring in Lombroso,
you clever fellow. Think a little, what are you saying all this for? Can
you imagine that all your thunderings and rhetoric will furnish an
answer to the question?”
Sasha Uskov sat at the door and listened. He felt neither terror, shame,
nor depression, but only weariness and inward emptiness. It seemed to
him that it made absolutely no difference to him whether they forgave
him or not; he had come here to hear his sentence and to explain himself
simply because kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch had begged him to do so. He
was not afraid of the future. It made no difference to him where he was:
here in the hall, in prison, or in Siberia.
“If Siberia, then let it be Siberia, damn it all!”
He was sick of life and found it insufferably hard. He was inextricably
involved in debt; he had not a farthing in his pocket; his family had
become detestable to him; he would have to part from his friends and his
women sooner or later, as they had begun to be too contemptuous of his
sponging on them. The future looked black.
Sasha was indifferent, and was only disturbed by one circumstance; the
other side of the door they were calling him a scoundrel and a criminal.
Every minute he was on the point of jumping up, bursting into the study
and shouting in answer to the detestable metallic voice of the Colonel:
“You are lying!”
“Criminal” is a dreadful word—that is what murderers, thieves, robbers
are; in fact, wicked and morally hopeless people. And Sasha was very far
from being all that. . . . It was true he owed a great deal and did not
pay his debts. But debt is not a crime, and it is unusual for a man not
to be in debt. The Colonel and Ivan Markovitch were both in debt. . . .
“What have I done wrong besides?” Sasha wondered.
He had discounted a forged note. But all the young men he knew did the
same. Handrikov and Von Burst always forged IOU’s from their parents or
friends when their allowances were not paid at the regular time, and
then when they got their money from home they redeemed them before they
became due. Sasha had done the same, but had not redeemed the IOU
because he had not got the money which Handrikov had promised to lend
him. He was not to blame; it was the fault of circumstances. It was true
that the use of another person’s signature was considered reprehensible;
but, still, it was not a crime but a generally accepted dodge, an ugly
formality which injured no one and was quite harmless, for in forging
the Colonel’s signature Sasha had had no intention of causing anybody
damage or loss.
“No, it doesn’t mean that I am a criminal . . .” thought Sasha. “And
it’s not in my character to bring myself to commit a crime. I am soft,
emotional. . . . When I have the money I help the poor. . . .”
Sasha was musing after this fashion while they went on talking the other
side of the door.
“But, my friends, this is endless,” the Colonel declared, getting
excited. “Suppose we were to forgive him and pay the money. You know he
would not give up leading a dissipated life, squandering money, making
debts, going to our tailors and ordering suits in our names! Can you
guarantee that this will be his last prank? As far as I am concerned, I
have no faith whatever in his reforming!”
The official of the Treasury muttered something in reply; after him Ivan
Markovitch began talking blandly and suavely again. The Colonel moved
his chair impatiently and drowned the other’s words with his detestable
metallic voice. At last the door opened and Ivan Markovitch came out of
the study; there were patches of red on his lean shaven face.
“Come along,” he said, taking Sasha by the hand. “Come and speak frankly
from your heart. Without pride, my dear boy, humbly and from your
heart.”
Sasha went into the study. The official of the Treasury was sitting
down; the Colonel was standing before the table with one hand in his
pocket and one knee on a chair. It was smoky and stifling in the study.
Sasha did not look at the official or the Colonel; he felt suddenly
ashamed and uncomfortable. He looked uneasily at Ivan Markovitch and
muttered:
“I’ll pay it . . . I’ll give it back. . . .”
“What did you expect when you discounted the IOU?” he heard a metallic
voice.
“I . . . Handrikov promised to lend me the money before now.”
Sasha could say no more. He went out of the study and sat down again on
the chair near the door.
He would have been glad to go away altogether at once, but he was
choking with hatred and he awfully wanted to remain, to tear the Colonel
to pieces, to say something rude to him. He sat trying to think of
something violent and effective to say to his hated uncle, and at that
moment a woman’s figure, shrouded in the twilight, appeared at the
drawing-room door. It was the Colonel’s wife. She beckoned Sasha to her,
and, wringing her hands, said, weeping:
“Alexandre, I know you don’t like me, but . . . listen to me; listen, I
beg you. . . . But, my dear, how can this have happened? Why, it’s
awful, awful! For goodness’ sake, beg them, defend yourself, entreat
them.”
Sasha looked at her quivering shoulders, at the big tears that were
rolling down her cheeks, heard behind his back the hollow, nervous
voices of worried and exhausted people, and shrugged his shoulders. He
had not in the least expected that his aristocratic relations would
raise such a tempest over a paltry fifteen hundred roubles! He could not
understand her tears nor the quiver of their voices.
An hour later he heard that the Colonel was getting the best of it; the
uncles were finally inclining to let the case go for trial.
“The matter’s settled,” said the Colonel, sighing. “Enough.”
After this decision all the uncles, even the emphatic Colonel, became
noticeably depressed. A silence followed.
“Merciful Heavens!” sighed Ivan Markovitch. “My poor sister!”
And he began saying in a subdued voice that most likely his sister,
Sasha’s mother, was present unseen in the study at that moment. He felt
in his soul how the unhappy, saintly woman was weeping, grieving, and
begging for her boy. For the sake of her peace beyond the grave, they
ought to spare Sasha.
The sound of a muffled sob was heard. Ivan Markovitch was weeping and
muttering something which it was impossible to catch through the door.
The Colonel got up and paced from corner to corner. The long
conversation began over again.
But then the clock in the drawing-room struck two. The family council
was over. To avoid seeing the person who had moved him to such wrath,
the Colonel went from the study, not into the hall, but into the
vestibule. . . . Ivan Markovitch came out into the hall. . . . He was
agitated and rubbing his hands joyfully. His tear-stained eyes looked
good-humoured and his mouth was twisted into a smile.
“Capital,” he said to Sasha. “Thank God! You can go home, my dear, and
sleep tranquilly. We have decided to pay the sum, but on condition that
you repent and come with me tomorrow into the country and set to work.”
A minute later Ivan Markovitch and Sasha in their great-coats and caps
were going down the stairs. The uncle was muttering something edifying.
Sasha did not listen, but felt as though some uneasy weight were
gradually slipping off his shoulders. They had forgiven him; he was
free! A gust of joy sprang up within him and sent a sweet chill to his
heart. He longed to breathe, to move swiftly, to live! Glancing at the
street lamps and the black sky, he remembered that Von Burst was
celebrating his name-day that evening at the “Bear,” and again a rush of
joy flooded his soul. . . .
“I am going!” he decided.
But then he remembered he had not a farthing, that the companions he was
going to would despise him at once for his empty pockets. He must get
hold of some money, come what may!
“Uncle, lend me a hundred roubles,” he said to Ivan Markovitch.
His uncle, surprised, looked into his face and backed against a lamp-
post.
“Give it to me,” said Sasha, shifting impatiently from one foot to the
other and beginning to pant. “Uncle, I entreat you, give me a hundred
roubles.”
His face worked; he trembled, and seemed on the point of attacking his
uncle. . . .
“Won’t you?” he kept asking, seeing that his uncle was still amazed and
did not understand. “Listen. If you don’t, I’ll give myself up tomorrow!
I won’t let you pay the IOU! I’ll present another false note tomorrow!”
Petrified, muttering something incoherent in his horror, Ivan Markovitch
took a hundred-rouble note out of his pocket-book and gave it to Sasha.
The young man took it and walked rapidly away from him. . . .
Taking a sledge, Sasha grew calmer, and felt a rush of joy within him
again. The “rights of youth” of which kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch had
spoken at the family council woke up and asserted themselves. Sasha
pictured the drinking-party before him, and, among the bottles, the
women, and his friends, the thought flashed through his mind:
“Now I see that I am a criminal; yes, I am a criminal.”
THE KISS
AT eight o’clock on the evening of the twentieth of May all the six
batteries of the N—— Reserve Artillery Brigade halted for the night in
the village of Myestetchki on their way to camp. When the general
commotion was at its height, while some officers were busily occupied
around the guns, while others, gathered together in the square near the
church enclosure, were listening to the quartermasters, a man in
civilian dress, riding a strange horse, came into sight round the
church. The little dun-coloured horse with a good neck and a short tail
came, moving not straight forward, but as it were sideways, with a sort
of dance step, as though it were being lashed about the legs. When he
reached the officers the man on the horse took off his hat and said:
“His Excellency Lieutenant-General von Rabbek invites the gentlemen to
drink tea with him this minute. . . .”
The horse turned, danced, and retired sideways; the messenger raised his
hat once more, and in an instant disappeared with his strange horse
behind the church.
“What the devil does it mean?” grumbled some of the officers, dispersing
to their quarters. “One is sleepy, and here this Von Rabbek with his
tea! We know what tea means.”
The officers of all the six batteries remembered vividly an incident of
the previous year, when during manoeuvres they, together with the
officers of a Cossack regiment, were in the same way invited to tea by a
count who had an estate in the neighbourhood and was a retired army
officer: the hospitable and genial count made much of them, fed them,
and gave them drink, refused to let them go to their quarters in the
village and made them stay the night. All that, of course, was very
nice—nothing better could be desired, but the worst of it was, the old
army officer was so carried away by the pleasure of the young men’s
company that till sunrise he was telling the officers anecdotes of his
glorious past, taking them over the house, showing them expensive
pictures, old engravings, rare guns, reading them autograph letters from
great people, while the weary and exhausted officers looked and
listened, longing for their beds and yawning in their sleeves; when at
last their host let them go, it was too late for sleep.
Might not this Von Rabbek be just such another? Whether he were or not,
there was no help for it. The officers changed their uniforms, brushed
themselves, and went all together in search of the gentleman’s house. In
the square by the church they were told they could get to His
Excellency’s by the lower path—going down behind the church to the
river, going along the bank to the garden, and there an avenue would
taken them to the house; or by the upper way— straight from the church
by the road which, half a mile from the village, led right up to His
Excellency’s granaries. The officers decided to go by the upper way.
“What Von Rabbek is it?” they wondered on the way. “Surely not the one
who was in command of the N—— cavalry division at Plevna?”
“No, that was not Von Rabbek, but simply Rabbe and no ‘von.’”
“What lovely weather!”
At the first of the granaries the road divided in two: one branch went
straight on and vanished in the evening darkness, the other led to the
owner’s house on the right. The officers turned to the right and began
to speak more softly. . . . On both sides of the road stretched stone
granaries with red roofs, heavy and sullen-looking, very much like
barracks of a district town. Ahead of them gleamed the windows of the
manor-house.
“A good omen, gentlemen,” said one of the officers. “Our setter is the
foremost of all; no doubt he scents game ahead of us! . . .”
Lieutenant Lobytko, who was walking in front, a tall and stalwart
fellow, though entirely without moustache (he was over five-and-twenty,
yet for some reason there was no sign of hair on his round, well-fed
face), renowned in the brigade for his peculiar faculty for divining the
presence of women at a distance, turned round and said:
“Yes, there must be women here; I feel that by instinct.”
On the threshold the officers were met by Von Rabbek himself, a comely-
looking man of sixty in civilian dress. Shaking hands with his guests,
he said that he was very glad and happy to see them, but begged them
earnestly for God’s sake to excuse him for not asking them to stay the
night; two sisters with their children, some brothers, and some
neighbours, had come on a visit to him, so that he had not one spare
room left.
The General shook hands with every one, made his apologies, and smiled,
but it was evident by his face that he was by no means so delighted as
their last year’s count, and that he had invited the officers simply
because, in his opinion, it was a social obligation to do so. And the
officers themselves, as they walked up the softly carpeted stairs, as
they listened to him, felt that they had been invited to this house
simply because it would have been awkward not to invite them; and at the
sight of the footmen, who hastened to light the lamps in the entrance
below and in the anteroom above, they began to feel as though they had
brought uneasiness and discomfort into the house with them. In a house
in which two sisters and their children, brothers, and neighbours were
gathered together, probably on account of some family festivity, or
event, how could the presence of nineteen unknown officers possibly be
welcome?
At the entrance to the drawing-room the officers were met by a tall,
graceful old lady with black eyebrows and a long face, very much like
the Empress Eugénie. Smiling graciously and majestically, she said she
was glad and happy to see her guests, and apologized that her husband
and she were on this occasion unable to invite messieurs les officiers
to stay the night. From her beautiful majestic smile, which instantly
vanished from her face every time she turned away from her guests, it
was evident that she had seen numbers of officers in her day, that she
was in no humour for them now, and if she invited them to her house and
apologized for not doing more, it was only because her breeding and
position in society required it of her.
When the officers went into the big dining-room, there were about a
dozen people, men and ladies, young and old, sitting at tea at the end
of a long table. A group of men was dimly visible behind their chairs,
wrapped in a haze of cigar smoke; and in the midst of them stood a lanky
young man with red whiskers, talking loudly, with a lisp, in English.
Through a door beyond the group could be seen a light room with pale
blue furniture.
“Gentlemen, there are so many of you that it is impossible to introduce
you all!” said the General in a loud voice, trying to sound very
cheerful. “Make each other’s acquaintance, gentlemen, without any
ceremony!”
The officers—some with very serious and even stern faces, others with
forced smiles, and all feeling extremely awkward—somehow made their bows
and sat down to tea.
The most ill at ease of them all was Ryabovitch—a little officer in
spectacles, with sloping shoulders, and whiskers like a lynx’s. While
some of his comrades assumed a serious expression, while others wore
forced smiles, his face, his lynx-like whiskers, and spectacles seemed
to say: “I am the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer
in the whole brigade!” At first, on going into the room and sitting down
to the table, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object.
The faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam
from the glasses, the moulded cornices—all blended in one general
impression that inspired in Ryabovitch alarm and a desire to hide his
head. Like a lecturer making his first appearance before the public, he
saw everything that was before his eyes, but apparently only had a dim
understanding of it (among physiologists this condition, when the
subject sees but does not understand, is called psychical blindness).
After a little while, growing accustomed to his surroundings, Ryabovitch
saw clearly and began to observe. As a shy man, unused to society, what
struck him first was that in which he had always been deficient—namely,
the extraordinary boldness of his new acquaintances. Von Rabbek, his
wife, two elderly ladies, a young lady in a lilac dress, and the young
man with the red whiskers, who was, it appeared, a younger son of Von
Rabbek, very cleverly, as though they had rehearsed it beforehand, took
seats between the officers, and at once got up a heated discussion in
which the visitors could not help taking part. The lilac young lady
hotly asserted that the artillery had a much better time than the
cavalry and the infantry, while Von Rabbek and the elderly ladies
maintained the opposite. A brisk interchange of talk followed.
Ryabovitch watched the lilac young lady who argued so hotly about what
was unfamiliar and utterly uninteresting to her, and watched artificial
smiles come and go on her face.
Von Rabbek and his family skilfully drew the officers into the
discussion, and meanwhile kept a sharp lookout over their glasses and
mouths, to see whether all of them were drinking, whether all had enough
sugar, why some one was not eating cakes or not drinking brandy. And the
longer Ryabovitch watched and listened, the more he was attracted by
this insincere but splendidly disciplined family.
After tea the officers went into the drawing-room. Lieutenant Lobytko’s
instinct had not deceived him. There were a great number of girls and
young married ladies. The “setter” lieutenant was soon standing by a
very young, fair girl in a black dress, and, bending down to her
jauntily, as though leaning on an unseen sword, smiled and shrugged his
shoulders coquettishly. He probably talked very interesting nonsense,
for the fair girl looked at his well-fed face condescendingly and asked
indifferently, “Really?” And from that uninterested “Really?” the
setter, had he been intelligent, might have concluded that she would
never call him to heel.
The piano struck up; the melancholy strains of a valse floated out of
the wide open windows, and every one, for some reason, remembered that
it was spring, a May evening. Every one was conscious of the fragrance
of roses, of lilac, and of the young leaves of the poplar. Ryabovitch,
in whom the brandy he had drunk made itself felt, under the influence of
the music stole a glance towards the window, smiled, and began watching
the movements of the women, and it seemed to him that the smell of
roses, of poplars, and lilac came not from the garden, but from the
ladies’ faces and dresses.
Von Rabbek’s son invited a scraggy-looking young lady to dance, and
waltzed round the room twice with her. Lobytko, gliding over the parquet
floor, flew up to the lilac young lady and whirled her away. Dancing
began. . . . Ryabovitch stood near the door among those who were not
dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and
he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a
respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the
sight of all take a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her
his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the
position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and
swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the consciousness
that he was timid, that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that
he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers, had deeply mortified him,
but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, looking at
his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but
only felt touched and mournful.
When the quadrille began, young Von Rabbek came up to those who were not
dancing and invited two officers to have a game at billiards. The
officers accepted and went with him out of the drawing-room. Ryabovitch,
having nothing to do and wishing to take part in the general movement,
slouched after them. From the big drawing-room they went into the little
drawing-room, then into a narrow corridor with a glass roof, and thence
into a room in which on their entrance three sleepy-looking footmen
jumped up quickly from the sofa. At last, after passing through a long
succession of rooms, young Von Rabbek and the officers came into a small
room where there was a billiard-table. They began to play.
Ryabovitch, who had never played any game but cards, stood near the
billiard-table and looked indifferently at the players, while they in
unbuttoned coats, with cues in their hands, stepped about, made puns,
and kept shouting out unintelligible words.
The players took no notice of him, and only now and then one of them,
shoving him with his elbow or accidentally touching him with the end of
his cue, would turn round and say “Pardon!” Before the first game was
over he was weary of it, and began to feel he was not wanted and in the
way. . . . He felt disposed to return to the drawing-room, and he went
out.
On his way back he met with a little adventure. When he had gone half-
way he noticed he had taken a wrong turning. He distinctly remembered
that he ought to meet three sleepy footmen on his way, but he had passed
five or six rooms, and those sleepy figures seemed to have vanished into
the earth. Noticing his mistake, he walked back a little way and turned
to the right; he found himself in a little dark room which he had not
seen on his way to the billiard-room. After standing there a little
while, he resolutely opened the first door that met his eyes and walked
into an absolutely dark room. Straight in front could be seen the crack
in the doorway through which there was a gleam of vivid light; from the
other side of the door came the muffled sound of a melancholy mazurka.
Here, too, as in the drawing-room, the windows were wide open and there
was a smell of poplars, lilac and roses. . . .
Ryabovitch stood still in hesitation. . . . At that moment, to his
surprise, he heard hurried footsteps and the rustling of a dress, a
breathless feminine voice whispered “At last!” And two soft, fragrant,
unmistakably feminine arms were clasped about his neck; a warm cheek was
pressed to his cheek, and simultaneously there was the sound of a kiss.
But at once the bestower of the kiss uttered a faint shriek and skipped
back from him, as it seemed to Ryabovitch, with aversion. He, too,
almost shrieked and rushed towards the gleam of light at the door. . . .
When he went back into the drawing-room his heart was beating and his
hands were trembling so noticeably that he made haste to hide them
behind his back. At first he was tormented by shame and dread that the
whole drawing-room knew that he had just been kissed and embraced by a
woman. He shrank into himself and looked uneasily about him, but as he
became convinced that people were dancing and talking as calmly as ever,
he gave himself up entirely to the new sensation which he had never
experienced before in his life. Something strange was happening to him.
. . . His neck, round which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been
clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near
his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly
tingling sensation as from peppermint drops, and the more he rubbed the
place the more distinct was the chilly sensation; all over, from head to
foot, he was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and
stronger . . . . He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to
laugh aloud. . . . He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and
uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an “undistinguished
appearance” (that was how his appearance had been described by some
ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard). When Von
Rabbek’s wife happened to pass by him, he gave her such a broad and
friendly smile that she stood still and looked at him inquiringly.
“I like your house immensely!” he said, setting his spectacles straight.
The General’s wife smiled and said that the house had belonged to her
father; then she asked whether his parents were living, whether he had
long been in the army, why he was so thin, and so on. . . . After
receiving answers to her questions, she went on, and after his
conversation with her his smiles were more friendly than ever, and he
thought he was surrounded by splendid people. . . .
At supper Ryabovitch ate mechanically everything offered him, drank, and
without listening to anything, tried to understand what had just
happened to him. . . . The adventure was of a mysterious and romantic
character, but it was not difficult to explain it. No doubt some girl or
young married lady had arranged a tryst with some one in the dark room;
had waited a long time, and being nervous and excited had taken
Ryabovitch for her hero; this was the more probable as Ryabovitch had
stood still hesitating in the dark room, so that he, too, had seemed
like a person expecting something. . . . This was how Ryabovitch
explained to himself the kiss he had received.
“And who is she?” he wondered, looking round at the women’s faces. “She
must be young, for elderly ladies don’t give rendezvous. That she was a
lady, one could tell by the rustle of her dress, her perfume, her voice.
. . .”
His eyes rested on the lilac young lady, and he thought her very
attractive; she had beautiful shoulders and arms, a clever face, and a
delightful voice. Ryabovitch, looking at her, hoped that she and no one
else was his unknown. . . . But she laughed somehow artificially and
wrinkled up her long nose, which seemed to him to make her look old.
Then he turned his eyes upon the fair girl in a black dress. She was
younger, simpler, and more genuine, had a charming brow, and drank very
daintily out of her wineglass. Ryabovitch now hoped that it was she. But
soon he began to think her face flat, and fixed his eyes upon the one
next her.
“It’s difficult to guess,” he thought, musing. “If one takes the
shoulders and arms of the lilac one only, adds the brow of the fair one
and the eyes of the one on the left of Lobytko, then . . .”
He made a combination of these things in his mind and so formed the
image of the girl who had kissed him, the image that he wanted her to
have, but could not find at the table. . . .
After supper, replete and exhilarated, the officers began to take leave
and say thank you. Von Rabbek and his wife began again apologizing that
they could not ask them to stay the night.
“Very, very glad to have met you, gentlemen,” said Von Rabbek, and this
time sincerely (probably because people are far more sincere and good-
humoured at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them).
“Delighted. I hope you will come on your way back! Don’t stand on
ceremony! Where are you going? Do you want to go by the upper way? No,
go across the garden; it’s nearer here by the lower way.”
The officers went out into the garden. After the bright light and the
noise the garden seemed very dark and quiet. They walked in silence all
the way to the gate. They were a little drunk, pleased, and in good
spirits, but the darkness and silence made them thoughtful for a minute.
Probably the same idea occurred to each one of them as to Ryabovitch:
would there ever come a time for them when, like Von Rabbek, they would
have a large house, a family, a garden— when they, too, would be able to
welcome people, even though insincerely, feed them, make them drunk and
contented?
Going out of the garden gate, they all began talking at once and
laughing loudly about nothing. They were walking now along the little
path that led down to the river, and then ran along the water’s edge,
winding round the bushes on the bank, the pools, and the willows that
overhung the water. The bank and the path were scarcely visible, and the
other bank was entirely plunged in darkness. Stars were reflected here
and there on the dark water; they quivered and were broken up on the
surface—and from that alone it could be seen that the river was flowing
rapidly. It was still. Drowsy curlews cried plaintively on the further
bank, and in one of the bushes on the nearest side a nightingale was
trilling loudly, taking no notice of the crowd of officers. The officers
stood round the bush, touched it, but the nightingale went on singing.
“What a fellow!” they exclaimed approvingly. “We stand beside him and he
takes not a bit of notice! What a rascal!”
At the end of the way the path went uphill, and, skirting the church
enclosure, turned into the road. Here the officers, tired with walking
uphill, sat down and lighted their cigarettes. On the other side of the
river a murky red fire came into sight, and having nothing better to do,
they spent a long time in discussing whether it was a camp fire or a
light in a window, or something else. . . . Ryabovitch, too, looked at
the light, and he fancied that the light looked and winked at him, as
though it knew about the kiss.
On reaching his quarters, Ryabovitch undressed as quickly as possible
and got into bed. Lobytko and Lieutenant Merzlyakov—a peaceable, silent
fellow, who was considered in his own circle a highly educated officer,
and was always, whenever it was possible, reading the “Vyestnik Evropi,”
which he carried about with him everywhere— were quartered in the same
hut with Ryabovitch. Lobytko undressed, walked up and down the room for
a long while with the air of a man who has not been satisfied, and sent
his orderly for beer. Merzlyakov got into bed, put a candle by his
pillow and plunged into reading the “Vyestnik Evropi.”
“Who was she?” Ryabovitch wondered, looking at the smoky ceiling.
His neck still felt as though he had been anointed with oil, and there
was still the chilly sensation near his mouth as though from peppermint
drops. The shoulders and arms of the young lady in lilac, the brow and
the truthful eyes of the fair girl in black, waists, dresses, and
brooches, floated through his imagination. He tried to fix his attention
on these images, but they danced about, broke up and flickered. When
these images vanished altogether from the broad dark background which
every man sees when he closes his eyes, he began to hear hurried
footsteps, the rustle of skirts, the sound of a kiss and—an intense
groundless joy took possession of him . . . . Abandoning himself to this
joy, he heard the orderly return and announce that there was no beer.
Lobytko was terribly indignant, and began pacing up and down again.
“Well, isn’t he an idiot?” he kept saying, stopping first before
Ryabovitch and then before Merzlyakov. “What a fool and a dummy a man
must be not to get hold of any beer! Eh? Isn’t he a scoundrel?”
“Of course you can’t get beer here,” said Merzlyakov, not removing his
eyes from the “Vyestnik Evropi.”
“Oh! Is that your opinion?” Lobytko persisted. “Lord have mercy upon us,
if you dropped me on the moon I’d find you beer and women directly! I’ll
go and find some at once. . . . You may call me an impostor if I don’t!”
He spent a long time in dressing and pulling on his high boots, then
finished smoking his cigarette in silence and went out.
“Rabbek, Grabbek, Labbek,” he muttered, stopping in the outer room. “I
don’t care to go alone, damn it all! Ryabovitch, wouldn’t you like to go
for a walk? Eh?”
Receiving no answer, he returned, slowly undressed and got into bed.
Merzlyakov sighed, put the “Vyestnik Evropi” away, and put out the
light.
“H’m! . . .” muttered Lobytko, lighting a cigarette in the dark.
Ryabovitch pulled the bed-clothes over his head, curled himself up in
bed, and tried to gather together the floating images in his mind and to
combine them into one whole. But nothing came of it. He soon fell
asleep, and his last thought was that some one had caressed him and made
him happy—that something extraordinary, foolish, but joyful and
delightful, had come into his life. The thought did not leave him even
in his sleep.
When he woke up the sensations of oil on his neck and the chill of
peppermint about his lips had gone, but joy flooded his heart just as
the day before. He looked enthusiastically at the window-frames, gilded
by the light of the rising sun, and listened to the movement of the
passers-by in the street. People were talking loudly close to the
window. Lebedetsky, the commander of Ryabovitch’s battery, who had only
just overtaken the brigade, was talking to his sergeant at the top of
his voice, being always accustomed to shout.
“What else?” shouted the commander.
“When they were shoeing yesterday, your high nobility, they drove a nail
into Pigeon’s hoof. The vet. put on clay and vinegar; they are leading
him apart now. And also, your honour, Artemyev got drunk yesterday, and
the lieutenant ordered him to be put in the limber of a spare gun-
carriage.”
The sergeant reported that Karpov had forgotten the new cords for the
trumpets and the rings for the tents, and that their honours, the
officers, had spent the previous evening visiting General Von Rabbek. In
the middle of this conversation the red-bearded face of Lebedetsky
appeared in the window. He screwed up his short-sighted eyes, looking at
the sleepy faces of the officers, and said good-morning to them.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“One of the horses has a sore neck from the new collar,” answered
Lobytko, yawning.
The commander sighed, thought a moment, and said in a loud voice:
“I am thinking of going to see Alexandra Yevgrafovna. I must call on
her. Well, good-bye. I shall catch you up in the evening.”
A quarter of an hour later the brigade set off on its way. When it was
moving along the road by the granaries, Ryabovitch looked at the house
on the right. The blinds were down in all the windows. Evidently the
household was still asleep. The one who had kissed Ryabovitch the day
before was asleep, too. He tried to imagine her asleep. The wide-open
windows of the bedroom, the green branches peeping in, the morning
freshness, the scent of the poplars, lilac, and roses, the bed, a chair,
and on it the skirts that had rustled the day before, the little
slippers, the little watch on the table —all this he pictured to himself
clearly and distinctly, but the features of the face, the sweet sleepy
smile, just what was characteristic and important, slipped through his
imagination like quicksilver through the fingers. When he had ridden on
half a mile, he looked back: the yellow church, the house, and the
river, were all bathed in light; the river with its bright green banks,
with the blue sky reflected in it and glints of silver in the sunshine
here and there, was very beautiful. Ryabovitch gazed for the last time
at Myestetchki, and he felt as sad as though he were parting with
something very near and dear to him.
And before him on the road lay nothing but long familiar, uninteresting
pictures. . . . To right and to left, fields of young rye and buckwheat
with rooks hopping about in them. If one looked ahead, one saw dust and
the backs of men’s heads; if one looked back, one saw the same dust and
faces. . . . Foremost of all marched four men with sabres—this was the
vanguard. Next, behind, the crowd of singers, and behind them the
trumpeters on horseback. The vanguard and the chorus of singers, like
torch-bearers in a funeral procession, often forgot to keep the
regulation distance and pushed a long way ahead. . . . Ryabovitch was
with the first cannon of the fifth battery. He could see all the four
batteries moving in front of him. For any one not a military man this
long tedious procession of a moving brigade seems an intricate and
unintelligible muddle; one cannot understand why there are so many
people round one cannon, and why it is drawn by so many horses in such a
strange network of harness, as though it really were so terrible and
heavy. To Ryabovitch it was all perfectly comprehensible and therefore
uninteresting. He had known for ever so long why at the head of each
battery there rode a stalwart bombardier, and why he was called a
bombardier; immediately behind this bombardier could be seen the
horsemen of the first and then of the middle units. Ryabovitch knew that
the horses on which they rode, those on the left, were called one name,
while those on the right were called another—it was extremely
uninteresting. Behind the horsemen came two shaft-horses. On one of them
sat a rider with the dust of yesterday on his back and a clumsy and
funny-looking piece of wood on his leg. Ryabovitch knew the object of
this piece of wood, and did not think it funny. All the riders waved
their whips mechanically and shouted from time to time. The cannon
itself was ugly. On the fore part lay sacks of oats covered with canvas,
and the cannon itself was hung all over with kettles, soldiers’
knapsacks, bags, and looked like some small harmless animal surrounded
for some unknown reason by men and horses. To the leeward of it marched
six men, the gunners, swinging their arms. After the cannon there came
again more bombardiers, riders, shaft-horses, and behind them another
cannon, as ugly and unimpressive as the first. After the second followed
a third, a fourth; near the fourth an officer, and so on. There were six
batteries in all in the brigade, and four cannons in each battery. The
procession covered half a mile; it ended in a string of wagons near
which an extremely attractive creature—the ass, Magar, brought by a
battery commander from Turkey—paced pensively with his long-eared head
drooping.
Ryabovitch looked indifferently before and behind, at the backs of heads
and at faces; at any other time he would have been half asleep, but now
he was entirely absorbed in his new agreeable thoughts. At first when
the brigade was setting off on the march he tried to persuade himself
that the incident of the kiss could only be interesting as a mysterious
little adventure, that it was in reality trivial, and to think of it
seriously, to say the least of it, was stupid; but now he bade farewell
to logic and gave himself up to dreams. . . . At one moment he imagined
himself in Von Rabbek’s drawing-room beside a girl who was like the
young lady in lilac and the fair girl in black; then he would close his
eyes and see himself with another, entirely unknown girl, whose features
were very vague. In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned on
her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with
his wife, children. . . .
“Brakes on!” the word of command rang out every time they went downhill.
He, too, shouted “Brakes on!” and was afraid this shout would disturb
his reverie and bring him back to reality. . . .
As they passed by some landowner’s estate Ryabovitch looked over the
fence into the garden. A long avenue, straight as a ruler, strewn with
yellow sand and bordered with young birch-trees, met his eyes. . . .
With the eagerness of a man given up to dreaming, he pictured to himself
little feminine feet tripping along yellow sand, and quite unexpectedly
had a clear vision in his imagination of the girl who had kissed him and
whom he had succeeded in picturing to himself the evening before at
supper. This image remained in his brain and did not desert him again.
At midday there was a shout in the rear near the string of wagons:
“Easy! Eyes to the left! Officers!”
The general of the brigade drove by in a carriage with a pair of white
horses. He stopped near the second battery, and shouted something which
no one understood. Several officers, among them Ryabovitch, galloped up
to them.
“Well?” asked the general, bClinking his red eyes. “Are there any sick?”
Receiving an answer, the general, a little skinny man, chewed, thought
for a moment and said, addressing one of the officers:
“One of your drivers of the third cannon has taken off his leg-guard and
hung it on the fore part of the cannon, the rascal. Reprimand him.”
He raised his eyes to Ryabovitch and went on:
“It seems to me your front strap is too long.”
Making a few other tedious remarks, the general looked at Lobytko and
grinned.
“You look very melancholy today, Lieutenant Lobytko,” he said. “Are you
pining for Madame Lopuhov? Eh? Gentlemen, he is pining for Madame
Lopuhov.”
The lady in question was a very stout and tall person who had long
passed her fortieth year. The general, who had a predilection for solid
ladies, whatever their ages, suspected a similar taste in his officers.
The officers smiled respectfully. The general, delighted at having said
something very amusing and biting, laughed loudly, touched his
coachman’s back, and saluted. The carriage rolled on. . . .
“All I am dreaming about now which seems to me so impossible and
unearthly is really quite an ordinary thing,” thought Ryabovitch,
looking at the clouds of dust racing after the general’s carriage. “It’s
all very ordinary, and every one goes through it. . . . That general,
for instance, has once been in love; now he is married and has children.
Captain Vahter, too, is married and beloved, though the nape of his neck
is very red and ugly and he has no waist. . . . Salrnanov is coarse and
very Tatar, but he has had a love affair that has ended in marriage. . .
. I am the same as every one else, and I, too, shall have the same
experience as every one else, sooner or later. . . .”
And the thought that he was an ordinary person, and that his life was
ordinary, delighted him and gave him courage. He pictured her and his
happiness as he pleased, and put no rein on his imagination.
When the brigade reached their halting-place in the evening, and the
officers were resting in their tents, Ryabovitch, Merzlyakov, and
Lobytko were sitting round a box having supper. Merzlyakov ate without
haste, and, as he munched deliberately, read the “Vyestnik Evropi,”
which he held on his knees. Lobytko talked incessantly and kept filling
up his glass with beer, and Ryabovitch, whose head was confused from
dreaming all day long, drank and said nothing. After three glasses he
got a little drunk, felt weak, and had an irresistible desire to impart
his new sensations to his comrades.
“A strange thing happened to me at those Von Rabbeks’,” he began, trying
to put an indifferent and ironical tone into his voice. “You know I went
into the billiard-room. . . .”
He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment
later relapsed into silence. . . . In the course of that moment he had
told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a
time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been
telling the story of the kiss till next morning. Listening to him,
Lobytko, who was a great liar and consequently believed no one, looked
at him sceptically and laughed. Merzlyakov twitched his eyebrows and,
without removing his eyes from the “Vyestnik Evropi,” said:
“That’s an odd thing! How strange! . . . throws herself on a man’s neck,
without addressing him by name. .. . She must be some sort of hysterical
neurotic.”
“Yes, she must,” Ryabovitch agreed.
“A similar thing once happened to me,” said Lobytko, assuming a scared
expression. “I was going last year to Kovno. . . . I took a second-class
ticket. The train was crammed, and it was impossible to sleep. I gave
the guard half a rouble; he took my luggage and led me to another
compartment. . . . I lay down and covered myself with a rug. . . . It
was dark, you understand. Suddenly I felt some one touch me on the
shoulder and breathe in my face. I made a movement with my hand and felt
somebody’s elbow. . . . I opened my eyes and only imagine—a woman. Black
eyes, lips red as a prime salmon, nostrils breathing passionately—a
bosom like a buffer. . . .”
“Excuse me,” Merzlyakov interrupted calmly, “I understand about the
bosom, but how could you see the lips if it was dark?”
Lobytko began trying to put himself right and laughing at Merzlyakov’s
unimaginativeness. It made Ryabovitch wince. He walked away from the
box, got into bed, and vowed never to confide again.
Camp life began. . . . The days flowed by, one very much like another.
All those days Ryabovitch felt, thought, and behaved as though he were
in love. Every morning when his orderly handed him water to wash with,
and he sluiced his head with cold water, he thought there was something
warm and delightful in his life.
In the evenings when his comrades began talking of love and women, he
would listen, and draw up closer; and he wore the expression of a
soldier when he hears the description of a battle in which he has taken
part. And on the evenings when the officers, out on the spree with the
setter—Lobytko—at their head, made Don Juan excursions to the “suburb,”
and Ryabovitch took part in such excursions, he always was sad, felt
profoundly guilty, and inwardly begged her forgiveness. . . . In hours
of leisure or on sleepless nights, when he felt moved to recall his
childhood, his father and mother— everything near and dear, in fact, he
invariably thought of Myestetchki, the strange horse, Von Rabbek, his
wife who was like the Empress Eugénie, the dark room, the crack of
light at the door. . . .
On the thirty-first of August he went back from the camp, not with the
whole brigade, but with only two batteries of it. He was dreaming and
excited all the way, as though he were going back to his native place.
He had an intense longing to see again the strange horse, the church,
the insincere family of the Von Rabbeks, the dark room. The “inner
voice,” which so often deceives lovers, whispered to him for some reason
that he would be sure to see her . . . and he was tortured by the
questions, How he should meet her? What he would talk to her about?
Whether she had forgotten the kiss? If the worst came to the worst, he
thought, even if he did not meet her, it would be a pleasure to him
merely to go through the dark room and recall the past. . . .
Towards evening there appeared on the horizon the familiar church and
white granaries. Ryabovitch’s heart beat. . . . He did not hear the
officer who was riding beside him and saying something to him, he forgot
everything, and looked eagerly at the river shining in the distance, at
the roof of the house, at the dovecote round which the pigeons were
circling in the light of the setting sun.
When they reached the church and were listening to the billeting orders,
he expected every second that a man on horseback would come round the
church enclosure and invite the officers to tea, but . . . the billeting
orders were read, the officers were in haste to go on to the village,
and the man on horseback did not appear.
“Von Rabbek will hear at once from the peasants that we have come and
will send for us,” thought Ryabovitch, as he went into the hut, unable
to understand why a comrade was lighting a candle and why the orderlies
were hurriedly setting samovars. . . .
A painful uneasiness took possession of him. He lay down, then got up
and looked out of the window to see whether the messenger were coming.
But there was no sign of him.
He lay down again, but half an hour later he got up, and, unable to
restrain his uneasiness, went into the street and strode towards the
church. It was dark and deserted in the square near the church . . . .
Three soldiers were standing silent in a row where the road began to go
downhill. Seeing Ryabovitch, they roused themselves and saluted. He
returned the salute and began to go down the familiar path.
On the further side of the river the whole sky was flooded with crimson:
the moon was rising; two peasant women, talking loudly, were picking
cabbage in the kitchen garden; behind the kitchen garden there were some
dark huts. . . . And everything on the near side of the river was just
as it had been in May: the path, the bushes, the willows overhanging the
water . . . but there was no sound of the brave nightingale, and no
scent of poplar and fresh grass.
Reaching the garden, Ryabovitch looked in at the gate. The garden was
dark and still. . . . He could see nothing but the white stems of the
nearest birch-trees and a little bit of the avenue; all the rest melted
together into a dark blur. Ryabovitch looked and listened eagerly, but
after waiting for a quarter of an hour without hearing a sound or
catching a glimpse of a light, he trudged back. . . .
He went down to the river. The General’s bath-house and the bath-sheets
on the rail of the little bridge showed white before him. . . . He went
on to the bridge, stood a little, and, quite unnecessarily, touched the
sheets. They felt rough and cold. He looked down at the water. . . . The
river ran rapidly and with a faintly audible gurgle round the piles of
the bath-house. The red moon was reflected near the left bank; little
ripples ran over the reflection, stretching it out, breaking it into
bits, and seemed trying to carry it away.
“How stupid, how stupid!” thought Ryabovitch, looking at the running
water. “How unintelligent it all is!”
Now that he expected nothing, the incident of the kiss, his impatience,
his vague hopes and disappointment, presented themselves in a clear
light. It no longer seemed to him strange that he had not seen the
General’s messenger, and that he would never see the girl who had
accidentally kissed him instead of some one else; on the contrary, it
would have been strange if he had seen her. . . .
The water was running, he knew not where or why, just as it did in May.
In May it had flowed into the great river, from the great river into the
sea; then it had risen in vapour, turned into rain, and perhaps the very
same water was running now before Ryabovitch’s eyes again. . . . What
for? Why?
And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an
unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water
and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an
unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer
dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre,
poverty-stricken, and colourless. . . .
When he went back to his hut he did not find one of his comrades. The
orderly informed him that they had all gone to “General von Rabbek’s,
who had sent a messenger on horseback to invite them. . . .”
For an instant there was a flash of joy in Ryabovitch’s heart, but he
quenched it at once, got into bed, and in his wrath with his fate, as
though to spite it, did not go to the General’s.
‘ANNA ON THE NECK’ I
AFTER the wedding they had not even light refreshments; the happy pair
simply drank a glass of champagne, changed into their travelling things,
and drove to the station. Instead of a gay wedding ball and supper,
instead of music and dancing, they went on a journey to pray at a shrine
a hundred and fifty miles away. Many people commended this, saying that
Modest Alexeitch was a man high up in the service and no longer young,
and that a noisy wedding might not have seemed quite suitable; and music
is apt to sound dreary when a government official of fifty-two marries a
girl who is only just eighteen. People said, too, that Modest Alexeitch,
being a man of principle, had arranged this visit to the monastery
expressly in order to make his young bride realize that even in marriage
he put religion and morality above everything.
The happy pair were seen off at the station. The crowd of relations and
colleagues in the service stood, with glasses in their hands, waiting
for the train to start to shout “Hurrah!” and the bride’s father, Pyotr
Leontyitch, wearing a top-hat and the uniform of a teacher, already
drunk and very pale, kept craning towards the window, glass in hand and
saying in an imploring voice:
“Anyuta! Anya, Anya! one word!”
Anna bent out of the window to him, and he whispered something to her,
enveloping her in a stale smell of alcohol, blew into her ear —she could
make out nothing—and made the sign of the cross over her face, her
bosom, and her hands; meanwhile he was breathing in gasps and tears were
shining in his eyes. And the schoolboys, Anna’s brothers, Petya and
Andrusha, pulled at his coat from behind, whispering in confusion:
“Father, hush! . . . Father, that’s enough. . . .”
When the train started, Anna saw her father run a little way after the
train, staggering and spilling his wine, and what a kind, guilty,
pitiful face he had:
“Hurra—ah!” he shouted.
The happy pair were left alone. Modest Alexeitch looked about the
compartment, arranged their things on the shelves, and sat down,
smiling, opposite his young wife. He was an official of medium height,
rather stout and puffy, who looked exceedingly well nourished, with long
whiskers and no moustache. His clean-shaven, round, sharply defined chin
looked like the heel of a foot. The most characteristic point in his
face was the absence of moustache, the bare, freshly shaven place, which
gradually passed into the fat cheeks, quivering like jelly. His
deportment was dignified, his movements were deliberate, his manner was
soft.
“I cannot help remembering now one circumstance,” he said, smiling.
“When, five years ago, Kosorotov received the order of St. Anna of the
second grade, and went to thank His Excellency, His Excellency expressed
himself as follows: ‘So now you have three Annas: one in your buttonhole
and two on your neck.’ And it must be explained that at that time
Kosorotov’s wife, a quarrelsome and frivolous person, had just returned
to him, and that her name was Anna. I trust that when I receive the Anna
of the second grade His Excellency will not have occasion to say the
same thing to me.”
He smiled with his little eyes. And she, too, smiled, troubled at the
thought that at any moment this man might kiss her with his thick damp
lips, and that she had no right to prevent his doing so. The soft
movements of his fat person frightened her; she felt both fear and
disgust. He got up, without haste took off the order from his neck, took
off his coat and waistcoat, and put on his dressing-gown.
“That’s better,” he said, sitting down beside Anna.
Anna remembered what agony the wedding had been, when it had seemed to
her that the priest, and the guests, and every one in church had been
looking at her sorrowfully and asking why, why was she, such a sweet,
nice girl, marrying such an elderly, uninteresting gentleman. Only that
morning she was delighted that everything had been satisfactorily
arranged, but at the time of the wedding, and now in the railway
carriage, she felt cheated, guilty, and ridiculous. Here she had married
a rich man and yet she had no money, her wedding-dress had been bought
on credit, and when her father and brothers had been saying good-bye,
she could see from their faces that they had not a farthing. Would they
have any supper that day? And tomorrow? And for some reason it seemed to
her that her father and the boys were sitting tonight hungry without
her, and feeling the same misery as they had the day after their
mother’s funeral.
“Oh, how unhappy I am!” she thought. “Why am I so unhappy?”
With the awkwardness of a man with settled habits, unaccustomed to deal
with women, Modest Alexeitch touched her on the waist and patted her on
the shoulder, while she went on thinking about money, about her mother
and her mother’s death. When her mother died, her father, Pyotr
Leontyitch, a teacher of drawing and writing in the high school, had
taken to drink, impoverishment had followed, the boys had not had boots
or goloshes, their father had been hauled up before the magistrate, the
warrant officer had come and made an inventory of the furniture. . . .
What a disgrace! Anna had had to look after her drunken father, darn her
brothers’ stockings, go to market, and when she was complimented on her
youth, her beauty, and her elegant manners, it seemed to her that every
one was looking at her cheap hat and the holes in her boots that were
inked over. And at night there had been tears and a haunting dread that
her father would soon, very soon, be dismissed from the school for his
weakness, and that he would not survive it, but would die, too, like
their mother. But ladies of their acquaintance had taken the matter in
hand and looked about for a good match for Anna. This Modest Alexevitch,
who was neither young nor good-looking but had money, was soon found. He
had a hundred thousand in the bank and the family estate, which he had
let on lease. He was a man of principle and stood well with His
Excellency; it would be nothing to him, so they told Anna, to get a note
from His Excellency to the directors of the high school, or even to the
Education Commissioner, to prevent Pyotr Leontyitch from being
dismissed.
While she was recalling these details, she suddenly heard strains of
music which floated in at the window, together with the sound of voices.
The train was stopping at a station. In the crowd beyond the platform an
accordion and a cheap squeaky fiddle were being briskly played, and the
sound of a military band came from beyond the villas and the tall
birches and poplars that lay bathed in the moonlight; there must have
been a dance in the place. Summer visitors and townspeople, who used to
come out here by train in fine weather for a breath of fresh air, were
parading up and down on the platform. Among them was the wealthy owner
of all the summer villas—a tall, stout, dark man called Artynov. He had
prominent eyes and looked like an Armenian. He wore a strange costume;
his shirt was unbuttoned, showing his chest; he wore high boots with
spurs, and a black cloak hung from his shoulders and dragged on the
ground like a train. Two boar-hounds followed him with their sharp noses
to the ground.
Tears were still shining in Anna’s eyes, but she was not thinking now of
her mother, nor of money, nor of her marriage; but shaking hands with
schoolboys and officers she knew, she laughed gaily and said quickly:
“How do you do? How are you?”
She went out on to the platform between the carriages into the
moonlight, and stood so that they could all see her in her new splendid
dress and hat.
“Why are we stopping here?” she asked.
“This is a junction. They are waiting for the mail train to pass.”
Seeing that Artynov was looking at her, she screwed up her eyes
coquettishly and began talking aloud in French; and because her voice
sounded so pleasant, and because she heard music and the moon was
reflected in the pond, and because Artynov, the notorious Don Juan and
spoiled child of fortune, was looking at her eagerly and with curiosity,
and because every one was in good spirits—she suddenly felt joyful, and
when the train started and the officers of her acquaintance saluted her,
she was humming the polka the strains of which reached her from the
military band playing beyond the trees; and she returned to her
compartment feeling as though it had been proved to her at the station
that she would certainly be happy in spite of everything.
The happy pair spent two days at the monastery, then went back to town.
They lived in a rent-free flat. When Modest Alexevitch had gone to the
office, Anna played the piano, or shed tears of depression, or lay down
on a couch and read novels or looked through fashion papers. At dinner
Modest Alexevitch ate a great deal and talked about politics, about
appointments, transfers, and promotions in the service, about the
necessity of hard work, and said that, family life not being a pleasure
but a duty, if you took care of the kopecks the roubles would take care
of themselves, and that he put religion and morality before everything
else in the world. And holding his knife in his fist as though it were a
sword, he would say:
“Every one ought to have his duties!”
And Anna listened to him, was frightened, and could not eat, and she
usually got up from the table hungry. After dinner her husband lay down
for a nap and snored loudly, while Anna went to see her own people. Her
father and the boys looked at her in a peculiar way, as though just
before she came in they had been blaming her for having married for
money a tedious, wearisome man she did not love; her rustling skirts,
her bracelets, and her general air of a married lady, offended them and
made them uncomfortable. In her presence they felt a little embarrassed
and did not know what to talk to her about; but yet they still loved her
as before, and were not used to having dinner without her. She sat down
with them to cabbage soup, porridge, and fried potatoes, smelling of
mutton dripping. Pyotr Leontyitch filled his glass from the decanter
with a trembling hand and drank it off hurriedly, greedily, with
repulsion, then poured out a second glass and then a third. Petya and
Andrusha, thin, pale boys with big eyes, would take the decanter and say
desperately:
“You mustn’t, father. . . . Enough, father. . . .”
And Anna, too, was troubled and entreated him to drink no more; and he
would suddenly fly into a rage and beat the table with his fists:
“I won’t allow any one to dictate to me!” he would shout. “Wretched
boys! wretched girl! I’ll turn you all out!”
But there was a note of weakness, of good-nature in his voice, and no
one was afraid of him. After dinner he usually dressed in his best.
Pale, with a cut on his chin from shaving, craning his thin neck, he
would stand for half an hour before the glass, prinking, combing his
hair, twisting his black moustache, sprinkling himself with scent, tying
his cravat in a bow; then he would put on his gloves and his top-hat,
and go off to give his private lessons. Or if it was a holiday he would
stay at home and paint, or play the harmonium, which wheezed and
growled; he would try to wrest from it pure harmonious sounds and would
sing to it; or would storm at the boys:
“Wretches! Good-for-nothing boys! You have spoiled the instrument!”
In the evening Anna’s husband played cards with his colleagues, who
lived under the same roof in the government quarters. The wives of these
gentlemen would come in—ugly, tastelessly dressed women, as coarse as
cooks—and gossip would begin in the flat as tasteless and unattractive
as the ladies themselves. Sometimes Modest Alexevitch would take Anna to
the theatre. In the intervals he would never let her stir a step from
his side, but walked about arm in arm with her through the corridors and
the foyer. When he bowed to some one, he immediately whispered to Anna:
“A civil councillor . . . visits at His Excellency’s”; or, “A man of
means . . . has a house of his own.” When they passed the buffet Anna
had a great longing for something sweet; she was fond of chocolate and
apple cakes, but she had no money, and she did not like to ask her
husband. He would take a pear, pinch it with his fingers, and ask
uncertainly:
“How much?”
“Twenty-five kopecks!”
“I say!” he would reply, and put it down; but as it was awkward to leave
the buffet without buying anything, he would order some seltzer-water
and drink the whole bottle himself, and tears would come into his eyes.
And Anna hated him at such times.
And suddenly flushing crimson, he would say to her rapidly:
“Bow to that old lady!”
“But I don’t know her.”
“No matter. That’s the wife of the director of the local treasury! Bow,
I tell you,” he would grumble insistently. “Your head won’t drop off.”
Anna bowed and her head certainly did not drop off, but it was
agonizing. She did everything her husband wanted her to, and was furious
with herself for having let him deceive her like the veriest idiot. She
had only married him for his money, and yet she had less money now than
before her marriage. In old days her father would sometimes give her
twenty kopecks, but now she had not a farthing.
To take money by stealth or ask for it, she could not; she was afraid of
her husband, she trembled before him. She felt as though she had been
afraid of him for years. In her childhood the director of the high
school had always seemed the most impressive and terrifying force in the
world, sweeping down like a thunderstorm or a steam-engine ready to
crush her; another similar force of which the whole family talked, and
of which they were for some reason afraid, was His Excellency; then
there were a dozen others, less formidable, and among them the teachers
at the high school, with shaven upper lips, stern, implacable; and now
finally, there was Modest Alexeitch, a man of principle, who even
resembled the director in the face. And in Anna’s imagination all these
forces blended together into one, and, in the form of a terrible, huge
white bear, menaced the weak and erring such as her father. And she was
afraid to say anything in opposition to her husband, and gave a forced
smile, and tried to make a show of pleasure when she was coarsely
caressed and defiled by embraces that excited her terror. Only once
Pyotr Leontyitch had the temerity to ask for a loan of fifty roubles in
order to pay some very irksome debt, but what an agony it had been!
“Very good; I’ll give it to you,” said Modest Alexeitch after a moment’s
thought; “but I warn you I won’t help you again till you give up
drinking. Such a failing is disgraceful in a man in the government
service! I must remind you of the well-known fact that many capable
people have been ruined by that passion, though they might possibly,
with temperance, have risen in time to a very high position.”
And long-winded phrases followed: “inasmuch as . . .”, “following upon
which proposition . . .”, “in view of the aforesaid contention . . .”;
and Pyotr Leontyitch was in agonies of humiliation and felt an intense
craving for alcohol.
And when the boys came to visit Anna, generally in broken boots and
threadbare trousers, they, too, had to listen to sermons.
“Every man ought to have his duties!” Modest Alexeitch would say to
them.
And he did not give them money. But he did give Anna bracelets, rings,
and brooches, saying that these things would come in useful for a rainy
day. And he often unlocked her drawer and made an inspection to see
whether they were all safe. II
Meanwhile winter came on. Long before Christmas there was an
announcement in the local papers that the usual winter ball would take
place on the twenty-ninth of December in the Hall of Nobility. Every
evening after cards Modest Alexeitch was excitedly whispering with his
colleagues’ wives and glancing at Anna, and then paced up and down the
room for a long while, thinking. At last, late one evening, he stood
still, facing Anna, and said:
“You ought to get yourself a ball dress. Do you understand? Only please
consult Marya Grigoryevna and Natalya Kuzminishna.”
And he gave her a hundred roubles. She took the money, but she did not
consult any one when she ordered the ball dress; she spoke to no one but
her father, and tried to imagine how her mother would have dressed for a
ball. Her mother had always dressed in the latest fashion and had always
taken trouble over Anna, dressing her elegantly like a doll, and had
taught her to speak French and dance the mazurka superbly (she had been
a governess for five years before her marriage). Like her mother, Anna
could make a new dress out of an old one, clean gloves with benzine,
hire jewels; and, like her mother, she knew how to screw up her eyes,
lisp, assume graceful attitudes, fly into raptures when necessary, and
throw a mournful and enigmatic look into her eyes. And from her father
she had inherited the dark colour of her hair and eyes, her highly-
strung nerves, and the habit of always making herself look her best.
When, half an hour before setting off for the ball, Modest Alexeitch
went into her room without his coat on, to put his order round his neck
before her pier-glass, dazzled by her beauty and the splendour of her
fresh, ethereal dress, he combed his whiskers complacently and said:
“So that’s what my wife can look like . . . so that’s what you can look
like! Anyuta!” he went on, dropping into a tone of solemnity, “I have
made your fortune, and now I beg you to do something for mine. I beg you
to get introduced to the wife of His Excellency! For God’s sake, do!
Through her I may get the post of senior reporting clerk!”
They went to the ball. They reached the Hall of Nobility, the entrance
with the hall porter. They came to the vestibule with the hat-stands,
the fur coats; footmen scurrying about, and ladies with low necks
putting up their fans to screen themselves from the draughts. There was
a smell of gas and of soldiers. When Anna, walking upstairs on her
husband’s arm, heard the music and saw herself full length in the
looking-glass in the full glow of the lights, there was a rush of joy in
her heart, and she felt the same presentiment of happiness as in the
moonlight at the station. She walked in proudly, confidently, for the
first time feeling herself not a girl but a lady, and unconsciously
imitating her mother in her walk and in her manner. And for the first
time in her life she felt rich and free. Even her husband’s presence did
not oppress her, for as she crossed the threshold of the hall she had
guessed instinctively that the proximity of an old husband did not
detract from her in the least, but, on the contrary, gave her that shade
of piquant mystery that is so attractive to men. The orchestra was
already playing and the dances had begun. After their flat Anna was
overwhelmed by the lights, the bright colours, the music, the noise, and
looking round the room, thought, “Oh, how lovely!” She at once
distinguished in the crowd all her acquaintances, every one she had met
before at parties or on picnics—all the officers, the teachers, the
lawyers, the officials, the landowners, His Excellency, Artynov, and the
ladies of the highest standing, dressed up and very décollettées,
handsome and ugly, who had already taken up their positions in the
stalls and pavilions of the charity bazaar, to begin selling things for
the benefit of the poor. A huge officer in epaulettes—she had been
introduced to him in Staro-Kievsky Street when she was a schoolgirl, but
now she could not remember his name—seemed to spring from out of the
ground, begging her for a waltz, and she flew away from her husband,
feeling as though she were floating away in a sailing-boat in a violent
storm, while her husband was left far away on the shore. She danced
passionately, with fervour, a waltz, then a polka and a quadrille, being
snatched by one partner as soon as she was left by another, dizzy with
music and the noise, mixing Russian with French, lisping, laughing, and
with no thought of her husband or anything else. She excited great
admiration among the men—that was evident, and indeed it could not have
been otherwise; she was breathless with excitement, felt thirsty, and
convulsively clutched her fan. Pyotr Leontyitch, her father, in a
crumpled dress-coat that smelt of benzine, came up to her, offering her
a plate of pink ice.
“You are enchanting this evening,” he said, looking at her rapturously,
“and I have never so much regretted that you were in such a hurry to get
married. . . . What was it for? I know you did it for our sake, but . .
.” With a shaking hand he drew out a roll of notes and said: “I got the
money for my lessons today, and can pay your husband what I owe him.”
She put the plate back into his hand, and was pounced upon by some one
and borne off to a distance. She caught a glimpse over her partner’s
shoulder of her father gliding over the floor, putting his arm round a
lady and whirling down the ball-room with her.
“How sweet he is when he is sober!” she thought.
She danced the mazurka with the same huge officer; he moved gravely, as
heavily as a dead carcase in a uniform, twitched his shoulders and his
chest, stamped his feet very languidly—he felt fearfully disinclined to
dance. She fluttered round him, provoking him by her beauty, her bare
neck; her eyes glowed defiantly, her movements were passionate, while he
became more and more indifferent, and held out his hands to her as
graciously as a king.
“Bravo, bravo!” said people watching them.
But little by little the huge officer, too, broke out; he grew lively,
excited, and, overcome by her fascination, was carried away and danced
lightly, youthfully, while she merely moved her shoulders and looked
slyly at him as though she were now the queen and he were her slave; and
at that moment it seemed to her that the whole room was looking at them,
and that everybody was thrilled and envied them. The huge officer had
hardly had time to thank her for the dance, when the crowd suddenly
parted and the men drew themselves up in a strange way, with their hands
at their sides.
His Excellency, with two stars on his dress-coat, was walking up to her.
Yes, His Excellency was walking straight towards her, for he was staring
directly at her with a sugary smile, while he licked his lips as he
always did when he saw a pretty woman.
“Delighted, delighted . . .” he began. “I shall order your husband to be
clapped in a lock-up for keeping such a treasure hidden from us till
now. I’ve come to you with a message from my wife,” he went on, offering
her his arm. “You must help us. . . . M-m-yes. . . . We ought to give
you the prize for beauty as they do in America . . . . M-m-yes. . . .
The Americans. . . . My wife is expecting you impatiently.”
He led her to a stall and presented her to a middle-aged lady, the lower
part of whose face was disproportionately large, so that she looked as
though she were holding a big stone in her mouth.
“You must help us,” she said through her nose in a sing-song voice. “All
the pretty women are working for our charity bazaar, and you are the
only one enjoying yourself. Why won’t you help us?”
She went away, and Anna took her place by the cups and the silver
samovar. She was soon doing a lively trade. Anna asked no less than a
rouble for a cup of tea, and made the huge officer drink three cups.
Artynov, the rich man with prominent eyes, who suffered from asthma,
came up, too; he was not dressed in the strange costume in which Anna
had seen him in the summer at the station, but wore a dress-coat like
every one else. Keeping his eyes fixed on Anna, he drank a glass of
champagne and paid a hundred roubles for it, then drank some tea and
gave another hundred—all this without saying a word, as he was short of
breath through asthma. . . . Anna invited purchasers and got money out
of them, firmly convinced by now that her smiles and glances could not
fail to afford these people great pleasure. She realized now that she
was created exclusively for this noisy, brilliant, laughing life, with
its music, its dancers, its adorers, and her old terror of a force that
was sweeping down upon her and menacing to crush her seemed to her
ridiculous: she was afraid of no one now, and only regretted that her
mother could not be there to rejoice at her success.
Pyotr Leontyitch, pale by now but still steady on his legs, came up to
the stall and asked for a glass of brandy. Anna turned crimson,
expecting him to say something inappropriate (she was already ashamed of
having such a poor and ordinary father); but he emptied his glass, took
ten roubles out of his roll of notes, flung it down, and walked away
with dignity without uttering a word. A little later she saw him dancing
in the grand chain, and by now he was staggering and kept shouting
something, to the great confusion of his partner; and Anna remembered
how at the ball three years before he had staggered and shouted in the
same way, and it had ended in the police-sergeant’s taking him home to
bed, and next day the director had threatened to dismiss him from his
post. How inappropriate that memory was!
When the samovars were put out in the stalls and the exhausted ladies
handed over their takings to the middle-aged lady with the stone in her
mouth, Artynov took Anna on his arm to the hall where supper was served
to all who had assisted at the bazaar. There were some twenty people at
supper, not more, but it was very noisy. His Excellency proposed a
toast:
“In this magnificent dining-room it will be appropriate to drink to the
success of the cheap dining-rooms, which are the object of today’s
bazaar.”
The brigadier-general proposed the toast: “To the power by which even
the artillery is vanquished,” and all the company cClinked glasses with
the ladies. It was very, very gay.
When Anna was escorted home it was daylight and the cooks were going to
market. Joyful, intoxicated, full of new sensations, exhausted, she
undressed, dropped into bed, and at once fell asleep. . . .
It was past one in the afternoon when the servant waked her and
announced that M. Artynov had called. She dressed quickly and went down
into the drawing-room. Soon after Artynov, His Excellency called to
thank her for her assistance in the bazaar. With a sugary smile, chewing
his lips, he kissed her hand, and asking her permission to come again,
took his leave, while she remained standing in the middle of the
drawing-room, amazed, enchanted, unable to believe that this change in
her life, this marvellous change, had taken place so quickly; and at
that moment Modest Alexeitch walked in . . . and he, too, stood before
her now with the same ingratiating, sugary, cringingly respectful
expression which she was accustomed to see on his face in the presence
of the great and powerful; and with rapture, with indignation, with
contempt, convinced that no harm would come to her from it, she said,
articulating distinctly each word:
“Be off, you blockhead!”
From this time forward Anna never had one day free, as she was always
taking part in picnics, expeditions, performances. She returned home
every day after midnight, and went to bed on the floor in the drawing-
room, and afterwards used to tell every one, touchingly, how she slept
under flowers. She needed a very great deal of money, but she was no
longer afraid of Modest Alexeitch, and spent his money as though it were
her own; and she did not ask, did not demand it, simply sent him in the
bills. “Give bearer two hundred roubles,” or “Pay one hundred roubles at
once.”
At Easter Modest Alexeitch received the Anna of the second grade. When
he went to offer his thanks, His Excellency put aside the paper he was
reading and settled himself more comfortably in his chair.
“So now you have three Annas,” he said, scrutinizing his white hands and
pink nails—“one on your buttonhole and two on your neck.”
Modest Alexeitch put two fingers to his lips as a precaution against
laughing too loud and said:
“Now I have only to look forward to the arrival of a little Vladimir. I
make bold to beg your Excellency to stand godfather.”
He was alluding to Vladimir of the fourth grade, and was already
imagining how he would tell everywhere the story of this pun, so happy
in its readiness and audacity, and he wanted to say something equally
happy, but His Excellency was buried again in his newspaper, and merely
gave him a nod.
And Anna went on driving about with three horses, going out hunting with
Artynov, playing in one-act dramas, going out to supper, and was more
and more rarely with her own family; they dined now alone. Pyotr
Leontyitch was drinking more heavily than ever; there was no money, and
the harmonium had been sold long ago for debt. The boys did not let him
go out alone in the street now, but looked after him for fear he might
fall down; and whenever they met Anna driving in Staro-Kievsky Street
with a pair of horses and Artynov on the box instead of a coachman,
Pyotr Leontyitch took off his top-hat, and was about to shout to her,
but Petya and Andrusha took him by the arm, and said imploringly:
“You mustn’t, father. Hush, father!”
THE TEACHER OF LITERATURE I
THERE was the thud of horses’ hoofs on the wooden floor; they brought
out of the stable the black horse, Count Nulin; then the white, Giant;
then his sister Maika. They were all magnificent, expensive horses. Old
Shelestov saddled Giant and said, addressing his daughter Masha:
“Well, Marie Godefroi, come, get on! Hopla!”
Masha Shelestov was the youngest of the family; she was eighteen, but
her family could not get used to thinking that she was not a little
girl, and so they still called her Manya and Manyusa; and after there
had been a circus in the town which she had eagerly visited, every one
began to call her Marie Godefroi.
“Hop-la!” she cried, mounting Giant. Her sister Varya got on Maika,
Nikitin on Count Nulin, the officers on their horses, and the long
picturesque cavalcade, with the officers in white tunics and the ladies
in their riding habits, moved at a walking pace out of the yard.
Nikitin noticed that when they were mounting the horses and afterwards
riding out into the street, Masha for some reason paid attention to no
one but himself. She looked anxiously at him and at Count Nulin and
said:
“You must hold him all the time on the curb, Sergey Vassilitch. Don’t
let him shy. He’s pretending.”
And either because her Giant was very friendly with Count Nulin, or
perhaps by chance, she rode all the time beside Nikitin, as she had done
the day before, and the day before that. And he looked at her graceful
little figure sitting on the proud white beast, at her delicate profile,
at the chimney-pot hat, which did not suit her at all and made her look
older than her age—looked at her with joy, with tenderness, with
rapture; listened to her, taking in little of what she said, and
thought:
“I promise on my honour, I swear to God, I won’t be afraid and I’ll
speak to her today.”
It was seven o’clock in the evening—the time when the scent of white
acacia and lilac is so strong that the air and the very trees seem heavy
with the fragrance. The band was already playing in the town gardens.
The horses made a resounding thud on the pavement, on all sides there
were sounds of laughter, talk, and the banging of gates. The soldiers
they met saluted the officers, the schoolboys bowed to Nikitin, and all
the people who were hurrying to the gardens to hear the band were
pleased at the sight of the party. And how warm it was! How soft-looking
were the clouds scattered carelessly about the sky, how kindly and
comforting the shadows of the poplars and the acacias, which stretched
across the street and reached as far as the balconies and second stories
of the houses on the other side.
They rode on out of the town and set off at a trot along the highroad.
Here there was no scent of lilac and acacia, no music of the band, but
there was the fragrance of the fields, there was the green of young rye
and wheat, the marmots were squeaking, the rooks were cawing. Wherever
one looked it was green, with only here and there black patches of bare
ground, and far away to the left in the cemetery a white streak of
apple-blossom.
They passed the slaughter-houses, then the brewery, and overtook a
military band hastening to the suburban gardens.
“Polyansky has a very fine horse, I don’t deny that,” Masha said to
Nikitin, with a glance towards the officer who was riding beside Varya.
“But it has blemishes. That white patch on its left leg ought not to be
there, and, look, it tosses its head. You can’t train it not to now; it
will toss its head till the end of its days.”
Masha was as passionate a lover of horses as her father. She felt a pang
when she saw other people with fine horses, and was pleased when she saw
defects in them. Nikitin knew nothing about horses; it made absolutely
no difference to him whether he held his horse on the bridle or on the
curb, whether he trotted or galloped; he only felt that his position was
strained and unnatural, and that consequently the officers who knew how
to sit in their saddles must please Masha more than he could. And he was
jealous of the officers.
As they rode by the suburban gardens some one suggested their going in
and getting some seltzer-water. They went in. There were no trees but
oaks in the gardens; they had only just come into leaf, so that through
the young foliage the whole garden could still be seen with its
platform, little tables, and swings, and the crows’ nests were visible,
looking like big hats. The party dismounted near a table and asked for
seltzer-water. People they knew, walking about the garden, came up to
them. Among them the army doctor in high boots, and the conductor of the
band, waiting for the musicians. The doctor must have taken Nikitin for
a student, for he asked: “Have you come for the summer holidays?”
“No, I am here permanently,” answered Nikitin. “I am a teacher at the
school.”
“You don’t say so?” said the doctor, with surprise. “So young and
already a teacher?”
“Young, indeed! My goodness, I’m twenty-six!
“You have a beard and moustache, but yet one would never guess you were
more than twenty-two or twenty-three. How young-looking you are!”
“What a beast!” thought Nikitin. “He, too, takes me for a whipper-
snapper!”
He disliked it extremely when people referred to his youth, especially
in the presence of women or the schoolboys. Ever since he had come to
the town as a master in the school he had detested his own youthful
appearance. The schoolboys were not afraid of him, old people called him
“young man,” ladies preferred dancing with him to listening to his long
arguments, and he would have given a great deal to be ten years older.
From the garden they went on to the Shelestovs’ farm. There they stopped
at the gate and asked the bailiff’s wife, Praskovya, to bring some new
milk. Nobody drank the milk; they all looked at one another, laughed,
and galloped back. As they rode back the band was playing in the
suburban garden; the sun was setting behind the cemetery, and half the
sky was crimson from the sunset.
Masha again rode beside Nikitin. He wanted to tell her how passionately
he loved her, but he was afraid he would be overheard by the officers
and Varya, and he was silent. Masha was silent, too, and he felt why she
was silent and why she was riding beside him, and was so happy that the
earth, the sky, the lights of the town, the black outline of the
brewery—all blended for him into something very pleasant and comforting,
and it seemed to him as though Count Nulin were stepping on air and
would climb up into the crimson sky.
They arrived home. The samovar was already boiling on the table, old
Shelestov was sitting with his friends, officials in the Circuit Court,
and as usual he was criticizing something.
“It’s loutishness!” he said. “Loutishness and nothing more. Yes!”
Since Nikitin had been in love with Masha, everything at the Shelestovs’
pleased him: the house, the garden, and the evening tea, and the
wickerwork chairs, and the old nurse, and even the word “loutishness,”
which the old man was fond of using. The only thing he did not like was
the number of cats and dogs and the Egyptian pigeons, who moaned
disconsolately in a big cage in the verandah. There were so many house-
dogs and yard-dogs that he had only learnt to recognize two of them in
the course of his acquaintance with the Shelestovs: Mushka and Som.
Mushka was a little mangy dog with a shaggy face, spiteful and spoiled.
She hated Nikitin: when she saw him she put her head on one side, showed
her teeth, and began: “Rrr . . . nga-nga-nga . . . rrr . . . !” Then she
would get under his chair, and when he would try to drive her away she
would go off into piercing yaps, and the family would say: “Don’t be
frightened. She doesn’t bite. She is a good dog.”
Som was a tall black dog with long legs and a tail as hard as a stick.
At dinner and tea he usually moved about under the table, and thumped on
people’s boots and on the legs of the table with his tail. He was a
good-natured, stupid dog, but Nikitin could not endure him because he
had the habit of putting his head on people’s knees at dinner and
messing their trousers with saliva. Nikitin had more than once tried to
hit him on his head with a knife-handle, to flip him on the nose, had
abused him, had complained of him, but nothing saved his trousers.
After their ride the tea, jam, rusks, and butter seemed very nice. They
all drank their first glass in silence and with great relish; over the
second they began an argument. It was always Varya who started the
arguments at tea; she was good-looking, handsomer than Masha, and was
considered the cleverest and most cultured person in the house, and she
behaved with dignity and severity, as an eldest daughter should who has
taken the place of her dead mother in the house. As the mistress of the
house, she felt herself entitled to wear a dressing-gown in the presence
of her guests, and to call the officers by their surnames; she looked on
Masha as a little girl, and talked to her as though she were a
schoolmistress. She used to speak of herself as an old maid—so she was
certain she would marry.
Every conversation, even about the weather, she invariably turned into
an argument. She had a passion for catching at words, pouncing on
contradictions, quibbling over phrases. You would begin talking to her,
and she would stare at you and suddenly interrupt: “Excuse me, excuse
me, Petrov, the other day you said the very opposite!”
Or she would smile ironically and say: “I notice, though, you begin to
advocate the principles of the secret police. I congratulate you.”
If you jested or made a pun, you would hear her voice at once: “That’s
stale,” “That’s pointless.” If an officer ventured on a joke, she would
make a contemptuous grimace and say, “An army joke!”
And she rolled the r so impressively that Mushka invariably answered
from under a chair, “Rrr . . . nga-nga-nga . . . !”
On this occasion at tea the argument began with Nikitin’s mentioning the
school examinations.
“Excuse me, Sergey Vassilitch,” Varya interrupted him. “You say it’s
difficult for the boys. And whose fault is that, let me ask you? For
instance, you set the boys in the eighth class an essay on ‘Pushkin as a
Psychologist.’ To begin with, you shouldn’t set such a difficult
subject; and, secondly, Pushkin was not a psychologist. Shtchedrin now,
or Dostoevsky let us say, is a different matter, but Pushkin is a great
poet and nothing more.”
“Shtchedrin is one thing, and Pushkin is another,” Nikitin answered
sulkily.
“I know you don’t think much of Shtchedrin at the high school, but
that’s not the point. Tell me, in what sense is Pushkin a psychologist?”
“Why, do you mean to say he was not a psychologist? If you like, I’ll
give you examples.”
And Nikitin recited several passages from “Onyegin” and then from “Boris
Godunov.”
“I see no psychology in that.” Varya sighed. “The psychologist is the
man who describes the recesses of the human soul, and that’s fine poetry
and nothing more.”
“I know the sort of psychology you want,” said Nikitin, offended. “You
want some one to saw my finger with a blunt saw while I howl at the top
of my voice—that’s what you mean by psychology.”
“That’s poor! But still you haven’t shown me in what sense Pushkin is a
psychologist?”
When Nikitin had to argue against anything that seemed to him narrow,
conventional, or something of that kind, he usually leaped up from his
seat, clutched at his head with both hands, and began with a moan,
running from one end of the room to another. And it was the same now: he
jumped up, clutched his head in his hands, and with a moan walked round
the table, then he sat down a little way off.
The officers took his part. Captain Polyansky began assuring Varya that
Pushkin really was a psychologist, and to prove it quoted two lines from
Lermontov; Lieutenant Gernet said that if Pushkin had not been a
psychologist they would not have erected a monument to him in Moscow.
“That’s loutishness!” was heard from the other end of the table. “I said
as much to the governor: ‘It’s loutishness, your Excellency,’ I said.”
“I won’t argue any more,” cried Nikitin. “It’s unending. . . . Enough!
Ach, get away, you nasty dog!” he cried to Som, who laid his head and
paw on his knee.
“Rrr . . . nga-nga-nga!” came from under the table.
“Admit that you are wrong!” cried Varya. “Own up!”
But some young ladies came in, and the argument dropped of itself. They
all went into the drawing-room. Varya sat down at the piano and began
playing dances. They danced first a waltz, then a polka, then a
quadrille with a grand chain which Captain Polyansky led through all the
rooms, then a waltz again.
During the dancing the old men sat in the drawing-room, smoking and
looking at the young people. Among them was Shebaldin, the director of
the municipal bank, who was famed for his love of literature and
dramatic art. He had founded the local Musical and Dramatic Society, and
took part in the performances himself, confining himself, for some
reason, to playing comic footmen or to reading in a sing-song voice “The
Woman who was a Sinner.” His nickname in the town was “the Mummy,” as he
was tall, very lean and scraggy, and always had a solemn air and a
fixed, lustreless eye. He was so devoted to the dramatic art that he
even shaved his moustache and beard, and this made him still more like a
mummy.
After the grand chain, he shuffled up to Nikitin sideways, coughed, and
said:
“I had the pleasure of being present during the argument at tea. I fully
share your opinion. We are of one mind, and it would be a great pleasure
to me to talk to you. Have you read Lessing on the dramatic art of
Hamburg?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Shebaldin was horrified, and waved his hands as though he had burnt his
fingers, and saying nothing more, staggered back from Nikitin.
Shebaldin’s appearance, his question, and his surprise, struck Nikitin
as funny, but he thought none the less:
“It really is awkward. I am a teacher of literature, and to this day
I’ve not read Lessing. I must read him.”
Before supper the whole company, old and young, sat down to play “fate.”
They took two packs of cards: one pack was dealt round to the company,
the other was laid on the table face downwards.
“The one who has this card in his hand,” old Shelestov began solemnly,
lifting the top card of the second pack, “is fated to go into the
nursery and kiss nurse.”
The pleasure of kissing the nurse fell to the lot of Shebaldin. They all
crowded round him, took him to the nursery, and laughing and clapping
their hands, made him kiss the nurse. There was a great uproar and
shouting.
“Not so ardently!” cried Shelestov with tears of laughter. “Not so
ardently!”
It was Nikitin’s “fate” to hear the confessions of all. He sat on a
chair in the middle of the drawing-room. A shawl was brought and put
over his head. The first who came to confess to him was Varya.
“I know your sins,” Nikitin began, looking in the darkness at her stern
profile. “Tell me, madam, how do you explain your walking with Polyansky
every day? Oh, it’s not for nothing she walks with an hussar!”
“That’s poor,” said Varya, and walked away.
Then under the shawl he saw the shine of big motionless eyes, caught the
lines of a dear profile in the dark, together with a familiar, precious
fragrance which reminded Nikitin of Masha’s room.
“Marie Godefroi,” he said, and did not know his own voice, it was so
soft and tender, “what are your sins?”
Masha screwed up her eyes and put out the tip of her tongue at him, then
she laughed and went away. And a minute later she was standing in the
middle of the room, clapping her hands and crying:
“Supper, supper, supper!”
And they all streamed into the dining-room. At supper Varya had another
argument, and this time with her father. Polyansky ate stolidly, drank
red wine, and described to Nikitin how once in a winter campaign he had
stood all night up to his knees in a bog; the enemy was so near that
they were not allowed to speak or smoke, the night was cold and dark, a
piercing wind was blowing. Nikitin listened and stole side-glances at
Masha. She was gazing at him immovably, without bClinking, as though she
was pondering something or was lost in a reverie. . . . It was pleasure
and agony to him both at once.
“Why does she look at me like that?” was the question that fretted him.
“It’s awkward. People may notice it. Oh, how young, how naïve she is!”
The party broke up at midnight. When Nikitin went out at the gate, a
window opened on the first-floor, and Masha showed herself at it.
“Sergey Vassilitch!” she called.
“What is it?”
“I tell you what . . .” said Masha, evidently thinking of something to
say. “I tell you what. . . Polyansky said he would come in a day or two
with his camera and take us all. We must meet here.”
“Very well.”
Masha vanished, the window was slammed, and some one immediately began
playing the piano in the house.
“Well, it is a house!” thought Nikitin while he crossed the street. “A
house in which there is no moaning except from Egyptian pigeons, and
they only do it because they have no other means of expressing their
joy!”
But the Shelestovs were not the only festive household. Nikitin had not
gone two hundred paces before he heard the strains of a piano from
another house. A little further he met a peasant playing the balalaika
at the gate. In the gardens the band struck up a potpourri of Russian
songs.
Nikitin lived nearly half a mile from the Shelestoys’ in a flat of eight
rooms at the rent of three hundred roubles a year, which he shared with
his colleague Ippolit Ippolititch, a teacher of geography and history.
When Nikitin went in this Ippolit Ippolititch, a snub-nosed, middle-aged
man with a reddish beard, with a coarse, good-natured, unintellectual
face like a workman’s, was sitting at the table correcting his pupils’
maps. He considered that the most important and necessary part of the
study of geography was the drawing of maps, and of the study of history
the learning of dates: he would sit for nights together correcting in
blue pencil the maps drawn by the boys and girls he taught, or making
chronological tables.
“What a lovely day it has been!” said Nikitin, going in to him. “I
wonder at you—how can you sit indoors?”
Ippolit Ippolititch was not a talkative person; he either remained
silent or talked of things which everybody knew already. Now what he
answered was:
“Yes, very fine weather. It’s May now; we soon shall have real summer.
And summer’s a very different thing from winter. In the winter you have
to heat the stoves, but in summer you can keep warm without. In summer
you have your window open at night and still are warm, and in winter you
are cold even with the double frames in.”
Nikitin had not sat at the table for more than one minute before he was
bored.
“Good-night!” he said, getting up and yawning. “I wanted to tell you
something romantic concerning myself, but you are—geography! If one
talks to you of love, you will ask one at once, ‘What was the date of
the Battle of Kalka?’ Confound you, with your battles and your capes in
Siberia!”
“What are you cross about?”
“Why, it is vexatious!”
And vexed that he had not spoken to Masha, and that he had no one to
talk to of his love, he went to his study and lay down upon the sofa. It
was dark and still in the study. Lying gazing into the darkness, Nikitin
for some reason began thinking how in two or three years he would go to
Petersburg, how Masha would see him off at the station and would cry; in
Petersburg he would get a long letter from her in which she would
entreat him to come home as quickly as possible. And he would write to
her. . . . He would begin his letter like that: “My dear little rat!”
“Yes, my dear little rat!” he said, and he laughed.
He was lying in an uncomfortable position. He put his arms under his
head and put his left leg over the back of the sofa. He felt more
comfortable. Meanwhile a pale light was more and more perceptible at the
windows, sleepy cocks crowed in the yard. Nikitin went on thinking how
he would come back from Petersburg, how Masha would meet him at the
station, and with a shriek of delight would fling herself on his neck;
or, better still, he would cheat her and come home by stealth late at
night: the cook would open the door, then he would go on tiptoe to the
bedroom, undress noiselessly, and jump into bed! And she would wake up
and be overjoyed.
It was beginning to get quite light. By now there were no windows, no
study. On the steps of the brewery by which they had ridden that day
Masha was sitting, saying something. Then she took Nikitin by the arm
and went with him to the suburban garden. There he saw the oaks and, the
crows’ nests like hats. One of the nests rocked; out of it peeped
Shebaldin, shouting loudly: “You have not read Lessing!”
Nikitin shuddered all over and opened his eyes. Ippolit Ippolititch was
standing before the sofa, and throwing back his head, was putting on his
cravat.
“Get up; it’s time for school,” he said. “You shouldn’t sleep in your
clothes; it spoils your clothes. You should sleep in your bed,
undressed.”
And as usual he began slowly and emphatically saying what everybody
knew.
Nikitin’s first lesson was on Russian language in the second class. When
at nine o’clock punctually he went into the classroom, he saw written on
the blackboard two large letters—M. S. That, no doubt, meant Masha
Shelestov.
“They’ve scented it out already, the rascals . . .” thought Nikitin.
“How is it they know everything?”
The second lesson was in the fifth class. And there two letters, M. S.,
were written on the blackboard; and when he went out of the classroom at
the end of the lesson, he heard the shout behind him as though from a
theatre gallery:
“Hurrah for Masha Shelestov!”
His head was heavy from sleeping in his clothes, his limbs were weighted
down with inertia. The boys, who were expecting every day to break up
before the examinations, did nothing, were restless, and so bored that
they got into mischief. Nikitin, too, was restless, did not notice their
pranks, and was continually going to the window. He could see the street
brilliantly lighted up with the sun; above the houses the blue limpid
sky, the birds, and far, far away, beyond the gardens and the houses,
vast indefinite distance, the forests in the blue haze, the smoke from a
passing train. . . .
Here two officers in white tunics, playing with their whips, passed in
the street in the shade of the acacias. Here a lot of Jews, with grey
beards, and caps on, drove past in a waggonette. . . . The governess
walked by with the director’s granddaughter. Som ran by in the company
of two other dogs. . . . And then Varya, wearing a simple grey dress and
red stockings, carrying the “Vyestnik Evropi” in her hand, passed by.
She must have been to the town library. . . .
And it would be a long time before lessons were over at three o’clock!
And after school he could not go home nor to the Shelestovs’, but must
go to give a lesson at Wolf’s. This Wolf, a wealthy Jew who had turned
Lutheran, did not send his children to the high school, but had them
taught at home by the high-school masters, and paid five roubles a
lesson.
He was bored, bored, bored.
At three o’clock he went to Wolf’s and spent there, as it seemed to him,
an eternity. He left there at five o’clock, and before seven he had to
be at the high school again to a meeting of the masters —to draw up the
plan for the viva voce examination of the fourth and sixth classes.
When late in the evening he left the high school and went to the
Shelestovs’, his heart was beating and his face was flushed. A month
before, even a week before, he had, every time that he made up his mind
to speak to her, prepared a whole speech, with an introduction and a
conclusion. Now he had not one word ready; everything was in a muddle in
his head, and all he knew was that today he would certainly declare
himself, and that it was utterly impossible to wait any longer.
“I will ask her to come to the garden,” he thought; “we’ll walk about a
little and I’ll speak.”
There was not a soul in the hall; he went into the dining-room and then
into the drawing-room. . . . There was no one there either. He could
hear Varya arguing with some one upstairs and the cClink of the
dressmaker’s scissors in the nursery.
There was a little room in the house which had three names: the little
room, the passage room, and the dark room. There was a big cupboard in
it where they kept medicines, gunpowder, and their hunting gear. Leading
from this room to the first floor was a narrow wooden staircase where
cats were always asleep. There were two doors in it—one leading to the
nursery, one to the drawing-room. When Nikitin went into this room to go
upstairs, the door from the nursery opened and shut with such a bang
that it made the stairs and the cupboard tremble; Masha, in a dark
dress, ran in with a piece of blue material in her hand, and, not
noticing Nikitin, darted towards the stairs.
“Stay . . .” said Nikitin, stopping her. “Good-evening, Godefroi . . . .
Allow me. . . .”
He gasped, he did not know what to say; with one hand he held her hand
and with the other the blue material. And she was half frightened, half
surprised, and looked at him with big eyes.
“Allow me . . .” Nikitin went on, afraid she would go away. “There’s
something I must say to you. . . . Only . . . it’s inconvenient here. I
cannot, I am incapable. . . . Understand, Godefroi, I can’t —that’s all
. . . .”
The blue material slipped on to the floor, and Nikitin took Masha by the
other hand. She turned pale, moved her lips, then stepped back from
Nikitin and found herself in the corner between the wall and the
cupboard.
“On my honour, I assure you . . .” he said softly. “Masha, on my honour.
. . .”
She threw back her head and he kissed her lips, and that the kiss might
last longer he put his fingers to her cheeks; and it somehow happened
that he found himself in the corner between the cupboard and the wall,
and she put her arms round his neck and pressed her head against his
chin.
Then they both ran into the garden. The Shelestoys had a garden of nine
acres. There were about twenty old maples and lime-trees in it; there
was one fir-tree, and all the rest were fruit-trees: cherries, apples,
pears, horse-chestnuts, silvery olive-trees. . . . There were heaps of
flowers, too.
Nikitin and Masha ran along the avenues in silence, laughed, asked each
other from time to time disconnected questions which they did not
answer. A crescent moon was shining over the garden, and drowsy tulips
and irises were stretching up from the dark grass in its faint light, as
though entreating for words of love for them, too.
When Nikitin and Masha went back to the house, the officers and the
young ladies were already assembled and dancing the mazurka. Again
Polyansky led the grand chain through all the rooms, again after dancing
they played “fate.” Before supper, when the visitors had gone into the
dining-room, Masha, left alone with Nikitin, pressed close to him and
said:
“You must speak to papa and Varya yourself; I am ashamed.”
After supper he talked to the old father. After listening to him,
Shelestov thought a little and said:
“I am very grateful for the honour you do me and my daughter, but let me
speak to you as a friend. I will speak to you, not as a father, but as
one gentleman to another. Tell me, why do you want to be married so
young? Only peasants are married so young, and that, of course, is
loutishness. But why should you? Where’s the satisfaction of putting on
the fetters at your age?”
“I am not young!” said Nikitin, offended. “I am in my twenty-seventh
year.”
“Papa, the farrier has come!” cried Varya from the other room.
And the conversation broke off. Varya, Masha, and Polyansky saw Nikitin
home. When they reached his gate, Varya said:
“Why is it your mysterious Metropolit Metropolititch never shows himself
anywhere? He might come and see us.”
The mysterious Ippolit Ippolititch was sitting on his bed, taking off
his trousers, when Nikitin went in to him.
“Don’t go to bed, my dear fellow,” said Nikitin breathlessly. “Stop a
minute; don’t go to bed!”
Ippolit Ippolititch put on his trousers hurriedly and asked in a
flutter:
“What is it?”
“I am going to be married.”
Nikitin sat down beside his companion, and looking at him wonderingly,
as though surprised at himself, said:
“Only fancy, I am going to be married! To Masha Shelestov! I made an
offer today.”
“Well? She seems a good sort of girl. Only she is very young.”
“Yes, she is young,” sighed Nikitin, and shrugged his shoulders with a
careworn air. “Very, very young!”
“She was my pupil at the high school. I know her. She wasn’t bad at
geography, but she was no good at history. And she was inattentive in
class, too.”
Nikitin for some reason felt suddenly sorry for his companion, and
longed to say something kind and comforting to him.
“My dear fellow, why don’t you get married?” he asked. “Why don’t you
marry Varya, for instance? She is a splendid, first-rate girl! It’s true
she is very fond of arguing, but a heart . . . what a heart! She was
just asking about you. Marry her, my dear boy! Eh?”
He knew perfectly well that Varya would not marry this dull, snub-nosed
man, but still persuaded him to marry her—why?
“Marriage is a serious step,” said Ippolit Ippolititch after a moment’s
thought. “One has to look at it all round and weigh things thoroughly;
it’s not to be done rashly. Prudence is always a good thing, and
especially in marriage, when a man, ceasing to be a bachelor, begins a
new life.”
And he talked of what every one has known for ages. Nikitin did not stay
to listen, said goodnight, and went to his own room. He undressed
quickly and quickly got into bed, in order to be able to think the
sooner of his happiness, of Masha, of the future; he smiled, then
suddenly recalled that he had not read Lessing.
“I must read him,” he thought. “Though, after all, why should I? Bother
him!”
And exhausted by his happiness, he fell asleep at once and went on
smiling till the morning.
He dreamed of the thud of horses’ hoofs on a wooden floor; he dreamed of
the black horse Count Nulin, then of the white Giant and its sister
Maika, being led out of the stable. II
“It was very crowded and noisy in the church, and once some one cried
out, and the head priest, who was marrying Masha and me, looked through
his spectacles at the crowd, and said severely: ‘Don’t move about the
church, and don’t make a noise, but stand quietly and pray. You should
have the fear of God in your hearts.’
“My best men were two of my colleagues, and Masha’s best men were
Captain Polyansky and Lieutenant Gernet. The bishop’s choir sang
superbly. The sputtering of the candles, the brilliant light, the
gorgeous dresses, the officers, the numbers of gay, happy faces, and a
special ethereal look in Masha, everything together—the surroundings and
the words of the wedding prayers—moved me to tears and filled me with
triumph. I thought how my life had blossomed, how poetically it was
shaping itself! Two years ago I was still a student, I was living in
cheap furnished rooms, without money, without relations, and, as I
fancied then, with nothing to look forward to. Now I am a teacher in the
high school in one of the best provincial towns, with a secure income,
loved, spoiled. It is for my sake, I thought, this crowd is collected,
for my sake three candelabra have been lighted, the deacon is booming,
the choir is doing its best; and it’s for my sake that this young
creature, whom I soon shall call my wife, is so young, so elegant, and
so joyful. I recalled our first meetings, our rides into the country, my
declaration of love and the weather, which, as though expressly, was so
exquisitely fine all the summer; and the happiness which at one time in
my old rooms seemed to me possible only in novels and stories, I was now
experiencing in reality—I was now, as it were, holding it in my hands.
“After the ceremony they all crowded in disorder round Masha and me,
expressed their genuine pleasure, congratulated us and wished us joy.
The brigadier-general, an old man of seventy, confined himself to
congratulating Masha, and said to her in a squeaky, aged voice, so loud
that it could be heard all over the church:
“‘I hope that even after you are married you may remain the rose you are
now, my dear.’
“The officers, the director, and all the teachers smiled from
politeness, and I was conscious of an agreeable artificial smile on my
face, too. Dear Ippolit Ippolititch, the teacher of history and
geography, who always says what every one has heard before, pressed my
hand warmly and said with feeling:
“‘Hitherto you have been unmarried and have lived alone, and now you are
married and no longer single.’
“From the church we went to a two-storied house which I am receiving as
part of the dowry. Besides that house Masha is bringing me twenty
thousand roubles, as well as a piece of waste land with a shanty on it,
where I am told there are numbers of hens and ducks which are not looked
after and are turning wild. When I got home from the church, I stretched
myself at full length on the low sofa in my new study and began to
smoke; I felt snug, cosy, and comfortable, as I never had in my life
before. And meanwhile the wedding party were shouting ‘Hurrah!’ while a
wretched band in the hall played flourishes and all sorts of trash.
Varya, Masha’s sister, ran into the study with a wineglass in her hand,
and with a queer, strained expression, as though her mouth were full of
water; apparently she had meant to go on further, but she suddenly burst
out laughing and sobbing, and the wineglass crashed on the floor. We
took her by the arms and led her away.
“‘Nobody can understand!’ she muttered afterwards, lying on the old
nurse’s bed in a back room. ‘Nobody, nobody! My God, nobody can
understand!’
“But every one understood very well that she was four years older than
her sister Masha, and still unmarried, and that she was crying, not from
envy, but from the melancholy consciousness that her time was passing,
and perhaps had passed. When they danced the quadrille, she was back in
the drawing-room with a tear-stained and heavily powdered face, and I
saw Captain Polyansky holding a plate of ice before her while she ate it
with a spoon.
“It is past five o’clock in the morning. I took up my diary to describe
my complete and perfect happiness, and thought I would write a good six
pages, and read it tomorrow to Masha; but, strange to say, everything is
muddled in my head and as misty as a dream, and I can remember vividly
nothing but that episode with Varya, and I want to write, ‘Poor Varya!’
I could go on sitting here and writing ‘Poor Varya!’ By the way, the
trees have begun rustling; it will rain. The crows are cawing, and my
Masha, who has just gone to sleep, has for some reason a sorrowful
face.”
For a long while afterwards Nikitin did not write his diary. At the
beginning of August he had the school examinations, and after the
fifteenth the classes began. As a rule he set off for school before nine
in the morning, and before ten o’clock he was looking at his watch and
pining for his Masha and his new house. In the lower forms he would set
some boy to dictate, and while the boys were writing, would sit in the
window with his eyes shut, dreaming; whether he dreamed of the future or
recalled the past, everything seemed to him equally delightful, like a
fairy tale. In the senior classes they were reading aloud Gogol or
Pushkin’s prose works, and that made him sleepy; people, trees, fields,
horses, rose before his imagination, and he would say with a sigh, as
though fascinated by the author:
“How lovely!”
At the midday recess Masha used to send him lunch in a snow-white
napkin, and he would eat it slowly, with pauses, to prolong the
enjoyment of it; and Ippolit Ippolititch, whose lunch as a rule
consisted of nothing but bread, looked at him with respect and envy, and
gave expression to some familiar fact, such as:
“Men cannot live without food.”
After school Nikitin went straight to give his private lessons, and when
at last by six o’clock he got home, he felt excited and anxious, as
though he had been away for a year. He would run upstairs breathless,
find Masha, throw his arms round her, and kiss her and swear that he
loved her, that he could not live without her, declare that he had
missed her fearfully, and ask her in trepidation how she was and why she
looked so depressed. Then they would dine together. After dinner he
would lie on the sofa in his study and smoke, while she sat beside him
and talked in a low voice.
His happiest days now were Sundays and holidays, when he was at home
from morning till evening. On those days he took part in the naïve but
extraordinarily pleasant life which reminded him of a pastoral idyl. He
was never weary of watching how his sensible and practical Masha was
arranging her nest, and anxious to show that he was of some use in the
house, he would do something useless— for instance, bring the chaise out
of the stable and look at it from every side. Masha had installed a
regular dairy with three cows, and in her cellar she had many jugs of
milk and pots of sour cream, and she kept it all for butter. Sometimes,
by way of a joke, Nikitin would ask her for a glass of milk, and she
would be quite upset because it was against her rules; but he would
laugh and throw his arms round her, saying:
“There, there; I was joking, my darling! I was joking!”
Or he would laugh at her strictness when, finding in the cupboard some
stale bit of cheese or sausage as hard as a stone, she would say
seriously:
“They will eat that in the kitchen.”
He would observe that such a scrap was only fit for a mousetrap, and she
would reply warmly that men knew nothing about housekeeping, and that it
was just the same to the servants if you were to send down a
hundredweight of savouries to the kitchen. He would agree, and embrace
her enthusiastically. Everything that was just in what she said seemed
to him extraordinary and amazing; and what did not fit in with his
convictions seemed to him naïve and touching.
Sometimes he was in a philosophical mood, and he would begin to discuss
some abstract subject while she listened and looked at his face with
curiosity.
“I am immensely happy with you, my joy,” he used to say, playing with
her fingers or plaiting and unplaiting her hair. “But I don’t look upon
this happiness of mine as something that has come to me by chance, as
though it had dropped from heaven. This happiness is a perfectly
natural, consistent, logical consequence. I believe that man is the
creator of his own happiness, and now I am enjoying just what I have
myself created. Yes, I speak without false modesty: I have created this
happiness myself and I have a right to it. You know my past. My unhappy
childhood, without father or mother; my depressing youth, poverty—all
this was a struggle, all this was the path by which I made my way to
happiness. . . .”
In October the school sustained a heavy loss: Ippolit Ippolititch was
taken ill with erysipelas on the head and died. For two days before his
death he was unconscious and delirious, but even in his delirium he said
nothing that was not perfectly well known to every one.
“The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. . . . Horses eat oats and hay. .
. .”
There were no lessons at the high school on the day of his funeral. His
colleagues and pupils were the coffin-bearers, and the school choir sang
all the way to the grave the anthem “Holy God.” Three priests, two
deacons, all his pupils and the staff of the boys’ high school, and the
bishop’s choir in their best kaftans, took part in the procession. And
passers-by who met the solemn procession, crossed themselves and said:
“God grant us all such a death.”
Returning home from the cemetery much moved, Nikitin got out his diary
from the table and wrote:
“We have just consigned to the tomb Ippolit Ippolititch Ryzhitsky. Peace
to your ashes, modest worker! Masha, Varya, and all the women at the
funeral, wept from genuine feeling, perhaps because they knew this
uninteresting, humble man had never been loved by a woman. I wanted to
say a warm word at my colleague’s grave, but I was warned that this
might displease the director, as he did not like our poor friend. I
believe that this is the first day since my marriage that my heart has
been heavy.”
There was no other event of note in the scholastic year.
The winter was mild, with wet snow and no frost; on Epiphany Eve, for
instance, the wind howled all night as though it were autumn, and water
trickled off the roofs; and in the morning, at the ceremony of the
blessing of the water, the police allowed no one to go on the river,
because they said the ice was swelling up and looked dark. But in spite
of bad weather Nikitin’s life was as happy as in summer. And, indeed, he
acquired another source of pleasure; he learned to play vint. Only one
thing troubled him, moved him to anger, and seemed to prevent him from
being perfectly happy: the cats and dogs which formed part of his wife’s
dowry. The rooms, especially in the morning, always smelt like a
menagerie, and nothing could destroy the odour; the cats frequently
fought with the dogs. The spiteful beast Mushka was fed a dozen times a
day; she still refused to recognize Nikitin and growled at him: “Rrr . .
. nga-nga-nga!”
One night in Lent he was returning home from the club where he had been
playing cards. It was dark, raining, and muddy. Nikitin had an
unpleasant feeling at the bottom of his heart and could not account for
it. He did not know whether it was because he had lost twelve roubles at
cards, or whether because one of the players, when they were settling
up, had said that of course Nikitin had pots of money, with obvious
reference to his wife’s portion. He did not regret the twelve roubles,
and there was nothing offensive in what had been said; but, still, there
was the unpleasant feeling. He did not even feel a desire to go home.
“Foo, how horrid!” he said, standing still at a lamp-post.
It occurred to him that he did not regret the twelve roubles because he
got them for nothing. If he had been a working man he would have known
the value of every farthing, and would not have been so careless whether
he lost or won. And his good-fortune had all, he reflected, come to him
by chance, for nothing, and really was as superfluous for him as
medicine for the healthy. If, like the vast majority of people, he had
been harassed by anxiety for his daily bread, had been struggling for
existence, if his back and chest had ached from work, then supper, a
warm snug home, and domestic happiness, would have been the necessity,
the compensation, the crown of his life; as it was, all this had a
strange, indefinite significance for him.
“Foo, how horrid!” he repeated, knowing perfectly well that these
reflections were in themselves a bad sign.
When he got home Masha was in bed: she was breathing evenly and smiling,
and was evidently sleeping with great enjoyment. Near her the white cat
lay curled up, purring. While Nikitin lit the candle and lighted his
cigarette, Masha woke up and greedily drank a glass of water.
“I ate too many sweets,” she said, and laughed. “Have you been home?”
she asked after a pause.
“No.”
Nikitin knew already that Captain Polyansky, on whom Varya had been
building great hopes of late, was being transferred to one of the
western provinces, and was already making his farewell visits in the
town, and so it was depressing at his father-in-law’s.
“Varya looked in this evening,” said Masha, sitting up. “She did not say
anything, but one could see from her face how wretched she is, poor
darling! I can’t bear Polyansky. He is fat and bloated, and when he
walks or dances his cheeks shake. . . . He is not a man I would choose.
But, still, I did think he was a decent person.”
“I think he is a decent person now,” said Nikitin.
“Then why has he treated Varya so badly?”
“Why badly?” asked Nikitin, beginning to feel irritation against the
white cat, who was stretching and arching its back. “As far as I know,
he has made no proposal and has given her no promises.”
“Then why was he so often at the house? If he didn’t mean to marry her,
he oughtn’t to have come.”
Nikitin put out the candle and got into bed. But he felt disinclined to
lie down and to sleep. He felt as though his head were immense and empty
as a barn, and that new, peculiar thoughts were wandering about in it
like tall shadows. He thought that, apart from the soft light of the
ikon lamp, that beamed upon their quiet domestic happiness, that apart
from this little world in which he and this cat lived so peacefully and
happily, there was another world. . . . And he had a passionate,
poignant longing to be in that other world, to work himself at some
factory or big workshop, to address big audiences, to write, to publish,
to raise a stir, to exhaust himself, to suffer. . . . He wanted
something that would engross him till he forgot himself, ceased to care
for the personal happiness which yielded him only sensations so
monotonous. And suddenly there rose vividly before his imagination the
figure of Shebaldin with his clean-shaven face, saying to him with
horror: “You haven’t even read Lessing! You are quite behind the times!
How you have gone to seed!”
Masha woke up and again drank some water. He glanced at her neck, at her
plump shoulders and throat, and remembered the word the brigadier-
general had used in church—“rose.”
“Rose,” he muttered, and laughed.
His laugh was answered by a sleepy growl from Mushka under the bed: “Rrr
. . . nga-nga-nga . . . !”
A heavy anger sank like a cold weight on his heart, and he felt tempted
to say something rude to Masha, and even to jump up and hit her; his
heart began throbbing.
“So then,” he asked, restraining himself, “since I went to your house, I
was bound in duty to marry you?”
“Of course. You know that very well.”
“That’s nice.” And a minute later he repeated: “That’s nice.”
To relieve the throbbing of his heart, and to avoid saying too much,
Nikitin went to his study and lay down on the sofa, without a pillow;
then he lay on the floor on the carpet.
“What nonsense it is!” he said to reassure himself. “You are a teacher,
you are working in the noblest of callings. . . . What need have you of
any other world? What rubbish!”
But almost immediately he told himself with conviction that he was not a
real teacher, but simply a government employé, as commonplace and
mediocre as the Czech who taught Greek. He had never had a vocation for
teaching, he knew nothing of the theory of teaching, and never had been
interested in the subject; he did not know how to treat children; he did
not understand the significance of what he taught, and perhaps did not
teach the right things. Poor Ippolit Ippolititch had been frankly
stupid, and all the boys, as well as his colleagues, knew what he was
and what to expect from him; but he, Nikitin, like the Czech, knew how
to conceal his stupidity and cleverly deceived every one by pretending
that, thank God, his teaching was a success. These new ideas frightened
Nikitin; he rejected them, called them stupid, and believed that all
this was due to his nerves, that he would laugh at himself.
And he did, in fact, by the morning laugh at himself and call himself an
old woman; but it was clear to him that his peace of mind was lost,
perhaps, for ever, and that in that little two-story house happiness was
henceforth impossible for him. He realized that the illusion had
evaporated, and that a new life of unrest and clear sight was beginning
which was incompatible with peace and personal happiness.
Next day, which was Sunday, he was at the school chapel, and there met
his colleagues and the director. It seemed to him that they were
entirely preoccupied with concealing their ignorance and discontent with
life, and he, too, to conceal his uneasiness, smiled affably and talked
of trivialities. Then he went to the station and saw the mail train come
in and go out, and it was agreeable to him to be alone and not to have
to talk to any one.
At home he found Varya and his father-in-law, who had come to dinner.
Varya’s eyes were red with crying, and she complained of a headache,
while Shelestov ate a great deal, saying that young men nowadays were
unreliable, and that there was very little gentlemanly feeling among
them.
“It’s loutishness!” he said. “I shall tell him so to his face: ‘It’s
loutishness, sir,’ I shall say.”
Nikitin smiled affably and helped Masha to look after their guests, but
after dinner he went to his study and shut the door.
The March sun was shining brightly in at the windows and shedding its
warm rays on the table. It was only the twentieth of the month, but
already the cabmen were driving with wheels, and the starlings were
noisy in the garden. It was just the weather in which Masha would come
in, put one arm round his neck, tell him the horses were saddled or the
chaise was at the door, and ask him what she should put on to keep warm.
Spring was beginning as exquisitely as last spring, and it promised the
same joys. . . . But Nikitin was thinking that it would be nice to take
a holiday and go to Moscow, and stay at his old lodgings there. In the
next room they were drinking coffee and talking of Captain Polyansky,
while he tried not to listen and wrote in his diary: “Where am I, my
God? I am surrounded by vulgarity and vulgarity. Wearisome,
insignificant people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches,
stupid women. . . . There is nothing more terrible, mortifying, and
distressing than vulgarity. I must escape from here, I must escape
today, or I shall go out of my mind!”
NOT WANTED
BETWEEN six and seven o’clock on a July evening, a crowd of summer
visitors—mostly fathers of families—burdened with parcels, portfolios,
and ladies’ hat-boxes, was trailing along from the little station of
Helkovo, in the direction of the summer villas. They all looked
exhausted, hungry, and ill-humoured, as though the sun were not shining
and the grass were not green for them.
Trudging along among the others was Pavel Matveyitch Zaikin, a member of
the Circuit Court, a tall, stooping man, in a cheap cotton dust-coat and
with a cockade on his faded cap. He was perspiring, red in the face, and
gloomy. . . .
“Do you come out to your holiday home every day?” said a summer visitor,
in ginger-coloured trousers, addressing him.
“No, not every day,” Zaikin answered sullenly. “My wife and son are
staying here all the while, and I come down two or three times a week. I
haven’t time to come every day; besides, it is expensive.”
“You’re right there; it is expensive,” sighed he of the ginger trousers.
“In town you can’t walk to the station, you have to take a cab; and
then, the ticket costs forty-two kopecks; you buy a paper for the
journey; one is tempted to drink a glass of vodka. It’s all petty
expenditure not worth considering, but, mind you, in the course of the
summer it will run up to some two hundred roubles. Of course, to be in
the lap of Nature is worth any money—I don’t dispute it . . . idyllic
and all the rest of it; but of course, with the salary an official gets,
as you know yourself, every farthing has to be considered. If you waste
a halfpenny you lie awake all night. . . . Yes. . . I receive, my dear
sir—I haven’t the honour of knowing your name—I receive a salary of very
nearly two thousand roubles a year. I am a civil councillor, I smoke
second-rate tobacco, and I haven’t a rouble to spare to buy Vichy water,
prescribed me by the doctor for gall-stones.”
“It’s altogether abominable,” said Zaikin after a brief silence. “I
maintain, sir, that summer holidays are the invention of the devil and
of woman. The devil was actuated in the present instance by malice,
woman by excessive frivolity. Mercy on us, it is not life at all; it is
hard labour, it is hell! It’s hot and stifling, you can hardly breathe,
and you wander about like a lost soul and can find no refuge. In town
there is no furniture, no servants. . . everything has been carried off
to the villa: you eat what you can get; you go without your tea because
there is no one to heat the samovar; you can’t wash yourself; and when
you come down here into this ‘lap of Nature’ you have to walk, if you
please, through the dust and heat. . . . Phew! Are you married?”
“Yes. . . three children,” sighs Ginger Trousers.
“It’s abominable altogether. . . . It’s a wonder we are still alive.”
At last the summer visitors reached their destination. Zaikin said good-
bye to Ginger Trousers and went into his villa. He found a death-like
silence in the house. He could hear nothing but the buzzing of the
gnats, and the prayer for help of a fly destined for the dinner of a
spider. The windows were hung with muslin curtains, through which the
faded flowers of the geraniums showed red. On the unpainted wooden walls
near the oleographs flies were slumbering. There was not a soul in the
passage, the kitchen, or the dining-room. In the room which was called
indifferently the parlour or the drawing-room, Zaikin found his son
Petya, a little boy of six. Petya was sitting at the table, and
breathing loudly with his lower lip stuck out, was engaged in cutting
out the figure of a knave of diamonds from a card.
“Oh, that’s you, father!” he said, without turning round. “Good-
evening.”
“Good-evening. . . . And where is mother?”
“Mother? She is gone with Olga Kirillovna to a rehearsal of the play.
The day after tomorrow they will have a performance. And they will take
me, too. . . . And will you go?”
“H’m! . . . When is she coming back?”
“She said she would be back in the evening.”
“And where is Natalya?”
“Mamma took Natalya with her to help her dress for the performance, and
Akulina has gone to the wood to get mushrooms. Father, why is it that
when gnats bite you their stomachs get red?”
“I don’t know. . . . Because they suck blood. So there is no one in the
house, then?”
“No one; I am all alone in the house.”
Zaikin sat down in an easy-chair, and for a moment gazed blankly at the
window.
“Who is going to get our dinner?” he asked.
“They haven’t cooked any dinner today, father. Mamma thought you were
not coming today, and did not order any dinner. She is going to have
dinner with Olga Kirillovna at the rehearsal.”
“Oh, thank you very much; and you, what have you to eat?”
“I’ve had some milk. They bought me six kopecks’ worth of milk. And,
father, why do gnats suck blood?”
Zaikin suddenly felt as though something heavy were rolling down on his
liver and beginning to gnaw it. He felt so vexed, so aggrieved, and so
bitter, that he was choking and tremulous; he wanted to jump up, to bang
something on the floor, and to burst into loud abuse; but then he
remembered that his doctor had absolutely forbidden him all excitement,
so he got up, and making an effort to control himself, began whistling a
tune from “Les Huguenots.”
“Father, can you act in plays?” he heard Petya’s voice.
“Oh, don’t worry me with stupid questions!” said Zaikin, getting angry.
“He sticks to one like a leaf in the bath! Here you are, six years old,
and just as silly as you were three years ago. . . . Stupid, neglected
child! Why are you spoiling those cards, for instance? How dare you
spoil them?”
“These cards aren’t yours,” said Petya, turning round. “Natalya gave
them me.”
“You are telling fibs, you are telling fibs, you horrid boy!” said
Zaikin, growing more and more irritated. “You are always telling fibs!
You want a whipping, you horrid little pig! I will pull your ears!”
Petya leapt up, and craning his neck, stared fixedly at his father’s red
and wrathful face. His big eyes first began bClinking, then were dimmed
with moisture, and the boy’s face began working.
“But why are you scolding?” squealed Petya. “Why do you attack me, you
stupid? I am not interfering with anybody; I am not naughty; I do what I
am told, and yet . . . you are cross! Why are you scolding me?”
The boy spoke with conviction, and wept so bitterly that Zaikin felt
conscience-stricken.
“Yes, really, why am I falling foul of him?” he thought. “Come, come,”
he said, touching the boy on the shoulder. “I am sorry, Petya . . .
forgive me. You are my good boy, my nice boy, I love you.”
Petya wiped his eyes with his sleeve, sat down, with a sigh, in the same
place and began cutting out the queen. Zaikin went off to his own room.
He stretched himself on the sofa, and putting his hands behind his head,
sank into thought. The boy’s tears had softened his anger, and by
degrees the oppression on his liver grew less. He felt nothing but
exhaustion and hunger.
“Father,” he heard on the other side of the door, “shall I show you my
collection of insects?”
“Yes, show me.”
Petya came into the study and handed his father a long green box. Before
raising it to his ear Zaikin could hear a despairing buzz and the
scratching of claws on the sides of the box. Opening the lid, he saw a
number of butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and flies fastened to the
bottom of the box with pins. All except two or three butterflies were
still alive and moving.
“Why, the grasshopper is still alive!” said Petya in surprise. “I caught
him yesterday morning, and he is still alive!”
“Who taught you to pin them in this way?”
“Olga Kirillovna.”
“Olga Kirillovna ought to be pinned down like that herself!” said Zaikin
with repulsion. “Take them away! It’s shameful to torture animals.”
“My God! How horribly he is being brought up!” he thought, as Petya went
out.
Pavel Matveyitch forgot his exhaustion and hunger, and thought of
nothing but his boy’s future. Meanwhile, outside the light was gradually
fading. . . . He could hear the summer visitors trooping back from the
evening bathe. Some one was stopping near the open dining-room window
and shouting: “Do you want any mushrooms?” And getting no answer,
shuffled on with bare feet. . . . But at last, when the dusk was so
thick that the outlines of the geraniums behind the muslin curtain were
lost, and whiffs of the freshness of evening were coming in at the
window, the door of the passage was thrown open noisily, and there came
a sound of rapid footsteps, talk, and laughter. . . .
“Mamma!” shrieked Petya.
Zaikin peeped out of his study and saw his wife, Nadyezhda Stepanovna,
healthy and rosy as ever; with her he saw Olga Kirillovna, a spare woman
with fair hair and heavy freckles, and two unknown men: one a lanky
young man with curly red hair and a big Adam’s apple; the other, a short
stubby man with a shaven face like an actor’s and a bluish crooked chin.
“Natalya, set the samovar,” cried Nadyezhda Stepanovna, with a loud
rustle of her skirts. “I hear Pavel Matveyitch is come. Pavel, where are
you? Good-evening, Pavel!” she said, running into the study
breathlessly. “So you’ve come. I am so glad. . . . Two of our amateurs
have come with me. . . . Come, I’ll introduce you. . . . Here, the
taller one is Koromyslov . . . he sings splendidly; and the other, the
little one . . . is called Smerkalov: he is a real actor . . . he
recites magnificently. Oh, how tired I am! We have just had a rehearsal.
. . . It goes splendidly. We are acting ‘The Lodger with the Trombone’
and ‘Waiting for Him.’ . . . The performance is the day after tomorrow.
. . .”
“Why did you bring them?” asked Zaikin.
“I couldn’t help it, Poppet; after tea we must rehearse our parts and
sing something. . . . I am to sing a duet with Koromyslov. . . . Oh,
yes, I was almost forgetting! Darling, send Natalya to get some
sardines, vodka, cheese, and something else. They will most likely stay
to supper. . . . Oh, how tired I am!”
“H’m! I’ve no money.”
“You must, Poppet! It would be awkward! Don’t make me blush.”
Half an hour later Natalya was sent for vodka and savouries; Zaikin,
after drinking tea and eating a whole French loaf, went to his bedroom
and lay down on the bed, while Nadyezhda Stepanovna and her visitors,
with much noise and laughter, set to work to rehearse their parts. For a
long time Pavel Matveyitch heard Koromyslov’s nasal reciting and
Smerkalov’s theatrical exclamations. . . . The rehearsal was followed by
a long conversation, interrupted by the shrill laughter of Olga
Kirillovna. Smerkalov, as a real actor, explained the parts with aplomb
and heat. . . .
Then followed the duet, and after the duet there was the clatter of
crockery. . . . Through his drowsiness Zaikin heard them persuading
Smerkalov to read “The Woman who was a Sinner,” and heard him, after
affecting to refuse, begin to recite. He hissed, beat himself on the
breast, wept, laughed in a husky bass. . . . Zaikin scowled and hid his
head under the quilt.
“It’s a long way for you to go, and it’s dark,” he heard Nadyezhda
Stepanovna’s voice an hour later. “Why shouldn’t you stay the night
here? Koromyslov can sleep here in the drawing-room on the sofa, and
you, Smerkalov, in Petya’s bed. . . . I can put Petya in my husband’s
study. . . . Do stay, really!”
At last when the clock was striking two, all was hushed, the bedroom
door opened, and Nadyezhda Stepanovna appeared.
“Pavel, are you asleep?” she whispered.
“No; why?”
“Go into your study, darling, and lie on the sofa. I am going to put
Olga Kirillovna here, in your bed. Do go, dear! I would put her to sleep
in the study, but she is afraid to sleep alone. . . . Do get up!”
Zaikin got up, threw on his dressing-gown, and taking his pillow, crept
wearily to the study. . . . Feeling his way to his sofa, he lighted a
match, and saw Petya lying on the sofa. The boy was not asleep, and,
looking at the match with wide-open eyes:
“Father, why is it gnats don’t go to sleep at night?” he asked.
“Because . . . because . . . you and I are not wanted. . . . We have
nowhere to sleep even.”
“Father, and why is it Olga Kirillovna has freckles on her face?”
“Oh, shut up! I am tired of you.”
After a moment’s thought, Zaikin dressed and went out into the street
for a breath of air. . . . He looked at the grey morning sky, at the
motionless clouds, heard the lazy call of the drowsy corncrake, and
began dreaming of the next day, when he would go to town, and coming
back from the court would tumble into bed. . . . Suddenly the figure of
a man appeared round the corner.
“A watchman, no doubt,” thought Zaikin. But going nearer and looking
more closely he recognized in the figure the summer visitor in the
ginger trousers.
“You’re not asleep?” he asked.
“No, I can’t sleep,” sighed Ginger Trousers. “I am enjoying Nature . . .
. A welcome visitor, my wife’s mother, arrived by the night train, you
know. She brought with her our nieces . . . splendid girls! I was
delighted to see them, although . . . it’s very damp! And you, too, are
enjoying Nature?”
“Yes,” grunted Zaikin, “I am enjoying it, too. . . . Do you know whether
there is any sort of tavern or restaurant in the neighbourhood?”
Ginger Trousers raised his eyes to heaven and meditated profoundly.
TYPHUS
A YOUNG lieutenant called Klimov was travelling from Petersburg to
Moscow in a smoking carriage of the mail train. Opposite him was sitting
an elderly man with a shaven face like a sea captain’s, by all
appearances a well-to-do Finn or Swede. He pulled at his pipe the whole
journey and kept talking about the same subject:
“Ha, you are an officer! I have a brother an officer too, only he is a
naval officer. . . . He is a naval officer, and he is stationed at
Kronstadt. Why are you going to Moscow?”
“I am serving there.”
“Ha! And are you a family man?”
“No, I live with my sister and aunt.”
“My brother’s an officer, only he is a naval officer; he has a wife and
three children. Ha!”
The Finn seemed continually surprised at something, and gave a broad
idiotic grin when he exclaimed “Ha!” and continually puffed at his
stinking pipe. Klimov, who for some reason did not feel well, and found
it burdensome to answer questions, hated him with all his heart. He
dreamed of how nice it would be to snatch the wheezing pipe out of his
hand and fling it under the seat, and drive the Finn himself into
another compartment.
“Detestable people these Finns and . . . Greeks,” he thought.
“Absolutely superfluous, useless, detestable people. They simply fill up
space on the earthly globe. What are they for?”
And the thought of Finns and Greeks produced a feeling akin to sickness
all over his body. For the sake of comparison he tried to think of the
French, of the Italians, but his efforts to think of these people evoked
in his mind, for some reason, nothing but images of organ-grinders,
naked women, and the foreign oleographs which hung over the chest of
drawers at home, at his aunt’s.
Altogether the officer felt in an abnormal state. He could not arrange
his arms and legs comfortably on the seat, though he had the whole seat
to himself. His mouth felt dry and sticky; there was a heavy fog in his
brain; his thoughts seemed to be straying, not only within his head, but
outside his skull, among the seats and the people that were shrouded in
the darkness of night. Through the mist in his brain, as through a
dream, he heard the murmur of voices, the rumble of wheels, the slamming
of doors. The sounds of the bells, the whistles, the guards, the running
to and fro of passengers on the platforms, seemed more frequent than
usual. The time flew by rapidly, imperceptibly, and so it seemed as
though the train were stopping at stations every minute, and metallic
voices crying continually:
“Is the mail ready?”
“Yes!” was repeatedly coming from outside.
It seemed as though the man in charge of the heating came in too often
to look at the thermometer, that the noise of trains going in the
opposite direction and the rumble of the wheels over the bridges was
incessant. The noise, the whistles, the Finn, the tobacco smoke—all this
mingling with the menace and flickering of the misty images in his
brain, the shape and character of which a man in health can never
recall, weighed upon Klimov like an unbearable nightmare. In horrible
misery he lifted his heavy head, looked at the lamp in the rays of which
shadows and misty blurs seemed to be dancing. He wanted to ask for
water, but his parched tongue would hardly move, and he scarcely had
strength to answer the Finn’s questions. He tried to lie down more
comfortably and go to sleep, but he could not succeed. The Finn several
times fell asleep, woke up again, lighted his pipe, addressed him with
his “Ha!” and went to sleep again; and still the lieutenant’s legs could
not get into a comfortable position, and still the menacing images stood
facing him.
At Spirovo he went out into the station for a drink of water. He saw
people sitting at the table and hurriedly eating.
“And how can they eat!” he thought, trying not to sniff the air, that
smelt of roast meat, and not to look at the munching mouths —they both
seemed to him sickeningly disgusting.
A good-looking lady was conversing loudly with a military man in a red
cap, and showing magnificent white teeth as she smiled; and the smile,
and the teeth, and the lady herself made on Klimov the same revolting
impression as the ham and the rissoles. He could not understand how it
was the military man in the red cap was not ill at ease, sitting beside
her and looking at her healthy, smiling face.
When after drinking some water he went back to his carriage, the Finn
was sitting smoking; his pipe was wheezing and squelching like a golosh
with holes in it in wet weather.
“Ha!” he said, surprised; “what station is this?”
“I don’t know,” answered Klimov, lying down and shutting his mouth that
he might not breathe the acrid tobacco smoke.
“And when shall we reach Tver?”
“I don’t know. Excuse me, I . . . I can’t answer. I am ill. I caught
cold today.”
The Finn knocked his pipe against the window-frame and began talking of
his brother, the naval officer. Klimov no longer heard him; he was
thinking miserably of his soft, comfortable bed, of a bottle of cold
water, of his sister Katya, who was so good at making one comfortable,
soothing, giving one water. He even smiled when the vision of his
orderly Pavel, taking off his heavy stifling boots and putting water on
the little table, flitted through his imagination. He fancied that if he
could only get into his bed, have a drink of water, his nightmare would
give place to sound healthy sleep.
“Is the mail ready?” a hollow voice reached him from the distance.
“Yes,” answered a bass voice almost at the window.
It was already the second or third station from Spirovo.
The time was flying rapidly in leaps and bounds, and it seemed as though
the bells, whistles, and stoppings would never end. In despair Klimov
buried his face in the corner of the seat, clutched his head in his
hands, and began again thinking of his sister Katya and his orderly
Pavel, but his sister and his orderly were mixed up with the misty
images in his brain, whirled round, and disappeared. His burning breath,
reflected from the back of the seat, seemed to scald his face; his legs
were uncomfortable; there was a draught from the window on his back;
but, however wretched he was, he did not want to change his position. .
. . A heavy nightmarish lethargy gradually gained possession of him and
fettered his limbs.
When he brought himself to raise his head, it was already light in the
carriage. The passengers were putting on their fur coats and moving
about. The train was stopping. Porters in white aprons and with discs on
their breasts were bustling among the passengers and snatching up their
boxes. Klimov put on his great-coat, mechanically followed the other
passengers out of the carriage, and it seemed to him that not he, but
some one else was moving, and he felt that his fever, his thirst, and
the menacing images which had not let him sleep all night, came out of
the carriage with him. Mechanically he took his luggage and engaged a
sledge-driver. The man asked him for a rouble and a quarter to drive to
Povarsky Street, but he did not haggle, and without protest got
submissively into the sledge. He still understood the difference of
numbers, but money had ceased to have any value to him.
At home Klimov was met by his aunt and his sister Katya, a girl of
eighteen. When Katya greeted him she had a pencil and exercise book in
her hand, and he remembered that she was preparing for an examination as
a teacher. Gasping with fever, he walked aimlessly through all the rooms
without answering their questions or greetings, and when he reached his
bed he sank down on the pillow. The Finn, the red cap, the lady with the
white teeth, the smell of roast meat, the flickering blurs, filled his
consciousness, and by now he did not know where he was and did not hear
the agitated voices.
When he recovered consciousness he found himself in bed, undressed, saw
a bottle of water and Pavel, but it was no cooler, nor softer, nor more
comfortable for that. His arms and legs, as before, refused to lie
comfortably; his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he heard the
wheezing of the Finn’s pipe. . . . A stalwart, black-bearded doctor was
busy doing something beside the bed, brushing against Pavel with his
broad back.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, young man,” he muttered. “Excellent,
excellent . . . goo-od, goo-od . . . !”
The doctor called Klimov “young man,” said “goo-od” instead of “good”
and “so-o” instead of “so.”
“So-o . . . so-o . . . so-o,” he murmured. “Goo-od, goo-od . . . !
Excellent, young man. You mustn’t lose heart!”
The doctor’s rapid, careless talk, his well-fed countenance, and
condescending “young man,” irritated Klimov.
“Why do you call me ‘young man’?” he moaned. “What familiarity! Damn it
all!”
And he was frightened by his own voice. The voice was so dried up, so
weak and peevish, that he would not have known it.
“Excellent, excellent!” muttered the doctor, not in the least offended.
. . . “You mustn’t get angry, so-o, so-o, so-s. . . .”
And the time flew by at home with the same startling swiftness as in the
railway carriage. The daylight was continually being replaced by the
dusk of evening. The doctor seemed never to leave his bedside, and he
heard at every moment his “so-o, so-o, so-o.” A continual succession of
people was incessantly crossing the bedroom. Among them were: Pavel, the
Finn, Captain Yaroshevitch, Lance-Corporal Maximenko, the red cap, the
lady with the white teeth, the doctor. They were all talking and waving
their arms, smoking and eating. Once by daylight Klimov saw the chaplain
of the regiment, Father Alexandr, who was standing before the bed,
wearing a stole and with a prayer-book in his hand. He was muttering
something with a grave face such as Klimov had never seen in him before.
The lieutenant remembered that Father Alexandr used in a friendly way to
call all the Catholic officers “Poles,” and wanting to amuse him, he
cried:
“Father, Yaroshevitch the Pole has climbed up a pole!”
But Father Alexandr, a light-hearted man who loved a joke, did not
smile, but became graver than ever, and made the sign of the cross over
Klimov. At night-time by turn two shadows came noiselessly in and out;
they were his aunt and sister. His sister’s shadow knelt down and
prayed; she bowed down to the ikon, and her grey shadow on the wall
bowed down too, so that two shadows were praying. The whole time there
was a smell of roast meat and the Finn’s pipe, but once Klimov smelt the
strong smell of incense. He felt so sick he could not lie still, and
began shouting:
“The incense! Take away the incense!”
There was no answer. He could only hear the subdued singing of the
priest somewhere and some one running upstairs.
When Klimov came to himself there was not a soul in his bedroom. The
morning sun was streaming in at the window through the lower blind, and
a quivering sunbeam, bright and keen as the sword’s edge, was flashing
on the glass bottle. He heard the rattle of wheels— so there was no snow
now in the street. The lieutenant looked at the ray, at the familiar
furniture, at the door, and the first thing he did was to laugh. His
chest and stomach heaved with delicious, happy, tickling laughter. His
whole body from head to foot was overcome by a sensation of infinite
happiness and joy in life, such as the first man must have felt when he
was created and first saw the world. Klimov felt a passionate desire for
movement, people, talk. His body lay a motionless block; only his hands
stirred, but that he hardly noticed, and his whole attention was
concentrated on trifles. He rejoiced in his breathing, in his laughter,
rejoiced in the existence of the water-bottle, the ceiling, the
sunshine, the tape on the curtains. God’s world, even in the narrow
space of his bedroom, seemed beautiful, varied, grand. When the doctor
made his appearance, the lieutenant was thinking what a delicious thing
medicine was, how charming and pleasant the doctor was, and how nice and
interesting people were in general.
“So-o, so, so. . . Excellent, excellent! . . . Now we are well again. .
. . Goo-od, goo-od!” the doctor pattered.
The lieutenant listened and laughed joyously; he remembered the Finn,
the lady with the white teeth, the train, and he longed to smoke, to
eat.
“Doctor,” he said, “tell them to give me a crust of rye bread and salt,
and . . . and sardines.”
The doctor refused; Pavel did not obey the order, and did not go for the
bread. The lieutenant could not bear this and began crying like a
naughty child.
“Baby!” laughed the doctor. “Mammy, bye-bye!”
Klimov laughed, too, and when the doctor went away he fell into a sound
sleep. He woke up with the same joyfulness and sensation of happiness.
His aunt was sitting near the bed.
“Well, aunt,” he said joyfully. “What has been the matter?”
“Spotted typhus.”
“Really. But now I am well, quite well! Where is Katya?”
“She is not at home. I suppose she has gone somewhere from her
examination.”
The old lady said this and looked at her stocking; her lips began
quivering, she turned away, and suddenly broke into sobs. Forgetting the
doctor’s prohibition in her despair, she said:
“Ah, Katya, Katya! Our angel is gone! Is gone!”
She dropped her stocking and bent down to it, and as she did so her cap
fell off her head. Looking at her grey head and understanding nothing,
Klimov was frightened for Katya, and asked:
“Where is she, aunt?”
The old woman, who had forgotten Klimov and was thinking only of her
sorrow, said:
“She caught typhus from you, and is dead. She was buried the day before
yesterday.”
This terrible, unexpected news was fully grasped by Klimov’s
consciousness; but terrible and startling as it was, it could not
overcome the animal joy that filled the convalescent. He cried and
laughed, and soon began scolding because they would not let him eat.
Only a week later when, leaning on Pavel, he went in his dressing-gown
to the window, looked at the overcast spring sky and listened to the
unpleasant clang of the old iron rails which were being carted by, his
heart ached, he burst into tears, and leaned his forehead against the
window-frame.
“How miserable I am!” he muttered. “My God, how miserable!”
And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life and the feeling of his
irrevocable loss.
A MISFORTUNE
SOFYA PETROVNA, the wife of Lubyantsev the notary, a handsome young
woman of five-and-twenty, was walking slowly along a track that had been
cleared in the wood, with Ilyin, a lawyer who was spending the summer in
the neighbourhood. It was five o’clock in the evening. Feathery-white
masses of cloud stood overhead; patches of bright blue sky peeped out
between them. The clouds stood motionless, as though they had caught in
the tops of the tall old pine-trees. It was still and sultry.
Farther on, the track was crossed by a low railway embankment on which a
sentinel with a gun was for some reason pacing up and down. Just beyond
the embankment there was a large white church with six domes and a rusty
roof.
“I did not expect to meet you here,” said Sofya Petrovna, looking at the
ground and prodding at the last year’s leaves with the tip of her
parasol, “and now I am glad we have met. I want to speak to you
seriously and once for all. I beg you, Ivan Mihalovitch, if you really
love and respect me, please make an end of this pursuit of me! You
follow me about like a shadow, you are continually looking at me not in
a nice way, making love to me, writing me strange letters, and . . . and
I don’t know where it’s all going to end! Why, what can come of it?”
Ilyin said nothing. Sofya Petrovna walked on a few steps and continued:
“And this complete transformation in you all came about in the course of
two or three weeks, after five years’ friendship. I don’t know you, Ivan
Mihalovitch!”
Sofya Petrovna stole a glance at her companion. Screwing up his eyes, he
was looking intently at the fluffy clouds. His face looked angry, ill-
humoured, and preoccupied, like that of a man in pain forced to listen
to nonsense.
“I wonder you don’t see it yourself,” Madame Lubyantsev went on,
shrugging her shoulders. “You ought to realize that it’s not a very nice
part you are playing. I am married; I love and respect my husband. . . .
I have a daughter . . . . Can you think all that means nothing? Besides,
as an old friend you know my attitude to family life and my views as to
the sanctity of marriage.”
Ilyin cleared his throat angrily and heaved a sigh.
“Sanctity of marriage . . .” he muttered. “Oh, Lord!”
“Yes, yes. . . . I love my husband, I respect him; and in any case I
value the peace of my home. I would rather let myself be killed than be
a cause of unhappiness to Andrey and his daughter. . . . And I beg you,
Ivan Mihalovitch, for God’s sake, leave me in peace! Let us be as good,
true friends as we used to be, and give up these sighs and groans, which
really don’t suit you. It’s settled and over! Not a word more about it.
Let us talk of something else.”
Sofya Petrovna again stole a glance at Ilyin’s face. Ilyin was looking
up; he was pale, and was angrily biting his quivering lips. She could
not understand why he was angry and why he was indignant, but his pallor
touched her.
“Don’t be angry; let us be friends,” she said affectionately. “Agreed?
Here’s my hand.”
Ilyin took her plump little hand in both of his, squeezed it, and slowly
raised it to his lips.
“I am not a schoolboy,” he muttered. “I am not in the least tempted by
friendship with the woman I love.”
“Enough, enough! It’s settled and done with. We have reached the seat;
let us sit down.”
Sofya Petrovna’s soul was filled with a sweet sense of relief: the most
difficult and delicate thing had been said, the painful question was
settled and done with. Now she could breathe freely and look Ilyin
straight in the face. She looked at him, and the egoistic feeling of the
superiority of the woman over the man who loves her, agreeably flattered
her. It pleased her to see this huge, strong man, with his manly, angry
face and his big black beard—clever, cultivated, and, people said,
talented—sit down obediently beside her and bow his head dejectedly. For
two or three minutes they sat without speaking.
“Nothing is settled or done with,” began Ilyin. “You repeat copy-book
maxims to me. ‘I love and respect my husband . . . the sanctity of
marriage. . . .’ I know all that without your help, and I could tell you
more, too. I tell you truthfully and honestly that I consider the way I
am behaving as criminal and immoral. What more can one say than that?
But what’s the good of saying what everybody knows? Instead of feeding
nightingales with paltry words, you had much better tell me what I am to
do.”
“I’ve told you already—go away.”
“As you know perfectly well, I have gone away five times, and every time
I turned back on the way. I can show you my through tickets —I’ve kept
them all. I have not will enough to run away from you! I am struggling.
I am struggling horribly; but what the devil am I good for if I have no
backbone, if I am weak, cowardly! I can’t struggle with Nature! Do you
understand? I cannot! I run away from here, and she holds on to me and
pulls me back. Contemptible, loathsome weakness!”
Ilyin flushed crimson, got up, and walked up and down by the seat.
“I feel as cross as a dog,” he muttered, clenching his fists. “I hate
and despise myself! My God! like some depraved schoolboy, I am making
love to another man’s wife, writing idiotic letters, degrading myself .
. . ugh!”
Ilyin clutched at his head, grunted, and sat down. “And then your
insincerity!” he went on bitterly. “If you do dislike my disgusting
behaviour, why have you come here? What drew you here? In my letters I
only ask you for a direct, definite answer—yes or no; but instead of a
direct answer, you contrive every day these ‘chance’ meetings with me
and regale me with copy-book maxims!”
Madame Lubyantsev was frightened and flushed. She suddenly felt the
awkwardness which a decent woman feels when she is accidentally
discovered undressed.
“You seem to suspect I am playing with you,” she muttered. “I have
always given you a direct answer, and . . . only today I’ve begged you .
. .”
“Ough! as though one begged in such cases! If you were to say straight
out ‘Get away,’ I should have been gone long ago; but you’ve never said
that. You’ve never once given me a direct answer. Strange indecision!
Yes, indeed; either you are playing with me, or else . . .”
Ilyin leaned his head on his fists without finishing. Sofya Petrovna
began going over in her own mind the way she had behaved from beginning
to end. She remembered that not only in her actions, but even in her
secret thoughts, she had always been opposed to Ilyin’s love-making; but
yet she felt there was a grain of truth in the lawyer’s words. But not
knowing exactly what the truth was, she could not find answers to make
to Ilyin’s complaint, however hard she thought. It was awkward to be
silent, and, shrugging her shoulders, she said:
So I am to blame, it appears.”
“I don’t blame you for your insincerity,” sighed Ilyin. “I did not mean
that when I spoke of it. . . . Your insincerity is natural and in the
order of things. If people agreed together and suddenly became sincere,
everything would go to the devil.”
Sofya Petrovna was in no mood for philosophical reflections, but she was
glad of a chance to change the conversation, and asked:
“But why?”
“Because only savage women and animals are sincere. Once civilization
has introduced a demand for such comforts as, for instance, feminine
virtue, sincerity is out of place. . . .”
Ilyin jabbed his stick angrily into the sand. Madame Lubyantsev listened
to him and liked his conversation, though a great deal of it she did not
understand. What gratified her most was that she, an ordinary woman, was
talked to by a talented man on “intellectual” subjects; it afforded her
great pleasure, too, to watch the working of his mobile, young face,
which was still pale and angry. She failed to understand a great deal
that he said, but what was clear to her in his words was the attractive
boldness with which the modern man without hesitation or doubt decides
great questions and draws conclusive deductions.
She suddenly realized that she was admiring him, and was alarmed.
“Forgive me, but I don’t understand,” she said hurriedly. “What makes
you talk of insincerity? I repeat my request again: be my good, true
friend; let me alone! I beg you most earnestly!”
“Very good; I’ll try again,” sighed Ilyin. “Glad to do my best. . . .
Only I doubt whether anything will come of my efforts. Either I shall
put a bullet through my brains or take to drink in an idiotic way. I
shall come to a bad end! There’s a limit to everything— to struggles
with Nature, too. Tell me, how can one struggle against madness? If you
drink wine, how are you to struggle against intoxication? What am I to
do if your image has grown into my soul, and day and night stands
persistently before my eyes, like that pine there at this moment? Come,
tell me, what hard and difficult thing can I do to get free from this
abominable, miserable condition, in which all my thoughts, desires, and
dreams are no longer my own, but belong to some demon who has taken
possession of me? I love you, love you so much that I am completely
thrown out of gear; I’ve given up my work and all who are dear to me;
I’ve forgotten my God! I’ve never been in love like this in my life.”
Sofya Petrovna, who had not expected such a turn to their conversation,
drew away from Ilyin and looked into his face in dismay. Tears came into
his eyes, his lips were quivering, and there was an imploring, hungry
expression in his face.
“I love you!” he muttered, bringing his eyes near her big, frightened
eyes. “You are so beautiful! I am in agony now, but I swear I would sit
here all my life, suffering and looking in your eyes. But . . . be
silent, I implore you!”
Sofya Petrovna, feeling utterly disconcerted, tried to think as quickly
as possible of something to say to stop him. “I’ll go away,” she
decided, but before she had time to make a movement to get up, Ilyin was
on his knees before her. . . . He was clasping her knees, gazing into
her face and speaking passionately, hotly, eloquently. In her terror and
confusion she did not hear his words; for some reason now, at this
dangerous moment, while her knees were being agreeably squeezed and felt
as though they were in a warm bath, she was trying, with a sort of angry
spite, to interpret her own sensations. She was angry that instead of
brimming over with protesting virtue, she was entirely overwhelmed with
weakness, apathy, and emptiness, like a drunken man utterly reckless;
only at the bottom of her soul a remote bit of herself was malignantly
taunting her: “Why don’t you go? Is this as it should be? Yes?”
Seeking for some explanation, she could not understand how it was she
did not pull away the hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and
why, like Ilyin, she hastily glanced to right and to left to see whether
any one was looking. The clouds and the pines stood motionless, looking
at them severely, like old ushers seeing mischief, but bribed not to
tell the school authorities. The sentry stood like a post on the
embankment and seemed to be looking at the seat.
“Let him look,” thought Sofya Petrovna.
“But . . . but listen,” she said at last, with despair in her voice.
“What can come of this? What will be the end of this?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he whispered, waving off the disagreeable
questions.
They heard the hoarse, discordant whistle of the train. This cold,
irrelevant sound from the everyday world of prose made Sofya Petrovna
rouse herself.
“I can’t stay . . . it’s time I was at home,” she said, getting up
quickly. “The train is coming in. . . Andrey is coming by it! He will
want his dinner.”
Sofya Petrovna turned towards the embankment with a burning face. The
engine slowly crawled by, then came the carriages. It was not the local
train, as she had supposed, but a goods train. The trucks filed by
against the background of the white church in a long string like the
days of a man’s life, and it seemed as though it would never end.
But at last the train passed, and the last carriage with the guard and a
light in it had disappeared behind the trees. Sofya Petrovna turned
round sharply, and without looking at Ilyin, walked rapidly back along
the track. She had regained her self-possession. Crimson with shame,
humiliated not by Ilyin—no, but by her own cowardice, by the
shamelessness with which she, a chaste and high-principled woman, had
allowed a man, not her husband, to hug her knees—she had only one
thought now: to get home as quickly as possible to her villa, to her
family. The lawyer could hardly keep pace with her. Turning from the
clearing into a narrow path, she turned round and glanced at him so
quickly that she saw nothing but the sand on his knees, and waved to him
to drop behind.
Reaching home, Sofya Petrovna stood in the middle of her room for five
minutes without moving, and looked first at the window and then at her
writing-table.
“You low creature!” she said, upbraiding herself. “You low creature!”
To spite herself, she recalled in precise detail, keeping nothing
back—she recalled that though all this time she had been opposed to
Ilyin’s lovemaking, something had impelled her to seek an interview with
him; and what was more, when he was at her feet she had enjoyed it
enormously. She recalled it all without sparing herself, and now,
breathless with shame, she would have liked to slap herself in the face.
“Poor Andrey!” she said to herself, trying as she thought of her husband
to put into her face as tender an expression as she could. “Varya, my
poor little girl, doesn’t know what a mother she has! Forgive me, my
dear ones! I love you so much . . . so much!”
And anxious to prove to herself that she was still a good wife and
mother, and that corruption had not yet touched that “sanctity of
marriage” of which she had spoken to Ilyin, Sofya Petrovna ran to the
kitchen and abused the cook for not having yet laid the table for Andrey
Ilyitch. She tried to picture her husband’s hungry and exhausted
appearance, commiserated him aloud, and laid the table for him with her
own hands, which she had never done before. Then she found her daughter
Varya, picked her up in her arms and hugged her warmly; the child seemed
to her cold and heavy, but she was unwilling to acknowledge this to
herself, and she began explaining to the child how good, kind, and
honourable her papa was.
But when Andrey Ilyitch arrived soon afterwards she hardly greeted him.
The rush of false feeling had already passed off without proving
anything to her, only irritating and exasperating her by its falsity.
She was sitting by the window, feeling miserable and cross. It is only
by being in trouble that people can understand how far from easy it is
to be the master of one’s feelings and thoughts. Sofya Petrovna said
afterwards that there was a tangle within her which it was as difficult
to unravel as to count a flock of sparrows rapidly flying by. From the
fact that she was not overjoyed to see her husband, that she did not
like his manner at dinner, she concluded all of a sudden that she was
beginning to hate her husband.
Andrey Ilyitch, languid with hunger and exhaustion, fell upon the
sausage while waiting for the soup to be brought in, and ate it
greedily, munching noisily and moving his temples.
“My goodness!” thought Sofya Petrovna. “I love and respect him, but . .
. why does he munch so repulsively?”
The disorder in her thoughts was no less than the disorder in her
feelings. Like all persons inexperienced in combating unpleasant ideas,
Madame Lubyantsev did her utmost not to think of her trouble, and the
harder she tried the more vividly Ilyin, the sand on his knees, the
fluffy clouds, the train, stood out in her imagination.
“And why did I go there this afternoon like a fool?” she thought,
tormenting herself. “And am I really so weak that I cannot depend upon
myself?”
Fear magnifies danger. By the time Andrey Ilyitch was finishing the last
course, she had firmly made up her mind to tell her husband everything
and to flee from danger!
“I’ve something serious to say to you, Andrey,” she began after dinner
while her husband was taking off his coat and boots to lie down for a
nap.
“Well?”
“Let us leave this place!”
“H’m! . . . Where shall we go? It’s too soon to go back to town.”
“No; for a tour or something of that sort.
“For a tour . . .” repeated the notary, stretching. “I dream of that
myself, but where are we to get the money, and to whom am I to leave the
office?”
And thinking a little he added:
“Of course, you must be bored. Go by yourself if you like.”
Sofya Petrovna agreed, but at once reflected that Ilyin would be
delighted with the opportunity, and would go with her in the same train,
in the same compartment. . . . She thought and looked at her husband,
now satisfied but still languid. For some reason her eyes rested on his
feet—miniature, almost feminine feet, clad in striped socks; there was a
thread standing out at the tip of each sock.
Behind the blind a bumble-bee was beating itself against the window-pane
and buzzing. Sofya Petrovna looked at the threads on the socks, listened
to the bee, and pictured how she would set off . . . . vis-Ã -vis Ilyin
would sit, day and night, never taking his eyes off her, wrathful at his
own weakness and pale with spiritual agony. He would call himself an
immoral schoolboy, would abuse her, tear his hair, but when darkness
came on and the passengers were asleep or got out at a station, he would
seize the opportunity to kneel before her and embrace her knees as he
had at the seat in the wood. . . .
She caught herself indulging in this day-dream.
“Listen. I won’t go alone,” she said. “You must come with me.”
“Nonsense, Sofotchka!” sighed Lubyantsev. “One must be sensible and not
want the impossible.”
“You will come when you know all about it,” thought Sofya Petrovna.
Making up her mind to go at all costs, she felt that she was out of
danger. Little by little her ideas grew clearer; her spirits rose and
she allowed herself to think about it all, feeling that however much she
thought, however much she dreamed, she would go away. While her husband
was asleep, the evening gradually came on. She sat in the drawing-room
and played the piano. The greater liveliness out of doors, the sound of
music, but above all the thought that she was a sensible person, that
she had surmounted her difficulties, completely restored her spirits.
Other women, her appeased conscience told her, would probably have been
carried off their feet in her position, and would have lost their
balance, while she had almost died of shame, had been miserable, and was
now running out of the danger which perhaps did not exist! She was so
touched by her own virtue and determination that she even looked at
herself two or three times in the looking-glass.
When it got dark, visitors arrived. The men sat down in the dining-room
to play cards; the ladies remained in the drawing-room and the verandah.
The last to arrive was Ilyin. He was gloomy, morose, and looked ill. He
sat down in the corner of the sofa and did not move the whole evening.
Usually good-humoured and talkative, this time he remained silent,
frowned, and rubbed his eyebrows. When he had to answer some question,
he gave a forced smile with his upper lip only, and answered jerkily and
irritably. Four or five times he made some jest, but his jests sounded
harsh and cutting. It seemed to Sofya Petrovna that he was on the verge
of hysterics. Only now, sitting at the piano, she recognized fully for
the first time that this unhappy man was in deadly earnest, that his
soul was sick, and that he could find no rest. For her sake he was
wasting the best days of his youth and his career, spending the last of
his money on a summer villa, abandoning his mother and sisters, and,
worst of all, wearing himself out in an agonizing struggle with himself.
From mere common humanity he ought to be treated seriously.
She recognized all this clearly till it made her heart ache, and if at
that moment she had gone up to him and said to him, “No,” there would
have been a force in her voice hard to disobey. But she did not go up to
him and did not speak—indeed, never thought of doing so. The pettiness
and egoism of youth had never been more patent in her than that evening.
She realized that Ilyin was unhappy, and that he was sitting on the sofa
as though he were on hot coals; she felt sorry for him, but at the same
time the presence of a man who loved her to distraction, filled her soul
with triumph and a sense of her own power. She felt her youth, her
beauty, and her unassailable virtue, and, since she had decided to go
away, gave herself full licence for that evening. She flirted, laughed
incessantly, sang with peculiar feeling and gusto. Everything delighted
and amused her. She was amused at the memory of what had happened at the
seat in the wood, of the sentinel who had looked on. She was amused by
her guests, by Ilyin’s cutting jests, by the pin in his cravat, which
she had never noticed before. There was a red snake with diamond eyes on
the pin; this snake struck her as so amusing that she could have kissed
it on the spot.
Sofya Petrovna sang nervously, with defiant recklessness as though half
intoxicated, and she chose sad, mournful songs which dealt with wasted
hopes, the past, old age, as though in mockery of another’s grief. “‘And
old age comes nearer and nearer’ . . .” she sang. And what was old age
to her?
“It seems as though there is something going wrong with me,” she thought
from time to time through her laughter and singing.
The party broke up at twelve o’clock. Ilyin was the last to leave. Sofya
Petrovna was still reckless enough to accompany him to the bottom step
of the verandah. She wanted to tell him that she was going away with her
husband, and to watch the effect this news would produce on him.
The moon was hidden behind the clouds, but it was light enough for Sofya
Petrovna to see how the wind played with the skirts of his overcoat and
with the awning of the verandah. She could see, too, how white Ilyin
was, and how he twisted his upper lip in the effort to smile.
“Sonia, Sonitchka . . . my darling woman!” he muttered, preventing her
from speaking. “My dear! my sweet!”
In a rush of tenderness, with tears in his voice, he showered caressing
words upon her, that grew tenderer and tenderer, and even called her
“thou,” as though she were his wife or mistress. Quite unexpectedly he
put one arm round her waist and with the other hand took hold of her
elbow.
“My precious! my delight!” he whispered, kissing the nape of her neck;
“be sincere; come to me at once!”
She slipped out of his arms and raised her head to give vent to her
indignation and anger, but the indignation did not come off, and all her
vaunted virtue and chastity was only sufficient to enable her to utter
the phrase used by all ordinary women on such occasions:
“You must be mad.”
“Come, let us go,” Ilyin continued. “I felt just now, as well as at the
seat in the wood, that you are as helpless as I am, Sonia . . . . You
are in the same plight! You love me and are fruitlessly trying to
appease your conscience. . . .”
Seeing that she was moving away, he caught her by her lace cuff and said
rapidly:
“If not today, then tomorrow you will have to give in! Why, then, this
waste of time? My precious, darling Sonia, the sentence is passed; why
put off the execution? Why deceive yourself?”
Sofya Petrovna tore herself from him and darted in at the door.
Returning to the drawing-room, she mechanically shut the piano, looked
for a long time at the music-stand, and sat down. She could not stand up
nor think. All that was left of her excitement and recklessness was a
fearful weakness, apathy, and dreariness. Her conscience whispered to
her that she had behaved badly, foolishly, that evening, like some
madcap girl—that she had just been embraced on the verandah, and still
had an uneasy feeling in her waist and her elbow. There was not a soul
in the drawing-room; there was only one candle burning. Madame
Lubyantsev sat on the round stool before the piano, motionless, as
though expecting something. And as though taking advantage of the
darkness and her extreme lassitude, an oppressive, overpowering desire
began to assail her. Like a boa-constrictor it gripped her limbs and her
soul, and grew stronger every second, and no longer menaced her as it
had done, but stood clear before her in all its nakedness.
She sat for half an hour without stirring, not restraining herself from
thinking of Ilyin, then she got up languidly and dragged herself to her
bedroom. Andrey Ilyitch was already in bed. She sat down by the open
window and gave herself up to desire. There was no “tangle” now in her
head; all her thoughts and feelings were bent with one accord upon a
single aim. She tried to struggle against it, but instantly gave it up.
. . . She understood now how strong and relentless was the foe. Strength
and fortitude were needed to combat him, and her birth, her education,
and her life had given her nothing to fall back upon.
“Immoral wretch! Low creature!” she nagged at herself for her weakness.
“So that’s what you’re like!”
Her outraged sense of propriety was moved to such indignation by this
weakness that she lavished upon herself every term of abuse she knew,
and told herself many offensive and humiliating truths. So, for
instance, she told herself that she never had been moral, that she had
not come to grief before simply because she had had no opportunity, that
her inward conflict during that day had all been a farce. . . .
“And even if I have struggled,” she thought, “what sort of struggle was
it? Even the woman who sells herself struggles before she brings herself
to it, and yet she sells herself. A fine struggle! Like milk, I’ve
turned in a day! In one day!”
She convicted herself of being tempted, not by feeling, not by Ilyin
personally, but by sensations which awaited her . . . an idle lady,
having her fling in the summer holidays, like so many!
“‘Like an unfledged bird when the mother has been slain,’” sang a husky
tenor outside the window.
“If I am to go, it’s time,” thought Sofya Petrovna. Her heart suddenly
began beating violently.
“Andrey!” she almost shrieked. “Listen! we . . . we are going? Yes?”
“Yes, I’ve told you already: you go alone.”
“But listen,” she began. “If you don’t go with me, you are in danger of
losing me. I believe I am . . . in love already.”
“With whom?” asked Andrey Ilyitch.
“It can’t make any difference to you who it is!” cried Sofya Petrovna.
Andrey Ilyitch sat up with his feet out of bed and looked wonderingly at
his wife’s dark figure.
“It’s a fancy!” he yawned.
He did not believe her, but yet he was frightened. After thinking a
little and asking his wife several unimportant questions, he delivered
himself of his opinions on the family, on infidelity . . . spoke
listlessly for about ten minutes and got into bed again. His moralizing
produced no effect. There are a great many opinions in the world, and a
good half of them are held by people who have never been in trouble!
In spite of the late hour, summer visitors were still walking outside.
Sofya Petrovna put on a light cape, stood a little, thought a little. .
. . She still had resolution enough to say to her sleeping husband:
“Are you asleep? I am going for a walk. . . . Will you come with me?”
That was her last hope. Receiving no answer, she went out. . . . It was
fresh and windy. She was conscious neither of the wind nor the darkness,
but went on and on. . . . An overmastering force drove her on, and it
seemed as though, if she had stopped, it would have pushed her in the
back.
“Immoral creature!” she muttered mechanically. “Low wretch!”
She was breathless, hot with shame, did not feel her legs under her, but
what drove her on was stronger than shame, reason, or fear.
A TRIFLE FROM LIFE
A WELL-FED, red-cheeked young man called Nikolay Ilyitch Belyaev, of
thirty-two, who was an owner of house property in Petersburg, and a
devotee of the race-course, went one evening to see Olga Ivanovna Irnin,
with whom he was living, or, to use his own expression, was dragging out
a long, wearisome romance. And, indeed, the first interesting and
enthusiastic pages of this romance had long been perused; now the pages
dragged on, and still dragged on, without presenting anything new or of
interest.
Not finding Olga Ivanovna at home, my hero lay down on the lounge chair
and proceeded to wait for her in the drawing-room.
“Good-evening, Nikolay Ilyitch!” he heard a child’s voice. “Mother will
be here directly. She has gone with Sonia to the dressmaker’s.”
Olga Ivanovna’s son, Alyosha—a boy of eight who looked graceful and very
well cared for, who was dressed like a picture, in a black velvet jacket
and long black stockings—was lying on the sofa in the same room. He was
lying on a satin cushion and, evidently imitating an acrobat he had
lately seen at the circus, stuck up in the air first one leg and then
the other. When his elegant legs were exhausted, he brought his arms
into play or jumped up impulsively and went on all fours, trying to
stand with his legs in the air. All this he was doing with the utmost
gravity, gasping and groaning painfully as though he regretted that God
had given him such a restless body.
“Ah, good-evening, my boy,” said Belyaev. “It’s you! I did not notice
you. Is your mother well?”
Alyosha, taking hold of the tip of his left toe with his right hand and
falling into the most unnatural attitude, turned over, jumped up, and
peeped at Belyaev from behind the big fluffy lampshade.
“What shall I say?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “In reality
mother’s never well. You see, she is a woman, and women, Nikolay
Ilyitch, have always something the matter with them.”
Belyaev, having nothing better to do, began watching Alyosha’s face. He
had never before during the whole of his intimacy with Olga Ivanovna
paid any attention to the boy, and had completely ignored his existence;
the boy had been before his eyes, but he had not cared to think why he
was there and what part he was playing.
In the twilight of the evening, Alyosha’s face, with his white forehead
and black, unbClinking eyes, unexpectedly reminded Belyaev of Olga
Ivanovna as she had been during the first pages of their romance. And he
felt disposed to be friendly to the boy.
“Come here, insect,” he said; “let me have a closer look at you.”
The boy jumped off the sofa and skipped up to Belyaev.
“Well,” began Nikolay Ilyitch, putting a hand on the boy’s thin
shoulder. “How are you getting on?”
“How shall I say! We used to get on a great deal better.”
“Why?”
“It’s very simple. Sonia and I used only to learn music and reading, and
now they give us French poetry to learn. Have you been shaved lately?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, I see you have. Your beard is shorter. Let me touch it. . . . Does
that hurt?”
“No.”
“Why is it that if you pull one hair it hurts, but if you pull a lot at
once it doesn’t hurt a bit? Ha, ha! And, you know, it’s a pity you don’t
have whiskers. Here ought to be shaved . . . but here at the sides the
hair ought to be left. . . .”
The boy nestled up to Belyaev and began playing with his watch-chain.
“When I go to the high-school,” he said, “mother is going to buy me a
watch. I shall ask her to buy me a watch-chain like this. . . . Wh-at a
lo-ket! Father’s got a locket like that, only yours has little bars on
it and his has letters. . . . There’s mother’s portrait in the middle of
his. Father has a different sort of chain now, not made with rings, but
like ribbon. . . .”
“How do you know? Do you see your father?”
“I? M’m . . . no . . . I . . .”
Alyosha blushed, and in great confusion, feeling caught in a lie, began
zealously scratching the locket with his nail. . . . Belyaev looked
steadily into his face and asked:
“Do you see your father?”
“N-no!”
“Come, speak frankly, on your honour. . . . I see from your face you are
telling a fib. Once you’ve let a thing slip out it’s no good wriggling
about it. Tell me, do you see him? Come, as a friend.”
Alyosha hesitated.
“You won’t tell mother?” he said.
“As though I should!”
“On your honour?”
“On my honour.”
“Do you swear?”
“Ah, you provoking boy! What do you take me for?”
Alyosha looked round him, then with wide-open eyes, whispered to him:
“Only, for goodness’ sake, don’t tell mother. . . . Don’t tell any one
at all, for it is a secret. I hope to goodness mother won’t find out, or
we should all catch it—Sonia, and I, and Pelagea . . . . Well, listen. .
. Sonia and I see father every Tuesday and Friday. When Pelagea takes us
for a walk before dinner we go to the Apfel Restaurant, and there is
father waiting for us. . . . He is always sitting in a room apart, where
you know there’s a marble table and an ash-tray in the shape of a goose
without a back. . . .”
“What do you do there?”
“Nothing! First we say how-do-you-do, then we all sit round the table,
and father treats us with coffee and pies. You know Sonia eats the meat-
pies, but I can’t endure meat-pies! I like the pies made of cabbage and
eggs. We eat such a lot that we have to try hard to eat as much as we
can at dinner, for fear mother should notice.”
“What do you talk about?”
“With father? About anything. He kisses us, he hugs us, tells us all
sorts of amusing jokes. Do you know, he says when we are grown up he is
going to take us to live with him. Sonia does not want to go, but I
agree. Of course, I should miss mother; but, then, I should write her
letters! It’s a queer idea, but we could come and visit her on
holidays—couldn’t we? Father says, too, that he will buy me a horse.
He’s an awfully kind man! I can’t understand why mother does not ask him
to come and live with us, and why she forbids us to see him. You know he
loves mother very much. He is always asking us how she is and what she
is doing. When she was ill he clutched his head like this, and . . . and
kept running about. He always tells us to be obedient and respectful to
her. Listen. Is it true that we are unfortunate?”
“H’m! . . . Why?”
“That’s what father says. ‘You are unhappy children,’ he says. It’s
strange to hear him, really. ‘You are unhappy,’ he says, ‘I am unhappy,
and mother’s unhappy. You must pray to God,’ he says; ‘for yourselves
and for her.’”
Alyosha let his eyes rest on a stuffed bird and sank into thought.
“So . . .” growled Belyaev. “So that’s how you are going on. You arrange
meetings at restaurants. And mother does not know?”
“No-o. . . . How should she know? Pelagea would not tell her for
anything, you know. The day before yesterday he gave us some pears. As
sweet as jam! I ate two.”
“H’m! . . . Well, and I say . . Listen. Did father say anything about
me?”
“About you? What shall I say?”
Alyosha looked searchingly into Belyaev’s face and shrugged his
shoulders.
“He didn’t say anything particular.”
“For instance, what did he say?”
“You won’t be offended?”
“What next? Why, does he abuse me?”
“He doesn’t abuse you, but you know he is angry with you. He says
mother’s unhappy owing to you . . . and that you have ruined mother. You
know he is so queer! I explain to him that you are kind, that you never
scold mother; but he only shakes his head.”
“So he says I have ruined her?”
“Yes; you mustn’t be offended, Nikolay Ilyitch.”
Belyaev got up, stood still a moment, and walked up and down the
drawing-room.
“That’s strange and . . . ridiculous!” he muttered, shrugging his
shoulders and smiling sarcastically. “He’s entirely to blame, and I have
ruined her, eh? An innocent lamb, I must say. So he told you I ruined
your mother?”
“Yes, but . . . you said you would not be offended, you know.”
“I am not offended, and . . . and it’s not your business. Why, it’s . .
. why, it’s positively ridiculous! I have been thrust into it like a
chicken in the broth, and now it seems I’m to blame!”
A ring was heard. The boy sprang up from his place and ran out. A minute
later a lady came into the room with a little girl; this was Olga
Ivanovna, Alyosha’s mother. Alyosha followed them in, skipping and
jumping, humming aloud and waving his hands. Belyaev nodded, and went on
walking up and down.
“Of course, whose fault is it if not mine?” he muttered with a snort.
“He is right! He is an injured husband.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
“What about? . . . Why, just listen to the tales your lawful spouse is
spreading now! It appears that I am a scoundrel and a villain, that I
have ruined you and the children. All of you are unhappy, and I am the
only happy one! Wonderfully, wonderfully happy!”
“I don’t understand, Nikolay. What’s the matter?”
“Why, listen to this young gentleman!” said Belyaev, pointing to
Alyosha.
Alyosha flushed crimson, then turned pale, and his whole face began
working with terror.
“Nikolay Ilyitch,” he said in a loud whisper. “Sh-sh!”
Olga Ivanovna looked in surprise at Alyosha, then at Belyaev, then at
Alyosha again.
“Just ask him,” Belyaev went on. “Your Pelagea, like a regular fool,
takes them about to restaurants and arranges meetings with their papa.
But that’s not the point: the point is that their dear papa is a victim,
while I’m a wretch who has broken up both your lives. . .”
“Nikolay Ilyitch,” moaned Alyosha. “Why, you promised on your word of
honour!”
“Oh, get away!” said Belyaev, waving him off. “This is more important
than any word of honour. It’s the hypocrisy revolts me, the lying! . .
.”
“I don’t understand it,” said Olga Ivanovna, and tears glistened in her
eyes. “Tell me, Alyosha,” she turned to her son. “Do you see your
father?”
Alyosha did not hear her; he was looking with horror at Belyaev.
“It’s impossible,” said his mother; “I will go and question Pelagea.”
Olga Ivanovna went out.
“I say, you promised on your word of honour!” said Alyosha, trembling
all over.
Belyaev dismissed him with a wave of his hand, and went on walking up
and down. He was absorbed in his grievance and was oblivious of the
boy’s presence, as he always had been. He, a grownup, serious person,
had no thought to spare for boys. And Alyosha sat down in the corner and
told Sonia with horror how he had been deceived. He was trembling,
stammering, and crying. It was the first time in his life that he had
been brought into such coarse contact with lying; till then he had not
known that there are in the world, besides sweet pears, pies, and
expensive watches, a great many things for which the language of
children has no expression.
The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories
THE COOK’S WEDDING
GRISHA, a fat, solemn little person of seven, was standing by the
kitchen door listening and peeping through the keyhole. In the kitchen
something extraordinary, and in his opinion never seen before, was
taking place. A big, thick-set, red-haired peasant, with a beard, and a
drop of perspiration on his nose, wearing a cabman’s full coat, was
sitting at the kitchen table on which they chopped the meat and sliced
the onions. He was balancing a saucer on the five fingers of his right
hand and drinking tea out of it, and crunching sugar so loudly that it
sent a shiver down Grisha’s back. Aksinya Stepanovna, the old nurse, was
sitting on the dirty stool facing him, and she, too, was drinking tea.
Her face was grave, though at the same time it beamed with a kind of
triumph. Pelageya, the cook, was busy at the stove, and was apparently
trying to hide her face. And on her face Grisha saw a regular
illumination: it was burning and shifting through every shade of colour,
beginning with a crimson purple and ending with a deathly white. She was
continually catching hold of knives, forks, bits of wood, and rags with
trembling hands, moving, grumbling to herself, making a clatter, but in
reality doing nothing. She did not once glance at the table at which
they were drinking tea, and to the questions put to her by the nurse she
gave jerky, sullen answers without turning her face.
“Help yourself, Danilo Semyonitch,” the nurse urged him hospitably. “Why
do you keep on with tea and nothing but tea? You should have a drop of
vodka!”
And nurse put before the visitor a bottle of vodka and a wine-glass,
while her face wore a very wily expression.
“I never touch it. . . . No . . .” said the cabman, declining. “Don’t
press me, Aksinya Stepanovna.”
“What a man! . . . A cabman and not drink! . . . A bachelor can’t get on
without drinking. Help yourself!”
The cabman looked askance at the bottle, then at nurse’s wily face, and
his own face assumed an expression no less cunning, as much as to say,
“You won’t catch me, you old witch!”
“I don’t drink; please excuse me. Such a weakness does not do in our
calling. A man who works at a trade may drink, for he sits at home, but
we cabmen are always in view of the public. Aren’t we? If one goes into
a pothouse one finds one’s horse gone; if one takes a drop too much it
is worse still; before you know where you are you will fall asleep or
slip off the box. That’s where it is.”
“And how much do you make a day, Danilo Semyonitch?”
“That’s according. One day you will have a fare for three roubles, and
another day you will come back to the yard without a farthing. The days
are very different. Nowadays our business is no good. There are lots and
lots of cabmen as you know, hay is dear, and folks are paltry nowadays
and always contriving to go by tram. And yet, thank God, I have nothing
to complain of. I have plenty to eat and good clothes to wear, and . . .
we could even provide well for another. . .” (the cabman stole a glance
at Pelageya) “if it were to their liking. . . .”
Grisha did not hear what was said further. His mamma came to the door
and sent him to the nursery to learn his lessons.
“Go and learn your lesson. It’s not your business to listen here!”
When Grisha reached the nursery, he put “My Own Book” in front of him,
but he did not get on with his reading. All that he had just seen and
heard aroused a multitude of questions in his mind.
“The cook’s going to be married,” he thought. “Strange—I don’t
understand what people get married for. Mamma was married to papa,
Cousin Verotchka to Pavel Andreyitch. But one might be married to papa
and Pavel Andreyitch after all: they have gold watch-chains and nice
suits, their boots are always polished; but to marry that dreadful
cabman with a red nose and felt boots. . . . Fi! And why is it nurse
wants poor Pelageya to be married?”
When the visitor had gone out of the kitchen, Pelageya appeared and
began clearing away. Her agitation still persisted. Her face was red and
looked scared. She scarcely touched the floor with the broom, and swept
every corner five times over. She lingered for a long time in the room
where mamma was sitting. She was evidently oppressed by her isolation,
and she was longing to express herself, to share her impressions with
some one, to open her heart.
“He’s gone,” she muttered, seeing that mamma would not begin the
conversation.
“One can see he is a good man,” said mamma, not taking her eyes off her
sewing. “Sober and steady.”
“I declare I won’t marry him, mistress!” Pelageya cried suddenly,
flushing crimson. “I declare I won’t!”
“Don’t be silly; you are not a child. It’s a serious step; you must
think it over thoroughly, it’s no use talking nonsense. Do you like
him?”
“What an idea, mistress!” cried Pelageya, abashed. “They say such things
that . . . my goodness. . . .”
“She should say she doesn’t like him!” thought Grisha.
“What an affected creature you are. . . . Do you like him?”
“But he is old, mistress!”
“Think of something else,” nurse flew out at her from the next room. “He
has not reached his fortieth year; and what do you want a young man for?
Handsome is as handsome does. . . . Marry him and that’s all about it!”
“I swear I won’t,” squealed Pelageya.
“You are talking nonsense. What sort of rascal do you want? Anyone else
would have bowed down to his feet, and you declare you won’t marry him.
You want to be always winking at the postmen and tutors. That tutor that
used to come to Grishenka, mistress . . . she was never tired of making
eyes at him. O-o, the shameless hussy!”
“Have you seen this Danilo before?” mamma asked Pelageya.
“How could I have seen him? I set eyes on him to-day for the first time.
Aksinya picked him up and brought him along . . . the accursed devil. .
. . And where has he come from for my undoing!”
At dinner, when Pelageya was handing the dishes, everyone looked into
her face and teased her about the cabman. She turned fearfully red, and
went off into a forced giggle.
“It must be shameful to get married,” thought Grisha. “Terribly
shameful.”
All the dishes were too salt, and blood oozed from the half-raw
chickens, and, to cap it all, plates and knives kept dropping out of
Pelageya’s hands during dinner, as though from a shelf that had given
way; but no one said a word of blame to her, as they all understood the
state of her feelings. Only once papa flicked his table-napkin angrily
and said to mamma:
“What do you want to be getting them all married for? What business is
it of yours? Let them get married of themselves if they want to.”
After dinner, neighbouring cooks and maidservants kept flitting into the
kitchen, and there was the sound of whispering till late evening. How
they had scented out the matchmaking, God knows. When Grisha woke in the
night he heard his nurse and the cook whispering together in the
nursery. Nurse was talking persuasively, while the cook alternately
sobbed and giggled. When he fell asleep after this, Grisha dreamed of
Pelageya being carried off by Tchernomor and a witch.
Next day there was a calm. The life of the kitchen went on its
accustomed way as though the cabman did not exist. Only from time to
time nurse put on her new shawl, assumed a solemn and austere air, and
went off somewhere for an hour or two, obviously to conduct
negotiations. . . . Pelageya did not see the cabman, and when his name
was mentioned she flushed up and cried:
“May he be thrice damned! As though I should be thinking of him! Tfoo!”
In the evening mamma went into the kitchen, while nurse and Pelageya
were zealously mincing something, and said:
“You can marry him, of course—that’s your business—but I must tell you,
Pelageya, that he cannot live here. . . . You know I don’t like to have
anyone sitting in the kitchen. Mind now, remember . . . . And I can’t
let you sleep out.”
“Goodness knows! What an idea, mistress!” shrieked the cook. “Why do you
keep throwing him up at me? Plague take him! He’s a regular curse,
confound him! . . .”
Glancing one Sunday morning into the kitchen, Grisha was struck dumb
with amazement. The kitchen was crammed full of people. Here were cooks
from the whole courtyard, the porter, two policemen, a non-commissioned
officer with good-conduct stripes, and the boy Filka. . . . This Filka
was generally hanging about the laundry playing with the dogs; now he
was combed and washed, and was holding an ikon in a tinfoil setting.
Pelageya was standing in the middle of the kitchen in a new cotton
dress, with a flower on her head. Beside her stood the cabman. The happy
pair were red in the face and perspiring and bDlinking with
embarrassment.
“Well . . . I fancy it is time,” said the non-commissioned officer,
after a prolonged silence.
Pelageya’s face worked all over and she began blubbering. . . .
The soldier took a big loaf from the table, stood beside nurse, and
began blessing the couple. The cabman went up to the soldier, flopped
down on his knees, and gave a smacking kiss on his hand. He did the same
before nurse. Pelageya followed him mechanically, and she too bowed down
to the ground. At last the outer door was opened, there was a whiff of
white mist, and the whole party flocked noisily out of the kitchen into
the yard.
“Poor thing, poor thing,” thought Grisha, hearing the sobs of the cook.
“Where have they taken her? Why don’t papa and mamma protect her?”
After the wedding there was singing and concertina-playing in the
laundry till late evening. Mamma was cross all the evening because nurse
smelt of vodka, and owing to the wedding there was no one to heat the
samovar. Pelageya had not come back by the time Grisha went to bed.
“The poor thing is crying somewhere in the dark!” he thought. “While the
cabman is saying to her ‘shut up!’”
Next morning the cook was in the kitchen again. The cabman came in for a
minute. He thanked mamma, and glancing sternly at Pelageya, said:
“Will you look after her, madam? Be a father and a mother to her. And
you, too, Aksinya Stepanovna, do not forsake her, see that everything is
as it should be . . . without any nonsense. . . . And also, madam, if
you would kindly advance me five roubles of her wages. I have got to buy
a new horse-collar.”
Again a problem for Grisha: Pelageya was living in freedom, doing as she
liked, and not having to account to anyone for her actions, and all at
once, for no sort of reason, a stranger turns up, who has somehow
acquired rights over her conduct and her property! Grisha was
distressed. He longed passionately, almost to tears, to comfort this
victim, as he supposed, of man’s injustice. Picking out the very biggest
apple in the store-room he stole into the kitchen, slipped it into
Pelageya’s hand, and darted headlong away.
SLEEPY
NIGHT. Varka, the little nurse, a girl of thirteen, is rocking the
cradle in which the baby is lying, and humming hardly audibly:
“Hush-a-bye, my baby wee, While I sing a song for thee.”
A little green lamp is burning before the ikon; there is a string
stretched from one end of the room to the other, on which baby-clothes
and a pair of big black trousers are hanging. There is a big patch of
green on the ceiling from the ikon lamp, and the baby-clothes and the
trousers throw long shadows on the stove, on the cradle, and on Varka. .
. . When the lamp begins to flicker, the green patch and the shadows
come to life, and are set in motion, as though by the wind. It is
stuffy. There is a smell of cabbage soup, and of the inside of a boot-
shop.
The baby’s crying. For a long while he has been hoarse and exhausted
with crying; but he still goes on screaming, and there is no knowing
when he will stop. And Varka is sleepy. Her eyes are glued together, her
head droops, her neck aches. She cannot move her eyelids or her lips,
and she feels as though her face is dried and wooden, as though her head
has become as small as the head of a pin.
“Hush-a-bye, my baby wee,” she hums, “while I cook the groats for thee.
. . .”
A cricket is churring in the stove. Through the door in the next room
the master and the apprentice Afanasy are snoring. . . . The cradle
creaks plaintively, Varka murmurs—and it all blends into that soothing
music of the night to which it is so sweet to listen, when one is lying
in bed. Now that music is merely irritating and oppressive, because it
goads her to sleep, and she must not sleep; if Varka—God forbid!—should
fall asleep, her master and mistress would beat her.
The lamp flickers. The patch of green and the shadows are set in motion,
forcing themselves on Varka’s fixed, half-open eyes, and in her half
slumbering brain are fashioned into misty visions. She sees dark clouds
chasing one another over the sky, and screaming like the baby. But then
the wind blows, the clouds are gone, and Varka sees a broad high road
covered with liquid mud; along the high road stretch files of wagons,
while people with wallets on their backs are trudging along and shadows
flit backwards and forwards; on both sides she can see forests through
the cold harsh mist. All at once the people with their wallets and their
shadows fall on the ground in the liquid mud. “What is that for?” Varka
asks. “To sleep, to sleep!” they answer her. And they fall sound asleep,
and sleep sweetly, while crows and magpies sit on the telegraph wires,
scream like the baby, and try to wake them.
“Hush-a-bye, my baby wee, and I will sing a song to thee,” murmurs
Varka, and now she sees herself in a dark stuffy hut.
Her dead father, Yefim Stepanov, is tossing from side to side on the
floor. She does not see him, but she hears him moaning and rolling on
the floor from pain. “His guts have burst,” as he says; the pain is so
violent that he cannot utter a single word, and can only draw in his
breath and clack his teeth like the rattling of a drum:
“Boo—boo—boo—boo. . . .”
Her mother, Pelageya, has run to the master’s house to say that Yefim is
dying. She has been gone a long time, and ought to be back. Varka lies
awake on the stove, and hears her father’s “boo—boo—boo.” And then she
hears someone has driven up to the hut. It is a young doctor from the
town, who has been sent from the big house where he is staying on a
visit. The doctor comes into the hut; he cannot be seen in the darkness,
but he can be heard coughing and rattling the door.
“Light a candle,” he says.
“Boo—boo—boo,” answers Yefim.
Pelageya rushes to the stove and begins looking for the broken pot with
the matches. A minute passes in silence. The doctor, feeling in his
pocket, lights a match.
“In a minute, sir, in a minute,” says Pelageya. She rushes out of the
hut, and soon afterwards comes back with a bit of candle.
Yefim’s cheeks are rosy and his eyes are shining, and there is a
peculiar keenness in his glance, as though he were seeing right through
the hut and the doctor.
“Come, what is it? What are you thinking about?” says the doctor,
bending down to him. “Aha! have you had this long?”
“What? Dying, your honour, my hour has come. . . . I am not to stay
among the living.”
“Don’t talk nonsense! We will cure you!”
“That’s as you please, your honour, we humbly thank you, only we
understand. . . . Since death has come, there it is.”
The doctor spends a quarter of an hour over Yefim, then he gets up and
says:
“I can do nothing. You must go into the hospital, there they will
operate on you. Go at once . . . You must go! It’s rather late, they
will all be asleep in the hospital, but that doesn’t matter, I will give
you a note. Do you hear?”
“Kind sir, but what can he go in?” says Pelageya. “We have no horse.”
“Never mind. I’ll ask your master, he’ll let you have a horse.”
The doctor goes away, the candle goes out, and again there is the sound
of “boo—boo—boo.” Half an hour later someone drives up to the hut. A
cart has been sent to take Yefim to the hospital. He gets ready and
goes. . . .
But now it is a clear bright morning. Pelageya is not at home; she has
gone to the hospital to find what is being done to Yefim. Somewhere
there is a baby crying, and Varka hears someone singing with her own
voice:
“Hush-a-bye, my baby wee, I will sing a song to thee.”
Pelageya comes back; she crosses herself and whispers:
“They put him to rights in the night, but towards morning he gave up his
soul to God. . . . The Kingdom of Heaven be his and peace everlasting. .
. . They say he was taken too late. . . . He ought to have gone sooner.
. . .”
Varka goes out into the road and cries there, but all at once someone
hits her on the back of her head so hard that her forehead knocks
against a birch tree. She raises her eyes, and sees facing her, her
master, the shoemaker.
“What are you about, you scabby slut?” he says. “The child is crying,
and you are asleep!”
He gives her a sharp slap behind the ear, and she shakes her head, rocks
the cradle, and murmurs her song. The green patch and the shadows from
the trousers and the baby-clothes move up and down, nod to her, and soon
take possession of her brain again. Again she sees the high road covered
with liquid mud. The people with wallets on their backs and the shadows
have lain down and are fast asleep. Looking at them, Varka has a
passionate longing for sleep; she would lie down with enjoyment, but her
mother Pelageya is walking beside her, hurrying her on. They are
hastening together to the town to find situations.
“Give alms, for Christ’s sake!” her mother begs of the people they meet.
“Show us the Divine Mercy, kind-hearted gentlefolk!”
“Give the baby here!” a familiar voice answers. “Give the baby here!”
the same voice repeats, this time harshly and angrily. “Are you asleep,
you wretched girl?”
Varka jumps up, and looking round grasps what is the matter: there is no
high road, no Pelageya, no people meeting them, there is only her
mistress, who has come to feed the baby, and is standing in the middle
of the room. While the stout, broad-shouldered woman nurses the child
and soothes it, Varka stands looking at her and waiting till she has
done. And outside the windows the air is already turning blue, the
shadows and the green patch on the ceiling are visibly growing pale, it
will soon be morning.
“Take him,” says her mistress, buttoning up her chemise over her bosom;
“he is crying. He must be bewitched.”
Varka takes the baby, puts him in the cradle and begins rocking it
again. The green patch and the shadows gradually disappear, and now
there is nothing to force itself on her eyes and cloud her brain. But
she is as sleepy as before, fearfully sleepy! Varka lays her head on the
edge of the cradle, and rocks her whole body to overcome her sleepiness,
but yet her eyes are glued together, and her head is heavy.
“Varka, heat the stove!” she hears the master’s voice through the door.
So it is time to get up and set to work. Varka leaves the cradle, and
runs to the shed for firewood. She is glad. When one moves and runs
about, one is not so sleepy as when one is sitting down. She brings the
wood, heats the stove, and feels that her wooden face is getting supple
again, and that her thoughts are growing clearer.
“Varka, set the samovar!” shouts her mistress.
Varka splits a piece of wood, but has scarcely time to light the
splinters and put them in the samovar, when she hears a fresh order:
“Varka, clean the master’s goloshes!”
She sits down on the floor, cleans the goloshes, and thinks how nice it
would be to put her head into a big deep golosh, and have a little nap
in it. . . . And all at once the golosh grows, swells, fills up the
whole room. Varka drops the brush, but at once shakes her head, opens
her eyes wide, and tries to look at things so that they may not grow big
and move before her eyes.
“Varka, wash the steps outside; I am ashamed for the customers to see
them!”
Varka washes the steps, sweeps and dusts the rooms, then heats another
stove and runs to the shop. There is a great deal of work: she hasn’t
one minute free.
But nothing is so hard as standing in the same place at the kitchen
table peeling potatoes. Her head droops over the table, the potatoes
dance before her eyes, the knife tumbles out of her hand while her fat,
angry mistress is moving about near her with her sleeves tucked up,
talking so loud that it makes a ringing in Varka’s ears. It is
agonising, too, to wait at dinner, to wash, to sew, there are minutes
when she longs to flop on to the floor regardless of everything, and to
sleep.
The day passes. Seeing the windows getting dark, Varka presses her
temples that feel as though they were made of wood, and smiles, though
she does not know why. The dusk of evening caresses her eyes that will
hardly keep open, and promises her sound sleep soon. In the evening
visitors come.
“Varka, set the samovar!” shouts her mistress. The samovar is a little
one, and before the visitors have drunk all the tea they want, she has
to heat it five times. After tea Varka stands for a whole hour on the
same spot, looking at the visitors, and waiting for orders.
“Varka, run and buy three bottles of beer!”
She starts off, and tries to run as quickly as she can, to drive away
sleep.
“Varka, fetch some vodka! Varka, where’s the corkscrew? Varka, clean a
herring!”
But now, at last, the visitors have gone; the lights are put out, the
master and mistress go to bed.
“Varka, rock the baby!” she hears the last order.
The cricket churrs in the stove; the green patch on the ceiling and the
shadows from the trousers and the baby-clothes force themselves on
Varka’s half-opened eyes again, wink at her and cloud her mind.
“Hush-a-bye, my baby wee,” she murmurs, “and I will sing a song to
thee.”
And the baby screams, and is worn out with screaming. Again Varka sees
the muddy high road, the people with wallets, her mother Pelageya, her
father Yefim. She understands everything, she recognises everyone, but
through her half sleep she cannot understand the force which binds her,
hand and foot, weighs upon her, and prevents her from living. She looks
round, searches for that force that she may escape from it, but she
cannot find it. At last, tired to death, she does her very utmost,
strains her eyes, looks up at the flickering green patch, and listening
to the screaming, finds the foe who will not let her live.
That foe is the baby.
She laughs. It seems strange to her that she has failed to grasp such a
simple thing before. The green patch, the shadows, and the cricket seem
to laugh and wonder too.
The hallucination takes possession of Varka. She gets up from her stool,
and with a broad smile on her face and wide unbDlinking eyes, she walks
up and down the room. She feels pleased and tickled at the thought that
she will be rid directly of the baby that binds her hand and foot. . . .
Kill the baby and then sleep, sleep, sleep. . . .
Laughing and winking and shaking her fingers at the green patch, Varka
steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. When she has strangled
him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughs with delight that she
can sleep, and in a minute is sleeping as sound as the dead.
CHILDREN
PAPA and mamma and Aunt Nadya are not at home. They have gone to a
christening party at the house of that old officer who rides on a little
grey horse. While waiting for them to come home, Grisha, Anya, Alyosha,
Sonya, and the cook’s son, Andrey, are sitting at the table in the
dining-room, playing at loto. To tell the truth, it is bedtime, but how
can one go to sleep without hearing from mamma what the baby was like at
the christening, and what they had for supper? The table, lighted by a
hanging lamp, is dotted with numbers, nutshells, scraps of paper, and
little bits of glass. Two cards lie in front of each player, and a heap
of bits of glass for covering the numbers. In the middle of the table is
a white saucer with five kopecks in it. Beside the saucer, a half-eaten
apple, a pair of scissors, and a plate on which they have been told to
put their nutshells. The children are playing for money. The stake is a
kopeck. The rule is: if anyone cheats, he is turned out at once. There
is no one in the dining-room but the players, and nurse, Agafya
Ivanovna, is in the kitchen, showing the cook how to cut a pattern,
while their elder brother, Vasya, a schoolboy in the fifth class, is
lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, feeling bored.
They are playing with zest. The greatest excitement is expressed on the
face of Grisha. He is a small boy of nine, with a head cropped so that
the bare skin shows through, chubby cheeks, and thick lips like a
negro’s. He is already in the preparatory class, and so is regarded as
grown up, and the cleverest. He is playing entirely for the sake of the
money. If there had been no kopecks in the saucer, he would have been
asleep long ago. His brown eyes stray uneasily and jealously over the
other players’ cards. The fear that he may not win, envy, and the
financial combinations of which his cropped head is full, will not let
him sit still and concentrate his mind. He fidgets as though he were
sitting on thorns. When he wins, he snatches up the money greedily, and
instantly puts it in his pocket. His sister, Anya, a girl of eight, with
a sharp chin and clever shining eyes, is also afraid that someone else
may win. She flushes and turns pale, and watches the players keenly. The
kopecks do not interest her. Success in the game is for her a question
of vanity. The other sister, Sonya, a child of six with a curly head,
and a complexion such as is seen only in very healthy children,
expensive dolls, and the faces on bonbon boxes, is playing loto for the
process of the game itself. There is bliss all over her face. Whoever
wins, she laughs and claps her hands. Alyosha, a chubby, spherical
little figure, gasps, breathes hard through his nose, and stares open-
eyed at the cards. He is moved neither by covetousness nor vanity. So
long as he is not driven out of the room, or sent to bed, he is
thankful. He looks phlegmatic, but at heart he is rather a little beast.
He is not there so much for the sake of the loto, as for the sake of the
misunderstandings which are inevitable in the game. He is greatly
delighted if one hits another, or calls him names. He ought to have run
off somewhere long ago, but he won’t leave the table for a minute, for
fear they should steal his counters or his kopecks. As he can only count
the units and numbers which end in nought, Anya covers his numbers for
him. The fifth player, the cook’s son, Andrey, a dark-skinned and sickly
looking boy in a cotton shirt, with a copper cross on his breast, stands
motionless, looking dreamily at the numbers. He takes no interest in
winning, or in the success of the others, because he is entirely
engrossed by the arithmetic of the game, and its far from complex
theory; “How many numbers there are in the world,” he is thinking, “and
how is it they don’t get mixed up?”
They all shout out the numbers in turn, except Sonya and Alyosha. To
vary the monotony, they have invented in the course of time a number of
synonyms and comic nicknames. Seven, for instance, is called the
“ovenrake,” eleven the “sticks,” seventy-seven “Semyon Semyonitch,”
ninety “grandfather,” and so on. The game is going merrily.
“Thirty-two,” cries Grisha, drawing the little yellow cylinders out of
his father’s cap. “Seventeen! Ovenrake! Twenty-eight! Lay them straight.
. . .”
Anya sees that Andrey has let twenty-eight slip. At any other time she
would have pointed it out to him, but now when her vanity lies in the
saucer with the kopecks, she is triumphant.
“Twenty-three!” Grisha goes on, “Semyon Semyonitch! Nine!”
“A beetle, a beetle,” cries Sonya, pointing to a beetle running across
the table. “Aie!”
“Don’t kill it,” says Alyosha, in his deep bass, “perhaps it’s got
children . . . .”
Sonya follows the black beetle with her eyes and wonders about its
children: what tiny little beetles they must be!
“Forty-three! One!” Grisha goes on, unhappy at the thought that Anya has
already made two fours. “Six!”
“Game! I have got the game!” cries Sonya, rolling her eyes coquettishly
and giggling.
The players’ countenances lengthen.
“Must make sure!” says Grisha, looking with hatred at Sonya.
Exercising his rights as a big boy, and the cleverest, Grisha takes upon
himself to decide. What he wants, that they do. Sonya’s reckoning is
slowly and carefully verified, and to the great regret of her fellow
players, it appears that she has not cheated. Another game is begun.
“I did see something yesterday!” says Anya, as though to herself.
“Filipp Filippitch turned his eyelids inside out somehow and his eyes
looked red and dreadful, like an evil spirit’s.”
“I saw it too,” says Grisha. “Eight! And a boy at our school can move
his ears. Twenty-seven!”
Andrey looks up at Grisha, meditates, and says:
“I can move my ears too. . . .”
“Well then, move them.”
Andrey moves his eyes, his lips, and his fingers, and fancies that his
ears are moving too. Everyone laughs.
“He is a horrid man, that Filipp Filippitch,” sighs Sonya. “He came into
our nursery yesterday, and I had nothing on but my chemise . . . And I
felt so improper!”
“Game!” Grisha cries suddenly, snatching the money from the saucer.
“I’ve got the game! You can look and see if you like.”
The cook’s son looks up and turns pale.
“Then I can’t go on playing any more,” he whispers.
“Why not?”
“Because . . . because I have got no more money.”
“You can’t play without money,” says Grisha.
Andrey ransacks his pockets once more to make sure. Finding nothing in
them but crumbs and a bitten pencil, he drops the corners of his mouth
and begins bDlinking miserably. He is on the point of crying. . . .
“I’ll put it down for you!” says Sonya, unable to endure his look of
agony. “Only mind you must pay me back afterwards.”
The money is brought and the game goes on.
“I believe they are ringing somewhere,” says Anya, opening her eyes
wide.
They all leave off playing and gaze open-mouthed at the dark window. The
reflection of the lamp glimmers in the darkness.
“It was your fancy.”
“At night they only ring in the cemetery,” says Andrey.
“And what do they ring there for?”
“To prevent robbers from breaking into the church. They are afraid of
the bells.”
“And what do robbers break into the church for?” asks Sonya.
“Everyone knows what for: to kill the watchmen.”
A minute passes in silence. They all look at one another, shudder, and
go on playing. This time Andrey wins.
“He has cheated,” Alyosha booms out, apropos of nothing.
“What a lie, I haven’t cheated.”
Andrey turns pale, his mouth works, and he gives Alyosha a slap on the
head! Alyosha glares angrily, jumps up, and with one knee on the table,
slaps Andrey on the cheek! Each gives the other a second blow, and both
howl. Sonya, feeling such horrors too much for her, begins crying too,
and the dining-room resounds with lamentations on various notes. But do
not imagine that that is the end of the game. Before five minutes are
over, the children are laughing and talking peaceably again. Their faces
are tear-stained, but that does not prevent them from smiling; Alyosha
is positively blissful, there has been a squabble!
Vasya, the fifth form schoolboy, walks into the dining-room. He looks
sleepy and disillusioned.
“This is revolting!” he thinks, seeing Grisha feel in his pockets in
which the kopecks are jingling. “How can they give children money? And
how can they let them play games of chance? A nice way to bring them up,
I must say! It’s revolting!”
But the children’s play is so tempting that he feels an inclination to
join them and to try his luck.
“Wait a minute and I’ll sit down to a game,” he says.
“Put down a kopeck!”
“In a minute,” he says, fumbling in his pockets. “I haven’t a kopeck,
but here is a rouble. I’ll stake a rouble.”
“No, no, no. . . . You must put down a kopeck.”
“You stupids. A rouble is worth more than a kopeck anyway,” the
schoolboy explains. “Whoever wins can give me change.”
“No, please! Go away!”
The fifth form schoolboy shrugs his shoulders, and goes into the kitchen
to get change from the servants. It appears there is not a single kopeck
in the kitchen.
“In that case, you give me change,” he urges Grisha, coming back from
the kitchen. “I’ll pay you for the change. Won’t you? Come, give me ten
kopecks for a rouble.”
Grisha looks suspiciously at Vasya, wondering whether it isn’t some
trick, a swindle.
“I won’t,” he says, holding his pockets.
Vasya begins to get cross, and abuses them, calling them idiots and
blockheads.
“I’ll put down a stake for you, Vasya!” says Sonya. “Sit down.” He sits
down and lays two cards before him. Anya begins counting the numbers.
“I’ve dropped a kopeck!” Grisha announces suddenly, in an agitated
voice. “Wait!”
He takes the lamp, and creeps under the table to look for the kopeck.
They clutch at nutshells and all sorts of nastiness, knock their heads
together, but do not find the kopeck. They begin looking again, and look
till Vasya takes the lamp out of Grisha’s hands and puts it in its
place. Grisha goes on looking in the dark. But at last the kopeck is
found. The players sit down at the table and mean to go on playing.
“Sonya is asleep!” Alyosha announces.
Sonya, with her curly head lying on her arms, is in a sweet, sound,
tranquil sleep, as though she had been asleep for an hour. She has
fallen asleep by accident, while the others were looking for the kopeck.
“Come along, lie on mamma’s bed!” says Anya, leading her away from the
table. “Come along!”
They all troop out with her, and five minutes later mamma’s bed presents
a curious spectacle. Sonya is asleep. Alyosha is snoring beside her.
With their heads to the others’ feet, sleep Grisha and Anya. The cook’s
son, Andrey too, has managed to snuggle in beside them. Near them lie
the kopecks, that have lost their power till the next game. Good-night!
THE RUNAWAY
IT had been a long business. At first Pashka had walked with his mother
in the rain, at one time across a mown field, then by forest paths,
where the yellow leaves stuck to his boots; he had walked until it was
daylight. Then he had stood for two hours in the dark passage, waiting
for the door to open. It was not so cold and damp in the passage as in
the yard, but with the high wind spurts of rain flew in even there. When
the passage gradually became packed with people Pashka, squeezed among
them, leaned his face against somebody’s sheepskin which smelt strongly
of salt fish, and sank into a doze. But at last the bolt clicked, the
door flew open, and Pashka and his mother went into the waiting-room.
All the patients sat on benches without stirring or speaking. Pashka
looked round at them, and he too was silent, though he was seeing a
great deal that was strange and funny. Only once, when a lad came into
the waiting-room hopping on one leg, Pashka longed to hop too; he nudged
his mother’s elbow, giggled in his sleeve, and said: “Look, mammy, a
sparrow.”
“Hush, child, hush!” said his mother.
A sleepy-looking hospital assistant appeared at the little window.
“Come and be registered!” he boomed out.
All of them, including the funny lad who hopped, filed up to the window.
The assistant asked each one his name, and his father’s name, where he
lived, how long he had been ill, and so on. From his mother’s answers,
Pashka learned that his name was not Pashka, but Pavel Galaktionov, that
he was seven years old, that he could not read or write, and that he had
been ill ever since Easter.
Soon after the registration, he had to stand up for a little while; the
doctor in a white apron, with a towel round his waist, walked across the
waiting-room. As he passed by the boy who hopped, he shrugged his
shoulders, and said in a sing-song tenor:
“Well, you are an idiot! Aren’t you an idiot? I told you to come on
Monday, and you come on Friday. It’s nothing to me if you don’t come at
all, but you know, you idiot, your leg will be done for!”
The lad made a pitiful face, as though he were going to beg for alms,
bDlinked, and said:
“Kindly do something for me, Ivan Mikolaitch!”
“It’s no use saying ‘Ivan Mikolaitch,’” the doctor mimicked him. “You
were told to come on Monday, and you ought to obey. You are an idiot,
and that is all about it.”
The doctor began seeing the patients. He sat in his little room, and
called up the patients in turn. Sounds were continually coming from the
little room, piercing wails, a child’s crying, or the doctor’s angry
words:
“Come, why are you bawling? Am I murdering you, or what? Sit quiet!”
Pashka’s turn came.
“Pavel Galaktionov!” shouted the doctor.
His mother was aghast, as though she had not expected this summons, and
taking Pashka by the hand, she led him into the room.
The doctor was sitting at the table, mechanically tapping on a thick
book with a little hammer.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, without looking at them.
“The little lad has an ulcer on his elbow, sir,” answered his mother,
and her face assumed an expression as though she really were terribly
grieved at Pashka’s ulcer.
“Undress him!”
Pashka, panting, unwound the kerchief from his neck, then wiped his nose
on his sleeve, and began deliberately pulling off his sheepskin.
“Woman, you have not come here on a visit!” said the doctor angrily.
“Why are you dawdling? You are not the only one here.”
Pashka hurriedly flung the sheepskin on the floor, and with his mother’s
help took off his shirt. . . The doctor looked at him lazily, and patted
him on his bare stomach.
“You have grown quite a respectable corporation, brother Pashka,” he
said, and heaved a sigh. “Come, show me your elbow.”
Pashka looked sideways at the basin full of bloodstained slops, looked
at the doctor’s apron, and began to cry.
“May-ay!” the doctor mimicked him. “Nearly old enough to be married,
spoilt boy, and here he is blubbering! For shame!”
Pashka, trying not to cry, looked at his mother, and in that look could
be read the entreaty: “Don’t tell them at home that I cried at the
hospital.”
The doctor examined his elbow, pressed it, heaved a sigh, clicked with
his lips, then pressed it again.
“You ought to be beaten, woman, but there is no one to do it,” he said.
“Why didn’t you bring him before? Why, the whole arm is done for. Look,
foolish woman. You see, the joint is diseased!”
“You know best, kind sir . . .” sighed the woman.
“Kind sir. . . . She’s let the boy’s arm rot, and now it is ‘kind sir.’
What kind of workman will he be without an arm? You’ll be nursing him
and looking after him for ages. I bet if you had had a pimple on your
nose, you’d have run to the hospital quick enough, but you have left
your boy to rot for six months. You are all like that.”
The doctor lighted a cigarette. While the cigarette smoked, he scolded
the woman, and shook his head in time to the song he was humming
inwardly, while he thought of something else. Pashka stood naked before
him, listening and looking at the smoke. When the cigarette went out,
the doctor started, and said in a lower tone:
“Well, listen, woman. You can do nothing with ointments and drops in
this case. You must leave him in the hospital.”
“If necessary, sir, why not?
“We must operate on him. You stop with me, Pashka,” said the doctor,
slapping Pashka on the shoulder. “Let mother go home, and you and I will
stop here, old man. It’s nice with me, old boy, it’s first-rate here.
I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Pashka, we will go catching finches
together. I will show you a fox! We will go visiting together! Shall we?
And mother will come for you tomorrow! Eh?”
Pashka looked inquiringly at his mother.
“You stay, child!” she said.
“He’ll stay, he’ll stay!” cried the doctor gleefully. “And there is no
need to discuss it. I’ll show him a live fox! We will go to the fair
together to buy candy! Marya Denisovna, take him upstairs!”
The doctor, apparently a light-hearted and friendly fellow, seemed glad
to have company; Pashka wanted to oblige him, especially as he had never
in his life been to a fair, and would have been glad to have a look at a
live fox, but how could he do without his mother?
After a little reflection he decided to ask the doctor to let his mother
stay in the hospital too, but before he had time to open his mouth the
lady assistant was already taking him upstairs. He walked up and looked
about him with his mouth open. The staircase, the floors, and the
doorposts—everything huge, straight, and bright-were painted a splendid
yellow colour, and had a delicious smell of Lenten oil. On all sides
lamps were hanging, strips of carpet stretched along the floor, copper
taps stuck out on the walls. But best of all Pashka liked the bedstead
upon which he was made to sit down, and the grey woollen coverlet. He
touched the pillows and the coverlet with his hands, looked round the
ward, and made up his mind that it was very nice at the doctor’s.
The ward was not a large one, it consisted of only three beds. One bed
stood empty, the second was occupied by Pashka, and on the third sat an
old man with sour eyes, who kept coughing and spitting into a mug. From
Pashka’s bed part of another ward could be seen with two beds; on one a
very pale wasted-looking man with an india-rubber bottle on his head was
asleep; on the other a peasant with his head tied up, looking very like
a woman, was sitting with his arms spread out.
After making Pashka sit down, the assistant went out and came back a
little later with a bundle of clothes under her arm.
“These are for you,” she said, “put them on.”
Pashka undressed and, not without satisfaction began attiring himself in
his new array. When he had put on the shirt, the drawers, and the little
grey dressing-gown, he looked at himself complacently, and thought that
it would not be bad to walk through the village in that costume. His
imagination pictured his mother’s sending him to the kitchen garden by
the river to gather cabbage leaves for the little pig; he saw himself
walking along, while the boys and girls surrounded him and looked with
envy at his little dressing-gown.
A nurse came into the ward, bringing two tin bowls, two spoons, and two
pieces of bread. One bowl she set before the old man, the other before
Pashka.
“Eat!” she said.
Looking into his bowl, Pashka saw some rich cabbage soup, and in the
soup a piece of meat, and thought again that it was very nice at the
doctor’s, and that the doctor was not nearly so cross as he had seemed
at first. He spent a long time swallowing the soup, licking the spoon
after each mouthful, then when there was nothing left in the bowl but
the meat he stole a look at the old man, and felt envious that he was
still eating the soup. With a sigh Pashka attacked the meat, trying to
make it last as long as possible, but his efforts were fruitless; the
meat, too, quickly vanished. There was nothing left but the piece of
bread. Plain bread without anything on it was not appetising, but there
was no help for it. Pashka thought a little, and ate the bread. At that
moment the nurse came in with another bowl. This time there was roast
meat with potatoes in the bowl.
“And where is the bread?” asked the nurse.
Instead of answering, Pashka puffed out his cheeks, and blew out the
air.
“Why did you gobble it all up?” said the nurse reproachfully. “What are
you going to eat your meat with?”
She went and fetched another piece of bread. Pashka had never eaten
roast meat in his life, and trying it now found it very nice. It
vanished quickly, and then he had a piece of bread left bigger than the
first. When the old man had finished his dinner, he put away the remains
of his bread in a little table. Pashka meant to do the same, but on
second thoughts ate his piece.
When he had finished he went for a walk. In the next ward, besides the
two he had seen from the door, there were four other people. Of these
only one drew his attention. This was a tall, extremely emaciated
peasant with a morose-looking, hairy face. He was sitting on the bed,
nodding his head and swinging his right arm all the time like a
pendulum. Pashka could not take his eyes off him for a long time. At
first the man’s regular pendulum-like movements seemed to him curious,
and he thought they were done for the general amusement, but when he
looked into the man’s face he felt frightened, and realised that he was
terribly ill. Going into a third ward he saw two peasants with dark red
faces as though they were smeared with clay. They were sitting
motionless on their beds, and with their strange faces, in which it was
hard to distinguish their features, they looked like heathen idols.
“Auntie, why do they look like that?” Pashka asked the nurse.
“They have got smallpox, little lad.”
Going back to his own ward, Pashka sat down on his bed and began waiting
for the doctor to come and take him to catch finches, or to go to the
fair. But the doctor did not come. He got a passing glimpse of a
hospital assistant at the door of the next ward. He bent over the
patient on whose head lay a bag of ice, and cried: “Mihailo!”
But the sleeping man did not stir. The assistant made a gesture and went
away. Pashka scrutinised the old man, his next neighbour. The old man
coughed without ceasing and spat into a mug. His cough had a long-drawn-
out, creaking sound.
Pashka liked one peculiarity about him; when he drew the air in as he
coughed, something in his chest whistled and sang on different notes.
“Grandfather, what is it whistles in you?” Pashka asked.
The old man made no answer. Pashka waited a little and asked:
“Grandfather, where is the fox?”
“What fox?”
“The live one.”
“Where should it be? In the forest!”
A long time passed, but the doctor still did not appear. The nurse
brought in tea, and scolded Pashka for not having saved any bread for
his tea; the assistant came once more and set to work to wake Mihailo.
It turned blue outside the windows, the wards were lighted up, but the
doctor did not appear. It was too late now to go to the fair and catch
finches; Pashka stretched himself on his bed and began thinking. He
remembered the candy promised him by the doctor, the face and voice of
his mother, the darkness in his hut at home, the stove, peevish granny
Yegorovna . . . and he suddenly felt sad and dreary. He remembered that
his mother was coming for him next day, smiled, and shut his eyes.
He was awakened by a rustling. In the next ward someone was stepping
about and speaking in a whisper. Three figures were moving about
Mihailo’s bed in the dim light of the night-light and the ikon lamp.
“Shall we take him, bed and all, or without?” asked one of them.
“Without. You won’t get through the door with the bed.”
“He’s died at the wrong time, the Kingdom of Heaven be his!”
One took Mihailo by his shoulders, another by his legs and lifted him
up: Mihailo’s arms and the skirt of his dressing-gown hung limply to the
ground. A third—it was the peasant who looked like a woman—crossed
himself, and all three tramping clumsily with their feet and stepping on
Mihailo’s skirts, went out of the ward.
There came the whistle and humming on different notes from the chest of
the old man who was asleep. Pashka listened, peeped at the dark windows,
and jumped out of bed in terror.
“Ma-a-mka!” he moaned in a deep bass.
And without waiting for an answer, he rushed into the next ward. There
the darkness was dimly lighted up by a night-light and the ikon lamp;
the patients, upset by the death of Mihailo, were sitting on their
bedsteads: their dishevelled figures, mixed up with the shadows, looked
broader, taller, and seemed to be growing bigger and bigger; on the
furthest bedstead in the corner, where it was darkest, there sat the
peasant moving his head and his hand.
Pashka, without noticing the doors, rushed into the smallpox ward, from
there into the corridor, from the corridor he flew into a big room where
monsters, with long hair and the faces of old women, were lying and
sitting on the beds. Running through the women’s wing he found himself
again in the corridor, saw the banisters of the staircase he knew
already, and ran downstairs. There he recognised the waiting-room in
which he had sat that morning, and began looking for the door into the
open air.
The latch creaked, there was a whiff of cold wind, and Pashka,
stumbling, ran out into the yard. He had only one thought—to run, to
run! He did not know the way, but felt convinced that if he ran he would
be sure to find himself at home with his mother. The sky was overcast,
but there was a moon behind the clouds. Pashka ran from the steps
straight forward, went round the barn and stumbled into some thick
bushes; after stopping for a minute and thinking, he dashed back again
to the hospital, ran round it, and stopped again undecided; behind the
hospital there were white crosses.
“Ma-a-mka!” he cried, and dashed back.
Running by the dark sinister buildings, he saw one lighted window.
The bright red patch looked dreadful in the darkness, but Pashka,
frantic with terror, not knowing where to run, turned towards it. Beside
the window was a porch with steps, and a front door with a white board
on it; Pashka ran up the steps, looked in at the window, and was at once
possessed by intense overwhelming joy. Through the window he saw the
merry affable doctor sitting at the table reading a book. Laughing with
happiness, Pashka stretched out his hands to the person he knew and
tried to call out, but some unseen force choked him and struck at his
legs; he staggered and fell down on the steps unconscious.
When he came to himself it was daylight, and a voice he knew very well,
that had promised him a fair, finches, and a fox, was saying beside him:
“Well, you are an idiot, Pashka! Aren’t you an idiot? You ought to be
beaten, but there’s no one to do it.”
GRISHA
GRISHA, a chubby little boy, born two years and eight months ago, is
walking on the boulevard with his nurse. He is wearing a long, wadded
pelisse, a scarf, a big cap with a fluffy pom-pom, and warm over-boots.
He feels hot and stifled, and now, too, the rollicking April sunshine is
beating straight in his face, and making his eyelids tingle.
The whole of his clumsy, timidly and uncertainly stepping little figure
expresses the utmost bewilderment.
Hitherto Grisha has known only a rectangular world, where in one corner
stands his bed, in the other nurse’s trunk, in the third a chair, while
in the fourth there is a little lamp burning. If one looks under the
bed, one sees a doll with a broken arm and a drum; and behind nurse’s
trunk, there are a great many things of all sorts: cotton reels, boxes
without lids, and a broken Jack-a-dandy. In that world, besides nurse
and Grisha, there are often mamma and the cat. Mamma is like a doll, and
puss is like papa’s fur-coat, only the coat hasn’t got eyes and a tail.
From the world which is called the nursery a door leads to a great
expanse where they have dinner and tea. There stands Grisha’s chair on
high legs, and on the wall hangs a clock which exists to swing its
pendulum and chime. From the dining-room, one can go into a room where
there are red arm-chairs. Here, there is a dark patch on the carpet,
concerning which fingers are still shaken at Grisha. Beyond that room is
still another, to which one is not admitted, and where one sees glimpses
of papa—an extremely enigmatical person! Nurse and mamma are
comprehensible: they dress Grisha, feed him, and put him to bed, but
what papa exists for is unknown. There is another enigmatical person,
auntie, who presented Grisha with a drum. She appears and disappears.
Where does she disappear to? Grisha has more than once looked under the
bed, behind the trunk, and under the sofa, but she was not there.
In this new world, where the sun hurts one’s eyes, there are so many
papas and mammas and aunties, that there is no knowing to whom to run.
But what is stranger and more absurd than anything is the horses. Grisha
gazes at their moving legs, and can make nothing of it. He looks at his
nurse for her to solve the mystery, but she does not speak.
All at once he hears a fearful tramping. . . . A crowd of soldiers, with
red faces and bath brooms under their arms, move in step along the
boulevard straight upon him. Grisha turns cold all over with terror, and
looks inquiringly at nurse to know whether it is dangerous. But nurse
neither weeps nor runs away, so there is no danger. Grisha looks after
the soldiers, and begins to move his feet in step with them himself.
Two big cats with long faces run after each other across the boulevard,
with their tongues out, and their tails in the air. Grisha thinks that
he must run too, and runs after the cats.
“Stop!” cries nurse, seizing him roughly by the shoulder. “Where are you
off to? Haven’t you been told not to be naughty?”
Here there is a nurse sitting holding a tray of oranges. Grisha passes
by her, and, without saying anything, takes an orange.
“What are you doing that for?” cries the companion of his travels,
slapping his hand and snatching away the orange. “Silly!”
Now Grisha would have liked to pick up a bit of glass that was lying at
his feet and gleaming like a lamp, but he is afraid that his hand will
be slapped again.
“My respects to you!” Grisha hears suddenly, almost above his ear, a
loud thick voice, and he sees a tall man with bright buttons.
To his great delight, this man gives nurse his hand, stops, and begins
talking to her. The brightness of the sun, the noise of the carriages,
the horses, the bright buttons are all so impressively new and not
dreadful, that Grisha’s soul is filled with a feeling of enjoyment and
he begins to laugh.
“Come along! Come along!” he cries to the man with the bright buttons,
tugging at his coattails.
“Come along where?” asks the man.
“Come along!” Grisha insists.
He wants to say that it would be just as well to take with them papa,
mamma, and the cat, but his tongue does not say what he wants to.
A little later, nurse turns out of the boulevard, and leads Grisha into
a big courtyard where there is still snow; and the man with the bright
buttons comes with them too. They carefully avoid the lumps of snow and
the puddles, then, by a dark and dirty staircase, they go into a room.
Here there is a great deal of smoke, there is a smell of roast meat, and
a woman is standing by the stove frying cutlets. The cook and the nurse
kiss each other, and sit down on the bench together with the man, and
begin talking in a low voice. Grisha, wrapped up as he is, feels
insufferably hot and stifled.
“Why is this?” he wonders, looking about him.
He sees the dark ceiling, the oven fork with two horns, the stove which
looks like a great black hole.
“Mam-ma,” he drawls.
“Come, come, come!” cries the nurse. “Wait a bit!”
The cook puts a bottle on the table, two wine-glasses, and a pie. The
two women and the man with the bright buttons cDlink glasses and empty
them several times, and, the man puts his arm round first the cook and
then the nurse. And then all three begin singing in an undertone.
Grisha stretches out his hand towards the pie, and they give him a piece
of it. He eats it and watches nurse drinking. . . . He wants to drink
too.
“Give me some, nurse!” he begs.
The cook gives him a sip out of her glass. He rolls his eyes, bDlinks,
coughs, and waves his hands for a long time afterwards, while the cook
looks at him and laughs.
When he gets home Grisha begins to tell mamma, the walls, and the bed
where he has been, and what he has seen. He talks not so much with his
tongue, as with his face and his hands. He shows how the sun shines, how
the horses run, how the terrible stove looks, and how the cook drinks. .
. .
In the evening he cannot get to sleep. The soldiers with the brooms, the
big cats, the horses, the bit of glass, the tray of oranges, the bright
buttons, all gathered together, weigh on his brain. He tosses from side
to side, babbles, and, at last, unable to endure his excitement, begins
crying.
“You are feverish,” says mamma, putting her open hand on his forehead.
“What can have caused it?
“Stove!” wails Grisha. “Go away, stove!”
“He must have eaten too much . . .” mamma decides.
And Grisha, shattered by the impressions of the new life he has just
experienced, receives a spoonful of castor-oil from mamma.
OYSTERS
I NEED no great effort of memory to recall, in every detail, the rainy
autumn evening when I stood with my father in one of the more frequented
streets of Moscow, and felt that I was gradually being overcome by a
strange illness. I had no pain at all, but my legs were giving way under
me, the words stuck in my throat, my head slipped weakly on one side . .
. It seemed as though, in a moment, I must fall down and lose
consciousness.
If I had been taken into a hospital at that minute, the doctors would
have had to write over my bed: Fames, a disease which is not in the
manuals of medicine.
Beside me on the pavement stood my father in a shabby summer overcoat
and a serge cap, from which a bit of white wadding was sticking out. On
his feet he had big heavy goloshes. Afraid, vain man, that people would
see that his feet were bare under his goloshes, he had drawn the tops of
some old boots up round the calves of his legs.
This poor, foolish, queer creature, whom I loved the more warmly the
more ragged and dirty his smart summer overcoat became, had come to
Moscow, five months before, to look for a job as copying-clerk. For
those five months he had been trudging about Moscow looking for work,
and it was only on that day that he had brought himself to go into the
street to beg for alms.
Before us was a big house of three storeys, adorned with a blue
signboard with the word “Restaurant” on it. My head was drooping feebly
backwards and on one side, and I could not help looking upwards at the
lighted windows of the restaurant. Human figures were flitting about at
the windows. I could see the right side of the orchestrion, two
oleographs, hanging lamps . . . . Staring into one window, I saw a patch
of white. The patch was motionless, and its rectangular outlines stood
out sharply against the dark, brown background. I looked intently and
made out of the patch a white placard on the wall. Something was written
on it, but what it was, I could not see. . .
For half an hour I kept my eyes on the placard. Its white attracted my
eyes, and, as it were, hypnotised my brain. I tried to read it, but my
efforts were in vain.
At last the strange disease got the upper hand.
The rumble of the carriages began to seem like thunder, in the stench of
the street I distinguished a thousand smells. The restaurant lights and
the lamps dazzled my eyes like lightning. My five senses were
overstrained and sensitive beyond the normal. I began to see what I had
not seen before.
“Oysters . . .” I made out on the placard.
A strange word! I had lived in the world eight years and three months,
but had never come across that word. What did it mean? Surely it was not
the name of the restaurant-keeper? But signboards with names on them
always hang outside, not on the walls indoors!
“Papa, what does ‘oysters’ mean?” I asked in a husky voice, making an
effort to turn my face towards my father.
My father did not hear. He was keeping a watch on the movements of the
crowd, and following every passer-by with his eyes. . . . From his eyes
I saw that he wanted to say something to the passers-by, but the fatal
word hung like a heavy weight on his trembling lips and could not be
flung off. He even took a step after one passer-by and touched him on
the sleeve, but when he turned round, he said, “I beg your pardon,” was
overcome with confusion, and staggered back.
“Papa, what does ‘oysters’ mean?” I repeated.
“It is an animal . . . that lives in the sea.”
I instantly pictured to myself this unknown marine animal. . . . I
thought it must be something midway between a fish and a crab. As it was
from the sea they made of it, of course, a very nice hot fish soup with
savoury pepper and laurel leaves, or broth with vinegar and fricassee of
fish and cabbage, or crayfish sauce, or served it cold with horse-
radish. . . . I vividly imagined it being brought from the market,
quickly cleaned, quickly put in the pot, quickly, quickly, for everyone
was hungry . . . awfully hungry! From the kitchen rose the smell of hot
fish and crayfish soup.
I felt that this smell was tickling my palate and nostrils, that it was
gradually taking possession of my whole body. . . . The restaurant, my
father, the white placard, my sleeves were all smelling of it, smelling
so strongly that I began to chew. I moved my jaws and swallowed as
though I really had a piece of this marine animal in my mouth . . .
My legs gave way from the blissful sensation I was feeling, and I
clutched at my father’s arm to keep myself from falling, and leant
against his wet summer overcoat. My father was trembling and shivering.
He was cold . . .
“Papa, are oysters a Lenten dish?” I asked.
“They are eaten alive . . .” said my father. “They are in shells like
tortoises, but . . . in two halves.”
The delicious smell instantly left off affecting me, and the illusion
vanished. . . . Now I understood it all!
“How nasty,” I whispered, “how nasty!”
So that’s what “oysters” meant! I imagined to myself a creature like a
frog. A frog sitting in a shell, peeping out from it with big,
glittering eyes, and moving its revolting jaws. I imagined this creature
in a shell with claws, glittering eyes, and a slimy skin, being brought
from the market. . . . The children would all hide while the cook,
frowning with an air of disgust, would take the creature by its claw,
put it on a plate, and carry it into the dining-room. The grown-ups
would take it and eat it, eat it alive with its eyes, its teeth, its
legs! While it squeaked and tried to bite their lips. . . .
I frowned, but . . . but why did my teeth move as though I were
munching? The creature was loathsome, disgusting, terrible, but I ate
it, ate it greedily, afraid of distinguishing its taste or smell. As
soon as I had eaten one, I saw the glittering eyes of a second, a third
. . . I ate them too. . . . At last I ate the table-napkin, the plate,
my father’s goloshes, the white placard . . . I ate everything that
caught my eye, because I felt that nothing but eating would take away my
illness. The oysters had a terrible look in their eyes and were
loathsome. I shuddered at the thought of them, but I wanted to eat! To
eat!
“Oysters! Give me some oysters!” was the cry that broke from me and I
stretched out my hand.
“Help us, gentlemen!” I heard at that moment my father say, in a hollow
and shaking voice. “I am ashamed to ask but—my God!—I can bear no more!”
“Oysters!” I cried, pulling my father by the skirts of his coat.
“Do you mean to say you eat oysters? A little chap like you!” I heard
laughter close to me.
Two gentlemen in top hats were standing before us, looking into my face
and laughing.
“Do you really eat oysters, youngster? That’s interesting! How do you
eat them?”
I remember that a strong hand dragged me into the lighted restaurant. A
minute later there was a crowd round me, watching me with curiosity and
amusement. I sat at a table and ate something slimy, salt with a flavour
of dampness and mouldiness. I ate greedily without chewing, without
looking and trying to discover what I was eating. I fancied that if I
opened my eyes I should see glittering eyes, claws, and sharp teeth.
All at once I began biting something hard, there was a sound of a
scrunching.
“Ha, ha! He is eating the shells,” laughed the crowd. “Little silly, do
you suppose you can eat that?”
After that I remember a terrible thirst. I was lying in my bed, and
could not sleep for heartburn and the strange taste in my parched mouth.
My father was walking up and down, gesticulating with his hands.
“I believe I have caught cold,” he was muttering. “I’ve a feeling in my
head as though someone were sitting on it. . . . Perhaps it is because I
have not . . . er . . . eaten anything to-day. . . . I really am a
queer, stupid creature. . . . I saw those gentlemen pay ten roubles for
the oysters. Why didn’t I go up to them and ask them . . . to lend me
something? They would have given something.”
Towards morning, I fell asleep and dreamt of a frog sitting in a shell,
moving its eyes. At midday I was awakened by thirst, and looked for my
father: he was still walking up and down and gesticulating.
HOME
“SOMEONE came from the Grigoryevs’ to fetch a book, but I said you were
not at home. The postman brought the newspaper and two letters. By the
way, Yevgeny Petrovitch, I should like to ask you to speak to Seryozha.
To-day, and the day before yesterday, I have noticed that he is smoking.
When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his ears as
usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice.”
Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit court, who
had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves in his
study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and laughed.
“Seryozha smoking . . .” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I can
picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how old is
he?”
“Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age smoking is a bad
and pernicious habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in the
beginning.”
“Perfectly true. And where does he get the tobacco?”
“He takes it from the drawer in your table.”
“Yes? In that case, send him to me.”
When the governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair
before his writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He
pictured his Seryozha with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst of
clouds of tobacco smoke, and this caricature made him smile; at the same
time, the grave, troubled face of the governess called up memories of
the long past, half-forgotten time when smoking aroused in his teachers
and parents a strange, not quite intelligible horror. It really was
horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and expelled from school, and
their lives were made a misery on account of smoking, though not a
single teacher or father knew exactly what was the harm or sinfulness of
smoking. Even very intelligent people did not scruple to wage war on a
vice which they did not understand. Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the
head-master of the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old
man, who was so appalled when he found a high-school boy with a
cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an
emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to
expulsion. This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was
understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.
The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled and
their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very often the
punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime itself. The living
organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself, growing accustomed
and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise man would be bound to
feel at every moment what an irrational basis there often is underlying
his rational activity, and how little of established truth and certainty
there is even in work so responsible and so terrible in its effects as
that of the teacher, of the lawyer, of the writer. . . .
And such light and discursive thoughts as visit the brain only when it
is weary and resting began straying through Yevgeny Petrovitch’s head;
there is no telling whence and why they come, they do not remain long in
the mind, but seem to glide over its surface without sinking deeply into
it. For people who are forced for whole hours, and even days, to think
by routine in one direction, such free private thinking affords a kind
of comfort, an agreeable solace.
It was between eight and nine o’clock in the evening. Overhead, on the
second storey, someone was walking up and down, and on the floor above
that four hands were playing scales. The pacing of the man overhead who,
to judge from his nervous step, was thinking of something harassing, or
was suffering from toothache, and the monotonous scales gave the
stillness of the evening a drowsiness that disposed to lazy reveries. In
the nursery, two rooms away, the governess and Seryozha were talking.
“Pa-pa has come!” carolled the child. “Papa has co-ome. Pa! Pa! Pa!”
“Votre père vous appelle, allez vite!” cried the governess, shrill as a
frightened bird. “I am speaking to you!”
“What am I to say to him, though?” Yevgeny Petrovitch wondered.
But before he had time to think of anything whatever his son Seryozha, a
boy of seven, walked into the study.
He was a child whose sex could only have been guessed from his dress:
weakly, white-faced, and fragile. He was limp like a hot-house plant,
and everything about him seemed extraordinarily soft and tender: his
movements, his curly hair, the look in his eyes, his velvet jacket.
“Good evening, papa!” he said, in a soft voice, clambering on to his
father’s knee and giving him a rapid kiss on his neck. “Did you send for
me?”
“Excuse me, Sergey Yevgenitch,” answered the prosecutor, removing him
from his knee. “Before kissing we must have a talk, and a serious talk .
. . I am angry with you, and don’t love you any more. I tell you, my
boy, I don’t love you, and you are no son of mine. . . .”
Seryozha looked intently at his father, then shifted his eyes to the
table, and shrugged his shoulders.
“What have I done to you?” he asked in perplexity, bDlinking. “I haven’t
been in your study all day, and I haven’t touched anything.”
“Natalya Semyonovna has just been complaining to me that you have been
smoking. . . . Is it true? Have you been smoking?”
“Yes, I did smoke once. . . . That’s true. . . .”
“Now you see you are lying as well,” said the prosecutor, frowning to
disguise a smile. “Natalya Semyonovna has seen you smoking twice. So you
see you have been detected in three misdeeds: smoking, taking someone
else’s tobacco, and lying. Three faults.”
“Oh yes,” Seryozha recollected, and his eyes smiled. “That’s true,
that’s true; I smoked twice: to-day and before.”
“So you see it was not once, but twice. . . . I am very, very much
displeased with you! You used to be a good boy, but now I see you are
spoilt and have become a bad one.”
Yevgeny Petrovitch smoothed down Seryozha’s collar and thought:
“What more am I to say to him!”
“Yes, it’s not right,” he continued. “I did not expect it of you. In the
first place, you ought not to take tobacco that does not belong to you.
Every person has only the right to make use of his own property; if he
takes anyone else’s . . . he is a bad man!” (“I am not saying the right
thing!” thought Yevgeny Petrovitch.) “For instance, Natalya Semyonovna
has a box with her clothes in it. That’s her box, and we—that is, you
and I—dare not touch it, as it is not ours. That’s right, isn’t it?
You’ve got toy horses and pictures. . . . I don’t take them, do I?
Perhaps I might like to take them, but . . . they are not mine, but
yours!”
“Take them if you like!” said Seryozha, raising his eyebrows. “Please
don’t hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is mine,
but I don’t mind. . . . Let it stay.”
“You don’t understand me,” said Bykovsky. “You have given me the dog, it
is mine now and I can do what I like with it; but I didn’t give you the
tobacco! The tobacco is mine.” (“I am not explaining properly!” thought
the prosecutor. “It’s wrong! Quite wrong!”) “If I want to smoke someone
else’s tobacco, I must first of all ask his permission. . . .”
Languidly Dlinking one phrase on to another and imitating the language
of the nursery, Bykovsky tried to explain to his son the meaning of
property. Seryozha gazed at his chest and listened attentively (he liked
talking to his father in the evening), then he leaned his elbow on the
edge of the table and began screwing up his short-sighted eyes at the
papers and the inkstand. His eyes strayed over the table and rested on
the gum-bottle.
“Papa, what is gum made of?” he asked suddenly, putting the bottle to
his eyes.
Bykovsky took the bottle out of his hands and set it in its place and
went on:
“Secondly, you smoke. . . . That’s very bad. Though I smoke it does not
follow that you may. I smoke and know that it is stupid, I blame myself
and don’t like myself for it.” (“A clever teacher, I am!” he thought.)
“Tobacco is very bad for the health, and anyone who smokes dies earlier
than he should. It’s particularly bad for boys like you to smoke. Your
chest is weak, you haven’t reached your full strength yet, and smoking
leads to consumption and other illness in weak people. Uncle Ignat died
of consumption, you know. If he hadn’t smoked, perhaps he would have
lived till now.”
Seryozha looked pensively at the lamp, touched the lamp-shade with his
finger, and heaved a sigh.
“Uncle Ignat played the violin splendidly!” he said. “His violin is at
the Grigoryevs’ now.”
Seryozha leaned his elbows on the edge of the table again, and sank into
thought. His white face wore a fixed expression, as though he were
listening or following a train of thought of his own; distress and
something like fear came into his big staring eyes. He was most likely
thinking now of death, which had so lately carried off his mother and
Uncle Ignat. Death carries mothers and uncles off to the other world,
while their children and violins remain upon the earth. The dead live
somewhere in the sky beside the stars, and look down from there upon the
earth. Can they endure the parting?
“What am I to say to him?” thought Yevgeny Petrovitch. “He’s not
listening to me. Obviously he does not regard either his misdoings or my
arguments as serious. How am I to drive it home?”
The prosecutor got up and walked about the study.
“Formerly, in my time, these questions were very simply settled,” he
reflected. “Every urchin who was caught smoking was thrashed. The
cowardly and faint-hearted did actually give up smoking, any who were
somewhat more plucky and intelligent, after the thrashing took to
carrying tobacco in the legs of their boots, and smoking in the barn.
When they were caught in the barn and thrashed again, they would go away
to smoke by the river . . . and so on, till the boy grew up. My mother
used to give me money and sweets not to smoke. Now that method is looked
upon as worthless and immoral. The modern teacher, taking his stand on
logic, tries to make the child form good principles, not from fear, nor
from desire for distinction or reward, but consciously.”
While he was walking about, thinking, Seryozha climbed up with his legs
on a chair sideways to the table, and began drawing. That he might not
spoil official paper nor touch the ink, a heap of half-sheets, cut on
purpose for him, lay on the table together with a blue pencil.
“Cook was chopping up cabbage to-day and she cut her finger,” he said,
drawing a little house and moving his eyebrows. “She gave such a scream
that we were all frightened and ran into the kitchen. Stupid thing!
Natalya Semyonovna told her to dip her finger in cold water, but she
sucked it . . . And how could she put a dirty finger in her mouth!
That’s not proper, you know, papa!”
Then he went on to describe how, while they were having dinner, a man
with a hurdy-gurdy had come into the yard with a little girl, who had
danced and sung to the music.
“He has his own train of thought!” thought the prosecutor. “He has a
little world of his own in his head, and he has his own ideas of what is
important and unimportant. To gain possession of his attention, it’s not
enough to imitate his language, one must also be able to think in the
way he does. He would understand me perfectly if I really were sorry for
the loss of the tobacco, if I felt injured and cried. . . . That’s why
no one can take the place of a mother in bringing up a child, because
she can feel, cry, and laugh together with the child. One can do nothing
by logic and morality. What more shall I say to him? What?”
And it struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as strange and absurd that he, an
experienced advocate, who spent half his life in the practice of
reducing people to silence, forestalling what they had to say, and
punishing them, was completely at a loss and did not know what to say to
the boy.
“I say, give me your word of honour that you won’t smoke again,” he
said.
“Word of hon-nour!” carolled Seryozha, pressing hard on the pencil and
bending over the drawing. “Word of hon-nour!”
“Does he know what is meant by word of honour?” Bykovsky asked himself.
“No, I am a poor teacher of morality! If some schoolmaster or one of our
legal fellows could peep into my brain at this moment he would call me a
poor stick, and would very likely suspect me of unnecessary subtlety. .
. . But in school and in court, of course, all these wretched questions
are far more simply settled than at home; here one has to do with people
whom one loves beyond everything, and love is exacting and complicates
the question. If this boy were not my son, but my pupil, or a prisoner
on his trial, I should not be so cowardly, and my thoughts would not be
racing all over the place!”
Yevgeny Petrovitch sat down to the table and pulled one of Seryozha’s
drawings to him. In it there was a house with a crooked roof, and smoke
which came out of the chimney like a flash of lightning in zigzags up to
the very edge of the paper; beside the house stood a soldier with dots
for eyes and a bayonet that looked like the figure 4.
“A man can’t be taller than a house,” said the prosecutor.
Seryozha got on his knee, and moved about for some time to get
comfortably settled there.
“No, papa!” he said, looking at his drawing. “If you were to draw the
soldier small you would not see his eyes.”
Ought he to argue with him? From daily observation of his son the
prosecutor had become convinced that children, like savages, have their
own artistic standpoints and requirements peculiar to them, beyond the
grasp of grown-up people. Had he been attentively observed, Seryozha
might have struck a grown-up person as abnormal. He thought it possible
and reasonable to draw men taller than houses, and to represent in
pencil, not only objects, but even his sensations. Thus he would depict
the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke like spherical blurs, a
whistle in the form of a spiral thread. . . . To his mind sound was
closely connected with form and colour, so that when he painted letters
he invariably painted the letter L yellow, M red, A black, and so on.
Abandoning his drawing, Seryozha shifted about once more, got into a
comfortable attitude, and busied himself with his father’s beard. First
he carefully smoothed it, then he parted it and began combing it into
the shape of whiskers.
“Now you are like Ivan Stepanovitch,” he said, “and in a minute you will
be like our porter. Papa, why is it porters stand by doors? Is it to
prevent thieves getting in?”
The prosecutor felt the child’s breathing on his face, he was
continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a warm soft
feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but his whole
soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha’s jacket.
He looked at the boy’s big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though
from those wide pupils there looked out at him his mother and his wife
and everything that he had ever loved.
“To think of thrashing him . . .” he mused. “A nice task to devise a
punishment for him! How can we undertake to bring up the young? In old
days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled problems
boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic . . . . The more
developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives himself up to
subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he becomes, and the more
timidity he shows in taking action. How much courage and self-confidence
it needs, when one comes to look into it closely, to undertake to teach,
to judge, to write a thick book. . . .”
It struck ten.
“Come, boy, it’s bedtime,” said the prosecutor. “Say good-night and go.”
“No, papa,” said Seryozha, “I will stay a little longer. Tell me
something! Tell me a story. . . .”
“Very well, only after the story you must go to bed at once.”
Yevgeny Petrovitch on his free evenings was in the habit of telling
Seryozha stories. Like most people engaged in practical affairs, he did
not know a single poem by heart, and could not remember a single fairy
tale, so he had to improvise. As a rule he began with the stereotyped:
“In a certain country, in a certain kingdom,” then he heaped up all
kinds of innocent nonsense and had no notion as he told the beginning
how the story would go on, and how it would end. Scenes, characters, and
situations were taken at random, impromptu, and the plot and the moral
came of itself as it were, with no plan on the part of the story-teller.
Seryozha was very fond of this improvisation, and the prosecutor noticed
that the simpler and the less ingenious the plot, the stronger the
impression it made on the child.
“Listen,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “Once upon a time,
in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived an old, very old
emperor with a long grey beard, and . . . and with great grey moustaches
like this. Well, he lived in a glass palace which sparkled and glittered
in the sun, like a great piece of clear ice. The palace, my boy, stood
in a huge garden, in which there grew oranges, you know . . . bergamots,
cherries . . . tulips, roses, and lilies-of-the-valley were in flower in
it, and birds of different colours sang there. . . . Yes. . . . On the
trees there hung little glass bells, and, when the wind blew, they rang
so sweetly that one was never tired of hearing them. Glass gives a
softer, tenderer note than metals. . . . Well, what next? There were
fountains in the garden. . . . Do you remember you saw a fountain at
Auntie Sonya’s summer villa? Well, there were fountains just like that
in the emperor’s garden, only ever so much bigger, and the jets of water
reached to the top of the highest poplar.”
Yevgeny Petrovitch thought a moment, and went on:
“The old emperor had an only son and heir of his kingdom—a boy as little
as you. He was a good boy. He was never naughty, he went to bed early,
he never touched anything on the table, and altogether he was a sensible
boy. He had only one fault, he used to smoke. . . .”
Seryozha listened attentively, and looked into his father’s eyes without
bDlinking. The prosecutor went on, thinking: “What next?” He spun out a
long rigmarole, and ended like this:
“The emperor’s son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and died
when he was twenty. His infirm and sick old father was left without
anyone to help him. There was no one to govern the kingdom and defend
the palace. Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed the palace,
and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor little bells in the
garden. . . . That’s what happened.”
This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naïve, but the
whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes were
clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked
pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a sinking voice:
“I am not going to smoke any more. . . .”
When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and down
the room and smiled to himself.
“They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,” he
meditated. “It may be so, but that’s no comfort. It’s not the right way,
all the same. . . . Why must morality and truth never be offered in
their crude form, but only with embellishments, sweetened and gilded
like pills? It’s not normal. . . . It’s falsification . . . deception .
. . tricks . . . .”
He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to make a
“speech,” of the general public who absorb history only from legends and
historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered an
understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables,
novels, poems.
“Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this foolish
habit since the days of Adam . . . though, indeed, perhaps it is all
natural, and ought to be so. . . . There are many deceptions and
delusions in nature that serve a purpose.”
He set to work, but lazy, intimate thoughts still strayed through his
mind for a good while. Overhead the scales could no longer be heard, but
the inhabitant of the second storey was still pacing from one end of the
room to another.
A CLASSICAL STUDENT
BEFORE setting off for his examination in Greek, Vanya kissed all the
holy images. His stomach felt as though it were upside down; there was a
chill at his heart, while the heart itself throbbed and stood still with
terror before the unknown. What would he get that day? A three or a two?
Six times he went to his mother for her blessing, and, as he went out,
asked his aunt to pray for him. On the way to school he gave a beggar
two kopecks, in the hope that those two kopecks would atone for his
ignorance, and that, please God, he would not get the numerals with
those awful forties and eighties.
He came back from the high school late, between four and five. He came
in, and noiselessly lay down on his bed. His thin face was pale. There
were dark rings round his red eyes.
“Well, how did you get on? How were you marked?” asked his mother, going
to his bedside.
Vanya bDlinked, twisted his mouth, and burst into tears. His mother
turned pale, let her mouth fall open, and clasped her hands. The
breeches she was mending dropped out of her hands.
“What are you crying for? You’ve failed, then?” she asked.
“I am plucked. . . . I got a two.”
“I knew it would be so! I had a presentiment of it,” said his mother.
“Merciful God! How is it you have not passed? What is the reason of it?
What subject have you failed in?”
“In Greek. . . . Mother, I . . . They asked me the future of phero, and
I . . . instead of saying oisomai said opsomai. Then . . . then there
isn’t an accent, if the last syllable is long, and I . . . I got
flustered. . . . I forgot that the alpha was long in it . . . . I went
and put in the accent. Then Artaxerxov told me to give the list of the
enclitic particles. . . . I did, and I accidentally mixed in a pronoun .
. . and made a mistake . . . and so he gave me a two. . . . I am a
miserable person. . . . I was working all night. . . I’ve been getting
up at four o’clock all this week . . . .”
“No, it’s not you but I who am miserable, you wretched boy! It’s I that
am miserable! You’ve worn me to a threadpaper, you Herod, you torment,
you bane of my life! I pay for you, you good-for-nothing rubbish; I’ve
bent my back toiling for you, I’m worried to death, and, I may say, I am
unhappy, and what do you care? How do you work?”
“I . . . I do work. All night. . . . You’ve seen it yourself.”
“I prayed to God to take me, but He won’t take me, a sinful woman . . .
. You torment! Other people have children like everyone else, and I’ve
one only and no sense, no comfort out of him. Beat you? I’d beat you,
but where am I to find the strength? Mother of God, where am I to find
the strength?”
The mamma hid her face in the folds of her blouse and broke into sobs.
Vanya wriggled with anguish and pressed his forehead against the wall.
The aunt came in.
“So that’s how it is. . . . Just what I expected,” she said, at once
guessing what was wrong, turning pale and clasping her hands. “I’ve been
depressed all the morning. . . . There’s trouble coming, I thought . . .
and here it’s come. . . .”
“The villain, the torment!”
“Why are you swearing at him?” cried the aunt, nervously pulling her
coffee-coloured kerchief off her head and turning upon the mother. “It’s
not his fault! It’s your fault! You are to blame! Why did you send him
to that high school? You are a fine lady! You want to be a lady? A-a-ah!
I dare say, as though you’ll turn into gentry! But if you had sent him,
as I told you, into business . . . to an office, like my Kuzya . . .
here is Kuzya getting five hundred a year. . . . Five hundred roubles is
worth having, isn’t it? And you are wearing yourself out, and wearing
the boy out with this studying, plague take it! He is thin, he coughs .
. . just look at him! He’s thirteen, and he looks no more than ten.”
“No, Nastenka, no, my dear! I haven’t thrashed him enough, the torment!
He ought to have been thrashed, that’s what it is! Ugh . . . Jesuit,
Mahomet, torment!” she shook her fist at her son. “You want a flogging,
but I haven’t the strength. They told me years ago when he was little,
‘Whip him, whip him!’ I didn’t heed them, sinful woman as I am. And now
I am suffering for it. You wait a bit! I’ll flay you! Wait a bit . . .
.”
The mamma shook her wet fist, and went weeping into her lodger’s room.
The lodger, Yevtihy Kuzmitch Kuporossov, was sitting at his table,
reading “Dancing Self-taught.” Yevtihy Kuzmitch was a man of
intelligence and education. He spoke through his nose, washed with a
soap the smell of which made everyone in the house sneeze, ate meat on
fast days, and was on the look-out for a bride of refined education, and
so was considered the cleverest of the lodgers. He sang tenor.
“My good friend,” began the mamma, dissolving into tears. “If you would
have the generosity—thrash my boy for me. . . . Do me the favour! He’s
failed in his examination, the nuisance of a boy! Would you believe it,
he’s failed! I can’t punish him, through the weakness of my ill-health.
. . . Thrash him for me, if you would be so obliging and considerate,
Yevtihy Kuzmitch! Have regard for a sick woman!”
Kuporossov frowned and heaved a deep sigh through his nose. He thought a
little, drummed on the table with his fingers, and sighing once more,
went to Vanya.
“You are being taught, so to say,” he began, “being educated, being
given a chance, you revolting young person! Why have you done it?”
He talked for a long time, made a regular speech. He alluded to science,
to light, and to darkness.
“Yes, young person.”
When he had finished his speech, he took off his belt and took Vanya by
the hand.
“It’s the only way to deal with you,” he said. Vanya knelt down
submissively and thrust his head between the lodger’s knees. His
prominent pink ears moved up and down against the lodger’s new serge
trousers, with brown stripes on the outer seams.
Vanya did not utter a single sound. At the family council in the
evening, it was decided to send him into business.
VANKA
VANKA ZHUKOV, a boy of nine, who had been for three months apprenticed
to Alyahin the shoemaker, was sitting up on Christmas Eve. Waiting till
his master and mistress and their workmen had gone to the midnight
service, he took out of his master’s cupboard a bottle of ink and a pen
with a rusty nib, and, spreading out a crumpled sheet of paper in front
of him, began writing. Before forming the first letter he several times
looked round fearfully at the door and the windows, stole a glance at
the dark ikon, on both sides of which stretched shelves full of lasts,
and heaved a broken sigh. The paper lay on the bench while he knelt
before it.
“Dear grandfather, Konstantin Makaritch,” he wrote, “I am writing you a
letter. I wish you a happy Christmas, and all blessings from God
Almighty. I have neither father nor mother, you are the only one left
me.”
Vanka raised his eyes to the dark ikon on which the light of his candle
was reflected, and vividly recalled his grandfather, Konstantin
Makaritch, who was night watchman to a family called Zhivarev. He was a
thin but extraordinarily nimble and lively little old man of sixty-five,
with an everlastingly laughing face and drunken eyes. By day he slept in
the servants’ kitchen, or made jokes with the cooks; at night, wrapped
in an ample sheepskin, he walked round the grounds and tapped with his
little mallet. Old Kashtanka and Eel, so-called on account of his dark
colour and his long body like a weasel’s, followed him with hanging
heads. This Eel was exceptionally polite and affectionate, and looked
with equal kindness on strangers and his own masters, but had not a very
good reputation. Under his politeness and meekness was hidden the most
Jesuitical cunning. No one knew better how to creep up on occasion and
snap at one’s legs, to slip into the store-room, or steal a hen from a
peasant. His hind legs had been nearly pulled off more than once, twice
he had been hanged, every week he was thrashed till he was half dead,
but he always revived.
At this moment grandfather was, no doubt, standing at the gate, screwing
up his eyes at the red windows of the church, stamping with his high
felt boots, and joking with the servants. His little mallet was hanging
on his belt. He was clasping his hands, shrugging with the cold, and,
with an aged chuckle, pinching first the housemaid, then the cook.
“How about a pinch of snuff?” he was saying, offering the women his
snuff-box.
The women would take a sniff and sneeze. Grandfather would be
indescribably delighted, go off into a merry chuckle, and cry:
“Tear it off, it has frozen on!”
They give the dogs a sniff of snuff too. Kashtanka sneezes, wriggles her
head, and walks away offended. Eel does not sneeze, from politeness, but
wags his tail. And the weather is glorious. The air is still, fresh, and
transparent. The night is dark, but one can see the whole village with
its white roofs and coils of smoke coming from the chimneys, the trees
silvered with hoar frost, the snowdrifts. The whole sky spangled with
gay twinkling stars, and the Milky Way is as distinct as though it had
been washed and rubbed with snow for a holiday. . . .
Vanka sighed, dipped his pen, and went on writing:
“And yesterday I had a wigging. The master pulled me out into the yard
by my hair, and whacked me with a boot-stretcher because I accidentally
fell asleep while I was rocking their brat in the cradle. And a week ago
the mistress told me to clean a herring, and I began from the tail end,
and she took the herring and thrust its head in my face. The workmen
laugh at me and send me to the tavern for vodka, and tell me to steal
the master’s cucumbers for them, and the master beats me with anything
that comes to hand. And there is nothing to eat. In the morning they
give me bread, for dinner, porridge, and in the evening, bread again;
but as for tea, or soup, the master and mistress gobble it all up
themselves. And I am put to sleep in the passage, and when their
wretched brat cries I get no sleep at all, but have to rock the cradle.
Dear grandfather, show the divine mercy, take me away from here, home to
the village. It’s more than I can bear. I bow down to your feet, and
will pray to God for you for ever, take me away from here or I shall
die.”
Vanka’s mouth worked, he rubbed his eyes with his black fist, and gave a
sob.
“I will powder your snuff for you,” he went on. “I will pray for you,
and if I do anything you can thrash me like Sidor’s goat. And if you
think I’ve no job, then I will beg the steward for Christ’s sake to let
me clean his boots, or I’ll go for a shepherd-boy instead of Fedka. Dear
grandfather, it is more than I can bear, it’s simply no life at all. I
wanted to run away to the village, but I have no boots, and I am afraid
of the frost. When I grow up big I will take care of you for this, and
not let anyone annoy you, and when you die I will pray for the rest of
your soul, just as for my mammy’s.”
“Moscow is a big town. It’s all gentlemen’s houses, and there are lots
of horses, but there are no sheep, and the dogs are not spiteful. The
lads here don’t go out with the star, and they don’t let anyone go into
the choir, and once I saw in a shop window fishing-hooks for sale,
fitted ready with the line and for all sorts of fish, awfully good ones,
there was even one hook that would hold a forty-pound sheat-fish. And I
have seen shops where there are guns of all sorts, after the pattern of
the master’s guns at home, so that I shouldn’t wonder if they are a
hundred roubles each. . . . And in the butchers’ shops there are grouse
and woodcocks and fish and hares, but the shopmen don’t say where they
shoot them.”
“Dear grandfather, when they have the Christmas tree at the big house,
get me a gilt walnut, and put it away in the green trunk. Ask the young
lady Olga Ignatyevna, say it’s for Vanka.”
Vanka gave a tremulous sigh, and again stared at the window. He
remembered how his grandfather always went into the forest to get the
Christmas tree for his master’s family, and took his grandson with him.
It was a merry time! Grandfather made a noise in his throat, the forest
crackled with the frost, and looking at them Vanka chortled too. Before
chopping down the Christmas tree, grandfather would smoke a pipe, slowly
take a pinch of snuff, and laugh at frozen Vanka. . . . The young fir
trees, covered with hoar frost, stood motionless, waiting to see which
of them was to die. Wherever one looked, a hare flew like an arrow over
the snowdrifts . . . . Grandfather could not refrain from shouting:
“Hold him, hold him . . . hold him! Ah, the bob-tailed devil!”
When he had cut down the Christmas tree, grandfather used to drag it to
the big house, and there set to work to decorate it. . . . The young
lady, who was Vanka’s favourite, Olga Ignatyevna, was the busiest of
all. When Vanka’s mother Pelageya was alive, and a servant in the big
house, Olga Ignatyevna used to give him goodies, and having nothing
better to do, taught him to read and write, to count up to a hundred,
and even to dance a quadrille. When Pelageya died, Vanka had been
transferred to the servants’ kitchen to be with his grandfather, and
from the kitchen to the shoemaker’s in Moscow.
“Do come, dear grandfather,” Vanka went on with his letter. “For
Christ’s sake, I beg you, take me away. Have pity on an unhappy orphan
like me; here everyone knocks me about, and I am fearfully hungry; I
can’t tell you what misery it is, I am always crying. And the other day
the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down. My life
is wretched, worse than any dog’s. . . . I send greetings to Alyona,
one-eyed Yegorka, and the coachman, and don’t give my concertina to
anyone. I remain, your grandson, Ivan Zhukov. Dear grandfather, do
come.”
Vanka folded the sheet of writing-paper twice, and put it into an
envelope he had bought the day before for a kopeck. . . . After thinking
a little, he dipped the pen and wrote the address:
To grandfather in the village.
Then he scratched his head, thought a little, and added: Konstantin
Makaritch. Glad that he had not been prevented from writing, he put on
his cap and, without putting on his little greatcoat, ran out into the
street as he was in his shirt. . . .
The shopmen at the butcher’s, whom he had questioned the day before,
told him that letters were put in post-boxes, and from the boxes were
carried about all over the earth in mailcarts with drunken drivers and
ringing bells. Vanka ran to the nearest post-box, and thrust the
precious letter in the slit. . . .
An hour later, lulled by sweet hopes, he was sound asleep. . . . He
dreamed of the stove. On the stove was sitting his grandfather, swinging
his bare legs, and reading the letter to the cooks. . . .
By the stove was Eel, wagging his tail.
AN INCIDENT
MORNING. Brilliant sunshine is piercing through the frozen lacework on
the window-panes into the nursery. Vanya, a boy of six, with a cropped
head and a nose like a button, and his sister Nina, a short, chubby,
curly-headed girl of four, wake up and look crossly at each other
through the bars of their cots.
“Oo-oo-oo! naughty children!” grumbles their nurse. “Good people have
had their breakfast already, while you can’t get your eyes open.”
The sunbeams frolic over the rugs, the walls, and nurse’s skirts, and
seem inviting the children to join in their play, but they take no
notice. They have woken up in a bad humour. Nina pouts, makes a grimace,
and begins to whine:
“Brea-eakfast, nurse, breakfast!”
Vanya knits his brows and ponders what to pitch upon to howl over. He
has already begun screwing up his eyes and opening his mouth, but at
that instant the voice of mamma reaches them from the drawing-room,
saying: “Don’t forget to give the cat her milk, she has a family now!”
The children’s puckered countenances grow smooth again as they look at
each other in astonishment. Then both at once begin shouting, jump out
of their cots, and filling the air with piercing shrieks, run barefoot,
in their nightgowns, to the kitchen.
“The cat has puppies!” they cry. “The cat has got puppies!”
Under the bench in the kitchen there stands a small box, the one in
which Stepan brings coal when he lights the fire. The cat is peeping out
of the box. There is an expression of extreme exhaustion on her grey
face; her green eyes, with their narrow black pupils, have a languid,
sentimental look. From her face it is clear that the only thing lacking
to complete her happiness is the presence in the box of “him,” the
father of her children, to whom she had abandoned herself so recklessly!
She wants to mew, and opens her mouth wide, but nothing but a hiss comes
from her throat; the squealing of the kittens is audible.
The children squat on their heels before the box, and, motionless,
holding their breath, gaze at the cat. . . . They are surprised,
impressed, and do not hear nurse grumbling as she pursues them. The most
genuine delight shines in the eyes of both.
Domestic animals play a scarcely noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part
in the education and life of children. Which of us does not remember
powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity,
dull-witted but haughty turkeys, mild old tabby cats, who forgave us
when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonising pain? I
even fancy, sometimes, that the patience, the fidelity, the readiness to
forgive, and the sincerity which are characteristic of our domestic
animals have a far stronger and more definite effect on the mind of a
child than the long exhortations of some dry, pale Karl Karlovitch, or
the misty expositions of a governess, trying to prove to children that
water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.
“What little things!” says Nina, opening her eyes wide and going off
into a joyous laugh. “They are like mice!”
“One, two, three,” Vanya counts. “Three kittens. So there is one for
you, one for me, and one for somebody else, too.”
“Murrm . . . murrm . . .” purrs the mother, flattered by their
attention. “Murrm.”
After gazing at the kittens, the children take them from under the cat,
and begin squeezing them in their hands, then, not satisfied with this,
they put them in the skirts of their nightgowns, and run into the other
rooms.
“Mamma, the cat has got pups!” they shout.
Mamma is sitting in the drawing-room with some unknown gentleman. Seeing
the children unwashed, undressed, with their nightgowns held up high,
she is embarrassed, and looks at them severely.
“Let your nightgowns down, disgraceful children,” she says. “Go out of
the room, or I will punish you.”
But the children do not notice either mamma’s threats or the presence of
a stranger. They put the kittens down on the carpet, and go off into
deafening squeals. The mother walks round them, mewing imploringly.
When, a little afterwards, the children are dragged off to the nursery,
dressed, made to say their prayers, and given their breakfast, they are
full of a passionate desire to get away from these prosaic duties as
quickly as possible, and to run to the kitchen again.
Their habitual pursuits and games are thrown completely into the
background.
The kittens throw everything into the shade by making their appearance
in the world, and supply the great sensation of the day. If Nina or
Vanya had been offered forty pounds of sweets or ten thousand kopecks
for each kitten, they would have rejected such a barter without the
slightest hesitation. In spite of the heated protests of the nurse and
the cook, the children persist in sitting by the cat’s box in the
kitchen, busy with the kittens till dinner-time. Their faces are earnest
and concentrated and express anxiety. They are worried not so much by
the present as by the future of the kittens. They decide that one kitten
shall remain at home with the old cat to be a comfort to her mother,
while the second shall go to their summer villa, and the third shall
live in the cellar, where there are ever so many rats.
“But why don’t they look at us?” Nina wondered. “Their eyes are blind
like the beggars’.”
Vanya, too, is perturbed by this question. He tries to open one kitten’s
eyes, and spends a long time puffing and breathing hard over it, but his
operation is unsuccessful. They are a good deal troubled, too, by the
circumstance that the kittens obstinately refuse the milk and the meat
that is offered to them. Everything that is put before their little
noses is eaten by their grey mamma.
“Let’s build the kittens little houses,” Vanya suggests. “They shall
live in different houses, and the cat shall come and pay them visits. .
. .”
Cardboard hat-boxes are put in the different corners of the kitchen and
the kittens are installed in them. But this division turns out to be
premature; the cat, still wearing an imploring and sentimental
expression on her face, goes the round of all the hat-boxes, and carries
off her children to their original position.
“The cat’s their mother,” observed Vanya, “but who is their father?”
“Yes, who is their father?” repeats Nina.
“They must have a father.”
Vanya and Nina are a long time deciding who is to be the kittens’
father, and, in the end, their choice falls on a big dark-red horse
without a tail, which is lying in the store-cupboard under the stairs,
together with other relics of toys that have outlived their day. They
drag him up out of the store-cupboard and stand him by the box.
“Mind now!” they admonish him, “stand here and see they behave
themselves properly.”
All this is said and done in the gravest way, with an expression of
anxiety on their faces. Vanya and Nina refuse to recognise the existence
of any world but the box of kittens. Their joy knows no bounds. But they
have to pass through bitter, agonising moments, too.
Just before dinner, Vanya is sitting in his father’s study, gazing
dreamily at the table. A kitten is moving about by the lamp, on stamped
note paper. Vanya is watching its movements, and thrusting first a
pencil, then a match into its little mouth. . . . All at once, as though
he has sprung out of the floor, his father is beside the table.
“What’s this?” Vanya hears, in an angry voice.
“It’s . . . it’s the kitty, papa. . . .”
“I’ll give it you; look what you have done, you naughty boy! You’ve
dirtied all my paper!”
To Vanya’s great surprise his papa does not share his partiality for the
kittens, and, instead of being moved to enthusiasm and delight, he pulls
Vanya’s ear and shouts:
“Stepan, take away this horrid thing.”
At dinner, too, there is a scene. . . . During the second course there
is suddenly the sound of a shrill mew. They begin to investigate its
origin, and discover a kitten under Nina’s pinafore.
“Nina, leave the table!” cries her father angrily. “Throw the kittens in
the cesspool! I won’t have the nasty things in the house! . . .”
Vanya and Nina are horrified. Death in the cesspool, apart from its
cruelty, threatens to rob the cat and the wooden horse of their
children, to lay waste the cat’s box, to destroy their plans for the
future, that fair future in which one cat will be a comfort to its old
mother, another will live in the country, while the third will catch
rats in the cellar. The children begin to cry and entreat that the
kittens may be spared. Their father consents, but on the condition that
the children do not go into the kitchen and touch the kittens.
After dinner, Vanya and Nina slouch about the rooms, feeling depressed.
The prohibition of visits to the kitchen has reduced them to dejection.
They refuse sweets, are naughty, and are rude to their mother. When
their uncle Petrusha comes in the evening, they draw him aside, and
complain to him of their father, who wanted to throw the kittens into
the cesspool.
“Uncle Petrusha, tell mamma to have the kittens taken to the nursery,”
the children beg their uncle, “do-o tell her.”
“There, there . . . very well,” says their uncle, waving them off. “All
right.”
Uncle Petrusha does not usually come alone. He is accompanied by Nero, a
big black dog of Danish breed, with drooping ears, and a tail as hard as
a stick. The dog is silent, morose, and full of a sense of his own
dignity. He takes not the slightest notice of the children, and when he
passes them hits them with his tail as though they were chairs. The
children hate him from the bottom of their hearts, but on this occasion,
practical considerations override sentiment.
“I say, Nina,” says Vanya, opening his eyes wide. “Let Nero be their
father, instead of the horse! The horse is dead and he is alive, you
see.”
They are waiting the whole evening for the moment when papa will sit
down to his cards and it will be possible to take Nero to the kitchen
without being observed. . . . At last, papa sits down to cards, mamma is
busy with the samovar and not noticing the children. . . .
The happy moment arrives.
“Come along!” Vanya whispers to his sister.
But, at that moment, Stepan comes in and, with a snigger, announces:
“Nero has eaten the kittens, madam.”
Nina and Vanya turn pale and look at Stepan with horror.
“He really has . . .” laughs the footman, “he went to the box and
gobbled them up.”
The children expect that all the people in the house will be aghast and
fall upon the miscreant Nero. But they all sit calmly in their seats,
and only express surprise at the appetite of the huge dog. Papa and
mamma laugh. Nero walks about by the table, wags his tail, and licks his
lips complacently . . . the cat is the only one who is uneasy. With her
tail in the air she walks about the rooms, looking suspiciously at
people and mewing plaintively.
“Children, it’s past nine,” cries mamma, “it’s bedtime.”
Vanya and Nina go to bed, shed tears, and spend a long time thinking
about the injured cat, and the cruel, insolent, and unpunished Nero.
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY BETWEEN eight and nine o’clock in the morning.
A dark leaden-coloured mass is creeping over the sky towards the sun.
Red zigzags of lightning gleam here and there across it. There is a
sound of far-away rumbling. A warm wind frolics over the grass, bends
the trees, and stirs up the dust. In a minute there will be a spurt of
May rain and a real storm will begin.
Fyokla, a little beggar-girl of six, is running through the village,
looking for Terenty the cobbler. The white-haired, barefoot child is
pale. Her eyes are wide-open, her lips are trembling.
“Uncle, where is Terenty?” she asks every one she meets. No one answers.
They are all preoccupied with the approaching storm and take refuge in
their huts. At last she meets Silanty Silitch, the sacristan, Terenty’s
bosom friend. He is coming along, staggering from the wind.
“Uncle, where is Terenty?”
“At the kitchen-gardens,” answers Silanty.
The beggar-girl runs behind the huts to the kitchen-gardens and there
finds Terenty; the tall old man with a thin, pock-marked face, very long
legs, and bare feet, dressed in a woman’s tattered jacket, is standing
near the vegetable plots, looking with drowsy, drunken eyes at the dark
storm-cloud. On his long crane-like legs he sways in the wind like a
starling-cote.
“Uncle Terenty!” the white-headed beggar-girl addresses him. “Uncle,
darling!”
Terenty bends down to Fyokla, and his grim, drunken face is overspread
with a smile, such as come into people’s faces when they look at
something little, foolish, and absurd, but warmly loved.
“Ah! servant of God, Fyokia,” he says, lisping tenderly, “where have you
come from?”
“Uncle Terenty,” says Fyokia, with a sob, tugging at the lapel of the
cobbler’s coat. “Brother Danilka has had an accident! Come along!”
“What sort of accident? Ough, what thunder! Holy, holy, holy. . . . What
sort of accident?”
“In the count’s copse Danilka stuck his hand into a hole in a tree, and
he can’t get it out. Come along, uncle, do be kind and pull his hand
out!”
“How was it he put his hand in? What for?”
“He wanted to get a cuckoo’s egg out of the hole for me.”
“The day has hardly begun and already you are in trouble. . . .” Terenty
shook his head and spat deliberately. “Well, what am I to do with you
now? I must come . . . I must, may the wolf gobble you up, you naughty
children! Come, little orphan!”
Terenty comes out of the kitchen-garden and, lifting high his long legs,
begins striding down the village street. He walks quickly without
stopping or looking from side to side, as though he were shoved from
behind or afraid of pursuit. Fyokla can hardly keep up with him.
They come out of the village and turn along the dusty road towards the
count’s copse that lies dark blue in the distance. It is about a mile
and a half away. The clouds have by now covered the sun, and soon
afterwards there is not a speck of blue left in the sky. It grows dark.
“Holy, holy, holy . . .” whispers Fyokla, hurrying after Terenty. The
first rain-drops, big and heavy, lie, dark dots on the dusty road. A big
drop falls on Fyokla’s cheek and glides like a tear down her chin.
“The rain has begun,” mutters the cobbler, kicking up the dust with his
bare, bony feet. “That’s fine, Fyokla, old girl. The grass and the trees
are fed by the rain, as we are by bread. And as for the thunder, don’t
you be frightened, little orphan. Why should it kill a little thing like
you?”
As soon as the rain begins, the wind drops. The only sound is the patter
of rain dropping like fine shot on the young rye and the parched road.
“We shall get soaked, Fyolka,” mutters Terenty. “There won’t be a dry
spot left on us. . . . Ho-ho, my girl! It’s run down my neck! But don’t
be frightened, silly. . . . The grass will be dry again, the earth will
be dry again, and we shall be dry again. There is the same sun for us
all.”
A flash of lightning, some fourteen feet long, gleams above their heads.
There is a loud peal of thunder, and it seems to Fyokla that something
big, heavy, and round is rolling over the sky and tearing it open,
exactly over her head.
“Holy, holy, holy . . .” says Terenty, crossing himself. “Don’t be
afraid, little orphan! It is not from spite that it thunders.”
Terenty’s and Fyokla’s feet are covered with lumps of heavy, wet clay.
It is slippery and difficult to walk, but Terenty strides on more and
more rapidly. The weak little beggar-girl is breathless and ready to
drop.
But at last they go into the count’s copse. The washed trees, stirred by
a gust of wind, drop a perfect waterfall upon them. Terenty stumbles
over stumps and begins to slacken his pace.
“Whereabouts is Danilka?” he asks. “Lead me to him.”
Fyokla leads him into a thicket, and, after going a quarter of a mile,
points to Danilka. Her brother, a little fellow of eight, with hair as
red as ochre and a pale sickly face, stands leaning against a tree, and,
with his head on one side, looking sideways at the sky. In one hand he
holds his shabby old cap, the other is hidden in an old lime tree. The
boy is gazing at the stormy sky, and apparently not thinking of his
trouble. Hearing footsteps and seeing the cobbler he gives a sickly
smile and says:
“A terrible lot of thunder, Terenty. . . . I’ve never heard so much
thunder in all my life.”
“And where is your hand?”
“In the hole. . . . Pull it out, please, Terenty!”
The wood had broken at the edge of the hole and jammed Danilka’s hand:
he could push it farther in, but could not pull it out. Terenty snaps
off the broken piece, and the boy’s hand, red and crushed, is released.
“It’s terrible how it’s thundering,” the boy says again, rubbing his
hand. “What makes it thunder, Terenty?”
“One cloud runs against the other,” answers the cobbler. The party come
out of the copse, and walk along the edge of it towards the darkened
road. The thunder gradually abates, and its rumbling is heard far away
beyond the village.
“The ducks flew by here the other day, Terenty,” says Danilka, still
rubbing his hand. “They must be nesting in the Gniliya Zaimishtcha
marshes. . . . Fyolka, would you like me to show you a nightingale’s
nest?”
“Don’t touch it, you might disturb them,” says Terenty, wringing the
water out of his cap. “The nightingale is a singing-bird, without sin.
He has had a voice given him in his throat, to praise God and gladden
the heart of man. It’s a sin to disturb him.”
“What about the sparrow?”
“The sparrow doesn’t matter, he’s a bad, spiteful bird. He is like a
pickpocket in his ways. He doesn’t like man to be happy. When Christ was
crucified it was the sparrow brought nails to the Jews, and called
‘alive! alive!’”
A bright patch of blue appears in the sky.
“Look!” says Terenty. “An ant-heap burst open by the rain! They’ve been
flooded, the rogues!”
They bend over the ant-heap. The downpour has damaged it; the insects
are scurrying to and fro in the mud, agitated, and busily trying to
carry away their drowned companions.
“You needn’t be in such a taking, you won’t die of it!” says Terenty,
grinning. “As soon as the sun warms you, you’ll come to your senses
again. . . . It’s a lesson to you, you stupids. You won’t settle on low
ground another time.”
They go on.
“And here are some bees,” cries Danilka, pointing to the branch of a
young oak tree.
The drenched and chilled bees are huddled together on the branch. There
are so many of them that neither bark nor leaf can be seen. Many of them
are settled on one another.
“That’s a swarm of bees,” Terenty informs them. “They were flying
looking for a home, and when the rain came down upon them they settled.
If a swarm is flying, you need only sprinkle water on them to make them
settle. Now if, say, you wanted to take the swarm, you would bend the
branch with them into a sack and shake it, and they all fall in.”
Little Fyokla suddenly frowns and rubs her neck vigorously. Her brother
looks at her neck, and sees a big swelling on it.
“Hey-hey!” laughs the cobbler. “Do you know where you got that from,
Fyokia, old girl? There are Spanish flies on some tree in the wood. The
rain has trickled off them, and a drop has fallen on your neck —that’s
what has made the swelling.”
The sun appears from behind the clouds and floods the wood, the fields,
and the three friends with its warm light. The dark menacing cloud has
gone far away and taken the storm with it. The air is warm and fragrant.
There is a scent of bird-cherry, meadowsweet, and lilies-of-the-valley.
“That herb is given when your nose bleeds,” says Terenty, pointing to a
woolly-looking flower. “It does good.”
They hear a whistle and a rumble, but not such a rumble as the storm-
clouds carried away. A goods train races by before the eyes of Terenty,
Danilka, and Fyokla. The engine, panting and puffing out black smoke,
drags more than twenty vans after it. Its power is tremendous. The
children are interested to know how an engine, not alive and without the
help of horses, can move and drag such weights, and Terenty undertakes
to explain it to them:
“It’s all the steam’s doing, children. . . . The steam does the work. .
. . You see, it shoves under that thing near the wheels, and it . . .
you see . . . it works. . . .”
They cross the railway line, and, going down from the embankment, walk
towards the river. They walk not with any object, but just at random,
and talk all the way. . . . Danilka asks questions, Terenty answers
them. . . .
Terenty answers all his questions, and there is no secret in Nature
which baffles him. He knows everything. Thus, for example, he knows the
names of all the wild flowers, animals, and stones. He knows what herbs
cure diseases, he has no difficulty in telling the age of a horse or a
cow. Looking at the sunset, at the moon, or the birds, he can tell what
sort of weather it will be next day. And indeed, it is not only Terenty
who is so wise. Silanty Silitch, the innkeeper, the market-gardener, the
shepherd, and all the villagers, generally speaking, know as much as he
does. These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in
the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds
themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of
crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
Danilka looks at Terenty and greedily drinks in every word. In spring,
before one is weary of the warmth and the monotonous green of the
fields, when everything is fresh and full of fragrance, who would not
want to hear about the golden may-beetles, about the cranes, about the
gurgling streams, and the corn mounting into ear?
The two of them, the cobbler and the orphan, walk about the fields, talk
unceasingly, and are not weary. They could wander about the world
endlessly. They walk, and in their talk of the beauty of the earth do
not notice the frail little beggar-girl tripping after them. She is
breathless and moves with a lagging step. There are tears in her eyes;
she would be glad to stop these inexhaustible wanderers, but to whom and
where can she go? She has no home or people of her own; whether she
likes it or not, she must walk and listen to their talk.
Towards midday, all three sit down on the river bank. Danilka takes out
of his bag a piece of bread, soaked and reduced to a mash, and they
begin to eat. Terenty says a prayer when he has eaten the bread, then
stretches himself on the sandy bank and falls asleep. While he is
asleep, the boy gazes at the water, pondering. He has many different
things to think of. He has just seen the storm, the bees, the ants, the
train. Now, before his eyes, fishes are whisking about. Some are two
inches long and more, others are no bigger than one’s nail. A viper,
with its head held high, is swimming from one bank to the other.
Only towards the evening our wanderers return to the village. The
children go for the night to a deserted barn, where the corn of the
commune used to be kept, while Terenty, leaving them, goes to the
tavern. The children lie huddled together on the straw, dozing.
The boy does not sleep. He gazes into the darkness, and it seems to him
that he is seeing all that he has seen in the day: the storm-clouds, the
bright sunshine, the birds, the fish, lanky Terenty. The number of his
impressions, together with exhaustion and hunger, are too much for him;
he is as hot as though he were on fire, and tosses from, side to side.
He longs to tell someone all that is haunting him now in the darkness
and agitating his soul, but there is no one to tell. Fyokla is too
little and could not understand.
“I’ll tell Terenty to-morrow,” thinks the boy.
The children fall asleep thinking of the homeless cobbler, and, in the
night, Terenty comes to them, makes the sign of the cross over them, and
puts bread under their heads. And no one sees his love. It is seen only
by the moon which floats in the sky and peeps caressingly through the
holes in the wall of the deserted barn.
BOYS “VOLODYA’S come!” someone shouted in the yard.
“Master Volodya’s here!” bawled Natalya the cook, running into the
dining-room. “Oh, my goodness!”
The whole Korolyov family, who had been expecting their Volodya from
hour to hour, rushed to the windows. At the front door stood a wide
sledge, with three white horses in a cloud of steam. The sledge was
empty, for Volodya was already in the hall, untying his hood with red
and chilly fingers. His school overcoat, his cap, his snowboots, and the
hair on his temples were all white with frost, and his whole figure from
head to foot diffused such a pleasant, fresh smell of the snow that the
very sight of him made one want to shiver and say “brrr!”
His mother and aunt ran to kiss and hug him. Natalya plumped down at his
feet and began pulling off his snowboots, his sisters shrieked with
delight, the doors creaked and banged, and Volodya’s father, in his
waistcoat and shirt-sleeves, ran out into the hall with scissors in his
hand, and cried out in alarm:
“We were expecting you all yesterday? Did you come all right? Had a good
journey? Mercy on us! you might let him say ‘how do you do’ to his
father! I am his father after all!”
“Bow-wow!” barked the huge black dog, Milord, in a deep bass, tapping
with his tail on the walls and furniture.
For two minutes there was nothing but a general hubbub of joy. After the
first outburst of delight was over the Korolyovs noticed that there was,
besides their Volodya, another small person in the hall, wrapped up in
scarves and shawls and white with frost. He was standing perfectly still
in a corner, in the shadow of a big fox-lined overcoat.
“Volodya darling, who is it?” asked his mother, in a whisper.
“Oh!” cried Volodya. “This is—let me introduce my friend Lentilov, a
schoolfellow in the second class. . . . I have brought him to stay with
us.”
“Delighted to hear it! You are very welcome,” the father said cordially.
“Excuse me, I’ve been at work without my coat. . . . Please come in!
Natalya, help Mr. Lentilov off with his things. Mercy on us, do turn
that dog out! He is unendurable!”
A few minutes later, Volodya and his friend Lentilov, somewhat dazed by
their noisy welcome, and still red from the outside cold, were sitting
down to tea. The winter sun, making its way through the snow and the
frozen tracery on the window-panes, gleamed on the samovar, and plunged
its pure rays in the tea-basin. The room was warm, and the boys felt as
though the warmth and the frost were struggling together with a tingling
sensation in their bodies.
“Well, Christmas will soon be here,” the father said in a pleasant sing-
song voice, rolling a cigarette of dark reddish tobacco. “It doesn’t
seem long since the summer, when mamma was crying at your going . . .
and here you are back again. . . . Time flies, my boy. Before you have
time to cry out, old age is upon you. Mr. Lentilov, take some more,
please help yourself! We don’t stand on ceremony!”
Volodya’s three sisters, Katya, Sonya, and Masha (the eldest was
eleven), sat at the table and never took their eyes off the newcomer.
Lentilov was of the same height and age as Volodya, but not as round-
faced and fair-skinned. He was thin, dark, and freckled; his hair stood
up like a brush, his eyes were small, and his lips were thick. He was,
in fact, distinctly ugly, and if he had not been wearing the school
uniform, he might have been taken for the son of a cook. He seemed
morose, did not speak, and never once smiled. The little girls, staring
at him, immediately came to the conclusion that he must be a very clever
and learned person. He seemed to be thinking about something all the
time, and was so absorbed in his own thoughts, that, whenever he was
spoken to, he started, threw his head back, and asked to have the
question repeated.
The little girls noticed that Volodya, who had always been so merry and
talkative, also said very little, did not smile at all, and hardly
seemed to be glad to be home. All the time they were at tea he only once
addressed his sisters, and then he said something so strange. He pointed
to the samovar and said:
“In California they don’t drink tea, but gin.”
He, too, seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, and, to judge by the looks
that passed between him and his friend Lentilov, their thoughts were the
same.
After tea, they all went into the nursery. The girls and their father
took up the work that had been interrupted by the arrival of the boys.
They were making flowers and frills for the Christmas tree out of paper
of different colours. It was an attractive and noisy occupation. Every
fresh flower was greeted by the little girls with shrieks of delight,
even of awe, as though the flower had dropped straight from heaven;
their father was in ecstasies too, and every now and then he threw the
scissors on the floor, in vexation at their bluntness. Their mother kept
running into the nursery with an anxious face, asking:
“Who has taken my scissors? Ivan Nikolaitch, have you taken my scissors
again?”
“Mercy on us! I’m not even allowed a pair of scissors!” their father
would respond in a lachrymose voice, and, flinging himself back in his
chair, he would pretend to be a deeply injured man; but a minute later,
he would be in ecstasies again.
On his former holidays Volodya, too, had taken part in the preparations
for the Christmas tree, or had been running in the yard to look at the
snow mountain that the watchman and the shepherd were building. But this
time Volodya and Lentilov took no notice whatever of the coloured paper,
and did not once go into the stable. They sat in the window and began
whispering to one another; then they opened an atlas and looked
carefully at a map.
“First to Perm . . .” Lentilov said, in an undertone, “from there to
Tiumen, then Tomsk . . . then . . . then . . . Kamchatka. There the
Samoyedes take one over Behring’s Straits in boats . . . . And then we
are in America. . . . There are lots of furry animals there. . . .”
“And California?” asked Volodya.
“California is lower down. . . . We’ve only to get to America and
California is not far off. . . . And one can get a living by hunting and
plunder.”
All day long Lentilov avoided the little girls, and seemed to look at
them with suspicion. In the evening he happened to be left alone with
them for five minutes or so. It was awkward to be silent.
He cleared his throat morosely, rubbed his left hand against his right,
looked sullenly at Katya and asked:
“Have you read Mayne Reid?”
“No, I haven’t. . . . I say, can you skate?”
Absorbed in his own reflections, Lentilov made no reply to this
question; he simply puffed out his cheeks, and gave a long sigh as
though he were very hot. He looked up at Katya once more and said:
“When a herd of bisons stampedes across the prairie the earth trembles,
and the frightened mustangs kick and neigh.”
He smiled impressively and added:
“And the Indians attack the trains, too. But worst of all are the
mosquitoes and the termites.”
“Why, what’s that?”
“They’re something like ants, but with wings. They bite fearfully. Do
you know who I am?”
“Mr. Lentilov.”
“No, I am Montehomo, the Hawk’s Claw, Chief of the Ever Victorious.”
Masha, the youngest, looked at him, then into the darkness out of window
and said, wondering:
“And we had lentils for supper yesterday.”
Lentilov’s incomprehensible utterances, and the way he was always
whispering with Volodya, and the way Volodya seemed now to be always
thinking about something instead of playing . . . all this was strange
and mysterious. And the two elder girls, Katya and Sonya, began to keep
a sharp look-out on the boys. At night, when the boys had gone to bed,
the girls crept to their bedroom door, and listened to what they were
saying. Ah, what they discovered! The boys were planning to run away to
America to dig for gold: they had everything ready for the journey, a
pistol, two knives, biscuits, a burning glass to serve instead of
matches, a compass, and four roubles in cash. They learned that the boys
would have to walk some thousands of miles, and would have to fight
tigers and savages on the road: then they would get gold and ivory, slay
their enemies, become pirates, drink gin, and finally marry beautiful
maidens, and make a plantation.
The boys interrupted each other in their excitement. Throughout the
conversation, Lentilov called himself “Montehomo, the Hawk’s Claw,” and
Volodya was “my pale-face brother!”
“Mind you don’t tell mamma,” said Katya, as they went back to bed.
“Volodya will bring us gold and ivory from America, but if you tell
mamma he won’t be allowed to go.”
The day before Christmas Eve, Lentilov spent the whole day poring over
the map of Asia and making notes, while Volodya, with a languid and
swollen face that looked as though it had been stung by a bee, walked
about the rooms and ate nothing. And once he stood still before the holy
image in the nursery, crossed himself, and said:
“Lord, forgive me a sinner; Lord, have pity on my poor unhappy mamma!”
In the evening he burst out crying. On saying good-night he gave his
father a long hug, and then hugged his mother and sisters. Katya and
Sonya knew what was the matter, but little Masha was puzzled, completely
puzzled. Every time she looked at Lentilov she grew thoughtful and said
with a sigh:
“When Lent comes, nurse says we shall have to eat peas and lentils.”
Early in the morning of Christmas Eve, Katya and Sonya slipped quietly
out of bed, and went to find out how the boys meant to run away to
America. They crept to their door.
“Then you don’t mean to go?” Lentilov was saying angrily. “Speak out:
aren’t you going?”
“Oh dear,” Volodya wept softly. “How can I go? I feel so unhappy about
mamma.”
“My pale-face brother, I pray you, let us set off. You declared you were
going, you egged me on, and now the time comes, you funk it!”
“I . . . I . . . I’m not funking it, but I . . . I . . . I’m sorry for
mamma.”
“Say once and for all, are you going or are you not?”
“I am going, only . . . wait a little . . . I want to be at home a
little.”
“In that case I will go by myself,” Lentilov declared. “I can get on
without you. And you wanted to hunt tigers and fight! Since that’s how
it is, give me back my cartridges!”
At this Volodya cried so bitterly that his sisters could not help crying
too. Silence followed.
“So you are not coming?” Lentilov began again.
“I . . . I . . . I am coming!”
“Well, put on your things, then.”
And Lentilov tried to cheer Volodya up by singing the praises of
America, growling like a tiger, pretending to be a steamer, scolding
him, and promising to give him all the ivory and lions’ and tigers’
skins.
And this thin, dark boy, with his freckles and his bristling shock of
hair, impressed the little girls as an extraordinary remarkable person.
He was a hero, a determined character, who knew no fear, and he growled
so ferociously, that, standing at the door, they really might imagine
there was a tiger or lion inside. When the little girls went back to
their room and dressed, Katya’s eyes were full of tears, and she said:
“Oh, I feel so frightened!”
Everything was as usual till two o’clock, when they sat down to dinner.
Then it appeared that the boys were not in the house. They sent to the
servants’ quarters, to the stables, to the bailiff’s cottage. They were
not to be found. They sent into the village— they were not there.
At tea, too, the boys were still absent, and by supper-time Volodya’s
mother was dreadfully uneasy, and even shed tears.
Late in the evening they sent again to the village, they searched
everywhere, and walked along the river bank with lanterns. Heavens! what
a fuss there was!
Next day the police officer came, and a paper of some sort was written
out in the dining-room. Their mother cried. . . .
All of a sudden a sledge stopped at the door, with three white horses in
a cloud of steam.
“Volodya’s come,” someone shouted in the yard.
“Master Volodya’s here!” bawled Natalya, running into the dining-room.
And Milord barked his deep bass, “bow-wow.”
It seemed that the boys had been stopped in the Arcade, where they had
gone from shop to shop asking where they could get gunpowder.
Volodya burst into sobs as soon as he came into the hall, and flung
himself on his mother’s neck. The little girls, trembling, wondered with
terror what would happen next. They saw their father take Volodya and
Lentilov into his study, and there he talked to them a long while.
“Is this a proper thing to do?” their father said to them. “I only pray
they won’t hear of it at school, you would both be expelled. You ought
to be ashamed, Mr. Lentilov, really. It’s not at all the thing to do!
You began it, and I hope you will be punished by your parents. How could
you? Where did you spend the night?”
“At the station,” Lentilov answered proudly.
Then Volodya went to bed, and had a compress, steeped in vinegar, on his
forehead.
A telegram was sent off, and next day a lady, Lentilov’s mother, made
her appearance and bore off her son.
Lentilov looked morose and haughty to the end, and he did not utter a
single word at taking leave of the little girls. But he took Katya’s
book and wrote in it as a souvenir: “Montehomo, the Hawk’s Claw, Chief
of the Ever Victorious.”
SHROVE TUESDAY
“PAVEL VASSILITCH!” cries Pelageya Ivanovna, waking her husband. “Pavel
Vassilitch! You might go and help Styopa with his lessons, he is sitting
crying over his book. He can’t understand something again!”
Pavel Vassilitch gets up, makes the sign of the cross over his mouth as
he yawns, and says softly: “In a minute, my love!”
The cat who has been asleep beside him gets up too, straightens out its
tail, arches its spine, and half-shuts its eyes. There is stillness. . .
. Mice can be heard scurrying behind the wall-paper. Putting on his
boots and his dressing-gown, Pavel Vassilitch, crumpled and frowning
from sleepiness, comes out of his bedroom into the dining-room; on his
entrance another cat, engaged in sniffing a marinade of fish in the
window, jumps down to the floor, and hides behind the cupboard.
“Who asked you to sniff that!” he says angrily, covering the fish with a
sheet of newspaper. “You are a pig to do that, not a cat. . . .”
From the dining-room there is a door leading into the nursery. There, at
a table covered with stains and deep scratches, sits Styopa, a high-
school boy in the second class, with a peevish expression of face and
tear-stained eyes. With his knees raised almost to his chin, and his
hands clasped round them, he is swaying to and fro like a Chinese idol
and looking crossly at a sum book.
“Are you working?” asks Pavel Vassilitch, sitting down to the table and
yawning. “Yes, my boy. . . . We have enjoyed ourselves, slept, and eaten
pancakes, and to-morrow comes Lenten fare, repentance, and going to
work. Every period of time has its limits. Why are your eyes so red? Are
you sick of learning your lessons? To be sure, after pancakes, lessons
are nasty to swallow. That’s about it.”
“What are you laughing at the child for?” Pelageya Ivanovna calls from
the next room. “You had better show him instead of laughing at him.
He’ll get a one again to-morrow, and make me miserable.”
“What is it you don’t understand?” Pavel Vassilitch asks Styopa.
“Why this . . . division of fractions,” the boy answers crossly. “The
division of fractions by fractions. . . .”
“H’m . . . queer boy! What is there in it? There’s nothing to understand
in it. Learn the rules, and that’s all. . . . To divide a fraction by a
fraction you must multiply the numerator of the first fraction by the
denominator of the second, and that will be the numerator of the
quotient. . . . In this case, the numerator of the first fraction. . .
.”
“I know that without your telling me,” Styopa interrupts him, flicking a
walnut shell off the table. “Show me the proof.”
“The proof? Very well, give me a pencil. Listen. . . . Suppose we want
to divide seven eighths by two fifths. Well, the point of it is, my boy,
that it’s required to divide these fractions by each other. . . . Have
they set the samovar?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s time for tea. . . . It’s past seven. Well, now listen. We will
look at it like this. . . . Suppose we want to divide seven eighths not
by two fifths but by two, that is, by the numerator only. We divide it,
what do we get?
“Seven sixteenths.”
“Right. Bravo! Well, the trick of it is, my boy, that if we . . . so if
we have divided it by two then. . . . Wait a bit, I am getting muddled.
I remember when I was at school, the teacher of arithmetic was called
Sigismund Urbanitch, a Pole. He used to get into a muddle over every
lesson. He would begin explaining some theory, get in a tangle, and turn
crimson all over and race up and down the class-room as though someone
were sticking an awl in his back, then he would blow his nose half a
dozen times and begin to cry. But you know we were magnanimous to him,
we pretended not to see it. ‘What is it, Sigismund Urbanitch?’ we used
to ask him. ‘Have you got toothache?’ And what a set of young ruffians,
regular cut-throats, we were, but yet we were magnanimous, you know!
There weren’t any boys like you in my day, they were all great hulking
fellows, great strapping louts, one taller than another. For instance,
in our third class, there was Mamahin. My goodness, he was a solid chap!
You know, a regular maypole, seven feet high. When he moved, the floor
shook; when he brought his great fist down on your back, he would knock
the breath out of your body! Not only we boys, but even the teachers
were afraid of him. So this Mamahin used to . . .”
Pelageya Ivanovna’s footsteps are heard through the door. Pavel
Vassilitch winks towards the door and says:
“There’s mother coming. Let’s get to work. Well, so you see, my boy,” he
says, raising his voice. “This fraction has to be multiplied by that
one. Well, and to do that you have to take the numerator of the first
fraction. . .”
“Come to tea!” cries Pelageya Ivanovna. Pavel Vassilitch and his son
abandon arithmetic and go in to tea. Pelageya Ivanovna is already
sitting at the table with an aunt who never speaks, another aunt who is
deaf and dumb, and Granny Markovna, a midwife who had helped Styopa into
the world. The samovar is hissing and puffing out steam which throws
flickering shadows on the ceiling. The cats come in from the entry
sleepy and melancholy with their tails in the air. . . .
“Have some jam with your tea, Markovna,” says Pelageya Ivanovna,
addressing the midwife. “To-morrow the great fast begins. Eat well to-
day.”
Markovna takes a heaped spoonful of jam hesitatingly as though it were a
powder, raises it to her lips, and with a sidelong look at Pavel
Vassilitch, eats it; at once her face is overspread with a sweet smile,
as sweet as the jam itself.
“The jam is particularly good,” she says. “Did you make it yourself,
Pelageya Ivanovna, ma’am?”
“Yes. Who else is there to do it? I do everything myself. Styopotchka,
have I given you your tea too weak? Ah, you have drunk it already. Pass
your cup, my angel; let me give you some more.”
“So this Mamahin, my boy, could not bear the French master,” Pavel
Vassilitch goes on, addressing his son. “‘I am a nobleman,’ he used to
shout, ‘and I won’t allow a Frenchman to lord it over me! We beat the
French in 1812!’ Well, of course they used to thrash him for it . . .
thrash him dre-ead-fully, and sometimes when he saw they were meaning to
thrash him, he would jump out of window, and off he would go! Then for
five or six days afterwards he would not show himself at the school. His
mother would come to the head-master and beg him for God’s sake: ‘Be so
kind, sir, as to find my Mishka, and flog him, the rascal!’ And the
head-master would say to her: ‘Upon my word, madam, our five porters
aren’t a match for him!’”
“Good heavens, to think of such ruffians being born,” whispers Pelageya
Ivanovna, looking at her husband in horror. “What a trial for the poor
mother!”
A silence follows. Styopa yawns loudly, and scrutinises the Chinaman on
the tea-caddy whom he has seen a thousand times already. Markovna and
the two aunts sip tea carefully out of their saucers. The air is still
and stifling from the stove. . . . Faces and gestures betray the sloth
and repletion that comes when the stomach is full, and yet one must go
on eating. The samovar, the cups, and the table-cloth are cleared away,
but still the family sits on at the table. . . . Pelageya Ivanovna is
continually jumping up and, with an expression of alarm on her face,
running off into the kitchen, to talk to the cook about the supper. The
two aunts go on sitting in the same position immovably, with their arms
folded across their bosoms and doze, staring with their pewtery little
eyes at the lamp. Markovna hiccups every minute and asks:
“Why is it I have the hiccups? I don’t think I have eaten anything to
account for it . . . nor drunk anything either. . . . Hic!”
Pavel Vassilitch and Styopa sit side by side, with their heads touching,
and, bending over the table, examine a volume of the “Neva” for 1878.
“‘The monument of Leonardo da Vinci, facing the gallery of Victor
Emmanuel at Milan.’ I say! . . . After the style of a triumphal arch. .
. . A cavalier with his lady. . . . And there are little men in the
distance. . . .”
“That little man is like a schoolfellow of mine called Niskubin,” says
Styopa.
“Turn over. . . . ‘The proboscis of the common house-fly seen under the
microscope.’ So that’s a proboscis! I say—a fly. Whatever would a bug
look like under a microscope, my boy? Wouldn’t it be horrid!”
The old-fashioned clock in the drawing-room does not strike, but coughs
ten times huskily as though it had a cold. The cook, Anna, comes into
the dining-room, and plumps down at the master’s feet.
“Forgive me, for Christ’s sake, Pavel Vassilitch!” she says, getting up,
flushed all over.
“You forgive me, too, for Christ’s sake,” Pavel Vassilitch responds
unconcernedly.
In the same manner, Anna goes up to the other members of the family,
plumps down at their feet, and begs forgiveness. She only misses out
Markovna to whom, not being one of the gentry, she does not feel it
necessary to bow down.
Another half-hour passes in stillness and tranquillity. The “Neva” is by
now lying on the sofa, and Pavel Vassilitch, holding up his finger,
repeats by heart some Latin verses he has learned in his childhood.
Styopa stares at the finger with the wedding ring, listens to the
unintelligible words, and dozes; he rubs his eyelids with his fists, and
they shut all the tighter.
“I am going to bed . . .” he says, stretching and yawning.
“What, to bed?” says Pelageya Ivanovna. “What about supper before the
fast?”
“I don’t want any.”
“Are you crazy?” says his mother in alarm. “How can you go without your
supper before the fast? You’ll have nothing but Lenten food all through
the fast!”
Pavel Vassilitch is scared too.
“Yes, yes, my boy,” he says. “For seven weeks mother will give you
nothing but Lenten food. You can’t miss the last supper before the
fast.”
“Oh dear, I am sleepy,” says Styopa peevishly.
“Since that is how it is, lay the supper quickly,” Pavel Vassilitch
cries in a fluster. “Anna, why are you sitting there, silly? Make haste
and lay the table.”
Pelageya Ivanovna clasps her hands and runs into the kitchen with an
expression as though the house were on fire.
“Make haste, make haste,” is heard all over the house. “Styopotchka is
sleepy. Anna! Oh dear me, what is one to do? Make haste.”
Five minutes later the table is laid. Again the cats, arching their
spines, and stretching themselves with their tails in the air, come into
the dining-room. . . . The family begin supper. . . . No one is hungry,
everyone’s stomach is overfull, but yet they must eat.
THE OLD HOUSE (A Story told by a Houseowner)
THE old house had to be pulled down that a new one might be built in its
place. I led the architect through the empty rooms, and between our
business talk told him various stories. The tattered wallpapers, the
dingy windows, the dark stoves, all bore the traces of recent habitation
and evoked memories. On that staircase, for instance, drunken men were
once carrying down a dead body when they stumbled and flew headlong
downstairs together with the coffin; the living were badly bruised,
while the dead man looked very serious, as though nothing had happened,
and shook his head when they lifted him up from the ground and put him
back in the coffin. You see those three doors in a row: in there lived
young ladies who were always receiving visitors, and so were better
dressed than any other lodgers, and could pay their rent regularly. The
door at the end of the corridor leads to the wash-house, where by day
they washed clothes and at night made an uproar and drank beer. And in
that flat of three rooms everything is saturated with bacteria and
bacilli. It’s not nice there. Many lodgers have died there, and I can
positively assert that that flat was at some time cursed by someone, and
that together with its human lodgers there was always another lodger,
unseen, living in it. I remember particularly the fate of one family.
Picture to yourself an ordinary man, not remarkable in any way, with a
wife, a mother, and four children. His name was Putohin; he was a
copying clerk at a notary’s, and received thirty-five roubles a month.
He was a sober, religious, serious man. When he brought me his rent for
the flat he always apologised for being badly dressed; apologised for
being five days late, and when I gave him a receipt he would smile good-
humouredly and say: “Oh yes, there’s that too, I don’t like those
receipts.” He lived poorly but decently. In that middle room, the
grandmother used to be with the four children; there they used to cook,
sleep, receive their visitors, and even dance. This was Putohin’s own
room; he had a table in it, at which he used to work doing private jobs,
copying parts for the theatre, advertisements, and so on. This room on
the right was let to his lodger, Yegoritch, a locksmith—a steady fellow,
but given to drink; he was always too hot, and so used to go about in
his waistcoat and barefoot. Yegoritch used to mend locks, pistols,
children’s bicycles, would not refuse to mend cheap clocks and make
skates for a quarter-rouble, but he despised that work, and looked on
himself as a specialist in musical instruments. Amongst the litter of
steel and iron on his table there was always to be seen a concertina
with a broken key, or a trumpet with its sides bent in. He paid Putohin
two and a half roubles for his room; he was always at his work-table,
and only came out to thrust some piece of iron into the stove.
On the rare occasions when I went into that flat in the evening, this
was always the picture I came upon: Putohin would be sitting at his
little table, copying something; his mother and his wife, a thin woman
with an exhausted-looking face, were sitting near the lamp, sewing;
Yegoritch would be making a rasping sound with his file. And the hot,
still smouldering embers in the stove filled the room with heat and
fumes; the heavy air smelt of cabbage soup, swaddling-clothes, and
Yegoritch. It was poor and stuffy, but the working-class faces, the
children’s little drawers hung up along by the stove, Yegoritch’s bits
of iron had yet an air of peace, friendliness, content. . . . In the
corridor outside the children raced about with well-combed heads, merry
and profoundly convinced that everything was satisfactory in this world,
and would be so endlessly, that one had only to say one’s prayers every
morning and at bedtime.
Now imagine in the midst of that same room, two paces from the stove,
the coffin in which Putohin’s wife is lying. There is no husband whose
wife will live for ever, but there was something special about this
death. When, during the requiem service, I glanced at the husband’s
grave face, at his stern eyes, I thought: “Oho, brother!”
It seemed to me that he himself, his children, the grandmother and
Yegoritch, were already marked down by that unseen being which lived
with them in that flat. I am a thoroughly superstitious man, perhaps,
because I am a houseowner and for forty years have had to do with
lodgers. I believe if you don’t win at cards from the beginning you will
go on losing to the end; when fate wants to wipe you and your family off
the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its persecution, and the
first misfortune is commonly only the first of a long series. . . .
Misfortunes are like stones. One stone has only to drop from a high
cliff for others to be set rolling after it. In short, as I came away
from the requiem service at Putohin’s, I believed that he and his family
were in a bad way.
And, in fact, a week afterwards the notary quite unexpectedly dismissed
Putohin, and engaged a young lady in his place. And would you believe
it, Putohin was not so much put out at the loss of his job as at being
superseded by a young lady and not by a man. Why a young lady? He so
resented this that on his return home he thrashed his children, swore at
his mother, and got drunk. Yegoritch got drunk, too, to keep him
company.
Putohin brought me the rent, but did not apologise this time, though it
was eighteen days overdue, and said nothing when he took the receipt
from me. The following month the rent was brought by his mother; she
only brought me half, and promised to bring the remainder a week later.
The third month, I did not get a farthing, and the porter complained to
me that the lodgers in No. 23 were “not behaving like gentlemen.”
These were ominous symptoms.
Picture this scene. A sombre Petersburg morning looks in at the dingy
windows. By the stove, the granny is pouring out the children’s tea.
Only the eldest, Vassya, drinks out of a glass, for the others the tea
is poured out into saucers. Yegoritch is squatting on his heels before
the stove, thrusting a bit of iron into the fire. His head is heavy and
his eyes are lustreless from yesterday’s drinking-bout; he sighs and
groans, trembles and coughs.
“He has quite put me off the right way, the devil,” he grumbles; “he
drinks himself and leads others into sin.”
Putohin sits in his room, on the bedstead from which the bedclothes and
the pillows have long ago disappeared, and with his hands straying in
his hair looks blankly at the floor at his feet. He is tattered,
unkempt, and ill.
“Drink it up, make haste or you will be late for school,” the old woman
urges on Vassya, “and it’s time for me, too, to go and scrub the floors
for the Jews. . . .”
The old woman is the only one in the flat who does not lose heart. She
thinks of old times, and goes out to hard dirty work. On Fridays she
scrubs the floors for the Jews at the crockery shop, on Saturdays she
goes out washing for shopkeepers, and on Sundays she is racing about the
town from morning to night, trying to find ladies who will help her.
Every day she has work of some sort; she washes and scrubs, and is by
turns a midwife, a matchmaker, or a beggar. It is true she, too, is not
disinclined to drown her sorrows, but even when she has had a drop she
does not forget her duties. In Russia there are many such tough old
women, and how much of its welfare rests upon them!
When he has finished his tea, Vassya packs up his books in a satchel and
goes behind the stove; his greatcoat ought to be hanging there beside
his granny’s clothes. A minute later he comes out from behind the stove
and asks:
“Where is my greatcoat?”
The grandmother and the other children look for the greatcoat together,
they waste a long time in looking for it, but the greatcoat has utterly
vanished. Where is it? The grandmother and Vassya are pale and
frightened. Even Yegoritch is surprised. Putohin is the only one who
does not move. Though he is quick to notice anything irregular or
disorderly, this time he makes a pretence of hearing and seeing nothing.
That is suspicious.
“He’s sold it for drink,” Yegoritch declares.
Putohin says nothing, so it is the truth. Vassya is overcome with
horror. His greatcoat, his splendid greatcoat, made of his dead mother’s
cloth dress, with a splendid calico lining, gone for drink at the
tavern! And with the greatcoat is gone too, of course, the blue pencil
that lay in the pocket, and the note-book with “Nota bene” in gold
letters on it! There’s another pencil with india-rubber stuck into the
note-book, and, besides that, there are transfer pictures lying in it.
Vassya would like to cry, but to cry is impossible. If his father, who
has a headache, heard crying he would shout, stamp with his feet, and
begin fighting, and after drinking he fights horribly. Granny would
stand up for Vassya, and his father would strike granny too; it would
end in Yegoritch getting mixed up in it too, clutching at his father and
falling on the floor with him. The two would roll on the floor,
struggling together and gasping with drunken animal fury, and granny
would cry, the children would scream, the neighbours would send for the
porter. No, better not cry.
Because he mustn’t cry, or give vent to his indignation aloud, Vassya
moans, wrings his hands and moves his legs convulsively, or biting his
sleeve shakes it with his teeth as a dog does a hare. His eyes are
frantic, and his face is distorted with despair. Looking at him, his
granny all at once takes the shawl off her head, and she too makes queer
movements with her arms and legs in silence, with her eyes fixed on a
point in the distance. And at that moment I believe there is a definite
certainty in the minds of the boy and the old woman that their life is
ruined, that there is no hope. . . .
Putohin hears no crying, but he can see it all from his room. When, half
an hour later, Vassya sets off to school, wrapped in his grandmother’s
shawl, he goes out with a face I will not undertake to describe, and
walks after him. He longs to call the boy, to comfort him, to beg his
forgiveness, to promise him on his word of honour, to call his dead
mother to witness, but instead of words, sobs break from him. It is a
grey, cold morning. When he reaches the town school Vassya untwists his
granny’s shawl, and goes into the school with nothing over his jacket
for fear the boys should say he looks like a woman. And when he gets
home Putohin sobs, mutters some incoherent words, bows down to the
ground before his mother and Yegoritch, and the locksmith’s table. Then,
recovering himself a little, he runs to me and begs me breathlessly, for
God’s sake, to find him some job. I give him hopes, of course.
“At last I am myself again,” he said. “It’s high time, indeed, to come
to my senses. I’ve made a beast of myself, and now it’s over.”
He is delighted and thanks me, while I, who have studied these gentry
thoroughly during the years I have owned the house, look at him, and am
tempted to say:
“It’s too late, dear fellow! You are a dead man already.”
From me, Putohin runs to the town school. There he paces up and down,
waiting till his boy comes out.
“I say, Vassya,” he says joyfully, when the boy at last comes out, “I
have just been promised a job. Wait a bit, I will buy you a splendid
fur-coat. . . . I’ll send you to the high school! Do you understand? To
the high school! I’ll make a gentleman of you! And I won’t drink any
more. On my honour I won’t.”
And he has intense faith in the bright future. But the evening comes on.
The old woman, coming back from the Jews with twenty kopecks, exhausted
and aching all over, sets to work to wash the children’s clothes. Vassya
is sitting doing a sum. Yegoritch is not working. Thanks to Putohin he
has got into the way of drinking, and is feeling at the moment an
overwhelming desire for drink. It’s hot and stuffy in the room. Steam
rises in clouds from the tub where the old woman is washing.
“Are we going?” Yegoritch asks surlily.
My lodger does not answer. After his excitement he feels insufferably
dreary. He struggles with the desire to drink, with acute depression and
. . . and, of course, depression gets the best of it. It is a familiar
story.
Towards night, Yegoritch and Putohin go out, and in the morning Vassya
cannot find granny’s shawl.
That is the drama that took place in that flat. After selling the shawl
for drink, Putohin did not come home again. Where he disappeared to I
don’t know. After he disappeared, the old woman first got drunk, then
took to her bed. She was taken to the hospital, the younger children
were fetched by relations of some sort, and Vassya went into the wash-
house here. In the day-time he handed the irons, and at night fetched
the beer. When he was turned out of the wash-house he went into the
service of one of the young ladies, used to run about at night on
errands of some sort, and began to be spoken of as “a dangerous
customer.”
What has happened to him since I don’t know.
And in this room here a street musician lived for ten years. When he
died they found twenty thousand roubles in his feather bed.
IN PASSION WEEK
“Go along, they are ringing already; and mind, don’t be naughty in
church or God will punish you.”
My mother thrusts a few copper coins upon me, and, instantly forgetting
about me, runs into the kitchen with an iron that needs reheating. I
know well that after confession I shall not be allowed to eat or drink,
and so, before leaving the house, I force myself to eat a crust of white
bread, and to drink two glasses of water. It is quite spring in the
street. The roads are all covered with brownish slush, in which future
paths are already beginning to show; the roofs and side-walks are dry;
the fresh young green is piercing through the rotting grass of last
year, under the fences. In the gutters there is the merry gurgling and
foaming of dirty water, in which the sunbeams do not disdain to bathe.
Chips, straws, the husks of sunflower seeds are carried rapidly along in
the water, whirling round and sticking in the dirty foam. Where, where
are those chips swimming to? It may well be that from the gutter they
may pass into the river, from the river into the sea, and from the sea
into the ocean. I try to imagine to myself that long terrible journey,
but my fancy stops short before reaching the sea.
A cabman drives by. He clicks to his horse, tugs at the reins, and does
not see that two street urchins are hanging on the back of his cab. I
should like to join them, but think of confession, and the street
urchins begin to seem to me great sinners.
“They will be asked on the day of judgment: ‘Why did you play pranks and
deceive the poor cabman?’” I think. “They will begin to defend
themselves, but evil spirits will seize them, and drag them to fire
everlasting. But if they obey their parents, and give the beggars a
kopeck each, or a roll, God will have pity on them, and will let them
into Paradise.”
The church porch is dry and bathed in sunshine. There is not a soul in
it. I open the door irresolutely and go into the church. Here, in the
twilight which seems to me thick and gloomy as at no other time, I am
overcome by the sense of sinfulness and insignificance. What strikes the
eye first of all is a huge crucifix, and on one side of it the Mother of
God, and on the other, St. John the Divine. The candelabra and the
candlestands are draped in black mourning covers, the lamps glimmer
dimly and faintly, and the sun seems intentionally to pass by the church
windows. The Mother of God and the beloved disciple of Jesus Christ,
depicted in profile, gaze in silence at the insufferable agony and do
not observe my presence; I feel that to them I am alien, superfluous,
unnoticed, that I can be no help to them by word or deed, that I am a
loathsome, dishonest boy, only capable of mischief, rudeness, and tale-
bearing. I think of all the people I know, and they all seem to me
petty, stupid, and wicked, and incapable of bringing one drop of relief
to that intolerable sorrow which I now behold.
The twilight of the church grows darker and more gloomy. And the Mother
of God and St. John look lonely and forlorn to me.
Prokofy Ignatitch, a veteran soldier, the church verger’s assistant, is
standing behind the candle cupboard. Raising his eyebrows and stroking
his beard he explains in a half-whisper to an old woman: “Matins will be
in the evening to-day, directly after vespers. And they will ring for
the ‘hours’ to-morrow between seven and eight. Do you understand?
Between seven and eight.”
Between the two broad columns on the right, where the chapel of Varvara
the Martyr begins, those who are going to confess stand beside the
screen, awaiting their turn. And Mitka is there too— a ragged boy with
his head hideously cropped, with ears that jut out, and little spiteful
eyes. He is the son of Nastasya the charwoman, and is a bully and a
ruffian who snatches apples from the women’s baskets, and has more than
once carried off my knuckle-bones. He looks at me angrily, and I fancy
takes a spiteful pleasure in the fact that he, not I, will first go
behind the screen. I feel boiling over with resentment, I try not to
look at him, and, at the bottom of my heart, I am vexed that this
wretched boy’s sins will soon be forgiven.
In front of him stands a grandly dressed, beautiful lady, wearing a hat
with a white feather. She is noticeably agitated, is waiting in strained
suspense, and one of her cheeks is flushed red with excitement.
I wait for five minutes, for ten. . . . A well-dressed young man with a
long thin neck, and rubber goloshes, comes out from behind the screen. I
begin dreaming how, when I am grown up, I will buy goloshes exactly like
them. I certainly will! The lady shudders and goes behind the screen. It
is her turn.
In the crack, between the two panels of the screen, I can see the lady
go up to the lectern and bow down to the ground, then get up, and,
without looking at the priest, bow her head in anticipation. The priest
stands with his back to the screen, and so I can only see his grey curly
head, the chain of the cross on his chest, and his broad back. His face
is not visible. Heaving a sigh, and not looking at the lady, he begins
speaking rapidly, shaking his head, alternately raising and dropping his
whispering voice. The lady listens meekly as though conscious of guilt,
answers meekly, and looks at the floor.
“In what way can she be sinful?” I wonder, looking reverently at her
gentle, beautiful face. “God forgive her sins, God send her happiness.”
But now the priest covers her head with the stole. “And I, unworthy
priest . . .” I hear his voice, “. . . by His power given unto me, do
forgive and absolve thee from all thy sins. . . .”
The lady bows down to the ground, kisses the cross, and comes back. Both
her cheeks are flushed now, but her face is calm and serene and
cheerful.
“She is happy now,” I think to myself, looking first at her and then at
the priest who had forgiven her sins. “But how happy the man must be who
has the right to forgive sins!”
Now it is Mitka’s turn, but a feeling of hatred for that young ruffian
suddenly boils up in me. I want to go behind the screen before him, I
want to be the first. Noticing my movement he hits me on the head with
his candle, I respond by doing the same, and, for half a minute, there
is a sound of panting, and, as it were, of someone breaking candles. . .
. We are separated. My foe goes timidly up to the lectern, and bows down
to the floor without bending his knees, but I do not see what happens
after that; the thought that my turn is coming after Mitka’s makes
everything grow blurred and confused before my eyes; Mitka’s protruding
ears grow large, and melt into his dark head, the priest sways, the
floor seems to be undulating. . . .
The priest’s voice is audible: “And I, unworthy priest . . .”
Now I too move behind the screen. I do not feel the ground under my
feet, it is as though I were walking on air. . . . I go up to the
lectern which is taller than I am. For a minute I have a glimpse of the
indifferent, exhausted face of the priest. But after that I see nothing
but his sleeve with its blue lining, the cross, and the edge of the
lectern. I am conscious of the close proximity of the priest, the smell
of his cassock; I hear his stern voice, and my cheek turned towards him
begins to burn. . . . I am so troubled that I miss a great deal that he
says, but I answer his questions sincerely in an unnatural voice, not my
own. I think of the forlorn figures of the Holy Mother and St. John the
Divine, the crucifix, my mother, and I want to cry and beg forgiveness.
“What is your name?” the priest asks me, covering my head with the soft
stole.
How light-hearted I am now, with joy in my soul!
I have no sins now, I am holy, I have the right to enter Paradise! I
fancy that I already smell like the cassock. I go from behind the screen
to the deacon to enter my name, and sniff at my sleeves. The dusk of the
church no longer seems gloomy, and I look indifferently, without malice,
at Mitka.
“What is your name?” the deacon asks.
“Fedya.”
“And your name from your father?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is your papa’s name?”
“Ivan Petrovitch.”
“And your surname?”
I make no answer.
“How old are you?”
“Nearly nine.”
When I get home I go to bed quickly, that I may not see them eating
supper; and, shutting my eyes, dream of how fine it would be to endure
martyrdom at the hands of some Herod or Dioskorus, to live in the
desert, and, like St. Serafim, feed the bears, live in a cell, and eat
nothing but holy bread, give my property to the poor, go on a pilgrimage
to Kiev. I hear them laying the table in the dining-room—they are going
to have supper, they will eat salad, cabbage pies, fried and baked fish.
How hungry I am! I would consent to endure any martyrdom, to live in the
desert without my mother, to feed bears out of my own hands, if only I
might first eat just one cabbage pie!
“Lord, purify me a sinner,” I pray, covering my head over. “Guardian
angel, save me from the unclean spirit.”
The next day, Thursday, I wake up with my heart as pure and clean as a
fine spring day. I go gaily and boldly into the church, feeling that I
am a communicant, that I have a splendid and expensive shirt on, made
out of a silk dress left by my grandmother. In the church everything has
an air of joy, happiness, and spring. The faces of the Mother of God and
St. John the Divine are not so sorrowful as yesterday. The faces of the
communicants are radiant with hope, and it seems as though all the past
is forgotten, all is forgiven. Mitka, too, has combed his hair, and is
dressed in his best. I look gaily at his protruding ears, and to show
that I have nothing against him, I say:
“You look nice to-day, and if your hair did not stand up so, and you
weren’t so poorly dressed, everybody would think that your mother was
not a washerwoman but a lady. Come to me at Easter, we will play
knuckle-bones.”
Mitka looks at me mistrustfully, and shakes his fist at me on the sly.
And the lady I saw yesterday looks lovely. She is wearing a light blue
dress, and a big sparkling brooch in the shape of a horse-shoe. I admire
her, and think that, when I am grown-up, I will certainly marry a woman
like that, but remembering that getting married is shameful, I leave off
thinking about it, and go into the choir where the deacon is already
reading the “hours.”
WHITEBROW
A HUNGRY she-wolf got up to go hunting. Her cubs, all three of them,
were sound asleep, huddled in a heap and keeping each other warm. She
licked them and went off.
It was already March, a month of spring, but at night the trees snapped
with the cold, as they do in December, and one could hardly put one’s
tongue out without its being nipped. The wolf-mother was in delicate
health and nervous; she started at the slightest sound, and kept hoping
that no one would hurt the little ones at home while she was away. The
smell of the tracks of men and horses, logs, piles of faggots, and the
dark road with horse-dung on it frightened her; it seemed to her that
men were standing behind the trees in the darkness, and that dogs were
howling somewhere beyond the forest.
She was no longer young and her scent had grown feebler, so that it
sometimes happened that she took the track of a fox for that of a dog,
and even at times lost her way, a thing that had never been in her
youth. Owing to the weakness of her health she no longer hunted calves
and big sheep as she had in old days, and kept her distance now from
mares with colts; she fed on nothing but carrion; fresh meat she tasted
very rarely, only in the spring when she would come upon a hare and take
away her young, or make her way into a peasant’s stall where there were
lambs.
Some three miles from her lair there stood a winter hut on the posting
road. There lived the keeper Ignat, an old man of seventy, who was
always coughing and talking to himself; at night he was usually asleep,
and by day he wandered about the forest with a single-barrelled gun,
whistling to the hares. He must have worked among machinery in early
days, for before he stood still he always shouted to himself: “Stop the
machine!” and before going on: “Full speed!” He had a huge black dog of
indeterminate breed, called Arapka. When it ran too far ahead he used to
shout to it: “Reverse action!” Sometimes he used to sing, and as he did
so staggered violently, and often fell down (the wolf thought the wind
blew him over), and shouted: “Run off the rails!”
The wolf remembered that, in the summer and autumn, a ram and two ewes
were pasturing near the winter hut, and when she had run by not so long
ago she fancied that she had heard bleating in the stall. And now, as
she got near the place, she reflected that it was already March, and, by
that time, there would certainly be lambs in the stall. She was
tormented by hunger, she thought with what greediness she would eat a
lamb, and these thoughts made her teeth snap, and her eyes glitter in
the darkness like two sparks of light.
Ignat’s hut, his barn, cattle-stall, and well were surrounded by high
snowdrifts. All was still. Arapka was, most likely, asleep in the barn.
The wolf clambered over a snowdrift on to the stall, and began
scratching away the thatched roof with her paws and her nose. The straw
was rotten and decaying, so that the wolf almost fell through; all at
once a smell of warm steam, of manure, and of sheep’s milk floated
straight to her nostrils. Down below, a lamb, feeling the cold, bleated
softly. Leaping through the hole, the wolf fell with her four paws and
chest on something soft and warm, probably a sheep, and at the same
moment, something in the stall suddenly began whining, barking, and
going off into a shrill little yap; the sheep huddled against the wall,
and the wolf, frightened, snatched the first thing her teeth fastened
on, and dashed away. . . .
She ran at her utmost speed, while Arapka, who by now had scented the
wolf, howled furiously, the frightened hens cackled, and Ignat, coming
out into the porch, shouted: “Full speed! Blow the whistle!”
And he whistled like a steam-engine, and then shouted: “Ho-ho-ho-ho!”
and all this noise was repeated by the forest echo. When, little by
little, it all died away, the wolf somewhat recovered herself, and began
to notice that the prey she held in her teeth and dragged along the snow
was heavier and, as it were, harder than lambs usually were at that
season; and it smelt somehow different, and uttered strange sounds. . .
. The wolf stopped and laid her burden on the snow, to rest and begin
eating it, then all at once she leapt back in disgust. It was not a
lamb, but a black puppy, with a big head and long legs, of a large
breed, with a white patch on his brow, like Arapka’s. Judging from his
manners he was a simple, ignorant, yard-dog. He licked his crushed and
wounded back, and, as though nothing was the matter, wagged his tail and
barked at the wolf. She growled like a dog, and ran away from him. He
ran after her. She looked round and snapped her teeth. He stopped in
perplexity, and, probably deciding that she was playing with him, craned
his head in the direction he had come from, and went off into a shrill,
gleeful bark, as though inviting his mother Arapka to play with him and
the wolf.
It was already getting light, and when the wolf reached her home in the
thick aspen wood, each aspen tree could be seen distinctly, and the
woodcocks were already awake, and the beautiful male birds often flew
up, disturbed by the incautious gambols and barking of the puppy.
“Why does he run after me?” thought the wolf with annoyance. “I suppose
he wants me to eat him.”
She lived with her cubs in a shallow hole; three years before, a tall
old pine tree had been torn up by the roots in a violent storm, and the
hole had been formed by it. Now there were dead leaves and moss at the
bottom, and around it lay bones and bullocks’ horns, with which the
little ones played. They were by now awake, and all three of them, very
much alike, were standing in a row at the edge of their hole, looking at
their returning mother, and wagging their tails. Seeing them, the puppy
stopped a little way off, and stared at them for a very long time;
seeing that they, too, were looking very attentively at him, he began
barking angrily, as at strangers.
By now it was daylight and the sun had risen, the snow sparkled all
around, but still the puppy stood a little way off and barked. The cubs
sucked their mother, pressing her thin belly with their paws, while she
gnawed a horse’s bone, dry and white; she was tormented by hunger, her
head ached from the dog’s barking, and she felt inclined to fall on the
uninvited guest and tear him to pieces.
At last the puppy was hoarse and exhausted; seeing they were not afraid
of him, and not even attending to him, he began somewhat timidly
approaching the cubs, alternately squatting down and bounding a few
steps forward. Now, by daylight, it was easy to have a good look at him.
. . . His white forehead was big, and on it was a hump such as is only
seen on very stupid dogs; he had little, blue, dingy-looking eyes, and
the expression of his whole face was extremely stupid. When he reached
the cubs he stretched out his broad paws, laid his head upon them, and
began:
“Mnya, myna . . . nga—nga—nga . . . !”
The cubs did not understand what he meant, but they wagged their tails.
Then the puppy gave one of the cubs a smack on its big head with his
paw. The cub, too, gave him a smack on the head. The puppy stood
sideways to him, and looked at him askance, wagging his tail, then
dashed off, and ran round several times on the frozen snow. The cubs ran
after him, he fell on his back and kicked up his legs, and all three of
them fell upon him, squealing with delight, and began biting him, not to
hurt but in play. The crows sat on the high pine tree, and looked down
on their struggle, and were much troubled by it. They grew noisy and
merry. The sun was hot, as though it were spring; and the woodcocks,
continually flitting through the pine tree that had been blown down by
the storm, looked as though made of emerald in the brilliant sunshine.
As a rule, wolf-mothers train their children to hunt by giving them prey
to play with; and now watching the cubs chasing the puppy over the
frozen snow and struggling with him, the mother thought:
“Let them learn.”
When they had played long enough, the cubs went into the hole and lay
down to sleep. The puppy howled a little from hunger, then he, too,
stretched out in the sunshine. And when they woke up they began playing
again.
All day long, and in the evening, the wolf-mother was thinking how the
lamb had bleated in the cattle-shed the night before, and how it had
smelt of sheep’s milk, and she kept snapping her teeth from hunger, and
never left off greedily gnawing the old bone, pretending to herself that
it was the lamb. The cubs sucked their mother, and the puppy, who was
hungry, ran round them and sniffed at the snow.
“I’ll eat him . . .” the mother-wolf decided.
She went up to him, and he licked her nose and yapped at her, thinking
that she wanted to play with him. In the past she had eaten dogs, but
the dog smelt very doggy, and in the delicate state of her health she
could not endure the smell; she felt disgusted and walked away. . . .
Towards night it grew cold. The puppy felt depressed and went home.
When the wolf-cubs were fast asleep, their mother went out hunting
again. As on the previous night she was alarmed at every sound, and she
was frightened by the stumps, the logs, the dark juniper bushes, which
stood out singly, and in the distance were like human beings. She ran on
the ice-covered snow, keeping away from the road. . . . All at once she
caught a glimpse of something dark, far away on the road. She strained
her eyes and ears: yes, something really was walking on in front, she
could even hear the regular thud of footsteps. Surely not a badger?
Cautiously holding her breath, and keeping always to one side, she
overtook the dark patch, looked round, and recognised it. It was the
puppy with the white brow, going with a slow, lingering step homewards.
“If only he doesn’t hinder me again,” thought the wolf, and ran quickly
on ahead.
But the homestead was by now near. Again she clambered on to the cattle-
shed by the snowdrift. The gap she had made yesterday had been already
mended with straw, and two new rafters stretched across the roof. The
wolf began rapidly working with her legs and nose, looking round to see
whether the puppy were coming, but the smell of the warm steam and
manure had hardly reached her nose before she heard a gleeful burst of
barking behind her. It was the puppy. He leapt up to the wolf on the
roof, then into the hole, and, feeling himself at home in the warmth,
recognising his sheep, he barked louder than ever. . . . Arapka woke up
in the barn, and, scenting a wolf, howled, the hens began cackling, and
by the time Ignat appeared in the porch with his single-barrelled gun
the frightened wolf was already far away.
“Fuite!” whistled Ignat. “Fuite! Full steam ahead!”
He pulled the trigger—the gun missed fire; he pulled the trigger
again—again it missed fire; he tried a third time—and a great blaze of
flame flew out of the barrel and there was a deafening boom, boom. It
kicked him violently on the shoulder, and, taking his gun in one hand
and his axe in the other, he went to see what the noise was about.
A little later he went back to the hut.
“What was it?” a pilgrim, who was staying the night at the hut and had
been awakened by the noise, asked in a husky voice.
“It’s all right,” answered Ignat. “Nothing of consequence. Our Whitebrow
has taken to sleeping with the sheep in the warm. Only he hasn’t the
sense to go in at the door, but always tries to wriggle in by the roof.
The other night he tore a hole in the roof and went off on the spree,
the rascal, and now he has come back and scratched away the roof again.”
“Stupid dog.”
“Yes, there is a spring snapped in his brain. I do detest fools,” sighed
Ignat, clambering on to the stove. “Come, man of God, it’s early yet to
get up. Let us sleep full steam! . . .”
In the morning he called Whitebrow, smacked him hard about the ears, and
then showing him a stick, kept repeating to him:
“Go in at the door! Go in at the door! Go in at the door!”
KASHTANKA (A Story) I
|Misbehaviour
A YOUNG dog, a reddish mongrel, between a dachshund and a “yard-dog,”
very like a fox in face, was running up and down the pavement looking
uneasily from side to side. From time to time she stopped and, whining
and lifting first one chilled paw and then another, tried to make up her
mind how it could have happened that she was lost.
She remembered very well how she had passed the day, and how, in the
end, she had found herself on this unfamiliar pavement.
The day had begun by her master Luka Alexandritch’s putting on his hat,
taking something wooden under his arm wrapped up in a red handkerchief,
and calling: “Kashtanka, come along!”
Hearing her name the mongrel had come out from under the work-table,
where she slept on the shavings, stretched herself voluptuously and run
after her master. The people Luka Alexandritch worked for lived a very
long way off, so that, before he could get to any one of them, the
carpenter had several times to step into a tavern to fortify himself.
Kashtanka remembered that on the way she had behaved extremely
improperly. In her delight that she was being taken for a walk she
jumped about, dashed barking after the trains, ran into yards, and
chased other dogs. The carpenter was continually losing sight of her,
stopping, and angrily shouting at her. Once he had even, with an
expression of fury in his face, taken her fox-like ear in his fist,
smacked her, and said emphatically: “Pla-a-ague take you, you pest!”
After having left the work where it had been bespoken, Luka Alexandritch
went into his sister’s and there had something to eat and drink; from
his sister’s he had gone to see a bookbinder he knew; from the
bookbinder’s to a tavern, from the tavern to another crony’s, and so on.
In short, by the time Kashtanka found herself on the unfamiliar
pavement, it was getting dusk, and the carpenter was as drunk as a
cobbler. He was waving his arms and, breathing heavily, muttered:
“In sin my mother bore me! Ah, sins, sins! Here now we are walking along
the street and looking at the street lamps, but when we die, we shall
burn in a fiery Gehenna. . . .”
Or he fell into a good-natured tone, called Kashtanka to him, and said
to her: “You, Kashtanka, are an insect of a creature, and nothing else.
Beside a man, you are much the same as a joiner beside a cabinet-maker.
. . .”
While he talked to her in that way, there was suddenly a burst of music.
Kashtanka looked round and saw that a regiment of soldiers was coming
straight towards her. Unable to endure the music, which unhinged her
nerves, she turned round and round and wailed. To her great surprise,
the carpenter, instead of being frightened, whining and barking, gave a
broad grin, drew himself up to attention, and saluted with all his five
fingers. Seeing that her master did not protest, Kashtanka whined louder
than ever, and dashed across the road to the opposite pavement.
When she recovered herself, the band was not playing and the regiment
was no longer there. She ran across the road to the spot where she had
left her master, but alas, the carpenter was no longer there. She dashed
forward, then back again and ran across the road once more, but the
carpenter seemed to have vanished into the earth. Kashtanka began
sniffing the pavement, hoping to find her master by the scent of his
tracks, but some wretch had been that way just before in new rubber
goloshes, and now all delicate scents were mixed with an acute stench of
india-rubber, so that it was impossible to make out anything.
Kashtanka ran up and down and did not find her master, and meanwhile it
had got dark. The street lamps were lighted on both sides of the road,
and lights appeared in the windows. Big, fluffy snowflakes were falling
and painting white the pavement, the horses’ backs and the cabmen’s
caps, and the darker the evening grew the whiter were all these objects.
Unknown customers kept walking incessantly to and fro, obstructing her
field of vision and shoving against her with their feet. (All mankind
Kashtanka divided into two uneven parts: masters and customers; between
them there was an essential difference: the first had the right to beat
her, and the second she had the right to nip by the calves of their
legs.) These customers were hurrying off somewhere and paid no attention
to her.
When it got quite dark, Kashtanka was overcome by despair and horror.
She huddled up in an entrance and began whining piteously. The long
day’s journeying with Luka Alexandritch had exhausted her, her ears and
her paws were freezing, and, what was more, she was terribly hungry.
Only twice in the whole day had she tasted a morsel: she had eaten a
little paste at the bookbinder’s, and in one of the taverns she had
found a sausage skin on the floor, near the counter —that was all. If
she had been a human being she would have certainly thought: “No, it is
impossible to live like this! I must shoot myself!” II
|A Mysterious Stranger
But she thought of nothing, she simply whined. When her head and back
were entirely plastered over with the soft feathery snow, and she had
sunk into a painful doze of exhaustion, all at once the door of the
entrance clicked, creaked, and struck her on the side. She jumped up. A
man belonging to the class of customers came out. As Kashtanka whined
and got under his feet, he could not help noticing her. He bent down to
her and asked:
“Doggy, where do you come from? Have I hurt you? O, poor thing, poor
thing. . . . Come, don’t be cross, don’t be cross. . . . I am sorry.”
Kashtanka looked at the stranger through the snow-flakes that hung on
her eyelashes, and saw before her a short, fat little man, with a plump,
shaven face wearing a top hat and a fur coat that swung open.
“What are you whining for?” he went on, knocking the snow off her back
with his fingers. “Where is your master? I suppose you are lost? Ah,
poor doggy! What are we going to do now?”
Catching in the stranger’s voice a warm, cordial note, Kashtanka licked
his hand, and whined still more pitifully.
“Oh, you nice funny thing!” said the stranger. “A regular fox! Well,
there’s nothing for it, you must come along with me! Perhaps you will be
of use for something. . . . Well!”
He clicked with his lips, and made a sign to Kashtanka with his hand,
which could only mean one thing: “Come along!” Kashtanka went.
Not more than half an hour later she was sitting on the floor in a big,
light room, and, leaning her head against her side, was looking with
tenderness and curiosity at the stranger who was sitting at the table,
dining. He ate and threw pieces to her. . . . At first he gave her bread
and the green rind of cheese, then a piece of meat, half a pie and
chicken bones, while through hunger she ate so quickly that she had not
time to distinguish the taste, and the more she ate the more acute was
the feeling of hunger.
“Your masters don’t feed you properly,” said the stranger, seeing with
what ferocious greediness she swallowed the morsels without munching
them. “And how thin you are! Nothing but skin and bones. . . .”
Kashtanka ate a great deal and yet did not satisfy her hunger, but was
simply stupefied with eating. After dinner she lay down in the middle of
the room, stretched her legs and, conscious of an agreeable weariness
all over her body, wagged her tail. While her new master, lounging in an
easy-chair, smoked a cigar, she wagged her tail and considered the
question, whether it was better at the stranger’s or at the carpenter’s.
The stranger’s surroundings were poor and ugly; besides the easy-chairs,
the sofa, the lamps and the rugs, there was nothing, and the room seemed
empty. At the carpenter’s the whole place was stuffed full of things: he
had a table, a bench, a heap of shavings, planes, chisels, saws, a cage
with a goldfinch, a basin. . . . The stranger’s room smelt of nothing,
while there was always a thick fog in the carpenter’s room, and a
glorious smell of glue, varnish, and shavings. On the other hand, the
stranger had one great superiority—he gave her a great deal to eat and,
to do him full justice, when Kashtanka sat facing the table and looking
wistfully at him, he did not once hit or kick her, and did not once
shout: “Go away, damned brute!”
When he had finished his cigar her new master went out, and a minute
later came back holding a little mattress in his hands.
“Hey, you dog, come here!” he said, laying the mattress in the corner
near the dog. “Lie down here, go to sleep!”
Then he put out the lamp and went away. Kashtanka lay down on the
mattress and shut her eyes; the sound of a bark rose from the street,
and she would have liked to answer it, but all at once she was overcome
with unexpected melancholy. She thought of Luka Alexandritch, of his son
Fedyushka, and her snug little place under the bench. . . . She
remembered on the long winter evenings, when the carpenter was planing
or reading the paper aloud, Fedyushka usually played with her. . . . He
used to pull her from under the bench by her hind legs, and play such
tricks with her, that she saw green before her eyes, and ached in every
joint. He would make her walk on her hind legs, use her as a bell, that
is, shake her violently by the tail so that she squealed and barked, and
give her tobacco to sniff . . . . The following trick was particularly
agonising: Fedyushka would tie a piece of meat to a thread and give it
to Kashtanka, and then, when she had swallowed it he would, with a loud
laugh, pull it back again from her stomach, and the more lurid were her
memories the more loudly and miserably Kashtanka whined.
But soon exhaustion and warmth prevailed over melancholy. She began to
fall asleep. Dogs ran by in her imagination: among them a shaggy old
poodle, whom she had seen that day in the street with a white patch on
his eye and tufts of wool by his nose. Fedyushka ran after the poodle
with a chisel in his hand, then all at once he too was covered with
shaggy wool, and began merrily barking beside Kashtanka. Kashtanka and
he goodnaturedly sniffed each other’s noses and merrily ran down the
street. . . . III
|New and Very Agreeable Acquaintances
When Kashtanka woke up it was already light, and a sound rose from the
street, such as only comes in the day-time. There was not a soul in the
room. Kashtanka stretched, yawned and, cross and ill-humoured, walked
about the room. She sniffed the corners and the furniture, looked into
the passage and found nothing of interest there. Besides the door that
led into the passage there was another door. After thinking a little
Kashtanka scratched on it with both paws, opened it, and went into the
adjoining room. Here on the bed, covered with a rug, a customer, in whom
she recognised the stranger of yesterday, lay asleep.
“Rrrrr . . .” she growled, but recollecting yesterday’s dinner, wagged
her tail, and began sniffing.
She sniffed the stranger’s clothes and boots and thought they smelt of
horses. In the bedroom was another door, also closed. Kashtanka
scratched at the door, leaned her chest against it, opened it, and was
instantly aware of a strange and very suspicious smell. Foreseeing an
unpleasant encounter, growling and looking about her, Kashtanka walked
into a little room with a dirty wall-paper and drew back in alarm. She
saw something surprising and terrible. A grey gander came straight
towards her, hissing, with its neck bowed down to the floor and its
wings outspread. Not far from him, on a little mattress, lay a white
tom-cat; seeing Kashtanka, he jumped up, arched his back, wagged his
tail with his hair standing on end and he, too, hissed at her. The dog
was frightened in earnest, but not caring to betray her alarm, began
barking loudly and dashed at the cat . . . . The cat arched his back
more than ever, mewed and gave Kashtanka a smack on the head with his
paw. Kashtanka jumped back, squatted on all four paws, and craning her
nose towards the cat, went off into loud, shrill barks; meanwhile the
gander came up behind and gave her a painful peck in the back. Kashtanka
leapt up and dashed at the gander.
“What’s this?” They heard a loud angry voice, and the stranger came into
the room in his dressing-gown, with a cigar between his teeth. “What’s
the meaning of this? To your places!”
He went up to the cat, flicked him on his arched back, and said:
“Fyodor Timofeyitch, what’s the meaning of this? Have you got up a
fight? Ah, you old rascal! Lie down!”
And turning to the gander he shouted: “Ivan Ivanitch, go home!”
The cat obediently lay down on his mattress and closed his eyes. Judging
from the expression of his face and whiskers, he was displeased with
himself for having lost his temper and got into a fight.
Kashtanka began whining resentfully, while the gander craned his neck
and began saying something rapidly, excitedly, distinctly, but quite
unintelligibly.
“All right, all right,” said his master, yawning. “You must live in
peace and friendship.” He stroked Kashtanka and went on: “And you,
redhair, don’t be frightened. . . . They are capital company, they won’t
annoy you. Stay, what are we to call you? You can’t go on without a
name, my dear.”
The stranger thought a moment and said: “I tell you what . . . you shall
be Auntie. . . . Do you understand? Auntie!”
And repeating the word “Auntie” several times he went out. Kashtanka sat
down and began watching. The cat sat motionless on his little mattress,
and pretended to be asleep. The gander, craning his neck and stamping,
went on talking rapidly and excitedly about something. Apparently it was
a very clever gander; after every long tirade, he always stepped back
with an air of wonder and made a show of being highly delighted with his
own speech. . . . Listening to him and answering “R-r-r-r,” Kashtanka
fell to sniffing the corners. In one of the corners she found a little
trough in which she saw some soaked peas and a sop of rye crusts. She
tried the peas; they were not nice; she tried the sopped bread and began
eating it. The gander was not at all offended that the strange dog was
eating his food, but, on the contrary, talked even more excitedly, and
to show his confidence went to the trough and ate a few peas himself. IV
|Marvels on a Hurdle
A little while afterwards the stranger came in again, and brought a
strange thing with him like a hurdle, or like the figure II. On the
crosspiece on the top of this roughly made wooden frame hung a bell, and
a pistol was also tied to it; there were strings from the tongue of the
bell, and the trigger of the pistol. The stranger put the frame in the
middle of the room, spent a long time tying and untying something, then
looked at the gander and said: “Ivan Ivanitch, if you please!”
The gander went up to him and stood in an expectant attitude.
“Now then,” said the stranger, “let us begin at the very beginning.
First of all, bow and make a curtsey! Look sharp!”
Ivan Ivanitch craned his neck, nodded in all directions, and scraped
with his foot.
“Right. Bravo. . . . Now die!”
The gander lay on his back and stuck his legs in the air. After
performing a few more similar, unimportant tricks, the stranger suddenly
clutched at his head, and assuming an expression of horror, shouted:
“Help! Fire! We are burning!”
Ivan Ivanitch ran to the frame, took the string in his beak, and set the
bell ringing.
The stranger was very much pleased. He stroked the gander’s neck and
said:
“Bravo, Ivan Ivanitch! Now pretend that you are a jeweller selling gold
and diamonds. Imagine now that you go to your shop and find thieves
there. What would you do in that case?”
The gander took the other string in his beak and pulled it, and at once
a deafening report was heard. Kashtanka was highly delighted with the
bell ringing, and the shot threw her into so much ecstasy that she ran
round the frame barking.
“Auntie, lie down!” cried the stranger; “be quiet!”
Ivan Ivanitch’s task was not ended with the shooting. For a whole hour
afterwards the stranger drove the gander round him on a cord, cracking a
whip, and the gander had to jump over barriers and through hoops; he had
to rear, that is, sit on his tail and wave his legs in the air.
Kashtanka could not take her eyes off Ivan Ivanitch, wriggled with
delight, and several times fell to running after him with shrill barks.
After exhausting the gander and himself, the stranger wiped the sweat
from his brow and cried:
“Marya, fetch Havronya Ivanovna here!”
A minute later there was the sound of grunting. Kashtanka growled,
assumed a very valiant air, and to be on the safe side, went nearer to
the stranger. The door opened, an old woman looked in, and, saying
something, led in a black and very ugly sow. Paying no attention to
Kashtanka’s growls, the sow lifted up her little hoof and grunted good-
humouredly. Apparently it was very agreeable to her to see her master,
the cat, and Ivan Ivanitch. When she went up to the cat and gave him a
light tap on the stomach with her hoof, and then made some remark to the
gander, a great deal of good-nature was expressed in her movements, and
the quivering of her tail. Kashtanka realised at once that to growl and
bark at such a character was useless.
The master took away the frame and cried. “Fyodor Timofeyitch, if you
please!”
The cat stretched lazily, and reluctantly, as though performing a duty,
went up to the sow.
“Come, let us begin with the Egyptian pyramid,” began the master.
He spent a long time explaining something, then gave the word of
command, “One . . . two . . . three!” At the word “three” Ivan Ivanitch
flapped his wings and jumped on to the sow’s back. . . . When, balancing
himself with his wings and his neck, he got a firm foothold on the
bristly back, Fyodor Timofeyitch listlessly and lazily, with manifest
disdain, and with an air of scorning his art and not caring a pin for
it, climbed on to the sow’s back, then reluctantly mounted on to the
gander, and stood on his hind legs. The result was what the stranger
called the Egyptian pyramid. Kashtanka yapped with delight, but at that
moment the old cat yawned and, losing his balance, rolled off the
gander. Ivan Ivanitch lurched and fell off too. The stranger shouted,
waved his hands, and began explaining something again. After spending an
hour over the pyramid their indefatigable master proceeded to teach Ivan
Ivanitch to ride on the cat, then began to teach the cat to smoke, and
so on.
The lesson ended in the stranger’s wiping the sweat off his brow and
going away. Fyodor Timofeyitch gave a disdainful sniff, lay down on his
mattress, and closed his eyes; Ivan Ivanitch went to the trough, and the
pig was taken away by the old woman. Thanks to the number of her new
impressions, Kashranka hardly noticed how the day passed, and in the
evening she was installed with her mattress in the room with the dirty
wall-paper, and spent the night in the society of Fyodor Timofeyitch and
the gander. V
|Talent! Talent!
A month passed.
Kashtanka had grown used to having a nice dinner every evening, and
being called Auntie. She had grown used to the stranger too, and to her
new companions. Life was comfortable and easy.
Every day began in the same way. As a rule, Ivan Ivanitch was the first
to wake up, and at once went up to Auntie or to the cat, twisting his
neck, and beginning to talk excitedly and persuasively, but, as before,
unintelligibly. Sometimes he would crane up his head in the air and
utter a long monologue. At first Kashtanka thought he talked so much
because he was very clever, but after a little time had passed, she lost
all her respect for him; when he went up to her with his long speeches
she no longer wagged her tail, but treated him as a tiresome chatterbox,
who would not let anyone sleep and, without the slightest ceremony,
answered him with “R-r-r-r!”
Fyodor Timofeyitch was a gentleman of a very different sort. When he
woke he did not utter a sound, did not stir, and did not even open his
eyes. He would have been glad not to wake, for, as was evident, he was
not greatly in love with life. Nothing interested him, he showed an
apathetic and nonchalant attitude to everything, he disdained everything
and, even while eating his delicious dinner, sniffed contemptuously.
When she woke Kashtanka began walking about the room and sniffing the
corners. She and the cat were the only ones allowed to go all over the
flat; the gander had not the right to cross the threshold of the room
with the dirty wall-paper, and Hayronya Ivanovna lived somewhere in a
little outhouse in the yard and made her appearance only during the
lessons. Their master got up late, and immediately after drinking his
tea began teaching them their tricks. Every day the frame, the whip, and
the hoop were brought in, and every day almost the same performance took
place. The lesson lasted three or four hours, so that sometimes Fyodor
Timofeyitch was so tired that he staggered about like a drunken man, and
Ivan Ivanitch opened his beak and breathed heavily, while their master
became red in the face and could not mop the sweat from his brow fast
enough.
The lesson and the dinner made the day very interesting, but the
evenings were tedious. As a rule, their master went off somewhere in the
evening and took the cat and the gander with him. Left alone, Auntie lay
down on her little mattress and began to feel sad.
Melancholy crept on her imperceptibly and took possession of her by
degrees, as darkness does of a room. It began with the dog’s losing
every inclination to bark, to eat, to run about the rooms, and even to
look at things; then vague figures, half dogs, half human beings, with
countenances attractive, pleasant, but incomprehensible, would appear in
her imagination; when they came Auntie wagged her tail, and it seemed to
her that she had somewhere, at some time, seen them and loved them. And
as she dropped asleep, she always felt that those figures smelt of glue,
shavings, and varnish.
When she had grown quite used to her new life, and from a thin, long
mongrel, had changed into a sleek, well-groomed dog, her master looked
at her one day before the lesson and said:
“It’s high time, Auntie, to get to business. You have kicked up your
heels in idleness long enough. I want to make an artiste of you. . . .
Do you want to be an artiste?”
And he began teaching her various accomplishments. At the first lesson
he taught her to stand and walk on her hind legs, which she liked
extremely. At the second lesson she had to jump on her hind legs and
catch some sugar, which her teacher held high above her head. After
that, in the following lessons she danced, ran tied to a cord, howled to
music, rang the bell, and fired the pistol, and in a month could
successfully replace Fyodor Timofeyitch in the “Egyptian Pyramid.” She
learned very eagerly and was pleased with her own success; running with
her tongue out on the cord, leaping through the hoop, and riding on old
Fyodor Timofeyitch, gave her the greatest enjoyment. She accompanied
every successful trick with a shrill, delighted bark, while her teacher
wondered, was also delighted, and rubbed his hands.
“It’s talent! It’s talent!” he said. “Unquestionable talent! You will
certainly be successful!”
And Auntie grew so used to the word talent, that every time her master
pronounced it, she jumped up as if it had been her name. VI
|An Uneasy Night
Auntie had a doggy dream that a porter ran after her with a broom, and
she woke up in a fright.
It was quite dark and very stuffy in the room. The fleas were biting.
Auntie had never been afraid of darkness before, but now, for some
reason, she felt frightened and inclined to bark.
Her master heaved a loud sigh in the next room, then soon afterwards the
sow grunted in her sty, and then all was still again. When one thinks
about eating one’s heart grows lighter, and Auntie began thinking how
that day she had stolen the leg of a chicken from Fyodor Timofeyitch,
and had hidden it in the drawing-room, between the cupboard and the
wall, where there were a great many spiders’ webs and a great deal of
dust. Would it not be as well to go now and look whether the chicken leg
were still there or not? It was very possible that her master had found
it and eaten it. But she must not go out of the room before morning,
that was the rule. Auntie shut her eyes to go to sleep as quickly as
possible, for she knew by experience that the sooner you go to sleep the
sooner the morning comes. But all at once there was a strange scream not
far from her which made her start and jump up on all four legs. It was
Ivan Ivanitch, and his cry was not babbling and persuasive as usual, but
a wild, shrill, unnatural scream like the squeak of a door opening.
Unable to distinguish anything in the darkness, and not understanding
what was wrong, Auntie felt still more frightened and growled: “R-r-r-r.
. . .”
Some time passed, as long as it takes to eat a good bone; the scream was
not repeated. Little by little Auntie’s uneasiness passed off and she
began to doze. She dreamed of two big black dogs with tufts of last
year’s coat left on their haunches and sides; they were eating out of a
big basin some swill, from which there came a white steam and a most
appetising smell; from time to time they looked round at Auntie, showed
their teeth and growled: “We are not going to give you any!” But a
peasant in a fur-coat ran out of the house and drove them away with a
whip; then Auntie went up to the basin and began eating, but as soon as
the peasant went out of the gate, the two black dogs rushed at her
growling, and all at once there was again a shrill scream.
“K-gee! K-gee-gee!” cried Ivan Ivanitch.
Auntie woke, jumped up and, without leaving her mattress, went off into
a yelping bark. It seemed to her that it was not Ivan Ivanitch that was
screaming but someone else, and for some reason the sow again grunted in
her sty.
Then there was the sound of shuffling slippers, and the master came into
the room in his dressing-gown with a candle in his hand. The flickering
light danced over the dirty wall-paper and the ceiling, and chased away
the darkness. Auntie saw that there was no stranger in the room. Ivan
Ivanitch was sitting on the floor and was not asleep. His wings were
spread out and his beak was open, and altogether he looked as though he
were very tired and thirsty. Old Fyodor Timofeyitch was not asleep
either. He, too, must have been awakened by the scream.
“Ivan Ivanitch, what’s the matter with you?” the master asked the
gander. “Why are you screaming? Are you ill?”
The gander did not answer. The master touched him on the neck, stroked
his back, and said: “You are a queer chap. You don’t sleep yourself, and
you don’t let other people. . . .”
When the master went out, carrying the candle with him, there was
darkness again. Auntie felt frightened. The gander did not scream, but
again she fancied that there was some stranger in the room. What was
most dreadful was that this stranger could not be bitten, as he was
unseen and had no shape. And for some reason she thought that something
very bad would certainly happen that night. Fyodor Timofeyitch was
uneasy too.
Auntie could hear him shifting on his mattress, yawning and shaking his
head.
Somewhere in the street there was a knocking at a gate and the sow
grunted in her sty. Auntie began to whine, stretched out her front-paws
and laid her head down upon them. She fancied that in the knocking at
the gate, in the grunting of the sow, who was for some reason awake, in
the darkness and the stillness, there was something as miserable and
dreadful as in Ivan Ivanitch’s scream. Everything was in agitation and
anxiety, but why? Who was the stranger who could not be seen? Then two
dim flashes of green gleamed for a minute near Auntie. It was Fyodor
Timofeyitch, for the first time of their whole acquaintance coming up to
her. What did he want? Auntie licked his paw, and not asking why he had
come, howled softly and on various notes.
“K-gee!” cried Ivan Ivanitch, “K-g-ee!”
The door opened again and the master came in with a candle.
The gander was sitting in the same attitude as before, with his beak
open, and his wings spread out, his eyes were closed.
“Ivan Ivanitch!” his master called him.
The gander did not stir. His master sat down before him on the floor,
looked at him in silence for a minute, and said:
“Ivan Ivanitch, what is it? Are you dying? Oh, I remember now, I
remember!” he cried out, and clutched at his head. “I know why it is!
It’s because the horse stepped on you to-day! My God! My God!”
Auntie did not understand what her master was saying, but she saw from
his face that he, too, was expecting something dreadful. She stretched
out her head towards the dark window, where it seemed to her some
stranger was looking in, and howled.
“He is dying, Auntie!” said her master, and wrung his hands. “Yes, yes,
he is dying! Death has come into your room. What are we to do?”
Pale and agitated, the master went back into his room, sighing and
shaking his head. Auntie was afraid to remain in the darkness, and
followed her master into his bedroom. He sat down on the bed and
repeated several times: “My God, what’s to be done?”
Auntie walked about round his feet, and not understanding why she was
wretched and why they were all so uneasy, and trying to understand,
watched every movement he made. Fyodor Timofeyitch, who rarely left his
little mattress, came into the master’s bedroom too, and began rubbing
himself against his feet. He shook his head as though he wanted to shake
painful thoughts out of it, and kept peeping suspiciously under the bed.
The master took a saucer, poured some water from his wash-stand into it,
and went to the gander again.
“Drink, Ivan Ivanitch!” he said tenderly, setting the saucer before him;
“drink, darling.”
But Ivan Ivanitch did not stir and did not open his eyes. His master
bent his head down to the saucer and dipped his beak into the water, but
the gander did not drink, he spread his wings wider than ever, and his
head remained lying in the saucer.
“No, there’s nothing to be done now,” sighed his master. “It’s all over.
Ivan Ivanitch is gone!”
And shining drops, such as one sees on the window-pane when it rains,
trickled down his cheeks. Not understanding what was the matter, Auntie
and Fyodor Timofeyitch snuggled up to him and looked with horror at the
gander.
“Poor Ivan Ivanitch!” said the master, sighing mournfully. “And I was
dreaming I would take you in the spring into the country, and would walk
with you on the green grass. Dear creature, my good comrade, you are no
more! How shall I do without you now?”
It seemed to Auntie that the same thing would happen to her, that is,
that she too, there was no knowing why, would close her eyes, stretch
out her paws, open her mouth, and everyone would look at her with
horror. Apparently the same reflections were passing through the brain
of Fyodor Timofeyitch. Never before had the old cat been so morose and
gloomy.
It began to get light, and the unseen stranger who had so frightened
Auntie was no longer in the room. When it was quite daylight, the porter
came in, took the gander, and carried him away. And soon afterwards the
old woman came in and took away the trough.
Auntie went into the drawing-room and looked behind the cupboard: her
master had not eaten the chicken bone, it was lying in its place among
the dust and spiders’ webs. But Auntie felt sad and dreary and wanted to
cry. She did not even sniff at the bone, but went under the sofa, sat
down there, and began softly whining in a thin voice. VII
|An Unsuccessful Début
One fine evening the master came into the room with the dirty wall-
paper, and, rubbing his hands, said:
“Well. . . .”
He meant to say something more, but went away without saying it. Auntie,
who during her lessons had thoroughly studied his face and intonations,
divined that he was agitated, anxious and, she fancied, angry. Soon
afterwards he came back and said:
“To-day I shall take with me Auntie and F’yodor Timofeyitch. To-day,
Auntie, you will take the place of poor Ivan Ivanitch in the ‘Egyptian
Pyramid.’ Goodness knows how it will be! Nothing is ready, nothing has
been thoroughly studied, there have been few rehearsals! We shall be
disgraced, we shall come to grief!”
Then he went out again, and a minute later, came back in his fur-coat
and top hat. Going up to the cat he took him by the fore-paws and put
him inside the front of his coat, while Fyodor Timofeyitch appeared
completely unconcerned, and did not even trouble to open his eyes. To
him it was apparently a matter of absolute indifference whether he
remained lying down, or were lifted up by his paws, whether he rested on
his mattress or under his master’s fur-coat.
“Come along, Auntie,” said her master.
Wagging her tail, and understanding nothing, Auntie followed him. A
minute later she was sitting in a sledge by her master’s feet and heard
him, shrinking with cold and anxiety, mutter to himself:
“We shall be disgraced! We shall come to grief!”
The sledge stopped at a big strange-looking house, like a soup-ladle
turned upside down. The long entrance to this house, with its three
glass doors, was lighted up with a dozen brilliant lamps. The doors
opened with a resounding noise and, like jaws, swallowed up the people
who were moving to and fro at the entrance. There were a great many
people, horses, too, often ran up to the entrance, but no dogs were to
be seen.
The master took Auntie in his arms and thrust her in his coat, where
Fyodor Timofeyirch already was. It was dark and stuffy there, but warm.
For an instant two green sparks flashed at her; it was the cat, who
opened his eyes on being disturbed by his neighbour’s cold rough paws.
Auntie licked his ear, and, trying to settle herself as comfortably as
possible, moved uneasily, crushed him under her cold paws, and casually
poked her head out from under the coat, but at once growled angrily, and
tucked it in again. It seemed to her that she had seen a huge, badly
lighted room, full of monsters; from behind screens and gratings, which
stretched on both sides of the room, horrible faces looked out: faces of
horses with horns, with long ears, and one fat, huge countenance with a
tail instead of a nose, and two long gnawed bones sticking out of his
mouth.
The cat mewed huskily under Auntie’s paws, but at that moment the coat
was flung open, the master said, “Hop!” and Fyodor Timofeyitch and
Auntie jumped to the floor. They were now in a little room with grey
plank walls; there was no other furniture in it but a little table with
a looking-glass on it, a stool, and some rags hung about the corners,
and instead of a lamp or candles, there was a bright fan-shaped light
attached to a little pipe fixed in the wall. Fyodor Timofeyitch licked
his coat which had been ruffled by Auntie, went under the stool, and lay
down. Their master, still agitated and rubbing his hands, began
undressing. . . . He undressed as he usually did at home when he was
preparing to get under the rug, that is, took off everything but his
underlinen, then he sat down on the stool, and, looking in the looking-
glass, began playing the most surprising tricks with himself. . . .
First of all he put on his head a wig, with a parting and with two tufts
of hair standing up like horns, then he smeared his face thickly with
something white, and over the white colour painted his eyebrows, his
moustaches, and red on his cheeks. His antics did not end with that.
After smearing his face and neck, he began putting himself into an
extraordinary and incongruous costume, such as Auntie had never seen
before, either in houses or in the street. Imagine very full trousers,
made of chintz covered with big flowers, such as is used in working-
class houses for curtains and covering furniture, trousers which
buttoned up just under his armpits. One trouser leg was made of brown
chintz, the other of bright yellow. Almost lost in these, he then put on
a short chintz jacket, with a big scalloped collar, and a gold star on
the back, stockings of different colours, and green slippers.
Everything seemed going round before Auntie’s eyes and in her soul. The
white-faced, sack-like figure smelt like her master, its voice, too, was
the familiar master’s voice, but there were moments when Auntie was
tortured by doubts, and then she was ready to run away from the parti-
coloured figure and to bark. The new place, the fan-shaped light, the
smell, the transformation that had taken place in her master—all this
aroused in her a vague dread and a foreboding that she would certainly
meet with some horror such as the big face with the tail instead of a
nose. And then, somewhere through the wall, some hateful band was
playing, and from time to time she heard an incomprehensible roar. Only
one thing reassured her—that was the imperturbability of Fyodor
Timofeyitch. He dozed with the utmost tranquillity under the stool, and
did not open his eyes even when it was moved.
A man in a dress coat and a white waistcoat peeped into the little room
and said:
“Miss Arabella has just gone on. After her—you.”
Their master made no answer. He drew a small box from under the table,
sat down, and waited. From his lips and his hands it could be seen that
he was agitated, and Auntie could hear how his breathing came in gasps.
“Monsieur George, come on!” someone shouted behind the door. Their
master got up and crossed himself three times, then took the cat from
under the stool and put him in the box.
“Come, Auntie,” he said softly.
Auntie, who could make nothing out of it, went up to his hands, he
kissed her on the head, and put her beside Fyodor Timofeyitch. Then
followed darkness. . . . Auntie trampled on the cat, scratched at the
walls of the box, and was so frightened that she could not utter a
sound, while the box swayed and quivered, as though it were on the
waves. . . .
“Here we are again!” her master shouted aloud: “here we are again!”
Auntie felt that after that shout the box struck against something hard
and left off swaying. There was a loud deep roar, someone was being
slapped, and that someone, probably the monster with the tail instead of
a nose, roared and laughed so loud that the locks of the box trembled.
In response to the roar, there came a shrill, squeaky laugh from her
master, such as he never laughed at home.
“Ha!” he shouted, trying to shout above the roar. “Honoured friends! I
have only just come from the station! My granny’s kicked the bucket and
left me a fortune! There is something very heavy in the box, it must be
gold, ha! ha! I bet there’s a million here! We’ll open it and look. . .
.”
The lock of the box clicked. The bright light dazzled Auntie’s eyes, she
jumped out of the box, and, deafened by the roar, ran quickly round her
master, and broke into a shrill bark.
“Ha!” exclaimed her master. “Uncle Fyodor Timofeyitch! Beloved Aunt,
dear relations! The devil take you!”
He fell on his stomach on the sand, seized the cat and Auntie, and fell
to embracing them. While he held Auntie tight in his arms, she glanced
round into the world into which fate had brought her and, impressed by
its immensity, was for a minute dumbfounded with amazement and delight,
then jumped out of her master’s arms, and to express the intensity of
her emotions, whirled round and round on one spot like a top. This new
world was big and full of bright light; wherever she looked, on all
sides, from floor to ceiling there were faces, faces, faces, and nothing
else.
“Auntie, I beg you to sit down!” shouted her master. Remembering what
that meant, Auntie jumped on to a chair, and sat down. She looked at her
master. His eyes looked at her gravely and kindly as always, but his
face, especially his mouth and teeth, were made grotesque by a broad
immovable grin. He laughed, skipped about, twitched his shoulders, and
made a show of being very merry in the presence of the thousands of
faces. Auntie believed in his merriment, all at once felt all over her
that those thousands of faces were looking at her, lifted up her fox-
like head, and howled joyously.
“You sit there, Auntie,” her master said to her, “while Uncle and I will
dance the Kamarinsky.”
Fyodor Timofeyitch stood looking about him indifferently, waiting to be
made to do something silly. He danced listlessly, carelessly, sullenly,
and one could see from his movements, his tail and his ears, that he had
a profound contempt for the crowd, the bright light, his master and
himself. When he had performed his allotted task, he gave a yawn and sat
down.
“Now, Auntie!” said her master, “we’ll have first a song, and then a
dance, shall we?”
He took a pipe out of his pocket, and began playing. Auntie, who could
not endure music, began moving uneasily in her chair and howled. A roar
of applause rose from all sides. Her master bowed, and when all was
still again, went on playing. . . . Just as he took one very high note,
someone high up among the audience uttered a loud exclamation:
“Auntie!” cried a child’s voice, “why it’s Kashtanka!”
“Kashtanka it is!” declared a cracked drunken tenor. “Kashtanka! Strike
me dead, Fedyushka, it is Kashtanka. Kashtanka! here!”
Someone in the gallery gave a whistle, and two voices, one a boy’s and
one a man’s, called loudly: “Kashtanka! Kashtanka!”
Auntie started, and looked where the shouting came from. Two faces, one
hairy, drunken and grinning, the other chubby, rosy-cheeked and
frightened-looking, dazed her eyes as the bright light had dazed them
before. . . . She remembered, fell off the chair, struggled on the sand,
then jumped up, and with a delighted yap dashed towards those faces.
There was a deafening roar, interspersed with whistles and a shrill
childish shout: “Kashtanka! Kashtanka!”
Auntie leaped over the barrier, then across someone’s shoulders. She
found herself in a box: to get into the next tier she had to leap over a
high wall. Auntie jumped, but did not jump high enough, and slipped back
down the wall. Then she was passed from hand to hand, licked hands and
faces, kept mounting higher and higher, and at last got into the
gallery. . . .
——
Half an hour afterwards, Kashtanka was in the street, following the
people who smelt of glue and varnish. Luka Alexandritch staggered and
instinctively, taught by experience, tried to keep as far from the
gutter as possible.
“In sin my mother bore me,” he muttered. “And you, Kashtanka, are a
thing of little understanding. Beside a man, you are like a joiner
beside a cabinetmaker.”
Fedyushka walked beside him, wearing his father’s cap. Kashtanka looked
at their backs, and it seemed to her that she had been following them
for ages, and was glad that there had not been a break for a minute in
her life.
She remembered the little room with dirty wall-paper, the gander, Fyodor
Timofeyitch, the delicious dinners, the lessons, the circus, but all
that seemed to her now like a long, tangled, oppressive dream.
A CHAMELEON
THE police superintendent Otchumyelov is walking across the market
square wearing a new overcoat and carrying a parcel under his arm. A
red-haired policeman strides after him with a sieve full of confiscated
gooseberries in his hands. There is silence all around. Not a soul in
the square. . . . The open doors of the shops and taverns look out upon
God’s world disconsolately, like hungry mouths; there is not even a
beggar near them.
“So you bite, you damned brute?” Otchumyelov hears suddenly. “Lads,
don’t let him go! Biting is prohibited nowadays! Hold him! ah . . . ah!”
There is the sound of a dog yelping. Otchumyelov looks in the direction
of the sound and sees a dog, hopping on three legs and looking about
her, run out of Pitchugin’s timber-yard. A man in a starched cotton
shirt, with his waistcoat unbuttoned, is chasing her. He runs after her,
and throwing his body forward falls down and seizes the dog by her hind
legs. Once more there is a yelping and a shout of “Don’t let go!” Sleepy
countenances are protruded from the shops, and soon a crowd, which seems
to have sprung out of the earth, is gathered round the timber-yard.
“It looks like a row, your honour . . .” says the policeman.
Otchumyelov makes a half turn to the left and strides towards the crowd.
He sees the aforementioned man in the unbuttoned waistcoat standing
close by the gate of the timber-yard, holding his right hand in the air
and displaying a bleeding finger to the crowd. On his half-drunken face
there is plainly written: “I’ll pay you out, you rogue!” and indeed the
very finger has the look of a flag of victory. In this man Otchumyelov
recognises Hryukin, the goldsmith. The culprit who has caused the
sensation, a white borzoy puppy with a sharp muzzle and a yellow patch
on her back, is sitting on the ground with her fore-paws outstretched in
the middle of the crowd, trembling all over. There is an expression of
misery and terror in her tearful eyes.
“What’s it all about?” Otchumyelov inquires, pushing his way through the
crowd. “What are you here for? Why are you waving your finger . . . ?
Who was it shouted?”
“I was walking along here, not interfering with anyone, your honour,”
Hryukin begins, coughing into his fist. “I was talking about firewood to
Mitry Mitritch, when this low brute for no rhyme or reason bit my
finger. . . . You must excuse me, I am a working man. . . . Mine is fine
work. I must have damages, for I shan’t be able to use this finger for a
week, may be. . . . It’s not even the law, your honour, that one should
put up with it from a beast. . . . If everyone is going to be bitten,
life won’t be worth living. . . .”
“H’m. Very good,” says Otchumyelov sternly, coughing and raising his
eyebrows. “Very good. Whose dog is it? I won’t let this pass! I’ll teach
them to let their dogs run all over the place! It’s time these gentry
were looked after, if they won’t obey the regulations! When he’s fined,
the blackguard, I’ll teach him what it means to keep dogs and such stray
cattle! I’ll give him a lesson! . . . Yeldyrin,” cries the
superintendent, addressing the policeman, “find out whose dog this is
and draw up a report! And the dog must be strangled. Without delay! It’s
sure to be mad. . . . Whose dog is it, I ask?”
“I fancy it’s General Zhigalov’s,” says someone in the crowd.
“General Zhigalov’s, h’m. . . . Help me off with my coat, Yeldyrin . . .
it’s frightfully hot! It must be a sign of rain. . . . There’s one thing
I can’t make out, how it came to bite you?” Otchumyelov turns to
Hryukin. “Surely it couldn’t reach your finger. It’s a little dog, and
you are a great hulking fellow! You must have scratched your finger with
a nail, and then the idea struck you to get damages for it. We all know
. . . your sort! I know you devils!”
“He put a cigarette in her face, your honour, for a joke, and she had
the sense to snap at him. . . . He is a nonsensical fellow, your
honour!”
“That’s a lie, Squinteye! You didn’t see, so why tell lies about it? His
honour is a wise gentleman, and will see who is telling lies and who is
telling the truth, as in God’s sight. . . . And if I am lying let the
court decide. It’s written in the law. . . . We are all equal nowadays.
My own brother is in the gendarmes . . . let me tell you. . . .”
“Don’t argue!”
“No, that’s not the General’s dog,” says the policeman, with profound
conviction, “the General hasn’t got one like that. His are mostly
setters.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“Yes, your honour.”
“I know it, too. The General has valuable dogs, thoroughbred, and this
is goodness knows what! No coat, no shape. . . . A low creature. And to
keep a dog like that! . . . where’s the sense of it. If a dog like that
were to turn up in Petersburg or Moscow, do you know what would happen?
They would not worry about the law, they would strangle it in a
twinkling! You’ve been injured, Hryukin, and we can’t let the matter
drop. . . . We must give them a lesson! It is high time . . . . !”
“Yet maybe it is the General’s,” says the policeman, thinking aloud.
“It’s not written on its face. . . . I saw one like it the other day in
his yard.”
“It is the General’s, that’s certain!” says a voice in the crowd.
“H’m, help me on with my overcoat, Yeldyrin, my lad . . . the wind’s
getting up. . . . I am cold. . . . You take it to the General’s, and
inquire there. Say I found it and sent it. And tell them not to let it
out into the street. . . . It may be a valuable dog, and if every swine
goes sticking a cigar in its mouth, it will soon be ruined. A dog is a
delicate animal. . . . And you put your hand down, you blockhead. It’s
no use your displaying your fool of a finger. It’s your own fault. . .
.”
“Here comes the General’s cook, ask him. . . Hi, Prohor! Come here, my
dear man! Look at this dog. . . . Is it one of yours?”
“What an idea! We have never had one like that!”
“There’s no need to waste time asking,” says Otchumyelov. “It’s a stray
dog! There’s no need to waste time talking about it. . . . Since he says
it’s a stray dog, a stray dog it is. . . . It must be destroyed, that’s
all about it.”
“It is not our dog,” Prohor goes on. “It belongs to the General’s
brother, who arrived the other day. Our master does not care for hounds.
But his honour is fond of them. . . .”
“You don’t say his Excellency’s brother is here? Vladimir Ivanitch?”
inquires Otchumyelov, and his whole face beams with an ecstatic smile.
“‘Well, I never! And I didn’t know! Has he come on a visit?
“Yes.”
“Well, I never. . . . He couldn’t stay away from his brother. . . . And
there I didn’t know! So this is his honour’s dog? Delighted to hear it.
. . . Take it. It’s not a bad pup. . . . A lively creature. . . .
Snapped at this fellow’s finger! Ha-ha-ha. . . . Come, why are you
shivering? Rrr . . . Rrrr. . . . The rogue’s angry . . . a nice little
pup.”
Prohor calls the dog, and walks away from the timber-yard with her. The
crowd laughs at Hryukin.
“I’ll make you smart yet!” Otchumyelov threatens him, and wrapping
himself in his greatcoat, goes on his way across the square.
THE DEPENDENTS
MIHAIL PETROVITCH ZOTOV, a decrepit and solitary old man of seventy,
belonging to the artisan class, was awakened by the cold and the aching
in his old limbs. It was dark in his room, but the little lamp before
the ikon was no longer burning. Zotov raised the curtain and looked out
of the window. The clouds that shrouded the sky were beginning to show
white here and there, and the air was becoming transparent, so it must
have been nearly five, not more.
Zotov cleared his throat, coughed, and shrinking from the cold, got out
of bed. In accordance with years of habit, he stood for a long time
before the ikon, saying his prayers. He repeated “Our Father,” “Hail
Mary,” the Creed, and mentioned a long string of names. To whom those
names belonged he had forgotten years ago, and he only repeated them
from habit. From habit, too, he swept his room and entry, and set his
fat little four-legged copper samovar. If Zotov had not had these habits
he would not have known how to occupy his old age.
The little samovar slowly began to get hot, and all at once,
unexpectedly, broke into a tremulous bass hum.
“Oh, you’ve started humming!” grumbled Zotov. “Hum away then, and bad
luck to you!”
At that point the old man appropriately recalled that, in the preceding
night, he had dreamed of a stove, and to dream of a stove is a sign of
sorrow.
Dreams and omens were the only things left that could rouse him to
reflection; and on this occasion he plunged with a special zest into the
considerations of the questions: What the samovar was humming for? and
what sorrow was foretold by the stove? The dream seemed to come true
from the first. Zotov rinsed out his teapot and was about to make his
tea, when he found there was not one teaspoonful left in the box.
“What an existence!” he grumbled, rolling crumbs of black bread round in
his mouth. “It’s a dog’s life. No tea! And it isn’t as though I were a
simple peasant: I’m an artisan and a house-owner. The disgrace!”
Grumbling and talking to himself, Zotov put on his overcoat, which was
like a crinoline, and, thrusting his feet into huge clumsy golosh-boots
(made in the year 1867 by a bootmaker called Prohoritch), went out into
the yard. The air was grey, cold, and sullenly still. The big yard, full
of tufts of burdock and strewn with yellow leaves, was faintly silvered
with autumn frost. Not a breath of wind nor a sound. The old man sat
down on the steps of his slanting porch, and at once there happened what
happened regularly every morning: his dog Lyska, a big, mangy, decrepit-
looking, white yard-dog, with black patches, came up to him with its
right eye shut. Lyska came up timidly, wriggling in a frightened way, as
though her paws were not touching the earth but a hot stove, and the
whole of her wretched figure was expressive of abjectness. Zotov
pretended not to notice her, but when she faintly wagged her tail, and,
wriggling as before, licked his golosh, he stamped his foot angrily.
“Be off! The plague take you!” he cried. “Con-found-ed bea-east!”
Lyska moved aside, sat down, and fixed her solitary eye upon her master.
“You devils!” he went on. “You are the last straw on my back, you
Herods.”
And he looked with hatred at his shed with its crooked, overgrown roof;
there from the door of the shed a big horse’s head was looking out at
him. Probably flattered by its master’s attention, the head moved,
pushed forward, and there emerged from the shed the whole horse, as
decrepit as Lyska, as timid and as crushed, with spindly legs, grey
hair, a pinched stomach, and a bony spine. He came out of the shed and
stood still, hesitating as though overcome with embarrassment.
“Plague take you,” Zotov went on. “Shall I ever see the last of you, you
jail-bird Pharaohs! . . . I wager you want your breakfast!” he jeered,
twisting his angry face into a contemptuous smile. “By all means, this
minute! A priceless steed like you must have your fill of the best oats!
Pray begin! This minute! And I have something to give to the
magnificent, valuable dog! If a precious dog like you does not care for
bread, you can have meat.”
Zotov grumbled for half an hour, growing more and more irritated. In the
end, unable to control the anger that boiled up in him, he jumped up,
stamped with his goloshes, and growled out to be heard all over the
yard:
“I am not obliged to feed you, you loafers! I am not some millionaire
for you to eat me out of house and home! I have nothing to eat myself,
you cursed carcases, the cholera take you! I get no pleasure or profit
out of you; nothing but trouble and ruin, Why don’t you give up the
ghost? Are you such personages that even death won’t take you? You can
live, damn you! but I don’t want to feed you! I have had enough of you!
I don’t want to!”
Zotov grew wrathful and indignant, and the horse and the dog listened.
Whether these two dependents understood that they were being reproached
for living at his expense, I don’t know, but their stomachs looked more
pinched than ever, and their whole figures shrivelled up, grew gloomier
and more abject than before. . . . Their submissive air exasperated
Zotov more than ever.
“Get away!” he shouted, overcome by a sort of inspiration. “Out of my
house! Don’t let me set eyes on you again! I am not obliged to keep all
sorts of rubbish in my yard! Get away!”
The old man moved with little hurried steps to the gate, opened it, and
picking up a stick from the ground, began driving out his dependents.
The horse shook its head, moved its shoulder-blades, and limped to the
gate; the dog followed him. Both of them went out into the street, and,
after walking some twenty paces, stopped at the fence.
“I’ll give it you!” Zotov threatened them.
When he had driven out his dependents he felt calmer, and began sweeping
the yard. From time to time he peeped out into the street: the horse and
the dog were standing like posts by the fence, looking dejectedly
towards the gate.
“Try how you can do without me,” muttered the old man, feeling as though
a weight of anger were being lifted from his heart. “Let somebody else
look after you now! I am stingy and ill-tempered. . . . It’s nasty
living with me, so you try living with other people . . . . Yes. . . .”
After enjoying the crushed expression of his dependents, and grumbling
to his heart’s content, Zotov went out of the yard, and, assuming a
ferocious air, shouted:
“Well, why are you standing there? Whom are you waiting for? Standing
right across the middle of the road and preventing the public from
passing! Go into the yard!”
The horse and the dog with drooping heads and a guilty air turned
towards the gate. Lyska, probably feeling she did not deserve
forgiveness, whined piteously.
“Stay you can, but as for food, you’ll get nothing from me! You may die,
for all I care!”
Meanwhile the sun began to break through the morning mist; its slanting
rays gilded over the autumn frost. There was a sound of steps and
voices. Zotov put back the broom in its place, and went out of the yard
to see his crony and neighbour, Mark Ivanitch, who kept a little general
shop. On reaching his friend’s shop, he sat down on a folding-stool,
sighed sedately, stroked his beard, and began about the weather. From
the weather the friends passed to the new deacon, from the deacon to the
choristers; and the conversation lengthened out. They did not notice as
they talked how time was passing, and when the shop-boy brought in a big
teapot of boiling water, and the friends proceeded to drink tea, the
time flew as quickly as a bird. Zotov got warm and felt more cheerful.
“I have a favour to ask of you, Mark Ivanitch,” he began, after the
sixth glass, drumming on the counter with his fingers. “If you would
just be so kind as to give me a gallon of oats again to-day. . . .”
From behind the big tea-chest behind which Mark Ivanitch was sitting
came the sound of a deep sigh.
“Do be so good,” Zotov went on; “never mind tea—don’t give it me to-day,
but let me have some oats. . . . I am ashamed to ask you, I have wearied
you with my poverty, but the horse is hungry.”
“I can give it you,” sighed the friend—“why not? But why the devil do
you keep those carcases?—tfoo!—Tell me that, please. It would be all
right if it were a useful horse, but—tfoo!— one is ashamed to look at
it. . . . And the dog’s nothing but a skeleton! Why the devil do you
keep them?”
“What am I to do with them?”
“You know. Take them to Ignat the slaughterer—that is all there is to
do. They ought to have been there long ago. It’s the proper place for
them.”
“To be sure, that is so! . . . I dare say! . . .”
“You live like a beggar and keep animals,” the friend went on. “I don’t
grudge the oats. . . . God bless you. But as to the future, brother . .
. I can’t afford to give regularly every day! There is no end to your
poverty! One gives and gives, and one doesn’t know when there will be an
end to it all.”
The friend sighed and stroked his red face.
“If you were dead that would settle it,” he said. “You go on living, and
you don’t know what for. . . . Yes, indeed! But if it is not the Lord’s
will for you to die, you had better go somewhere into an almshouse or a
refuge.”
“What for? I have relations. I have a great-niece. . . .”
And Zotov began telling at great length of his great-niece Glasha,
daughter of his niece Katerina, who lived somewhere on a farm.
“She is bound to keep me!” he said. “My house will be left to her, so
let her keep me; I’ll go to her. It’s Glasha, you know . . . Katya’s
daughter; and Katya, you know, was my brother Panteley’s stepdaughter. .
. . You understand? The house will come to her . . . . Let her keep me!”
“To be sure; rather than live, as you do, a beggar, I should have gone
to her long ago.”
“I will go! As God’s above, I will go. It’s her duty.”
When an hour later the old friends were drinking a glass of vodka, Zotov
stood in the middle of the shop and said with enthusiasm:
“I have been meaning to go to her for a long time; I will go this very
day.”
“To be sure; rather than hanging about and dying of hunger, you ought to
have gone to the farm long ago.”
“I’ll go at once! When I get there, I shall say: Take my house, but keep
me and treat me with respect. It’s your duty! If you don’t care to, then
there is neither my house, nor my blessing for you! Good-bye, Ivanitch!”
Zotov drank another glass, and, inspired by the new idea, hurried home.
The vodka had upset him and his head was reeling, but instead of lying
down, he put all his clothes together in a bundle, said a prayer, took
his stick, and went out. Muttering and tapping on the stones with his
stick, he walked the whole length of the street without looking back,
and found himself in the open country. It was eight or nine miles to the
farm. He walked along the dry road, looked at the town herd lazily
munching the yellow grass, and pondered on the abrupt change in his life
which he had only just brought about so resolutely. He thought, too,
about his dependents. When he went out of the house, he had not locked
the gate, and so had left them free to go whither they would.
He had not gone a mile into the country when he heard steps behind him.
He looked round and angrily clasped his hands. The horse and Lyska, with
their heads drooping and their tails between their legs, were quietly
walking after him.
“Go back!” he waved to them.
They stopped, looked at one another, looked at him. He went on, they
followed him. Then he stopped and began ruminating. It was impossible to
go to his great-niece Glasha, whom he hardly knew, with these creatures;
he did not want to go back and shut them up, and, indeed, he could not
shut them up, because the gate was no use.
“To die of hunger in the shed,” thought Zotov. “Hadn’t I really better
take them to Ignat?”
Ignat’s hut stood on the town pasture-ground, a hundred paces from the
flagstaff. Though he had not quite made up his mind, and did not know
what to do, he turned towards it. His head was giddy and there was a
darkness before his eyes. . . .
He remembers little of what happened in the slaughterer’s yard. He has a
memory of a sickening, heavy smell of hides and the savoury steam of the
cabbage-soup Ignat was sipping when he went in to him. As in a dream he
saw Ignat, who made him wait two hours, slowly preparing something,
changing his clothes, talking to some women about corrosive sublimate;
he remembered the horse was put into a stand, after which there was the
sound of two dull thuds, one of a blow on the skull, the other of the
fall of a heavy body. When Lyska, seeing the death of her friend, flew
at Ignat, barking shrilly, there was the sound of a third blow that cut
short the bark abruptly. Further, Zotov remembers that in his drunken
foolishness, seeing the two corpses, he went up to the stand, and put
his own forehead ready for a blow.
And all that day his eyes were dimmed by a haze, and he could not even
see his own fingers.
WHO WAS TO BLAME?
As my uncle Pyotr Demyanitch, a lean, bilious collegiate councillor,
exceedingly like a stale smoked fish with a stick through it, was
getting ready to go to the high school, where he taught Latin, he
noticed that the corner of his grammar was nibbled by mice.
“I say, Praskovya,” he said, going into the kitchen and addressing the
cook, “how is it we have got mice here? Upon my word! yesterday my top
hat was nibbled, to-day they have disfigured my Latin grammar . . . . At
this rate they will soon begin eating my clothes!
“What can I do? I did not bring them in!” answered Praskovya.
“We must do something! You had better get a cat, hadn’t you?”
“I’ve got a cat, but what good is it?”
And Praskovya pointed to the corner where a white kitten, thin as a
match, lay curled up asleep beside a broom.
“Why is it no good?” asked Pyotr Demyanitch.
“It’s young yet, and foolish. It’s not two months old yet.”
“H’m. . . . Then it must be trained. It had much better be learning
instead of lying there.”
Saying this, Pyotr Demyanitch sighed with a careworn air and went out of
the kitchen. The kitten raised his head, looked lazily after him, and
shut his eyes again.
The kitten lay awake thinking. Of what? Unacquainted with real life,
having no store of accumulated impressions, his mental processes could
only be instinctive, and he could but picture life in accordance with
the conceptions that he had inherited, together with his flesh and
blood, from his ancestors, the tigers (vide Darwin). His thoughts were
of the nature of day-dreams. His feline imagination pictured something
like the Arabian desert, over which flitted shadows closely resembling
Praskovya, the stove, the broom. In the midst of the shadows there
suddenly appeared a saucer of milk; the saucer began to grow paws, it
began moving and displayed a tendency to run; the kitten made a bound,
and with a thrill of blood-thirsty sensuality thrust his claws into it.
When the saucer had vanished into obscurity a piece of meat appeared,
dropped by Praskovya; the meat ran away with a cowardly squeak, but the
kitten made a bound and got his claws into it. . . . Everything that
rose before the imagination of the young dreamer had for its starting-
point leaps, claws, and teeth. . . The soul of another is darkness, and
a cat’s soul more than most, but how near the visions just described are
to the truth may be seen from the following fact: under the influence of
his day-dreams the kitten suddenly leaped up, looked with flashing eyes
at Praskovya, ruffled up his coat, and making one bound, thrust his
claws into the cook’s skirt. Obviously he was born a mouse catcher, a
worthy son of his bloodthirsty ancestors. Fate had destined him to be
the terror of cellars, store-rooms and cornbins, and had it not been for
education . . . we will not anticipate, however.
On his way home from the high school, Pyotr Demyanitch went into a
general shop and bought a mouse-trap for fifteen kopecks. At dinner he
fixed a little bit of his rissole on the hook, and set the trap under
the sofa, where there were heaps of the pupils’ old exercise-books,
which Praskovya used for various domestic purposes. At six o’clock in
the evening, when the worthy Latin master was sitting at the table
correcting his pupils’ exercises, there was a sudden “klop!” so loud
that my uncle started and dropped his pen. He went at once to the sofa
and took out the trap. A neat little mouse, the size of a thimble, was
sniffing the wires and trembling with fear.
“Aha,” muttered Pyotr Demyanitch, and he looked at the mouse
malignantly, as though he were about to give him a bad mark. “You are
cau—aught, wretch! Wait a bit! I’ll teach you to eat my grammar!”
Having gloated over his victim, Poytr Demyanitch put the mouse-trap on
the floor and called:
“Praskovya, there’s a mouse caught! Bring the kitten here!
“I’m coming,” responded Praskovya, and a minute later she came in with
the descendant of tigers in her arms.
“Capital!” said Pyotr Demyanitch, rubbing his hands. “We will give him a
lesson. . . . Put him down opposite the mouse-trap . . . that’s it. . .
. Let him sniff it and look at it. . . . That’s it. . . .”
The kitten looked wonderingly at my uncle, at his arm-chair, sniffed the
mouse-trap in bewilderment, then, frightened probably by the glaring
lamplight and the attention directed to him, made a dash and ran in
terror to the door.
“Stop!” shouted my uncle, seizing him by the tail, “stop, you rascal!
He’s afraid of a mouse, the idiot! Look! It’s a mouse! Look! Well? Look,
I tell you!”
Pyotr Demyanitch took the kitten by the scruff of the neck and pushed
him with his nose against the mouse-trap.
“Look, you carrion! Take him and hold him, Praskovya. . . . Hold him
opposite the door of the trap. . . . When I let the mouse out, you let
him go instantly. . . . Do you hear? . . . Instantly let go! Now!”
My uncle assumed a mysterious expression and lifted the door of the
trap. . . . The mouse came out irresolutely, sniffed the air, and flew
like an arrow under the sofa. . . . The kitten on being released darted
under the table with his tail in the air.
“It has got away! got away!” cried Pyotr Demyanitch, looking ferocious.
“Where is he, the scoundrel? Under the table? You wait. . .”
My uncle dragged the kitten from under the table and shook him in the
air.
“Wretched little beast,” he muttered, smacking him on the ear. “Take
that, take that! Will you shirk it next time? Wr-r-r-etch. . . .”
Next day Praskovya heard again the summons.
“Praskovya, there is a mouse caught! Bring the kitten here!”
After the outrage of the previous day the kitten had taken refuge under
the stove and had not come out all night. When Praskovya pulled him out
and, carrying him by the scruff of the neck into the study, set him down
before the mouse-trap, he trembled all over and mewed piteously.
“Come, let him feel at home first,” Pyotr Demyanitch commanded. “Let him
look and sniff. Look and learn! Stop, plague take you!” he shouted,
noticing that the kitten was backing away from the mouse-trap. “I’ll
thrash you! Hold him by the ear! That’s it. . . . Well now, set him down
before the trap. . . .”
My uncle slowly lifted the door of the trap . . . the mouse whisked
under the very nose of the kitten, flung itself against Praskovya’s hand
and fled under the cupboard; the kitten, feeling himself free, took a
desperate bound and retreated under the sofa.
“He’s let another mouse go!” bawled Pyotr Demyanitch. “Do you call that
a cat? Nasty little beast! Thrash him! thrash him by the mousetrap!”
When the third mouse had been caught, the kitten shivered all over at
the sight of the mousetrap and its inmate, and scratched Praskovya’s
hand. . . . After the fourth mouse my uncle flew into a rage, kicked the
kitten, and said:
“Take the nasty thing away! Get rid of it! Chuck it away! It’s no
earthly use!”
A year passed, the thin, frail kitten had turned into a solid and
sagacious tom-cat. One day he was on his way by the back yards to an
amatory interview. He had just reached his destination when he suddenly
heard a rustle, and thereupon caught sight of a mouse which ran from a
water-trough towards a stable; my hero’s hair stood on end, he arched
his back, hissed, and trembling all over, took to ignominious flight.
Alas! sometimes I feel myself in the ludicrous position of the flying
cat. Like the kitten, I had in my day the honour of being taught Latin
by my uncle. Now, whenever I chance to see some work of classical
antiquity, instead of being moved to eager enthusiasm, I begin
recalling, ut consecutivum, the irregular verbs, the sallow grey face of
my uncle, the ablative absolute. . . . I turn pale, my hair stands up on
my head, and, like the cat, I take to ignominious flight.
THE BIRD MARKET
THERE is a small square near the monastery of the Holy Birth which is
called Trubnoy, or simply Truboy; there is a market there on Sundays.
Hundreds of sheepskins, wadded coats, fur caps, and chimneypot hats
swarm there, like crabs in a sieve. There is the sound of the twitter of
birds in all sorts of keys, recalling the spring. If the sun is shining,
and there are no clouds in the sky, the singing of the birds and the
smell of hay make a more vivid impression, and this reminder of spring
sets one thinking and carries one’s fancy far, far away. Along one side
of the square there stands a string of waggons. The waggons are loaded,
not with hay, not with cabbages, nor with beans, but with goldfinches,
siskins, larks, blackbirds and thrushes, bluetits, bullfinches. All of
them are hopping about in rough, home-made cages, twittering and looking
with envy at the free sparrows. The goldfinches cost five kopecks, the
siskins are rather more expensive, while the value of the other birds is
quite indeterminate.
“How much is a lark?”
The seller himself does not know the value of a lark. He scratches his
head and asks whatever comes into it, a rouble, or three kopecks,
according to the purchaser. There are expensive birds too. A faded old
blackbird, with most of its feathers plucked out of its tail, sits on a
dirty perch. He is dignified, grave, and motionless as a retired
general. He has waved his claw in resignation to his captivity long ago,
and looks at the blue sky with indifference. Probably, owing to this
indifference, he is considered a sagacious bird. He is not to be bought
for less than forty kopecks. Schoolboys, workmen, young men in stylish
greatcoats, and bird-fanciers in incredibly shabby caps, in ragged
trousers that are turned up at the ankles, and look as though they had
been gnawed by mice, crowd round the birds, splashing through the mud.
The young people and the workmen are sold hens for cocks, young birds
for old ones. . . . They know very little about birds. But there is no
deceiving the bird-fancier. He sees and understands his bird from a
distance.
“There is no relying on that bird,” a fancier will say, looking into a
siskin’s beak, and counting the feathers on its tail. “He sings now,
it’s true, but what of that? I sing in company too. No, my boy, shout,
sing to me without company; sing in solitude, if you can. . . . You give
me that one yonder that sits and holds its tongue! Give me the quiet
one! That one says nothing, so he thinks the more. . . .”
Among the waggons of birds there are some full of other live creatures.
Here you see hares, rabbits, hedgehogs, guinea-pigs, polecats. A hare
sits sorrowfully nibbling the straw. The guinea-pigs shiver with cold,
while the hedgehogs look out with curiosity from under their prickles at
the public.
“I have read somewhere,” says a post-office official in a faded
overcoat, looking lovingly at the hare, and addressing no one in
particular, “I have read that some learned man had a cat and a mouse and
a falcon and a sparrow, who all ate out of one bowl.”
“That’s very possible, sir. The cat must have been beaten, and the
falcon, I dare say, had all its tail pulled out. There’s no great
cleverness in that, sir. A friend of mine had a cat who, saving your
presence, used to eat his cucumbers. He thrashed her with a big whip for
a fortnight, till he taught her not to. A hare can learn to light
matches if you beat it. Does that surprise you? It’s very simple! It
takes the match in its mouth and strikes it. An animal is like a man. A
man’s made wiser by beating, and it’s the same with a beast.”
Men in long, full-skirted coats move backwards and forwards in the crowd
with cocks and ducks under their arms. The fowls are all lean and
hungry. Chickens poke their ugly, mangy-looking heads out of their cages
and peck at something in the mud. Boys with pigeons stare into your face
and try to detect in you a pigeon-fancier.
“Yes, indeed! It’s no use talking to you,” someone shouts angrily. “You
should look before you speak! Do you call this a pigeon? It is an eagle,
not a pigeon!”
A tall thin man, with a shaven upper lip and side whiskers, who looks
like a sick and drunken footman, is selling a snow-white lap-dog. The
old lap-dog whines.
“She told me to sell the nasty thing,” says the footman, with a
contemptuous snigger. “She is bankrupt in her old age, has nothing to
eat, and here now is selling her dogs and cats. She cries, and kisses
them on their filthy snouts. And then she is so hard up that she sells
them. ‘Pon my soul, it is a fact! Buy it, gentlemen! The money is wanted
for coffee.”
But no one laughs. A boy who is standing by screws up one eye and looks
at him gravely with compassion.
The most interesting of all is the fish section. Some dozen peasants are
sitting in a row. Before each of them is a pail, and in each pail there
is a veritable little hell. There, in the thick, greenish water are
swarms of little carp, eels, small fry, water-snails, frogs, and newts.
Big water-beetles with broken legs scurry over the small surface,
clambering on the carp, and jumping over the frogs. The creatures have a
strong hold on life. The frogs climb on the beetles, the newts on the
frogs. The dark green tench, as more expensive fish, enjoy an
exceptional position; they are kept in a special jar where they can’t
swim, but still they are not so cramped. . . .
“The carp is a grand fish! The carp’s the fish to keep, your honour,
plague take him! You can keep him for a year in a pail and he’ll live!
It’s a week since I caught these very fish. I caught them, sir, in
Pererva, and have come from there on foot. The carp are two kopecks
each, the eels are three, and the minnows are ten kopecks the dozen,
plague take them! Five kopecks’ worth of minnows, sir? Won’t you take
some worms?”
The seller thrusts his coarse rough fingers into the pail and pulls out
of it a soft minnow, or a little carp, the size of a nail. Fishing
lines, hooks, and tackle are laid out near the pails, and pond-worms
glow with a crimson light in the sun.
An old fancier in a fur cap, iron-rimmed spectacles, and goloshes that
look like two dread-noughts, walks about by the waggons of birds and
pails of fish. He is, as they call him here, “a type.” He hasn’t a
farthing to bless himself with, but in spite of that he haggles, gets
excited, and pesters purchasers with advice. He has thoroughly examined
all the hares, pigeons, and fish; examined them in every detail, fixed
the kind, the age, and the price of each one of them a good hour ago. He
is as interested as a child in the goldfinches, the carp, and the
minnows. Talk to him, for instance, about thrushes, and the queer old
fellow will tell you things you could not find in any book. He will tell
you them with enthusiasm, with passion, and will scold you too for your
ignorance. Of goldfinches and bullfinches he is ready to talk endlessly,
opening his eyes wide and gesticulating violently with his hands. He is
only to be met here at the market in the cold weather; in the summer he
is somewhere in the country, catching quails with a bird-call and
angling for fish.
And here is another “type,” a very tall, very thin, close-shaven
gentleman in dark spectacles, wearing a cap with a cockade, and looking
like a scrivener of by-gone days. He is a fancier; he is a man of decent
position, a teacher in a high school, and that is well known to the
habitués of the market, and they treat him with respect, greet him with
bows, and have even invented for him a special title: “Your
Scholarship.” At Suharev market he rummages among the books, and at
Trubnoy looks out for good pigeons.
“Please, sir!” the pigeon-sellers shout to him, “Mr. Schoolmaster, your
Scholarship, take notice of my tumblers! your Scholarship!”
“Your Scholarship!” is shouted at him from every side.
“Your Scholarship!” an urchin repeats somewhere on the boulevard.
And his “Scholarship,” apparently quite accustomed to his title, grave
and severe, takes a pigeon in both hands, and lifting it above his head,
begins examining it, and as he does so frowns and looks graver than
ever, like a conspirator.
And Trubnoy Square, that little bit of Moscow where animals are so
tenderly loved, and where they are so tortured, lives its little life,
grows noisy and excited, and the business-like or pious people who pass
by along the boulevard cannot make out what has brought this crowd of
people, this medley of caps, fur hats, and chimneypots together; what
they are talking about there, what they are buying and selling.
AN ADVENTURE (A Driver’s Story)
IT was in that wood yonder, behind the creek, that it happened, sir. My
father, the kingdom of Heaven be his, was taking five hundred roubles to
the master; in those days our fellows and the Shepelevsky peasants used
to rent land from the master, so father was taking money for the half-
year. He was a God-fearing man, he used to read the scriptures, and as
for cheating or wronging anyone, or defrauding —God forbid, and the
peasants honoured him greatly, and when someone had to be sent to the
town about taxes or such-like, or with money, they used to send him. He
was a man above the ordinary, but, not that I’d speak ill of him, he had
a weakness. He was fond of a drop. There was no getting him past a
tavern: he would go in, drink a glass, and be completely done for! He
was aware of this weakness in himself, and when he was carrying public
money, that he might not fall asleep or lose it by some chance, he
always took me or my sister Anyutka with him.
To tell the truth, all our family have a great taste for vodka. I can
read and write, I served for six years at a tobacconist’s in the town,
and I can talk to any educated gentleman, and can use very fine
language, but, it is perfectly true, sir, as I read in a book, that
vodka is the blood of Satan. Through vodka my face has darkened. And
there is nothing seemly about me, and here, as you may see, sir, I am a
cab-driver like an ignorant, uneducated peasant.
And so, as I was telling you, father was taking the money to the master,
Anyutka was going with him, and at that time Anyutka was seven or maybe
eight—a silly chit, not that high. He got as far as Kalantchiko
successfully, he was sober, but when he reached Kalantchiko and went
into Moiseika’s tavern, this same weakness of his came upon him. He
drank three glasses and set to bragging before people:
“I am a plain humble man,” he says, “but I have five hundred roubles in
my pocket; if I like,” says he, “I could buy up the tavern and all the
crockery and Moiseika and his Jewess and his little Jews. I can buy it
all out and out,” he said. That was his way of joking, to be sure, but
then he began complaining: “It’s a worry, good Christian people,” said
he, “to be a rich man, a merchant, or anything of that kind. If you have
no money you have no care, if you have money you must watch over your
pocket the whole time that wicked men may not rob you. It’s a terror to
live in the world for a man who has a lot of money.”
The drunken people listened of course, took it in, and made a note of
it. And in those days they were making a railway line at Kalantchiko,
and there were swarms and swarms of tramps and vagabonds of all sorts
like locusts. Father pulled himself up afterwards, but it was too late.
A word is not a sparrow, if it flies out you can’t catch it. They drove,
sir, by the wood, and all at once there was someone galloping on
horseback behind them. Father was not of the chicken-hearted
brigade—that I couldn’t say—but he felt uneasy; there was no regular
road through the wood, nothing went that way but hay and timber, and
there was no cause for anyone to be galloping there, particularly in
working hours. One wouldn’t be galloping after any good.
“It seems as though they are after someone,” said father to Anyutka,
“they are galloping so furiously. I ought to have kept quiet in the
tavern, a plague on my tongue. Oy, little daughter, my heart misgives
me, there is something wrong!”
He did not spend long in hesitation about his dangerous position, and he
said to my sister Anyutka:
“Things don’t look very bright, they really are in pursuit. Anyway,
Anyutka dear, you take the money, put it away in your skirts, and go and
hide behind a bush. If by ill-luck they attack me, you run back to
mother, and give her the money. Let her take it to the village elder.
Only mind you don’t let anyone see you; keep to the wood and by the
creek, that no one may see you. Run your best and call on the merciful
God. Christ be with you!”
Father thrust the parcel of notes on Anyutka, and she looked out the
thickest of the bushes and hid herself. Soon after, three men on
horseback galloped up to father. One a stalwart, big-jawed fellow, in a
crimson shirt and high boots, and the other two, ragged, shabby fellows,
navvies from the line. As my father feared, so it really turned out,
sir. The one in the crimson shirt, the sturdy, strong fellow, a man
above the ordinary, left his horse, and all three made for my father.
“Halt you, so-and-so! Where’s the money!”
“What money? Go to the devil!”
“Oh, the money you are taking the master for the rent. Hand it over, you
bald devil, or we will throttle you, and you’ll die in your sins.”
And they began to practise their villainy on father, and, instead of
beseeching them, weeping, or anything of the sort, father got angry and
began to reprove them with the greatest severity.
“What are you pestering me for?” said he. “You are a dirty lot. There is
no fear of God in you, plague take you! It’s not money you want, but a
beating, to make your backs smart for three years after. Be off,
blockheads, or I shall defend myself. I have a revolver that takes six
bullets, it’s in my bosom!”
But his words did not deter the robbers, and they began beating him with
anything they could lay their hands on.
They looked through everything in the cart, searched my father
thoroughly, even taking off his boots; when they found that beating
father only made him swear at them the more, they began torturing him in
all sorts of ways. All the time Anyutka was sitting behind the bush, and
she saw it all, poor dear. When she saw father lying on the ground and
gasping, she started off and ran her hardest through the thicket and the
creek towards home. She was only a little girl, with no understanding;
she did not know the way, just ran on not knowing where she was going.
It was some six miles to our home. Anyone else might have run there in
an hour, but a little child, as we all know, takes two steps back for
one forwards, and indeed it is not everyone who can run barefoot through
the prickly bushes; you want to be used to it, too, and our girls used
always to be crowding together on the stove or in the yard, and were
afraid to run in the forest.
Towards evening Anyutka somehow reached a habitation, she looked, it was
a hut. It was the forester’s hut, in the Crown forest; some merchants
were renting it at the time and burning charcoal. She knocked. A woman,
the forester’s wife, came out to her. Anyutka, first of all, burst out
crying, and told her everything just as it was, and even told her about
the money. The forester’s wife was full of pity for her.
“My poor little dear! Poor mite, God has preserved you, poor little one!
My precious! Come into the hut, and I will give you something to eat.”
She began to make up to Anyutka, gave her food and drink, and even wept
with her, and was so attentive to her that the girl, only think, gave
her the parcel of notes.
“I will put it away, darling, and to-morrow morning I will give it you
back and take you home, dearie.”
The woman took the money, and put Anyutka to sleep on the stove where at
the time the brooms were drying. And on the same stove, on the brooms,
the forester’s daughter, a girl as small as our Anyutka, was asleep. And
Anyutka used to tell us afterwards that there was such a scent from the
brooms, they smelt of honey! Anyutka lay down, but she could not get to
sleep, she kept crying quietly; she was sorry for father, and terrified.
But, sir, an hour or two passed, and she saw those very three robbers
who had tortured father walk into the hut; and the one in the crimson
shirt, with big jaws, their leader, went up to the woman and said:
“Well, wife, we have simply murdered a man for nothing. To-day we killed
a man at dinner-time, we killed him all right, but not a farthing did we
find.”
So this fellow in the crimson shirt turned out to be the forester, the
woman’s husband.
“The man’s dead for nothing,” said his ragged companions. “In vain we
have taken a sin on our souls.”
The forester’s wife looked at all three and laughed.
“What are you laughing at, silly?”
“I am laughing because I haven’t murdered anyone, and I have not taken
any sin on my soul, but I have found the money.”
“What money? What nonsense are you talking!”
“Here, look whether I am talking nonsense.”
The forester’s wife untied the parcel and, wicked woman, showed them the
money. Then she described how Anyutka had come, what she had said, and
so on. The murderers were delighted and began to divide the money
between them, they almost quarrelled, then they sat down to the table,
you know, to drink. And Anyutka lay there, poor child, hearing every
word and shaking like a Jew in a frying-pan. What was she to do? And
from their words she learned that father was dead and lying across the
road, and she fancied, in her foolishness, that the wolves and the dogs
would eat father, and that our horse had gone far away into the forest,
and would be eaten by wolves too, and that she, Anyutka herself, would
be put in prison and beaten, because she had not taken care of the
money. The robbers got drunk and sent the woman for vodka. They gave her
five roubles for vodka and sweet wine. They set to singing and drinking
on other people’s money. They drank and drank, the dogs, and sent the
woman off again that they might drink beyond all bounds.
“We will keep it up till morning,” they cried. “We have plenty of money
now, there is no need to spare! Drink, and don’t drink away your wits.”
And so at midnight, when they were all fairly fuddled, the woman ran off
for vodka the third time, and the forester strode twice up and down the
cottage, and he was staggering.
“Look here, lads,” he said, “we must make away with the girl, too! If we
leave her, she will be the first to bear witness against us.”
They talked it over and discussed it, and decided that Anyutka must not
be left alive, that she must be killed. Of course, to murder an innocent
child’s a fearful thing, even a man drunken or crazy would not take such
a job on himself. They were quarrelling for maybe an hour which was to
kill her, one tried to put it on the other, they almost fought again,
and no one would agree to do it; then they cast lots. It fell to the
forester. He drank another full glass, cleared his throat, and went to
the outer room for an axe.
But Anyutka was a sharp wench. For all she was so simple, she thought of
something that, I must say, not many an educated man would have thought
of. Maybe the Lord had compassion on her, and gave her sense for the
moment, or perhaps it was the fright sharpened her wits, anyway when it
came to the test it turned out that she was cleverer than anyone. She
got up stealthily, prayed to God, took the little sheepskin, the one the
forester’s wife had put over her, and, you understand, the forester’s
little daughter, a girl of the same age as herself, was lying on the
stove beside her. She covered this girl with the sheepskin, and took the
woman’s jacket off her and threw it over herself. Disguised herself, in
fact. She put it over her head, and so walked across the hut by the
drunken men, and they thought it was the forester’s daughter, and did
not even look at her. Luckily for her the woman was not in the hut, she
had gone for vodka, or maybe she would not have escaped the axe, for a
woman’s eyes are as far-seeing as a buzzard’s. A woman’s eyes are sharp.
Anyutka came out of the hut, and ran as fast as her legs could carry
her. All night she was lost in the forest, but towards morning she came
out to the edge and ran along the road. By the mercy of God she met the
clerk Yegor Danilitch, the kingdom of Heaven be his. He was going along
with his hooks to catch fish. Anyutka told him all about it. He went
back quicker than he came—thought no more of the fish—gathered the
peasants together in the village, and off they went to the forester’s.
They got there, and all the murderers were lying side by side, dead
drunk, each where he had fallen; the woman, too, was drunk. First thing
they searched them; they took the money and then looked on the stove—the
Holy Cross be with us! The forester’s child was lying on the brooms,
under the sheepskin, and her head was in a pool of blood, chopped off by
the axe. They roused the peasants and the woman, tied their hands behind
them, and took them to the district court; the woman howled, but the
forester only shook his head and asked:
“You might give me a drop, lads! My head aches!”
Afterwards they were tried in the town in due course, and punished with
the utmost rigour of the law.
So that’s what happened, sir, beyond the forest there, that lies behind
the creek. Now you can scarcely see it, the sun is setting red behind
it. I have been talking to you, and the horses have stopped, as though
they were listening too. Hey there, my beauties! Move more briskly, the
good gentleman will give us something extra. Hey, you darlings!
THE FISH
A SUMMER morning. The air is still; there is no sound but the churring
of a grasshopper on the river bank, and somewhere the timid cooing of a
turtle-dove. Feathery clouds stand motionless in the sky, looking like
snow scattered about. . . . Gerassim, the carpenter, a tall gaunt
peasant, with a curly red head and a face overgrown with hair, is
floundering about in the water under the green willow branches near an
unfinished bathing shed. . . . He puffs and pants and, bDlinking
furiously, is trying to get hold of something under the roots of the
willows. His face is covered with perspiration. A couple of yards from
him, Lubim, the carpenter, a young hunchback with a triangular face and
narrow Chinese-looking eyes, is standing up to his neck in water. Both
Gerassim and Lubim are in shirts and linen breeches. Both are blue with
cold, for they have been more than an hour already in the water.
“But why do you keep poking with your hand?” cries the hunchback Lubim,
shivering as though in a fever. “You blockhead! Hold him, hold him, or
else he’ll get away, the anathema! Hold him, I tell you!”
“He won’t get away. . . . Where can he get to? He’s under a root,” says
Gerassim in a hoarse, hollow bass, which seems to come not from his
throat, but from the depths of his stomach. “He’s slippery, the beggar,
and there’s nothing to catch hold of.”
“Get him by the gills, by the gills!”
“There’s no seeing his gills. . . . Stay, I’ve got hold of something . .
. . I’ve got him by the lip. . . He’s biting, the brute!”
“Don’t pull him out by the lip, don’t—or you’ll let him go! Take him by
the gills, take him by the gills. . . . You’ve begun poking with your
hand again! You are a senseless man, the Queen of Heaven forgive me!
Catch hold!”
“Catch hold!” Gerassim mimics him. “You’re a fine one to give orders . .
. . You’d better come and catch hold of him yourself, you hunchback
devil. . . . What are you standing there for?”
“I would catch hold of him if it were possible. But can I stand by the
bank, and me as short as I am? It’s deep there.”
“It doesn’t matter if it is deep. . . . You must swim.”
The hunchback waves his arms, swims up to Gerassim, and catches hold of
the twigs. At the first attempt to stand up, he goes into the water over
his head and begins blowing up bubbles.
“I told you it was deep,” he says, rolling his eyes angrily. “Am I to
sit on your neck or what?”
“Stand on a root . . . there are a lot of roots like a ladder.” The
hunchback gropes for a root with his heel, and tightly gripping several
twigs, stands on it. . . . Having got his balance, and established
himself in his new position, he bends down, and trying not to get the
water into his mouth, begins fumbling with his right hand among the
roots. Getting entangled among the weeds and slipping on the mossy roots
he finds his hand in contact with the sharp pincers of a crayfish.
“As though we wanted to see you, you demon!” says Lubim, and he angrily
flings the crayfish on the bank.
At last his hand feels Gerassim’ s arm, and groping its way along it
comes to something cold and slimy.
“Here he is!” says Lubim with a grin. “A fine fellow! Move your fingers,
I’ll get him directly . . . by the gills. Stop, don’t prod me with your
elbow. . . . I’ll have him in a minute, in a minute, only let me get
hold of him. . . . The beggar has got a long way under the roots, there
is nothing to get hold of. . . . One can’t get to the head . . . one can
only feel its belly . . . . kill that gnat on my neck—it’s stinging!
I’ll get him by the gills, directly . . . . Come to one side and give
him a push! Poke him with your finger!”
The hunchback puffs out his cheeks, holds his breath, opens his eyes
wide, and apparently has already got his fingers in the gills, but at
that moment the twigs to which he is holding on with his left hand
break, and losing his balance he plops into the water! Eddies race away
from the bank as though frightened, and little bubbles come up from the
spot where he has fallen in. The hunchback swims out and, snorting,
clutches at the twigs.
“You’ll be drowned next, you stupid, and I shall have to answer for
you,” wheezes Gerassim. “Clamber out, the devil take you! I’ll get him
out myself.”
High words follow. . . . The sun is baking hot. The shadows begin to
grow shorter and to draw in on themselves, like the horns of a snail. .
. . The high grass warmed by the sun begins to give out a strong, heavy
smell of honey. It will soon be midday, and Gerassim and Lubim are still
floundering under the willow tree. The husky bass and the shrill, frozen
tenor persistently disturb the stillness of the summer day.
“Pull him out by the gills, pull him out! Stay, I’ll push him out! Where
are you shoving your great ugly fist? Poke him with your finger—you
pig’s face! Get round by the side! get to the left, to the left, there’s
a big hole on the right! You’ll be a supper for the water-devil! Pull it
by the lip!”
There is the sound of the flick of a whip. . . . A herd of cattle,
driven by Yefim, the shepherd, saunter lazily down the sloping bank to
drink. The shepherd, a decrepit old man, with one eye and a crooked
mouth, walks with his head bowed, looking at his feet. The first to
reach the water are the sheep, then come the horses, and last of all the
cows.
“Push him from below!” he hears Lubim’s voice. “Stick your finger in!
Are you deaf, fellow, or what? Tfoo!”
“What are you after, lads?” shouts Yefim.
“An eel-pout! We can’t get him out! He’s hidden under the roots. Get
round to the side! To the side!”
For a minute Yefim screws up his eye at the fishermen, then he takes off
his bark shoes, throws his sack off his shoulders, and takes off his
shirt. He has not the patience to take off his breeches, but, making the
sign of the cross, he steps into the water, holding out his thin dark
arms to balance himself. . . . For fifty paces he walks along the slimy
bottom, then he takes to swimming.
“Wait a minute, lads!” he shouts. “Wait! Don’t be in a hurry to pull him
out, you’ll lose him. You must do it properly!”
Yefim joins the carpenters and all three, shoving each other with their
knees and their elbows, puffing and swearing at one another, bustle
about the same spot. Lubim, the hunchback, gets a mouthful of water, and
the air rings with his hard spasmodic coughing.
“Where’s the shepherd?” comes a shout from the bank. “Yefim! Shepherd!
Where are you? The cattle are in the garden! Drive them out, drive them
out of the garden! Where is he, the old brigand?”
First men’s voices are heard, then a woman’s. The master himself, Andrey
Andreitch, wearing a dressing-gown made of a Persian shawl and carrying
a newspaper in his hand, appears from behind the garden fence. He looks
inquiringly towards the shouts which come from the river, and then trips
rapidly towards the bathing shed.
“What’s this? Who’s shouting?” he asks sternly, seeing through the
branches of the willow the three wet heads of the fishermen. “What are
you so busy about there?”
“Catching a fish,” mutters Yefim, without raising his head.
“I’ll give it to you! The beasts are in the garden and he is fishing! .
. . When will that bathing shed be done, you devils? You’ve been at work
two days, and what is there to show for it?”
“It . . . will soon be done,” grunts Gerassim; summer is long, you’ll
have plenty of time to wash, your honour. . . . Pfrrr! . . . We can’t
manage this eel-pout here anyhow. . . . He’s got under a root and sits
there as if he were in a hole and won’t budge one way or another . . .
.”
“An eel-pout?” says the master, and his eyes begin to glisten. “Get him
out quickly then.”
“You’ll give us half a rouble for it presently if we oblige you . . . .
A huge eel-pout, as fat as a merchant’s wife. . . . It’s worth half a
rouble, your honour, for the trouble. . . . Don’t squeeze him, Lubim,
don’t squeeze him, you’ll spoil him! Push him up from below! Pull the
root upwards, my good man . . . what’s your name? Upwards, not
downwards, you brute! Don’t swing your legs!”
Five minutes pass, ten. . . . The master loses all patience.
“Vassily!” he shouts, turning towards the garden. “Vaska! Call Vassily
to me!”
The coachman Vassily runs up. He is chewing something and breathing
hard.
“Go into the water,” the master orders him. “Help them to pull out that
eel-pout. They can’t get him out.”
Vassily rapidly undresses and gets into the water.
“In a minute. . . . I’ll get him in a minute,” he mutters. “Where’s the
eel-pout? We’ll have him out in a trice! You’d better go, Yefim. An old
man like you ought to be minding his own business instead of being here.
Where’s that eel-pout? I’ll have him in a minute . . . . Here he is! Let
go.”
“What’s the good of saying that? We know all about that! You get it
out!”
But there is no getting it out like this! One must get hold of it by the
head.”
“And the head is under the root! We know that, you fool!”
“Now then, don’t talk or you’ll catch it! You dirty cur!”
“Before the master to use such language,” mutters Yefim. “You won’t get
him out, lads! He’s fixed himself much too cleverly!”
“Wait a minute, I’ll come directly,” says the master, and he begins
hurriedly undressing. “Four fools, and can’t get an eel-pout!”
When he is undressed, Andrey Andreitch gives himself time to cool and
gets into the water. But even his interference leads to nothing.
“We must chop the root off,” Lubim decides at last. “Gerassim, go and
get an axe! Give me an axe!”
“Don’t chop your fingers off,” says the master, when the blows of the
axe on the root under water are heard. “Yefim, get out of this! Stay,
I’ll get the eel-pout. . . . You’ll never do it.”
The root is hacked a little. They partly break it off, and Andrey
Andreitch, to his immense satisfaction, feels his fingers under the
gills of the fish.
“I’m pulling him out, lads! Don’t crowd round . . . stand still . . . .
I am pulling him out!”
The head of a big eel-pout, and behind it its long black body, nearly a
yard long, appears on the surface of the water. The fish flaps its tail
heavily and tries to tear itself away.
“None of your nonsense, my boy! Fiddlesticks! I’ve got you! Aha!”
A honied smile overspreads all the faces. A minute passes in silent
contemplation.
“A famous eel-pout,” mutters Yefim, scratching under his shoulder-
blades. “I’ll be bound it weighs ten pounds.”
“Mm! . . . Yes,” the master assents. “The liver is fairly swollen! It
seems to stand out! A-ach!”
The fish makes a sudden, unexpected upward movement with its tail and
the fishermen hear a loud splash . . . they all put out their hands, but
it is too late; they have seen the last of the eel-pout.
ART A GLOOMY winter morning.
On the smooth and glittering surface of the river Bystryanka, sprinkled
here and there with snow, stand two peasants, scrubby little Seryozhka
and the church beadle, Matvey. Seryozhka, a short-legged, ragged, mangy-
looking fellow of thirty, stares angrily at the ice. Tufts of wool hang
from his shaggy sheepskin like a mangy dog. In his hands he holds a
compass made of two pointed sticks. Matvey, a fine-looking old man in a
new sheepskin and high felt boots, looks with mild blue eyes upwards
where on the high sloping bank a village nestles picturesquely. In his
hands there is a heavy crowbar.
“Well, are we going to stand like this till evening with our arms
folded?” says Seryozhka, breaking the silence and turning his angry eyes
on Matvey. “Have you come here to stand about, old fool, or to work?”
“Well, you . . . er . . . show me . . .” Matvey mutters, bDlinking
mildly.
“Show you. . . . It’s always me: me to show you, and me to do it. They
have no sense of their own! Mark it out with the compasses, that’s
what’s wanted! You can’t break the ice without marking it out. Mark it!
Take the compass.”
Matvey takes the compasses from Seryozhka’s hands, and, shuffling
heavily on the same spot and jerking with his elbows in all directions,
he begins awkwardly trying to describe a circle on the ice. Seryozhka
screws up his eyes contemptuously and obviously enjoys his awkwardness
and incompetence.
“Eh-eh-eh!” he mutters angrily. “Even that you can’t do! The fact is you
are a stupid peasant, a wooden-head! You ought to be grazing geese and
not making a Jordan! Give the compasses here! Give them here, I say!”
Seryozhka snatches the compasses out of the hands of the perspiring
Matvey, and in an instant, jauntily twirling round on one heel, he
describes a circle on the ice. The outline of the new Jordan is ready
now, all that is left to do is to break the ice. . .
But before proceeding to the work Seryozhka spends a long time in airs
and graces, whims and reproaches. . .
“I am not obliged to work for you! You are employed in the church, you
do it!”
He obviously enjoys the peculiar position in which he has been placed by
the fate that has bestowed on him the rare talent of surprising the
whole parish once a year by his art. Poor mild Matvey has to listen to
many venomous and contemptuous words from him. Seryozhka sets to work
with vexation, with anger. He is lazy. He has hardly described the
circle when he is already itching to go up to the village to drink tea,
lounge about, and babble. . .
“I’ll be back directly,” he says, lighting his cigarette, “and meanwhile
you had better bring something to sit on and sweep up, instead of
standing there counting the crows.”
Matvey is left alone. The air is grey and harsh but still. The white
church peeps out genially from behind the huts scattered on the river
bank. Jackdaws are incessantly circling round its golden crosses. On one
side of the village where the river bank breaks off and is steep a
hobbled horse is standing at the very edge, motionless as a stone,
probably asleep or deep in thought.
Matvey, too, stands motionless as a statue, waiting patiently. The
dreamily brooding look of the river, the circling of the jackdaws, and
the sight of the horse make him drowsy. One hour passes, a second, and
still Seryozhka does not come. The river has long been swept and a box
brought to sit on, but the drunken fellow does not appear. Matvey waits
and merely yawns. The feeling of boredom is one of which he knows
nothing. If he were told to stand on the river for a day, a month, or a
year he would stand there.
At last Seryozhka comes into sight from behind the huts. He walks with a
lurching gait, scarcely moving. He is too lazy to go the long way round,
and he comes not by the road, but prefers a short cut in a straight line
down the bank, and sticks in the snow, hangs on to the bushes, slides on
his back as he comes—and all this slowly, with pauses.
“What are you about?” he cries, falling on Matvey at once. “Why are you
standing there doing nothing! When are you going to break the ice?”
Matvey crosses himself, takes the crowbar in both hands, and begins
breaking the ice, carefully keeping to the circle that has been drawn.
Seryozhka sits down on the box and watches the heavy clumsy movements of
his assistant.
“Easy at the edges! Easy there!” he commands. “If you can’t do it
properly, you shouldn’t undertake it, once you have undertaken it you
should do it. You!”
A crowd collects on the top of the bank. At the sight of the spectators
Seryozhka becomes even more excited.
“I declare I am not going to do it . . .” he says, lighting a stinking
cigarette and spitting on the ground. “I should like to see how you get
on without me. Last year at Kostyukovo, Styopka Gulkov undertook to make
a Jordan as I do. And what did it amount to—it was a laughing-stock. The
Kostyukovo folks came to ours —crowds and crowds of them! The people
flocked from all the villages.”
“Because except for ours there is nowhere a proper Jordan . . .”
“Work, there is no time for talking. . . . Yes, old man . . . you won’t
find another Jordan like it in the whole province. The soldiers say you
would look in vain, they are not so good even in the towns. Easy, easy!”
Matvey puffs and groans. The work is not easy. The ice is firm and
thick; and he has to break it and at once take the pieces away that the
open space may not be blocked up.
But, hard as the work is and senseless as Seryozhka’s commands are, by
three o’clock there is a large circle of dark water in the Bystryanka.
“It was better last year,” says Seryozhka angrily. “You can’t do even
that! Ah, dummy! To keep such fools in the temple of God! Go and bring a
board to make the pegs! Bring the ring, you crow! And er . . . get some
bread somewhere . . . and some cucumbers, or something.”
Matvey goes off and soon afterwards comes back, carrying on his
shoulders an immense wooden ring which had been painted in previous
years in patterns of various colours. In the centre of the ring is a red
cross, at the circumference holes for the pegs. Seryozhka takes the ring
and covers the hole in the ice with it.
“Just right . . . it fits. . . . We have only to renew the paint and it
will be first-rate. . . . Come, why are you standing still? Make the
lectern. Or—er—go and get logs to make the cross . . .”
Matvey, who has not tasted food or drink all day, trudges up the hill
again. Lazy as Seryozhka is, he makes the pegs with his own hands. He
knows that those pegs have a miraculous power: whoever gets hold of a
peg after the blessing of the water will be lucky for the whole year.
Such work is really worth doing.
But the real work begins the following day. Then Seryozhka displays
himself before the ignorant Matvey in all the greatness of his talent.
There is no end to his babble, his fault-finding, his whims and fancies.
If Matvey nails two big pieces of wood to make a cross, he is
dissatisfied and tells him to do it again. If Matvey stands still,
Seryozhka asks him angrily why he does not go; if he moves, Seryozhka
shouts to him not to go away but to do his work. He is not satisfied
with his tools, with the weather, or with his own talent; nothing
pleases him.
Matvey saws out a great piece of ice for a lectern.
“Why have you broken off the corner?” cries Seryozhka, and glares at him
furiously. “Why have you broken off the corner? I ask you.”
“Forgive me, for Christ’s sake.”
“Do it over again!”
Matvey saws again . . . and there is no end to his sufferings. A lectern
is to stand by the hole in the ice that is covered by the painted ring;
on the lectern is to be carved the cross and the open gospel. But that
is not all. Behind the lectern there is to be a high cross to be seen by
all the crowd and to glitter in the sun as though sprinkled with
diamonds and rubies. On the cross is to be a dove carved out of ice. The
path from the church to the Jordan is to be strewn with branches of fir
and juniper. All this is their task.
First of all Seryozhka sets to work on the lectern. He works with a
file, a chisel, and an awl. He is perfectly successful in the cross on
the lectern, the gospel, and the drapery that hangs down from the
lectern. Then he begins on the dove. While he is trying to carve an
expression of meekness and humility on the face of the dove, Matvey,
lumbering about like a bear, is coating with ice the cross he has made
of wood. He takes the cross and dips it in the hole. Waiting till the
water has frozen on the cross he dips it in a second time, and so on
till the cross is covered with a thick layer of ice. It is a difficult
job, calling for a great deal of strength and patience.
But now the delicate work is finished. Seryozhka races about the village
like one possessed. He swears and vows he will go at once to the river
and smash all his work. He is looking for suitable paints.
His pockets are full of ochre, dark blue, red lead, and verdigris;
without paying a farthing he rushes headlong from one shop to another.
The shop is next door to the tavern. Here he has a drink; with a wave of
his hand he darts off without paying. At one hut he gets beetroot
leaves, at another an onion skin, out of which he makes a yellow colour.
He swears, shoves, threatens, and not a soul murmurs! They all smile at
him, they sympathise with him, call him Sergey Nikititch; they all feel
that his art is not his personal affair but something that concerns them
all, the whole people. One creates, the others help him. Seryozhka in
himself is a nonentity, a sluggard, a drunkard, and a wastrel, but when
he has his red lead or compasses in his hand he is at once something
higher, a servant of God.
Epiphany morning comes. The precincts of the church and both banks of
the river for a long distance are swarming with people. Everything that
makes up the Jordan is scrupulously concealed under new mats. Seryozhka
is meekly moving about near the mats, trying to control his emotion. He
sees thousands of people. There are many here from other parishes; these
people have come many a mile on foot through the frost and the snow
merely to see his celebrated Jordan. Matvey, who had finished his
coarse, rough work, is by now back in the church, there is no sight, no
sound of him; he is already forgotten . . . . The weather is lovely. . .
. There is not a cloud in the sky. The sunshine is dazzling.
The church bells ring out on the hill . . . Thousands of heads are
bared, thousands of hands are moving, there are thousands of signs of
the cross!
And Seryozhka does not know what to do with himself for impatience. But
now they are ringing the bells for the Sacrament; then half an hour
later a certain agitation is perceptible in the belfry and among the
people. Banners are borne out of the church one after the other, while
the bells peal in joyous haste. Seryozhka, trembling, pulls away the mat
. . . and the people behold something extraordinary. The lectern, the
wooden ring, the pegs, and the cross in the ice are iridescent with
thousands of colors. The cross and the dove glitter so dazzlingly that
it hurts the eyes to look at them. Merciful God, how fine it is! A
murmur of wonder and delight runs through the crowd; the bells peal more
loudly still, the day grows brighter; the banners oscillate and move
over the crowd as over the waves. The procession, glittering with the
settings of the ikons and the vestments of the clergy, comes slowly down
the road and turns towards the Jordan. Hands are waved to the belfry for
the ringing to cease, and the blessing of the water begins. The priests
conduct the service slowly, deliberately, evidently trying to prolong
the ceremony and the joy of praying all gathered together. There is
perfect stillness.
But now they plunge the cross in, and the air echoes with an
extraordinary din. Guns are fired, the bells peal furiously, loud
exclamations of delight, shouts, and a rush to get the pegs. Seryozhka
listens to this uproar, sees thousands of eyes fixed upon him, and the
lazy fellow’s soul is filled with a sense of glory and triumph.
THE SWEDISH MATCH (The Story of a Crime) I
ON the morning of October 6, 1885, a well-dressed young man presented
himself at the office of the police superintendent of the 2nd division
of the S. district, and announced that his employer, a retired cornet of
the guards, called Mark Ivanovitch Klyauzov, had been murdered. The
young man was pale and extremely agitated as he made this announcement.
His hands trembled and there was a look of horror in his eyes.
“To whom have I the honour of speaking?” the superintendent asked him.
“Psyekov, Klyauzov’s steward. Agricultural and engineering expert.”
The police superintendent, on reaching the spot with Psyekov and the
necessary witnesses, found the position as follows.
Masses of people were crowding about the lodge in which Klyauzov lived.
The news of the event had flown round the neighbourhood with the
rapidity of lightning, and, thanks to its being a holiday, the people
were flocking to the lodge from all the neighbouring villages. There was
a regular hubbub of talk. Pale and tearful faces were to be seen here
and there. The door into Klyauzov’s bedroom was found to be locked. The
key was in the lock on the inside.
“Evidently the criminals made their way in by the window” Psyekov
observed, as they examined the door.
They went into the garden into which the bedroom window looked. The
window had a gloomy, ominous air. It was covered by a faded green
curtain. One corner of the curtain was slightly turned back, which made
it possible to peep into the bedroom.
“Has anyone of you looked in at the window?” inquired the
superintendent.
“No, your honour,” said Yefrem, the gardener, a little, grey-haired old
man with the face of a veteran non-commissioned officer. “No one feels
like looking when they are shaking in every limb!”
“Ech, Mark Ivanitch! Mark Ivanitch!” sighed the superintendent, as he
looked at the window. “I told you that you would come to a bad end! I
told you, poor dear—you wouldn’t listen! Dissipation leads to no good!”
“It’s thanks to Yefrem,” said Psyekov. “We should never have guessed it
but for him. It was he who first thought that something was wrong. He
came to me this morning and said: ‘Why is it our master hasn’t waked up
for so long? He hasn’t been out of his bedroom for a whole week! When he
said that to me I was struck all of a heap . . . . The thought flashed
through my mind at once. He hasn’t made an appearance since Saturday of
last week, and to-day’s Sunday. Seven days is no joke!”
“Yes, poor man,” the superintendent sighed again. “A clever fellow,
well-educated, and so good-hearted. There was no one like him, one may
say, in company. But a rake; the kingdom of heaven be his! I’m not
surprised at anything with him! Stepan,” he said, addressing one of the
witnesses, “ride off this minute to my house and send Andryushka to the
police captain’s, let him report to him. Say Mark Ivanitch has been
murdered! Yes, and run to the inspector—why should he sit in comfort
doing nothing? Let him come here. And you go yourself as fast as you can
to the examining magistrate, Nikolay Yermolaitch, and tell him to come
here. Wait a bit, I will write him a note.”
The police superintendent stationed watchmen round the lodge, and went
off to the steward’s to have tea. Ten minutes later he was sitting on a
stool, carefully nibbling lumps of sugar, and sipping tea as hot as a
red-hot coal.
“There it is! . . .” he said to Psyekov, “there it is! . . . a
gentleman, and a well-to-do one, too . . . a favourite of the gods, one
may say, to use Pushkin’s expression, and what has he made of it?
Nothing! He gave himself up to drinking and debauchery, and . . . here
now . . . he has been murdered!”
Two hours later the examining magistrate drove up. Nikolay Yermolaitch
Tchubikov (that was the magistrate’s name), a tall, thick-set old man of
sixty, had been hard at work for a quarter of a century. He was known to
the whole district as an honest, intelligent, energetic man, devoted to
his work. His invariable companion, assistant, and secretary, a tall
young man of six and twenty, called Dyukovsky, arrived on the scene of
action with him.
“Is it possible, gentlemen?” Tchubikov began, going into Psyekov’s room
and rapidly shaking hands with everyone. “Is it possible? Mark Ivanitch?
Murdered? No, it’s impossible! Imposs-i-ble!”
“There it is,” sighed the superintendent
“Merciful heavens! Why I saw him only last Friday. At the fair at
Tarabankovo! Saving your presence, I drank a glass of vodka with him!”
“There it is,” the superintendent sighed once more.
They heaved sighs, expressed their horror, drank a glass of tea each,
and went to the lodge.
“Make way!” the police inspector shouted to the crowd.
On going into the lodge the examining magistrate first of all set to
work to inspect the door into the bedroom. The door turned out to be
made of deal, painted yellow, and not to have been tampered with. No
special traces that might have served as evidence could be found. They
proceeded to break open the door.
“I beg you, gentlemen, who are not concerned, to retire,” said the
examining magistrate, when, after long banging and cracking, the door
yielded to the axe and the chisel. “I ask this in the interests of the
investigation. . . . Inspector, admit no one!”
Tchubikov, his assistant, and the police superintendent opened the door
and hesitatingly, one after the other, walked into the room. The
following spectacle met their eyes. In the solitary window stood a big
wooden bedstead with an immense feather bed on it. On the rumpled
feather bed lay a creased and crumpled quilt. A pillow, in a cotton
pillow case—also much creased, was on the floor. On a little table
beside the bed lay a silver watch, and silver coins to the value of
twenty kopecks. Some sulphur matches lay there too. Except the bed, the
table, and a solitary chair, there was no furniture in the room. Looking
under the bed, the superintendent saw two dozen empty bottles, an old
straw hat, and a jar of vodka. Under the table lay one boot, covered
with dust. Taking a look round the room, Tchubikov frowned and flushed
crimson.
“The blackguards!” he muttered, clenching his fists.
“And where is Mark Ivanitch?” Dyukovsky asked quietly.
“I beg you not to put your spoke in,” Tchubikov answered roughly.
“Kindly examine the floor. This is the second case in my experience,
Yevgraf Kuzmitch,” he added to the police superintendent, dropping his
voice. “In 1870 I had a similar case. But no doubt you remember it. . .
. The murder of the merchant Portretov. It was just the same. The
blackguards murdered him, and dragged the dead body out of the window.”
Tchubikov went to the window, drew the curtain aside, and cautiously
pushed the window. The window opened.
“It opens, so it was not fastened. . . . H’m there are traces on the
window-sill. Do you see? Here is the trace of a knee. . . . Some one
climbed out. . . . We shall have to inspect the window thoroughly.”
“There is nothing special to be observed on the floor,” said Dyukovsky.
“No stains, nor scratches. The only thing I have found is a used Swedish
match. Here it is. As far as I remember, Mark Ivanitch didn’t smoke; in
a general way he used sulphur ones, never Swedish matches. This match
may serve as a clue. . . .”
“Oh, hold your tongue, please!” cried Tchubikov, with a wave of his
hand. “He keeps on about his match! I can’t stand these excitable
people! Instead of looking for matches, you had better examine the bed!”
On inspecting the bed, Dyukovsky reported:
“There are no stains of blood or of anything else. . . . Nor are there
any fresh rents. On the pillow there are traces of teeth. A liquid,
having the smell of beer and also the taste of it, has been spilt on the
quilt. . . . The general appearance of the bed gives grounds for
supposing there has been a struggle.”
“I know there was a struggle without your telling me! No one asked you
whether there was a struggle. Instead of looking out for a struggle you
had better be . . .”
“One boot is here, the other one is not on the scene.”
“Well, what of that?”
“Why, they must have strangled him while he was taking off his boots. He
hadn’t time to take the second boot off when . . . .”
“He’s off again! . . . And how do you know that he was strangled?”
“There are marks of teeth on the pillow. The pillow itself is very much
crumpled, and has been flung to a distance of six feet from the bed.”
“He argues, the chatterbox! We had better go into the garden. You had
better look in the garden instead of rummaging about here. . . . I can
do that without your help.”
When they went out into the garden their first task was the inspection
of the grass. The grass had been trampled down under the windows. The
clump of burdock against the wall under the window turned out to have
been trodden on too. Dyukovsky succeeded in finding on it some broken
shoots, and a little bit of wadding. On the topmost burrs, some fine
threads of dark blue wool were found.
“What was the colour of his last suit? Dyukovsky asked Psyekov.
“It was yellow, made of canvas.”
“Capital! Then it was they who were in dark blue. . . .”
Some of the burrs were cut off and carefully wrapped up in paper. At
that moment Artsybashev-Svistakovsky, the police captain, and Tyutyuev,
the doctor, arrived. The police captain greeted the others, and at once
proceeded to satisfy his curiosity; the doctor, a tall and extremely
lean man with sunken eyes, a long nose, and a sharp chin, greeting no
one and asking no questions, sat down on a stump, heaved a sigh and
said:
“The Serbians are in a turmoil again! I can’t make out what they want!
Ah, Austria, Austria! It’s your doing!”
The inspection of the window from outside yielded absolutely no result;
the inspection of the grass and surrounding bushes furnished many
valuable clues. Dyukovsky succeeded, for instance, in detecting a long,
dark streak in the grass, consisting of stains, and stretching from the
window for a good many yards into the garden. The streak ended under one
of the lilac bushes in a big, brownish stain. Under the same bush was
found a boot, which turned out to be the fellow to the one found in the
bedroom.
“This is an old stain of blood,” said Dyukovsky, examining the stain.
At the word “blood,” the doctor got up and lazily took a cursory glance
at the stain.
“Yes, it’s blood,” he muttered.
“Then he wasn’t strangled since there’s blood,” said Tchubikov, looking
malignantly at Dyukovsky.
“He was strangled in the bedroom, and here, afraid he would come to,
they stabbed him with something sharp. The stain under the bush shows
that he lay there for a comparatively long time, while they were trying
to find some way of carrying him, or something to carry him on out of
the garden.”
“Well, and the boot?”
“That boot bears out my contention that he was murdered while he was
taking off his boots before going to bed. He had taken off one boot, the
other, that is, this boot he had only managed to get half off. While he
was being dragged and shaken the boot that was only half on came off of
itself. . . .”
“What powers of deduction! Just look at him!” Tchubikov jeered. “He
brings it all out so pat! And when will you learn not to put your
theories forward? You had better take a little of the grass for analysis
instead of arguing!”
After making the inspection and taking a plan of the locality they went
off to the steward’s to write a report and have lunch. At lunch they
talked.
“Watch, money, and everything else . . . are untouched,” Tchubikov began
the conversation. “It is as clear as twice two makes four that the
murder was committed not for mercenary motives.”
“It was committed by a man of the educated class,” Dyukovsky put in.
“From what do you draw that conclusion?”
“I base it on the Swedish match which the peasants about here have not
learned to use yet. Such matches are only used by landowners and not by
all of them. He was murdered, by the way, not by one but by three, at
least: two held him while the third strangled him. Klyauzov was strong
and the murderers must have known that.”
“What use would his strength be to him, supposing he were asleep?”
“The murderers came upon him as he was taking off his boots. He was
taking off his boots, so he was not asleep.”
“It’s no good making things up! You had better eat your lunch!”
“To my thinking, your honour,” said Yefrem, the gardener, as he set the
samovar on the table, “this vile deed was the work of no other than
Nikolashka.”
“Quite possible,” said Psyekov.
“Who’s this Nikolashka?”
“The master’s valet, your honour,” answered Yefrem. “Who else should it
be if not he? He’s a ruffian, your honour! A drunkard, and such a
dissipated fellow! May the Queen of Heaven never bring the like again!
He always used to fetch vodka for the master, he always used to put the
master to bed. . . . Who should it be if not he? And what’s more, I
venture to bring to your notice, your honour, he boasted once in a
tavern, the rascal, that he would murder his master. It’s all on account
of Akulka, on account of a woman. . . . He had a soldier’s wife. . . .
The master took a fancy to her and got intimate with her, and he . . .
was angered by it, to be sure. He’s lolling about in the kitchen now,
drunk. He’s crying . . . making out he is grieving over the master . . .
.”
“And anyone might be angry over Akulka, certainly,” said Psyekov. “She
is a soldier’s wife, a peasant woman, but . . . Mark Ivanitch might well
call her Nana. There is something in her that does suggest Nana . . .
fascinating . . .”
“I have seen her . . . I know . . .” said the examining magistrate,
blowing his nose in a red handkerchief.
Dyukovsky blushed and dropped his eyes. The police superintendent
drummed on his saucer with his fingers. The police captain coughed and
rummaged in his portfolio for something. On the doctor alone the mention
of Akulka and Nana appeared to produce no impression. Tchubikov ordered
Nikolashka to be fetched. Nikolashka, a lanky young man with a long
pock-marked nose and a hollow chest, wearing a reefer jacket that had
been his master’s, came into Psyekov’s room and bowed down to the ground
before Tchubikov. His face looked sleepy and showed traces of tears. He
was drunk and could hardly stand up.
“Where is your master?” Tchubikov asked him.
“He’s murdered, your honour.”
As he said this Nikolashka bDlinked and began to cry.
“We know that he is murdered. But where is he now? Where is his body?”
“They say it was dragged out of window and buried in the garden.”
“H’m . . . the results of the investigation are already known in the
kitchen then. . . . That’s bad. My good fellow, where were you on the
night when your master was killed? On Saturday, that is?”
Nikolashka raised his head, craned his neck, and pondered.
“I can’t say, your honour,” he said. “I was drunk and I don’t remember.”
“An alibi!” whispered Dyukovsky, grinning and rubbing his hands.
“Ah! And why is it there’s blood under your master’s window!”
Nikolashka flung up his head and pondered.
“Think a little quicker,” said the police captain.
“In a minute. That blood’s from a trifling matter, your honour. I killed
a hen; I cut her throat very simply in the usual way, and she fluttered
out of my hands and took and ran off. . . .That’s what the blood’s
from.”
Yefrem testified that Nikolashka really did kill a hen every evening and
killed it in all sorts of places, and no one had seen the half-killed
hen running about the garden, though of course it could not be
positively denied that it had done so.
“An alibi,” laughed Dyukovsky, “and what an idiotic alibi.”
“Have you had relations with Akulka?”
“Yes, I have sinned.”
“And your master carried her off from you?”
“No, not at all. It was this gentleman here, Mr. Psyekov, Ivan
Mihalitch, who enticed her from me, and the master took her from Ivan
Mihalitch. That’s how it was.”
Psyekov looked confused and began rubbing his left eye. Dyukovsky
fastened his eyes upon him, detected his confusion, and started. He saw
on the steward’s legs dark blue trousers which he had not previously
noticed. The trousers reminded him of the blue threads found on the
burdock. Tchubikov in his turn glanced suspiciously at Psyekov.
“You can go!” he said to Nikolashka. “And now allow me to put one
question to you, Mr. Psyekov. You were here, of course, on the Saturday
of last week?
“Yes, at ten o’clock I had supper with Mark Ivanitch.”
“And afterwards?”
Psyekov was confused, and got up from the table.
“Afterwards . . . afterwards . . . I really don’t remember,” he
muttered. “I had drunk a good deal on that occasion. . . . I can’t
remember where and when I went to bed. . . . Why do you all look at me
like that? As though I had murdered him!”
“Where did you wake up?”
“I woke up in the servants’ kitchen on the stove . . . . They can all
confirm that. How I got on to the stove I can’t say. . . .”
“Don’t disturb yourself . . . Do you know Akulina?”
“Oh well, not particularly.”
“Did she leave you for Klyauzov?”
“Yes. . . . Yefrem, bring some more mushrooms! Will you have some tea,
Yevgraf Kuzmitch?”
There followed an oppressive, painful silence that lasted for some five
minutes. Dyukovsky held his tongue, and kept his piercing eyes on
Psyekov’s face, which gradually turned pale. The silence was broken by
Tchubikov.
“We must go to the big house,” he said, “and speak to the deceased’s
sister, Marya Ivanovna. She may give us some evidence.”
Tchubikov and his assistant thanked Psyekov for the lunch, then went off
to the big house. They found Klyauzov’s sister, a maiden lady of five
and forty, on her knees before a high family shrine of ikons. When she
saw portfolios and caps adorned with cockades in her visitors’ hands,
she turned pale.
“First of all, I must offer an apology for disturbing your devotions, so
to say,” the gallant Tchubikov began with a scrape. “We have come to you
with a request. You have heard, of course, already. . . . There is a
suspicion that your brother has somehow been murdered. God’s will, you
know. . . . Death no one can escape, neither Tsar nor ploughman. Can you
not assist us with some fact, something that will throw light?”
“Oh, do not ask me!” said Marya Ivanovna, turning whiter still, and
hiding her face in her hands. “I can tell you nothing! Nothing! I
implore you! I can say nothing . . . What can I do? Oh, no, no . . . not
a word . . . of my brother! I would rather die than speak!”
Marya Ivanovna burst into tears and went away into another room. The
officials looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and beat a
retreat.
“A devil of a woman!” said Dyukovsky, swearing as they went out of the
big house. “Apparently she knows something and is concealing it. And
there is something peculiar in the maid-servant’s expression too. . . .
You wait a bit, you devils! We will get to the bottom of it all!”
In the evening, Tchubikov and his assistant were driving home by the
light of a pale-faced moon; they sat in their waggonette, summing up in
their minds the incidents of the day. Both were exhausted and sat
silent. Tchubikov never liked talking on the road. In spite of his
talkativeness, Dyukovsky held his tongue in deference to the old man.
Towards the end of the journey, however, the young man could endure the
silence no longer, and began:
“That Nikolashka has had a hand in the business,” he said, “non
dubitandum est. One can see from his mug too what sort of a chap he is.
. . . His alibi gives him away hand and foot. There is no doubt either
that he was not the instigator of the crime. He was only the stupid
hired tool. Do you agree? The discreet Psyekov plays a not unimportant
part in the affair too. His blue trousers, his embarrassment, his lying
on the stove from fright after the murder, his alibi, and Akulka.”
“Keep it up, you’re in your glory! According to you, if a man knows
Akulka he is the murderer. Ah, you hot-head! You ought to be sucking
your bottle instead of investigating cases! You used to be running after
Akulka too, does that mean that you had a hand in this business?”
“Akulka was a cook in your house for a month, too, but . . . I don’t say
anything. On that Saturday night I was playing cards with you, I saw
you, or I should be after you too. The woman is not the point, my good
sir. The point is the nasty, disgusting, mean feeling. . . . The
discreet young man did not like to be cut out, do you see. Vanity, do
you see. . . . He longed to be revenged. Then . . . His thick lips are a
strong indication of sensuality. Do you remember how he smacked his lips
when he compared Akulka to Nana? That he is burning with passion, the
scoundrel, is beyond doubt! And so you have wounded vanity and
unsatisfied passion. That’s enough to lead to murder. Two of them are in
our hands, but who is the third? Nikolashka and Psyekov held him. Who
was it smothered him? Psyekov is timid, easily embarrassed, altogether a
coward. People like Nikolashka are not equal to smothering with a
pillow, they set to work with an axe or a mallet. . . . Some third
person must have smothered him, but who?”
Dyukovsky pulled his cap over his eyes, and pondered. He was silent till
the waggonette had driven up to the examining magistrate’s house.
“Eureka!” he said, as he went into the house, and took off his overcoat.
“Eureka, Nikolay Yermolaitch! I can’t understand how it is it didn’t
occur to me before. Do you know who the third is?”
“Do leave off, please! There’s supper ready. Sit down to supper!”
Tchubikov and Dyukovsky sat down to supper. Dyukovsky poured himself out
a wine-glassful of vodka, got up, stretched, and with sparkling eyes,
said:
“Let me tell you then that the third person who collaborated with the
scoundrel Psyekov and smothered him was a woman! Yes! I am speaking of
the murdered man’s sister, Marya Ivanovna!”
Tchubikov coughed over his vodka and fastened his eyes on Dyukovsky.
“Are you . . . not quite right? Is your head . . . not quite right? Does
it ache?”
“I am quite well. Very good, suppose I have gone out of my mind, but how
do you explain her confusion on our arrival? How do you explain her
refusal to give information? Admitting that that is trivial—very good!
All right!—but think of the terms they were on! She detested her
brother! She is an Old Believer, he was a profligate, a godless fellow .
. . that is what has bred hatred between them! They say he succeeded in
persuading her that he was an angel of Satan! He used to practise
spiritualism in her presence!”
“Well, what then?”
“Don’t you understand? She’s an Old Believer, she murdered him through
fanaticism! She has not merely slain a wicked man, a profligate, she has
freed the world from Antichrist—and that she fancies is her merit, her
religious achievement! Ah, you don’t know these old maids, these Old
Believers! You should read Dostoevsky! And what does Lyeskov say . . .
and Petchersky! It’s she, it’s she, I’ll stake my life on it. She
smothered him! Oh, the fiendish woman! Wasn’t she, perhaps, standing
before the ikons when we went in to put us off the scent? ‘I’ll stand up
and say my prayers,’ she said to herself, ‘they will think I am calm and
don’t expect them.’ That’s the method of all novices in crime. Dear
Nikolay Yermolaitch! My dear man! Do hand this case over to me! Let me
go through with it to the end! My dear fellow! I have begun it, and I
will carry it through to the end.”
Tchubikov shook his head and frowned.
“I am equal to sifting difficult cases myself,” he said. “And it’s your
place not to put yourself forward. Write what is dictated to you, that
is your business!”
Dyukovsky flushed crimson, walked out, and slammed the door.
“A clever fellow, the rogue,” Tchubikov muttered, looking after him.
“Ve-ery clever! Only inappropriately hasty. I shall have to buy him a
cigar-case at the fair for a present.”
Next morning a lad with a big head and a hare lip came from Klyauzovka.
He gave his name as the shepherd Danilko, and furnished a very
interesting piece of information.
“I had had a drop,” said he. “I stayed on till midnight at my crony’s.
As I was going home, being drunk, I got into the river for a bathe. I
was bathing and what do I see! Two men coming along the dam carrying
something black. ‘Tyoo!’ I shouted at them. They were scared, and cut
along as fast as they could go into the Makarev kitchen-gardens. Strike
me dead, if it wasn’t the master they were carrying!”
Towards evening of the same day Psyekov and Nikolashka were arrested and
taken under guard to the district town. In the town they were put in the
prison tower. II
Twelve days passed.
It was morning. The examining magistrate, Nikolay Yermolaitch, was
sitting at a green table at home, looking through the papers, relating
to the “Klyauzov case”; Dyukovsky was pacing up and down the room
restlessly, like a wolf in a cage.
“You are convinced of the guilt of Nikolashka and Psyekov,” he said,
nervously pulling at his youthful beard. “Why is it you refuse to be
convinced of the guilt of Marya Ivanovna? Haven’t you evidence enough?”
“I don’t say that I don’t believe in it. I am convinced of it, but
somehow I can’t believe it. . . . There is no real evidence. It’s all
theoretical, as it were. . . . Fanaticism and one thing and another. . .
.”
“And you must have an axe and bloodstained sheets! . . . You lawyers!
Well, I will prove it to you then! Do give up your slip-shod attitude to
the psychological aspect of the case. Your Marya Ivanovna ought to be in
Siberia! I’ll prove it. If theoretical proof is not enough for you, I
have something material. . . . It will show you how right my theory is!
Only let me go about a little!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Swedish match! Have you forgotten? I haven’t forgotten it! I’ll
find out who struck it in the murdered man’s room! It was not struck by
Nikolashka, nor by Psyekov, neither of whom turned out to have matches
when searched, but a third person, that is Marya Ivanovna. And I will
prove it! . . . Only let me drive about the district, make some
inquiries. . . .”
“Oh, very well, sit down. . . . Let us proceed to the examination.”
Dyukovsky sat down to the table, and thrust his long nose into the
papers.
“Bring in Nikolay Tetchov!” cried the examining magistrate.
Nikolashka was brought in. He was pale and thin as a chip. He was
trembling.
“Tetchov!” began Tchubikov. “In 1879 you were convicted of theft and
condemned to a term of imprisonment. In 1882 you were condemned for
theft a second time, and a second time sent to prison . . . We know all
about it. . . .”
A look of surprise came up into Nikolashka’s face. The examining
magistrate’s omniscience amazed him, but soon wonder was replaced by an
expression of extreme distress. He broke into sobs, and asked leave to
go to wash, and calm himself. He was led out.
“Bring in Psyekov!” said the examining magistrate.
Psyekov was led in. The young man’s face had greatly changed during
those twelve days. He was thin, pale, and wasted. There was a look of
apathy in his eyes.
“Sit down, Psyekov,” said Tchubikov. “I hope that to-day you will be
sensible and not persist in lying as on other occasions. All this time
you have denied your participation in the murder of Klyauzov, in spite
of the mass of evidence against you. It is senseless. Confession is some
mitigation of guilt. To-day I am talking to you for the last time. If
you don’t confess to-day, to-morrow it will be too late. Come, tell us.
. . .”
“I know nothing, and I don’t know your evidence,” whispered Psyekov.
“That’s useless! Well then, allow me to tell you how it happened. On
Saturday evening, you were sitting in Klyauzov’s bedroom drinking vodka
and beer with him.” (Dyukovsky riveted his eyes on Psyekov’s face, and
did not remove them during the whole monologue.) “Nikolay was waiting
upon you. Between twelve and one Mark Ivanitch told you he wanted to go
to bed. He always did go to bed at that time. While he was taking off
his boots and giving you some instructions regarding the estate, Nikolay
and you at a given signal seized your intoxicated master and flung him
back upon the bed. One of you sat on his feet, the other on his head. At
that moment the lady, you know who, in a black dress, who had arranged
with you beforehand the part she would take in the crime, came in from
the passage. She picked up the pillow, and proceeded to smother him with
it. During the struggle, the light went out. The woman took a box of
Swedish matches out of her pocket and lighted the candle. Isn’t that
right? I see from your face that what I say is true. Well, to proceed. .
. . Having smothered him, and being convinced that he had ceased to
breathe, Nikolay and you dragged him out of window and put him down near
the burdocks. Afraid that he might regain consciousness, you struck him
with something sharp. Then you carried him, and laid him for some time
under a lilac bush. After resting and considering a little, you carried
him . . . lifted him over the hurdle. . . . Then went along the road. .
. Then comes the dam; near the dam you were frightened by a peasant. But
what is the matter with you?”
Psyekov, white as a sheet, got up, staggering.
“I am suffocating!” he said. “Very well. . . . So be it. . . . Only I
must go. . . . Please.”
Psyekov was led out.
“At last he has admitted it!” said Tchubikov, stretching at his ease.
“He has given himself away! How neatly I caught him there.”
“And he didn’t deny the woman in black!” said Dyukovsky, laughing. “I am
awfully worried over that Swedish match, though! I can’t endure it any
longer. Good-bye! I am going!”
Dyukovsky put on his cap and went off. Tchubikov began interrogating
Akulka.
Akulka declared that she knew nothing about it. . . .
“I have lived with you and with nobody else!” she said.
At six o’clock in the evening Dyukovsky returned. He was more excited
than ever. His hands trembled so much that he could not unbutton his
overcoat. His cheeks were burning. It was evident that he had not come
back without news.
“Veni, vidi, vici!” he cried, dashing into Tchubikov’s room and sinking
into an arm-chair. “I vow on my honour, I begin to believe in my own
genius. Listen, damnation take us! Listen and wonder, old friend! It’s
comic and it’s sad. You have three in your grasp already . . . haven’t
you? I have found a fourth murderer, or rather murderess, for it is a
woman! And what a woman! I would have given ten years of my life merely
to touch her shoulders. But . . . listen. I drove to Klyauzovka and
proceeded to describe a spiral round it. On the way I visited all the
shopkeepers and innkeepers, asking for Swedish matches. Everywhere I was
told ‘No.’ I have been on my round up to now. Twenty times I lost hope,
and as many times regained it. I have been on the go all day long, and
only an hour ago came upon what I was looking for. A couple of miles
from here they gave me a packet of a dozen boxes of matches. One box was
missing . . . I asked at once: ‘Who bought that box?’ ‘So-and-so. She
took a fancy to them. . . They crackle.’ My dear fellow! Nikolay
Yermolaitch! What can sometimes be done by a man who has been expelled
from a seminary and studied Gaboriau is beyond all conception! From to-
day I shall began to respect myself! . . . Ough. . . . Well, let us go!”
“Go where?”
“To her, to the fourth. . . . We must make haste, or . . . I shall
explode with impatience! Do you know who she is? You will never guess.
The young wife of our old police superintendent, Yevgraf Kuzmitch, Olga
Petrovna; that’s who it is! She bought that box of matches!”
“You . . . you. . . . Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s very natural! In the first place she smokes, and in the second she
was head over ears in love with Klyauzov. He rejected her love for the
sake of an Akulka. Revenge. I remember now, I once came upon them behind
the screen in the kitchen. She was cursing him, while he was smoking her
cigarette and puffing the smoke into her face. But do come along; make
haste, for it is getting dark already . . . . Let us go!”
“I have not gone so completely crazy yet as to disturb a respectable,
honourable woman at night for the sake of a wretched boy!”
“Honourable, respectable. . . . You are a rag then, not an examining
magistrate! I have never ventured to abuse you, but now you force me to
it! You rag! you old fogey! Come, dear Nikolay Yermolaitch, I entreat
you!”
The examining magistrate waved his hand in refusal and spat in disgust.
“I beg you! I beg you, not for my own sake, but in the interests of
justice! I beseech you, indeed! Do me a favour, if only for once in your
life!”
Dyukovsky fell on his knees.
“Nikolay Yermolaitch, do be so good! Call me a scoundrel, a worthless
wretch if I am in error about that woman! It is such a case, you know!
It is a case! More like a novel than a case. The fame of it will be all
over Russia. They will make you examining magistrate for particularly
important cases! Do understand, you unreasonable old man!”
The examining magistrate frowned and irresolutely put out his hand
towards his hat.
“Well, the devil take you!” he said, “let us go.”
It was already dark when the examining magistrate’s waggonette rolled up
to the police superintendent’s door.
“What brutes we are!” said Tchubikov, as he reached for the bell. “We
are disturbing people.”
“Never mind, never mind, don’t be frightened. We will say that one of
the springs has broken.”
Tchubikov and Dyukovsky were met in the doorway by a tall, plump woman
of three and twenty, with eyebrows as black as pitch and full red lips.
It was Olga Petrovna herself.
“Ah, how very nice,” she said, smiling all over her face. “You are just
in time for supper. My Yevgraf Kuzmitch is not at home. . . . He is
staying at the priest’s. But we can get on without him. Sit down. Have
you come from an inquiry?”
“Yes. . . . We have broken one of our springs, you know,” began
Tchubikov, going into the drawing-room and sitting down in an easy-
chair.
“Take her by surprise at once and overwhelm her,” Dyukovsky whispered to
him.
“A spring .. . er . . . yes. . . . We just drove up. . . .”
“Overwhelm her, I tell you! She will guess if you go drawing it out.”
“Oh, do as you like, but spare me,” muttered Tchubikov, getting up and
walking to the window. “I can’t! You cooked the mess, you eat it!”
“Yes, the spring,” Dyukovsky began, going up to the superintendent’s
wife and wrinkling his long nose. “We have not come in to . . . er-er-er
. . . supper, nor to see Yevgraf Kuzmitch. We have come to ask you,
madam, where is Mark Ivanovitch whom you have murdered?”
“What? What Mark Ivanovitch?” faltered the superintendent’s wife, and
her full face was suddenly in one instant suffused with crimson. “I . .
. don’t understand.”
“I ask you in the name of the law! Where is Klyauzov? We know all about
it!”
“Through whom?” the superintendent’s wife asked slowly, unable to face
Dyukovsky’s eyes.
“Kindly inform us where he is!”
“But how did you find out? Who told you?”
“We know all about it. I insist in the name of the law.”
The examining magistrate, encouraged by the lady’s confusion, went up to
her.
“Tell us and we will go away. Otherwise we . . .”
“What do you want with him?”
“What is the object of such questions, madam? We ask you for
information. You are trembling, confused. . . . Yes, he has been
murdered, and if you will have it, murdered by you! Your accomplices
have betrayed you!”
The police superintendent’s wife turned pale.
“Come along,” she said quietly, wringing her hands. “He is hidden in the
bath-house. Only for God’s sake, don’t tell my husband! I implore you!
It would be too much for him.”
The superintendent’s wife took a big key from the wall, and led her
visitors through the kitchen and the passage into the yard. It was dark
in the yard. There was a drizzle of fine rain. The superintendent’s wife
went on ahead. Tchubikov and Dyukovsky strode after her through the long
grass, breathing in the smell of wild hemp and slops, which made a
squelching sound under their feet. It was a big yard. Soon there were no
more pools of slops, and their feet felt ploughed land. In the darkness
they saw the silhouette of trees, and among the trees a little house
with a crooked chimney.
“This is the bath-house,” said the superintendent’s wife, “but, I
implore you, do not tell anyone.”
Going up to the bath-house, Tchubikov and Dyukovsky saw a large padlock
on the door.
“Get ready your candle-end and matches,” Tchubikov whispered to his
assistant.
The superintendent’s wife unlocked the padlock and let the visitors into
the bath-house. Dyukovsky struck a match and lighted up the entry. In
the middle of it stood a table. On the table, beside a podgy little
samovar, was a soup tureen with some cold cabbage-soup in it, and a dish
with traces of some sauce on it.
“Go on!”
They went into the next room, the bath-room. There, too, was a table. On
the table there stood a big dish of ham, a bottle of vodka, plates,
knives and forks.
“But where is he . . . where’s the murdered man?”
“He is on the top shelf,” whispered the superintendent’s wife, turning
paler than ever and trembling.
Dyukovsky took the candle-end in his hand and climbed up to the upper
shelf. There he saw a long, human body, lying motionless on a big
feather bed. The body emitted a faint snore. . . .
“They have made fools of us, damn it all!” Dyukovsky cried. “This is not
he! It is some living blockhead lying here. Hi! who are you, damnation
take you!”
The body drew in its breath with a whistling sound and moved. Dyukovsky
prodded it with his elbow. It lifted up its arms, stretched, and raised
its head.
“Who is that poking?” a hoarse, ponderous bass voice inquired. “What do
you want?”
Dyukovsky held the candle-end to the face of the unknown and uttered a
shriek. In the crimson nose, in the ruffled, uncombed hair, in the
pitch-black moustaches of which one was jauntily twisted and pointed
insolently towards the ceiling, he recognised Cornet Klyauzov.
“You. . . . Mark . . . Ivanitch! Impossible!”
The examining magistrate looked up and was dumbfoundered.
“It is I, yes. . . . And it’s you, Dyukovsky! What the devil do you want
here? And whose ugly mug is that down there? Holy Saints, it’s the
examining magistrate! How in the world did you come here?”
Klyauzov hurriedly got down and embraced Tchubikov. Olga Petrovna
whisked out of the door.
“However did you come? Let’s have a drink!—dash it all! Tra-ta-ti-to-tom
. . . . Let’s have a drink! Who brought you here, though? How did you
get to know I was here? It doesn’t matter, though! Have a drink!”
Klyauzov lighted the lamp and poured out three glasses of vodka.
“The fact is, I don’t understand you,” said the examining magistrate,
throwing out his hands. “Is it you, or not you?”
“Stop that. . . . Do you want to give me a sermon? Don’t trouble
yourself! Dyukovsky boy, drink up your vodka! Friends, let us pass the .
. . What are you staring at . . . ? Drink!”
“All the same, I can’t understand,” said the examining magistrate,
mechanically drinking his vodka. “Why are you here?”
“Why shouldn’t I be here, if I am comfortable here?”
Klyauzov sipped his vodka and ate some ham.
“I am staying with the superintendent’s wife, as you see. In the wilds
among the ruins, like some house goblin. Drink! I felt sorry for her,
you know, old man! I took pity on her, and, well, I am living here in
the deserted bath-house, like a hermit. . . . I am well fed. Next week I
am thinking of moving on. . . . I’ve had enough of it. . . .”
“Inconceivable!” said Dyukovsky.
“What is there inconceivable in it?”
“Inconceivable! For God’s sake, how did your boot get into the garden?”
“What boot?”
“We found one of your boots in the bedroom and the other in the garden.”
“And what do you want to know that for? It is not your business. But do
drink, dash it all. Since you have waked me up, you may as well drink!
There’s an interesting tale about that boot, my boy. I didn’t want to
come to Olga’s. I didn’t feel inclined, you know, I’d had a drop too
much. . . . She came under the window and began scolding me. . . . You
know how women . . . as a rule. Being drunk, I up and flung my boot at
her. Ha-ha! . . . ‘Don’t scold,’ I said. She clambered in at the window,
lighted the lamp, and gave me a good drubbing, as I was drunk. I have
plenty to eat here. . . . Love, vodka, and good things! But where are
you off to? Tchubikov, where are you off to?”
The examining magistrate spat on the floor and walked out of the bath-
house. Dyukovsky followed him with his head hanging. Both got into the
waggonette in silence and drove off. Never had the road seemed so long
and dreary. Both were silent. Tchubikov was shaking with anger all the
way. Dyukovsky hid his face in his collar as though he were afraid the
darkness and the drizzling rain might read his shame on his face.
On getting home the examining magistrate found the doctor, Tyutyuev,
there. The doctor was sitting at the table and heaving deep sighs as he
turned over the pages of the Neva.
“The things that are going on in the world,” he said, greeting the
examining magistrate with a melancholy smile. “Austria is at it again .
. . and Gladstone, too, in a way. . . .”
Tchubikov flung his hat under the table and began to tremble.
“You devil of a skeleton! Don’t bother me! I’ve told you a thousand
times over, don’t bother me with your politics! It’s not the time for
politics! And as for you,” he turned upon Dyukovsky and shook his fist
at him, “as for you. . . . I’ll never forget it, as long as I live!”
“But the Swedish match, you know! How could I tell. . . .”
“Choke yourself with your match! Go away and don’t irritate me, or
goodness knows what I shall do to you. Don’t let me set eyes on you.”
Dyukovsky heaved a sigh, took his hat, and went out.
“I’ll go and get drunk!” he decided, as he went out of the gate, and he
sauntered dejectedly towards the tavern.
When the superintendent’s wife got home from the bath-house she found
her husband in the drawing-room.
“What did the examining magistrate come about?” asked her husband.
“He came to say that they had found Klyauzov. Only fancy, they found him
staying with another man’s wife.”
“Ah, Mark Ivanitch, Mark Ivanitch!” sighed the police superintendent,
turning up his eyes. “I told you that dissipation would lead to no good!
I told you so—you wouldn’t heed me!”
The Bishop and Other Stories
THE BISHOP I
THE evening service was being celebrated on the eve of Palm Sunday in
the Old Petrovsky Convent. When they began distributing the palm it was
close upon ten o’clock, the candles were burning dimly, the wicks wanted
snuffing; it was all in a sort of mist. In the twilight of the church
the crowd seemed heaving like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been
unwell for the last three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and
young, men’s and women’s—were alike, that everyone who came up for the
palm had the same expression in his eyes. In the mist he could not see
the doors; the crowd kept moving and looked as though there were no end
to it. The female choir was singing, a nun was reading the prayers for
the day.
How stifling, how hot it was! How long the service went on! Bishop Pyotr
was tired. His breathing was laboured and rapid, his throat was parched,
his shoulders ached with weariness, his legs were trembling. And it
disturbed him unpleasantly when a religious maniac uttered occasional
shrieks in the gallery. And then all of a sudden, as though in a dream
or delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though his own mother Marya
Timofyevna, whom he had not seen for nine years, or some old woman just
like his mother, came up to him out of the crowd, and, after taking a
palm branch from him, walked away looking at him all the while good-
humouredly with a kind, joyful smile until she was lost in the crowd.
And for some reason tears flowed down his face. There was peace in his
heart, everything was well, yet he kept gazing fixedly towards the left
choir, where the prayers were being read, where in the dusk of evening
you could not recognize anyone, and—wept. Tears glistened on his face
and on his beard. Here someone close at hand was weeping, then someone
else farther away, then others and still others, and little by little
the church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later, within five
minutes, the nuns’ choir was singing; no one was weeping and everything
was as before.
Soon the service was over. When the bishop got into his carriage to
drive home, the gay, melodious chime of the heavy, costly bells was
filling the whole garden in the moonlight. The white walls, the white
crosses on the tombs, the white birch-trees and black shadows, and the
far-away moon in the sky exactly over the convent, seemed now living
their own life, apart and incomprehensible, yet very near to man. It was
the beginning of April, and after the warm spring day it turned cool;
there was a faint touch of frost, and the breath of spring could be felt
in the soft, chilly air. The road from the convent to the town was
sandy, the horses had to go at a walking pace, and on both sides of the
carriage in the brilliant, peaceful moonlight there were people trudging
along home from church through the sand. And all was silent, sunk in
thought; everything around seemed kindly, youthful, akin,
everything—trees and sky and even the moon, and one longed to think that
so it would be always.
At last the carriage drove into the town and rumbled along the principal
street. The shops were already shut, but at Erakin’s, the millionaire
shopkeeper’s, they were trying the new electric lights, which flickered
brightly, and a crowd of people were gathered round. Then came wide,
dark, deserted streets, one after another; then the highroad, the open
country, the fragrance of pines. And suddenly there rose up before the
bishop’s eyes a white turreted wall, and behind it a tall belfry in the
full moonlight, and beside it five shining, golden cupolas: this was the
Pankratievsky Monastery, in which Bishop Pyotr lived. And here, too,
high above the monastery, was the silent, dreamy moon. The carriage
drove in at the gate, crunching over the sand; here and there in the
moonlight there were glimpses of dark monastic figures, and there was
the sound of footsteps on the flag-stones. . . .
“You know, your holiness, your mamma arrived while you were away,” the
lay brother informed the bishop as he went into his cell.
“My mother? When did she come?”
“Before the evening service. She asked first where you were and then she
went to the convent.”
“Then it was her I saw in the church, just now! Oh, Lord!”
And the bishop laughed with joy.
“She bade me tell your holiness,” the lay brother went on, “that she
would come to-morrow. She had a little girl with her—her grandchild, I
suppose. They are staying at Ovsyannikov’s inn.”
“What time is it now?”
“A little after eleven.”
“Oh, how vexing!”
The bishop sat for a little while in the parlour, hesitating, and as it
were refusing to believe it was so late. His arms and legs were stiff,
his head ached. He was hot and uncomfortable. After resting a little he
went into his bedroom, and there, too, he sat a little, still thinking
of his mother; he could hear the lay brother going away, and Father
Sisoy coughing the other side of the wall. The monastery clock struck a
quarter.
The bishop changed his clothes and began reading the prayers before
sleep. He read attentively those old, long familiar prayers, and at the
same time thought about his mother. She had nine children and about
forty grandchildren. At one time, she had lived with her husband, the
deacon, in a poor village; she had lived there a very long time from the
age of seventeen to sixty. The bishop remembered her from early
childhood, almost from the age of three, and—how he had loved her!
Sweet, precious childhood, always fondly remembered! Why did it, that
long-past time that could never return, why did it seem brighter,
fuller, and more festive than it had really been? When in his childhood
or youth he had been ill, how tender and sympathetic his mother had
been! And now his prayers mingled with the memories, which gleamed more
and more brightly like a flame, and the prayers did not hinder his
thinking of his mother.
When he had finished his prayers he undressed and lay down, and at once,
as soon as it was dark, there rose before his mind his dead father, his
mother, his native village Lesopolye . . . the creak of wheels, the
bleat of sheep, the church bells on bright summer mornings, the gypsies
under the window—oh, how sweet to think of it! He remembered the priest
of Lesopolye, Father Simeon—mild, gentle, kindly; he was a lean little
man, while his son, a divinity student, was a huge fellow and talked in
a roaring bass voice. The priest’s son had flown into a rage with the
cook and abused her: “Ah, you Jehud’s ass!” and Father Simeon
overhearing it, said not a word, and was only ashamed because he could
not remember where such an ass was mentioned in the Bible. After him the
priest at Lesopolye had been Father Demyan, who used to drink heavily,
and at times drank till he saw green snakes, and was even nicknamed
Demyan Snakeseer. The schoolmaster at Lesopolye was Matvey Nikolaitch,
who had been a divinity student, a kind and intelligent man, but he,
too, was a drunkard; he never beat the schoolchildren, but for some
reason he always had hanging on his wall a bunch of birch-twigs, and
below it an utterly meaningless inscription in Latin: “Betula
kinderbalsamica secuta.” He had a shaggy black dog whom he called
Syntax.
And his holiness laughed. Six miles from Lesopolye was the village
Obnino with a wonder-working ikon. In the summer they used to carry the
ikon in procession about the neighbouring villages and ring the bells
the whole day long; first in one village and then in another, and it
used to seem to the bishop then that joy was quivering in the air, and
he (in those days his name was Pavlusha) used to follow the ikon,
bareheaded and barefoot, with naïve faith, with a naïve smile,
infinitely happy. In Obnino, he remembered now, there were always a lot
of people, and the priest there, Father Alexey, to save time during
mass, used to make his deaf nephew Ilarion read the names of those for
whose health or whose souls’ peace prayers were asked. Ilarion used to
read them, now and then getting a five or ten kopeck piece for the
service, and only when he was grey and bald, when life was nearly over,
he suddenly saw written on one of the pieces of paper: “What a fool you
are, Ilarion.” Up to fifteen at least Pavlusha was undeveloped and idle
at his lessons, so much so that they thought of taking him away from the
clerical school and putting him into a shop; one day, going to the post
at Obnino for letters, he had stared a long time at the post-office
clerks and asked: “Allow me to ask, how do you get your salary, every
month or every day?”
His holiness crossed himself and turned over on the other side, trying
to stop thinking and go to sleep.
“My mother has come,” he remembered and laughed.
The moon peeped in at the window, the floor was lighted up, and there
were shadows on it. A cricket was chirping. Through the wall Father
Sisoy was snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound that
suggested loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy. Sisoy had once been
housekeeper to the bishop of the diocese, and was called now “the former
Father Housekeeper”; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery
twelve miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the town, too. He had
come to the Pankratievsky Monastery three days before, and the bishop
had kept him that he might talk to him at his leisure about matters of
business, about the arrangements here. . . .
At half-past one they began ringing for matins. Father Sisoy could be
heard coughing, muttering something in a discontented voice, then he got
up and walked barefoot about the rooms.
“Father Sisoy,” the bishop called.
Sisoy went back to his room and a little later made his appearance in
his boots, with a candle; he had on his cassock over his underclothes
and on his head was an old faded skull-cap.
“I can’t sleep,” said the bishop, sitting up. “I must be unwell. And
what it is I don’t know. Fever!”
“You must have caught cold, your holiness. You must be rubbed with
tallow.” Sisoy stood a little and yawned. “O Lord, forgive me, a
sinner.”
“They had the electric lights on at Erakin’s today,” he said; “I don’t
like it!”
Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always dissatisfied with something,
and his eyes were angry-looking and prominent as a crab’s.
“I don’t like it,” he said, going away. “I don’t like it. Bother it!” II
Next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop took the service in the cathedral in
the town, then he visited the bishop of the diocese, then visited a very
sick old lady, the widow of a general, and at last drove home. Between
one and two o’clock he had welcome visitors dining with him—his mother
and his niece Katya, a child of eight years old. All dinner-time the
spring sunshine was streaming in at the windows, throwing bright light
on the white tablecloth and on Katya’s red hair. Through the double
windows they could hear the noise of the rooks and the notes of the
starlings in the garden.
“It is nine years since we have met,” said the old lady. “And when I
looked at you in the monastery yesterday, good Lord! you’ve not changed
a bit, except maybe you are thinner and your beard is a little longer.
Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven! Yesterday at the evening service no one
could help crying. I, too, as I looked at you, suddenly began crying,
though I couldn’t say why. His Holy Will!”
And in spite of the affectionate tone in which she said this, he could
see she was constrained as though she were uncertain whether to address
him formally or familiarly, to laugh or not, and that she felt herself
more a deacon’s widow than his mother. And Katya gazed without bElinking
at her uncle, his holiness, as though trying to discover what sort of a
person he was. Her hair sprang up from under the comb and the velvet
ribbon and stood out like a halo; she had a turned-up nose and sly eyes.
The child had broken a glass before sitting down to dinner, and now her
grandmother, as she talked, moved away from Katya first a wineglass and
then a tumbler. The bishop listened to his mother and remembered how
many, many years ago she used to take him and his brothers and sisters
to relations whom she considered rich; in those days she was taken up
with the care of her children, now with her grandchildren, and she had
brought Katya. . . .
“Your sister, Varenka, has four children,” she told him; “Katya, here,
is the eldest. And your brother-in-law Father Ivan fell sick, God knows
of what, and died three days before the Assumption; and my poor Varenka
is left a beggar.”
“And how is Nikanor getting on?” the bishop asked about his eldest
brother.
“He is all right, thank God. Though he has nothing much, yet he can
live. Only there is one thing: his son, my grandson Nikolasha, did not
want to go into the Church; he has gone to the university to be a
doctor. He thinks it is better; but who knows! His Holy Will!”
“Nikolasha cuts up dead people,” said Katya, spilling water over her
knees.
“Sit still, child,” her grandmother observed calmly, and took the glass
out of her hand. “Say a prayer, and go on eating.”
“How long it is since we have seen each other!” said the bishop, and he
tenderly stroked his mother’s hand and shoulder; “and I missed you
abroad, mother, I missed you dreadfully.”
“Thank you.”
“I used to sit in the evenings at the open window, lonely and alone;
often there was music playing, and all at once I used to be overcome
with homesickness and felt as though I would give everything only to be
at home and see you.”
His mother smiled, beamed, but at once she made a grave face and said:
“Thank you.”
His mood suddenly changed. He looked at his mother and could not
understand how she had come by that respectfulness, that timid
expression of face: what was it for? And he did not recognize her. He
felt sad and vexed. And then his head ached just as it had the day
before; his legs felt fearfully tired, and the fish seemed to him stale
and tasteless; he felt thirsty all the time. . . .
After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, arrived and sat for an hour
and a half in silence with rigid countenances; the archimandrite, a
silent, rather deaf man, came to see him about business. Then they began
ringing for vespers; the sun was setting behind the wood and the day was
over. When he returned from church, he hurriedly said his prayers, got
into bed, and wrapped himself up as warm as possible.
It was disagreeable to remember the fish he had eaten at dinner. The
moonlight worried him, and then he heard talking. In an adjoining room,
probably in the parlour, Father Sisoy was talking politics:
“There’s war among the Japanese now. They are fighting. The Japanese, my
good soul, are the same as the Montenegrins; they are the same race.
They were under the Turkish yoke together.”
And then he heard the voice of Marya Timofyevna:
“So, having said our prayers and drunk tea, we went, you know, to Father
Yegor at Novokatnoye, so. . .”
And she kept on saying, “having had tea” or “having drunk tea,” and it
seemed as though the only thing she had done in her life was to drink
tea.
The bishop slowly, languidly, recalled the seminary, the academy. For
three years he had been Greek teacher in the seminary: by that time he
could not read without spectacles. Then he had become a monk; he had
been made a school inspector. Then he had defended his thesis for his
degree. When he was thirty-two he had been made rector of the seminary,
and consecrated archimandrite: and then his life had been so easy, so
pleasant; it seemed so long, so long, no end was in sight. Then he had
begun to be ill, had grown very thin and almost blind, and by the advice
of the doctors had to give up everything and go abroad.
“And what then?” asked Sisoy in the next room.
“Then we drank tea . . .” answered Marya Timofyevna.
“Good gracious, you’ve got a green beard,” said Katya suddenly in
surprise, and she laughed.
The bishop remembered that the grey-headed Father Sisoy’s beard really
had a shade of green in it, and he laughed.
“God have mercy upon us, what we have to put up with with this girl!”
said Sisoy, aloud, getting angry. “Spoilt child! Sit quiet!”
The bishop remembered the perfectly new white church in which he had
conducted the services while living abroad, he remembered the sound of
the warm sea. In his flat he had five lofty light rooms; in his study he
had a new writing-table, lots of books. He had read a great deal and
often written. And he remembered how he had pined for his native land,
how a blind beggar woman had played the guitar under his window every
day and sung of love, and how, as he listened, he had always for some
reason thought of the past. But eight years had passed and he had been
called back to Russia, and now he was a suffragan bishop, and all the
past had retreated far away into the mist as though it were a dream. . .
.
Father Sisoy came into the bedroom with a candle.
“I say!” he said, wondering, “are you asleep already, your holiness?”
“What is it?”
“Why, it’s still early, ten o’clock or less. I bought a candle to-day; I
wanted to rub you with tallow.”
“I am in a fever . . .” said the bishop, and he sat up. “I really ought
to have something. My head is bad. . . .”
Sisoy took off the bishop’s shirt and began rubbing his chest and back
with tallow.
“That’s the way . . . that’s the way . . .” he said. “Lord Jesus Christ
. . . that’s the way. I walked to the town to-day; I was at what’s-his-
name’s—the chief priest Sidonsky’s. . . . I had tea with him. I don’t
like him. Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That’s the way. I don’t like him.”
III
The bishop of the diocese, a very fat old man, was ill with rheumatism
or gout, and had been in bed for over a month. Bishop Pyotr went to see
him almost every day, and saw all who came to ask his help. And now that
he was unwell he was struck by the emptiness, the triviality of
everything which they asked and for which they wept; he was vexed at
their ignorance, their timidity; and all this useless, petty business
oppressed him by the mass of it, and it seemed to him that now he
understood the diocesan bishop, who had once in his young days written
on “The Doctrines of the Freedom of the Will,” and now seemed to be all
lost in trivialities, to have forgotten everything, and to have no
thoughts of religion. The bishop must have lost touch with Russian life
while he was abroad; he did not find it easy; the peasants seemed to him
coarse, the women who sought his help dull and stupid, the seminarists
and their teachers uncultivated and at times savage. And the documents
coming in and going out were reckoned by tens of thousands; and what
documents they were! The higher clergy in the whole diocese gave the
priests, young and old, and even their wives and children, marks for
their behaviour—a five, a four, and sometimes even a three; and about
this he had to talk and to read and write serious reports. And there was
positively not one minute to spare; his soul was troubled all day long,
and the bishop was only at peace when he was in church.
He could not get used, either, to the awe which, through no wish of his
own, he inspired in people in spite of his quiet, modest disposition.
All the people in the province seemed to him little, scared, and guilty
when he looked at them. Everyone was timid in his presence, even the old
chief priests; everyone “flopped” at his feet, and not long previously
an old lady, a village priest’s wife who had come to consult him, was so
overcome by awe that she could not utter a single word, and went empty
away. And he, who could never in his sermons bring himself to speak ill
of people, never reproached anyone because he was so sorry for them, was
moved to fury with the people who came to consult him, lost his temper
and flung their petitions on the floor. The whole time he had been here,
not one person had spoken to him genuinely, simply, as to a human being;
even his old mother seemed now not the same! And why, he wondered, did
she chatter away to Sisoy and laugh so much; while with him, her son,
she was grave and usually silent and constrained, which did not suit her
at all. The only person who behaved freely with him and said what he
meant was old Sisoy, who had spent his whole life in the presence of
bishops and had outlived eleven of them. And so the bishop was at ease
with him, although, of course, he was a tedious and nonsensical man.
After the service on Tuesday, his holiness Pyotr was in the diocesan
bishop’s house receiving petitions there; he got excited and angry, and
then drove home. He was as unwell as before; he longed to be in bed, but
he had hardly reached home when he was informed that a young merchant
called Erakin, who subscribed liberally to charities, had come to see
him about a very important matter. The bishop had to see him. Erakin
stayed about an hour, talked very loud, almost shouted, and it was
difficult to understand what he said.
“God grant it may,” he said as he went away. “Most essential! According
to circumstances, your holiness! I trust it may!”
After him came the Mother Superior from a distant convent. And when she
had gone they began ringing for vespers. He had to go to church.
In the evening the monks sang harmoniously, with inspiration. A young
priest with a black beard conducted the service; and the bishop, hearing
of the Bridegroom who comes at midnight and of the Heavenly Mansion
adorned for the festival, felt no repentance for his sins, no
tribulation, but peace at heart and tranquillity. And he was carried
back in thought to the distant past, to his childhood and youth, when,
too, they used to sing of the Bridegroom and of the Heavenly Mansion;
and now that past rose up before him—living, fair, and joyful as in all
likelihood it never had been. And perhaps in the other world, in the
life to come, we shall think of the distant past, of our life here, with
the same feeling. Who knows? The bishop was sitting near the altar. It
was dark; tears flowed down his face. He thought that here he had
attained everything a man in his position could attain; he had faith and
yet everything was not clear, something was lacking still. He did not
want to die; and he still felt that he had missed what was most
important, something of which he had dimly dreamed in the past; and he
was troubled by the same hopes for the future as he had felt in
childhood, at the academy and abroad.
“How well they sing to-day!” he thought, listening to the singing. “How
nice it is!” IV
On Thursday he celebrated mass in the cathedral; it was the Washing of
Feet. When the service was over and the people were going home, it was
sunny, warm; the water gurgled in the gutters, and the unceasing
trilling of the larks, tender, telling of peace, rose from the fields
outside the town. The trees were already awakening and smiling a
welcome, while above them the infinite, fathomless blue sky stretched
into the distance, God knows whither.
On reaching home his holiness drank some tea, then changed his clothes,
lay down on his bed, and told the lay brother to close the shutters on
the windows. The bedroom was darkened. But what weariness, what pain in
his legs and his back, a chill heavy pain, what a noise in his ears! He
had not slept for a long time—for a very long time, as it seemed to him
now, and some trifling detail which haunted his brain as soon as his
eyes were closed prevented him from sleeping. As on the day before,
sounds reached him from the adjoining rooms through the walls, voices,
the jingle of glasses and teaspoons. . . . Marya Timofyevna was gaily
telling Father Sisoy some story with quaint turns of speech, while the
latter answered in a grumpy, ill-humoured voice: “Bother them! Not
likely! What next!” And the bishop again felt vexed and then hurt that
with other people his old mother behaved in a simple, ordinary way,
while with him, her son, she was shy, spoke little, and did not say what
she meant, and even, as he fancied, had during all those three days kept
trying in his presence to find an excuse for standing up, because she
was embarrassed at sitting before him. And his father? He, too,
probably, if he had been living, would not have been able to utter a
word in the bishop’s presence. . . .
Something fell down on the floor in the adjoining room and was broken;
Katya must have dropped a cup or a saucer, for Father Sisoy suddenly
spat and said angrily:
“What a regular nuisance the child is! Lord forgive my transgressions!
One can’t provide enough for her.”
Then all was quiet, the only sounds came from outside. And when the
bishop opened his eyes he saw Katya in his room, standing motionless,
staring at him. Her red hair, as usual, stood up from under the comb
like a halo.
“Is that you, Katya?” he asked. “Who is it downstairs who keeps opening
and shutting a door?”
“I don’t hear it,” answered Katya; and she listened.
“There, someone has just passed by.”
“But that was a noise in your stomach, uncle.”
He laughed and stroked her on the head.
“So you say Cousin Nikolasha cuts up dead people?” he asked after a
pause.
“Yes, he is studying.”
“And is he kind?”
“Oh, yes, he’s kind. But he drinks vodka awfully.”
“And what was it your father died of?”
“Papa was weak and very, very thin, and all at once his throat was bad.
I was ill then, too, and brother Fedya; we all had bad throats. Papa
died, uncle, and we got well.”
Her chin began quivering, and tears gleamed in her eyes and trickled
down her cheeks.
“Your holiness,” she said in a shrill voice, by now weeping bitterly,
“uncle, mother and all of us are left very wretched. . . . Give us a
little money . . . do be kind . . . uncle darling. . . .”
He, too, was moved to tears, and for a long time was too much touched to
speak. Then he stroked her on the head, patted her on the shoulder and
said:
“Very good, very good, my child. When the holy Easter comes, we will
talk it over. . . . I will help you. . . . I will help you. . . .”
His mother came in quietly, timidly, and prayed before the ikon.
Noticing that he was not sleeping, she said:
“Won’t you have a drop of soup?”
“No, thank you,” he answered, “I am not hungry.”
“You seem to be unwell, now I look at you. I should think so; you may
well be ill! The whole day on your legs, the whole day. . . . And, my
goodness, it makes one’s heart ache even to look at you! Well, Easter is
not far off; you will rest then, please God. Then we will have a talk,
too, but now I’m not going to disturb you with my chatter. Come along,
Katya; let his holiness sleep a little.”
And he remembered how once very long ago, when he was a boy, she had
spoken exactly like that, in the same jestingly respectful tone, with a
Church dignitary. . . . Only from her extraordinarily kind eyes and the
timid, anxious glance she stole at him as she went out of the room could
one have guessed that this was his mother. He shut his eyes and seemed
to sleep, but twice heard the clock strike and Father Sisoy coughing the
other side of the wall. And once more his mother came in and looked
timidly at him for a minute. Someone drove up to the steps, as he could
hear, in a coach or in a chaise. Suddenly a knock, the door slammed, the
lay brother came into the bedroom.
“Your holiness,” he called.
“Well?”
“The horses are here; it’s time for the evening service.”
“What o’clock is it?”
“A quarter past seven.”
He dressed and drove to the cathedral. During all the “Twelve Gospels”
he had to stand in the middle of the church without moving, and the
first gospel, the longest and the most beautiful, he read himself. A
mood of confidence and courage came over him. That first gospel, “Now is
the Son of Man glorified,” he knew by heart; and as he read he raised
his eyes from time to time, and saw on both sides a perfect sea of
lights and heard the splutter of candles, but, as in past years, he
could not see the people, and it seemed as though these were all the
same people as had been round him in those days, in his childhood and
his youth; that they would always be the same every year and till such
time as God only knew.
His father had been a deacon, his grandfather a priest, his great-
grandfather a deacon, and his whole family, perhaps from the days when
Christianity had been accepted in Russia, had belonged to the
priesthood; and his love for the Church services, for the priesthood,
for the peal of the bells, was deep in him, ineradicable, innate. In
church, particularly when he took part in the service, he felt vigorous,
of good cheer, happy. So it was now. Only when the eighth gospel had
been read, he felt that his voice had grown weak, even his cough was
inaudible. His head had begun to ache intensely, and he was troubled by
a fear that he might fall down. And his legs were indeed quite numb, so
that by degrees he ceased to feel them and could not understand how or
on what he was standing, and why he did not fall. . . .
It was a quarter to twelve when the service was over. When he reached
home, the bishop undressed and went to bed at once without even saying
his prayers. He could not speak and felt that he could not have stood
up. When he had covered his head with the quilt he felt a sudden longing
to be abroad, an insufferable longing! He felt that he would give his
life not to see those pitiful cheap shutters, those low ceilings, not to
smell that heavy monastery smell. If only there were one person to whom
he could have talked, have opened his heart!
For a long while he heard footsteps in the next room and could not tell
whose they were. At last the door opened, and Sisoy came in with a
candle and a tea-cup in his hand.
“You are in bed already, your holiness?” he asked. “Here I have come to
rub you with spirit and vinegar. A thorough rubbing does a great deal of
good. Lord Jesus Christ! . . . That’s the way . . . that’s the way. . .
. I’ve just been in our monastery. . . . I don’t like it. I’m going away
from here to-morrow, your holiness; I don’t want to stay longer. Lord
Jesus Christ. . . . That’s the way. . . .”
Sisoy could never stay long in the same place, and he felt as though he
had been a whole year in the Pankratievsky Monastery. Above all,
listening to him it was difficult to understand where his home was,
whether he cared for anyone or anything, whether he believed in God. . .
. He did not know himself why he was a monk, and, indeed, he did not
think about it, and the time when he had become a monk had long passed
out of his memory; it seemed as though he had been born a monk.
“I’m going away to-morrow; God be with them all.”
“I should like to talk to you. . . . I can’t find the time,” said the
bishop softly with an effort. “I don’t know anything or anybody here. .
. .”
“I’ll stay till Sunday if you like; so be it, but I don’t want to stay
longer. I am sick of them!”
“I ought not to be a bishop,” said the bishop softly. “I ought to have
been a village priest, a deacon . . . or simply a monk. . . . All this
oppresses me . . . oppresses me.”
“What? Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That’s the way. Come, sleep well, your
holiness! . . . What’s the good of talking? It’s no use. Good-night!”
The bishop did not sleep all night. And at eight o’clock in the morning
he began to have hemorrhage from the bowels. The lay brother was
alarmed, and ran first to the archimandrite, then for the monastery
doctor, Ivan Andreyitch, who lived in the town. The doctor, a stout old
man with a long grey beard, made a prolonged examination of the bishop,
and kept shaking his head and frowning, then said:
“Do you know, your holiness, you have got typhoid?”
After an hour or so of hemorrhage the bishop looked much thinner, paler,
and wasted; his face looked wrinkled, his eyes looked bigger, and he
seemed older, shorter, and it seemed to him that he was thinner, weaker,
more insignificant than any one, that everything that had been had
retreated far, far away and would never go on again or be repeated.
“How good,” he thought, “how good!”
His old mother came. Seeing his wrinkled face and his big eyes, she was
frightened, she fell on her knees by the bed and began kissing his face,
his shoulders, his hands. And to her, too, it seemed that he was
thinner, weaker, and more insignificant than anyone, and now she forgot
that he was a bishop, and kissed him as though he were a child very near
and very dear to her.
“Pavlusha, darling,” she said; “my own, my darling son! . . . Why are
you like this? Pavlusha, answer me!”
Katya, pale and severe, stood beside her, unable to understand what was
the matter with her uncle, why there was such a look of suffering on her
grandmother’s face, why she was saying such sad and touching things. By
now he could not utter a word, he could understand nothing, and he
imagined he was a simple ordinary man, that he was walking quickly,
cheerfully through the fields, tapping with his stick, while above him
was the open sky bathed in sunshine, and that he was free now as a bird
and could go where he liked!
“Pavlusha, my darling son, answer me,” the old woman was saying. “What
is it? My own!”
“Don’t disturb his holiness,” Sisoy said angrily, walking about the
room. “Let him sleep . . . what’s the use . . . it’s no good. . . .”
Three doctors arrived, consulted together, and went away again. The day
was long, incredibly long, then the night came on and passed slowly,
slowly, and towards morning on Saturday the lay brother went in to the
old mother who was lying on the sofa in the parlour, and asked her to go
into the bedroom: the bishop had just breathed his last.
Next day was Easter Sunday. There were forty-two churches and six
monasteries in the town; the sonorous, joyful clang of the bells hung
over the town from morning till night unceasingly, setting the spring
air aquiver; the birds were singing, the sun was shining brightly. The
big market square was noisy, swings were going, barrel organs were
playing, accordions were squeaking, drunken voices were shouting. After
midday people began driving up and down the principal street.
In short, all was merriment, everything was satisfactory, just as it had
been the year before, and as it will be in all likelihood next year.
A month later a new suffragan bishop was appointed, and no one thought
anything more of Bishop Pyotr, and afterwards he was completely
forgotten. And only the dead man’s old mother, who is living to-day with
her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, when she
goes out at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the
pasture, begins talking of her children and her grandchildren, and says
that she had a son a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she
may not be believed. . . .
And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.
THE LETTER
The clerical superintendent of the district, his Reverence Father Fyodor
Orlov, a handsome, well-nourished man of fifty, grave and important as
he always was, with an habitual expression of dignity that never left
his face, was walking to and fro in his little drawing-room, extremely
exhausted, and thinking intensely about the same thing: “When would his
visitor go?” The thought worried him and did not leave him for a minute.
The visitor, Father Anastasy, the priest of one of the villages near the
town, had come to him three hours before on some very unpleasant and
dreary business of his own, had stayed on and on, was now sitting in the
corner at a little round table with his elbow on a thick account book,
and apparently had no thought of going, though it was getting on for
nine o’clock in the evening.
Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently
happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to
observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in
their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed
with an effort and disguised with a lie. But Father Anastasy perceived
it clearly, and realized that his presence was burdensome and
inappropriate, that his Reverence, who had taken an early morning
service in the night and a long mass at midday, was exhausted and
longing for repose; every minute he was meaning to get up and go, but he
did not get up, he sat on as though he were waiting for something. He
was an old man of sixty-five, prematurely aged, with a bent and bony
figure, with a sunken face and the dark skin of old age, with red
eyelids and a long narrow back like a fish’s; he was dressed in a smart
cassock of a light lilac colour, but too big for him (presented to him
by the widow of a young priest lately deceased), a full cloth coat with
a broad leather belt, and clumsy high boots the size and hue of which
showed clearly that Father Anastasy dispensed with goloshes. In spite of
his position and his venerable age, there was something pitiful, crushed
and humiliated in his lustreless red eyes, in the strands of grey hair
with a shade of green in it on the nape of his neck, and in the big
shoulder-blades on his lean back. . . . He sat without speaking or
moving, and coughed with circumspection, as though afraid that the sound
of his coughing might make his presence more noticeable.
The old man had come to see his Reverence on business. Two months before
he had been prohibited from officiating till further notice, and his
case was being inquired into. His shortcomings were numerous. He was
intemperate in his habits, fell out with the other clergy and the
commune, kept the church records and accounts carelessly —these were the
formal charges against him; but besides all that, there had been rumours
for a long time past that he celebrated unlawful marriages for money and
sold certificates of having fasted and taken the sacrament to officials
and officers who came to him from the town. These rumours were
maintained the more persistently that he was poor and had nine children
to keep, who were as incompetent and unsuccessful as himself. The sons
were spoilt and uneducated, and stayed at home doing nothing, while the
daughters were ugly and did not get married.
Not having the moral force to be open, his Reverence walked up and down
the room and said nothing or spoke in hints.
“So you are not going home to-night?” he asked, stopping near the dark
window and poking with his little finger into the cage where a canary
was asleep with its feathers puffed out.
Father Anastasy started, coughed cautiously and said rapidly:
“Home? I don’t care to, Fyodor Ilyitch. I cannot officiate, as you know,
so what am I to do there? I came away on purpose that I might not have
to look the people in the face. One is ashamed not to officiate, as you
know. Besides, I have business here, Fyodor Ilyitch. To-morrow after
breaking the fast I want to talk things over thoroughly with the Father
charged with the inquiry.”
“Ah! . . .” yawned his Reverence, “and where are you staying?”
“At Zyavkin’s.”
Father Anastasy suddenly remembered that within two hours his Reverence
had to take the Easter-night service, and he felt so ashamed of his
unwelcome burdensome presence that he made up his mind to go away at
once and let the exhausted man rest. And the old man got up to go. But
before he began saying good-bye he stood clearing his throat for a
minute and looking searchingly at his Reverence’s back, still with the
same expression of vague expectation in his whole figure; his face was
working with shame, timidity, and a pitiful forced laugh such as one
sees in people who do not respect themselves. Waving his hand as it were
resolutely, he said with a husky quavering laugh:
“Father Fyodor, do me one more kindness: bid them give me at leave-
taking . . . one little glass of vodka.”
“It’s not the time to drink vodka now,” said his Reverence sternly. “One
must have some regard for decency.”
Father Anastasy was still more overwhelmed by confusion; he laughed,
and, forgetting his resolution to go away, he dropped back on his chair.
His Reverence looked at his helpless, embarrassed face and his bent
figure and he felt sorry for the old man.
“Please God, we will have a drink to-morrow,” he said, wishing to soften
his stem refusal. “Everything is good in due season.”
His Reverence believed in people’s reforming, but now when a feeling of
pity had been kindled in him it seemed to him that this disgraced, worn-
out old man, entangled in a network of sins and weaknesses, was
hopelessly wrecked, that there was no power on earth that could
straighten out his spine, give brightness to his eyes and restrain the
unpleasant timid laugh which he laughed on purpose to smoothe over to
some slight extent the repulsive impression he made on people.
The old man seemed now to Father Fyodor not guilty and not vicious, but
humiliated, insulted, unfortunate; his Reverence thought of his wife,
his nine children, the dirty beggarly shelter at Zyavkin’s; he thought
for some reason of the people who are glad to see priests drunk and
persons in authority detected in crimes; and thought that the very best
thing Father Anastasy could do now would be to die as soon as possible
and to depart from this world for ever.
There were a sound of footsteps.
“Father Fyodor, you are not resting?” a bass voice asked from the
passage.
“No, deacon; come in.”
Orlov’s colleague, the deacon Liubimov, an elderly man with a big bald
patch on the top of his head, though his hair was still black and he was
still vigorous-looking, with thick black eyebrows like a Georgian’s,
walked in. He bowed to Father Anastasy and sat down.
“What good news have you?” asked his Reverence.
“What good news?” answered the deacon, and after a pause he went on with
a smile: “When your children are little, your trouble is small; when
your children are big, your trouble is great. Such goings on, Father
Fyodor, that I don’t know what to think of it. It’s a regular farce,
that’s what it is.”
He paused again for a little, smiled still more broadly and said:
“Nikolay Matveyitch came back from Harkov to-day. He has been telling me
about my Pyotr. He has been to see him twice, he tells me.”
“What has he been telling you, then?”
“He has upset me, God bless him. He meant to please me but when I came
to think it over, it seems there is not much to be pleased at. I ought
to grieve rather than be pleased. . . ‘Your Petrushka,’ said he, ‘lives
in fine style. He is far above us now,’ said he. ‘Well thank God for
that,’ said I. ‘I dined with him,’ said he, ‘and saw his whole manner of
life. He lives like a gentleman,’ he said; ‘you couldn’t wish to live
better.’ I was naturally interested and I asked, ‘And what did you have
for dinner?’ ‘First,’ he said, ‘a fish course something like fish soup,
then tongue and peas,’ and then he said, ‘roast turkey.’ ‘Turkey in
Lent? that is something to please me,’ said I. ‘Turkey in Lent? Eh?’”
“Nothing marvellous in that,” said his Reverence, screwing up his eyes
ironically. And sticking both thumbs in his belt, he drew himself up and
said in the tone in which he usually delivered discourses or gave his
Scripture lessons to the pupils in the district school: “People who do
not keep the fasts are divided into two different categories: some do
not keep them through laxity, others through infidelity. Your Pyotr does
not keep them through infidelity. Yes.”
The deacon looked timidly at Father Fyodor’s stern face and said:
“There is worse to follow. . . . We talked and discussed one thing and
another, and it turned out that my infidel of a son is living with some
madame, another man’s wife. She takes the place of wife and hostess in
his flat, pours out the tea, receives visitors and all the rest of it,
as though she were his lawful wife. For over two years he has been
keeping up this dance with this viper. It’s a regular farce. They have
been living together for three years and no children.”
“I suppose they have been living in chastity!” chuckled Father Anastasy,
coughing huskily. “There are children, Father Deacon— there are, but
they don’t keep them at home! They send them to the Foundling! He-he-he!
. . .” Anastasy went on coughing till he choked.
“Don’t interfere, Father Anastasy,” said his Reverence sternly.
“Nikolay Matveyitch asked him, ‘What madame is this helping the soup at
your table?’” the deacon went on, gloomily scanning Anastasy’s bent
figure. “‘That is my wife,’ said he. ‘When was your wedding?’ Nikolay
Matveyitch asked him, and Pyotr answered, ‘We were married at Kulikov’s
restaurant.’”
His Reverence’s eyes flashed wrathfully and the colour came into his
temples. Apart from his sinfulness, Pyotr was not a person he liked.
Father Fyodor had, as they say, a grudge against him. He remembered him
a boy at school—he remembered him distinctly, because even then the boy
had seemed to him not normal. As a schoolboy, Petrushka had been ashamed
to serve at the altar, had been offended at being addressed without
ceremony, had not crossed himself on entering the room, and what was
still more noteworthy, was fond of talking a great deal and with
heat—and, in Father Fyodor’s opinion, much talking was unseemly in
children and pernicious to them; moreover Petrushka had taken up a
contemptuous and critical attitude to fishing, a pursuit to which both
his Reverence and the deacon were greatly addicted. As a student Pyotr
had not gone to church at all, had slept till midday, had looked down on
people, and had been given to raising delicate and insoluble questions
with a peculiarly provoking zest.
“What would you have?” his Reverence asked, going up to the deacon and
looking at him angrily. “What would you have? This was to be expected! I
always knew and was convinced that nothing good would come of your
Pyotr! I told you so, and I tell you so now. What you have sown, that
now you must reap! Reap it!”
“But what have I sown, Father Fyodor?” the deacon asked softly, looking
up at his Reverence.
“Why, who is to blame if not you? You’re his father, he is your
offspring! You ought to have admonished him, have instilled the fear of
God into him. A child must be taught! You have brought him into the
world, but you haven’t trained him up in the right way. It’s a sin! It’s
wrong! It’s a shame!”
His Reverence forgot his exhaustion, paced to and fro and went on
talking. Drops of perspiration came out on the deacon’s bald head and
forehead. He raised his eyes to his Reverence with a look of guilt, and
said:
“But didn’t I train him, Father Fyodor? Lord have mercy on us, haven’t I
been a father to my children? You know yourself I spared nothing for his
good; I have prayed and done my best all my life to give him a thorough
education. He went to the high school and I got him tutors, and he took
his degree at the University. And as to my not being able to influence
his mind, Father Fyodor, why, you can judge for yourself that I am not
qualified to do so! Sometimes when he used to come here as a student, I
would begin admonishing him in my way, and he wouldn’t heed me. I’d say
to him, ‘Go to church,’ and he would answer, ‘What for?’ I would begin
explaining, and he would say, ‘Why? what for?’ Or he would slap me on
the shoulder and say, ‘Everything in this world is relative, approximate
and conditional. I don’t know anything, and you don’t know anything
either, dad.’”
Father Anastasy laughed huskily, cleared his throat and waved his
fingers in the air as though preparing to say something. His Reverence
glanced at him and said sternly:
“Don’t interfere, Father Anastasy.”
The old man laughed, beamed, and evidently listened with pleasure to the
deacon as though he were glad there were other sinful persons in this
world besides himself. The deacon spoke sincerely, with an aching heart,
and tears actually came into his eyes. Father Fyodor felt sorry for him.
“You are to blame, deacon, you are to blame,” he said, but not so
sternly and heatedly as before. “If you could beget him, you ought to
know how to instruct him. You ought to have trained him in his
childhood; it’s no good trying to correct a student.”
A silence followed; the deacon clasped his hands and said with a sigh:
“But you know I shall have to answer for him!”
“To be sure you will!”
After a brief silence his Reverence yawned and sighed at the same moment
and asked:
“Who is reading the ‘Acts’?”
“Yevstrat. Yevstrat always reads them.”
The deacon got up and, looking imploringly at his Reverence, asked:
“Father Fyodor, what am I to do now?”
“Do as you please; you are his father, not I. You ought to know best.”
“I don’t know anything, Father Fyodor! Tell me what to do, for goodness’
sake! Would you believe it, I am sick at heart! I can’t sleep now, nor
keep quiet, and the holiday will be no holiday to me. Tell me what to
do, Father Fyodor!”
“Write him a letter.”
“What am I to write to him?”
“Write that he mustn’t go on like that. Write shortly, but sternly and
circumstantially, without softening or smoothing away his guilt. It is
your parental duty; if you write, you will have done your duty and will
be at peace.”
“That’s true. But what am I to write to him, to what effect? If I write
to him, he will answer, ‘Why? what for? Why is it a sin?’”
Father Anastasy laughed hoarsely again, and brandished his fingers.
“Why? what for? why is it a sin?” he began shrilly. “I was once
confessing a gentleman, and I told him that excessive confidence in the
Divine Mercy is a sin; and he asked, ‘Why?’ I tried to answer him,
but——” Anastasy slapped himself on the forehead. “I had nothing here.
He-he-he-he! . . .”
Anastasy’s words, his hoarse jangling laugh at what was not laughable,
had an unpleasant effect on his Reverence and on the deacon. The former
was on the point of saying, “Don’t interfere” again, but he did not say
it, he only frowned.
“I can’t write to him,” sighed the deacon.
“If you can’t, who can?”
“Father Fyodor!” said the deacon, putting his head on one side and
pressing his hand to his heart. “I am an uneducated slow-witted man,
while the Lord has vouchsafed you judgment and wisdom. You know
everything and understand everything. You can master anything, while I
don’t know how to put my words together sensibly. Be generous. Instruct
me how to write the letter. Teach me what to say and how to say it. . .
.”
“What is there to teach? There is nothing to teach. Sit down and write.”
“Oh, do me the favour, Father Fyodor! I beseech you! I know he will be
frightened and will attend to your letter, because, you see, you are a
cultivated man too. Do be so good! I’ll sit down, and you’ll dictate to
me. It will be a sin to write to-morrow, but now would be the very time;
my mind would be set at rest.”
His Reverence looked at the deacon’s imploring face, thought of the
disagreeable Pyotr, and consented to dictate. He made the deacon sit
down to his table and began.
“Well, write . . . ‘Christ is risen, dear son . . .’ exclamation mark.
‘Rumours have reached me, your father,’ then in parenthesis, ‘from what
source is no concern of yours . . .’ close the parenthesis. . . . Have
you written it? ‘That you are leading a life inconsistent with the laws
both of God and of man. Neither the luxurious comfort, nor the worldly
splendour, nor the culture with which you seek outwardly to disguise it,
can hide your heathen manner of life. In name you are a Christian, but
in your real nature a heathen as pitiful and wretched as all other
heathens—more wretched, indeed, seeing that those heathens who know not
Christ are lost from ignorance, while you are lost in that, possessing a
treasure, you neglect it. I will not enumerate here your vices, which
you know well enough; I will say that I see the cause of your ruin in
your infidelity. You imagine yourself to be wise, boast of your
knowledge of science, but refuse to see that science without faith, far
from elevating a man, actually degrades him to the level of a lower
animal, inasmuch as. . .’” The whole letter was in this strain.
When he had finished writing it the deacon read it aloud, beamed all
over and jumped up.
“It’s a gift, it’s really a gift!” he said, clasping his hands and
looking enthusiastically at his Reverence. “To think of the Lord’s
bestowing a gift like that! Eh? Holy Mother! I do believe I couldn’t
write a letter like that in a hundred years. Lord save you!”
Father Anastasy was enthusiastic too.
“One couldn’t write like that without a gift,” he said, getting up and
wagging his fingers—“that one couldn’t! His rhetoric would trip any
philosopher and shut him up. Intellect. Brilliant intellect! If you
weren’t married, Father Fyodor, you would have been a bishop long ago,
you would really!”
Having vented his wrath in a letter, his Reverence felt relieved; his
fatigue and exhaustion came back to him. The deacon was an old friend,
and his Reverence did not hesitate to say to him:
“Well deacon, go, and God bless you. I’ll have half an hour’s nap on the
sofa; I must rest.”
The deacon went away and took Anastasy with him. As is always the case
on Easter Eve, it was dark in the street, but the whole sky was
sparkling with bright luminous stars. There was a scent of spring and
holiday in the soft still air.
“How long was he dictating?” the deacon said admiringly. “Ten minutes,
not more! It would have taken someone else a month to compose such a
letter. Eh! What a mind! Such a mind that I don’t know what to call it!
It’s a marvel! It’s really a marvel!”
“Education!” sighed Anastasy as he crossed the muddy street; holding up
his cassock to his waist. “It’s not for us to compare ourselves with
him. We come of the sacristan class, while he has had a learned
education. Yes, he’s a real man, there is no denying that.”
“And you listen how he’ll read the Gospel in Latin at mass to-day! He
knows Latin and he knows Greek. . . . Ah Petrushka, Petrushka!” the
deacon said, suddenly remembering. “Now that will make him scratch his
head! That will shut his mouth, that will bring it home to him! Now he
won’t ask ‘Why.’ It is a case of one wit to outwit another! Haha-ha!”
The deacon laughed gaily and loudly. Since the letter had been written
to Pyotr he had become serene and more cheerful. The consciousness of
having performed his duty as a father and his faith in the power of the
letter had brought back his mirthfulness and good-humour.
“Pyotr means a stone,” said he, as he went into his house. “My Pyotr is
not a stone, but a rag. A viper has fastened upon him and he pampers
her, and hasn’t the pluck to kick her out. Tfoo! To think there should
be women like that, God forgive me! Eh? Has she no shame? She has
fastened upon the lad, sticking to him, and keeps him tied to her apron
strings. . . . Fie upon her!”
“Perhaps it’s not she keeps hold of him, but he of her?”
“She is a shameless one anyway! Not that I am defending Pyotr. . . .
He’ll catch it. He’ll read the letter and scratch his head! He’ll burn
with shame!”
“It’s a splendid letter, only you know I wouldn’t send it, Father
Deacon. Let him alone.”
“What?” said the deacon, disconcerted.
“Why. . . . Don’t send it, deacon! What’s the sense of it? Suppose you
send it; he reads it, and . . . and what then? You’ll only upset him.
Forgive him. Let him alone!”
The deacon looked in surprise at Anastasy’s dark face, at his unbuttoned
cassock, which looked in the dusk like wings, and shrugged his
shoulders.
“How can I forgive him like that?” he asked. “Why I shall have to answer
for him to God!”
“Even so, forgive him all the same. Really! And God will forgive you for
your kindness to him.”
“But he is my son, isn’t he? Ought I not to teach him?”
“Teach him? Of course—why not? You can teach him, but why call him a
heathen? It will hurt his feelings, you know, deacon. . . .”
The deacon was a widower, and lived in a little house with three
windows. His elder sister, an old maid, looked after his house for him,
though she had three years before lost the use of her legs and was
confined to her bed; he was afraid of her, obeyed her, and did nothing
without her advice. Father Anastasy went in with him. Seeing his table
already laid with Easter cakes and red eggs, he began weeping for some
reason, probably thinking of his own home, and to turn these tears into
a jest, he at once laughed huskily.
“Yes, we shall soon be breaking the fast,” he said. “Yes . . . it
wouldn’t come amiss, deacon, to have a little glass now. Can we? I’ll
drink it so that the old lady does not hear,” he whispered, glancing
sideways towards the door.
Without a word the deacon moved a decanter and wineglass towards him. He
unfolded the letter and began reading it aloud. And now the letter
pleased him just as much as when his Reverence had dictated it to him.
He beamed with pleasure and wagged his head, as though he had been
tasting something very sweet.
“A-ah, what a letter!” he said. “Petrushka has never dreamt of such a
letter. It’s just what he wants, something to throw him into a fever. .
.”
“Do you know, deacon, don’t send it!” said Anastasy, pouring himself out
a second glass of vodka as though unconsciously. “Forgive him, let him
alone! I am telling you . . . what I really think. If his own father
can’t forgive him, who will forgive him? And so he’ll live without
forgiveness. Think, deacon: there will be plenty to chastise him without
you, but you should look out for some who will show mercy to your son!
I’ll . . . I’ll . . . have just one more. The last, old man. . . . Just
sit down and write straight off to him, ‘I forgive you Pyotr!’ He will
under-sta-and! He will fe-el it! I understand it from myself, you see
old man . . . deacon, I mean. When I lived like other people, I hadn’t
much to trouble about, but now since I lost the image and semblance,
there is only one thing I care about, that good people should forgive
me. And remember, too, it’s not the righteous but sinners we must
forgive. Why should you forgive your old woman if she is not sinful? No,
you must forgive a man when he is a sad sight to look at . . . yes!”
Anastasy leaned his head on his fist and sank into thought.
“It’s a terrible thing, deacon,” he sighed, evidently struggling with
the desire to take another glass—“a terrible thing! In sin my mother
bore me, in sin I have lived, in sin I shall die. . . . God forgive me,
a sinner! I have gone astray, deacon! There is no salvation for me! And
it’s not as though I had gone astray in my life, but in old age—at
death’s door . . . I . . .”
The old man, with a hopeless gesture, drank off another glass, then got
up and moved to another seat. The deacon, still keeping the letter in
his hand, was walking up and down the room. He was thinking of his son.
Displeasure, distress and anxiety no longer troubled him; all that had
gone into the letter. Now he was simply picturing Pyotr; he imagined his
face, he thought of the past years when his son used to come to stay
with him for the holidays. His thoughts were only of what was good,
warm, touching, of which one might think for a whole lifetime without
wearying. Longing for his son, he read the letter through once more and
looked questioningly at Anastasy.
“Don’t send it,” said the latter, with a wave of his hand.
“No, I must send it anyway; I must . . . bring him to his senses a
little, all the same. It’s just as well. . . .”
The deacon took an envelope from the table, but before putting the
letter into it he sat down to the table, smiled and added on his own
account at the bottom of the letter:
“They have sent us a new inspector. He’s much friskier than the old one.
He’s a great one for dancing and talking, and there’s nothing he can’t
do, so that all the Govorovsky girls are crazy over him. Our military
chief, Kostyrev, will soon get the sack too, they say. High time he
did!” And very well pleased, without the faintest idea that with this
postscript he had completely spoiled the stern letter, the deacon
addressed the envelope and laid it in the most conspicuous place on the
table.
EASTER EVE
I was standing on the bank of the River Goltva, waiting for the ferry-
boat from the other side. At ordinary times the Goltva is a humble
stream of moderate size, silent and pensive, gently glimmering from
behind thick reeds; but now a regular lake lay stretched out before me.
The waters of spring, running riot, had overflowed both banks and
flooded both sides of the river for a long distance, submerging
vegetable gardens, hayfields and marshes, so that it was no unusual
thing to meet poplars and bushes sticking out above the surface of the
water and looking in the darkness like grim solitary crags.
The weather seemed to me magnificent. It was dark, yet I could see the
trees, the water and the people. . . . The world was lighted by the
stars, which were scattered thickly all over the sky. I don’t remember
ever seeing so many stars. Literally one could not have put a finger in
between them. There were some as big as a goose’s egg, others tiny as
hempseed. . . . They had come out for the festival procession, every one
of them, little and big, washed, renewed and joyful, and everyone of
them was softly twinkling its beams. The sky was reflected in the water;
the stars were bathing in its dark depths and trembling with the
quivering eddies. The air was warm and still. . . . Here and there, far
away on the further bank in the impenetrable darkness, several bright
red lights were gleaming. . . .
A couple of paces from me I saw the dark silhouette of a peasant in a
high hat, with a thick knotted stick in his hand.
“How long the ferry-boat is in coming!” I said.
“It is time it was here,” the silhouette answered.
“You are waiting for the ferry-boat, too?”
“No I am not,” yawned the peasant—“I am waiting for the illumination. I
should have gone, but to tell you the truth, I haven’t the five kopecks
for the ferry.”
“I’ll give you the five kopecks.”
“No; I humbly thank you. . . . With that five kopecks put up a candle
for me over there in the monastery. . . . That will be more interesting,
and I will stand here. What can it mean, no ferry-boat, as though it had
sunk in the water!”
The peasant went up to the water’s edge, took the rope in his hands, and
shouted; “Ieronim! Ieron—im!”
As though in answer to his shout, the slow peal of a great bell floated
across from the further bank. The note was deep and low, as from the
thickest string of a double bass; it seemed as though the darkness
itself had hoarsely uttered it. At once there was the sound of a cannon
shot. It rolled away in the darkness and ended somewhere in the far
distance behind me. The peasant took off his hat and crossed himself.
‘“Christ is risen,” he said.
Before the vibrations of the first peal of the bell had time to die away
in the air a second sounded, after it at once a third, and the darkness
was filled with an unbroken quivering clamour. Near the red lights fresh
lights flashed, and all began moving together and twinkling restlessly.
“Ieron—im!” we heard a hollow prolonged shout.
“They are shouting from the other bank,” said the peasant, “so there is
no ferry there either. Our Ieronim has gone to sleep.”
The lights and the velvety chimes of the bell drew one towards them. . .
. I was already beginning to lose patience and grow anxious, but behold
at last, staring into the dark distance, I saw the outline of something
very much like a gibbet. It was the long-expected ferry. It moved
towards us with such deliberation that if it had not been that its lines
grew gradually more definite, one might have supposed that it was
standing still or moving to the other bank.
“Make haste! Ieronim!” shouted my peasant. “The gentleman’s tired of
waiting!”
The ferry crawled to the bank, gave a lurch and stopped with a creak. A
tall man in a monk’s cassock and a conical cap stood on it, holding the
rope.
“Why have you been so long?” I asked jumping upon the ferry.
“Forgive me, for Christ’s sake,” Ieronim answered gently. “Is there no
one else?”
“No one. . . .”
Ieronim took hold of the rope in both hands, bent himself to the figure
of a mark of interrogation, and gasped. The ferry-boat creaked and gave
a lurch. The outline of the peasant in the high hat began slowly
retreating from me—so the ferry was moving off. Ieronim soon drew
himself up and began working with one hand only. We were silent, gazing
towards the bank to which we were floating. There the illumination for
which the peasant was waiting had begun. At the water’s edge barrels of
tar were flaring like huge camp fires. Their reflections, crimson as the
rising moon, crept to meet us in long broad streaks. The burning barrels
lighted up their own smoke and the long shadows of men flitting about
the fire; but further to one side and behind them from where the velvety
chime floated there was still the same unbroken black gloom. All at
once, cleaving the darkness, a rocket zigzagged in a golden ribbon up
the sky; it described an arc and, as though broken to pieces against the
sky, was scattered crackling into sparks. There was a roar from the bank
like a far-away hurrah.
“How beautiful!” I said.
“Beautiful beyond words!” sighed Ieronim. “Such a night, sir! Another
time one would pay no attention to the fireworks, but to-day one
rejoices in every vanity. Where do you come from?”
I told him where I came from.
“To be sure . . . a joyful day to-day. . . .” Ieronim went on in a weak
sighing tenor like the voice of a convalescent. “The sky is rejoicing
and the earth and what is under the earth. All the creatures are keeping
holiday. Only tell me kind sir, why, even in the time of great
rejoicing, a man cannot forget his sorrows?”
I fancied that this unexpected question was to draw me into one of those
endless religious conversations which bored and idle monks are so fond
of. I was not disposed to talk much, and so I only asked:
“What sorrows have you, father?”
“As a rule only the same as all men, kind sir, but to-day a special
sorrow has happened in the monastery: at mass, during the reading of the
Bible, the monk and deacon Nikolay died.”
“Well, it’s God’s will!” I said, falling into the monastic tone. “We
must all die. To my mind, you ought to rejoice indeed. . . . They say if
anyone dies at Easter he goes straight to the kingdom of heaven.”
“That’s true.”
We sank into silence. The figure of the peasant in the high hat melted
into the lines of the bank. The tar barrels were flaring up more and
more.
“The Holy Scripture points clearly to the vanity of sorrow and so does
reflection,” said Ieronim, breaking the silence, “but why does the heart
grieve and refuse to listen to reason? Why does one want to weep
bitterly?”
Ieronim shrugged his shoulders, turned to me and said quickly:
“If I died, or anyone else, it would not be worth notice perhaps; but,
you see, Nikolay is dead! No one else but Nikolay! Indeed, it’s hard to
believe that he is no more! I stand here on my ferry-boat and every
minute I keep fancying that he will lift up his voice from the bank. He
always used to come to the bank and call to me that I might not be
afraid on the ferry. He used to get up from his bed at night on purpose
for that. He was a kind soul. My God! how kindly and gracious! Many a
mother is not so good to her child as Nikolay was to me! Lord, save his
soul!”
Ieronim took hold of the rope, but turned to me again at once.
“And such a lofty intelligence, your honour,” he said in a vibrating
voice. “Such a sweet and harmonious tongue! Just as they will sing
immediately at early matins: ‘Oh lovely! oh sweet is Thy Voice!’ Besides
all other human qualities, he had, too, an extraordinary gift!”
“What gift?” I asked.
The monk scrutinized me, and as though he had convinced himself that he
could trust me with a secret, he laughed good-humouredly.
“He had a gift for writing hymns of praise,” he said. “It was a marvel,
sir; you couldn’t call it anything else! You would be amazed if I tell
you about it. Our Father Archimandrite comes from Moscow, the Father
Sub-Prior studied at the Kazan academy, we have wise monks and elders,
but, would you believe it, no one could write them; while Nikolay, a
simple monk, a deacon, had not studied anywhere, and had not even any
outer appearance of it, but he wrote them! A marvel! A real marvel!”
Ieronim clasped his hands and, completely forgetting the rope, went on
eagerly:
“The Father Sub-Prior has great difficulty in composing sermons; when he
wrote the history of the monastery he worried all the brotherhood and
drove a dozen times to town, while Nikolay wrote canticles! Hymns of
praise! That’s a very different thing from a sermon or a history!”
“Is it difficult to write them?” I asked.
“There’s great difficulty!” Ieronim wagged his head. “You can do nothing
by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift. The monks who
don’t understand argue that you only need to know the life of the saint
for whom you are writing the hymn, and to make it harmonize with the
other hymns of praise. But that’s a mistake, sir. Of course, anyone who
writes canticles must know the life of the saint to perfection, to the
least trivial detail. To be sure, one must make them harmonize with the
other canticles and know where to begin and what to write about. To give
you an instance, the first response begins everywhere with ‘the chosen’
or ‘the elect.’ . . . The first line must always begin with the ‘angel.’
In the canticle of praise to Jesus the Most Sweet, if you are interested
in the subject, it begins like this: ‘Of angels Creator and Lord of all
powers!’ In the canticle to the Holy Mother of God: ‘Of angels the
foremost sent down from on high,’ to Nikolay, the Wonder-worker— ‘An
angel in semblance, though in substance a man,’ and so on. Everywhere
you begin with the angel. Of course, it would be impossible without
making them harmonize, but the lives of the saints and conformity with
the others is not what matters; what matters is the beauty and sweetness
of it. Everything must be harmonious, brief and complete. There must be
in every line softness, graciousness and tenderness; not one word should
be harsh or rough or unsuitable. It must be written so that the
worshipper may rejoice at heart and weep, while his mind is stirred and
he is thrown into a tremor. In the canticle to the Holy Mother are the
words: ‘Rejoice, O Thou too high for human thought to reach! Rejoice, O
Thou too deep for angels’ eyes to fathom!’ In another place in the same
canticle: ‘Rejoice, O tree that bearest the fair fruit of light that is
the food of the faithful! Rejoice, O tree of gracious spreading shade,
under which there is shelter for multitudes!’”
Ieronim hid his face in his hands, as though frightened at something or
overcome with shame, and shook his head.
“Tree that bearest the fair fruit of light . . . tree of gracious
spreading shade. . . .” he muttered. “To think that a man should find
words like those! Such a power is a gift from God! For brevity he packs
many thoughts into one phrase, and how smooth and complete it all is!
‘Light-radiating torch to all that be . . .’ comes in the canticle to
Jesus the Most Sweet. ‘Light-radiating!’ There is no such word in
conversation or in books, but you see he invented it, he found it in his
mind! Apart from the smoothness and grandeur of language, sir, every
line must be beautified in every way, there must be flowers and
lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world. And
every exclamation ought to be put so as to be smooth and easy for the
ear. ‘Rejoice, thou flower of heavenly growth!’ comes in the hymn to
Nikolay the Wonder-worker. It’s not simply ‘heavenly flower,’ but
‘flower of heavenly growth.’ It’s smoother so and sweet to the ear. That
was just as Nikolay wrote it! Exactly like that! I can’t tell you how he
used to write!”
“Well, in that case it is a pity he is dead,” I said; “but let us get
on, father, or we shall be late.”
Ieronim started and ran to the rope; they were beginning to peal all the
bells. Probably the procession was already going on near the monastery,
for all the dark space behind the tar barrels was now dotted with moving
lights.
“Did Nikolay print his hymns?” I asked Ieronim.
“How could he print them?” he sighed. “And indeed, it would be strange
to print them. What would be the object? No one in the monastery takes
any interest in them. They don’t like them. They knew Nikolay wrote
them, but they let it pass unnoticed. No one esteems new writings
nowadays, sir!”
“Were they prejudiced against him?”
“Yes, indeed. If Nikolay had been an elder perhaps the brethren would
have been interested, but he wasn’t forty, you know. There were some who
laughed and even thought his writing a sin.”
“What did he write them for?”
“Chiefly for his own comfort. Of all the brotherhood, I was the only one
who read his hymns. I used to go to him in secret, that no one else
might know of it, and he was glad that I took an interest in them. He
would embrace me, stroke my head, speak to me in caressing words as to a
little child. He would shut his cell, make me sit down beside him, and
begin to read. . . .”
Ieronim left the rope and came up to me.
“We were dear friends in a way,” he whispered, looking at me with
shining eyes. “Where he went I would go. If I were not there he would
miss me. And he cared more for me than for anyone, and all because I
used to weep over his hymns. It makes me sad to remember. Now I feel
just like an orphan or a widow. You know, in our monastery they are all
good people, kind and pious, but . . . there is no one with softness and
refinement, they are just like peasants. They all speak loudly, and
tramp heavily when they walk; they are noisy, they clear their throats,
but Nikolay always talked softly, caressingly, and if he noticed that
anyone was asleep or praying he would slip by like a fly or a gnat. His
face was tender, compassionate. . . .”
Ieronim heaved a deep sigh and took hold of the rope again. We were by
now approaching the bank. We floated straight out of the darkness and
stillness of the river into an enchanted realm, full of stifling smoke,
crackling lights and uproar. By now one could distinctly see people
moving near the tar barrels. The flickering of the lights gave a
strange, almost fantastic, expression to their figures and red faces.
From time to time one caught among the heads and faces a glimpse of a
horse’s head motionless as though cast in copper.
“They’ll begin singing the Easter hymn directly, . . .” said Ieronim,
“and Nikolay is gone; there is no one to appreciate it. . . . There was
nothing written dearer to him than that hymn. He used to take in every
word! You’ll be there, sir, so notice what is sung; it takes your breath
away!”
“Won’t you be in church, then?”
“I can’t; . . . I have to work the ferry. . . .”
“But won’t they relieve you?”
“I don’t know. . . . I ought to have been relieved at eight; but, as you
see, they don’t come! . . . And I must own I should have liked to be in
the church. . . .”
“Are you a monk?”
“Yes . . . that is, I am a lay-brother.”
The ferry ran into the bank and stopped. I thrust a five-kopeck piece
into Ieronim’s hand for taking me across and jumped on land. Immediately
a cart with a boy and a sleeping woman in it drove creaking onto the
ferry. Ieronim, with a faint glow from the lights on his figure, pressed
on the rope, bent down to it, and started the ferry back. . . .
I took a few steps through mud, but a little farther walked on a soft
freshly trodden path. This path led to the dark monastery gates, that
looked like a cavern through a cloud of smoke, through a disorderly
crowd of people, unharnessed horses, carts and chaises. All this crowd
was rattling, snorting, laughing, and the crimson light and wavering
shadows from the smoke flickered over it all . . . . A perfect chaos!
And in this hubbub the people yet found room to load a little cannon and
to sell cakes. There was no less commotion on the other side of the wall
in the monastery precincts, but there was more regard for decorum and
order. Here there was a smell of juniper and incense. They talked
loudly, but there was no sound of laughter or snorting. Near the
tombstones and crosses people pressed close to one another with Easter
cakes and bundles in their arms. Apparently many had come from a long
distance for their cakes to be blessed and now were exhausted. Young lay
brothers, making a metallic sound with their boots, ran busily along the
iron slabs that paved the way from the monastery gates to the church
door. They were busy and shouting on the belfry, too.
“What a restless night!” I thought. “How nice!”
One was tempted to see the same unrest and sleeplessness in all nature,
from the night darkness to the iron slabs, the crosses on the tombs and
the trees under which the people were moving to and fro. But nowhere was
the excitement and restlessness so marked as in the church. An unceasing
struggle was going on in the entrance between the inflowing stream and
the outflowing stream. Some were going in, others going out and soon
coming back again to stand still for a little and begin moving again.
People were scurrying from place to place, lounging about as though they
were looking for something. The stream flowed from the entrance all
round the church, disturbing even the front rows, where persons of
weight and dignity were standing. There could be no thought of
concentrated prayer. There were no prayers at all, but a sort of
continuous, childishly irresponsible joy, seeking a pretext to break out
and vent itself in some movement, even in senseless jostling and
shoving.
The same unaccustomed movement is striking in the Easter service itself.
The altar gates are flung wide open, thick clouds of incense float in
the air near the candelabra; wherever one looks there are lights, the
gleam and splutter of candles. . . . There is no reading; restless and
lighthearted singing goes on to the end without ceasing. After each hymn
the clergy change their vestments and come out to burn the incense,
which is repeated every ten minutes.
I had no sooner taken a place, when a wave rushed from in front and
forced me back. A tall thick-set deacon walked before me with a long red
candle; the grey-headed archimandrite in his golden mitre hurried after
him with the censer. When they had vanished from sight the crowd
squeezed me back to my former position. But ten minutes had not passed
before a new wave burst on me, and again the deacon appeared. This time
he was followed by the Father Sub-Prior, the man who, as Ieronim had
told me, was writing the history of the monastery.
As I mingled with the crowd and caught the infection of the universal
joyful excitement, I felt unbearably sore on Ieronim’s account. Why did
they not send someone to relieve him? Why could not someone of less
feeling and less susceptibility go on the ferry? ‘Lift up thine eyes, O
Sion, and look around,’ they sang in the choir, ‘for thy children have
come to thee as to a beacon of divine light from north and south, and
from east and from the sea. . . .’
I looked at the faces; they all had a lively expression of triumph, but
not one was listening to what was being sung and taking it in, and not
one was ‘holding his breath.’ Why was not Ieronim released? I could
fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending forward and
hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase. All this that glided
by the ears of the people standing by me he would have eagerly drunk in
with his delicately sensitive soul, and would have been spell-bound to
ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there would not have been a man
happier than he in all the church. Now he was plying to and fro over the
dark river and grieving for his dead friend and brother.
The wave surged back. A stout smiling monk, playing with his rosary and
looking round behind him, squeezed sideways by me, making way for a lady
in a hat and velvet cloak. A monastery servant hurried after the lady,
holding a chair over our heads.
I came out of the church. I wanted to have a look at the dead Nikolay,
the unknown canticle writer. I walked about the monastery wall, where
there was a row of cells, peeped into several windows, and, seeing
nothing, came back again. I do not regret now that I did not see
Nikolay; God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I should have lost the
picture my imagination paints for me now. I imagine the lovable poetical
figure solitary and not understood, who went out at nights to call to
Ieronim over the water, and filled his hymns with flowers, stars and
sunbeams, as a pale timid man with soft mild melancholy features. His
eyes must have shone, not only with intelligence, but with kindly
tenderness and that hardly restrained childlike enthusiasm which I could
hear in Ieronim’s voice when he quoted to me passages from the hymns.
When we came out of church after mass it was no longer night. The
morning was beginning. The stars had gone out and the sky was a morose
greyish blue. The iron slabs, the tombstones and the buds on the trees
were covered with dew There was a sharp freshness in the air. Outside
the precincts I did not find the same animated scene as I had beheld in
the night. Horses and men looked exhausted, drowsy, scarcely moved,
while nothing was left of the tar barrels but heaps of black ash. When
anyone is exhausted and sleepy he fancies that nature, too, is in the
same condition. It seemed to me that the trees and the young grass were
asleep. It seemed as though even the bells were not pealing so loudly
and gaily as at night. The restlessness was over, and of the excitement
nothing was left but a pleasant weariness, a longing for sleep and
warmth.
Now I could see both banks of the river; a faint mist hovered over it in
shifting masses. There was a harsh cold breath from the water. When I
jumped on to the ferry, a chaise and some two dozen men and women were
standing on it already. The rope, wet and as I fancied drowsy, stretched
far away across the broad river and in places disappeared in the white
mist.
“Christ is risen! Is there no one else?” asked a soft voice.
I recognized the voice of Ieronim. There was no darkness now to hinder
me from seeing the monk. He was a tall narrow-shouldered man of five-
and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed listless-
looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard. He had an
extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.
“They have not relieved you yet?” I asked in surprise.
“Me?” he answered, turning to me his chilled and dewy face with a smile.
“There is no one to take my place now till morning. They’ll all be going
to the Father Archimandrite’s to break the fast directly.”
With the help of a little peasant in a hat of reddish fur that looked
like the little wooden tubs in which honey is sold, he threw his weight
on the rope; they gasped simultaneously, and the ferry started.
We floated across, disturbing on the way the lazily rising mist.
Everyone was silent. Ieronim worked mechanically with one hand. He
slowly passed his mild lustreless eyes over us; then his glance rested
on the rosy face of a young merchant’s wife with black eyebrows, who was
standing on the ferry beside me silently shrinking from the mist that
wrapped her about. He did not take his eyes off her face all the way.
There was little that was masculine in that prolonged gaze. It seemed to
me that Ieronim was looking in the woman’s face for the soft and tender
features of his dead friend.
A NIGHTMARE
Kunin, a young man of thirty, who was a permanent member of the Rural
Board, on returning from Petersburg to his district, Borisovo,
immediately sent a mounted messenger to Sinkino, for the priest there,
Father Yakov Smirnov.
Five hours later Father Yakov appeared.
“Very glad to make your acquaintance,” said Kunin, meeting him in the
entry. “I’ve been living and serving here for a year; it seems as though
we ought to have been acquainted before. You are very welcome! But . . .
how young you are!” Kunin added in surprise. “What is your age?”
“Twenty-eight, . . .” said Father Yakov, faintly pressing Kunin’s
outstretched hand, and for some reason turning crimson.
Kunin led his visitor into his study and began looking at him more
attentively.
“What an uncouth womanish face!” he thought.
There certainly was a good deal that was womanish in Father Yakov’s
face: the turned-up nose, the bright red cheeks, and the large grey-blue
eyes with scanty, scarcely perceptible eyebrows. His long reddish hair,
smooth and dry, hung down in straight tails on to his shoulders. The
hair on his upper lip was only just beginning to form into a real
masculine moustache, while his little beard belonged to that class of
good-for-nothing beards which among divinity students are for some
reason called “ticklers.” It was scanty and extremely transparent; it
could not have been stroked or combed, it could only have been pinched.
. . . All these scanty decorations were put on unevenly in tufts, as
though Father Yakov, thinking to dress up as a priest and beginning to
gum on the beard, had been interrupted halfway through. He had on a
cassock, the colour of weak coffee with chicory in it, with big patches
on both elbows.
“A queer type,” thought Kunin, looking at his muddy skirts. “Comes to
the house for the first time and can’t dress decently.
“Sit down, Father,” he began more carelessly than cordially, as he moved
an easy-chair to the table. “Sit down, I beg you.”
Father Yakov coughed into his fist, sank awkwardly on to the edge of the
chair, and laid his open hands on his knees. With his short figure, his
narrow chest, his red and perspiring face, he made from the first moment
a most unpleasant impression on Kunin. The latter could never have
imagined that there were such undignified and pitiful-looking priests in
Russia; and in Father Yakov’s attitude, in the way he held his hands on
his knees and sat on the very edge of his chair, he saw a lack of
dignity and even a shade of servility.
“I have invited you on business, Father. . . .” Kunin began, sinking
back in his low chair. “It has fallen to my lot to perform the agreeable
duty of helping you in one of your useful undertakings. . . . On coming
back from Petersburg, I found on my table a letter from the Marshal of
Nobility. Yegor Dmitrevitch suggests that I should take under my
supervision the church parish school which is being opened in Sinkino. I
shall be very glad to, Father, with all my heart. . . . More than that,
I accept the proposition with enthusiasm.”
Kunin got up and walked about the study.
“Of course, both Yegor Dmitrevitch and probably you, too, are aware that
I have not great funds at my disposal. My estate is mortgaged, and I
live exclusively on my salary as the permanent member. So that you
cannot reckon on very much assistance, but I will do all that is in my
power. . . . And when are you thinking of opening the school Father?”
“When we have the money, . . .” answered Father Yakov.
“You have some funds at your disposal already?”
“Scarcely any. . . . The peasants settled at their meeting that they
would pay, every man of them, thirty kopecks a year; but that’s only a
promise, you know! And for the first beginning we should need at least
two hundred roubles. . . .”
“M’yes. . . . Unhappily, I have not that sum now,” said Kunin with a
sigh. “I spent all I had on my tour and got into debt, too. Let us try
and think of some plan together.”
Kunin began planning aloud. He explained his views and watched Father
Yakov’s face, seeking signs of agreement or approval in it. But the face
was apathetic and immobile, and expressed nothing but constrained
shyness and uneasiness. Looking at it, one might have supposed that
Kunin was talking of matters so abstruse that Father Yakov did not
understand and only listened from good manners, and was at the same time
afraid of being detected in his failure to understand.
“The fellow is not one of the brightest, that’s evident . . .” thought
Kunin. “He’s rather shy and much too stupid.”
Father Yakov revived somewhat and even smiled only when the footman came
into the study bringing in two glasses of tea on a tray and a cake-
basket full of biscuits. He took his glass and began drinking at once.
“Shouldn’t we write at once to the bishop?” Kunin went on, meditating
aloud. “To be precise, you know, it is not we, not the Zemstvo, but the
higher ecclesiastical authorities, who have raised the question of the
church parish schools. They ought really to apportion the funds. I
remember I read that a sum of money had been set aside for the purpose.
Do you know nothing about it?”
Father Yakov was so absorbed in drinking tea that he did not answer this
question at once. He lifted his grey-blue eyes to Kunin, thought a
moment, and as though recalling his question, he shook his head in the
negative. An expression of pleasure and of the most ordinary prosaic
appetite overspread his face from ear to ear. He drank and smacked his
lips over every gulp. When he had drunk it to the very last drop, he put
his glass on the table, then took his glass back again, looked at the
bottom of it, then put it back again. The expression of pleasure faded
from his face. . . . Then Kunin saw his visitor take a biscuit from the
cake-basket, nibble a little bit off it, then turn it over in his hand
and hurriedly stick it in his pocket.
“Well, that’s not at all clerical!” thought Kunin, shrugging his
shoulders contemptuously. “What is it, priestly greed or childishness?”
After giving his visitor another glass of tea and seeing him to the
entry, Kunin lay down on the sofa and abandoned himself to the
unpleasant feeling induced in him by the visit of Father Yakov.
“What a strange wild creature!” he thought. “Dirty, untidy, coarse,
stupid, and probably he drinks. . . . My God, and that’s a priest, a
spiritual father! That’s a teacher of the people! I can fancy the irony
there must be in the deacon’s face when before every mass he booms out:
‘Thy blessing, Reverend Father!’ A fine reverend Father! A reverend
Father without a grain of dignity or breeding, hiding biscuits in his
pocket like a schoolboy. . . . Fie! Good Lord, where were the bishop’s
eyes when he ordained a man like that? What can he think of the people
if he gives them a teacher like that? One wants people here who . . .”
And Kunin thought what Russian priests ought to be like.
“If I were a priest, for instance. . . . An educated priest fond of his
work might do a great deal. . . . I should have had the school opened
long ago. And the sermons? If the priest is sincere and is inspired by
love for his work, what wonderful rousing sermons he might give!”
Kunin shut his eyes and began mentally composing a sermon. A little
later he sat down to the table and rapidly began writing.
“I’ll give it to that red-haired fellow, let him read it in church, . .
.” he thought.
The following Sunday Kunin drove over to Sinkino in the morning to
settle the question of the school, and while he was there to make
acquaintance with the church of which he was a parishioner. In spite of
the awful state of the roads, it was a glorious morning. The sun was
shining brightly and cleaving with its rays the layers of white snow
still lingering here and there. The snow as it took leave of the earth
glittered with such diamonds that it hurt the eyes to look, while the
young winter corn was hastily thrusting up its green beside it. The
rooks floated with dignity over the fields. A rook would fly, drop to
earth, and give several hops before standing firmly on its feet. . . .
The wooden church up to which Kunin drove was old and grey; the columns
of the porch had once been painted white, but the colour had now
completely peeled off, and they looked like two ungainly shafts. The
ikon over the door looked like a dark smudged blur. But its poverty
touched and softened Kunin. Modestly dropping his eyes, he went into the
church and stood by the door. The service had only just begun. An old
sacristan, bent into a bow, was reading the “Hours” in a hollow
indistinct tenor. Father Yakov, who conducted the service without a
deacon, was walking about the church, burning incense. Had it not been
for the softened mood in which Kunin found himself on entering the
poverty-stricken church, he certainly would have smiled at the sight of
Father Yakov. The short priest was wearing a crumpled and extremely long
robe of some shabby yellow material; the hem of the robe trailed on the
ground.
The church was not full. Looking at the parishioners, Kunin was struck
at the first glance by one strange circumstance: he saw nothing but old
people and children. . . . Where were the men of working age? Where was
the youth and manhood? But after he had stood there a little and looked
more attentively at the aged-looking faces, Kunin saw that he had
mistaken young people for old. He did not, however, attach any
significance to this little optical illusion.
The church was as cold and grey inside as outside. There was not one
spot on the ikons nor on the dark brown walls which was not begrimed and
defaced by time. There were many windows, but the general effect of
colour was grey, and so it was twilight in the church.
“Anyone pure in soul can pray here very well,” thought Kunin. “Just as
in St. Peter’s in Rome one is impressed by grandeur, here one is touched
by the lowliness and simplicity.”
But his devout mood vanished like smoke as soon as Father Yakov went up
to the altar and began mass. Being still young and having come straight
from the seminary bench to the priesthood, Father Yakov had not yet
formed a set manner of celebrating the service. As he read he seemed to
be vacillating between a high tenor and a thin bass; he bowed clumsily,
walked quickly, and opened and shut the gates abruptly. . . . The old
sacristan, evidently deaf and ailing, did not hear the prayers very
distinctly, and this very often led to slight misunderstandings. Before
Father Yakov had time to finish what he had to say, the sacristan began
chanting his response, or else long after Father Yakov had finished the
old man would be straining his ears, listening in the direction of the
altar and saying nothing till his skirt was pulled. The old man had a
sickly hollow voice and an asthmatic quavering lisp. . . . The complete
lack of dignity and decorum was emphasized by a very small boy who
seconded the sacristan and whose head was hardly visible over the
railing of the choir. The boy sang in a shrill falsetto and seemed to be
trying to avoid singing in tune. Kunin stayed a little while, listened
and went out for a smoke. He was disappointed, and looked at the grey
church almost with dislike.
“They complain of the decline of religious feeling among the people . .
.” he sighed. “I should rather think so! They’d better foist a few more
priests like this one on them!”
Kunin went back into the church three times, and each time he felt a
great temptation to get out into the open air again. Waiting till the
end of the mass, he went to Father Yakov’s. The priest’s house did not
differ outwardly from the peasants’ huts, but the thatch lay more
smoothly on the roof and there were little white curtains in the
windows. Father Yakov led Kunin into a light little room with a clay
floor and walls covered with cheap paper; in spite of some painful
efforts towards luxury in the way of photographs in frames and a clock
with a pair of scissors hanging on the weight the furnishing of the room
impressed him by its scantiness. Looking at the furniture, one might
have supposed that Father Yakov had gone from house to house and
collected it in bits; in one place they had given him a round three-
legged table, in another a stool, in a third a chair with a back bent
violently backwards; in a fourth a chair with an upright back, but the
seat smashed in; while in a fifth they had been liberal and given him a
semblance of a sofa with a flat back and a lattice-work seat. This
semblance had been painted dark red and smelt strongly of paint. Kunin
meant at first to sit down on one of the chairs, but on second thoughts
he sat down on the stool.
“This is the first time you have been to our church?” asked Father
Yakov, hanging his hat on a huge misshapen nail.
“Yes it is. I tell you what, Father, before we begin on business, will
you give me some tea? My soul is parched.”
Father Yakov bElinked, gasped, and went behind the partition wall. There
was a sound of whispering.
“With his wife, I suppose,” thought Kunin; “it would be interesting to
see what the red-headed fellow’s wife is like.”
A little later Father Yakov came back, red and perspiring and with an
effort to smile, sat down on the edge of the sofa.
“They will heat the samovar directly,” he said, without looking at his
visitor.
“My goodness, they have not heated the samovar yet!” Kunin thought with
horror. “A nice time we shall have to wait.”
“I have brought you,” he said, “the rough draft of the letter I have
written to the bishop. I’ll read it after tea; perhaps you may find
something to add. . . .”
“Very well.”
A silence followed. Father Yakov threw furtive glances at the partition
wall, smoothed his hair, and blew his nose.
“It’s wonderful weather, . . .” he said.
“Yes. I read an interesting thing yesterday. . . . the Volsky Zemstvo
have decided to give their schools to the clergy, that’s typical.”
Kunin got up, and pacing up and down the clay floor, began to give
expression to his reflections.
“That would be all right,” he said, “if only the clergy were equal to
their high calling and recognized their tasks. I am so unfortunate as to
know priests whose standard of culture and whose moral qualities make
them hardly fit to be army secretaries, much less priests. You will
agree that a bad teacher does far less harm than a bad priest.”
Kunin glanced at Father Yakov; he was sitting bent up, thinking intently
about something and apparently not listening to his visitor.
“Yasha, come here!” a woman’s voice called from behind the partition.
Father Yakov started and went out. Again a whispering began.
Kunin felt a pang of longing for tea.
“No; it’s no use my waiting for tea here,” he thought, looking at his
watch. “Besides I fancy I am not altogether a welcome visitor. My host
has not deigned to say one word to me; he simply sits and bElinks.”
Kunin took up his hat, waited for Father Yakov to return, and said good-
bye to him.
“I have simply wasted the morning,” he thought wrathfully on the way
home. “The blockhead! The dummy! He cares no more about the school than
I about last year’s snow. . . . No, I shall never get anything done with
him! We are bound to fail! If the Marshal knew what the priest here was
like, he wouldn’t be in such a hurry to talk about a school. We ought
first to try and get a decent priest, and then think about the school.”
By now Kunin almost hated Father Yakov. The man, his pitiful, grotesque
figure in the long crumpled robe, his womanish face, his manner of
officiating, his way of life and his formal restrained respectfulness,
wounded the tiny relic of religious feeling which was stored away in a
warm corner of Kunin’s heart together with his nurse’s other fairy
tales. The coldness and lack of attention with which Father Yakov had
met Kunin’s warm and sincere interest in what was the priest’s own work
was hard for the former’s vanity to endure. . . .
On the evening of the same day Kunin spent a long time walking about his
rooms and thinking. Then he sat down to the table resolutely and wrote a
letter to the bishop. After asking for money and a blessing for the
school, he set forth genuinely, like a son, his opinion of the priest at
Sinkino.
“He is young,” he wrote, “insufficiently educated, leads, I fancy, an
intemperate life, and altogether fails to satisfy the ideals which the
Russian people have in the course of centuries formed of what a pastor
should be.”
After writing this letter Kunin heaved a deep sigh, and went to bed with
the consciousness that he had done a good deed.
On Monday morning, while he was still in bed, he was informed that
Father Yakov had arrived. He did not want to get up, and instructed the
servant to say he was not at home. On Tuesday he went away to a sitting
of the Board, and when he returned on Saturday he was told by the
servants that Father Yakov had called every day in his absence.
“He liked my biscuits, it seems,” he thought.
Towards evening on Sunday Father Yakov arrived. This time not only his
skirts, but even his hat, was bespattered with mud. Just as on his first
visit, he was hot and perspiring, and sat down on the edge of his chair
as he had done then. Kunin determined not to talk about the school—not
to cast pearls.
“I have brought you a list of books for the school, Pavel Mihailovitch,
. . .” Father Yakov began.
“Thank you.”
But everything showed that Father Yakov had come for something else
besides the list. Has whole figure was expressive of extreme
embarrassment, and at the same time there was a look of determination
upon his face, as on the face of a man suddenly inspired by an idea. He
struggled to say something important, absolutely necessary, and strove
to overcome his timidity.
“Why is he dumb?” Kunin thought wrathfully. “He’s settled himself
comfortably! I haven’t time to be bothered with him.”
To smoothe over the awkwardness of his silence and to conceal the
struggle going on within him, the priest began to smile constrainedly,
and this slow smile, wrung out on his red perspiring face, and out of
keeping with the fixed look in his grey-blue eyes, made Kunin turn away.
He felt moved to repulsion.
“Excuse me, Father, I have to go out,” he said.
Father Yakov started like a man asleep who has been struck a blow, and,
still smiling, began in his confusion wrapping round him the skirts of
his cassock. In spite of his repulsion for the man, Kunin felt suddenly
sorry for him, and he wanted to soften his cruelty.
“Please come another time, Father,” he said, “and before we part I want
to ask you a favour. I was somehow inspired to write two sermons the
other day. . . . I will give them to you to look at. If they are
suitable, use them.”
“Very good,” said Father Yakov, laying his open hand on Kunin’s sermons
which were lying on the table. “I will take them.”
After standing a little, hesitating and still wrapping his cassock round
him, he suddenly gave up the effort to smile and lifted his head
resolutely.
“Pavel Mihailovitch,” he said, evidently trying to speak loudly and
distinctly.
“What can I do for you?”
“I have heard that you . . . er . . . have dismissed your secretary, and
. . . and are looking for a new one. . . .”
“Yes, I am. . . . Why, have you someone to recommend?”
“I. . . er . . . you see . . . I . . . Could you not give the post to
me?”
“Why, are you giving up the Church?” said Kunin in amazement.
“No, no,” Father Yakov brought out quickly, for some reason turning pale
and trembling all over. “God forbid! If you feel doubtful, then never
mind, never mind. You see, I could do the work between whiles, . . so as
to increase my income. . . . Never mind, don’t disturb yourself!”
“H’m! . . . your income. . . . But you know, I only pay my secretary
twenty roubles a month.”
“Good heavens! I would take ten,” whispered Father Yakov, looking about
him. “Ten would be enough! You . . . you are astonished, and everyone is
astonished. The greedy priest, the grasping priest, what does he do with
his money? I feel myself I am greedy, . . . and I blame myself, I
condemn myself. . . . I am ashamed to look people in the face. . . . I
tell you on my conscience, Pavel Mihailovitch. . . . I call the God of
truth to witness. . . .”
Father Yakov took breath and went on:
“On the way here I prepared a regular confession to make you, but . . .
I’ve forgotten it all; I cannot find a word now. I get a hundred and
fifty roubles a year from my parish, and everyone wonders what I do with
the money. . . . But I’ll explain it all truly. . . . I pay forty
roubles a year to the clerical school for my brother Pyotr. He has
everything found there, except that I have to provide pens and paper.”
“Oh, I believe you; I believe you! But what’s the object of all this?”
said Kunin, with a wave of the hand, feeling terribly oppressed by this
outburst of confidence on the part of his visitor, and not knowing how
to get away from the tearful gleam in his eyes.
“Then I have not yet paid up all that I owe to the consistory for my
place here. They charged me two hundred roubles for the living, and I
was to pay ten roubles a month. . . . You can judge what is left! And,
besides, I must allow Father Avraamy at least three roubles a month.”
“What Father Avraamy?”
“Father Avraamy who was priest at Sinkino before I came. He was deprived
of the living on account of . . . his failing, but you know, he is still
living at Sinkino! He has nowhere to go. There is no one to keep him.
Though he is old, he must have a corner, and food and clothing—I can’t
let him go begging on the roads in his position! It would be on my
conscience if anything happened! It would be my fault! He is. . . in
debt all round; but, you see, I am to blame for not paying for him.”
Father Yakov started up from his seat and, looking frantically at the
floor, strode up and down the room.
“My God, my God!” he muttered, raising his hands and dropping them
again. “Lord, save us and have mercy upon us! Why did you take such a
calling on yourself if you have so little faith and no strength? There
is no end to my despair! Save me, Queen of Heaven!”
“Calm yourself, Father,” said Kunin.
“I am worn out with hunger, Pavel Mihailovitch,” Father Yakov went on.
“Generously forgive me, but I am at the end of my strength . . . . I
know if I were to beg and to bow down, everyone would help, but . . . I
cannot! I am ashamed. How can I beg of the peasants? You are on the
Board here, so you know. . . . How can one beg of a beggar? And to beg
of richer people, of landowners, I cannot! I have pride! I am ashamed!”
Father Yakov waved his hand, and nervously scratched his head with both
hands.
“I am ashamed! My God, I am ashamed! I am proud and can’t bear people to
see my poverty! When you visited me, Pavel Mihailovitch, I had no tea in
the house! There wasn’t a pinch of it, and you know it was pride
prevented me from telling you! I am ashamed of my clothes, of these
patches here. . . . I am ashamed of my vestments, of being hungry. . . .
And is it seemly for a priest to be proud?”
Father Yakov stood still in the middle of the study, and, as though he
did not notice Kunin’s presence, began reasoning with himself.
“Well, supposing I endure hunger and disgrace—but, my God, I have a
wife! I took her from a good home! She is not used to hard work; she is
soft; she is used to tea and white bread and sheets on her bed. . . . At
home she used to play the piano. . . . She is young, not twenty yet. . .
. She would like, to be sure, to be smart, to have fun, go out to see
people. . . . And she is worse off with me than any cook; she is ashamed
to show herself in the street. My God, my God! Her only treat is when I
bring an apple or some biscuit from a visit. . . .”
Father Yakov scratched his head again with both hands.
“And it makes us feel not love but pity for each other. . . . I cannot
look at her without compassion! And the things that happen in this life,
O Lord! Such things that people would not believe them if they saw them
in the newspaper. . . . And when will there be an end to it all!”
“Hush, Father!” Kunin almost shouted, frightened at his tone. “Why take
such a gloomy view of life?”
“Generously forgive me, Pavel Mihailovitch . . .” muttered Father Yakov
as though he were drunk, “Forgive me, all this . . . doesn’t matter, and
don’t take any notice of it. . . . Only I do blame myself, and always
shall blame myself . . . always.”
Father Yakov looked about him and began whispering:
“One morning early I was going from Sinkino to Lutchkovo; I saw a woman
standing on the river bank, doing something. . . . I went up close and
could not believe my eyes. . . . It was horrible! The wife of the
doctor, Ivan Sergeitch, was sitting there washing her linen. . . . A
doctor’s wife, brought up at a select boarding-school! She had got up
you see, early and gone half a mile from the village that people should
not see her. . . . She couldn’t get over her pride! When she saw that I
was near her and noticed her poverty, she turned red all over. . . . I
was flustered—I was frightened, and ran up to help her, but she hid her
linen from me; she was afraid I should see her ragged chemises. . . .”
“All this is positively incredible,” said Kunin, sitting down and
looking almost with horror at Father Yakov’s pale face.
“Incredible it is! It’s a thing that has never been! Pavel Mihailovitch,
that a doctor’s wife should be rinsing the linen in the river! Such a
thing does not happen in any country! As her pastor and spiritual
father, I ought not to allow it, but what can I do? What? Why, I am
always trying to get treated by her husband for nothing myself! It is
true that, as you say, it is all incredible! One can hardly believe
one’s eyes. During Mass, you know, when I look out from the altar and
see my congregation, Avraamy starving, and my wife, and think of the
doctor’s wife—how blue her hands were from the cold water—would you
believe it, I forget myself and stand senseless like a fool, until the
sacristan calls to me. . . . It’s awful!”
Father Yakov began walking about again.
“Lord Jesus!” he said, waving his hands, “holy Saints! I can’t officiate
properly. . . . Here you talk to me about the school, and I sit like a
dummy and don’t understand a word, and think of nothing but food. . . .
Even before the altar. . . . But . . . what am I doing?” Father Yakov
pulled himself up suddenly. “You want to go out. Forgive me, I meant
nothing. . . . Excuse . . .”
Kunin shook hands with Father Yakov without speaking, saw him into the
hall, and going back into his study, stood at the window. He saw Father
Yakov go out of the house, pull his wide-brimmed rusty-looking hat over
his eyes, and slowly, bowing his head, as though ashamed of his
outburst, walk along the road.
“I don’t see his horse,” thought Kunin.
Kunin did not dare to think that the priest had come on foot every day
to see him; it was five or six miles to Sinkino, and the mud on the road
was impassable. Further on he saw the coachman Andrey and the boy
Paramon, jumping over the puddles and splashing Father Yakov with mud,
run up to him for his blessing. Father Yakov took off his hat and slowly
blessed Andrey, then blessed the boy and stroked his head.
Kunin passed his hand over his eyes, and it seemed to him that his hand
was moist. He walked away from the window and with dim eyes looked round
the room in which he still seemed to hear the timid droning voice. He
glanced at the table. Luckily, Father Yakov, in his haste, had forgotten
to take the sermons. Kunin rushed up to them, tore them into pieces, and
with loathing thrust them under the table.
“And I did not know!” he moaned, sinking on to the sofa. “After being
here over a year as member of the Rural Board, Honorary Justice of the
Peace, member of the School Committee! Blind puppet, egregious idiot! I
must make haste and help them, I must make haste!”
He turned from side to side uneasily, pressed his temples and racked his
brains.
“On the twentieth I shall get my salary, two hundred roubles. . . . On
some good pretext I will give him some, and some to the doctor’s wife. .
. . I will ask them to perform a special service here, and will get up
an illness for the doctor. . . . In that way I shan’t wound their pride.
And I’ll help Father Avraamy too. . . .”
He reckoned his money on his fingers, and was afraid to own to himself
that those two hundred roubles would hardly be enough for him to pay his
steward, his servants, the peasant who brought the meat. . . . He could
not help remembering the recent past when he was senselessly squandering
his father’s fortune, when as a puppy of twenty he had given expensive
fans to prostitutes, had paid ten roubles a day to Kuzma, his cab-
driver, and in his vanity had made presents to actresses. Oh, how useful
those wasted rouble, three-rouble, ten-rouble notes would have been now!
“Father Avraamy lives on three roubles a month!” thought Kunin. “For a
rouble the priest’s wife could get herself a chemise, and the doctor’s
wife could hire a washerwoman. But I’ll help them, anyway! I must help
them.”
Here Kunin suddenly recalled the private information he had sent to the
bishop, and he writhed as from a sudden draught of cold air. This
remembrance filled him with overwhelming shame before his inner self and
before the unseen truth.
So had begun and had ended a sincere effort to be of public service on
the part of a well-intentioned but unreflecting and over-comfortable
person.
THE MURDER I
The evening service was being celebrated at Progonnaya Station. Before
the great ikon, painted in glaring colours on a background of gold,
stood the crowd of railway servants with their wives and children, and
also of the timbermen and sawyers who worked close to the railway line.
All stood in silence, fascinated by the glare of the lights and the
howling of the snow-storm which was aimlessly disporting itself outside,
regardless of the fact that it was the Eve of the Annunciation. The old
priest from Vedenyapino conducted the service; the sacristan and Matvey
Terehov were singing.
Matvey’s face was beaming with delight; he sang stretching out his neck
as though he wanted to soar upwards. He sang tenor and chanted the
“Praises” too in a tenor voice with honied sweetness and persuasiveness.
When he sang “Archangel Voices” he waved his arms like a conductor, and
trying to second the sacristan’s hollow bass with his tenor, achieved
something extremely complex, and from his face it could be seen that he
was experiencing great pleasure.
At last the service was over, and they all quietly dispersed, and it was
dark and empty again, and there followed that hush which is only known
in stations that stand solitary in the open country or in the forest
when the wind howls and nothing else is heard and when all the emptiness
around, all the dreariness of life slowly ebbing away is felt.
Matvey lived not far from the station at his cousin’s tavern. But he did
not want to go home. He sat down at the refreshment bar and began
talking to the waiter in a low voice.
“We had our own choir in the tile factory. And I must tell you that
though we were only workmen, our singing was first-rate, splendid. We
were often invited to the town, and when the Deputy Bishop, Father Ivan,
took the service at Trinity Church, the bishop’s singers sang in the
right choir and we in the left. Only they complained in the town that we
kept the singing on too long: ‘the factory choir drag it out,’ they used
to say. It is true we began St. Andrey’s prayers and the Praises between
six and seven, and it was past eleven when we finished, so that it was
sometimes after midnight when we got home to the factory. It was good,”
sighed Matvey. “Very good it was, indeed, Sergey Nikanoritch! But here
in my father’s house it is anything but joyful. The nearest church is
four miles away; with my weak health I can’t get so far; there are no
singers there. And there is no peace or quiet in our family; day in day
out, there is an uproar, scolding, uncleanliness; we all eat out of one
bowl like peasants; and there are beetles in the cabbage soup. . . . God
has not given me health, else I would have gone away long ago, Sergey
Nikanoritch.”
Matvey Terehov was a middle-aged man about forty-five, but he had a look
of ill-health; his face was wrinkled and his lank, scanty beard was
quite grey, and that made him seem many years older. He spoke in a weak
voice, circumspectly, and held his chest when he coughed, while his eyes
assumed the uneasy and anxious look one sees in very apprehensive
people. He never said definitely what was wrong with him, but he was
fond of describing at length how once at the factory he had lifted a
heavy box and had ruptured himself, and how this had led to “the
gripes,” and had forced him to give up his work in the tile factory and
come back to his native place; but he could not explain what he meant by
“the gripes.”
“I must own I am not fond of my cousin,” he went on, pouring himself out
some tea. “He is my elder; it is a sin to censure him, and I fear the
Lord, but I cannot bear it in patience. He is a haughty, surly, abusive
man; he is the torment of his relations and workmen, and constantly out
of humour. Last Sunday I asked him in an amiable way, ‘Brother, let us
go to Pahomovo for the Mass!’ but he said ‘I am not going; the priest
there is a gambler;’ and he would not come here to-day because, he said,
the priest from Vedenyapino smokes and drinks vodka. He doesn’t like the
clergy! He reads Mass himself and the Hours and the Vespers, while his
sister acts as sacristan; he says, ‘Let us pray unto the Lord’! and she,
in a thin little voice like a turkey-hen, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us! . .
.’ It’s a sin, that’s what it is. Every day I say to him, ‘Think what
you are doing, brother! Repent, brother!’ and he takes no notice.”
Sergey Nikanoritch, the waiter, poured out five glasses of tea and
carried them on a tray to the waiting-room. He had scarcely gone in when
there was a shout:
“Is that the way to serve it, pig’s face? You don’t know how to wait!”
It was the voice of the station-master. There was a timid mutter, then
again a harsh and angry shout:
“Get along!”
The waiter came back greatly crestfallen.
“There was a time when I gave satisfaction to counts and princes,” he
said in a low voice; “but now I don’t know how to serve tea. . . . He
called me names before the priest and the ladies!”
The waiter, Sergey Nikanoritch, had once had money of his own, and had
kept a buffet at a first-class station, which was a junction, in the
principal town of a province. There he had worn a swallow-tail coat and
a gold chain. But things had gone ill with him; he had squandered all
his own money over expensive fittings and service; he had been robbed by
his staff, and getting gradually into difficulties, had moved to another
station less bustling. Here his wife had left him, taking with her all
the silver, and he moved to a third station of a still lower class,
where no hot dishes were served. Then to a fourth. Frequently changing
his situation and sinking lower and lower, he had at last come to
Progonnaya, and here he used to sell nothing but tea and cheap vodka,
and for lunch hard-boiled eggs and dry sausages, which smelt of tar, and
which he himself sarcastically said were only fit for the orchestra. He
was bald all over the top of his head, and had prominent blue eyes and
thick bushy whiskers, which he often combed out, looking into the little
looking-glass. Memories of the past haunted him continually; he could
never get used to sausage “only fit for the orchestra,” to the rudeness
of the station-master, and to the peasants who used to haggle over the
prices, and in his opinion it was as unseemly to haggle over prices in a
refreshment room as in a chemist’s shop. He was ashamed of his poverty
and degradation, and that shame was now the leading interest of his
life.
“Spring is late this year,” said Matvey, listening. “It’s a good job; I
don’t like spring. In spring it is very muddy, Sergey Nikanoritch. In
books they write: Spring, the birds sing, the sun is setting, but what
is there pleasant in that? A bird is a bird, and nothing more. I am fond
of good company, of listening to folks, of talking of religion or
singing something agreeable in chorus; but as for nightingales and
flowers—bless them, I say!”
He began again about the tile factory, about the choir, but Sergey
Nikanoritch could not get over his mortification, and kept shrugging his
shoulders and muttering. Matvey said good-bye and went home.
There was no frost, and the snow was already melting on the roofs,
though it was still falling in big flakes; they were whirling rapidly
round and round in the air and chasing one another in white clouds along
the railway line. And the oak forest on both sides of the line, in the
dim light of the moon which was hidden somewhere high up in the clouds,
resounded with a prolonged sullen murmur. When a violent storm shakes
the trees, how terrible they are! Matvey walked along the causeway
beside the line, covering his face and his hands, while the wind beat on
his back. All at once a little nag, plastered all over with snow, came
into sight; a sledge scraped along the bare stones of the causeway, and
a peasant, white all over, too, with his head muffled up, cracked his
whip. Matvey looked round after him, but at once, as though it had been
a vision, there was neither sledge nor peasant to be seen, and he
hastened his steps, suddenly scared, though he did not know why.
Here was the crossing and the dark little house where the signalman
lived. The barrier was raised, and by it perfect mountains had drifted
and clouds of snow were whirling round like witches on broomsticks. At
that point the line was crossed by an old highroad, which was still
called “the track.” On the right, not far from the crossing, by the
roadside stood Terehov’s tavern, which had been a posting inn. Here
there was always a light twinkling at night.
When Matvey reached home there was a strong smell of incense in all the
rooms and even in the entry. His cousin Yakov Ivanitch was still reading
the evening service. In the prayer-room where this was going on, in the
corner opposite the door, there stood a shrine of old-fashioned
ancestral ikons in gilt settings, and both walls to right and to left
were decorated with ikons of ancient and modern fashion, in shrines and
without them. On the table, which was draped to the floor, stood an ikon
of the Annunciation, and close by a cyprus-wood cross and the censer;
wax candles were burning. Beside the table was a reading desk. As he
passed by the prayer-room, Matvey stopped and glanced in at the door.
Yakov Ivanitch was reading at the desk at that moment, his sister
Aglaia, a tall lean old woman in a dark-blue dress and white kerchief,
was praying with him. Yakov Ivanitch’s daughter Dashutka, an ugly
freckled girl of eighteen, was there, too, barefoot as usual, and
wearing the dress in which she had at nightfall taken water to the
cattle.
“Glory to Thee Who hast shown us the light!” Yakov Ivanitch boomed out
in a chant, bowing low.
Aglaia propped her chin on her hand and chanted in a thin, shrill,
drawling voice. And upstairs, above the ceiling, there was the sound of
vague voices which seemed menacing or ominous of evil. No one had lived
on the storey above since a fire there a long time ago. The windows were
boarded up, and empty bottles lay about on the floor between the beams.
Now the wind was banging and droning, and it seemed as though someone
were running and stumbling over the beams.
Half of the lower storey was used as a tavern, while Terehov’s family
lived in the other half, so that when drunken visitors were noisy in the
tavern every word they said could be heard in the rooms. Matvey lived in
a room next to the kitchen, with a big stove, in which, in old days,
when this had been a posting inn, bread had been baked every day.
Dashutka, who had no room of her own, lived in the same room behind the
stove. A cricket chirped there always at night and mice ran in and out.
Matvey lighted a candle and began reading a book which he had borrowed
from the station policeman. While he was sitting over it the service
ended, and they all went to bed. Dashutka lay down, too. She began
snoring at once, but soon woke up and said, yawning:
“You shouldn’t burn a candle for nothing, Uncle Matvey.”
“It’s my candle,” answered Matvey; “I bought it with my own money.”
Dashutka turned over a little and fell asleep again. Matvey sat up a
good time longer—he was not sleepy—and when he had finished the last
page he took a pencil out of a box and wrote on the book:
“I, Matvey Terehov, have read this book, and think it the very best of
all the books I have read, for which I express my gratitude to the non-
commissioned officer of the Police Department of Railways, Kuzma
Nikolaev Zhukov, as the possessor of this priceless book.”
He considered it an obligation of politeness to make such inscriptions
in other people’s books. II
On Annunciation Day, after the mail train had been sent off, Matvey was
sitting in the refreshment bar, talking and drinking tea with lemon in
it.
The waiter and Zhukov the policeman were listening to him.
“I was, I must tell you,” Matvey was saying, “inclined to religion from
my earliest childhood. I was only twelve years old when I used to read
the epistle in church, and my parents were greatly delighted, and every
summer I used to go on a pilgrimage with my dear mother. Sometimes other
lads would be singing songs and catching crayfish, while I would be all
the time with my mother. My elders commended me, and, indeed, I was
pleased myself that I was of such good behaviour. And when my mother
sent me with her blessing to the factory, I used between working hours
to sing tenor there in our choir, and nothing gave me greater pleasure.
I needn’t say, I drank no vodka, I smoked no tobacco, and lived in
chastity; but we all know such a mode of life is displeasing to the
enemy of mankind, and he, the unclean spirit, once tried to ruin me and
began to darken my mind, just as now with my cousin. First of all, I
took a vow to fast every Monday and not to eat meat any day, and as time
went on all sorts of fancies came over me. For the first week of Lent
down to Saturday the holy fathers have ordained a diet of dry food, but
it is no sin for the weak or those who work hard even to drink tea, yet
not a crumb passed into my mouth till the Sunday, and afterwards all
through Lent I did not allow myself a drop of oil, and on Wednesdays and
Fridays I did not touch a morsel at all. It was the same in the lesser
fasts. Sometimes in St. Peter’s fast our factory lads would have fish
soup, while I would sit a little apart from them and suck a dry crust.
Different people have different powers, of course, but I can say of
myself I did not find fast days hard, and, indeed, the greater the zeal
the easier it seems. You are only hungry on the first days of the fast,
and then you get used to it; it goes on getting easier, and by the end
of a week you don’t mind it at all, and there is a numb feeling in your
legs as though you were not on earth, but in the clouds. And, besides
that, I laid all sorts of penances on myself; I used to get up in the
night and pray, bowing down to the ground, used to drag heavy stones
from place to place, used to go out barefoot in the snow, and I even
wore chains, too. Only, as time went on, you know, I was confessing one
day to the priest and suddenly this reflection occurred to me: why, this
priest, I thought, is married, he eats meat and smokes tobacco—how can
he confess me, and what power has he to absolve my sins if he is more
sinful that I? I even scruple to eat Lenten oil, while he eats sturgeon,
I dare say. I went to another priest, and he, as ill luck would have it,
was a fat fleshy man, in a silk cassock; he rustled like a lady, and he
smelt of tobacco too. I went to fast and confess in the monastery, and
my heart was not at ease even there; I kept fancying the monks were not
living according to their rules. And after that I could not find a
service to my mind: in one place they read the service too fast, in
another they sang the wrong prayer, in a third the sacristan stammered.
Sometimes, the Lord forgive me a sinner, I would stand in church and my
heart would throb with anger. How could one pray, feeling like that? And
I fancied that the people in the church did not cross themselves
properly, did not listen properly; wherever I looked it seemed to me
that they were all drunkards, that they broke the fast, smoked, lived
loose lives and played cards. I was the only one who lived according to
the commandments. The wily spirit did not slumber; it got worse as it
went on. I gave up singing in the choir and I did not go to church at
all; since my notion was that I was a righteous man and that the church
did not suit me owing to its imperfections—that is, indeed, like a
fallen angel, I was puffed up in my pride beyond all belief. After this
I began attempting to make a church for myself. I hired from a deaf
woman a tiny little room, a long way out of town near the cemetery, and
made a prayer-room like my cousin’s, only I had big church candlesticks,
too, and a real censer. In this prayer-room of mine I kept the rules of
holy Mount Athos—that is, every day my matins began at midnight without
fail, and on the eve of the chief of the twelve great holy days my
midnight service lasted ten hours and sometimes even twelve. Monks are
allowed by rule to sit during the singing of the Psalter and the reading
of the Bible, but I wanted to be better than the monks, and so I used to
stand all through. I used to read and sing slowly, with tears and
sighing, lifting up my hands, and I used to go straight from prayer to
work without sleeping; and, indeed, I was always praying at my work,
too. Well, it got all over the town ‘Matvey is a saint; Matvey heals the
sick and senseless.’ I never had healed anyone, of course, but we all
know wherever any heresy or false doctrine springs up there’s no keeping
the female sex away. They are just like flies on the honey. Old maids
and females of all sorts came trailing to me, bowing down to my feet,
kissing my hands and crying out I was a saint and all the rest of it,
and one even saw a halo round my head. It was too crowded in the prayer-
room. I took a bigger room, and then we had a regular tower of Babel.
The devil got hold of me completely and screened the light from my eyes
with his unclean hoofs. We all behaved as though we were frantic. I
read, while the old maids and other females sang, and then after
standing on their legs for twenty-four hours or longer without eating or
drinking, suddenly a trembling would come over them as though they were
in a fever; after that, one would begin screaming and then another—it
was horrible! I, too, would shiver all over like a Jew in a frying-pan,
I don’t know myself why, and our legs began to prance about. It’s a
strange thing, indeed: you don’t want to, but you prance about and
waggle your arms; and after that, screaming and shrieking, we all danced
and ran after one another —ran till we dropped; and in that way, in wild
frenzy, I fell into fornication.”
The policeman laughed, but, noticing that no one else was laughing,
became serious and said:
“That’s Molokanism. I have heard they are all like that in the
Caucasus.”
“But I was not killed by a thunderbolt,” Matvey went on, crossing
himself before the ikon and moving his lips. “My dead mother must have
been praying for me in the other world. When everyone in the town looked
upon me as a saint, and even the ladies and gentlemen of good family
used to come to me in secret for consolation, I happened to go into our
landlord, Osip Varlamitch, to ask forgiveness —it was the Day of
Forgiveness—and he fastened the door with the hook, and we were left
alone face to face. And he began to reprove me, and I must tell you Osip
Varlamitch was a man of brains, though without education, and everyone
respected and feared him, for he was a man of stern, God-fearing life
and worked hard. He had been the mayor of the town, and a warden of the
church for twenty years maybe, and had done a great deal of good; he had
covered all the New Moscow Road with gravel, had painted the church, and
had decorated the columns to look like malachite. Well, he fastened the
door, and—‘I have been wanting to get at you for a long time, you
rascal, . . .’ he said. ‘You think you are a saint,’ he said. ‘No you
are not a saint, but a backslider from God, a heretic and an evildoer! .
. .’ And he went on and on. . . . I can’t tell you how he said it, so
eloquently and cleverly, as though it were all written down, and so
touchingly. He talked for two hours. His words penetrated my soul; my
eyes were opened. I listened, listened and —burst into sobs! ‘Be an
ordinary man,’ he said, ‘eat and drink, dress and pray like everyone
else. All that is above the ordinary is of the devil. Your chains,’ he
said, ‘are of the devil; your fasting is of the devil; your prayer-room
is of the devil. It is all pride,’ he said. Next day, on Monday in Holy
Week, it pleased God I should fall ill. I ruptured myself and was taken
to the hospital. I was terribly worried, and wept bitterly and trembled.
I thought there was a straight road before me from the hospital to hell,
and I almost died. I was in misery on a bed of sickness for six months,
and when I was discharged the first thing I did I confessed, and took
the sacrament in the regular way and became a man again. Osip Varlamitch
saw me off home and exhorted me: ‘Remember, Matvey, that anything above
the ordinary is of the devil.’ And now I eat and drink like everyone
else and pray like everyone else . . . . If it happens now that the
priest smells of tobacco or vodka I don’t venture to blame him, because
the priest, too, of course, is an ordinary man. But as soon as I am told
that in the town or in the village a saint has set up who does not eat
for weeks, and makes rules of his own, I know whose work it is. So that
is how I carried on in the past, gentlemen. Now, like Osip Varlamitch, I
am continually exhorting my cousins and reproaching them, but I am a
voice crying in the wilderness. God has not vouchsafed me the gift.”
Matvey’s story evidently made no impression whatever. Sergey Nikanoritch
said nothing, but began clearing the refreshments off the counter, while
the policeman began talking of how rich Matvey’s cousin was.
“He must have thirty thousand at least,” he said.
Zhukov the policeman, a sturdy, well-fed, red-haired man with a full
face (his cheeks quivered when he walked), usually sat lolling and
crossing his legs when not in the presence of his superiors. As he
talked he swayed to and fro and whistled carelessly, while his face had
a self-satisfied replete air, as though he had just had dinner. He was
making money, and he always talked of it with the air of a connoisseur.
He undertook jobs as an agent, and when anyone wanted to sell an estate,
a horse or a carriage, they applied to him.
“Yes, it will be thirty thousand, I dare say,” Sergey Nikanoritch
assented. “Your grandfather had an immense fortune,” he said, addressing
Matvey. “Immense it was; all left to your father and your uncle. Your
father died as a young man and your uncle got hold of it all, and
afterwards, of course, Yakov Ivanitch. While you were going pilgrimages
with your mama and singing tenor in the factory, they didn’t let the
grass grow under their feet.”
“Fifteen thousand comes to your share,” said the policeman swaying from
side to side. “The tavern belongs to you in common, so the capital is in
common. Yes. If I were in your place I should have taken it into court
long ago. I would have taken it into court for one thing, and while the
case was going on I’d have knocked his face to a jelly.”
Yakov Ivanitch was disliked because, when anyone believes differently
from others, it upsets even people who are indifferent to religion. The
policeman disliked him also because he, too, sold horses and carriages.
“You don’t care about going to law with your cousin because you have
plenty of money of your own,” said the waiter to Matvey, looking at him
with envy. “It is all very well for anyone who has means, but here I
shall die in this position, I suppose. . . .”
Matvey began declaring that he hadn’t any money at all, but Sergey
Nikanoritch was not listening. Memories of the past and of the insults
which he endured every day came showering upon him. His bald head began
to perspire; he flushed and bElinked.
“A cursed life!” he said with vexation, and he banged the sausage on the
floor. III
The story ran that the tavern had been built in the time of Alexander I,
by a widow who had settled here with her son; her name was Avdotya
Terehov. The dark roofed-in courtyard and the gates always kept locked
excited, especially on moonlight nights, a feeling of depression and
unaccountable uneasiness in people who drove by with posting-horses, as
though sorcerers or robbers were living in it; and the driver always
looked back after he passed, and whipped up his horses. Travellers did
not care to put up here, as the people of the house were always
unfriendly and charged heavily. The yard was muddy even in summer; huge
fat pigs used to lie there in the mud, and the horses in which the
Terehovs dealt wandered about untethered, and often it happened that
they ran out of the yard and dashed along the road like mad creatures,
terrifying the pilgrim women. At that time there was a great deal of
traffic on the road; long trains of loaded waggons trailed by, and all
sorts of adventures happened, such as, for instance, that thirty years
ago some waggoners got up a quarrel with a passing merchant and killed
him, and a slanting cross is standing to this day half a mile from the
tavern; posting-chaises with bells and the heavy dormeuses of country
gentlemen drove by; and herds of horned cattle passed bellowing and
stirring up clouds of dust.
When the railway came there was at first at this place only a platform,
which was called simply a halt; ten years afterwards the present
station, Progonnaya, was built. The traffic on the old posting-road
almost ceased, and only local landowners and peasants drove along it
now, but the working people walked there in crowds in spring and autumn.
The posting-inn was transformed into a restaurant; the upper storey was
destroyed by fire, the roof had grown yellow with rust, the roof over
the yard had fallen by degrees, but huge fat pigs, pink and revolting,
still wallowed in the mud in the yard. As before, the horses sometimes
ran away and, lashing their tails dashed madly along the road. In the
tavern they sold tea, hay oats and flour, as well as vodka and beer, to
be drunk on the premises and also to be taken away; they sold spirituous
liquors warily, for they had never taken out a licence.
The Terehovs had always been distinguished by their piety, so much so
that they had even been given the nickname of the “Godlies.” But perhaps
because they lived apart like bears, avoided people and thought out all
their ideas for themselves, they were given to dreams and to doubts and
to changes of faith and almost each generation had a peculiar faith of
its own. The grandmother Avdotya, who had built the inn, was an Old
Believer; her son and both her grandsons (the fathers of Matvey and
Yakov) went to the Orthodox church, entertained the clergy, and
worshipped before the new ikons as devoutly as they had done before the
old. The son in old age refused to eat meat and imposed upon himself the
rule of silence, considering all conversation as sin; it was the
peculiarity of the grandsons that they interpreted the Scripture not
simply, but sought in it a hidden meaning, declaring that every sacred
word must contain a mystery.
Avdotya’s great-grandson Matvey had struggled from early childhood with
all sorts of dreams and fancies and had been almost ruined by it; the
other great-grandson, Yakov Ivanitch, was orthodox, but after his wife’s
death he gave up going to church and prayed at home. Following his
example, his sister Aglaia had turned, too; she did not go to church
herself, and did not let Dashutka go. Of Aglaia it was told that in her
youth she used to attend the Flagellant meetings in Vedenyapino, and
that she was still a Flagellant in secret, and that was why she wore a
white kerchief.
Yakov Ivanitch was ten years older than Matvey—he was a very handsome
tall old man with a big grey beard almost to his waist, and bushy
eyebrows which gave his face a stern, even ill-natured expression. He
wore a long jerkin of good cloth or a black sheepskin coat, and
altogether tried to be clean and neat in dress; he wore goloshes even in
dry weather. He did not go to church, because, to his thinking, the
services were not properly celebrated and because the priests drank wine
at unlawful times and smoked tobacco. Every day he read and sang the
service at home with Aglaia. At Vedenyapino they left out the “Praises”
at early matins, and had no evening service even on great holidays, but
he used to read through at home everything that was laid down for every
day, without hurrying or leaving out a single line, and even in his
spare time read aloud the Lives of the Saints. And in everyday life he
adhered strictly to the rules of the church; thus, if wine were allowed
on some day in Lent “for the sake of the vigil,” then he never failed to
drink wine, even if he were not inclined.
He read, sang, burned incense and fasted, not for the sake of receiving
blessings of some sort from God, but for the sake of good order. Man
cannot live without religion, and religion ought to be expressed from
year to year and from day to day in a certain order, so that every
morning and every evening a man might turn to God with exactly those
words and thoughts that were befitting that special day and hour. One
must live, and, therefore, also pray as is pleasing to God, and so every
day one must read and sing what is pleasing to God—that is, what is laid
down in the rule of the church. Thus the first chapter of St. John must
only be read on Easter Day, and “It is most meet” must not be sung from
Easter to Ascension, and so on. The consciousness of this order and its
importance afforded Yakov Ivanitch great gratification during his
religious exercises. When he was forced to break this order by some
necessity—to drive to town or to the bank, for instance his conscience
was uneasy and he felt miserable.
When his cousin Matvey had returned unexpectedly from the factory and
settled in the tavern as though it were his home, he had from the very
first day disturbed his settled order. He refused to pray with them, had
meals and drank tea at wrong times, got up late, drank milk on
Wednesdays and Fridays on the pretext of weak health; almost every day
he went into the prayer-room while they were at prayers and cried:
“Think what you are doing, brother! Repent, brother!” These words threw
Yakov into a fury, while Aglaia could not refrain from beginning to
scold; or at night Matvey would steal into the prayer-room and say
softly: “Cousin, your prayer is not pleasing to God. For it is written,
First be reconciled with thy brother and then offer thy gift. You lend
money at usury, you deal in vodka—repent!”
In Matvey’s words Yakov saw nothing but the usual evasions of empty-
headed and careless people who talk of loving your neighbour, of being
reconciled with your brother, and so on, simply to avoid praying,
fasting and reading holy books, and who talk contemptuously of profit
and interest simply because they don’t like working. Of course, to be
poor, save nothing, and put by nothing was a great deal easier than
being rich.
But yet he was troubled and could not pray as before. As soon as he went
into the prayer-room and opened the book he began to be afraid his
cousin would come in and hinder him; and, in fact, Matvey did soon
appear and cry in a trembling voice: “Think what you are doing, brother!
Repent, brother!” Aglaia stormed and Yakov, too, flew into a passion and
shouted: “Go out of my house!” while Matvey answered him: “The house
belongs to both of us.”
Yakov would begin singing and reading again, but he could not regain his
calm, and unconsciously fell to dreaming over his book. Though he
regarded his cousin’s words as nonsense, yet for some reason it had of
late haunted his memory that it is hard for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven, that the year before last he had made a very good
bargain over buying a stolen horse, that one day when his wife was alive
a drunkard had died of vodka in his tavern. . . .
He slept badly at nights now and woke easily, and he could hear that
Matvey, too, was awake, and continually sighing and pining for his tile
factory. And while Yakov turned over from one side to another at night
he thought of the stolen horse and the drunken man, and what was said in
the gospels about the camel.
It looked as though his dreaminess were coming over him again. And as
ill-luck would have it, although it was the end of March, every day it
kept snowing, and the forest roared as though it were winter, and there
was no believing that spring would ever come. The weather disposed one
to depression, and to quarrelling and to hatred and in the night, when
the wind droned over the ceiling, it seemed as though someone were
living overhead in the empty storey; little by little the broodings
settled like a burden on his mind, his head burned and he could not
sleep. IV
On the morning of the Monday before Good Friday, Matvey heard from his
room Dashutka say to Aglaia:
“Uncle Matvey said, the other day, that there is no need to fast.”
Matvey remembered the whole conversation he had had the evening before
with Dashutka, and he felt hurt all at once.
“Girl, don’t do wrong!” he said in a moaning voice, like a sick man.
“You can’t do without fasting; our Lord Himself fasted forty days. I
only explained that fasting does a bad man no good.”
“You should just listen to the factory hands; they can teach you
goodness,” Aglaia said sarcastically as she washed the floor (she
usually washed the floors on working days and was always angry with
everyone when she did it). “We know how they keep the fasts in the
factory. You had better ask that uncle of yours—ask him about his
‘Darling,’ how he used to guzzle milk on fast days with her, the viper.
He teaches others; he forgets about his viper. But ask him who was it he
left his money with—who was it?”
Matvey had carefully concealed from everyone, as though it were a foul
sore, that during that period of his life when old women and unmarried
girls had danced and run about with him at their prayers he had formed a
connection with a working woman and had had a child by her. When he went
home he had given this woman all he had saved at the factory, and had
borrowed from his landlord for his journey, and now he had only a few
roubles which he spent on tea and candles. The “Darling” had informed
him later on that the child was dead, and asked him in a letter what she
should do with the money. This letter was brought from the station by
the labourer. Aglaia intercepted it and read it, and had reproached
Matvey with his “Darling” every day since.
“Just fancy, nine hundred roubles,” Aglaia went on. “You gave nine
hundred roubles to a viper, no relation, a factory jade, blast you!” She
had flown into a passion by now and was shouting shrilly: “Can’t you
speak? I could tear you to pieces, wretched creature! Nine hundred
roubles as though it were a farthing. You might have left it to
Dashutka—she is a relation, not a stranger—or else have it sent to
Byelev for Marya’s poor orphans. And your viper did not choke, may she
be thrice accursed, the she-devil! May she never look upon the light of
day!”
Yakov Ivanitch called to her: it was time to begin the “Hours.” She
washed, put on a white kerchief, and by now quiet and meek, went into
the prayer-room to the brother she loved. When she spoke to Matvey or
served peasants in the tavern with tea she was a gaunt, keen-eyed, ill-
humoured old woman; in the prayer-room her face was serene and softened,
she looked younger altogether, she curtsied affectedly, and even pursed
up her lips.
Yakov Ivanitch began reading the service softly and dolefully, as he
always did in Lent. After he had read a little he stopped to listen to
the stillness that reigned through the house, and then went on reading
again, with a feeling of gratification; he folded his hands in
supplication, rolled his eyes, shook his head, sighed. But all at once
there was the sound of voices. The policeman and Sergey Nikanoritch had
come to see Matvey. Yakov Ivanitch was embarrassed at reading aloud and
singing when there were strangers in the house, and now, hearing voices,
he began reading in a whisper and slowly. He could hear in the prayer-
room the waiter say:
“The Tatar at Shtchepovo is selling his business for fifteen hundred.
He’ll take five hundred down and an I.O.U. for the rest. And so, Matvey
Vassilitch, be so kind as to lend me that five hundred roubles. I will
pay you two per cent a month.”
“What money have I got?” cried Matvey, amazed. “I have no money!”
“Two per cent a month will be a godsend to you,” the policeman
explained. “While lying by, your money is simply eaten by the moth, and
that’s all that you get from it.”
Afterwards the visitors went out and a silence followed. But Yakov
Ivanitch had hardly begun reading and singing again when a voice was
heard outside the door:
“Brother, let me have a horse to drive to Vedenyapino.”
It was Matvey. And Yakov was troubled again. “Which can you go with?” he
asked after a moment’s thought. “The man has gone with the sorrel to
take the pig, and I am going with the little stallion to Shuteykino as
soon as I have finished.”
“Brother, why is it you can dispose of the horses and not I?” Matvey
asked with irritation.
“Because I am not taking them for pleasure, but for work.”
“Our property is in common, so the horses are in common, too, and you
ought to understand that, brother.”
A silence followed. Yakov did not go on praying, but waited for Matvey
to go away from the door.
“Brother,” said Matvey, “I am a sick man. I don’t want possession —let
them go; you have them, but give me a small share to keep me in my
illness. Give it me and I’ll go away.”
Yakov did not speak. He longed to be rid of Matvey, but he could not
give him money, since all the money was in the business; besides, there
had never been a case of the family dividing in the whole history of the
Terehovs. Division means ruin.
Yakov said nothing, but still waited for Matvey to go away, and kept
looking at his sister, afraid that she would interfere, and that there
would be a storm of abuse again, as there had been in the morning. When
at last Matvey did go Yakov went on reading, but now he had no pleasure
in it. There was a heaviness in his head and a darkness before his eyes
from continually bowing down to the ground, and he was weary of the
sound of his soft dejected voice. When such a depression of spirit came
over him at night, he put it down to not being able to sleep; by day it
frightened him, and he began to feel as though devils were sitting on
his head and shoulders.
Finishing the service after a fashion, dissatisfied and ill-humoured, he
set off for Shuteykino. In the previous autumn a gang of navvies had dug
a boundary ditch near Progonnaya, and had run up a bill at the tavern
for eighteen roubles, and now he had to find their foreman in Shuteykino
and get the money from him. The road had been spoilt by the thaw and the
snowstorm; it was of a dark colour and full of holes, and in parts it
had given way altogether. The snow had sunk away at the sides below the
road, so that he had to drive, as it were, upon a narrow causeway, and
it was very difficult to turn off it when he met anything. The sky had
been overcast ever since the morning and a damp wind was blowing. . . .
A long train of sledges met him; peasant women were carting bricks.
Yakov had to turn off the road. His horse sank into the snow up to its
belly; the sledge lurched over to the right, and to avoid falling out he
bent over to the left, and sat so all the time the sledges moved slowly
by him. Through the wind he heard the creaking of the sledge poles and
the breathing of the gaunt horses, and the women saying about him,
“There’s Godly coming,” while one, gazing with compassion at his horse,
said quickly:
“It looks as though the snow will be lying till Yegory’s Day! They are
worn out with it!”
Yakov sat uncomfortably huddled up, screwing up his eyes on account of
the wind, while horses and red bricks kept passing before him. And
perhaps because he was uncomfortable and his side ached, he felt all at
once annoyed, and the business he was going about seemed to him
unimportant, and he reflected that he might send the labourer next day
to Shuteykino. Again, as in the previous sleepless night, he thought of
the saying about the camel, and then memories of all sorts crept into
his mind; of the peasant who had sold him the stolen horse, of the
drunken man, of the peasant women who had brought their samovars to him
to pawn. Of course, every merchant tries to get as much as he can, but
Yakov felt depressed that he was in trade; he longed to get somewhere
far away from this routine, and he felt dreary at the thought that he
would have to read the evening service that day. The wind blew straight
into his face and soughed in his collar; and it seemed as though it were
whispering to him all these thoughts, bringing them from the broad white
plain . . . . Looking at that plain, familiar to him from childhood,
Yakov remembered that he had had just this same trouble and these same
thoughts in his young days when dreams and imaginings had come upon him
and his faith had wavered.
He felt miserable at being alone in the open country; he turned back and
drove slowly after the sledges, and the women laughed and said:
“Godly has turned back.”
At home nothing had been cooked and the samovar was not heated on
account of the fast, and this made the day seem very long. Yakov
Ivanitch had long ago taken the horse to the stable, dispatched the
flour to the station, and twice taken up the Psalms to read, and yet the
evening was still far off. Aglaia has already washed all the floors,
and, having nothing to do, was tidying up her chest, the lid of which
was pasted over on the inside with labels off bottles. Matvey, hungry
and melancholy, sat reading, or went up to the Dutch stove and slowly
scrutinized the tiles which reminded him of the factory. Dashutka was
asleep; then, waking up, she went to take water to the cattle. When she
was getting water from the well the cord broke and the pail fell in. The
labourer began looking for a boathook to get the pail out, and Dashutka,
barefooted, with legs as red as a goose’s, followed him about in the
muddy snow, repeating: “It’s too far!” She meant to say that the well
was too deep for the hook to reach the bottom, but the labourer did not
understand her, and evidently she bothered him, so that he suddenly
turned around and abused her in unseemly language. Yakov Ivanitch,
coming out that moment into the yard, heard Dashutka answer the labourer
in a long rapid stream of choice abuse, which she could only have
learned from drunken peasants in the tavern.
“What are you saying, shameless girl!” he cried to her, and he was
positively aghast. “What language!”
And she looked at her father in perplexity, dully, not understanding why
she should not use those words. He would have admonished her, but she
struck him as so savage and benighted; and for the first time he
realized that she had no religion. And all this life in the forest, in
the snow, with drunken peasants, with coarse oaths, seemed to him as
savage and benighted as this girl, and instead of giving her a lecture
he only waved his hand and went back into the room.
At that moment the policeman and Sergey Nikanoritch came in again to see
Matvey. Yakov Ivanitch thought that these people, too, had no religion,
and that that did not trouble them in the least; and human life began to
seem to him as strange, senseless and unenlightened as a dog’s.
Bareheaded he walked about the yard, then he went out on to the road,
clenching his fists. Snow was falling in big flakes at the time. His
beard was blown about in the wind. He kept shaking his head, as though
there were something weighing upon his head and shoulders, as though
devils were sitting on them; and it seemed to him that it was not
himself walking about, but some wild beast, a huge terrible beast, and
that if he were to cry out his voice would be a roar that would sound
all over the forest and the plain, and would frighten everyone. . . . V
When he went back into the house the policeman was no longer there, but
the waiter was sitting with Matvey, counting something on the reckoning
beads. He was in the habit of coming often, almost every day, to the
tavern; in old days he had come to see Yakov Ivanitch, now he came to
see Matvey. He was continually reckoning on the beads, while his face
perspired and looked strained, or he would ask for money or, stroking
his whiskers, would describe how he had once been in a first-class
station and used to prepare champagne-punch for officers, and at grand
dinners served the sturgeon-soup with his own hands. Nothing in this
world interested him but refreshment bars, and he could only talk about
things to eat, about wines and the paraphernalia of the dinner-table. On
one occasion, handing a cup of tea to a young woman who was nursing her
baby and wishing to say something agreeable to her, he expressed himself
in this way:
“The mother’s breast is the baby’s refreshment bar.”
Reckoning with the beads in Matvey’s room, he asked for money; said he
could not go on living at Progonnaya, and several times repeated in a
tone of voice that sounded as though he were just going to cry:
“Where am I to go? Where am I to go now? Tell me that, please.”
Then Matvey went into the kitchen and began peeling some boiled potatoes
which he had probably put away from the day before. It was quiet, and it
seemed to Yakov Ivanitch that the waiter was gone. It was past the time
for evening service; he called Aglaia, and, thinking there was no one
else in the house sang out aloud without embarrassment. He sang and
read, but was inwardly pronouncing other words, “Lord, forgive me! Lord,
save me!” and, one after another, without ceasing, he made low bows to
the ground as though he wanted to exhaust himself, and he kept shaking
his head, so that Aglaia looked at him with wonder. He was afraid Matvey
would come in, and was certain that he would come in, and felt an anger
against him which he could overcome neither by prayer nor by continually
bowing down to the ground.
Matvey opened the door very softly and went into the prayer-room.
“It’s a sin, such a sin!” he said reproachfully, and heaved a sigh.
“Repent! Think what you are doing, brother!”
Yakov Ivanitch, clenching his fists and not looking at him for fear of
striking him, went quickly out of the room. Feeling himself a huge
terrible wild beast, just as he had done before on the road, he crossed
the passage into the grey, dirty room, reeking with smoke and fog, in
which the peasants usually drank tea, and there he spent a long time
walking from one corner to the other, treading heavily, so that the
crockery jingled on the shelves and the tables shook. It was clear to
him now that he was himself dissatisfied with his religion, and could
not pray as he used to do. He must repent, he must think things over,
reconsider, live and pray in some other way. But how pray? And perhaps
all this was a temptation of the devil, and nothing of this was
necessary? . . . How was it to be? What was he to do? Who could guide
him? What helplessness! He stopped and, clutching at his head, began to
think, but Matvey’s being near him prevented him from reflecting calmly.
And he went rapidly into the room.
Matvey was sitting in the kitchen before a bowl of potato, eating. Close
by, near the stove, Aglaia and Dashutka were sitting facing one another,
spinning yarn. Between the stove and the table at which Matvey was
sitting was stretched an ironing-board; on it stood a cold iron.
“Sister,” Matvey asked, “let me have a little oil!”
“Who eats oil on a day like this?” asked Aglaia.
“I am not a monk, sister, but a layman. And in my weak health I may take
not only oil but milk.”
“Yes, at the factory you may have anything.”
Aglaia took a bottle of Lenten oil from the shelf and banged it angrily
down before Matvey, with a malignant smile evidently pleased that he was
such a sinner.
“But I tell you, you can’t eat oil!” shouted Yakov.
Aglaia and Dashutka started, but Matvey poured the oil into the bowl and
went on eating as though he had not heard.
“I tell you, you can’t eat oil!” Yakov shouted still more loudly; he
turned red all over, snatched up the bowl, lifted it higher than his
head, and dashed it with all his force to the ground, so that it flew
into fragments. “Don’t dare to speak!” he cried in a furious voice,
though Matvey had not said a word. “Don’t dare!” he repeated, and struck
his fist on the table.
Matvey turned pale and got up.
“Brother!” he said, still munching—“brother, think what you are about!”
“Out of my house this minute!” shouted Yakov; he loathed Matvey’s
wrinkled face, and his voice, and the crumbs on his moustache, and the
fact that he was munching. “Out, I tell you!”
“Brother, calm yourself! The pride of hell has confounded you!”
“Hold your tongue!” (Yakov stamped.) “Go away, you devil!”
“If you care to know,” Matvey went on in a loud voice, as he, too, began
to get angry, “you are a backslider from God and a heretic. The accursed
spirits have hidden the true light from you; your prayer is not
acceptable to God. Repent before it is too late! The deathbed of the
sinner is terrible! Repent, brother!”
Yakov seized him by the shoulders and dragged him away from the table,
while he turned whiter than ever, and frightened and bewildered, began
muttering, “What is it? What’s the matter?” and, struggling and making
efforts to free himself from Yakov’s hands, he accidentally caught hold
of his shirt near the neck and tore the collar; and it seemed to Aglaia
that he was trying to beat Yakov. She uttered a shriek, snatched up the
bottle of Lenten oil and with all her force brought it down straight on
the skull of the cousin she hated. Matvey reeled, and in one instant his
face became calm and indifferent. Yakov, breathing heavily, excited, and
feeling pleasure at the gurgle the bottle had made, like a living thing,
when it had struck the head, kept him from falling and several times (he
remembered this very distinctly) motioned Aglaia towards the iron with
his finger; and only when the blood began trickling through his hands
and he heard Dashutka’s loud wail, and when the ironing-board fell with
a crash, and Matvey rolled heavily on it, Yakov left off feeling anger
and understood what had happened.
“Let him rot, the factory buck!” Aglaia brought out with repulsion,
still keeping the iron in her hand. The white bloodstained kerchief
slipped on to her shoulders and her grey hair fell in disorder. “He’s
got what he deserved!”
Everything was terrible. Dashutka sat on the floor near the stove with
the yarn in her hands, sobbing, and continually bowing down, uttering at
each bow a gasping sound. But nothing was so terrible to Yakov as the
potato in the blood, on which he was afraid of stepping, and there was
something else terrible which weighed upon him like a bad dream and
seemed the worst danger, though he could not take it in for the first
minute. This was the waiter, Sergey Nikanoritch, who was standing in the
doorway with the reckoning beads in his hands, very pale, looking with
horror at what was happening in the kitchen. Only when he turned and
went quickly into the passage and from there outside, Yakov grasped who
it was and followed him.
Wiping his hands on the snow as he went, he reflected. The idea flashed
through his mind that their labourer had gone away long before and had
asked leave to stay the night at home in the village; the day before
they had killed a pig, and there were huge bloodstains in the snow and
on the sledge, and even one side of the top of the well was splattered
with blood, so that it could not have seemed suspicious even if the
whole of Yakov’s family had been stained with blood. To conceal the
murder would be agonizing, but for the policeman, who would whistle and
smile ironically, to come from the station, for the peasants to arrive
and bind Yakov’s and Aglaia’s hands, and take them solemnly to the
district courthouse and from there to the town, while everyone on the
way would point at them and say mirthfully, “They are taking the
Godlies!”—this seemed to Yakov more agonizing than anything, and he
longed to lengthen out the time somehow, so as to endure this shame not
now, but later, in the future.
“I can lend you a thousand roubles, . . .” he said, overtaking Sergey
Nikanoritch. “If you tell anyone, it will do no good. . . . There’s no
bringing the man back, anyway;” and with difficulty keeping up with the
waiter, who did not look round, but tried to walk away faster than ever,
he went on: “I can give you fifteen hundred. . . .”
He stopped because he was out of breath, while Sergey Nikanoritch walked
on as quickly as ever, probably afraid that he would be killed, too.
Only after passing the railway crossing and going half the way from the
crossing to the station, he furtively looked round and walked more
slowly. Lights, red and green, were already gleaming in the station and
along the line; the wind had fallen, but flakes of snow were still
coming down and the road had turned white again. But just at the station
Sergey Nikanoritch stopped, thought a minute, and turned resolutely
back. It was growing dark.
“Oblige me with the fifteen hundred, Yakov Ivanitch,” he said, trembling
all over. “I agree.” VI
Yakov Ivanitch’s money was in the bank of the town and was invested in
second mortgages; he only kept a little at home, Just what was wanted
for necessary expenses. Going into the kitchen he felt for the matchbox,
and while the sulphur was burning with a blue light he had time to make
out the figure of Matvey, which was still lying on the floor near the
table, but now it was covered with a white sheet, and nothing could be
seen but his boots. A cricket was chirruping. Aglaia and Dashutka were
not in the room, they were both sitting behind the counter in the tea-
room, spinning yarn in silence. Yakov Ivanitch crossed to his own room
with a little lamp in his hand, and pulled from under the bed a little
box in which he kept his money. This time there were in it four hundred
and twenty one-rouble notes and silver to the amount of thirty-five
roubles; the notes had an unpleasant heavy smell. Putting the money
together in his cap, Yakov Ivanitch went out into the yard and then out
of the gate. He walked, looking from side to side, but there was no sign
of the waiter.
“Hi!” cried Yakov.
A dark figure stepped out from the barrier at the railway crossing and
came irresolutely towards him.
“Why do you keep walking about?” said Yakov with vexation, as he
recognized the waiter. “Here you are; there is a little less than five
hundred. . . . I’ve no more in the house.”
“Very well; . . . very grateful to you,” muttered Sergey Nikanoritch,
taking the money greedily and stuffing it into his pockets. He was
trembling all over, and that was perceptible in spite of the darkness.
“Don’t worry yourself, Yakov Ivanitch. . . . What should I chatter for:
I came and went away, that’s all I’ve had to do with it. As the saying
is, I know nothing and I can tell nothing . . .” And at once he added
with a sigh “Cursed life!”
For a minute they stood in silence, without looking at each other.
“So it all came from a trifle, goodness knows how, . . .” said the
waiter, trembling. “I was sitting counting to myself when all at once a
noise. . . . I looked through the door, and just on account of Lenten
oil you. . . . Where is he now?”
“Lying there in the kitchen.”
“You ought to take him somewhere. . . . Why put it off?”
Yakov accompanied him to the station without a word, then went home
again and harnessed the horse to take Matvey to Limarovo. He had decided
to take him to the forest of Limarovo, and to leave him there on the
road, and then he would tell everyone that Matvey had gone off to
Vedenyapino and had not come back, and then everyone would think that he
had been killed by someone on the road. He knew there was no deceiving
anyone by this, but to move, to do something, to be active, was not as
agonizing as to sit still and wait. He called Dashutka, and with her
carried Matvey out. Aglaia stayed behind to clean up the kitchen.
When Yakov and Dashutka turned back they were detained at the railway
crossing by the barrier being let down. A long goods train was passing,
dragged by two engines, breathing heavily, and flinging puffs of crimson
fire out of their funnels.
The foremost engine uttered a piercing whistle at the crossing in sight
of the station.
“It’s whistling, . . .” said Dashutka.
The train had passed at last, and the signalman lifted the barrier
without haste.
“Is that you, Yakov Ivanitch? I didn’t know you, so you’ll be rich.”
And then when they had reached home they had to go to bed.
Aglaia and Dashutka made themselves a bed in the tea-room and lay down
side by side, while Yakov stretched himself on the counter. They neither
said their prayers nor lighted the ikon lamp before lying down to sleep.
All three lay awake till morning, but did not utter a single word, and
it seemed to them that all night someone was walking about in the empty
storey overhead.
Two days later a police inspector and the examining magistrate came from
the town and made a search, first in Matvey’s room and then in the whole
tavern. They questioned Yakov first of all, and he testified that on the
Monday Matvey had gone to Vedenyapino to confess, and that he must have
been killed by the sawyers who were working on the line.
And when the examining magistrate had asked him how it had happened that
Matvey was found on the road, while his cap had turned up at home—surely
he had not gone to Vedenyapino without his cap?— and why they had not
found a single drop of blood beside him in the snow on the road, though
his head was smashed in and his face and chest were black with blood,
Yakov was confused, lost his head and answered:
“I cannot tell.”
And just what Yakov had so feared happened: the policeman came, the
district police officer smoked in the prayer-room and Aglaia fell upon
him with abuse and was rude to the police inspector; and afterwards when
Yakov and Aglaia were led out to the yard, the peasants crowded at the
gates and said, “They are taking the Godlies!” and it seemed that they
were all glad.
At the inquiry the policeman stated positively that Yakov and Aglaia had
killed Matvey in order not to share with him, and that Matvey had money
of his own, and that if it was not found at the search evidently Yakov
and Aglaia had got hold of it. And Dashutka was questioned. She said
that Uncle Matvey and Aunt Aglaia quarrelled and almost fought every day
over money, and that Uncle Matvey was rich, so much so that he had given
someone—“his Darling”—nine hundred roubles.
Dashutka was left alone in the tavern. No one came now to drink tea or
vodka, and she divided her time between cleaning up the rooms, drinking
mead and eating rolls; but a few days later they questioned the
signalman at the railway crossing, and he said that late on Monday
evening he had seen Yakov and Dashutka driving from Limarovo. Dashutka,
too, was arrested, taken to the town and put in prison. It soon became
known, from what Aglaia said, that Sergey Nikanoritch had been present
at the murder. A search was made in his room, and money was found in an
unusual place, in his snowboots under the stove, and the money was all
in small change, three hundred one-rouble notes. He swore he had made
this money himself, and that he hadn’t been in the tavern for a year,
but witnesses testified that he was poor and had been in great want of
money of late, and that he used to go every day to the tavern to borrow
from Matvey; and the policeman described how on the day of the murder he
had himself gone twice to the tavern with the waiter to help him to
borrow. It was recalled at this juncture that on Monday evening Sergey
Nikanoritch had not been there to meet the passenger train, but had gone
off somewhere. And he, too, was arrested and taken to the town.
The trial took place eleven months later.
Yakov Ivanitch looked much older and much thinner, and spoke in a low
voice like a sick man. He felt weak, pitiful, lower in stature that
anyone else, and it seemed as though his soul, too, like his body, had
grown older and wasted, from the pangs of his conscience and from the
dreams and imaginings which never left him all the while he was in
prison. When it came out that he did not go to church the president of
the court asked him:
“Are you a dissenter?”
“I can’t tell,” he answered.
He had no religion at all now; he knew nothing and understood nothing;
and his old belief was hateful to him now, and seemed to him darkness
and folly. Aglaia was not in the least subdued, and she still went on
abusing the dead man, blaming him for all their misfortunes. Sergey
Nikanoritch had grown a beard instead of whiskers. At the trial he was
red and perspiring, and was evidently ashamed of his grey prison coat
and of sitting on the same bench with humble peasants. He defended
himself awkwardly, and, trying to prove that he had not been to the
tavern for a whole year, got into an altercation with every witness, and
the spectators laughed at him. Dashutka had grown fat in prison. At the
trial she did not understand the questions put to her, and only said
that when they killed Uncle Matvey she was dreadfully frightened, but
afterwards she did not mind.
All four were found guilty of murder with mercenary motives. Yakov
Ivanitch was sentenced to penal servitude for twenty years; Aglaia for
thirteen and a half; Sergey Nikanoritch to ten; Dashutka to six. VII
Late one evening a foreign steamer stopped in the roads of Dué in
Sahalin and asked for coal. The captain was asked to wait till morning,
but he did not want to wait over an hour, saying that if the weather
changed for the worse in the night there would be a risk of his having
to go off without coal. In the Gulf of Tartary the weather is liable to
violent changes in the course of half an hour, and then the shores of
Sahalin are dangerous. And already it had turned fresh, and there was a
considerable sea running.
A gang of convicts were sent to the mine from the Voevodsky prison, the
grimmest and most forbidding of all the prisons in Sahalin. The coal had
to be loaded upon barges, and then they had to be towed by a steam-
cutter alongside the steamer which was anchored more than a quarter of a
mile from the coast, and then the unloading and reloading had to
begin—an exhausting task when the barge kept rocking against the steamer
and the men could scarcely keep on their legs for sea-sickness. The
convicts, only just roused from their sleep, still drowsy, went along
the shore, stumbling in the darkness and clanking their fetters. On the
left, scarcely visible, was a tall, steep, extremely gloomy-looking
cliff, while on the right there was a thick impenetrable mist, in which
the sea moaned with a prolonged monotonous sound, “Ah! . . . ah! . . .
ah! . . . ah! . . .” And it was only when the overseer was lighting his
pipe, casting as he did so a passing ray of light on the escort with a
gun and on the coarse faces of two or three of the nearest convicts, or
when he went with his lantern close to the water that the white crests
of the foremost waves could be discerned.
One of this gang was Yakov Ivanitch, nicknamed among the convicts the
“Brush,” on account of his long beard. No one had addressed him by his
name or his father’s name for a long time now; they called him simply
Yashka.
He was here in disgrace, as, three months after coming to Siberia,
feeling an intense irresistible longing for home, he had succumbed to
temptation and run away; he had soon been caught, had been sentenced to
penal servitude for life and given forty lashes. Then he was punished by
flogging twice again for losing his prison clothes, though on each
occasion they were stolen from him. The longing for home had begun from
the very time he had been brought to Odessa, and the convict train had
stopped in the night at Progonnaya; and Yakov, pressing to the window,
had tried to see his own home, and could see nothing in the darkness. He
had no one with whom to talk of home. His sister Aglaia had been sent
right across Siberia, and he did not know where she was now. Dashutka
was in Sahalin, but she had been sent to live with some ex-convict in a
far away settlement; there was no news of her except that once a settler
who had come to the Voevodsky Prison told Yakov that Dashutka had three
children. Sergey Nikanoritch was serving as a footman at a government
official’s at Dué, but he could not reckon on ever seeing him, as he
was ashamed of being acquainted with convicts of the peasant class.
The gang reached the mine, and the men took their places on the quay. It
was said there would not be any loading, as the weather kept getting
worse and the steamer was meaning to set off. They could see three
lights. One of them was moving: that was the steam-cutter going to the
steamer, and it seemed to be coming back to tell them whether the work
was to be done or not. Shivering with the autumn cold and the damp sea
mist, wrapping himself in his short torn coat, Yakov Ivanitch looked
intently without bElinking in the direction in which lay his home. Ever
since he had lived in prison together with men banished here from all
ends of the earth—with Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Chinese,
Gypsies, Jews— and ever since he had listened to their talk and watched
their sufferings, he had begun to turn again to God, and it seemed to
him at last that he had learned the true faith for which all his family,
from his grandmother Avdotya down, had so thirsted, which they had
sought so long and which they had never found. He knew it all now and
understood where God was, and how He was to be served, and the only
thing he could not understand was why men’s destinies were so diverse,
why this simple faith which other men receive from God for nothing and
together with their lives, had cost him such a price that his arms and
legs trembled like a drunken man’s from all the horrors and agonies
which as far as he could see would go on without a break to the day of
his death. He looked with strained eyes into the darkness, and it seemed
to him that through the thousand miles of that mist he could see home,
could see his native province, his district, Progonnaya, could see the
darkness, the savagery, the heartlessness, and the dull, sullen, animal
indifference of the men he had left there. His eyes were dimmed with
tears; but still he gazed into the distance where the pale lights of the
steamer faintly gleamed, and his heart ached with yearning for home, and
he longed to live, to go back home to tell them there of his new faith
and to save from ruin if only one man, and to live without suffering if
only for one day.
The cutter arrived, and the overseer announced in a loud voice that
there would be no loading.
“Back!” he commanded. “Steady!”
They could hear the hoisting of the anchor chain on the steamer. A
strong piercing wind was blowing by now; somewhere on the steep cliff
overhead the trees were creaking. Most likely a storm was coming.
UPROOTED An Incident of My Travels
I WAS on my way back from evening service. The clock in the belfry of
the Svyatogorsky Monastery pealed out its soft melodious chimes by way
of prelude and then struck twelve. The great courtyard of the monastery
stretched out at the foot of the Holy Mountains on the banks of the
Donets, and, enclosed by the high hostel buildings as by a wall, seemed
now in the night, when it was lighted up only by dim lanterns, lights in
the windows, and the stars, a living hotch-potch full of movement,
sound, and the most original confusion. From end to end, so far as the
eye could see, it was all choked up with carts, old-fashioned coaches
and chaises, vans, tilt-carts, about which stood crowds of horses, dark
and white, and horned oxen, while people bustled about, and black long-
skirted lay brothers threaded their way in and out in all directions.
Shadows and streaks of light cast from the windows moved over the carts
and the heads of men and horses, and in the dense twilight this all
assumed the most monstrous capricious shapes: here the tilted shafts
stretched upwards to the sky, here eyes of fire appeared in the face of
a horse, there a lay brother grew a pair of black wings. . . . There was
the noise of talk, the snorting and munching of horses, the creaking of
carts, the whimpering of children. Fresh crowds kept walking in at the
gate and belated carts drove up.
The pines which were piled up on the overhanging mountain, one above
another, and leaned towards the roof of the hostel, gazed into the
courtyard as into a deep pit, and listened in wonder; in their dark
thicket the cuckoos and nightingales never ceased calling. . . . Looking
at the confusion, listening to the uproar, one fancied that in this
living hotch-potch no one understood anyone, that everyone was looking
for something and would not find it, and that this multitude of carts,
chaises and human beings could not ever succeed in getting off.
More than ten thousand people flocked to the Holy Mountains for the
festivals of St. John the Divine and St. Nikolay the wonder-worker. Not
only the hostel buildings, but even the bakehouse, the tailoring room,
the carpenter’s shop, the carriage house, were filled to overflowing. .
. . Those who had arrived towards night clustered like flies in autumn,
by the walls, round the wells in the yard, or in the narrow passages of
the hostel, waiting to be shown a resting-place for the night. The lay
brothers, young and old, were in an incessant movement, with no rest or
hope of being relieved. By day or late at night they produced the same
impression of men hastening somewhere and agitated by something, yet, in
spite of their extreme exhaustion, their faces remained full of courage
and kindly welcome, their voices friendly, their movements rapid. . . .
For everyone who came they had to find a place to sleep, and to provide
food and drink; to those who were deaf, slow to understand, or profuse
in questions, they had to give long and wearisome explanations, to tell
them why there were no empty rooms, at what o’clock the service was to
be where holy bread was sold, and so on. They had to run, to carry, to
talk incessantly, but more than that, they had to be polite, too, to be
tactful, to try to arrange that the Greeks from Mariupol, accustomed to
live more comfortably than the Little Russians, should be put with other
Greeks, that some shopkeeper from Bahmut or Lisitchansk, dressed like a
lady, should not be offended by being put with peasants. There were
continual cries of: “Father, kindly give us some kvass! Kindly give us
some hay!” or “Father, may I drink water after confession?” And the lay
brother would have to give out kvass or hay or to answer: “Address
yourself to the priest, my good woman, we have not the authority to give
permission.” Another question would follow, “Where is the priest then?”
and the lay brother would have to explain where was the priest’s cell.
With all this bustling activity, he yet had to make time to go to
service in the church, to serve in the part devoted to the gentry, and
to give full answers to the mass of necessary and unnecessary questions
which pilgrims of the educated class are fond of showering about them.
Watching them during the course of twenty-four hours, I found it hard to
imagine when these black moving figures sat down and when they slept.
When, coming back from the evening service, I went to the hostel in
which a place had been assigned me, the monk in charge of the sleeping
quarters was standing in the doorway, and beside him, on the steps, was
a group of several men and women dressed like townsfolk.
“Sir,” said the monk, stopping me, “will you be so good as to allow this
young man to pass the night in your room? If you would do us the favour!
There are so many people and no place left—it is really dreadful!”
And he indicated a short figure in a light overcoat and a straw hat. I
consented, and my chance companion followed me. Unlocking the little
padlock on my door, I was always, whether I wanted to or not, obliged to
look at the picture that hung on the doorpost on a level with my face.
This picture with the title, “A Meditation on Death,” depicted a monk on
his knees, gazing at a coffin and at a skeleton laying in it. Behind the
man’s back stood another skeleton, somewhat more solid and carrying a
scythe.
“There are no bones like that,” said my companion, pointing to the place
in the skeleton where there ought to have been a pelvis. “Speaking
generally, you know, the spiritual fare provided for the people is not
of the first quality,” he added, and heaved through his nose a long and
very melancholy sigh, meant to show me that I had to do with a man who
really knew something about spiritual fare.
While I was looking for the matches to light a candle he sighed once
more and said:
“When I was in Harkov I went several times to the anatomy theatre and
saw the bones there; I have even been in the mortuary. Am I not in your
way?”
My room was small and poky, with neither table nor chairs in it, but
quite filled up with a chest of drawers by the window, the stove and two
little wooden sofas which stood against the walls, facing one another,
leaving a narrow space to walk between them. Thin rusty-looking little
mattresses lay on the little sofas, as well as my belongings. There were
two sofas, so this room was evidently intended for two, and I pointed
out the fact to my companion.
“They will soon be ringing for mass, though,” he said, “and I shan’t
have to be in your way very long.”
Still under the impression that he was in my way and feeling awkward, he
moved with a guilty step to his little sofa, sighed guiltily and sat
down. When the tallow candle with its dim, dilatory flame had left off
flickering and burned up sufficiently to make us both visible, I could
make out what he was like. He was a young man of two-and-twenty, with a
round and pleasing face, dark childlike eyes, dressed like a townsman in
grey cheap clothes, and as one could judge from his complexion and
narrow shoulders, not used to manual labour. He was of a very indefinite
type; one could take him neither for a student nor for a man in trade,
still less for a workman. But looking at his attractive face and
childlike friendly eyes, I was unwilling to believe he was one of those
vagabond impostors with whom every conventual establishment where they
give food and lodging is flooded, and who give themselves out as
divinity students, expelled for standing up for justice, or for church
singers who have lost their voice. . . . There was something
characteristic, typical, very familiar in his face, but what exactly, I
could not remember nor make out.
For a long time he sat silent, pondering. Probably because I had not
shown appreciation of his remarks about bones and the mortuary, he
thought that I was ill-humoured and displeased at his presence. Pulling
a sausage out of his pocket, he turned it about before his eyes and said
irresolutely:
“Excuse my troubling you, . . . have you a knife?”
I gave him a knife.
“The sausage is disgusting,” he said, frowning and cutting himself off a
little bit. “In the shop here they sell you rubbish and fleece you
horribly. . . . I would offer you a piece, but you would scarcely care
to consume it. Will you have some?”
In his language, too, there was something typical that had a very great
deal in common with what was characteristic in his face, but what it was
exactly I still could not decide. To inspire confidence and to show that
I was not ill-humoured, I took some of the proffered sausage. It
certainly was horrible; one needed the teeth of a good house-dog to deal
with it. As we worked our jaws we got into conversation; we began
complaining to each other of the lengthiness of the service.
“The rule here approaches that of Mount Athos,” I said; “but at Athos
the night services last ten hours, and on great feast-days —fourteen!
You should go there for prayers!”
“Yes,” answered my companion, and he wagged his head, “I have been here
for three weeks. And you know, every day services, every day services.
On ordinary days at midnight they ring for matins, at five o’clock for
early mass, at nine o’clock for late mass. Sleep is utterly out of the
question. In the daytime there are hymns of praise, special prayers,
vespers. . . . And when I was preparing for the sacrament I was simply
dropping from exhaustion.” He sighed and went on: “And it’s awkward not
to go to church. . . . The monks give one a room, feed one, and, you
know, one is ashamed not to go. One wouldn’t mind standing it for a day
or two, perhaps, but three weeks is too much—much too much! Are you here
for long?”
“I am going to-morrow evening.”
“But I am staying another fortnight.”
“But I thought it was not the rule to stay for so long here?” I said.
“Yes, that’s true: if anyone stays too long, sponging on the monks, he
is asked to go. Judge for yourself, if the proletariat were allowed to
stay on here as long as they liked there would never be a room vacant,
and they would eat up the whole monastery. That’s true. But the monks
make an exception for me, and I hope they won’t turn me out for some
time. You know I am a convert.”
“You mean?”
“I am a Jew baptized. . . . Only lately I have embraced orthodoxy.”
Now I understood what I had before been utterly unable to understand
from his face: his thick lips, and his way of twitching up the right
corner of his mouth and his right eyebrow, when he was talking, and that
peculiar oily brilliance of his eyes which is only found in Jews. I
understood, too, his phraseology. . . . From further conversation I
learned that his name was Alexandr Ivanitch, and had in the past been
Isaac, that he was a native of the Mogilev province, and that he had
come to the Holy Mountains from Novotcherkassk, where he had adopted the
orthodox faith.
Having finished his sausage, Alexandr Ivanitch got up, and, raising his
right eyebrow, said his prayer before the ikon. The eyebrow remained up
when he sat down again on the little sofa and began giving me a brief
account of his long biography.
“From early childhood I cherished a love for learning,” he began in a
tone which suggested he was not speaking of himself, but of some great
man of the past. “My parents were poor Hebrews; they exist by buying and
selling in a small way; they live like beggars, you know, in filth. In
fact, all the people there are poor and superstitious; they don’t like
education, because education, very naturally, turns a man away from
religion. . . . They are fearful fanatics. . . . Nothing would induce my
parents to let me be educated, and they wanted me to take to trade, too,
and to know nothing but the Talmud. . . . But you will agree, it is not
everyone who can spend his whole life struggling for a crust of bread,
wallowing in filth, and mumbling the Talmud. At times officers and
country gentlemen would put up at papa’s inn, and they used to talk a
great deal of things which in those days I had never dreamed of; and, of
course, it was alluring and moved me to envy. I used to cry and entreat
them to send me to school, but they taught me to read Hebrew and nothing
more. Once I found a Russian newspaper, and took it home with me to make
a kite of it. I was beaten for it, though I couldn’t read Russian. Of
course, fanaticism is inevitable, for every people instinctively strives
to preserve its nationality, but I did not know that then and was very
indignant. . . .”
Having made such an intellectual observation, Isaac, as he had been,
raised his right eyebrow higher than ever in his satisfaction and looked
at me, as it were, sideways, like a cock at a grain of corn, with an air
as though he would say: “Now at last you see for certain that I am an
intellectual man, don’t you?” After saying something more about
fanaticism and his irresistible yearning for enlightenment, he went on:
“What could I do? I ran away to Smolensk. And there I had a cousin who
relined saucepans and made tins. Of course, I was glad to work under
him, as I had nothing to live upon; I was barefoot and in rags. . . . I
thought I could work by day and study at night and on Saturdays. And so
I did, but the police found out I had no passport and sent me back by
stages to my father. . . .”
Alexandr Ivanitch shrugged one shoulder and sighed.
“What was one to do?” he went on, and the more vividly the past rose up
before his mind, the more marked his Jewish accent became. “My parents
punished me and handed me over to my grandfather, a fanatical old Jew,
to be reformed. But I went off at night to Shklov. And when my uncle
tried to catch me in Shklov, I went off to Mogilev; there I stayed two
days and then I went off to Starodub with a comrade.”
Later on he mentioned in his story Gonel, Kiev, Byelaya, Tserkov, Uman,
Balt, Bendery and at last reached Odessa.
“In Odessa I wandered about for a whole week, out of work and hungry,
till I was taken in by some Jews who went about the town buying second-
hand clothes. I knew how to read and write by then, and had done
arithmetic up to fractions, and I wanted to go to study somewhere, but I
had not the means. What was I to do? For six months I went about Odessa
buying old clothes, but the Jews paid me no wages, the rascals. I
resented it and left them. Then I went by steamer to Perekop.”
“What for?”
“Oh, nothing. A Greek promised me a job there. In short, till I was
sixteen I wandered about like that with no definite work and no roots
till I got to Poltava. There a student, a Jew, found out that I wanted
to study, and gave me a letter to the Harkov students. Of course, I went
to Harkov. The students consulted together and began to prepare me for
the technical school. And, you know, I must say the students that I met
there were such that I shall never forget them to the day of my death.
To say nothing of their giving me food and lodging, they set me on the
right path, they made me think, showed me the object of life. Among them
were intellectual remarkable people who by now are celebrated. For
instance, you have heard of Grumaher, haven’t you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“You haven’t! He wrote very clever articles in the Harkov Gazette, and
was preparing to be a professor. Well, I read a great deal and attended
the student’s societies, where you hear nothing that is commonplace. I
was working up for six months, but as one has to have been through the
whole high-school course of mathematics to enter the technical school,
Grumaher advised me to try for the veterinary institute, where they
admit high-school boys from the sixth form. Of course, I began working
for it. I did not want to be a veterinary surgeon but they told me that
after finishing the course at the veterinary institute I should be
admitted to the faculty of medicine without examination. I learnt all
Kühner; I could read Cornelius Nepos, à livre ouvert; and in Greek I
read through almost all Curtius. But, you know, one thing and another, .
. . the students leaving and the uncertainty of my position, and then I
heard that my mamma had come and was looking for me all over Harkov.
Then I went away. What was I to do? But luckily I learned that there was
a school of mines here on the Donets line. Why should I not enter that?
You know the school of mines qualifies one as a mining foreman—a
splendid berth. I know of mines where the foremen get a salary of
fifteen hundred a year. Capital. . . . I entered it. . . .”
With an expression of reverent awe on his face Alexandr Ivanitch
enumerated some two dozen abstruse sciences in which instruction was
given at the school of mines; he described the school itself, the
construction of the shafts, and the condition of the miners. . . . Then
he told me a terrible story which sounded like an invention, though I
could not help believing it, for his tone in telling it was too genuine
and the expression of horror on his Semitic face was too evidently
sincere.
“While I was doing the practical work, I had such an accident one day!”
he said, raising both eyebrows. “I was at a mine here in the Donets
district. You have seen, I dare say, how people are let down into the
mine. You remember when they start the horse and set the gates moving
one bucket on the pulley goes down into the mine, while the other comes
up; when the first begins to come up, then the second goes down—exactly
like a well with two pails. Well, one day I got into the bucket, began
going down, and can you fancy, all at once I heard, Trrr! The chain had
broken and I flew to the devil together with the bucket and the broken
bit of chain. . . . I fell from a height of twenty feet, flat on my
chest and stomach, while the bucket, being heavier, reached the bottom
before me, and I hit this shoulder here against its edge. I lay, you
know, stunned. I thought I was killed, and all at once I saw a fresh
calamity: the other bucket, which was going up, having lost the counter-
balancing weight, was coming down with a crash straight upon me. . . .
What was I to do? Seeing the position, I squeezed closer to the wall,
crouching and waiting for the bucket to come full crush next minute on
my head. I thought of papa and mamma and Mogilev and Grumaher. . . . I
prayed. . . . But happily . . . it frightens me even to think of it. . .
.”
Alexandr Ivanitch gave a constrained smile and rubbed his forehead with
his hand.
“But happily it fell beside me and only caught this side a little. . . .
It tore off coat, shirt and skin, you know, from this side. . . . The
force of it was terrific. I was unconscious after it. They got me out
and sent me to the hospital. I was there four months, and the doctors
there said I should go into consumption. I always have a cough now and a
pain in my chest. And my psychic condition is terrible. . . . When I am
alone in a room I feel overcome with terror. Of course, with my health
in that state, to be a mining foreman is out of the question. I had to
give up the school of mines. . . .”
“And what are you doing now?” I asked.
“I have passed my examination as a village schoolmaster. Now I belong to
the orthodox church, and I have a right to be a teacher. In
Novotcherkassk, where I was baptized, they took a great interest in me
and promised me a place in a church parish school. I am going there in a
fortnight, and shall ask again.”
Alexandr Ivanitch took off his overcoat and remained in a shirt with an
embroidered Russian collar and a worsted belt.
“It is time for bed,” he said, folding his overcoat for a pillow, and
yawning. “Till lately, you know, I had no knowledge of God at all. I was
an atheist. When I was lying in the hospital I thought of religion, and
began reflecting on that subject. In my opinion, there is only one
religion possible for a thinking man, and that is the Christian
religion. If you don’t believe in Christ, then there is nothing else to
believe in, . . . is there? Judaism has outlived its day, and is
preserved only owing to the peculiarities of the Jewish race. When
civilization reaches the Jews there will not be a trace of Judaism left.
All young Jews are atheists now, observe. The New Testament is the
natural continuation of the Old, isn’t it?”
I began trying to find out the reasons which had led him to take so
grave and bold a step as the change of religion, but he kept repeating
the same, “The New Testament is the natural continuation of the Old”—a
formula obviously not his own, but acquired— which did not explain the
question in the least. In spite of my efforts and artifices, the reasons
remained obscure. If one could believe that he had embraced Orthodoxy
from conviction, as he said he had done, what was the nature and
foundation of this conviction it was impossible to grasp from his words.
It was equally impossible to assume that he had changed his religion
from interested motives: his cheap shabby clothes, his going on living
at the expense of the convent, and the uncertainty of his future, did
not look like interested motives. There was nothing for it but to accept
the idea that my companion had been impelled to change his religion by
the same restless spirit which had flung him like a chip of wood from
town to town, and which he, using the generally accepted formula, called
the craving for enlightenment.
Before going to bed I went into the corridor to get a drink of water.
When I came back my companion was standing in the middle of the room,
and he looked at me with a scared expression. His face looked a greyish
white, and there were drops of perspiration on his forehead.
“My nerves are in an awful state,” he muttered with a sickly smile,”
awful! It’s acute psychological disturbance. But that’s of no
consequence.”
And he began reasoning again that the New Testament was a natural
continuation of the Old, that Judaism has outlived its day. . . .
Picking out his phrases, he seemed to be trying to put together the
forces of his conviction and to smother with them the uneasiness of his
soul, and to prove to himself that in giving up the religion of his
fathers he had done nothing dreadful or peculiar, but had acted as a
thinking man free from prejudice, and that therefore he could boldly
remain in a room all alone with his conscience. He was trying to
convince himself, and with his eyes besought my assistance.
Meanwhile a big clumsy wick had burned up on our tallow candle. It was
by now getting light. At the gloomy little window, which was turning
blue, we could distinctly see both banks of the Donets River and the oak
copse beyond the river. It was time to sleep.
“It will be very interesting here to-morrow,” said my companion when I
put out the candle and went to bed. “After early mass, the procession
will go in boats from the Monastery to the Hermitage.”
Raising his right eyebrow and putting his head on one side, he prayed
before the ikons, and, without undressing, lay down on his little sofa.
“Yes,” he said, turning over on the other side.
“Why yes?” I asked.
“When I accepted orthodoxy in Novotcherkassk my mother was looking for
me in Rostov. She felt that I meant to change my religion,” he sighed,
and went on: “It is six years since I was there in the province of
Mogilev. My sister must be married by now.”
After a short silence, seeing that I was still awake, he began talking
quietly of how they soon, thank God, would give him a job, and that at
last he would have a home of his own, a settled position, his daily
bread secure. . . . And I was thinking that this man would never have a
home of his own, nor a settled position, nor his daily bread secure. He
dreamed aloud of a village school as of the Promised Land; like the
majority of people, he had a prejudice against a wandering life, and
regarded it as something exceptional, abnormal and accidental, like an
illness, and was looking for salvation in ordinary workaday life. The
tone of his voice betrayed that he was conscious of his abnormal
position and regretted it. He seemed as it were apologizing and
justifying himself.
Not more than a yard from me lay a homeless wanderer; in the rooms of
the hostels and by the carts in the courtyard among the pilgrims some
hundreds of such homeless wanderers were waiting for the morning, and
further away, if one could picture to oneself the whole of Russia, a
vast multitude of such uprooted creatures was pacing at that moment
along highroads and side-tracks, seeking something better, or were
waiting for the dawn, asleep in wayside inns and little taverns, or on
the grass under the open sky. . . . As I fell asleep I imagined how
amazed and perhaps even overjoyed all these people would have been if
reasoning and words could be found to prove to them that their life was
as little in need of justification as any other. In my sleep I heard a
bell ring outside as plaintively as though shedding bitter tears, and
the lay brother calling out several times:
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon us! Come to mass!”
When I woke up my companion was not in the room. It was sunny and there
was a murmur of the crowds through the window. Going out, I learned that
mass was over and that the procession had set off for the Hermitage some
time before. The people were wandering in crowds upon the river bank
and, feeling at liberty, did not know what to do with themselves: they
could not eat or drink, as the late mass was not yet over at the
Hermitage; the Monastery shops where pilgrims are so fond of crowding
and asking prices were still shut. In spite of their exhaustion, many of
them from sheer boredom were trudging to the Hermitage. The path from
the Monastery to the Hermitage, towards which I directed my steps,
twined like a snake along the high steep bank, going up and down and
threading in and out among the oaks and pines. Below, the Donets
gleamed, reflecting the sun; above, the rugged chalk cliff stood up
white with bright green on the top from the young foliage of oaks and
pines, which, hanging one above another, managed somehow to grow on the
vertical cliff without falling. The pilgrims trailed along the path in
single file, one behind another. The majority of them were Little
Russians from the neighbouring districts, but there were many from a
distance, too, who had come on foot from the provinces of Kursk and
Orel; in the long string of varied colours there were Greek settlers,
too, from Mariupol, strongly built, sedate and friendly people, utterly
unlike their weakly and degenerate compatriots who fill our southern
seaside towns. There were men from the Donets, too, with red stripes on
their breeches, and emigrants from the Tavritchesky province. There were
a good many pilgrims of a nondescript class, like my Alexandr Ivanitch;
what sort of people they were and where they came from it was impossible
to tell from their faces, from their clothes, or from their speech. The
path ended at the little landing-stage, from which a narrow road went to
the left to the Hermitage, cutting its way through the mountain. At the
landing-stage stood two heavy big boats of a forbidding aspect, like the
New Zealand pirogues which one may see in the works of Jules Verne. One
boat with rugs on the seats was destined for the clergy and the singers,
the other without rugs for the public. When the procession was returning
I found myself among the elect who had succeeded in squeezing themselves
into the second. There were so many of the elect that the boat scarcely
moved, and one had to stand all the way without stirring and to be
careful that one’s hat was not crushed. The route was lovely. Both
banks—one high, steep and white, with overhanging pines and oaks, with
the crowds hurrying back along the path, and the other shelving, with
green meadows and an oak copse bathed in sunshine—looked as happy and
rapturous as though the May morning owed its charm only to them. The
reflection of the sun in the rapidly flowing Donets quivered and raced
away in all directions, and its long rays played on the chasubles, on
the banners and on the drops splashed up by the oars. The singing of the
Easter hymns, the ringing of the bells, the splash of the oars in the
water, the calls of the birds, all mingled in the air into something
tender and harmonious. The boat with the priests and the banners led the
way; at its helm the black figure of a lay brother stood motionless as a
statue.
When the procession was getting near the Monastery, I noticed Alexandr
Ivanitch among the elect. He was standing in front of them all, and, his
mouth wide open with pleasure and his right eyebrow cocked up, was
gazing at the procession. His face was beaming; probably at such
moments, when there were so many people round him and it was so bright,
he was satisfied with himself, his new religion, and his conscience.
When a little later we were sitting in our room, drinking tea, he still
beamed with satisfaction; his face showed that he was satisfied both
with the tea and with me, that he fully appreciated my being an
intellectual, but that he would know how to play his part with credit if
any intellectual topic turned up. . . .
“Tell me, what psychology ought I to read?” he began an intellectual
conversation, wrinkling up his nose.
“Why, what do you want it for?”
“One cannot be a teacher without a knowledge of psychology. Before
teaching a boy I ought to understand his soul.”
I told him that psychology alone would not be enough to make one
understand a boy’s soul, and moreover psychology for a teacher who had
not yet mastered the technical methods of instruction in reading,
writing, and arithmetic would be a luxury as superfluous as the higher
mathematics. He readily agreed with me, and began describing how hard
and responsible was the task of a teacher, how hard it was to eradicate
in the boy the habitual tendency to evil and superstition, to make him
think honestly and independently, to instil into him true religion, the
ideas of personal dignity, of freedom, and so on. In answer to this I
said something to him. He agreed again. He agreed very readily, in fact.
Obviously his brain had not a very firm grasp of all these “intellectual
subjects.”
Up to the time of my departure we strolled together about the Monastery,
whiling away the long hot day. He never left my side a minute; whether
he had taken a fancy to me or was afraid of solitude, God only knows! I
remember we sat together under a clump of yellow acacia in one of the
little gardens that are scattered on the mountain side.
“I am leaving here in a fortnight,” he said; “it is high time.”
“Are you going on foot?”
“From here to Slavyansk I shall walk, then by railway to Nikitovka; from
Nikitovka the Donets line branches off, and along that branch line I
shall walk as far as Hatsepetovka, and there a railway guard, I know,
will help me on my way.”
I thought of the bare, deserted steppe between Nikitovka and
Hatsepetovka, and pictured to myself Alexandr Ivanitch striding along
it, with his doubts, his homesickness, and his fear of solitude . . . .
He read boredom in my face, and sighed.
“And my sister must be married by now,” he said, thinking aloud, and at
once, to shake off melancholy thoughts, pointed to the top of the rock
and said:
“From that mountain one can see Izyum.”
As we were walking up the mountain he had a little misfortune. I suppose
he stumbled, for he slit his cotton trousers and tore the sole of his
shoe.
“Tss!” he said, frowning as he took off a shoe and exposed a bare foot
without a stocking. “How unpleasant! . . . That’s a complication, you
know, which . . . Yes!”
Turning the shoe over and over before his eyes, as though unable to
believe that the sole was ruined for ever, he spent a long time
frowning, sighing, and clicking with his tongue.
I had in my trunk a pair of boots, old but fashionable, with pointed
toes and laces. I had brought them with me in case of need, and only
wore them in wet weather. When we got back to our room I made up a
phrase as diplomatic as I could and offered him these boots. He accepted
them and said with dignity:
“I should thank you, but I know that you consider thanks a convention.”
He was pleased as a child with the pointed toes and the laces, and even
changed his plans.
“Now I shall go to Novotcherkassk in a week, and not in a fortnight,” he
said, thinking aloud. “In shoes like these I shall not be ashamed to
show myself to my godfather. I was not going away from here just because
I hadn’t any decent clothes. . . .”
When the coachman was carrying out my trunk, a lay brother with a good
ironical face came in to sweep out the room. Alexandr Ivanitch seemed
flustered and embarrassed and asked him timidly:
“Am I to stay here or go somewhere else?”
He could not make up his mind to occupy a whole room to himself, and
evidently by now was feeling ashamed of living at the expense of the
Monastery. He was very reluctant to part from me; to put off being
lonely as long as possible, he asked leave to see me on my way.
The road from the Monastery, which had been excavated at the cost of no
little labour in the chalk mountain, moved upwards, going almost like a
spiral round the mountain, over roots and under sullen overhanging
pines. . . .
The Donets was the first to vanish from our sight, after it the
Monastery yard with its thousands of people, and then the green roofs. .
. . Since I was mounting upwards everything seemed vanishing into a pit.
The cross on the church, burnished by the rays of the setting sun,
gleamed brightly in the abyss and vanished. Nothing was left but the
oaks, the pines, and the white road. But then our carriage came out on a
level country, and that was all left below and behind us. Alexandr
Ivanitch jumped out and, smiling mournfully, glanced at me for the last
time with his childish eyes, and vanished from me for ever. . . .
The impressions of the Holy Mountains had already become memories, and I
saw something new: the level plain, the whitish-brown distance, the way
side copse, and beyond it a windmill which stood with out moving, and
seemed bored at not being allowed to wave its sails because it was a
holiday.
THE STEPPE The Story of a Journey I
EARLY one morning in July a shabby covered chaise, one of those
antediluvian chaises without springs in which no one travels in Russia
nowadays, except merchant’s clerks, dealers and the less well-to-do
among priests, drove out of N., the principal town of the province of
Z., and rumbled noisily along the posting-track. It rattled and creaked
at every movement; the pail, hanging on behind, chimed in gruffly, and
from these sounds alone and from the wretched rags of leather hanging
loose about its peeling body one could judge of its decrepit age and
readiness to drop to pieces.
Two of the inhabitants of N. were sitting in the chaise; they were a
merchant of N. called Ivan Ivanitch Kuzmitchov, a man with a shaven face
wearing glasses and a straw hat, more like a government clerk than a
merchant, and Father Christopher Sireysky, the priest of the Church of
St. Nikolay at N., a little old man with long hair, in a grey canvas
cassock, a wide-brimmed top-hat and a coloured embroidered girdle. The
former was absorbed in thought, and kept tossing his head to shake off
drowsiness; in his countenance an habitual business-like reserve was
struggling with the genial expression of a man who has just said good-
bye to his relatives and has had a good drink at parting. The latter
gazed with moist eyes wonderingly at God’s world, and his smile was so
broad that it seemed to embrace even the brim of his hat; his face was
red and looked frozen. Both of them, Father Christopher as well as
Kuzmitchov, were going to sell wool. At parting with their families they
had just eaten heartily of pastry puffs and cream, and although it was
so early in the morning had had a glass or two. . . . Both were in the
best of humours.
Apart from the two persons described above and the coachman Deniska, who
lashed the pair of frisky bay horses, there was another figure in the
chaise—a boy of nine with a sunburnt face, wet with tears. This was
Yegorushka, Kuzmitchov’s nephew. With the sanction of his uncle and the
blessing of Father Christopher, he was now on his way to go to school.
His mother, Olga Ivanovna, the widow of a collegiate secretary, and
Kuzmitchov’s sister, who was fond of educated people and refined
society, had entreated her brother to take Yegorushka with him when he
went to sell wool and to put him to school; and now the boy was sitting
on the box beside the coachman Deniska, holding on to his elbow to keep
from falling off, and dancing up and down like a kettle on the hob, with
no notion where he was going or what he was going for. The rapid motion
through the air blew out his red shirt like a balloon on his back and
made his new hat with a peacock’s feather in it, like a coachman’s, keep
slipping on to the back of his head. He felt himself an intensely
unfortunate person, and had an inclination to cry.
When the chaise drove past the prison, Yegorushka glanced at the
sentinels pacing slowly by the high white walls, at the little barred
windows, at the cross shining on the roof, and remembered how the week
before, on the day of the Holy Mother of Kazan, he had been with his
mother to the prison church for the Dedication Feast, and how before
that, at Easter, he had gone to the prison with Deniska and Ludmila the
cook, and had taken the prisoners Easter bread, eggs, cakes and roast
beef. The prisoners had thanked them and made the sign of the cross, and
one of them had given Yegorushka a pewter buckle of his own making.
The boy gazed at the familiar places, while the hateful chaise flew by
and left them all behind. After the prison he caught glimpses of black
grimy foundries, followed by the snug green cemetery surrounded by a
wall of cobblestones; white crosses and tombstones, nestling among green
cherry-trees and looking in the distance like patches of white, peeped
out gaily from behind the wall. Yegorushka remembered that when the
cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers
into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white
tombstones and crosses were dotted with splashes of red like
bloodstains. Under the cherry trees in the cemetery Yegorushka’s father
and granny, Zinaida Danilovna, lay sleeping day and night. When Granny
had died she had been put in a long narrow coffin and two pennies had
been put upon her eyes, which would not keep shut. Up to the time of her
death she had been brisk, and used to bring soft rolls covered with
poppy seeds from the market. Now she did nothing but sleep and sleep. .
. .
Beyond the cemetery came the smoking brickyards. From under the long
roofs of reeds that looked as though pressed flat to the ground, a thick
black smoke rose in great clouds and floated lazily upwards. The sky was
murky above the brickyards and the cemetery, and great shadows from the
clouds of smoke crept over the fields and across the roads. Men and
horses covered with red dust were moving about in the smoke near the
roofs.
The town ended with the brickyards and the open country began.
Yegorushka looked at the town for the last time, pressed his face
against Deniska’s elbow, and wept bitterly.
“Come, not done howling yet, cry-baby!” cried Kuzmitchov. “You are
blubbering again, little milksop! If you don’t want to go, stay behind;
no one is taking you by force!
“Never mind, never mind, Yegor boy, never mind,” Father Christopher
muttered rapidly—“never mind, my boy. . . . Call upon God. . . . You are
not going for your harm, but for your good. Learning is light, as the
saying is, and ignorance is darkness. . . . That is so, truly.”
“Do you want to go back?” asked Kuzmitchov.
“Yes, . . . yes, . . .” answered Yegorushka, sobbing.
“Well, you’d better go back then. Anyway, you are going for nothing;
it’s a day’s journey for a spoonful of porridge.”
“Never mind, never mind, my boy,” Father Christopher went on. “Call upon
God. . . . Lomonosov set off with the fishermen in the same way, and he
became a man famous all over Europe. Learning in conjunction with faith
brings forth fruit pleasing to God. What are the words of the prayer?
For the glory of our Maker, for the comfort of our parents, for the
benefit of our Church and our country. . . . Yes, indeed!”
“The benefit is not the same in all cases,” said Kuzmitchov, lighting a
cheap cigar; “some will study twenty years and get no sense from it.”
“That does happen.”
“Learning is a benefit to some, but others only muddle their brains. My
sister is a woman who does not understand; she is set upon refinement,
and wants to turn Yegorka into a learned man, and she does not
understand that with my business I could settle Yegorka happily for the
rest of his life. I tell you this, that if everyone were to go in for
being learned and refined there would be no one to sow the corn and do
the trading; they would all die of hunger.”
“And if all go in for trading and sowing corn there will be no one to
acquire learning.”
And considering that each of them had said something weighty and
convincing, Kuzmitchov and Father Christopher both looked serious and
cleared their throats simultaneously.
Deniska, who had been listening to their conversation without
understanding a word of it, shook his head and, rising in his seat,
lashed at both the bays. A silence followed.
Meanwhile a wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills lay
stretched before the travellers’ eyes. Huddling together and peeping out
from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground,
which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the lilac
distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or
where it ends. . . . The sun had already peeped out from beyond the town
behind them, and quietly, without fuss, set to its accustomed task. At
first in the distance before them a broad, bright, yellow streak of
light crept over the ground where the earth met the sky, near the little
barrows and the windmills, which in the distance looked like tiny men
waving their arms. A minute later a similar streak gleamed a little
nearer, crept to the right and embraced the hills. Something warm
touched Yegorushka’s spine; the streak of light, stealing up from
behind, darted between the chaise and the horses, moved to meet the
other streak, and soon the whole wide steppe flung off the twilight of
early morning, and was smiling and sparkling with dew.
The cut rye, the coarse steppe grass, the milkwort, the wild hemp, all
withered from the sultry heat, turned brown and half dead, now washed by
the dew and caressed by the sun, revived, to fade again. Arctic petrels
flew across the road with joyful cries; marmots called to one another in
the grass. Somewhere, far away to the left, lapwings uttered their
plaintive notes. A covey of partridges, scared by the chaise, fluttered
up and with their soft “trrrr!” flew off to the hills. In the grass
crickets, locusts and grasshoppers kept up their churring, monotonous
music.
But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew stagnant, and
the disillusioned steppe began to wear its jaded July aspect. The grass
drooped, everything living was hushed. The sun-baked hills, brownish-
green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet shadowy tones, the
plain with the misty distance and, arched above them, the sky, which
seems terribly deep and transparent in the steppes, where there are no
woods or high hills, seemed now endless, petrified with dreariness. . .
.
How stifling and oppressive it was! The chaise raced along, while
Yegorushka saw always the same—the sky, the plain, the low hills . . . .
The music in the grass was hushed, the petrels had flown away, the
partridges were out of sight, rooks hovered idly over the withered
grass; they were all alike and made the steppe even more monotonous.
A hawk flew just above the ground, with an even sweep of its wings,
suddenly halted in the air as though pondering on the dreariness of
life, then fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow over the steppe,
and there was no telling why it flew off and what it wanted. In the
distance a windmill waved its sails. . . .
Now and then a glimpse of a white potsherd or a heap of stones broke the
monotony; a grey stone stood out for an instant or a parched willow with
a blue crow on its top branch; a marmot would run across the road
and—again there flitted before the eyes only the high grass, the low
hills, the rooks. . . .
But at last, thank God, a waggon loaded with sheaves came to meet them;
a peasant wench was lying on the very top. Sleepy, exhausted by the
heat, she lifted her head and looked at the travellers. Deniska gaped,
looking at her; the horses stretched out their noses towards the
sheaves; the chaise, squeaking, kissed the waggon, and the pointed ears
passed over Father Christopher’s hat like a brush.
“You are driving over folks, fatty!” cried Deniska. “What a swollen lump
of a face, as though a bumble-bee had stung it!”
The girl smiled drowsily, and moving her lips lay down again; then a
solitary poplar came into sight on the low hill. Someone had planted it,
and God only knows why it was there. It was hard to tear the eyes away
from its graceful figure and green drapery. Was that lovely creature
happy? Sultry heat in summer, in winter frost and snowstorms, terrible
nights in autumn when nothing is to be seen but darkness and nothing is
to be heard but the senseless angry howling wind, and, worst of all,
alone, alone for the whole of life . . . . Beyond the poplar stretches
of wheat extended like a bright yellow carpet from the road to the top
of the hills. On the hills the corn was already cut and laid up in
sheaves, while at the bottom they were still cutting. . . . Six mowers
were standing in a row swinging their scythes, and the scythes gleamed
gaily and uttered in unison together “Vzhee, vzhee!” From the movements
of the peasant women binding the sheaves, from the faces of the mowers,
from the glitter of the scythes, it could be seen that the sultry heat
was baking and stifling. A black dog with its tongue hanging out ran
from the mowers to meet the chaise, probably with the intention of
barking, but stopped halfway and stared indifferently at Deniska, who
shook his whip at him; it was too hot to bark! One peasant woman got up
and, putting both hands to her aching back, followed Yegorushka’s red
shirt with her eyes. Whether it was that the colour pleased her or that
he reminded her of her children, she stood a long time motionless
staring after him.
But now the wheat, too, had flashed by; again the parched plain, the
sunburnt hills, the sultry sky stretched before them; again a hawk
hovered over the earth. In the distance, as before, a windmill whirled
its sails, and still it looked like a little man waving his arms. It was
wearisome to watch, and it seemed as though one would never reach it, as
though it were running away from the chaise.
Father Christopher and Kuzmitchov were silent. Deniska lashed the horses
and kept shouting to them, while Yegorushka had left off crying, and
gazed about him listlessly. The heat and the tedium of the steppes
overpowered him. He felt as though he had been travelling and jolting up
and down for a very long time, that the sun had been baking his back a
long time. Before they had gone eight miles he began to feel “It must be
time to rest.” The geniality gradually faded out of his uncle’s face and
nothing else was left but the air of business reserve; and to a gaunt
shaven face, especially when it is adorned with spectacles and the nose
and temples are covered with dust, this reserve gives a relentless,
inquisitorial appearance. Father Christopher never left off gazing with
wonder at God’s world, and smiling. Without speaking, he brooded over
something pleasant and nice, and a kindly, genial smile remained
imprinted on his face. It seemed as though some nice and pleasant
thought were imprinted on his brain by the heat.
“Well, Deniska, shall we overtake the waggons to-day?” asked Kuzmitchov.
Deniska looked at the sky, rose in his seat, lashed at his horses and
then answered:
“By nightfall, please God, we shall overtake them.”
There was a sound of dogs barking. Half a dozen steppe sheep-dogs,
suddenly leaping out as though from ambush, with ferocious howling
barks, flew to meet the chaise. All of them, extraordinarily furious,
surrounded the chaise, with their shaggy spider-like muzzles and their
eyes red with anger, and jostling against one another in their anger,
raised a hoarse howl. They were filled with passionate hatred of the
horses, of the chaise, and of the human beings, and seemed ready to tear
them into pieces. Deniska, who was fond of teasing and beating, was
delighted at the chance of it, and with a malignant expression bent over
and lashed at the sheep-dogs with his whip. The brutes growled more than
ever, the horses flew on; and Yegorushka, who had difficulty in keeping
his seat on the box, realized, looking at the dogs’ eyes and teeth, that
if he fell down they would instantly tear him to bits; but he felt no
fear and looked at them as malignantly as Deniska, and regretted that he
had no whip in his hand.
The chaise came upon a flock of sheep.
“Stop!” cried Kuzmitchov. “Pull up! Woa!”
Deniska threw his whole body backwards and pulled up the horses.
“Come here!” Kuzmitchov shouted to the shepherd. “Call off the dogs,
curse them!”
The old shepherd, tattered and barefoot, wearing a fur cap, with a dirty
sack round his loins and a long crook in his hand—a regular figure from
the Old Testament—called off the dogs, and taking off his cap, went up
to the chaise. Another similar Old Testament figure was standing
motionless at the other end of the flock, staring without interest at
the travellers.
“Whose sheep are these?” asked Kuzmitchov.
“Varlamov’s,” the old man answered in a loud voice.
“Varlamov’s,” repeated the shepherd standing at the other end of the
flock.
“Did Varlamov come this way yesterday or not?”
“He did not; his clerk came. . . .”
“Drive on!”
The chaise rolled on and the shepherds, with their angry dogs, were left
behind. Yegorushka gazed listlessly at the lilac distance in front, and
it began to seem as though the windmill, waving its sails, were getting
nearer. It became bigger and bigger, grew quite large, and now he could
distinguish clearly its two sails. One sail was old and patched, the
other had only lately been made of new wood and glistened in the sun.
The chaise drove straight on, while the windmill, for some reason, began
retreating to the left. They drove on and on, and the windmill kept
moving away to the left, and still did not disappear.
“A fine windmill Boltva has put up for his son,” observed Deniska.
“And how is it we don’t see his farm?”
“It is that way, beyond the creek.”
Boltva’s farm, too, soon came into sight, but yet the windmill did not
retreat, did not drop behind; it still watched Yegorushka with its
shining sail and waved. What a sorcerer! II
Towards midday the chaise turned off the road to the right; it went on a
little way at walking pace and then stopped. Yegorushka heard a soft,
very caressing gurgle, and felt a different air breathe on his face with
a cool velvety touch. Through a little pipe of hemlock stuck there by
some unknown benefactor, water was running in a thin trickle from a low
hill, put together by nature of huge monstrous stones. It fell to the
ground, and limpid, sparkling gaily in the sun, and softly murmuring as
though fancying itself a great tempestuous torrent, flowed swiftly away
to the left. Not far from its source the little stream spread itself out
into a pool; the burning sunbeams and the parched soil greedily drank it
up and sucked away its strength; but a little further on it must have
mingled with another rivulet, for a hundred paces away thick reeds
showed green and luxuriant along its course, and three snipe flew up
from them with a loud cry as the chaise drove by.
The travellers got out to rest by the stream and feed the horses.
Kuzmitchov, Father Christopher and Yegorushka sat down on a mat in the
narrow strip of shade cast by the chaise and the unharnessed horses. The
nice pleasant thought that the heat had imprinted in Father
Christopher’s brain craved expression after he had had a drink of water
and eaten a hard-boiled egg. He bent a friendly look upon Yegorushka,
munched, and began:
“I studied too, my boy; from the earliest age God instilled into me good
sense and understanding, so that while I was just such a lad as you I
was beyond others, a comfort to my parents and preceptors by my good
sense. Before I was fifteen I could speak and make verses in Latin, just
as in Russian. I was the crosier-bearer to his Holiness Bishop
Christopher. After mass one day, as I remember it was the patron saint’s
day of His Majesty Tsar Alexandr Pavlovitch of blessed memory, he
unrobed at the altar, looked kindly at me and asked, ‘Puer bone, quam
appelaris?’ And I answered, ‘Christopherus sum;’ and he said, ‘Ergo
connominati sumus’—that is, that we were namesakes. . . Then he asked in
Latin, ‘Whose son are you?’ To which I answered, also in Latin, that I
was the son of deacon Sireysky of the village of Lebedinskoe. Seeing my
readiness and the clearness of my answers, his Holiness blessed me and
said, ‘Write to your father that I will not forget him, and that I will
keep you in view.’ The holy priests and fathers who were standing round
the altar, hearing our discussion in Latin, were not a little surprised,
and everyone expressed his pleasure in praise of me. Before I had
moustaches, my boy, I could read Latin, Greek, and French; I knew
philosophy, mathematics, secular history, and all the sciences. The Lord
gave me a marvellous memory. Sometimes, if I read a thing once or twice,
I knew it by heart. My preceptors and patrons were amazed, and so they
expected I should make a learned man, a luminary of the Church. I did
think of going to Kiev to continue my studies, but my parents did not
approve. ‘You’ll be studying all your life,’ said my father; ‘when shall
we see you finished?’ Hearing such words, I gave up study and took a
post. . . . Of course, I did not become a learned man, but then I did
not disobey my parents; I was a comfort to them in their old age and
gave them a creditable funeral. Obedience is more than fasting and
prayer.
“I suppose you have forgotten all your learning?” observed Kuzmitchov.
“I should think so! Thank God, I have reached my eightieth year!
Something of philosophy and rhetoric I do remember, but languages and
mathematics I have quite forgotten.”
Father Christopher screwed up his eyes, thought a minute and said in an
undertone:
“What is a substance? A creature is a self-existing object, not
requiring anything else for its completion.”
He shook his head and laughed with feeling.
“Spiritual nourishment!” he said. “Of a truth matter nourishes the flesh
and spiritual nourishment the soul!”
“Learning is all very well,” sighed Kuzmitchov, “but if we don’t
overtake Varlamov, learning won’t do much for us.”
“A man isn’t a needle—we shall find him. He must be going his rounds in
these parts.”
Among the sedge were flying the three snipe they had seen before, and in
their plaintive cries there was a note of alarm and vexation at having
been driven away from the stream. The horses were steadily munching and
snorting. Deniska walked about by them and, trying to appear indifferent
to the cucumbers, pies, and eggs that the gentry were eating, he
concentrated himself on the gadflies and horseflies that were fastening
upon the horses’ backs and bellies; he squashed his victims
apathetically, emitting a peculiar, fiendishly triumphant, guttural
sound, and when he missed them cleared his throat with an air of
vexation and looked after every lucky one that escaped death.
“Deniska, where are you? Come and eat,” said Kuzmitchov, heaving a deep
sigh, a sign that he had had enough.
Deniska diffidently approached the mat and picked out five thick and
yellow cucumbers (he did not venture to take the smaller and fresher
ones), took two hard-boiled eggs that looked dark and were cracked, then
irresolutely, as though afraid he might get a blow on his outstretched
hand, touched a pie with his finger.
“Take them, take them,” Kuzmitchov urged him on.
Deniska took the pies resolutely, and, moving some distance away, sat
down on the grass with his back to the chaise. At once there was such a
sound of loud munching that even the horses turned round to look
suspiciously at Deniska.
After his meal Kuzmitchov took a sack containing something out of the
chaise and said to Yegorushka:
“I am going to sleep, and you mind that no one takes the sack from under
my head.”
Father Christopher took off his cassock, his girdle, and his full coat,
and Yegorushka, looking at him, was dumb with astonishment. He had never
imagined that priests wore trousers, and Father Christopher had on real
canvas trousers thrust into high boots, and a short striped jacket.
Looking at him, Yegorushka thought that in this costume, so unsuitable
to his dignified position, he looked with his long hair and beard very
much like Robinson Crusoe. After taking off their outer garments
Kuzmitchov and Father Christopher lay down in the shade under the
chaise, facing one another, and closed their eyes. Deniska, who had
finished munching, stretched himself out on his back and also closed his
eyes.
“You look out that no one takes away the horses!” he said to Yegorushka,
and at once fell asleep.
Stillness reigned. There was no sound except the munching and snorting
of the horses and the snoring of the sleepers; somewhere far away a
lapwing wailed, and from time to time there sounded the shrill cries of
the three snipe who had flown up to see whether their uninvited visitors
had gone away; the rivulet babbled, lisping softly, but all these sounds
did not break the stillness, did not stir the stagnation, but, on the
contrary, lulled all nature to slumber.
Yegorushka, gasping with the heat, which was particularly oppressive
after a meal, ran to the sedge and from there surveyed the country. He
saw exactly the same as he had in the morning: the plain, the low hills,
the sky, the lilac distance; only the hills stood nearer; and he could
not see the windmill, which had been left far behind. From behind the
rocky hill from which the stream flowed rose another, smoother and
broader; a little hamlet of five or six homesteads clung to it. No
people, no trees, no shade were to be seen about the huts; it looked as
though the hamlet had expired in the burning air and was dried up. To
while away the time Yegorushka caught a grasshopper in the grass, held
it in his closed hand to his ear, and spent a long time listening to the
creature playing on its instrument. When he was weary of its music he
ran after a flock of yellow butterflies who were flying towards the
sedge on the watercourse, and found himself again beside the chaise,
without noticing how he came there. His uncle and Father Christopher
were sound asleep; their sleep would be sure to last two or three hours
till the horses had rested. . . . How was he to get through that long
time, and where was he to get away from the heat? A hard problem. . . .
Mechanically Yegorushka put his lips to the trickle that ran from the
waterpipe; there was a chilliness in his mouth and there was the smell
of hemlock. He drank at first eagerly, then went on with effort till the
sharp cold had run from his mouth all over his body and the water was
spilt on his shirt. Then he went up to the chaise and began looking at
the sleeping figures. His uncle’s face wore, as before, an expression of
business-like reserve. Fanatically devoted to his work, Kuzmitchov
always, even in his sleep and at church when they were singing, “Like
the cherubim,” thought about his business and could never forget it for
a moment; and now he was probably dreaming about bales of wool, waggons,
prices, Varlamov. . . . Father Christopher, now, a soft, frivolous and
absurd person, had never all his life been conscious of anything which
could, like a boa-constrictor, coil about his soul and hold it tight. In
all the numerous enterprises he had undertaken in his day what attracted
him was not so much the business itself, but the bustle and the contact
with other people involved in every undertaking. Thus, in the present
expedition, he was not so much interested in wool, in Varlamov, and in
prices, as in the long journey, the conversations on the way, the
sleeping under a chaise, and the meals at odd times. . . . And now,
judging from his face, he must have been dreaming of Bishop Christopher,
of the Latin discussion, of his wife, of puffs and cream and all sorts
of things that Kuzmitchov could not possibly dream of.
While Yegorushka was watching their sleeping faces he suddenly heard a
soft singing; somewhere at a distance a woman was singing, and it was
difficult to tell where and in what direction. The song was subdued,
dreary and melancholy, like a dirge, and hardly audible, and seemed to
come first from the right, then from the left, then from above, and then
from underground, as though an unseen spirit were hovering over the
steppe and singing. Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out
where the strange song came from. Then as he listened he began to fancy
that the grass was singing; in its song, withered and half-dead, it was
without words, but plaintively and passionately, urging that it was not
to blame, that the sun was burning it for no fault of its own; it urged
that it ardently longed to live, that it was young and might have been
beautiful but for the heat and the drought; it was guiltless, but yet it
prayed forgiveness and protested that it was in anguish, sad and sorry
for itself. . . .
Yegorushka listened for a little, and it began to seem as though this
dreary, mournful song made the air hotter, more suffocating and more
stagnant. . . . To drown the singing he ran to the sedge, humming to
himself and trying to make a noise with his feet. From there he looked
about in all directions and found out who was singing. Near the furthest
hut in the hamlet stood a peasant woman in a short petticoat, with long
thin legs like a heron. She was sowing something. A white dust floated
languidly from her sieve down the hillock. Now it was evident that she
was singing. A couple of yards from her a little bare-headed boy in
nothing but a smock was standing motionless. As though fascinated by the
song, he stood stock-still, staring away into the distance, probably at
Yegorushka’s crimson shirt.
The song ceased. Yegorushka sauntered back to the chaise, and to while
away the time went again to the trickle of water.
And again there was the sound of the dreary song. It was the same long-
legged peasant woman in the hamlet over the hill. Yegorushka’s boredom
came back again. He left the pipe and looked upwards. What he saw was so
unexpected that he was a little frightened. Just above his head on one
of the big clumsy stones stood a chubby little boy, wearing nothing but
a shirt, with a prominent stomach and thin legs, the same boy who had
been standing before by the peasant woman. He was gazing with open mouth
and unbElinking eyes at Yegorushka’s crimson shirt and at the chaise,
with a look of blank astonishment and even fear, as though he saw before
him creatures of another world. The red colour of the shirt charmed and
allured him. But the chaise and the men sleeping under it excited his
curiosity; perhaps he had not noticed how the agreeable red colour and
curiosity had attracted him down from the hamlet, and now probably he
was surprised at his own boldness. For a long while Yegorushka stared at
him, and he at Yegorushka. Both were silent and conscious of some
awkwardness. After a long silence Yegorushka asked:
“What’s your name?”
The stranger’s cheeks puffed out more than ever; he pressed his back
against the rock, opened his eyes wide, moved his lips, and answered in
a husky bass: “Tit!”
The boys said not another word to each other; after a brief silence,
still keeping his eyes fixed on Yegorushka, the mysterious Tit kicked up
one leg, felt with his heel for a niche and clambered up the rock; from
that point he ascended to the next rock, staggering backwards and
looking intently at Yegorushka, as though afraid he might hit him from
behind, and so made his way upwards till he disappeared altogether
behind the crest of the hill.
After watching him out of sight, Yegorushka put his arms round his knees
and leaned his head on them. . . . The burning sun scorched the back of
his head, his neck, and his spine. The melancholy song died away, then
floated again on the stagnant stifling air. The rivulet gurgled
monotonously, the horses munched, and time dragged on endlessly, as
though it, too, were stagnant and had come to a standstill. It seemed as
though a hundred years had passed since the morning. Could it be that
God’s world, the chaise and the horses would come to a standstill in
that air, and, like the hills, turn to stone and remain for ever in one
spot? Yegorushka raised his head, and with smarting eyes looked before
him; the lilac distance, which till then had been motionless, began
heaving, and with the sky floated away into the distance. . . . It drew
after it the brown grass, the sedge, and with extraordinary swiftness
Yegorushka floated after the flying distance. Some force noiselessly
drew him onwards, and the heat and the wearisome song flew after in
pursuit. Yegorushka bent his head and shut his eyes. . . .
Deniska was the first to wake up. Something must have bitten him, for he
jumped up, quickly scratched his shoulder and said:
“Plague take you, cursed idolater!”
Then he went to the brook, had a drink and slowly washed. His splashing
and puffing roused Yegorushka from his lethargy. The boy looked at his
wet face with drops of water and big freckles which made it look like
marble, and asked:
“Shall we soon be going?”
Deniska looked at the height of the sun and answered:
“I expect so.”
He dried himself with the tail of his shirt and, making a very serious
face, hopped on one leg.
“I say, which of us will get to the sedge first?” he said.
Yegorushka was exhausted by the heat and drowsiness, but he raced off
after him all the same. Deniska was in his twentieth year, was a
coachman and going to be married, but he had not left off being a boy.
He was very fond of flying kites, chasing pigeons, playing knuckle-
bones, running races, and always took part in children’s games and
disputes. No sooner had his master turned his back or gone to sleep than
Deniska would begin doing something such as hopping on one leg or
throwing stones. It was hard for any grown-up person, seeing the genuine
enthusiasm with which he frolicked about in the society of children, to
resist saying, “What a baby!” Children, on the other hand, saw nothing
strange in the invasion of their domain by the big coachman. “Let him
play,” they thought, “as long as he doesn’t fight!” In the same way
little dogs see nothing strange in it when a simple-hearted big dog
joins their company uninvited and begins playing with them.
Deniska outstripped Yegorushka, and was evidently very much pleased at
having done so. He winked at him, and to show that he could hop on one
leg any distance, suggested to Yegorushka that he should hop with him
along the road and from there, without resting, back to the chaise.
Yegorushka declined this suggestion, for he was very much out of breath
and exhausted.
All at once Deniska looked very grave, as he did not look even when
Kuzmitchov gave him a scolding or threatened him with a stick; listening
intently, he dropped quietly on one knee and an expression of sternness
and alarm came into his face, such as one sees in people who hear
heretical talk. He fixed his eyes on one spot, raised his hand curved
into a hollow, and suddenly fell on his stomach on the ground and
slapped the hollow of his hand down upon the grass.
“Caught!” he wheezed triumphantly, and, getting up, lifted a big
grasshopper to Yegorushka’s eyes.
The two boys stroked the grasshopper’s broad green back with their
fingers and touched his antenna, supposing that this would please the
creature. Then Deniska caught a fat fly that had been sucking blood and
offered it to the grasshopper. The latter moved his huge jaws, that were
like the visor of a helmet, with the utmost unconcern, as though he had
been long acquainted with Deniska, and bit off the fly’s stomach. They
let him go. With a flash of the pink lining of his wings, he flew down
into the grass and at once began his churring notes again. They let the
fly go, too. It preened its wings, and without its stomach flew off to
the horses.
A loud sigh was heard from under the chaise. It was Kuzmitchov waking
up. He quickly raised his head, looked uneasily into the distance, and
from that look, which passed by Yegorushka and Deniska without sympathy
or interest, it could be seen that his thought on awaking was of the
wool and of Varlamov.
“Father Christopher, get up; it is time to start,” he said anxiously.
“Wake up; we’ve slept too long as it is! Deniska, put the horses in.”
Father Christopher woke up with the same smile with which he had fallen
asleep; his face looked creased and wrinkled from sleep, and seemed only
half the size. After washing and dressing, he proceeded without haste to
take out of his pocket a little greasy psalter; and standing with his
face towards the east, began in a whisper repeating the psalms of the
day and crossing himself.
“Father Christopher,” said Kuzmitchov reproachfully, “it’s time to
start; the horses are ready, and here are you, . . . upon my word.”
“In a minute, in a minute,” muttered Father Christopher. “I must read
the psalms. . . . I haven’t read them to-day.”
“The psalms can wait.”
“Ivan Ivanitch, that is my rule every day. . . . I can’t . . .”
“God will overlook it.”
For a full quarter of an hour Father Christopher stood facing the east
and moving his lips, while Kuzmitchov looked at him almost with hatred
and impatiently shrugged his shoulders. He was particularly irritated
when, after every “Hallelujah,” Father Christopher drew a long breath,
rapidly crossed himself and repeated three times, intentionally raising
his voice so that the others might cross themselves, “Hallelujah,
hallelujah, hallelujah! Glory be to Thee, O Lord!” At last he smiled,
looked upwards at the sky, and, putting the psalter in his pocket, said:
“Finis!”
A minute later the chaise had started on the road. As though it were
going backwards and not forwards, the travellers saw the same scene as
they had before midday.
The low hills were still plunged in the lilac distance, and no end could
be seen to them. There were glimpses of high grass and heaps of stones;
strips of stubble land passed by them and still the same rooks, the same
hawk, moving its wings with slow dignity, moved over the steppe. The air
was more sultry than ever; from the sultry heat and the stillness
submissive nature was spellbound into silence . . . . No wind, no fresh
cheering sound, no cloud.
But at last, when the sun was beginning to sink into the west, the
steppe, the hills and the air could bear the oppression no longer, and,
driven out of all patience, exhausted, tried to fling off the yoke. A
fleecy ashen-grey cloud unexpectedly appeared behind the hills. It
exchanged glances with the steppe, as though to say, “Here I am,” and
frowned. Suddenly something burst in the stagnant air; there was a
violent squall of wind which whirled round and round, roaring and
whistling over the steppe. At once a murmur rose from the grass and last
year’s dry herbage, the dust curled in spiral eddies over the road,
raced over the steppe, and carrying with it straws, dragon flies and
feathers, rose up in a whirling black column towards the sky and
darkened the sun. Prickly uprooted plants ran stumbling and leaping in
all directions over the steppe, and one of them got caught in the
whirlwind, turned round and round like a bird, flew towards the sky, and
turning into a little black speck, vanished from sight. After it flew
another, and then a third, and Yegorushka saw two of them meet in the
blue height and clutch at one another as though they were wrestling.
A bustard flew up by the very road. Fluttering his wings and his tail,
he looked, bathed in the sunshine, like an angler’s glittering tin fish
or a waterfly flashing so swiftly over the water that its wings cannot
be told from its antenna, which seem to be growing before, behind and on
all sides. . . . Quivering in the air like an insect with a shimmer of
bright colours, the bustard flew high up in a straight line, then,
probably frightened by a cloud of dust, swerved to one side, and for a
long time the gleam of his wings could be seen. . . .
Then a corncrake flew up from the grass, alarmed by the hurricane and
not knowing what was the matter. It flew with the wind and not against
it, like all the other birds, so that all its feathers were ruffled up
and it was puffed out to the size of a hen and looked very angry and
impressive. Only the rooks who had grown old on the steppe and were
accustomed to its vagaries hovered calmly over the grass, or taking no
notice of anything, went on unconcernedly pecking with their stout beaks
at the hard earth.
There was a dull roll of thunder beyond the hills; there came a whiff of
fresh air. Deniska gave a cheerful whistle and lashed his horses. Father
Christopher and Kuzmitchov held their hats and looked intently towards
the hills. . . . How pleasant a shower of rain would have been!
One effort, one struggle more, and it seemed the steppe would have got
the upper hand. But the unseen oppressive force gradually riveted its
fetters on the wind and the air, laid the dust, and the stillness came
back again as though nothing had happened, the cloud hid, the sun-baked
hills frowned submissively, the air grew calm, and only somewhere the
troubled lapwings wailed and lamented their destiny. . . .
Soon after that the evening came on. III
In the dusk of evening a big house of one storey, with a rusty iron roof
and with dark windows, came into sight. This house was called a posting-
inn, though it had nothing like a stableyard, and it stood in the middle
of the steppe, with no kind of enclosure round it. A little to one side
of it a wretched little cherry orchard shut in by a hurdle fence made a
dark patch, and under the windows stood sleepy sunflowers drooping their
heavy heads. From the orchard came the clatter of a little toy windmill,
set there to frighten away hares by the rattle. Nothing more could be
seen near the house, and nothing could be heard but the steppe. The
chaise had scarcely stopped at the porch with an awning over it, when
from the house there came the sound of cheerful voices, one a man’s,
another a woman’s; there was the creak of a swing-door, and in a flash a
tall gaunt figure, swinging its arms and fluttering its coat, was
standing by the chaise. This was the innkeeper, Moisey Moisevitch, a man
no longer young, with a very pale face and a handsome beard as black as
charcoal. He was wearing a threadbare black coat, which hung flapping on
his narrow shoulders as though on a hatstand, and fluttered its skirts
like wings every time Moisey Moisevitch flung up his hands in delight or
horror. Besides his coat the innkeeper was wearing full white trousers,
not stuck into his boots, and a velvet waistcoat with brown flowers on
it that looked like gigantic bugs.
Moisey Moisevitch was at first dumb with excess of feeling on
recognizing the travellers, then he clasped his hands and uttered a
moan. His coat swung its skirts, his back bent into a bow, and his pale
face twisted into a smile that suggested that to see the chaise was not
merely a pleasure to him, but actually a joy so sweet as to be painful.
“Oh dear! oh dear!” he began in a thin sing-song voice, breathless,
fussing about and preventing the travellers from getting out of the
chaise by his antics. “What a happy day for me! Oh, what am I to do now?
Ivan Ivanitch! Father Christopher! What a pretty little gentleman
sitting on the box, God strike me dead! Oh, my goodness! why am I
standing here instead of asking the visitors indoors? Please walk in, I
humbly beg you. . . . You are kindly welcome! Give me all your things. .
. . Oh, my goodness me!”
Moisey Moisevitch, who was rummaging in the chaise and assisting the
travellers to alight, suddenly turned back and shouted in a voice as
frantic and choking as though he were drowning and calling for help:
“Solomon! Solomon!”
“Solomon! Solomon!” a woman’s voice repeated indoors.
The swing-door creaked, and in the doorway appeared a rather short young
Jew with a big beak-like nose, with a bald patch surrounded by rough red
curly hair; he was dressed in a short and very shabby reefer jacket,
with rounded lappets and short sleeves, and in short serge trousers, so
that he looked skimpy and short-tailed like an unfledged bird. This was
Solomon, the brother of Moisey Moisevitch. He went up to the chaise,
smiling rather queerly, and did not speak or greet the travellers.
“Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher have come,” said Moisey Moisevitch
in a tone as though he were afraid his brother would not believe him.
“Dear, dear! What a surprise! Such honoured guests to have come us so
suddenly! Come, take their things, Solomon. Walk in, honoured guests.”
A little later Kuzmitchov, Father Christopher, and Yegorushka were
sitting in a big gloomy empty room at an old oak table. The table was
almost in solitude, for, except a wide sofa covered with torn American
leather and three chairs, there was no other furniture in the room. And,
indeed, not everybody would have given the chairs that name. They were a
pitiful semblance of furniture, covered with American leather that had
seen its best days, and with backs bent backwards at an unnaturally
acute angle, so that they looked like children’s sledges. It was hard to
imagine what had been the unknown carpenter’s object in bending the
chairbacks so mercilessly, and one was tempted to imagine that it was
not the carpenter’s fault, but that some athletic visitor had bent the
chairs like this as a feat, then had tried to bend them back again and
had made them worse. The room looked gloomy, the walls were grey, the
ceilings and the cornices were grimy; on the floor were chinks and
yawning holes that were hard to account for (one might have fancied they
were made by the heel of the same athlete), and it seemed as though the
room would still have been dark if a dozen lamps had hung in it. There
was nothing approaching an ornament on the walls or the windows. On one
wall, however, there hung a list of regulations of some sort under a
two-headed eagle in a grey wooden frame, and on another wall in the same
sort of frame an engraving with the inscription, “The Indifference of
Man.” What it was to which men were indifferent it was impossible to
make out, as the engraving was very dingy with age and was extensively
flyblown. There was a smell of something decayed and sour in the room.
As he led the visitors into the room, Moisey Moisevitch went on
wriggling, gesticulating, shrugging and uttering joyful exclamations; he
considered these antics necessary in order to seem polite and agreeable.
“When did our waggons go by?” Kuzmitchov asked.
“One party went by early this morning, and the other, Ivan Ivanitch, put
up here for dinner and went on towards evening.”
“Ah! . . . Has Varlamov been by or not?”
“No, Ivan Ivanitch. His clerk, Grigory Yegoritch, went by yesterday
morning and said that he had to be to-day at the Molokans’ farm.”
“Good! so we will go after the waggons directly and then on to the
Molokans’.”
“Mercy on us, Ivan Ivanitch!” Moisey Moisevitch cried in horror,
flinging up his hands. “Where are you going for the night? You will have
a nice little supper and stay the night, and to-morrow morning, please
God, you can go on and overtake anyone you like.”
“There is no time for that. . . . Excuse me, Moisey Moisevitch, another
time; but now I must make haste. We’ll stay a quarter of an hour and
then go on; we can stay the night at the Molokans’.”
“A quarter of an hour!” squealed Moisey Moisevitch. “Have you no fear of
God, Ivan Ivanitch? You will compel me to hide your caps and lock the
door! You must have a cup of tea and a snack of something, anyway.”
“We have no time for tea,” said Kuzmitchov.
Moisey Moisevitch bent his head on one side, crooked his knees, and put
his open hands before him as though warding off a blow, while with a
smile of agonized sweetness he began imploring:
“Ivan Ivanitch! Father Christopher! Do be so good as to take a cup of
tea with me. Surely I am not such a bad man that you can’t even drink
tea in my house? Ivan Ivanitch!”
“Well, we may just as well have a cup of tea,” said Father Christopher,
with a sympathetic smile; “that won’t keep us long.”
“Very well,” Kuzmitchov assented.
Moisey Moisevitch, in a fluster uttered an exclamation of joy, and
shrugging as though he had just stepped out of cold weather into warm,
ran to the door and cried in the same frantic voice in which he had
called Solomon:
“Rosa! Rosa! Bring the samovar!”
A minute later the door opened, and Solomon came into the room carrying
a large tray in his hands. Setting the tray on the table, he looked away
sarcastically with the same queer smile as before. Now, by the light of
the lamp, it was possible to see his smile distinctly; it was very
complex, and expressed a variety of emotions, but the predominant
element in it was undisguised contempt. He seemed to be thinking of
something ludicrous and silly, to be feeling contempt and dislike, to be
pleased at something and waiting for the favourable moment to turn
something into ridicule and to burst into laughter. His long nose, his
thick lips, and his sly prominent eyes seemed tense with the desire to
laugh. Looking at his face, Kuzmitchov smiled ironically and asked:
“Solomon, why did you not come to our fair at N. this summer, and act
some Jewish scenes?”
Two years before, as Yegorushka remembered very well, at one of the
booths at the fair at N., Solomon had performed some scenes of Jewish
life, and his acting had been a great success. The allusion to this made
no impression whatever upon Solomon. Making no answer, he went out and
returned a little later with the samovar.
When he had done what he had to do at the table he moved a little aside,
and, folding his arms over his chest and thrusting out one leg, fixed
his sarcastic eyes on Father Christopher. There was something defiant,
haughty, and contemptuous in his attitude, and at the same time it was
comic and pitiful in the extreme, because the more impressive his
attitude the more vividly it showed up his short trousers, his bobtail
coat, his caricature of a nose, and his bird-like plucked-looking little
figure.
Moisey Moisevitch brought a footstool from the other room and sat down a
little way from the table.
“I wish you a good appetite! Tea and sugar!” he began, trying to
entertain his visitors. “I hope you will enjoy it. Such rare guests,
such rare ones; it is years since I last saw Father Christopher. And
will no one tell me who is this nice little gentleman?” he asked,
looking tenderly at Yegorushka.
“He is the son of my sister, Olga Ivanovna,” answered Kuzmitchov.
“And where is he going?”
“To school. We are taking him to a high school.”
In his politeness, Moisey Moisevitch put on a look of wonder and wagged
his head expressively.
“Ah, that is a fine thing,” he said, shaking his finger at the samovar.
“That’s a fine thing. You will come back from the high school such a
gentleman that we shall all take off our hats to you. You will be
wealthy and wise and so grand that your mamma will be delighted. Oh,
that’s a fine thing!”
He paused a little, stroked his knees, and began again in a jocose and
deferential tone.
“You must excuse me, Father Christopher, but I am thinking of writing to
the bishop to tell him you are robbing the merchants of their living. I
shall take a sheet of stamped paper and write that I suppose Father
Christopher is short of pence, as he has taken up with trade and begun
selling wool.”
“H’m, yes . . . it’s a queer notion in my old age,” said Father
Christopher, and he laughed. “I have turned from priest to merchant,
brother. I ought to be at home now saying my prayers, instead of
galloping about the country like a Pharaoh in his chariot. . . .
Vanity!”
“But it will mean a lot of pence!”
“Oh, I dare say! More kicks than halfpence, and serve me right. The
wool’s not mine, but my son-in-law Mikhail’s!”
“Why doesn’t he go himself?”
“Why, because . . . His mother’s milk is scarcely dry upon his lips. He
can buy wool all right, but when it comes to selling, he has no sense;
he is young yet. He has wasted all his money; he wanted to grow rich and
cut a dash, but he tried here and there, and no one would give him his
price. And so the lad went on like that for a year, and then he came to
me and said, ‘Daddy, you sell the wool for me; be kind and do it! I am
no good at the business!’ And that is true enough. As soon as there is
anything wrong then it’s ‘Daddy,’ but till then they could get on
without their dad. When he was buying he did not consult me, but now
when he is in difficulties it’s Daddy’s turn. And what does his dad know
about it? If it were not for Ivan Ivanitch, his dad could do nothing. I
have a lot of worry with them.”
“Yes; one has a lot of worry with one’s children, I can tell you that,”
sighed Moisey Moisevitch. “I have six of my own. One needs schooling,
another needs doctoring, and a third needs nursing, and when they grow
up they are more trouble still. It is not only nowadays, it was the same
in Holy Scripture. When Jacob had little children he wept, and when they
grew up he wept still more bitterly.”
“H’m, yes . . .” Father Christopher assented pensively, looking at his
glass. “I have no cause myself to rail against the Lord. I have lived to
the end of my days as any man might be thankful to live. . . . I have
married my daughters to good men, my sons I have set up in life, and now
I am free; I have done my work and can go where I like. I live in peace
with my wife. I eat and drink and sleep and rejoice in my grandchildren,
and say my prayers and want nothing more. I live on the fat of the land,
and don’t need to curry favour with anyone. I have never had any trouble
from childhood, and now suppose the Tsar were to ask me, ‘What do you
need? What would you like?’ why, I don’t need anything. I have
everything I want and everything to be thankful for. In the whole town
there is no happier man than I am. My only trouble is I have so many
sins, but there —only God is without sin. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“No doubt it is.”
“I have no teeth, of course; my poor old back aches; there is one thing
and another, . . . asthma and that sort of thing. . . . I ache. . . .
The flesh is weak, but then think of my age! I am in the eighties! One
can’t go on for ever; one mustn’t outstay one’s welcome.”
Father Christopher suddenly thought of something, spluttered into his
glass and choked with laughter. Moisey Moisevitch laughed, too, from
politeness, and he, too, cleared his throat.
“So funny!” said Father Christopher, and he waved his hand. “My eldest
son Gavrila came to pay me a visit. He is in the medical line, and is a
district doctor in the province of Tchernigov. . . . ‘Very well . . .’ I
said to him, ‘here I have asthma and one thing and another. . . . You
are a doctor; cure your father!’ He undressed me on the spot, tapped me,
listened, and all sorts of tricks, . . . kneaded my stomach, and then he
said, ‘Dad, you ought to be treated with compressed air.’” Father
Christopher laughed convulsively, till the tears came into his eyes, and
got up.
“And I said to him, ‘God bless your compressed air!’” he brought out
through his laughter, waving both hands. “God bless your compressed
air!”
Moisey Moisevitch got up, too, and with his hands on his stomach, went
off into shrill laughter like the yap of a lap-dog.
“God bless the compressed air!” repeated Father Christopher, laughing.
Moisey Moisevitch laughed two notes higher and so violently that he
could hardly stand on his feet.
“Oh dear!” he moaned through his laughter. “Let me get my breath . . . .
You’ll be the death of me.”
He laughed and talked, though at the same time he was casting timorous
and suspicious looks at Solomon. The latter was standing in the same
attitude and still smiling. To judge from his eyes and his smile, his
contempt and hatred were genuine, but that was so out of keeping with
his plucked-looking figure that it seemed to Yegorushka as though he
were putting on his defiant attitude and biting sarcastic smile to play
the fool for the entertainment of their honoured guests.
After drinking six glasses of tea in silence, Kuzmitchov cleared a space
before him on the table, took his bag, the one which he kept under his
head when he slept under the chaise, untied the string and shook it.
Rolls of paper notes were scattered out of the bag on the table.
“While we have the time, Father Christopher, let us reckon up,” said
Kuzmitchov.
Moisey Moisevitch was embarrassed at the sight of the money. He got up,
and, as a man of delicate feeling unwilling to pry into other people’s
secrets, he went out of the room on tiptoe, swaying his arms. Solomon
remained where he was.
“How many are there in the rolls of roubles?” Father Christopher began.
“The rouble notes are done up in fifties, . . . the three-rouble notes
in nineties, the twenty-five and hundred roubles in thousands. You count
out seven thousand eight hundred for Varlamov, and I will count out for
Gusevitch. And mind you don’t make a mistake. . .”
Yegorushka had never in his life seen so much money as was lying on the
table before him. There must have been a great deal of money, for the
roll of seven thousand eight hundred, which Father Christopher put aside
for Varlamov, seemed very small compared with the whole heap. At any
other time such a mass of money would have impressed Yegorushka, and
would have moved him to reflect how many cracknels, buns and poppy-cakes
could be bought for that money. Now he looked at it listlessly, only
conscious of the disgusting smell of kerosene and rotten apples that
came from the heap of notes. He was exhausted by the jolting ride in the
chaise, tired out and sleepy. His head was heavy, his eyes would hardly
keep open and his thoughts were tangled like threads. If it had been
possible he would have been relieved to lay his head on the table, so as
not to see the lamp and the fingers moving over the heaps of notes, and
to have let his tired sleepy thoughts go still more at random. When he
tried to keep awake, the light of the lamp, the cups and the fingers
grew double, the samovar heaved and the smell of rotten apples seemed
even more acrid and disgusting.
“Ah, money, money!” sighed Father Christopher, smiling. “You bring
trouble! Now I expect my Mihailo is asleep and dreaming that I am going
to bring him a heap of money like this.”
“Your Mihailo Timofevitch is a man who doesn’t understand business,”
said Kuzmitchov in an undertone; “he undertakes what isn’t his work, but
you understand and can judge. You had better hand over your wool to me,
as I have said already, and I would give you half a rouble above my own
price—yes, I would, simply out of regard for you. . . .”
“No, Ivan Ivanitch.” Father Christopher sighed. “I thank you for your
kindness. . . . Of course, if it were for me to decide, I shouldn’t
think twice about it; but as it is, the wool is not mine, as you know. .
. .”
Moisey Moisevitch came in on tiptoe. Trying from delicacy not to look at
the heaps of money, he stole up to Yegorushka and pulled at his shirt
from behind.
“Come along, little gentleman,” he said in an undertone, “come and see
the little bear I can show you! Such a queer, cross little bear. Oo-oo!”
The sleepy boy got up and listlessly dragged himself after Moisey
Moisevitch to see the bear. He went into a little room, where, before he
saw anything, he felt he could not breathe from the smell of something
sour and decaying, which was much stronger here than in the big room and
probably spread from this room all over the house. One part of the room
was occupied by a big bed, covered with a greasy quilt and another by a
chest of drawers and heaps of rags of all kinds from a woman’s stiff
petticoat to children’s little breeches and braces. A tallow candle
stood on the chest of drawers.
Instead of the promised bear, Yegorushka saw a big fat Jewess with her
hair hanging loose, in a red flannel skirt with black sprigs on it; she
turned with difficulty in the narrow space between the bed and the chest
of drawers and uttered drawn-out moaning as though she had toothache. On
seeing Yegorushka, she made a doleful, woe-begone face, heaved a long
drawn-out sigh, and before he had time to look round, put to his lips a
slice of bread smeared with honey.
“Eat it, dearie, eat it!” she said. “You are here without your mamma,
and no one to look after you. Eat it up.”
Yegorushka did eat it, though after the goodies and poppy-cakes he had
every day at home, he did not think very much of the honey, which was
mixed with wax and bees’ wings. He ate while Moisey Moisevitch and the
Jewess looked at him and sighed.
“Where are you going, dearie?” asked the Jewess.
“To school,” answered Yegorushka.
“And how many brothers and sisters have you got?”
“I am the only one; there are no others.”
“O-oh!” sighed the Jewess, and turned her eyes upward. “Poor mamma, poor
mamma! How she will weep and miss you! We are going to send our Nahum to
school in a year. O-oh!”
“Ah, Nahum, Nahum!” sighed Moisey Moisevitch, and the skin of his pale
face twitched nervously. “And he is so delicate.”
The greasy quilt quivered, and from beneath it appeared a child’s curly
head on a very thin neck; two black eyes gleamed and stared with
curiosity at Yegorushka. Still sighing, Moisey Moisevitch and the Jewess
went to the chest of drawers and began talking in Yiddish. Moisey
Moisevitch spoke in a low bass undertone, and altogether his talk in
Yiddish was like a continual “ghaal-ghaal-ghaal-ghaal, . . .” while his
wife answered him in a shrill voice like a turkeycock’s, and the whole
effect of her talk was something like “Too-too-too-too!” While they were
consulting, another little curly head on a thin neck peeped out of the
greasy quilt, then a third, then a fourth. . . . If Yegorushka had had a
fertile imagination he might have imagined that the hundred-headed hydra
was hiding under the quilt.
“Ghaal-ghaal-ghaal-ghaal!” said Moisey Moisevitch.
“Too-too-too-too!” answered the Jewess.
The consultation ended in the Jewess’s diving with a deep sigh into the
chest of drawers, and, unwrapping some sort of green rag there, she took
out a big rye cake made in the shape of a heart.
“Take it, dearie,” she said, giving Yegorushka the cake; “you have no
mamma now—no one to give you nice things.”
Yegorushka stuck the cake in his pocket and staggered to the door, as he
could not go on breathing the foul, sour air in which the innkeeper and
his wife lived. Going back to the big room, he settled himself more
comfortably on the sofa and gave up trying to check his straying
thoughts.
As soon as Kuzmitchov had finished counting out the notes he put them
back into the bag. He did not treat them very respectfully and stuffed
them into the dirty sack without ceremony, as indifferently as though
they had not been money but waste paper.
Father Christopher was talking to Solomon.
“Well, Solomon the Wise!” he said, yawning and making the sign of the
cross over his mouth. “How is business?”
“What sort of business are you talking about?” asked Solomon, and he
looked as fiendish, as though it were a hint of some crime on his part.
“Oh, things in general. What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” Solomon repeated, and he shrugged his shoulders. “The
same as everyone else. . . . You see, I am a menial, I am my brother’s
servant; my brother’s the servant of the visitors; the visitors are
Varlamov’s servants; and if I had ten millions, Varlamov would be my
servant.”
“Why would he be your servant?”
“Why, because there isn’t a gentleman or millionaire who isn’t ready to
lick the hand of a scabby Jew for the sake of making a kopeck. Now, I am
a scabby Jew and a beggar. Everybody looks at me as though I were a dog,
but if I had money Varlamov would play the fool before me just as Moisey
does before you.”
Father Christopher and Kuzmitchov looked at each other. Neither of them
understood Solomon. Kuzmitchov looked at him sternly and dryly, and
asked:
“How can you compare yourself with Varlamov, you blockhead?”
“I am not such a fool as to put myself on a level with Varlamov,”
answered Solomon, looking sarcastically at the speaker. “Though Varlamov
is a Russian, he is at heart a scabby Jew; money and gain are all he
lives for, but I threw my money in the stove! I don’t want money, or
land, or sheep, and there is no need for people to be afraid of me and
to take off their hats when I pass. So I am wiser than your Varlamov and
more like a man!”
A little later Yegorushka, half asleep, heard Solomon in a hoarse hollow
voice choked with hatred, in hurried stuttering phrases, talking about
the Jews. At first he talked correctly in Russian, then he fell into the
tone of a Jewish recitation, and began speaking as he had done at the
fair with an exaggerated Jewish accent.
“Stop! . . .” Father Christopher said to him. “If you don’t like your
religion you had better change it, but to laugh at it is a sin; it is
only the lowest of the low who will make fun of his religion.”
“You don’t understand,” Solomon cut him short rudely. “I am talking of
one thing and you are talking of something else. . . .”
“One can see you are a foolish fellow,” sighed Father Christopher. “I
admonish you to the best of my ability, and you are angry. I speak to
you like an old man quietly, and you answer like a turkeycock: ‘Bla—-
bla—-bla!’ You really are a queer fellow. . . .”
Moisey Moisevitch came in. He looked anxiously at Solomon and at his
visitors, and again the skin on his face quivered nervously. Yegorushka
shook his head and looked about him; he caught a passing glimpse of
Solomon’s face at the very moment when it was turned three-quarters
towards him and when the shadow of his long nose divided his left cheek
in half; the contemptuous smile mingled with that shadow; the gleaming
sarcastic eyes, the haughty expression, and the whole plucked-looking
little figure, dancing and doubling itself before Yegorushka’s eyes,
made him now not like a buffoon, but like something one sometimes dreams
of, like an evil spirit.
“What a ferocious fellow you’ve got here, Moisey Moisevitch! God bless
him!” said Father Christopher with a smile. “You ought to find him a
place or a wife or something. . . . There’s no knowing what to make of
him. . . .”
Kuzmitchov frowned angrily. Moisey Moisevitch looked uneasily and
inquiringly at his brother and the visitors again.
“Solomon, go away!” he said shortly. “Go away!” and he added something
in Yiddish. Solomon gave an abrupt laugh and went out.
“What was it?” Moisey Moisevitch asked Father Christopher anxiously.
“He forgets himself,” answered Kuzmitchov. “He’s rude and thinks too
much of himself.”
“I knew it!” Moisey Moisevitch cried in horror, clasping his hands. “Oh
dear, oh dear!” he muttered in a low voice. “Be so kind as to excuse it,
and don’t be angry. He is such a queer fellow, such a queer fellow! Oh
dear, oh dear! He is my own brother, but I have never had anything but
trouble from him. You know he’s. . .”
Moisey Moisevitch crooked his finger by his forehead and went on:
“He is not in his right mind; . . . he’s hopeless. And I don’t know what
I am to do with him! He cares for nobody, he respects nobody, and is
afraid of nobody. . . . You know he laughs at everybody, he says silly
things, speaks familiarly to anyone. You wouldn’t believe it, Varlamov
came here one day and Solomon said such things to him that he gave us
both a taste of his whip. . . . But why whip me? Was it my fault? God
has robbed him of his wits, so it is God’s will, and how am I to blame?”
Ten minutes passed and Moisey Moisevitch was still muttering in an
undertone and sighing:
“He does not sleep at night, and is always thinking and thinking and
thinking, and what he is thinking about God only knows. If you go to him
at night he is angry and laughs. He doesn’t like me either . . . . And
there is nothing he wants! When our father died he left us each six
thousand roubles. I bought myself an inn, married, and now I have
children; and he burnt all his money in the stove. Such a pity, such a
pity! Why burn it? If he didn’t want it he could give it to me, but why
burn it?”
Suddenly the swing-door creaked and the floor shook under footsteps.
Yegorushka felt a draught of cold air, and it seemed to him as though
some big black bird had passed by him and had fluttered its wings close
in his face. He opened his eyes. . . . His uncle was standing by the
sofa with his sack in his hands ready for departure; Father Christopher,
holding his broad-brimmed top-hat, was bowing to someone and smiling—not
his usual soft kindly smile, but a respectful forced smile which did not
suit his face at all—while Moisey Moisevitch looked as though his body
had been broken into three parts, and he were balancing and doing his
utmost not to drop to pieces. Only Solomon stood in the corner with his
arms folded, as though nothing had happened, and smiled contemptuously
as before.
“Your Excellency must excuse us for not being tidy,” moaned Moisey
Moisevitch with the agonizingly sweet smile, taking no more notice of
Kuzmitchov or Father Christopher, but swaying his whole person so as to
avoid dropping to pieces. “We are plain folks, your Excellency.”
Yegorushka rubbed his eyes. In the middle of the room there really was
standing an Excellency, in the form of a young plump and very beautiful
woman in a black dress and a straw hat. Before Yegorushka had time to
examine her features the image of the solitary graceful poplar he had
seen that day on the hill for some reason came into his mind.
“Has Varlamov been here to-day?” a woman’s voice inquired.
“No, your Excellency,” said Moisey Moisevitch.
“If you see him to-morrow, ask him to come and see me for a minute.”
All at once, quite unexpectedly, Yegorushka saw half an inch from his
eyes velvety black eyebrows, big brown eyes, delicate feminine cheeks
with dimples, from which smiles seemed radiating all over the face like
sunbeams. There was a glorious scent.
“What a pretty boy!” said the lady. “Whose boy is it? Kazimir
Mihalovitch, look what a charming fellow! Good heavens, he is asleep!”
And the lady kissed Yegorushka warmly on both cheeks, and he smiled and,
thinking he was asleep, shut his eyes. The swing-door squeaked, and
there was the sound of hurried footsteps, coming in and going out.
“Yegorushka, Yegorushka!” he heard two bass voices whisper. “Get up; it
is time to start.”
Somebody, it seemed to be Deniska, set him on his feet and led him by
the arm. On the way he half-opened his eyes and once more saw the
beautiful lady in the black dress who had kissed him. She was standing
in the middle of the room and watched him go out, smiling at him and
nodding her head in a friendly way. As he got near the door he saw a
handsome, stoutly built, dark man in a bowler hat and in leather
gaiters. This must have been the lady’s escort.
“Woa!” he heard from the yard.
At the front door Yegorushka saw a splendid new carriage and a pair of
black horses. On the box sat a groom in livery, with a long whip in his
hands. No one but Solomon came to see the travellers off. His face was
tense with a desire to laugh; he looked as though he were waiting
impatiently for the visitors to be gone, so that he might laugh at them
without restraint.
“The Countess Dranitsky,” whispered Father Christopher, clambering into
the chaise.
“Yes, Countess Dranitsky,” repeated Kuzmitchov, also in a whisper.
The impression made by the arrival of the countess was probably very
great, for even Deniska spoke in a whisper, and only ventured to lash
his bays and shout when the chaise had driven a quarter of a mile away
and nothing could be seen of the inn but a dim light. IV
Who was this elusive, mysterious Varlamov of whom people talked so much,
whom Solomon despised, and whom even the beautiful countess needed?
Sitting on the box beside Deniska, Yegorushka, half asleep, thought
about this person. He had never seen him. But he had often heard of him
and pictured him in his imagination. He knew that Varlamov possessed
several tens of thousands of acres of land, about a hundred thousand
sheep, and a great deal of money. Of his manner of life and occupation
Yegorushka knew nothing, except that he was always “going his rounds in
these parts,” and he was always being looked for.
At home Yegorushka had heard a great deal of the Countess Dranitsky,
too. She, too, had some tens of thousands of acres, a great many sheep,
a stud farm and a great deal of money, but she did not “go rounds,” but
lived at home in a splendid house and grounds, about which Ivan
Ivanitch, who had been more than once at the countess’s on business, and
other acquaintances told many marvellous tales; thus, for instance, they
said that in the countess’s drawing-room, where the portraits of all the
kings of Poland hung on the walls, there was a big table-clock in the
form of a rock, on the rock a gold horse with diamond eyes, rearing, and
on the horse the figure of a rider also of gold, who brandished his
sword to right and to left whenever the clock struck. They said, too,
that twice a year the countess used to give a ball, to which the gentry
and officials of the whole province were invited, and to which even
Varlamov used to come; all the visitors drank tea from silver samovars,
ate all sorts of extraordinary things (they had strawberries and
raspberries, for instance, in winter at Christmas), and danced to a band
which played day and night. . . .
“And how beautiful she is,” thought Yegorushka, remembering her face and
smile.
Kuzmitchov, too, was probably thinking about the countess. For when the
chaise had driven a mile and a half he said:
“But doesn’t that Kazimir Mihalovitch plunder her right and left! The
year before last when, do you remember, I bought some wool from her, he
made over three thousand from my purchase alone.”
“That is just what you would expect from a Pole,” said Father
Christopher.
“And little does it trouble her. Young and foolish, as they say, her
head is full of nonsense.”
Yegorushka, for some reason, longed to think of nothing but Varlamov and
the countess, particularly the latter. His drowsy brain utterly refused
ordinary thoughts, was in a cloud and retained only fantastic fairy-tale
images, which have the advantage of springing into the brain of
themselves without any effort on the part of the thinker, and completely
vanishing of themselves at a mere shake of the head; and, indeed,
nothing that was around him disposed to ordinary thoughts. On the right
there were the dark hills which seemed to be screening something unseen
and terrible; on the left the whole sky about the horizon was covered
with a crimson glow, and it was hard to tell whether there was a fire
somewhere, or whether it was the moon about to rise. As by day the
distance could be seen, but its tender lilac tint had gone, quenched by
the evening darkness, in which the whole steppe was hidden like Moisey
Moisevitch’s children under the quilt.
Corncrakes and quails do not call in the July nights, the nightingale
does not sing in the woodland marsh, and there is no scent of flowers,
but still the steppe is lovely and full of life. As soon as the sun goes
down and the darkness enfolds the earth, the day’s weariness is
forgotten, everything is forgiven, and the steppe breathes a light sigh
from its broad bosom. As though because the grass cannot see in the dark
that it has grown old, a gay youthful twitter rises up from it, such as
is not heard by day; chirruping, twittering, whistling, scratching, the
basses, tenors and sopranos of the steppe all mingle in an incessant,
monotonous roar of sound in which it is sweet to brood on memories and
sorrows. The monotonous twitter soothes to sleep like a lullaby; you
drive and feel you are falling asleep, but suddenly there comes the
abrupt agitated cry of a wakeful bird, or a vague sound like a voice
crying out in wonder “A-ah, a-ah!” and slumber closes one’s eyelids
again. Or you drive by a little creek where there are bushes and hear
the bird, called by the steppe dwellers “the sleeper,” call “Asleep,
asleep, asleep!” while another laughs or breaks into trills of
hysterical weeping—that is the owl. For whom do they call and who hears
them on that plain, God only knows, but there is deep sadness and
lamentation in their cry. . . . There is a scent of hay and dry grass
and belated flowers, but the scent is heavy, sweetly mawkish and soft.
Everything can be seen through the mist, but it is hard to make out the
colours and the outlines of objects. Everything looks different from
what it is. You drive on and suddenly see standing before you right in
the roadway a dark figure like a monk; it stands motionless, waiting,
holding something in its hands. . . . Can it be a robber? The figure
comes closer, grows bigger; now it is on a level with the chaise, and
you see it is not a man, but a solitary bush or a great stone. Such
motionless expectant figures stand on the low hills, hide behind the old
barrows, peep out from the high grass, and they all look like human
beings and arouse suspicion.
And when the moon rises the night becomes pale and dim. The mist seems
to have passed away. The air is transparent, fresh and warm; one can see
well in all directions and even distinguish the separate stalks of grass
by the wayside. Stones and bits of pots can be seen at a long distance.
The suspicious figures like monks look blacker against the light
background of the night, and seem more sinister. More and more often in
the midst of the monotonous chirruping there comes the sound of the “A-
ah, a-ah!” of astonishment troubling the motionless air, and the cry of
a sleepless or delirious bird. Broad shadows move across the plain like
clouds across the sky, and in the inconceivable distance, if you look
long and intently at it, misty monstrous shapes rise up and huddle one
against another. . . . It is rather uncanny. One glances at the pale
green, star-spangled sky on which there is no cloudlet, no spot, and
understands why the warm air is motionless, why nature is on her guard,
afraid to stir: she is afraid and reluctant to lose one instant of life.
Of the unfathomable depth and infinity of the sky one can only form a
conception at sea and on the steppe by night when the moon is shining.
It is terribly lonely and caressing; it looks down languid and alluring,
and its caressing sweetness makes one giddy.
You drive on for one hour, for a second. . . . You meet upon the way a
silent old barrow or a stone figure put up God knows when and by whom; a
nightbird floats noiselessly over the earth, and little by little those
legends of the steppes, the tales of men you have met, the stories of
some old nurse from the steppe, and all the things you have managed to
see and treasure in your soul, come back to your mind. And then in the
churring of insects, in the sinister figures, in the ancient barrows, in
the blue sky, in the moonlight, in the flight of the nightbird, in
everything you see and hear, triumphant beauty, youth, the fulness of
power, and the passionate thirst for life begin to be apparent; the soul
responds to the call of her lovely austere fatherland, and longs to fly
over the steppes with the nightbird. And in the triumph of beauty, in
the exuberance of happiness you are conscious of yearning and grief, as
though the steppe knew she was solitary, knew that her wealth and her
inspiration were wasted for the world, not glorified in song, not wanted
by anyone; and through the joyful clamour one hears her mournful,
hopeless call for singers, singers!
“Woa! Good-evening, Panteley! Is everything all right?”
“First-rate, Ivan Ivanitch!
“Haven’t you seen Varlamov, lads?”
“No, we haven’t.”
Yegorushka woke up and opened his eyes. The chaise had stopped. On the
right the train of waggons stretched for a long way ahead on the road,
and men were moving to and fro near them. All the waggons being loaded
up with great bales of wool looked very high and fat, while the horses
looked short-legged and little.
“Well, then, we shall go on to the Molokans’!” Kuzmitchov said aloud.
“The Jew told us that Varlamov was putting up for the night at the
Molokans’. So good-bye, lads! Good luck to you!”
“Good-bye, Ivan Ivanitch,” several voices replied.
“I say, lads,” Kuzmitchov cried briskly, “you take my little lad along
with you! Why should he go jolting off with us for nothing? You put him
on the bales, Panteley, and let him come on slowly, and we shall
overtake you. Get down, Yegor! Go on; it’s all right. . . .”
Yegorushka got down from the box-seat. Several hands caught him, lifted
him high into the air, and he found himself on something big, soft, and
rather wet with dew. It seemed to him now as though the sky were quite
close and the earth far away.
“Hey, take his little coat!” Deniska shouted from somewhere far below.
His coat and bundle flung up from far below fell close to Yegorushka.
Anxious not to think of anything, he quickly put his bundle under his
head and covered himself with his coat, and stretching his legs out and
shrinking a little from the dew, he laughed with content.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep, . . .” he thought.
“Don’t be unkind to him, you devils!” he heard Deniska’s voice below.
“Good-bye, lads; good luck to you,” shouted Kuzmitchov. “I rely upon
you!”
“Don’t you be uneasy, Ivan Ivanitch!”
Deniska shouted to the horses, the chaise creaked and started, not along
the road, but somewhere off to the side. For two minutes there was
silence, as though the waggons were asleep and there was no sound except
the clanking of the pails tied on at the back of the chaise as it slowly
died away in the distance. Then someone at the head of the waggons
shouted:
“Kiruha! Sta-art!”
The foremost of the waggons creaked, then the second, then the third. .
. . Yegorushka felt the waggon he was on sway and creak also. The
waggons were moving. Yegorushka took a tighter hold of the cord with
which the bales were tied on, laughed again with content, shifted the
cake in his pocket, and fell asleep just as he did in his bed at home. .
. .
When he woke up the sun had risen, it was screened by an ancient barrow,
and, trying to shed its light upon the earth, it scattered its beams in
all directions and flooded the horizon with gold. It seemed to
Yegorushka that it was not in its proper place, as the day before it had
risen behind his back, and now it was much more to his left. . . . And
the whole landscape was different. There were no hills now, but on all
sides, wherever one looked, there stretched the brown cheerless plain;
here and there upon it small barrows rose up and rooks flew as they had
done the day before. The belfries and huts of some village showed white
in the distance ahead; as it was Sunday the Little Russians were at home
baking and cooking—that could be seen by the smoke which rose from every
chimney and hung, a dark blue transparent veil, over the village. In
between the huts and beyond the church there were blue glimpses of a
river, and beyond the river a misty distance. But nothing was so
different from yesterday as the road. Something extraordinarily broad,
spread out and titanic, stretched over the steppe by way of a road. It
was a grey streak well trodden down and covered with dust, like all
roads. Its width puzzled Yegorushka and brought thoughts of fairy tales
to his mind. Who travelled along that road? Who needed so much space? It
was strange and unintelligible. It might have been supposed that giants
with immense strides, such as Ilya Muromets and Solovy the Brigand, were
still surviving in Russia, and that their gigantic steeds were still
alive. Yegorushka, looking at the road, imagined some half a dozen high
chariots racing along side by side, like some he used to see in pictures
in his Scripture history; these chariots were each drawn by six wild
furious horses, and their great wheels raised a cloud of dust to the
sky, while the horses were driven by men such as one may see in one’s
dreams or in imagination brooding over fairy tales. And if those figures
had existed, how perfectly in keeping with the steppe and the road they
would have been!
Telegraph-poles with two wires on them stretched along the right side of
the road to its furthermost limit. Growing smaller and smaller they
disappeared near the village behind the huts and green trees, and then
again came into sight in the lilac distance in the form of very small
thin sticks that looked like pencils stuck into the ground. Hawks,
falcons, and crows sat on the wires and looked indifferently at the
moving waggons.
Yegorushka was lying in the last of the waggons, and so could see the
whole string. There were about twenty waggons, and there was a driver to
every three waggons. By the last waggon, the one in which Yegorushka
was, there walked an old man with a grey beard, as short and lean as
Father Christopher, but with a sunburnt, stern and brooding face. It is
very possible that the old man was not stern and not brooding, but his
red eyelids and his sharp long nose gave his face a stern frigid
expression such as is common with people in the habit of continually
thinking of serious things in solitude. Like Father Christopher he was
wearing a wide-brimmed top-hat, not like a gentleman’s, but made of
brown felt, and in shape more like a cone with the top cut off than a
real top-hat. Probably from a habit acquired in cold winters, when he
must more than once have been nearly frozen as he trudged beside the
waggons, he kept slapping his thighs and stamping with his feet as he
walked. Noticing that Yegorushka was awake, he looked at him and said,
shrugging his shoulders as though from the cold:
“Ah, you are awake, youngster! So you are the son of Ivan Ivanitch?”
“No; his nephew. . . .”
“Nephew of Ivan Ivanitch? Here I have taken off my boots and am hopping
along barefoot. My feet are bad; they are swollen, and it’s easier
without my boots . . . easier, youngster . . . without boots, I mean. .
. . So you are his nephew? He is a good man; no harm in him. . . . God
give him health. . . . No harm in him . . . I mean Ivan Ivanitch. . . .
He has gone to the Molokans’. . . . O Lord, have mercy upon us!”
The old man talked, too, as though it were very cold, pausing and not
opening his mouth properly; and he mispronounced the labial consonants,
stuttering over them as though his lips were frozen. As he talked to
Yegorushka he did not once smile, and he seemed stern.
Two waggons ahead of them there walked a man wearing a long reddish-
brown coat, a cap and high boots with sagging bootlegs and carrying a
whip in his hand. This was not an old man, only about forty. When he
looked round Yegorushka saw a long red face with a scanty goat-beard and
a spongy looking swelling under his right eye. Apart from this very ugly
swelling, there was another peculiar thing about him which caught the
eye at once: in his left hand he carried a whip, while he waved the
right as though he were conducting an unseen choir; from time to time he
put the whip under his arm, and then he conducted with both hands and
hummed something to himself.
The next driver was a long rectilinear figure with extremely sloping
shoulders and a back as flat as a board. He held himself as stiffly
erect as though he were marching or had swallowed a yard measure. His
hands did not swing as he walked, but hung down as if they were straight
sticks, and he strode along in a wooden way, after the manner of toy
soldiers, almost without bending his knees, and trying to take as long
steps as possible. While the old man or the owner of the spongy swelling
were taking two steps he succeeded in taking only one, and so it seemed
as though he were walking more slowly than any of them, and would drop
behind. His face was tied up in a rag, and on his head something stuck
up that looked like a monk’s peaked cap; he was dressed in a short
Little Russian coat, with full dark blue trousers and bark shoes.
Yegorushka did not even distinguish those that were farther on. He lay
on his stomach, picked a little hole in the bale, and, having nothing
better to do, began twisting the wool into a thread. The old man
trudging along below him turned out not to be so stern as one might have
supposed from his face. Having begun a conversation, he did not let it
drop.
“Where are you going?” he asked, stamping with his feet.
“To school,” answered Yegorushka.
“To school? Aha! . . . Well, may the Queen of Heaven help you. Yes. One
brain is good, but two are better. To one man God gives one brain, to
another two brains, and to another three. . . . To another three, that
is true. . . . One brain you are born with, one you get from learning,
and a third with a good life. So you see, my lad, it is a good thing if
a man has three brains. Living is easier for him, and, what’s more,
dying is, too. Dying is, too. . . . And we shall all die for sure.”
The old man scratched his forehead, glanced upwards at Yegorushka with
his red eyes, and went on:
“Maxim Nikolaitch, the gentleman from Slavyanoserbsk, brought a little
lad to school, too, last year. I don’t know how he is getting on there
in studying the sciences, but he was a nice good little lad. . . . God
give them help, they are nice gentlemen. Yes, he, too, brought his boy
to school. . . . In Slavyanoserbsk there is no establishment, I suppose,
for study. No. . . . But it is a nice town. . . . There’s an ordinary
school for simple folks, but for the higher studies there is nothing.
No, that’s true. What’s your name? . . .”
“Yegorushka.”
“Yegory, then. . . . The holy martyr Yegory, the Bearer of Victory,
whose day is the twenty-third of April. And my christian name is
Panteley, . . . Panteley Zaharov Holodov. . . . We are Holodovs . . . .
I am a native of—maybe you’ve heard of it—Tim in the province of Kursk.
My brothers are artisans and work at trades in the town, but I am a
peasant. . . . I have remained a peasant. Seven years ago I went
there—home, I mean. I went to the village and to the town. . . . To Tim,
I mean. Then, thank God, they were all alive and well; . . . but now I
don’t know. . . . Maybe some of them are dead. . . . And it’s time they
did die, for some of them are older than I am. Death is all right; it is
good so long, of course, as one does not die without repentance. There
is no worse evil than an impenitent death; an impenitent death is a joy
to the devil. And if you want to die penitent, so that you may not be
forbidden to enter the mansions of the Lord, pray to the holy martyr
Varvara. She is the intercessor. She is, that’s the truth. . . . For God
has given her such a place in the heavens that everyone has the right to
pray to her for penitence.”
Panteley went on muttering, and apparently did not trouble whether
Yegorushka heard him or not. He talked listlessly, mumbling to himself,
without raising or dropping his voice, but succeeded in telling him a
great deal in a short time. All he said was made up of fragments that
had very little connection with one another, and quite uninteresting for
Yegorushka. Possibly he talked only in order to reckon over his thoughts
aloud after the night spent in silence, in order to see if they were all
there. After talking of repentance, he spoke about a certain Maxim
Nikolaitch from Slavyanoserbsk.
“Yes, he took his little lad; . . . he took him, that’s true . . .”
One of the waggoners walking in front darted from his place, ran to one
side and began lashing on the ground with his whip. He was a stalwart,
broad-shouldered man of thirty, with curly flaxen hair and a look of
great health and vigour. Judging from the movements of his shoulders and
the whip, and the eagerness expressed in his attitude, he was beating
something alive. Another waggoner, a short stubby little man with a
bushy black beard, wearing a waistcoat and a shirt outside his trousers,
ran up to him. The latter broke into a deep guffaw of laughter and
coughing and said: “I say, lads, Dymov has killed a snake!”
There are people whose intelligence can be gauged at once by their voice
and laughter. The man with the black beard belonged to that class of
fortunate individuals; impenetrable stupidity could be felt in his voice
and laugh. The flaxen-headed Dymov had finished, and lifting from the
ground with his whip something like a cord, flung it with a laugh into
the cart.
“That’s not a viper; it’s a grass snake!” shouted someone.
The man with the wooden gait and the bandage round his face strode up
quickly to the dead snake, glanced at it and flung up his stick-like
arms.
“You jail-bird!” he cried in a hollow wailing voice. “What have you
killed a grass snake for? What had he done to you, you damned brute?
Look, he has killed a grass snake; how would you like to be treated so?”
“Grass snakes ought not to be killed, that’s true,” Panteley muttered
placidly, “they ought not. . . They are not vipers; though it looks like
a snake, it is a gentle, innocent creature. . . . It’s friendly to man,
the grass snake is.”
Dymov and the man with the black beard were probably ashamed, for they
laughed loudly, and not answering, slouched lazily back to their
waggons. When the hindmost waggon was level with the spot where the dead
snake lay, the man with his face tied up standing over it turned to
Panteley and asked in a tearful voice:
“Grandfather, what did he want to kill the grass snake for?”
His eyes, as Yegorushka saw now, were small and dingy looking; his face
was grey, sickly and looked somehow dingy too while his chin was red and
seemed very much swollen.
“Grandfather, what did he kill it for?” he repeated, striding along
beside Panteley.
“A stupid fellow. His hands itch to kill, and that is why he does it,”
answered the old man; “but he oughtn’t to kill a grass snake, that’s
true. . . . Dymov is a ruffian, we all know, he kills everything he
comes across, and Kiruha did not interfere. He ought to have taken its
part, but instead of that, he goes off into ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ and ‘Ho-ho-ho!’
. . . But don’t be angry, Vassya. . . . Why be angry? They’ve killed
it—well, never mind them. Dymov is a ruffian and Kiruha acted from
foolishness—never mind. . . . They are foolish people without
understanding—but there, don’t mind them. Emelyan here never touches
what he shouldn’t; he never does; . . . that is true, . . . because he
is a man of education, while they are stupid. . . . Emelyan, he doesn’t
touch things.”
The waggoner in the reddish-brown coat and the spongy swelling on his
face, who was conducting an unseen choir, stopped. Hearing his name, and
waiting till Panteley and Vassya came up to him, he walked beside them.
“What are you talking about?” he asked in a husky muffled voice.
“Why, Vassya here is angry,” said Panteley. “So I have been saying
things to him to stop his being angry. . . . Oh, how my swollen feet
hurt! Oh, oh! They are more inflamed than ever for Sunday, God’s holy
day!”
“It’s from walking,” observed Vassya.
“No, lad, no. It’s not from walking. When I walk it seems easier; when I
lie down and get warm, . . . it’s deadly. Walking is easier for me.”
Emelyan, in his reddish-brown coat, walked between Panteley and Vassya
and waved his arms, as though they were going to sing. After waving them
a little while he dropped them, and croaked out hopelessly:
“I have no voice. It’s a real misfortune. All last night and this
morning I have been haunted by the trio ‘Lord, have Mercy’ that we sang
at the wedding at Marionovsky’s. It’s in my head and in my throat. It
seems as though I could sing it, but I can’t; I have no voice.”
He paused for a minute, thinking, then went on:
“For fifteen years I was in the choir. In all the Lugansky works there
was, maybe, no one with a voice like mine. But, confound it, I bathed
two years ago in the Donets, and I can’t get a single note true ever
since. I took cold in my throat. And without a voice I am like a workman
without hands.”
“That’s true,” Panteley agreed.
“I think of myself as a ruined man and nothing more.”
At that moment Vassya chanced to catch sight of Yegorushka. His eyes
grew moist and smaller than ever.
“There’s a little gentleman driving with us,” and he covered his nose
with his sleeve as though he were bashful. “What a grand driver! Stay
with us and you shall drive the waggons and sell wool.”
The incongruity of one person being at once a little gentleman and a
waggon driver seemed to strike him as very queer and funny, for he burst
into a loud guffaw, and went on enlarging upon the idea. Emelyan glanced
upwards at Yegorushka, too, but coldly and cursorily. He was absorbed in
his own thoughts, and had it not been for Vassya, would not have noticed
Yegorushka’s presence. Before five minutes had passed he was waving his
arms again, then describing to his companions the beauties of the
wedding anthem, “Lord, have Mercy,” which he had remembered in the
night. He put the whip under his arm and waved both hands.
A mile from the village the waggons stopped by a well with a crane.
Letting his pail down into the well, black-bearded Kiruha lay on his
stomach on the framework and thrust his shaggy head, his shoulders, and
part of his chest into the black hole, so that Yegorushka could see
nothing but his short legs, which scarcely touched the ground. Seeing
the reflection of his head far down at the bottom of the well, he was
delighted and went off into his deep bass stupid laugh, and the echo
from the well answered him. When he got up his neck and face were as red
as beetroot. The first to run up and drink was Dymov. He drank laughing,
often turning from the pail to tell Kiruha something funny, then he
turned round, and uttered aloud, to be heard all over the steppe, five
very bad words. Yegorushka did not understand the meaning of such words,
but he knew very well they were bad words. He knew the repulsion his
friends and relations silently felt for such words. He himself, without
knowing why, shared that feeling and was accustomed to think that only
drunk and disorderly people enjoy the privilege of uttering such words
aloud. He remembered the murder of the grass snake, listened to Dymov’s
laughter, and felt something like hatred for the man. And as ill-luck
would have it, Dymov at that moment caught sight of Yegorushka, who had
climbed down from the waggon and gone up to the well. He laughed aloud
and shouted:
“I say, lads, the old man has been brought to bed of a boy in the
night!”
Kiruha laughed his bass laugh till he coughed. Someone else laughed too,
while Yegorushka crimsoned and made up his mind finally that Dymov was a
very wicked man.
With his curly flaxen head, with his shirt opened on his chest and no
hat on, Dymov looked handsome and exceptionally strong; in every
movement he made one could see the reckless dare-devil and athlete,
knowing his value. He shrugged his shoulders, put his arms akimbo,
talked and laughed louder than any of the rest, and looked as though he
were going to lift up something very heavy with one hand and astonish
the whole world by doing so. His mischievous mocking eyes glided over
the road, the waggons, and the sky without resting on anything, and
seemed looking for someone to kill, just as a pastime, and something to
laugh at. Evidently he was afraid of no one, would stick at nothing, and
most likely was not in the least interested in Yegorushka’s opinion of
him. . . . Yegorushka meanwhile hated his flaxen head, his clear face,
and his strength with his whole heart, listened with fear and loathing
to his laughter, and kept thinking what word of abuse he could pay him
out with.
Panteley, too, went up to the pail. He took out of his pocket a little
green glass of an ikon lamp, wiped it with a rag, filled it from the
pail and drank from it, then filled it again, wrapped the little glass
in the rag, and then put it back into his pocket.
“Grandfather, why do you drink out of a lamp?” Yegorushka asked him,
surprised.
“One man drinks out of a pail and another out of a lamp,” the old man
answered evasively. “Every man to his own taste. . . . You drink out of
the pail—well, drink, and may it do you good. . . .”
“You darling, you beauty!” Vassya said suddenly, in a caressing,
plaintive voice. “You darling!”
His eyes were fixed on the distance; they were moist and smiling, and
his face wore the same expression as when he had looked at Yegorushka.
“Who is it you are talking to?” asked Kiruha.
“A darling fox, . . . lying on her back, playing like a dog.”
Everyone began staring into the distance, looking for the fox, but no
one could see it, only Vassya with his grey muddy-looking eyes, and he
was enchanted by it. His sight was extraordinarily keen, as Yegorushka
learnt afterwards. He was so long-sighted that the brown steppe was for
him always full of life and interest. He had only to look into the
distance to see a fox, a hare, a bustard, or some other animal keeping
at a distance from men. There was nothing strange in seeing a hare
running away or a flying bustard—everyone crossing the steppes could see
them; but it was not vouchsafed to everyone to see wild animals in their
own haunts when they were not running nor hiding, nor looking about them
in alarm. Yet Vassya saw foxes playing, hares washing themselves with
their paws, bustards preening their wings and hammering out their hollow
nests. Thanks to this keenness of sight, Vassya had, besides the world
seen by everyone, another world of his own, accessible to no one else,
and probably a very beautiful one, for when he saw something and was in
raptures over it it was impossible not to envy him.
When the waggons set off again, the church bells were ringing for
service. V
The train of waggons drew up on the bank of a river on one side of a
village. The sun was blazing, as it had been the day before; the air was
stagnant and depressing. There were a few willows on the bank, but the
shade from them did not fall on the earth, but on the water, where it
was wasted; even in the shade under the waggon it was stifling and
wearisome. The water, blue from the reflection of the sky in it, was
alluring.
Styopka, a waggoner whom Yegorushka noticed now for the first time, a
Little Russian lad of eighteen, in a long shirt without a belt, and full
trousers that flapped like flags as he walked, undressed quickly, ran
along the steep bank and plunged into the water. He dived three times,
then swam on his back and shut his eyes in his delight. His face was
smiling and wrinkled up as though he were being tickled, hurt and
amused.
On a hot day when there is nowhere to escape from the sultry, stifling
heat, the splash of water and the loud breathing of a man bathing sounds
like good music to the ear. Dymov and Kiruha, looking at Styopka,
undressed quickly and one after the other, laughing loudly in eager
anticipation of their enjoyment, dropped into the water, and the quiet,
modest little river resounded with snorting and splashing and shouting.
Kiruha coughed, laughed and shouted as though they were trying to drown
him, while Dymov chased him and tried to catch him by the leg.
“Ha-ha-ha!” he shouted. “Catch him! Hold him!”
Kiruha laughed and enjoyed himself, but his expression was the same as
it had been on dry land, stupid, with a look of astonishment on it as
though someone had, unnoticed, stolen up behind him and hit him on the
head with the butt-end of an axe. Yegorushka undressed, too, but did not
let himself down by the bank, but took a run and a flying leap from the
height of about ten feet. Describing an arc in the air, he fell into the
water, sank deep, but did not reach the bottom; some force, cold and
pleasant to the touch, seemed to hold him up and bring him back to the
surface. He popped out and, snorting and blowing bubbles, opened his
eyes; but the sun was reflected in the water quite close to his face. At
first blinding spots of light, then rainbow colours and dark patches,
flitted before his eyes. He made haste to dive again, opened his eyes in
the water and saw something cloudy-green like a sky on a moonlight
night. Again the same force would not let him touch the bottom and stay
in the coolness, but lifted him to the surface. He popped out and heaved
a sigh so deep that he had a feeling of space and freshness, not only in
his chest, but in his stomach. Then, to get from the water everything he
possibly could get, he allowed himself every luxury; he lay on his back
and basked, splashed, frolicked, swam on his face, on his side, on his
back and standing up—just as he pleased till he was exhausted. The other
bank was thickly overgrown with reeds; it was golden in the sun, and the
flowers of the reeds hung drooping to the water in lovely tassels. In
one place the reeds were shaking and nodding, with their flowers
rustling— Styopka and Kiruha were hunting crayfish.
“A crayfish, look, lads! A crayfish!” Kiruha cried triumphantly and
actually showed a crayfish.
Yegorushka swam up to the reeds, dived, and began fumbling among their
roots. Burrowing in the slimy, liquid mud, he felt something sharp and
unpleasant—perhaps it really was a crayfish. But at that minute someone
seized him by the leg and pulled him to the surface. Spluttering and
coughing, Yegorushka opened his eyes and saw before him the wet grinning
face of the dare-devil Dymov. The impudent fellow was breathing hard,
and from a look in his eyes he seemed inclined for further mischief. He
held Yegorushka tight by the leg, and was lifting his hand to take hold
of his neck. But Yegorushka tore himself away with repulsion and terror,
as though disgusted at being touched and afraid that the bully would
drown him, and said:
“Fool! I’ll punch you in the face.”
Feeling that this was not sufficient to express his hatred, he thought a
minute and added:
“You blackguard! You son of a bitch!”
But Dymov, as though nothing were the matter, took no further notice of
Yegorushka, but swam off to Kiruha, shouting:
“Ha-ha-ha! Let us catch fish! Mates, let us catch fish.”
“To be sure,” Kiruha agreed; “there must be a lot of fish here.”
“Styopka, run to the village and ask the peasants for a net!
“They won’t give it to me.”
“They will, you ask them. Tell them that they should give it to us for
Christ’s sake, because we are just the same as pilgrims.”
“That’s true.”
Styopka clambered out of the water, dressed quickly, and without a cap
on he ran, his full trousers flapping, to the village. The water lost
all its charm for Yegorushka after his encounter with Dymov. He got out
and began dressing. Panteley and Vassya were sitting on the steep bank,
with their legs hanging down, looking at the bathers. Emelyan was
standing naked, up to his knees in the water, holding on to the grass
with one hand to prevent himself from falling while the other stroked
his body. With his bony shoulder-blades, with the swelling under his
eye, bending down and evidently afraid of the water, he made a ludicrous
figure. His face was grave and severe. He looked angrily at the water,
as though he were just going to upbraid it for having given him cold in
the Donets and robbed him of his voice.
“And why don’t you bathe?” Yegorushka asked Vassya.
“Oh, I don’t care for it, . . .” answered Vassya.
“How is it your chin is swollen?”
“It’s bad. . . . I used to work at the match factory, little sir. . . .
The doctor used to say that it would make my jaw rot. The air is not
healthy there. There were three chaps beside me who had their jaws
swollen, and with one of them it rotted away altogether.”
Styopka soon came back with the net. Dymov and Kiruha were already
turning blue and getting hoarse by being so long in the water, but they
set about fishing eagerly. First they went to a deep place beside the
reeds; there Dymov was up to his neck, while the water went over squat
Kiruha’s head. The latter spluttered and blew bubbles, while Dymov
stumbling on the prickly roots, fell over and got caught in the net;
both flopped about in the water, and made a noise, and nothing but
mischief came of their fishing.
“It’s deep,” croaked Kiruha. “You won’t catch anything.”
“Don’t tug, you devil!” shouted Dymov trying to put the net in the
proper position. “Hold it up.”
“You won’t catch anything here,” Panteley shouted from the bank. “You
are only frightening the fish, you stupids! Go more to the left! It’s
shallower there!”
Once a big fish gleamed above the net; they all drew a breath, and Dymov
struck the place where it had vanished with his fist, and his face
expressed vexation.
“Ugh!” cried Panteley, and he stamped his foot. “You’ve let the perch
slip! It’s gone!”
Moving more to the left, Dymov and Kiruha picked out a shallower place,
and then fishing began in earnest. They had wandered off some hundred
paces from the waggons; they could be seen silently trying to go as deep
as they could and as near the reeds, moving their legs a little at a
time, drawing out the nets, beating the water with their fists to drive
them towards the nets. From the reeds they got to the further bank; they
drew the net out, then, with a disappointed air, lifting their knees
high as they walked, went back into the reeds. They were talking about
something, but what it was no one could hear. The sun was scorching
their backs, the flies were stinging them, and their bodies had turned
from purple to crimson. Styopka was walking after them with a pail in
his hands; he had tucked his shirt right up under his armpits, and was
holding it up by the hem with his teeth. After every successful catch he
lifted up some fish, and letting it shine in the sun, shouted:
“Look at this perch! We’ve five like that!”
Every time Dymov, Kiruha and Styopka pulled out the net they could be
seen fumbling about in the mud in it, putting some things into the pail
and throwing other things away; sometimes they passed something that was
in the net from hand to hand, examined it inquisitively, then threw
that, too, away.
“What is it?” they shouted to them from the bank.
Styopka made some answer, but it was hard to make out his words. Then he
climbed out of the water and, holding the pail in both hands, forgetting
to let his shirt drop, ran to the waggons.
“It’s full!” he shouted, breathing hard. “Give us another!”
Yegorushka looked into the pail: it was full. A young pike poked its
ugly nose out of the water, and there were swarms of crayfish and little
fish round about it. Yegorushka put his hand down to the bottom and
stirred up the water; the pike vanished under the crayfish and a perch
and a tench swam to the surface instead of it. Vassya, too, looked into
the pail. His eyes grew moist and his face looked as caressing as before
when he saw the fox. He took something out of the pail, put it to his
mouth and began chewing it.
“Mates,” said Styopka in amazement, “Vassya is eating a live gudgeon!
Phoo!”
“It’s not a gudgeon, but a minnow,” Vassya answered calmly, still
munching.
He took a fish’s tail out of his mouth, looked at it caressingly, and
put it back again. While he was chewing and crunching with his teeth it
seemed to Yegorushka that he saw before him something not human.
Vassya’s swollen chin, his lustreless eyes, his extraordinary sharp
sight, the fish’s tail in his mouth, and the caressing friendliness with
which he crunched the gudgeon made him like an animal.
Yegorushka felt dreary beside him. And the fishing was over, too. He
walked about beside the waggons, thought a little, and, feeling bored,
strolled off to the village.
Not long afterwards he was standing in the church, and with his forehead
leaning on somebody’s back, listened to the singing of the choir. The
service was drawing to a close. Yegorushka did not understand church
singing and did not care for it. He listened a little, yawned, and began
looking at the backs and heads before him. In one head, red and wet from
his recent bathe, he recognized Emelyan. The back of his head had been
cropped in a straight line higher than is usual; the hair in front had
been cut unbecomingly high, and Emelyan’s ears stood out like two dock
leaves, and seemed to feel themselves out of place. Looking at the back
of his head and his ears, Yegorushka, for some reason, thought that
Emelyan was probably very unhappy. He remembered the way he conducted
with his hands, his husky voice, his timid air when he was bathing, and
felt intense pity for him. He longed to say something friendly to him.
“I am here, too,” he said, putting out his hand.
People who sing tenor or bass in the choir, especially those who have at
any time in their lives conducted, are accustomed to look with a stern
and unfriendly air at boys. They do not give up this habit, even when
they leave off being in a choir. Turning to Yegorushka, Emelyan looked
at him from under his brows and said:
“Don’t play in church!”
Then Yegorushka moved forwards nearer to the ikon-stand. Here he saw
interesting people. On the right side, in front of everyone, a lady and
a gentleman were standing on a carpet. There were chairs behind them.
The gentleman was wearing newly ironed shantung trousers; he stood as
motionless as a soldier saluting, and held high his bluish shaven chin.
There was a very great air of dignity in his stand-up collar, in his
blue chin, in his small bald patch and his cane. His neck was so
strained from excess of dignity, and his chin was drawn up so tensely,
that it looked as though his head were ready to fly off and soar upwards
any minute. The lady, who was stout and elderly and wore a white silk
shawl, held her head on one side and looked as though she had done
someone a favour, and wanted to say: “Oh, don’t trouble yourself to
thank me; I don’t like it . . . .” A thick wall of Little Russian heads
stood all round the carpet.
Yegorushka went up to the ikon-stand and began kissing the local ikons.
Before each image he slowly bowed down to the ground, without getting
up, looked round at the congregation, then got up and kissed the ikon.
The contact of his forehead with the cold floor afforded him great
satisfaction. When the beadle came from the altar with a pair of long
snuffers to put out the candles, Yegorushka jumped up quickly from the
floor and ran up to him.
“Have they given out the holy bread?” he asked.
“There is none; there is none,” the beadle muttered gruffly. “It is no
use your. . .”
The service was over; Yegorushka walked out of the church in a leisurely
way, and began strolling about the market-place. He had seen a good many
villages, market-places, and peasants in his time, and everything that
met his eyes was entirely without interest for him. At a loss for
something to do, he went into a shop over the door of which hung a wide
strip of red cotton. The shop consisted of two roomy, badly lighted
parts; in one half they sold drapery and groceries, in the other there
were tubs of tar, and there were horse-collars hanging from the ceiling;
from both came the savoury smell of leather and tar. The floor of the
shop had been watered; the man who watered it must have been a very
whimsical and original person, for it was sprinkled in patterns and
mysterious symbols. The shopkeeper, an overfed-looking man with a broad
face and round beard, apparently a Great Russian, was standing, leaning
his person over the counter. He was nibbling a piece of sugar as he
drank his tea, and heaved a deep sigh at every sip. His face expressed
complete indifference, but each sigh seemed to be saying:
“Just wait a minute; I will give it you.”
“Give me a farthing’s worth of sunflower seeds,” Yegorushka said,
addressing him.
The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows, came out from behind the counter,
and poured a farthing’s worth of sunflower seeds into Yegorushka’s
pocket, using an empty pomatum pot as a measure. Yegorushka did not want
to go away. He spent a long time in examining the box of cakes, thought
a little and asked, pointing to some little cakes covered with the
mildew of age:
“How much are these cakes?”
“Two for a farthing.”
Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before by
the Jewess, and asked him:
“And how much do you charge for cakes like this?”
The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all sides, and
raised one eyebrow.
“Like that?” he asked.
Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:
“Two for three farthings. . . .”
A silence followed.
“Whose boy are you?” the shopman asked, pouring himself out some tea
from a red copper teapot.
“The nephew of Ivan Ivanitch.”
“There are all sorts of Ivan Ivanitchs,” the shopkeeper sighed. He
looked over Yegorushka’s head towards the door, paused a minute and
asked:
“Would you like some tea?”
“Please. . . .” Yegorushka assented not very readily, though he felt an
intense longing for his usual morning tea.
The shopkeeper poured him out a glass and gave him with it a bit of
sugar that looked as though it had been nibbled. Yegorushka sat down on
the folding chair and began drinking it. He wanted to ask the price of a
pound of sugar almonds, and had just broached the subject when a
customer walked in, and the shopkeeper, leaving his glass of tea,
attended to his business. He led the customer into the other half, where
there was a smell of tar, and was there a long time discussing something
with him. The customer, a man apparently very obstinate and pig-headed,
was continually shaking his head to signify his disapproval, and
retreating towards the door. The shopkeeper tried to persuade him of
something and began pouring some oats into a big sack for him.
“Do you call those oats?” the customer said gloomily. “Those are not
oats, but chaff. It’s a mockery to give that to the hens; enough to make
the hens laugh. . . . No, I will go to Bondarenko.”
When Yegorushka went back to the river a small camp fire was smoking on
the bank. The waggoners were cooking their dinner. Styopka was standing
in the smoke, stirring the cauldron with a big notched spoon. A little
on one side Kiruha and Vassya, with eyes reddened from the smoke, were
sitting cleaning the fish. Before them lay the net covered with slime
and water weeds, and on it lay gleaming fish and crawling crayfish.
Emelyan, who had not long been back from the church, was sitting beside
Panteley, waving his arm and humming just audibly in a husky voice: “To
Thee we sing. . . .” Dymov was moving about by the horses.
When they had finished cleaning them, Kiruha and Vassya put the fish and
the living crayfish together in the pail, rinsed them, and from the pail
poured them all into the boiling water.
“Shall I put in some fat?” asked Styopka, skimming off the froth.
“No need. The fish will make its own gravy,” answered Kiruha.
Before taking the cauldron off the fire Styopka scattered into the water
three big handfuls of millet and a spoonful of salt; finally he tried
it, smacked his lips, licked the spoon, and gave a self-satisfied grunt,
which meant that the grain was done.
All except Panteley sat down near the cauldron and set to work with
their spoons.
“You there! Give the little lad a spoon!” Panteley observed sternly. “I
dare say he is hungry too!”
“Ours is peasant fare,” sighed Kiruha.
“Peasant fare is welcome, too, when one is hungry.”
They gave Yegorushka a spoon. He began eating, not sitting, but standing
close to the cauldron and looking down into it as in a hole. The grain
smelt of fish and fish-scales were mixed up with the millet. The
crayfish could not be hooked out with a spoon, and the men simply picked
them out of the cauldron with their hands; Vassya did so particularly
freely, and wetted his sleeves as well as his hands in the mess. But yet
the stew seemed to Yegorushka very nice, and reminded him of the
crayfish soup which his mother used to make at home on fast-days.
Panteley was sitting apart munching bread.
“Grandfather, why aren’t you eating?” Emelyan asked him.
“I don’t eat crayfish. . . . Nasty things,” the old man said, and turned
away with disgust.
While they were eating they all talked. From this conversation
Yegorushka gathered that all his new acquaintances, in spite of the
differences of their ages and their characters, had one point in common
which made them all alike: they were all people with a splendid past and
a very poor present. Of their past they all— every one of them—spoke
with enthusiasm; their attitude to the present was almost one of
contempt. The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.
Yegorushka did not yet know that, and before the stew had been all eaten
he firmly believed that the men sitting round the cauldron were the
injured victims of fate. Panteley told them that in the past, before
there were railways, he used to go with trains of waggons to Moscow and
to Nizhni, and used to earn so much that he did not know what to do with
his money; and what merchants there used to be in those days! what fish!
how cheap everything was! Now the roads were shorter, the merchants were
stingier, the peasants were poorer, the bread was dearer, everything had
shrunk and was on a smaller scale. Emelyan told them that in old days he
had been in the choir in the Lugansky works, and that he had a
remarkable voice and read music splendidly, while now he had become a
peasant and lived on the charity of his brother, who sent him out with
his horses and took half his earnings. Vassya had once worked in a match
factory; Kiruha had been a coachman in a good family, and had been
reckoned the smartest driver of a three-in-hand in the whole district.
Dymov, the son of a well-to-do peasant, lived at ease, enjoyed himself
and had known no trouble till he was twenty, when his stern harsh
father, anxious to train him to work, and afraid he would be spoiled at
home, had sent him to a carrier’s to work as a hired labourer. Styopka
was the only one who said nothing, but from his beardless face it was
evident that his life had been a much better one in the past.
Thinking of his father, Dymov frowned and left off eating. Sullenly from
under his brows he looked round at his companions and his eye rested
upon Yegorushka.
“You heathen, take off your cap,” he said rudely. “You can’t eat with
your cap on, and you a gentleman too!”
Yegorushka took off his hat and did not say a word, but the stew lost
all savour for him, and he did not hear Panteley and Vassya intervening
on his behalf. A feeling of anger with the insulting fellow was rankling
oppressively in his breast, and he made up his mind that he would do him
some injury, whatever it cost him.
After dinner everyone sauntered to the waggons and lay down in the
shade.
“Are we going to start soon, grandfather?” Yegorushka asked Panteley.
“In God’s good time we shall set off. There’s no starting yet; it is too
hot. . . . O Lord, Thy will be done. Holy Mother. . . Lie down, little
lad.”
Soon there was a sound of snoring from under the waggons. Yegorushka
meant to go back to the village, but on consideration, yawned and lay
down by the old man. VI
The waggons remained by the river the whole day, and set off again when
the sun was setting.
Yegorushka was lying on the bales again; the waggon creaked softly and
swayed from side to side. Panteley walked below, stamping his feet,
slapping himself on his thighs and muttering. The air was full of the
churring music of the steppes, as it had been the day before.
Yegorushka lay on his back, and, putting his hands under his head, gazed
upwards at the sky. He watched the glow of sunset kindle, then fade
away; guardian angels covering the horizon with their gold wings
disposed themselves to slumber. The day had passed peacefully; the quiet
peaceful night had come, and they could stay tranquilly at home in
heaven. . . . Yegorushka saw the sky by degrees grow dark and the mist
fall over the earth—saw the stars light up, one after the other. . . .
When you gaze a long while fixedly at the deep sky thoughts and feelings
for some reason merge in a sense of loneliness. One begins to feel
hopelessly solitary, and everything one used to look upon as near and
akin becomes infinitely remote and valueless; the stars that have looked
down from the sky thousands of years already, the mists and the
incomprehensible sky itself, indifferent to the brief life of man,
oppress the soul with their silence when one is left face to face with
them and tries to grasp their significance. One is reminded of the
solitude awaiting each one of us in the grave, and the reality of life
seems awful . . . full of despair. . . .
Yegorushka thought of his grandmother, who was sleeping now under the
cherry-trees in the cemetery. He remembered how she lay in her coffin
with pennies on her eyes, how afterwards she was shut in and let down
into the grave; he even recalled the hollow sound of the clods of earth
on the coffin lid. . . . He pictured his granny in the dark and narrow
coffin, helpless and deserted by everyone. His imagination pictured his
granny suddenly awakening, not understanding where she was, knocking
upon the lid and calling for help, and in the end swooning with horror
and dying again. He imagined his mother dead, Father Christopher,
Countess Dranitsky, Solomon. But however much he tried to imagine
himself in the dark tomb, far from home, outcast, helpless and dead, he
could not succeed; for himself personally he could not admit the
possibility of death, and felt that he would never die. . . .
Panteley, for whom death could not be far away, walked below and went on
reckoning up his thoughts.
“All right. . . . Nice gentlefolk, . . .” he muttered. “Took his little
lad to school—but how he is doing now I haven’t heard say —in
Slavyanoserbsk. I say there is no establishment for teaching them to be
very clever. . . . No, that’s true—a nice little lad, no harm in him. .
. . He’ll grow up and be a help to his father . . . . You, Yegory, are
little now, but you’ll grow big and will keep your father and mother. .
. . So it is ordained of God, ‘Honour your father and your mother.’ . .
. I had children myself, but they were burnt. . . . My wife was burnt
and my children, . . . that’s true. . . . The hut caught fire on the
night of Epiphany. . . . I was not at home, I was driving in Oryol. In
Oryol. . . . Marya dashed out into the street, but remembering that the
children were asleep in the hut, ran back and was burnt with her
children. . . . Next day they found nothing but bones.”
About midnight Yegorushka and the waggoners were again sitting round a
small camp fire. While the dry twigs and stems were burning up, Kiruha
and Vassya went off somewhere to get water from a creek; they vanished
into the darkness, but could be heard all the time talking and cElinking
their pails; so the creek was not far away. The light from the fire lay
a great flickering patch on the earth; though the moon was bright, yet
everything seemed impenetrably black beyond that red patch. The light
was in the waggoners’ eyes, and they saw only part of the great road;
almost unseen in the darkness the waggons with the bales and the horses
looked like a mountain of undefined shape. Twenty paces from the camp
fire at the edge of the road stood a wooden cross that had fallen
aslant. Before the camp fire had been lighted, when he could still see
things at a distance, Yegorushka had noticed that there was a similar
old slanting cross on the other side of the great road.
Coming back with the water, Kiruha and Vassya filled the cauldron and
fixed it over the fire. Styopka, with the notched spoon in his hand,
took his place in the smoke by the cauldron, gazing dreamily into the
water for the scum to rise. Panteley and Emelyan were sitting side by
side in silence, brooding over something. Dymov was lying on his
stomach, with his head propped on his fists, looking into the fire. . .
. Styopka’s shadow was dancing over him, so that his handsome face was
at one minute covered with darkness, at the next lighted up. . . .
Kiruha and Vassya were wandering about at a little distance gathering
dry grass and bark for the fire. Yegorushka, with his hands in his
pockets, was standing by Panteley, watching how the fire devoured the
grass.
All were resting, musing on something, and they glanced cursorily at the
cross over which patches of red light were dancing. There is something
melancholy, pensive, and extremely poetical about a solitary tomb; one
feels its silence, and the silence gives one the sense of the presence
of the soul of the unknown man who lies under the cross. Is that soul at
peace on the steppe? Does it grieve in the moonlight? Near the tomb the
steppe seems melancholy, dreary and mournful; the grass seems more
sorrowful, and one fancies the grasshoppers chirrup less freely, and
there is no passer-by who would not remember that lonely soul and keep
looking back at the tomb, till it was left far behind and hidden in the
mists. . . .
“Grandfather, what is that cross for?” asked Yegorushka.
Panteley looked at the cross and then at Dymov and asked:
“Nikola, isn’t this the place where the mowers killed the merchants?”
Dymov not very readily raised himself on his elbow, looked at the road
and said:
“Yes, it is. . . .”
A silence followed. Kiruha broke up some dry stalks, crushed them up
together and thrust them under the cauldron. The fire flared up
brightly; Styopka was enveloped in black smoke, and the shadow cast by
the cross danced along the road in the dusk beside the waggons.
“Yes, they were killed,” Dymov said reluctantly. “Two merchants, father
and son, were travelling, selling holy images. They put up in the inn
not far from here that is now kept by Ignat Fomin. The old man had a
drop too much, and began boasting that he had a lot of money with him.
We all know merchants are a boastful set, God preserve us. . . . They
can’t resist showing off before the likes of us. And at the time some
mowers were staying the night at the inn. So they overheard what the
merchants said and took note of it.”
“O Lord! . . . Holy Mother!” sighed Panteley.
“Next day, as soon as it was light,” Dymov went on, “the merchants were
preparing to set off and the mowers tried to join them. ‘Let us go
together, your worships. It will be more cheerful and there will be less
danger, for this is an out-of-the-way place. . . .’ The merchants had to
travel at a walking pace to avoid breaking the images, and that just
suited the mowers. . . .”
Dymov rose into a kneeling position and stretched.
“Yes,” he went on, yawning. “Everything went all right till they reached
this spot, and then the mowers let fly at them with their scythes. The
son, he was a fine young fellow, snatched the scythe from one of them,
and he used it, too. . . . Well, of course, they got the best of it
because there were eight of them. They hacked at the merchants so that
there was not a sound place left on their bodies; when they had finished
they dragged both of them off the road, the father to one side and the
son to the other. Opposite that cross there is another cross on this
side. . . . Whether it is still standing, I don’t know. . . . I can’t
see from here. . . .”
“It is,” said Kiruha.
“They say they did not find much money afterwards.”
“No,” Panteley confirmed; “they only found a hundred roubles.”
“And three of them died afterwards, for the merchant had cut them badly
with the scythe, too. They died from loss of blood. One had his hand cut
off, so that they say he ran three miles without his hand, and they
found him on a mound close to Kurikovo. He was squatting on his heels,
with his head on his knees, as though he were lost in thought, but when
they looked at him there was no life in him and he was dead. . . .”
“They found him by the track of blood,” said Panteley.
Everyone looked at the cross, and again there was a hush. From
somewhere, most likely from the creek, floated the mournful cry of the
bird: “Sleep! sleep! sleep!”
“There are a great many wicked people in the world,” said Emelyan.
“A great many,” assented Panteley, and he moved up closer to the fire as
though he were frightened. “A great many,” he went on in a low voice.
“I’ve seen lots and lots of them. . . . Wicked people! . . . I have seen
a great many holy and just, too. . . . Queen of Heaven, save us and have
mercy on us. I remember once thirty years ago, or maybe more, I was
driving a merchant from Morshansk. The merchant was a jolly handsome
fellow, with money, too . . . the merchant was . . . a nice man, no harm
in him. . . . So we put up for the night at an inn. And in Russia the
inns are not what they are in these parts. There the yards are roofed in
and look like the ground floor, or let us say like barns in good farms.
Only a barn would be a bit higher. So we put up there and were all
right. My merchant was in a room, while I was with the horses, and
everything was as it should be. So, lads, I said my prayers before going
to sleep and began walking about the yard. And it was a dark night, I
couldn’t see anything; it was no good trying. So I walked about a bit up
to the waggons, or nearly, when I saw a light gleaming. What could it
mean? I thought the people of the inn had gone to bed long ago, and
besides the merchant and me there were no other guests in the inn. . . .
Where could the light have come from? I felt suspicious. . . . I went
closer . . . towards the light. . . . The Lord have mercy upon me! and
save me, Queen of Heaven! I looked and there was a little window with a
grating, . . . close to the ground, in the house. . . I lay down on the
ground and looked in; as soon as I looked in a cold chill ran all down
me. . . .”
Kiruha, trying not to make a noise, thrust a handful of twigs into the
fire. After waiting for it to leave off crackling and hissing, the old
man went on:
“I looked in and there was a big cellar, black and dark. . . . There was
a lighted lantern on a tub. In the middle of the cellar were about a
dozen men in red shirts with their sleeves turned up, sharpening long
knives. . . . Ugh! So we had fallen into a nest of robbers. . . . What’s
to be done? I ran to the merchant, waked him up quietly, and said:
‘Don’t be frightened, merchant,’ said I, ‘but we are in a bad way. We
have fallen into a nest of robbers,’ I said. He turned pale and asked:
‘What are we to do now, Panteley? I have a lot of money that belongs to
orphans. As for my life,’ he said, ‘that’s in God’s hands. I am not
afraid to die, but it’s dreadful to lose the orphans’ money,’ said he. .
. . What were we to do? The gates were locked; there was no getting out.
If there had been a fence one could have climbed over it, but with the
yard shut up! . . . ‘Come, don’t be frightened, merchant,’ said I; ‘but
pray to God. Maybe the Lord will not let the orphans suffer. Stay
still.’ said I, ‘and make no sign, and meanwhile, maybe, I shall think
of something. . . .’ Right! . . . I prayed to God and the Lord put the
thought into my mind. . . . I clambered up on my chaise and softly, . .
. softly so that no one should hear, began pulling out the straw in the
thatch, made a hole and crept out, crept out. . . . Then I jumped off
the roof and ran along the road as fast as I could. I ran and ran till I
was nearly dead. . . . I ran maybe four miles without taking breath, if
not more. Thank God I saw a village. I ran up to a hut and began tapping
at a window. ‘Good Christian people,’ I said, and told them all about
it, ‘do not let a Christian soul perish. . . .’ I waked them all up. . .
. The peasants gathered together and went with me, . . one with a cord,
one with an oakstick, others with pitchforks. . . . We broke in the
gates of the inn-yard and went straight to the cellar. . . . And the
robbers had just finished sharpening their knives and were going to kill
the merchant. The peasants took them, every one of them, bound them and
carried them to the police. The merchant gave them three hundred roubles
in his joy, and gave me five gold pieces and put my name down. They said
that they found human bones in the cellar afterwards, heaps and heaps of
them. . . . Bones! . . . So they robbed people and then buried them, so
that there should be no traces. . . . Well, afterwards they were
punished at Morshansk.”
Panteley had finished his story, and he looked round at his listeners.
They were gazing at him in silence. The water was boiling by now and
Styopka was skimming off the froth.
“Is the fat ready?” Kiruha asked him in a whisper.
“Wait a little. . . . Directly.”
Styopka, his eyes fixed on Panteley as though he were afraid that the
latter might begin some story before he was back, ran to the waggons;
soon he came back with a little wooden bowl and began pounding some lard
in it.
“I went another journey with a merchant, too, . . .” Panteley went on
again, speaking as before in a low voice and with fixed unbElinking
eyes. “His name, as I remember now, was Pyotr Grigoritch. He was a nice
man, . . . the merchant was. We stopped in the same way at an inn. . . .
He indoors and me with the horses. . . . The people of the house, the
innkeeper and his wife, seemed friendly good sort of people; the
labourers, too, seemed all right; but yet, lads, I couldn’t sleep. I had
a queer feeling in my heart, . . . a queer feeling, that was just it.
The gates were open and there were plenty of people about, and yet I
felt afraid and not myself. Everyone had been asleep long ago. It was
the middle of the night; it would soon be time to get up, and I was
lying alone in my chaise and could not close my eyes, as though I were
some owl. And then, lads, I heard this sound, ‘Toop! toop! toop!’
Someone was creeping up to the chaise. I poke my head out, and there was
a peasant woman in nothing but her shift and with her feet bare. . . .
‘What do you want, good woman?’ I asked. And she was all of a tremble;
her face was terror-stricken. . . ‘Get up, good man,’ said she; ‘the
people are plotting evil. . . . They mean to kill your merchant. With my
own ears I heard the master whispering with his wife. . . .’ So it was
not for nothing, the foreboding of my heart! ‘And who are you?’ I asked.
‘I am their cook,’ she said. . . . Right! . . . So I got out of the
chaise and went to the merchant. I waked him up and said: ‘Things aren’t
quite right, Pyotr Grigoritch. . . . Make haste and rouse yourself from
sleep, your worship, and dress now while there is still time,’ I said;
‘and to save our skins, let us get away from trouble.’ He had no sooner
begun dressing when the door opened and, mercy on us! I saw, Holy
Mother! the innkeeper and his wife come into the room with three
labourers. . . . So they had persuaded the labourers to join them. ‘The
merchant has a lot of money, and we’ll go shares,’ they told them. Every
one of the five had a long knife in their hand each a knife. The
innkeeper locked the door and said: ‘Say your prayers, travellers, . . .
and if you begin screaming,’ they said, ‘we won’t let you say your
prayers before you die. . . .’ As though we could scream! I had such a
lump in my throat I could not cry out. . . . The merchant wept and said:
‘Good Christian people! you have resolved to kill me because my money
tempts you. Well, so be it; I shall not be the first nor shall I be the
last. Many of us merchants have been murdered at inns. But why, good
Christian brothers,’ says he, ‘murder my driver? Why should he have to
suffer for my money?’ And he said that so pitifully! And the innkeeper
answered him: ‘If we leave him alive,’ said he, ‘he will be the first to
bear witness against us. One may just as well kill two as one. You can
but answer once for seven misdeeds. . . Say your prayers, that’s all you
can do, and it is no good talking!’ The merchant and I knelt down side
by side and wept and said our prayers. He thought of his children. I was
young in those days; I wanted to live. . . . We looked at the images and
prayed, and so pitifully that it brings a tear even now. . . . And the
innkeeper’s wife looks at us and says: ‘Good people,’ said she, ‘don’t
bear a grudge against us in the other world and pray to God for our
punishment, for it is want that drives us to it.’ We prayed and wept and
prayed and wept, and God heard us. He had pity on us, I suppose. . . .
At the very minute when the innkeeper had taken the merchant by the
beard to rip open his throat with his knife suddenly someone seemed to
tap at the window from the yard! We all started, and the innkeeper’s
hands dropped. . . . Someone was tapping at the window and shouting:
‘Pyotr Grigoritch,’ he shouted, ‘are you here? Get ready and let’s go!’
The people saw that someone had come for the merchant; they were
terrified and took to their heels. . . . And we made haste into the
yard, harnessed the horses, and were out of sight in a minute. . .”
“Who was it knocked at the window?” asked Dymov.
“At the window? It must have been a holy saint or angel, for there was
no one else. . . . When we drove out of the yard there wasn’t a soul in
the street. . . . It was the Lord’s doing.”
Panteley told other stories, and in all of them “long knives” figured
and all alike sounded made up. Had he heard these stories from someone
else, or had he made them up himself in the remote past, and afterwards,
as his memory grew weaker, mixed up his experiences with his
imaginations and become unable to distinguish one from the other?
Anything is possible, but it is strange that on this occasion and for
the rest of the journey, whenever he happened to tell a story, he gave
unmistakable preference to fiction, and never told of what he really had
experienced. At the time Yegorushka took it all for the genuine thing,
and believed every word; later on it seemed to him strange that a man
who in his day had travelled all over Russia and seen and known so much,
whose wife and children had been burnt to death, so failed to appreciate
the wealth of his life that whenever he was sitting by the camp fire he
was either silent or talked of what had never been.
Over their porridge they were all silent, thinking of what they had just
heard. Life is terrible and marvellous, and so, however terrible a story
you tell in Russia, however you embroider it with nests of robbers, long
knives and such marvels, it always finds an echo of reality in the soul
of the listener, and only a man who has been a good deal affected by
education looks askance distrustfully, and even he will be silent. The
cross by the roadside, the dark bales of wool, the wide expanse of the
plain, and the lot of the men gathered together by the camp fire—all
this was of itself so marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours
of legend and fairy-tale were pale and blended with life.
All the others ate out of the cauldron, but Panteley sat apart and ate
his porridge out of a wooden bowl. His spoon was not like those the
others had, but was made of cypress wood, with a little cross on it.
Yegorushka, looking at him, thought of the little ikon glass and asked
Styopka softly:
“Why does Grandfather sit apart?”
“He is an Old Believer,” Styopka and Vassya answered in a whisper. And
as they said it they looked as though they were speaking of some secret
vice or weakness.
All sat silent, thinking. After the terrible stories there was no
inclination to speak of ordinary things. All at once in the midst of the
silence Vassya drew himself up and, fixing his lustreless eyes on one
point, pricked up his ears.
“What is it?” Dymov asked him.
“Someone is coming,” answered Vassya.
“Where do you see him?”
“Yo-on-der! There’s something white. . .”
There was nothing to be seen but darkness in the direction in which
Vassya was looking; everyone listened, but they could hear no sound of
steps.
“Is he coming by the highroad?” asked Dymov.
“No, over the open country. . . . He is coming this way.”
A minute passed in silence.
“And maybe it’s the merchant who was buried here walking over the
steppe,” said Dymov.
All looked askance at the cross, exchanged glances and suddenly broke
into a laugh. They felt ashamed of their terror.
“Why should he walk?” asked Panteley. “It’s only those walk at night
whom the earth will not take to herself. And the merchants were all
right. . . . The merchants have received the crown of martyrs.”
But all at once they heard the sound of steps; someone was coming in
haste.
“He’s carrying something,” said Vassya.
They could hear the grass rustling and the dry twigs crackling under the
feet of the approaching wayfarer. But from the glare of the camp fire
nothing could be seen. At last the steps sounded close by, and someone
coughed. The flickering light seemed to part; a veil dropped from the
waggoners’ eyes, and they saw a man facing them.
Whether it was due to the flickering light or because everyone wanted to
make out the man’s face first of all, it happened, strangely enough,
that at the first glance at him they all saw, first of all, not his face
nor his clothes, but his smile. It was an extraordinarily good-natured,
broad, soft smile, like that of a baby on waking, one of those
infectious smiles to which it is difficult not to respond by smiling
too. The stranger, when they did get a good look at him, turned out to
be a man of thirty, ugly and in no way remarkable. He was a tall Little
Russian, with a long nose, long arms and long legs; everything about him
seemed long except his neck, which was so short that it made him seem
stooping. He was wearing a clean white shirt with an embroidered collar,
white trousers, and new high boots, and in comparison with the waggoners
he looked quite a dandy. In his arms he was carrying something big,
white, and at the first glance strange-looking, and the stock of a gun
also peeped out from behind his shoulder.
Coming from the darkness into the circle of light, he stopped short as
though petrified, and for half a minute looked at the waggoners as
though he would have said: “Just look what a smile I have!”
Then he took a step towards the fire, smiled still more radiantly and
said:
“Bread and salt, friends!”
“You are very welcome!” Panteley answered for them all.
The stranger put down by the fire what he was carrying in his arms —it
was a dead bustard—and greeted them once more.
They all went up to the bustard and began examining it.
“A fine big bird; what did you kill it with?” asked Dymov.
“Grape-shot. You can’t get him with small shot, he won’t let you get
near enough. Buy it, friends! I will let you have it for twenty
kopecks.”
“What use would it be to us? It’s good roast, but I bet it would be
tough boiled; you could not get your teeth into it. . . .”
“Oh, what a pity! I would take it to the gentry at the farm; they would
give me half a rouble for it. But it’s a long way to go— twelve miles!”
The stranger sat down, took off his gun and laid it beside him.
He seemed sleepy and languid; he sat smiling, and, screwing up his eyes
at the firelight, apparently thinking of something very agreeable. They
gave him a spoon; he began eating.
“Who are you?” Dymov asked him.
The stranger did not hear the question; he made no answer, and did not
even glance at Dymov. Most likely this smiling man did not taste the
flavour of the porridge either, for he seemed to eat it mechanically,
lifting the spoon to his lips sometimes very full and sometimes quite
empty. He was not drunk, but he seemed to have something nonsensical in
his head.
“I ask you who you are?” repeated Dymov.
“I?” said the unknown, starting. “Konstantin Zvonik from Rovno. It’s
three miles from here.”
And anxious to show straight off that he was not quite an ordinary
peasant, but something better, Konstantin hastened to add:
“We keep bees and fatten pigs.”
“Do you live with your father or in a house of your own?”
“No; now I am living in a house of my own. I have parted. This month,
just after St. Peter’s Day, I got married. I am a married man now! . . .
It’s eighteen days since the wedding.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Panteley. “Marriage is a good thing . . . .
God’s blessing is on it.”
“His young wife sits at home while he rambles about the steppe,” laughed
Kiruha. “Queer chap!”
As though he had been pinched on the tenderest spot, Konstantin started,
laughed and flushed crimson.
“But, Lord, she is not at home!” he said quickly, taking the spoon out
of his mouth and looking round at everyone with an expression of delight
and wonder. “She is not; she has gone to her mother’s for three days!
Yes, indeed, she has gone away, and I feel as though I were not married.
. . .”
Konstantin waved his hand and turned his head; he wanted to go on
thinking, but the joy which beamed in his face prevented him. As though
he were not comfortable, he changed his attitude, laughed, and again
waved his hand. He was ashamed to share his happy thoughts with
strangers, but at the same time he had an irresistible longing to
communicate his joy.
“She has gone to Demidovo to see her mother,” he said, blushing and
moving his gun. “She’ll be back to-morrow. . . . She said she would be
back to dinner.”
“And do you miss her?” said Dymov.
“Oh, Lord, yes; I should think so. We have only been married such a
little while, and she has gone away. . . . Eh! Oh, but she is a tricky
one, God strike me dead! She is such a fine, splendid girl, such a one
for laughing and singing, full of life and fire! When she is there your
brain is in a whirl, and now she is away I wander about the steppe like
a fool, as though I had lost something. I have been walking since
dinner.”
Konstantin rubbed his eyes, looked at the fire and laughed.
“You love her, then, . . .” said Panteley.
“She is so fine and splendid,” Konstantin repeated, not hearing him;
“such a housewife, clever and sensible. You wouldn’t find another like
her among simple folk in the whole province. She has gone away. . . .
But she is missing me, I kno-ow! I know the little magpie. She said she
would be back to-morrow by dinner-time. . . . And just think how queer!”
Konstantin almost shouted, speaking a note higher and shifting his
position. “Now she loves me and is sad without me, and yet she would not
marry me.”
“But eat,” said Kiruha.
“She would not marry me,” Konstantin went on, not heeding him. “I have
been struggling with her for three years! I saw her at the Kalatchik
fair; I fell madly in love with her, was ready to hang myself. . . . I
live at Rovno, she at Demidovo, more than twenty miles apart, and there
was nothing I could do. I sent match-makers to her, and all she said
was: ‘I won’t!’ Ah, the magpie! I sent her one thing and another,
earrings and cakes, and twenty pounds of honey—but still she said: ‘I
won’t!’ And there it was. If you come to think of it, I was not a match
for her! She was young and lovely, full of fire, while I am old: I shall
soon be thirty, and a regular beauty, too; a fine beard like a goat’s, a
clear complexion all covered with pimples—how could I be compared with
her! The only thing to be said is that we are well off, but then the
Vahramenkys are well off, too. They’ve six oxen, and they keep a couple
of labourers. I was in love, friends, as though I were plague-stricken.
I couldn’t sleep or eat; my brain was full of thoughts, and in such a
maze, Lord preserve us! I longed to see her, and she was in Demidovo.
What do you think? God be my witness, I am not lying, three times a week
I walked over there on foot just to have a look at her. I gave up my
work! I was so frantic that I even wanted to get taken on as a labourer
in Demidovo, so as to be near her. I was in misery! My mother called in
a witch a dozen times; my father tried thrashing me. For three years I
was in this torment, and then I made up my mind. ‘Damn my soul!’ I said.
‘I will go to the town and be a cabman. . . . It seems it is fated not
to be.’ At Easter I went to Demidovo to have a last look at her. . . .”
Konstantin threw back his head and went off into a mirthful tinkling
laugh, as though he had just taken someone in very cleverly.
“I saw her by the river with the lads,” he went on. “I was overcome with
anger. . . . I called her aside and maybe for a full hour I said all
manner of things to her. She fell in love with me! For three years she
did not like me! she fell in love with me for what I said to her. . . .”
“What did you say to her?” asked Dymov.
“What did I say? I don’t remember. . . How could one remember? My words
flowed at the time like water from a tap, without stopping to take
breath. Ta-ta-ta! And now I can’t utter a word. . . . Well, so she
married me. . . . She’s gone now to her mother’s, the magpie, and while
she is away here I wander over the steppe. I can’t stay at home. It’s
more than I can do!”
Konstantin awkwardly released his feet, on which he was sitting,
stretched himself on the earth, and propped his head in his fists, then
got up and sat down again. Everyone by now thoroughly understood that he
was in love and happy, poignantly happy; his smile, his eyes, and every
movement, expressed fervent happiness. He could not find a place for
himself, and did not know what attitude to take to keep himself from
being overwhelmed by the multitude of his delightful thoughts. Having
poured out his soul before these strangers, he settled down quietly at
last, and, looking at the fire, sank into thought.
At the sight of this happy man everyone felt depressed and longed to be
happy, too. Everyone was dreamy. Dymov got up, walked about softly by
the fire, and from his walk, from the movement of his shoulder-blades,
it could be seen that he was weighed down by depression and yearning. He
stood still for a moment, looked at Konstantin and sat down.
The camp fire had died down by now; there was no flicker, and the patch
of red had grown small and dim. . . . And as the fire went out the
moonlight grew clearer and clearer. Now they could see the full width of
the road, the bales of wool, the shafts of the waggons, the munching
horses; on the further side of the road there was the dim outline of the
second cross. . . .
Dymov leaned his cheek on his hand and softly hummed some plaintive
song. Konstantin smiled drowsily and chimed in with a thin voice. They
sang for half a minute, then sank into silence. Emelyan started, jerked
his elbows and wriggled his fingers.
“Lads,” he said in an imploring voice, “let’s sing something sacred!”
Tears came into his eyes. “Lads,” he repeated, pressing his hands on his
heart, “let’s sing something sacred!”
“I don’t know anything,” said Konstantin.
Everyone refused, then Emelyan sang alone. He waved both arms, nodded
his head, opened his mouth, but nothing came from his throat but a
discordant gasp. He sang with his arms, with his head, with his eyes,
even with the swelling on his face; he sang passionately with anguish,
and the more he strained his chest to extract at least one note from it,
the more discordant were his gasps.
Yegorushka, like the rest, was overcome with depression. He went to his
waggon, clambered up on the bales and lay down. He looked at the sky,
and thought of happy Konstantin and his wife. Why did people get
married? What were women in the world for? Yegorushka put the vague
questions to himself, and thought that a man would certainly be happy if
he had an affectionate, merry and beautiful woman continually living at
his side. For some reason he remembered the Countess Dranitsky, and
thought it would probably be very pleasant to live with a woman like
that; he would perhaps have married her with pleasure if that idea had
not been so shameful. He recalled her eyebrows, the pupils of her eyes,
her carriage, the clock with the horseman. . . . The soft warm night
moved softly down upon him and whispered something in his ear, and it
seemed to him that it was that lovely woman bending over him, looking at
him with a smile and meaning to kiss him. . . .
Nothing was left of the fire but two little red eyes, which kept on
growing smaller and smaller. Konstantin and the waggoners were sitting
by it, dark motionless figures, and it seemed as though there were many
more of them than before. The twin crosses were equally visible, and
far, far away, somewhere by the highroad there gleamed a red light—other
people cooking their porridge, most likely.
“Our Mother Russia is the he-ad of all the world!” Kiruha sang out
suddenly in a harsh voice, choked and subsided. The steppe echo caught
up his voice, carried it on, and it seemed as though stupidity itself
were rolling on heavy wheels over the steppe.
“It’s time to go,” said Panteley. “Get up, lads.”
While they were putting the horses in, Konstantin walked by the waggons
and talked rapturously of his wife.
“Good-bye, mates!” he cried when the waggons started. “Thank you for
your hospitality. I shall go on again towards that light. It’s more than
I can stand.”
And he quickly vanished in the mist, and for a long time they could hear
him striding in the direction of the light to tell those other strangers
of his happiness.
When Yegorushka woke up next day it was early morning; the sun had not
yet risen. The waggons were at a standstill. A man in a white cap and a
suit of cheap grey material, mounted on a little Cossack stallion, was
talking to Dymov and Kiruha beside the foremost waggon. A mile and a
half ahead there were long low white barns and little houses with tiled
roofs; there were neither yards nor trees to be seen beside the little
houses.
“What village is that, Grandfather?” asked Yegorushka.
“That’s the Armenian Settlement, youngster,” answered Panteley. “The
Armenians live there. They are a good sort of people, . . . the
Arnienians are.”
The man in grey had finished talking to Dymov and Kiruha; he pulled up
his little stallion and looked across towards the settlement.
“What a business, only think!” sighed Panteley, looking towards the
settlement, too, and shuddering at the morning freshness. “He has sent a
man to the settlement for some papers, and he doesn’t come . . . . He
should have sent Styopka.”
“Who is that, Grandfather?” asked Yegorushka.
“Varlamov.”
My goodness! Yegorushka jumped up quickly, getting upon his knees, and
looked at the white cap. It was hard to recognize the mysterious elusive
Varlamov, who was sought by everyone, who was always “on his rounds,”
and who had far more money than Countess Dranitsky, in the short, grey
little man in big boots, who was sitting on an ugly little nag and
talking to peasants at an hour when all decent people were asleep.
“He is all right, a good man,” said Panteley, looking towards the
settlement. “God give him health—a splendid gentleman, Semyon
Alexandritch. . . . It’s people like that the earth rests upon. That’s
true. . . . The cocks are not crowing yet, and he is already up and
about. . . . Another man would be asleep, or gallivanting with visitors
at home, but he is on the steppe all day, . . . on his rounds. . . . He
does not let things slip. . . . No-o! He’s a fine fellow. . .”
Varlamov was talking about something, while he kept his eyes fixed. The
little stallion shifted from one leg to another impatiently.
“Semyon Alexandritch!” cried Panteley, taking off his hat. “Allow us to
send Styopka! Emelyan, call out that Styopka should be sent.”
But now at last a man on horseback could be seen coming from the
settlement. Bending very much to one side and brandishing his whip above
his head like a gallant young Caucasian, and wanting to astonish
everyone by his horsemanship, he flew towards the waggons with the
swiftness of a bird.
“That must be one of his circuit men,” said Panteley. “He must have a
hundred such horsemen or maybe more.”
Reaching the first waggon, he pulled up his horse, and taking off his
hat, handed Varlamov a little book. Varlamov took several papers out of
the book, read them and cried:
“And where is Ivantchuk’s letter?”
The horseman took the book back, looked at the papers and shrugged his
shoulders. He began saying something, probably justifying himself and
asking to be allowed to ride back to the settlement again. The little
stallion suddenly stirred as though Varlamov had grown heavier. Varlamov
stirred too.
“Go along!” he cried angrily, and he waved his whip at the man.
Then he turned his horse round and, looking through the papers in the
book, moved at a walking pace alongside the waggons. When he reached the
hindmost, Yegorushka strained his eyes to get a better look at him.
Varlamov was an elderly man. His face, a simple Russian sunburnt face
with a small grey beard, was red, wet with dew and covered with little
blue veins; it had the same expression of businesslike coldness as Ivan
Ivanitch’s face, the same look of fanatical zeal for business. But yet
what a difference could be felt between him and Kuzmitchov! Uncle Ivan
Ivanitch always had on his face, together with his business-like
reserve, a look of anxiety and apprehension that he would not find
Varlamov, that he would be late, that he would miss a good price;
nothing of that sort, so characteristic of small and dependent persons,
could be seen in the face or figure of Varlamov. This man made the price
himself, was not looking for anyone, and did not depend on anyone;
however ordinary his exterior, yet in everything, even in the manner of
holding his whip, there was a sense of power and habitual authority over
the steppe.
As he rode by Yegorushka he did not glance at him. Only the little
stallion deigned to notice Yegorushka; he looked at him with his large
foolish eyes, and even he showed no interest. Panteley bowed to
Varlamov; the latter noticed it, and without taking his eyes off the
sheets of paper, said lisping:
“How are you, old man?”
Varlamov’s conversation with the horseman and the way he had brandished
his whip had evidently made an overwhelming impression on the whole
party. Everyone looked grave. The man on horseback, cast down at the
anger of the great man, remained stationary, with his hat off, and the
rein loose by the foremost waggon; he was silent, and seemed unable to
grasp that the day had begun so badly for him.
“He is a harsh old man, . .” muttered Panteley. “It’s a pity he is so
harsh! But he is all right, a good man. . . . He doesn’t abuse men for
nothing. . . . It’s no matter. . . .”
After examining the papers, Varlamov thrust the book into his pocket;
the little stallion, as though he knew what was in his mind, without
waiting for orders, started and dashed along the highroad. VII
On the following night the waggoners had halted and were cooking their
porridge. On this occasion there was a sense of overwhelming oppression
over everyone. It was sultry; they all drank a great deal, but could not
quench their thirst. The moon was intensely crimson and sullen, as
though it were sick. The stars, too, were sullen, the mist was thicker,
the distance more clouded. Nature seemed as though languid and weighed
down by some foreboding.
There was not the same liveliness and talk round the camp fire as there
had been the day before. All were dreary and spoke listlessly and
without interest. Panteley did nothing but sigh and complain of his
feet, and continually alluded to impenitent deathbeds.
Dymov was lying on his stomach, chewing a straw in silence; there was an
expression of disgust on his face as though the straw smelt unpleasant,
a spiteful and exhausted look. . . . Vassya complained that his jaw
ached, and prophesied bad weather; Emelyan was not waving his arms, but
sitting still and looking gloomily at the fire. Yegorushka, too, was
weary. This slow travelling exhausted him, and the sultriness of the day
had given him a headache.
While they were cooking the porridge, Dymov, to relieve his boredom,
began quarrelling with his companions.
“Here he lolls, the lumpy face, and is the first to put his spoon in,”
he said, looking spitefully at Emelyan. “Greedy! always contrives to sit
next the cauldron. He’s been a church-singer, so he thinks he is a
gentleman! There are a lot of singers like you begging along the
highroad!”
“What are you pestering me for?” asked Emelyan, looking at him angrily.
“To teach you not to be the first to dip into the cauldron. Don’t think
too much of yourself!”
“You are a fool, and that is all about it!” wheezed out Emelyan.
Knowing by experience how such conversations usually ended, Panteley and
Vassya intervened and tried to persuade Dymov not to quarrel about
nothing.
“A church-singer!” The bully would not desist, but laughed
contemptuously. “Anyone can sing like that—sit in the church porch and
sing ‘Give me alms, for Christ’s sake!’ Ugh! you are a nice fellow!”
Emelyan did not speak. His silence had an irritating effect on Dymov. He
looked with still greater hatred at the ex-singer and said:
“I don’t care to have anything to do with you, or I would show you what
to think of yourself.”
“But why are you pushing me, you Mazeppa?” Emelyan cried, flaring up.
“Am I interfering with you?”
“What did you call me?” asked Dymov, drawing himself up, and his eyes
were suffused with blood. “Eh! I am a Mazeppa? Yes? Take that, then; go
and look for it.”
Dymov snatched the spoon out of Emelyan’s hand and flung it far away.
Kiruha, Vassya, and Styopka ran to look for it, while Emelyan fixed an
imploring and questioning look on Panteley. His face suddenly became
small and wrinkled; it began twitching, and the ex-singer began to cry
like a child.
Yegorushka, who had long hated Dymov, felt as though the air all at once
were unbearably stifling, as though the fire were scorching his face; he
longed to run quickly to the waggons in the darkness, but the bully’s
angry bored eyes drew the boy to him. With a passionate desire to say
something extremely offensive, he took a step towards Dymov and brought
out, gasping for breath:
“You are the worst of the lot; I can’t bear you!”
After this he ought to have run to the waggons, but he could not stir
from the spot and went on:
“In the next world you will burn in hell! I’ll complain to Ivan
Ivanitch. Don’t you dare insult Emelyan!”
“Say this too, please,” laughed Dyrnov: “‘every little sucking-pig wants
to lay down the law.’ Shall I pull your ear?”
Yegorushka felt that he could not breathe; and something which had never
happened to him before—he suddenly began shaking all over, stamping his
feet and crying shrilly:
“Beat him, beat him!”
Tears gushed from his eyes; he felt ashamed, and ran staggering back to
the waggon. The effect produced by his outburst he did not see. Lying on
the bales and twitching his arms and legs, he whispered:
“Mother, mother!”
And these men and the shadows round the camp fire, and the dark bales
and the far-away lightning, which was flashing every minute in the
distance—all struck him now as terrible and unfriendly. He was overcome
with terror and asked himself in despair why and how he had come into
this unknown land in the company of terrible peasants? Where was his
uncle now, where was Father Christopher, where was Deniska? Why were
they so long in coming? Hadn’t they forgotten him? At the thought that
he was forgotten and cast out to the mercy of fate, he felt such a cold
chill of dread that he had several times an impulse to jump off the
bales of wool, and run back full speed along the road; but the thought
of the huge dark crosses, which would certainly meet him on the way, and
the lightning flashing in the distance, stopped him. . . . And only when
he whispered, “Mother, mother!” he felt as it were a little better.
The waggoners must have been full of dread, too. After Yegorushka had
run away from the camp fire they sat at first for a long time in
silence, then they began speaking in hollow undertones about something,
saying that it was coming and that they must make haste and get away
from it. . . . They quickly finished supper, put out the fire and began
harnessing the horses in silence. From their fluster and the broken
phrases they uttered it was apparent they foresaw some trouble. Before
they set off on their way, Dymov went up to Panteley and asked softly:
“What’s his name?”
“Yegory,” answered Panteley.
Dymov put one foot on the wheel, caught hold of the cord which was tied
round the bales and pulled himself up. Yegorushka saw his face and curly
head. The face was pale and looked grave and exhausted, but there was no
expression of spite in it.
“Yera!” he said softly, “here, hit me!”
Yegorushka looked at him in surprise. At that instant there was a flash
of lightning.
“It’s all right, hit me,” repeated Dymov. And without waiting for
Yegorushka to hit him or to speak to him, he jumped down and said: “How
dreary I am!”
Then, swaying from one leg to the other and moving his shoulder-blades,
he sauntered lazily alongside the string of waggons and repeated in a
voice half weeping, half angry:
“How dreary I am! O Lord! Don’t you take offence, Emelyan,” he said as
he passed Emelyan. “Ours is a wretched cruel life!”
There was a flash of lightning on the right, and, like a reflection in
the looking-glass, at once a second flash in the distance.
“Yegory, take this,” cried Panteley, throwing up something big and dark.
“What is it?” asked Yegorushka.
“A mat. There will be rain, so cover yourself up.”
Yegorushka sat up and looked about him. The distance had grown
perceptibly blacker, and now oftener than every minute winked with a
pale light. The blackness was being bent towards the right as though by
its own weight.
“Will there be a storm, Grandfather?” asked Yegorushka.
“Ah, my poor feet, how they ache!” Panteley said in a high-pitched
voice, stamping his feet and not hearing the boy.
On the left someone seemed to strike a match in the sky; a pale
phosphorescent streak gleamed and went out. There was a sound as though
someone very far away were walking over an iron roof, probably barefoot,
for the iron gave a hollow rumble.
“It’s set in!” cried Kiruha.
Between the distance and the horizon on the right there was a flash of
lightning so vivid that it lighted up part of the steppe and the spot
where the clear sky met the blackness. A terrible cloud was swooping
down, without haste, a compact mass; big black shreds hung from its
edge; similar shreds pressing one upon another were piling up on the
right and left horizon. The tattered, ragged look of the storm-cloud
gave it a drunken disorderly air. There was a distinct, not smothered,
growl of thunder. Yegorushka crossed himself and began quickly putting
on his great-coat.
“I am dreary!” Dymov’s shout floated from the foremost waggon, and it
could be told from his voice that he was beginning to be ill-humoured
again. “I am so dreary!”
All at once there was a squall of wind, so violent that it almost
snatched away Yegorushka’s bundle and mat; the mat fluttered in all
directions and flapped on the bale and on Yegorushka’s face. The wind
dashed whistling over the steppe, whirled round in disorder and raised
such an uproar from the grass that neither the thunder nor the creaking
of the wheels could be heard; it blew from the black storm-cloud,
carrying with it clouds of dust and the scent of rain and wet earth. The
moonlight grew mistier, as it were dirtier; the stars were even more
overcast; and clouds of dust could be seen hurrying along the edge of
the road, followed by their shadows. By now, most likely, the whirlwind
eddying round and lifting from the earth dust, dry grass and feathers,
was mounting to the very sky; uprooted plants must have been flying by
that very black storm-cloud, and how frightened they must have been! But
through the dust that clogged the eyes nothing could be seen but the
flash of lightning.
Yegorushka, thinking it would pour with rain in a minute, knelt up and
covered himself with the mat.
“Panteley-ey!” someone shouted in the front. “A. . . a. . . va!”
“I can’t!” Panteley answered in a loud high voice. “A . . . a . . . va!
Arya . . . a!”
There was an angry clap of thunder, which rolled across the sky from
right to left, then back again, and died away near the foremost waggon.
“Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth,” whispered Yegorushka, crossing
himself. “Fill heaven and earth with Thy glory.”
The blackness in the sky yawned wide and breathed white fire. At once
there was another clap of thunder. It had scarcely ceased when there was
a flash of lightning so broad that Yegorushka suddenly saw through a
slit in the mat the whole highroad to the very horizon, all the
waggoners and even Kiruha’s waistcoat. The black shreds had by now moved
upwards from the left, and one of them, a coarse, clumsy monster like a
claw with fingers, stretched to the moon. Yegorushka made up his mind to
shut his eyes tight, to pay no attention to it, and to wait till it was
all over.
The rain was for some reason long in coming. Yegorushka peeped out from
the mat in the hope that perhaps the storm-cloud was passing over. It
was fearfully dark. Yegorushka could see neither Panteley, nor the bale
of wool, nor himself; he looked sideways towards the place where the
moon had lately been, but there was the same black darkness there as
over the waggons. And in the darkness the flashes of lightning seemed
more violent and blinding, so that they hurt his eyes.
“Panteley!” called Yegorushka.
No answer followed. But now a gust of wind for the last time flung up
the mat and hurried away. A quiet regular sound was heard. A big cold
drop fell on Yegorushka’s knee, another trickled over his hand. He
noticed that his knees were not covered, and tried to rearrange the mat,
but at that moment something began pattering on the road, then on the
shafts and the bales. It was the rain. As though they understood one
another, the rain and the mat began prattling of something rapidly,
gaily and most annoyingly like two magpies.
Yegorushka knelt up or rather squatted on his boots. While the rain was
pattering on the mat, he leaned forward to screen his knees, which were
suddenly wet. He succeeded in covering his knees, but in less than a
minute was aware of a penetrating, unpleasant dampness behind on his
back and the calves of his legs. He returned to his former position,
exposing his knees to the rain, and wondered what to do to rearrange the
mat which he could not see in the darkness. But his arms were already
wet, the water was trickling up his sleeves and down his collar, and his
shoulder-blades felt chilly. And he made up his mind to do nothing but
sit motionless and wait till it was all over.
“Holy, holy, holy!” he whispered.
Suddenly, exactly over his head, the sky cracked with a fearful
deafening din; he huddled up and held his breath, waiting for the
fragments to fall upon his head and back. He inadvertently opened his
eyes and saw a blinding intense light flare out and flash five times on
his fingers, his wet sleeves, and on the trickles of water running from
the mat upon the bales and down to the ground. There was a fresh peal of
thunder as violent and awful; the sky was not growling and rumbling now,
but uttering short crashing sounds like the crackling of dry wood.
“Trrah! tah! tah! tah!” the thunder rang out distinctly, rolled over the
sky, seemed to stumble, and somewhere by the foremost waggons or far
behind to fall with an abrupt angry “Trrra!”
The flashes of lightning had at first been only terrible, but with such
thunder they seemed sinister and menacing. Their magic light pierced
through closed eyelids and sent a chill all over the body. What could he
do not to see them? Yegorushka made up his mind to turn over on his
face. Cautiously, as though afraid of being watched, he got on all
fours, and his hands slipping on the wet bale, he turned back again.
“Trrah! tah! tah!” floated over his head, rolled under the waggons and
exploded “Kraa!”
Again he inadvertently opened his eyes and saw a new danger: three huge
giants with long pikes were following the waggon! A flash of lightning
gleamed on the points of their pikes and lighted up their figures very
distinctly. They were men of huge proportions, with covered faces, bowed
heads, and heavy footsteps. They seemed gloomy and dispirited and lost
in thought. Perhaps they were not following the waggons with any harmful
intent, and yet there was something awful in their proximity.
Yegorushka turned quickly forward, and trembling all over cried:
“Panteley! Grandfather!”
“Trrah! tah! tah!” the sky answered him.
He opened his eyes to see if the waggoners were there. There were
flashes of lightning in two places, which lighted up the road to the far
distance, the whole string of waggons and all the waggoners. Streams of
water were flowing along the road and bubbles were dancing. Panteley was
walking beside the waggon; his tall hat and his shoulder were covered
with a small mat; his figure expressed neither terror nor uneasiness, as
though he were deafened by the thunder and blinded by the lightning.
“Grandfather, the giants!” Yegorushka shouted to him in tears.
But the old man did not hear. Further away walked Emelyan. He was
covered from head to foot with a big mat and was triangular in shape.
Vassya, without anything over him, was walking with the same wooden step
as usual, lifting his feet high and not bending his knees. In the flash
of lightning it seemed as though the waggons were not moving and the men
were motionless, that Vassya’s lifted foot was rigid in the same
position. . . .
Yegorushka called the old man once more. Getting no answer, he sat
motionless, and no longer waited for it all to end. He was convinced
that the thunder would kill him in another minute, that he would
accidentally open his eyes and see the terrible giants, and he left off
crossing himself, calling the old man and thinking of his mother, and
was simply numb with cold and the conviction that the storm would never
end.
But at last there was the sound of voices.
“Yegory, are you asleep?” Panteley cried below. “Get down! Is he deaf,
the silly little thing? . . .”
“Something like a storm!” said an unfamiliar bass voice, and the
stranger cleared his throat as though he had just tossed off a good
glass of vodka.
Yegorushka opened his eyes. Close to the waggon stood Panteley, Emelyan,
looking like a triangle, and the giants. The latter were by now much
shorter, and when Yegorushka looked more closely at them they turned out
to be ordinary peasants, carrying on their shoulders not pikes but
pitchforks. In the space between Panteley and the triangular figure,
gleamed the window of a low-pitched hut. So the waggons were halting in
the village. Yegorushka flung off the mat, took his bundle and made
haste to get off the waggon. Now when close to him there were people
talking and a lighted window he no longer felt afraid, though the
thunder was crashing as before and the whole sky was streaked with
lightning.
“It was a good storm, all right, . . .” Panteley was muttering. “Thank
God, . . . my feet are a little softened by the rain. It was all right.
. . . Have you got down, Yegory? Well, go into the hut; it is all right.
. . .”
“Holy, holy, holy!” wheezed Emelyan, “it must have struck something . .
. . Are you of these parts?” he asked the giants.
“No, from Glinovo. We belong to Glinovo. We are working at the
Platers’.”
“Threshing?”
“All sorts. Just now we are getting in the wheat. The lightning, the
lightning! It is long since we have had such a storm. . . .”
Yegorushka went into the hut. He was met by a lean hunchbacked old woman
with a sharp chin. She stood holding a tallow candle in her hands,
screwing up her eyes and heaving prolonged sighs.
“What a storm God has sent us!” she said. “And our lads are out for the
night on the steppe; they’ll have a bad time, poor dears! Take off your
things, little sir, take off your things.”
Shivering with cold and shrugging squeamishly, Yegorushka pulled off his
drenched overcoat, then stretched out his arms and straddled his legs,
and stood a long time without moving. The slightest movement caused an
unpleasant sensation of cold and wetness. His sleeves and the back of
his shirt were sopped, his trousers stuck to his legs, his head was
dripping.
“What’s the use of standing there, with your legs apart, little lad?”
said the old woman. “Come, sit down.”
Holding his legs wide apart, Yegorushka went up to the table and sat
down on a bench near somebody’s head. The head moved, puffed a stream of
air through its nose, made a chewing sound and subsided. A mound covered
with a sheepskin stretched from the head along the bench; it was a
peasant woman asleep.
The old woman went out sighing, and came back with a big water melon and
a little sweet melon.
“Have something to eat, my dear! I have nothing else to offer you, . .
.” she said, yawning. She rummaged in the table and took out a long
sharp knife, very much like the one with which the brigands killed the
merchants in the inn. “Have some, my dear!”
Yegorushka, shivering as though he were in a fever, ate a slice of sweet
melon with black bread and then a slice of water melon, and that made
him feel colder still.
“Our lads are out on the steppe for the night, . . .” sighed the old
woman while he was eating. “The terror of the Lord! I’d light the candle
under the ikon, but I don’t know where Stepanida has put it. Have some
more, little sir, have some more. . . .”
The old woman gave a yawn and, putting her right hand behind her,
scratched her left shoulder.
“It must be two o’clock now,” she said; “it will soon be time to get up.
Our lads are out on the steppe for the night; they are all wet through
for sure. . . .”
“Granny,” said Yegorushka. “I am sleepy.”
“Lie down, my dear, lie down,” the old woman sighed, yawning. “Lord
Jesus Christ! I was asleep, when I heard a noise as though someone were
knocking. I woke up and looked, and it was the storm God had sent us. .
. . I’d have lighted the candle, but I couldn’t find it.”
Talking to herself, she pulled some rags, probably her own bed, off the
bench, took two sheepskins off a nail by the stove, and began laying
them out for a bed for Yegorushka. “The storm doesn’t grow less,” she
muttered. “If only nothing’s struck in an unlucky hour. Our lads are out
on the steppe for the night. Lie down and sleep, my dear. . . . Christ
be with you, my child. . . . I won’t take away the melon; maybe you’ll
have a bit when you get up.”
The sighs and yawns of the old woman, the even breathing of the sleeping
woman, the half-darkness of the hut, and the sound of the rain outside,
made one sleepy. Yegorushka was shy of undressing before the old woman.
He only took off his boots, lay down and covered himself with the
sheepskin.
“Is the little lad lying down?” he heard Panteley whisper a little
later.
“Yes,” answered the old woman in a whisper. “The terror of the Lord! It
thunders and thunders, and there is no end to it.”
“It will soon be over,” wheezed Panteley, sitting down; “it’s getting
quieter. . . . The lads have gone into the huts, and two have stayed
with the horses. The lads have. . . . They can’t; . . . the horses would
be taken away. . . . I’ll sit here a bit and then go and take my turn. .
. . We can’t leave them; they would be taken. . . .”
Panteley and the old woman sat side by side at Yegorushka’s feet,
talking in hissing whispers and interspersing their speech with sighs
and yawns. And Yegorushka could not get warm. The warm heavy sheepskin
lay on him, but he was trembling all over; his arms and legs were
twitching, and his whole inside was shivering. . . . He undressed under
the sheepskin, but that was no good. His shivering grew more and more
acute.
Panteley went out to take his turn with the horses, and afterwards came
back again, and still Yegorushka was shivering all over and could not
get to sleep. Something weighed upon his head and chest and oppressed
him, and he did not know what it was, whether it was the old people
whispering, or the heavy smell of the sheepskin. The melon he had eaten
had left an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth. Moreover he was
being bitten by fleas.
“Grandfather, I am cold,” he said, and did not know his own voice.
“Go to sleep, my child, go to sleep,” sighed the old woman.
Tit came up to the bedside on his thin little legs and waved his arms,
then grew up to the ceiling and turned into a windmill. . . . Father
Christopher, not as he was in the chaise, but in his full vestments with
the sprinkler in his hand, walked round the mill, sprinkling it with
holy water, and it left off waving. Yegorushka, knowing this was
delirium, opened his eyes.
“Grandfather,” he called, “give me some water.”
No one answered. Yegorushka felt it insufferably stifling and
uncomfortable lying down. He got up, dressed, and went out of the hut.
Morning was beginning. The sky was overcast, but it was no longer
raining. Shivering and wrapping himself in his wet overcoat, Yegorushka
walked about the muddy yard and listened to the silence; he caught sight
of a little shed with a half-open door made of reeds. He looked into
this shed, went into it, and sat down in a dark corner on a heap of dry
dung.
There was a tangle of thoughts in his heavy head; his mouth was dry and
unpleasant from the metallic taste. He looked at his hat, straightened
the peacock’s feather on it, and thought how he had gone with his mother
to buy the hat. He put his hand into his pocket and took out a lump of
brownish sticky paste. How had that paste come into his pocket? He
thought a minute, smelt it; it smelt of honey. Aha! it was the Jewish
cake! How sopped it was, poor thing!
Yegorushka examined his coat. It was a little grey overcoat with big
bone buttons, cut in the shape of a frock-coat. At home, being a new and
expensive article, it had not been hung in the hall, but with his
mother’s dresses in her bedroom; he was only allowed to wear it on
holidays. Looking at it, Yegorushka felt sorry for it. He thought that
he and the great-coat were both abandoned to the mercy of destiny; he
thought that he would never get back home, and began sobbing so
violently that he almost fell off the heap of dung.
A big white dog with woolly tufts like curl-papers about its face,
sopping from the rain, came into the shed and stared with curiosity at
Yegorushka. It seemed to be hesitating whether to bark or not. Deciding
that there was no need to bark, it went cautiously up to Yegorushka, ate
the sticky plaster and went out again.
“There are Varlamov’s men!” someone shouted in the street.
After having his cry out, Yegorushka went out of the shed and, walking
round a big puddle, made his way towards the street. The waggons were
standing exactly opposite the gateway. The drenched waggoners, with
their muddy feet, were sauntering beside them or sitting on the shafts,
as listless and drowsy as flies in autumn. Yegorushka looked at them and
thought: “How dreary and comfortless to be a peasant!” He went up to
Panteley and sat down beside him on the shaft.
“Grandfather, I’m cold,” he said, shivering and thrusting his hands up
his sleeves.
“Never mind, we shall soon be there,” yawned Panteley. “Never mind, you
will get warm.”
It must have been early when the waggons set off, for it was not hot.
Yegorushka lay on the bales of wool and shivered with cold, though the
sun soon came out and dried his clothes, the bales, and the earth. As
soon as he closed his eyes he saw Tit and the windmill again. Feeling a
sickness and heaviness all over, he did his utmost to drive away these
images, but as soon as they vanished the dare-devil Dymov, with red eyes
and lifted fists, rushed at Yegorushka with a roar, or there was the
sound of his complaint: “I am so dreary!” Varlamov rode by on his little
Cossack stallion; happy Konstantin passed, with a smile and the bustard
in his arms. And how tedious these people were, how sickening and
unbearable!
Once—it was towards evening—he raised his head to ask for water. The
waggons were standing on a big bridge across a broad river. There was
black smoke below over the river, and through it could be seen a steamer
with a barge in tow. Ahead of them, beyond the river, was a huge
mountain dotted with houses and churches; at the foot of the mountain an
engine was being shunted along beside some goods trucks.
Yegorushka had never before seen steamers, nor engines, nor broad
rivers. Glancing at them now, he was not alarmed or surprised; there was
not even a look of anything like curiosity in his face. He merely felt
sick, and made haste to turn over to the edge of the bale. He was sick.
Panteley, seeing this, cleared his throat and shook his head.
“Our little lad’s taken ill,” he said. “He must have got a chill to the
stomach. The little lad must. . . away from home; it’s a bad lookout!”
VIII
The waggons stopped at a big inn for merchants, not far from the quay.
As Yegorushka climbed down from the waggon he heard a very familiar
voice. Someone was helping him to get down, and saying:
“We arrived yesterday evening. . . . We have been expecting you all day.
We meant to overtake you yesterday, but it was out of our way; we came
by the other road. I say, how you have crumpled your coat! You’ll catch
it from your uncle!”
Yegorushka looked into the speaker’s mottled face and remembered that
this was Deniska.
“Your uncle and Father Christopher are in the inn now, drinking tea;
come along!”
And he led Yegorushka to a big two-storied building, dark and gloomy
like the almshouse at N. After going across the entry, up a dark
staircase and through a narrow corridor, Yegorushka and Deniska reached
a little room in which Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher were sitting
at the tea-table. Seeing the boy, both the old men showed surprise and
pleasure.
“Aha! Yegor Ni-ko-la-aitch!” chanted Father Christopher. “Mr.
Lomonosov!”
“Ah, our gentleman that is to be,” said Kuzmitchov, “pleased to see
you!”
Yegorushka took off his great-coat, kissed his uncle’s hand and Father
Christopher’s, and sat down to the table.
“Well, how did you like the journey, puer bone?” Father Christopher
pelted him with questions as he poured him out some tea, with his
radiant smile. “Sick of it, I’ve no doubt? God save us all from having
to travel by waggon or with oxen. You go on and on, God forgive us; you
look ahead and the steppe is always lying stretched out the same as it
was—you can’t see the end of it! It’s not travelling but regular
torture. Why don’t you drink your tea? Drink it up; and in your absence,
while you have been trailing along with the waggons, we have settled all
our business capitally. Thank God we have sold our wool to Tcherepahin,
and no one could wish to have done better. . . . We have made a good
bargain.”
At the first sight of his own people Yegorushka felt an overwhelming
desire to complain. He did not listen to Father Christopher, but thought
how to begin and what exactly to complain of. But Father Christopher’s
voice, which seemed to him harsh and unpleasant, prevented him from
concentrating his attention and confused his thoughts. He had not sat at
the table five minutes before he got up, went to the sofa and lay down.
“Well, well,” said Father Christopher in surprise. “What about your
tea?”
Still thinking what to complain of, Yegorushka leaned his head against
the wall and broke into sobs.
“Well, well!” repeated Father Christopher, getting up and going to the
sofa. “Yegory, what is the matter with you? Why are you crying?”
“I’m . . . I’m ill,” Yegorushka brought out.
“Ill?” said Father Christopher in amazement. “That’s not the right
thing, my boy. . . . One mustn’t be ill on a journey. Aie, aie, what are
you thinking about, boy . . . eh?”
He put his hand to Yegorushka’s head, touched his cheek and said:
“Yes, your head’s feverish. . . . You must have caught cold or else have
eaten something. . . . Pray to God.”
“Should we give him quinine? . . .” said Ivan Ivanitch, troubled.
“No; he ought to have something hot. . . . Yegory, have a little drop of
soup? Eh?”
“I . . . don’t want any,” said Yegorushka.
“Are you feeling chilly?”
“I was chilly before, but now . . . now I am hot. And I ache all over. .
. .”
Ivan Ivanitch went up to the sofa, touched Yegorushka on the head,
cleared his throat with a perplexed air, and went back to the table.
“I tell you what, you undress and go to bed,” said Father Christopher.
“What you want is sleep now.”
He helped Yegorushka to undress, gave him a pillow and covered him with
a quilt, and over that Ivan Ivanitch’s great-coat. Then he walked away
on tiptoe and sat down to the table. Yegorushka shut his eyes, and at
once it seemed to him that he was not in the hotel room, but on the
highroad beside the camp fire. Emelyan waved his hands, and Dymov with
red eyes lay on his stomach and looked mockingly at Yegorushka.
“Beat him, beat him!” shouted Yegorushka.
“He is delirious,” said Father Christopher in an undertone.
“It’s a nuisance!” sighed Ivan Ivanitch.
“He must be rubbed with oil and vinegar. Please God, he will be better
to-morrow.”
To be rid of bad dreams, Yegorushka opened his eyes and began looking
towards the fire. Father Christopher and Ivan Ivanitch had now finished
their tea and were talking in a whisper. The first was smiling with
delight, and evidently could not forget that he had made a good bargain
over his wool; what delighted him was not so much the actual profit he
had made as the thought that on getting home he would gather round him
his big family, wink slyly and go off into a chuckle; at first he would
deceive them all, and say that he had sold the wool at a price below its
value, then he would give his son-in-law, Mihail, a fat pocket-book and
say: “Well, take it! that’s the way to do business!” Kuzmitchov did not
seem pleased; his face expressed, as before, a business-like reserve and
anxiety.
“If I could have known that Tcherepahin would give such a price,” he
said in a low voice, “I wouldn’t have sold Makarov those five tons at
home. It is vexatious! But who could have told that the price had gone
up here?”
A man in a white shirt cleared away the samovar and lighted the little
lamp before the ikon in the corner. Father Christopher whispered
something in his ear; the man looked, made a serious face like a
conspirator, as though to say, “I understand,” went out, and returned a
little while afterwards and put something under the sofa. Ivan Ivanitch
made himself a bed on the floor, yawned several times, said his prayers
lazily, and lay down.
“I think of going to the cathedral to-morrow,” said Father Christopher.
“I know the sacristan there. I ought to go and see the bishop after
mass, but they say he is ill.”
He yawned and put out the lamp. Now there was no light in the room but
the little lamp before the ikon.
“They say he can’t receive visitors,” Father Christopher went on,
undressing. “So I shall go away without seeing him.”
He took off his full coat, and Yegorushka saw Robinson Crusoe reappear.
Robinson stirred something in a saucer, went up to Yegorushka and
whispered:
“Lomonosov, are you asleep? Sit up; I’m going to rub you with oil and
vinegar. It’s a good thing, only you must say a prayer.”
Yegorushka roused himself quickly and sat up. Father Christopher pulled
down the boy’s shirt, and shrinking and breathing jerkily, as though he
were being tickled himself, began rubbing Yegorushka’s chest.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he whispered,
“lie with your back upwards—that’s it. . . . You’ll be all right to-
morrow, but don’t do it again. . . . You are as hot as fire. I suppose
you were on the road in the storm.”
“Yes.”
“You might well fall ill! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost, . . . you might well fall ill!”
After rubbing Yegorushka, Father Christopher put on his shirt again,
covered him, made the sign of the cross over him, and walked away. Then
Yegorushka saw him saying his prayers. Probably the old man knew a great
many prayers by heart, for he stood a long time before the ikon
murmuring. After saying his prayers he made the sign of the cross over
the window, the door, Yegorushka, and Ivan Ivanitch, lay down on the
little sofa without a pillow, and covered himself with his full coat. A
clock in the corridor struck ten. Yegorushka thought how long a time it
would be before morning; feeling miserable, he pressed his forehead
against the back of the sofa and left off trying to get rid of the
oppressive misty dreams. But morning came much sooner than he expected.
It seemed to him that he had not been lying long with his head pressed
to the back of the sofa, but when he opened his eyes slanting rays of
sunlight were already shining on the floor through the two windows of
the little hotel room. Father Christopher and Ivan Ivanitch were not in
the room. The room had been tidied; it was bright, snug, and smelt of
Father Christopher, who always smelt of cypress and dried cornflowers
(at home he used to make the holy-water sprinklers and decorations for
the ikonstands out of cornflowers, and so he was saturated with the
smell of them). Yegorushka looked at the pillow, at the slanting
sunbeams, at his boots, which had been cleaned and were standing side by
side near the sofa, and laughed. It seemed strange to him that he was
not on the bales of wool, that everything was dry around him, and that
there was no thunder and lightning on the ceiling.
He jumped off the sofa and began dressing. He felt splendid; nothing was
left of his yesterday’s illness but a slight weakness in his legs and
neck. So the vinegar and oil had done good. He remembered the steamer,
the railway engine, and the broad river, which he had dimly seen the day
before, and now he made haste to dress, to run to the quay and have a
look at them. When he had washed and was putting on his red shirt, the
latch of the door clicked, and Father Christopher appeared in the
doorway, wearing his top-hat and a brown silk cassock over his canvas
coat and carrying his staff in his hand. Smiling and radiant (old men
are always radiant when they come back from church), he put a roll of
holy bread and a parcel of some sort on the table, prayed before the
ikon, and said:
“God has sent us blessings—well, how are you?”
“Quite well now,” answered Yegorushka, kissing his hand.
“Thank God. . . . I have come from mass. I’ve been to see a sacristan I
know. He invited me to breakfast with him, but I didn’t go. I don’t like
visiting people too early, God bless them!”
He took off his cassock, stroked himself on the chest, and without haste
undid the parcel. Yegorushka saw a little tin of caviare, a piece of dry
sturgeon, and a French loaf.
“See; I passed a fish-shop and brought this,” said Father Christopher.
“There is no need to indulge in luxuries on an ordinary weekday; but I
thought, I’ve an invalid at home, so it is excusable. And the caviare is
good, real sturgeon. . . .”
The man in the white shirt brought in the samovar and a tray with tea-
things.
“Eat some,” said Father Christopher, spreading the caviare on a slice of
bread and handing it to Yegorushka. “Eat now and enjoy yourself, but the
time will soon come for you to be studying. Mind you study with
attention and application, so that good may come of it. What you have to
learn by heart, learn by heart, but when you have to tell the inner
sense in your own words, without regard to the outer form, then say it
in your own words. And try to master all subjects. One man knows
mathematics excellently, but has never heard of Pyotr Mogila; another
knows about Pyotr Mogila, but cannot explain about the moon. But you
study so as to understand everything. Study Latin, French, German, . . .
geography, of course, history, theology, philosophy, mathematics, . . .
and when you have mastered everything, not with haste but with prayer
and with zeal, then go into the service. When you know everything it
will be easy for you in any line of life. . . . You study and strive for
the divine blessing, and God will show you what to be. Whether a doctor,
a judge or an engineer. . . .”
Father Christopher spread a little caviare on a piece of bread, put it
in his mouth and said:
“The Apostle Paul says: ‘Do not apply yourself to strange and diverse
studies.’ Of course, if it is black magic, unlawful arts, or calling up
spirits from the other world, like Saul, or studying subjects that can
be of no use to yourself or others, better not learn them. You must
undertake only what God has blessed. Take example . . . the Holy
Apostles spoke in all languages, so you study languages. Basil the Great
studied mathematics and philosophy—so you study them; St. Nestor wrote
history—so you study and write history. Take example from the saints.”
Father Christopher sipped the tea from his saucer, wiped his moustaches,
and shook his head.
“Good!” he said. “I was educated in the old-fashioned way; I have
forgotten a great deal by now, but still I live differently from other
people. Indeed, there is no comparison. For instance, in company at a
dinner, or at an assembly, one says something in Latin, or makes some
allusion from history or philosophy, and it pleases people, and it
pleases me myself. . . . Or when the circuit court comes and one has to
take the oath, all the other priests are shy, but I am quite at home
with the judges, the prosecutors, and the lawyers. I talk
intellectually, drink a cup of tea with them, laugh, ask them what I
don’t know, . . . and they like it. So that’s how it is, my boy.
Learning is light and ignorance is darkness. Study! It’s hard, of
course; nowadays study is expensive. . . . Your mother is a widow; she
lives on her pension, but there, of course . . .”
Father Christopher glanced apprehensively towards the door, and went on
in a whisper:
“Ivan Ivanitch will assist. He won’t desert you. He has no children of
his own, and he will help you. Don’t be uneasy.”
He looked grave, and whispered still more softly:
“Only mind, Yegory, don’t forget your mother and Ivan Ivanitch, God
preserve you from it. The commandment bids you honour your mother, and
Ivan Ivanitch is your benefactor and takes the place of a father to you.
If you become learned, God forbid you should be impatient and scornful
with people because they are not so clever as you, then woe, woe to
you!”
Father Christopher raised his hand and repeated in a thin voice:
“Woe to you! Woe to you!”
Father Christopher’s tongue was loosened, and he was, as they say,
warming to his subject; he would not have finished till dinnertime but
the door opened and Ivan Ivanitch walked in. He said good-morning
hurriedly, sat down to the table, and began rapidly swallowing his tea.
“Well, I have settled all our business,” he said. “We might have gone
home to-day, but we have still to think about Yegor. We must arrange for
him. My sister told me that Nastasya Petrovna, a friend of hers, lives
somewhere here, so perhaps she will take him in as a boarder.”
He rummaged in his pocket-book, found a crumpled note and read:
“‘Little Lower Street: Nastasya Petrovna Toskunov, living in a house of
her own.’ We must go at once and try to find her. It’s a nuisance!”
Soon after breakfast Ivan Ivanitch and Yegorushka left the inn.
“It’s a nuisance,” muttered his uncle. “You are sticking to me like a
burr. You and your mother want education and gentlemanly breeding and I
have nothing but worry with you both. . . .”
When they crossed the yard, the waggons and the drivers were not there.
They had all gone off to the quay early in the morning. In a far-off
dark corner of the yard stood the chaise.
“Good-bye, chaise!” thought Yegorushka.
At first they had to go a long way uphill by a broad street, then they
had to cross a big marketplace; here Ivan Ivanitch asked a policeman for
Little Lower Street.
“I say,” said the policeman, with a grin, “it’s a long way off, out that
way towards the town grazing ground.”
They met several cabs but Ivan Ivanitch only permitted himself such a
weakness as taking a cab in exceptional cases and on great holidays.
Yegorushka and he walked for a long while through paved streets, then
along streets where there were only wooden planks at the sides and no
pavements, and in the end got to streets where there were neither planks
nor pavements. When their legs and their tongues had brought them to
Little Lower Street they were both red in the face, and taking off their
hats, wiped away the perspiration.
“Tell me, please,” said Ivan Ivanitch, addressing an old man sitting on
a little bench by a gate, “where is Nastasya Petrovna Toskunov’s house?”
“There is no one called Toskunov here,” said the old man, after
pondering a moment. “Perhaps it’s Timoshenko you want.”
“No, Toskunov. . . .”
“Excuse me, there’s no one called Toskunov. . . .”
Ivan Ivanitch shrugged his shoulders and trudged on farther.
“You needn’t look,” the old man called after them. “I tell you there
isn’t, and there isn’t.”
“Listen, auntie,” said Ivan Ivanitch, addressing an old woman who was
sitting at a corner with a tray of pears and sunflower seeds, “where is
Nastasya Petrovna Toskunov’s house?”
The old woman looked at him with surprise and laughed.
“Why, Nastasya Petrovna live in her own house now!” she cried. “Lord! it
is eight years since she married her daughter and gave up the house to
her son-in-law! It’s her son-in-law lives there now.”
And her eyes expressed: “How is it you didn’t know a simple thing like
that, you fools?”
“And where does she live now?” Ivan Ivanitch asked.
“Oh, Lord!” cried the old woman, flinging up her hands in surprise. “She
moved ever so long ago! It’s eight years since she gave up her house to
her son-in-law! Upon my word!”
She probably expected Ivan Ivanitch to be surprised, too, and to
exclaim: “You don’t say so,” but Ivan Ivanitch asked very calmly:
“Where does she live now?”
The old woman tucked up her sleeves and, stretching out her bare arm to
point, shouted in a shrill piercing voice:
“Go straight on, straight on, straight on. You will pass a little red
house, then you will see a little alley on your left. Turn down that
little alley, and it will be the third gate on the right. . . .”
Ivan Ivanitch and Yegorushka reached the little red house, turned to the
left down the little alley, and made for the third gate on the right. On
both sides of this very old grey gate there was a grey fence with big
gaps in it. The first part of the fence was tilting forwards and
threatened to fall, while on the left of the gate it sloped backwards
towards the yard. The gate itself stood upright and seemed to be still
undecided which would suit it best —to fall forwards or backwards. Ivan
Ivanitch opened the little gate at the side, and he and Yegorushka saw a
big yard overgrown with weeds and burdocks. A hundred paces from the
gate stood a little house with a red roof and green shutters. A stout
woman with her sleeves tucked up and her apron held out was standing in
the middle of the yard, scattering something on the ground and shouting
in a voice as shrill as that of the woman selling fruit:
“Chick! . . . Chick! . . . Chick!”
Behind her sat a red dog with pointed ears. Seeing the strangers, he ran
to the little gate and broke into a tenor bark (all red dogs have a
tenor bark).
“Whom do you want?” asked the woman, putting up her hand to shade her
eyes from the sun.
“Good-morning!” Ivan Ivanitch shouted, too, waving off the red dog with
his stick. “Tell me, please, does Nastasya Petrovna Toskunov live here?”
“Yes! But what do you want with her?”
“Perhaps you are Nastasya Petrovna?”
“Well, yes, I am!”
“Very pleased to see you. . . . You see, your old friend Olga Ivanovna
Knyasev sends her love to you. This is her little son. And I, perhaps
you remember, am her brother Ivan Ivanitch. . . . You are one of us from
N. . . . You were born among us and married there. . . .”
A silence followed. The stout woman stared blankly at Ivan Ivanitch, as
though not believing or not understanding him, then she flushed all
over, and flung up her hands; the oats were scattered out of her apron
and tears spurted from her eyes.
“Olga Ivanovna!” she screamed, breathless with excitement. “My own
darling! Ah, holy saints, why am I standing here like a fool? My pretty
little angel. . . .”
She embraced Yegorushka, wetted his face with her tears, and broke down
completely.
“Heavens!” she said, wringing her hands, “Olga’s little boy! How
delightful! He is his mother all over! The image of his mother! But why
are you standing in the yard? Come indoors.”
Crying, gasping for breath and talking as she went, she hurried towards
the house. Her visitors trudged after her.
“The room has not been done yet,” she said, ushering the visitors into a
stuffy little drawing-room adorned with many ikons and pots of flowers.
“Oh, Mother of God! Vassilisa, go and open the shutters anyway! My
little angel! My little beauty! I did not know that Olitchka had a boy
like that!”
When she had calmed down and got over her first surprise Ivan Ivanitch
asked to speak to her alone. Yegorushka went into another room; there
was a sewing-machine; in the window was a cage with a starling in it,
and there were as many ikons and flowers as in the drawing-room. Near
the machine stood a little girl with a sunburnt face and chubby cheeks
like Tit’s, and a clean cotton dress. She stared at Yegorushka without
bElinking, and apparently felt very awkward. Yegorushka looked at her
and after a pause asked:
“What’s your name?”
The little girl moved her lips, looked as if she were going to cry, and
answered softly:
“Atka. . . .”
This meant Katka.
“He will live with you,” Ivan Ivanitch was whispering in the drawing-
room, “if you will be so kind, and we will pay ten roubles a month for
his keep. He is not a spoilt boy; he is quiet. . . .”
“I really don’t know what to say, Ivan Ivanitch!” Nastasya Petrovna
sighed tearfully. “Ten roubles a month is very good, but it is a
dreadful thing to take another person’s child! He may fall ill or
something. . . .”
When Yegorushka was summoned back to the drawing-room Ivan Ivanitch was
standing with his hat in his hands, saying good-bye.
“Well, let him stay with you now, then,” he said. “Good-bye! You stay,
Yegor!” he said, addressing his nephew. “Don’t be troublesome; mind you
obey Nastasya Petrovna. . . . Good-bye; I am coming again to-morrow.”
And he went away. Nastasya once more embraced Yegorushka, called him a
little angel, and with a tear-stained face began preparing for dinner.
Three minutes later Yegorushka was sitting beside her, answering her
endless questions and eating hot savoury cabbage soup.
In the evening he sat again at the same table and, resting his head on
his hand, listened to Nastasya Petrovna. Alternately laughing and
crying, she talked of his mother’s young days, her own marriage, her
children. . . . A cricket chirruped in the stove, and there was a faint
humming from the burner of the lamp. Nastasya Petrovna talked in a low
voice, and was continually dropping her thimble in her excitement; and
Katka her granddaughter, crawled under the table after it and each time
sat a long while under the table, probably examining Yegorushka’s feet;
and Yegorushka listened, half dozing and looking at the old woman’s
face, her wart with hairs on it, and the stains of tears, and he felt
sad, very sad. He was put to sleep on a chest and told that if he were
hungry in the night he must go out into the little passage and take some
chicken, put there under a plate in the window.
Next morning Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher came to say good-bye.
Nastasya Petrovna was delighted to see them, and was about to set the
samovar; but Ivan Ivanitch, who was in a great hurry, waved his hands
and said:
“We have no time for tea! We are just setting off.”
Before parting they all sat down and were silent for a minute. Nastasya
Petrovna heaved a deep sigh and looked towards the ikon with tear-
stained eyes.
“Well,” began Ivan Ivanitch, getting up, “so you will stay. . . .”
All at once the look of business-like reserve vanished from his face; he
flushed a little and said with a mournful smile:
“Mind you work hard. . . . Don’t forget your mother, and obey Nastasya
Petrovna. . . . If you are diligent at school, Yegor, I’ll stand by
you.”
He took his purse out of his pocket, turned his back to Yegorushka,
fumbled for a long time among the smaller coins, and, finding a ten-
kopeck piece, gave it to Yegorushka.
Father Christopher, without haste, blessed Yegorushka.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. . . . Study,”
he said. “Work hard, my lad. If I die, remember me in your prayers. Here
is a ten-kopeck piece from me, too. . . .”
Yegorushka kissed his hand, and shed tears; something whispered in his
heart that he would never see the old man again.
“I have applied at the high school already,” said Ivan Ivanitch in a
voice as though there were a corpse in the room. “You will take him for
the entrance examination on the seventh of August. . . . Well, good-bye;
God bless you, good-bye, Yegor!”
“You might at least have had a cup of tea,” wailed Nastasya Petrovna.
Through the tears that filled his eyes Yegorushka could not see his
uncle and Father Christopher go out. He rushed to the window, but they
were not in the yard, and the red dog, who had just been barking, was
running back from the gate with the air of having done his duty. When
Yegorushka ran out of the gate Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher, the
former waving his stick with the crook, the latter his staff, were just
turning the corner. Yegorushka felt that with these people all that he
had known till then had vanished from him for ever. He sank helplessly
on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown
life that was beginning for him now. . . .
What would that life be like?
Best Russian Short Stories
INTRODUCTION
Conceive the joy of a lover of nature who, leaving the art galleries,
wanders out among the trees and wild flowers and birds that the pictures
of the galleries have sentimentalised. It is some such joy that the man
who truly loves the noblest in letters feels when tasting for the first
time the simple delights of Russian literature. French and English and
German authors, too, occasionally, offer works of lofty, simple
naturalness; but the very keynote to the whole of Russian literature is
simplicity, naturalness, veraciousness.
Another essentially Russian trait is the quite unaffected conception
that the lowly are on a plane of equality with the so-called upper
classes. When the Englishman Dickens wrote with his profound pity and
understanding of the poor, there was yet a bit; of remoteness, perhaps,
even, a bit of caricature, in his treatment of them. He showed their
sufferings to the rest of the world with a “Behold how the other half
lives!” The Russian writes of the poor, as it were, from within, as one
of them, with no eye to theatrical effect upon the well-to-do. There is
no insistence upon peculiar virtues or vices. The poor are portrayed
just as they are, as human beings like the rest of us. A democratic
spirit is reflected, breathing a broad humanity, a true universality, an
unstudied generosity that proceed not from the intellectual conviction
that to understand all is to forgive all, but from an instinctive
feeling that no man has the right to set himself up as a judge over
another, that one can only observe and record.
In 1834 two short stories appeared, The Queen of Spades, by Pushkin, and
The Cloak, by Gogol. The first was a finishing-off of the old, outgoing
style of romanticism, the other was the beginning of the new, the
characteristically Russian style. We read Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, the
first story in the volume, and the likelihood is we shall enjoy it
greatly. “But why is it Russian?” we ask. The answer is, “It is not
Russian.” It might have been printed in an American magazine over the
name of John Brown. But, now, take the very next story in the volume,
The Cloak. “Ah,” you exclaim, “a genuine Russian story, Surely. You
cannot palm it off on me over the name of Jones or Smith.” Why? Because
The Cloak for the first time strikes that truly Russian note of deep
sympathy with the disinherited. It is not yet wholly free from
artificiality, and so is not yet typical of the purely realistic fiction
that reached its perfected development in Turgenev and Tolstoy.
Though Pushkin heads the list of those writers who made the literature
of their country world-famous, he was still a romanticist, in the
universal literary fashion of his day. However, he already gave strong
indication of the peculiarly Russian genius for naturalness or realism,
and was a true Russian in his simplicity of style. In no sense an
innovator, but taking the cue for his poetry from Byron and for his
prose from the romanticism current at that period, he was not in advance
of his age. He had a revolutionary streak in his nature, as his Ode to
Liberty and other bits of verse and his intimacy with the Decembrist
rebels show. But his youthful fire soon died down, and he found it
possible to accommodate himself to the life of a Russian high
functionary and courtier under the severe despot Nicholas I, though, to
be sure, he always hated that life. For all his flirting with
revolutionarism, he never displayed great originality or depth of
thought. He was simply an extraordinarily gifted author, a perfect
versifier, a wondrous lyrist, and a delicious raconteur, endowed with a
grace, ease and power of expression that delighted even the exacting
artistic sense of Turgenev. To him aptly applies the dictum of Socrates:
“Not by wisdom do the poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and
inspiration.” I do not mean to convey that as a thinker Pushkin is to be
despised. Nevertheless, it is true that he would occupy a lower position
in literature did his reputation depend upon his contributions to
thought and not upon his value as an artist.
“We are all descended from Gogol’s Cloak,” said a Russian writer. And
Dostoyevsky’s novel, Poor People, which appeared ten years later, is, in
a way, merely an extension of Gogol’s shorter tale. In Dostoyevsky,
indeed, the passion for the common people and the all-embracing, all-
penetrating pity for suffering humanity reach their climax. He was a
profound psychologist and delved deeply into the human soul, especially
in its abnormal and diseased aspects. Between scenes of heart-rending,
abject poverty, injustice, and wrong, and the torments of mental
pathology, he managed almost to exhaust the whole range of human woe.
And he analysed this misery with an intensity of feeling and a
painstaking regard for the most harrowing details that are quite
upsetting to normally constituted nerves. Yet all the horrors must be
forgiven him because of the motive inspiring them—an overpowering love
and the desire to induce an equal love in others. It is not horror for
horror’s sake, not a literary tour de force, as in Poe, but horror for a
high purpose, for purification through suffering, which was one of the
articles of Dostoyevsky’s faith.
Following as a corollary from the love and pity for mankind that make a
leading element in Russian literature, is a passionate search for the
means of improving the lot of humanity, a fervent attachment to social
ideas and ideals. A Russian author is more ardently devoted to a cause
than an American short-story writer to a plot. This, in turn, is but a
reflection of the spirit of the Russian people, especially of the
intellectuals. The Russians take literature perhaps more seriously than
any other nation. To them books are not a mere diversion. They demand
that fiction and poetry be a true mirror of life and be of service to
life. A Russian author, to achieve the highest recognition, must be a
thinker also. He need not necessarily be a finished artist. Everything
is subordinated to two main requirements—humanitarian ideals and
fidelity to life. This is the secret of the marvellous simplicity of
Russian-literary art. Before the supreme function of literature, the
Russian writer stands awed and humbled. He knows he cannot cover up
poverty of thought, poverty of spirit and lack of sincerity by
rhetorical tricks or verbal cleverness. And if he possesses the two
essential requirements, the simplest language will suffice.
These qualities are exemplified at their best by Turgenev and Tolstoy.
They both had a strong social consciousness; they both grappled with the
problems of human welfare; they were both artists in the larger sense,
that is, in their truthful representation of life, Turgenev was an
artist also in the narrower sense—in a keen appreciation Of form.
Thoroughly Occidental in his tastes, he sought the regeneration of
Russia in radical progress along the lines of European democracy.
Tolstoy, on the other hand, sought the salvation of mankind in a return
to the primitive life and primitive Christian religion.
The very first work of importance by Turgenev, A Sportsman’s Sketches,
dealt with the question of serfdom, and it wielded tremendous influence
in bringing about its abolition. Almost every succeeding book of his,
from Rudin through Fathers and Sons to Virgin Soil, presented vivid
pictures of contemporary Russian society, with its problems, the clash
of ideas between the old and the new generations, and the struggles, the
aspirations and the thoughts that engrossed the advanced youth of
Russia; so that his collected works form a remarkable literary record of
the successive movements of Russian society in a period of preparation,
fraught with epochal significance, which culminated in the overthrow of
Czarism and the inauguration of a new and true democracy, marking the
beginning, perhaps, of a radical transformation the world over.
“The greatest writer of Russia.” That is Turgenev’s estimate of Tolstoy.
“A second Shakespeare!” was Flaubert’s enthusiastic outburst. The
Frenchman’s comparison is not wholly illuminating. The one point of
resemblance between the two authors is simply in the tremendous
magnitude of their genius. Each is a Colossus. Each creates a whole
world of characters, from kings and princes and ladies to servants and
maids and peasants. But how vastly divergent the angle of approach! Anna
Karenina may have all the subtle womanly charm of an Olivia or a Portia,
but how different her trials. Shakespeare could not have treated Anna’s
problems at all. Anna could not have appeared in his pages except as a
sinning Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet. Shakespeare had all the
prejudices of his age. He accepted the world as it is with its absurd
moralities, its conventions and institutions and social classes. A
gravedigger is naturally inferior to a lord, and if he is to be
presented at all, he must come on as a clown. The people are always a
mob, the rabble. Tolstoy, is the revolutionist, the iconoclast. He has
the completest independence of mind. He utterly refuses to accept
established opinions just because they are established. He probes into
the right and wrong of things. His is a broad, generous universal
democracy, his is a comprehensive sympathy, his an absolute incapacity
to evaluate human beings according to station, rank or profession, or
any standard but that of spiritual worth. In all this he was a complete
contrast to Shakespeare. Each of the two men was like a creature of a
higher world, possessed of supernatural endowments. Their omniscience of
all things human, their insight into the hiddenmost springs of men’s
actions appear miraculous. But Shakespeare makes the impression of
detachment from his works. The works do not reveal the man; while in
Tolstoy the greatness of the man blends with the greatness of the
genius. Tolstoy was no mere oracle uttering profundities he wot not of.
As the social, religious and moral tracts that he wrote in the latter
period of his life are instinct with a literary beauty of which he never
could divest himself, and which gave an artistic value even to his
sermons, so his earlier novels show a profound concern for the welfare
of society, a broad, humanitarian spirit, a bigness of soul that
included prince and pauper alike.
Is this extravagant praise? Then let me echo William Dean Howells: “I
know very well that I do not speak of Tolstoy’s books in measured terms;
I cannot.”
The Russian writers so far considered have made valuable contributions
to the short story; but, with the exception of Pushkin, whose reputation
rests chiefly upon his poetry, their best work, generally, was in the
field of the long novel. It was the novel that gave Russian literature
its pre-eminence. It could not have been otherwise, since Russia is
young as a literary nation, and did not come of age until the period at
which the novel was almost the only form of literature that counted. If,
therefore, Russia was to gain distinction in the world of letters, it
could be only through the novel. Of the measure of her success there is
perhaps no better testimony than the words of Matthew Arnold, a critic
certainly not given to overstatement. “The Russian novel,” he wrote in
1887, “has now the vogue, and deserves to have it... The Russian
novelist is master of a spell to which the secret of human nature—both
what is external and internal, gesture and manner no less than thought
and feeling—willingly make themselves known... In that form of
imaginative literature, which in our day is the most popular and the
most possible, the Russians at the present moment seem to me to hold the
field.”
With the strict censorship imposed on Russian writers, many of them who
might perhaps have contented themselves with expressing their opinions
in essays, were driven to conceal their meaning under the guise of
satire or allegory; which gave rise to a peculiar genre of literature, a
sort of editorial or essay done into fiction, in which the satirist
Saltykov, a contemporary of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who wrote under
the pseudonym of Shchedrin, achieved the greatest success and
popularity.
It was not however, until the concluding quarter of the last century
that writers like Korolenko and Garshin arose, who devoted themselves
chiefly to the cultivation of the short story. With Anton Chekhov the
short story assumed a position of importance alongside the larger works
of the great Russian masters. Gorky and Andreyev made the short story do
the same service for the active revolutionary period in the last decade
of the nineteenth century down to its temporary defeat in 1906 that
Turgenev rendered in his series of larger novels for the period of
preparation. But very different was the voice of Gorky, the man sprung
from the people, the embodiment of all the accumulated wrath and
indignation of centuries of social wrong and oppression, from the
gentlemanly tones of the cultured artist Turgenev. Like a mighty hammer
his blows fell upon the decaying fabric of the old society. His was no
longer a feeble, despairing protest. With the strength and confidence of
victory he made onslaught upon onslaught on the old institutions until
they shook and almost tumbled. And when reaction celebrated its short-
lived triumph and gloom settled again upon his country and most of his
co-fighters withdrew from the battle in despair, some returning to the
old-time Russian mood of hopelessness, passivity and apathy, and some
even backsliding into wild orgies of literary debauchery, Gorky never
wavered, never lost his faith and hope, never for a moment was untrue to
his principles. Now, with the revolution victorious, he has come into
his right, one of the most respected, beloved and picturesque figures in
the Russian democracy.
Kuprin, the most facile and talented short-story writer next to Chekhov,
has, on the whole, kept well to the best literary traditions of Russia,
though he has frequently wandered off to extravagant sex themes, for
which he seems to display as great a fondness as Artzybashev. Semyonov
is a unique character in Russian literature, a peasant who had scarcely
mastered the most elementary mechanics of writing when he penned his
first story. But that story pleased Tolstoy, who befriended and
encouraged him. His tales deal altogether with peasant life in country
and city, and have a lifelikeness, an artlessness, a simplicity striking
even in a Russian author.
There is a small group of writers detached from the main current of
Russian literature who worship at the shrine of beauty and mysticism. Of
these Sologub has attained the highest reputation.
Rich as Russia has become in the short story, Anton Chekhov still stands
out as the supreme master, one of the greatest short-story writers of
the world. He was born in Taganarok, in the Ukraine, in 1860, the son of
a peasant serf who succeeded in buying his freedom. Anton Chekhov
studied medicine, but devoted himself largely to writing, in which, he
acknowledged, his scientific training was of great service. Though he
lived only forty-four years, dying of tuberculosis in 1904, his
collected works consist of sixteen fair-sized volumes of short stories,
and several dramas besides. A few volumes of his works have already
appeared in English translation.
Critics, among them Tolstoy, have often compared Chekhov to Maupassant.
I find it hard to discover the resemblance. Maupassant holds a supreme
position as a short-story writer; so does Chekhov. But there, it seems
to me, the likeness ends.
The chill wind that blows from the atmosphere created by the Frenchman’s
objective artistry is by the Russian commingled with the warm breath of
a great human sympathy. Maupassant never tells where his sympathies lie,
and you don’t know; you only guess. Chekhov does not tell you where his
sympathies lie, either, but you know all the same; you don’t have to
guess. And yet Chekhov is as objective as Maupassant. In the chronicling
of facts, conditions, and situations, in the reproduction of characters,
he is scrupulously true, hard, and inexorable. But without obtruding his
personality, he somehow manages to let you know that he is always
present, always at hand. If you laugh, he is there to laugh with you; if
you cry, he is there to shed a tear with you; if you are horrified, he
is horrified, too. It is a subtle art by which he contrives to make one
feel the nearness of himself for all his objectiveness, so subtle that
it defies analysis. And yet it constitutes one of the great charms of
his tales.
Chekhov’s works show an astounding resourcefulness and versatility.
There is no monotony, no repetition. Neither in incident nor in
character are any two stories alike. The range of Chekhov’s knowledge of
men and things seems to be unlimited, and he is extravagant in the use
of it. Some great idea which many a writer would consider sufficient to
expand into a whole novel he disposes of in a story of a few pages.
Take, for example, Vanka, apparently but a mere episode in the childhood
of a nine-year-old boy; while it is really the tragedy of a whole life
in its tempting glimpses into a past environment and ominous forebodings
of the future—all contracted into the space of four or five pages.
Chekhov is lavish with his inventiveness. Apparently, it cost him no
effort to invent.
I have used the word inventiveness for lack of a better name. It
expresses but lamely the peculiar faculty that distinguishes Chekhov.
Chekhov does not really invent. He reveals. He reveals things that no
author before him has revealed. It is as though he possessed a special
organ which enabled him to see, hear and feel things of which we other
mortals did not even dream the existence. Yet when he lays them bare we
know that they are not fictitious, not invented, but as real as the
ordinary familiar facts of life. This faculty of his playing on all
conceivable objects, all conceivable emotions, no matter how
microscopic, endows them with life and a soul. By virtue of this power
The Steppe, an uneventful record of peasants travelling day after day
through flat, monotonous fields, becomes instinct with dramatic
interest, and its 125 pages seem all too short. And by virtue of the
same attribute we follow with breathless suspense the minute description
of the declining days of a great scientist, who feels his physical and
mental faculties gradually ebbing away. A Tiresome Story, Chekhov calls
it; and so it would be without the vitality conjured into it by the
magic touch of this strange genius.
Divination is perhaps a better term than invention. Chekhov divines the
most secret impulses of the soul, scents out what is buried in the
subconscious, and brings it up to the surface. Most writers are
specialists. They know certain strata of society, and when they venture
beyond, their step becomes uncertain. Chekhov’s material is only
delimited by humanity. He is equally at home everywhere. The peasant,
the labourer, the merchant, the priest, the professional man, the
scholar, the military officer, and the government functionary, Gentile
or Jew, man, woman, or child—Chekhov is intimate with all of them. His
characters are sharply defined individuals, not types. In almost all his
stories, however short, the men and women and children who play a part
in them come out as clear, distinct personalities. Ariadne is as vivid a
character as Lilly, the heroine of Sudermann’s Song of Songs; yet
Ariadne is but a single story in a volume of stories. Who that has read
The Darling can ever forget her—the woman who had no separate existence
of her own, but thought the thoughts, felt the feelings, and spoke the
words of the men she loved? And when there was no man to love any more,
she was utterly crushed until she found a child to take care of and to
love; and then she sank her personality in the boy as she had sunk it
before in her husbands and lover, became a mere reflection of him, and
was happy again.
In the compilation of this volume I have been guided by the desire to
give the largest possible representation to the prominent authors of the
Russian short story, and to present specimens characteristic of each. At
the same time the element of interest has been kept in mind; and in a
few instances, as in the case of Korolenko, the selection of the story
was made with a view to its intrinsic merit and striking qualities
rather than as typifying the writer’s art. It was, of course, impossible
in the space of one book to exhaust all that is best. But to my
knowledge, the present volume is the most comprehensive anthology of the
Russian short story in the English language, and gives a fair notion of
the achievement in that field. All who enjoy good reading, I have no
reason to doubt, will get pleasure from it, and if, in addition, it will
prove of assistance to American students of Russian literature, I shall
feel that the task has been doubly worth the while.
Korolenko’s Shades and Andreyev’s Lazarus first appeared in Current
Opinion, and Artzybashev’s The Revolutionist in the Metropolitan
Magazine. I take pleasure in thanking Mr. Edward J. Wheeler, editor of
Current Opinion, and Mr. Carl Hovey, editor of the Metropolitan
Magazine, for permission to reprint them.
[Signature: Thomas Seltzer]
“Everything is subordinated to two main requirements—humanitarian ideals
and fidelity to life. This is the secret of the marvellous simplicity of
Russian literary art.”—THOMAS SELTZER.
BEST RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES
THE QUEEN OF SPADES BY ALEXSANDR S. PUSHKIN I
There was a card party at the rooms of Narumov of the Horse Guards. The
long winter night passed away imperceptibly, and it was five o’clock in
the morning before the company sat down to supper. Those who had won,
ate with a good appetite; the others sat staring absently at their empty
plates. When the champagne appeared, however, the conversation became
more animated, and all took a part in it.
“And how did you fare, Surin?” asked the host.
“Oh, I lost, as usual. I must confess that I am unlucky: I play
mirandole, I always keep cool, I never allow anything to put me out, and
yet I always lose!”
“And you did not once allow yourself to be tempted to back the red?...
Your firmness astonishes me.”
“But what do you think of Hermann?” said one of the guests, pointing to
a young Engineer: “he has never had a card in his hand in his life, he
has never in his life laid a wager, and yet he sits here till five
o’clock in the morning watching our play.”
“Play interests me very much,” said Hermann: “but I am not in the
position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the
superfluous.”
“Hermann is a German: he is economical—that is all!” observed Tomsky.
“But if there is one person that I cannot understand, it is my
grandmother, the Countess Anna Fedotovna.”
“How so?” inquired the guests.
“I cannot understand,” continued Tomsky, “how it is that my grandmother
does not punt.”
“What is there remarkable about an old lady of eighty not punting?” said
Narumov.
“Then you do not know the reason why?”
“No, really; haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Oh! then listen. About sixty years ago, my grandmother went to Paris,
where she created quite a sensation. People used to run after her to
catch a glimpse of the ‘Muscovite Venus.’ Richelieu made love to her,
and my grandmother maintains that he almost blew out his brains in
consequence of her cruelty. At that time ladies used to play at faro. On
one occasion at the Court, she lost a very considerable sum to the Duke
of Orleans. On returning home, my grandmother removed the patches from
her face, took off her hoops, informed my grandfather of her loss at the
gaming-table, and ordered him to pay the money. My deceased grandfather,
as far as I remember, was a sort of house-steward to my grandmother. He
dreaded her like fire; but, on hearing of such a heavy loss, he almost
went out of his mind; he calculated the various sums she had lost, and
pointed out to her that in six months she had spent half a million
francs, that neither their Moscow nor Saratov estates were in Paris, and
finally refused point blank to pay the debt. My grandmother gave him a
box on the ear and slept by herself as a sign of her displeasure. The
next day she sent for her husband, hoping that this domestic punishment
had produced an effect upon him, but she found him inflexible. For the
first time in her life, she entered into reasonings and explanations
with him, thinking to be able to convince him by pointing out to him
that there are debts and debts, and that there is a great difference
between a Prince and a coachmaker. But it was all in vain, my
grandfather still remained obdurate. But the matter did not rest there.
My grandmother did not know what to do. She had shortly before become
acquainted with a very remarkable man. You have heard of Count St.
Germain, about whom so many marvellous stories are told. You know that
he represented himself as the Wandering Jew, as the discoverer of the
elixir of life, of the philosopher’s stone, and so forth. Some laughed
at him as a charlatan; but Casanova, in his memoirs, says that he was a
spy. But be that as it may, St. Germain, in spite of the mystery
surrounding him, was a very fascinating person, and was much sought
after in the best circles of society. Even to this day my grandmother
retains an affectionate recollection of him, and becomes quite angry if
any one speaks disrespectfully of him. My grandmother knew that St.
Germain had large sums of money at his disposal. She resolved to have
recourse to him, and she wrote a letter to him asking him to come to her
without delay. The queer old man immediately waited upon her and found
her overwhelmed with grief. She described to him in the blackest colours
the barbarity of her husband, and ended by declaring that her whole hope
depended upon his friendship and amiability.
“St. Germain reflected.
“‘I could advance you the sum you want,’ said he; ‘but I know that you
would not rest easy until you had paid me back, and I should not like to
bring fresh troubles upon you. But there is another way of getting out
of your difficulty: you can win back your money.’
“‘But, my dear Count,’ replied my grandmother, ‘I tell you that I
haven’t any money left.’
“‘Money is not necessary,’ replied St. Germain: ‘be pleased to listen to
me.’
“Then he revealed to her a secret, for which each of us would give a
good deal...”
The young officers listened with increased attention. Tomsky lit his
pipe, puffed away for a moment and then continued:
“That same evening my grandmother went to Versailles to the jeu de la
reine. The Duke of Orleans kept the bank; my grandmother excused herself
in an off-hand manner for not having yet paid her debt, by inventing
some little story, and then began to play against him. She chose three
cards and played them one after the other: all three won sonika, [Said
of a card when it wins or loses in the quickest possible time.] and my
grandmother recovered every farthing that she had lost.”
“Mere chance!” said one of the guests.
“A tale!” observed Hermann.
“Perhaps they were marked cards!” said a third.
“I do not think so,” replied Tomsky gravely.
“What!” said Narumov, “you have a grandmother who knows how to hit upon
three lucky cards in succession, and you have never yet succeeded in
getting the secret of it out of her?”
“That’s the deuce of it!” replied Tomsky: “she had four sons, one of
whom was my father; all four were determined gamblers, and yet not to
one of them did she ever reveal her secret, although it would not have
been a bad thing either for them or for me. But this is what I heard
from my uncle, Count Ivan Ilyich, and he assured me, on his honour, that
it was true. The late Chaplitzky—the same who died in poverty after
having squandered millions—once lost, in his youth, about three hundred
thousand roubles—to Zorich, if I remember rightly. He was in despair. My
grandmother, who was always very severe upon the extravagance of young
men, took pity, however, upon Chaplitzky. She gave him three cards,
telling him to play them one after the other, at the same time exacting
from him a solemn promise that he would never play at cards again as
long as he lived. Chaplitzky then went to his victorious opponent, and
they began a fresh game. On the first card he staked fifty thousand
rubles and won sonika; he doubled the stake and won again, till at last,
by pursuing the same tactics, he won back more than he had lost ...
“But it is time to go to bed: it is a quarter to six already.”
And indeed it was already beginning to dawn: the young men emptied their
glasses and then took leave of each other. II
The old Countess A—— was seated in her dressing-room in front of her
looking—glass. Three waiting maids stood around her. One held a small
pot of rouge, another a box of hair-pins, and the third a tall can with
bright red ribbons. The Countess had no longer the slightest pretensions
to beauty, but she still preserved the habits of her youth, dressed in
strict accordance with the fashion of seventy years before, and made as
long and as careful a toilette as she would have done sixty years
previously. Near the window, at an embroidery frame, sat a young lady,
her ward.
“Good morning, grandmamma,” said a young officer, entering the room.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Lise. Grandmamma, I want to ask you something.”
“What is it, Paul?”
“I want you to let me introduce one of my friends to you, and to allow
me to bring him to the ball on Friday.”
“Bring him direct to the ball and introduce him to me there. Were you at
B——‘s yesterday?”
“Yes; everything went off very pleasantly, and dancing was kept up until
five o’clock. How charming Yeletzkaya was!”
“But, my dear, what is there charming about her? Isn’t she like her
grandmother, the Princess Daria Petrovna? By the way, she must be very
old, the Princess Daria Petrovna.”
“How do you mean, old?” cried Tomsky thoughtlessly; “she died seven
years ago.”
The young lady raised her head and made a sign to the young officer. He
then remembered that the old Countess was never to be informed of the
death of any of her contemporaries, and he bit his lips. But the old
Countess heard the news with the greatest indifference.
“Dead!” said she; “and I did not know it. We were appointed maids of
honour at the same time, and when we were presented to the Empress...”
And the Countess for the hundredth time related to her grandson one of
her anecdotes.
“Come, Paul,” said she, when she had finished her story, “help me to get
up. Lizanka, where is my snuff-box?”
And the Countess with her three maids went behind a screen to finish her
toilette. Tomsky was left alone with the young lady.
“Who is the gentleman you wish to introduce to the Countess?” asked
Lizaveta Ivanovna in a whisper.
“Narumov. Do you know him?”
“No. Is he a soldier or a civilian?”
“A soldier.”
“Is he in the Engineers?”
“No, in the Cavalry. What made you think that he was in the Engineers?”
The young lady smiled, but made no reply.
“Paul,” cried the Countess from behind the screen, “send me some new
novel, only pray don’t let it be one of the present day style.”
“What do you mean, grandmother?”
“That is, a novel, in which the hero strangles neither his father nor
his mother, and in which there are no drowned bodies. I have a great
horror of drowned persons.”
“There are no such novels nowadays. Would you like a Russian one?”
“Are there any Russian novels? Send me one, my dear, pray send me one!”
“Good-bye, grandmother: I am in a hurry... Good-bye, Lizaveta Ivanovna.
What made you think that Narumov was in the Engineers?”
And Tomsky left the boudoir.
Lizaveta Ivanovna was left alone: she laid aside her work and began to
look out of the window. A few moments afterwards, at a corner house on
the other side of the street, a young officer appeared. A deep blush
covered her cheeks; she took up her work again and bent her head down
over the frame. At the same moment the Countess returned completely
dressed.
“Order the carriage, Lizaveta,” said she; “we will go out for a drive.”
Lizaveta arose from the frame and began to arrange her work.
“What is the matter with you, my child, are you deaf?” cried the
Countess. “Order the carriage to be got ready at once.”
“I will do so this moment,” replied the young lady, hastening into the
ante-room.
A servant entered and gave the Countess some books from Prince Paul
Aleksandrovich.
“Tell him that I am much obliged to him,” said the Countess. “Lizaveta!
Lizaveta! Where are you running to?”
“I am going to dress.”
“There is plenty of time, my dear. Sit down here. Open the first volume
and read to me aloud.”
Her companion took the book and read a few lines.
“Louder,” said the Countess. “What is the matter with you, my child?
Have you lost your voice? Wait—give me that footstool—a little
nearer—that will do.”
Lizaveta read two more pages. The Countess yawned.
“Put the book down,” said she: “what a lot of nonsense! Send it back to
Prince Paul with my thanks... But where is the carriage?”
“The carriage is ready,” said Lizaveta, looking out into the street.
“How is it that you are not dressed?” said the Countess: “I must always
wait for you. It is intolerable, my dear!”
Liza hastened to her room. She had not been there two minutes, before
the Countess began to ring with all her might. The three waiting-maids
came running in at one door and the valet at another.
“How is it that you cannot hear me when I ring for you?” said the
Countess. “Tell Lizaveta Ivanovna that I am waiting for her.”
Lizaveta returned with her hat and cloak on.
“At last you are here!” said the Countess. “But why such an elaborate
toilette? Whom do you intend to captivate? What sort of weather is it?
It seems rather windy.”
“No, your Ladyship, it is very calm,” replied the valet.
“You never think of what you are talking about. Open the window. So it
is: windy and bitterly cold. Unharness the horses. Lizaveta, we won’t go
out—there was no need for you to deck yourself like that.”
“What a life is mine!” thought Lizaveta Ivanovna.
And, in truth, Lizaveta Ivanovna was a very unfortunate creature. “The
bread of the stranger is bitter,” says Dante, “and his staircase hard to
climb.” But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as
the poor companion of an old lady of quality? The Countess A—— had by no
means a bad heart, but she was capricious, like a woman who had been
spoilt by the world, as well as being avaricious and egotistical, like
all old people who have seen their best days, and whose thoughts are
with the past and not the present. She participated in all the vanities
of the great world, went to balls, where she sat in a corner, painted
and dressed in old-fashioned style, like a deformed but indispensable
ornament of the ball-room; all the guests on entering approached her and
made a profound bow, as if in accordance with a set ceremony, but after
that nobody took any further notice of her. She received the whole town
at her house, and observed the strictest etiquette, although she could
no longer recognise the faces of people. Her numerous domestics, growing
fat and old in her ante-chamber and servants’ hall, did just as they
liked, and vied with each other in robbing the aged Countess in the most
bare-faced manner. Lizaveta Ivanovna was the martyr of the household.
She made tea, and was reproached with using too much sugar; she read
novels aloud to the Countess, and the faults of the author were visited
upon her head; she accompanied the Countess in her walks, and was held
answerable for the weather or the state of the pavement. A salary was
attached to the post, but she very rarely received it, although she was
expected to dress like everybody else, that is to say, like very few
indeed. In society she played the most pitiable role. Everybody knew
her, and nobody paid her any attention. At balls she danced only when a
partner was wanted, and ladies would only take hold of her arm when it
was necessary to lead her out of the room to attend to their dresses.
She was very self-conscious, and felt her position keenly, and she
looked about her with impatience for a deliverer to come to her rescue;
but the young men, calculating in their giddiness, honoured her with but
very little attention, although Lizaveta Ivanovna was a hundred times
prettier than the bare-faced and cold-hearted marriageable girls around
whom they hovered. Many a time did she quietly sFlink away from the
glittering but wearisome drawing-room, to go and cry in her own poor
little room, in which stood a screen, a chest of drawers, a looking-
glass and a painted bedstead, and where a tallow candle burnt feebly in
a copper candle-stick.
One morning—this was about two days after the evening party described at
the beginning of this story, and a week previous to the scene at which
we have just assisted—Lizaveta Ivanovna was seated near the window at
her embroidery frame, when, happening to look out into the street, she
caught sight of a young Engineer officer, standing motionless with his
eyes fixed upon her window. She lowered her head and went on again with
her work. About five minutes afterwards she looked out again—the young
officer was still standing in the same place. Not being in the habit of
coquetting with passing officers, she did not continue to gaze out into
the street, but went on sewing for a couple of hours, without raising
her head. Dinner was announced. She rose up and began to put her
embroidery away, but glancing casually out of the window, she perceived
the officer again. This seemed to her very strange. After dinner she
went to the window with a certain feeling of uneasiness, but the officer
was no longer there—and she thought no more about him.
A couple of days afterwards, just as she was stepping into the carriage
with the Countess, she saw him again. He was standing close behind the
door, with his face half-concealed by his fur collar, but his dark eyes
sparkled beneath his cap. Lizaveta felt alarmed, though she knew not
why, and she trembled as she seated herself in the carriage.
On returning home, she hastened to the window—the officer was standing
in his accustomed place, with his eyes fixed upon her. She drew back, a
prey to curiosity and agitated by a feeling which was quite new to her.
From that time forward not a day passed without the young officer making
his appearance under the window at the customary hour, and between him
and her there was established a sort of mute acquaintance. Sitting in
her place at work, she used to feel his approach; and raising her head,
she would look at him longer and longer each day. The young man seemed
to be very grateful to her: she saw with the sharp eye of youth, how a
sudden flush covered his pale cheeks each time that their glances met.
After about a week she commenced to smile at him...
When Tomsky asked permission of his grandmother the Countess to present
one of his friends to her, the young girl’s heart beat violently. But
hearing that Narumov was not an Engineer, she regretted that by her
thoughtless question, she had betrayed her secret to the volatile
Tomsky.
Hermann was the son of a German who had become a naturalised Russian,
and from whom he had inherited a small capital. Being firmly convinced
of the necessity of preserving his independence, Hermann did not touch
his private income, but lived on his pay, without allowing himself the
slightest luxury. Moreover, he was reserved and ambitious, and his
companions rarely had an opportunity of making merry at the expense of
his extreme parsimony. He had strong passions and an ardent imagination,
but his firmness of disposition preserved him from the ordinary errors
of young men. Thus, though a gamester at heart, he never touched a card,
for he considered his position did not allow him—as he said—“to risk the
necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous,” yet he would sit for
nights together at the card table and follow with feverish anxiety the
different turns of the game.
The story of the three cards had produced a powerful impression upon his
imagination, and all night long he could think of nothing else. “If,” he
thought to himself the following evening, as he walked along the streets
of St. Petersburg, “if the old Countess would but reveal her secret to
me! if she would only tell me the names of the three winning cards. Why
should I not try my fortune? I must get introduced to her and win her
favour—become her lover... But all that will take time, and she is
eighty-seven years old: she might be dead in a week, in a couple of days
even!... But the story itself: can it really be true?... No! Economy,
temperance and industry: those are my three winning cards; by means of
them I shall be able to double my capital—increase it sevenfold, and
procure for myself ease and independence.”
Musing in this manner, he walked on until he found himself in one of the
principal streets of St. Petersburg, in front of a house of antiquated
architecture. The street was blocked with equipages; carriages one after
the other drew up in front of the brilliantly illuminated doorway. At
one moment there stepped out on to the pavement the well-shaped little
foot of some young beauty, at another the heavy boot of a cavalry
officer, and then the silk stockings and shoes of a member of the
diplomatic world. Furs and cloaks passed in rapid succession before the
gigantic porter at the entrance.
Hermann stopped. “Whose house is this?” he asked of the watchman at the
corner.
“The Countess A——‘s,” replied the watchman.
Hermann started. The strange story of the three cards again presented
itself to his imagination. He began walking up and down before the
house, thinking of its owner and her strange secret. Returning late to
his modest lodging, he could not go to sleep for a long time, and when
at last he did doze off, he could dream of nothing but cards, green
tables, piles of banknotes and heaps of ducats. He played one card after
the other, winning uninterruptedly, and then he gathered up the gold and
filled his pockets with the notes. When he woke up late the next
morning, he sighed over the loss of his imaginary wealth, and then
sallying out into the town, he found himself once more in front of the
Countess’s residence. Some unknown power seemed to have attracted him
thither. He stopped and looked up at the windows. At one of these he saw
a head with luxuriant black hair, which was bent down probably over some
book or an embroidery frame. The head was raised. Hermann saw a fresh
complexion and a pair of dark eyes. That moment decided his fate. III
Lizaveta Ivanovna had scarcely taken off her hat and cloak, when the
Countess sent for her and again ordered her to get the carriage ready.
The vehicle drew up before the door, and they prepared to take their
seats. Just at the moment when two footmen were assisting the old lady
to enter the carriage, Lizaveta saw her Engineer standing close beside
the wheel; he grasped her hand; alarm caused her to lose her presence of
mind, and the young man disappeared—but not before he had left a letter
between her fingers. She concealed it in her glove, and during the whole
of the drive she neither saw nor heard anything. It was the custom of
the Countess, when out for an airing in her carriage, to be constantly
asking such questions as: “Who was that person that met us just now?
What is the name of this bridge? What is written on that signboard?” On
this occasion, however, Lizaveta returned such vague and absurd answers,
that the Countess became angry with her.
“What is the matter with you, my dear?” she exclaimed. “Have you taken
leave of your senses, or what is it? Do you not hear me or understand
what I say?... Heaven be thanked, I am still in my right mind and speak
plainly enough!”
Lizaveta Ivanovna did not hear her. On returning home she ran to her
room, and drew the letter out of her glove: it was not sealed. Lizaveta
read it. The letter contained a declaration of love; it was tender,
respectful, and copied word for word from a German novel. But Lizaveta
did not know anything of the German language, and she was quite
delighted.
For all that, the letter caused her to feel exceedingly uneasy. For the
first time in her life she was entering into secret and confidential
relations with a young man. His boldness alarmed her. She reproached
herself for her imprudent behaviour, and knew not what to do. Should she
cease to sit at the window and, by assuming an appearance of
indifference towards him, put a check upon the young officer’s desire
for further acquaintance with her? Should she send his letter back to
him, or should she answer him in a cold and decided manner? There was
nobody to whom she could turn in her perplexity, for she had neither
female friend nor adviser... At length she resolved to reply to him.
She sat down at her little writing-table, took pen and paper, and began
to think. Several times she began her letter, and then tore it up: the
way she had expressed herself seemed to her either too inviting or too
cold and decisive. At last she succeeded in writing a few lines with
which she felt satisfied.
“I am convinced,” she wrote, “that your intentions are honourable, and
that you do not wish to offend me by any imprudent behaviour, but our
acquaintance must not begin in such a manner. I return you your letter,
and I hope that I shall never have any cause to complain of this
undeserved slight.”
The next day, as soon as Hermann made his appearance, Lizaveta rose from
her embroidery, went into the drawing-room, opened the ventilator and
threw the letter into the street, trusting that the young officer would
have the perception to pick it up.
Hermann hastened forward, picked it up and then repaired to a
confectioner’s shop. Breaking the seal of the envelope, he found inside
it his own letter and Lizaveta’s reply. He had expected this, and he
returned home, his mind deeply occupied with his intrigue.
Three days afterwards, a bright-eyed young girl from a milliner’s
establishment brought Lizaveta a letter. Lizaveta opened it with great
uneasiness, fearing that it was a demand for money, when suddenly she
recognised Hermann’s hand-writing.
“You have made a mistake, my dear,” said she: “this letter is not for
me.”
“Oh, yes, it is for you,” replied the girl, smiling very knowingly.
“Have the goodness to read it.”
Lizaveta glanced at the letter. Hermann requested an interview.
“It cannot be,” she cried, alarmed at the audacious request, and the
manner in which it was made. “This letter is certainly not for me.”
And she tore it into fragments.
“If the letter was not for you, why have you torn it up?” said the girl.
“I should have given it back to the person who sent it.”
“Be good enough, my dear,” said Lizaveta, disconcerted by this remark,
“not to bring me any more letters for the future, and tell the person
who sent you that he ought to be ashamed...”
But Hermann was not the man to be thus put off. Every day Lizaveta
received from him a letter, sent now in this way, now in that. They were
no longer translated from the German. Hermann wrote them under the
inspiration of passion, and spoke in his own language, and they bore
full testimony to the inflexibility of his desire and the disordered
condition of his uncontrollable imagination. Lizaveta no longer thought
of sending them back to him: she became intoxicated with them and began
to reply to them, and little by little her answers became longer and
more affectionate. At last she threw out of the window to him the
following letter:
“This evening there is going to be a ball at the Embassy. The Countess
will be there. We shall remain until two o’clock. You have now an
opportunity of seeing me alone. As soon as the Countess is gone, the
servants will very probably go out, and there will be nobody left but
the Swiss, but he usually goes to sleep in his lodge. Come about half-
past eleven. Walk straight upstairs. If you meet anybody in the ante-
room, ask if the Countess is at home. You will be told ‘No,’ in which
case there will be nothing left for you to do but to go away again. But
it is most probable that you will meet nobody. The maidservants will all
be together in one room. On leaving the ante-room, turn to the left, and
walk straight on until you reach the Countess’s bedroom. In the bedroom,
behind a screen, you will find two doors: the one on the right leads to
a cabinet, which the Countess never enters; the one on the left leads to
a corridor, at the end of which is a little winding staircase; this
leads to my room.”
Hermann trembled like a tiger, as he waited for the appointed time to
arrive. At ten o’clock in the evening he was already in front of the
Countess’s house. The weather was terrible; the wind blew with great
violence; the sleety snow fell in large flakes; the lamps emitted a
feeble light, the streets were deserted; from time to time a sledge,
drawn by a sorry-looking hack, passed by, on the look-out for a belated
passenger. Hermann was enveloped in a thick overcoat, and felt neither
wind nor snow.
At last the Countess’s carriage drew up. Hermann saw two footmen carry
out in their arms the bent form of the old lady, wrapped in sable fur,
and immediately behind her, clad in a warm mantle, and with her head
ornamented with a wreath of fresh flowers, followed Lizaveta. The door
was closed. The carriage rolled away heavily through the yielding snow.
The porter shut the street-door; the windows became dark.
Hermann began walking up and down near the deserted house; at length he
stopped under a lamp, and glanced at his watch: it was twenty minutes
past eleven. He remained standing under the lamp, his eyes fixed upon
the watch, impatiently waiting for the remaining minutes to pass. At
half-past eleven precisely, Hermann ascended the steps of the house, and
made his way into the brightly-illuminated vestibule. The porter was not
there. Hermann hastily ascended the staircase, opened the door of the
ante-room and saw a footman sitting asleep in an antique chair by the
side of a lamp. With a light firm step Hermann passed by him. The
drawing-room and dining-room were in darkness, but a feeble reflection
penetrated thither from the lamp in the ante-room.
Hermann reached the Countess’s bedroom. Before a shrine, which was full
of old images, a golden lamp was burning. Faded stuffed chairs and
divans with soft cushions stood in melancholy symmetry around the room,
the walls of which were hung with China silk. On one side of the room
hung two portraits painted in Paris by Madame Lebrun. One of these
represented a stout, red-faced man of about forty years of age in a
bright-green uniform and with a star upon his breast; the other—a
beautiful young woman, with an aquiline nose, forehead curls and a rose
in her powdered hair. In the corners stood porcelain shepherds and
shepherdesses, dining-room clocks from the workshop of the celebrated
Lefroy, bandboxes, roulettes, fans and the various playthings for the
amusement of ladies that were in vogue at the end of the last century,
when Montgolfier’s balloons and Mesmer’s magnetism were the rage.
Hermann stepped behind the screen. At the back of it stood a little iron
bedstead; on the right was the door which led to the cabinet; on the
left—the other which led to the corridor. He opened the latter, and saw
the little winding staircase which led to the room of the poor
companion... But he retraced his steps and entered the dark cabinet.
The time passed slowly. All was still. The clock in the drawing-room
struck twelve; the strokes echoed through the room one after the other,
and everything was quiet again. Hermann stood leaning against the cold
stove. He was calm; his heart beat regularly, like that of a man
resolved upon a dangerous but inevitable undertaking. One o’clock in the
morning struck; then two; and he heard the distant noise of carriage-
wheels. An involuntary agitation took possession of him. The carriage
drew near and stopped. He heard the sound of the carriage-steps being
let down. All was bustle within the house. The servants were running
hither and thither, there was a confusion of voices, and the rooms were
lit up. Three antiquated chamber-maids entered the bedroom, and they
were shortly afterwards followed by the Countess who, more dead than
alive, sank into a Voltaire armchair. Hermann peeped through a chink.
Lizaveta Ivanovna passed close by him, and he heard her hurried steps as
she hastened up the little spiral staircase. For a moment his heart was
assailed by something like a pricking of conscience, but the emotion was
only transitory, and his heart became petrified as before.
The Countess began to undress before her looking-glass. Her rose-
bedecked cap was taken off, and then her powdered wig was removed from
off her white and closely-cut hair. Hairpins fell in showers around her.
Her yellow satin dress, brocaded with silver, fell down at her swollen
feet.
Hermann was a witness of the repugnant mysteries of her toilette; at
last the Countess was in her night-cap and dressing-gown, and in this
costume, more suitable to her age, she appeared less hideous and
deformed.
Like all old people in general, the Countess suffered from
sleeplessness. Having undressed, she seated herself at the window in a
Voltaire armchair and dismissed her maids. The candles were taken away,
and once more the room was left with only one lamp burning in it. The
Countess sat there looking quite yellow, mumbling with her flaccid lips
and swaying to and fro. Her dull eyes expressed complete vacancy of
mind, and, looking at her, one would have thought that the rocking of
her body was not a voluntary action of her own, but was produced by the
action of some concealed galvanic mechanism.
Suddenly the death-like face assumed an inexplicable expression. The
lips ceased to tremble, the eyes became animated: before the Countess
stood an unknown man.
“Do not be alarmed, for Heaven’s sake, do not be alarmed!” said he in a
low but distinct voice. “I have no intention of doing you any harm, I
have only come to ask a favour of you.”
The old woman looked at him in silence, as if she had not heard what he
had said. Hermann thought that she was deaf, and bending down towards
her ear, he repeated what he had said. The aged Countess remained silent
as before.
“You can insure the happiness of my life,” continued Hermann, “and it
will cost you nothing. I know that you can name three cards in order—”
Hermann stopped. The Countess appeared now to understand what he wanted;
she seemed as if seeking for words to reply.
“It was a joke,” she replied at last: “I assure you it was only a joke.”
“There is no joking about the matter,” replied Hermann angrily.
“Remember Chaplitzky, whom you helped to win.”
The Countess became visibly uneasy. Her features expressed strong
emotion, but they quickly resumed their former immobility.
“Can you not name me these three winning cards?” continued Hermann.
The Countess remained silent; Hermann continued:
“For whom are you preserving your secret? For your grandsons? They are
rich enough without it; they do not know the worth of money. Your cards
would be of no use to a spendthrift. He who cannot preserve his paternal
inheritance, will die in want, even though he had a demon at his
service. I am not a man of that sort; I know the value of money. Your
three cards will not be thrown away upon me. Come!”...
He paused and tremblingly awaited her reply. The Countess remained
silent; Hermann fell upon his knees.
“If your heart has ever known the feeling of love,” said he, “if you
remember its rapture, if you have ever smiled at the cry of your new-
born child, if any human feeling has ever entered into your breast, I
entreat you by the feelings of a wife, a lover, a mother, by all that is
most sacred in life, not to reject my prayer. Reveal to me your secret.
Of what use is it to you?... May be it is connected with some terrible
sin with the loss of eternal salvation, with some bargain with the
devil... Reflect,—you are old; you have not long to live—I am ready to
take your sins upon my soul. Only reveal to me your secret. Remember
that the happiness of a man is in your hands, that not only I, but my
children, and grandchildren will bless your memory and reverence you as
a saint...”
The old Countess answered not a word.
Hermann rose to his feet.
“You old hag!” he exclaimed, grinding his teeth, “then I will make you
answer!”
With these words he drew a pistol from his pocket.
At the sight of the pistol, the Countess for the second time exhibited
strong emotion. She shook her head and raised her hands as if to protect
herself from the shot... then she fell backwards and remained
motionless.
“Come, an end to this childish nonsense!” said Hermann, taking hold of
her hand. “I ask you for the last time: will you tell me the names of
your three cards, or will you not?”
The Countess made no reply. Hermann perceived that she was dead! IV
Lizaveta Ivanovna was sitting in her room, still in her ball dress, lost
in deep thought. On returning home, she had hastily dismissed the
chambermaid who very reluctantly came forward to assist her, saying that
she would undress herself, and with a trembling heart had gone up to her
own room, expecting to find Hermann there, but yet hoping not to find
him. At the first glance she convinced herself that he was not there,
and she thanked her fate for having prevented him keeping the
appointment. She sat down without undressing, and began to recall to
mind all the circumstances which in so short a time had carried her so
far. It was not three weeks since the time when she first saw the young
officer from the window—and yet she was already in correspondence with
him, and he had succeeded in inducing her to grant him a nocturnal
interview! She knew his name only through his having written it at the
bottom of some of his letters; she had never spoken to him, had never
heard his voice, and had never heard him spoken of until that evening.
But, strange to say, that very evening at the ball, Tomsky, being piqued
with the young Princess Pauline N——, who, contrary to her usual custom,
did not flirt with him, wished to revenge himself by assuming an air of
indifference: he therefore engaged Lizaveta Ivanovna and danced an
endless mazurka with her. During the whole of the time he kept teasing
her about her partiality for Engineer officers; he assured her that he
knew far more than she imagined, and some of his jests were so happily
aimed, that Lizaveta thought several times that her secret was known to
him.
“From whom have you learnt all this?” she asked, smiling.
“From a friend of a person very well known to you,” replied Tomsky,
“from a very distinguished man.”
“And who is this distinguished man?”
“His name is Hermann.”
Lizaveta made no reply; but her hands and feet lost all sense of
feeling.
“This Hermann,” continued Tomsky, “is a man of romantic personality. He
has the profile of a Napoleon, and the soul of a Mephistopheles. I
believe that he has at least three crimes upon his conscience... How
pale you have become!”
“I have a headache... But what did this Hermann—or whatever his name
is—tell you?”
“Hermann is very much dissatisfied with his friend: he says that in his
place he would act very differently... I even think that Hermann himself
has designs upon you; at least, he listens very attentively to all that
his friend has to say about you.”
“And where has he seen me?”
“In church, perhaps; or on the parade—God alone knows where. It may have
been in your room, while you were asleep, for there is nothing that he—”
Three ladies approaching him with the question: “oubli ou regret?”
interrupted the conversation, which had become so tantalisingly
interesting to Lizaveta.
The lady chosen by Tomsky was the Princess Pauline herself. She
succeeded in effecting a reconciliation with him during the numerous
turns of the dance, after which he conducted her to her chair. On
returning to his place, Tomsky thought no more either of Hermann or
Lizaveta. She longed to renew the interrupted conversation, but the
mazurka came to an end, and shortly afterwards the old Countess took her
departure.
Tomsky’s words were nothing more than the customary small talk of the
dance, but they sank deep into the soul of the young dreamer. The
portrait, sketched by Tomsky, coincided with the picture she had formed
within her own mind, and thanks to the latest romances, the ordinary
countenance of her admirer became invested with attributes capable of
alarming her and fascinating her imagination at the same time. She was
now sitting with her bare arms crossed and with her head, still adorned
with flowers, sunk upon her uncovered bosom. Suddenly the door opened
and Hermann entered. She shuddered.
“Where were you?” she asked in a terrified whisper.
“In the old Countess’s bedroom,” replied Hermann: “I have just left her.
The Countess is dead.”
“My God! What do you say?”
“And I am afraid,” added Hermann, “that I am the cause of her death.”
Lizaveta looked at him, and Tomsky’s words found an echo in her soul:
“This man has at least three crimes upon his conscience!” Hermann sat
down by the window near her, and related all that had happened.
Lizaveta listened to him in terror. So all those passionate letters,
those ardent desires, this bold obstinate pursuit—all this was not love!
Money—that was what his soul yearned for! She could not satisfy his
desire and make him happy! The poor girl had been nothing but the blind
tool of a robber, of the murderer of her aged benefactress!... She wept
bitter tears of agonised repentance. Hermann gazed at her in silence:
his heart, too, was a prey to violent emotion, but neither the tears of
the poor girl, nor the wonderful charm of her beauty, enhanced by her
grief, could produce any impression upon his hardened soul. He felt no
pricking of conscience at the thought of the dead old woman. One thing
only grieved him: the irreparable loss of the secret from which he had
expected to obtain great wealth.
“You are a monster!” said Lizaveta at last.
“I did not wish for her death,” replied Hermann: “my pistol was not
loaded.”
Both remained silent.
The day began to dawn. Lizaveta extinguished her candle: a pale light
illumined her room. She wiped her tear-stained eyes and raised them
towards Hermann: he was sitting near the window, with his arms crossed
and with a fierce frown upon his forehead. In this attitude he bore a
striking resemblance to the portrait of Napoleon. This resemblance
struck Lizaveta even.
“How shall I get you out of the house?” said she at last. “I thought of
conducting you down the secret staircase, but in that case it would be
necessary to go through the Countess’s bedroom, and I am afraid.”
“Tell me how to find this secret staircase—I will go alone.”
Lizaveta arose, took from her drawer a key, handed it to Hermann and
gave him the necessary instructions. Hermann pressed her cold, limp
hand, kissed her bowed head, and left the room.
He descended the winding staircase, and once more entered the Countess’s
bedroom. The dead old lady sat as if petrified; her face expressed
profound tranquillity. Hermann stopped before her, and gazed long and
earnestly at her, as if he wished to convince himself of the terrible
reality; at last he entered the cabinet, felt behind the tapestry for
the door, and then began to descend the dark staircase, filled with
strange emotions. “Down this very staircase,” thought he, “perhaps
coming from the very same room, and at this very same hour sixty years
ago, there may have glided, in an embroidered coat, with his hair
dressed à l’oiseau royal and pressing to his heart his three-cornered
hat, some young gallant, who has long been mouldering in the grave, but
the heart of his aged mistress has only to-day ceased to beat...”
At the bottom of the staircase Hermann found a door, which he opened
with a key, and then traversed a corridor which conducted him into the
street. V
Three days after the fatal night, at nine o’clock in the morning,
Hermann repaired to the Convent of ——, where the last honours were to be
paid to the mortal remains of the old Countess. Although feeling no
remorse, he could not altogether stifle the voice of conscience, which
said to him: “You are the murderer of the old woman!” In spite of his
entertaining very little religious belief, he was exceedingly
superstitious; and believing that the dead Countess might exercise an
evil influence on his life, he resolved to be present at her obsequies
in order to implore her pardon.
The church was full. It was with difficulty that Hermann made his way
through the crowd of people. The coffin was placed upon a rich
catafalque beneath a velvet baldachin. The deceased Countess lay within
it, with her hands crossed upon her breast, with a lace cap upon her
head and dressed in a white satin robe. Around the catafalque stood the
members of her household: the servants in black caftans, with armorial
ribbons upon their shoulders, and candles in their hands; the
relatives—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—in deep
mourning.
Nobody wept; tears would have been une affectation. The Countess was so
old, that her death could have surprised nobody, and her relatives had
long looked upon her as being out of the world. A famous preacher
pronounced the funeral sermon. In simple and touching words he described
the peaceful passing away of the righteous, who had passed long years in
calm preparation for a Christian end. “The angel of death found her,”
said the orator, “engaged in pious meditation and waiting for the
midnight bridegroom.”
The service concluded amidst profound silence. The relatives went
forward first to take farewell of the corpse. Then followed the numerous
guests, who had come to render the last homage to her who for so many
years had been a participator in their frivolous amusements. After these
followed the members of the Countess’s household. The last of these was
an old woman of the same age as the deceased. Two young women led her
forward by the hand. She had not strength enough to bow down to the
ground—she merely shed a few tears and kissed the cold hand of her
mistress.
Hermann now resolved to approach the coffin. He knelt down upon the cold
stones and remained in that position for some minutes; at last he arose,
as pale as the deceased Countess herself; he ascended the steps of the
catafalque and bent over the corpse... At that moment it seemed to him
that the dead woman darted a mocking look at him and winked with one
eye. Hermann started back, took a false step and fell to the ground.
Several persons hurried forward and raised him up. At the same moment
Lizaveta Ivanovna was borne fainting into the porch of the church. This
episode disturbed for some minutes the solemnity of the gloomy ceremony.
Among the congregation arose a deep murmur, and a tall thin chamberlain,
a near relative of the deceased, whispered in the ear of an Englishman
who was standing near him, that the young officer was a natural son of
the Countess, to which the Englishman coldly replied: “Oh!”
During the whole of that day, Hermann was strangely excited. Repairing
to an out-of-the-way restaurant to dine, he drank a great deal of wine,
contrary to his usual custom, in the hope of deadening his inward
agitation. But the wine only served to excite his imagination still
more. On returning home, he threw himself upon his bed without
undressing, and fell into a deep sleep.
When he woke up it was already night, and the moon was shining into the
room. He looked at his watch: it was a quarter to three. Sleep had left
him; he sat down upon his bed and thought of the funeral of the old
Countess.
At that moment somebody in the street looked in at his window, and
immediately passed on again. Hermann paid no attention to this incident.
A few moments afterwards he heard the door of his ante-room open.
Hermann thought that it was his orderly, drunk as usual, returning from
some nocturnal expedition, but presently he heard footsteps that were
unknown to him: somebody was walking softly over the floor in slippers.
The door opened, and a woman dressed in white, entered the room. Hermann
mistook her for his old nurse, and wondered what could bring her there
at that hour of the night. But the white woman glided rapidly across the
room and stood before him—and Hermann recognised the Countess!
“I have come to you against my wish,” she said in a firm voice: “but I
have been ordered to grant your request. Three, seven, ace, will win for
you if played in succession, but only on these conditions: that you do
not play more than one card in twenty-four hours, and that you never
play again during the rest of your life. I forgive you my death, on
condition that you marry my companion, Lizaveta Ivanovna.”
With these words she turned round very quietly, walked with a shuffling
gait towards the door and disappeared. Hermann heard the street-door
open and shut, and again he saw some one look in at him through the
window.
For a long time Hermann could not recover himself. He then rose up and
entered the next room. His orderly was lying asleep upon the floor, and
he had much difficulty in waking him. The orderly was drunk as usual,
and no information could be obtained from him. The street-door was
locked. Hermann returned to his room, lit his candle, and wrote down all
the details of his vision. VI
Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two
bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world. “Three,
seven, ace,” soon drove out of Hermann’s mind the thought of the dead
Countess. “Three, seven, ace,” were perpetually running through his head
and continually being repeated by his lips. If he saw a young girl, he
would say: “How slender she is! quite like the three of hearts.” If
anybody asked: “What is the time?” he would reply: “Five minutes to
seven.” Every stout man that he saw reminded him of the ace. “Three,
seven, ace” haunted him in his sleep, and assumed all possible shapes.
The threes bloomed before him in the forms of magnificent flowers, the
sevens were represented by Gothic portals, and the aces became
transformed into gigantic spiders. One thought alone occupied his whole
mind—to make a profitable use of the secret which he had purchased so
dearly. He thought of applying for a furlough so as to travel abroad. He
wanted to go to Paris and tempt fortune in some of the public gambling-
houses that abounded there. Chance spared him all this trouble.
There was in Moscow a society of rich gamesters, presided over by the
celebrated Chekalinsky, who had passed all his life at the card-table
and had amassed millions, accepting bills of exchange for his winnings
and paying his losses in ready money. His long experience secured for
him the confidence of his companions, and his open house, his famous
cook, and his agreeable and fascinating manners gained for him the
respect of the public. He came to St. Petersburg. The young men of the
capital flocked to his rooms, forgetting balls for cards, and preferring
the emotions of faro to the seductions of flirting. Narumov conducted
Hermann to Chekalinsky’s residence.
They passed through a suite of magnificent rooms, filled with attentive
domestics. The place was crowded. Generals and Privy Counsellors were
playing at whist; young men were lolling carelessly upon the velvet-
covered sofas, eating ices and smoking pipes. In the drawing-room, at
the head of a long table, around which were assembled about a score of
players, sat the master of the house keeping the bank. He was a man of
about sixty years of age, of a very dignified appearance; his head was
covered with silvery-white hair; his full, florid countenance expressed
good-nature, and his eyes twinkled with a perpetual smile. Narumov
introduced Hermann to him. Chekalinsky shook him by the hand in a
friendly manner, requested him not to stand on ceremony, and then went
on dealing.
The game occupied some time. On the table lay more than thirty cards.
Chekalinsky paused after each throw, in order to give the players time
to arrange their cards and note down their losses, listened politely to
their requests, and more politely still, put straight the corners of
cards that some player’s hand had chanced to bend. At last the game was
finished. Chekalinsky shuffled the cards and prepared to deal again.
“Will you allow me to take a card?” said Hermann, stretching out his
hand from behind a stout gentleman who was punting.
Chekalinsky smiled and bowed silently, as a sign of acquiescence.
Narumov laughingly congratulated Hermann on his abjuration of that
abstention from cards which he had practised for so long a period, and
wished him a lucky beginning.
“Stake!” said Hermann, writing some figures with chalk on the back of
his card.
“How much?” asked the banker, contracting the muscles of his eyes;
“excuse me, I cannot see quite clearly.”
“Forty-seven thousand rubles,” replied Hermann.
At these words every head in the room turned suddenly round, and all
eyes were fixed upon Hermann.
“He has taken leave of his senses!” thought Narumov.
“Allow me to inform you,” said Chekalinsky, with his eternal smile,
“that you are playing very high; nobody here has ever staked more than
two hundred and seventy-five rubles at once.”
“Very well,” replied Hermann; “but do you accept my card or not?”
Chekalinsky bowed in token of consent.
“I only wish to observe,” said he, “that although I have the greatest
confidence in my friends, I can only play against ready money. For my
own part, I am quite convinced that your word is sufficient, but for the
sake of the order of the game, and to facilitate the reckoning up, I
must ask you to put the money on your card.”
Hermann drew from his pocket a bank-note and handed it to Chekalinsky,
who, after examining it in a cursory manner, placed it on Hermann’s
card.
He began to deal. On the right a nine turned up, and on the left a
three.
“I have won!” said Hermann, showing his card.
A murmur of astonishment arose among the players. Chekalinsky frowned,
but the smile quickly returned to his face.
“Do you wish me to settle with you?” he said to Hermann.
“If you please,” replied the latter.
Chekalinsky drew from his pocket a number of banknotes and paid at once.
Hermann took up his money and left the table. Narumov could not recover
from his astonishment. Hermann drank a glass of lemonade and returned
home.
The next evening he again repaired to Chekalinsky’s. The host was
dealing. Hermann walked up to the table; the punters immediately made
room for him. Chekalinsky greeted him with a gracious bow.
Hermann waited for the next deal, took a card and placed upon it his
forty-seven thousand roubles, together with his winnings of the previous
evening.
Chekalinsky began to deal. A knave turned up on the right, a seven on
the left.
Hermann showed his seven.
There was a general exclamation. Chekalinsky was evidently ill at ease,
but he counted out the ninety-four thousand rubles and handed them over
to Hermann, who pocketed them in the coolest manner possible and
immediately left the house.
The next evening Hermann appeared again at the table. Every one was
expecting him. The generals and Privy Counsellors left their whist in
order to watch such extraordinary play. The young officers quitted their
sofas, and even the servants crowded into the room. All pressed round
Hermann. The other players left off punting, impatient to see how it
would end. Hermann stood at the table and prepared to play alone against
the pale, but still smiling Chekalinsky. Each opened a pack of cards.
Chekalinsky shuffled. Hermann took a card and covered it with a pile of
bank-notes. It was like a duel. Deep silence reigned around.
Chekalinsky began to deal; his hands trembled. On the right a queen
turned up, and on the left an ace.
“Ace has won!” cried Hermann, showing his card.
“Your queen has lost,” said Chekalinsky, politely.
Hermann started; instead of an ace, there lay before him the queen of
spades! He could not believe his eyes, nor could he understand how he
had made such a mistake.
At that moment it seemed to him that the queen of spades smiled
ironically and winked her eye at him. He was struck by her remarkable
resemblance...
“The old Countess!” he exclaimed, seized with terror.
Chekalinsky gathered up his winnings. For some time, Hermann remained
perfectly motionless. When at last he left the table, there was a
general commotion in the room.
“Splendidly punted!” said the players. Chekalinsky shuffled the cards
afresh, and the game went on as usual.
Hermann went out of his mind, and is now confined in room Number 17 of
the Obukhov Hospital. He never answers any questions, but he constantly
mutters with unusual rapidity: “Three, seven, ace!” “Three, seven,
queen!”
Lizaveta Ivanovna has married a very amiable young man, a son of the
former steward of the old Countess. He is in the service of the State
somewhere, and is in receipt of a good income. Lizaveta is also
supporting a poor relative.
Tomsky has been promoted to the rank of captain, and has become the
husband of the Princess Pauline.
THE CLOAK BY NIKOLAY V. GOGOL
In the department of——, but it is better not to mention the department.
The touchiest things in the world are departments, regiments, courts of
justice, in a word, all branches of public service. Each individual
nowadays thinks all society insulted in his person. Quite recently, a
complaint was received from a district chief of police in which he
plainly demonstrated that all the imperial institutions were going to
the dogs, and that the Czar’s sacred name was being taken in vain; and
in proof he appended to the complaint a romance, in which the district
chief of police is made to appear about once in every ten pages, and
sometimes in a downright drunken condition. Therefore, in order to avoid
all unpleasantness, it will be better to designate the department in
question, as a certain department.
So, in a certain department there was a certain official—not a very
notable one, it must be allowed—short of stature, somewhat pock-marked,
red-haired, and mole-eyed, with a bald forehead, wrinkled cheeks, and a
complexion of the kind known as sanguine. The St. Petersburg climate was
responsible for this. As for his official rank—with us Russians the rank
comes first—he was what is called a perpetual titular councillor, over
which, as is well known, some writers make merry and crack their jokes,
obeying the praiseworthy custom of attacking those who cannot bite back.
His family name was Bashmachkin. This name is evidently derived from
bashmak (shoe); but, when, at what time, and in what manner, is not
known. His father and grandfather, and all the Bashmachkins, always wore
boots, which were resoled two or three times a year. His name was Akaky
Akakiyevich. It may strike the reader as rather singular and far-
fetched; but he may rest assured that it was by no means far-fetched,
and that the circumstances were such that it would have been impossible
to give him any other.
This was how it came about.
Akaky Akakiyevich was born, if my memory fails me not, in the evening on
the 23rd of March. His mother, the wife of a Government official, and a
very fine woman, made all due arrangements for having the child
baptised. She was lying on the bed opposite the door; on her right stood
the godfather, Ivan Ivanovich Eroshkin, a most estimable man, who served
as the head clerk of the senate; and the godmother, Arina Semyonovna
Bielobrinshkova, the wife of an officer of the quarter, and a woman of
rare virtues. They offered the mother her choice of three names, Mokiya,
Sossiya, or that the child should be called after the martyr Khozdazat.
“No,” said the good woman, “all those names are poor.” In order to
please her, they opened the calendar at another place; three more names
appeared, Triphily, Dula, and Varakhasy. “This is awful,” said the old
woman. “What names! I truly never heard the like. I might have put up
with Varadat or Varukh, but not Triphily and Varakhasy!” They turned to
another page and found Pavsikakhy and Vakhtisy. “Now I see,” said the
old woman, “that it is plainly fate. And since such is the case, it will
be better to name him after his father. His father’s name was Akaky, so
let his son’s name be Akaky too.” In this manner he became Akaky
Akakiyevich. They christened the child, whereat he wept, and made a
grimace, as though he foresaw that he was to be a titular councillor.
In this manner did it all come about. We have mentioned it in order that
the reader might see for himself that it was a case of necessity, and
that it was utterly impossible to give him any other name.
When and how he entered the department, and who appointed him, no one
could remember. However much the directors and chiefs of all kinds were
changed, he was always to be seen in the same place, the same attitude,
the same occupation—always the letter-copying clerk—so that it was
afterwards affirmed that he had been born in uniform with a bald head.
No respect was shown him in the department. The porter not only did not
rise from his seat when he passed, but never even glanced at him, any
more than if a fly had flown through the reception-room. His superiors
treated him in coolly despotic fashion. Some insignificant assistant to
the head clerk would thrust a paper under his nose without so much as
saying, “Copy,” or, “Here’s an interesting little case,” or anything
else agreeable, as is customary amongst well-bred officials. And he took
it, looking only at the paper, and not observing who handed it to him,
or whether he had the right to do so; simply took it, and set about
copying it.
The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their
official wit permitted; told in his presence various stories concocted
about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; declared
that she beat him; asked when the wedding was to be; and strewed bits of
paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akaky Akakiyevich answered
not a word, any more than if there had been no one there besides
himself. It even had no effect upon his work. Amid all these annoyances
he never made a single mistake in a letter. But if the joking became
wholly unbearable, as when they jogged his head, and prevented his
attending to his work, he would exclaim:
“Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?”
And there was something strange in the words and the voice in which they
were uttered. There was in it something which moved to pity; so much so
that one young man, a newcomer, who, taking pattern by the others, had
permitted himself to make sport of Akaky, suddenly stopped short, as
though all about him had undergone a transformation, and presented
itself in a different aspect. Some unseen force repelled him from the
comrades whose acquaintance he had made, on the supposition that they
were decent, well-bred men. Long afterwards, in his gayest moments,
there recurred to his mind the little official with the bald forehead,
with his heart-rending words, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” In
these moving words, other words resounded—“I am thy brother.” And the
young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in
the course of his life, shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is
in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath refined,
cultured, worldly refinement, and even, O God! in that man whom the
world acknowledges as honourable and upright.
It would be difficult to find another man who lived so entirely for his
duties. It is not enough to say that Akaky laboured with zeal; no, he
laboured with love. In his copying, he found a varied and agreeable
employment. Enjoyment was written on his face; some letters were even
favourites with him; and when he encountered these, he smiled, winked,
and worked with his lips, till it seemed as though each letter might be
read in his face, as his pen traced it. If his pay had been in
proportion to his zeal, he would, perhaps, to his great surprise, have
been made even a councillor of state. But he worked, as his companions,
the wits, put it, like a horse in a mill.
However, it would be untrue to say that no attention was paid to him.
One director being a kindly man, and desirous of rewarding him for his
long service, ordered him to be given something more important than mere
copying. So he was ordered to make a report of an already concluded
affair, to another department; the duty consisting simply in changing
the heading and altering a few words from the first to the third person.
This caused him so much toil, that he broke into a perspiration, rubbed
his forehead, and finally said, “No, give me rather something to copy.”
After that they let him copy on forever.
Outside this copying, it appeared that nothing existed for him. He gave
no thought to his clothes. His uniform was not green, but a sort of
rusty-meal colour. The collar was low, so that his neck, in spite of the
fact that it was not long, seemed inordinately so as it emerged from it,
like the necks of the plaster cats which pedlars carry about on their
heads. And something was always sticking to his uniform, either a bit of
hay or some trifle. Moreover, he had a peculiar knack, as he walked
along the street, of arriving beneath a window just as all sorts of
rubbish was being flung out of it; hence he always bore about on his hat
scraps of melon rinds, and other such articles. Never once in his life
did he give heed to what was going on every day to the street; while it
is well known that his young brother officials trained the range of
their glances till they could see when any one’s trouser-straps came
undone upon the opposite sidewalk, which always brought a malicious
smile to their faces. But Akaky Akakiyevich saw in all things the clean,
even strokes of his written lines; and only when a horse thrust his
nose, from some unknown quarter, over his shoulder, and sent a whole
gust of wind down his neck from his nostrils, did he observe that he was
not in the middle of a line, but in the middle of the street.
On reaching home, he sat down at once at the table, sipped his cabbage-
soup up quickly, and swallowed a bit of beef with onions, never noticing
their taste, and gulping down everything with flies and anything else
which the Lord happened to send at the moment. When he saw that his
stomach was beginning to swell, he rose from the table, and copied
papers which he had brought home. If there happened to be none, he took
copies for himself, for his own gratification, especially if the
document was noteworthy, not on account of its style, but of its being
addressed to some distinguished person.
Even at the hour when the grey St. Petersburg sky had quite disappeared,
and all the official world had eaten or dined, each as he could, in
accordance with the salary he received and his own fancy; when, all were
resting from the department jar of pens, running to and fro, for their
own and other people’s indispensable occupations’, and from all the work
that an uneasy man makes willingly for himself, rather than what is
necessary; when, officials hasten to dedicate to pleasure the time which
is left to them, one bolder than the rest, going to the theatre;
another; into the street looking under the bonnets; another, wasting his
evening in compliments to some pretty girl, the star of a small official
circle; another—and this is the common case of all—visiting his comrades
on the third or fourth floor, in two small rooms with an ante-room or
kitchen, and some pretensions to fashion, such as a lamp or some other
trifle which has cost many a sacrifice of dinner or pleasure trip; in a
word, at the hour when all officials disperse among the contracted
quarters of their friends, to play whist, as they sip their tea from
glasses with a kopek’s worth of sugar, smoke long pipes, relate at time
some bits of gossip which a Russian man can never, under any
circumstances, refrain from, and when there is nothing else to talk of,
repeat eternal anecdotes about the commandant to whom they had sent word
that the tails of the horses on the Falconet Monument had been cut off;
when all strive to divert themselves, Akaky Akakiyevich indulged in no
kind of diversion. No one could even say that he had seen him at any
kind of evening party. Having written to his heart’s content, he lay
down to sleep, smiling at the thought of the coming day—of what God
might send him to copy on the morrow.
Thus flowed on the peaceful life of the man, who, with a salary of four
hundred rubles, understood how to be content with his lot; and thus it
would have continued to flow on, perhaps, to extreme old age, were it
not that there are various ills strewn along the path of life for
titular councillors as well as for private, actual, court, and every
other species of councillor, even to those who never give any advice or
take any themselves.
There exists in St. Petersburg a powerful foe of all who receive a
salary of four hundred rubles a year, or there-abouts. This foe is no
other than the Northern cold, although it is said to be very healthy. At
nine o’clock in the morning, at the very hour when the streets are
filled with men bound for the various official departments, it begins to
bestow such powerful and piercing nips on all noses impartially, that
the poor officials really do not know what to do with them. At an hour,
when the foreheads of even those who occupy exalted positions ache with
the cold, and tears start to their eyes, the poor titular councillors
are sometimes quite unprotected. Their only salvation lies in traversing
as quickly as possible, in their thin little cloaks, five or six
streets, and then warming their feet in the porter’s room, and so
thawing all their talents and qualifications for official service, which
had become frozen on the way.
Akaky Akakiyevich had felt for some time that his back and shoulders
were paining with peculiar poignancy, in spite of the fact that he tried
to traverse the distance with all possible speed. He began finally to
wonder whether the fault did not lie in his cloak. He examined it
thoroughly at home, and discovered that in two places, namely, on the
back and shoulders, it had become thin as gauze. The cloth was worn to
such a degree that he could see through it, and the lining had fallen
into pieces. You must know that Akaky Akakiyevich’s cloak served as an
object of ridicule to the officials. They even refused it the noble name
of cloak, and called it a cape. In fact, it was of singular make, its
collar diminishing year by year to serve to patch its other parts. The
patching did not exhibit great skill on the part of the tailor, and was,
in fact, baggy and ugly. Seeing how the matter stood, Akaky Akakiyevich
decided that it would be necessary to take the cloak to Petrovich, the
tailor, who lived somewhere on the fourth floor up a dark staircase, and
who, in spite of his having but one eye and pock-marks all over his
face, busied himself with considerable success in repairing the trousers
and coats of officials and others; that is to say, when he was sober and
not nursing some other scheme in his head.
It is not necessary to say much about this tailor, but as it is the
custom to have the character of each personage in a novel clearly
defined there is no help for it, so here is Petrovich the tailor. At
first he was called only Grigory, and was some gentleman’s serf. He
commenced calling himself Petrovich from the time when he received his
free papers, and further began to drink heavily on all holidays, at
first on the great ones, and then on all church festivals without
discrimination, wherever a cross stood in the calendar. On this point he
was faithful to ancestral custom; and when quarrelling with his wife, he
called her a low female and a German. As we have mentioned his wife, it
will be necessary to say a word or two about her. Unfortunately, little
is known of her beyond the fact that Petrovich had a wife, who wore a
cap and a dress, but could not lay claim to beauty, at least, no one but
the soldiers of the guard even looked under her cap when they met her.
Ascending the staircase which led to Petrovich’s room—which staircase
was all soaked with dish-water and reeked with the smell of spirits
which affects the eyes, and is an inevitable adjunct to all dark
stairways in St. Petersburg houses—ascending the stairs, Akaky
Akakiyevich pondered how much Petrovich would ask, and mentally resolved
not to give more than two rubles. The door was open, for the mistress,
in cooking some fish, had raised such a smoke in the kitchen that not
even the beetles were visible. Akaky Akakiyevich passed through the
kitchen unperceived, even by the housewife, and at length reached a room
where he beheld Petrovich seated on a large unpainted table, with his
legs tucked under him like a Turkish pasha. His feet were bare, after
the fashion of tailors as they sit at work; and the first thing which
caught the eye was his thumb, with a deformed nail thick and strong as a
turtle’s shell. About Petrovich’s neck hung a skein of silk and thread,
and upon his knees lay some old garment. He had been trying
unsuccessfully for three minutes to thread his needle, and was enraged
at the darkness and even at the thread, growling in a low voice, “It
won’t go through, the barbarian! you pricked me, you rascal!”
Akaky Akakiyevich was vexed at arriving at the precise moment when
Petrovich was angry. He liked to order something of Petrovich when he
was a little downhearted, or, as his wife expressed it, “when he had
settled himself with brandy, the one-eyed devil!” Under such
circumstances Petrovich generally came down in his price very readily,
and even bowed and returned thanks. Afterwards, to be sure, his wife
would come, complaining that her husband had been drunk, and so had
fixed the price too low; but, if only a ten-kopek piece were added then
the matter would be settled. But now it appeared that Petrovich was in a
sober condition, and therefore rough, taciturn, and inclined to demand,
Satan only knows what price. Akaky Akakiyevich felt this, and would
gladly have beat a retreat, but he was in for it. Petrovich screwed up
his one eye very intently at him, and Akaky Akakiyevich involuntarily
said, “How do you do, Petrovich?”
“I wish you a good morning, sir,” said Petrovich squinting at Akaky
Akakiyevich’s hands, to see what sort of booty he had brought.
“Ah! I—to you, Petrovich, this—” It must be known that Akaky Akakiyevich
expressed himself chiefly by prepositions, adverbs, and scraps of
phrases which had no meaning whatever. If the matter was a very
difficult one, he had a habit of never completing his sentences, so that
frequently, having begun a phrase with the words, “This, in fact, is
quite—” he forgot to go on, thinking he had already finished it.
“What is it?” asked Petrovich, and with his one eye scanned Akaky
Akakiyevich’s whole uniform from the collar down to the cuffs, the back,
the tails and the button-holes, all of which were well known to him,
since they were his own handiwork. Such is the habit of tailors; it is
the first thing they do on meeting one.
“But I, here, this—Petrovich—a cloak, cloth—here you see, everywhere, in
different places, it is quite strong—it is a little dusty and looks old,
but it is new, only here in one place it is a little—on the back, and
here on one of the shoulders, it is a little worn, yes, here on this
shoulder it is a little—do you see? That is all. And a little work—”
Petrovich took the cloak, spread it out, to begin with, on the table,
looked at it hard, shook his head, reached out his hand to the window-
sill for his snuff-box, adorned with the portrait of some general,
though what general is unknown, for the place where the face should have
been had been rubbed through by the finger and a square bit of paper had
been pasted over it. Having taken a pinch of snuff, Petrovich held up
the cloak, and inspected it against the light, and again shook his head.
Then he turned it, lining upwards, and shook his head once more. After
which he again lifted the general-adorned lid with its bit of pasted
paper, and having stuffed his nose with snuff, dosed and put away the
snuff-box, and said finally, “No, it is impossible to mend it. It is a
wretched garment!”
Akaky Akakiyevich’s heart sank at these words.
“Why is it impossible, Petrovich?” he said, almost in the pleading voice
of a child. “All that ails it is, that it is worn on the shoulders. You
must have some pieces—”
“Yes, patches could be found, patches are easily found,” said Petrovich,
“but there’s nothing to sew them to. The thing is completely rotten. If
you put a needle to it—see, it will give way.”
“Let it give way, and you can put on another patch at once.”
“But there is nothing to put the patches on to. There’s no use in
strengthening it. It is too far gone. It’s lucky that it’s cloth, for,
if the wind were to blow, it would fly away.”
“Well, strengthen it again. How this, in fact—”
“No,” said Petrovich decisively, “there is nothing to be done with it.
It’s a thoroughly bad job. You’d better, when the cold winter weather
comes on, make yourself some gaiters out of it, because stockings are
not warm. The Germans invented them in order to make more money.”
Petrovich loved on all occasions to have a fling at the Germans. “But it
is plain you must have a new cloak.”
At the word “new” all grew dark before Akaky Akakiyevich’s eyes, and
everything in the room began to whirl round. The only thing he saw
clearly was the general with the paper face on the lid of Petrovich’s
snuff-box. “A new one?” said he, as if still in a dream. “Why, I have no
money for that.”
“Yes, a new one,” said Petrovich, with barbarous composure.
“Well, if it came to a new one, how—it—”
“You mean how much would it cost?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you would have to lay out a hundred and fifty or more,” said
Petrovich, and pursed up his lips significantly. He liked to produce
powerful effects, liked to stun utterly and suddenly, and then to glance
sideways to see what face the stunned person would put on the matter.
“A hundred and fifty rubles for a cloak!” shrieked poor Akaky
Akakiyevich, perhaps for the first time in his life, for his voice had
always been distinguished for softness.
“Yes, sir,” said Petrovich, “for any kind of cloak. If you have a marten
fur on the collar, or a silk-lined hood, it will mount up to two
hundred.”
“Petrovich, please,” said Akaky Akakiyevich in a beseeching tone, not
hearing, and not trying to hear, Petrovich’s words, and disregarding all
his “effects,” “some repairs, in order that it may wear yet a little
longer.”
“No, it would only be a waste of time and money,” said Petrovich. And
Akaky Akakiyevich went away after these words, utterly discouraged. But
Petrovich stood for some time after his departure, with significantly
compressed lips, and without betaking himself to his work, satisfied
that he would not be dropped, and an artistic tailor employed.
Akaky Akakiyevich went out into the street as if in a dream. “Such an
affair!” he said to himself. “I did not think it had come to—” and then
after a pause, he added, “Well, so it is! see what it has come to at
last! and I never imagined that it was so!” Then followed a long
silence, after which he exclaimed, “Well, so it is! see what
already—nothing unexpected that—it would be nothing—what a strange
circumstance!” So saying, instead of going home, he went in exactly the
opposite direction without suspecting it. On the way, a chimney-sweep
bumped up against him, and blackened his shoulder, and a whole hatful of
rubbish landed on him from the top of a house which was building. He did
not notice it, and only when he ran against a watchman, who, having
planted his halberd beside him, was shaking some snuff from his box into
his horny hand, did he recover himself a little, and that because the
watchman said, “Why are you poking yourself into a man’s very face?
Haven’t you the pavement?” This caused him to look about him, and turn
towards home.
There only, he finally began to collect his thoughts, and to survey his
position in its clear and actual light, and to argue with himself,
sensibly and frankly, as with a reasonable friend, with whom one can
discuss private and personal matters. “No,” said Akaky Akakiyevich, “it
is impossible to reason with Petrovich now. He is that—evidently, his
wife has been beating him. I’d better go to him on Sunday morning. After
Saturday night he will be a little cross-eyed and sleepy, for he will
want to get drunk, and his wife won’t give him any money, and at such a
time, a ten-kopek piece in his hand will—he will become more fit to
reason with, and then the cloak and that—” Thus argued Akaky Akakiyevich
with himself regained his courage, and waited until the first Sunday,
when, seeing from afar that Petrovich’s wife had left the house, he went
straight to him.
Petrovich’s eye was indeed very much askew after Saturday. His head
drooped, and he was very sleepy; but for all that, as soon as he knew
what it was a question of, it seemed as though Satan jogged his memory.
“Impossible,” said he. “Please to order a new one.” Thereupon Akaky
Akakiyevich handed over the ten-kopek piece. “Thank you, sir. I will
drink your good health,” said Petrovich. “But as for the cloak, don’t
trouble yourself about it; it is good for nothing. I will make you a
capital new one, so let us settle about it now.”
Akaky Akakiyevich was still for mending it, but Petrovich would not hear
of it, and said, “I shall certainly have to make you a new one, and you
may depend upon it that I shall do my best. It may even be, as the
fashion goes, that the collar can be fastened by silver hooks under a
flap.”
Then Akaky Akakiyevich saw that it was impossible to get along without a
new cloak, and his spirit sank utterly. How, in fact, was it to be done?
Where was the money to come from? He must have some new trousers, and
pay a debt of long standing to the shoemaker for putting new tops to his
old boots, and he must order three shirts from the seamstress, and a
couple of pieces of linen. In short, all his money must be spent. And
even if the director should be so kind as to order him to receive forty-
five or even fifty rubles instead of forty, it would be a mere nothing,
a mere drop in the ocean towards the funds necessary for a cloak,
although he knew that Petrovich was often wrong-headed enough to blurt
out some outrageous price, so that even his own wife could not refrain
from exclaiming, “Have you lost your senses, you fool?” At one time he
would not work at any price, and now it was quite likely that he had
named a higher sum than the cloak would cost.
But although he knew that Petrovich would undertake to make a cloak for
eighty rubles, still, where was he to get the eighty rubles from? He
might possibly manage half. Yes, half might be procured, but where was
the other half to come from? But the reader must first be told where the
first half came from.
Akaky Akakiyevich had a habit of putting, for every ruble he spent, a
groschen into a small box, fastened with lock and key, and with a slit
in the top for the reception of money. At the end of every half-year he
counted over the heap of coppers, and changed it for silver. This he had
done for a long time, and in the course of years, the sum had mounted up
to over forty rubles. Thus he had one half on hand. But where was he to
find the other half? Where was he to get another forty rubles from?
Akaky Akakiyevich thought and thought, and decided that it would be
necessary to curtail his ordinary expenses, for the space of one year at
least, to dispense with tea in the evening, to burn no candles, and, if
there was anything which he must do, to go into his landlady’s room, and
work by her light. When he went into the street, he must walk as lightly
as he could, and as cautiously, upon the stones, almost upon tiptoe, in
order not to wear his heels down in too short a time. He must give the
laundress as little to wash as possible; and, in order not to wear out
his clothes, he must take them off as soon as he got home, and wear only
his cotton dressing-gown, which had been long and carefully saved.
To tell the truth, it was a little hard for him at first to accustom
himself to these deprivations. But he got used to them at length, after
a fashion, and all went smoothly. He even got used to being hungry in
the evening, but he made up for it by treating himself, so to say, in
spirit, by bearing ever in mind the idea of his future cloak. From that
time forth, his existence seemed to become, in some way, fuller, as if
he were married, or as if some other man lived in him, as if, in fact,
he were not alone, and some pleasant friend had consented to travel
along life’s path with him, the friend being no other than the cloak,
with thick wadding and a strong lining incapable of wearing out. He
became more lively, and even his character grew firmer, like that of a
man who has made up his mind, and set himself a goal. From his face and
gait, doubt and indecision, all hesitating and wavering disappeared of
themselves. Fire gleamed in his eyes, and occasionally the boldest and
most daring ideas flitted through his mind. Why not, for instance, have
marten fur on the collar? The thought of this almost made him absent-
minded. Once, in copying a letter, he nearly made a mistake, so that he
exclaimed almost aloud, “Ugh!” and crossed himself. Once, in the course
of every month, he had a conference with Petrovich on the subject of the
cloak, where it would be better to buy the cloth, and the colour, and
the price. He always returned home satisfied, though troubled,
reflecting that the time would come at last when it could all be bought,
and then the cloak made.
The affair progressed more briskly than he had expected. For beyond all
his hopes, the director awarded neither forty nor forty-five rubles for
Akaky Akakiyevich’s share, but sixty. Whether he suspected that Akaky
Akakiyevich needed a cloak, or whether it was merely chance, at all
events, twenty extra rubles were by this means provided. This
circumstance hastened matters. Two or three months more of hunger and
Akaky Akakiyevich had accumulated about eighty rubles. His heart,
generally so quiet, began to throb. On the first possible day, he went
shopping in company with Petrovich. They bought some very good cloth,
and at a reasonable rate too, for they had been considering the matter
for six months, and rarely let a month pass without their visiting the
shops to enquire prices. Petrovich himself said that no better cloth
could be had. For lining, they selected a cotton stuff, but so firm and
thick, that Petrovich declared it to be better than silk, and even
prettier and more glossy. They did not buy the marten fur, because it
was, in fact, dear, but in its stead, they picked out the very best of
cat-skin which could be found in the shop, and which might, indeed, be
taken for marten at a distance.
Petrovich worked at the cloak two whole weeks, for there was a great
deal of quilting; otherwise it would have been finished sooner. He
charged twelve rubles for the job, it could not possibly have been done
for less. It was all sewed with silk, in small, double seams, and
Petrovich went over each seam afterwards with his own teeth, stamping in
various patterns.
It was—it is difficult to say precisely on what day, but probably the
most glorious one in Akaky Akakiyevich’s life, when Petrovich at length
brought home the cloak. He brought it in the morning, before the hour
when it was necessary to start for the department. Never did a cloak
arrive so exactly in the nick of time, for the severe cold had set in,
and it seemed to threaten to increase. Petrovich brought the cloak
himself as befits a good tailor. On his countenance was a significant
expression, such as Akaky Akakiyevich had never beheld there. He seemed
fully sensible that he had done no small deed, and crossed a gulf
separating tailors who put in linings, and execute repairs, from those
who make new things. He took the cloak out of the pocket-handkerchief in
which he had brought it. The handkerchief was fresh from the laundress,
and he put it in his pocket for use. Taking out the cloak, he gazed
proudly at it, held it up with both hands, and flung it skilfully over
the shoulders of Akaky Akakiyevich. Then he pulled it and fitted it down
behind with his hand, and he draped it around Akaky Akakiyevich without
buttoning it. Akaky Akakiyevich, like an experienced man, wished to try
the sleeves. Petrovich helped him on with them, and it turned out that
the sleeves were satisfactory also. In short, the cloak appeared to be
perfect, and most seasonable. Petrovich did not neglect to observe that
it was only because he lived in a narrow street, and had no signboard,
and had known Akaky Akakiyevich so long, that he had made it so cheaply;
but that if he had been in business on the Nevsky Prospect, he would
have charged seventy-five rubles for the making alone. Akaky Akakiyevich
did not care to argue this point with Petrovich. He paid him, thanked
him, and set out at once in his new cloak for the department. Petrovich
followed him, and pausing in the street, gazed long at the cloak in the
distance, after which he went to one side expressly to run through a
crooked alley, and emerge again into the street beyond to gaze once more
upon the cloak from another point, namely, directly in front.
Meantime Akaky Akakiyevich went on in holiday mood. He was conscious
every second of the time that he had a new cloak on his shoulders, and
several times he laughed with internal satisfaction. In fact, there were
two advantages, one was its warmth, the other its beauty. He saw nothing
of the road, but suddenly found himself at the department. He took off
his cloak in the ante-room, looked it over carefully, and confided it to
the special care of the attendant. It is impossible to say precisely how
it was that every one in the department knew at once that Akaky
Akakiyevich had a new cloak, and that the “cape” no longer existed. All
rushed at the same moment into the ante-room to inspect it. They
congratulated him, and said pleasant things to him, so that he began at
first to smile, and then to grow ashamed. When all surrounded him, and
said that the new cloak must be “christened,” and that he must at least
give them all a party, Akaky Akakiyevich lost his head completely, and
did not know where he stood, what to answer, or how to get out of it. He
stood blushing all over for several minutes, trying to assure them with
great simplicity that it was not a new cloak, that it was in fact the
old “cape.”
At length one of the officials, assistant to the head clerk, in order to
show that he was not at all proud, and on good terms with his inferiors,
said:
“So be it, only I will give the party instead of Akaky Akakiyevich; I
invite you all to tea with me to-night. It just happens to be my name-
day too.”
The officials naturally at once offered the assistant clerk their
congratulations, and accepted the invitation with pleasure. Akaky
Akakiyevich would have declined; but all declared that it was
discourteous, that it was simply a sin and a shame, and that he could
not possibly refuse. Besides, the notion became pleasant to him when he
recollected that he should thereby have a chance of wearing his new
cloak in the evening also.
That whole day was truly a most triumphant festival for Akaky
Akakiyevich. He returned home in the most happy frame of mind, took off
his cloak, and hung it carefully on the wall, admiring afresh the cloth
and the lining. Then he brought out his old, worn-out cloak, for
comparison. He looked at it, and laughed, so vast was the difference.
And long after dinner he laughed again when the condition of the “cape”
recurred to his mind. He dined cheerfully, and after dinner wrote
nothing, but took his ease for a while on the bed, until it got dark.
Then he dressed himself leisurely, put on his cloak, and stepped out
into the street.
Where the host lived, unfortunately we cannot say. Our memory begins to
fail us badly. The houses and streets in St. Petersburg have become so
mixed up in our head that it is very difficult to get anything out of it
again in proper form. This much is certain, that the official lived in
the best part of the city; and therefore it must have been anything but
near to Akaky Akakiyevich’s residence. Akaky Akakiyevich was first
obliged to traverse a kind of wilderness of deserted, dimly-lighted
streets. But in proportion as he approached the official’s quarter of
the city, the streets became more lively, more populous, and more
brilliantly illuminated. Pedestrians began to appear; handsomely dressed
ladies were more frequently encountered; the men had otter skin collars
to their coats; shabby sleigh-men with their wooden, railed sledges
stuck over with brass-headed nails, became rarer; whilst on the other
hand, more and more drivers in red velvet caps, lacquered sledges and
bear-skin coats began to appear, and carriages with rich hammer-cloths
flew swiftly through the streets, their wheels scrunching the snow.
Akaky Akakiyevich gazed upon all this as upon a novel sight. He had not
been in the streets during the evening for years. He halted out of
curiosity before a shop-window, to look at a picture representing a
handsome woman, who had thrown off her shoe, thereby baring her whole
foot in a very pretty way; whilst behind her the head of a man with
whiskers and a handsome moustache peeped through the doorway of another
room. Akaky Akakiyevich shook his head, and laughed, and then went on
his way. Why did he laugh? Either because he had met with a thing
utterly unknown, but for which every one cherishes, nevertheless, some
sort of feeling, or else he thought, like many officials, “Well, those
French! What is to be said? If they do go in for anything of that sort,
why—” But possibly he did not think at all.
Akaky Akakiyevich at length reached the house in which the head clerk’s
assistant lodged. He lived in fine style. The staircase was lit by a
lamp, his apartment being on the second floor. On entering the
vestibule, Akaky Akakiyevich beheld a whole row of goloshes on the
floor. Among them, in the centre of the room, stood a samovar, humming
and emitting clouds of steam. On the walls hung all sorts of coats and
cloaks, among which there were even some with beaver collars, or velvet
facings. Beyond, the buzz of conversation was audible, and became clear
and loud, when the servant came out with a trayful of empty glasses,
cream-jugs and sugar-bowls. It was evident that the officials had
arrived long before, and had already finished their first glass of tea.
Akaky Akakiyevich, having hung up his own cloak, entered the inner room.
Before him all at once appeared lights, officials, pipes, and card-
tables, and he was bewildered by a sound of rapid conversation rising
from all the tables, and the noise of moving chairs. He halted very
awkwardly in the middle of the room, wondering what he ought to do. But
they had seen him. They received him with a shout, and all thronged at
once into the ante-room, and there took another look at his cloak. Akaky
Akakiyevich, although somewhat confused, was frank-hearted, and could
not refrain from rejoicing when he saw how they praised his cloak. Then,
of course, they all dropped him and his cloak, and returned, as was
proper, to the tables set out for whist.
All this, the noise, the talk, and the throng of people, was rather
overwhelming to Akaky Akakiyevich. He simply did not know where he
stood, or where to put his hands, his feet, and his whole body. Finally
he sat down by the players, looked at the cards, gazed at the face of
one and another, and after a while began to gape, and to feel that it
was wearisome, the more so, as the hour was already long past when he
usually went to bed. He wanted to take leave of the host, but they would
not let him go, saying that he must not fail to drink a glass of
champagne, in honour of his new garment. In the course of an hour,
supper, consisting of vegetable salad, cold veal, pastry, confectioner’s
pies, and champagne, was served. They made Akaky Akakiyevich drink two
glasses of champagne, after which he felt things grow livelier.
Still, he could not forget that it was twelve o’clock, and that he
should have been at home long ago. In order that the host might not
think of some excuse for detaining him, he stole out of the room
quickly, sought out, in the ante-room, his cloak, which, to his sorrow,
he found lying on the floor, brushed it, picked off every speck upon it,
put it on his shoulders, and descended the stairs to the street.
In the street all was still bright. Some petty shops, those permanent
clubs of servants and all sorts of folks, were open. Others were shut,
but, nevertheless, showed a streak of light the whole length of the
door-crack, indicating that they were not yet free of company, and that
probably some domestics, male and female, were finishing their stories
and conversations, whilst leaving their masters in complete ignorance as
to their whereabouts. Akaky Akakiyevich went on in a happy frame of
mind. He even started to run, without knowing why, after some lady, who
flew past like a flash of lightning. But he stopped short, and went on
very quietly as before, wondering why he had quickened his pace. Soon
there spread before him these deserted streets which are not cheerful in
the daytime, to say no thing of the evening. Now they were even more dim
and lonely. The lanterns began to grow rarer, oil, evidently, had been
less liberally supplied. Then came wooden houses and fences. Not a soul
anywhere; only the snow sparkled in the streets, and mournfully veiled
the low-roofed cabins with their closed shutters. He approached the spot
where the street crossed a vast square with houses barely visible on its
farther side, a square which seemed a fearful desert.
Afar, a tiny spark glimmered from some watchman’s-box, which seemed to
stand on the edge of the world. Akaky Akakiyevich’s cheerfulness
diminished at this point in a marked degree. He entered the square, not
without an involuntary sensation of fear, as though his heart warned him
of some evil. He glanced back, and on both sides it was like a sea about
him. “No, it is better not to look,” he thought, and went on, closing
his eyes. When he opened them, to see whether he was near the end of the
square, he suddenly beheld, standing just before his very nose, some
bearded individuals of precisely what sort, he could not make out. All
grew dark before his eyes, and his heart throbbed.
“Of course, the cloak is mine!” said one of them in a loud voice,
seizing hold of his collar. Akaky Akakiyevich was about to shout “Help!”
when the second man thrust a fist, about the size of an official’s head,
at his very mouth, muttering, “Just you dare to scream!”
Akaky Akakiyevich felt them strip off his cloak, and give him a kick. He
fell headlong upon the snow, and felt no more.
In a few minutes he recovered consciousness, and rose to his feet, but
no one was there. He felt that it was cold in the square, and that his
cloak was gone. He began to shout, but his voice did not appear to reach
the outskirts of the square. In despair, but without ceasing to shout,
he started at a run across the square, straight towards the watch-box,
beside which stood the watchman, leaning on his halberd, and apparently
curious to know what kind of a customer was running towards him
shouting. Akaky Akakiyevich ran up to him, and began in a sobbing voice
to shout that he was asleep, and attended to nothing, and did not see
when a man was robbed. The watchman replied that he had seen two men
stop him in the middle of the square, but supposed that they were
friends of his, and that, instead of scolding vainly, he had better go
to the police on the morrow, so that they might make a search for
whoever had stolen the cloak.
Akaky Akakiyevich ran home and arrived in a state of complete disorder,
his hair which grew very thinly upon his temples and the back of his
head all tousled, his body, arms and legs, covered with snow. The old
woman, who was mistress of his lodgings, on hearing a terrible knocking,
sprang hastily from her bed, and, with only one shoe on, ran to open the
door, pressing the sleeve of her chemise to her bosom out of modesty.
But when she had opened it, she fell back on beholding Akaky Akakiyevich
in such a condition. When he told her about the affair, she clasped her
hands, and said that he must go straight to the district chief of
police, for his subordinate would turn up his nose, promise well, and
drop the matter there. The very best thing to do, therefore, would be to
go to the district chief, whom she knew, because Finnish Anna, her
former cook, was now nurse at his house. She often saw him passing the
house, and he was at church every Sunday, praying, but at the same time
gazing cheerfully at everybody; so that he must be a good man, judging
from all appearances. Having listened to this opinion, Akaky Akakiyevich
betook himself sadly to his room. And how he spent the night there, any
one who can put himself in another’s place may readily imagine.
Early in the morning, he presented himself at the district chief’s, but
was told the official was asleep. He went again at ten and was again
informed that he was asleep. At eleven, and they said, “The
superintendent is not at home.” At dinner time, and the clerks in the
ante-room would not admit him on any terms, and insisted upon knowing
his business. So that at last, for once in his life, Akaky Akakiyevich
felt an inclination to show some spirit, and said curtly that he must
see the chief in person, that they ought not to presume to refuse him
entrance, that he came from the department of justice, and that when he
complained of them, they would see.
The clerks dared make no reply to this, and one of them went to call the
chief, who listened to the strange story of the theft of the coat.
Instead of directing his attention to the principal points of the
matter, he began to question Akaky Akakiyevich. Why was he going home so
late? Was he in the habit of doing so, or had he been to some disorderly
house? So that Akaky Akakiyevich got thoroughly confused, and left him,
without knowing whether the affair of his cloak was in proper train or
not.
All that day, for the first time in his life, he never went near the
department. The next day he made his appearance, very pale, and in his
old cape, which had become even more shabby. The news of the robbery of
the cloak touched many, although there were some officials present who
never lost an opportunity, even such a one as the present, of ridiculing
Akaky Akakiyevich. They decided to make a collection for him on the
spot, but the officials had already spent a great deal in subscribing
for the director’s portrait, and for some book, at the suggestion of the
head of that division, who was a friend of the author; and so the sum
was trifling.
One of them, moved by pity, resolved to help Akaky Akakiyevich with some
good advice, at least, and told him that he ought not to go to the
police, for although it might happen that a police-officer, wishing to
win the approval of his superiors, might hunt up the cloak by some
means, still, his cloak would remain in the possession of the police if
he did not offer legal proof that it belonged to him. The best thing for
him, therefore, would be to apply to a certain prominent personage;
since this prominent personage, by entering into relation with the
proper persons, could greatly expedite the matter.
As there was nothing else to be done, Akaky Akakiyevich decided to go to
the prominent personage. What was the exact official position of the
prominent personage, remains unknown to this day. The reader must know
that the prominent personage had but recently become a prominent
personage, having up to that time been only an insignificant person.
Moreover, his present position was not considered prominent in
comparison with others still more so. But there is always a circle of
people to whom what is insignificant in the eyes of others, is important
enough. Moreover, he strove to increase his importance by sundry
devices. For instance, he managed to have the inferior officials meet
him on the staircase when he entered upon his service; no one was to
presume to come directly to him, but the strictest etiquette must be
observed; the collegiate recorder must make a report to the government
secretary, the government secretary to the titular councillor, or
whatever other man was proper, and all business must come before him in
this manner. In Holy Russia, all is thus contaminated with the love of
imitation; every man imitates and copies his superior. They even say
that a certain titular councillor, when promoted to the head of some
small separate office, immediately partitioned off a private room for
himself, called it the audience chamber, and posted at the door a lackey
with red collar and braid, who grasped the handle of the door, and
opened to all comers, though the audience chamber would hardly hold an
ordinary writing table.
The manners and customs of the prominent personage were grand and
imposing, but rather exaggerated. The main foundation of his system was
strictness. “Strictness, strictness, and always strictness!” he
generally said; and at the last word he looked significantly into the
face of the person to whom he spoke. But there was no necessity for
this, for the halfscore of subordinates, who formed the entire force of
the office, were properly afraid. On catching sight of him afar off,
they left their work, and waited, drawn up in line, until he had passed
through the room. His ordinary converse with his inferiors smacked of
sternness, and consisted chiefly of three phrases: “How dare you?” “Do
you know whom you are speaking to?” “Do you realise who is standing
before you?”
Otherwise he was a very kind-hearted man, good to his comrades, and
ready to oblige. But the rank of general threw him completely off his
balance. On receiving any one of that rank, he became confused, lost his
way, as it were, and never knew what to do. If he chanced to be amongst
his equals, he was still a very nice kind of man, a very good fellow in
many respects, and not stupid, but the very moment that he found himself
in the society of people but one rank lower than himself, he became
silent. And his situation aroused sympathy, the more so, as he felt
himself that he might have been making an incomparably better use of his
time. In his eyes, there was sometimes visible a desire to join some
interesting conversation or group, but he was kept back by the thought,
“Would it not be a very great condescension on his part? Would it not be
familiar? And would he not thereby lose his importance?” And in
consequence of such reflections, he always remained in the same dumb
state, uttering from time to time a few monosyllabic sounds, and thereby
earning the name of the most wearisome of men.
To this prominent personage Akaky Akakiyevich presented himself, and
this at the most unfavourable time for himself, though opportune for the
prominent personage. The prominent personage was in his cabinet,
conversing very gaily with an old acquaintance and companion of his
childhood, whom he had not seen for several years, and who had just
arrived, when it was announced to him that a person named Bashmachkin
had come. He asked abruptly, “Who is he?”—“Some official,” he was
informed. “Ah, he can wait! This is no time for him to call,” said the
important man.
It must be remarked here that the important man lied outrageously. He
had said all he had to say to his friend long before, and the
conversation had been interspersed for some time with very long pauses,
during which they merely slapped each other on the leg, and said, “You
think so, Ivan Abramovich!” “Just so, Stepan Varlamovich!” Nevertheless,
he ordered that the official should be kept waiting, in order to show
his friend, a man who had not been in the service for a long time, but
had lived at home in the country, how long officials had to wait in his
ante-room.
At length, having talked himself completely out, and more than that,
having had his fill of pauses, and smoked a cigar in a very comfortable
arm-chair with reclining back, he suddenly seemed to recollect, and said
to the secretary, who stood by the door with papers of reports, “So it
seems that there is an official waiting to see me. Tell him that he may
come in.” On perceiving Akaky Akakiyevich’s modest mien and his worn
uniform, he turned abruptly to him, and said, “What do you want?” in a
curt hard voice, which he had practised in his room in private, and
before the looking-glass, for a whole week before being raised to his
present rank.
Akaky Akakiyevich, who was already imbued with a due amount of fear,
became somewhat confused, and as well as his tongue would permit,
explained, with a rather more frequent addition than usual of the word
“that” that his cloak was quite new, and had been stolen in the most
inhuman manner; that he had applied to him, in order that he might, in
some way, by his intermediation—that he might enter into correspondence
with the chief of police, and find the cloak.
For some inexplicable reason, this conduct seemed familiar to the
prominent personage.
“What, my dear sir!” he said abruptly, “are you not acquainted with
etiquette? To whom have you come? Don’t you know how such matters are
managed? You should first have presented a petition to the office. It
would have gone to the head of the department, then to the chief of the
division, then it would have been handed over to the secretary, and the
secretary would have given it to me.”
“But, your excellency,” said Akaky Akakiyevich, trying to collect his
small handful of wits, and conscious at the same time that he was
perspiring terribly, “I, your excellency, presumed to trouble you
because secretaries—are an untrustworthy race.”
“What, what, what!” said the important personage. “Where did you get
such courage? Where did you get such ideas? What impudence towards their
chiefs and superiors has spread among the young generation!” The
prominent personage apparently had not observed that Akaky Akakiyevich
was already in the neighbourhood of fifty. If he could be called a young
man, it must have been in comparison with some one who was seventy. “Do
you know to whom you are speaking? Do you realise who is standing before
you? Do you realise it? Do you realise it, I ask you!” Then he stamped
his foot, and raised his voice to such a pitch that it would have
frightened even a different man from Akaky Akakiyevich.
Akaky Akakiyevich’s senses failed him. He staggered, trembled in every
limb, and, if the porters had not run in to support him, would have
fallen to the floor. They carried him out insensible. But the prominent
personage, gratified that the effect should have surpassed his
expectations, and quite intoxicated with the thought that his word could
even deprive a man of his senses, glanced sideways at his friend in
order to see how he looked upon this, and perceived, not without
satisfaction, that his friend was in a most uneasy frame of mind, and
even beginning on his part, to feel a trifle frightened.
Akaky Akakiyevich could not remember how he descended the stairs, and
got into the street. He felt neither his hands nor feet. Never in his
life had he been so rated by any high official, let alone a strange one.
He went staggering on through the snow-storm, which was blowing in the
streets, with his mouth wide open. The wind, in St. Petersburg fashion,
darted upon him from all quarters, and down every cross-street. In a
twinkling it had blown a quinsy into his throat, and he reached home
unable to utter a word. His throat was swollen, and he lay down on his
bed. So powerful is sometimes a good scolding!
The next day a violent fever developed. Thanks to the generous
assistance of the St. Petersburg climate, the malady progressed more
rapidly than could have been expected, and when the doctor arrived, he
found, on feeling the sick man’s pulse, that there was nothing to be
done, except to prescribe a poultice, so that the patient might not be
left entirely without the beneficent aid of medicine. But at the same
time, he predicted his end in thirty-six hours. After this he turned to
the landlady, and said, “And as for you, don’t waste your time on him.
Order his pine coffin now, for an oak one will be too expensive for
him.”
Did Akaky Akakiyevich hear these fatal words? And if he heard them, did
they produce any overwhelming effect upon him? Did he lament the
bitterness of his life?—We know not, for he continued in a delirious
condition. Visions incessantly appeared to him, each stranger than the
other. Now he saw Petrovich, and ordered him to make a cloak, with some
traps for robbers, who seemed to him to be always under the bed; and he
cried every moment to the landlady to pull one of them from under his
coverlet. Then he inquired why his old mantle hung before him when he
had a new cloak. Next he fancied that he was standing before the
prominent person, listening to a thorough setting-down and saying,
“Forgive me, your excellency!” but at last he began to curse, uttering
the most horrible words, so that his aged landlady crossed herself,
never in her life having heard anything of the kind from him, and more
so as these words followed directly after the words “your excellency.”
Later on he talked utter nonsense, of which nothing could be made, all
that was evident being that these incoherent words and thoughts hovered
ever about one thing, his cloak.
At length poor Akaky Akakiyevich breathed his last. They sealed up
neither his room nor his effects, because, in the first place, there
were no heirs, and, in the second, there was very little to inherit
beyond a bundle of goose-quills, a quire of white official paper, three
pairs of socks, two or three buttons which had burst off his trousers,
and the mantle already known to the reader. To whom all this fell, God
knows. I confess that the person who told me this tale took no interest
in the matter. They carried Akaky Akakiyevich out, and buried him.
And St. Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakiyevich, as though he had
never lived there. A being disappeared, who was protected by none, dear
to none, interesting to none, and who never even attracted to himself
the attention of those students of human nature who omit no opportunity
of thrusting a pin through a common fly and examining it under the
microscope. A being who bore meekly the jibes of the department, and
went to his grave without having done one unusual deed, but to whom,
nevertheless, at the close of his life, appeared a bright visitant in
the form of a cloak, which momentarily cheered his poor life, and upon
him, thereafter, an intolerable misfortune descended, just as it
descends upon the heads of the mighty of this world!
Several days after his death, the porter was sent from the department to
his lodgings, with an order for him to present himself there
immediately, the chief commanding it. But the porter had to return
unsuccessful, with the answer that he could not come; and to the
question, “Why?” replied, “Well, because he is dead! he was buried four
days ago.” In this manner did they hear of Akaky Akakiyevich’s death at
the department. And the next day a new official sat in his place, with a
handwriting by no means so upright, but more inclined and slanting.
But who could have imagined that this was not really the end of Akaky
Akakiyevich, that he was destined to raise a commotion after death, as
if in compensation for his utterly insignificant life? But so it
happened, and our poor story unexpectedly gains a fantastic ending.
A rumour suddenly spread through St. Petersburg, that a dead man had
taken to appearing on the KaFlinkin Bridge, and its vicinity, at night
in the form of an official seeking a stolen cloak, and that, under the
pretext of its being the stolen cloak, he dragged, without regard to
rank or calling, every one’s cloak from his shoulders, be it cat-skin,
beaver, fox, bear, sable, in a word, every sort of fur and skin which
men adopted for their covering. One of the department officials saw the
dead man with his own eyes, and immediately recognised in him Akaky
Akakiyevich. This, however, inspired him with such terror, that he ran
off with all his might, and therefore did not scan the dead man closely,
but only saw how the latter threatened him from afar with his finger.
Constant complaints poured in from all quarters, that the backs and
shoulders, not only of titular but even of court councillors, were
exposed to the danger of a cold, on account of the frequent dragging off
of their cloaks.
Arrangements were made by the police to catch the corpse, alive or dead,
at any cost, and punish him as an example to others, in the most severe
manner. In this they nearly succeeded, for a watchman, on guard in
Kirinshkin Lane, caught the corpse by the collar on the very scene of
his evil deeds, when attempting to pull off the frieze cloak of a
retired musician. Having seized him by the collar, he summoned, with a
shout, two of his comrades, whom he enjoined to hold him fast, while he
himself felt for a moment in his boot, in order to draw out his snuff-
box, and refresh his frozen nose. But the snuff was of a sort which even
a corpse could not endure. The watchman having closed his right nostril
with his finger, had no sooner succeeded in holding half a handful up to
the left, than the corpse sneezed so violently that he completely filled
the eyes of all three. While they raised their hands to wipe them, the
dead man vanished completely, so that they positively did not know
whether they had actually had him in their grip at all. Thereafter the
watchmen conceived such a terror of dead men that they were afraid even
to seize the living, and only screamed from a distance. “Hey, there! go
your way!” So the dead official began to appear even beyond the
KaFlinkin Bridge, causing no little terror to all timid people.
But we have totally neglected that certain prominent personage who may
really be considered as the cause of the fantastic turn taken by this
true history. First of all, justice compels us to say, that after the
departure of poor, annihilated Akaky Akakiyevich, he felt something like
remorse. Suffering was unpleasant to him, for his heart was accessible
to many good impulses, in spite of the fact that his rank often
prevented his showing his true self. As soon as his friend had left his
cabinet, he began to think about poor Akaky Akakiyevich. And from that
day forth, poor Akaky Akakiyevich, who could not bear up under an
official reprimand, recurred to his mind almost every day. The thought
troubled him to such an extent, that a week later he even resolved to
send an official to him, to learn whether he really could assist him.
And when it was reported to him that Akaky Akakiyevich had died suddenly
of fever, he was startled, hearkened to the reproaches of his
conscience, and was out of sorts for the whole day.
Wishing to divert his mind in some way and drive away the disagreeable
impression, he set out that evening for one of his friends’ houses,
where he found quite a large party assembled. What was better, nearly
every one was of the same rank as himself, so that he need not feel in
the least constrained. This had a marvellous effect upon his mental
state. He grew expansive, made himself agreeable in conversation, in
short, he passed a delightful evening. After supper he drank a couple of
glasses of champagne—not a bad recipe for cheerfulness, as every one
knows. The champagne inclined him to various adventures, and he
determined not to return home, but to go and see a certain well-known
lady, of German extraction, Karolina Ivanovna, a lady, it appears, with
whom he was on a very friendly footing.
It must be mentioned that the prominent personage was no longer a young
man, but a good husband and respected father of a family. Two sons, one
of whom was already in the service, and a good-looking, sixteen-year-old
daughter, with a slightly arched but pretty little nose, came every
morning to kiss his hand and say, “Bon jour, papa.” His wife, a still
fresh and good-looking woman, first gave him her hand to kiss, and then,
reversing the procedure, kissed his. But the prominent personage, though
perfectly satisfied in his domestic relations, considered it stylish to
have a friend in another quarter of the city. This friend was scarcely
prettier or younger than his wife; but there are such puzzles in the
world, and it is not our place to judge them. So the important personage
descended the stairs, stepped into his sledge, said to the coachman, “To
Karolina Ivanovna’s,” and, wrapping himself luxuriously in his warm
cloak, found himself in that delightful frame of mind than which a
Russian can conceive nothing better, namely, when you think of nothing
yourself, yet when the thoughts creep into your mind of their own
accord, each more agreeable than the other, giving you no trouble either
to drive them away, or seek them. Fully satisfied, he recalled all the
gay features of the evening just passed and all the mots which had made
the little circle laugh. Many of them he repeated in a low voice, and
found them quite as funny as before; so it is not surprising that he
should laugh heartily at them. Occasionally, however, he was interrupted
by gusts of wind, which, coming suddenly, God knows whence or why, cut
his face, drove masses of snow into it, filled out his cloak-collar like
a sail, or suddenly blew it over his head with supernatural force, and
thus caused him constant trouble to disentangle himself.
Suddenly the important personage felt some one clutch him firmly by the
collar. Turning round, he perceived a man of short stature, in an old,
worn uniform, and recognised, not without terror, Akaky Akakiyevich. The
official’s face was white as snow, and looked just like a corpse’s. But
the horror of the important personage transcended all bounds when he saw
the dead man’s mouth open, and heard it utter the following remarks,
while it breathed upon him the terrible odour of the grave: “Ah, here
you are at last! I have you, that—by the collar! I need your cloak. You
took no trouble about mine, but reprimanded me. So now give up your
own.”
The pallid prominent personage almost died of fright. Brave as he was in
the office and in the presence of inferiors generally, and although, at
the sight of his manly form and appearance, every one said, “Ugh! how
much character he has!” at this crisis, he, like many possessed of an
heroic exterior, experienced such terror, that, not without cause, he
began to fear an attack of illness. He flung his cloak hastily from his
shoulders and shouted to his coachman in an unnatural voice, “Home at
full speed!” The coachman, hearing the tone which is generally employed
at critical moments, and even accompanied by something much more
tangible, drew his head down between his shoulders in case of an
emergency, flourished his whip, and flew on like an arrow. In a little
more than six minutes the prominent personage was at the entrance of his
own house. Pale, thoroughly scared, and cloakless, he went home instead
of to Karolina Ivanovna’s, reached his room somehow or other, and passed
the night in the direst distress; so that the next morning over their
tea, his daughter said, “You are very pale to-day, papa.” But papa
remained silent, and said not a word to any one of what had happened to
him, where he had been, or where he had intended to go.
This occurrence made a deep impression upon him. He even began to say,
“How dare you? Do you realise who is standing before you?” less
frequently to the under-officials, and, if he did utter the words, it
was only after first having learned the bearings of the matter. But the
most noteworthy point was, that from that day forward the apparition of
the dead official ceased to be seen. Evidently the prominent personage’s
cloak just fitted his shoulders. At all events, no more instances of his
dragging cloaks from people’s shoulders were heard of. But many active
and solicitous persons could by no means reassure themselves, and
asserted that the dead official still showed himself in distant parts of
the city.
In fact, one watchman in Kolomen saw with his own eyes the apparition
come from behind a house. But the watchman was not a strong man, so he
was afraid to arrest him, and followed him in the dark, until, at
length, the apparition looked round, paused, and inquired, “What do you
want?” at the same time showing such a fist as is never seen on living
men. The watchman said, “Nothing,” and turned back instantly. But the
apparition was much too tall, wore huge moustaches, and, directing its
steps apparently towards the Obukhov Bridge, disappeared in the darkness
of the night.
THE DISTRICT DOCTOR BY IVAN S. TURGENEV
One day in autumn on my way back from a remote part of the country I
caught cold and fell ill. Fortunately the fever attacked me in the
district town at the inn; I sent for the doctor. In half-an-hour the
district doctor appeared, a thin, dark-haired man of middle height. He
prescribed me the usual sudorific, ordered a mustard-plaster to be put
on, very deftly slid a five-ruble note up his sleeve, coughing drily and
looking away as he did so, and then was getting up to go home, but
somehow fell into talk and remained. I was exhausted with feverishness;
I foresaw a sleepless night, and was glad of a little chat with a
pleasant companion. Tea was served. My doctor began to converse freely.
He was a sensible fellow, and expressed himself with vigour and some
humour. Queer things happen in the world: you may live a long while with
some people, and be on friendly terms with them, and never once speak
openly with them from your soul; with others you have scarcely time to
get acquainted, and all at once you are pouring out to him—or he to
you—all your secrets, as though you were at confession. I don’t know how
I gained the confidence of my new friend—anyway, with nothing to lead up
to it, he told me a rather curious incident; and here I will report his
tale for the information of the indulgent reader. I will try to tell it
in the doctor’s own words.
“You don’t happen to know,” he began in a weak and quavering voice (the
common result of the use of unmixed Berezov snuff); “you don’t happen to
know the judge here, Mylov, Pavel Lukich?... You don’t know him?...
Well, it’s all the same.” (He cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes.)
“Well, you see, the thing happened, to tell you exactly without mistake,
in Lent, at the very time of the thaws. I was sitting at his house—our
judge’s, you know—playing preference. Our judge is a good fellow, and
fond of playing preference. Suddenly” (the doctor made frequent use of
this word, suddenly) “they tell me, ‘There’s a servant asking for you.’
I say, ‘What does he want?’ They say, He has brought a note—it must be
from a patient.’ ‘Give me the note,’ I say. So it is from a patient—well
and good—you understand—it’s our bread and butter... But this is how it
was: a lady, a widow, writes to me; she says, ‘My daughter is dying.
Come, for God’s sake!’ she says, ‘and the horses have been sent for
you.’... Well, that’s all right. But she was twenty miles from the town,
and it was midnight out of doors, and the roads in such a state, my
word! And as she was poor herself, one could not expect more than two
silver rubles, and even that problematic; and perhaps it might only be a
matter of a roll of linen and a sack of oatmeal in payment. However,
duty, you know, before everything: a fellow-creature may be dying. I
hand over my cards at once to Kalliopin, the member of the provincial
commission, and return home. I look; a wretched little trap was standing
at the steps, with peasant’s horses, fat—too fat—and their coat as
shaggy as felt; and the coachman sitting with his cap off out of
respect. Well, I think to myself, ‘It’s clear, my friend, these patients
aren’t rolling in riches.’... You smile; but I tell you, a poor man like
me has to take everything into consideration... If the coachman sits
like a prince, and doesn’t touch his cap, and even sneers at you behind
his beard, and flicks his whip—then you may bet on six rubles. But this
case, I saw, had a very different air. However, I think there’s no help
for it; duty before everything. I snatch up the most necessary drugs,
and set off. Will you believe it? I only just managed to get there at
all. The road was infernal: streams, snow, watercourses, and the dyke
had suddenly burst there—that was the worst of it! However, I arrived at
last. It was a little thatched house. There was a light in the windows;
that meant they expected me. I was met by an old lady, very venerable,
in a cap. ‘Save her!’ she says; ‘she is dying.’ I say, 'Pray don’t
distress yourself—Where is the invalid?’ ‘Come this way.’ I see a clean
little room, a lamp in the corner; on the bed a girl of twenty,
unconscious. She was in a burning heat, and breathing heavily—it was
fever. There were two other girls, her sisters, scared and in tears.
‘Yesterday,’ they tell me, ‘she was perfectly well and had a good
appetite; this morning she complained of her head, and this evening,
suddenly, you see, like this.’ I say again: ‘Pray don’t be uneasy.’ It’s
a doctor’s duty, you know—and I went up to her and bled her, told them
to put on a mustard-plaster, and prescribed a mixture. Meantime I looked
at her; I looked at her, you know—there, by God! I had never seen such a
face!—she was a beauty, in a word! I felt quite shaken with pity. Such
lovely features; such eyes!... But, thank God! she became easier; she
fell into a perspiration, seemed to come to her senses, looked round,
smiled, and passed her hand over her face... Her sisters bent over her.
They ask, ‘How are you?’ ‘All right,’ she says, and turns away. I looked
at her; she had fallen asleep. ‘Well,’ I say, 'now the patient should be
left alone.’ So we all went out on tiptoe; only a maid remained, in case
she was wanted. In the parlour there was a samovar standing on the
table, and a bottle of rum; in our profession one can’t get on without
it. They gave me tea; asked me to stop the night... I consented: where
could I go, indeed, at that time of night? The old lady kept groaning.
‘What is it?’ I say; ‘she will live; don’t worry yourself; you had
better take a little rest yourself; it is about two o’clock.’ ‘But will
you send to wake me if anything happens?’ ‘Yes, yes.’ The old lady went
away, and the girls too went to their own room; they made up a bed for
me in the parlour. Well, I went to bed—but I could not get to sleep, for
a wonder! for in reality I was very tired. I could not get my patient
out of my head. At last I could not put up with it any longer; I got up
suddenly; I think to myself, ‘I will go and see how the patient is
getting on.’ Her bedroom was next to the parlour. Well, I got up, and
gently opened the door—how my heart beat! I looked in: the servant was
asleep, her mouth wide open, and even snoring, the wretch! but the
patient lay with her face towards me and her arms flung wide apart, poor
girl! I went up to her ... when suddenly she opened her eyes and stared
at me! ‘Who is it? who is it?’ I was in confusion. ‘Don’t be alarmed,
madam,’ I say; ‘I am the doctor; I have come to see how you feel.’ ‘You
the doctor?’ ‘Yes, the doctor; your mother sent for me from the town; we
have bled you, madam; now pray go to sleep, and in a day or two, please
God! we will set you on your feet again.’ ‘Ah, yes, yes, doctor, don’t
let me die... please, please.’ ‘Why do you talk like that? God bless
you!’ She is in a fever again, I think to myself; I felt her pulse; yes,
she was feverish. She looked at me, and then took me by the hand. ‘I
will tell you why I don’t want to die: I will tell you... Now we are
alone; and only, please don’t you ... not to any one ... Listen...’ I
bent down; she moved her lips quite to my ear; she touched my cheek with
her hair—I confess my head went round—and began to whisper... I could
make out nothing of it... Ah, she was delirious! ... She whispered and
whispered, but so quickly, and as if it were not in Russian; at last she
finished, and shivering dropped her head on the pillow, and threatened
me with her finger: 'Remember, doctor, to no one.’ I calmed her somehow,
gave her something to drink, waked the servant, and went away.”
At this point the doctor again took snuff with exasperated energy, and
for a moment seemed stupefied by its effects.
“However,” he continued, “the next day, contrary to my expectations, the
patient was no better. I thought and thought, and suddenly decided to
remain there, even though my other patients were expecting me... And you
know one can’t afford to disregard that; one’s practice suffers if one
does. But, in the first place, the patient was really in danger; and
secondly, to tell the truth, I felt strongly drawn to her. Besides, I
liked the whole family. Though they were really badly off, they were
singularly, I may say, cultivated people... Their father had been a
learned man, an author; he died, of course, in poverty, but he had
managed before he died to give his children an excellent education; he
left a lot of books too. Either because I looked after the invalid very
carefully, or for some other reason; anyway, I can venture to say all
the household loved me as if I were one of the family... Meantime the
roads were in a worse state than ever; all communications, so to say,
were cut off completely; even medicine could with difficulty be got from
the town... The sick girl was not getting better... Day after day, and
day after day ... but ... here...” (The doctor made a brief pause.) “I
declare I don’t know how to tell you.”... (He again took snuff, coughed,
and swallowed a little tea.) “I will tell you without beating about the
bush. My patient ... how should I say?... Well she had fallen in love
with me ... or, no, it was not that she was in love ... however ...
really, how should one say?” (The doctor looked down and grew red.)
“No,” he went on quickly, “in love, indeed! A man should not over-
estimate himself. She was an educated girl, clever and well-read, and I
had even forgotten my Latin, one may say, completely. As to appearance”
(the doctor looked himself over with a smile) “I am nothing to boast of
there either. But God Almighty did not make me a fool; I don’t take
black for white; I know a thing or two; I could see very clearly, for
instance that Aleksandra Andreyevna—that was her name—did not feel love
for me, but had a friendly, so to say, inclination—a respect or
something for me. Though she herself perhaps mistook this sentiment,
anyway this was her attitude; you may form your own judgment of it.
But,” added the doctor, who had brought out all these disconnected
sentences without taking breath, and with obvious embarrassment, “I seem
to be wandering rather—you won’t understand anything like this ...
There, with your leave, I will relate it all in order.”
He drank off a glass of tea, and began in a calmer voice.
“Well, then. My patient kept getting worse and worse. You are not a
doctor, my good sir; you cannot understand what passes in a poor
fellow’s heart, especially at first, when he begins to suspect that the
disease is getting the upper hand of him. What becomes of his belief in
himself? You suddenly grow so timid; it’s indescribable. You fancy then
that you have forgotten everything you knew, and that the patient has no
faith in you, and that other people begin to notice how distracted you
are, and tell you the symptoms with reluctance; that they are looking at
you suspiciously, whispering... Ah! it’s horrid! There must be a remedy,
you think, for this disease, if one could find it. Isn’t this it? You
try—no, that’s not it! You don’t allow the medicine the necessary time
to do good... You clutch at one thing, then at another. Sometimes you
take up a book of medical prescriptions—here it is, you think!
Sometimes, by Jove, you pick one out by chance, thinking to leave it to
fate... But meantime a fellow-creature’s dying, and another doctor would
have saved him. ‘We must have a consultation,’ you say; ‘I will not take
the responsibility on myself.’ And what a fool you look at such times!
Well, in time you learn to bear it; it’s nothing to you. A man has
died—but it’s not your fault; you treated him by the rules. But what’s
still more torture to you is to see blind faith in you, and to feel
yourself that you are not able to be of use. Well, it was just this
blind faith that the whole of Aleksandra Andreyevna’s family had in me;
they had forgotten to think that their daughter was in danger. I, too,
on my side assure them that it’s nothing, but meantime my heart sinks
into my boots. To add to our troubles, the roads were in such a state
that the coachman was gone for whole days together to get medicine. And
I never left the patient’s room; I could not tear myself away; I tell
her amusing stories, you know, and play cards with her. I watch by her
side at night. The old mother thanks me with tears in her eyes; but I
think to myself, ‘I don’t deserve your gratitude.’ I frankly confess to
you—there is no object in concealing it now—I was in love with my
patient. And Aleksandra Andreyevna had grown fond of me; she would not
sometimes let any one be in her room but me. She began to talk to me, to
ask me questions; where I had studied, how I lived, who are my people,
whom I go to see. I feel that she ought not to talk; but to forbid her
to—to forbid her resolutely, you know—I could not. Sometimes I held my
head in my hands, and asked myself, “What are you doing, villain?”...
And she would take my hand and hold it, give me a long, long look, and
turn away, sigh, and say, ‘How good you are!’ Her hands were so
feverish, her eyes so large and languid... 'Yes,’ she says, ‘you are a
good, kind man; you are not like our neighbours... No, you are not like
that... Why did I not know you till now!’ ‘Aleksandra Andreyevna, calm
yourself,’ I say... ‘I feel, believe me, I don’t know how I have gained
... but there, calm yourself... All will be right; you will be well
again.’ And meanwhile I must tell you,” continued the doctor, bending
forward and raising his eyebrows, “that they associated very little with
the neighbours, because the smaller people were not on their level, and
pride hindered them from being friendly with the rich. I tell you, they
were an exceptionally cultivated family; so you know it was gratifying
for me. She would only take her medicine from my hands ... she would
lift herself up, poor girl, with my aid, take it, and gaze at me... My
heart felt as if it were bursting. And meanwhile she was growing worse
and worse, worse and worse, all the time; she will die, I think to
myself; she must die. Believe me, I would sooner have gone to the grave
myself; and here were her mother and sisters watching me, looking into
my eyes ... and their faith in me was wearing away. 'Well? how is she?’
‘Oh, all right, all right!’ All right, indeed! My mind was failing me.
Well, I was sitting one night alone again by my patient. The maid was
sitting there too, and snoring away in full swing; I can’t find fault
with the poor girl, though; she was worn out too. Aleksandra Andreyevna
had felt very unwell all the evening; she was very feverish. Until
midnight she kept tossing about; at last she seemed to fall asleep; at
least, she lay still without stirring. The lamp was burning in the
corner before the holy image. I sat there, you know, with my head bent;
I even dozed a little. Suddenly it seemed as though some one touched me
in the side; I turned round... Good God! Aleksandra Andreyevna was
gazing with intent eyes at me ... her lips parted, her cheeks seemed
burning. ‘What is it?’ ‘Doctor, shall I die?’ ‘Merciful Heavens!’ ‘No,
doctor, no; please don’t tell me I shall live ... don’t say so... If you
knew... Listen! for God’s sake don’t conceal my real position,’ and her
breath came so fast. ‘If I can know for certain that I must die ... then
I will tell you all— all!’ ‘Aleksandra Andreyevna, I beg!’ ‘Listen; I
have not been asleep at all ... I have been looking at you a long
while... For God’s sake!... I believe in you; you are a good man, an
honest man; I entreat you by all that is sacred in the world—tell me the
truth! If you knew how important it is for me... Doctor, for God’s sake
tell me... Am I in danger?’ ‘What can I tell you, Aleksandra Andreyevna,
pray?’ ‘For God’s sake, I beseech you!’ ‘I can’t disguise from you,’ I
say, ‘Aleksandra Andreyevna; you are certainly in danger; but God is
merciful.’ ‘I shall die, I shall die.’ And it seemed as though she were
pleased; her face grew so bright; I was alarmed. ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t
be afraid! I am not frightened of death at all.’ She suddenly sat up and
leaned on her elbow. ‘Now ... yes, now I can tell you that I thank you
with my whole heart ... that you are kind and good—that I love you!’ I
stare at her, like one possessed; it was terrible for me, you know. ‘Do
you hear, I love you!’ ‘Aleksandra Andreyevna, how have I deserved—’
‘No, no, you don’t—you don’t understand me.’... And suddenly she
stretched out her arms, and taking my head in her hands, she kissed
it... Believe me, I almost screamed aloud... I threw myself on my knees,
and buried my head in the pillow. She did not speak; her fingers
trembled in my hair; I listen; she is weeping. I began to soothe her, to
assure her... I really don’t know what I did say to her. ‘You will wake
up the girl,’ I say to her; 'Aleksandra Andreyevna, I thank you ...
believe me ... calm yourself.’ 'Enough, enough!’ she persisted; ‘never
mind all of them; let them wake, then; let them come in—it does not
matter; I am dying, you see... And what do you fear? why are you afraid?
Lift up your head... Or, perhaps, you don’t love me; perhaps I am
wrong... In that case, forgive me.’ ‘Aleksandra Andreyevna, what are you
saying!... I love you, Aleksandra Andreyevna.’ She looked straight into
my eyes, and opened her arms wide. ‘Then take me in your arms.’ I tell
you frankly, I don’t know how it was I did not go mad that night. I feel
that my patient is killing herself; I see that she is not fully herself;
I understand, too, that if she did not consider herself on the point of
death, she would never have thought of me; and, indeed, say what you
will, it’s hard to die at twenty without having known love; this was
what was torturing her; this was why, in despair, she caught at me—do
you understand now? But she held me in her arms, and would not let me
go. ‘Have pity on me, Aleksandra Andreyevna, and have pity on yourself,’
I say. ‘Why,’ she says; ‘what is there to think of? You know I must
die.’ ... This she repeated incessantly ... ‘If I knew that I should
return to life, and be a proper young lady again, I should be ashamed
... of course, ashamed ... but why now?’ ‘But who has said you will
die?’ ‘Oh, no, leave off! you will not deceive me; you don’t know how to
lie—look at your face.’ ... ‘You shall live, Aleksandra Andreyevna; I
will cure you; we will ask your mother’s blessing ... we will be
united—we will be happy.’ ‘No, no, I have your word; I must die ... you
have promised me ... you have told me.’ ... It was cruel for me—cruel
for many reasons. And see what trifling things can do sometimes; it
seems nothing at all, but it’s painful. It occurred to her to ask me,
what is my name; not my surname, but my first name. I must needs be so
unlucky as to be called Trifon. Yes, indeed; Trifon Ivanich. Every one
in the house called me doctor. However, there’s no help for it. I say,
‘Trifon, madam.’ She frowned, shook her head, and muttered something in
French—ah, something unpleasant, of course!—and then she
laughed—disagreeably too. Well, I spent the whole night with her in this
way. Before morning I went away, feeling as though I were mad. When I
went again into her room it was daytime, after morning tea. Good God! I
could scarcely recognise her; people are laid in their grave looking
better than that. I swear to you, on my honour, I don’t understand—I
absolutely don’t understand—now, how I lived through that experience.
Three days and nights my patient still lingered on. And what nights!
What things she said to me! And on the last night—only imagine to
yourself—I was sitting near her, and kept praying to God for one thing
only: ‘Take her,’ I said, ‘quickly, and me with her.’ Suddenly the old
mother comes unexpectedly into the room. I had already the evening
before told her—-the mother—there was little hope, and it would be well
to send for a priest. When the sick girl saw her mother she said: ‘It’s
very well you have come; look at us, we love one another—we have given
each other our word.’ ‘What does she say, doctor? what does she say?’ I
turned livid. ‘She is wandering,’ I say; ‘the fever.’ But she: ‘Hush,
hush; you told me something quite different just now, and have taken my
ring. Why do you pretend? My mother is good—she will forgive—she will
understand—and I am dying. ... I have no need to tell lies; give me your
hand.’ I jumped up and ran out of the room. The old lady, of course,
guessed how it was.
“I will not, however, weary you any longer, and to me too, of course,
it’s painful to recall all this. My patient passed away the next day.
God rest her soul!” the doctor added, speaking quickly and with a sigh.
“Before her death she asked her family to go out and leave me alone with
her.”
“‘Forgive me,’ she said; ‘I am perhaps to blame towards you ... my
illness ... but believe me, I have loved no one more than you ... do not
forget me ... keep my ring.’”
The doctor turned away; I took his hand.
“Ah!” he said, “let us talk of something else, or would you care to play
preference for a small stake? It is not for people like me to give way
to exalted emotions. There’s only one thing for me to think of; how to
keep the children from crying and the wife from scolding. Since then,
you know, I have had time to enter into lawful wedlock, as they say...
Oh ... I took a merchant’s daughter—seven thousand for her dowry. Her
name’s Akulina; it goes well with Trifon. She is an ill-tempered woman,
I must tell you, but luckily she’s asleep all day... Well, shall it be
preference?”
We sat down to preference for halfpenny points. Trifon Ivanich won two
rubles and a half from me, and went home late, well pleased with his
success.
THE CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE WEDDING BY FIODOR M. DOSTOYEVSKY
The other day I saw a wedding... But no! I would rather tell you about a
Christmas tree. The wedding was superb. I liked it immensely. But the
other incident was still finer. I don’t know why it is that the sight of
the wedding reminded me of the Christmas tree. This is the way it
happened:
Exactly five years ago, on New Year’s Eve, I was invited to a children’s
ball by a man high up in the business world, who had his connections,
his circle of acquaintances, and his intrigues. So it seemed as though
the children’s ball was merely a pretext for the parents to come
together and discuss matters of interest to themselves, quite innocently
and casually.
I was an outsider, and, as I had no special matters to air, I was able
to spend the evening independently of the others. There was another
gentleman present who like myself had just stumbled upon this affair of
domestic bliss. He was the first to attract my attention. His appearance
was not that of a man of birth or high family. He was tall, rather thin,
very serious, and well dressed. Apparently he had no heart for the
family festivities. The instant he went off into a corner by himself the
smile disappeared from his face, and his thick dark brows knitted into a
frown. He knew no one except the host and showed every sign of being
bored to death, though bravely sustaining the role of thorough enjoyment
to the end. Later I learned that he was a provincial, had come to the
capital on some important, brain-racking business, had brought a letter
of recommendation to our host, and our host had taken him under his
protection, not at all con amore. It was merely out of politeness that
he had invited him to the children’s ball.
They did not play cards with him, they did not offer him cigars. No one
entered into conversation with him. Possibly they recognised the bird by
its feathers from a distance. Thus, my gentleman, not knowing what to do
with his hands, was compelled to spend the evening stroking his
whiskers. His whiskers were really fine, but he stroked them so
assiduously that one got the feeling that the whiskers had come into the
world first and afterwards the man in order to stroke them.
There was another guest who interested me. But he was of quite a
different order. He was a personage. They called him Julian Mastakovich.
At first glance one could tell he was an honoured guest and stood in the
same relation to the host as the host to the gentleman of the whiskers.
The host and hostess said no end of amiable things to him, were most
attentive, wining him, hovering over him, bringing guests up to be
introduced, but never leading him to any one else. I noticed tears
glisten in our host’s eyes when Julian Mastakovich remarked that he had
rarely spent such a pleasant evening. Somehow I began to feel
uncomfortable in this personage’s presence. So, after amusing myself
with the children, five of whom, remarkably well-fed young persons, were
our host’s, I went into a little sitting-room, entirely unoccupied, and
seated myself at the end that was a conservatory and took up almost half
the room.
The children were charming. They absolutely refused to resemble their
elders, notwithstanding the efforts of mothers and governesses. In a
jiffy they had denuded the Christmas tree down to the very last sweet
and had already succeeded in breaking half of their playthings before
they even found out which belonged to whom.
One of them was a particularly handsome little lad, dark-eyed, curly-
haired, who stubbornly persisted in aiming at me with his wooden gun.
But the child that attracted the greatest attention was his sister, a
girl of about eleven, lovely as a Cupid. She was quiet and thoughtful,
with large, full, dreamy eyes. The children had somehow offended her,
and she left them and walked into the same room that I had withdrawn
into. There she seated herself with her doll in a corner.
“Her father is an immensely wealthy business man,” the guests informed
each other in tones of awe. “Three hundred thousand rubles set aside for
her dowry already.”
As I turned to look at the group from which I heard this news item
issuing, my glance met Julian Mastakovich’s. He stood listening to the
insipid chatter in an attitude of concentrated attention, with his hands
behind his back and his head inclined to one side.
All the while I was quite lost in admiration of the shrewdness our host
displayed in the dispensing of the gifts. The little maid of the many-
rubied dowry received the handsomest doll, and the rest of the gifts
were graded in value according to the diminishing scale of the parents’
stations in life. The last child, a tiny chap of ten, thin, red-haired,
freckled, came into possession of a small book of nature stories without
illustrations or even head and tail pieces. He was the governess’s
child. She was a poor widow, and her little boy, clad in a sorry-looking
little nankeen jacket, looked thoroughly crushed and intimidated. He
took the book of nature stories and circled slowly about the children’s
toys. He would have given anything to play with them. But he did not
dare to. You could tell he already knew his place.
I like to observe children. It is fascinating to watch the individuality
in them struggling for self-assertion. I could see that the other
children’s things had tremendous charm for the red-haired boy,
especially a toy theatre, in which he was so anxious to take a part that
he resolved to fawn upon the other children. He smiled and began to play
with them. His one and only apple he handed over to a puffy urchin whose
pockets were already crammed with sweets, and he even carried another
youngster pickaback—all simply that he might be allowed to stay with the
theatre.
But in a few moments an impudent young person fell on him and gave him a
pummelling. He did not dare even to cry. The governess came and told him
to leave off interfering with the other children’s games, and he crept
away to the same room the little girl and I were in. She let him sit
down beside her, and the two set themselves busily dressing the
expensive doll.
Almost half an hour passed, and I was nearly dozing off, as I sat there
in the conservatory half listening to the chatter of the red-haired boy
and the dowered beauty, when Julian Mastakovich entered suddenly. He had
slipped out of the drawing-room under cover of a noisy scene among the
children. From my secluded corner it had not escaped my notice that a
few moments before he had been eagerly conversing with the rich girl’s
father, to whom he had only just been introduced.
He stood still for a while reflecting and mumbling to himself, as if
counting something on his fingers.
“Three hundred—three hundred—eleven—twelve—thirteen—sixteen—in five
years! Let’s say four per cent—five times twelve—sixty, and on these
sixty——. Let us assume that in five years it will amount to—well, four
hundred. Hm—hm! But the shrewd old fox isn’t likely to be satisfied with
four per cent. He gets eight or even ten, perhaps. Let’s suppose five
hundred, five hundred thousand, at least, that’s sure. Anything above
that for pocket money—hm—”
He blew his nose and was about to leave the room when he spied the girl
and stood still. I, behind the plants, escaped his notice. He seemed to
me to be quivering with excitement. It must have been his calculations
that upset him so. He rubbed his hands and danced from place to place,
and kept getting more and more excited. Finally, however, he conquered
his emotions and came to a standstill. He cast a determined look at the
future bride and wanted to move toward her, but glanced about first.
Then, as if with a guilty conscience, he stepped over to the child on
tip-toe, smiling, and bent down and kissed her head.
His coming was so unexpected that she uttered a shriek of alarm.
“What are you doing here, dear child?” he whispered, looking around and
pinching her cheek.
“We’re playing.”
“What, with him?” said Julian Mastakovich with a look askance at the
governess’s child. “You should go into the drawing-room, my lad,” he
said to him.
The boy remained silent and looked up at the man with wide-open eyes.
Julian Mastakovich glanced round again cautiously and bent down over the
girl.
“What have you got, a doll, my dear?”
“Yes, sir.” The child quailed a little, and her brow wrinkled.
“A doll? And do you know, my dear, what dolls are made of?”
“No, sir,” she said weakly, and lowered her head.
“Out of rags, my dear. You, boy, you go back to the drawing-room, to the
children,” said Julian Mastakovich looking at the boy sternly.
The two children frowned. They caught hold of each other and would not
part.
“And do you know why they gave you the doll?” asked Julian Mastakovich,
dropping his voice lower and lower.
“No.”
“Because you were a good, very good little girl the whole week.”
Saying which, Julian Mastakovich was seized with a paroxysm of
agitation. He looked round and said in a tone faint, almost inaudible
with excitement and impatience:
“If I come to visit your parents will you love me, my dear?”
He tried to kiss the sweet little creature, but the red-haired boy saw
that she was on the verge of tears, and he caught her hand and sobbed
out loud in sympathy. That enraged the man.
“Go away! Go away! Go back to the other room, to your playmates.”
“I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to! You go away!” cried the girl.
“Let him alone! Let him alone!” She was almost weeping.
There was a sound of footsteps in the doorway. Julian Mastakovich
started and straightened up his respectable body. The red-haired boy was
even more alarmed. He let go the girl’s hand, sidled along the wall, and
escaped through the drawing-room into the dining-room.
Not to attract attention, Julian Mastakovich also made for the dining-
room. He was red as a lobster. The sight of himself in a mirror seemed
to embarrass him. Presumably he was annoyed at his own ardour and
impatience. Without due respect to his importance and dignity, his
calculations had lured and pricked him to the greedy eagerness of a boy,
who makes straight for his object—though this was not as yet an object;
it only would be so in five years’ time. I followed the worthy man into
the dining-room, where I witnessed a remarkable play.
Julian Mastakovich, all flushed with vexation, venom in his look, began
to threaten the red-haired boy. The red-haired boy retreated farther and
farther until there was no place left for him to retreat to, and he did
not know where to turn in his fright.
“Get out of here! What are you doing here? Get out, I say, you good-for-
nothing! Stealing fruit, are you? Oh, so, stealing fruit! Get out, you
freckle face, go to your likes!”
The frightened child, as a last desperate resort, crawled quickly under
the table. His persecutor, completely infuriated, pulled out his large
linen handkerchief and used it as a lash to drive the boy out of his
position.
Here I must remark that Julian Mastakovich was a somewhat corpulent man,
heavy, well-fed, puffy-cheeked, with a paunch and ankles as round as
nuts. He perspired and puffed and panted. So strong was his dislike (or
was it jealousy?) of the child that he actually began to carry on like a
madman.
I laughed heartily. Julian Mastakovich turned. He was utterly confused
and for a moment, apparently, quite oblivious of his immense importance.
At that moment our host appeared in the doorway opposite. The boy
crawled out from under the table and wiped his knees and elbows. Julian
Mastakovich hastened to carry his handkerchief, which he had been
dangling by the corner, to his nose. Our host looked at the three of us
rather suspiciously. But, like a man who knows the world and can readily
adjust himself, he seized upon the opportunity to lay hold of his very
valuable guest and get what he wanted out of him.
“Here’s the boy I was talking to you about,” he said, indicating the
red-haired child. “I took the liberty of presuming on your goodness in
his behalf.”
“Oh,” replied Julian Mastakovich, still not quite master of himself.
“He’s my governess’s son,” our host continued in a beseeching tone.
“She’s a poor creature, the widow of an honest official. That’s why, if
it were possible for you—”
“Impossible, impossible!” Julian Mastakovich cried hastily. “You must
excuse me, Philip Alexeyevich, I really cannot. I’ve made inquiries.
There are no vacancies, and there is a waiting list of ten who have a
greater right—I’m sorry.”
“Too bad,” said our host. “He’s a quiet, unobtrusive child.”
“A very naughty little rascal, I should say,” said Julian Mastakovich,
wryly. “Go away, boy. Why are you here still? Be off with you to the
other children.”
Unable to control himself, he gave me a sidelong glance. Nor could I
control myself. I laughed straight in his face. He turned away and asked
our host, in tones quite audible to me, who that odd young fellow was.
They whispered to each other and left the room, disregarding me.
I shook with laughter. Then I, too, went to the drawing-room. There the
great man, already surrounded by the fathers and mothers and the host
and the hostess, had begun to talk eagerly with a lady to whom he had
just been introduced. The lady held the rich little girl’s hand. Julian
Mastakovich went into fulsome praise of her. He waxed ecstatic over the
dear child’s beauty, her talents, her grace, her excellent breeding,
plainly laying himself out to flatter the mother, who listened scarcely
able to restrain tears of joy, while the father showed his delight by a
gratified smile.
The joy was contagious. Everybody shared in it. Even the children were
obliged to stop playing so as not to disturb the conversation. The
atmosphere was surcharged with awe. I heard the mother of the important
little girl, touched to her profoundest depths, ask Julian Mastakovich
in the choicest language of courtesy, whether he would honour them by
coming to see them. I heard Julian Mastakovich accept the invitation
with unfeigned enthusiasm. Then the guests scattered decorously to
different parts of the room, and I heard them, with veneration in their
tones, extol the business man, the business man’s wife, the business
man’s daughter, and, especially, Julian Mastakovich.
“Is he married?” I asked out loud of an acquaintance of mine standing
beside Julian Mastakovich.
Julian Mastakovich gave me a venomous look.
“No,” answered my acquaintance, profoundly shocked by
my—intentional—indiscretion.
Not long ago I passed the Church of——. I was struck by the concourse of
people gathered there to witness a wedding. It was a dreary day. A
drizzling rain was beginning to come down. I made my way through the
throng into the church. The bridegroom was a round, well-fed, pot-
bellied little man, very much dressed up. He ran and fussed about and
gave orders and arranged things. Finally word was passed that the bride
was coming. I pushed through the crowd, and I beheld a marvellous beauty
whose first spring was scarcely commencing. But the beauty was pale and
sad. She looked distracted. It seemed to me even that her eyes were red
from recent weeping. The classic severity of every line of her face
imparted a peculiar significance and solemnity to her beauty. But
through that severity and solemnity, through the sadness, shone the
innocence of a child. There was something inexpressibly naïve,
unsettled and young in her features, which, without words, seemed to
plead for mercy.
They said she was just sixteen years old. I looked at the bridegroom
carefully. Suddenly I recognised Julian Mastakovich, whom I had not seen
again in all those five years. Then I looked at the bride again.—Good
God! I made my way, as quickly as I could, out of the church. I heard
gossiping in the crowd about the bride’s wealth—about her dowry of five
hundred thousand rubles—so and so much for pocket money.
“Then his calculations were correct,” I thought, as I pressed out into
the street.
GOD SEES THE TRUTH, BUT WAITS BY LEO N. TOLSTOY
In the town of Vladimir lived a young merchant named Ivan Dmitrich
Aksionov. He had two shops and a house of his own.
Aksionov was a handsome, fair-haired, curly-headed fellow, full of fun,
and very fond of singing. When quite a young man he had been given to
drink, and was riotous when he had had too much; but after he married he
gave up drinking, except now and then.
One summer Aksionov was going to the Nizhny Fair, and as he bade good-
bye to his family, his wife said to him, “Ivan Dmitrich, do not start
to-day; I have had a bad dream about you.”
Aksionov laughed, and said, “You are afraid that when I get to the fair
I shall go on a spree.”
His wife replied: “I do not know what I am afraid of; all I know is that
I had a bad dream. I dreamt you returned from the town, and when you
took off your cap I saw that your hair was quite grey.”
Aksionov laughed. “That’s a lucky sign,” said he. “See if I don’t sell
out all my goods, and bring you some presents from the fair.”
So he said good-bye to his family, and drove away.
When he had travelled half-way, he met a merchant whom he knew, and they
put up at the same inn for the night. They had some tea together, and
then went to bed in adjoining rooms.
It was not Aksionov’s habit to sleep late, and, wishing to travel while
it was still cool, he aroused his driver before dawn, and told him to
put in the horses.
Then he made his way across to the landlord of the inn (who lived in a
cottage at the back), paid his bill, and continued his journey.
When he had gone about twenty-five miles, he stopped for the horses to
be fed. Aksionov rested awhile in the passage of the inn, then he
stepped out into the porch, and, ordering a samovar to be heated, got
out his guitar and began to play.
Suddenly a troika drove up with tinkling bells and an official alighted,
followed by two soldiers. He came to Aksionov and began to question him,
asking him who he was and whence he came. Aksionov answered him fully,
and said, “Won’t you have some tea with me?” But the official went on
cross-questioning him and asking him. “Where did you spend last night?
Were you alone, or with a fellow-merchant? Did you see the other
merchant this morning? Why did you leave the inn before dawn?”
Aksionov wondered why he was asked all these questions, but he described
all that had happened, and then added, “Why do you cross-question me as
if I were a thief or a robber? I am travelling on business of my own,
and there is no need to question me.”
Then the official, calling the soldiers, said, “I am the police-officer
of this district, and I question you because the merchant with whom you
spent last night has been found with his throat cut. We must search your
things.”
They entered the house. The soldiers and the police-officer unstrapped
Aksionov’s luggage and searched it. Suddenly the officer drew a knife
out of a bag, crying, “Whose knife is this?”
Aksionov looked, and seeing a blood-stained knife taken from his bag, he
was frightened.
“How is it there is blood on this knife?”
Aksionov tried to answer, but could hardly utter a word, and only
stammered: “I—don’t know—not mine.” Then the police-officer said: “This
morning the merchant was found in bed with his throat cut. You are the
only person who could have done it. The house was locked from inside,
and no one else was there. Here is this blood-stained knife in your bag
and your face and manner betray you! Tell me how you killed him, and how
much money you stole?”
Aksionov swore he had not done it; that he had not seen the merchant
after they had had tea together; that he had no money except eight
thousand rubles of his own, and that the knife was not his. But his
voice was broken, his face pale, and he trembled with fear as though he
went guilty.
The police-officer ordered the soldiers to bind Aksionov and to put him
in the cart. As they tied his feet together and flung him into the cart,
Aksionov crossed himself and wept. His money and goods were taken from
him, and he was sent to the nearest town and imprisoned there. Enquiries
as to his character were made in Vladimir. The merchants and other
inhabitants of that town said that in former days he used to drink and
waste his time, but that he was a good man. Then the trial came on: he
was charged with murdering a merchant from Ryazan, and robbing him of
twenty thousand rubles.
His wife was in despair, and did not know what to believe. Her children
were all quite small; one was a baby at her breast. Taking them all with
her, she went to the town where her husband was in jail. At first she
was not allowed to see him; but after much begging, she obtained
permission from the officials, and was taken to him. When she saw her
husband in prison-dress and in chains, shut up with thieves and
criminals, she fell down, and did not come to her senses for a long
time. Then she drew her children to her, and sat down near him. She told
him of things at home, and asked about what had happened to him. He told
her all, and she asked, “What can we do now?”
“We must petition the Czar not to let an innocent man perish.”
His wife told him that she had sent a petition to the Czar, but it had
not been accepted.
Aksionov did not reply, but only looked downcast.
Then his wife said, “It was not for nothing I dreamt your hair had
turned grey. You remember? You should not have started that day.” And
passing her fingers through his hair, she said: “Vanya dearest, tell
your wife the truth; was it not you who did it?”
“So you, too, suspect me!” said Aksionov, and, hiding his face in his
hands, he began to weep. Then a soldier came to say that the wife and
children must go away; and Aksionov said good-bye to his family for the
last time.
When they were gone, Aksionov recalled what had been said, and when he
remembered that his wife also had suspected him, he said to himself, “It
seems that only God can know the truth; it is to Him alone we must
appeal, and from Him alone expect mercy.”
And Aksionov wrote no more petitions; gave up all hope, and only prayed
to God.
Aksionov was condemned to be flogged and sent to the mines. So he was
flogged with a knot, and when the wounds made by the knot were healed,
he was driven to Siberia with other convicts.
For twenty-six years Aksionov lived as a convict in Siberia. His hair
turned white as snow, and his beard grew long, thin, and grey. All his
mirth went; he stooped; he walked slowly, spoke little, and never
laughed, but he often prayed.
In prison Aksionov learnt to make boots, and earned a little money, with
which he bought The Lives of the Saints. He read this book when there
was light enough in the prison; and on Sundays in the prison-church he
read the lessons and sang in the choir; for his voice was still good.
The prison authorities liked Aksionov for his meekness, and his fellow-
prisoners respected him: they called him “Grandfather,” and “The Saint.”
When they wanted to petition the prison authorities about anything, they
always made Aksionov their spokesman, and when there were quarrels among
the prisoners they came to him to put things right, and to judge the
matter.
No news reached Aksionov from his home, and he did not even know if his
wife and children were still alive.
One day a fresh gang of convicts came to the prison. In the evening the
old prisoners collected round the new ones and asked them what towns or
villages they came from, and what they were sentenced for. Among the
rest Aksionov sat down near the newcomers, and listened with downcast
air to what was said.
One of the new convicts, a tall, strong man of sixty, with a closely-
cropped grey beard, was telling the others what he had been arrested
for.
“Well, friends,” he said, “I only took a horse that was tied to a
sledge, and I was arrested and accused of stealing. I said I had only
taken it to get home quicker, and had then let it go; besides, the
driver was a personal friend of mine. So I said, ‘It’s all right.’ 'No,’
said they, ‘you stole it.’ But how or where I stole it they could not
say. I once really did something wrong, and ought by rights to have come
here long ago, but that time I was not found out. Now I have been sent
here for nothing at all... Eh, but it’s lies I’m telling you; I’ve been
to Siberia before, but I did not stay long.”
“Where are you from?” asked some one.
“From Vladimir. My family are of that town. My name is Makar, and they
also call me Semyonich.”
Aksionov raised his head and said: “Tell me, Semyonich, do you know
anything of the merchants Aksionov of Vladimir? Are they still alive?”
“Know them? Of course I do. The Aksionovs are rich, though their father
is in Siberia: a sinner like ourselves, it seems! As for you, Gran’dad,
how did you come here?”
Aksionov did not like to speak of his misfortune. He only sighed, and
said, “For my sins I have been in prison these twenty-six years.”
“What sins?” asked Makar Semyonich.
But Aksionov only said, “Well, well—I must have deserved it!” He would
have said no more, but his companions told the newcomers how Aksionov
came to be in Siberia; how some one had killed a merchant, and had put
the knife among Aksionov’s things, and Aksionov had been unjustly
condemned.
When Makar Semyonich heard this, he looked at Aksionov, slapped his own
knee, and exclaimed, “Well, this is wonderful! Really wonderful! But how
old you’ve grown, Gran’dad!”
The others asked him why he was so surprised, and where he had seen
Aksionov before; but Makar Semyonich did not reply. He only said: “It’s
wonderful that we should meet here, lads!”
These words made Aksionov wonder whether this man knew who had killed
the merchant; so he said, “Perhaps, Semyonich, you have heard of that
affair, or maybe you’ve seen me before?”
“How could I help hearing? The world’s full of rumours. But it’s a long
time ago, and I’ve forgotten what I heard.”
“Perhaps you heard who killed the merchant?” asked Aksionov.
Makar Semyonich laughed, and replied: “It must have been him in whose
bag the knife was found! If some one else hid the knife there, ‘He’s not
a thief till he’s caught,’ as the saying is. How could any one put a
knife into your bag while it was under your head? It would surely have
woke you up.”
When Aksionov heard these words, he felt sure this was the man who had
killed the merchant. He rose and went away. All that night Aksionov lay
awake. He felt terribly unhappy, and all sorts of images rose in his
mind. There was the image of his wife as she was when he parted from her
to go to the fair. He saw her as if she were present; her face and her
eyes rose before him; he heard her speak and laugh. Then he saw his
children, quite little, as they were at that time: one with a little
cloak on, another at his mother’s breast. And then he remembered himself
as he used to be-young and merry. He remembered how he sat playing the
guitar in the porch of the inn where he was arrested, and how free from
care he had been. He saw, in his mind, the place where he was flogged,
the executioner, and the people standing around; the chains, the
convicts, all the twenty-six years of his prison life, and his premature
old age. The thought of it all made him so wretched that he was ready to
kill himself.
“And it’s all that villain’s doing!” thought Aksionov. And his anger was
so great against Makar Semyonich that he longed for vengeance, even if
he himself should perish for it. He kept repeating prayers all night,
but could get no peace. During the day he did not go near Makar
Semyonich, nor even look at him.
A fortnight passed in this way. Aksionov could not sleep at night, and
was so miserable that he did not know what to do.
One night as he was walking about the prison he noticed some earth that
came rolling out from under one of the shelves on which the prisoners
slept. He stopped to see what it was. Suddenly Makar Semyonich crept out
from under the shelf, and looked up at Aksionov with frightened face.
Aksionov tried to pass without looking at him, but Makar seized his hand
and told him that he had dug a hole under the wall, getting rid of the
earth by putting it into his high-boots, and emptying it out every day
on the road when the prisoners were driven to their work.
“Just you keep quiet, old man, and you shall get out too. If you blab,
they’ll flog the life out of me, but I will kill you first.”
Aksionov trembled with anger as he looked at his enemy. He drew his hand
away, saying, “I have no wish to escape, and you have no need to kill
me; you killed me long ago! As to telling of you—I may do so or not, as
God shall direct.”
Next day, when the convicts were led out to work, the convoy soldiers
noticed that one or other of the prisoners emptied some earth out of his
boots. The prison was searched and the tunnel found. The Governor came
and questioned all the prisoners to find out who had dug the hole. They
all denied any knowledge of it. Those who knew would not betray Makar
Semyonich, knowing he would be flogged almost to death. At last the
Governor turned to Aksionov whom he knew to be a just man, and said:
“You are a truthful old man; tell me, before God, who dug the hole?”
Makar Semyonich stood as if he were quite unconcerned, looking at the
Governor and not so much as glancing at Aksionov. Aksionov’s lips and
hands trembled, and for a long time he could not utter a word. He
thought, “Why should I screen him who ruined my life? Let him pay for
what I have suffered. But if I tell, they will probably flog the life
out of him, and maybe I suspect him wrongly. And, after all, what good
would it be to me?”
“Well, old man,” repeated the Governor, “tell me the truth: who has been
digging under the wall?”
Aksionov glanced at Makar Semyonich, and said, “I cannot say, your
honour. It is not God’s will that I should tell! Do what you like with
me; I am in your hands.”
However much the Governor tried, Aksionov would say no more, and so the
matter had to be left.
That night, when Aksionov was lying on his bed and just beginning to
doze, some one came quietly and sat down on his bed. He peered through
the darkness and recognised Makar.
“What more do you want of me?” asked Aksionov. “Why have you come here?”
Makar Semyonich was silent. So Aksionov sat up and said, “What do you
want? Go away, or I will call the guard!”
Makar Semyonich bent close over Aksionov, and whispered, “Ivan Dmitrich,
forgive me!”
“What for?” asked Aksionov.
“It was I who killed the merchant and hid the knife among your things. I
meant to kill you too, but I heard a noise outside, so I hid the knife
in your bag and escaped out of the window.”
Aksionov was silent, and did not know what to say. Makar Semyonich slid
off the bed-shelf and knelt upon the ground. “Ivan Dmitrich,” said he,
“forgive me! For the love of God, forgive me! I will confess that it was
I who killed the merchant, and you will be released and can go to your
home.”
“It is easy for you to talk,” said Aksionov, “but I have suffered for
you these twenty-six years. Where could I go to now?... My wife is dead,
and my children have forgotten me. I have nowhere to go...”
Makar Semyonich did not rise, but beat his head on the floor. “Ivan
Dmitrich, forgive me!” he cried. “When they flogged me with the knot it
was not so hard to bear as it is to see you now ... yet you had pity on
me, and did not tell. For Christ’s sake forgive me, wretch that I am!”
And he began to sob.
When Aksionov heard him sobbing he, too, began to weep. “God will
forgive you!” said he. “Maybe I am a hundred times worse than you.” And
at these words his heart grew light, and the longing for home left him.
He no longer had any desire to leave the prison, but only hoped for his
last hour to come.
In spite of what Aksionov had said, Makar Semyonich confessed his guilt.
But when the order for his release came, Aksionov was already dead.
HOW A MUZHIK FED TWO OFFICIALS
BY M.Y. SALTYKOV [N.Shchedrin]
Once upon a time there were two Officials. They were both empty-headed,
and so they found themselves one day suddenly transported to an
uninhabited isle, as if on a magic carpet.
They had passed their whole life in a Government Department, where
records were kept; had been born there, bred there, grown old there, and
consequently hadn’t the least understanding for anything outside of the
Department; and the only words they knew were: “With assurances of the
highest esteem, I am your humble servant.”
But the Department was abolished, and as the services of the two
Officials were no longer needed, they were given their freedom. So the
retired Officials migrated to Podyacheskaya Street in St. Petersburg.
Each had his own home, his own cook and his pension.
Waking up on the uninhabited isle, they found themselves lying under the
same cover. At first, of course, they couldn’t understand what had
happened to them, and they spoke as if nothing extraordinary had taken
place.
“What a peculiar dream I had last night, your Excellency,” said the one
Official. “It seemed to me as if I were on an uninhabited isle.”
Scarcely had he uttered the words, when he jumped to his feet. The other
Official also jumped up.
“Good Lord, what does this mean! Where are we?” they cried out in
astonishment.
They felt each other to make sure that they were no longer dreaming, and
finally convinced themselves of the sad reality.
Before them stretched the ocean, and behind them was a little spot of
earth, beyond which the ocean stretched again. They began to cry—the
first time since their Department had been shut down.
They looked at each other, and each noticed that the other was clad in
nothing but his night shirt with his order hanging about his neck.
“We really should be having our coffee now,” observed the one Official.
Then he bethought himself again of the strange situation he was in and a
second time fell to weeping.
“What are we going to do now?” he sobbed. “Even supposing we were to
draw up a report, what good would that do?”
“You know what, your Excellency,” replied the other Official, “you go to
the east and I will go to the west. Toward evening we will come back
here again and, perhaps, we shall have found something.”
They started to ascertain which was the east and which was the west.
They recalled that the head of their Department had once said to them,
“If you want to know where the east is, then turn your face to the
north, and the east will be on your right.” But when they tried to find
out which was the north, they turned to the right and to the left and
looked around on all sides. Having spent their whole life in the
Department of Records, their efforts were all in vain.
“To my mind, your Excellency, the best thing to do would be for you to
go to the right and me to go to the left,” said one Official, who had
served not only in the Department of Records, but had also been teacher
of handwriting in the School for Reserves, and so was a little bit
cleverer.
So said, so done. The one Official went to the right. He came upon
trees, bearing all sorts of fruits. Gladly would he have plucked an
apple, but they all hung so high that he would have been obliged to
climb up. He tried to climb up in vain. All he succeeded in doing was
tearing his night shirt. Then he struck upon a brook. It was swarming
with fish.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had all this fish in Podyacheskaya
Street!” he thought, and his mouth watered. Then he entered woods and
found partridges, grouse and hares.
“Good Lord, what an abundance of food!” he cried. His hunger was going
up tremendously.
But he had to return to the appointed spot with empty hands. He found
the other Official waiting for him.
“Well, Your Excellency, how went it? Did you find anything?”
“Nothing but an old number of the Moscow Gazette, not another thing.”
The Officials lay down to sleep again, but their empty stomachs gave
them no rest They were partly robbed of their sleep by the thought of
who was now enjoying their pension, and partly by the recollection of
the fruit, fishes, partridges, grouse and hares that they had seen
during the day.
“The human pabulum in its original form flies, swims and grows on trees.
Who would have thought it your Excellency?” said the one Official.
“To be sure,” rejoined the other Official. “I, too, must admit that I
had imagined that our breakfast rolls, came into the world just as they
appear on the table.”
“From which it is to be deduced that if we want to eat a pheasant, we
must catch it first, kill it, pull its feathers and roast it. But how’s
that to be done?”
“Yes, how’s that to be done?” repeated the other Official.
They turned silent and tried again to fall asleep, but their hunger
scared sleep away. Before their eyes swarmed flocks of pheasants and
ducks, herds of porklings, and they were all so juicy, done so tenderly
and garnished so deliciously with olives, capers and pickles.
“I believe I could devour my own boots now,” said the one Official.
“Gloves, are not bad either, especially if they have been born quite
mellow,” said the other Official.
The two Officials stared at each other fixedly. In their glances gleamed
an evil-boding fire, their teeth chattered and a dull groaning issued
from their breasts. Slowly they crept upon each other and suddenly they
burst into a fearful frenzy. There was a yelling and groaning, the rags
flew about, and the Official who had been teacher of handwriting bit off
his colleague’s order and swallowed it. However, the sight of blood
brought them both back to their senses.
“God help us!” they cried at the same time. “We certainly don’t mean to
eat each other up. How could we have come to such a pass as this? What
evil genius is making sport of us?”
“We must, by all means, entertain each other to pass the time away,
otherwise there will be murder and death,” said the one Official.
“You begin,” said the other.
“Can you explain why it is that the sun first rises and then sets? Why
isn’t it the reverse?”
“Aren’t you a funny man, your Excellency? You get up first, then you go
to your office and work there, and at night you lie down to sleep.”
“But why can’t one assume the opposite, that is, that one goes to bed,
sees all sorts of dream figures, and then gets up?”
“Well, yes, certainly. But when I was still an Official, I always
thought this way: ‘Now it is dawn, then it will be day, then will come
supper, and finally will come the time to go to bed.’”
The word “supper” recalled that incident in the day’s doings, and the
thought of it made both Officials melancholy, so that the conversation
came to a halt.
“A doctor once told me that human beings can sustain themselves for a
long time on their own juices,” the one Official began again.
“What does that mean?”
“It is quite simple. You see, one’s own juices generate other juices,
and these in their turn still other juices, and so it goes on until
finally all the juices are consumed.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then food has to be taken into the system again.”
“The devil!”
No matter what topic the Officials chose, the conversation invariably
reverted to the subject of eating; which only increased their appetite
more and more. So they decided to give up talking altogether, and,
recollecting the Moscow Gazette that the one of them had found, they
picked it up and began to read eagerly. BANQUET GIVEN BY THE MAYOR
"The table was set for one hundred persons. The magnificence of it
exceeded all expectations. The remotest provinces were represented at
this feast of the gods by the costliest gifts. The golden sturgeon from
Sheksna and the silver pheasant from the Caucasian woods held a
rendezvous with strawberries so seldom to be had in our latitude in
winter...”
“The devil! For God’s sake, stop reading, your Excellency. Couldn’t you
find something else to read about?” cried the other Official in sheer
desperation. He snatched the paper from his colleague’s hands, and
started to read something else.
“Our correspondent in Tula informs us that yesterday a sturgeon was
found in the Upa (an event which even the oldest inhabitants cannot
recall, and all the more remarkable since they recognised the former
police captain in this sturgeon). This was made the occasion for giving
a banquet in the club. The prime cause of the banquet was served in a
large wooden platter garnished with vinegar pickles. A bunch of parsley
stuck out of its mouth. Doctor P—— who acted as toast-master saw to it
that everybody present got a piece of the sturgeon. The sauces to go
with it were unusually varied and delicate—”
“Permit me, your Excellency, it seems to me you are not so careful
either in the selection of reading matter,” interrupted the first
Official, who secured the Gazette again and started to read:
“One of the oldest inhabitants of Viatka has discovered a new and highly
original recipe for fish soup; A live codfish (lota vulgaris) is taken
and beaten with a rod until its liver swells up with anger...”
The Officials’ heads drooped. Whatever their eyes fell upon had
something to do with eating. Even their own thoughts were fatal. No
matter how much they tried to keep their minds off beefsteak and the
like, it was all in vain; their fancy returned invariably, with
irresistible force, back to that for which they were so painfully
yearning.
Suddenly an inspiration came to the Official who had once taught
handwriting.
“I have it!” he cried delightedly. “What do you say to this, your
Excellency? What do you say to our finding a muzhik?”
“A muzhik, your Excellency? What sort of a muzhik?”
“Why a plain ordinary muzhik. A muzhik like all other muzhiks. He would
get the breakfast rolls for us right away, and he could also catch
partridges and fish for us.”
“Hm, a muzhik. But where are we to fetch one from, if there is no muzhik
here?”
“Why shouldn’t there be a muzhik here? There are muzhiks everywhere. All
one has to do is hunt for them. There certainly must be a muzhik hiding
here somewhere so as to get out of working.”
This thought so cheered the Officials that they instantly jumped up to
go in search of a muzhik.
For a long while they wandered about on the island without the desired
result, until finally a concentrated smell of black bread and old sheep
skin assailed their nostrils and guided them in the right direction.
There under a tree was a colossal muzhik lying fast asleep with his
hands under his head. It was clear that to escape his duty to work he
had impudently withdrawn to this island. The indignation of the
Officials knew no bounds.
“What, lying asleep here you lazy-bones you!” they raged at him, “It is
nothing to you that there are two Officials here who are fairly
perishing of hunger. Up, forward, march, work.”
The Muzhik rose and looked at the two severe gentlemen standing in front
of him. His first thought was to make his escape, but the Officials held
him fast.
He had to submit to his fate. He had to work.
First he climbed up on a tree and plucked several dozen of the finest
apples for the Officials. He kept a rotten one for himself. Then he
turned up the earth and dug out some potatoes. Next he started a fire
with two bits of wood that he rubbed against each other. Out of his own
hair he made a snare and caught partridges. Over the fire, by this time
burning brightly, he cooked so many kinds of food that the question
arose in the Officials’ minds whether they shouldn’t give some to this
idler.
Beholding the efforts of the Muzhik, they rejoiced in their hearts. They
had already forgotten how the day before they had nearly been perishing
of hunger, and all they thought of now was: “What a good thing it is to
be an Official. Nothing bad can ever happen to an Official.”
“Are you satisfied, gentlemen?” the lazy Muzhik asked.
“Yes, we appreciate your industry,” replied the Officials.
“Then you will permit me to rest a little?”
“Go take a little rest, but first make a good strong cord.”
The Muzhik gathered wild hemp stalks, laid them in water, beat them and
broke them, and toward evening a good stout cord was ready. The
Officials took the cord and bound the Muzhik to a tree, so that he
should not run away. Then they laid themselves to sleep.
Thus day after day passed, and the Muzhik became so skilful that he
could actually cook soup for the Officials in his bare hands. The
Officials had become round and well-fed and happy. It rejoiced them that
here they needn’t spend any money and that in the meanwhile their
pensions were accumulating in St. Petersburg.
“What is your opinion, your Excellency,” one said to the other after
breakfast one day, “is the Story of the Tower of Babel true? Don’t you
think it is simply an allegory?”
“By no means, your Excellency, I think it was something that really
happened. What other explanation is there for the existence of so many
different languages on earth?”
“Then the Flood must really have taken place, too?”
“Certainly, else; how would you explain the existence of Antediluvian
animals? Besides, the Moscow Gazette says——”
They made search for the old number of the Moscow Gazette, seated
themselves in the shade, and read the whole sheet from beginning to end.
They read of festivities in Moscow, Tula, Penza and Riazan, and
strangely enough felt no discomfort at the description of the delicacies
served.
There is no saying how long this life might have lasted. Finally,
however, it began to bore the Officials. They often thought of their
cooks in St. Petersburg, and even shed a few tears in secret.
“I wonder how it looks in Podyacheskaya Street now, your Excellency,”
one of them said to the other.
“Oh, don’t remind me of it, your Excellency. I am pining away with
homesickness.”
“It is very nice here. There is really no fault to be found with this
place, but the lamb longs for its mother sheep. And it is a pity, too,
for the beautiful uniforms.”
“Yes, indeed, a uniform of the fourth class is no joke. The gold
embroidery alone is enough to make one dizzy.”
Now they began to importune the Muzhik to find some way of getting them
back to Podyacheskaya Street, and strange to say, the Muzhik even knew
where Podyacheskaya Street was. He had once drunk beer and mead there,
and as the saying goes, everything had run down his beard, alas, but
nothing into his mouth. The Officials rejoiced and said: “We are
Officials from Podyacheskaya Street.”
“And I am one of those men—do you remember?—who sit on a scaffolding
hung by ropes from the roofs and paint the outside walls. I am one of
those who crawl about on the roofs like flies. That is what I am,”
replied the Muzhik.
The Muzhik now pondered long and heavily on how to give great pleasure
to his Officials, who had been so gracious to him, the lazy-bones, and
had not scorned his work. And he actually succeeded in constructing a
ship. It was not really a ship, but still it was a vessel, that would
carry them across the ocean close to Podyacheskaya Street.
“Now, take care, you dog, that you don’t drown us,” said the Officials,
when they saw the raft rising and falling on the waves.
“Don’t be afraid. We muzhiks are used to this,” said the Muzhik, making
all the preparations for the journey. He gathered swan’s-down and made a
couch for his two Officials, then he crossed himself and rowed off from
shore.
How frightened the Officials were on the way, how seasick they were
during the storms, how they scolded the coarse Muzhik for his idleness,
can neither be told nor described. The Muzhik, however, just kept rowing
on and fed his Officials on herring. At last, they caught sight of dear
old Mother Neva. Soon they were in the glorious Catherine Canal, and
then, oh joy! they struck the grand Podyacheskaya Street. When the cooks
saw their Officials so well-fed, round and so happy, they rejoiced
immensely. The Officials drank coffee and rolls, then put on their
uniforms and drove to the Pension Bureau. How much money they collected
there is another thing that can neither be told nor described. Nor was
the Muzhik forgotten. The Officials sent a glass of whiskey out to him
and five kopeks. Now, Muzhik, rejoice.
THE SHADES, A PHANTASY BY VLADIMIR G. KORLENKO I
A month and two days had elapsed since the judges, amid the loud acclaim
of the Athenian people, had pronounced the death sentence against the
philosopher Socrates because he had sought to destroy faith in the gods.
What the gadfly is to the horse Socrates was to Athens. The gadfly
stings the horse in order to prevent it from dozing off and to keep it
moving briskly on its course. The philosopher said to the people of
Athens:
“I am your gadfly. My sting pricks your conscience and arouses you when
you are caught napping. Sleep not, sleep not, people of Athens; awake
and seek the truth!”
The people arose in their exasperation and cruelly demanded to be rid of
their gadfly.
“Perchance both of his accusers, Meletus and Anytus, are wrong,” said
the citizens, on leaving the court after sentence had been pronounced.
“But after all whither do his doctrines tend? What would he do? He has
wrought confusion, he overthrows beliefs that have existed since the
beginning, he speaks of new virtues which must be recognised and sought
for, he speaks of a Divinity hitherto unknown to us. The blasphemer, he
deems himself wiser than the gods! No, ‘twere better we remain true to
the old gods whom we know. They may not always be just, sometimes they
may flare up in unjust wrath, and they may also be seized with a wanton
lust for the wives of mortals; but did not our ancestors live with them
in the peace of their souls, did not our forefathers accomplish their
heroic deeds with the help of these very gods? And now the faces of the
Olympians have paled and the old virtue is out of joint. What does it
all lead to? Should not an end be put to this impious wisdom once for
all?”
Thus the citizens of Athens spoke to one another as they left the place,
and the blue twilight was falling. They had determined to kill the
restless gadfly in the hope that the countenances of the gods would
shine again. And yet—before their souls arose the mild figure of the
singular philosopher. There were some citizens who recalled how
courageously he had shared their troubles and dangers at Potidæa; how
he alone had prevented them from committing the sin of unjustly
executing the generals after the victory over the Arginusæe; how he
alone had dared to raise his voice against the tyrants who had had
fifteen hundred people put to death, speaking to the people on the
market-place concerning shepherds and their sheep.
“Is not he a good shepherd,” he asked, “who guards his flock and watches
over its increase? Or is it the work of the good shepherd to reduce the
number of his sheep and disperse them, and of the good ruler to do the
same with his people? Men of Athens, let us investigate this question!”
And at this question of the solitary, undefended philosopher, the faces
of the tyrants paled, while the eyes of the youths kindled with the fire
of just wrath and indignation.
Thus, when on dispersing after the sentence the Athenians recalled all
these things of Socrates, their hearts were oppressed with heavy doubt.
“Have we not done a cruel wrong to the son of Sophroniscus?”
But then the good Athenians looked upon the harbour and the sea, and in
the red glow of the dying day they saw the purple sails of the sharp-
keeled ship, sent to the Delian festival, shimmering in the distance on
the blue Pontus. The ship would not return until the expiration of a
month, and the Athenians recollected that during this time no blood
might be shed in Athens, whether the blood of the innocent or the
guilty. A month, moreover, has many days and still more hours. Supposing
the son of Sophroniscus had been unjustly condemned, who would hinder
his escaping from the prison, especially since he had numerous friends
to help him? Was it so difficult for the rich Plato, for Æschines and
others to bribe the guards? Then the restless gadfly would flee from
Athens to the barbarians in Thessaly, or to the Peloponnesus, or, still
farther, to Egypt; Athens would no longer hear his blasphemous speeches;
his death would not weigh upon the conscience of the worthy citizens,
and so everything would end for the best of all.
Thus said many to themselves that evening, while aloud they praised the
wisdom of the demos and the heliasts. In secret, however, they cherished
the hope that the restless philosopher would leave Athens, fly from the
hemlock to the barbarians, and so free the Athenians of his troublesome
presence and of the pangs of consciences that smote them for inflicting
death upon an innocent man.
Two and thirty times since that evening had the sun risen from the ocean
and dipped down into it again. The ship had returned from Delos and lay
in the harbour with sadly drooping sails, as if ashamed of its native
city. The moon did not shine in the heavens, the sea heaved under a
heavy fog, and on the hills lights peered through the obscurity like the
eyes of men gripped by a sense of guilt.
The stubborn Socrates did not spare the conscience of the good
Athenians.
“We part! You go home and I go to death,” he said to the judges after
the sentence had been pronounced. “I know not, my friends, which of us
chooses the better lot!”
As the time had approached for the return of the ship, many of the
citizens had begun to feel uneasy. Must that obstinate fellow really
die? And they began to appeal to the consciences of Æschines, Phædo,
and other pupils of Socrates, trying to urge them on to further efforts
for their master.
“Will you permit your teacher to die?” they asked reproachfully in
biting tones. “Or do you grudge the few coins it would take to bribe the
guard?”
In vain Crito besought Socrates to take to flight, and complained that
the public, was upbraiding his disciples with lack of friendship and
with avarice. The self-willed philosopher refused to gratify his pupils
or the good people of Athens.
“Let us investigate.” he said. “If it turns out that I must flee, I will
flee; but if I must die, I will die. Let us remember what we once
said—the wise man need not fear death, he need fear nothing but
falsehood. Is it right to abide by the laws we ourselves have made so
long as they are agreeable to us, and refuse to obey those which are
disagreeable? If my memory does not deceive me I believe we once spoke
of these things, did we not?”
“Yes, we did,” answered his pupil.
“And I think all were agreed as to the answer?”
“Yes.”
“But perhaps what is true for others is not true for us?”
“No, truth is alike for all, including ourselves.”
“But perhaps when we must die and not some one else, truth becomes
untruth?”
“No, Socrates, truth remains the truth under all circumstances.”
After his pupil had thus agreed to each premise of Socrates in turn, he
smiled and drew his conclusion.
“If that is so, my friend, mustn’t I die? Or has my head already become
so weak that I am no longer in a condition to draw a logical conclusion?
Then correct me, my friend and show my erring brain the right way.”
His pupil covered his face with his mantle and turned aside.
“Yes,” he said, “now I see you must die.”
And on that evening when the sea tossed hither and thither and roared
dully under the load of fog, and the whimsical wind in mournful
astonishment gently stirred the sails of the ships; when the citizens
meeting on the streets asked one another: “Is he dead?” and their voices
timidly betrayed the hope that he was not dead; when the first breath of
awakened conscience, touched the hearts of the Athenians like the first
messenger of the storm; and when, it seemed the very faces of the gods
were darkened with shame—on that evening at the sinking of the sun the
self-willed man drank the cup of death!
The wind increased in violence and shrouded the city more closely in the
veil of mist, angrily tugging at the sails of the vessels delayed in the
harbour. And the Erinyes sang their gloomy songs to the hearts of the
citizens and whipped up in their breasts that tempest which was later,
to overwhelm the denouncers of Socrates.
But in that hour the first stirrings of regret were still uncertain and
confused. The citizens found more fault with Socrates than ever because
he had not given them the satisfaction of fleeing to Thessaly; they were
annoyed with his pupils because in the last days they had walked about
in sombre mourning attire, a living reproach to the Athenians; they were
vexed with the judges because they had not had the sense and the courage
to resist the blind rage of the excited people; they bore even the gods
resentment.
“To you, ye gods, have we brought this sacrifice,” spoke many. “Rejoice,
ye unsatiable!”
“I know not which of us chooses the better lot!”
Those words of Socrates came back to their memory, those his last words
to the judges and to the people gathered in the court. Now he lay in the
prison quiet and motionless under his cloak, while over the city hovered
mourning, horror, and shame.
Again he became the tormentor of the city, he who was himself no longer
accessible to torment. The gadfly had been killed, but it stung the
people more sharply than ever—sleep not, sleep not this night, O men of
Athens! Sleep not! You have committed an injustice, a cruel injustice,
which can never be erased! II
During those sad days Xenophon, the general, a pupil of Socrates, was
marching with his Ten Thousand in a distant land, amid dangers, seeking
a way of return to his beloved fatherland.
Æschines, Crito, Critobulus, Phædo, and Apollodorus were now occupied
with the preparations for the modest funeral.
Plato was burning his lamp and bending over a parchment; the best
disciple of the philosopher was busy inscribing the deeds, words, and
teachings that marked the end of the sage’s life. A thought is never
lost, and the truth discovered by a great intellect illumines the way
for future generations like a torch in the dark.
There was one other disciple of Socrates. Not long before, the impetuous
Ctesippus had been one of the most frivolous and pleasure-seeking of the
Athenian youths. He had set up beauty as his sole god, and had bowed
before Clinias as its highest exemplar. But since he had become
acquainted with Socrates, all desire for pleasure and all light-
mindedness had gone from him. He looked on indifferently while others
took his place with Clinias. The grace of thought and the harmony of
spirit that he found in Socrates seemed a hundred times more attractive
than the graceful form and the harmonious features of Clinias. With all
the intensity of his stormy temperament he hung on the man who had
disturbed the serenity of his virginal soul, which for the first time
opened to doubts as the bud of a young oak opens to the fresh winds of
spring.
Now that the master was dead, he could find peace neither at his own
hearth nor in the oppressive stillness of the streets nor among his
friends and fellow-disciples. The gods of hearth and home and the gods
of the people inspired him with repugnance.
“I know not,” he said, “whether ye are the best of all the gods to whom
numerous generations have burned incense and brought offerings; all I
know is that for your sake the blind mob extinguished the clear torch of
truth, and for your sake sacrificed the greatest and best of mortals!”
It almost seemed to Ctesippus as though the streets and market-places
still echoed with the shrieking of that unjust sentence. And he
remembered how it was here that the people clamoured for the execution
of the generals who had led them to victory against the Argunisæ, and
how Socrates alone had opposed the savage sentence of the judges and the
blind rage of the mob. But when Socrates himself needed a champion, no
one had been found to defend him with equal strength. Ctesippus blamed
himself and his friends, and for that reason he wanted to avoid
everybody—even himself, if possible.
That evening he went to the sea. But his grief grew only the more
violent. It seemed to him that the mourning daughters of Nereus were
tossing hither and thither on the shore bewailing the death of the best
of the Athenians and the folly of the frenzied city. The waves broke on
the rocky coast with a growl of lament. Their booming sounded like a
funeral dirge.
He turned away, left the shore, and went on further without looking
before him. He forgot time and space and his own ego, filled only with
the afflicting thought of Socrates!
“Yesterday he still was, yesterday his mild words still could be heard.
How is it possible that to-day he no longer is? O night, O giant
mountain shrouded in mist, O heaving sea moved by your own life, O
restless winds that carry the breath of an immeasurable world on your
wings, O starry vault flecked with flying clouds—take me to you,
disclose to me the mystery of this death, if it is revealed to you! And
if ye know not, then grant my ignorant soul your own lofty indifference.
Remove from me these torturing questions. I no longer have strength to
carry them in my bosom without an answer, without even the hope of an
answer. For who shall answer them, now that the lips of Socrates are
sealed in eternal silence, and eternal darkness is laid upon his lids?”
Thus Ctesippus cried out to the sea and the mountains, and to the dark
night, which followed its invariable course, ceaselessly, invisibly,
over the slumbering world. Many hours passed before Ctesippus glanced up
and saw whither his steps had unconsciously led him. A dark horror
seized his soul as he looked about him. III
It seemed as if the unknown gods of eternal night had heard his impious
prayer. Ctesippus looked about, without being able to recognise the
place where he was. The lights of the city had long been extinguished by
the darkness. The roaring of the sea had died away in the distance; his
anxious soul had even lost the recollection of having heard it. No
single sound—no mournful cry of nocturnal bird, nor whirr of wings, nor
rustling of trees, nor murmur of a merry stream—broke the deep silence.
Only the blind will-o’-the-wisps flickered here and there over rocks,
and sheet-lightning, unaccompanied by any sound, flared up and died down
against crag-peaks. This brief illumination merely emphasised the
darkness; and the dead light disclosed the outlines of dead deserts
crossed by gorges like crawling serpents, and rising into rocky heights
in a wild chaos.
All the joyous gods that haunt green groves, purling brooks, and
mountain valleys seemed to have fled forever from these deserts. Pan
alone, the great and mysterious Pan, was hiding somewhere nearby in the
chaos of nature, and with mocking glance seemed to be pursuing the tiny
ant that a short time before had blasphemously asked to know the secret
of the world and of death. Dark, senseless horror overwhelmed the soul
of Ctesippus. It is thus that the sea in stormy floodtide overwhelms a
rock on the shore.
Was it a dream, was it reality, or was it the revelation of the unknown
divinity? Ctesippus felt that in an instant he would step across the
threshold of life, and that his soul would melt into an ocean of
unending, inconceivable horror like a drop of rain in the waves of the
grey sea on a dark and stormy night. But at this moment he suddenly
heard voices that seemed familiar to him, and in the glare of the sheet-
lightning his eyes recognised human figures. IV
On a rocky slope sat a man in deep despair. He had thrown a cloak over
his head and was bowed to the ground. Another figure approached him
softly, cautiously climbing upward and carefully feeling every step. The
first man uncovered his face and exclaimed:
“Is that you I just now saw, my good Socrates? Is that you passing by me
in this cheerless place? I have already spent many hours here without
knowing when day will relieve the night. I have been waiting in vain for
the dawn.”
“Yes, I am Socrates, my friend, and you, are you not Elpidias who died
three days before me?”
“Yes, I am Elpidias, formerly the richest tanner in Athens, now the most
miserable of slaves. For the first time I understand the words of the
poet: ‘Better to be a slave in this world than a ruler in gloomy
Hades.’”
“My friend, if it is disagreeable for you where you are, why don’t you
move to another spot?”
“O Socrates, I marvel at you—how dare you wander about in this cheerless
gloom? I—I sit here overcome with grief and bemoan the joys of a
fleeting life.”
“Friend Elpidias, like you, I, too, was plunged in this gloom when the
light of earthly life was removed from my eyes. But an inner voice told
me: ‘Tread this new path without hesitation’, and I went.”
“But whither do you go, O son of Sophroniscus? Here there is no way, no
path, not even a ray of light; nothing but a chaos of rocks, mist, and
gloom.”
“True. But, my Elpidias, since you are aware of this sad truth, have you
not asked yourself what is the most distressing thing in your present
situation?”
“Undoubtedly the dismal darkness.”
“Then one should seek for light. Perchance you will find here the great
law—that mortals must in darkness seek the source of life. Do you not
think it is better so to seek than to remain sitting in one spot? I
think it is, therefore I keep walking. Farewell!”
“Oh, good Socrates, abandon me not! You go with sure steps through the
pathless chaos in Hades. Hold out to me but a fold of your mantle—”
“If you think it is better for you, too, then follow me, friend
Elpidias.”
And the two shades walked on, while the soul of Ctesippus, released by
sleep from its mortal envelop, flew after them, greedily absorbing the
tones of the clear Socratic speech.
“Are you here, good Socrates?” the voice of the Athenian again was
heard. “Why are you silent? Converse shortens the way, and I swear, by
Hercules, never did I have to traverse such a horrid way.”
“Put questions, friend Elpidias! The question of one who seeks knowledge
brings forth answers and produces conversation.”
Elpidias maintained silence for a moment, and then, after he had
collected his thoughts, asked:
“Yes, this is what I wanted to say—tell me, my poor Socrates, did they
at least give you a good burial?”
“I must confess, friend Elpidias, I cannot satisfy your curiosity.”
“I understand, my poor Socrates, it doesn’t help you cut a figure. Now
with me it was so different! Oh, how they buried me, how magnificently
they buried me, my poor fellow-Wanderer! I still think with great
pleasure of those lovely moments after my death. First they washed me
and sprinkled me with well-smelling balsam. Then my faithful Larissa
dressed me in garments of the finest weave. The best mourning-women of
the city tore their hair from their heads because they had been promised
good pay, and in the family vault they placed an amphora—a crater with
beautiful, decorated handles of bronze, and, besides, a vial.—”
“Stay, friend Elpidias. I am convinced that the faithful Larissa
converted her love into several minas. Yet—”
“Exactly ten minas and four drachmas, not counting the drinks for the
guests. I hardly think that the richest tanner can come before the souls
of his ancestors and boast of such respect on the part of the living.”
“Friend Elpidias, don’t you think that money would have been of more use
to the poor people who are still alive in Athens than to you at this
moment?”
“Admit, Socrates, you are speaking in envy,” responded Elpidias, pained.
“I am sorry for you, unfortunate Socrates, although, between ourselves,
you really deserved your fate. I myself in the family circle said more
than once that an end ought to be put to your impious doings, because—”
“Stay, friend, I thought you wanted to draw a conclusion, and I fear you
are straying from the straight path. Tell me, my good friend, whither
does your wavering thought tend?”
“I wanted to say that in my goodness I am sorry for you. A month ago I
myself spoke against you in the assembly, but truly none of us who
shouted so loud wanted such a great ill to befall you. Believe me, now I
am all the sorrier for you, unhappy philosopher!”
“I thank you. But tell me, my friend, do you perceive a brightness
before your eyes?”
“No, on the contrary such darkness lies before me that I must ask myself
whether this is not the misty region of Orcus.”
“This way, therefore, is just as dark for you as for me?”
“Quite right.”
“If I am not mistaken, you are even holding on to the folds of my
cloak?”
“Also true.”
“Then we are in the same position? You see your ancestors are not
hastening to rejoice in the tale of your pompous burial. Where is the
difference between us, my good friend?”
“But, Socrates, have the gods enveloped your reason in such obscurity
that the difference is not clear to you?”
“Friend, if your situation is clearer to you, then give me your hand and
lead me, for I swear, by the dog, you let me go ahead in this darkness.”
“Cease your scoffing, Socrates! Do not make sport, and do not compare
yourself, your godless self, with a man who died in his own bed——“.
“Ah, I believe I am beginning to understand you. But tell me, Elpidias,
do you hope ever again to rejoice in your bed?”
“Oh, I think not.”
“And was there ever a time when you did not sleep in it?”
“Yes. That was before I bought goods from Agesilaus at half their value.
You see, that Agesilaus is really a deep-dyed rogue——”
“Ah, never mind about Agesilaus! Perhaps he is getting them back, from
your widow at a quarter their value. Then wasn’t I right when I said
that you were in possession of your bed only part of the time?”
“Yes, you were right.”
“Well, and I, too, was in possession of the bed in which I died part of
the time. Proteus, the good guard of the prison, lent it to me for a
period.”
“Oh, if I had known what you were aiming at with your talk, I wouldn’t
have answered your wily questions. By Hercules, such profanation is
unheard of—he compares himself with me! Why, I could put an end to you
with two words, if it came to it——”
“Say them, Elpidias, without fear. Words can scarcely be more
destructive to me than the hemlock.”
“Well, then, that is just what I wanted to say. You unfortunate man, you
died by the sentence of the court and had to drink hemlock!”
“But I have known that since the day of my death, even long before. And
you, unfortunate Elpidias, tell me what caused your death?”
“Oh, with me, it was different, entirely different! You see I got the
dropsy in my abdomen. An expensive physician from Corinth was called who
promised to cure me for two minas, and he was given half that amount in
advance. I am afraid that Larissa in her lack of experience in such
things gave him the other half, too——”
“Then the physician did not keep his promise?”
“That’s it.”
“And you died from dropsy?”
“Ah, Socrates, believe me, three times it wanted to vanquish me, and
finally it quenched the flame of my life!”
“Then tell me—did death by dropsy give you great pleasure?”
“Oh, wicked Socrates, don’t make sport of me. I told you it wanted to
vanquish me three times. I bellowed like a steer under the knife of the
slaughterer, and begged the Parcæ to cut the thread of my life as
quickly as possible.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. But from what do you conclude that the dropsy
was pleasanter to you than the hemlock to me? The hemlock made an end of
me in a moment.”
“I see, I fell into your snare again, you crafty sinner! I won’t enrage
the gods still more by speaking with you, you destroyer of sacred
customs.”
Both were silent, and quiet reigned. But in a short while Elpidias was
again the first to begin a conversation.
“Why are you silent, good Socrates?”
“My friend; didn’t you yourself ask for silence?”
“I am not proud, and I can treat men who are worse than I am
considerately. Don’t let us quarrel.”
“I did not quarrel with you, friend Elpidias, and did not wish to say
anything to insult you. I am merely accustomed to get at the truth of
things by comparisons. My situation is not clear to me. You consider
your situation better, and I should be glad to learn why. On the other
hand, it would not hurt you to learn the truth, whatever shape it may
take.”
“Well, no more of this.”
“Tell me, are you afraid? I don’t think that the feeling I now have can
be called fear.”
“I am afraid, although I have less cause than you to be at odds with the
gods. But don’t you think that the gods, in abandoning us to ourselves
here in this chaos, have cheated us of our hopes?”
“That depends upon what sort of hopes they were. What did you expect
from the gods, Elpidias?”
“Well, well, what did I expect from the gods! What curious questions you
ask, Socrates! If a man throughout life brings offerings, and at his
death passes away with a pious heart and with all that custom demands,
the gods might at least send some one to meet him, at least one of the
inferior gods, to show a man the way. ... But that reminds me. Many a
time when I begged for good luck in traffic in hides, I promised Hermes
calves——”
“And you didn’t have luck?”
“Oh, yes, I had luck, good Socrates, but——“.
“I understand, you had no calf.”
“Bah! Socrates, a rich tanner and not have calves?”
“Now I understand. You had luck, had calves, but you kept them for
yourself, and Hermes received nothing.”
“You’re a clever man. I’ve often said so. I kept only three of my ten
oaths, and I didn’t deal differently with the other gods. If the same is
the case with you, isn’t that the reason, possibly, why we are now
abandoned by the gods? To be sure, I ordered Larissa to sacrifice a
whole hecatomb after my death.”
“But that is Larissa’s affair, whereas it was you, friend Elpidias, who
made the promises.”
“That’s true, that’s true. But you, good Socrates, could you, godless as
you are, deal better with the gods than I who was a god-fearing tanner?”
“My friend, I know not whether I dealt better or worse. At first I
brought offerings without having made vows. Later I offered neither
calves nor vows.”
“What, not a single calf, you unfortunate man?”
“Yes, friend, if Hermes had had to live by my gifts, I am afraid he
would have grown very thin.”
“I understand. You did not traffic in cattle, so you offered articles of
some other trade—probably a mina or so of what the pupils paid you.”
“You know, my friend, I didn’t ask pay of my pupils, and my trade
scarcely sufficed to support me. If the gods reckoned on the sorry
remnants of my meals they miscalculated.”
“Oh, blasphemer, in comparison with you I can be proud of my piety. Ye
gods, look upon this man! I did deceive you at times, but now and then I
shared with you the surplus of some fortunate deal. He who gives at all
gives much in comparison with a blasphemer who gives nothing. Socrates,
I think you had better go on alone! I fear that your company, godless
one, damages me in the eyes of the gods.”
“As you will, good Elpidias. I swear by the dog no one shall force his
company on another. Unhand the fold of my mantle, and farewell. I will
go on alone.”
And Socrates walked forward with a sure tread, feeling the ground,
however, at every step.
But Elpidias behind him instantly cried out:
“Wait, wait, my good fellow-citizen, do not leave an Athenian alone in
this horrible place! I was only making fun. Take what I said as a joke,
and don’t go so quickly. I marvel how you can see a thing in this
hellish darkness.”
“Friend, I have accustomed my eyes to it.”
“That’s good. Still I, can’t approve of your not having brought
sacrifices to the gods. No, I can’t, poor Socrates, I can’t. The
honourable Sophroniscus certainly taught you better in your youth, and
you yourself used to take part in the prayers. I saw you.”
“Yes. But I am accustomed to examine all our motives and to accept only
those that after investigation prove to be reasonable. And so a day came
on which I said to myself: ‘Socrates, here you are praying to the
Olympians. Why are you praying to them?’”
Elpidias laughed.
“Really you philosophers sometimes don’t know how to answer the simplest
questions. I’m a plain tanner who never in my life studied sophistry,
yet I know why I must honour the Olympians.”
“Tell me quickly, so that I, too, may know why.”
“Why? Ha! Ha! It’s too simple, you wise Socrates.”
“So much the better if it’s simple. But don’t keep your wisdom from me.
Tell me—why must one honour the gods?”
“Why. Because everybody does it.”
“Friend, you know very well that not every one honours the gods.
Wouldn’t it be more correct to say ‘many’?”
“Very well, many.”
“But tell me, don’t more men deal wickedly than righteously?”
“I think so. You find more wicked people than good people.”
“Therefore, if you follow the majority, you ought to deal wickedly and
not righteously?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying it, you are. But I think the reason that men reverence
the Olympians is not because the majority worship them. We must find
another, more rational ground. Perhaps you mean they deserve reverence?”
“Yes, very right.”
“Good. But then arises a new question: Why do they deserve reverence?”
“Because of their greatness.”
“Ah, that’s more like it. Perhaps I will soon be agreeing with you. It
only remains for you to tell me wherein their greatness consists. That’s
a difficult question, isn’t it? Let us seek the answer together. Homer
says that the impetuous Ares, when stretched flat on the ground by a
stone thrown by Pallas Athene, covered with his body the space that can
be travelled in seven mornings. You see what an enormous space.”
“Is that wherein greatness consists?”
“There you have me, my friend. That raises another question. Do you
remember the athlete Theophantes? He towered over the people a whole
head’s length, whereas Pericles was no larger than you. But whom do we
call great, Pericles or Theophantes?”
“I see that greatness does not consist in size of body. In that you’re
right. I am glad we agree. Perhaps greatness consists in virtue?”
“Certainly.”
“I think so, too.”
“Well, then, who must bow to whom? The small before the large, or those
who are great in virtues before the wicked?”
“The answer is clear.”
“I think so, too. Now we will look further into this matter. Tell me
truly, did you ever kill other people’s children with arrows?”
“It goes without saying, never! Do you think so ill of me?”
“Nor have you, I trust, ever seduced the wives of other men?”
“I was an upright tanner and a good husband. Don’t forget that,
Socrates, I beg of you!”
“You never became a brute, nor by your lustfulness gave your faithful
Larissa occasion to revenge herself on women whom you had ruined and on
their innocent children?”
“You anger me, really, Socrates.”
“But perhaps you snatched your inheritance from your father and threw
him into prison?”
“Never! Why these insulting questions?”
“Wait, my friend. Perhaps we will both reach a conclusion. Tell me,
would you have considered a man great who had done all these things of
which I have spoken?”
“No, no, no! I should have called such a man a scoundrel, and lodged
public complaint against him with the judges in the market-place.”
“Well, Elpidias, why did you not complain in the market-place against
Zeus and the Olympians? The son of Cronos carried on war with his own
father, and was seized with brutal lust for the daughters of men, while
Hera took vengeance upon innocent virgins. Did not both of them convert
the unhappy daughter of Inachos into a common cow? Did not Apollo kill
all the children of Niobe with his arrows? Did not Callenius steal
bulls? Well, then, Elpidias, if it is true that he who has less virtue
must do honour to him who has more, then you should not build altars to
the Olympians, but they to you.”
“Blaspheme not, impious Socrates! Keep quiet! How dare you judge the
acts of the gods?”
“Friend, a higher power has judged them. Let us investigate the
question. What is the mark of divinity? I think you said, Greatness,
which consists in virtue. Now is not this greatness the one divine spark
in man? But if we test the greatness of the gods by our small human
virtues, and it turns out that that which measures is greater than that
which is measured, then it follows that the divine principle itself
condemns the Olympians. But, then—”
“What, then?”
“Then, friend Elpidias, they are no gods, but deceptive phantoms,
creations of a dream. Is it not so?”
“Ah, that’s whither your talk leads, you bare-footed philosopher! Now I
see what they said of you is true. You are like that fish that takes men
captive with its look. So you took me captive in order to confound my
believing soul and awaken doubt in it. It was already beginning to waver
in its reverence for Zeus. Speak alone. I won’t answer any more.”
“Be not wrathful, Elpidias! I don’t wish to inflict any evil upon you.
But if you are tired of following my arguments to their logical
conclusions, permit me to relate to you an allegory of a Milesian youth.
Allegories rest the mind, and the relaxation is not unprofitable.”
“Speak, if your story is not too long and its purpose is good.”
“Its purpose is truth, friend Elpidias, and I will be brief. Once, you
know, in ancient times, Miletus was exposed to the attacks of the
barbarians. Among the youth who were seized was a son of the wisest and
best of all the citizens in the land. His precious child was overtaken
by a severe illness and became unconscious. He was abandoned and allowed
to lie like worthless booty. In the dead of night he came to his senses.
High above him glimmered the stars. Round about stretched the desert;
and in the distance he heard the howl of beasts of prey. He was alone.
“He was entirely alone, and, besides that, the gods had taken from him
the recollection of his former life. In vain he racked his brain—it was
as dark and empty as the inhospitable desert in which he found himself.
But somewhere, far away, behind the misty and obscure figures conjured
up by his reason, loomed the thought of his lost home, and a vague
realisation of the figure of the best of all men; and in his heart
resounded the word ‘father.’ Doesn’t it seem to you that the fate of
this youth resembles the fate of all humanity?”
“How so?”
“Do we not all awake to life on earth with a hazy recollection of
another home? And does not the figure of the great unknown hover before
our souls?”
“Continue, Socrates, I am listening.”
“The youth revived, arose, and walked cautiously, seeking to avoid all
dangers. When after long wanderings his strength was nearly gone, he
discerned a fire in the misty distance which illumined the darkness and
banished the cold. A faint hope crept into his weary soul, and the
recollections of his father’s house again awoke within him. The youth
walked toward the light, and cried: ‘It is you, my father, it is you!’
“And was it his father’s house?”
“No, it was merely a night lodging of wild nomads. So for many years he
led the miserable life of a captive slave, and only in his dreams saw
the distant home and rested on his father’s bosom. Sometimes with weak
hand he endeavoured to lure from dead clay or wood or stone the face and
form that ever hovered before him. There even came moments when he grew
weary and embraced his own handiwork and prayed to it and wet it with
his tears. But the stone remained cold stone. And as he waxed in years
the youth destroyed his creations, which already seemed to him a vile
defamation of his ever-present dreams. At last fate brought him to a
good barbarian, who asked him for the cause of his constant mourning.
When the youth, confided to him the hopes and longings of his soul, the
barbarian, a wise man, said:
“‘The world would be better did such a man and such a country exist as
that of which you speak. But by what mark would you recognise your
father?’
“‘In my country,’ answered the youth, ‘they reverenced wisdom and virtue
and looked up to my father as to the master.’
“‘Well and good,’ answered the barbarian. ‘I must assume that a kernel
of your father’s teaching resides in you. Therefore take up the
wanderer’s staff, and proceed on your way. Seek perfect wisdom and
truth, and when you have found them, cast aside your staff—there will be
your home and your father.’
“And the youth went on his way at break of day—”
“Did he find the one whom he sought?”
“He is still seeking. Many countries, cities and men has he seen. He has
come to know all the ways by land; he has traversed the stormy seas; he
has searched the courses of the stars in heaven by which a pilgrim can
direct his course in the limitless deserts. And each time that on his
wearisome way an inviting fire lighted up the darkness before his eyes,
his heart beat faster and hope crept into his soul. 'That is my father’s
hospitable house,’ he thought.
“And when a hospitable host would greet the tired traveller and offer
him the peace and blessing of his hearth, the youth would fall at his
feet and say with emotion: ‘I thank you, my father! Do you not recognise
your son?’
“And many were prepared to take him as their son, for at that time
children were frequently kidnapped. But after the first glow of
enthusiasm, the youth would detect traces of imperfection, sometimes
even of wickedness. Then he would begin to investigate and to test his
host with questions concerning justice and injustice. And soon he would
be driven forth again upon the cold wearisome way. More than once he
said to himself: ‘I will remain at this last hearth, I will preserve my
last belief. It shall be the home of my father.’”
“Do you know, Socrates, perhaps that would have been the most sensible
thing to do.”
“So he thought sometimes. But the habit of investigating, the confused
dream of a father, gave him no peace. Again and again he shook the dust
from his feet; again and again he grasped his staff. Not a few stormy
nights found him shelterless. Doesn’t it seem to you that the fate of
this youth resembles the fate of mankind?”
“Why?”
“Does not the race of man make trial of its childish belief and doubt it
while seeking the unknown? Doesn’t it fashion the form of its father in
wood, stone, custom, and tradition? And then man finds the form
imperfect, destroys it, and again goes on his wanderings in the desert
of doubt. Always for the purpose of seeking something better—”
“Oh, you cunning sage, now I understand the purpose of your allegory!
And I will tell you to your face that if only a ray of light were to
penetrate this gloom, I would not put the Lord on trial with unnecessary
questions—”
“Friend, the light is already shining,” answered Socrates. V
It seemed as if the words of the philosopher had taken effect. High up
in the distance a beam of light penetrated a vapoury envelop and
disappeared in the mountains. It was followed by a second and a third.
There beyond the darkness luminous genii seemed to be hovering, and a
great mystery seemed about to be revealed, as if the breath of life were
blowing, as if some great ceremony were in process. But it was still
very remote. The shades descended thicker and thicker; foggy clouds
rolled into masses, separated, and chased one another endlessly,
ceaselessly.
A blue light from a distant peak fell upon a deep ravine; the clouds
rose and covered the heavens to the zenith.
The rays disappeared and withdrew to a greater and greater distance, as
if fleeing from this vale of shades and horrors. Socrates stood and
looked after them sadly. Elpidias peered up at the peak full of dread.
“Look, Socrates! What do you see there on the mountain?”
“Friend,” answered; the philosopher, “let us investigate our situation.
Since we are in motion, we must arrive somewhere, and since earthly
existence must have a limit, I believe that this limit is to be found at
the parting of two beginnings. In the struggle of light with darkness we
attain the crown of our endeavours. Since the ability to think has not
been taken from us, I believe that it is the will of the divine being
who called our power of thinking into existence that we should
investigate the goal of our endeavours ourselves. Therefore, Elpidias,
let us in dignified manner go to meet the dawn that lies beyond those
clouds.”
“Oh, my friend! If that is the dawn, I would rather the long cheerless
night had endured forever, for it was quiet and peaceful. Don’t you
think our time passed tolerably well in instructive converse? And now my
soul trembles before the tempest drawing nigh. Say what you will, but
there before us are no ordinary shades of the dead night.”
Zeus hurled a bolt into the bottomless gulf.
Ctesippus looked up to the peak, and his soul was frozen with horror.
Huge sombre figures of the Olympian gods crowded on the mountain in a
circle. A last ray shot through the region of clouds and mists, and died
away like a faint memory. A storm was approaching now, and the powers of
night were once more in the ascendant. Dark figures covered the heavens.
In the centre Ctesippus could discern the all-powerful son of Cronos
surrounded by a halo. The sombre figures of the older gods encircled him
in wrathful excitement. Like flocks of birds winging their way in the
twilight, like eddies of dust driven by a hurricane, like autumn leaves
lashed by Boreas, numerous minor gods hovered in long clouds and
occupied the spaces.
When the clouds gradually lifted from the peak and sent down dismal
horror to embrace the earth, Ctesippus fell upon his knees. Later, he
admitted that in this dreadful moment he forgot all his master’s
deductions and conclusions. His courage failed him; and terror took
possession of his soul.
He merely listened.
Two voices resounded there where before had been silence, the one the
mighty and threatening voice of the Godhead, the other the weak voice of
a mortal which the wind carried from the mountain slope to the spot
where Ctesippus had left Socrates.
“Are you,” thus spake the voice from the clouds, “are you the
blasphemous Socrates who strives with the gods of heaven and earth? Once
there were none so joyous, so immortal, as we. Now, for long we have
passed our days in darkness because of the unbelief and doubt that have
come upon earth. Never has the mist closed in on us so heavily as since
the time your voice resounded in Athens, the city we once so dearly
loved. Why did you not follow the commands of your father, Sophroniscus?
The good man permitted himself a few little sins, especially in his
youth, yet by way of recompense, we frequently enjoyed the smell of his
offerings—”
“Stay, son of Cronos, and solve my doubts! Do I understand that you
prefer cowardly hypocrisy to searchings for the truth?”
At this question the crags trembled with the shock of a thundering peal.
The first breath of the tempest scattered in the distant gorges. But the
mountains still trembled, for he who was enthroned upon them still
trembled. And in the anxious quiet of the night only distant sighs could
be heard.
In the very bowels of the earth the chained Titans seemed to be groaning
under the blow of the son of Cronos.
“Where are you now, you impious questioner?” suddenly came the mocking
voice of the Olympian.
“I am here, son of Cronos, on the same spot. Nothing but your answer can
move me from it. I am waiting.”
Thunder bellowed in the clouds like a wild animal amazed at the daring
of a Lybian tamer’s fearless approach. At the end of a few moments the
Voice again rolled over the spaces:
“Son of Sophroniscus! Is it not enough that you bred so much scepticism
on earth that the clouds of your doubt reached even to Olympus? Indeed,
many a time when you were carrying on your discourse in the market-
places or in the academies or on the promenades, it seemed to me as if
you had already destroyed all the altars on earth, and the dust were
rising from them up to us here on the mountain. Even that is not enough!
Here before my very face you will not recognise the power of the
immortals—”
“Zeus, thou art wrathful. Tell me, who gave me the ‘Daemon’ which spoke
to my soul throughout my life and forced me to seek the truth without
resting?”
Mysterious silence reigned in the clouds.
“Was it not you? You are silent? Then I will investigate the matter.
Either this divine beginning emanates from you or from some one else. If
from you, I bring it to you as an offering. I offer you the ripe fruit
of my life, the flame of the spark of your own kindling! See, son of
Cronos, I preserved my gift; in my deepest heart grew the seed that you
sowed. It is the very fire of my soul. It burned in those crises when
with my own hand I tore the thread of life. Why will you not accept it?
Would you have me regard you as a poor master whose age prevents him
from seeing that his own pupil obediently follows out his commands? Who
are you that would command me to stifle the flame that has illuminated
my whole life, ever since it was penetrated by the first ray of sacred
thought? The sun says not to the stars: ‘Be extinguished that I may
rise.’ The sun rises and the weak glimmer of the stars is quenched by
its far, far stronger light. The day says not to the torch: ‘Be
extinguished; you interfere with me.’ The day breaks, and the torch
smokes, but no longer shines. The divinity that I am questing is not you
who are afraid of doubt. That divinity is like the day, like the sun,
and shines without extinguishing other lights. The god I seek is the god
who would say to me: ‘Wanderer, give me your torch, you no longer need
it, for I am the source of all light. Searcher for truth, set upon my
altar the little gift of your doubt, because in me is its solution.’ If
you are that god, harken to my questions. No one kills his own child,
and my doubts are a branch of the eternal spirit whose name is truth.”
Round about, the fires of heaven tore the dark clouds, and out of the
howling storm again resounded the powerful voice:
“Whither did your doubts tend, you arrogant sage, who renounce humility,
the most beautiful adornment of earthly virtues? You abandoned the
friendly shelter of credulous simplicity to wander in the desert of
doubt. You have seen this dead space from which the living gods have
departed. Will you traverse it, you insignificant worm, who crawl in the
dust of your pitiful profanation of the gods? Will you vivify the world?
Will you conceive the unknown divinity to whom you do not dare to pray?
You miserable digger of dung, soiled by the smut of ruined altars, are
you perchance the architect who shall build the new temple? Upon what do
you base your hopes, you who disavow the old gods and have no new gods
to take their place? The eternal night of doubts unsolved, the dead
desert, deprived of the living spirit—this is your world, you pitiful
worm, who gnawed at the living belief which was a refuge for simple
hearts, who converted the world into a dead chaos. Now, then, where are
you, you insignificant, blasphemous sage?”
Nothing was heard but the mighty storm roaring through the spaces. Then
the thunder died away, the wind folded its pinions, and torrents of rain
streamed through the darkness, like incessant floods of tears which
threatened to devour the earth and drown it in a deluge of unquenchable
grief.
It seemed to Ctesippus that the master was overcome, and that the
fearless, restless, questioning voice had been silenced forever. But a
few moments later it issued again from the same spot.
“Your words, son of Cronos, hit the mark better than your thunderbolts.
The thoughts you have cast into my terrified soul have haunted me often,
and it has sometimes seemed as if my heart would break under the burden
of their unendurable anguish. Yes, I abandoned the friendly shelter of
credulous simplicity. Yes, I have seen the spaces from which the living
gods have departed enveloped in the night of eternal doubt. But I walked
without fear, for my ‘Daemon’ lighted the way, the divine beginning of
all life. Let us investigate the question. Are not offerings of incense
burnt on your altars in the name of Him who gives life? You are stealing
what belongs to another! Not you, but that other, is served by credulous
simplicity. Yes, you are right, I am no architect. I am not the builder
of a new temple. Not to me was it given to raise from the earth to the
heavens the glorious structure of the coming faith. I am one who digs
dung, soiled by the smut of destruction. But my conscience tells me, son
of Cronos, that the work of one who digs dung is also necessary for the
future temple. When the time comes for the proud and stately edifice to
stand on the purified place, and for the living divinity of the new
belief to erect his throne upon it, I, the modest digger of dung, will
go to him and say: ‘Here am I who restlessly crawled in the dust of
disavowal. When surrounded by fog and soot, I had no time to raise my
eyes from the ground; my head had only a vague conception of the future
building. Will you reject me, you just one, Just, and True, and Great?’”
Silence and astonishment reigned in the spaces. Then Socrates raised his
voice, and continued:
“The sunbeam falls upon the filthy puddle, and light vapour, leaving
heavy mud behind, rises to the sun, melts, and dissolves in the ether.
With your sunbeam you touched my dust-laden soul and it aspired to you,
Unknown One, whose name is mystery! I sought for you, because you are
Truth; I strove to attain to you, because you are Justice; I loved you,
because you are Love; I died for you, because you are the Source of
Life. Will you reject me, O Unknown? My torturing doubts, my passionate
search for truth, my difficult life, my voluntary death—accept them as a
bloodless offering, as a prayer, as a sigh! Absorb them as the
immeasurable ether absorbs the evaporating mists! Take them, you whose
name I do not know, let not the ghosts of the night I have traversed bar
the way to you, to eternal light! Give way, you shades who dim the light
of the dawn! I tell you, gods of my people, you are unjust, and where
there is no justice there can be no truth, but only phantoms, creations
of a dream. To this conclusion have I come, I, Socrates, who sought to
fathom all things. Rise, dead mists, I go my way to Him whom I have
sought all my life long!”
The thunder burst again—a short, abrupt peal, as if the egis had fallen
from the weakened hand of the thunderer. Storm-voices trembled from the
mountains, sounding dully in the gorges, and died away in the clefts. In
their place resounded other, marvellous tones.
When Ctesippus looked up in astonishment, a spectacle presented itself
such as no mortal eyes had ever seen.
The night vanished. The clouds lifted, and godly figures floated in the
azure like golden ornaments on the hem of a festive robe. Heroic forms
glimmered over the remote crags and ravines, and Elpidias, whose little
figure was seen standing at the edge of a cleft in the rocks, stretched
his hands toward them, as if beseeching the vanishing gods for a
solution of his fate.
A mountain-peak now stood out clearly above the mysterious mist,
gleaming like a torch over dark blue valleys. The son of Cronos, the
thunderer, was no longer enthroned upon it, and the other Olympians too
were gone.
Socrates stood alone in the light of the sun under the high heavens.
Ctesippus was distinctly conscious of the pulse-beat of a mysterious
life quivering throughout nature, stirring even the tiniest blade of
grass.
A breath seemed to be stirring the balmy air, a voice to be sounding in
wonderful harmony, an invisible tread to be heard—the tread of the
radiant Dawn!
And on the illumined peak a man still stood, stretching out his arms in
mute ecstasy, moved by a mighty impulse.
A moment, and all disappeared, and the light of an ordinary day shone
upon the awakened soul of Ctesippus. It was like dismal twilight after
the revelation of nature that had blown upon him the breath of an
unknown life.
In deep silence the pupils of the philosopher listened to the marvellous
recital of Ctesippus. Plato broke the silence.
“Let us investigate the dream and its significance,” he said.
“Let us investigate it,” responded the others.
THE SIGNAL BY VSEVOLOD M. GARSHIN.
Semyon Ivanov was a track-walker. His hut was ten versts away from a
railroad station in one direction and twelve versts away in the other.
About four versts away there was a cotton mill that had opened the year
before, and its tall chimney rose up darkly from behind the forest. The
only dwellings around were the distant huts of the other track-walkers.
Semyon Ivanov’s health had been completely shattered. Nine years before
he had served right through the war as servant to an officer. The sun
had roasted him, the cold frozen him, and hunger famished him on the
forced marches of forty and fifty versts a day in the heat and the cold
and the rain and the shine. The bullets had whizzed about him, but,
thank God! none had struck him.
Semyon’s regiment had once been on the firing line. For a whole week
there had been skirmishing with the Turks, only a deep ravine separating
the two hostile armies; and from morn till eve there had been a steady
cross-fire. Thrice daily Semyon carried a steaming samovar and his
officer’s meals from the camp kitchen to the ravine. The bullets hummed
about him and rattled viciously against the rocks. Semyon was terrified
and cried sometimes, but still he kept right on. The officers were
pleased with him, because he always had hot tea ready for them.
He returned from the campaign with limbs unbroken but crippled with
rheumatism. He had experienced no little sorrow since then. He arrived
home to find that his father, an old man, and his little four-year-old
son had died. Semyon remained alone with his wife. They could not do
much. It was difficult to plough with rheumatic arms and legs. They
could no longer stay in their village, so they started off to seek their
fortune in new places. They stayed for a short time on the line, in
Kherson and Donshchina, but nowhere found luck. Then the wife went out
to service, and Semyon continued to travel about. Once he happened to
ride on an engine, and at one of the stations the face of the station-
master seemed familiar to him. Semyon looked at the station-master and
the station-master looked at Semyon, and they recognised each other. He
had been an officer in Semyon’s regiment.
“You are Ivanov?” he said.
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“How do you come to be here?”
Semyon told him all.
“Where are you off to?”
“I cannot tell you, sir.”
“Idiot! What do you mean by ‘cannot tell you?’”
“I mean what I say, your Excellency. There is nowhere for me to go to. I
must hunt for work, sir.”
The station-master looked at him, thought a bit, and said: “See here,
friend, stay here a while at the station. You are married, I think.
Where is your wife?”
“Yes, your Excellency, I am married. My wife is at Kursk, in service
with a merchant.”
“Well, write to your wife to come here. I will give you a free pass for
her. There is a position as track-walker open. I will speak to the Chief
on your behalf.”
“I shall be very grateful to you, your Excellency,” replied Semyon.
He stayed at the station, helped in the kitchen, cut firewood, kept the
yard clean, and swept the platform. In a fortnight’s time his wife
arrived, and Semyon went on a hand-trolley to his hut. The hut was a new
one and warm, with as much wood as he wanted. There was a little
vegetable garden, the legacy of former track-walkers, and there was
about half a dessiatin of ploughed land on either side of the railway
embankment. Semyon was rejoiced. He began to think of doing some
farming, of purchasing a cow and a horse.
He was given all necessary stores—a green flag, a red flag, lanterns, a
horn, hammer, screw-wrench for the nuts, a crow-bar, spade, broom,
bolts, and nails; they gave him two books of regulations and a time-
table of the train. At first Semyon could not sleep at night, and learnt
the whole time-table by heart. Two hours before a train was due he would
go over his section, sit on the bench at his hut, and look and listen
whether the rails were trembling or the rumble of the train could be
heard. He even learned the regulations by heart, although he could only
read by spelling out each word.
It was summer; the work was not heavy; there was no snow to clear away,
and the trains on that line were infrequent. Semyon used to go over his
verst twice a day, examine and screw up nuts here and there, keep the
bed level, look at the water-pipes, and then go home to his own affairs.
There was only one drawback—he always had to get the inspector’s
permission for the least little thing he wanted to do. Semyon and his
wife were even beginning to be bored.
Two months passed, and Semyon commenced to make the acquaintance of his
neighbours, the track-walkers on either side of him. One was a very old
man, whom the authorities were always meaning to relieve. He scarcely
moved out of his hut. His wife used to do all his work. The other track-
walker, nearer the station, was a young man, thin, but muscular. He and
Semyon met for the first time on the line midway between the huts.
Semyon took off his hat and bowed. “Good health to you, neighbour,” he
said.
The neighbour glanced askance at him. “How do you do?” he replied; then
turned around and made off.
Later the wives met. Semyon’s wife passed the time of day with her
neighbour, but neither did she say much.
On one occasion Semyon said to her: “Young woman, your husband is not
very talkative.”
The woman said nothing at first, then replied: “But what is there for
him to talk about? Every one has his own business. Go your way, and God
be with you.”
However, after another month or so they became acquainted. Semyon would
go with Vasily along the line, sit on the edge of a pipe, smoke, and
talk of life. Vasily, for the most part, kept silent, but Semyon talked
of his village, and of the campaign through which he had passed.
“I have had no little sorrow in my day,” he would say; “and goodness
knows I have not lived long. God has not given me happiness, but what He
may give, so will it be. That’s so, friend Vasily Stepanych.”
Vasily Stepanych knocked the ashes out of his pipe against a rail, stood
up, and said: “It is not luck which follows us in life, but human
beings. There is no crueller beast on this earth than man. Wolf does not
eat wolf, but man will readily devour man.”
“Come, friend, don’t say that; a wolf eats wolf.”
“The words came into my mind and I said it. All the same, there is
nothing crueller than man. If it were not for his wickedness and greed,
it would be possible to live. Everybody tries to sting you to the quick,
to bite and eat you up.”
Semyon pondered a bit. “I don’t know, brother,” he said; “perhaps it is
as you say, and perhaps it is God’s will.”
“And perhaps,” said Vasily, “it is waste of time for me to talk to you.
To put everything unpleasant on God, and sit and suffer, means, brother,
being not a man but an animal. That’s what I have to say.” And he turned
and went off without saying good-bye.
Semyon also got up. “Neighbour,” he called, “why do you lose your
temper?” But his neighbour did not look round, and kept on his way.
Semyon gazed after him until he was lost to sight in the cutting at the
turn. He went home and said to his wife: “Arina, our neighbour is a
wicked person, not a man.”
However, they did not quarrel. They met again and discussed the same
topics.
“All, mend, if it were not for men we should not be poking in these
huts,” said Vasily, on one occasion.
“And what if we are poking in these huts? It’s not so bad. You can live
in them.”
“Live in them, indeed! Bah, you!... You have lived long and learned
little, looked at much and seen little. What sort of life is there for a
poor man in a hut here or there? The cannibals are devouring you. They
are sucking up all your life-blood, and when you become old, they will
throw you out just as they do husks to feed the pigs on. What pay do you
get?”
“Not much, Vasily Stepanych—twelve rubles.”
“And I, thirteen and a half rubles. Why? By the regulations the company
should give us fifteen rubles a month with firing and lighting. Who
decides that you should have twelve rubles, or I thirteen and a half?
Ask yourself! And you say a man can live on that? You understand it is
not a question of one and a half rubles or three rubles—even if they
paid us each the whole fifteen rubles. I was at the station last month.
The director passed through. I saw him. I had that honour. He had a
separate coach. He came out and stood on the platform... I shall not
stay here long; I shall go somewhere, anywhere, follow my nose.”
“But where will you go, Stepanych? Leave well enough alone. Here you
have a house, warmth, a little piece of land. Your wife is a worker.”
“Land! You should look at my piece of land. Not a twig on it—nothing. I
planted some cabbages in the spring, just when the inspector came along.
He said: ‘What is this? Why have you not reported this? Why have you
done this without permission? Dig them up, roots and all.’ He was drunk.
Another time he would not have said a word, but this time it struck him.
Three rubles fine!...”
Vasily kept silent for a while, pulling at his pipe, then added quietly:
“A little more and I should have done for him.”
“You are hot-tempered.”
“No, I am not hot-tempered, but I tell the truth and think. Yes, he will
still get a bloody nose from me. I will complain to the Chief. We will
see then!” And Vasily did complain to the Chief.
Once the Chief came to inspect the line. Three days later important
personages were coming from St. Petersburg and would pass over the line.
They were conducting an inquiry, so that previous to their journey it
was necessary to put everything in order. Ballast was laid down, the bed
was levelled, the sleepers carefully examined, spikes driven in a bit,
nuts screwed up, posts painted, and orders given for yellow sand to be
sprinkled at the level crossings. The woman at the neighbouring hut
turned her old man out to weed. Semyon worked for a whole week. He put
everything in order, mended his kaftan, cleaned and polished his brass
plate until it fairly shone. Vasily also worked hard. The Chief arrived
on a trolley, four men working the handles and the levers making the six
wheels hum. The trolley travelled at twenty versts an hour, but the
wheels squeaked. It reached Semyon’s hut, and he ran out and reported in
soldierly fashion. All appeared to be in repair.
“Have you been here long?” inquired the Chief.
“Since the second of May, your Excellency.”
“All right. Thank you. And who is at hut No. 164?”
The traffic inspector (he was travelling with the Chief on the trolley)
replied: “Vasily Spiridov.”
“Spiridov, Spiridov... Ah! is he the man against whom you made a note
last year?”
“He is.”
“Well, we will see Vasily Spiridov. Go on!” The workmen laid to the
handles, and the trolley got under way. Semyon watched it, and thought,
“There will be trouble between them and my neighbour.”
About two hours later he started on his round. He saw some one coming
along the line from the cutting. Something white showed on his head.
Semyon began to look more attentively. It was Vasily. He had a stick in
his hand, a small bundle on his shoulder, and his cheek was bound up in
a handkerchief.
“Where are you off to?” cried Semyon.
Vasily came quite close. He was very pale, white as chalk, and his eyes
had a wild look. Almost choking, he muttered: “To town—to Moscow—to the
head office.”
“Head office? Ah, you are going to complain, I suppose. Give it up!
Vasily Stepanych, forget it.”
“No, mate, I will not forget. It is too late. See! He struck me in the
face, drew blood. So long as I live I will not forget. I will not leave
it like this!”
Semyon took his hand. “Give it up, Stepanych. I am giving you good
advice. You will not better things...”
“Better things! I know myself I shan’t better things. You were right
about Fate. It would be better for me not to do it, but one must stand
up for the right.” “But tell me, how did it happen?”
“How? He examined everything, got down from the trolley, looked into the
hut. I knew beforehand that he would be strict, and so I had put
everything into proper order. He was just going when I made my
complaint. He immediately cried out: ‘Here is a Government inquiry
coming, and you make a complaint about a vegetable garden. Here are
privy councillors coming, and you annoy me with cabbages!’ I lost
patience and said something—not very much, but it offended him, and he
struck me in the face. I stood still; I did nothing, just as if what he
did was perfectly all right. They went off; I came to myself, washed my
face, and left.”
“And what about the hut?”
“My wife is staying there. She will look after things. Never mind about
their roads.”
Vasily got up and collected himself. “Good-bye, Ivanov. I do not know
whether I shall get any one at the office to listen to me.”
“Surely you are not going to walk?”
“At the station I will try to get on a freight train, and to-morrow I
shall be in Moscow.”
The neighbours bade each other farewell. Vasily was absent for some
time. His wife worked for him night and day. She never slept, and wore
herself out waiting for her husband. On the third day the commission
arrived. An engine, luggage-van, and two first-class saloons; but Vasily
was still away. Semyon saw his wife on the fourth day. Her face was
swollen from crying and her eyes were red.
“Has your husband returned?” he asked. But the woman only made a gesture
with her hands, and without saying a word went her way.
Semyon had learnt when still a lad to make flutes out of a kind of reed.
He used to burn out the heart of the stalk, make holes where necessary,
drill them, fix a mouthpiece at one end, and tune them so well that it
was possible to play almost any air on them. He made a number of them in
his spare time, and sent them by his friends amongst the freight
brakemen to the bazaar in the town. He got two kopeks apiece for them.
On the day following the visit of the commission he left his wife at
home to meet the six o’clock train, and started off to the forest to cut
some sticks. He went to the end of his section—at this point the line
made a sharp turn—descended the embankment, and struck into the wood at
the foot of the mountain. About half a verst away there was a big marsh,
around which splendid reeds for his flutes grew. He cut a whole bundle
of stalks and started back home. The sun was already dropping low, and
in the dead stillness only the twittering of the birds was audible, and
the crackle of the dead wood under his feet. As he walked along rapidly,
he fancied he heard the clang of iron striking iron, and he redoubled
his pace. There was no repair going on in his section. What did it mean?
He emerged from the woods, the railway embankment stood high before him;
on the top a man was squatting on the bed of the line busily engaged in
something. Semyon commenced quietly to crawl up towards him. He thought
it was some one after the nuts which secure the rails. He watched, and
the man got up, holding a crow-bar in his hand. He had loosened a rail,
so that it would move to one side. A mist swam before Semyon’s eyes; he
wanted to cry out, but could not. It was Vasily! Semyon scrambled up the
bank, as Vasily with crow-bar and wrench slid headlong down the other
side.
“Vasily Stepanych! My dear friend, come back! Give me the crow-bar. We
will put the rail back; no one will know. Come back! Save your soul from
sin!”
Vasily did not look back, but disappeared into the woods.
Semyon stood before the rail which had been torn up. He threw down his
bundle of sticks. A train was due; not a freight, but a passenger-train.
And he had nothing with which to stop it, no flag. He could not replace
the rail and could not drive in the spikes with his bare hands. It was
necessary to run, absolutely necessary to run to the hut for some tools.
“God help me!” he murmured.
Semyon started running towards his hut. He was out of breath, but still
ran, falling every now and then. He had cleared the forest; he was only
a few hundred feet from his hut, not more, when he heard the distant
hooter of the factory sound—six o’clock! In two minutes’ time No. 7
train was due. “Oh, Lord! Have pity on innocent souls!” In his mind
Semyon saw the engine strike against the loosened rail with its left
wheel, shiver, careen, tear up and splinter the sleepers—and just there,
there was a curve and the embankment seventy feet high, down which the
engine would topple—and the third-class carriages would be packed ...
little children... All sitting in the train now, never dreaming of
danger. “Oh, Lord! Tell me what to do!... No, it is impossible to run to
the hut and get back in time.”
Semyon did not run on to the hut, but turned back and ran faster than
before. He was running almost mechanically, blindly; he did not know
himself what was to happen. He ran as far as the rail which had been
pulled up; his sticks were lying in a heap. He bent down, seized one
without knowing why, and ran on farther. It seemed to him the train was
already coming. He heard the distant whistle; he heard the quiet, even
tremor of the rails; but his strength was exhausted, he could run no
farther, and came to a halt about six hundred feet from the awful spot.
Then an idea came into his head, literally like a ray of light. Pulling
off his cap, he took out of it a cotton scarf, drew his knife out of the
upper part of his boot, and crossed himself, muttering, “God bless me!”
He buried the knife in his left arm above the elbow; the blood spurted
out, flowing in a hot stream. In this he soaked his scarf, smoothed it
out, tied it to the stick and hung out his red flag.
He stood waving his flag. The train was already in sight. The driver
would not see him—would come close up, and a heavy train cannot be
pulled up in six hundred feet.
And the blood kept on flowing. Semyon pressed the sides of the wound
together so as to close it, but the blood did not diminish. Evidently he
had cut his arm very deep. His head commenced to swim, black spots began
to dance before his eyes, and then it became dark. There was a ringing
in his ears. He could not see the train or hear the noise. Only one
thought possessed him. “I shall not be able to keep standing up. I shall
fall and drop the flag; the train will pass over me. Help me, oh Lord!”
All turned black before him, his mind became a blank, and he dropped the
flag; but the blood-stained banner did not fall to the ground. A hand
seized it and held it high to meet the approaching train. The engineer
saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed steam. The train came to a
standstill.
People jumped out of the carriages and collected in a crowd. They saw a
man lying senseless on the footway, drenched in blood, and another man
standing beside him with a blood-stained rag on a stick.
Vasily looked around at all. Then, lowering his head, he said: “Bind me.
I tore up a rail!”
THE DARLING BY ANTON P. CHEKOV
Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor Plemyanikov, was
sitting on the back-door steps of her house doing nothing. It was hot,
the flies were nagging and teasing, and it was pleasant to think that it
would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were gathering from the east,
wafting a breath of moisture every now and then.
Kukin, who roomed in the wing of the same house, was standing in the
yard looking up at the sky. He was the manager of the Tivoli, an open-
air theatre.
“Again,” he said despairingly. “Rain again. Rain, rain, rain! Every day
rain! As though to spite me. I might as well stick my head into a noose
and be done with it. It’s ruining me. Heavy losses every day!” He wrung
his hands, and continued, addressing Olenka: “What a life, Olga
Semyonovna! It’s enough to make a man weep. He works, he does his best,
his very best, he tortures himself, he passes sleepless nights, he
thinks and thinks and thinks how to do everything just right. And what’s
the result? He gives the public the best operetta, the very best
pantomime, excellent artists. But do they want it? Have they the least
appreciation of it? The public is rude. The public is a great boor. The
public wants a circus, a lot of nonsense, a lot of stuff. And there’s
the weather. Look! Rain almost every evening. It began to rain on the
tenth of May, and it’s kept it up through the whole of June. It’s simply
awful. I can’t get any audiences, and don’t I have to pay rent? Don’t I
have to pay the actors?”
The next day towards evening the clouds gathered again, and Kukin said
with an hysterical laugh:
“Oh, I don’t care. Let it do its worst. Let it drown the whole theatre,
and me, too. All right, no luck for me in this world or the next. Let
the actors bring suit against me and drag me to court. What’s the court?
Why not Siberia at hard labour, or even the scaffold? Ha, ha, ha!”
It was the same on the third day.
Olenka listened to Kukin seriously, in silence. Sometimes tears would
rise to her eyes. At last Kukin’s misfortune touched her. She fell in
love with him. He was short, gaunt, with a yellow face, and curly hair
combed back from his forehead, and a thin tenor voice. His features
puckered all up when he spoke. Despair was ever inscribed on his face.
And yet he awakened in Olenka a sincere, deep feeling.
She was always loving somebody. She couldn’t get on without loving
somebody. She had loved her sick father, who sat the whole time in his
armchair in a darkened room, breathing heavily. She had loved her aunt,
who came from Brianska once or twice a year to visit them. And before
that, when a pupil at the progymnasium, she had loved her French
teacher. She was a quiet, kind-hearted, compassionate girl, with a soft
gentle way about her. And she made a very healthy, wholesome impression.
Looking at her full, rosy cheeks, at her soft white neck with the black
mole, and at the good naïve smile that always played on her face when
something pleasant was said, the men would think, “Not so bad,” and
would smile too; and the lady visitors, in the middle of the
conversation, would suddenly grasp her hand and exclaim, “You darling!”
in a burst of delight.
The house, hers by inheritance, in which she had lived from birth, was
located at the outskirts of the city on the Gypsy Road, not far from the
Tivoli. From early evening till late at night she could hear the music
in the theatre and the bursting of the rockets; and it seemed to her
that Kukin was roaring and battling with his fate and taking his chief
enemy, the indifferent public, by assault. Her heart melted softly, she
felt no desire to sleep, and when Kukin returned home towards morning,
she tapped on her window-pane, and through the curtains he saw her face
and one shoulder and the kind smile she gave him.
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a good look
of her neck and her full vigorous shoulders, he clapped his hands and
said:
“You darling!”
He was happy. But it rained on their wedding-day, and the expression of
despair never left his face.
They got along well together. She sat in the cashier’s box, kept the
theatre in order, wrote down the expenses, and paid out the salaries.
Her rosy cheeks, her kind naïve smile, like a halo around her face,
could be seen at the cashier’s window, behind the scenes, and in the
café. She began to tell her friends that the theatre was the greatest,
the most important, the most essential thing in the world, that it was
the only place to obtain true enjoyment in and become humanised and
educated.
“But do you suppose the public appreciates it?” she asked. “What the
public wants is the circus. Yesterday Vanichka and I gave Faust
Burlesqued, and almost all the boxes were empty. If we had given some
silly nonsense, I assure you, the theatre would have been overcrowded.
To-morrow we’ll put Orpheus in Hades on. Do come.”
Whatever Kukin said about the theatre and the actors, she repeated. She
spoke, as he did, with contempt of the public, of its indifference to
art, of its boorishness. She meddled in the rehearsals, corrected the
actors, watched the conduct of the musicians; and when an unfavourable
criticism appeared in the local paper, she wept and went to the editor
to argue with him.
The actors were fond of her and called her “Vanichka and I” and “the
darling.” She was sorry for them and lent them small sums. When they
bilked her, she never complained to her husband; at the utmost she shed
a few tears.
In winter, too, they got along nicely together. They leased a theatre in
the town for the whole winter and sublet it for short periods to a
Little Russian theatrical company, to a conjuror and to the local
amateur players.
Olenka grew fuller and was always beaming with contentment; while Kukin
grew thinner and yellower and complained of his terrible losses, though
he did fairly well the whole winter. At night he coughed, and she gave
him raspberry syrup and lime water, rubbed him with eau de Cologne, and
wrapped him up in soft coverings.
“You are my precious sweet,” she said with perfect sincerity, stroking
his hair. “You are such a dear.”
At Lent he went to Moscow to get his company together, and, while
without him, Olenka was unable to sleep. She sat at the window the whole
time, gazing at the stars. She likened herself to the hens that are also
uneasy and unable to sleep when their rooster is out of the coop. Kukin
was detained in Moscow. He wrote he would be back during Easter Week,
and in his letters discussed arrangements already for the Tivoli. But
late one night, before Easter Monday, there was an ill-omened knocking
at the wicket-gate. It was like a knocking on a barrel—boom, boom, boom!
The sleepy cook ran barefooted, plashing through the puddles, to open
the gate.
“Open the gate, please,” said some one in a hollow bass voice. “I have a
telegram for you.”
Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before; but this time,
somehow, she was numbed with terror. She opened the telegram with
trembling hands and read:
“Ivan Petrovich died suddenly to-day. Awaiting propt orders for wuneral
Tuesday.”
That was the way the telegram was written—“wuneral”—and another
unintelligible word—“propt.” The telegram was signed by the manager of
the opera company.
“My dearest!” Olenka burst out sobbing. “Vanichka, my dearest, my
sweetheart. Why did I ever meet you? Why did I ever get to know you and
love you? To whom have you abandoned your poor Olenka, your poor,
unhappy Olenka?”
Kukin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagankov Cemetery in Moscow. Olenka
returned home on Wednesday; and as soon as she entered her house she
threw herself on her bed and broke into such loud sobbing that she could
be heard in the street and in the neighbouring yards.
“The darling!” said the neighbours, crossing themselves. “How Olga
Semyonovna, the poor darling, is grieving!”
Three months afterwards Olenka was returning home from mass, downhearted
and in deep mourning. Beside her walked a man also returning from
church, Vasily Pustovalov, the manager of the merchant Babakayev’s
lumber-yard. He was wearing a straw hat, a white vest with a gold chain,
and looked more like a landowner than a business man.
“Everything has its ordained course, Olga Semyonovna,” he said sedately,
with sympathy in his voice. “And if any one near and dear to us dies,
then it means it was God’s will and we should remember that and bear it
with submission.”
He took her to the wicket-gate, said good-bye and went away. After that
she heard his sedate voice the whole day; and on closing her eyes she
instantly had a vision of his dark beard. She took a great liking to
him. And evidently he had been impressed by her, too; for, not long
after, an elderly woman, a distant acquaintance, came in to have a cup
of coffee with her. As soon as the woman was seated at table she began
to speak about Pustovalov—how good he was, what a steady man, and any
woman could be glad to get him as a husband. Three days later Pustovalov
himself paid Olenka a visit. He stayed only about ten minutes, and spoke
little, but Olenka fell in love with him, fell in love so desperately
that she did not sleep the whole night and burned as with fever. In the
morning she sent for the elderly woman. Soon after, Olenka and
Pustovalov were engaged, and the wedding followed.
Pustovalov and Olenka lived happily together. He usually stayed in the
lumber-yard until dinner, then went out on business. In his absence
Olenka took his place in the office until evening, attending to the
book-keeping and despatching the orders.
“Lumber rises twenty per cent every year nowadays,” she told her
customers and acquaintances. “Imagine, we used to buy wood from our
forests here. Now Vasichka has to go every year to the government of
Mogilev to get wood. And what a tax!” she exclaimed, covering her cheeks
with her hands in terror. “What a tax!”
She felt as if she had been dealing in lumber for ever so long, that the
most important and essential thing in life was lumber. There was
something touching and endearing in the way she pronounced the words,
“beam,” “joist,” “plank,” “stave,” “lath,” “gun-carriage,” “clamp.” At
night she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, long, endless
rows of wagons conveying the wood somewhere, far, far from the city. She
dreamed that a whole regiment of beams, 36 ft. x 5 in., were advancing
in an upright position to do battle against the lumber-yard; that the
beams and joists and clamps were knocking against each other, emitting
the sharp crackling reports of dry wood, that they were all falling and
then rising again, piling on top of each other. Olenka cried out in her
sleep, and Pustovalov said to her gently:
“Olenka my dear, what is the matter? Cross yourself.”
Her husband’s opinions were all hers. If he thought the room was too
hot, she thought so too. If he thought business was dull, she thought
business was dull. Pustovalov was not fond of amusements and stayed home
on holidays; she did the same.
“You are always either at home or in the office,” said her friends. “Why
don’t you go to the theatre or to the circus, darling?”
“Vasichka and I never go to the theatre,” she answered sedately. “We
have work to do, we have no time for nonsense. What does one get out of
going to theatre?”
On Saturdays she and Pustovalov went to vespers, and on holidays to
early mass. On returning home they walked side by side with rapt faces,
an agreeable smell emanating from both of them and her silk dress
rustling pleasantly. At home they drank tea with milk-bread and various
jams, and then ate pie. Every day at noontime there was an appetising
odour in the yard and outside the gate of cabbage soup, roast mutton, or
duck; and, on fast days, of fish. You couldn’t pass the gate without
being seized by an acute desire to eat. The samovar was always boiling
on the office table, and customers were treated to tea and biscuits.
Once a week the married couple went to the baths and returned with red
faces, walking side by side.
“We are getting along very well, thank God,” said Olenka to her friends.
“God grant that all should live as well as Vasichka and I.”
When Pustovalov went to the government of Mogilev to buy wood, she was
dreadfully homesick for him, did not sleep nights, and cried. Sometimes
the veterinary surgeon of the regiment, Smirnov, a young man who lodged
in the wing of her house, came to see her evenings. He related
incidents, or they played cards together. This distracted her. The most
interesting of his stories were those of his own life. He was married
and had a son; but he had separated from his wife because she had
deceived him, and now he hated her and sent her forty rubles a month for
his son’s support. Olenka sighed, shook her head, and was sorry for him.
“Well, the Lord keep you,” she said, as she saw him off to the door by
candlelight. “Thank you for coming to kill time with me. May God give
you health. Mother in Heaven!” She spoke very sedately, very
judiciously, imitating her husband. The veterinary surgeon had
disappeared behind the door when she called out after him: “Do you know,
Vladimir Platonych, you ought to make up with your wife. Forgive her, if
only for the sake of your son. The child understands everything, you may
be sure.”
When Pustovalov returned, she told him in a low voice about the
veterinary surgeon and his unhappy family life; and they sighed and
shook their heads, and talked about the boy who must be homesick for his
father. Then, by a strange association of ideas, they both stopped
before the sacred images, made genuflections, and prayed to God to send
them children.
And so the Pustovalovs lived for full six years, quietly and peaceably,
in perfect love and harmony. But once in the winter Vasily Andreyich,
after drinking some hot tea, went out into the lumber-yard without a hat
on his head, caught a cold and took sick. He was treated by the best
physicians, but the malady progressed, and he died after an illness of
four months. Olenka was again left a widow.
“To whom have you left me, my darling?” she wailed after the funeral.
“How shall I live now without you, wretched creature that I am. Pity me,
good people, pity me, fatherless and motherless, all alone in the
world!”
She went about dressed in black and weepers, and she gave up wearing
hats and gloves for good. She hardly left the house except to go to
church and to visit her husband’s grave. She almost led the life of a
nun.
It was not until six months had passed that she took off the weepers and
opened her shutters. She began to go out occasionally in the morning to
market with her cook. But how she lived at home and what went on there,
could only be surmised. It could be surmised from the fact that she was
seen in her little garden drinking tea with the veterinarian while he
read the paper out loud to her, and also from the fact that once on
meeting an acquaintance at the post-office, she said to her:
“There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town. That is why there
is so much disease. You constantly hear of people getting sick from the
milk and becoming infected by the horses and cows. The health of
domestic animals ought really to be looked after as much as that of
human beings.”
She repeated the veterinarian’s words and held the same opinions as he
about everything. It was plain that she could not exist a single year
without an attachment, and she found her new happiness in the wing of
her house. In any one else this would have been condemned; but no one
could think ill of Olenka. Everything in her life was so transparent.
She and the veterinary surgeon never spoke about the change in their
relations. They tried, in fact, to conceal it, but unsuccessfully; for
Olenka could have no secrets. When the surgeon’s colleagues from the
regiment came to see him, she poured tea, and served the supper, and
talked to them about the cattle plague, the foot and mouth disease, and
the municipal slaughter houses. The surgeon was dreadfully embarrassed,
and after the visitors had left, he caught her hand and hissed angrily:
“Didn’t I ask you not to talk about what you don’t understand? When we
doctors discuss things, please don’t mix in. It’s getting to be a
nuisance.”
She looked at him in astonishment and alarm, and asked:
“But, Volodichka, what am I to talk about?”
And she threw her arms round his neck, with tears in her eyes, and
begged him not to be angry. And they were both happy.
But their happiness was of short duration. The veterinary surgeon went
away with his regiment to be gone for good, when it was transferred to
some distant place almost as far as Siberia, and Olenka was left alone.
Now she was completely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his
armchair lay in the attic covered with dust and minus one leg. She got
thin and homely, and the people who met her on the street no longer
looked at her as they had used to, nor smiled at her. Evidently her best
years were over, past and gone, and a new, dubious life was to begin
which it were better not to think about.
In the evening Olenka sat on the steps and heard the music playing and
the rockets bursting in the Tivoli; but it no longer aroused any
response in her. She looked listlessly into the yard, thought of
nothing, wanted nothing, and when night came on, she went to bed and
dreamed of nothing but the empty yard. She ate and drank as though by
compulsion.
And what was worst of all, she no longer held any opinions. She saw and
understood everything that went on around her, but she could not form an
opinion about it. She knew of nothing to talk about. And how dreadful
not to have opinions! For instance, you see a bottle, or you see that it
is raining, or you see a muzhik riding by in a wagon. But what the
bottle or the rain or the muzhik are for, or what the sense of them all
is, you cannot tell—you cannot tell, not for a thousand rubles. In the
days of Kukin and Pustovalov and then of the veterinary surgeon, Olenka
had had an explanation for everything, and would have given her opinion
freely no matter about what. But now there was the same emptiness in her
heart and brain as in her yard. It was as galling and bitter as a taste
of wormwood.
Gradually the town grew up all around. The Gypsy Road had become a
street, and where the Tivoli and the lumber-yard had been, there were
now houses and a row of side streets. How quickly time flies! Olenka’s
house turned gloomy, the roof rusty, the shed slanting. Dock and
thistles overgrew the yard. Olenka herself had aged and grown homely. In
the summer she sat on the steps, and her soul was empty and dreary and
bitter. When she caught the breath of spring, or when the wind wafted
the chime of the cathedral bells, a sudden flood of memories would pour
over her, her heart would expand with a tender warmth, and the tears
would stream down her cheeks. But that lasted only a moment. Then would
come emptiness again, and the feeling, What is the use of living? The
black kitten Bryska rubbed up against her and purred softly, but the
little creature’s caresses left Olenka untouched. That was not what she
needed. What she needed was a love that would absorb her whole being,
her reason, her whole soul, that would give her ideas, an object in
life, that would warm her aging blood. And she shook the black kitten
off her skirt angrily, saying:
“Go away! What are you doing here?”
And so day after day, year after year not a single joy, not a single
opinion. Whatever Marva, the cook, said was all right.
One hot day in July, towards evening, as the town cattle were being
driven by, and the whole yard was filled with clouds of dust, there was
suddenly a knocking at the gate. Olenka herself went to open it, and was
dumbfounded to behold the veterinarian Smirnov. He had turned grey and
was dressed as a civilian. All the old memories flooded into her soul,
she could not restrain herself, she burst out crying, and laid her head
on Smirnov’s breast without saying a word. So overcome was she that she
was totally unconscious of how they walked into the house and seated
themselves to drink tea.
“My darling!” she murmured, trembling with joy. “Vladimir Platonych,
from where has God sent you?”
“I want to settle here for good,” he told her. “I have resigned my
position and have come here to try my fortune as a free man and lead a
settled life. Besides, it’s time to send my boy to the gymnasium. He is
grown up now. You know, my wife and I have become reconciled.”
“Where is she?” asked Olenka.
“At the hotel with the boy. I am looking for lodgings.”
“Good gracious, bless you, take my house. Why won’t my house do? Oh,
dear! Why, I won’t ask any rent of you,” Olenka burst out in the
greatest excitement, and began to cry again. “You live here, and the
wing will be enough for me. Oh, Heavens, what a joy!”
The very next day the roof was being painted and the walls whitewashed,
and Olenka, arms akimbo, was going about the yard superintending. Her
face brightened with her old smile. Her whole being revived and
freshened, as though she had awakened from a long sleep. The
veterinarian’s wife and child arrived. She was a thin, plain woman, with
a crabbed expression. The boy Sasha, small for his ten years of age, was
a chubby child, with clear blue eyes and dimples in his cheeks. He made
for the kitten the instant he entered the yard, and the place rang with
his happy laughter.
“Is that your cat, auntie?” he asked Olenka. “When she has little
kitties, please give me one. Mamma is awfully afraid of mice.”
Olenka chatted with him, gave him tea, and there was a sudden warmth in
her bosom and a soft gripping at her heart, as though the boy were her
own son.
In the evening, when he sat in the dining-room studying his lessons, she
looked at him tenderly and whispered to herself:
“My darling, my pretty. You are such a clever child, so good to look
at.”
“An island is a tract of land entirely surrounded by water,” he recited.
“An island is a tract of land,” she repeated—the first idea asseverated
with conviction after so many years of silence and mental emptiness.
She now had her opinions, and at supper discussed with Sasha’s parents
how difficult the studies had become for the children at the gymnasium,
but how, after all, a classical education was better than a commercial
course, because when you graduated from the gymnasium then the road was
open to you for any career at all. If you chose to, you could become a
doctor, or, if you wanted to, you could become an engineer.
Sasha began to go to the gymnasium. His mother left on a visit to her
sister in Kharkov and never came back. The father was away every day
inspecting cattle, and sometimes was gone three whole days at a time, so
that Sasha, it seemed to Olenka, was utterly abandoned, was treated as
if he were quite superfluous, and must be dying of hunger. So she
transferred him into the wing along with herself and fixed up a little
room for him there.
Every morning Olenka would come into his room and find him sound asleep
with his hand tucked under his cheek, so quiet that he seemed not to be
breathing. What a shame to have to wake him, she thought.
“Sashenka,” she said sorrowingly, “get up, darling. It’s time to go to
the gymnasium.”
He got up, dressed, said his prayers, then sat down to drink tea. He
drank three glasses of tea, ate two large cracknels and half a buttered
roll. The sleep was not yet out of him, so he was a little cross.
“You don’t know your fable as you should, Sashenka,” said Olenka,
looking at him as though he were departing on a long journey. “What a
lot of trouble you are. You must try hard and learn, dear, and mind your
teachers.”
“Oh, let me alone, please,” said Sasha.
Then he went down the street to the gymnasium, a little fellow wearing a
large cap and carrying a satchel on his back. Olenka followed him
noiselessly.
“Sashenka,” she called.
He looked round and she shoved a date or a caramel into his hand. When
he reached the street of the gymnasium, he turned around and said,
ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman:
“You had better go home, aunt. I can go the rest of the way myself.”
She stopped and stared after him until he had disappeared into the
school entrance.
Oh, how she loved him! Not one of her other ties had been so deep. Never
before had she given herself so completely, so disinterestedly, so
cheerfully as now that her maternal instincts were all aroused. For this
boy, who was not hers, for the dimples in his cheeks and for his big
cap, she would have given her life, given it with joy and with tears of
rapture. Why? Ah, indeed, why?
When she had seen Sasha off to the gymnasium, she returned home quietly,
content, serene, overflowing with love. Her face, which had grown
younger in the last half year, smiled and beamed. People who met her
were pleased as they looked at her.
“How are you, Olga Semyonovna, darling? How are you getting on,
darling?”
“The gymnasium course is very hard nowadays,” she told at the market.
“It’s no joke. Yesterday the first class had a fable to learn by heart,
a Latin translation, and a problem. How is a little fellow to do all
that?”
And she spoke of the teacher and the lessons and the text-books,
repeating exactly what Sasha said about them.
At three o’clock they had dinner. In the evening they prepared the
lessons together, and Olenka wept with Sasha over the difficulties. When
she put him to bed, she lingered a long time making the sign of the
cross over him and muttering a prayer. And when she lay in bed, she
dreamed of the far-away, misty future when Sasha would finish his
studies and become a doctor or an engineer, have a large house of his
own, with horses and a carriage, marry and have children. She would fall
asleep still thinking of the same things, and tears would roll down her
cheeks from her closed eyes. And the black cat would lie at her side
purring: “Mrr, mrr, mrr.”
Suddenly there was a loud knocking at the gate. Olenka woke up
breathless with fright, her heart beating violently. Half a minute later
there was another knock.
“A telegram from Kharkov,” she thought, her whole body in a tremble.
“His mother wants Sasha to come to her in Kharkov. Oh, great God!”
She was in despair. Her head, her feet, her hands turned cold. There was
no unhappier creature in the world, she felt. But another minute passed,
she heard voices. It was the veterinarian coming home from the club.
“Thank God,” she thought. The load gradually fell from her heart, she
was at ease again. And she went back to bed, thinking of Sasha who lay
fast asleep in the next room and sometimes cried out in his sleep:
“I’ll give it to you! Get away! Quit your scrapping!”
THE BET BY ANTON P. CHEKHOV I
It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to
corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the
autumn fifteen years before. There were many clever people at the party
and much interesting conversation. They talked among other things of
capital punishment. The guests, among them not a few scholars and
journalists, for the most part disapproved of capital punishment. They
found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to a Christian
State and immoral. Some of them thought that capital punishment should
be replaced universally by life-imprisonment.
“I don’t agree with you,” said the host. “I myself have experienced
neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may judge a
priori, then in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and more
humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment
kills by degrees. Who is the more humane executioner, one who kills you
in a few seconds or one who draws the life out of you incessantly, for
years?”
“They’re both equally immoral,” remarked one of the guests, “because
their purpose is the same, to take away life. The State is not God. It
has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should
so desire.”
Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. On
being asked his opinion, he said:
“Capital punishment and life-imprisonment are equally immoral; but if I
were offered the choice between them, I would certainly choose the
second. It’s better to live somehow than not to live at all.”
There ensued a lively discussion. The banker who was then younger and
more nervous suddenly lost his temper, banged his fist on the table, and
turning to the young lawyer, cried out:
“It’s a lie. I bet you two millions you wouldn’t stick in a cell even
for five years.”
“If you mean it seriously,” replied the lawyer, “then I bet I’ll stay
not five but fifteen.”
“Fifteen! Done!” cried the banker. “Gentlemen, I stake two millions.”
“Agreed. You stake two millions, I my freedom,” said the lawyer.
So this wild, ridiculous bet came to pass. The banker, who at that time
had too many millions to count, spoiled and capricious, was beside
himself with rapture. During supper he said to the lawyer jokingly:
“Come to your senses, young roan, before it’s too late. Two millions are
nothing to me, but you stand to lose three or four of the best years of
your life. I say three or four, because you’ll never stick it out any
longer. Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary is much
heavier than enforced imprisonment. The idea that you have the right to
free yourself at any moment will poison the whole of your life in the
cell. I pity you.”
And now the banker, pacing from corner to corner, recalled all this and
asked himself:
“Why did I make this bet? What’s the good? The lawyer loses fifteen
years of his life and I throw away two millions. Will it convince people
that capital punishment is worse or better than imprisonment for life?
No, no! all stuff and rubbish. On my part, it was the caprice of a well-
fed man; on the lawyer’s pure greed of gold.”
He recollected further what happened after the evening party. It was
decided that the lawyer must undergo his imprisonment under the
strictest observation, in a garden wing of the banker’s house. It was
agreed that during the period he would be deprived of the right to cross
the threshold, to see living people, to hear human voices, and to
receive letters and newspapers. He was permitted to have a musical
instrument, to read books, to write letters, to drink wine and smoke
tobacco. By the agreement he could communicate, but only in silence,
with the outside world through a little window specially constructed for
this purpose. Everything necessary, books, music, wine, he could receive
in any quantity by sending a note through the window. The agreement
provided for all the minutest details, which made the confinement
strictly solitary, and it obliged the lawyer to remain exactly fifteen
years from twelve o’clock of November 14th, 1870, to twelve o’clock of
November 14th, 1885. The least attempt on his part to violate the
conditions, to escape if only for two minutes before the time freed the
banker from the obligation to pay him the two millions.
During the first year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was
possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from
loneliness and boredom. From his wing day and night came the sound of
the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco. “Wine,” he wrote, “excites
desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing
is more boring than to drink good wine alone,” and tobacco spoils the
air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a
light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of
crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on.
In the second year the piano was heard no longer and the lawyer asked
only for classics. In the fifth year, music was heard again, and the
prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him said that during the
whole of that year he was only eating, drinking, and lying on his bed.
He yawned often and talked angrily to himself. Books he did not read.
Sometimes at nights he would sit down to write. He would write for a
long time and tear it all up in the morning. More than once he was heard
to weep.
In the second half of the sixth year, the prisoner began zealously to
study languages, philosophy, and history. He fell on these subjects so
hungrily that the banker hardly had time to get books enough for him. In
the space of four years about six hundred volumes were bought at his
request. It was while that passion lasted that the banker received the
following letter from the prisoner: “My dear gaoler, I am writing these
lines in six languages. Show them to experts. Let them read them. If
they do not find one single mistake, I beg you to give orders to have a
gun fired off in the garden. By the noise I shall know that my efforts
have not been in vain. The geniuses of all ages and countries speak in
different languages; but in them all burns the same flame. Oh, if you
knew my heavenly happiness now that I can understand them!” The
prisoner’s desire was fulfilled. Two shots were fired in the garden by
the banker’s order.
Later on, after the tenth year, the lawyer sat immovable before his
table and read only the New Testament. The banker found it strange that
a man who in four years had mastered six hundred erudite volumes, should
have spent nearly a year in reading one book, easy to understand and by
no means thick. The New Testament was then replaced by the history of
religions and theology.
During the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an
extraordinary amount, quite haphazard. Now he would apply himself to the
natural sciences, then he would read Byron or Shakespeare. Notes used to
come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on
chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on
philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea
among broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was
eagerly grasping one piece after another. II
The banker recalled all this, and thought:
“To-morrow at twelve o’clock he receives his freedom. Under the
agreement, I shall have to pay him two millions. If I pay, it’s all over
with me. I am ruined for ever ...”
Fifteen years before he had too many millions to count, but now he was
afraid to ask himself which he had more of, money or debts. Gambling on
the Stock-Exchange, risky speculation, and the recklessness of which he
could not rid himself even in old age, had gradually brought his
business to decay; and the fearless, self-confident, proud man of
business had become an ordinary banker, trembling at every rise and fall
in the market.
“That cursed bet,” murmured the old man clutching his head in despair...
“Why didn’t the man die? He’s only forty years old. He will take away my
last farthing, marry, enjoy life, gamble on the Exchange, and I will
look on like an envious beggar and hear the same words from him every
day: ‘I’m obliged to you for the happiness of my life. Let me help you.’
No, it’s too much! The only escape from bankruptcy and disgrace—is that
the man should die.”
The clock had just struck three. The banker was listening. In the house
every one was asleep, and one could hear only the frozen trees whining
outside the windows. Trying to make no sound, he took out of his safe
the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years, put on
his overcoat, and went out of the house. The garden was dark and cold.
It was raining. A damp, penetrating wind howled in the garden and gave
the trees no rest. Though he strained his eyes, the banker could see
neither the ground, nor the white statues, nor the garden wing, nor the
trees. Approaching the garden wing, he called the watchman twice. There
was no answer. Evidently the watchman had taken shelter from the bad
weather and was now asleep somewhere in the kitchen or the greenhouse.
“If I have the courage to fulfil my intention,” thought the old man,
“the suspicion will fall on the watchman first of all.”
In the darkness he groped for the steps and the door and entered the
hall of the garden-wing, then poked his way into a narrow passage and
struck a match. Not a soul was there. Some one’s bed, with no bedclothes
on it, stood there, and an iron stove loomed dark in the corner. The
seals on the door that led into the prisoner’s room were unbroken.
When the match went out, the old man, trembling from agitation, peeped
into the little window.
In the prisoner’s room a candle was burning dimly. The prisoner himself
sat by the table. Only his back, the hair on his head and his hands were
visible. Open books were strewn about on the table, the two chairs, and
on the carpet near the table.
Five minutes passed and the prisoner never once stirred. Fifteen years’
confinement had taught him to sit motionless. The banker tapped on the
window with his finger, but the prisoner made no movement in reply. Then
the banker cautiously tore the seals from the door and put the key into
the lock. The rusty lock gave a hoarse groan and the door creaked. The
banker expected instantly to hear a cry of surprise and the sound of
steps. Three minutes passed and it was as quiet inside as it had been
before. He made up his mind to enter.
Before the table sat a man, unlike an ordinary human being. It was a
skeleton, with tight-drawn skin, with long curly hair like a woman’s,
and a shaggy beard. The colour of his face was yellow, of an earthy
shade; the cheeks were sunken, the back long and narrow, and the hand
upon which he leaned his hairy head was so lean and skinny that it was
painful to look upon. His hair was already silvering with grey, and no
one who glanced at the senile emaciation of the face would have believed
that he was only forty years old. On the table, before his bended head,
lay a sheet of paper on which something was written in a tiny hand.
“Poor devil,” thought the banker, “he’s asleep and probably seeing
millions in his dreams. I have only to take and throw this half-dead
thing on the bed, smother him a moment with the pillow, and the most
careful examination will find no trace of unnatural death. But, first,
let us read what he has written here.”
The banker took the sheet from the table and read:
“To-morrow at twelve o’clock midnight, I shall obtain my freedom and the
right to mix with people. But before I leave this room and see the sun I
think it necessary to say a few words to you. On my own clear conscience
and before God who sees me I declare to you that I despise freedom,
life, health, and all that your books call the blessings of the world.
“For fifteen years I have diligently studied earthly life. True, I saw
neither the earth nor the people, but in your books I drank fragrant
wine, sang songs, hunted deer and wild boar in the forests, loved
women... And beautiful women, like clouds ethereal, created by the magic
of your poets’ genius, visited me by night and whispered to me wonderful
tales, which made my head drunken. In your books I climbed the summits
of Elbruz and Mont Blanc and saw from there how the sun rose in the
morning, and in the evening suffused the sky, the ocean and the mountain
ridges with a purple gold. I saw from there how above me lightnings
glimmered cleaving the clouds; I saw green forests, fields, rivers,
lakes, cities; I heard syrens singing, and the playing of the pipes of
Pan; I touched the wings of beautiful devils who came flying to me to
speak of God... In your books I cast myself into bottomless abysses,
worked miracles, burned cities to the ground, preached new religions,
conquered whole countries...
“Your books gave me wisdom. All that unwearying human thought created in
the centuries is compressed to a little lump in my skull. I know that I
am cleverer than you all.
“And I despise your books, despise all worldly blessings and wisdom.
Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive as a mirage. Though
you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the
face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your
history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen
slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.
“You are mad, and gone the wrong way. You take falsehood for truth and
ugliness for beauty. You would marvel if suddenly apple and orange trees
should bear frogs and lizards instead of fruit, and if roses should
begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse. So do I marvel at you,
who have bartered heaven for earth. I do not want to understand you.
“That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I
waive the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and which
I now despise. That I may deprive myself of my right to them, I shall
come out from here five minutes before the stipulated term, and thus
shall violate the agreement.”
When he had read, the banker put the sheet on the table, kissed the head
of the strange man, and began to weep. He went out of the wing. Never at
any other time, not even after his terrible losses on the Exchange, had
he felt such contempt for himself as now. Coming home, he lay down on
his bed, but agitation and tears kept him a long time from sleeping...
The next morning the poor watchman came running to him and told him that
they had seen the man who lived in the wing climb through the window
into the garden. He had gone to the gate and disappeared. The banker
instantly went with his servants to the wing and established the escape
of his prisoner. To avoid unnecessary rumours he took the paper with the
renunciation from the table and, on his return, locked it in his safe.
VANKA BY ANTON P. CHEKHOV
Nine-year-old Vanka Zhukov, who had been apprentice to the shoemaker
Aliakhin for three months, did not go to bed the night before Christmas.
He waited till the master and mistress and the assistants had gone out
to an early church-service, to procure from his employer’s cupboard a
small phial of ink and a penholder with a rusty nib; then, spreading a
crumpled sheet of paper in front of him, he began to write.
Before, however, deciding to make the first letter, he looked furtively
at the door and at the window, glanced several times at the sombre ikon,
on either side of which stretched shelves full of lasts, and heaved a
heart-rending sigh. The sheet of paper was spread on a bench, and he
himself was on his knees in front of it.
“Dear Grandfather Konstantin Makarych,” he wrote, “I am writing you a
letter. I wish you a Happy Christmas and all God’s holy best. I have no
mamma or papa, you are all I have.”
Vanka gave a look towards the window in which shone the reflection of
his candle, and vividly pictured to himself his grandfather, Konstantin
Makarych, who was night-watchman at Messrs. Zhivarev. He was a small,
lean, unusually lively and active old man of sixty-five, always smiling
and blear-eyed. All day he slept in the servants’ kitchen or trifled
with the cooks. At night, enveloped in an ample sheep-skin coat, he
strayed round the domain tapping with his cudgel. Behind him, each
hanging its head, walked the old bitch Kashtanka, and the dog Viun, so
named because of his black coat and long body and his resemblance to a
loach. Viun was an unusually civil and friendly dog, looking as kindly
at a stranger as at his masters, but he was not to be trusted. Beneath
his deference and humbleness was hid the most inquisitorial
maliciousness. No one knew better than he how to sneak up and take a
bite at a leg, or slip into the larder or steal a muzhik’s chicken. More
than once they had nearly broken his hind-legs, twice he had been hung
up, every week he was nearly flogged to death, but he always recovered.
At this moment, for certain, Vanka’s grandfather must be standing at the
gate, bFlinking his eyes at the bright red windows of the village
church, stamping his feet in their high-felt boots, and jesting with the
people in the yard; his cudgel will be hanging from his belt, he will be
hugging himself with cold, giving a little dry, old man’s cough, and at
times pinching a servant-girl or a cook.
“Won’t we take some snuff?” he asks, holding out his snuff-box to the
women. The women take a pinch of snuff, and sneeze.
The old man goes into indescribable ecstasies, breaks into loud
laughter, and cries:
“Off with it, it will freeze to your nose!”
He gives his snuff to the dogs, too. Kashtanka sneezes, twitches her
nose, and walks away offended. Viun deferentially refuses to sniff and
wags his tail. It is glorious weather, not a breath of wind, clear, and
frosty; it is a dark night, but the whole village, its white roofs and
streaks of smoke from the chimneys, the trees silvered with hoar-frost,
and the snowdrifts, you can see it all. The sky scintillates with bright
twinkling stars, and the Milky Way stands out so clearly that it looks
as if it had been polished and rubbed over with snow for the holidays...
Vanka sighs, dips his pen in the ink, and continues to write:
“Last night I got a thrashing, my master dragged me by my hair into the
yard, and belaboured me with a shoe-maker’s stirrup, because, while I
was rocking his brat in its cradle, I unfortunately fell asleep. And
during the week, my mistress told me to clean a herring, and I began by
its tail, so she took the herring and stuck its snout into my face. The
assistants tease me, send me to the tavern for vodka, make me steal the
master’s cucumbers, and the master beats me with whatever is handy. Food
there is none; in the morning it’s bread, at dinner gruel, and in the
evening bread again. As for tea or sour-cabbage soup, the master and the
mistress themselves guzzle that. They make me sleep in the vestibule,
and when their brat cries, I don’t sleep at all, but have to rock the
cradle. Dear Grandpapa, for Heaven’s sake, take me away from here, home
to our village, I can’t bear this any more... I bow to the ground to
you, and will pray to God for ever and ever, take me from here or I
shall die...”
The corners of Vanka’s mouth went down, he rubbed his eyes with his
dirty fist, and sobbed.
“I’ll grate your tobacco for you,” he continued, “I’ll pray to God for
you, and if there is anything wrong, then flog me like the grey goat.
And if you really think I shan’t find work, then I’ll ask the manager,
for Christ’s sake, to let me clean the boots, or I’ll go instead of
Fedya as underherdsman. Dear Grandpapa, I can’t bear this any more,
it’ll kill me... I wanted to run away to our village, but I have no
boots, and I was afraid of the frost, and when I grow up I’ll look after
you, no one shall harm you, and when you die I’ll pray for the repose of
your soul, just like I do for mamma Pelagueya.
“As for Moscow, it is a large town, there are all gentlemen’s houses,
lots of horses, no sheep, and the dogs are not vicious. The children
don’t come round at Christmas with a star, no one is allowed to sing in
the choir, and once I saw in a shop window hooks on a line and fishing
rods, all for sale, and for every kind of fish, awfully convenient. And
there was one hook which would catch a sheat-fish weighing a pound. And
there are shops with guns, like the master’s, and I am sure they must
cost 100 rubles each. And in the meat-shops there are woodcocks,
partridges, and hares, but who shot them or where they come from, the
shopman won’t say.
“Dear Grandpapa, and when the masters give a Christmas tree, take a
golden walnut and hide it in my green box. Ask the young lady, Olga
Ignatyevna, for it, say it’s for Vanka.”
Vanka sighed convulsively, and again stared at the window. He remembered
that his grandfather always went to the forest for the Christmas tree,
and took his grandson with him. What happy times! The frost crackled,
his grandfather crackled, and as they both did, Vanka did the same. Then
before cutting down the Christmas tree his grandfather smoked his pipe,
took a long pinch of snuff, and made fun of poor frozen little Vanka...
The young fir trees, wrapt in hoar-frost, stood motionless, waiting for
which of them would die. Suddenly a hare springing from somewhere would
dart over the snowdrift... His grandfather could not help shouting:
“Catch it, catch it, catch it! Ah, short-tailed devil!”
When the tree was down, his grandfather dragged it to the master’s
house, and there they set about decorating it. The young lady, Olga
Ignatyevna, Vanka’s great friend, busied herself most about it. When
little Vanka’s mother, Pelagueya, was still alive, and was servant-woman
in the house, Olga Ignatyevna used to stuff him with sugar-candy, and,
having nothing to do, taught him to read, write, count up to one
hundred, and even to dance the quadrille. When Pelagueya died, they
placed the orphan Vanka in the kitchen with his grandfather, and from
the kitchen he was sent to Moscow to Aliakhin, the shoemaker.
“Come quick, dear Grandpapa,” continued Vanka, “I beseech you for
Christ’s sake take me from here. Have pity on a poor orphan, for here
they beat me, and I am frightfully hungry, and so sad that I can’t tell
you, I cry all the time. The other day the master hit me on the head
with a last; I fell to the ground, and only just returned to life. My
life is a misfortune, worse than any dog’s... I send greetings to
Aliona, to one-eyed Tegor, and the coachman, and don’t let any one have
my mouth-organ. I remain, your grandson, Ivan Zhukov, dear Grandpapa, do
come.”
Vanka folded his sheet of paper in four, and put it into an envelope
purchased the night before for a kopek. He thought a little, dipped the
pen into the ink, and wrote the address:
“The village, to my grandfather.” He then scratched his head, thought
again, and added: “Konstantin Makarych.” Pleased at not having been
interfered with in his writing, he put on his cap, and, without putting
on his sheep-skin coat, ran out in his shirt-sleeves into the street.
The shopman at the poulterer’s, from whom he had inquired the night
before, had told him that letters were to be put into post-boxes, and
from there they were conveyed over the whole earth in mail troikas by
drunken post-boys and to the sound of bells. Vanka ran to the first
post-box and slipped his precious letter into the slit.
An hour afterwards, lulled by hope, he was sleeping soundly. In his
dreams he saw a stove, by the stove his grandfather sitting with his
legs dangling down, barefooted, and reading a letter to the cooks, and
Viun walking round the stove wagging his tail.
HIDE AND SEEK BY FIODOR SOLOGUB
Everything in Lelechka’s nursery was bright, pretty, and cheerful.
Lelechka’s sweet voice charmed her mother. Lelechka was a delightful
child. There was no other such child, there never had been, and there
never would be. Lelechka’s mother, Serafima Aleksandrovna, was sure of
that. Lelechka’s eyes were dark and large, her cheeks were rosy, her
lips were made for kisses and for laughter. But it was not these charms
in Lelechka that gave her mother the keenest joy. Lelechka was her
mother’s only child. That was why every movement of Lelechka’s bewitched
her mother. It was great bliss to hold Lelechka on her knees and to
fondle her; to feel the little girl in her arms—a thing as lively and as
bright as a little bird.
To tell the truth, Serafima Aleksandrovna felt happy only in the
nursery. She felt cold with her husband.
Perhaps it was because he himself loved the cold—he loved to drink cold
water, and to breathe cold air. He was always fresh and cool, with a
frigid smile, and wherever he passed cold currents seemed to move in the
air.
The Nesletyevs, Sergey Modestovich and Serafima Aleksandrovna, had
married without love or calculation, because it was the accepted thing.
He was a young man of thirty-five, she a young woman of twenty-five;
both were of the same circle and well brought up; he was expected to
take a wife, and the time had come for her to take a husband.
It even seemed to Serafima Aleksandrovna that she was in love with her
future husband, and this made her happy. He looked handsome and well-
bred; his intelligent grey eyes always preserved a dignified expression;
and he fulfilled his obligations of a fiancé with irreproachable
gentleness.
The bride was also good-looking; she was a tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired
girl, somewhat timid but very tactful. He was not after her dowry,
though it pleased him to know that she had something. He had connexions,
and his wife came of good, influential people. This might, at the proper
opportunity, prove useful. Always irreproachable and tactful, Nesletyev
got on in his position not so fast that any one should envy him, nor yet
so slow that he should envy any one else—everything came in the proper
measure and at the proper time.
After their marriage there was nothing in the manner of Sergey
Modestovich to suggest anything wrong to his wife. Later, however, when
his wife was about to have a child, Sergey Modestovich established
connexions elsewhere of a light and temporary nature. Serafima
Aleksandrovna found this out, and, to her own astonishment, was not
particularly hurt; she awaited her infant with a restless anticipation
that swallowed every other feeling.
A little girl was born; Serafima Aleksandrovna gave herself up to her.
At the beginning she used to tell her husband, with rapture, of all the
joyous details of Lelechka’s existence. But she soon found that he
listened to her without the slightest interest, and only from the habit
of politeness. Serafima Aleksandrovna drifted farther and farther away
from him. She loved her little girl with the ungratified passion that
other women, deceived in their husbands, show their chance young lovers.
“Mamochka, let’s play priatki” (hide and seek), cried Lelechka,
pronouncing the r like the l, so that the word sounded “pliatki.”
This charming inability to speak always made Serafima Aleksandrovna
smile with tender rapture. Lelechka then ran away, stamping with her
plump little legs over the carpets, and hid herself behind the curtains
near her bed.
“Tiu-tiu, mamochka!” she cried out in her sweet, laughing voice, as she
looked out with a single roguish eye.
“Where is my baby girl?” the mother asked, as she looked for Lelechka
and made believe that she did not see her.
And Lelechka poured out her rippling laughter in her hiding place. Then
she came out a little farther, and her mother, as though she had only
just caught sight of her, seized her by her little shoulders and
exclaimed joyously: “Here she is, my Lelechka!”
Lelechka laughed long and merrily, her head close to her mother’s knees,
and all of her cuddled up between her mother’s white hands. Her mother’s
eyes glowed with passionate emotion.
“Now, mamochka, you hide,” said Lelechka, as she ceased laughing.
Her mother went to hide. Lelechka turned away as though not to see, but
watched her mamochka stealthily all the time. Mamma hid behind the
cupboard, and exclaimed: “Tiu-tiu, baby girl!”
Lelechka ran round the room and looked into all the corners, making
believe, as her mother had done before, that she was seeking—though she
really knew all the time where her mamochka was standing.
“Where’s my mamochka?” asked Lelechka. “She’s not here, and she’s not
here,” she kept on repeating, as she ran from corner to corner.
Her mother stood, with suppressed breathing, her head pressed against
the wall, her hair somewhat disarranged. A smile of absolute bliss
played on her red lips.
The nurse, Fedosya, a good-natured and fine-looking, if somewhat stupid
woman, smiled as she looked at her mistress with her characteristic
expression, which seemed to say that it was not for her to object to
gentlewomen’s caprices. She thought to herself: “The mother is like a
little child herself—look how excited she is.”
Lelechka was getting nearer her mother’s corner. Her mother was growing
more absorbed every moment by her interest in the game; her heart beat
with short quick strokes, and she pressed even closer to the wall,
disarranging her hair still more. Lelechka suddenly glanced toward her
mother’s corner and screamed with joy.
“I’ve found ‘oo,” she cried out loudly and joyously, mispronouncing her
words in a way that again made her mother happy.
She pulled her mother by her hands to the middle of the room, they were
merry and they laughed; and Lelechka again hid her head against her
mother’s knees, and went on lisping and lisping, without end, her sweet
little words, so fascinating yet so awkward.
Sergey Modestovich was coming at this moment toward the nursery. Through
the half-closed doors he heard the laughter, the joyous outcries, the
sound of romping. He entered the nursery, smiling his genial cold smile;
he was irreproachably dressed, and he looked fresh and erect, and he
spread round him an atmosphere of cleanliness, freshness and coldness.
He entered in the midst of the lively game, and he confused them all by
his radiant coldness. Even Fedosya felt abashed, now for her mistress,
now for herself. Serafima Aleksandrovna at once became calm and
apparently cold—and this mood communicated itself to the little girl,
who ceased to laugh, but looked instead, silently and intently, at her
father.
Sergey Modestovich gave a swift glance round the room. He liked coming
here, where everything was beautifully arranged; this was done by
Serafima Aleksandrovna, who wished to surround her little girl, from her
very infancy, only with the loveliest things. Serafima Aleksandrovna
dressed herself tastefully; this, too, she did for Lelechka, with the
same end in view. One thing Sergey Modestovich had not become reconciled
to, and this was his wife’s almost continuous presence in the nursery.
“It’s just as I thought... I knew that I’d find you here,” he said with
a derisive and condescending smile.
They left the nursery together. As he followed his wife through the door
Sergey Modestovich said rather indifferently, in an incidental way,
laying no stress on his words: “Don’t you think that it would be well
for the little girl if she were sometimes without your company? Merely,
you see, that the child should feel its own individuality,” he explained
in answer to Serafima Aleksandrovna’s puzzled glance.
“She’s still so little,” said Serafima Aleksandrovna.
“In any case, this is but my humble opinion. I don’t insist. It’s your
kingdom there.”
“I’ll think it over,” his wife answered, smiling, as he did, coldly but
genially.
Then they began to talk of something else. II
Nurse Fedosya, sitting in the kitchen that evening, was telling the
silent housemaid Darya and the talkative old cook Agathya about the
young lady of the house, and how the child loved to play priatki with
her mother—“She hides her little face, and cries ‘tiutiu’!”
“And the mistress herself is like a little one,” added Fedosya, smiling.
Agathya listened and shook her head ominously; while her face became
grave and reproachful.
“That the mistress does it, well, that’s one thing; but that the young
lady does it, that’s bad.”
“Why?” asked Fedosya with curiosity.
This expression of curiosity gave her face the look of a wooden,
roughly-painted doll.
“Yes, that’s bad,” repeated Agathya with conviction. “Terribly bad!”
“Well?” said Fedosya, the ludicrous expression of curiosity on her face
becoming more emphatic.
“She’ll hide, and hide, and hide away,” said Agathya, in a mysterious
whisper, as she looked cautiously toward the door.
“What are you saying?” exclaimed Fedosya, frightened.
“It’s the truth I’m saying, remember my words,” Agathya went on with the
same assurance and secrecy. “It’s the surest sign.”
The old woman had invented this sign, quite suddenly, herself; and she
was evidently very proud of it. III
Lelechka was asleep, and Serafima Aleksandrovna was sitting in her own
room, thinking with joy and tenderness of Lelechka. Lelechka was in her
thoughts, first a sweet, tiny girl, then a sweet, big girl, then again a
delightful little girl; and so until the end she remained mamma’s little
Lelechka.
Serafima Aleksandrovna did not even notice that Fedosya came up to her
and paused before her. Fedosya had a worried, frightened look.
“Madam, madam,” she said quietly, in a trembling voice.
Serafima Aleksandrovna gave a start. Fedosya’s face made her anxious.
“What is it, Fedosya?” she asked with great concern. “Is there anything
wrong with Lelechka?”
“No, madam,” said Fedosya, as she gesticulated with her hands to
reassure her mistress and to make her sit down. “Lelechka is asleep, may
God be with her! Only I’d like to say something—you see—Lelechka is
always hiding herself—that’s not good.”
Fedosya looked at her mistress with fixed eyes, which had grown round
from fright.
“Why not good?” asked Serafima Aleksandrovna, with vexation, succumbing
involuntarily to vague fears.
“I can’t tell you how bad it is,” said Fedosya, and her face expressed
the most decided confidence.
“Please speak in a sensible way,” observed Serafima Aleksandrovna dryly.
“I understand nothing of what you are saying.”
“You see, madam, it’s a kind of omen,” explained Fedosya abruptly, in a
shamefaced way.
“Nonsense!” said Serafima Aleksandrovna.
She did not wish to hear any further as to the sort of omen it was, and
what it foreboded. But, somehow, a sense of fear and of sadness crept
into her mood, and it was humiliating to feel that an absurd tale should
disturb her beloved fancies, and should agitate her so deeply.
“Of course I know that gentlefolk don’t believe in omens, but it’s a bad
omen, madam,” Fedosya went on in a doleful voice, “the young lady will
hide, and hide...”
Suddenly she burst into tears, sobbing out loudly: “She’ll hide, and
hide, and hide away, angelic little soul, in a damp grave,” she
continued, as she wiped her tears with her apron and blew her nose.
“Who told you all this?” asked Serafima Aleksandrovna in an austere low
voice.
“Agathya says so, madam,” answered Fedosya; “it’s she that knows.”
“Knows!” exclaimed Serafima Aleksandrovna in irritation, as though she
wished to protect herself somehow from this sudden anxiety. “What
nonsense! Please don’t come to me with any such notions in the future.
Now you may go.”
Fedosya, dejected, her feelings hurt, left her mistress.
“What nonsense! As though Lelechka could die!” thought Serafima
Aleksandrovna to herself, trying to conquer the feeling of coldness and
fear which took possession, of her at the thought of the possible death
of Lelechka. Serafima Aleksandrovna, upon reflection, attributed these
women’s beliefs in omens to ignorance. She saw clearly that there could
be no possible connexion between a child’s quite ordinary diversion and
the continuation of the child’s life. She made a special effort that
evening to occupy her mind with other matters, but her thoughts returned
involuntarily to the fact that Lelechka loved to hide herself.
When Lelechka was still quite small, and had learned to distinguish
between her mother and her nurse, she sometimes, sitting in her nurse’s
arms, made a sudden roguish grimace, and hid her laughing face in the
nurse’s shoulder. Then she would look out with a sly glance.
Of late, in those rare moments of the mistress’ absence from the
nursery, Fedosya had again taught Lelechka to hide; and when Lelechka’s
mother, on coming in, saw how lovely the child looked when she was
hiding, she herself began to play hide and seek with her tiny daughter.
IV
The next day Serafima Aleksandrovna, absorbed in her joyous cares for
Lelechka, had forgotten Fedosya’s words of the day before.
But when she returned to the nursery, after having ordered the dinner,
and she heard Lelechka suddenly cry “Tiu-tiu!” from under the table, a
feeling of fear suddenly took hold of her. Though she reproached herself
at once for this unfounded, superstitious dread, nevertheless she could
not enter wholeheartedly into the spirit of Lelechka’s favourite game,
and she tried to divert Lelechka’s attention to something else.
Lelechka was a lovely and obedient child. She eagerly complied with her
mother’s new wishes. But as she had got into the habit of hiding from
her mother in some corner, and of crying out “Tiu-tiu!” so even that day
she returned more than once to the game.
Serafima Aleksandrovna tried desperately to amuse Lelechka. This was not
so easy because restless, threatening thoughts obtruded themselves
constantly.
“Why does Lelechka keep on recalling the tiu-tiu? Why does she not get
tired of the same thing—of eternally closing her eyes, and of hiding her
face? Perhaps,” thought Serafima Aleksandrovna, “she is not as strongly
drawn to the world as other children, who are attracted by many things.
If this is so, is it not a sign of organic weakness? Is it not a germ of
the unconscious non-desire to live?”
Serafima Aleksandrovna was tormented by presentiments. She felt ashamed
of herself for ceasing to play hide and seek with Lelechka before
Fedosya. But this game had become agonising to her, all the more
agonising because she had a real desire to play it, and because
something drew her very strongly to hide herself from Lelechka and to
seek out the hiding child. Serafima Aleksandrovna herself began the game
once or twice, though she played it with a heavy heart. She suffered as
though committing an evil deed with full consciousness.
It was a sad day for Serafima Aleksandrovna.
V
Lelechka was about to fall asleep. No sooner had she climbed into her
little bed, protected by a network on all sides, than her eyes began to
close from fatigue. Her mother covered her with a blue blanket. Lelechka
drew her sweet little hands from under the blanket and stretched them
out to embrace her mother. Her mother bent down. Lelechka, with a tender
expression on her sleepy face, kissed her mother and let her head fall
on the pillow. As her hands hid themselves under the blanket Lelechka
whispered: “The hands tiu-tiu!”
The mother’s heart seemed to stop—Lelechka lay there so small, so frail,
so quiet. Lelechka smiled gently, closed her eyes and said quietly: “The
eyes tiu-tiu!”
Then even more quietly: “Lelechka tiu-tiu!”
With these words she fell asleep, her face pressing the pillow. She
seemed so small and so frail under the blanket that covered her. Her
mother looked at her with sad eyes.
Serafima Aleksandrovna remained standing over Lelechka’s bed a long
while, and she kept looking at Lelechka with tenderness and fear.
“I’m a mother: is it possible that I shouldn’t be able to protect her?”
she thought, as she imagined the various ills that might befall
Lelechka.
She prayed long that night, but the prayer did not relieve her sadness.
VI
Several days passed. Lelechka caught cold. The fever came upon her at
night. When Serafima Aleksandrovna, awakened by Fedosya, came to
Lelechka and saw her looking so hot, so restless, and so tormented, she
instantly recalled the evil omen, and a hopeless despair took possession
of her from the first moments.
A doctor was called, and everything was done that is usual on such
occasions—but the inevitable happened. Serafima Aleksandrovna tried to
console herself with the hope that Lelechka would get well, and would
again laugh and play—yet this seemed to her an unthinkable happiness!
And Lelechka grew feebler from hour to hour.
All simulated tranquillity, so as not to frighten Serafima
Aleksandrovna, but their masked faces only made her sad.
Nothing made her so unhappy as the reiterations of Fedosya, uttered
between sobs: “She hid herself and hid herself, our Lelechka!”
But the thoughts of Serafima Aleksandrovna were confused, and she could
not quite grasp what was happening.
Fever was consuming Lelechka, and there were times when she lost
consciousness and spoke in delirium. But when she returned to herself
she bore her pain and her fatigue with gentle good nature; she smiled
feebly at her mamochka, so that her mamochka should not see how much she
suffered. Three days passed, torturing like a nightmare. Lelechka grew
quite feeble. She did not know that she was dying.
She glanced at her mother with her dimmed eyes, and lisped in a scarcely
audible, hoarse voice: “Tiu-tiu, mamochka! Make tiu-tiu, mamochka!”
Serafima Aleksandrovna hid her face behind the curtains near Lelechka’s
bed. How tragic!
“Mamochka!” called Lelechka in an almost inaudible voice.
Lelechka’s mother bent over her, and Lelechka, her vision grown still
more dim, saw her mother’s pale, despairing face for the last time.
“A white mamochka!” whispered Lelechka.
Mamochka’s white face became blurred, and everything grew dark before
Lelechka. She caught the edge of the bed-cover feebly with her hands and
whispered: “Tiu-tiu!”
Something rattled in her throat; Lelechka opened and again closed her
rapidly paling lips, and died.
Serafima Aleksandrovna was in dumb despair as she left Lelechka, and
went out of the room. She met her husband.
“Lelechka is dead,” she said in a quiet, dull voice.
Sergey Modestovich looked anxiously at her pale face. He was struck by
the strange stupor in her formerly animated handsome features. VII
Lelechka was dressed, placed in a little coffin, and carried into the
parlour. Serafima Aleksandrovna was standing by the coffin and looking
dully at her dead child. Sergey Modestovich went to his wife and,
consoling her with cold, empty words, tried to draw her away from the
coffin. Serafima Aleksandrovna smiled.
“Go away,” she said quietly. “Lelechka is playing. She’ll be up in a
minute.”
“Sima, my dear, don’t agitate yourself,” said Sergey Modestovich in a
whisper. “You must resign yourself to your fate.”
“She’ll be up in a minute,” persisted Serafima Aleksandrovna, her eyes
fixed on the dead little girl.
Sergey Modestovich looked round him cautiously: he was afraid of the
unseemly and of the ridiculous.
“Sima, don’t agitate yourself,” he repeated. “This would be a miracle,
and miracles do not happen in the nineteenth century.”
No sooner had he said these words than Sergey Modestovich felt their
irrelevance to what had happened. He was confused and annoyed.
He took his wife by the arm, and cautiously led her away from the
coffin. She did not oppose him.
Her face seemed tranquil and her eyes were dry. She went into the
nursery and began to walk round the room, looking into those places
where Lelechka used to hide herself. She walked all about the room, and
bent now and then to look under the table or under the bed, and kept on
repeating cheerfully: “Where is my little one? Where is my Lelechka?”
After she had walked round the room once she began to make her quest
anew. Fedosya, motionless, with dejected face, sat in a corner, and
looked frightened at her mistress; then she suddenly burst out sobbing,
and she wailed loudly:
“She hid herself, and hid herself, our Lelechka, our angelic little
soul!”
Serafima Aleksandrovna trembled, paused, cast a perplexed look at
Fedosya, began to weep, and left the nursery quietly. VIII
Sergey Modestovich hurried the funeral. He saw that Serafima
Aleksandrovna was terribly shocked by her sudden misfortune, and as he
feared for her reason he thought she would more readily be diverted and
consoled when Lelechka was buried.
Next morning Serafima Aleksandrovna dressed with particular care—for
Lelechka. When she entered the parlour there were several people between
her and Lelechka. The priest and deacon paced up and down the room;
clouds of blue smoke drifted in the air, and there was a smell of
incense. There was an oppressive feeling of heaviness in Serafima
Aleksandrovna’s head as she approached Lelechka. Lelechka lay there
still and pale, and smiled pathetically. Serafima Aleksandrovna laid her
cheek upon the edge of Lelechka’s coffin, and whispered: “Tiu-tiu,
little one!”
The little one did not reply. Then there was some kind of stir and
confusion around Serafima Aleksandrovna; strange, unnecessary faces bent
over her, some one held her—and Lelechka was carried away somewhere.
Serafima Aleksandrovna stood up erect, sighed in a lost way, smiled, and
called loudly: “Lelechka!”
Lelechka was being carried out. The mother threw herself after the
coffin with despairing sobs, but she was held back. She sprang behind
the door, through which Lelechka had passed, sat down there on the
floor, and as she looked through the crevice, she cried out: “Lelechka,
tiu-tiu!”
Then she put her head out from behind the door, and began to laugh.
Lelechka was quickly carried away from her mother, and those who carried
her seemed to run rather than to walk.
DETHRONED BY I.N. POTAPENKO
"Well?” Captain Zarubkin’s wife called out impatiently to her husband,
rising from the sofa and turning to face him as he entered.
“He doesn’t know anything about it,” he replied indifferently, as if the
matter were of no interest to him. Then he asked in a businesslike tone:
“Nothing for me from the office?”
“Why should I know? Am I your errand boy?”
“How they dilly-dally! If only the package doesn’t come too late. It’s
so important!”
“Idiot!”
“Who’s an idiot?”
“You, with your indifference, your stupid egoism.”
The captain said nothing. He was neither surprised nor insulted. On the
contrary, the smile on his face was as though he had received a
compliment. These wifely animadversions, probably oft-heard, by no means
interfered with his domestic peace.
“It can’t be that the man doesn’t know when his wife is coming back
home,” Mrs. Zarubkin continued excitedly. “She’s written to him every
day of the four months that she’s been away. The postmaster told me so.”
“Semyonov! Ho, Semyonov! Has any one from the office been here?”
“I don’t know, your Excellency,” came in a loud, clear voice from back
of the room.
“Why don’t you know? Where have you been?”
“I went to Abramka, your Excellency.”
“The tailor again?”
“Yes, your Excellency, the tailor Abramka.”
The captain spat in annoyance.
“And where is Krynka?”
“He went to market, your Excellency.”
“Was he told to go to market?”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
The captain spat again.
“Why do you keep spitting? Such vulgar manners!” his wife cried angrily.
“You behave at home like a drunken subaltern. You haven’t the least
consideration for your wife. You are so coarse in your behaviour towards
me! Do, please, go to your office.”
“Semyonov.”
“Your Excellency?”
“If the package comes, please have it sent back to the office and say
I’ve gone there. And listen! Some one must always be here. I won’t have
everybody out of the house at the same time. Do you hear?”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
The captain put on his cap to go. In the doorway he turned and addressed
his wife.
“Please, Tasya, please don’t send all the servants on your errands at
the same time. Something important may turn up, and then there’s nobody
here to attend to it.”
He went out, and his wife remained reclining in the sofa corner as if
his plea were no concern of hers. But scarcely had he left the house,
when she called out:
“Semyonov, come here. Quick!”
A bare-footed unshaven man in dark blue pantaloons and cotton shirt
presented himself. His stocky figure and red face made a wholesome
appearance. He was the Captain’s orderly.
“At your service, your Excellency.”
“Listen, Semyonov, you don’t seem to be stupid.”
“I don’t know, your Excellency.”
“For goodness’ sake, drop ‘your Excellency.’ I am not your superior
officer.”
“Yes, your Excel—”
“Idiot!”
But the lady’s manner toward the servant was far friendlier than toward
her husband. Semyonov had it in his power to perform important services
for her, while the captain had not come up to her expectations.
“Listen, Semyonov, how do you and the doctor’s men get along together?
Are you friendly?”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“Intolerable!” cried the lady, jumping up. “Stop using that silly title.
Can’t you speak like a sensible man?”
Semyonov had been standing in the stiff attitude of attention, with the
palms of his hands at the seams of his trousers. Now he suddenly
relaxed, and even wiped his nose with his fist.
“That’s the way we are taught to do,” he said carelessly, with a
clownish grin. “The gentlemen, the officers, insist on it.”
“Now, tell me, you are on good terms with the doctor’s men?”
“You mean Podmar and Shuchok? Of course, we’re friends.”
“Very well, then go straight to them and try to find out when Mrs.
Shaldin is expected back. They ought to know. They must be getting
things ready against her return—cleaning her bedroom and fixing it up.
Do you understand? But be careful to find out right. And also be very
careful not to let on for whom you are finding it out. Do you
understand?’
“Of course, I understand.”
“Well, then, go. But one more thing. Since you’re going out, you may as
well stop at Abramka’s again and tell him to come here right away. You
understand?”
“But his Excellency gave me orders to stay at home,” said Semyonov,
scratching himself behind his ears.
“Please don’t answer back. Just do as I tell you. Go on, now.”
“At your service.” And the orderly, impressed by the lady’s severe
military tone, left the room.
Mrs. Zarubkin remained reclining on the sofa for a while. Then she rose
and walked up and down the room and finally went to her bedroom, where
her two little daughters were playing in their nurse’s care. She scolded
them a bit and returned to her former place on the couch. Her every
movement betrayed great excitement.
Tatyana Grigoryevna Zarubkin was one of the most looked-up to ladies of
the S—— Regiment and even of the whole town of Chmyrsk, where the
regiment was quartered. To be sure, you hardly could say that, outside
the regiment, the town could boast any ladies at all. There were very
respectable women, decent wives, mothers, daughters and widows of
honourable citizens; but they all dressed in cotton and flannel, and on
high holidays made a show of cheap Cashmere gowns over which they wore
gay shawls with borders of wonderful arabesques. Their hats and other
headgear gave not the faintest evidence of good taste. So they could
scarcely be dubbed “ladies.” They were satisfied to be called “women.”
Each one of them, almost, had the name of her husband’s trade or
position tacked to her name—Mrs. Grocer so-and-so, Mrs. Mayor so-and-so,
Mrs. Milliner so-and-so, etc. Genuine ladies in the Russian society
sense had never come to the town before the S—— Regiment had taken up
its quarters there; and it goes without saying that the ladies of the
regiment had nothing in common, and therefore no intercourse with, the
women of the town. They were so dissimilar that they were like creatures
of a different species.
There is no disputing that Tatyana Grigoryevna Zarubkin was one of the
most looked-up-to of the ladies. She invariably played the most
important part at all the regimental affairs—the amateur theatricals,
the social evenings, the afternoon teas. If the captain’s wife was not
to be present, it was a foregone conclusion that the affair would not be
a success.
The most important point was that Mrs. Zarubkin had the untarnished
reputation of being the best-dressed of all the ladies. She was always
the most distinguished looking at the annual ball. Her gown for the
occasion, ordered from Moscow, was always chosen with the greatest
regard for her charms and defects, and it was always exquisitely
beautiful. A new fashion could not gain admittance to the other ladies
of the regiment except by way of the captain’s wife. Thanks to her good
taste in dressing, the stately blonde was queen at all the balls and in
all the salons of Chmyrsk. Another advantage of hers was that although
she was nearly forty she still looked fresh and youthful, so that the
young officers were constantly hovering about her and paying her homage.
November was a very lively month in the regiment’s calendar. It was on
the tenth of November that the annual ball took place. The ladies, of
course, spent their best efforts in preparation for this event. Needless
to say that in these arduous activities, Abramka Stiftik, the ladies’
tailor, played a prominent role. He was the one man in Chmyrsk who had
any understanding at all for the subtle art of the feminine toilet.
Preparations had begun in his shop in August already. Within the last
weeks his modest parlour—furnished with six shabby chairs placed about a
round table, and a fly-specked mirror on the wall—the atmosphere heavy
with a smell of onions and herring, had been filled from early morning
to the evening hours with the most charming and elegant of the fairer
sex. There was trying-on and discussion of styles and selection of
material. It was all very nerve-racking for the ladies.
The only one who had never appeared in this parlour was the captain’s
wife. That had been a thorn in Abramka’s flesh. He had spent days and
nights going over in his mind how he could rid this lady of the, in his
opinion, wretched habit of ordering her clothes from Moscow. For this
ball, however, as she herself had told him, she had not ordered a dress
but only material from out of town, from which he deduced that he was to
make the gown for her. But there was only one week left before the ball,
and still she had not come to him. Abramka was in a state of
feverishness. He longed once to make a dress for Mrs. Zarubkin. It would
add to his glory. He wanted to prove that he understood his trade just
as well as any tailor in Moscow, and that it was quite superfluous for
her to order her gowns outside of Chmyrsk. He would come out the
triumphant competitor of Moscow.
As each day passed and Mrs. Zarubkin did not appear in his shop, his
nervousness increased. Finally she ordered a dressing-jacket from
him—but not a word said of a ball gown. What was he to think of it?
So, when Semyonov told him that Mrs. Zarubkin was expecting him at her
home, it goes without saying that he instantly removed the dozen pins in
his mouth, as he was trying on a customer’s dress, told one of his
assistants to continue with the fitting, and instantly set off to call
on the captain’s wife. In this case, it was not a question of a mere
ball gown, but of the acquisition of the best customer in town.
Although Abramka wore a silk hat and a suit in keeping with the silk
hat, still he was careful not to ring at the front entrance, but always
knocked at the back door. At another time when the captain’s orderly was
not in the house—for the captain’s orderly also performed the duties of
the captain’s cook—he might have knocked long and loud. On other
occasions a cannon might have been shot off right next to Tatyana
Grigoryevna’s ears and she would not have lifted her fingers to open the
door. But now she instantly caught the sound of the modest knocking and
opened the back door herself for Abramka.
“Oh!” she cried delightedly. “You, Abramka!”
She really wanted to address him less familiarly, as was more befitting
so dignified a man in a silk hat; but everybody called him “Abramka,”
and he would have been very much surprised had he been honoured with his
full name, Abram Srulevich Stiftik. So she thought it best to address
him as the others did.
Mr. “Abramka” was tall and thin. There was always a melancholy
expression in his pale face. He had a little stoop, a long and very
heavy greyish beard. He had been practising his profession for thirty
years. Ever since his apprenticeship he had been called “Abramka,” which
did not strike him as at all derogatory or unfitting. Even his shingle
read: “Ladies’ Tailor: Abramka Stiftik”—the most valid proof that he
deemed his name immaterial, but that the chief thing to him was his art.
As a matter of fact, he had attained, if not perfection in tailoring,
yet remarkable skill. To this all the ladies of the S—— Regiment could
attest with conviction.
Abramka removed his silk hat, stepped into the kitchen, and said
gravely, with profound feeling:
“Mrs. Zarubkin, I am entirely at your service.”
“Come into the reception room. I have something very important to speak
to you about.”
Abramka followed in silence. He stepped softly on tiptoe, as if afraid
of waking some one.
“Sit down, Abramka, listen—but give me your word of honour, you won’t
tell any one?” Tatyana Grigoryevna began, reddening a bit. She was
ashamed to have to let the tailor Abramka into her secret, but since
there was no getting around it, she quieted herself and in an instant
had regained her ease.
“I don’t know what you are speaking of, Mrs. Zarubkin,” Abramka
rejoined. He assumed a somewhat injured manner. “Have you ever heard of
Abramka ever babbling anything out? You certainly know that in my
profession—you know everybody has some secret to be kept.”
“Oh, you must have misunderstood me, Abramka. What sort of secrets do
you mean?”
“Well, one lady is a little bit one-sided, another lady”—he pointed to
his breast—“is not quite full enough, another lady has scrawny arms—such
things as that have to be covered up or filled out or laced in, so as to
look better. That is where our art comes in. But we are in duty bound
not to say anything about it.”
Tatyana Grigoryevna smiled.
“Well, I can assure you I am all right that way. There is nothing about
me that needs to be covered up or filled out.”
“Oh, as if I didn’t know that! Everybody knows that Mrs. Zarubkin’s
figure is perfect,” Abramka cried, trying to flatter his new customer.
Mrs. Zarubkin laughed and made up her mind to remember “Everybody knows
that Mrs. Zarubkin’s figure is perfect.” Then she said:
“You know that the ball is to take place in a week.”
“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Zarubkin, in only one week; unfortunately, only one
week,” replied Abramka, sighing.
“But you remember your promise to make my dress for me for the ball this
time?”
“Mrs. Zarubkin,” Abramka cried, laying his hand on his heart. “Have I
said that I was not willing to make it? No, indeed, I said it must be
made and made right—for Mrs. Zarubkin, it must be better than for any
one else. That’s the way I feel about it.”
“Splendid! Just what I wanted to know.”
“But why don’t you show me your material? Why don’t you say to me,
'Here, Abramka, here is the stuff, make a dress?’ Abramka would work on
it day and night.”
“Ahem, that’s just it—I can’t order it. That is where the trouble comes
in. Tell me, Abramka, what is the shortest time you need for making the
dress? Listen, the very shortest?”
Abramka shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, is a week too much for a ball dress such as you will want? It’s
got to be sewed, it can’t be pasted together, You, yourself, know that,
Mrs. Zarubkin.”
“But supposing I order it only three days before the ball?”
Abramka started.
“Only three days before the ball? A ball dress? Am I a god, Mrs.
Zarubkin? I am nothing but the ladies’ tailor, Abramka Stiftik.”
“Well, then you are a nice tailor!” said Tatyana Grigoryevna,
scornfully. “In Moscow they made a ball dress for me in two days.”
Abramka jumped up as if at a shot, and beat his breast.
“Is that so? Then I say, Mrs. Zarubkin,” he cried pathetically, “if they
made a ball gown for you in Moscow in two days, very well, then I will
make a ball gown for you, if I must, in one day. I will neither eat nor
sleep, and I won’t let my help off either for one minute. How does that
suit you?”
“Sit down, Abramka, thank you very much. I hope I shall not have to put
such a strain on you. It really does not depend upon me, otherwise I
should have ordered the dress from you long ago.”
“It doesn’t depend upon you? Then upon whom does it depend?”
“Ahem, it depends upon—but now, Abramka, remember this is just between
you and me—it depends upon Mrs. Shaldin.”
“Upon Mrs. Shaldin, the doctor’s wife? Why she isn’t even here.”
“That’s just it. That is why I have to wait. How is it that a clever man
like you, Abramka, doesn’t grasp the situation?”
“Hm, hm! Let me see.” Abramka racked his brains for a solution of the
riddle. How could it be that Mrs. Shaldin, who was away, should have
anything to do with Mrs. Zarubkin’s order for a gown? No, that passed
his comprehension.
“She certainly will get back in time for the ball,” said Mrs. Zarubkin,
to give him a cue.
“Well, yes.”
“And certainly will bring a dress back with her.”
“Certainly!”
“A dress from abroad, something we have never seen here—something highly
original.”
“Mrs. Zarubkin!” Abramka cried, as if a truth of tremendous import had
been revealed to him. “Mrs. Zarubkin, I understand. Why certainly! Yes,
but that will be pretty hard.”
“That’s just it.”
Abramka reflected a moment, then said:
“I assure you, Mrs. Zarubkin, you need not be a bit uneasy. I will make
a dress for you that will be just as grand as the one from abroad. I
assure you, your dress will be the most elegant one at the ball, just as
it always has been. I tell you, my name won’t be Abramka Stiftik if—”
His eager asseverations seemed not quite to satisfy the captain’s wife.
Her mind was not quite set at ease. She interrupted him.
“But the style, Abramka, the style! You can’t possibly guess what the
latest fashion is abroad.”
“Why shouldn’t I know what the latest fashion is, Mrs. Zarubkin? In Kiev
I have a friend who publishes fashion-plates. I will telegraph to him,
and he will immediately send me pictures of the latest French models.
The telegram will cost only eighty cents, Mrs. Zarubkin, and I swear to
you I will copy any dress he sends. Mrs. Shaldin can’t possibly have a
dress like that.”
“All very well and good, and that’s what we’ll do. Still we must wait
until Mrs. Shaldin comes back. Don’t you see, Abramka, I must have
exactly the same style that she has? Can’t you see, so that nobody can
say that she is in the latest fashion?”
At this point Semyonov entered the room cautiously. He was wearing the
oddest-looking jacket and the captain’s old boots. His hair was rumpled,
and his eyes were shining suspiciously. There was every sign that he had
used the renewal of friendship with the doctor’s men as a pretext for a
booze.
“I had to stand them some brandy, your Excellency,” he said saucily, but
catching his mistress’s threatening look, he lowered his head guiltily.
“Idiot,” she yelled at him, “face about. Be off with you to the
kitchen.”
In his befuddlement, Semyonov had not noticed Abramka’s presence. Now he
became aware of him, faced about and retired to the kitchen sheepishly.
“What an impolite fellow,” said Abramka reproachfully.
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe—” said the captain’s wife, but instantly
followed Semyonov into the kitchen.
Semyonov aware of his awful misdemeanour, tried to stand up straight and
give a report.
“She will come back, your Excellency, day after to-morrow toward
evening. She sent a telegram.”
“Is that true now?”
“I swear it’s true. Shuchok saw it himself.”
“All right, very good. You will get something for this.”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“Silence, you goose. Go on, set the table.”
Abramka remained about ten minutes longer with the captain’s wife, and
on leaving said:
“Let me assure you once again, Mrs. Zarubkin, you needn’t worry; just
select the style, and I will make a gown for you that the best tailor in
Paris can’t beat.” He pressed his hand to his heart in token of his
intention to do everything in his power for Mrs. Zarubkin.
It was seven o’clock in the evening. Mrs. Shaldin and her trunk had
arrived hardly half an hour before, yet the captain’s wife was already
there paying visit; which was a sign of the warm friendship that existed
between the two women. They kissed each other and fell to talking. The
doctor, a tall man of forty-five, seemed discomfited by the visit, and
passed unfriendly side glances at his guest. He had hoped to spend that
evening undisturbed with his wife, and he well knew that when the ladies
of the regiment came to call upon each other “for only a second,” it
meant a whole evening of listening to idle talk.
“You wouldn’t believe me, dear, how bored I was the whole time you were
away, how I longed for you, Natalie Semyonovna. But you probably never
gave us a thought.”
“Oh, how can you say anything like that. I was thinking of you every
minute, every second. If I hadn’t been obliged to finish the cure, I
should have returned long ago. No matter how beautiful it may be away
from home, still the only place to live is among those that are near and
dear to you.”
These were only the preliminary soundings. They lasted with variations
for a quarter of an hour. First Mrs. Shaldin narrated a few incidents of
the trip, then Mrs. Zarubkin gave a report of some of the chief
happenings in the life of the regiment. When the conversation was in
full swing, and the samovar was singing on the table, and the pancakes
were spreading their appetising odour, the captain’s wife suddenly
cried:
“I wonder what the fashions are abroad now. I say, you must have feasted
your eyes on them!”
Mrs. Shaldin simply replied with a scornful gesture.
“Other people may like them, but I don’t care for them one bit. I am
glad we here don’t get to see them until a year later. You know, Tatyana
Grigoryevna, you sometimes see the ugliest styles.”
“Really?” asked the captain’s wife eagerly, her eyes gleaming with
curiosity. The great moment of complete revelation seemed to have
arrived.
“Perfectly hideous, I tell you. Just imagine, you know how nice the
plain skirts were. Then why change them? But no, to be in style now, the
skirts have to be draped. Why? It is just a sign of complete lack of
imagination. And in Lyons they got out a new kind of silk—but that is
still a French secret.”
“Why a secret? The silk is certainly being worn already?”
“Yes, one does see it being worn already, but when it was first
manufactured, the greatest secret was made of it. They were afraid the
Germans would imitate. You understand?”
“Oh, but what is the latest style?”
“I really can’t explain it to you. All I know is, it is something
awful.”
“She can’t explain! That means she doesn’t want to explain. Oh, the
cunning one. What a sly look she has in her eyes.” So thought the
captain’s wife. From the very beginning of the conversation, the two
warm friends, it need scarcely be said, were mutually distrustful. Each
had the conviction that everything the other said was to be taken in the
very opposite sense. They were of about the same age, Mrs. Shaldin
possibly one or two years younger than Mrs. Zarubkin. Mrs. Zarubkin was
rather plump, and had heavy light hair. Her appearance was blooming.
Mrs. Shaldin was slim, though well proportioned. She was a brunette with
a pale complexion and large dark eyes. They were two types of beauty
very likely to divide the gentlemen of the regiment into two camps of
admirers. But women are never content with halves. Mrs. Zarubkin wanted
to see all the officers of the regiment at her feet, and so did Mrs.
Shaldin. It naturally led to great rivalry between the two women, of
which they were both conscious, though they always had the friendliest
smiles for each other.
Mrs. Shaldin tried to give a different turn to the conversation.
“Do you think the ball will be interesting this year?”
“Why should it be interesting?” rejoined the captain’s wife scornfully.
“Always the same people, the same old humdrum jog-trot.”
“I suppose the ladies have been besieging our poor Abramka?”
“I really can’t tell you. So far as I am concerned, I have scarcely
looked at what he made for me.”
“Hm, how’s that? Didn’t you order your dress from Moscow again?”
“No, it really does not pay. I am sick of the bother of it all. Why all
that trouble? For whom? Our officers don’t care a bit how one dresses.
They haven’t the least taste.”
“Hm, there’s something back of that,” thought Mrs. Shaldin.
The captain’s wife continued with apparent indifference:
“I can guess what a gorgeous dress you had made abroad. Certainly in the
latest fashion?”
“I?” Mrs. Shaldin laughed innocently. “How could I get the time during
my cure to think of a dress? As a matter of fact, I completely forgot
the ball, thought of it at the last moment, and bought the first piece
of goods I laid my hands on.”
“Pink?”
“Oh, no. How can you say pink!”
“Light blue, then?”
“You can’t call it exactly light blue. It is a very undefined sort of
colour. I really wouldn’t know what to call it.”
“But it certainly must have some sort of a shade?”
“You may believe me or not if you choose, but really I don’t know. It’s
a very indefinite shade.”
“Is it Sura silk?”
“No, I can’t bear Sura. It doesn’t keep the folds well.”
“I suppose it is crêpe de Chine?”
“Heavens, no! Crêpe de Chine is much too expensive for me.”
“Then what can it be?”
“Oh, wait a minute, what is the name of that goods? You know there are
so many funny new names now. They don’t make any sense.”
“Then show me your dress, dearest. Do please show me your dress.”
Mrs. Shaldin seemed to be highly embarrassed.
“I am so sorry I can’t. It is way down at the bottom of the trunk. There
is the trunk. You see yourself I couldn’t unpack it now.”
The trunk, close to the wall, was covered with oil cloth and tied tight
with heavy cords. The captain’s wife devoured it with her eyes. She
would have liked to see through and through it. She had nothing to say
in reply, because it certainly was impossible to ask her friend, tired
out from her recent journey, to begin to unpack right away and take out
all her things just to show her her new dress. Yet she could not tear
her eyes away from the trunk. There was a magic in it that held her
enthralled. Had she been alone she would have begun to unpack it
herself, nor even have asked the help of a servant to undo the knots.
Now there was nothing left for her but to turn her eyes sorrowfully away
from the fascinating object and take up another topic of conversation to
which she would be utterly indifferent. But she couldn’t think of
anything else to talk about. Mrs. Shaldin must have prepared herself
beforehand. She must have suspected something. So now Mrs. Zarubkin
pinned her last hope to Abramka’s inventiveness. She glanced at the
clock.
“Dear me,” she exclaimed, as if surprised at the lateness of the hour.
“I must be going. I don’t want to disturb you any longer either,
dearest. You must be very tired. I hope you rest well.”
She shook hands with Mrs. Shaldin, kissed her and left.
Abramka Stiftik had just taken off his coat and was doing some ironing
in his shirt sleeves, when a peculiar figure appeared in his shop. It
was that of a stocky orderly in a well-worn uniform without buttons and
old galoshes instead of boots. His face was gloomy-looking and was
covered with a heavy growth of hair. Abramka knew this figure well. It
seemed always just to have been awakened from the deepest sleep.
“Ah, Shuchok, what do you want?”
“Mrs. Shaldin would like you to call upon her,” said Shuchok. He behaved
as if he had come on a terribly serious mission.
“Ah, that’s so, your lady has come back. I heard about it. You see I am
very busy. Still you may tell her I am coming right away. I just want to
finish ironing Mrs. Konopotkin’s dress.”
Abramka simply wanted to keep up appearances, as always when he was sent
for. But his joy at the summons to Mrs. Shaldin was so great that to the
astonishment of his helpers and Shuchok he left immediately.
He found Mrs. Shaldin alone. She had not slept well the two nights
before and had risen late that morning. Her husband had left long before
for the Military Hospital. She was sitting beside her open trunk taking
her things out very carefully.
“How do you do, Mrs. Shaldin? Welcome back to Chmyrsk. I congratulate
you on your happy arrival.”
“Oh, how do you do, Abramka?” said Mrs. Shaldin delightedly; “we haven’t
seen each other for a long time, have we? I was rather homesick for
you.”
“Oh, Mrs. Shaldin, you must have had a very good time abroad. But what
do you need me for? You certainly brought a dress back with you?”
“Abramka always comes in handy,” said Mrs. Shaldin jestingly. “We ladies
of the regiment are quite helpless without Abramka. Take a seat.”
Abramka seated himself. He felt much more at ease in Mrs. Shaldin’s home
than in Mrs. Zarubkin’s. Mrs. Shaldin did not order her clothes from
Moscow. She was a steady customer of his. In this room he had many a
time circled about the doctor’s wife with a yard measure, pins, chalk
and scissors, had kneeled down beside her, raised himself to his feet,
bent over again and stood puzzling over some difficult problem of
dressmaking—how low to cut the dress out at the neck, how long to make
the train, how wide the hem, and so on. None of the ladies of the
regiment ordered as much from him as Mrs. Shaldin. Her grandmother would
send her material from Kiev or the doctor would go on a professional
trip to Chernigov and always bring some goods back with him; or
sometimes her aunt in Voronesh would make her a gift of some silk.
“Abramka is always ready to serve Mrs. Shaldin first,” said the tailor,
though seized with a little pang, as if bitten by a guilty conscience.
“Are you sure you are telling the truth? Is Abramka always to be
depended upon? Eh, is he?” She looked at him searchingly from beneath
drooping lids.
“What a question,” rejoined Abramka. His face quivered slightly. His
feeling of discomfort was waxing. “Has Abramka ever—”
“Oh, things can happen. But, all right, never mind. I brought a dress
along with me. I had to have it made in a great hurry, and there is just
a little more to be done on it. Now if I give you this dress to finish,
can I be sure that you positively won’t tell another soul how it is
made?”
“Mrs. Shaldin, oh, Mrs. Shaldin,” said Abramka reproachfully.
Nevertheless, the expression of his face was not so reassuring as usual.
“You give me your word of honour?”
“Certainly! My name isn’t Abramka Stiftik if I—”
“Well, all right, I will trust you. But be careful. You know of whom you
must be careful?”
“Who is that, Mrs. Shaldin?”
“Oh, you know very well whom I mean. No, you needn’t put your hand on
your heart. She was here to see me yesterday and tried in every way she
could to find out how my dress is made. But she couldn’t get it out of
me.” Abramka sighed. Mrs. Shaldin seemed to suspect his betrayal. “I am
right, am I not? She has not had her dress made yet, has she? She waited
to see my dress, didn’t she? And she told you to copy the style, didn’t
she?” Mrs, Shaldin asked with honest naïveté. “But I warn you,
Abramka, if you give away the least little thing about my dress, then
all is over between you and me. Remember that.”
Abramka’s hand went to his heart again, and the gesture carried the same
sense of conviction as of old.
“Mrs. Shaldin, how can you speak like that?”
“Wait a moment.”
Mrs. Shaldin left the room. About ten minutes passed during which
Abramka had plenty of time to reflect. How could he have given the
captain’s wife a promise like that so lightly? What was the captain’s
wife to him as compared with the doctor’s wife? Mrs. Zarubkin had never
given him a really decent order—just a few things for the house and some
mending. Supposing he were now to perform this great service for her,
would that mean that he could depend upon her for the future? Was any
woman to be depended upon? She would wear this dress out and go back to
ordering her clothes from Moscow again. But Mrs. Shaldin, she was very
different. He could forgive her having brought this one dress along from
abroad. What woman in Russia would have refrained, when abroad, from
buying a new dress? Mrs. Shaldin would continue to be his steady
customer all the same.
The door opened. Abramka rose involuntarily, and clasped his hands in
astonishment.
“Well,” he exclaimed rapturously, “that is a dress, that is—My, my!” He
was so stunned he could find nothing more to say. And how charming Mrs.
Shaldin looked in her wonderful gown! Her tall slim figure seemed to
have been made for it. What simple yet elegant lines. At first glance
you would think it was nothing more than an ordinary house-gown, but
only at first glance. If you looked at it again, you could tell right
away that it met all the requirements of a fancy ball-gown. What struck
Abramka most was that it had no waist line, that it did not consist of
bodice and skirt. That was strange. It was just caught lightly together
under the bosom, which it brought out in relief. Draped over the whole
was a sort of upper garment of exquisite old-rose lace embroidered with
large silk flowers, which fell from the shoulders and broadened out in
bold superb lines. The dress was cut low and edged with a narrow strip
of black down around the bosom, around the bottom of the lace drapery,
and around the hem of the skirt. A wonderful fan of feathers to match
the down edging gave the finishing touch.
“Well, how do you like it, Abramka!” asked Mrs. Shaldin with a
triumphant smile.
“Glorious, glorious! I haven’t the words at my command. What a dress!
No, I couldn’t make a dress like that. And how beautifully it fits you,
as if you had been born in it, Mrs. Shaldin. What do you call the
style?”
“Empire.”
“Ampeer?” he queried. “Is that a new style? Well, well, what people
don’t think of. Tailors like us might just as well throw our needles and
scissors away.”
“Now, listen, Abramka, I wouldn’t have shown it to you if there were not
this sewing to be done on it. You are the only one who will have seen it
before the ball. I am not even letting my husband look at it.”
“Oh, Mrs. Shaldin, you can rely upon me as upon a rock. But after the
ball may I copy it?”
“Oh, yes, after the ball copy it as much as you please, but not now, not
for anything in the world.”
There were no doubts in Abramka’s mind when he left the doctor’s house.
He had arrived at his decision. That superb creation had conquered him.
It would be a piece of audacity on his part, he felt, even to think of
imitating such a gown. Why, it was not a gown. It was a dream, a
fantastic vision—without a bodice, without puffs or frills or tawdry
trimmings of any sort. Simplicity itself and yet so chic.
Back in his shop he opened the package of fashion-plates that had just
arrived from Kiev. He turned the pages and stared in astonishment. What
was that? Could he trust his eyes? An Empire gown. There it was, with
the broad voluptuous drapery of lace hanging from the shoulders and the
edging of down. Almost exactly the same thing as Mrs. Shaldin’s.
He glanced up and saw Semyonov outside the window. He had certainly come
to fetch him to the captain’s wife, who must have ordered him to watch
the tailor’s movements, and must have learned that he had just been at
Mrs. Shaldin’s. Semyonov entered and told him his mistress wanted to see
him right away.
Abramka slammed the fashion magazine shut as if afraid that Semyonov
might catch a glimpse of the new Empire fashion and give the secret
away.
“I will come immediately,” he said crossly.
He picked up his fashion plates, put the yard measure in his pocket,
rammed his silk hat sorrowfully on his head and set off for the
captain’s house. He found Mrs. Zarubkin pacing the room excitedly,
greeted her, but carefully avoided meeting her eyes.
“Well, what did you find out?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Zarubkin,” said Abramka dejectedly. “Unfortunately I
couldn’t find out a thing.”
“Idiot! I have no patience with you. Where are the fashion plates?”
“Here, Mrs. Zarubkin.”
She turned the pages, looked at one picture after the other, and
suddenly her eyes shone and her cheeks reddened.
“Oh, Empire! The very thing. Empire is the very latest. Make this one
for me,” she cried commandingly.
Abramka turned pale.
“Ampeer, Mrs. Zarubkin? I can’t make that Ampeer dress for you,” he
murmured.
“Why not?” asked the captain’s wife, giving him a searching look.
“Because—because—I can’t.”
“Oh—h—h, you can’t? You know why you can’t. Because that is the style of
Mrs. Shaldin’s dress. So that is the reliability you boast so about?
Great!”
“Mrs. Zarubkin, I will make any other dress you choose, but it is
absolutely impossible for me to make this one.”
“I don’t need your fashion plates, do you hear me? Get out of here, and
don’t ever show your face again.”
“Mrs. Zarubkin, I—”
“Get out of here,” repeated the captain’s wife, quite beside herself.
The poor tailor stuck his yard measure, which he had already taken out,
back into his pocket and left.
Half an hour later the captain’s wife was entering a train for Kiev,
carrying a large package which contained material for a dress. The
captain had accompanied her to the station with a pucker in his
forehead. That was five days before the ball.
At the ball two expensive Empire gowns stood out conspicuously from
among the more or less elegant gowns which had been finished in the shop
of Abramka Stiftik, Ladies’ Tailor. The one gown adorned Mrs. Shaldin’s
figure, the other the figure of the captain’s wife.
Mrs. Zarubkin had bought her gown ready made at Kiev, and had returned
only two hours before the beginning of the ball. She had scarcely had
time to dress. Perhaps it would have been better had she not appeared at
this one of the annual balls, had she not taken that fateful trip to
Kiev. For in comparison with the make and style of Mrs. Shaldin’s dress,
which had been brought abroad, hers was like the botched imitation of an
amateur.
That was evident to everybody, though the captain’s wife had her little
group of partisans, who maintained with exaggerated eagerness that she
looked extraordinarily fascinating in her dress and Mrs. Shaldin still
could not rival her. But there was no mistaking it, there was little
justice in this contention. Everybody knew better; what was worst of
all, Mrs. Zarubkin herself knew better. Mrs. Shaldin’s triumph was
complete.
The two ladies gave each other the same friendly smiles as always, but
one of them was experiencing the fine disdain and the derision of the
conqueror, while the other was burning inside with the furious
resentment of a dethroned goddess—goddess of the annual ball.
From that time on Abramka cautiously avoided passing the captain’s
house.
THE SERVANT BY S.T. SEMYONOV I
Gerasim returned to Moscow just at a time when it was hardest to find
work, a short while before Christmas, when a man sticks even to a poor
job in the expectation of a present. For three weeks the peasant lad had
been going about in vain seeking a position.
He stayed with relatives and friends from his village, and although he
had not yet suffered great want, it disheartened him that he, a strong
young man, should go without work.
Gerasim had lived in Moscow from early boyhood. When still a mere child,
he had gone to work in a brewery as bottle-washer, and later as a lower
servant in a house. In the last two years he had been in a merchant’s
employ, and would still have held that position, had he not been
summoned back to his village for military duty. However, he had not been
drafted. It seemed dull to him in the village, he was not used to the
country life, so he decided he would rather count the stones in Moscow
than stay there.
Every minute it was getting to be more and more irk-some for him to be
tramping the streets in idleness. Not a stone did he leave unturned in
his efforts to secure any sort of work. He plagued all of his
acquaintances, he even held up people on the street and asked them if
they knew of a situation—all in vain.
Finally Gerasim could no longer bear being a burden on his people. Some
of them were annoyed by his coming to them; and others had suffered
unpleasantness from their masters on his account. He was altogether at a
loss what to do. Sometimes he would go a whole day without eating. II
One day Gerasim betook himself to a friend from his village, who lived
at the extreme outer edge of Moscow, near Sokolnik. The man was coachman
to a merchant by the name of Sharov, in whose service he had been for
many years. He had ingratiated himself with his master, so that Sharov
trusted him absolutely and gave every sign of holding him in high
favour. It was the man’s glib tongue, chiefly, that had gained him his
master’s confidence. He told on all the servants, and Sharov valued him
for it.
Gerasim approached and greeted him. The coachman gave his guest a proper
reception, served him with tea and something to eat, and asked him how
he was doing.
“Very badly, Yegor Danilych,” said Gerasim. “I’ve been without a job for
weeks.”
“Didn’t you ask your old employer to take you back?”
“I did.”
“He wouldn’t take you again?”
“The position was filled already.”
“That’s it. That’s the way you young fellows are. You serve your
employers so-so, and when you leave your jobs, you usually have muddied
up the way back to them. You ought to serve your masters so that they
will think a lot of you, and when you come again, they will not refuse
you, but rather dismiss the man who has taken your place.”
“How can a man do that? In these days there aren’t any employers like
that, and we aren’t exactly angels, either.”
“What’s the use of wasting words? I just want to tell you about myself.
If for some reason or other I should ever have to leave this place and
go home, not only would Mr. Sharov, if I came back, take me on again
without a word, but he would be glad to, too.”
Gerasim sat there downcast. He saw his friend was boasting, and it
occurred to him to gratify him.
“I know it,” he said. “But it’s hard to find men like you, Yegor
Danilych. If you were a poor worker, your master would not have kept you
twelve years.”
Yegor smiled. He liked the praise.
“That’s it,” he said. “If you were to live and serve as I do, you
wouldn’t be out of work for months and months.”
Gerasim made no reply.
Yegor was summoned to his master.
“Wait a moment,” he said to Gerasim. “I’ll be right back.”
“Very well.” III
Yegor came back and reported that inside of half an hour he would have
to have the horses harnessed, ready to drive his master to town. He
lighted his pipe and took several turns in the room. Then he came to a
halt in front of Gerasim.
“Listen, my boy,” he said, “if you want, I’ll ask my master to take you
as a servant here.”
“Does he need a man?”
“We have one, but he’s not much good. He’s getting old, and it’s very
hard for him to do the work. It’s lucky for us that the neighbourhood
isn’t a lively one and the police don’t make a fuss about things being
kept just so, else the old man couldn’t manage to keep the place clean
enough for them.”
“Oh, if you can, then please do say a word for me, Yegor Danilych. I’ll
pray for you all my life. I can’t stand being without work any longer.”
“All right, I’ll speak for you. Come again to-morrow, and in the
meantime take this ten-kopek piece. It may come in handy.”
“Thanks, Yegor Danilych. Then you will try for me? Please do me the
favour.”
“All right. I’ll try for you.”
Gerasim left, and Yegor harnessed up his horses. Then he put on his
coachman’s habit, and drove up to the front door. Mr. Sharov stepped out
of the house, seated himself in the sleigh, and the horses galloped off.
He attended to his business in town and returned home. Yegor, observing
that his master was in a good humour, said to him:
“Yegor Fiodorych, I have a favour to ask of you.”
“What is it?”
“There’s a young man from my village here, a good boy. He’s without a
job.”
“Well?”
“Wouldn’t you take him?”
“What do I want him for?”
“Use him as man of all work round the place.”
“How about Polikarpych?”
“What good is he? It’s about time you dismissed him.”
“That wouldn’t be fair. He has been with me so many years. I can’t let
him go just so, without any cause.”
“Supposing he has worked for you for years. He didn’t work for nothing.
He got paid for it. He’s certainly saved up a few dollars for his old
age.”
“Saved up! How could he? From what? He’s not alone in the world. He has
a wife to support, and she has to eat and drink also.”
“His wife earns money, too, at day’s work as charwoman.”
“A lot she could have made! Enough for kvas.”
“Why should you care about Polikarpych and his wife? To tell you the
truth, he’s a very poor servant. Why should you throw your money away on
him? He never shovels the snow away on time, or does anything right. And
when it comes his turn to be night watchman, he slips away at least ten
times a night. It’s too cold for him. You’ll see, some day, because of
him, you will have trouble with the police. The quarterly inspector will
descend on us, and it won’t be so agreeable for you to be responsible
for Polikarpych.”
“Still, it’s pretty rough. He’s been with me fifteen years. And to treat
him that way in his old age—it would be a sin.”
“A sin! Why, what harm would you be doing him? He won’t starve. He’ll go
to the almshouse. It will be better for him, too, to be quiet in his old
age.”
Sharov reflected.
“All right,” he said finally. “Bring your friend here. I’ll see what I
can do.”
“Do take him, sir. I’m so sorry for him. He’s a good boy, and he’s been
without work for such a long time. I know he’ll do his work well and
serve you faithfully. On account of having to report for military duty,
he lost his last position. If it hadn’t been for that, his master would
never have let him go.”
IV
The next evening Gerasim came again and asked:
“Well, could you do anything for me?”
“Something, I believe. First let’s have some tea. Then we’ll go see my
master.”
Even tea had no allurements for Gerasim. He was eager for a decision;
but under the compulsion of politeness to his host, he gulped down two
glasses of tea, and then they betook themselves to Sharov.
Sharov asked Gerasim where he had lived before and what work he could
do. Then he told him he was prepared to engage him as man of all work,
and he should come back the next day ready to take the place.
Gerasim was fairly stunned by the great stroke of fortune. So
overwhelming was his joy that his legs would scarcely carry him. He went
to the coachman’s room, and Yegor said to him:
“Well, my lad, see to it that you do your work right, so that I shan’t
have to be ashamed of you. You know what masters are like. If you go
wrong once, they’ll be at you forever after with their fault-finding,
and never give you peace.”
“Don’t worry about that, Yegor Danilych.”
“Well—well.”
Gerasim took leave, crossing the yard to go out by the gate.
Polikarpych’s rooms gave on the yard, and a broad beam of light from the
window fell across Gerasim’s way. He was curious to get a glimpse of his
future home, but the panes were all frosted over, and it was impossible
to peep through. However, he could hear what the people inside were
saying.
“What will we do now?” was said in a woman’s voice.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” a man, undoubtedly Polikarpych, replied.
“Go begging, I suppose.”
“That’s all we can do. There’s nothing else left,” said the woman. “Oh,
we poor people, what a miserable life we lead. We work and work from
early morning till late at night, day after day, and when we get old,
then it’s, ‘Away with you!’”
“What can we do? Our master is not one of us. It wouldn’t be worth the
while to say much to him about it. He cares only for his own advantage.”
“All the masters are so mean. They don’t think of any one but
themselves. It doesn’t occur to them that we work for them honestly and
faithfully for years, and use up our best strength in their service.
They’re afraid to keep us a year longer, even though we’ve got all the
strength we need to do their work. If we weren’t strong enough, we’d go
of our own accord.”
“The master’s not so much to blame as his coachman. Yegor Danilych wants
to get a good position for his friend.”
“Yes, he’s a serpent. He knows how to wag his tongue. You wait, you
foul-mouthed beast, I’ll get even with you. I’ll go straight to the
master and tell him how the fellow deceives him, how he steals the hay
and fodder. I’ll put it down in writing, and he can convince himself how
the fellow lies about us all.”
“Don’t, old woman. Don’t sin.”
“Sin? Isn’t what I said all true? I know to a dot what I’m saying, and I
mean to tell it straight out to the master. He should see with his own
eyes. Why not? What can we do now anyhow? Where shall we go? He’s ruined
us, ruined us.”
The old woman burst out sobbing.
Gerasim heard all that, and it stabbed him like a dagger. He realised
what misfortune he would be bringing the old people, and it made him
sick at heart. He stood there a long while, saddened, lost in thought,
then he turned and went back into the coachman’s room.
“Ah, you forgot something?”
“No, Yegor Danilych.” Gerasim stammered out, “I’ve come—listen—I want to
thank you ever and ever so much—for the way you received me—and—and all
the trouble you took for me—but—I can’t take the place.”
“What! What does that mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t want the place. I will look for another one for
myself.”
Yegor flew into a rage.
“Did you mean to make a fool of me, did you, you idiot? You come here so
meek—‘Try for me, do try for me’—and then you refuse to take the place.
You rascal, you have disgraced me!”
Gerasim found nothing to say in reply. He reddened, and lowered his
eyes. Yegor turned his back scornfully and said nothing more.
Then Gerasim quietly picked up his cap and left the coachman’s room. He
crossed the yard rapidly, went out by the gate, and hurried off down the
street. He felt happy and lighthearted.
ONE AUTUMN NIGHT BY MAXIM GORKY
Once in the autumn I happened to be in a very unpleasant and
inconvenient position. In the town where I had just arrived and where I
knew not a soul, I found myself without a farthing in my pocket and
without a night’s lodging.
Having sold during the first few days every part of my costume without
which it was still possible to go about, I passed from the town into the
quarter called “Yste,” where were the steamship wharves—a quarter which
during the navigation season fermented with boisterous, laborious life,
but now was silent and deserted, for we were in the last days of
October.
Dragging my feet along the moist sand, and obstinately scrutinising it
with the desire to discover in it any sort of fragment of food, I
wandered alone among the deserted buildings and warehouses, and thought
how good it would be to get a full meal.
In our present state of culture hunger of the mind is more quickly
satisfied than hunger of the body. You wander about the streets, you are
surrounded by buildings not bad-looking from the outside and—you may
safely say it—not so badly furnished inside, and the sight of them may
excite within you stimulating ideas about architecture, hygiene, and
many other wise and high-flying subjects. You may meet warmly and neatly
dressed folks—all very polite, and turning away from you tactfully, not
wishing offensively to notice the lamentable fact of your existence.
Well, well, the mind of a hungry man is always better nourished and
healthier than the mind of the well-fed man; and there you have a
situation from which you may draw a very ingenious conclusion in favour
of the ill fed.
The evening was approaching, the rain was falling, and the wind blew
violently from the north. It whistled in the empty booths and shops,
blew into the plastered window-panes of the taverns, and whipped into
foam the wavelets of the river which splashed noisily on the sandy
shore, casting high their white crests, racing one after another into
the dim distance, and leaping impetuously over one another’s shoulders.
It seemed as if the river felt the proximity of winter, and was running
at random away from the fetters of ice which the north wind might well
have flung upon her that very night. The sky was heavy and dark; down
from it swept incessantly scarcely visible drops of rain, and the
melancholy elegy in nature all around me was emphasised by a couple of
battered and misshapen willow-trees and a boat, bottom upwards, that was
fastened to their roots.
The overturned canoe with its battered keel and the miserable old trees
rifled by the cold wind—everything around me was bankrupt, barren, and
dead, and the sky flowed with undryable tears... Everything around was
waste and gloomy ... it seemed as if everything were dead, leaving me
alone among the living, and for me also a cold death waited.
I was then eighteen years old—a good time!
I walked and walked along the cold wet sand, making my chattering teeth
warble in honour of cold and hunger, when suddenly, as I was carefully
searching for something to eat behind one of the empty crates, I
perceived behind it, crouching on the ground, a figure in woman’s
clothes dank with the rain and clinging fast to her stooping shoulders.
Standing over her, I watched to see what she was doing. It appeared that
she was digging a trench in the sand with her hands—digging away under
one of the crates.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked, crouching down on my heels quite
close to her.
She gave a little scream and was quickly on her legs again. Now that she
stood there staring at me, with her wide-open grey eyes full of terror,
I perceived that it was a girl of my own age, with a very pleasant face
embellished unfortunately by three large blue marks. This spoilt her,
although these blue marks had been distributed with a remarkable sense
of proportion, one at a time, and all were of equal size—two under the
eyes, and one a little bigger on the forehead just over the bridge of
the nose. This symmetry was evidently the work of an artist well inured
to the business of spoiling the human physiognomy.
The girl looked at me, and the terror in her eyes gradually died out...
She shook the sand from her hands, adjusted her cotton head-gear,
cowered down, and said:
“I suppose you too want something to eat? Dig away then! My hands are
tired. Over there”—she nodded her head in the direction of a
booth—“there is bread for certain ... and sausages too... That booth is
still carrying on business.”
I began to dig. She, after waiting a little and looking at me, sat down
beside me and began to help me.
We worked in silence. I cannot say now whether I thought at that moment
of the criminal code, of morality, of proprietorship, and all the other
things about which, in the opinion of many experienced persons, one
ought to think every moment of one’s life. Wishing to keep as close to
the truth as possible, I must confess that apparently I was so deeply
engaged in digging under the crate that I completely forgot about
everything else except this one thing: What could be inside that crate?
The evening drew on. The grey, mouldy, cold fog grew thicker and thicker
around us. The waves roared with a hollower sound than before, and the
rain pattered down on the boards of that crate more loudly and more
frequently. Somewhere or other the night-watchman began springing his
rattle.
“Has it got a bottom or not?” softly inquired my assistant. I did not
understand what she was talking about, and I kept silence.
“I say, has the crate got a bottom? If it has we shall try in vain to
break into it. Here we are digging a trench, and we may, after all, come
upon nothing but solid boards. How shall we take them off? Better smash
the lock; it is a wretched lock.”
Good ideas rarely visit the heads of women, but, as you see, they do
visit them sometimes. I have always valued good ideas, and have always
tried to utilise them as far as possible.
Having found the lock, I tugged at it and wrenched off the whole thing.
My accomplice immediately stooped down and wriggled like a serpent into
the gaping-open, four cornered cover of the crate whence she called to
me approvingly, in a low tone:
“You’re a brick!”
Nowadays a little crumb of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a
whole dithyramb from a man, even though he be more eloquent than all the
ancient and modern orators put together. Then, however, I was less
amiably disposed than I am now, and, paying no attention to the
compliment of my comrade, I asked her curtly and anxiously:
“Is there anything?”
In a monotonous tone she set about calculating our discoveries.
“A basketful of bottles—thick furs—a sunshade—an iron pail.”
All this was uneatable. I felt that my hopes had vanished... But
suddenly she exclaimed vivaciously:
“Aha! here it is!”
“What?”
“Bread ... a loaf ... it’s only wet ... take it!”
A loaf flew to my feet and after it herself, my valiant comrade. I had
already bitten off a morsel, stuffed it in my mouth, and was chewing
it...
“Come, give me some too!... And we mustn’t stay here... Where shall we
go?” she looked inquiringly about on all sides... It was dark, wet, and
boisterous.
“Look! there’s an upset canoe yonder ... let us go there.”
“Let us go then!” And off we set, demolishing our booty as we went, and
filling our mouths with large portions of it... The rain grew more
violent, the river roared; from somewhere or other resounded a prolonged
mocking whistle—just as if Someone great who feared nobody was whistling
down all earthly institutions and along with them this horrid autumnal
wind and us its heroes. This whistling made my heart throb painfully, in
spite of which I greedily went on eating, and in this respect the girl,
walking on my left hand, kept even pace with me.
“What do they call you?” I asked her—why I know not.
“Natasha,” she answered shortly, munching loudly.
I stared at her. My heart ached within me; and then I stared into the
mist before me, and it seemed to me as if the inimical countenance of my
Destiny was smiling at me enigmatically and coldly.
The rain scourged the timbers of the skiff incessantly, and its soft
patter induced melancholy thoughts, and the wind whistled as it flew
down into the boat’s battered bottom through a rift, where some loose
splinters of wood were rattling together—a disquieting and depressing
sound. The waves of the river were splashing on the shore, and sounded
so monotonous and hopeless, just as if they were telling something
unbearably dull and heavy, which was boring them into utter disgust,
something from which they wanted to run away and yet were obliged to
talk about all the same. The sound of the rain blended with their
splashing, and a long-drawn sigh seemed to be floating above the
overturned skiff—the endless, labouring sigh of the earth, injured and
exhausted by the eternal changes from the bright and warm summer to the
cold misty and damp autumn. The wind blew continually over the desolate
shore and the foaming river—blew and sang its melancholy songs...
Our position beneath the shelter of the skiff was utterly devoid of
comfort; it was narrow and damp, tiny cold drops of rain dribbled
through the damaged bottom; gusts of wind penetrated it. We sat in
silence and shivered with cold. I remembered that I wanted to go to
sleep. Natasha leaned her back against the hull of the boat and curled
herself up into a tiny ball. Embracing her knees with her hands, and
resting her chin upon them, she stared doggedly at the river with wide-
open eyes; on the pale patch of her face they seemed immense, because of
the blue marks below them. She never moved, and this immobility and
silence—I felt it—gradually produced within me a terror of my neighbour.
I wanted to talk to her, but I knew not how to begin.
It was she herself who spoke.
“What a cursed thing life is!” she exclaimed plainly, abstractedly, and
in a tone of deep conviction.
But this was no complaint. In these words there was too much of
indifference for a complaint. This simple soul thought according to her
understanding—thought and proceeded to form a certain conclusion which
she expressed aloud, and which I could not confute for fear of
contradicting myself. Therefore I was silent, and she, as if she had not
noticed me, continued to sit there immovable.
“Even if we croaked ... what then...?” Natasha began again, this time
quietly and reflectively, and still there was not one note of complaint
in her words. It was plain that this person, in the course of her
reflections on life, was regarding her own case, and had arrived at the
conviction that in order to preserve herself from the mockeries of life,
she was not in a position to do anything else but simply “croak”—to use
her own expression.
The clearness of this line of thought was inexpressibly sad and painful
to me, and I felt that if I kept silence any longer I was really bound
to weep... And it would have been shameful to have done this before a
woman, especially as she was not weeping herself. I resolved to speak to
her.
“Who was it that knocked you about?” I asked. For the moment I could not
think of anything more sensible or more delicate.
“Pashka did it all,” she answered in a dull and level tone.
“And who is he?”
“My lover... He was a baker.”
“Did he beat you often?”
“Whenever he was drunk he beat me... Often!”
And suddenly, turning towards me, she began to talk about herself,
Pashka, and their mutual relations. He was a baker with red moustaches
and played very well on the banjo. He came to see her and greatly
pleased her, for he was a merry chap and wore nice clean clothes. He had
a vest which cost fifteen rubles and boots with dress tops. For these
reasons she had fallen in love with him, and he became her “creditor.”
And when he became her creditor he made it his business to take away
from her the money which her other friends gave to her for bonbons, and,
getting drunk on this money, he would fall to beating her; but that
would have been nothing if he hadn’t also begun to “run after” other
girls before her very eyes.
“Now, wasn’t that an insult? I am not worse than the others. Of course
that meant that he was laughing at me, the blackguard. The day before
yesterday I asked leave of my mistress to go out for a bit, went to him,
and there I found Dimka sitting beside him drunk. And he, too, was half
seas over. I said, ‘You scoundrel, you!’ And he gave me a thorough
hiding. He kicked me and dragged me by the hair. But that was nothing to
what came after. He spoiled everything I had on—left me just as I am
now! How could I appear before my mistress? He spoiled everything ... my
dress and my jacket too—it was quite a new one; I gave a fiver for it
... and tore my kerchief from my head... Oh, Lord! What will become of
me now?” she suddenly whined in a lamentable overstrained voice.
The wind howled, and became ever colder and more boisterous... Again my
teeth began to dance up and down, and she, huddled up to avoid the cold,
pressed as closely to me as she could, so that I could see the gleam of
her eyes through the darkness.
“What wretches all you men are! I’d burn you all in an oven; I’d cut you
in pieces. If any one of you was dying I’d spit in his mouth, and not
pity him a bit. Mean skunks! You wheedle and wheedle, you wag your tails
like cringing dogs, and we fools give ourselves up to you, and it’s all
up with us! Immediately you trample us underfoot... Miserable loafers”
She cursed us up and down, but there was no vigour, no malice, no hatred
of these “miserable loafers” in her cursing that I could hear. The tone
of her language by no means corresponded with its subject-matter, for it
was calm enough, and the gamut of her voice was terribly poor.
Yet all this made a stronger impression on me than the most eloquent and
convincing pessimistic books and speeches, of which I had read a good
many and which I still read to this day. And this, you see, was because
the agony of a dying person is much more natural and violent than the
most minute and picturesque descriptions of death.
I felt really wretched—more from cold than from the words of my
neighbour. I groaned softly and ground my teeth.
Almost at the same moment I felt two little arms about me—one of them
touched my neck and the other lay upon my face—and at the same time an
anxious, gentle, friendly voice uttered the question:
“What ails you?”
I was ready to believe that some one else was asking me this and not
Natasha, who had just declared that all men were scoundrels, and
expressed a wish for their destruction. But she it was, and now she
began speaking quickly, hurriedly.
“What ails you, eh? Are you cold? Are you frozen? Ah, what a one you
are, sitting there so silent like a little owl! Why, you should have
told me long ago that you were cold. Come ... lie on the ground ...
stretch yourself out and I will lie ... there! How’s that? Now put your
arms round me?... tighter! How’s that? You shall be warm very soon
now... And then we’ll lie back to back... The night will pass so
quickly, see if it won’t. I say ... have you too been drinking?...
Turned out of your place, eh?... It doesn’t matter.”
And she comforted me... She encouraged me.
May I be thrice accursed! What a world of irony was in this single fact
for me! Just imagine! Here was I, seriously occupied at this very time
with the destiny of humanity, thinking of the re-organisation of the
social system, of political revolutions, reading all sorts of
devilishly-wise books whose abysmal profundity was certainly
unfathomable by their very authors—at this very time, I say, I was
trying with all my might to make of myself “a potent active social
force.” It even seemed to me that I had partially accomplished my
object; anyhow, at this time, in my ideas about myself, I had got so far
as to recognise that I had an exclusive right to exist, that I had the
necessary greatness to deserve to live my life, and that I was fully
competent to play a great historical part therein. And a woman was now
warming me with her body, a wretched, battered, hunted creature, who had
no place and no value in life, and whom I had never thought of helping
till she helped me herself, and whom I really would not have known how
to help in any way even if the thought of it had occurred to me.
Ah! I was ready to think that all this was happening to me in a dream—in
a disagreeable, an oppressive dream.
But, ugh! it was impossible for me to think that, for cold drops of rain
were dripping down upon me, the woman was pressing close to me, her warm
breath was fanning my face, and—despite a slight odor of vodka—it did me
good. The wind howled and raged, the rain smote upon the skiff, the
waves splashed, and both of us, embracing each other convulsively,
nevertheless shivered with cold. All this was only too real, and I am
certain that nobody ever dreamed such an oppressive and horrid dream as
that reality.
But Natasha was talking all the time of something or other, talking
kindly and sympathetically, as only women can talk. Beneath the
influence of her voice and kindly words a little fire began to burn up
within me, and something inside my heart thawed in consequence.
Then tears poured from my eyes like a hailstorm, washing away from my
heart much that was evil, much that was stupid, much sorrow and dirt
which had fastened upon it before that night. Natasha comforted me.
“Come, come, that will do, little one! Don’t take on! That’ll do! God
will give you another chance ... you will right yourself and stand in
your proper place again ... and it will be all right...”
And she kept kissing me ... many kisses did she give me ... burning
kisses ... and all for nothing...
Those were the first kisses from a woman that had ever been bestowed
upon me, and they were the best kisses too, for all the subsequent
kisses cost me frightfully dear, and really gave me nothing at all in
exchange.
“Come, don’t take on so, funny one! I’ll manage for you to-morrow if you
cannot find a place.” Her quiet persuasive whispering sounded in my ears
as if it came through a dream...
There we lay till dawn...
And when the dawn came, we crept from behind the skiff and went into the
town... Then we took friendly leave of each other and never met again,
although for half a year I searched in every hole and corner for that
kind Natasha, with whom I spent the autumn night just described.
If she be already dead—and well for her if it were so—may she rest in
peace! And if she be alive ... still I say “Peace to her soul!” And may
the consciousness of her fall never enter her soul ... for that would be
a superfluous and fruitless suffering if life is to be lived...
HER LOVER BY MAXIM GORKY
An acquaintance of mine once told me the following story.
When I was a student at Moscow I happened to live alongside one of those
ladies whose repute is questionable. She was a Pole, and they called her
Teresa. She was a tallish, powerfully-built brunette, with black, bushy
eyebrows and a large coarse face as if carved out by a hatchet—the
bestial gleam of her dark eyes, her thick bass voice, her cabman-like
gait and her immense muscular vigour, worthy of a fishwife, inspired me
with horror. I lived on the top flight and her garret was opposite to
mine. I never left my door open when I knew her to be at home. But this,
after all, was a very rare occurrence. Sometimes I chanced to meet her
on the staircase or in the yard, and she would smile upon me with a
smile which seemed to me to be sly and cynical. Occasionally, I saw her
drunk, with bleary eyes, tousled hair, and a particularly hideous grin.
On such occasions she would speak to me.
“How d’ye do, Mr. Student!” and her stupid laugh would still further
intensify my loathing of her. I should have liked to have changed my
quarters in order to have avoided such encounters and greetings; but my
little chamber was a nice one, and there was such a wide view from the
window, and it was always so quiet in the street below—so I endured.
And one morning I was sprawling on my couch, trying to find some sort of
excuse for not attending my class, when the door opened, and the bass
voice of Teresa the loathsome resounded from my threshold:
“Good health to you, Mr. Student!”
“What do you want?” I said. I saw that her face was confused and
supplicatory... It was a very unusual sort of face for her.
“Sir! I want to beg a favour of you. Will you grant it me?”
I lay there silent, and thought to myself:
“Gracious!... Courage, my boy!”
“I want to send a letter home, that’s what it is,” she said; her voice
was beseeching, soft, timid.
“Deuce take you!” I thought; but up I jumped, sat down at my table, took
a sheet of paper, and said:
“Come here, sit down, and dictate!”
She came, sat down very gingerly on a chair, and looked at me with a
guilty look.
“Well, to whom do you want to write?”
“To Boleslav Kashput, at the town of Svieptziana, on the Warsaw Road...”
“Well, fire away!”
“My dear Boles ... my darling ... my faithful lover. May the Mother of
God protect thee! Thou heart of gold, why hast thou not written for such
a long time to thy sorrowing little dove, Teresa?”
I very nearly burst out laughing. “A sorrowing little dove!” more than
five feet high, with fists a stone and more in weight, and as black a
face as if the little dove had lived all its life in a chimney, and had
never once washed itself! Restraining myself somehow, I asked:
“Who is this Bolest?”
“Boles, Mr. Student,” she said, as if offended with me for blundering
over the name, “he is Boles—my young man.”
“Young man!”
“Why are you so surprised, sir? Cannot I, a girl, have a young man?”
She? A girl? Well!
“Oh, why not?” I said. “All things are possible. And has he been your
young man long?”
“Six years.”
“Oh, ho!” I thought. “Well, let us write your letter...”
And I tell you plainly that I would willingly have changed places with
this Boles if his fair correspondent had been not Teresa but something
less than she.
“I thank you most heartily, sir, for your kind services,” said Teresa to
me, with a curtsey. “Perhaps I can show you some service, eh?”
“No, I most humbly thank you all the same.”
“Perhaps, sir, your shirts or your trousers may want a little mending?”
I felt that this mastodon in petticoats had made me grow quite red with
shame, and I told her pretty sharply that I had no need whatever of her
services.
She departed.
A week or two passed away. It was evening. I was sitting at my window
whistling and thinking of some expedient for enabling me to get away
from myself. I was bored; the weather was dirty. I didn’t want to go
out, and out of sheer ennui I began a course of self-analysis and
reflection. This also was dull enough work, but I didn’t care about
doing anything else. Then the door opened. Heaven be praised! Some one
came in.
“Oh, Mr. Student, you have no pressing business, I hope?”
It was Teresa. Humph!
“No. What is it?”
“I was going to ask you, sir, to write me another letter.”
“Very well! To Boles, eh?”
“No, this time it is from him.”
“Wha-at?”
“Stupid that I am! It is not for me, Mr. Student, I beg your pardon. It
is for a friend of mine, that is to say, not a friend but an
acquaintance—a man acquaintance. He has a sweetheart just like me here,
Teresa. That’s how it is. Will you, sir, write a letter to this Teresa?”
I looked at her—her face was troubled, her fingers were trembling. I was
a bit fogged at first—and then I guessed how it was.
“Look here, my lady,” I said, “there are no Boleses or Teresas at all,
and you’ve been telling me a pack of lies. Don’t you come sneaking about
me any longer. I have no wish whatever to cultivate your acquaintance.
Do you understand?”
And suddenly she grew strangely terrified and distraught; she began to
shift from foot to foot without moving from the place, and spluttered
comically, as if she wanted to say something and couldn’t. I waited to
see what would come of all this, and I saw and felt that, apparently, I
had made a great mistake in suspecting her of wishing to draw me from
the path of righteousness. It was evidently something very different.
“Mr. Student!” she began, and suddenly, waving her hand, she turned
abruptly towards the door and went out. I remained with a very
unpleasant feeling in my mind. I listened. Her door was flung violently
to—plainly the poor wench was very angry... I thought it over, and
resolved to go to her, and, inviting her to come in here, write
everything she wanted.
I entered her apartment. I looked round. She was sitting at the table,
leaning on her elbows, with her head in her hands.
“Listen to me,” I said.
Now, whenever I come to this point in my story, I always feel horribly
awkward and idiotic. Well, well!
“Listen to me,” I said.
She leaped from her seat, came towards me with flashing eyes, and laying
her hands on my shoulders, began to whisper, or rather to hum in her
peculiar bass voice:
“Look you, now! It’s like this. There’s no Boles at all, and there’s no
Teresa either. But what’s that to you? Is it a hard thing for you to
draw your pen over paper? Eh? Ah, and you, too! Still such a little
fair-haired boy! There’s nobody at all, neither Boles, nor Teresa, only
me. There you have it, and much good may it do you!”
“Pardon me!” said I, altogether flabbergasted by such a reception, “what
is it all about? There’s no Boles, you say?”
“No. So it is.”
“And no Teresa either?”
“And no Teresa. I’m Teresa.”
I didn’t understand it at all. I fixed my eyes upon her, and tried to
make out which of us was taking leave of his or her senses. But she went
again to the table, searched about for something, came back to me, and
said in an offended tone:
“If it was so hard for you to write to Boles, look, there’s your letter,
take it! Others will write for me.”
I looked. In her hand was my letter to Boles. Phew!
“Listen, Teresa! What is the meaning of all this? Why must you get
others to write for you when I have already written it, and you haven’t
sent it?”
“Sent it where?”
“Why, to this—Boles.”
“There’s no such person.”
I absolutely did not understand it. There was nothing for me but to spit
and go. Then she explained.
“What is it?” she said, still offended. “There’s no such person, I tell
you,” and she extended her arms as if she herself did not understand why
there should be no such person. “But I wanted him to be... Am I then not
a human creature like the rest of them? Yes, yes, I know, I know, of
course... Yet no harm was done to any one by my writing to him that I
can see...”
“Pardon me—to whom?”
“To Boles, of course.”
“But he doesn’t exist.”
“Alas! alas! But what if he doesn’t? He doesn’t exist, but he might! I
write to him, and it looks as if he did exist. And Teresa—that’s me, and
he replies to me, and then I write to him again...”
I understood at last. And I felt so sick, so miserable, so ashamed,
somehow. Alongside of me, not three yards away, lived a human creature
who had nobody in the world to treat her kindly, affectionately, and
this human being had invented a friend for herself!
“Look, now! you wrote me a letter to Boles, and I gave it to some one
else to read it to me; and when they read it to me I listened and
fancied that Boles was there. And I asked you to write me a letter from
Boles to Teresa—that is to me. When they write such a letter for me, and
read it to me, I feel quite sure that Boles is there. And life grows
easier for me in consequence.”
“Deuce take you for a blockhead!” said I to myself when I heard this.
And from thenceforth, regularly, twice a week, I wrote a letter to
Boles, and an answer from Boles to Teresa. I wrote those answers well...
She, of course, listened to them, and wept like anything, roared, I
should say, with her bass voice. And in return for my thus moving her to
tears by real letters from the imaginary Boles, she began to mend the
holes I had in my socks, shirts, and other articles of clothing.
Subsequently, about three months after this history began, they put her
in prison for something or other. No doubt by this time she is dead.
My acquaintance shook the ash from his cigarette, looked pensively up at
the sky, and thus concluded:
Well, well, the more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the
more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round in
the rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our
self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do not
understand this.
And the whole thing turns out pretty stupidly—and very cruelly. The
fallen classes, we say. And who are the fallen classes, I should like to
know? They are, first of all, people with the same bones, flesh, and
blood and nerves as ourselves. We have been told this day after day for
ages. And we actually listen—and the devil only knows how hideous the
whole thing is. Or are we completely depraved by the loud sermonising of
humanism? In reality, we also are fallen folks, and, so far as I can
see, very deeply fallen into the abyss of self-sufficiency and the
conviction of our own superiority. But enough of this. It is all as old
as the hills—so old that it is a shame to speak of it. Very old
indeed—yes, that’s what it is!
LAZARUS BY LEONID ANDREYEV I
When Lazarus rose from the grave, after three days and nights in the
mysterious thraldom of death, and returned alive to his home, it was a
long time before any one noticed the evil peculiarities in him that were
later to make his very name terrible. His friends and relatives were
jubilant that he had come back to life. They surrounded him with
tenderness, they were lavish of their eager attentions, spending the
greatest care upon his food and drink and the new garments they made for
him. They clad him gorgeously in the glowing colours of hope and
laughter, and when, arrayed like a bridegroom, he sat at table with them
again, ate again, and drank again, they wept fondly and summoned the
neighbours to look upon the man miraculously raised from the dead.
The neighbours came and were moved with joy. Strangers arrived from
distant cities and villages to worship the miracle. They burst into
stormy exclamations, and buzzed around the house of Mary and Martha,
like so many bees.
That which was new in Lazarus’ face and gestures they explained
naturally, as the traces of his severe illness and the shock he had
passed through. It was evident that the disintegration of the body had
been halted by a miraculous power, but that the restoration had not been
complete; that death had left upon his face and body the effect of an
artist’s unfinished sketch seen through a thin glass. On his temples,
under his eyes, and in the hollow of his cheek lay a thick, earthy blue.
His fingers were blue, too, and under his nails, which had grown long in
the grave, the blue had turned livid. Here and there on his lips and
body, the skin, blistered in the grave, had burst open and left reddish
glistening cracks, as if covered with a thin, glassy slime. And he had
grown exceedingly stout. His body was horribly bloated and suggested the
fetid, damp smell of putrefaction. But the cadaverous, heavy odour that
clung to his burial garments and, as it seemed, to his very body, soon
wore off, and after some time the blue of his hands and face softened,
and the reddish cracks of his skin smoothed out, though they never
disappeared completely. Such was the aspect of Lazarus in his second
life. It looked natural only to those who had seen him buried.
Not merely Lazarus’ face, but his very character, it seemed, had
changed; though it astonished no one and did not attract the attention
it deserved. Before his death Lazarus had been cheerful and careless, a
lover of laughter and harmless jest. It was because of his good humour,
pleasant and equable, his freedom from meanness and gloom, that he had
been so beloved by the Master. Now he was grave and silent; neither he
himself jested nor did he laugh at the jests of others; and the words he
spoke occasionally were simple, ordinary and necessary words—words as
much devoid of sense and depth as are the sounds with which an animal
expresses pain and pleasure, thirst and hunger. Such words a man may
speak all his life and no one would ever know the sorrows and joys that
dwelt within him.
Thus it was that Lazarus sat at the festive table among his friends and
relatives—his face the face of a corpse over which, for three days,
death had reigned in darkness, his garments gorgeous and festive,
glittering with gold, bloody-red and purple; his mien heavy and silent.
He was horribly changed and strange, but as yet undiscovered. In high
waves, now mild, now stormy, the festivities went on around him. Warm
glances of love caressed his face, still cold with the touch of the
grave; and a friend’s warm hand patted his bluish, heavy hand. And the
music played joyous tunes mingled of the sounds of the tympanum, the
pipe, the zither and the dulcimer. It was as if bees were humming,
locusts buzzing and birds singing over the happy home of Mary and
Martha. II
Some one recklessly lifted the veil. By one breath of an uttered word he
destroyed the serene charm, and uncovered the truth in its ugly
nakedness. No thought was clearly defined in his mind, when his lips
smilingly asked: “Why do you not tell us, Lazarus, what was There?” And
all became silent, struck with the question. Only now it seemed to have
occurred to them that for three days Lazarus had been dead; and they
looked with curiosity, awaiting an answer. But Lazarus remained silent.
“You will not tell us?” wondered the inquirer. “Is it so terrible
There?”
Again his thought lagged behind his words. Had it preceded them, he
would not have asked the question, for, at the very moment he uttered
it, his heart sank with a dread fear. All grew restless; they awaited
the words of Lazarus anxiously. But he was silent, cold and severe, and
his eyes were cast down. And now, as if for the first time, they
perceived the horrible bluishness of his face and the loathsome
corpulence of his body. On the table, as if forgotten by Lazarus, lay
his livid blue hand, and all eyes were riveted upon it, as though
expecting the desired answer from that hand. The musicians still played;
then silence fell upon them, too, and the gay sounds died down, as
scattered coals are extinguished by water. The pipe became mute, and the
ringing tympanum and the murmuring dulcimer; and as though a chord were
broken, as though song itself were dying, the zither echoed a trembling
broken sound. Then all was quiet.
“You will not?” repeated the inquirer, unable to restrain his babbling
tongue. Silence reigned, and the livid blue hand lay motionless. It
moved slightly, and the company sighed with relief and raised their
eyes. Lazarus, risen from the dead, was looking straight at them,
embracing all with one glance, heavy and terrible.
This was on the third day after Lazarus had arisen from the grave. Since
then many had felt that his gaze was the gaze of destruction, but
neither those who had been forever crushed by it, nor those who in the
prime of life (mysterious even as death) had found the will to resist
his glance, could ever explain the terror that lay immovable in the
depths of his black pupils. He looked quiet and simple. One felt that he
had no intention to hide anything, but also no intention to tell
anything. His look was cold, as of one who is entirely indifferent to
all that is alive. And many careless people who pressed around him, and
did not notice him, later learned with wonder and fear the name of this
stout, quiet man who brushed against them with his sumptuous, gaudy
garments. The sun did not stop shining when he looked, neither did the
fountain cease playing, and the Eastern sky remained cloudless and blue
as always; but the man who fell under his inscrutable gaze could no
longer feel the sun, nor hear the fountain, nor recognise his native
sky. Sometimes he would cry bitterly, sometimes tear his hair in despair
and madly call for help; but generally it happened that the men thus
stricken by the gaze of Lazarus began to fade away listlessly and
quietly and pass into a slow death lasting many long years. They died in
the presence of everybody, colourless, haggard and gloomy, like trees
withering on rocky ground. Those who screamed in madness sometimes came
back to life; but the others, never.
“So you will not tell us, Lazarus, what you saw There?” the inquirer
repeated for the third time. But now his voice was dull, and a dead,
grey weariness looked stupidly from out his eyes. The faces of all
present were also covered by the same dead grey weariness like a mist.
The guests stared at one another stupidly, not knowing why they had come
together or why they sat around this rich table. They stopped talking,
and vaguely felt it was time to leave; but they could not overcome the
lassitude that spread through their muscles. So they continued to sit
there, each one isolated, like little dim lights scattered in the
darkness of night.
The musicians were paid to play, and they again took up the instruments,
and again played gay or mournful airs. But it was music made to order,
always the same tunes, and the guests listened wonderingly. Why was this
music necessary, they thought, why was it necessary and what good did it
do for people to pull at strings and blow their cheeks into thin pipes,
and produce varied and strange-sounding noises?
“How badly they play!” said some one.
The musicians were insulted and left. Then the guests departed one by
one, for it was nearing night. And when the quiet darkness enveloped
them, and it became easier to breathe, the image of Lazarus suddenly
arose before each one in stern splendour. There he stood, with the blue
face of a corpse and the raiment of a bridegroom, sumptuous and
resplendent, in his eyes that cold stare in the depths of which lurked
The Horrible! They stood still as if turned into stone. The darkness
surrounded them, and in the midst of this darkness flamed up the
horrible apparition, the supernatural vision, of the one who for three
days had lain under the measureless power of death. Three days he had
been dead. Thrice had the sun risen and set—and he had lain dead. The
children had played, the water had murmured as it streamed over the
rocks, the hot dust had clouded the highway—and he had been dead. And
now he was among men again—touched them—looked at them—looked at them!
And through the black rings of his pupils, as through dark glasses, the
unfathomable There gazed upon humanity. III
No one took care of Lazarus, and no friends or kindred remained with
him. Only the great desert, enfolding the Holy City, came close to the
threshold of his abode. It entered his home, and lay down on his couch
like a spouse, and put out all the fires. No one cared for Lazarus. One
after the other went away, even his sisters, Mary and Martha. For a long
while Martha did not want to leave him, for she knew not who would nurse
him or take care of him; and she cried and prayed. But one night, when
the wind was roaming about the desert, and the rustling cypress trees
were bending over the roof, she dressed herself quietly, and quietly
went away. Lazarus probably heard how the door was slammed—it had not
shut properly and the wind kept knocking it continually against the
post—but he did not rise, did not go out, did not try to find out the
reason. And the whole night until the morning the cypress trees hissed
over his head, and the door swung to and fro, allowing the cold,
greedily prowling desert to enter his dwelling. Everybody shunned him as
though he were a leper. They wanted to put a bell on his neck to avoid
meeting him. But some one, turning pale, remarked it would be terrible
if at night, under the windows, one should happen to hear Lazarus’ bell,
and all grew pale and assented.
Since he did nothing for himself, he would probably have starved had not
his neighbours, in trepidation, saved some food for him. Children
brought it to him. They did not fear him, neither did they laugh at him
in the innocent cruelty in which children often laugh at unfortunates.
They were indifferent to him, and Lazarus showed the same indifference
to them. He showed no desire to thank them for their services; he did
not try to pat the dark hands and look into the simple shining little
eyes. Abandoned to the ravages of time and the desert, his house was
falling to ruins, and his hungry, bleating goats had long been scattered
among his neighbours. His wedding garments had grown old. He wore them
without changing them, as he had donned them on that happy day when the
musicians played. He did not see the difference between old and new,
between torn and whole. The brilliant colours were burnt and faded; the
vicious dogs of the city and the sharp thorns of the desert had rent the
fine clothes to shreds.
During the day, when the sun beat down mercilessly upon all living
things, and even the scorpions hid under the stones, convulsed with a
mad desire to sting, he sat motionless in the burning rays, lifting high
his blue face and shaggy wild beard.
While yet the people were unafraid to speak to him, same one had asked
him: “Poor Lazarus! Do you find it pleasant to sit so, and look at the
sun?” And he answered: “Yes, it is pleasant.”
The thought suggested itself to people that the cold of the three days
in the grave had been so intense, its darkness so deep, that there was
not in all the earth enough heat or light to warm Lazarus and lighten
the gloom of his eyes; and inquirers turned away with a sigh.
And when the setting sun, flat and purple-red, descended to earth,
Lazarus went into the desert and walked straight toward it, as though
intending to reach it. Always he walked directly toward the sun, and
those who tried to follow him and find out what he did at night in the
desert had indelibly imprinted upon their mind’s vision the black
silhouette of a tall, stout man against the red background of an immense
disk. The horrors of the night drove them away, and so they never found
out what Lazarus did in the desert; but the image of the black form
against the red was burned forever into their brains. Like an animal
with a cinder in its eye which furiously rubs its muzzle against its
paws, they foolishly rubbed their eyes; but the impression left by
Lazarus was ineffaceable, forgotten only in death.
There were people living far away who never saw Lazarus and only heard
of him. With an audacious curiosity which is stronger than fear and
feeds on fear, with a secret sneer in their hearts, some of them came to
him one day as he basked in the sun, and entered into conversation with
him. At that time his appearance had changed for the better and was not
so frightful. At first the visitors snapped their fingers and thought
disapprovingly of the foolish inhabitants of the Holy City. But when the
short talk came to an end and they went home, their expression was such
that the inhabitants of the Holy City at once knew their errand and
said: “Here go some more madmen at whom Lazarus has looked.” The
speakers raised their hands in silent pity.
Other visitors came, among them brave warriors in cFlinking armour, who
knew not fear, and happy youths who made merry with laughter and song.
Busy merchants, jingling their coins, ran in for awhile, and proud
attendants at the Temple placed their staffs at Lazarus’ door. But no
one returned the same as he came. A frightful shadow fell upon their
souls, and gave a new appearance to the old familiar world.
Those who felt any desire to speak, after they had been stricken by the
gaze of Lazarus, described the change that had come over them somewhat
like this:
All objects seen by the eye and palpable to the hand became empty, light
and transparent, as though they were light shadows in the darkness; and
this darkness enveloped the whole universe. It was dispelled neither by
the sun, nor by the moon, nor by the stars, but embraced the earth like
a mother, and clothed it in a boundless black veil.
Into all bodies it penetrated, even into iron and stone; and the
particles of the body lost their unity and became lonely. Even to the
heart of the particles it penetrated, and the particles of the particles
became lonely.
The vast emptiness which surrounds the universe, was not filled with
things seen, with sun or moon or stars; it stretched boundless,
penetrating everywhere, disuniting everything, body from body, particle
from particle.
In emptiness the trees spread their roots, themselves empty; in
emptiness rose phantom temples, palaces and houses—all empty; and in the
emptiness moved restless Man, himself empty and light, like a shadow.
There was no more a sense of time; the beginning of all things and their
end merged into one. In the very moment when a building was being
erected and one could hear the builders striking with their hammers, one
seemed already to see its ruins, and then emptiness where the ruins
were.
A man was just born, and funeral candles were already lighted at his
head, and then were extinguished; and soon there was emptiness where
before had been the man and the candles.
And surrounded by Darkness and Empty Waste, Man trembled hopelessly
before the dread of the Infinite.
So spoke those who had a desire to speak. But much more could probably
have been told by those who did not want to talk, and who died in
silence. IV
At that time there lived in Rome a celebrated sculptor by the name of
Aurelius. Out of clay, marble and bronze he created forms of gods and
men of such beauty that this beauty was proclaimed immortal. But he
himself was not satisfied, and said there was a supreme beauty that he
had never succeeded in expressing in marble or bronze. “I have not yet
gathered the radiance of the moon,” he said; “I have not yet caught the
glare of the sun. There is no soul in my marble, there is no life in my
beautiful bronze.” And when by moonlight he would slowly wander along
the roads, crossing the black shadows of the cypress-trees, his white
tunic flashing in the moonlight, those he met used to laugh good-
naturedly and say: “Is it moonlight that you are gathering, Aurelius?
Why did you not bring some baskets along?”
And he, too, would laugh and point to his eyes and say: “Here are the
baskets in which I gather the light of the moon and the radiance of the
sun.”
And that was the truth. In his eyes shone moon and sun. But he could not
transmit the radiance to marble. Therein lay the greatest tragedy of his
life. He was a descendant of an ancient race of patricians, had a good
wife and children, and except in this one respect, lacked nothing.
When the dark rumour about Lazarus reached him, he consulted his wife
and friends and decided to make the long voyage to Judea, in order that
he might look upon the man miraculously raised from the dead. He felt
lonely in those days and hoped on the way to renew his jaded energies.
What they told him about Lazarus did not frighten him. He had meditated
much upon death. He did not like it, nor did he like those who tried to
harmonise it with life. On this side, beautiful life; on the other,
mysterious death, he reasoned, and no better lot could befall a man than
to live—to enjoy life and the beauty of living. And he already had
conceived a desire to convince Lazarus of the truth of this view and to
return his soul to life even as his body had been returned. This task
did not appear impossible, for the reports about Lazarus, fearsome and
strange as they were, did not tell the whole truth about him, but only
carried a vague warning against something awful.
Lazarus was getting up from a stone to follow in the path of the setting
sun, on the evening when the rich Roman, accompanied by an armed slave,
approached him, and in a ringing voice called to him: “Lazarus!”
Lazarus saw a proud and beautiful face, made radiant by fame, and white
garments and precious jewels shining in the sunlight. The ruddy rays of
the sun lent to the head and face a likeness to dimly shining
bronze—that was what Lazarus saw. He sank back to his seat obediently,
and wearily lowered his eyes.
“It is true you are not beautiful, my poor Lazarus,” said the Roman
quietly, playing with his gold chain. “You are even frightful, my poor
friend; and death was not lazy the day when you so carelessly fell into
its arms. But you are as fat as a barrel, and ‘Fat people are not bad,’
as the great Cæsar said. I do not understand why people are so afraid
of you. You will permit me to stay with you over night? It is already
late, and I have no abode.”
Nobody had ever asked Lazarus to be allowed to pass the night with him.
“I have no bed,” said he.
“I am somewhat of a warrior and can sleep sitting,” replied the Roman.
“We shall make a light.”
“I have no light.”
“Then we will converse in the darkness like two friends. I suppose you
have some wine?”
“I have no wine.”
The Roman laughed.
“Now I understand why you are so gloomy and why you do not like your
second life. No wine? Well, we shall do without. You know there are
words that go to one’s head even as Falernian wine.”
With a motion of his head he dismissed the slave, and they were alone.
And again the sculptor spoke, but it seemed as though the sinking sun
had penetrated into his words. They faded, pale and empty, as if
trembling on weak feet, as if slipping and falling, drunk with the wine
of anguish and despair. And black chasms appeared between the two
men—like remote hints of vast emptiness and vast darkness.
“Now I am your guest and you will not ill-treat me, Lazarus!” said the
Roman. “Hospitality is binding even upon those who have been three days
dead. Three days, I am told, you were in the grave. It must have been
cold there... and it is from there that you have brought this bad habit
of doing without light and wine. I like a light. It gets dark so quickly
here. Your eyebrows and forehead have an interesting line: even as the
ruins of castles covered with the ashes of an earthquake. But why in
such strange, ugly clothes? I have seen the bridegrooms of your country,
they wear clothes like that—such ridiculous clothes—such awful
garments... Are you a bridegroom?”
Already the sun had disappeared. A gigantic black shadow was approaching
fast from the west, as if prodigious bare feet were rustling over the
sand. And the chill breezes stole up behind.
“In the darkness you seem even bigger, Lazarus, as though you had grown
stouter in these few minutes. Do you feed on darkness, perchance?... And
I would like a light... just a small light... just a small light. And I
am cold. The nights here are so barbarously cold... If it were not so
dark, I should say you were looking at me, Lazarus. Yes, it seems, you
are looking. You are looking. You are looking at me!... I feel it—now
you are smiling.”
The night had come, and a heavy blackness filled the air.
“How good it will be when the sun rises again to-morrow... You know I am
a great sculptor... so my friends call me. I create, yes, they say I
create, but for that daylight is necessary. I give life to cold marble.
I melt the ringing bronze in the fire, in a bright, hot fire. Why did
you touch me with your hand?”
“Come,” said Lazarus, “you are my guest.” And they went into the house.
And the shadows of the long evening fell on the earth...
The slave at last grew tired waiting for his master, and when the sun
stood high he came to the house. And he saw, directly under its burning
rays, Lazarus and his master sitting close together. They looked
straight up and were silent.
The slave wept and cried aloud: “Master, what ails you, Master!”
The same day Aurelius left for Rome. The whole way he was thoughtful and
silent, attentively examining everything, the people, the ship, and the
sea, as though endeavouring to recall something. On the sea a great
storm overtook them, and all the while Aurelius remained on deck and
gazed eagerly at the approaching and falling waves. When he reached home
his family were shocked at the terrible change in his demeanour, but he
calmed them with the words: “I have found it!”
In the dusty clothes which he had worn during the entire journey and had
not changed, he began his work, and the marble ringingly responded to
the resounding blows of the hammer. Long and eagerly he worked,
admitting no one. At last, one morning, he announced that the work was
ready, and gave instructions that all his friends, and the severe
critics and judges of art, be called together. Then he donned gorgeous
garments, shining with gold, glowing with the purple of the byssin.
“Here is what I have created,” he said thoughtfully.
His friends looked, and immediately the shadow of deep sorrow covered
their faces. It was a thing monstrous, possessing none of the forms
familiar to the eye, yet not devoid of a hint of some new unknown form.
On a thin tortuous little branch, or rather an ugly likeness of one, lay
crooked, strange, unsightly, shapeless heaps of something turned outside
in, or something turned inside out—wild fragments which seemed to be
feebly trying to get away from themselves. And, accidentally, under one
of the wild projections, they noticed a wonderfully sculptured
butterfly, with transparent wings, trembling as though with a weak
longing to fly.
“Why that wonderful butterfly, Aurelius?” timidly asked some one.
“I do not know,” answered the sculptor.
The truth had to be told, and one of his friends, the one who loved
Aurelius best, said: “This is ugly, my poor friend. It must be
destroyed. Give me the hammer.” And with two blows he destroyed the
monstrous mass, leaving only the wonderfully sculptured butterfly.
After that Aurelius created nothing. He looked with absolute
indifference at marble and at bronze and at his own divine creations, in
which dwelt immortal beauty. In the hope of breathing into him once
again the old flame of inspiration, with the idea of awakening his dead
soul, his friends led him to see the beautiful creations of others, but
he remained indifferent and no smile warmed his closed lips. And only
after they spoke to him much and long of beauty, he would reply wearily:
“But all this is—a lie.”
And in the daytime, when the sun was shining, he would go into his rich
and beautifully laid-out garden, and finding a place where there was no
shadow, would expose his bare head and his dull eyes to the glitter and
burning heat of the sun. Red and white butterflies fluttered around;
down into the marble cistern ran splashing water from the crooked mouth
of a blissfully drunken Satyr; but he sat motionless, like a pale shadow
of that other one who, in a far land, at the very gates of the stony
desert, also sat motionless under the fiery sun. V
And it came about finally that Lazarus was summoned to Rome by the great
Augustus.
They dressed him in gorgeous garments as though it had been ordained
that he was to remain a bridegroom to an unknown bride until the very
day of his death. It was as if an old coffin, rotten and falling apart,
were regilded over and over, and gay tassels were hung on it. And
solemnly they conducted him in gala attire, as though in truth it were a
bridal procession, the runners loudly sounding the trumpet that the way
be made for the ambassadors of the Emperor. But the roads along which he
passed were deserted. His entire native land cursed the execrable name
of Lazarus, the man miraculously brought to life, and the people
scattered at the mere report of his horrible approach. The trumpeters
blew lonely blasts, and only the desert answered with a dying echo.
Then they carried him across the sea on the saddest and most gorgeous
ship that was ever mirrored in the azure waves of the Mediterranean.
There were many people aboard, but the ship was silent and still as a
coffin, and the water seemed to moan as it parted before the short
curved prow. Lazarus sat lonely, baring his head to the sun, and
listening in silence to the splashing of the waters. Further away the
seamen and the ambassadors gathered like a crowd of distressed shadows.
If a thunderstorm had happened to burst upon them at that time or the
wind had overwhelmed the red sails, the ship would probably have
perished, for none of those who were on her had strength or desire
enough to fight for life. With supreme effort some went to the side of
the ship and eagerly gazed at the blue, transparent abyss. Perhaps they
imagined they saw a naiad flashing a pink shoulder through the waves, or
an insanely joyous and drunken centaur galloping by, splashing up the
water with his hoofs. But the sea was deserted and mute, and so was the
watery abyss.
Listlessly Lazarus set foot on the streets of the Eternal City, as
though all its riches, all the majesty of its gigantic edifices, all the
lustre and beauty and music of refined life, were simply the echo of the
wind in the desert, or the misty images of hot running sand. Chariots
whirled by; the crowd of strong, beautiful, haughty men passed on,
builders of the Eternal City and proud partakers of its life; songs rang
out; fountains laughed; pearly laughter of women filled the air, while
the drunkard philosophised and the sober ones smilingly listened;
horseshoes rattled on the pavement. And surrounded on all sides by glad
sounds, a fat, heavy man moved through the centre of the city like a
cold spot of silence, sowing in his path grief, anger and vague, carking
distress. Who dared to be sad in Rome? indignantly demanded frowning
citizens; and in two days the swift-tongued Rome knew of Lazarus, the
man miraculously raised from the grave, and timidly evaded him.
There were many brave men ready to try their strength, and at their
senseless call Lazarus came obediently. The Emperor was so engrossed
with state affairs that he delayed receiving the visitor, and for seven
days Lazarus moved among the people.
A jovial drunkard met him with a smile on his red lips. “Drink, Lazarus,
drink!” he cried, “Would not Augustus laugh to see you drink!” And
naked, besotted women laughed, and decked the blue hands of Lazarus with
rose-leaves. But the drunkard looked into the eyes of Lazarus—and his
joy ended forever. Thereafter he was always drunk. He drank no more, but
was drunk all the time, shadowed by fearful dreams, instead of the
joyous reveries that wine gives. Fearful dreams became the food of his
broken spirit. Fearful dreams held him day and night in the mists of
monstrous fantasy, and death itself was no more fearful than the
apparition of its fierce precursor.
Lazarus came to a youth and his lass who loved each other and were
beautiful in their love. Proudly and strongly holding in his arms his
beloved one, the youth said, with gentle pity: “Look at us, Lazarus, and
rejoice with us. Is there anything stronger than love?”
And Lazarus looked at them. And their whole life they continued to love
one another, but their love became mournful and gloomy, even as those
cypress trees over the tombs that feed their roots on the putrescence of
the grave, and strive in vain in the quiet evening hour to touch the sky
with their pointed tops. Hurled by fathomless life-forces into each
other’s arms, they mingled their kisses with tears, their joy with pain,
and only succeeded in realising the more vividly a sense of their
slavery to the silent Nothing. Forever united, forever parted, they
flashed like sparks, and like sparks went out in boundless darkness.
Lazarus came to a proud sage, and the sage said to him: “I already know
all the horrors that you may tell me, Lazarus. With what else can you
terrify me?”
Only a few moments passed before the sage realised that the knowledge of
the horrible is not the horrible, and that the sight of death is not
death. And he felt that in the eyes of the Infinite wisdom and folly are
the same, for the Infinite knows them not. And the boundaries between
knowledge and ignorance, between truth and falsehood, between top and
bottom, faded and his shapeless thought was suspended in emptiness. Then
he grasped his grey head in his hands and cried out insanely: “I cannot
think! I cannot think!”
Thus it was that under the cool gaze of Lazarus, the man miraculously
raised from the dead, all that serves to affirm life, its sense and its
joys, perished. And people began to say it was dangerous to allow him to
see the Emperor; that it were better to kill him and bury him secretly,
and swear he had disappeared. Swords were sharpened and youths devoted
to the welfare of the people announced their readiness to become
assassins, when Augustus upset the cruel plans by demanding that Lazarus
appear before him.
Even though Lazarus could not be kept away, it was felt that the heavy
impression conveyed by his face might be somewhat softened. With that
end in view expert painters, barbers and artists were secured who worked
the whole night on Lazarus’ head. His beard was trimmed and curled. The
disagreeable and deadly bluishness of his hands and face was covered up
with paint; his hands were whitened, his cheeks rouged. The disgusting
wrinkles of suffering that ridged his old face were patched up and
painted, and on the smooth surface, wrinkles of good-nature and
laughter, and of pleasant, good-humoured cheeriness, were laid on
artistically with fine brushes.
Lazarus submitted indifferently to all they did with him, and soon was
transformed into a stout, nice-looking old man, for all the world a
quiet and good-humoured grandfather of numerous grandchildren. He looked
as though the smile with which he told funny stories had not left his
lips, as though a quiet tenderness still lay hidden in the corner of his
eyes. But the wedding-dress they did not dare to take off; and they
could not change his eyes—the dark, terrible eyes from out of which
stared the incomprehensible There. VI
Lazarus was untouched by the magnificence of the imperial apartments. He
remained stolidly indifferent, as though he saw no contrast between his
ruined house at the edge of the desert and the solid, beautiful palace
of stone. Under his feet the hard marble of the floor took on the
semblance of the moving sands of the desert, and to his eyes the throngs
of gaily dressed, haughty men were as unreal as the emptiness of the
air. They looked not into his face as he passed by, fearing to come
under the awful bane of his eyes; but when the sound of his heavy steps
announced that he had passed, heads were lifted, and eyes examined with
timid curiosity the figure of the corpulent, tall, slightly stooping old
man, as he slowly passed into the heart of the imperial palace. If death
itself had appeared men would not have feared it so much; for hitherto
death had been known to the dead only, and life to the living only, and
between these two there had been no bridge. But this strange being knew
death, and that knowledge of his was felt to be mysterious and cursed.
“He will kill our great, divine Augustus,” men cried with horror, and
they hurled curses after him. Slowly and stolidly he passed them by,
penetrating ever deeper into the palace.
Caesar knew already who Lazarus was, and was prepared to meet him. He
was a courageous man; he felt his power was invincible, and in the
fateful encounter with the man “wonderfully raised from the dead” he
refused to lean on other men’s weak help. Man to man, face to face, he
met Lazarus.
“Do not fix your gaze on me, Lazarus,” he commanded. “I have heard that
your head is like the head of Medusa, and turns into stone all upon whom
you look. But I should like to have a close look at you, and to talk to
you before I turn into stone,” he added in a spirit of playfulness that
concealed his real misgivings.
Approaching him, he examined closely Lazarus’ face and his strange
festive clothes. Though his eyes were sharp and keen, he was deceived by
the skilful counterfeit.
“Well, your appearance is not terrible, venerable sir. But all the worse
for men, when the terrible takes on such a venerable and pleasant
appearance. Now let us talk.”
Augustus sat down, and as much by glance as by words began the
discussion. “Why did you not salute me when you entered?”
Lazarus answered indifferently: “I did not know it was necessary.”
“You are a Christian?”
“No.”
Augustus nodded approvingly. “That is good. I do not like the
Christians. They shake the tree of life, forbidding it to bear fruit,
and they scatter to the wind its fragrant blossoms. But who are you?”
With some effort Lazarus answered: “I was dead.”
“I heard about that. But who are you now?”
Lazarus’ answer came slowly. Finally he said again, listlessly and
indistinctly: “I was dead.”
“Listen to me, stranger,” said the Emperor sharply, giving expression to
what had been in his mind before. “My empire is an empire of the living;
my people are a people of the living and not of the dead. You are
superfluous here. I do not know who you are, I do not know what you have
seen There, but if you lie, I hate your lies, and if you tell the truth,
I hate your truth. In my heart I feel the pulse of life; in my hands I
feel power, and my proud thoughts, like eagles, fly through space.
Behind my back, under the protection of my authority, under the shadow
of the laws I have created, men live and labour and rejoice. Do you hear
this divine harmony of life? Do you hear the war cry that men hurl into
the face of the future, challenging it to strife?”
Augustus extended his arms reverently and solemnly cried out: “Blessed
art thou, Great Divine Life!”
But Lazarus was silent, and the Emperor continued more severely: “You
are not wanted here. Pitiful remnant, half devoured of death, you fill
men with distress and aversion to life. Like a caterpillar on the
fields, you are gnawing away at the full seed of joy, exuding the slime
of despair and sorrow. Your truth is like a rusted sword in the hands of
a night assassin, and I shall condemn you to death as an assassin. But
first I want to look into your eyes. Mayhap only cowards fear them, and
brave men are spurred on to struggle and victory. Then will you merit
not death but a reward. Look at me, Lazarus.”
At first it seemed to divine Augustus as if a friend were looking at
him, so soft, so alluring, so gently fascinating was the gaze of
Lazarus. It promised not horror but quiet rest, and the Infinite dwelt
there as a fond mistress, a compassionate sister, a mother. And ever
stronger grew its gentle embrace, until he felt, as it were, the breath
of a mouth hungry for kisses... Then it seemed as if iron bones
protruded in a ravenous grip, and closed upon him in an iron band; and
cold nails touched his heart, and slowly, slowly sank into it.
“It pains me,” said divine Augustus, growing pale; “but look, Lazarus,
look!”
Ponderous gates, shutting off eternity, appeared to be slowly swinging
open, and through the growing aperture poured in, coldly and calmly, the
awful horror of the Infinite. Boundless Emptiness and Boundless Gloom
entered like two shadows, extinguishing the sun, removing the ground
from under the feet, and the cover from over the head. And the pain in
his icy heart ceased.
“Look at me, look at me, Lazarus!” commanded Augustus, staggering...
Time ceased and the beginning of things came perilously near to the end.
The throne of Augustus, so recently erected, fell to pieces, and
emptiness took the place of the throne and of Augustus. Rome fell
silently into ruins. A new city rose in its place, and it too was erased
by emptiness. Like phantom giants, cities, kingdoms, and countries
swiftly fell and disappeared into emptiness—swallowed up in the black
maw of the Infinite...
“Cease,” commanded the Emperor. Already the accent of indifference was
in his voice. His arms hung powerless, and his eagle eyes flashed and
were dimmed again, struggling against overwhelming darkness.
“You have killed me, Lazarus,” he said drowsily.
These words of despair saved him. He thought of the people, whose shield
he was destined to be, and a sharp, redeeming pang pierced his dull
heart. He thought of them doomed to perish, and he was filled with
anguish. First they seemed bright shadows in the gloom of the
Infinite.—How terrible! Then they appeared as fragile vessels with life-
agitated blood, and hearts that knew both sorrow and great joy.—And he
thought of them with tenderness.
And so thinking and feeling, inclining the scales now to the side of
life, now to the side of death, he slowly returned to life, to find in
its suffering and joy a refuge from the gloom, emptiness and fear of the
Infinite.
“No, you did not kill me, Lazarus,” said he firmly. “But I will kill
you. Go!”
Evening came and divine Augustus partook of food and drink with great
joy. But there were moments when his raised arm would remain suspended
in the air, and the light of his shining, eager eyes was dimmed. It
seemed as if an icy wave of horror washed against his feet. He was
vanquished but not killed, and coldly awaited his doom, like a black
shadow. His nights were haunted by horror, but the bright days still
brought him the joys, as well as the sorrows, of life.
Next day, by order of the Emperor, they burned out Lazarus’ eyes with
hot irons and sent him home. Even Augustus dared not kill him.
Lazarus returned to the desert and the desert received him with the
breath of the hissing wind and the ardour of the glowing sun. Again he
sat on the stone with matted beard uplifted; and two black holes, where
the eyes had once been, looked dull and horrible at the sky. In the
distance the Holy City surged and roared restlessly, but near him all
was deserted and still. No one approached the place where Lazarus,
miraculously raised from the dead, passed his last days, for his
neighbours had long since abandoned their homes. His cursed knowledge,
driven by the hot irons from his eyes deep into the brain, lay there in
ambush; as if from ambush it might spring out upon men with a thousand
unseen eyes. No one dared to look at Lazarus.
And in the evening, when the sun, swollen crimson and growing larger,
bent its way toward the west, blind Lazarus slowly groped after it. He
stumbled against stones and fell; corpulent and feeble, he rose heavily
and walked on; and against the red curtain of sunset his dark form and
outstretched arms gave him the semblance of a cross.
It happened once that he went and never returned. Thus ended the second
life of Lazarus, who for three days had been in the mysterious thraldom
of death and then was miraculously raised from the dead.
THE REVOLUTIONIST BY MICHAÃL P. ARTZYBASHEV I
Gabriel Andersen, the teacher, walked to the edge of the school garden,
where he paused, undecided what to do. Off in the distance, two miles
away, the woods hung like bluish lace over a field of pure snow. It was
a brilliant day. A hundred tints glistened on the white ground and the
iron bars of the garden railing. There was a lightness and transparency
in the air that only the days of early spring possess. Gabriel Andersen
turned his steps toward the fringe of blue lace for a tramp in the
woods.
“Another spring in my life,” he said, breathing deep and peering up at
the heavens through his spectacles. Andersen was rather given to
sentimental poetising. He walked with his hands folded behind him,
dangling his cane.
He had gone but a few paces when he noticed a group of soldiers and
horses on the road beyond the garden rail. Their drab uniforms stood out
dully against the white of the snow, but their swords and horses’ coats
tossed back the light. Their bowed cavalry legs moved awkwardly on the
snow. Andersen wondered what they were doing there. Suddenly the nature
of their business flashed upon him. It was an ugly errand they were
upon, an instinct rather that his reason told him. Something unusual and
terrible was to happen. And the same instinct told him he must conceal
himself from the soldiers. He turned to the left quickly, dropped on his
knees, and crawled on the soft, thawing, crackling snow to a low
haystack, from behind which, by craning his neck, he could watch what
the soldiers were doing.
There were twelve of them, one a stocky young officer in a grey cloak
caught in prettily at the waist by a silver belt. His face was so red
that even at that distance Andersen caught the odd, whitish gleam of his
light protruding moustache and eyebrows against the vivid colour of his
skin. The broken tones of his raucous voice reached distinctly to where
the teacher, listening intently, lay hidden.
“I know what I am about. I don’t need anybody’s advice,” the officer
cried. He clapped his arms akimbo and looked down at some one among the
group of bustling soldiers. “I’ll show you how to be a rebel, you damned
skunk.”
Andersen’s heart beat fast. “Good heavens!” he thought. “Is it
possible?” His head grew chill as if struck by a cold wave.
“Officer,” a quiet, restrained, yet distinct voice came from among the
soldiers, “you have no right—It’s for the court to decide—you aren’t a
judge—it’s plain murder, not—” “Silence!” thundered the officer, his
voice choking with rage. “I’ll give you a court. Ivanov, go ahead.”
He put the spurs to his horse and rode away. Gabriel Andersen
mechanically observed how carefully the horse picked its way, placing
its feet daintily as if for the steps of a minuet. Its ears were pricked
to catch every sound. There was momentary bustle and excitement among
the soldiers. Then they dispersed in different directions, leaving three
persons in black behind, two tall men and one very short and frail.
Andersen could see the hair of the short one’s head. It was very light.
And he saw his rosy ears sticking out on each side.
Now he fully understood what was to happen. But it was a thing so out of
the ordinary, so horrible, that he fancied he was dreaming.
“It’s so bright, so beautiful—the snow, the field, the woods, the sky.
The breath of spring is upon everything. Yet people are going to be
killed. How can it be? Impossible!” So his thoughts ran in confusion. He
had the sensation of a man suddenly gone insane, who finds he sees,
hears and feels what he is not accustomed to, and ought not hear, see
and feel.
The three men in black stood next to one another hard by the railing,
two quite close together, the short one some distance away.
“Officer!” one of them cried in a desperate voice—Andersen could not see
which it was—“God sees us! Officer!”
Eight soldiers dismounted quickly, their spurs and sabres catching
awkwardly. Evidently they were in a hurry, as if doing a thief’s job.
Several seconds passed in silence until the soldiers placed themselves
in a row a few feet from the black figures and levelled their guns. In
doing so one soldier knocked his cap from his head. He picked it up and
put it on again without brushing off the wet snow.
The officer’s mount still kept dancing on one spot with his ears
pricked, while the other horses, also with sharp ears erect to catch
every sound, stood motionless looking at the men in black, their long
wise heads inclined to one side.
“Spare the boy at least!” another voice suddenly pierced the air. “Why
kill a child, damn you! What has the child done?”
“Ivanov, do what I told you to do,” thundered the officer, drowning the
other voice. His face turned as scarlet as a piece of red flannel.
There followed a scene savage and repulsive in its gruesomeness. The
short figure in black, with the light hair and the rosy ears, uttered a
wild shriek in a shrill child’s tones and reeled to one side. Instantly
it was caught up by two or three soldiers. But the boy began to
struggle, and two more soldiers ran up.
“Ow-ow-ow-ow!” the boy cried. “Let me go, let me go! Ow-ow!”
His shrill voice cut the air like the yell of a stuck porkling not quite
done to death. Suddenly he grew quiet. Some one must have struck him. An
unexpected, oppressive silence ensued. The boy was being pushed forward.
Then there came a deafening report. Andersen started back all in a
tremble. He saw distinctly, yet vaguely as in a dream, the dropping of
two dark bodies, the flash of pale sparks, and a light smoke rising in
the clean, bright atmosphere. He saw the soldiers hastily mounting their
horses without even glancing at the bodies. He saw them galloping along
the muddy road, their arms clanking, their horses’ hoofs clattering.
He saw all this, himself now standing in the middle of the road, not
knowing when and why he had jumped from behind the haystack. He was
deathly pale. His face was covered with dank sweat, his body was
aquiver. A physical sadness smote and tortured him. He could not make
out the nature of the feeling. It was akin to extreme sickness, though
far more nauseating and terrible.
After the soldiers had disappeared beyond the bend toward the woods,
people came hurrying to the spot of the shooting, though till then not a
soul had been in sight.
The bodies lay at the roadside on the other side of the railing, where
the snow was clean, brittle and untrampled and glistened cheerfully in
the bright atmosphere. There were three dead bodies, two men and a boy.
The boy lay with his long soft neck stretched on the snow. The face of
the man next to the boy was invisible. He had fallen face downward in a
pool of blood. The third was a big man with a black beard and huge,
muscular arms. He lay stretched out to the full length of his big body,
his arms extended over a large area of blood-stained snow.
The three men who had been shot lay black against the white snow,
motionless. From afar no one could have told the terror that was in
their immobility as they lay there at the edge of the narrow road
crowded with people.
That night Gabriel Andersen in his little room in the schoolhouse did
not write poems as usual. He stood at the window and looked at the
distant pale disk of the moon in the misty blue sky, and thought. And
his thoughts were confused, gloomy, and heavy as if a cloud had
descended upon his brain.
Indistinctly outlined in the dull moonlight he saw the dark railing, the
trees, the empty garden. It seemed to him that he beheld them—the three
men who had been shot, two grown up, one a child. They were lying there
now at the roadside, in the empty, silent field, looking at the far-off
cold moon with their dead, white eyes as he with his living eyes.
“The time will come some day,” he thought, “when the killing of people
by others will be an utter impossibility. The time will come when even
the soldiers and officers who killed these three men will realise what
they have done and will understand that what they killed them for is
just as necessary, important, and dear to them—to the officers and
soldiers—as to those whom they killed.”
“Yes,” he said aloud and solemnly, his eyes moistening, “that time will
come. They will understand.” And the pale disk of the moon was blotted
out by the moisture in his eyes.
A large pity pierced his heart for the three victims whose eyes looked
at the moon, sad and unseeing. A feeling of rage cut him as with a sharp
knife and took possession of him.
But Gabriel Andersen quieted his heart, whispering softly, “They know
not what they do.” And this old and ready phrase gave him the strength
to stifle his rage and indignation. II
The day was as bright and white, but the spring was already advanced.
The wet soil smelt of spring. Clear cold water ran everywhere from under
the loose, thawing snow. The branches of the trees were springy and
elastic. For miles and miles around, the country opened up in clear
azure stretches.
Yet the clearness and the joy of the spring day were not in the village.
They were somewhere outside the village, where there were no people—in
the fields, the woods and the mountains. In the village the air was
stifling, heavy and terrible as in a nightmare.
Gabriel Andersen stood in the road near a crowd of dark, sad, absent-
minded people and craned his neck to see the preparations for the
flogging of seven peasants.
They stood in the thawing snow, and Gabriel Andersen could not persuade
himself that they were people whom he had long known and understood. By
that which was about to happen to them, the shameful, terrible,
ineradicable thing that was to happen to them, they were separated from
all the rest of the world, and so were unable to feel what he, Gabriel
Andersen, felt, just as he was unable to feel what they felt. Round them
were the soldiers, confidently and beautifully mounted on high upon
their large steeds, who tossed their wise heads and turned their dappled
wooden faces slowly from side to side, looking contemptuously at him,
Gabriel Andersen, who was soon to behold this horror, this disgrace, and
would do nothing, would not dare to do anything. So it seemed to Gabriel
Andersen; and a sense of cold, intolerable shame gripped him as between
two clamps of ice through which he could see everything without being
able to move, cry out or utter a groan.
They took the first peasant. Gabriel Andersen saw his strange,
imploring, hopeless look. His lips moved, but no sound was heard, and
his eyes wandered. There was a bright gleam in them as in the eyes of a
madman. His mind, it was evident, was no longer able to comprehend what
was happening.
And so terrible was that face, at once full of reason and of madness,
that Andersen felt relieved when they put him face downward on the snow
and, instead of the fiery eyes, he saw his bare back glistening—a
senseless, shameful, horrible sight.
The large, red-faced soldier in a red cap pushed toward him, looked down
at his body with seeming delight, and then cried in a clear voice:
“Well, let her go, with God’s blessing!”
Andersen seemed not to see the soldiers, the sky, the horses or the
crowd. He did not feel the cold, the terror or the shame. He did not
hear the swish of the knout in the air or the savage howl of pain and
despair. He only saw the bare back of a man’s body swelling up and
covered over evenly with white and purple stripes. Gradually the bare
back lost the semblance of human flesh. The blood oozed and squirted,
forming patches, drops and rivulets, which ran down on the white,
thawing snow.
Terror gripped the soul of Gabriel Andersen as he thought of the moment
when the man would rise and face all the people who had seen his body
bared out in the open and reduced to a bloody pulp. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he saw four soldiers in uniform and red hats
forcing another man down on the snow, his back bared just as shamefully,
terribly and absurdly—a ludicrously tragic sight.
Then came the third, the fourth, and so on, to the end.
And Gabriel Andersen stood on the wet, thawing snow, craning his neck,
trembling and stuttering, though he did not say a word. Dank sweat
poured from his body. A sense of shame permeated his whole being. It was
a humiliating feeling, having to escape being noticed so that they
should not catch him and lay him there on the snow and strip him
bare—him, Gabriel Andersen.
The soldiers pressed and crowded, the horses tossed their heads, the
knout swished in the air, and the bare, shamed human flesh swelled up,
tore, ran over with blood, and curled like a snake. Oaths, wild shrieks
rained upon the village through the clean white air of that spring day.
Andersen now saw five men’s faces at the steps of the town hall, the
faces of those men who had already undergone their shame. He quickly
turned his eyes away. After seeing this a man must die, he thought. III
There were seventeen of them, fifteen soldiers, a subaltern and a young
beardless officer. The officer lay in front of the fire looking intently
into the flames. The soldiers were tinkering with the firearms in the
wagon.
Their grey figures moved about quietly on the black thawing ground, and
occasionally stumbled across the logs sticking out from the blazing
fire.
Gabriel Andersen, wearing an overcoat and carrying his cane behind his
back, approached them. The subaltern, a stout fellow with a moustache,
jumped up, turned from the fire, and looked at him.
“Who are you? What do you want?” he asked excitedly. From his tone it
was evident that the soldiers feared everybody in that district, through
which they went scattering death, destruction and torture.
“Officer,” he said, “there is a man here I don’t know.”
The officer looked at Andersen without speaking.
“Officer,” said Andersen in a thin, strained voice, “my name is
Michelson. I am a business man here, and I am going to the village on
business. I was afraid I might be mistaken for some one else—you know.”
“Then what are you nosing about here for?” the officer said angrily, and
turned away.
“A business man,” sneered a soldier. “He ought to be searched, this
business man ought, so as not to be knocking about at night. A good one
in the jaw is what he needs.”
“He’s a suspicious character, officer,” said the subaltern. “Don’t you
think we’d better arrest him, what?”
“Don’t,” answered the officer lazily. “I’m sick of them, damn ‘em.”
Gabriel Andersen stood there without saying anything. His eyes flashed
strangely in the dark by the firelight. And it was strange to see his
short, substantial, clean, neat figure in the field at night among the
soldiers, with his overcoat and cane and glasses glistening in the
firelight.
The soldiers left him and walked away. Gabriel Andersen remained
standing for a while. Then he turned and left, rapidly disappearing in
the darkness.
The night was drawing to a close. The air turned chilly, and the tops of
the bushes defined themselves more clearly in the dark. Gabriel Andersen
went again to the military post. But this time he hid, crouching low as
he made his way under the cover of the bushes. Behind him people moved
about quietly and carefully, bending the bushes, silent as shadows. Next
to Gabriel, on his right, walked a tall man with a revolver in his hand.
The figure of a soldier on the hill outlined itself strangely,
unexpectedly, not where they had been looking for it. It was faintly
illumined by the gleam from the dying fire. Gabriel Andersen recognised
the soldier. It was the one who had proposed that he should be searched.
Nothing stirred in Andersen’s heart. His face was cold and motionless,
as of a man who is asleep. Round the fire the soldiers lay stretched out
sleeping, all except the subaltern, who sat with his head drooping over
his knees.
The tall thin man on Andersen’s right raised the revolver and pulled the
trigger. A momentary blinding flash, a deafening report.
Andersen saw the guard lift his hands and then sit down on the ground
clasping his bosom. From all directions short, crackling sparks flashed
up which combined into one riving roar. The subaltern jumped up and
dropped straight into the fire. Grey soldiers’ figures moved about in
all directions like apparitions, throwing up their hands and falling and
writhing on the black earth. The young officer ran past Andersen,
fluttering his hands like some strange, frightened bird. Andersen, as if
he were thinking of something else, raised his cane. With all his
strength he hit the officer on the head, each blow descending with a
dull, ugly thud. The officer reeled in a circle, struck a bush, and sat
down after the second blow, covering his head with both hands, as
children do. Some one ran up and discharged a revolver as if from
Andersen’s own hand. The officer sank together in a heap and lunged with
great force head foremost on the ground. His legs twitched for a while,
then he curled up quietly.
The shots ceased. Black men with white faces, ghostly grey in the dark,
moved about the dead bodies of the soldiers, taking away their arms and
ammunition.
Andersen watched all this with a cold, attentive stare. When all was
over, he went up, took hold of the burned subaltern’s legs, and tried to
remove the body from the fire. But it was too heavy for him, and he let
it go. IV
Andersen sat motionless on the steps of the town hall, and thought. He
thought of how he, Gabriel Andersen, with his spectacles, cane, overcoat
and poems, had lied and betrayed fifteen men. He thought it was
terrible, yet there was neither pity, shame nor regret in his heart.
Were he to be set free, he knew that he, Gabriel Andersen, with the
spectacles and poems, would go straightway and do it again. He tried to
examine himself, to see what was going on inside his soul. But his
thoughts were heavy and confused. For some reason it was more painful
for him to think of the three men lying on the snow, looking at the pale
disk of the far-off moon with their dead, unseeing eyes, than of the
murdered officer whom he had struck two dry, ugly blows on the head. Of
his own death he did not think. It seemed to him that he had done with
everything long, long ago. Something had died, had gone out and left him
empty, and he must not think about it.
And when they grabbed him by the shoulder and he rose, and they quickly
led him through the garden where the cabbages raised their dry heads, he
could not formulate a single thought.
He was conducted to the road and placed at the railing with his back to
one of the iron bars. He fixed his spectacles, put his hands behind him,
and stood there with his neat, stocky body, his head slightly inclined
to one side.
At the last moment he looked in front of him and saw rifle barrels
pointing at his head, chest and stomach, and pale faces with trembling
lips. He distinctly saw how one barrel levelled at his forehead suddenly
dropped.
Something strange and incomprehensible, as if no longer of this world,
no longer earthly, passed through Andersen’s mind. He straightened
himself to the full height of his short body and threw back his head in
simple pride. A strange indistinct sense of cleanness, strength and
pride filled his soul, and everything—the sun and the sky and the people
and the field and death—seemed to him insignificant, remote and useless.
The bullets hit him in the chest, in the left eye, in the stomach, went
through his clean coat buttoned all the way up. His glasses shivered
into bits. He uttered a shriek, circled round, and fell with his face
against one of the iron bars, his one remaining eye wide open. He clawed
the ground with his outstretched hands as if trying to support himself.
The officer, who had turned green, rushed toward him, and senselessly
thrust the revolver against his neck, and fired twice. Andersen
stretched out on the ground.
The soldiers left quickly. But Andersen remained pressed flat to the
ground. The index finger of his left hand continued to quiver for about
ten seconds.
THE OUTRAGE—A TRUE STORY BY ALEKSANDR I. KUPRIN
It was five o’clock on a July afternoon. The heat was terrible. The
whole of the huge stone-built town breathed out heat like a glowing
furnace. The glare of the white-walled house was insufferable. The
asphalt pavements grew soft and burned the feet. The shadows of the
acacias spread over the cobbled road, pitiful and weary. They too seemed
hot. The sea, pale in the sunlight, lay heavy and immobile as one dead.
Over the streets hung a white dust.
In the foyer of one of the private theatres a small committee of local
barristers who had undertaken to conduct the cases of those who had
suffered in the last pogrom against the Jews was reaching the end of its
daily task. There were nineteen of them, all juniors, young, progressive
and conscientious men. The sitting was without formality, and white
suits of duck, flannel and alpaca were in the majority. They sat
anywhere, at little marble tables, and the chairman stood in front of an
empty counter where chocolates were sold in the winter.
The barristers were quite exhausted by the heat which poured in through
the windows, with the dazzling sunlight and the noise of the streets.
The proceedings went lazily and with a certain irritation.
A tall young man with a fair moustache and thin hair was in the chair.
He was dreaming voluptuously how he would be off in an instant on his
new-bought bicycle to the bungalow. He would undress quickly, and
without waiting to cool, still bathed in sweat, would fling himself into
the clear, cold, sweet-smelling sea. His whole body was enervated and
tense, thrilled by the thought. Impatiently moving the papers before
him, he spoke in a drowsy voice.
“So, Joseph Moritzovich will conduct the case of Rubinchik... Perhaps
there is still a statement to be made on the order of the day?”
His youngest colleague, a short, stout Karaite, very black and lively,
said in a whisper so that every one could hear: “On the order of the
day, the best thing would be iced kvas...”
The chairman gave him a stern side-glance, but could not restrain a
smile. He sighed and put both his hands on the table to raise himself
and declare the meeting closed, when the doorkeeper, who stood at the
entrance to the theatre, suddenly moved forward and said: “There are
seven people outside, sir. They want to come in.”
The chairman looked impatiently round the company.
“What is to be done, gentlemen?”
Voices were heard.
“Next time. Basta!”
“Let ‘em put it in writing.”
“If they’ll get it over quickly... Decide it at once.”
“Let ‘em go to the devil. Phew! It’s like boiling pitch.”
“Let them in.” The chairman gave a sign with his head, annoyed. “Then
bring me a Vichy, please. But it must be cold.”
The porter opened the door and called down the corridor: “Come in. They
say you may.”
Then seven of the most surprising and unexpected individuals filed into
the foyer. First appeared a full-grown, confident man in a smart suit,
of the colour of dry sea-sand, in a magnificent pink shirt with white
stripes and a crimson rose in his buttonhole. From the front his head
looked like an upright bean, from the side like a horizontal bean. His
face was adorned with a strong, bushy, martial moustache. He wore dark
blue pince-nez on his nose, on his hands straw-coloured gloves. In his
left hand he held a black walking-stick with a silver mount, in his
right a light blue handkerchief.
The other six produced a strange, chaotic, incongruous impression,
exactly as though they had all hastily pooled not merely their clothes,
but their hands, feet and heads as well. There was a man with the
splendid profile of a Roman senator, dressed in rags and tatters.
Another wore an elegant dress waistcoat, from the deep opening of which
a dirty Little-Russian shirt leapt to the eye. Here were the unbalanced
faces of the criminal type, but looking with a confidence that nothing
could shake. All these men, in spite of their apparent youth, evidently
possessed a large experience of life, an easy manner, a bold approach,
and some hidden, suspicious cunning.
The gentleman in the sandy suit bowed just his head, neatly and easily,
and said with a half-question in his voice: “Mr. Chairman?”
“Yes. I am the chairman. What is your business?”
“We—all whom you see before you,” the gentleman began in a quiet voice
and turned round to indicate his companions, “we come as delegates from
the United Rostov-Kharkov-and-Odessa-Nikolayev Association of Thieves.”
The barristers began to shift in their seats.
The chairman flung himself back and opened his eyes wide. “Association
of what?” he said, perplexed.
“The Association of Thieves,” the gentleman in the sandy suit coolly
repeated. “As for myself, my comrades did me the signal honour of
electing me as the spokesman of the deputation.”
“Very ... pleased,” the chairman said uncertainly.
“Thank you. All seven of us are ordinary thieves—naturally of different
departments. The Association has authorised us to put before your
esteemed Committee”—the gentleman again made an elegant bow—“our
respectful demand for assistance.”
“I don’t quite understand ... quite frankly ... what is the
connection...” The chairman waved his hands helplessly. “However, please
go on.”
“The matter about which we have the courage and the honour to apply to
you, gentlemen, is very clear, very simple, and very brief. It will take
only six or seven minutes. I consider it my duty to warn you of this
beforehand, in view of the late hour and the 115 degrees that Fahrenheit
marks in the shade.” The orator expectorated slightly and glanced at his
superb gold watch. “You see, in the reports that have lately appeared in
the local papers of the melancholy and terrible days of the last pogrom,
there have very often been indications that among the instigators of the
pogrom who were paid and organised by the police—the dregs of society,
consisting of drunkards, tramps, souteneurs, and hooligans from the
slums—thieves were also to be found. At first we were silent, but
finally we considered ourselves under the necessity of protesting
against such an unjust and serious accusation, before the face of the
whole of intellectual society. I know well that in the eye of the law we
are offenders and enemies of society. But imagine only for a moment,
gentlemen, the situation of this enemy of society when he is accused
wholesale of an offence which he not only never committed, but which he
is ready to resist with the whole strength of his soul. It goes without
saying that he will feel the outrage of such an injustice more keenly
than a normal, average, fortunate citizen. Now, we declare that the
accusation brought against us is utterly devoid of all basis, not merely
of fact but even of logic. I intend to prove this in a few words if the
honourable committee will kindly listen.”
“Proceed,” said the chairman.
“Please do ... Please ...” was heard from the barristers, now animated.
“I offer you my sincere thanks in the name of all my comrades. Believe
me, you will never repent your attention to the representatives of our
... well, let us say, slippery, but nevertheless difficult, profession.
‘So we begin,’ as Giraldoni sings in the prologue to Pagliacci.
“But first I would ask your permission, Mr. Chairman, to quench my
thirst a little... Porter, bring me a lemonade and a glass of English
bitter, there’s a good fellow. Gentlemen, I will not speak of the moral
aspect of our profession nor of its social importance. Doubtless you
know better than I the striking and brilliant paradox of Proudhon: La
propriete c’est le vol—a paradox if you like, but one that has never yet
been refuted by the sermons of cowardly bourgeois or fat priests. For
instance: a father accumulates a million by energetic and clever
exploitation, and leaves it to his son—a rickety, lazy, ignorant,
degenerate idiot, a brainless maggot, a true parasite. Potentially a
million rubles is a million working days, the absolutely irrational
right to labour, sweat, life, and blood of a terrible number of men.
Why? What is the ground of reason? Utterly unknown. Then why not agree
with the proposition, gentlemen, that our profession is to some extent
as it were a correction of the excessive accumulation of values in the
hands of individuals, and serves as a protest against all the hardships,
abominations, arbitrariness, violence, and negligence of the human
personality, against all the monstrosities created by the bourgeois
capitalistic organisation of modern society? Sooner or later, this order
of things will assuredly be overturned by the social revolution.
Property will pass away into the limbo of melancholy memories and with
it, alas! we will disappear from the face of the earth, we, les braves
chevaliers d’industrie.”
The orator paused to take the tray from the hands of the porter, and
placed it near to his hand on the table.
“Excuse me, gentlemen... Here, my good man, take this,... and by the
way, when you go out shut the door close behind you.”
“Very good, your Excellency!” the porter bawled in jest.
The orator drank off half a glass and continued: “However, let us leave
aside the philosophical, social, and economic aspects of the question. I
do not wish to fatigue your attention. I must nevertheless point out
that our profession very closely approaches the idea of that which is
called art. Into it enter all the elements which go to form
art—vocation, inspiration, fantasy, inventiveness, ambition, and a long
and arduous apprenticeship to the science. From it is absent virtue
alone, concerning which the great Karamzin wrote with such stupendous
and fiery fascination. Gentlemen, nothing is further from my intention
than to trifle with you and waste your precious time with idle
paradoxes; but I cannot avoid expounding my idea briefly. To an
outsider’s ear it sounds absurdly wild and ridiculous to speak of the
vocation of a thief. However, I venture to assure you that this vocation
is a reality. There are men who possess a peculiarly strong visual
memory, sharpness and accuracy of eye, presence of mind, dexterity of
hand, and above all a subtle sense of touch, who are as it were born
into God’s world for the sole and special purpose of becoming
distinguished card-sharpers. The pickpockets’ profession demands
extraordinary nimbleness and agility, a terrific certainty of movement,
not to mention a ready wit, a talent for observation and strained
attention. Some have a positive vocation for breaking open safes: from
their tenderest childhood they are attracted by the mysteries of every
kind of complicated mechanism—bicycles, sewing machines, clock-work toys
and watches. Finally, gentlemen, there are people with an hereditary
animus against private property. You may call this phenomenon
degeneracy. But I tell you that you cannot entice a true thief, and
thief by vocation, into the prose of honest vegetation by any
gingerbread reward, or by the offer of a secure position, or by the gift
of money, or by a woman’s love: because there is here a permanent beauty
of risk, a fascinating abyss of danger, the delightful sinking of the
heart, the impetuous pulsation of life, the ecstasy! You are armed with
the protection of the law, by locks, revolvers, telephones, police and
soldiery; but we only by our own dexterity, cunning and fearlessness. We
are the foxes, and society—is a chicken-run guarded by dogs. Are you
aware that the most artistic and gifted natures in our villages become
horse-thieves and poachers? What would you have? Life is so meagre, so
insipid, so intolerably dull to eager and high-spirited souls!
“I pass on to inspiration. Gentlemen, doubtless you have had to read of
thefts that were supernatural in design and execution. In the headlines
of the newspapers they are called ‘An Amazing Robbery,’ or 'An Ingenious
Swindle,’ or again ‘A Clever Ruse of the Gangsters.’ In such cases our
bourgeois paterfamilias waves his hands and exclaims: 'What a terrible
thing! If only their abilities were turned to good—their inventiveness,
their amazing knowledge of human psychology, their self-possession,
their fearlessness, their incomparable histrionic powers! What
extraordinary benefits they would bring to the country!’ But it is well
known that the bourgeois paterfamilias was specially devised by Heaven
to utter commonplaces and trivialities. I myself sometimes—we thieves
are sentimental people, I confess—I myself sometimes admire a beautiful
sunset in Aleksandra Park or by the sea-shore. And I am always certain
beforehand that some one near me will say with infallible aplomb: 'Look
at it. If it were put into picture no one would ever believe it!’ I turn
round and naturally I see a self-satisfied, full-fed paterfamilias, who
delights in repeating some one else’s silly statement as though it were
his own. As for our dear country, the bourgeois paterfamilias looks upon
it as though it were a roast turkey. If you’ve managed to cut the best
part of the bird for yourself, eat it quietly in a comfortable corner
and praise God. But he’s not really the important person. I was led away
by my detestation of vulgarity and I apologise for the digression. The
real point is that genius and inspiration, even when they are not
devoted to the service of the Orthodox Church, remain rare and beautiful
things. Progress is a law—and theft too has its creation.
“Finally, our profession is by no means as easy and pleasant as it seems
to the first glance. It demands long experience, constant practice, slow
and painful apprenticeship. It comprises in itself hundreds of supple,
skilful processes that the cleverest juggler cannot compass. That I may
not give you only empty words, gentlemen, I will perform a few
experiments before you now. I ask you to have every confidence in the
demonstrators. We are all at present in the enjoyment of legal freedom,
and though we are usually watched, and every one of us is known by face,
and our photographs adorn the albums of all detective departments, for
the time being we are not under the necessity of hiding ourselves from
anybody. If any one of you should recognise any of us in the future
under different circumstances, we ask you earnestly always to act in
accordance with your professional duties and your obligations as
citizens. In grateful return for your kind attention we have decided to
declare your property inviolable, and to invest it with a thieves’
taboo. However, I proceed to business.”
The orator turned round and gave an order: “Sesoi the Great, will you
come this way!”
An enormous fellow with a stoop, whose hands reached to his knees,
without a forehead or a neck, like a big, fair Hercules, came forward.
He grinned stupidly and rubbed his left eyebrow in his confusion.
“Can’t do nothin’ here,” he said hoarsely.
The gentleman in the sandy suit spoke for him, turning to the committee.
“Gentlemen, before you stands a respected member of our association. His
specialty is breaking open safes, iron strong boxes, and other
receptacles for monetary tokens. In his night work he sometimes avails
himself of the electric current of the lighting installation for fusing
metals. Unfortunately he has nothing on which he can demonstrate the
best items of his repertoire. He will open the most elaborate lock
irreproachably... By the way, this door here, it’s locked, is it not?”
Every one turned to look at the door, on which a printed notice hung:
“Stage Door. Strictly Private.”
“Yes, the door’s locked, evidently,” the chairman agreed.
“Admirable. Sesoi the Great, will you be so kind?”
“‘Tain’t nothin’ at all,” said the giant leisurely.
He went close to the door, shook it cautiously with his hand, took out
of his pocket a small bright instrument, bent down to the keyhole, made
some almost imperceptible movements with the tool, suddenly straightened
and flung the door wide in silence. The chairman had his watch in his
hands. The whole affair took only ten seconds.
“Thank you, Sesoi the Great,” said the gentleman in the sandy suit
politely. “You may go back to your seat.”
But the chairman interrupted in some alarm: “Excuse me. This is all very
interesting and instructive, but ... is it included in your esteemed
colleague’s profession to be able to lock the door again?”
“Ah, mille pardons.” The gentleman bowed hurriedly. “It slipped my mind.
Sesoi the Great, would you oblige?”
The door was locked with the same adroitness and the same silence. The
esteemed colleague waddled back to his friends, grinning.
“Now I will have the honour to show you the skill of one of our comrades
who is in the line of picking pockets in theatres and railway-stations,”
continued the orator. “He is still very young, but you may to some
extent judge from the delicacy of his present work of the heights he
will attain by diligence. Yasha!” A swarthy youth in a blue silk blouse
and long glacé boots, like a gipsy, came forward with a swagger,
fingering the tassels of his belt, and merrily screwing up his big,
impudent black eyes with yellow whites.
“Gentlemen,” said the gentleman in the sandy suit persuasively, “I must
ask if one of you would be kind enough to submit himself to a little
experiment. I assure you this will be an exhibition only, just a game.”
He looked round over the seated company.
The short plump Karaite, black as a beetle, came forward from his table.
“At your service,” he said amusedly.
“Yasha!” The orator signed with his head.
Yasha came close to the solicitor. On his left arm, which was bent, hung
a bright-coloured, figured scarf.
“Suppose yer in church or at the bar in one of the halls,—or watchin’ a
circus,” he began in a sugary, fluent voice. “I see straight off—there’s
a toff... Excuse me, sir. Suppose you’re the toff. There’s no
offence—just means a rich gent, decent enough, but don’t know his way
about. First—what’s he likely to have about ‘im? All sorts. Mostly, a
ticker and a chain. Whereabouts does he keep ‘em? Somewhere in his top
vest pocket—here. Others have ‘em in the bottom pocket. Just here.
Purse—most always in the trousers, except when a greeny keeps it in his
jacket. Cigar-case. Have a look first what it is—gold, silver—with a
monogram. Leather—what decent man’d soil his hands? Cigar-case. Seven
pockets: here, here, here, up there, there, here and here again. That’s
right, ain’t it? That’s how you go to work.”
As he spoke the young man smiled. His eyes shone straight into the
barrister’s. With a quick, dexterous movement of his right hand he
pointed to various portions of his clothes.
“Then again you might see a pin here in the tie. However we do not
appropriate. Such gents nowadays—they hardly ever wear a real stone.
Then I comes up to him. I begin straight off to talk to him like a gent:
‘Sir, would you be so kind as to give me a light from your cigarette’—or
something of the sort. At any rate, I enter into conversation. What’s
next? I look him straight in the peepers, just like this. Only two of me
fingers are at it—just this and this.” Yasha lifted two fingers of his
right hand on a level with the solicitor’s face, the forefinger and the
middle finger and moved them about.
“D’ you see? With these two fingers I run over the whole pianner.
Nothin’ wonderful in it: one, two, three—ready. Any man who wasn’t
stupid could learn easily. That’s all it is. Most ordinary business. I
thank you.”
The pickpocket swung on his heel as if to return to his seat.
“Yasha!” The gentleman in the sandy suit said with meaning weight.
“Yasha!” he repeated sternly.
Yasha stopped. His back was turned to the barrister, but be evidently
gave his representative an imploring look, because the latter frowned
and shook his head.
“Yasha!” he said for the third time, in a threatening tone.
“Huh!” The young thief grunted in vexation and turned to face the
solicitor. “Where’s your little watch, sir?” he said in a piping voice.
“Oh!” the Karaite brought himself up sharp.
“You see—now you say ‘Oh!’” Yasha continued reproachfully. “All the
while you were admiring me right hand, I was operatin’ yer watch with my
left. Just with these two little fingers, under the scarf. That’s why we
carry a scarf. Since your chain’s not worth anything—a present from some
mamselle and the watch is a gold one, I’ve left you the chain as a
keepsake. Take it,” he added with a sigh, holding out the watch.
“But ... That is clever,” the barrister said in confusion. “I didn’t
notice it at all.”
“That’s our business,” Yasha said with pride.
He swaggered back to his comrades. Meantime the orator took a drink from
his glass and continued.
“Now, gentlemen, our next collaborator will give you an exhibition of
some ordinary card tricks, which are worked at fairs, on steamboats and
railways. With three cards, for instance, an ace, a queen, and a six, he
can quite easily... But perhaps you are tired of these demonstrations,
gentlemen.”...
“Not at all. It’s extremely interesting,” the chairman answered affably.
“I should like to ask one question—that is if it is not too
indiscreet—what is your own specialty?”
“Mine... H’m... No, how could it be an indiscretion?... I work the big
diamond shops ... and my other business is banks,” answered the orator
with a modest smile. “Don’t think this occupation is easier than others.
Enough that I know four European languages, German, French, English, and
Italian, not to mention Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish. But shall I show
you some more experiments, Mr. Chairman?”
The chairman looked at his watch.
“Unfortunately the time is too short,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better
to pass on to the substance of your business? Besides, the experiments
we have just seen have amply convinced us of the talent of your esteemed
associates... Am I not right, Isaac Abramovich?”
“Yes, yes ... absolutely,” the Karaite barrister readily confirmed.
“Admirable,” the gentleman in the sandy suit kindly agreed. “My dear
Count”—he turned to a blond, curly-haired man, with a face like a
billiard-maker on a bank-holiday—“put your instruments away. They will
not be wanted. I have only a few words more to say, gentlemen. Now that
you have convinced yourselves that our art, although it does not enjoy
the patronage of high-placed individuals, is nevertheless an art; and
you have probably come to my opinion that this art is one which demands
many personal qualities besides constant labour, danger, and unpleasant
misunderstandings—you will also, I hope, believe that it is possible to
become attached to its practice and to love and esteem it, however
strange that may appear at first sight. Picture to yourselves that a
famous poet of talent, whose tales and poems adorn the pages of our best
magazines, is suddenly offered the chance of writing verses at a penny a
line, signed into the bargain, as an advertisement for ‘Cigarettes
Jasmine’—or that a slander was spread about one of you distinguished
barristers, accusing you of making a business of concocting evidence for
divorce cases, or of writing petitions from the cabmen to the governor
in public-houses! Certainly your relatives, friends and acquaintances
wouldn’t believe it. But the rumour has already done its poisonous work,
and you have to live through minutes of torture. Now picture to
yourselves that such a disgraceful and vexatious slander, started by God
knows whom, begins to threaten not only your good name and your quiet
digestion, but your freedom, your health, and even your life!
“This is the position of us thieves, now being slandered by the
newspapers. I must explain. There is in existence a class of
scum—passez-moi le mot—whom we call their ‘Mothers’ Darlings.’ With
these we are unfortunately confused. They have neither shame nor
conscience, a dissipated riff-raff, mothers’ useless darlings, idle,
clumsy drones, shop assistants who commit unskilful thefts. He thinks
nothing of living on his mistress, a prostitute, like the male mackerel,
who always swims after the female and lives on her excrements. He is
capable of robbing a child with violence in a dark alley, in order to
get a penny; he will kill a man in his sleep and torture an old woman.
These men are the pests of our profession. For them the beauties and the
traditions of the art have no existence. They watch us real, talented
thieves like a pack of jackals after a lion. Suppose I’ve managed to
bring off an important job—we won’t mention the fact that I have to
leave two-thirds of what I get to the receivers who sell the goods and
discount the notes, or the customary subsidies to our incorruptible
police—I still have to share out something to each one of these
parasites, who have got wind of my job, by accident, hearsay, or a
casual glance.
“So we call them Motients, which means ‘half,’ a corruption of moitié
... Original etymology. I pay him only because he knows and may inform
against me. And it mostly happens that even when he’s got his share he
runs off to the police in order to get another dollar. We, honest
thieves... Yes, you may laugh, gentlemen, but I repeat it: we honest
thieves detest these reptiles. We have another name for them, a stigma
of ignominy; but I dare not utter it here out of respect for the place
and for my audience. Oh, yes, they would gladly accept an invitation to
a pogrom. The thought that we may be confused with them is a hundred
times more insulting to us even than the accusation of taking part in a
pogrom.
“Gentlemen! While I have been speaking I have often noticed smiles on
your faces. I understand you. Our presence here, our application for
your assistance, and above all the unexpectedness of such a phenomenon
as a systematic organisation of thieves, with delegates who are thieves,
and a leader of the deputation, also a thief by profession—it is all so
original that it must inevitably arouse a smile. But now I will speak
from the depth of my heart. Let us be rid of our outward wrappings,
gentlemen, let us speak as men to men.
“Almost all of us are educated, and all love books. We don’t only read
the adventures of Roqueambole, as the realistic writers say of us. Do
you think our hearts did not bleed and our cheeks did not burn from
shame, as though we had been slapped in the face, all the time that this
unfortunate, disgraceful, accursed, cowardly war lasted. Do you really
think that our souls do not flame with anger when our country is lashed
with Cossack-whips, and trodden under foot, shot and spit at by mad,
exasperated men? Will you not believe that we thieves meet every step
towards the liberation to come with a thrill of ecstasy?
“We understand, every one of us—perhaps only a little less than you
barristers, gentlemen—the real sense of the pogroms. Every time that
some dastardly event or some ignominious failure has occurred, after
executing a martyr in a dark corner of a fortress, or after deceiving
public confidence, some one who is hidden and unapproachable gets
frightened of the people’s anger and diverts its vicious element upon
the heads of innocent Jews. Whose diabolical mind invents these
pogroms—these titanic blood-lettings, these cannibal amusements for the
dark, bestial souls?
“We all see with certain clearness that the last convulsions of the
bureaucracy are at hand. Forgive me if I present it imaginatively. There
was a people that had a chief temple, wherein dwelt a bloodthirsty
deity, behind a curtain, guarded by priests. Once fearless hands tore
the curtain away. Then all the people saw, instead of a god, a huge,
shaggy, voracious spider, like a loathsome cuttlefish. They beat it and
shoot at it: it is dismembered already; but still in the frenzy of its
final agony it stretches over all the ancient temple its disgusting,
clawing tentacles. And the priests, themselves under sentence of death,
push into the monster’s grasp all whom they can seize in their
terrified, trembling fingers.
“Forgive me. What I have said is probably wild and incoherent. But I am
somewhat agitated. Forgive me. I continue. We thieves by profession know
better than any one else how these pogroms were organised. We wander
everywhere: into public houses, markets, tea-shops, doss-houses, public
places, the harbour. We can swear before God and man and posterity that
we have seen how the police organise the massacres, without shame and
almost without concealment. We know them all by face, in uniform or
disguise. They invited many of us to take part; but there was none so
vile among us as to give even the outward consent that fear might have
extorted.
“You know, of course, how the various strata of Russian society behave
towards the police? It is not even respected by those who avail
themselves of its dark services. But we despise and hate it three, ten
times more—not because many of us have been tortured in the detective
departments, which are just chambers of horror, beaten almost to death,
beaten with whips of ox-hide and of rubber in order to extort a
confession or to make us betray a comrade. Yes, we hate them for that
too. But we thieves, all of us who have been in prison, have a mad
passion for freedom. Therefore we despise our gaolers with all the
hatred that a human heart can feel. I will speak for myself. I have been
tortured three times by police detectives till I was half dead. My lungs
and liver have been shattered. In the mornings I spit blood until I can
breathe no more. But if I were told that I will be spared a fourth
flogging only by shaking hands with a chief of the detective police, I
would refuse to do it!
“And then the newspapers say that we took from these hands Judas-money,
dripping with human blood. No, gentlemen, it is a slander which stabs
our very soul, and inflicts insufferable pain. Not money, nor threats,
nor promises will suffice to make us mercenary murderers of our
brethren, nor accomplices with them.”
“Never ... No ... No ... ,” his comrades standing behind him began to
murmur.
“I will say more,” the thief continued. “Many of us protected the
victims during this pogrom. Our friend, called Sesoi the Great—you have
just seen him, gentlemen—was then lodging with a Jewish braid-maker on
the Moldavanka. With a poker in his hands he defended his landlord from
a great horde of assassins. It is true, Sesoi the Great is a man of
enormous physical strength, and this is well known to many of the
inhabitants of the Moldavanka. But you must agree, gentlemen, that in
these moments Sesoi the Great looked straight into the face of death.
Our comrade Martin the Miner—this gentleman here” —the orator pointed to
a pale, bearded man with beautiful eyes who was holding himself in the
background—“saved an old Jewess, whom he had never seen before, who was
being pursued by a crowd of these canaille. They broke his head with a
crowbar for his pains, smashed his arm in two places and splintered a
rib. He is only just out of hospital. That is the way our most ardent
and determined members acted. The others trembled for anger and wept for
their own impotence.
“None of us will forget the horrors of those bloody days and bloody
nights lit up by the glare of fires, those sobbing women, those little
children’s bodies torn to pieces and left lying in the street. But for
all that not one of us thinks that the police and the mob are the real
origin of the evil. These tiny, stupid, loathsome vermin are only a
senseless fist that is governed by a vile, calculating mind, moved by a
diabolical will.
“Yes, gentlemen,” the orator continued, “we thieves have nevertheless
merited your legal contempt. But when you, noble gentlemen, need the
help of clever, brave, obedient men at the barricades, men who will be
ready to meet death with a song and a jest on their lips for the most
glorious word in the world—Freedom—will you cast us off then and order
us away because of an inveterate revulsion? Damn it all, the first
victim in the French Revolution was a prostitute. She jumped up on to a
barricade, with her skirt caught elegantly up into her hand and called
out: ‘Which of you soldiers will dare to shoot a woman?’ Yes, by God.”
The orator exclaimed aloud and brought down his fist on to the marble
table top: “They killed her, but her action was magnificent, and the
beauty of her words immortal.
“If you should drive us away on the great day, we will turn to you and
say: ‘You spotless Cherubim—if human thoughts had the power to wound,
kill, and rob man of honour and property, then which of you innocent
doves would not deserve the knout and imprisonment for life?’ Then we
will go away from you and build our own gay, sporting, desperate
thieves’ barricade, and will die with such united songs on our lips that
you will envy us, you who are whiter than snow!
“But I have been once more carried away. Forgive me. I am at the end.
You now see, gentlemen, what feelings the newspaper slanders have
excited in us. Believe in our sincerity and do what you can to remove
the filthy stain which has so unjustly been cast upon us. I have
finished.”
He went away from the table and joined his comrades. The barristers were
whispering in an undertone, very much as the magistrates of the bench at
sessions. Then the chairman rose.
“We trust you absolutely, and we will make every effort to clear your
association of this most grievous charge. At the same time my colleagues
have authorised me, gentlemen, to convey to you their deep respect for
your passionate feelings as citizens. And for my own part I ask the
leader of the deputation for permission to shake him by the hand.”
The two men, both tall and serious, held each other’s hands in a strong,
masculine grip.
The barristers were leaving the theatre; but four of them hung back a
little beside the clothes rack in the hall. Isaac Abramovich could not
find his new, smart grey hat anywhere. In its place on the wooden peg
hung a cloth cap jauntily flattened in on either side.
“Yasha!” The stern voice of the orator was suddenly heard from the other
side of the door. “Yasha! It’s the last time I’ll speak to you, curse
you! ... Do you hear?” The heavy door opened wide. The gentleman in the
sandy suit entered. In his hands he held Isaac Abramovich’s hat; on his
face was a well-bred smile.
“Gentlemen, for Heaven’s sake forgive us—an odd little misunderstanding.
One of our comrades exchanged his hat by accident... Oh, it is yours! A
thousand pardons. Doorkeeper! Why don’t you keep an eye on things, my
good fellow, eh? Just give me that cap, there. Once more, I ask you to
forgive me, gentlemen.”
With a pleasant bow and the same well-bred smile he made his way quickly
into the street.
The Duel and Other Stories
THE DUEL I
It was eight o’clock in the morning—the time when the officers, the
local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the
sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to
drink tea or coffee. Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of
twenty-eight, wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and
with slippers on his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of
acquaintances on the beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the
army doctor.
With his big cropped head, short neck, his red face, his big nose, his
shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, his stout puffy figure and his
hoarse military bass, this Samoylenko made on every newcomer the
unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after
making his acquaintance, one began to think his face extraordinarily
good-natured, kind, and even handsome. In spite of his clumsiness and
rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and
goodness of heart, always ready to be of use. He was on familiar terms
with every one in the town, lent every one money, doctored every one,
made matches, patched up quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked
shashlik and an awfully good soup of grey mullets. He was always looking
after other people’s affairs and trying to interest some one on their
behalf, and was always delighted about something. The general opinion
about him was that he was without faults of character. He had only two
weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good nature, and tried to disguise
it by a surly expression and an assumed gruffness; and he liked his
assistants and his soldiers to call him “Your Excellency,” although he
was only a civil councillor.
“Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch,” Laevsky began, when
both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders. “Suppose
you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or three
years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel
that you had nothing in common with her. How would you behave in that
case?”
“It’s very simple. ‘You go where you please, madam’—and that would be
the end of it.”
“It’s easy to say that! But if she has nowhere to go? A woman with no
friends or relations, without a farthing, who can’t work . . .”
“Well? Five hundred roubles down or an allowance of twenty-five roubles
a month—and nothing more. It’s very simple.”
“Even supposing you have five hundred roubles and can pay twenty-five
roubles a month, the woman I am speaking of is an educated woman and
proud. Could you really bring yourself to offer her money? And how would
you do it?”
Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered
them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the
shingle. The friends got out and began dressing.
“Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don’t love her,”
said Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. “But one must look
at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I should never show a
sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I
died.”
He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said:
“But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go
to the devil!”
The friends dressed and went into the pavilion. There Samoylenko was
quite at home, and even had a special cup and saucer. Every morning they
brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall cut glass of iced water,
and a tiny glass of brandy. He would first drink the brandy, then the
hot coffee, then the iced water, and this must have been very nice, for
after drinking it his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke
his whiskers with both hands, and say, looking at the sea:
“A wonderfully magnificent view!”
After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which
prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and
sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no
better for the bathe and the coffee.
“Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch,” he said. “I won’t make
a secret of it; I’ll speak to you openly as to a friend. Things are in a
bad way with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me . . . a very bad way! Forgive
me for forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak out.”
Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about,
dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.
“I’ve lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her,” Laevsky
went on; “or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any love for her.
. . . These two years have been a mistake.”
It was Laevsky’s habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink
palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did
so now.
“I know very well you can’t help me,” he said. “But I tell you, because
unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in
talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I’m bound to look
for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody
else’s theories, in literary types—in the idea that we, upper-class
Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for
example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: ‘Ah, how true
Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!’ And that did me good. Yes, really,
brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!”
Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every
day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:
“Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight
from nature.”
“My God!” sighed Laevsky; “how distorted we all are by civilisation! I
fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with,
we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and
interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away from her
husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the
emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured our future like
this: to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the
people and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter
the service; then at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground,
would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field,
and so on. If you were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von
Koren, you might live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years,
perhaps, and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand
acres of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day. In the
town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society; if you go out
into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions, or snakes
lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and beyond the
fields—mountains and the desert. Alien people, an alien country, a
wretched form of civilisation—all that is not so easy, brother, as
walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one’s fur coat, arm-in-arm with
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South. What is needed here
is a life and death struggle, and I’m not a fighting man. A wretched
neurasthenic, an idle gentleman . . . . From the first day I knew that
my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were worthless. As for
love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer
and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting
than living with any Anfissa or Akulina. There’s the same smell of
ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every
morning, the same self-deception.”
“You can’t get on in the house without an iron,” said Samoylenko,
blushing at Laevsky’s speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew. “You
are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is a
splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man of the highest
intellect. Of course, you are not married,” Samoylenko went on, glancing
round at the adjacent tables, “but that’s not your fault; and besides .
. . one ought to be above conventional prejudices and rise to the level
of modern ideas. I believe in free love myself, yes. . . . But to my
thinking, once you have settled together, you ought to go on living
together all your life.”
“Without love?”
“I will tell you directly,” said Samoylenko. “Eight years ago there was
an old fellow, an agent, here—a man of very great intelligence. Well, he
used to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you
hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long. You have
lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached
the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you
ought to exercise all your patience. . . .”
“You believe in your old agent; to me his words are meaningless. Your
old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of
patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an
object indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen
so low. If I want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumb-bells
or a frisky horse, but I’ll leave human beings alone.”
Samoylenko asked for some white wine with ice. When they had drunk a
glass each, Laevsky suddenly asked:
“Tell me, please, what is the meaning of softening of the brain?”
“How can I explain it to you? . . . It’s a disease in which the brain
becomes softer . . . as it were, dissolves.”
“Is it curable?”
“Yes, if the disease is not neglected. Cold douches, blisters. . . .
Something internal, too.”
“Oh! . . . Well, you see my position; I can’t live with her: it is more
than I can do. While I’m with you I can be philosophical about it and
smile, but at home I lose heart completely; I am so utterly miserable,
that if I were told, for instance, that I should have to live another
month with her, I should blow out my brains. At the same time, parting
with her is out of the question. She has no friends or relations; she
cannot work, and neither she nor I have any money. . . . What could
become of her? To whom could she go? There is nothing one can think of.
. . . Come, tell me, what am I to do?”
“H’m! . . .” growled Samoylenko, not knowing what to answer. “Does she
love you?”
“Yes, she loves me in so far as at her age and with her temperament she
wants a man. It would be as difficult for her to do without me as to do
without her powder or her curl-papers. I am for her an indispensable,
integral part of her boudoir.”
Samoylenko was embarrassed.
“You are out of humour to-day, Vanya,” he said. “You must have had a bad
night.”
“Yes, I slept badly. . . . Altogether, I feel horribly out of sorts,
brother. My head feels empty; there’s a sinking at my heart, a weakness.
. . . I must run away.”
“Run where?”
“There, to the North. To the pines and the mushrooms, to people and
ideas. . . . I’d give half my life to bathe now in some little stream in
the province of Moscow or Tula; to feel chilly, you know, and then to
stroll for three hours even with the feeblest student, and to talk and
talk endlessly. . . . And the scent of the hay! Do you remember it? And
in the evening, when one walks in the garden, sounds of the piano float
from the house; one hears the train passing. . . .”
Laevsky laughed with pleasure; tears came into his eyes, and to cover
them, without getting up, he stretched across the next table for the
matches.
“I have not been in Russia for eighteen years,” said Samoylenko. “I’ve
forgotten what it is like. To my mind, there is not a country more
splendid than the Caucasus.”
“Vereshtchagin has a picture in which some men condemned to death are
languishing at the bottom of a very deep well. Your magnificent Caucasus
strikes me as just like that well. If I were offered the choice of a
chimney-sweep in Petersburg or a prince in the Caucasus, I should choose
the job of chimney-sweep.”
Laevsky grew pensive. Looking at his stooping figure, at his eyes fixed
dreamily at one spot, at his pale, perspiring face and sunken temples,
at his bitten nails, at the slipper which had dropped off his heel,
displaying a badly darned sock, Samoylenko was moved to pity, and
probably because Laevsky reminded him of a helpless child, he asked:
“Is your mother living?”
“Yes, but we are on bad terms. She could not forgive me for this
affair.”
Samoylenko was fond of his friend. He looked upon Laevsky as a good-
natured fellow, a student, a man with no nonsense about him, with whom
one could drink, and laugh, and talk without reserve. What he understood
in him he disliked extremely. Laevsky drank a great deal and at
unsuitable times; he played cards, despised his work, lived beyond his
means, frequently made use of unseemly expressions in conversation,
walked about the streets in his slippers, and quarrelled with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna before other people—and Samoylenko did not like this. But the
fact that Laevsky had once been a student in the Faculty of Arts,
subscribed to two fat reviews, often talked so cleverly that only a few
people understood him, was living with a well-educated woman—all this
Samoylenko did not understand, and he liked this and respected Laevsky,
thinking him superior to himself.
“There is another point,” said Laevsky, shaking his head. “Only it is
between ourselves. I’m concealing it from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for the
time. . . . Don’t let it out before her. . . . I got a letter the day
before yesterday, telling me that her husband has died from softening of
the brain.”
“The Kingdom of Heaven be his!” sighed Samoylenko. “Why are you
concealing it from her?”
“To show her that letter would be equivalent to ‘Come to church to be
married.’ And we should first have to make our relations clear. When she
understands that we can’t go on living together, I will show her the
letter. Then there will be no danger in it.”
“Do you know what, Vanya,” said Samoylenko, and a sad and imploring
expression came into his face, as though he were going to ask him about
something very touching and were afraid of being refused. “Marry her, my
dear boy!”
“Why?”
“Do your duty to that splendid woman! Her husband is dead, and so
Providence itself shows you what to do!”
“But do understand, you queer fellow, that it is impossible. To marry
without love is as base and unworthy of a man as to perform mass without
believing in it.”
“But it’s your duty to.”
“Why is it my duty?” Laevsky asked irritably.
“Because you took her away from her husband and made yourself
responsible for her.”
“But now I tell you in plain Russian, I don’t love her!”
“Well, if you’ve no love, show her proper respect, consider her wishes.
. . .”
“‘Show her respect, consider her wishes,’” Laevsky mimicked him. “As
though she were some Mother Superior! . . . You are a poor psychologist
and physiologist if you think that living with a woman one can get off
with nothing but respect and consideration. What a woman thinks most of
is her bedroom.”
“Vanya, Vanya!” said Samoylenko, overcome with confusion.
“You are an elderly child, a theorist, while I am an old man in spite of
my years, and practical, and we shall never understand one another. We
had better drop this conversation. Mustapha!” Laevsky shouted to the
waiter. “What’s our bill?”
“No, no . . .” the doctor cried in dismay, clutching Laevsky’s arm. “It
is for me to pay. I ordered it. Make it out to me,” he cried to
Mustapha.
The friends got up and walked in silence along the sea-front. When they
reached the boulevard, they stopped and shook hands at parting.
“You are awfully spoilt, my friend!” Samoylenko sighed. “Fate has sent
you a young, beautiful, cultured woman, and you refuse the gift, while
if God were to give me a crooked old woman, how pleased I should be if
only she were kind and affectionate! I would live with her in my
vineyard and . . .”
Samoylenko caught himself up and said:
“And she might get the samovar ready for me there, the old hag.”
After parting with Laevsky he walked along the boulevard. When, bulky
and majestic, with a stern expression on his face, he walked along the
boulevard in his snow-white tunic and superbly polished boots, squaring
his chest, decorated with the Vladimir cross on a ribbon, he was very
much pleased with himself, and it seemed as though the whole world were
looking at him with pleasure. Without turning his head, he looked to
each side and thought that the boulevard was extremely well laid out;
that the young cypress-trees, the eucalyptuses, and the ugly, anemic
palm-trees were very handsome and would in time give abundant shade;
that the Circassians were an honest and hospitable people.
“It’s strange that Laevsky does not like the Caucasus,” he thought,
“very strange.”
Five soldiers, carrying rifles, met him and saluted him. On the right
side of the boulevard the wife of a local official was walking along the
pavement with her son, a schoolboy.
“Good-morning, Marya Konstantinovna,” Samoylenko shouted to her with a
pleasant smile. “Have you been to bathe? Ha, ha, ha! . . . My respects
to Nikodim Alexandritch!”
And he went on, still smiling pleasantly, but seeing an assistant of the
military hospital coming towards him, he suddenly frowned, stopped him,
and asked:
“Is there any one in the hospital?”
“No one, Your Excellency.”
“Eh?”
“No one, Your Excellency.”
“Very well, run along. . . .”
Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where sat a full-
bosomed old Jewess, who gave herself out to be a Georgian, and said to
her as loudly as though he were giving the word of command to a
regiment:
“Be so good as to give me some soda-water!” II
Laevsky’s not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in the
fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or equivalent
to a lie, and everything he read against women and love seemed to him to
apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband.
When he returned home, she was sitting at the window, dressed and with
her hair done, and with a preoccupied face was drinking coffee and
turning over the leaves of a fat magazine; and he thought the drinking
of coffee was not such a remarkable event that she need put on a
preoccupied expression over it, and that she had been wasting her time
doing her hair in a fashionable style, as there was no one here to
attract and no need to be attractive. And in the magazine he saw nothing
but falsity. He thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look
handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever.
“Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?” she said.
“Why? There won’t be an earthquake whether you go or not, I suppose . .
. .”
“No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed.”
“Well, ask the doctor, then; I’m not a doctor.”
On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her head.
And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her husband, what
she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: “How true it is, how
true!”
Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went into
his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a
handkerchief that he might not be bothered by the flies. Despondent and
oppressive thoughts always about the same thing trailed slowly across
his brain like a long string of waggons on a gloomy autumn evening, and
he sank into a state of drowsy oppression. It seemed to him that he had
wronged Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband, and that it was through
his fault that her husband had died. It seemed to him that he had sinned
against his own life, which he had ruined, against the world of lofty
ideas, of learning, and of work, and he conceived that wonderful world
as real and possible, not on this sea-front with hungry Turks and lazy
mountaineers sauntering upon it, but there in the North, where there
were operas, theatres, newspapers, and all kinds of intellectual
activity. One could only there—not here—be honest, intelligent, lofty,
and pure. He accused himself of having no ideal, no guiding principle in
life, though he had a dim understanding now what it meant. Two years
before, when he fell in love with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, it seemed to him
that he had only to go with her as his wife to the Caucasus, and he
would be saved from vulgarity and emptiness; in the same way now, he was
convinced that he had only to part from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and to go
to Petersburg, and he would get everything he wanted.
“Run away,” he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails.
“Run away!”
He pictured in his imagination how he would go aboard the steamer and
then would have some lunch, would drink some cold beer, would talk on
deck with ladies, then would get into the train at Sevastopol and set
off. Hurrah for freedom! One station after another would flash by, the
air would keep growing colder and keener, then the birches and the fir-
trees, then Kursk, Moscow. . . . In the restaurants cabbage soup, mutton
with kasha, sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real Russia.
The passengers in the train would talk about trade, new singers, the
Franco-Russian entente; on all sides there would be the feeling of keen,
cultured, intellectual, eager life. . . . Hasten on, on! At last Nevsky
Prospect, and Great Morskaya Street, and then Kovensky Place, where he
used to live at one time when he was a student, the dear grey sky, the
drizzling rain, the drenched cabmen. . . .
“Ivan Andreitch!” some one called from the next room. “Are you at home?”
“I’m here,” Laevsky responded. “What do you want?”
“Papers.”
Laevsky got up languidly, feeling giddy, walked into the other room,
yawning and shuffling with his slippers. There, at the open window that
looked into the street, stood one of his young fellow-clerks, laying out
some government documents on the window-sill.
“One minute, my dear fellow,” Laevsky said softly, and he went to look
for the ink; returning to the window, he signed the papers without
looking at them, and said: “It’s hot!”
“Yes. Are you coming to-day?”
“I don’t think so. . . . I’m not quite well. Tell Sheshkovsky that I
will come and see him after dinner.”
The clerk went away. Laevsky lay down on his sofa again and began
thinking:
“And so I must weigh all the circumstances and reflect on them. Before I
go away from here I ought to pay up my debts. I owe about two thousand
roubles. I have no money. . . . Of course, that’s not important; I shall
pay part now, somehow, and I shall send the rest, later, from
Petersburg. The chief point is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. . . . First of all
we must define our relations. . . . Yes.”
A little later he was considering whether it would not be better to go
to Samoylenko for advice.
“I might go,” he thought, “but what use would there be in it? I shall
only say something inappropriate about boudoirs, about women, about what
is honest or dishonest. What’s the use of talking about what is honest
or dishonest, if I must make haste to save my life, if I am suffocating
in this cursed slavery and am killing myself? . . . One must realise at
last that to go on leading the life I do is something so base and so
cruel that everything else seems petty and trivial beside it. To run
away,” he muttered, sitting down, “to run away.”
The deserted seashore, the insatiable heat, and the monotony of the
smoky lilac mountains, ever the same and silent, everlastingly solitary,
overwhelmed him with depression, and, as it were, made him drowsy and
sapped his energy. He was perhaps very clever, talented, remarkably
honest; perhaps if the sea and the mountains had not closed him in on
all sides, he might have become an excellent Zemstvo leader, a
statesman, an orator, a political writer, a saint. Who knows? If so, was
it not stupid to argue whether it were honest or dishonest when a gifted
and useful man—an artist or musician, for instance—to escape from
prison, breaks a wall and deceives his jailers? Anything is honest when
a man is in such a position.
At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When
the cook gave them rice and tomato soup, Laevsky said:
“The same thing every day. Why not have cabbage soup?”
“There are no cabbages.”
“It’s strange. Samoylenko has cabbage soup and Marya Konstantinovna has
cabbage soup, and only I am obliged to eat this mawkish mess. We can’t
go on like this, darling.”
As is common with the vast majority of husbands and wives, not a single
dinner had in earlier days passed without scenes and fault-finding
between Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Laevsky; but ever since Laevsky had
made up his mind that he did not love her, he had tried to give way to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna in everything, spoke to her gently and politely,
smiled, and called her “darling.”
“This soup tastes like liquorice,” he said, smiling; he made an effort
to control himself and seem amiable, but could not refrain from saying:
“Nobody looks after the housekeeping. . . . If you are too ill or busy
with reading, let me look after the cooking.”
In earlier days she would have said to him, “Do by all means,” or, “I
see you want to turn me into a cook”; but now she only looked at him
timidly and flushed crimson.
“Well, how do you feel to-day?” he asked kindly.
“I am all right to-day. There is nothing but a little weakness.”
“You must take care of yourself, darling. I am awfully anxious about
you.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was ill in some way. Samoylenko said she had
intermittent fever, and gave her quinine; the other doctor, Ustimovitch,
a tall, lean, unsociable man, who used to sit at home in the daytime,
and in the evenings walk slowly up and down on the sea-front coughing,
with his hands folded behind him and a cane stretched along his back,
was of opinion that she had a female complaint, and prescribed warm
compresses. In old days, when Laevsky loved her, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s
illness had excited his pity and terror; now he saw falsity even in her
illness. Her yellow, sleepy face, her lustreless eyes, her apathetic
expression, and the yawning that always followed her attacks of fever,
and the fact that during them she lay under a shawl and looked more like
a boy than a woman, and that it was close and stuffy in her room—all
this, in his opinion, destroyed the illusion and was an argument against
love and marriage.
The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a
preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began
languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was
possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head tingle.
He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but
he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for
arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder
their mistresses. He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been
on a jury now, he would have acquitted the murderer.
“Merci, darling,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
on the forehead.
Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and fro,
looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered:
“Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!”
He lay down on the sofa and recalled again that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s
husband had died, perhaps, by his fault.
“To blame a man for loving a woman, or ceasing to love a woman, is
stupid,” he persuaded himself, lying down and raising his legs in order
to put on his high boots. “Love and hatred are not under our control. As
for her husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of the causes of his
death; but again, is it my fault that I fell in love with his wife and
she with me?”
Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his
colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day to
play vint and drink beer.
“My indecision reminds me of Hamlet,” thought Laevsky on the way. “How
truly Shakespeare describes it! Ah, how truly!” III
For the sake of sociability and from sympathy for the hard plight of
newcomers without families, who, as there was not an hotel in the town,
had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoylenko kept a sort of table d’hôte. At
this time there were only two men who habitually dined with him: a young
zoologist called Von Koren, who had come for the summer to the Black Sea
to study the embryology of the medusa, and a deacon called Pobyedov, who
had only just left the seminary and been sent to the town to take the
duty of the old deacon who had gone away for a cure. Each of them paid
twelve roubles a month for their dinner and supper, and Samoylenko made
them promise to turn up at two o’clock punctually.
Von Koren was usually the first to appear. He sat down in the drawing-
room in silence, and taking an album from the table, began attentively
scrutinising the faded photographs of unknown men in full trousers and
top-hats, and ladies in crinolines and caps. Samoylenko only remembered
a few of them by name, and of those whom he had forgotten he said with a
sigh: “A very fine fellow, remarkably intelligent!” When he had finished
with the album, Von Koren took a pistol from the whatnot, and screwing
up his left eye, took deliberate aim at the portrait of Prince
Vorontsov, or stood still at the looking-glass and gazed a long time at
his swarthy face, his big forehead, and his black hair, which curled
like a negro’s, and his shirt of dull-coloured cotton with big flowers
on it like a Persian rug, and the broad leather belt he wore instead of
a waistcoat. The contemplation of his own image seemed to afford him
almost more satisfaction than looking at photographs or playing with the
pistols. He was very well satisfied with his face, and his becomingly
clipped beard, and the broad shoulders, which were unmistakable evidence
of his excellent health and physical strength. He was satisfied, too,
with his stylish get-up, from the cravat, which matched the colour of
his shirt, down to his brown boots.
While he was looking at the album and standing before the glass, at that
moment, in the kitchen and in the passage near, Samoylenko, without his
coat and waistcoat, with his neck bare, excited and bathed in
perspiration, was bustling about the tables, mixing the salad, or making
some sauce, or preparing meat, cucumbers, and onion for the cold soup,
while he glared fiercely at the orderly who was helping him, and
brandished first a knife and then a spoon at him.
“Give me the vinegar!” he said. “That’s not the vinegar—it’s the salad
oil!” he shouted, stamping. “Where are you off to, you brute?”
“To get the butter, Your Excellency,” answered the flustered orderly in
a cracked voice.
“Make haste; it’s in the cupboard! And tell Daria to put some fennel in
the jar with the cucumbers! Fennel! Cover the cream up, gaping laggard,
or the flies will get into it!”
And the whole house seemed resounding with his shouts. When it was ten
or fifteen minutes to two the deacon would come in; he was a lanky young
man of twenty-two, with long hair, with no beard and a hardly
perceptible moustache. Going into the drawing-room, he crossed himself
before the ikon, smiled, and held out his hand to Von Koren.
“Good-morning,” the zoologist said coldly. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been catching sea-gudgeon in the harbour.”
“Oh, of course. . . . Evidently, deacon, you will never be busy with
work.”
“Why not? Work is not like a bear; it doesn’t run off into the woods,”
said the deacon, smiling and thrusting his hands into the very deep
pockets of his white cassock.
“There’s no one to whip you!” sighed the zoologist.
Another fifteen or twenty minutes passed and they were not called to
dinner, and they could still hear the orderly running into the kitchen
and back again, noisily treading with his boots, and Samoylenko
shouting:
“Put it on the table! Where are your wits? Wash it first.”
The famished deacon and Von Koren began tapping on the floor with their
heels, expressing in this way their impatience like the audience at a
theatre. At last the door opened and the harassed orderly announced that
dinner was ready! In the dining-room they were met by Samoylenko,
crimson in the face, wrathful, perspiring from the heat of the kitchen;
he looked at them furiously, and with an expression of horror, took the
lid off the soup tureen and helped each of them to a plateful; and only
when he was convinced that they were eating it with relish and liked it,
he gave a sigh of relief and settled himself in his deep arm-chair. His
face looked blissful and his eyes grew moist. . . . He deliberately
poured himself out a glass of vodka and said:
“To the health of the younger generation.”
After his conversation with Laevsky, from early morning till dinner
Samoylenko had been conscious of a load at his heart, although he was in
the best of humours; he felt sorry for Laevsky and wanted to help him.
After drinking a glass of vodka before the soup, he heaved a sigh and
said:
“I saw Vanya Laevsky to-day. He is having a hard time of it, poor
fellow! The material side of life is not encouraging for him, and the
worst of it is all this psychology is too much for him. I’m sorry for
the lad.”
“Well, that is a person I am not sorry for,” said Von Koren. “If that
charming individual were drowning, I would push him under with a stick
and say, ‘Drown, brother, drown away.’ . . .”
“That’s untrue. You wouldn’t do it.”
“Why do you think that?” The zoologist shrugged his shoulders. “I’m just
as capable of a good action as you are.”
“Is drowning a man a good action?” asked the deacon, and he laughed.
“Laevsky? Yes.”
“I think there is something amiss with the soup . . .” said Samoylenko,
anxious to change the conversation.
“Laevsky is absolutely pernicious and is as dangerous to society as the
cholera microbe,” Von Koren went on. “To drown him would be a service.”
“It does not do you credit to talk like that about your neighbour. Tell
us: what do you hate him for?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, doctor. To hate and despise a microbe is stupid,
but to look upon everybody one meets without distinction as one’s
neighbour, whatever happens—thanks very much, that is equivalent to
giving up criticism, renouncing a straightforward attitude to people,
washing one’s hands of responsibility, in fact! I consider your Laevsky
a blackguard; I do not conceal it, and I am perfectly conscientious in
treating him as such. Well, you look upon him as your neighbour—and you
may kiss him if you like: you look upon him as your neighbour, and that
means that your attitude to him is the same as to me and to the deacon;
that is no attitude at all. You are equally indifferent to all.”
“To call a man a blackguard!” muttered Samoylenko, frowning with
distaste—“that is so wrong that I can’t find words for it!”
“People are judged by their actions,” Von Koren continued. “Now you
decide, deacon. . . . I am going to talk to you, deacon. Mr. Laevsky’s
career lies open before you, like a long Chinese puzzle, and you can
read it from beginning to end. What has he been doing these two years
that he has been living here? We will reckon his doings on our fingers.
First, he has taught the inhabitants of the town to play vint: two years
ago that game was unknown here; now they all play it from morning till
late at night, even the women and the boys. Secondly, he has taught the
residents to drink beer, which was not known here either; the
inhabitants are indebted to him for the knowledge of various sorts of
spirits, so that now they can distinguish Kospelov’s vodka from
Smirnov’s No. 21, blindfold. Thirdly, in former days, people here made
love to other men’s wives in secret, from the same motives as thieves
steal in secret and not openly; adultery was considered something they
were ashamed to make a public display of. Laevsky has come as a pioneer
in that line; he lives with another man’s wife openly. . . . Fourthly .
. .”
Von Koren hurriedly ate up his soup and gave his plate to the orderly.
“I understood Laevsky from the first month of our acquaintance,” he went
on, addressing the deacon. “We arrived here at the same time. Men like
him are very fond of friendship, intimacy, solidarity, and all the rest
of it, because they always want company for vint, drinking, and eating;
besides, they are talkative and must have listeners. We made
friends—that is, he turned up every day, hindered me working, and
indulged in confidences in regard to his mistress. From the first he
struck me by his exceptional falsity, which simply made me sick. As a
friend I pitched into him, asking him why he drank too much, why he
lived beyond his means and got into debt, why he did nothing and read
nothing, why he had so little culture and so little knowledge; and in
answer to all my questions he used to smile bitterly, sigh, and say: ‘I
am a failure, a superfluous man’; or: ‘What do you expect, my dear
fellow, from us, the debris of the serf-owning class?’ or: ‘We are
degenerate. . . .’ Or he would begin a long rigmarole about Onyegin,
Petchorin, Byron’s Cain, and Bazarov, of whom he would say: ‘They are
our fathers in flesh and in spirit.’ So we are to understand that it was
not his fault that Government envelopes lay unopened in his office for
weeks together, and that he drank and taught others to drink, but
Onyegin, Petchorin, and Turgenev, who had invented the failure and the
superfluous man, were responsible for it. The cause of his extreme
dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but
somewhere outside in space. And so—an ingenious idea!—it is not only he
who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . ‘we men of the
eighties,’ ‘we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning
class’; ‘civilisation has crippled us’ . . . in fact, we are to
understand that such a great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall:
that his dissoluteness, his lack of culture and of moral purity, is a
phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by inevitability; that the
causes of it are world-wide, elemental; and that we ought to hang up a
lamp before Laevsky, since he is the fated victim of the age, of
influences, of heredity, and so on. All the officials and their ladies
were in ecstasies when they listened to him, and I could not make out
for a long time what sort of man I had to deal with, a cynic or a clever
rogue. Such types as he, on the surface intellectual with a smattering
of education and a great deal of talk about their own nobility, are very
clever in posing as exceptionally complex natures.”
“Hold your tongue!” Samoylenko flared up. “I will not allow a splendid
fellow to be spoken ill of in my presence!”
“Don’t interrupt, Alexandr Daviditch,” said Von Koren coldly; “I am just
finishing. Laevsky is by no means a complex organism. Here is his moral
skeleton: in the morning, slippers, a bathe, and coffee; then till
dinner-time, slippers, a constitutional, and conversation; at two
o’clock slippers, dinner, and wine; at five o’clock a bathe, tea and
wine, then vint and lying; at ten o’clock supper and wine; and after
midnight sleep and la femme. His existence is confined within this
narrow programme like an egg within its shell. Whether he walks or sits,
is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to wine, cards,
slippers, and women. Woman plays a fatal, overwhelming part in his life.
He tells us himself that at thirteen he was in love; that when he was a
student in his first year he was living with a lady who had a good
influence over him, and to whom he was indebted for his musical
education. In his second year he bought a prostitute from a brothel and
raised her to his level—that is, took her as his kept mistress, and she
lived with him for six months and then ran away back to the brothel-
keeper, and her flight caused him much spiritual suffering. Alas! his
sufferings were so great that he had to leave the university and spend
two years at home doing nothing. But this was all for the best. At home
he made friends with a widow who advised him to leave the Faculty of
Jurisprudence and go into the Faculty of Arts. And so he did. When he
had taken his degree, he fell passionately in love with his present . .
. what’s her name? . . . married lady, and was obliged to flee with her
here to the Caucasus for the sake of his ideals, he would have us
believe, seeing that . . . to-morrow, if not to-day, he will be tired of
her and flee back again to Petersburg, and that, too, will be for the
sake of his ideals.”
“How do you know?” growled Samoylenko, looking angrily at the zoologist.
“You had better eat your dinner.”
The next course consisted of boiled mullet with Polish sauce. Samoylenko
helped each of his companions to a whole mullet and poured out the sauce
with his own hand. Two minutes passed in silence.
“Woman plays an essential part in the life of every man,” said the
deacon. “You can’t help that.”
“Yes, but to what degree? For each of us woman means mother, sister,
wife, friend. To Laevsky she is everything, and at the same time nothing
but a mistress. She—that is, cohabitation with her— is the happiness and
object of his life; he is gay, sad, bored, disenchanted—on account of
woman; his life grows disagreeable —woman is to blame; the dawn of a new
life begins to glow, ideals turn up—and again look for the woman. . . .
He only derives enjoyment from books and pictures in which there is
woman. Our age is, to his thinking, poor and inferior to the forties and
the sixties only because we do not know how to abandon ourselves
obviously to the passion and ecstasy of love. These voluptuaries must
have in their brains a special growth of the nature of sarcoma, which
stifles the brain and directs their whole psychology. Watch Laevsky when
he is sitting anywhere in company. You notice: when one raises any
general question in his presence, for instance, about the cell or
instinct, he sits apart, and neither speaks nor listens; he looks
languid and disillusioned; nothing has any interest for him, everything
is vulgar and trivial. But as soon as you speak of male and female—for
instance, of the fact that the female spider, after fertilisation,
devours the male—his eyes glow with curiosity, his face brightens, and
the man revives, in fact. All his thoughts, however noble, lofty, or
neutral they may be, they all have one point of resemblance. You walk
along the street with him and meet a donkey, for instance. . . . ‘Tell
me, please,’ he asks, ‘what would happen if you mated a donkey with a
camel?’ And his dreams! Has he told you of his dreams? It is
magnificent! First, he dreams that he is married to the moon, then that
he is summoned before the police and ordered to live with a guitar . .
.”
The deacon burst into resounding laughter; Samoylenko frowned and
wrinkled up his face angrily so as not to laugh, but could not restrain
himself, and laughed.
“And it’s all nonsense!” he said, wiping his tears. “Yes, by Jove, it’s
nonsense!” IV
The deacon was very easily amused, and laughed at every trifle till he
got a stitch in his side, till he was helpless. It seemed as though he
only liked to be in people’s company because there was a ridiculous side
to them, and because they might be given ridiculous nicknames. He had
nicknamed Samoylenko “the tarantula,” his orderly “the drake,” and was
in ecstasies when on one occasion Von Koren spoke of Laevsky and
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna as “Japanese monkeys.” He watched people’s faces
greedily, listened without bGlinking, and it could be seen that his eyes
filled with laughter and his face was tense with expectation of the
moment when he could let himself go and burst into laughter.
“He is a corrupt and depraved type,” the zoologist continued, while the
deacon kept his eyes riveted on his face, expecting he would say
something funny. “It is not often one can meet with such a nonentity. In
body he is inert, feeble, prematurely old, while in intellect he differs
in no respect from a fat shopkeeper’s wife who does nothing but eat,
drink, and sleep on a feather-bed, and who keeps her coachman as a
lover.”
The deacon began guffawing again.
“Don’t laugh, deacon,” said Von Koren. “It grows stupid, at last. I
should not have paid attention to his insignificance,” he went on, after
waiting till the deacon had left off laughing; “I should have passed him
by if he were not so noxious and dangerous. His noxiousness lies first
of all in the fact that he has great success with women, and so
threatens to leave descendants—that is, to present the world with a
dozen Laevskys as feeble and as depraved as himself. Secondly, he is in
the highest degree contaminating. I have spoken to you already of vint
and beer. In another year or two he will dominate the whole Caucasian
coast. You know how the mass, especially its middle stratum, believe in
intellectuality, in a university education, in gentlemanly manners, and
in literary language. Whatever filthy thing he did, they would all
believe that it was as it should be, since he is an intellectual man, of
liberal ideas and university education. What is more, he is a failure, a
superfluous man, a neurasthenic, a victim of the age, and that means he
can do anything. He is a charming fellow, a regular good sort, he is so
genuinely indulgent to human weaknesses; he is compliant, accommodating,
easy and not proud; one can drink with him and gossip and talk evil of
people. . . . The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in
religion and morals, like best of all the little gods who have the same
weaknesses as themselves. Only think what a wide field he has for
contamination! Besides, he is not a bad actor and is a clever hypocrite,
and knows very well how to twist things round. Only take his little
shifts and dodges, his attitude to civilisation, for instance. He has
scarcely sniffed at civilisation, yet: ‘Ah, how we have been crippled by
civilisation! Ah, how I envy those savages, those children of nature,
who know nothing of civilisation!’ We are to understand, you see, that
at one time, in ancient days, he has been devoted to civilisation with
his whole soul, has served it, has sounded it to its depths, but it has
exhausted him, disillusioned him, deceived him; he is a Faust, do you
see?—a second Tolstoy. . . . As for Schopenhauer and Spencer, he treats
them like small boys and slaps them on the shoulder in a fatherly way:
‘Well, what do you say, old Spencer?’ He has not read Spencer, of
course, but how charming he is when with light, careless irony he says
of his lady friend: ‘She has read Spencer!’ And they all listen to him,
and no one cares to understand that this charlatan has not the right to
kiss the sole of Spencer’s foot, let alone speaking about him in that
tone! Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other
people’s altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them
only to justify and conceal one’s own rottenness and moral poverty is
only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature.”
“I don’t know what it is you expect of him, Kolya,” said Samoylenko,
looking at the zoologist, not with anger now, but with a guilty air. “He
is a man the same as every one else. Of course, he has his weaknesses,
but he is abreast of modern ideas, is in the service, is of use to his
country. Ten years ago there was an old fellow serving as agent here, a
man of the greatest intelligence . . . and he used to say . . .”
“Nonsense, nonsense!” the zoologist interrupted. “You say he is in the
service; but how does he serve? Do you mean to tell me that things have
been done better because he is here, and the officials are more
punctual, honest, and civil? On the contrary, he has only sanctioned
their slackness by his prestige as an intellectual university man. He is
only punctual on the 20th of the month, when he gets his salary; on the
other days he lounges about at home in slippers and tries to look as if
he were doing the Government a great service by living in the Caucasus.
No, Alexandr Daviditch, don’t stick up for him. You are insincere from
beginning to end. If you really loved him and considered him your
neighbour, you would above all not be indifferent to his weaknesses, you
would not be indulgent to them, but for his own sake would try to make
him innocuous.”
“That is?”
“Innocuous. Since he is incorrigible, he can only be made innocuous in
one way. . . .” Von Koren passed his finger round his throat. “Or he
might be drowned . . .”, he added. “In the interests of humanity and in
their own interests, such people ought to be destroyed. They certainly
ought.”
“What are you saying?” muttered Samoylenko, getting up and looking with
amazement at the zoologist’s calm, cold face. “Deacon, what is he
saying? Why—are you in your senses?”
“I don’t insist on the death penalty,” said Von Koren. “If it is proved
that it is pernicious, devise something else. If we can’t destroy
Laevsky, why then, isolate him, make him harmless, send him to hard
labour.”
“What are you saying!” said Samoylenko in horror. “With pepper, with
pepper,” he cried in a voice of despair, seeing that the deacon was
eating stuffed aubergines without pepper. “You with your great
intellect, what are you saying! Send our friend, a proud intellectual
man, to penal servitude!”
“Well, if he is proud and tries to resist, put him in fetters!”
Samoylenko could not utter a word, and only twiddled his fingers; the
deacon looked at his flabbergasted and really absurd face, and laughed.
“Let us leave off talking of that,” said the zoologist. “Only remember
one thing, Alexandr Daviditch: primitive man was preserved from such as
Laevsky by the struggle for existence and by natural selection; now our
civilisation has considerably weakened the struggle and the selection,
and we ought to look after the destruction of the rotten and worthless
for ourselves; otherwise, when the Laevskys multiply, civilisation will
perish and mankind will degenerate utterly. It will be our fault.”
“If it depends on drowning and hanging,” said Samoylenko, “damnation
take your civilisation, damnation take your humanity! Damnation take it!
I tell you what: you are a very learned and intelligent man and the
pride of your country, but the Germans have ruined you. Yes, the
Germans! The Germans!”
Since Samoylenko had left Dorpat, where he had studied medicine, he had
rarely seen a German and had not read a single German book, but, in his
opinion, every harmful idea in politics or science was due to the
Germans. Where he had got this notion he could not have said himself,
but he held it firmly.
“Yes, the Germans!” he repeated once more. “Come and have some tea.”
All three stood up, and putting on their hats, went out into the little
garden, and sat there under the shade of the light green maples, the
pear-trees, and a chestnut-tree. The zoologist and the deacon sat on a
bench by the table, while Samoylenko sank into a deep wicker chair with
a sloping back. The orderly handed them tea, jam, and a bottle of syrup.
It was very hot, thirty degrees Réaumur in the shade. The sultry air
was stagnant and motionless, and a long spider-web, stretching from the
chestnut-tree to the ground, hung limply and did not stir.
The deacon took up the guitar, which was constantly lying on the ground
near the table, tuned it, and began singing softly in a thin voice:
“‘Gathered round the tavern were the seminary lads,’”
but instantly subsided, overcome by the heat, mopped his brow and
glanced upwards at the blazing blue sky. Samoylenko grew drowsy; the
sultry heat, the stillness and the delicious after-dinner languor, which
quickly pervaded all his limbs, made him feel heavy and sleepy; his arms
dropped at his sides, his eyes grew small, his head sank on his breast.
He looked with almost tearful tenderness at Von Koren and the deacon,
and muttered:
“The younger generation. . . A scientific star and a luminary of the
Church. . . . I shouldn’t wonder if the long-skirted alleluia will be
shooting up into a bishop; I dare say I may come to kissing his hand. .
. . Well . . . please God. . . .”
Soon a snore was heard. Von Koren and the deacon finished their tea and
went out into the street.
“Are you going to the harbour again to catch sea-gudgeon?” asked the
zoologist.
“No, it’s too hot.”
“Come and see me. You can pack up a parcel and copy something for me. By
the way, we must have a talk about what you are to do. You must work,
deacon. You can’t go on like this.”
“Your words are just and logical,” said the deacon. “But my laziness
finds an excuse in the circumstances of my present life. You know
yourself that an uncertain position has a great tendency to make people
apathetic. God only knows whether I have been sent here for a time or
permanently. I am living here in uncertainty, while my wife is
vegetating at her father’s and is missing me. And I must confess my
brain is melting with the heat.”
“That’s all nonsense,” said the zoologist. “You can get used to the
heat, and you can get used to being without the deaconess. You mustn’t
be slack; you must pull yourself together.” V
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went to bathe in the morning, and her cook, Olga,
followed her with a jug, a copper basin, towels, and a sponge. In the
bay stood two unknown steamers with dirty white funnels, obviously
foreign cargo vessels. Some men dressed in white and wearing white shoes
were walking along the harbour, shouting loudly in French, and were
answered from the steamers. The bells were ringing briskly in the little
church of the town.
“To-day is Sunday!” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna remembered with pleasure.
She felt perfectly well, and was in a gay holiday humour. In a new
loose-fitting dress of coarse thick tussore silk, and a big wide-brimmed
straw hat which was bent down over her ears, so that her face looked out
as though from a basket, she fancied she looked very charming. She
thought that in the whole town there was only one young, pretty,
intellectual woman, and that was herself, and that she was the only one
who knew how to dress herself cheaply, elegantly, and with taste. That
dress, for example, cost only twenty-two roubles, and yet how charming
it was! In the whole town she was the only one who could be attractive,
while there were numbers of men, so they must all, whether they would or
not, be envious of Laevsky.
She was glad that of late Laevsky had been cold to her, reserved and
polite, and at times even harsh and rude; in the past she had met all
his outbursts, all his contemptuous, cold or strange incomprehensible
glances, with tears, reproaches, and threats to leave him or to starve
herself to death; now she only blushed, looked guiltily at him, and was
glad he was not affectionate to her. If he had abused her, threatened
her, it would have been better and pleasanter, since she felt hopelessly
guilty towards him. She felt she was to blame, in the first place, for
not sympathising with the dreams of a life of hard work, for the sake of
which he had given up Petersburg and had come here to the Caucasus, and
she was convinced that he had been angry with her of late for precisely
that. When she was travelling to the Caucasus, it seemed that she would
find here on the first day a cosy nook by the sea, a snug little garden
with shade, with birds, with little brooks, where she could grow flowers
and vegetables, rear ducks and hens, entertain her neighbours, doctor
poor peasants and distribute little books amongst them. It had turned
out that the Caucasus was nothing but bare mountains, forests, and huge
valleys, where it took a long time and a great deal of effort to find
anything and settle down; that there were no neighbours of any sort;
that it was very hot and one might be robbed. Laevsky had been in no
hurry to obtain a piece of land; she was glad of it, and they seemed to
be in a tacit compact never to allude to a life of hard work. He was
silent about it, she thought, because he was angry with her for being
silent about it.
In the second place, she had without his knowledge during those two
years bought various trifles to the value of three hundred roubles at
Atchmianov’s shop. She had bought the things by degrees, at one time
materials, at another time silk or a parasol, and the debt had grown
imperceptibly.
“I will tell him about it to-day . . .”, she used to decide, but at once
reflected that in Laevsky’s present mood it would hardly be convenient
to talk to him of debts.
Thirdly, she had on two occasions in Laevsky’s absence received a visit
from Kirilin, the police captain: once in the morning when Laevsky had
gone to bathe, and another time at midnight when he was playing cards.
Remembering this, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna flushed crimson, and looked round
at the cook as though she might overhear her thoughts. The long,
insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and
stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to
night one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent
thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her
youth was passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest
and idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers,
biting his nails, and wearying her with his caprices, led by degrees to
her becoming possessed by desire, and as though she were mad, she
thought of nothing else day and night. Breathing, looking, walking, she
felt nothing but desire. The sound of the sea told her she must love;
the darkness of evening—the same; the mountains—the same. . . . And when
Kirilin began paying her attentions, she had neither the power nor the
wish to resist, and surrendered to him. . . .
Now the foreign steamers and the men in white reminded her for some
reason of a huge hall; together with the shouts of French she heard the
strains of a waltz, and her bosom heaved with unaccountable delight. She
longed to dance and talk French.
She reflected joyfully that there was nothing terrible about her
infidelity. Her soul had no part in her infidelity; she still loved
Laevsky, and that was proved by the fact that she was jealous of him,
was sorry for him, and missed him when he was away. Kirilin had turned
out to be very mediocre, rather coarse though handsome; everything was
broken off with him already and there would never be anything more. What
had happened was over; it had nothing to do with any one, and if Laevsky
found it out he would not believe in it.
There was only one bathing-house for ladies on the sea-front; men bathed
under the open sky. Going into the bathing-house, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
found there an elderly lady, Marya Konstantinovna Bityugov, and her
daughter Katya, a schoolgirl of fifteen; both of them were sitting on a
bench undressing. Marya Konstantinovna was a good-natured, enthusiastic,
and genteel person, who talked in a drawling and pathetic voice. She had
been a governess until she was thirty-two, and then had married
Bityugov, a Government official—a bald little man with his hair combed
on to his temples and with a very meek disposition. She was still in
love with him, was jealous, blushed at the word “love,” and told every
one she was very happy.
“My dear,” she cried enthusiastically, on seeing Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,
assuming an expression which all her acquaintances called “almond-oily.”
“My dear, how delightful that you have come! We’ll bathe together
—that’s enchanting!”
Olga quickly flung off her dress and chemise, and began undressing her
mistress.
“It’s not quite so hot to-day as yesterday?” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,
shrinking at the coarse touch of the naked cook. “Yesterday I almost
died of the heat.”
“Oh, yes, my dear; I could hardly breathe myself. Would you believe it?
I bathed yesterday three times! Just imagine, my dear, three times!
Nikodim Alexandritch was quite uneasy.”
“Is it possible to be so ugly?” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, looking at
Olga and the official’s wife; she glanced at Katya and thought: “The
little girl’s not badly made.”
“Your Nikodim Alexandritch is very charming!” she said. “I’m simply in
love with him.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” cried Marya Konstantinovna, with a forced laugh; “that’s
quite enchanting.”
Free from her clothes, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna felt a desire to fly. And it
seemed to her that if she were to wave her hands she would fly upwards.
When she was undressed, she noticed that Olga looked scornfully at her
white body. Olga, a young soldier’s wife, was living with her lawful
husband, and so considered herself superior to her mistress. Marya
Konstantinovna and Katya were afraid of her, and did not respect her.
This was disagreeable, and to raise herself in their opinion, Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna said:
“At home, in Petersburg, summer villa life is at its height now. My
husband and I have so many friends! We ought to go and see them.”
“I believe your husband is an engineer?” said Marya Konstantinovna
timidly.
“I am speaking of Laevsky. He has a great many acquaintances. But
unfortunately his mother is a proud aristocrat, not very intelligent. .
. .”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna threw herself into the water without finishing;
Marya Konstantinovna and Katya made their way in after her.
“There are so many conventional ideas in the world,” Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna went on, “and life is not so easy as it seems.”
Marya Konstantinovna, who had been a governess in aristocratic families
and who was an authority on social matters, said:
“Oh yes! Would you believe me, my dear, at the Garatynskys’ I was
expected to dress for lunch as well as for dinner, so that, like an
actress, I received a special allowance for my wardrobe in addition to
my salary.”
She stood between Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Katya as though to screen her
daughter from the water that washed the former.
Through the open doors looking out to the sea they could see some one
swimming a hundred paces from their bathing-place.
“Mother, it’s our Kostya,” said Katya.
“Ach, ach!” Marya Konstantinovna cackled in her dismay. “Ach, Kostya!”
she shouted, “Come back! Kostya, come back!”
Kostya, a boy of fourteen, to show off his prowess before his mother and
sister, dived and swam farther, but began to be exhausted and hurried
back, and from his strained and serious face it could be seen that he
could not trust his own strength.
“The trouble one has with these boys, my dear!” said Marya
Konstantinovna, growing calmer. “Before you can turn round, he will
break his neck. Ah, my dear, how sweet it is, and yet at the same time
how difficult, to be a mother! One’s afraid of everything.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna put on her straw hat and dashed out into the open
sea. She swam some thirty feet and then turned on her back. She could
see the sea to the horizon, the steamers, the people on the sea-front,
the town; and all this, together with the sultry heat and the soft,
transparent waves, excited her and whispered that she must live, live. .
. . A sailing-boat darted by her rapidly and vigorously, cleaving the
waves and the air; the man sitting at the helm looked at her, and she
liked being looked at. . . .
After bathing, the ladies dressed and went away together.
“I have fever every alternate day, and yet I don’t get thin,” said
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, licking her lips, which were salt from the bathe,
and responding with a smile to the bows of her acquaintances. “I’ve
always been plump, and now I believe I’m plumper than ever.”
“That, my dear, is constitutional. If, like me, one has no
constitutional tendency to stoutness, no diet is of any use. . . . But
you’ve wetted your hat, my dear.”
“It doesn’t matter; it will dry.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna saw again the men in white who were walking on the
sea-front and talking French; and again she felt a sudden thrill of joy,
and had a vague memory of some big hall in which she had once danced, or
of which, perhaps, she had once dreamed. And something at the bottom of
her soul dimly and obscurely whispered to her that she was a pretty,
common, miserable, worthless woman. . . .
Marya Konstantinovna stopped at her gate and asked her to come in and
sit down for a little while.
“Come in, my dear,” she said in an imploring voice, and at the same time
she looked at Nadyezhda Fyodorovna with anxiety and hope; perhaps she
would refuse and not come in!
“With pleasure,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, accepting. “You know how I
love being with you!”
And she went into the house. Marya Konstantinovna sat her down and gave
her coffee, regaled her with milk rolls, then showed her photographs of
her former pupils, the Garatynskys, who were by now married. She showed
her, too, the examination reports of Kostya and Katya. The reports were
very good, but to make them seem even better, she complained, with a
sigh, how difficult the lessons at school were now. . . . She made much
of her visitor, and was sorry for her, though at the same time she was
harassed by the thought that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna might have a
corrupting influence on the morals of Kostya and Katya, and was glad
that her Nikodim Alexandritch was not at home. Seeing that in her
opinion all men are fond of “women like that,” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
might have a bad effect on Nikodim Alexandritch too.
As she talked to her visitor, Marya Konstantinovna kept remembering that
they were to have a picnic that evening, and that Von Koren had
particularly begged her to say nothing about it to the “Japanese
monkeys”—that is, Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna; but she dropped a
word about it unawares, crimsoned, and said in confusion:
“I hope you will come too!” VI
It was agreed to drive about five miles out of town on the road to the
south, to stop near a duhan at the junction of two streams —the Black
River and the Yellow River—and to cook fish soup. They started out soon
after five. Foremost of the party in a char-Ã -banc drove Samoylenko and
Laevsky; they were followed by Marya Konstantinovna, Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, Katya and Kostya, in a coach with three horses, carrying
with them the crockery and a basket with provisions. In the next
carriage came the police captain, Kirilin, and the young Atchmianov, the
son of the shopkeeper to whom Nadyezhda Fyodorovna owed three hundred
roubles; opposite them, huddled up on the little seat with his feet
tucked under him, sat Nikodim Alexandritch, a neat little man with hair
combed on to his temples. Last of all came Von Koren and the deacon; at
the deacon’s feet stood a basket of fish.
“R-r-right!” Samoylenko shouted at the top of his voice when he met a
cart or a mountaineer riding on a donkey.
“In two years’ time, when I shall have the means and the people ready, I
shall set off on an expedition,” Von Koren was telling the deacon. “I
shall go by the sea-coast from Vladivostok to the Behring Straits, and
then from the Straits to the mouth of the Yenisei. We shall make the
map, study the fauna and the flora, and make detailed geological,
anthropological, and ethnographical researches. It depends upon you to
go with me or not.”
“It’s impossible,” said the deacon.
“Why?”
“I’m a man with ties and a family.”
“Your wife will let you go; we will provide for her. Better still if you
were to persuade her for the public benefit to go into a nunnery; that
would make it possible for you to become a monk, too, and join the
expedition as a priest. I can arrange it for you.”
The deacon was silent.
“Do you know your theology well?” asked the zoologist.
“No, rather badly.”
“H’m! . . . I can’t give you any advice on that score, because I don’t
know much about theology myself. You give me a list of books you need,
and I will send them to you from Petersburg in the winter. It will be
necessary for you to read the notes of religious travellers, too; among
them are some good ethnologists and Oriental scholars. When you are
familiar with their methods, it will be easier for you to set to work.
And you needn’t waste your time till you get the books; come to me, and
we will study the compass and go through a course of meteorology. All
that’s indispensable.”
“To be sure . . .” muttered the deacon, and he laughed. “I was trying to
get a place in Central Russia, and my uncle, the head priest, promised
to help me. If I go with you I shall have troubled them for nothing.”
“I don’t understand your hesitation. If you go on being an ordinary
deacon, who is only obliged to hold a service on holidays, and on the
other days can rest from work, you will be exactly the same as you are
now in ten years’ time, and will have gained nothing but a beard and
moustache; while on returning from this expedition in ten years’ time
you will be a different man, you will be enriched by the consciousness
that something has been done by you.”
From the ladies’ carriage came shrieks of terror and delight. The
carriages were driving along a road hollowed in a literally overhanging
precipitous cliff, and it seemed to every one that they were galloping
along a shelf on a steep wall, and that in a moment the carriages would
drop into the abyss. On the right stretched the sea; on the left was a
rough brown wall with black blotches and red veins and with climbing
roots; while on the summit stood shaggy fir-trees bent over, as though
looking down in terror and curiosity. A minute later there were shrieks
and laughter again: they had to drive under a huge overhanging rock.
“I don’t know why the devil I’m coming with you,” said Laevsky. “How
stupid and vulgar it is! I want to go to the North, to run away, to
escape; but here I am, for some reason, going to this stupid picnic.”
“But look, what a view!” said Samoylenko as the horses turned to the
left, and the valley of the Yellow River came into sight and the stream
itself gleamed in the sunlight, yellow, turbid, frantic.
“I see nothing fine in that, Sasha,” answered Laevsky. “To be in
continual ecstasies over nature shows poverty of imagination. In
comparison with what my imagination can give me, all these streams and
rocks are trash, and nothing else.”
The carriages now were by the banks of the stream. The high mountain
banks gradually grew closer, the valley shrank together and ended in a
gorge; the rocky mountain round which they were driving had been piled
together by nature out of huge rocks, pressing upon each other with such
terrible weight, that Samoylenko could not help gasping every time he
looked at them. The dark and beautiful mountain was cleft in places by
narrow fissures and gorges from which came a breath of dewy moisture and
mystery; through the gorges could be seen other mountains, brown, pink,
lilac, smoky, or bathed in vivid sunlight. From time to time as they
passed a gorge they caught the sound of water falling from the heights
and splashing on the stones.
“Ach, the damned mountains!” sighed Laevsky. “How sick I am of them!”
At the place where the Black River falls into the Yellow, and the water
black as ink stains the yellow and struggles with it, stood the Tatar
Kerbalay’s duhan, with the Russian flag on the roof and with an
inscription written in chalk: “The Pleasant duhan.” Near it was a little
garden, enclosed in a hurdle fence, with tables and chairs set out in
it, and in the midst of a thicket of wretched thornbushes stood a single
solitary cypress, dark and beautiful.
Kerbalay, a nimble little Tatar in a blue shirt and a white apron, was
standing in the road, and, holding his stomach, he bowed low to welcome
the carriages, and smiled, showing his glistening white teeth.
“Good-evening, Kerbalay,” shouted Samoylenko. “We are driving on a
little further, and you take along the samovar and chairs! Look sharp!”
Kerbalay nodded his shaven head and muttered something, and only those
sitting in the last carriage could hear: “We’ve got trout, your
Excellency.”
“Bring them, bring them!” said Von Koren.
Five hundred paces from the duhan the carriages stopped. Samoylenko
selected a small meadow round which there were scattered stones
convenient for sitting on, and a fallen tree blown down by the storm
with roots overgrown by moss and dry yellow needles. Here there was a
fragile wooden bridge over the stream, and just opposite on the other
bank there was a little barn for drying maize, standing on four low
piles, and looking like the hut on hen’s legs in the fairy tale; a
little ladder sloped from its door.
The first impression in all was a feeling that they would never get out
of that place again. On all sides wherever they looked, the mountains
rose up and towered above them, and the shadows of evening were stealing
rapidly, rapidly from the duhan and dark cypress, making the narrow
winding valley of the Black River narrower and the mountains higher.
They could hear the river murmuring and the unceasing chirrup of the
grasshoppers.
“Enchanting!” said Marya Konstantinovna, heaving deep sighs of ecstasy.
“Children, look how fine! What peace!”
“Yes, it really is fine,” assented Laevsky, who liked the view, and for
some reason felt sad as he looked at the sky and then at the blue smoke
rising from the chimney of the duhan. “Yes, it is fine,” he repeated.
“Ivan Andreitch, describe this view,” Marya Konstantinovna said
tearfully.
“Why?” asked Laevsky. “The impression is better than any description.
The wealth of sights and sounds which every one receives from nature by
direct impression is ranted about by authors in a hideous and
unrecognisable way.”
“Really?” Von Koren asked coldly, choosing the biggest stone by the side
of the water, and trying to clamber up and sit upon it. “Really?” he
repeated, looking directly at Laevsky. “What of ‘Romeo and Juliet’? Or,
for instance, Pushkin’s ‘Night in the Ukraine’? Nature ought to come and
bow down at their feet.”
“Perhaps,” said Laevsky, who was too lazy to think and oppose him.
“Though what is ‘Romeo and Juliet’ after all?” he added after a short
pause. “The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses
under which they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort
of animal as all the rest of us.”
“Whatever one talks to you about, you always bring it round to . . .”
Von Koren glanced round at Katya and broke off.
“What do I bring it round to?” asked Laevsky.
“One tells you, for instance, how beautiful a bunch of grapes is, and
you answer: ‘Yes, but how ugly it is when it is chewed and digested in
one’s stomach!’ Why say that? It’s not new, and . . . altogether it is a
queer habit.”
Laevsky knew that Von Koren did not like him, and so was afraid of him,
and felt in his presence as though every one were constrained and some
one were standing behind his back. He made no answer and walked away,
feeling sorry he had come.
“Gentlemen, quick march for brushwood for the fire!” commanded
Samoylenko.
They all wandered off in different directions, and no one was left but
Kirilin, Atchmianov, and Nikodim Alexandritch. Kerbalay brought chairs,
spread a rug on the ground, and set a few bottles of wine.
The police captain, Kirilin, a tall, good-looking man, who in all
weathers wore his great-coat over his tunic, with his haughty
deportment, stately carriage, and thick, rather hoarse voice, looked
like a young provincial chief of police; his expression was mournful and
sleepy, as though he had just been waked against his will.
“What have you brought this for, you brute?” he asked Kerbalay,
deliberately articulating each word. “I ordered you to give us kvarel,
and what have you brought, you ugly Tatar? Eh? What?”
“We have plenty of wine of our own, Yegor Alekseitch,” Nikodim
Alexandritch observed, timidly and politely.
“What? But I want us to have my wine, too; I’m taking part in the picnic
and I imagine I have full right to contribute my share. I im-ma-gine so!
Bring ten bottles of kvarel.”
“Why so many?” asked Nikodim Alexandritch, in wonder, knowing Kirilin
had no money.
“Twenty bottles! Thirty!” shouted Kirilin.
“Never mind, let him,” Atchmianov whispered to Nikodim Alexandritch;
“I’ll pay.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was in a light-hearted, mischievous mood; she
wanted to skip and jump, to laugh, to shout, to tease, to flirt. In her
cheap cotton dress with blue pansies on it, in her red shoes and the
same straw hat, she seemed to herself, little, simple, light, ethereal
as a butterfly. She ran over the rickety bridge and looked for a minute
into the water, in order to feel giddy; then, shrieking and laughing,
ran to the other side to the drying-shed, and she fancied that all the
men were admiring her, even Kerbalay. When in the rapidly falling
darkness the trees began to melt into the mountains and the horses into
the carriages, and a light gleamed in the windows of the duhan, she
climbed up the mountain by the little path which zigzagged between
stones and thorn-bushes and sat on a stone. Down below, the camp-fire
was burning. Near the fire, with his sleeves tucked up, the deacon was
moving to and fro, and his long black shadow kept describing a circle
round it; he put on wood, and with a spoon tied to a long stick he
stirred the cauldron. Samoylenko, with a copper-red face, was fussing
round the fire just as though he were in his own kitchen, shouting
furiously:
“Where’s the salt, gentlemen? I bet you’ve forgotten it. Why are you all
sitting about like lords while I do the work?”
Laevsky and Nikodim Alexandritch were sitting side by side on the fallen
tree looking pensively at the fire. Marya Konstantinovna, Katya, and
Kostya were taking the cups, saucers, and plates out of the baskets. Von
Koren, with his arms folded and one foot on a stone, was standing on a
bank at the very edge of the water, thinking about something. Patches of
red light from the fire moved together with the shadows over the ground
near the dark human figures, and quivered on the mountain, on the trees,
on the bridge, on the drying-shed; on the other side the steep, scooped-
out bank was all lighted up and glimmering in the stream, and the
rushing turbid water broke its reflection into little bits.
The deacon went for the fish which Kerbalay was cleaning and washing on
the bank, but he stood still half-way and looked about him.
“My God, how nice it is!” he thought. “People, rocks, the fire, the
twilight, a monstrous tree—nothing more, and yet how fine it is!”
On the further bank some unknown persons made their appearance near the
drying-shed. The flickering light and the smoke from the camp-fire
puffing in that direction made it impossible to get a full view of them
all at once, but glimpses were caught now of a shaggy hat and a grey
beard, now of a blue shirt, now of a figure, ragged from shoulder to
knee, with a dagger across the body; then a swarthy young face with
black eyebrows, as thick and bold as though they had been drawn in
charcoal. Five of them sat in a circle on the ground, and the other five
went into the drying-shed. One was standing at the door with his back to
the fire, and with his hands behind his back was telling something,
which must have been very interesting, for when Samoylenko threw on
twigs and the fire flared up, and scattered sparks and threw a glaring
light on the shed, two calm countenances with an expression on them of
deep attention could be seen, looking out of the door, while those who
were sitting in a circle turned round and began listening to the
speaker. Soon after, those sitting in a circle began softly singing
something slow and melodious, that sounded like Lenten Church music. . .
. Listening to them, the deacon imagined how it would be with him in ten
years’ time, when he would come back from the expedition: he would be a
young priest and monk, an author with a name and a splendid past; he
would be consecrated an archimandrite, then a bishop; and he would serve
mass in the cathedral; in a golden mitre he would come out into the body
of the church with the ikon on his breast, and blessing the mass of the
people with the triple and the double candelabra, would proclaim: “Look
down from Heaven, O God, behold and visit this vineyard which Thy Hand
has planted,” and the children with their angel voices would sing in
response: “Holy God. . .”
“Deacon, where is that fish?” he heard Samoylenko’s voice.
As he went back to the fire, the deacon imagined the Church procession
going along a dusty road on a hot July day; in front the peasants
carrying the banners and the women and children the ikons, then the boy
choristers and the sacristan with his face tied up and a straw in his
hair, then in due order himself, the deacon, and behind him the priest
wearing his calotte and carrying a cross, and behind them, tramping in
the dust, a crowd of peasants—men, women, and children; in the crowd his
wife and the priest’s wife with kerchiefs on their heads. The choristers
sing, the babies cry, the corncrakes call, the lark carols. . . . Then
they make a stand and sprinkle the herd with holy water. . . . They go
on again, and then kneeling pray for rain. Then lunch and talk. . . .
“And that’s nice too . . .” thought the deacon. VII
Kirilin and Atchmianov climbed up the mountain by the path. Atchmianov
dropped behind and stopped, while Kirilin went up to Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna.
“Good-evening,” he said, touching his cap.
“Good-evening.”
“Yes!” said Kirilin, looking at the sky and pondering.
“Why ‘yes’?” asked Nadyezhda Fyodorovna after a brief pause, noticing
that Atchmianov was watching them both.
“And so it seems,” said the officer, slowly, “that our love has withered
before it has blossomed, so to speak. How do you wish me to understand
it? Is it a sort of coquetry on your part, or do you look upon me as a
nincompoop who can be treated as you choose.”
“It was a mistake! Leave me alone!” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna said sharply,
on that beautiful, marvellous evening, looking at him with terror and
asking herself with bewilderment, could there really have been a moment
when that man attracted her and had been near to her?
“So that’s it!” said Kirilin; he thought in silence for a few minutes
and said: “Well, I’ll wait till you are in a better humour, and
meanwhile I venture to assure you I am a gentleman, and I don’t allow
any one to doubt it. Adieu!”
He touched his cap again and walked off, making his way between the
bushes. After a short interval Atchmianov approached hesitatingly.
“What a fine evening!” he said with a slight Armenian accent.
He was nice-looking, fashionably dressed, and behaved unaffectedly like
a well-bred youth, but Nadyezhda Fyodorovna did not like him because she
owed his father three hundred roubles; it was displeasing to her, too,
that a shopkeeper had been asked to the picnic, and she was vexed at his
coming up to her that evening when her heart felt so pure.
“The picnic is a success altogether,” he said, after a pause.
“Yes,” she agreed, and as though suddenly remembering her debt, she said
carelessly: “Oh, tell them in your shop that Ivan Andreitch will come
round in a day or two and will pay three hundred roubles . . . . I don’t
remember exactly what it is.”
“I would give another three hundred if you would not mention that debt
every day. Why be prosaic?”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna laughed; the amusing idea occurred to her that if
she had been willing and sufficiently immoral she might in one minute be
free from her debt. If she, for instance, were to turn the head of this
handsome young fool! How amusing, absurd, wild it would be really! And
she suddenly felt a longing to make him love her, to plunder him, throw
him over, and then to see what would come of it.
“Allow me to give you one piece of advice,” Atchmianov said timidly. “I
beg you to beware of Kirilin. He says horrible things about you
everywhere.”
“It doesn’t interest me to know what every fool says of me,” Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna said coldly, and the amusing thought of playing with handsome
young Atchmianov suddenly lost its charm.
“We must go down,” she said; “they’re calling us.”
The fish soup was ready by now. They were ladling it out by platefuls,
and eating it with the religious solemnity with which this is only done
at a picnic; and every one thought the fish soup very good, and thought
that at home they had never eaten anything so nice. As is always the
case at picnics, in the mass of dinner napkins, parcels, useless greasy
papers fluttering in the wind, no one knew where was his glass or where
his bread. They poured the wine on the carpet and on their own knees,
spilt the salt, while it was dark all round them and the fire burnt more
dimly, and every one was too lazy to get up and put wood on. They all
drank wine, and even gave Kostya and Katya half a glass each. Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna drank one glass and then another, got a little drunk and
forgot about Kirilin.
“A splendid picnic, an enchanting evening,” said Laevsky, growing lively
with the wine. “But I should prefer a fine winter to all this. ‘His
beaver collar is silver with hoar-frost.’”
“Every one to his taste,” observed Von Koren.
Laevsky felt uncomfortable; the heat of the campfire was beating upon
his back, and the hatred of Von Koren upon his breast and face: this
hatred on the part of a decent, clever man, a feeling in which there
probably lay hid a well-grounded reason, humiliated him and enervated
him, and unable to stand up against it, he said in a propitiatory tone:
“I am passionately fond of nature, and I regret that I’m not a
naturalist. I envy you.”
“Well, I don’t envy you, and don’t regret it,” said Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna. “I don’t understand how any one can seriously interest
himself in beetles and ladybirds while the people are suffering.”
Laevsky shared her opinion. He was absolutely ignorant of natural
science, and so could never reconcile himself to the authoritative tone
and the learned and profound air of the people who devoted themselves to
the whiskers of ants and the claws of beetles, and he always felt vexed
that these people, relying on these whiskers, claws, and something they
called protoplasm (he always imagined it in the form of an oyster),
should undertake to decide questions involving the origin and life of
man. But in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s words he heard a note of falsity, and
simply to contradict her he said: “The point is not the ladybirds, but
the deductions made from them.” VIII
It was late, eleven o’clock, when they began to get into the carriages
to go home. They took their seats, and the only ones missing were
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Atchmianov, who were running after one another,
laughing, the other side of the stream.
“Make haste, my friends,” shouted Samoylenko.
“You oughtn’t to give ladies wine,” said Von Koren in a low voice.
Laevsky, exhausted by the picnic, by the hatred of Von Koren, and by his
own thoughts, went to meet Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and when, gay and
happy, feeling light as a feather, breathless and laughing, she took him
by both hands and laid her head on his breast, he stepped back and said
dryly:
“You are behaving like a . . . cocotte.”
It sounded horribly coarse, so that he felt sorry for her at once. On
his angry, exhausted face she read hatred, pity and vexation with
himself, and her heart sank at once. She realised instantly that she had
gone too far, had been too free and easy in her behaviour, and overcome
with misery, feeling herself heavy, stout, coarse, and drunk, she got
into the first empty carriage together with Atchmianov. Laevsky got in
with Kirilin, the zoologist with Samoylenko, the deacon with the ladies,
and the party set off.
“You see what the Japanese monkeys are like,” Von Koren began, rolling
himself up in his cloak and shutting his eyes. “You heard she doesn’t
care to take an interest in beetles and ladybirds because the people are
suffering. That’s how all the Japanese monkeys look upon people like us.
They’re a slavish, cunning race, terrified by the whip and the fist for
ten generations; they tremble and burn incense only before violence; but
let the monkey into a free state where there’s no one to take it by the
collar, and it relaxes at once and shows itself in its true colours.
Look how bold they are in picture galleries, in museums, in theatres, or
when they talk of science: they puff themselves out and get excited,
they are abusive and critical . . . they are bound to criticise—it’s the
sign of the slave. You listen: men of the liberal professions are more
often sworn at than pickpockets—that’s because three-quarters of society
are made up of slaves, of just such monkeys. It never happens that a
slave holds out his hand to you and sincerely says ‘Thank you’ to you
for your work.”
“I don’t know what you want,” said Samoylenko, yawning; “the poor thing,
in the simplicity of her heart, wanted to talk to you of scientific
subjects, and you draw a conclusion from that. You’re cross with him for
something or other, and with her, too, to keep him company. She’s a
splendid woman.”
“Ah, nonsense! An ordinary kept woman, depraved and vulgar. Listen,
Alexandr Daviditch; when you meet a simple peasant woman, who isn’t
living with her husband, who does nothing but giggle, you tell her to go
and work. Why are you timid in this case and afraid to tell the truth?
Simply because Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is kept, not by a sailor, but by an
official.”
“What am I to do with her?” said Samoylenko, getting angry. “Beat her or
what?
“Not flatter vice. We curse vice only behind its back, and that’s like
making a long nose at it round a corner. I am a zoologist or a
sociologist, which is the same thing; you are a doctor; society believes
in us; we ought to point out the terrible harm which threatens it and
the next generation from the existence of ladies like Nadyezhda
Ivanovna.”
“Fyodorovna,” Samoylenko corrected. “But what ought society to do?”
“Society? That’s its affair. To my thinking the surest and most direct
method is—compulsion. Manu militari she ought to be returned to her
husband; and if her husband won’t take her in, then she ought to be sent
to penal servitude or some house of correction.”
“Ouf!” sighed Samoylenko. He paused and asked quietly: “You said the
other day that people like Laevsky ought to be destroyed. . . . Tell me,
if you . . . if the State or society commissioned you to destroy him,
could you . . . bring yourself to it?”
“My hand would not tremble.” IX
When they got home, Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went into their
dark, stuffy, dull rooms. Both were silent. Laevsky lighted a candle,
while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down, and without taking off her cloak
and hat, lifted her melancholy, guilty eyes to him.
He knew that she expected an explanation from him, but an explanation
would be wearisome, useless and exhausting, and his heart was heavy
because he had lost control over himself and been rude to her. He
chanced to feel in his pocket the letter which he had been intending
every day to read to her, and thought if he were to show her that letter
now, it would turn her thoughts in another direction.
“It is time to define our relations,” he thought. “I will give it her;
what is to be will be.”
He took out the letter and gave it her.
“Read it. It concerns you.”
Saying this, he went into his own room and lay down on the sofa in the
dark without a pillow. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna read the letter, and it
seemed to her as though the ceiling were falling and the walls were
closing in on her. It seemed suddenly dark and shut in and terrible. She
crossed herself quickly three times and said:
“Give him peace, O Lord . . . give him peace. . . .”
And she began crying.
“Vanya,” she called. “Ivan Andreitch!”
There was no answer. Thinking that Laevsky had come in and was standing
behind her chair, she sobbed like a child, and said:
“Why did you not tell me before that he was dead? I wouldn’t have gone
to the picnic; I shouldn’t have laughed so horribly. . . . The men said
horrid things to me. What a sin, what a sin! Save me, Vanya, save me. .
. . I have been mad. . . . I am lost. . . .”
Laevsky heard her sobs. He felt stifled and his heart was beating
violently. In his misery he got up, stood in the middle of the room,
groped his way in the dark to an easy-chair by the table, and sat down.
“This is a prison . . .” he thought. “I must get away . . . I can’t bear
it.”
It was too late to go and play cards; there were no restaurants in the
town. He lay down again and covered his ears that he might not hear her
sobbing, and he suddenly remembered that he could go to Samoylenko. To
avoid going near Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, he got out of the window into the
garden, climbed over the garden fence and went along the street. It was
dark. A steamer, judging by its lights, a big passenger one, had just
come in. He heard the clank of the anchor chain. A red light was moving
rapidly from the shore in the direction of the steamer: it was the
Customs boat going out to it.
“The passengers are asleep in their cabins . . .” thought Laevsky, and
he envied the peace of mind of other people.
The windows in Samoylenko’s house were open. Laevsky looked in at one of
them, then in at another; it was dark and still in the rooms.
“Alexandr Daviditch, are you asleep?” he called. “Alexandr Daviditch!”
He heard a cough and an uneasy shout:
“Who’s there? What the devil?”
“It is I, Alexandr Daviditch; excuse me.”
A little later the door opened; there was a glow of soft light from the
lamp, and Samoylenko’s huge figure appeared all in white, with a white
nightcap on his head.
“What now?” he asked, scratching himself and breathing hard from
sleepiness. “Wait a minute; I’ll open the door directly.”
“Don’t trouble; I’ll get in at the window. . . .”
Laevsky climbed in at the window, and when he reached Samoylenko, seized
him by the hand.
“Alexandr Daviditch,” he said in a shaking voice, “save me! I beseech
you, I implore you. Understand me! My position is agonising. If it goes
on for another two days I shall strangle myself like . . . like a dog.”
“Wait a bit. . . . What are you talking about exactly?”
“Light a candle.”
“Oh . . . oh! . . .” sighed Samoylenko, lighting a candle. “My God! My
God! . . . Why, it’s past one, brother.”
“Excuse me, but I can’t stay at home,” said Laevsky, feeling great
comfort from the light and the presence of Samoylenko. “You are my best,
my only friend, Alexandr Daviditch. . . . You are my only hope. For
God’s sake, come to my rescue, whether you want to or not. I must get
away from here, come what may! . . . Lend me the money!”
“Oh, my God, my God! . . .” sighed Samoylenko, scratching himself. “I
was dropping asleep and I hear the whistle of the steamer, and now you .
. . Do you want much?”
“Three hundred roubles at least. I must leave her a hundred, and I need
two hundred for the journey. . . . I owe you about four hundred already,
but I will send it you all . . . all. . . .”
Samoylenko took hold of both his whiskers in one hand, and standing with
his legs wide apart, pondered.
“Yes . . .” he muttered, musing. “Three hundred. . . . Yes. . . . But I
haven’t got so much. I shall have to borrow it from some one.”
“Borrow it, for God’s sake!” said Laevsky, seeing from Samoylenko’s face
that he wanted to lend him the money and certainly would lend it.
“Borrow it, and I’ll be sure to pay you back. I will send it from
Petersburg as soon as I get there. You can set your mind at rest about
that. I’ll tell you what, Sasha,” he said, growing more animated; “let
us have some wine.”
“Yes . . . we can have some wine, too.”
They both went into the dining-room.
“And how about Nadyezhda Fyodorovna?” asked Samoylenko, setting three
bottles and a plate of peaches on the table. “Surely she’s not
remaining?”
“I will arrange it all, I will arrange it all,” said Laevsky, feeling an
unexpected rush of joy. “I will send her the money afterwards and she
will join me. . . . Then we will define our relations. To your health,
friend.”
“Wait a bit,” said Samoylenko. “Drink this first. . . . This is from my
vineyard. This bottle is from Navaridze’s vineyard and this one is from
Ahatulov’s. . . . Try all three kinds and tell me candidly. . . . There
seems a little acidity about mine. Eh? Don’t you taste it?”
“Yes. You have comforted me, Alexandr Daviditch. Thank you. . . . I feel
better.”
“Is there any acidity?”
“Goodness only knows, I don’t know. But you are a splendid, wonderful
man!”
Looking at his pale, excited, good-natured face, Samoylenko remembered
Von Koren’s view that men like that ought to be destroyed, and Laevsky
seemed to him a weak, defenceless child, whom any one could injure and
destroy.
“And when you go, make it up with your mother,” he said. “It’s not
right.”
“Yes, yes; I certainly shall.”
They were silent for a while. When they had emptied the first bottle,
Samoylenko said:
“You ought to make it up with Von Koren too. You are both such splendid,
clever fellows, and you glare at each other like wolves.”
“Yes, he’s a fine, very intelligent fellow,” Laevsky assented, ready now
to praise and forgive every one. “He’s a remarkable man, but it’s
impossible for me to get on with him. No! Our natures are too different.
I’m an indolent, weak, submissive nature. Perhaps in a good minute I
might hold out my hand to him, but he would turn away from me . . . with
contempt.”
Laevsky took a sip of wine, walked from corner to corner and went on,
standing in the middle of the room:
“I understand Von Koren very well. His is a resolute, strong, despotic
nature. You have heard him continually talking of ‘the expedition,’ and
it’s not mere talk. He wants the wilderness, the moonlit night: all
around in little tents, under the open sky, lie sleeping his sick and
hungry Cossacks, guides, porters, doctor, priest, all exhausted with
their weary marches, while only he is awake, sitting like Stanley on a
camp-stool, feeling himself the monarch of the desert and the master of
these men. He goes on and on and on, his men groan and die, one after
another, and he goes on and on, and in the end perishes himself, but
still is monarch and ruler of the desert, since the cross upon his tomb
can be seen by the caravans for thirty or forty miles over the desert. I
am sorry the man is not in the army. He would have made a splendid
military genius. He would not have hesitated to drown his cavalry in the
river and make a bridge out of dead bodies. And such hardihood is more
needed in war than any kind of fortification or strategy. Oh, I
understand him perfectly! Tell me: why is he wasting his substance here?
What does he want here?”
“He is studying the marine fauna.”
“No, no, brother, no!” Laevsky sighed. “A scientific man who was on the
steamer told me the Black Sea was poor in animal life, and that in its
depths, thanks to the abundance of sulphuric hydrogen, organic life was
impossible. All the serious zoologists work at the biological station at
Naples or Villefranche. But Von Koren is independent and obstinate: he
works on the Black Sea because nobody else is working there; he is at
loggerheads with the university, does not care to know his comrades and
other scientific men because he is first of all a despot and only
secondly a zoologist. And you’ll see he’ll do something. He is already
dreaming that when he comes back from his expedition he will purify our
universities from intrigue and mediocrity, and will make the scientific
men mind their p’s and q’s. Despotism is just as strong in science as in
the army. And he is spending his second summer in this stinking little
town because he would rather be first in a village than second in a
town. Here he is a king and an eagle; he keeps all the inhabitants under
his thumb and oppresses them with his authority. He has appropriated
every one, he meddles in other people’s affairs; everything is of use to
him, and every one is afraid of him. I am slipping out of his clutches,
he feels that and hates me. Hasn’t he told you that I ought to be
destroyed or sent to hard labour?”
“Yes,” laughed Samoylenko.
Laevsky laughed too, and drank some wine.
“His ideals are despotic too,” he said, laughing, and biting a peach.
“Ordinary mortals think of their neighbour—me, you, man in fact—if they
work for the common weal. To Von Koren men are puppets and nonentities,
too trivial to be the object of his life. He works, will go for his
expedition and break his neck there, not for the sake of love for his
neighbour, but for the sake of such abstractions as humanity, future
generations, an ideal race of men. He exerts himself for the improvement
of the human race, and we are in his eyes only slaves, food for the
cannon, beasts of burden; some he would destroy or stow away in Siberia,
others he would break by discipline, would, like Araktcheev, force them
to get up and go to bed to the sound of the drum; would appoint eunuchs
to preserve our chastity and morality, would order them to fire at any
one who steps out of the circle of our narrow conservative morality; and
all this in the name of the improvement of the human race. . . . And
what is the human race? Illusion, mirage . . . despots have always been
illusionists. I understand him very well, brother. I appreciate him and
don’t deny his importance; this world rests on men like him, and if the
world were left only to such men as us, for all our good-nature and good
intentions, we should make as great a mess of it as the flies have of
that picture. Yes.”
Laevsky sat down beside Samoylenko, and said with genuine feeling: “I’m
a foolish, worthless, depraved man. The air I breathe, this wine, love,
life in fact—for all that, I have given nothing in exchange so far but
lying, idleness, and cowardice. Till now I have deceived myself and
other people; I have been miserable about it, and my misery was cheap
and common. I bow my back humbly before Von Koren’s hatred because at
times I hate and despise myself.”
Laevsky began again pacing from one end of the room to the other in
excitement, and said:
“I’m glad I see my faults clearly and am conscious of them. That will
help me to reform and become a different man. My dear fellow, if only
you knew how passionately, with what anguish, I long for such a change.
And I swear to you I’ll be a man! I will! I don’t know whether it is the
wine that is speaking in me, or whether it really is so, but it seems to
me that it is long since I have spent such pure and lucid moments as I
have just now with you.”
“It’s time to sleep, brother,” said Samoylenko.
“Yes, yes. . . . Excuse me; I’ll go directly.”
Laevsky moved hurriedly about the furniture and windows, looking for his
cap.
“Thank you,” he muttered, sighing. “Thank you. . . . Kind and friendly
words are better than charity. You have given me new life.”
He found his cap, stopped, and looked guiltily at Samoylenko.
“Alexandr Daviditch,” he said in an imploring voice.
“What is it?”
“Let me stay the night with you, my dear fellow!”
“Certainly. . . . Why not?”
Laevsky lay down on the sofa, and went on talking to the doctor for a
long time. X
Three days after the picnic, Marya Konstantinovna unexpectedly called on
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and without greeting her or taking off her hat,
seized her by both hands, pressed them to her breast and said in great
excitement:
“My dear, I am deeply touched and moved: our dear kind-hearted doctor
told my Nikodim Alexandritch yesterday that your husband was dead. Tell
me, my dear . . . tell me, is it true?”
“Yes, it’s true; he is dead,” answered Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.
“That is awful, awful, my dear! But there’s no evil without some
compensation; your husband was no doubt a noble, wonderful, holy man,
and such are more needed in Heaven than on earth.”
Every line and feature in Marya Konstantinovna’s face began quivering as
though little needles were jumping up and down under her skin; she gave
an almond-oily smile and said, breathlessly, enthusiastically:
“And so you are free, my dear. You can hold your head high now, and look
people boldly in the face. Henceforth God and man will bless your union
with Ivan Andreitch. It’s enchanting. I am trembling with joy, I can
find no words. My dear, I will give you away. . . . Nikodim Alexandritch
and I have been so fond of you, you will allow us to give our blessing
to your pure, lawful union. When, when do you think of being married?”
“I haven’t thought of it,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, freeing her hands.
“That’s impossible, my dear. You have thought of it, you have.”
“Upon my word, I haven’t,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, laughing. “What
should we be married for? I see no necessity for it. We’ll go on living
as we have lived.”
“What are you saying!” cried Marya Konstantinovna in horror. “For God’s
sake, what are you saying!”
“Our getting married won’t make things any better. On the contrary, it
will make them even worse. We shall lose our freedom.”
“My dear, my dear, what are you saying!” exclaimed Marya Konstantinovna,
stepping back and flinging up her hands. “You are talking wildly! Think
what you are saying. You must settle down!”
“‘Settle down.’ How do you mean? I have not lived yet, and you tell me
to settle down.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna reflected that she really had not lived. She had
finished her studies in a boarding-school and had been married to a man
she did not love; then she had thrown in her lot with Laevsky, and had
spent all her time with him on this empty, desolate coast, always
expecting something better. Was that life?
“I ought to be married though,” she thought, but remembering Kirilin and
Atchmianov she flushed and said:
“No, it’s impossible. Even if Ivan Andreitch begged me to on his
knees—even then I would refuse.”
Marya Konstantinovna sat on the sofa for a minute in silence, grave and
mournful, gazing fixedly into space; then she got up and said coldly:
“Good-bye, my dear! Forgive me for having troubled you. Though it’s not
easy for me, it’s my duty to tell you that from this day all is over
between us, and, in spite of my profound respect for Ivan Andreitch, the
door of my house is closed to you henceforth.”
She uttered these words with great solemnity and was herself overwhelmed
by her solemn tone. Her face began quivering again; it assumed a soft
almond-oily expression. She held out both hands to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,
who was overcome with alarm and confusion, and said in an imploring
voice:
“My dear, allow me if only for a moment to be a mother or an elder
sister to you! I will be as frank with you as a mother.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna felt in her bosom warmth, gladness, and pity for
herself, as though her own mother had really risen up and were standing
before her. She impulsively embraced Marya Konstantinovna and pressed
her face to her shoulder. Both of them shed tears. They sat down on the
sofa and for a few minutes sobbed without looking at one another or
being able to utter a word.
“My dear child,” began Marya Konstantinovna, “I will tell you some harsh
truths, without sparing you.”
“For God’s sake, for God’s sake, do!”
“Trust me, my dear. You remember of all the ladies here, I was the only
one to receive you. You horrified me from the very first day, but I had
not the heart to treat you with disdain like all the rest. I grieved
over dear, good Ivan Andreitch as though he were my son —a young man in
a strange place, inexperienced, weak, with no mother; and I was worried,
dreadfully worried. . . . My husband was opposed to our making his
acquaintance, but I talked him over . . . persuaded him. . . . We began
receiving Ivan Andreitch, and with him, of course, you. If we had not,
he would have been insulted. I have a daughter, a son. . . . You
understand the tender mind, the pure heart of childhood . . . ‘who so
offendeth one of these little ones.’ . . . I received you into my house
and trembled for my children. Oh, when you become a mother, you will
understand my fears. And every one was surprised at my receiving you,
excuse my saying so, as a respectable woman, and hinted to me . . .
well, of course, slanders, suppositions. . . . At the bottom of my heart
I blamed you, but you were unhappy, flighty, to be pitied, and my heart
was wrung with pity for you.”
“But why, why?” asked Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, trembling all over. “What
harm have I done any one?”
“You are a terrible sinner. You broke the vow you made your husband at
the altar. You seduced a fine young man, who perhaps had he not met you
might have taken a lawful partner for life from a good family in his own
circle, and would have been like every one else now. You have ruined his
youth. Don’t speak, don’t speak, my dear! I never believe that man is to
blame for our sins. It is always the woman’s fault. Men are frivolous in
domestic life; they are guided by their minds, and not by their hearts.
There’s a great deal they don’t understand; woman understands it all.
Everything depends on her. To her much is given and from her much will
be required. Oh, my dear, if she had been more foolish or weaker than
man on that side, God would not have entrusted her with the education of
boys and girls. And then, my dear, you entered on the path of vice,
forgetting all modesty; any other woman in your place would have hidden
herself from people, would have sat shut up at home, and would only have
been seen in the temple of God, pale, dressed all in black and weeping,
and every one would have said in genuine compassion: ‘O Lord, this
erring angel is coming back again to Thee . . . .’ But you, my dear,
have forgotten all discretion; have lived openly, extravagantly; have
seemed to be proud of your sin; you have been gay and laughing, and I,
looking at you, shuddered with horror, and have been afraid that thunder
from Heaven would strike our house while you were sitting with us. My
dear, don’t speak, don’t speak,” cried Marya Konstantinovna, observing
that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna wanted to speak. “Trust me, I will not deceive
you, I will not hide one truth from the eyes of your soul. Listen to me,
my dear. . . . God marks great sinners, and you have been marked-out:
only think—your costumes have always been appalling.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, who had always had the highest opinion of her
costumes, left off crying and looked at her with surprise.
“Yes, appalling,” Marya Konstantinovna went on. “Any one could judge of
your behaviour from the elaboration and gaudiness of your attire. People
laughed and shrugged their shoulders as they looked at you, and I
grieved, I grieved. . . . And forgive me, my dear; you are not nice in
your person! When we met in the bathing-place, you made me tremble. Your
outer clothing was decent enough, but your petticoat, your chemise. . .
. My dear, I blushed! Poor Ivan Andreitch! No one ever ties his cravat
properly, and from his linen and his boots, poor fellow! one can see he
has no one at home to look after him. And he is always hungry, my
darling, and of course, if there is no one at home to think of the
samovar and the coffee, one is forced to spend half one’s salary at the
pavilion. And it’s simply awful, awful in your home! No one else in the
town has flies, but there’s no getting rid of them in your rooms: all
the plates and dishes are black with them. If you look at the windows
and the chairs, there’s nothing but dust, dead flies, and glasses. . . .
What do you want glasses standing about for? And, my dear, the table’s
not cleared till this time in the day. And one’s ashamed to go into your
bedroom: underclothes flung about everywhere, india-rubber tubes hanging
on the walls, pails and basins standing about. . . . My dear! A husband
ought to know nothing, and his wife ought to be as neat as a little
angel in his presence. I wake up every morning before it is light, and
wash my face with cold water that my Nikodim Alexandritch may not see me
looking drowsy.”
“That’s all nonsense,” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sobbed. “If only I were
happy, but I am so unhappy!”
“Yes, yes; you are very unhappy!” Marya Konstantinovna sighed, hardly
able to restrain herself from weeping. “And there’s terrible grief in
store for you in the future! A solitary old age, ill-health; and then
you will have to answer at the dread judgment seat. . . It’s awful,
awful. Now fate itself holds out to you a helping hand, and you madly
thrust it from you. Be married, make haste and be married!”
“Yes, we must, we must,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna; “but it’s
impossible!”
“Why?”
“It’s impossible. Oh, if only you knew!”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna had an impulse to tell her about Kirilin, and how
the evening before she had met handsome young Atchmianov at the harbour,
and how the mad, ridiculous idea had occurred to her of cancelling her
debt for three hundred; it had amused her very much, and she returned
home late in the evening feeling that she had sold herself and was
irrevocably lost. She did not know herself how it had happened. And she
longed to swear to Marya Konstantinovna that she would certainly pay
that debt, but sobs and shame prevented her from speaking.
“I am going away,” she said. “Ivan Andreitch may stay, but I am going.”
“Where?”
“To Russia.”
“But how will you live there? Why, you have nothing.”
“I will do translation, or . . . or I will open a library . . . .”
“Don’t let your fancy run away with you, my dear. You must have money
for a library. Well, I will leave you now, and you calm yourself and
think things over, and to-morrow come and see me, bright and happy. That
will be enchanting! Well, good-bye, my angel. Let me kiss you.”
Marya Konstantinovna kissed Nadyezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead, made
the sign of the cross over her, and softly withdrew. It was getting
dark, and Olga lighted up in the kitchen. Still crying, Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. She began to
be very feverish. She undressed without getting up, crumpled up her
clothes at her feet, and curled herself up under the bedclothes. She was
thirsty, and there was no one to give her something to drink.
“I’ll pay it back!” she said to herself, and it seemed to her in
delirium that she was sitting beside some sick woman, and recognised her
as herself. “I’ll pay it back. It would be stupid to imagine that it was
for money I . . . I will go away and send him the money from Petersburg.
At first a hundred . . . then another hundred . . . and then the third
hundred. . . .”
It was late at night when Laevsky came in.
“At first a hundred . . .” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna said to him, “then
another hundred . . .”
“You ought to take some quinine,” he said, and thought, “To-morrow is
Wednesday; the steamer goes and I am not going in it. So I shall have to
go on living here till Saturday.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna knelt up in bed.
“I didn’t say anything just now, did I?” she asked, smiling and screwing
up her eyes at the light.
“No, nothing. We shall have to send for the doctor to-morrow morning. Go
to sleep.”
He took his pillow and went to the door. Ever since he had finally made
up his mind to go away and leave Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, she had begun to
raise in him pity and a sense of guilt; he felt a little ashamed in her
presence, as though in the presence of a sick or old horse whom one has
decided to kill. He stopped in the doorway and looked round at her.
“I was out of humour at the picnic and said something rude to you.
Forgive me, for God’s sake!”
Saying this, he went off to his study, lay down, and for a long while
could not get to sleep.
Next morning when Samoylenko, attired, as it was a holiday, in full-
dress uniform with epaulettes on his shoulders and decorations on his
breast, came out of the bedroom after feeling Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s
pulse and looking at her tongue, Laevsky, who was standing in the
doorway, asked him anxiously: “Well? Well?”
There was an expression of terror, of extreme uneasiness, and of hope on
his face.
“Don’t worry yourself; there’s nothing dangerous,” said Samoylenko;
“it’s the usual fever.”
“I don’t mean that.” Laevsky frowned impatiently. “Have you got the
money?”
“My dear soul, forgive me,” he whispered, looking round at the door and
overcome with confusion.
“For God’s sake, forgive me! No one has anything to spare, and I’ve only
been able to collect by five- and by ten-rouble notes. . . . Only a
hundred and ten in all. To-day I’ll speak to some one else. Have
patience.”
“But Saturday is the latest date,” whispered Laevsky, trembling with
impatience. “By all that’s sacred, get it by Saturday! If I don’t get
away by Saturday, nothing’s any use, nothing! I can’t understand how a
doctor can be without money!”
“Lord have mercy on us!” Samoylenko whispered rapidly and intensely, and
there was positively a breaking note in his throat. “I’ve been stripped
of everything; I am owed seven thousand, and I’m in debt all round. Is
it my fault?”
“Then you’ll get it by Saturday? Yes?”
“I’ll try.”
“I implore you, my dear fellow! So that the money may be in my hands by
Friday morning!”
Samoylenko sat down and prescribed solution of quinine and kalii bromati
and tincture of rhubarb, tincturæ gentianæ, aquæ foeniculi —all in
one mixture, added some pink syrup to sweeten it, and went away. XI
“You look as though you were coming to arrest me,” said Von Koren,
seeing Samoylenko coming in, in his full-dress uniform.
“I was passing by and thought: ‘Suppose I go in and pay my respects to
zoology,’” said Samoylenko, sitting down at the big table, knocked
together by the zoologist himself out of plain boards. “Good-morning,
holy father,” he said to the deacon, who was sitting in the window,
copying something. “I’ll stay a minute and then run home to see about
dinner. It’s time. . . . I’m not hindering you?”
“Not in the least,” answered the zoologist, laying out over the table
slips of paper covered with small writing. “We are busy copying.”
“Ah! . . . Oh, my goodness, my goodness! . . .” sighed Samoylenko. He
cautiously took up from the table a dusty book on which there was lying
a dead dried spider, and said: “Only fancy, though; some little green
beetle is going about its business, when suddenly a monster like this
swoops down upon it. I can fancy its terror.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Is poison given it to protect it from its enemies?”
“Yes, to protect it and enable it to attack.”
“To be sure, to be sure. . . . And everything in nature, my dear
fellows, is consistent and can be explained,” sighed Samoylenko; “only I
tell you what I don’t understand. You’re a man of very great intellect,
so explain it to me, please. There are, you know, little beasts no
bigger than rats, rather handsome to look at, but nasty and immoral in
the extreme, let me tell you. Suppose such a little beast is running in
the woods. He sees a bird; he catches it and devours it. He goes on and
sees in the grass a nest of eggs; he does not want to eat them—he is not
hungry, but yet he tastes one egg and scatters the others out of the
nest with his paw. Then he meets a frog and begins to play with it; when
he has tormented the frog he goes on licking himself and meets a beetle;
he crushes the beetle with his paw . . . and so he spoils and destroys
everything on his way. . . . He creeps into other beasts’ holes, tears
up the anthills, cracks the snail’s shell. If he meets a rat, he fights
with it; if he meets a snake or a mouse, he must strangle it; and so the
whole day long. Come, tell me: what is the use of a beast like that? Why
was he created?”
“I don’t know what animal you are talking of,” said Von Koren; “most
likely one of the insectivora. Well, he got hold of the bird because it
was incautious; he broke the nest of eggs because the bird was not
skilful, had made the nest badly and did not know how to conceal it. The
frog probably had some defect in its colouring or he would not have seen
it, and so on. Your little beast only destroys the weak, the unskilful,
the careless—in fact, those who have defects which nature does not think
fit to hand on to posterity. Only the cleverer, the stronger, the more
careful and developed survive; and so your little beast, without
suspecting it, is serving the great ends of perfecting creation.”
“Yes, yes, yes. . . . By the way, brother,” said Samoylenko carelessly,
“lend me a hundred roubles.”
“Very good. There are some very interesting types among the
insectivorous mammals. For instance, the mole is said to be useful
because he devours noxious insects. There is a story that some German
sent William I. a fur coat made of moleskins, and the Emperor ordered
him to be reproved for having destroyed so great a number of useful
animals. And yet the mole is not a bit less cruel than your little
beast, and is very mischievous besides, as he spoils meadows terribly.”
Von Koren opened a box and took out a hundred-rouble note.
“The mole has a powerful thorax, just like the bat,” he went on,
shutting the box; “the bones and muscles are tremendously developed, the
mouth is extraordinarily powerfully furnished. If it had the proportions
of an elephant, it would be an all-destructive, invincible animal. It is
interesting when two moles meet underground; they begin at once as
though by agreement digging a little platform; they need the platform in
order to have a battle more conveniently. When they have made it they
enter upon a ferocious struggle and fight till the weaker one falls.
Take the hundred roubles,” said Von Koren, dropping his voice, “but only
on condition that you’re not borrowing it for Laevsky.”
“And if it were for Laevsky,” cried Samoylenko, flaring up, “what is
that to you?”
“I can’t give it to you for Laevsky. I know you like lending people
money. You would give it to Kerim, the brigand, if he were to ask you;
but, excuse me, I can’t assist you in that direction.”
“Yes, it is for Laevsky I am asking it,” said Samoylenko, standing up
and waving his right arm. “Yes! For Laevsky! And no one, fiend or devil,
has a right to dictate to me how to dispose of my own money. It doesn’t
suit you to lend it me? No?”
The deacon began laughing.
“Don’t get excited, but be reasonable,” said the zoologist. “To shower
benefits on Mr. Laevsky is, to my thinking, as senseless as to water
weeds or to feed locusts.”
“To my thinking, it is our duty to help our neighbours!” cried
Samoylenko.
“In that case, help that hungry Turk who is lying under the fence! He is
a workman and more useful and indispensable than your Laevsky. Give him
that hundred-rouble note! Or subscribe a hundred roubles to my
expedition!”
“Will you give me the money or not? I ask you!”
“Tell me openly: what does he want money for?”
“It’s not a secret; he wants to go to Petersburg on Saturday.”
“So that is it!” Von Koren drawled out. “Aha! . . . We understand. And
is she going with him, or how is it to be?”
“She’s staying here for the time. He’ll arrange his affairs in
Petersburg and send her the money, and then she’ll go.”
“That’s smart!” said the zoologist, and he gave a short tenor laugh.
“Smart, well planned.”
He went rapidly up to Samoylenko, and standing face to face with him,
and looking him in the eyes, asked: “Tell me now honestly: is he tired
of her? Yes? tell me: is he tired of her? Yes?”
“Yes,” Samoylenko articulated, beginning to perspire.
“How repulsive it is!” said Von Koren, and from his face it could be
seen that he felt repulsion. “One of two things, Alexandr Daviditch:
either you are in the plot with him, or, excuse my saying so, you are a
simpleton. Surely you must see that he is taking you in like a child in
the most shameless way? Why, it’s as clear as day that he wants to get
rid of her and abandon her here. She’ll be left a burden on you. It is
as clear as day that you will have to send her to Petersburg at your
expense. Surely your fine friend can’t have so blinded you by his
dazzling qualities that you can’t see the simplest thing?”
“That’s all supposition,” said Samoylenko, sitting down.
“Supposition? But why is he going alone instead of taking her with him?
And ask him why he doesn’t send her off first. The sly beast!”
Overcome with sudden doubts and suspicions about his friend, Samoylenko
weakened and took a humbler tone.
“But it’s impossible,” he said, recalling the night Laevsky had spent at
his house. “He is so unhappy!”
“What of that? Thieves and incendiaries are unhappy too!”
“Even supposing you are right . . .” said Samoylenko, hesitating. “Let
us admit it. . . . Still, he’s a young man in a strange place . . . a
student. We have been students, too, and there is no one but us to come
to his assistance.”
“To help him to do abominable things, because he and you at different
times have been at universities, and neither of you did anything there!
What nonsense!”
“Stop; let us talk it over coolly. I imagine it will be possible to make
some arrangement. . . .” Samoylenko reflected, twiddling his fingers.
“I’ll give him the money, you see, but make him promise on his honour
that within a week he’ll send Nadyezhda Fyodorovna the money for the
journey.”
“And he’ll give you his word of honour—in fact, he’ll shed tears and
believe in it himself; but what’s his word of honour worth? He won’t
keep it, and when in a year or two you meet him on the Nevsky Prospect
with a new mistress on his arm, he’ll excuse himself on the ground that
he has been crippled by civilisation, and that he is made after the
pattern of Rudin. Drop him, for God’s sake! Keep away from the filth;
don’t stir it up with both hands!”
Samoylenko thought for a minute and said resolutely:
“But I shall give him the money all the same. As you please. I can’t
bring myself to refuse a man simply on an assumption.”
“Very fine, too. You can kiss him if you like.”
“Give me the hundred roubles, then,” Samoylenko asked timidly.
“I won’t.”
A silence followed. Samoylenko was quite crushed; his face wore a
guilty, abashed, and ingratiating expression, and it was strange to see
this pitiful, childish, shamefaced countenance on a huge man wearing
epaulettes and orders of merit.
“The bishop here goes the round of his diocese on horseback instead of
in a carriage,” said the deacon, laying down his pen. “It’s extremely
touching to see him sit on his horse. His simplicity and humility are
full of Biblical grandeur.”
“Is he a good man?” asked Von Koren, who was glad to change the
conversation.
“Of course! If he hadn’t been a good man, do you suppose he would have
been consecrated a bishop?”
“Among the bishops are to be found good and gifted men,” said Von Koren.
“The only drawback is that some of them have the weakness to imagine
themselves statesmen. One busies himself with Russification, another
criticises the sciences. That’s not their business. They had much better
look into their consistory a little.”
“A layman cannot judge of bishops.”
“Why so, deacon? A bishop is a man just the same as you or I.”
“The same, but not the same.” The deacon was offended and took up his
pen. “If you had been the same, the Divine Grace would have rested upon
you, and you would have been bishop yourself; and since you are not
bishop, it follows you are not the same.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, deacon,” said Samoylenko dejectedly. “Listen to
what I suggest,” he said, turning to Von Koren. “Don’t give me that
hundred roubles. You’ll be having your dinners with me for three months
before the winter, so let me have the money beforehand for three
months.”
“I won’t.”
Samoylenko bGlinked and turned crimson; he mechanically drew towards him
the book with the spider on it and looked at it, then he got up and took
his hat.
Von Koren felt sorry for him.
“What it is to have to live and do with people like this,” said the
zoologist, and he kicked a paper into the corner with indignation. “You
must understand that this is not kindness, it is not love, but
cowardice, slackness, poison! What’s gained by reason is lost by your
flabby good-for-nothing hearts! When I was ill with typhoid as a
schoolboy, my aunt in her sympathy gave me pickled mushrooms to eat, and
I very nearly died. You, and my aunt too, must understand that love for
man is not to be found in the heart or the stomach or the bowels, but
here!”
Von Koren slapped himself on the forehead.
“Take it,” he said, and thrust a hundred-rouble note into his hand.
“You’ve no need to be angry, Kolya,” said Samoylenko mildly, folding up
the note. “I quite understand you, but . . . you must put yourself in my
place.”
“You are an old woman, that’s what you are.”
The deacon burst out laughing.
“Hear my last request, Alexandr Daviditch,” said Von Koren hotly. “When
you give that scoundrel the money, make it a condition that he takes his
lady with him, or sends her on ahead, and don’t give it him without.
There’s no need to stand on ceremony with him. Tell him so, or, if you
don’t, I give you my word I’ll go to his office and kick him downstairs,
and I’ll break off all acquaintance with you. So you’d better know it.”
“Well! To go with her or send her on beforehand will be more convenient
for him,” said Samoylenko. “He’ll be delighted indeed. Well, goodbye.”
He said good-bye affectionately and went out, but before shutting the
door after him, he looked round at Von Koren and, with a ferocious face,
said:
“It’s the Germans who have ruined you, brother! Yes! The Germans!” XII
Next day, Thursday, Marya Konstantinovna was celebrating the birthday of
her Kostya. All were invited to come at midday and eat pies, and in the
evening to drink chocolate. When Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
arrived in the evening, the zoologist, who was already sitting in the
drawing-room, drinking chocolate, asked Samoylenko:
“Have you talked to him?”
“Not yet.”
“Mind now, don’t stand on ceremony. I can’t understand the insolence of
these people! Why, they know perfectly well the view taken by this
family of their cohabitation, and yet they force themselves in here.”
“If one is to pay attention to every prejudice,” said Samoylenko, “one
could go nowhere.”
“Do you mean to say that the repugnance felt by the masses for illicit
love and moral laxity is a prejudice?”
“Of course it is. It’s prejudice and hate. When the soldiers see a girl
of light behaviour, they laugh and whistle; but just ask them what they
are themselves.”
“It’s not for nothing they whistle. The fact that girls strangle their
illegitimate children and go to prison for it, and that Anna Karenin
flung herself under the train, and that in the villages they smear the
gates with tar, and that you and I, without knowing why, are pleased by
Katya’s purity, and that every one of us feels a vague craving for pure
love, though he knows there is no such love—is all that prejudice? That
is the one thing, brother, which has survived intact from natural
selection, and, if it were not for that obscure force regulating the
relations of the sexes, the Laevskys would have it all their own way,
and mankind would degenerate in two years.”
Laevsky came into the drawing-room, greeted every one, and shaking hands
with Von Koren, smiled ingratiatingly. He waited for a favourable moment
and said to Samoylenko:
“Excuse me, Alexandr Daviditch, I must say two words to you.”
Samoylenko got up, put his arm round Laevsky’s waist, and both of them
went into Nikodim Alexandritch’s study.
“To-morrow’s Friday,” said Laevsky, biting his nails. “Have you got what
you promised?”
“I’ve only got two hundred. I’ll get the rest to-day or to-morrow. Don’t
worry yourself.”
“Thank God . . .” sighed Laevsky, and his hands began trembling with
joy. “You are saving me, Alexandr Daviditch, and I swear to you by God,
by my happiness and anything you like, I’ll send you the money as soon
as I arrive. And I’ll send you my old debt too.”
“Look here, Vanya . . .” said Samoylenko, turning crimson and taking him
by the button. “You must forgive my meddling in your private affairs,
but . . . why shouldn’t you take Nadyezhda Fyodorovna with you?”
“You queer fellow. How is that possible? One of us must stay, or our
creditors will raise an outcry. You see, I owe seven hundred or more to
the shops. Only wait, and I will send them the money. I’ll stop their
mouths, and then she can come away.”
“I see. . . . But why shouldn’t you send her on first?”
“My goodness, as though that were possible!” Laevsky was horrified.
“Why, she’s a woman; what would she do there alone? What does she know
about it? That would only be a loss of time and a useless waste of
money.”
“That’s reasonable . . .” thought Samoylenko, but remembering his
conversation with Von Koren, he looked down and said sullenly: “I can’t
agree with you. Either go with her or send her first; otherwise . . .
otherwise I won’t give you the money. Those are my last words. . .”
He staggered back, lurched backwards against the door, and went into the
drawing-room, crimson, and overcome with confusion.
“Friday . . . Friday,” thought Laevsky, going back into the drawing-
room. “Friday. . . .”
He was handed a cup of chocolate; he burnt his lips and tongue with the
scalding chocolate and thought: “Friday . . . Friday. . . .”
For some reason he could not get the word “Friday” out of his head; he
could think of nothing but Friday, and the only thing that was clear to
him, not in his brain but somewhere in his heart, was that he would not
get off on Saturday. Before him stood Nikodim Alexandritch, very neat,
with his hair combed over his temples, saying:
“Please take something to eat. . . .”
Marya Konstantinovna showed the visitors Katya’s school report and said,
drawling:
“It’s very, very difficult to do well at school nowadays! So much is
expected . . .”
“Mamma!” groaned Katya, not knowing where to hide her confusion at the
praises of the company.
Laevsky, too, looked at the report and praised it. Scripture, Russian
language, conduct, fives and fours, danced before his eyes, and all
this, mixed with the haunting refrain of “Friday,” with the carefully
combed locks of Nikodim Alexandritch and the red cheeks of Katya,
produced on him a sensation of such immense overwhelming boredom that he
almost shrieked with despair and asked himself: “Is it possible, is it
possible I shall not get away?”
They put two card tables side by side and sat down to play post. Laevsky
sat down too.
“Friday . . . Friday . . .” he kept thinking, as he smiled and took a
pencil out of his pocket. “Friday. . . .”
He wanted to think over his position, and was afraid to think. It was
terrible to him to realise that the doctor had detected him in the
deception which he had so long and carefully concealed from himself.
Every time he thought of his future he would not let his thoughts have
full rein. He would get into the train and set off, and thereby the
problem of his life would be solved, and he did not let his thoughts go
farther. Like a far-away dim light in the fields, the thought sometimes
flickered in his mind that in one of the side-streets of Petersburg, in
the remote future, he would have to have recourse to a tiny lie in order
to get rid of Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and pay his debts; he would tell a
lie only once, and then a completely new life would begin. And that was
right: at the price of a small lie he would win so much truth.
Now when by his blunt refusal the doctor had crudely hinted at his
deception, he began to understand that he would need deception not only
in the remote future, but to-day, and to-morrow, and in a month’s time,
and perhaps up to the very end of his life. In fact, in order to get
away he would have to lie to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, to his creditors, and
to his superiors in the Service; then, in order to get money in
Petersburg, he would have to lie to his mother, to tell her that he had
already broken with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna; and his mother would not give
him more than five hundred roubles, so he had already deceived the
doctor, as he would not be in a position to pay him back the money
within a short time. Afterwards, when Nadyezhda Fyodorovna came to
Petersburg, he would have to resort to a regular series of deceptions,
little and big, in order to get free of her; and again there would be
tears, boredom, a disgusting existence, remorse, and so there would be
no new life. Deception and nothing more. A whole mountain of lies rose
before Laevsky’s imagination. To leap over it at one bound and not to do
his lying piecemeal, he would have to bring himself to stern,
uncompromising action; for instance, to getting up without saying a
word, putting on his hat, and at once setting off without money and
without explanation. But Laevsky felt that was impossible for him.
“Friday, Friday . . .” he thought. “Friday. . . .”
They wrote little notes, folded them in two, and put them in Nikodim
Alexandritch’s old top-hat. When there were a sufficient heap of notes,
Kostya, who acted the part of postman, walked round the table and
delivered them. The deacon, Katya, and Kostya, who received amusing
notes and tried to write as funnily as they could, were highly
delighted.
“We must have a little talk,” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna read in a little
note; she glanced at Marya Konstantinovna, who gave her an almond-oily
smile and nodded.
“Talk of what?” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. “If one can’t tell the
whole, it’s no use talking.”
Before going out for the evening she had tied Laevsky’s cravat for him,
and that simple action filled her soul with tenderness and sorrow. The
anxiety in his face, his absent-minded looks, his pallor, and the
incomprehensible change that had taken place in him of late, and the
fact that she had a terrible revolting secret from him, and the fact
that her hands trembled when she tied his cravat—all this seemed to tell
her that they had not long left to be together. She looked at him as
though he were an ikon, with terror and penitence, and thought:
“Forgive, forgive.”
Opposite her was sitting Atchmianov, and he never took his black, love-
sick eyes off her. She was stirred by passion; she was ashamed of
herself, and afraid that even her misery and sorrow would not prevent
her from yielding to impure desire to-morrow, if not to-day —and that,
like a drunkard, she would not have the strength to stop herself.
She made up her mind to go away that she might not continue this life,
shameful for herself, and humiliating for Laevsky. She would beseech him
with tears to let her go; and if he opposed her, she would go away
secretly. She would not tell him what had happened; let him keep a pure
memory of her.
“I love you, I love you, I love you,” she read. It was from Atchmianov.
She would live in some far remote place, would work and send Laevsky,
“anonymously,” money, embroidered shirts, and tobacco, and would return
to him only in old age or if he were dangerously ill and needed a nurse.
When in his old age he learned what were her reasons for leaving him and
refusing to be his wife, he would appreciate her sacrifice and forgive.
“You’ve got a long nose.” That must be from the deacon or Kostya.
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna imagined how, parting from Laevsky, she would
embrace him warmly, would kiss his hand, and would swear to love him all
her life, all her life, and then, living in obscurity among strangers,
she would every day think that somewhere she had a friend, some one she
loved—a pure, noble, lofty man who kept a pure memory of her.
“If you don’t give me an interview to-day, I shall take measures, I
assure you on my word of honour. You can’t treat decent people like
this; you must understand that.” That was from Kirilin. XIII
Laevsky received two notes; he opened one and read: “Don’t go away, my
darling.”
“Who could have written that?” he thought. “Not Samoylenko, of course.
And not the deacon, for he doesn’t know I want to go away. Von Koren,
perhaps?”
The zoologist bent over the table and drew a pyramid. Laevsky fancied
that his eyes were smiling.
“Most likely Samoylenko . . . has been gossiping,” thought Laevsky.
In the other note, in the same disguised angular handwriting with long
tails to the letters, was written: “Somebody won’t go away on Saturday.”
“A stupid gibe,” thought Laevsky. “Friday, Friday. . . .”
Something rose in his throat. He touched his collar and coughed, but
instead of a cough a laugh broke from his throat.
“Ha-ha-ha!” he laughed. “Ha-ha-ha! What am I laughing at? Ha-ha-ha!”
He tried to restrain himself, covered his mouth with his hand, but the
laugh choked his chest and throat, and his hand could not cover his
mouth.
“How stupid it is!” he thought, rolling with laughter. “Have I gone out
of my mind?”
The laugh grew shriller and shriller, and became something like the bark
of a lap-dog. Laevsky tried to get up from the table, but his legs would
not obey him and his right hand was strangely, without his volition,
dancing on the table, convulsively clutching and crumpling up the bits
of paper. He saw looks of wonder, Samoylenko’s grave, frightened face,
and the eyes of the zoologist full of cold irony and disgust, and
realised that he was in hysterics.
“How hideous, how shameful!” he thought, feeling the warmth of tears on
his face. “. . . Oh, oh, what a disgrace! It has never happened to me. .
. .”
They took him under his arms, and supporting his head from behind, led
him away; a glass gleamed before his eyes and knocked against his teeth,
and the water was spilt on his breast; he was in a little room, with two
beds in the middle, side by side, covered by two snow-white quilts. He
dropped on one of the beds and sobbed.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Samoylenko kept saying; “it does happen .
. . it does happen. . . .”
Chill with horror, trembling all over and dreading something awful,
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna stood by the bedside and kept asking:
“What is it? What is it? For God’s sake, tell me.”
“Can Kirilin have written him something?” she thought.
“It’s nothing,” said Laevsky, laughing and crying; “go away, darling.”
His face expressed neither hatred nor repulsion: so he knew nothing;
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was somewhat reassured, and she went into the
drawing-room.
“Don’t agitate yourself, my dear!” said Marya Konstantinovna, sitting
down beside her and taking her hand. “It will pass. Men are just as weak
as we poor sinners. You are both going through a crisis. . . . One can
so well understand it! Well, my dear, I am waiting for an answer. Let us
have a little talk.”
“No, we are not going to talk,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, listening to
Laevsky’s sobs. “I feel depressed. . . . You must allow me to go home.”
“What do you mean, what do you mean, my dear?” cried Marya
Konstantinovna in alarm. “Do you think I could let you go without
supper? We will have something to eat, and then you may go with my
blessing.”
“I feel miserable . . .” whispered Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and she caught
at the arm of the chair with both hands to avoid falling.
“He’s got a touch of hysterics,” said Von Koren gaily, coming into the
drawing-room, but seeing Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, he was taken aback and
retreated.
When the attack was over, Laevsky sat on the strange bed and thought.
“Disgraceful! I’ve been howling like some wretched girl! I must have
been absurd and disgusting. I will go away by the back stairs . . . .
But that would seem as though I took my hysterics too seriously. I ought
to take it as a joke. . . .”
He looked in the looking-glass, sat there for some time, and went back
into the drawing-room.
“Here I am,” he said, smiling; he felt agonisingly ashamed, and he felt
others were ashamed in his presence. “Fancy such a thing happening,” he
said, sitting down. “I was sitting here, and all of a sudden, do you
know, I felt a terrible piercing pain in my side . . . unendurable, my
nerves could not stand it, and . . . and it led to this silly
performance. This is the age of nerves; there is no help for it.”
At supper he drank some wine, and, from time to time, with an abrupt
sigh rubbed his side as though to suggest that he still felt the pain.
And no one, except Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, believed him, and he saw that.
After nine o’clock they went for a walk on the boulevard. Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, afraid that Kirilin would speak to her, did her best to keep
all the time beside Marya Konstantinovna and the children. She felt weak
with fear and misery, and felt she was going to be feverish; she was
exhausted and her legs would hardly move, but she did not go home,
because she felt sure that she would be followed by Kirilin or
Atchmianov or both at once. Kirilin walked behind her with Nikodim
Alexandritch, and kept humming in an undertone:
“I don’t al-low people to play with me! I don’t al-low it.”
From the boulevard they went back to the pavilion and walked along the
beach, and looked for a long time at the phosphorescence on the water.
Von Koren began telling them why it looked phosphorescent. XIV
“It’s time I went to my vint. . . . They will be waiting for me,” said
Laevsky. “Good-bye, my friends.”
“I’ll come with you; wait a minute,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and she
took his arm.
They said good-bye to the company and went away. Kirilin took leave too,
and saying that he was going the same way, went along beside them.
“What will be, will be,” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. “So be it. . . .”
And it seemed to her that all the evil memories in her head had taken
shape and were walking beside her in the darkness, breathing heavily,
while she, like a fly that had fallen into the inkpot, was crawling
painfully along the pavement and smirching Laevsky’s side and arm with
blackness.
If Kirilin should do anything horrid, she thought, not he but she would
be to blame for it. There was a time when no man would have talked to
her as Kirilin had done, and she had torn up her security like a thread
and destroyed it irrevocably—who was to blame for it? Intoxicated by her
passions she had smiled at a complete stranger, probably just because he
was tall and a fine figure. After two meetings she was weary of him, had
thrown him over, and did not that, she thought now, give him the right
to treat her as he chose?
“Here I’ll say good-bye to you, darling,” said Laevsky. “Ilya Mihalitch
will see you home.”
He nodded to Kirilin, and, quickly crossing the boulevard, walked along
the street to Sheshkovsky’s, where there were lights in the windows, and
then they heard the gate bang as he went in.
“Allow me to have an explanation with you,” said Kirilin. “I’m not a
boy, not some Atchkasov or Latchkasov, Zatchkasov. . . . I demand
serious attention.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s heart began beating violently. She made no reply.
“The abrupt change in your behaviour to me I put down at first to
coquetry,” Kirilin went on; “now I see that you don’t know how to behave
with gentlemanly people. You simply wanted to play with me, as you are
playing with that wretched Armenian boy; but I’m a gentleman and I
insist on being treated like a gentleman. And so I am at your service. .
. .”
“I’m miserable,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna beginning to cry, and to hide
her tears she turned away.
“I’m miserable too,” said Kirilin, “but what of that?”
Kirilin was silent for a space, then he said distinctly and
emphatically:
“I repeat, madam, that if you do not give me an interview this evening,
I’ll make a scandal this very evening.”
“Let me off this evening,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and she did not
recognise her own voice, it was so weak and pitiful.
“I must give you a lesson. . . . Excuse me for the roughness of my tone,
but it’s necessary to give you a lesson. Yes, I regret to say I must
give you a lesson. I insist on two interviews—to-day and to-morrow.
After to-morrow you are perfectly free and can go wherever you like with
any one you choose. To-day and to-morrow.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went up to her gate and stopped.
“Let me go,” she murmured, trembling all over and seeing nothing before
her in the darkness but his white tunic. “You’re right: I’m a horrible
woman. . . . I’m to blame, but let me go . . . I beg you.” She touched
his cold hand and shuddered. “I beseech you. . . .”
“Alas!” sighed Kirilin, “alas! it’s not part of my plan to let you go; I
only mean to give you a lesson and make you realise. And what’s more,
madam, I’ve too little faith in women.”
“I’m miserable. . . .”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna listened to the even splash of the sea, looked at
the sky studded with stars, and longed to make haste and end it all, and
get away from the cursed sensation of life, with its sea, stars, men,
fever.
“Only not in my home,” she said coldly. “Take me somewhere else.”
“Come to Muridov’s. That’s better.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near the old wall.”
She walked quickly along the street and then turned into the side-street
that led towards the mountains. It was dark. There were pale streaks of
light here and there on the pavement, from the lighted windows, and it
seemed to her that, like a fly, she kept falling into the ink and
crawling out into the light again. At one point he stumbled, almost fell
down and burst out laughing.
“He’s drunk,” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. “Never mind. . . . Never
mind. . . . So be it.”
Atchmianov, too, soon took leave of the party and followed Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna to ask her to go for a row. He went to her house and looked
over the fence: the windows were wide open, there were no lights.
“Nadyezhda Fyodorovna!” he called.
A moment passed, he called again.
“Who’s there?” he heard Olga’s voice.
“Is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna at home?”
“No, she has not come in yet.”
“Strange . . . very strange,” thought Atchmianov, feeling very uneasy.
“She went home. . . .”
He walked along the boulevard, then along the street, and glanced in at
the windows of Sheshkovsky’s. Laevsky was sitting at the table without
his coat on, looking attentively at his cards.
“Strange, strange,” muttered Atchmianov, and remembering Laevsky’s
hysterics, he felt ashamed. “If she is not at home, where is she?”
He went to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s lodgings again, and looked at the dark
windows.
“It’s a cheat, a cheat . . .” he thought, remembering that, meeting him
at midday at Marya Konstantinovna’s, she had promised to go in a boat
with him that evening.
The windows of the house where Kirilin lived were dark, and there was a
policeman sitting asleep on a little bench at the gate. Everything was
clear to Atchmianov when he looked at the windows and the policeman. He
made up his mind to go home, and set off in that direction, but somehow
found himself near Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s lodgings again. He sat down on
the bench near the gate and took off his hat, feeling that his head was
burning with jealousy and resentment.
The clock in the town church only struck twice in the twenty-four
hours—at midday and midnight. Soon after it struck midnight he heard
hurried footsteps.
“To-morrow evening, then, again at Muridov’s,” Atchmianov heard, and he
recognised Kirilin’s voice. “At eight o’clock; good-bye!”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna made her appearance near the garden. Without
noticing that Atchmianov was sitting on the bench, she passed beside him
like a shadow, opened the gate, and leaving it open, went into the
house. In her own room she lighted the candle and quickly undressed, but
instead of getting into bed, she sank on her knees before a chair, flung
her arms round it, and rested her head on it.
It was past two when Laevsky came home. XV
Having made up his mind to lie, not all at once but piecemeal, Laevsky
went soon after one o’clock next day to Samoylenko to ask for the money
that he might be sure to get off on Saturday. After his hysterical
attack, which had added an acute feeling of shame to his depressed state
of mind, it was unthinkable to remain in the town. If Samoylenko should
insist on his conditions, he thought it would be possible to agree to
them and take the money, and next day, just as he was starting, to say
that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna refused to go. He would be able to persuade
her that evening that the whole arrangement would be for her benefit. If
Samoylenko, who was obviously under the influence of Von Koren, should
refuse the money altogether or make fresh conditions, then he, Laevsky,
would go off that very evening in a cargo vessel, or even in a sailing-
boat, to Novy Athon or Novorossiisk, would send from there an
humiliating telegram, and would stay there till his mother sent him the
money for the journey.
When he went into Samoylenko’s, he found Von Koren in the drawing-room.
The zoologist had just arrived for dinner, and, as usual, was turning
over the album and scrutinising the gentlemen in top-hats and the ladies
in caps.
“How very unlucky!” thought Laevsky, seeing him. “He may be in the way.
Good-morning.”
“Good-morning,” answered Von Koren, without looking at him.
“Is Alexandr Daviditch at home?”
“Yes, in the kitchen.”
Laevsky went into the kitchen, but seeing from the door that Samoylenko
was busy over the salad, he went back into the drawing-room and sat
down. He always had a feeling of awkwardness in the zoologist’s
presence, and now he was afraid there would be talk about his attack of
hysterics. There was more than a minute of silence. Von Koren suddenly
raised his eyes to Laevsky and asked:
“How do you feel after yesterday?”
“Very well indeed,” said Laevsky, flushing. “It really was nothing much.
. . .”
“Until yesterday I thought it was only ladies who had hysterics, and so
at first I thought you had St. Vitus’s dance.”
Laevsky smiled ingratiatingly, and thought:
“How indelicate on his part! He knows quite well how unpleasant it is
for me. . . .”
“Yes, it was a ridiculous performance,” he said, still smiling. “I’ve
been laughing over it the whole morning. What’s so curious in an attack
of hysterics is that you know it is absurd, and are laughing at it in
your heart, and at the same time you sob. In our neurotic age we are the
slaves of our nerves; they are our masters and do as they like with us.
Civilisation has done us a bad turn in that way. . . .”
As Laevsky talked, he felt it disagreeable that Von Koren listened to
him gravely, and looked at him steadily and attentively as though
studying him; and he was vexed with himself that in spite of his dislike
of Von Koren, he could not banish the ingratiating smile from his face.
“I must admit, though,” he added, “that there were immediate causes for
the attack, and quite sufficient ones too. My health has been terribly
shaky of late. To which one must add boredom, constantly being hard up .
. . the absence of people and general interests . . . . My position is
worse than a governor’s.”
“Yes, your position is a hopeless one,” answered Von Koren.
These calm, cold words, implying something between a jeer and an
uninvited prediction, offended Laevsky. He recalled the zoologist’s eyes
the evening before, full of mockery and disgust. He was silent for a
space and then asked, no longer smiling:
“How do you know anything of my position?”
“You were only just speaking of it yourself. Besides, your friends take
such a warm interest in you, that I am hearing about you all day long.”
“What friends? Samoylenko, I suppose?”
“Yes, he too.”
“I would ask Alexandr Daviditch and my friends in general not to trouble
so much about me.”
“Here is Samoylenko; you had better ask him not to trouble so much about
you.”
“I don’t understand your tone,” Laevsky muttered, suddenly feeling as
though he had only just realised that the zoologist hated and despised
him, and was jeering at him, and was his bitterest and most inveterate
enemy.
“Keep that tone for some one else,” he said softly, unable to speak
aloud for the hatred with which his chest and throat were choking, as
they had been the night before with laughter.
Samoylenko came in in his shirt-sleeves, crimson and perspiring from the
stifling kitchen.
“Ah, you here?” he said. “Good-morning, my dear boy. Have you had
dinner? Don’t stand on ceremony. Have you had dinner?”
“Alexandr Daviditch,” said Laevsky, standing up, “though I did appeal to
you to help me in a private matter, it did not follow that I released
you from the obligation of discretion and respect for other people’s
private affairs.”
“What’s this?” asked Samoylenko, in astonishment.
“If you have no money,” Laevsky went on, raising his voice and shifting
from one foot to the other in his excitement, “don’t give it; refuse it.
But why spread abroad in every back street that my position is hopeless,
and all the rest of it? I can’t endure such benevolence and friend’s
assistance where there’s a shilling-worth of talk for a ha’p’orth of
help! You can boast of your benevolence as much as you please, but no
one has given you the right to gossip about my private affairs!”
“What private affairs?” asked Samoylenko, puzzled and beginning to be
angry. “If you’ve come here to be abusive, you had better clear out. You
can come again afterwards!”
He remembered the rule that when one is angry with one’s neighbour, one
must begin to count a hundred, and one will grow calm again; and he
began rapidly counting.
“I beg you not to trouble yourself about me,” Laevsky went on. “Don’t
pay any attention to me, and whose business is it what I do and how I
live? Yes, I want to go away. Yes, I get into debt, I drink, I am living
with another man’s wife, I’m hysterical, I’m ordinary. I am not so
profound as some people, but whose business is that? Respect other
people’s privacy.”
“Excuse me, brother,” said Samoylenko, who had counted up to thirty-
five, “but . . .”
“Respect other people’s individuality!” interrupted Laevsky. “This
continual gossip about other people’s affairs, this sighing and groaning
and everlasting prying, this eavesdropping, this friendly sympathy . . .
damn it all! They lend me money and make conditions as though I were a
schoolboy! I am treated as the devil knows what! I don’t want anything,”
shouted Laevsky, staggering with excitement and afraid that it might end
in another attack of hysterics. “I shan’t get away on Saturday, then,”
flashed through his mind. “I want nothing. All I ask of you is to spare
me your protecting care. I’m not a boy, and I’m not mad, and I beg you
to leave off looking after me.”
The deacon came in, and seeing Laevsky pale and gesticulating,
addressing his strange speech to the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, stood
still by the door as though petrified.
“This continual prying into my soul,” Laevsky went on, “is insulting to
my human dignity, and I beg these volunteer detectives to give up their
spying! Enough!”
“What’s that . . . what did you say?” said Samoylenko, who had counted
up to a hundred. He turned crimson and went up to Laevsky.
“It’s enough,” said Laevsky, breathing hard and snatching up his cap.
“I’m a Russian doctor, a nobleman by birth, and a civil councillor,”
said Samoylenko emphatically. “I’ve never been a spy, and I allow no one
to insult me!” he shouted in a breaking voice, emphasising the last
word. “Hold your tongue!”
The deacon, who had never seen the doctor so majestic, so swelling with
dignity, so crimson and so ferocious, shut his mouth, ran out into the
entry and there exploded with laughter.
As though through a fog, Laevsky saw Von Koren get up and, putting his
hands in his trouser-pockets, stand still in an attitude of expectancy,
as though waiting to see what would happen. This calm attitude struck
Laevsky as insolent and insulting to the last degree.
“Kindly take back your words,” shouted Samoylenko.
Laevsky, who did not by now remember what his words were, answered:
“Leave me alone! I ask for nothing. All I ask is that you and German
upstarts of Jewish origin should let me alone! Or I shall take steps to
make you! I will fight you!”
“Now we understand,” said Von Koren, coming from behind the table. “Mr.
Laevsky wants to amuse himself with a duel before he goes away. I can
give him that pleasure. Mr. Laevsky, I accept your challenge.”
“A challenge,” said Laevsky, in a low voice, going up to the zoologist
and looking with hatred at his swarthy brow and curly hair. “A
challenge? By all means! I hate you! I hate you!”
“Delighted. To-morrow morning early near Kerbalay’s. I leave all details
to your taste. And now, clear out!”
“I hate you,” Laevsky said softly, breathing hard. “I have hated you a
long while! A duel! Yes!”
“Get rid of him, Alexandr Daviditch, or else I’m going,” said Von Koren.
“He’ll bite me.”
Von Koren’s cool tone calmed the doctor; he seemed suddenly to come to
himself, to recover his reason; he put both arms round Laevsky’s waist,
and, leading him away from the zoologist, muttered in a friendly voice
that shook with emotion:
“My friends . . . dear, good . . . you’ve lost your tempers and that’s
enough . . . and that’s enough, my friends.”
Hearing his soft, friendly voice, Laevsky felt that something unheard
of, monstrous, had just happened to him, as though he had been nearly
run over by a train; he almost burst into tears, waved his hand, and ran
out of the room.
“To feel that one is hated, to expose oneself before the man who hates
one, in the most pitiful, contemptible, helpless state. My God, how hard
it is!” he thought a little while afterwards as he sat in the pavilion,
feeling as though his body were scarred by the hatred of which he had
just been the object.
“How coarse it is, my God!”
Cold water with brandy in it revived him. He vividly pictured Von
Koren’s calm, haughty face; his eyes the day before, his shirt like a
rug, his voice, his white hand; and heavy, passionate, hungry hatred
rankled in his breast and clamoured for satisfaction. In his thoughts he
felled Von Koren to the ground, and trampled him underfoot. He
remembered to the minutest detail all that had happened, and wondered
how he could have smiled ingratiatingly to that insignificant man, and
how he could care for the opinion of wretched petty people whom nobody
knew, living in a miserable little town which was not, it seemed, even
on the map, and of which not one decent person in Petersburg had heard.
If this wretched little town suddenly fell into ruins or caught fire,
the telegram with the news would be read in Russia with no more interest
than an advertisement of the sale of second-hand furniture. Whether he
killed Von Koren next day or left him alive, it would be just the same,
equally useless and uninteresting. Better to shoot him in the leg or
hand, wound him, then laugh at him, and let him, like an insect with a
broken leg lost in the grass—let him be lost with his obscure sufferings
in the crowd of insignificant people like himself.
Laevsky went to Sheshkovsky, told him all about it, and asked him to be
his second; then they both went to the superintendent of the postal
telegraph department, and asked him, too, to be a second, and stayed to
dinner with him. At dinner there was a great deal of joking and
laughing. Laevsky made jests at his own expense, saying he hardly knew
how to fire off a pistol, calling himself a royal archer and William
Tell.
“We must give this gentleman a lesson . . .” he said.
After dinner they sat down to cards. Laevsky played, drank wine, and
thought that duelling was stupid and senseless, as it did not decide the
question but only complicated it, but that it was sometimes impossible
to get on without it. In the given case, for instance, one could not, of
course, bring an action against Von Koren. And this duel was so far good
in that it made it impossible for Laevsky to remain in the town
afterwards. He got a little drunk and interested in the game, and felt
at ease.
But when the sun had set and it grew dark, he was possessed by a feeling
of uneasiness. It was not fear at the thought of death, because while he
was dining and playing cards, he had for some reason a confident belief
that the duel would end in nothing; it was dread at the thought of
something unknown which was to happen next morning for the first time in
his life, and dread of the coming night. . . . He knew that the night
would be long and sleepless, and that he would have to think not only of
Von Koren and his hatred, but also of the mountain of lies which he had
to get through, and which he had not strength or ability to dispense
with. It was as though he had been taken suddenly ill; all at once he
lost all interest in the cards and in people, grew restless, and began
asking them to let him go home. He was eager to get into bed, to lie
without moving, and to prepare his thoughts for the night. Sheshkovsky
and the postal superintendent saw him home and went on to Von Koren’s to
arrange about the duel.
Near his lodgings Laevsky met Atchmianov. The young man was breathless
and excited.
“I am looking for you, Ivan Andreitch,” he said. “I beg you to come
quickly. . . .”
“Where?”
“Some one wants to see you, some one you don’t know, about very
important business; he earnestly begs you to come for a minute. He wants
to speak to you of something. . . . For him it’s a question of life and
death. . . .” In his excitement Atchmianov spoke in a strong Armenian
accent.
“Who is it?” asked Laevsky.
“He asked me not to tell you his name.”
“Tell him I’m busy; to-morrow, if he likes. . . .”
“How can you!” Atchmianov was aghast. “He wants to tell you something
very important for you . . . very important! If you don’t come,
something dreadful will happen.”
“Strange . . .” muttered Laevsky, unable to understand why Atchmianov
was so excited and what mysteries there could be in this dull, useless
little town.
“Strange,” he repeated in hesitation. “Come along, though; I don’t
care.”
Atchmianov walked rapidly on ahead and Laevsky followed him. They walked
down a street, then turned into an alley.
“What a bore this is!” said Laevsky.
“One minute, one minute . . . it’s near.”
Near the old rampart they went down a narrow alley between two empty
enclosures, then they came into a sort of large yard and went towards a
small house.
“That’s Muridov’s, isn’t it?” asked Laevsky.
“Yes.”
“But why we’ve come by the back yards I don’t understand. We might have
come by the street; it’s nearer. . . .”
“Never mind, never mind. . . .”
It struck Laevsky as strange, too, that Atchmianov led him to a back
entrance, and motioned to him as though bidding him go quietly and hold
his tongue.
“This way, this way . . .” said Atchmianov, cautiously opening the door
and going into the passage on tiptoe. “Quietly, quietly, I beg you . . .
they may hear.”
He listened, drew a deep breath and said in a whisper:
“Open that door, and go in . . . don’t be afraid.”
Laevsky, puzzled, opened the door and went into a room with a low
ceiling and curtained windows.
There was a candle on the table.
“What do you want?” asked some one in the next room. “Is it you,
Muridov?”
Laevsky turned into that room and saw Kirilin, and beside him Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna.
He didn’t hear what was said to him; he staggered back, and did not know
how he found himself in the street. His hatred for Von Koren and his
uneasiness—all had vanished from his soul. As he went home he waved his
right arm awkwardly and looked carefully at the ground under his feet,
trying to step where it was smooth. At home in his study he walked
backwards and forwards, rubbing his hands, and awkwardly shrugging his
shoulders and neck, as though his jacket and shirt were too tight; then
he lighted a candle and sat down to the table. . . . XVI
“The ‘humane studies’ of which you speak will only satisfy human thought
when, as they advance, they meet the exact sciences and progress side by
side with them. Whether they will meet under a new microscope, or in the
monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but I
expect the earth will be covered with a crust of ice before it comes to
pass. Of all humane learning the most durable and living is, of course,
the teaching of Christ; but look how differently even that is
interpreted! Some teach that we must love all our neighbours but make an
exception of soldiers, criminals, and lunatics. They allow the first to
be killed in war, the second to be isolated or executed, and the third
they forbid to marry. Other interpreters teach that we must love all our
neighbours without exception, with no distinction of plus or minus.
According to their teaching, if a consumptive or a murderer or an
epileptic asks your daughter in marriage, you must let him have her. If
crêtins go to war against the physically and mentally healthy, don’t
defend yourselves. This advocacy of love for love’s sake, like art for
art’s sake, if it could have power, would bring mankind in the long run
to complete extinction, and so would become the vastest crime that has
ever been committed upon earth. There are very many interpretations, and
since there are many of them, serious thought is not satisfied by any
one of them, and hastens to add its own individual interpretation to the
mass. For that reason you should never put a question on a philosophical
or so-called Christian basis; by so doing you only remove the question
further from solution.”
The deacon listened to the zoologist attentively, thought a little, and
asked:
“Have the philosophers invented the moral law which is innate in every
man, or did God create it together with the body?”
“I don’t know. But that law is so universal among all peoples and all
ages that I fancy we ought to recognise it as organically connected with
man. It is not invented, but exists and will exist. I don’t tell you
that one day it will be seen under the microscope, but its organic
connection is shown, indeed, by evidence: serious affections of the
brain and all so-called mental diseases, to the best of my belief, show
themselves first of all in the perversion of the moral law.”
“Good. So then, just as our stomach bids us eat, our moral sense bids us
love our neighbours. Is that it? But our natural man through self-love
opposes the voice of conscience and reason, and this gives rise to many
brain-racking questions. To whom ought we to turn for the solution of
those questions if you forbid us to put them on the philosophic basis?”
“Turn to what little exact science we have. Trust to evidence and the
logic of facts. It is true it is but little, but, on the other hand, it
is less fluid and shifting than philosophy. The moral law, let us
suppose, demands that you love your neighbour. Well? Love ought to show
itself in the removal of everything which in one way or another is
injurious to men and threatens them with danger in the present or in the
future. Our knowledge and the evidence tells us that the morally and
physically abnormal are a menace to humanity. If so you must struggle
against the abnormal; if you are not able to raise them to the normal
standard you must have strength and ability to render them harmless—that
is, to destroy them.”
“So love consists in the strong overcoming the weak.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“But you know the strong crucified our Lord Jesus Christ,” said the
deacon hotly.
“The fact is that those who crucified Him were not the strong but the
weak. Human culture weakens and strives to nullify the struggle for
existence and natural selection; hence the rapid advancement of the weak
and their predominance over the strong. Imagine that you succeeded in
instilling into bees humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary
form. What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would
remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees,
resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the
degeneration of the latter. The same process is taking place now with
humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by
civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he
is the chief and the master. But we civilised men have crucified Christ,
and we go on crucifying Him, so there is something lacking in us. . . .
And that something one ought to raise up in ourselves, or there will be
no end to these errors.”
“But what criterion have you to distinguish the strong from the weak?”
“Knowledge and evidence. The tuberculous and the scrofulous are
recognised by their diseases, and the insane and the immoral by their
actions.”
“But mistakes may be made!”
“Yes, but it’s no use to be afraid of getting your feet wet when you are
threatened with the deluge!”
“That’s philosophy,” laughed the deacon.
“Not a bit of it. You are so corrupted by your seminary philosophy that
you want to see nothing but fog in everything. The abstract studies with
which your youthful head is stuffed are called abstract just because
they abstract your minds from what is obvious. Look the devil straight
in the eye, and if he’s the devil, tell him he’s the devil, and don’t go
calling to Kant or Hegel for explanations.”
The zoologist paused and went on:
“Twice two’s four, and a stone’s a stone. Here to-morrow we have a duel.
You and I will say it’s stupid and absurd, that the duel is out of date,
that there is no real difference between the aristocratic duel and the
drunken brawl in the pot-house, and yet we shall not stop, we shall go
there and fight. So there is some force stronger than our reasoning. We
shout that war is plunder, robbery, atrocity, fratricide; we cannot look
upon blood without fainting; but the French or the Germans have only to
insult us for us to feel at once an exaltation of spirit; in the most
genuine way we shout ‘Hurrah!’ and rush to attack the foe. You will
invoke the blessing of God on our weapons, and our valour will arouse
universal and general enthusiasm. Again it follows that there is a
force, if not higher, at any rate stronger, than us and our philosophy.
We can no more stop it than that cloud which is moving upwards over the
sea. Don’t be hypocritical, don’t make a long nose at it on the sly; and
don’t say, ‘Ah, old-fashioned, stupid! Ah, it’s inconsistent with
Scripture!’ but look it straight in the face, recognise its rational
lawfulness, and when, for instance, it wants to destroy a rotten,
scrofulous, corrupt race, don’t hinder it with your pilules and
misunderstood quotations from the Gospel. Leskov has a story of a
conscientious Danila who found a leper outside the town, and fed and
warmed him in the name of love and of Christ. If that Danila had really
loved humanity, he would have dragged the leper as far as possible from
the town, and would have flung him in a pit, and would have gone to save
the healthy. Christ, I hope, taught us a rational, intelligent,
practical love.”
“What a fellow you are!” laughed the deacon. “You don’t believe in
Christ. Why do you mention His name so often?”
“Yes, I do believe in Him. Only, of course, in my own way, not in yours.
Oh, deacon, deacon!” laughed the zoologist; he put his arm round the
deacon’s waist, and said gaily: “Well? Are you coming with us to the
duel to-morrow?”
“My orders don’t allow it, or else I should come.”
“What do you mean by ‘orders’?”
“I have been consecrated. I am in a state of grace.”
“Oh, deacon, deacon,” repeated Von Koren, laughing, “I love talking to
you.”
“You say you have faith,” said the deacon. “What sort of faith is it?
Why, I have an uncle, a priest, and he believes so that when in time of
drought he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes his
umbrella and leather overcoat for fear of getting wet through on his way
home. That’s faith! When he speaks of Christ, his face is full of
radiance, and all the peasants, men and women, weep floods of tears. He
would stop that cloud and put all those forces you talk about to flight.
Yes . . . faith moves mountains.”
The deacon laughed and slapped the zoologist on the shoulder.
“Yes . . .” he went on; “here you are teaching all the time, fathoming
the depths of the ocean, dividing the weak and the strong, writing books
and challenging to duels—and everything remains as it is; but, behold!
some feeble old man will mutter just one word with a holy spirit, or a
new Mahomet, with a sword, will gallop from Arabia, and everything will
be topsy-turvy, and in Europe not one stone will be left standing upon
another.”
“Well, deacon, that’s on the knees of the gods.”
“Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse
still—mere waste of time and nothing more.”
The doctor came into sight on the sea-front. He saw the deacon and the
zoologist, and went up to them.
“I believe everything is ready,” he said, breathing hard. “Govorovsky
and Boyko will be the seconds. They will start at five o’clock in the
morning. How it has clouded over,” he said, looking at the sky. “One can
see nothing; there will be rain directly.”
“I hope you are coming with us?” said the zoologist.
“No, God preserve me; I’m worried enough as it is. Ustimovitch is going
instead of me. I’ve spoken to him already.”
Far over the sea was a flash of lightning, followed by a hollow roll of
thunder.
“How stifling it is before a storm!” said Von Koren. “I bet you’ve been
to Laevsky already and have been weeping on his bosom.”
“Why should I go to him?” answered the doctor in confusion. “What next?”
Before sunset he had walked several times along the boulevard and the
street in the hope of meeting Laevsky. He was ashamed of his hastiness
and the sudden outburst of friendliness which had followed it. He wanted
to apologise to Laevsky in a joking tone, to give him a good talking to,
to soothe him and to tell him that the duel was a survival of mediæval
barbarism, but that Providence itself had brought them to the duel as a
means of reconciliation; that the next day, both being splendid and
highly intelligent people, they would, after exchanging shots,
appreciate each other’s noble qualities and would become friends. But he
could not come across Laevsky.
“What should I go and see him for?” repeated Samoylenko. “I did not
insult him; he insulted me. Tell me, please, why he attacked me. What
harm had I done him? I go into the drawing-room, and, all of a sudden,
without the least provocation: ‘Spy!’ There’s a nice thing! Tell me, how
did it begin? What did you say to him?”
“I told him his position was hopeless. And I was right. It is only
honest men or scoundrels who can find an escape from any position, but
one who wants to be at the same time an honest man and a scoundrel —it
is a hopeless position. But it’s eleven o’clock, gentlemen, and we have
to be up early to-morrow.”
There was a sudden gust of wind; it blew up the dust on the sea-front,
whirled it round in eddies, with a howl that drowned the roar of the
sea.
“A squall,” said the deacon. “We must go in, our eyes are getting full
of dust.”
As they went, Samoylenko sighed and, holding his hat, said:
“I suppose I shan’t sleep to-night.”
“Don’t you agitate yourself,” laughed the zoologist. “You can set your
mind at rest; the duel will end in nothing. Laevsky will magnanimously
fire into the air—he can do nothing else; and I daresay I shall not fire
at all. To be arrested and lose my time on Laevsky’s account—the game’s
not worth the candle. By the way, what is the punishment for duelling?”
“Arrest, and in the case of the death of your opponent a maximum of
three years’ imprisonment in the fortress.”
“The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul?”
“No, in a military fortress, I believe.”
“Though this fine gentleman ought to have a lesson!”
Behind them on the sea, there was a flash of lightning, which for an
instant lighted up the roofs of the houses and the mountains. The
friends parted near the boulevard. When the doctor disappeared in the
darkness and his steps had died away, Von Koren shouted to him:
“I only hope the weather won’t interfere with us to-morrow!”
“Very likely it will! Please God it may!”
“Good-night!”
“What about the night? What do you say?”
In the roar of the wind and the sea and the crashes of thunder, it was
difficult to hear.
“It’s nothing,” shouted the zoologist, and hurried home. XVII
“Upon my mind, weighed down with woe, Crowd thoughts, a heavy multitude:
In silence memory unfolds Her long, long scroll before my eyes. Loathing
and shuddering I curse And bitterly lament in vain, And bitter though
the tears I weep I do not wash those lines away.”
PUSHKIN.
Whether they killed him next morning, or mocked at him—that is, left him
his life—he was ruined, anyway. Whether this disgraced woman killed
herself in her shame and despair, or dragged on her pitiful existence,
she was ruined anyway.
So thought Laevsky as he sat at the table late in the evening, still
rubbing his hands. The windows suddenly blew open with a bang; a violent
gust of wind burst into the room, and the papers fluttered from the
table. Laevsky closed the windows and bent down to pick up the papers.
He was aware of something new in his body, a sort of awkwardness he had
not felt before, and his movements were strange to him. He moved
timidly, jerking with his elbows and shrugging his shoulders; and when
he sat down to the table again, he again began rubbing his hands. His
body had lost its suppleness.
On the eve of death one ought to write to one’s nearest relation.
Laevsky thought of this. He took a pen and wrote with a tremulous hand:
“Mother!”
He wanted to write to beg his mother, for the sake of the merciful God
in whom she believed, that she would give shelter and bring a little
warmth and kindness into the life of the unhappy woman who, by his
doing, had been disgraced and was in solitude, poverty, and weakness,
that she would forgive and forget everything, everything, everything,
and by her sacrifice atone to some extent for her son’s terrible sin.
But he remembered how his mother, a stout, heavily-built old woman in a
lace cap, used to go out into the garden in the morning, followed by her
companion with the lap-dog; how she used to shout in a peremptory way to
the gardener and the servants, and how proud and haughty her face was—he
remembered all this and scratched out the word he had written.
There was a vivid flash of lightning at all three windows, and it was
followed by a prolonged, deafening roll of thunder, beginning with a
hollow rumble and ending with a crash so violent that all the window-
panes rattled. Laevsky got up, went to the window, and pressed his
forehead against the pane. There was a fierce, magnificent storm. On the
horizon lightning-flashes were flung in white streams from the storm-
clouds into the sea, lighting up the high, dark waves over the far-away
expanse. And to right and to left, and, no doubt, over the house too,
the lightning flashed.
“The storm!” whispered Laevsky; he had a longing to pray to some one or
to something, if only to the lightning or the storm-clouds. “Dear
storm!”
He remembered how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without a
hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with blue
eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with the rain;
they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal of thunder,
the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly, while he crossed
himself and made haste to repeat: “Holy, holy, holy. . . .” Oh, where
had they vanished to! In what sea were they drowned, those dawning days
of pure, fair life? He had no fear of the storm, no love of nature now;
he had no God. All the confiding girls he had ever known had by now been
ruined by him and those like him. All his life he had not planted one
tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass; and living among
the living, he had not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy
and ruin, and lie, lie. . . .
“What in my past was not vice?” he asked himself, trying to clutch at
some bright memory as a man falling down a precipice clutches at the
bushes.
School? The university? But that was a sham. He had neglected his work
and forgotten what he had learnt. The service of his country? That, too,
was a sham, for he did nothing in the Service, took a salary for doing
nothing, and it was an abominable swindling of the State for which one
was not punished.
He had no craving for truth, and had not sought it; spellbound by vice
and lying, his conscience had slept or been silent. Like a stranger,
like an alien from another planet, he had taken no part in the common
life of men, had been indifferent to their sufferings, their ideas,
their religion, their sciences, their strivings, and their struggles. He
had not said one good word, not written one line that was not useless
and vulgar; he had not done his fellows one ha’p’orth of service, but
had eaten their bread, drunk their wine, seduced their wives, lived on
their thoughts, and to justify his contemptible, parasitic life in their
eyes and in his own, he had always tried to assume an air of being
higher and better than they. Lies, lies, lies. . . .
He vividly remembered what he had seen that evening at Muridov’s, and he
was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin and
Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what he had
begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This young weak
woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had deprived her of
her husband, of her friends and of her country, and had brought her
here—to the heat, to fever, and to boredom; and from day to day she was
bound to reflect, like a mirror, his idleness, his viciousness and
falsity—and that was all she had had to fill her weak, listless,
pitiable life. Then he had grown sick of her, had begun to hate her, but
had not had the pluck to abandon her, and he had tried to entangle her
more and more closely in a web of lies. . . . These men had done the
rest.
Laevsky sat at the table, then got up and went to the window; at one
minute he put out the candle and then he lighted it again. He cursed
himself aloud, wept and wailed, and asked forgiveness; several times he
ran to the table in despair, and wrote:
“Mother!”
Except his mother, he had no relations or near friends; but how could
his mother help him? And where was she? He had an impulse to run to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, to fall at her feet, to kiss her hands and feet,
to beg her forgiveness; but she was his victim, and he was afraid of her
as though she were dead.
“My life is ruined,” he repeated, rubbing his hands. “Why am I still
alive, my God! . . .”
He had cast out of heaven his dim star; it had fallen, and its track was
lost in the darkness of night. It would never return to the sky again,
because life was given only once and never came a second time. If he
could have turned back the days and years of the past, he would have
replaced the falsity with truth, the idleness with work, the boredom
with happiness; he would have given back purity to those whom he had
robbed of it. He would have found God and goodness, but that was as
impossible as to put back the fallen star into the sky, and because it
was impossible he was in despair.
When the storm was over, he sat by the open window and thought calmly of
what was before him. Von Koren would most likely kill him. The man’s
clear, cold theory of life justified the destruction of the rotten and
the useless; if it changed at the crucial moment, it would be the hatred
and the repugnance that Laevsky inspired in him that would save him. If
he missed his aim or, in mockery of his hated opponent, only wounded
him, or fired in the air, what could he do then? Where could he go?
“Go to Petersburg?” Laevsky asked himself. But that would mean beginning
over again the old life which he cursed. And the man who seeks salvation
in change of place like a migrating bird would find nothing anywhere,
for all the world is alike to him. Seek salvation in men? In whom and
how? Samoylenko’s kindness and generosity could no more save him than
the deacon’s laughter or Von Koren’s hatred. He must look for salvation
in himself alone, and if there were no finding it, why waste time? He
must kill himself, that was all. . . .
He heard the sound of a carriage. It was getting light. The carriage
passed by, turned, and crunching on the wet sand, stopped near the
house. There were two men in the carriage.
“Wait a minute; I’m coming directly,” Laevsky said to them out of the
window. “I’m not asleep. Surely it’s not time yet?”
“Yes, it’s four o’clock. By the time we get there . . . .”
Laevsky put on his overcoat and cap, put some cigarettes in his pocket,
and stood still hesitating. He felt as though there was something else
he must do. In the street the seconds talked in low voices and the
horses snorted, and this sound in the damp, early morning, when
everybody was asleep and light was hardly dawning in the sky, filled
Laevsky’s soul with a disconsolate feeling which was like a presentiment
of evil. He stood for a little, hesitating, and went into the bedroom.
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was lying stretched out on the bed, wrapped from
head to foot in a rug. She did not stir, and her whole appearance,
especially her head, suggested an Egyptian mummy. Looking at her in
silence, Laevsky mentally asked her forgiveness, and thought that if the
heavens were not empty and there really were a God, then He would save
her; if there were no God, then she had better perish—there was nothing
for her to live for.
All at once she jumped up, and sat up in bed. Lifting her pale face and
looking with horror at Laevsky, she asked:
“Is it you? Is the storm over?”
“Yes.”
She remembered; put both hands to her head and shuddered all over.
“How miserable I am!” she said. “If only you knew how miserable I am! I
expected,” she went on, half closing her eyes, “that you would kill me
or turn me out of the house into the rain and storm, but you delay . . .
delay . . .”
Warmly and impulsively he put his arms round her and covered her knees
and hands with kisses. Then when she muttered something and shuddered
with the thought of the past, he stroked her hair, and looking into her
face, realised that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near
and dear to him, whom no one could replace.
When he went out of the house and got into the carriage he wanted to
return home alive. XVIII
The deacon got up, dressed, took his thick, gnarled stick and slipped
quietly out of the house. It was dark, and for the first minute when he
went into the street, he could not even see his white stick. There was
not a single star in the sky, and it looked as though there would be
rain again. There was a smell of wet sand and sea.
“It’s to be hoped that the mountaineers won’t attack us,” thought the
deacon, hearing the tap of the stick on the pavement, and noticing how
loud and lonely the taps sounded in the stillness of the night.
When he got out of town, he began to see both the road and his stick.
Here and there in the black sky there were dark cloudy patches, and soon
a star peeped out and timidly bGlinked its one eye. The deacon walked
along the high rocky coast and did not see the sea; it was slumbering
below, and its unseen waves broke languidly and heavily on the shore, as
though sighing “Ouf!” and how slowly! One wave broke—the deacon had time
to count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third.
As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the
languid, drowsy drone of the sea. One could hear the infinitely faraway,
inconceivable time when God moved above chaos.
The deacon felt uncanny. He hoped God would not punish him for keeping
company with infidels, and even going to look at their duels. The duel
would be nonsensical, bloodless, absurd, but however that might be, it
was a heathen spectacle, and it was altogether unseemly for an
ecclesiastical person to be present at it. He stopped and
wondered—should he go back? But an intense, restless curiosity triumphed
over his doubts, and he went on.
“Though they are infidels they are good people, and will be saved,” he
assured himself. “They are sure to be saved,” he said aloud, lighting a
cigarette.
By what standard must one measure men’s qualities, to judge rightly of
them? The deacon remembered his enemy, the inspector of the clerical
school, who believed in God, lived in chastity, and did not fight duels;
but he used to feed the deacon on bread with sand in it, and on one
occasion almost pulled off the deacon’s ear. If human life was so
artlessly constructed that every one respected this cruel and dishonest
inspector who stole the Government flour, and his health and salvation
were prayed for in the schools, was it just to shun such men as Von
Koren and Laevsky, simply because they were unbelievers? The deacon was
weighing this question, but he recalled how absurd Samoylenko had looked
yesterday, and that broke the thread of his ideas. What fun they would
have next day! The deacon imagined how he would sit under a bush and
look on, and when Von Koren began boasting next day at dinner, he, the
deacon, would begin laughing and telling him all the details of the
duel.
“How do you know all about it?” the zoologist would ask.
“Well, there you are! I stayed at home, but I know all about it.”
It would be nice to write a comic description of the duel. His father-
in-law would read it and laugh. A good story, told or written, was more
than meat and drink to his father-in-law.
The valley of the Yellow River opened before him. The stream was broader
and fiercer for the rain, and instead of murmuring as before, it was
raging. It began to get light. The grey, dingy morning, and the clouds
racing towards the west to overtake the storm-clouds, the mountains girt
with mist, and the wet trees, all struck the deacon as ugly and
sinister. He washed at the brook, repeated his morning prayer, and felt
a longing for tea and hot rolls, with sour cream, which were served
every morning at his father-in-law’s. He remembered his wife and the
“Days past Recall,” which she played on the piano. What sort of woman
was she? His wife had been introduced, betrothed, and married to him all
in one week: he had lived with her less than a month when he was ordered
here, so that he had not had time to find out what she was like. All the
same, he rather missed her.
“I must write her a nice letter . . .” he thought. The flag on the duhan
hung limp, soaked by the rain, and the duhan itself with its wet roof
seemed darker and lower than it had been before. Near the door was
standing a cart; Kerbalay, with two mountaineers and a young Tatar woman
in trousers—no doubt Kerbalay’s wife or daughter—were bringing sacks of
something out of the duhan, and putting them on maize straw in the cart.
Near the cart stood a pair of asses hanging their heads. When they had
put in all the sacks, the mountaineers and the Tatar woman began
covering them over with straw, while Kerbalay began hurriedly harnessing
the asses.
“Smuggling, perhaps,” thought the deacon.
Here was the fallen tree with the dried pine-needles, here was the
blackened patch from the fire. He remembered the picnic and all its
incidents, the fire, the singing of the mountaineers, his sweet dreams
of becoming a bishop, and of the Church procession. . . . The Black
River had grown blacker and broader with the rain. The deacon walked
cautiously over the narrow bridge, which by now was reached by the
topmost crests of the dirty water, and went up through the little copse
to the drying-shed.
“A splendid head,” he thought, stretching himself on the straw, and
thinking of Von Koren. “A fine head—God grant him health; only there is
cruelty in him. . . .”
Why did he hate Laevsky and Laevsky hate him? Why were they going to
fight a duel? If from their childhood they had known poverty as the
deacon had; if they had been brought up among ignorant, hard-hearted,
grasping, coarse and ill-mannered people who grudged you a crust of
bread, who spat on the floor and hiccoughed at dinner and at prayers; if
they had not been spoilt from childhood by the pleasant surroundings and
the select circle of friends they lived in—how they would have rushed at
each other, how readily they would have overlooked each other’s
shortcomings and would have prized each other’s strong points! Why, how
few even outwardly decent people there were in the world! It was true
that Laevsky was flighty, dissipated, queer, but he did not steal, did
not spit loudly on the floor; he did not abuse his wife and say, “You’ll
eat till you burst, but you don’t want to work;” he would not beat a
child with reins, or give his servants stinking meat to eat— surely this
was reason enough to be indulgent to him? Besides, he was the chief
sufferer from his failings, like a sick man from his sores. Instead of
being led by boredom and some sort of misunderstanding to look for
degeneracy, extinction, heredity, and other such incomprehensible things
in each other, would they not do better to stoop a little lower and turn
their hatred and anger where whole streets resounded with moanings from
coarse ignorance, greed, scolding, impurity, swearing, the shrieks of
women. . . .
The sound of a carriage interrupted the deacon’s thoughts. He glanced
out of the door and saw a carriage and in it three persons: Laevsky,
Sheshkovsky, and the superintendent of the post-office.
“Stop!” said Sheshkovsky.
All three got out of the carriage and looked at one another.
“They are not here yet,” said Sheshkovsky, shaking the mud off. “Well?
Till the show begins, let us go and find a suitable spot; there’s not
room to turn round here.”
They went further up the river and soon vanished from sight. The Tatar
driver sat in the carriage with his head resting on his shoulder and
fell asleep. After waiting ten minutes the deacon came out of the
drying-shed, and taking off his black hat that he might not be noticed,
he began threading his way among the bushes and strips of maize along
the bank, crouching and looking about him. The grass and maize were wet,
and big drops fell on his head from the trees and bushes. “Disgraceful!”
he muttered, picking up his wet and muddy skirt. “Had I realised it, I
would not have come.”
Soon he heard voices and caught sight of them. Laevsky was walking
rapidly to and fro in the small glade with bowed back and hands thrust
in his sleeves; his seconds were standing at the water’s edge, rolling
cigarettes.
“Strange,” thought the deacon, not recognising Laevsky’s walk; “he looks
like an old man. . . .”
“How rude it is of them!” said the superintendent of the post-office,
looking at his watch. “It may be learned manners to be late, but to my
thinking it’s hoggish.”
Sheshkovsky, a stout man with a black beard, listened and said:
“They’re coming!” XIX
“It’s the first time in my life I’ve seen it! How glorious!” said Von
Koren, pointing to the glade and stretching out his hands to the east.
“Look: green rays!”
In the east behind the mountains rose two green streaks of light, and it
really was beautiful. The sun was rising.
“Good-morning!” the zoologist went on, nodding to Laevsky’s seconds.
“I’m not late, am I?”
He was followed by his seconds, Boyko and Govorovsky, two very young
officers of the same height, wearing white tunics, and Ustimovitch, the
thin, unsociable doctor; in one hand he had a bag of some sort, and in
the other hand, as usual, a cane which he held behind him. Laying the
bag on the ground and greeting no one, he put the other hand, too,
behind his back and began pacing up and down the glade.
Laevsky felt the exhaustion and awkwardness of a man who is soon perhaps
to die, and is for that reason an object of general attention. He wanted
to be killed as soon as possible or taken home. He saw the sunrise now
for the first time in his life; the early morning, the green rays of
light, the dampness, and the men in wet boots, seemed to him to have
nothing to do with his life, to be superfluous and embarrassing. All
this had no connection with the night he had been through, with his
thoughts and his feeling of guilt, and so he would have gladly gone away
without waiting for the duel.
Von Koren was noticeably excited and tried to conceal it, pretending
that he was more interested in the green light than anything. The
seconds were confused, and looked at one another as though wondering why
they were here and what they were to do.
“I imagine, gentlemen, there is no need for us to go further,” said
Sheshkovsky. “This place will do.”
“Yes, of course,” Von Koren agreed.
A silence followed. Ustimovitch, pacing to and fro, suddenly turned
sharply to Laevsky and said in a low voice, breathing into his face:
“They have very likely not told you my terms yet. Each side is to pay me
fifteen roubles, and in the case of the death of one party, the survivor
is to pay thirty.”
Laevsky was already acquainted with the man, but now for the first time
he had a distinct view of his lustreless eyes, his stiff moustaches, and
wasted, consumptive neck; he was a money-grubber, not a doctor; his
breath had an unpleasant smell of beef.
“What people there are in the world!” thought Laevsky, and answered:
“Very good.”
The doctor nodded and began pacing to and fro again, and it was evident
he did not need the money at all, but simply asked for it from hatred.
Every one felt it was time to begin, or to end what had been begun, but
instead of beginning or ending, they stood about, moved to and fro and
smoked. The young officers, who were present at a duel for the first
time in their lives, and even now hardly believed in this civilian and,
to their thinking, unnecessary duel, looked critically at their tunics
and stroked their sleeves. Sheshkovsky went up to them and said softly:
“Gentlemen, we must use every effort to prevent this duel; they ought to
be reconciled.”
He flushed crimson and added:
“Kirilin was at my rooms last night complaining that Laevsky had found
him with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and all that sort of thing.”
“Yes, we know that too,” said Boyko.
“Well, you see, then . . . Laevsky’s hands are trembling and all that
sort of thing . . . he can scarcely hold a pistol now. To fight with him
is as inhuman as to fight a man who is drunk or who has typhoid. If a
reconciliation cannot be arranged, we ought to put off the duel,
gentlemen, or something. . . . It’s such a sickening business, I can’t
bear to see it.”
“Talk to Von Koren.”
“I don’t know the rules of duelling, damnation take them, and I don’t
want to either; perhaps he’ll imagine Laevsky funks it and has sent me
to him, but he can think what he likes—I’ll speak to him.”
Sheshkovsky hesitatingly walked up to Von Koren with a slight limp, as
though his leg had gone to sleep; and as he went towards him, clearing
his throat, his whole figure was a picture of indolence.
“There’s something I must say to you, sir,” he began, carefully
scrutinising the flowers on the zoologist’s shirt. “It’s confidential. I
don’t know the rules of duelling, damnation take them, and I don’t want
to, and I look on the matter not as a second and that sort of thing, but
as a man, and that’s all about it.”
“Yes. Well?”
“When seconds suggest reconciliation they are usually not listened to;
it is looked upon as a formality. Amour propre and all that. But I
humbly beg you to look carefully at Ivan Andreitch. He’s not in a normal
state, so to speak, to-day—not in his right mind, and a pitiable object.
He has had a misfortune. I can’t endure gossip. . . .”
Sheshkovsky flushed crimson and looked round.
“But in view of the duel, I think it necessary to inform you, Laevsky
found his madam last night at Muridov’s with . . . another gentleman.”
“How disgusting!” muttered the zoologist; he turned pale, frowned, and
spat loudly. “Tfoo!”
His lower lip quivered, he walked away from Sheshkovsky, unwilling to
hear more, and as though he had accidentally tasted something bitter,
spat loudly again, and for the first time that morning looked with
hatred at Laevsky. His excitement and awkwardness passed off; he tossed
his head and said aloud:
“Gentlemen, what are we waiting for, I should like to know? Why don’t we
begin?”
Sheshkovsky glanced at the officers and shrugged his shoulders.
“Gentlemen,” he said aloud, addressing no one in particular. “Gentlemen,
we propose that you should be reconciled.”
“Let us make haste and get the formalities over,” said Von Koren.
“Reconciliation has been discussed already. What is the next formality?
Make haste, gentlemen, time won’t wait for us.”
“But we insist on reconciliation all the same,” said Sheshkovsky in a
guilty voice, as a man compelled to interfere in another man’s business;
he flushed, laid his hand on his heart, and went on: “Gentlemen, we see
no grounds for associating the offence with the duel. There’s nothing in
common between duelling and offences against one another of which we are
sometimes guilty through human weakness. You are university men and men
of culture, and no doubt you see in the duel nothing but a foolish and
out-of-date formality, and all that sort of thing. That’s how we look at
it ourselves, or we shouldn’t have come, for we cannot allow that in our
presence men should fire at one another, and all that.” Sheshkovsky
wiped the perspiration off his face and went on: “Make an end to your
misunderstanding, gentlemen; shake hands, and let us go home and drink
to peace. Upon my honour, gentlemen!”
Von Koren did not speak. Laevsky, seeing that they were looking at him,
said:
“I have nothing against Nikolay Vassilitch; if he considers I’m to
blame, I’m ready to apologise to him.”
Von Koren was offended.
“It is evident, gentlemen,” he said, “you want Mr. Laevsky to return
home a magnanimous and chivalrous figure, but I cannot give you and him
that satisfaction. And there was no need to get up early and drive eight
miles out of town simply to drink to peace, to have breakfast, and to
explain to me that the duel is an out-of-date formality. A duel is a
duel, and there is no need to make it more false and stupid than it is
in reality. I want to fight!”
A silence followed. Boyko took a pair of pistols out of a box; one was
given to Von Koren and one to Laevsky, and then there followed a
difficulty which afforded a brief amusement to the zoologist and the
seconds. It appeared that of all the people present not one had ever in
his life been at a duel, and no one knew precisely how they ought to
stand, and what the seconds ought to say and do. But then Boyko
remembered and began, with a smile, to explain.
“Gentlemen, who remembers the description in Lermontov?” asked Von
Koren, laughing. “In Turgenev, too, Bazarov had a duel with some one. .
. .”
“There’s no need to remember,” said Ustimovitch impatiently. “Measure
the distance, that’s all.”
And he took three steps as though to show how to measure it. Boyko
counted out the steps while his companion drew his sabre and scratched
the earth at the extreme points to mark the barrier. In complete silence
the opponents took their places.
“Moles,” the deacon thought, sitting in the bushes.
Sheshkovsky said something, Boyko explained something again, but Laevsky
did not hear—or rather heard, but did not understand. He cocked his
pistol when the time came to do so, and raised the cold, heavy weapon
with the barrel upwards. He forgot to unbutton his overcoat, and it felt
very tight over his shoulder and under his arm, and his arm rose as
awkwardly as though the sleeve had been cut out of tin. He remembered
the hatred he had felt the night before for the swarthy brow and curly
hair, and felt that even yesterday at the moment of intense hatred and
anger he could not have shot a man. Fearing that the bullet might
somehow hit Von Koren by accident, he raised the pistol higher and
higher, and felt that this too obvious magnanimity was indelicate and
anything but magnanimous, but he did not know how else to do and could
do nothing else. Looking at the pale, ironically smiling face of Von
Koren, who evidently had been convinced from the beginning that his
opponent would fire in the air, Laevsky thought that, thank God,
everything would be over directly, and all that he had to do was to
press the trigger rather hard. . . .
He felt a violent shock on the shoulder; there was the sound of a shot
and an answering echo in the mountains: ping-ting!
Von Koren cocked his pistol and looked at Ustimovitch, who was pacing as
before with his hands behind his back, taking no notice of any one.
“Doctor,” said the zoologist, “be so good as not to move to and fro like
a pendulum. You make me dizzy.”
The doctor stood still. Von Koren began to take aim at Laevsky.
“It’s all over!” thought Laevsky.
The barrel of the pistol aimed straight at his face, the expression of
hatred and contempt in Von Koren’s attitude and whole figure, and the
murder just about to be committed by a decent man in broad daylight, in
the presence of decent men, and the stillness and the unknown force that
compelled Laevsky to stand still and not to run —how mysterious it all
was, how incomprehensible and terrible!
The moment while Von Koren was taking aim seemed to Laevsky longer than
a night: he glanced imploringly at the seconds; they were pale and did
not stir.
“Make haste and fire,” thought Laevsky, and felt that his pale,
quivering, and pitiful face must arouse even greater hatred in Von
Koren.
“I’ll kill him directly,” thought Von Koren, aiming at his forehead,
with his finger already on the catch. “Yes, of course I’ll kill him.”
“He’ll kill him!” A despairing shout was suddenly heard somewhere very
close at hand.
A shot rang out at once. Seeing that Laevsky remained standing where he
was and did not fall, they all looked in the direction from which the
shout had come, and saw the deacon. With pale face and wet hair sticking
to his forehead and his cheeks, wet through and muddy, he was standing
in the maize on the further bank, smiling rather queerly and waving his
wet hat. Sheshkovsky laughed with joy, burst into tears, and moved away.
. . . XX
A little while afterwards, Von Koren and the deacon met near the little
bridge. The deacon was excited; he breathed hard, and avoided looking in
people’s faces. He felt ashamed both of his terror and his muddy, wet
garments.
“I thought you meant to kill him . . .” he muttered. “How contrary to
human nature it is! How utterly unnatural it is!”
“But how did you come here?” asked the zoologist.
“Don’t ask,” said the deacon, waving his hand. “The evil one tempted me,
saying: ‘Go, go. . . .’ So I went and almost died of fright in the
maize. But now, thank God, thank God. . . . I am awfully pleased with
you,” muttered the deacon. “Old Grandad Tarantula will be glad . . . .
It’s funny, it’s too funny! Only I beg of you most earnestly don’t tell
anybody I was there, or I may get into hot water with the authorities.
They will say: ‘The deacon was a second.’”
“Gentlemen,” said Von Koren, “the deacon asks you not to tell any one
you’ve seen him here. He might get into trouble.”
“How contrary to human nature it is!” sighed the deacon. “Excuse my
saying so, but your face was so dreadful that I thought you were going
to kill him.”
“I was very much tempted to put an end to that scoundrel,” said Von
Koren, “but you shouted close by, and I missed my aim. The whole
procedure is revolting to any one who is not used to it, and it has
exhausted me, deacon. I feel awfully tired. Come along. . . .”
“No, you must let me walk back. I must get dry, for I am wet and cold.”
“Well, as you like,” said the zoologist, in a weary tone, feeling
dispirited, and, getting into the carriage, he closed his eyes. “As you
like. . . .”
While they were moving about the carriages and taking their seats,
Kerbalay stood in the road, and, laying his hands on his stomach, he
bowed low, showing his teeth; he imagined that the gentry had come to
enjoy the beauties of nature and drink tea, and could not understand why
they were getting into the carriages. The party set off in complete
silence and only the deacon was left by the duhan.
“Come to the duhan, drink tea,” he said to Kerbalay. “Me wants to eat.”
Kerbalay spoke good Russian, but the deacon imagined that the Tatar
would understand him better if he talked to him in broken Russian. “Cook
omelette, give cheese. . . .”
“Come, come, father,” said Kerbalay, bowing. “I’ll give you everything .
. . . I’ve cheese and wine. . . . Eat what you like.”
“What is ‘God’ in Tatar?” asked the deacon, going into the duhan.
“Your God and my God are the same,” said Kerbalay, not understanding
him. “God is the same for all men, only men are different. Some are
Russian, some are Turks, some are English—there are many sorts of men,
but God is one.”
“Very good. If all men worship the same God, why do you Mohammedans look
upon Christians as your everlasting enemies?”
“Why are you angry?” said Kerbalay, laying both hands on his stomach.
“You are a priest; I am a Mussulman: you say, ‘I want to eat’—I give it
you. . . . Only the rich man distinguishes your God from my God; for the
poor man it is all the same. If you please, it is ready.”
While this theological conversation was taking place at the duhan,
Laevsky was driving home thinking how dreadful it had been driving there
at daybreak, when the roads, the rocks, and the mountains were wet and
dark, and the uncertain future seemed like a terrible abyss, of which
one could not see the bottom; while now the raindrops hanging on the
grass and on the stones were sparkling in the sun like diamonds, nature
was smiling joyfully, and the terrible future was left behind. He looked
at Sheshkovsky’s sullen, tear-stained face, and at the two carriages
ahead of them in which Von Koren, his seconds, and the doctor were
sitting, and it seemed to him as though they were all coming back from a
graveyard in which a wearisome, insufferable man who was a burden to
others had just been buried.
“Everything is over,” he thought of his past, cautiously touching his
neck with his fingers.
On the right side of his neck was a small swelling, of the length and
breadth of his little finger, and he felt a pain, as though some one had
passed a hot iron over his neck. The bullet had bruised it.
Afterwards, when he got home, a strange, long, sweet day began for him,
misty as forgetfulness. Like a man released from prison or from
hospital, he stared at the long-familiar objects and wondered that the
tables, the windows, the chairs, the light, and the sea stirred in him a
keen, childish delight such as he had not known for long, long years.
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, pale and haggard, could not understand his gentle
voice and strange movements; she made haste to tell him everything that
had happened to her. . . . It seemed to her that very likely he scarcely
heard and did not understand her, and that if he did know everything he
would curse her and kill her, but he listened to her, stroked her face
and hair, looked into her eyes and said:
“I have nobody but you. . . .”
Then they sat a long while in the garden, huddled close together, saying
nothing, or dreaming aloud of their happy life in the future, in brief,
broken sentences, while it seemed to him that he had never spoken at
such length or so eloquently. XXI
More than three months had passed.
The day came that Von Koren had fixed on for his departure. A cold,
heavy rain had been falling from early morning, a north-east wind was
blowing, and the waves were high on the sea. It was said that the
steamer would hardly be able to come into the harbour in such weather.
By the time-table it should have arrived at ten o’clock in the morning,
but Von Koren, who had gone on to the sea-front at midday and again
after dinner, could see nothing through the field-glass but grey waves
and rain covering the horizon.
Towards the end of the day the rain ceased and the wind began to drop
perceptibly. Von Koren had already made up his mind that he would not be
able to get off that day, and had settled down to play chess with
Samoylenko; but after dark the orderly announced that there were lights
on the sea and that a rocket had been seen.
Von Koren made haste. He put his satchel over his shoulder, and kissed
Samoylenko and the deacon. Though there was not the slightest necessity,
he went through the rooms again, said good-bye to the orderly and the
cook, and went out into the street, feeling that he had left something
behind, either at the doctor’s or his lodging. In the street he walked
beside Samoylenko, behind them came the deacon with a box, and last of
all the orderly with two portmanteaus. Only Samoylenko and the orderly
could distinguish the dim lights on the sea. The others gazed into the
darkness and saw nothing. The steamer had stopped a long way from the
coast.
“Make haste, make haste,” Von Koren hurried them. “I am afraid it will
set off.”
As they passed the little house with three windows, into which Laevsky
had moved soon after the duel, Von Koren could not resist peeping in at
the window. Laevsky was sitting, writing, bent over the table, with his
back to the window.
“I wonder at him!” said the zoologist softly. “What a screw he has put
on himself!”
“Yes, one may well wonder,” said Samoylenko. “He sits from morning till
night, he’s always at work. He works to pay off his debts. And he lives,
brother, worse than a beggar!”
Half a minute of silence followed. The zoologist, the doctor, and the
deacon stood at the window and went on looking at Laevsky.
“So he didn’t get away from here, poor fellow,” said Samoylenko. “Do you
remember how hard he tried?”
“Yes, he has put a screw on himself,” Von Koren repeated. “His marriage,
the way he works all day long for his daily bread, a new expression in
his face, and even in his walk—it’s all so extraordinary that I don’t
know what to call it.”
The zoologist took Samoylenko’s sleeve and went on with emotion in his
voice:
“You tell him and his wife that when I went away I was full of
admiration for them and wished them all happiness . . . and I beg him,
if he can, not to remember evil against me. He knows me. He knows that
if I could have foreseen this change, then I might have become his best
friend.”
“Go in and say good-bye to him.”
“No, that wouldn’t do.”
“Why? God knows, perhaps you’ll never see him again.”
The zoologist reflected, and said:
“That’s true.”
Samoylenko tapped softly at the window. Laevsky started and looked
round.
“Vanya, Nikolay Vassilitch wants to say goodbye to you,” said
Samoylenko. “He is just going away.”
Laevsky got up from the table, and went into the passage to open the
door. Samoylenko, the zoologist, and the deacon went into the house.
“I can only come for one minute,” began the zoologist, taking off his
goloshes in the passage, and already wishing he had not given way to his
feelings and come in, uninvited. “It is as though I were forcing myself
on him,” he thought, “and that’s stupid.”
“Forgive me for disturbing you,” he said as he went into the room with
Laevsky, “but I’m just going away, and I had an impulse to see you. God
knows whether we shall ever meet again.”
“I am very glad to see you. . . . Please come in,” said Laevsky, and he
awkwardly set chairs for his visitors as though he wanted to bar their
way, and stood in the middle of the room, rubbing his hands.
“I should have done better to have left my audience in the street,”
thought Von Koren, and he said firmly: “Don’t remember evil against me,
Ivan Andreitch. To forget the past is, of course, impossible —it is too
painful, and I’ve not come here to apologise or to declare that I was
not to blame. I acted sincerely, and I have not changed my convictions
since then. . . . It is true that I see, to my great delight, that I was
mistaken in regard to you, but it’s easy to make a false step even on a
smooth road, and, in fact, it’s the natural human lot: if one is not
mistaken in the main, one is mistaken in the details. Nobody knows the
real truth.”
“No, no one knows the truth,” said Laevsky.
“Well, good-bye. . . . God give you all happiness.”
Von Koren gave Laevsky his hand; the latter took it and bowed.
“Don’t remember evil against me,” said Von Koren. “Give my greetings to
your wife, and say I am very sorry not to say good-bye to her.”
“She is at home.”
Laevsky went to the door of the next room, and said:
“Nadya, Nikolay Vassilitch wants to say goodbye to you.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna came in; she stopped near the doorway and looked
shyly at the visitors. There was a look of guilt and dismay on her face,
and she held her hands like a schoolgirl receiving a scolding.
“I’m just going away, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,” said Von Koren, “and have
come to say good-bye.”
She held out her hand uncertainly, while Laevsky bowed.
“What pitiful figures they are, though!” thought Von Koren. “The life
they are living does not come easy to them. I shall be in Moscow and
Petersburg; can I send you anything?” he asked.
“Oh!” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and she looked anxiously at her
husband. “I don’t think there’s anything. . . .”
“No, nothing . . .” said Laevsky, rubbing his hands. “Our greetings.”
Von Koren did not know what he could or ought to say, though as he went
in he thought he would say a very great deal that would be warm and good
and important. He shook hands with Laevsky and his wife in silence, and
left them with a depressed feeling.
“What people!” said the deacon in a low voice, as he walked behind them.
“My God, what people! Of a truth, the right hand of God has planted this
vine! Lord! Lord! One man vanquishes thousands and another tens of
thousands. Nikolay Vassilitch,” he said ecstatically, “let me tell you
that to-day you have conquered the greatest of man’s enemies—pride.”
“Hush, deacon! Fine conquerors we are! Conquerors ought to look like
eagles, while he’s a pitiful figure, timid, crushed; he bows like a
Chinese idol, and I, I am sad. . . .”
They heard steps behind them. It was Laevsky, hurrying after them to see
him off. The orderly was standing on the quay with the two portmanteaus,
and at a little distance stood four boatmen.
“There is a wind, though. . . . Brrr!” said Samoylenko. “There must be a
pretty stiff storm on the sea now! You are not going off at a nice time,
Koyla.”
“I’m not afraid of sea-sickness.”
“That’s not the point. . . . I only hope these rascals won’t upset you.
You ought to have crossed in the agent’s sloop. Where’s the agent’s
sloop?” he shouted to the boatmen.
“It has gone, Your Excellency.”
“And the Customs-house boat?”
“That’s gone, too.”
“Why didn’t you let us know,” said Samoylenko angrily. “You dolts!”
“It’s all the same, don’t worry yourself . . .” said Von Koren. “Well,
good-bye. God keep you.”
Samoylenko embraced Von Koren and made the sign of the cross over him
three times.
“Don’t forget us, Kolya. . . . Write. . . . We shall look out for you
next spring.”
“Good-bye, deacon,” said Von Koren, shaking hands with the deacon.
“Thank you for your company and for your pleasant conversation. Think
about the expedition.”
“Oh Lord, yes! to the ends of the earth,” laughed the deacon. “I’ve
nothing against it.”
Von Koren recognised Laevsky in the darkness, and held out his hand
without speaking. The boatmen were by now below, holding the boat, which
was beating against the piles, though the breakwater screened it from
the breakers. Von Koren went down the ladder, jumped into the boat, and
sat at the helm.
“Write!” Samoylenko shouted to him. “Take care of yourself.”
“No one knows the real truth,” thought Laevsky, turning up the collar of
his coat and thrusting his hands into his sleeves.
The boat turned briskly out of the harbour into the open sea. It
vanished in the waves, but at once from a deep hollow glided up onto a
high breaker, so that they could distinguish the men and even the oars.
The boat moved three yards forward and was sucked two yards back.
“Write!” shouted Samoylenko; “it’s devilish weather for you to go in.”
“Yes, no one knows the real truth . . .” thought Laevsky, looking
wearily at the dark, restless sea.
“It flings the boat back,” he thought; “she makes two steps forward and
one step back; but the boatmen are stubborn, they work the oars
unceasingly, and are not afraid of the high waves. The boat goes on and
on. Now she is out of sight, but in half an hour the boatmen will see
the steamer lights distinctly, and within an hour they will be by the
steamer ladder. So it is in life. . . . In the search for truth man
makes two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and
weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and
stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Perhaps they will
reach the real truth at last.”
“Go—o—od-by—e,” shouted Samoylenko.
“There’s no sight or sound of them,” said the deacon. “Good luck on the
journey!”
It began to spot with rain.
EXCELLENT PEOPLE
ONCE upon a time there lived in Moscow a man called Vladimir Semyonitch
Liadovsky. He took his degree at the university in the faculty of law
and had a post on the board of management of some railway; but if you
had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at
you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would
answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone:
“My work is literature.”
After completing his course at the university, Vladimir Semyonitch had
had a paragraph of theatrical criticism accepted by a newspaper. From
this paragraph he passed on to reviewing, and a year later he had
advanced to writing a weekly article on literary matters for the same
paper. But it does not follow from these facts that he was an amateur,
that his literary work was of an ephemeral, haphazard character.
Whenever I saw his neat spare figure, his high forehead and long mane of
hair, when I listened to his speeches, it always seemed to me that his
writing, quite apart from what and how he wrote, was something
organically part of him, like the beating of his heart, and that his
whole literary programme must have been an integral part of his brain
while he was a baby in his mother’s womb. Even in his walk, his
gestures, his manner of shaking off the ash from his cigarette, I could
read this whole programme from A to Z, with all its claptrap, dulness,
and honourable sentiments. He was a literary man all over when with an
inspired face he laid a wreath on the coffin of some celebrity, or with
a grave and solemn face collected signatures for some address; his
passion for making the acquaintance of distinguished literary men, his
faculty for finding talent even where it was absent, his perpetual
enthusiasm, his pulse that went at one hundred and twenty a minute, his
ignorance of life, the genuinely feminine flutter with which he threw
himself into concerts and literary evenings for the benefit of destitute
students, the way in which he gravitated towards the young—all this
would have created for him the reputation of a writer even if he had not
written his articles.
He was one of those writers to whom phrases like, “We are but few,” or
“What would life be without strife? Forward!” were pre-eminently
becoming, though he never strove with any one and never did go forward.
It did not even sound mawkish when he fell to discoursing of ideals.
Every anniversary of the university, on St. Tatiana’s Day, he got drunk,
chanted Gaudeamus out of tune, and his beaming and perspiring
countenance seemed to say: “See, I’m drunk; I’m keeping it up!” But even
that suited him.
Vladimir Semyonitch had genuine faith in his literary vocation and his
whole programme. He had no doubts, and was evidently very well pleased
with himself. Only one thing grieved him—the paper for which he worked
had a limited circulation and was not very influential. But Vladimir
Semyonitch believed that sooner or later he would succeed in getting on
to a solid magazine where he would have scope and could display
himself—and what little distress he felt on this score was pale beside
the brilliance of his hopes.
Visiting this charming man, I made the acquaintance of his sister, Vera
Semyonovna, a woman doctor. At first sight, what struck me about this
woman was her look of exhaustion and extreme ill-health. She was young,
with a good figure and regular, rather large features, but in comparison
with her agile, elegant, and talkative brother she seemed angular,
listless, slovenly, and sullen. There was something strained, cold,
apathetic in her movements, smiles, and words; she was not liked, and
was thought proud and not very intelligent.
In reality, I fancy, she was resting.
“My dear friend,” her brother would often say to me, sighing and
flinging back his hair in his picturesque literary way, “one must never
judge by appearances! Look at this book: it has long ago been read. It
is warped, tattered, and lies in the dust uncared for; but open it, and
it will make you weep and turn pale. My sister is like that book. Lift
the cover and peep into her soul, and you will be horror-stricken. Vera
passed in some three months through experiences that would have been
ample for a whole lifetime!”
Vladimir Semyonitch looked round him, took me by the sleeve, and began
to whisper:
“You know, after taking her degree she married, for love, an architect.
It’s a complete tragedy! They had hardly been married a month
when—whew—her husband died of typhus. But that was not all. She caught
typhus from him, and when, on her recovery, she learnt that her Ivan was
dead, she took a good dose of morphia. If it had not been for vigorous
measures taken by her friends, my Vera would have been by now in
Paradise. Tell me, isn’t it a tragedy? And is not my sister like an
ingénue, who has played already all the five acts of her life? The
audience may stay for the farce, but the ingénue must go home to rest.”
After three months of misery Vera Semyonovna had come to live with her
brother. She was not fitted for the practice of medicine, which
exhausted her and did not satisfy her; she did not give one the
impression of knowing her subject, and I never once heard her say
anything referring to her medical studies.
She gave up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she were a
prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colourless apathy, with
bowed head and hanging hands. The only thing to which she was not
completely indifferent, and which brought some brightness into the
twilight of her life, was the presence of her brother, whom she loved.
She loved him himself and his programme, she was full of reverence for
his articles; and when she was asked what her brother was doing, she
would answer in a subdued voice as though afraid of waking or
distracting him: “He is writing. . . .” Usually when he was at his work
she used to sit beside him, her eyes fixed on his writing hand. She used
at such moments to look like a sick animal warming itself in the sun. .
. .
One winter evening Vladimir Semyonitch was sitting at his table writing
a critical article for his newspaper: Vera Semyonovna was sitting beside
him, staring as usual at his writing hand. The critic wrote rapidly,
without erasures or corrections. The pen scratched and squeaked. On the
table near the writing hand there lay open a freshly-cut volume of a
thick magazine, containing a story of peasant life, signed with two
initials. Vladimir Semyonitch was enthusiastic; he thought the author
was admirable in his handling of the subject, suggested Turgenev in his
descriptions of nature, was truthful, and had an excellent knowledge of
the life of the peasantry. The critic himself knew nothing of peasant
life except from books and hearsay, but his feelings and his inner
convictions forced him to believe the story. He foretold a brilliant
future for the author, assured him he should await the conclusion of the
story with great impatience, and so on.
“Fine story!” he said, flinging himself back in his chair and closing
his eyes with pleasure. “The tone is extremely good.”
Vera Semyonovna looked at him, yawned aloud, and suddenly asked an
unexpected question. In the evening she had a habit of yawning nervously
and asking short, abrupt questions, not always relevant.
“Volodya,” she asked, “what is the meaning of non-resistance to evil?”
“Non-resistance to evil!” repeated her brother, opening his eyes.
“Yes. What do you understand by it?”
“You see, my dear, imagine that thieves or brigands attack you, and you,
instead of . . .”
“No, give me a logical definition.”
“A logical definition? Um! Well.” Vladimir Semyonitch pondered. “Non-
resistance to evil means an attitude of non-interference with regard to
all that in the sphere of mortality is called evil.”
Saying this, Vladimir Semyonitch bent over the table and took up a
novel. This novel, written by a woman, dealt with the painfulness of the
irregular position of a society lady who was living under the same roof
with her lover and her illegitimate child. Vladimir Semyonitch was
pleased with the excellent tendency of the story, the plot and the
presentation of it. Making a brief summary of the novel, he selected the
best passages and added to them in his account: “How true to reality,
how living, how picturesque! The author is not merely an artist; he is
also a subtle psychologist who can see into the hearts of his
characters. Take, for example, this vivid description of the emotions of
the heroine on meeting her husband,” and so on.
“Volodya,” Vera Semyonovna interrupted his critical effusions, “I’ve
been haunted by a strange idea since yesterday. I keep wondering where
we should all be if human life were ordered on the basis of non-
resistance to evil?”
“In all probability, nowhere. Non-resistance to evil would give the full
rein to the criminal will, and, to say nothing of civilisation, this
would leave not one stone standing upon another anywhere on earth.”
“What would be left?”
“Bashi-Bazouke and brothels. In my next article I’ll talk about that
perhaps. Thank you for reminding me.”
And a week later my friend kept his promise. That was just at the
period—in the eighties—when people were beginning to talk and write of
non-resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make war; when some
people in our set were beginning to do without servants, to retire into
the country, to work on the land, and to renounce animal food and carnal
love.
After reading her brother’s article, Vera Semyonovna pondered and hardly
perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.
“Very nice!” she said. “But still there’s a great deal I don’t
understand. For instance, in Leskov’s story ‘Belonging to the Cathedral’
there is a queer gardener who sows for the benefit of all—for customers,
for beggars, and any who care to steal. Did he behave sensibly?”
From his sister’s tone and expression Vladimir Semyonitch saw that she
did not like his article, and, almost for the first time in his life,
his vanity as an author sustained a shock. With a shade of irritation he
answered:
“Theft is immoral. To sow for thieves is to recognise the right of
thieves to existence. What would you think if I were to establish a
newspaper and, dividing it into sections, provide for blackmailing as
well as for liberal ideas? Following the example of that gardener, I
ought, logically, to provide a section for blackmailers, the
intellectual scoundrels? Yes.”
Vera Semyonovna made no answer. She got up from the table, moved
languidly to the sofa and lay down.
“I don’t know, I know nothing about it,” she said musingly. “You are
probably right, but it seems to me, I feel somehow, that there’s
something false in our resistance to evil, as though there were
something concealed or unsaid. God knows, perhaps our methods of
resisting evil belong to the category of prejudices which have become so
deeply rooted in us, that we are incapable of parting with them, and
therefore cannot form a correct judgment of them.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain to you. Perhaps man is mistaken in thinking
that he is obliged to resist evil and has a right to do so, just as he
is mistaken in thinking, for instance, that the heart looks like an ace
of hearts. It is very possible in resisting evil we ought not to use
force, but to use what is the very opposite of force—if you, for
instance, don’t want this picture stolen from you, you ought to give it
away rather than lock it up. . . .”
“That’s clever, very clever! If I want to marry a rich, vulgar woman,
she ought to prevent me from such a shabby action by hastening to make
me an offer herself!”
The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding each
other. If any outsider had overheard them he would hardly have been able
to make out what either of them was driving at.
They usually spent the evening at home. There were no friends’ houses to
which they could go, and they felt no need for friends; they only went
to the theatre when there was a new play—such was the custom in literary
circles—they did not go to concerts, for they did not care for music.
“You may think what you like,” Vera Semyonovna began again the next day,
“but for me the question is to a great extent settled. I am firmly
convinced that I have no grounds for resisting evil directed against me
personally. If they want to kill me, let them. My defending myself will
not make the murderer better. All I have now to decide is the second
half of the question: how I ought to behave to evil directed against my
neighbours?”
“Vera, mind you don’t become rabid!” said Vladimir Semyonitch, laughing.
“I see non-resistance is becoming your idée fixe!”
He wanted to turn off these tedious conversations with a jest, but
somehow it was beyond a jest; his smile was artificial and sour. His
sister gave up sitting beside his table and gazing reverently at his
writing hand, and he felt every evening that behind him on the sofa lay
a person who did not agree with him. And his back grew stiff and numb,
and there was a chill in his soul. An author’s vanity is vindictive,
implacable, incapable of forgiveness, and his sister was the first and
only person who had laid bare and disturbed that uneasy feeling, which
is like a big box of crockery, easy to unpack but impossible to pack up
again as it was before.
Weeks and months passed by, and his sister clung to her ideas, and did
not sit down by the table. One spring evening Vladimir Semyonitch was
sitting at his table writing an article. He was reviewing a novel which
described how a village schoolmistress refused the man whom she loved
and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual, simply because
marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible. Vera Semyonovna
lay on the sofa and brooded.
“My God, how slow it is!” she said, stretching. “How insipid and empty
life is! I don’t know what to do with myself, and you are wasting your
best years in goodness knows what. Like some alchemist, you are
rummaging in old rubbish that nobody wants. My God!”
Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his
sister.
“It’s depressing to look at you!” said his sister. “Wagner in ‘Faust’
dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you are
looking for worms for the sake of the worms.”
“That’s vague!”
“Yes, Volodya; all these days I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking
painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that you
are hopelessly reactionary and conventional. Come, ask yourself what is
the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me, what is it?
Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from
that rubbish in which you are always rummaging. You may pound water in a
mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you’ll make nothing more of
it than the chemists have made already. . . .”
“Indeed!” drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up. “Yes, all this is old
rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you consider new,
then?”
“You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to think
of something new. It’s not for me to teach you.”
“Me—an alchemist!” the critic cried in wonder and indignation, screwing
up his eyes ironically. “Art, progress—all that is alchemy?”
“You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people had
set yourselves to solving great problems, all these little questions
that you fuss about now would solve themselves by the way. If you go up
in a balloon to see a town, you will incidentally, without any effort,
see the fields and the villages and the rivers as well. When stearine is
manufactured, you get glycerine as a by-product. It seems to me that
contemporary thought has settled on one spot and stuck to it. It is
prejudiced, apathetic, timid, afraid to take a wide titanic flight, just
as you and I are afraid to climb on a high mountain; it is
conservative.”
Such conversations could not but leave traces. The relations of the
brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother
became unable to work in his sister’s presence, and grew irritable when
he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back; while the
sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to bring back the
past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with her. Every evening she
complained of being bored, and talked about independence of mind and
those who are in the rut of tradition. Carried away by her new ideas,
Vera Semyonovna proved that the work that her brother was so engrossed
in was conventional, that it was a vain effort of conservative minds to
preserve what had already served its turn and was vanishing from the
scene of action. She made no end of comparisons. She compared her
brother at one time to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who
would sooner die than listen to reason. By degrees there was a
perceptible change in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying
on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a
cold, dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong
faith. She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and
tidied her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.
Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred at
her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work, which
was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something strained
and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected. And knowing
he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her and teased her
like a schoolboy.
“You won’t resist evil, but you resist my having servants!” he taunted
her. “If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That’s
inconsistent!”
He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when his
sister began doing odd things before strangers.
“It’s awful, my dear fellow,” he said to me in private, waving his hands
in despair. “It seems that our ingénue has remained to play a part in
the farce, too. She’s become morbid to the marrow of her bones! I’ve
washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she
talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what it means for me to
listen to her. What I feel when in my presence she has the effrontery to
support her errors by blasphemously quoting the teaching of Christ! It
chokes me! It makes me hot all over to hear my sister propounding her
doctrines and trying to distort the Gospel to suit her, when she
purposely refrains from mentioning how the moneychangers were driven out
of the Temple. That’s, my dear fellow, what comes of being half
educated, undeveloped! That’s what comes of medical studies which
provide no general culture!”
One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found his
sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed, wringing
her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks. The critic’s
good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his eyes, too, and he
longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg her forgiveness, and to
live as they used to before. . . . He knelt down and kissed her head,
her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled, smiled bitterly,
unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped up, seized the magazine
from the table and said warmly:
“Hurrah! We’ll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God’s blessing! And
I’ve such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the occasion
with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid, wonderful thing!”
“Oh, no, no!” cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
“I’ve read it already! I don’t want it, I don’t want it!”
“When did you read it?”
“A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it, I
know it!”
“H’m! . . . You’re a fanatic!” her brother said coldly, flinging the
magazine on to the table.
“No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!” And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into
tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering
shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness
endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of
the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the
outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author’s vanity.
From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he
endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence of old
women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off disputing
with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks with a
condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.
One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a
satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed him
on the forehead.
“Where are you going?” he asked with surprise.
“To the province of N. to do vaccination work.” Her brother went out
into the street with her.
“So that’s what you’ve decided upon, you queer girl,” he muttered.
“Don’t you want some money?”
“No, thank you. Good-bye.”
The sister shook her brother’s hand and set off.
“Why don’t you have a cab?” cried Vladimir Semyonitch.
She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her rusty-
looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched along,
forced himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a feeling of
regret. His sister had become a stranger to him. And he was a stranger
to her. Anyway, she did not once look round.
Going back to his room, Vladimir Semyonitch at once sat down to the
table and began to work at his article.
I never saw Vera Semyonovna again. Where she is now I do not know. And
Vladimir Semyonitch went on writing his articles, laying wreaths on
coffins, singing Gaudeamus, busying himself over the Mutual Aid Society
of Moscow Journalists.
He fell ill with inflammation of the lungs; he was ill in bed for three
months—at first at home, and afterwards in the Golitsyn Hospital. An
abscess developed in his knee. People said he ought to be sent to the
Crimea, and began getting up a collection for him. But he did not go to
the Crimea—he died. We buried him in the Vagankovsky Cemetery, on the
left side, where artists and literary men are buried.
One day we writers were sitting in the Tatars’ restaurant. I mentioned
that I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen Vladimir
Semyonitch’s grave there. It was utterly neglected and almost
indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had fallen; it
was necessary to collect a few roubles to put it in order.
But they listened to what I said unconcernedly, made no answer, and I
could not collect a farthing. No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He
was utterly forgotten.
MIRE I
GRACEFULLY swaying in the saddle, a young man wearing the snow-white
tunic of an officer rode into the great yard of the vodka distillery
belonging to the heirs of M. E. Rothstein. The sun smiled carelessly on
the lieutenant’s little stars, on the white trunks of the birch-trees,
on the heaps of broken glass scattered here and there in the yard. The
radiant, vigorous beauty of a summer day lay over everything, and
nothing hindered the snappy young green leaves from dancing gaily and
winking at the clear blue sky. Even the dirty and soot-begrimed
appearance of the bricksheds and the stifling fumes of the distillery
did not spoil the general good impression. The lieutenant sprang gaily
out of the saddle, handed over his horse to a man who ran up, and
stroking with his finger his delicate black moustaches, went in at the
front door. On the top step of the old but light and softly carpeted
staircase he was met by a maidservant with a haughty, not very youthful
face. The lieutenant gave her his card without speaking.
As she went through the rooms with the card, the maid could see on it
the name “Alexandr Grigoryevitch Sokolsky.” A minute later she came back
and told the lieutenant that her mistress could not see him, as she was
not feeling quite well. Sokolsky looked at the ceiling and thrust out
his lower lip.
“How vexatious!” he said. “Listen, my dear,” he said eagerly. “Go and
tell Susanna Moiseyevna, that it is very necessary for me to speak to
her—very. I will only keep her one minute. Ask her to excuse me.”
The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her mistress.
“Very well!” she sighed, returning after a brief interval. “Please walk
in!”
The lieutenant went with her through five or six large, luxuriously
furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found himself in a large and
lofty square room, in which from the first step he was impressed by the
abundance of flowers and plants and the sweet, almost revoltingly heavy
fragrance of jasmine. Flowers were trained to trellis-work along the
walls, screening the windows, hung from the ceiling, and were wreathed
over the corners, so that the room was more like a greenhouse than a
place to live in. Tits, canaries, and goldfinches chirruped among the
green leaves and fluttered against the window-panes.
“Forgive me for receiving you here,” the lieutenant heard in a mellow
feminine voice with a burr on the letter r which was not without charm.
“Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I’m trying to keep still to
prevent its coming on again. What do you want?”
Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low chair, such
as old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese dressing-gown, with her
head wrapped up, leaning back on a pillow. Nothing could be seen behind
the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed,
somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown
concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her
voice, her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.
“Forgive me for being so persistent . . .” began the lieutenant,
cGlinking his spurs. “Allow me to introduce myself: Sokolsky! I come
with a message from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov, who . . .”
“I know!” interposed Susanna Moiseyevna. “I know Kryukov. Sit down; I
don’t like anything big standing before me.”
“My cousin charges me to ask you a favour,” the lieutenant went on,
cGlinking his spurs once more and sitting down. “The fact is, your late
father made a purchase of oats from my cousin last winter, and a small
sum was left owing. The payment only becomes due next week, but my
cousin begs you most particularly to pay him—if possible, to-day.”
As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.
“Surely I’m not in her bedroom?” he thought.
In one corner of the room, where the foliage was thickest and tallest,
under a pink awning like a funeral canopy, stood a bed not yet made,
with the bedclothes still in disorder. Close by on two arm-chairs lay
heaps of crumpled feminine garments. Petticoats and sleeves with rumpled
lace and flounces were trailing on the carpet, on which here and there
lay bits of white tape, cigarette-ends, and the papers of caramels. . .
. Under the bed the toes, pointed and square, of slippers of all kinds
peeped out in a long row. And it seemed to the lieutenant that the scent
of the jasmine came not from the flowers, but from the bed and the
slippers.
“And what is the sum owing?” asked Susanna Moiseyevna.
“Two thousand three hundred.”
“Oho!” said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. “And you call
that—a small sum! However, it’s just the same paying it to-day or paying
it in a week, but I’ve had so many payments to make in the last two
months since my father’s death. . . . Such a lot of stupid business, it
makes my head go round! A nice idea! I want to go abroad, and they keep
forcing me to attend to these silly things. Vodka, oats . . .” she
muttered, half closing her eyes, “oats, bills, percentages, or, as my
head-clerk says, ‘percentage.’ . . . It’s awful. Yesterday I simply
turned the excise officer out. He pesters me with his Tralles. I said to
him: ‘Go to the devil with your Tralles! I can’t see any one!’ He kissed
my hand and went away. I tell you what: can’t your cousin wait two or
three months?”
“A cruel question!” laughed the lieutenant. “My cousin can wait a year,
but it’s I who cannot wait! You see, it’s on my own account I’m acting,
I ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money, and by ill-luck my
cousin hasn’t a rouble to spare. I’m forced to ride about and collect
debts. I’ve just been to see a peasant, our tenant; here I’m now calling
on you; from here I shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that
until I get together five thousand roubles. I need money awfully!”
“Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims, mischief. Why,
have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing at cards? Or are you
getting married?”
“You’ve guessed!” laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly from his
seat, he cGlinked his spurs. “I really am going to be married.”
Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry face, and
sighed.
“I can’t make out what possesses people to get married!” she said,
looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. “Life is so short, one
has so little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!”
“Every one has his own way of looking at things. . . .”
“Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at things . .
. . But, I say, are you really going to marry some one poor? Are you
passionately in love? And why must you have five thousand? Why won’t
four do, or three?”
“What a tongue she has!” thought the lieutenant, and answered: “The
difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to marry till he is
twenty-eight; if you choose to marry, you have to leave the Service or
else pay a deposit of five thousand.”
“Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one has his
own way of looking at things. . . . Perhaps your fiancée is some one
special and remarkable, but . . . but I am utterly unable to understand
how any decent man can live with a woman. I can’t for the life of me
understand it. I have lived, thank the Lord, twenty-seven years, and I
have never yet seen an endurable woman. They’re all affected minxes,
immoral, liars. . . . The only ones I can put up with are cooks and
housemaids, but so-called ladies I won’t let come within shooting
distance of me. But, thank God, they hate me and don’t force themselves
on me! If one of them wants money she sends her husband, but nothing
will induce her to come herself, not from pride—no, but from cowardice;
she’s afraid of my making a scene. Oh, I understand their hatred very
well! Rather! I openly display what they do their very utmost to conceal
from God and man. How can they help hating me? No doubt you’ve heard
bushels of scandal about me already. . . .”
“I only arrived here so lately . . .”
“Tut, tut, tut! . . . I see from your eyes! But your brother’s wife,
surely she primed you for this expedition? Think of letting a young man
come to see such an awful woman without warning him—how could she? Ha,
ha! . . . But tell me, how is your brother? He’s a fine fellow, such a
handsome man! . . . I’ve seen him several times at mass. Why do you look
at me like that? I very often go to church! We all have the same God. To
an educated person externals matter less than the idea. . . . That’s so,
isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course . . .” smiled the lieutenant.
“Yes, the idea. . . . But you are not a bit like your brother. You are
handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal better-looking. There’s
wonderfully little likeness!”
“That’s quite natural; he’s not my brother, but my cousin.”
“Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?”
“My furlough is over in a few days.”
“Well, what’s to be done with you!” sighed Susanna Moiseyevna. “So be
it. I’ll give you the money, though I know you’ll abuse me for it
afterwards. You’ll quarrel with your wife after you are married, and
say: ‘If that mangy Jewess hadn’t given me the money, I should perhaps
have been as free as a bird to-day!’ Is your fiancée pretty?”
“Oh yes. . . .”
“H’m! . . . Anyway, better something, if it’s only beauty, than nothing.
Though however beautiful a woman is, it can never make up to her husband
for her silliness.”
“That’s original!” laughed the lieutenant. “You are a woman yourself,
and such a woman-hater!”
“A woman . . .” smiled Susanna. “It’s not my fault that God has cast me
into this mould, is it? I’m no more to blame for it than you are for
having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for the choice of its
case. I am very fond of myself, but when any one reminds me that I am a
woman, I begin to hate myself. Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress.
Wait for me in the drawing-room.”
The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw a deep
breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which had begun to
irritate his throat and to make him feel giddy.
“What a strange woman!” he thought, looking about him. “She talks
fluently, but . . . far too much, and too freely. She must be neurotic.”
The drawing-room, in which he was standing now, was richly furnished,
and had pretensions to luxury and style. There were dark bronze dishes
with patterns in relief, views of Nice and the Rhine on the tables, old-
fashioned sconces, Japanese statuettes, but all this striving after
luxury and style only emphasised the lack of taste which was glaringly
apparent in the gilt cornices, the gaudy wall-paper, the bright velvet
table-cloths, the common oleographs in heavy frames. The bad taste of
the general effect was the more complete from the lack of finish and the
overcrowding of the room, which gave one a feeling that something was
lacking, and that a great deal should have been thrown away. It was
evident that the furniture had not been bought all at once, but had been
picked up at auctions and other favourable opportunities.
Heaven knows what taste the lieutenant could boast of, but even he
noticed one characteristic peculiarity about the whole place, which no
luxury or style could efface—a complete absence of all trace of womanly,
careful hands, which, as we all know, give a warmth, poetry, and
snugness to the furnishing of a room. There was a chilliness about it
such as one finds in waiting-rooms at stations, in clubs, and foyers at
the theatres.
There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish, except,
perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau. The lieutenant
looked round about him, and, shrugging his shoulders, thought of his
strange, new acquaintance, of her free-and-easy manners, and her way of
talking. But then the door opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady
herself, in a long black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her
figure looked as though it had been turned in a lathe. Now the
lieutenant saw not only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a
head black and as curly as lamb’s-wool. She did not attract him, though
she did not strike him as ugly. He had a prejudice against un-Russian
faces in general, and he considered, too, that the lady’s white face,
the whiteness of which for some reason suggested the cloying scent of
jasmine, did not go well with her little black curls and thick eyebrows;
that her nose and ears were astoundingly white, as though they belonged
to a corpse, or had been moulded out of transparent wax. When she smiled
she showed pale gums as well as her teeth, and he did not like that
either.
“Anæmic debility . . .” he thought; “she’s probably as nervous as a
turkey.”
“Here I am! Come along!” she said, going on rapidly ahead of him and
pulling off the yellow leaves from the plants as she passed.
“I’ll give you the money directly, and if you like I’ll give you some
lunch. Two thousand three hundred roubles! After such a good stroke of
business you’ll have an appetite for your lunch. Do you like my rooms?
The ladies about here declare that my rooms always smell of garlic. With
that culinary gibe their stock of wit is exhausted. I hasten to assure
you that I’ve no garlic even in the cellar. And one day when a doctor
came to see me who smelt of garlic, I asked him to take his hat and go
and spread his fragrance elsewhere. There is no smell of garlic here,
but the place does smell of drugs. My father lay paralyzed for a year
and a half, and the whole house smelt of medicine. A year and a half! I
was sorry to lose him, but I’m glad he’s dead: he suffered so!”
She led the officer through two rooms similar to the drawing-room,
through a large reception hall, and came to a stop in her study, where
there was a lady’s writing-table covered with little knick-knacks. On
the carpet near it several books lay strewn about, opened and folded
back. Through a small door leading from the study he saw a table laid
for lunch.
Still chatting, Susanna took out of her pocket a bunch of little keys
and unlocked an ingeniously made cupboard with a curved, sloping lid.
When the lid was raised the cupboard emitted a plaintive note which made
the lieutenant think of an Æolian harp. Susanna picked out another key
and clicked another lock.
“I have underground passages here and secret doors,” she said, taking
out a small morocco portfolio. “It’s a funny cupboard, isn’t it? And in
this portfolio I have a quarter of my fortune. Look how podgy it is! You
won’t strangle me, will you?”
Susanna raised her eyes to the lieutenant and laughed good-naturedly.
The lieutenant laughed too.
“She’s rather jolly,” he thought, watching the keys flashing between her
fingers.
“Here it is,” she said, picking out the key of the portfolio. “Now, Mr.
Creditor, trot out the IOU. What a silly thing money is really! How
paltry it is, and yet how women love it! I am a Jewess, you know, to the
marrow of my bones. I am passionately fond of Shmuls and Yankels, but
how I loathe that passion for gain in our Semitic blood. They hoard and
they don’t know what they are hoarding for. One ought to live and enjoy
oneself, but they’re afraid of spending an extra farthing. In that way I
am more like an hussar than a Shmul. I don’t like money to be kept long
in one place. And altogether I fancy I’m not much like a Jewess. Does my
accent give me away much, eh?”
“What shall I say?” mumbled the lieutenant. “You speak good Russian, but
you do roll your r’s.”
Susanna laughed and put the little key in the lock of the portfolio. The
lieutenant took out of his pocket a little roll of IOUs and laid them
with a notebook on the table.
“Nothing betrays a Jew as much as his accent,” Susanna went on, looking
gaily at the lieutenant. “However much he twists himself into a Russian
or a Frenchman, ask him to say ‘feather’ and he will say ‘fedder’ . . .
but I pronounce it correctly: ‘Feather! feather! feather!’”
Both laughed.
“By Jove, she’s very jolly!” thought Sokolsky.
Susanna put the portfolio on a chair, took a step towards the
lieutenant, and bringing her face close to his, went on gaily:
“Next to the Jews I love no people so much as the Russian and the
French. I did not do much at school and I know no history, but it seems
to me that the fate of the world lies in the hands of those two nations.
I lived a long time abroad. . . . I spent six months in Madrid. . . .
I’ve gazed my fill at the public, and the conclusion I’ve come to is
that there are no decent peoples except the Russian and the French. Take
the languages, for instance. . . . The German language is like the
neighing of horses; as for the English . . . you can’t imagine anything
stupider. Fight—feet—foot! Italian is only pleasant when they speak it
slowly. If you listen to Italians gabbling, you get the effect of the
Jewish jargon. And the Poles? Mercy on us! There’s no language so
disgusting! ‘Nie pieprz, Pietrze, pieprzem wieprza bo mozeoz
przepieprzyé wieprza pieprzem.’ That means: ‘Don’t pepper a sucking pig
with pepper, Pyotr, or perhaps you’ll over-pepper the sucking pig with
pepper.’ Ha, ha, ha!”
Susanna Moiseyevna rolled her eyes and broke into such a pleasant,
infectious laugh that the lieutenant, looking at her, went off into a
loud and merry peal of laughter. She took the visitor by the button, and
went on:
“You don’t like Jews, of course . . . they’ve many faults, like all
nations. I don’t dispute that. But are the Jews to blame for it? No,
it’s not the Jews who are to blame, but the Jewish women! They are
narrow-minded, greedy; there’s no sort of poetry about them, they’re
dull. . . . You have never lived with a Jewess, so you don’t know how
charming it is!” Susanna Moiseyevna pronounced the last words with
deliberate emphasis and with no eagerness or laughter. She paused as
though frightened at her own openness, and her face was suddenly
distorted in a strange, unaccountable way. Her eyes stared at the
lieutenant without bGlinking, her lips parted and showed clenched teeth.
Her whole face, her throat, and even her bosom, seemed quivering with a
spiteful, catlike expression. Still keeping her eyes fixed on her
visitor, she rapidly bent to one side, and swiftly, like a cat, snatched
something from the table. All this was the work of a few seconds.
Watching her movements, the lieutenant saw five fingers crumple up his
IOUs and caught a glimpse of the white rustling paper as it disappeared
in her clenched fist. Such an extraordinary transition from good-natured
laughter to crime so appalled him that he turned pale and stepped back.
. . .
And she, still keeping her frightened, searching eyes upon him, felt
along her hip with her clenched fist for her pocket. Her fist struggled
convulsively for the pocket, like a fish in the net, and could not find
the opening. In another moment the IOUs would have vanished in the
recesses of her feminine garments, but at that point the lieutenant
uttered a faint cry, and, moved more by instinct than reflection, seized
the Jewess by her arm above the clenched fist. Showing her teeth more
than ever, she struggled with all her might and pulled her hand away.
Then Sokolsky put his right arm firmly round her waist, and the other
round her chest and a struggle followed. Afraid of outraging her sex or
hurting her, he tried only to prevent her moving, and to get hold of the
fist with the IOUs; but she wriggled like an eel in his arms with her
supple, flexible body, struck him in the chest with her elbows, and
scratched him, so that he could not help touching her all over, and was
forced to hurt her and disregard her modesty.
“How unusual this is! How strange!” he thought, utterly amazed, hardly
able to believe his senses, and feeling rather sick from the scent of
jasmine.
In silence, breathing heavily, stumbling against the furniture, they
moved about the room. Susanna was carried away by the struggle. She
flushed, closed her eyes, and forgetting herself, once even pressed her
face against the face of the lieutenant, so that there was a sweetish
taste left on his lips. At last he caught hold of her clenched hand. . .
. Forcing it open, and not finding the papers in it, he let go the
Jewess. With flushed faces and dishevelled hair, they looked at one
another, breathing hard. The spiteful, catlike expression on the
Jewess’s face was gradually replaced by a good-natured smile. She burst
out laughing, and turning on one foot, went towards the room where lunch
was ready. The lieutenant moved slowly after her. She sat down to the
table, and, still flushed and breathing hard, tossed off half a glass of
port.
“Listen”—the lieutenant broke the silence—“I hope you are joking?”
“Not a bit of it,” she answered, thrusting a piece of bread into her
mouth.
“H’m! . . . How do you wish me to take all this?”
“As you choose. Sit down and have lunch!”
“But . . . it’s dishonest!”
“Perhaps. But don’t trouble to give me a sermon; I have my own way of
looking at things.”
“Won’t you give them back?”
“Of course not! If you were a poor unfortunate man, with nothing to eat,
then it would be a different matter. But—he wants to get married!”
“It’s not my money, you know; it’s my cousin’s!”
“And what does your cousin want with money? To get fashionable clothes
for his wife? But I really don’t care whether your belle-soeur has
dresses or not.”
The lieutenant had ceased to remember that he was in a strange house
with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with decorum. He
strode up and down the room, scowled and nervously fingered his
waistcoat. The fact that the Jewess had lowered herself in his eyes by
her dishonest action, made him feel bolder and more free-and-easy.
“The devil knows what to make of it!” he muttered. “Listen. I shan’t go
away from here until I get the IOUs!”
“Ah, so much the better,” laughed Susanna. “If you stay here for good,
it will make it livelier for me.”
Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna’s laughing,
insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving bosom, and grew
bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking about the IOU he began
for some reason recalling with a sort of relish his cousin’s stories of
the Jewess’s romantic adventures, of her free way of life, and these
reminiscences only provoked him to greater audacity. Impulsively he sat
down beside the Jewess and thinking no more of the IOUs began to eat. .
. .
“Will you have vodka or wine?” Susanna asked with a laugh. “So you will
stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days and nights you
will have to spend with me, waiting for those IOUs! Won’t your fiancée
have something to say about it?” II
Five hours had passed. The lieutenant’s cousin, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov was walking about the rooms of his country-house in his
dressing-gown and slippers, and looking impatiently out of window. He
was a tall, sturdy man, with a large black beard and a manly face; and
as the Jewess had truly said, he was handsome, though he had reached the
age when men are apt to grow too stout, puffy, and bald. By mind and
temperament he was one of those natures in which the Russian
intellectual classes are so rich: warm-hearted, good-natured, well-bred,
having some knowledge of the arts and sciences, some faith, and the most
chivalrous notions about honour, but indolent and lacking in depth. He
was fond of good eating and drinking, was an ideal whist-player, was a
connoisseur in women and horses, but in other things he was apathetic
and sluggish as a seal, and to rouse him from his lethargy something
extraordinary and quite revolting was needed, and then he would forget
everything in the world and display intense activity; he would fume and
talk of a duel, write a petition of seven pages to a Minister, gallop at
breakneck speed about the district, call some one publicly “a
scoundrel,” would go to law, and so on.
“How is it our Sasha’s not back yet?” he kept asking his wife, glancing
out of window. “Why, it’s dinner-time!”
After waiting for the lieutenant till six o’clock, they sat down to
dinner. When supper-time came, however, Alexey Ivanovitch was listening
to every footstep, to every sound of the door, and kept shrugging his
shoulders.
“Strange!” he said. “The rascally dandy must have stayed on at the
tenant’s.”
As he went to bed after supper, Kryukov made up his mind that the
lieutenant was being entertained at the tenant’s, where after a festive
evening he was staying the night.
Alexandr Grigoryevitch only returned next morning. He looked extremely
crumpled and confused.
“I want to speak to you alone . . .” he said mysteriously to his cousin.
They went into the study. The lieutenant shut the door, and he paced for
a long time up and down before he began to speak.
“Something’s happened, my dear fellow,” he began, “that I don’t know how
to tell you about. You wouldn’t believe it . . .”
And blushing, faltering, not looking at his cousin, he told what had
happened with the IOUs. Kryukov, standing with his feet wide apart and
his head bent, listened and frowned.
“Are you joking?” he asked.
“How the devil could I be joking? It’s no joking matter!”
“I don’t understand!” muttered Kryukov, turning crimson and flinging up
his hands. “It’s positively . . . immoral on your part. Before your very
eyes a hussy is up to the devil knows what, a serious crime, plays a
nasty trick, and you go and kiss her!”
“But I can’t understand myself how it happened!” whispered the
lieutenant, bGlinking guiltily. “Upon my honour, I don’t understand it!
It’s the first time in my life I’ve come across such a monster! It’s not
her beauty that does for you, not her mind, but that . . . you
understand . . . insolence, cynicism. . . .”
“Insolence, cynicism . . . it’s unclean! If you’ve such a longing for
insolence and cynicism, you might have picked a sow out of the mire and
have devoured her alive. It would have been cheaper, anyway! Instead of
two thousand three hundred!”
“You do express yourself elegantly!” said the lieutenant, frowning.
“I’ll pay you back the two thousand three hundred!”
“I know you’ll pay it back, but it’s not a question of money! Damn the
money! What revolts me is your being such a limp rag . . . such filthy
feebleness! And engaged! With a fiancée!”
“Don’t speak of it . . .” said the lieutenant, blushing. “I loathe
myself as it is. I should like to sink into the earth. It’s sickening
and vexatious that I shall have to bother my aunt for that five
thousand. . . .”
Kryukov continued for some time longer expressing his indignation and
grumbling, then, as he grew calmer, he sat down on the sofa and began to
jeer at his cousin.
“You young officers!” he said with contemptuous irony. “Nice
bridegrooms.”
Suddenly he leapt up as though he had been stung, stamped his foot, and
ran about the study.
“No, I’m not going to leave it like that!” he said, shaking his fist. “I
will have those IOUs, I will! I’ll give it her! One doesn’t beat women,
but I’ll break every bone in her body. . . . I’ll pound her to a jelly!
I’m not a lieutenant! You won’t touch me with insolence or cynicism! No-
o-o, damn her! Mishka!” he shouted, “run and tell them to get the racing
droshky out for me!”
Kryukov dressed rapidly, and, without heeding the agitated lieutenant,
got into the droshky, and with a wave of his hand resolutely raced off
to Susanna Moiseyevna. For a long time the lieutenant gazed out of
window at the clouds of dust that rolled after his cousin’s droshky,
stretched, yawned, and went to his own room. A quarter of an hour later
he was sound asleep.
At six o’clock he was waked up and summoned to dinner.
“How nice this is of Alexey!” his cousin’s wife greeted him in the
dining-room. “He keeps us waiting for dinner.”
“Do you mean to say he’s not come back yet?” yawned the lieutenant.
“H’m! . . . he’s probably gone round to see the tenant.”
But Alexey Ivanovitch was not back by supper either. His wife and
Sokolsky decided that he was playing cards at the tenant’s and would
most likely stay the night there. What had happened was not what they
had supposed, however.
Kryukov returned next morning, and without greeting any one, without a
word, dashed into his study.
“Well?” whispered the lieutenant, gazing at him round-eyed.
Kryukov waved his hand and gave a snort.
“Why, what’s the matter? What are you laughing at?”
Kryukov flopped on the sofa, thrust his head in the pillow, and shook
with suppressed laughter. A minute later he got up, and looking at the
surprised lieutenant, with his eyes full of tears from laughing, said:
“Close the door. Well . . . she is a fe-e-male, I beg to inform you!”
“Did you get the IOUs?”
Kryukov waved his hand and went off into a peal of laughter again.
“Well! she is a female!” he went on. “Merci for the acquaintance, my
boy! She’s a devil in petticoats. I arrived; I walked in like such an
avenging Jove, you know, that I felt almost afraid of myself . . . . I
frowned, I scowled, even clenched my fists to be more awe-inspiring. . .
. ‘Jokes don’t pay with me, madam!’ said I, and more in that style. And
I threatened her with the law and with the Governor. To begin with she
burst into tears, said she’d been joking with you, and even took me to
the cupboard to give me the money. Then she began arguing that the
future of Europe lies in the hands of the French, and the Russians,
swore at women. . . . Like you, I listened, fascinated, ass that I was.
. . . She kept singing the praises of my beauty, patted me on the arm
near the shoulder, to see how strong I was, and . . . and as you see,
I’ve only just got away from her! Ha, ha! She’s enthusiastic about you!”
“You’re a nice fellow!” laughed the lieutenant. “A married man! highly
respected. . . . Well, aren’t you ashamed? Disgusted? Joking apart
though, old man, you’ve got your Queen Tamara in your own neighbourhood.
. . .”
“In my own neighbourhood! Why, you wouldn’t find another such chameleon
in the whole of Russia! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,
though I know a good bit about women, too. I have known regular devils
in my time, but I never met anything like this. It is, as you say, by
insolence and cynicism she gets over you. What is so attractive in her
is the diabolical suddenness, the quick transitions, the swift shifting
hues. . . . Brrr! And the IOU— phew! Write it off for lost. We are both
great sinners, we’ll go halves in our sin. I shall put down to you not
two thousand three hundred, but half of it. Mind, tell my wife I was at
the tenant’s.”
Kryukov and the lieutenant buried their heads in the pillows, and broke
into laughter; they raised their heads, glanced at one another, and
again subsided into their pillows.
“Engaged! A lieutenant!” Kryukov jeered.
“Married!” retorted Sokolsky. “Highly respected! Father of a family!”
At dinner they talked in veiled allusions, winked at one another, and,
to the surprise of the others, were continually gushing with laughter
into their dinner-napkins. After dinner, still in the best of spirits,
they dressed up as Turks, and, running after one another with guns,
played at soldiers with the children. In the evening they had a long
argument. The lieutenant maintained that it was mean and contemptible to
accept a dowry with your wife, even when there was passionate love on
both sides. Kryukov thumped the table with his fists and declared that
this was absurd, and that a husband who did not like his wife to have
property of her own was an egoist and a despot. Both shouted, boiled
over, did not understand each other, drank a good deal, and in the end,
picking up the skirts of their dressing-gowns, went to their bedrooms.
They soon fell asleep and slept soundly.
Life went on as before, even, sluggish and free from sorrow. The shadows
lay on the earth, thunder pealed from the clouds, from time to time the
wind moaned plaintively, as though to prove that nature, too, could
lament, but nothing troubled the habitual tranquillity of these people.
Of Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said nothing. Both of them felt,
somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud. Yet they remembered it
and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had
unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be
pleasant to recall in old age.
On the sixth or seventh day after his visit to the Jewess, Kryukov was
sitting in his study in the morning writing a congratulatory letter to
his aunt. Alexandr Grigoryevitch was walking to and fro near the table
in silence. The lieutenant had slept badly that night; he woke up
depressed, and now he felt bored. He paced up and down, thinking of the
end of his furlough, of his fiancée, who was expecting him, of how
people could live all their lives in the country without feeling bored.
Standing at the window, for a long time he stared at the trees, smoked
three cigarettes one after another, and suddenly turned to his cousin.
“I have a favour to ask you, Alyosha,” he said. “Let me have a saddle-
horse for the day. . . .”
Kryukov looked searchingly at him and continued his writing with a
frown.
“You will, then?” asked the lieutenant.
Kryukov looked at him again, then deliberately drew out a drawer in the
table, and taking out a thick roll of notes, gave it to his cousin.
“Here’s five thousand . . .” he said. “Though it’s not my money, yet,
God bless you, it’s all the same. I advise you to send for post-horses
at once and go away. Yes, really!”
The lieutenant in his turn looked searchingly at Kryukov and laughed.
“You’ve guessed right, Alyosha,” he said, reddening. “It was to her I
meant to ride. Yesterday evening when the washerwoman gave me that
damned tunic, the one I was wearing then, and it smelt of jasmine, why .
. . I felt I must go!”
“You must go away.”
“Yes, certainly. And my furlough’s just over. I really will go to-day!
Yes, by Jove! However long one stays, one has to go in the end. . . .
I’m going!”
The post-horses were brought after dinner the same day; the lieutenant
said good-bye to the Kryukovs and set off, followed by their good
wishes.
Another week passed. It was a dull but hot and heavy day. From early
morning Kryukov walked aimlessly about the house, looking out of window,
or turning over the leaves of albums, though he was sick of the sight of
them already. When he came across his wife or children, he began
grumbling crossly. It seemed to him, for some reason that day, that his
children’s manners were revolting, that his wife did not know how to
look after the servants, that their expenditure was quite
disproportionate to their income. All this meant that “the master” was
out of humour.
After dinner, Kryukov, feeling dissatisfied with the soup and the roast
meat he had eaten, ordered out his racing droshky. He drove slowly out
of the courtyard, drove at a walking pace for a quarter of a mile, and
stopped.
“Shall I . . . drive to her . . . that devil?” he thought, looking at
the leaden sky.
And Kryukov positively laughed, as though it were the first time that
day he had asked himself that question. At once the load of boredom was
lifted from his heart, and there rose a gleam of pleasure in his lazy
eyes. He lashed the horse. . . .
All the way his imagination was picturing how surprised the Jewess would
be to see him, how he would laugh and chat, and come home feeling
refreshed. . . .
“Once a month one needs something to brighten one up . . . something out
of the common round,” he thought, “something that would give the
stagnant organism a good shaking up, a reaction . . . whether it’s a
drinking bout, or . . . Susanna. One can’t get on without it.”
It was getting dark when he drove into the yard of the vodka distillery.
From the open windows of the owner’s house came sounds of laughter and
singing:
“‘Brighter than lightning, more burning than flame. . . .’”
sang a powerful, mellow, bass voice.
“Aha! she has visitors,” thought Kryukov.
And he was annoyed that she had visitors.
“Shall I go back?” he thought with his hand on the bell, but he rang all
the same, and went up the familiar staircase. From the entry he glanced
into the reception hall. There were about five men there—all landowners
and officials of his acquaintance; one, a tall, thin gentleman, was
sitting at the piano, singing, and striking the keys with his long, thin
fingers. The others were listening and grinning with enjoyment. Kryukov
looked himself up and down in the looking-glass, and was about to go
into the hall, when Susanna Moiseyevna herself darted into the entry, in
high spirits and wearing the same black dress. . . . Seeing Kryukov, she
was petrified for an instant, then she uttered a little scream and
beamed with delight.
“Is it you?” she said, clutching his hand. “What a surprise!”
“Here she is!” smiled Kryukov, putting his arm round her waist. “Well!
Does the destiny of Europe still lie in the hands of the French and the
Russians?”
“I’m so glad,” laughed the Jewess, cautiously removing his arm. “Come,
go into the hall; they’re all friends there. . . . I’ll go and tell them
to bring you some tea. Your name’s Alexey, isn’t it? Well, go in, I’ll
come directly. . . .”
She blew him a kiss and ran out of the entry, leaving behind her the
same sickly smell of jasmine. Kryukov raised his head and walked into
the hall. He was on terms of friendly intimacy with all the men in the
room, but scarcely nodded to them; they, too, scarcely responded, as
though the places in which they met were not quite decent, and as though
they were in tacit agreement with one another that it was more suitable
for them not to recognise one another.
From the hall Kryukov walked into the drawing-room, and from it into a
second drawing-room. On the way he met three or four other guests, also
men whom he knew, though they barely recognised him. Their faces were
flushed with drink and merriment. Alexey Ivanovitch glanced furtively at
them and marvelled that these men, respectable heads of families, who
had known sorrow and privation, could demean themselves to such pitiful,
cheap gaiety! He shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and walked on.
“There are places,” he reflected, “where a sober man feels sick, and a
drunken man rejoices. I remember I never could go to the operetta or the
gipsies when I was sober: wine makes a man more good-natured and
reconciles him with vice. . . .”
Suddenly he stood still, petrified, and caught hold of the door-post
with both hands. At the writing-table in Susanna’s study was sitting
Lieutenant Alexandr Grigoryevitch. He was discussing something in an
undertone with a fat, flabby-looking Jew, and seeing his cousin, flushed
crimson and looked down at an album.
The sense of decency was stirred in Kryukov and the blood rushed to his
head. Overwhelmed with amazement, shame, and anger, he walked up to the
table without a word. Sokolsky’s head sank lower than ever. His face
worked with an expression of agonising shame.
“Ah, it’s you, Alyosha!” he articulated, making a desperate effort to
raise his eyes and to smile. “I called here to say good-bye, and, as you
see. . . . But to-morrow I am certainly going.”
“What can I say to him? What?” thought Alexey Ivanovitch. “How can I
judge him since I’m here myself?”
And clearing his throat without uttering a word, he went out slowly.
“‘Call her not heavenly, and leave her on earth. . . .’”
The bass was singing in the hall. A little while after, Kryukov’s racing
droshky was bumping along the dusty road.
NEIGHBOURS
PYOTR MIHALITCH IVASHIN was very much out of humour: his sister, a young
girl, had gone away to live with Vlassitch, a married man. To shake off
the despondency and depression which pursued him at home and in the
fields, he called to his aid his sense of justice, his genuine and noble
ideas—he had always defended free-love! —but this was of no avail, and
he always came back to the same conclusion as their foolish old nurse,
that his sister had acted wrongly and that Vlassitch had abducted his
sister. And that was distressing.
His mother did not leave her room all day long; the old nurse kept
sighing and speaking in whispers; his aunt had been on the point of
taking her departure every day, and her trunks were continually being
brought down to the hall and carried up again to her room. In the house,
in the yard, and in the garden it was as still as though there were some
one dead in the house. His aunt, the servants, and even the peasants, so
it seemed to Pyotr Mihalitch, looked at him enigmatically and with
perplexity, as though they wanted to say “Your sister has been seduced;
why are you doing nothing?” And he reproached himself for inactivity,
though he did not know precisely what action he ought to have taken.
So passed six days. On the seventh—it was Sunday afternoon—a messenger
on horseback brought a letter. The address was in a familiar feminine
handwriting: “Her Excy. Anna Nikolaevna Ivashin.” Pyotr Mihalitch
fancied that there was something defiant, provocative, in the
handwriting and in the abbreviation “Excy.” And advanced ideas in women
are obstinate, ruthless, cruel.
“She’d rather die than make any concession to her unhappy mother, or beg
her forgiveness,” thought Pyotr Mihalitch, as he went to his mother with
the letter.
His mother was lying on her bed, dressed. Seeing her son, she rose
impulsively, and straightening her grey hair, which had fallen from
under her cap, asked quickly:
“What is it? What is it?”
“This has come . . .” said her son, giving her the letter.
Zina’s name, and even the pronoun “she” was not uttered in the house.
Zina was spoken of impersonally: “this has come,” “Gone away,” and so
on. . . . The mother recognised her daughter’s handwriting, and her face
grew ugly and unpleasant, and her grey hair escaped again from her cap.
“No!” she said, with a motion of her hands, as though the letter
scorched her fingers. “No, no, never! Nothing would induce me!”
The mother broke into hysterical sobs of grief and shame; she evidently
longed to read the letter, but her pride prevented her. Pyotr Mihalitch
realised that he ought to open the letter himself and read it aloud, but
he was overcome by anger such as he had never felt before; he ran out
into the yard and shouted to the messenger:
“Say there will be no answer! There will be no answer! Tell them that,
you beast!”
And he tore up the letter; then tears came into his eyes, and feeling
that he was cruel, miserable, and to blame, he went out into the fields.
He was only twenty-seven, but he was already stout. He dressed like an
old man in loose, roomy clothes, and suffered from asthma. He already
seemed to be developing the characteristics of an elderly country
bachelor. He never fell in love, never thought of marriage, and loved no
one but his mother, his sister, his old nurse, and the gardener,
Vassilitch. He was fond of good fare, of his nap after dinner, and of
talking about politics and exalted subjects. He had in his day taken his
degree at the university, but he now looked upon his studies as though
in them he had discharged a duty incumbent upon young men between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-five; at any rate, the ideas which now
strayed every day through his mind had nothing in common with the
university or the subjects he had studied there.
In the fields it was hot and still, as though rain were coming. It was
steaming in the wood, and there was a heavy fragrant scent from the
pines and rotting leaves. Pyotr Mihalitch stopped several times and
wiped his wet brow. He looked at his winter corn and his spring oats,
walked round the clover-field, and twice drove away a partridge with its
chicks which had strayed in from the wood. And all the while he was
thinking that this insufferable state of things could not go on for
ever, and that he must end it one way or another. End it stupidly,
madly, but he must end it.
“But how? What can I do?” he asked himself, and looked imploringly at
the sky and at the trees, as though begging for their help.
But the sky and the trees were mute. His noble ideas were no help, and
his common sense whispered that the agonising question could have no
solution but a stupid one, and that to-day’s scene with the messenger
was not the last one of its kind. It was terrible to think what was in
store for him!
As he returned home the sun was setting. By now it seemed to him that
the problem was incapable of solution. He could not accept the
accomplished fact, and he could not refuse to accept it, and there was
no intermediate course. When, taking off his hat and fanning himself
with his handkerchief, he was walking along the road, and had only
another mile and a half to go before he would reach home, he heard bells
behind him. It was a very choice and successful combination of bells,
which gave a clear crystal note. No one had such bells on his horses but
the police captain, Medovsky, formerly an officer in the hussars, a man
in broken-down health, who had been a great rake and spendthrift, and
was a distant relation of Pyotr Mihalitch. He was like one of the family
at the Ivashins’ and had a tender, fatherly affection for Zina, as well
as a great admiration for her.
“I was coming to see you,” he said, overtaking Pyotr Mihalitch. “Get in;
I’ll give you a lift.”
He was smiling and looked cheerful. Evidently he did not yet know that
Zina had gone to live with Vlassitch; perhaps he had been told of it
already, but did not believe it. Pyotr Mihalitch felt in a difficult
position.
“You are very welcome,” he muttered, blushing till the tears came into
his eyes, and not knowing how to lie or what to say. “I am delighted,”
he went on, trying to smile, “but . . . Zina is away and mother is ill.”
“How annoying!” said the police captain, looking pensively at Pyotr
Mihalitch. “And I was meaning to spend the evening with you. Where has
Zinaida Mihalovna gone?”
“To the Sinitskys’, and I believe she meant to go from there to the
monastery. I don’t quite know.”
The police captain talked a little longer and then turned back. Pyotr
Mihalitch walked home, and thought with horror what the police captain’s
feelings would be when he learned the truth. And Pyotr Mihalitch
imagined his feelings, and actually experiencing them himself, went into
the house.
“Lord help us,” he thought, “Lord help us!”
At evening tea the only one at the table was his aunt. As usual, her
face wore the expression that seemed to say that though she was a weak,
defenceless woman, she would allow no one to insult her. Pyotr Mihalitch
sat down at the other end of the table (he did not like his aunt) and
began drinking tea in silence.
“Your mother has had no dinner again to-day,” said his aunt. “You ought
to do something about it, Petrusha. Starving oneself is no help in
sorrow.”
It struck Pyotr Mihalitch as absurd that his aunt should meddle in other
people’s business and should make her departure depend on Zina’s having
gone away. He was tempted to say something rude to her, but restrained
himself. And as he restrained himself he felt the time had come for
action, and that he could not bear it any longer. Either he must act at
once or fall on the ground, and scream and bang his head upon the floor.
He pictured Vlassitch and Zina, both of them progressive and self-
satisfied, kissing each other somewhere under a maple tree, and all the
anger and bitterness that had been accumulating in him for the last
seven days fastened upon Vlassitch.
“One has seduced and abducted my sister,” he thought, “another will come
and murder my mother, a third will set fire to the house and sack the
place. . . . And all this under the mask of friendship, lofty ideas,
unhappiness!”
“No, it shall not be!” Pyotr Mihalitch cried suddenly, and he brought
his fist down on the table.
He jumped up and ran out of the dining-room. In the stable the steward’s
horse was standing ready saddled. He got on it and galloped off to
Vlassitch.
There was a perfect tempest within him. He felt a longing to do
something extraordinary, startling, even if he had to repent of it all
his life afterwards. Should he call Vlassitch a blackguard, slap him in
the face, and then challenge him to a duel? But Vlassitch was not one of
those men who do fight duels; being called a blackguard and slapped in
the face would only make him more unhappy, and would make him shrink
into himself more than ever. These unhappy, defenceless people are the
most insufferable, the most tiresome creatures in the world. They can do
anything with impunity. When the luckless man responds to well-deserved
reproach by looking at you with eyes full of deep and guilty feeling,
and with a sickly smile bends his head submissively, even justice itself
could not lift its hand against him.
“No matter. I’ll horsewhip him before her eyes and tell him what I think
of him,” Pyotr Mihalitch decided.
He was riding through his wood and waste land, and he imagined Zina
would try to justify her conduct by talking about the rights of women
and individual freedom, and about there being no difference between
legal marriage and free union. Like a woman, she would argue about what
she did not understand. And very likely at the end she would ask, “How
do you come in? What right have you to interfere?”
“No, I have no right,” muttered Pyotr Mihalitch. “But so much the
better. . . . The harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere, the
better.”
It was sultry. Clouds of gnats hung over the ground and in the waste
places the peewits called plaintively. Everything betokened rain, but he
could not see a cloud in the sky. Pyotr Mihalitch crossed the boundary
of his estate and galloped over a smooth, level field. He often went
along this road and knew every bush, every hollow in it. What now in the
far distance looked in the dusk like a dark cliff was a red church; he
could picture it all down to the smallest detail, even the plaster on
the gate and the calves that were always grazing in the church
enclosure. Three-quarters of a mile to the right of the church there was
a copse like a dark blur—it was Count Koltonovitch’s. And beyond the
church Vlassitch’s estate began.
From behind the church and the count’s copse a huge black storm-cloud
was rising, and there were ashes of white lightning.
“Here it is!” thought Pyotr Mihalitch. “Lord help us, Lord help us!”
The horse was soon tired after its quick gallop, and Pyotr Mihalitch was
tired too. The storm-cloud looked at him angrily and seemed to advise
him to go home. He felt a little scared.
“I will prove to them they are wrong,” he tried to reassure himself.
“They will say that it is free-love, individual freedom; but freedom
means self-control and not subjection to passion. It’s not liberty but
license!”
He reached the count’s big pond; it looked dark blue and frowning under
the cloud, and a smell of damp and slime rose from it. Near the dam, two
willows, one old and one young, drooped tenderly towards one another.
Pyotr Mihalitch and Vlassitch had been walking near this very spot only
a fortnight before, humming a students’ song:
“‘Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and
loveless.’”
A wretched song!
It was thundering as Pyotr Mihalitch rode through the copse, and the
trees were bending and rustling in the wind. He had to make haste. It
was only three-quarters of a mile through a meadow from the copse to
Vlassitch’s house. Here there were old birch-trees on each side of the
road. They had the same melancholy and unhappy air as their owner
Vlassitch, and looked as tall and lanky as he. Big drops of rain
pattered on the birches and on the grass; the wind had suddenly dropped,
and there was a smell of wet earth and poplars. Before him he saw
Vlassitch’s fence with a row of yellow acacias, which were tall and
lanky too; where the fence was broken he could see the neglected
orchard.
Pyotr Mihalitch was not thinking now of the horsewhip or of a slap in
the face, and did not know what he would do at Vlassitch’s. He felt
nervous. He felt frightened on his own account and on his sister’s, and
was terrified at the thought of seeing her. How would she behave with
her brother? What would they both talk about? And had he not better go
back before it was too late? As he made these reflections, he galloped
up the avenue of lime-trees to the house, rode round the big clumps of
lilacs, and suddenly saw Vlassitch.
Vlassitch, wearing a cotton shirt, and top-boots, bending forward, with
no hat on in the rain, was coming from the corner of the house to the
front door. He was followed by a workman with a hammer and a box of
nails. They must have been mending a shutter which had been banging in
the wind. Seeing Pyotr Mihalitch, Vlassitch stopped.
“It’s you!” he said, smiling. “That’s nice.”
“Yes, I’ve come, as you see,” said Pyotr Mihalitch, brushing the rain
off himself with both hands.
“Well, that’s capital! I’m very glad,” said Vlassitch, but he did not
hold out his hand: evidently he did not venture, but waited for Pyotr
Mihalitch to hold out his. “It will do the oats good,” he said, looking
at the sky.
“Yes.”
They went into the house in silence. To the right of the hall was a door
leading to another hall and then to the drawing-room, and on the left
was a little room which in winter was used by the steward. Pyotr
Mihalitch and Vlassitch went into this little room.
“Where were you caught in the rain?”
“Not far off, quite close to the house.”
Pyotr Mihalitch sat down on the bed. He was glad of the noise of the
rain and the darkness of the room. It was better: it made it less
dreadful, and there was no need to see his companion’s face. There was
no anger in his heart now, nothing but fear and vexation with himself.
He felt he had made a bad beginning, and that nothing would come of this
visit.
Both were silent for some time and affected to be listening to the rain.
“Thank you, Petrusha,” Vlassitch began, clearing his throat. “I am very
grateful to you for coming. It’s generous and noble of you. I understand
it, and, believe me, I appreciate it. Believe me.”
He looked out of the window and went on, standing in the middle of the
room:
“Everything happened so secretly, as though we were concealing it all
from you. The feeling that you might be wounded and angry has been a
blot on our happiness all these days. But let me justify myself. We kept
it secret not because we did not trust you. To begin with, it all
happened suddenly, by a kind of inspiration; there was no time to
discuss it. Besides, it’s such a private, delicate matter, and it was
awkward to bring a third person in, even some one as intimate as you.
Above all, in all this we reckoned on your generosity. You are a very
noble and generous person. I am infinitely grateful to you. If you ever
need my life, come and take it.”
Vlassitch talked in a quiet, hollow bass, always on the same droning
note; he was evidently agitated. Pyotr Mihalitch felt it was his turn to
speak, and that to listen and keep silent would really mean playing the
part of a generous and noble simpleton, and that had not been his idea
in coming. He got up quickly and said, breathlessly in an undertone:
“Listen, Grigory. You know I liked you and could have desired no better
husband for my sister; but what has happened is awful! It’s terrible to
think of it!”
“Why is it terrible?” asked Vlassitch, with a quiver in his voice. “It
would be terrible if we had done wrong, but that isn’t so.”
“Listen, Grigory. You know I have no prejudices; but, excuse my
frankness, to my mind you have both acted selfishly. Of course, I shan’t
say so to my sister—it will distress her; but you ought to know: mother
is miserable beyond all description.”
“Yes, that’s sad,” sighed Vlassitch. “We foresaw that, Petrusha, but
what could we have done? Because one’s actions hurt other people, it
doesn’t prove that they are wrong. What’s to be done! Every important
step one takes is bound to distress somebody. If you went to fight for
freedom, that would distress your mother, too. What’s to be done! Any
one who puts the peace of his family before everything has to renounce
the life of ideas completely.”
There was a vivid flash of lightning at the window, and the lightning
seemed to change the course of Vlassitch’s thoughts. He sat down beside
Pyotr Mihalitch and began saying what was utterly beside the point.
“I have such a reverence for your sister, Petrusha,” he said. “When I
used to come and see you, I felt as though I were going to a holy
shrine, and I really did worship Zina. Now my reverence for her grows
every day. For me she is something higher than a wife—yes, higher!”
Vlassitch waved his hands. “She is my holy of holies. Since she is
living with me, I enter my house as though it were a temple. She is an
extraordinary, rare, most noble woman!”
“Well, he’s off now!” thought Pyotr Mihalitch; he disliked the word
“woman.”
“Why shouldn’t you be married properly?” he asked. “How much does your
wife want for a divorce?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
“It’s rather a lot. But if we were to negotiate with her?”
“She won’t take a farthing less. She is an awful woman, brother,” sighed
Vlassitch. “I’ve never talked to you about her before—it was unpleasant
to think of her; but now that the subject has come up, I’ll tell you
about her. I married her on the impulse of the moment—a fine, honourable
impulse. An officer in command of a battalion of our regiment—if you
care to hear the details—had an affair with a girl of eighteen; that is,
to put it plainly, he seduced her, lived with her for two months, and
abandoned her. She was in an awful position, brother. She was ashamed to
go home to her parents; besides, they wouldn’t have received her. Her
lover had abandoned her; there was nothing left for her but to go to the
barracks and sell herself. The other officers in the regiment were
indignant. They were by no means saints themselves, but the baseness of
it was so striking. Besides, no one in the regiment could endure the
man. And to spite him, you understand, the indignant lieutenants and
ensigns began getting up a subscription for the unfortunate girl. And
when we subalterns met together and began to subscribe five or ten
roubles each, I had a sudden inspiration. I felt it was an opportunity
to do something fine. I hastened to the girl and warmly expressed my
sympathy. And while I was on my way to her, and while I was talking to
her, I loved her fervently as a woman insulted and injured. Yes. . . .
Well, a week later I made her an offer. The colonel and my comrades
thought my marriage out of keeping with the dignity of an officer. That
roused me more than ever. I wrote a long letter, do you know, in which I
proved that my action ought to be inscribed in the annals of the
regiment in letters of gold, and so on. I sent the letter to my colonel
and copies to my comrades. Well, I was excited, and, of course, I could
not avoid being rude. I was asked to leave the regiment. I have a rough
copy of it put away somewhere; I’ll give it to you to read sometime. It
was written with great feeling. You will see what lofty and noble
sentiments I was experiencing. I resigned my commission and came here
with my wife. My father had left a few debts, I had no money, and from
the first day my wife began making acquaintances, dressing herself
smartly, and playing cards, and I was obliged to mortgage the estate.
She led a bad life, you understand, and you are the only one of the
neighbours who hasn’t been her lover. After two years I gave her all I
had to set me free and she went off to town. Yes. . . . And now I pay
her twelve hundred roubles a year. She is an awful woman! There is a
fly, brother, which lays an egg in the back of a spider so that the
spider can’t shake it off: the grub fastens upon the spider and drinks
its heart’s blood. That was how this woman fastened upon me and sucks
the blood of my heart. She hates and despises me for being so stupid;
that is, for marrying a woman like her. My chivalry seems to her
despicable. ‘A wise man cast me off,’ she says, ‘and a fool picked me
up.’ To her thinking no one but a pitiful idiot could have behaved as I
did. And that is insufferably bitter to me, brother. Altogether, I may
say in parenthesis, fate has been hard upon me, very hard.”
Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and wondered in perplexity what it
was in this man that had so charmed his sister. He was not young—he was
forty-one—lean and lanky, narrow-chested, with a long nose, and grey
hairs in his beard. He talked in a droning voice, had a sickly smile,
and waved his hands awkwardly as he talked. He had neither health, nor
pleasant, manly manners, nor savoir-faire, nor gaiety, and in all his
exterior there was something colourless and indefinite. He dressed
without taste, his surroundings were depressing, he did not care for
poetry or painting because “they have no answer to give to the questions
of the day” —that is, he did not understand them; music did not touch
him. He was a poor farmer.
His estate was in a wretched condition and was mortgaged; he was paying
twelve percent on the second mortgage and owed ten thousand on personal
securities as well. When the time came to pay the interest on the
mortgage or to send money to his wife, he asked every one to lend him
money with as much agitation as though his house were on fire, and, at
the same time losing his head, he would sell the whole of his winter
store of fuel for five roubles and a stack of straw for three roubles,
and then have his garden fence or old cucumber-frames chopped up to heat
his stoves. His meadows were ruined by pigs, the peasants’ cattle
strayed in the undergrowth in his woods, and every year the old trees
were fewer and fewer: beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden
and kitchen-garden. He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even
ordinary capacity for living like other people. In practical life he was
a weak, naïve man, easy to deceive and to cheat, and the peasants with
good reason called him “simple.”
He was a Liberal, and in the district was regarded as a “Red,” but even
his progressiveness was a bore. There was no originality nor moving
power about his independent views: he was revolted, indignant, and
delighted always on the same note; it was always spiritless and
ineffective. Even in moments of strong enthusiasm he never raised his
head or stood upright. But the most tiresome thing of all was that he
managed to express even his best and finest ideas so that they seemed in
him commonplace and out of date. It reminded one of something old one
had read long ago, when slowly and with an air of profundity he would
begin discoursing of his noble, lofty moments, of his best years; or
when he went into raptures over the younger generation, which has always
been, and still is, in advance of society; or abused Russians for
donning their dressing-gowns at thirty and forgetting the principles of
their alma mater. If you stayed the night with him, he would put
Pissarev or Darwin on your bedroom table; if you said you had read it,
he would go and bring Dobrolubov.
In the district this was called free-thinking, and many people looked
upon this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; it
made him profoundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot of which
he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his
life-blood. In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style
of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies written in a bad, unintelligible
hand-writing, but with great feeling, endless misunderstandings,
explanations, disappointments, then debts, a second mortgage, the
allowance to his wife, the monthly borrowing of money—and all this for
no benefit to any one, either himself or others. And in the present, as
in the past, he was still in a nervous flurry, on the lookout for heroic
actions, and poking his nose into other people’s affairs; as before, at
every favourable opportunity there were long letters and copies,
wearisome, stereotyped conversations about the village community, or the
revival of handicrafts or the establishment of cheese
factories—conversations as like one another as though he had prepared
them, not in his living brain, but by some mechanical process. And
finally this scandal with Zina of which one could not see the end!
And meanwhile Zina was young—she was only twenty-two—good-looking,
elegant, gay; she was fond of laughing, chatter, argument, a passionate
musician; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in books, and in
her own home she would not have put up with a room like this, smelling
of boots and cheap vodka. She, too, had advanced ideas, but in her free-
thinking one felt the overflow of energy, the vanity of a young, strong,
spirited girl, passionately eager to be better and more original than
others. . . . How had it happened that she had fallen in love with
Vlassitch?
“He is a Quixote, an obstinate fanatic, a maniac,” thought Pyotr
Mihalitch, “and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as I am.
. . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves him; but,
then, I, too, love him in spite of everything.”
Pyotr Mihalitch considered Vlassitch a good, straightforward man, but
narrow and one-sided. In his perturbations and his sufferings, and in
fact in his whole life, he saw no lofty aims, remote or immediate; he
saw nothing but boredom and incapacity for life. His self-sacrifice and
all that Vlassitch himself called heroic actions or noble impulses
seemed to him a useless waste of force, unnecessary blank shots which
consumed a great deal of powder. And Vlassitch’s fanatical belief in the
extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness of his own way of thinking
struck him as naïve and even morbid; and the fact that Vlassitch all
his life had contrived to mix the trivial with the exalted, that he had
made a stupid marriage and looked upon it as an act of heroism, and then
had affairs with other women and regarded that as a triumph of some idea
or other was simply incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, Pyotr Mihalitch was fond of Vlassitch; he was conscious of
a sort of power in him, and for some reason he had never had the heart
to contradict him.
Vlassitch sat down quite close to him for a talk in the dark, to the
accompaniment of the rain, and he had cleared his throat as a prelude to
beginning on something lengthy, such as the history of his marriage. But
it was intolerable for Pyotr Mihalitch to listen to him; he was
tormented by the thought that he would see his sister directly.
“Yes, you’ve had bad luck,” he said gently; “but, excuse me, we’ve been
wandering from the point. That’s not what we are talking about.”
“Yes, yes, quite so. Well, let us come back to the point,” said
Vlassitch, and he stood up. “I tell you, Petrusha, our conscience is
clear. We are not married, but there is no need for me to prove to you
that our marriage is perfectly legitimate. You are as free in your ideas
as I am, and, happily, there can be no disagreement between us on that
point. As for our future, that ought not to alarm you. I’ll work in the
sweat of my brow, I’ll work day and night— in fact, I will strain every
nerve to make Zina happy. Her life will be a splendid one! You may ask,
am I able to do it. I am, brother! When a man devotes every minute to
one thought, it’s not difficult for him to attain his object. But let us
go to Zina; it will be a joy to her to see you.”
Pyotr Mihalitch’s heart began to beat. He got up and followed Vlassitch
into the hall, and from there into the drawing-room. There was nothing
in the huge gloomy room but a piano and a long row of old chairs
ornamented with bronze, on which no one ever sat. There was a candle
alight on the piano. From the drawing-room they went in silence into the
dining-room. This room, too, was large and comfortless; in the middle of
the room there was a round table with two leaves with six thick legs,
and only one candle. A clock in a large mahogany case like an ikon stand
pointed to half-past two.
Vlassitch opened the door into the next room and said:
“Zina, here is Petrusha come to see us!”
At once there was the sound of hurried footsteps and Zina came into the
dining-room. She was tall, plump, and very pale, and, just as when he
had seen her for the last time at home, she was wearing a black skirt
and a red blouse, with a large buckle on her belt. She flung one arm
round her brother and kissed him on the temple.
“What a storm!” she said. “Grigory went off somewhere and I was left
quite alone in the house.”
She was not embarrassed, and looked at her brother as frankly and
candidly as at home; looking at her, Pyotr Mihalitch, too, lost his
embarrassment.
“But you are not afraid of storms,” he said, sitting down at the table.
“No,” she said, “but here the rooms are so big, the house is so old, and
when there is thunder it all rattles like a cupboard full of crockery.
It’s a charming house altogether,” she went on, sitting down opposite
her brother. “There’s some pleasant memory in every room. In my room,
only fancy, Grigory’s grandfather shot himself.”
“In August we shall have the money to do up the lodge in the garden,”
said Vlassitch.
“For some reason when it thunders I think of that grandfather,” Zina
went on. “And in this dining-room somebody was flogged to death.”
“That’s an actual fact,” said Vlassitch, and he looked with wide-open
eyes at Pyotr Mihalitch. “Sometime in the forties this place was let to
a Frenchman called Olivier. The portrait of his daughter is lying in an
attic now—a very pretty girl. This Olivier, so my father told me,
despised Russians for their ignorance and treated them with cruel
derision. Thus, for instance, he insisted on the priest walking without
his hat for half a mile round his house, and on the church bells being
rung when the Olivier family drove through the village. The serfs and
altogether the humble of this world, of course, he treated with even
less ceremony. Once there came along this road one of the simple-hearted
sons of wandering Russia, somewhat after the style of Gogol’s divinity
student, Homa Brut. He asked for a night’s lodging, pleased the
bailiffs, and was given a job at the office of the estate. There are
many variations of the story. Some say the divinity student stirred up
the peasants, others that Olivier’ s daughter fell in love with him. I
don’t know which is true, only one fine evening Olivier called him in
here and cross-examined him, then ordered him to be beaten. Do you know,
he sat here at this table drinking claret while the stable-boys beat the
man. He must have tried to wring something out of him. Towards morning
the divinity student died of the torture and his body was hidden. They
say it was thrown into Koltovitch’s pond. There was an inquiry, but the
Frenchman paid some thousands to some one in authority and went away to
Alsace. His lease was up just then, and so the matter ended.”
“What scoundrels!” said Zina, shuddering.
“My father remembered Olivier and his daughter well. He used to say she
was remarkably beautiful and eccentric. I imagine the divinity student
had done both—stirred up the peasants and won the daughter’s heart.
Perhaps he wasn’t a divinity student at all, but some one travelling
incognito.”
Zina grew thoughtful; the story of the divinity student and the
beautiful French girl had evidently carried her imagination far away. It
seemed to Pyotr Mihalitch that she had not changed in the least during
the last week, except that she was a little paler. She looked calm and
just as usual, as though she had come with her brother to visit
Vlassitch. But Pyotr Mihalitch felt that some change had taken place in
himself. Before, when she was living at home, he could have spoken to
her about anything, and now he did not feel equal to asking her the
simple question, “How do you like being here?” The question seemed
awkward and unnecessary. Probably the same change had taken place in
her. She was in no haste to turn the conversation to her mother, to her
home, to her relations with Vlassitch; she did not defend herself, she
did not say that free unions are better than marriages in the church;
she was not agitated, and calmly brooded over the story of Olivier. . .
. And why had they suddenly begun talking of Olivier?
“You are both of you wet with the rain,” said Zina, and she smiled
joyfully; she was touched by this point of resemblance between her
brother and Vlassitch.
And Pyotr Mihalitch felt all the bitterness and horror of his position.
He thought of his deserted home, the closed piano, and Zina’s bright
little room into which no one went now; he thought there were no prints
of little feet on the garden-paths, and that before tea no one went off,
laughing gaily, to bathe. What he had clung to more and more from his
childhood upwards, what he had loved thinking about when he used to sit
in the stuffy class-room or the lecture theatre—brightness, purity, and
joy, everything that filled the house with life and light, had gone
never to return, had vanished, and was mixed up with a coarse, clumsy
story of some battalion officer, a chivalrous lieutenant, a depraved
woman and a grandfather who had shot himself. . . . And to begin to talk
about his mother or to think that the past could ever return would mean
not understanding what was clear.
Pyotr Mihalitch’s eyes filled with tears and his hand began to tremble
as it lay on the table. Zina guessed what he was thinking about, and her
eyes, too, glistened and looked red.
“Grigory, come here,” she said to Vlassitch.
They walked away to the window and began talking of something in a
whisper. From the way that Vlassitch stooped down to her and the way she
looked at him, Pyotr Mihalitch realised again that everything was
irreparably over, and that it was no use to talk of anything. Zina went
out of the room.
“Well, brother!” Vlassitch began, after a brief silence, rubbing his
hands and smiling. “I called our life happiness just now, but that was,
so to speak, poetical license. In reality, there has not been a sense of
happiness so far. Zina has been thinking all the time of you, of her
mother, and has been worrying; looking at her, I, too, felt worried.
Hers is a bold, free nature, but, you know, it’s difficult when you’re
not used to it, and she is young, too. The servants call her ‘Miss’; it
seems a trifle, but it upsets her. There it is, brother.”
Zina brought in a plateful of strawberries. She was followed by a little
maidservant, looking crushed and humble, who set a jug of milk on the
table and made a very low bow: she had something about her that was in
keeping with the old furniture, something petrified and dreary.
The sound of the rain had ceased. Pyotr Mihalitch ate strawberries while
Vlassitch and Zina looked at him in silence. The moment of the
inevitable but useless conversation was approaching, and all three felt
the burden of it. Pyotr Mihalitch’s eyes filled with tears again; he
pushed away his plate and said that he must be going home, or it would
be getting late, and perhaps it would rain again. The time had come when
common decency required Zina to speak of those at home and of her new
life.
“How are things at home?” she asked rapidly, and her pale face quivered.
“How is mother?”
“You know mother . . .” said Pyotr Mihalitch, not looking at her.
“Petrusha, you’ve thought a great deal about what has happened,” she
said, taking hold of her brother’s sleeve, and he knew how hard it was
for her to speak. “You’ve thought a great deal: tell me, can we reckon
on mother’s accepting Grigory . . . and the whole position, one day?”
She stood close to her brother, face to face with him, and he was
astonished that she was so beautiful, and that he seemed not to have
noticed it before. And it seemed to him utterly absurd that his sister,
so like his mother, pampered, elegant, should be living with Vlassitch
and in Vlassitch’s house, with the petrified servant, and the table with
six legs—in the house where a man had been flogged to death, and that
she was not going home with him, but was staying here to sleep.
“You know mother,” he said, not answering her question. “I think you
ought to have . . . to do something, to ask her forgiveness or
something. . . .”
“But to ask her forgiveness would mean pretending we had done wrong. I’m
ready to tell a lie to comfort mother, but it won’t lead anywhere. I
know mother. Well, what will be, must be!” said Zina, growing more
cheerful now that the most unpleasant had been said. “We’ll wait for
five years, ten years, and be patient, and then God’s will be done.”
She took her brother’s arm, and when she walked through the dark hall
she squeezed close to him. They went out on the steps. Pyotr Mihalitch
said good-bye, got on his horse, and set off at a walk; Zina and
Vlassitch walked a little way with him. It was still and warm, with a
delicious smell of hay; stars were twinkling brightly between the
clouds. Vlassitch’s old garden, which had seen so many gloomy stories in
its time, lay slumbering in the darkness, and for some reason it was
mournful riding through it.
“Zina and I to-day after dinner spent some really exalted moments,” said
Vlassitch. “I read aloud to her an excellent article on the question of
emigration. You must read it, brother! You really must. It’s remarkable
for its lofty tone. I could not resist writing a letter to the editor to
be forwarded to the author. I wrote only a single line: ‘I thank you and
warmly press your noble hand.’”
Pyotr Mihalitch was tempted to say, “Don’t meddle in what does not
concern you,” but he held his tongue.
Vlassitch walked by his right stirrup and Zina by the left; both seemed
to have forgotten that they had to go home. It was damp, and they had
almost reached Koltovitch’s copse. Pyotr Mihalitch felt that they were
expecting something from him, though they hardly knew what it was, and
he felt unbearably sorry for them. Now as they walked by the horse with
submissive faces, lost in thought, he had a deep conviction that they
were unhappy, and could not be happy, and their love seemed to him a
melancholy, irreparable mistake. Pity and the sense that he could do
nothing to help them reduced him to that state of spiritual softening
when he was ready to make any sacrifice to get rid of the painful
feeling of sympathy.
“I’ll come over sometimes for a night,” he said.
But it sounded as though he were making a concession, and did not
satisfy him. When they stopped near Koltovitch’s copse to say good-bye,
he bent down to Zina, touched her shoulder, and said:
“You are right, Zina! You have done well.” To avoid saying more and
bursting into tears, he lashed his horse and galloped into the wood. As
he rode into the darkness, he looked round and saw Vlassitch and Zina
walking home along the road—he taking long strides, while she walked
with a hurried, jerky step beside him—talking eagerly about something.
“I am an old woman!” thought Pyotr Mihalitch. “I went to solve the
question and I have only made it more complicated—there it is!”
He was heavy at heart. When he got out of the copse he rode at a walk
and then stopped his horse near the pond. He wanted to sit and think
without moving. The moon was rising and was reflected in a streak of red
on the other side of the pond. There were low rumbles of thunder in the
distance. Pyotr Mihalitch looked steadily at the water and imagined his
sister’s despair, her martyr-like pallor, the tearless eyes with which
she would conceal her humiliation from others. He imagined her with
child, imagined the death of their mother, her funeral, Zina’s horror. .
. . The proud, superstitious old woman would be sure to die of grief.
Terrible pictures of the future rose before him on the background of
smooth, dark water, and among pale feminine figures he saw himself, a
weak, cowardly man with a guilty face.
A hundred paces off on the right bank of the pond, something dark was
standing motionless: was it a man or a tall post? Pyotr Mihalitch
thought of the divinity student who had been killed and thrown into the
pond.
“Olivier behaved inhumanly, but one way or another he did settle the
question, while I have settled nothing and have only made it worse,” he
thought, gazing at the dark figure that looked like a ghost. “He said
and did what he thought right while I say and do what I don’t think
right; and I don’t know really what I do think. . . .”
He rode up to the dark figure: it was an old rotten post, the relic of
some shed.
From Koltovitch’s copse and garden there came a strong fragrant scent of
lilies of the valley and honey-laden flowers. Pyotr Mihalitch rode along
the bank of the pond and looked mournfully into the water. And thinking
about his life, he came to the conclusion he had never said or acted
upon what he really thought, and other people had repaid him in the same
way. And so the whole of life seemed to him as dark as this water in
which the night sky was reflected and water-weeds grew in a tangle. And
it seemed to him that nothing could ever set it right.
AT HOME I
THE Don railway. A quiet, cheerless station, white and solitary in the
steppe, with its walls baking in the sun, without a speck of shade, and,
it seems, without a human being. The train goes on after leaving one
here; the sound of it is scarcely audible and dies away at last. Outside
the station it is a desert, and there are no horses but one’s own. One
gets into the carriage—which is so pleasant after the train—and is borne
along the road through the steppe, and by degrees there are unfolded
before one views such as one does not see near Moscow—immense, endless,
fascinating in their monotony. The steppe, the steppe, and nothing more;
in the distance an ancient barrow or a windmill; ox-waggons laden with
coal trail by. . . . Solitary birds fly low over the plain, and a drowsy
feeling comes with the monotonous beat of their wings. It is hot.
Another hour or so passes, and still the steppe, the steppe, and still
in the distance the barrow. The driver tells you something, some long
unnecessary tale, pointing into the distance with his whip. And
tranquillity takes possession of the soul; one is loth to think of the
past. . . .
A carriage with three horses had been sent to fetch Vera Ivanovna
Kardin. The driver put in her luggage and set the harness to rights.
“Everything just as it always has been,” said Vera, looking about her.
“I was a little girl when I was here last, ten years ago. I remember old
Boris came to fetch me then. Is he still living, I wonder?”
The driver made no reply, but, like a Little Russian, looked at her
angrily and clambered on to the box.
It was a twenty-mile drive from the station, and Vera, too, abandoned
herself to the charm of the steppe, forgot the past, and thought only of
the wide expanse, of the freedom. Healthy, clever, beautiful, and
young—she was only three-and-twenty—she had hitherto lacked nothing in
her life but just this space and freedom.
The steppe, the steppe. . . . The horses trotted, the sun rose higher
and higher; and it seemed to Vera that never in her childhood had the
steppe been so rich, so luxuriant in June; the wild flowers were green,
yellow, lilac, white, and a fragrance rose from them and from the warmed
earth; and there were strange blue birds along the roadside. . . . Vera
had long got out of the habit of praying, but now, struggling with
drowsiness, she murmured:
“Lord, grant that I may be happy here.”
And there was peace and sweetness in her soul, and she felt as though
she would have been glad to drive like that all her life, looking at the
steppe.
Suddenly there was a deep ravine overgrown with oak saplings and alder-
trees; there was a moist feeling in the air—there must have been a
spring at the bottom. On the near side, on the very edge of the ravine,
a covey of partridges rose noisily. Vera remembered that in old days
they used to go for evening walks to this ravine; so it must be near
home! And now she could actually see the poplars, the barn, black smoke
rising on one side—they were burning old straw. And there was Auntie
Dasha coming to meet her and waving her handkerchief; grandfather was on
the terrace. Oh dear, how happy she was!
“My darling, my darling!” cried her aunt, shrieking as though she were
in hysterics. “Our real mistress has come! You must understand you are
our mistress, you are our queen! Here everything is yours! My darling,
my beauty, I am not your aunt, but your willing slave!”
Vera had no relations but her aunt and her grandfather; her mother had
long been dead; her father, an engineer, had died three months before at
Kazan, on his way from Siberia. Her grandfather had a big grey beard. He
was stout, red-faced, and asthmatic, and walked leaning on a cane and
sticking his stomach out. Her aunt, a lady of forty-two, drawn in
tightly at the waist and fashionably dressed with sleeves high on the
shoulder, evidently tried to look young and was still anxious to be
charming; she walked with tiny steps with a wriggle of her spine.
“Will you love us?” she said, embracing Vera, “You are not proud?”
At her grandfather’s wish there was a thanksgiving service, then they
spent a long while over dinner—and Vera’s new life began. She was given
the best room. All the rugs in the house had been put in it, and a great
many flowers; and when at night she lay down in her snug, wide, very
soft bed and covered herself with a silk quilt that smelt of old clothes
long stored away, she laughed with pleasure. Auntie Dasha came in for a
minute to wish her good-night.
“Here you are home again, thank God,” she said, sitting down on the bed.
“As you see, we get along very well and have everything we want. There’s
only one thing: your grandfather is in a poor way! A terribly poor way!
He is short of breath and he has begun to lose his memory. And you
remember how strong, how vigorous, he used to be! There was no doing
anything with him. . . . In old days, if the servants didn’t please him
or anything else went wrong, he would jump up at once and shout:
‘Twenty-five strokes! The birch!’ But now he has grown milder and you
never hear him. And besides, times are changed, my precious; one mayn’t
beat them nowadays. Of course, they oughtn’t to be beaten, but they need
looking after.”
“And are they beaten now, auntie?” asked Vera.
“The steward beats them sometimes, but I never do, bless their hearts!
And your grandfather sometimes lifts his stick from old habit, but he
never beats them.”
Auntie Dasha yawned and crossed herself over her mouth and her right
ear.
“It’s not dull here?” Vera inquired.
“What shall I say? There are no landowners living here now, but there
have been works built near, darling, and there are lots of engineers,
doctors, and mine managers. Of course, we have theatricals and concerts,
but we play cards more than anything. They come to us, too. Dr.
Neshtchapov from the works comes to see us—such a handsome, interesting
man! He fell in love with your photograph. I made up my mind: he is
Verotchka’s destiny, I thought. He’s young, handsome, he has means—a
good match, in fact. And of course you’re a match for any one. You’re of
good family. The place is mortgaged, it’s true, but it’s in good order
and not neglected; there is my share in it, but it will all come to you;
I am your willing slave. And my brother, your father, left you fifteen
thousand roubles. . . . But I see you can’t keep your eyes open. Sleep,
my child.”
Next day Vera spent a long time walking round the house. The garden,
which was old and unattractive, lying inconveniently upon the slope, had
no paths, and was utterly neglected; probably the care of it was
regarded as an unnecessary item in the management. There were numbers of
grass-snakes. Hoopoes flew about under the trees calling “Oo-too-toot!”
as though they were trying to remind her of something. At the bottom of
the hill there was a river overgrown with tall reeds, and half a mile
beyond the river was the village. From the garden Vera went out into the
fields; looking into the distance, thinking of her new life in her own
home, she kept trying to grasp what was in store for her. The space, the
lovely peace of the steppe, told her that happiness was near at hand,
and perhaps was here already; thousands of people, in fact, would have
said: “What happiness to be young, healthy, well-educated, to be living
on one’s own estate!” And at the same time the endless plain, all alike,
without one living soul, frightened her, and at moments it was clear to
her that its peaceful green vastness would swallow up her life and
reduce it to nothingness. She was very young, elegant, fond of life; she
had finished her studies at an aristocratic boarding-school, had learnt
three languages, had read a great deal, had travelled with her
father—and could all this have been meant to lead to nothing but
settling down in a remote country-house in the steppe, and wandering day
after day from the garden into the fields and from the fields into the
garden to while away the time, and then sitting at home listening to her
grandfather’s breathing? But what could she do? Where could she go? She
could find no answer, and as she was returning home she doubted whether
she would be happy here, and thought that driving from the station was
far more interesting than living here.
Dr. Neshtchapov drove over from the works. He was a doctor, but three
years previously he had taken a share in the works, and had become one
of the partners; and now he no longer looked upon medicine as his chief
vocation, though he still practised. In appearance he was a pale, dark
man in a white waistcoat, with a good figure; but to guess what there
was in his heart and his brain was difficult. He kissed Auntie Dasha’s
hand on greeting her, and was continually leaping up to set a chair or
give his seat to some one. He was very silent and grave all the while,
and, when he did speak, it was for some reason impossible to hear and
understand his first sentence, though he spoke correctly and not in a
low voice.
“You play the piano?” he asked Vera, and immediately leapt up, as she
had dropped her handkerchief.
He stayed from midday to midnight without speaking, and Vera found him
very unattractive. She thought that a white waistcoat in the country was
bad form, and his elaborate politeness, his manners, and his pale,
serious face with dark eyebrows, were mawkish; and it seemed to her that
he was perpetually silent, probably because he was stupid. When he had
gone her aunt said enthusiastically:
“Well? Isn’t he charming?” II
Auntie Dasha looked after the estate. Tightly laced, with jingling
bracelets on her wrists, she went into the kitchen, the granary, the
cattle-yard, tripping along with tiny steps, wriggling her spine; and
whenever she talked to the steward or to the peasants, she used, for
some reason, to put on a pince-nez. Vera’s grandfather always sat in the
same place, playing patience or dozing. He ate a very great deal at
dinner and supper; they gave him the dinner cooked to-day and what was
left from yesterday, and cold pie left from Sunday, and salt meat from
the servants’ dinner, and he ate it all greedily. And every dinner left
on Vera such an impression, that when she saw afterwards a flock of
sheep driven by, or flour being brought from the mill, she thought,
“Grandfather will eat that.” For the most part he was silent, absorbed
in eating or in patience; but it sometimes happened at dinner that at
the sight of Vera he would be touched and say tenderly:
“My only grandchild! Verotchka!”
And tears would glisten in his eyes. Or his face would turn suddenly
crimson, his neck would swell, he would look with fury at the servants,
and ask, tapping with his stick:
“Why haven’t you brought the horse-radish?”
In winter he led a perfectly inactive existence; in summer he sometimes
drove out into the fields to look at the oats and the hay; and when he
came back he would flourish his stick and declare that everything was
neglected now that he was not there to look after it.
“Your grandfather is out of humour,” Auntie Dasha would whisper. “But
it’s nothing now to what it used to be in the old days: ‘Twenty-five
strokes! The birch!’”
Her aunt complained that every one had grown lazy, that no one did
anything, and that the estate yielded no profit. Indeed, there was no
systematic farming; they ploughed and sowed a little simply from habit,
and in reality did nothing and lived in idleness. Meanwhile there was a
running to and fro, reckoning and worrying all day long; the bustle in
the house began at five o’clock in the morning; there were continual
sounds of “Bring it,” “Fetch it,” “Make haste,” and by the evening the
servants were utterly exhausted. Auntie Dasha changed her cooks and her
housemaids every week; sometimes she discharged them for immorality;
sometimes they went of their own accord, complaining that they were
worked to death. None of the village people would come to the house as
servants; Auntie Dasha had to hire them from a distance. There was only
one girl from the village living in the house, Alyona, and she stayed
because her whole family—old people and children—were living upon her
wages. This Alyona, a pale, rather stupid little thing, spent the whole
day turning out the rooms, waiting at table, heating the stoves, sewing,
washing; but it always seemed as though she were only pottering about,
treading heavily with her boots, and were nothing but a hindrance in the
house. In her terror that she might be dismissed and sent home, she
often dropped and broke the crockery, and they stopped the value of it
out of her wages, and then her mother and grandmother would come and bow
down at Auntie Dasha’s feet.
Once a week or sometimes oftener visitors would arrive. Her aunt would
come to Vera and say:
“You should sit a little with the visitors, or else they’ll think that
you are stuck up.”
Vera would go in to the visitors and play vint with them for hours
together, or play the piano for the visitors to dance; her aunt, in high
spirits and breathless from dancing, would come up and whisper to her:
“Be nice to Marya Nikiforovna.”
On the sixth of December, St. Nikolay’s Day, a large party of about
thirty arrived all at once; they played vint until late at night, and
many of them stayed the night. In the morning they sat down to cards
again, then they had dinner, and when Vera went to her room after dinner
to rest from conversation and tobacco smoke, there were visitors there
too, and she almost wept in despair. And when they began to get ready to
go in the evening, she was so pleased they were going at last, that she
said:
“Do stay a little longer.”
She felt exhausted by the visitors and constrained by their presence;
yet every day, as soon as it began to grow dark, something drew her out
of the house, and she went out to pay visits either at the works or at
some neighbours’, and then there were cards, dancing, forfeits, suppers.
. . .The young people in the works or in the mines sometimes sang Little
Russian songs, and sang them very well. It made one sad to hear them
sing. Or they all gathered together in one room and talked in the dusk
of the mines, of the treasures that had once been buried in the steppes,
of Saur’s Grave. . . . Later on, as they talked, a shout of “Help!”
sometimes reached them. It was a drunken man going home, or some one was
being robbed by the pit near by. Or the wind howled in the chimneys, the
shutters banged; then, soon afterwards, they would hear the uneasy
church bell, as the snow-storm began.
At all the evening parties, picnics, and dinners, Auntie Dasha was
invariably the most interesting woman and the doctor the most
interesting man. There was very little reading either at the works or at
the country-houses; they played only marches and polkas; and the young
people always argued hotly about things they did not understand, and the
effect was crude. The discussions were loud and heated, but, strange to
say, Vera had nowhere else met people so indifferent and careless as
these. They seemed to have no fatherland, no religion, no public
interests. When they talked of literature or debated some abstract
question, it could be seen from Dr. Neshtchapov’s face that the question
had no interest for him whatever, and that for long, long years he had
read nothing and cared to read nothing. Serious and expressionless, like
a badly painted portrait, for ever in his white waistcoat, he was silent
and incomprehensible as before; but the ladies, young and old, thought
him interesting and were enthusiastic over his manners. They envied
Vera, who appeared to attract him very much. And Vera always came away
from the visits with a feeling of vexation, vowing inwardly to remain at
home; but the day passed, the evening came, and she hurried off to the
works again, and it was like that almost all the winter.
She ordered books and magazines, and used to read them in her room. And
she read at night, lying in bed. When the clock in the corridor struck
two or three, and her temples were beginning to ache from reading, she
sat up in bed and thought, “What am I to do? Where am I to go?”
Accursed, importunate question, to which there were a number of ready-
made answers, and in reality no answer at all.
Oh, how noble, how holy, how picturesque it must be to serve the people,
to alleviate their sufferings, to enlighten them! But she, Vera, did not
know the people. And how could she go to them? They were strange and
uninteresting to her; she could not endure the stuffy smell of the huts,
the pot-house oaths, the unwashed children, the women’s talk of
illnesses. To walk over the snow-drifts, to feel cold, then to sit in a
stifling hut, to teach children she disliked—no, she would rather die!
And to teach the peasants’ children while Auntie Dasha made money out of
the pot-houses and fined the peasants—it was too great a farce! What a
lot of talk there was of schools, of village libraries, of universal
education; but if all these engineers, these mine-owners and ladies of
her acquaintance, had not been hypocrites, and really had believed that
enlightenment was necessary, they would not have paid the schoolmasters
fifteen roubles a month as they did now, and would not have let them go
hungry. And the schools and the talk about ignorance—it was all only to
stifle the voice of conscience because they were ashamed to own fifteen
or thirty thousand acres and to be indifferent to the peasants’ lot.
Here the ladies said about Dr. Neshtchapov that he was a kind man and
had built a school at the works. Yes, he had built a school out of the
old bricks at the works for some eight hundred roubles, and they sang
the prayer for “long life” to him when the building was opened, but
there was no chance of his giving up his shares, and it certainly never
entered his head that the peasants were human beings like himself, and
that they, too, needed university teaching, and not merely lessons in
these wretched schools.
And Vera felt full of anger against herself and every one else. She took
up a book again and tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat down and
thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that one must pass an
examination in Latin; besides, she had an invincible repugnance to
corpses and disease. It would be nice to become a mechanic, a judge, a
commander of a steamer, a scientist; to do something into which she
could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out
and sleep soundly at night; to give up her life to something that would
make her an interesting person, able to attract interesting people, to
love, to have a real family of her own. . . . But what was she to do?
How was she to begin?
One Sunday in Lent her aunt came into her room early in the morning to
fetch her umbrella. Vera was sitting up in bed clasping her head in her
hands, thinking.
“You ought to go to church, darling,” said her aunt, “or people will
think you are not a believer.”
Vera made no answer.
“I see you are dull, poor child,” said Auntie Dasha, sinking on her
knees by the bedside; she adored Vera. “Tell me the truth, are you
bored?”
“Dreadfully.”
“My beauty, my queen, I am your willing slave, I wish you nothing but
good and happiness. . . . Tell me, why don’t you want to marry
Nestchapov? What more do you want, my child? You must forgive me,
darling; you can’t pick and choose like this, we are not princes . . . .
Time is passing, you are not seventeen. . . . And I don’t understand it!
He loves you, idolises you!”
“Oh, mercy!” said Vera with vexation. “How can I tell? He sits dumb and
never says a word.”
“He’s shy, darling. . . . He’s afraid you’ll refuse him!”
And when her aunt had gone away, Vera remained standing in the middle of
her room uncertain whether to dress or to go back to bed. The bed was
hateful; if one looked out of the window there were the bare trees, the
grey snow, the hateful jackdaws, the pigs that her grandfather would
eat. . . .
“Yes, after all, perhaps I’d better get married!” she thought. III
For two days Auntie Dasha went about with a tear-stained and heavily
powdered face, and at dinner she kept sighing and looking towards the
ikon. And it was impossible to make out what was the matter with her.
But at last she made up her mind, went in to Vera, and said in a casual
way:
“The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and the
tenant hasn’t paid his rent. Will you let me pay it out of the fifteen
thousand your papa left you?”
All day afterwards Auntie Dasha spent in making cherry jam in the
garden. Alyona, with her cheeks flushed with the heat, ran to and from
the garden to the house and back again to the cellar.
When Auntie Dasha was making jam with a very serious face as though she
were performing a religious rite, and her short sleeves displayed her
strong, little, despotic hands and arms, and when the servants ran about
incessantly, bustling about the jam which they would never taste, there
was always a feeling of martyrdom in the air. . . .
The garden smelt of hot cherries. The sun had set, the charcoal stove
had been carried away, but the pleasant, sweetish smell still lingered
in the air. Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new
labourer, a young soldier, not of the neighbourhood, who was, by her
express orders, making new paths. He was cutting the turf with a spade
and heaping it up on a barrow.
“Where were you serving?” Vera asked him.
“At Berdyansk.”
“And where are you going now? Home?”
“No,” answered the labourer. “I have no home.”
“But where were you born and brought up?”
“In the province of Oryol. Till I went into the army I lived with my
mother, in my step-father’s house; my mother was the head of the house,
and people looked up to her, and while she lived I was cared for. But
while I was in the army I got a letter telling me my mother was dead. .
. . And now I don’t seem to care to go home. It’s not my own father, so
it’s not like my own home.”
“Then your father is dead?”
“I don’t know. I am illegitimate.”
At that moment Auntie Dasha appeared at the window and said:
“Il ne faut pas parler aux gens . . . . Go into the kitchen, my good
man. You can tell your story there,” she said to the soldier.
And then came as yesterday and every day supper, reading, a sleepless
night, and endless thinking about the same thing. At three o’clock the
sun rose; Alyona was already busy in the corridor, and Vera was not
asleep yet and was trying to read. She heard the creak of the barrow: it
was the new labourer at work in the garden. . . . Vera sat at the open
window with a book, dozed, and watched the soldier making the paths for
her, and that interested her. The paths were as even and level as a
leather strap, and it was pleasant to imagine what they would be like
when they were strewn with yellow sand.
She could see her aunt come out of the house soon after five o’clock, in
a pink wrapper and curl-papers. She stood on the steps for three minutes
without speaking, and then said to the soldier:
“Take your passport and go in peace. I can’t have any one illegitimate
in my house.”
An oppressive, angry feeling sank like a stone on Vera’s heart. She was
indignant with her aunt, she hated her; she was so sick of her aunt that
her heart was full of misery and loathing. But what was she to do? To
stop her mouth? To be rude to her? But what would be the use? Suppose
she struggled with her, got rid of her, made her harmless, prevented her
grandfather from flourishing his stick— what would be the use of it? It
would be like killing one mouse or one snake in the boundless steppe.
The vast expanse, the long winters, the monotony and dreariness of life,
instil a sense of helplessness; the position seems hopeless, and one
wants to do nothing—everything is useless.
Alyona came in, and bowing low to Vera, began carrying out the arm-
chairs to beat the dust out of them.
“You have chosen a time to clean up,” said Vera with annoyance. “Go
away.”
Alyona was overwhelmed, and in her terror could not understand what was
wanted of her. She began hurriedly tidying up the dressing-table.
“Go out of the room, I tell you,” Vera shouted, turning cold; she had
never had such an oppressive feeling before. “Go away!”
Alyona uttered a sort of moan, like a bird, and dropped Vera’s gold
watch on the carpet.
“Go away!” Vera shrieked in a voice not her own, leaping up and
trembling all over. “Send her away; she worries me to death!” she went
on, walking rapidly after Alyona down the passage, stamping her feet.
“Go away! Birch her! Beat her!” Then suddenly she came to herself, and
just as she was, unwashed, uncombed, in her dressing-gown and slippers,
she rushed out of the house. She ran to the familiar ravine and hid
herself there among the sloe-trees, so that she might see no one and be
seen by no one. Lying there motionless on the grass, she did not weep,
she was not horror-stricken, but gazing at the sky open-eyed, she
reflected coldly and clearly that something had happened which she could
never forget and for which she could never forgive herself all her life.
“No, I can’t go on like this,” she thought. “It’s time to take myself in
hand, or there’ll be no end to it. . . . I can’t go on like this. . . .”
At midday Dr. Neshtchapov drove by the ravine on his way to the house.
She saw him and made up her mind that she would begin a new life, and
that she would make herself begin it, and this decision calmed her. And
following with her eyes the doctor’s well-built figure, she said, as
though trying to soften the crudity of her decision:
“He’s a nice man. . . . We shall get through life somehow.”
She returned home. While she was dressing, Auntie Dasha came into the
room, and said:
“Alyona upset you, darling; I’ve sent her home to the village. Her
mother’s given her a good beating and has come here, crying.”
“Auntie,” said Vera quickly, “I’m going to marry Dr. Neshtchapov. Only
talk to him yourself . . . I can’t.”
And again she went out into the fields. And wandering aimlessly about,
she made up her mind that when she was married she would look after the
house, doctor the peasants, teach in the school, that she would do all
the things that other women of her circle did. And this perpetual
dissatisfaction with herself and every one else, this series of crude
mistakes which stand up like a mountain before one whenever one looks
back upon one’s past, she would accept as her real life to which she was
fated, and she would expect nothing better. . . . Of course there was
nothing better! Beautiful nature, dreams, music, told one story, but
reality another. Evidently truth and happiness existed somewhere outside
real life. . . . One must give up one’s own life and merge oneself into
this luxuriant steppe, boundless and indifferent as eternity, with its
flowers, its ancient barrows, and its distant horizon, and then it would
be well with one. . . .
A month later Vera was living at the works.
EXPENSIVE LESSONS
FOR a cultivated man to be ignorant of foreign languages is a great
inconvenience. Vorotov became acutely conscious of it when, after taking
his degree, he began upon a piece of research work.
“It’s awful,” he said, breathing hard (although he was only twenty-six
he was fat, heavy, and suffered from shortness of breath).
“It’s awful! Without languages I’m like a bird without wings. I might
just as well give up the work.”
And he made up his mind at all costs to overcome his innate laziness,
and to learn French and German; and began to look out for a teacher.
One winter noon, as Vorotov was sitting in his study at work, the
servant told him that a young lady was inquiring for him.
“Ask her in,” said Vorotov.
And a young lady elaborately dressed in the last fashion walked in. She
introduced herself as a teacher of French, Alice Osipovna Enquête, and
told Vorotov that she had been sent to him by one of his friends.
“Delighted! Please sit down,” said Vorotov, breathing hard and putting
his hand over the collar of his nightshirt (to breathe more freely he
always wore a nightshirt at work instead of a stiff linen one with
collar). “It was Pyotr Sergeitch sent you? Yes, yes . . . I asked him
about it. Delighted!”
As he talked to Mdlle. Enquête he looked at her shyly and with
curiosity. She was a genuine Frenchwoman, very elegant and still quite
young. Judging from her pale, languid face, her short curly hair, and
her unnaturally slim waist, she might have been eighteen; but looking at
her broad, well-developed shoulders, the elegant lines of her back and
her severe eyes, Vorotov thought that she was not less than three-and-
twenty and might be twenty-five; but then again he began to think she
was not more than eighteen. Her face looked as cold and business-like as
the face of a person who has come to speak about money. She did not once
smile or frown, and only once a look of perplexity flitted over her face
when she learnt that she was not required to teach children, but a stout
grown-up man.
“So, Alice Osipovna,” said Vorotov, “we’ll have a lesson every evening
from seven to eight. As regards your terms—a rouble a lesson—I’ve
nothing to say against that. By all means let it be a rouble. . . .”
And he asked her if she would not have some tea or coffee, whether it
was a fine day, and with a good-natured smile, stroking the baize of the
table, he inquired in a friendly voice who she was, where she had
studied, and what she lived on.
With a cold, business-like expression, Alice Osipovna answered that she
had completed her studies at a private school and had the diploma of a
private teacher, that her father had died lately of scarlet fever, that
her mother was alive and made artificial flowers; that she, Mdlle.
Enquête, taught in a private school till dinnertime, and after dinner
was busy till evening giving lessons in different good families.
She went away leaving behind her the faint fragrance of a woman’s
clothes. For a long time afterwards Vorotov could not settle to work,
but, sitting at the table stroking its green baize surface, he
meditated.
“It’s very pleasant to see a girl working to earn her own living,” he
thought. “On the other hand, it’s very unpleasant to think that poverty
should not spare such elegant and pretty girls as Alice Osipovna, and
that she, too, should have to struggle for existence. It’s a sad thing!”
Having never seen virtuous Frenchwomen before, he reflected also that
this elegantly dressed young lady with her well-developed shoulders and
exaggeratedly small waist in all probability followed another calling as
well as giving French lessons.
The next evening when the clock pointed to five minutes to seven, Mdlle.
Enquête appeared, rosy from the frost. She opened Margot, which she had
brought with her, and without introduction began:
“French grammar has twenty-six letters. The first letter is called A,
the second B . . .”
“Excuse me,” Vorotov interrupted, smiling. “I must warn you,
mademoiselle, that you must change your method a little in my case. You
see, I know Russian, Greek, and Latin well. . . . I’ve studied
comparative philology, and I think we might omit Margot and pass
straight to reading some author.”
And he explained to the French girl how grown-up people learn languages.
“A friend of mine,” he said, “wanting to learn modern languages, laid
before him the French, German, and Latin gospels, and read them side by
side, carefully analysing each word, and would you believe it, he
attained his object in less than a year. Let us do the same. We’ll take
some author and read him.”
The French girl looked at him in perplexity. Evidently the suggestion
seemed to her very naïve and ridiculous. If this strange proposal had
been made to her by a child, she would certainly have been angry and
have scolded it, but as he was a grown-up man and very stout and she
could not scold him, she only shrugged her shoulders hardly perceptibly
and said:
“As you please.”
Vorotov rummaged in his bookcase and picked out a dog’s-eared French
book.
“Will this do?”
“It’s all the same,” she said.
“In that case let us begin, and good luck to it! Let’s begin with the
title . . . ‘Mémoires.’”
“Reminiscences,” Mdlle. Enquête translated.
With a good-natured smile, breathing hard, he spent a quarter of an hour
over the word “Mémoires,” and as much over the word de, and this
wearied the young lady. She answered his questions languidly, grew
confused, and evidently did not understand her pupil well, and did not
attempt to understand him. Vorotov asked her questions, and at the same
time kept looking at her fair hair and thinking:
“Her hair isn’t naturally curly; she curls it. It’s a strange thing! She
works from morning to night, and yet she has time to curl her hair.”
At eight o’clock precisely she got up, and saying coldly and dryly, “Au
revoir, monsieur,” walked out of the study, leaving behind her the same
tender, delicate, disturbing fragrance. For a long time again her pupil
did nothing; he sat at the table meditating.
During the days that followed he became convinced that his teacher was a
charming, conscientious, and precise young lady, but that she was very
badly educated, and incapable of teaching grown-up people, and he made
up his mind not to waste his time, to get rid of her, and to engage
another teacher. When she came the seventh time he took out of his
pocket an envelope with seven roubles in it, and holding it in his hand,
became very confused and began:
“Excuse me, Alice Osipovna, but I ought to tell you . . . I’m under
painful necessity . . .”
Seeing the envelope, the French girl guessed what was meant, and for the
first time during their lessons her face quivered and her cold,
business-like expression vanished. She coloured a little, and dropping
her eyes, began nervously fingering her slender gold chain. And Vorotov,
seeing her perturbation, realised how much a rouble meant to her, and
how bitter it would be to her to lose what she was earning.
“I ought to tell you,” he muttered, growing more and more confused, and
quavering inwardly; he hurriedly stuffed the envelope into his pocket
and went on: “Excuse me, I . . . I must leave you for ten minutes.”
And trying to appear as though he had not in the least meant to get rid
of her, but only to ask her permission to leave her for a short time, he
went into the next room and sat there for ten minutes. And then he
returned more embarrassed than ever: it struck him that she might have
interpreted his brief absence in some way of her own, and he felt
awkward.
The lessons began again. Yorotov felt no interest in them. Realising
that he would gain nothing from the lessons, he gave the French girl
liberty to do as she liked, asking her nothing and not interrupting her.
She translated away as she pleased ten pages during a lesson, and he did
not listen, breathed hard, and having nothing better to do, gazed at her
curly head, or her soft white hands or her neck and sniffed the
fragrance of her clothes. He caught himself thinking very unsuitable
thoughts, and felt ashamed, or he was moved to tenderness, and then he
felt vexed and wounded that she was so cold and business-like with him,
and treated him as a pupil, never smiling and seeming afraid that he
might accidentally touch her. He kept wondering how to inspire her with
confidence and get to know her better, and to help her, to make her
understand how badly she taught, poor thing.
One day Mdlle. Enquête came to the lesson in a smart pink dress,
slightly décolleté, and surrounded by such a fragrance that she seemed
to be wrapped in a cloud, and, if one blew upon her, ready to fly away
into the air or melt away like smoke. She apologised and said she could
stay only half an hour for the lesson, as she was going straight from
the lesson to a dance.
He looked at her throat and the back of her bare neck, and thought he
understood why Frenchwomen had the reputation of frivolous creatures
easily seduced; he was carried away by this cloud of fragrance, beauty,
and bare flesh, while she, unconscious of his thoughts and probably not
in the least interested in them, rapidly turned over the pages and
translated at full steam:
“‘He was walking the street and meeting a gentleman his friend and
saying, “Where are you striving to seeing your face so pale it makes me
sad.”’”
The “Mémoires” had long been finished, and now Alice was translating
some other book. One day she came an hour too early for the lesson,
apologizing and saying that she wanted to leave at seven and go to the
Little Theatre. Seeing her out after the lesson, Vorotov dressed and
went to the theatre himself. He went, and fancied that he was going
simply for change and amusement, and that he was not thinking about
Alice at all. He could not admit that a serious man, preparing for a
learned career, lethargic in his habits, could fling up his work and go
to the theatre simply to meet there a girl he knew very little, who was
unintelligent and utterly unintellectual.
Yet for some reason his heart was beating during the intervals, and
without realizing what he was doing, he raced about the corridors and
foyer like a boy impatiently looking for some one, and he was
disappointed when the interval was over. And when he saw the familiar
pink dress and the handsome shoulders under the tulle, his heart
quivered as though with a foretaste of happiness; he smiled joyfully,
and for the first time in his life experienced the sensation of
jealousy.
Alice was walking with two unattractive-looking students and an officer.
She was laughing, talking loudly, and obviously flirting. Vorotov had
never seen her like that. She was evidently happy, contented, warm,
sincere. What for? Why? Perhaps because these men were her friends and
belonged to her own circle. And Vorotov felt there was a terrible gulf
between himself and that circle. He bowed to his teacher, but she gave
him a chilly nod and walked quickly by; she evidently did not care for
her friends to know that she had pupils, and that she had to give
lessons to earn money.
After the meeting at the theatre Vorotov realised that he was in love. .
. . During the subsequent lessons he feasted his eyes on his elegant
teacher, and without struggling with himself, gave full rein to his
imaginations, pure and impure. Mdlle. Enquête’s face did not cease to
be cold; precisely at eight o’clock every evening she said coldly, “Au
revoir, monsieur,” and he felt she cared nothing about him, and never
would care anything about him, and that his position was hopeless.
Sometimes in the middle of a lesson he would begin dreaming, hoping,
making plans. He inwardly composed declarations of love, remembered that
Frenchwomen were frivolous and easily won, but it was enough for him to
glance at the face of his teacher for his ideas to be extinguished as a
candle is blown out when you bring it into the wind on the verandah.
Once, overcome, forgetting himself as though in delirium, he could not
restrain himself, and barred her way as she was going from the study
into the entry after the lesson, and, gasping for breath and stammering,
began to declare his love:
“You are dear to me! I . . . I love you! Allow me to speak.”
And Alice turned pale—probably from dismay, reflecting that after this
declaration she could not come here again and get a rouble a lesson.
With a frightened look in her eyes she said in a loud whisper:
“Ach, you mustn’t! Don’t speak, I entreat you! You mustn’t!”
And Vorotov did not sleep all night afterwards; he was tortured by
shame; he blamed himself and thought intensely. It seemed to him that he
had insulted the girl by his declaration, that she would not come to him
again.
He resolved to find out her address from the address bureau in the
morning, and to write her a letter of apology. But Alice came without a
letter. For the first minute she felt uncomfortable, then she opened a
book and began briskly and rapidly translating as usual:
“‘Oh, young gentleman, don’t tear those flowers in my garden which I
want to be giving to my ill daughter. . . .’”
She still comes to this day. Four books have already been translated,
but Vorotov knows no French but the word “Mémoires,” and when he is
asked about his literary researches, he waves his hand, and without
answering, turns the conversation to the weather.
THE PRINCESS
A CARRIAGE with four fine sleek horses drove in at the big so-called Red
Gate of the N—- Monastery. While it was still at a distance, the priests
and monks who were standing in a group round the part of the hostel
allotted to the gentry, recognised by the coachman and horses that the
lady in the carriage was Princess Vera Gavrilovna, whom they knew very
well.
An old man in livery jumped off the box and helped the princess to get
out of the carriage. She raised her dark veil and moved in a leisurely
way up to the priests to receive their blessing; then she nodded
pleasantly to the rest of the monks and went into the hostel.
“Well, have you missed your princess?” she said to the monk who brought
in her things. “It’s a whole month since I’ve been to see you. But here
I am; behold your princess. And where is the Father Superior? My
goodness, I am burning with impatience! Wonderful, wonderful old man!
You must be proud of having such a Superior.”
When the Father Superior came in, the princess uttered a shriek of
delight, crossed her arms over her bosom, and went up to receive his
blessing.
“No, no, let me kiss your hand,” she said, snatching it and eagerly
kissing it three times. “How glad I am to see you at last, holy Father!
I’m sure you’ve forgotten your princess, but my thoughts have been in
your dear monastery every moment. How delightful it is here! This living
for God far from the busy, giddy world has a special charm of its own,
holy Father, which I feel with my whole soul although I cannot express
it!”
The princess’s cheeks glowed and tears came into her eyes. She talked
incessantly, fervently, while the Father Superior, a grave, plain, shy
old man of seventy, remained mute or uttered abruptly, like a soldier on
duty, phrases such as:
“Certainly, Your Excellency. . . . Quite so. I understand.”
“Has Your Excellency come for a long stay?” he inquired.
“I shall stay the night here, and to-morrow I’m going on to Klavdia
Nikolaevna’s—it’s a long time since I’ve seen her—and the day after to-
morrow I’ll come back to you and stay three or four days. I want to rest
my soul here among you, holy Father. . . .”
The princess liked being at the monastery at N—-. For the last two years
it had been a favourite resort of hers; she used to go there almost
every month in the summer and stay two or three days, even sometimes a
week. The shy novices, the stillness, the low ceilings, the smell of
cypress, the modest fare, the cheap curtains on the windows—all this
touched her, softened her, and disposed her to contemplation and good
thoughts. It was enough for her to be half an hour in the hostel for her
to feel that she, too, was timid and modest, and that she, too, smelt of
cypress-wood. The past retreated into the background, lost its
significance, and the princess began to imagine that in spite of her
twenty-nine years she was very much like the old Father Superior, and
that, like him, she was created not for wealth, not for earthly grandeur
and love, but for a peaceful life secluded from the world, a life in
twilight like the hostel.
It happens that a ray of light gleams in the dark cell of the anchorite
absorbed in prayer, or a bird alights on the window and sings its song;
the stern anchorite will smile in spite of himself, and a gentle,
sinless joy will pierce through the load of grief over his sins, like
water flowing from under a stone. The princess fancied she brought from
the outside world just such comfort as the ray of light or the bird. Her
gay, friendly smile, her gentle eyes, her voice, her jests, her whole
personality in fact, her little graceful figure always dressed in simple
black, must arouse in simple, austere people a feeling of tenderness and
joy. Every one, looking at her, must think: “God has sent us an angel. .
. .” And feeling that no one could help thinking this, she smiled still
more cordially, and tried to look like a bird.
After drinking tea and resting, she went for a walk. The sun was already
setting. From the monastery garden came a moist fragrance of freshly
watered mignonette, and from the church floated the soft singing of
men’s voices, which seemed very pleasant and mournful in the distance.
It was the evening service. In the dark windows where the little lamps
glowed gently, in the shadows, in the figure of the old monk sitting at
the church door with a collecting-box, there was such unruffled peace
that the princess felt moved to tears.
Outside the gate, in the walk between the wall and the birch-trees where
there were benches, it was quite evening. The air grew rapidly darker
and darker. The princess went along the walk, sat on a seat, and sank
into thought.
She thought how good it would be to settle down for her whole life in
this monastery where life was as still and unruffled as a summer
evening; how good it would be to forget the ungrateful, dissipated
prince; to forget her immense estates, the creditors who worried her
every day, her misfortunes, her maid Dasha, who had looked at her
impertinently that morning. It would be nice to sit here on the bench
all her life and watch through the trunks of the birch-trees the evening
mist gathering in wreaths in the valley below; the rooks flying home in
a black cloud like a veil far, far away above the forest; two novices,
one astride a piebald horse, another on foot driving out the horses for
the night and rejoicing in their freedom, playing pranks like little
children; their youthful voices rang out musically in the still air, and
she could distinguish every word. It is nice to sit and listen to the
silence: at one moment the wind blows and stirs the tops of the birch-
trees, then a frog rustles in last year’s leaves, then the clock on the
belfry strikes the quarter. . . . One might sit without moving, listen
and think, and think. . . .
An old woman passed by with a wallet on her back. The princess thought
that it would be nice to stop the old woman and to say something
friendly and cordial to her, to help her. . . . But the old woman turned
the corner without once looking round.
Not long afterwards a tall man with a grey beard and a straw hat came
along the walk. When he came up to the princess, he took off his hat and
bowed. From the bald patch on his head and his sharp, hooked nose the
princess recognised him as the doctor, Mihail Ivanovitch, who had been
in her service at Dubovki. She remembered that some one had told her
that his wife had died the year before, and she wanted to sympathise
with him, to console him.
“Doctor, I expect you don’t recognise me?” she said with an affable
smile.
“Yes, Princess, I recognised you,” said the doctor, taking off his hat
again.
“Oh, thank you; I was afraid that you, too, had forgotten your princess.
People only remember their enemies, but they forget their friends. Have
you, too, come to pray?”
“I am the doctor here, and I have to spend the night at the monastery
every Saturday.”
“Well, how are you?” said the princess, sighing. “I hear that you have
lost your wife. What a calamity!”
“Yes, Princess, for me it is a great calamity.”
“There’s nothing for it! We must bear our troubles with resignation. Not
one hair of a man’s head is lost without the Divine Will.”
“Yes, Princess.”
To the princess’s friendly, gentle smile and her sighs the doctor
responded coldly and dryly: “Yes, Princess.” And the expression of his
face was cold and dry.
“What else can I say to him?” she wondered.
“How long it is since we met!” she said. “Five years! How much water has
flowed under the bridge, how many changes in that time; it quite
frightens one to think of it! You know, I am married. . . . I am not a
countess now, but a princess. And by now I am separated from my husband
too.”
“Yes, I heard so.”
“God has sent me many trials. No doubt you have heard, too, that I am
almost ruined. My Dubovki, Sofyino, and Kiryakovo have all been sold for
my unhappy husband’s debts. And I have only Baranovo and Mihaltsevo
left. It’s terrible to look back: how many changes and misfortunes of
all kinds, how many mistakes!”
“Yes, Princess, many mistakes.”
The princess was a little disconcerted. She knew her mistakes; they were
all of such a private character that no one but she could think or speak
of them. She could not resist asking:
“What mistakes are you thinking about?”
“You referred to them, so you know them . . .” answered the doctor, and
he smiled. “Why talk about them!”
“No; tell me, doctor. I shall be very grateful to you. And please don’t
stand on ceremony with me. I love to hear the truth.”
“I am not your judge, Princess.”
“Not my judge! What a tone you take! You must know something about me.
Tell me!”
“If you really wish it, very well. Only I regret to say I’m not clever
at talking, and people can’t always understand me.”
The doctor thought a moment and began:
“A lot of mistakes; but the most important of them, in my opinion, was
the general spirit that prevailed on all your estates. You see, I don’t
know how to express myself. I mean chiefly the lack of love, the
aversion for people that was felt in absolutely everything. Your whole
system of life was built upon that aversion. Aversion for the human
voice, for faces, for heads, steps . . . in fact, for everything that
makes up a human being. At all the doors and on the stairs there stand
sleek, rude, and lazy grooms in livery to prevent badly dressed persons
from entering the house; in the hall there are chairs with high backs so
that the footmen waiting there, during balls and receptions, may not
soil the walls with their heads; in every room there are thick carpets
that no human step may be heard; every one who comes in is infallibly
warned to speak as softly and as little as possible, and to say nothing
that might have a disagreeable effect on the nerves or the imagination.
And in your room you don’t shake hands with any one or ask him to sit
down— just as you didn’t shake hands with me or ask me to sit down. . .
.”
“By all means, if you like,” said the princess, smiling and holding out
her hand. “Really, to be cross about such trifles. . . .”
“But I am not cross,” laughed the doctor, but at once he flushed, took
off his hat, and waving it about, began hotly: “To be candid, I’ve long
wanted an opportunity to tell you all I think. . . . That is, I want to
tell you that you look upon the mass of mankind from the Napoleonic
standpoint as food for the cannon. But Napoleon had at least some idea;
you have nothing except aversion.”
“I have an aversion for people?” smiled the princess, shrugging her
shoulders in astonishment. “I have!”
“Yes, you! You want facts? By all means. In Mihaltsevo three former
cooks of yours, who have gone blind in your kitchens from the heat of
the stove, are living upon charity. All the health and strength and good
looks that is found on your hundreds of thousands of acres is taken by
you and your parasites for your grooms, your footmen, and your coachmen.
All these two-legged cattle are trained to be flunkeys, overeat
themselves, grow coarse, lose the ‘image and likeness,’ in fact. . . .
Young doctors, agricultural experts, teachers, intellectual workers
generally—think of it!—are torn away from their honest work and forced
for a crust of bread to take part in all sorts of mummeries which make
every decent man feel ashamed! Some young men cannot be in your service
for three years without becoming hypocrites, toadies, sneaks. . . . Is
that a good thing? Your Polish superintendents, those abject spies, all
those Kazimers and Kaetans, go hunting about on your hundreds of
thousands of acres from morning to night, and to please you try to get
three skins off one ox. Excuse me, I speak disconnectedly, but that
doesn’t matter. You don’t look upon the simple people as human beings.
And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to come and see you,
you looked upon simply as decorative figures, not as living beings. But
the worst of all, the thing that most revolts me, is having a fortune of
over a million and doing nothing for other people, nothing!”
The princess sat amazed, aghast, offended, not knowing what to say or
how to behave. She had never before been spoken to in such a tone. The
doctor’s unpleasant, angry voice and his clumsy, faltering phrases made
a harsh clattering noise in her ears and her head. Then she began to
feel as though the gesticulating doctor was hitting her on the head with
his hat.
“It’s not true!” she articulated softly, in an imploring voice. “I’ve
done a great deal of good for other people; you know it yourself!”
“Nonsense!” cried the doctor. “Can you possibly go on thinking of your
philanthropic work as something genuine and useful, and not a mere
mummery? It was a farce from beginning to end; it was playing at loving
your neighbour, the most open farce which even children and stupid
peasant women saw through! Take for instance your— what was it
called?—house for homeless old women without relations, of which you
made me something like a head doctor, and of which you were the
patroness. Mercy on us! What a charming institution it was! A house was
built with parquet floors and a weathercock on the roof; a dozen old
women were collected from the villages and made to sleep under blankets
and sheets of Dutch linen, and given toffee to eat.”
The doctor gave a malignant chuckle into his hat, and went on speaking
rapidly and stammering:
“It was a farce! The attendants kept the sheets and the blankets under
lock and key, for fear the old women should soil them—‘Let the old
devil’s pepper-pots sleep on the floor.’ The old women did not dare to
sit down on the beds, to put on their jackets, to walk over the polished
floors. Everything was kept for show and hidden away from the old women
as though they were thieves, and the old women were clothed and fed on
the sly by other people’s charity, and prayed to God night and day to be
released from their prison and from the canting exhortations of the
sleek rascals to whose care you committed them. And what did the
managers do? It was simply charming! About twice a week there would be
thirty-five thousand messages to say that the princess—that is, you—were
coming to the home next day. That meant that next day I had to abandon
my patients, dress up and be on parade. Very good; I arrive. The old
women, in everything clean and new, are already drawn up in a row,
waiting. Near them struts the old garrison rat—the superintendent with
his mawkish, sneaking smile. The old women yawn and exchange glances,
but are afraid to complain. We wait. The junior steward gallops up. Half
an hour later the senior steward; then the superintendent of the
accounts’ office, then another, and then another of them . . . they keep
arriving endlessly. They all have mysterious, solemn faces. We wait and
wait, shift from one leg to another, look at the clock—all this in
monumental silence because we all hate each other like poison. One hour
passes, then a second, and then at last the carriage is seen in the
distance, and . . . and . . .”
The doctor went off into a shrill laugh and brought out in a shrill
voice:
“You get out of the carriage, and the old hags, at the word of command
from the old garrison rat, begin chanting: ‘The Glory of our Lord in
Zion the tongue of man cannot express. . .’ A pretty scene, wasn’t it?”
The doctor went off into a bass chuckle, and waved his hand as though to
signify that he could not utter another word for laughing. He laughed
heavily, harshly, with clenched teeth, as ill-natured people laugh; and
from his voice, from his face, from his glittering, rather insolent eyes
it could be seen that he had a profound contempt for the princess, for
the home, and for the old women. There was nothing amusing or laughable
in all that he described so clumsily and coarsely, but he laughed with
satisfaction, even with delight.
“And the school?” he went on, panting from laughter. “Do you remember
how you wanted to teach peasant children yourself? You must have taught
them very well, for very soon the children all ran away, so that they
had to be thrashed and bribed to come and be taught. And you remember
how you wanted to feed with your own hands the infants whose mothers
were working in the fields. You went about the village crying because
the infants were not at your disposal, as the mothers would take them to
the fields with them. Then the village foreman ordered the mothers by
turns to leave their infants behind for your entertainment. A strange
thing! They all ran away from your benevolence like mice from a cat! And
why was it? It’s very simple. Not because our people are ignorant and
ungrateful, as you always explained it to yourself, but because in all
your fads, if you’ll excuse the word, there wasn’t a ha’p’orth of love
and kindness! There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with
living puppets, nothing else. . . . A person who does not feel the
difference between a human being and a lap-dog ought not to go in for
philanthropy. I assure you, there’s a great difference between human
beings and lap-dogs!”
The princess’s heart was beating dreadfully; there was a thudding in her
ears, and she still felt as though the doctor were beating her on the
head with his hat. The doctor talked quickly, excitedly, and uncouthly,
stammering and gesticulating unnecessarily. All she grasped was that she
was spoken to by a coarse, ill-bred, spiteful, and ungrateful man; but
what he wanted of her and what he was talking about, she could not
understand.
“Go away!” she said in a tearful voice, putting up her hands to protect
her head from the doctor’s hat; “go away!”
“And how you treat your servants!” the doctor went on, indignantly. “You
treat them as the lowest scoundrels, and don’t look upon them as human
beings. For example, allow me to ask, why did you dismiss me? For ten
years I worked for your father and afterwards for you, honestly, without
vacations or holidays. I gained the love of all for more than seventy
miles round, and suddenly one fine day I am informed that I am no longer
wanted. What for? I’ve no idea to this day. I, a doctor of medicine, a
gentleman by birth, a student of the Moscow University, father of a
family—am such a petty, insignificant insect that you can kick me out
without explaining the reason! Why stand on ceremony with me! I heard
afterwards that my wife went without my knowledge three times to
intercede with you for me—you wouldn’t receive her. I am told she cried
in your hall. And I shall never forgive her for it, never!”
The doctor paused and clenched his teeth, making an intense effort to
think of something more to say, very unpleasant and vindictive. He
thought of something, and his cold, frowning face suddenly brightened.
“Take your attitude to this monastery!” he said with avidity. “You’ve
never spared any one, and the holier the place, the more chance of its
suffering from your loving-kindness and angelic sweetness. Why do you
come here? What do you want with the monks here, allow me to ask you?
What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? It’s another farce, another
amusement for you, another sacrilege against human dignity, and nothing
more. Why, you don’t believe in the monks’ God; you’ve a God of your own
in your heart, whom you’ve evolved for yourself at spiritualist
séances. You look with condescension upon the ritual of the Church; you
don’t go to mass or vespers; you sleep till midday. . . . Why do you
come here? . . . You come with a God of your own into a monastery you
have nothing to do with, and you imagine that the monks look upon it as
a very great honour. To be sure they do! You’d better ask, by the way,
what your visits cost the monastery. You were graciously pleased to
arrive here this evening, and a messenger from your estate arrived on
horseback the day before yesterday to warn them of your coming. They
were the whole day yesterday getting the rooms ready and expecting you.
This morning your advance-guard arrived—an insolent maid, who keeps
running across the courtyard, rustling her skirts, pestering them with
questions, giving orders. . . . I can’t endure it! The monks have been
on the lookout all day, for if you were not met with due ceremony, there
would be trouble! You’d complain to the bishop! ‘The monks don’t like
me, your holiness; I don’t know what I’ve done to displease them. It’s
true I’m a great sinner, but I’m so unhappy!’ Already one monastery has
been in hot water over you. The Father Superior is a busy, learned man;
he hasn’t a free moment, and you keep sending for him to come to your
rooms. Not a trace of respect for age or for rank! If at least you were
a bountiful giver to the monastery, one wouldn’t resent it so much, but
all this time the monks have not received a hundred roubles from you!”
Whenever people worried the princess, misunderstood her, or mortified
her, and when she did not know what to say or do, she usually began to
cry. And on this occasion, too, she ended by hiding her face in her
hands and crying aloud in a thin treble like a child. The doctor
suddenly stopped and looked at her. His face darkened and grew stern.
“Forgive me, Princess,” he said in a hollow voice. “I’ve given way to a
malicious feeling and forgotten myself. It was not right.”
And coughing in an embarrassed way, he walked away quickly, without
remembering to put his hat on.
Stars were already twinkling in the sky. The moon must have been rising
on the further side of the monastery, for the sky was clear, soft, and
transparent. Bats were flitting noiselessly along the white monastery
wall.
The clock slowly struck three quarters, probably a quarter to nine. The
princess got up and walked slowly to the gate. She felt wounded and was
crying, and she felt that the trees and the stars and even the bats were
pitying her, and that the clock struck musically only to express its
sympathy with her. She cried and thought how nice it would be to go into
a monastery for the rest of her life. On still summer evenings she would
walk alone through the avenues, insulted, injured, misunderstood by
people, and only God and the starry heavens would see the martyr’s
tears. The evening service was still going on in the church. The
princess stopped and listened to the singing; how beautiful the singing
sounded in the still darkness! How sweet to weep and suffer to the sound
of that singing!
Going into her rooms, she looked at her tear-stained face in the glass
and powdered it, then she sat down to supper. The monks knew that she
liked pickled sturgeon, little mushrooms, Malaga and plain honey-cakes
that left a taste of cypress in the mouth, and every time she came they
gave her all these dishes. As she ate the mushrooms and drank the
Malaga, the princess dreamed of how she would be finally ruined and
deserted—how all her stewards, bailiffs, clerks, and maid-servants for
whom she had done so much, would be false to her, and begin to say rude
things; how people all the world over would set upon her, speak ill of
her, jeer at her. She would renounce her title, would renounce society
and luxury, and would go into a convent without one word of reproach to
any one; she would pray for her enemies—and then they would all
understand her and come to beg her forgiveness, but by that time it
would be too late. . . .
After supper she knelt down in the corner before the ikon and read two
chapters of the Gospel. Then her maid made her bed and she got into it.
Stretching herself under the white quilt, she heaved a sweet, deep sigh,
as one sighs after crying, closed her eyes, and began to fall asleep.
In the morning she waked up and glanced at her watch. It was half-past
nine. On the carpet near the bed was a bright, narrow streak of sunlight
from a ray which came in at the window and dimly lighted up the room.
Flies were buzzing behind the black curtain at the window. “It’s early,”
thought the princess, and she closed her eyes.
Stretching and lying snug in her bed, she recalled her meeting yesterday
with the doctor and all the thoughts with which she had gone to sleep
the night before: she remembered she was unhappy. Then she thought of
her husband living in Petersburg, her stewards, doctors, neighbours, the
officials of her acquaintance . . . a long procession of familiar
masculine faces passed before her imagination. She smiled and thought,
if only these people could see into her heart and understand her, they
would all be at her feet.
At a quarter past eleven she called her maid.
“Help me to dress, Dasha,” she said languidly. “But go first and tell
them to get out the horses. I must set off for Klavdia Nikolaevna’s.”
Going out to get into the carriage, she bGlinked at the glaring daylight
and laughed with pleasure: it was a wonderfully fine day! As she scanned
from her half-closed eyes the monks who had gathered round the steps to
see her off, she nodded graciously and said:
“Good-bye, my friends! Till the day after tomorrow.”
It was an agreeable surprise to her that the doctor was with the monks
by the steps. His face was pale and severe.
“Princess,” he said with a guilty smile, taking off his hat, “I’ve been
waiting here a long time to see you. Forgive me, for God’s sake. . . . I
was carried away yesterday by an evil, vindictive feeling and I talked .
. . nonsense. In short, I beg your pardon.”
The princess smiled graciously, and held out her hand for him to kiss.
He kissed it, turning red.
Trying to look like a bird, the princess fluttered into the carriage and
nodded in all directions. There was a gay, warm, serene feeling in her
heart, and she felt herself that her smile was particularly soft and
friendly. As the carriage rolled towards the gates, and afterwards along
the dusty road past huts and gardens, past long trains of waggons and
strings of pilgrims on their way to the monastery, she still screwed up
her eyes and smiled softly. She was thinking there was no higher bliss
than to bring warmth, light, and joy wherever one went, to forgive
injuries, to smile graciously on one’s enemies. The peasants she passed
bowed to her, the carriage rustled softly, clouds of dust rose from
under the wheels and floated over the golden rye, and it seemed to the
princess that her body was swaying not on carriage cushions but on
clouds, and that she herself was like a light, transparent little cloud.
. . .
“How happy I am!” she murmured, shutting her eyes. “How happy I am!”
THE CHEMIST’S WIFE
THE little town of B——, consisting of two or three crooked streets, was
sound asleep. There was a complete stillness in the motionless air.
Nothing could be heard but far away, outside the town no doubt, the
barking of a dog in a thin, hoarse tenor. It was close upon daybreak.
Everything had long been asleep. The only person not asleep was the
young wife of Tchernomordik, a qualified dispenser who kept a chemist’s
shop at B——. She had gone to bed and got up again three times, but could
not sleep, she did not know why. She sat at the open window in her
nightdress and looked into the street. She felt bored, depressed, vexed
. . . so vexed that she felt quite inclined to cry—again she did not
know why. There seemed to be a lump in her chest that kept rising into
her throat. . . . A few paces behind her Tchernomordik lay curled up
close to the wall, snoring sweetly. A greedy flea was stabbing the
bridge of his nose, but he did not feel it, and was positively smiling,
for he was dreaming that every one in the town had a cough, and was
buying from him the King of Denmark’s cough-drops. He could not have
been wakened now by pinpricks or by cannon or by caresses.
The chemist’s shop was almost at the extreme end of the town, so that
the chemist’s wife could see far into the fields. She could see the
eastern horizon growing pale by degrees, then turning crimson as though
from a great fire. A big broad-faced moon peeped out unexpectedly from
behind bushes in the distance. It was red (as a rule when the moon
emerges from behind bushes it appears to be blushing).
Suddenly in the stillness of the night there came the sounds of
footsteps and a jingle of spurs. She could hear voices.
“That must be the officers going home to the camp from the Police
Captain’s,” thought the chemist’s wife.
Soon afterwards two figures wearing officers’ white tunics came into
sight: one big and tall, the other thinner and shorter. . . . They
slouched along by the fence, dragging one leg after the other and
talking loudly together. As they passed the chemist’s shop, they walked
more slowly than ever, and glanced up at the windows.
“It smells like a chemist’s,” said the thin one. “And so it is! Ah, I
remember. . . . I came here last week to buy some castor-oil. There’s a
chemist here with a sour face and the jawbone of an ass! Such a jawbone,
my dear fellow! It must have been a jawbone like that Samson killed the
Philistines with.”
“M’yes,” said the big one in a bass voice. “The pharmacist is asleep.
And his wife is asleep too. She is a pretty woman, Obtyosov.”
“I saw her. I liked her very much. . . . Tell me, doctor, can she
possibly love that jawbone of an ass? Can she?”
“No, most likely she does not love him,” sighed the doctor, speaking as
though he were sorry for the chemist. “The little woman is asleep behind
the window, Obtyosov, what? Tossing with the heat, her little mouth half
open . . . and one little foot hanging out of bed. I bet that fool the
chemist doesn’t realise what a lucky fellow he is. . . . No doubt he
sees no difference between a woman and a bottle of carbolic!”
“I say, doctor,” said the officer, stopping. “Let us go into the shop
and buy something. Perhaps we shall see her.”
“What an idea—in the night!”
“What of it? They are obliged to serve one even at night. My dear
fellow, let us go in!”
“If you like. . . .”
The chemist’s wife, hiding behind the curtain, heard a muffled ring.
Looking round at her husband, who was smiling and snoring sweetly as
before, she threw on her dress, slid her bare feet into her slippers,
and ran to the shop.
On the other side of the glass door she could see two shadows. The
chemist’s wife turned up the lamp and hurried to the door to open it,
and now she felt neither vexed nor bored nor inclined to cry, though her
heart was thumping. The big doctor and the slender Obtyosov walked in.
Now she could get a view of them. The doctor was corpulent and swarthy;
he wore a beard and was slow in his movements. At the slightest motion
his tunic seemed as though it would crack, and perspiration came on to
his face. The officer was rosy, clean-shaven, feminine-looking, and as
supple as an English whip.
“What may I give you?” asked the chemist’s wife, holding her dress
across her bosom.
“Give us . . . er-er . . . four pennyworth of peppermint lozenges!”
Without haste the chemist’s wife took down a jar from a shelf and began
weighing out lozenges. The customers stared fixedly at her back; the
doctor screwed up his eyes like a well-fed cat, while the lieutenant was
very grave.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen a lady serving in a chemist’s shop,”
observed the doctor.
“There’s nothing out of the way in it,” replied the chemist’s wife,
looking out of the corner of her eye at the rosy-cheeked officer. “My
husband has no assistant, and I always help him.”
“To be sure. . . . You have a charming little shop! What a number of
different . . . jars! And you are not afraid of moving about among the
poisons? Brrr!”
The chemist’s wife sealed up the parcel and handed it to the doctor.
Obtyosov gave her the money. Half a minute of silence followed. . . .
The men exchanged glances, took a step towards the door, then looked at
one another again.
“Will you give me two pennyworth of soda?” said the doctor.
Again the chemist’s wife slowly and languidly raised her hand to the
shelf.
“Haven’t you in the shop anything . . . such as . . .” muttered
Obtyosov, moving his fingers, “something, so to say, allegorical . . .
revivifying . . . seltzer-water, for instance. Have you any seltzer-
water?”
“Yes,” answered the chemist’s wife.
“Bravo! You’re a fairy, not a woman! Give us three bottles!”
The chemist’s wife hurriedly sealed up the soda and vanished through the
door into the darkness.
“A peach!” said the doctor, with a wink. “You wouldn’t find a pineapple
like that in the island of Madeira! Eh? What do you say? Do you hear the
snoring, though? That’s his worship the chemist enjoying sweet repose.”
A minute later the chemist’s wife came back and set five bottles on the
counter. She had just been in the cellar, and so was flushed and rather
excited.
“Sh-sh! . . . quietly!” said Obtyosov when, after uncorking the bottles,
she dropped the corkscrew. “Don’t make such a noise; you’ll wake your
husband.”
“Well, what if I do wake him?”
“He is sleeping so sweetly . . . he must be dreaming of you. . . . To
your health!”
“Besides,” boomed the doctor, hiccupping after the seltzer-water,
“husbands are such a dull business that it would be very nice of them to
be always asleep. How good a drop of red wine would be in this water!”
“What an idea!” laughed the chemist’s wife.
“That would be splendid. What a pity they don’t sell spirits in
chemist’s shops! Though you ought to sell wine as a medicine. Have you
any vinum gallicum rubrum?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, give us some! Bring it here, damn it!”
“How much do you want?”
“Quantum satis. . . . Give us an ounce each in the water, and afterwards
we’ll see. . . . Obtyosov, what do you say? First with water and
afterwards per se. . . .”
The doctor and Obtyosov sat down to the counter, took off their caps,
and began drinking the wine.
“The wine, one must admit, is wretched stuff! Vinum nastissimum! Though
in the presence of . . . er . . . it tastes like nectar. You are
enchanting, madam! In imagination I kiss your hand.”
“I would give a great deal to do so not in imagination,” said Obtyosov.
“On my honour, I’d give my life.”
“That’s enough,” said Madame Tchernomordik, flushing and assuming a
serious expression.
“What a flirt you are, though!” the doctor laughed softly, looking slyly
at her from under his brows. “Your eyes seem to be firing shot: piff-
paff! I congratulate you: you’ve conquered! We are vanquished!”
The chemist’s wife looked at their ruddy faces, listened to their
chatter, and soon she, too, grew quite lively. Oh, she felt so gay! She
entered into the conversation, she laughed, flirted, and even, after
repeated requests from the customers, drank two ounces of wine.
“You officers ought to come in oftener from the camp,” she said; “it’s
awful how dreary it is here. I’m simply dying of it.”
“I should think so!” said the doctor indignantly. “Such a peach, a
miracle of nature, thrown away in the wilds! How well Griboyedov said,
‘Into the wilds, to Saratov’! It’s time for us to be off, though.
Delighted to have made your acquaintance . . . very. How much do we owe
you?”
The chemist’s wife raised her eyes to the ceiling and her lips moved for
some time.
“Twelve roubles forty-eight kopecks,” she said.
Obtyosov took out of his pocket a fat pocket-book, and after fumbling
for some time among the notes, paid.
“Your husband’s sleeping sweetly . . . he must be dreaming,” he
muttered, pressing her hand at parting.
“I don’t like to hear silly remarks. . . .”
“What silly remarks? On the contrary, it’s not silly at all . . . even
Shakespeare said: ‘Happy is he who in his youth is young.’”
“Let go of my hand.”
At last after much talk and after kissing the lady’s hand at parting,
the customers went out of the shop irresolutely, as though they were
wondering whether they had not forgotten something.
She ran quickly into the bedroom and sat down in the same place. She saw
the doctor and the officer, on coming out of the shop, walk lazily away
a distance of twenty paces; then they stopped and began whispering
together. What about? Her heart throbbed, there was a pulsing in her
temples, and why she did not know. . . . Her heart beat violently as
though those two whispering outside were deciding her fate.
Five minutes later the doctor parted from Obtyosov and walked on, while
Obtyosov came back. He walked past the shop once and a second time. . .
. He would stop near the door and then take a few steps again. At last
the bell tinkled discreetly.
“What? Who is there?” the chemist’s wife heard her husband’s voice
suddenly. “There’s a ring at the bell, and you don’t hear it,” he said
severely. “Is that the way to do things?”
He got up, put on his dressing-gown, and staggering, half asleep,
flopped in his slippers to the shop.
“What . . . is it?” he asked Obtyosov.
“Give me . . . give me four pennyworth of peppermint lozenges.”
Sniffing continually, yawning, dropping asleep as he moved, and knocking
his knees against the counter, the chemist went to the shelf and reached
down the jar.
Two minutes later the chemist’s wife saw Obtyosov go out of the shop,
and, after he had gone some steps, she saw him throw the packet of
peppermints on the dusty road. The doctor came from behind a corner to
meet him. . . . They met and, gesticulating, vanished in the morning
mist.
“How unhappy I am!” said the chemist’s wife, looking angrily at her
husband, who was undressing quickly to get into bed again. “Oh, how
unhappy I am!” she repeated, suddenly melting into bitter tears. “And
nobody knows, nobody knows. . . .”
“I forgot fourpence on the counter,” muttered the chemist, pulling the
quilt over him. “Put it away in the till, please. . . .”
And at once he fell asleep again.
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories
THE SCHOOLMISTRESS
AT half-past eight they drove out of the town.
The highroad was dry, a lovely April sun was shining warmly, but the
snow was still lying in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, dark,
long, and spiteful, was hardly over; spring had come all of a sudden.
But neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the
breath of spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge
puddles that were like lakes, nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into
which it seemed one would have gone away so joyfully, presented anything
new or interesting to Marya Vassilyevna who was sitting in the cart. For
thirteen years she had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning
how many times during all those years she had been to the town for her
salary; and whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or
winter, it was all the same to her, and she always—invariably—longed for
one thing only, to get to the end of her journey as quickly as could be.
She felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for
ages and ages, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew
every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Her
past was here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other
future than the school, the road to the town and back again, and again
the school and again the road....
She had got out of the habit of thinking of her past before she became a
schoolmistress, and had almost forgotten it. She had once had a father
and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big flat near the Red Gate,
but of all that life there was left in her memory only something vague
and fluid like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old,
and her mother had died soon after.... She had a brother, an officer; at
first they used to write to each other, then her brother had given up
answering her letters, he had got out of the way of writing. Of her old
belongings, all that was left was a photograph of her mother, but it had
grown dim from the dampness of the school, and now nothing could be seen
but the hair and the eyebrows.
When they had driven a couple of miles, old Semyon, who was driving,
turned round and said:
“They have caught a government clerk in the town. They have taken him
away. The story is that with some Germans he killed Alexeyev, the Mayor,
in Moscow.”
“Who told you that?”
“They were reading it in the paper, in Ivan Ionov’s tavern.”
And again they were silent for a long time. Marya Vassilyevna thought of
her school, of the examination that was coming soon, and of the girl and
four boys she was sending up for it. And just as she was thinking about
the examination, she was overtaken by a neighboring landowner called
Hanov in a carriage with four horses, the very man who had been examiner
in her school the year before. When he came up to her he recognized her
and bowed.
“Good-morning,” he said to her. “You are driving home, I suppose.”
This Hanov, a man of forty with a listless expression and a face that
showed signs of wear, was beginning to look old, but was still handsome
and admired by women. He lived in his big homestead alone, and was not
in the service; and people used to say of him that he did nothing at
home but walk up and down the room whistling, or play chess with his old
footman. People said, too, that he drank heavily. And indeed at the
examination the year before the very papers he brought with him smelt of
wine and scent. He had been dressed all in new clothes on that occasion,
and Marya Vassilyevna thought him very attractive, and all the while she
sat beside him she had felt embarrassed. She was accustomed to see
frigid and sensible examiners at the school, while this one did not
remember a single prayer, or know what to ask questions about, and was
exceedingly courteous and delicate, giving nothing but the highest
marks.
“I am going to visit Bakvist,” he went on, addressing Marya Vassilyevna,
“but I am told he is not at home.”
They turned off the highroad into a by-road to the village, Hanov
leading the way and Semyon following. The four horses moved at a walking
pace, with effort dragging the heavy carriage through the mud. Semyon
tacked from side to side, keeping to the edge of the road, at one time
through a snowdrift, at another through a pool, often jumping out of the
cart and helping the horse. Marya Vassilyevna was still thinking about
the school, wondering whether the arithmetic questions at the
examination would be difficult or easy. And she felt annoyed with the
Zemstvo board at which she had found no one the day before. How
unbusiness-like! Here she had been asking them for the last two years to
dismiss the watchman, who did nothing, was rude to her, and hit the
schoolboys; but no one paid any attention. It was hard to find the
president at the office, and when one did find him he would say with
tears in his eyes that he hadn’t a moment to spare; the inspector
visited the school at most once in three years, and knew nothing
whatever about his work, as he had been in the Excise Duties Department,
and had received the post of school inspector through influence. The
School Council met very rarely, and there was no knowing where it met;
the school guardian was an almost illiterate peasant, the head of a
tanning business, unintelligent, rude, and a great friend of the
watchman’s—and goodness knows to whom she could appeal with complaints
or inquiries....
“He really is handsome,” she thought, glancing at Hanov.
The road grew worse and worse.... They drove into the wood. Here there
was no room to turn round, the wheels sank deeply in, water splashed and
gurgled through them, and sharp twigs struck them in the face.
“What a road!” said Hanov, and he laughed.
The schoolmistress looked at him and could not understand why this queer
man lived here. What could his money, his interesting appearance, his
refined bearing do for him here, in this mud, in this God-forsaken,
dreary place? He got no special advantages out of life, and here, like
Semyon, was driving at a jog-trot on an appalling road and enduring the
same discomforts. Why live here if one could live in Petersburg or
abroad? And one would have thought it would be nothing for a rich man
like him to make a good road instead of this bad one, to avoid enduring
this misery and seeing the despair on the faces of his coachman and
Semyon; but he only laughed, and apparently did not mind, and wanted no
better life. He was kind, soft, naive, and he did not understand this
coarse life, just as at the examination he did not know the prayers. He
subscribed nothing to the schools but globes, and genuinely regarded
himself as a useful person and a prominent worker in the cause of
popular education. And what use were his globes here?
“Hold on, Vassilyevna!” said Semyon.
The cart lurched violently and was on the point of upsetting; something
heavy rolled on to Marya Vassilyevna’s feet—it was her parcel of
purchases. There was a steep ascent uphill through the clay; here in the
winding ditches rivulets were gurgling. The water seemed to have gnawed
away the road; and how could one get along here! The horses breathed
hard. Hanov got out of his carriage and walked at the side of the road
in his long overcoat. He was hot.
“What a road!” he said, and laughed again. “It would soon smash up one’s
carriage.”
“Nobody obliges you to drive about in such weather,” said Semyon
surlily. “You should stay at home.”
“I am dull at home, grandfather. I don’t like staying at home.”
Beside old Semyon he looked graceful and vigorous, but yet in his walk
there was something just perceptible which betrayed in him a being
already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin. And all at once
there was a whiff of spirits in the wood. Marya Vassilyevna was filled
with dread and pity for this man going to his ruin for no visible cause
or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or
sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin.
His wife! Life was so ordered that here he was living in his great house
alone, and she was living in a God-forsaken village alone, and yet for
some reason the mere thought that he and she might be close to one
another and equals seemed impossible and absurd. In reality, life was
arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all
understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one’s
heart sank.
“And it is beyond all understanding,” she thought, “why God gives
beauty, this graciousness, and sad, sweet eyes to weak, unlucky, useless
people—why they are so charming.”
“Here we must turn off to the right,” said Hanov, getting into his
carriage. “Good-by! I wish you all things good!”
And again she thought of her pupils, of the examination, of the
watchman, of the School Council; and when the wind brought the sound of
the retreating carriage these thoughts were mingled with others. She
longed to think of beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness which would
never be....
His wife? It was cold in the morning, there was no one to heat the
stove, the watchman disappeared; the children came in as soon as it was
light, bringing in snow and mud and making a noise: it was all so
inconvenient, so comfortless. Her abode consisted of one little room and
the kitchen close by. Her head ached every day after her work, and after
dinner she had heart-burn. She had to collect money from the school-
children for wood and for the watchman, and to give it to the school
guardian, and then to entreat him—that overfed, insolent peasant—for
God’s sake to send her wood. And at night she dreamed of examinations,
peasants, snowdrifts. And this life was making her grow old and coarse,
making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she were made of lead.
She was always afraid, and she would get up from her seat and not
venture to sit down in the presence of a member of the Zemstvo or the
school guardian. And she used formal, deferential expressions when she
spoke of any one of them. And no one thought her attractive, and life
was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy,
without interesting acquaintances. How awful it would have been in her
position if she had fallen in love!
“Hold on, Vassilyevna!”
Again a sharp ascent uphill....
She had become a schoolmistress from necessity, without feeling any
vocation for it; and she had never thought of a vocation, of serving the
cause of enlightenment; and it always seemed to her that what was most
important in her work was not the children, nor enlightenment, but the
examinations. And what time had she for thinking of vocation, of serving
the cause of enlightenment? Teachers, badly paid doctors, and their
assistants, with their terribly hard work, have not even the comfort of
thinking that they are serving an idea or the people, as their heads are
always stuffed with thoughts of their daily bread, of wood for the fire,
of bad roads, of illnesses. It is a hard-working, an uninteresting life,
and only silent, patient cart-horses like Mary Vassilyevna could put up
with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked
about vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up
the work.
Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a meadow,
then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place the peasants
would not let them pass, in another it was the priest’s land and they
could not cross it, in another Ivan Ionov had bought a plot from the
landowner and had dug a ditch round it. They kept having to turn back.
They reached Nizhneye Gorodistche. Near the tavern on the dung-strewn
earth, where the snow was still lying, there stood wagons that had
brought great bottles of crude sulphuric acid. There were a great many
people in the tavern, all drivers, and there was a smell of vodka,
tobacco, and sheepskins. There was a loud noise of conversation and the
banging of the swing-door. Through the wall, without ceasing for a
moment, came the sound of a concertina being played in the shop. Marya
Vassilyevna sat down and drank some tea, while at the next table
peasants were drinking vodka and beer, perspiring from the tea they had
just swallowed and the stifling fumes of the tavern.
“I say, Kuzma!” voices kept shouting in confusion. “What there!” “The
Lord bless us!” “Ivan Dementyitch, I can tell you that!” “Look out, old
man!”
A little pock-marked man with a black beard, who was quite drunk, was
suddenly surprised by something and began using bad language.
“What are you swearing at, you there?” Semyon, who was sitting some way
off, responded angrily. “Don’t you see the young lady?”
“The young lady!” someone mimicked in another corner.
“Swinish crow!”
“We meant nothing...” said the little man in confusion. “I beg your
pardon. We pay with our money and the young lady with hers. Good-
morning!”
“Good-morning,” answered the schoolmistress.
“And we thank you most feelingly.”
Marya Vassilyevna drank her tea with satisfaction, and she, too, began
turning red like the peasants, and fell to thinking again about
firewood, about the watchman....
“Stay, old man,” she heard from the next table, “it’s the schoolmistress
from Vyazovye.... We know her; she’s a good young lady.”
“She’s all right!”
The swing-door was continually banging, some coming in, others going
out. Marya Vassilyevna sat on, thinking all the time of the same things,
while the concertina went on playing and playing. The patches of
sunshine had been on the floor, then they passed to the counter, to the
wall, and disappeared altogether; so by the sun it was past midday. The
peasants at the next table were getting ready to go. The little man,
somewhat unsteadily, went up to Marya Vassilyevna and held out his hand
to her; following his example, the others shook hands, too, at parting,
and went out one after another, and the swing-door squeaked and slammed
nine times.
“Vassilyevna, get ready,” Semyon called to her.
They set off. And again they went at a walking pace.
“A little while back they were building a school here in their Nizhneye
Gorodistche,” said Semyon, turning round. “It was a wicked thing that
was done!”
“Why, what?”
“They say the president put a thousand in his pocket, and the school
guardian another thousand in his, and the teacher five hundred.”
“The whole school only cost a thousand. It’s wrong to slander people,
grandfather. That’s all nonsense.”
“I don’t know,... I only tell you what folks say.”
But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The
peasants did not believe her. They always thought she received too large
a salary, twenty-one roubles a month (five would have been enough), and
that of the money that she collected from the children for the firewood
and the watchman the greater part she kept for herself. The guardian
thought the same as the peasants, and he himself made a profit off the
firewood and received payments from the peasants for being a
guardian—without the knowledge of the authorities.
The forest, thank God! was behind them, and now it would be flat, open
ground all the way to Vyazovye, and there was not far to go now. They
had to cross the river and then the railway line, and then Vyazovye was
in sight.
“Where are you driving?” Marya Vassilyevna asked Semyon. “Take the road
to the right to the bridge.”
“Why, we can go this way as well. It’s not deep enough to matter.”
“Mind you don’t drown the horse.”
“What?”
“Look, Hanov is driving to the bridge,” said Marya Vassilyevna, seeing
the four horses far away to the right. “It is he, I think.”
“It is. So he didn’t find Bakvist at home. What a pig-headed fellow he
is. Lord have mercy upon us! He’s driven over there, and what for? It’s
fully two miles nearer this way.”
They reached the river. In the summer it was a little stream easily
crossed by wading. It usually dried up in August, but now, after the
spring floods, it was a river forty feet in breadth, rapid, muddy, and
cold; on the bank and right up to the water there were fresh tracks of
wheels, so it had been crossed here.
“Go on!” shouted Semyon angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the
reins and jerking his elbows as a bird does its wings. “Go on!”
The horse went on into the water up to his belly and stopped, but at
once went on again with an effort, and Marya Vassilyevna was aware of a
keen chilliness in her feet.
“Go on!” she, too, shouted, getting up. “Go on!”
They got out on the bank.
“Nice mess it is, Lord have mercy upon us!” muttered Semyon, setting
straight the harness. “It’s a perfect plague with this Zemstvo....”
Her shoes and goloshes were full of water, the lower part of her dress
and of her coat and one sleeve were wet and dripping: the sugar and
flour had got wet, and that was worst of all, and Marya Vassilyevna
could only clasp her hands in despair and say:
“Oh, Semyon, Semyon! How tiresome you are really!...”
The barrier was down at the railway crossing. A train was coming out of
the station. Marya Vassilyevna stood at the crossing waiting till it
should pass, and shivering all over with cold. Vyazovye was in sight
now, and the school with the green roof, and the church with its crosses
flashing in the evening sun: and the station windows flashed too, and a
pink smoke rose from the engine... and it seemed to her that everything
was trembling with cold.
Here was the train; the windows reflected the gleaming light like the
crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. On the
little platform between two first-class carriages a lady was standing,
and Marya Vassilyevna glanced at her as she passed. Her mother! What a
resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a
brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first
time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture
of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the
aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard
the sound of the piano, her father’s voice; she felt as she had been
then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her
own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she
pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstacy, and called softly,
beseechingly:
“Mother!”
And she began crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov
drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined
happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an
equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her
triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on
the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a
schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had
awakened....
“Vassilyevna, get in!”
And at once it all vanished. The barrier was slowly raised. Marya
Vassilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart. The
carriage with the four horses crossed the railway line; Semyon followed
it. The signalman took off his cap.
“And here is Vyazovye. Here we are.”
A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
A MEDICAL student called Mayer, and a pupil of the Moscow School of
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture called Rybnikov, went one evening
to see their friend Vassilyev, a law student, and suggested that he
should go with them to S. Street. For a long time Vassilyev would not
consent to go, but in the end he put on his greatcoat and went with
them.
He knew nothing of fallen women except by hearsay and from books, and he
had never in his life been in the houses in which they live. He knew
that there are immoral women who, under the pressure of fatal
circumstances—environment, bad education, poverty, and so on—are forced
to sell their honor for money. They know nothing of pure love, have no
children, have no civil rights; their mothers and sisters weep over them
as though they were dead, science treats of them as an evil, men address
them with contemptuous familiarity. But in spite of all that, they do
not lose the semblance and image of God. They all acknowledge their sin
and hope for salvation. Of the means that lead to salvation they can
avail themselves to the fullest extent. Society, it is true, will not
forgive people their past, but in the sight of God St. Mary of Egypt is
no lower than the other saints. When it had happened to Vassilyev in the
street to recognize a fallen woman as such, by her dress or her manners,
or to see a picture of one in a comic paper, he always remembered a
story he had once read: a young man, pure and self-sacrificing, loves a
fallen woman and urges her to become his wife; she, considering herself
unworthy of such happiness, takes poison.
Vassilyev lived in one of the side streets turning out of Tverskoy
Boulevard. When he came out of the house with his two friends it was
about eleven o’clock. The first snow had not long fallen, and all nature
was under the spell of the fresh snow. There was the smell of snow in
the air, the snow crunched softly under the feet; the earth, the roofs,
the trees, the seats on the boulevard, everything was soft, white,
young, and this made the houses look quite different from the day
before; the street lamps burned more brightly, the air was more
transparent, the carriages rumbled with a deeper note, and with the
fresh, light, frosty air a feeling stirred in the soul akin to the
white, youthful, feathery snow. “Against my will an unknown force,”
hummed the medical student in his agreeable tenor, “has led me to these
mournful shores.”
“Behold the mill...” the artist seconded him, “in ruins now....”
“Behold the mill... in ruins now,” the medical student repeated, raising
his eyebrows and shaking his head mournfully.
He paused, rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the words, and then
sang aloud, so well that passers-by looked round:
“Here in old days when I was free, Love, free, unfettered, greeted me.”
The three of them went into a restaurant and, without taking off their
greatcoats, drank a couple of glasses of vodka each. Before drinking the
second glass, Vassilyev noticed a bit of cork in his vodka, raised the
glass to his eyes, and gazed into it for a long time, screwing up his
shortsighted eyes. The medical student did not understand his
expression, and said:
“Come, why look at it? No philosophizing, please. Vodka is given us to
be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked
upon. For one evening anyway live like a human being!”
“But I haven’t said anything...” said Vassilyev, laughing. “Am I
refusing to?”
There was a warmth inside him from the vodka. He looked with softened
feelings at his friends, admired them and envied them. In these strong,
healthy, cheerful people how wonderfully balanced everything is, how
finished and smooth is everything in their minds and souls! They sing,
and have a passion for the theatre, and draw, and talk a great deal, and
drink, and they don’t have headaches the day after; they are both
poetical and debauched, both soft and hard; they can work, too, and be
indignant, and laugh without reason, and talk nonsense; they are warm,
honest, self-sacrificing, and as men are in no way inferior to himself,
Vassilyev, who watched over every step he took and every word he
uttered, who was fastidious and cautious, and ready to raise every
trifle to the level of a problem. And he longed for one evening to live
as his friends did, to open out, to let himself loose from his own
control. If vodka had to be drunk, he would drink it, though his head
would be splitting next morning. If he were taken to the women he would
go. He would laugh, play the fool, gaily respond to the passing advances
of strangers in the street....
He went out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends—one in a
crushed broad-brimmed hat, with an affectation of artistic untidiness;
the other in a sealskin cap, a man not poor, though he affected to
belong to the Bohemia of learning. He liked the snow, the pale street
lamps, the sharp black tracks left in the first snow by the feet of the
passers-by. He liked the air, and especially that limpid, tender, naive,
as it were virginal tone, which can be seen in nature only twice in the
year—when everything is covered with snow, and in spring on bright days
and moonlight evenings when the ice breaks on the river.
“Against my will an unknown force, Has led me to these mournful shores,”
he hummed in an undertone.
And the tune for some reason haunted him and his friends all the way,
and all three of them hummed it mechanically, not in time with one
another.
Vassilyev’s imagination was picturing how, in another ten minutes, he
and his friends would knock at a door; how by little dark passages and
dark rooms they would steal in to the women; how, taking advantage of
the darkness, he would strike a match, would light up and see the face
of a martyr and a guilty smile. The unknown, fair or dark, would
certainly have her hair down and be wearing a white dressing-jacket; she
would be panic-stricken by the light, would be fearfully confused, and
would say: “For God’s sake, what are you doing! Put it out!” It would
all be dreadful, but interesting and new.
The friends turned out of Trubnoy Square into Gratchevka, and soon
reached the side street which Vassilyev only knew by reputation. Seeing
two rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide-open doors,
and hearing gay strains of pianos and violins, sounds which floated out
from every door and mingled in a strange chaos, as though an unseen
orchestra were tuning up in the darkness above the roofs, Vassilyev was
surprised and said:
“What a lot of houses!”
“That’s nothing,” said the medical student. “In London there are ten
times as many. There are about a hundred thousand such women there.”
The cabmen were sitting on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as in
any other side street; the same passers-by were walking along the
pavement as in other streets. No one was hurrying, no one was hiding his
face in his coat-collar, no one shook his head reproachfully.... And in
this indifference to the noisy chaos of pianos and violins, to the
bright windows and wide-open doors, there was a feeling of something
very open, insolent, reckless, and devil-may-care. Probably it was as
gay and noisy at the slave-markets in their day, and people’s faces and
movements showed the same indifference.
“Let us begin from the beginning,” said the artist.
The friends went into a narrow passage lighted by a lamp with a
reflector. When they opened the door a man in a black coat, with an
unshaven face like a flunkey’s, and sleepy-looking eyes, got up lazily
from a yellow sofa in the hall. The place smelt like a laundry with an
odor of vinegar in addition. A door from the hall led into a brightly
lighted room. The medical student and the artist stopped at this door
and, craning their necks, peeped into the room.
“Buona sera, signori, rigolleto—hugenotti—traviata!” began the artist,
with a theatrical bow.
“Havanna—tarakano—pistoleto!” said the medical student, pressing his cap
to his breast and bowing low.
Vassilyev was standing behind them. He would have liked to make a
theatrical bow and say something silly, too, but he only smiled, felt an
awkwardness that was like shame, and waited impatiently for what would
happen next.
A little fair girl of seventeen or eighteen, with short hair, in a short
light-blue frock with a bunch of white ribbon on her bosom, appeared in
the doorway.
“Why do you stand at the door?” she said. “Take off your coats and come
into the drawing-room.”
The medical student and the artist, still talking Italian, went into the
drawing-room. Vassilyev followed them irresolutely.
“Gentlemen, take off your coats!” the flunkey said sternly; “you can’t
go in like that.”
In the drawing-room there was, besides the girl, another woman, very
stout and tall, with a foreign face and bare arms. She was sitting near
the piano, laying out a game of patience on her lap. She took no notice
whatever of the visitors.
“Where are the other young ladies?” asked the medical student.
“They are having their tea,” said the fair girl. “Stepan,” she called,
“go and tell the young ladies some students have come!”
A little later a third young lady came into the room. She was wearing a
bright red dress with blue stripes. Her face was painted thickly and
unskillfully, her brow was hidden under her hair, and there was an
unbHlinking, frightened stare in her eyes. As she came in, she began at
once singing some song in a coarse, powerful contralto. After her a
fourth appeared, and after her a fifth....
In all this Vassilyev saw nothing new or interesting. It seemed to him
that that room, the piano, the looking-glass in its cheap gilt frame,
the bunch of white ribbon, the dress with the blue stripes, and the
blank indifferent faces, he had seen before and more than once. Of the
darkness, the silence, the secrecy, the guilty smile, of all that he had
expected to meet here and had dreaded, he saw no trace.
Everything was ordinary, prosaic, and uninteresting. Only one thing
faintly stirred his curiosity—the terrible, as it were intentionally
designed, bad taste which was visible in the cornices, in the absurd
pictures, in the dresses, in the bunch of ribbons. There was something
characteristic and peculiar in this bad taste.
“How poor and stupid it all is!” thought Vassilyev. “What is there in
all this trumpery I see now that can tempt a normal man and excite him
to commit the horrible sin of buying a human being for a rouble? I
understand any sin for the sake of splendor, beauty, grace, passion,
taste; but what is there here? What is there here worth sinning for?
But... one mustn’t think!”
“Beardy, treat me to some porter!” said the fair girl, addressing him.
Vassilyev was at once overcome with confusion.
“With pleasure,” he said, bowing politely. “Only excuse me, madam, I....
I won’t drink with you. I don’t drink.”
Five minutes later the friends went off into another house.
“Why did you ask for porter?” said the medical student angrily. “What a
millionaire! You have thrown away six roubles for no reason
whatever—simply waste!”
“If she wants it, why not let her have the pleasure?” said Vassilyev,
justifying himself.
“You did not give pleasure to her, but to the ‘Madam.’ They are told to
ask the visitors to stand them treat because it is a profit to the
keeper.”
“Behold the mill...” hummed the artist, “in ruins now....”
Going into the next house, the friends stopped in the hall and did not
go into the drawing-room. Here, as in the first house, a figure in a
black coat, with a sleepy face like a flunkey’s, got up from a sofa in
the hall. Looking at this flunkey, at his face and his shabby black
coat, Vassilyev thought: “What must an ordinary simple Russian have gone
through before fate flung him down as a flunkey here? Where had he been
before and what had he done? What was awaiting him? Was he married?
Where was his mother, and did she know that he was a servant here?” And
Vassilyev could not help particularly noticing the flunkey in each
house. In one of the houses—he thought it was the fourth—there was a
little spare, frail-looking flunkey with a watch-chain on his waistcoat.
He was reading a newspaper, and took no notice of them when they went
in. Looking at his face Vassilyev, for some reason, thought that a man
with such a face might steal, might murder, might bear false witness.
But the face was really interesting: a big forehead, gray eyes, a little
flattened nose, thin compressed lips, and a blankly stupid and at the
same time insolent expression like that of a young harrier overtaking a
hare. Vassilyev thought it would be nice to touch this man’s hair, to
see whether it was soft or coarse. It must be coarse like a dog’s.
III
Having drunk two glasses of porter, the artist became suddenly tipsy and
grew unnaturally lively.
“Let’s go to another!” he said peremptorily, waving his hands. “I will
take you to the best one.”
When he had brought his friends to the house which in his opinion was
the best, he declared his firm intention of dancing a quadrille. The
medical student grumbled something about their having to pay the
musicians a rouble, but agreed to be his vis-a-vis. They began dancing.
It was just as nasty in the best house as in the worst. Here there were
just the same looking-glasses and pictures, the same styles of coiffure
and dress. Looking round at the furnishing of the rooms and the
costumes, Vassilyev realized that this was not lack of taste, but
something that might be called the taste, and even the style, of S.
Street, which could not be found elsewhere—something intentional in its
ugliness, not accidental, but elaborated in the course of years. After
he had been in eight houses he was no longer surprised at the color of
the dresses, at the long trains, the gaudy ribbons, the sailor dresses,
and the thick purplish rouge on the cheeks; he saw that it all had to be
like this, that if a single one of the women had been dressed like a
human being, or if there had been one decent engraving on the wall, the
general tone of the whole street would have suffered.
“How unskillfully they sell themselves!” he thought. “How can they fail
to understand that vice is only alluring when it is beautiful and
hidden, when it wears the mask of virtue? Modest black dresses, pale
faces, mournful smiles, and darkness would be far more effective than
this clumsy tawdriness. Stupid things! If they don’t understand it of
themselves, their visitors might surely have taught them....”
A young lady in a Polish dress edged with white fur came up to him and
sat down beside him.
“You nice dark man, why aren’t you dancing?” she asked. “Why are you so
dull?”
“Because it is dull.”
“Treat me to some Lafitte. Then it won’t be dull.”
Vassilyev made no answer. He was silent for a little, and then asked:
“What time do you get to sleep?”
“At six o’clock.”
“And what time do you get up?”
“Sometimes at two and sometimes at three.”
“And what do you do when you get up?”
“We have coffee, and at six o’clock we have dinner.”
“And what do you have for dinner?”
“Usually soup, beefsteak, and dessert. Our madam keeps the girls well.
But why do you ask all this?”
“Oh, just to talk....”
Vassilyev longed to talk to the young lady about many things. He felt an
intense desire to find out where she came from, whether her parents were
living, and whether they knew that she was here; how she had come into
this house; whether she were cheerful and satisfied, or sad and
oppressed by gloomy thoughts; whether she hoped some day to get out of
her present position.... But he could not think how to begin or in what
shape to put his questions so as not to seem impertinent. He thought for
a long time, and asked:
“How old are you?”
“Eighty,” the young lady jested, looking with a laugh at the antics of
the artist as he danced.
All at once she burst out laughing at something, and uttered a long
cynical sentence loud enough to be heard by everyone. Vassilyev was
aghast, and not knowing how to look, gave a constrained smile. He was
the only one who smiled; all the others, his friends, the musicians, the
women, did not even glance towards his neighbor, but seemed not to have
heard her.
“Stand me some Lafitte,” his neighbor said again.
Vassilyev felt a repulsion for her white fur and for her voice, and
walked away from her. It seemed to him hot and stifling, and his heart
began throbbing slowly but violently, like a hammer—one! two! three!
“Let us go away!” he said, pulling the artist by his sleeve.
“Wait a little; let me finish.”
While the artist and the medical student were finishing the quadrille,
to avoid looking at the women, Vassilyev scrutinized the musicians. A
respectable-looking old man in spectacles, rather like Marshal Bazaine,
was playing the piano; a young man with a fair beard, dressed in the
latest fashion, was playing the violin. The young man had a face that
did not look stupid nor exhausted, but intelligent, youthful, and fresh.
He was dressed fancifully and with taste; he played with feeling. It was
a mystery how he and the respectable-looking old man had come here. How
was it they were not ashamed to sit here? What were they thinking about
when they looked at the women?
If the violin and the piano had been played by men in rags, looking
hungry, gloomy, drunken, with dissipated or stupid faces, then one could
have understood their presence, perhaps. As it was, Vassilyev could not
understand it at all. He recalled the story of the fallen woman he had
once read, and he thought now that that human figure with the guilty
smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing now. It seemed to
him that he was seeing not fallen women, but some different world quite
apart, alien to him and incomprehensible; if he had seen this world
before on the stage, or read of it in a book, he would not have believed
in it....
The woman with the white fur burst out laughing again and uttered a
loathsome sentence in a loud voice. A feeling of disgust took possession
of him. He flushed crimson and went out of the room.
“Wait a minute, we are coming too!” the artist shouted to him.
IV
“While we were dancing,” said the medical student, as they all three
went out into the street, “I had a conversation with my partner. We
talked about her first romance. He, the hero, was an accountant at
Smolensk with a wife and five children. She was seventeen, and she lived
with her papa and mamma, who sold soap and candles.”
“How did he win her heart?” asked Vassilyev.
“By spending fifty roubles on underclothes for her. What next!”
“So he knew how to get his partner’s story out of her,” thought
Vassilyev about the medical student. “But I don’t know how to.”
“I say, I am going home!” he said.
“What for?”
“Because I don’t know how to behave here. Besides, I am bored,
disgusted. What is there amusing in it? If they were human beings—but
they are savages and animals. I am going; do as you like.”
“Come, Grisha, Grigory, darling...” said the artist in a tearful voice,
hugging Vassilyev, “come along! Let’s go to one more together and
damnation take them!... Please do, Grisha!”
They persuaded Vassilyev and led him up a staircase. In the carpet and
the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels
that decorated the hall, the same S. Street style was apparent, but
carried to a greater perfection, more imposing.
“I really will go home!” said Vassilyev as he was taking off his coat.
“Come, come, dear boy,” said the artist, and he kissed him on the neck.
“Don’t be tiresome.... Gri-gri, be a good comrade! We came together, we
will go back together. What a beast you are, really!”
“I can wait for you in the street. I think it’s loathsome, really!”
“Come, come, Grisha.... If it is loathsome, you can observe it! Do you
understand? You can observe!”
“One must take an objective view of things,” said the medical student
gravely.
Vassilyev went into the drawing-room and sat down. There were a number
of visitors in the room besides him and his friends: two infantry
officers, a bald, gray-haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless
youths from the institute of land-surveying, and a very tipsy man who
looked like an actor. All the young ladies were taken up with these
visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev.
Only one of them, dressed a la Aida, glanced sideways at him, smiled,
and said, yawning: “A dark one has come....”
Vassilyev’s heart was throbbing and his face burned. He felt ashamed
before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and
miserable. He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and loving
man (such as he had hitherto considered himself), hated these women and
felt nothing but repulsion towards them. He felt pity neither for the
women nor the musicians nor the flunkeys.
“It is because I am not trying to understand them,” he thought. “They
are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are
human beings all the same, they have souls. One must understand them and
then judge....”
“Grisha, don’t go, wait for us,” the artist shouted to him and
disappeared.
The medical student disappeared soon after.
“Yes, one must make an effort to understand, one mustn’t be like
this....” Vassilyev went on thinking.
And he began gazing at each of the women with strained attention,
looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their
faces, or not one of these women felt herself to be guilty; he read on
every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and
complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent
movements, and nothing else. Apparently each of them had in the past a
romance with an accountant based on underclothes for fifty roubles, and
looked for no other charm in the present but coffee, a dinner of three
courses, wines, quadrilles, sleeping till two in the afternoon....
Finding no guilty smile, Vassilyev began to look whether there was not
one intelligent face. And his attention was caught by one pale, rather
sleepy, exhausted-looking face.... It was a dark woman, not very young,
wearing a dress covered with spangles; she was sitting in an easy-chair,
looking at the floor lost in thought. Vassilyev walked from one corner
of the room to the other, and, as though casually, sat down beside her.
“I must begin with something trivial,” he thought, “and pass to what is
serious....”
“What a pretty dress you have,” and with his finger he touched the gold
fringe of her fichu.
“Oh, is it?...” said the dark woman listlessly.
“What province do you come from?”
“I? From a distance.... From Tchernigov.”
“A fine province. It’s nice there.”
“Any place seems nice when one is not in it.”
“It’s a pity I cannot describe nature,” thought Vassilyev. “I might
touch her by a description of nature in Tchernigov. No doubt she loves
the place if she has been born there.”
“Are you dull here?” he asked.
“Of course I am dull.”
“Why don’t you go away from here if you are dull?”
“Where should I go to? Go begging or what?”
“Begging would be easier than living here.”
“How do you know that? Have you begged?”
“Yes, when I hadn’t the money to study. Even if I hadn’t anyone could
understand that. A beggar is anyway a free man, and you are a slave.”
The dark woman stretched, and watched with sleepy eyes the footman who
was bringing a trayful of glasses and seltzer water.
“Stand me a glass of porter,” she said, and yawned again.
“Porter,” thought Vassilyev. “And what if your brother or mother walked
in at this moment? What would you say? And what would they say? There
would be porter then, I imagine....”
All at once there was the sound of weeping. From the adjoining room,
from which the footman had brought the seltzer water, a fair man with a
red face and angry eyes ran in quickly. He was followed by the tall,
stout “madam,” who was shouting in a shrill voice:
“Nobody has given you leave to slap girls on the cheeks! We have
visitors better than you, and they don’t fight! Impostor!”
A hubbub arose. Vassilyev was frightened and turned pale. In the next
room there was the sound of bitter, genuine weeping, as though of
someone insulted. And he realized that there were real people living
here who, like people everywhere else, felt insulted, suffered, wept,
and cried for help. The feeling of oppressive hate and disgust gave way
to an acute feeling of pity and anger against the aggressor. He rushed
into the room where there was weeping. Across rows of bottles on a
marble-top table he distinguished a suffering face, wet with tears,
stretched out his hands towards that face, took a step towards the
table, but at once drew back in horror. The weeping girl was drunk.
As he made his way though the noisy crowd gathered about the fair man,
his heart sank and he felt frightened like a child; and it seemed to him
that in this alien, incomprehensible world people wanted to pursue him,
to beat him, to pelt him with filthy words.... He tore down his coat
from the hatstand and ran headlong downstairs.
V
Leaning against the fence, he stood near the house waiting for his
friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and violins, gay,
reckless, insolent, and mournful, mingled in the air in a sort of chaos,
and this tangle of sounds seemed again like an unseen orchestra tuning
up on the roofs. If one looked upwards into the darkness, the black
background was all spangled with white, moving spots: it was snow
falling. As the snowflakes came into the light they floated round lazily
in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. The
snowflakes whirled thickly round Vassilyev and hung upon his beard, his
eyelashes, his eyebrows.... The cabmen, the horses, and the passers-by
were white.
“And how can the snow fall in this street!” thought Vassilyev.
“Damnation take these houses!”
His legs seemed to be giving way from fatigue, simply from having run
down the stairs; he gasped for breath as though he had been climbing
uphill, his heart beat so loudly that he could hear it. He was consumed
by a desire to get out of the street as quickly as possible and to go
home, but even stronger was his desire to wait for his companions and
vent upon them his oppressive feeling.
There was much he did not understand in these houses, the souls of
ruined women were a mystery to him as before; but it was clear to him
that the thing was far worse than could have been believed. If that
sinful woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, it was
difficult to find a fitting name for all these who were dancing now to
this tangle of sound and uttering long, loathsome sentences. They were
not on the road to ruin, but ruined.
“There is vice,” he thought, “but neither consciousness of sin nor hope
of salvation. They are sold and bought, steeped in wine and
abominations, while they, like sheep, are stupid, indifferent, and don’t
understand. My God! My God!”
It was clear to him, too, that everything that is called human dignity,
personal rights, the Divine image and semblance, were defiled to their
very foundations—“to the very marrow,” as drunkards say—and that not
only the street and the stupid women were responsible for it.
A group of students, white with snow, passed him laughing and talking
gaily; one, a tall thin fellow, stopped, glanced into Vassilyev’s face,
and said in a drunken voice:
“One of us! A bit on, old man? Aha-ha! Never mind, have a good time!
Don’t be down-hearted, old chap!”
He took Vassilyev by the shoulder and pressed his cold wet mustache
against his cheek, then he slipped, staggered, and, waving both hands,
cried:
“Hold on! Don’t upset!”
And laughing, he ran to overtake his companions.
Through the noise came the sound of the artist’s voice:
“Don’t you dare to hit the women! I won’t let you, damnation take you!
You scoundrels!”
The medical student appeared in the doorway. He looked from side to
side, and seeing Vassilyev, said in an agitated voice:
“You here! I tell you it’s really impossible to go anywhere with Yegor!
What a fellow he is! I don’t understand him! He has got up a scene! Do
you hear? Yegor!” he shouted at the door. “Yegor!”
“I won’t allow you to hit women!” the artist’s piercing voice sounded
from above. Something heavy and lumbering rolled down the stairs. It was
the artist falling headlong. Evidently he had been pushed downstairs.
He picked himself up from the ground, shook his hat, and, with an angry
and indignant face, brandished his fist towards the top of the stairs
and shouted:
“Scoundrels! Torturers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t allow you to hit them! To
hit a weak, drunken woman! Oh, you brutes!...”
“Yegor!... Come, Yegor!...” the medical student began imploring him. “I
give you my word of honor I’ll never come with you again. On my word of
honor I won’t!”
Little by little the artist was pacified and the friends went homewards.
“Against my will an unknown force,” hummed the medical student, “has led
me to these mournful shores.”
“Behold the mill,” the artist chimed in a little later, “in ruins now.
What a lot of snow, Holy Mother! Grisha, why did you go? You are a funk,
a regular old woman.”
Vassilyev walked behind his companions, looked at their backs, and
thought:
“One of two things: either we only fancy prostitution is an evil, and we
exaggerate it; or, if prostitution really is as great an evil as is
generally assumed, these dear friends of mine are as much slaveowners,
violators, and murderers, as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo, that
are described in the ‘Neva.’ Now they are singing, laughing, talking
sense, but haven’t they just been exploiting hunger, ignorance, and
stupidity? They have—I have been a witness of it. What is the use of
their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and
lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of the piece of
bacon in the story. Two brigands murdered a beggar in a forest; they
began sharing his clothes between them, and found in his wallet a piece
of bacon. ‘Well found,’ said one of them, ‘let us have a bit.’ ‘What do
you mean? How can you?’ cried the other in horror. ‘Have you forgotten
that to-day is Wednesday?’ And they would not eat it. After murdering a
man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were
keeping the fast. In the same way these men, after buying women, go
their way imagining that they are artists and men of science....”
“Listen!” he said sharply and angrily. “Why do you come here? Is it
possible—is it possible you don’t understand how horrible it is? Your
medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of
consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even
earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain
five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed
by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in
the course of your lives visits this place or others like it two hundred
and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of
you! Can’t you understand that? Isn’t it horrible to murder, two of you,
three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! Ah! isn’t it awful,
my God!”
“I knew it would end like that,” the artist said frowning. “We ought not
to have gone with this fool and ass! You imagine you have grand notions
in your head now, ideas, don’t you? No, it’s the devil knows what, but
not ideas. You are looking at me now with hatred and repulsion, but I
tell you it’s better you should set up twenty more houses like those
than look like that. There’s more vice in your expression than in the
whole street! Come along, Volodya, let him go to the devil! He’s a fool
and an ass, and that’s all....”
“We human beings do murder each other,” said the medical student. “It’s
immoral, of course, but philosophizing doesn’t help it. Good-by!”
At Trubnoy Square the friends said good-by and parted. When he was left
alone, Vassilyev strode rapidly along the boulevard. He felt frightened
of the darkness, of the snow which was falling in heavy flakes on the
ground, and seemed as though it would cover up the whole world; he felt
frightened of the street lamps shining with pale light through the
clouds of snow. His soul was possessed by an unaccountable, faint-
hearted terror. Passers-by came towards him from time to time, but he
timidly moved to one side; it seemed to him that women, none but women,
were coming from all sides and staring at him....
“It’s beginning,” he thought, “I am going to have a breakdown.”
VI
At home he lay on his bed and said, shuddering all over: “They are
alive! Alive! My God, those women are alive!”
He encouraged his imagination in all sorts of ways to picture himself
the brother of a fallen woman, or her father; then a fallen woman
herself, with her painted cheeks; and it all moved him to horror.
It seemed to him that he must settle the question at once at all costs,
and that this question was not one that did not concern him, but was his
own personal problem. He made an immense effort, repressed his despair,
and, sitting on the bed, holding his head in his hands, began thinking
how one could save all the women he had seen that day. The method for
attacking problems of all kinds was, as he was an educated man, well
known to him. And, however excited he was, he strictly adhered to that
method. He recalled the history of the problem and its literature, and
for a quarter of an hour he paced from one end of the room to the other
trying to remember all the methods practiced at the present time for
saving women. He had very many good friends and acquaintances who lived
in lodgings in Petersburg.... Among them were a good many honest and
self-sacrificing men. Some of them had attempted to save women....
“All these not very numerous attempts,” thought Vassilyev, “can be
divided into three groups. Some, after buying the woman out of the
brothel, took a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine, and she
became a semptress. And whether he wanted to or not, after having bought
her out he made her his mistress; then when he had taken his degree, he
went away and handed her into the keeping of some other decent man as
though she were a thing. And the fallen woman remained a fallen woman.
Others, after buying her out, took a lodging apart for her, bought the
inevitable sewing-machine, and tried teaching her to read, preaching at
her and giving her books. The woman lived and sewed as long as it was
interesting and a novelty to her, then getting bored, began receiving
men on the sly, or ran away and went back where she could sleep till
three o’clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. The third class, the
most ardent and self-sacrificing, had taken a bold, resolute step. They
had married them. And when the insolent and spoilt, or stupid and
crushed animal became a wife, the head of a household, and afterwards a
mother, it turned her whole existence and attitude to life upside down,
so that it was hard to recognize the fallen woman afterwards in the wife
and the mother. Yes, marriage was the best and perhaps the only means.”
“But it is impossible!” Vassilyev said aloud, and he sank upon his bed.
“I, to begin with, could not marry one! To do that one must be a saint
and be unable to feel hatred or repulsion. But supposing that I, the
medical student, and the artist mastered ourselves and did marry
them—suppose they were all married. What would be the result? The result
would be that while here in Moscow they were being married, some
Smolensk accountant would be debauching another lot, and that lot would
be streaming here to fill the vacant places, together with others from
Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what is one to do with the
hundred thousand in London? What’s one to do with those in Hamburg?”
The lamp in which the oil had burnt down began to smoke. Vassilyev did
not notice it. He began pacing to and fro again, still thinking. Now he
put the question differently: what must be done that fallen women should
not be needed? For that, it was essential that the men who buy them and
do them to death should feel all the immorality of their share in
enslaving them and should be horrified. One must save the men.
“One won’t do anything by art and science, that is clear...” thought
Vassilyev. “The only way out of it is missionary work.”
And he began to dream how he would the next evening stand at the corner
of the street and say to every passer-by: “Where are you going and what
for? Have some fear of God!”
He would turn to the apathetic cabmen and say to them: “Why are you
staying here? Why aren’t you revolted? Why aren’t you indignant? I
suppose you believe in God and know that it is a sin, that people go to
hell for it? Why don’t you speak? It is true that they are strangers to
you, but you know even they have fathers, brothers like yourselves....”
One of Vassilyev’s friends had once said of him that he was a talented
man. There are all sorts of talents—talent for writing, talent for the
stage, talent for art; but he had a peculiar talent—a talent for
humanity. He possessed an extraordinarily fine delicate scent for pain
in general. As a good actor reflects in himself the movements and voice
of others, so Vassilyev could reflect in his soul the sufferings of
others. When he saw tears, he wept; beside a sick man, he felt sick
himself and moaned; if he saw an act of violence, he felt as though he
himself were the victim of it, he was frightened as a child, and in his
fright ran to help. The pain of others worked on his nerves, excited
him, roused him to a state of frenzy, and so on.
Whether this friend were right I don’t know, but what Vassilyev
experienced when he thought this question was settled was something like
inspiration. He cried and laughed, spoke aloud the words that he should
say next day, felt a fervent love for those who would listen to him and
would stand beside him at the corner of the street to preach; he sat
down to write letters, made vows to himself....
All this was like inspiration also from the fact that it did not last
long. Vassilyev was soon tired. The cases in London, in Hamburg, in
Warsaw, weighed upon him by their mass as a mountain weighs upon the
earth; he felt dispirited, bewildered, in the face of this mass; he
remembered that he had not a gift for words, that he was cowardly and
timid, that indifferent people would not be willing to listen and
understand him, a law student in his third year, a timid and
insignificant person; that genuine missionary work included not only
teaching but deeds...
When it was daylight and carriages were already beginning to rumble in
the street, Vassilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into
space. He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of
missionary work. His whole attention was turned upon the spiritual agony
which was torturing him. It was a dull, vague, undefined anguish akin to
misery, to an extreme form of terror and to despair. He could point to
the place where the pain was, in his breast under his heart; but he
could not compare it with anything. In the past he had had acute
toothache, he had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but all that was
insignificant compared with this spiritual anguish. In the presence of
that pain life seemed loathsome. The dissertation, the excellent work he
had written already, the people he loved, the salvation of fallen
women—everything that only the day before he had cared about or been
indifferent to, now when he thought of them irritated him in the same
way as the noise of the carriages, the scurrying footsteps of the
waiters in the passage, the daylight.... If at that moment someone had
performed a great deed of mercy or had committed a revolting outrage, he
would have felt the same repulsion for both actions. Of all the thoughts
that strayed through his mind only two did not irritate him: one was
that at every moment he had the power to kill himself, the other that
this agony would not last more than three days. This last he knew by
experience.
After lying for a while he got up and, wringing his hands, walked about
the room, not as usual from corner to corner, but round the room beside
the walls. As he passed he glanced at himself in the looking-glass. His
face looked pale and sunken, his temples looked hollow, his eyes were
bigger, darker, more staring, as though they belonged to someone else,
and they had an expression of insufferable mental agony.
At midday the artist knocked at the door.
“Grigory, are you at home?” he asked.
Getting no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered himself
in Little Russian: “Nay. The confounded fellow has gone to the
University.”
And he went away. Vassilyev lay down on the bed and, thrusting his head
under the pillow, began crying with agony, and the more freely his tears
flowed the more terrible his mental anguish became. As it began to get
dark, he thought of the agonizing night awaiting him, and was overcome
by a horrible despair. He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, and,
leaving his door wide open, for no object or reason, went out into the
street. Without asking himself where he should go, he walked quickly
along Sadovoy Street.
Snow was falling as heavily as the day before; it was thawing. Thrusting
his hands into his sleeves, shuddering and frightened at the noises, at
the trambells, and at the passers-by, Vassilyev walked along Sadovoy
Street as far as Suharev Tower; then to the Red Gate; from there he
turned off to Basmannya Street. He went into a tavern and drank off a
big glass of vodka, but that did not make him feel better. When he
reached Razgulya he turned to the right, and strode along side streets
in which he had never been before in his life. He reached the old bridge
by which the Yauza runs gurgling, and from which one can see long rows
of lights in the windows of the Red Barracks. To distract his spiritual
anguish by some new sensation or some other pain, Vassilyev, not knowing
what to do, crying and shuddering, undid his greatcoat and jacket and
exposed his bare chest to the wet snow and the wind. But that did not
lessen his suffering either. Then he bent down over the rail of the
bridge and looked down into the black, yeasty Yauza, and he longed to
plunge down head foremost; not from loathing for life, not for the sake
of suicide, but in order to bruise himself at least, and by one pain to
ease the other. But the black water, the darkness, the deserted banks
covered with snow were terrifying. He shivered and walked on. He walked
up and down by the Red Barracks, then turned back and went down to a
copse, from the copse back to the bridge again.
“No, home, home!” he thought. “At home I believe it’s better...”
And he went back. When he reached home he pulled off his wet coat and
cap, began pacing round the room, and went on pacing round and round
without stopping till morning.
VII
When next morning the artist and the medical student went in to him, he
was moving about the room with his shirt torn, biting his hands and
moaning with pain.
“For God’s sake!” he sobbed when he saw his friends, “take me where you
please, do what you can; but for God’s sake, save me quickly! I shall
kill myself!”
The artist turned pale and was helpless. The medical student, too,
almost shed tears, but considering that doctors ought to be cool and
composed in every emergency said coldly:
“It’s a nervous breakdown. But it’s nothing. Let us go at once to the
doctor.”
“Wherever you like, only for God’s sake, make haste!”
“Don’t excite yourself. You must try and control yourself.”
The artist and the medical student with trembling hands put Vassilyev’s
coat and hat on and led him out into the street.
“Mihail Sergeyitch has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long
time,” the medical student said on the way. “He is a very nice man and
thoroughly good at his work. He took his degree in 1882, and he has an
immense practice already. He treats students as though he were one
himself.”
“Make haste, make haste!...” Vassilyev urged.
Mihail Sergeyitch, a stout, fair-haired doctor, received the friends
with politeness and frigid dignity, and smiled only on one side of his
face.
“Rybnikov and Mayer have spoken to me of your illness already,” he said.
“Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, I beg....”
He made Vassilyev sit down in a big armchair near the table, and moved a
box of cigarettes towards him.
“Now then!” he began, stroking his knees. “Let us get to work.... How
old are you?”
He asked questions and the medical student answered them. He asked
whether Vassilyev’s father had suffered from certain special diseases,
whether he drank to excess, whether he were remarkable for cruelty or
any peculiarities. He made similar inquiries about his grandfather,
mother, sisters, and brothers. On learning that his mother had a
beautiful voice and sometimes acted on the stage, he grew more animated
at once, and asked:
“Excuse me, but don’t you remember, perhaps, your mother had a passion
for the stage?”
Twenty minutes passed. Vassilyev was annoyed by the way the doctor kept
stroking his knees and talking of the same thing.
“So far as I understand your questions, doctor,” he said, “you want to
know whether my illness is hereditary or not. It is not.”
The doctor proceeded to ask Vassilyev whether he had had any secret
vices as a boy, or had received injuries to his head; whether he had had
any aberrations, any peculiarities, or exceptional propensities. Half
the questions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left
unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail
Sergeyitch, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though if
Vassilyev failed to answer one question all would be lost. As he
received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip
of paper. On learning that Vassilyev had taken his degree in natural
science, and was now studying law, the doctor pondered.
“He wrote a first-rate piece of original work last year,...” said the
medical student.
“I beg your pardon, but don’t interrupt me; you prevent me from
concentrating,” said the doctor, and he smiled on one side of his face.
“Though, of course, that does enter into the diagnosis. Intense
intellectual work, nervous exhaustion.... Yes, yes.... And do you drink
vodka?” he said, addressing Vassilyev.
“Very rarely.”
Another twenty minutes passed. The medical student began telling the
doctor in a low voice his opinion as to the immediate cause of the
attack, and described how the day before yesterday the artist,
Vassilyev, and he had visited S. Street.
The indifferent, reserved, and frigid tone in which his friends and the
doctor spoke of the women and that miserable street struck Vassilyev as
strange in the extreme....
“Doctor, tell me one thing only,” he said, controlling himself so as not
to speak rudely. “Is prostitution an evil or not?”
“My dear fellow, who disputes it?” said the doctor, with an expression
that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long
ago. “Who disputes it?”
“You are a mental doctor, aren’t you?” Vassilyev asked curtly.
“Yes, a mental doctor.”
“Perhaps all of you are right!” said Vassilyev, getting up and beginning
to walk from one end of the room to the other. “Perhaps! But it all
seems marvelous to me! That I should have taken my degree in two
faculties you look upon as a great achievement; because I have written a
work which in three years will be thrown aside and forgotten, I am
praised up to the skies; but because I cannot speak of fallen women as
unconcernedly as of these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am
called mad, I am pitied!”
Vassilyev for some reason felt all at once unutterably sorry for
himself, and his companions, and all the people he had seen two days
before, and for the doctor; he burst into tears and sank into a chair.
His friends looked inquiringly at the doctor. The latter, with the air
of completely comprehending the tears and the despair, of feeling
himself a specialist in that line, went up to Vassilyev and, without a
word, gave him some medicine to drink; and then, when he was calmer,
undressed him and began to investigate the degree of sensibility of the
skin, the reflex action of the knees, and so on.
And Vassilyev felt easier. When he came out from the doctor’s he was
beginning to feel ashamed; the rattle of the carriages no longer
irritated him, and the load at his heart grew lighter and lighter as
though it were melting away. He had two prescriptions in his hand: one
was for bromide, one was for morphia.... He had taken all these remedies
before.
In the street he stood still and, saying good-by to his friends, dragged
himself languidly to the University.
MISERY “To whom shall I tell my grief?”
THE twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily
about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a
thin soft layer on roofs, horses’ backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov,
the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost. He sits on the box without
stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent. If a regular
snowdrift fell on him it seems as though even then he would not think it
necessary to shake it off.... His little mare is white and motionless
too. Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like
straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread
horse. She is probably lost in thought. Anyone who has been torn away
from the plough, from the familiar gray landscapes, and cast into this
slough, full of monstrous lights, of unceasing uproar and hurrying
people, is bound to think.
It is a long time since Iona and his nag have budged. They came out of
the yard before dinnertime and not a single fare yet. But now the shades
of evening are falling on the town. The pale light of the street lamps
changes to a vivid color, and the bustle of the street grows noisier.
“Sledge to Vyborgskaya!” Iona hears. “Sledge!”
Iona starts, and through his snow-plastered eyelashes sees an officer in
a military overcoat with a hood over his head.
“To Vyborgskaya,” repeats the officer. “Are you asleep? To Vyborgskaya!”
In token of assent Iona gives a tug at the reins which sends cakes of
snow flying from the horse’s back and shoulders. The officer gets into
the sledge. The sledge-driver clicks to the horse, cranes his neck like
a swan, rises in his seat, and more from habit than necessity brandishes
his whip. The mare cranes her neck, too, crooks her stick-like legs, and
hesitatingly sets of....
“Where are you shoving, you devil?” Iona immediately hears shouts from
the dark mass shifting to and fro before him. “Where the devil are you
going? Keep to the r-right!”
“You don’t know how to drive! Keep to the right,” says the officer
angrily.
A coachman driving a carriage swears at him; a pedestrian crossing the
road and brushing the horse’s nose with his shoulder looks at him
angrily and shakes the snow off his sleeve. Iona fidgets on the box as
though he were sitting on thorns, jerks his elbows, and turns his eyes
about like one possessed as though he did not know where he was or why
he was there.
“What rascals they all are!” says the officer jocosely. “They are simply
doing their best to run up against you or fall under the horse’s feet.
They must be doing it on purpose.”
Iona looks as his fare and moves his lips.... Apparently he means to say
something, but nothing comes but a sniff.
“What?” inquires the officer.
Iona gives a wry smile, and straining his throat, brings out huskily:
“My son... er... my son died this week, sir.”
“H’m! What did he die of?”
Iona turns his whole body round to his fare, and says:
“Who can tell! It must have been from fever.... He lay three days in the
hospital and then he died.... God’s will.”
“Turn round, you devil!” comes out of the darkness. “Have you gone
cracked, you old dog? Look where you are going!”
“Drive on! drive on!...” says the officer. “We shan’t get there till to-
morrow going on like this. Hurry up!”
The sledge-driver cranes his neck again, rises in his seat, and with
heavy grace swings his whip. Several times he looks round at the
officer, but the latter keeps his eyes shut and is apparently
disinclined to listen. Putting his fare down at Vyborgskaya, Iona stops
by a restaurant, and again sits huddled up on the box.... Again the wet
snow paints him and his horse white. One hour passes, and then
another....
Three young men, two tall and thin, one short and hunchbacked, come up,
railing at each other and loudly stamping on the pavement with their
goloshes.
“Cabby, to the Police Bridge!” the hunchback cries in a cracked voice.
“The three of us,... twenty kopecks!”
Iona tugs at the reins and clicks to his horse. Twenty kopecks is not a
fair price, but he has no thoughts for that. Whether it is a rouble or
whether it is five kopecks does not matter to him now so long as he has
a fare.... The three young men, shoving each other and using bad
language, go up to the sledge, and all three try to sit down at once.
The question remains to be settled: Which are to sit down and which one
is to stand? After a long altercation, ill-temper, and abuse, they come
to the conclusion that the hunchback must stand because he is the
shortest.
“Well, drive on,” says the hunchback in his cracked voice, settling
himself and breathing down Iona’s neck. “Cut along! What a cap you’ve
got, my friend! You wouldn’t find a worse one in all Petersburg....”
“He-he!... he-he!...” laughs Iona. “It’s nothing to boast of!”
“Well, then, nothing to boast of, drive on! Are you going to drive like
this all the way? Eh? Shall I give you one in the neck?”
“My head aches,” says one of the tall ones. “At the Dukmasovs’ yesterday
Vaska and I drank four bottles of brandy between us.”
“I can’t make out why you talk such stuff,” says the other tall one
angrily. “You lie like a brute.”
“Strike me dead, it’s the truth!...”
“It’s about as true as that a louse coughs.”
“He-he!” grins Iona. “Me-er-ry gentlemen!”
“Tfoo! the devil take you!” cries the hunchback indignantly. “Will you
get on, you old plague, or won’t you? Is that the way to drive? Give her
one with the whip. Hang it all, give it her well.”
Iona feels behind his back the jolting person and quivering voice of the
hunchback. He hears abuse addressed to him, he sees people, and the
feeling of loneliness begins little by little to be less heavy on his
heart. The hunchback swears at him, till he chokes over some elaborately
whimsical string of epithets and is overpowered by his cough. His tall
companions begin talking of a certain Nadyezhda Petrovna. Iona looks
round at them. Waiting till there is a brief pause, he looks round once
more and says:
“This week... er... my... er... son died!”
“We shall all die,...” says the hunchback with a sigh, wiping his lips
after coughing. “Come, drive on! drive on! My friends, I simply cannot
stand crawling like this! When will he get us there?”
“Well, you give him a little encouragement... one in the neck!”
“Do you hear, you old plague? I’ll make you smart. If one stands on
ceremony with fellows like you one may as well walk. Do you hear, you
old dragon? Or don’t you care a hang what we say?”
And Iona hears rather than feels a slap on the back of his neck.
“He-he!...” he laughs. “Merry gentlemen.... God give you health!”
“Cabman, are you married?” asks one of the tall ones.
“I? He he! Me-er-ry gentlemen. The only wife for me now is the damp
earth.... He-ho-ho!.... The grave that is!... Here my son’s dead and I
am alive.... It’s a strange thing, death has come in at the wrong
door.... Instead of coming for me it went for my son....”
And Iona turns round to tell them how his son died, but at that point
the hunchback gives a faint sigh and announces that, thank God! they
have arrived at last. After taking his twenty kopecks, Iona gazes for a
long while after the revelers, who disappear into a dark entry. Again he
is alone and again there is silence for him.... The misery which has
been for a brief space eased comes back again and tears his heart more
cruelly than ever. With a look of anxiety and suffering Iona’s eyes
stray restlessly among the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the
street: can he not find among those thousands someone who will listen to
him? But the crowds flit by heedless of him and his misery.... His
misery is immense, beyond all bounds. If Iona’s heart were to burst and
his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but
yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant
shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight....
Iona sees a house-porter with a parcel and makes up his mind to address
him.
“What time will it be, friend?” he asks.
“Going on for ten.... Why have you stopped here? Drive on!”
Iona drives a few paces away, bends himself double, and gives himself up
to his misery. He feels it is no good to appeal to people. But before
five minutes have passed he draws himself up, shakes his head as though
he feels a sharp pain, and tugs at the reins.... He can bear it no
longer.
“Back to the yard!” he thinks. “To the yard!”
And his little mare, as though she knew his thoughts, falls to trotting.
An hour and a half later Iona is sitting by a big dirty stove. On the
stove, on the floor, and on the benches are people snoring. The air is
full of smells and stuffiness. Iona looks at the sleeping figures,
scratches himself, and regrets that he has come home so early....
“I have not earned enough to pay for the oats, even,” he thinks. “That’s
why I am so miserable. A man who knows how to do his work,... who has
had enough to eat, and whose horse has had enough to eat, is always at
ease....”
In one of the corners a young cabman gets up, clears his throat
sleepily, and makes for the water-bucket.
“Want a drink?” Iona asks him.
“Seems so.”
“May it do you good.... But my son is dead, mate.... Do you hear? This
week in the hospital.... It’s a queer business....”
Iona looks to see the effect produced by his words, but he sees nothing.
The young man has covered his head over and is already asleep. The old
man sighs and scratches himself.... Just as the young man had been
thirsty for water, he thirsts for speech. His son will soon have been
dead a week, and he has not really talked to anybody yet.... He wants to
talk of it properly, with deliberation.... He wants to tell how his son
was taken ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he
died.... He wants to describe the funeral, and how he went to the
hospital to get his son’s clothes. He still has his daughter Anisya in
the country.... And he wants to talk about her too.... Yes, he has
plenty to talk about now. His listener ought to sigh and exclaim and
lament.... It would be even better to talk to women. Though they are
silly creatures, they blubber at the first word.
“Let’s go out and have a look at the mare,” Iona thinks. “There is
always time for sleep.... You’ll have sleep enough, no fear....”
He puts on his coat and goes into the stables where his mare is
standing. He thinks about oats, about hay, about the weather.... He
cannot think about his son when he is alone.... To talk about him with
someone is possible, but to think of him and picture him is insufferable
anguish....
“Are you munching?” Iona asks his mare, seeing her shining eyes. “There,
munch away, munch away.... Since we have not earned enough for oats, we
will eat hay.... Yes,... I have grown too old to drive.... My son ought
to be driving, not I.... He was a real cabman.... He ought to have
lived....”
Iona is silent for a while, and then he goes on:
“That’s how it is, old girl.... Kuzma Ionitch is gone.... He said good-
by to me.... He went and died for no reason.... Now, suppose you had a
little colt, and you were own mother to that little colt. ... And all at
once that same little colt went and died.... You’d be sorry, wouldn’t
you?...”
The little mare munches, listens, and breathes on her master’s hands.
Iona is carried away and tells her all about it.
CHAMPAGNE A WAYFARER’S STORY
IN the year in which my story begins I had a job at a little station on
one of our southwestern railways. Whether I had a gay or a dull life at
the station you can judge from the fact that for fifteen miles round
there was not one human habitation, not one woman, not one decent
tavern; and in those days I was young, strong, hot-headed, giddy, and
foolish. The only distraction I could possibly find was in the windows
of the passenger trains, and in the vile vodka which the Jews drugged
with thorn-apple. Sometimes there would be a glimpse of a woman’s head
at a carriage window, and one would stand like a statue without
breathing and stare at it until the train turned into an almost
invisible speck; or one would drink all one could of the loathsome vodka
till one was stupefied and did not feel the passing of the long hours
and days. Upon me, a native of the north, the steppe produced the effect
of a deserted Tatar cemetery. In the summer the steppe with its solemn
calm, the monotonous chur of the grasshoppers, the transparent moonlight
from which one could not hide, reduced me to listless melancholy; and in
the winter the irreproachable whiteness of the steppe, its cold
distance, long nights, and howling wolves oppressed me like a heavy
nightmare. There were several people living at the station: my wife and
I, a deaf and scrofulous telegraph clerk, and three watchmen. My
assistant, a young man who was in consumption, used to go for treatment
to the town, where he stayed for months at a time, leaving his duties to
me together with the right of pocketing his salary. I had no children,
no cake would have tempted visitors to come and see me, and I could only
visit other officials on the line, and that no oftener than once a
month.
I remember my wife and I saw the New Year in. We sat at table, chewed
lazily, and heard the deaf telegraph clerk monotonously tapping on his
apparatus in the next room. I had already drunk five glasses of drugged
vodka, and, propping my heavy head on my fist, thought of my
overpowering boredom from which there was no escape, while my wife sat
beside me and did not take her eyes off me. She looked at me as no one
can look but a woman who has nothing in this world but a handsome
husband. She loved me madly, slavishly, and not merely my good looks, or
my soul, but my sins, my ill-humor and boredom, and even my cruelty
when, in drunken fury, not knowing how to vent my ill-humor, I tormented
her with reproaches.
In spite of the boredom which was consuming me, we were preparing to see
the New Year in with exceptional festiveness, and were awaiting midnight
with some impatience. The fact is, we had in reserve two bottles of
champagne, the real thing, with the label of Veuve Clicquot; this
treasure I had won the previous autumn in a bet with the station-master
of D. when I was drinking with him at a christening. It sometimes
happens during a lesson in mathematics, when the very air is still with
boredom, a butterfly flutters into the class-room; the boys toss their
heads and begin watching its flight with interest, as though they saw
before them not a butterfly but something new and strange; in the same
way ordinary champagne, chancing to come into our dreary station, roused
us. We sat in silence looking alternately at the clock and at the
bottles.
When the hands pointed to five minutes to twelve I slowly began
uncorking a bottle. I don’t know whether I was affected by the vodka, or
whether the bottle was wet, but all I remember is that when the cork
flew up to the ceiling with a bang, my bottle slipped out of my hands
and fell on the floor. Not more than a glass of the wine was spilt, as I
managed to catch the bottle and put my thumb over the foaming neck.
“Well, may the New Year bring you happiness!” I said, filling two
glasses. “Drink!”
My wife took her glass and fixed her frightened eyes on me. Her face was
pale and wore a look of horror.
“Did you drop the bottle?” she asked.
“Yes. But what of that?”
“It’s unlucky,” she said, putting down her glass and turning paler
still. “It’s a bad omen. It means that some misfortune will happen to us
this year.”
“What a silly thing you are,” I sighed. “You are a clever woman, and yet
you talk as much nonsense as an old nurse. Drink.”
“God grant it is nonsense, but... something is sure to happen! You’ll
see.”
She did not even sip her glass, she moved away and sank into thought. I
uttered a few stale commonplaces about superstition, drank half a
bottle, paced up and down, and then went out of the room.
Outside there was the still frosty night in all its cold, inhospitable
beauty. The moon and two white fluffy clouds beside it hung just over
the station, motionless as though glued to the spot, and looked as
though waiting for something. A faint transparent light came from them
and touched the white earth softly, as though afraid of wounding her
modesty, and lighted up everything—the snowdrifts, the embankment.... It
was still.
I walked along the railway embankment.
“Silly woman,” I thought, looking at the sky spangled with brilliant
stars. “Even if one admits that omens sometimes tell the truth, what
evil can happen to us? The misfortunes we have endured already, and
which are facing us now, are so great that it is difficult to imagine
anything worse. What further harm can you do a fish which has been
caught and fried and served up with sauce?”
A poplar covered with hoar frost looked in the bluish darkness like a
giant wrapt in a shroud. It looked at me sullenly and dejectedly, as
though like me it realized its loneliness. I stood a long while looking
at it.
“My youth is thrown away for nothing, like a useless cigarette end,” I
went on musing. “My parents died when I was a little child; I was
expelled from the high school, I was born of a noble family, but I have
received neither education nor breeding, and I have no more knowledge
than the humblest mechanic. I have no refuge, no relations, no friends,
no work I like. I am not fitted for anything, and in the prime of my
powers I am good for nothing but to be stuffed into this little station;
I have known nothing but trouble and failure all my life. What can
happen worse?”
Red lights came into sight in the distance. A train was moving towards
me. The slumbering steppe listened to the sound of it. My thoughts were
so bitter that it seemed to me that I was thinking aloud and that the
moan of the telegraph wire and the rumble of the train were expressing
my thoughts.
“What can happen worse? The loss of my wife?” I wondered. “Even that is
not terrible. It’s no good hiding it from my conscience: I don’t love my
wife. I married her when I was only a wretched boy; now I am young and
vigorous, and she has gone off and grown older and sillier, stuffed from
her head to her heels with conventional ideas. What charm is there in
her maudlin love, in her hollow chest, in her lusterless eyes? I put up
with her, but I don’t love her. What can happen? My youth is being
wasted, as the saying is, for a pinch of snuff. Women flit before my
eyes only in the carriage windows, like falling stars. Love I never had
and have not. My manhood, my courage, my power of feeling are going to
ruin.... Everything is being thrown away like dirt, and all my wealth
here in the steppe is not worth a farthing.”
The train rushed past me with a roar and indifferently cast the glow of
its red lights upon me. I saw it stop by the green lights of the
station, stop for a minute and rumble off again. After walking a mile
and a half I went back. Melancholy thoughts haunted me still. Painful as
it was to me, yet I remember I tried as it were to make my thoughts
still gloomier and more melancholy. You know people who are vain and not
very clever have moments when the consciousness that they are miserable
affords them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their
misery for their own entertainment. There was a great deal of truth in
what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was absurd and
conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant in my question:
“What could happen worse?”
“And what is there to happen?” I asked myself. “I think I have endured
everything. I’ve been ill, I’ve lost money, I get reprimanded by my
superiors every day, and I go hungry, and a mad wolf has run into the
station yard. What more is there? I have been insulted, humiliated,...
and I have insulted others in my time. I have not been a criminal, it is
true, but I don’t think I am capable of crime—I am not afraid of being
hauled up for it.”
The two little clouds had moved away from the moon and stood at a little
distance, looking as though they were whispering about something which
the moon must not know. A light breeze was racing across the steppe,
bringing the faint rumble of the retreating train.
My wife met me at the doorway. Her eyes were laughing gaily and her
whole face was beaming with good-humor.
“There is news for you!” she whispered. “Make haste, go to your room and
put on your new coat; we have a visitor.”
“What visitor?”
“Aunt Natalya Petrovna has just come by the train.”
“What Natalya Petrovna?”
“The wife of my uncle Semyon Fyodoritch. You don’t know her. She is a
very nice, good woman.”
Probably I frowned, for my wife looked grave and whispered rapidly:
“Of course it is queer her having come, but don’t be cross, Nikolay, and
don’t be hard on her. She is unhappy, you know; Uncle Semyon Fyodoritch
really is ill-natured and tyrannical, it is difficult to live with him.
She says she will only stay three days with us, only till she gets a
letter from her brother.”
My wife whispered a great deal more nonsense to me about her despotic
uncle; about the weakness of mankind in general and of young wives in
particular; about its being our duty to give shelter to all, even great
sinners, and so on. Unable to make head or tail of it, I put on my new
coat and went to make acquaintance with my “aunt.”
A little woman with large black eyes was sitting at the table. My table,
the gray walls, my roughly-made sofa, everything to the tiniest grain of
dust seemed to have grown younger and more cheerful in the presence of
this new, young, beautiful, and dissolute creature, who had a most
subtle perfume about her. And that our visitor was a lady of easy virtue
I could see from her smile, from her scent, from the peculiar way in
which she glanced and made play with her eyelashes, from the tone in
which she talked with my wife—a respectable woman. There was no need to
tell me she had run away from her husband, that her husband was old and
despotic, that she was good-natured and lively; I took it all in at the
first glance. Indeed, it is doubtful whether there is a man in all
Europe who cannot spot at the first glance a woman of a certain
temperament.
“I did not know I had such a big nephew!” said my aunt, holding out her
hand to me and smiling.
“And I did not know I had such a pretty aunt,” I answered.
Supper began over again. The cork flew with a bang out of the second
bottle, and my aunt swallowed half a glassful at a gulp, and when my
wife went out of the room for a moment my aunt did not scruple to drain
a full glass. I was drunk both with the wine and with the presence of a
woman. Do you remember the song?
“Eyes black as pitch, eyes full of passion, Eyes burning bright and
beautiful, How I love you, How I fear you!”
I don’t remember what happened next. Anyone who wants to know how love
begins may read novels and long stories; I will put it shortly and in
the words of the same silly song:
“It was an evil hour When first I met you.”
Everything went head over heels to the devil. I remember a fearful,
frantic whirlwind which sent me flying round like a feather. It lasted a
long while, and swept from the face of the earth my wife and my aunt
herself and my strength. From the little station in the steppe it has
flung me, as you see, into this dark street.
Now tell me what further evil can happen to me?
AFTER THE THEATRE
NADYA ZELENIN had just come back with her mamma from the theatre where
she had seen a performance of “Yevgeny Onyegin.” As soon as she reached
her own room she threw off her dress, let down her hair, and in her
petticoat and white dressing-jacket hastily sat down to the table to
write a letter like Tatyana’s.
“I love you,” she wrote, “but you do not love me, do not love me!”
She wrote it and laughed.
She was only sixteen and did not yet love anyone. She knew that an
officer called Gorny and a student called Gruzdev loved her, but now
after the opera she wanted to be doubtful of their love. To be unloved
and unhappy—how interesting that was. There is something beautiful,
touching, and poetical about it when one loves and the other is
indifferent. Onyegin was interesting because he was not in love at all,
and Tatyana was fascinating because she was so much in love; but if they
had been equally in love with each other and had been happy, they would
perhaps have seemed dull.
“Leave off declaring that you love me,” Nadya went on writing, thinking
of Gorny. “I cannot believe it. You are very clever, cultivated,
serious, you have immense talent, and perhaps a brilliant future awaits
you, while I am an uninteresting girl of no importance, and you know
very well that I should be only a hindrance in your life. It is true
that you were attracted by me and thought you had found your ideal in
me, but that was a mistake, and now you are asking yourself in despair:
‘Why did I meet that girl?’ And only your goodness of heart prevents you
from owning it to yourself....”
Nadya felt sorry for herself, she began to cry, and went on:
“It is hard for me to leave my mother and my brother, or I should take a
nun’s veil and go whither chance may lead me. And you would be left free
and would love another. Oh, if I were dead!”
She could not make out what she had written through her tears; little
rainbows were quivering on the table, on the floor, on the ceiling, as
though she were looking through a prism. She could not write, she sank
back in her easy-chair and fell to thinking of Gorny.
My God! how interesting, how fascinating men were! Nadya recalled the
fine expression, ingratiating, guilty, and soft, which came into the
officer’s face when one argued about music with him, and the effort he
made to prevent his voice from betraying his passion. In a society where
cold haughtiness and indifference are regarded as signs of good breeding
and gentlemanly bearing, one must conceal one’s passions. And he did try
to conceal them, but he did not succeed, and everyone knew very well
that he had a passionate love of music. The endless discussions about
music and the bold criticisms of people who knew nothing about it kept
him always on the strain; he was frightened, timid, and silent. He
played the piano magnificently, like a professional pianist, and if he
had not been in the army he would certainly have been a famous musician.
The tears on her eyes dried. Nadya remembered that Gorny had declared
his love at a Symphony concert, and again downstairs by the hatstand
where there was a tremendous draught blowing in all directions.
“I am very glad that you have at last made the acquaintance of Gruzdev,
our student friend,” she went on writing. “He is a very clever man, and
you will be sure to like him. He came to see us yesterday and stayed
till two o’clock. We were all delighted with him, and I regretted that
you had not come. He said a great deal that was remarkable.”
Nadya laid her arms on the table and leaned her head on them, and her
hair covered the letter. She recalled that the student, too, loved her,
and that he had as much right to a letter from her as Gorny. Wouldn’t it
be better after all to write to Gruzdev? There was a stir of joy in her
bosom for no reason whatever; at first the joy was small, and rolled in
her bosom like an india-rubber ball; then it became more massive,
bigger, and rushed like a wave. Nadya forgot Gorny and Gruzdev; her
thoughts were in a tangle and her joy grew and grew; from her bosom it
passed into her arms and legs, and it seemed as though a light, cool
breeze were breathing on her head and ruffling her hair. Her shoulders
quivered with subdued laughter, the table and the lamp chimney shook,
too, and tears from her eyes splashed on the letter. She could not stop
laughing, and to prove to herself that she was not laughing about
nothing she made haste to think of something funny.
“What a funny poodle,” she said, feeling as though she would choke with
laughter. “What a funny poodle!”
She thought how, after tea the evening before, Gruzdev had played with
Maxim the poodle, and afterwards had told them about a very intelligent
poodle who had run after a crow in the yard, and the crow had looked
round at him and said: “Oh, you scamp!”
The poodle, not knowing he had to do with a learned crow, was fearfully
confused and retreated in perplexity, then began barking....
“No, I had better love Gruzdev,” Nadya decided, and she tore up the
letter to Gorny.
She fell to thinking of the student, of his love, of her love; but the
thoughts in her head insisted on flowing in all directions, and she
thought about everything—about her mother, about the street, about the
pencil, about the piano.... She thought of them joyfully, and felt that
everything was good, splendid, and her joy told her that this was not
all, that in a little while it would be better still. Soon it would be
spring, summer, going with her mother to Gorbiki. Gorny would come for
his furlough, would walk about the garden with her and make love to her.
Gruzdev would come too. He would play croquet and skittles with her, and
would tell her wonderful things. She had a passionate longing for the
garden, the darkness, the pure sky, the stars. Again her shoulders shook
with laughter, and it seemed to her that there was a scent of wormwood
in the room and that a twig was tapping at the window.
She went to her bed, sat down, and not knowing what to do with the
immense joy which filled her with yearning, she looked at the holy image
hanging at the back of her bed, and said:
“Oh, Lord God! Oh, Lord God!”
A LADY’S STORY
NINE years ago Pyotr Sergeyitch, the deputy prosecutor, and I were
riding towards evening in hay-making time to fetch the letters from the
station.
The weather was magnificent, but on our way back we heard a peal of
thunder, and saw an angry black storm-cloud which was coming straight
towards us. The storm-cloud was approaching us and we were approaching
it.
Against the background of it our house and church looked white and the
tall poplars shone like silver. There was a scent of rain and mown hay.
My companion was in high spirits. He kept laughing and talking all sorts
of nonsense. He said it would be nice if we could suddenly come upon a
medieval castle with turreted towers, with moss on it and owls, in which
we could take shelter from the rain and in the end be killed by a
thunderbolt....
Then the first wave raced through the rye and a field of oats, there was
a gust of wind, and the dust flew round and round in the air. Pyotr
Sergeyitch laughed and spurred on his horse.
“It’s fine!” he cried, “it’s splendid!”
Infected by his gaiety, I too began laughing at the thought that in a
minute I should be drenched to the skin and might be struck by
lightning.
Riding swiftly in a hurricane when one is breathless with the wind, and
feels like a bird, thrills one and puts one’s heart in a flutter. By the
time we rode into our courtyard the wind had gone down, and big drops of
rain were pattering on the grass and on the roofs. There was not a soul
near the stable.
Pyotr Sergeyitch himself took the bridles off, and led the horses to
their stalls. I stood in the doorway waiting for him to finish, and
watching the slanting streaks of rain; the sweetish, exciting scent of
hay was even stronger here than in the fields; the storm-clouds and the
rain made it almost twilight.
“What a crash!” said Pyotr Sergeyitch, coming up to me after a very loud
rolling peal of thunder when it seemed as though the sky were split in
two. “What do you say to that?”
He stood beside me in the doorway and, still breathless from his rapid
ride, looked at me. I could see that he was admiring me.
“Natalya Vladimirovna,” he said, “I would give anything only to stay
here a little longer and look at you. You are lovely to-day.”
His eyes looked at me with delight and supplication, his face was pale.
On his beard and mustache were glittering raindrops, and they, too,
seemed to be looking at me with love.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you, and I am happy at seeing you. I know
you cannot be my wife, but I want nothing, I ask nothing; only know that
I love you. Be silent, do not answer me, take no notice of it, but only
know that you are dear to me and let me look at you.”
His rapture affected me too; I looked at his enthusiastic face, listened
to his voice which mingled with the patter of the rain, and stood as
though spellbound, unable to stir.
I longed to go on endlessly looking at his shining eyes and listening.
“You say nothing, and that is splendid,” said Pyotr Sergeyitch. “Go on
being silent.”
I felt happy. I laughed with delight and ran through the drenching rain
to the house; he laughed too, and, leaping as he went, ran after me.
Both drenched, panting, noisily clattering up the stairs like children,
we dashed into the room. My father and brother, who were not used to
seeing me laughing and light-hearted, looked at me in surprise and began
laughing too.
The storm-clouds had passed over and the thunder had ceased, but the
raindrops still glittered on Pyotr Sergeyitch’s beard. The whole evening
till supper-time he was singing, whistling, playing noisily with the dog
and racing about the room after it, so that he nearly upset the servant
with the samovar. And at supper he ate a great deal, talked nonsense,
and maintained that when one eats fresh cucumbers in winter there is the
fragrance of spring in one’s mouth.
When I went to bed I lighted a candle and threw my window wide open, and
an undefined feeling took possession of my soul. I remembered that I was
free and healthy, that I had rank and wealth, that I was beloved; above
all, that I had rank and wealth, rank and wealth, my God! how nice that
was!... Then, huddling up in bed at a touch of cold which reached me
from the garden with the dew, I tried to discover whether I loved Pyotr
Sergeyitch or not,... and fell asleep unable to reach any conclusion.
And when in the morning I saw quivering patches of sunlight and the
shadows of the lime trees on my bed, what had happened yesterday rose
vividly in my memory. Life seemed to me rich, varied, full of charm.
Humming, I dressed quickly and went out into the garden....
And what happened afterwards? Why—nothing. In the winter when we lived
in town Pyotr Sergeyitch came to see us from time to time. Country
acquaintances are charming only in the country and in summer; in the
town and in winter they lose their charm. When you pour out tea for them
in the town it seems as though they are wearing other people’s coats,
and as though they stirred their tea too long. In the town, too, Pyotr
Sergeyitch spoke sometimes of love, but the effect was not at all the
same as in the country. In the town we were more vividly conscious of
the wall that stood between us. I had rank and wealth, while he was
poor, and he was not even a nobleman, but only the son of a deacon and a
deputy public prosecutor; we both of us—I through my youth and he for
some unknown reason—thought of that wall as very high and thick, and
when he was with us in the town he would criticize aristocratic society
with a forced smile, and maintain a sullen silence when there was anyone
else in the drawing-room. There is no wall that cannot be broken
through, but the heroes of the modern romance, so far as I know them,
are too timid, spiritless, lazy, and oversensitive, and are too ready to
resign themselves to the thought that they are doomed to failure, that
personal life has disappointed them; instead of struggling they merely
criticize, calling the world vulgar and forgetting that their criticism
passes little by little into vulgarity.
I was loved, happiness was not far away, and seemed to be almost
touching me; I went on living in careless ease without trying to
understand myself, not knowing what I expected or what I wanted from
life, and time went on and on.... People passed by me with their love,
bright days and warm nights flashed by, the nightingales sang, the hay
smelt fragrant, and all this, sweet and overwhelming in remembrance,
passed with me as with everyone rapidly, leaving no trace, was not
prized, and vanished like mist.... Where is it all?
My father is dead, I have grown older; everything that delighted me,
caressed me, gave me hope—the patter of the rain, the rolling of the
thunder, thoughts of happiness, talk of love—all that has become nothing
but a memory, and I see before me a flat desert distance; on the plain
not one living soul, and out there on the horizon it is dark and
terrible....
A ring at the bell.... It is Pyotr Sergeyitch. When in the winter I see
the trees and remember how green they were for me in the summer I
whisper:
“Oh, my darlings!”
And when I see people with whom I spent my spring-time, I feel sorrowful
and warm and whisper the same thing.
He has long ago by my father’s good offices been transferred to town. He
looks a little older, a little fallen away. He has long given up
declaring his love, has left off talking nonsense, dislikes his official
work, is ill in some way and disillusioned; he has given up trying to
get anything out of life, and takes no interest in living. Now he has
sat down by the hearth and looks in silence at the fire....
Not knowing what to say I ask him:
“Well, what have you to tell me?”
“Nothing,” he answers.
And silence again. The red glow of the fire plays about his melancholy
face.
I thought of the past, and all at once my shoulders began quivering, my
head dropped, and I began weeping bitterly. I felt unbearably sorry for
myself and for this man, and passionately longed for what had passed
away and what life refused us now. And now I did not think about rank
and wealth.
I broke into loud sobs, pressing my temples, and muttered:
“My God! my God! my life is wasted!”
And he sat and was silent, and did not say to me: “Don’t weep.” He
understood that I must weep, and that the time for this had come.
I saw from his eyes that he was sorry for me; and I was sorry for him,
too, and vexed with this timid, unsuccessful man who could not make a
life for me, nor for himself.
When I saw him to the door, he was, I fancied, purposely a long while
putting on his coat. Twice he kissed my hand without a word, and looked
a long while into my tear-stained face. I believe at that moment he
recalled the storm, the streaks of rain, our laughter, my face that day;
he longed to say something to me, and he would have been glad to say it;
but he said nothing, he merely shook his head and pressed my hand. God
help him!
After seeing him out, I went back to my study and again sat on the
carpet before the fireplace; the red embers were covered with ash and
began to grow dim. The frost tapped still more angrily at the windows,
and the wind droned in the chimney.
The maid came in and, thinking I was asleep, called my name.
IN EXILE
OLD SEMYON, nicknamed Canny, and a young Tatar, whom no one knew by
name, were sitting on the river-bank by the camp-fire; the other three
ferrymen were in the hut. Semyon, an old man of sixty, lean and
toothless, but broad shouldered and still healthy-looking, was drunk; he
would have gone in to sleep long before, but he had a bottle in his
pocket and he was afraid that the fellows in the hut would ask him for
vodka. The Tatar was ill and weary, and wrapping himself up in his rags
was describing how nice it was in the Simbirsk province, and what a
beautiful and clever wife he had left behind at home. He was not more
than twenty five, and now by the light of the camp-fire, with his pale
and sick, mournful face, he looked like a boy.
“To be sure, it is not paradise here,” said Canny. “You can see for
yourself, the water, the bare banks, clay, and nothing else.... Easter
has long passed and yet there is ice on the river, and this morning
there was snow...”
“It’s bad! it’s bad!” said the Tatar, and looked round him in terror.
The dark, cold river was flowing ten paces away; it grumbled, lapped
against the hollow clay banks and raced on swiftly towards the far-away
sea. Close to the bank there was the dark blur of a big barge, which the
ferrymen called a “karbos.” Far away on the further bank, lights, dying
down and flickering up again, zigzagged like little snakes; they were
burning last year’s grass. And beyond the little snakes there was
darkness again. There little icicles could be heard knocking against the
barge. It was damp and cold....
The Tatar glanced at the sky. There were as many stars as at home, and
the same blackness all round, but something was lacking. At home in the
Simbirsk province the stars were quite different, and so was the sky.
“It’s bad! it’s bad!” he repeated.
“You will get used to it,” said Semyon, and he laughed. “Now you are
young and foolish, the milk is hardly dry on your lips, and it seems to
you in your foolishness that you are more wretched than anyone; but the
time will come when you will say to yourself: ‘I wish no one a better
life than mine.’ You look at me. Within a week the floods will be over
and we shall set up the ferry; you will all go wandering off about
Siberia while I shall stay and shall begin going from bank to bank. I’ve
been going like that for twenty-two years, day and night. The pike and
the salmon are under the water while I am on the water. And thank God
for it, I want nothing; God give everyone such a life.”
The Tatar threw some dry twigs on the camp-fire, lay down closer to the
blaze, and said:
“My father is a sick man. When he dies my mother and wife will come
here. They have promised.”
“And what do you want your wife and mother for?” asked Canny. “That’s
mere foolishness, my lad. It’s the devil confounding you, damn his soul!
Don’t you listen to him, the cursed one. Don’t let him have his way. He
is at you about the women, but you spite him; say, ‘I don’t want them!’
He is on at you about freedom, but you stand up to him and say: ‘I don’t
want it!’ I want nothing, neither father nor mother, nor wife, nor
freedom, nor post, nor paddock; I want nothing, damn their souls!”
Semyon took a pull at the bottle and went on:
“I am not a simple peasant, not of the working class, but the son of a
deacon, and when I was free I lived at Kursk; I used to wear a
frockcoat, and now I have brought myself to such a pass that I can sleep
naked on the ground and eat grass. And I wish no one a better life. I
want nothing and I am afraid of nobody, and the way I look at it is that
there is nobody richer and freer than I am. When they sent me here from
Russia from the first day I stuck it out; I want nothing! The devil was
at me about my wife and about my home and about freedom, but I told him:
‘I want nothing.’ I stuck to it, and here you see I live well, and I
don’t complain, and if anyone gives way to the devil and listens to him,
if but once, he is lost, there is no salvation for him: he is sunk in
the bog to the crown of his head and will never get out.
“It is not only a foolish peasant like you, but even gentlemen, well-
educated people, are lost. Fifteen years ago they sent a gentleman here
from Russia. He hadn’t shared something with his brothers and had forged
something in a will. They did say he was a prince or a baron, but maybe
he was simply an official—who knows? Well, the gentleman arrived here,
and first thing he bought himself a house and land in Muhortinskoe. ‘I
want to live by my own work,’ says he, ‘in the sweat of my brow, for I
am not a gentleman now,’ says he, ‘but a settler.’ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘God
help you, that’s the right thing.’ He was a young man then, busy and
careful; he used to mow himself and catch fish and ride sixty miles on
horseback. Only this is what happened: from the very first year he took
to riding to Gyrino for the post; he used to stand on my ferry and sigh:
‘Ech, Semyon, how long it is since they sent me any money from home!’
‘You don’t want money, Vassily Sergeyitch,’ says I. ‘What use is it to
you? You cast away the past, and forget it as though it had never been
at all, as though it had been a dream, and begin to live anew. Don’t
listen to the devil,’ says I; ‘he will bring you to no good, he’ll draw
you into a snare. Now you want money,’ says I, ‘but in a very little
while you’ll be wanting something else, and then more and more. If you
want to be happy,’ says I, the chief thing is not to want anything.
Yes.... If,’ says I, ‘if Fate has wronged you and me cruelly it’s no
good asking for her favor and bowing down to her, but you despise her
and laugh at her, or else she will laugh at you.’ That’s what I said to
him....
“Two years later I ferried him across to this side, and he was rubbing
his hands and laughing. ‘I am going to Gyrino to meet my wife,’ says he.
‘She was sorry for me,’ says he; ‘she has come. She is good and kind.’
And he was breathless with joy. So a day later he came with his wife. A
beautiful young lady in a hat; in her arms was a baby girl. And lots of
luggage of all sorts. And my Vassily Sergeyitch was fussing round her;
he couldn’t take his eyes off her and couldn’t say enough in praise of
her. ‘Yes, brother Semyon, even in Siberia people can live!’ ‘Oh, all
right,’ thinks I, ‘it will be a different tale presently.’ And from that
time forward he went almost every week to inquire whether money had not
come from Russia. He wanted a lot of money. ‘She is losing her youth and
beauty here in Siberia for my sake,’ says he, ‘and sharing my bitter lot
with me, and so I ought,’ says he, ‘to provide her with every
comfort....’
“To make it livelier for the lady he made acquaintance with the
officials and all sorts of riff-raff. And of course he had to give food
and drink to all that crew, and there had to be a piano and a shaggy
lapdog on the sofa—plague take it!... Luxury, in fact, self-indulgence.
The lady did not stay with him long. How could she? The clay, the water,
the cold, no vegetables for you, no fruit. All around you ignorant and
drunken people and no sort of manners, and she was a spoilt lady from
Petersburg or Moscow.... To be sure she moped. Besides, her husband, say
what you like, was not a gentleman now, but a settler—not the same rank.
“Three years later, I remember, on the eve of the Assumption, there was
shouting from the further bank. I went over with the ferry, and what do
I see but the lady, all wrapped up, and with her a young gentleman, an
official. A sledge with three horses.... I ferried them across here,
they got in and away like the wind. They were soon lost to sight. And
towards morning Vassily Sergeyitch galloped down to the ferry. ‘Didn’t
my wife come this way with a gentleman in spectacles, Semyon?’ ‘She
did,’ said I; ‘you may look for the wind in the fields!’ He galloped in
pursuit of them. For five days and nights he was riding after them. When
I ferried him over to the other side afterwards, he flung himself on the
ferry and beat his head on the boards of the ferry and howled. ‘So
that’s how it is,’ says I. I laughed, and reminded him ‘people can live
even in Siberia!’ And he beat his head harder than ever....
“Then he began longing for freedom. His wife had slipped off to Russia,
and of course he was drawn there to see her and to get her away from her
lover. And he took, my lad, to galloping almost every day, either to the
post or the town to see the commanding officer; he kept sending in
petitions for them to have mercy on him and let him go back home; and he
used to say that he had spent some two hundred roubles on telegrams
alone. He sold his land and mortgaged his house to the Jews. He grew
gray and bent, and yellow in the face, as though he was in consumption.
If he talked to you he would go, khee—khee—khee,... and there were tears
in his eyes. He kept rushing about like this with petitions for eight
years, but now he has grown brighter and more cheerful again: he has
found another whim to give way to. You see, his daughter has grown up.
He looks at her, and she is the apple of his eye. And to tell the truth
she is all right, good-looking, with black eyebrows and a lively
disposition. Every Sunday he used to ride with her to church in Gyrino.
They used to stand on the ferry, side by side, she would laugh and he
could not take his eyes off her. ‘Yes, Semyon,’ says he, ‘people can
live even in Siberia. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Look,’ says
he, ‘what a daughter I have got! I warrant you wouldn’t find another
like her for a thousand versts round.’ ‘Your daughter is all right,’
says I, ‘that’s true, certainly.’ But to myself I thought: ‘Wait a bit,
the wench is young, her blood is dancing, she wants to live, and there
is no life here.’ And she did begin to pine, my lad.... She faded and
faded, and now she can hardly crawl about. Consumption.
“So you see what Siberian happiness is, damn its soul! You see how
people can live in Siberia.... He has taken to going from one doctor to
another and taking them home with him. As soon as he hears that two or
three hundred miles away there is a doctor or a sorcerer, he will drive
to fetch him. A terrible lot of money he spent on doctors, and to my
thinking he had better have spent the money on drink.... She’ll die just
the same. She is certain to die, and then it will be all over with him.
He’ll hang himself from grief or run away to Russia—that’s a sure thing.
He’ll run away and they’ll catch him, then he will be tried, sent to
prison, he will have a taste of the lash....”
“Good! good!” said the Tatar, shivering with cold.
“What is good?” asked Canny.
“His wife, his daughter.... What of prison and what of sorrow!—anyway,
he did see his wife and his daughter.... You say, want nothing. But
‘nothing’ is bad! His wife lived with him three years—that was a gift
from God. ‘Nothing’ is bad, but three years is good. How not
understand?”
Shivering and hesitating, with effort picking out the Russian words of
which he knew but few, the Tatar said that God forbid one should fall
sick and die in a strange land, and be buried in the cold and dark
earth; that if his wife came to him for one day, even for one hour, that
for such happiness he would be ready to bear any suffering and to thank
God. Better one day of happiness than nothing.
Then he described again what a beautiful and clever wife he had left at
home. Then, clutching his head in both hands, he began crying and
assuring Semyon that he was not guilty, and was suffering for nothing.
His two brothers and an uncle had carried off a peasant’s horses, and
had beaten the old man till he was half dead, and the commune had not
judged fairly, but had contrived a sentence by which all the three
brothers were sent to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, was left at
home.
“You will get used to it!” said Semyon.
The Tatar was silent, and stared with tear-stained eyes at the fire; his
face expressed bewilderment and fear, as though he still did not
understand why he was here in the darkness and the wet, beside
strangers, and not in the Simbirsk province.
Canny lay near the fire, chuckled at something, and began humming a song
in an undertone.
“What joy has she with her father?” he said a little later. “He loves
her and he rejoices in her, that’s true; but, mate, you must mind your
ps and qs with him, he is a strict old man, a harsh old man. And young
wenches don’t want strictness. They want petting and ha-ha-ha! and ho-
ho-ho! and scent and pomade. Yes.... Ech! life, life,” sighed Semyon,
and he got up heavily. “The vodka is all gone, so it is time to sleep.
Eh? I am going, my lad....”
Left alone, the Tatar put on more twigs, lay down and stared at the
fire; he began thinking of his own village and of his wife. If his wife
could only come for a month, for a day; and then if she liked she might
go back again. Better a month or even a day than nothing. But if his
wife kept her promise and came, what would he have to feed her on? Where
could she live here?
“If there were not something to eat, how could she live?” the Tatar
asked aloud.
He was paid only ten kopecks for working all day and all night at the
oar; it is true that travelers gave him tips for tea and for vodkas but
the men shared all they received among themselves, and gave nothing to
the Tatar, but only laughed at him. And from poverty he was hungry,
cold, and frightened.... Now, when his whole body was aching and
shivering, he ought to go into the hut and lie down to sleep; but he had
nothing to cover him there, and it was colder than on the river-bank;
here he had nothing to cover him either, but at least he could make up
the fire....
In another week, when the floods were quite over and they set the ferry
going, none of the ferrymen but Semyon would be wanted, and the Tatar
would begin going from village to village begging for alms and for work.
His wife was only seventeen; she was beautiful, spoilt, and shy; could
she possibly go from village to village begging alms with her face
unveiled? No, it was terrible even to think of that....
It was already getting light; the barge, the bushes of willow on the
water, and the waves could be clearly discerned, and if one looked round
there was the steep clay slope; at the bottom of it the hut thatched
with dingy brown straw, and the huts of the village lay clustered higher
up. The cocks were already crowing in the village.
The rusty red clay slope, the barge, the river, the strange, unkind
people, hunger, cold, illness, perhaps all that was not real. Most
likely it was all a dream, thought the Tatar. He felt that he was asleep
and heard his own snoring.... Of course he was at home in the Simbirsk
province, and he had only to call his wife by name for her to answer;
and in the next room was his mother.... What terrible dreams there are,
though! What are they for? The Tatar smiled and opened his eyes. What
river was this, the Volga?
Snow was falling.
“Boat!” was shouted on the further side. “Boat!”
The Tatar woke up, and went to wake his mates and row over to the other
side. The ferrymen came on to the river-bank, putting on their torn
sheepskins as they walked, swearing with voices husky from sleepiness
and shivering from the cold. On waking from their sleep, the river, from
which came a breath of piercing cold, seemed to strike them as revolting
and horrible. They jumped into the barge without hurrying themselves....
The Tatar and the three ferrymen took the long, broad-bladed oars, which
in the darkness looked like the claws of crabs; Semyon leaned his
stomach against the tiller. The shout on the other side still continued,
and two shots were fired from a revolver, probably with the idea that
the ferrymen were asleep or had gone to the pot-house in the village.
“All right, you have plenty of time,” said Semyon in the tone of a man
convinced that there was no necessity in this world to hurry—that it
would lead to nothing, anyway.
The heavy, clumsy barge moved away from the bank and floated between the
willow-bushes, and only the willows slowly moving back showed that the
barge was not standing still but moving. The ferrymen swung the oars
evenly in time; Semyon lay with his stomach on the tiller and,
describing a semicircle in the air, flew from one side to the other. In
the darkness it looked as though the men were sitting on some
antediluvian animal with long paws, and were moving on it through a
cold, desolate land, the land of which one sometimes dreams in
nightmares.
They passed beyond the willows and floated out into the open. The creak
and regular splash of the oars was heard on the further shore, and a
shout came: “Make haste! make haste!”
Another ten minutes passed, and the barge banged heavily against the
landing-stage.
“And it keeps sprinkling and sprinkling,” muttered Semyon, wiping the
snow from his face; “and where it all comes from God only knows.”
On the bank stood a thin man of medium height in a jacket lined with fox
fur and in a white lambskin cap. He was standing at a little distance
from his horses and not moving; he had a gloomy, concentrated
expression, as though he were trying to remember something and angry
with his untrustworthy memory. When Semyon went up to him and took off
his cap, smiling, he said:
“I am hastening to Anastasyevka. My daughter’s worse again, and they say
that there is a new doctor at Anastasyevka.”
They dragged the carriage on to the barge and floated back. The man whom
Semyon addressed as Vassily Sergeyitch stood all the time motionless,
tightly compressing his thick lips and staring off into space; when his
coachman asked permission to smoke in his presence he made no answer, as
though he had not heard. Semyon, lying with his stomach on the tiller,
looked mockingly at him and said:
“Even in Siberia people can live—can li-ive!”
There was a triumphant expression on Canny’s face, as though he had
proved something and was delighted that things had happened as he had
foretold. The unhappy helplessness of the man in the foxskin coat
evidently afforded him great pleasure.
“It’s muddy driving now, Vassily Sergeyitch,” he said when the horses
were harnessed again on the bank. “You should have put off going for
another fortnight, when it will be drier. Or else not have gone at all.
... If any good would come of your going—but as you know yourself,
people have been driving about for years and years, day and night, and
it’s always been no use. That’s the truth.”
Vassily Sergeyitch tipped him without a word, got into his carriage and
drove off.
“There, he has galloped off for a doctor!” said Semyon, shrinking from
the cold. “But looking for a good doctor is like chasing the wind in the
fields or catching the devil by the tail, plague take your soul! What a
queer chap, Lord forgive me a sinner!”
The Tatar went up to Canny, and, looking at him with hatred and
repulsion, shivering, and mixing Tatar words with his broken Russian,
said: “He is good... good; but you are bad! You are bad! The gentleman
is a good soul, excellent, and you are a beast, bad! The gentleman is
alive, but you are a dead carcass.... God created man to be alive, and
to have joy and grief and sorrow; but you want nothing, so you are not
alive, you are stone, clay! A stone wants nothing and you want nothing.
You are a stone, and God does not love you, but He loves the gentleman!”
Everyone laughed; the Tatar frowned contemptuously, and with a wave of
his hand wrapped himself in his rags and went to the campfire. The
ferrymen and Semyon sauntered to the hut.
“It’s cold,” said one ferryman huskily as he stretched himself on the
straw with which the damp clay floor was covered.
“Yes, it’s not warm,” another assented. “It’s a dog’s life....”
They all lay down. The door was thrown open by the wind and the snow
drifted into the hut; nobody felt inclined to get up and shut the door:
they were cold, and it was too much trouble.
“I am all right,” said Semyon as he began to doze. “I wouldn’t wish
anyone a better life.”
“You are a tough one, we all know. Even the devils won’t take you!”
Sounds like a dog’s howling came from outside.
“What’s that? Who’s there?”
“It’s the Tatar crying.”
“I say.... He’s a queer one!”
“He’ll get u-used to it!” said Semyon, and at once fell asleep.
The others were soon asleep too. The door remained unclosed.
THE CATTLE-DEALERS
THE long goods train has been standing for hours in the little station.
The engine is as silent as though its fire had gone out; there is not a
soul near the train or in the station yard.
A pale streak of light comes from one of the vans and glides over the
rails of a siding. In that van two men are sitting on an outspread cape:
one is an old man with a big gray beard, wearing a sheepskin coat and a
high lambskin hat, somewhat like a busby; the other a beardless youth in
a threadbare cloth reefer jacket and muddy high boots. They are the
owners of the goods. The old man sits, his legs stretched out before
him, musing in silence; the young man half reclines and softly strums on
a cheap accordion. A lantern with a tallow candle in it is hanging on
the wall near them.
The van is quite full. If one glances in through the dim light of the
lantern, for the first moment the eyes receive an impression of
something shapeless, monstrous, and unmistakably alive, something very
much like gigantic crabs which move their claws and feelers, crowd
together, and noiselessly climb up the walls to the ceiling; but if one
looks more closely, horns and their shadows, long lean backs, dirty
hides, tails, eyes begin to stand out in the dusk. They are cattle and
their shadows. There are eight of them in the van. Some turn round and
stare at the men and swing their tails. Others try to stand or lie down
more comfortably. They are crowded. If one lies down the others must
stand and huddle closer. No manger, no halter, no litter, not a wisp of
hay....*
At last the old man pulls out of his pocket a silver watch and looks at
the time: a quarter past two.
“We have been here nearly two hours,” he says, yawning. “Better go and
stir them up, or we may be here till morning. They have gone to sleep,
or goodness knows what they are up to.”
The old man gets up and, followed by his long shadow, cautiously gets
down from the van into the darkness. He makes his way along beside the
train to the engine, and after passing some two dozen vans sees a red
open furnace; a human figure sits motionless facing it; its peaked cap,
nose, and knees are lighted up by the crimson glow, all the rest is
black and can scarcely be distinguished in the darkness.
“Are we going to stay here much longer?” asks the old man.
No answer. The motionless figure is evidently asleep. The old man clears
his throat impatiently and, shrinking from the penetrating damp, walks
round the engine, and as he does so the brilliant light of the two
engine lamps dazzles his eyes for an instant and makes the night even
blacker to him; he goes to the station.
The platform and steps of the station are wet. Here and there are white
patches of freshly fallen melting snow. In the station itself it is
light and as hot as a steam-bath. There is a smell of paraffin. Except
for the weighing-machine and a yellow seat on which a man wearing a
guard’s uniform is asleep, there is no furniture in the place at all. On
the left are two wide-open doors. Through one of them the telegraphic
apparatus and a lamp with a green shade on it can be seen; through the
other, a small room, half of it taken up by a dark cupboard. In this
room the head guard and the engine-driver are sitting on the window-
sill. They are both feeling a cap with their fingers and disputing.
“That’s not real beaver, it’s imitation,” says the engine-driver. “Real
beaver is not like that. Five roubles would be a high price for the
whole cap, if you care to know!”
“You know a great deal about it,...” the head guard says, offended.
“Five roubles, indeed! Here, we will ask the merchant. Mr. Malahin,” he
says, addressing the old man, “what do you say: is this imitation beaver
or real?”
Old Malahin takes the cap into his hand, and with the air of a
connoisseur pinches the fur, blows on it, sniffs at it, and a
contemptuous smile lights up his angry face.
“It must be imitation!” he says gleefully. “Imitation it is.”
A dispute follows. The guard maintains that the cap is real beaver, and
the engine-driver and Malahin try to persuade him that it is not. In the
middle of the argument the old man suddenly remembers the object of his
coming.
“Beaver and cap is all very well, but the train’s standing still,
gentlemen!” he says. “Who is it we are waiting for? Let us start!”
“Let us,” the guard agrees. “We will smoke another cigarette and go on.
But there is no need to be in a hurry.... We shall be delayed at the
next station anyway!”
“Why should we?”
“Oh, well.... We are too much behind time.... If you are late at one
station you can’t help being delayed at the other stations to let the
trains going the opposite way pass. Whether we set off now or in the
morning we shan’t be number fourteen. We shall have to be number twenty-
three.”
“And how do you make that out?”
“Well, there it is.”
Malahin looks at the guard, reflects, and mutters mechanically as though
to himself:
“God be my judge, I have reckoned it and even jotted it down in a
notebook; we have wasted thirty-four hours standing still on the
journey. If you go on like this, either the cattle will die, or they
won’t pay me two roubles for the meat when I do get there. It’s not
traveling, but ruination.”
The guard raises his eyebrows and sighs with an air that seems to say:
“All that is unhappily true!” The engine-driver sits silent, dreamily
looking at the cap. From their faces one can see that they have a secret
thought in common, which they do not utter, not because they want to
conceal it, but because such thoughts are much better expressed by signs
than by words. And the old man understands. He feels in his pocket,
takes out a ten-rouble note, and without preliminary words, without any
change in the tone of his voice or the expression of his face, but with
the confidence and directness with which probably only Russians give and
take bribes, he gives the guard the note. The latter takes it, folds it
in four, and without undue haste puts it in his pocket. After that all
three go out of the room, and waking the sleeping guard on the way, go
on to the platform.
“What weather!” grumbles the head guard, shrugging his shoulders. “You
can’t see your hand before your face.”
“Yes, it’s vile weather.”
From the window they can see the flaxen head of the telegraph clerk
appear beside the green lamp and the telegraphic apparatus; soon after
another head, bearded and wearing a red cap, appears beside it—no doubt
that of the station-master. The station-master bends down to the table,
reads something on a blue form, rapidly passing his cigarette along the
lines.... Malahin goes to his van.
The young man, his companion, is still half reclining and hardly audibly
strumming on the accordion. He is little more than a boy, with no trace
of a mustache; his full white face with its broad cheek-bones is
childishly dreamy; his eyes have a melancholy and tranquil look unlike
that of a grown-up person, but he is broad, strong, heavy and rough like
the old man; he does not stir nor shift his position, as though he is
not equal to moving his big body. It seems as though any movement he
made would tear his clothes and be so noisy as to frighten both him and
the cattle. From under his big fat fingers that clumsily pick out the
stops and keys of the accordion comes a steady flow of thin, tinkling
sounds which blend into a simple, monotonous little tune; he listens to
it, and is evidently much pleased with his performance.
A bell rings, but with such a muffled note that it seems to come from
far away. A hurried second bell soon follows, then a third and the
guard’s whistle. A minute passes in profound silence; the van does not
move, it stands still, but vague sounds begin to come from beneath it,
like the crunch of snow under sledge-runners; the van begins to shake
and the sounds cease. Silence reigns again. But now comes the clank of
buffers, the violent shock makes the van start and, as it were, give a
lurch forward, and all the cattle fall against one another.
“May you be served the same in the world to come,” grumbles the old man,
setting straight his cap, which had slipped on the back of his head from
the jolt. “He’ll maim all my cattle like this!”
Yasha gets up without a word and, taking one of the fallen beasts by the
horns, helps it to get on to its legs.... The jolt is followed by a
stillness again. The sounds of crunching snow come from under the van
again, and it seems as though the train had moved back a little.
“There will be another jolt in a minute,” says the old man. And the
convulsive quiver does, in fact, run along the train, there is a
crashing sound and the bullocks fall on one another again.
“It’s a job!” says Yasha, listening. “The train must be heavy. It seems
it won’t move.”
“It was not heavy before, but now it has suddenly got heavy. No, my lad,
the guard has not gone shares with him, I expect. Go and take him
something, or he will be jolting us till morning.”
Yasha takes a three-rouble note from the old man and jumps out of the
van. The dull thud of his heavy footsteps resounds outside the van and
gradually dies away. Stillness.... In the next van a bullock utters a
prolonged subdued “moo,” as though it were singing.
Yasha comes back. A cold damp wind darts into the van.
“Shut the door, Yasha, and we will go to bed,” says the old man. “Why
burn a candle for nothing?”
Yasha moves the heavy door; there is a sound of a whistle, the engine
and the train set off.
“It’s cold,” mutters the old man, stretching himself on the cape and
laying his head on a bundle. “It is very different at home! It’s warm
and clean and soft, and there is room to say your prayers, but here we
are worse off than any pigs. It’s four days and nights since I have
taken off my boots.”
Yasha, staggering from the jolting of the train, opens the lantern and
snuffs out the wick with his wet fingers. The light flares up, hisses
like a frying pan and goes out.
“Yes, my lad,” Malahin goes on, as he feels Yasha lie down beside him
and the young man’s huge back huddle against his own, “it’s cold. There
is a draught from every crack. If your mother or your sister were to
sleep here for one night they would be dead by morning. There it is, my
lad, you wouldn’t study and go to the high school like your brothers, so
you must take the cattle with your father. It’s your own fault, you have
only yourself to blame.... Your brothers are asleep in their beds now,
they are snug under the bedclothes, but you, the careless and lazy one,
are in the same box as the cattle.... Yes.... ”
The old man’s words are inaudible in the noise of the train, but for a
long time he goes on muttering, sighing and clearing his throat.... The
cold air in the railway van grows thicker and more stifling. The pungent
odor of fresh dung and smoldering candle makes it so repulsive and acrid
that it irritates Yasha’s throat and chest as he falls asleep. He coughs
and sneezes, while the old man, being accustomed to it, breathes with
his whole chest as though nothing were amiss, and merely clears his
throat.
To judge from the swaying of the van and the rattle of the wheels the
train is moving rapidly and unevenly. The engine breathes heavily,
snorting out of time with the pulsation of the train, and altogether
there is a medley of sounds. The bullocks huddle together uneasily and
knock their horns against the walls.
When the old man wakes up, the deep blue sky of early morning is peeping
in at the cracks and at the little uncovered window. He feels unbearably
cold, especially in the back and the feet. The train is standing still;
Yasha, sleepy and morose, is busy with the cattle.
The old man wakes up out of humor. Frowning and gloomy, he clears his
throat angrily and looks from under his brows at Yasha who, supporting a
bullock with his powerful shoulder and slightly lifting it, is trying to
disentangle its leg.
“I told you last night that the cords were too long,” mutters the old
man; “but no, ‘It’s not too long, Daddy.’ There’s no making you do
anything, you will have everything your own way.... Blockhead!”
He angrily moves the door open and the light rushes into the van. A
passenger train is standing exactly opposite the door, and behind it a
red building with a roofed-in platform—a big station with a refreshment
bar. The roofs and bridges of the trains, the earth, the sleepers, all
are covered with a thin coating of fluffy, freshly fallen snow. In the
spaces between the carriages of the passenger train the passengers can
be seen moving to and fro, and a red-haired, red-faced gendarme walking
up and down; a waiter in a frock-coat and a snow-white shirt-front,
looking cold and sleepy, and probably very much dissatisfied with his
fate, is running along the platform carrying a glass of tea and two
rusks on a tray.
The old man gets up and begins saying his prayers towards the east.
Yasha, having finished with the bullock and put down the spade in the
corner, stands beside him and says his prayers also. He merely moves his
lips and crosses himself; the father prays in a loud whisper and
pronounces the end of each prayer aloud and distinctly.
“... And the life of the world to come. Amen,” the old man says aloud,
draws in a breath, and at once whispers another prayer, rapping out
clearly and firmly at the end: “... and lay calves upon Thy altar!”
After saying his prayers, Yasha hurriedly crosses himself and says:
“Five kopecks, please.”
And on being given the five-kopeck piece, he takes a red copper teapot
and runs to the station for boiling water. Taking long jumps over the
rails and sleepers, leaving huge tracks in the feathery snow, and
pouring away yesterday’s tea out of the teapot he runs to the
refreshment room and jingles his five-kopeck piece against his teapot.
From the van the bar-keeper can be seen pushing away the big teapot and
refusing to give half of his samovar for five kopecks, but Yasha turns
the tap himself and, spreading wide his elbows so as not to be
interfered with fills his teapot with boiling water.
“Damned blackguard!” the bar-keeper shouts after him as he runs back to
the railway van.
The scowling face of Malahin grows a little brighter over the tea.
“We know how to eat and drink, but we don’t remember our work. Yesterday
we could do nothing all day but eat and drink, and I’ll be bound we
forgot to put down what we spent. What a memory! Lord have mercy on us!”
The old man recalls aloud the expenditure of the day before, and writes
down in a tattered notebook where and how much he had given to guards,
engine-drivers, oilers....
Meanwhile the passenger train has long ago gone off, and an engine runs
backwards and forwards on the empty line, apparently without any
definite object, but simply enjoying its freedom. The sun has risen and
is playing on the snow; bright drops are falling from the station roof
and the tops of the vans.
Having finished his tea, the old man lazily saunters from the van to the
station. Here in the middle of the first-class waiting-room he sees the
familiar figure of the guard standing beside the station-master, a young
man with a handsome beard and in a magnificent rough woollen overcoat.
The young man, probably new to his position, stands in the same place,
gracefully shifting from one foot to the other like a good racehorse,
looks from side to side, salutes everyone that passes by, smiles and
screws up his eyes.... He is red-cheeked, sturdy, and good-humored; his
face is full of eagerness, and is as fresh as though he had just fallen
from the sky with the feathery snow. Seeing Malahin, the guard sighs
guiltily and throws up his hands.
“We can’t go number fourteen,” he says. “We are very much behind time.
Another train has gone with that number.”
The station-master rapidly looks through some forms, then turns his
beaming blue eyes upon Malahin, and, his face radiant with smiles and
freshness, showers questions on him:
“You are Mr. Malahin? You have the cattle? Eight vanloads? What is to be
done now? You are late and I let number fourteen go in the night. What
are we to do now?”
The young man discreetly takes hold of the fur of Malahin’s coat with
two pink fingers and, shifting from one foot to the other, explains
affably and convincingly that such and such numbers have gone already,
and that such and such are going, and that he is ready to do for Malahin
everything in his power. And from his face it is evident that he is
ready to do anything to please not only Malahin, but the whole world—he
is so happy, so pleased, and so delighted! The old man listens, and
though he can make absolutely nothing of the intricate system of
numbering the trains, he nods his head approvingly, and he, too, puts
two fingers on the soft wool of the rough coat. He enjoys seeing and
hearing the polite and genial young man. To show goodwill on his side
also, he takes out a ten-rouble note and, after a moment’s thought, adds
a couple of rouble notes to it, and gives them to the station-master.
The latter takes them, puts his finger to his cap, and gracefully
thrusts them into his pocket.
“Well, gentlemen, can’t we arrange it like this?” he says, kindled by a
new idea that has flashed on him. “The troop train is late,... as you
see, it is not here,... so why shouldn’t you go as the troop train?**
And I will let the troop train go as twenty-eight. Eh?”
“If you like,” agrees the guard.
“Excellent!” the station-master says, delighted. “In that case there is
no need for you to wait here; you can set off at once. I’ll dispatch you
immediately. Excellent!”
He salutes Malahin and runs off to his room, reading forms as he goes.
The old man is very much pleased by the conversation that has just taken
place; he smiles and looks about the room as though looking for
something else agreeable.
“We’ll have a drink, though,” he says, taking the guard’s arm.
“It seems a little early for drinking.”
“No, you must let me treat you to a glass in a friendly way.”
They both go to the refreshment bar. After having a drink the guard
spends a long time selecting something to eat.
He is a very stout, elderly man, with a puffy and discolored face. His
fatness is unpleasant, flabby-looking, and he is sallow as people are
who drink too much and sleep irregularly.
“And now we might have a second glass,” says Malahin. “It’s cold now,
it’s no sin to drink. Please take some. So I can rely upon you, Mr.
Guard, that there will be no hindrance or unpleasantness for the rest of
the journey. For you know in moving cattle every hour is precious. To-
day meat is one price; and to-morrow, look you, it will be another. If
you are a day or two late and don’t get your price, instead of a profit
you get home—excuse my saying it—without your breeches. Pray take a
little.... I rely on you, and as for standing you something or what you
like, I shall be pleased to show you my respect at any time.”
After having fed the guard, Malahin goes back to the van.
“I have just got hold of the troop train,” he says to his son. “We shall
go quickly. The guard says if we go all the way with that number we
shall arrive at eight o’clock to-morrow evening. If one does not bestir
oneself, my boy, one gets nothing.... That’s so.... So you watch and
learn....”
After the first bell a man with a face black with soot, in a blouse and
filthy frayed trousers hanging very slack, comes to the door of the van.
This is the oiler, who had been creeping under the carriages and tapping
the wheels with a hammer.
“Are these your vans of cattle?” he asks.
“Yes. Why?”
“Why, because two of the vans are not safe. They can’t go on, they must
stay here to be repaired.”
“Oh, come, tell us another! You simply want a drink, to get something
out of me.... You should have said so.”
“As you please, only it is my duty to report it at once.”
Without indignation or protest, simply, almost mechanically, the old man
takes two twenty-kopeck pieces out of his pocket and gives them to the
oiler. He takes them very calmly, too, and looking good-naturedly at the
old man enters into conversation.
“You are going to sell your cattle, I suppose.... It’s good business!”
Malahin sighs and, looking calmly at the oiler’s black face, tells him
that trading in cattle used certainly to be profitable, but now it has
become a risky and losing business.
“I have a mate here,” the oiler interrupts him. “You merchant gentlemen
might make him a little present....”
Malahin gives something to the mate too. The troop train goes quickly
and the waits at the stations are comparatively short. The old man is
pleased. The pleasant impression made by the young man in the rough
overcoat has gone deep, the vodka he has drunk slightly clouds his
brain, the weather is magnificent, and everything seems to be going
well. He talks without ceasing, and at every stopping place runs to the
refreshment bar. Feeling the need of a listener, he takes with him first
the guard, and then the engine-driver, and does not simply drink, but
makes a long business of it, with suitable remarks and cHlinking of
glasses.
“You have your job and we have ours,” he says with an affable smile.
“May God prosper us and you, and not our will but His be done.”
The vodka gradually excites him and he is worked up to a great pitch of
energy. He wants to bestir himself, to fuss about, to make inquiries, to
talk incessantly. At one minute he fumbles in his pockets and bundles
and looks for some form. Then he thinks of something and cannot remember
it; then takes out his pocketbook, and with no sort of object counts
over his money. He bustles about, sighs and groans, clasps his hands....
Laying out before him the letters and telegrams from the meat salesmen
in the city, bills, post office and telegraphic receipt forms, and his
note book, he reflects aloud and insists on Yasha’s listening.
And when he is tired of reading over forms and talking about prices, he
gets out at the stopping places, runs to the vans where his cattle are,
does nothing, but simply clasps his hands and exclaims in horror.
“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” he says in a complaining voice. “Holy Martyr
Vlassy! Though they are bullocks, though they are beasts, yet they want
to eat and drink as men do.... It’s four days and nights since they have
drunk or eaten. Oh, dear! oh, dear!”
Yasha follows him and does what he is told like an obedient son. He does
not like the old man’s frequent visits to the refreshment bar. Though he
is afraid of his father, he cannot refrain from remarking on it.
“So you have begun already!” he says, looking sternly at the old man.
“What are you rejoicing at? Is it your name-day or what?”
“Don’t you dare teach your father.”
“Fine goings on!”
When he has not to follow his father along the other vans Yasha sits on
the cape and strums on the accordion. Occasionally he gets out and walks
lazily beside the train; he stands by the engine and turns a prolonged,
unmoving stare on the wheels or on the workmen tossing blocks of wood
into the tender; the hot engine wheezes, the falling blocks come down
with the mellow, hearty thud of fresh wood; the engine-driver and his
assistant, very phlegmatic and imperturbable persons, perform
incomprehensible movements and don’t hurry themselves. After standing
for a while by the engine, Yasha saunters lazily to the station; here he
looks at the eatables in the refreshment bar, reads aloud some quite
uninteresting notice, and goes back slowly to the cattle van. His face
expresses neither boredom nor desire; apparently he does not care where
he is, at home, in the van, or by the engine.
Towards evening the train stops near a big station. The lamps have only
just been lighted along the line; against the blue background in the
fresh limpid air the lights are bright and pale like stars; they are
only red and glowing under the station roof, where it is already dark.
All the lines are loaded up with carriages, and it seems that if another
train came in there would be no place for it. Yasha runs to the station
for boiling water to make the evening tea. Well-dressed ladies and high-
school boys are walking on the platform. If one looks into the distance
from the platform there are far-away lights twinkling in the evening
dusk on both sides of the station—that is the town. What town? Yasha
does not care to know. He sees only the dim lights and wretched
buildings beyond the station, hears the cabmen shouting, feels a sharp,
cold wind on his face, and imagines that the town is probably
disagreeable, uncomfortable, and dull.
While they are having tea, when it is quite dark and a lantern is
hanging on the wall again as on the previous evening, the train quivers
from a slight shock and begins moving backwards. After going a little
way it stops; they hear indistinct shouts, someone sets the chains
clanking near the buffers and shouts, “Ready!” The train moves and goes
forward. Ten minutes later it is dragged back again.
Getting out of the van, Malahin does not recognize his train. His eight
vans of bullocks are standing in the same row with some trolleys which
were not a part of the train before. Two or three of these are loaded
with rubble and the others are empty. The guards running to and fro on
the platform are strangers. They give unwilling and indistinct answers
to his questions. They have no thoughts to spare for Malahin; they are
in a hurry to get the train together so as to finish as soon as possible
and be back in the warmth.
“What number is this?” asks Malahin
“Number eighteen.”
“And where is the troop train? Why have you taken me off the troop
train?”
Getting no answer, the old man goes to the station. He looks first for
the familiar figure of the head guard and, not finding him, goes to the
station-master. The station-master is sitting at a table in his own
room, turning over a bundle of forms. He is busy, and affects not to see
the newcomer. His appearance is impressive: a cropped black head,
prominent ears, a long hooked nose, a swarthy face; he has a forbidding
and, as it were, offended expression. Malahin begins making his
complaint at great length.
“What?” queries the station-master. “How is this?” He leans against the
back of his chair and goes on, growing indignant: “What is it? and why
shouldn’t you go by number eighteen? Speak more clearly, I don’t
understand! How is it? Do you want me to be everywhere at once?”
He showers questions on him, and for no apparent reason grows sterner
and sterner. Malahin is already feeling in his pocket for his
pocketbook, but in the end the station-master, aggrieved and indignant,
for some unknown reason jumps up from his seat and runs out of the room.
Malahin shrugs his shoulders, and goes out to look for someone else to
speak to.
From boredom or from a desire to put the finishing stroke to a busy day,
or simply that a window with the inscription “Telegraph!” on it catches
his eye, he goes to the window and expresses a desire to send off a
telegram. Taking up a pen, he thinks for a moment, and writes on a blue
form: “Urgent. Traffic Manager. Eight vans of live stock. Delayed at
every station. Kindly send an express number. Reply paid. Malahin.”
Having sent off the telegram, he goes back to the station-master’s room.
There he finds, sitting on a sofa covered with gray cloth, a benevolent-
looking gentleman in spectacles and a cap of raccoon fur; he is wearing
a peculiar overcoat very much like a lady’s, edged with fur, with frogs
and slashed sleeves. Another gentleman, dried-up and sinewy, wearing the
uniform of a railway inspector, stands facing him.
“Just think of it,” says the inspector, addressing the gentleman in the
queer overcoat. “I’ll tell you an incident that really is A1! The Z.
railway line in the coolest possible way stole three hundred trucks from
the N. line. It’s a fact, sir! I swear it! They carried them off,
repainted them, put their letters on them, and that’s all about it. The
N. line sends its agents everywhere, they hunt and hunt. And then—can
you imagine it?—the Company happen to come upon a broken-down carriage
of the Z. line. They repair it at their depot, and all at once, bless my
soul! see their own mark on the wheels What do you say to that? Eh? If I
did it they would send me to Siberia, but the railway companies simply
snap their fingers at it!”
It is pleasant to Malahin to talk to educated, cultured people. He
strokes his beard and joins in the conversation with dignity.
“Take this case, gentlemen, for instance,” he says. “I am transporting
cattle to X. Eight vanloads. Very good.... Now let us say they charge me
for each vanload as a weight of ten tons; eight bullocks don’t weigh ten
tons, but much less, yet they don’t take any notice of that....”
At that instant Yasha walks into the room looking for his father. He
listens and is about to sit down on a chair, but probably thinking of
his weight goes and sits on the window-sill.
“They don’t take any notice of that,” Malahin goes on, “and charge me
and my son the third-class fare, too, forty-two roubles, for going in
the van with the bullocks. This is my son Yakov. I have two more at
home, but they have gone in for study. Well and apart from that it is my
opinion that the railways have ruined the cattle trade. In old days when
they drove them in herds it was better.”
The old man’s talk is lengthy and drawn out. After every sentence he
looks at Yasha as though he would say: “See how I am talking to clever
people.”
“Upon my word!” the inspector interrupts him. “No one is indignant, no
one criticizes. And why? It is very simple. An abomination strikes the
eye and arouses indignation only when it is exceptional, when the
established order is broken by it. Here, where, saving your presence, it
constitutes the long-established program and forms and enters into the
basis of the order itself, where every sleeper on the line bears the
trace of it and stinks of it, one too easily grows accustomed to it!
Yes, sir!”
The second bell rings, the gentlemen in the queer overcoat gets up. The
inspector takes him by the arm and, still talking with heat, goes off
with him to the platform. After the third bell the station-master runs
into his room, and sits down at his table.
“Listen, with what number am I to go?” asks Malahin.
The station-master looks at a form and says indignantly:
“Are you Malahin, eight vanloads? You must pay a rouble a van and six
roubles and twenty kopecks for stamps. You have no stamps. Total,
fourteen roubles, twenty kopecks.”
Receiving the money, he writes something down, dries it with sand, and,
hurriedly snatching up a bundle of forms, goes quickly out of the room.
At ten o’clock in the evening Malahin gets an answer from the traffic
manager: “Give precedence.”
Reading the telegram through, the old man winks significantly and, very
well pleased with himself, puts it in his pocket.
“Here,” he says to Yasha, “look and learn.”
At midnight his train goes on. The night is dark and cold like the
previous one; the waits at the stations are long. Yasha sits on the cape
and imperturbably strums on the accordion, while the old man is still
more eager to exert himself. At one of the stations he is overtaken by a
desire to lodge a complaint. At his request a gendarme sits down and
writes:
“November 10, 188-.—I, non-commissioned officer of the Z. section of the
N. police department of railways, Ilya Tchered, in accordance with
article II of the statute of May 19, 1871, have drawn up this protocol
at the station of X. as herewith follows.... ”
“What am I to write next?” asks the gendarme.
Malahin lays out before him forms, postal and telegraph receipts,
accounts.... He does not know himself definitely what he wants of the
gendarme; he wants to describe in the protocol not any separate episode
but his whole journey, with all his losses and conversations with
station-masters—to describe it lengthily and vindictively.
“At the station of Z.,” he says, “write that the station-master
unHlinked my vans from the troop train because he did not like my
countenance.”
And he wants the gendarme to be sure to mention his countenance. The
latter listens wearily, and goes on writing without hearing him to the
end. He ends his protocol thus:
“The above deposition I, non-commissioned officer Tchered, have written
down in this protocol with a view to present it to the head of the Z.
section, and have handed a copy thereof to Gavril Malahin.”
The old man takes the copy, adds it to the papers with which his side
pocket is stuffed, and, much pleased, goes back to his van.
In the morning Malahin wakes up again in a bad humor, but his wrath
vents itself not on Yasha but the cattle.
“The cattle are done for!” he grumbles. “They are done for! They are at
the last gasp! God be my judge! they will all die. Tfoo!”
The bullocks, who have had nothing to drink for many days, tortured by
thirst, are licking the hoar frost on the walls, and when Malachin goes
up to them they begin licking his cold fur jacket. From their clear,
tearful eyes it can be seen that they are exhausted by thirst and the
jolting of the train, that they are hungry and miserable.
“It’s a nice job taking you by rail, you wretched brutes!” mutters
Malahin. “I could wish you were dead to get it over! It makes me sick to
look at you!”
At midday the train stops at a big station where, according to the
regulations, there was drinking water provided for cattle.
Water is given to the cattle, but the bullocks will not drink it: the
water is too cold....
Two more days and nights pass, and at last in the distance in the murky
fog the city comes into sight. The journey is over. The train comes to a
standstill before reaching the town, near a goods’ station. The
bullocks, released from the van, stagger and stumble as though they were
walking on slippery ice.
Having got through the unloading and veterinary inspection, Malahin and
Yasha take up their quarters in a dirty, cheap hotel in the outskirts of
the town, in the square in which the cattle-market is held. Their
lodgings are filthy and their food is disgusting, unlike what they ever
have at home; they sleep to the harsh strains of a wretched steam hurdy-
gurdy which plays day and night in the restaurant under their lodging.
The old man spends his time from morning till night going about looking
for purchasers, and Yasha sits for days in the hotel room, or goes out
into the street to look at the town. He sees the filthy square heaped up
with dung, the signboards of restaurants, the turreted walls of a
monastery in the fog. Sometimes he runs across the street and looks into
the grocer’s shop, admires the jars of cakes of different colors, yawns,
and lazily saunters back to his room. The city does not interest him.
At last the bullocks are sold to a dealer. Malahin hires drovers. The
cattle are divided into herds, ten in each, and driven to the other end
of the town. The bullocks, exhausted, go with drooping heads through the
noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and
last time in their lives. The tattered drovers walk after them, their
heads drooping too. They are bored.... Now and then some drover starts
out of his brooding, remembers that there are cattle in front of him
intrusted to his charge, and to show that he is doing his duty brings a
stick down full swing on a bullock’s back. The bullock staggers with the
pain, runs forward a dozen paces, and looks about him as though he were
ashamed at being beaten before people.
After selling the bullocks and buying for his family presents such as
they could perfectly well have bought at home, Malahin and Yasha get
ready for their journey back. Three hours before the train goes the old
man, who has already had a drop too much with the purchaser and so is
fussy, goes down with Yasha to the restaurant and sits down to drink
tea. Like all provincials, he cannot eat and drink alone: he must have
company as fussy and as fond of sedate conversation as himself.
“Call the host!” he says to the waiter; “tell him I should like to
entertain him.”
The hotel-keeper, a well-fed man, absolutely indifferent to his lodgers,
comes and sits down to the table.
“Well, we have sold our stock,” Malahin says, laughing. “I have swapped
my goat for a hawk. Why, when we set off the price of meat was three
roubles ninety kopecks, but when we arrived it had dropped to three
roubles twenty-five. They tell us we are too late, we should have been
here three days earlier, for now there is not the same demand for meat,
St. Philip’s fast has come.... Eh? It’s a nice how-do-you-do! It meant a
loss of fourteen roubles on each bullock. Yes. But only think what it
costs to bring the stock! Fifteen roubles carriage, and you must put
down six roubles for each bullock, tips, bribes, drinks, and one thing
and another....”
The hotel-keeper listens out of politeness and reluctantly drinks tea.
Malahin sighs and groans, gesticulates, jests about his ill-luck, but
everything shows that the loss he has sustained does not trouble him
much. He doesn’t mind whether he has lost or gained as long as he has
listeners, has something to make a fuss about, and is not late for his
train.
An hour later Malahin and Yasha, laden with bags and boxes, go
downstairs from the hotel room to the front door to get into a sledge
and drive to the station. They are seen off by the hotel-keeper, the
waiter, and various women. The old man is touched. He thrusts ten-kopeck
pieces in all directions, and says in a sing-song voice:
“Good by, good health to you! God grant that all may be well with you.
Please God if we are alive and well we shall come again in Lent. Good-
by. Thank you. God bless you!”
Getting into the sledge, the old man spends a long time crossing himself
in the direction in which the monastery walls make a patch of darkness
in the fog. Yasha sits beside him on the very edge of the seat with his
legs hanging over the side. His face as before shows no sign of emotion
and expresses neither boredom nor desire. He is not glad that he is
going home, nor sorry that he has not had time to see the sights of the
city.
“Drive on!”
The cabman whips up the horse and, turning round, begins swearing at the
heavy and cumbersome luggage.
* On many railway lines, in order to avoid accidents, it is against the
regulations to carry hay on the trains, and so live stock are without
fodder on the journey.—Author’s Note.
**The train destined especially for the transport of troops is called
the troop train; when there are no troops it takes goods, and goes more
rapidly than ordinary goods train. —Author’s Note.
SORROW
THE turner, Grigory Petrov, who had been known for years past as a
splendid craftsman, and at the same time as the most senseless peasant
in the Galtchinskoy district, was taking his old woman to the hospital.
He had to drive over twenty miles, and it was an awful road. A
government post driver could hardly have coped with it, much less an
incompetent sluggard like Grigory. A cutting cold wind was blowing
straight in his face. Clouds of snowflakes were whirling round and round
in all directions, so that one could not tell whether the snow was
falling from the sky or rising from the earth. The fields, the telegraph
posts, and the forest could not be seen for the fog of snow. And when a
particularly violent gust of wind swooped down on Grigory, even the yoke
above the horse’s head could not be seen. The wretched, feeble little
nag crawled slowly along. It took all its strength to drag its legs out
of the snow and to tug with its head. The turner was in a hurry. He kept
restlessly hopping up and down on the front seat and lashing the horse’s
back.
“Don’t cry, Matryona,...” he muttered. “Have a little patience. Please
God we shall reach the hospital, and in a trice it will be the right
thing for you.... Pavel Ivanitch will give you some little drops, or
tell them to bleed you; or maybe his honor will be pleased to rub you
with some sort of spirit—it’ll... draw it out of your side. Pavel
Ivanitch will do his best. He will shout and stamp about, but he will do
his best.... He is a nice gentleman, affable, God give him health! As
soon as we get there he will dart out of his room and will begin calling
me names. ‘How? Why so?’ he will cry. ‘Why did you not come at the right
time? I am not a dog to be hanging about waiting on you devils all day.
Why did you not come in the morning? Go away! Get out of my sight. Come
again to-morrow.’ And I shall say: ‘Mr. Doctor! Pavel Ivanitch! Your
honor!’ Get on, do! plague take you, you devil! Get on!”
The turner lashed his nag, and without looking at the old woman went on
muttering to himself:
“‘Your honor! It’s true as before God.... Here’s the Cross for you, I
set off almost before it was light. How could I be here in time if the
Lord.... The Mother of God... is wroth, and has sent such a snowstorm?
Kindly look for yourself.... Even a first-rate horse could not do it,
while mine—you can see for yourself—is not a horse but a disgrace.’ And
Pavel Ivanitch will frown and shout: ‘We know you! You always find some
excuse! Especially you, Grishka; I know you of old! I’ll be bound you
have stopped at half a dozen taverns!’ And I shall say: ‘Your honor! am
I a criminal or a heathen? My old woman is giving up her soul to God,
she is dying, and am I going to run from tavern to tavern! What an idea,
upon my word! Plague take them, the taverns!’ Then Pavel Ivanitch will
order you to be taken into the hospital, and I shall fall at his
feet.... ‘Pavel Ivanitch! Your honor, we thank you most humbly! Forgive
us fools and anathemas, don’t be hard on us peasants! We deserve a good
kicking, while you graciously put yourself out and mess your feet in the
snow!’ And Pavel Ivanitch will give me a look as though he would like to
hit me, and will say: ‘You’d much better not be swilling vodka, you
fool, but taking pity on your old woman instead of falling at my feet.
You want a thrashing!’ ‘You are right there—a thrashing, Pavel Ivanitch,
strike me God! But how can we help bowing down at your feet if you are
our benefactor, and a real father to us? Your honor! I give you my
word,... here as before God,... you may spit in my face if I deceive
you: as soon as my Matryona, this same here, is well again and restored
to her natural condition, I’ll make anything for your honor that you
would like to order! A cigarette-case, if you like, of the best
birchwood,... balls for croquet, skittles of the most foreign pattern I
can turn.... I will make anything for you! I won’t take a farthing from
you. In Moscow they would charge you four roubles for such a cigarette-
case, but I won’t take a farthing.’ The doctor will laugh and say: ‘Oh,
all right, all right.... I see! But it’s a pity you are a drunkard....’
I know how to manage the gentry, old girl. There isn’t a gentleman I
couldn’t talk to. Only God grant we don’t get off the road. Oh, how it
is blowing! One’s eyes are full of snow.”
And the turner went on muttering endlessly. He prattled on mechanically
to get a little relief from his depressing feelings. He had plenty of
words on his tongue, but the thoughts and questions in his brain were
even more numerous. Sorrow had come upon the turner unawares, unlooked-
for, and unexpected, and now he could not get over it, could not recover
himself. He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though in drunken
half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he was
suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler and
drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man,
weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even struggling with nature.
The turner remembered that his trouble had begun the evening before.
When he had come home yesterday evening, a little drunk as usual, and
from long-established habit had begun swearing and shaking his fists,
his old woman had looked at her rowdy spouse as she had never looked at
him before. Usually, the expression in her aged eyes was that of a
martyr, meek like that of a dog frequently beaten and badly fed; this
time she had looked at him sternly and immovably, as saints in the holy
pictures or dying people look. From that strange, evil look in her eyes
the trouble had begun. The turner, stupefied with amazement, borrowed a
horse from a neighbor, and now was taking his old woman to the hospital
in the hope that, by means of powders and ointments, Pavel Ivanitch
would bring back his old woman’s habitual expression.
“I say, Matryona,...” the turner muttered, “if Pavel Ivanitch asks you
whether I beat you, say, ‘Never!’ and I never will beat you again. I
swear it. And did I ever beat you out of spite? I just beat you without
thinking. I am sorry for you. Some men wouldn’t trouble, but here I am
taking you.... I am doing my best. And the way it snows, the way it
snows! Thy Will be done, O Lord! God grant we don’t get off the road....
Does your side ache, Matryona, that you don’t speak? I ask you, does
your side ache?”
It struck him as strange that the snow on his old woman’s face was not
melting; it was queer that the face itself looked somehow drawn, and had
turned a pale gray, dingy waxen hue and had grown grave and solemn.
“You are a fool!” muttered the turner.... “I tell you on my conscience,
before God,... and you go and... Well, you are a fool! I have a good
mind not to take you to Pavel Ivanitch!”
The turner let the reins go and began thinking. He could not bring
himself to look round at his old woman: he was frightened. He was
afraid, too, of asking her a question and not getting an answer. At
last, to make an end of uncertainty, without looking round he felt his
old woman’s cold hand. The lifted hand fell like a log.
“She is dead, then! What a business!”
And the turner cried. He was not so much sorry as annoyed. He thought
how quickly everything passes in this world! His trouble had hardly
begun when the final catastrophe had happened. He had not had time to
live with his old woman, to show her he was sorry for her before she
died. He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had
passed by as it were in a fog. What with drunkenness, quarreling, and
poverty, there had been no feeling of life. And, as though to spite him,
his old woman died at the very time when he felt he was sorry for her,
that he could not live without her, and that he had behaved dreadfully
badly to her.
“Why, she used to go the round of the village,” he remembered. “I sent
her out myself to beg for bread. What a business! She ought to have
lived another ten years, the silly thing; as it is I’ll be bound she
thinks I really was that sort of man.... Holy Mother! but where the
devil am I driving? There’s no need for a doctor now, but a burial. Turn
back!”
Grigory turned back and lashed the horse with all his might. The road
grew worse and worse every hour. Now he could not see the yoke at all.
Now and then the sledge ran into a young fir tree, a dark object
scratched the turner’s hands and flashed before his eyes, and the field
of vision was white and whirling again.
“To live over again,” thought the turner.
He remembered that forty years ago Matryona had been young, handsome,
merry, that she had come of a well-to-do family. They had married her to
him because they had been attracted by his handicraft. All the
essentials for a happy life had been there, but the trouble was that,
just as he had got drunk after the wedding and lay sprawling on the
stove, so he had gone on without waking up till now. His wedding he
remembered, but of what happened after the wedding—for the life of him
he could remember nothing, except perhaps that he had drunk, lain on the
stove, and quarreled. Forty years had been wasted like that.
The white clouds of snow were beginning little by little to turn gray.
It was getting dusk.
“Where am I going?” the turner suddenly bethought him with a start. “I
ought to be thinking of the burial, and I am on the way to the
hospital.... It as is though I had gone crazy.”
Grigory turned round again, and again lashed his horse. The little nag
strained its utmost and, with a snort, fell into a little trot. The
turner lashed it on the back time after time.... A knocking was audible
behind him, and though he did not look round, he knew it was the dead
woman’s head knocking against the sledge. And the snow kept turning
darker and darker, the wind grew colder and more cutting....
“To live over again!” thought the turner. “I should get a new lathe,
take orders,... give the money to my old woman....”
And then he dropped the reins. He looked for them, tried to pick them
up, but could not—his hands would not work....
“It does not matter,” he thought, “the horse will go of itself, it knows
the way. I might have a little sleep now.... Before the funeral or the
requiem it would be as well to get a little rest....”
The turner closed his eyes and dozed. A little later he heard the horse
stop; he opened his eyes and saw before him something dark like a hut or
a haystack....
He would have got out of the sledge and found out what it was, but he
felt overcome by such inertia that it seemed better to freeze than move,
and he sank into a peaceful sleep.
He woke up in a big room with painted walls. Bright sunlight was
streaming in at the windows. The turner saw people facing him, and his
first feeling was a desire to show himself a respectable man who knew
how things should be done.
“A requiem, brothers, for my old woman,” he said. “The priest should be
told....”
“Oh, all right, all right; lie down,” a voice cut him short.
“Pavel Ivanitch!” the turner cried in surprise, seeing the doctor before
him. “Your honor, benefactor!”
He wanted to leap up and fall on his knees before the doctor, but felt
that his arms and legs would not obey him.
“Your honor, where are my legs, where are my arms!”
“Say good-by to your arms and legs.... They’ve been frozen off. Come,
come!... What are you crying for? You’ve lived your life, and thank God
for it! I suppose you have had sixty years of it—that’s enough for
you!...”
“I am grieving.... Graciously forgive me! If I could have another five
or six years!...”
“What for?”
“The horse isn’t mine, I must give it back.... I must bury my old
woman.... How quickly it is all ended in this world! Your honor, Pavel
Ivanitch! A cigarette-case of birchwood of the best! I’ll turn you
croquet balls....”
The doctor went out of the ward with a wave of his hand. It was all over
with the turner.
ON OFFICIAL DUTY
THE deputy examining magistrate and the district doctor were going to an
inquest in the village of Syrnya. On the road they were overtaken by a
snowstorm; they spent a long time going round and round, and arrived,
not at midday, as they had intended, but in the evening when it was
dark. They put up for the night at the Zemstvo hut. It so happened that
it was in this hut that the dead body was lying—the corpse of the
Zemstvo insurance agent, Lesnitsky, who had arrived in Syrnya three days
before and, ordering the samovar in the hut, had shot himself, to the
great surprise of everyone; and the fact that he had ended his life so
strangely, after unpacking his eatables and laying them out on the
table, and with the samovar before him, led many people to suspect that
it was a case of murder; an inquest was necessary.
In the outer room the doctor and the examining magistrate shook the snow
off themselves and knocked it off their boots. And meanwhile the old
village constable, Ilya Loshadin, stood by, holding a little tin lamp.
There was a strong smell of paraffin.
“Who are you?” asked the doctor.
“Conshtable,...” answered the constable.
He used to spell it “conshtable” when he signed the receipts at the post
office.
“And where are the witnesses?”
“They must have gone to tea, your honor.”
On the right was the parlor, the travelers’ or gentry’s room; on the
left the kitchen, with a big stove and sleeping shelves under the
rafters. The doctor and the examining magistrate, followed by the
constable, holding the lamp high above his head, went into the parlor.
Here a still, long body covered with white linen was lying on the floor
close to the table-legs. In the dim light of the lamp they could clearly
see, besides the white covering, new rubber goloshes, and everything
about it was uncanny and sinister: the dark walls, and the silence, and
the goloshes, and the stillness of the dead body. On the table stood a
samovar, cold long ago; and round it parcels, probably the eatables.
“To shoot oneself in the Zemstvo hut, how tactless!” said the doctor.
“If one does want to put a bullet through one’s brains, one ought to do
it at home in some outhouse.”
He sank on to a bench, just as he was, in his cap, his fur coat, and his
felt overboots; his fellow-traveler, the examining magistrate, sat down
opposite.
“These hysterical, neurasthenic people are great egoists,” the doctor
went on hotly. “If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he
rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he gets up a scene with
his wife without troubling about your presence; and when he feels
inclined to shoot himself, he shoots himself in a village in a Zemstvo
hut, so as to give the maximum of trouble to everybody. These gentlemen
in every circumstance of life think of no one but themselves! That’s why
the elderly so dislike our ‘nervous age.’”
“The elderly dislike so many things,” said the examining magistrate,
yawning. “You should point out to the elder generation what the
difference is between the suicides of the past and the suicides of to-
day. In the old days the so-called gentleman shot himself because he had
made away with Government money, but nowadays it is because he is sick
of life, depressed.... Which is better?”
“Sick of life, depressed; but you must admit that he might have shot
himself somewhere else.”
“Such trouble!” said the constable, “such trouble! It’s a real
affliction. The people are very much upset, your honor; they haven’t
slept these three nights. The children are crying. The cows ought to be
milked, but the women won’t go to the stall—they are afraid... for fear
the gentleman should appear to them in the darkness. Of course they are
silly women, but some of the men are frightened too. As soon as it is
dark they won’t go by the hut one by one, but only in a flock together.
And the witnesses too....”
Dr. Startchenko, a middle-aged man in spectacles with a dark beard, and
the examining magistrate Lyzhin, a fair man, still young, who had only
taken his degree two years before and looked more like a student than an
official, sat in silence, musing. They were vexed that they were late.
Now they had to wait till morning, and to stay here for the night,
though it was not yet six o’clock; and they had before them a long
evening, a dark night, boredom, uncomfortable beds, beetles, and cold in
the morning; and listening to the blizzard that howled in the chimney
and in the loft, they both thought how unlike all this was the life
which they would have chosen for themselves and of which they had once
dreamed, and how far away they both were from their contemporaries, who
were at that moment walking about the lighted streets in town without
noticing the weather, or were getting ready for the theatre, or sitting
in their studies over a book. Oh, how much they would have given now
only to stroll along the Nevsky Prospect, or along Petrovka in Moscow,
to listen to decent singing, to sit for an hour or so in a restaurant!
“Oo-oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm in the loft, and something outside slammed
viciously, probably the signboard on the hut. “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
“You can do as you please, but I have no desire to stay here,” said
Startchenko, getting up. “It’s not six yet, it’s too early to go to bed;
I am off. Von Taunitz lives not far from here, only a couple of miles
from Syrnya. I shall go to see him and spend the evening there.
Constable, run and tell my coachman not to take the horses out. And what
are you going to do?” he asked Lyzhin.
“I don’t know; I expect I shall go to sleep.”
The doctor wrapped himself in his fur coat and went out. Lyzhin could
hear him talking to the coachman and the bells beginning to quiver on
the frozen horses. He drove off.
“It is not nice for you, sir, to spend the night in here,” said the
constable; “come into the other room. It’s dirty, but for one night it
won’t matter. I’ll get a samovar from a peasant and heat it directly.
I’ll heap up some hay for you, and then you go to sleep, and God bless
you, your honor.”
A little later the examining magistrate was sitting in the kitchen
drinking tea, while Loshadin, the constable, was standing at the door
talking. He was an old man about sixty, short and very thin, bent and
white, with a naive smile on his face and watery eyes, and he kept
smacking with his lips as though he were sucking a sweetmeat. He was
wearing a short sheepskin coat and high felt boots, and held his stick
in his hands all the time. The youth of the examining magistrate aroused
his compassion, and that was probably why he addressed him familiarly.
“The elder gave orders that he was to be informed when the police
superintendent or the examining magistrate came,” he said, “so I suppose
I must go now.... It’s nearly three miles to the volost, and the storm,
the snowdrifts, are something terrible—maybe one won’t get there before
midnight. Ough! how the wind roars!”
“I don’t need the elder,” said Lyzhin. “There is nothing for him to do
here.”
He looked at the old man with curiosity, and asked:
“Tell me, grandfather, how many years have you been constable?”
“How many? Why, thirty years. Five years after the Freedom I began going
as constable, that’s how I reckon it. And from that time I have been
going every day since. Other people have holidays, but I am always
going. When it’s Easter and the church bells are ringing and Christ has
risen, I still go about with my bag—to the treasury, to the post, to the
police superintendent’s lodgings, to the rural captain, to the tax
inspector, to the municipal office, to the gentry, to the peasants, to
all orthodox Christians. I carry parcels, notices, tax papers, letters,
forms of different sorts, circulars, and to be sure, kind gentleman,
there are all sorts of forms nowadays, so as to note down the
numbers—yellow, white, and red—and every gentleman or priest or well-to-
do peasant must write down a dozen times in the year how much he has
sown and harvested, how many quarters or poods he has of rye, how many
of oats, how many of hay, and what the weather’s like, you know, and
insects, too, of all sorts. To be sure you can write what you like, it’s
only a regulation, but one must go and give out the notices and then go
again and collect them. Here, for instance, there’s no need to cut open
the gentleman; you know yourself it’s a silly thing, it’s only dirtying
your hands, and here you have been put to trouble, your honor; you have
come because it’s the regulation; you can’t help it. For thirty years I
have been going round according to regulation. In the summer it is all
right, it is warm and dry; but in winter and autumn it’s uncomfortable.
At times I have been almost drowned and almost frozen; all sorts of
things have happened—wicked people set on me in the forest and took away
my bag; I have been beaten, and I have been before a court of law.”
“What were you accused of?”
“Of fraud.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, you see, Hrisanf Grigoryev, the clerk, sold the contractor some
boards belonging to someone else—cheated him, in fact. I was mixed up in
it. They sent me to the tavern for vodka; well, the clerk did not share
with me—did not even offer me a glass; but as through my poverty I
was—in appearance, I mean—not a man to be relied upon, not a man of any
worth, we were both brought to trial; he was sent to prison, but, praise
God! I was acquitted on all points. They read a notice, you know, in the
court. And they were all in uniforms—in the court, I mean. I can tell
you, your honor, my duties for anyone not used to them are terrible,
absolutely killing; but to me it is nothing. In fact, my feet ache when
I am not walking. And at home it is worse for me. At home one has to
heat the stove for the clerk in the volost office, to fetch water for
him, to clean his boots.”
“And what wages do you get?” Lyzhin asked.
“Eighty-four roubles a year.”
“I’ll bet you get other little sums coming in. You do, don’t you?”
“Other little sums? No, indeed! Gentlemen nowadays don’t often give
tips. Gentlemen nowadays are strict, they take offense at anything. If
you bring them a notice they are offended, if you take off your cap
before them they are offended. ‘You have come to the wrong entrance,’
they say. ‘You are a drunkard,’ they say. ‘You smell of onion; you are a
blockhead; you are the son of a bitch.’ There are kind-hearted ones, of
course; but what does one get from them? They only laugh and call one
all sorts of names. Mr. Altuhin, for instance, he is a good-natured
gentleman; and if you look at him he seems sober and in his right mind,
but so soon as he sees me he shouts and does not know what he means
himself. He gave me such a name ‘You,’ said he,...” The constable
uttered some word, but in such a low voice that it was impossible to
make out what he said.
“What?” Lyzhin asked. “Say it again.”
“‘Administration,’” the constable repeated aloud. “He has been calling
me that for a long while, for the last six years. ‘Hullo,
Administration!’ But I don’t mind; let him, God bless him! Sometimes a
lady will send one a glass of vodka and a bit of pie and one drinks to
her health. But peasants give more; peasants are more kind-hearted, they
have the fear of God in their hearts: one will give a bit of bread,
another a drop of cabbage soup, another will stand one a glass. The
village elders treat one to tea in the tavern. Here the witnesses have
gone to their tea. ‘Loshadin,’ they said, ‘you stay here and keep watch
for us,’ and they gave me a kopeck each. You see, they are frightened,
not being used to it, and yesterday they gave me fifteen kopecks and
offered me a glass.”
“And you, aren’t you frightened?”
“I am, sir; but of course it is my duty, there is no getting away from
it. In the summer I was taking a convict to the town, and he set upon me
and gave me such a drubbing! And all around were fields, forest—how
could I get away from him? It’s just the same here. I remember the
gentleman, Mr. Lesnitsky, when he was so high, and I knew his father and
mother. I am from the village of Nedoshtchotova, and they, the Lesnitsky
family, were not more than three-quarters of a mile from us and less
than that, their ground next to ours, and Mr. Lesnitsky had a sister, a
God-fearing and tender-hearted lady. Lord keep the soul of Thy servant
Yulya, eternal memory to her! She was never married, and when she was
dying she divided all her property; she left three hundred acres to the
monastery, and six hundred to the commune of peasants of Nedoshtchotova
to commemorate her soul; but her brother hid the will, they do say burnt
it in the stove, and took all this land for himself. He thought, to be
sure, it was for his benefit; but—nay, wait a bit, you won’t get on in
the world through injustice, brother. The gentleman did not go to
confession for twenty years after. He kept away from the church, to be
sure, and died impenitent. He burst. He was a very fat man, so he burst
lengthways. Then everything was taken from the young master, from
Seryozha, to pay the debts—everything there was. Well, he had not gone
very far in his studies, he couldn’t do anything, and the president of
the Rural Board, his uncle—‘I’ll take him’—Seryozha, I mean—thinks he,
‘for an agent; let him collect the insurance, that’s not a difficult
job,’ and the gentleman was young and proud, he wanted to be living on a
bigger scale and in better style and with more freedom. To be sure it
was a come-down for him to be jolting about the district in a wretched
cart and talking to the peasants; he would walk and keep looking on the
ground, looking on the ground and saying nothing; if you called his name
right in his ear, ‘Sergey Sergeyitch!’ he would look round like this,
‘Eh?’ and look down on the ground again, and now you see he has laid
hands on himself. There’s no sense in it, your honor, it’s not right,
and there’s no making out what’s the meaning of it, merciful Lord! Say
your father was rich and you are poor; it is mortifying, there’s no
doubt about it, but there, you must make up your mind to it. I used to
live in good style, too; I had two horses, your honor, three cows, I
used to keep twenty head of sheep; but the time has come, and I am left
with nothing but a wretched bag, and even that is not mine but
Government property. And now in our Nedoshtchotova, if the truth is to
be told, my house is the worst of the lot. Makey had four footmen, and
now Makey is a footman himself. Petrak had four laborers, and now Petrak
is a laborer himself.”
“How was it you became poor?” asked the examining magistrate.
“My sons drink terribly. I could not tell you how they drink, you
wouldn’t believe it.”
Lyzhin listened and thought how he, Lyzhin, would go back sooner or
later to Moscow, while this old man would stay here for ever, and would
always be walking and walking. And how many times in his life he would
come across such battered, unkempt old men, not “men of any worth,” in
whose souls fifteen kopecks, glasses of vodka, and a profound belief
that you can’t get on in this life by dishonesty, were equally firmly
rooted.
Then he grew tired of listening, and told the old man to bring him some
hay for his bed, There was an iron bedstead with a pillow and a quilt in
the traveler’s room, and it could be fetched in; but the dead man had
been lying by it for nearly three days (and perhaps sitting on it just
before his death), and it would be disagreeable to sleep upon it now....
“It’s only half-past seven,” thought Lyzhin, glancing at his watch. “How
awful it is!”
He was not sleepy, but having nothing to do to pass away the time, he
lay down and covered himself with a rug. Loshadin went in and out
several times, clearing away the tea-things; smacking his lips and
sighing, he kept tramping round the table; at last he took his little
lamp and went out, and, looking at his long, gray-headed, bent figure
from behind, Lyzhin thought:
“Just like a magician in an opera.”
It was dark. The moon must have been behind the clouds, as the windows
and the snow on the window-frames could be seen distinctly.
“Oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm, “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
“Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!” wailed a woman in the loft, or it sounded like it.
“Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!”
“B-booh!” something outside banged against the wall. “Trah!”
The examining magistrate listened: there was no woman up there, it was
the wind howling. It was rather cold, and he put his fur coat over his
rug. As he got warm he thought how remote all this—the storm, and the
hut, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room—how
remote it all was from the life he desired for himself, and how alien it
all was to him, how petty, how uninteresting. If this man had killed
himself in Moscow or somewhere in the neighborhood, and he had had to
hold an inquest on him there, it would have been interesting, important,
and perhaps he might even have been afraid to sleep in the next room to
the corpse. Here, nearly a thousand miles from Moscow, all this was seen
somehow in a different light; it was not life, they were not human
beings, but something only existing “according to the regulation,” as
Loshadin said; it would leave not the faintest trace in the memory, and
would be forgotten as soon as he, Lyzhin, drove away from Syrnya. The
fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but here he was in
the provinces, the colonies. When one dreamed of playing a leading part,
of becoming a popular figure, of being, for instance, examining
magistrate in particularly important cases or prosecutor in a circuit
court, of being a society lion, one always thought of Moscow. To live,
one must be in Moscow; here one cared for nothing, one grew easily
resigned to one’s insignificant position, and only expected one thing of
life—to get away quickly, quickly. And Lyzhin mentally moved about the
Moscow streets, went into the familiar houses, met his kindred, his
comrades, and there was a sweet pang at his heart at the thought that he
was only twenty-six, and that if in five or ten years he could break
away from here and get to Moscow, even then it would not be too late and
he would still have a whole life before him. And as he sank into
unconsciousness, as his thoughts began to be confused, he imagined the
long corridor of the court at Moscow, himself delivering a speech, his
sisters, the orchestra which for some reason kept droning: “Oo-oo-oo-oo!
Oo-oooo-oo!”
“Booh! Trah!” sounded again. “Booh!”
And he suddenly recalled how one day, when he was talking to the
bookkeeper in the little office of the Rural Board, a thin, pale
gentleman with black hair and dark eyes walked in; he had a disagreeable
look in his eyes such as one sees in people who have slept too long
after dinner, and it spoilt his delicate, intelligent profile; and the
high boots he was wearing did not suit him, but looked clumsy. The
bookkeeper had introduced him: “This is our insurance agent.”
“So that was Lesnitsky,... this same man,” Lyzhin reflected now.
He recalled Lesnitsky’s soft voice, imagined his gait, and it seemed to
him that someone was walking beside him now with a step like
Lesnitsky’s.
All at once he felt frightened, his head turned cold.
“Who’s there?” he asked in alarm.
“The conshtable!”
“What do you want here?”
“I have come to ask, your honor—you said this evening that you did not
want the elder, but I am afraid he may be angry. He told me to go to
him. Shouldn’t I go?”
“That’s enough, you bother me,” said Lyzhin with vexation, and he
covered himself up again.
“He may be angry.... I’ll go, your honor. I hope you will be
comfortable,” and Loshadin went out.
In the passage there was coughing and subdued voices. The witnesses must
have returned.
“We’ll let those poor beggars get away early to-morrow,...” thought the
examining magistrate; “we’ll begin the inquest as soon as it is
daylight.”
He began sinking into forgetfulness when suddenly there were steps
again, not timid this time but rapid and noisy. There was the slam of a
door, voices, the scratching of a match....
“Are you asleep? Are you asleep?” Dr. Startchenko was asking him
hurriedly and angrily as he struck one match after another; he was
covered with snow, and brought a chill air in with him. “Are you asleep?
Get up! Let us go to Von Taunitz’s. He has sent his own horses for you.
Come along. There, at any rate, you will have supper, and sleep like a
human being. You see I have come for you myself. The horses are
splendid, we shall get there in twenty minutes.”
“And what time is it now?”
“A quarter past ten.”
Lyzhin, sleepy and discontented, put on his felt overboots, his fur-
lined coat, his cap and hood, and went out with the doctor. There was
not a very sharp frost, but a violent and piercing wind was blowing and
driving along the street the clouds of snow which seemed to be racing
away in terror: high drifts were heaped up already under the fences and
at the doorways. The doctor and the examining magistrate got into the
sledge, and the white coachman bent over them to button up the cover.
They were both hot.
“Ready!”
They drove through the village. “Cutting a feathery furrow,” thought the
examining magistrate, listlessly watching the action of the trace
horse’s legs. There were lights in all the huts, as though it were the
eve of a great holiday: the peasants had not gone to bed because they
were afraid of the dead body. The coachman preserved a sullen silence,
probably he had felt dreary while he was waiting by the Zemstvo hut, and
now he, too, was thinking of the dead man.
“At the Von Taunitz’s,” said Startchenko, “they all set upon me when
they heard that you were left to spend the night in the hut, and asked
me why I did not bring you with me.”
As they drove out of the village, at the turning the coachman suddenly
shouted at the top of his voice: “Out of the way!”
They caught a glimpse of a man: he was standing up to his knees in the
snow, moving off the road and staring at the horses. The examining
magistrate saw a stick with a crook, and a beard and a bag, and he
fancied that it was Loshadin, and even fancied that he was smiling. He
flashed by and disappeared.
The road ran at first along the edge of the forest, then along a broad
forest clearing; they caught glimpses of old pines and a young birch
copse, and tall, gnarled young oak trees standing singly in the
clearings where the wood had lately been cut; but soon it was all merged
in the clouds of snow. The coachman said he could see the forest; the
examining magistrate could see nothing but the trace horse. The wind
blew on their backs.
All at once the horses stopped.
“Well, what is it now?” asked Startchenko crossly.
The coachman got down from the box without a word and began running
round the sledge, treading on his heels; he made larger and larger
circles, getting further and further away from the sledge, and it looked
as though he were dancing; at last he came back and began to turn off to
the right.
“You’ve got off the road, eh?” asked Startchenko.
“It’s all ri-ight....”
Then there was a little village and not a single light in it. Again the
forest and the fields. Again they lost the road, and again the coachman
got down from the box and danced round the sledge. The sledge flew along
a dark avenue, flew swiftly on. And the heated trace horse’s hoofs
knocked against the sledge. Here there was a fearful roaring sound from
the trees, and nothing could be seen, as though they were flying on into
space; and all at once the glaring light at the entrance and the windows
flashed upon their eyes, and they heard the good-natured, drawn-out
barking of dogs. They had arrived.
While they were taking off their fur coats and their felt boots below,
“Un Petit Verre de Clicquot” was being played upon the piano overhead,
and they could hear the children beating time with their feet.
Immediately on going in they were aware of the snug warmth and special
smell of the old apartments of a mansion where, whatever the weather
outside, life is so warm and clean and comfortable.
“That’s capital!” said Von Taunitz, a fat man with an incredibly thick
neck and with whiskers, as he shook the examining magistrate’s hand.
“That’s capital! You are very welcome, delighted to make your
acquaintance. We are colleagues to some extent, you know. At one time I
was deputy prosecutor; but not for long, only two years. I came here to
look after the estate, and here I have grown old—an old fogey, in fact.
You are very welcome,” he went on, evidently restraining his voice so as
not to speak too loud; he was going upstairs with his guests. “I have no
wife, she’s dead. But here, I will introduce my daughters,” and turning
round, he shouted down the stairs in a voice of thunder: “Tell Ignat to
have the sledge ready at eight o’clock to-morrow morning.”
His four daughters, young and pretty girls, all wearing gray dresses and
with their hair done up in the same style, and their cousin, also young
and attractive, with her children, were in the drawing-room.
Startchenko, who knew them already, began at once begging them to sing
something, and two of the young ladies spent a long time declaring they
could not sing and that they had no music; then the cousin sat down to
the piano, and with trembling voices, they sang a duet from “The Queen
of Spades.” Again “Un Petit Verre de Clicquot” was played, and the
children skipped about, beating time with their feet. And Startchenko
pranced about too. Everybody laughed.
Then the children said good-night and went off to bed. The examining
magistrate laughed, danced a quadrille, flirted, and kept wondering
whether it was not all a dream? The kitchen of the Zemstvo hut, the heap
of hay in the corner, the rustle of the beetles, the revolting poverty-
stricken surroundings, the voices of the witnesses, the wind, the snow
storm, the danger of being lost; and then all at once this splendid,
brightly lighted room, the sounds of the piano, the lovely girls, the
curly-headed children, the gay, happy laughter—such a transformation
seemed to him like a fairy tale, and it seemed incredible that such
transitions were possible at the distance of some two miles in the
course of one hour. And dreary thoughts prevented him from enjoying
himself, and he kept thinking this was not life here, but bits of life
fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no
conclusions from it; and he even felt sorry for these girls, who were
living and would end their lives in the wilds, in a province far away
from the center of culture, where nothing is accidental, but everything
is in accordance with reason and law, and where, for instance, every
suicide is intelligible, so that one can explain why it has happened and
what is its significance in the general scheme of things. He imagined
that if the life surrounding him here in the wilds were not intelligible
to him, and if he did not see it, it meant that it did not exist at all.
At supper the conversation turned on Lesnitsky.
“He left a wife and child,” said Startchenko. “I would forbid
neurasthenics and all people whose nervous system is out of order to
marry, I would deprive them of the right and possibility of multiplying
their kind. To bring into the world nervous, invalid children is a
crime.”
“He was an unfortunate young man,” said Von Taunitz, sighing gently and
shaking his head. “What a lot one must suffer and think about before one
brings oneself to take one’s own life,... a young life! Such a
misfortune may happen in any family, and that is awful. It is hard to
bear such a thing, insufferable....”
And all the girls listened in silence with grave faces, looking at their
father. Lyzhin felt that he, too, must say something, but he couldn’t
think of anything, and merely said:
“Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon.”
He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed covered with a quilt under which
there were fine clean sheets, but for some reason did not feel
comfortable: perhaps because the doctor and Von Taunitz were, for a long
time, talking in the adjoining room, and overhead he heard, through the
ceiling and in the stove, the wind roaring just as in the Zemstvo hut,
and as plaintively howling: “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
Von Taunitz’s wife had died two years before, and he was still unable to
resign himself to his loss and, whatever he was talking about, always
mentioned his wife; and there was no trace of a prosecutor left about
him now.
“Is it possible that I may some day come to such a condition?” thought
Lyzhin, as he fell asleep, still hearing through the wall his host’s
subdued, as it were bereaved, voice.
The examining magistrate did not sleep soundly. He felt hot and
uncomfortable, and it seemed to him in his sleep that he was not at Von
Taunitz’s, and not in a soft clean bed, but still in the hay at the
Zemstvo hut, hearing the subdued voices of the witnesses; he fancied
that Lesnitsky was close by, not fifteen paces away. In his dreams he
remembered how the insurance agent, black-haired and pale, wearing dusty
high boots, had come into the bookkeeper’s office. “This is our
insurance agent....”
Then he dreamed that Lesnitsky and Loshadin the constable were walking
through the open country in the snow, side by side, supporting each
other; the snow was whirling about their heads, the wind was blowing on
their backs, but they walked on, singing: “We go on, and on, and on....”
The old man was like a magician in an opera, and both of them were
singing as though they were on the stage:
“We go on, and on, and on!... You are in the warmth, in the light and
snugness, but we are walking in the frost and the storm, through the
deep snow.... We know nothing of ease, we know nothing of joy.... We
bear all the burden of this life, yours and ours.... Oo-oo-oo! We go on,
and on, and on....”
Lyzhin woke and sat up in bed. What a confused, bad dream! And why did
he dream of the constable and the agent together? What nonsense! And now
while Lyzhin’s heart was throbbing violently and he was sitting on his
bed, holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him that there really
was something in common between the lives of the insurance agent and the
constable. Don’t they really go side by side holding each other up? Some
tie unseen, but significant and essential, existed between them, and
even between them and Von Taunitz and between all men—all men; in this
life, even in the remotest desert, nothing is accidental, everything is
full of one common idea, everything has one soul, one aim, and to
understand it it is not enough to think, it is not enough to reason, one
must have also, it seems, the gift of insight into life, a gift which is
evidently not bestowed on all. And the unhappy man who had broken down,
who had killed himself—the “neurasthenic,” as the doctor called him—and
the old peasant who spent every day of his life going from one man to
another, were only accidental, were only fragments of life for one who
thought of his own life as accidental, but were parts of one
organism—marvelous and rational—for one who thought of his own life as
part of that universal whole and understood it. So thought Lyzhin, and
it was a thought that had long lain hidden in his soul, and only now it
was unfolded broadly and clearly to his consciousness.
He lay down and began to drop asleep; and again they were going along
together, singing: “We go on, and on, and on.... We take from life what
is hardest and bitterest in it, and we leave you what is easy and
joyful; and sitting at supper, you can coldly and sensibly discuss why
we suffer and perish, and why we are not as sound and as satisfied as
you.”
What they were singing had occurred to his mind before, but the thought
was somewhere in the background behind his other thoughts, and flickered
timidly like a faraway light in foggy weather. And he felt that this
suicide and the peasant’s sufferings lay upon his conscience, too; to
resign himself to the fact that these people, submissive to their fate,
should take up the burden of what was hardest and gloomiest in life—how
awful it was! To accept this, and to desire for himself a life full of
light and movement among happy and contented people, and to be
continually dreaming of such, means dreaming of fresh suicides of men
crushed by toil and anxiety, or of men weak and outcast whom people only
talk of sometimes at supper with annoyance or mockery, without going to
their help.... And again:
“We go on, and on, and on...” as though someone were beating with a
hammer on his temples.
He woke early in the morning with a headache, roused by a noise; in the
next room Von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:
“It’s impossible for you to go now. Look what’s going on outside. Don’t
argue, you had better ask the coachman; he won’t take you in such
weather for a million.”
“But it’s only two miles,” said the doctor in an imploring voice.
“Well, if it were only half a mile. If you can’t, then you can’t.
Directly you drive out of the gates it is perfect hell, you would be off
the road in a minute. Nothing will induce me to let you go, you can say
what you like.”
“It’s bound to be quieter towards evening,” said the peasant who was
heating the stove.
And in the next room the doctor began talking of the rigorous climate
and its influence on the character of the Russian, of the long winters
which, by preventing movement from place to place, hinder the
intellectual development of the people; and Lyzhin listened with
vexation to these observations and looked out of window at the snow
drifts which were piled on the fence. He gazed at the white dust which
covered the whole visible expanse, at the trees which bowed their heads
despairingly to right and then to left, listened to the howling and the
banging, and thought gloomily:
“Well, what moral can be drawn from it? It’s a blizzard and that is all
about it....”
At midday they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house; they
went to the windows.
“And Lesnitsky is lying there,” thought Lyzhin, watching the whirling
snow, which raced furiously round and round upon the drifts. “Lesnitsky
is lying there, the witnesses are waiting....”
They talked of the weather, saying that the snowstorm usually lasted two
days and nights, rarely longer. At six o’clock they had dinner, then
they played cards, sang, danced; at last they had supper. The day was
over, they went to bed.
In the night, towards morning, it all subsided. When they got up and
looked out of window, the bare willows with their weakly drooping
branches were standing perfectly motionless; it was dull and still, as
though nature now were ashamed of its orgy, of its mad nights, and the
license it had given to its passions. The horses, harnessed tandem, had
been waiting at the front door since five o’clock in the morning. When
it was fully daylight the doctor and the examining magistrate put on
their fur coats and felt boots, and, saying good-by to their host, went
out.
At the steps beside the coachman stood the familiar figure of the
constable, Ilya Loshadin, with an old leather bag across his shoulder
and no cap on his head, covered with snow all over, and his face was red
and wet with perspiration. The footman who had come out to help the
gentlemen and cover their legs looked at him sternly and said:
“What are you standing here for, you old devil? Get away!”
“Your honor, the people are anxious,” said Loshadin, smiling naively all
over his face, and evidently pleased at seeing at last the people he had
waited for so long. “The people are very uneasy, the children are
crying.... They thought, your honor, that you had gone back to the town
again. Show us the heavenly mercy, our benefactors!...”
The doctor and the examining magistrate said nothing, got into the
sledge, and drove to Syrnya.
THE FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER
A FIRST-CLASS passenger who had just dined at the station and drunk a
little too much lay down on the velvet-covered seat, stretched himself
out luxuriously, and sank into a doze. After a nap of no more than five
minutes, he looked with oily eyes at his vis-a-vis, gave a smirk, and
said:
“My father of blessed memory used to like to have his heels tickled by
peasant women after dinner. I am just like him, with this difference,
that after dinner I always like my tongue and my brains gently
stimulated. Sinful man as I am, I like empty talk on a full stomach.
Will you allow me to have a chat with you?”
“I shall be delighted,” answered the vis-a-vis.
“After a good dinner the most trifling subject is sufficient to arouse
devilishly great thoughts in my brain. For instance, we saw just now
near the refreshment bar two young men, and you heard one congratulate
the other on being celebrated. ‘I congratulate you,’ he said; ‘you are
already a celebrity and are beginning to win fame.’ Evidently actors or
journalists of microscopic dimensions. But they are not the point. The
question that is occupying my mind at the moment, sir, is exactly what
is to be understood by the word fame or charity. What do you think?
Pushkin called fame a bright patch on a ragged garment; we all
understand it as Pushkin does—that is, more or less subjectively—but no
one has yet given a clear, logical definition of the word.... I would
give a good deal for such a definition!”
“Why do you feel such a need for it?”
“You see, if we knew what fame is, the means of attaining it might also
perhaps be known to us,” said the first-class passenger, after a
moment’s thought. “I must tell you, sir, that when I was younger I
strove after celebrity with every fiber of my being. To be popular was
my craze, so to speak. For the sake of it I studied, worked, sat up at
night, neglected my meals. And I fancy, as far as I can judge without
partiality, I had all the natural gifts for attaining it. To begin with,
I am an engineer by profession. In the course of my life I have built in
Russia some two dozen magnificent bridges, I have laid aqueducts for
three towns; I have worked in Russia, in England, in Belgium....
Secondly, I am the author of several special treatises in my own line.
And thirdly, my dear sir, I have from a boy had a weakness for
chemistry. Studying that science in my leisure hours, I discovered
methods of obtaining certain organic acids, so that you will find my
name in all the foreign manuals of chemistry. I have always been in the
service, I have risen to the grade of actual civil councilor, and I have
an unblemished record. I will not fatigue your attention by enumerating
my works and my merits, I will only say that I have done far more than
some celebrities. And yet here I am in my old age, I am getting ready
for my coffin, so to say, and I am as celebrated as that black dog
yonder running on the embankment.”
“How can you tell? Perhaps you are celebrated.”
“H’m! Well, we will test it at once. Tell me, have you ever heard the
name Krikunov?”
The vis-a-vis raised his eyes to the ceiling, thought a minute, and
laughed.
“No, I haven’t heard it,...” he said.
“That is my surname. You, a man of education, getting on in years, have
never heard of me—a convincing proof! It is evident that in my efforts
to gain fame I have not done the right thing at all: I did not know the
right way to set to work, and, trying to catch fame by the tail, got on
the wrong side of her.”
“What is the right way to set to work?”
“Well, the devil only knows! Talent, you say? Genius? Originality? Not a
bit of it, sir!... People have lived and made a career side by side with
me who were worthless, trivial, and even contemptible compared with me.
They did not do one-tenth of the work I did, did not put themselves out,
were not distinguished for their talents, and did not make an effort to
be celebrated, but just look at them! Their names are continually in the
newspapers and on men’s lips! If you are not tired of listening I will
illustrate it by an example. Some years ago I built a bridge in the town
of K. I must tell you that the dullness of that scurvy little town was
terrible. If it had not been for women and cards I believe I should have
gone out of my mind. Well, it’s an old story: I was so bored that I got
into an affair with a singer. Everyone was enthusiastic about her, the
devil only knows why; to my thinking she was—what shall I say?—an
ordinary, commonplace creature, like lots of others. The hussy was
empty-headed, ill-tempered, greedy, and what’s more, she was a fool.
“She ate and drank a vast amount, slept till five o clock in the
afternoon—and I fancy did nothing else. She was looked upon as a
cocotte, and that was indeed her profession; but when people wanted to
refer to her in a literary fashion, they called her an actress and a
singer. I used to be devoted to the theatre, and therefore this
fraudulent pretense of being an actress made me furiously indignant. My
young lady had not the slightest right to call herself an actress or a
singer. She was a creature entirely devoid of talent, devoid of
feeling—a pitiful creature one may say. As far as I can judge she sang
disgustingly. The whole charm of her ‘art’ lay in her kicking up her
legs on every suitable occasion, and not being embarrassed when people
walked into her dressing-room. She usually selected translated
vaudevilles, with singing in them, and opportunities for disporting
herself in male attire, in tights. In fact it was—ough! Well, I ask your
attention. As I remember now, a public ceremony took place to celebrate
the opening of the newly constructed bridge. There was a religious
service, there were speeches, telegrams, and so on. I hung about my
cherished creation, you know, all the while afraid that my heart would
burst with the excitement of an author. It’s an old story and there’s no
need for false modesty, and so I will tell you that my bridge was a
magnificent work! It was not a bridge but a picture, a perfect delight!
And who would not have been excited when the whole town came to the
opening? ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘now the eyes of all the public will be on me!
Where shall I hide myself?’ Well, I need not have worried myself,
sir—alas! Except the official personages, no one took the slightest
notice of me. They stood in a crowd on the river-bank, gazed like sheep
at the bridge, and did not concern themselves to know who had built it.
And it was from that time, by the way, that I began to hate our
estimable public—damnation take them! Well, to continue. All at once the
public became agitated; a whisper ran through the crowd,... a smile came
on their faces, their shoulders began to move. ‘They must have seen me,’
I thought. A likely idea! I looked, and my singer, with a train of young
scamps, was making her way through the crowd. The eyes of the crowd were
hurriedly following this procession. A whisper began in a thousand
voices: ‘That’s so-and-so.... Charming! Bewitching!’ Then it was they
noticed me.... A couple of young milksops, local amateurs of the scenic
art, I presume, looked at me, exchanged glances, and whispered: ‘That’s
her lover!’ How do you like that? And an unprepossessing individual in a
top-hat, with a chin that badly needed shaving, hung round me, shifting
from one foot to the other, then turned to me with the words:
“‘Do you know who that lady is, walking on the other bank? That’s so-
and-so.... Her voice is beneath all criticism, but she has a most
perfect mastery of it!...’
“‘Can you tell me,’ I asked the unprepossessing individual, ‘who built
this bridge?’
“‘I really don’t know,’ answered the individual; some engineer, I
expect.’
“‘And who built the cathedral in your town?’ I asked again.
“‘I really can’t tell you.’
“Then I asked him who was considered the best teacher in K., who the
best architect, and to all my questions the unprepossessing individual
answered that he did not know.
“‘And tell me, please,’ I asked in conclusion, with whom is that singer
living?’
“‘With some engineer called Krikunov.’
“Well, how do you like that, sir? But to proceed. There are no
minnesingers or bards nowadays, and celebrity is created almost
exclusively by the newspapers. The day after the dedication of the
bridge, I greedily snatched up the local Messenger, and looked for
myself in it. I spent a long time running my eyes over all the four
pages, and at last there it was—hurrah! I began reading: ‘Yesterday in
beautiful weather, before a vast concourse of people, in the presence of
His Excellency the Governor of the province, so-and-so, and other
dignitaries, the ceremony of the dedication of the newly constructed
bridge took place,’ and so on.... Towards the end: Our talented actress
so-and-so, the favorite of the K. public, was present at the dedication
looking very beautiful. I need not say that her arrival created a
sensation. The star was wearing...’ and so on. They might have given me
one word! Half a word. Petty as it seems, I actually cried with
vexation!
“I consoled myself with the reflection that the provinces are stupid,
and one could expect nothing of them and for celebrity one must go to
the intellectual centers—to Petersburg and to Moscow. And as it
happened, at that very time there was a work of mine in Petersburg which
I had sent in for a competition. The date on which the result was to be
declared was at hand.
“I took leave of K. and went to Petersburg. It is a long journey from K.
to Petersburg, and that I might not be bored on the journey I took a
reserved compartment and—well—of course, I took my singer. We set off,
and all the way we were eating, drinking champagne, and—tra-la-la! But
behold, at last we reach the intellectual center. I arrived on the very
day the result was declared, and had the satisfaction, my dear sir, of
celebrating my own success: my work received the first prize. Hurrah!
Next day I went out along the Nevsky and spent seventy kopecks on
various newspapers. I hastened to my hotel room, lay down on the sofa,
and, controlling a quiver of excitement, made haste to read. I ran
through one newspaper—nothing. I ran through a second—nothing either; my
God! At last, in the fourth, I lighted upon the following paragraph:
‘Yesterday the well-known provincial actress so-and-so arrived by
express in Petersburg. We note with pleasure that the climate of the
South has had a beneficial effect on our fair friend; her charming stage
appearance...’ and I don't remember the rest! Much lower down than that
paragraph I found, printed in the smallest type: ’First prize in the
competition was adjudged to an engineer called so-and-so.’ That was all!
And to make things better, they even misspelt my name: instead of
Krikunov it was Kirkutlov. So much for your intellectual center! But
that was not all.... By the time I left Petersburg, a month later, all
the newspapers were vying with one another in discussing our
incomparable, divine, highly talented actress, and my mistress was
referred to, not by her surname, but by her Christian name and her
father’s....
“Some years later I was in Moscow. I was summoned there by a letter, in
the mayor’s own handwriting, to undertake a work for which Moscow, in
its newspapers, had been clamoring for over a hundred years. In the
intervals of my work I delivered five public lectures, with a
philanthropic object, in one of the museums there. One would have
thought that was enough to make one known to the whole town for three
days at least, wouldn’t one? But, alas! not a single Moscow gazette said
a word about me. There was something about houses on fire, about an
operetta, sleeping town councilors, drunken shop keepers—about
everything; but about my work, my plans, my lectures—mum. And a nice set
they are in Moscow! I got into a tram.... It was packed full; there were
ladies and military men and students of both sexes, creatures of all
sorts in couples.
“‘I am told the town council has sent for an engineer to plan such and
such a work!’ I said to my neighbor, so loudly that all the tram could
hear. ‘Do you know the name of the engineer?’
“My neighbor shook his head. The rest of the public took a cursory
glance at me, and in all their eyes I read: ‘I don’t know.’
“‘I am told that there is someone giving lectures in such and such a
museum?’ I persisted, trying to get up a conversation. ‘I hear it is
interesting.’
“No one even nodded. Evidently they had not all of them heard of the
lectures, and the ladies were not even aware of the existence of the
museum. All that would not have mattered, but imagine, my dear sir, the
people suddenly leaped to their feet and struggled to the windows. What
was it? What was the matter?
“‘Look, look!’ my neighbor nudged me. ‘Do you see that dark man getting
into that cab? That’s the famous runner, King!’
“And the whole tram began talking breathlessly of the runner who was
then absorbing the brains of Moscow.
“I could give you ever so many other examples, but I think that is
enough. Now let us assume that I am mistaken about myself, that I am a
wretchedly boastful and incompetent person; but apart from myself I
might point to many of my contemporaries, men remarkable for their
talent and industry, who have nevertheless died unrecognized. Are
Russian navigators, chemists, physicists, mechanicians, and
agriculturists popular with the public? Do our cultivated masses know
anything of Russian artists, sculptors, and literary men? Some old
literary hack, hard-working and talented, will wear away the doorstep of
the publishers’ offices for thirty-three years, cover reams of paper, be
had up for libel twenty times, and yet not step beyond his ant-heap. Can
you mention to me a single representative of our literature who would
have become celebrated if the rumor had not been spread over the earth
that he had been killed in a duel, gone out of his mind, been sent into
exile, or had cheated at cards?”
The first-class passenger was so excited that he dropped his cigar out
of his mouth and got up.
“Yes,” he went on fiercely, “and side by side with these people I can
quote you hundreds of all sorts of singers, acrobats, buffoons, whose
names are known to every baby. Yes!”
The door creaked, there was a draught, and an individual of forbidding
aspect, wearing an Inverness coat, a top-hat, and blue spectacles,
walked into the carriage. The individual looked round at the seats,
frowned, and went on further.
“Do you know who that is?” there came a timid whisper from the furthest
corner of the compartment.
“That is N. N., the famous Tula cardsharper who was had up in connection
with the Y. bank affair.”
“There you are!” laughed the first-class passenger. “He knows a Tula
cardsharper, but ask him whether he knows Semiradsky, Tchaykovsky, or
Solovyov the philosopher—he’ll shake his head.... It swinish!”
Three minutes passed in silence.
“Allow me in my turn to ask you a question,” said the vis-a-vis timidly,
clearing his throat. “Do you know the name of Pushkov?”
“Pushkov? H’m! Pushkov.... No, I don’t know it!”
“That is my name,...” said the vis-a-vis,, overcome with embarrassment.
“Then you don’t know it? And yet I have been a professor at one of the
Russian universities for thirty-five years,... a member of the Academy
of Sciences,... have published more than one work....”
The first-class passenger and the vis-a-vis looked at each other and
burst out laughing.
A TRAGIC ACTOR
IT was the benefit night of Fenogenov, the tragic actor. They were
acting “Prince Serebryany.” The tragedian himself was playing Vyazemsky;
Limonadov, the stage manager, was playing Morozov; Madame Beobahtov,
Elena. The performance was a grand success. The tragedian accomplished
wonders indeed. When he was carrying off Elena, he held her in one hand
above his head as he dashed across the stage. He shouted, hissed, banged
with his feet, tore his coat across his chest. When he refused to fight
Morozov, he trembled all over as nobody ever trembles in reality, and
gasped loudly. The theatre shook with applause. There were endless
calls. Fenogenov was presented with a silver cigarette-case and a
bouquet tied with long ribbons. The ladies waved their handkerchiefs and
urged their men to applaud, many shed tears.... But the one who was the
most enthusiastic and most excited was Masha, daughter of Sidoretsky the
police captain. She was sitting in the first row of the stalls beside
her papa; she was ecstatic and could not take her eyes off the stage
even between the acts. Her delicate little hands and feet were
quivering, her eyes were full of tears, her cheeks turned paler and
paler. And no wonder—she was at the theatre for the first time in her
life.
“How well they act! how splendidly!” she said to her papa the police
captain, every time the curtain fell. “How good Fenogenov is!”
And if her papa had been capable of reading faces he would have read on
his daughter’s pale little countenance a rapture that was almost
anguish. She was overcome by the acting, by the play, by the
surroundings. When the regimental band began playing between the acts,
she closed her eyes, exhausted.
“Papa!” she said to the police captain during the last interval, “go
behind the scenes and ask them all to dinner to-morrow!”
The police captain went behind the scenes, praised them for all their
fine acting, and complimented Madame Beobahtov.
“Your lovely face demands a canvas, and I only wish I could wield the
brush!”
And with a scrape, he thereupon invited the company to dinner.
“All except the fair sex,” he whispered. “I don’t want the actresses,
for I have a daughter.”
Next day the actors dined at the police captain’s. Only three turned up,
the manager Limonadov, the tragedian Fenogenov, and the comic man
Vodolazov; the others sent excuses. The dinner was a dull affair.
Limonadov kept telling the police captain how much he respected him, and
how highly he thought of all persons in authority; Vodolazov mimicked
drunken merchants and Armenians; and Fenogenov (on his passport his name
was Knish), a tall, stout Little Russian with black eyes and frowning
brow, declaimed “At the portals of the great,” and “To be or not to be.”
Limonadov, with tears in his eyes, described his interview with the
former Governor, General Kanyutchin. The police captain listened, was
bored, and smiled affably. He was well satisfied, although Limonadov
smelt strongly of burnt feathers, and Fenogenov was wearing a hired
dress coat and boots trodden down at heel. They pleased his daughter and
made her lively, and that was enough for him. And Masha never took her
eyes off the actors. She had never before seen such clever, exceptional
people!
In the evening the police captain and Masha were at the theatre again. A
week later the actors dined at the police captain’s again, and after
that came almost every day either to dinner or supper. Masha became more
and more devoted to the theatre, and went there every evening.
She fell in love with the tragedian. One fine morning, when the police
captain had gone to meet the bishop, Masha ran away with Limonadov’s
company and married her hero on the way. After celebrating the wedding,
the actors composed a long and touching letter and sent it to the police
captain.
It was the work of their combined efforts.
“Bring out the motive, the motive!” Limonadov kept saying as he dictated
to the comic man. “Lay on the respect.... These official chaps like it.
Add something of a sort... to draw a tear.”
The answer to this letter was most discomforting. The police captain
disowned his daughter for marrying, as he said, “a stupid, idle Little
Russian with no fixed home or occupation.”
And the day after this answer was received Masha was writing to her
father.
“Papa, he beats me! Forgive us!”
He had beaten her, beaten her behind the scenes, in the presence of
Limonadov, the washerwoman, and two lighting men. He remembered how,
four days before the wedding, he was sitting in the London Tavern with
the whole company, and all were talking about Masha. The company were
advising him to “chance it,” and Limonadov, with tears in his eyes
urged: “It would be stupid and irrational to let slip such an
opportunity! Why, for a sum like that one would go to Siberia, let alone
getting married! When you marry and have a theatre of your own, take me
into your company. I shan’t be master then, you’ll be master.”
Fenogenov remembered it, and muttered with clenched fists:
“If he doesn’t send money I’ll smash her! I won’t let myself be made a
fool of, damn my soul!”
At one provincial town the company tried to give Masha the slip, but
Masha found out, ran to the station, and got there when the second bell
had rung and the actors had all taken their seats.
“I’ve been shamefully treated by your father,” said the tragedian; “all
is over between us!”
And though the carriage was full of people, she went down on her knees
and held out her hands, imploring him:
“I love you! Don’t drive me away, Kondraty Ivanovitch,” she besought
him. “I can’t live without you!”
They listened to her entreaties, and after consulting together, took her
into the company as a “countess”—the name they used for the minor
actresses who usually came on to the stage in crowds or in dumb parts.
To begin with Masha used to play maid-servants and pages, but when
Madame Beobahtov, the flower of Limonadov’s company, eloped, they made
her ingenue. She acted badly, lisped, and was nervous. She soon grew
used to it, however, and began to be liked by the audience. Fenogenov
was much displeased.
“To call her an actress!” he used to say. “She has no figure, no
deportment, nothing whatever but silliness.”
In one provincial town the company acted Schiller’s “Robbers.” Fenogenov
played Franz, Masha, Amalie. The tragedian shouted and quivered. Masha
repeated her part like a well-learnt lesson, and the play would have
gone off as they generally did had it not been for a trifling mishap.
Everything went well up to the point where Franz declares his love for
Amalie and she seizes his sword. The tragedian shouted, hissed,
quivered, and squeezed Masha in his iron embrace. And Masha, instead of
repulsing him and crying “Hence!” trembled in his arms like a bird and
did not move,... she seemed petrified.
“Have pity on me!” she whispered in his ear. “Oh, have pity on me! I am
so miserable!”
“You don’t know your part! Listen to the prompter!” hissed the
tragedian, and he thrust his sword into her hand.
After the performance, Limonadov and Fenogenov were sitting in the
ticket box-office engaged in conversation.
“Your wife does not learn her part, you are right there,” the manager
was saying. “She doesn’t know her line.... Every man has his own
line,... but she doesn’t know hers....”
Fenogenov listened, sighed, and scowled and scowled.
Next morning, Masha was sitting in a little general shop writing:
“Papa, he beats me! Forgive us! Send us some money!”
A TRANSGRESSION
A COLLEGIATE assessor called Miguev stopped at a telegraph-post in the
course of his evening walk and heaved a deep sigh. A week before, as he
was returning home from his evening walk, he had been overtaken at that
very spot by his former housemaid, Agnia, who said to him viciously:
“Wait a bit! I’ll cook you such a crab that’ll teach you to ruin
innocent girls! I’ll leave the baby at your door, and I’ll have the law
of you, and I’ll tell your wife, too....”
And she demanded that he should put five thousand roubles into the bank
in her name. Miguev remembered it, heaved a sigh, and once more
reproached himself with heartfelt repentance for the momentary
infatuation which had caused him so much worry and misery.
When he reached his bungalow, he sat down to rest on the doorstep. It
was just ten o’clock, and a bit of the moon peeped out from behind the
clouds. There was not a soul in the street nor near the bungalows;
elderly summer visitors were already going to bed, while young ones were
walking in the wood. Feeling in both his pockets for a match to light
his cigarette, Miguev brought his elbow into contact with something
soft. He looked idly at his right elbow, and his face was instantly
contorted by a look of as much horror as though he had seen a snake
beside him. On the step at the very door lay a bundle. Something oblong
in shape was wrapped up in something—judging by the feel of it, a wadded
quilt. One end of the bundle was a little open, and the collegiate
assessor, putting in his hand, felt something damp and warm. He leaped
on to his feet in horror, and looked about him like a criminal trying to
escape from his warders....
“She has left it!” he muttered wrathfully through his teeth, clenching
his fists. “Here it lies.... Here lies my transgression! O Lord!”
He was numb with terror, anger, and shame... What was he to do now? What
would his wife say if she found out? What would his colleagues at the
office say? His Excellency would be sure to dig him in the ribs, guffaw,
and say: “I congratulate you!... He-he-he! Though your beard is gray,
your heart is gay.... You are a rogue, Semyon Erastovitch!” The whole
colony of summer visitors would know his secret now, and probably the
respectable mothers of families would shut their doors to him. Such
incidents always get into the papers, and the humble name of Miguev
would be published all over Russia....
The middle window of the bungalow was open and he could distinctly hear
his wife, Anna Filippovna, laying the table for supper; in the yard
close to the gate Yermolay, the porter, was plaintively strumming on the
balalaika. The baby had only to wake up and begin to cry, and the secret
would be discovered. Miguev was conscious of an overwhelming desire to
make haste.
“Haste, haste!...” he muttered, “this minute, before anyone sees. I’ll
carry it away and lay it on somebody’s doorstep....”
Miguev took the bundle in one hand and quietly, with a deliberate step
to avoid awakening suspicion, went down the street....
“A wonderfully nasty position!” he reflected, trying to assume an air of
unconcern. “A collegiate assessor walking down the street with a baby!
Good heavens! if anyone sees me and understands the position, I am done
for.... I’d better put it on this doorstep.... No, stay, the windows are
open and perhaps someone is looking. Where shall I put it? I know! I’ll
take it to the merchant Myelkin’s.... Merchants are rich people and
tenderhearted; very likely they will say thank you and adopt it.”
And Miguev made up his mind to take the baby to Myelkin’s, although the
merchant’s villa was in the furthest street, close to the river.
“If only it does not begin screaming or wriggle out of the bundle,”
thought the collegiate assessor. “This is indeed a pleasant surprise!
Here I am carrying a human being under my arm as though it were a
portfolio. A human being, alive, with soul, with feelings like anyone
else.... If by good luck the Myelkins adopt him, he may turn out
somebody.... Maybe he will become a professor, a great general, an
author.... Anything may happen! Now I am carrying him under my arm like
a bundle of rubbish, and perhaps in thirty or forty years I may not dare
to sit down in his presence....”
As Miguev was walking along a narrow, deserted alley, beside a long row
of fences, in the thick black shade of the lime trees, it suddenly
struck him that he was doing something very cruel and criminal.
“How mean it is really!” he thought. “So mean that one can’t imagine
anything meaner.... Why are we shifting this poor baby from door to
door? It’s not its fault that it’s been born. It’s done us no harm. We
are scoundrels.... We take our pleasure, and the innocent babies have to
pay the penalty. Only to think of all this wretched business! I’ve done
wrong and the child has a cruel fate before it. If I lay it at the
Myelkins’ door, they’ll send it to the foundling hospital, and there it
will grow up among strangers, in mechanical routine,... no love, no
petting, no spoiling.... And then he’ll be apprenticed to a
shoemaker,... he’ll take to drink, will learn to use filthy language,
will go hungry. A shoemaker! and he the son of a collegiate assessor, of
good family.... He is my flesh and blood,... ”
Miguev came out of the shade of the lime trees into the bright moonlight
of the open road, and opening the bundle, he looked at the baby.
“Asleep!” he murmured. “You little rascal! why, you’ve an aquiline nose
like your father’s.... He sleeps and doesn’t feel that it’s his own
father looking at him!... It’s a drama, my boy... Well, well, you must
forgive me. Forgive me, old boy.... It seems it’s your fate....”
The collegiate assessor bHlinked and felt a spasm running down his
cheeks.... He wrapped up the baby, put him under his arm, and strode on.
All the way to the Myelkins’ villa social questions were swarming in his
brain and conscience was gnawing in his bosom.
“If I were a decent, honest man,” he thought, “I should damn everything,
go with this baby to Anna Filippovna, fall on my knees before her, and
say: ‘Forgive me! I have sinned! Torture me, but we won’t ruin an
innocent child. We have no children; let us adopt him!’ She’s a good
sort, she’d consent.... And then my child would be with me.... Ech!”
He reached the Myelkins’ villa and stood still hesitating. He imagined
himself in the parlor at home, sitting reading the paper while a little
boy with an aquiline nose played with the tassels of his dressing gown.
At the same time visions forced themselves on his brain of his winking
colleagues, and of his Excellency digging him in the ribs and
guffawing.... Besides the pricking of his conscience, there was
something warm, sad, and tender in his heart....
Cautiously the collegiate assessor laid the baby on the verandah step
and waved his hand. Again he felt a spasm run over his face....
“Forgive me, old fellow! I am a scoundrel,” he muttered. “Don’t remember
evil against me.”
He stepped back, but immediately cleared his throat resolutely and said:
“Oh, come what will! Damn it all! I’ll take him, and let people say what
they like!”
Miguev took the baby and strode rapidly back.
“Let them say what they like,” he thought. “I’ll go at once, fall on my
knees, and say: ‘Anna Filippovna!’ Anna is a good sort, she’ll
understand.... And we’ll bring him up.... If it’s a boy we’ll call him
Vladimir, and if it’s a girl we’ll call her Anna! Anyway, it will be a
comfort in our old age.”
And he did as he determined. Weeping and almost faint with shame and
terror, full of hope and vague rapture, he went into his bungalow, went
up to his wife, and fell on his knees before her.
“Anna Filippovna!” he said with a sob, and he laid the baby on the
floor. “Hear me before you punish.... I have sinned! This is my
child.... You remember Agnia? Well, it was the devil drove me to it.
...”
And, almost unconscious with shame and terror, he jumped up without
waiting for an answer, and ran out into the open air as though he had
received a thrashing....
“I’ll stay here outside till she calls me,” he thought. “I’ll give her
time to recover, and to think it over....”
The porter Yermolay passed him with his balalaika, glanced at him and
shrugged his shoulders. A minute later he passed him again, and again he
shrugged his shoulders.
“Here’s a go! Did you ever!” he muttered grinning. “Aksinya, the washer-
woman, was here just now, Semyon Erastovitch. The silly woman put her
baby down on the steps here, and while she was indoors with me, someone
took and carried off the baby... Who’d have thought it!”
“What? What are you saying?” shouted Miguev at the top of his voice.
Yermolay, interpreting his master’s wrath in his own fashion, scratched
his head and heaved a sigh.
“I am sorry, Semyon Erastovitch,” he said, “but it’s the summer
holidays,... one can’t get on without... without a woman, I mean....”
And glancing at his master’s eyes glaring at him with anger and
astonishment, he cleared his throat guiltily and went on:
“It’s a sin, of course, but there—what is one to do?... You’ve forbidden
us to have strangers in the house, I know, but we’ve none of our own
now. When Agnia was here I had no women to see me, for I had one at
home; but now, you can see for yourself, sir,... one can’t help having
strangers. In Agnia’s time, of course, there was nothing irregular,
because...”
“Be off, you scoundrel!” Miguev shouted at him, stamping, and he went
back into the room.
Anna Filippovna, amazed and wrathful, was sitting as before, her tear-
stained eyes fixed on the baby....
“There! there!” Miguev muttered with a pale face, twisting his lips into
a smile. “It was a joke.... It’s not my baby,... it’s the washer-
woman’s!... I... I was joking.... Take it to the porter.”
SMALL FRY
|“HONORED Sir, Father and Benefactor!” a petty clerk called Nevyrazimov
was writing a rough copy of an Easter congratulatory letter. “I trust
that you may spend this Holy Day even as many more to come, in good
health and prosperity. And to your family also I...”
The lamp, in which the kerosene was getting low, was smoking and
smelling. A stray cockroach was running about the table in alarm near
Nevyrazimov’s writing hand. Two rooms away from the office Paramon the
porter was for the third time cleaning his best boots, and with such
energy that the sound of the blacking-brush and of his expectorations
was audible in all the rooms.
“What else can I write to him, the rascal?” Nevyrazimov wondered,
raising his eyes to the smutty ceiling.
On the ceiling he saw a dark circle—the shadow of the lamp-shade. Below
it was the dusty cornice, and lower still the wall, which had once been
painted a bluish muddy color. And the office seemed to him such a place
of desolation that he felt sorry, not only for himself, but even for the
cockroach.
“When I am off duty I shall go away, but he’ll be on duty here all his
cockroach-life,” he thought, stretching. “I am bored! Shall I clean my
boots?”
And stretching once more, Nevyrazimov slouched lazily to the porter’s
room. Paramon had finished cleaning his boots. Crossing himself with one
hand and holding the brush in the other, he was standing at the open
window-pane, listening.
“They’re ringing,” he whispered to Nevyrazimov, looking at him with eyes
intent and wide open. “Already!”
Nevyrazimov put his ear to the open pane and listened. The Easter chimes
floated into the room with a whiff of fresh spring air. The booming of
the bells mingled with the rumble of carriages, and above the chaos of
sounds rose the brisk tenor tones of the nearest church and a loud
shrill laugh.
“What a lot of people!” sighed Nevyrazimov, looking down into the
street, where shadows of men flitted one after another by the
illumination lamps. “They’re all hurrying to the midnight service....
Our fellows have had a drink by now, you may be sure, and are strolling
about the town. What a lot of laughter, what a lot of talk! I’m the only
unlucky one, to have to sit here on such a day: And I have to do it
every year!”
“Well, nobody forces you to take the job. It’s not your turn to be on
duty today, but Zastupov hired you to take his place. When other folks
are enjoying themselves you hire yourself out. It’s greediness!”
“Devil a bit of it! Not much to be greedy over—two roubles is all he
gives me; a necktie as an extra.... It’s poverty, not greediness. And it
would be jolly, now, you know, to be going with a party to the service,
and then to break the fast.... To drink and to have a bit of supper and
tumble off to sleep.... One sits down to the table, there’s an Easter
cake and the samovar hissing, and some charming little thing beside
you.... You drink a glass and chuck her under the chin, and it’s first-
rate.... You feel you’re somebody.... Ech h-h!... I’ve made a mess of
things! Look at that hussy driving by in her carriage, while I have to
sit here and brood.”
“We each have our lot in life, Ivan Danilitch. Please God, you’ll be
promoted and drive about in your carriage one day.”
“I? No, brother, not likely. I shan’t get beyond a ‘titular,’ not if I
try till I burst. I’m not an educated man.”
“Our General has no education either, but...”
“Well, but the General stole a hundred thousand before he got his
position. And he’s got very different manners and deportment from me,
brother. With my manners and deportment one can’t get far! And such a
scoundrelly surname, Nevyrazimov! It’s a hopeless position, in fact. One
may go on as one is, or one may hang oneself...”
He moved away from the window and walked wearily about the rooms. The
din of the bells grew louder and louder.... There was no need to stand
by the window to hear it. And the better he could hear the bells and the
louder the roar of the carriages, the darker seemed the muddy walls and
the smutty cornice and the more the lamp smoked.
“Shall I hook it and leave the office?” thought Nevyrazimov.
But such a flight promised nothing worth having.... After coming out of
the office and wandering about the town, Nevyrazimov would have gone
home to his lodging, and in his lodging it was even grayer and more
depressing than in the office.... Even supposing he were to spend that
day pleasantly and with comfort, what had he beyond? Nothing but the
same gray walls, the same stop-gap duty and complimentary letters....
Nevyrazimov stood still in the middle of the office and sank into
thought. The yearning for a new, better life gnawed at his heart with an
intolerable ache. He had a passionate longing to find himself suddenly
in the street, to mingle with the living crowd, to take part in the
solemn festivity for the sake of which all those bells were clashing and
those carriages were rumbling. He longed for what he had known in
childhood—the family circle, the festive faces of his own people, the
white cloth, light, warmth...! He thought of the carriage in which the
lady had just driven by, the overcoat in which the head clerk was so
smart, the gold chain that adorned the secretary’s chest.... He thought
of a warm bed, of the Stanislav order, of new boots, of a uniform
without holes in the elbows.... He thought of all those things because
he had none of them.
“Shall I steal?” he thought. “Even if stealing is an easy matter, hiding
is what’s difficult. Men run away to America, they say, with what
they’ve stolen, but the devil knows where that blessed America is. One
must have education even to steal, it seems.”
The bells died down. He heard only a distant noise of carriages and
Paramon’s cough, while his depression and anger grew more and more
intense and unbearable. The clock in the office struck half-past twelve.
“Shall I write a secret report? Proshkin did, and he rose rapidly.”
Nevyrazimov sat down at his table and pondered. The lamp in which the
kerosene had quite run dry was smoking violently and threatening to go
out. The stray cockroach was still running about the table and had found
no resting-place.
“One can always send in a secret report, but how is one to make it up? I
should want to make all sorts of innuendoes and insinuations, like
Proshkin, and I can’t do it. If I made up anything I should be the first
to get into trouble for it. I’m an ass, damn my soul!”
And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for a means of escape from his
hopeless position, stared at the rough copy he had written. The letter
was written to a man whom he feared and hated with his whole soul, and
from whom he had for the last ten years been trying to wring a post
worth eighteen roubles a month, instead of the one he had at sixteen
roubles.
“Ah, I’ll teach you to run here, you devil!” He viciously slapped the
palm of his hand on the cockroach, who had the misfortune to catch his
eye. “Nasty thing!”
The cockroach fell on its back and wriggled its legs in despair.
Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp
flared up and spluttered.
And Nevyrazimov felt better.
THE REQUIEM
IN the village church of Verhny Zaprudy mass was just over. The people
had begun moving and were trooping out of church. The only one who did
not move was Andrey Andreyitch, a shopkeeper and old inhabitant of
Verhny Zaprudy. He stood waiting, with his elbows on the railing of the
right choir. His fat and shaven face, covered with indentations left by
pimples, expressed on this occasion two contradictory feelings:
resignation in the face of inevitable destiny, and stupid, unbounded
disdain for the smocks and striped kerchiefs passing by him. As it was
Sunday, he was dressed like a dandy. He wore a long cloth overcoat with
yellow bone buttons, blue trousers not thrust into his boots, and sturdy
goloshes—the huge clumsy goloshes only seen on the feet of practical and
prudent persons of firm religious convictions.
His torpid eyes, sunk in fat, were fixed upon the ikon stand. He saw the
long familiar figures of the saints, the verger Matvey puffing out his
cheeks and blowing out the candles, the darkened candle stands, the
threadbare carpet, the sacristan Lopuhov running impulsively from the
altar and carrying the holy bread to the churchwarden.... All these
things he had seen for years, and seen over and over again like the five
fingers of his hand.... There was only one thing, however, that was
somewhat strange and unusual. Father Grigory, still in his vestments,
was standing at the north door, twitching his thick eyebrows angrily.
“Who is it he is winking at? God bless him!” thought the shopkeeper.
“And he is beckoning with his finger! And he stamped his foot! What
next! What’s the matter, Holy Queen and Mother! Whom does he mean it
for?”
Andrey Andreyitch looked round and saw the church completely deserted.
There were some ten people standing at the door, but they had their
backs to the altar.
“Do come when you are called! Why do you stand like a graven image?” he
heard Father Grigory’s angry voice. “I am calling you.”
The shopkeeper looked at Father Grigory’s red and wrathful face, and
only then realized that the twitching eyebrows and beckoning finger
might refer to him. He started, left the railing, and hesitatingly
walked towards the altar, tramping with his heavy goloshes.
“Andrey Andreyitch, was it you asked for prayers for the rest of
Mariya’s soul?” asked the priest, his eyes angrily transfixing the
shopkeeper’s fat, perspiring face.
“Yes, Father.”
“Then it was you wrote this? You?” And Father Grigory angrily thrust
before his eyes the little note.
And on this little note, handed in by Andrey Andreyitch before mass, was
written in big, as it were staggering, letters:
“For the rest of the soul of the servant of God, the harlot Mariya.”
“Yes, certainly I wrote it,...” answered the shopkeeper.
“How dared you write it?” whispered the priest, and in his husky whisper
there was a note of wrath and alarm.
The shopkeeper looked at him in blank amazement; he was perplexed, and
he, too, was alarmed. Father Grigory had never in his life spoken in
such a tone to a leading resident of Verhny Zaprudy. Both were silent
for a minute, staring into each other’s face. The shopkeeper’s amazement
was so great that his fat face spread in all directions like spilt
dough.
“How dared you?” repeated the priest.
“Wha... what?” asked Andrey Andreyitch in bewilderment.
“You don’t understand?” whispered Father Grigory, stepping back in
astonishment and clasping his hands. “What have you got on your
shoulders, a head or some other object? You send a note up to the altar,
and write a word in it which it would be unseemly even to utter in the
street! Why are you rolling your eyes? Surely you know the meaning of
the word?”
“Are you referring to the word harlot?” muttered the shopkeeper,
flushing crimson and bHlinking. “But you know, the Lord in His mercy...
forgave this very thing,... forgave a harlot.... He has prepared a place
for her, and indeed from the life of the holy saint, Mariya of Egypt,
one may see in what sense the word is used—excuse me...”
The shopkeeper wanted to bring forward some other argument in his
justification, but took fright and wiped his lips with his sleeve.
“So that’s what you make of it!” cried Father Grigory, clasping his
hands. “But you see God has forgiven her—do you understand? He has
forgiven, but you judge her, you slander her, call her by an unseemly
name, and whom! Your own deceased daughter! Not only in Holy Scripture,
but even in worldly literature you won’t read of such a sin! I tell you
again, Andrey, you mustn’t be over-subtle! No, no, you mustn’t be over-
subtle, brother! If God has given you an inquiring mind, and if you
cannot direct it, better not go into things.... Don’t go into things,
and hold your peace!”
“But you know, she,... excuse my mentioning it, was an actress!”
articulated Andrey Andreyitch, overwhelmed.
“An actress! But whatever she was, you ought to forget it all now she is
dead, instead of writing it on the note.”
“Just so,...” the shopkeeper assented.
“You ought to do penance,” boomed the deacon from the depths of the
altar, looking contemptuously at Andrey Andreyitch’s embarrassed face,
“that would teach you to leave off being so clever! Your daughter was a
well-known actress. There were even notices of her death in the
newspapers.... Philosopher!”
“To be sure,... certainly,” muttered the shopkeeper, “the word is not a
seemly one; but I did not say it to judge her, Father Grigory, I only
meant to speak spiritually,... that it might be clearer to you for whom
you were praying. They write in the memorial notes the various callings,
such as the infant John, the drowned woman Pelagea, the warrior Yegor,
the murdered Pavel, and so on.... I meant to do the same.”
“It was foolish, Andrey! God will forgive you, but beware another time.
Above all, don’t be subtle, but think like other people. Make ten bows
and go your way.”
“I obey,” said the shopkeeper, relieved that the lecture was over, and
allowing his face to resume its expression of importance and dignity.
“Ten bows? Very good, I understand. But now, Father, allow me to ask you
a favor.... Seeing that I am, anyway, her father,... you know yourself,
whatever she was, she was still my daughter, so I was,... excuse me,
meaning to ask you to sing the requiem today. And allow me to ask you,
Father Deacon!”
“Well, that’s good,” said Father Grigory, taking off his vestments.
“That I commend. I can approve of that! Well, go your way. We will come
out immediately.”
Andrey Andreyitch walked with dignity from the altar, and with a solemn,
requiem-like expression on his red face took his stand in the middle of
the church. The verger Matvey set before him a little table with the
memorial food upon it, and a little later the requiem service began.
There was perfect stillness in the church. Nothing could be heard but
the metallic click of the censer and slow singing.... Near Andrey
Andreyitch stood the verger Matvey, the midwife Makaryevna, and her one-
armed son Mitka. There was no one else. The sacristan sang badly in an
unpleasant, hollow bass, but the tune and the words were so mournful
that the shopkeeper little by little lost the expression of dignity and
was plunged in sadness. He thought of his Mashutka,... he remembered she
had been born when he was still a lackey in the service of the owner of
Verhny Zaprudy. In his busy life as a lackey he had not noticed how his
girl had grown up. That long period during which she was being shaped
into a graceful creature, with a little flaxen head and dreamy eyes as
big as kopeck-pieces passed unnoticed by him. She had been brought up
like all the children of favorite lackeys, in ease and comfort in the
company of the young ladies. The gentry, to fill up their idle time, had
taught her to read, to write, to dance; he had had no hand in her
bringing up. Only from time to time casually meeting her at the gate or
on the landing of the stairs, he would remember that she was his
daughter, and would, so far as he had leisure for it, begin teaching her
the prayers and the scripture. Oh, even then he had the reputation of an
authority on the church rules and the holy scriptures! Forbidding and
stolid as her father’s face was, yet the girl listened readily. She
repeated the prayers after him yawning, but on the other hand, when he,
hesitating and trying to express himself elaborately, began telling her
stories, she was all attention. Esau’s pottage, the punishment of Sodom,
and the troubles of the boy Joseph made her turn pale and open her blue
eyes wide.
Afterwards when he gave up being a lackey, and with the money he had
saved opened a shop in the village, Mashutka had gone away to Moscow
with his master’s family....
Three years before her death she had come to see her father. He had
scarcely recognized her. She was a graceful young woman with the manners
of a young lady, and dressed like one. She talked cleverly, as though
from a book, smoked, and slept till midday. When Andrey Andreyitch asked
her what she was doing, she had announced, looking him boldly straight
in the face: “I am an actress.” Such frankness struck the former flunkey
as the acme of cynicism. Mashutka had begun boasting of her successes
and her stage life; but seeing that her father only turned crimson and
threw up his hands, she ceased. And they spent a fortnight together
without speaking or looking at one another till the day she went away.
Before she went away she asked her father to come for a walk on the bank
of the river. Painful as it was for him to walk in the light of day, in
the sight of all honest people, with a daughter who was an actress, he
yielded to her request.
“What a lovely place you live in!” she said enthusiastically. “What
ravines and marshes! Good heavens, how lovely my native place is!”
And she had burst into tears.
“The place is simply taking up room,...” Andrey Andreyvitch had thought,
looking blankly at the ravines, not understanding his daughter’s
enthusiasm. “There is no more profit from them than milk from a billy-
goat.”
And she had cried and cried, drawing her breath greedily with her whole
chest, as though she felt she had not a long time left to breathe.
Andrey Andreyitch shook his head like a horse that has been bitten, and
to stifle painful memories began rapidly crossing himself....
“Be mindful, O Lord,” he muttered, “of Thy departed servant, the harlot
Mariya, and forgive her sins, voluntary or involuntary....”
The unseemly word dropped from his lips again, but he did not notice it:
what is firmly imbedded in the consciousness cannot be driven out by
Father Grigory’s exhortations or even knocked out by a nail. Makaryevna
sighed and whispered something, drawing in a deep breath, while one-
armed Mitka was brooding over something....
“Where there is no sickness, nor grief, nor sighing,” droned the
sacristan, covering his right cheek with his hand.
Bluish smoke coiled up from the censer and bathed in the broad, slanting
patch of sunshine which cut across the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the
church. And it seemed as though the soul of the dead woman were soaring
into the sunlight together with the smoke. The coils of smoke like a
child’s curls eddied round and round, floating upwards to the window
and, as it were, holding aloof from the woes and tribulations of which
that poor soul was full.
IN THE COACH-HOUSE
IT was between nine and ten o’clock in the evening. Stepan the coachman,
Mihailo the house-porter, Alyoshka the coachman’s grandson, who had come
up from the village to stay with his grandfather, and Nikandr, an old
man of seventy, who used to come into the yard every evening to sell
salt herrings, were sitting round a lantern in the big coach-house,
playing “kings.” Through the wide-open door could be seen the whole
yard, the big house, where the master’s family lived, the gates, the
cellars, and the porter’s lodge. It was all shrouded in the darkness of
night, and only the four windows of one of the lodges which was let were
brightly lit up. The shadows of the coaches and sledges with their
shafts tipped upwards stretched from the walls to the doors, quivering
and cutting across the shadows cast by the lantern and the players....
On the other side of the thin partition that divided the coach-house
from the stable were the horses. There was a scent of hay, and a
disagreeable smell of salt herrings coming from old Nikandr.
The porter won and was king; he assumed an attitude such as was in his
opinion befitting a king, and blew his nose loudly on a red-checked
handkerchief.
“Now if I like I can chop off anybody’s head,” he said. Alyoshka, a boy
of eight with a head of flaxen hair, left long uncut, who had only
missed being king by two tricks, looked angrily and with envy at the
porter. He pouted and frowned.
“I shall give you the trick, grandfather,” he said, pondering over his
cards; “I know you have got the queen of diamonds.”
“Well, well, little silly, you have thought enough!”
Alyoshka timidly played the knave of diamonds. At that moment a ring was
heard from the yard.
“Oh, hang you!” muttered the porter, getting up. “Go and open the gate,
O king!”
When he came back a little later, Alyoshka was already a prince, the
fish-hawker a soldier, and the coachman a peasant.
“It’s a nasty business,” said the porter, sitting down to the cards
again. “I have just let the doctors out. They have not extracted it.”
“How could they? Just think, they would have to pick open the brains. If
there is a bullet in the head, of what use are doctors?”
“He is lying unconscious,” the porter went on. “He is bound to die.
Alyoshka, don’t look at the cards, you little puppy, or I will pull your
ears! Yes, I let the doctors out, and the father and mother in... They
have only just arrived. Such crying and wailing, Lord preserve us! They
say he is the only son.... It’s a grief!”
All except Alyoshka, who was absorbed in the game, looked round at the
brightly lighted windows of the lodge.
“I have orders to go to the police station tomorrow,” said the porter.
“There will be an inquiry... But what do I know about it? I saw nothing
of it. He called me this morning, gave me a letter, and said: ‘Put it in
the letter-box for me.’ And his eyes were red with crying. His wife and
children were not at home. They had gone out for a walk. So when I had
gone with the letter, he put a bullet into his forehead from a revolver.
When I came back his cook was wailing for the whole yard to hear.”
“It’s a great sin,” said the fish-hawker in a husky voice, and he shook
his head, “a great sin!”
“From too much learning,” said the porter, taking a trick; “his wits
outstripped his wisdom. Sometimes he would sit writing papers all
night.... Play, peasant!... But he was a nice gentleman. And so white
skinned, black-haired and tall!... He was a good lodger.”
“It seems the fair sex is at the bottom of it,” said the coachman,
slapping the nine of trumps on the king of diamonds. “It seems he was
fond of another man’s wife and disliked his own; it does happen.”
“The king rebels,” said the porter.
At that moment there was again a ring from the yard. The rebellious king
spat with vexation and went out. Shadows like dancing couples flitted
across the windows of the lodge. There was the sound of voices and
hurried footsteps in the yard.
“I suppose the doctors have come again,” said the coachman. “Our Mihailo
is run off his legs....”
A strange wailing voice rang out for a moment in the air. Alyoshka
looked in alarm at his grandfather, the coachman; then at the windows,
and said:
“He stroked me on the head at the gate yesterday, and said, ‘What
district do you come from, boy?’ Grandfather, who was that howled just
now?”
His grandfather trimmed the light in the lantern and made no answer.
“The man is lost,” he said a little later, with a yawn. “He is lost, and
his children are ruined, too. It’s a disgrace for his children for the
rest of their lives now.”
The porter came back and sat down by the lantern.
“He is dead,” he said. “They have sent to the almshouse for the old
women to lay him out.”
“The kingdom of heaven and eternal peace to him!” whispered the
coachman, and he crossed himself.
Looking at him, Alyoshka crossed himself too.
“You can’t pray for such as him,” said the fish-hawker.
“Why not?”
“It’s a sin.”
“That’s true,” the porter assented. “Now his soul has gone straight to
hell, to the devil....”
“It’s a sin,” repeated the fish-hawker; “such as he have no funeral, no
requiem, but are buried like carrion with no respect.”
The old man put on his cap and got up.
“It was the same thing at our lady’s,” he said, pulling his cap on
further. “We were serfs in those days; the younger son of our mistress,
the General’s lady, shot himself through the mouth with a pistol, from
too much learning, too. It seems that by law such have to be buried
outside the cemetery, without priests, without a requiem service; but to
save disgrace our lady, you know, bribed the police and the doctors, and
they gave her a paper to say her son had done it when delirious, not
knowing what he was doing. You can do anything with money. So he had a
funeral with priests and every honor, the music played, and he was
buried in the church; for the deceased General had built that church
with his own money, and all his family were buried there. Only this is
what happened, friends. One month passed, and then another, and it was
all right. In the third month they informed the General’s lady that the
watchmen had come from that same church. What did they want? They were
brought to her, they fell at her feet. ‘We can’t go on serving, your
excellency,’ they said. ‘Look out for other watchmen and graciously
dismiss us.’ ‘What for?’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘we can’t possibly; your son
howls under the church all night.’”
Alyoshka shuddered, and pressed his face to the coachman’s back so as
not to see the windows.
“At first the General’s lady would not listen,” continued the old man.
“‘All this is your fancy, you simple folk have such notions,’ she said.
‘A dead man cannot howl.’ Some time afterwards the watchmen came to her
again, and with them the sacristan. So the sacristan, too, had heard him
howling. The General’s lady saw that it was a bad job; she locked
herself in her bedroom with the watchmen. ‘Here, my friends, here are
twenty-five roubles for you, and for that go by night in secret, so that
no one should hear or see you, dig up my unhappy son, and bury him,’ she
said, ‘outside the cemetery.’ And I suppose she stood them a glass...
And the watchmen did so. The stone with the inscription on it is there
to this day, but he himself, the General’s son, is outside the
cemetery.... O Lord, forgive us our transgressions!” sighed the fish-
hawker. “There is only one day in the year when one may pray for such
people: the Saturday before Trinity.... You mustn’t give alms to beggars
for their sake, it is a sin, but you may feed the birds for the rest of
their souls. The General’s lady used to go out to the crossroads every
three days to feed the birds. Once at the cross-roads a black dog
suddenly appeared; it ran up to the bread, and was such a... we all know
what that dog was. The General’s lady was like a half-crazy creature for
five days afterwards, she neither ate nor drank.... All at once she fell
on her knees in the garden, and prayed and prayed.... Well, good-by,
friends, the blessing of God and the Heavenly Mother be with you. Let us
go, Mihailo, you’ll open the gate for me.”
The fish-hawker and the porter went out. The coachman and Alyoshka went
out too, so as not to be left in the coach-house.
“The man was living and is dead!” said the coachman, looking towards the
windows where shadows were still flitting to and fro. “Only this morning
he was walking about the yard, and now he is lying dead.”
“The time will come and we shall die too,” said the porter, walking away
with the fish-hawker, and at once they both vanished from sight in the
darkness.
The coachman, and Alyoshka after him, somewhat timidly went up to the
lighted windows. A very pale lady with large tear stained eyes, and a
fine-looking gray headed man were moving two card-tables into the middle
of the room, probably with the intention of laying the dead man upon
them, and on the green cloth of the table numbers could still be seen
written in chalk. The cook who had run about the yard wailing in the
morning was now standing on a chair, stretching up to try and cover the
looking glass with a towel.
“Grandfather what are they doing?” asked Alyoshka in a whisper.
“They are just going to lay him on the tables,” answered his
grandfather. “Let us go, child, it is bedtime.”
The coachman and Alyoshka went back to the coach-house. They said their
prayers, and took off their boots. Stepan lay down in a corner on the
floor, Alyoshka in a sledge. The doors of the coach house were shut,
there was a horrible stench from the extinguished lantern. A little
later Alyoshka sat up and looked about him; through the crack of the
door he could still see a light from those lighted windows.
“Grandfather, I am frightened!” he said.
“Come, go to sleep, go to sleep!...”
“I tell you I am frightened!”
“What are you frightened of? What a baby!”
They were silent.
Alyoshka suddenly jumped out of the sledge and, loudly weeping, ran to
his grandfather.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” cried the coachman in a fright, getting
up also.
“He’s howling!”
“Who is howling?”
“I am frightened, grandfather, do you hear?”
The coachman listened.
“It’s their crying,” he said. “Come! there, little silly! They are sad,
so they are crying.”
“I want to go home,...” his grandson went on sobbing and trembling all
over. “Grandfather, let us go back to the village, to mammy; come,
grandfather dear, God will give you the heavenly kingdom for it....”
“What a silly, ah! Come, be quiet, be quiet! Be quiet, I will light the
lantern,... silly!”
The coachman fumbled for the matches and lighted the lantern. But the
light did not comfort Alyoshka.
“Grandfather Stepan, let’s go to the village!” he besought him, weeping.
“I am frightened here; oh, oh, how frightened I am! And why did you
bring me from the village, accursed man?”
“Who’s an accursed man? You mustn’t use such disrespectable words to
your lawful grandfather. I shall whip you.”
“Do whip me, grandfather, do; beat me like Sidor’s goat, but only take
me to mammy, for God’s mercy!...”
“Come, come, grandson, come!” the coachman said kindly. “It’s all right,
don’t be frightened....I am frightened myself.... Say your prayers!”
The door creaked and the porter’s head appeared. “Aren’t you asleep,
Stepan?” he asked. “I shan’t get any sleep all night,” he said, coming
in. “I shall be opening and shutting the gates all night.... What are
you crying for, Alyoshka?”
“He is frightened,” the coachman answered for his grandson.
Again there was the sound of a wailing voice in the air. The porter
said:
“They are crying. The mother can’t believe her eyes.... It’s dreadful
how upset she is.”
“And is the father there?”
“Yes.... The father is all right. He sits in the corner and says
nothing. They have taken the children to relations.... Well, Stepan,
shall we have a game of trumps?”
“Yes,” the coachman agreed, scratching himself, “and you, Alyoshka, go
to sleep. Almost big enough to be married, and blubbering, you rascal.
Come, go along, grandson, go along....”
The presence of the porter reassured Alyoshka. He went, not very
resolutely, towards the sledge and lay down. And while he was falling
asleep he heard a half-whisper.
“I beat and cover,” said his grandfather.
“I beat and cover,” repeated the porter.
The bell rang in the yard, the door creaked and seemed also saying: “I
beat and cover.” When Alyoshka dreamed of the gentleman and, frightened
by his eyes, jumped up and burst out crying, it was morning, his
grandfather was snoring, and the coach-house no longer seemed terrible.
PANIC FEARS
DURING all the years I have been living in this world I have only three
times been terrified.
The first real terror, which made my hair stand on end and made shivers
run all over me, was caused by a trivial but strange phenomenon. It
happened that, having nothing to do one July evening, I drove to the
station for the newspapers. It was a still, warm, almost sultry evening,
like all those monotonous evenings in July which, when once they have
set in, go on for a week, a fortnight, or sometimes longer, in regular
unbroken succession, and are suddenly cut short by a violent
thunderstorm and a lavish downpour of rain that refreshes everything for
a long time.
The sun had set some time before, and an unbroken gray dusk lay all over
the land. The mawkishly sweet scents of the grass and flowers were heavy
in the motionless, stagnant air.
I was driving in a rough trolley. Behind my back the gardener’s son
Pashka, a boy of eight years old, whom I had taken with me to look after
the horse in case of necessity, was gently snoring, with his head on a
sack of oats. Our way lay along a narrow by-road, straight as a ruler,
which lay hid like a great snake in the tall thick rye. There was a pale
light from the afterglow of sunset; a streak of light cut its way
through a narrow, uncouth-looking cloud, which seemed sometimes like a
boat and sometimes like a man wrapped in a quilt....
I had driven a mile and a half, or two miles, when against the pale
background of the evening glow there came into sight one after another
some graceful tall poplars; a river glimmered beyond them, and a
gorgeous picture suddenly, as though by magic, lay stretched before me.
I had to stop the horse, for our straight road broke off abruptly and
ran down a steep incline overgrown with bushes. We were standing on the
hillside and beneath us at the bottom lay a huge hole full of twilight,
of fantastic shapes, and of space. At the bottom of this hole, in a wide
plain guarded by the poplars and caressed by the gleaming river, nestled
a village. It was now sleeping.... Its huts, its church with the belfry,
its trees, stood out against the gray twilight and were reflected darkly
in the smooth surface of the river.
I waked Pashka for fear he should fall out and began cautiously going
down.
“Have we got to Lukovo?” asked Pashka, lifting his head lazily.
“Yes. Hold the reins!...”
I led the horse down the hill and looked at the village. At the first
glance one strange circumstance caught my attention: at the very top of
the belfry, in the tiny window between the cupola and the bells, a light
was twinkling. This light was like that of a smoldering lamp, at one
moment dying down, at another flickering up. What could it come from?
Its source was beyond my comprehension. It could not be burning at the
window, for there were neither ikons nor lamps in the top turret of the
belfry; there was nothing there, as I knew, but beams, dust, and
spiders’ webs. It was hard to climb up into that turret, for the passage
to it from the belfry was closely blocked up.
It was more likely than anything else to be the reflection of some
outside light, but though I strained my eyes to the utmost, I could not
see one other speck of light in the vast expanse that lay before me.
There was no moon. The pale and, by now, quite dim streak of the
afterglow could not have been reflected, for the window looked not to
the west, but to the east. These and other similar considerations were
straying through my mind all the while that I was going down the slope
with the horse. At the bottom I sat down by the roadside and looked
again at the light. As before it was glimmering and flaring up.
“Strange,” I thought, lost in conjecture. “Very strange.”
And little by little I was overcome by an unpleasant feeling. At first I
thought that this was vexation at not being able to explain a simple
phenomenon; but afterwards, when I suddenly turned away from the light
in horror and caught hold of Pashka with one hand, it became clear that
I was overcome with terror....
I was seized with a feeling of loneliness, misery, and horror, as though
I had been flung down against my will into this great hole full of
shadows, where I was standing all alone with the belfry looking at me
with its red eye.
“Pashka!” I cried, closing my eyes in horror.
“Well?”
“Pashka, what’s that gleaming on the belfry?”
Pashka looked over my shoulder at the belfry and gave a yawn.
“Who can tell?”
This brief conversation with the boy reassured me for a little, but not
for long. Pashka, seeing my uneasiness, fastened his big eyes upon the
light, looked at me again, then again at the light....
“I am frightened,” he whispered.
At this point, beside myself with terror, I clutched the boy with one
hand, huddled up to him, and gave the horse a violent lash.
“It’s stupid!” I said to myself. “That phenomenon is only terrible
because I don’t understand it; everything we don’t understand is
mysterious.”
I tried to persuade myself, but at the same time I did not leave off
lashing the horse. When we reached the posting station I purposely
stayed for a full hour chatting with the overseer, and read through two
or three newspapers, but the feeling of uneasiness did not leave me. On
the way back the light was not to be seen, but on the other hand the
silhouettes of the huts, of the poplars, and of the hill up which I had
to drive, seemed to me as though animated. And why the light was there I
don’t know to this day.
The second terror I experienced was excited by a circumstance no less
trivial.... I was returning from a romantic interview. It was one
o’clock at night, the time when nature is buried in the soundest,
sweetest sleep before the dawn. That time nature was not sleeping, and
one could not call the night a still one. Corncrakes, quails,
nightingales, and woodcocks were calling, crickets and grasshoppers were
chirruping. There was a light mist over the grass, and clouds were
scurrying straight ahead across the sky near the moon. Nature was awake,
as though afraid of missing the best moments of her life.
I walked along a narrow path at the very edge of a railway embankment.
The moonlight glided over the lines which were already covered with dew.
Great shadows from the clouds kept flitting over the embankment. Far
ahead, a dim green light was glimmering peacefully.
“So everything is well,” I thought, looking at them.
I had a quiet, peaceful, comfortable feeling in my heart. I was
returning from a tryst, I had no need to hurry; I was not sleepy, and I
was conscious of youth and health in every sigh, every step I took,
rousing a dull echo in the monotonous hum of the night. I don’t know
what I was feeling then, but I remember I was happy, very happy.
I had gone not more than three-quarters of a mile when I suddenly heard
behind me a monotonous sound, a rumbling, rather like the roar of a
great stream. It grew louder and louder every second, and sounded nearer
and nearer. I looked round; a hundred paces from me was the dark copse
from which I had only just come; there the embankment turned to the
right in a graceful curve and vanished among the trees. I stood still in
perplexity and waited. A huge black body appeared at once at the turn,
noisily darted towards me, and with the swiftness of a bird flew past me
along the rails. Less than half a minute passed and the blur had
vanished, the rumble melted away into the noise of the night.
It was an ordinary goods truck. There was nothing peculiar about it in
itself, but its appearance without an engine and in the night puzzled
me. Where could it have come from and what force sent it flying so
rapidly along the rails? Where did it come from and where was it flying
to?
If I had been superstitious I should have made up my mind it was a party
of demons and witches journeying to a devils’ sabbath, and should have
gone on my way; but as it was, the phenomenon was absolutely
inexplicable to me. I did not believe my eyes, and was entangled in
conjectures like a fly in a spider’s web....
I suddenly realized that I was utterly alone on the whole vast plain;
that the night, which by now seemed inhospitable, was peeping into my
face and dogging my footsteps; all the sounds, the cries of the birds,
the whisperings of the trees, seemed sinister, and existing simply to
alarm my imagination. I dashed on like a madman, and without realizing
what I was doing I ran, trying to run faster and faster. And at once I
heard something to which I had paid no attention before: that is, the
plaintive whining of the telegraph wires.
“This is beyond everything,” I said, trying to shame myself. “It’s
cowardice! it’s silly!”
But cowardice was stronger than common sense. I only slackened my pace
when I reached the green light, where I saw a dark signal-box, and near
it on the embankment the figure of a man, probably the signalman.
“Did you see it?” I asked breathlessly.
“See whom? What?”
“Why, a truck ran by.”
“I saw it,...” the peasant said reluctantly. “It broke away from the
goods train. There is an incline at the ninetieth mile...; the train is
dragged uphill. The coupling on the last truck gave way, so it broke off
and ran back.... There is no catching it now!...”
The strange phenomenon was explained and its fantastic character
vanished. My panic was over and I was able to go on my way.
My third fright came upon me as I was going home from stand shooting in
early spring. It was in the dusk of evening. The forest road was covered
with pools from a recent shower of rain, and the earth squelched under
one’s feet. The crimson glow of sunset flooded the whole forest,
coloring the white stems of the birches and the young leaves. I was
exhausted and could hardly move.
Four or five miles from home, walking along the forest road, I suddenly
met a big black dog of the water spaniel breed. As he ran by, the dog
looked intently at me, straight in my face, and ran on.
“A nice dog!” I thought. “Whose is it?”
I looked round. The dog was standing ten paces off with his eyes fixed
on me. For a minute we scanned each other in silence, then the dog,
probably flattered by my attention, came slowly up to me and wagged his
tail.
I walked on, the dog following me.
“Whose dog can it be?” I kept asking myself. “Where does he come from?”
I knew all the country gentry for twenty or thirty miles round, and knew
all their dogs. Not one of them had a spaniel like that. How did he come
to be in the depths of the forest, on a track used for nothing but
carting timber? He could hardly have dropped behind someone passing
through, for there was nowhere for the gentry to drive to along that
road.
I sat down on a stump to rest, and began scrutinizing my companion. He,
too, sat down, raised his head, and fastened upon me an intent stare. He
gazed at me without bHlinking. I don’t know whether it was the influence
of the stillness, the shadows and sounds of the forest, or perhaps a
result of exhaustion, but I suddenly felt uneasy under the steady gaze
of his ordinary doggy eyes. I thought of Faust and his bulldog, and of
the fact that nervous people sometimes when exhausted have
hallucinations. That was enough to make me get up hurriedly and
hurriedly walk on. The dog followed me.
“Go away!” I shouted.
The dog probably liked my voice, for he gave a gleeful jump and ran
about in front of me.
“Go away!” I shouted again.
The dog looked round, stared at me intently, and wagged his tail good-
humoredly. Evidently my threatening tone amused him. I ought to have
patted him, but I could not get Faust’s dog out of my head, and the
feeling of panic grew more and more acute... Darkness was coming on,
which completed my confusion, and every time the dog ran up to me and
hit me with his tail, like a coward I shut my eyes. The same thing
happened as with the light in the belfry and the truck on the railway: I
could not stand it and rushed away.
At home I found a visitor, an old friend, who, after greeting me, began
to complain that as he was driving to me he had lost his way in the
forest, and a splendid valuable dog of his had dropped behind.
THE BET
IT WAS a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his
study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party
one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had
been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked of
capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many
journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They
considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable
for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty
ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.
“I don’t agree with you,” said their host the banker. “I have not tried
either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge
a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than
imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but
lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more
humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out
of you in the course of many years?”
“Both are equally immoral,” observed one of the guests, “for they both
have the same object—to take away life. The State is not God. It has not
the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.”
Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty.
When he was asked his opinion, he said:
“The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if I
had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I
would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at
all.”
A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous
in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the
table with his fist and shouted at the young man:
“It’s not true! I’ll bet you two millions you wouldn’t stay in solitary
confinement for five years.”
“If you mean that in earnest,” said the young man, “I’ll take the bet,
but I would stay not five but fifteen years.”
“Fifteen? Done!” cried the banker. “Gentlemen, I stake two millions!”
“Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!” said the young
man.
And this wild, senseless bet was carried out! The banker, spoilt and
frivolous, with millions beyond his reckoning, was delighted at the bet.
At supper he made fun of the young man, and said:
“Think better of it, young man, while there is still time. To me two
millions are a trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best
years of your life. I say three or four, because you won’t stay longer.
Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a
great deal harder to bear than compulsory. The thought that you have the
right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole
existence in prison. I am sorry for you.”
And now the banker, walking to and fro, remembered all this, and asked
himself: “What was the object of that bet? What is the good of that
man’s losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two
millions? Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than
imprisonment for life? No, no. It was all nonsensical and meaningless.
On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man, and on his part simple
greed for money....”
Then he remembered what followed that evening. It was decided that the
young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest
supervision in one of the lodges in the banker’s garden. It was agreed
that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of
the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive
letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument and
books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke. By
the terms of the agreement, the only relations he could have with the
outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object. He
might have anything he wanted—books, music, wine, and so on—in any
quantity he desired by writing an order, but could only receive them
through the window. The agreement provided for every detail and every
trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary, and bound the
young man to stay there exactly fifteen years, beginning from twelve
o’clock of November 14, 1870, and ending at twelve o’clock of November
14, 1885. The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions, if
only two minutes before the end, released the banker from the obligation
to pay him two millions.
For the first year of his confinement, as far as one could judge from
his brief notes, the prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and
depression. The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and
night from his lodge. He refused wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote,
excites the desires, and desires are the worst foes of the prisoner; and
besides, nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing
no one. And tobacco spoilt the air of his room. In the first year the
books he sent for were principally of a light character; novels with a
complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories, and so on.
In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge, and the prisoner
asked only for the classics. In the fifth year music was audible again,
and the prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him through the
window said that all that year he spent doing nothing but eating and
drinking and lying on his bed, frequently yawning and angrily talking to
himself. He did not read books. Sometimes at night he would sit down to
write; he would spend hours writing, and in the morning tear up all that
he had written. More than once he could be heard crying.
In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously
studying languages, philosophy, and history. He threw himself eagerly
into these studies—so much so that the banker had enough to do to get
him the books he ordered. In the course of four years some six hundred
volumes were procured at his request. It was during this period that the
banker received the following letter from his prisoner:
“My dear Jailer, I write you these lines in six languages. Show them to
people who know the languages. Let them read them. If they find not one
mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden. That shot will show
me that my efforts have not been thrown away. The geniuses of all ages
and of all lands speak different languages, but the same flame burns in
them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels
now from being able to understand them!” The prisoner’s desire was
fulfilled. The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.
Then after the tenth year, the prisoner sat immovably at the table and
read nothing but the Gospel. It seemed strange to the banker that a man
who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste
nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension. Theology and
histories of religion followed the Gospels.
In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense
quantity of books quite indiscriminately. At one time he was busy with
the natural sciences, then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare. There
were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and
a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or
theology. His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the
wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching
first at one spar and then at another.
II
The old banker remembered all this, and thought:
“To-morrow at twelve o’clock he will regain his freedom. By our
agreement I ought to pay him two millions. If I do pay him, it is all
over with me: I shall be utterly ruined.”
Fifteen years before, his millions had been beyond his reckoning; now he
was afraid to ask himself which were greater, his debts or his assets.
Desperate gambling on the Stock Exchange, wild speculation and the
excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years, had by
degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud, fearless, self-
confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank, trembling at
every rise and fall in his investments. “Cursed bet!” muttered the old
man, clutching his head in despair. “Why didn’t the man die? He is only
forty now. He will take my last penny from me, he will marry, will enjoy
life, will gamble on the Exchange; while I shall look at him with envy
like a beggar, and hear from him every day the same sentence: ‘I am
indebted to you for the happiness of my life, let me help you!’ No, it
is too much! The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace
is the death of that man!”
It struck three o’clock, the banker listened; everyone was asleep in the
house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled
trees. Trying to make no noise, he took from a fireproof safe the key of
the door which had not been opened for fifteen years, put on his
overcoat, and went out of the house.
It was dark and cold in the garden. Rain was falling. A damp cutting
wind was racing about the garden, howling and giving the trees no rest.
The banker strained his eyes, but could see neither the earth nor the
white statues, nor the lodge, nor the trees. Going to the spot where the
lodge stood, he twice called the watchman. No answer followed. Evidently
the watchman had sought shelter from the weather, and was now asleep
somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.
“If I had the pluck to carry out my intention,” thought the old man,
“suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.”
He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door, and went into the
entry of the lodge. Then he groped his way into a little passage and
lighted a match. There was not a soul there. There was a bedstead with
no bedding on it, and in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.
The seals on the door leading to the prisoner’s rooms were intact.
When the match went out the old man, trembling with emotion, peeped
through the little window. A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner’s
room. He was sitting at the table. Nothing could be seen but his back,
the hair on his head, and his hands. Open books were lying on the table,
on the two easy-chairs, and on the carpet near the table.
Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir. Fifteen years’
imprisonment had taught him to sit still. The banker tapped at the
window with his finger, and the prisoner made no movement whatever in
response. Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and
put the key in the keyhole. The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the
door creaked. The banker expected to hear at once footsteps and a cry of
astonishment, but three minutes passed and it was as quiet as ever in
the room. He made up his mind to go in.
At the table a man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless. He was
a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones, with long curls
like a woman’s and a shaggy beard. His face was yellow with an earthy
tint in it, his cheeks were hollow, his back long and narrow, and the
hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that
it was dreadful to look at it. His hair was already streaked with
silver, and seeing his emaciated, aged-looking face, no one would have
believed that he was only forty. He was asleep.... In front of his bowed
head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was
something written in fine handwriting.
“Poor creature!” thought the banker, “he is asleep and most likely
dreaming of the millions. And I have only to take this half-dead man,
throw him on the bed, stifle him a little with the pillow, and the most
conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death. But let us
first read what he has written here....”
The banker took the page from the table and read as follows:
“To-morrow at twelve o’clock I regain my freedom and the right to
associate with other men, but before I leave this room and see the
sunshine, I think it necessary to say a few words to you. With a clear
conscience I tell you, as before God, who beholds me, that I despise
freedom and life and health, and all that in your books is called the
good things of the world.
“For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is
true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk
fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in
the forests, have loved women.... Beauties as ethereal as clouds,
created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at
night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my
brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz
and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched
it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold
and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my
head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields,
rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the
strains of the shepherds’ pipes; I have touched the wings of comely
devils who flew down to converse with me of God.... In your books I have
flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned
towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms....
“Your books have given me wisdom. All that the unresting thought of man
has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.
I know that I am wiser than all of you.
“And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this
world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a
mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off
the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing
under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal
geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.
“You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies
for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to
strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple
and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a
sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I
don’t want to understand you.
“To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by, I
renounce the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise and
which now I despise. To deprive myself of the right to the money I shall
go out from here five hours before the time fixed, and so break the
compact....”
When the banker had read this he laid the page on the table, kissed the
strange man on the head, and went out of the lodge, weeping. At no other
time, even when he had lost heavily on the Stock Exchange, had he felt
so great a contempt for himself. When he got home he lay on his bed, but
his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.
Next morning the watchmen ran in with pale faces, and told him they had
seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the
garden, go to the gate, and disappear. The banker went at once with the
servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner. To
avoid arousing unnecessary talk, he took from the table the writing in
which the millions were renounced, and when he got home locked it up in
the fireproof safe.
THE HEAD-GARDENER’S STORY
A SALE of flowers was taking place in Count N.‘s greenhouses. The
purchasers were few in number—a landowner who was a neighbor of mine, a
young timber-merchant, and myself. While the workmen were carrying out
our magnificent purchases and packing them into the carts, we sat at the
entry of the greenhouse and chatted about one thing and another. It is
extremely pleasant to sit in a garden on a still April morning,
listening to the birds, and watching the flowers brought out into the
open air and basking in the sunshine.
The head-gardener, Mihail Karlovitch, a venerable old man with a full
shaven face, wearing a fur waistcoat and no coat, superintended the
packing of the plants himself, but at the same time he listened to our
conversation in the hope of hearing something new. He was an
intelligent, very good-hearted man, respected by everyone. He was for
some reason looked upon by everyone as a German, though he was in
reality on his father’s side Swedish, on his mother’s side Russian, and
attended the Orthodox church. He knew Russian, Swedish, and German. He
had read a good deal in those languages, and nothing one could do gave
him greater pleasure than lending him some new book or talking to him,
for instance, about Ibsen.
He had his weaknesses, but they were innocent ones: he called himself
the head gardener, though there were no under-gardeners; the expression
of his face was unusually dignified and haughty; he could not endure to
be contradicted, and liked to be listened to with respect and attention.
“That young fellow there I can recommend to you as an awful rascal,”
said my neighbor, pointing to a laborer with a swarthy, gipsy face, who
drove by with the water-barrel. “Last week he was tried in the town for
burglary and was acquitted; they pronounced him mentally deranged, and
yet look at him, he is the picture of health. Scoundrels are very often
acquitted nowadays in Russia on grounds of abnormality and aberration,
yet these acquittals, these unmistakable proofs of an indulgent attitude
to crime, lead to no good. They demoralize the masses, the sense of
justice is blunted in all as they become accustomed to seeing vice
unpunished, and you know in our age one may boldly say in the words of
Shakespeare that in our evil and corrupt age virtue must ask forgiveness
of vice.”
“That’s very true,” the merchant assented. “Owing to these frequent
acquittals, murder and arson have become much more common. Ask the
peasants.”
Mihail Karlovitch turned towards us and said:
“As far as I am concerned, gentlemen, I am always delighted to meet with
these verdicts of not guilty. I am not afraid for morality and justice
when they say ‘Not guilty,’ but on the contrary I feel pleased. Even
when my conscience tells me the jury have made a mistake in acquitting
the criminal, even then I am triumphant. Judge for yourselves,
gentlemen; if the judges and the jury have more faith in man than in
evidence, material proofs, and speeches for the prosecution, is not that
faith in man in itself higher than any ordinary considerations? Such
faith is only attainable by those few who understand and feel Christ.”
“A fine thought,” I said.
“But it’s not a new one. I remember a very long time ago I heard a
legend on that subject. A very charming legend,” said the gardener, and
he smiled. “I was told it by my grandmother, my father’s mother, an
excellent old lady. She told me it in Swedish, and it does not sound so
fine, so classical, in Russian.”
But we begged him to tell it and not to be put off by the coarseness of
the Russian language. Much gratified, he deliberately lighted his pipe,
looked angrily at the laborers, and began:
“There settled in a certain little town a solitary, plain, elderly
gentleman called Thomson or Wilson—but that does not matter; the surname
is not the point. He followed an honorable profession: he was a doctor.
He was always morose and unsociable, and only spoke when required by his
profession. He never visited anyone, never extended his acquaintance
beyond a silent bow, and lived as humbly as a hermit. The fact was, he
was a learned man, and in those days learned men were not like other
people. They spent their days and nights in contemplation, in reading
and in healing disease, looked upon everything else as trivial, and had
no time to waste a word. The inhabitants of the town understood this,
and tried not to worry him with their visits and empty chatter. They
were very glad that God had sent them at last a man who could heal
diseases, and were proud that such a remarkable man was living in their
town. ‘He knows everything,’ they said about him.
“But that was not enough. They ought to have also said, ‘He loves
everyone.’ In the breast of that learned man there beat a wonderful
angelic heart. Though the people of that town were strangers and not his
own people, yet he loved them like children, and did not spare himself
for them. He was himself ill with consumption, he had a cough, but when
he was summoned to the sick he forgot his own illness he did not spare
himself and, gasping for breath, climbed up the hills however high they
might be. He disregarded the sultry heat and the cold, despised thirst
and hunger. He would accept no money and strange to say, when one of his
patients died, he would follow the coffin with the relations, weeping.
“And soon he became so necessary to the town that the inhabitants
wondered how they could have got on before without the man. Their
gratitude knew no bounds. Grown-up people and children, good and bad
alike, honest men and cheats—all in fact, respected him and knew his
value. In the little town and all the surrounding neighborhood there was
no man who would allow himself to do anything disagreeable to him;
indeed, they would never have dreamed of it. When he came out of his
lodging, he never fastened the doors or windows, in complete confidence
that there was no thief who could bring himself to do him wrong. He
often had in the course of his medical duties to walk along the
highroads, through the forests and mountains haunted by numbers of
hungry vagrants; but he felt that he was in perfect security.
“One night he was returning from a patient when robbers fell upon him in
the forest, but when they recognized him, they took off their hats
respectfully and offered him something to eat. When he answered that he
was not hungry, they gave him a warm wrap and accompanied him as far as
the town, happy that fate had given them the chance in some small way to
show their gratitude to the benevolent man. Well, to be sure, my
grandmother told me that even the horses and the cows and the dogs knew
him and expressed their joy when they met him.
“And this man who seemed by his sanctity to have guarded himself from
every evil, to whom even brigands and frenzied men wished nothing but
good, was one fine morning found murdered. Covered with blood, with his
skull broken, he was lying in a ravine, and his pale face wore an
expression of amazement. Yes, not horror but amazement was the emotion
that had been fixed upon his face when he saw the murderer before him.
You can imagine the grief that overwhelmed the inhabitants of the town
and the surrounding districts. All were in despair, unable to believe
their eyes, wondering who could have killed the man. The judges who
conducted the inquiry and examined the doctor’s body said: ‘Here we have
all the signs of a murder, but as there is not a man in the world
capable of murdering our doctor, obviously it was not a case of murder,
and the combination of evidence is due to simple chance. We must suppose
that in the darkness he fell into the ravine of himself and was mortally
injured.’
“The whole town agreed with this opinion. The doctor was buried, and
nothing more was said about a violent death. The existence of a man who
could have the baseness and wickedness to kill the doctor seemed
incredible. There is a limit even to wickedness, isn’t there?
“All at once, would you believe it, chance led them to discovering the
murderer. A vagrant who had been many times convicted, notorious for his
vicious life, was seen selling for drink a snuff-box and watch that had
belonged to the doctor. When he was questioned he was confused, and
answered with an obvious lie. A search was made, and in his bed was
found a shirt with stains of blood on the sleeves, and a doctor’s lancet
set in gold. What more evidence was wanted? They put the criminal in
prison. The inhabitants were indignant, and at the same time said:
“‘It’s incredible! It can’t be so! Take care that a mistake is not made;
it does happen, you know, that evidence tells a false tale.’
“At his trial the murderer obstinately denied his guilt. Everything was
against him, and to be convinced of his guilt was as easy as to believe
that this earth is black; but the judges seem to have gone mad: they
weighed every proof ten times, looked distrustfully at the witnesses,
flushed crimson and sipped water.... The trial began early in the
morning and was only finished in the evening.
“‘Accused!’ the chief judge said, addressing the murderer, ‘the court
has found you guilty of murdering Dr. So-and-so, and has sentenced you
to....’
“The chief judge meant to say ‘to the death penalty,’ but he dropped
from his hands the paper on which the sentence was written, wiped the
cold sweat from his face, and cried out:
“‘No! May God punish me if I judge wrongly, but I swear he is not
guilty. I cannot admit the thought that there exists a man who would
dare to murder our friend the doctor! A man could not sink so low!’
“‘There cannot be such a man!’ the other judges assented.
“‘No,’ the crowd cried. ‘Let him go!’
“The murderer was set free to go where he chose, and not one soul blamed
the court for an unjust verdict. And my grandmother used to say that for
such faith in humanity God forgave the sins of all the inhabitants of
that town. He rejoices when people believe that man is His image and
semblance, and grieves if, forgetful of human dignity, they judge worse
of men than of dogs. The sentence of acquittal may bring harm to the
inhabitants of the town, but on the other hand, think of the beneficial
influence upon them of that faith in man—a faith which does not remain
dead, you know; it raises up generous feelings in us, and always impels
us to love and respect every man. Every man! And that is important.”
Mihail Karlovitch had finished. My neighbor would have urged some
objection, but the head-gardener made a gesture that signified that he
did not like objections; then he walked away to the carts, and, with an
expression of dignity, went on looking after the packing.
THE BEAUTIES I
I REMEMBER, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, I
was driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshoe Kryepkoe in
the Don region to Rostov-on-the-Don. It was a sultry, languidly dreary
day of August. Our eyes were glued together, and our mouths were parched
from the heat and the dry burning wind which drove clouds of dust to
meet us; one did not want to look or speak or think, and when our drowsy
driver, a Little Russian called Karpo, swung his whip at the horses and
lashed me on my cap, I did not protest or utter a sound, but only,
rousing myself from half-slumber, gazed mildly and dejectedly into the
distance to see whether there was a village visible through the dust. We
stopped to feed the horses in a big Armenian village at a rich
Armenian’s whom my grandfather knew. Never in my life have I seen a
greater caricature than that Armenian. Imagine a little shaven head with
thick overhanging eyebrows, a beak of a nose, long gray mustaches, and a
wide mouth with a long cherry-wood chibouk sticking out of it. This
little head was clumsily attached to a lean hunch-back carcass attired
in a fantastic garb, a short red jacket, and full bright blue trousers.
This figure walked straddling its legs and shuffling with its slippers,
spoke without taking the chibouk out of its mouth, and behaved with
truly Armenian dignity, not smiling, but staring with wide-open eyes and
trying to take as little notice as possible of its guests.
There was neither wind nor dust in the Armenian’s rooms, but it was just
as unpleasant, stifling, and dreary as in the steppe and on the road. I
remember, dusty and exhausted by the heat, I sat in the corner on a
green box. The unpainted wooden walls, the furniture, and the floors
colored with yellow ocher smelt of dry wood baked by the sun. Wherever I
looked there were flies and flies and flies.... Grandfather and the
Armenian were talking about grazing, about manure, and about oats.... I
knew that they would be a good hour getting the samovar; that
grandfather would be not less than an hour drinking his tea, and then
would lie down to sleep for two or three hours; that I should waste a
quarter of the day waiting, after which there would be again the heat,
the dust, the jolting cart. I heard the muttering of the two voices, and
it began to seem to me that I had been seeing the Armenian, the cupboard
with the crockery, the flies, the windows with the burning sun beating
on them, for ages and ages, and should only cease to see them in the
far-off future, and I was seized with hatred for the steppe, the sun,
the flies....
A Little Russian peasant woman in a kerchief brought in a tray of tea-
things, then the samovar. The Armenian went slowly out into the passage
and shouted: “Mashya, come and pour out tea! Where are you, Mashya?”
Hurried footsteps were heard, and there came into the room a girl of
sixteen in a simple cotton dress and a white kerchief. As she washed the
crockery and poured out the tea, she was standing with her back to me,
and all I could see was that she was of a slender figure, barefooted,
and that her little bare heels were covered by long trousers.
The Armenian invited me to have tea. Sitting down to the table, I
glanced at the girl, who was handing me a glass of tea, and felt all at
once as though a wind were blowing over my soul and blowing away all the
impressions of the day with their dust and dreariness. I saw the
bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real
life or in my dreams. Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at
the first glance as I should have recognized lightning.
I am ready to swear that Masha—or, as her father called her, Mashya—was
a real beauty, but I don’t know how to prove it. It sometimes happens
that clouds are huddled together in disorder on the horizon, and the sun
hiding behind them colors them and the sky with tints of every possible
shade—crimson, orange, gold, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a
monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban. The glow of
sunset enveloping a third of the sky gleams on the cross on the church,
flashes on the windows of the manor house, is reflected in the river and
the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far away against the background
of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is flying homewards.... And the boy
herding the cows, and the surveyor driving in his chaise over the dam,
and the gentleman out for a walk, all gaze at the sunset, and every one
of them thinks it terribly beautiful, but no one knows or can say in
what its beauty lies.
I was not the only one to think the Armenian girl beautiful. My
grandfather, an old man of seventy, gruff and indifferent to women and
the beauties of nature, looked caressingly at Masha for a full minute,
and asked:
“Is that your daughter, Avert Nazaritch?”
“Yes, she is my daughter,” answered the Armenian.
“A fine young lady,” said my grandfather approvingly.
An artist would have called the Armenian girl’s beauty classical and
severe, it was just that beauty, the contemplation of which—God knows
why!—inspires in one the conviction that one is seeing correct features;
that hair, eyes, nose, mouth, neck, bosom, and every movement of the
young body all go together in one complete harmonious accord in which
nature has not blundered over the smallest line. You fancy for some
reason that the ideally beautiful woman must have such a nose as
Masha’s, straight and slightly aquiline, just such great dark eyes, such
long lashes, such a languid glance; you fancy that her black curly hair
and eyebrows go with the soft white tint of her brow and cheeks as the
green reeds go with the quiet stream. Masha’s white neck and her
youthful bosom were not fully developed, but you fancy the sculptor
would need a great creative genius to mold them. You gaze, and little by
little the desire comes over you to say to Masha something
extraordinarily pleasant, sincere, beautiful, as beautiful as she
herself was.
At first I felt hurt and abashed that Masha took no notice of me, but
was all the time looking down; it seemed to me as though a peculiar
atmosphere, proud and happy, separated her from me and jealously
screened her from my eyes.
“That’s because I am covered with dust,” I thought, “am sunburnt, and am
still a boy.”
But little by little I forgot myself, and gave myself up entirely to the
consciousness of beauty. I thought no more now of the dreary steppe, of
the dust, no longer heard the buzzing of the flies, no longer tasted the
tea, and felt nothing except that a beautiful girl was standing only the
other side of the table.
I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy, nor
enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant
sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some
reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian,
even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had
lost something important and essential to life which we should never
find again. My grandfather, too, grew melancholy; he talked no more
about manure or about oats, but sat silent, looking pensively at Masha.
After tea my grandfather lay down for a nap while I went out of the
house into the porch. The house, like all the houses in the Armenian
village stood in the full sun; there was not a tree, not an awning, no
shade. The Armenian’s great courtyard, overgrown with goosefoot and wild
mallows, was lively and full of gaiety in spite of the great heat.
Threshing was going on behind one of the low hurdles which intersected
the big yard here and there. Round a post stuck into the middle of the
threshing-floor ran a dozen horses harnessed side by side, so that they
formed one long radius. A Little Russian in a long waistcoat and full
trousers was walking beside them, cracking a whip and shouting in a tone
that sounded as though he were jeering at the horses and showing off his
power over them.
“A—a—a, you damned brutes!... A—a—a, plague take you! Are you
frightened?”
The horses, sorrel, white, and piebald, not understanding why they were
made to run round in one place and to crush the wheat straw, ran
unwillingly as though with effort, swinging their tails with an offended
air. The wind raised up perfect clouds of golden chaff from under their
hoofs and carried it away far beyond the hurdle. Near the tall fresh
stacks peasant women were swarming with rakes, and carts were moving,
and beyond the stacks in another yard another dozen similar horses were
running round a post, and a similar Little Russian was cracking his whip
and jeering at the horses.
The steps on which I was sitting were hot; on the thin rails and here
and there on the window-frames sap was oozing out of the wood from the
heat; red ladybirds were huddling together in the streaks of shadow
under the steps and under the shutters. The sun was baking me on my
head, on my chest, and on my back, but I did not notice it, and was
conscious only of the thud of bare feet on the uneven floor in the
passage and in the rooms behind me. After clearing away the tea-things,
Masha ran down the steps, fluttering the air as she passed, and like a
bird flew into a little grimy outhouse—I suppose the kitchen—from which
came the smell of roast mutton and the sound of angry talk in Armenian.
She vanished into the dark doorway, and in her place there appeared on
the threshold an old bent, red-faced Armenian woman wearing green
trousers. The old woman was angry and was scolding someone. Soon
afterwards Masha appeared in the doorway, flushed with the heat of the
kitchen and carrying a big black loaf on her shoulder; swaying
gracefully under the weight of the bread, she ran across the yard to the
threshing-floor, darted over the hurdle, and, wrapt in a cloud of golden
chaff, vanished behind the carts. The Little Russian who was driving the
horses lowered his whip, sank into silence, and gazed for a minute in
the direction of the carts. Then when the Armenian girl darted again by
the horses and leaped over the hurdle, he followed her with his eyes,
and shouted to the horses in a tone as though he were greatly
disappointed:
“Plague take you, unclean devils!”
And all the while I was unceasingly hearing her bare feet, and seeing
how she walked across the yard with a grave, preoccupied face. She ran
now down the steps, swishing the air about me, now into the kitchen, now
to the threshing-floor, now through the gate, and I could hardly turn my
head quickly enough to watch her.
And the oftener she fluttered by me with her beauty, the more acute
became my sadness. I felt sorry both for her and for myself and for the
Little Russian, who mournfully watched her every time she ran through
the cloud of chaff to the carts. Whether it was envy of her beauty, or
that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be, or
that I was a stranger to her; or whether I vaguely felt that her rare
beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and, like everything on earth, of
short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar
feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real beauty, God
only knows.
The three hours of waiting passed unnoticed. It seemed to me that I had
not had time to look properly at Masha when Karpo drove up to the river,
bathed the horse, and began to put it in the shafts. The wet horse
snorted with pleasure and kicked his hoofs against the shafts. Karpo
shouted to it: “Ba—ack!” My grandfather woke up. Masha opened the
creaking gates for us, we got into the chaise and drove out of the yard.
We drove in silence as though we were angry with one another.
When, two or three hours later, Rostov and Nahitchevan appeared in the
distance, Karpo, who had been silent the whole time, looked round
quickly, and said:
“A fine wench, that at the Armenian’s.”
And he lashed his horses.
II
Another time, after I had become a student, I was traveling by rail to
the south. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe it was between
Byelgorod and Harkov, I got out of the tram to walk about the platform.
The shades of evening were already lying on the station garden, on the
platform, and on the fields; the station screened off the sunset, but on
the topmost clouds of smoke from the engine, which were tinged with rosy
light, one could see the sun had not yet quite vanished.
As I walked up and down the platform I noticed that the greater number
of the passengers were standing or walking near a second-class
compartment, and that they looked as though some celebrated person were
in that compartment. Among the curious whom I met near this compartment
I saw, however, an artillery officer who had been my fellow-traveler, an
intelligent, cordial, and sympathetic fellow—as people mostly are whom
we meet on our travels by chance and with whom we are not long
acquainted.
“What are you looking at there?” I asked.
He made no answer, but only indicated with his eyes a feminine figure.
It was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, wearing a Russian dress,
with her head bare and a little shawl flung carelessly on one shoulder;
not a passenger, but I suppose a sister or daughter of the station-
master. She was standing near the carriage window, talking to an elderly
woman who was in the train. Before I had time to realize what I was
seeing, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling I had once experienced
in the Armenian village.
The girl was remarkably beautiful, and that was unmistakable to me and
to those who were looking at her as I was.
If one is to describe her appearance feature by feature, as the practice
is, the only really lovely thing was her thick wavy fair hair, which
hung loose with a black ribbon tied round her head; all the other
features were either irregular or very ordinary. Either from a peculiar
form of coquettishness, or from short-sightedness, her eyes were screwed
up, her nose had an undecided tilt, her mouth was small, her profile was
feebly and insipidly drawn, her shoulders were narrow and undeveloped
for her age—and yet the girl made the impression of being really
beautiful, and looking at her, I was able to feel convinced that the
Russian face does not need strict regularity in order to be lovely; what
is more, that if instead of her turn-up nose the girl had been given a
different one, correct and plastically irreproachable like the Armenian
girl’s, I fancy her face would have lost all its charm from the change.
Standing at the window talking, the girl, shrugging at the evening damp,
continually looking round at us, at one moment put her arms akimbo, at
the next raised her hands to her head to straighten her hair, talked,
laughed, while her face at one moment wore an expression of wonder, the
next of horror, and I don’t remember a moment when her face and body
were at rest. The whole secret and magic of her beauty lay just in these
tiny, infinitely elegant movements, in her smile, in the play of her
face, in her rapid glances at us, in the combination of the subtle grace
of her movements with her youth, her freshness, the purity of her soul
that sounded in her laugh and voice, and with the weakness we love so
much in children, in birds, in fawns, and in young trees.
It was that butterfly’s beauty so in keeping with waltzing, darting
about the garden, laughter and gaiety, and incongruous with serious
thought, grief, and repose; and it seemed as though a gust of wind
blowing over the platform, or a fall of rain, would be enough to wither
the fragile body and scatter the capricious beauty like the pollen of a
flower.
“So—o!...” the officer muttered with a sigh when, after the second bell,
we went back to our compartment.
And what that “So—o” meant I will not undertake to decide.
Perhaps he was sad, and did not want to go away from the beauty and the
spring evening into the stuffy train; or perhaps he, like me, was
unaccountably sorry for the beauty, for himself, and for me, and for all
the passengers, who were listlessly and reluctantly sauntering back to
their compartments. As we passed the station window, at which a pale,
red-haired telegraphist with upstanding curls and a faded, broad-cheeked
face was sitting beside his apparatus, the officer heaved a sigh and
said:
“I bet that telegraphist is in love with that pretty girl. To live out
in the wilds under one roof with that ethereal creature and not fall in
love is beyond the power of man. And what a calamity, my friend! what an
ironical fate, to be stooping, unkempt, gray, a decent fellow and not a
fool, and to be in love with that pretty, stupid little girl who would
never take a scrap of notice of you! Or worse still: imagine that
telegraphist is in love, and at the same time married, and that his wife
is as stooping, as unkempt, and as decent a person as himself.”
On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was standing
with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of the
beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face,
exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look
of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw
happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though
he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not
his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and
his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as
far away as heaven....
The third bell rang, the whistles sounded, and the train slowly moved
off. First the guard, the station-master, then the garden, the beautiful
girl with her exquisitely sly smile, passed before our windows....
Putting my head out and looking back, I saw how, looking after the
train, she walked along the platform by the window where the telegraph
clerk was sitting, smoothed her hair, and ran into the garden. The
station no longer screened off the sunset, the plain lay open before us,
but the sun had already set and the smoke lay in black clouds over the
green, velvety young corn. It was melancholy in the spring air, and in
the darkening sky, and in the railway carriage.
The familiar figure of the guard came into the carriage, and he began
lighting the candles.
THE SHOEMAKER AND THE DEVIL
IT was Christmas Eve. Marya had long been snoring on the stove; all the
paraffin in the little lamp had burnt out, but Fyodor Nilov still sat at
work. He would long ago have flung aside his work and gone out into the
street, but a customer from Kolokolny Lane, who had a fortnight before
ordered some boots, had been in the previous day, had abused him
roundly, and had ordered him to finish the boots at once before the
morning service.
“It’s a convict’s life!” Fyodor grumbled as he worked. “Some people have
been asleep long ago, others are enjoying themselves, while you sit here
like some Cain and sew for the devil knows whom....”
To save himself from accidentally falling asleep, he kept taking a
bottle from under the table and drinking out of it, and after every pull
at it he twisted his head and said aloud:
“What is the reason, kindly tell me, that customers enjoy themselves
while I am forced to sit and work for them? Because they have money and
I am a beggar?”
He hated all his customers, especially the one who lived in Kolokolny
Lane. He was a gentleman of gloomy appearance, with long hair, a yellow
face, blue spectacles, and a husky voice. He had a German name which one
could not pronounce. It was impossible to tell what was his calling and
what he did. When, a fortnight before, Fyodor had gone to take his
measure, he, the customer, was sitting on the floor pounding something
in a mortar. Before Fyodor had time to say good-morning the contents of
the mortar suddenly flared up and burned with a bright red flame; there
was a stink of sulphur and burnt feathers, and the room was filled with
a thick pink smoke, so that Fyodor sneezed five times; and as he
returned home afterwards, he thought: “Anyone who feared God would not
have anything to do with things like that.”
When there was nothing left in the bottle Fyodor put the boots on the
table and sank into thought. He leaned his heavy head on his fist and
began thinking of his poverty, of his hard life with no glimmer of light
in it. Then he thought of the rich, of their big houses and their
carriages, of their hundred-rouble notes.... How nice it would be if the
houses of these rich men—the devil flay them!—were smashed, if their
horses died, if their fur coats and sable caps got shabby! How splendid
it would be if the rich, little by little, changed into beggars having
nothing, and he, a poor shoemaker, were to become rich, and were to lord
it over some other poor shoemaker on Christmas Eve.
Dreaming like this, Fyodor suddenly thought of his work, and opened his
eyes.
“Here’s a go,” he thought, looking at the boots. “The job has been
finished ever so long ago, and I go on sitting here. I must take the
boots to the gentleman.”
He wrapped up the work in a red handkerchief, put on his things, and
went out into the street. A fine hard snow was falling, pricking the
face as though with needles. It was cold, slippery, dark, the gas-lamps
burned dimly, and for some reason there was a smell of paraffin in the
street, so that Fyodor coughed and cleared his throat. Rich men were
driving to and fro on the road, and every rich man had a ham and a
bottle of vodka in his hands. Rich young ladies peeped at Fyodor out of
the carriages and sledges, put out their tongues and shouted, laughing:
“Beggar! Beggar!”
Students, officers, and merchants walked behind Fyodor, jeering at him
and crying:
“Drunkard! Drunkard! Infidel cobbler! Soul of a boot-leg! Beggar!”
All this was insulting, but Fyodor held his tongue and only spat in
disgust. But when Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw, a master-bootmaker, met
him and said: “I’ve married a rich woman and I have men working under
me, while you are a beggar and have nothing to eat,” Fyodor could not
refrain from running after him. He pursued him till he found himself in
Kolokolny Lane. His customer lived in the fourth house from the corner
on the very top floor. To reach him one had to go through a long, dark
courtyard, and then to climb up a very high slippery stair-case which
tottered under one’s feet. When Fyodor went in to him he was sitting on
the floor pounding something in a mortar, just as he had been the
fortnight before.
“Your honor, I have brought your boots,” said Fyodor sullenly.
The customer got up and began trying on the boots in silence. Desiring
to help him, Fyodor went down on one knee and pulled off his old, boot,
but at once jumped up and staggered towards the door in horror. The
customer had not a foot, but a hoof like a horse’s.
“Aha!” thought Fyodor; “here’s a go!”
The first thing should have been to cross himself, then to leave
everything and run downstairs; but he immediately reflected that he was
meeting a devil for the first and probably the last time, and not to
take advantage of his services would be foolish. He controlled himself
and determined to try his luck. Clasping his hands behind him to avoid
making the sign of the cross, he coughed respectfully and began:
“They say that there is nothing on earth more evil and impure than the
devil, but I am of the opinion, your honor, that the devil is highly
educated. He has—excuse my saying it—hoofs and a tail behind, but he has
more brains than many a student.”
“I like you for what you say,” said the devil, flattered. “Thank you,
shoemaker! What do you want?”
And without loss of time the shoemaker began complaining of his lot. He
began by saying that from his childhood up he had envied the rich. He
had always resented it that all people did not live alike in big houses
and drive with good horses. Why, he asked, was he poor? How was he worse
than Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw, who had his own house, and whose wife
wore a hat? He had the same sort of nose, the same hands, feet, head,
and back, as the rich, and so why was he forced to work when others were
enjoying themselves? Why was he married to Marya and not to a lady
smelling of scent? He had often seen beautiful young ladies in the
houses of rich customers, but they either took no notice of him
whatever, or else sometimes laughed and whispered to each other: “What a
red nose that shoemaker has!” It was true that Marya was a good, kind,
hard-working woman, but she was not educated; her hand was heavy and hit
hard, and if one had occasion to speak of politics or anything
intellectual before her, she would put her spoke in and talk the most
awful nonsense.
“What do you want, then?” his customer interrupted him.
“I beg you, your honor Satan Ivanitch, to be graciously pleased to make
me a rich man.”
“Certainly. Only for that you must give me up your soul! Before the
cocks crow, go and sign on this paper here that you give me up your
soul.”
“Your honor,” said Fyodor politely, “when you ordered a pair of boots
from me I did not ask for the money in advance. One has first to carry
out the order and then ask for payment.”
“Oh, very well!” the customer assented.
A bright flame suddenly flared up in the mortar, a pink thick smoke came
puffing out, and there was a smell of burnt feathers and sulphur. When
the smoke had subsided, Fyodor rubbed his eyes and saw that he was no
longer Fyodor, no longer a shoemaker, but quite a different man, wearing
a waistcoat and a watch-chain, in a new pair of trousers, and that he
was sitting in an armchair at a big table. Two foot men were handing him
dishes, bowing low and saying:
“Kindly eat, your honor, and may it do you good!”
What wealth! The footmen handed him a big piece of roast mutton and a
dish of cucumbers, and then brought in a frying-pan a roast goose, and a
little afterwards boiled pork with horse-radish cream. And how
dignified, how genteel it all was! Fyodor ate, and before each dish
drank a big glass of excellent vodka, like some general or some count.
After the pork he was handed some boiled grain moistened with goose fat,
then an omelette with bacon fat, then fried liver, and he went on eating
and was delighted. What more? They served, too, a pie with onion and
steamed turnip with kvass.
“How is it the gentry don’t burst with such meals?” he thought.
In conclusion they handed him a big pot of honey. After dinner the devil
appeared in blue spectacles and asked with a low bow:
“Are you satisfied with your dinner, Fyodor Pantelyeitch?”
But Fyodor could not answer one word, he was so stuffed after his
dinner. The feeling of repletion was unpleasant, oppressive, and to
distract his thoughts he looked at the boot on his left foot.
“For a boot like that I used not to take less than seven and a half
roubles. What shoemaker made it?” he asked.
“Kuzma Lebyodkin,” answered the footman.
“Send for him, the fool!”
Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw soon made his appearance. He stopped in a
respectful attitude at the door and asked:
“What are your orders, your honor?”
“Hold your tongue!” cried Fyodor, and stamped his foot. “Don’t dare to
argue; remember your place as a cobbler! Blockhead! You don’t know how
to make boots! I’ll beat your ugly phiz to a jelly! Why have you come?”
“For money.”
“What money? Be off! Come on Saturday! Boy, give him a cuff!”
But he at once recalled what a life the customers used to lead him, too,
and he felt heavy at heart, and to distract his attention he took a fat
pocketbook out of his pocket and began counting his money. There was a
great deal of money, but Fyodor wanted more still. The devil in the blue
spectacles brought him another notebook fatter still, but he wanted even
more; and the more he counted it, the more discontented he became.
In the evening the evil one brought him a full-bosomed lady in a red
dress, and said that this was his new wife. He spent the whole evening
kissing her and eating gingerbreads, and at night he went to bed on a
soft, downy feather-bed, turned from side to side, and could not go to
sleep. He felt uncanny.
“We have a great deal of money,” he said to his wife; “we must look out
or thieves will be breaking in. You had better go and look with a
candle.”
He did not sleep all night, and kept getting up to see if his box was
all right. In the morning he had to go to church to matins. In church
the same honor is done to rich and poor alike. When Fyodor was poor he
used to pray in church like this: “God, forgive me, a sinner!” He said
the same thing now though he had become rich. What difference was there?
And after death Fyodor rich would not be buried in gold, not in
diamonds, but in the same black earth as the poorest beggar. Fyodor
would burn in the same fire as cobblers. Fyodor resented all this, and,
too, he felt weighed down all over by his dinner, and instead of prayer
he had all sorts of thoughts in his head about his box of money, about
thieves, about his bartered, ruined soul.
He came out of church in a bad temper. To drive away his unpleasant
thoughts as he had often done before, he struck up a song at the top of
his voice. But as soon as he began a policeman ran up and said, with his
fingers to the peak of his cap:
“Your honor, gentlefolk must not sing in the street! You are not a
shoemaker!”
Fyodor leaned his back against a fence and fell to thinking: what could
he do to amuse himself?
“Your honor,” a porter shouted to him, “don’t lean against the fence,
you will spoil your fur coat!”
Fyodor went into a shop and bought himself the very best concertina,
then went out into the street playing it. Everybody pointed at him and
laughed.
“And a gentleman, too,” the cabmen jeered at him; “like some
cobbler....”
“Is it the proper thing for gentlefolk to be disorderly in the street?”
a policeman said to him. “You had better go into a tavern!”
“Your honor, give us a trifle, for Christ’s sake,” the beggars wailed,
surrounding Fyodor on all sides.
In earlier days when he was a shoemaker the beggars took no notice of
him, now they wouldn’t let him pass.
And at home his new wife, the lady, was waiting for him, dressed in a
green blouse and a red skirt. He meant to be attentive to her, and had
just lifted his arm to give her a good clout on the back, but she said
angrily:
“Peasant! Ignorant lout! You don’t know how to behave with ladies! If
you love me you will kiss my hand; I don’t allow you to beat me.”
“This is a blasted existence!” thought Fyodor. “People do lead a life!
You mustn’t sing, you mustn’t play the concertina, you mustn’t have a
lark with a lady.... Pfoo!”
He had no sooner sat down to tea with the lady when the evil spirit in
the blue spectacles appeared and said:
“Come, Fyodor Pantelyeitch, I have performed my part of the bargain. Now
sign your paper and come along with me!”
And he dragged Fyodor to hell, straight to the furnace, and devils flew
up from all directions and shouted:
“Fool! Blockhead! Ass!”
There was a fearful smell of paraffin in hell, enough to suffocate one.
And suddenly it all vanished. Fyodor opened his eyes and saw his table,
the boots, and the tin lamp. The lamp-glass was black, and from the
faint light on the wick came clouds of stinking smoke as from a chimney.
Near the table stood the customer in the blue spectacles, shouting
angrily:
“Fool! Blockhead! Ass! I’ll give you a lesson, you scoundrel! You took
the order a fortnight ago and the boots aren’t ready yet! Do you suppose
I want to come trapesing round here half a dozen times a day for my
boots? You wretch! you brute!”
Fyodor shook his head and set to work on the boots. The customer went on
swearing and threatening him for a long time. At last when he subsided,
Fyodor asked sullenly:
“And what is your occupation, sir?”
“I make Bengal lights and fireworks. I am a pyrotechnician.”
They began ringing for matins. Fyodor gave the customer the boots, took
the money for them, and went to church.
Carriages and sledges with bearskin rugs were dashing to and fro in the
street; merchants, ladies, officers were walking along the pavement
together with the humbler folk.... But Fyodor did not envy them nor
repine at his lot. It seemed to him now that rich and poor were equally
badly off. Some were able to drive in a carriage, and others to sing
songs at the top of their voice and to play the concertina, but one and
the same thing, the same grave, was awaiting all alike, and there was
nothing in life for which one would give the devil even a tiny scrap of
one’s soul.
The Wife and Other Stories
THE WIFE I
I RECEIVED the following letter:
“DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREITCH!
“Not far from you—that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo—very
distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which I feel it my
duty to write to you. All the peasants of that village sold their
cottages and all their belongings, and set off for the province of
Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there, and have come back. Here,
of course, they have nothing now; everything belongs to other people.
They have settled three or four families in a hut, so that there are no
less than fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the
young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing to
eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of hunger, or
spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The doctor’s assistant
says one goes into a cottage and what does one see? Every one is sick,
every one delirious, some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy;
there is no one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and
nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor)
and his lady assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need
bread which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them,
on the ground that their names have been taken off the register of this
district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and,
besides, the Zemstvo has no money.
“Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg you not
to refuse immediate help.
“Your well-wisher.”
Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal name* or
his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants go on for years
growing more and more convinced every day that they can do nothing, and
yet continue to receive their salaries from people who are living upon
frozen potatoes, and consider they have a right to judge whether I am
humane or not.
*Sobol in Russian means “sable-marten.”—TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.
Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants came every
morning to the servants’ kitchen and went down on their knees there, and
that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen at night out of the barn, the
wall having first been broken in, and by the general depression which
was fostered by conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather—worried
by all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing “A
History of Railways”; I had to read a great number of Russian and
foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make
calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then again
to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a book or began
to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes began bIlinking, I would
get up from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms
of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would
stand still at my study window, and, looking across the wide courtyard,
over the pond and the bare young birch-trees and the great fields
covered with recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the
horizon a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran
down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was Pestrovo,
concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written to me. If it had
not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated
cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter’s
shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss was being made would
have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, motionless,
lifeless, and dreary!
My uneasiness hindered me from working and concentrating myself; I did
not know what it was, and chose to believe it was disappointment. I had
actually given up my post in the Department of Ways and Communications,
and had come here into the country expressly to live in peace and to
devote myself to writing on social questions. It had long been my
cherished dream. And now I had to say good-bye both to peace and to
literature, to give up everything and think only of the peasants. And
that was inevitable, because I was convinced that there was absolutely
nobody in the district except me to help the starving. The people
surrounding me were uneducated, unintellectual, callous, for the most
part dishonest, or if they were honest, they were unreasonable and
unpractical like my wife, for instance. It was impossible to rely on
such people, it was impossible to leave the peasants to their fate, so
that the only thing left to do was to submit to necessity and see to
setting the peasants to rights myself.
I began by making up my mind to give five thousand roubles to the
assistance of the starving peasants. And that did not decrease, but only
aggravated my uneasiness. As I stood by the window or walked about the
rooms I was tormented by the question which had not occurred to me
before: how this money was to be spent. To have bread bought and to go
from hut to hut distributing it was more than one man could do, to say
nothing of the risk that in your haste you might give twice as much to
one who was well-fed or to one who was making money out of his fellows
as to the hungry. I had no faith in the local officials. All these
district captains and tax inspectors were young men, and I distrusted
them as I do all young people of today, who are materialistic and
without ideals. The District Zemstvo, the Peasant Courts, and all the
local institutions, inspired in me not the slightest desire to appeal to
them for assistance. I knew that all these institutions who were busily
engaged in picking out plums from the Zemstvo and the Government pie had
their mouths always wide open for a bite at any other pie that might
turn up.
The idea occurred to me to invite the neighbouring landowners and
suggest to them to organize in my house something like a committee or a
centre to which all subscriptions could be forwarded, and from which
assistance and instructions could be distributed throughout the
district; such an organization, which would render possible frequent
consultations and free control on a big scale, would completely meet my
views. But I imagined the lunches, the dinners, the suppers and the
noise, the waste of time, the verbosity and the bad taste which that
mixed provincial company would inevitably bring into my house, and I
made haste to reject my idea.
As for the members of my own household, the last thing I could look for
was help or support from them. Of my father’s household, of the
household of my childhood, once a big and noisy family, no one remained
but the governess Mademoiselle Marie, or, as she was now called, Marya
Gerasimovna, an absolutely insignificant person. She was a precise
little old lady of seventy, who wore a light grey dress and a cap with
white ribbons, and looked like a china doll. She always sat in the
drawing-room reading.
Whenever I passed by her, she would say, knowing the reason for my
brooding:
“What can you expect, Pasha? I told you how it would be before. You can
judge from our servants.”
My wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the lower storey, all the rooms of
which she occupied. She slept, had her meals, and received her visitors
downstairs in her own rooms, and took not the slightest interest in how
I dined, or slept, or whom I saw. Our relations with one another were
simple and not strained, but cold, empty, and dreary as relations are
between people who have been so long estranged, that even living under
the same roof gives no semblance of nearness. There was no trace now of
the passionate and tormenting love—at one time sweet, at another bitter
as wormwood—which I had once felt for Natalya Gavrilovna. There was
nothing left, either, of the outbursts of the past—the loud
altercations, upbraidings, complaints, and gusts of hatred which had
usually ended in my wife’s going abroad or to her own people, and in my
sending money in small but frequent instalments that I might sting her
pride oftener. (My proud and sensitive wife and her family live at my
expense, and much as she would have liked to do so, my wife could not
refuse my money: that afforded me satisfaction and was one comfort in my
sorrow.) Now when we chanced to meet in the corridor downstairs or in
the yard, I bowed, she smiled graciously. We spoke of the weather, said
that it seemed time to put in the double windows, and that some one with
bells on their harness had driven over the dam. And at such times I read
in her face: “I am faithful to you and am not disgracing your good name
which you think so much about; you are sensible and do not worry me; we
are quits.”
I assured myself that my love had died long ago, that I was too much
absorbed in my work to think seriously of my relations with my wife.
But, alas! that was only what I imagined. When my wife talked aloud
downstairs I listened intently to her voice, though I could not
distinguish one word. When she played the piano downstairs I stood up
and listened. When her carriage or her saddlehorse was brought to the
door, I went to the window and waited to see her out of the house; then
I watched her get into her carriage or mount her horse and ride out of
the yard. I felt that there was something wrong with me, and was afraid
the expression of my eyes or my face might betray me. I looked after my
wife and then watched for her to come back that I might see again from
the window her face, her shoulders, her fur coat, her hat. I felt
dreary, sad, infinitely regretful, and felt inclined in her absence to
walk through her rooms, and longed that the problem that my wife and I
had not been able to solve because our characters were incompatible,
should solve itself in the natural way as soon as possible—that is, that
this beautiful woman of twenty-seven might make haste and grow old, and
that my head might be grey and bald.
One day at lunch my bailiff informed me that the Pestrovo peasants had
begun to pull the thatch off the roofs to feed their cattle. Marya
Gerasimovna looked at me in alarm and perplexity.
“What can I do?” I said to her. “One cannot fight single-handed, and I
have never experienced such loneliness as I do now. I would give a great
deal to find one man in the whole province on whom I could rely.”
“Invite Ivan Ivanitch,” said Marya Gerasimovna.
“To be sure!” I thought, delighted. “That is an idea! C’est raison,” I
hummed, going to my study to write to Ivan Ivanitch. “C’est raison,
c’est raison.”
II
Of all the mass of acquaintances who, in this house twenty-five to
thirty-five years ago, had eaten, drunk, masqueraded, fallen in love,
married, bored us with accounts of their splendid packs of hounds and
horses, the only one still living was Ivan Ivanitch Bragin. At one time
he had been very active, talkative, noisy, and given to falling in love,
and had been famous for his extreme views and for the peculiar charm of
his face, which fascinated men as well as women; now he was an old man,
had grown corpulent, and was living out his days with neither views nor
charm. He came the day after getting my letter, in the evening just as
the samovar was brought into the dining-room and little Marya
Gerasimovna had begun slicing the lemon.
“I am very glad to see you, my dear fellow,” I said gaily, meeting him.
“Why, you are stouter than ever....”
“It isn’t getting stout; it’s swelling,” he answered. “The bees must
have stung me.”
With the familiarity of a man laughing at his own fatness, he put his
arms round my waist and laid on my breast his big soft head, with the
hair combed down on the forehead like a Little Russian’s, and went off
into a thin, aged laugh.
“And you go on getting younger,” he said through his laugh. “I wonder
what dye you use for your hair and beard; you might let me have some of
it.” Sniffing and gasping, he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek.
“You might give me some of it,” he repeated. “Why, you are not forty,
are you?”
“Alas, I am forty-six!” I said, laughing.
Ivan Ivanitch smelt of tallow candles and cooking, and that suited him.
His big, puffy, slow-moving body was swathed in a long frock-coat like a
coachman’s full coat, with a high waist, and with hooks and eyes instead
of buttons, and it would have been strange if he had smelt of eau-de-
Cologne, for instance. In his long, unshaven, bluish double chin, which
looked like a thistle, his goggle eyes, his shortness of breath, and in
the whole of his clumsy, slovenly figure, in his voice, his laugh, and
his words, it was difficult to recognize the graceful, interesting
talker who used in old days to make the husbands of the district jealous
on account of their wives.
“I am in great need of your assistance, my friend,” I said, when we were
sitting in the dining-room, drinking tea. “I want to organize relief for
the starving peasants, and I don’t know how to set about it. So perhaps
you will be so kind as to advise me.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Ivan Ivanitch, sighing. “To be sure, to be sure,
to be sure....”
“I would not have worried you, my dear fellow, but really there is no
one here but you I can appeal to. You know what people are like about
here.”
“To be sure, to be sure, to be sure.... Yes.”
I thought that as we were going to have a serious, business consultation
in which any one might take part, regardless of their position or
personal relations, why should I not invite Natalya Gavrilovna.
“Tres faciunt collegium,” I said gaily. “What if we were to ask Natalya
Gavrilovna? What do you think? Fenya,” I said, turning to the maid, “ask
Natalya Gavrilovna to come upstairs to us, if possible at once. Tell her
it’s a very important matter.”
A little later Natalya Gavrilovna came in. I got up to meet her and
said:
“Excuse us for troubling you, Natalie. We are discussing a very
important matter, and we had the happy thought that we might take
advantage of your good advice, which you will not refuse to give us.
Please sit down.”
Ivan Ivanitch kissed her hand while she kissed his forehead; then, when
we all sat down to the table, he, looking at her tearfully and
blissfully, craned forward to her and kissed her hand again. She was
dressed in black, her hair was carefully arranged, and she smelt of
fresh scent. She had evidently dressed to go out or was expecting
somebody. Coming into the dining-room, she held out her hand to me with
simple friendliness, and smiled to me as graciously as she did to Ivan
Ivanitch—that pleased me; but as she talked she moved her fingers, often
and abruptly leaned back in her chair and talked rapidly, and this
jerkiness in her words and movements irritated me and reminded me of her
native town—Odessa, where the society, men and women alike, had wearied
me by its bad taste.
“I want to do something for the famine-stricken peasants,” I began, and
after a brief pause I went on: “Money, of course, is a great thing, but
to confine oneself to subscribing money, and with that to be satisfied,
would be evading the worst of the trouble. Help must take the form of
money, but the most important thing is a proper and sound organization.
Let us think it over, my friends, and do something.”
Natalya Gavrilovna looked at me inquiringly and shrugged her shoulders
as though to say, “What do I know about it?”
“Yes, yes, famine...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch. “Certainly... yes.”
“It’s a serious position,” I said, “and assistance is needed as soon as
possible. I imagine the first point among the principles which we must
work out ought to be promptitude. We must act on the military principles
of judgment, promptitude, and energy.”
“Yes, promptitude...” repeated Ivan Ivanitch in a drowsy and listless
voice, as though he were dropping asleep. “Only one can’t do anything.
The crops have failed, and so what’s the use of all your judgment and
energy?... It’s the elements.... You can’t go against God and fate.”
“Yes, but that’s what man has a head for, to contend against the
elements.”
“Eh? Yes... that’s so, to be sure.... Yes.”
Ivan Ivanitch sneezed into his handkerchief, brightened up, and as
though he had just woken up, looked round at my wife and me.
“My crops have failed, too.” He laughed a thin little laugh and gave a
sly wink as though this were really funny. “No money, no corn, and a
yard full of labourers like Count Sheremetyev’s. I want to kick them
out, but I haven’t the heart to.”
Natalya Gavrilovna laughed, and began questioning him about his private
affairs. Her presence gave me a pleasure such as I had not felt for a
long time, and I was afraid to look at her for fear my eyes would betray
my secret feeling. Our relations were such that that feeling might seem
surprising and ridiculous.
She laughed and talked with Ivan Ivanitch without being in the least
disturbed that she was in my room and that I was not laughing.
“And so, my friends, what are we to do?” I asked after waiting for a
pause. “I suppose before we do anything else we had better immediately
open a subscription-list. We will write to our friends in the capitals
and in Odessa, Natalie, and ask them to subscribe. When we have got
together a little sum we will begin buying corn and fodder for the
cattle; and you, Ivan Ivanitch, will you be so kind as to undertake
distributing the relief? Entirely relying on your characteristic tact
and efficiency, we will only venture to express a desire that before you
give any relief you make acquaintance with the details of the case on
the spot, and also, which is very important, you should be careful that
corn should be distributed only to those who are in genuine need, and
not to the drunken, the idle, or the dishonest.”
“Yes, yes, yes...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch. “To be sure, to be sure.”
“Well, one won’t get much done with that slobbering wreck,” I thought,
and I felt irritated.
“I am sick of these famine-stricken peasants, bother them! It’s nothing
but grievances with them!” Ivan Ivanitch went on, sucking the rind of
the lemon. “The hungry have a grievance against those who have enough,
and those who have enough have a grievance against the hungry. Yes...
hunger stupefies and maddens a man and makes him savage; hunger is not a
potato. When a man is starving he uses bad language, and steals, and may
do worse.... One must realize that.”
Ivan Ivanitch choked over his tea, coughed, and shook all over with a
squeaky, smothered laughter.
“‘There was a battle at Pol... Poltava,’” he brought out, gesticulating
with both hands in protest against the laughter and coughing which
prevented him from speaking. “‘There was a battle at Poltava!’ When
three years after the Emancipation we had famine in two districts here,
Fyodor Fyodoritch came and invited me to go to him. ‘Come along, come
along,’ he persisted, and nothing else would satisfy him. ‘Very well,
let us go,’ I said. And, so we set off. It was in the evening; there was
snow falling. Towards night we were getting near his place, and suddenly
from the wood came ‘bang!’ and another time ‘bang!’ ‘Oh, damn it
all!’... I jumped out of the sledge, and I saw in the darkness a man
running up to me, knee-deep in the snow. I put my arm round his
shoulder, like this, and knocked the gun out of his hand. Then another
one turned up; I fetched him a knock on the back of his head so that he
grunted and flopped with his nose in the snow. I was a sturdy chap then,
my fist was heavy; I disposed of two of them, and when I turned round
Fyodor was sitting astride of a third. We did not let our three fine
fellows go; we tied their hands behind their backs so that they might
not do us or themselves any harm, and took the fools into the kitchen.
We were angry with them and at the same time ashamed to look at them;
they were peasants we knew, and were good fellows; we were sorry for
them. They were quite stupid with terror. One was crying and begging our
pardon, the second looked like a wild beast and kept swearing, the third
knelt down and began to pray. I said to Fedya: ‘Don’t bear them a
grudge; let them go, the rascals!’ He fed them, gave them a bushel of
flour each, and let them go: ‘Get along with you,’ he said. So that’s
what he did.... The Kingdom of Heaven be his and everlasting peace! He
understood and did not bear them a grudge; but there were some who did,
and how many people they ruined! Yes... Why, over the affair at the
Klotchkovs’ tavern eleven men were sent to the disciplinary battalion.
Yes.... And now, look, it’s the same thing. Anisyin, the investigating
magistrate, stayed the night with me last Thursday, and he told me about
some landowner.... Yes.... They took the wall of his barn to pieces at
night and carried off twenty sacks of rye. When the gentleman heard that
such a crime had been committed, he sent a telegram to the Governor and
another to the police captain, another to the investigating
magistrate!... Of course, every one is afraid of a man who is fond of
litigation. The authorities were in a flutter and there was a general
hubbub. Two villages were searched.”
“Excuse me, Ivan Ivanitch,” I said. “Twenty sacks of rye were stolen
from me, and it was I who telegraphed to the Governor. I telegraphed to
Petersburg, too. But it was by no means out of love for litigation, as
you are pleased to express it, and not because I bore them a grudge. I
look at every subject from the point of view of principle. From the
point of view of the law, theft is the same whether a man is hungry or
not.”
“Yes, yes...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch in confusion. “Of course... To be
sure, yes.”
Natalya Gavrilovna blushed.
“There are people...” she said and stopped; she made an effort to seem
indifferent, but she could not keep it up, and looked into my eyes with
the hatred that I know so well. “There are people,” she said, “for whom
famine and human suffering exist simply that they may vent their hateful
and despicable temperaments upon them.”
I was confused and shrugged my shoulders.
“I meant to say generally,” she went on, “that there are people who are
quite indifferent and completely devoid of all feeling of sympathy, yet
who do not pass human suffering by, but insist on meddling for fear
people should be able to do without them. Nothing is sacred for their
vanity.”
“There are people,” I said softly, “who have an angelic character, but
who express their glorious ideas in such a form that it is difficult to
distinguish the angel from an Odessa market-woman.”
I must confess it was not happily expressed.
My wife looked at me as though it cost her a great effort to hold her
tongue. Her sudden outburst, and then her inappropriate eloquence on the
subject of my desire to help the famine-stricken peasants, were, to say
the least, out of place; when I had invited her to come upstairs I had
expected quite a different attitude to me and my intentions. I cannot
say definitely what I had expected, but I had been agreeably agitated by
the expectation. Now I saw that to go on speaking about the famine would
be difficult and perhaps stupid.
“Yes...” Ivan Ivanitch muttered inappropriately. “Burov, the merchant,
must have four hundred thousand at least. I said to him: ‘Hand over one
or two thousand to the famine. You can’t take it with you when you die,
anyway.’ He was offended. But we all have to die, you know. Death is not
a potato.”
A silence followed again.
“So there’s nothing left for me but to reconcile myself to loneliness,”
I sighed. “One cannot fight single-handed. Well, I will try single-
handed. Let us hope that my campaign against the famine will be more
successful than my campaign against indifference.”
“I am expected downstairs,” said Natalya Gavrilovna.
She got up from the table and turned to Ivan Ivanitch.
“So you will look in upon me downstairs for a minute? I won’t say good-
bye to you.”
And she went away.
Ivan Ivanitch was now drinking his seventh glass of tea, choking,
smacking his lips, and sucking sometimes his moustache, sometimes the
lemon. He was muttering something drowsily and listlessly, and I did not
listen but waited for him to go. At last, with an expression that
suggested that he had only come to me to take a cup of tea, he got up
and began to take leave. As I saw him out I said:
“And so you have given me no advice.”
“Eh? I am a feeble, stupid old man,” he answered. “What use would my
advice be? You shouldn’t worry yourself.... I really don’t know why you
worry yourself. Don’t disturb yourself, my dear fellow! Upon my word,
there’s no need,” he whispered genuinely and affectionately, soothing me
as though I were a child. “Upon my word, there’s no need.”
“No need? Why, the peasants are pulling the thatch off their huts, and
they say there is typhus somewhere already.”
“Well, what of it? If there are good crops next year, they’ll thatch
them again, and if we die of typhus others will live after us. Anyway,
we have to die—if not now, later. Don’t worry yourself, my dear.”
“I can’t help worrying myself,” I said irritably.
We were standing in the dimly lighted vestibule. Ivan Ivanitch suddenly
took me by the elbow, and, preparing to say something evidently very
important, looked at me in silence for a couple of minutes.
“Pavel Andreitch!” he said softly, and suddenly in his puffy, set face
and dark eyes there was a gleam of the expression for which he had once
been famous and which was truly charming. “Pavel Andreitch, I speak to
you as a friend: try to be different! One is ill at ease with you, my
dear fellow, one really is!”
He looked intently into my face; the charming expression faded away, his
eyes grew dim again, and he sniffed and muttered feebly:
“Yes, yes.... Excuse an old man.... It’s all nonsense... yes.”
As he slowly descended the staircase, spreading out his hands to balance
himself and showing me his huge, bulky back and red neck, he gave me the
unpleasant impression of a sort of crab.
“You ought to go away, your Excellency,” he muttered. “To Petersburg or
abroad.... Why should you live here and waste your golden days? You are
young, wealthy, and healthy.... Yes.... Ah, if I were younger I would
whisk away like a hare, and snap my fingers at everything.”
III
My wife’s outburst reminded me of our married life together. In old days
after every such outburst we felt irresistibly drawn to each other; we
would meet and let off all the dynamite that had accumulated in our
souls. And now after Ivan Ivanitch had gone away I had a strong impulse
to go to my wife. I wanted to go downstairs and tell her that her
behaviour at tea had been an insult to me, that she was cruel, petty,
and that her plebeian mind had never risen to a comprehension of what I
was saying and of what I was doing. I walked about the rooms a long time
thinking of what I would say to her and trying to guess what she would
say to me.
That evening, after Ivan Ivanitch went away, I felt in a peculiarly
irritating form the uneasiness which had worried me of late. I could not
sit down or sit still, but kept walking about in the rooms that were
lighted up and keeping near to the one in which Marya Gerasimovna was
sitting. I had a feeling very much like that which I had on the North
Sea during a storm when every one thought that our ship, which had no
freight nor ballast, would overturn. And that evening I understood that
my uneasiness was not disappointment, as I had supposed, but a different
feeling, though what exactly I could not say, and that irritated me more
than ever.
“I will go to her,” I decided. “I can think of a pretext. I shall say
that I want to see Ivan Ivanitch; that will be all.”
I went downstairs and walked without haste over the carpeted floor
through the vestibule and the hall. Ivan Ivanitch was sitting on the
sofa in the drawing-room; he was drinking tea again and muttering
something. My wife was standing opposite to him and holding on to the
back of a chair. There was a gentle, sweet, and docile expression on her
face, such as one sees on the faces of people listening to crazy saints
or holy men when a peculiar hidden significance is imagined in their
vague words and mutterings. There was something morbid, something of a
nun’s exaltation, in my wife’s expression and attitude; and her low-
pitched, half-dark rooms with their old-fashioned furniture, with her
birds asleep in their cages, and with a smell of geranium, reminded me
of the rooms of some abbess or pious old lady.
I went into the drawing-room. My wife showed neither surprise nor
confusion, and looked at me calmly and serenely, as though she had known
I should come.
“I beg your pardon,” I said softly. “I am so glad you have not gone yet,
Ivan Ivanitch. I forgot to ask you, do you know the Christian name of
the president of our Zemstvo?”
“Andrey Stanislavovitch. Yes....”
“Merci,” I said, took out my notebook, and wrote it down.
There followed a silence during which my wife and Ivan Ivanitch were
probably waiting for me to go; my wife did not believe that I wanted to
know the president’s name—I saw that from her eyes.
“Well, I must be going, my beauty,” muttered Ivan Ivanitch, after I had
walked once or twice across the drawing-room and sat down by the
fireplace.
“No,” said Natalya Gavrilovna quickly, touching his hand. “Stay another
quarter of an hour.... Please do!”
Evidently she did not wish to be left alone with me without a witness.
“Oh, well, I’ll wait a quarter of an hour, too,” I thought.
“Why, it’s snowing!” I said, getting up and looking out of window. “A
good fall of snow! Ivan Ivanitch”—I went on walking about the room—“I do
regret not being a sportsman. I can imagine what a pleasure it must be
coursing hares or hunting wolves in snow like this!”
My wife, standing still, watched my movements, looking out of the corner
of her eyes without turning her head. She looked as though she thought I
had a sharp knife or a revolver in my pocket.
“Ivan Ivanitch, do take me out hunting some day,” I went on softly. “I
shall be very, very grateful to you.”
At that moment a visitor came into the room. He was a tall, thick-set
gentleman whom I did not know, with a bald head, a big fair beard, and
little eyes. From his baggy, crumpled clothes and his manners I took him
to be a parish clerk or a teacher, but my wife introduced him to me as
Dr. Sobol.
“Very, very glad to make your acquaintance,” said the doctor in a loud
tenor voice, shaking hands with me warmly, with a naive smile. “Very
glad!”
He sat down at the table, took a glass of tea, and said in a loud voice:
“Do you happen to have a drop of rum or brandy? Have pity on me, Olya,
and look in the cupboard; I am frozen,” he said, addressing the maid.
I sat down by the fire again, looked on, listened, and from time to time
put in a word in the general conversation. My wife smiled graciously to
the visitors and kept a sharp lookout on me, as though I were a wild
beast. She was oppressed by my presence, and this aroused in me
jealousy, annoyance, and an obstinate desire to wound her. “Wife, these
snug rooms, the place by the fire,” I thought, “are mine, have been mine
for years, but some crazy Ivan Ivanitch or Sobol has for some reason
more right to them than I. Now I see my wife, not out of window, but
close at hand, in ordinary home surroundings that I feel the want of now
I am growing older, and, in spite of her hatred for me, I miss her as
years ago in my childhood I used to miss my mother and my nurse. And I
feel that now, on the verge of old age, my love for her is purer and
loftier than it was in the past; and that is why I want to go up to her,
to stamp hard on her toe with my heel, to hurt her and smile as I do
it.”
“Monsieur Marten,” I said, addressing the doctor, “how many hospitals
have we in the district?”
“Sobol,” my wife corrected.
“Two,” answered Sobol.
“And how many deaths are there every year in each hospital?”
“Pavel Andreitch, I want to speak to you,” said my wife.
She apologized to the visitors and went to the next room. I got up and
followed her.
“You will go upstairs to your own rooms this minute,” she said.
“You are ill-bred,” I said to her.
“You will go upstairs to your own rooms this very minute,” she repeated
sharply, and she looked into my face with hatred.
She was standing so near that if I had stooped a little my beard would
have touched her face.
“What is the matter?” I asked. “What harm have I done all at once?”
Her chin quivered, she hastily wiped her eyes, and, with a cursory
glance at the looking-glass, whispered:
“The old story is beginning all over again. Of course you won’t go away.
Well, do as you like. I’ll go away myself, and you stay.”
We returned to the drawing-room, she with a resolute face, while I
shrugged my shoulders and tried to smile. There were some more
visitors—an elderly lady and a young man in spectacles. Without greeting
the new arrivals or taking leave of the others, I went off to my own
rooms.
After what had happened at tea and then again downstairs, it became
clear to me that our “family happiness,” which we had begun to forget
about in the course of the last two years, was through some absurd and
trivial reason beginning all over again, and that neither I nor my wife
could now stop ourselves; and that next day or the day after, the
outburst of hatred would, as I knew by experience of past years, be
followed by something revolting which would upset the whole order of our
lives. “So it seems that during these two years we have grown no wiser,
colder, or calmer,” I thought as I began walking about the rooms. “So
there will again be tears, outcries, curses, packing up, going abroad,
then the continual sickly fear that she will disgrace me with some
coxcomb out there, Italian or Russian, refusing a passport, letters,
utter loneliness, missing her, and in five years old age, grey hairs.” I
walked about, imagining what was really impossible—her, grown handsomer,
stouter, embracing a man I did not know. By now convinced that that
would certainly happen, “‘Why,” I asked myself, “Why, in one of our long
past quarrels, had not I given her a divorce, or why had she not at that
time left me altogether? I should not have had this yearning for her
now, this hatred, this anxiety; and I should have lived out my life
quietly, working and not worrying about anything.”
A carriage with two lamps drove into the yard, then a big sledge with
three horses. My wife was evidently having a party.
Till midnight everything was quiet downstairs and I heard nothing, but
at midnight there was a sound of moving chairs and a clatter of
crockery. So there was supper. Then the chairs moved again, and through
the floor I heard a noise; they seemed to be shouting hurrah. Marya
Gerasimovna was already asleep and I was quite alone in the whole upper
storey; the portraits of my forefathers, cruel, insignificant people,
looked at me from the walls of the drawing-room, and the reflection of
my lamp in the window winked unpleasantly. And with a feeling of
jealousy and envy for what was going on downstairs, I listened and
thought: “I am master here; if I like, I can in a moment turn out all
that fine crew.” But I knew that all that was nonsense, that I could not
turn out any one, and the word “master” had no meaning. One may think
oneself master, married, rich, a kammer-junker, as much as one likes,
and at the same time not know what it means.
After supper some one downstairs began singing in a tenor voice.
“Why, nothing special has happened,” I tried to persuade myself. “Why am
I so upset? I won’t go downstairs tomorrow, that’s all; and that will be
the end of our quarrel.”
At a quarter past one I went to bed.
“Have the visitors downstairs gone?” I asked Alexey as he was undressing
me.
“Yes, sir, they’ve gone.”
“And why were they shouting hurrah?”
“Alexey Dmitritch Mahonov subscribed for the famine fund a thousand
bushels of flour and a thousand roubles. And the old lady—I don’t know
her name—promised to set up a soup kitchen on her estate to feed a
hundred and fifty people. Thank God... Natalya Gavrilovna has been
pleased to arrange that all the gentry should assemble every Friday.”
“To assemble here, downstairs?”
“Yes, sir. Before supper they read a list: since August up to today
Natalya Gavrilovna has collected eight thousand roubles, besides corn.
Thank God.... What I think is that if our mistress does take trouble for
the salvation of her soul, she will soon collect a lot. There are plenty
of rich people here.”
Dismissing Alexey, I put out the light and drew the bedclothes over my
head.
“After all, why am I so troubled?” I thought. “What force draws me to
the starving peasants like a butterfly to a flame? I don’t know them, I
don’t understand them; I have never seen them and I don’t like them. Why
this uneasiness?”
I suddenly crossed myself under the quilt.
“But what a woman she is!” I said to myself, thinking of my wife.
“There’s a regular committee held in the house without my knowing. Why
this secrecy? Why this conspiracy? What have I done to them? Ivan
Ivanitch is right—I must go away.”
Next morning I woke up firmly resolved to go away. The events of the
previous day—the conversation at tea, my wife, Sobol, the supper, my
apprehensions—worried me, and I felt glad to think of getting away from
the surroundings which reminded me of all that. While I was drinking my
coffee the bailiff gave me a long report on various matters. The most
agreeable item he saved for the last.
“The thieves who stole our rye have been found,” he announced with a
smile. “The magistrate arrested three peasants at Pestrovo yesterday.”
“Go away!” I shouted at him; and a propos of nothing, I picked up the
cake-basket and flung it on the floor.
IV
After lunch I rubbed my hands, and thought I must go to my wife and tell
her that I was going away. Why? Who cared? Nobody cares, I answered, but
why shouldn’t I tell her, especially as it would give her nothing but
pleasure? Besides, to go away after our yesterday’s quarrel without
saying a word would not be quite tactful: she might think that I was
frightened of her, and perhaps the thought that she has driven me out of
my house may weigh upon her. It would be just as well, too, to tell her
that I subscribe five thousand, and to give her some advice about the
organization, and to warn her that her inexperience in such a
complicated and responsible matter might lead to most lamentable
results. In short, I wanted to see my wife, and while I thought of
various pretexts for going to her, I had a firm conviction in my heart
that I should do so.
It was still light when I went in to her, and the lamps had not yet been
lighted. She was sitting in her study, which led from the drawing-room
to her bedroom, and, bending low over the table, was writing something
quickly. Seeing me, she started, got up from the table, and remained
standing in an attitude such as to screen her papers from me.
“I beg your pardon, I have only come for a minute,” I said, and, I don’t
know why, I was overcome with embarrassment. “I have learnt by chance
that you are organizing relief for the famine, Natalie.”
“Yes, I am. But that’s my business,” she answered.
“Yes, it is your business,” I said softly. “I am glad of it, for it just
fits in with my intentions. I beg your permission to take part in it.”
“Forgive me, I cannot let you do it,” she said in response, and looked
away.
“Why not, Natalie?” I said quietly. “Why not? I, too, am well fed and I,
too, want to help the hungry.”
“I don’t know what it has to do with you,” she said with a contemptuous
smile, shrugging her shoulders. “Nobody asks you.”
“Nobody asks you, either, and yet you have got up a regular committee in
my house,” I said.
“I am asked, but you can have my word for it no one will ever ask you.
Go and help where you are not known.”
“For God’s sake, don’t talk to me in that tone.” I tried to be mild, and
besought myself most earnestly not to lose my temper. For the first few
minutes I felt glad to be with my wife. I felt an atmosphere of youth,
of home, of feminine softness, of the most refined elegance—exactly what
was lacking on my floor and in my life altogether. My wife was wearing a
pink flannel dressing-gown; it made her look much younger, and gave a
softness to her rapid and sometimes abrupt movements. Her beautiful dark
hair, the mere sight of which at one time stirred me to passion, had
from sitting so long with her head bent come loose from the comb and was
untidy, but, to my eyes, that only made it look more rich and luxuriant.
All this, though is banal to the point of vulgarity. Before me stood an
ordinary woman, perhaps neither beautiful nor elegant, but this was my
wife with whom I had once lived, and with whom I should have been living
to this day if it had not been for her unfortunate character; she was
the one human being on the terrestrial globe whom I loved. At this
moment, just before going away, when I knew that I should no longer see
her even through the window, she seemed to me fascinating even as she
was, cold and forbidding, answering me with a proud and contemptuous
mockery. I was proud of her, and confessed to myself that to go away
from her was terrible and impossible.
“Pavel Andreitch,” she said after a brief silence, “for two years we
have not interfered with each other but have lived quietly. Why do you
suddenly feel it necessary to go back to the past? Yesterday you came to
insult and humiliate me,” she went on, raising her voice, and her face
flushed and her eyes flamed with hatred; “but restrain yourself; do not
do it, Pavel Andreitch! Tomorrow I will send in a petition and they will
give me a passport, and I will go away; I will go! I will go! I’ll go
into a convent, into a widows’ home, into an almshouse....”
“Into a lunatic asylum!” I cried, not able to restrain myself.
“Well, even into a lunatic asylum! That would be better, that would be
better,” she cried, with flashing eyes. “When I was in Pestrovo today I
envied the sick and starving peasant women because they are not living
with a man like you. They are free and honest, while, thanks to you, I
am a parasite, I am perishing in idleness, I eat your bread, I spend
your money, and I repay you with my liberty and a fidelity which is of
no use to any one. Because you won’t give me a passport, I must respect
your good name, though it doesn’t exist.”
I had to keep silent. Clenching my teeth, I walked quickly into the
drawing-room, but turned back at once and said:
“I beg you earnestly that there should be no more assemblies, plots, and
meetings of conspirators in my house! I only admit to my house those
with whom I am acquainted, and let all your crew find another place to
do it if they want to take up philanthropy. I can’t allow people at
midnight in my house to be shouting hurrah at successfully exploiting an
hysterical woman like you!”
My wife, pale and wringing her hands, took a rapid stride across the
room, uttering a prolonged moan as though she had toothache. With a wave
of my hand, I went into the drawing-room. I was choking with rage, and
at the same time I was trembling with terror that I might not restrain
myself, and that I might say or do something which I might regret all my
life. And I clenched my hands tight, hoping to hold myself in.
After drinking some water and recovering my calm a little, I went back
to my wife. She was standing in the same attitude as before, as though
barring my approach to the table with the papers. Tears were slowly
trickling down her pale, cold face. I paused then and said to her
bitterly but without anger:
“How you misunderstand me! How unjust you are to me! I swear upon my
honour I came to you with the best of motives, with nothing but the
desire to do good!”
“Pavel Andreitch!” she said, clasping her hands on her bosom, and her
face took on the agonized, imploring expression with which frightened,
weeping children beg not to be punished, “I know perfectly well that you
will refuse me, but still I beg you. Force yourself to do one kind
action in your life. I entreat you, go away from here! That’s the only
thing you can do for the starving peasants. Go away, and I will forgive
you everything, everything!”
“There is no need for you to insult me, Natalie,” I sighed, feeling a
sudden rush of humility. “I had already made up my mind to go away, but
I won’t go until I have done something for the peasants. It’s my duty!”
“Ach!” she said softly with an impatient frown. “You can make an
excellent bridge or railway, but you can do nothing for the starving
peasants. Do understand!”
“Indeed? Yesterday you reproached me with indifference and with being
devoid of the feeling of compassion. How well you know me!” I laughed.
“You believe in God—well, God is my witness that I am worried day and
night....”
“I see that you are worried, but the famine and compassion have nothing
to do with it. You are worried because the starving peasants can get on
without you, and because the Zemstvo, and in fact every one who is
helping them, does not need your guidance.”
I was silent, trying to suppress my irritation. Then I said:
“I came to speak to you on business. Sit down. Please sit down.”
She did not sit down.
“I beg you to sit down,” I repeated, and I motioned her to a chair.
She sat down. I sat down, too, thought a little, and said:
“I beg you to consider earnestly what I am saying. Listen.... Moved by
love for your fellow-creatures, you have undertaken the organization of
famine relief. I have nothing against that, of course; I am completely
in sympathy with you, and am prepared to co-operate with you in every
way, whatever our relations may be. But, with all my respect for your
mind and your heart... and your heart,” I repeated, “I cannot allow such
a difficult, complex, and responsible matter as the organization of
relief to be left in your hands entirely. You are a woman, you are
inexperienced, you know nothing of life, you are too confiding and
expansive. You have surrounded yourself with assistants whom you know
nothing about. I am not exaggerating if I say that under these
conditions your work will inevitably lead to two deplorable
consequences. To begin with, our district will be left unrelieved; and,
secondly, you will have to pay for your mistakes and those of your
assistants, not only with your purse, but with your reputation. The
money deficit and other losses I could, no doubt, make good, but who
could restore you your good name? When through lack of proper
supervision and oversight there is a rumour that you, and consequently
I, have made two hundred thousand over the famine fund, will your
assistants come to your aid?”
She said nothing.
“Not from vanity, as you say,” I went on, “but simply that the starving
peasants may not be left unrelieved and your reputation may not be
injured, I feel it my moral duty to take part in your work.”
“Speak more briefly,” said my wife.
“You will be so kind,” I went on, “as to show me what has been
subscribed so far and what you have spent. Then inform me daily of every
fresh subscription in money or kind, and of every fresh outlay. You will
also give me, Natalie, the list of your helpers. Perhaps they are quite
decent people; I don’t doubt it; but, still, it is absolutely necessary
to make inquiries.”
She was silent. I got up, and walked up and down the room.
“Let us set to work, then,” I said, and I sat down to her table.
“Are you in earnest?” she asked, looking at me in alarm and
bewilderment.
“Natalie, do be reasonable!” I said appealingly, seeing from her face
that she meant to protest. “I beg you, trust my experience and my sense
of honour.”
“I don’t understand what you want.”
“Show me how much you have collected and how much you have spent.”
“I have no secrets. Any one may see. Look.”
On the table lay five or six school exercise books, several sheets of
notepaper covered with writing, a map of the district, and a number of
pieces of paper of different sizes. It was getting dusk. I lighted a
candle.
“Excuse me, I don’t see anything yet,” I said, turning over the leaves
of the exercise books. “Where is the account of the receipt of money
subscriptions?”
“That can be seen from the subscription lists.”
“Yes, but you must have an account,” I said, smiling at her naivete.
“Where are the letters accompanying the subscriptions in money or in
kind? Pardon, a little practical advice, Natalie: it’s absolutely
necessary to keep those letters. You ought to number each letter and
make a special note of it in a special record. You ought to do the same
with your own letters. But I will do all that myself.”
“Do so, do so...” she said.
I was very much pleased with myself. Attracted by this living
interesting work, by the little table, the naive exercise books and the
charm of doing this work in my wife’s society, I was afraid that my wife
would suddenly hinder me and upset everything by some sudden whim, and
so I was in haste and made an effort to attach no consequence to the
fact that her lips were quivering, and that she was looking about her
with a helpless and frightened air like a wild creature in a trap.
“I tell you what, Natalie,” I said without looking at her; “let me take
all these papers and exercise books upstairs to my study. There I will
look through them and tell you what I think about it tomorrow. Have you
any more papers?” I asked, arranging the exercise books and sheets of
papers in piles.
“Take them, take them all!” said my wife, helping me to arrange them,
and big tears ran down her cheeks. “Take it all! That’s all that was
left me in life.... Take the last.”
“Ach! Natalie, Natalie!” I sighed reproachfully.
She opened the drawer in the table and began flinging the papers out of
it on the table at random, poking me in the chest with her elbow and
brushing my face with her hair; as she did so, copper coins kept
dropping upon my knees and on the floor.
“Take everything!” she said in a husky voice.
When she had thrown out the papers she walked away from me, and putting
both hands to her head, she flung herself on the couch. I picked up the
money, put it back in the drawer, and locked it up that the servants
might not be led into dishonesty; then I gathered up all the papers and
went off with them. As I passed my wife I stopped and, looking at her
back and shaking shoulders, I said:
“What a baby you are, Natalie! Fie, fie! Listen, Natalie: when you
realize how serious and responsible a business it is you will be the
first to thank me. I assure you you will.”
In my own room I set to work without haste. The exercise books were not
bound, the pages were not numbered. The entries were put in all sorts of
handwritings; evidently any one who liked had a hand in managing the
books. In the record of the subscriptions in kind there was no note of
their money value. But, excuse me, I thought, the rye which is now worth
one rouble fifteen kopecks may be worth two roubles fifteen kopecks in
two months’ time! Was that the way to do things? Then, “Given to A. M.
Sobol 32 roubles.” When was it given? For what purpose was it given?
Where was the receipt? There was nothing to show, and no making anything
of it. In case of legal proceedings, these papers would only obscure the
case.
“How naive she is!” I thought with surprise. “What a child!”
I felt both vexed and amused.
V
My wife had already collected eight thousand; with my five it would be
thirteen thousand. For a start that was very good. The business which
had so worried and interested me was at last in my hands; I was doing
what the others would not and could not do; I was doing my duty,
organizing the relief fund in a practical and business-like way.
Everything seemed to be going in accordance with my desires and
intentions; but why did my feeling of uneasiness persist? I spent four
hours over my wife’s papers, making out their meaning and correcting her
mistakes, but instead of feeling soothed, I felt as though some one were
standing behind me and rubbing my back with a rough hand. What was it I
wanted? The organization of the relief fund had come into trustworthy
hands, the hungry would be fed—what more was wanted?
The four hours of this light work for some reason exhausted me, so that
I could not sit bending over the table nor write. From below I heard
from time to time a smothered moan; it was my wife sobbing. Alexey,
invariably meek, sleepy, and sanctimonious, kept coming up to the table
to see to the candles, and looked at me somewhat strangely.
“Yes, I must go away,” I decided at last, feeling utterly exhausted. “As
far as possible from these agreeable impressions! I will set off
tomorrow.”
I gathered together the papers and exercise books, and went down to my
wife. As, feeling quite worn out and shattered, I held the papers and
the exercise books to my breast with both hands, and passing through my
bedroom saw my trunks, the sound of weeping reached me through the
floor.
“Are you a kammer-junker?” a voice whispered in my ear. “That’s a very
pleasant thing. But yet you are a reptile.”
“It’s all nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” I muttered as I went
downstairs. “Nonsense... and it’s nonsense, too, that I am actuated by
vanity or a love of display.... What rubbish! Am I going to get a
decoration for working for the peasants or be made the director of a
department? Nonsense, nonsense! And who is there to show off to here in
the country?”
I was tired, frightfully tired, and something kept whispering in my ear:
“Very pleasant. But, still, you are a reptile.” For some reason I
remembered a line out of an old poem I knew as a child: “How pleasant it
is to be good!”
My wife was lying on the couch in the same attitude, on her face and
with her hands clutching her head. She was crying. A maid was standing
beside her with a perplexed and frightened face. I sent the maid away,
laid the papers on the table, thought a moment and said:
“Here are all your papers, Natalie. It’s all in order, it’s all capital,
and I am very much pleased. I am going away tomorrow.”
She went on crying. I went into the drawing-room and sat there in the
dark. My wife’s sobs, her sighs, accused me of something, and to justify
myself I remembered the whole of our quarrel, starting from my unhappy
idea of inviting my wife to our consultation and ending with the
exercise books and these tears. It was an ordinary attack of our
conjugal hatred, senseless and unseemly, such as had been frequent
during our married life, but what had the starving peasants to do with
it? How could it have happened that they had become a bone of contention
between us? It was just as though pursuing one another we had
accidentally run up to the altar and had carried on a quarrel there.
“Natalie,” I said softly from the drawing-room, “hush, hush!”
To cut short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing state of
affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and comforted her, caressed
her, or apologized; but how could I do it so that she would believe me?
How could I persuade the wild duck, living in captivity and hating me,
that it was dear to me, and that I felt for its sufferings? I had never
known my wife, so I had never known how to talk to her or what to talk
about. Her appearance I knew very well and appreciated it as it
deserved, but her spiritual, moral world, her mind, her outlook on life,
her frequent changes of mood, her eyes full of hatred, her disdain, the
scope and variety of her reading which sometimes struck me, or, for
instance, the nun-like expression I had seen on her face the day
before—all that was unknown and incomprehensible to me. When in my
collisions with her I tried to define what sort of a person she was, my
psychology went no farther than deciding that she was giddy,
impractical, ill-tempered, guided by feminine logic; and it seemed to me
that that was quite sufficient. But now that she was crying I had a
passionate desire to know more.
The weeping ceased. I went up to my wife. She sat up on the couch, and,
with her head propped in both hands, looked fixedly and dreamily at the
fire.
“I am going away tomorrow morning,” I said.
She said nothing. I walked across the room, sighed, and said:
“Natalie, when you begged me to go away, you said: ‘I will forgive you
everything, everything’.... So you think I have wronged you. I beg you
calmly and in brief terms to formulate the wrong I’ve done you.”
“I am worn out. Afterwards, some time...” said my wife.
“How am I to blame?” I went on. “What have I done? Tell me: you are
young and beautiful, you want to live, and I am nearly twice your age
and hated by you, but is that my fault? I didn’t marry you by force. But
if you want to live in freedom, go; I’ll give you your liberty. You can
go and love whom you please.... I will give you a divorce.”
“That’s not what I want,” she said. “You know I used to love you and
always thought of myself as older than you. That’s all nonsense.... You
are not to blame for being older or for my being younger, or that I
might be able to love some one else if I were free; but because you are
a difficult person, an egoist, and hate every one.”
“Perhaps so. I don’t know,” I said.
“Please go away. You want to go on at me till the morning, but I warn
you I am quite worn out and cannot answer you. You promised me to go to
town. I am very grateful; I ask nothing more.”
My wife wanted me to go away, but it was not easy for me to do that. I
was dispirited and I dreaded the big, cheerless, chill rooms that I was
so weary of. Sometimes when I had an ache or a pain as a child, I used
to huddle up to my mother or my nurse, and when I hid my face in the
warm folds of their dress, it seemed to me as though I were hiding from
the pain. And in the same way it seemed to me now that I could only hide
from my uneasiness in this little room beside my wife. I sat down and
screened away the light from my eyes with my hand.... There was a
stillness.
“How are you to blame?” my wife said after a long silence, looking at me
with red eyes that gleamed with tears. “You are very well educated and
very well bred, very honest, just, and high-principled, but in you the
effect of all that is that wherever you go you bring suffocation,
oppression, something insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree.
You have a straightforward way of looking at things, and so you hate the
whole world. You hate those who have faith, because faith is an
expression of ignorance and lack of culture, and at the same time you
hate those who have no faith for having no faith and no ideals; you hate
old people for being conservative and behind the times, and young people
for free-thinking. The interests of the peasantry and of Russia are dear
to you, and so you hate the peasants because you suspect every one of
them of being a thief and a robber. You hate every one. You are just,
and always take your stand on your legal rights, and so you are always
at law with the peasants and your neighbours. You have had twenty
bushels of rye stolen, and your love of order has made you complain of
the peasants to the Governor and all the local authorities, and to send
a complaint of the local authorities to Petersburg. Legal justice!” said
my wife, and she laughed. “On the ground of your legal rights and in the
interests of morality, you refuse to give me a passport. Law and
morality is such that a self-respecting healthy young woman has to spend
her life in idleness, in depression, and in continual apprehension, and
to receive in return board and lodging from a man she does not love. You
have a thorough knowledge of the law, you are very honest and just, you
respect marriage and family life, and the effect of all that is that all
your life you have not done one kind action, that every one hates you,
that you are on bad terms with every one, and the seven years that you
have been married you’ve only lived seven months with your wife. You’ve
had no wife and I’ve had no husband. To live with a man like you is
impossible; there is no way of doing it. In the early years I was
frightened with you, and now I am ashamed.... That’s how my best years
have been wasted. When I fought with you I ruined my temper, grew
shrewish, coarse, timid, mistrustful.... Oh, but what’s the use of
talking! As though you wanted to understand! Go upstairs, and God be
with you!”
My wife lay down on the couch and sank into thought.
“And how splendid, how enviable life might have been!” she said softly,
looking reflectively into the fire. “What a life it might have been!
There’s no bringing it back now.”
Any one who has lived in the country in winter and knows those long
dreary, still evenings when even the dogs are too bored to bark and even
the clocks seem weary of ticking, and any one who on such evenings has
been troubled by awakening conscience and has moved restlessly about,
trying now to smother his conscience, now to interpret it, will
understand the distraction and the pleasure my wife’s voice gave me as
it sounded in the snug little room, telling me I was a bad man. I did
not understand what was wanted of me by my conscience, and my wife,
translating it in her feminine way, made clear to me in the meaning of
my agitation. As often before in the moments of intense uneasiness, I
guessed that the whole secret lay, not in the starving peasants, but in
my not being the sort of a man I ought to be.
My wife got up with an effort and came up to me.
“Pavel Andreitch,” she said, smiling mournfully, “forgive me, I don’t
believe you: you are not going away, but I will ask you one more favour.
Call this”—she pointed to her papers—“self-deception, feminine logic, a
mistake, as you like; but do not hinder me. It’s all that is left me in
life.” She turned away and paused. “Before this I had nothing. I have
wasted my youth in fighting with you. Now I have caught at this and am
living; I am happy.... It seems to me that I have found in this a means
of justifying my existence.”
“Natalie, you are a good woman, a woman of ideas,” I said, looking at my
wife enthusiastically, “and everything you say and do is intelligent and
fine.”
I walked about the room to conceal my emotion.
“Natalie,” I went on a minute later, “before I go away, I beg of you as
a special favour, help me to do something for the starving peasants!”
“What can I do?” said my wife, shrugging her shoulders. “Here’s the
subscription list.”
She rummaged among the papers and found the subscription list.
“Subscribe some money,” she said, and from her tone I could see that she
did not attach great importance to her subscription list; “that is the
only way in which you can take part in the work.”
I took the list and wrote: “Anonymous, 5,000.”
In this “anonymous” there was something wrong, false, conceited, but I
only realized that when I noticed that my wife flushed very red and
hurriedly thrust the list into the heap of papers. We both felt ashamed;
I felt that I must at all costs efface this clumsiness at once, or else
I should feel ashamed afterwards, in the train and at Petersburg. But
how efface it? What was I to say?
“I fully approve of what you are doing, Natalie,” I said genuinely, “and
I wish you every success. But allow me at parting to give you one piece
of advice, Natalie; be on your guard with Sobol, and with your
assistants generally, and don’t trust them blindly. I don’t say they are
not honest, but they are not gentlefolks; they are people with no ideas,
no ideals, no faith, with no aim in life, no definite principles, and
the whole object of their life is comprised in the rouble. Rouble,
rouble, rouble!” I sighed. “They are fond of getting money easily, for
nothing, and in that respect the better educated they are the more they
are to be dreaded.”
My wife went to the couch and lay down.
“Ideas,” she brought out, listlessly and reluctantly, “ideas, ideals,
objects of life, principles....you always used to use those words when
you wanted to insult or humiliate some one, or say something unpleasant.
Yes, that’s your way: if with your views and such an attitude to people
you are allowed to take part in anything, you would destroy it from the
first day. It’s time you understand that.”
She sighed and paused.
“It’s coarseness of character, Pavel Andreitch,” she said. “You are
well-bred and educated, but what a... Scythian you are in reality!
That’s because you lead a cramped life full of hatred, see no one, and
read nothing but your engineering books. And, you know, there are good
people, good books! Yes... but I am exhausted and it wearies me to talk.
I ought to be in bed.”
“So I am going away, Natalie,” I said.
“Yes... yes.... Merci....”
I stood still for a little while, then went upstairs. An hour later—it
was half-past one—I went downstairs again with a candle in my hand to
speak to my wife. I didn’t know what I was going to say to her, but I
felt that I must say some thing very important and necessary. She was
not in her study, the door leading to her bedroom was closed.
“Natalie, are you asleep?” I asked softly.
There was no answer.
I stood near the door, sighed, and went into the drawing-room. There I
sat down on the sofa, put out the candle, and remained sitting in the
dark till the dawn.
VI
I went to the station at ten o’clock in the morning. There was no frost,
but snow was falling in big wet flakes and an unpleasant damp wind was
blowing.
We passed a pond and then a birch copse, and then began going uphill
along the road which I could see from my window. I turned round to take
a last look at my house, but I could see nothing for the snow. Soon
afterwards dark huts came into sight ahead of us as in a fog. It was
Pestrovo.
“If I ever go out of my mind, Pestrovo will be the cause of it,” I
thought. “It persecutes me.”
We came out into the village street. All the roofs were intact, not one
of them had been pulled to pieces; so my bailiff had told a lie. A boy
was pulling along a little girl and a baby in a sledge. Another boy of
three, with his head wrapped up like a peasant woman’s and with huge
mufflers on his hands, was trying to catch the flying snowflakes on his
tongue, and laughing. Then a wagon loaded with fagots came toward us and
a peasant walking beside it, and there was no telling whether his beard
was white or whether it was covered with snow. He recognized my
coachman, smiled at him and said something, and mechanically took off
his hat to me. The dogs ran out of the yards and looked inquisitively at
my horses. Everything was quiet, ordinary, as usual. The emigrants had
returned, there was no bread; in the huts “some were laughing, some were
delirious”; but it all looked so ordinary that one could not believe it
really was so. There were no distracted faces, no voices whining for
help, no weeping, nor abuse, but all around was stillness, order, life,
children, sledges, dogs with dishevelled tails. Neither the children nor
the peasant we met were troubled; why was I so troubled?
Looking at the smiling peasant, at the boy with the huge mufflers, at
the huts, remembering my wife, I realized there was no calamity that
could daunt this people; I felt as though there were already a breath of
victory in the air. I felt proud and felt ready to cry out that I was
with them too; but the horses were carrying us away from the village
into the open country, the snow was whirling, the wind was howling, and
I was left alone with my thoughts. Of the million people working for the
peasantry, life itself had cast me out as a useless, incompetent, bad
man. I was a hindrance, a part of the people’s calamity; I was
vanquished, cast out, and I was hurrying to the station to go away and
hide myself in Petersburg in a hotel in Bolshaya Morskaya.
An hour later we reached the station. The coachman and a porter with a
disc on his breast carried my trunks into the ladies’ room. My coachman
Nikanor, wearing high felt boots and the skirt of his coat tucked up
through his belt, all wet with the snow and glad I was going away, gave
me a friendly smile and said:
“A fortunate journey, your Excellency. God give you luck.”
Every one, by the way, calls me “your Excellency,” though I am only a
collegiate councillor and a kammer-junker. The porter told me the train
had not yet left the next station; I had to wait. I went outside, and
with my head heavy from my sleepless night, and so exhausted I could
hardly move my legs, I walked aimlessly towards the pump. There was not
a soul anywhere near.
“Why am I going?” I kept asking myself. “What is there awaiting me
there? The acquaintances from whom I have come away, loneliness,
restaurant dinners, noise, the electric light, which makes my eyes ache.
Where am I going, and what am I going for? What am I going for?”
And it seemed somehow strange to go away without speaking to my wife. I
felt that I was leaving her in uncertainty. Going away, I ought to have
told that she was right, that I really was a bad man.
When I turned away from the pump, I saw in the doorway the station-
master, of whom I had twice made complaints to his superiors, turning up
the collar of his coat, shrinking from the wind and the snow. He came up
to me, and putting two fingers to the peak of his cap, told me with an
expression of helpless confusion, strained respectfulness, and hatred on
his face, that the train was twenty minutes late, and asked me would I
not like to wait in the warm?
“Thank you,” I answered, “but I am probably not going. Send word to my
coachman to wait; I have not made up my mind.”
I walked to and fro on the platform and thought, should I go away or
not? When the train came in I decided not to go. At home I had to expect
my wife’s amazement and perhaps her mockery, the dismal upper storey and
my uneasiness; but, still, at my age that was easier and as it were more
homelike than travelling for two days and nights with strangers to
Petersburg, where I should be conscious every minute that my life was of
no use to any one or to anything, and that it was approaching its end.
No, better at home whatever awaited me there.... I went out of the
station. It was awkward by daylight to return home, where every one was
so glad at my going. I might spend the rest of the day till evening at
some neighbour’s, but with whom? With some of them I was on strained
relations, others I did not know at all. I considered and thought of
Ivan Ivanitch.
“We are going to Bragino!” I said to the coachman, getting into the
sledge.
“It’s a long way,” sighed Nikanor; “it will be twenty miles, or maybe
twenty-five.”
“Oh, please, my dear fellow,” I said in a tone as though Nikanor had the
right to refuse. “Please let us go!”
Nikanor shook his head doubtfully and said slowly that we really ought
to have put in the shafts, not Circassian, but Peasant or Siskin; and
uncertainly, as though expecting I should change my mind, took the reins
in his gloves, stood up, thought a moment, and then raised his whip.
“A whole series of inconsistent actions...” I thought, screening my face
from the snow. “I must have gone out of my mind. Well, I don’t care....”
In one place, on a very high and steep slope, Nikanor carefully held the
horses in to the middle of the descent, but in the middle the horses
suddenly bolted and dashed downhill at a fearful rate; he raised his
elbows and shouted in a wild, frantic voice such as I had never heard
from him before:
“Hey! Let’s give the general a drive! If you come to grief he’ll buy new
ones, my darlings! Hey! look out! We’ll run you down!”
Only now, when the extraordinary pace we were going at took my breath
away, I noticed that he was very drunk. He must have been drinking at
the station. At the bottom of the descent there was the crash of ice; a
piece of dirty frozen snow thrown up from the road hit me a painful blow
in the face.
The runaway horses ran up the hill as rapidly as they had downhill, and
before I had time to shout to Nikanor my sledge was flying along on the
level in an old pine forest, and the tall pines were stretching out
their shaggy white paws to me from all directions.
“I have gone out of my mind, and the coachman’s drunk,” I thought.
“Good!”
I found Ivan Ivanitch at home. He laughed till he coughed, laid his head
on my breast, and said what he always did say on meeting me:
“You grow younger and younger. I don’t know what dye you use for your
hair and your beard; you might give me some of it.”
“I’ve come to return your call, Ivan Ivanitch,” I said untruthfully.
“Don’t be hard on me; I’m a townsman, conventional; I do keep count of
calls.”
“I am delighted, my dear fellow. I am an old man; I like respect....
Yes.”
From his voice and his blissfully smiling face, I could see that he was
greatly flattered by my visit. Two peasant women helped me off with my
coat in the entry, and a peasant in a red shirt hung it on a hook, and
when Ivan Ivanitch and I went into his little study, two barefooted
little girls were sitting on the floor looking at a picture-book; when
they saw us they jumped up and ran away, and a tall, thin old woman in
spectacles came in at once, bowed gravely to me, and picking up a pillow
from the sofa and a picture-book from the floor, went away. From the
adjoining rooms we heard incessant whispering and the patter of bare
feet.
“I am expecting the doctor to dinner,” said Ivan Ivanitch. “He promised
to come from the relief centre. Yes. He dines with me every Wednesday,
God bless him.” He craned towards me and kissed me on the neck. “You
have come, my dear fellow, so you are not vexed,” he whispered,
sniffing. “Don’t be vexed, my dear creature. Yes. Perhaps it is
annoying, but don’t be cross. My only prayer to God before I die is to
live in peace and harmony with all in the true way. Yes.”
“Forgive me, Ivan Ivanitch, I will put my feet on a chair,” I said,
feeling that I was so exhausted I could not be myself; I sat further
back on the sofa and put up my feet on an arm-chair. My face was burning
from the snow and the wind, and I felt as though my whole body were
basking in the warmth and growing weaker from it.
“It’s very nice here,” I went on—“warm, soft, snug... and goose-feather
pens,” I laughed, looking at the writing-table; “sand instead of
blotting-paper.”
“Eh? Yes... yes.... The writing-table and the mahogany cupboard here
were made for my father by a self-taught cabinet-maker—Glyeb Butyga, a
serf of General Zhukov’s. Yes... a great artist in his own way.”
Listlessly and in the tone of a man dropping asleep, he began telling me
about cabinet-maker Butyga. I listened. Then Ivan Ivanitch went into the
next room to show me a polisander wood chest of drawers remarkable for
its beauty and cheapness. He tapped the chest with his fingers, then
called my attention to a stove of patterned tiles, such as one never
sees now. He tapped the stove, too, with his fingers. There was an
atmosphere of good-natured simplicity and well-fed abundance about the
chest of drawers, the tiled stove, the low chairs, the pictures
embroidered in wool and silk on canvas in solid, ugly frames. When one
remembers that all those objects were standing in the same places and
precisely in the same order when I was a little child, and used to come
here to name-day parties with my mother, it is simply unbelievable that
they could ever cease to exist.
I thought what a fearful difference between Butyga and me! Butyga who
made things, above all, solidly and substantially, and seeing in that
his chief object, gave to length of life peculiar significance, had no
thought of death, and probably hardly believed in its possibility; I,
when I built my bridges of iron and stone which would last a thousand
years, could not keep from me the thought, “It’s not for long....it’s no
use.” If in time Butyga’s cupboard and my bridge should come under the
notice of some sensible historian of art, he would say: “These were two
men remarkable in their own way: Butyga loved his fellow-creatures and
would not admit the thought that they might die and be annihilated, and
so when he made his furniture he had the immortal man in his mind. The
engineer Asorin did not love life or his fellow-creatures; even in the
happy moments of creation, thoughts of death, of finiteness and
dissolution, were not alien to him, and we see how insignificant and
finite, how timid and poor, are these lines of his....”
“I only heat these rooms,” muttered Ivan Ivanitch, showing me his rooms.
“Ever since my wife died and my son was killed in the war, I have kept
the best rooms shut up. Yes... see...”
He opened a door, and I saw a big room with four columns, an old piano,
and a heap of peas on the floor; it smelt cold and damp.
“The garden seats are in the next room...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch.
“There’s no one to dance the mazurka now.... I’ve shut them up.”
We heard a noise. It was Dr. Sobol arriving. While he was rubbing his
cold hands and stroking his wet beard, I had time to notice in the first
place that he had a very dull life, and so was pleased to see Ivan
Ivanitch and me; and, secondly, that he was a naive and simple-hearted
man. He looked at me as though I were very glad to see him and very much
interested in him.
“I have not slept for two nights,” he said, looking at me naively and
stroking his beard. “One night with a confinement, and the next I stayed
at a peasant’s with the bugs biting me all night. I am as sleepy as
Satan, do you know.”
With an expression on his face as though it could not afford me anything
but pleasure, he took me by the arm and led me to the dining-room. His
naive eyes, his crumpled coat, his cheap tie and the smell of iodoform
made an unpleasant impression upon me; I felt as though I were in vulgar
company. When we sat down to table he filled my glass with vodka, and,
smiling helplessly, I drank it; he put a piece of ham on my plate and I
ate it submissively.
“Repetitia est mater studiorum,” said Sobol, hastening to drink off
another wineglassful. “Would you believe it, the joy of seeing good
people has driven away my sleepiness? I have turned into a peasant, a
savage in the wilds; I’ve grown coarse, but I am still an educated man,
and I tell you in good earnest, it’s tedious without company.”
They served first for a cold course white sucking-pig with horse-radish
cream, then a rich and very hot cabbage soup with pork on it, with
boiled buckwheat, from which rose a column of steam. The doctor went on
talking, and I was soon convinced that he was a weak, unfortunate man,
disorderly in external life. Three glasses of vodka made him drunk; he
grew unnaturally lively, ate a great deal, kept clearing his throat and
smacking his lips, and already addressed me in Italian, “Eccellenza.”
Looking naively at me as though he were convinced that I was very glad
to see and hear him, he informed me that he had long been separated from
his wife and gave her three-quarters of his salary; that she lived in
the town with his children, a boy and a girl, whom he adored; that he
loved another woman, a widow, well educated, with an estate in the
country, but was rarely able to see her, as he was busy with his work
from morning till night and had not a free moment.
“The whole day long, first at the hospital, then on my rounds,” he told
us; “and I assure you, Eccellenza, I have not time to read a book, let
alone going to see the woman I love. I’ve read nothing for ten years!
For ten years, Eccellenza. As for the financial side of the question,
ask Ivan Ivanitch: I have often no money to buy tobacco.”
“On the other hand, you have the moral satisfaction of your work,” I
said.
“What?” he asked, and he winked. “No,” he said, “better let us drink.”
I listened to the doctor, and, after my invariable habit, tried to take
his measure by my usual classification—materialist, idealist, filthy
lucre, gregarious instincts, and so on; but no classification fitted him
even approximately; and strange to say, while I simply listened and
looked at him, he seemed perfectly clear to me as a person, but as soon
as I began trying to classify him he became an exceptionally complex,
intricate, and incomprehensible character in spite of all his candour
and simplicity. “Is that man,” I asked myself, “capable of wasting other
people’s money, abusing their confidence, being disposed to sponge on
them?” And now this question, which had once seemed to me grave and
important, struck me as crude, petty, and coarse.
Pie was served; then, I remember, with long intervals between, during
which we drank home-made liquors, they gave us a stew of pigeons, some
dish of giblets, roast sucking-pig, partridges, cauliflower, curd
dumplings, curd cheese and milk, jelly, and finally pancakes and jam. At
first I ate with great relish, especially the cabbage soup and the
buckwheat, but afterwards I munched and swallowed mechanically, smiling
helplessly and unconscious of the taste of anything. My face was burning
from the hot cabbage soup and the heat of the room. Ivan Ivanitch and
Sobol, too, were crimson.
“To the health of your wife,” said Sobol. “She likes me. Tell her her
doctor sends her his respects.”
“She’s fortunate, upon my word,” sighed Ivan Ivanitch. “Though she takes
no trouble, does not fuss or worry herself, she has become the most
important person in the whole district. Almost the whole business is in
her hands, and they all gather round her, the doctor, the District
Captains, and the ladies. With people of the right sort that happens of
itself. Yes.... The apple-tree need take no thought for the apple to
grow on it; it will grow of itself.”
“It’s only people who don’t care who take no thought,” said I.
“Eh? Yes...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch, not catching what I said, “that’s
true.... One must not worry oneself. Just so, just so.... Only do your
duty towards God and your neighbour, and then never mind what happens.”
“Eccellenza,” said Sobol solemnly, “just look at nature about us: if you
poke your nose or your ear out of your fur collar it will be frost-
bitten; stay in the fields for one hour, you’ll be buried in the snow;
while the village is just the same as in the days of Rurik, the same
Petchenyegs and Polovtsi. It’s nothing but being burnt down, starving,
and struggling against nature in every way. What was I saying? Yes! If
one thinks about it, you know, looks into it and analyses all this
hotchpotch, if you will allow me to call it so, it’s not life but more
like a fire in a theatre! Any one who falls down or screams with terror,
or rushes about, is the worst enemy of good order; one must stand up and
look sharp, and not stir a hair! There’s no time for whimpering and
busying oneself with trifles. When you have to deal with elemental
forces you must put out force against them, be firm and as unyielding as
a stone. Isn’t that right, grandfather?” He turned to Ivan Ivanitch and
laughed. “I am no better than a woman myself; I am a limp rag, a flabby
creature, so I hate flabbiness. I can’t endure petty feelings! One
mopes, another is frightened, a third will come straight in here and
say: ‘Fie on you! Here you’ve guzzled a dozen courses and you talk about
the starving!’ That’s petty and stupid! A fourth will reproach you,
Eccellenza, for being rich. Excuse me, Eccellenza,” he went on in a loud
voice, laying his hand on his heart, “but your having set our magistrate
the task of hunting day and night for your thieves—excuse me, that’s
also petty on your part. I am a little drunk, so that’s why I say this
now, but you know, it is petty!”
“Who’s asking him to worry himself? I don’t understand!” I said, getting
up.
I suddenly felt unbearably ashamed and mortified, and I walked round the
table.
“Who asks him to worry himself? I didn’t ask him to.... Damn him!”
“They have arrested three men and let them go again. They turned out not
to be the right ones, and now they are looking for a fresh lot,” said
Sobol, laughing. “It’s too bad!”
“I did not ask him to worry himself,” said I, almost crying with
excitement. “What’s it all for? What’s it all for? Well, supposing I was
wrong, supposing I have done wrong, why do they try to put me more in
the wrong?”
“Come, come, come, come!” said Sobol, trying to soothe me. “Come! I have
had a drop, that is why I said it. My tongue is my enemy. Come,” he
sighed, “we have eaten and drunk wine, and now for a nap.”
He got up from the table, kissed Ivan Ivanitch on the head, and
staggering from repletion, went out of the dining-room. Ivan Ivanitch
and I smoked in silence.
“I don’t sleep after dinner, my dear,” said Ivan Ivanitch, “but you have
a rest in the lounge-room.”
I agreed. In the half-dark and warmly heated room they called the
lounge-room, there stood against the walls long, wide sofas, solid and
heavy, the work of Butyga the cabinet maker; on them lay high, soft,
white beds, probably made by the old woman in spectacles. On one of them
Sobol, without his coat and boots, already lay asleep with his face to
the back of the sofa; another bed was awaiting me. I took off my coat
and boots, and, overcome by fatigue, by the spirit of Butyga which
hovered over the quiet lounge-room, and by the light, caressing snore of
Sobol, I lay down submissively.
And at once I began dreaming of my wife, of her room, of the station-
master with his face full of hatred, the heaps of snow, a fire in the
theatre. I dreamed of the peasants who had stolen twenty sacks of rye
out of my barn.
“Anyway, it’s a good thing the magistrate let them go,” I said.
I woke up at the sound of my own voice, looked for a moment in
perplexity at Sobol’s broad back, at the buckles of his waistcoat, at
his thick heels, then lay down again and fell asleep.
When I woke up the second time it was quite dark. Sobol was asleep.
There was peace in my heart, and I longed to make haste home. I dressed
and went out of the lounge-room. Ivan Ivanitch was sitting in a big arm-
chair in his study, absolutely motionless, staring at a fixed point, and
it was evident that he had been in the same state of petrifaction all
the while I had been asleep.
“Good!” I said, yawning. “I feel as though I had woken up after breaking
the fast at Easter. I shall often come and see you now. Tell me, did my
wife ever dine here?”
“So-ome-ti-mes... sometimes,”’ muttered Ivan Ivanitch, making an effort
to stir. “She dined here last Saturday. Yes.... She likes me.”
After a silence I said:
“Do you remember, Ivan Ivanitch, you told me I had a disagreeable
character and that it was difficult to get on with me? But what am I to
do to make my character different?”
“I don’t know, my dear boy.... I’m a feeble old man, I can’t advise
you.... Yes.... But I said that to you at the time because I am fond of
you and fond of your wife, and I was fond of your father.... Yes. I
shall soon die, and what need have I to conceal things from you or to
tell you lies? So I tell you: I am very fond of you, but I don’t respect
you. No, I don’t respect you.”
He turned towards me and said in a breathless whisper:
“It’s impossible to respect you, my dear fellow. You look like a real
man. You have the figure and deportment of the French President Carnot—I
saw a portrait of him the other day in an illustrated paper... yes....
You use lofty language, and you are clever, and you are high up in the
service beyond all reach, but haven’t real soul, my dear boy... there’s
no strength in it.”
“A Scythian, in fact,” I laughed. “But what about my wife? Tell me
something about my wife; you know her better.”
I wanted to talk about my wife, but Sobol came in and prevented me.
“I’ve had a sleep and a wash,” he said, looking at me naively. “I’ll
have a cup of tea with some rum in it and go home.”
VII
It was by now past seven. Besides Ivan Ivanitch, women servants, the old
dame in spectacles, the little girls and the peasant, all accompanied us
from the hall out on to the steps, wishing us good-bye and all sorts of
blessings, while near the horses in the darkness there were standing and
moving about men with lanterns, telling our coachmen how and which way
to drive, and wishing us a lucky journey. The horses, the men, and the
sledges were white.
“Where do all these people come from?” I asked as my three horses and
the doctor’s two moved at a walking pace out of the yard.
“They are all his serfs,” said Sobol. “The new order has not reached him
yet. Some of the old servants are living out their lives with him, and
then there are orphans of all sorts who have nowhere to go; there are
some, too, who insist on living there, there’s no turning them out. A
queer old man!”
Again the flying horses, the strange voice of drunken Nikanor, the wind
and the persistent snow, which got into one’s eyes, one’s mouth, and
every fold of one’s fur coat....
“Well, I am running a rig,” I thought, while my bells chimed in with the
doctor’s, the wind whistled, the coachmen shouted; and while this
frantic uproar was going on, I recalled all the details of that strange
wild day, unique in my life, and it seemed to me that I really had gone
out of my mind or become a different man. It was as though the man I had
been till that day were already a stranger to me.
The doctor drove behind and kept talking loudly with his coachman. From
time to time he overtook me, drove side by side, and always, with the
same naive confidence that it was very pleasant to me, offered me a
cigarette or asked for the matches. Or, overtaking me, he would lean
right out of his sledge, and waving about the sleeves of his fur coat,
which were at least twice as long as his arms, shout:
“Go it, Vaska! Beat the thousand roublers! Hey, my kittens!”
And to the accompaniment of loud, malicious laughter from Sobol and his
Vaska the doctor’s kittens raced ahead. My Nikanor took it as an
affront, and held in his three horses, but when the doctor’s bells had
passed out of hearing, he raised his elbows, shouted, and our horses
flew like mad in pursuit. We drove into a village, there were glimpses
of lights, the silhouettes of huts. Some one shouted:
“Ah, the devils!” We seemed to have galloped a mile and a half, and
still it was the village street and there seemed no end to it. When we
caught up the doctor and drove more quietly, he asked for matches and
said:
“Now try and feed that street! And, you know, there are five streets
like that, sir. Stay, stay,” he shouted. “Turn in at the tavern! We must
get warm and let the horses rest.”
They stopped at the tavern.
“I have more than one village like that in my district,” said the
doctor, opening a heavy door with a squeaky block, and ushering me in
front of him. “If you look in broad daylight you can’t see to the end of
the street, and there are side-streets, too, and one can do nothing but
scratch one’s head. It’s hard to do anything.”
We went into the best room where there was a strong smell of table-
cloths, and at our entrance a sleepy peasant in a waistcoat and a shirt
worn outside his trousers jumped up from a bench. Sobol asked for some
beer and I asked for tea.
“It’s hard to do anything,” said Sobol. “Your wife has faith; I respect
her and have the greatest reverence for her, but I have no great faith
myself. As long as our relations to the people continue to have the
character of ordinary philanthropy, as shown in orphan asylums and
almshouses, so long we shall only be shuffling, shamming, and deceiving
ourselves, and nothing more. Our relations ought to be businesslike,
founded on calculation, knowledge, and justice. My Vaska has been
working for me all his life; his crops have failed, he is sick and
starving. If I give him fifteen kopecks a day, by so doing I try to
restore him to his former condition as a workman; that is, I am first
and foremost looking after my own interests, and yet for some reason I
call that fifteen kopecks relief, charity, good works. Now let us put it
like this. On the most modest computation, reckoning seven kopecks a
soul and five souls a family, one needs three hundred and fifty roubles
a day to feed a thousand families. That sum is fixed by our practical
duty to a thousand families. Meanwhile we give not three hundred and
fifty a day, but only ten, and say that that is relief, charity, that
that makes your wife and all of us exceptionally good people and hurrah
for our humaneness. That is it, my dear soul! Ah! if we would talk less
of being humane and calculated more, reasoned, and took a conscientious
attitude to our duties! How many such humane, sensitive people there are
among us who tear about in all good faith with subscription lists, but
don’t pay their tailors or their cooks. There is no logic in our life;
that’s what it is! No logic!”
We were silent for a while. I was making a mental calculation and said:
“I will feed a thousand families for two hundred days. Come and see me
tomorrow to talk it over.”
I was pleased that this was said quite simply, and was glad that Sobol
answered me still more simply:
“Right.”
We paid for what we had and went out of the tavern.
“I like going on like this,” said Sobol, getting into the sledge.
“Eccellenza, oblige me with a match. I’ve forgotten mine in the tavern.”
A quarter of an hour later his horses fell behind, and the sound of his
bells was lost in the roar of the snow-storm. Reaching home, I walked
about my rooms, trying to think things over and to define my position
clearly to myself; I had not one word, one phrase, ready for my wife. My
brain was not working.
But without thinking of anything, I went downstairs to my wife. She was
in her room, in the same pink dressing-gown, and standing in the same
attitude as though screening her papers from me. On her face was an
expression of perplexity and irony, and it was evident that having heard
of my arrival, she had prepared herself not to cry, not to entreat me,
not to defend herself, as she had done the day before, but to laugh at
me, to answer me contemptuously, and to act with decision. Her face was
saying: “If that’s how it is, good-bye.”
“Natalie, I’ve not gone away,” I said, “but it’s not deception. I have
gone out of my mind; I’ve grown old, I’m ill, I’ve become a different
man—think as you like.... I’ve shaken off my old self with horror, with
horror; I despise him and am ashamed of him, and the new man who has
been in me since yesterday will not let me go away. Do not drive me
away, Natalie!”
She looked intently into my face and believed me, and there was a gleam
of uneasiness in her eyes. Enchanted by her presence, warmed by the
warmth of her room, I muttered as in delirium, holding out my hands to
her:
“I tell you, I have no one near to me but you. I have never for one
minute ceased to miss you, and only obstinate vanity prevented me from
owning it. The past, when we lived as husband and wife, cannot be
brought back, and there’s no need; but make me your servant, take all my
property, and give it away to any one you like. I am at peace, Natalie,
I am content.... I am at peace.”
My wife, looking intently and with curiosity into my face, suddenly
uttered a faint cry, burst into tears, and ran into the next room. I
went upstairs to my own storey.
An hour later I was sitting at my table, writing my “History of
Railways,” and the starving peasants did not now hinder me from doing
so. Now I feel no uneasiness. Neither the scenes of disorder which I saw
when I went the round of the huts at Pestrovo with my wife and Sobol the
other day, nor malignant rumours, nor the mistakes of the people around
me, nor old age close upon me—nothing disturbs me. Just as the flying
bullets do not hinder soldiers from talking of their own affairs, eating
and cleaning their boots, so the starving peasants do not hinder me from
sleeping quietly and looking after my personal affairs. In my house and
far around it there is in full swing the work which Dr. Sobol calls “an
orgy of philanthropy.” My wife often comes up to me and looks about my
rooms uneasily, as though looking for what more she can give to the
starving peasants “to justify her existence,” and I see that, thanks to
her, there will soon be nothing of our property left and we shall be
poor; but that does not trouble me, and I smile at her gaily. What will
happen in the future I don’t know.
DIFFICULT PEOPLE
YEVGRAF IVANOVITCH SHIRYAEV, a small farmer, whose father, a parish
priest, now deceased, had received a gift of three hundred acres of land
from Madame Kuvshinnikov, a general’s widow, was standing in a corner
before a copper washing-stand, washing his hands. As usual, his face
looked anxious and ill-humoured, and his beard was uncombed.
“What weather!” he said. “It’s not weather, but a curse laid upon us.
It’s raining again!”
He grumbled on, while his family sat waiting at table for him to have
finished washing his hands before beginning dinner. Fedosya Semyonovna,
his wife, his son Pyotr, a student, his eldest daughter Varvara, and
three small boys, had been sitting waiting a long time. The boys—Kolka,
Vanka, and Arhipka—grubby, snub-nosed little fellows with chubby faces
and tousled hair that wanted cutting, moved their chairs impatiently,
while their elders sat without stirring, and apparently did not care
whether they ate their dinner or waited....
As though trying their patience, Shiryaev deliberately dried his hands,
deliberately said his prayer, and sat down to the table without hurrying
himself. Cabbage-soup was served immediately. The sound of carpenters’
axes (Shiryaev was having a new barn built) and the laughter of Fomka,
their labourer, teasing the turkey, floated in from the courtyard.
Big, sparse drops of rain pattered on the window.
Pyotr, a round-shouldered student in spectacles, kept exchanging glances
with his mother as he ate his dinner. Several times he laid down his
spoon and cleared his throat, meaning to begin to speak, but after an
intent look at his father he fell to eating again. At last, when the
porridge had been served, he cleared his throat resolutely and said:
“I ought to go tonight by the evening train. I ought to have gone
before; I have missed a fortnight as it is. The lectures begin on the
first of September.”
“Well, go,” Shiryaev assented; “why are you lingering on here? Pack up
and go, and good luck to you.”
A minute passed in silence.
“He must have money for the journey, Yevgraf Ivanovitch,” the mother
observed in a low voice.
“Money? To be sure, you can’t go without money. Take it at once, since
you need it. You could have had it long ago!”
The student heaved a faint sigh and looked with relief at his mother.
Deliberately Shiryaev took a pocket-book out of his coat-pocket and put
on his spectacles.
“How much do you want?” he asked.
“The fare to Moscow is eleven roubles forty-two kopecks....”
“Ah, money, money!” sighed the father. (He always sighed when he saw
money, even when he was receiving it.) “Here are twelve roubles for you.
You will have change out of that which will be of use to you on the
journey.”
“Thank you.”
After waiting a little, the student said:
“I did not get lessons quite at first last year. I don’t know how it
will be this year; most likely it will take me a little time to find
work. I ought to ask you for fifteen roubles for my lodging and dinner.”
Shiryaev thought a little and heaved a sigh.
“You will have to make ten do,” he said. “Here, take it.”
The student thanked him. He ought to have asked him for something more,
for clothes, for lecture fees, for books, but after an intent look at
his father he decided not to pester him further.
The mother, lacking in diplomacy and prudence, like all mothers, could
not restrain herself, and said:
“You ought to give him another six roubles, Yevgraf Ivanovitch, for a
pair of boots. Why, just see, how can he go to Moscow in such wrecks?”
“Let him take my old ones; they are still quite good.”
“He must have trousers, anyway; he is a disgrace to look at.”
And immediately after that a storm-signal showed itself, at the sight of
which all the family trembled.
Shiryaev’s short, fat neck turned suddenly red as a beetroot. The colour
mounted slowly to his ears, from his ears to his temples, and by degrees
suffused his whole face. Yevgraf Ivanovitch shifted in his chair and
unbuttoned his shirt-collar to save himself from choking. He was
evidently struggling with the feeling that was mastering him. A
deathlike silence followed. The children held their breath. Fedosya
Semyonovna, as though she did not grasp what was happening to her
husband, went on:
“He is not a little boy now, you know; he is ashamed to go about without
clothes.”
Shiryaev suddenly jumped up, and with all his might flung down his fat
pocket-book in the middle of the table, so that a hunk of bread flew off
a plate. A revolting expression of anger, resentment, avarice—all mixed
together—flamed on his face.
“Take everything!” he shouted in an unnatural voice; “plunder me! Take
it all! Strangle me!”
He jumped up from the table, clutched at his head, and ran staggering
about the room.
“Strip me to the last thread!” he shouted in a shrill voice. “Squeeze
out the last drop! Rob me! Wring my neck!”
The student flushed and dropped his eyes. He could not go on eating.
Fedosya Semyonovna, who had not after twenty-five years grown used to
her husband’s difficult character, shrank into herself and muttered
something in self-defence. An expression of amazement and dull terror
came into her wasted and birdlike face, which at all times looked dull
and scared. The little boys and the elder daughter Varvara, a girl in
her teens, with a pale ugly face, laid down their spoons and sat mute.
Shiryaev, growing more and more ferocious, uttering words each more
terrible than the one before, dashed up to the table and began shaking
the notes out of his pocket-book.
“Take them!” he muttered, shaking all over. “You’ve eaten and drunk your
fill, so here’s money for you too! I need nothing! Order yourself new
boots and uniforms!”
The student turned pale and got up.
“Listen, papa,” he began, gasping for breath. “I... I beg you to end
this, for...”
“Hold your tongue!” the father shouted at him, and so loudly that the
spectacles fell off his nose; “hold your tongue!”
“I used... I used to be able to put up with such scenes, but... but now
I have got out of the way of it. Do you understand? I have got out of
the way of it!”
“Hold your tongue!” cried the father, and he stamped with his feet. “You
must listen to what I say! I shall say what I like, and you hold your
tongue. At your age I was earning my living, while you... Do you know
what you cost me, you scoundrel? I’ll turn you out! Wastrel!”
“Yevgraf Ivanovitch,” muttered Fedosya Semyonovna, moving her fingers
nervously; “you know he... you know Petya...!”
“Hold your tongue!” Shiryaev shouted out to her, and tears actually came
into his eyes from anger. “It is you who have spoilt them—you! It’s all
your fault! He has no respect for us, does not say his prayers, and
earns nothing! I am only one against the ten of you! I’ll turn you out
of the house!”
The daughter Varvara gazed fixedly at her mother with her mouth open,
moved her vacant-looking eyes to the window, turned pale, and, uttering
a loud shriek, fell back in her chair. The father, with a curse and a
wave of the hand, ran out into the yard.
This was how domestic scenes usually ended at the Shiryaevs’. But on
this occasion, unfortunately, Pyotr the student was carried away by
overmastering anger. He was just as hasty and ill-tempered as his father
and his grandfather the priest, who used to beat his parishioners about
the head with a stick. Pale and clenching his fists, he went up to his
mother and shouted in the very highest tenor note his voice could reach:
“These reproaches are loathsome! sickening to me! I want nothing from
you! Nothing! I would rather die of hunger than eat another mouthful at
your expense! Take your nasty money back! take it!”
The mother huddled against the wall and waved her hands, as though it
were not her son, but some phantom before her. “What have I done?” she
wailed. “What?”
Like his father, the boy waved his hands and ran into the yard.
Shiryaev’s house stood alone on a ravine which ran like a furrow for
four miles along the steppe. Its sides were overgrown with oak saplings
and alders, and a stream ran at the bottom. On one side the house looked
towards the ravine, on the other towards the open country, there were no
fences nor hurdles. Instead there were farm-buildings of all sorts close
to one another, shutting in a small space in front of the house which
was regarded as the yard, and in which hens, ducks, and pigs ran about.
Going out of the house, the student walked along the muddy road towards
the open country. The air was full of a penetrating autumn dampness. The
road was muddy, puddles gleamed here and there, and in the yellow fields
autumn itself seemed looking out from the grass, dismal, decaying, dark.
On the right-hand side of the road was a vegetable-garden cleared of its
crops and gloomy-looking, with here and there sunflowers standing up in
it with hanging heads already black.
Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to walk to Moscow on foot; to
walk just as he was, with holes in his boots, without a cap, and without
a farthing of money. When he had gone eighty miles his father,
frightened and aghast, would overtake him, would begin begging him to
turn back or take the money, but he would not even look at him, but
would go on and on.... Bare forests would be followed by desolate
fields, fields by forests again; soon the earth would be white with the
first snow, and the streams would be coated with ice.... Somewhere near
Kursk or near Serpuhovo, exhausted and dying of hunger, he would sink
down and die. His corpse would be found, and there would be a paragraph
in all the papers saying that a student called Shiryaev had died of
hunger....
A white dog with a muddy tail who was wandering about the vegetable-
garden looking for something gazed at him and sauntered after him.
He walked along the road and thought of death, of the grief of his
family, of the moral sufferings of his father, and then pictured all
sorts of adventures on the road, each more marvellous than the one
before—picturesque places, terrible nights, chance encounters. He
imagined a string of pilgrims, a hut in the forest with one little
window shining in the darkness; he stands before the window, begs for a
night’s lodging.... They let him in, and suddenly he sees that they are
robbers. Or, better still, he is taken into a big manor-house, where,
learning who he is, they give him food and drink, play to him on the
piano, listen to his complaints, and the daughter of the house, a
beauty, falls in love with him.
Absorbed in his bitterness and such thoughts, young Shiryaev walked on
and on. Far, far ahead he saw the inn, a dark patch against the grey
background of cloud. Beyond the inn, on the very horizon, he could see a
little hillock; this was the railway-station. That hillock reminded him
of the connection existing between the place where he was now standing
and Moscow, where street-lamps were burning and carriages were rattling
in the streets, where lectures were being given. And he almost wept with
depression and impatience. The solemn landscape, with its order and
beauty, the deathlike stillness all around, revolted him and moved him
to despair and hatred!
“Look out!” He heard behind him a loud voice.
An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the neighbourhood, drove
past him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her, and smiled all
over his face. And at once he caught himself in that smile, which was so
out of keeping with his gloomy mood. Where did it come from if his whole
heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had
given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of
spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the
fox and the wild duck do. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but
however great they may be, it’s hard for an outsider’s eye to see them;
they are a secret. The father of the old lady who had just driven by,
for instance, had for some offence lain for half his lifetime under the
ban of the wrath of Tsar Nicolas I.; her husband had been a gambler; of
her four sons, not one had turned out well. One could imagine how many
terrible scenes there must have been in her life, how many tears must
have been shed. And yet the old lady seemed happy and satisfied, and she
had answered his smile by smiling too. The student thought of his
comrades, who did not like talking about their families; he thought of
his mother, who almost always lied when she had to speak of her husband
and children....
Pyotr walked about the roads far from home till dusk, abandoning himself
to dreary thoughts. When it began to drizzle with rain he turned
homewards. As he walked back he made up his mind at all costs to talk to
his father, to explain to him, once and for all, that it was dreadful
and oppressive to live with him.
He found perfect stillness in the house. His sister Varvara was lying
behind a screen with a headache, moaning faintly. His mother, with a
look of amazement and guilt upon her face, was sitting beside her on a
box, mending Arhipka’s trousers. Yevgraf Ivanovitch was pacing from one
window to another, scowling at the weather. From his walk, from the way
he cleared his throat, and even from the back of his head, it was
evident he felt himself to blame.
“I suppose you have changed your mind about going today?” he asked.
The student felt sorry for him, but immediately suppressing that
feeling, he said:
“Listen... I must speak to you seriously... yes, seriously. I have
always respected you, and... and have never brought myself to speak to
you in such a tone, but your behaviour... your last action...”
The father looked out of the window and did not speak. The student, as
though considering his words, rubbed his forehead and went on in great
excitement:
“Not a dinner or tea passes without your making an uproar. Your bread
sticks in our throat... nothing is more bitter, more humiliating, than
bread that sticks in one’s throat.... Though you are my father, no one,
neither God nor nature, has given you the right to insult and humiliate
us so horribly, to vent your ill-humour on the weak. You have worn my
mother out and made a slave of her, my sister is hopelessly crushed,
while I...”
“It’s not your business to teach me,” said his father.
“Yes, it is my business! You can quarrel with me as much as you like,
but leave my mother in peace! I will not allow you to torment my
mother!” the student went on, with flashing eyes. “You are spoilt
because no one has yet dared to oppose you. They tremble and are mute
towards you, but now that is over! Coarse, ill-bred man! You are
coarse... do you understand? You are coarse, ill-humoured, unfeeling.
And the peasants can’t endure you!”
The student had by now lost his thread, and was not so much speaking as
firing off detached words. Yevgraf Ivanovitch listened in silence, as
though stunned; but suddenly his neck turned crimson, the colour crept
up his face, and he made a movement.
“Hold your tongue!” he shouted.
“That’s right!” the son persisted; “you don’t like to hear the truth!
Excellent! Very good! begin shouting! Excellent!”
“Hold your tongue, I tell you!” roared Yevgraf Ivanovitch.
Fedosya Semyonovna appeared in the doorway, very pale, with an
astonished face; she tried to say something, but she could not, and
could only move her fingers.
“It’s all your fault!” Shiryaev shouted at her. “You have brought him up
like this!”
“I don’t want to go on living in this house!” shouted the student,
crying, and looking angrily at his mother. “I don’t want to live with
you!”
Varvara uttered a shriek behind the screen and broke into loud sobs.
With a wave of his hand, Shiryaev ran out of the house.
The student went to his own room and quietly lay down. He lay till
midnight without moving or opening his eyes. He felt neither anger nor
shame, but a vague ache in his soul. He neither blamed his father nor
pitied his mother, nor was he tormented by stings of conscience; he
realized that every one in the house was feeling the same ache, and God
only knew which was most to blame, which was suffering most....
At midnight he woke the labourer, and told him to have the horse ready
at five o’clock in the morning for him to drive to the station; he
undressed and got into bed, but could not get to sleep. He heard how his
father, still awake, paced slowly from window to window, sighing, till
early morning. No one was asleep; they spoke rarely, and only in
whispers. Twice his mother came to him behind the screen. Always with
the same look of vacant wonder, she slowly made the cross over him,
shaking nervously.
At five o’clock in the morning he said good-bye to them all
affectionately, and even shed tears. As he passed his father’s room, he
glanced in at the door. Yevgraf Ivanovitch, who had not taken off his
clothes or gone to bed, was standing by the window, drumming on the
panes.
“Good-bye; I am going,” said his son.
“Good-bye... the money is on the round table...” his father answered,
without turning round.
A cold, hateful rain was falling as the labourer drove him to the
station. The sunflowers were drooping their heads still lower, and the
grass seemed darker than ever.
THE GRASSHOPPER I
ALL Olga Ivanovna’s friends and acquaintances were at her wedding.
“Look at him; isn’t it true that there is something in him?” she said to
her friends, with a nod towards her husband, as though she wanted to
explain why she was marrying a simple, very ordinary, and in no way
remarkable man.
Her husband, Osip Stepanitch Dymov, was a doctor, and only of the rank
of a titular councillor. He was on the staff of two hospitals: in one a
ward-surgeon and in the other a dissecting demonstrator. Every day from
nine to twelve he saw patients and was busy in his ward, and after
twelve o’clock he went by tram to the other hospital, where he
dissected. His private practice was a small one, not worth more than
five hundred roubles a year. That was all. What more could one say about
him? Meanwhile, Olga Ivanovna and her friends and acquaintances were not
quite ordinary people. Every one of them was remarkable in some way, and
more or less famous; already had made a reputation and was looked upon
as a celebrity; or if not yet a celebrity, gave brilliant promise of
becoming one. There was an actor from the Dramatic Theatre, who was a
great talent of established reputation, as well as an elegant,
intelligent, and modest man, and a capital elocutionist, and who taught
Olga Ivanovna to recite; there was a singer from the opera, a good-
natured, fat man who assured Olga Ivanovna, with a sigh, that she was
ruining herself, that if she would take herself in hand and not be lazy
she might make a remarkable singer; then there were several artists, and
chief among them Ryabovsky, a very handsome, fair young man of five-and-
twenty who painted genre pieces, animal studies, and landscapes, was
successful at exhibitions, and had sold his last picture for five
hundred roubles. He touched up Olga Ivanovna’s sketches, and used to say
she might do something. Then a violoncellist, whose instrument used to
sob, and who openly declared that of all the ladies of his acquaintance
the only one who could accompany him was Olga Ivanovna; then there was a
literary man, young but already well known, who had written stories,
novels, and plays. Who else? Why, Vassily Vassilyitch, a landowner and
amateur illustrator and vignettist, with a great feeling for the old
Russian style, the old ballad and epic. On paper, on china, and on
smoked plates, he produced literally marvels. In the midst of this free
artistic company, spoiled by fortune, though refined and modest, who
recalled the existence of doctors only in times of illness, and to whom
the name of Dymov sounded in no way different from Sidorov or Tarasov—in
the midst of this company Dymov seemed strange, not wanted, and small,
though he was tall and broad-shouldered. He looked as though he had on
somebody else’s coat, and his beard was like a shopman’s. Though if he
had been a writer or an artist, they would have said that his beard
reminded them of Zola.
An artist said to Olga Ivanovna that with her flaxen hair and in her
wedding-dress she was very much like a graceful cherry-tree when it is
covered all over with delicate white blossoms in spring.
“Oh, let me tell you,” said Olga Ivanovna, taking his arm, “how it was
it all came to pass so suddenly. Listen, listen!... I must tell you that
my father was on the same staff at the hospital as Dymov. When my poor
father was taken ill, Dymov watched for days and nights together at his
bedside. Such self-sacrifice! Listen, Ryabovsky! You, my writer, listen;
it is very interesting! Come nearer. Such self-sacrifice, such genuine
sympathy! I sat up with my father, and did not sleep for nights, either.
And all at once—the princess had won the hero’s heart—my Dymov fell head
over ears in love. Really, fate is so strange at times! Well, after my
father’s death he came to see me sometimes, met me in the street, and
one fine evening, all at once he made me an offer... like snow upon my
head.... I lay awake all night, crying, and fell hellishly in love
myself. And here, as you see, I am his wife. There really is something
strong, powerful, bearlike about him, isn’t there? Now his face is
turned three-quarters towards us in a bad light, but when he turns round
look at his forehead. Ryabovsky, what do you say to that forehead?
Dymov, we are talking about you!” she called to her husband. “Come here;
hold out your honest hand to Ryabovsky.... That’s right, be friends.”
Dymov, with a naive and good-natured smile, held out his hand to
Ryabovsky, and said:
“Very glad to meet you. There was a Ryabovsky in my year at the medical
school. Was he a relation of yours?”
II
Olga Ivanovna was twenty-two, Dymov was thirty-one. They got on
splendidly together when they were married. Olga Ivanovna hung all her
drawing-room walls with her own and other people’s sketches, in frames
and without frames, and near the piano and furniture arranged
picturesque corners with Japanese parasols, easels, daggers, busts,
photographs, and rags of many colours.... In the dining-room she papered
the walls with peasant woodcuts, hung up bark shoes and sickles, stood
in a corner a scythe and a rake, and so achieved a dining-room in the
Russian style. In her bedroom she draped the ceiling and the walls with
dark cloths to make it like a cavern, hung a Venetian lantern over the
beds, and at the door set a figure with a halberd. And every one thought
that the young people had a very charming little home.
When she got up at eleven o’clock every morning, Olga Ivanovna played
the piano or, if it were sunny, painted something in oils. Then between
twelve and one she drove to her dressmaker’s. As Dymov and she had very
little money, only just enough, she and her dressmaker were often put to
clever shifts to enable her to appear constantly in new dresses and make
a sensation with them. Very often out of an old dyed dress, out of bits
of tulle, lace, plush, and silk, costing nothing, perfect marvels were
created, something bewitching—not a dress, but a dream. From the
dressmaker’s Olga Ivanovna usually drove to some actress of her
acquaintance to hear the latest theatrical gossip, and incidentally to
try and get hold of tickets for the first night of some new play or for
a benefit performance. From the actress’s she had to go to some artist’s
studio or to some exhibition or to see some celebrity—either to pay a
visit or to give an invitation or simply to have a chat. And everywhere
she met with a gay and friendly welcome, and was assured that she was
good, that she was sweet, that she was rare.... Those whom she called
great and famous received her as one of themselves, as an equal, and
predicted with one voice that, with her talents, her taste, and her
intelligence, she would do great things if she concentrated herself. She
sang, she played the piano, she painted in oils, she carved, she took
part in amateur performances; and all this not just anyhow, but all with
talent, whether she made lanterns for an illumination or dressed up or
tied somebody’s cravat—everything she did was exceptionally graceful,
artistic, and charming. But her talents showed themselves in nothing so
clearly as in her faculty for quickly becoming acquainted and on
intimate terms with celebrated people. No sooner did any one become ever
so little celebrated, and set people talking about him, than she made
his acquaintance, got on friendly terms the same day, and invited him to
her house. Every new acquaintance she made was a veritable fete for her.
She adored celebrated people, was proud of them, dreamed of them every
night. She craved for them, and never could satisfy her craving. The old
ones departed and were forgotten, new ones came to replace them, but to
these, too, she soon grew accustomed or was disappointed in them, and
began eagerly seeking for fresh great men, finding them and seeking for
them again. What for?
Between four and five she dined at home with her husband. His
simplicity, good sense, and kind-heartedness touched her and moved her
up to enthusiasm. She was constantly jumping up, impulsively hugging his
head and showering kisses on it.
“You are a clever, generous man, Dymov,” she used to say, “but you have
one very serious defect. You take absolutely no interest in art. You
don’t believe in music or painting.”
“I don’t understand them,” he would say mildly. “I have spent all my
life in working at natural science and medicine, and I have never had
time to take an interest in the arts.”
“But, you know, that’s awful, Dymov!”
“Why so? Your friends don’t know anything of science or medicine, but
you don’t reproach them with it. Every one has his own line. I don’t
understand landscapes and operas, but the way I look at it is that if
one set of sensible people devote their whole lives to them, and other
sensible people pay immense sums for them, they must be of use. I don’t
understand them, but not understanding does not imply disbelieving in
them.”
“Let me shake your honest hand!”
After dinner Olga Ivanovna would drive off to see her friends, then to a
theatre or to a concert, and she returned home after midnight. So it was
every day.
On Wednesdays she had “At Homes.” At these “At Homes” the hostess and
her guests did not play cards and did not dance, but entertained
themselves with various arts. An actor from the Dramatic Theatre
recited, a singer sang, artists sketched in the albums of which Olga
Ivanovna had a great number, the violoncellist played, and the hostess
herself sketched, carved, sang, and played accompaniments. In the
intervals between the recitations, music, and singing, they talked and
argued about literature, the theatre, and painting. There were no
ladies, for Olga Ivanovna considered all ladies wearisome and vulgar
except actresses and her dressmaker. Not one of these entertainments
passed without the hostess starting at every ring at the bell, and
saying, with a triumphant expression, “It is he,” meaning by “he,” of
course, some new celebrity. Dymov was not in the drawing-room, and no
one remembered his existence. But exactly at half-past eleven the door
leading into the dining-room opened, and Dymov would appear with his
good-natured, gentle smile and say, rubbing his hands:
“Come to supper, gentlemen.”
They all went into the dining-room, and every time found on the table
exactly the same things: a dish of oysters, a piece of ham or veal,
sardines, cheese, caviare, mushrooms, vodka, and two decanters of wine.
“My dear maitre d’ hotel!” Olga Ivanovna would say, clasping her hands
with enthusiasm, “you are simply fascinating! My friends, look at his
forehead! Dymov, turn your profile. Look! he has the face of a Bengal
tiger and an expression as kind and sweet as a gazelle. Ah, the
darling!”
The visitors ate, and, looking at Dymov, thought, “He really is a nice
fellow”; but they soon forgot about him, and went on talking about the
theatre, music, and painting.
The young people were happy, and their life flowed on without a hitch.
The third week of their honeymoon was spent, however, not quite
happily—sadly, indeed. Dymov caught erysipelas in the hospital, was in
bed for six days, and had to have his beautiful black hair cropped. Olga
Ivanovna sat beside him and wept bitterly, but when he was better she
put a white handkerchief on his shaven head and began to paint him as a
Bedouin. And they were both in good spirits. Three days after he had
begun to go back to the hospital he had another mischance.
“I have no luck, little mother,” he said one day at dinner. “I had four
dissections to do today, and I cut two of my fingers at one. And I did
not notice it till I got home.”
Olga Ivanovna was alarmed. He smiled, and told her that it did not
matter, and that he often cut his hands when he was dissecting.
“I get absorbed, little mother, and grow careless.”
Olga Ivanovna dreaded symptoms of blood-poisoning, and prayed about it
every night, but all went well. And again life flowed on peaceful and
happy, free from grief and anxiety. The present was happy, and to follow
it spring was at hand, already smiling in the distance, and promising a
thousand delights. There would be no end to their happiness. In April,
May and June a summer villa a good distance out of town; walks,
sketching, fishing, nightingales; and then from July right on to autumn
an artist’s tour on the Volga, and in this tour Olga Ivanovna would take
part as an indispensable member of the society. She had already had made
for her two travelling dresses of linen, had bought paints, brushes,
canvases, and a new palette for the journey. Almost every day Ryabovsky
visited her to see what progress she was making in her painting; when
she showed him her painting, he used to thrust his hands deep into his
pockets, compress his lips, sniff, and say:
“Ye—es...! That cloud of yours is screaming: it’s not in the evening
light. The foreground is somehow chewed up, and there is something, you
know, not the thing.... And your cottage is weighed down and whines
pitifully. That corner ought to have been taken more in shadow, but on
the whole it is not bad; I like it.”
And the more incomprehensible he talked, the more readily Olga Ivanovna
understood him.
III
After dinner on the second day of Trinity week, Dymov bought some sweets
and some savouries and went down to the villa to see his wife. He had
not seen her for a fortnight, and missed her terribly. As he sat in the
train and afterwards as he looked for his villa in a big wood, he felt
all the while hungry and weary, and dreamed of how he would have supper
in freedom with his wife, then tumble into bed and to sleep. And he was
delighted as he looked at his parcel, in which there was caviare,
cheese, and white salmon.
The sun was setting by the time he found his villa and recognized it.
The old servant told him that her mistress was not at home, but that
most likely she would soon be in. The villa, very uninviting in
appearance, with low ceilings papered with writing-paper and with uneven
floors full of crevices, consisted only of three rooms. In one there was
a bed, in the second there were canvases, brushes, greasy papers, and
men’s overcoats and hats lying about on the chairs and in the windows,
while in the third Dymov found three unknown men; two were dark-haired
and had beards, the other was clean-shaven and fat, apparently an actor.
There was a samovar boiling on the table.
“What do you want?” asked the actor in a bass voice, looking at Dymov
ungraciously. “Do you want Olga Ivanovna? Wait a minute; she will be
here directly.”
Dymov sat down and waited. One of the dark-haired men, looking sleepily
and listlessly at him, poured himself out a glass of tea, and asked:
“Perhaps you would like some tea?”
Dymov was both hungry and thirsty, but he refused tea for fear of
spoiling his supper. Soon he heard footsteps and a familiar laugh; a
door slammed, and Olga Ivanovna ran into the room, wearing a wide-
brimmed hat and carrying a box in her hand; she was followed by
Ryabovsky, rosy and good-humoured, carrying a big umbrella and a camp-
stool.
“Dymov!” cried Olga Ivanovna, and she flushed crimson with pleasure.
“Dymov!” she repeated, laying her head and both arms on his bosom. “Is
that you? Why haven’t you come for so long? Why? Why?”
“When could I, little mother? I am always busy, and whenever I am free
it always happens somehow that the train does not fit.”
“But how glad I am to see you! I have been dreaming about you the whole
night, the whole night, and I was afraid you must be ill. Ah! if you
only knew how sweet you are! You have come in the nick of time! You will
be my salvation! You are the only person who can save me! There is to be
a most original wedding here tomorrow,” she went on, laughing, and tying
her husband’s cravat. “A young telegraph clerk at the station, called
Tchikeldyeev, is going to be married. He is a handsome young man
and—well, not stupid, and you know there is something strong, bearlike
in his face... you might paint him as a young Norman. We summer visitors
take a great interest in him, and have promised to be at his wedding....
He is a lonely, timid man, not well off, and of course it would be a
shame not to be sympathetic to him. Fancy! the wedding will be after the
service; then we shall all walk from the church to the bride’s
lodgings... you see the wood, the birds singing, patches of sunlight on
the grass, and all of us spots of different colours against the bright
green background—very original, in the style of the French
impressionists. But, Dymov, what am I to go to the church in?” said Olga
Ivanovna, and she looked as though she were going to cry. “I have
nothing here, literally nothing! no dress, no flowers, no gloves... you
must save me. Since you have come, fate itself bids you save me. Take
the keys, my precious, go home and get my pink dress from the wardrobe.
You remember it; it hangs in front.... Then, in the storeroom, on the
floor, on the right side, you will see two cardboard boxes. When you
open the top one you will see tulle, heaps of tulle and rags of all
sorts, and under them flowers. Take out all the flowers carefully, try
not to crush them, darling; I will choose among them later.... And buy
me some gloves.”
“Very well,” said Dymov; “I will go tomorrow and send them to you.”
“Tomorrow?” asked Olga Ivanovna, and she looked at him surprised. “You
won’t have time tomorrow. The first train goes tomorrow at nine, and the
wedding’s at eleven. No, darling, it must be today; it absolutely must
be today. If you won’t be able to come tomorrow, send them by a
messenger. Come, you must run along.... The passenger train will be in
directly; don’t miss it, darling.”
“Very well.”
“Oh, how sorry I am to let you go!” said Olga Ivanovna, and tears came
into her eyes. “And why did I promise that telegraph clerk, like a
silly?”
Dymov hurriedly drank a glass of tea, took a cracknel, and, smiling
gently, went to the station. And the caviare, the cheese, and the white
salmon were eaten by the two dark gentlemen and the fat actor.
IV
On a still moonlight night in July Olga Ivanovna was standing on the
deck of a Volga steamer and looking alternately at the water and at the
picturesque banks. Beside her was standing Ryabovsky, telling her the
black shadows on the water were not shadows, but a dream, that it would
be sweet to sink into forgetfulness, to die, to become a memory in the
sight of that enchanted water with the fantastic glimmer, in sight of
the fathomless sky and the mournful, dreamy shores that told of the
vanity of our life and of the existence of something higher, blessed,
and eternal. The past was vulgar and uninteresting, the future was
trivial, and that marvellous night, unique in a lifetime, would soon be
over, would blend with eternity; then, why live?
And Olga Ivanovna listened alternately to Ryabovsky’s voice and the
silence of the night, and thought of her being immortal and never dying.
The turquoise colour of the water, such as she had never seen before,
the sky, the river-banks, the black shadows, and the unaccountable joy
that flooded her soul, all told her that she would make a great artist,
and that somewhere in the distance, in the infinite space beyond the
moonlight, success, glory, the love of the people, lay awaiting her....
When she gazed steadily without bIlinking into the distance, she seemed
to see crowds of people, lights, triumphant strains of music, cries of
enthusiasm, she herself in a white dress, and flowers showered upon her
from all sides. She thought, too, that beside her, leaning with his
elbows on the rail of the steamer, there was standing a real great man,
a genius, one of God’s elect.... All that he had created up to the
present was fine, new, and extraordinary, but what he would create in
time, when with maturity his rare talent reached its full development,
would be astounding, immeasurably sublime; and that could be seen by his
face, by his manner of expressing himself and his attitude to nature. He
talked of shadows, of the tones of evening, of the moonlight, in a
special way, in a language of his own, so that one could not help
feeling the fascination of his power over nature. He was very handsome,
original, and his life, free, independent, aloof from all common cares,
was like the life of a bird.
“It’s growing cooler,” said Olga Ivanovna, and she gave a shudder.
Ryabovsky wrapped her in his cloak, and said mournfully:
“I feel that I am in your power; I am a slave. Why are you so enchanting
today?”
He kept staring intently at her, and his eyes were terrible. And she was
afraid to look at him.
“I love you madly,” he whispered, breathing on her cheek. “Say one word
to me and I will not go on living; I will give up art...” he muttered in
violent emotion. “Love me, love....”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Olga Ivanovna, covering her eyes. “It’s
dreadful! How about Dymov?”
“What of Dymov? Why Dymov? What have I to do with Dymov? The Volga, the
moon, beauty, my love, ecstasy, and there is no such thing as Dymov....
Ah! I don’t know... I don’t care about the past; give me one moment, one
instant!”
Olga Ivanovna’s heart began to throb. She tried to think about her
husband, but all her past, with her wedding, with Dymov, and with her
“At Homes,” seemed to her petty, trivial, dingy, unnecessary, and far,
far away.... Yes, really, what of Dymov? Why Dymov? What had she to do
with Dymov? Had he any existence in nature, or was he only a dream?
“For him, a simple and ordinary man the happiness he has had already is
enough,” she thought, covering her face with her hands. “Let them
condemn me, let them curse me, but in spite of them all I will go to my
ruin; I will go to my ruin!... One must experience everything in life.
My God! how terrible and how glorious!”
“Well? Well?” muttered the artist, embracing her, and greedily kissing
the hands with which she feebly tried to thrust him from her. “You love
me? Yes? Yes? Oh, what a night! marvellous night!”
“Yes, what a night!” she whispered, looking into his eyes, which were
bright with tears.
Then she looked round quickly, put her arms round him, and kissed him on
the lips.
“We are nearing Kineshmo!” said some one on the other side of the deck.
They heard heavy footsteps; it was a waiter from the refreshment-bar.
“Waiter,” said Olga Ivanovna, laughing and crying with happiness, “bring
us some wine.”
The artist, pale with emotion, sat on the seat, looking at Olga Ivanovna
with adoring, grateful eyes; then he closed his eyes, and said, smiling
languidly:
“I am tired.”
And he leaned his head against the rail.
V
On the second of September the day was warm and still, but overcast. In
the early morning a light mist had hung over the Volga, and after nine
o’clock it had begun to spout with rain. And there seemed no hope of the
sky clearing. Over their morning tea Ryabovsky told Olga Ivanovna that
painting was the most ungrateful and boring art, that he was not an
artist, that none but fools thought that he had any talent, and all at
once, for no rhyme or reason, he snatched up a knife and with it scraped
over his very best sketch. After his tea he sat plunged in gloom at the
window and gazed at the Volga. And now the Volga was dingy, all of one
even colour without a gleam of light, cold-looking. Everything,
everything recalled the approach of dreary, gloomy autumn. And it seemed
as though nature had removed now from the Volga the sumptuous green
covers from the banks, the brilliant reflections of the sunbeams, the
transparent blue distance, and all its smart gala array, and had packed
it away in boxes till the coming spring, and the crows were flying above
the Volga and crying tauntingly, “Bare, bare!”
Ryabovsky heard their cawing, and thought he had already gone off and
lost his talent, that everything in this world was relative,
conditional, and stupid, and that he ought not to have taken up with
this woman.... In short, he was out of humour and depressed.
Olga Ivanovna sat behind the screen on the bed, and, passing her fingers
through her lovely flaxen hair, pictured herself first in the drawing-
room, then in the bedroom, then in her husband’s study; her imagination
carried her to the theatre, to the dress-maker, to her distinguished
friends. Were they getting something up now? Did they think of her? The
season had begun by now, and it would be time to think about her “At
Homes.” And Dymov? Dear Dymov! with what gentleness and childlike pathos
he kept begging her in his letters to make haste and come home! Every
month he sent her seventy-five roubles, and when she wrote him that she
had lent the artists a hundred roubles, he sent that hundred too. What a
kind, generous-hearted man! The travelling wearied Olga Ivanovna; she
was bored; and she longed to get away from the peasants, from the damp
smell of the river, and to cast off the feeling of physical
uncleanliness of which she was conscious all the time, living in the
peasants’ huts and wandering from village to village. If Ryabovsky had
not given his word to the artists that he would stay with them till the
twentieth of September, they might have gone away that very day. And how
nice that would have been!
“My God!” moaned Ryabovsky. “Will the sun ever come out? I can’t go on
with a sunny landscape without the sun....”
“But you have a sketch with a cloudy sky,” said Olga Ivanovna, coming
from behind the screen. “Do you remember, in the right foreground forest
trees, on the left a herd of cows and geese? You might finish it now.”
“Aie!” the artist scowled. “Finish it! Can you imagine I am such a fool
that I don’t know what I want to do?”
“How you have changed to me!” sighed Olga Ivanovna.
“Well, a good thing too!”
Olga Ivanovna’s face quivered; she moved away to the stove and began to
cry.
“Well, that’s the last straw—crying! Give over! I have a thousand
reasons for tears, but I am not crying.”
“A thousand reasons!” cried Olga Ivanovna. “The chief one is that you
are weary of me. Yes!” she said, and broke into sobs. “If one is to tell
the truth, you are ashamed of our love. You keep trying to prevent the
artists from noticing it, though it is impossible to conceal it, and
they have known all about it for ever so long.”
“Olga, one thing I beg you,” said the artist in an imploring voice,
laying his hand on his heart—“one thing; don’t worry me! I want nothing
else from you!”
“But swear that you love me still!”
“This is agony!” the artist hissed through his teeth, and he jumped up.
“It will end by my throwing myself in the Volga or going out of my mind!
Let me alone!”
“Come, kill me, kill me!” cried Olga Ivanovna. “Kill me!”
She sobbed again, and went behind the screen. There was a swish of rain
on the straw thatch of the hut. Ryabovsky clutched his head and strode
up and down the hut; then with a resolute face, as though bent on
proving something to somebody, put on his cap, slung his gun over his
shoulder, and went out of the hut.
After he had gone, Olga Ivanovna lay a long time on the bed, crying. At
first she thought it would be a good thing to poison herself, so that
when Ryabovsky came back he would find her dead; then her imagination
carried her to her drawing-room, to her husband’s study, and she
imagined herself sitting motionless beside Dymov and enjoying the
physical peace and cleanliness, and in the evening sitting in the
theatre, listening to Mazini. And a yearning for civilization, for the
noise and bustle of the town, for celebrated people sent a pang to her
heart. A peasant woman came into the hut and began in a leisurely way
lighting the stove to get the dinner. There was a smell of charcoal
fumes, and the air was filled with bluish smoke. The artists came in, in
muddy high boots and with faces wet with rain, examined their sketches,
and comforted themselves by saying that the Volga had its charms even in
bad weather. On the wall the cheap clock went “tic-tic-tic.”... The
flies, feeling chilled, crowded round the ikon in the corner, buzzing,
and one could hear the cockroaches scurrying about among the thick
portfolios under the seats....
Ryabovsky came home as the sun was setting. He flung his cap on the
table, and, without removing his muddy boots, sank pale and exhausted on
the bench and closed his eyes.
“I am tired...” he said, and twitched his eyebrows, trying to raise his
eyelids.
To be nice to him and to show she was not cross, Olga Ivanovna went up
to him, gave him a silent kiss, and passed the comb through his fair
hair. She meant to comb it for him.
“What’s that?” he said, starting as though something cold had touched
him, and he opened his eyes. “What is it? Please let me alone.”
He thrust her off, and moved away. And it seemed to her that there was a
look of aversion and annoyance on his face.
At that time the peasant woman cautiously carried him, in both hands, a
plate of cabbage-soup. And Olga Ivanovna saw how she wetted her fat
fingers in it. And the dirty peasant woman, standing with her body
thrust forward, and the cabbage-soup which Ryabovsky began eating
greedily, and the hut, and their whole way of life, which she at first
had so loved for its simplicity and artistic disorder, seemed horrible
to her now. She suddenly felt insulted, and said coldly:
“We must part for a time, or else from boredom we shall quarrel in
earnest. I am sick of this; I am going today.”
“Going how? Astride on a broomstick?”
“Today is Thursday, so the steamer will be here at half-past nine.”
“Eh? Yes, yes.... Well, go, then...” Ryabovsky said softly, wiping his
mouth with a towel instead of a dinner napkin. “You are dull and have
nothing to do here, and one would have to be a great egoist to try and
keep you. Go home, and we shall meet again after the twentieth.”
Olga Ivanovna packed in good spirits. Her cheeks positively glowed with
pleasure. Could it really be true, she asked herself, that she would
soon be writing in her drawing-room and sleeping in her bedroom, and
dining with a cloth on the table? A weight was lifted from her heart,
and she no longer felt angry with the artist.
“My paints and brushes I will leave with you, Ryabovsky,” she said. “You
can bring what’s left.... Mind, now, don’t be lazy here when I am gone;
don’t mope, but work. You are such a splendid fellow, Ryabovsky!”
At ten o’clock Ryabovsky gave her a farewell kiss, in order, as she
thought, to avoid kissing her on the steamer before the artists, and
went with her to the landing-stage. The steamer soon came up and carried
her away.
She arrived home two and a half days later. Breathless with excitement,
she went, without taking off her hat or waterproof, into the drawing-
room and thence into the dining-room. Dymov, with his waistcoat
unbuttoned and no coat, was sitting at the table sharpening a knife on a
fork; before him lay a grouse on a plate. As Olga Ivanovna went into the
flat she was convinced that it was essential to hide everything from her
husband, and that she would have the strength and skill to do so; but
now, when she saw his broad, mild, happy smile, and shining, joyful
eyes, she felt that to deceive this man was as vile, as revolting, and
as impossible and out of her power as to bear false witness, to steal,
or to kill, and in a flash she resolved to tell him all that had
happened. Letting him kiss and embrace her, she sank down on her knees
before him and hid her face.
“What is it, what is it, little mother?” he asked tenderly. “Were you
homesick?”
She raised her face, red with shame, and gazed at him with a guilty and
imploring look, but fear and shame prevented her from telling him the
truth.
“Nothing,” she said; “it’s just nothing....”
“Let us sit down,” he said, raising her and seating her at the table.
“That’s right, eat the grouse. You are starving, poor darling.”
She eagerly breathed in the atmosphere of home and ate the grouse, while
he watched her with tenderness and laughed with delight.
VI
Apparently, by the middle of the winter Dymov began to suspect that he
was being deceived. As though his conscience was not clear, he could not
look his wife straight in the face, did not smile with delight when he
met her, and to avoid being left alone with her, he often brought in to
dinner his colleague, Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a
wrinkled face, who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer jacket with
embarrassment when he talked with Olga Ivanovna, and then with his right
hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about
the fact that a displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied
by irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic
complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had the day before found
a cancer of the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with the
diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they were
talking of medicine to give Olga Ivanovna a chance of being silent—that
is, of not lying. After dinner Korostelev sat down to the piano, while
Dymov sighed and said to him:
“Ech, brother—well, well! Play something melancholy.”
Hunching up his shoulders and stretching his fingers wide apart,
Korostelev played some chords and began singing in a tenor voice, “Show
me the abode where the Russian peasant would not groan,” while Dymov
sighed once more, propped his head on his fist, and sank into thought.
Olga Ivanovna had been extremely imprudent in her conduct of late. Every
morning she woke up in a very bad humour and with the thought that she
no longer cared for Ryabovsky, and that, thank God, it was all over now.
But as she drank her coffee she reflected that Ryabovsky had robbed her
of her husband, and that now she was left with neither her husband nor
Ryabovsky; then she remembered talks she had heard among her
acquaintances of a picture Ryabovsky was preparing for the exhibition,
something striking, a mixture of genre and landscape, in the style of
Polyenov, about which every one who had been into his studio went into
raptures; and this, of course, she mused, he had created under her
influence, and altogether, thanks to her influence, he had greatly
changed for the better. Her influence was so beneficent and essential
that if she were to leave him he might perhaps go to ruin. And she
remembered, too, that the last time he had come to see her in a great-
coat with flecks on it and a new tie, he had asked her languidly:
“Am I beautiful?”
And with his elegance, his long curls, and his blue eyes, he really was
very beautiful (or perhaps it only seemed so), and he had been
affectionate to her.
Considering and remembering many things Olga Ivanovna dressed and in
great agitation drove to Ryabovsky’s studio. She found him in high
spirits, and enchanted with his really magnificent picture. He was
dancing about and playing the fool and answering serious questions with
jokes. Olga Ivanovna was jealous of the picture and hated it, but from
politeness she stood before the picture for five minutes in silence,
and, heaving a sigh, as though before a holy shrine, said softly:
“Yes, you have never painted anything like it before. Do you know, it is
positively awe-inspiring?”
And then she began beseeching him to love her and not to cast her off,
to have pity on her in her misery and her wretchedness. She shed tears,
kissed his hands, insisted on his swearing that he loved her, told him
that without her good influence he would go astray and be ruined. And,
when she had spoilt his good-humour, feeling herself humiliated, she
would drive off to her dressmaker or to an actress of her acquaintance
to try and get theatre tickets.
If she did not find him at his studio she left a letter in which she
swore that if he did not come to see her that day she would poison
herself. He was scared, came to see her, and stayed to dinner.
Regardless of her husband’s presence, he would say rude things to her,
and she would answer him in the same way. Both felt they were a burden
to each other, that they were tyrants and enemies, and were wrathful,
and in their wrath did not notice that their behaviour was unseemly, and
that even Korostelev, with his close-cropped head, saw it all. After
dinner Ryabovsky made haste to say good-bye and get away.
“Where are you off to?” Olga Ivanovna would ask him in the hall, looking
at him with hatred.
Scowling and screwing up his eyes, he mentioned some lady of their
acquaintance, and it was evident that he was laughing at her jealousy
and wanted to annoy her. She went to her bedroom and lay down on her
bed; from jealousy, anger, a sense of humiliation and shame, she bit the
pillow and began sobbing aloud. Dymov left Korostelev in the drawing-
room, went into the bedroom, and with a desperate and embarrassed face
said softly:
“Don’t cry so loud, little mother; there’s no need. You must be quiet
about it. You must not let people see.... You know what is done is done,
and can’t be mended.”
Not knowing how to ease the burden of her jealousy, which actually set
her temples throbbing with pain, and thinking still that things might be
set right, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face, and fly off to
the lady mentioned.
Not finding Ryabovsky with her, she would drive off to a second, then to
a third. At first she was ashamed to go about like this, but afterwards
she got used to it, and it would happen that in one evening she would
make the round of all her female acquaintances in search of Ryabovsky,
and they all understood it.
One day she said to Ryabovsky of her husband:
“That man crushes me with his magnanimity.”
This phrase pleased her so much that when she met the artists who knew
of her affair with Ryabovsky she said every time of her husband, with a
vigorous movement of her arm:
“That man crushes me with his magnanimity.”
Their manner of life was the same as it had been the year before. On
Wednesdays they were “At Home”; an actor recited, the artists sketched.
The violoncellist played, a singer sang, and invariably at half-past
eleven the door leading to the dining-room opened and Dymov, smiling,
said:
“Come to supper, gentlemen.”
As before, Olga Ivanovna hunted celebrities, found them, was not
satisfied, and went in pursuit of fresh ones. As before, she came back
late every night; but now Dymov was not, as last year, asleep, but
sitting in his study at work of some sort. He went to bed at three
o’clock and got up at eight.
One evening when she was getting ready to go to the theatre and standing
before the pier glass, Dymov came into her bedroom, wearing his dress-
coat and a white tie. He was smiling gently and looked into his wife’s
face joyfully, as in old days; his face was radiant.
“I have just been defending my thesis,” he said, sitting down and
smoothing his knees.
“Defending?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
“Oh, oh!” he laughed, and he craned his neck to see his wife’s face in
the mirror, for she was still standing with her back to him, doing up
her hair. “Oh, oh,” he repeated, “do you know it’s very possible they
may offer me the Readership in General Pathology? It seems like it.”
It was evident from his beaming, blissful face that if Olga Ivanovna had
shared with him his joy and triumph he would have forgiven her
everything, both the present and the future, and would have forgotten
everything, but she did not understand what was meant by a “readership”
or by “general pathology”; besides, she was afraid of being late for the
theatre, and she said nothing.
He sat there another two minutes, and with a guilty smile went away.
VII
It had been a very troubled day.
Dymov had a very bad headache; he had no breakfast, and did not go to
the hospital, but spent the whole time lying on his sofa in the study.
Olga Ivanovna went as usual at midday to see Ryabovsky, to show him her
still-life sketch, and to ask him why he had not been to see her the
evening before. The sketch seemed to her worthless, and she had painted
it only in order to have an additional reason for going to the artist.
She went in to him without ringing, and as she was taking off her
goloshes in the entry she heard a sound as of something running softly
in the studio, with a feminine rustle of skirts; and as she hastened to
peep in she caught a momentary glimpse of a bit of brown petticoat,
which vanished behind a big picture draped, together with the easel,
with black calico, to the floor. There could be no doubt that a woman
was hiding there. How often Olga Ivanovna herself had taken refuge
behind that picture!
Ryabovsky, evidently much embarrassed, held out both hands to her, as
though surprised at her arrival, and said with a forced smile:
“Aha! Very glad to see you! Anything nice to tell me?”
Olga Ivanovna’s eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed and bitter, and
would not for a million roubles have consented to speak in the presence
of the outsider, the rival, the deceitful woman who was standing now
behind the picture, and probably giggling malignantly.
“I have brought you a sketch,” she said timidly in a thin voice, and her
lips quivered. “Nature morte.”
“Ah—ah!... A sketch?”
The artist took the sketch in his hands, and as he examined it walked,
as it were mechanically, into the other room.
Olga Ivanovna followed him humbly.
“Nature morte... first-rate sort,” he muttered, falling into rhyme.
“Kurort... sport... port...”
From the studio came the sound of hurried footsteps and the rustle of a
skirt.
So she had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to scream aloud, to hit the artist
on the head with something heavy, but she could see nothing through her
tears, was crushed by her shame, and felt herself, not Olga Ivanovna,
not an artist, but a little insect.
“I am tired...” said the artist languidly, looking at the sketch and
tossing his head as though struggling with drowsiness. “It’s very nice,
of course, but here a sketch today, a sketch last year, another sketch
in a month... I wonder you are not bored with them. If I were you I
should give up painting and work seriously at music or something. You’re
not an artist, you know, but a musician. But you can’t think how tired I
am! I’ll tell them to bring us some tea, shall I?”
He went out of the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some order to
his footman. To avoid farewells and explanations, and above all to avoid
bursting into sobs, she ran as fast as she could, before Ryabovsky came
back, to the entry, put on her goloshes, and went out into the street;
then she breathed easily, and felt she was free for ever from Ryabovsky
and from painting and from the burden of shame which had so crushed her
in the studio. It was all over!
She drove to her dressmaker’s; then to see Barnay, who had only arrived
the day before; from Barnay to a music-shop, and all the time she was
thinking how she would write Ryabovsky a cold, cruel letter full of
personal dignity, and how in the spring or the summer she would go with
Dymov to the Crimea, free herself finally from the past there, and begin
a new life.
On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the drawing-room,
without taking off her things, to begin the letter. Ryabovsky had told
her she was not an artist, and to pay him out she wrote to him now that
he painted the same thing every year, and said exactly the same thing
every day; that he was at a standstill, and that nothing more would come
of him than had come already. She wanted to write, too, that he owed a
great deal to her good influence, and that if he was going wrong it was
only because her influence was paralysed by various dubious persons like
the one who had been hiding behind the picture that day.
“Little mother!” Dymov called from the study, without opening the door.
“What is it?”
“Don’t come in to me, but only come to the door—that’s right.... The day
before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria at the hospital, and
now... I am ill. Make haste and send for Korostelev.”
Olga Ivanovna always called her husband by his surname, as she did all
the men of her acquaintance; she disliked his Christian name, Osip,
because it reminded her of the Osip in Gogol and the silly pun on his
name. But now she cried:
“Osip, it cannot be!”
“Send for him; I feel ill,” Dymov said behind the door, and she could
hear him go back to the sofa and lie down. “Send!” she heard his voice
faintly.
“Good Heavens!” thought Olga Ivanovna, turning chill with horror. “Why,
it’s dangerous!”
For no reason she took the candle and went into the bedroom, and there,
reflecting what she must do, glanced casually at herself in the pier
glass. With her pale, frightened face, in a jacket with sleeves high on
the shoulders, with yellow ruches on her bosom, and with stripes running
in unusual directions on her skirt, she seemed to herself horrible and
disgusting. She suddenly felt poignantly sorry for Dymov, for his
boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for the desolate
little bed in which he had not slept for so long; and she remembered his
habitual, gentle, submissive smile. She wept bitterly, and wrote an
imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o’clock in the night.
VIII
When towards eight o’clock in the morning Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy
from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed, came out of her bedroom,
looking unattractive and with a guilty expression on her face, a
gentleman with a black beard, apparently the doctor, passed by her into
the entry. There was a smell of drugs. Korostelev was standing near the
study door, twisting his left moustache with his right hand.
“Excuse me, I can’t let you go in,” he said surlily to Olga Ivanovna;
“it’s catching. Besides, it’s no use, really; he is delirious, anyway.”
“Has he really got diphtheria?” Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.
“People who wantonly risk infection ought to be hauled up and punished
for it,” muttered Korostelev, not answering Olga Ivanovna’s question.
“Do you know why he caught it? On Tuesday he was sucking up the mucus
through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was
stupid.... Just from folly....”
“Is it dangerous, very?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
“Yes; they say it is the malignant form. We ought to send for Shrek
really.”
A little red-haired man with a long nose and a Jewish accent arrived;
then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual, who looked like a head deacon;
then a stout young man with a red face and spectacles. These were
doctors who came to watch by turns beside their colleague. Korostelev
did not go home when his turn was over, but remained and wandered about
the rooms like an uneasy spirit. The maid kept getting tea for the
various doctors, and was constantly running to the chemist, and there
was no one to do the rooms. There was a dismal stillness in the flat.
Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was punishing her
for having deceived her husband. That silent, unrepining, uncomprehended
creature, robbed by his mildness of all personality and will, weak from
excessive kindness, had been suffering in obscurity somewhere on his
sofa, and had not complained. And if he were to complain even in
delirium, the doctors watching by his bedside would learn that
diphtheria was not the only cause of his sufferings. They would ask
Korostelev. He knew all about it, and it was not for nothing that he
looked at his friend’s wife with eyes that seemed to say that she was
the real chief criminal and diphtheria was only her accomplice. She did
not think now of the moonlight evening on the Volga, nor the words of
love, nor their poetical life in the peasant’s hut. She thought only
that from an idle whim, from self-indulgence, she had sullied herself
all over from head to foot in something filthy, sticky, which one could
never wash off....
“Oh, how fearfully false I’ve been!” she thought, recalling the troubled
passion she had known with Ryabovsky. “Curse it all!...”
At four o’clock she dined with Korostelev. He did nothing but scowl and
drink red wine, and did not eat a morsel. She ate nothing, either. At
one minute she was praying inwardly and vowing to God that if Dymov
recovered she would love him again and be a faithful wife to him. Then,
forgetting herself for a minute, she would look at Korostelev, and
think: “Surely it must be dull to be a humble, obscure person, not
remarkable in any way, especially with such a wrinkled face and bad
manners!”
Then it seemed to her that God would strike her dead that minute for not
having once been in her husband’s study, for fear of infection. And
altogether she had a dull, despondent feeling and a conviction that her
life was spoilt, and that there was no setting it right anyhow....
After dinner darkness came on. When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-
room Korostelev was asleep on the sofa, with a gold-embroidered silk
cushion under his head.
“Khee-poo-ah,” he snored—“khee-poo-ah.”
And the doctors as they came to sit up and went away again did not
notice this disorder. The fact that a strange man was asleep and snoring
in the drawing-room, and the sketches on the walls and the exquisite
decoration of the room, and the fact that the lady of the house was
dishevelled and untidy—all that aroused not the slightest interest now.
One of the doctors chanced to laugh at something, and the laugh had a
strange and timid sound that made one’s heart ache.
When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room next time, Korostelev was
not asleep, but sitting up and smoking.
“He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity,” he said in a low voice, “and
the heart is not working properly now. Things are in a bad way, really.”
“But you will send for Shrek?” said Olga Ivanovna.
“He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had passed
into the nose. What’s the use of Shrek! Shrek’s no use at all, really.
He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more.”
The time dragged on fearfully slowly. Olga Ivanovna lay down in her
clothes on her bed, that had not been made all day, and sank into a
doze. She dreamed that the whole flat was filled up from floor to
ceiling with a huge piece of iron, and that if they could only get the
iron out they would all be light-hearted and happy. Waking, she realized
that it was not the iron but Dymov’s illness that was weighing on her.
“Nature morte, port...” she thought, sinking into forgetfulness again.
“Sport... Kurort... and what of Shrek? Shrek... trek... wreck.... And
where are my friends now? Do they know that we are in trouble? Lord,
save... spare! Shrek... trek...”
And again the iron was there.... The time dragged on slowly, though the
clock on the lower storey struck frequently. And bells were continually
ringing as the doctors arrived.... The house-maid came in with an empty
glass on a tray, and asked, “Shall I make the bed, madam?” and getting
no answer, went away.
The clock below struck the hour. She dreamed of the rain on the Volga;
and again some one came into her bedroom, she thought a stranger. Olga
Ivanovna jumped up, and recognized Korostelev.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“About three.”
“Well, what is it?”
“What, indeed!... I’ve come to tell you he is passing....”
He gave a sob, sat down on the bed beside her, and wiped away the tears
with his sleeve. She could not grasp it at once, but turned cold all
over and began slowly crossing herself.
“He is passing,” he repeated in a shrill voice, and again he gave a sob.
“He is dying because he sacrificed himself. What a loss for science!” he
said bitterly. “Compare him with all of us. He was a great man, an
extraordinary man! What gifts! What hopes we all had of him!” Korostelev
went on, wringing his hands: “Merciful God, he was a man of science; we
shall never look on his like again. Osip Dymov, what have you done—aie,
aie, my God!”
Korostelev covered his face with both hands in despair, and shook his
head.
“And his moral force,” he went on, seeming to grow more and more
exasperated against some one. “Not a man, but a pure, good, loving soul,
and clean as crystal. He served science and died for science. And he
worked like an ox night and day—no one spared him—and with his youth and
his learning he had to take a private practice and work at translations
at night to pay for these... vile rags!”
Korostelev looked with hatred at Olga Ivanovna, snatched at the sheet
with both hands and angrily tore it, as though it were to blame.
“He did not spare himself, and others did not spare him. Oh, what’s the
use of talking!”
“Yes, he was a rare man,” said a bass voice in the drawing-room.
Olga Ivanovna remembered her whole life with him from the beginning to
the end, with all its details, and suddenly she understood that he
really was an extraordinary, rare, and, compared with every one else she
knew, a great man. And remembering how her father, now dead, and all the
other doctors had behaved to him, she realized that they really had seen
in him a future celebrity. The walls, the ceiling, the lamp, and the
carpet on the floor, seemed to be winking at her sarcastically, as
though they would say, “You were blind! you were blind!” With a wail she
flung herself out of the bedroom, dashed by some unknown man in the
drawing-room, and ran into her husband’s study. He was lying motionless
on the sofa, covered to the waist with a quilt. His face was fearfully
thin and sunken, and was of a greyish-yellow colour such as is never
seen in the living; only from the forehead, from the black eyebrows and
from the familiar smile, could he be recognized as Dymov. Olga Ivanovna
hurriedly felt his chest, his forehead, and his hands. The chest was
still warm, but the forehead and hands were unpleasantly cold, and the
half-open eyes looked, not at Olga Ivanovna, but at the quilt.
“Dymov!” she called aloud, “Dymov!” She wanted to explain to him that it
had been a mistake, that all was not lost, that life might still be
beautiful and happy, that he was an extraordinary, rare, great man, and
that she would all her life worship him and bow down in homage and holy
awe before him....
“Dymov!” she called him, patting him on the shoulder, unable to believe
that he would never wake again. “Dymov! Dymov!”
In the drawing-room Korostelev was saying to the housemaid:
“Why keep asking? Go to the church beadle and enquire where they live.
They’ll wash the body and lay it out, and do everything that is
necessary.”
A DREARY STORY FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN OLD MAN
T HERE is in Russia an emeritus Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch, a
chevalier and privy councillor; he has so many Russian and foreign
decorations that when he has occasion to put them on the students
nickname him “The Ikonstand.” His acquaintances are of the most
aristocratic; for the last twenty-five or thirty years, at any rate,
there has not been one single distinguished man of learning in Russia
with whom he has not been intimately acquainted. There is no one for him
to make friends with nowadays; but if we turn to the past, the long list
of his famous friends winds up with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and
the poet Nekrasov, all of whom bestowed upon him a warm and sincere
affection. He is a member of all the Russian and of three foreign
universities. And so on, and so on. All that and a great deal more that
might be said makes up what is called my “name.”
That is my name as known to the public. In Russia it is known to every
educated man, and abroad it is mentioned in the lecture-room with the
addition “honoured and distinguished.” It is one of those fortunate
names to abuse which or to take which in vain, in public or in print, is
considered a sign of bad taste. And that is as it should be. You see, my
name is closely associated with the conception of a highly distinguished
man of great gifts and unquestionable usefulness. I have the industry
and power of endurance of a camel, and that is important, and I have
talent, which is even more important. Moreover, while I am on this
subject, I am a well-educated, modest, and honest fellow. I have never
poked my nose into literature or politics; I have never sought
popularity in polemics with the ignorant; I have never made speeches
either at public dinners or at the funerals of my friends.... In fact,
there is no slur on my learned name, and there is no complaint one can
make against it. It is fortunate.
The bearer of that name, that is I, see myself as a man of sixty-two,
with a bald head, with false teeth, and with an incurable tic
douloureux. I am myself as dingy and unsightly as my name is brilliant
and splendid. My head and my hands tremble with weakness; my neck, as
Turgenev says of one of his heroines, is like the handle of a double
bass; my chest is hollow; my shoulders narrow; when I talk or lecture,
my mouth turns down at one corner; when I smile, my whole face is
covered with aged-looking, deathly wrinkles. There is nothing impressive
about my pitiful figure; only, perhaps, when I have an attack of tic
douloureux my face wears a peculiar expression, the sight of which must
have roused in every one the grim and impressive thought, “Evidently
that man will soon die.”
I still, as in the past, lecture fairly well; I can still, as in the
past, hold the attention of my listeners for a couple of hours. My
fervour, the literary skill of my exposition, and my humour, almost
efface the defects of my voice, though it is harsh, dry, and monotonous
as a praying beggar’s. I write poorly. That bit of my brain which
presides over the faculty of authorship refuses to work. My memory has
grown weak; there is a lack of sequence in my ideas, and when I put them
on paper it always seems to me that I have lost the instinct for their
organic connection; my construction is monotonous; my language is poor
and timid. Often I write what I do not mean; I have forgotten the
beginning when I am writing the end. Often I forget ordinary words, and
I always have to waste a great deal of energy in avoiding superfluous
phrases and unnecessary parentheses in my letters, both unmistakable
proofs of a decline in mental activity. And it is noteworthy that the
simpler the letter the more painful the effort to write it. At a
scientific article I feel far more intelligent and at ease than at a
letter of congratulation or a minute of proceedings. Another point: I
find it easier to write German or English than to write Russian.
As regards my present manner of life, I must give a foremost place to
the insomnia from which I have suffered of late. If I were asked what
constituted the chief and fundamental feature of my existence now, I
should answer, Insomnia. As in the past, from habit I undress and go to
bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but before two o’clock I
wake up and feel as though I had not slept at all. Sometimes I get out
of bed and light a lamp. For an hour or two I walk up and down the room
looking at the familiar photographs and pictures. When I am weary of
walking about, I sit down to my table. I sit motionless, thinking of
nothing, conscious of no inclination; if a book is lying before me, I
mechanically move it closer and read it without any interest—in that way
not long ago I mechanically read through in one night a whole novel,
with the strange title “The Song the Lark was Singing”; or to occupy my
attention I force myself to count to a thousand; or I imagine the face
of one of my colleagues and begin trying to remember in what year and
under what circumstances he entered the service. I like listening to
sounds. Two rooms away from me my daughter Liza says something rapidly
in her sleep, or my wife crosses the drawing-room with a candle and
invariably drops the matchbox; or a warped cupboard creaks; or the
burner of the lamp suddenly begins to hum—and all these sounds, for some
reason, excite me.
To lie awake at night means to be at every moment conscious of being
abnormal, and so I look forward with impatience to the morning and the
day when I have a right to be awake. Many wearisome hours pass before
the cock crows in the yard. He is my first bringer of good tidings. As
soon as he crows I know that within an hour the porter will wake up
below, and, coughing angrily, will go upstairs to fetch something. And
then a pale light will begin gradually glimmering at the windows, voices
will sound in the street....
The day begins for me with the entrance of my wife. She comes in to me
in her petticoat, before she has done her hair, but after she has
washed, smelling of flower-scented eau-de-Cologne, looking as though she
had come in by chance. Every time she says exactly the same thing:
“Excuse me, I have just come in for a minute.... Have you had a bad
night again?”
Then she puts out the lamp, sits down near the table, and begins
talking. I am no prophet, but I know what she will talk about. Every
morning it is exactly the same thing. Usually, after anxious inquiries
concerning my health, she suddenly mentions our son who is an officer
serving at Warsaw. After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty
roubles, and that serves as the chief topic of our conversation.
“Of course it is difficult for us,” my wife would sigh, “but until he is
completely on his own feet it is our duty to help him. The boy is among
strangers, his pay is small.... However, if you like, next month we
won’t send him fifty, but forty. What do you think?”
Daily experience might have taught my wife that constantly talking of
our expenses does not reduce them, but my wife refuses to learn by
experience, and regularly every morning discusses our officer son, and
tells me that bread, thank God, is cheaper, while sugar is a halfpenny
dearer—with a tone and an air as though she were communicating
interesting news.
I listen, mechanically assent, and probably because I have had a bad
night, strange and inappropriate thoughts intrude themselves upon me. I
gaze at my wife and wonder like a child. I ask myself in perplexity, is
it possible that this old, very stout, ungainly woman, with her dull
expression of petty anxiety and alarm about daily bread, with eyes
dimmed by continual brooding over debts and money difficulties, who can
talk of nothing but expenses and who smiles at nothing but things
getting cheaper—is it possible that this woman is no other than the
slender Varya whom I fell in love with so passionately for her fine,
clear intelligence, for her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello his
Desdemona, for her “sympathy” for my studies? Could that woman be no
other than the Varya who had once borne me a son?
I look with strained attention into the face of this flabby, spiritless,
clumsy old woman, seeking in her my Varya, but of her past self nothing
is left but her anxiety over my health and her manner of calling my
salary “our salary,” and my cap “our cap.” It is painful for me to look
at her, and, to give her what little comfort I can, I let her say what
she likes, and say nothing even when she passes unjust criticisms on
other people or pitches into me for not having a private practice or not
publishing text-books.
Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers
with dismay that I have not had my tea.
“What am I thinking about, sitting here?” she says, getting up. “The
samovar has been on the table ever so long, and here I stay gossiping.
My goodness! how forgetful I am growing!”
She goes out quickly, and stops in the doorway to say:
“We owe Yegor five months’ wages. Did you know it? You mustn’t let the
servants’ wages run on; how many times I have said it! It’s much easier
to pay ten roubles a month than fifty roubles every five months!”
As she goes out, she stops to say:
“The person I am sorriest for is our Liza. The girl studies at the
Conservatoire, always mixes with people of good position, and goodness
knows how she is dressed. Her fur coat is in such a state she is ashamed
to show herself in the street. If she were somebody else’s daughter it
wouldn’t matter, but of course every one knows that her father is a
distinguished professor, a privy councillor.”
And having reproached me with my rank and reputation, she goes away at
last. That is how my day begins. It does not improve as it goes on.
As I am drinking my tea, my Liza comes in wearing her fur coat and her
cap, with her music in her hand, already quite ready to go to the
Conservatoire. She is two-and-twenty. She looks younger, is pretty, and
rather like my wife in her young days. She kisses me tenderly on my
forehead and on my hand, and says:
“Good-morning, papa; are you quite well?”
As a child she was very fond of ice-cream, and I used often to take her
to a confectioner’s. Ice-cream was for her the type of everything
delightful. If she wanted to praise me she would say: “You are as nice
as cream, papa.” We used to call one of her little fingers “pistachio
ice,” the next, “cream ice,” the third “raspberry,” and so on. Usually
when she came in to say good-morning to me I used to sit her on my knee,
kiss her little fingers, and say:
“Creamy ice... pistachio... lemon....”
And now, from old habit, I kiss Liza’s fingers and mutter: “Pistachio...
cream... lemon...” but the effect is utterly different. I am cold as ice
and I am ashamed. When my daughter comes in to me and touches my
forehead with her lips I start as though a bee had stung me on the head,
give a forced smile, and turn my face away. Ever since I have been
suffering from sleeplessness, a question sticks in my brain like a nail.
My daughter often sees me, an old man and a distinguished man, blush
painfully at being in debt to my footman; she sees how often anxiety
over petty debts forces me to lay aside my work and to walk up and down
the room for hours together, thinking; but why is it she never comes to
me in secret to whisper in my ear: “Father, here is my watch, here are
my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses.... Pawn them all; you want
money...”? How is it that, seeing how her mother and I are placed in a
false position and do our utmost to hide our poverty from people, she
does not give up her expensive pleasure of music lessons? I would not
accept her watch nor her bracelets, nor the sacrifice of her lessons—God
forbid! That isn’t what I want.
I think at the same time of my son, the officer at Warsaw. He is a
clever, honest, and sober fellow. But that is not enough for me. I think
if I had an old father, and if I knew there were moments when he was put
to shame by his poverty, I should give up my officer’s commission to
somebody else, and should go out to earn my living as a workman. Such
thoughts about my children poison me. What is the use of them? It is
only a narrow-minded or embittered man who can harbour evil thoughts
about ordinary people because they are not heroes. But enough of that!
At a quarter to ten I have to go and give a lecture to my dear boys. I
dress and walk along the road which I have known for thirty years, and
which has its history for me. Here is the big grey house with the
chemist’s shop; at this point there used to stand a little house, and in
it was a beershop; in that beershop I thought out my thesis and wrote my
first love-letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page headed
“Historia morbi.” Here there is a grocer’s shop; at one time it was kept
by a little Jew, who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant
woman, who liked the students because “every one of them has a mother”;
now there is a red-haired shopkeeper sitting in it, a very stolid man
who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy gates of
the University, which have long needed doing up; I see the bored porter
in his sheep-skin, the broom, the drifts of snow.... On a boy coming
fresh from the provinces and imagining that the temple of science must
really be a temple, such gates cannot make a healthy impression.
Altogether the dilapidated condition of the University buildings, the
gloominess of the corridors, the griminess of the walls, the lack of
light, the dejected aspect of the steps, the hat-stands and the benches,
take a prominent position among predisposing causes in the history of
Russian pessimism.... Here is our garden... I fancy it has grown neither
better nor worse since I was a student. I don’t like it. It would be far
more sensible if there were tall pines and fine oaks growing here
instead of sickly-looking lime-trees, yellow acacias, and skimpy pollard
lilacs. The student whose state of mind is in the majority of cases
created by his surroundings, ought in the place where he is studying to
see facing him at every turn nothing but what is lofty, strong and
elegant.... God preserve him from gaunt trees, broken windows, grey
walls, and doors covered with torn American leather!
When I go to my own entrance the door is flung wide open, and I am met
by my colleague, contemporary, and namesake, the porter Nikolay. As he
lets me in he clears his throat and says:
“A frost, your Excellency!”
Or, if my great-coat is wet:
“Rain, your Excellency!”
Then he runs on ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In my
study he carefully takes off my fur coat, and while doing so manages to
tell me some bit of University news. Thanks to the close intimacy
existing between all the University porters and beadles, he knows
everything that goes on in the four faculties, in the office, in the
rector’s private room, in the library. What does he not know? When in an
evil day a rector or dean, for instance, retires, I hear him in
conversation with the young porters mention the candidates for the post,
explain that such a one would not be confirmed by the minister, that
another would himself refuse to accept it, then drop into fantastic
details concerning mysterious papers received in the office, secret
conversations alleged to have taken place between the minister and the
trustee, and so on. With the exception of these details, he almost
always turns out to be right. His estimates of the candidates, though
original, are very correct, too. If one wants to know in what year some
one read his thesis, entered the service, retired, or died, then summon
to your assistance the vast memory of that soldier, and he will not only
tell you the year, the month and the day, but will furnish you also with
the details that accompanied this or that event. Only one who loves can
remember like that.
He is the guardian of the University traditions. From the porters who
were his predecessors he has inherited many legends of University life,
has added to that wealth much of his own gained during his time of
service, and if you care to hear he will tell you many long and intimate
stories. He can tell one about extraordinary sages who knew everything,
about remarkable students who did not sleep for weeks, about numerous
martyrs and victims of science; with him good triumphs over evil, the
weak always vanquishes the strong, the wise man the fool, the humble the
proud, the young the old. There is no need to take all these fables and
legends for sterling coin; but filter them, and you will have left what
is wanted: our fine traditions and the names of real heroes, recognized
as such by all.
In our society the knowledge of the learned world consists of anecdotes
of the extraordinary absentmindedness of certain old professors, and two
or three witticisms variously ascribed to Gruber, to me, and to Babukin.
For the educated public that is not much. If it loved science, learned
men, and students, as Nikolay does, its literature would long ago have
contained whole epics, records of sayings and doings such as,
unfortunately, it cannot boast of now.
After telling me a piece of news, Nikolay assumes a severe expression,
and conversation about business begins. If any outsider could at such
times overhear Nikolay’s free use of our terminology, he might perhaps
imagine that he was a learned man disguised as a soldier. And, by the
way, the rumours of the erudition of the University porters are greatly
exaggerated. It is true that Nikolay knows more than a hundred Latin
words, knows how to put the skeleton together, sometimes prepares the
apparatus and amuses the students by some long, learned quotation, but
the by no means complicated theory of the circulation of the blood, for
instance, is as much a mystery to him now as it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my study, bending low over some book or preparation,
sits Pyotr Ignatyevitch, my demonstrator, a modest and industrious but
by no means clever man of five-and-thirty, already bald and corpulent;
he works from morning to night, reads a lot, remembers well everything
he has read—and in that way he is not a man, but pure gold; in all else
he is a carthorse or, in other words, a learned dullard. The carthorse
characteristics that show his lack of talent are these: his outlook is
narrow and sharply limited by his specialty; outside his special branch
he is simple as a child.
“Fancy! what a misfortune! They say Skobelev is dead.”
Nikolay crosses himself, but Pyotr Ignatyevitch turns to me and asks:
“What Skobelev is that?”
Another time—somewhat earlier—I told him that Professor Perov was dead.
Good Pyotr Ignatyevitch asked:
“What did he lecture on?”
I believe if Patti had sung in his very ear, if a horde of Chinese had
invaded Russia, if there had been an earthquake, he would not have
stirred a limb, but screwing up his eye, would have gone on calmly
looking through his microscope. What is he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him,
in fact? I would give a good deal to see how this dry stick sleeps with
his wife at night.
Another characteristic is his fanatical faith in the infallibility of
science, and, above all, of everything written by the Germans. He
believes in himself, in his preparations; knows the object of life, and
knows nothing of the doubts and disappointments that turn the hair of
talent grey. He has a slavish reverence for authorities and a complete
lack of any desire for independent thought. To change his convictions is
difficult, to argue with him impossible. How is one to argue with a man
who is firmly persuaded that medicine is the finest of sciences, that
doctors are the best of men, and that the traditions of the medical
profession are superior to those of any other? Of the evil past of
medicine only one tradition has been preserved—the white tie still worn
by doctors; for a learned—in fact, for any educated man the only
traditions that can exist are those of the University as a whole, with
no distinction between medicine, law, etc. But it would be hard for
Pyotr Ignatyevitch to accept these facts, and he is ready to argue with
you till the day of judgment.
I have a clear picture in my mind of his future. In the course of his
life he will prepare many hundreds of chemicals of exceptional purity;
he will write a number of dry and very accurate memoranda, will make
some dozen conscientious translations, but he won’t do anything
striking. To do that one must have imagination, inventiveness, the gift
of insight, and Pyotr Ignatyevitch has nothing of the kind. In short, he
is not a master in science, but a journeyman.
Pyotr Ignatyevitch, Nikolay, and I, talk in subdued tones. We are not
quite ourselves. There is always a peculiar feeling when one hears
through the doors a murmur as of the sea from the lecture-theatre. In
the course of thirty years I have not grown accustomed to this feeling,
and I experience it every morning. I nervously button up my coat, ask
Nikolay unnecessary questions, lose my temper.... It is just as though I
were frightened; it is not timidity, though, but something different
which I can neither describe nor find a name for.
Quite unnecessarily, I look at my watch and say: “Well, it’s time to go
in.”
And we march into the room in the following order: foremost goes
Nikolay, with the chemicals and apparatus or with a chart; after him I
come; and then the carthorse follows humbly, with hanging head; or, when
necessary, a dead body is carried in first on a stretcher, followed by
Nikolay, and so on. On my entrance the students all stand up, then they
sit down, and the sound as of the sea is suddenly hushed. Stillness
reigns.
I know what I am going to lecture about, but I don’t know how I am going
to lecture, where I am going to begin or with what I am going to end. I
haven’t a single sentence ready in my head. But I have only to look
round the lecture-hall (it is built in the form of an amphitheatre) and
utter the stereotyped phrase, “Last lecture we stopped at...” when
sentences spring up from my soul in a long string, and I am carried away
by my own eloquence. I speak with irresistible rapidity and passion, and
it seems as though there were no force which could check the flow of my
words. To lecture well—that is, with profit to the listeners and without
boring them—one must have, besides talent, experience and a special
knack; one must possess a clear conception of one’s own powers, of the
audience to which one is lecturing, and of the subject of one’s lecture.
Moreover, one must be a man who knows what he is doing; one must keep a
sharp lookout, and not for one second lose sight of what lies before
one.
A good conductor, interpreting the thought of the composer, does twenty
things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer,
makes a motion sideways, first to the drum then to the wind-instruments,
and so on. I do just the same when I lecture. Before me a hundred and
fifty faces, all unlike one another; three hundred eyes all looking
straight into my face. My object is to dominate this many-headed
monster. If every moment as I lecture I have a clear vision of the
degree of its attention and its power of comprehension, it is in my
power. The other foe I have to overcome is in myself. It is the infinite
variety of forms, phenomena, laws, and the multitude of ideas of my own
and other people’s conditioned by them. Every moment I must have the
skill to snatch out of that vast mass of material what is most important
and necessary, and, as rapidly as my words flow, clothe my thought in a
form in which it can be grasped by the monster’s intelligence, and may
arouse its attention, and at the same time one must keep a sharp lookout
that one’s thoughts are conveyed, not just as they come, but in a
certain order, essential for the correct composition of the picture I
wish to sketch. Further, I endeavour to make my diction literary, my
definitions brief and precise, my wording, as far as possible, simple
and eloquent. Every minute I have to pull myself up and remember that I
have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, one has
one’s work cut out. At one and the same minute one has to play the part
of savant and teacher and orator, and it’s a bad thing if the orator
gets the upper hand of the savant or of the teacher in one, or vice
versa.
You lecture for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour, when you notice
that the students are beginning to look at the ceiling, at Pyotr
Ignatyevitch; one is feeling for his handkerchief, another shifts in his
seat, another smiles at his thoughts.... That means that their attention
is flagging. Something must be done. Taking advantage of the first
opportunity, I make some pun. A broad grin comes on to a hundred and
fifty faces, the eyes shine brightly, the sound of the sea is audible
for a brief moment.... I laugh too. Their attention is refreshed, and I
can go on.
No kind of sport, no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such
enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon
myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not
an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine
Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such
voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.
That was in old times. Now at lectures I feel nothing but torture.
Before half an hour is over I am conscious of an overwhelming weakness
in my legs and my shoulders. I sit down in my chair, but I am not
accustomed to lecture sitting down; a minute later I get up and go on
standing, then sit down again. There is a dryness in my mouth, my voice
grows husky, my head begins to go round.... To conceal my condition from
my audience I continually drink water, cough, often blow my nose as
though I were hindered by a cold, make puns inappropriately, and in the
end break off earlier than I ought to. But above all I am ashamed.
My conscience and my intelligence tell me that the very best thing I
could do now would be to deliver a farewell lecture to the boys, to say
my last word to them, to bless them, and give up my post to a man
younger and stronger than me. But, God, be my judge, I have not manly
courage enough to act according to my conscience.
Unfortunately, I am not a philosopher and not a theologian. I know
perfectly well that I cannot live more than another six months; it might
be supposed that I ought now to be chiefly concerned with the question
of the shadowy life beyond the grave, and the visions that will visit my
slumbers in the tomb. But for some reason my soul refuses to recognize
these questions, though my mind is fully alive to their importance. Just
as twenty, thirty years ago, so now, on the threshold of death, I am
interested in nothing but science. As I yield up my last breath I shall
still believe that science is the most important, the most splendid, the
most essential thing in the life of man; that it always has been and
will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by means of it
will man conquer himself and nature. This faith is perhaps naive and may
rest on false assumptions, but it is not my fault that I believe that
and nothing else; I cannot overcome in myself this belief.
But that is not the point. I only ask people to be indulgent to my
weakness, and to realize that to tear from the lecture-theatre and his
pupils a man who is more interested in the history of the development of
the bone medulla than in the final object of creation would be
equivalent to taking him and nailing him up in his coffin without
waiting for him to be dead.
Sleeplessness and the consequent strain of combating increasing weakness
leads to something strange in me. In the middle of my lecture tears
suddenly rise in my throat, my eyes begin to smart, and I feel a
passionate, hysterical desire to stretch out my hands before me and
break into loud lamentation. I want to cry out in a loud voice that I, a
famous man, have been sentenced by fate to the death penalty, that
within some six months another man will be in control here in the
lecture-theatre. I want to shriek that I am poisoned; new ideas such as
I have not known before have poisoned the last days of my life, and are
still stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at that moment my position
seems to me so awful that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to
leap up from their seats and to rush in panic terror, with desperate
screams, to the exit.
It is not easy to get through such moments.
II
After my lecture I sit at home and work. I read journals and monographs,
or prepare my next lecture; sometimes I write something. I work with
interruptions, as I have from time to time to see visitors.
There is a ring at the bell. It is a colleague come to discuss some
business matter with me. He comes in to me with his hat and his stick,
and, holding out both these objects to me, says:
“Only for a minute! Only for a minute! Sit down, collega! Only a couple
of words.”
To begin with, we both try to show each other that we are
extraordinarily polite and highly delighted to see each other. I make
him sit down in an easy-chair, and he makes me sit down; as we do so, we
cautiously pat each other on the back, touch each other’s buttons, and
it looks as though we were feeling each other and afraid of scorching
our fingers. Both of us laugh, though we say nothing amusing. When we
are seated we bow our heads towards each other and begin talking in
subdued voices. However affectionately disposed we may be to one
another, we cannot help adorning our conversation with all sorts of
Chinese mannerisms, such as “As you so justly observed,” or “I have
already had the honour to inform you”; we cannot help laughing if one of
us makes a joke, however unsuccessfully. When we have finished with
business my colleague gets up impulsively and, waving his hat in the
direction of my work, begins to say good-bye. Again we paw one another
and laugh. I see him into the hall; when I assist my colleague to put on
his coat, while he does all he can to decline this high honour. Then
when Yegor opens the door my colleague declares that I shall catch cold,
while I make a show of being ready to go even into the street with him.
And when at last I go back into my study my face still goes on smiling,
I suppose from inertia.
A little later another ring at the bell. Somebody comes into the hall,
and is a long time coughing and taking off his things. Yegor announces a
student. I tell him to ask him in. A minute later a young man of
agreeable appearance comes in. For the last year he and I have been on
strained relations; he answers me disgracefully at the examinations, and
I mark him one. Every year I have some seven such hopefuls whom, to
express it in the students’ slang, I “chivy” or “floor.” Those of them
who fail in their examination through incapacity or illness usually bear
their cross patiently and do not haggle with me; those who come to the
house and haggle with me are always youths of sanguine temperament,
broad natures, whose failure at examinations spoils their appetites and
hinders them from visiting the opera with their usual regularity. I let
the first class off easily, but the second I chivy through a whole year.
“Sit down,” I say to my visitor; “what have you to tell me?”
“Excuse me, professor, for troubling you,” he begins, hesitating, and
not looking me in the face. “I would not have ventured to trouble you if
it had not been... I have been up for your examination five times, and
have been ploughed.... I beg you, be so good as to mark me for a pass,
because...”
The argument which all the sluggards bring forward on their own behalf
is always the same; they have passed well in all their subjects and have
only come to grief in mine, and that is the more surprising because they
have always been particularly interested in my subject and knew it so
well; their failure has always been entirely owing to some
incomprehensible misunderstanding.
“Excuse me, my friend,” I say to the visitor; “I cannot mark you for a
pass. Go and read up the lectures and come to me again. Then we shall
see.”
A pause. I feel an impulse to torment the student a little for liking
beer and the opera better than science, and I say, with a sigh:
“To my mind, the best thing you can do now is to give up medicine
altogether. If, with your abilities, you cannot succeed in passing the
examination, it’s evident that you have neither the desire nor the
vocation for a doctor’s calling.”
The sanguine youth’s face lengthens.
“Excuse me, professor,” he laughs, “but that would be odd of me, to say
the least of it. After studying for five years, all at once to give it
up.”
“Oh, well! Better to have lost your five years than have to spend the
rest of your life in doing work you do not care for.”
But at once I feel sorry for him, and I hasten to add:
“However, as you think best. And so read a little more and come again.”
“When?” the idle youth asks in a hollow voice.
“When you like. Tomorrow if you like.”
And in his good-natured eyes I read:
“I can come all right, but of course you will plough me again, you
beast!”
“Of course,” I say, “you won’t know more science for going in for my
examination another fifteen times, but it is training your character,
and you must be thankful for that.”
Silence follows. I get up and wait for my visitor to go, but he stands
and looks towards the window, fingers his beard, and thinks. It grows
boring.
The sanguine youth’s voice is pleasant and mellow, his eyes are clever
and ironical, his face is genial, though a little bloated from frequent
indulgence in beer and overlong lying on the sofa; he looks as though he
could tell me a lot of interesting things about the opera, about his
affairs of the heart, and about comrades whom he likes. Unluckily, it is
not the thing to discuss these subjects, or else I should have been glad
to listen to him.
“Professor, I give you my word of honour that if you mark me for a pass
I... I’ll...”
As soon as we reach the “word of honour” I wave my hands and sit down to
the table. The student ponders a minute longer, and says dejectedly:
“In that case, good-bye... I beg your pardon.”
“Good-bye, my friend. Good luck to you.”
He goes irresolutely into the hall, slowly puts on his outdoor things,
and, going out into the street, probably ponders for some time longer;
unable to think of anything, except “old devil,” inwardly addressed to
me, he goes into a wretched restaurant to dine and drink beer, and then
home to bed. “Peace be to thy ashes, honest toiler.”
A third ring at the bell. A young doctor, in a pair of new black
trousers, gold spectacles, and of course a white tie, walks in. He
introduces himself. I beg him to be seated, and ask what I can do for
him. Not without emotion, the young devotee of science begins telling me
that he has passed his examination as a doctor of medicine, and that he
has now only to write his dissertation. He would like to work with me
under my guidance, and he would be greatly obliged to me if I would give
him a subject for his dissertation.
“Very glad to be of use to you, colleague,” I say, “but just let us come
to an understanding as to the meaning of a dissertation. That word is
taken to mean a composition which is a product of independent creative
effort. Is that not so? A work written on another man’s subject and
under another man’s guidance is called something different....”
The doctor says nothing. I fly into a rage and jump up from my seat.
“Why is it you all come to me?” I cry angrily. “Do I keep a shop? I
don’t deal in subjects. For the thousand and oneth time I ask you all to
leave me in peace! Excuse my brutality, but I am quite sick of it!”
The doctor remains silent, but a faint flush is apparent on his cheek-
bones. His face expresses a profound reverence for my fame and my
learning, but from his eyes I can see he feels a contempt for my voice,
my pitiful figure, and my nervous gesticulation. I impress him in my
anger as a queer fish.
“I don’t keep a shop,” I go on angrily. “And it is a strange thing! Why
don’t you want to be independent? Why have you such a distaste for
independence?”
I say a great deal, but he still remains silent. By degrees I calm down,
and of course give in. The doctor gets a subject from me for his theme
not worth a halfpenny, writes under my supervision a dissertation of no
use to any one, with dignity defends it in a dreary discussion, and
receives a degree of no use to him.
The rings at the bell may follow one another endlessly, but I will
confine my description here to four of them. The bell rings for the
fourth time, and I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress, a
dear voice....
Eighteen years ago a colleague of mine, an oculist, died leaving a
little daughter Katya, a child of seven, and sixty thousand roubles. In
his will he made me the child’s guardian. Till she was ten years old
Katya lived with us as one of the family, then she was sent to a
boarding-school, and only spent the summer holidays with us. I never had
time to look after her education. I only superintended it at leisure
moments, and so I can say very little about her childhood.
The first thing I remember, and like so much in remembrance, is the
extraordinary trustfulness with which she came into our house and let
herself be treated by the doctors, a trustfulness which was always
shining in her little face. She would sit somewhere out of the way, with
her face tied up, invariably watching something with attention; whether
she watched me writing or turning over the pages of a book, or watched
my wife bustling about, or the cook scrubbing a potato in the kitchen,
or the dog playing, her eyes invariably expressed the same thought—that
is, “Everything that is done in this world is nice and sensible.” She
was curious, and very fond of talking to me. Sometimes she would sit at
the table opposite me, watching my movements and asking questions. It
interested her to know what I was reading, what I did at the University,
whether I was not afraid of the dead bodies, what I did with my salary.
“Do the students fight at the University?” she would ask.
“They do, dear.”
“And do you make them go down on their knees?”
“Yes, I do.”
And she thought it funny that the students fought and I made them go
down on their knees, and she laughed. She was a gentle, patient, good
child. It happened not infrequently that I saw something taken away from
her, saw her punished without reason, or her curiosity repressed; at
such times a look of sadness was mixed with the invariable expression of
trustfulness on her face—that was all. I did not know how to take her
part; only when I saw her sad I had an inclination to draw her to me and
to commiserate her like some old nurse: “My poor little orphan one!”
I remember, too, that she was fond of fine clothes and of sprinkling
herself with scent. In that respect she was like me. I, too, am fond of
pretty clothes and nice scent.
I regret that I had not time nor inclination to watch over the rise and
development of the passion which took complete possession of Katya when
she was fourteen or fifteen. I mean her passionate love for the theatre.
When she used to come from boarding-school and stay with us for the
summer holidays, she talked of nothing with such pleasure and such
warmth as of plays and actors. She bored us with her continual talk of
the theatre. My wife and children would not listen to her. I was the
only one who had not the courage to refuse to attend to her. When she
had a longing to share her transports, she used to come into my study
and say in an imploring tone:
“Nikolay Stepanovitch, do let me talk to you about the theatre!”
I pointed to the clock, and said:
“I’ll give you half an hour—begin.”
Later on she used to bring with her dozens of portraits of actors and
actresses which she worshipped; then she attempted several times to take
part in private theatricals, and the upshot of it all was that when she
left school she came to me and announced that she was born to be an
actress.
I had never shared Katya’s inclinations for the theatre. To my mind, if
a play is good there is no need to trouble the actors in order that it
may make the right impression; it is enough to read it. If the play is
poor, no acting will make it good.
In my youth I often visited the theatre, and now my family takes a box
twice a year and carries me off for a little distraction. Of course,
that is not enough to give me the right to judge of the theatre. In my
opinion the theatre has become no better than it was thirty or forty
years ago. Just as in the past, I can never find a glass of clean water
in the corridors or foyers of the theatre. Just as in the past, the
attendants fine me twenty kopecks for my fur coat, though there is
nothing reprehensible in wearing a warm coat in winter. As in the past,
for no sort of reason, music is played in the intervals, which adds
something new and uncalled-for to the impression made by the play. As in
the past, men go in the intervals and drink spirits in the buffet. If no
progress can be seen in trifles, I should look for it in vain in what is
more important. When an actor wrapped from head to foot in stage
traditions and conventions tries to recite a simple ordinary speech, “To
be or not to be,” not simply, but invariably with the accompaniment of
hissing and convulsive movements all over his body, or when he tries to
convince me at all costs that Tchatsky, who talks so much with fools and
is so fond of folly, is a very clever man, and that “Woe from Wit” is
not a dull play, the stage gives me the same feeling of conventionality
which bored me so much forty years ago when I was regaled with the
classical howling and beating on the breast. And every time I come out
of the theatre more conservative than I go in.
The sentimental and confiding public may be persuaded that the stage,
even in its present form, is a school; but any one who is familiar with
a school in its true sense will not be caught with that bait. I cannot
say what will happen in fifty or a hundred years, but in its actual
condition the theatre can serve only as an entertainment. But this
entertainment is too costly to be frequently enjoyed. It robs the state
of thousands of healthy and talented young men and women, who, if they
had not devoted themselves to the theatre, might have been good doctors,
farmers, schoolmistresses, officers; it robs the public of the evening
hours—the best time for intellectual work and social intercourse. I say
nothing of the waste of money and the moral damage to the spectator when
he sees murder, fornication, or false witness unsuitably treated on the
stage.
Katya was of an entirely different opinion. She assured me that the
theatre, even in its present condition, was superior to the lecture-
hall, to books, or to anything in the world. The stage was a power that
united in itself all the arts, and actors were missionaries. No art nor
science was capable of producing so strong and so certain an effect on
the soul of man as the stage, and it was with good reason that an actor
of medium quality enjoys greater popularity than the greatest savant or
artist. And no sort of public service could provide such enjoyment and
gratification as the theatre.
And one fine day Katya joined a troupe of actors, and went off, I
believe to Ufa, taking away with her a good supply of money, a store of
rainbow hopes, and the most aristocratic views of her work.
Her first letters on the journey were marvellous. I read them, and was
simply amazed that those small sheets of paper could contain so much
youth, purity of spirit, holy innocence, and at the same time subtle and
apt judgments which would have done credit to a fine masculine
intellect. It was more like a rapturous paean of praise she sent me than
a mere description of the Volga, the country, the towns she visited, her
companions, her failures and successes; every sentence was fragrant with
that confiding trustfulness I was accustomed to read in her face—and at
the same time there were a great many grammatical mistakes, and there
was scarcely any punctuation at all.
Before six months had passed I received a highly poetical and
enthusiastic letter beginning with the words, “I have come to love...”
This letter was accompanied by a photograph representing a young man
with a shaven face, a wide-brimmed hat, and a plaid flung over his
shoulder. The letters that followed were as splendid as before, but now
commas and stops made their appearance in them, the grammatical mistakes
disappeared, and there was a distinctly masculine flavour about them.
Katya began writing to me how splendid it would be to build a great
theatre somewhere on the Volga, on a cooperative system, and to attract
to the enterprise the rich merchants and the steamer owners; there would
be a great deal of money in it; there would be vast audiences; the
actors would play on co-operative terms.... Possibly all this was really
excellent, but it seemed to me that such schemes could only originate
from a man’s mind.
However that may have been, for a year and a half everything seemed to
go well: Katya was in love, believed in her work, and was happy; but
then I began to notice in her letters unmistakable signs of falling off.
It began with Katya’s complaining of her companions—this was the first
and most ominous symptom; if a young scientific or literary man begins
his career with bitter complaints of scientific and literary men, it is
a sure sign that he is worn out and not fit for his work. Katya wrote to
me that her companions did not attend the rehearsals and never knew
their parts; that one could see in every one of them an utter disrespect
for the public in the production of absurd plays, and in their behaviour
on the stage; that for the benefit of the Actors’ Fund, which they only
talked about, actresses of the serious drama demeaned themselves by
singing chansonettes, while tragic actors sang comic songs making fun of
deceived husbands and the pregnant condition of unfaithful wives, and so
on. In fact, it was amazing that all this had not yet ruined the
provincial stage, and that it could still maintain itself on such a
rotten and unsubstantial footing.
In answer I wrote Katya a long and, I must confess, a very boring
letter. Among other things, I wrote to her:
“I have more than once happened to converse with old actors, very worthy
men, who showed a friendly disposition towards me; from my conversations
with them I could understand that their work was controlled not so much
by their own intelligence and free choice as by fashion and the mood of
the public. The best of them had had to play in their day in tragedy, in
operetta, in Parisian farces, and in extravaganzas, and they always
seemed equally sure that they were on the right path and that they were
of use. So, as you see, the cause of the evil must be sought, not in the
actors, but, more deeply, in the art itself and in the attitude of the
whole of society to it.”
This letter of mine only irritated Katya. She answered me:
“You and I are singing parts out of different operas. I wrote to you,
not of the worthy men who showed a friendly disposition to you, but of a
band of knaves who have nothing worthy about them. They are a horde of
savages who have got on the stage simply because no one would have taken
them elsewhere, and who call themselves artists simply because they are
impudent. There are numbers of dull-witted creatures, drunkards,
intriguing schemers and slanderers, but there is not one person of
talent among them. I cannot tell you how bitter it is to me that the art
I love has fallen into the hands of people I detest; how bitter it is
that the best men look on at evil from afar, not caring to come closer,
and, instead of intervening, write ponderous commonplaces and utterly
useless sermons....” And so on, all in the same style.
A little time passed, and I got this letter: “I have been brutally
deceived. I cannot go on living. Dispose of my money as you think best.
I loved you as my father and my only friend. Good-bye.”
It turned out that he, too, belonged to the “horde of savages.” Later
on, from certain hints, I gathered that there had been an attempt at
suicide. I believe Katya tried to poison herself. I imagine that she
must have been seriously ill afterwards, as the next letter I got was
from Yalta, where she had most probably been sent by the doctors. Her
last letter contained a request to send her a thousand roubles to Yalta
as quickly as possible, and ended with these words:
“Excuse the gloominess of this letter; yesterday I buried my child.”
After spending about a year in the Crimea, she returned home.
She had been about four years on her travels, and during those four
years, I must confess, I had played a rather strange and unenviable part
in regard to her. When in earlier days she had told me she was going on
the stage, and then wrote to me of her love; when she was periodically
overcome by extravagance, and I continually had to send her first one
and then two thousand roubles; when she wrote to me of her intention of
suicide, and then of the death of her baby, every time I lost my head,
and all my sympathy for her sufferings found no expression except that,
after prolonged reflection, I wrote long, boring letters which I might
just as well not have written. And yet I took a father’s place with her
and loved her like a daughter!
Now Katya is living less than half a mile off. She has taken a flat of
five rooms, and has installed herself fairly comfortably and in the
taste of the day. If any one were to undertake to describe her
surroundings, the most characteristic note in the picture would be
indolence. For the indolent body there are soft lounges, soft stools;
for indolent feet soft rugs; for indolent eyes faded, dingy, or flat
colours; for the indolent soul the walls are hung with a number of cheap
fans and trivial pictures, in which the originality of the execution is
more conspicuous than the subject; and the room contains a multitude of
little tables and shelves filled with utterly useless articles of no
value, and shapeless rags in place of curtains.... All this, together
with the dread of bright colours, of symmetry, and of empty space, bears
witness not only to spiritual indolence, but also to a corruption of
natural taste. For days together Katya lies on the lounge reading,
principally novels and stories. She only goes out of the house once a
day, in the afternoon, to see me.
I go on working while Katya sits silent not far from me on the sofa,
wrapping herself in her shawl, as though she were cold. Either because I
find her sympathetic or because I was used to her frequent visits when
she was a little girl, her presence does not prevent me from
concentrating my attention. From time to time I mechanically ask her
some question; she gives very brief replies; or, to rest for a minute, I
turn round and watch her as she looks dreamily at some medical journal
or review. And at such moments I notice that her face has lost the old
look of confiding trustfulness. Her expression now is cold, apathetic,
and absent-minded, like that of passengers who had to wait too long for
a train. She is dressed, as in old days, simply and beautifully, but
carelessly; her dress and her hair show visible traces of the sofas and
rocking-chairs in which she spends whole days at a stretch. And she has
lost the curiosity she had in old days. She has ceased to ask me
questions now, as though she had experienced everything in life and
looked for nothing new from it.
Towards four o’clock there begins to be sounds of movement in the hall
and in the drawing-room. Liza has come back from the Conservatoire, and
has brought some girl-friends in with her. We hear them playing on the
piano, trying their voices and laughing; in the dining-room Yegor is
laying the table, with the clatter of crockery.
“Good-bye,” said Katya. “I won’t go in and see your people today. They
must excuse me. I haven’t time. Come and see me.”
While I am seeing her to the door, she looks me up and down grimly, and
says with vexation:
“You are getting thinner and thinner! Why don’t you consult a doctor?
I’ll call at Sergey Fyodorovitch’s and ask him to have a look at you.”
“There’s no need, Katya.”
“I can’t think where your people’s eyes are! They are a nice lot, I must
say!”
She puts on her fur coat abruptly, and as she does so two or three
hairpins drop unnoticed on the floor from her carelessly arranged hair.
She is too lazy and in too great a hurry to do her hair up; she
carelessly stuffs the falling curls under her hat, and goes away.
When I go into the dining-room my wife asks me:
“Was Katya with you just now? Why didn’t she come in to see us? It’s
really strange....”
“Mamma,” Liza says to her reproachfully, “let her alone, if she doesn’t
want to. We are not going down on our knees to her.”
“It’s very neglectful, anyway. To sit for three hours in the study
without remembering our existence! But of course she must do as she
likes.”
Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is beyond my comprehension,
and probably one would have to be a woman in order to understand it. I
am ready to stake my life that of the hundred and fifty young men I see
every day in the lecture-theatre, and of the hundred elderly ones I meet
every week, hardly one could be found capable of understanding their
hatred and aversion for Katya’s past—that is, for her having been a
mother without being a wife, and for her having had an illegitimate
child; and at the same time I cannot recall one woman or girl of my
acquaintance who would not consciously or unconsciously harbour such
feelings. And this is not because woman is purer or more virtuous than
man: why, virtue and purity are not very different from vice if they are
not free from evil feeling. I attribute this simply to the backwardness
of woman. The mournful feeling of compassion and the pang of conscience
experienced by a modern man at the sight of suffering is, to my mind,
far greater proof of culture and moral elevation than hatred and
aversion. Woman is as tearful and as coarse in her feelings now as she
was in the Middle Ages, and to my thinking those who advise that she
should be educated like a man are quite right.
My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for ingratitude,
for pride, for eccentricity, and for the numerous vices which one woman
can always find in another.
Besides my wife and daughter and me, there are dining with us two or
three of my daughter’s friends and Alexandr Adolfovitch Gnekker, her
admirer and suitor. He is a fair-haired young man under thirty, of
medium height, very stout and broad-shouldered, with red whiskers near
his ears, and little waxed moustaches which make his plump smooth face
look like a toy. He is dressed in a very short reefer jacket, a flowered
waistcoat, breeches very full at the top and very narrow at the ankle,
with a large check pattern on them, and yellow boots without heels. He
has prominent eyes like a crab’s, his cravat is like a crab’s neck, and
I even fancy there is a smell of crab-soup about the young man’s whole
person. He visits us every day, but no one in my family knows anything
of his origin nor of the place of his education, nor of his means of
livelihood. He neither plays nor sings, but has some connection with
music and singing, sells somebody’s pianos somewhere, is frequently at
the Conservatoire, is acquainted with all the celebrities, and is a
steward at the concerts; he criticizes music with great authority, and I
have noticed that people are eager to agree with him.
Rich people always have dependents hanging about them; the arts and
sciences have the same. I believe there is not an art nor a science in
the world free from “foreign bodies” after the style of this Mr.
Gnekker. I am not a musician, and possibly I am mistaken in regard to
Mr. Gnekker, of whom, indeed, I know very little. But his air of
authority and the dignity with which he takes his stand beside the piano
when any one is playing or singing strike me as very suspicious.
You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if
you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity from that petty
bourgeois atmosphere which is so often brought into your house and into
your mood by the attentions of suitors, by matchmaking and marriage. I
can never reconcile myself, for instance, to the expression of triumph
on my wife’s face every time Gnekker is in our company, nor can I
reconcile myself to the bottles of Lafitte, port and sherry which are
only brought out on his account, that he may see with his own eyes the
liberal and luxurious way in which we live. I cannot tolerate the habit
of spasmodic laughter Liza has picked up at the Conservatoire, and her
way of screwing up her eyes whenever there are men in the room. Above
all, I cannot understand why a creature utterly alien to my habits, my
studies, my whole manner of life, completely different from the people I
like, should come and see me every day, and every day should dine with
me. My wife and my servants mysteriously whisper that he is a suitor,
but still I don’t understand his presence; it rouses in me the same
wonder and perplexity as if they were to set a Zulu beside me at the
table. And it seems strange to me, too, that my daughter, whom I am used
to thinking of as a child, should love that cravat, those eyes, those
soft cheeks....
In the old days I used to like my dinner, or at least was indifferent
about it; now it excites in me no feeling but weariness and irritation.
Ever since I became an “Excellency” and one of the Deans of the Faculty
my family has for some reason found it necessary to make a complete
change in our menu and dining habits. Instead of the simple dishes to
which I was accustomed when I was a student and when I was in practice,
now they feed me with a puree with little white things like circles
floating about in it, and kidneys stewed in madeira. My rank as a
general and my fame have robbed me for ever of cabbage-soup and savoury
pies, and goose with apple-sauce, and bream with boiled grain. They have
robbed me of our maid-servant Agasha, a chatty and laughter-loving old
woman, instead of whom Yegor, a dull-witted and conceited fellow with a
white glove on his right hand, waits at dinner. The intervals between
the courses are short, but they seem immensely long because there is
nothing to occupy them. There is none of the gaiety of the old days, the
spontaneous talk, the jokes, the laughter; there is nothing of mutual
affection and the joy which used to animate the children, my wife, and
me when in old days we met together at meals. For me, the celebrated man
of science, dinner was a time of rest and reunion, and for my wife and
children a fete—brief indeed, but bright and joyous—in which they knew
that for half an hour I belonged, not to science, not to students, but
to them alone. Our real exhilaration from one glass of wine is gone for
ever, gone is Agasha, gone the bream with boiled grain, gone the uproar
that greeted every little startling incident at dinner, such as the cat
and dog fighting under the table, or Katya’s bandage falling off her
face into her soup-plate.
To describe our dinner nowadays is as uninteresting as to eat it. My
wife’s face wears a look of triumph and affected dignity, and her
habitual expression of anxiety. She looks at our plates and says, “I see
you don’t care for the joint. Tell me; you don’t like it, do you?” and I
am obliged to answer: “There is no need for you to trouble, my dear; the
meat is very nice.” And she will say: “You always stand up for me,
Nikolay Stepanovitch, and you never tell the truth. Why is Alexandr
Adolfovitch eating so little?” And so on in the same style all through
dinner. Liza laughs spasmodically and screws up her eyes. I watch them
both, and it is only now at dinner that it becomes absolutely evident to
me that the inner life of these two has slipped away out of my ken. I
have a feeling as though I had once lived at home with a real wife and
children and that now I am dining with visitors, in the house of a sham
wife who is not the real one, and am looking at a Liza who is not the
real Liza. A startling change has taken place in both of them; I have
missed the long process by which that change was effected, and it is no
wonder that I can make nothing of it. Why did that change take place? I
don’t know. Perhaps the whole trouble is that God has not given my wife
and daughter the same strength of character as me. From childhood I have
been accustomed to resisting external influences, and have steeled
myself pretty thoroughly. Such catastrophes in life as fame, the rank of
a general, the transition from comfort to living beyond our means,
acquaintance with celebrities, etc., have scarcely affected me, and I
have remained intact and unashamed; but on my wife and Liza, who have
not been through the same hardening process and are weak, all this has
fallen like an avalanche of snow, overwhelming them. Gnekker and the
young ladies talk of fugues, of counterpoint, of singers and pianists,
of Bach and Brahms, while my wife, afraid of their suspecting her of
ignorance of music, smiles to them sympathetically and mutters: “That’s
exquisite... really! You don’t say so!...” Gnekker eats with solid
dignity, jests with solid dignity, and condescendingly listens to the
remarks of the young ladies. From time to time he is moved to speak in
bad French, and then, for some reason or other, he thinks it necessary
to address me as “Votre Excellence.”
And I am glum. Evidently I am a constraint to them and they are a
constraint to me. I have never in my earlier days had a close knowledge
of class antagonism, but now I am tormented by something of that sort. I
am on the lookout for nothing but bad qualities in Gnekker; I quickly
find them, and am fretted at the thought that a man not of my circle is
sitting here as my daughter’s suitor. His presence has a bad influence
on me in other ways, too. As a rule, when I am alone or in the society
of people I like, never think of my own achievements, or, if I do recall
them, they seem to me as trivial as though I had only completed my
studies yesterday; but in the presence of people like Gnekker my
achievements in science seem to be a lofty mountain the top of which
vanishes into the clouds, while at its foot Gnekkers are running about
scarcely visible to the naked eye.
After dinner I go into my study and there smoke my pipe, the only one in
the whole day, the sole relic of my old bad habit of smoking from
morning till night. While I am smoking my wife comes in and sits down to
talk to me. Just as in the morning, I know beforehand what our
conversation is going to be about.
“I must talk to you seriously, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she begins. “I
mean about Liza.... Why don’t you pay attention to it?”
“To what?”
“You pretend to notice nothing. But that is not right. We can’t shirk
responsibility.... Gnekker has intentions in regard to Liza.... What do
you say?”
“That he is a bad man I can’t say, because I don’t know him, but that I
don’t like him I have told you a thousand times already.”
“But you can’t... you can’t!”
She gets up and walks about in excitement.
“You can’t take up that attitude to a serious step,” she says. “When it
is a question of our daughter’s happiness we must lay aside all personal
feeling. I know you do not like him.... Very good... if we refuse him
now, if we break it all off, how can you be sure that Liza will not have
a grievance against us all her life? Suitors are not plentiful nowadays,
goodness knows, and it may happen that no other match will turn up....
He is very much in love with Liza, and she seems to like him.... Of
course, he has no settled position, but that can’t be helped. Please
God, in time he will get one. He is of good family and well off.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“He told us so. His father has a large house in Harkov and an estate in
the neighbourhood. In short, Nikolay Stepanovitch, you absolutely must
go to Harkov.”
“What for?”
“You will find out all about him there.... You know the professors
there; they will help you. I would go myself, but I am a woman. I
cannot....”
“I am not going to Harkov,” I say morosely.
My wife is frightened, and a look of intense suffering comes into her
face.
“For God’s sake, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she implores me, with tears in
her voice—“for God’s sake, take this burden off me! I am so worried!”
It is painful for me to look at her.
“Very well, Varya,” I say affectionately, “if you wish it, then
certainly I will go to Harkov and do all you want.”
She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes off to her room to
cry, and I am left alone.
A little later lights are brought in. The armchair and the lamp-shade
cast familiar shadows that have long grown wearisome on the walls and on
the floor, and when I look at them I feel as though the night had come
and with it my accursed sleeplessness. I lie on my bed, then get up and
walk about the room, then lie down again. As a rule it is after dinner,
at the approach of evening, that my nervous excitement reaches its
highest pitch. For no reason I begin crying and burying my head in the
pillow. At such times I am afraid that some one may come in; I am afraid
of suddenly dying; I am ashamed of my tears, and altogether there is
something insufferable in my soul. I feel that I can no longer bear the
sight of my lamp, of my books, of the shadows on the floor. I cannot
bear the sound of the voices coming from the drawing-room. Some force
unseen, uncomprehended, is roughly thrusting me out of my flat. I leap
up hurriedly, dress, and cautiously, that my family may not notice, slip
out into the street. Where am I to go?
The answer to that question has long been ready in my brain. To Katya.
III
As a rule she is lying on the sofa or in a lounge-chair reading. Seeing
me, she raises her head languidly, sits up, and shakes hands.
“You are always lying down,” I say, after pausing and taking breath.
“That’s not good for you. You ought to occupy yourself with something.”
“What?”
“I say you ought to occupy yourself in some way.”
“With what? A woman can be nothing but a simple workwoman or an
actress.”
“Well, if you can’t be a workwoman, be an actress.”
She says nothing.
“You ought to get married,” I say, half in jest.
“There is no one to marry. There’s no reason to, either.”
“You can’t live like this.”
“Without a husband? Much that matters; I could have as many men as I
like if I wanted to.”
“That’s ugly, Katya.”
“What is ugly?”
“Why, what you have just said.”
Noticing that I am hurt and wishing to efface the disagreeable
impression, Katya says:
“Let us go; come this way.”
She takes me into a very snug little room, and says, pointing to the
writing-table:
“Look... I have got that ready for you. You shall work here. Come here
every day and bring your work with you. They only hinder you there at
home. Will you work here? Will you like to?”
Not to wound her by refusing, I answer that I will work here, and that I
like the room very much. Then we both sit down in the snug little room
and begin talking.
The warm, snug surroundings and the presence of a sympathetic person
does not, as in old days, arouse in me a feeling of pleasure, but an
intense impulse to complain and grumble. I feel for some reason that if
I lament and complain I shall feel better.
“Things are in a bad way with me, my dear—very bad....”
“What is it?”
“You see how it is, my dear; the best and holiest right of kings is the
right of mercy. And I have always felt myself a king, since I have made
unlimited use of that right. I have never judged, I have been indulgent,
I have readily forgiven every one, right and left. Where others have
protested and expressed indignation, I have only advised and persuaded.
All my life it has been my endeavour that my society should not be a
burden to my family, to my students, to my colleagues, to my servants.
And I know that this attitude to people has had a good influence on all
who have chanced to come into contact with me. But now I am not a king.
Something is happening to me that is only excusable in a slave; day and
night my brain is haunted by evil thoughts, and feelings such as I never
knew before are brooding in my soul. I am full of hatred, and contempt,
and indignation, and loathing, and dread. I have become excessively
severe, exacting, irritable, ungracious, suspicious. Even things that in
old days would have provoked me only to an unnecessary jest and a good-
natured laugh now arouse an oppressive feeling in me. My reasoning, too,
has undergone a change: in old days I despised money; now I harbour an
evil feeling, not towards money, but towards the rich as though they
were to blame: in old days I hated violence and tyranny, but now I hate
the men who make use of violence, as though they were alone to blame,
and not all of us who do not know how to educate each other. What is the
meaning of it? If these new ideas and new feelings have come from a
change of convictions, what is that change due to? Can the world have
grown worse and I better, or was I blind before and indifferent? If this
change is the result of a general decline of physical and intellectual
powers—I am ill, you know, and every day I am losing weight—my position
is pitiable; it means that my new ideas are morbid and abnormal; I ought
to be ashamed of them and think them of no consequence....”
“Illness has nothing to do with it,” Katya interrupts me; “it’s simply
that your eyes are opened, that’s all. You have seen what in old days,
for some reason, you refused to see. To my thinking, what you ought to
do first of all, is to break with your family for good, and go away.”
“You are talking nonsense.”
“You don’t love them; why should you force your feelings? Can you call
them a family? Nonentities! If they died today, no one would notice
their absence tomorrow.”
Katya despises my wife and Liza as much as they hate her. One can hardly
talk at this date of people’s having a right to despise one another. But
if one looks at it from Katya’s standpoint and recognizes such a right,
one can see she has as much right to despise my wife and Liza as they
have to hate her.
“Nonentities,” she goes on. “Have you had dinner today? How was it they
did not forget to tell you it was ready? How is it they still remember
your existence?”
“Katya,” I say sternly, “I beg you to be silent.”
“You think I enjoy talking about them? I should be glad not to know them
at all. Listen, my dear: give it all up and go away. Go abroad. The
sooner the better.”
“What nonsense! What about the University?”
“The University, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it, anyway.
You have been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your pupils? Are
many of them celebrated scientific men? Count them up! And to multiply
the doctors who exploit ignorance and pile up hundreds of thousands for
themselves, there is no need to be a good and talented man. You are not
wanted.”
“Good heavens! how harsh you are!” I cry in horror. “How harsh you are!
Be quiet or I will go away! I don’t know how to answer the harsh things
you say!”
The maid comes in and summons us to tea. At the samovar our
conversation, thank God, changes. After having had my grumble out, I
have a longing to give way to another weakness of old age,
reminiscences. I tell Katya about my past, and to my great astonishment
tell her incidents which, till then, I did not suspect of being still
preserved in my memory, and she listens to me with tenderness, with
pride, holding her breath. I am particularly fond of telling her how I
was educated in a seminary and dreamed of going to the University.
“At times I used to walk about our seminary garden...” I would tell her.
“If from some faraway tavern the wind floated sounds of a song and the
squeaking of an accordion, or a sledge with bells dashed by the garden-
fence, it was quite enough to send a rush of happiness, filling not only
my heart, but even my stomach, my legs, my arms.... I would listen to
the accordion or the bells dying away in the distance and imagine myself
a doctor, and paint pictures, one better than another. And here, as you
see, my dreams have come true. I have had more than I dared to dream of.
For thirty years I have been the favourite professor, I have had
splendid comrades, I have enjoyed fame and honour. I have loved, married
from passionate love, have had children. In fact, looking back upon it,
I see my whole life as a fine composition arranged with talent. Now all
that is left to me is not to spoil the end. For that I must die like a
man. If death is really a thing to dread, I must meet it as a teacher, a
man of science, and a citizen of a Christian country ought to meet it,
with courage and untroubled soul. But I am spoiling the end; I am
sinking, I fly to you, I beg for help, and you tell me ‘Sink; that is
what you ought to do.’”
But here there comes a ring at the front-door. Katya and I recognize it,
and say:
“It must be Mihail Fyodorovitch.”
And a minute later my colleague, the philologist Mihail Fyodorovitch, a
tall, well-built man of fifty, clean-shaven, with thick grey hair and
black eyebrows, walks in. He is a good-natured man and an excellent
comrade. He comes of a fortunate and talented old noble family which has
played a prominent part in the history of literature and enlightenment.
He is himself intelligent, talented, and very highly educated, but has
his oddities. To a certain extent we are all odd and all queer fish, but
in his oddities there is something exceptional, apt to cause anxiety
among his acquaintances. I know a good many people for whom his oddities
completely obscure his good qualities.
Coming in to us, he slowly takes off his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
“Good-evening. Are you having tea? That’s just right. It’s diabolically
cold.”
Then he sits down to the table, takes a glass, and at once begins
talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of talking is the
continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of philosophy and drollery
as in Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He is always talking about serious
things, but he never speaks seriously. His judgments are always harsh
and railing, but, thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone, the harshness
and abuse do not jar upon the ear, and one soon grows used to them.
Every evening he brings with him five or six anecdotes from the
University, and he usually begins with them when he sits down to table.
“Oh, Lord!” he sighs, twitching his black eyebrows ironically. “What
comic people there are in the world!”
“Well?” asks Katya.
“As I was coming from my lecture this morning I met that old idiot N.
N—— on the stairs.... He was going along as usual, sticking out his chin
like a horse, looking for some one to listen to his grumblings at his
migraine, at his wife, and his students who won’t attend his lectures.
‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘he has seen me—I am done for now; it is all up....’”
And so on in the same style. Or he will begin like this:
“I was yesterday at our friend Z. Z——‘s public lecture. I wonder how it
is our alma mater—don’t speak of it after dark—dare display in public
such noodles and patent dullards as that Z. Z—— Why, he is a European
fool! Upon my word, you could not find another like him all over Europe!
He lectures—can you imagine?—as though he were sucking a sugar-
stick—sue, sue, sue;... he is in a nervous funk; he can hardly decipher
his own manuscript; his poor little thoughts crawl along like a bishop
on a bicycle, and, what’s worse, you can never make out what he is
trying to say. The deadly dulness is awful, the very flies expire. It
can only be compared with the boredom in the assembly-hall at the yearly
meeting when the traditional address is read—damn it!”
And at once an abrupt transition:
“Three years ago—Nikolay Stepanovitch here will remember it—I had to
deliver that address. It was hot, stifling, my uniform cut me under the
arms—it was deadly! I read for half an hour, for an hour, for an hour
and a half, for two hours.... ‘Come,’ I thought; ‘thank God, there are
only ten pages left!’ And at the end there were four pages that there
was no need to read, and I reckoned to leave them out. ‘So there are
only six really,’ I thought; ‘that is, only six pages left to read.’
But, only fancy, I chanced to glance before me, and, sitting in the
front row, side by side, were a general with a ribbon on his breast and
a bishop. The poor beggars were numb with boredom; they were staring
with their eyes wide open to keep awake, and yet they were trying to put
on an expression of attention and to pretend that they understood what I
was saying and liked it. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘since you like it you shall
have it! I’ll pay you out;’ so I just gave them those four pages too.”
As is usual with ironical people, when he talks nothing in his face
smiles but his eyes and eyebrows. At such times there is no trace of
hatred or spite in his eyes, but a great deal of humour, and that
peculiar fox-like slyness which is only to be noticed in very observant
people. Since I am speaking about his eyes, I notice another peculiarity
in them. When he takes a glass from Katya, or listens to her speaking,
or looks after her as she goes out of the room for a moment, I notice in
his eyes something gentle, beseeching, pure....
The maid-servant takes away the samovar and puts on the table a large
piece of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne—a rather
poor wine of which Katya had grown fond in the Crimea. Mihail
Fyodorovitch takes two packs of cards off the whatnot and begins to play
patience. According to him, some varieties of patience require great
concentration and attention, yet while he lays out the cards he does not
leave off distracting his attention with talk. Katya watches his cards
attentively, and more by gesture than by words helps him in his play.
She drinks no more than a couple of wine-glasses of wine the whole
evening; I drink four glasses, and the rest of the bottle falls to the
share of Mihail Fyodorovitch, who can drink a great deal and never get
drunk.
Over our patience we settle various questions, principally of the higher
order, and what we care for most of all—that is, science and learning—is
more roughly handled than anything.
“Science, thank God, has outlived its day,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch
emphatically. “Its song is sung. Yes, indeed. Mankind begins to feel
impelled to replace it by something different. It has grown on the soil
of superstition, been nourished by superstition, and is now just as much
the quintessence of superstition as its defunct granddames, alchemy,
metaphysics, and philosophy. And, after all, what has it given to
mankind? Why, the difference between the learned Europeans and the
Chinese who have no science is trifling, purely external. The Chinese
know nothing of science, but what have they lost thereby?”
“Flies know nothing of science, either,” I observe, “but what of that?”
“There is no need to be angry, Nikolay Stepanovitch. I only say this
here between ourselves... I am more careful than you think, and I am not
going to say this in public—God forbid! The superstition exists in the
multitude that the arts and sciences are superior to agriculture,
commerce, superior to handicrafts. Our sect is maintained by that
superstition, and it is not for you and me to destroy it. God forbid!”
After patience the younger generation comes in for a dressing too.
“Our audiences have degenerated,” sighs Mihail Fyodorovitch. “Not to
speak of ideals and all the rest of it, if only they were capable of
work and rational thought! In fact, it’s a case of ‘I look with mournful
eyes on the young men of today.’”
“Yes; they have degenerated horribly,” Katya agrees. “Tell me, have you
had one man of distinction among them for the last five or ten years?”
“I don’t know how it is with the other professors, but I can’t remember
any among mine.”
“I have seen in my day many of your students and young scientific men
and many actors—well, I have never once been so fortunate as to meet—I
won’t say a hero or a man of talent, but even an interesting man. It’s
all the same grey mediocrity, puffed up with self-conceit.”
All this talk of degeneration always affects me as though I had
accidentally overheard offensive talk about my own daughter. It offends
me that these charges are wholesale, and rest on such worn-out
commonplaces, on such wordy vapourings as degeneration and absence of
ideals, or on references to the splendours of the past. Every
accusation, even if it is uttered in ladies’ society, ought to be
formulated with all possible definiteness, or it is not an accusation,
but idle disparagement, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, I have been lecturing for thirty years, but I notice
neither degeneration nor lack of ideals, and I don’t find that the
present is worse than the past. My porter Nikolay, whose experience of
this subject has its value, says that the students of today are neither
better nor worse than those of the past.
If I were asked what I don’t like in my pupils of today, I should answer
the question, not straight off and not at length, but with sufficient
definiteness. I know their failings, and so have no need to resort to
vague generalities. I don’t like their smoking, using spirituous
beverages, marrying late, and often being so irresponsible and careless
that they will let one of their number be starving in their midst while
they neglect to pay their subscriptions to the Students’ Aid Society.
They don’t know modern languages, and they don’t express themselves
correctly in Russian; no longer ago than yesterday my colleague, the
professor of hygiene, complained to me that he had to give twice as many
lectures, because the students had a very poor knowledge of physics and
were utterly ignorant of meteorology. They are readily carried away by
the influence of the last new writers, even when they are not first-
rate, but they take absolutely no interest in classics such as
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability
to distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of
practical life more than anything. All difficult questions that have
more or less a social character (for instance the migration question)
they settle by studying monographs on the subject, but not by way of
scientific investigation or experiment, though that method is at their
disposal and is more in keeping with their calling. They gladly become
ward-surgeons, assistants, demonstrators, external teachers, and are
ready to fill such posts until they are forty, though independence, a
sense of freedom and personal initiative, are no less necessary in
science than, for instance, in art or commerce. I have pupils and
listeners, but no successors and helpers, and so I love them and am
touched by them, but am not proud of them. And so on, and so on....
Such shortcomings, however numerous they may be, can only give rise to a
pessimistic or fault-finding temper in a faint-hearted and timid man.
All these failings have a casual, transitory character, and are
completely dependent on conditions of life; in some ten years they will
have disappeared or given place to other fresh defects, which are all
inevitable and will in their turn alarm the faint-hearted. The students’
sins often vex me, but that vexation is nothing in comparison with the
joy I have been experiencing now for the last thirty years when I talk
to my pupils, lecture to them, watch their relations, and compare them
with people not of their circle.
Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens, and
neither of them notices into what depths the apparently innocent
diversion of finding fault with their neighbours is gradually drawing
them. They are not conscious how by degrees simple talk passes into
malicious mockery and jeering, and how they are both beginning to drop
into the habits and methods of slander.
“Killing types one meets with,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch. “I went
yesterday to our friend Yegor Petrovitch’s, and there I found a studious
gentleman, one of your medicals in his third year, I believe. Such a
face!... in the Dobrolubov style, the imprint of profound thought on his
brow; we got into talk. ‘Such doings, young man,’ said I. ‘I’ve read,’
said I, ‘that some German—I’ve forgotten his name—has created from the
human brain a new kind of alkaloid, idiotine.’ What do you think? He
believed it, and there was positively an expression of respect on his
face, as though to say, ‘See what we fellows can do!’ And the other day
I went to the theatre. I took my seat. In the next row directly in front
of me were sitting two men: one of ‘us fellows’ and apparently a law
student, the other a shaggy-looking figure, a medical student. The
latter was as drunk as a cobbler. He did not look at the stage at all.
He was dozing with his nose on his shirt-front. But as soon as an actor
begins loudly reciting a monologue, or simply raises his voice, our
friend starts, pokes his neighbour in the ribs, and asks, ‘What is he
saying? Is it elevating?’ ‘Yes,’ answers one of our fellows. ‘B-r-r-
ravo!’ roars the medical student. ‘Elevating! Bravo!’ He had gone to the
theatre, you see, the drunken blockhead, not for the sake of art, the
play, but for elevation! He wanted noble sentiments.”
Katya listens and laughs. She has a strange laugh; she catches her
breath in rhythmically regular gasps, very much as though she were
playing the accordion, and nothing in her face is laughing but her
nostrils. I grow depressed and don’t know what to say. Beside myself, I
fire up, leap up from my seat, and cry:
“Do leave off! Why are you sitting here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? Give over!”
And without waiting for them to finish their gossip I prepare to go
home. And, indeed, it is high time: it is past ten.
“I will stay a little longer,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch. “Will you allow
me, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”
“I will,” answers Katya.
“Bene! In that case have up another little bottle.”
They both accompany me with candles to the hall, and while I put on my
fur coat, Mihail Fyodorovitch says:
“You have grown dreadfully thin and older looking, Nikolay Stepanovitch.
What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
“Yes; I am not very well.”
“And you are not doing anything for it...” Katya puts in grimly.
“Why don’t you? You can’t go on like that! God helps those who help
themselves, my dear fellow. Remember me to your wife and daughter, and
make my apologies for not having been to see them. In a day or two,
before I go abroad, I shall come to say good-bye. I shall be sure to. I
am going away next week.”
I come away from Katya, irritated and alarmed by what has been said
about my being ill, and dissatisfied with myself. I ask myself whether I
really ought not to consult one of my colleagues. And at once I imagine
how my colleague, after listening to me, would walk away to the window
without speaking, would think a moment, then would turn round to me and,
trying to prevent my reading the truth in his face, would say in a
careless tone: “So far I see nothing serious, but at the same time,
collega, I advise you to lay aside your work....” And that would deprive
me of my last hope.
Who is without hope? Now that I am diagnosing my illness and prescribing
for myself, from time to time I hope that I am deceived by my own
illness, that I am mistaken in regard to the albumen and the sugar I
find, and in regard to my heart, and in regard to the swellings I have
twice noticed in the mornings; when with the fervour of the
hypochondriac I look through the textbooks of therapeutics and take a
different medicine every day, I keep fancying that I shall hit upon
something comforting. All that is petty.
Whether the sky is covered with clouds or the moon and the stars are
shining, I turn my eyes towards it every evening and think that death is
taking me soon. One would think that my thoughts at such times ought to
be deep as the sky, brilliant, striking.... But no! I think about
myself, about my wife, about Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in
general; my thoughts are evil, petty, I am insincere with myself, and at
such times my theory of life may be expressed in the words the
celebrated Araktcheev said in one of his intimate letters: “Nothing good
can exist in the world without evil, and there is more evil than good.”
That is, everything is disgusting; there is nothing to live for, and the
sixty-two years I have already lived must be reckoned as wasted. I catch
myself in these thoughts, and try to persuade myself that they are
accidental, temporary, and not deeply rooted in me, but at once I think:
“If so, what drives me every evening to those two toads?”
And I vow to myself that I will never go to Katya’s again, though I know
I shall go next evening.
Ringing the bell at the door and going upstairs, I feel that I have no
family now and no desire to bring it back again. It is clear that the
new Araktcheev thoughts are not casual, temporary visitors, but have
possession of my whole being. With my conscience ill at ease, dejected,
languid, hardly able to move my limbs, feeling as though tons were added
to my weight, I get into bed and quickly drop asleep.
And then—insomnia!
IV
Summer comes on and life is changed.
One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a jesting tone:
“Come, your Excellency! We are ready.”
My Excellency is conducted into the street, and seated in a cab. As I go
along, having nothing to do, I read the signboards from right to left.
The word “Traktir” reads “Ritkart”; that would just suit some baron’s
family: Baroness Ritkart. Farther on I drive through fields, by the
graveyard, which makes absolutely no impression on me, though I shall
soon lie in it; then I drive by forests and again by fields. There is
nothing of interest. After two hours of driving, my Excellency is
conducted into the lower storey of a summer villa and installed in a
small, very cheerful little room with light blue hangings.
At night there is sleeplessness as before, but in the morning I do not
put a good face upon it and listen to my wife, but lie in bed. I do not
sleep, but lie in the drowsy, half-conscious condition in which you know
you are not asleep, but dreaming. At midday I get up and from habit sit
down at my table, but I do not work now; I amuse myself with French
books in yellow covers, sent me by Katya. Of course, it would be more
patriotic to read Russian authors, but I must confess I cherish no
particular liking for them. With the exception of two or three of the
older writers, all our literature of today strikes me as not being
literature, but a special sort of home industry, which exists simply in
order to be encouraged, though people do not readily make use of its
products. The very best of these home products cannot be called
remarkable and cannot be sincerely praised without qualification. I must
say the same of all the literary novelties I have read during the last
ten or fifteen years; not one of them is remarkable, and not one of them
can be praised without a “but.” Cleverness, a good tone, but no talent;
talent, a good tone, but no cleverness; or talent, cleverness, but not a
good tone.
I don’t say the French books have talent, cleverness, and a good tone.
They don’t satisfy me, either. But they are not so tedious as the
Russian, and it is not unusual to find in them the chief element of
artistic creation—the feeling of personal freedom which is lacking in
the Russian authors. I don’t remember one new book in which the author
does not try from the first page to entangle himself in all sorts of
conditions and contracts with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of
the naked body; another ties himself up hand and foot in psychological
analysis; a third must have a “warm attitude to man”; a fourth purposely
scrawls whole descriptions of nature that he may not be suspected of
writing with a purpose.... One is bent upon being middle-class in his
work, another must be a nobleman, and so on. There is intentionalness,
circumspection, and self-will, but they have neither the independence
nor the manliness to write as they like, and therefore there is no
creativeness.
All this applies to what is called belles-lettres.
As for serious treatises in Russian on sociology, for instance, on art,
and so on, I do not read them simply from timidity. In my childhood and
early youth I had for some reason a terror of doorkeepers and attendants
at the theatre, and that terror has remained with me to this day. I am
afraid of them even now. It is said that we are only afraid of what we
do not understand. And, indeed, it is very difficult to understand why
doorkeepers and theatre attendants are so dignified, haughty, and
majestically rude. I feel exactly the same terror when I read serious
articles. Their extraordinary dignity, their bantering lordly tone,
their familiar manner to foreign authors, their ability to split straws
with dignity—all that is beyond my understanding; it is intimidating and
utterly unlike the quiet, gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed when
I read the works of our medical and scientific writers. It oppresses me
to read not only the articles written by serious Russians, but even
works translated or edited by them. The pretentious, edifying tone of
the preface; the redundancy of remarks made by the translator, which
prevent me from concentrating my attention; the question marks and “sic”
in parenthesis scattered all over the book or article by the liberal
translator, are to my mind an outrage on the author and on my
independence as a reader.
Once I was summoned as an expert to a circuit court; in an interval one
of my fellow-experts drew my attention to the rudeness of the public
prosecutor to the defendants, among whom there were two ladies of good
education. I believe I did not exaggerate at all when I told him that
the prosecutor’s manner was no ruder than that of the authors of serious
articles to one another. Their manners are, indeed, so rude that I
cannot speak of them without distaste. They treat one another and the
writers they criticize either with superfluous respect, at the sacrifice
of their own dignity, or, on the contrary, with far more ruthlessness
than I have shown in my notes and my thoughts in regard to my future
son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irrationality, of evil intentions,
and, indeed, of every sort of crime, form an habitual ornament of
serious articles. And that, as young medical men are fond of saying in
their monographs, is the ultima ratio! Such ways must infallibly have an
effect on the morals of the younger generation of writers, and so I am
not at all surprised that in the new works with which our literature has
been enriched during the last ten or fifteen years the heroes drink too
much vodka and the heroines are not over-chaste.
I read French books, and I look out of the window which is open; I can
see the spikes of my garden-fence, two or three scraggy trees, and
beyond the fence the road, the fields, and beyond them a broad stretch
of pine-wood. Often I admire a boy and girl, both flaxen-headed and
ragged, who clamber on the fence and laugh at my baldness. In their
shining little eyes I read, “Go up, go up, thou baldhead!” They are
almost the only people who care nothing for my celebrity or my rank.
Visitors do not come to me every day now. I will only mention the visits
of Nikolay and Pyotr Ignatyevitch. Nikolay usually comes to me on
holidays, with some pretext of business, though really to see me. He
arrives very much exhilarated, a thing which never occurs to him in the
winter.
“What have you to tell me?” I ask, going out to him in the hall.
“Your Excellency!” he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking
at me with the ecstasy of a lover—“your Excellency! God be my witness!
Strike me dead on the spot! Gaudeamus egitur juventus!”
And he greedily kisses me on the shoulder, on the sleeve, and on the
buttons.
“Is everything going well?” I ask him.
“Your Excellency! So help me God!...”
He persists in grovelling before me for no sort of reason, and soon
bores me, so I send him away to the kitchen, where they give him dinner.
Pyotr Ignatyevitch comes to see me on holidays, too, with the special
object of seeing me and sharing his thoughts with me. He usually sits
down near my table, modest, neat, and reasonable, and does not venture
to cross his legs or put his elbows on the table. All the time, in a
soft, even, little voice, in rounded bookish phrases, he tells me
various, to his mind, very interesting and piquant items of news which
he has read in the magazines and journals. They are all alike and may be
reduced to this type: “A Frenchman has made a discovery; some one else,
a German, has denounced him, proving that the discovery was made in 1870
by some American; while a third person, also a German, trumps them both
by proving they both had made fools of themselves, mistaking bubbles of
air for dark pigment under the microscope.” Even when he wants to amuse
me, Pyotr Ignatyevitch tells me things in the same lengthy,
circumstantial manner as though he were defending a thesis, enumerating
in detail the literary sources from which he is deriving his narrative,
doing his utmost to be accurate as to the date and number of the
journals and the name of every one concerned, invariably mentioning it
in full—Jean Jacques Petit, never simply Petit. Sometimes he stays to
dinner with us, and then during the whole of dinner-time he goes on
telling me the same sort of piquant anecdotes, reducing every one at
table to a state of dejected boredom. If Gnekker and Liza begin talking
before him of fugues and counterpoint, Brahms and Bach, he drops his
eyes modestly, and is overcome with embarrassment; he is ashamed that
such trivial subjects should be discussed before such serious people as
him and me.
In my present state of mind five minutes of him is enough to sicken me
as though I had been seeing and hearing him for an eternity. I hate the
poor fellow. His soft, smooth voice and bookish language exhaust me, and
his stories stupefy me.... He cherishes the best of feelings for me, and
talks to me simply in order to give me pleasure, and I repay him by
looking at him as though I wanted to hypnotize him, and think, “Go, go,
go!...” But he is not amenable to thought-suggestion, and sits on and on
and on....
While he is with me I can never shake off the thought, “It’s possible
when I die he will be appointed to succeed me,” and my poor lecture-hall
presents itself to me as an oasis in which the spring is died up; and I
am ungracious, silent, and surly with Pyotr Ignatyevitch, as though he
were to blame for such thoughts, and not I myself. When he begins, as
usual, praising up the German savants, instead of making fun of him
good-humouredly, as I used to do, I mutter sullenly:
“Asses, your Germans!...”
That is like the late Professor Nikita Krylov, who once, when he was
bathing with Pirogov at Revel and vexed at the water’s being very cold,
burst out with, “Scoundrels, these Germans!” I behave badly with Pyotr
Ignatyevitch, and only when he is going away, and from the window I
catch a glimpse of his grey hat behind the garden-fence, I want to call
out and say, “Forgive me, my dear fellow!”
Dinner is even drearier than in the winter. Gnekker, whom now I hate and
despise, dines with us almost every day. I used to endure his presence
in silence, now I aim biting remarks at him which make my wife and
daughter blush. Carried away by evil feeling, I often say things that
are simply stupid, and I don’t know why I say them. So on one occasion
it happened that I stared a long time at Gnekker, and, a propos of
nothing, I fired off:
“An eagle may perchance swoop down below a cock, But never will the fowl
soar upwards to the clouds...”
And the most vexatious thing is that the fowl Gnekker shows himself much
cleverer than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are
on his side, he takes up the line of meeting my gibes with condescending
silence, as though to say:
“The old chap is in his dotage; what’s the use of talking to him?”
Or he makes fun of me good-naturedly. It is wonderful how petty a man
may become! I am capable of dreaming all dinner-time of how Gnekker will
turn out to be an adventurer, how my wife and Liza will come to see
their mistake, and how I will taunt them—and such absurd thoughts at the
time when I am standing with one foot in the grave!
There are now, too, misunderstandings of which in the old days I had no
idea except from hearsay. Though I am ashamed of it, I will describe one
that occurred the other day after dinner.
I was sitting in my room smoking a pipe; my wife came in as usual, sat
down, and began saying what a good thing it would be for me to go to
Harkov now while it is warm and I have free time, and there find out
what sort of person our Gnekker is.
“Very good; I will go,” I assented.
My wife, pleased with me, got up and was going to the door, but turned
back and said:
“By the way, I have another favour to ask of you. I know you will be
angry, but it is my duty to warn you.... Forgive my saying it, Nikolay
Stepanovitch, but all our neighbours and acquaintances have begun
talking about your being so often at Katya’s. She is clever and well-
educated; I don’t deny that her company may be agreeable; but at your
age and with your social position it seems strange that you should find
pleasure in her society.... Besides, she has such a reputation that...”
All the blood suddenly rushed to my brain, my eyes flashed fire, I
leaped up and, clutching at my head and stamping my feet, shouted in a
voice unlike my own:
“Let me alone! let me alone! let me alone!”
Probably my face was terrible, my voice was strange, for my wife
suddenly turned pale and began shrieking aloud in a despairing voice
that was utterly unlike her own. Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor, came running
in at our shouts....
“Let me alone!” I cried; “let me alone! Go away!”
My legs turned numb as though they had ceased to exist; I felt myself
falling into someone’s arms; for a little while I still heard weeping,
then sank into a swoon which lasted two or three hours.
Now about Katya; she comes to see me every day towards evening, and of
course neither the neighbours nor our acquaintances can avoid noticing
it. She comes in for a minute and carries me off for a drive with her.
She has her own horse and a new chaise bought this summer. Altogether
she lives in an expensive style; she has taken a big detached villa with
a large garden, and has taken all her town retinue with her—two maids, a
coachman... I often ask her:
“Katya, what will you live on when you have spent your father’s money?”
“Then we shall see,” she answers.
“That money, my dear, deserves to be treated more seriously. It was
earned by a good man, by honest labour.”
“You have told me that already. I know it.”
At first we drive through the open country, then through the pine-wood
which is visible from my window. Nature seems to me as beautiful as it
always has been, though some evil spirit whispers to me that these pines
and fir trees, birds, and white clouds on the sky, will not notice my
absence when in three or four months I am dead. Katya loves driving, and
she is pleased that it is fine weather and that I am sitting beside her.
She is in good spirits and does not say harsh things.
“You are a very good man, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she says. “You are a
rare specimen, and there isn’t an actor who would understand how to play
you. Me or Mihail Fyodorovitch, for instance, any poor actor could do,
but not you. And I envy you, I envy you horribly! Do you know what I
stand for? What?”
She ponders for a minute, and then asks me:
“Nikolay Stepanovitch, I am a negative phenomenon! Yes?”
“Yes,” I answer.
“H’m! what am I to do?”
What answer was I to make her? It is easy to say “work,” or “give your
possessions to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and because it is so easy
to say that, I don’t know what to answer.
My colleagues when they teach therapeutics advise “the individual study
of each separate case.” One has but to obey this advice to gain the
conviction that the methods recommended in the textbooks as the best and
as providing a safe basis for treatment turn out to be quite unsuitable
in individual cases. It is just the same in moral ailments.
But I must make some answer, and I say:
“You have too much free time, my dear; you absolutely must take up some
occupation. After all, why shouldn’t you be an actress again if it is
your vocation?”
“I cannot!”
“Your tone and manner suggest that you are a victim. I don’t like that,
my dear; it is your own fault. Remember, you began with falling out with
people and methods, but you have done nothing to make either better. You
did not struggle with evil, but were cast down by it, and you are not
the victim of the struggle, but of your own impotence. Well, of course
you were young and inexperienced then; now it may all be different. Yes,
really, go on the stage. You will work, you will serve a sacred art.”
“Don’t pretend, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” Katya interrupts me. “Let us make
a compact once for all; we will talk about actors, actresses, and
authors, but we will let art alone. You are a splendid and rare person,
but you don’t know enough about art sincerely to think it sacred. You
have no instinct or feeling for art. You have been hard at work all your
life, and have not had time to acquire that feeling. Altogether... I
don’t like talk about art,” she goes on nervously. “I don’t like it!
And, my goodness, how they have vulgarized it!”
“Who has vulgarized it?”
“They have vulgarized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by their
familiar attitude, clever people by philosophy.”
“Philosophy has nothing to do with it.”
“Yes, it has. If any one philosophizes about it, it shows he does not
understand it.”
To avoid bitterness I hasten to change the subject, and then sit a long
time silent. Only when we are driving out of the wood and turning
towards Katya’s villa I go back to my former question, and say:
“You have still not answered me, why you don’t want to go on the stage.”
“Nikolay Stepanovitch, this is cruel!” she cries, and suddenly flushes
all over. “You want me to tell you the truth aloud? Very well, if... if
you like it! I have no talent! No talent and... and a great deal of
vanity! So there!”
After making this confession she turns her face away from me, and to
hide the trembling of her hands tugs violently at the reins.
As we are driving towards her villa we see Mihail Fyodorovitch walking
near the gate, impatiently awaiting us.
“That Mihail Fyodorovitch again!” says Katya with vexation. “Do rid me
of him, please! I am sick and tired of him... bother him!”
Mihail Fyodorovitch ought to have gone abroad long ago, but he puts off
going from week to week. Of late there have been certain changes in him.
He looks, as it were, sunken, has taken to drinking until he is tipsy, a
thing which never used to happen to him, and his black eyebrows are
beginning to turn grey. When our chaise stops at the gate he does not
conceal his joy and his impatience. He fussily helps me and Katya out,
hurriedly asks questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that gentle,
imploring, pure expression, which I used to notice only in his eyes, is
now suffused all over his face. He is glad and at the same time he is
ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of his habit of spending every evening
with Katya. And he thinks it necessary to explain his visit by some
obvious absurdity such as: “I was driving by, and I thought I would just
look in for a minute.”
We all three go indoors; first we drink tea, then the familiar packs of
cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the bottle of Crimean
champagne are put upon the table. The subjects of our conversation are
not new; they are just the same as in the winter. We fall foul of the
University, the students, and literature and the theatre; the air grows
thick and stifling with evil speaking, and poisoned by the breath, not
of two toads as in the winter, but of three. Besides the velvety
baritone laugh and the giggle like the gasp of a concertina, the maid
who waits upon us hears an unpleasant cracked “He, he!” like the chuckle
of a general in a vaudeville.
V
There are terrible nights with thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, such
as are called among the people “sparrow nights.” There has been one such
night in my personal life.
I woke up after midnight and leaped suddenly out of bed. It seemed to me
for some reason that I was just immediately going to die. Why did it
seem so? I had no sensation in my body that suggested my immediate
death, but my soul was oppressed with terror, as though I had suddenly
seen a vast menacing glow of fire.
I rapidly struck a light, drank some water straight out of the decanter,
then hurried to the open window. The weather outside was magnificent.
There was a smell of hay and some other very sweet scent. I could see
the spikes of the fence, the gaunt, drowsy trees by the window, the
road, the dark streak of woodland, there was a serene, very bright moon
in the sky and not a single cloud, perfect stillness, not one leaf
stirring. I felt that everything was looking at me and waiting for me to
die....
It was uncanny. I closed the window and ran to my bed. I felt for my
pulse, and not finding it in my wrist, tried to find it in my temple,
then in my chin, and again in my wrist, and everything I touched was
cold and clammy with sweat. My breathing came more and more rapidly, my
body was shivering, all my inside was in commotion; I had a sensation on
my face and on my bald head as though they were covered with spiders’
webs.
What should I do? Call my family? No; it would be no use. I could not
imagine what my wife and Liza would do when they came in to me.
I hid my head under the pillow, closed my eyes, and waited and
waited.... My spine was cold; it seemed to be drawn inwards, and I felt
as though death were coming upon me stealthily from behind.
“Kee-vee! kee-vee!” I heard a sudden shriek in the night’s stillness,
and did not know where it was—in my breast or in the street—“Kee-vee!
kee-vee!”
“My God, how terrible!” I would have drunk some more water, but by then
it was fearful to open my eyes and I was afraid to raise my head. I was
possessed by unaccountable animal terror, and I cannot understand why I
was so frightened: was it that I wanted to live, or that some new
unknown pain was in store for me?
Upstairs, overhead, some one moaned or laughed. I listened. Soon
afterwards there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. Some one came
hurriedly down, then went up again. A minute later there was a sound of
steps downstairs again; some one stopped near my door and listened.
“Who is there?” I cried.
The door opened. I boldly opened my eyes, and saw my wife. Her face was
pale and her eyes were tear-stained.
“You are not asleep, Nikolay Stepanovitch?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“For God’s sake, go up and have a look at Liza; there is something the
matter with her....”
“Very good, with pleasure,” I muttered, greatly relieved at not being
alone. “Very good, this minute....”
I followed my wife, heard what she said to me, and was too agitated to
understand a word. Patches of light from her candle danced about the
stairs, our long shadows trembled. My feet caught in the skirts of my
dressing-gown; I gasped for breath, and felt as though something were
pursuing me and trying to catch me from behind.
“I shall die on the spot, here on the staircase,” I thought. “On the
spot....” But we passed the staircase, the dark corridor with the
Italian windows, and went into Liza’s room. She was sitting on the bed
in her nightdress, with her bare feet hanging down, and she was moaning.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” she was muttering, screwing up her eyes at our
candle. “I can’t bear it.”
“Liza, my child,” I said, “what is it?”
Seeing me, she began crying out, and flung herself on my neck.
“My kind papa!...” she sobbed—“my dear, good papa... my darling, my pet,
I don’t know what is the matter with me.... I am miserable!”
She hugged me, kissed me, and babbled fond words I used to hear from her
when she was a child.
“Calm yourself, my child. God be with you,” I said. “There is no need to
cry. I am miserable, too.”
I tried to tuck her in; my wife gave her water, and we awkwardly
stumbled by her bedside; my shoulder jostled against her shoulder, and
meanwhile I was thinking how we used to give our children their bath
together.
“Help her! help her!” my wife implored me. “Do something!”
What could I do? I could do nothing. There was some load on the girl’s
heart; but I did not understand, I knew nothing about it, and could only
mutter:
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing; it will pass. Sleep, sleep!”
To make things worse, there was a sudden sound of dogs howling, at first
subdued and uncertain, then loud, two dogs howling together. I had never
attached significance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the
shrieking of owls, but on that occasion it sent a pang to my heart, and
I hastened to explain the howl to myself.
“It’s nonsense,” I thought, “the influence of one organism on another.
The intensely strained condition of my nerves has infected my wife,
Liza, the dog—that is all.... Such infection explains presentiments,
forebodings....”
When a little later I went back to my room to write a prescription for
Liza, I no longer thought I should die at once, but only had such a
weight, such a feeling of oppression in my soul that I felt actually
sorry that I had not died on the spot. For a long time I stood
motionless in the middle of the room, pondering what to prescribe for
Liza. But the moans overhead ceased, and I decided to prescribe nothing,
and yet I went on standing there....
There was a deathlike stillness, such a stillness, as some author has
expressed it, “it rang in one’s ears.” Time passed slowly; the streaks
of moonlight on the window-sill did not shift their position, but seemed
as though frozen.... It was still some time before dawn.
But the gate in the fence creaked, some one stole in and, breaking a
twig from one of those scraggy trees, cautiously tapped on the window
with it.
“Nikolay Stepanovitch,” I heard a whisper. “Nikolay Stepanovitch.”
I opened the window, and fancied I was dreaming: under the window,
huddled against the wall, stood a woman in a black dress, with the
moonlight bright upon her, looking at me with great eyes. Her face was
pale, stern, and weird-looking in the moonlight, like marble, her chin
was quivering.
“It is I,” she said—“I... Katya.”
In the moonlight all women’s eyes look big and black, all people look
taller and paler, and that was probably why I had not recognized her for
the first minute.
“What is it?”
“Forgive me!” she said. “I suddenly felt unbearably miserable... I
couldn’t stand it, so came here. There was a light in your window and...
and I ventured to knock.... I beg your pardon. Ah! if you knew how
miserable I am! What are you doing just now?”
“Nothing.... I can’t sleep.”
“I had a feeling that there was something wrong, but that is nonsense.”
Her brows were lifted, her eyes shone with tears, and her whole face was
lighted up with the familiar look of trustfulness which I had not seen
for so long.
“Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she said imploringly, stretching out both hands
to me, “my precious friend, I beg you, I implore you.... If you don’t
despise my affection and respect for you, consent to what I ask of you.”
“What is it?”
“Take my money from me!”
“Come! what an idea! What do I want with your money?”
“You’ll go away somewhere for your health.... You ought to go for your
health. Will you take it? Yes? Nikolay Stepanovitch darling, yes?”
She looked greedily into my face and repeated: “Yes, you will take it?”
“No, my dear, I won’t take it,” I said. “Thank you.”
She turned her back upon me and bowed her head. Probably I refused her
in a tone which made further conversation about money impossible.
“Go home to bed,” I said. “We will see each other tomorrow.”
“So you don’t consider me your friend?” she asked dejectedly.
“I don’t say that. But your money would be no use to me now.”
“I beg your pardon...” she said, dropping her voice a whole octave. “I
understand you... to be indebted to a person like me... a retired
actress.... But, good-bye....”
And she went away so quickly that I had not time even to say good-bye.
VI
I am in Harkov.
As it would be useless to contend against my present mood and, indeed,
beyond my power, I have made up my mind that the last days of my life
shall at least be irreproachable externally. If I am unjust in regard to
my wife and daughter, which I fully recognize, I will try and do as she
wishes; since she wants me to go to Harkov, I go to Harkov. Besides, I
have become of late so indifferent to everything that it is really all
the same to me where I go, to Harkov, or to Paris, or to Berditchev.
I arrived here at midday, and have put up at the hotel not far from the
cathedral. The train was jolting, there were draughts, and now I am
sitting on my bed, holding my head and expecting tic douloureux. I ought
to have gone today to see some professors of my acquaintance, but I have
neither strength nor inclination.
The old corridor attendant comes in and asks whether I have brought my
bed-linen. I detain him for five minutes, and put several questions to
him about Gnekker, on whose account I have come here. The attendant
turns out to be a native of Harkov; he knows the town like the fingers
of his hand, but does not remember any household of the surname of
Gnekker. I question him about the estate—the same answer.
The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three.... These
last months in which I am waiting for death seem much longer than the
whole of my life. And I have never before been so ready to resign myself
to the slowness of time as now. In the old days, when one sat in the
station and waited for a train, or presided in an examination-room, a
quarter of an hour would seem an eternity. Now I can sit all night on my
bed without moving, and quite unconcernedly reflect that tomorrow will
be followed by another night as long and colourless, and the day after
tomorrow.
In the corridor it strikes five, six, seven.... It grows dark.
There is a dull pain in my cheek, the tic beginning. To occupy myself
with thoughts, I go back to my old point of view, when I was not so
indifferent, and ask myself why I, a distinguished man, a privy
councillor, am sitting in this little hotel room, on this bed with the
unfamiliar grey quilt. Why am I looking at that cheap tin washing-stand
and listening to the whirr of the wretched clock in the corridor? Is all
this in keeping with my fame and my lofty position? And I answer these
questions with a jeer. I am amused by the naivete with which I used in
my youth to exaggerate the value of renown and of the exceptional
position which celebrities are supposed to enjoy. I am famous, my name
is pronounced with reverence, my portrait has been both in the Niva and
in the Illustrated News of the World; I have read my biography even in a
German magazine. And what of all that? Here I am sitting utterly alone
in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my
hand.... Domestic worries, the hard-heartedness of creditors, the
rudeness of the railway servants, the inconveniences of the passport
system, the expensive and unwholesome food in the refreshment-rooms, the
general rudeness and coarseness in social intercourse—all this, and a
great deal more which would take too long to reckon up, affects me as
much as any working man who is famous only in his alley. In what way,
does my exceptional position find expression? Admitting that I am
celebrated a thousand times over, that I am a hero of whom my country is
proud. They publish bulletins of my illness in every paper, letters of
sympathy come to me by post from my colleagues, my pupils, the general
public; but all that does not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in
misery, in utter loneliness. Of course, no one is to blame for that; but
I in my foolishness dislike my popularity. I feel as though it had
cheated me.
At ten o’clock I fall asleep, and in spite of the tic I sleep soundly,
and should have gone on sleeping if I had not been awakened. Soon after
one came a sudden knock at the door.
“Who is there?”
“A telegram.”
“You might have waited till tomorrow,” I say angrily, taking the
telegram from the attendant. “Now I shall not get to sleep again.”
“I am sorry. Your light was burning, so I thought you were not asleep.”
I tear open the telegram and look first at the signature. From my wife.
“What does she want?”
“Gnekker was secretly married to Liza yesterday. Return.”
I read the telegram, and my dismay does not last long. I am dismayed,
not by what Liza and Gnekker have done, but by the indifference with
which I hear of their marriage. They say philosophers and the truly wise
are indifferent. It is false: indifference is the paralysis of the soul;
it is premature death.
I go to bed again, and begin trying to think of something to occupy my
mind. What am I to think about? I feel as though everything had been
thought over already and there is nothing which could hold my attention
now.
When daylight comes I sit up in bed with my arms round my knees, and to
pass the time I try to know myself. “Know thyself” is excellent and
useful advice; it is only a pity that the ancients never thought to
indicate the means of following this precept.
When I have wanted to understand somebody or myself I have considered,
not the actions, in which everything is relative, but the desires.
“Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what manner of man you are.”
And now I examine myself: what do I want?
I want our wives, our children, our friends, our pupils, to love in us,
not our fame, not the brand and not the label, but to love us as
ordinary men. Anything else? I should like to have had helpers and
successors. Anything else? I should like to wake up in a hundred years’
time and to have just a peep out of one eye at what is happening in
science. I should have liked to have lived another ten years... What
further? Why, nothing further. I think and think, and can think of
nothing more. And however much I might think, and however far my
thoughts might travel, it is clear to me that there is nothing vital,
nothing of great importance in my desires. In my passion for science, in
my desire to live, in this sitting on a strange bed, and in this
striving to know myself—in all the thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form
about everything, there is no common bond to connect it all into one
whole. Every feeling and every thought exists apart in me; and in all my
criticisms of science, the theatre, literature, my pupils, and in all
the pictures my imagination draws, even the most skilful analyst could
not find what is called a general idea, or the god of a living man.
And if there is not that, then there is nothing.
In a state so poverty-stricken, a serious ailment, the fear of death,
the influences of circumstance and men were enough to turn upside down
and scatter in fragments all which I had once looked upon as my theory
of life, and in which I had seen the meaning and joy of my existence. So
there is nothing surprising in the fact that I have over-shadowed the
last months of my life with thoughts and feelings only worthy of a slave
and barbarian, and that now I am indifferent and take no heed of the
dawn. When a man has not in him what is loftier and mightier than all
external impressions a bad cold is really enough to upset his
equilibrium and make him begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a
dog howling in every sound. And all his pessimism or optimism with his
thoughts great and small have at such times significance as symptoms and
nothing more.
I am vanquished. If it is so, it is useless to think, it is useless to
talk. I will sit and wait in silence for what is to come.
In the morning the corridor attendant brings me tea and a copy of the
local newspaper. Mechanically I read the advertisements on the first
page, the leading article, the extracts from the newspapers and
journals, the chronicle of events.... In the latter I find, among other
things, the following paragraph: “Our distinguished savant, Professor
Nikolay Stepanovitch So-and-so, arrived yesterday in Harkov, and is
staying in the So-and-so Hotel.”
Apparently, illustrious names are created to live on their own account,
apart from those that bear them. Now my name is promenading tranquilly
about Harkov; in another three months, printed in gold letters on my
monument, it will shine bright as the sun itself, while I shall be
already under the moss.
A light tap at the door. Somebody wants me.
“Who is there? Come in.”
The door opens, and I step back surprised and hurriedly wrap my
dressing-gown round me. Before me stands Katya.
“How do you do?” she says, breathless with running upstairs. “You didn’t
expect me? I have come here, too.... I have come, too!”
She sits down and goes on, hesitating and not looking at me.
“Why don’t you speak to me? I have come, too... today.... I found out
that you were in this hotel, and have come to you.”
“Very glad to see you,” I say, shrugging my shoulders, “but I am
surprised. You seem to have dropped from the skies. What have you come
for?”
“Oh... I’ve simply come.”
Silence. Suddenly she jumps up impulsively and comes to me.
“Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she says, turning pale and pressing her hands on
her bosom—“Nikolay Stepanovitch, I cannot go on living like this! I
cannot! For God’s sake tell me quickly, this minute, what I am to do!
Tell me, what am I to do?”
“What can I tell you?” I ask in perplexity. “I can do nothing.”
“Tell me, I beseech you,” she goes on, breathing hard and trembling all
over. “I swear that I cannot go on living like this. It’s too much for
me!”
She sinks on a chair and begins sobbing. She flings her head back,
wrings her hands, taps with her feet; her hat falls off and hangs
bobbing on its elastic; her hair is ruffled.
“Help me! help me!” she implores me. “I cannot go on!”
She takes her handkerchief out of her travelling-bag, and with it pulls
out several letters, which fall from her lap to the floor. I pick them
up, and on one of them I recognize the handwriting of Mihail
Fyodorovitch and accidentally read a bit of a word “passionat...”
“There is nothing I can tell you, Katya,” I say.
“Help me!” she sobs, clutching at my hand and kissing it. “You are my
father, you know, my only friend! You are clever, educated; you have
lived so long; you have been a teacher! Tell me, what am I to do?”
“Upon my word, Katya, I don’t know....”
I am utterly at a loss and confused, touched by her sobs, and hardly
able to stand.
“Let us have lunch, Katya,” I say, with a forced smile. “Give over
crying.”
And at once I add in a sinking voice:
“I shall soon be gone, Katya....”
“Only one word, only one word!” she weeps, stretching out her hands to
me.
“What am I to do?”
“You are a queer girl, really...” I mutter. “I don’t understand it! So
sensible, and all at once crying your eyes out....”
A silence follows. Katya straightens her hair, puts on her hat, then
crumples up the letters and stuffs them in her bag—and all this
deliberately, in silence. Her face, her bosom, and her gloves are wet
with tears, but her expression now is cold and forbidding.... I look at
her, and feel ashamed that I am happier than she. The absence of what my
philosophic colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself
only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of
this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her
life!
“Let us have lunch, Katya,” I say.
“No, thank you,” she answers coldly. Another minute passes in silence.
“I don’t like Harkov,” I say; “it’s so grey here—such a grey town.”
“Yes, perhaps.... It’s ugly. I am here not for long, passing through. I
am going on today.”
“Where?”
“To the Crimea... that is, to the Caucasus.”
“Oh! For long?”
“I don’t know.”
Katya gets up, and, with a cold smile, holds out her hand without
looking at me.
I want to ask her, “Then, you won’t be at my funeral?” but she does not
look at me; her hand is cold and, as it were, strange. I escort her to
the door in silence. She goes out, walks down the long corridor without
looking back; she knows that I am looking after her, and most likely she
will look back at the turn.
No, she did not look back. I’ve seen her black dress for the last time:
her steps have died away. Farewell, my treasure!
THE PRIVY COUNCILLOR
AT the beginning of April in 1870 my mother, Klavdia Arhipovna, the
widow of a lieutenant, received from her brother Ivan, a privy
councillor in Petersburg, a letter in which, among other things, this
passage occurred: “My liver trouble forces me to spend every summer
abroad, and as I have not at the moment the money in hand for a trip to
Marienbad, it is very possible, dear sister, that I may spend this
summer with you at Kotchuevko....”
On reading the letter my mother turned pale and began trembling all
over; then an expression of mingled tears and laughter came into her
face. She began crying and laughing. This conflict of tears and laughter
always reminds me of the flickering and spluttering of a brightly
burning candle when one sprinkles it with water. Reading the letter once
more, mother called together all the household, and in a voice broken
with emotion began explaining to us that there had been four Gundasov
brothers: one Gundasov had died as a baby; another had gone to the war,
and he, too, was dead; the third, without offence to him be it said, was
an actor; the fourth...
“The fourth has risen far above us,” my mother brought out tearfully.
“My own brother, we grew up together; and I am all of a tremble, all of
a tremble!... A privy councillor with the rank of a general! How shall I
meet him, my angel brother? What can I, a foolish, uneducated woman,
talk to him about? It’s fifteen years since I’ve seen him!
Andryushenka,” my mother turned to me, “you must rejoice, little stupid!
It’s a piece of luck for you that God is sending him to us!”
After we had heard a detailed history of the Gundasovs, there followed a
fuss and bustle in the place such as I had been accustomed to see only
before Christmas and Easter. The sky above and the water in the river
were all that escaped; everything else was subjected to a merciless
cleansing, scrubbing, painting. If the sky had been lower and smaller
and the river had not flowed so swiftly, they would have scoured them,
too, with bath-brick and rubbed them, too, with tow. Our walls were as
white as snow, but they were whitewashed; the floors were bright and
shining, but they were washed every day. The cat Bobtail (as a small
child I had cut off a good quarter of his tail with the knife used for
chopping the sugar, and that was why he was called Bobtail) was carried
off to the kitchen and put in charge of Anisya; Fedka was told that if
any of the dogs came near the front-door “God would punish him.” But no
one was so badly treated as the poor sofas, easy-chairs, and rugs! They
had never, before been so violently beaten as on this occasion in
preparation for our visitor. My pigeons took fright at the loud thud of
the sticks, and were continually flying up into the sky.
The tailor Spiridon, the only tailor in the whole district who ventured
to make for the gentry, came over from Novostroevka. He was a hard-
working capable man who did not drink and was not without a certain
fancy and feeling for form, but yet he was an atrocious tailor. His work
was ruined by hesitation.... The idea that his cut was not fashionable
enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to
the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits
that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque. We cut a
dash in impossibly narrow trousers and in such short jackets that we
always felt quite abashed in the presence of young ladies.
This Spiridon spent a long time taking my measure. He measured me all
over lengthways and crossways, as though he meant to put hoops round me
like a barrel; then he spent a long time noting down my measurements
with a thick pencil on a bit of paper, and ticked off all the
measurements with triangular signs. When he had finished with me he set
to work on my tutor, Yegor Alexyevitch Pobyedimsky. My beloved tutor was
then at the stage when young men watch the growth of their moustache and
are critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the devout awe
with which Spiridon approached him. Yegor Alexyevitch had to throw back
his head, to straddle his legs like an inverted V, first lift up his
arms, then let them fall. Spiridon measured him several times, walking
round him during the process like a love-sick pigeon round its mate,
going down on one knee, bending double.... My mother, weary, exhausted
by her exertions and heated by ironing, watched these lengthy
proceedings, and said:
“Mind now, Spiridon, you will have to answer for it to God if you spoil
the cloth! And it will be the worse for you if you don’t make them fit!”
Mother’s words threw Spiridon first into a fever, then into a
perspiration, for he was convinced that he would not make them fit. He
received one rouble twenty kopecks for making my suit, and for
Pobyedimsky’s two roubles, but we provided the cloth, the lining, and
the buttons. The price cannot be considered excessive, as Novostroevka
was about seven miles from us, and the tailor came to fit us four times.
When he came to try the things on and we squeezed ourselves into the
tight trousers and jackets adorned with basting threads, mother always
frowned contemptuously and expressed her surprise:
“Goodness knows what the fashions are coming to nowadays! I am
positively ashamed to look at them. If brother were not used to
Petersburg I would not get you fashionable clothes!”
Spiridon, relieved that the blame was thrown on the fashion and not on
him, shrugged his shoulders and sighed, as though to say:
“There’s no help for it; it’s the spirit of the age!”
The excitement with which we awaited the arrival of our guest can only
be compared with the strained suspense with which spiritualists wait
from minute to minute the appearance of a ghost. Mother went about with
a sick headache, and was continually melting into tears. I lost my
appetite, slept badly, and did not learn my lessons. Even in my dreams I
was haunted by an impatient longing to see a general—that is, a man with
epaulettes and an embroidered collar sticking up to his ears, and with a
naked sword in his hands, exactly like the one who hung over the sofa in
the drawing-room and glared with terrible black eyes at everybody who
dared to look at him. Pobyedimsky was the only one who felt himself in
his element. He was neither terrified nor delighted, and merely from
time to time, when he heard the history of the Gundasov family, said:
“Yes, it will be pleasant to have some one fresh to talk to.”
My tutor was looked upon among us as an exceptional nature. He was a
young man of twenty, with a pimply face, shaggy locks, a low forehead,
and an unusually long nose. His nose was so big that when he wanted to
look close at anything he had to put his head on one side like a bird.
To our thinking, there was not a man in the province cleverer, more
cultivated, or more stylish. He had left the high-school in the class
next to the top, and had then entered a veterinary college, from which
he was expelled before the end of the first half-year. The reason of his
expulsion he carefully concealed, which enabled any one who wished to do
so to look upon my instructor as an injured and to some extent a
mysterious person. He spoke little, and only of intellectual subjects;
he ate meat during the fasts, and looked with contempt and condescension
on the life going on around him, which did not prevent him, however,
from taking presents, such as suits of clothes, from my mother, and
drawing funny faces with red teeth on my kites. Mother disliked him for
his “pride,” but stood in awe of his cleverness.
Our visitor did not keep us long waiting. At the beginning of May two
wagon-loads of big boxes arrived from the station. These boxes looked so
majestic that the drivers instinctively took off their hats as they
lifted them down.
“There must be uniforms and gunpowder in those boxes,” I thought.
Why “gunpowder”? Probably the conception of a general was closely
connected in my mind with cannons and gunpowder.
When I woke up on the morning of the tenth of May, nurse told me in a
whisper that “my uncle had come.” I dressed rapidly, and, washing after
a fashion, flew out of my bedroom without saying my prayers. In the
vestibule I came upon a tall, solid gentleman with fashionable whiskers
and a foppish-looking overcoat. Half dead with devout awe, I went up to
him and, remembering the ceremonial mother had impressed upon me, I
scraped my foot before him, made a very low bow, and craned forward to
kiss his hand; but the gentleman did not allow me to kiss his hand: he
informed me that he was not my uncle, but my uncle’s footman, Pyotr. The
appearance of this Pyotr, far better dressed than Pobyedimsky or me,
excited in me the utmost astonishment, which, to tell the truth, has
lasted to this day. Can such dignified, respectable people with stern
and intellectual faces really be footmen? And what for?
Pyotr told me that my uncle was in the garden with my mother. I rushed
into the garden.
Nature, knowing nothing of the history of the Gundasov family and the
rank of my uncle, felt far more at ease and unconstrained than I. There
was a clamour going on in the garden such as one only hears at fairs.
Masses of starlings flitting through the air and hopping about the walks
were noisily chattering as they hunted for cockchafers. There were
swarms of sparrows in the lilac-bushes, which threw their tender,
fragrant blossoms straight in one’s face. Wherever one turned, from
every direction came the note of the golden oriole and the shrill cry of
the hoopoe and the red-legged falcon. At any other time I should have
begun chasing dragon-flies or throwing stones at a crow which was
sitting on a low mound under an aspen-tree, with his blunt beak turned
away; but at that moment I was in no mood for mischief. My heart was
throbbing, and I felt a cold sinking at my stomach; I was preparing
myself to confront a gentleman with epaulettes, with a naked sword, and
with terrible eyes!
But imagine my disappointment! A dapper little foppish gentleman in
white silk trousers, with a white cap on his head, was walking beside my
mother in the garden. With his hands behind him and his head thrown
back, every now and then running on ahead of mother, he looked quite
young. There was so much life and movement in his whole figure that I
could only detect the treachery of age when I came close up behind and
saw beneath his cap a fringe of close-cropped silver hair. Instead of
the staid dignity and stolidity of a general, I saw an almost
schoolboyish nimbleness; instead of a collar sticking up to his ears, an
ordinary light blue necktie. Mother and my uncle were walking in the
avenue talking together. I went softly up to them from behind, and
waited for one of them to look round.
“What a delightful place you have here, Klavdia!” said my uncle. “How
charming and lovely it is! Had I known before that you had such a
charming place, nothing would have induced me to go abroad all these
years.”
My uncle stooped down rapidly and sniffed at a tulip. Everything he saw
moved him to rapture and excitement, as though he had never been in a
garden on a sunny day before. The queer man moved about as though he
were on springs, and chattered incessantly, without allowing mother to
utter a single word. All of a sudden Pobyedimsky came into sight from
behind an elder-tree at the turn of the avenue. His appearance was so
unexpected that my uncle positively started and stepped back a pace. On
this occasion my tutor was attired in his best Inverness cape with
sleeves, in which, especially back-view, he looked remarkably like a
windmill. He had a solemn and majestic air. Pressing his hat to his
bosom in Spanish style, he took a step towards my uncle and made a bow
such as a marquis makes in a melodrama, bending forward, a little to one
side.
“I have the honour to present myself to your high excellency,” he said
aloud: “the teacher and instructor of your nephew, formerly a pupil of
the veterinary institute, and a nobleman by birth, Pobyedimsky!”
This politeness on the part of my tutor pleased my mother very much. She
gave a smile, and waited in thrilled suspense to hear what clever thing
he would say next; but my tutor, expecting his dignified address to be
answered with equal dignity—that is, that my uncle would say “H’m!” like
a general and hold out two fingers—was greatly confused and abashed when
the latter laughed genially and shook hands with him. He muttered
something incoherent, cleared his throat, and walked away.
“Come! isn’t that charming?” laughed my uncle. “Just look! he has made
his little flourish and thinks he’s a very clever fellow! I do like
that—upon my soul I do! What youthful aplomb, what life in that foolish
flourish! And what boy is this?” he asked, suddenly turning and looking
at me.
“That is my Andryushenka,” my mother introduced me, flushing crimson.
“My consolation...”
I made a scrape with my foot on the sand and dropped a low bow.
“A fine fellow... a fine fellow...” muttered my uncle, taking his hand
from my lips and stroking me on the head. “So your name is Andrusha?
Yes, yes.... H’m!... upon my soul!... Do you learn lessons?”
My mother, exaggerating and embellishing as all mothers do, began to
describe my achievements in the sciences and the excellence of my
behaviour, and I walked round my uncle and, following the ceremonial
laid down for me, I continued making low bows. Then my mother began
throwing out hints that with my remarkable abilities it would not be
amiss for me to get a government nomination to the cadet school; but at
the point when I was to have burst into tears and begged for my uncle’s
protection, my uncle suddenly stopped and flung up his hands in
amazement.
“My goo-oodness! What’s that?” he asked.
Tatyana Ivanovna, the wife of our bailiff, Fyodor Petrovna, was coming
towards us. She was carrying a starched white petticoat and a long
ironing-board. As she passed us she looked shyly at the visitor through
her eyelashes and flushed crimson.
“Wonders will never cease...” my uncle filtered through his teeth,
looking after her with friendly interest. “You have a fresh surprise at
every step, sister... upon my soul!”
“She’s a beauty...” said mother. “They chose her as a bride for Fyodor,
though she lived over seventy miles from here....”
Not every one would have called Tatyana a beauty. She was a plump little
woman of twenty, with black eyebrows and a graceful figure, always rosy
and attractive-looking, but in her face and in her whole person there
was not one striking feature, not one bold line to catch the eye, as
though nature had lacked inspiration and confidence when creating her.
Tatyana Ivanovna was shy, bashful, and modest in her behaviour; she
moved softly and smoothly, said little, seldom laughed, and her whole
life was as regular as her face and as flat as her smooth, tidy hair. My
uncle screwed up his eyes looking after her, and smiled. Mother looked
intently at his smiling face and grew serious.
“And so, brother, you’ve never married!” she sighed.
“No; I’ve not married.”
“Why not?” asked mother softly.
“How can I tell you? It has happened so. In my youth I was too hard at
work, I had no time to live, and when I longed to live—I looked
round—and there I had fifty years on my back already. I was too late!
However, talking about it... is depressing.”
My mother and my uncle both sighed at once and walked on, and I left
them and flew off to find my tutor, that I might share my impressions
with him. Pobyedimsky was standing in the middle of the yard, looking
majestically at the heavens.
“One can see he is a man of culture!” he said, twisting his head round.
“I hope we shall get on together.”
An hour later mother came to us.
“I am in trouble, my dears!” she began, sighing. “You see brother has
brought a valet with him, and the valet, God bless him, is not one you
can put in the kitchen or in the hall; we must give him a room apart. I
can’t think what I am to do! I tell you what, children, couldn’t you
move out somewhere—to Fyodor’s lodge, for instance—and give your room to
the valet? What do you say?”
We gave our ready consent, for living in the lodge was a great deal more
free than in the house, under mother’s eye.
“It’s a nuisance, and that’s a fact!” said mother. “Brother says he
won’t have dinner in the middle of the day, but between six and seven,
as they do in Petersburg. I am simply distracted with worry! By seven
o’clock the dinner will be done to rags in the oven. Really, men don’t
understand anything about housekeeping, though they have so much
intellect. Oh, dear! we shall have to cook two dinners every day! You
will have dinner at midday as before, children, while your poor old
mother has to wait till seven, for the sake of her brother.”
Then my mother heaved a deep sigh, bade me try and please my uncle,
whose coming was a piece of luck for me for which we must thank God, and
hurried off to the kitchen. Pobyedimsky and I moved into the lodge the
same day. We were installed in a room which formed the passage from the
entry to the bailiff’s bedroom.
Contrary to my expectations, life went on just as before, drearily and
monotonously, in spite of my uncle’s arrival and our move into new
quarters. We were excused lessons “on account of the visitor.”
Pobyedimsky, who never read anything or occupied himself in any way,
spent most of his time sitting on his bed, with his long nose thrust
into the air, thinking. Sometimes he would get up, try on his new suit,
and sit down again to relapse into contemplation and silence. Only one
thing worried him, the flies, which he used mercilessly to squash
between his hands. After dinner he usually “rested,” and his snores were
a cause of annoyance to the whole household. I ran about the garden from
morning to night, or sat in the lodge sticking my kites together. For
the first two or three weeks we did not see my uncle often. For days
together he sat in his own room working, in spite of the flies and the
heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting as though glued to his
table produced upon us the effect of an inexplicable conjuring trick. To
us idlers, knowing nothing of systematic work, his industry seemed
simply miraculous. Getting up at nine, he sat down to his table, and did
not leave it till dinner-time; after dinner he set to work again, and
went on till late at night. Whenever I peeped through the keyhole I
invariably saw the same thing: my uncle sitting at the table working.
The work consisted in his writing with one hand while he turned over the
leaves of a book with the other, and, strange to say, he kept moving all
over—swinging his leg as though it were a pendulum, whistling, and
nodding his head in time. He had an extremely careless and frivolous
expression all the while, as though he were not working, but playing at
noughts and crosses. I always saw him wearing a smart short jacket and a
jauntily tied cravat, and he always smelt, even through the keyhole, of
delicate feminine perfumery. He only left his room for dinner, but he
ate little.
“I can’t make brother out!” mother complained of him. “Every day we kill
a turkey and pigeons on purpose for him, I make a compote with my own
hands, and he eats a plateful of broth and a bit of meat the size of a
finger and gets up from the table. I begin begging him to eat; he comes
back and drinks a glass of milk. And what is there in that, in a glass
of milk? It’s no better than washing up water! You may die of a diet
like that.... If I try to persuade him, he laughs and makes a joke of
it.... No; he does not care for our fare, poor dear!”
We spent the evenings far more gaily than the days. As a rule, by the
time the sun was setting and long shadows were lying across the yard,
we—that is, Tatyana Ivanovna, Pobyedimsky, and I—were sitting on the
steps of the lodge. We did not talk till it grew quite dusk. And,
indeed, what is one to talk of when every subject has been talked over
already? There was only one thing new, my uncle’s arrival, and even that
subject was soon exhausted. My tutor never took his eyes off Tatyana
Ivanovna ‘s face, and frequently heaved deep sighs.... At the time I did
not understand those sighs, and did not try to fathom their
significance; now they explain a great deal to me.
When the shadows merged into one thick mass of shade, the bailiff Fyodor
would come in from shooting or from the field. This Fyodor gave me the
impression of being a fierce and even a terrible man. The son of a
Russianized gipsy from Izyumskoe, swarthy-faced and curly-headed, with
big black eyes and a matted beard, he was never called among our
Kotchuevko peasants by any name but “The Devil.” And, indeed, there was
a great deal of the gipsy about him apart from his appearance. He could
not, for instance, stay at home, and went off for days together into the
country or into the woods to shoot. He was gloomy, ill-humoured,
taciturn, was afraid of nobody, and refused to recognize any authority.
He was rude to mother, addressed me familiarly, and was contemptuous of
Pobyedimsky’s learning. All this we forgave him, looking upon him as a
hot-tempered and nervous man; mother liked him because, in spite of his
gipsy nature, he was ideally honest and industrious. He loved his
Tatyana Ivanovna passionately, like a gipsy, but this love took in him a
gloomy form, as though it cost him suffering. He was never affectionate
to his wife in our presence, but simply rolled his eyes angrily at her
and twisted his mouth.
When he came in from the fields he would noisily and angrily put down
his gun, would come out to us on the steps, and sit down beside his
wife. After resting a little, he would ask his wife a few questions
about household matters, and then sink into silence.
“Let us sing,” I would suggest.
My tutor would tune his guitar, and in a deep deacon’s bass strike up
“In the midst of the valley.” We would begin singing. My tutor took the
bass, Fyodor sang in a hardly audible tenor, while I sang soprano in
unison with Tatyana Ivanovna.
When the whole sky was covered with stars and the frogs had left off
croaking, they would bring in our supper from the kitchen. We went into
the lodge and sat down to the meal. My tutor and the gipsy ate greedily,
with such a sound that it was hard to tell whether it was the bones
crunching or their jaws, and Tatyana Ivanovna and I scarcely succeeded
in getting our share. After supper the lodge was plunged in deep sleep.
One evening, it was at the end of May, we were sitting on the steps,
waiting for supper. A shadow suddenly fell across us, and Gundasov stood
before us as though he had sprung out of the earth. He looked at us for
a long time, then clasped his hands and laughed gaily.
“An idyll!” he said. “They sing and dream in the moonlight! It’s
charming, upon my soul! May I sit down and dream with you?”
We looked at one another and said nothing. My uncle sat down on the
bottom step, yawned, and looked at the sky. A silence followed.
Pobyedimsky, who had for a long time been wanting to talk to somebody
fresh, was delighted at the opportunity, and was the first to break the
silence. He had only one subject for intellectual conversation, the
epizootic diseases. It sometimes happens that after one has been in an
immense crowd, only some one countenance of the thousands remains long
imprinted on the memory; in the same way, of all that Pobyedimsky had
heard, during his six months at the veterinary institute, he remembered
only one passage:
“The epizootics do immense damage to the stock of the country. It is the
duty of society to work hand in hand with the government in waging war
upon them.”
Before saying this to Gundasov, my tutor cleared his throat three times,
and several times, in his excitement, wrapped himself up in his
Inverness. On hearing about the epizootics, my uncle looked intently at
my tutor and made a sound between a snort and a laugh.
“Upon my soul, that’s charming!” he said, scrutinizing us as though we
were mannequins. “This is actually life.... This is really what reality
is bound to be. Why are you silent, Pelagea Ivanovna?” he said,
addressing Tatyana Ivanovna.
She coughed, overcome with confusion.
“Talk, my friends, sing... play!... Don’t lose time. You know, time, the
rascal, runs away and waits for no man! Upon my soul, before you have
time to look round, old age is upon you.... Then it is too late to live!
That’s how it is, Pelagea Ivanovna.... We mustn’t sit still and be
silent....”
At that point supper was brought out from the kitchen. Uncle went into
the lodge with us, and to keep us company ate five curd fritters and the
wing of a duck. He ate and looked at us. He was touched and delighted by
us all. Whatever silly nonsense my precious tutor talked, and whatever
Tatyana Ivanovna did, he thought charming and delightful. When after
supper Tatyana Ivanovna sat quietly down and took up her knitting, he
kept his eyes fixed on her fingers and chatted away without ceasing.
“Make all the haste you can to live, my friends...” he said. “God forbid
you should sacrifice the present for the future! There is youth, health,
fire in the present; the future is smoke and deception! As soon as you
are twenty begin to live.”
Tatyana Ivanovna dropped a knitting-needle. My uncle jumped up, picked
up the needle, and handed it to Tatyana Ivanovna with a bow, and for the
first time in my life I learnt that there were people in the world more
refined than Pobyedimsky.
“Yes...” my uncle went on, “love, marry, do silly things. Foolishness is
a great deal more living and healthy than our straining and striving
after rational life.”
My uncle talked a great deal, so much that he bored us; I sat on a box
listening to him and dropping to sleep. It distressed me that he did not
once all the evening pay attention to me. He left the lodge at two
o’clock, when, overcome with drowsiness, I was sound asleep.
From that time forth my uncle took to coming to the lodge every evening.
He sang with us, had supper with us, and always stayed on till two
o’clock in the morning, chatting incessantly, always about the same
subject. His evening and night work was given up, and by the end of
June, when the privy councillor had learned to eat mother’s turkey and
compote, his work by day was abandoned too. My uncle tore himself away
from his table and plunged into “life.” In the daytime he walked up and
down the garden, he whistled to the workmen and hindered them from
working, making them tell him their various histories. When his eye fell
on Tatyana Ivanovna he ran up to her, and, if she were carrying
anything, offered his assistance, which embarrassed her dreadfully.
As the summer advanced my uncle grew more and more frivolous, volatile,
and careless. Pobyedimsky was completely disillusioned in regard to him.
“He is too one-sided,” he said. “There is nothing to show that he is in
the very foremost ranks of the service. And he doesn’t even know how to
talk. At every word it’s ‘upon my soul.’ No, I don’t like him!”
From the time that my uncle began visiting the lodge there was a
noticeable change both in Fyodor and my tutor. Fyodor gave up going out
shooting, came home early, sat more taciturn than ever, and stared with
particular ill-humour at his wife. In my uncle’s presence my tutor gave
up talking about epizootics, frowned, and even laughed sarcastically.
“Here comes our little bantam cock!” he growled on one occasion when my
uncle was coming into the lodge.
I put down this change in them both to their being offended with my
uncle. My absent-minded uncle mixed up their names, and to the very day
of his departure failed to distinguish which was my tutor and which was
Tatyana Ivanovna’s husband. Tatyana Ivanovna herself he sometimes called
Nastasya, sometimes Pelagea, and sometimes Yevdokia. Touched and
delighted by us, he laughed and behaved exactly as though in the company
of small children.... All this, of course, might well offend young men.
It was not a case of offended pride, however, but, as I realize now,
subtler feelings.
I remember one evening I was sitting on the box struggling with sleep.
My eyelids felt glued together and my body, tired out by running about
all day, drooped sideways. But I struggled against sleep and tried to
look on. It was about midnight. Tatyana Ivanovna, rosy and unassuming as
always, was sitting at a little table sewing at her husband’s shirt.
Fyodor, sullen and gloomy, was staring at her from one corner, and in
the other sat Pobyedimsky, snorting angrily and retreating into the high
collar of his shirt. My uncle was walking up and down the room thinking.
Silence reigned; nothing was to be heard but the rustling of the linen
in Tatyana Ivanovna’s hands. Suddenly my uncle stood still before
Tatyana Ivanovna, and said:
“You are all so young, so fresh, so nice, you live so peacefully in this
quiet place, that I envy you. I have become attached to your way of life
here; my heart aches when I remember I have to go away.... You may
believe in my sincerity!”
Sleep closed my eyes and I lost myself. When some sound waked me, my
uncle was standing before Tatyana Ivanovna, looking at her with a
softened expression. His cheeks were flushed.
“My life has been wasted,” he said. “I have not lived! Your young face
makes me think of my own lost youth, and I should be ready to sit here
watching you to the day of my death. It would be a pleasure to me to
take you with me to Petersburg.”
“What for?” Fyodor asked in a husky voice.
“I should put her under a glass case on my work-table. I should admire
her and show her to other people. You know, Pelagea Ivanovna, we have no
women like you there. Among us there is wealth, distinction, sometimes
beauty, but we have not this true sort of life, this healthy
serenity....”
My uncle sat down facing Tatyana Ivanovna and took her by the hand.
“So you won’t come with me to Petersburg?” he laughed. “In that case
give me your little hand.... A charming little hand!... You won’t give
it? Come, you miser! let me kiss it, anyway....”
At that moment there was the scrape of a chair. Fyodor jumped up, and
with heavy, measured steps went up to his wife. His face was pale, grey,
and quivering. He brought his fist down on the table with a bang, and
said in a hollow voice:
“I won’t allow it!”
At the same moment Pobyedimsky jumped up from his chair. He, too, pale
and angry, went up to Tatyana Ivanovna, and he, too, struck the table
with his fist.
“I... I won’t allow it!” he said.
“What, what’s the matter?” asked my uncle in surprise.
“I won’t allow it!” repeated Fyodor, banging on the table.
My uncle jumped up and bIlinked nervously. He tried to speak, but in his
amazement and alarm could not utter a word; with an embarrassed smile,
he shuffled out of the lodge with the hurried step of an old man,
leaving his hat behind. When, a little later, my mother ran into the
lodge, Fyodor and Pobyedimsky were still hammering on the table like
blacksmiths and repeating, “I won’t allow it!”
“What has happened here?” asked mother. “Why has my brother been taken
ill? What’s the matter?”
Looking at Tatyana’s pale, frightened face and at her infuriated
husband, mother probably guessed what was the matter. She sighed and
shook her head.
“Come! give over banging on the table!” she said. “Leave off, Fyodor!
And why are you thumping, Yegor Alexyevitch? What have you got to do
with it?”
Pobyedimsky was startled and confused. Fyodor looked intently at him,
then at his wife, and began walking about the room. When mother had gone
out of the lodge, I saw what for long afterwards I looked upon as a
dream. I saw Fyodor seize my tutor, lift him up in the air, and thrust
him out of the door.
When I woke up in the morning my tutor’s bed was empty. To my question
where he was nurse told me in a whisper that he had been taken off early
in the morning to the hospital, as his arm was broken. Distressed at
this intelligence and remembering the scene of the previous evening, I
went out of doors. It was a grey day. The sky was covered with storm-
clouds and there was a wind blowing dust, bits of paper, and feathers
along the ground.... It felt as though rain were coming. There was a
look of boredom in the servants and in the animals. When I went into the
house I was told not to make such a noise with my feet, as mother was
ill and in bed with a migraine. What was I to do? I went outside the
gate, sat down on the little bench there, and fell to trying to discover
the meaning of what I had seen and heard the day before. From our gate
there was a road which, passing the forge and the pool which never dried
up, ran into the main road. I looked at the telegraph-posts, about which
clouds of dust were whirling, and at the sleepy birds sitting on the
wires, and I suddenly felt so dreary that I began to cry.
A dusty wagonette crammed full of townspeople, probably going to visit
the shrine, drove by along the main road. The wagonette was hardly out
of sight when a light chaise with a pair of horses came into view. In it
was Akim Nikititch, the police inspector, standing up and holding on to
the coachman’s belt. To my great surprise, the chaise turned into our
road and flew by me in at the gate. While I was puzzling why the police
inspector had come to see us, I heard a noise, and a carriage with three
horses came into sight on the road. In the carriage stood the police
captain, directing his coachman towards our gate.
“And why is he coming?” I thought, looking at the dusty police captain.
“Most probably Pobyedimsky has complained of Fyodor to him, and they
have come to take him to prison.”
But the mystery was not so easily solved. The police inspector and the
police captain were only the first instalment, for five minutes had
scarcely passed when a coach drove in at our gate. It dashed by me so
swiftly that I could only get a glimpse of a red beard.
Lost in conjecture and full of misgivings, I ran to the house. In the
passage first of all I saw mother; she was pale and looking with horror
towards the door, from which came the sounds of men’s voices. The
visitors had taken her by surprise in the very throes of migraine.
“Who has come, mother?” I asked.
“Sister,” I heard my uncle’s voice, “will you send in something to eat
for the governor and me?”
“It is easy to say ‘something to eat,’” whispered my mother, numb with
horror. “What have I time to get ready now? I am put to shame in my old
age!”
Mother clutched at her head and ran into the kitchen. The governor’s
sudden visit stirred and overwhelmed the whole household. A ferocious
slaughter followed. A dozen fowls, five turkeys, eight ducks, were
killed, and in the fluster the old gander, the progenitor of our whole
flock of geese and a great favourite of mother’s, was beheaded. The
coachmen and the cook seemed frenzied, and slaughtered birds at random,
without distinction of age or breed. For the sake of some wretched sauce
a pair of valuable pigeons, as dear to me as the gander was to mother,
were sacrificed. It was a long while before I could forgive the governor
their death.
In the evening, when the governor and his suite, after a sumptuous
dinner, had got into their carriages and driven away, I went into the
house to look at the remains of the feast. Glancing into the drawing-
room from the passage, I saw my uncle and my mother. My uncle, with his
hands behind his back, was walking nervously up and down close to the
wall, shrugging his shoulders. Mother, exhausted and looking much
thinner, was sitting on the sofa and watching his movements with heavy
eyes.
“Excuse me, sister, but this won’t do at all,” my uncle grumbled,
wrinkling up his face. “I introduced the governor to you, and you didn’t
offer to shake hands. You covered him with confusion, poor fellow! No,
that won’t do.... Simplicity is a very good thing, but there must be
limits to it.... Upon my soul! And then that dinner! How can one give
people such things? What was that mess, for instance, that they served
for the fourth course?”
“That was duck with sweet sauce...” mother answered softly.
“Duck! Forgive me, sister, but... but here I’ve got heartburn! I am
ill!”
My uncle made a sour, tearful face, and went on:
“It was the devil sent that governor! As though I wanted his visit!
Pff!... heartburn! I can’t work or sleep... I am completely out of
sorts.... And I can’t understand how you can live here without anything
to do... in this boredom! Here I’ve got a pain coming under my shoulder-
blade!...”
My uncle frowned, and walked about more rapidly than ever.
“Brother,” my mother inquired softly, “what would it cost to go abroad?”
“At least three thousand...” my uncle answered in a tearful voice. “I
would go, but where am I to get it? I haven’t a farthing. Pff!...
heartburn!”
My uncle stopped to look dejectedly at the grey, overcast prospect from
the window, and began pacing to and fro again.
A silence followed.... Mother looked a long while at the ikon, pondering
something, then she began crying, and said:
“I’ll give you the three thousand, brother....”
Three days later the majestic boxes went off to the station, and the
privy councillor drove off after them. As he said good-bye to mother he
shed tears, and it was a long time before he took his lips from her
hands, but when he got into his carriage his face beamed with childlike
pleasure.... Radiant and happy, he settled himself comfortably, kissed
his hand to my mother, who was crying, and all at once his eye was
caught by me. A look of the utmost astonishment came into his face.
“What boy is this?” he asked.
My mother, who had declared my uncle’s coming was a piece of luck for
which I must thank God, was bitterly mortified at this question. I was
in no mood for questions. I looked at my uncle’s happy face, and for
some reason I felt fearfully sorry for him. I could not resist jumping
up to the carriage and hugging that frivolous man, weak as all men are.
Looking into his face and wanting to say something pleasant, I asked:
“Uncle, have you ever been in a battle?”
“Ah, the dear boy...” laughed my uncle, kissing me. “A charming boy,
upon my soul! How natural, how living it all is, upon my soul!...”
The carriage set off.... I looked after him, and long afterwards that
farewell “upon my soul” was ringing in my ears.
THE MAN IN A CASE
AT the furthest end of the village of Mironositskoe some belated
sportsmen lodged for the night in the elder Prokofy’s barn. There were
two of them, the veterinary surgeon Ivan Ivanovitch and the schoolmaster
Burkin. Ivan Ivanovitch had a rather strange double-barrelled
surname—Tchimsha-Himalaisky—which did not suit him at all, and he was
called simply Ivan Ivanovitch all over the province. He lived at a stud-
farm near the town, and had come out shooting now to get a breath of
fresh air. Burkin, the high-school teacher, stayed every summer at Count
P—-’s, and had been thoroughly at home in this district for years.
They did not sleep. Ivan Ivanovitch, a tall, lean old fellow with long
moustaches, was sitting outside the door, smoking a pipe in the
moonlight. Burkin was lying within on the hay, and could not be seen in
the darkness.
They were telling each other all sorts of stories. Among other things,
they spoke of the fact that the elder’s wife, Mavra, a healthy and by no
means stupid woman, had never been beyond her native village, had never
seen a town nor a railway in her life, and had spent the last ten years
sitting behind the stove, and only at night going out into the street.
“What is there wonderful in that!” said Burkin. “There are plenty of
people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to retreat into
their shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps it is an instance of
atavism, a return to the period when the ancestor of man was not yet a
social animal and lived alone in his den, or perhaps it is only one of
the diversities of human character—who knows? I am not a natural science
man, and it is not my business to settle such questions; I only mean to
say that people like Mavra are not uncommon. There is no need to look
far; two months ago a man called Byelikov, a colleague of mine, the
Greek master, died in our town. You have heard of him, no doubt. He was
remarkable for always wearing goloshes and a warm wadded coat, and
carrying an umbrella even in the very finest weather. And his umbrella
was in a case, and his watch was in a case made of grey chamois leather,
and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, his penknife,
too, was in a little case; and his face seemed to be in a case too,
because he always hid it in his turned-up collar. He wore dark
spectacles and flannel vests, stuffed up his ears with cotton-wool, and
when he got into a cab always told the driver to put up the hood. In
short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap
himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would
isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated
him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to
justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the
past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which
he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he
sheltered himself from real life.
“‘Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful is the Greek language!’ he would say,
with a sugary expression; and as though to prove his words he would
screw up his eyes and, raising his finger, would pronounce ‘Anthropos!’
“And Byelikov tried to hide his thoughts also in a case. The only things
that were clear to his mind were government circulars and newspaper
articles in which something was forbidden. When some proclamation
prohibited the boys from going out in the streets after nine o’clock in
the evening, or some article declared carnal love unlawful, it was to
his mind clear and definite; it was forbidden, and that was enough. For
him there was always a doubtful element, something vague and not fully
expressed, in any sanction or permission. When a dramatic club or a
reading-room or a tea-shop was licensed in the town, he would shake his
head and say softly:
“It is all right, of course; it is all very nice, but I hope it won’t
lead to anything!”
“Every sort of breach of order, deviation or departure from rule,
depressed him, though one would have thought it was no business of his.
If one of his colleagues was late for church or if rumours reached him
of some prank of the high-school boys, or one of the mistresses was seen
late in the evening in the company of an officer, he was much disturbed,
and said he hoped that nothing would come of it. At the teachers’
meetings he simply oppressed us with his caution, his circumspection,
and his characteristic reflection on the ill-behaviour of the young
people in both male and female high-schools, the uproar in the classes.
“Oh, he hoped it would not reach the ears of the authorities; oh, he
hoped nothing would come of it; and he thought it would be a very good
thing if Petrov were expelled from the second class and Yegorov from the
fourth. And, do you know, by his sighs, his despondency, his black
spectacles on his pale little face, a little face like a pole-cat’s, you
know, he crushed us all, and we gave way, reduced Petrov’s and Yegorov’s
marks for conduct, kept them in, and in the end expelled them both. He
had a strange habit of visiting our lodgings. He would come to a
teacher’s, would sit down, and remain silent, as though he were
carefully inspecting something. He would sit like this in silence for an
hour or two and then go away. This he called ‘maintaining good relations
with his colleagues’; and it was obvious that coming to see us and
sitting there was tiresome to him, and that he came to see us simply
because he considered it his duty as our colleague. We teachers were
afraid of him. And even the headmaster was afraid of him. Would you
believe it, our teachers were all intellectual, right-minded people,
brought up on Turgenev and Shtchedrin, yet this little chap, who always
went about with goloshes and an umbrella, had the whole high-school
under his thumb for fifteen long years! High-school, indeed—he had the
whole town under his thumb! Our ladies did not get up private
theatricals on Saturdays for fear he should hear of it, and the clergy
dared not eat meat or play cards in his presence. Under the influence of
people like Byelikov we have got into the way of being afraid of
everything in our town for the last ten or fifteen years. They are
afraid to speak aloud, afraid to send letters, afraid to make
acquaintances, afraid to read books, afraid to help the poor, to teach
people to read and write....”
Ivan Ivanovitch cleared his throat, meaning to say something, but first
lighted his pipe, gazed at the moon, and then said, with pauses:
“Yes, intellectual, right minded people read Shtchedrin and Turgenev,
Buckle, and all the rest of them, yet they knocked under and put up with
it... that’s just how it is.”
“Byelikov lived in the same house as I did,” Burkin went on, “on the
same storey, his door facing mine; we often saw each other, and I knew
how he lived when he was at home. And at home it was the same story:
dressing-gown, nightcap, blinds, bolts, a perfect succession of
prohibitions and restrictions of all sorts, and—‘Oh, I hope nothing will
come of it!’ Lenten fare was bad for him, yet he could not eat meat, as
people might perhaps say Byelikov did not keep the fasts, and he ate
freshwater fish with butter—not a Lenten dish, yet one could not say
that it was meat. He did not keep a female servant for fear people might
think evil of him, but had as cook an old man of sixty, called Afanasy,
half-witted and given to tippling, who had once been an officer’s
servant and could cook after a fashion. This Afanasy was usually
standing at the door with his arms folded; with a deep sigh, he would
mutter always the same thing:
“‘There are plenty of them about nowadays!’
“Byelikov had a little bedroom like a box; his bed had curtains. When he
went to bed he covered his head over; it was hot and stuffy; the wind
battered on the closed doors; there was a droning noise in the stove and
a sound of sighs from the kitchen—ominous sighs.... And he felt
frightened under the bed-clothes. He was afraid that something might
happen, that Afanasy might murder him, that thieves might break in, and
so he had troubled dreams all night, and in the morning, when we went
together to the high-school, he was depressed and pale, and it was
evident that the high-school full of people excited dread and aversion
in his whole being, and that to walk beside me was irksome to a man of
his solitary temperament.
“‘They make a great noise in our classes,’ he used to say, as though
trying to find an explanation for his depression. ‘It’s beyond
anything.’
“And the Greek master, this man in a case—would you believe it?—almost
got married.”
Ivan Ivanovitch glanced quickly into the barn, and said:
“You are joking!”
“Yes, strange as it seems, he almost got married. A new teacher of
history and geography, Milhail Savvitch Kovalenko, a Little Russian, was
appointed. He came, not alone, but with his sister Varinka. He was a
tall, dark young man with huge hands, and one could see from his face
that he had a bass voice, and, in fact, he had a voice that seemed to
come out of a barrel—‘boom, boom, boom!’ And she was not so young, about
thirty, but she, too, was tall, well-made, with black eyebrows and red
cheeks—in fact, she was a regular sugar-plum, and so sprightly, so
noisy; she was always singing Little Russian songs and laughing. For the
least thing she would go off into a ringing laugh—‘Ha-ha-ha!’ We made
our first thorough acquaintance with the Kovalenkos at the headmaster’s
name-day party. Among the glum and intensely bored teachers who came
even to the name-day party as a duty we suddenly saw a new Aphrodite
risen from the waves; she walked with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang,
danced.... She sang with feeling ‘The Winds do Blow,’ then another song,
and another, and she fascinated us all—all, even Byelikov. He sat down
by her and said with a honeyed smile:
“‘The Little Russian reminds one of the ancient Greek in its softness
and agreeable resonance.’
“That flattered her, and she began telling him with feeling and
earnestness that they had a farm in the Gadyatchsky district, and that
her mamma lived at the farm, and that they had such pears, such melons,
such kabaks! The Little Russians call pumpkins kabaks (i.e., pothouses),
while their pothouses they call shinki, and they make a beetroot soup
with tomatoes and aubergines in it, ‘which was so nice—awfully nice!’
“We listened and listened, and suddenly the same idea dawned upon us
all:
“‘It would be a good thing to make a match of it,’ the headmaster’s wife
said to me softly.
“We all for some reason recalled the fact that our friend Byelikov was
not married, and it now seemed to us strange that we had hitherto failed
to observe, and had in fact completely lost sight of, a detail so
important in his life. What was his attitude to woman? How had he
settled this vital question for himself? This had not interested us in
the least till then; perhaps we had not even admitted the idea that a
man who went out in all weathers in goloshes and slept under curtains
could be in love.
“‘He is a good deal over forty and she is thirty,’ the headmaster’s wife
went on, developing her idea. ‘I believe she would marry him.’
“All sorts of things are done in the provinces through boredom, all
sorts of unnecessary and nonsensical things! And that is because what is
necessary is not done at all. What need was there for instance, for us
to make a match for this Byelikov, whom one could not even imagine
married? The headmaster’s wife, the inspector’s wife, and all our high-
school ladies, grew livelier and even better-looking, as though they had
suddenly found a new object in life. The headmaster’s wife would take a
box at the theatre, and we beheld sitting in her box Varinka, with such
a fan, beaming and happy, and beside her Byelikov, a little bent figure,
looking as though he had been extracted from his house by pincers. I
would give an evening party, and the ladies would insist on my inviting
Byelikov and Varinka. In short, the machine was set in motion. It
appeared that Varinka was not averse to matrimony. She had not a very
cheerful life with her brother; they could do nothing but quarrel and
scold one another from morning till night. Here is a scene, for
instance. Kovalenko would be coming along the street, a tall, sturdy
young ruffian, in an embroidered shirt, his love-locks falling on his
forehead under his cap, in one hand a bundle of books, in the other a
thick knotted stick, followed by his sister, also with books in her
hand.
“‘But you haven’t read it, Mihalik!’ she would be arguing loudly. ‘I
tell you, I swear you have not read it at all!’
“‘And I tell you I have read it,’ cries Kovalenko, thumping his stick on
the pavement.
“‘Oh, my goodness, Mihalik! why are you so cross? We are arguing about
principles.’
“‘I tell you that I have read it!’ Kovalenko would shout, more loudly
than ever.
“And at home, if there was an outsider present, there was sure to be a
skirmish. Such a life must have been wearisome, and of course she must
have longed for a home of her own. Besides, there was her age to be
considered; there was no time left to pick and choose; it was a case of
marrying anybody, even a Greek master. And, indeed, most of our young
ladies don’t mind whom they marry so long as they do get married.
However that may be, Varinka began to show an unmistakable partiality
for Byelikov.
“And Byelikov? He used to visit Kovalenko just as he did us. He would
arrive, sit down, and remain silent. He would sit quiet, and Varinka
would sing to him ‘The Winds do Blow,’ or would look pensively at him
with her dark eyes, or would suddenly go off into a peal—‘Ha-ha-ha!’
“Suggestion plays a great part in love affairs, and still more in
getting married. Everybody—both his colleagues and the ladies—began
assuring Byelikov that he ought to get married, that there was nothing
left for him in life but to get married; we all congratulated him, with
solemn countenances delivered ourselves of various platitudes, such as
‘Marriage is a serious step.’ Besides, Varinka was good-looking and
interesting; she was the daughter of a civil councillor, and had a farm;
and what was more, she was the first woman who had been warm and
friendly in her manner to him. His head was turned, and he decided that
he really ought to get married.”
“Well, at that point you ought to have taken away his goloshes and
umbrella,” said Ivan Ivanovitch.
“Only fancy! that turned out to be impossible. He put Varinka’s portrait
on his table, kept coming to see me and talking about Varinka, and home
life, saying marriage was a serious step. He was frequently at
Kovalenko’s, but he did not alter his manner of life in the least; on
the contrary, indeed, his determination to get married seemed to have a
depressing effect on him. He grew thinner and paler, and seemed to
retreat further and further into his case.
“‘I like Varvara Savvishna,’ he used to say to me, with a faint and wry
smile, ‘and I know that every one ought to get married, but... you know
all this has happened so suddenly.... One must think a little.’
“‘What is there to think over?’ I used to say to him. ‘Get married—that
is all.’
“‘No; marriage is a serious step. One must first weigh the duties before
one, the responsibilities... that nothing may go wrong afterwards. It
worries me so much that I don’t sleep at night. And I must confess I am
afraid: her brother and she have a strange way of thinking; they look at
things strangely, you know, and her disposition is very impetuous. One
may get married, and then, there is no knowing, one may find oneself in
an unpleasant position.’
“And he did not make an offer; he kept putting it off, to the great
vexation of the headmaster’s wife and all our ladies; he went on
weighing his future duties and responsibilities, and meanwhile he went
for a walk with Varinka almost every day—possibly he thought that this
was necessary in his position—and came to see me to talk about family
life. And in all probability in the end he would have proposed to her,
and would have made one of those unnecessary, stupid marriages such as
are made by thousands among us from being bored and having nothing to
do, if it had not been for a kolossalische scandal. I must mention that
Varinka’s brother, Kovalenko, detested Byelikov from the first day of
their acquaintance, and could not endure him.
“‘I don’t understand,’ he used to say to us, shrugging his shoulders—‘I
don’t understand how you can put up with that sneak, that nasty phiz.
Ugh! how can you live here! The atmosphere is stifling and unclean! Do
you call yourselves schoolmasters, teachers? You are paltry government
clerks. You keep, not a temple of science, but a department for red tape
and loyal behaviour, and it smells as sour as a police-station. No, my
friends; I will stay with you for a while, and then I will go to my farm
and there catch crabs and teach the Little Russians. I shall go, and you
can stay here with your Judas—damn his soul!’
“Or he would laugh till he cried, first in a loud bass, then in a
shrill, thin laugh, and ask me, waving his hands:
“‘What does he sit here for? What does he want? He sits and stares.’
“He even gave Byelikov a nickname, ‘The Spider.’ And it will readily be
understood that we avoided talking to him of his sister’s being about to
marry ‘The Spider.’
“And on one occasion, when the headmaster’s wife hinted to him what a
good thing it would be to secure his sister’s future with such a
reliable, universally respected man as Byelikov, he frowned and
muttered:
“‘It’s not my business; let her marry a reptile if she likes. I don’t
like meddling in other people’s affairs.’
“Now hear what happened next. Some mischievous person drew a caricature
of Byelikov walking along in his goloshes with his trousers tucked up,
under his umbrella, with Varinka on his arm; below, the inscription
‘Anthropos in love.’ The expression was caught to a marvel, you know.
The artist must have worked for more than one night, for the teachers of
both the boys’ and girls’ high-schools, the teachers of the seminary,
the government officials, all received a copy. Byelikov received one,
too. The caricature made a very painful impression on him.
“We went out together; it was the first of May, a Sunday, and all of us,
the boys and the teachers, had agreed to meet at the high-school and
then to go for a walk together to a wood beyond the town. We set off,
and he was green in the face and gloomier than a storm-cloud.
“‘What wicked, ill-natured people there are!’ he said, and his lips
quivered.
“I felt really sorry for him. We were walking along, and all of a
sudden—would you believe it?—Kovalenko came bowling along on a bicycle,
and after him, also on a bicycle, Varinka, flushed and exhausted, but
good-humoured and gay.
“‘We are going on ahead,’ she called. ‘What lovely weather! Awfully
lovely!’
“And they both disappeared from our sight. Byelikov turned white instead
of green, and seemed petrified. He stopped short and stared at me....
“‘What is the meaning of it? Tell me, please!’ he asked. ‘Can my eyes
have deceived me? Is it the proper thing for high-school masters and
ladies to ride bicycles?’
“‘What is there improper about it?’ I said. ‘Let them ride and enjoy
themselves.’
“‘But how can that be?’ he cried, amazed at my calm. ‘What are you
saying?’
“And he was so shocked that he was unwilling to go on, and returned
home.
“Next day he was continually twitching and nervously rubbing his hands,
and it was evident from his face that he was unwell. And he left before
his work was over, for the first time in his life. And he ate no dinner.
Towards evening he wrapped himself up warmly, though it was quite warm
weather, and sallied out to the Kovalenkos’. Varinka was out; he found
her brother, however.
“‘Pray sit down,’ Kovalenko said coldly, with a frown. His face looked
sleepy; he had just had a nap after dinner, and was in a very bad
humour.
“Byelikov sat in silence for ten minutes, and then began:
“‘I have come to see you to relieve my mind. I am very, very much
troubled. Some scurrilous fellow has drawn an absurd caricature of me
and another person, in whom we are both deeply interested. I regard it
as a duty to assure you that I have had no hand in it.... I have given
no sort of ground for such ridicule—on the contrary, I have always
behaved in every way like a gentleman.’
“Kovalenko sat sulky and silent. Byelikov waited a little, and went on
slowly in a mournful voice:
“‘And I have something else to say to you. I have been in the service
for years, while you have only lately entered it, and I consider it my
duty as an older colleague to give you a warning. You ride on a bicycle,
and that pastime is utterly unsuitable for an educator of youth.’
“‘Why so?’ asked Kovalenko in his bass.
“‘Surely that needs no explanation, Mihail Savvitch—surely you can
understand that? If the teacher rides a bicycle, what can you expect the
pupils to do? You will have them walking on their heads next! And so
long as there is no formal permission to do so, it is out of the
question. I was horrified yesterday! When I saw your sister everything
seemed dancing before my eyes. A lady or a young girl on a bicycle—it’s
awful!’
“‘What is it you want exactly?’
“‘All I want is to warn you, Mihail Savvitch. You are a young man, you
have a future before you, you must be very, very careful in your
behaviour, and you are so careless—oh, so careless! You go about in an
embroidered shirt, are constantly seen in the street carrying books, and
now the bicycle, too. The headmaster will learn that you and your sister
ride the bicycle, and then it will reach the higher authorities.... Will
that be a good thing?’
“‘It’s no business of anybody else if my sister and I do bicycle!’ said
Kovalenko, and he turned crimson. ‘And damnation take any one who
meddles in my private affairs!’
“Byelikov turned pale and got up.
“‘If you speak to me in that tone I cannot continue,’ he said. ‘And I
beg you never to express yourself like that about our superiors in my
presence; you ought to be respectful to the authorities.’
“‘Why, have I said any harm of the authorities?’ asked Kovalenko,
looking at him wrathfully. ‘Please leave me alone. I am an honest man,
and do not care to talk to a gentleman like you. I don’t like sneaks!’
“Byelikov flew into a nervous flutter, and began hurriedly putting on
his coat, with an expression of horror on his face. It was the first
time in his life he had been spoken to so rudely.
“‘You can say what you please,’ he said, as he went out from the entry
to the landing on the staircase. ‘I ought only to warn you: possibly
some one may have overheard us, and that our conversation may not be
misunderstood and harm come of it, I shall be compelled to inform our
headmaster of our conversation... in its main features. I am bound to do
so.’
“‘Inform him? You can go and make your report!’
“Kovalenko seized him from behind by the collar and gave him a push, and
Byelikov rolled downstairs, thudding with his goloshes. The staircase
was high and steep, but he rolled to the bottom unhurt, got up, and
touched his nose to see whether his spectacles were all right. But just
as he was falling down the stairs Varinka came in, and with her two
ladies; they stood below staring, and to Byelikov this was more terrible
than anything. I believe he would rather have broken his neck or both
legs than have been an object of ridicule. ‘Why, now the whole town
would hear of it; it would come to the headmaster’s ears, would reach
the higher authorities—oh, it might lead to something! There would be
another caricature, and it would all end in his being asked to resign
his post....
“When he got up, Varinka recognized him, and, looking at his ridiculous
face, his crumpled overcoat, and his goloshes, not understanding what
had happened and supposing that he had slipped down by accident, could
not restrain herself, and laughed loud enough to be heard by all the
flats:
“‘Ha-ha-ha!’
“And this pealing, ringing ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ was the last straw that put an
end to everything: to the proposed match and to Byelikov’s earthly
existence. He did not hear what Varinka said to him; he saw nothing. On
reaching home, the first thing he did was to remove her portrait from
the table; then he went to bed, and he never got up again.
“Three days later Afanasy came to me and asked whether we should not
send for the doctor, as there was something wrong with his master. I
went in to Byelikov. He lay silent behind the curtain, covered with a
quilt; if one asked him a question, he said ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and not
another sound. He lay there while Afanasy, gloomy and scowling, hovered
about him, sighing heavily, and smelling like a pothouse.
“A month later Byelikov died. We all went to his funeral—that is, both
the high-schools and the seminary. Now when he was lying in his coffin
his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, as though he were
glad that he had at last been put into a case which he would never leave
again. Yes, he had attained his ideal! And, as though in his honour, it
was dull, rainy weather on the day of his funeral, and we all wore
goloshes and took our umbrellas. Varinka, too, was at the funeral, and
when the coffin was lowered into the grave she burst into tears. I have
noticed that Little Russian women are always laughing or crying—no
intermediate mood.
“One must confess that to bury people like Byelikov is a great pleasure.
As we were returning from the cemetery we wore discreet Lenten faces; no
one wanted to display this feeling of pleasure—a feeling like that we
had experienced long, long ago as children when our elders had gone out
and we ran about the garden for an hour or two, enjoying complete
freedom. Ah, freedom, freedom! The merest hint, the faintest hope of its
possibility gives wings to the soul, does it not?
“We returned from the cemetery in a good humour. But not more than a
week had passed before life went on as in the past, as gloomy,
oppressive, and senseless—a life not forbidden by government
prohibition, but not fully permitted, either: it was no better. And,
indeed, though we had buried Byelikov, how many such men in cases were
left, how many more of them there will be!”
“That’s just how it is,” said Ivan Ivanovitch and he lighted his pipe.
“How many more of them there will be!” repeated Burkin.
The schoolmaster came out of the barn. He was a short, stout man,
completely bald, with a black beard down to his waist. The two dogs came
out with him.
“What a moon!” he said, looking upwards.
It was midnight. On the right could be seen the whole village, a long
street stretching far away for four miles. All was buried in deep silent
slumber; not a movement, not a sound; one could hardly believe that
nature could be so still. When on a moonlight night you see a broad
village street, with its cottages, haystacks, and slumbering willows, a
feeling of calm comes over the soul; in this peace, wrapped away from
care, toil, and sorrow in the darkness of night, it is mild, melancholy,
beautiful, and it seems as though the stars look down upon it kindly and
with tenderness, and as though there were no evil on earth and all were
well. On the left the open country began from the end of the village; it
could be seen stretching far away to the horizon, and there was no
movement, no sound in that whole expanse bathed in moonlight.
“Yes, that is just how it is,” repeated Ivan Ivanovitch; “and isn’t our
living in town, airless and crowded, our writing useless papers, our
playing vint—isn’t that all a sort of case for us? And our spending our
whole lives among trivial, fussy men and silly, idle women, our talking
and our listening to all sorts of nonsense—isn’t that a case for us,
too? If you like, I will tell you a very edifying story.”
“No; it’s time we were asleep,” said Burkin. “Tell it tomorrow.”
They went into the barn and lay down on the hay. And they were both
covered up and beginning to doze when they suddenly heard light
footsteps—patter, patter.... Some one was walking not far from the barn,
walking a little and stopping, and a minute later, patter, patter
again.... The dogs began growling.
“That’s Mavra,” said Burkin.
The footsteps died away.
“You see and hear that they lie,” said Ivan Ivanovitch, turning over on
the other side, “and they call you a fool for putting up with their
lying. You endure insult and humiliation, and dare not openly say that
you are on the side of the honest and the free, and you lie and smile
yourself; and all that for the sake of a crust of bread, for the sake of
a warm corner, for the sake of a wretched little worthless rank in the
service. No, one can’t go on living like this.”
“Well, you are off on another tack now, Ivan Ivanovitch,” said the
schoolmaster. “Let us go to sleep!”
And ten minutes later Burkin was asleep. But Ivan Ivanovitch kept
sighing and turning over from side to side; then he got up, went outside
again, and, sitting in the doorway, lighted his pipe.
GOOSEBERRIES
THE whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it
was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when
the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when one
expects rain and it does not come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary
surgeon, and Burkin, the high-school teacher, were already tired from
walking, and the fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of them they
could just see the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe; on the
right stretched a row of hillocks which disappeared in the distance
behind the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the
river, that there were meadows, green willows, homesteads there, and
that if one stood on one of the hillocks one could see from it the same
vast plain, telegraph-wires, and a train which in the distance looked
like a crawling caterpillar, and that in clear weather one could even
see the town. Now, in still weather, when all nature seemed mild and
dreamy, Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were filled with love of that
countryside, and both thought how great, how beautiful a land it was.
“Last time we were in Prokofy’s barn,” said Burkin, “you were about to
tell me a story.”
“Yes; I meant to tell you about my brother.”
Ivan Ivanovitch heaved a deep sigh and lighted a pipe to begin to tell
his story, but just at that moment the rain began. And five minutes
later heavy rain came down, covering the sky, and it was hard to tell
when it would be over. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin stopped in hesitation;
the dogs, already drenched, stood with their tails between their legs
gazing at them feelingly.
“We must take shelter somewhere,” said Burkin. “Let us go to Alehin’s;
it’s close by.”
“Come along.”
They turned aside and walked through mown fields, sometimes going
straight forward, sometimes turning to the right, till they came out on
the road. Soon they saw poplars, a garden, then the red roofs of barns;
there was a gleam of the river, and the view opened on to a broad
expanse of water with a windmill and a white bath-house: this was
Sofino, where Alehin lived.
The watermill was at work, drowning the sound of the rain; the dam was
shaking. Here wet horses with drooping heads were standing near their
carts, and men were walking about covered with sacks. It was damp,
muddy, and desolate; the water looked cold and malignant. Ivan
Ivanovitch and Burkin were already conscious of a feeling of wetness,
messiness, and discomfort all over; their feet were heavy with mud, and
when, crossing the dam, they went up to the barns, they were silent, as
though they were angry with one another.
In one of the barns there was the sound of a winnowing machine, the door
was open, and clouds of dust were coming from it. In the doorway was
standing Alehin himself, a man of forty, tall and stout, with long hair,
more like a professor or an artist than a landowner. He had on a white
shirt that badly needed washing, a rope for a belt, drawers instead of
trousers, and his boots, too, were plastered up with mud and straw. His
eyes and nose were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanovitch and
Burkin, and was apparently much delighted to see them.
“Go into the house, gentlemen,” he said, smiling; “I’ll come directly,
this minute.”
It was a big two-storeyed house. Alehin lived in the lower storey, with
arched ceilings and little windows, where the bailiffs had once lived;
here everything was plain, and there was a smell of rye bread, cheap
vodka, and harness. He went upstairs into the best rooms only on rare
occasions, when visitors came. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were met in
the house by a maid-servant, a young woman so beautiful that they both
stood still and looked at one another.
“You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you, my friends,” said
Alehin, going into the hall with them. “It is a surprise! Pelagea,” he
said, addressing the girl, “give our visitors something to change into.
And, by the way, I will change too. Only I must first go and wash, for I
almost think I have not washed since spring. Wouldn’t you like to come
into the bath-house? and meanwhile they will get things ready here.”
Beautiful Pelagea, looking so refined and soft, brought them towels and
soap, and Alehin went to the bath-house with his guests.
“It’s a long time since I had a wash,” he said, undressing. “I have got
a nice bath-house, as you see—my father built it—but I somehow never
have time to wash.”
He sat down on the steps and soaped his long hair and his neck, and the
water round him turned brown.
“Yes, I must say,” said Ivan Ivanovitch meaningly, looking at his head.
“It’s a long time since I washed...” said Alehin with embarrassment,
giving himself a second soaping, and the water near him turned dark
blue, like ink.
Ivan Ivanovitch went outside, plunged into the water with a loud splash,
and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He stirred the water
into waves which set the white lilies bobbing up and down; he swam to
the very middle of the millpond and dived, and came up a minute later in
another place, and swam on, and kept on diving, trying to touch the
bottom.
“Oh, my goodness!” he repeated continually, enjoying himself thoroughly.
“Oh, my goodness!” He swam to the mill, talked to the peasants there,
then returned and lay on his back in the middle of the pond, turning his
face to the rain. Burkin and Alehin were dressed and ready to go, but he
still went on swimming and diving. “Oh, my goodness!...” he said. “Oh,
Lord, have mercy on me!...”
“That’s enough!” Burkin shouted to him.
They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was lighted in the
big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in
silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in arm-chairs; and
Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was walking about the drawing-
room, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry
clothes, and light shoes; and when lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly
on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray—only then
Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story, and it seemed as though not only
Burkin and Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and old,
and the officers who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from their
gold frames.
“There are two of us brothers,” he began—“I, Ivan Ivanovitch, and my
brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years younger. I went in for a learned
profession and became a veterinary surgeon, while Nikolay sat in a
government office from the time he was nineteen. Our father, Tchimsha-
Himalaisky, was a kantonist, but he rose to be an officer and left us a
little estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the little
estate went in debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had spent our
childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children, we passed
our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after horses,
stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on.... And, you know,
whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the migrating of
the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks over the
village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and will
have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother was
miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on
sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking
of one and the same thing—how to get into the country. And this yearning
by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself
a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake.
“He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I
never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of
his life in a little farm of his own. It’s the correct thing to say that
a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a
corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our
intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm,
it’s a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of
earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life,
to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm—it’s not life, it’s egoism,
laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good
works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole
globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.
“My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he
would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a
savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit
for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the
forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were his
delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading
newspapers, too, but the only things he read in them were the
advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for
sale. And his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit,
starling cotes, the carp in the pond, and all that sort of thing, you
know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds according to the
advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every one of
them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a
homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.
“‘Country life has its conveniences,’ he would sometimes say. ‘You sit
on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond,
there is a delicious smell everywhere, and... and the gooseberries are
growing.’
“He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were the
same things—(a) house for the family, (b) servants’ quarters, (c)
kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived parsimoniously, was
frugal in food and drink, his clothes were beyond description; he looked
like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. He grew
fearfully avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give
him something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he
used to save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no
doing anything with him.
“Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was over
forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and
saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of
buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an elderly and ugly
widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had filthy
lucre. He went on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short
of food, while he put her money in the bank in his name.
“Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was
accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second husband
she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine away with this
sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God. And I
need hardly say that my brother never for one moment imagined that he
was responsible for her death. Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In
our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of
honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so
that no one might get the benefit of it. While I was inspecting cattle
at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had his
leg cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was
flowing—it was a horrible thing—and he kept asking them to look for his
leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty roubles in the
boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would be
lost.”
“That’s a story from a different opera,” said Burkin.
“After his wife’s death,” Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for
half a minute, “my brother began looking out for an estate for himself.
Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a
mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed
of. My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate of
three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family, with
servants’ quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no gooseberry-
bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the
colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a
brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay
Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes,
planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.
“Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what
it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate ‘Tchumbaroklov
Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.’ I reached ‘alias Himalaiskoe’ in the
afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges,
fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the
yard, where to put one’s horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a
fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too
lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and
she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after
dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a
quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks,
his nose, and his mouth all stuck out—he looked as though he might begin
grunting into the quilt at any moment.
“We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the
thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and
near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to show me the estate.
“‘Well, how are you getting on here?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.’
“He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a gentleman.
He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked it. He
ate a great deal, went to the bath-house, was growing stout, was already
at law with the village commune and both factories, and was very much
offended when the peasants did not call him ‘Your Honour.’ And he
concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial,
gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with
an air of consequence. And what deeds of charity! He treated the
peasants for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his
name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the village, and
then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka—he thought that was the
thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka! One day the fat
landowner hauls the peasants up before the district captain for
trespass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to a gallon
of vodka, and they drink and shout ‘Hurrah!’ and when they are drunk bow
down to his feet. A change of life for the better, and being well-fed
and idle develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay
Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid to have
any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth,
and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister. ‘Education is
essential, but for the peasants it is premature.’ ‘Corporal punishment
is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is
nothing to take its place.’
“‘I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,’ he would say.
‘The peasants like me. I need only to hold up my little finger and the
peasants will do anything I like.’
“And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He
repeated twenty times over ‘We noblemen,’ ‘I as a noble’; obviously he
did not remember that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father a
soldier. Even our surname Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so
incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and very
agreeable.
“But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell you about
the change that took place in me during the brief hours I spent at his
country place. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put
on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, but his
own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were
planted. Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence
at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for
excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with
the triumph of a child who has at last received his favourite toy, and
said:
“‘How delicious!’
“And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, ‘Ah, how delicious! Do
taste them!’
“They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:
“‘Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts Than hosts of baser truths.’
“I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously fulfilled, who
had attained his object in life, who had gained what he wanted, who was
satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason,
an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and,
on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an
oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly
oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my
brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept
getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I
reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a
suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of
the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible
poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness,
hypocrisy, lying.... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in
the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one
who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see
the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by
night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old,
serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we
do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on
somewhere behind the scenes.... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and
nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their
minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from
malnutrition.... And this order of things is evidently necessary;
evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear
their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be
impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind
the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer
continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that
however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later,
trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see
or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no
man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily
cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree—and all goes
well.
“That night I realized that I, too, was happy and contented,” Ivan
Ivanovitch went on, getting up. “I, too, at dinner and at the hunt liked
to lay down the law on life and religion, and the way to manage the
peasantry. I, too, used to say that science was light, that culture was
essential, but for the simple people reading and writing was enough for
the time. Freedom is a blessing, I used to say; we can no more do
without it than without air, but we must wait a little. Yes, I used to
talk like that, and now I ask, ‘For what reason are we to wait?’” asked
Ivan Ivanovitch, looking angrily at Burkin. “Why wait, I ask you? What
grounds have we for waiting? I shall be told, it can’t be done all at
once; every idea takes shape in life gradually, in its due time. But who
is it says that? Where is the proof that it’s right? You will fall back
upon the natural order of things, the uniformity of phenomena; but is
there order and uniformity in the fact that I, a living, thinking man,
stand over a chasm and wait for it to close of itself, or to fill up
with mud at the very time when perhaps I might leap over it or build a
bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till
there’s no strength to live? And meanwhile one must live, and one wants
to live!
“I went away from my brother’s early in the morning, and ever since then
it has been unbearable for me to be in town. I am oppressed by its peace
and quiet; I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is no spectacle
more painful to me now than the sight of a happy family sitting round
the table drinking tea. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am
not even capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated
and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas, and I
cannot sleep.... Ah, if I were young!”
Ivan Ivanovitch walked backwards and forwards in excitement, and
repeated: “If I were young!”
He suddenly went up to Alehin and began pressing first one of his hands
and then the other.
“Pavel Konstantinovitch,” he said in an imploring voice, “don’t be calm
and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young,
strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing! There is no happiness,
and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in
life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something
greater and more rational. Do good!”
And all this Ivan Ivanovitch said with a pitiful, imploring smile, as
though he were asking him a personal favour.
Then all three sat in arm-chairs at different ends of the drawing-room
and were silent. Ivan Ivanovitch’s story had not satisfied either Burkin
or Alehin. When the generals and ladies gazed down from their gilt
frames, looking in the dusk as though they were alive, it was dreary to
listen to the story of the poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt
inclined, for some reason, to talk about elegant people, about women.
And their sitting in the drawing-room where everything—the chandeliers
in their covers, the arm-chairs, and the carpet under their
feet—reminded them that those very people who were now looking down from
their frames had once moved about, sat, drunk tea in this room, and the
fact that lovely Pelagea was moving noiselessly about was better than
any story.
Alehin was fearfully sleepy; he had got up early, before three o’clock
in the morning, to look after his work, and now his eyes were closing;
but he was afraid his visitors might tell some interesting story after
he had gone, and he lingered on. He did not go into the question whether
what Ivan Ivanovitch had just said was right and true. His visitors did
not talk of groats, nor of hay, nor of tar, but of something that had no
direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.
“It’s bed-time, though,” said Burkin, getting up. “Allow me to wish you
good-night.”
Alehin said good-night and went downstairs to his own domain, while the
visitors remained upstairs. They were both taken for the night to a big
room where there stood two old wooden beds decorated with carvings, and
in the corner was an ivory crucifix. The big cool beds, which had been
made by the lovely Pelagea, smelt agreeably of clean linen.
Ivan Ivanovitch undressed in silence and got into bed.
“Lord forgive us sinners!” he said, and put his head under the quilt.
His pipe lying on the table smelt strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin
could not sleep for a long while, and kept wondering where the
oppressive smell came from.
The rain was pattering on the window-panes all night.
ABOUT LOVE
AT lunch next day there were very nice pies, crayfish, and mutton
cutlets; and while we were eating, Nikanor, the cook, came up to ask
what the visitors would like for dinner. He was a man of medium height,
with a puffy face and little eyes; he was close-shaven, and it looked as
though his moustaches had not been shaved, but had been pulled out by
the roots. Alehin told us that the beautiful Pelagea was in love with
this cook. As he drank and was of a violent character, she did not want
to marry him, but was willing to live with him without. He was very
devout, and his religious convictions would not allow him to “live in
sin”; he insisted on her marrying him, and would consent to nothing
else, and when he was drunk he used to abuse her and even beat her.
Whenever he got drunk she used to hide upstairs and sob, and on such
occasions Alehin and the servants stayed in the house to be ready to
defend her in case of necessity.
We began talking about love.
“How love is born,” said Alehin, “why Pelagea does not love somebody
more like herself in her spiritual and external qualities, and why she
fell in love with Nikanor, that ugly snout—we all call him ‘The
Snout’—how far questions of personal happiness are of consequence in
love—all that is known; one can take what view one likes of it. So far
only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a
great mystery.’ Everything else that has been written or said about love
is not a conclusion, but only a statement of questions which have
remained unanswered. The explanation which would seem to fit one case
does not apply in a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind,
would be to explain every case individually without attempting to
generalize. We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each case.”
“Perfectly true,” Burkin assented.
“We Russians of the educated class have a partiality for these questions
that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized, decorated with
roses, nightingales; we Russians decorate our loves with these momentous
questions, and select the most uninteresting of them, too. In Moscow,
when I was a student, I had a friend who shared my life, a charming
lady, and every time I took her in my arms she was thinking what I would
allow her a month for housekeeping and what was the price of beef a
pound. In the same way, when we are in love we are never tired of asking
ourselves questions: whether it is honourable or dishonourable, sensible
or stupid, what this love is leading up to, and so on. Whether it is a
good thing or not I don’t know, but that it is in the way,
unsatisfactory, and irritating, I do know.”
It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who lead a
solitary existence always have something in their hearts which they are
eager to talk about. In town bachelors visit the baths and the
restaurants on purpose to talk, and sometimes tell the most interesting
things to bath attendants and waiters; in the country, as a rule, they
unbosom themselves to their guests. Now from the window we could see a
grey sky, trees drenched in the rain; in such weather we could go
nowhere, and there was nothing for us to do but to tell stories and to
listen.
“I have lived at Sofino and been farming for a long time,” Alehin began,
“ever since I left the University. I am an idle gentleman by education,
a studious person by disposition; but there was a big debt owing on the
estate when I came here, and as my father was in debt partly because he
had spent so much on my education, I resolved not to go away, but to
work till I paid off the debt. I made up my mind to this and set to
work, not, I must confess, without some repugnance. The land here does
not yield much, and if one is not to farm at a loss one must employ serf
labour or hired labourers, which is almost the same thing, or put it on
a peasant footing—that is, work the fields oneself and with one’s
family. There is no middle path. But in those days I did not go into
such subtleties. I did not leave a clod of earth unturned; I gathered
together all the peasants, men and women, from the neighbouring
villages; the work went on at a tremendous pace. I myself ploughed and
sowed and reaped, and was bored doing it, and frowned with disgust, like
a village cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen-garden.
My body ached, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I
could easily reconcile this life of toil with my cultured habits; to do
so, I thought, all that is necessary is to maintain a certain external
order in life. I established myself upstairs here in the best rooms, and
ordered them to bring me there coffee and liquor after lunch and dinner,
and when I went to bed I read every night the Yyesnik Evropi. But one
day our priest, Father Ivan, came and drank up all my liquor at one
sitting; and the Yyesnik Evropi went to the priest’s daughters; as in
the summer, especially at the haymaking, I did not succeed in getting to
my bed at all, and slept in the sledge in the barn, or somewhere in the
forester’s lodge, what chance was there of reading? Little by little I
moved downstairs, began dining in the servants’ kitchen, and of my
former luxury nothing is left but the servants who were in my father’s
service, and whom it would be painful to turn away.
“In the first years I was elected here an honourary justice of the
peace. I used to have to go to the town and take part in the sessions of
the congress and of the circuit court, and this was a pleasant change
for me. When you live here for two or three months without a break,
especially in the winter, you begin at last to pine for a black coat.
And in the circuit court there were frock-coats, and uniforms, and
dress-coats, too, all lawyers, men who have received a general
education; I had some one to talk to. After sleeping in the sledge and
dining in the kitchen, to sit in an arm-chair in clean linen, in thin
boots, with a chain on one’s waistcoat, is such luxury!
“I received a warm welcome in the town. I made friends eagerly. And of
all my acquaintanceships the most intimate and, to tell the truth, the
most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with Luganovitch, the vice-
president of the circuit court. You both know him: a most charming
personality. It all happened just after a celebrated case of
incendiarism; the preliminary investigation lasted two days; we were
exhausted. Luganovitch looked at me and said:
“‘Look here, come round to dinner with me.’
“This was unexpected, as I knew Luganovitch very little, only
officially, and I had never been to his house. I only just went to my
hotel room to change and went off to dinner. And here it was my lot to
meet Anna Alexyevna, Luganovitch’s wife. At that time she was still very
young, not more than twenty-two, and her first baby had been born just
six months before. It is all a thing of the past; and now I should find
it difficult to define what there was so exceptional in her, what it was
in her attracted me so much; at the time, at dinner, it was all
perfectly clear to me. I saw a lovely young, good, intelligent,
fascinating woman, such as I had never met before; and I felt her at
once some one close and already familiar, as though that face, those
cordial, intelligent eyes, I had seen somewhere in my childhood, in the
album which lay on my mother’s chest of drawers.
“Four Jews were charged with being incendiaries, were regarded as a gang
of robbers, and, to my mind, quite groundlessly. At dinner I was very
much excited, I was uncomfortable, and I don’t know what I said, but
Anna Alexyevna kept shaking her head and saying to her husband:
“‘Dmitry, how is this?’
“Luganovitch is a good-natured man, one of those simple-hearted people
who firmly maintain the opinion that once a man is charged before a
court he is guilty, and to express doubt of the correctness of a
sentence cannot be done except in legal form on paper, and not at dinner
and in private conversation.
“‘You and I did not set fire to the place,’ he said softly, ‘and you see
we are not condemned, and not in prison.’
“And both husband and wife tried to make me eat and drink as much as
possible. From some trifling details, from the way they made the coffee
together, for instance, and from the way they understood each other at
half a word, I could gather that they lived in harmony and comfort, and
that they were glad of a visitor. After dinner they played a duet on the
piano; then it got dark, and I went home. That was at the beginning of
spring.
“After that I spent the whole summer at Sofino without a break, and I
had no time to think of the town, either, but the memory of the graceful
fair-haired woman remained in my mind all those days; I did not think of
her, but it was as though her light shadow were lying on my heart.
“In the late autumn there was a theatrical performance for some
charitable object in the town. I went into the governor’s box (I was
invited to go there in the interval); I looked, and there was Anna
Alexyevna sitting beside the governor’s wife; and again the same
irresistible, thrilling impression of beauty and sweet, caressing eyes,
and again the same feeling of nearness. We sat side by side, then went
to the foyer.
“‘You’ve grown thinner,’ she said; ‘have you been ill?’
“‘Yes, I’ve had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather I can’t
sleep.’
“‘You look dispirited. In the spring, when you came to dinner, you were
younger, more confident. You were full of eagerness, and talked a great
deal then; you were very interesting, and I really must confess I was a
little carried away by you. For some reason you often came back to my
memory during the summer, and when I was getting ready for the theatre
today I thought I should see you.’
“And she laughed.
“‘But you look dispirited today,’ she repeated; ‘it makes you seem
older.’
“The next day I lunched at the Luganovitchs’. After lunch they drove out
to their summer villa, in order to make arrangements there for the
winter, and I went with them. I returned with them to the town, and at
midnight drank tea with them in quiet domestic surroundings, while the
fire glowed, and the young mother kept going to see if her baby girl was
asleep. And after that, every time I went to town I never failed to
visit the Luganovitchs. They grew used to me, and I grew used to them.
As a rule I went in unannounced, as though I were one of the family.
“‘Who is there?’ I would hear from a faraway room, in the drawling voice
that seemed to me so lovely.
“‘It is Pavel Konstantinovitch,’ answered the maid or the nurse.
“Anna Alexyevna would come out to me with an anxious face, and would ask
every time:
“‘Why is it so long since you have been? Has anything happened?’
“Her eyes, the elegant refined hand she gave me, her indoor dress, the
way she did her hair, her voice, her step, always produced the same
impression on me of something new and extraordinary in my life, and very
important. We talked together for hours, were silent, thinking each our
own thoughts, or she played for hours to me on the piano. If there were
no one at home I stayed and waited, talked to the nurse, played with the
child, or lay on the sofa in the study and read; and when Anna Alexyevna
came back I met her in the hall, took all her parcels from her, and for
some reason I carried those parcels every time with as much love, with
as much solemnity, as a boy.
“There is a proverb that if a peasant woman has no troubles she will buy
a pig. The Luganovitchs had no troubles, so they made friends with me.
If I did not come to the town I must be ill or something must have
happened to me, and both of them were extremely anxious. They were
worried that I, an educated man with a knowledge of languages, should,
instead of devoting myself to science or literary work, live in the
country, rush round like a squirrel in a rage, work hard with never a
penny to show for it. They fancied that I was unhappy, and that I only
talked, laughed, and ate to conceal my sufferings, and even at cheerful
moments when I felt happy I was aware of their searching eyes fixed upon
me. They were particularly touching when I really was depressed, when I
was being worried by some creditor or had not money enough to pay
interest on the proper day. The two of them, husband and wife, would
whisper together at the window; then he would come to me and say with a
grave face:
“‘If you really are in need of money at the moment, Pavel
Konstantinovitch, my wife and I beg you not to hesitate to borrow from
us.’
“And he would blush to his ears with emotion. And it would happen that,
after whispering in the same way at the window, he would come up to me,
with red ears, and say:
“‘My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present.’
“And he would give me studs, a cigar-case, or a lamp, and I would send
them game, butter, and flowers from the country. They both, by the way,
had considerable means of their own. In early days I often borrowed
money, and was not very particular about it—borrowed wherever I
could—but nothing in the world would have induced me to borrow from the
Luganovitchs. But why talk of it?
“I was unhappy. At home, in the fields, in the barn, I thought of her; I
tried to understand the mystery of a beautiful, intelligent young
woman’s marrying some one so uninteresting, almost an old man (her
husband was over forty), and having children by him; to understand the
mystery of this uninteresting, good, simple-hearted man, who argued with
such wearisome good sense, at balls and evening parties kept near the
more solid people, looking listless and superfluous, with a submissive,
uninterested expression, as though he had been brought there for sale,
who yet believed in his right to be happy, to have children by her; and
I kept trying to understand why she had met him first and not me, and
why such a terrible mistake in our lives need have happened.
“And when I went to the town I saw every time from her eyes that she was
expecting me, and she would confess to me herself that she had had a
peculiar feeling all that day and had guessed that I should come. We
talked a long time, and were silent, yet we did not confess our love to
each other, but timidly and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of
everything that might reveal our secret to ourselves. I loved her
tenderly, deeply, but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love
could lead to if we had not the strength to fight against it. It seemed
to be incredible that my gentle, sad love could all at once coarsely
break up the even tenor of the life of her husband, her children, and
all the household in which I was so loved and trusted. Would it be
honourable? She would go away with me, but where? Where could I take
her? It would have been a different matter if I had had a beautiful,
interesting life—if, for instance, I had been struggling for the
emancipation of my country, or had been a celebrated man of science, an
artist or a painter; but as it was it would mean taking her from one
everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so. And how
long would our happiness last? What would happen to her in case I was
ill, in case I died, or if we simply grew cold to one another?
“And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought of her
husband, her children, and of her mother, who loved the husband like a
son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings she would have to lie, or
else to tell the truth, and in her position either would have been
equally terrible and inconvenient. And she was tormented by the question
whether her love would bring me happiness—would she not complicate my
life, which, as it was, was hard enough and full of all sorts of
trouble? She fancied she was not young enough for me, that she was not
industrious nor energetic enough to begin a new life, and she often
talked to her husband of the importance of my marrying a girl of
intelligence and merit who would be a capable housewife and a help to
me—and she would immediately add that it would be difficult to find such
a girl in the whole town.
“Meanwhile the years were passing. Anna Alexyevna already had two
children. When I arrived at the Luganovitchs’ the servants smiled
cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel Konstantinovitch had
come, and hung on my neck; every one was overjoyed. They did not
understand what was passing in my soul, and thought that I, too, was
happy. Every one looked on me as a noble being. And grown-ups and
children alike felt that a noble being was walking about their rooms,
and that gave a peculiar charm to their manner towards me, as though in
my presence their life, too, was purer and more beautiful. Anna
Alexyevna and I used to go to the theatre together, always walking
there; we used to sit side by side in the stalls, our shoulders
touching. I would take the opera-glass from her hands without a word,
and feel at that minute that she was near me, that she was mine, that we
could not live without each other; but by some strange misunderstanding,
when we came out of the theatre we always said good-bye and parted as
though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people were saying about
us in the town already, but there was not a word of truth in it all!
“In the latter years Anna Alexyevna took to going away for frequent
visits to her mother or to her sister; she began to suffer from low
spirits, she began to recognize that her life was spoilt and
unsatisfied, and at times she did not care to see her husband nor her
children. She was already being treated for neurasthenia.
“We were silent and still silent, and in the presence of outsiders she
displayed a strange irritation in regard to me; whatever I talked about,
she disagreed with me, and if I had an argument she sided with my
opponent. If I dropped anything, she would say coldly:
“‘I congratulate you.’
“If I forgot to take the opera-glass when we were going to the theatre,
she would say afterwards:
“‘I knew you would forget it.’
“Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does not end
sooner or later. The time of parting came, as Luganovitch was appointed
president in one of the western provinces. They had to sell their
furniture, their horses, their summer villa. When they drove out to the
villa, and afterwards looked back as they were going away, to look for
the last time at the garden, at the green roof, every one was sad, and I
realized that I had to say goodbye not only to the villa. It was
arranged that at the end of August we should see Anna Alexyevna off to
the Crimea, where the doctors were sending her, and that a little later
Luganovitch and the children would set off for the western province.
“We were a great crowd to see Anna Alexyevna off. When she had said
good-bye to her husband and her children and there was only a minute
left before the third bell, I ran into her compartment to put a basket,
which she had almost forgotten, on the rack, and I had to say good-bye.
When our eyes met in the compartment our spiritual fortitude deserted us
both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and
tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands
wet with tears—oh, how unhappy we were!—I confessed my love for her, and
with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty,
and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood
that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love,
start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness
or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not
reason at all.
“I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and parted for ever.
The train had already started. I went into the next compartment—it was
empty—and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Then I
walked home to Sofino....”
While Alehin was telling his story, the rain left off and the sun came
out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch went out on the balcony, from which
there was a beautiful view over the garden and the mill-pond, which was
shining now in the sunshine like a mirror. They admired it, and at the
same time they were sorry that this man with the kind, clever eyes, who
had told them this story with such genuine feeling, should be rushing
round and round this huge estate like a squirrel on a wheel instead of
devoting himself to science or something else which would have made his
life more pleasant; and they thought what a sorrowful face Anna
Alexyevna must have had when he said good-bye to her in the railway-
carriage and kissed her face and shoulders. Both of them had met her in
the town, and Burkin knew her and thought her beautiful.
THE LOTTERY TICKET
IVAN DMITRITCH, a middle-class man who lived with his family on an
income of twelve hundred a year and was very well satisfied with his
lot, sat down on the sofa after supper and began reading the newspaper.
“I forgot to look at the newspaper today,” his wife said to him as she
cleared the table. “Look and see whether the list of drawings is there.”
“Yes, it is,” said Ivan Dmitritch; “but hasn’t your ticket lapsed?”
“No; I took the interest on Tuesday.”
“What is the number?”
“Series 9,499, number 26.”
“All right... we will look... 9,499 and 26.”
Ivan Dmitritch had no faith in lottery luck, and would not, as a rule,
have consented to look at the lists of winning numbers, but now, as he
had nothing else to do and as the newspaper was before his eyes, he
passed his finger downwards along the column of numbers. And
immediately, as though in mockery of his scepticism, no further than the
second line from the top, his eye was caught by the figure 9,499! Unable
to believe his eyes, he hurriedly dropped the paper on his knees without
looking to see the number of the ticket, and, just as though some one
had given him a douche of cold water, he felt an agreeable chill in the
pit of the stomach; tingling and terrible and sweet!
“Masha, 9,499 is there!” he said in a hollow voice.
His wife looked at his astonished and panic-stricken face, and realized
that he was not joking.
“9,499?” she asked, turning pale and dropping the folded tablecloth on
the table.
“Yes, yes... it really is there!”
“And the number of the ticket?”
“Oh, yes! There’s the number of the ticket too. But stay... wait! No, I
say! Anyway, the number of our series is there! Anyway, you
understand....”
Looking at his wife, Ivan Dmitritch gave a broad, senseless smile, like
a baby when a bright object is shown it. His wife smiled too; it was as
pleasant to her as to him that he only mentioned the series, and did not
try to find out the number of the winning ticket. To torment and
tantalize oneself with hopes of possible fortune is so sweet, so
thrilling!
“It is our series,” said Ivan Dmitritch, after a long silence. “So there
is a probability that we have won. It’s only a probability, but there it
is!”
“Well, now look!”
“Wait a little. We have plenty of time to be disappointed. It’s on the
second line from the top, so the prize is seventy-five thousand. That’s
not money, but power, capital! And in a minute I shall look at the list,
and there—26! Eh? I say, what if we really have won?”
The husband and wife began laughing and staring at one another in
silence. The possibility of winning bewildered them; they could not have
said, could not have dreamed, what they both needed that seventy-five
thousand for, what they would buy, where they would go. They thought
only of the figures 9,499 and 75,000 and pictured them in their
imagination, while somehow they could not think of the happiness itself
which was so possible.
Ivan Dmitritch, holding the paper in his hand, walked several times from
corner to corner, and only when he had recovered from the first
impression began dreaming a little.
“And if we have won,” he said—“why, it will be a new life, it will be a
transformation! The ticket is yours, but if it were mine I should, first
of all, of course, spend twenty-five thousand on real property in the
shape of an estate; ten thousand on immediate expenses, new
furnishing... travelling... paying debts, and so on.... The other forty
thousand I would put in the bank and get interest on it.”
“Yes, an estate, that would be nice,” said his wife, sitting down and
dropping her hands in her lap.
“Somewhere in the Tula or Oryol provinces.... In the first place we
shouldn’t need a summer villa, and besides, it would always bring in an
income.”
And pictures came crowding on his imagination, each more gracious and
poetical than the last. And in all these pictures he saw himself well-
fed, serene, healthy, felt warm, even hot! Here, after eating a summer
soup, cold as ice, he lay on his back on the burning sand close to a
stream or in the garden under a lime-tree.... It is hot.... His little
boy and girl are crawling about near him, digging in the sand or
catching ladybirds in the grass. He dozes sweetly, thinking of nothing,
and feeling all over that he need not go to the office today, tomorrow,
or the day after. Or, tired of lying still, he goes to the hayfield, or
to the forest for mushrooms, or watches the peasants catching fish with
a net. When the sun sets he takes a towel and soap and saunters to the
bathing-shed, where he undresses at his leisure, slowly rubs his bare
chest with his hands, and goes into the water. And in the water, near
the opaque soapy circles, little fish flit to and fro and green water-
weeds nod their heads. After bathing there is tea with cream and milk
rolls.... In the evening a walk or vint with the neighbours.
“Yes, it would be nice to buy an estate,” said his wife, also dreaming,
and from her face it was evident that she was enchanted by her thoughts.
Ivan Dmitritch pictured to himself autumn with its rains, its cold
evenings, and its St. Martin’s summer. At that season he would have to
take longer walks about the garden and beside the river, so as to get
thoroughly chilled, and then drink a big glass of vodka and eat a salted
mushroom or a soused cucumber, and then—drink another.... The children
would come running from the kitchen-garden, bringing a carrot and a
radish smelling of fresh earth.... And then, he would lie stretched full
length on the sofa, and in leisurely fashion turn over the pages of some
illustrated magazine, or, covering his face with it and unbuttoning his
waistcoat, give himself up to slumber.
The St. Martin’s summer is followed by cloudy, gloomy weather. It rains
day and night, the bare trees weep, the wind is damp and cold. The dogs,
the horses, the fowls—all are wet, depressed, downcast. There is nowhere
to walk; one can’t go out for days together; one has to pace up and down
the room, looking despondently at the grey window. It is dreary!
Ivan Dmitritch stopped and looked at his wife.
“I should go abroad, you know, Masha,” he said.
And he began thinking how nice it would be in late autumn to go abroad
somewhere to the South of France... to Italy.... to India!
“I should certainly go abroad too,” his wife said. “But look at the
number of the ticket!”
“Wait, wait!...”
He walked about the room and went on thinking. It occurred to him: what
if his wife really did go abroad? It is pleasant to travel alone, or in
the society of light, careless women who live in the present, and not
such as think and talk all the journey about nothing but their children,
sigh, and tremble with dismay over every farthing. Ivan Dmitritch
imagined his wife in the train with a multitude of parcels, baskets, and
bags; she would be sighing over something, complaining that the train
made her head ache, that she had spent so much money.... At the stations
he would continually be having to run for boiling water, bread and
butter.... She wouldn’t have dinner because of its being too dear....
“She would begrudge me every farthing,” he thought, with a glance at his
wife. “The lottery ticket is hers, not mine! Besides, what is the use of
her going abroad? What does she want there? She would shut herself up in
the hotel, and not let me out of her sight.... I know!”
And for the first time in his life his mind dwelt on the fact that his
wife had grown elderly and plain, and that she was saturated through and
through with the smell of cooking, while he was still young, fresh, and
healthy, and might well have got married again.
“Of course, all that is silly nonsense,” he thought; “but... why should
she go abroad? What would she make of it? And yet she would go, of
course.... I can fancy... In reality it is all one to her, whether it is
Naples or Klin. She would only be in my way. I should be dependent upon
her. I can fancy how, like a regular woman, she will lock the money up
as soon as she gets it.... She will hide it from me.... She will look
after her relations and grudge me every farthing.”
Ivan Dmitritch thought of her relations. All those wretched brothers and
sisters and aunts and uncles would come crawling about as soon as they
heard of the winning ticket, would begin whining like beggars, and
fawning upon them with oily, hypocritical smiles. Wretched, detestable
people! If they were given anything, they would ask for more; while if
they were refused, they would swear at them, slander them, and wish them
every kind of misfortune.
Ivan Dmitritch remembered his own relations, and their faces, at which
he had looked impartially in the past, struck him now as repulsive and
hateful.
“They are such reptiles!” he thought.
And his wife’s face, too, struck him as repulsive and hateful. Anger
surged up in his heart against her, and he thought malignantly:
“She knows nothing about money, and so she is stingy. If she won it she
would give me a hundred roubles, and put the rest away under lock and
key.”
And he looked at his wife, not with a smile now, but with hatred. She
glanced at him too, and also with hatred and anger. She had her own
daydreams, her own plans, her own reflections; she understood perfectly
well what her husband’s dreams were. She knew who would be the first to
try and grab her winnings.
“It’s very nice making daydreams at other people’s expense!” is what her
eyes expressed. “No, don’t you dare!”
Her husband understood her look; hatred began stirring again in his
breast, and in order to annoy his wife he glanced quickly, to spite her
at the fourth page on the newspaper and read out triumphantly:
“Series 9,499, number 46! Not 26!”
Hatred and hope both disappeared at once, and it began immediately to
seem to Ivan Dmitritch and his wife that their rooms were dark and small
and low-pitched, that the supper they had been eating was not doing them
good, but lying heavy on their stomachs, that the evenings were long and
wearisome....
“What the devil’s the meaning of it?” said Ivan Dmitritch, beginning to
be ill-humoured. “Wherever one steps there are bits of paper under one’s
feet, crumbs, husks. The rooms are never swept! One is simply forced to
go out. Damnation take my soul entirely! I shall go and hang myself on
the first aspen-tree!”
The Witch and Other Stories
THE WITCH
IT was approaching nightfall. The sexton, Savely Gykin, was lying in his
huge bed in the hut adjoining the church. He was not asleep, though it
was his habit to go to sleep at the same time as the hens. His coarse
red hair peeped from under one end of the greasy patchwork quilt, made
up of coloured rags, while his big unwashed feet stuck out from the
other. He was listening. His hut adjoined the wall that encircled the
church and the solitary window in it looked out upon the open country.
And out there a regular battle was going on. It was hard to say who was
being wiped off the face of the earth, and for the sake of whose
destruction nature was being churned up into such a ferment; but,
judging from the unceasing malignant roar, someone was getting it very
hot. A victorious force was in full chase over the fields, storming in
the forest and on the church roof, battering spitefully with its fists
upon the windows, raging and tearing, while something vanquished was
howling and wailing.... A plaintive lament sobbed at the window, on the
roof, or in the stove. It sounded not like a call for help, but like a
cry of misery, a consciousness that it was too late, that there was no
salvation. The snowdrifts were covered with a thin coating of ice; tears
quivered on them and on the trees; a dark slush of mud and melting snow
flowed along the roads and paths. In short, it was thawing, but through
the dark night the heavens failed to see it, and flung flakes of fresh
snow upon the melting earth at a terrific rate. And the wind staggered
like a drunkard. It would not let the snow settle on the ground, and
whirled it round in the darkness at random.
Savely listened to all this din and frowned. The fact was that he knew,
or at any rate suspected, what all this racket outside the window was
tending to and whose handiwork it was.
“I know!” he muttered, shaking his finger menacingly under the
bedclothes; “I know all about it.”
On a stool by the window sat the sexton’s wife, Raissa Nilovna. A tin
lamp standing on another stool, as though timid and distrustful of its
powers, shed a dim and flickering light on her broad shoulders, on the
handsome, tempting-looking contours of her person, and on her thick
plait, which reached to the floor. She was making sacks out of coarse
hempen stuff. Her hands moved nimbly, while her whole body, her eyes,
her eyebrows, her full lips, her white neck were as still as though they
were asleep, absorbed in the monotonous, mechanical toil. Only from time
to time she raised her head to rest her weary neck, glanced for a moment
towards the window, beyond which the snowstorm was raging, and bent
again over her sacking. No desire, no joy, no grief, nothing was
expressed by her handsome face with its turned-up nose and its dimples.
So a beautiful fountain expresses nothing when it is not playing.
But at last she had finished a sack. She flung it aside, and, stretching
luxuriously, rested her motionless, lack-lustre eyes on the window. The
panes were swimming with drops like tears, and white with short-lived
snowflakes which fell on the window, glanced at Raissa, and melted....
“Come to bed!” growled the sexton. Raissa remained mute. But suddenly
her eyelashes flickered and there was a gleam of attention in her eye.
Savely, all the time watching her expression from under the quilt, put
out his head and asked:
“What is it?”
“Nothing.... I fancy someone’s coming,” she answered quietly.
The sexton flung the quilt off with his arms and legs, knelt up in bed,
and looked blankly at his wife. The timid light of the lamp illuminated
his hirsute, pock-marked countenance and glided over his rough matted
hair.
“Do you hear?” asked his wife.
Through the monotonous roar of the storm he caught a scarcely audible
thin and jingling monotone like the shrill note of a gnat when it wants
to settle on one’s cheek and is angry at being prevented.
“It’s the post,” muttered Savely, squatting on his heels.
Two miles from the church ran the posting road. In windy weather, when
the wind was blowing from the road to the church, the inmates of the hut
caught the sound of bells.
“Lord! fancy people wanting to drive about in such weather,” sighed
Raissa.
“It’s government work. You’ve to go whether you like or not.”
The murmur hung in the air and died away.
“It has driven by,” said Savely, getting into bed.
But before he had time to cover himself up with the bedclothes he heard
a distinct sound of the bell. The sexton looked anxiously at his wife,
leapt out of bed and walked, waddling, to and fro by the stove. The bell
went on ringing for a little, then died away again as though it had
ceased.
“I don’t hear it,” said the sexton, stopping and looking at his wife
with his eyes screwed up.
But at that moment the wind rapped on the window and with it floated a
shrill jingling note. Savely turned pale, cleared his throat, and
flopped about the floor with his bare feet again.
“The postman is lost in the storm,” he wheezed out glancing malignantly
at his wife. “Do you hear? The postman has lost his way!... I... I know!
Do you suppose I... don’t understand?” he muttered. “I know all about
it, curse you!”
“What do you know?” Raissa asked quietly, keeping her eyes fixed on the
window.
“I know that it’s all your doing, you she-devil! Your doing, damn you!
This snowstorm and the post going wrong, you’ve done it all—you!”
“You’re mad, you silly,” his wife answered calmly.
“I’ve been watching you for a long time past and I’ve seen it. From the
first day I married you I noticed that you’d bitch’s blood in you!”
“Tfoo!” said Raissa, surprised, shrugging her shoulders and crossing
herself. “Cross yourself, you fool!”
“A witch is a witch,” Savely pronounced in a hollow, tearful voice,
hurriedly blowing his nose on the hem of his shirt; “though you are my
wife, though you are of a clerical family, I’d say what you are even at
confession.... Why, God have mercy upon us! Last year on the Eve of the
Prophet Daniel and the Three Young Men there was a snowstorm, and what
happened then? The mechanic came in to warm himself. Then on St.
Alexey’s Day the ice broke on the river and the district policeman
turned up, and he was chatting with you all night... the damned brute!
And when he came out in the morning and I looked at him, he had rings
under his eyes and his cheeks were hollow! Eh? During the August fast
there were two storms and each time the huntsman turned up. I saw it
all, damn him! Oh, she is redder than a crab now, aha!”
“You didn’t see anything.”
“Didn’t I! And this winter before Christmas on the Day of the Ten
Martyrs of Crete, when the storm lasted for a whole day and night—do you
remember?—the marshal’s clerk was lost, and turned up here, the
hound.... Tfoo! To be tempted by the clerk! It was worth upsetting God’s
weather for him! A drivelling scribbler, not a foot from the ground,
pimples all over his mug and his neck awry! If he were good-looking,
anyway—but he, tfoo! he is as ugly as Satan!”
The sexton took breath, wiped his lips and listened. The bell was not to
be heard, but the wind banged on the roof, and again there came a tinkle
in the darkness.
“And it’s the same thing now!” Savely went on. “It’s not for nothing the
postman is lost! Blast my eyes if the postman isn’t looking for you! Oh,
the devil is a good hand at his work; he is a fine one to help! He will
turn him round and round and bring him here. I know, I see! You can’t
conceal it, you devil’s bauble, you heathen wanton! As soon as the storm
began I knew what you were up to.”
“Here’s a fool!” smiled his wife. “Why, do you suppose, you thick-head,
that I make the storm?”
“H’m!... Grin away! Whether it’s your doing or not, I only know that
when your blood’s on fire there’s sure to be bad weather, and when
there’s bad weather there’s bound to be some crazy fellow turning up
here. It happens so every time! So it must be you!”
To be more impressive the sexton put his finger to his forehead, closed
his left eye, and said in a singsong voice:
“Oh, the madness! oh, the unclean Judas! If you really are a human being
and not a witch, you ought to think what if he is not the mechanic, or
the clerk, or the huntsman, but the devil in their form! Ah! You’d
better think of that!”
“Why, you are stupid, Savely,” said his wife, looking at him
compassionately. “When father was alive and living here, all sorts of
people used to come to him to be cured of the ague: from the village,
and the hamlets, and the Armenian settlement. They came almost every
day, and no one called them devils. But if anyone once a year comes in
bad weather to warm himself, you wonder at it, you silly, and take all
sorts of notions into your head at once.”
His wife’s logic touched Savely. He stood with his bare feet wide apart,
bent his head, and pondered. He was not firmly convinced yet of the
truth of his suspicions, and his wife’s genuine and unconcerned tone
quite disconcerted him. Yet after a moment’s thought he wagged his head
and said:
“It’s not as though they were old men or bandy-legged cripples; it’s
always young men who want to come for the night.... Why is that? And if
they only wanted to warm themselves——But they are up to mischief. No,
woman; there’s no creature in this world as cunning as your female sort!
Of real brains you’ve not an ounce, less than a starling, but for
devilish slyness—oo-oo-oo! The Queen of Heaven protect us! There is the
postman’s bell! When the storm was only beginning I knew all that was in
your mind. That’s your witchery, you spider!”
“Why do you keep on at me, you heathen?” His wife lost her patience at
last. “Why do you keep sticking to it like pitch?”
“I stick to it because if anything—God forbid—happens to-night... do you
hear?... if anything happens to-night, I’ll go straight off to-morrow
morning to Father Nikodim and tell him all about it. ‘Father Nikodim,’ I
shall say, ‘graciously excuse me, but she is a witch.’ ‘Why so?’ ‘H’m!
do you want to know why?’ ‘Certainly....’ And I shall tell him. And woe
to you, woman! Not only at the dread Seat of Judgment, but in your
earthly life you’ll be punished, too! It’s not for nothing there are
prayers in the breviary against your kind!”
Suddenly there was a knock at the window, so loud and unusual that
Savely turned pale and almost dropped backwards with fright. His wife
jumped up, and she, too, turned pale.
“For God’s sake, let us come in and get warm!” they heard in a trembling
deep bass. “Who lives here? For mercy’s sake! We’ve lost our way.”
“Who are you?” asked Raissa, afraid to look at the window.
“The post,” answered a second voice.
“You’ve succeeded with your devil’s tricks,” said Savely with a wave of
his hand. “No mistake; I am right! Well, you’d better look out!”
The sexton jumped on to the bed in two skips, stretched himself on the
feather mattress, and sniffing angrily, turned with his face to the
wall. Soon he felt a draught of cold air on his back. The door creaked
and the tall figure of a man, plastered over with snow from head to
foot, appeared in the doorway. Behind him could be seen a second figure
as white.
“Am I to bring in the bags?” asked the second in a hoarse bass voice.
“You can’t leave them there.” Saying this, the first figure began
untying his hood, but gave it up, and pulling it off impatiently with
his cap, angrily flung it near the stove. Then taking off his greatcoat,
he threw that down beside it, and, without saying good-evening, began
pacing up and down the hut.
He was a fair-haired, young postman wearing a shabby uniform and black
rusty-looking high boots. After warming himself by walking to and fro,
he sat down at the table, stretched out his muddy feet towards the sacks
and leaned his chin on his fist. His pale face, reddened in places by
the cold, still bore vivid traces of the pain and terror he had just
been through. Though distorted by anger and bearing traces of recent
suffering, physical and moral, it was handsome in spite of the melting
snow on the eyebrows, moustaches, and short beard.
“It’s a dog’s life!” muttered the postman, looking round the walls and
seeming hardly able to believe that he was in the warmth. “We were
nearly lost! If it had not been for your light, I don’t know what would
have happened. Goodness only knows when it will all be over! There’s no
end to this dog’s life! Where have we come?” he asked, dropping his
voice and raising his eyes to the sexton’s wife.
“To the Gulyaevsky Hill on General Kalinovsky’s estate,” she answered,
startled and blushing.
“Do you hear, Stepan?” The postman turned to the driver, who was wedged
in the doorway with a huge mail-bag on his shoulders. “We’ve got to
Gulyaevsky Hill.”
“Yes... we’re a long way out.” Jerking out these words like a hoarse
sigh, the driver went out and soon after returned with another bag, then
went out once more and this time brought the postman’s sword on a big
belt, of the pattern of that long flat blade with which Judith is
portrayed by the bedside of Holofernes in cheap woodcuts. Laying the
bags along the wall, he went out into the outer room, sat down there and
lighted his pipe.
“Perhaps you’d like some tea after your journey?” Raissa inquired.
“How can we sit drinking tea?” said the postman, frowning. “We must make
haste and get warm, and then set off, or we shall be late for the mail
train. We’ll stay ten minutes and then get on our way. Only be so good
as to show us the way.”
“What an infliction it is, this weather!” sighed Raissa.
“H’m, yes.... Who may you be?”
“We? We live here, by the church.... We belong to the clergy.... There
lies my husband. Savely, get up and say good-evening! This used to be a
separate parish till eighteen months ago. Of course, when the gentry
lived here there were more people, and it was worth while to have the
services. But now the gentry have gone, and I need not tell you there’s
nothing for the clergy to live on. The nearest village is Markovka, and
that’s over three miles away. Savely is on the retired list now, and has
got the watchman’s job; he has to look after the church....”
And the postman was immediately informed that if Savely were to go to
the General’s lady and ask her for a letter to the bishop, he would be
given a good berth. “But he doesn’t go to the General’s lady because he
is lazy and afraid of people. We belong to the clergy all the same...”
added Raissa.
“What do you live on?” asked the postman.
“There’s a kitchen garden and a meadow belonging to the church. Only we
don’t get much from that,” sighed Raissa. “The old skinflint, Father
Nikodim, from the next village celebrates here on St. Nicolas’ Day in
the winter and on St. Nicolas’ Day in the summer, and for that he takes
almost all the crops for himself. There’s no one to stick up for us!”
“You are lying,” Savely growled hoarsely. “Father Nikodim is a saintly
soul, a luminary of the Church; and if he does take it, it’s the
regulation!”
“You’ve a cross one!” said the postman, with a grin. “Have you been
married long?”
“It was three years ago the last Sunday before Lent. My father was
sexton here in the old days, and when the time came for him to die, he
went to the Consistory and asked them to send some unmarried man to
marry me that I might keep the place. So I married him.”
“Aha, so you killed two birds with one stone!” said the postman, looking
at Savely’s back. “Got wife and job together.”
Savely wriggled his leg impatiently and moved closer to the wall. The
postman moved away from the table, stretched, and sat down on the mail-
bag. After a moment’s thought he squeezed the bags with his hands,
shifted his sword to the other side, and lay down with one foot touching
the floor.
“It’s a dog’s life,” he muttered, putting his hands behind his head and
closing his eyes. “I wouldn’t wish a wild Tatar such a life.”
Soon everything was still. Nothing was audible except the sniffing of
Savely and the slow, even breathing of the sleeping postman, who uttered
a deep prolonged “h-h-h” at every breath. From time to time there was a
sound like a creaking wheel in his throat, and his twitching foot
rustled against the bag.
Savely fidgeted under the quilt and looked round slowly. His wife was
sitting on the stool, and with her hands pressed against her cheeks was
gazing at the postman’s face. Her face was immovable, like the face of
some one frightened and astonished.
“Well, what are you gaping at?” Savely whispered angrily.
“What is it to you? Lie down!” answered his wife without taking her eyes
off the flaxen head.
Savely angrily puffed all the air out of his chest and turned abruptly
to the wall. Three minutes later he turned over restlessly again, knelt
up on the bed, and with his hands on the pillow looked askance at his
wife. She was still sitting motionless, staring at the visitor. Her
cheeks were pale and her eyes were glowing with a strange fire. The
sexton cleared his throat, crawled on his stomach off the bed, and going
up to the postman, put a handkerchief over his face.
“What’s that for?” asked his wife.
“To keep the light out of his eyes.”
“Then put out the light!”
Savely looked distrustfully at his wife, put out his lips towards the
lamp, but at once thought better of it and clasped his hands.
“Isn’t that devilish cunning?” he exclaimed. “Ah! Is there any creature
slyer than womenkind?”
“Ah, you long-skirted devil!” hissed his wife, frowning with vexation.
“You wait a bit!”
And settling herself more comfortably, she stared at the postman again.
It did not matter to her that his face was covered. She was not so much
interested in his face as in his whole appearance, in the novelty of
this man. His chest was broad and powerful, his hands were slender and
well formed, and his graceful, muscular legs were much comelier than
Savely’s stumps. There could be no comparison, in fact.
“Though I am a long-skirted devil,” Savely said after a brief interval,
“they’ve no business to sleep here.... It’s government work; we shall
have to answer for keeping them. If you carry the letters, carry them,
you can’t go to sleep.... Hey! you!” Savely shouted into the outer room.
“You, driver. What’s your name? Shall I show you the way? Get up;
postmen mustn’t sleep!”
And Savely, thoroughly roused, ran up to the postman and tugged him by
the sleeve.
“Hey, your honour, if you must go, go; and if you don’t, it’s not the
thing.... Sleeping won’t do.”
The postman jumped up, sat down, looked with blank eyes round the hut,
and lay down again.
“But when are you going?” Savely pattered away. “That’s what the post is
for—to get there in good time, do you hear? I’ll take you.”
The postman opened his eyes. Warmed and relaxed by his first sweet
sleep, and not yet quite awake, he saw as through a mist the white neck
and the immovable, alluring eyes of the sexton’s wife. He closed his
eyes and smiled as though he had been dreaming it all.
“Come, how can you go in such weather!” he heard a soft feminine voice;
“you ought to have a sound sleep and it would do you good!”
“And what about the post?” said Savely anxiously. “Who’s going to take
the post? Are you going to take it, pray, you?”
The postman opened his eyes again, looked at the play of the dimples on
Raissa’s face, remembered where he was, and understood Savely. The
thought that he had to go out into the cold darkness sent a chill
shudder all down him, and he winced.
“I might sleep another five minutes,” he said, yawning. “I shall be
late, anyway....”
“We might be just in time,” came a voice from the outer room. “All days
are not alike; the train may be late for a bit of luck.”
The postman got up, and stretching lazily began putting on his coat.
Savely positively neighed with delight when he saw his visitors were
getting ready to go.
“Give us a hand,” the driver shouted to him as he lifted up a mail-bag.
The sexton ran out and helped him drag the post-bags into the yard. The
postman began undoing the knot in his hood. The sexton’s wife gazed into
his eyes, and seemed trying to look right into his soul.
“You ought to have a cup of tea...” she said.
“I wouldn’t say no... but, you see, they’re getting ready,” he assented.
“We are late, anyway.”
“Do stay,” she whispered, dropping her eyes and touching him by the
sleeve.
The postman got the knot undone at last and flung the hood over his
elbow, hesitating. He felt it comfortable standing by Raissa.
“What a... neck you’ve got!...” And he touched her neck with two
fingers. Seeing that she did not resist, he stroked her neck and
shoulders.
“I say, you are...”
“You’d better stay... have some tea.”
“Where are you putting it?” The driver’s voice could be heard outside.
“Lay it crossways.”
“You’d better stay.... Hark how the wind howls.”
And the postman, not yet quite awake, not yet quite able to shake off
the intoxicating sleep of youth and fatigue, was suddenly overwhelmed by
a desire for the sake of which mail-bags, postal trains... and all
things in the world, are forgotten. He glanced at the door in a
frightened way, as though he wanted to escape or hide himself, seized
Raissa round the waist, and was just bending over the lamp to put out
the light, when he heard the tramp of boots in the outer room, and the
driver appeared in the doorway. Savely peeped in over his shoulder. The
postman dropped his hands quickly and stood still as though irresolute.
“It’s all ready,” said the driver. The postman stood still for a moment,
resolutely threw up his head as though waking up completely, and
followed the driver out. Raissa was left alone.
“Come, get in and show us the way!” she heard.
One bell sounded languidly, then another, and the jingling notes in a
long delicate chain floated away from the hut.
When little by little they had died away, Raissa got up and nervously
paced to and fro. At first she was pale, then she flushed all over. Her
face was contorted with hate, her breathing was tremulous, her eyes
gleamed with wild, savage anger, and, pacing up and down as in a cage,
she looked like a tigress menaced with red-hot iron. For a moment she
stood still and looked at her abode. Almost half of the room was filled
up by the bed, which stretched the length of the whole wall and
consisted of a dirty feather-bed, coarse grey pillows, a quilt, and
nameless rags of various sorts. The bed was a shapeless ugly mass which
suggested the shock of hair that always stood up on Savely’s head
whenever it occurred to him to oil it. From the bed to the door that led
into the cold outer room stretched the dark stove surrounded by pots and
hanging clouts. Everything, including the absent Savely himself, was
dirty, greasy, and smutty to the last degree, so that it was strange to
see a woman’s white neck and delicate skin in such surroundings.
Raissa ran up to the bed, stretched out her hands as though she wanted
to fling it all about, stamp it underfoot, and tear it to shreds. But
then, as though frightened by contact with the dirt, she leapt back and
began pacing up and down again.
When Savely returned two hours later, worn out and covered with snow,
she was undressed and in bed. Her eyes were closed, but from the slight
tremor that ran over her face he guessed that she was not asleep. On his
way home he had vowed inwardly to wait till next day and not to touch
her, but he could not resist a biting taunt at her.
“Your witchery was all in vain: he’s gone off,” he said, grinning with
malignant joy.
His wife remained mute, but her chin quivered. Savely undressed slowly,
clambered over his wife, and lay down next to the wall.
“To-morrow I’ll let Father Nikodim know what sort of wife you are!” he
muttered, curling himself up.
Raissa turned her face to him and her eyes gleamed.
“The job’s enough for you, and you can look for a wife in the forest,
blast you!” she said. “I am no wife for you, a clumsy lout, a slug-a-
bed, God forgive me!”
“Come, come... go to sleep!”
“How miserable I am!” sobbed his wife. “If it weren’t for you, I might
have married a merchant or some gentleman! If it weren’t for you, I
should love my husband now! And you haven’t been buried in the snow, you
haven’t been frozen on the highroad, you Herod!”
Raissa cried for a long time. At last she drew a deep sigh and was
still. The storm still raged without. Something wailed in the stove, in
the chimney, outside the walls, and it seemed to Savely that the wailing
was within him, in his ears. This evening had completely confirmed him
in his suspicions about his wife. He no longer doubted that his wife,
with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges.
But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird
power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm of
which he had not been conscious before. The fact that in his stupidity
he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her seem, as it
were, whiter, sleeker, more unapproachable.
“Witch!” he muttered indignantly. “Tfoo, horrid creature!”
Yet, waiting till she was quiet and began breathing evenly, he touched
her head with his finger... held her thick plait in his hand for a
minute. She did not feel it. Then he grew bolder and stroked her neck.
“Leave off!” she shouted, and prodded him on the nose with her elbow
with such violence that he saw stars before his eyes.
The pain in his nose was soon over, but the torture in his heart
remained.
PEASANT WIVES
IN the village of Reybuzh, just facing the church, stands a two-storeyed
house with a stone foundation and an iron roof. In the lower storey the
owner himself, Filip Ivanov Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives with his
family, and on the upper floor, where it is apt to be very hot in summer
and very cold in winter, they put up government officials, merchants, or
landowners, who chance to be travelling that way. Dyudya rents some bits
of land, keeps a tavern on the highroad, does a trade in tar, honey,
cattle, and jackdaws, and has already something like eight thousand
roubles put by in the bank in the town.
His elder son, Fyodor, is head engineer in the factory, and, as the
peasants say of him, he has risen so high in the world that he is quite
out of reach now. Fyodor’s wife, Sofya, a plain, ailing woman, lives at
home at her father-in-law’s. She is for ever crying, and every Sunday
she goes over to the hospital for medicine. Dyudya’s second son, the
hunchback Alyoshka, is living at home at his father’s. He has only
lately been married to Varvara, whom they singled out for him from a
poor family. She is a handsome young woman, smart and buxom. When
officials or merchants put up at the house, they always insist on having
Varvara to bring in the samovar and make their beds.
One June evening when the sun was setting and the air was full of the
smell of hay, of steaming dung-heaps and new milk, a plain-looking cart
drove into Dyudya’s yard with three people in it: a man of about thirty
in a canvas suit, beside him a little boy of seven or eight in a long
black coat with big bone buttons, and on the driver’s seat a young
fellow in a red shirt.
The young fellow took out the horses and led them out into the street to
walk them up and down a bit, while the traveller washed, said a prayer,
turning towards the church, then spread a rug near the cart and sat down
with the boy to supper. He ate without haste, sedately, and Dyudya, who
had seen a good many travellers in his time, knew him from his manners
for a businesslike man, serious and aware of his own value.
Dyudya was sitting on the step in his waistcoat without a cap on,
waiting for the visitor to speak first. He was used to hearing all kinds
of stories from the travellers in the evening, and he liked listening to
them before going to bed. His old wife, Afanasyevna, and his daughter-
in-law Sofya, were milking in the cowshed. The other daughter-in-law,
Varvara, was sitting at the open window of the upper storey, eating
sunflower seeds.
“The little chap will be your son, I’m thinking?” Dyudya asked the
traveller.
“No; adopted. An orphan. I took him for my soul’s salvation.”
They got into conversation. The stranger seemed to be a man fond of
talking and ready of speech, and Dyudya learned from him that he was
from the town, was of the tradesman class, and had a house of his own,
that his name was Matvey Savitch, that he was on his way now to look at
some gardens that he was renting from some German colonists, and that
the boy’s name was Kuzka. The evening was hot and close, no one felt
inclined for sleep. When it was getting dark and pale stars began to
twinkle here and there in the sky, Matvey Savitch began to tell how he
had come by Kuzka. Afanasyevna and Sofya stood a little way off,
listening. Kuzka had gone to the gate.
“It’s a complicated story, old man,” began Matvey Savitch, “and if I
were to tell you all just as it happened, it would take all night and
more. Ten years ago in a little house in our street, next door to me,
where now there’s a tallow and oil factory, there was living an old
widow, Marfa Semyonovna Kapluntsev, and she had two sons: one was a
guard on the railway, but the other, Vasya, who was just my own age,
lived at home with his mother. Old Kapluntsev had kept five pair of
horses and sent carriers all over the town; his widow had not given up
the business, but managed the carriers as well as her husband had done,
so that some days they would bring in as much as five roubles from their
rounds.
“The young fellow, too, made a trifle on his own account. He used to
breed fancy pigeons and sell them to fanciers; at times he would stand
for hours on the roof, waving a broom in the air and whistling; his
pigeons were right up in the clouds, but it wasn’t enough for him, and
he’d want them to go higher yet. Siskins and starlings, too, he used to
catch, and he made cages for sale. All trifles, but, mind you, he’d pick
up some ten roubles a month over such trifles. Well, as time went on,
the old lady lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. In
consequence of which event the house was left without a woman to look
after it, and that’s for all the world like a man without an eye. The
old lady bestirred herself and made up her mind to marry Vasya. They
called in a matchmaker at once, the women got to talking of one thing
and another, and Vasya went off to have a look at the girls. He picked
out Mashenka, a widow’s daughter. They made up their minds without loss
of time and in a week it was all settled. The girl was a little slip of
a thing, seventeen, but fair-skinned and pretty-looking, and like a lady
in all her ways; and a decent dowry with her, five hundred roubles, a
cow, a bed.... Well, the old lady—it seemed as though she had known it
was coming—three days after the wedding, departed to the Heavenly
Jerusalem where is neither sickness nor sighing. The young people gave
her a good funeral and began their life together. For just six months
they got on splendidly, and then all of a sudden another misfortune. It
never rains but it pours: Vasya was summoned to the recruiting office to
draw lots for the service. He was taken, poor chap, for a soldier, and
not even granted exemption. They shaved his head and packed him off to
Poland. It was God’s will; there was nothing to be done. When he said
good-bye to his wife in the yard, he bore it all right; but as he
glanced up at the hay-loft and his pigeons for the last time, he burst
out crying. It was pitiful to see him.
“At first Mashenka got her mother to stay with her, that she mightn’t be
dull all alone; she stayed till the baby—this very Kuzka here—was born,
and then she went off to Oboyan to another married daughter’s and left
Mashenka alone with the baby. There were five peasants—the carriers—a
drunken saucy lot; horses, too, and dray-carts to see to, and then the
fence would be broken or the soot afire in the chimney—jobs beyond a
woman, and through our being neighbours, she got into the way of turning
to me for every little thing.... Well, I’d go over, set things to
rights, and give advice.... Naturally, not without going indoors,
drinking a cup of tea and having a little chat with her. I was a young
fellow, intellectual, and fond of talking on all sorts of subjects; she,
too, was well-bred and educated. She was always neatly dressed, and in
summer she walked out with a sunshade. Sometimes I would begin upon
religion or politics with her, and she was flattered and would entertain
me with tea and jam.... In a word, not to make a long story of it, I
must tell you, old man, a year had not passed before the Evil One, the
enemy of all mankind, confounded me. I began to notice that any day I
didn’t go to see her, I seemed out of sorts and dull. And I’d be
continually making up something that I must see her about: ‘It’s high
time,’ I’d say to myself, ‘to put the double windows in for the winter,’
and the whole day I’d idle away over at her place putting in the windows
and take good care to leave a couple of them over for the next day too.
“‘I ought to count over Vasya’s pigeons, to see none of them have
strayed,’ and so on. I used always to be talking to her across the
fence, and in the end I made a little gate in the fence so as not to
have to go so far round. From womankind comes much evil into the world
and every kind of abomination. Not we sinners only; even the saints
themselves have been led astray by them. Mashenka did not try to keep me
at a distance. Instead of thinking of her husband and being on her
guard, she fell in love with me. I began to notice that she was dull
without me, and was always walking to and fro by the fence looking into
my yard through the cracks.
“My brains were going round in my head in a sort of frenzy. On Thursday
in Holy Week I was going early in the morning—it was scarcely light—to
market. I passed close by her gate, and the Evil One was by me—at my
elbow. I looked—she had a gate with open trellis work at the top—and
there she was, up already, standing in the middle of the yard, feeding
the ducks. I could not restrain myself, and I called her name. She came
up and looked at me through the trellis.... Her little face was white,
her eyes soft and sleepy-looking.... I liked her looks immensely, and I
began paying her compliments, as though we were not at the gate, but
just as one does on namedays, while she blushed, and laughed, and kept
looking straight into my eyes without winking.... I lost all sense and
began to declare my love to her.... She opened the gate, and from that
morning we began to live as man and wife....”
The hunchback Alyoshka came into the yard from the street and ran out of
breath into the house, not looking at any one. A minute later he ran out
of the house with a concertina. Jingling some coppers in his pocket, and
cracking sunflower seeds as he ran, he went out at the gate.
“And who’s that, pray?” asked Matvey Savitch.
“My son Alexey,” answered Dyudya. “He’s off on a spree, the rascal. God
has afflicted him with a hump, so we are not very hard on him.”
“And he’s always drinking with the other fellows, always drinking,”
sighed Afanasyevna. “Before Carnival we married him, thinking he’d be
steadier, but there! he’s worse than ever.”
“It’s been no use. Simply keeping another man’s daughter for nothing,”
said Dyudya.
Somewhere behind the church they began to sing a glorious, mournful
song. The words they could not catch and only the voices could be
heard—two tenors and a bass. All were listening; there was complete
stillness in the yard.... Two voices suddenly broke off with a loud roar
of laughter, but the third, a tenor, still sang on, and took so high a
note that every one instinctively looked upwards, as though the voice
had soared to heaven itself.
Varvara came out of the house, and screening her eyes with her hand, as
though from the sun, she looked towards the church.
“It’s the priest’s sons with the schoolmaster,” she said.
Again all the three voices began to sing together. Matvey Savitch sighed
and went on:
“Well, that’s how it was, old man. Two years later we got a letter from
Vasya from Warsaw. He wrote that he was being sent home sick. He was
ill. By that time I had put all that foolishness out of my head, and I
had a fine match picked out all ready for me, only I didn’t know how to
break it off with my sweetheart. Every day I’d make up my mind to have
it out with Mashenka, but I didn’t know how to approach her so as not to
have a woman’s screeching about my ears. The letter freed my hands. I
read it through with Mashenka; she turned white as a sheet, while I said
to her: ‘Thank God; now,’ says I, ‘you’ll be a married woman again.’ But
says she: ‘I’m not going to live with him.’ ‘Why, isn’t he your
husband?’ said I. ‘Is it an easy thing?... I never loved him and I
married him not of my own free will. My mother made me.’ ‘Don’t try to
get out of it, silly,’ said I, ‘but tell me this: were you married to
him in church or not?’ ‘I was married,’ she said, ‘but it’s you that I
love, and I will stay with you to the day of my death. Folks may jeer. I
don’t care....’ ‘You’re a Christian woman,’ said I, ‘and have read the
Scriptures; what is written there?’
“Once married, with her husband she must live,” said Dyudya.
“‘Man and wife are one flesh. We have sinned,’ I said, ‘you and I, and
it is enough; we must repent and fear God. We must confess it all to
Vasya,’ said I; ‘he’s a quiet fellow and soft—he won’t kill you. And
indeed,’ said I, ‘better to suffer torments in this world at the hands
of your lawful master than to gnash your teeth at the dread Seat of
Judgment.’ The wench wouldn’t listen; she stuck to her silly, ‘It’s you
I love!’ and nothing more could I get out of her.
“Vasya came back on the Saturday before Trinity, early in the morning.
From my fence I could see everything; he ran into the house, and came
back a minute later with Kuzka in his arms, and he was laughing and
crying all at once; he was kissing Kuzka and looking up at the hay-loft,
and hadn’t the heart to put the child down, and yet he was longing to go
to his pigeons. He was always a soft sort of chap—sentimental. That day
passed off very well, all quiet and proper. They had begun ringing the
church bells for the evening service, when the thought struck me: ‘To-
morrow’s Trinity Sunday; how is it they are not decking the gates and
the fence with green? Something’s wrong,’ I thought. I went over to
them. I peeped in, and there he was, sitting on the floor in the middle
of the room, his eyes staring like a drunken man’s, the tears streaming
down his cheeks and his hands shaking; he was pulling cracknels,
necklaces, gingerbread nuts, and all sorts of little presents out of his
bundle and flinging them on the floor. Kuzka—he was three years old—was
crawling on the floor, munching the gingerbreads, while Mashenka stood
by the stove, white and shivering all over, muttering: ‘I’m not your
wife; I can’t live with you,’ and all sorts of foolishness. I bowed down
at Vasya’s feet, and said: ‘We have sinned against you, Vassily
Maximitch; forgive us, for Christ’s sake!’ Then I got up and spoke to
Mashenka: ‘You, Marya Semyonovna, ought now to wash Vassily Maximitch’s
feet and drink the water. Do you be an obedient wife to him, and pray to
God for me, that He in His mercy may forgive my transgression.’ It came
to me like an inspiration from an angel of Heaven; I gave her solemn
counsel and spoke with such feeling that my own tears flowed too. And so
two days later Vasya comes to me: ‘Matyusha,’ says he, ‘I forgive you
and my wife; God have mercy on you! She was a soldier’s wife, a young
thing all alone; it was hard for her to be on her guard. She’s not the
first, nor will she be the last. Only,’ he says, ‘I beg you to behave as
though there had never been anything between you, and to make no sign,
while I,’ says he, ‘will do my best to please her in every way, so that
she may come to love me again.’ He gave me his hand on it, drank a cup
of tea, and went away more cheerful.
“‘Well,’ thought I, ‘thank God!’ and I did feel glad that everything had
gone off so well. But no sooner had Vasya gone out of the yard, when in
came Mashenka. Ah! What I had to suffer! She hung on my neck, weeping
and praying: ‘For God’s sake, don’t cast me off; I can’t live without
you!’”
“The vile hussy!” sighed Dyudya.
“I swore at her, stamped my foot, and dragging her into the passage, I
fastened the door with the hook. ‘Go to your husband,’ I cried. ‘Don’t
shame me before folks. Fear God!’ And every day there was a scene of
that sort.
“One morning I was standing in my yard near the stable cleaning a
bridle. All at once I saw her running through the little gate into my
yard, with bare feet, in her petticoat, and straight towards me; she
clutched at the bridle, getting all smeared with the pitch, and shaking
and weeping, she cried: ‘I can’t stand him; I loathe him; I can’t bear
it! If you don’t love me, better kill me!’ I was angry, and I struck her
twice with the bridle, but at that instant Vasya ran in at the gate, and
in a despairing voice he shouted: ‘Don’t beat her! Don’t beat her!’ But
he ran up himself, and waving his arms, as though he were mad, he let
fly with his fists at her with all his might, then flung her on the
ground and kicked her. I tried to defend her, but he snatched up the
reins and thrashed her with them, and all the while, like a colt’s
whinny, he went: ‘He—he—he!’”
“I’d take the reins and let you feel them,” muttered Varvara, moving
away; “murdering our sister, the damned brutes!...”
“Hold your tongue, you jade!” Dyudya shouted at her.
“‘He—he—he!’” Matvey Savitch went on. “A carrier ran out of his yard; I
called to my workman, and the three of us got Mashenka away from him and
carried her home in our arms. The disgrace of it! The same day I went
over in the evening to see how things were. She was lying in bed, all
wrapped up in bandages, nothing but her eyes and nose to be seen; she
was looking at the ceiling. I said: ‘Good-evening, Marya Semyonovna!’
She did not speak. And Vasya was sitting in the next room, his head in
his hands, crying and saying: ‘Brute that I am! I’ve ruined my life! O
God, let me die!’ I sat for half an hour by Mashenka and gave her a good
talking-to. I tried to frighten her a bit. ‘The righteous,’ said I,
‘after this life go to Paradise, but you will go to a Gehenna of fire,
like all adulteresses. Don’t strive against your husband, go and lay
yourself at his feet.’ But never a word from her; she didn’t so much as
bJlink an eyelid, for all the world as though I were talking to a post.
The next day Vasya fell ill with something like cholera, and in the
evening I heard that he was dead. Well, so they buried him, and Mashenka
did not go to the funeral; she didn’t care to show her shameless face
and her bruises. And soon there began to be talk all over the district
that Vasya had not died a natural death, that Mashenka had made away
with him. It got to the ears of the police; they had Vasya dug up and
cut open, and in his stomach they found arsenic. It was clear he had
been poisoned; the police came and took Mashenka away, and with her the
innocent Kuzka. They were put in prison.... The woman had gone too
far—God punished her.... Eight months later they tried her. She sat, I
remember, on a low stool, with a little white kerchief on her head,
wearing a grey gown, and she was so thin, so pale, so sharp-eyed it made
one sad to look at her. Behind her stood a soldier with a gun. She would
not confess her guilt. Some in the court said she had poisoned her
husband and others declared he had poisoned himself for grief. I was one
of the witnesses. When they questioned me, I told the whole truth
according to my oath. ‘Hers,’ said I, ‘is the guilt. It’s no good to
conceal it; she did not love her husband, and she had a will of her
own....’ The trial began in the morning and towards night they passed
this sentence: to send her to hard labour in Siberia for thirteen years.
After that sentence Mashenka remained three months longer in prison. I
went to see her, and from Christian charity I took her a little tea and
sugar. But as soon as she set eyes on me she began to shake all over,
wringing her hands and muttering: ‘Go away! go away!’ And Kuzka she
clasped to her as though she were afraid I would take him away. ‘See,’
said I, ‘what you have come to! Ah, Masha, Masha! you would not listen
to me when I gave you good advice, and now you must repent it. You are
yourself to blame,’ said I; ‘blame yourself!’ I was giving her good
counsel, but she: ‘Go away, go away!’ huddling herself and Kuzka against
the wall, and trembling all over.
“When they were taking her away to the chief town of our province, I
walked by the escort as far as the station and slipped a rouble into her
bundle for my soul’s salvation. But she did not get as far as
Siberia.... She fell sick of fever and died in prison.”
“Live like a dog and you must die a dog’s death,” said Dyudya.
“Kuzka was sent back home.... I thought it over and took him to bring
up. After all—though a convict’s child—still he was a living soul, a
Christian.... I was sorry for him. I shall make him my clerk, and if I
have no children of my own, I’ll make a merchant of him. Wherever I go
now, I take him with me; let him learn his work.”
All the while Matvey Savitch had been telling his story, Kuzka had sat
on a little stone near the gate. His head propped in both hands, he
gazed at the sky, and in the distance he looked in the dark like a stump
of wood.
“Kuzka, come to bed,” Matvey Savitch bawled to him.
“Yes, it’s time,” said Dyudya, getting up; he yawned loudly and added:
“Folks will go their own way, and that’s what comes of it.”
Over the yard the moon was floating now in the heavens; she was moving
one way, while the clouds beneath moved the other way; the clouds were
disappearing into the darkness, but still the moon could be seen high
above the yard.
Matvey Savitch said a prayer, facing the church, and saying good-night,
he lay down on the ground near his cart. Kuzka, too, said a prayer, lay
down in the cart, and covered himself with his little overcoat; he made
himself a little hole in the hay so as to be more comfortable, and
curled up so that his elbows looked like knees. From the yard Dyudya
could be seen lighting a candle in his room below, putting on his
spectacles and standing in the corner with a book. He was a long while
reading and crossing himself.
The travellers fell asleep. Afanasyevna and Sofya came up to the cart
and began looking at Kuzka.
“The little orphan’s asleep,” said the old woman. “He’s thin and frail,
nothing but bones. No mother and no one to care for him properly.”
“My Grishutka must be two years older,” said Sofya. “Up at the factory
he lives like a slave without his mother. The foreman beats him, I dare
say. When I looked at this poor mite just now, I thought of my own
Grishutka, and my heart went cold within me.”
A minute passed in silence.
“Doesn’t remember his mother, I suppose,” said the old woman.
“How could he remember?”
And big tears began dropping from Sofya’s eyes.
“He’s curled himself up like a cat,” she said, sobbing and laughing with
tenderness and sorrow.... “Poor motherless mite!”
Kuzka started and opened his eyes. He saw before him an ugly, wrinkled,
tear-stained face, and beside it another, aged and toothless, with a
sharp chin and hooked nose, and high above them the infinite sky with
the flying clouds and the moon. He cried out in fright, and Sofya, too,
uttered a cry; both were answered by the echo, and a faint stir passed
over the stifling air; a watchman tapped somewhere near, a dog barked.
Matvey Savitch muttered something in his sleep and turned over on the
other side.
Late at night when Dyudya and the old woman and the neighbouring
watchman were all asleep, Sofya went out to the gate and sat down on the
bench. She felt stifled and her head ached from weeping. The street was
a wide and long one; it stretched for nearly two miles to the right and
as far to the left, and the end of it was out of sight. The moon was now
not over the yard, but behind the church. One side of the street was
flooded with moonlight, while the other side lay in black shadow. The
long shadows of the poplars and the starling-cotes stretched right
across the street, while the church cast a broad shadow, black and
terrible that enfolded Dyudya’s gates and half his house. The street was
still and deserted. From time to time the strains of music floated
faintly from the end of the street—Alyoshka, most likely, playing his
concertina.
Someone moved in the shadow near the church enclosure, and Sofya could
not make out whether it were a man or a cow, or perhaps merely a big
bird rustling in the trees. But then a figure stepped out of the shadow,
halted, and said something in a man’s voice, then vanished down the
turning by the church. A little later, not three yards from the gate,
another figure came into sight; it walked straight from the church to
the gate and stopped short, seeing Sofya on the bench.
“Varvara, is that you?” said Sofya.
“And if it were?”
It was Varvara. She stood still a minute, then came up to the bench and
sat down.
“Where have you been?” asked Sofya.
Varvara made no answer.
“You’d better mind you don’t get into trouble with such goings-on, my
girl,” said Sofya. “Did you hear how Mashenka was kicked and lashed with
the reins? You’d better look out, or they’ll treat you the same.”
“Well, let them!”
Varvara laughed into her kerchief and whispered:
“I have just been with the priest’s son.”
“Nonsense!”
“I have!”
“It’s a sin!” whispered Sofya.
“Well, let it be.... What do I care? If it’s a sin, then it is a sin,
but better be struck dead by thunder than live like this. I’m young and
strong, and I’ve a filthy crooked hunchback for a husband, worse than
Dyudya himself, curse him! When I was a girl, I hadn’t bread to eat, or
a shoe to my foot, and to get away from that wretchedness I was tempted
by Alyoshka’s money, and got caught like a fish in a net, and I’d rather
have a viper for my bedfellow than that scurvy Alyoshka. And what’s your
life? It makes me sick to look at it. Your Fyodor sent you packing from
the factory and he’s taken up with another woman. They have robbed you
of your boy and made a slave of him. You work like a horse, and never
hear a kind word. I’d rather pine all my days an old maid, I’d rather
get half a rouble from the priest’s son, I’d rather beg my bread, or
throw myself into the well...
“It’s a sin!” whispered Sofya again.
“Well, let it be.”
Somewhere behind the church the same three voices, two tenors and a
bass, began singing again a mournful song. And again the words could not
be distinguished.
“They are not early to bed,” Varvara said, laughing.
And she began telling in a whisper of her midnight walks with the
priest’s son, and of the stories he had told her, and of his comrades,
and of the fun she had with the travellers who stayed in the house. The
mournful song stirred a longing for life and freedom. Sofya began to
laugh; she thought it sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and
she felt envious and sorry that she, too, had not been a sinner when she
was young and pretty.
In the churchyard they heard twelve strokes beaten on the watchman’s
board.
“It’s time we were asleep,” said Sofya, getting up, “or, maybe, we shall
catch it from Dyudya.”
They both went softly into the yard.
“I went away without hearing what he was telling about Mashenka,” said
Varvara, making herself a bed under the window.
“She died in prison, he said. She poisoned her husband.”
Varvara lay down beside Sofya a while, and said softly:
“I’d make away with my Alyoshka and never regret it.”
“You talk nonsense; God forgive you.”
When Sofya was just dropping asleep, Varvara, coming close, whispered in
her ear:
“Let us get rid of Dyudya and Alyoshka!”
Sofya started and said nothing. Then she opened her eyes and gazed a
long while steadily at the sky.
“People would find out,” she said.
“No, they wouldn’t. Dyudya’s an old man, it’s time he did die; and
they’d say Alyoshka died of drink.”
“I’m afraid... God would chastise us.”
“Well, let Him....”
Both lay awake thinking in silence.
“It’s cold,” said Sofya, beginning to shiver all over. “It will soon be
morning.... Are you asleep?”
“No.... Don’t you mind what I say, dear,” whispered Varvara; “I get so
mad with the damned brutes, I don’t know what I do say. Go to sleep, or
it will be daylight directly.... Go to sleep.”
Both were quiet and soon they fell asleep.
Earlier than all woke the old woman. She waked up Sofya and they went
together into the cowshed to milk the cows. The hunchback Alyoshka came
in hopelessly drunk without his concertina; his breast and knees had
been in the dust and straw—he must have fallen down in the road.
Staggering, he went into the cowshed, and without undressing he rolled
into a sledge and began to snore at once. When first the crosses on the
church and then the windows were flashing in the light of the rising
sun, and shadows stretched across the yard over the dewy grass from the
trees and the top of the well, Matvey Savitch jumped up and began
hurrying about:
“Kuzka! get up!” he shouted. “It’s time to put in the horses! Look
sharp!”
The bustle of morning was beginning. A young Jewess in a brown gown with
flounces led a horse into the yard to drink. The pulley of the well
creaked plaintively, the bucket knocked as it went down....
Kuzka, sleepy, tired, covered with dew, sat up in the cart, lazily
putting on his little overcoat, and listening to the drip of the water
from the bucket into the well as he shivered with the cold.
“Auntie!” shouted Matvey Savitch to Sofya, “tell my lad to hurry up and
to harness the horses!”
And Dyudya at the same instant shouted from the window:
“Sofya, take a farthing from the Jewess for the horse’s drink! They’re
always in here, the mangy creatures!”
In the street sheep were running up and down, baaing; the peasant women
were shouting at the shepherd, while he played his pipes, cracked his
whip, or answered them in a thick sleepy bass. Three sheep strayed into
the yard, and not finding the gate again, pushed at the fence.
Varvara was waked by the noise, and bundling her bedding up in her arms,
she went into the house.
“You might at least drive the sheep out!” the old woman bawled after
her, “my lady!”
“I dare say! As if I were going to slave for you Herods!” muttered
Varvara, going into the house.
Dyudya came out of the house with his accounts in his hands, sat down on
the step, and began reckoning how much the traveller owed him for the
night’s lodging, oats, and watering his horses.
“You charge pretty heavily for the oats, my good man,” said Matvey
Savitch.
“If it’s too much, don’t take them. There’s no compulsion, merchant.”
When the travellers were ready to start, they were detained for a
minute. Kuzka had lost his cap.
“Little swine, where did you put it?” Matvey Savitch roared angrily.
“Where is it?”
Kuzka’s face was working with terror; he ran up and down near the cart,
and not finding it there, ran to the gate and then to the shed. The old
woman and Sofya helped him look.
“I’ll pull your ears off!” yelled Matvey Savitch. “Dirty brat!”
The cap was found at the bottom of the cart.
Kuzka brushed the hay off it with his sleeve, put it on, and timidly he
crawled into the cart, still with an expression of terror on his face as
though he were afraid of a blow from behind.
Matvey Savitch crossed himself. The driver gave a tug at the reins and
the cart rolled out of the yard.
THE POST
IT was three o’clock in the night. The postman, ready to set off, in his
cap and his coat, with a rusty sword in his hand, was standing near the
door, waiting for the driver to finish putting the mail bags into the
cart which had just been brought round with three horses. The sleepy
postmaster sat at his table, which was like a counter; he was filling up
a form and saying:
“My nephew, the student, wants to go to the station at once. So look
here, Ignatyev, let him get into the mail cart and take him with you to
the station: though it is against the regulations to take people with
the mail, what’s one to do? It’s better for him to drive with you free
than for me to hire horses for him.”
“Ready!” they heard a shout from the yard.
“Well, go then, and God be with you,” said the postmaster. “Which driver
is going?”
“Semyon Glazov.”
“Come, sign the receipt.”
The postman signed the receipt and went out. At the entrance of the
post-office there was the dark outline of a cart and three horses. The
horses were standing still except that one of the tracehorses kept
uneasily shifting from one leg to the other and tossing its head, making
the bell clang from time to time. The cart with the mail bags looked
like a patch of darkness. Two silhouettes were moving lazily beside it:
the student with a portmanteau in his hand and a driver. The latter was
smoking a short pipe; the light of the pipe moved about in the darkness,
dying away and flaring up again; for an instant it lighted up a bit of a
sleeve, then a shaggy moustache and big copper-red nose, then stern-
looking, overhanging eyebrows. The postman pressed down the mail bags
with his hands, laid his sword on them and jumped into the cart. The
student clambered irresolutely in after him, and accidentally touching
him with his elbow, said timidly and politely: “I beg your pardon.”
The pipe went out. The postmaster came out of the post-office just as he
was, in his waistcoat and slippers; shrinking from the night dampness
and clearing his throat, he walked beside the cart and said:
“Well, God speed! Give my love to your mother, Mihailo. Give my love to
them all. And you, Ignatyev, mind you don’t forget to give the parcel to
Bystretsov.... Off!”
The driver took the reins in one hand, blew his nose, and, arranging the
seat under himself, clicked to the horses.
“Give them my love,” the postmaster repeated.
The big bell clanged something to the little bells, the little bells
gave it a friendly answer. The cart squeaked, moved. The big bell
lamented, the little bells laughed. Standing up in his seat the driver
lashed the restless tracehorse twice, and the cart rumbled with a hollow
sound along the dusty road. The little town was asleep. Houses and trees
stood black on each side of the broad street, and not a light was to be
seen. Narrow clouds stretched here and there over the star-spangled sky,
and where the dawn would soon be coming there was a narrow crescent
moon; but neither the stars, of which there were many, nor the half-
moon, which looked white, lighted up the night air. It was cold and
damp, and there was a smell of autumn.
The student, who thought that politeness required him to talk affably to
a man who had not refused to let him accompany him, began:
“In summer it would be light at this time, but now there is not even a
sign of the dawn. Summer is over!”
The student looked at the sky and went on:
“Even from the sky one can see that it is autumn. Look to the right. Do
you see three stars side by side in a straight line? That is the
constellation of Orion, which, in our hemisphere, only becomes visible
in September.”
The postman, thrusting his hands into his sleeves and retreating up to
his ears into his coat collar, did not stir and did not glance at the
sky. Apparently the constellation of Orion did not interest him. He was
accustomed to see the stars, and probably he had long grown weary of
them. The student paused for a while and then said:
“It’s cold! It’s time for the dawn to begin. Do you know what time the
sun rises?”
“What?”
“What time does the sun rise now?”
“Between five and six,” said the driver.
The mail cart drove out of the town. Now nothing could be seen on either
side of the road but the fences of kitchen gardens and here and there a
solitary willow-tree; everything in front of them was shrouded in
darkness. Here in the open country the half-moon looked bigger and the
stars shone more brightly. Then came a scent of dampness; the postman
shrank further into his collar, the student felt an unpleasant chill
first creeping about his feet, then over the mail bags, over his hands
and his face. The horses moved more slowly; the bell was mute as though
it were frozen. There was the sound of the splash of water, and stars
reflected in the water danced under the horses’ feet and round the
wheels.
But ten minutes later it became so dark that neither the stars nor the
moon could be seen. The mail cart had entered the forest. Prickly pine
branches were continually hitting the student on his cap and a spider’s
web settled on his face. Wheels and hoofs knocked against huge roots,
and the mail cart swayed from side to side as though it were drunk.
“Keep to the road,” said the postman angrily. “Why do you run up the
edge? My face is scratched all over by the twigs! Keep more to the
right!”
But at that point there was nearly an accident. The cart suddenly
bounded as though in the throes of a convulsion, began trembling, and,
with a creak, lurched heavily first to the right and then to the left,
and at a fearful pace dashed along the forest track. The horses had
taken fright at something and bolted.
“Wo! wo!” the driver cried in alarm. “Wo... you devils!”
The student, violently shaken, bent forward and tried to find something
to catch hold of so as to keep his balance and save himself from being
thrown out, but the leather mail bags were slippery, and the driver,
whose belt the student tried to catch at, was himself tossed up and down
and seemed every moment on the point of flying out. Through the rattle
of the wheels and the creaking of the cart they heard the sword fall
with a clank on the ground, then a little later something fell with two
heavy thuds behind the mail cart.
“Wo!” the driver cried in a piercing voice, bending backwards. “Stop!”
The student fell on his face and bruised his forehead against the
driver’s seat, but was at once tossed back again and knocked his spine
violently against the back of the cart.
“I am falling!” was the thought that flashed through his mind, but at
that instant the horses dashed out of the forest into the open, turned
sharply to the right, and rumbling over a bridge of logs, suddenly
stopped dead, and the suddenness of this halt flung the student forward
again.
The driver and the student were both breathless. The postman was not in
the cart. He had been thrown out, together with his sword, the student’s
portmanteau, and one of the mail bags.
“Stop, you rascal! Sto-op!” they heard him shout from the forest. “You
damned blackguard!” he shouted, running up to the cart, and there was a
note of pain and fury in his tearful voice. “You anathema, plague take
you!” he roared, dashing up to the driver and shaking his fist at him.
“What a to-do! Lord have mercy on us!” muttered the driver in a
conscience-stricken voice, setting right something in the harness at the
horses’ heads. “It’s all that devil of a tracehorse. Cursed filly; it is
only a week since she has run in harness. She goes all right, but as
soon as we go down hill there is trouble! She wants a touch or two on
the nose, then she wouldn’t play about like this... Stea-eady! Damn!”
While the driver was setting the horses to rights and looking for the
portmanteau, the mail bag, and the sword on the road, the postman in a
plaintive voice shrill with anger ejaculated oaths. After replacing the
luggage the driver for no reason whatever led the horses for a hundred
paces, grumbled at the restless tracehorse, and jumped up on the box.
When his fright was over the student felt amused and good-humoured. It
was the first time in his life that he had driven by night in a mail
cart, and the shaking he had just been through, the postman’s having
been thrown out, and the pain in his own back struck him as interesting
adventures. He lighted a cigarette and said with a laugh:
“Why you know, you might break your neck like that! I very nearly flew
out, and I didn’t even notice you had been thrown out. I can fancy what
it is like driving in autumn!”
The postman did not speak.
“Have you been going with the post for long?” the student asked.
“Eleven years.”
“Oho; every day?”
“Yes, every day. I take this post and drive back again at once. Why?”
Making the journey every day, he must have had a good many interesting
adventures in eleven years. On bright summer and gloomy autumn nights,
or in winter when a ferocious snowstorm whirled howling round the mail
cart, it must have been hard to avoid feeling frightened and uncanny. No
doubt more than once the horses had bolted, the mail cart had stuck in
the mud, they had been attacked by highwaymen, or had lost their way in
the blizzard....
“I can fancy what adventures you must have had in eleven years!” said
the student. “I expect it must be terrible driving?”
He said this and expected that the postman would tell him something, but
the latter preserved a sullen silence and retreated into his collar.
Meanwhile it began to get light. The sky changed colour imperceptibly;
it still seemed dark, but by now the horses and the driver and the road
could be seen. The crescent moon looked bigger and bigger, and the cloud
that stretched below it, shaped like a cannon in a gun-carriage, showed
a faint yellow on its lower edge. Soon the postman’s face was visible.
It was wet with dew, grey and rigid as the face of a corpse. An
expression of dull, sullen anger was set upon it, as though the postman
were still in pain and still angry with the driver.
“Thank God it is daylight!” said the student, looking at his chilled and
angry face. “I am quite frozen. The nights are cold in September, but as
soon as the sun rises it isn’t cold. Shall we soon reach the station?”
The postman frowned and made a wry face.
“How fond you are of talking, upon my word!” he said. “Can’t you keep
quiet when you are travelling?”
The student was confused, and did not approach him again all the
journey. The morning came on rapidly. The moon turned pale and melted
away into the dull grey sky, the cloud turned yellow all over, the stars
grew dim, but the east was still cold-looking and the same colour as the
rest of the sky, so that one could hardly believe the sun was hidden in
it.
The chill of the morning and the surliness of the postman gradually
infected the student. He looked apathetically at the country around him,
waited for the warmth of the sun, and thought of nothing but how
dreadful and horrible it must be for the poor trees and the grass to
endure the cold nights. The sun rose dim, drowsy, and cold. The tree-
tops were not gilded by the rays of the rising sun, as usually
described, the sunbeams did not creep over the earth and there was no
sign of joy in the flight of the sleepy birds. The cold remained just
the same now that the sun was up as it had been in the night.
The student looked drowsily and ill-humouredly at the curtained windows
of a mansion by which the mail cart drove. Behind those windows, he
thought, people were most likely enjoying their soundest morning sleep
not hearing the bells, nor feeling the cold, nor seeing the postman’s
angry face; and if the bell did wake some young lady, she would turn
over on the other side, smile in the fulness of her warmth and comfort,
and, drawing up her feet and putting her hand under her cheek, would go
off to sleep more soundly than ever.
The student looked at the pond which gleamed near the house and thought
of the carp and the pike which find it possible to live in cold
water....
“It’s against the regulations to take anyone with the post....” the
postman said unexpectedly. “It’s not allowed! And since it is not
allowed, people have no business... to get in.... Yes. It makes no
difference to me, it’s true, only I don’t like it, and I don’t wish it.”
“Why didn’t you say so before, if you don’t like it?”
The postman made no answer but still had an unfriendly, angry
expression. When, a little later, the horses stopped at the entrance of
the station the student thanked him and got out of the cart. The mail
train had not yet come in. A long goods train stood in a siding; in the
tender the engine driver and his assistant, with faces wet with dew,
were drinking tea from a dirty tin teapot. The carriages, the platforms,
the seats were all wet and cold. Until the train came in the student
stood at the buffet drinking tea while the postman, with his hands
thrust up his sleeves and the same look of anger still on his face,
paced up and down the platform in solitude, staring at the ground under
his feet.
With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the
autumn nights?
THE NEW VILLA I
Two miles from the village of Obrutchanovo a huge bridge was being
built. From the village, which stood up high on the steep river-bank,
its trellis-like skeleton could be seen, and in foggy weather and on
still winter days, when its delicate iron girders and all the
scaffolding around was covered with hoar frost, it presented a
picturesque and even fantastic spectacle. Kutcherov, the engineer who
was building the bridge, a stout, broad-shouldered, bearded man in a
soft crumpled cap drove through the village in his racing droshky or his
open carriage. Now and then on holidays navvies working on the bridge
would come to the village; they begged for alms, laughed at the women,
and sometimes carried off something. But that was rare; as a rule the
days passed quietly and peacefully as though no bridge-building were
going on, and only in the evening, when camp fires gleamed near the
bridge, the wind faintly wafted the songs of the navvies. And by day
there was sometimes the mournful clang of metal, don-don-don.
It happened that the engineer’s wife came to see him. She was pleased
with the river-banks and the gorgeous view over the green valley with
trees, churches, flocks, and she began begging her husband to buy a
small piece of ground and to build them a cottage on it. Her husband
agreed. They bought sixty acres of land, and on the high bank in a
field, where in earlier days the cows of Obrutchanovo used to wander,
they built a pretty house of two storeys with a terrace and a verandah,
with a tower and a flagstaff on which a flag fluttered on Sundays—they
built it in about three months, and then all the winter they were
planting big trees, and when spring came and everything began to be
green there were already avenues to the new house, a gardener and two
labourers in white aprons were digging near it, there was a little
fountain, and a globe of looking-glass flashed so brilliantly that it
was painful to look at. The house had already been named the New Villa.
On a bright, warm morning at the end of May two horses were brought to
Obrutchanovo to the village blacksmith, Rodion Petrov. They came from
the New Villa. The horses were sleek, graceful beasts, as white as snow,
and strikingly alike.
“Perfect swans!” said Rodion, gazing at them with reverent admiration.
His wife Stepanida, his children and grandchildren came out into the
street to look at them. By degrees a crowd collected. The Lytchkovs,
father and son, both men with swollen faces and entirely beardless, came
up bareheaded. Kozov, a tall, thin old man with a long, narrow beard,
came up leaning on a stick with a crook handle: he kept winking with his
crafty eyes and smiling ironically as though he knew something.
“It’s only that they are white; what is there in them?” he said. “Put
mine on oats, and they will be just as sleek. They ought to be in a
plough and with a whip, too....”
The coachman simply looked at him with disdain, but did not utter a
word. And afterwards, while they were blowing up the fire at the forge,
the coachman talked while he smoked cigarettes. The peasants learned
from him various details: his employers were wealthy people; his
mistress, Elena Ivanovna, had till her marriage lived in Moscow in a
poor way as a governess; she was kind-hearted, compassionate, and fond
of helping the poor. On the new estate, he told them, they were not
going to plough or to sow, but simply to live for their pleasure, live
only to breathe the fresh air. When he had finished and led the horses
back a crowd of boys followed him, the dogs barked, and Kozov, looking
after him, winked sarcastically.
“Landowners, too-oo!” he said. “They have built a house and set up
horses, but I bet they are nobodies—landowners, too-oo.”
Kozov for some reason took a dislike from the first to the new house, to
the white horses, and to the handsome, well-fed coachman. Kozov was a
solitary man, a widower; he had a dreary life (he was prevented from
working by a disease which he sometimes called a rupture and sometimes
worms) he was maintained by his son, who worked at a confectioner’s in
Harkov and sent him money; and from early morning till evening he
sauntered at leisure about the river or about the village; if he saw,
for instance, a peasant carting a log, or fishing, he would say: “That
log’s dry wood—it is rotten,” or, “They won’t bite in weather like
this.” In times of drought he would declare that there would not be a
drop of rain till the frost came; and when the rains came he would say
that everything would rot in the fields, that everything was ruined. And
as he said these things he would wink as though he knew something.
At the New Villa they burned Bengal lights and sent up fireworks in the
evenings, and a sailing-boat with red lanterns floated by Obrutchanovo.
One morning the engineer’s wife, Elena Ivanovna, and her little daughter
drove to the village in a carriage with yellow wheels and a pair of dark
bay ponies; both mother and daughter were wearing broad-brimmed straw
hats, bent down over their ears.
This was exactly at the time when they were carting manure, and the
blacksmith Rodion, a tall, gaunt old man, bareheaded and barefooted, was
standing near his dirty and repulsive-looking cart and, flustered,
looked at the ponies, and it was evident by his face that he had never
seen such little horses before.
“The Kutcherov lady has come!” was whispered around. “Look, the
Kutcherov lady has come!”
Elena Ivanovna looked at the huts as though she were selecting one, and
then stopped at the very poorest, at the windows of which there were so
many children’s heads—flaxen, red, and dark. Stepanida, Rodion’s wife, a
stout woman, came running out of the hut; her kerchief slipped off her
grey head; she looked at the carriage facing the sun, and her face
smiled and wrinkled up as though she were blind.
“This is for your children,” said Elena Ivanovna, and she gave her three
roubles.
Stepanida suddenly burst into tears and bowed down to the ground.
Rodion, too, flopped to the ground, displaying his brownish bald head,
and as he did so he almost caught his wife in the ribs with the fork.
Elena Ivanovna was overcome with confusion and drove back.
II
The Lytchkovs, father and son, caught in their meadows two cart-horses,
a pony, and a broad-faced Aalhaus bull-calf, and with the help of red-
headed Volodka, son of the blacksmith Rodion, drove them to the village.
They called the village elder, collected witnesses, and went to look at
the damage.
“All right, let ‘em!” said Kozov, winking, “le-et em! Let them get out
of it if they can, the engineers! Do you think there is no such thing as
law? All right! Send for the police inspector, draw up a statement!...”
“Draw up a statement,” repeated Volodka.
“I don’t want to let this pass!” shouted the younger Lytchkov. He
shouted louder and louder, and his beardless face seemed to be more and
more swollen. “They’ve set up a nice fashion! Leave them free, and they
will ruin all the meadows! You’ve no sort of right to ill-treat people!
We are not serfs now!”
“We are not serfs now!” repeated Volodka.
“We got on all right without a bridge,” said the elder Lytchkov
gloomily; “we did not ask for it. What do we want a bridge for? We don’t
want it!”
“Brothers, good Christians, we cannot leave it like this!”
“All right, let ‘em!” said Kozov, winking. “Let them get out of it if
they can! Landowners, indeed!”
They went back to the village, and as they walked the younger Lytchkov
beat himself on the breast with his fist and shouted all the way, and
Volodka shouted, too, repeating his words. And meanwhile quite a crowd
had gathered in the village round the thoroughbred bull-calf and the
horses. The bullcalf was embarrassed and looked up from under his brows,
but suddenly lowered his muzzle to the ground and took to his heels,
kicking up his hind legs; Kozov was frightened and waved his stick at
him, and they all burst out laughing. Then they locked up the beasts and
waited.
In the evening the engineer sent five roubles for the damage, and the
two horses, the pony and the bull-calf, without being fed or given
water, returned home, their heads hanging with a guilty air as though
they were convicted criminals.
On getting the five roubles the Lytchkovs, father and son, the village
elder and Volodka, punted over the river in a boat and went to a hamlet
on the other side where there was a tavern, and there had a long
carousal. Their singing and the shouting of the younger Lytchkov could
be heard from the village. Their women were uneasy and did not sleep all
night. Rodion did not sleep either.
“It’s a bad business,” he said, sighing and turning from side to side.
“The gentleman will be angry, and then there will be trouble.... They
have insulted the gentleman.... Oh, they’ve insulted him. It’s a bad
business...”
It happened that the peasants, Rodion amongst them, went into their
forest to divide the clearings for mowing, and as they were returning
home they were met by the engineer. He was wearing a red cotton shirt
and high boots; a setter dog with its long tongue hanging out, followed
behind him.
“Good-day, brothers,” he said.
The peasants stopped and took off their hats.
“I have long wanted to have a talk with you, friends,” he went on. “This
is what it is. Ever since the early spring your cattle have been in my
copse and garden every day. Everything is trampled down; the pigs have
rooted up the meadow, are ruining everything in the kitchen garden, and
all the undergrowth in the copse is destroyed. There is no getting on
with your herdsmen; one asks them civilly, and they are rude. Damage is
done on my estate every day and I do nothing—I don’t fine you or make a
complaint; meanwhile you impounded my horses and my bull calf and
exacted five roubles. Was that right? Is that neighbourly?” he went on,
and his face was so soft and persuasive, and his expression was not
forbidding. “Is that the way decent people behave? A week ago one of
your people cut down two oak saplings in my copse. You have dug up the
road to Eresnevo, and now I have to go two miles round. Why do you
injure me at every step? What harm have I done you? For God’s sake, tell
me! My wife and I do our utmost to live with you in peace and harmony;
we help the peasants as we can. My wife is a kind, warm-hearted woman;
she never refuses you help. That is her dream—to be of use to you and
your children. You reward us with evil for our good. You are unjust, my
friends. Think of that. I ask you earnestly to think it over. We treat
you humanely; repay us in the same coin.”
He turned and went away. The peasants stood a little longer, put on
their caps and walked away. Rodion, who always understood everything
that was said to him in some peculiar way of his own, heaved a sigh and
said:
“We must pay. ‘Repay in coin, my friends’... he said.”
They walked to the village in silence. On reaching home Rodion said his
prayer, took off his boots, and sat down on the bench beside his wife.
Stepanida and he always sat side by side when they were at home, and
always walked side by side in the street; they ate and they drank and
they slept always together, and the older they grew the more they loved
one another. It was hot and crowded in their hut, and there were
children everywhere—on the floors, in the windows, on the stove.... In
spite of her advanced years Stepanida was still bearing children, and
now, looking at the crowd of children, it was hard to distinguish which
were Rodion’s and which were Volodka’s. Volodka’s wife, Lukerya, a plain
young woman with prominent eyes and a nose like the beak of a bird, was
kneading dough in a tub; Volodka was sitting on the stove with his legs
hanging.
“On the road near Nikita’s buckwheat... the engineer with his dog...”
Rodion began, after a rest, scratching his ribs and his elbow. “‘You
must pay,’ says he... ‘coin,’ says he.... Coin or no coin, we shall have
to collect ten kopecks from every hut. We’ve offended the gentleman very
much. I am sorry for him....”
“We’ve lived without a bridge,” said Volodka, not looking at anyone,
“and we don’t want one.”
“What next; the bridge is a government business.”
“We don’t want it.”
“Your opinion is not asked. What is it to you?”
“‘Your opinion is not asked,’” Volodka mimicked him. “We don’t want to
drive anywhere; what do we want with a bridge? If we have to, we can
cross by the boat.”
Someone from the yard outside knocked at the window so violently that it
seemed to shake the whole hut.
“Is Volodka at home?” he heard the voice of the younger Lytchkov.
“Volodka, come out, come along.”
Volodka jumped down off the stove and began looking for his cap.
“Don’t go, Volodka,” said Rodion diffidently. “Don’t go with them, son.
You are foolish, like a little child; they will teach you no good; don’t
go!”
“Don’t go, son,” said Stepanida, and she bJlinked as though about to
shed tears. “I bet they are calling you to the tavern.”
“‘To the tavern,’” Volodka mimicked.
“You’ll come back drunk again, you currish Herod,” said Lukerya, looking
at him angrily. “Go along, go along, and may you burn up with vodka, you
tailless Satan!”
“You hold your tongue,” shouted Volodka.
“They’ve married me to a fool, they’ve ruined me, a luckless orphan, you
red-headed drunkard...” wailed Lukerya, wiping her face with a hand
covered with dough. “I wish I had never set eyes on you.”
Volodka gave her a blow on the ear and went off.
III
Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter visited the village on foot. They
were out for a walk. It was a Sunday, and the peasant women and girls
were walking up and down the street in their brightly-coloured dresses.
Rodion and Stepanida, sitting side by side at their door, bowed and
smiled to Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter as to acquaintances.
From the windows more than a dozen children stared at them; their faces
expressed amazement and curiosity, and they could be heard whispering:
“The Kutcherov lady has come! The Kutcherov lady!”
“Good-morning,” said Elena Ivanovna, and she stopped; she paused, and
then asked: “Well, how are you getting on?”
“We get along all right, thank God,” answered Rodion, speaking rapidly.
“To be sure we get along.”
“The life we lead!” smiled Stepanida. “You can see our poverty yourself,
dear lady! The family is fourteen souls in all, and only two bread-
winners. We are supposed to be blacksmiths, but when they bring us a
horse to shoe we have no coal, nothing to buy it with. We are worried to
death, lady,” she went on, and laughed. “Oh, oh, we are worried to
death.”
Elena Ivanovna sat down at the entrance and, putting her arm round her
little girl, pondered something, and judging from the little girl’s
expression, melancholy thoughts were straying through her mind, too; as
she brooded she played with the sumptuous lace on the parasol she had
taken out of her mother’s hands.
“Poverty,” said Rodion, “a great deal of anxiety—you see no end to it.
Here, God sends no rain... our life is not easy, there is no denying
it.”
“You have a hard time in this life,” said Elena Ivanovna, “but in the
other world you will be happy.”
Rodion did not understand her, and simply coughed into his clenched hand
by way of reply. Stepanida said:
“Dear lady, the rich men will be all right in the next world, too. The
rich put up candles, pay for services; the rich give to beggars, but
what can the poor man do? He has no time to make the sign of the cross.
He is the beggar of beggars himself; how can he think of his soul? And
many sins come from poverty; from trouble we snarl at one another like
dogs, we haven’t a good word to say to one another, and all sorts of
things happen, dear lady—God forbid! It seems we have no luck in this
world nor the next. All the luck has fallen to the rich.”
She spoke gaily; she was evidently used to talking of her hard life. And
Rodion smiled, too; he was pleased that his old woman was so clever, so
ready of speech.
“It is only on the surface that the rich seem to be happy,” said Elena
Ivanovna. “Every man has his sorrow. Here my husband and I do not live
poorly, we have means, but are we happy? I am young, but I have had four
children; my children are always being ill. I am ill, too, and
constantly being doctored.”
“And what is your illness?” asked Rodion.
“A woman’s complaint. I get no sleep; a continual headache gives me no
peace. Here I am sitting and talking, but my head is bad, I am weak all
over, and I should prefer the hardest labour to such a condition. My
soul, too, is troubled; I am in continual fear for my children, my
husband. Every family has its own trouble of some sort; we have ours. I
am not of noble birth. My grandfather was a simple peasant, my father
was a tradesman in Moscow; he was a plain, uneducated man, too, while my
husband’s parents were wealthy and distinguished. They did not want him
to marry me, but he disobeyed them, quarrelled with them, and they have
not forgiven us to this day. That worries my husband; it troubles him
and keeps him in constant agitation; he loves his mother, loves her
dearly. So I am uneasy, too, my soul is in pain.”
Peasants, men and women, were by now standing round Rodion’s hut and
listening. Kozov came up, too, and stood twitching his long, narrow
beard. The Lytchkovs, father and son, drew near.
“And say what you like, one cannot be happy and satisfied if one does
not feel in one’s proper place.” Elena Ivanovna went on. “Each of you
has his strip of land, each of you works and knows what he is working
for; my husband builds bridges—in short, everyone has his place, while
I, I simply walk about. I have not my bit to work. I don’t work, and
feel as though I were an outsider. I am saying all this that you may not
judge from outward appearances; if a man is expensively dressed and has
means it does not prove that he is satisfied with his life.”
She got up to go away and took her daughter by the hand.
“I like your place here very much,” she said, and smiled, and from that
faint, diffident smile one could tell how unwell she really was, how
young and how pretty; she had a pale, thinnish face with dark eyebrows
and fair hair. And the little girl was just such another as her mother:
thin, fair, and slender. There was a fragrance of scent about them.
“I like the river and the forest and the village,” Elena Ivanovna went
on; “I could live here all my life, and I feel as though here I should
get strong and find my place. I want to help you—I want to dreadfully—to
be of use, to be a real friend to you. I know your need, and what I
don’t know I feel, my heart guesses. I am sick, feeble, and for me
perhaps it is not possible to change my life as I would. But I have
children. I will try to bring them up that they may be of use to you,
may love you. I shall impress upon them continually that their life does
not belong to them, but to you. Only I beg you earnestly, I beseech you,
trust us, live in friendship with us. My husband is a kind, good man.
Don’t worry him, don’t irritate him. He is sensitive to every trifle,
and yesterday, for instance, your cattle were in our vegetable garden,
and one of your people broke down the fence to the bee-hives, and such
an attitude to us drives my husband to despair. I beg you,” she went on
in an imploring voice, and she clasped her hands on her bosom—“I beg you
to treat us as good neighbours; let us live in peace! There is a saying,
you know, that even a bad peace is better than a good quarrel, and,
‘Don’t buy property, but buy neighbours.’ I repeat my husband is a kind
man and good; if all goes well we promise to do everything in our power
for you; we will mend the roads, we will build a school for your
children. I promise you.”
“Of course we thank you humbly, lady,” said Lytchkov the father, looking
at the ground; “you are educated people; it is for you to know best.
Only, you see, Voronov, a rich peasant at Eresnevo, promised to build a
school; he, too, said, ‘I will do this for you,’ ‘I will do that for
you,’ and he only put up the framework and refused to go on. And then
they made the peasants put the roof on and finish it; it cost them a
thousand roubles. Voronov did not care; he only stroked his beard, but
the peasants felt it a bit hard.”
“That was a crow, but now there’s a rook, too,” said Kozov, and he
winked.
There was the sound of laughter.
“We don’t want a school,” said Volodka sullenly. “Our children go to
Petrovskoe, and they can go on going there; we don’t want it.”
Elena Ivanovna seemed suddenly intimidated; her face looked paler and
thinner, she shrank into herself as though she had been touched with
something coarse, and walked away without uttering another word. And she
walked more and more quickly, without looking round.
“Lady,” said Rodion, walking after her, “lady, wait a bit; hear what I
would say to you.”
He followed her without his cap, and spoke softly as though begging.
“Lady, wait and hear what I will say to you.”
They had walked out of the village, and Elena Ivanovna stopped beside a
cart in the shade of an old mountain ash.
“Don’t be offended, lady,” said Rodion. “What does it mean? Have
patience. Have patience for a couple of years. You will live here, you
will have patience, and it will all come round. Our folks are good and
peaceable; there’s no harm in them; it’s God’s truth I’m telling you.
Don’t mind Kozov and the Lytchkovs, and don’t mind Volodka. He’s a fool;
he listens to the first that speaks. The others are quiet folks; they
are silent. Some would be glad, you know, to say a word from the heart
and to stand up for themselves, but cannot. They have a heart and a
conscience, but no tongue. Don’t be offended... have patience.... What
does it matter?”
Elena Ivanovna looked at the broad, tranquil river, pondering, and tears
flowed down her cheeks. And Rodion was troubled by those tears; he
almost cried himself.
“Never mind...” he muttered. “Have patience for a couple of years. You
can have the school, you can have the roads, only not all at once. If
you went, let us say, to sow corn on that mound you would first have to
weed it out, to pick out all the stones, and then to plough, and work
and work... and with the people, you see, it is the same... you must
work and work until you overcome them.”
The crowd had moved away from Rodion’s hut, and was coming along the
street towards the mountain ash. They began singing songs and playing
the concertina, and they kept coming closer and closer....
“Mamma, let us go away from here,” said the little girl, huddling up to
her mother, pale and shaking all over; “let us go away, mamma!
“Where?”
“To Moscow.... Let us go, mamma.”
The child began crying.
Rodion was utterly overcome; his face broke into profuse perspiration;
he took out of his pocket a little crooked cucumber, like a half-moon,
covered with crumbs of rye bread, and began thrusting it into the little
girl’s hands.
“Come, come,” he muttered, scowling severely; “take the little cucumber,
eat it up.... You mustn’t cry. Mamma will whip you.... She’ll tell your
father of you when you get home. Come, come....”
They walked on, and he still followed behind them, wanting to say
something friendly and persuasive to them. And seeing that they were
both absorbed in their own thoughts and their own griefs, and not
noticing him, he stopped and, shading his eyes from the sun, looked
after them for a long time till they disappeared into their copse.
IV
The engineer seemed to grow irritable and petty, and in every trivial
incident saw an act of robbery or outrage. His gate was kept bolted even
by day, and at night two watchmen walked up and down the garden beating
a board; and they gave up employing anyone from Obrutchanovo as a
labourer. As ill-luck would have it someone (either a peasant or one of
the workmen) took the new wheels off the cart and replaced them by old
ones, then soon afterwards two bridles and a pair of pincers were
carried off, and murmurs arose even in the village. People began to say
that a search should be made at the Lytchkovs’ and at Volodka’s, and
then the bridles and the pincers were found under the hedge in the
engineer’s garden; someone had thrown them down there.
It happened that the peasants were coming in a crowd out of the forest,
and again they met the engineer on the road. He stopped, and without
wishing them good-day he began, looking angrily first at one, then at
another:
“I have begged you not to gather mushrooms in the park and near the
yard, but to leave them for my wife and children, but your girls come
before daybreak and there is not a mushroom left....Whether one asks you
or not it makes no difference. Entreaties, and friendliness, and
persuasion I see are all useless.”
He fixed his indignant eyes on Rodion and went on:
“My wife and I behaved to you as human beings, as to our equals, and
you? But what’s the use of talking! It will end by our looking down upon
you. There is nothing left!”
And making an effort to restrain his anger, not to say too much, he
turned and went on.
On getting home Rodion said his prayer, took off his boots, and sat down
beside his wife.
“Yes...” he began with a sigh. “We were walking along just now, and Mr.
Kutcherov met us.... Yes.... He saw the girls at daybreak... ‘Why don’t
they bring mushrooms,’... he said ‘to my wife and children?’ he said....
And then he looked at me and he said: ‘I and my wife will look after
you,’ he said. I wanted to fall down at his feet, but I hadn’t the
courage.... God give him health... God bless him!...”
Stephania crossed herself and sighed.
“They are kind, simple-hearted people,” Rodion went on. “‘We shall look
after you.’... He promised me that before everyone. In our old age... it
wouldn’t be a bad thing.... I should always pray for them.... Holy
Mother, bless them....”
The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the fourteenth of September,
was the festival of the village church. The Lytchkovs, father and son,
went across the river early in the morning and returned to dinner drunk;
they spent a long time going about the village, alternately singing and
swearing; then they had a fight and went to the New Villa to complain.
First Lytchkov the father went into the yard with a long ashen stick in
his hands. He stopped irresolutely and took off his hat. Just at that
moment the engineer and his family were sitting on the verandah,
drinking tea.
“What do you want?” shouted the engineer.
“Your honour...” Lytchkov began, and burst into tears. “Show the Divine
mercy, protect me... my son makes my life a misery... your honour...”
Lytchkov the son walked up, too; he, too, was bareheaded and had a stick
in his hand; he stopped and fixed his drunken senseless eyes on the
verandah.
“It is not my business to settle your affairs,” said the engineer. “Go
to the rural captain or the police officer.”
“I have been everywhere.... I have lodged a petition...” said Lytchkov
the father, and he sobbed. “Where can I go now? He can kill me now, it
seems. He can do anything. Is that the way to treat a father? A father?”
He raised his stick and hit his son on the head; the son raised his
stick and struck his father just on his bald patch such a blow that the
stick bounced back. The father did not even flinch, but hit his son
again and again on the head. And so they stood and kept hitting one
another on the head, and it looked not so much like a fight as some sort
of a game. And peasants, men and women, stood in a crowd at the gate and
looked into the garden, and the faces of all were grave. They were the
peasants who had come to greet them for the holiday, but seeing the
Lytchkovs, they were ashamed and did not go in.
The next morning Elena Ivanovna went with the children to Moscow. And
there was a rumour that the engineer was selling his house....
V
The peasants had long ago grown used to the sight of the bridge, and it
was difficult to imagine the river at that place without a bridge. The
heap of rubble left from the building of it had long been overgrown with
grass, the navvies were forgotten, and instead of the strains of the
“Dubinushka” that they used to sing, the peasants heard almost every
hour the sounds of a passing train.
The New Villa has long ago been sold; now it belongs to a government
clerk who comes here from the town for the holidays with his family,
drinks tea on the terrace, and then goes back to the town again. He
wears a cockade on his cap; he talks and clears his throat as though he
were a very important official, though he is only of the rank of a
collegiate secretary, and when the peasants bow he makes no response.
In Obrutchanovo everyone has grown older; Kozov is dead. In Rodion’s hut
there are even more children. Volodka has grown a long red beard. They
are still as poor as ever.
In the early spring the Obrutchanovo peasants were sawing wood near the
station. And after work they were going home; they walked without haste
one after the other. Broad saws curved over their shoulders; the sun was
reflected in them. The nightingales were singing in the bushes on the
bank, larks were trilling in the heavens. It was quiet at the New Villa;
there was not a soul there, and only golden pigeons—golden because the
sunlight was streaming upon them—were flying over the house. All of
them—Rodion, the two Lytchkovs, and Volodka—thought of the white horses,
the little ponies, the fireworks, the boat with the lanterns; they
remembered how the engineer’s wife, so beautiful and so grandly dressed,
had come into the village and talked to them in such a friendly way. And
it seemed as though all that had never been; it was like a dream or a
fairy-tale.
They trudged along, tired out, and mused as they went.... In their
village, they mused, the people were good, quiet, sensible, fearing God,
and Elena Ivanovna, too, was quiet, kind, and gentle; it made one sad to
look at her, but why had they not got on together? Why had they parted
like enemies? How was it that some mist had shrouded from their eyes
what mattered most, and had let them see nothing but damage done by
cattle, bridles, pincers, and all those trivial things which now, as
they remembered them, seemed so nonsensical? How was it that with the
new owner they lived in peace, and yet had been on bad terms with the
engineer?
And not knowing what answer to make to these questions they were all
silent except Volodka, who muttered something.
“What is it?” Rodion asked.
“We lived without a bridge...” said Volodka gloomily. “We lived without
a bridge, and did not ask for one... and we don’t want it....”
No one answered him and they walked on in silence with drooping heads.
DREAMS
Two peasant constables—one a stubby, black-bearded individual with such
exceptionally short legs that if you looked at him from behind it seemed
as though his legs began much lower down than in other people; the
other, long, thin, and straight as a stick, with a scanty beard of dark
reddish colour—were escorting to the district town a tramp who refused
to remember his name. The first waddled along, looking from side to
side, chewing now a straw, now his own sleeve, slapping himself on the
haunches and humming, and altogether had a careless and frivolous air;
the other, in spite of his lean face and narrow shoulders, looked solid,
grave, and substantial; in the lines and expression of his whole figure
he was like the priests among the Old Believers, or the warriors who are
painted on old-fashioned ikons. “For his wisdom God had added to his
forehead”—that is, he was bald—which increased the resemblance referred
to. The first was called Andrey Ptaha, the second Nikandr Sapozhnikov.
The man they were escorting did not in the least correspond with the
conception everyone has of a tramp. He was a frail little man, weak and
sickly-looking, with small, colourless, and extremely indefinite
features. His eyebrows were scanty, his expression mild and submissive;
he had scarcely a trace of a moustache, though he was over thirty. He
walked along timidly, bent forward, with his hands thrust into his
sleeves. The collar of his shabby cloth overcoat, which did not look
like a peasant’s, was turned up to the very brim of his cap, so that
only his little red nose ventured to peep out into the light of day. He
spoke in an ingratiating tenor, continually coughing. It was very, very
difficult to believe that he was a tramp concealing his surname. He was
more like an unsuccessful priest’s son, stricken by God and reduced to
beggary; a clerk discharged for drunkenness; a merchant’s son or nephew
who had tried his feeble powers in a theatrical career, and was now
going home to play the last act in the parable of the prodigal son;
perhaps, judging by the dull patience with which he struggled with the
hopeless autumn mud, he might have been a fanatical monk, wandering from
one Russian monastery to another, continually seeking “a peaceful life,
free from sin,” and not finding it....
The travellers had been a long while on their way, but they seemed to be
always on the same small patch of ground. In front of them there
stretched thirty feet of muddy black-brown mud, behind them the same,
and wherever one looked further, an impenetrable wall of white fog. They
went on and on, but the ground remained the same, the wall was no
nearer, and the patch on which they walked seemed still the same patch.
They got a glimpse of a white, clumsy-looking stone, a small ravine, or
a bundle of hay dropped by a passer-by, the brief glimmer of a great
muddy puddle, or, suddenly, a shadow with vague outlines would come into
view ahead of them; the nearer they got to it the smaller and darker it
became; nearer still, and there stood up before the wayfarers a slanting
milestone with the number rubbed off, or a wretched birch-tree drenched
and bare like a wayside beggar. The birch-tree would whisper something
with what remained of its yellow leaves, one leaf would break off and
float lazily to the ground.... And then again fog, mud, the brown grass
at the edges of the road. On the grass hung dingy, unfriendly tears.
They were not the tears of soft joy such as the earth weeps at welcoming
the summer sun and parting from it, and such as she gives to drink at
dawn to the corncrakes, quails, and graceful, long-beaked crested
snipes. The travellers’ feet stuck in the heavy, clinging mud. Every
step cost an effort.
Andrey Ptaha was somewhat excited. He kept looking round at the tramp
and trying to understand how a live, sober man could fail to remember
his name.
“You are an orthodox Christian, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” the tramp answered mildly.
“H’m... then you’ve been christened?”
“Why, to be sure! I’m not a Turk. I go to church and to the sacrament,
and do not eat meat when it is forbidden. And I observe my religious
duties punctually....”
“Well, what are you called, then?”
“Call me what you like, good man.”
Ptaha shrugged his shoulders and slapped himself on the haunches in
extreme perplexity. The other constable, Nikandr Sapozhnikov, maintained
a staid silence. He was not so naive as Ptaha, and apparently knew very
well the reasons which might induce an orthodox Christian to conceal his
name from other people. His expressive face was cold and stern. He
walked apart and did not condescend to idle chatter with his companions,
but, as it were, tried to show everyone, even the fog, his sedateness
and discretion.
“God knows what to make of you,” Ptaha persisted in addressing the
tramp. “Peasant you are not, and gentleman you are not, but some sort of
a thing between.... The other day I was washing a sieve in the pond and
caught a reptile—see, as long as a finger, with gills and a tail. The
first minute I thought it was a fish, then I looked—and, blow it! if it
hadn’t paws. It was not a fish, it was a viper, and the deuce only knows
what it was.... So that’s like you.... What’s your calling?”
“I am a peasant and of peasant family,” sighed the tramp. “My mamma was
a house serf. I don’t look like a peasant, that’s true, for such has
been my lot, good man. My mamma was a nurse with the gentry, and had
every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and blood, I lived with her in
the master’s house. She petted and spoiled me, and did her best to take
me out of my humble class and make a gentleman of me. I slept in a bed,
every day I ate a real dinner, I wore breeches and shoes like a
gentleman’s child. What my mamma ate I was fed on, too; they gave her
stuffs as a present, and she dressed me up in them.... We lived well! I
ate so many sweets and cakes in my childish years that if they could be
sold now it would be enough to buy a good horse. Mamma taught me to read
and write, she instilled the fear of God in me from my earliest years,
and she so trained me that now I can’t bring myself to utter an
unrefined peasant word. And I don’t drink vodka, my lad, and am neat in
my dress, and know how to behave with decorum in good society. If she is
still living, God give her health; and if she is dead, then, O Lord,
give her soul peace in Thy Kingdom, wherein the just are at rest.”
The tramp bared his head with the scanty hair standing up like a brush
on it, turned his eyes upward and crossed himself twice.
“Grant her, O Lord, a verdant and peaceful resting-place,” he said in a
drawling voice, more like an old woman’s than a man’s. “Teach Thy
servant Xenia Thy justifications, O Lord! If it had not been for my
beloved mamma I should have been a peasant with no sort of
understanding! Now, young man, ask me about anything and I understand it
all: the holy Scriptures and profane writings, and every prayer and
catechism. I live according to the Scriptures.... I don’t injure anyone,
I keep my flesh in purity and continence, I observe the fasts, I eat at
fitting times. Another man will take no pleasure in anything but vodka
and lewd talk, but when I have time I sit in a corner and read a book. I
read and I weep and weep.”
“What do you weep for?”
“They write so pathetically! For some books one gives but a five-kopeck
piece, and yet one weeps and sighs exceedingly over it.”
“Is your father dead?” asked Ptaha.
“I don’t know, good man. I don’t know my parent; it is no use concealing
it. I judge that I was mamma’s illegitimate son. My mamma lived all her
life with the gentry, and did not want to marry a simple peasant....”
“And so she fell into the master’s hands,” laughed Ptaha.
“She did transgress, that’s true. She was pious, God-fearing, but she
did not keep her maiden purity. It is a sin, of course, a great sin,
there’s no doubt about it, but to make up for it there is, maybe, noble
blood in me. Maybe I am only a peasant by class, but in nature a noble
gentleman.”
The “noble gentleman” uttered all this in a soft, sugary tenor,
wrinkling up his narrow forehead and emitting creaking sounds from his
red, frozen little nose. Ptaha listened and looked askance at him in
wonder, continually shrugging his shoulders.
After going nearly five miles the constables and the tramp sat down on a
mound to rest.
“Even a dog knows his name,” Ptaha muttered. “My name is Andryushka, his
is Nikandr; every man has his holy name, and it can’t be forgotten.
Nohow.”
“Who has any need to know my name?” sighed the tramp, leaning his cheek
on his fist. “And what advantage would it be to me if they did know it?
If I were allowed to go where I would—but it would only make things
worse. I know the law, Christian brothers. Now I am a tramp who doesn’t
remember his name, and it’s the very most if they send me to Eastern
Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if I were to tell them
my real name and description they would send me back to hard labour, I
know!”
“Why, have you been a convict?”
“I have, dear friend. For four years I went about with my head shaved
and fetters on my legs.”
“What for?”
“For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so, my
mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into my
master’s glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the storeroom, numbers
of them; it was easy to make a mistake over them.”
The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:
“She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man’s soul is a
slumbering forest! It may have been an accident, or maybe she could not
endure the affront of seeing the master prefer another servant....
Perhaps she put it in on purpose, God knows! I was young then, and did
not understand it all... now I remember that our master had taken
another mistress and mamma was greatly disturbed. Our trial lasted
nearly two years.... Mamma was condemned to penal servitude for twenty
years, and I, on account of my youth, only to seven.”
“And why were you sentenced?”
“As an accomplice. I handed the glass to the master. That was always the
custom. Mamma prepared the soda and I handed it to him. Only I tell you
all this as a Christian, brothers, as I would say it before God. Don’t
you tell anybody....”
“Oh, nobody’s going to ask us,” said Ptaha. “So you’ve run away from
prison, have you?”
“I have, dear friend. Fourteen of us ran away. Some folks, God bless
them! ran away and took me with them. Now you tell me, on your
conscience, good man, what reason have I to disclose my name? They will
send me back to penal servitude, you know! And I am not fit for penal
servitude! I am a refined man in delicate health. I like to sleep and
eat in cleanliness. When I pray to God I like to light a little lamp or
a candle, and not to have a noise around me. When I bow down to the
ground I like the floor not to be dirty or spat upon. And I bow down
forty times every morning and evening, praying for mamma.”
The tramp took off his cap and crossed himself.
“And let them send me to Eastern Siberia,” he said; “I am not afraid of
that.”
“Surely that’s no better?”
“It is quite a different thing. In penal servitude you are like a crab
in a basket: crowding, crushing, jostling, there’s no room to breathe;
it’s downright hell—such hell, may the Queen of Heaven keep us from it!
You are a robber and treated like a robber—worse than any dog. You can’t
sleep, you can’t eat or even say your prayers. But it’s not like that in
a settlement. In a settlement I shall be a member of a commune like
other people. The authorities are bound by law to give me my share...
ye-es! They say the land costs nothing, no more than snow; you can take
what you like! They will give me corn land and building land and
garden.... I shall plough my fields like other people, sow seed. I shall
have cattle and stock of all sorts, bees, sheep, and dogs.... A Siberian
cat, that rats and mice may not devour my goods.... I will put up a
house, I shall buy ikons.... Please God, I’ll get married, I shall have
children....”
The tramp muttered and looked, not at his listeners, but away into the
distance. Naive as his dreams were, they were uttered in such a genuine
and heartfelt tone that it was difficult not to believe in them. The
tramp’s little mouth was screwed up in a smile. His eyes and little nose
and his whole face were fixed and blank with blissful anticipation of
happiness in the distant future. The constables listened and looked at
him gravely, not without sympathy. They, too, believed in his dreams.
“I am not afraid of Siberia,” the tramp went on muttering. “Siberia is
just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as here. They are just
as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only there is more freedom there
and people are better off. Everything is better there. Take the rivers
there, for instance; they are far better than those here. There’s no end
of fish; and all sorts of wild fowl. And my greatest pleasure, brothers,
is fishing. Give me no bread to eat, but let me sit with a fishhook.
Yes, indeed! I fish with a hook and with a wire line, and set creels,
and when the ice comes I catch with a net. I am not strong to draw up
the net, so I shall hire a man for five kopecks. And, Lord, what a
pleasure it is! You catch an eel-pout or a roach of some sort and are as
pleased as though you had met your own brother. And would you believe
it, there’s a special art for every fish: you catch one with a live
bait, you catch another with a grub, the third with a frog or a
grasshopper. One has to understand all that, of course! For example,
take the eel-pout. It is not a delicate fish—it will take a perch; and a
pike loves a gudgeon, the shilishper likes a butterfly. If you fish for
a roach in a rapid stream there is no greater pleasure. You throw the
line of seventy feet without lead, with a butterfly or a beetle, so that
the bait floats on the surface; you stand in the water without your
trousers and let it go with the current, and tug! the roach pulls at it!
Only you have got to be artful that he doesn’t carry off the bait, the
damned rascal. As soon as he tugs at your line you must whip it up; it’s
no good waiting. It’s wonderful what a lot of fish I’ve caught in my
time. When we were running away the other convicts would sleep in the
forest; I could not sleep, but I was off to the river. The rivers there
are wide and rapid, the banks are steep—awfully! It’s all slumbering
forests on the bank. The trees are so tall that if you look to the top
it makes you dizzy. Every pine would be worth ten roubles by the prices
here.”
In the overwhelming rush of his fancies, of artistic images of the past
and sweet presentiments of happiness in the future, the poor wretch sank
into silence, merely moving his lips as though whispering to himself.
The vacant, blissful smile never left his lips. The constables were
silent. They were pondering with bent heads. In the autumn stillness,
when the cold, sullen mist that rises from the earth lies like a weight
on the heart, when it stands like a prison wall before the eyes, and
reminds man of the limitation of his freedom, it is sweet to think of
the broad, rapid rivers, with steep banks wild and luxuriant, of the
impenetrable forests, of the boundless steppes. Slowly and quietly the
fancy pictures how early in the morning, before the flush of dawn has
left the sky, a man makes his way along the steep deserted bank like a
tiny speck: the ancient, mast-like pines rise up in terraces on both
sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur
menacingly; rocks, huge stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is
strong in body and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees,
nor stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which
repeats the sound of every footstep that he takes.
The peasants called up a picture of a free life such as they had never
lived; whether they vaguely recalled the images of stories heard long
ago or whether notions of a free life had been handed down to them with
their flesh and blood from far-off free ancestors, God knows!
The first to break the silence was Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who had not till
then let fall a single word. Whether he envied the tramp’s transparent
happiness, or whether he felt in his heart that dreams of happiness were
out of keeping with the grey fog and the dirty brown mud—anyway, he
looked sternly at the tramp and said:
“It’s all very well, to be sure, only you won’t reach those plenteous
regions, brother. How could you? Before you’d gone two hundred miles
you’d give up your soul to God. Just look what a weakling you are! Here
you’ve hardly gone five miles and you can’t get your breath.”
The tramp turned slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile vanished
from his face. He looked with a scared and guilty air at the peasant’s
staid face, apparently remembered something, and bent his head. A
silence followed again.... All three were pondering. The peasants were
racking their brains in the effort to grasp in their imagination what
can be grasped by none but God—that is, the vast expanse dividing them
from the land of freedom. Into the tramp’s mind thronged clear and
distinct pictures more terrible than that expanse. Before him rose
vividly the picture of the long legal delays and procrastinations, the
temporary and permanent prisons, the convict boats, the wearisome
stoppages on the way, the frozen winters, illnesses, deaths of
companions....
The tramp bJlinked guiltily, wiped the tiny drops of sweat from his
forehead with his sleeve, drew a deep breath as though he had just leapt
out of a very hot bath, then wiped his forehead with the other sleeve
and looked round fearfully.
“That’s true; you won’t get there!” Ptaha agreed. “You are not much of a
walker! Look at you—nothing but skin and bone! You’ll die, brother!”
“Of course he’ll die! What could he do?” said Nikandr. “He’s fit for the
hospital now.... For sure!”
The man who had forgotten his name looked at the stern, unconcerned
faces of his sinister companions, and without taking off his cap,
hurriedly crossed himself, staring with wide-open eyes.... He trembled,
his head shook, and he began twitching all over, like a caterpillar when
it is stepped upon....
“Well, it’s time to go,” said Nikandr, getting up; “we’ve had a rest.”
A minute later they were stepping along the muddy road. The tramp was
more bent than ever, and he thrust his hands further up his sleeves.
Ptaha was silent.
THE PIPE
MELITON SHISHKIN, a bailiff from the Dementyev farm, exhausted by the
sultry heat of the fir-wood and covered with spiders’ webs and pine-
needles, made his way with his gun to the edge of the wood. His Damka—a
mongrel between a yard dog and a setter—an extremely thin bitch heavy
with young, trailed after her master with her wet tail between her legs,
doing all she could to avoid pricking her nose. It was a dull, overcast
morning. Big drops dripped from the bracken and from the trees that were
wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell of decay from the
dampness of the wood.
There were birch-trees ahead of him where the wood ended, and between
their stems and branches he could see the misty distance. Beyond the
birch-trees someone was playing on a shepherd’s rustic pipe. The player
produced no more than five or six notes, dragged them out languidly with
no attempt at forming a tune, and yet there was something harsh and
extremely dreary in the sound of the piping.
As the copse became sparser, and the pines were interspersed with young
birch-trees, Meliton saw a herd. Hobbled horses, cows, and sheep were
wandering among the bushes and, snapping the dry branches, sniffed at
the herbage of the copse. A lean old shepherd, bareheaded, in a torn
grey smock, stood leaning against the wet trunk of a birch-tree. He
stared at the ground, pondering something, and played his pipe, it
seemed, mechanically.
“Good-day, grandfather! God help you!” Meliton greeted him in a thin,
husky voice which seemed incongruous with his huge stature and big,
fleshy face. “How cleverly you are playing your pipe! Whose herd are you
minding?”
“The Artamonovs’,” the shepherd answered reluctantly, and he thrust the
pipe into his bosom.
“So I suppose the wood is the Artamonovs’ too?” Meliton inquired,
looking about him. “Yes, it is the Artamonovs’; only fancy... I had
completely lost myself. I got my face scratched all over in the
thicket.”
He sat down on the wet earth and began rolling up a bit of newspaper
into a cigarette.
Like his voice, everything about the man was small and out of keeping
with his height, his breadth, and his fleshy face: his smiles, his eyes,
his buttons, his tiny cap, which would hardly keep on his big, closely-
cropped head. When he talked and smiled there was something womanish,
timid, and meek about his puffy, shaven face and his whole figure.
“What weather! God help us!” he said, and he turned his head from side
to side. “Folk have not carried the oats yet, and the rain seems as
though it had been taken on for good, God bless it.”
The shepherd looked at the sky, from which a drizzling rain was falling,
at the wood, at the bailif’s wet clothes, pondered, and said nothing.
“The whole summer has been the same,” sighed Meliton. “A bad business
for the peasants and no pleasure for the gentry.”
The shepherd looked at the sky again, thought a moment, and said
deliberately, as though chewing each word:
“It’s all going the same way.... There is nothing good to be looked
for.”
“How are things with you here?” Meliton inquired, lighting his
cigarette. “Haven’t you seen any coveys of grouse in the Artamonovs’
clearing?”
The shepherd did not answer at once. He looked again at the sky and to
right and left, thought a little, bJlinked.... Apparently he attached no
little significance to his words, and to increase their value tried to
pronounce them with deliberation and a certain solemnity. The expression
of his face had the sharpness and staidness of old age, and the fact
that his nose had a saddle-shaped depression across the middle and his
nostrils turned upwards gave him a sly and sarcastic look.
“No, I believe I haven’t,” he said. “Our huntsman Eryomka was saying
that on Elijah’s Day he started one covey near Pustoshye, but I dare say
he was lying. There are very few birds.”
“Yes, brother, very few.... Very few everywhere! The shooting here, if
one is to look at it with common sense, is good for nothing and not
worth having. There is no game at all, and what there is is not worth
dirtying your hands over—it is not full-grown. It is such poor stuff
that one is ashamed to look at it.”
Meliton gave a laugh and waved his hands.
“Things happen so queerly in this world that it is simply laughable and
nothing else. Birds nowadays have become so unaccountable: they sit late
on their eggs, and there are some, I declare, that have not hatched them
by St. Peter’s Day!”
“It’s all going the same,” said the shepherd, turning his face upwards.
“There was little game last year, this year there are fewer birds still,
and in another five years, mark my words, there will be none at all. As
far as I can see there will soon be not only no game, but no birds at
all.”
“Yes,” Meliton assented, after a moment’s thought. “That’s true.”
The shepherd gave a bitter smile and shook his head.
“It’s a wonder,” he said, “what has become of them all! I remember
twenty years ago there used to be geese here, and cranes and ducks and
grouse—clouds and clouds of them! The gentry used to meet together for
shooting, and one heard nothing but pouf-pouf-pouf! pouf-pouf-pouf!
There was no end to the woodcocks, the snipe, and the little teals, and
the water-snipe were as common as starlings, or let us say sparrows—lots
and lots of them! And what has become of them all? We don’t even see the
birds of prey. The eagles, the hawks, and the owls have all gone....
There are fewer of every sort of wild beast, too. Nowadays, brother,
even the wolf and the fox have grown rare, let alone the bear or the
otter. And you know in old days there were even elks! For forty years I
have been observing the works of God from year to year, and it is my
opinion that everything is going the same way.”
“What way?”
“To the bad, young man. To ruin, we must suppose... The time has come
for God’s world to perish.”
The old man put on his cap and began gazing at the sky.
“It’s a pity,” he sighed, after a brief silence. “O God, what a pity! Of
course it is God’s will; the world was not created by us, but yet it is
a pity, brother. If a single tree withers away, or let us say a single
cow dies, it makes one sorry, but what will it be, good man, if the
whole world crumbles into dust? Such blessings, Lord Jesus! The sun, and
the sky, and the forest, and the rivers, and the creatures—all these
have been created, adapted, and adjusted to one another. Each has been
put to its appointed task and knows its place. And all that must
perish.”
A mournful smile gleamed on the shepherd’s face, and his eyelids
quivered.
“You say—the world is perishing,” said Meliton, pondering. “It may be
that the end of the world is near at hand, but you can’t judge by the
birds. I don’t think the birds can be taken as a sign.”
“Not the birds only,” said the shepherd. “It’s the wild beasts, too, and
the cattle, and the bees, and the fish.... If you don’t believe me ask
the old people; every old man will tell you that the fish are not at all
what they used to be. In the seas, in the lakes, and in the rivers,
there are fewer fish from year to year. In our Pestchanka, I remember,
pike used to be caught a yard long, and there were eel-pouts, and roach,
and bream, and every fish had a presentable appearance; while nowadays,
if you catch a wretched little pikelet or perch six inches long you have
to be thankful. There are not any gudgeon even worth talking about.
Every year it is worse and worse, and in a little while there will be no
fish at all. And take the rivers now... the rivers are drying up, for
sure.”
“It is true; they are drying up.”
“To be sure, that’s what I say. Every year they are shallower and
shallower, and there are not the deep holes there used to be. And do you
see the bushes yonder?” the old man asked, pointing to one side. “Beyond
them is an old river-bed; it’s called a backwater. In my father’s time
the Pestchanka flowed there, but now look; where have the evil spirits
taken it to? It changes its course, and, mind you, it will go on
changing till such time as it has dried up altogether. There used to be
marshes and ponds beyond Kurgasovo, and where are they now? And what has
become of the streams? Here in this very wood we used to have a stream
flowing, and such a stream that the peasants used to set creels in it
and caught pike; wild ducks used to spend the winter by it, and nowadays
there is no water in it worth speaking of, even at the spring floods.
Yes, brother, look where you will, things are bad everywhere.
Everywhere!”
A silence followed. Meliton sank into thought, with his eyes fixed on
one spot. He wanted to think of some one part of nature as yet untouched
by the all-embracing ruin. Spots of light glistened on the mist and the
slanting streaks of rain as though on opaque glass, and immediately died
away again—it was the rising sun trying to break through the clouds and
peep at the earth.
“Yes, the forests, too...” Meliton muttered.
“The forests, too,” the shepherd repeated. “They cut them down, and they
catch fire, and they wither away, and no new ones are growing. Whatever
does grow up is cut down at once; one day it shoots up and the next it
has been cut down—and so on without end till nothing’s left. I have kept
the herds of the commune ever since the time of Freedom, good man;
before the time of Freedom I was shepherd of the master’s herds. I have
watched them in this very spot, and I can’t remember a summer day in all
my life that I have not been here. And all the time I have been
observing the works of God. I have looked at them in my time till I know
them, and it is my opinion that all things growing are on the decline.
Whether you take the rye, or the vegetables, or flowers of any sort,
they are all going the same way.”
“But people have grown better,” observed the bailiff.
“In what way better?”
“Cleverer.”
“Cleverer, maybe, that’s true, young man; but what’s the use of that?
What earthly good is cleverness to people on the brink of ruin? One can
perish without cleverness. What’s the good of cleverness to a huntsman
if there is no game? What I think is that God has given men brains and
taken away their strength. People have grown weak, exceedingly weak.
Take me, for instance... I am not worth a halfpenny, I am the humblest
peasant in the whole village, and yet, young man, I have strength. Mind
you, I am in my seventies, and I tend my herd day in and day out, and
keep the night watch, too, for twenty kopecks, and I don’t sleep, and I
don’t feel the cold; my son is cleverer than I am, but put him in my
place and he would ask for a raise next day, or would be going to the
doctors. There it is. I eat nothing but bread, for ‘Give us this day our
daily bread,’ and my father ate nothing but bread, and my grandfather;
but the peasant nowadays must have tea and vodka and white loaves, and
must sleep from sunset to dawn, and he goes to the doctor and pampers
himself in all sorts of ways. And why is it? He has grown weak; he has
not the strength to endure. If he wants to stay awake, his eyes
close—there is no doing anything.”
“That’s true,” Meliton agreed; “the peasant is good for nothing
nowadays.”
“It’s no good hiding what is wrong; we get worse from year to year. And
if you take the gentry into consideration, they’ve grown feebler even
more than the peasants have. The gentleman nowadays has mastered
everything; he knows what he ought not to know, and what is the sense of
it? It makes you feel pitiful to look at him.... He is a thin, puny
little fellow, like some Hungarian or Frenchman; there is no dignity nor
air about him; it’s only in name he is a gentleman. There is no place
for him, poor dear, and nothing for him to do, and there is no making
out what he wants. Either he sits with a hook catching fish, or he lolls
on his back reading, or trots about among the peasants saying all sorts
of things to them, and those that are hungry go in for being clerks. So
he spends his life in vain. And he has no notion of doing something real
and useful. The gentry in old days were half of them generals, but
nowadays they are—a poor lot.”
“They are badly off nowadays,” said Meliton.
“They are poorer because God has taken away their strength. You can’t go
against God.”
Meliton stared at a fixed point again. After thinking a little he heaved
a sigh as staid, reasonable people do sigh, shook his head, and said:
“And all because of what? We have sinned greatly, we have forgotten
God.. and it seems that the time has come for all to end. And, after
all, the world can’t last for ever—it’s time to know when to take
leave.”
The shepherd sighed and, as though wishing to cut short an unpleasant
conversation, he walked away from the birch-tree and began silently
reckoning over the cows.
“Hey-hey-hey!” he shouted. “Hey-hey-hey! Bother you, the plague take
you! The devil has taken you into the thicket. Tu-lu-lu!”
With an angry face he went into the bushes to collect his herd. Meliton
got up and sauntered slowly along the edge of the wood. He looked at the
ground at his feet and pondered; he still wanted to think of something
which had not yet been touched by death. Patches of light crept upon the
slanting streaks of rain again; they danced on the tops of the trees and
died away among the wet leaves. Damka found a hedgehog under a bush, and
wanting to attract her master’s attention to it, barked and howled.
“Did you have an eclipse or not?” the shepherd called from the bushes.
“Yes, we had,” answered Meliton.
“Ah! Folks are complaining all about that there was one. It shows there
is disorder even in the heavens! It’s not for nothing.... Hey-hey-hey!
Hey!”
Driving his herd together to the edge of the wood, the shepherd leaned
against the birch-tree, looked up at the sky, without haste took his
pipe from his bosom and began playing. As before, he played mechanically
and took no more than five or six notes; as though the pipe had come
into his hands for the first time, the sounds floated from it
uncertainly, with no regularity, not blending into a tune, but to
Meliton, brooding on the destruction of the world, there was a sound in
it of something very depressing and revolting which he would much rather
not have heard. The highest, shrillest notes, which quivered and broke,
seemed to be weeping disconsolately, as though the pipe were sick and
frightened, while the lowest notes for some reason reminded him of the
mist, the dejected trees, the grey sky. Such music seemed in keeping
with the weather, the old man and his sayings.
Meliton wanted to complain. He went up to the old man and, looking at
his mournful, mocking face and at the pipe, muttered:
“And life has grown worse, grandfather. It is utterly impossible to
live. Bad crops, want.... Cattle plague continually, diseases of all
sorts.... We are crushed by poverty.”
The bailiff’s puffy face turned crimson and took a dejected, womanish
expression. He twirled his fingers as though seeking words to convey his
vague feeling and went on:
“Eight children, a wife... and my mother still living, and my whole
salary ten roubles a month and to board myself. My wife has become a
Satan from poverty.... I go off drinking myself. I am a sensible, steady
man; I have education. I ought to sit at home in peace, but I stray
about all day with my gun like a dog because it is more than I can
stand; my home is hateful to me!”
Feeling that his tongue was uttering something quite different from what
he wanted to say, the bailiff waved his hand and said bitterly:
“If the world’s going to end I wish it would make haste about it.
There’s no need to drag it out and make folks miserable for nothing....”
The old man took the pipe from his lips and, screwing up one eye, looked
into its little opening. His face was sad and covered with thick drops
like tears. He smiled and said:
“It’s a pity, my friend! My goodness, what a pity! The earth, the
forest, the sky, the beasts of all sorts—all this has been created, you
know, adapted; they all have their intelligence. It is all going to
ruin. And most of all I am sorry for people.”
There was the sound in the wood of heavy rain coming nearer. Meliton
looked in the direction of the sound, did up all his buttons, and said:
“I am going to the village. Good-bye, grandfather. What is your name?”
“Luka the Poor.”
“Well, good-bye, Luka! Thank you for your good words. Damka, ici!”
After parting from the shepherd Meliton made his way along the edge of
the wood, and then down hill to a meadow which by degrees turned into a
marsh. There was a squelch of water under his feet, and the rusty marsh
sedge, still green and juicy, drooped down to the earth as though afraid
of being trampled underfoot. Beyond the marsh, on the bank of the
Pestchanka, of which the old man had spoken, stood a row of willows, and
beyond the willows a barn looked dark blue in the mist. One could feel
the approach of that miserable, utterly inevitable season, when the
fields grow dark and the earth is muddy and cold, when the weeping
willow seems still more mournful and tears trickle down its stem, and
only the cranes fly away from the general misery, and even they, as
though afraid of insulting dispirited nature by the expression of their
happiness, fill the air with their mournful, dreary notes.
Meliton plodded along to the river, and heard the sounds of the pipe
gradually dying away behind him. He still wanted to complain. He looked
dejectedly about him, and he felt insufferably sorry for the sky and the
earth and the sun and the woods and his Damka, and when the highest
drawn-out note of the pipe floated quivering in the air, like a voice
weeping, he felt extremely bitter and resentful of the impropriety in
the conduct of nature.
The high note quivered, broke off, and the pipe was silent.
AGAFYA
DURING my stay in the district of S. I often used to go to see the
watchman Savva Stukatch, or simply Savka, in the kitchen gardens of
Dubovo. These kitchen gardens were my favorite resort for so-called
“mixed” fishing, when one goes out without knowing what day or hour one
may return, taking with one every sort of fishing tackle as well as a
store of provisions. To tell the truth, it was not so much the fishing
that attracted me as the peaceful stroll, the meals at no set time, the
talk with Savka, and being for so long face to face with the calm summer
nights. Savka was a young man of five-and-twenty, well grown and
handsome, and as strong as a flint. He had the reputation of being a
sensible and reasonable fellow. He could read and write, and very rarely
drank, but as a workman this strong and healthy young man was not worth
a farthing. A sluggish, overpowering sloth was mingled with the strength
in his muscles, which were strong as cords. Like everyone else in his
village, he lived in his own hut, and had his share of land, but neither
tilled it nor sowed it, and did not work at any sort of trade. His old
mother begged alms at people’s windows and he himself lived like a bird
of the air; he did not know in the morning what he would eat at midday.
It was not that he was lacking in will, or energy, or feeling for his
mother; it was simply that he felt no inclination for work and did not
recognize the advantage of it. His whole figure suggested unruffled
serenity, an innate, almost artistic passion for living carelessly,
never with his sleeves tucked up. When Savka’s young, healthy body had a
physical craving for muscular work, the young man abandoned himself
completely for a brief interval to some free but nonsensical pursuit,
such as sharpening skates not wanted for any special purpose, or racing
about after the peasant women. His favorite attitude was one of
concentrated immobility. He was capable of standing for hours at a
stretch in the same place with his eyes fixed on the same spot without
stirring. He never moved except on impulse, and then only when an
occasion presented itself for some rapid and abrupt action: catching a
running dog by the tail, pulling off a woman’s kerchief, or jumping over
a big hole. It need hardly be said that with such parsimony of movement
Savka was as poor as a mouse and lived worse than any homeless outcast.
As time went on, I suppose he accumulated arrears of taxes and, young
and sturdy as he was, he was sent by the commune to do an old man’s
job—to be watchman and scarecrow in the kitchen gardens. However much
they laughed at him for his premature senility he did not object to it.
This position, quiet and convenient for motionless contemplation,
exactly fitted his temperament.
It happened I was with this Savka one fine May evening. I remember I was
lying on a torn and dirty sackcloth cover close to the shanty from which
came a heavy, fragrant scent of hay. Clasping my hands under my head I
looked before me. At my feet was lying a wooden fork. Behind it Savka’s
dog Kutka stood out like a black patch, and not a dozen feet from Kutka
the ground ended abruptly in the steep bank of the little river. Lying
down I could not see the river; I could only see the tops of the young
willows growing thickly on the nearer bank, and the twisting, as it were
gnawed away, edges of the opposite bank. At a distance beyond the bank
on the dark hillside the huts of the village in which Savka lived lay
huddling together like frightened young partridges. Beyond the hill the
afterglow of sunset still lingered in the sky. One pale crimson streak
was all that was left, and even that began to be covered by little
clouds as a fire with ash.
A copse with alder-trees, softly whispering, and from time to time
shuddering in the fitful breeze, lay, a dark blur, on the right of the
kitchen gardens; on the left stretched the immense plain. In the
distance, where the eye could not distinguish between the sky and the
plain, there was a bright gleam of light. A little way off from me sat
Savka. With his legs tucked under him like a Turk and his head hanging,
he looked pensively at Kutka. Our hooks with live bait on them had long
been in the river, and we had nothing left to do but to abandon
ourselves to repose, which Savka, who was never exhausted and always
rested, loved so much. The glow had not yet quite died away, but the
summer night was already enfolding nature in its caressing, soothing
embrace.
Everything was sinking into its first deep sleep except some night bird
unfamiliar to me, which indolently uttered a long, protracted cry in
several distinct notes like the phrase, “Have you seen Ni-ki-ta?” and
immediately answered itself, “Seen him, seen him, seen him!”
“Why is it the nightingales aren’t singing tonight?” I asked Savka.
He turned slowly towards me. His features were large, but his face was
open, soft, and expressive as a woman’s. Then he gazed with his mild,
dreamy eyes at the copse, at the willows, slowly pulled a whistle out of
his pocket, put it in his mouth and whistled the note of a hen-
nightingale. And at once, as though in answer to his call, a landrail
called on the opposite bank.
“There’s a nightingale for you...” laughed Savka. “Drag-drag! drag-drag!
just like pulling at a hook, and yet I bet he thinks he is singing,
too.”
“I like that bird,” I said. “Do you know, when the birds are migrating
the landrail does not fly, but runs along the ground? It only flies over
the rivers and the sea, but all the rest it does on foot.”
“Upon my word, the dog...” muttered Savka, looking with respect in the
direction of the calling landrail.
Knowing how fond Savka was of listening, I told him all I had learned
about the landrail from sportsman’s books. From the landrail I passed
imperceptibly to the migration of the birds. Savka listened attentively,
looking at me without bJlinking, and smiling all the while with
pleasure.
“And which country is most the bird’s home? Ours or those foreign
parts?” he asked.
“Ours, of course. The bird itself is hatched here, and it hatches out
its little ones here in its native country, and they only fly off there
to escape being frozen.”
“It’s interesting,” said Savka. “Whatever one talks about it is always
interesting. Take a bird now, or a man... or take this little stone;
there’s something to learn about all of them.... Ah, sir, if I had known
you were coming I wouldn’t have told a woman to come here this
evening.... She asked to come to-day.”
“Oh, please don’t let me be in your way,” I said. “I can lie down in the
wood....”
“What next! She wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t come till to-morrow....
If only she would sit quiet and listen, but she always wants to be
slobbering.... You can’t have a good talk when she’s here.”
“Are you expecting Darya?” I asked, after a pause.
“No... a new one has asked to come this evening... Agafya, the
signalman’s wife.”
Savka said this in his usual passionless, somewhat hollow voice, as
though he were talking of tobacco or porridge, while I started with
surprise. I knew Agafya.... She was quite a young peasant woman of
nineteen or twenty, who had been married not more than a year before to
a railway signalman, a fine young fellow. She lived in the village, and
her husband came home there from the line every night.
“Your goings on with the women will lead to trouble, my boy,” said I.
“Well, may be....”
And after a moment’s thought Savka added:
“I’ve said so to the women; they won’t heed me....They don’t trouble
about it, the silly things!”
Silence followed.... Meanwhile the darkness was growing thicker and
thicker, and objects began to lose their contours. The streak behind the
hill had completely died away, and the stars were growing brighter and
more luminous.... The mournfully monotonous chirping of the
grasshoppers, the call of the landrail, and the cry of the quail did not
destroy the stillness of the night, but, on the contrary, gave it an
added monotony. It seemed as though the soft sounds that enchanted the
ear came, not from birds or insects, but from the stars looking down
upon us from the sky....
Savka was the first to break the silence. He slowly turned his eyes from
black Kutka and said:
“I see you are dull, sir. Let’s have supper.”
And without waiting for my consent he crept on his stomach into the
shanty, rummaged about there, making the whole edifice tremble like a
leaf; then he crawled back and set before me my vodka and an earthenware
bowl; in the bowl there were baked eggs, lard scones made of rye, pieces
of black bread, and something else.... We had a drink from a little
crooked glass that wouldn’t stand, and then we fell upon the food....
Coarse grey salt, dirty, greasy cakes, eggs tough as india-rubber, but
how nice it all was!
“You live all alone, but what lots of good things you have,” I said,
pointing to the bowl. “Where do you get them from?”
“The women bring them,” mumbled Savka.
“What do they bring them to you for?”
“Oh... from pity.”
Not only Savka’s menu, but his clothing, too, bore traces of feminine
“pity.” Thus I noticed that he had on, that evening, a new woven belt
and a crimson ribbon on which a copper cross hung round his dirty neck.
I knew of the weakness of the fair sex for Savka, and I knew that he did
not like talking about it, and so I did not carry my inquiries any
further. Besides there was not time to talk.... Kutka, who had been
fidgeting about near us and patiently waiting for scraps, suddenly
pricked up his ears and growled. We heard in the distance repeated
splashing of water.
“Someone is coming by the ford,” said Savka.
Three minutes later Kutka growled again and made a sound like a cough.
“Shsh!” his master shouted at him.
In the darkness there was a muffled thud of timid footsteps, and the
silhouette of a woman appeared out of the copse. I recognized her,
although it was dark—it was Agafya. She came up to us diffidently and
stopped, breathing hard. She was breathless, probably not so much from
walking as from fear and the unpleasant sensation everyone experiences
in wading across a river at night. Seeing near the shanty not one but
two persons, she uttered a faint cry and fell back a step.
“Ah... that is you!” said Savka, stuffing a scone into his mouth.
“Ye-es... I,” she muttered, dropping on the ground a bundle of some sort
and looking sideways at me. “Yakov sent his greetings to you and told me
to give you... something here....”
“Come, why tell stories? Yakov!” laughed Savka. “There is no need for
lying; the gentleman knows why you have come! Sit down; you shall have
supper with us.”
Agafya looked sideways at me and sat down irresolutely.
“I thought you weren’t coming this evening,” Savka said, after a
prolonged silence. “Why sit like that? Eat! Or shall I give you a drop
of vodka?”
“What an idea!” laughed Agafya; “do you think you have got hold of a
drunkard?...”
“Oh, drink it up.... Your heart will feel warmer.... There!”
Savka gave Agafya the crooked glass. She slowly drank the vodka, ate
nothing with it, but drew a deep breath when she had finished.
“You’ve brought something,” said Savka, untying the bundle and throwing
a condescending, jesting shade into his voice. “Women can never come
without bringing something. Ah, pie and potatoes.... They live well,” he
sighed, turning to me. “They are the only ones in the whole village who
have got potatoes left from the winter!”
In the darkness I did not see Agafya’s face, but from the movement of
her shoulders and head it seemed to me that she could not take her eyes
off Savka’s face. To avoid being the third person at this tryst, I
decided to go for a walk and got up. But at that moment a nightingale in
the wood suddenly uttered two low contralto notes. Half a minute later
it gave a tiny high trill and then, having thus tried its voice, began
singing. Savka jumped up and listened.
“It’s the same one as yesterday,” he said. “Wait a minute.”
And, getting up, he went noiselessly to the wood.
“Why, what do you want with it?” I shouted out after him, “Stop!”
Savka shook his hand as much as to say, “Don’t shout,” and vanished into
the darkness. Savka was an excellent sportsman and fisherman when he
liked, but his talents in this direction were as completely thrown away
as his strength. He was too slothful to do things in the routine way,
and vented his passion for sport in useless tricks. For instance, he
would catch nightingales only with his hands, would shoot pike with a
fowling piece, he would spend whole hours by the river trying to catch
little fish with a big hook.
Left alone with me, Agafya coughed and passed her hand several times
over her forehead.... She began to feel a little drunk from the vodka.
“How are you getting on, Agasha?” I asked her, after a long silence,
when it began to be awkward to remain mute any longer.
“Very well, thank God.... Don’t tell anyone, sir, will you?” she added
suddenly in a whisper.
“That’s all right,” I reassured her. “But how reckless you are,
Agasha!... What if Yakov finds out?”
“He won’t find out.”
“But what if he does?”
“No... I shall be at home before he is. He is on the line now, and he
will come back when the mail train brings him, and from here I can hear
when the train’s coming....”
Agafya once more passed her hand over her forehead and looked away in
the direction in which Savka had vanished. The nightingale was singing.
Some night bird flew low down close to the ground and, noticing us, was
startled, fluttered its wings and flew across to the other side of the
river.
Soon the nightingale was silent, but Savka did not come back. Agafya got
up, took a few steps uneasily, and sat down again.
“What is he doing?” she could not refrain from saying. “The train’s not
coming in to-morrow! I shall have to go away directly.”
“Savka,” I shouted. “Savka.”
I was not answered even by an echo. Agafya moved uneasily and sat down
again.
“It’s time I was going,” she said in an agitated voice. “The train will
be here directly! I know when the trains come in.”
The poor woman was not mistaken. Before a quarter of an hour had passed
a sound was heard in the distance.
Agafya kept her eyes fixed on the copse for a long time and moved her
hands impatiently.
“Why, where can he be?” she said, laughing nervously. “Where has the
devil carried him? I am going! I really must be going.”
Meanwhile the noise was growing more and more distinct. By now one could
distinguish the rumble of the wheels from the heavy gasps of the engine.
Then we heard the whistle, the train crossed the bridge with a hollow
rumble... another minute and all was still.
“I’ll wait one minute more,” said Agafya, sitting down resolutely. “So
be it, I’ll wait.”
At last Savka appeared in the darkness. He walked noiselessly on the
crumbling earth of the kitchen gardens and hummed something softly to
himself.
“Here’s a bit of luck; what do you say to that now?” he said gaily. “As
soon as I got up to the bush and began taking aim with my hand it left
off singing! Ah, the bald dog! I waited and waited to see when it would
begin again, but I had to give it up.”
Savka flopped clumsily down to the ground beside Agafya and, to keep his
balance, clutched at her waist with both hands.
“Why do you look cross, as though your aunt were your mother?” he asked.
With all his soft-heartedness and good-nature, Savka despised women. He
behaved carelessly, condescendingly with them, and even stooped to
scornful laughter of their feelings for himself. God knows, perhaps this
careless, contemptuous manner was one of the causes of his irresistible
attraction for the village Dulcineas. He was handsome and well-built; in
his eyes there was always a soft friendliness, even when he was looking
at the women he so despised, but the fascination was not to be explained
by merely external qualities. Apart from his happy exterior and original
manner, one must suppose that the touching position of Savka as an
acknowledged failure and an unhappy exile from his own hut to the
kitchen gardens also had an influence upon the women.
“Tell the gentleman what you have come here for!” Savka went on, still
holding Agafya by the waist. “Come, tell him, you good married woman!
Ho-ho! Shall we have another drop of vodka, friend Agasha?”
I got up and, threading my way between the plots, I walked the length of
the kitchen garden. The dark beds looked like flattened-out graves. They
smelt of dug earth and the tender dampness of plants beginning to be
covered with dew.... A red light was still gleaming on the left. It
winked genially and seemed to smile.
I heard a happy laugh. It was Agafya laughing.
“And the train?” I thought. “The train has come in long ago.”
Waiting a little longer, I went back to the shanty. Savka was sitting
motionless, his legs crossed like a Turk, and was softly, scarcely
audibly humming a song consisting of words of one syllable something
like: “Out on you, fie on you... I and you.” Agafya, intoxicated by the
vodka, by Savka’s scornful caresses, and by the stifling warmth of the
night, was lying on the earth beside him, pressing her face convulsively
to his knees. She was so carried away by her feelings that she did not
even notice my arrival.
“Agasha, the train has been in a long time,” I said.
“It’s time—it’s time you were gone,” Savka, tossing his head, took up my
thought. “What are you sprawling here for? You shameless hussy!”
Agafya started, took her head from his knees, glanced at me, and sank
down beside him again.
“You ought to have gone long ago,” I said.
Agafya turned round and got up on one knee.... She was unhappy.... For
half a minute her whole figure, as far as I could distinguish it through
the darkness, expressed conflict and hesitation. There was an instant
when, seeming to come to herself, she drew herself up to get upon her
feet, but then some invincible and implacable force seemed to push her
whole body, and she sank down beside Savka again.
“Bother him!” she said, with a wild, guttural laugh, and reckless
determination, impotence, and pain could be heard in that laugh.
I strolled quietly away to the copse, and from there down to the river,
where our fishing lines were set. The river slept. Some soft, fluffy-
petalled flower on a tall stalk touched my cheek tenderly like a child
who wants to let one know it’s awake. To pass the time I felt for one of
the lines and pulled at it. It yielded easily and hung limply—nothing
had been caught.... The further bank and the village could not be seen.
A light gleamed in one hut, but soon went out. I felt my way along the
bank, found a hollow place which I had noticed in the daylight, and sat
down in it as in an arm-chair. I sat there a long time.... I saw the
stars begin to grow misty and lose their brightness; a cool breath
passed over the earth like a faint sigh and touched the leaves of the
slumbering osiers....
“A-ga-fya!” a hollow voice called from the village. “Agafya!”
It was the husband, who had returned home, and in alarm was looking for
his wife in the village. At that moment there came the sound of
unrestrained laughter: the wife, forgetful of everything, sought in her
intoxication to make up by a few hours of happiness for the misery
awaiting her next day.
I dropped asleep.
When I woke up Savka was sitting beside me and lightly shaking my
shoulder. The river, the copse, both banks, green and washed, trees and
fields—all were bathed in bright morning light. Through the slim trunks
of the trees the rays of the newly risen sun beat upon my back.
“So that’s how you catch fish?” laughed Savka. “Get up!”
I got up, gave a luxurious stretch, and began greedily drinking in the
damp and fragrant air.
“Has Agasha gone?” I asked.
“There she is,” said Savka, pointing in the direction of the ford.
I glanced and saw Agafya. Dishevelled, with her kerchief dropping off
her head, she was crossing the river, holding up her skirt. Her legs
were scarcely moving....
“The cat knows whose meat it has eaten,” muttered Savka, screwing up his
eyes as he looked at her. “She goes with her tail hanging down.... They
are sly as cats, these women, and timid as hares.... She didn’t go,
silly thing, in the evening when we told her to! Now she will catch it,
and they’ll flog me again at the peasant court... all on account of the
women....”
Agafya stepped upon the bank and went across the fields to the village.
At first she walked fairly boldly, but soon terror and excitement got
the upper hand; she turned round fearfully, stopped and took breath.
“Yes, you are frightened!” Savka laughed mournfully, looking at the
bright green streak left by Agafya in the dewy grass. “She doesn’t want
to go! Her husband’s been standing waiting for her for a good hour....
Did you see him?”
Savka said the last words with a smile, but they sent a chill to my
heart. In the village, near the furthest hut, Yakov was standing in the
road, gazing fixedly at his returning wife. He stood without stirring,
and was as motionless as a post. What was he thinking as he looked at
her? What words was he preparing to greet her with? Agafya stood still a
little while, looked round once more as though expecting help from us,
and went on. I have never seen anyone, drunk or sober, move as she did.
Agafya seemed to be shrivelled up by her husband’s eyes. At one time she
moved in zigzags, then she moved her feet up and down without going
forward, bending her knees and stretching out her hands, then she
staggered back. When she had gone another hundred paces she looked round
once more and sat down.
“You ought at least to hide behind a bush...” I said to Savka. “If the
husband sees you...”
“He knows, anyway, who it is Agafya has come from.... The women don’t go
to the kitchen garden at night for cabbages—we all know that.”
I glanced at Savka’s face. It was pale and puckered up with a look of
fastidious pity such as one sees in the faces of people watching
tortured animals.
“What’s fun for the cat is tears for the mouse...” he muttered.
Agafya suddenly jumped up, shook her head, and with a bold step went
towards her husband. She had evidently plucked up her courage and made
up her mind.
AT CHRISTMAS TIME I
|“WHAT shall I write?” said Yegor, and he dipped his pen in the ink.
Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years. Her daughter Yefimya
had gone after her wedding to Petersburg, had sent them two letters, and
since then seemed to vanish out of their lives; there had been no sight
nor sound of her. And whether the old woman were milking her cow at
dawn, or heating her stove, or dozing at night, she was always thinking
of one and the same thing—what was happening to Yefimya, whether she
were alive out yonder. She ought to have sent a letter, but the old
father could not write, and there was no one to write.
But now Christmas had come, and Vasilisa could not bear it any longer,
and went to the tavern to Yegor, the brother of the innkeeper’s wife,
who had sat in the tavern doing nothing ever since he came back from the
army; people said that he could write letters very well if he were
properly paid. Vasilisa talked to the cook at the tavern, then to the
mistress of the house, then to Yegor himself. They agreed upon fifteen
kopecks.
And now—it happened on the second day of the holidays, in the tavern
kitchen—Yegor was sitting at the table, holding the pen in his hand.
Vasilisa was standing before him, pondering with an expression of
anxiety and woe on her face. Pyotr, her husband, a very thin old man
with a brownish bald patch, had come with her; he stood looking straight
before him like a blind man. On the stove a piece of pork was being
braised in a saucepan; it was spurting and hissing, and seemed to be
actually saying: “Flu-flu-flu.” It was stifling.
“What am I to write?” Yegor asked again.
“What?” asked Vasilisa, looking at him angrily and suspiciously. “Don’t
worry me! You are not writing for nothing; no fear, you’ll be paid for
it. Come, write: ‘To our dear son-in-law, Andrey Hrisanfitch, and to our
only beloved daughter, Yefimya Petrovna, with our love we send a low bow
and our parental blessing abiding for ever.’”
“Written; fire away.”
“‘And we wish them a happy Christmas; we are alive and well, and I wish
you the same, please the Lord... the Heavenly King.’”
Vasilisa pondered and exchanged glances with the old man.
“‘And I wish you the same, please the Lord the Heavenly King,’” she
repeated, beginning to cry.
She could say nothing more. And yet before, when she lay awake thinking
at night, it had seemed to her that she could not get all she had to say
into a dozen letters. Since the time when her daughter had gone away
with her husband much water had flowed into the sea, the old people had
lived feeling bereaved, and sighed heavily at night as though they had
buried their daughter. And how many events had occurred in the village
since then, how many marriages and deaths! How long the winters had
been! How long the nights!
“It’s hot,” said Yegor, unbuttoning his waistcoat. “It must be seventy
degrees. What more?” he asked.
The old people were silent.
“What does your son-in-law do in Petersburg?” asked Yegor.
“He was a soldier, my good friend,” the old man answered in a weak
voice. “He left the service at the same time as you did. He was a
soldier, and now, to be sure, he is at Petersburg at a hydropathic
establishment. The doctor treats the sick with water. So he, to be sure,
is house-porter at the doctor’s.”
“Here it is written down,” said the old woman, taking a letter out of
her pocket. “We got it from Yefimya, goodness knows when. Maybe they are
no longer in this world.”
Yegor thought a little and began writing rapidly:
“At the present time”—he wrote—“since your destiny through your own
doing allotted you to the Military Career, we counsel you to look into
the Code of Disciplinary Offences and Fundamental Laws of the War
Office, and you will see in that law the Civilization of the Officials
of the War Office.”
He wrote and kept reading aloud what was written, while Vasilisa
considered what she ought to write: how great had been their want the
year before, how their corn had not lasted even till Christmas, how they
had to sell their cow. She ought to ask for money, ought to write that
the old father was often ailing and would soon no doubt give up his soul
to God... but how to express this in words? What must be said first and
what afterwards?
“Take note,” Yegor went on writing, “in volume five of the Army
Regulations soldier is a common noun and a proper one, a soldier of the
first rank is called a general, and of the last a private....”
The old man stirred his lips and said softly:
“It would be all right to have a look at the grandchildren.”
“What grandchildren?” asked the old woman, and she looked angrily at
him; “perhaps there are none.”
“Well, but perhaps there are. Who knows?”
“And thereby you can judge,” Yegor hurried on, “what is the enemy
without and what is the enemy within. The foremost of our enemies within
is Bacchus.” The pen squeaked, executing upon the paper flourishes like
fish-hooks. Yegor hastened and read over every line several times. He
sat on a stool sprawling his broad feet under the table, well-fed,
bursting with health, with a coarse animal face and a red bull neck. He
was vulgarity itself: coarse, conceited, invincible, proud of having
been born and bred in a pot-house; and Vasilisa quite understood the
vulgarity, but could not express it in words, and could only look
angrily and suspiciously at Yegor. Her head was beginning to ache, and
her thoughts were in confusion from the sound of his voice and his
unintelligible words, from the heat and the stuffiness, and she said
nothing and thought nothing, but simply waited for him to finish
scribbling. But the old man looked with full confidence. He believed in
his old woman who had brought him there, and in Yegor; and when he had
mentioned the hydropathic establishment it could be seen that he
believed in the establishment and the healing efficacy of water.
Having finished the letter, Yegor got up and read the whole of it
through from the beginning. The old man did not understand, but he
nodded his head trustfully.
“That’s all right; it is smooth...” he said. “God give you health.
That’s all right....”
They laid on the table three five-kopeck pieces and went out of the
tavern; the old man looked immovably straight before him as though he
were blind, and perfect trustfulness was written on his face; but as
Vasilisa came out of the tavern she waved angrily at the dog, and said
angrily:
“Ugh, the plague.”
The old woman did not sleep all night; she was disturbed by thoughts,
and at daybreak she got up, said her prayers, and went to the station to
send off the letter.
It was between eight and nine miles to the station.
II
Dr. B. O. Mozelweiser’s hydropathic establishment worked on New Year’s
Day exactly as on ordinary days; the only difference was that the
porter, Andrey Hrisanfitch, had on a uniform with new braiding, his
boots had an extra polish, and he greeted every visitor with “A Happy
New Year to you!”
It was the morning; Andrey Hrisanfitch was standing at the door, reading
the newspaper. Just at ten o’clock there arrived a general, one of the
habitual visitors, and directly after him the postman; Andrey
Hrisanfitch helped the general off with his great-coat, and said:
“A Happy New Year to your Excellency!”
“Thank you, my good fellow; the same to you.”
And at the top of the stairs the general asked, nodding towards the door
(he asked the same question every day and always forgot the answer):
“And what is there in that room?”
“The massage room, your Excellency.”
When the general’s steps had died away Andrey Hrisanfitch looked at the
post that had come, and found one addressed to himself. He tore it open,
read several lines, then, looking at the newspaper, he walked without
haste to his own room, which was downstairs close by at the end of the
passage. His wife Yefimya was sitting on the bed, feeding her baby;
another child, the eldest, was standing by, laying its curly head on her
knee; a third was asleep on the bed.
Going into the room, Andrey gave his wife the letter and said:
“From the country, I suppose.”
Then he walked out again without taking his eyes from the paper. He
could hear Yefimya with a shaking voice reading the first lines. She
read them and could read no more; these lines were enough for her. She
burst into tears, and hugging her eldest child, kissing him, she began
saying—and it was hard to say whether she were laughing or crying:
“It’s from granny, from grandfather,” she said. “From the country....
The Heavenly Mother, Saints and Martyrs! The snow lies heaped up under
the roofs now... the trees are as white as white. The boys slide on
little sledges... and dear old bald grandfather is on the stove... and
there is a little yellow dog.... My own darlings!”
Andrey Hrisanfitch, hearing this, recalled that his wife had on three or
four occasions given him letters and asked him to send them to the
country, but some important business had always prevented him; he had
not sent them, and the letters somehow got lost.
“And little hares run about in the fields,” Yefimya went on chanting,
kissing her boy and shedding tears. “Grandfather is kind and gentle;
granny is good, too—kind-hearted. They are warm-hearted in the country,
they are God-fearing... and there is a little church in the village; the
peasants sing in the choir. Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother and Defender,
take us away from here!”
Andrey Hrisanfitch returned to his room to smoke a little till there was
another ring at the door, and Yefimya ceased speaking, subsided, and
wiped her eyes, though her lips were still quivering. She was very much
frightened of him—oh, how frightened of him! She trembled and was
reduced to terror by the sound of his steps, by the look in his eyes,
and dared not utter a word in his presence.
Andrey Hrisanfitch lighted a cigarette, but at that very moment there
was a ring from upstairs. He put out his cigarette, and, assuming a very
grave face, hastened to his front door.
The general was coming downstairs, fresh and rosy from his bath.
“And what is there in that room?” he asked, pointing to a door.
Andrey Hrisanfitch put his hands down swiftly to the seams of his
trousers, and pronounced loudly:
“Charcot douche, your Excellency!”
GUSEV I
IT was getting dark; it would soon be night.
Gusev, a discharged soldier, sat up in his hammock and said in an
undertone:
“I say, Pavel Ivanitch. A soldier at Sutchan told me: while they were
sailing a big fish came into collision with their ship and stove a hole
in it.”
The nondescript individual whom he was addressing, and whom everyone in
the ship’s hospital called Pavel Ivanitch, was silent, as though he had
not heard.
And again a stillness followed... The wind frolicked with the rigging,
the screw throbbed, the waves lashed, the hammocks creaked, but the ear
had long ago become accustomed to these sounds, and it seemed that
everything around was asleep and silent. It was dreary. The three
invalids—two soldiers and a sailor—who had been playing cards all the
day were asleep and talking in their dreams.
It seemed as though the ship were beginning to rock. The hammock slowly
rose and fell under Gusev, as though it were heaving a sigh, and this
was repeated once, twice, three times.... Something crashed on to the
floor with a clang: it must have been a jug falling down.
“The wind has broken loose from its chain...” said Gusev, listening.
This time Pavel Ivanitch cleared his throat and answered irritably:
“One minute a vessel’s running into a fish, the next, the wind’s
breaking loose from its chain. Is the wind a beast that it can break
loose from its chain?”
“That’s how christened folk talk.”
“They are as ignorant as you are then. They say all sorts of things. One
must keep a head on one’s shoulders and use one’s reason. You are a
senseless creature.”
Pavel Ivanitch was subject to sea-sickness. When the sea was rough he
was usually ill-humoured, and the merest trifle would make him
irritable. And in Gusev’s opinion there was absolutely nothing to be
vexed about. What was there strange or wonderful, for instance, in the
fish or in the wind’s breaking loose from its chain? Suppose the fish
were as big as a mountain and its back were as hard as a sturgeon: and
in the same way, supposing that away yonder at the end of the world
there stood great stone walls and the fierce winds were chained up to
the walls... if they had not broken loose, why did they tear about all
over the sea like maniacs, and struggle to escape like dogs? If they
were not chained up, what did become of them when it was calm?
Gusev pondered for a long time about fishes as big as a mountain and
stout, rusty chains, then he began to feel dull and thought of his
native place to which he was returning after five years’ service in the
East. He pictured an immense pond covered with snow.... On one side of
the pond the red-brick building of the potteries with a tall chimney and
clouds of black smoke; on the other side—a village.... His brother
Alexey comes out in a sledge from the fifth yard from the end; behind
him sits his little son Vanka in big felt over-boots, and his little
girl Akulka, also in big felt boots. Alexey has been drinking, Vanka is
laughing, Akulka’s face he could not see, she had muffled herself up.
“You never know, he’ll get the children frozen...” thought Gusev. “Lord
send them sense and judgment that they may honour their father and
mother and not be wiser than their parents.”
“They want re-soleing,” a delirious sailor says in a bass voice. “Yes,
yes!”
Gusev’s thoughts break off, and instead of a pond there suddenly appears
apropos of nothing a huge bull’s head without eyes, and the horse and
sledge are not driving along, but are whirling round and round in a
cloud of smoke. But still he was glad he had seen his own folks. He held
his breath from delight, shudders ran all over him, and his fingers
twitched.
“The Lord let us meet again,” he muttered feverishly, but he at once
opened his eyes and sought in the darkness for water.
He drank and lay back, and again the sledge was moving, then again the
bull’s head without eyes, smoke, clouds.... And so on till daybreak.
II
The first outline visible in the darkness was a blue circle—the little
round window; then little by little Gusev could distinguish his
neighbour in the next hammock, Pavel Ivanitch. The man slept sitting up,
as he could not breathe lying down. His face was grey, his nose was long
and sharp, his eyes looked huge from the terrible thinness of his face,
his temples were sunken, his beard was skimpy, his hair was long....
Looking at him you could not make out of what class he was, whether he
were a gentleman, a merchant, or a peasant. Judging from his expression
and his long hair he might have been a hermit or a lay brother in a
monastery—but if one listened to what he said it seemed that he could
not be a monk. He was worn out by his cough and his illness and by the
stifling heat, and breathed with difficulty, moving his parched lips.
Noticing that Gusev was looking at him he turned his face towards him
and said:
“I begin to guess.... Yes.... I understand it all perfectly now.”
“What do you understand, Pavel Ivanitch?”
“I’ll tell you.... It has always seemed to me strange that terribly ill
as you are you should be here in a steamer where it is so hot and
stifling and we are always being tossed up and down, where, in fact,
everything threatens you with death; now it is all clear to me....
Yes.... Your doctors put you on the steamer to get rid of you. They get
sick of looking after poor brutes like you.... You don’t pay them
anything, they have a bother with you, and you damage their records with
your deaths—so, of course, you are brutes! It’s not difficult to get rid
of you.... All that is necessary is, in the first place, to have no
conscience or humanity, and, secondly, to deceive the steamer
authorities. The first condition need hardly be considered, in that
respect we are artists; and one can always succeed in the second with a
little practice. In a crowd of four hundred healthy soldiers and sailors
half a dozen sick ones are not conspicuous; well, they drove you all on
to the steamer, mixed you with the healthy ones, hurriedly counted you
over, and in the confusion nothing amiss was noticed, and when the
steamer had started they saw that there were paralytics and consumptives
in the last stage lying about on the deck....”
Gusev did not understand Pavel Ivanitch; but supposing he was being
blamed, he said in self-defence:
“I lay on the deck because I had not the strength to stand; when we were
unloaded from the barge on to the ship I caught a fearful chill.”
“It’s revolting,” Pavel Ivanitch went on. “The worst of it is they know
perfectly well that you can’t last out the long journey, and yet they
put you here. Supposing you get as far as the Indian Ocean, what then?
It’s horrible to think of it.... And that’s their gratitude for your
faithful, irreproachable service!”
Pavel Ivanitch’s eyes looked angry; he frowned contemptuously and said,
gasping:
“Those are the people who ought to be plucked in the newspapers till the
feathers fly in all directions.”
The two sick soldiers and the sailor were awake and already playing
cards. The sailor was half reclining in his hammock, the soldiers were
sitting near him on the floor in the most uncomfortable attitudes. One
of the soldiers had his right arm in a sling, and the hand was swathed
up in a regular bundle so that he held his cards under his right arm or
in the crook of his elbow while he played with the left. The ship was
rolling heavily. They could not stand up, nor drink tea, nor take their
medicines.
“Were you an officer’s servant?” Pavel Ivanitch asked Gusev.
“Yes, an officer’s servant.”
“My God, my God!” said Pavel Ivanitch, and he shook his head mournfully.
“To tear a man out of his home, drag him twelve thousand miles away,
then to drive him into consumption and... and what is it all for, one
wonders? To turn him into a servant for some Captain Kopeikin or
midshipman Dirka! How logical!”
“It’s not hard work, Pavel Ivanitch. You get up in the morning and clean
the boots, get the samovar, sweep the rooms, and then you have nothing
more to do. The lieutenant is all the day drawing plans, and if you like
you can say your prayers, if you like you can read a book or go out into
the street. God grant everyone such a life.”
“Yes, very nice, the lieutenant draws plans all the day and you sit in
the kitchen and pine for home.... Plans indeed!... It is not plans that
matter, but a human life. Life is not given twice, it must be treated
mercifully.”
“Of course, Pavel Ivanitch, a bad man gets no mercy anywhere, neither at
home nor in the army, but if you live as you ought and obey orders, who
has any need to insult you? The officers are educated gentlemen, they
understand.... In five years I was never once in prison, and I was never
struck a blow, so help me God, but once.”
“What for?”
“For fighting. I have a heavy hand, Pavel Ivanitch. Four Chinamen came
into our yard; they were bringing firewood or something, I don’t
remember. Well, I was bored and I knocked them about a bit, one’s nose
began bleeding, damn the fellow.... The lieutenant saw it through the
little window, he was angry and gave me a box on the ear.”
“Foolish, pitiful man...” whispered Pavel Ivanitch. “You don’t
understand anything.”
He was utterly exhausted by the tossing of the ship and closed his eyes;
his head alternately fell back and dropped forward on his breast.
Several times he tried to lie down but nothing came of it; his
difficulty in breathing prevented it.
“And what did you hit the four Chinamen for?” he asked a little while
afterwards.
“Oh, nothing. They came into the yard and I hit them.”
And a stillness followed.... The card-players had been playing for two
hours with enthusiasm and loud abuse of one another, but the motion of
the ship overcame them, too; they threw aside the cards and lay down.
Again Gusev saw the big pond, the brick building, the village.... Again
the sledge was coming along, again Vanka was laughing and Akulka, silly
little thing, threw open her fur coat and stuck her feet out, as much as
to say: “Look, good people, my snowboots are not like Vanka’s, they are
new ones.”
“Five years old, and she has no sense yet,” Gusev muttered in delirium.
“Instead of kicking your legs you had better come and get your soldier
uncle a drink. I will give you something nice.”
Then Andron with a flintlock gun on his shoulder was carrying a hare he
had killed, and he was followed by the decrepit old Jew Isaitchik, who
offers to barter the hare for a piece of soap; then the black calf in
the shed, then Domna sewing at a shirt and crying about something, and
then again the bull’s head without eyes, black smoke....
Overhead someone gave a loud shout, several sailors ran by, they seemed
to be dragging something bulky over the deck, something fell with a
crash. Again they ran by.... Had something gone wrong? Gusev raised his
head, listened, and saw that the two soldiers and the sailor were
playing cards again; Pavel Ivanitch was sitting up moving his lips. It
was stifling, one hadn’t strength to breathe, one was thirsty, the water
was warm, disgusting. The ship heaved as much as ever.
Suddenly something strange happened to one of the soldiers playing
cards.... He called hearts diamonds, got muddled in his score, and
dropped his cards, then with a frightened, foolish smile looked round at
all of them.
“I shan’t be a minute, mates, I’ll...” he said, and lay down on the
floor.
Everybody was amazed. They called to him, he did not answer.
“Stephan, maybe you are feeling bad, eh?” the soldier with his arm in a
sling asked him. “Perhaps we had better bring the priest, eh?”
“Have a drink of water, Stepan...” said the sailor. “Here, lad, drink.”
“Why are you knocking the jug against his teeth?” said Gusev angrily.
“Don’t you see, turnip head?”
“What?”
“What?” Gusev repeated, mimicking him. “There is no breath in him, he is
dead! That’s what! What nonsensical people, Lord have mercy on us...!”
III
The ship was not rocking and Pavel Ivanitch was more cheerful. He was no
longer ill-humoured. His face had a boastful, defiant, mocking
expression. He looked as though he wanted to say: “Yes, in a minute I
will tell you something that will make you split your sides with
laughing.” The little round window was open and a soft breeze was
blowing on Pavel Ivanitch. There was a sound of voices, of the plash of
oars in the water.... Just under the little window someone began droning
in a high, unpleasant voice: no doubt it was a Chinaman singing.
“Here we are in the harbour,” said Pavel Ivanitch, smiling ironically.
“Only another month and we shall be in Russia. Well, worthy gentlemen
and warriors! I shall arrive at Odessa and from there go straight to
Harkov. In Harkov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him and
say, ‘Come, old man, put aside your horrid subjects, ladies’ amours and
the beauties of nature, and show up human depravity.’”
For a minute he pondered, then said:
“Gusev, do you know how I took them in?”
“Took in whom, Pavel Ivanitch?”
“Why, these fellows.... You know that on this steamer there is only a
first-class and a third-class, and they only allow peasants—that is the
rift-raft—to go in the third. If you have got on a reefer jacket and
have the faintest resemblance to a gentleman or a bourgeois you must go
first-class, if you please. You must fork out five hundred roubles if
you die for it. Why, I ask, have you made such a rule? Do you want to
raise the prestige of educated Russians thereby? Not a bit of it. We
don’t let you go third-class simply because a decent person can’t go
third-class; it is very horrible and disgusting. Yes, indeed. I am very
grateful for such solicitude for decent people’s welfare. But in any
case, whether it is nasty there or nice, five hundred roubles I haven’t
got. I haven’t pilfered government money. I haven’t exploited the
natives, I haven’t trafficked in contraband, I have flogged no one to
death, so judge whether I have the right to travel first-class and even
less to reckon myself of the educated class? But you won’t catch them
with logic.... One has to resort to deception. I put on a workman’s coat
and high boots, I assumed a drunken, servile mug and went to the agents:
‘Give us a little ticket, your honour,’ said I....”
“Why, what class do you belong to?” asked a sailor.
“Clerical. My father was an honest priest, he always told the great ones
of the world the truth to their faces; and he had a great deal to put up
with in consequence.”
Pavel Ivanitch was exhausted with talking and gasped for breath, but
still went on:
“Yes, I always tell people the truth to their faces. I am not afraid of
anyone or anything. There is a vast difference between me and all of you
in that respect. You are in darkness, you are blind, crushed; you see
nothing and what you do see you don’t understand.... You are told the
wind breaks loose from its chain, that you are beasts, Petchenyegs, and
you believe it; they punch you in the neck, you kiss their hands; some
animal in a sable-lined coat robs you and then tips you fifteen kopecks
and you: ‘Let me kiss your hand, sir.’ You are pariahs, pitiful
people.... I am a different sort. My eyes are open, I see it all as
clearly as a hawk or an eagle when it floats over the earth, and I
understand it all. I am a living protest. I see irresponsible tyranny—I
protest. I see cant and hypocrisy—I protest. I see swine triumphant—I
protest. And I cannot be suppressed, no Spanish Inquisition can make me
hold my tongue. No.... Cut out my tongue and I would protest in dumb
show; shut me up in a cellar—I will shout from it to be heard half a
mile away, or I will starve myself to death that they may have another
weight on their black consciences. Kill me and I will haunt them with my
ghost. All my acquaintances say to me: ‘You are a most insufferable
person, Pavel Ivanitch.’ I am proud of such a reputation. I have served
three years in the far East, and I shall be remembered there for a
hundred years: I had rows with everyone. My friends write to me from
Russia, ‘Don’t come back,’ but here I am going back to spite them...
yes.... That is life as I understand it. That is what one can call
life.”
Gusev was looking at the little window and was not listening. A boat was
swaying on the transparent, soft, turquoise water all bathed in hot,
dazzling sunshine. In it there were naked Chinamen holding up cages with
canaries and calling out:
“It sings, it sings!”
Another boat knocked against the first; the steam cutter darted by. And
then there came another boat with a fat Chinaman sitting in it, eating
rice with little sticks.
Languidly the water heaved, languidly the white seagulls floated over
it.
“I should like to give that fat fellow one in the neck,” thought Gusev,
gazing at the stout Chinaman, with a yawn.
He dozed off, and it seemed to him that all nature was dozing, too. Time
flew swiftly by; imperceptibly the day passed, imperceptibly the
darkness came on.... The steamer was no longer standing still, but
moving on further.
IV
Two days passed, Pavel Ivanitch lay down instead of sitting up; his eyes
were closed, his nose seemed to have grown sharper.
“Pavel Ivanitch,” Gusev called to him. “Hey, Pavel Ivanitch.”
Pavel Ivanitch opened his eyes and moved his lips.
“Are you feeling bad?”
“No... it’s nothing...” answered Pavel Ivanitch, gasping. “Nothing; on
the contrary—I am rather better.... You see I can lie down. I am a
little easier....”
“Well, thank God for that, Pavel Ivanitch.”
“When I compare myself with you I am sorry for you... poor fellow. My
lungs are all right, it is only a stomach cough.... I can stand hell,
let alone the Red Sea. Besides I take a critical attitude to my illness
and to the medicines they give me for it. While you... you are in
darkness.... It’s hard for you, very, very hard!”
The ship was not rolling, it was calm, but as hot and stifling as a
bath-house; it was not only hard to speak but even hard to listen. Gusev
hugged his knees, laid his head on them and thought of his home. Good
heavens, what a relief it was to think of snow and cold in that stifling
heat! You drive in a sledge, all at once the horses take fright at
something and bolt.... Regardless of the road, the ditches, the ravines,
they dash like mad things, right through the village, over the pond by
the pottery works, out across the open fields. “Hold on,” the pottery
hands and the peasants shout, meeting them. “Hold on.” But why? Let the
keen, cold wind beat in one’s face and bite one’s hands; let the lumps
of snow, kicked up by the horses’ hoofs, fall on one’s cap, on one’s
back, down one’s collar, on one’s chest; let the runners ring on the
snow, and the traces and the sledge be smashed, deuce take them one and
all! And how delightful when the sledge upsets and you go flying full
tilt into a drift, face downwards in the snow, and then you get up white
all over with icicles on your moustaches; no cap, no gloves, your belt
undone.... People laugh, the dogs bark....
Pavel Ivanitch half opened one eye, looked at Gusev with it, and asked
softly:
“Gusev, did your commanding officer steal?”
“Who can tell, Pavel Ivanitch! We can’t say, it didn’t reach us.”
And after that a long time passed in silence. Gusev brooded, muttered
something in delirium, and kept drinking water; it was hard for him to
talk and hard to listen, and he was afraid of being talked to. An hour
passed, a second, a third; evening came on, then night, but he did not
notice it. He still sat dreaming of the frost.
There was a sound as though someone came into the hospital, and voices
were audible, but a few minutes passed and all was still again.
“The Kingdom of Heaven and eternal peace,” said the soldier with his arm
in a sling. “He was an uncomfortable man.”
“What?” asked Gusev. “Who?”
“He is dead, they have just carried him up.”
“Oh, well,” muttered Gusev, yawning, “the Kingdom of Heaven be his.”
“What do you think?” the soldier with his arm in a sling asked Gusev.
“Will he be in the Kingdom of Heaven or not?”
“Who is it you are talking about?”
“Pavel Ivanitch.”
“He will be... he suffered so long. And there is another thing, he
belonged to the clergy, and the priests always have a lot of relations.
Their prayers will save him.”
The soldier with the sling sat down on a hammock near Gusev and said in
an undertone:
“And you, Gusev, are not long for this world. You will never get to
Russia.”
“Did the doctor or his assistant say so?” asked Gusev.
“It isn’t that they said so, but one can see it.... One can see directly
when a man’s going to die. You don’t eat, you don’t drink; it’s dreadful
to see how thin you’ve got. It’s consumption, in fact. I say it, not to
upset you, but because maybe you would like to have the sacrament and
extreme unction. And if you have any money you had better give it to the
senior officer.”
“I haven’t written home...” Gusev sighed. “I shall die and they won’t
know.”
“They’ll hear of it,” the sick sailor brought out in a bass voice. “When
you die they will put it down in the Gazette, at Odessa they will send
in a report to the commanding officer there and he will send it to the
parish or somewhere....”
Gusev began to be uneasy after such a conversation and to feel a vague
yearning. He drank water—it was not that; he dragged himself to the
window and breathed the hot, moist air—it was not that; he tried to
think of home, of the frost—it was not that.... At last it seemed to him
one minute longer in the ward and he would certainly expire.
“It’s stifling, mates...” he said. “I’ll go on deck. Help me up, for
Christ’s sake.”
“All right,” assented the soldier with the sling. “I’ll carry you, you
can’t walk, hold on to my neck.”
Gusev put his arm round the soldier’s neck, the latter put his unhurt
arm round him and carried him up. On the deck sailors and time-expired
soldiers were lying asleep side by side; there were so many of them it
was difficult to pass.
“Stand down,” the soldier with the sling said softly. “Follow me
quietly, hold on to my shirt....”
It was dark. There was no light on deck, nor on the masts, nor anywhere
on the sea around. At the furthest end of the ship the man on watch was
standing perfectly still like a statue, and it looked as though he were
asleep. It seemed as though the steamer were abandoned to itself and
were going at its own will.
“Now they will throw Pavel Ivanitch into the sea,” said the soldier with
the sling. “In a sack and then into the water.”
“Yes, that’s the rule.”
“But it’s better to lie at home in the earth. Anyway, your mother comes
to the grave and weeps.”
“Of course.”
There was a smell of hay and of dung. There were oxen standing with
drooping heads by the ship’s rail. One, two, three; eight of them! And
there was a little horse. Gusev put out his hand to stroke it, but it
shook its head, showed its teeth, and tried to bite his sleeve.
“Damned brute...” said Gusev angrily.
The two of them, he and the soldier, threaded their way to the head of
the ship, then stood at the rail and looked up and down. Overhead deep
sky, bright stars, peace and stillness, exactly as at home in the
village, below darkness and disorder. The tall waves were resounding, no
one could tell why. Whichever wave you looked at each one was trying to
rise higher than all the rest and to chase and crush the next one; after
it a third as fierce and hideous flew noisily, with a glint of light on
its white crest.
The sea has no sense and no pity. If the steamer had been smaller and
not made of thick iron, the waves would have crushed it to pieces
without the slightest compunction, and would have devoured all the
people in it with no distinction of saints or sinners. The steamer had
the same cruel and meaningless expression. This monster with its huge
beak was dashing onwards, cutting millions of waves in its path; it had
no fear of the darkness nor the wind, nor of space, nor of solitude,
caring for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, this monster would
have crushed them, too, without distinction of saints or sinners.
“Where are we now?” asked Gusev.
“I don’t know. We must be in the ocean.”
“There is no sight of land...”
“No indeed! They say we shan’t see it for seven days.”
The two soldiers watched the white foam with the phosphorus light on it
and were silent, thinking. Gusev was the first to break the silence.
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” he said, “only one is full of dread
as though one were sitting in a dark forest; but if, for instance, they
let a boat down on to the water this minute and an officer ordered me to
go a hundred miles over the sea to catch fish, I’d go. Or, let’s say, if
a Christian were to fall into the water this minute, I’d go in after
him. A German or a Chinaman I wouldn’t save, but I’d go in after a
Christian.”
“And are you afraid to die?”
“Yes. I am sorry for the folks at home. My brother at home, you know,
isn’t steady; he drinks, he beats his wife for nothing, he does not
honour his parents. Everything will go to ruin without me, and father
and my old mother will be begging their bread, I shouldn’t wonder. But
my legs won’t bear me, brother, and it’s hot here. Let’s go to sleep.”
V
Gusev went back to the ward and got into his hammock. He was again
tormented by a vague craving, and he could not make out what he wanted.
There was an oppression on his chest, a throbbing in his head, his mouth
was so dry that it was difficult for him to move his tongue. He dozed,
and murmured in his sleep, and, worn out with nightmares, his cough, and
the stifling heat, towards morning he fell into a sound sleep. He
dreamed that they were just taking the bread out of the oven in the
barracks and he climbed into the stove and had a steam bath in it,
lashing himself with a bunch of birch twigs. He slept for two days, and
at midday on the third two sailors came down and carried him out.
He was sewn up in sailcloth and to make him heavier they put with him
two iron weights. Sewn up in the sailcloth he looked like a carrot or a
radish: broad at the head and narrow at the feet.... Before sunset they
brought him up to the deck and put him on a plank; one end of the plank
lay on the side of the ship, the other on a box, placed on a stool.
Round him stood the soldiers and the officers with their caps off.
“Blessed be the Name of the Lord...” the priest began. “As it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”
“Amen,” chanted three sailors.
The soldiers and the officers crossed themselves and looked away at the
waves. It was strange that a man should be sewn up in sailcloth and
should soon be flying into the sea. Was it possible that such a thing
might happen to anyone?
The priest strewed earth upon Gusev and bowed down. They sang “Eternal
Memory.”
The man on watch duty tilted up the end of the plank, Gusev slid off and
flew head foremost, turned a somersault in the air and splashed into the
sea. He was covered with foam and for a moment looked as though he were
wrapped in lace, but the minute passed and he disappeared in the waves.
He went rapidly towards the bottom. Did he reach it? It was said to be
three miles to the bottom. After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he began
moving more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though he were
hesitating and, carried along by the current, moved more rapidly
sideways than downwards.
Then he was met by a shoal of the fish called harbour pilots. Seeing the
dark body the fish stopped as though petrified, and suddenly turned
round and disappeared. In less than a minute they flew back swift as an
arrow to Gusev, and began zig-zagging round him in the water.
After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under
Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice
him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking
in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two
rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what
will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark
nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its
teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one
of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking
the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.
Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where
the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a
lion, a third like a pair of scissors.... From behind the clouds a
broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle
of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it;
next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured.... The sky turns a soft
lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean
scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for
which it is hard to find a name in human speech.
THE STUDENT
AT first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and
in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound
like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed
at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when
it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew
inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles
of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and
lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical
academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path
in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning
with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on
had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt
ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more
rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy.
The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river;
the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all
round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that,
as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the
floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the
stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the
student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he
thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the
time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been
just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with
holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same
darkness, the same feeling of oppression—all these had existed, did
exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make
life no better. And he did not want to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ because they were kept by two
widows, mother and daughter. A camp fire was burning brightly with a
crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth.
The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man’s coat, was standing
by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a
little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the
ground, washing a caldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had
supper. There was a sound of men’s voices; it was the labourers watering
their horses at the river.
“Here you have winter back again,” said the student, going up to the
camp fire. “Good evening.”
Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.
“I did not know you; God bless you,” she said.
“You’ll be rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience, who had been in service
with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children’s nurse,
expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left
her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman, who had been
beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and
said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf mute.
“At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,” said the
student, stretching out his hands to the fire, “so it must have been
cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An
utterly dismal long night!”
He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:
“No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?”
“Yes, I have,” answered Vasilisa.
“If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, ‘I am ready to
go with Thee into darkness and unto death.’ And our Lord answered him
thus: ‘I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have
denied Me thrice.’ After the supper Jesus went through the agony of
death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and
faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep.
He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and
betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest
and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm,
hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to
happen on earth, followed behind.... He loved Jesus passionately,
intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten...”
Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.
“They came to the high priest’s,” he went on; “they began to question
Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was
cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire
and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: ‘He was
with Jesus, too’—that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken
to be questioned. And all the labourers that were standing near the fire
must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused
and said: ‘I don’t know Him.’ A little while after again someone
recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples and said: ‘Thou, too, art one
of them,’ but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned
to him: ‘Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?’ For the
third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the cock
crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words
He had said to him in the evening.... He remembered, he came to himself,
went out of the yard and wept bitterly—bitterly. In the Gospel it is
written: ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’ I imagine it: the still,
still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible,
smothered sobbing...”
T he student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa
suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she
screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her
tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson,
and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone
enduring intense pain.
The labourers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse
was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The
student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the
darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind
was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though
Easter would be the day after to-morrow.
Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears
all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must
have some relation to her....
He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness
and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that
if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was
evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had
happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present—to both
women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman
had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because
Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what
was passing in Peter’s soul.
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute
to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is Jlinked with the present by
an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed
to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he
touched one end the other quivered.
When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the
hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson
sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty
which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the
high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had
evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly
life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour—he was only
twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of
unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little,
and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty
meaning.
IN THE RAVINE I
THE village of Ukleevo lay in a ravine so that only the belfry and the
chimneys of the printed cottons factories could be seen from the high
road and the railway-station. When visitors asked what village this was,
they were told:
“That’s the village where the deacon ate all the caviare at the
funeral.”
It had happened at the dinner at the funeral of Kostukov that the old
deacon saw among the savouries some large-grained caviare and began
eating it greedily; people nudged him, tugged at his arm, but he seemed
petrified with enjoyment: felt nothing, and only went on eating. He ate
up all the caviare, and there were four pounds in the jar. And years had
passed since then, the deacon had long been dead, but the caviare was
still remembered. Whether life was so poor here or people had not been
clever enough to notice anything but that unimportant incident that had
occurred ten years before, anyway the people had nothing else to tell
about the village Ukleevo.
The village was never free from fever, and there was boggy mud there
even in the summer, especially under the fences over which hung old
willow-trees that gave deep shade. Here there was always a smell from
the factory refuse and the acetic acid which was used in the finishing
of the cotton print.
The three cotton factories and the tanyard were not in the village
itself, but a little way off. They were small factories, and not more
than four hundred workmen were employed in all of them. The tanyard
often made the water in the little river stink; the refuse contaminated
the meadows, the peasants’ cattle suffered from Siberian plague, and
orders were given that the factory should be closed. It was considered
to be closed, but went on working in secret with the connivance of the
local police officer and the district doctor, who was paid ten roubles a
month by the owner. In the whole village there were only two decent
houses built of brick with iron roofs; one of them was the local court,
in the other, a two-storied house just opposite the church, there lived
a shopkeeper from Epifan called Grigory Petrovitch Tsybukin.
Grigory kept a grocer’s shop, but that was only for appearance’ sake: in
reality he sold vodka, cattle, hides, grain, and pigs; he traded in
anything that came to hand, and when, for instance, magpies were wanted
abroad for ladies’ hats, he made some thirty kopecks on every pair of
birds; he bought timber for felling, lent money at interest, and
altogether was a sharp old man, full of resources.
He had two sons. The elder, Anisim, was in the police in the detective
department and was rarely at home. The younger, Stepan, had gone in for
trade and helped his father: but no great help was expected from him as
he was weak in health and deaf; his wife Aksinya, a handsome woman with
a good figure, who wore a hat and carried a parasol on holidays, got up
early and went to bed late, and ran about all day long, picking up her
skirts and jingling her keys, going from the granary to the cellar and
from there to the shop, and old Tsybukin looked at her good-humouredly
while his eyes glowed, and at such moments he regretted she had not been
married to his elder son instead of to the younger one, who was deaf,
and who evidently knew very little about female beauty.
The old man had always an inclination for family life, and he loved his
family more than anything on earth, especially his elder son, the
detective, and his daughter-in-law. Aksinya had no sooner married the
deaf son than she began to display an extraordinary gift for business,
and knew who could be allowed to run up a bill and who could not: she
kept the keys and would not trust them even to her husband; she kept the
accounts by means of the reckoning beads, looked at the horses’ teeth
like a peasant, and was always laughing or shouting; and whatever she
did or said the old man was simply delighted and muttered:
“Well done, daughter-in-law! You are a smart wench!”
He was a widower, but a year after his son’s marriage he could not
resist getting married himself. A girl was found for him, living twenty
miles from Ukleevo, called Varvara Nikolaevna, no longer quite young,
but good-looking, comely, and belonging to a decent family. As soon as
she was installed into the upper-storey room everything in the house
seemed to brighten up as though new glass had been put into all the
windows. The lamps gleamed before the ikons, the tables were covered
with snow-white cloths, flowers with red buds made their appearance in
the windows and in the front garden, and at dinner, instead of eating
from a single bowl, each person had a separate plate set for him.
Varvara Nikolaevna had a pleasant, friendly smile, and it seemed as
though the whole house were smiling, too. Beggars and pilgrims, male and
female, began to come into the yard, a thing which had never happened in
the past; the plaintive sing-song voices of the Ukleevo peasant women
and the apologetic coughs of weak, seedy-looking men, who had been
dismissed from the factory for drunkenness were heard under the windows.
Varvara helped them with money, with bread, with old clothes, and
afterwards, when she felt more at home, began taking things out of the
shop. One day the deaf man saw her take four ounces of tea and that
disturbed him.
“Here, mother’s taken four ounces of tea,” he informed his father
afterwards; “where is that to be entered?”
The old man made no reply but stood still and thought a moment, moving
his eyebrows, and then went upstairs to his wife.
“Varvarushka, if you want anything out of the shop,” he said
affectionately, “take it, my dear. Take it and welcome; don’t hesitate.”
And the next day the deaf man, running across the yard, called to her:
“If there is anything you want, mother, take it.”
There was something new, something gay and light-hearted in her giving
of alms, just as there was in the lamps before the ikons and in the red
flowers. When at Carnival or at the church festival, which lasted for
three days, they sold the peasants tainted salt meat, smelling so strong
it was hard to stand near the tub of it, and took scythes, caps, and
their wives’ kerchiefs in pledge from the drunken men; when the factory
hands stupefied with bad vodka lay rolling in the mud, and sin seemed to
hover thick like a fog in the air, then it was a relief to think that up
there in the house there was a gentle, neatly dressed woman who had
nothing to do with salt meat or vodka; her charity had in those
burdensome, murky days the effect of a safety valve in a machine.
The days in Tsybukin’s house were spent in business cares. Before the
sun had risen in the morning Aksinya was panting and puffing as she
washed in the outer room, and the samovar was boiling in the kitchen
with a hum that boded no good. Old Grigory Petrovitch, dressed in a long
black coat, cotton breeches and shiny top boots, looking a dapper little
figure, walked about the rooms, tapping with his little heels like the
father-in-law in a well-known song. The shop was opened. When it was
daylight a racing droshky was brought up to the front door and the old
man got jauntily on to it, pulling his big cap down to his ears; and,
looking at him, no one would have said he was fifty-six. His wife and
daughter-in-law saw him off, and at such times when he had on a good,
clean coat, and had in the droshky a huge black horse that had cost
three hundred roubles, the old man did not like the peasants to come up
to him with their complaints and petitions; he hated the peasants and
disdained them, and if he saw some peasants waiting at the gate, he
would shout angrily:
“Why are you standing there? Go further off.”
Or if it were a beggar, he would say:
“God will provide!”
He used to drive off on business; his wife, in a dark dress and a black
apron, tidied the rooms or helped in the kitchen. Aksinya attended to
the shop, and from the yard could be heard the cJlink of bottles and of
money, her laughter and loud talk, and the anger of customers whom she
had offended; and at the same time it could be seen that the secret sale
of vodka was already going on in the shop. The deaf man sat in the shop,
too, or walked about the street bare-headed, with his hands in his
pockets looking absent-mindedly now at the huts, now at the sky
overhead. Six times a day they had tea; four times a day they sat down
to meals; and in the evening they counted over their takings, put them
down, went to bed, and slept soundly.
All the three cotton factories in Ukleevo and the houses of the factory
owners—Hrymin Seniors, Hrymin Juniors, and Kostukov—were on a telephone.
The telephone was laid on in the local court, too, but it soon ceased to
work as bugs and beetles bred there. The elder of the rural district had
had little education and wrote every word in the official documents in
capitals. But when the telephone was spoiled he said:
“Yes, now we shall be badly off without a telephone.”
The Hrymin Seniors were continually at law with the Juniors, and
sometimes the Juniors quarrelled among themselves and began going to
law, and their factory did not work for a month or two till they were
reconciled again, and this was an entertainment for the people of
Ukleevo, as there was a great deal of talk and gossip on the occasion of
each quarrel. On holidays Kostukov and the Juniors used to get up races,
used to dash about Ukleevo and run over calves. Aksinya, rustling her
starched petticoats, used to promenade in a low-necked dress up and down
the street near her shop; the Juniors used to snatch her up and carry
her off as though by force. Then old Tsybukin would drive out to show
his new horse and take Varvara with him.
In the evening, after the races, when people were going to bed, an
expensive concertina was played in the Juniors’ yard and, if it were a
moonlight night, those sounds sent a thrill of delight to the heart, and
Ukleevo no longer seemed a wretched hole.
II
The elder son Anisim came home very rarely, only on great holidays, but
he often sent by a returning villager presents and letters written in
very good writing by some other hand, always on a sheet of foolscap in
the form of a petition. The letters were full of expressions that Anisim
never made use of in conversation: “Dear papa and mamma, I send you a
pound of flower tea for the satisfaction of your physical needs.”
At the bottom of every letter was scratched, as though with a broken
pen: “Anisim Tsybukin,” and again in the same excellent hand: “Agent.”
The letters were read aloud several times, and the old father, touched,
red with emotion, would say:
“Here he did not care to stay at home, he has gone in for an
intellectual line. Well, let him! Every man to his own job!”
It happened just before Carnival there was a heavy storm of rain mixed
with hail; the old man and Varvara went to the window to look at it, and
lo and behold! Anisim drove up in a sledge from the station. He was
quite unexpected. He came indoors, looking anxious and troubled about
something, and he remained the same all the time; there was something
free and easy in his manner. He was in no haste to go away, it seemed,
as though he had been dismissed from the service. Varvara was pleased at
his arrival; she looked at him with a sly expression, sighed, and shook
her head.
“How is this, my friends?” she said. “Tut, tut, the lad’s in his twenty-
eighth year, and he is still leading a gay bachelor life; tut, tut,
tut....”
From the other room her soft, even speech sounded like tut, tut, tut.
She began whispering with her husband and Aksinya, and their faces wore
the same sly and mysterious expression as though they were conspirators.
It was decided to marry Anisim.
“Oh, tut, tut... the younger brother has been married long ago,” said
Varvara, “and you are still without a helpmate like a cock at a fair.
What is the meaning of it? Tut, tut, you will be married, please God,
then as you choose—you will go into the service and your wife will
remain here at home to help us. There is no order in your life, young
man, and I see you have forgotten how to live properly. Tut, tut, it’s
the same trouble with all you townspeople.”
When the Tsybukins married, the most handsome girls were chosen as
brides for them as rich men. For Anisim, too, they found a handsome one.
He was himself of an uninteresting and inconspicuous appearance; of a
feeble, sickly build and short stature; he had full, puffy cheeks which
looked as though he were blowing them out; his eyes looked with a keen,
unbJlinking stare; his beard was red and scanty, and when he was
thinking he always put it into his mouth and bit it; moreover he often
drank too much, and that was noticeable from his face and his walk. But
when he was informed that they had found a very beautiful bride for him,
he said:
“Oh well, I am not a fright myself. All of us Tsybukins are handsome, I
may say.”
The village of Torguevo was near the town. Half of it had lately been
incorporated into the town, the other half remained a village. In the
first—the town half—there was a widow living in her own little house;
she had a sister living with her who was quite poor and went out to work
by the day, and this sister had a daughter called Lipa, a girl who went
out to work, too. People in Torguevo were already talking about Lipa’s
good looks, but her terrible poverty put everyone off; people opined
that some widower or elderly man would marry her regardless of her
poverty, or would perhaps take her to himself without marriage, and that
her mother would get enough to eat living with her. Varvara heard about
Lipa from the matchmakers, and she drove over to Torguevo.
Then a visit of inspection was arranged at the aunt’s, with lunch and
wine all in due order, and Lipa wore a new pink dress made on purpose
for this occasion, and a crimson ribbon like a flame gleamed in her
hair. She was pale-faced, thin, and frail, with soft, delicate features
sunburnt from working in the open air; a shy, mournful smile always
hovered about her face, and there was a childlike look in her eyes,
trustful and curious.
She was young, quite a little girl, her bosom still scarcely
perceptible, but she could be married because she had reached the legal
age. She really was beautiful, and the only thing that might be thought
unattractive was her big masculine hands which hung idle now like two
big claws.
“There is no dowry—and we don’t think much of that,” said Tsybukin to
the aunt. “We took a wife from a poor family for our son Stepan, too,
and now we can’t say too much for her. In house and in business alike
she has hands of gold.”
Lipa stood in the doorway and looked as though she would say: “Do with
me as you will, I trust you,” while her mother Praskovya the work-woman
hid herself in the kitchen numb with shyness. At one time in her youth a
merchant whose floors she was scrubbing stamped at her in a rage; she
went chill with terror and there always was a feeling of fear at the
bottom of her heart. When she was frightened her arms and legs trembled
and her cheeks twitched. Sitting in the kitchen she tried to hear what
the visitors were saying, and she kept crossing herself, pressing her
fingers to her forehead, and gazing at the ikons. Anisim, slightly
drunk, opened the door into the kitchen and said in a free-and-easy way:
“Why are you sitting in here, precious mamma? We are dull without you.”
And Praskovya, overcome with timidity, pressing her hands to her lean,
wasted bosom, said:
“Oh, not at all.... It’s very kind of you.”
After the visit of inspection the wedding day was fixed. Then Anisim
walked about the rooms at home whistling, or suddenly thinking of
something, would fall to brooding and would look at the floor fixedly,
silently, as though he would probe to the depths of the earth. He
expressed neither pleasure that he was to be married, married so soon,
on Low Sunday, nor a desire to see his bride, but simply went on
whistling. And it was evident he was only getting married because his
father and stepmother wished him to, and because it was the custom in
the village to marry the son in order to have a woman to help in the
house. When he went away he seemed in no haste, and behaved altogether
not as he had done on previous visits—was particularly free and easy,
and talked inappropriately.
III
In the village Shikalovo lived two dressmakers, sisters, belonging to
the Flagellant sect. The new clothes for the wedding were ordered from
them, and they often came to try them on, and stayed a long while
drinking tea. They were making Varvara a brown dress with black lace and
bugles on it, and Aksinya a light green dress with a yellow front, with
a train. When the dressmakers had finished their work Tsybukin paid them
not in money but in goods from the shop, and they went away depressed,
carrying parcels of tallow candles and tins of sardines which they did
not in the least need, and when they got out of the village into the
open country they sat down on a hillock and cried.
Anisim arrived three days before the wedding, rigged out in new clothes
from top to toe. He had dazzling india-rubber goloshes, and instead of a
cravat wore a red cord with little balls on it, and over his shoulder he
had hung an overcoat, also new, without putting his arms into the
sleeves.
After crossing himself sedately before the ikon, he greeted his father
and gave him ten silver roubles and ten half-roubles; to Varvara he gave
as much, and to Aksinya twenty quarter-roubles. The chief charm of the
present lay in the fact that all the coins, as though carefully matched,
were new and glittered in the sun. Trying to seem grave and sedate he
pursed up his face and puffed out his cheeks, and he smelt of spirits.
Probably he had visited the refreshment bar at every station. And again
there was a free-and-easiness about the man—something superfluous and
out of place. Then Anisim had lunch and drank tea with the old man, and
Varvara turned the new coins over in her hand and inquired about
villagers who had gone to live in the town.
“They are all right, thank God, they get on quite well,” said Anisim.
“Only something has happened to Ivan Yegorov: his old wife Sofya
Nikiforovna is dead. From consumption. They ordered the memorial dinner
for the peace of her soul at the confectioner’s at two and a half
roubles a head. And there was real wine. Those who were peasants from
our village—they paid two and a half roubles for them, too. They ate
nothing, as though a peasant would understand sauce!”
“Two and a half,” said his father, shaking his head.
“Well, it’s not like the country there, you go into a restaurant to have
a snack of something, you ask for one thing and another, others join
till there is a party of us, one has a drink—and before you know where
you are it is daylight and you’ve three or four roubles each to pay. And
when one is with Samorodov he likes to have coffee with brandy in it
after everything, and brandy is sixty kopecks for a little glass.”
“And he is making it all up,” said the old man enthusiastically; “he is
making it all up, lying!”
“I am always with Samorodov now. It is Samorodov who writes my letters
to you. He writes splendidly. And if I were to tell you, mamma,” Anisim
went on gaily, addressing Varvara, “the sort of fellow that Samorodov
is, you would not believe me. We call him Muhtar, because he is black
like an Armenian. I can see through him, I know all his affairs like the
five fingers of my hand, and he feels that, and he always follows me
about, we are regular inseparables. He seems not to like it in a way,
but he can’t get on without me. Where I go he goes. I have a correct,
trustworthy eye, mamma. One sees a peasant selling a shirt in the market
place. ‘Stay, that shirt’s stolen.’ And really it turns out it is so:
the shirt was a stolen one.”
“What do you tell from?” asked Varvara.
“Not from anything, I have just an eye for it. I know nothing about the
shirt, only for some reason I seem drawn to it: it’s stolen, and that’s
all I can say. Among us detectives it’s come to their saying, ‘Oh,
Anisim has gone to shoot snipe!’ That means looking for stolen goods.
Yes.... Anybody can steal, but it is another thing to keep! The earth is
wide, but there is nowhere to hide stolen goods.”
“In our village a ram and two ewes were carried off last week,” said
Varvara, and she heaved a sigh, and there is no one to try and find
them.... Oh, tut, tut..”
“Well, I might have a try. I don’t mind.”
The day of the wedding arrived. It was a cool but bright, cheerful April
day. People were driving about Ukleevo from early morning with pairs or
teams of three horses decked with many-coloured ribbons on their yokes
and manes, with a jingle of bells. The rooks, disturbed by this
activity, were cawing noisily in the willows, and the starlings sang
their loudest unceasingly as though rejoicing that there was a wedding
at the Tsybukins’.
Indoors the tables were already covered with long fish, smoked hams,
stuffed fowls, boxes of sprats, pickled savouries of various sorts, and
a number of bottles of vodka and wine; there was a smell of smoked
sausage and of sour tinned lobster. Old Tsybukin walked about near the
tables, tapping with his heels and sharpening the knives against each
other. They kept calling Varvara and asking for things, and she was
constantly with a distracted face running breathlessly into the kitchen,
where the man cook from Kostukov’s and the woman cook from Hrymin
Juniors’ had been at work since early morning. Aksinya, with her hair
curled, in her stays without her dress on, in new creaky boots, flew
about the yard like a whirlwind showing glimpses of her bare knees and
bosom.
It was noisy, there was a sound of scolding and oaths; passers-by
stopped at the wide-open gates, and in everything there was a feeling
that something extraordinary was happening.
“They have gone for the bride!”
The bells began jingling and died away far beyond the village....
Between two and three o’clock people ran up: again there was a jingling
of bells: they were bringing the bride! The church was full, the
candelabra were lighted, the choir were singing from music books as old
Tsybukin had wished it. The glare of the lights and the bright coloured
dresses dazzled Lipa; she felt as though the singers with their loud
voices were hitting her on the head with a hammer. Her boots and the
stays, which she had put on for the first time in her life, pinched her,
and her face looked as though she had only just come to herself after
fainting; she gazed about without understanding. Anisim, in his black
coat with a red cord instead of a tie, stared at the same spot lost in
thought, and when the singers shouted loudly he hurriedly crossed
himself. He felt touched and disposed to weep. This church was familiar
to him from earliest childhood; at one time his dead mother used to
bring him here to take the sacrament; at one time he used to sing in the
choir; every ikon he remembered so well, every corner. Here he was being
married, he had to take a wife for the sake of doing the proper thing,
but he was not thinking of that now, he had forgotten his wedding
completely. Tears dimmed his eyes so that he could not see the ikons, he
felt heavy at heart; he prayed and besought God that the misfortunes
that threatened him, that were ready to burst upon him to-morrow, if not
to-day, might somehow pass him by as storm-clouds in time of drought
pass over the village without yielding one drop of rain. And so many
sins were heaped up in the past, so many sins, all getting away from
them or setting them right was so beyond hope that it seemed incongruous
even to ask forgiveness. But he did ask forgiveness, and even gave a
loud sob, but no one took any notice of that, since they all supposed he
had had a drop too much.
There was a sound of a fretful childish wail:
“Take me away, mamma darling!”
“Quiet there!” cried the priest.
When they returned from the church people ran after them; there were
crowds, too, round the shop, round the gates, and in the yard under the
windows. The peasant women came in to sing songs of congratulation to
them. The young couple had scarcely crossed the threshold when the
singers, who were already standing in the outer room with their music
books, broke into a loud chant at the top of their voices; a band
ordered expressly from the town began playing. Foaming Don wine was
brought in tall wine-glasses, and Elizarov, a carpenter who did jobs by
contract, a tall, gaunt old man with eyebrows so bushy that his eyes
could scarcely be seen, said, addressing the happy pair:
“Anisim and you, my child, love one another, live in God’s way, little
children, and the Heavenly Mother will not abandon you.”
He leaned his face on the old father’s shoulder and gave a sob.
“Grigory Petrovitch, let us weep, let us weep with joy!” he said in a
thin voice, and then at once burst out laughing in a loud bass guffaw.
“Ho-ho-ho! This is a fine daughter-in-law for you too! Everything is in
its place in her; all runs smoothly, no creaking, the mechanism works
well, lots of screws in it.”
He was a native of the Yegoryevsky district, but had worked in the
factories in Ukleevo and the neighborhood from his youth up, and had
made it his home. He had been a familiar figure for years as old and
gaunt and lanky as now, and for years he had been nicknamed “Crutch.”
Perhaps because he had been for forty years occupied in repairing the
factory machinery he judged everybody and everything by its soundness or
its need of repair. And before sitting down to the table he tried
several chairs to see whether they were solid, and he touched the smoked
fish also.
After the Don wine, they all sat down to the table. The visitors talked,
moving their chairs. The singers were singing in the outer room. The
band was playing, and at the same time the peasant women in the yard
were singing their songs all in chorus—and there was an awful, wild
medley of sounds which made one giddy.
Crutch turned round in his chair and prodded his neighbours with his
elbows, prevented people from talking, and laughed and cried
alternately.
“Little children, little children, little children,” he muttered
rapidly. “Aksinya my dear, Varvara darling, we will live all in peace
and harmony, my dear little axes....”
He drank little and was now only drunk from one glass of English
bitters. The revolting bitters, made from nobody knows what, intoxicated
everyone who drank it as though it had stunned them. Their tongues began
to falter.
The local clergy, the clerks from the factories with their wives, the
tradesmen and tavern-keepers from the other villages were present. The
clerk and the elder of the rural district who had served together for
fourteen years, and who had during all that time never signed a single
document for anybody nor let a single person out of the local court
without deceiving or insulting him, were sitting now side by side, both
fat and well-fed, and it seemed as though they were so saturated in
injustice and falsehood that even the skin of their faces was somehow
peculiar, fraudulent. The clerk’s wife, a thin woman with a squint, had
brought all her children with her, and like a bird of prey looked aslant
at the plates and snatched anything she could get hold of to put in her
own or her children’s pockets.
Lipa sat as though turned to stone, still with the same expression as in
church. Anisim had not said a single word to her since he had made her
acquaintance, so that he did not yet know the sound of her voice; and
now, sitting beside her, he remained mute and went on drinking bitters,
and when he got drunk he began talking to the aunt who was sitting
opposite:
“I have a friend called Samorodov. A peculiar man. He is by rank an
honorary citizen, and he can talk. But I know him through and through,
auntie, and he feels it. Pray join me in drinking to the health of
Samorodov, auntie!”
Varvara, worn out and distracted, walked round the table pressing the
guests to eat, and was evidently pleased that there were so many dishes
and that everything was so lavish—no one could disparage them now. The
sun set, but the dinner went on: the guests were beyond knowing what
they were eating or drinking, it was impossible to distinguish what was
said, and only from time to time when the band subsided some peasant
woman could be heard shouting:
“They have sucked the blood out of us, the Herods; a pest on them!”
In the evening they danced to the band. The Hrymin Juniors came,
bringing their wine, and one of them, when dancing a quadrille, held a
bottle in each hand and a wineglass in his mouth, and that made everyone
laugh. In the middle of the quadrille they suddenly crooked their knees
and danced in a squatting position; Aksinya in green flew by like a
flash, stirring up a wind with her train. Someone trod on her flounce
and Crutch shouted:
“Aie, they have torn off the panel! Children!”
Aksinya had naive grey eyes which rarely bJlinked, and a naive smile
played continually on her face. And in those unbJlinking eyes, and in
that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was
something snake-like; all in green but for the yellow on her bosom, she
looked with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in
the spring at the passers-by, stretching itself and lifting its head.
The Hrymins were free in their behaviour to her, and it was very
noticeable that she was on intimate terms with the elder of them. But
her deaf husband saw nothing, he did not look at her; he sat with his
legs crossed and ate nuts, cracking them so loudly that it sounded like
pistol shots.
But, behold, old Tsybukin himself walked into the middle of the room and
waved his handkerchief as a sign that he, too, wanted to dance the
Russian dance, and all over the house and from the crowd in the yard
rose a roar of approbation:
“He’s going to dance! He himself!”
Varvara danced, but the old man only waved his handkerchief and kicked
up his heels, but the people in the yard, propped against one another,
peeping in at the windows, were in raptures, and for the moment forgave
him everything—his wealth and the wrongs he had done them.
“Well done, Grigory Petrovitch!” was heard in the crowd. “That’s right,
do your best! You can still play your part! Ha-ha!”
It was kept up till late, till two o’clock in the morning. Anisim,
staggering, went to take leave of the singers and bandsmen, and gave
each of them a new half-rouble. His father, who was not staggering but
still seemed to be standing on one leg, saw his guests off, and said to
each of them:
“The wedding has cost two thousand.”
As the party was breaking up, someone took the Shikalovo innkeeper’s
good coat instead of his own old one, and Anisim suddenly flew into a
rage and began shouting:
“Stop, I’ll find it at once; I know who stole it, stop.”
He ran out into the street and pursued someone. He was caught, brought
back home and shoved, drunken, red with anger, and wet, into the room
where the aunt was undressing Lipa, and was locked in.
IV
Five days had passed. Anisim, who was preparing to go, went upstairs to
say good-bye to Varvara. All the lamps were burning before the ikons,
there was a smell of incense, while she sat at the window knitting a
stocking of red wool.
“You have not stayed with us long,” she said. “You’ve been dull, I dare
say. Oh, tut, tut. We live comfortably; we have plenty of everything. We
celebrated your wedding properly, in good style; your father says it
came to two thousand. In fact we live like merchants, only it’s dreary.
We treat the people very badly. My heart aches, my dear; how we treat
them, my goodness! Whether we exchange a horse or buy something or hire
a labourer—it’s cheating in everything. Cheating and cheating. The
Lenten oil in the shop is bitter, rancid, the people have pitch that is
better. But surely, tell me pray, couldn’t we sell good oil?”
“Every man to his job, mamma.”
“But you know we all have to die? Oy, oy, really you ought to talk to
your father...!”
“Why, you should talk to him yourself.”
“Well, well, I did put in my word, but he said just what you do: ‘Every
man to his own job.’ Do you suppose in the next world they’ll consider
what job you have been put to? God’s judgment is just.”
“Of course no one will consider,” said Anisim, and he heaved a sigh.
“There is no God, anyway, you know, mamma, so what considering can there
be?”
Varvara looked at him with surprise, burst out laughing, and clasped her
hands. Perhaps because she was so genuinely surprised at his words and
looked at him as though he were a queer person, he was confused.
“Perhaps there is a God, only there is no faith. When I was being
married I was not myself. Just as you may take an egg from under a hen
and there is a chicken chirping in it, so my conscience was beginning to
chirp in me, and while I was being married I thought all the time there
was a God! But when I left the church it was nothing. And indeed, how
can I tell whether there is a God or not? We are not taught right from
childhood, and while the babe is still at his mother’s breast he is only
taught ‘every man to his own job.’ Father does not believe in God,
either. You were saying that Guntorev had some sheep stolen.... I have
found them; it was a peasant at Shikalovo stole them; he stole them, but
father’s got the fleeces... so that’s all his faith amounts to.”
Anisim winked and wagged his head.
“The elder does not believe in God, either,” he went on. “And the clerk
and the deacon, too. And as for their going to church and keeping the
fasts, that is simply to prevent people talking ill of them, and in case
it really may be true that there will be a Day of Judgment. Nowadays
people say that the end of the world has come because people have grown
weaker, do not honour their parents, and so on. All that is nonsense. My
idea, mamma, is that all our trouble is because there is so little
conscience in people. I see through things, mamma, and I understand. If
a man has a stolen shirt I see it. A man sits in a tavern and you fancy
he is drinking tea and no more, but to me the tea is neither here nor
there; I see further, he has no conscience. You can go about the whole
day and not meet one man with a conscience. And the whole reason is that
they don’t know whether there is a God or not.... Well, good-bye, mamma,
keep alive and well, don’t remember evil against me.”
Anisim bowed down at Varvara’s feet.
“I thank you for everything, mamma,” he said. “You are a great gain to
our family. You are a very ladylike woman, and I am very pleased with
you.”
Much moved, Anisim went out, but returned again and said:
“Samorodov has got me mixed up in something: I shall either make my
fortune or come to grief. If anything happens, then you must comfort my
father, mamma.”
“Oh, nonsense, don’t you worry, tut, tut, tut... God is merciful. And,
Anisim, you should be affectionate to your wife, instead of giving each
other sulky looks as you do; you might smile at least.”
“Yes, she is rather a queer one,” said Anisim, and he gave a sigh. “She
does not understand anything, she never speaks. She is very young, let
her grow up.”
A tall, sleek white stallion was already standing at the front door,
harnessed to the chaise.
Old Tsybukin jumped in jauntily with a run and took the reins. Anisim
kissed Varvara, Aksinya, and his brother. On the steps Lipa, too, was
standing; she was standing motionless, looking away, and it seemed as
though she had not come to see him off but just by chance for some
unknown reason. Anisim went up to her and just touched her cheek with
his lips.
“Good-bye,” he said.
And without looking at him she gave a strange smile; her face began to
quiver, and everyone for some reason felt sorry for her. Anisim, too,
leaped into the chaise with a bound and put his arms jauntily akimbo,
for he considered himself a good-looking fellow.
When they drove up out of the ravine Anisim kept looking back towards
the village. It was a warm, bright day. The cattle were being driven out
for the first time, and the peasant girls and women were walking by the
herd in their holiday dresses. The dun-coloured bull bellowed, glad to
be free, and pawed the ground with his forefeet. On all sides, above and
below, the larks were singing. Anisim looked round at the elegant white
church—it had only lately been whitewashed—and he thought how he had
been praying in it five days before; he looked round at the school with
its green roof, at the little river in which he used once to bathe and
catch fish, and there was a stir of joy in his heart, and he wished that
walls might rise up from the ground and prevent him from going further,
and that he might be left with nothing but the past.
At the station they went to the refreshment room and drank a glass of
sherry each. His father felt in his pocket for his purse to pay.
“I will stand treat,” said Anisim. The old man, touched and delighted,
slapped him on the shoulder, and winked to the waiter as much as to say,
“See what a fine son I have got.”
“You ought to stay at home in the business, Anisim,” he said; “you would
be worth any price to me! I would shower gold on you from head to foot,
my son.”
“It can’t be done, papa.”
The sherry was sour and smelt of sealing-wax, but they had another
glass.
When old Tsybukin returned home from the station, for the first moment
he did not recognize his younger daughter-in-law. As soon as her husband
had driven out of the yard, Lipa was transformed and suddenly brightened
up. Wearing a threadbare old petticoat, with her feet bare and her
sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the
entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a
big tub of dirty water and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile
it seemed as though she, too, were a lark.
An old labourer who was passing by the door shook his head and cleared
his throat.
“Yes, indeed, your daughters-in-law, Grigory Petrovitch, are a blessing
from God,” he said. “Not women, but treasures!”
V
On Friday the 8th of July, Elizarov, nicknamed Crutch, and Lipa were
returning from the village of Kazanskoe, where they had been to a
service on the occasion of a church holiday in the honour of the Holy
Mother of Kazan. A good distance after them walked Lipa’s mother
Praskovya, who always fell behind, as she was ill and short of breath.
It was drawing towards evening.
“A-a-a...” said Crutch, wondering as he listened to Lipa. “A-a!... We-
ell!
“I am very fond of jam, Ilya Makaritch,” said Lipa. “I sit down in my
little corner and drink tea and eat jam. Or I drink it with Varvara
Nikolaevna, and she tells some story full of feeling. We have a lot of
jam—four jars. ‘Have some, Lipa; eat as much as you like.’”
“A-a-a, four jars!”
“They live very well. We have white bread with our tea; and meat, too,
as much as one wants. They live very well, only I am frightened with
them, Ilya Makaritch. Oh, oh, how frightened I am!”
“Why are you frightened, child?” asked Crutch, and he looked back to see
how far Praskovya was behind.
“To begin with, when the wedding had been celebrated I was afraid of
Anisim Grigoritch. Anisim Grigoritch did nothing, he didn’t ill-treat
me, only when he comes near me a cold shiver runs all over me, through
all my bones. And I did not sleep one night, I trembled all over and
kept praying to God. And now I am afraid of Aksinya, Ilya Makaritch.
It’s not that she does anything, she is always laughing, but sometimes
she glances at the window, and her eyes are so fierce and there is a
gleam of green in them—like the eyes of the sheep in the shed. The
Hrymin Juniors are leading her astray: ‘Your old man,’ they tell her,
‘has a bit of land at Butyokino, a hundred and twenty acres,’ they say,
‘and there is sand and water there, so you, Aksinya,’ they say, ‘build a
brickyard there and we will go shares in it.’ Bricks now are twenty
roubles the thousand, it’s a profitable business. Yesterday at dinner
Aksinya said to my father-in-law: ‘I want to build a brickyard at
Butyokino; I’m going into business on my own account.’ She laughed as
she said it. And Grigory Petrovitch’s face darkened, one could see he
did not like it. ‘As long as I live,’ he said, ‘the family must not
break up, we must go on altogether.’ She gave a look and gritted her
teeth.... Fritters were served, she would not eat them.”
“A-a-a!...” Crutch was surprised.
“And tell me, if you please, when does she sleep?” said Lipa. “She
sleeps for half an hour, then jumps up and keeps walking and walking
about to see whether the peasants have not set fire to something, have
not stolen something.... I am frightened with her, Ilya Makaritch. And
the Hrymin Juniors did not go to bed after the wedding, but drove to the
town to go to law with each other; and folks do say it is all on account
of Aksinya. Two of the brothers have promised to build her a brickyard,
but the third is offended, and the factory has been at a standstill for
a month, and my uncle Prohor is without work and goes about from house
to house getting crusts. ‘Hadn’t you better go working on the land or
sawing up wood, meanwhile, uncle?’ I tell him; ‘why disgrace yourself?’
‘I’ve got out of the way of it,’ he says; ‘I don’t know how to do any
sort of peasant’s work now, Lipinka.’...”
They stopped to rest and wait for Praskovya near a copse of young aspen-
trees. Elizarov had long been a contractor in a small way, but he kept
no horses, going on foot all over the district with nothing but a little
bag in which there was bread and onions, and stalking along with big
strides, swinging his arms. And it was difficult to walk with him.
At the entrance to the copse stood a milestone. Elizarov touched it;
read it. Praskovya reached them out of breath. Her wrinkled and always
scared-looking face was beaming with happiness; she had been at church
to-day like anyone else, then she had been to the fair and there had
drunk pear cider. For her this was unusual, and it even seemed to her
now that she had lived for her own pleasure that day for the first time
in her life. After resting they all three walked on side by side. The
sun had already set, and its beams filtered through the copse, casting a
light on the trunks of the trees. There was a faint sound of voices
ahead. The Ukleevo girls had long before pushed on ahead but had
lingered in the copse, probably gathering mushrooms.
“Hey, wenches!” cried Elizarov. “Hey, my beauties!”
There was a sound of laughter in response.
“Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.”
And the echo laughed, too. And then the copse was left behind. The tops
of the factory chimneys came into view. The cross on the belfry
glittered: this was the village: “the one at which the deacon ate all
the caviare at the funeral.” Now they were almost home; they only had to
go down into the big ravine. Lipa and Praskovya, who had been walking
barefooted, sat down on the grass to put on their boots; Elizar sat down
with them. If they looked down from above Ukleevo looked beautiful and
peaceful with its willow-trees, its white church, and its little river,
and the only blot on the picture was the roof of the factories, painted
for the sake of cheapness a gloomy ashen grey. On the slope on the
further side they could see the rye—some in stacks and sheaves here and
there as though strewn about by the storm, and some freshly cut lying in
swathes; the oats, too, were ripe and glistened now in the sun like
mother-of-pearl. It was harvest-time. To-day was a holiday, to-morrow
they would harvest the rye and carry the hay, and then Sunday a holiday
again; every day there were mutterings of distant thunder. It was misty
and looked like rain, and, gazing now at the fields, everyone thought,
God grant we get the harvest in in time; and everyone felt gay and
joyful and anxious at heart.
“Mowers ask a high price nowadays,” said Praskovya. “One rouble and
forty kopecks a day.”
People kept coming and coming from the fair at Kazanskoe: peasant women,
factory workers in new caps, beggars, children.... Here a cart would
drive by stirring up the dust and behind it would run an unsold horse,
and it seemed glad it had not been sold; then a cow was led along by the
horns, resisting stubbornly; then a cart again, and in it drunken
peasants swinging their legs. An old woman led a little boy in a big cap
and big boots; the boy was tired out with the heat and the heavy boots
which prevented his bending his legs at the knees, but yet blew
unceasingly with all his might at a tin trumpet. They had gone down the
slope and turned into the street, but the trumpet could still be heard.
“Our factory owners don’t seem quite themselves...” said Elizarov.
“There’s trouble. Kostukov is angry with me. ‘Too many boards have gone
on the cornices.’ ‘Too many? As many have gone on it as were needed,
Vassily Danilitch; I don’t eat them with my porridge.’ ‘How can you
speak to me like that?’ said he, ‘you good-for-nothing blockhead! Don’t
forget yourself! It was I made you a contractor.’ ‘That’s nothing so
wonderful,’ said I. ‘Even before I was a contractor I used to have tea
every day.’ ‘You are a rascal...’ he said. I said nothing. ‘We are
rascals in this world,’ thought I, ‘and you will be rascals in the
next....’ Ha-ha-ha! The next day he was softer. ‘Don’t you bear malice
against me for my words, Makaritch,’ he said. ‘If I said too much,’ says
he, ‘what of it? I am a merchant of the first guild, your superior—you
ought to hold your tongue.’ ‘You,’ said I, ‘are a merchant of the first
guild and I am a carpenter, that’s correct. And Saint Joseph was a
carpenter, too. Ours is a righteous calling and pleasing to God, and if
you are pleased to be my superior you are very welcome to it, Vassily
Danilitch.’ And later on, after that conversation I mean, I thought:
‘Which was the superior? A merchant of the first guild or a carpenter?’
The carpenter must be, my child!”
Crutch thought a minute and added:
“Yes, that’s how it is, child. He who works, he who is patient is the
superior.”
By now the sun had set and a thick mist as white as milk was rising over
the river, in the church enclosure, and in the open spaces round the
factories. Now when the darkness was coming on rapidly, when lights were
twinkling below, and when it seemed as though the mists were hiding a
fathomless abyss, Lipa and her mother who were born in poverty and
prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except
their frightened, gentle souls, may have fancied for a minute perhaps
that in the vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives,
they, too, counted for something, and they, too, were superior to
someone; they liked sitting here at the top, they smiled happily and
forgot that they must go down below again all the same.
At last they went home again. The mowers were sitting on the ground at
the gates near the shop. As a rule the Ukleevo peasants did not go to
Tsybukin’s to work, and they had to hire strangers, and now in the
darkness it seemed as though there were men sitting there with long
black beards. The shop was open, and through the doorway they could see
the deaf man playing draughts with a boy. The mowers were singing
softly, scarcely audibly, or loudly demanding their wages for the
previous day, but they were not paid for fear they should go away before
to-morrow. Old Tsybukin, with his coat off, was sitting in his waistcoat
with Aksinya under the birch-tree, drinking tea; a lamp was burning on
the table.
“I say, grandfather,” a mower called from outside the gates, as though
taunting him, “pay us half anyway! Hey, grandfather.”
And at once there was the sound of laughter, and then again they sang
hardly audibly.... Crutch, too, sat down to have some tea.
“We have been at the fair, you know,” he began telling them. “We have
had a walk, a very nice walk, my children, praise the Lord. But an
unfortunate thing happened: Sashka the blacksmith bought some tobacco
and gave the shopman half a rouble to be sure. And the half rouble was a
false one”—Crutch went on, and he meant to speak in a whisper, but he
spoke in a smothered husky voice which was audible to everyone. “The
half-rouble turned out to be a bad one. He was asked where he got it.
‘Anisim Tsybukin gave it me,’ he said. ‘When I went to his wedding,’ he
said. They called the police inspector, took the man away.... Look out,
Grigory Petrovitch, that nothing comes of it, no talk....”
“Gra-ndfather!” the same voice called tauntingly outside the gates.
“Gra-andfather!”
A silence followed.
“Ah, little children, little children, little children...” Crutch
muttered rapidly, and he got up. He was overcome with drowsiness. “Well,
thank you for the tea, for the sugar, little children. It is time to
sleep. I am like a bit of rotten timber nowadays, my beams are crumbling
under me. Ho-ho-ho! I suppose it’s time I was dead.”
And he gave a gulp. Old Tsybukin did not finish his tea but sat on a
little, pondering; and his face looked as though he were listening to
the footsteps of Crutch, who was far away down the street.
“Sashka the blacksmith told a lie, I expect,” said Aksinya, guessing his
thoughts.
He went into the house and came back a little later with a parcel; he
opened it, and there was the gleam of roubles—perfectly new coins. He
took one, tried it with his teeth, flung it on the tray; then flung down
another.
“The roubles really are false...” he said, looking at Aksinya and
seeming perplexed. “These are those Anisim brought, his present. Take
them, daughter,” he whispered, and thrust the parcel into her hands.
“Take them and throw them into the well... confound them! And mind there
is no talk about it. Harm might come of it.... Take away the samovar,
put out the light.”
Lipa and her mother sitting in the barn saw the lights go out one after
the other; only overhead in Varvara’s room there were blue and red lamps
gleaming, and a feeling of peace, content, and happy ignorance seemed to
float down from there. Praskovya could never get used to her daughter’s
being married to a rich man, and when she came she huddled timidly in
the outer room with a deprecating smile on her face, and tea and sugar
were sent out to her. And Lipa, too, could not get used to it either,
and after her husband had gone away she did not sleep in her bed, but
lay down anywhere to sleep, in the kitchen or the barn, and every day
she scrubbed the floor or washed the clothes, and felt as though she
were hired by the day. And now, on coming back from the service, they
drank tea in the kitchen with the cook, then they went into the barn and
lay down on the ground between the sledge and the wall. It was dark here
and smelt of harness. The lights went out about the house, then they
could hear the deaf man shutting up the shop, the mowers settling
themselves about the yard to sleep. In the distance at the Hrymin
Juniors’ they were playing on the expensive concertina.... Praskovya and
Lipa began to go to sleep.
And when they were awakened by somebody’s steps it was bright moonlight;
at the entrance of the barn stood Aksinya with her bedding in her arms.
“Maybe it’s a bit cooler here,” she said; then she came in and lay down
almost in the doorway so that the moonlight fell full upon her.
She did not sleep, but breathed heavily, tossing from side to side with
the heat, throwing off almost all the bedclothes. And in the magic
moonlight what a beautiful, what a proud animal she was! A little time
passed, and then steps were heard again: the old father, white all over,
appeared in the doorway.
“Aksinya,” he called, “are you here?”
“Well?” she responded angrily.
“I told you just now to throw the money into the well, have you done
so?”
“What next, throwing property into the water! I gave them to the
mowers....”
“Oh my God!” cried the old man, dumbfounded and alarmed. “Oh my God! you
wicked woman....”
He flung up his hands and went out, and he kept saying something as he
went away. And a little later Aksinya sat up and sighed heavily with
annoyance, then got up and, gathering up her bedclothes in her arms,
went out.
“Why did you marry me into this family, mother?” said Lipa.
“One has to be married, daughter. It was not us who ordained it.”
And a feeling of inconsolable woe was ready to take possession of them.
But it seemed to them that someone was looking down from the height of
the heavens, out of the blue from where the stars were seeing everything
that was going on in Ukleevo, watching over them. And however great was
wickedness, still the night was calm and beautiful, and still in God’s
world there is and will be truth and justice as calm and beautiful, and
everything on earth is only waiting to be made one with truth and
justice, even as the moonlight is blended with the night.
And both, huddling close to one another, fell asleep comforted.
VI
News had come long before that Anisim had been put in prison for coining
and passing bad money. Months passed, more than half a year passed, the
long winter was over, spring had begun, and everyone in the house and
the village had grown used to the fact that Anisim was in prison. And
when anyone passed by the house or the shop at night he would remember
that Anisim was in prison; and when they rang at the churchyard for some
reason, that, too, reminded them that he was in prison awaiting trial.
It seemed as though a shadow had fallen upon the house. The house looked
darker, the roof was rustier, the heavy, iron-bound door into the shop,
which was painted green, was covered with cracks, or, as the deaf man
expressed it, “blisters”; and old Tsybukin seemed to have grown dingy,
too. He had given up cutting his hair and beard, and looked shaggy. He
no longer sprang jauntily into his chaise, nor shouted to beggars: “God
will provide!” His strength was on the wane, and that was evident in
everything. People were less afraid of him now, and the police officer
drew up a formal charge against him in the shop though he received his
regular bribe as before; and three times the old man was called up to
the town to be tried for illicit dealing in spirits, and the case was
continually adjourned owing to the non-appearance of witnesses, and old
Tsybukin was worn out with worry.
He often went to see his son, hired somebody, handed in a petition to
somebody else, presented a holy banner to some church. He presented the
governor of the prison in which Anisim was confined with a silver glass
stand with a long spoon and the inscription: “The soul knows its right
measure.”
“There is no one to look after things for us,” said Varvara. “Tut,
tut.... You ought to ask someone of the gentlefolks, they would write to
the head officials.... At least they might let him out on bail! Why wear
the poor fellow out?”
She, too, was grieved, but had grown stouter and whiter; she lighted the
lamps before the ikons as before, and saw that everything in the house
was clean, and regaled the guests with jam and apple cheese. The deaf
man and Aksinya looked after the shop. A new project was in progress—a
brickyard in Butyokino—and Aksinya went there almost every day in the
chaise. She drove herself, and when she met acquaintances she stretched
out her neck like a snake out of the young rye, and smiled naively and
enigmatically. Lipa spent her time playing with the baby which had been
born to her before Lent. It was a tiny, thin, pitiful little baby, and
it was strange that it should cry and gaze about and be considered a
human being, and even be called Nikifor. He lay in his swinging cradle,
and Lipa would walk away towards the door and say, bowing to him:
“Good-day, Nikifor Anisimitch!”
And she would rush at him and kiss him. Then she would walk away to the
door, bow again, and say:
‘Good-day, Nikifor Anisimitch!
And he kicked up his little red legs, and his crying was mixed with
laughter like the carpenter Elizarov’s.
At last the day of the trial was fixed. Tsybukin went away five days
before. Then they heard that the peasants called as witnesses had been
fetched; their old workman who had received a notice to appear went too.
The trial was on a Thursday. But Sunday had passed, and Tsybukin was
still not back, and there was no news. Towards the evening on Tuesday
Varvara was sitting at the open window, listening for her husband to
come. In the next room Lipa was playing with her baby. She was tossing
him up in her arms and saying enthusiastically:
“You will grow up ever so big, ever so big. You will be a peasant, we
shall go out to work together! We shall go out to work together!”
“Come, come,” said Varvara, offended. “Go out to work, what an idea, you
silly girl! He will be a merchant...!”
Lipa sang softly, but a minute later she forgot and again:
“You will grow ever so big, ever so big. You will be a peasant, we’ll go
out to work together.”
“There she is at it again!”
Lipa, with Nikifor in her arms, stood still in the doorway and asked:
“Why do I love him so much, mamma? Why do I feel so sorry for him?” she
went on in a quivering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. “Who is
he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb,
but I love him; I love him like a real person. Here he can do nothing,
he can’t talk, and yet I know what he wants with his little eyes.”
Varvara was listening; the sound of the evening train coming in to the
station reached her. Had her husband come? She did not hear and she did
not heed what Lipa was saying, she had no idea how the time passed, but
only trembled all over—not from dread, but intense curiosity. She saw a
cart full of peasants roll quickly by with a rattle. It was the
witnesses coming back from the station. When the cart passed the shop
the old workman jumped out and walked into the yard. She could hear him
being greeted in the yard and being asked some questions....
“Deprivation of rights and all his property,” he said loudly, “and six
years’ penal servitude in Siberia.”
She could see Aksinya come out of the shop by the back way; she had just
been selling kerosene, and in one hand held a bottle and in the other a
can, and in her mouth she had some silver coins.
“Where is father?” she asked, lisping.
“At the station,” answered the labourer. “‘When it gets a little
darker,’ he said, ‘then I shall come.’”
And when it became known all through the household that Anisim was
sentenced to penal servitude, the cook in the kitchen suddenly broke
into a wail as though at a funeral, imagining that this was demanded by
the proprieties:
“There is no one to care for us now you have gone, Anisim Grigoritch,
our bright falcon....”
The dogs began barking in alarm. Varvara ran to the window, and rushing
about in distress, shouted to the cook with all her might, straining her
voice:
“Sto-op, Stepanida, sto-op! Don’t harrow us, for Christ’s sake!”
They forgot to set the samovar, they could think of nothing. Only Lipa
could not make out what it was all about and went on playing with her
baby.
When the old father arrived from the station they asked him no
questions. He greeted them and walked through all the rooms in silence;
he had no supper.
“There was no one to see about things...” Varvara began when they were
alone. “I said you should have asked some of the gentry, you would not
heed me at the time.... A petition would...”
“I saw to things,” said her husband with a wave of his hand. “When
Anisim was condemned I went to the gentleman who was defending him.
‘It’s no use now,’ he said, ‘it’s too late’; and Anisim said the same;
it’s too late. But all the same as I came out of the court I made an
agreement with a lawyer, I paid him something in advance. I’ll wait a
week and then I will go again. It is as God wills.”
Again the old man walked through all the rooms, and when he went back to
Varvara he said:
“I must be ill. My head’s in a sort of... fog. My thoughts are in a
maze.”
He closed the door that Lipa might not hear, and went on softly:
“I am unhappy about my money. Do you remember on Low Sunday before his
wedding Anisim’s bringing me some new roubles and half-roubles? One
parcel I put away at the time, but the others I mixed with my own money.
When my uncle Dmitri Filatitch—the kingdom of heaven be his—was alive,
he used constantly to go journeys to Moscow and to the Crimea to buy
goods. He had a wife, and this same wife, when he was away buying goods,
used to take up with other men. She had half a dozen children. And when
uncle was in his cups he would laugh and say: ‘I never can make out,’ he
used to say, ‘which are my children and which are other people’s.’ An
easy-going disposition, to be sure; and so I now can’t distinguish which
are genuine roubles and which are false ones. And it seems to me that
they are all false.”
“Nonsense, God bless you.”
“I take a ticket at the station, I give the man three roubles, and I
keep fancying they are false. And I am frightened. I must be ill.”
“There’s no denying it, we are all in God’s hands.... Oh dear, dear...”
said Varvara, and she shook her head. “You ought to think about this,
Grigory Petrovitch: you never know, anything may happen, you are not a
young man. See they don’t wrong your grandchild when you are dead and
gone. Oy, I am afraid they will be unfair to Nikifor! He has as good as
no father, his mother’s young and foolish... you ought to secure
something for him, poor little boy, at least the land, Butyokino,
Grigory Petrovitch, really! Think it over!” Varvara went on persuading
him. “The pretty boy, one is sorry for him! You go to-morrow and make
out a deed; why put it off?”
“I’d forgotten about my grandson,” said Tsybukin. “I must go and have a
look at him. So you say the boy is all right? Well, let him grow up,
please God.”
He opened the door and, crooking his finger, beckoned to Lipa. She went
up to him with the baby in her arms.
“If there is anything you want, Lipinka, you ask for it,” he said. “And
eat anything you like, we don’t grudge it, so long as it does you
good....” He made the sign of the cross over the baby. “And take care of
my grandchild. My son is gone, but my grandson is left.”
Tears rolled down his cheeks; he gave a sob and went away. Soon
afterwards he went to bed and slept soundly after seven sleepless
nights.
VII
Old Tsybukin went to the town for a short time. Someone told Aksinya
that he had gone to the notary to make his will and that he was leaving
Butyokino, the very place where she had set up a brickyard, to Nikifor,
his grandson. She was informed of this in the morning when old Tsybukin
and Varvara were sitting near the steps under the birch-tree, drinking
their tea. She closed the shop in the front and at the back, gathered
together all the keys she had, and flung them at her father-in-law’s
feet.
“I am not going on working for you,” she began in a loud voice, and
suddenly broke into sobs. “It seems I am not your daughter-in-law, but a
servant! Everybody’s jeering and saying, ‘See what a servant the
Tsybukins have got hold of!’ I did not come to you for wages! I am not a
beggar, I am not a slave, I have a father and mother.”
She did not wipe away her tears, she fixed upon her father-in-law eyes
full of tears, vindictive, squinting with wrath; her face and neck were
red and tense, and she was shouting at the top of her voice.
“I don’t mean to go on being a slave!” she went on. “I am worn out. When
it is work, when it is sitting in the shop day in and day out, scurrying
out at night for vodka—then it is my share, but when it is giving away
the land then it is for that convict’s wife and her imp. She is mistress
here, and I am her servant. Give her everything, the convict’s wife, and
may it choke her! I am going home! Find yourselves some other fool, you
damned Herods!”
Tsybukin had never in his life scolded or punished his children, and had
never dreamed that one of his family could speak to him rudely or behave
disrespectfully; and now he was very much frightened; he ran into the
house and there hid behind the cupboard. And Varvara was so much
flustered that she could not get up from her seat, and only waved her
hands before her as though she were warding off a bee.
“Oh, Holy Saints! what’s the meaning of it?” she muttered in horror.
“What is she shouting? Oh, dear, dear!... People will hear! Hush. Oh,
hush!”
“He has given Butyokino to the convict’s wife,” Aksinya went on bawling.
“Give her everything now, I don’t want anything from you! Let me alone!
You are all a gang of thieves here! I have seen my fill of it, I have
had enough! You have robbed folks coming in and going out; you have
robbed old and young alike, you brigands! And who has been selling vodka
without a licence? And false money? You’ve filled boxes full of false
coins, and now I am no more use!”
A crowd had by now collected at the open gate and was staring into the
yard.
“Let the people look,” bawled Aksinya. “I will shame you all! You shall
burn with shame! You shall grovel at my feet. Hey! Stepan,” she called
to the deaf man, “let us go home this minute! Let us go to my father and
mother; I don’t want to live with convicts. Get ready!”
Clothes were hanging on lines stretched across the yard; she snatched
off her petticoats and blouses still wet and flung them into the deaf
man’s arms. Then in her fury she dashed about the yard by the linen,
tore down all of it, and what was not hers she threw on the ground and
trampled upon.
“Holy Saints, take her away,” moaned Varvara. “What a woman! Give her
Butyokino! Give it her, for the Lord’s sake!
“Well! Wha-at a woman!” people were saying at the gate. “She’s a wo-
oman! She’s going it—something like!”
Aksinya ran into the kitchen where washing was going on. Lipa was
washing alone, the cook had gone to the river to rinse the clothes.
Steam was rising from the trough and from the caldron on the side of the
stove, and the kitchen was thick and stifling from the steam. On the
floor was a heap of unwashed clothes, and Nikifor, kicking up his little
red legs, had been put down on a bench near them, so that if he fell he
should not hurt himself. Just as Aksinya went in Lipa took the former’s
chemise out of the heap and put it in the trough, and was just
stretching out her hand to a big ladle of boiling water which was
standing on the table.
“Give it here,” said Aksinya, looking at her with hatred, and snatching
the chemise out of the trough; “it is not your business to touch my
linen! You are a convict’s wife, and ought to know your place and who
you are.”
Lipa gazed at her, taken aback, and did not understand, but suddenly she
caught the look Aksinya turned upon the child, and at once she
understood and went numb all over.
“You’ve taken my land, so here you are!” Saying this Aksinya snatched up
the ladle with the boiling water and flung it over Nikifor.
After this there was heard a scream such as had never been heard before
in Ukleevo, and no one would have believed that a little weak creature
like Lipa could scream like that. And it was suddenly silent in the
yard.
Aksinya walked into the house with her old naive smile.... The deaf man
kept moving about the yard with his arms full of linen, then he began
hanging it up again, in silence, without haste. And until the cook came
back from the river no one ventured to go into the kitchen and see what
was there.
VIII
Nikifor was taken to the district hospital, and towards evening he died
there. Lipa did not wait for them to come for her, but wrapped the dead
baby in its little quilt and carried it home.
The hospital, a new one recently built, with big windows, stood high up
on a hill; it was glittering from the setting sun and looked as though
it were on fire from inside. There was a little village below. Lipa went
down along the road, and before reaching the village sat down by a pond.
A woman brought a horse down to drink and the horse did not drink.
“What more do you want?” said the woman to it softly. “What do you
want?”
A boy in a red shirt, sitting at the water’s edge, was washing his
father’s boots. And not another soul was in sight either in the village
or on the hill.
“It’s not drinking,” said Lipa, looking at the horse.
Then the woman with the horse and the boy with the boots walked away,
and there was no one left at all. The sun went to bed wrapped in cloth
of gold and purple, and long clouds, red and lilac, stretched across the
sky, guarded its slumbers. Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow,
melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that
mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like
or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes
close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling. The
cuckoo kept reckoning someone’s years and losing count and beginning
again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining
themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: “That’s
what you are! That’s what you are!” What a noise there was! It seemed as
though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one
might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs,
might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.
A silver half-moon was shining in the sky; there were many stars. Lipa
had no idea how long she sat by the pond, but when she got up and walked
on everybody was asleep in the little village, and there was not a
single light. It was probably about nine miles’ walk home, but she had
not the strength, she had not the power to think how to go: the moon
gleamed now in front, now on the right, and the same cuckoo kept calling
in a voice grown husky, with a chuckle as though gibing at her: “Oy,
look out, you’ll lose your way!” Lipa walked rapidly; she lost the
kerchief from her head... she looked at the sky and wondered where her
baby’s soul was now: was it following her, or floating aloft yonder
among the stars and thinking nothing now of his mother? Oh, how lonely
it was in the open country at night, in the midst of that singing when
one cannot sing oneself; in the midst of the incessant cries of joy when
one cannot oneself be joyful, when the moon, which cares not whether it
is spring or winter, whether men are alive or dead, looks down as
lonely, too.... When there is grief in the heart it is hard to be
without people. If only her mother, Praskovya, had been with her, or
Crutch, or the cook, or some peasant!
“Boo-oo!” cried the bittern. “Boo-oo!”
And suddenly she heard clearly the sound of human speech: “Put the
horses in, Vavila!”
By the wayside a camp fire was burning ahead of her: the flames had died
down, there were only red embers. She could hear the horses munching. In
the darkness she could see the outlines of two carts, one with a barrel,
the other, a lower one with sacks in it, and the figures of two men; one
was leading a horse to put it into the shafts, the other was standing
motionless by the fire with his hands behind his back. A dog growled by
the carts. The one who was leading the horse stopped and said:
“It seems as though someone were coming along the road.”
“Sharik, be quiet!” the other called to the dog.
And from the voice one could tell that the second was an old man. Lipa
stopped and said:
“God help you.”
The old man went up to her and answered not immediately:
“Good-evening!”
“Your dog does not bite, grandfather?”
“No, come along, he won’t touch you.”
“I have been at the hospital,” said Lipa after a pause. “My little son
died there. Here I am carrying him home.”
It must have been unpleasant for the old man to hear this, for he moved
away and said hurriedly:
“Never mind, my dear. It’s God’s will. You are very slow, lad,” he
added, addressing his companion; “look alive!”
“Your yoke’s nowhere,” said the young man; “it is not to be seen.”
“You are a regular Vavila.”
The old man picked up an ember, blew on it—only his eyes and nose were
lighted up—then, when they had found the yoke, he went with the light to
Lipa and looked at her, and his look expressed compassion and
tenderness.
“You are a mother,” he said; “every mother grieves for her child.”
And he sighed and shook his head as he said it. Vavila threw something
on the fire, stamped on it—and at once it was very dark; the vision
vanished, and as before there were only the fields, the sky with the
stars, and the noise of the birds hindering each other from sleep. And
the landrail called, it seemed, in the very place where the fire had
been.
But a minute passed, and again she could see the two carts and the old
man and lanky Vavila. The carts creaked as they went out on the road.
“Are you holy men?” Lipa asked the old man.
“No. We are from Firsanovo.”
“You looked at me just now and my heart was softened. And the young man
is so gentle. I thought you must be holy men.”
“Are you going far?”
“To Ukleevo.”
“Get in, we will give you a lift as far as Kuzmenki, then you go
straight on and we turn off to the left.”
Vavila got into the cart with the barrel and the old man and Lipa got
into the other. They moved at a walking pace, Vavila in front.
“My baby was in torment all day,” said Lipa. “He looked at me with his
little eyes and said nothing; he wanted to speak and could not. Holy
Father, Queen of Heaven! In my grief I kept falling down on the floor. I
stood up and fell down by the bedside. And tell me, grandfather, why a
little thing should be tormented before his death? When a grown-up
person, a man or woman, are in torment their sins are forgiven, but why
a little thing, when he has no sins? Why?”
“Who can tell?” answered the old man.
They drove on for half an hour in silence.
“We can’t know everything, how and wherefore,” said the old man. “It is
ordained for the bird to have not four wings but two because it is able
to fly with two; and so it is ordained for man not to know everything
but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know so as to live,
so much he knows.”
“It is better for me to go on foot, grandfather. Now my heart is all of
a tremble.”
“Never mind, sit still.”
The old man yawned and made the sign of the cross over his mouth.
“Never mind,” he repeated. “Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is
long, there will be good and bad to come, there will be everything.
Great is mother Russia,” he said, and looked round on each side of him.
“I have been all over Russia, and I have seen everything in her, and you
may believe my words, my dear. There will be good and there will be bad.
I went as a delegate from my village to Siberia, and I have been to the
Amur River and the Altai Mountains and I settled in Siberia; I worked
the land there, then I was homesick for mother Russia and I came back to
my native village. We came back to Russia on foot; and I remember we
went on a steamer, and I was thin as thin, all in rags, barefoot,
freezing with cold, and gnawing a crust, and a gentleman who was on the
steamer—the kingdom of heaven be his if he is dead—looked at me
pitifully, and the tears came into his eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘your bread
is black, your days are black....’ And when I got home, as the saying
is, there was neither stick nor stall; I had a wife, but I left her
behind in Siberia, she was buried there. So I am living as a day
labourer. And yet I tell you: since then I have had good as well as bad.
Here I do not want to die, my dear, I would be glad to live another
twenty years; so there has been more of the good. And great is our
mother Russia!” and again he gazed to each side and looked round.
“Grandfather,” Lipa asked, “when anyone dies, how many days does his
soul walk the earth?”
“Who can tell! Ask Vavila here, he has been to school. Now they teach
them everything. Vavila!” the old man called to him.
“Yes!”
“Vavila, when anyone dies how long does his soul walk the earth?”
Vavila stopped the horse and only then answered:
“Nine days. My uncle Kirilla died and his soul lived in our hut thirteen
days after.”
“How do you know?”
“For thirteen days there was a knocking in the stove.”
“Well, that’s all right. Go on,” said the old man, and it could be seen
that he did not believe a word of all that.
Near Kuzmenki the cart turned into the high road while Lipa went
straight on. It was by now getting light. As she went down into the
ravine the Ukleevo huts and the church were hidden in fog. It was cold,
and it seemed to her that the same cuckoo was calling still.
When Lipa reached home the cattle had not yet been driven out; everyone
was asleep. She sat down on the steps and waited. The old man was the
first to come out; he understood all that had happened from the first
glance at her, and for a long time he could not articulate a word, but
only moved his lips without a sound.
“Ech, Lipa,” he said, “you did not take care of my grandchild....”
Varvara was awakened. She clasped her hands and broke into sobs, and
immediately began laying out the baby.
“And he was a pretty child...” she said. “Oh, dear, dear.... You only
had the one child, and you did not take care enough of him, you silly
girl....”
There was a requiem service in the morning and the evening. The funeral
took place the next day, and after it the guests and the priests ate a
great deal, and with such greed that one might have thought that they
had not tasted food for a long time. Lipa waited at table, and the
priest, lifting his fork on which there was a salted mushroom, said to
her:
“Don’t grieve for the babe. For of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
And only when they had all separated Lipa realized fully that there was
no Nikifor and never would be, she realized it and broke into sobs. And
she did not know what room to go into to sob, for she felt that now that
her child was dead there was no place for her in the house, that she had
no reason to be here, that she was in the way; and the others felt it,
too.
“Now what are you bellowing for?” Aksinya shouted, suddenly appearing in
the doorway; in honour of the funeral she was dressed all in new clothes
and had powdered her face. “Shut up!”
Lipa tried to stop but could not, and sobbed louder than ever.
“Do you hear?” shouted Aksinya, and she stamped her foot in violent
anger. “Who is it I am speaking to? Go out of the yard and don’t set
foot here again, you convict’s wife. Get away.”
“There, there, there,” the old man put in fussily. “Aksinya, don’t make
such an outcry, my girl.... She is crying, it is only natural... her
child is dead....”
“‘It’s only natural,’” Aksinya mimicked him. “Let her stay the night
here, and don’t let me see a trace of her here to-morrow! ‘It’s only
natural!’...” she mimicked him again, and, laughing, she went into the
shop.
Early the next morning Lipa went off to her mother at Torguevo.
IX
At the present time the steps and the front door of the shop have been
repainted and are as bright as though they were new, there are gay
geraniums in the windows as of old, and what happened in Tsybukin’s
house and yard three years ago is almost forgotten.
Grigory Petrovitch is looked upon as the master as he was in old days,
but in reality everything has passed into Aksinya’s hands; she buys and
sells, and nothing can be done without her consent. The brickyard is
working well; and as bricks are wanted for the railway the price has
gone up to twenty-four roubles a thousand; peasant women and girls cart
the bricks to the station and load them up in the trucks and earn a
quarter-rouble a day for the work.
Aksinya has gone into partnership with the Hrymin Juniors, and their
factory is now called Hrymin Juniors and Co. They have opened a tavern
near the station, and now the expensive concertina is played not at the
factory but at the tavern, and the head of the post office often goes
there, and he, too, is engaged in some sort of traffic, and the
stationmaster, too. Hrymin Juniors have presented the deaf man Stepan
with a gold watch, and he is constantly taking it out of his pocket and
putting it to his ear.
People say of Aksinya that she has become a person of power; and it is
true that when she drives in the morning to her brickyard, handsome and
happy, with the naive smile on her face, and afterwards when she is
giving orders there, one is aware of great power in her. Everyone is
afraid of her in the house and in the village and in the brickyard. When
she goes to the post the head of the postal department jumps up and says
to her:
“I humbly beg you to be seated, Aksinya Abramovna!”
A certain landowner, middle-aged but foppish, in a tunic of fine cloth
and patent leather high boots, sold her a horse, and was so carried away
by talking to her that he knocked down the price to meet her wishes. He
held her hand a long time and, looking into her merry, sly, naive eyes,
said:
“For a woman like you, Aksinya Abramovna, I should be ready to do
anything you please. Only say when we can meet where no one will
interfere with us?”
“Why, when you please.”
And since then the elderly fop drives up to the shop almost every day to
drink beer. And the beer is horrid, bitter as wormwood. The landowner
shakes his head, but he drinks it.
Old Tsybukin does not have anything to do with the business now at all.
He does not keep any money because he cannot distinguish between the
good and the false, but he is silent, he says nothing of this weakness.
He has become forgetful, and if they don’t give him food he does not ask
for it. They have grown used to having dinner without him, and Varvara
often says:
“He went to bed again yesterday without any supper.”
And she says it unconcernedly because she is used to it. For some
reason, summer and winter alike, he wears a fur coat, and only in very
hot weather he does not go out but sits at home. As a rule putting on
his fur coat, wrapping it round him and turning up his collar, he walks
about the village, along the road to the station, or sits from morning
till night on the seat near the church gates. He sits there without
stirring. Passers-by bow to him, but he does not respond, for as of old
he dislikes the peasants. If he is asked a question he answers quite
rationally and politely, but briefly.
There is a rumour going about in the village that his daughter-in-law
turns him out of the house and gives him nothing to eat, and that he is
fed by charity; some are glad, others are sorry for him.
Varvara has grown even fatter and whiter, and as before she is active in
good works, and Aksinya does not interfere with her.
There is so much jam now that they have not time to eat it before the
fresh fruit comes in; it goes sugary, and Varvara almost sheds tears,
not knowing what to do with it.
They have begun to forget about Anisim. A letter has come from him
written in verse on a big sheet of paper as though it were a petition,
all in the same splendid handwriting. Evidently his friend Samorodov was
sharing his punishment. Under the verses in an ugly, scarcely legible
handwriting there was a single line: “I am ill here all the time; I am
wretched, for Christ’s sake help me!”
Towards evening—it was a fine autumn day—old Tsybukin was sitting near
the church gates, with the collar of his fur coat turned up and nothing
of him could be seen but his nose and the peak of his cap. At the other
end of the long seat was sitting Elizarov the contractor, and beside him
Yakov the school watchman, a toothless old man of seventy. Crutch and
the watchman were talking.
“Children ought to give food and drink to the old.... Honour thy father
and mother...” Yakov was saying with irritation, “while she, this
daughter-in-law, has turned her father-in-law out of his own house; the
old man has neither food nor drink, where is he to go? He has not had a
morsel for these three days.”
“Three days!” said Crutch, amazed.
“Here he sits and does not say a word. He has grown feeble. And why be
silent? He ought to prosecute her, they wouldn’t flatter her in the
police court.”
“Wouldn’t flatter whom?” asked Crutch, not hearing.
“What?”
“The woman’s all right, she does her best. In their line of business
they can’t get on without that... without sin, I mean....”
“From his own house,” Yakov went on with irritation. “Save up and buy
your own house, then turn people out of it! She is a nice one, to be
sure! A pla-ague!”
Tsybukin listened and did not stir.
“Whether it is your own house or others’ it makes no difference so long
as it is warm and the women don’t scold...” said Crutch, and he laughed.
“When I was young I was very fond of my Nastasya. She was a quiet woman.
And she used to be always at it: ‘Buy a house, Makaritch! Buy a house,
Makaritch! Buy a house, Makaritch!’ She was dying and yet she kept on
saying, ‘Buy yourself a racing droshky, Makaritch, that you may not have
to walk.’ And I bought her nothing but gingerbread.”
“Her husband’s deaf and stupid,” Yakov went on, not hearing Crutch; “a
regular fool, just like a goose. He can’t understand anything. Hit a
goose on the head with a stick and even then it does not understand.”
Crutch got up to go home to the factory. Yakov also got up, and both of
them went off together, still talking. When they had gone fifty paces
old Tsybukin got up, too, and walked after them, stepping uncertainly as
though on slippery ice.
The village was already plunged in the dusk of evening and the sun only
gleamed on the upper part of the road which ran wriggling like a snake
up the slope. Old women were coming back from the woods and children
with them; they were bringing baskets of mushrooms. Peasant women and
girls came in a crowd from the station where they had been loading the
trucks with bricks, and their noses and their cheeks under their eyes
were covered with red brick-dust. They were singing. Ahead of them all
was Lipa singing in a high voice, with her eyes turned upwards to the
sky, breaking into trills as though triumphant and ecstatic that at last
the day was over and she could rest. In the crowd was her mother
Praskovya, who was walking with a bundle in her arms and breathless as
usual.
“Good-evening, Makaritch!” cried Lipa, seeing Crutch. “Good-evening,
darling!”
“Good-evening, Lipinka,” cried Crutch delighted. “Dear girls and women,
love the rich carpenter! Ho-ho! My little children, my little children.
(Crutch gave a gulp.) My dear little axes!”
Crutch and Yakov went on further and could still be heard talking. Then
after them the crowd was met by old Tsybukin and there was a sudden
hush. Lipa and Praskovya had dropped a little behind, and when the old
man was on a level with them Lipa bowed down low and said:
“Good-evening, Grigory Petrovitch.”
Her mother, too, bowed down. The old man stopped and, saying nothing,
looked at the two in silence; his lips were quivering and his eyes full
of tears. Lipa took out of her mother’s bundle a piece of savoury
turnover and gave it him. He took it and began eating.
The sun had by now set: its glow died away on the road above. It grew
dark and cool. Lipa and Praskovya walked on and for some time they kept
crossing themselves.
THE HUNTSMAN
A SULTRY, stifling midday. Not a cloudlet in the sky.... The sun-baked
grass had a disconsolate, hopeless look: even if there were rain it
could never be green again.... The forest stood silent, motionless, as
though it were looking at something with its tree-tops or expecting
something.
At the edge of the clearing a tall, narrow-shouldered man of forty in a
red shirt, in patched trousers that had been a gentleman’s, and in high
boots, was slouching along with a lazy, shambling step. He was
sauntering along the road. On the right was the green of the clearing,
on the left a golden sea of ripe rye stretched to the very horizon. He
was red and perspiring, a white cap with a straight jockey peak,
evidently a gift from some open-handed young gentleman, perched jauntily
on his handsome flaxen head. Across his shoulder hung a game-bag with a
blackcock lying in it. The man held a double-barrelled gun cocked in his
hand, and screwed up his eyes in the direction of his lean old dog who
was running on ahead sniffing the bushes. There was stillness all round,
not a sound... everything living was hiding away from the heat.
“Yegor Vlassitch!” the huntsman suddenly heard a soft voice.
He started and, looking round, scowled. Beside him, as though she had
sprung out of the earth, stood a pale-faced woman of thirty with a
sickle in her hand. She was trying to look into his face, and was
smiling diffidently.
“Oh, it is you, Pelagea!” said the huntsman, stopping and deliberately
uncocking the gun. “H’m!... How have you come here?”
“The women from our village are working here, so I have come with
them.... As a labourer, Yegor Vlassitch.”
“Oh...” growled Yegor Vlassitch, and slowly walked on.
Pelagea followed him. They walked in silence for twenty paces.
“I have not seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlassitch...” said Pelagea
looking tenderly at the huntsman’s moving shoulders. “I have not seen
you since you came into our hut at Easter for a drink of water... you
came in at Easter for a minute and then God knows how... drunk... you
scolded and beat me and went away... I have been waiting and waiting...
I’ve tired my eyes out looking for you. Ah, Yegor Vlassitch, Yegor
Vlassitch! you might look in just once!”
“What is there for me to do there?”
“Of course there is nothing for you to do... though to be sure... there
is the place to look after.... To see how things are going.... You are
the master.... I say, you have shot a blackcock, Yegor Vlassitch! You
ought to sit down and rest!”
As she said all this Pelagea laughed like a silly girl and looked up at
Yegor’s face. Her face was simply radiant with happiness.
“Sit down? If you like...” said Yegor in a tone of indifference, and he
chose a spot between two fir-trees. “Why are you standing? You sit down
too.”
Pelagea sat a little way off in the sun and, ashamed of her joy, put her
hand over her smiling mouth. Two minutes passed in silence.
“You might come for once,” said Pelagea.
“What for?” sighed Yegor, taking off his cap and wiping his red forehead
with his hand. “There is no object in my coming. To go for an hour or
two is only waste of time, it’s simply upsetting you, and to live
continually in the village my soul could not endure.... You know
yourself I am a pampered man.... I want a bed to sleep in, good tea to
drink, and refined conversation.... I want all the niceties, while you
live in poverty and dirt in the village.... I couldn’t stand it for a
day. Suppose there were an edict that I must live with you, I should
either set fire to the hut or lay hands on myself. From a boy I’ve had
this love for ease; there is no help for it.”
“Where are you living now?”
“With the gentleman here, Dmitry Ivanitch, as a huntsman. I furnish his
table with game, but he keeps me... more for his pleasure than
anything.”
“That’s not proper work you’re doing, Yegor Vlassitch.... For other
people it’s a pastime, but with you it’s like a trade... like real
work.”
“You don’t understand, you silly,” said Yegor, gazing gloomily at the
sky. “You have never understood, and as long as you live you will never
understand what sort of man I am.... You think of me as a foolish man,
gone to the bad, but to anyone who understands I am the best shot there
is in the whole district. The gentry feel that, and they have even
printed things about me in a magazine. There isn’t a man to be compared
with me as a sportsman.... And it is not because I am pampered and proud
that I look down upon your village work. From my childhood, you know, I
have never had any calling apart from guns and dogs. If they took away
my gun, I used to go out with the fishing-hook, if they took the hook I
caught things with my hands. And I went in for horse-dealing too, I used
to go to the fairs when I had the money, and you know that if a peasant
goes in for being a sportsman, or a horse-dealer, it’s good-bye to the
plough. Once the spirit of freedom has taken a man you will never root
it out of him. In the same way, if a gentleman goes in for being an
actor or for any other art, he will never make an official or a
landowner. You are a woman, and you do not understand, but one must
understand that.”
“I understand, Yegor Vlassitch.”
“You don’t understand if you are going to cry....”
“I... I’m not crying,” said Pelagea, turning away. “It’s a sin, Yegor
Vlassitch! You might stay a day with luckless me, anyway. It’s twelve
years since I was married to you, and... and... there has never once
been love between us!... I... I am not crying.”
“Love...” muttered Yegor, scratching his hand. “There can’t be any love.
It’s only in name we are husband and wife; we aren’t really. In your
eyes I am a wild man, and in mine you are a simple peasant woman with no
understanding. Are we well matched? I am a free, pampered, profligate
man, while you are a working woman, going in bark shoes and never
straightening your back. The way I think of myself is that I am the
foremost man in every kind of sport, and you look at me with pity.... Is
that being well matched?”
“But we are married, you know, Yegor Vlassitch,” sobbed Pelagea.
“Not married of our free will.... Have you forgotten? You have to thank
Count Sergey Paylovitch and yourself. Out of envy, because I shot better
than he did, the Count kept giving me wine for a whole month, and when a
man’s drunk you could make him change his religion, let alone getting
married. To pay me out he married me to you when I was drunk.... A
huntsman to a herd-girl! You saw I was drunk, why did you marry me? You
were not a serf, you know; you could have resisted. Of course it was a
bit of luck for a herd-girl to marry a huntsman, but you ought to have
thought about it. Well, now be miserable, cry. It’s a joke for the
Count, but a crying matter for you.... Beat yourself against the wall.”
A silence followed. Three wild ducks flew over the clearing. Yegor
followed them with his eyes till, transformed into three scarcely
visible dots, they sank down far beyond the forest.
“How do you live?” he asked, moving his eyes from the ducks to Pelagea.
“Now I am going out to work, and in the winter I take a child from the
Foundling Hospital and bring it up on the bottle. They give me a rouble
and a half a month.”
“Oh....”
Again a silence. From the strip that had been reaped floated a soft song
which broke off at the very beginning. It was too hot to sing.
“They say you have put up a new hut for Akulina,” said Pelagea.
Yegor did not speak.
“So she is dear to you....”
“It’s your luck, it’s fate!” said the huntsman, stretching. “You must
put up with it, poor thing. But good-bye, I’ve been chattering long
enough.... I must be at Boltovo by the evening.”
Yegor rose, stretched himself, and slung his gun over his shoulder;
Pelagea got up.
“And when are you coming to the village?” she asked softly.
“I have no reason to, I shall never come sober, and you have little to
gain from me drunk; I am spiteful when I am drunk. Good-bye!”
“Good-bye, Yegor Vlassitch.”
Yegor put his cap on the back of his head and, clicking to his dog, went
on his way. Pelagea stood still looking after him.... She saw his moving
shoulder-blades, his jaunty cap, his lazy, careless step, and her eyes
were full of sadness and tender affection.... Her gaze flitted over her
husband’s tall, lean figure and caressed and fondled it.... He, as
though he felt that gaze, stopped and looked round.... He did not speak,
but from his face, from his shrugged shoulders, Pelagea could see that
he wanted to say something to her. She went up to him timidly and looked
at him with imploring eyes.
“Take it,” he said, turning round.
He gave her a crumpled rouble note and walked quickly away.
“Good-bye, Yegor Vlassitch,” she said, mechanically taking the rouble.
He walked by a long road, straight as a taut strap. She, pale and
motionless as a statue, stood, her eyes seizing every step he took. But
the red of his shirt melted into the dark colour of his trousers, his
step could not be seen, and the dog could not be distinguished from the
boots. Nothing could be seen but the cap, and... suddenly Yegor turned
off sharply into the clearing and the cap vanished in the greenness.
“Good-bye, Yegor Vlassitch,” whispered Pelagea, and she stood on tiptoe
to see the white cap once more.
HAPPINESS
A FLOCK of sheep was spending the night on the broad steppe road that is
called the great highway. Two shepherds were guarding it. One, a
toothless old man of eighty, with a tremulous face, was lying on his
stomach at the very edge of the road, leaning his elbows on the dusty
leaves of a plantain; the other, a young fellow with thick black
eyebrows and no moustache, dressed in the coarse canvas of which cheap
sacks are made, was lying on his back, with his arms under his head,
looking upwards at the sky, where the stars were slumbering and the
Milky Way lay stretched exactly above his face.
The shepherds were not alone. A couple of yards from them in the dusk
that shrouded the road a horse made a patch of darkness, and, beside it,
leaning against the saddle, stood a man in high boots and a short full-
skirted jacket who looked like an overseer on some big estate. Judging
from his upright and motionless figure, from his manners, and his
behaviour to the shepherds and to his horse, he was a serious,
reasonable man who knew his own value; even in the darkness signs could
be detected in him of military carriage and of the majestically
condescending expression gained by frequent intercourse with the gentry
and their stewards.
The sheep were asleep. Against the grey background of the dawn, already
beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky, the silhouettes of sheep
that were not asleep could be seen here and there; they stood with
drooping heads, thinking. Their thoughts, tedious and oppressive, called
forth by images of nothing but the broad steppe and the sky, the days
and the nights, probably weighed upon them themselves, crushing them
into apathy; and, standing there as though rooted to the earth, they
noticed neither the presence of a stranger nor the uneasiness of the
dogs.
The drowsy, stagnant air was full of the monotonous noise inseparable
from a summer night on the steppes; the grasshoppers chirruped
incessantly; the quails called, and the young nightingales trilled
languidly half a mile away in a ravine where a stream flowed and willows
grew.
The overseer had halted to ask the shepherds for a light for his pipe.
He lighted it in silence and smoked the whole pipe; then, still without
uttering a word, stood with his elbow on the saddle, plunged in thought.
The young shepherd took no notice of him, he still lay gazing at the sky
while the old man slowly looked the overseer up and down and then asked:
“Why, aren’t you Panteley from Makarov’s estate?”
“That’s myself,” answered the overseer.
“To be sure, I see it is. I didn’t know you—that is a sign you will be
rich. Where has God brought you from?”
“From the Kovylyevsky fields.”
“That’s a good way. Are you letting the land on the part-crop system?”
“Part of it. Some like that, and some we are letting on lease, and some
for raising melons and cucumbers. I have just come from the mill.”
A big shaggy old sheep-dog of a dirty white colour with woolly tufts
about its nose and eyes walked three times quietly round the horse,
trying to seem unconcerned in the presence of strangers, then all at
once dashed suddenly from behind at the overseer with an angry aged
growl; the other dogs could not refrain from leaping up too.
“Lie down, you damned brute,” cried the old man, raising himself on his
elbow; “blast you, you devil’s creature.”
When the dogs were quiet again, the old man resumed his former attitude
and said quietly:
“It was at Kovyli on Ascension Day that Yefim Zhmenya died. Don’t speak
of it in the dark, it is a sin to mention such people. He was a wicked
old man. I dare say you have heard.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yefim Zhmenya, the uncle of Styopka, the blacksmith. The whole district
round knew him. Aye, he was a cursed old man, he was! I knew him for
sixty years, ever since Tsar Alexander who beat the French was brought
from Taganrog to Moscow. We went together to meet the dead Tsar, and in
those days the great highway did not run to Bahmut, but from Esaulovka
to Gorodishtche, and where Kovyli is now, there were bustards’
nests—there was a bustard’s nest at every step. Even then I had noticed
that Yefim had given his soul to damnation, and that the Evil One was in
him. I have observed that if any man of the peasant class is apt to be
silent, takes up with old women’s jobs, and tries to live in solitude,
there is no good in it, and Yefim from his youth up was always one to
hold his tongue and look at you sideways, he always seemed to be sulky
and bristling like a cock before a hen. To go to church or to the tavern
or to lark in the street with the lads was not his fashion, he would
rather sit alone or be whispering with old women. When he was still
young he took jobs to look after the bees and the market gardens. Good
folks would come to his market garden sometimes and his melons were
whistling. One day he caught a pike, when folks were looking on, and it
laughed aloud, ‘Ho-ho-ho-ho!’”
“It does happen,” said Panteley.
The young shepherd turned on his side and, lifting his black eyebrows,
stared intently at the old man.
“Did you hear the melons whistling?” he asked.
“Hear them I didn’t, the Lord spared me,” sighed the old man, “but folks
told me so. It is no great wonder... the Evil One will begin whistling
in a stone if he wants to. Before the Day of Freedom a rock was humming
for three days and three nights in our parts. I heard it myself. The
pike laughed because Yefim caught a devil instead of a pike.”
The old man remembered something. He got up quickly on to his knees and,
shrinking as though from the cold, nervously thrusting his hands into
his sleeves, he muttered in a rapid womanish gabble:
“Lord save us and have mercy upon us! I was walking along the river bank
one day to Novopavlovka. A storm was gathering, such a tempest it was,
preserve us Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven.... I was hurrying on as best I
could, I looked, and beside the path between the thorn bushes—the thorn
was in flower at the time—there was a white bullock coming along. I
wondered whose bullock it was, and what the devil had sent it there for.
It was coming along and swinging its tail and moo-oo-oo! but would you
believe it, friends, I overtake it, I come up close—and it’s not a
bullock, but Yefim—holy, holy, holy! I make the sign of the cross while
he stares at me and mutters, showing the whites of his eyes; wasn’t I
frightened! We came alongside, I was afraid to say a word to him—the
thunder was crashing, the sky was streaked with lightning, the willows
were bent right down to the water—all at once, my friends, God strike me
dead that I die impenitent, a hare ran across the path... it ran and
stopped, and said like a man: ‘Good-evening, peasants.’ Lie down, you
brute!” the old man cried to the shaggy dog, who was moving round the
horse again. “Plague take you!”
“It does happen,” said the overseer, still leaning on the saddle and not
stirring; he said this in the hollow, toneless voice in which men speak
when they are plunged in thought.
“It does happen,” he repeated, in a tone of profundity and conviction.
“Ugh, he was a nasty old fellow,” the old shepherd went on with somewhat
less fervour. “Five years after the Freedom he was flogged by the
commune at the office, so to show his spite he took and sent the throat
illness upon all Kovyli. Folks died out of number, lots and lots of
them, just as in cholera....”
“How did he send the illness?” asked the young shepherd after a brief
silence.
“We all know how, there is no great cleverness needed where there is a
will to it. Yefim murdered people with viper’s fat. That is such a
poison that folks will die from the mere smell of it, let alone the
fat.”
“That’s true,” Panteley agreed.
“The lads wanted to kill him at the time, but the old people would not
let them. It would never have done to kill him; he knew the place where
the treasure is hidden, and not another soul did know. The treasures
about here are charmed so that you may find them and not see them, but
he did see them. At times he would walk along the river bank or in the
forest, and under the bushes and under the rocks there would be little
flames, little flames... little flames as though from brimstone. I have
seen them myself. Everyone expected that Yefim would show people the
places or dig the treasure up himself, but he—as the saying is, like a
dog in the manger—so he died without digging it up himself or showing
other people.”
The overseer lit a pipe, and for an instant lighted up his big
moustaches and his sharp, stern-looking, and dignified nose. Little
circles of light danced from his hands to his cap, raced over the saddle
along the horse’s back, and vanished in its mane near its ears.
“There are lots of hidden treasures in these parts,” he said.
And slowly stretching, he looked round him, resting his eyes on the
whitening east and added:
“There must be treasures.”
“To be sure,” sighed the old man, “one can see from every sign there are
treasures, only there is no one to dig them, brother. No one knows the
real places; besides, nowadays, you must remember, all the treasures are
under a charm. To find them and see them you must have a talisman, and
without a talisman you can do nothing, lad. Yefim had talismans, but
there was no getting anything out of him, the bald devil. He kept them,
so that no one could get them.”
The young shepherd crept two paces nearer to the old man and, propping
his head on his fists, fastened his fixed stare upon him. A childish
expression of terror and curiosity gleamed in his dark eyes, and seemed
in the twilight to stretch and flatten out the large features of his
coarse young face. He was listening intently.
“It is even written in the Scriptures that there are lots of treasures
hidden here,” the old man went on; “it is so for sure... and no mistake
about it. An old soldier of Novopavlovka was shown at Ivanovka a
writing, and in this writing it was printed about the place of the
treasure and even how many pounds of gold was in it and the sort of
vessel it was in; they would have found the treasures long ago by that
writing, only the treasure is under a spell, you can’t get at it.”
“Why can’t you get at it, grandfather?” asked the young man.
“I suppose there is some reason, the soldier didn’t say. It is under a
spell... you need a talisman.”
The old man spoke with warmth, as though he were pouring out his soul
before the overseer. He talked through his nose and, being unaccustomed
to talk much and rapidly, stuttered; and, conscious of his defects, he
tried to adorn his speech with gesticulations of the hands and head and
thin shoulders, and at every movement his hempen shirt crumpled into
folds, slipped upwards and displayed his back, black with age and
sunburn. He kept pulling it down, but it slipped up again at once. At
last, as though driven out of all patience by the rebellious shirt, the
old man leaped up and said bitterly:
“There is fortune, but what is the good of it if it is buried in the
earth? It is just riches wasted with no profit to anyone, like chaff or
sheep’s dung, and yet there are riches there, lad, fortune enough for
all the country round, but not a soul sees it! It will come to this,
that the gentry will dig it up or the government will take it away. The
gentry have begun digging the barrows.... They scented something! They
are envious of the peasants’ luck! The government, too, is looking after
itself. It is written in the law that if any peasant finds the treasure
he is to take it to the authorities! I dare say, wait till you get it!
There is a brew but not for you!”
The old man laughed contemptuously and sat down on the ground. The
overseer listened with attention and agreed, but from his silence and
the expression of his figure it was evident that what the old man told
him was not new to him, that he had thought it all over long ago, and
knew much more than was known to the old shepherd.
“In my day, I must own, I did seek for fortune a dozen times,” said the
old man, scratching himself nervously. “I looked in the right places,
but I must have come on treasures under a charm. My father looked for
it, too, and my brother, too—but not a thing did they find, so they died
without luck. A monk revealed to my brother Ilya—the Kingdom of Heaven
be his—that in one place in the fortress of Taganrog there was a
treasure under three stones, and that that treasure was under a charm,
and in those days—it was, I remember, in the year ‘38—an Armenian used
to live at Matvyeev Barrow who sold talismans. Ilya bought a talisman,
took two other fellows with him, and went to Taganrog. Only when he got
to the place in the fortress, brother, there was a soldier with a gun,
standing at the very spot....”
A sound suddenly broke on the still air, and floated in all directions
over the steppe. Something in the distance gave a menacing bang, crashed
against stone, and raced over the steppe, uttering, “Tah! tah! tah!
tah!” When the sound had died away the old man looked inquiringly at
Panteley, who stood motionless and unconcerned.
“It’s a bucket broken away at the pits,” said the young shepherd after a
moment’s thought.
It was by now getting light. The Milky Way had turned pale and gradually
melted like snow, losing its outlines; the sky was becoming dull and
dingy so that you could not make out whether it was clear or covered
thickly with clouds, and only from the bright leaden streak in the east
and from the stars that lingered here and there could one tell what was
coming.
The first noiseless breeze of morning, cautiously stirring the spurges
and the brown stalks of last year’s grass, fluttered along the road.
The overseer roused himself from his thoughts and tossed his head. With
both hands he shook the saddle, touched the girth and, as though he
could not make up his mind to mount the horse, stood still again,
hesitating.
“Yes,” he said, “your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it. There is
fortune, but there is not the wit to find it.”
And he turned facing the shepherds. His stern face looked sad and
mocking, as though he were a disappointed man.
“Yes, so one dies without knowing what happiness is like...” he said
emphatically, lifting his left leg into the stirrup. “A younger man may
live to see it, but it is time for us to lay aside all thought of it.”
Stroking his long moustaches covered with dew, he seated himself heavily
on the horse and screwed up his eyes, looking into the distance, as
though he had forgotten something or left something unsaid. In the
bluish distance where the furthest visible hillock melted into the mist
nothing was stirring; the ancient barrows, once watch-mounds and tombs,
which rose here and there above the horizon and the boundless steppe had
a sullen and death-like look; there was a feeling of endless time and
utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence; another
thousand years would pass, myriads of men would die, while they would
still stand as they had stood, with no regret for the dead nor interest
in the living, and no soul would ever know why they stood there, and
what secret of the steppes was hidden under them.
The rooks awakening, flew one after another in silence over the earth.
No meaning was to be seen in the languid flight of those long-lived
birds, nor in the morning which is repeated punctually every twenty-four
hours, nor in the boundless expanse of the steppe.
The overseer smiled and said:
“What space, Lord have mercy upon us! You would have a hunt to find
treasure in it! Here,” he went on, dropping his voice and making a
serious face, “here there are two treasures buried for a certainty. The
gentry don’t know of them, but the old peasants, particularly the
soldiers, know all about them. Here, somewhere on that ridge [the
overseer pointed with his whip] robbers one time attacked a caravan of
gold; the gold was being taken from Petersburg to the Emperor Peter who
was building a fleet at the time at Voronezh. The robbers killed the men
with the caravan and buried the gold, but did not find it again
afterwards. Another treasure was buried by our Cossacks of the Don. In
the year ‘12 they carried off lots of plunder of all sorts from the
French, goods and gold and silver. When they were going homewards they
heard on the way that the government wanted to take away all the gold
and silver from them. Rather than give up their plunder like that to the
government for nothing, the brave fellows took and buried it, so that
their children, anyway, might get it; but where they buried it no one
knows.”
“I have heard of those treasures,” the old man muttered grimly.
“Yes...” Panteley pondered again. “So it is....”
A silence followed. The overseer looked dreamily into the distance, gave
a laugh and pulled the rein, still with the same expression as though he
had forgotten something or left something unsaid. The horse reluctantly
started at a walking pace. After riding a hundred paces Panteley shook
his head resolutely, roused himself from his thoughts and, lashing his
horse, set off at a trot.
The shepherds were left alone.
“That was Panteley from Makarov’s estate,” said the old man. “He gets a
hundred and fifty a year and provisions found, too. He is a man of
education....”
The sheep, waking up—there were about three thousand of them—began
without zest to while away the time, nipping at the low, half-trampled
grass. The sun had not yet risen, but by now all the barrows could be
seen and, like a cloud in the distance, Saur’s Grave with its peaked
top. If one clambered up on that tomb one could see the plain from it,
level and boundless as the sky, one could see villages, manor-houses,
the settlements of the Germans and of the Molokani, and a long-sighted
Kalmuck could even see the town and the railway-station. Only from there
could one see that there was something else in the world besides the
silent steppe and the ancient barrows, that there was another life that
had nothing to do with buried treasure and the thoughts of sheep.
The old man felt beside him for his crook—a long stick with a hook at
the upper end—and got up. He was silent and thoughtful. The young
shepherd’s face had not lost the look of childish terror and curiosity.
He was still under the influence of what he had heard in the night, and
impatiently awaiting fresh stories.
“Grandfather,” he asked, getting up and taking his crook, “what did your
brother Ilya do with the soldier?”
The old man did not hear the question. He looked absent-mindedly at the
young man, and answered, mumbling with his lips:
“I keep thinking, Sanka, about that writing that was shown to that
soldier at Ivanovka. I didn’t tell Panteley—God be with him—but you know
in that writing the place was marked out so that even a woman could find
it. Do you know where it is? At Bogata Bylotchka at the spot, you know,
where the ravine parts like a goose’s foot into three little ravines; it
is the middle one.”
“Well, will you dig?”
“I will try my luck...”
“And, grandfather, what will you do with the treasure when you find it?”
“Do with it?” laughed the old man. “H’m!... If only I could find it
then.... I would show them all.... H’m!... I should know what to do....”
And the old man could not answer what he would do with the treasure if
he found it. That question had presented itself to him that morning
probably for the first time in his life, and judging from the expression
of his face, indifferent and uncritical, it did not seem to him
important and deserving of consideration. In Sanka’s brain another
puzzled question was stirring: why was it only old men searched for
hidden treasure, and what was the use of earthly happiness to people who
might die any day of old age? But Sanka could not put this perplexity
into words, and the old man could scarcely have found an answer to it.
An immense crimson sun came into view surrounded by a faint haze. Broad
streaks of light, still cold, bathing in the dewy grass, lengthening out
with a joyous air as though to prove they were not weary of their task,
began spreading over the earth. The silvery wormwood, the blue flowers
of the pig’s onion, the yellow mustard, the corn-flowers—all burst into
gay colours, taking the sunlight for their own smile.
The old shepherd and Sanka parted and stood at the further sides of the
flock. Both stood like posts, without moving, staring at the ground and
thinking. The former was haunted by thoughts of fortune, the latter was
pondering on what had been said in the night; what interested him was
not the fortune itself, which he did not want and could not imagine, but
the fantastic, fairy-tale character of human happiness.
A hundred sheep started and, in some inexplicable panic as at a signal,
dashed away from the flock; and as though the thoughts of the
sheep—tedious and oppressive—had for a moment infected Sanka also, he,
too, dashed aside in the same inexplicable animal panic, but at once he
recovered himself and shouted:
“You crazy creatures! You’ve gone mad, plague take you!”
When the sun, promising long hours of overwhelming heat, began to bake
the earth, all living things that in the night had moved and uttered
sounds were sunk in drowsiness. The old shepherd and Sanka stood with
their crooks on opposite sides of the flock, stood without stirring,
like fakirs at their prayers, absorbed in thought. They did not heed
each other; each of them was living in his own life. The sheep were
pondering, too.
A MALEFACTOR
AN exceedingly lean little peasant, in a striped hempen shirt and
patched drawers, stands facing the investigating magistrate. His face
overgrown with hair and pitted with smallpox, and his eyes scarcely
visible under thick, overhanging eyebrows have an expression of sullen
moroseness. On his head there is a perfect mop of tangled, unkempt hair,
which gives him an even more spider-like air of moroseness. He is
barefooted.
“Denis Grigoryev!” the magistrate begins. “Come nearer, and answer my
questions. On the seventh of this July the railway watchman, Ivan
Semyonovitch Akinfov, going along the line in the morning, found you at
the hundred-and-forty-first mile engaged in unscrewing a nut by which
the rails are made fast to the sleepers. Here it is, the nut!... With
the aforesaid nut he detained you. Was that so?”
“Wha-at?”
“Was this all as Akinfov states?”
“To be sure, it was.”
“Very good; well, what were you unscrewing the nut for?”
“Wha-at?”
“Drop that ‘wha-at’ and answer the question; what were you unscrewing
the nut for?”
“If I hadn’t wanted it I shouldn’t have unscrewed it,” croaks Denis,
looking at the ceiling.
“What did you want that nut for?”
“The nut? We make weights out of those nuts for our lines.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“We, people.... The Klimovo peasants, that is.”
“Listen, my man; don’t play the idiot to me, but speak sensibly. It’s no
use telling lies here about weights!”
“I’ve never been a liar from a child, and now I’m telling lies...”
mutters Denis, bJlinking. “But can you do without a weight, your honour?
If you put live bait or maggots on a hook, would it go to the bottom
without a weight?... I am telling lies,” grins Denis.... “What the devil
is the use of the worm if it swims on the surface! The perch and the
pike and the eel-pout always go to the bottom, and a bait on the surface
is only taken by a shillisper, not very often then, and there are no
shillispers in our river.... That fish likes plenty of room.”
“Why are you telling me about shillispers?”
“Wha-at? Why, you asked me yourself! The gentry catch fish that way too
in our parts. The silliest little boy would not try to catch a fish
without a weight. Of course anyone who did not understand might go to
fish without a weight. There is no rule for a fool.”
“So you say you unscrewed this nut to make a weight for your fishing
line out of it?”
“What else for? It wasn’t to play knuckle-bones with!”
“But you might have taken lead, a bullet... a nail of some sort....”
“You don’t pick up lead in the road, you have to buy it, and a nail’s no
good. You can’t find anything better than a nut.... It’s heavy, and
there’s a hole in it.”
“He keeps pretending to be a fool! as though he’d been born yesterday or
dropped from heaven! Don’t you understand, you blockhead, what
unscrewing these nuts leads to? If the watchman had not noticed it the
train might have run off the rails, people would have been killed—you
would have killed people.”
“God forbid, your honour! What should I kill them for? Are we heathens
or wicked people? Thank God, good gentlemen, we have lived all our lives
without ever dreaming of such a thing.... Save, and have mercy on us,
Queen of Heaven!... What are you saying?”
“And what do you suppose railway accidents do come from? Unscrew two or
three nuts and you have an accident.”
Denis grins, and screws up his eye at the magistrate incredulously.
“Why! how many years have we all in the village been unscrewing nuts,
and the Lord has been merciful; and you talk of accidents, killing
people. If I had carried away a rail or put a log across the line, say,
then maybe it might have upset the train, but... pouf! a nut!”
“But you must understand that the nut holds the rail fast to the
sleepers!”
“We understand that.... We don’t unscrew them all... we leave some....
We don’t do it thoughtlessly... we understand....”
Denis yawns and makes the sign of the cross over his mouth.
“Last year the train went off the rails here,” says the magistrate. “Now
I see why!”
“What do you say, your honour?”
“I am telling you that now I see why the train went off the rails last
year.... I understand!”
“That’s what you are educated people for, to understand, you kind
gentlemen. The Lord knows to whom to give understanding.... Here you
have reasoned how and what, but the watchman, a peasant like ourselves,
with no understanding at all, catches one by the collar and hauls one
along.... You should reason first and then haul me off. It’s a saying
that a peasant has a peasant’s wit.... Write down, too, your honour,
that he hit me twice—in the jaw and in the chest.”
“When your hut was searched they found another nut.... At what spot did
you unscrew that, and when?”
“You mean the nut which lay under the red box?”
“I don’t know where it was lying, only it was found. When did you
unscrew it?”
“I didn’t unscrew it; Ignashka, the son of one-eyed Semyon, gave it me.
I mean the one which was under the box, but the one which was in the
sledge in the yard Mitrofan and I unscrewed together.”
“What Mitrofan?”
“Mitrofan Petrov.... Haven’t you heard of him? He makes nets in our
village and sells them to the gentry. He needs a lot of those nuts.
Reckon a matter of ten for each net.”
“Listen. Article 1081 of the Penal Code lays down that every wilful
damage of the railway line committed when it can expose the traffic on
that line to danger, and the guilty party knows that an accident must be
caused by it... (Do you understand? Knows! And you could not help
knowing what this unscrewing would lead to...) is liable to penal
servitude.”
“Of course, you know best.... We are ignorant people.... What do we
understand?”
“You understand all about it! You are lying, shamming!”
“What should I lie for? Ask in the village if you don’t believe me. Only
a bleak is caught without a weight, and there is no fish worse than a
gudgeon, yet even that won’t bite without a weight.”
“You’d better tell me about the shillisper next,” said the magistrate,
smiling.
“There are no shillispers in our parts.... We cast our line without a
weight on the top of the water with a butterfly; a mullet may be caught
that way, though that is not often.”
“Come, hold your tongue.”
A silence follows. Denis shifts from one foot to the other, looks at the
table with the green cloth on it, and bJlinks his eyes violently as
though what was before him was not the cloth but the sun. The magistrate
writes rapidly.
“Can I go?” asks Denis after a long silence.
“No. I must take you under guard and send you to prison.”
Denis leaves off bJlinking and, raising his thick eyebrows, looks
inquiringly at the magistrate.
“How do you mean, to prison? Your honour! I have no time to spare, I
must go to the fair; I must get three roubles from Yegor for some
tallow!...”
“Hold your tongue; don’t interrupt.”
“To prison.... If there was something to go for, I’d go; but just to go
for nothing! What for? I haven’t stolen anything, I believe, and I’ve
not been fighting.... If you are in doubt about the arrears, your
honour, don’t believe the elder.... You ask the agent... he’s a regular
heathen, the elder, you know.”
“Hold your tongue.”
“I am holding my tongue, as it is,” mutters Denis; “but that the elder
has lied over the account, I’ll take my oath for it.... There are three
of us brothers: Kuzma Grigoryev, then Yegor Grigoryev, and me, Denis
Grigoryev.”
“You are hindering me.... Hey, Semyon,” cries the magistrate, “take him
away!”
“There are three of us brothers,” mutters Denis, as two stalwart
soldiers take him and lead him out of the room. “A brother is not
responsible for a brother. Kuzma does not pay, so you, Denis, must
answer for it.... Judges indeed! Our master the general is dead—the
Kingdom of Heaven be his—or he would have shown you judges.... You ought
to judge sensibly, not at random.... Flog if you like, but flog someone
who deserves it, flog with conscience.”
PEASANTS I
NIKOLAY TCHIKILDYEEV, a waiter in the Moscow hotel, Slavyansky Bazaar,
was taken ill. His legs went numb and his gait was affected, so that on
one occasion, as he was going along the corridor, he tumbled and fell
down with a tray full of ham and peas. He had to leave his job. All his
own savings and his wife’s were spent on doctors and medicines; they had
nothing left to live upon. He felt dull with no work to do, and he made
up his mind he must go home to the village. It is better to be ill at
home, and living there is cheaper; and it is a true saying that the
walls of home are a help.
He reached Zhukovo towards evening. In his memories of childhood he had
pictured his home as bright, snug, comfortable. Now, going into the hut,
he was positively frightened; it was so dark, so crowded, so unclean.
His wife Olga and his daughter Sasha, who had come with him, kept
looking in bewilderment at the big untidy stove, which filled up almost
half the hut and was black with soot and flies. What lots of flies! The
stove was on one side, the beams lay slanting on the walls, and it
looked as though the hut were just going to fall to pieces. In the
corner, facing the door, under the holy images, bottle labels and
newspaper cuttings were stuck on the walls instead of pictures. The
poverty, the poverty! Of the grown-up people there were none at home;
all were at work at the harvest. On the stove was sitting a white-headed
girl of eight, unwashed and apathetic; she did not even glance at them
as they came in. On the floor a white cat was rubbing itself against the
oven fork.
“Puss, puss!” Sasha called to her. “Puss!”
“She can’t hear,” said the little girl; “she has gone deaf.”
“How is that?”
“Oh, she was beaten.”
Nikolay and Olga realized from the firs t glance what life was like
here, but said nothing to one another; in silence they put down their
bundles, and went out into the village street. Their hut was the third
from the end, and seemed the very poorest and oldest-looking; the second
was not much better; but the last one had an iron roof, and curtains in
the windows. That hut stood apart, not enclosed; it was a tavern. The
huts were in a single row, and the whole of the little village—quiet and
dreamy, with willows, elders, and mountain-ash trees peeping out from
the yards—had an attractive look.
Beyond the peasants homesteads there was a slope down to the river, so
steep and precipitous that huge stones jutted out bare here and there
through the clay. Down the slope, among the stones and holes dug by the
potters, ran winding paths; bits of broken pottery, some brown, some
red, lay piled up in heaps, and below there stretched a broad, level,
bright green meadow, from which the hay had been already carried, and in
which the peasants’ cattle were wandering. The river, three-quarters of
a mile from the village, ran twisting and turning, with beautiful leafy
banks; beyond it was again a broad meadow, a herd of cattle, long
strings of white geese; then, just as on the near side, a steep ascent
uphill, and on the top of the hill a hamlet, and a church with five
domes, and at a little distance the manor-house.
“It’s lovely here in your parts!” said Olga, crossing herself at the
sight of the church. “What space, oh Lord!”
Just at that moment the bell began ringing for service (it was Saturday
evening). Two little girls, down below, who were dragging up a pail of
water, looked round at the church to listen to the bell.
“At this time they are serving the dinners at the Slavyansky Bazaar,”
said Nikolay dreamily.
Sitting on the edge of the slope, Nikolay and Olga watched the sun
setting, watched the gold and crimson sky reflected in the river, in the
church windows, and in the whole air—which was soft and still and
unutterably pure as it never was in Moscow. And when the sun had set the
flocks and herds passed, bleating and lowing; geese flew across from the
further side of the river, and all sank into silence; the soft light
died away in the air, and the dusk of evening began quickly moving down
upon them.
Meanwhile Nikolay’s father and mother, two gaunt, bent, toothless old
people, just of the same height, came back. The women—the sisters-in-law
Marya and Fyokla—who had been working on the landowner’s estate beyond
the river, arrived home, too. Marya, the wife of Nikolay’s brother
Kiryak, had six children, and Fyokla, the wife of Nikolay’s brother
Denis—who had gone for a soldier—had two; and when Nikolay, going into
the hut, saw all the family, all those bodies big and little moving
about on the lockers, in the hanging cradles and in all the corners, and
when he saw the greed with which the old father and the women ate the
black bread, dipping it in water, he realized he had made a mistake in
coming here, sick, penniless, and with a family, too—a great mistake!
“And where is Kiryak?” he asked after they had exchanged greetings.
“He is in service at the merchant’s,” answered his father; “a keeper in
the woods. He is not a bad peasant, but too fond of his glass.”
“He is no great help!” said the old woman tearfully. “Our men are a
grievous lot; they bring nothing into the house, but take plenty out.
Kiryak drinks, and so does the old man; it is no use hiding a sin; he
knows his way to the tavern. The Heavenly Mother is wroth.”
In honour of the visitors they brought out the samovar. The tea smelt of
fish; the sugar was grey and looked as though it had been nibbled;
cockroaches ran to and fro over the bread and among the crockery. It was
disgusting to drink, and the conversation was disgusting, too—about
nothing but poverty and illnesses. But before they had time to empty
their first cups there came a loud, prolonged, drunken shout from the
yard:
“Ma-arya!”
“It looks as though Kiryak were coming,” said the old man. “Speak of the
devil.”
All were hushed. And again, soon afterwards, the same shout, coarse and
drawn-out as though it came out of the earth:
“Ma-arya!”
Marya, the elder sister-in-law, turned pale and huddled against the
stove, and it was strange to see the look of terror on the face of the
strong, broad-shouldered, ugly woman. Her daughter, the child who had
been sitting on the stove and looked so apathetic, suddenly broke into
loud weeping.
“What are you howling for, you plague?” Fyokla, a handsome woman, also
strong and broad-shouldered, shouted to her. “He won’t kill you, no
fear!”
From his old father Nikolay learned that Marya was afraid to live in the
forest with Kiryak, and that when he was drunk he always came for her,
made a row, and beat her mercilessly.
“Ma-arya!” the shout sounded close to the door.
“Protect me, for Christ’s sake, good people!” faltered Marya, breathing
as though she had been plunged into very cold water. “Protect me, kind
people....”
All the children in the hut began crying, and looking at them, Sasha,
too, began to cry. They heard a drunken cough, and a tall, black-bearded
peasant wearing a winter cap came into the hut, and was the more
terrible because his face could not be seen in the dim light of the
little lamp. It was Kiryak. Going up to his wife, he swung his arm and
punched her in the face with his fist. Stunned by the blow, she did not
utter a sound, but sat down, and her nose instantly began bleeding.
“What a disgrace! What a disgrace!” muttered the old man, clambering up
on to the stove. “Before visitors, too! It’s a sin!”
The old mother sat silent, bowed, lost in thought; Fyokla rocked the
cradle.
Evidently conscious of inspiring fear, and pleased at doing so, Kiryak
seized Marya by the arm, dragged her towards the door, and bellowed like
an animal in order to seem still more terrible; but at that moment he
suddenly caught sight of the visitors and stopped.
“Oh, they have come,...” he said, letting his wife go; “my own brother
and his family....”
Staggering and opening wide his red, drunken eyes, he said his prayer
before the image and went on:
“My brother and his family have come to the parental home... from
Moscow, I suppose. The great capital Moscow, to be sure, the mother of
cities.... Excuse me.”
He sank down on the bench near the samovar and began drinking tea,
sipping it loudly from the saucer in the midst of general silence.... He
drank off a dozen cups, then reclined on the bench and began snoring.
They began going to bed. Nikolay, as an invalid, was put on the stove
with his old father; Sasha lay down on the floor, while Olga went with
the other women into the barn.
“Aye, aye, dearie,” she said, lying down on the hay beside Marya; “you
won’t mend your trouble with tears. Bear it in patience, that is all. It
is written in the Scriptures: ‘If anyone smite thee on the right cheek,
offer him the left one also.’... Aye, aye, dearie.”
Then in a low singsong murmur she told them about Moscow, about her own
life, how she had been a servant in furnished lodgings.
“And in Moscow the houses are big, built of brick,” she said; “and there
are ever so many churches, forty times forty, dearie; and they are all
gentry in the houses, so handsome and so proper!”
Marya told her that she had not only never been in Moscow, but had not
even been in their own district town; she could not read or write, and
knew no prayers, not even “Our Father.” Both she and Fyokla, the other
sister-in-law, who was sitting a little way off listening, were
extremely ignorant and could understand nothing. They both disliked
their husbands; Marya was afraid of Kiryak, and whenever he stayed with
her she was shaking with fear, and always got a headache from the fumes
of vodka and tobacco with which he reeked. And in answer to the question
whether she did not miss her husband, Fyokla answered with vexation:
“Miss him!”
They talked a little and sank into silence.
It was cool, and a cock crowed at the top of his voice near the barn,
preventing them from sleeping. When the bluish morning light was already
peeping through all the crevices, Fyokla got up stealthily and went out,
and then they heard the sound of her bare feet running off somewhere.
II
Olga went to church, and took Marya with her. As they went down the path
towards the meadow both were in good spirits. Olga liked the wide view,
and Marya felt that in her sister-in-law she had someone near and akin
to her. The sun was rising. Low down over the meadow floated a drowsy
hawk. The river looked gloomy; there was a haze hovering over it here
and there, but on the further bank a streak of light already stretched
across the hill. The church was gleaming, and in the manor garden the
rooks were cawing furiously.
“The old man is all right,” Marya told her, “but Granny is strict; she
is continually nagging. Our own grain lasted till Carnival. We buy flour
now at the tavern. She is angry about it; she says we eat too much.”
“Aye, aye, dearie! Bear it in patience, that is all. It is written:
‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.’”
Olga spoke sedately, rhythmically, and she walked like a pilgrim woman,
with a rapid, anxious step. Every day she read the gospel, read it aloud
like a deacon; a great deal of it she did not understand, but the words
of the gospel moved her to tears, and words like “forasmuch as” and
“verily” she pronounced with a sweet flutter at her heart. She believed
in God, in the Holy Mother, in the Saints; she believed one must not
offend anyone in the world—not simple folks, nor Germans, nor gypsies,
nor Jews—and woe even to those who have no compassion on the beasts. She
believed this was written in the Holy Scriptures; and so, when she
pronounced phrases from Holy Writ, even though she did not understand
them, her face grew softened, compassionate, and radiant.
“What part do you come from?” Marya asked her.
“I am from Vladimir. Only I was taken to Moscow long ago, when I was
eight years old.”
They reached the river. On the further side a woman was standing at the
water’s edge, undressing.
“It’s our Fyokla,” said Marya, recognizing her. “She has been over the
river to the manor yard. To the stewards. She is a shameless hussy and
foul-mouthed—fearfully!”
Fyokla, young and vigorous as a girl, with her black eyebrows and her
loose hair, jumped off the bank and began splashing the water with her
feet, and waves ran in all directions from her.
“Shameless—dreadfully!” repeated Marya.
The river was crossed by a rickety little bridge of logs, and exactly
below it in the clear, limpid water was a shoal of broad-headed mullets.
The dew was glistening on the green bushes that looked into the water.
There was a feeling of warmth; it was comforting! What a lovely morning!
And how lovely life would have been in this world, in all likelihood, if
it were not for poverty, horrible, hopeless poverty, from which one can
find no refuge! One had only to look round at the village to remember
vividly all that had happened the day before, and the illusion of
happiness which seemed to surround them vanished instantly.
They reached the church. Marya stood at the entrance, and did not dare
to go farther. She did not dare to sit down either. Though they only
began ringing for mass between eight and nine, she remained standing the
whole time.
While the gospel was being read the crowd suddenly parted to make way
for the family from the great house. Two young girls in white frocks and
wide-brimmed hats walked in; with them a chubby, rosy boy in a sailor
suit. Their appearance touched Olga; she made up her mind from the first
glance that they were refined, well-educated, handsome people. Marya
looked at them from under her brows, sullenly, dejectedly, as though
they were not human beings coming in, but monsters who might crush her
if she did not make way for them.
And every time the deacon boomed out something in his bass voice she
fancied she heard “Ma-arya!” and she shuddered.
III
The arrival of the visitors was already known in the village, and
directly after mass a number of people gathered together in the hut. The
Leonytchevs and Matvyeitchevs and the Ilyitchovs came to inquire about
their relations who were in service in Moscow. All the lads of Zhukovo
who could read and write were packed off to Moscow and hired out as
butlers or waiters (while from the village on the other side of the
river the boys all became bakers), and that had been the custom from the
days of serfdom long ago when a certain Luka Ivanitch, a peasant from
Zhukovo, now a legendary figure, who had been a waiter in one of the
Moscow clubs, would take none but his fellow-villagers into his service,
and found jobs for them in taverns and restaurants; and from that time
the village of Zhukovo was always called among the inhabitants of the
surrounding districts Slaveytown. Nikolay had been taken to Moscow when
he was eleven, and Ivan Makaritch, one of the Matvyeitchevs, at that
time a headwaiter in the “Hermitage” garden, had put him into a
situation. And now, addressing the Matvyeitchevs, Nikolay said
emphatically:
“Ivan Makaritch was my benefactor, and I am bound to pray for him day
and night, as it is owing to him I have become a good man.”
“My good soul!” a tall old woman, the sister of Ivan Makaritch, said
tearfully, “and not a word have we heard about him, poor dear.”
“In the winter he was in service at Omon’s, and this season there was a
rumour he was somewhere out of town, in gardens.... He has aged! In old
days he would bring home as much as ten roubles a day in the summer-
time, but now things are very quiet everywhere. The old man frets.”
The women looked at Nikolay’s feet, shod in felt boots, and at his pale
face, and said mournfully:
“You are not one to get on, Nikolay Osipitch; you are not one to get on!
No, indeed!”
And they all made much of Sasha. She was ten years old, but she was
little and very thin, and might have been taken for no more than seven.
Among the other little girls, with their sunburnt faces and roughly
cropped hair, dressed in long faded smocks, she with her white little
face, with her big dark eyes, with a red ribbon in her hair, looked
funny, as though she were some little wild creature that had been caught
and brought into the hut.
“She can read, too,” Olga said in her praise, looking tenderly at her
daughter. “Read a little, child!” she said, taking the gospel from the
corner. “You read, and the good Christian people will listen.”
The testament was an old and heavy one in leather binding, with dog’s-
eared edges, and it exhaled a smell as though monks had come into the
hut. Sasha raised her eyebrows and began in a loud rhythmic chant:
“‘And the angel of the Lord... appeared unto Joseph, saying unto him:
Rise up, and take the Babe and His mother.’”
“The Babe and His mother,” Olga repeated, and flushed all over with
emotion.
“‘And flee into Egypt,... and tarry there until such time as...’”
At the word “tarry” Olga could not refrain from tears. Looking at her,
Marya began to whimper, and after her Ivan Makaritch’s sister. The old
father cleared his throat, and bustled about to find something to give
his grand-daughter, but, finding nothing, gave it up with a wave of his
hand. And when the reading was over the neighbours dispersed to their
homes, feeling touched and very much pleased with Olga and Sasha.
As it was a holiday, the family spent the whole day at home. The old
woman, whom her husband, her daughters-in-law, her grandchildren all
alike called Granny, tried to do everything herself; she heated the
stove and set the samovar with her own hands, even waited at the midday
meal, and then complained that she was worn out with work. And all the
time she was uneasy for fear someone should eat a piece too much, or
that her husband and daughters-in-law would sit idle. At one time she
would hear the tavern-keeper’s geese going at the back of the huts to
her kitchen-garden, and she would run out of the hut with a long stick
and spend half an hour screaming shrilly by her cabbages, which were as
gaunt and scraggy as herself; at another time she fancied that a crow
had designs on her chickens, and she rushed to attack it with loud words
of abuse. She was cross and grumbling from morning till night. And often
she raised such an outcry that passers-by stopped in the street.
She was not affectionate towards the old man, reviling him as a lazy-
bones and a plague. He was not a responsible, reliable peasant, and
perhaps if she had not been continually nagging at him he would not have
worked at all, but would have simply sat on the stove and talked. He
talked to his son at great length about certain enemies of his,
complained of the insults he said he had to put up with every day from
the neighbours, and it was tedious to listen to him.
“Yes,” he would say, standing with his arms akimbo, “yes.... A week
after the Exaltation of the Cross I sold my hay willingly at thirty
kopecks a pood.... Well and good.... So you see I was taking the hay in
the morning with a good will; I was interfering with no one. In an
unlucky hour I see the village elder, Antip Syedelnikov, coming out of
the tavern. ‘Where are you taking it, you ruffian?’ says he, and takes
me by the ear.”
Kiryak had a fearful headache after his drinking bout, and was ashamed
to face his brother.
“What vodka does! Ah, my God!” he muttered, shaking his aching head.
“For Christ’s sake, forgive me, brother and sister; I’m not happy
myself.”
As it was a holiday, they bought a herring at the tavern and made a soup
of the herring’s head. At midday they all sat down to drink tea, and
went on drinking it for a long time, till they were all perspiring; they
looked positively swollen from the tea-drinking, and after it began
sipping the broth from the herring’s head, all helping themselves out of
one bowl. But the herring itself Granny had hidden.
In the evening a potter began firing pots on the ravine. In the meadow
below the girls got up a choral dance and sang songs. They played the
concertina. And on the other side of the river a kiln for baking pots
was lighted, too, and the girls sang songs, and in the distance the
singing sounded soft and musical. The peasants were noisy in and about
the tavern. They were singing with drunken voices, each on his own
account, and swearing at one another, so that Olga could only shudder
and say:
“Oh, holy Saints!”
She was amazed that the abuse was incessant, and those who were loudest
and most persistent in this foul language were the old men who were so
near their end. And the girls and children heard the swearing, and were
not in the least disturbed by it, and it was evident that they were used
to it from their cradles.
It was past midnight, the kilns on both sides of the river were put out,
but in the meadow below and in the tavern the merrymaking still went on.
The old father and Kiryak, both drunk, walking arm-in-arm and jostling
against each other’s shoulders, went to the barn where Olga and Marya
were lying.
“Let her alone,” the old man persuaded him; “let her alone.... She is a
harmless woman.... It’s a sin....”
“Ma-arya!” shouted Kiryak.
“Let her be.... It’s a sin.... She is not a bad woman.”
Both stopped by the barn and went on.
“I lo-ove the flowers of the fi-ield,” the old man began singing
suddenly in a high, piercing tenor. “I lo-ove to gather them in the
meadows!”
Then he spat, and with a filthy oath went into the hut.
IV
Granny put Sasha by her kitchen-garden and told her to keep watch that
the geese did not go in. It was a hot August day. The tavernkeeper’s
geese could make their way into the kitchen-garden by the backs of the
huts, but now they were busily engaged picking up oats by the tavern,
peacefully conversing together, and only the gander craned his head high
as though trying to see whether the old woman were coming with her
stick. The other geese might come up from below, but they were now
grazing far away the other side of the river, stretched out in a long
white garland about the meadow. Sasha stood about a little, grew weary,
and, seeing that the geese were not coming, went away to the ravine.
There she saw Marya’s eldest daughter Motka, who was standing motionless
on a big stone, staring at the church. Marya had given birth to thirteen
children, but she only had six living, all girls, not one boy, and the
eldest was eight. Motka in a long smock was standing barefooted in the
full sunshine; the sun was blazing down right on her head, but she did
not notice that, and seemed as though turned to stone. Sasha stood
beside her and said, looking at the church:
“God lives in the church. Men have lamps and candles, but God has little
green and red and blue lamps like little eyes. At night God walks about
the church, and with Him the Holy Mother of God and Saint Nikolay, thud,
thud, thud!... And the watchman is terrified, terrified! Aye, aye,
dearie,” she added, imitating her mother. “And when the end of the world
comes all the churches will be carried up to heaven.”
“With the-ir be-ells?” Motka asked in her deep voice, drawling every
syllable.
“With their bells. And when the end of the world comes the good will go
to Paradise, but the angry will burn in fire eternal and unquenchable,
dearie. To my mother as well as to Marya God will say: ‘You never
offended anyone, and for that go to the right to Paradise’; but to
Kiryak and Granny He will say: ‘You go to the left into the fire.’ And
anyone who has eaten meat in Lent will go into the fire, too.”
She looked upwards at the sky, opening wide her eyes, and said:
“Look at the sky without winking, you will see angels.”
Motka began looking at the sky, too, and a minute passed in silence.
“Do you see them?” asked Sasha.
“I don’t,” said Motka in her deep voice.
“But I do. Little angels are flying about the sky and flap, flap with
their little wings as though they were gnats.”
Motka thought for a little, with her eyes on the ground, and asked:
“Will Granny burn?”
“She will, dearie.”
From the stone an even gentle slope ran down to the bottom, covered with
soft green grass, which one longed to lie down on or to touch with one’s
hands... Sasha lay down and rolled to the bottom. Motka with a grave,
severe face, taking a deep breath, lay down, too, and rolled to the
bottom, and in doing so tore her smock from the hem to the shoulder.
“What fun it is!” said Sasha, delighted.
They walked up to the top to roll down again, but at that moment they
heard a shrill, familiar voice. Oh, how awful it was! Granny, a
toothless, bony, hunchbacked figure, with short grey hair which was
fluttering in the wind, was driving the geese out of the kitchen-garden
with a long stick, shouting.
“They have trampled all the cabbages, the damned brutes! I’d cut your
throats, thrice accursed plagues! Bad luck to you!”
She saw the little girls, flung down the stick and picked up a switch,
and, seizing Sasha by the neck with her fingers, thin and hard as the
gnarled branches of a tree, began whipping her. Sasha cried with pain
and terror, while the gander, waddling and stretching his neck, went up
to the old woman and hissed at her, and when he went back to his flock
all the geese greeted him approvingly with “Ga-ga-ga!” Then Granny
proceeded to whip Motka, and in this Motka’s smock was torn again.
Feeling in despair, and crying loudly, Sasha went to the hut to
complain. Motka followed her; she, too, was crying on a deeper note,
without wiping her tears, and her face was as wet as though it had been
dipped in water.
“Holy Saints!” cried Olga, aghast, as the two came into the hut. “Queen
of Heaven!”
Sasha began telling her story, while at the same time Granny walked in
with a storm of shrill cries and abuse; then Fyokla flew into a rage,
and there was an uproar in the hut.
“Never mind, never mind!” Olga, pale and upset, tried to comfort them,
stroking Sasha’s head. “She is your grandmother; it’s a sin to be angry
with her. Never mind, my child.”
Nikolay, who was worn out already by the everlasting hubbub, hunger,
stifling fumes, filth, who hated and despised the poverty, who was
ashamed for his wife and daughter to see his father and mother, swung
his legs off the stove and said in an irritable, tearful voice,
addressing his mother:
“You must not beat her! You have no right to beat her!”
“You lie rotting on the stove, you wretched creature!” Fyokla shouted at
him spitefully. “The devil brought you all on us, eating us out of house
and home.”
Sasha and Motka and all the little girls in the hut huddled on the stove
in the corner behind Nikolay’s back, and from that refuge listened in
silent terror, and the beating of their little hearts could be
distinctly heard. Whenever there is someone in a family who has long
been ill, and hopelessly ill, there come painful moments when all
timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death; and
only the children fear the death of someone near them, and always feel
horrified at the thought of it. And now the children, with bated breath,
with a mournful look on their faces, gazed at Nikolay and thought that
he was soon to die; and they wanted to cry and to say something friendly
and compassionate to him.
He pressed close to Olga, as though seeking protection, and said to her
softly in a quavering voice:
“Olya darling, I can’t stay here longer. It’s more than I can bear. For
God’s sake, for Christ’s sake, write to your sister Klavdia Abramovna.
Let her sell and pawn everything she has; let her send us the money. We
will go away from here. Oh, Lord,” he went on miserably, “to have one
peep at Moscow! If I could see it in my dreams, the dear place!”
And when the evening came on, and it was dark in the hut, it was so
dismal that it was hard to utter a word. Granny, very ill-tempered,
soaked some crusts of rye bread in a cup, and was a long time, a whole
hour, sucking at them. Marya, after milking the cow, brought in a pail
of milk and set it on a bench; then Granny poured it from the pail into
a jug just as slowly and deliberately, evidently pleased that it was now
the Fast of the Assumption, so that no one would drink milk and it would
be left untouched. And she only poured out a very little in a saucer for
Fyokla’s baby. When Marya and she carried the jug down to the cellar
Motka suddenly stirred, clambered down from the stove, and going to the
bench where stood the wooden cup full of crusts, sprinkled into it some
milk from the saucer.
Granny, coming back into the hut, sat down to her soaked crusts again,
while Sasha and Motka, sitting on the stove, gazed at her, and they were
glad that she had broken her fast and now would go to hell. They were
comforted and lay down to sleep, and Sasha as she dozed off to sleep
imagined the Day of Judgment: a huge fire was burning, somewhat like a
potter’s kiln, and the Evil One, with horns like a cow’s, and black all
over, was driving Granny into the fire with a long stick, just as Granny
herself had been driving the geese.
V
On the day of the Feast of the Assumption, between ten and eleven in the
evening, the girls and lads who were merrymaking in the meadow suddenly
raised a clamour and outcry, and ran in the direction of the village;
and those who were above on the edge of the ravine could not for the
first moment make out what was the matter.
“Fire! Fire!” they heard desperate shouts from below. “The village is on
fire!”
Those who were sitting above looked round, and a terrible and
extraordinary spectacle met their eyes. On the thatched roof of one of
the end cottages stood a column of flame, seven feet high, which curled
round and scattered sparks in all directions as though it were a
fountain. And all at once the whole roof burst into bright flame, and
the crackling of the fire was audible.
The light of the moon was dimmed, and the whole village was by now
bathed in a red quivering glow: black shadows moved over the ground,
there was a smell of burning, and those who ran up from below were all
gasping and could not speak for trembling; they jostled against each
other, fell down, and they could hardly see in the unaccustomed light,
and did not recognize each other. It was terrible. What seemed
particularly dreadful was that doves were flying over the fire in the
smoke; and in the tavern, where they did not yet know of the fire, they
were still singing and playing the concertina as though there were
nothing the matter.
“Uncle Semyon’s on fire,” shouted a loud, coarse voice.
Marya was fussing about round her hut, weeping and wringing her hands,
while her teeth chattered, though the fire was a long way off at the
other end of the village. Nikolay came out in high felt boots, the
children ran out in their little smocks. Near the village constable’s
hut an iron sheet was struck. Boom, boom, boom!... floated through the
air, and this repeated, persistent sound sent a pang to the heart and
turned one cold. The old women stood with the holy ikons. Sheep, calves,
cows were driven out of the back-yards into the street; boxes,
sheepskins, tubs were carried out. A black stallion, who was kept apart
from the drove of horses because he kicked and injured them, on being
set free ran once or twice up and down the village, neighing and pawing
the ground; then suddenly stopped short near a cart and began kicking it
with his hind-legs.
They began ringing the bells in the church on the other side of the
river.
Near the burning hut it was hot and so light that one could distinctly
see every blade of grass. Semyon, a red-haired peasant with a long nose,
wearing a reefer-jacket and a cap pulled down right over his ears, sat
on one of the boxes which they had succeeded in bringing out: his wife
was lying on her face, moaning and unconscious. A little old man of
eighty, with a big beard, who looked like a gnome—not one of the
villagers, though obviously connected in some way with the fire—walked
about bareheaded, with a white bundle in his arms. The glare was
reflected on his bald head. The village elder, Antip Syedelnikov, as
swarthy and black-haired as a gypsy, went up to the hut with an axe, and
hacked out the windows one after another—no one knew why—then began
chopping up the roof.
“Women, water!” he shouted. “Bring the engine! Look sharp!”
The peasants, who had been drinking in the tavern just before, dragged
the engine up. They were all drunk; they kept stumbling and falling
down, and all had a helpless expression and tears in their eyes.
“Wenches, water!” shouted the elder, who was drunk, too. “Look sharp,
wenches!”
The women and the girls ran downhill to where there was a spring, and
kept hauling pails and buckets of water up the hill, and, pouring it
into the engine, ran down again. Olga and Marya and Sasha and Motka all
brought water. The women and the boys pumped the water; the pipe hissed,
and the elder, directing it now at the door, now at the windows, held
back the stream with his finger, which made it hiss more sharply still.
“Bravo, Antip!” voices shouted approvingly. “Do your best.”
Antip went inside the hut into the fire and shouted from within.
“Pump! Bestir yourselves, good Christian folk, in such a terrible
mischance!”
The peasants stood round in a crowd, doing nothing but staring at the
fire. No one knew what to do, no one had the sense to do anything,
though there were stacks of wheat, hay, barns, and piles of faggots
standing all round. Kiryak and old Osip, his father, both tipsy, were
standing there, too. And as though to justify his doing nothing, old
Osip said, addressing the woman who lay on the ground:
“What is there to trouble about, old girl! The hut is insured—why are
you taking on?”
Semyon, addressing himself first to one person and then to another, kept
describing how the fire had started.
“That old man, the one with the bundle, a house-serf of General
Zhukov’s.... He was cook at our general’s, God rest his soul! He came
over this evening: ‘Let me stay the night,’ says he.... Well, we had a
glass, to be sure.... The wife got the samovar—she was going to give the
old fellow a cup of tea, and in an unlucky hour she set the samovar in
the entrance. The sparks from the chimney must have blown straight up to
the thatch; that’s how it was. We were almost burnt ourselves. And the
old fellow’s cap has been burnt; what a shame!”
And the sheet of iron was struck indefatigably, and the bells kept
ringing in the church the other side of the river. In the glow of the
fire, Olga, breathless, looking with horror at the red sheep and the
pink doves flying in the smoke, kept running down the hill and up again.
It seemed to her that the ringing went to her heart with a sharp stab,
that the fire would never be over, that Sasha was lost.... And when the
ceiling of the hut fell in with a crash, the thought that now the whole
village would be burnt made her weak and faint, and she could not go on
fetching water, but sat down on the ravine, setting the pail down near
her; beside her and below her, the peasant women sat wailing as though
at a funeral.
Then the stewards and watchmen from the estate the other side of the
river arrived in two carts, bringing with them a fire-engine. A very
young student in an unbuttoned white tunic rode up on horseback. There
was the thud of axes. They put a ladder to the burning framework of the
house, and five men ran up it at once. Foremost of them all was the
student, who was red in the face and shouting in a harsh hoarse voice,
and in a tone as though putting out fires was a thing he was used to.
They pulled the house to pieces, a beam at a time; they dragged away the
corn, the hurdles, and the stacks that were near.
“Don’t let them break it up!” cried stern voices in the crowd. “Don’t
let them.”
Kiryak made his way up to the hut with a resolute air, as though he
meant to prevent the newcomers from breaking up the hut, but one of the
workmen turned him back with a blow in his neck. There was the sound of
laughter, the workman dealt him another blow, Kiryak fell down, and
crawled back into the crowd on his hands and knees.
Two handsome girls in hats, probably the student’s sisters, came from
the other side of the river. They stood a little way off, looking at the
fire. The beams that had been dragged apart were no longer burning, but
were smoking vigorously; the student, who was working the hose, turned
the water, first on the beams, then on the peasants, then on the women
who were bringing the water.
“George!” the girls called to him reproachfully in anxiety, “George!”
The fire was over. And only when they began to disperse they noticed
that the day was breaking, that everyone was pale and rather dark in the
face, as it always seems in the early morning when the last stars are
going out. As they separated, the peasants laughed and made jokes about
General Zhukov’s cook and his cap which had been burnt; they already
wanted to turn the fire into a joke, and even seemed sorry that it had
so soon been put out.
“How well you extinguished the fire, sir!” said Olga to the student.
“You ought to come to us in Moscow: there we have a fire every day.”
“Why, do you come from Moscow?” asked one of the young ladies.
“Yes, miss. My husband was a waiter at the Slavyansky Bazaar. And this
is my daughter,” she said, indicating Sasha, who was cold and huddling
up to her. “She is a Moscow girl, too.”
The two young ladies said something in French to the student, and he
gave Sasha a twenty-kopeck piece.
Old Father Osip saw this, and there was a gleam of hope in his face.
“We must thank God, your honour, there was no wind,” he said, addressing
the student, “or else we should have been all burnt up together. Your
honour, kind gentlefolks,” he added in embarrassment in a lower tone,
“the morning’s chilly... something to warm one... half a bottle to your
honour’s health.”
Nothing was given him, and clearing his throat he slouched home. Olga
stood afterwards at the end of the street and watched the two carts
crossing the river by the ford and the gentlefolks walking across the
meadow; a carriage was waiting for them the other side of the river.
Going into the hut, she described to her husband with enthusiasm:
“Such good people! And so beautiful! The young ladies were like
cherubim.”
“Plague take them!” Fyokla, sleepy, said spitefully.
VI
Marya thought herself unhappy, and said that she would be very glad to
die; Fyokla, on the other hand, found all this life to her taste: the
poverty, the uncleanliness, and the incessant quarrelling. She ate what
was given her without discrimination; slept anywhere, on whatever came
to hand. She would empty the slops just at the porch, would splash them
out from the doorway, and then walk barefoot through the puddle. And
from the very first day she took a dislike to Olga and Nikolay just
because they did not like this life.
“We shall see what you’ll find to eat here, you Moscow gentry!” she said
malignantly. “We shall see!”
One morning, it was at the beginning of September, Fyokla, vigorous,
good-looking, and rosy from the cold, brought up two pails of water;
Marya and Olga were sitting meanwhile at the table drinking tea.
“Tea and sugar,” said Fyokla sarcastically. “The fine ladies!” she
added, setting down the pails. “You have taken to the fashion of tea
every day. You better look out that you don’t burst with your tea-
drinking,” she went on, looking with hatred at Olga. “That’s how you
have come by your fat mug, having a good time in Moscow, you lump of
flesh!” She swung the yoke and hit Olga such a blow on the shoulder that
the two sisters-in-law could only clasp their hands and say:
“Oh, holy Saints!”
Then Fyokla went down to the river to wash the clothes, swearing all the
time so loudly that she could be heard in the hut.
The day passed and was followed by the long autumn evening. They wound
silk in the hut; everyone did it except Fyokla; she had gone over the
river. They got the silk from a factory close by, and the whole family
working together earned next to nothing, twenty kopecks a week.
“Things were better in the old days under the gentry,” said the old
father as he wound silk. “You worked and ate and slept, everything in
its turn. At dinner you had cabbage-soup and boiled grain, and at supper
the same again. Cucumbers and cabbage in plenty: you could eat to your
heart’s content, as much as you wanted. And there was more strictness.
Everyone minded what he was about.”
The hut was lighted by a single little lamp, which burned dimly and
smoked. When someone screened the lamp and a big shadow fell across the
window, the bright moonlight could be seen. Old Osip, speaking slowly,
told them how they used to live before the emancipation; how in those
very parts, where life was now so poor and so dreary, they used to hunt
with harriers, greyhounds, retrievers, and when they went out as beaters
the peasants were given vodka; how whole waggonloads of game used to be
sent to Moscow for the young masters; how the bad were beaten with rods
or sent away to the Tver estate, while the good were rewarded. And
Granny told them something, too. She remembered everything, positively
everything. She described her mistress, a kind, God-fearing woman, whose
husband was a profligate and a rake, and all of whose daughters made
unlucky marriages: one married a drunkard, another married a workman,
the other eloped secretly (Granny herself, at that time a young girl,
helped in the elopement), and they had all three as well as their mother
died early from grief. And remembering all this, Granny positively began
to shed tears.
All at once someone knocked at the door, and they all started.
“Uncle Osip, give me a night’s lodging.”
The little bald old man, General Zhukov’s cook, the one whose cap had
been burnt, walked in. He sat down and listened, then he, too, began
telling stories of all sorts. Nikolay, sitting on the stove with his
legs hanging down, listened and asked questions about the dishes that
were prepared in the old days for the gentry. They talked of rissoles,
cutlets, various soups and sauces, and the cook, who remembered
everything very well, mentioned dishes that are no longer served. There
was one, for instance—a dish made of bulls’ eyes, which was called
“waking up in the morning.”
“And used you to do cutlets a la marechal?” asked Nikolay.
“No.”
Nikolay shook his head reproachfully and said:
“Tut, tut! You were not much of a cook!”
The little girls sitting and lying on the stove stared down without
bJlinking; it seemed as though there were a great many of them, like
cherubim in the clouds. They liked the stories: they were breathless;
they shuddered and turned pale with alternate rapture and terror, and
they listened breathlessly, afraid to stir, to Granny, whose stories
were the most interesting of all.
They lay down to sleep in silence; and the old people, troubled and
excited by their reminiscences, thought how precious was youth, of
which, whatever it might have been like, nothing was left in the memory
but what was living, joyful, touching, and how terribly cold was death,
which was not far off, better not think of it! The lamp died down. And
the dusk, and the two little windows sharply defined by the moonlight,
and the stillness and the creak of the cradle, reminded them for some
reason that life was over, that nothing one could do would bring it
back.... You doze off, you forget yourself, and suddenly someone touches
your shoulder or breathes on your cheek—and sleep is gone; your body
feels cramped, and thoughts of death keep creeping into your mind. You
turn on the other side: death is forgotten, but old dreary, sickening
thoughts of poverty, of food, of how dear flour is getting, stray
through the mind, and a little later again you remember that life is
over and you cannot bring it back....
“Oh, Lord!” sighed the cook.
Someone gave a soft, soft tap at the window. It must be Fyokla come
back. Olga got up, and yawning and whispering a prayer, opened the door,
then drew the bolt in the outer room, but no one came in; only from the
street came a cold draught and a sudden brightness from the moonlight.
The street, still and deserted, and the moon itself floating across the
sky, could be seen at the open door.
“Who is there?” called Olga.
“I,” she heard the answer—“it is I.”
Near the door, crouching against the wall, stood Fyokla, absolutely
naked. She was shivering with cold, her teeth were chattering, and in
the bright moonlight she looked very pale, strange, and beautiful. The
shadows on her, and the bright moonlight on her skin, stood out vividly,
and her dark eyebrows and firm, youthful bosom were defined with
peculiar distinctness.
“The ruffians over there undressed me and turned me out like this,” she
said. “I’ve come home without my clothes... naked as my mother bore me.
Bring me something to put on.”
“But go inside!” Olga said softly, beginning to shiver, too.
“I don’t want the old folks to see.” Granny was, in fact, already
stirring and muttering, and the old father asked: “Who is there?” Olga
brought her own smock and skirt, dressed Fyokla, and then both went
softly into the inner room, trying not to make a noise with the door.
“Is that you, you sleek one?” Granny grumbled angrily, guessing who it
was. “Fie upon you, nightwalker!... Bad luck to you!”
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” whispered Olga, wrapping Fyokla up;
“it’s all right, dearie.”
All was stillness again. They always slept badly; everyone was kept
awake by something worrying and persistent: the old man by the pain in
his back, Granny by anxiety and anger, Marya by terror, the children by
itch and hunger. Now, too, their sleep was troubled; they kept turning
over from one side to the other, talking in their sleep, getting up for
a drink.
Fyokla suddenly broke into a loud, coarse howl, but immediately checked
herself, and only uttered sobs from time to time, growing softer and on
a lower note, until she relapsed into silence. From time to time from
the other side of the river there floated the sound of the beating of
the hours; but the time seemed somehow strange—five was struck and then
three.
“Oh Lord!” sighed the cook.
Looking at the windows, it was difficult to tell whether it was still
moonlight or whether the dawn had begun. Marya got up and went out, and
she could be heard milking the cows and saying, “Stea-dy!” Granny went
out, too. It was still dark in the hut, but all the objects in it could
be discerned.
Nikolay, who had not slept all night, got down from the stove. He took
his dress-coat out of a green box, put it on, and going to the window,
stroked the sleeves and took hold of the coat-tails—and smiled. Then he
carefully took off the coat, put it away in his box, and lay down again.
Marya came in again and began lighting the stove. She was evidently
hardly awake, and seemed dropping asleep as she walked. Probably she had
had some dream, or the stories of the night before came into her mind
as, stretching luxuriously before the stove, she said:
“No, freedom is better.”
VII
The master arrived—that was what they called the police inspector. When
he would come and what he was coming for had been known for the last
week. There were only forty households in Zhukovo, but more than two
thousand roubles of arrears of rates and taxes had accumulated.
The police inspector stopped at the tavern. He drank there two glasses
of tea, and then went on foot to the village elder’s hut, near which a
crowd of those who were in debt stood waiting. The elder, Antip
Syedelnikov, was, in spite of his youth—he was only a little over
thirty—strict and always on the side of the authorities, though he
himself was poor and did not pay his taxes regularly. Evidently he
enjoyed being elder, and liked the sense of authority, which he could
only display by strictness. In the village council the peasants were
afraid of him and obeyed him. It would sometimes happen that he would
pounce on a drunken man in the street or near the tavern, tie his hands
behind him, and put him in the lock-up. On one occasion he even put
Granny in the lock-up because she went to the village council instead of
Osip, and began swearing, and he kept her there for a whole day and
night. He had never lived in a town or read a book, but somewhere or
other had picked up various learned expressions, and loved to make use
of them in conversation, and he was respected for this though he was not
always understood.
When Osip came into the village elder’s hut with his tax book, the
police inspector, a lean old man with a long grey beard, in a grey
tunic, was sitting at a table in the passage, writing something. It was
clean in the hut; all the walls were dotted with pictures cut out of the
illustrated papers, and in the most conspicuous place near the ikon
there was a portrait of the Battenburg who was the Prince of Bulgaria.
By the table stood Antip Syedelnikov with his arms folded.
“There is one hundred and nineteen roubles standing against him,” he
said when it came to Osip’s turn. “Before Easter he paid a rouble, and
he has not paid a kopeck since.”
The police inspector raised his eyes to Osip and asked:
“Why is this, brother?”
“Show Divine mercy, your honour,” Osip began, growing agitated. “Allow
me to say last year the gentleman at Lutorydsky said to me, ‘Osip,’ he
said, ‘sell your hay... you sell it,’ he said. Well, I had a hundred
poods for sale; the women mowed it on the water-meadow. Well, we struck
a bargain all right, willingly....”
He complained of the elder, and kept turning round to the peasants as
though inviting them to bear witness; his face flushed red and
perspired, and his eyes grew sharp and angry.
“I don’t know why you are saying all this,” said the police inspector.
“I am asking you... I am asking you why you don’t pay your arrears. You
don’t pay, any of you, and am I to be responsible for you?”
“I can’t do it.”
“His words have no sequel, your honour,” said the elder. “The
Tchikildyeevs certainly are of a defective class, but if you will just
ask the others, the root of it all is vodka, and they are a very bad
lot. With no sort of understanding.”
The police inspector wrote something down, and said to Osip quietly, in
an even tone, as though he were asking him for water:
“Be off.”
Soon he went away; and when he got into his cheap chaise and cleared his
throat, it could be seen from the very expression of his long thin back
that he was no longer thinking of Osip or of the village elder, nor of
the Zhukovo arrears, but was thinking of his own affairs. Before he had
gone three-quarters of a mile Antip was already carrying off the samovar
from the Tchikildyeevs’ cottage, followed by Granny, screaming shrilly
and straining her throat:
“I won’t let you have it, I won’t let you have it, damn you!”
He walked rapidly with long steps, and she pursued him panting, almost
falling over, a bent, ferocious figure; her kerchief slipped on to her
shoulders, her grey hair with greenish lights on it was blown about in
the wind. She suddenly stopped short, and like a genuine rebel, fell to
beating her breast with her fists and shouting louder than ever in a
sing-song voice, as though she were sobbing:
“Good Christians and believers in God! Neighbours, they have ill-treated
me! Kind friends, they have oppressed me! Oh, oh! dear people, take my
part.”
“Granny, Granny!” said the village elder sternly, “have some sense in
your head!”
It was hopelessly dreary in the Tchikildyeevs’ hut without the samovar;
there was something humiliating in this loss, insulting, as though the
honour of the hut had been outraged. Better if the elder had carried off
the table, all the benches, all the pots—it would not have seemed so
empty. Granny screamed, Marya cried, and the little girls, looking at
her, cried, too. The old father, feeling guilty, sat in the corner with
bowed head and said nothing. And Nikolay, too, was silent. Granny loved
him and was sorry for him, but now, forgetting her pity, she fell upon
him with abuse, with reproaches, shaking her fist right in his face. She
shouted that it was all his fault; why had he sent them so little when
he boasted in his letters that he was getting fifty roubles a month at
the Slavyansky Bazaar? Why had he come, and with his family, too? If he
died, where was the money to come from for his funeral...? And it was
pitiful to look at Nikolay, Olga, and Sasha.
The old father cleared his throat, took his cap, and went off to the
village elder. Antip was soldering something by the stove, puffing out
his cheeks; there was a smell of burning. His children, emaciated and
unwashed, no better than the Tchikildyeevs, were scrambling about the
floor; his wife, an ugly, freckled woman with a prominent stomach, was
winding silk. They were a poor, unlucky family, and Antip was the only
one who looked vigorous and handsome. On a bench there were five
samovars standing in a row. The old man said his prayer to Battenburg
and said:
“Antip, show the Divine mercy. Give me back the samovar, for Christ’s
sake!”
“Bring three roubles, then you shall have it.”
“I can’t do it!”
Antip puffed out his cheeks, the fire roared and hissed, and the glow
was reflected in the samovar. The old man crumpled up his cap and said
after a moment’s thought:
“You give it me back.”
The swarthy elder looked quite black, and was like a magician; he turned
round to Osip and said sternly and rapidly:
“It all depends on the rural captain. On the twenty-sixth instant you
can state the grounds for your dissatisfaction before the administrative
session, verbally or in writing.”
Osip did not understand a word, but he was satisfied with that and went
home.
Ten days later the police inspector came again, stayed an hour and went
away. During those days the weather had changed to cold and windy; the
river had been frozen for some time past, but still there was no snow,
and people found it difficult to get about. On the eve of a holiday some
of the neighbours came in to Osip’s to sit and have a talk. They did not
light the lamp, as it would have been a sin to work, but talked in the
darkness. There were some items of news, all rather unpleasant. In two
or three households hens had been taken for the arrears, and had been
sent to the district police station, and there they had died because no
one had fed them; they had taken sheep, and while they were being driven
away tied to one another, shifted into another cart at each village, one
of them had died. And now they were discussing the question, who was to
blame?
“The Zemstvo,” said Osip. “Who else?”
“Of course it is the Zemstvo.”
The Zemstvo was blamed for everything—for the arrears, and for the
oppressions, and for the failure of the crops, though no one of them
knew what was meant by the Zemstvo. And this dated from the time when
well-to-do peasants who had factories, shops, and inns of their own were
members of the Zemstvos, were dissatisfied with them, and took to
swearing at the Zemstvos in their factories and inns.
They talked of God’s not sending the snow; they had to bring in wood for
fuel, and there was no driving nor walking in the frozen ruts. In old
days fifteen to twenty years ago conversation was much more interesting
in Zhukovo. In those days every old man looked as though he were
treasuring some secret; as though he knew something and was expecting
something. They used to talk about an edict in golden letters, about the
division of lands, about new land, about treasures; they hinted at
something. Now the people of Zhukovo had no mystery at all; their whole
life was bare and open in the sight of all, and they could talk of
nothing but poverty, food, there being no snow yet....
There was a pause. Then they thought again of the hens, of the sheep,
and began discussing whose fault it was.
“The Zemstvo,” said Osip wearily. “Who else?”
VIII
The parish church was nearly five miles away at Kosogorovo, and the
peasants only attended it when they had to do so for baptisms, weddings,
or funerals; they went to the services at the church across the river.
On holidays in fine weather the girls dressed up in their best and went
in a crowd together to church, and it was a cheering sight to see them
in their red, yellow, and green dresses cross the meadow; in bad weather
they all stayed at home. They went for the sacrament to the parish
church. From each of those who did not manage in Lent to go to
confession in readiness for the sacrament the parish priest, going the
round of the huts with the cross at Easter, took fifteen kopecks.
The old father did not believe in God, for he hardly ever thought about
Him; he recognized the supernatural, but considered it was entirely the
women’s concern, and when religion or miracles were discussed before
him, or a question were put to him, he would say reluctantly, scratching
himself:
“Who can tell!”
Granny believed, but her faith was somewhat hazy; everything was mixed
up in her memory, and she could scarcely begin to think of sins, of
death, of the salvation of the soul, before poverty and her daily cares
took possession of her mind, and she instantly forgot what she was
thinking about. She did not remember the prayers, and usually in the
evenings, before lying down to sleep, she would stand before the ikons
and whisper:
“Holy Mother of Kazan, Holy Mother of Smolensk, Holy Mother of
Troerutchitsy...”
Marya and Fyokla crossed themselves, fasted, and took the sacrament
every year, but understood nothing. The children were not taught their
prayers, nothing was told them about God, and no moral principles were
instilled into them; they were only forbidden to eat meat or milk in
Lent. In the other families it was much the same: there were few who
believed, few who understood. At the same time everyone loved the Holy
Scripture, loved it with a tender, reverent love; but they had no Bible,
there was no one to read it and explain it, and because Olga sometimes
read them the gospel, they respected her, and they all addressed her and
Sasha as though they were superior to themselves.
For church holidays and services Olga often went to neighbouring
villages, and to the district town, in which there were two monasteries
and twenty-seven churches. She was dreamy, and when she was on these
pilgrimages she quite forgot her family, and only when she got home
again suddenly made the joyful discovery that she had a husband and
daughter, and then would say, smiling and radiant:
“God has sent me blessings!”
What went on in the village worried her and seemed to her revolting. On
Elijah’s Day they drank, at the Assumption they drank, at the Ascension
they drank. The Feast of the Intercession was the parish holiday for
Zhukovo, and the peasants used to drink then for three days; they
squandered on drink fifty roubles of money belonging to the Mir, and
then collected more for vodka from all the households. On the first day
of the feast the Tchikildyeevs killed a sheep and ate of it in the
morning, at dinner-time, and in the evening; they ate it ravenously, and
the children got up at night to eat more. Kiryak was fearfully drunk for
three whole days; he drank up everything, even his boots and cap, and
beat Marya so terribly that they had to pour water over her. And then
they were all ashamed and sick.
However, even in Zhukovo, in this “Slaveytown,” there was once an
outburst of genuine religious enthusiasm. It was in August, when
throughout the district they carried from village to village the Holy
Mother, the giver of life. It was still and overcast on the day when
they expected Her at Zhukovo. The girls set off in the morning to meet
the ikon, in their bright holiday dresses, and brought Her towards the
evening, in procession with the cross and with singing, while the bells
pealed in the church across the river. An immense crowd of villagers and
strangers flooded the street; there was noise, dust, a great crush....
And the old father and Granny and Kiryak—all stretched out their hands
to the ikon, looked eagerly at it and said, weeping:
“Defender! Mother! Defender!”
All seemed suddenly to realize that there was not an empty void between
earth and heaven, that the rich and the powerful had not taken
possession of everything, that there was still a refuge from injury,
from slavish bondage, from crushing, unendurable poverty, from the
terrible vodka.
“Defender! Mother!” sobbed Marya. “Mother!”
But the thanksgiving service ended and the ikon was carried away, and
everything went on as before; and again there was a sound of coarse
drunken oaths from the tavern.
Only the well-to-do peasants were afraid of death; the richer they were
the less they believed in God, and in the salvation of souls, and only
through fear of the end of the world put up candles and had services
said for them, to be on the safe side. The peasants who were rather
poorer were not afraid of death. The old father and Granny were told to
their faces that they had lived too long, that it was time they were
dead, and they did not mind. They did not hinder Fyokla from saying in
Nikolay’s presence that when Nikolay died her husband Denis would get
exemption—to return home from the army. And Marya, far from fearing
death, regretted that it was so slow in coming, and was glad when her
children died.
Death they did not fear, but of every disease they had an exaggerated
terror. The merest trifle was enough—a stomach upset, a slight chill,
and Granny would be wrapped up on the stove, and would begin moaning
loudly and incessantly:
“I am dy-ing!”
The old father hurried off for the priest, and Granny received the
sacrament and extreme unction. They often talked of colds, of worms, of
tumours which move in the stomach and coil round to the heart. Above
all, they were afraid of catching cold, and so put on thick clothes even
in the summer and warmed themselves at the stove. Granny was fond of
being doctored, and often went to the hospital, where she used to say
she was not seventy, but fifty-eight; she supposed that if the doctor
knew her real age he would not treat her, but would say it was time she
died instead of taking medicine. She usually went to the hospital early
in the morning, taking with her two or three of the little girls, and
came back in the evening, hungry and ill-tempered—with drops for herself
and ointments for the little girls. Once she took Nikolay, who swallowed
drops for a fortnight afterwards, and said he felt better.
Granny knew all the doctors and their assistants and the wise men for
twenty miles round, and not one of them she liked. At the Intercession,
when the priest made the round of the huts with the cross, the deacon
told her that in the town near the prison lived an old man who had been
a medical orderly in the army, and who made wonderful cures, and advised
her to try him. Granny took his advice. When the first snow fell she
drove to the town and fetched an old man with a big beard, a converted
Jew, in a long gown, whose face was covered with blue veins. There were
outsiders at work in the hut at the time: an old tailor, in terrible
spectacles, was cutting a waistcoat out of some rags, and two young men
were making felt boots out of wool; Kiryak, who had been dismissed from
his place for drunkenness, and now lived at home, was sitting beside the
tailor mending a bridle. And it was crowded, stifling, and noisome in
the hut. The converted Jew examined Nikolay and said that it was
necessary to try cupping.
He put on the cups, and the old tailor, Kiryak, and the little girls
stood round and looked on, and it seemed to them that they saw the
disease being drawn out of Nikolay; and Nikolay, too, watched how the
cups suckling at his breast gradually filled with dark blood, and felt
as though there really were something coming out of him, and smiled with
pleasure.
“It’s a good thing,” said the tailor. “Please God, it will do you good.”
The Jew put on twelve cups and then another twelve, drank some tea, and
went away. Nikolay began shivering; his face looked drawn, and, as the
women expressed it, shrank up like a fist; his fingers turned blue. He
wrapped himself up in a quilt and in a sheepskin, but got colder and
colder. Towards the evening he began to be in great distress; asked to
be laid on the ground, asked the tailor not to smoke; then he subsided
under the sheepskin and towards morning he died.
IX
Oh, what a grim, what a long winter!
Their own grain did not last beyond Christmas, and they had to buy
flour. Kiryak, who lived at home now, was noisy in the evenings,
inspiring terror in everyone, and in the mornings he suffered from
headache and was ashamed; and he was a pitiful sight. In the stall the
starved cows bellowed day and night—a heart-rending sound to Granny and
Marya. And as ill-luck would have it, there was a sharp frost all the
winter, the snow drifted in high heaps, and the winter dragged on. At
Annunciation there was a regular blizzard, and there was a fall of snow
at Easter.
But in spite of it all the winter did end. At the beginning of April
there came warm days and frosty nights. Winter would not give way, but
one warm day overpowered it at last, and the streams began to flow and
the birds began to sing. The whole meadow and the bushes near the river
were drowned in the spring floods, and all the space between Zhukovo and
the further side was filled up with a vast sheet of water, from which
wild ducks rose up in flocks here and there. The spring sunset, flaming
among gorgeous clouds, gave every evening something new, extraordinary,
incredible—just what one does not believe in afterwards, when one sees
those very colours and those very clouds in a picture.
The cranes flew swiftly, swiftly, with mournful cries, as though they
were calling themselves. Standing on the edge of the ravine, Olga looked
a long time at the flooded meadow, at the sunshine, at the bright
church, that looked as though it had grown younger; and her tears flowed
and her breath came in gasps from her passionate longing to go away, to
go far away to the end of the world. It was already settled that she
should go back to Moscow to be a servant, and that Kiryak should set off
with her to get a job as a porter or something. Oh, to get away quickly!
As soon as it dried up and grew warm they got ready to set off. Olga and
Sasha, with wallets on their backs and shoes of plaited bark on their
feet, came out before daybreak: Marya came out, too, to see them on
their way. Kiryak was not well, and was kept at home for another week.
For the last time Olga prayed at the church and thought of her husband,
and though she did not shed tears, her face puckered up and looked ugly
like an old woman’s. During the winter she had grown thinner and
plainer, and her hair had gone a little grey, and instead of the old
look of sweetness and the pleasant smile on her face, she had the
resigned, mournful expression left by the sorrows she had been through,
and there was something blank and irresponsive in her eyes, as though
she did not hear what was said. She was sorry to part from the village
and the peasants. She remembered how they had carried out Nikolay, and
how a requiem had been ordered for him at almost every hut, and all had
shed tears in sympathy with her grief. In the course of the summer and
the winter there had been hours and days when it seemed as though these
people lived worse than the beasts, and to live with them was terrible;
they were coarse, dishonest, filthy, and drunken; they did not live in
harmony, but quarrelled continually, because they distrusted and feared
and did not respect one another. Who keeps the tavern and makes the
people drunken? A peasant. Who wastes and spends on drink the funds of
the commune, of the schools, of the church? A peasant. Who stole from
his neighbours, set fire to their property, gave false witness at the
court for a bottle of vodka? At the meetings of the Zemstvo and other
local bodies, who was the first to fall foul of the peasants? A peasant.
Yes, to live with them was terrible; but yet, they were human beings,
they suffered and wept like human beings, and there was nothing in their
lives for which one could not find excuse. Hard labour that made the
whole body ache at night, the cruel winters, the scanty harvests, the
overcrowding; and they had no help and none to whom they could look for
help. Those of them who were a little stronger and better off could be
no help, as they were themselves coarse, dishonest, drunken, and abused
one another just as revoltingly; the paltriest little clerk or official
treated the peasants as though they were tramps, and addressed even the
village elders and church wardens as inferiors, and considered they had
a right to do so. And, indeed, can any sort of help or good example be
given by mercenary, greedy, depraved, and idle persons who only visit
the village in order to insult, to despoil, and to terrorize? Olga
remembered the pitiful, humiliated look of the old people when in the
winter Kiryak had been taken to be flogged.... And now she felt sorry
for all these people, painfully so, and as she walked on she kept
looking back at the huts.
After walking two miles with them Marya said good-bye, then kneeling,
and falling forward with her face on the earth, she began wailing:
“Again I am left alone. Alas, for poor me! poor, unhappy!...”
And she wailed like this for a long time, and for a long way Olga and
Sasha could still see her on her knees, bowing down to someone at the
side and clutching her head in her hands, while the rooks flew over her
head.
The sun rose high; it began to get hot. Zhukovo was left far behind.
Walking was pleasant. Olga and Sasha soon forgot both the village and
Marya; they were gay and everything entertained them. Now they came upon
an ancient barrow, now upon a row of telegraph posts running one after
another into the distance and disappearing into the horizon, and the
wires hummed mysteriously. Then they saw a homestead, all wreathed in
green foliage; there came a scent from it of dampness, of hemp, and it
seemed for some reason that happy people lived there. Then they came
upon a horse’s skeleton whitening in solitude in the open fields. And
the larks trilled unceasingly, the corncrakes called to one another, and
the landrail cried as though someone were really scraping at an old iron
rail.
At midday Olga and Sasha reached a big village. There in the broad
street they met the little old man who was General Zhukov’s cook. He was
hot, and his red, perspiring bald head shone in the sunshine. Olga and
he did not recognize each other, then looked round at the same moment,
recognized each other, and went their separate ways without saying a
word. Stopping near the hut which looked newest and most prosperous,
Olga bowed down before the open windows, and said in a loud, thin,
chanting voice:
“Good Christian folk, give alms, for Christ’s sake, that God’s blessing
may be upon you, and that your parents may be in the Kingdom of Heaven
in peace eternal.”
“Good Christian folk,” Sasha began chanting, “give, for Christ’s sake,
that God’s blessing, the Heavenly Kingdom...”
The Chorus Girl and Other Stories
THE CHORUS GIRL
ONE day when she was younger and better-looking, and when her voice was
stronger, Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov, her adorer, was sitting in the
outer room in her summer villa. It was intolerably hot and stifling.
Kolpakov, who had just dined and drunk a whole bottle of inferior port,
felt ill-humoured and out of sorts. Both were bored and waiting for the
heat of the day to be over in order to go for a walk.
All at once there was a sudden ring at the door. Kolpakov, who was
sitting with his coat off, in his slippers, jumped up and looked
inquiringly at Pasha.
"It must be the postman or one of the girls," said the singer.
Kolpakov did not mind being found by the postman or Pasha's lady
friends, but by way of precaution gathered up his clothes and went into
the next room, while Pasha ran to open the door. To her great surprise
in the doorway stood, not the postman and not a girl friend, but an
unknown woman, young and beautiful, who was dressed like a lady, and
from all outward signs was one.
The stranger was pale and was breathing heavily as though she had been
running up a steep flight of stairs.
"What is it?" asked Pasha.
The lady did not at once answer. She took a step forward, slowly looked
about the room, and sat down in a way that suggested that from fatigue,
or perhaps illness, she could not stand; then for a long time her pale
lips quivered as she tried in vain to speak.
"Is my husband here?" she asked at last, raising to Pasha her big eyes
with their red tear-stained lids.
"Husband?" whispered Pasha, and was suddenly so frightened that her
hands and feet turned cold. "What husband?" she repeated, beginning to
tremble.
"My husband, . . . Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov."
"N . . . no, madam. . . . I . . . I don't know any husband."
A minute passed in silence. The stranger several times passed her
handkerchief over her pale lips and held her breath to stop her inward
trembling, while Pasha stood before her motionless, like a post, and
looked at her with astonishment and terror.
"So you say he is not here?" the lady asked, this time speaking with a
firm voice and smiling oddly.
"I . . . I don't know who it is you are asking about."
"You are horrid, mean, vile . . ." the stranger muttered, scanning Pasha
with hatred and repulsion. "Yes, yes . . . you are horrid. I am very,
very glad that at last I can tell you so!"
Pasha felt that on this lady in black with the angry eyes and white
slender fingers she produced the impression of something horrid and
unseemly, and she felt ashamed of her chubby red cheeks, the pock-mark
on her nose, and the fringe on her forehead, which never could be combed
back. And it seemed to her that if she had been thin, and had had no
powder on her face and no fringe on her forehead, then she could have
disguised the fact that she was not "respectable," and she would not
have felt so frightened and ashamed to stand facing this unknown,
mysterious lady.
"Where is my husband?" the lady went on. "Though I don't care whether he
is here or not, but I ought to tell you that the money has been missed,
and they are looking for Nikolay Petrovitch. . . . They mean to arrest
him. That's your doing!"
The lady got up and walked about the room in great excitement. Pasha
looked at her and was so frightened that she could not understand.
"He'll be found and arrested to-day," said the lady, and she gave a sob,
and in that sound could be heard her resentment and vexation. "I know
who has brought him to this awful position! Low, horrid creature!
Loathsome, mercenary hussy!" The lady's lips worked and her nose
wrinkled up with disgust. "I am helpless, do you hear, you low woman? .
. . I am helpless; you are stronger than I am, but there is One to
defend me and my children! God sees all! He is just! He will punish you
for every tear I have shed, for all my sleepless nights! The time will
come; you will think of me! . . ."
Silence followed again. The lady walked about the room and wrung her
hands, while Pasha still gazed blankly at her in amazement, not
understanding and expecting something terrible.
"I know nothing about it, madam," she said, and suddenly burst into
tears.
"You are lying!" cried the lady, and her eyes flashed angrily at her. "I
know all about it! I've known you a long time. I know that for the last
month he has been spending every day with you!"
"Yes. What then? What of it? I have a great many visitors, but I don't
force anyone to come. He is free to do as he likes."
"I tell you they have discovered that money is missing! He has embezzled
money at the office! For the sake of such a . . . creature as you, for
your sake he has actually committed a crime. Listen," said the lady in a
resolute voice, stopping short, facing Pasha. "You can have no
principles; you live simply to do harm-that's your object; but one can't
imagine you have fallen so low that you have no trace of human feeling
left! He has a wife, children. . . . If he is condemned and sent into
exile we shall starve, the children and I. . . . Understand that! And
yet there is a chance of saving him and us from destitution and
disgrace. If I take them nine hundred roubles to-day they will let him
alone. Only nine hundred roubles!"
"What nine hundred roubles?" Pasha asked softly. "I . . . I don't know.
. . . I haven't taken it."
"I am not asking you for nine hundred roubles. . . . You have no money,
and I don't want your money. I ask you for something else. . . . Men
usually give expensive things to women like you. Only give me back the
things my husband has given you!"
"Madam, he has never made me a present of anything!" Pasha wailed,
beginning to understand.
"Where is the money? He has squandered his own and mine and other
people's. . . . What has become of it all? Listen, I beg you! I was
carried away by indignation and have said a lot of nasty things to you,
but I apologize. You must hate me, I know, but if you are capable of
sympathy, put yourself in my position! I implore you to give me back the
things!"
"H'm!" said Pasha, and she shrugged her shoulders. "I would with
pleasure, but God is my witness, he never made me a present of anything.
Believe me, on my conscience. However, you are right, though," said the
singer in confusion, "he did bring me two little things. Certainly I
will give them back, if you wish it."
Pasha pulled out one of the drawers in the toilet-table and took out of
it a hollow gold bracelet and a thin ring with a ruby in it.
"Here, madam!" she said, handing the visitor these articles.
The lady flushed and her face quivered. She was offended.
"What are you giving me?" she said. "I am not asking for charity, but
for what does not belong to you . . . what you have taken advantage of
your position to squeeze out of my husband . . . that weak, unhappy man.
. . . On Thursday, when I saw you with my husband at the harbour you
were wearing expensive brooches and bracelets. So it's no use your
playing the innocent lamb to me! I ask you for the last time: will you
give me the things, or not?"
"You are a queer one, upon my word," said Pasha, beginning to feel
offended. "I assure you that, except the bracelet and this little ring,
I've never seen a thing from your Nikolay Petrovitch. He brings me
nothing but sweet cakes."
"Sweet cakes!" laughed the stranger. "At home the children have nothing
to eat, and here you have sweet cakes. You absolutely refuse to restore
the presents?"
Receiving no answer, the lady sat down and stared into space, pondering.
"What's to be done now?" she said. "If I don't get nine hundred roubles,
he is ruined, and the children and I am ruined, too. Shall I kill this
low woman or go down on my knees to her?"
The lady pressed her handkerchief to her face and broke into sobs.
"I beg you!" Pasha heard through the stranger's sobs. "You see you have
plundered and ruined my husband. Save him. . . . You have no feeling for
him, but the children . . . the children . . . What have the children
done?"
Pasha imagined little children standing in the street, crying with
hunger, and she, too, sobbed.
"What can I do, madam?" she said. "You say that I am a low woman and
that I have ruined Nikolay Petrovitch, and I assure you . . . before God
Almighty, I have had nothing from him whatever. . . . There is only one
girl in our chorus who has a rich admirer; all the rest of us live from
hand to mouth on bread and kvass. Nikolay Petrovitch is a highly
educated, refined gentleman, so I've made him welcome. We are bound to
make gentlemen welcome."
"I ask you for the things! Give me the things! I am crying. . . . I am
humiliating myself. . . . If you like I will go down on my knees! If you
wish it!"
Pasha shrieked with horror and waved her hands. She felt that this pale,
beautiful lady who expressed herself so grandly, as though she were on
the stage, really might go down on her knees to her, simply from pride,
from grandeur, to exalt herself and humiliate the chorus girl.
"Very well, I will give you things!" said Pasha, wiping her eyes and
bustling about. "By all means. Only they are not from Nikolay
Petrovitch. . . . I got these from other gentlemen. As you please. . .
."
Pasha pulled out the upper drawer of the chest, took out a diamond
brooch, a coral necklace, some rings and bracelets, and gave them all to
the lady.
"Take them if you like, only I've never had anything from your husband.
Take them and grow rich," Pasha went on, offended at the threat to go
down on her knees. "And if you are a lady . . . his lawful wife, you
should keep him to yourself. I should think so! I did not ask him to
come; he came of himself."
Through her tears the lady scrutinized the articles given her and said:
"This isn't everything. . . . There won't be five hundred roubles' worth
here."
Pasha impulsively flung out of the chest a gold watch, a cigar-case and
studs, and said, flinging up her hands:
"I've nothing else left. . . . You can search!"
The visitor gave a sigh, with trembling hands twisted the things up in
her handkerchief, and went out without uttering a word, without even
nodding her head.
The door from the next room opened and Kolpakov walked in. He was pale
and kept shaking his head nervously, as though he had swallowed
something very bitter; tears were glistening in his eyes.
"What presents did you make me?" Pasha asked, pouncing upon him. "When
did you, allow me to ask you?"
"Presents . . . that's no matter!" said Kolpakov, and he tossed his
head. "My God! She cried before you, she humbled herself. . . ."
"I am asking you, what presents did you make me?" Pasha cried.
"My God! She, a lady, so proud, so pure. . . . She was ready to go down
on her knees to . . . to this wench! And I've brought her to this! I've
allowed it!"
He clutched his head in his hands and moaned.
"No, I shall never forgive myself for this! I shall never forgive
myself! Get away from me . . . you low creature!" he cried with
repulsion, backing away from Pasha, and thrusting her off with trembling
hands. "She would have gone down on her knees, and . . . and to you! Oh,
my God!"
He rapidly dressed, and pushing Pasha aside contemptuously, made for the
door and went out.
Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting her
things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings were
hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for
no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever. VEROTCHKA
IVAN ALEXEYITCH OGNEV remembers how on that August evening he opened the
glass door with a rattle and went out on to the verandah. He was wearing
a light Inverness cape and a wide-brimmed straw hat, the very one that
was lying with his top-boots in the dust under his bed. In one hand he
had a big bundle of books and notebooks, in the other a thick knotted
stick.
Behind the door, holding the lamp to show the way, stood the master of
the house, Kuznetsov, a bald old man with a long grey beard, in a snow-
white piqué jacket. The old man was smiling cordially and nodding his
head.
"Good-bye, old fellow!" said Ognev.
Kuznetsov put the lamp on a little table and went out to the verandah.
Two long narrow shadows moved down the steps towards the flower-beds,
swayed to and fro, and leaned their heads on the trunks of the lime-
trees.
"Good-bye and once more thank you, my dear fellow!" said Ivan
Alexeyitch. "Thank you for your welcome, for your kindness, for your
affection. . . . I shall never forget your hospitality as long as I
live. You are so good, and your daughter is so good, and everyone here
is so kind, so good-humoured and friendly . . . Such a splendid set of
people that I don't know how to say what I feel!"
From excess of feeling and under the influence of the home-made wine he
had just drunk, Ognev talked in a singing voice like a divinity student,
and was so touched that he expressed his feelings not so much by words
as by the blinking of his eyes and the twitching of his shoulders.
Kuznetsov, who had also drunk a good deal and was touched, craned
forward to the young man and kissed him.
"I've grown as fond of you as if I were your dog," Ognev went on. "I've
been turning up here almost every day; I've stayed the night a dozen
times. It's dreadful to think of all the home-made wine I've drunk. And
thank you most of all for your co-operation and help. Without you I
should have been busy here over my statistics till October. I shall put
in my preface: 'I think it my duty to express my gratitude to the
President of the District Zemstvo of N--, Kuznetsov, for his kind co-
operation.' There is a brilliant future before statistics! My humble
respects to Vera Gavrilovna, and tell the doctors, both the lawyers and
your secretary, that I shall never forget their help! And now, old
fellow, let us embrace one another and kiss for the last time!"
Ognev, limp with emotion, kissed the old man once more and began going
down the steps. On the last step he looked round and asked: "Shall we
meet again some day?"
"God knows!" said the old man. "Most likely not!"
"Yes, that's true! Nothing will tempt you to Petersburg and I am never
likely to turn up in this district again. Well, good-bye!"
"You had better leave the books behind!" Kuznetsov called after him.
"You don't want to drag such a weight with you. I would send them by a
servant to-morrow!"
But Ognev was rapidly walking away from the house and was not listening.
His heart, warmed by the wine, was brimming over with good-humour,
friendliness, and sadness. He walked along thinking how frequently one
met with good people, and what a pity it was that nothing was left of
those meetings but memories. At times one catches a glimpse of cranes on
the horizon, and a faint gust of wind brings their plaintive, ecstatic
cry, and a minute later, however greedily one scans the blue distance,
one cannot see a speck nor catch a sound; and like that, people with
their faces and their words flit through our lives and are drowned in
the past, leaving nothing except faint traces in the memory. Having been
in the N-- District from the early spring, and having been almost every
day at the friendly Kuznetsovs', Ivan Alexeyitch had become as much at
home with the old man, his daughter, and the servants as though they
were his own people; he had grown familiar with the whole house to the
smallest detail, with the cosy verandah, the windings of the avenues,
the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the bath-house; but as
soon as he was out of the gate all this would be changed to memory and
would lose its meaning as reality for ever, and in a year or two all
these dear images would grow as dim in his consciousness as stories he
had read or things he had imagined.
"Nothing in life is so precious as people!" Ognev thought in his
emotion, as he strode along the avenue to the gate. "Nothing!"
It was warm and still in the garden. There was a scent of the
mignonette, of the tobacco-plants, and of the heliotrope, which were not
yet over in the flower-beds. The spaces between the bushes and the tree-
trunks were filled with a fine soft mist soaked through and through with
moonlight, and, as Ognev long remembered, coils of mist that looked like
phantoms slowly but perceptibly followed one another across the avenue.
The moon stood high above the garden, and below it transparent patches
of mist were floating eastward. The whole world seemed to consist of
nothing but black silhouettes and wandering white shadows. Ognev, seeing
the mist on a moonlight August evening almost for the first time in his
life, imagined he was seeing, not nature, but a stage effect in which
unskilful workmen, trying to light up the garden with white Bengal fire,
hid behind the bushes and let off clouds of white smoke together with
the light.
When Ognev reached the garden gate a dark shadow moved away from the low
fence and came towards him.
"Vera Gavrilovna!" he said, delighted. "You here? And I have been
looking everywhere for you; wanted to say good-bye. . . . Good-bye; I am
going away!"
"So early? Why, it's only eleven o'clock."
"Yes, it's time I was off. I have a four-mile walk and then my packing.
I must be up early to-morrow."
Before Ognev stood Kuznetsov's daughter Vera, a girl of one-and-twenty,
as usual melancholy, carelessly dressed, and attractive. Girls who are
dreamy and spend whole days lying down, lazily reading whatever they
come across, who are bored and melancholy, are usually careless in their
dress. To those of them who have been endowed by nature with taste and
an instinct of beauty, the slight carelessness adds a special charm.
When Ognev later on remembered her, he could not picture pretty
Verotchka except in a full blouse which was crumpled in deep folds at
the belt and yet did not touch her waist; without her hair done up high
and a curl that had come loose from it on her forehead; without the
knitted red shawl with ball fringe at the edge which hung disconsolately
on Vera's shoulders in the evenings, like a flag on a windless day, and
in the daytime lay about, crushed up, in the hall near the men's hats or
on a box in the dining-room, where the old cat did not hesitate to sleep
on it. This shawl and the folds of her blouse suggested a feeling of
freedom and laziness, of good-nature and sitting at home. Perhaps
because Vera attracted Ognev he saw in every frill and button something
warm, naïve, cosy, something nice and poetical, just what is lacking in
cold, insincere women that have no instinct for beauty.
Verotchka had a good figure, a regular profile, and beautiful curly
hair. Ognev, who had seen few women in his life, thought her a beauty.
"I am going away," he said as he took leave of her at the gate. "Don't
remember evil against me! Thank you for everything!"
In the same singing divinity student's voice in which he had talked to
her father, with the same blinking and twitching of his shoulders, he
began thanking Vera for her hospitality, kindness, and friendliness.
"I've written about you in every letter to my mother," he said. "If
everyone were like you and your dad, what a jolly place the world would
be! You are such a splendid set of people! All such genuine, friendly
people with no nonsense about you."
"Where are you going to now?" asked Vera.
"I am going now to my mother's at Oryol; I shall be a fortnight with
her, and then back to Petersburg and work."
"And then?"
"And then? I shall work all the winter and in the spring go somewhere
into the provinces again to collect material. Well, be happy, live a
hundred years . . . don't remember evil against me. We shall not see
each other again."
Ognev stooped down and kissed Vera's hand. Then, in silent emotion, he
straightened his cape, shifted his bundle of books to a more comfortable
position, paused, and said:
"What a lot of mist!"
"Yes. Have you left anything behind?"
"No, I don't think so. . . ."
For some seconds Ognev stood in silence, then he moved clumsily towards
the gate and went out of the garden.
"Stay; I'll see you as far as our wood," said Vera, following him out.
They walked along the road. Now the trees did not obscure the view, and
one could see the sky and the distance. As though covered with a veil
all nature was hidden in a transparent, colourless haze through which
her beauty peeped gaily; where the mist was thicker and whiter it lay
heaped unevenly about the stones, stalks, and bushes or drifted in coils
over the road, clung close to the earth and seemed trying not to conceal
the view. Through the haze they could see all the road as far as the
wood, with dark ditches at the sides and tiny bushes which grew in the
ditches and caught the straying wisps of mist. Half a mile from the gate
they saw the dark patch of Kuznetsov's wood.
"Why has she come with me? I shall have to see her back," thought Ognev,
but looking at her profile he gave a friendly smile and said: "One
doesn't want to go away in such lovely weather. It's quite a romantic
evening, with the moon, the stillness, and all the etceteras. Do you
know, Vera Gavrilovna, here I have lived twenty-nine years in the world
and never had a romance. No romantic episode in my whole life, so that I
only know by hearsay of rendezvous, 'avenues of sighs,' and kisses. It's
not normal! In town, when one sits in one's lodgings, one does not
notice the blank, but here in the fresh air one feels it. . . . One
resents it!"
"Why is it?"
"I don't know. I suppose I've never had time, or perhaps it was I have
never met women who. . . . In fact, I have very few acquaintances and
never go anywhere."
For some three hundred paces the young people walked on in silence.
Ognev kept glancing at Verotchka's bare head and shawl, and days of
spring and summer rose to his mind one after another. It had been a
period when far from his grey Petersburg lodgings, enjoying the friendly
warmth of kind people, nature, and the work he loved, he had not had
time to notice how the sunsets followed the glow of dawn, and how, one
after another foretelling the end of summer, first the nightingale
ceased singing, then the quail, then a little later the landrail. The
days slipped by unnoticed, so that life must have been happy and easy.
He began calling aloud how reluctantly he, poor and unaccustomed to
change of scene and society, had come at the end of April to the N--
District, where he had expected dreariness, loneliness, and indifference
to statistics, which he considered was now the foremost among the
sciences. When he arrived on an April morning at the little town of N--
he had put up at the inn kept by Ryabuhin, the Old Believer, where for
twenty kopecks a day they had given him a light, clean room on condition
that he should not smoke indoors. After resting and finding who was the
president of the District Zemstvo, he had set off at once on foot to
Kuznetsov. He had to walk three miles through lush meadows and young
copses. Larks were hovering in the clouds, filling the air with silvery
notes, and rooks flapping their wings with sedate dignity floated over
the green cornland.
"Good heavens!" Ognev had thought in wonder; "can it be that there's
always air like this to breathe here, or is this scent only to-day, in
honour of my coming?"
Expecting a cold business-like reception, he went in to Kuznetsov's
diffidently, looking up from under his eyebrows and shyly pulling his
beard. At first Kuznetsov wrinkled up his brows and could not understand
what use the Zemstvo could be to the young man and his statistics; but
when the latter explained at length what was material for statistics and
how such material was collected, Kuznetsov brightened, smiled, and with
childish curiosity began looking at his notebooks. On the evening of the
same day Ivan Alexeyitch was already sitting at supper with the
Kuznetsovs, was rapidly becoming exhilarated by their strong home-made
wine, and looking at the calm faces and lazy movements of his new
acquaintances, felt all over that sweet, drowsy indolence which makes
one want to sleep and stretch and smile; while his new acquaintances
looked at him good-naturedly and asked him whether his father and mother
were living, how much he earned a month, how often he went to the
theatre. . . .
Ognev recalled his expeditions about the neighbourhood, the picnics, the
fishing parties, the visit of the whole party to the convent to see the
Mother Superior Marfa, who had given each of the visitors a bead purse;
he recalled the hot, endless typically Russian arguments in which the
opponents, spluttering and banging the table with their fists,
misunderstand and interrupt one another, unconsciously contradict
themselves at every phrase, continually change the subject, and after
arguing for two or three hours, laugh and say: "Goodness knows what we
have been arguing about! Beginning with one thing and going on to
another!"
"And do you remember how the doctor and you and I rode to Shestovo?"
said Ivan Alexeyitch to Vera as they reached the copse. "It was there
that the crazy saint met us: I gave him a five-kopeck piece, and he
crossed himself three times and flung it into the rye. Good heavens! I
am carrying away such a mass of memories that if I could gather them
together into a whole it would make a good nugget of gold! I don't
understand why clever, perceptive people crowd into Petersburg and
Moscow and don't come here. Is there more truth and freedom in the
Nevsky and in the big damp houses than here? Really, the idea of
artists, scientific men, and journalists all living crowded together in
furnished rooms has always seemed to me a mistake."
Twenty paces from the copse the road was crossed by a small narrow
bridge with posts at the corners, which had always served as a resting-
place for the Kuznetsovs and their guests on their evening walks. From
there those who liked could mimic the forest echo, and one could see the
road vanish in the dark woodland track.
"Well, here is the bridge!" said Ognev. "Here you must turn back."
Vera stopped and drew a breath.
"Let us sit down," she said, sitting down on one of the posts. "People
generally sit down when they say good-bye before starting on a journey."
Ognev settled himself beside her on his bundle of books and went on
talking. She was breathless from the walk, and was looking, not at Ivan
Alexeyitch, but away into the distance so that he could not see her
face.
"And what if we meet in ten years' time?" he said. "What shall we be
like then? You will be by then the respectable mother of a family, and I
shall be the author of some weighty statistical work of no use to
anyone, as thick as forty thousand such works. We shall meet and think
of old days. . . . Now we are conscious of the present; it absorbs and
excites us, but when we meet we shall not remember the day, nor the
month, nor even the year in which we saw each other for the last time on
this bridge. You will be changed, perhaps . . . . Tell me, will you be
different?"
Vera started and turned her face towards him.
"What?" she asked.
"I asked you just now. . . ."
"Excuse me, I did not hear what you were saying."
Only then Ognev noticed a change in Vera. She was pale, breathing fast,
and the tremor in her breathing affected her hands and lips and head,
and not one curl as usual, but two, came loose and fell on her forehead.
. . . Evidently she avoided looking him in the face, and, trying to mask
her emotion, at one moment fingered her collar, which seemed to be
rasping her neck, at another pulled her red shawl from one shoulder to
the other.
"I am afraid you are cold," said Ognev. "It's not at all wise to sit in
the mist. Let me see you back nach-haus."
Vera sat mute.
"What is the matter?" asked Ognev, with a smile. "You sit silent and
don't answer my questions. Are you cross, or don't you feel well?"
Vera pressed the palm of her hand to the cheek nearest to Ognev, and
then abruptly jerked it away.
"An awful position!" she murmured, with a look of pain on her face.
"Awful!"
"How is it awful?" asked Ognev, shrugging his shoulders and not
concealing his surprise. "What's the matter?"
Still breathing hard and twitching her shoulders, Vera turned her back
to him, looked at the sky for half a minute, and said:
"There is something I must say to you, Ivan Alexeyitch. . . ."
"I am listening."
"It may seem strange to you. . . . You will be surprised, but I don't
care. . . ."
Ognev shrugged his shoulders once more and prepared himself to listen.
"You see . . ." Verotchka began, bowing her head and fingering a ball on
the fringe of her shawl. "You see . . . this is what I wanted to tell
you. . . . You'll think it strange . . . and silly, but I . . . can't
bear it any longer."
Vera's words died away in an indistinct mutter and were suddenly cut
short by tears. The girl hid her face in her handkerchief, bent lower
than ever, and wept bitterly. Ivan Alexeyitch cleared his throat in
confusion and looked about him hopelessly, at his wits' end, not knowing
what to say or do. Being unused to the sight of tears, he felt his own
eyes, too, beginning to smart.
"Well, what next!" he muttered helplessly. "Vera Gavrilovna, what's this
for, I should like to know? My dear girl, are you . . . are you ill? Or
has someone been nasty to you? Tell me, perhaps I could, so to say . . .
help you. . . ."
When, trying to console her, he ventured cautiously to remove her hands
from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:
"I . . . love you!"
These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human
language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera, and
got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.
The sad, warm, sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the home-
made wine suddenly vanished, and gave place to an acute and unpleasant
feeling of awkwardness. He felt an inward revulsion; he looked askance
at Vera, and now that by declaring her love for him she had cast off the
aloofness which so adds to a woman's charm, she seemed to him, as it
were, shorter, plainer, more ordinary.
"What's the meaning of it?" he thought with horror. "But I . . . do I
love her or not? That's the question!"
And she breathed easily and freely now that the worst and most difficult
thing was said. She, too, got up, and looking Ivan Alexeyitch straight
in the face, began talking rapidly, warmly, irrepressibly.
As a man suddenly panic-stricken cannot afterwards remember the
succession of sounds accompanying the catastrophe that overwhelmed him,
so Ognev cannot remember Vera's words and phrases. He can only recall
the meaning of what she said, and the sensation her words evoked in him.
He remembers her voice, which seemed stifled and husky with emotion, and
the extraordinary music and passion of her intonation. Laughing, crying
with tears glistening on her eyelashes, she told him that from the first
day of their acquaintance he had struck her by his originality, his
intelligence, his kind intelligent eyes, by his work and objects in
life; that she loved him passionately, deeply, madly; that when coming
into the house from the garden in the summer she saw his cape in the
hall or heard his voice in the distance, she felt a cold shudder at her
heart, a foreboding of happiness; even his slightest jokes had made her
laugh; in every figure in his note-books she saw something
extraordinarily wise and grand; his knotted stick seemed to her more
beautiful than the trees.
The copse and the wisps of mist and the black ditches at the side of the
road seemed hushed listening to her, whilst something strange and
unpleasant was passing in Ognev's heart. . . . Telling him of her love,
Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and passionately,
but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would have liked to; he
felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and regret that a good girl
should be distressed on his account. Whether he was affected by
generalizations from reading or by the insuperable habit of looking at
things objectively, which so often hinders people from living, but
Vera's ecstasies and suffering struck him as affected, not to be taken
seriously, and at the same time rebellious feeling whispered to him that
all he was hearing and seeing now, from the point of view of nature and
personal happiness, was more important than any statistics and books and
truths. . . . And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not
understand exactly where he was in fault.
To complete his embarrassment, he was absolutely at a loss what to say,
and yet something he must say. To say bluntly, "I don't love you," was
beyond him, and he could not bring himself to say "Yes," because however
much he rummaged in his heart he could not find one spark of feeling in
it. . . .
He was silent, and she meanwhile was saying that for her there was no
greater happiness than to see him, to follow him wherever he liked this
very moment, to be his wife and helper, and that if he went away from
her she would die of misery.
"I cannot stay here!" she said, wringing her hands. "I am sick of the
house and this wood and the air. I cannot bear the everlasting peace and
aimless life, I can't endure our colourless, pale people, who are all as
like one another as two drops of water! They are all good-natured and
warm-hearted because they are all well-fed and know nothing of struggle
or suffering, . . . I want to be in those big damp houses where people
suffer, embittered by work and need. . ."
And this, too, seemed to Ognev affected and not to be taken seriously.
When Vera had finished he still did not know what to say, but it was
impossible to be silent, and he muttered:
"Vera Gavrilovna, I am very grateful to you, though I feel I've done
nothing to deserve such . . . feeling . . . on your part. Besides, as an
honest man I ought to tell you that . . . happiness depends on equality-
that is, when both parties are . . . equally in love. . . ."
But he was immediately ashamed of his mutterings and ceased. He felt
that his face at that moment looked stupid, guilty, blank, that it was
strained and affected. . . . Vera must have been able to read the truth
on his countenance, for she suddenly became grave, turned pale, and bent
her head.
"You must forgive me," Ognev muttered, not able to endure the silence.
"I respect you so much that . . . it pains me. . . ."
Vera turned sharply and walked rapidly homewards. Ognev followed her.
"No, don't!" said Vera, with a wave of her hand. "Don't come; I can go
alone."
"Oh, yes . . . I must see you home anyway."
Whatever Ognev said, it all to the last word struck him as loathsome and
flat. The feeling of guilt grew greater at every step. He raged
inwardly, clenched his fists, and cursed his coldness and his stupidity
with women. Trying to stir his feelings, he looked at Verotchka's
beautiful figure, at her hair and the traces of her little feet on the
dusty road; he remembered her words and her tears, but all that only
touched his heart and did not quicken his pulse.
"Ach! one can't force oneself to love," he assured himself, and at the
same time he thought, "But shall I ever fall in love without? I am
nearly thirty! I have never met anyone better than Vera and I never
shall. . . . Oh, this premature old age! Old age at thirty!"
Vera walked on in front more and more rapidly, without looking back at
him or raising her head. It seemed to him that sorrow had made her
thinner and narrower in the shoulders.
"I can imagine what's going on in her heart now!" he thought, looking at
her back. "She must be ready to die with shame and mortification! My
God, there's so much life, poetry, and meaning in it that it would move
a stone, and I . . . I am stupid and absurd!"
At the gate Vera stole a glance at him, and, shrugging and wrapping her
shawl round her walked rapidly away down the avenue.
Ivan Alexeyitch was left alone. Going back to the copse, he walked
slowly, continually standing still and looking round at the gate with an
expression in his whole figure that suggested that he could not believe
his own memory. He looked for Vera's footprints on the road, and could
not believe that the girl who had so attracted him had just declared her
love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly "refused" her. For the
first time in his life it was his lot to learn by experience how little
that a man does depends on his own will, and to suffer in his own person
the feelings of a decent kindly man who has against his will caused his
neighbour cruel, undeserved anguish.
His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as
though he had lost something very precious, something very near and dear
which he could never find again. He felt that with Vera a part of his
youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which he had
passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.
When he reached the bridge he stopped and sank into thought. He wanted
to discover the reason of his strange coldness. That it was due to
something within him and not outside himself was clear to him. He
frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the intellectual
coldness of which clever people so often boast, not the coldness of a
conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul, incapacity for being moved
by beauty, premature old age brought on by education, his casual
existence, struggling for a livelihood, his homeless life in lodgings.
From the bridge he walked slowly, as it were reluctantly, into the wood.
Here, where in the dense black darkness glaring patches of moonlight
gleamed here and there, where he felt nothing except his thoughts, he
longed passionately to regain what he had lost.
And Ivan Alexeyitch remembers that he went back again. Urging himself on
with his memories, forcing himself to picture Vera, he strode rapidly
towards the garden. There was no mist by then along the road or in the
garden, and the bright moon looked down from the sky as though it had
just been washed; only the eastern sky was dark and misty. . . . Ognev
remembers his cautious steps, the dark windows, the heavy scent of
heliotrope and mignonette. His old friend Karo, wagging his tail
amicably, came up to him and sniffed his hand. This was the one living
creature who saw him walk two or three times round the house, stand near
Vera's dark window, and with a deep sigh and a wave of his hand walk out
of the garden.
An hour later he was in the town, and, worn out and exhausted, leaned
his body and hot face against the gatepost of the inn as he knocked at
the gate. Somewhere in the town a dog barked sleepily, and as though in
response to his knock, someone clanged the hour on an iron plate near
the church.
"You prowl about at night," grumbled his host, the Old Believer, opening
the door to him, in a long nightgown like a woman's. "You had better be
saying your prayers instead of prowling about."
When Ivan Alexeyitch reached his room he sank on the bed and gazed a
long, long time at the light. Then he tossed his head and began packing.
MY LIFE THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL I
THE Superintendent said to me: "I only keep you out of regard for your
worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago." I
replied to him: "You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming
that I am capable of flying." And then I heard him say: "Take that
gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves."
Two days later I was dismissed. And in this way I have, during the years
I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to the great
mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I have served in
various departments, but all these nine jobs have been as alike as one
drop of water is to another: I had to sit, write, listen to rude or
stupid observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed.
When I came in to my father he was sitting buried in a low arm-chair
with his eyes closed. His dry, emaciated face, with a shade of dark blue
where it was shaved (he looked like an old Catholic organist), expressed
meekness and resignation. Without responding to my greeting or opening
his eyes, he said:
"If my dear wife and your mother were living, your life would have been
a source of continual distress to her. I see the Divine Providence in
her premature death. I beg you, unhappy boy," he continued, opening his
eyes, "tell me: what am I to do with you?"
In the past when I was younger my friends and relations had known what
to do with me: some of them used to advise me to volunteer for the army,
others to get a job in a pharmacy, and others in the telegraph
department; now that I am over twenty-five, that grey hairs are
beginning to show on my temples, and that I have been already in the
army, and in a pharmacy, and in the telegraph department, it would seem
that all earthly possibilities have been exhausted, and people have
given up advising me, and merely sigh or shake their heads.
"What do you think about yourself?" my father went on. "By the time they
are your age, young men have a secure social position, while look at
you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on your father!"
And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of to-day
were on the road to perdition through infidelity, materialism, and self-
conceit, and that amateur theatricals ought to be prohibited, because
they seduced young people from religion and their duties.
"To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the
superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously," he said in
conclusion. "You ought not to remain one single day with no regular
position in society."
"I beg you to listen to me," I said sullenly, expecting nothing good
from this conversation. "What you call a position in society is the
privilege of capital and education. Those who have neither wealth nor
education earn their daily bread by manual labour, and I see no grounds
for my being an exception."
"When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid and
vulgar!" said my father with irritation. "Understand, you dense fellow-
understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse physical strength you
have the divine spirit, a spark of the holy fire, which distinguishes
you in the most striking way from the ass or the reptile, and brings you
nearer to the Deity! This fire is the fruit of the efforts of the best
of mankind during thousands of years. Your great-grandfather Poloznev,
the general, fought at Borodino; your grandfather was a poet, an orator,
and a Marshal of Nobility; your uncle is a schoolmaster; and lastly, I,
your father, am an architect! All the Poloznevs have guarded the sacred
fire for you to put it out!"
"One must be just," I said. "Millions of people put up with manual
labour."
"And let them put up with it! They don't know how to do anything else!
Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable of manual
labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the slave and the
barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only to a few!"
To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father worshipped
himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself.
Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of
physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire
as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the
whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had
long ago taken their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of
the manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor, while
I, his only son, was nothing! To continue the conversation was
unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly retorted,
hoping that I might at last be understood. The whole question, of
course, was clear and simple, and only concerned with the means of my
earning my living; but the simplicity of it was not seen, and I was
talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire,
of my uncle a forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial
verses; I was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I
longed to be understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and
my sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them-a
habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got rid of
it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in constant dread of
wounding them, constantly afraid that my father's thin neck would turn
crimson and that he would have a stroke.
"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a
typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What can
the sacred fire have to do with it?"
"It's intellectual work, anyway," said my father. "But that's enough;
let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you: if you
don't go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible
propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts. I
shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!"
With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which I
wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:
"The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me. I shall
renounce it all beforehand."
For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were deeply
resented by my father. He turned crimson.
"Don't dare to talk to me like that, stupid!" he shouted in a thin,
shrill voice. "Wastrel!" and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual
movement he slapped me twice in the face. "You are forgetting yourself."
When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with my
hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight in the
face. And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and, as though I
were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look him in the face. My
father was old and very thin but his delicate muscles must have been as
strong as leather, for his blows hurt a good deal.
I staggered back into the passage, and there he snatched up his
umbrella, and with it hit me several times on the head and shoulders; at
that moment my sister opened the drawing-room door to find out what the
noise was, but at once turned away with a look of horror and pity
without uttering a word in my defence.
My determination not to return to the Government office, but to begin a
new life of toil, was not to be shaken. All that was left for me to do
was to fix upon the special employment, and there was no particular
difficulty about that, as it seemed to me that I was very strong and
fitted for the very heaviest labour. I was faced with a monotonous life
of toil in the midst of hunger, coarseness, and stench, continually
preoccupied with earning my daily bread. And-who knows?-as I returned
from my work along Great Dvoryansky Street, I might very likely envy
Dolzhikov, the engineer, who lived by intellectual work, but, at the
moment, thinking over all my future hardships made me light-hearted. At
times I had dreamed of spiritual activity, imagining myself a teacher, a
doctor, or a writer, but these dreams remained dreams. The taste for
intellectual pleasures-for the theatre, for instance, and for reading-
was a passion with me, but whether I had any ability for intellectual
work I don't know. At school I had had an unconquerable aversion for
Greek, so that I was only in the fourth class when they had to take me
from school. For a long while I had coaches preparing me for the fifth
class. Then I served in various Government offices, spending the greater
part of the day in complete idleness, and I was told that was
intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic and official sphere had
required neither mental application nor talent, nor special
qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such
intellectual work I put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise
it, and I don't think that for one moment it could serve as a
justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed nothing but a
sham, one of the forms of that same idleness. Real intellectual work I
have in all probability never known.
Evening came on. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street; it was the
principal street in the town, and in the absence of decent public
gardens our beau monde used to use it as a promenade in the evenings.
This charming street did to some extent take the place of a public
garden, as on each side of it there was a row of poplars which smelt
sweet, particularly after rain, and acacias, tall bushes of lilac, wild-
cherries and apple-trees hung over the fences and palings. The May
twilight, the tender young greenery with its shifting shades, the scent
of the lilac, the buzzing of the insects, the stillness, the warmth-how
fresh and marvellous it all is, though spring is repeated every year! I
stood at the garden gate and watched the passers-by. With most of them I
had grown up and at one time played pranks; now they might have been
disconcerted by my being near them, for I was poorly and unfashionably
dressed, and they used to say of my very narrow trousers and huge,
clumsy boots that they were like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats.
Besides, I had a bad reputation in the town because I had no decent
social position, and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and
also, perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before an
officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to account for
this.
In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov's.
It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky. Here
my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked slowly by
with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.
"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same
umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look up at the
sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant is man in
comparison with the universe!"
And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly
agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How
absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he was
the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty years that
I could remember not one single decent house had been built in it. When
any one asked him to plan a house, he usually drew first the reception
hall and drawing-room: just as in old days the boarding-school misses
always started from the stove when they danced, so his artistic ideas
could only begin and develop from the hall and drawing-room. To them he
tacked on a dining-room, a nursery, a study, linking the rooms together
with doors, and so they all inevitably turned into passages, and every
one of them had two or even three unnecessary doors. His imagination
must have been lacking in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As
though feeling that something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to
all sorts of outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see
now the narrow entries, the poky little passages, the crooked staircases
leading to half-landings where one could not stand upright, and where,
instead of a floor, there were three huge steps like the shelves of a
bath-house; and the kitchen was invariably in the basement with a brick
floor and vaulted ceilings. The front of the house had a harsh, stubborn
expression; the lines of it were stiff and timid; the roof was low-
pitched and, as it were, squashed down; and the fat, well-fed-looking
chimneys were invariably crowned by wire caps with squeaking black
cowls. And for some reason all these houses, built by my father exactly
like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top-hat and the back of his
head, stiff and stubborn-looking. In the course of years they have grown
used in the town to the poverty of my father's imagination. It has taken
root and become our local style.
This same style my father had brought into my sister's life also,
beginning with christening her Kleopatra (just as he had named me
Misail). When she was a little girl he scared her by references to the
stars, to the sages of ancient times, to our ancestors, and discoursed
at length on the nature of life and duty; and now, when she was twenty-
six, he kept up the same habits, allowing her to walk arm in arm with no
one but himself, and imagining for some reason that sooner or later a
suitable young man would be sure to appear, and to desire to enter into
matrimony with her from respect for his personal qualities. She adored
my father, feared him, and believed in his exceptional intelligence.
It was quite dark, and gradually the street grew empty. The music had
ceased in the house opposite; the gate was thrown wide open, and a team
with three horses trotted frolicking along our street with a soft tinkle
of little bells. That was the engineer going for a drive with his
daughter. It was bedtime.
I had my own room in the house, but I lived in a shed in the yard, under
the same roof as a brick barn which had been built some time or other,
probably to keep harness in; great hooks were driven into the wall. Now
it was not wanted, and for the last thirty years my father had stowed
away in it his newspapers, which for some reason he had bound in half-
yearly volumes and allowed nobody to touch. Living here, I was less
liable to be seen by my father and his visitors, and I fancied that if I
did not live in a real room, and did not go into the house every day to
dinner, my father's words that I was a burden upon him did not sound so
offensive.
My sister was waiting for me. Unseen by my father, she had brought me
some supper: not a very large slice of cold veal and a piece of bread.
In our house such sayings as: "A penny saved is a penny gained," and
"Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves,"
and so on, were frequently repeated, and my sister, weighed down by
these vulgar maxims, did her utmost to cut down the expenses, and so we
fared badly. Putting the plate on the table, she sat down on my bed and
began to cry.
"Misail," she said, "what a way to treat us!"
She did not cover her face; her tears dropped on her bosom and hands,
and there was a look of distress on her face. She fell back on the
pillow, and abandoned herself to her tears, sobbing and quivering all
over.
"You have left the service again . . ." she articulated. "Oh, how awful
it is!"
"But do understand, sister, do understand . . . ." I said, and I was
overcome with despair because she was crying.
As ill-luck would have it, the kerosene in my little lamp was exhausted;
it began to smoke, and was on the point of going out, and the old hooks
on the walls looked down sullenly, and their shadows flickered.
"Have mercy on us," said my sister, sitting up. "Father is in terrible
distress and I am ill; I shall go out of my mind. What will become of
you?" she said, sobbing and stretching out her arms to me. "I beg you, I
implore you, for our dear mother's sake, I beg you to go back to the
office!"
"I can't, Kleopatra!" I said, feeling that a little more and I should
give way. "I cannot!"
"Why not?" my sister went on. "Why not? Well, if you can't get on with
the Head, look out for another post. Why shouldn't you get a situation
on the railway, for instance? I have just been talking to Anyuta
Blagovo; she declares they would take you on the railway-line, and even
promised to try and get a post for you. For God's sake, Misail, think a
little! Think a little, I implore you."
We talked a little longer and I gave way. I said that the thought of a
job on the railway that was being constructed had never occurred to me,
and that if she liked I was ready to try it.
She smiled joyfully through her tears and squeezed my hand, and then
went on crying because she could not stop, while I went to the kitchen
for some kerosene. II
Among the devoted supporters of amateur theatricals, concerts and
tableaux vivants for charitable objects the Azhogins, who lived in their
own house in Great Dvoryansky Street, took a foremost place; they always
provided the room, and took upon themselves all the troublesome
arrangements and the expenses. They were a family of wealthy landowners
who had an estate of some nine thousand acres in the district and a
capital house, but they did not care for the country, and lived winter
and summer alike in the town. The family consisted of the mother, a
tall, spare, refined lady, with short hair, a short jacket, and a flat-
looking skirt in the English fashion, and three daughters who, when they
were spoken of, were called not by their names but simply: the eldest,
the middle, and the youngest. They all had ugly sharp chins, and were
short-sighted and round-shouldered. They were dressed like their mother,
they lisped disagreeably, and yet, in spite of that, infallibly took
part in every performance and were continually doing something with a
charitable object-acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and
never smiled, and even in a musical comedy they played without the
faintest trace of gaiety, with a businesslike air, as though they were
engaged in bookkeeping.
I loved our theatricals, especially the numerous, noisy, and rather
incoherent rehearsals, after which they always gave a supper. In the
choice of the plays and the distribution of the parts I had no hand at
all. The post assigned to me lay behind the scenes. I painted the
scenes, copied out the parts, prompted, made up the actors' faces; and I
was entrusted, too, with various stage effects such as thunder, the
singing of nightingales, and so on. Since I had no proper social
position and no decent clothes, at the rehearsals I held aloof from the
rest in the shadows of the wings and maintained a shy silence.
I painted the scenes at the Azhogins' either in the barn or in the yard.
I was assisted by Andrey Ivanov, a house painter, or, as he called
himself, a contractor for all kinds of house decorations, a tall, very
thin, pale man of fifty, with a hollow chest, with sunken temples, with
blue rings round his eyes, rather terrible to look at in fact. He was
afflicted with some internal malady, and every autumn and spring people
said that he wouldn't recover, but after being laid up for a while he
would get up and say afterwards with surprise: "I have escaped dying
again."
In the town he was called Radish, and they declared that this was his
real name. He was as fond of the theatre as I was, and as soon as
rumours reached him that a performance was being got up he threw aside
all his work and went to the Azhogins' to paint scenes.
The day after my talk with my sister, I was working at the Azhogins'
from morning till night. The rehearsal was fixed for seven o'clock in
the evening, and an hour before it began all the amateurs were gathered
together in the hall, and the eldest, the middle, and the youngest
Azhogins were pacing about the stage, reading from manuscript books.
Radish, in a long rusty-red overcoat and a scarf muffled round his neck,
already stood leaning with his head against the wall, gazing with a
devout expression at the stage. Madame Azhogin went up first to one and
then to another guest, saying something agreeable to each. She had a way
of gazing into one's face, and speaking softly as though telling a
secret.
"It must be difficult to paint scenery," she said softly, coming up to
me. "I was just talking to Madame Mufke about superstitions when I saw
you come in. My goodness, my whole life I have been waging war against
superstitions! To convince the servants what nonsense all their terrors
are, I always light three candles, and begin all my important
undertakings on the thirteenth of the month."
Dolzhikov's daughter came in, a plump, fair beauty, dressed, as people
said, in everything from Paris. She did not act, but a chair was set for
her on the stage at the rehearsals, and the performances never began
till she had appeared in the front row, dazzling and astounding everyone
with her fine clothes. As a product of the capital she was allowed to
make remarks during the rehearsals; and she did so with a sweet
indulgent smile, and one could see that she looked upon our performance
as a childish amusement. It was said she had studied singing at the
Petersburg Conservatoire, and even sang for a whole winter in a private
opera. I thought her very charming, and I usually watched her through
the rehearsals and performances without taking my eyes off her.
I had just picked up the manuscript book to begin prompting when my
sister suddenly made her appearance. Without taking off her cloak or
hat, she came up to me and said:
"Come along, I beg you."
I went with her. Anyuta Blagovo, also in her hat and wearing a dark
veil, was standing behind the scenes at the door. She was the daughter
of the Assistant President of the Court, who had held that office in our
town almost ever since the establishment of the circuit court. Since she
was tall and had a good figure, her assistance was considered
indispensable for tableaux vivants, and when she represented a fairy or
something like Glory her face burned with shame; but she took no part in
dramatic performances, and came to the rehearsals only for a moment on
some special errand, and did not go into the hall. Now, too, it was
evident that she had only looked in for a minute.
"My father was speaking about you," she said drily, blushing and not
looking at me. "Dolzhikov has promised you a post on the railway-line.
Apply to him to-morrow; he will be at home."
I bowed and thanked her for the trouble she had taken.
"And you can give up this," she said, indicating the exercise book.
My sister and she went up to Madame Azhogin and for two minutes they
were whispering with her looking towards me; they were consulting about
something.
"Yes, indeed," said Madame Azhogin, softly coming up to me and looking
intently into my face. "Yes, indeed, if this distracts you from serious
pursuits"-she took the manuscript book from my hands-"you can hand it
over to someone else; don't distress yourself, my friend, go home, and
good luck to you."
I said good-bye to her, and went away overcome with confusion. As I went
down the stairs I saw my sister and Anyuta Blagovo going away; they were
hastening along, talking eagerly about something, probably about my
going into the railway service. My sister had never been at a rehearsal
before, and now she was most likely conscience-stricken, and afraid her
father might find out that, without his permission, she had been to the
Azhogins'!
I went to Dolzhikov's next day between twelve and one. The footman
conducted me into a very beautiful room, which was the engineer's
drawing-room, and, at the same time, his working study. Everything here
was soft and elegant, and, for a man so unaccustomed to luxury as I was,
it seemed strange. There were costly rugs, huge arm-chairs, bronzes,
pictures, gold and plush frames; among the photographs scattered about
the walls there were very beautiful women, clever, lovely faces, easy
attitudes; from the drawing-room there was a door leading straight into
the garden on to a verandah: one could see lilac-trees; one could see a
table laid for lunch, a number of bottles, a bouquet of roses; there was
a fragrance of spring and expensive cigars, a fragrance of happiness-and
everything seemed as though it would say: "Here is a man who has lived
and laboured, and has attained at last the happiness possible on earth."
The engineer's daughter was sitting at the writing-table, reading a
newspaper.
"You have come to see my father?" she asked. "He is having a shower
bath; he will be here directly. Please sit down and wait."
I sat down.
"I believe you live opposite?" she questioned me, after a brief silence.
"Yes."
"I am so bored that I watch you every day out of the window; you must
excuse me," she went on, looking at the newspaper, "and I often see your
sister; she always has such a look of kindness and concentration."
Dolzhikov came in. He was rubbing his neck with a towel.
"Papa, Monsieur Poloznev," said his daughter.
"Yes, yes, Blagovo was telling me," he turned briskly to me without
giving me his hand. "But listen, what can I give you? What sort of posts
have I got? You are a queer set of people!" he went on aloud in a tone
as though he were giving me a lecture. "A score of you keep coming to me
every day; you imagine I am the head of a department! I am constructing
a railway-line, my friends; I have employment for heavy labour: I need
mechanics, smiths, navvies, carpenters, well-sinkers, and none of you
can do anything but sit and write! You are all clerks."
And he seemed to me to have the same air of happiness as his rugs and
easy chairs. He was stout and healthy, ruddy-cheeked and broad-chested,
in a print cotton shirt and full trousers like a toy china sledge-
driver. He had a curly, round beard-and not a single grey hair-a hooked
nose, and clear, dark, guileless eyes.
"What can you do?" he went on. "There is nothing you can do! I am an
engineer. I am a man of an assured position, but before they gave me a
railway-line I was for years in harness; I have been a practical
mechanic. For two years I worked in Belgium as an oiler. You can judge
for yourself, my dear fellow, what kind of work can I offer you?"
"Of course that is so . . ." I muttered in extreme confusion, unable to
face his clear, guileless eyes.
"Can you work the telegraph, any way?" he asked, after a moment's
thought.
"Yes, I have been a telegraph clerk."
"Hm! Well, we will see then. Meanwhile, go to Dubetchnya. I have got a
fellow there, but he is a wretched creature."
"And what will my duties consist of?" I asked.
"We shall see. Go there; meanwhile I will make arrangements. Only please
don't get drunk, and don't worry me with requests of any sort, or I
shall send you packing."
He turned away from me without even a nod.
I bowed to him and his daughter who was reading a newspaper, and went
away. My heart felt so heavy, that when my sister began asking me how
the engineer had received me, I could not utter a single word.
I got up early in the morning, at sunrise, to go to Dubetchnya. There
was not a soul in our Great Dvoryansky Street; everyone was asleep, and
my footsteps rang out with a solitary, hollow sound. The poplars,
covered with dew, filled the air with soft fragrance. I was sad, and did
not want to go away from the town. I was fond of my native town. It
seemed to be so beautiful and so snug! I loved the fresh greenery, the
still, sunny morning, the chiming of our bells; but the people with whom
I lived in this town were boring, alien to me, sometimes even repulsive.
I did not like them nor understand them.
I did not understand what these sixty-five thousand people lived for and
by. I knew that Kimry lived by boots, that Tula made samovars and guns,
that Odessa was a sea-port, but what our town was, and what it did, I
did not know. Great Dvoryansky Street and the two other smartest streets
lived on the interest of capital, or on salaries received by officials
from the public treasury; but what the other eight streets, which ran
parallel for over two miles and vanished beyond the hills, lived upon,
was always an insoluble riddle to me. And the way those people lived one
is ashamed to describe! No garden, no theatre, no decent band; the
public library and the club library were only visited by Jewish youths,
so that the magazines and new books lay for months uncut; rich and well-
educated people slept in close, stuffy bedrooms, on wooden bedsteads
infested with bugs; their children were kept in revoltingly dirty rooms
called nurseries, and the servants, even the old and respected ones,
slept on the floor in the kitchen, covered with rags. On ordinary days
the houses smelt of beetroot soup, and on fast days of sturgeon cooked
in sunflower oil. The food was not good, and the drinking water was
unwholesome. In the town council, at the governor's, at the head
priest's, on all sides in private houses, people had been saying for
years and years that our town had not a good and cheap water-supply, and
that it was necessary to obtain a loan of two hundred thousand from the
Treasury for laying on water; very rich people, of whom three dozen
could have been counted up in our town, and who at times lost whole
estates at cards, drank the polluted water, too, and talked all their
lives with great excitement of a loan for the water-supply-and I did not
understand that; it seemed to me it would have been simpler to take the
two hundred thousand out of their own pockets and lay it out on that
object.
I did not know one honest man in the town. My father took bribes, and
imagined that they were given him out of respect for his moral
qualities; at the high school, in order to be moved up rapidly from
class to class, the boys went to board with their teachers, who charged
them exorbitant sums; the wife of the military commander took bribes
from the recruits when they were called up before the board and even
deigned to accept refreshments from them, and on one occasion could not
get up from her knees in church because she was drunk; the doctors took
bribes, too, when the recruits came up for examination, and the town
doctor and the veterinary surgeon levied a regular tax on the butchers'
shops and the restaurants; at the district school they did a trade in
certificates, qualifying for partial exemption from military service;
the higher clergy took bribes from the humbler priests and from the
church elders; at the Municipal, the Artisans', and all the other Boards
every petitioner was pursued by a shout: "Don't forget your thanks!" and
the petitioner would turn back to give sixpence or a shilling. And those
who did not take bribes, such as the higher officials of the Department
of Justice, were haughty, offered two fingers instead of shaking hands,
were distinguished by the frigidity and narrowness of their judgments,
spent a great deal of time over cards, drank to excess, married
heiresses, and undoubtedly had a pernicious corrupting influence on
those around them. It was only the girls who had still the fresh
fragrance of moral purity; most of them had higher impulses, pure and
honest hearts; but they had no understanding of life, and believed that
bribes were given out of respect for moral qualities, and after they
were married grew old quickly, let themselves go completely, and sank
hopelessly in the mire of vulgar, petty bourgeois existence. III
A railway-line was being constructed in our neighbourhood. On the eve of
feast days the streets were thronged with ragged fellows whom the
townspeople called "navvies," and of whom they were afraid. And more
than once I had seen one of these tatterdemalions with a bloodstained
countenance being led to the police station, while a samovar or some
linen, wet from the wash, was carried behind by way of material
evidence. The navvies usually congregated about the taverns and the
market-place; they drank, ate, and used bad language, and pursued with
shrill whistles every woman of light behaviour who passed by. To
entertain this hungry rabble our shopkeepers made cats and dogs drunk
with vodka, or tied an old kerosene can to a dog's tail; a hue and cry
was raised, and the dog dashed along the street, jingling the can,
squealing with terror; it fancied some monster was close upon its heels;
it would run far out of the town into the open country and there sink
exhausted. There were in the town several dogs who went about trembling
with their tails between their legs; and people said this diversion had
been too much for them, and had driven them mad.
A station was being built four miles from the town. It was said that the
engineers asked for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles for bringing the
line right up to the town, but the town council would only consent to
give forty thousand; they could not come to an agreement over the
difference, and now the townspeople regretted it, as they had to make a
road to the station and that, it was reckoned, would cost more. The
sleepers and rails had been laid throughout the whole length of the
line, and trains ran up and down it, bringing building materials and
labourers, and further progress was only delayed on account of the
bridges which Dolzhikov was building, and some of the stations were not
yet finished.
Dubetchnya, as our first station was called, was a little under twelve
miles from the town. I walked. The cornfields, bathed in the morning
sunshine, were bright green. It was a flat, cheerful country, and in the
distance there were the distinct outlines of the station, of ancient
barrows, and far-away homesteads. . . . How nice it was out there in the
open! And how I longed to be filled with the sense of freedom, if only
for that one morning, that I might not think of what was being done in
the town, not think of my needs, not feel hungry! Nothing has so marred
my existence as an acute feeling of hunger, which made images of
buckwheat porridge, rissoles, and baked fish mingle strangely with my
best thoughts. Here I was standing alone in the open country, gazing
upward at a lark which hovered in the air at the same spot, trilling as
though in hysterics, and meanwhile I was thinking: "How nice it would be
to eat a piece of bread and butter!"
Or I would sit down by the roadside to rest, and shut my eyes to listen
to the delicious sounds of May, and what haunted me was the smell of hot
potatoes. Though I was tall and strongly built, I had as a rule little
to eat, and so the predominant sensation throughout the day was hunger,
and perhaps that was why I knew so well how it is that such multitudes
of people toil merely for their daily bread, and can talk of nothing but
things to eat.
At Dubetchnya they were plastering the inside of the station, and
building a wooden upper storey to the pumping shed. It was hot; there
was a smell of lime, and the workmen sauntered listlessly between the
heaps of shavings and mortar rubble. The pointsman lay asleep near his
sentry box, and the sun was blazing full on his face. There was not a
single tree. The telegraph wire hummed faintly and hawks were perching
on it here and there. I, wandering, too, among the heaps of rubbish, and
not knowing what to do, recalled how the engineer, in answer to my
question what my duties would consist in, had said: "We shall see when
you are there"; but what could one see in that wilderness?
The plasterers spoke of the foreman, and of a certain Fyodot Vasilyev. I
did not understand, and gradually I was overcome by depression-the
physical depression in which one is conscious of one's arms and legs and
huge body, and does not know what to do with them or where to put them.
After I had been walking about for at least a couple of hours, I noticed
that there were telegraph poles running off to the right from the
station, and that they ended a mile or a mile and a half away at a white
stone wall. The workmen told me the office was there, and at last I
reflected that that was where I ought to go.
It was a very old manor house, deserted long ago. The wall round it, of
porous white stone, was mouldering and had fallen away in places, and
the lodge, the blank wall of which looked out on the open country, had a
rusty roof with patches of tin-plate gleaming here and there on it.
Within the gates could be seen a spacious courtyard overgrown with rough
weeds, and an old manor house with sunblinds on the windows, and a high
roof red with rust. Two lodges, exactly alike, stood one on each side of
the house to right and to left: one had its windows nailed up with
boards; near the other, of which the windows were open, there was
washing on the line, and there were calves moving about. The last of the
telegraph poles stood in the courtyard, and the wire from it ran to the
window of the lodge, of which the blank wall looked out into the open
country. The door stood open; I went in. By the telegraph apparatus a
gentleman with a curly dark head, wearing a reefer coat made of
sailcloth, was sitting at a table; he glanced at me morosely from under
his brows, but immediately smiled and said:
"Hullo, Better-than-nothing!"
It was Ivan Tcheprakov, an old schoolfellow of mine, who had been
expelled from the second class for smoking. We used at one time, during
autumn, to catch goldfinches, finches, and linnets together, and to sell
them in the market early in the morning, while our parents were still in
their beds. We watched for flocks of migrating starlings and shot at
them with small shot, then we picked up those that were wounded, and
some of them died in our hands in terrible agonies (I remember to this
day how they moaned in the cage at night); those that recovered we sold,
and swore with the utmost effrontery that they were all cocks. On one
occasion at the market I had only one starling left, which I had offered
to purchasers in vain, till at last I sold it for a farthing. "Anyway,
it's better than nothing," I said to comfort myself, as I put the
farthing in my pocket, and from that day the street urchins and the
schoolboys called after me: "Better-than-nothing"; and to this day the
street boys and the shopkeepers mock at me with the nickname, though no
one remembers how it arose.
Tcheprakov was not of robust constitution: he was narrow-chested, round-
shouldered, and long-legged. He wore a silk cord for a tie, had no trace
of a waistcoat, and his boots were worse than mine, with the heels
trodden down on one side. He stared, hardly even blinking, with a
strained expression, as though he were just going to catch something,
and he was always in a fuss.
"You wait a minute," he would say fussily. "You listen. . . . Whatever
was I talking about?"
We got into conversation. I learned that the estate on which I now was
had until recently been the property of the Tcheprakovs, and had only
the autumn before passed into the possession of Dolzhikov, who
considered it more profitable to put his money into land than to keep it
in notes, and had already bought up three good-sized mortgaged estates
in our neighbourhood. At the sale Tcheprakov's mother had reserved for
herself the right to live for the next two years in one of the lodges at
the side, and had obtained a post for her son in the office.
"I should think he could buy!" Tcheprakov said of the engineer. "See
what he fleeces out of the contractors alone! He fleeces everyone!"
Then he took me to dinner, deciding fussily that I should live with him
in the lodge, and have my meals from his mother.
"She is a bit stingy," he said, "but she won't charge you much."
It was very cramped in the little rooms in which his mother lived; they
were all, even the passage and the entry, piled up with furniture which
had been brought from the big house after the sale; and the furniture
was all old-fashioned mahogany. Madame Tcheprakov, a very stout middle-
aged lady with slanting Chinese eyes, was sitting in a big arm-chair by
the window, knitting a stocking. She received me ceremoniously.
"This is Poloznev, mamma," Tcheprakov introduced me. "He is going to
serve here."
"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, disagreeable voice: it
seemed to me to sound as though fat were bubbling in her throat.
"Yes," I answered.
"Sit down."
The dinner was a poor one. Nothing was served but pies filled with
bitter curd, and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, who presided, kept
blinking in a queer way, first with one eye and then with the other. She
talked, she ate, but yet there was something deathly about her whole
figure, and one almost fancied the faint smell of a corpse. There was
only a glimmer of life in her, a glimmer of consciousness that she had
been a lady who had once had her own serfs, that she was the widow of a
general whom the servants had to address as "your Excellency"; and when
these feeble relics of life flickered up in her for an instant she would
say to her son:
"Jean, you are not holding your knife properly!"
Or she would say to me, drawing a deep breath, with the mincing air of a
hostess trying to entertain a visitor:
"You know we have sold our estate. Of course, it is a pity, we are used
to the place, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster of
Dubetchnya, so we shall not have to go away; we shall live here at the
station, and that is just the same as being on our own property! The
engineer is so nice! Don't you think he is very handsome?"
Until recently the Tcheprakovs had lived in a wealthy style, but since
the death of the general everything had been changed. Elena Nikiforovna
had taken to quarrelling with the neighbours, to going to law, and to
not paying her bailiffs or her labourers; she was in constant terror of
being robbed, and in some ten years Dubetchnya had become
unrecognizable.
Behind the great house was an old garden which had already run wild, and
was overgrown with rough weeds and bushes. I walked up and down the
verandah, which was still solid and beautiful; through the glass doors
one could see a room with parquetted floor, probably the drawing-room;
an old-fashioned piano and pictures in deep mahogany frames-there was
nothing else. In the old flower-beds all that remained were peonies and
poppies, which lifted their white and bright red heads above the grass.
Young maples and elms, already nibbled by the cows, grew beside the
paths, drawn up and hindering each other's growth. The garden was
thickly overgrown and seemed impassable, but this was only near the
house where there stood poplars, fir-trees, and old limetrees, all of
the same age, relics of the former avenues. Further on, beyond them the
garden had been cleared for the sake of hay, and here it was not moist
and stuffy, and there were no spiders' webs in one's mouth and eyes. A
light breeze was blowing. The further one went the more open it was, and
here in the open space were cherries, plums, and spreading apple-trees,
disfigured by props and by canker; and pear-trees so tall that one could
not believe they were pear-trees. This part of the garden was let to
some shopkeepers of the town, and it was protected from thieves and
starlings by a feeble-minded peasant who lived in a shanty in it.
The garden, growing more and more open, till it became definitely a
meadow, sloped down to the river, which was overgrown with green weeds
and osiers. Near the milldam was the millpond, deep and full of fish; a
little mill with a thatched roof was working away with a wrathful sound,
and frogs croaked furiously. Circles passed from time to time over the
smooth, mirror-like water, and the water-lilies trembled, stirred by the
lively fish. On the further side of the river was the little village
Dubetchnya. The still, blue millpond was alluring with its promise of
coolness and peace. And now all this-the millpond and the mill and the
snug-looking banks-belonged to the engineer!
And so my new work began. I received and forwarded telegrams, wrote
various reports, and made fair copies of the notes of requirements, the
complaints, and the reports sent to the office by the illiterate foremen
and workmen. But for the greater part of the day I did nothing but walk
about the room waiting for telegrams, or made a boy sit in the lodge
while I went for a walk in the garden, until the boy ran to tell me that
there was a tapping at the operating machine. I had dinner at Madame
Tcheprakov's. Meat we had very rarely: our dishes were all made of milk,
and Wednesdays and Fridays were fast days, and on those days we had pink
plates which were called Lenten plates. Madame Tcheprakov was
continually blinking-it was her invariable habit, and I always felt ill
at ease in her presence.
As there was not enough work in the lodge for one, Tcheprakov did
nothing, but simply dozed, or went with his gun to shoot ducks on the
millpond. In the evenings he drank too much in the village or the
station, and before going to bed stared in the looking-glass and said:
"Hullo, Ivan Tcheprakov."
When he was drunk he was very pale, and kept rubbing his hands and
laughing with a sound like a neigh: "hee-hee-hee!" By way of bravado he
used to strip and run about the country naked. He used to eat flies and
say they were rather sour. IV
One day, after dinner, he ran breathless into the lodge and said: "Go
along, your sister has come."
I went out, and there I found a hired brake from the town standing
before the entrance of the great house. My sister had come in it with
Anyuta Blagovo and a gentleman in a military tunic. Going up closer I
recognized the latter: it was the brother of Anyuta Blagovo, the army
doctor.
"We have come to you for a picnic," he said; "is that all right?"
My sister and Anyuta wanted to ask how I was getting on here, but both
were silent, and simply gazed at me. I was silent too. They saw that I
did not like the place, and tears came into my sister's eyes, while
Anyuta Blagovo turned crimson.
We went into the garden. The doctor walked ahead of us all and said
enthusiastically:
"What air! Holy Mother, what air!"
In appearance he was still a student. And he walked and talked like a
student, and the expression of his grey eyes was as keen, honest, and
frank as a nice student's. Beside his tall and handsome sister he looked
frail and thin; and his beard was thin too, and his voice, too, was a
thin but rather agreeable tenor. He was serving in a regiment somewhere,
and had come home to his people for a holiday, and said he was going in
the autumn to Petersburg for his examination as a doctor of medicine. He
was already a family man, with a wife and three children, he had married
very young, in his second year at the University, and now people in the
town said he was unhappy in his family life and was not living with his
wife.
"What time is it?" my sister asked uneasily. "We must get back in good
time. Papa let me come to see my brother on condition I was back at
six."
"Oh, bother your papa!" sighed the doctor.
I set the samovar. We put down a carpet before the verandah of the great
house and had our tea there, and the doctor knelt down, drank out of his
saucer, and declared that he now knew what bliss was. Then Tcheprakov
came with the key and opened the glass door, and we all went into the
house. There it was half dark and mysterious, and smelt of mushrooms,
and our footsteps had a hollow sound as though there were cellars under
the floor. The doctor stopped and touched the keys of the piano, and it
responded faintly with a husky, quivering, but melodious chord; he tried
his voice and sang a song, frowning and tapping impatiently with his
foot when some note was mute. My sister did not talk about going home,
but walked about the rooms and kept saying:
"How happy I am! How happy I am!"
There was a note of astonishment in her voice, as though it seemed to
her incredible that she, too, could feel light-hearted. It was the first
time in my life I had seen her so happy. She actually looked prettier.
In profile she did not look nice; her nose and mouth seemed to stick out
and had an expression as though she were pouting, but she had beautiful
dark eyes, a pale, very delicate complexion, and a touching expression
of goodness and melancholy, and when she talked she seemed charming and
even beautiful. We both, she and I, took after our mother, were broad
shouldered, strongly built, and capable of endurance, but her pallor was
a sign of ill-health; she often had a cough, and I sometimes caught in
her face that look one sees in people who are seriously ill, but for
some reason conceal the fact. There was something naïve and childish in
her gaiety now, as though the joy that had been suppressed and smothered
in our childhood by harsh education had now suddenly awakened in her
soul and found a free outlet.
But when evening came on and the horses were brought round, my sister
sank into silence and looked thin and shrunken, and she got into the
brake as though she were going to the scaffold.
When they had all gone, and the sound had died away . . . I remembered
that Anyuta Blagovo had not said a word to me all day.
"She is a wonderful girl!" I thought. "Wonderful girl!"
St. Peter's fast came, and we had nothing but Lenten dishes every day. I
was weighed down by physical depression due to idleness and my unsettled
position, and dissatisfied with myself. Listless and hungry, I lounged
about the garden and only waited for a suitable mood to go away.
Towards evening one day, when Radish was sitting in the lodge,
Dolzhikov, very sunburnt and grey with dust, walked in unexpectedly. He
had been spending three days on his land, and had come now to Dubetchnya
by the steamer, and walked to us from the station. While waiting for the
carriage, which was to come for him from the town, he walked round the
grounds with his bailiff, giving orders in a loud voice, then sat for a
whole hour in our lodge, writing letters. While he was there telegrams
came for him, and he himself tapped off the answers. We three stood in
silence at attention.
"What a muddle!" he said, glancing contemptuously at a record book. "In
a fortnight I am transferring the office to the station, and I don't
know what I am to do with you, my friends."
"I do my best, your honour," said Tcheprakov.
"To be sure, I see how you do your best. The only thing you can do is to
take your salary," the engineer went on, looking at me; "you keep
relying on patronage to faire le carrière as quickly and as easily as
possible. Well, I don't care for patronage. No one took any trouble on
my behalf. Before they gave me a railway contract I went about as a
mechanic and worked in Belgium as an oiler. And you, Panteley, what are
you doing here?" he asked, turning to Radish. "Drinking with them?"
He, for some reason, always called humble people Panteley, and such as
me and Tcheprakov he despised, and called them drunkards, beasts, and
rabble to their faces. Altogether he was cruel to humble subordinates,
and used to fine them and turn them off coldly without explanations.
At last the horses came for him. As he said good-bye he promised to turn
us all off in a fortnight; he called his bailiff a blockhead; and then,
lolling at ease in his carriage, drove back to the town.
"Andrey Ivanitch," I said to Radish, "take me on as a workman."
"Oh, all right!"
And we set off together in the direction of the town. When the station
and the big house with its buildings were left behind I asked: "Andrey
Ivanitch, why did you come to Dubetchnya this evening?"
"In the first place my fellows are working on the line, and in the
second place I came to pay the general's lady my interest. Last year I
borrowed fifty roubles from her, and I pay her now a rouble a month
interest."
The painter stopped and took me by the button.
"Misail Alexeyitch, our angel," he went on. "The way I look at it is
that if any man, gentle or simple, takes even the smallest interest, he
is doing evil. There cannot be truth and justice in such a man."
Radish, lean, pale, dreadful-looking, shut his eyes, shook his head,
and, in the tone of a philosopher, pronounced:
"Lice consume the grass, rust consumes the iron, and lying the soul.
Lord, have mercy upon us sinners." V
Radish was not practical, and was not at all good at forming an
estimate; he took more work than he could get through, and when
calculating he was agitated, lost his head, and so was almost always out
of pocket over his jobs. He undertook painting, glazing, paperhanging,
and even tiling roofs, and I can remember his running about for three
days to find tilers for the sake of a paltry job. He was a first-rate
workman; he sometimes earned as much as ten roubles a day; and if it had
not been for the desire at all costs to be a master, and to be called a
contractor, he would probably have had plenty of money.
He was paid by the job, but he paid me and the other workmen by the day,
from one and twopence to two shillings a day. When it was fine and dry
we did all kinds of outside work, chiefly painting roofs. When I was new
to the work it made my feet burn as though I were walking on hot bricks,
and when I put on felt boots they were hotter than ever. But this was
only at first; later on I got used to it, and everything went
swimmingly. I was living now among people to whom labour was obligatory,
inevitable, and who worked like cart-horses, often with no idea of the
moral significance of labour, and, indeed, never using the word "labour"
in conversation at all. Beside them I, too, felt like a cart-horse,
growing more and more imbued with the feeling of the obligatory and
inevitable character of what I was doing, and this made my life easier,
setting me free from all doubt and uncertainty.
At first everything interested me, everything was new, as though I had
been born again. I could sleep on the ground and go about barefoot, and
that was extremely pleasant; I could stand in a crowd of the common
people and be no constraint to anyone, and when a cab horse fell down in
the street I ran to help it up without being afraid of soiling my
clothes. And the best of it all was, I was living on my own account and
no burden to anyone!
Painting roofs, especially with our own oil and colours, was regarded as
a particularly profitable job, and so this rough, dull work was not
disdained, even by such good workmen as Radish. In short breeches, and
wasted, purple-looking legs, he used to go about the roofs, looking like
a stork, and I used to hear him, as he plied his brush, breathing
heavily and saying: "Woe, woe to us sinners!"
He walked about the roofs as freely as though he were upon the ground.
In spite of his being ill and pale as a corpse, his agility was
extraordinary: he used to paint the domes and cupolas of the churches
without scaffolding, like a young man, with only the help of a ladder
and a rope, and it was rather horrible when standing on a height far
from the earth; he would draw himself up erect, and for some unknown
reason pronounce:
"Lice consume grass, rust consumes iron, and lying the soul!"
Or, thinking about something, would answer his thoughts aloud:
"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"
When I went home from my work, all the people who were sitting on
benches by the gates, all the shopmen and boys and their employers, made
sneering and spiteful remarks after me, and this upset me at first and
seemed to be simply monstrous.
"Better-than-nothing!" I heard on all sides. "House painter! Yellow
ochre!"
And none behaved so ungraciously to me as those who had only lately been
humble people themselves, and had earned their bread by hard manual
labour. In the streets full of shops I was once passing an ironmonger's
when water was thrown over me as though by accident, and on one occasion
someone darted out with a stick at me, while a fishmonger, a grey-headed
old man, barred my way and said, looking at me angrily:
"I am not sorry for you, you fool! It's your father I am sorry for."
And my acquaintances were for some reason overcome with embarrassment
when they met me. Some of them looked upon me as a queer fish and a
comic fool; others were sorry for me; others did not know what attitude
to take up to me, and it was difficult to make them out. One day I met
Anyuta Blagovo in a side street near Great Dvoryansky Street. I was
going to work, and was carrying two long brushes and a pail of paint.
Recognizing me Anyuta flushed crimson.
"Please do not bow to me in the street," she said nervously, harshly,
and in a shaking voice, without offering me her hand, and tears suddenly
gleamed in her eyes. "If to your mind all this is necessary, so be it .
. . so be it, but I beg you not to meet me!"
I no longer lived in Great Dvoryansky Street, but in the suburb with my
old nurse Karpovna, a good-natured but gloomy old woman, who always
foreboded some harm, was afraid of all dreams, and even in the bees and
wasps that flew into her room saw omens of evil, and the fact that I had
become a workman, to her thinking, boded nothing good.
"Your life is ruined," she would say, mournfully shaking her head,
"ruined."
Her adopted son Prokofy, a huge, uncouth, red-headed fellow of thirty,
with bristling moustaches, a butcher by trade, lived in the little house
with her. When he met me in the passage he would make way for me in
respectful silence, and if he was drunk he would salute me with all five
fingers at once. He used to have supper in the evening, and through the
partition wall of boards I could hear him clear his throat and sigh as
he drank off glass after glass.
"Mamma," he would call in an undertone.
"Well," Karpovna, who was passionately devoted to her adopted son, would
respond: "What is it, sonny?"
"I can show you a testimony of my affection, mamma. All this earthly
life I will cherish you in your declining years in this vale of tears,
and when you die I will bury you at my expense; I have said it, and you
can believe it."
I got up every morning before sunrise, and went to bed early. We house
painters ate a great deal and slept soundly; the only thing amiss was
that my heart used to beat violently at night. I did not quarrel with my
mates. Violent abuse, desperate oaths, and wishes such as, "Blast your
eyes," or "Cholera take you," never ceased all day, but, nevertheless,
we lived on very friendly terms. The other fellows suspected me of being
some sort of religious sectary, and made good-natured jokes at my
expense, saying that even my own father had disowned me, and thereupon
would add that they rarely went into the temple of God themselves, and
that many of them had not been to confession for ten years. They
justified this laxity on their part by saying that a painter among men
was like a jackdaw among birds.
The men had a good opinion of me, and treated me with respect; it was
evident that my not drinking, not smoking, but leading a quiet, steady
life pleased them very much. It was only an unpleasant shock to them
that I took no hand in stealing oil and did not go with them to ask for
tips from people on whose property we were working. Stealing oil and
paints from those who employed them was a house painter's custom, and
was not regarded as theft, and it was remarkable that even so upright a
man as Radish would always carry away a little white lead and oil as he
went home from work. And even the most respectable old fellows, who
owned the houses in which they lived in the suburb, were not ashamed to
ask for a tip, and it made me feel vexed and ashamed to see the men go
in a body to congratulate some nonentity on the commencement or the
completion of the job, and thank him with degrading servility when they
had received a few coppers.
With people on whose work they were engaged they behaved like wily
courtiers, and almost every day I was reminded of Shakespeare's
Polonius.
"I fancy it is going to rain," the man whose house was being painted
would say, looking at the sky.
"It is, there is not a doubt it is," the painters would agree.
"I don't think it is a rain-cloud, though. Perhaps it won't rain after
all."
"No, it won't, your honour! I am sure it won't."
But their attitude to their patrons behind their backs was usually one
of irony, and when they saw, for instance, a gentleman sitting in the
verandah reading a newspaper, they would observe:
"He reads the paper, but I daresay he has nothing to eat."
I never went home to see my own people. When I came back from work I
often found waiting for me little notes, brief and anxious, in which my
sister wrote to me about my father; that he had been particularly
preoccupied at dinner and had eaten nothing, or that he had been giddy
and staggering, or that he had locked himself in his room and had not
come out for a long time. Such items of news troubled me; I could not
sleep, and at times even walked up and down Great Dvoryansky Street at
night by our house, looking in at the dark windows and trying to guess
whether everything was well at home. On Sundays my sister came to see
me, but came in secret, as though it were not to see me but our nurse.
And if she came in to see me she was very pale, with tear-stained eyes,
and she began crying at once.
"Our father will never live through this," she would say. "If anything
should happen to him-God grant it may not-your conscience will torment
you all your life. It's awful, Misail; for our mother's sake I beseech
you: reform your ways."
"My darling sister," I would say, "how can I reform my ways if I am
convinced that I am acting in accordance with my conscience? Do
understand!"
"I know you are acting on your conscience, but perhaps it could be done
differently, somehow, so as not to wound anybody."
"Ah, holy Saints!" the old woman sighed through the door. "Your life is
ruined! There will be trouble, my dears, there will be trouble!" VI
One Sunday Dr. Blagovo turned up unexpectedly. He was wearing a military
tunic over a silk shirt and high boots of patent leather.
"I have come to see you," he began, shaking my hand heartily like a
student. "I am hearing about you every day, and I have been meaning to
come and have a heart-to-heart talk, as they say. The boredom in the
town is awful, there is not a living soul, no one to say a word to. It's
hot, Holy Mother," he went on, taking off his tunic and sitting in his
silk shirt. "My dear fellow, let me talk to you."
I was dull myself, and had for a long time been craving for the society
of someone not a house painter. I was genuinely glad to see him.
"I'll begin by saying," he said, sitting down on my bed, "that I
sympathize with you from the bottom of my heart, and deeply respect the
life you are leading. They don't understand you here in the town, and,
indeed, there is no one to understand, seeing that, as you know, they
are all, with very few exceptions, regular Gogolesque pig faces here.
But I saw what you were at once that time at the picnic. You are a noble
soul, an honest, high-minded man! I respect you, and feel it a great
honour to shake hands with you!" he went on enthusiastically. "To have
made such a complete and violent change of life as you have done, you
must have passed through a complicated spiritual crisis, and to continue
this manner of life now, and to keep up to the high standard of your
convictions continually, must be a strain on your mind and heart from
day to day. Now to begin our talk, tell me, don't you consider that if
you had spent your strength of will, this strained activity, all these
powers on something else, for instance, on gradually becoming a great
scientist, or artist, your life would have been broader and deeper and
would have been more productive?"
We talked, and when we got upon manual labour I expressed this idea:
that what is wanted is that the strong should not enslave the weak, that
the minority should not be a parasite on the majority, nor a vampire for
ever sucking its vital sap; that is, all, without exception, strong and
weak, rich and poor, should take part equally in the struggle for
existence, each one on his own account, and that there was no better
means for equalizing things in that way than manual labour, in the form
of universal service, compulsory for all.
"Then do you think everyone without exception ought to engage in manual
labour?" asked the doctor.
"Yes."
"And don't you think that if everyone, including the best men, the
thinkers and great scientists, taking part in the struggle for
existence, each on his own account, are going to waste their time
breaking stones and painting roofs, may not that threaten a grave danger
to progress?"
"Where is the danger?" I asked. "Why, progress is in deeds of love, in
fulfilling the moral law; if you don't enslave anyone, if you don't
oppress anyone, what further progress do you want?"
"But, excuse me," Blagovo suddenly fired up, rising to his feet. "But,
excuse me! If a snail in its shell busies itself over perfecting its own
personality and muddles about with the moral law, do you call that
progress?"
"Why muddles?" I said, offended. "If you don't force your neighbour to
feed and clothe you, to transport you from place to place and defend you
from your enemies, surely in the midst of a life entirely resting on
slavery, that is progress, isn't it? To my mind it is the most important
progress, and perhaps the only one possible and necessary for man."
"The limits of universal world progress are in infinity, and to talk of
some 'possible' progress limited by our needs and temporary theories is,
excuse my saying so, positively strange."
"If the limits of progress are in infinity as you say, it follows that
its aims are not definite," I said. "To live without knowing definitely
what you are living for!"
"So be it! But that 'not knowing' is not so dull as your 'knowing.' I am
going up a ladder which is called progress, civilization, culture; I go
on and up without knowing definitely where I am going, but really it is
worth living for the sake of that delightful ladder; while you know what
you are living for, you live for the sake of some people's not enslaving
others, that the artist and the man who rubs his paints may dine equally
well. But you know that's the petty, bourgeois, kitchen, grey side of
life, and surely it is revolting to live for that alone? If some insects
do enslave others, bother them, let them devour each other! We need not
think about them. You know they will die and decay just the same,
however zealously you rescue them from slavery. We must think of that
great millennium which awaits humanity in the remote future."
Blagovo argued warmly with me, but at the same time one could see he was
troubled by some irrelevant idea.
"I suppose your sister is not coming?" he said, looking at his watch.
"She was at our house yesterday, and said she would be seeing you to-
day. You keep saying slavery, slavery . . ." he went on. "But you know
that is a special question, and all such questions are solved by
humanity gradually."
We began talking of doing things gradually. I said that "the question of
doing good or evil every one settles for himself, without waiting till
humanity settles it by the way of gradual development. Moreover, this
gradual process has more than one aspect. Side by side with the gradual
development of human ideas the gradual growth of ideas of another order
is observed. Serfdom is no more, but the capitalist system is growing.
And in the very heyday of emancipating ideas, just as in the days of
Baty, the majority feeds, clothes, and defends the minority while
remaining hungry, inadequately clad, and defenceless. Such an order of
things can be made to fit in finely with any tendencies and currents of
thought you like, because the art of enslaving is also gradually being
cultivated. We no longer flog our servants in the stable, but we give to
slavery refined forms, at least, we succeed in finding a justification
for it in each particular case. Ideas are ideas with us, but if now, at
the end of the nineteenth century, it were possible to lay the burden of
the most unpleasant of our physiological functions upon the working
class, we should certainly do so, and afterwards, of course, justify
ourselves by saying that if the best people, the thinkers and great
scientists, were to waste their precious time on these functions,
progress might be menaced with great danger."
But at this point my sister arrived. Seeing the doctor she was fluttered
and troubled, and began saying immediately that it was time for her to
go home to her father.
"Kleopatra Alexyevna," said Blagovo earnestly, pressing both hands to
his heart, "what will happen to your father if you spend half an hour or
so with your brother and me?"
He was frank, and knew how to communicate his liveliness to others.
After a moment's thought, my sister laughed, and all at once became
suddenly gay as she had been at the picnic. We went out into the
country, and lying in the grass went on with our talk, and looked
towards the town where all the windows facing west were like glittering
gold because the sun was setting.
After that, whenever my sister was coming to see me Blagovo turned up
too, and they always greeted each other as though their meeting in my
room was accidental. My sister listened while the doctor and I argued,
and at such times her expression was joyfully enthusiastic, full of
tenderness and curiosity, and it seemed to me that a new world she had
never dreamed of before, and which she was now striving to fathom, was
gradually opening before her eyes. When the doctor was not there she was
quiet and sad, and now if she sometimes shed tears as she sat on my bed
it was for reasons of which she did not speak.
In August Radish ordered us to be ready to go to the railway-line. Two
days before we were "banished" from the town my father came to see me.
He sat down and in a leisurely way, without looking at me, wiped his red
face, then took out of his pocket our town Messenger, and deliberately,
with emphasis on each word, read out the news that the son of the branch
manager of the State Bank, a young man of my age, had been appointed
head of a Department in the Exchequer.
"And now look at you," he said, folding up the newspaper, "a beggar, in
rags, good for nothing! Even working-class people and peasants obtain
education in order to become men, while you, a Poloznev, with ancestors
of rank and distinction, aspire to the gutter! But I have not come here
to talk to you; I have washed my hands of you-" he added in a stifled
voice, getting up. "I have come to find out where your sister is, you
worthless fellow. She left home after dinner, and here it is nearly
eight and she is not back. She has taken to going out frequently without
telling me; she is less dutiful-and I see in it your evil and degrading
influence. Where is she?"
In his hand he had the umbrella I knew so well, and I was already
flustered and drew myself up like a schoolboy, expecting my father to
begin hitting me with it, but he noticed my glance at the umbrella and
most likely that restrained him.
"Live as you please!" he said. "I shall not give you my blessing!"
"Holy Saints!" my nurse muttered behind the door. "You poor, unlucky
child! Ah, my heart bodes ill!"
I worked on the railway-line. It rained without stopping all August; it
was damp and cold; they had not carried the corn in the fields, and on
big farms where the wheat had been cut by machines it lay not in sheaves
but in heaps, and I remember how those luckless heaps of wheat turned
blacker every day and the grain was sprouting in them. It was hard to
work; the pouring rain spoiled everything we managed to do. We were not
allowed to live or to sleep in the railway buildings, and we took refuge
in the damp and filthy mud huts in which the navvies had lived during
the summer, and I could not sleep at night for the cold and the woodlice
crawling on my face and hands. And when we worked near the bridges the
navvies used to come in the evenings in a gang, simply in order to beat
the painters-it was a form of sport to them. They used to beat us, to
steal our brushes. And to annoy us and rouse us to fight they used to
spoil our work; they would, for instance, smear over the signal boxes
with green paint. To complete our troubles, Radish took to paying us
very irregularly. All the painting work on the line was given out to a
contractor; he gave it out to another; and this subcontractor gave it to
Radish after subtracting twenty per cent. for himself. The job was not a
profitable one in itself, and the rain made it worse; time was wasted;
we could not work while Radish was obliged to pay the fellows by the
day. The hungry painters almost came to beating him, called him a cheat,
a blood-sucker, a Judas, while he, poor fellow, sighed, lifted up his
hand to Heaven in despair, and was continually going to Madame
Tcheprakov for money. VII
Autumn came on, rainy, dark, and muddy. The season of unemployment set
in, and I used to sit at home out of work for three days at a stretch,
or did various little jobs, not in the painting line. For instance, I
wheeled earth, earning about fourpence a day by it. Dr. Blagovo had gone
away to Petersburg. My sister had given up coming to see me. Radish was
laid up at home ill, expecting death from day to day.
And my mood was autumnal too. Perhaps because, having become a workman,
I saw our town life only from the seamy side, it was my lot almost every
day to make discoveries which reduced me almost to despair. Those of my
fellow-citizens, about whom I had no opinion before, or who had
externally appeared perfectly decent, turned out now to be base, cruel
people, capable of any dirty action. We common people were deceived,
cheated, and kept waiting for hours together in the cold entry or the
kitchen; we were insulted and treated with the utmost rudeness. In the
autumn I papered the reading-room and two other rooms at the club; I was
paid a penny three-farthings the piece, but had to sign a receipt at the
rate of twopence halfpenny, and when I refused to do so, a gentleman of
benevolent appearance in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one
of the club committee, said to me:
"If you say much more, you blackguard, I'll pound your face into a
jelly!"
And when the flunkey whispered to him what I was, the son of Poloznev
the architect, he became embarrassed, turned crimson, but immediately
recovered himself and said: "Devil take him."
In the shops they palmed off on us workmen putrid meat, musty flour, and
tea that had been used and dried again; the police hustled us in church,
the assistants and nurses in the hospital plundered us, and if we were
too poor to give them a bribe they revenged themselves by bringing us
food in dirty vessels. In the post-office the pettiest official
considered he had a right to treat us like animals, and to shout with
coarse insolence: "You wait!" "Where are you shoving to?" Even the
housedogs were unfriendly to us, and fell upon us with peculiar
viciousness. But the thing that struck me most of all in my new position
was the complete lack of justice, what is defined by the peasants in the
words: "They have forgotten God." Rarely did a day pass without
swindling. We were swindled by the merchants who sold us oil, by the
contractors and the workmen and the people who employed us. I need not
say that there could never be a question of our rights, and we always
had to ask for the money we earned as though it were a charity, and to
stand waiting for it at the back door, cap in hand.
I was papering a room at the club next to the reading-room; in the
evening, when I was just getting ready to go, the daughter of Dolzhikov,
the engineer, walked into the room with a bundle of books under her arm.
I bowed to her.
"Oh, how do you do!" she said, recognizing me at once, and holding out
her hand. "I'm very glad to see you."
She smiled and looked with curiosity and wonder at my smock, my pail of
paste, the paper stretched on the floor; I was embarrassed, and she,
too, felt awkward.
"You must excuse my looking at you like this," she said. "I have been
told so much about you. Especially by Dr. Blagovo; he is simply in love
with you. And I have made the acquaintance of your sister too; a sweet,
dear girl, but I can never persuade her that there is nothing awful
about your adopting the simple life. On the contrary, you have become
the most interesting man in the town."
She looked again at the pail of paste and the wallpaper, and went on:
"I asked Dr. Blagovo to make me better acquainted with you, but
apparently he forgot, or had not time. Anyway, we are acquainted all the
same, and if you would come and see me quite simply I should be
extremely indebted to you. I so long to have a talk. I am a simple
person," she added, holding out her hand to me, "and I hope that you
will feel no constraint with me. My father is not here, he is in
Petersburg."
She went off into the reading-room, rustling her skirts, while I went
home, and for a long time could not get to sleep.
That cheerless autumn some kind soul, evidently wishing to alleviate my
existence, sent me from time to time tea and lemons, or biscuits, or
roast game. Karpovna told me that they were always brought by a soldier,
and from whom they came she did not know; and the soldier used to
enquire whether I was well, and whether I dined every day, and whether I
had warm clothing. When the frosts began I was presented in the same way
in my absence with a soft knitted scarf brought by the soldier. There
was a faint elusive smell of scent about it, and I guessed who my good
fairy was. The scarf smelt of lilies-of-the-valley, the favourite scent
of Anyuta Blagovo.
Towards winter there was more work and it was more cheerful. Radish
recovered, and we worked together in the cemetery church, where we were
putting the ground-work on the ikon-stand before gilding. It was a
clean, quiet job, and, as our fellows used to say, profitable. One could
get through a lot of work in a day, and the time passed quickly,
imperceptibly. There was no swearing, no laughter, no loud talk. The
place itself compelled one to quietness and decent behaviour, and
disposed one to quiet, serious thoughts. Absorbed in our work we stood
or sat motionless like statues; there was a deathly silence in keeping
with the cemetery, so that if a tool fell, or a flame spluttered in the
lamp, the noise of such sounds rang out abrupt and resonant, and made us
look round. After a long silence we would hear a buzzing like the
swarming of bees: it was the requiem of a baby being chanted slowly in
subdued voices in the porch; or an artist, painting a dove with stars
round it on a cupola would begin softly whistling, and recollecting
himself with a start would at once relapse into silence; or Radish,
answering his thoughts, would say with a sigh: "Anything is possible!
Anything is possible!" or a slow disconsolate bell would begin ringing
over our heads, and the painters would observe that it must be for the
funeral of some wealthy person. . . .
My days I spent in this stillness in the twilight of the church, and in
the long evenings I played billiards or went to the theatre in the
gallery wearing the new trousers I had bought out of my own earnings.
Concerts and performances had already begun at the Azhogins'; Radish
used to paint the scenes alone now. He used to tell me the plot of the
plays and describe the tableaux vivants which he witnessed. I listened
to him with envy. I felt greatly drawn to the rehearsals, but I could
not bring myself to go to the Azhogins'.
A week before Christmas Dr. Blagovo arrived. And again we argued and
played billiards in the evenings. When he played he used to take off his
coat and unbutton his shirt over his chest, and for some reason tried
altogether to assume the air of a desperate rake. He did not drink much,
but made a great uproar about it, and had a special faculty for getting
through twenty roubles in an evening at such a poor cheap tavern as the
Volga.
My sister began coming to see me again; they both expressed surprise
every time on seeing each other, but from her joyful, guilty face it was
evident that these meetings were not accidental. One evening, when we
were playing billiards, the doctor said to me:
"I say, why don't you go and see Miss Dolzhikov? You don't know Mariya
Viktorovna; she is a clever creature, a charmer, a simple, good-natured
soul."
I described how her father had received me in the spring.
"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor, "the engineer's one thing and she's
another. Really, my dear fellow, you mustn't be nasty to her; go and see
her sometimes. For instance, let's go and see her tomorrow evening. What
do you say?"
He persuaded me. The next evening I put on my new serge trousers, and in
some agitation I set off to Miss Dolzhikov's. The footman did not seem
so haughty and terrible, nor the furniture so gorgeous, as on that
morning when I had come to ask a favour. Mariya Viktorovna was expecting
me, and she received me like an old acquaintance, shaking hands with me
in a friendly way. She was wearing a grey cloth dress with full sleeves,
and had her hair done in the style which we used to call "dogs' ears,"
when it came into fashion in the town a year before. The hair was combed
down over the ears, and this made Mariya Viktorovna's face look broader,
and she seemed to me this time very much like her father, whose face was
broad and red, with something in its expression like a sledge-driver.
She was handsome and elegant, but not youthful looking; she looked
thirty, though in reality she was not more than twenty-five.
"Dear Doctor, how grateful I am to you," she said, making me sit down.
"If it hadn't been for him you wouldn't have come to see me. I am bored
to death! My father has gone away and left me alone, and I don't know
what to do with myself in this town."
Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned,
where I lived.
"Do you spend on yourself nothing but what you earn?" she asked.
"No."
"Happy man!" she sighed. "All the evil in life, it seems to me, comes
from idleness, boredom, and spiritual emptiness, and all this is
inevitable when one is accustomed to living at other people's expense.
Don't think I am showing off, I tell you truthfully: it is not
interesting or pleasant to be rich. 'Make to yourselves friends of the
mammon of unrighteousness' is said, because there is not and cannot be a
mammon that's righteous."
She looked round at the furniture with a grave, cold expression, as
though she wanted to count it over, and went on:
"Comfort and luxury have a magical power; little by little they draw
into their clutches even strong-willed people. At one time father and I
lived simply, not in a rich style, but now you see how! It is something
monstrous," she said, shrugging her shoulders; "we spend up to twenty
thousand a year! In the provinces!"
"One comes to look at comfort and luxury as the invariable privilege of
capital and education," I said, "and it seems to me that the comforts of
life may be combined with any sort of labour, even the hardest and
dirtiest. Your father is rich, and yet he says himself that it has been
his lot to be a mechanic and an oiler."
She smiled and shook her head doubtfully: "My father sometimes eats
bread dipped in kvass," she said. "It's a fancy, a whim!"
At that moment there was a ring and she got up.
"The rich and well-educated ought to work like everyone else," she said,
"and if there is comfort it ought to be equal for all. There ought not
to be any privileges. But that's enough philosophizing. Tell me
something amusing. Tell me about the painters. What are they like?
Funny?"
The doctor came in; I began telling them about the painters, but, being
unaccustomed to talking, I was constrained, and described them like an
ethnologist, gravely and tediously. The doctor, too, told us some
anecdotes of working men: he staggered about, shed tears, dropped on his
knees, and, even, mimicking a drunkard, lay on the floor; it was as good
as a play, and Mariya Viktorovna laughed till she cried as she looked at
him. Then he played on the piano and sang in his thin, pleasant tenor,
while Mariya Viktorovna stood by and picked out what he was to sing, and
corrected him when he made a mistake.
"I've heard that you sing, too?" I enquired.
"Sing, too!" cried the doctor in horror. "She sings exquisitely, a
perfect artist, and you talk of her 'singing too'! What an idea!"
"I did study in earnest at one time," she said, answering my question,
"but now I have given it up."
Sitting on a low stool she told us of her life in Petersburg, and
mimicked some celebrated singers, imitating their voice and manner of
singing. She made a sketch of the doctor in her album, then of me; she
did not draw well, but both the portraits were like us. She laughed, and
was full of mischief and charming grimaces, and this suited her better
than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness, and it seemed to me
that she had been talking just before about wealth and luxury, not in
earnest, but in imitation of someone. She was a superb comic actress. I
mentally compared her with our young ladies, and even the handsome,
dignified Anyuta Blagovo could not stand comparison with her; the
difference was immense, like the difference between a beautiful,
cultivated rose and a wild briar.
We had supper together, the three of us. The doctor and Mariya
Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with brandy in it; they
clinked glasses and drank to friendship, to enlightenment, to progress,
to liberty, and they did not get drunk but only flushed, and were
continually, for no reason, laughing till they cried. So as not to be
tiresome I drank claret too.
"Talented, richly endowed natures," said Miss Dolzhikov, "know how to
live, and go their own way; mediocre people, like myself for instance,
know nothing and can do nothing of themselves; there is nothing left for
them but to discern some deep social movement, and to float where they
are carried by it."
"How can one discern what doesn't exist?" asked the doctor.
"We think so because we don't see it."
"Is that so? The social movements are the invention of the new
literature. There are none among us."
An argument began.
"There are no deep social movements among us and never have been," the
doctor declared loudly. "There is no end to what the new literature has
invented! It has invented intellectual workers in the country, and you
may search through all our villages and find at the most some lout in a
reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who will make four mistakes in
spelling a word of three letters. Cultured life has not yet begun among
us. There's the same savagery, the same uniform boorishness, the same
triviality, as five hundred years ago. Movements, currents there have
been, but it has all been petty, paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary
interests-and one cannot see anything important in them. If you think
you have discerned a deep social movement, and in following it you
devote yourself to tasks in the modern taste, such as the emancipation
of insects from slavery or abstinence from beef rissoles, I congratulate
you, Madam. We must study, and study, and study and we must wait a bit
with our deep social movements; we are not mature enough for them yet;
and to tell the truth, we don't know anything about them."
"You don't know anything about them, but I do," said Mariya Viktorovna.
"Goodness, how tiresome you are to-day!"
"Our duty is to study and to study, to try to accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, for genuine social movements arise where there is
knowledge; and the happiness of mankind in the future lies only in
knowledge. I drink to science!"
"There is no doubt about one thing: one must organize one's life somehow
differently," said Mariya Viktorovna, after a moment's silence and
thought. "Life, such as it has been hitherto, is not worth having. Don't
let us talk about it."
As we came away from her the cathedral clock struck two.
"Did you like her?" asked the doctor; "she's nice, isn't she?"
On Christmas day we dined with Mariya Viktorovna, and all through the
holidays we went to see her almost every day. There was never anyone
there but ourselves, and she was right when she said that she had no
friends in the town but the doctor and me. We spent our time for the
most part in conversation; sometimes the doctor brought some book or
magazine and read aloud to us. In reality he was the first well-educated
man I had met in my life: I cannot judge whether he knew a great deal,
but he always displayed his knowledge as though he wanted other people
to share it. When he talked about anything relating to medicine he was
not like any one of the doctors in our town, but made a fresh, peculiar
impression upon me, and I fancied that if he liked he might have become
a real man of science. And he was perhaps the only person who had a real
influence upon me at that time. Seeing him, and reading the books he
gave me, I began little by little to feel a thirst for the knowledge
which would have given significance to my cheerless labour. It seemed
strange to me, for instance, that I had not known till then that the
whole world was made up of sixty elements, I had not known what oil was,
what paints were, and that I could have got on without knowing these
things. My acquaintance with the doctor elevated me morally too. I was
continually arguing with him and, though I usually remained of my own
opinion, yet, thanks to him, I began to perceive that everything was not
clear to me, and I began trying to work out as far as I could definite
convictions in myself, that the dictates of conscience might be
definite, and that there might be nothing vague in my mind. Yet, though
he was the most cultivated and best man in the town, he was nevertheless
far from perfection. In his manners, in his habit of turning every
conversation into an argument, in his pleasant tenor, even in his
friendliness, there was something coarse, like a divinity student, and
when he took off his coat and sat in his silk shirt, or flung a tip to a
waiter in the restaurant, I always fancied that culture might be all
very well, but the Tatar was fermenting in him still.
At Epiphany he went back to Petersburg. He went off in the morning, and
after dinner my sister came in. Without taking off her fur coat and her
cap she sat down in silence, very pale, and kept her eyes fixed on the
same spot. She was chilled by the frost and one could see that she was
upset by it.
"You must have caught cold," I said.
Her eyes filled with tears; she got up and went out to Karpovna without
saying a word to me, as though I had hurt her feelings. And a little
later I heard her saying, in a tone of bitter reproach:
"Nurse, what have I been living for till now? What? Tell me, haven't I
wasted my youth? All the best years of my life to know nothing but
keeping accounts, pouring out tea, counting the halfpence, entertaining
visitors, and thinking there was nothing better in the world! Nurse, do
understand, I have the cravings of a human being, and I want to live,
and they have turned me into something like a housekeeper. It's
horrible, horrible!"
She flung her keys towards the door, and they fell with a jingle into my
room. They were the keys of the sideboard, of the kitchen cupboard, of
the cellar, and of the tea-caddy, the keys which my mother used to
carry.
"Oh, merciful heavens!" cried the old woman in horror. "Holy Saints
above!"
Before going home my sister came into my room to pick up the keys, and
said:
"You must forgive me. Something queer has happened to me lately." VIII
On returning home late one evening from Mariya Viktorovna's I found
waiting in my room a young police inspector in a new uniform; he was
sitting at my table, looking through my books.
"At last," he said, getting up and stretching himself. "This is the
third time I have been to you. The Governor commands you to present
yourself before him at nine o'clock in the morning. Without fail."
He took from me a signed statement that I would act upon his
Excellency's command, and went away. This late visit of the police
inspector and unexpected invitation to the Governor's had an
overwhelmingly oppressive effect upon me. From my earliest childhood I
have felt terror-stricken in the presence of gendarmes, policemen, and
law court officials, and now I was tormented by uneasiness, as though I
were really guilty in some way. And I could not get to sleep. My nurse
and Prokofy were also upset and could not sleep. My nurse had earache
too; she moaned, and several times began crying with pain. Hearing that
I was awake, Prokofy came into my room with a lamp and sat down at the
table.
"You ought to have a drink of pepper cordial," he said, after a moment's
thought. "If one does have a drink in this vale of tears it does no
harm. And if Mamma were to pour a little pepper cordial in her ear it
would do her a lot of good."
Between two and three he was going to the slaughter-house for the meat.
I knew I should not sleep till morning now, and to get through the time
till nine o'clock I went with him. We walked with a lantern, while his
boy Nikolka, aged thirteen, with blue patches on his cheeks from
frostbites, a regular young brigand to judge by his expression, drove
after us in the sledge, urging on the horse in a husky voice.
"I suppose they will punish you at the Governor's," Prokofy said to me
on the way. "There are rules of the trade for governors, and rules for
the higher clergy, and rules for the officers, and rules for the
doctors, and every class has its rules. But you haven't kept to your
rules, and you can't be allowed."
The slaughter-house was behind the cemetery, and till then I had only
seen it in the distance. It consisted of three gloomy barns, surrounded
by a grey fence, and when the wind blew from that quarter on hot days in
summer, it brought a stifling stench from them. Now going into the yard
in the dark I did not see the barns; I kept coming across horses and
sledges, some empty, some loaded up with meat. Men were walking about
with lanterns, swearing in a disgusting way. Prokofy and Nikolka swore
just as revoltingly, and the air was in a continual uproar with
swearing, coughing, and the neighing of horses.
There was a smell of dead bodies and of dung. It was thawing, the snow
was changing into mud; and in the darkness it seemed to me that I was
walking through pools of blood.
Having piled up the sledges full of meat we set off to the butcher's
shop in the market. It began to get light. Cooks with baskets and
elderly ladies in mantles came along one after another. Prokofy, with a
chopper in his hand, in a white apron spattered with blood, swore
fearful oaths, crossed himself at the church, shouted aloud for the
whole market to hear, that he was giving away the meat at cost price and
even at a loss to himself. He gave short weight and short change, the
cooks saw that, but, deafened by his shouts, did not protest, and only
called him a hangman. Brandishing and bringing down his terrible chopper
he threw himself into picturesque attitudes, and each time uttered the
sound "Geck" with a ferocious expression, and I was afraid he really
would chop off somebody's head or hand.
I spent all the morning in the butcher's shop, and when at last I went
to the Governor's, my overcoat smelt of meat and blood. My state of mind
was as though I were being sent spear in hand to meet a bear. I remember
the tall staircase with a striped carpet on it, and the young official,
with shiny buttons, who mutely motioned me to the door with both hands,
and ran to announce me. I went into a hall luxuriously but frigidly and
tastelessly furnished, and the high, narrow mirrors in the spaces
between the walls, and the bright yellow window curtains, struck the eye
particularly unpleasantly. One could see that the governors were
changed, but the furniture remained the same. Again the young official
motioned me with both hands to the door, and I went up to a big green
table at which a military general, with the Order of Vladimir on his
breast, was standing.
"Mr. Poloznev, I have asked you to come," he began, holding a letter in
his hand, and opening his mouth like a round "o," "I have asked you to
come here to inform you of this. Your highly respected father has
appealed by letter and by word of mouth to the Marshal of the Nobility
begging him to summon you, and to lay before you the inconsistency of
your behaviour with the rank of the nobility to which you have the
honour to belong. His Excellency Alexandr Pavlovitch, justly supposing
that your conduct might serve as a bad example, and considering that
mere persuasion on his part would not be sufficient, but that official
intervention in earnest was essential, presents me here in this letter
with his views in regard to you, which I share."
He said this, quietly, respectfully, standing erect, as though I were
his superior officer and looking at me with no trace of severity. His
face looked worn and wizened, and was all wrinkles; there were bags
under his eyes; his hair was dyed; and it was impossible to tell from
his appearance how old he was-forty or sixty.
"I trust," he went on, "that you appreciate the delicacy of our honoured
Alexandr Pavlovitch, who has addressed himself to me not officially, but
privately. I, too, have asked you to come here unofficially, and I am
speaking to you, not as a Governor, but from a sincere regard for your
father. And so I beg you either to alter your line of conduct and return
to duties in keeping with your rank, or to avoid setting a bad example,
remove to another district where you are not known, and where you can
follow any occupation you please. In the other case, I shall be forced
to take extreme measures."
He stood for half a minute in silence, looking at me with his mouth
open.
"Are you a vegetarian?" he asked.
"No, your Excellency, I eat meat."
He sat down and drew some papers towards him. I bowed and went out.
It was not worth while now to go to work before dinner. I went home to
sleep, but could not sleep from an unpleasant, sickly feeling, induced
by the slaughter house and my conversation with the Governor, and when
the evening came I went, gloomy and out of sorts, to Mariya Viktorovna.
I told her how I had been at the Governor's, while she stared at me in
perplexity as though she did not believe it, then suddenly began
laughing gaily, loudly, irrepressibly, as only good-natured laughter-
loving people can.
"If only one could tell that in Petersburg!" she brought out, almost
falling over with laughter, and propping herself against the table. "If
one could tell that in Petersburg!" IX
Now we used to see each other often, sometimes twice a day. She used to
come to the cemetery almost every day after dinner, and read the
epitaphs on the crosses and tombstones while she waited for me.
Sometimes she would come into the church, and, standing by me, would
look on while I worked. The stillness, the naïve work of the painters
and gilders, Radish's sage reflections, and the fact that I did not
differ externally from the other workmen, and worked just as they did in
my waistcoat with no socks on, and that I was addressed familiarly by
them-all this was new to her and touched her. One day a workman, who was
painting a dove on the ceiling, called out to me in her presence:
"Misail, hand me up the white paint."
I took him the white paint, and afterwards, when I let myself down by
the frail scaffolding, she looked at me, touched to tears and smiling.
"What a dear you are!" she said.
I remembered from my childhood how a green parrot, belonging to one of
the rich men of the town, had escaped from its cage, and how for quite a
month afterwards the beautiful bird had haunted the town, flying from
garden to garden, homeless and solitary. Mariya Viktorovna reminded me
of that bird.
"There is positively nowhere for me to go now but the cemetery," she
said to me with a laugh. "The town has become disgustingly dull. At the
Azhogins' they are still reciting, singing, lisping. I have grown to
detest them of late; your sister is an unsociable creature; Mademoiselle
Blagovo hates me for some reason. I don't care for the theatre. Tell me
where am I to go?"
When I went to see her I smelt of paint and turpentine, and my hands
were stained-and she liked that; she wanted me to come to her in my
ordinary working clothes; but in her drawing-room those clothes made me
feel awkward. I felt embarrassed, as though I were in uniform, so I
always put on my new serge trousers when I went to her. And she did not
like that.
"You must own you are not quite at home in your new character," she said
to me one day. "Your workman's dress does not feel natural to you; you
are awkward in it. Tell me, isn't that because you haven't a firm
conviction, and are not satisfied? The very kind of work you have
chosen-your painting-surely it does not satisfy you, does it?" she
asked, laughing. "I know paint makes things look nicer and last longer,
but those things belong to rich people who live in towns, and after all
they are luxuries. Besides, you have often said yourself that everybody
ought to get his bread by the work of his own hands, yet you get money
and not bread. Why shouldn't you keep to the literal sense of your
words? You ought to be getting bread, that is, you ought to be
ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, or doing something which has a
direct connection with agriculture, for instance, looking after cows,
digging, building huts of logs. . . ."
She opened a pretty cupboard that stood near her writing-table, and
said:
"I am saying all this to you because I want to let you into my secret.
Voilà ! This is my agricultural library. Here I have fields, kitchen
garden and orchard, and cattleyard and beehives. I read them greedily,
and have already learnt all the theory to the tiniest detail. My dream,
my darling wish, is to go to our Dubetchnya as soon as March is here.
It's marvellous there, exquisite, isn't it? The first year I shall have
a look round and get into things, and the year after I shall begin to
work properly myself, putting my back into it as they say. My father has
promised to give me Dubetchnya and I shall do exactly what I like with
it."
Flushed, excited to tears, and laughing, she dreamed aloud how she would
live at Dubetchnya, and what an interesting life it would be! I envied
her. March was near, the days were growing longer and longer, and on
bright sunny days water dripped from the roofs at midday, and there was
a fragrance of spring; I, too, longed for the country.
And when she said that she should move to Dubetchnya, I realized vividly
that I should remain in the town alone, and I felt that I envied her
with her cupboard of books and her agriculture. I knew nothing of work
on the land, and did not like it, and I should have liked to have told
her that work on the land was slavish toil, but I remembered that
something similar had been said more than once by my father, and I held
my tongue.
Lent began. Viktor Ivanitch, whose existence I had begun to forget,
arrived from Petersburg. He arrived unexpectedly, without even a
telegram to say he was coming. When I went in, as usual in the evening,
he was walking about the drawing-room, telling some story with his face
freshly washed and shaven, looking ten years younger: his daughter was
kneeling on the floor, taking out of his trunks boxes, bottles, and
books, and handing them to Pavel the footman. I involuntarily drew back
a step when I saw the engineer, but he held out both hands to me and
said, smiling, showing his strong white teeth that looked like a sledge-
driver's:
"Here he is, here he is! Very glad to see you, Mr. House-painter! Masha
has told me all about it; she has been singing your praises. I quite
understand and approve," he went on, taking my arm. "To be a good
workman is ever so much more honest and more sensible than wasting
government paper and wearing a cockade on your head. I myself worked in
Belgium with these very hands and then spent two years as a mechanic. .
. ."
He was wearing a short reefer jacket and indoor slippers; he walked like
a man with the gout, rolling slightly from side to side and rubbing his
hands. Humming something he softly purred and hugged himself with
satisfaction at being at home again at last, and able to have his
beloved shower bath.
"There is no disputing," he said to me at supper, "there is no
disputing; you are all nice and charming people, but for some reason, as
soon as you take to manual labour, or go in for saving the peasants, in
the long run it all comes to no more than being a dissenter. Aren't you
a dissenter? Here you don't take vodka. What's the meaning of that if it
is not being a dissenter?"
To satisfy him I drank some vodka and I drank some wine, too. We tasted
the cheese, the sausage, the pâtés, the pickles, and the savouries of
all sorts that the engineer had brought with him, and the wine that had
come in his absence from abroad. The wine was first-rate. For some
reason the engineer got wine and cigars from abroad without paying duty;
the caviare and the dried sturgeon someone sent him for nothing; he did
not pay rent for his flat as the owner of the house provided the
kerosene for the line; and altogether he and his daughter produced on me
the impression that all the best in the world was at their service, and
provided for them for nothing.
I went on going to see them, but not with the same eagerness. The
engineer made me feel constrained, and in his presence I did not feel
free. I could not face his clear, guileless eyes, his reflections
wearied and sickened me; I was sickened, too, by the memory that so
lately I had been in the employment of this red-faced, well-fed man, and
that he had been brutally rude to me. It is true that he put his arm
round my waist, slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way, approved
my manner of life, but I felt that, as before, he despised my
insignificance, and only put up with me to please his daughter, and I
couldn't now laugh and talk as I liked, and I behaved unsociably and
kept expecting that in another minute he would address me as Panteley as
he did his footman Pavel. How my pride as a provincial and a working man
was revolted. I, a proletarian, a house painter, went every day to rich
people who were alien to me, and whom the whole town regarded as though
they were foreigners, and every day I drank costly wines with them and
ate unusual dainties-my conscience refused to be reconciled to it! On my
way to the house I sullenly avoided meeting people, and looked at them
from under my brows as though I really were a dissenter, and when I was
going home from the engineer's I was ashamed of my well-fed condition.
Above all I was afraid of being carried away. Whether I was walking
along the street, or working, or talking to the other fellows, I was all
the time thinking of one thing only, of going in the evening to see
Mariya Viktorovna and was picturing her voice, her laugh, her movements.
When I was getting ready to go to her I always spent a long time before
my nurse's warped looking-glass, as I fastened my tie; my serge trousers
were detestable in my eyes, and I suffered torments, and at the same
time despised myself for being so trivial. When she called to me out of
the other room that she was not dressed and asked me to wait, I listened
to her dressing; it agitated me, I felt as though the ground were giving
way under my feet. And when I saw a woman's figure in the street, even
at a distance, I invariably compared it. It seemed to me that all our
girls and women were vulgar, that they were absurdly dressed, and did
not know how to hold themselves; and these comparisons aroused a feeling
of pride in me: Mariya Viktorovna was the best of them all! And I
dreamed of her and myself at night.
One evening at supper with the engineer we ate a whole lobster As I was
going home afterwards I remembered that the engineer twice called me "My
dear fellow" at supper, and I reflected that they treated me very kindly
in that house, as they might an unfortunate big dog who had been kicked
out by its owners, that they were amusing themselves with me, and that
when they were tired of me they would turn me out like a dog. I felt
ashamed and wounded, wounded to the point of tears as though I had been
insulted, and looking up at the sky I took a vow to put an end to all
this.
The next day I did not go to the Dolzhikov's. Late in the evening, when
it was quite dark and raining, I walked along Great Dvoryansky Street,
looking up at the windows. Everyone was asleep at the Azhogins', and the
only light was in one of the furthest windows. It was Madame Azhogin in
her own room, sewing by the light of three candles, imagining that she
was combating superstition. Our house was in darkness, but at the
Dolzhikovs', on the contrary, the windows were lighted up, but one could
distinguish nothing through the flowers and the curtains. I kept walking
up and down the street; the cold March rain drenched me through. I heard
my father come home from the club; he stood knocking at the gate. A
minute later a light appeared at the window, and I saw my sister, who
was hastening down with a lamp, while with the other hand she was
twisting her thick hair together as she went. Then my father walked
about the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, while my sister
sat in a low chair, thinking and not listening to what he said.
But then they went away; the light went out. . . . I glanced round at
the engineer's, and there, too, all was darkness now. In the dark and
the rain I felt hopelessly alone, abandoned to the whims of destiny; I
felt that all my doings, my desires, and everything I had thought and
said till then were trivial in comparison with my loneliness, in
comparison with my present suffering, and the suffering that lay before
me in the future. Alas, the thoughts and doings of living creatures are
not nearly so significant as their sufferings! And without clearly
realizing what I was doing, I pulled at the bell of the Dolzhikovs'
gate, broke it, and ran along the street like some naughty boy, with a
feeling of terror in my heart, expecting every moment that they would
come out and recognize me. When I stopped at the end of the street to
take breath I could hear nothing but the sound of the rain, and
somewhere in the distance a watchman striking on a sheet of iron.
For a whole week I did not go to the Dolzhikovs'. My serge trousers were
sold. There was nothing doing in the painting trade. I knew the pangs of
hunger again, and earned from twopence to fourpence a day, where I
could, by heavy and unpleasant work. Struggling up to my knees in the
cold mud, straining my chest, I tried to stifle my memories, and, as it
were, to punish myself for the cheeses and preserves with which I had
been regaled at the engineer's. But all the same, as soon as I lay in
bed, wet and hungry, my sinful imagination immediately began to paint
exquisite, seductive pictures, and with amazement I acknowledged to
myself that I was in love, passionately in love, and I fell into a
sound, heavy sleep, feeling that hard labour only made my body stronger
and younger.
One evening snow began falling most inappropriately, and the wind blew
from the north as though winter had come back again. When I returned
from work that evening I found Mariya Viktorovna in my room. She was
sitting in her fur coat, and had both hands in her muff.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she asked, raising her clear, clever
eyes, and I was utterly confused with delight and stood stiffly upright
before her, as I used to stand facing my father when he was going to
beat me; she looked into my face and I could see from her eyes that she
understood why I was confused.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "If you don't want to
come, you see, I have come to you."
She got up and came close to me.
"Don't desert me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
alone, utterly alone."
She began crying; and, hiding her face in her muff, articulated:
"Alone! My life is hard, very hard, and in all the world I have no one
but you. Don't desert me!"
Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears she smiled; we were silent
for some time, then I put my arms round her and kissed her, scratching
my cheek till it bled with her hatpin as I did it.
And we began talking to each other as though we had been on the closest
terms for ages and ages. X
Two days later she sent me to Dubetchnya and I was unutterably delighted
to go. As I walked towards the station and afterwards, as I was sitting
in the train, I kept laughing from no apparent cause, and people looked
at me as though I were drunk. Snow was falling, and there were still
frosts in the mornings, but the roads were already dark-coloured and
rooks hovered over them, cawing.
At first I had intended to fit up an abode for us two, Masha and me, in
the lodge at the side opposite Madame Tcheprakov's lodge, but it
appeared that the doves and the ducks had been living there for a long
time, and it was impossible to clean it without destroying a great
number of nests. There was nothing for it but to live in the comfortless
rooms of the big house with the sunblinds. The peasants called the house
the palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it, and the only
furniture was a piano and a child's arm-chair lying in the attic. And if
Masha had brought all her furniture from the town we should even then
have been unable to get rid of the impression of immense emptiness and
cold. I picked out three small rooms with windows looking into the
garden, and worked from early morning till night, setting them to
rights, putting in new panes, papering the walls, filling up the holes
and chinks in the floors. It was easy, pleasant work. I was continually
running to the river to see whether the ice were not going; I kept
fancying that starlings were flying. And at night, thinking of Masha, I
listened with an unutterably sweet feeling, with clutching delight to
the noise of the rats and the wind droning and knocking above the
ceiling. It seemed as though some old house spirit were coughing in the
attic.
The snow was deep; a great deal had fallen even at the end of March, but
it melted quickly, as though by magic, and the spring floods passed in a
tumultuous rush, so that by the beginning of April the starlings were
already noisy, and yellow butterflies were flying in the garden. It was
exquisite weather. Every day, towards evening, I used to walk to the
town to meet Masha, and what a delight it was to walk with bare feet
along the gradually drying, still soft road. Half-way I used to sit down
and look towards the town, not venturing to go near it. The sight of it
troubled me. I kept wondering how the people I knew would behave to me
when they heard of my love. What would my father say? What troubled me
particularly was the thought that my life was more complicated, and that
I had completely lost all power to set it right, and that, like a
balloon, it was bearing me away, God knows whither. I no longer
considered the problem how to earn my daily bread, how to live, but
thought about-I really don't know what.
Masha used to come in a carriage; I used to get in with her, and we
drove to Dubetchnya, feeling light-hearted and free. Or, after waiting
till the sun had set, I would go back dissatisfied and dreary, wondering
why Masha had not come; at the gate or in the garden I would be met by a
sweet, unexpected apparition-it was she! It would turn out that she had
come by rail, and had walked from the station. What a festival it was!
In a simple woollen dress with a kerchief on her head, with a modest
sunshade, but laced in, slender, in expensive foreign boots-it was a
talented actress playing the part of a little workgirl. We looked round
our domain and decided which should be her room, and which mine, where
we would have our avenue, our kitchen garden, our beehives.
We already had hens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because they were
ours. We had, all ready for sowing, oats, clover, timothy grass,
buckwheat, and vegetable seeds, and we always looked at all these stores
and discussed at length the crop we might get; and everything Masha said
to me seemed extraordinarily clever, and fine. This was the happiest
time of my life.
Soon after St. Thomas's week we were married at our parish church in the
village of Kurilovka, two miles from Dubetchnya. Masha wanted everything
to be done quietly; at her wish our "best men" were peasant lads, the
sacristan sang alone, and we came back from the church in a small,
jolting chaise which she drove herself. Our only guest from the town was
my sister Kleopatra, to whom Masha sent a note three days before the
wedding. My sister came in a white dress and wore gloves. During the
wedding she cried quietly from joy and tenderness. Her expression was
motherly and infinitely kind. She was intoxicated with our happiness,
and smiled as though she were absorbing a sweet delirium, and looking at
her during our wedding, I realized that for her there was nothing in the
world higher than love, earthly love, and that she was dreaming of it
secretly, timidly, but continually and passionately. She embraced and
kissed Masha, and, not knowing how to express her rapture, said to her
of me: "He is good! He is very good!"
Before she went away she changed into her ordinary dress, and drew me
into the garden to talk to me alone.
"Father is very much hurt," she said, "that you have written nothing to
him. You ought to have asked for his blessing. But in reality he is very
much pleased. He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of
all society, and that under the influence of Mariya Viktorovna you will
begin to take a more serious view of life. We talk of nothing but you in
the evenings now, and yesterday he actually used the expression: 'Our
Misail.' That pleased me. It seems as though he had some plan in his
mind, and I fancy he wants to set you an example of magnanimity and be
the first to speak of reconciliation. It is very possible he may come
here to see you in a day or two."
She hurriedly made the sign of the cross over me several times and said:
"Well, God be with you. Be happy. Anyuta Blagovo is a very clever girl;
she says about your marriage that God is sending you a fresh ordeal. To
be sure-married life does not bring only joy but suffering too. That's
bound to be so."
Masha and I walked a couple of miles to see her on her way; we walked
back slowly and in silence, as though we were resting. Masha held my
hand, my heart felt light, and I had no inclination to talk about love;
we had become closer and more akin now that we were married, and we felt
that nothing now could separate us.
"Your sister is a nice creature," said Masha, "but it seems as though
she had been tormented for years. Your father must be a terrible man."
I began telling her how my sister and I had been brought up, and what a
senseless torture our childhood had really been. When she heard how my
father had so lately beaten me, she shuddered and drew closer to me.
"Don't tell me any more," she said. "It's horrible!"
Now she never left me. We lived together in the three rooms in the big
house, and in the evenings we bolted the door which led to the empty
part of the house, as though someone were living there whom we did not
know, and were afraid of. I got up early, at dawn, and immediately set
to work of some sort. I mended the carts, made paths in the garden, dug
the flower beds, painted the roof of the house. When the time came to
sow the oats I tried to plough the ground over again, to harrow and to
sow, and I did it all conscientiously, keeping up with our labourer; I
was worn out, the rain and the cold wind made my face and feet burn for
hours afterwards. I dreamed of ploughed land at night. But field labour
did not attract me. I did not understand farming, and I did not care for
it; it was perhaps because my forefathers had not been tillers of the
soil, and the very blood that flowed in my veins was purely of the city.
I loved nature tenderly; I loved the fields and meadows and kitchen
gardens, but the peasant who turned up the soil with his plough and
urged on his pitiful horse, wet and tattered, with his craning neck, was
to me the expression of coarse, savage, ugly force, and every time I
looked at his uncouth movements I involuntarily began thinking of the
legendary life of the remote past, before men knew the use of fire. The
fierce bull that ran with the peasants' herd, and the horses, when they
dashed about the village, stamping their hoofs, moved me to fear, and
everything rather big, strong, and angry, whether it was the ram with
its horns, the gander, or the yard-dog, seemed to me the expression of
the same coarse, savage force. This mood was particularly strong in me
in bad weather, when heavy clouds were hanging over the black ploughed
land. Above all, when I was ploughing or sowing, and two or three people
stood looking how I was doing it, I had not the feeling that this work
was inevitable and obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing
myself. I preferred doing something in the yard, and there was nothing I
liked so much as painting the roof.
I used to walk through the garden and the meadow to our mill. It was let
to a peasant of Kurilovka called Stepan, a handsome, dark fellow with a
thick black beard, who looked very strong. He did not like the miller's
work, and looked upon it as dreary and unprofitable, and only lived at
the mill in order not to live at home. He was a leather-worker, and was
always surrounded by a pleasant smell of tar and leather. He was not
fond of talking, he was listless and sluggish, and was always sitting in
the doorway or on the river bank, humming "oo-loo-loo." His wife and
mother-in-law, both white-faced, languid, and meek, used sometimes to
come from Kurilovka to see him; they made low bows to him and addressed
him formally, "Stepan Petrovitch," while he went on sitting on the river
bank, softly humming "oo-loo-loo," without responding by word or
movement to their bows. One hour and then a second would pass in
silence. His mother-in-law and wife, after whispering together, would
get up and gaze at him for some time, expecting him to look round; then
they would make a low bow, and in sugary, chanting voices, say:
"Good-bye, Stepan Petrovitch!"
And they would go away. After that Stepan, picking up the parcel they
had left, containing cracknels or a shirt, would heave a sigh and say,
winking in their direction:
"The female sex!"
The mill with two sets of millstones worked day and night. I used to
help Stepan; I liked the work, and when he went off I was glad to stay
and take his place. XI
After bright warm weather came a spell of wet; all May it rained and was
cold. The sound of the millwheels and of the rain disposed one to
indolence and slumber. The floor trembled, there was a smell of flour,
and that, too, induced drowsiness. My wife in a short fur-lined jacket,
and in men's high golosh boots, would make her appearance twice a day,
and she always said the same thing:
"And this is called summer! Worse than it was in October!"
We used to have tea and make the porridge together, or we would sit for
hours at a stretch without speaking, waiting for the rain to stop. Once,
when Stepan had gone off to the fair, Masha stayed all night at the
mill. When we got up we could not tell what time it was, as the
rainclouds covered the whole sky; but sleepy cocks were crowing at
Dubetchnya, and landrails were calling in the meadows; it was still
very, very early. . . . My wife and I went down to the millpond and drew
out the net which Stepan had thrown in over night in our presence. A big
pike was struggling in it, and a cray-fish was twisting about, clawing
upwards with its pincers.
"Let them go," said Masha. "Let them be happy too."
Because we got up so early and afterwards did nothing, that day seemed
very long, the longest day in my life. Towards evening Stepan came back
and I went home.
"Your father came to-day," said Masha.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"He has gone away. I would not see him."
Seeing that I remained standing and silent, that I was sorry for my
father, she said:
"One must be consistent. I would not see him, and sent word to him not
to trouble to come and see us again."
A minute later I was out at the gate and walking to the town to explain
things to my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time
since my marriage I felt suddenly sad, and in my brain exhausted by that
long, grey day, there was stirring the thought that perhaps I was not
living as I ought. I was worn out; little by little I was overcome by
despondency and indolence, I did not want to move or think, and after
going on a little I gave it up with a wave of my hand and turned back.
The engineer in a leather overcoat with a hood was standing in the
middle of the yard.
"Where's the furniture? There used to be lovely furniture in the Empire
style: there used to be pictures, there used to be vases, while now you
could play ball in it! I bought the place with the furniture. The devil
take her!"
Moisey, a thin pock-marked fellow of twenty-five, with insolent little
eyes, who was in the service of the general's widow, stood near him
crumpling up his cap in his hands; one of his cheeks was bigger than the
other, as though he had lain too long on it.
"Your honour was graciously pleased to buy the place without the
furniture," he brought out irresolutely; "I remember."
"Hold your tongue!" shouted the engineer; he turned crimson and shook
with anger . . . and the echo in the garden loudly repeated his shout.
XII
When I was doing anything in the garden or the yard, Moisey would stand
beside me, and folding his arms behind his back he would stand lazily
and impudently staring at me with his little eyes. And this irritated me
to such a degree that I threw up my work and went away.
From Stepan we heard that Moisey was Madame Tcheprakov's lover. I
noticed that when people came to her to borrow money they addressed
themselves first to Moisey, and once I saw a peasant, black from head to
foot-he must have been a coalheaver-bow down at Moisey's feet.
Sometimes, after a little whispering, he gave out money himself, without
consulting his mistress, from which I concluded that he did a little
business on his own account.
He used to shoot in our garden under our windows, carried off victuals
from our cellar, borrowed our horses without asking permission, and we
were indignant and began to feel as though Dubetchnya were not ours, and
Masha would say, turning pale:
"Can we really have to go on living with these reptiles another eighteen
months?"
Madame Tcheprakov's son, Ivan, was serving as a guard on our railway-
line. He had grown much thinner and feebler during the winter, so that a
single glass was enough to make him drunk, and he shivered out of the
sunshine. He wore the guard's uniform with aversion and was ashamed of
it, but considered his post a good one, as he could steal the candles
and sell them. My new position excited in him a mixed feeling of wonder,
envy, and a vague hope that something of the same sort might happen to
him. He used to watch Masha with ecstatic eyes, ask me what I had for
dinner now, and his lean and ugly face wore a sad and sweetish
expression, and he moved his fingers as though he were feeling my
happiness with them.
"Listen, Better-than-nothing," he said fussily, relighting his cigarette
at every instant; there was always a litter where he stood, for he
wasted dozens of matches, lighting one cigarette. "Listen, my life now
is the nastiest possible. The worst of it is any subaltern can shout:
'Hi, there, guard!' I have overheard all sorts of things in the train,
my boy, and do you know, I have learned that life's a beastly thing! My
mother has been the ruin of me! A doctor in the train told me that if
parents are immoral, their children are drunkards or criminals. Think of
that!"
Once he came into the yard, staggering; his eyes gazed about blankly,
his breathing was laboured; he laughed and cried and babbled as though
in a high fever, and the only words I could catch in his muddled talk
were, "My mother! Where's my mother?" which he uttered with a wail like
a child who has lost his mother in a crowd. I led him into our garden
and laid him down under a tree, and Masha and I took turns to sit by him
all that day and all night. He was very sick, and Masha looked with
aversion at his pale, wet face, and said:
"Is it possible these reptiles will go on living another year and a half
in our yard? It's awful! it's awful!"
And how many mortifications the peasants caused us! How many bitter
disappointments in those early days in the spring months, when we so
longed to be happy. My wife built a school. I drew a plan of a school
for sixty boys, and the Zemstvo Board approved of it, but advised us to
build the school at Kurilovka the big village which was only two miles
from us. Moreover, the school at Kurilovka in which children-from four
villages, our Dubetchnya being one of the number-were taught, was old
and too small, and the floor was scarcely safe to walk upon. At the end
of March at Masha's wish, she was appointed guardian of the Kurilovka
school, and at the beginning of April we three times summoned the
village assembly, and tried to persuade the peasants that their school
was old and overcrowded, and that it was essential to build a new one. A
member of the Zemstvo Board and the Inspector of Peasant Schools came,
and they, too, tried to persuade them. After each meeting the peasants
surrounded us, begging for a bucket of vodka; we were hot in the crowd;
we were soon exhausted, and returned home dissatisfied and a little ill
at ease. In the end the peasants set apart a plot of ground for the
school, and were obliged to bring all the building material from the
town with their own horses. And the very first Sunday after the spring
corn was sown carts set off from Kurilovka and Dubetchnya to fetch
bricks for the foundations. They set off as soon as it was light, and
came back late in the evening; the peasants were drunk, and said they
were worn out.
As ill-luck would have it, the rain and the cold persisted all through
May. The road was in an awful state: it was deep in mud. The carts
usually drove into our yard when they came back from the town-and what a
horrible ordeal it was. A potbellied horse would appear at the gate,
setting its front legs wide apart; it would stumble forward before
coming into the yard; a beam, nine yards long, wet and slimy-looking,
crept in on a waggon. Beside it, muffled up against the rain, strode a
peasant with the skirts of his coat tucked up in his belt, not looking
where he was going, but stepping through the puddles. Another cart would
appear with boards, then a third with a beam, a fourth . . . and the
space before our house was gradually crowded up with horses, beams, and
planks. Men and women, with their heads muffled and their skirts tucked
up, would stare angrily at our windows, make an uproar, and clamour for
the mistress to come out to them; coarse oaths were audible. Meanwhile
Moisey stood at one side, and we fancied he was enjoying our
discomfiture.
"We are not going to cart any more," the peasants would shout. "We are
worn out! Let her go and get the stuff herself."
Masha, pale and flustered, expecting every minute that they would break
into the house, would send them out a half-pail of vodka; after that the
noise would subside and the long beams, one after another, would crawl
slowly out of the yard.
When I was setting off to see the building my wife was worried and said:
"The peasants are spiteful; I only hope they won't do you a mischief.
Wait a minute, I'll come with you."
We drove to Kurilovka together, and there the carpenters asked us for a
drink. The framework of the house was ready. It was time to lay the
foundation, but the masons had not come; this caused delay, and the
carpenters complained. And when at last the masons did come, it appeared
that there was no sand; it had been somehow overlooked that it would be
needed. Taking advantage of our helpless position, the peasants demanded
thirty kopecks for each cartload, though the distance from the building
to the river where they got the sand was less than a quarter of a mile,
and more than five hundred cartloads were found to be necessary. There
was no end to the misunderstandings, swearing, and importunity; my wife
was indignant, and the foreman of the masons, Tit Petrov, an old man of
seventy, took her by the arm, and said:
"You look here! You look here! You only bring me the sand; I set ten men
on at once, and in two days it will be done! You look here!"
But they brought the sand and two days passed, and four, and a week, and
instead of the promised foundations there was still a yawning hole.
"It's enough to drive one out of one's senses," said my wife, in
distress. "What people! What people!"
In the midst of these disorderly doings the engineer arrived; he brought
with him parcels of wine and savouries, and after a prolonged meal lay
down for a nap in the verandah and snored so loudly that the labourers
shook their heads and said: "Well!"
Masha was not pleased at his coming, she did not trust him, though at
the same time she asked his advice. When, after sleeping too long after
dinner, he got up in a bad humour and said unpleasant things about our
management of the place, or expressed regret that he had bought
Dubetchnya, which had already been a loss to him, poor Masha's face wore
an expression of misery. She would complain to him, and he would yawn
and say that the peasants ought to be flogged.
He called our marriage and our life a farce, and said it was a caprice,
a whim.
"She has done something of the sort before," he said about Masha. "She
once fancied herself a great opera singer and left me; I was looking for
her for two months, and, my dear soul, I spent a thousand roubles on
telegrams alone."
He no longer called me a dissenter or Mr. Painter, and did not as in the
past express approval of my living like a workman, but said:
"You are a strange person! You are not a normal person! I won't venture
to prophesy, but you will come to a bad end!"
And Masha slept badly at night, and was always sitting at our bedroom
window thinking. There was no laughter at supper now, no charming
grimaces. I was wretched, and when it rained, every drop that fell
seemed to pierce my heart, like small shot, and I felt ready to fall on
my knees before Masha and apologize for the weather. When the peasants
made a noise in the yard I felt guilty also. For hours at a time I sat
still in one place, thinking of nothing but what a splendid person Masha
was, what a wonderful person. I loved her passionately, and I was
fascinated by everything she did, everything she said. She had a bent
for quiet, studious pursuits; she was fond of reading for hours
together, of studying. Although her knowledge of farming was only from
books she surprised us all by what she knew; and every piece of advice
she gave was of value; not one was ever thrown away; and, with all that,
what nobility, what taste, what graciousness, that graciousness which is
only found in well-educated people.
To this woman, with her sound, practical intelligence, the disorderly
surroundings with petty cares and sordid anxieties in which we were
living now were an agony: I saw that and could not sleep at night; my
brain worked feverishly and I had a lump in my throat. I rushed about
not knowing what to do.
I galloped to the town and brought Masha books, newspapers, sweets,
flowers; with Stepan I caught fish, wading for hours up to my neck in
the cold water in the rain to catch eel-pout to vary our fare; I
demeaned myself to beg the peasants not to make a noise; I plied them
with vodka, bought them off, made all sorts of promises. And how many
other foolish things I did!
At last the rain ceased, the earth dried. One would get up at four
o'clock in the morning; one would go out into the garden-where there was
dew sparkling on the flowers, the twitter of birds, the hum of insects,
not one cloud in the sky; and the garden, the meadows, and the river
were so lovely, yet there were memories of the peasants, of their carts,
of the engineer. Masha and I drove out together in the racing droshky to
the fields to look at the oats. She used to drive, I sat behind; her
shoulders were raised and the wind played with her hair.
"Keep to the right!" she shouted to those she met.
"You are like a sledge-driver," I said to her one day.
"Maybe! Why, my grandfather, the engineer's father, was a sledge-driver.
Didn't you know that?" she asked, turning to me, and at once she
mimicked the way sledge-drivers shout and sing.
"And thank God for that," I thought as I listened to her. "Thank God."
And again memories of the peasants, of the carts, of the engineer. . . .
XIII
Dr. Blagovo arrived on his bicycle. My sister began coming often. Again
there were conversations about manual labour, about progress, about a
mysterious millennium awaiting mankind in the remote future. The doctor
did not like our farmwork, because it interfered with arguments, and
said that ploughing, reaping, grazing calves were unworthy of a free
man, and all these coarse forms of the struggle for existence men would
in time relegate to animals and machines, while they would devote
themselves exclusively to scientific investigation. My sister kept
begging them to let her go home earlier, and if she stayed on till late
in the evening, or spent the night with us, there would be no end to the
agitation.
"Good Heavens, what a baby you are still!" said Masha reproachfully. "It
is positively absurd."
"Yes, it is absurd," my sister agreed, "I know it's absurd; but what is
to be done if I haven't the strength to get over it? I keep feeling as
though I were doing wrong."
At haymaking I ached all over from the unaccustomed labour; in the
evening, sitting on the verandah and talking with the others, I suddenly
dropped asleep, and they laughed aloud at me. They waked me up and made
me sit down to supper; I was overpowered with drowsiness and I saw the
lights, the faces, and the plates as it were in a dream, heard the
voices, but did not understand them. And getting up early in the
morning, I took up the scythe at once, or went to the building and
worked hard all day.
When I remained at home on holidays I noticed that my sister and Masha
were concealing something from me, and even seemed to be avoiding me. My
wife was tender to me as before, but she had thoughts of her own apart,
which she did not share with me. There was no doubt that her
exasperation with the peasants was growing, the life was becoming more
and more distasteful to her, and yet she did not complain to me. She
talked to the doctor now more readily than she did to me, and I did not
understand why it was so.
It was the custom in our province at haymaking and harvest time for the
labourers to come to the manor house in the evening and be regaled with
vodka; even young girls drank a glass. We did not keep up this practice;
the mowers and the peasant women stood about in our yard till late in
the evening expecting vodka, and then departed abusing us. And all the
time Masha frowned grimly and said nothing, or murmured to the doctor
with exasperation: "Savages! Petchenyegs!"
In the country newcomers are met ungraciously, almost with hostility, as
they are at school. And we were received in this way. At first we were
looked upon as stupid, silly people, who had bought an estate simply
because we did not know what to do with our money. We were laughed at.
The peasants grazed their cattle in our wood and even in our garden;
they drove away our cows and horses to the village, and then demanded
money for the damage done by them. They came in whole companies into our
yard, and loudly clamoured that at the mowing we had cut some piece of
land that did not belong to us; and as we did not yet know the
boundaries of our estate very accurately, we took their word for it and
paid damages. Afterwards it turned out that there had been no mistake at
the mowing. They barked the lime-trees in our wood. One of the
Dubetchnya peasants, a regular shark, who did a trade in vodka without a
licence, bribed our labourers, and in collaboration with them cheated us
in a most treacherous way. They took the new wheels off our carts and
replaced them with old ones, stole our ploughing harness and actually
sold them to us, and so on. But what was most mortifying of all was what
happened at the building; the peasant women stole by night boards,
bricks, tiles, pieces of iron. The village elder with witnesses made a
search in their huts; the village meeting fined them two roubles each,
and afterwards this money was spent on drink by the whole commune.
When Masha heard about this, she would say to the doctor or my sister
indignantly:
"What beasts! It's awful! awful!"
And I heard her more than once express regret that she had ever taken it
into her head to build the school.
"You must understand," the doctor tried to persuade her, "that if you
build this school and do good in general, it's not for the sake of the
peasants, but in the name of culture, in the name of the future; and the
worse the peasants are the more reason for building the school.
Understand that!"
But there was a lack of conviction in his voice, and it seemed to me
that both he and Masha hated the peasants.
Masha often went to the mill, taking my sister with her, and they both
said, laughing, that they went to have a look at Stepan, he was so
handsome. Stepan, it appeared, was torpid and taciturn only with men; in
feminine society his manners were free and easy, and he talked
incessantly. One day, going down to the river to bathe, I accidentally
overheard a conversation. Masha and Kleopatra, both in white dresses,
were sitting on the bank in the spreading shade of a willow, and Stepan
was standing by them with his hands behind his back, and was saying:
"Are peasants men? They are not men, but, asking your pardon, wild
beasts, impostors. What life has a peasant? Nothing but eating and
drinking; all he cares for is victuals to be cheaper and swilling liquor
at the tavern like a fool; and there's no conversation, no manners, no
formality, nothing but ignorance! He lives in filth, his wife lives in
filth, and his children live in filth. What he stands up in, he lies
down to sleep in; he picks the potatoes out of the soup with his
fingers; he drinks kvass with a cockroach in it, and doesn't bother to
blow it away!"
"It's their poverty, of course," my sister put in.
"Poverty? There is want to be sure, there's different sorts of want,
Madam. If a man is in prison, or let us say blind or crippled, that
really is trouble I wouldn't wish anyone, but if a man's free and has
all his senses, if he has his eyes and his hands and his strength and
God, what more does he want? It's cockering themselves, and it's
ignorance, Madam, it's not poverty. If you, let us suppose, good
gentlefolk, by your education, wish out of kindness to help him he will
drink away your money in his low way; or, what's worse, he will open a
drinkshop, and with your money start robbing the people. You say
poverty, but does the rich peasant live better? He, too, asking your
pardon, lives like a swine: coarse, loud-mouthed, cudgel-headed, broader
than he is long, fat, red-faced mug, I'd like to swing my fist and send
him flying, the scoundrel. There's Larion, another rich one at
Dubetchnya, and I bet he strips the bark off your trees as much as any
poor one; and he is a foul-mouthed fellow; his children are the same,
and when he has had a drop too much he'll topple with his nose in a
puddle and sleep there. They are all a worthless lot, Madam. If you live
in a village with them it is like hell. It has stuck in my teeth, that
village has, and thank the Lord, the King of Heaven, I've plenty to eat
and clothes to wear, I served out my time in the dragoons, I was village
elder for three years, and now I am a free Cossack, I live where I like.
I don't want to live in the village, and no one has the right to force
me. They say-my wife. They say you are bound to live in your cottage
with your wife. But why so? I am not her hired man."
"Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?" asked Masha.
"Love among us in the village!" answered Stepan, and he gave a laugh.
"Properly speaking, Madam, if you care to know, this is my second
marriage. I am not a Kurilovka man, I am from Zalegoshtcho, but
afterwards I was taken into Kurilovka when I married. You see my father
did not want to divide the land among us. There were five of us
brothers. I took my leave and went to another village to live with my
wife's family, but my first wife died when she was young."
"What did she die of?"
"Of foolishness. She used to cry and cry and cry for no reason, and so
she pined away. She was always drinking some sort of herbs to make her
better looking, and I suppose she damaged her inside. And my second wife
is a Kurilovka woman too, there is nothing in her. She's a village
woman, a peasant woman, and nothing more. I was taken in when they
plighted me to her. I thought she was young and fair-skinned, and that
they lived in a clean way. Her mother was just like a Flagellant and she
drank coffee, and the chief thing, to be sure, they were clean in their
ways. So I married her, and next day we sat down to dinner; I bade my
mother-in-law give me a spoon, and she gives me a spoon, and I see her
wipe it out with her finger. So much for you, thought I; nice sort of
cleanliness yours is. I lived a year with them and then I went away. I
might have married a girl from the town," he went on after a pause.
"They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want with a
helpmate? I help myself; I'd rather she talked to me, and not clack,
clack, clack, but circumstantially, feelingly. What is life without good
conversation?"
Stepan suddenly paused, and at once there was the sound of his dreary,
monotonous "oo-loo-loo-loo." This meant that he had seen me.
Masha used often to go to the mill, and evidently found pleasure in her
conversations with Stepan. Stepan abused the peasants with such
sincerity and conviction, and she was attracted to him. Every time she
came back from the mill the feeble-minded peasant, who looked after the
garden, shouted at her:
"Wench Palashka! Hulla, wench Palashka!" and he would bark like a dog:
"Ga! Ga!"
And she would stop and look at him attentively, as though in that
idiot's barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and probably he
attracted her in the same way as Stepan's abuse. At home some piece of
news would await her, such, for instance, as that the geese from the
village had ruined our cabbage in the garden, or that Larion had stolen
the reins; and shrugging her shoulders, she would say with a laugh:
"What do you expect of these people?"
She was indignant, and there was rancour in her heart, and meanwhile I
was growing used to the peasants, and I felt more and more drawn to
them. For the most part they were nervous, irritable, downtrodden
people; they were people whose imagination had been stifled, ignorant,
with a poor, dingy outlook on life, whose thoughts were ever the same-of
the grey earth, of grey days, of black bread, people who cheated, but
like birds hiding nothing but their head behind the tree-people who
could not count. They would not come to mow for us for twenty roubles,
but they came for half a pail of vodka, though for twenty roubles they
could have bought four pails. There really was filth and drunkenness and
foolishness and deceit, but with all that one yet felt that the life of
the peasants rested on a firm, sound foundation. However uncouth a wild
animal the peasant following the plough seemed, and however he might
stupefy himself with vodka, still, looking at him more closely, one felt
that there was in him what was needed, something very important, which
was lacking in Masha and in the doctor, for instance, and that was that
he believed the chief thing on earth was truth and justice, and that his
salvation, and that of the whole people, was only to be found in truth
and justice, and so more than anything in the world he loved just
dealing. I told my wife she saw the spots on the glass, but not the
glass itself; she said nothing in reply, or hummed like Stepan "oo-loo-
loo-loo." When this good-hearted and clever woman turned pale with
indignation, and with a quiver in her voice spoke to the doctor of the
drunkenness and dishonesty, it perplexed me, and I was struck by the
shortness of her memory. How could she forget that her father the
engineer drank too, and drank heavily, and that the money with which
Dubetchnya had been bought had been acquired by a whole series of
shameless, impudent dishonesties? How could she forget it? XIV
My sister, too, was leading a life of her own which she carefully hid
from me. She was often whispering with Masha. When I went up to her she
seemed to shrink into herself, and there was a guilty, imploring look in
her eyes; evidently there was something going on in her heart of which
she was afraid or ashamed. So as to avoid meeting me in the garden, or
being left alone with me, she always kept close to Masha, and I rarely
had an opportunity of talking to her except at dinner.
One evening I was walking quietly through the garden on my way back from
the building. It was beginning to get dark. Without noticing me, or
hearing my step, my sister was walking near a spreading old apple-tree,
absolutely noiselessly as though she were a phantom. She was dressed in
black, and was walking rapidly backwards and forwards on the same track,
looking at the ground. An apple fell from the tree; she started at the
sound, stood still and pressed her hands to her temples. At that moment
I went up to her.
In a rush of tender affection which suddenly flooded my heart, with
tears in my eyes, suddenly remembering my mother and our childhood, I
put my arm round her shoulders and kissed her.
"What is the matter?" I asked her. "You are unhappy; I have seen it for
a long time. Tell me what's wrong?"
"I am frightened," she said, trembling.
"What is it?" I insisted. "For God's sake, be open!"
"I will, I will be open; I will tell you the whole truth. To hide it
from you is so hard, so agonizing. Misail, I love . . ." she went on in
a whisper, "I love him . . . I love him. . . . I am happy, but why am I
so frightened?"
There was the sound of footsteps; between the trees appeared Dr. Blagovo
in his silk shirt with his high top boots. Evidently they had arranged
to meet near the apple-tree. Seeing him, she rushed impulsively towards
him with a cry of pain as though he were being taken from her.
"Vladimir! Vladimir!"
She clung to him and looked greedily into his face, and only then I
noticed how pale and thin she had become of late. It was particularly
noticeable from her lace collar which I had known for so long, and which
now hung more loosely than ever before about her thin, long neck. The
doctor was disconcerted, but at once recovered himself, and, stroking
her hair, said:
"There, there. . . . Why so nervous? You see, I'm here."
We were silent, looking with embarrassment at each other, then we walked
on, the three of us together, and I heard the doctor say to me:
"Civilized life has not yet begun among us. Old men console themselves
by making out that if there is nothing now, there was something in the
forties or the sixties; that's the old: you and I are young; our brains
have not yet been touched by marasmus senilis; we cannot comfort
ourselves with such illusions. The beginning of Russia was in 862, but
the beginning of civilized Russia has not come yet."
But I did not grasp the meaning of these reflections. It was somehow
strange, I could not believe it, that my sister was in love, that she
was walking and holding the arm of a stranger and looking tenderly at
him. My sister, this nervous, frightened, crushed, fettered creature,
loved a man who was married and had children! I felt sorry for
something, but what exactly I don't know; the presence of the doctor was
for some reason distasteful to me now, and I could not imagine what
would come of this love of theirs. XV
Masha and I drove to Kurilovka to the dedication of the school.
"Autumn, autumn, autumn, . . ." said Masha softly, looking away. "Summer
is over. There are no birds and nothing is green but the willows."
Yes, summer was over. There were fine, warm days, but it was fresh in
the morning, and the shepherds went out in their sheepskins already; and
in our garden the dew did not dry off the asters all day long. There
were plaintive sounds all the time, and one could not make out whether
they came from the shutters creaking on their rusty hinges, or from the
flying cranes-and one's heart felt light, and one was eager for life.
"The summer is over," said Masha. "Now you and I can balance our
accounts. We have done a lot of work, a lot of thinking; we are the
better for it-all honour and glory to us-we have succeeded in self-
improvement; but have our successes had any perceptible influence on the
life around us, have they brought any benefit to anyone whatever? No.
Ignorance, physical uncleanliness, drunkenness, an appallingly high
infant mortality, everything remains as it was, and no one is the better
for your having ploughed and sown, and my having wasted money and read
books. Obviously we have been working only for ourselves and have had
advanced ideas only for ourselves." Such reasonings perplexed me, and I
did not know what to think.
"We have been sincere from beginning to end," said I, "and if anyone is
sincere he is right."
"Who disputes it? We were right, but we haven't succeeded in properly
accomplishing what we were right in. To begin with, our external methods
themselves-aren't they mistaken? You want to be of use to men, but by
the very fact of your buying an estate, from the very start you cut
yourself off from any possibility of doing anything useful for them.
Then if you work, dress, eat like a peasant you sanctify, as it were, by
your authority, their heavy, clumsy dress, their horrible huts, their
stupid beards. . . . On the other hand, if we suppose that you work for
long, long years, your whole life, that in the end some practical
results are obtained, yet what are they, your results, what can they do
against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold,
degeneration? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of struggle are needed,
strong, bold, rapid! If one really wants to be of use one must get out
of the narrow circle of ordinary social work, and try to act direct upon
the mass! What is wanted, first of all, is a loud, energetic propaganda.
Why is it that art-music, for instance-is so living, so popular, and in
reality so powerful? Because the musician or the singer affects
thousands at once. Precious, precious art!" she went on, looking
dreamily at the sky. "Art gives us wings and carries us far, far away!
Anyone who is sick of filth, of petty, mercenary interests, anyone who
is revolted, wounded, and indignant, can find peace and satisfaction
only in the beautiful."
When we drove into Kurilovka the weather was bright and joyous.
Somewhere they were threshing; there was a smell of rye straw. A
mountain ash was bright red behind the hurdle fences, and all the trees
wherever one looked were ruddy or golden. They were ringing the bells,
they were carrying the ikons to the school, and we could hear them sing:
"Holy Mother, our Defender," and how limpid the air was, and how high
the doves were flying.
The service was being held in the classroom. Then the peasants of
Kurilovka brought Masha the ikon, and the peasants of Dubetchnya offered
her a big loaf and a gilt salt cellar. And Masha broke into sobs.
"If anything has been said that shouldn't have been or anything done not
to your liking, forgive us," said an old man, and he bowed down to her
and to me.
As we drove home Masha kept looking round at the school; the green roof,
which I had painted, and which was glistening in the sun, remained in
sight for a long while. And I felt that the look Masha turned upon it
now was one of farewell. XVI
In the evening she got ready to go to the town. Of late she had taken to
going often to the town and staying the night there. In her absence I
could not work, my hands felt weak and limp; our huge courtyard seemed a
dreary, repulsive, empty hole. The garden was full of angry noises, and
without her the house, the trees, the horses were no longer "ours."
I did not go out of the house, but went on sitting at her table beside
her bookshelf with the books on land work, those old favourites no
longer wanted and looking at me now so shamefacedly. For whole hours
together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn night,
black as soot, came on outside, I kept examining her old glove, or the
pen with which she always wrote, or her little scissors. I did nothing,
and realized clearly that all I had done before, ploughing, mowing,
chopping, had only been because she wished it. And if she had sent me to
clean a deep well, where I had to stand up to my waist in deep water, I
should have crawled into the well without considering whether it was
necessary or not. And now when she was not near, Dubetchnya, with its
ruins, its untidiness, its banging shutters, with its thieves by day and
by night, seemed to me a chaos in which any work would be useless.
Besides, what had I to work for here, why anxiety and thought about the
future, if I felt that the earth was giving way under my feet, that I
had played my part in Dubetchnya, and that the fate of the books on
farming was awaiting me too? Oh, what misery it was at night, in hours
of solitude, when I was listening every minute in alarm, as though I
were expecting someone to shout that it was time for me to go away! I
did not grieve for Dubetchnya. I grieved for my love which, too, was
threatened with its autumn. What an immense happiness it is to love and
be loved, and how awful to feel that one is slipping down from that high
pinnacle!
Masha returned from the town towards the evening of the next day. She
was displeased with something, but she concealed it, and only said, why
was it all the window frames had been put in for the winter it was
enough to suffocate one. I took out two frames. We were not hungry, but
we sat down to supper.
"Go and wash your hands," said my wife; "you smell of putty."
She had brought some new illustrated papers from the town, and we looked
at them together after supper. There were supplements with fashion
plates and patterns. Masha looked through them casually, and was putting
them aside to examine them properly later on; but one dress, with a flat
skirt as full as a bell and large sleeves, interested her, and she
looked at it for a minute gravely and attentively.
"That's not bad," she said.
"Yes, that dress would suit you beautifully," I said, "beautifully."
And looking with emotion at the dress, admiring that patch of grey
simply because she liked it, I went on tenderly:
"A charming, exquisite dress! Splendid, glorious, Masha! My precious
Masha!"
And tears dropped on the fashion plate.
"Splendid Masha . . ." I muttered; "sweet, precious Masha. . . ."
She went to bed, while I sat another hour looking at the illustrations.
"It's a pity you took out the window frames," she said from the bedroom,
"I am afraid it may be cold. Oh, dear, what a draught there is!"
I read something out of the column of odds and ends, a receipt for
making cheap ink, and an account of the biggest diamond in the world. I
came again upon the fashion plate of the dress she liked, and I imagined
her at a ball, with a fan, bare shoulders, brilliant, splendid, with a
full understanding of painting, music, literature, and how small and how
brief my part seemed!
Our meeting, our marriage, had been only one of the episodes of which
there would be many more in the life of this vital, richly gifted woman.
All the best in the world, as I have said already, was at her service,
and she received it absolutely for nothing, and even ideas and the
intellectual movement in vogue served simply for her recreation, giving
variety to her life, and I was only the sledge-driver who drove her from
one entertainment to another. Now she did not need me. She would take
flight, and I should be alone.
And as though in response to my thought, there came a despairing scream
from the garden.
"He-e-elp!"
It was a shrill, womanish voice, and as though to mimic it the wind
whistled in the chimney on the same shrill note. Half a minute passed,
and again through the noise of the wind, but coming, it seemed, from the
other end of the yard:
"He-e-elp!"
"Misail, do you hear?" my wife asked me softly. "Do you hear?"
She came out from the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and
listened, looking at the dark window.
"Someone is being murdered," she said. "That is the last straw."
I took my gun and went out. It was very dark outside, the wind was high,
and it was difficult to stand. I went to the gate and listened, the
trees roared, the wind whistled and, probably at the feeble-minded
peasant's, a dog howled lazily. Outside the gates the darkness was
absolute, not a light on the railway-line. And near the lodge, which a
year before had been the office, suddenly sounded a smothered scream:
"He-e-elp!"
"Who's there?" I called.
There were two people struggling. One was thrusting the other out, while
the other was resisting, and both were breathing heavily.
"Leave go," said one, and I recognized Ivan Tcheprakov; it was he who
was shrieking in a shrill, womanish voice: "Let go, you damned brute, or
I'll bite your hand off."
The other I recognized as Moisey. I separated them, and as I did so I
could not resist hitting Moisey two blows in the face. He fell down,
then got up again, and I hit him once more.
"He tried to kill me," he muttered. "He was trying to get at his mamma's
chest. . . . I want to lock him up in the lodge for security."
Tcheprakov was drunk and did not recognize me; he kept drawing deep
breaths, as though he were just going to shout "help" again.
I left them and went back to the house; my wife was lying on her bed;
she had dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard, and did not
conceal the fact that I had hit Moisey.
"It's terrible to live in the country," she said.
"And what a long night it is. Oh dear, if only it were over!"
"He-e-elp!" we heard again, a little later.
"I'll go and stop them," I said.
"No, let them bite each other's throats," she said with an expression of
disgust.
She was looking up at the ceiling, listening, while I sat beside her,
not daring to speak to her, feeling as though I were to blame for their
shouting "help" in the yard and for the night's seeming so long.
We were silent, and I waited impatiently for a gleam of light at the
window, and Masha looked all the time as though she had awakened from a
trance and now was marvelling how she, so clever, and well-educated, so
elegant, had come into this pitiful, provincial, empty hole among a crew
of petty, insignificant people, and how she could have so far forgotten
herself as ever to be attracted by one of these people, and for more
than six months to have been his wife. It seemed to me that at that
moment it did not matter to her whether it was I, or Moisey, or
Tcheprakov; everything for her was merged in that savage drunken "help"-
I and our marriage, and our work together, and the mud and slush of
autumn, and when she sighed or moved into a more comfortable position I
read in her face: "Oh, that morning would come quickly!"
In the morning she went away. I spent another three days at Dubetchnya
expecting her, then I packed all our things in one room, locked it, and
walked to the town. It was already evening when I rang at the
engineer's, and the street lamps were burning in Great Dvoryansky
Street. Pavel told me there was no one at home; Viktor Ivanitch had gone
to Petersburg, and Mariya Viktorovna was probably at the rehearsal at
the Azhogins'. I remember with what emotion I went on to the Azhogins',
how my heart throbbed and fluttered as I mounted the stairs, and stood
waiting a long while on the landing at the top, not daring to enter that
temple of the muses! In the big room there were lighted candles
everywhere, on a little table, on the piano, and on the stage,
everywhere in threes; and the first performance was fixed for the
thirteenth, and now the first rehearsal was on a Monday, an unlucky day.
All part of the war against superstition! All the devotees of the scenic
art were gathered together; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest
sisters were walking about the stage, reading their parts in exercise
books. Apart from all the rest stood Radish, motionless, with the side
of his head pressed to the wall as he gazed with adoration at the stage,
waiting for the rehearsal to begin. Everything as it used to be.
I was making my way to my hostess; I had to pay my respects to her, but
suddenly everyone said "Hush!" and waved me to step quietly. There was a
silence. The lid of the piano was raised; a lady sat down at it screwing
up her short-sighted eyes at the music, and my Masha walked up to the
piano, in a low-necked dress, looking beautiful, but with a special, new
sort of beauty not in the least like the Masha who used to come and meet
me in the spring at the mill. She sang: "Why do I love the radiant
night?"
It was the first time during our whole acquaintance that I had heard her
sing. She had a fine, mellow, powerful voice, and while she sang I felt
as though I were eating a ripe, sweet, fragrant melon. She ended, the
audience applauded, and she smiled, very much pleased, making play with
her eyes, turning over the music, smoothing her skirts, like a bird that
has at last broken out of its cage and preens its wings in freedom. Her
hair was arranged over her ears, and she had an unpleasant, defiant
expression in her face, as though she wanted to throw down a challenge
to us all, or to shout to us as she did to her horses: "Hey, there, my
beauties!"
And she must at that moment have been very much like her grandfather the
sledge-driver.
"You here too?" she said, giving me her hand. "Did you hear me sing?
Well, what did you think of it?" and without waiting for my answer she
went on: "It's a very good thing you are here. I am going to-night to
Petersburg for a short time. You'll let me go, won't you?"
At midnight I went with her to the station. She embraced me
affectionately, probably feeling grateful to me for not asking
unnecessary questions, and she promised to write to me, and I held her
hands a long time, and kissed them, hardly able to restrain my tears and
not uttering a word.
And when she had gone I stood watching the retreating lights, caressing
her in imagination and softly murmuring:
"My darling Masha, glorious Masha. . . ."
I spent the night at Karpovna's, and next morning I was at work with
Radish, re-covering the furniture of a rich merchant who was marrying
his daughter to a doctor. XVII
My sister came after dinner on Sunday and had tea with me.
"I read a great deal now," she said, showing me the books which she had
fetched from the public library on her way to me. "Thanks to your wife
and to Vladimir, they have awakened me to self-realization. They have
been my salvation; they have made me feel myself a human being. In old
days I used to lie awake at night with worries of all sorts, thinking
what a lot of sugar we had used in the week, or hoping the cucumbers
would not be too salt. And now, too, I lie awake at night, but I have
different thoughts. I am distressed that half my life has been passed in
such a foolish, cowardly way. I despise my past; I am ashamed of it. And
I look upon our father now as my enemy. Oh, how grateful I am to your
wife! And Vladimir! He is such a wonderful person! They have opened my
eyes!"
"That's bad that you don't sleep at night," I said.
"Do you think I am ill? Not at all. Vladimir sounded me, and said I was
perfectly well. But health is not what matters, it is not so important.
Tell me: am I right?"
She needed moral support, that was obvious. Masha had gone away. Dr.
Blagovo was in Petersburg, and there was no one left in the town but me,
to tell her she was right. She looked intently into my face, trying to
read my secret thoughts, and if I were absorbed or silent in her
presence she thought this was on her account, and was grieved. I always
had to be on my guard, and when she asked me whether she was right I
hastened to assure her that she was right, and that I had a deep respect
for her.
"Do you know they have given me a part at the Azhogins'?" she went on.
"I want to act on the stage, I want to live-in fact, I mean to drain the
full cup. I have no talent, none, and the part is only ten lines, but
still this is immeasurably finer and loftier than pouring out tea five
times a day, and looking to see if the cook has eaten too much. Above
all, let my father see I am capable of protest."
After tea she lay down on my bed, and lay for a little while with her
eyes closed, looking very pale.
"What weakness," she said, getting up. "Vladimir says all city-bred
women and girls are anæmic from doing nothing. What a clever man
Vladimir is! He is right, absolutely right. We must work!"
Two days later she came to the Azhogins' with her manuscript for the
rehearsal. She was wearing a black dress with a string of coral round
her neck, and a brooch that in the distance was like a pastry puff, and
in her ears earrings sparkling with brilliants. When I looked at her I
felt uncomfortable. I was struck by her lack of taste. That she had very
inappropriately put on earrings and brilliants, and that she was
strangely dressed, was remarked by other people too; I saw smiles on
people's faces, and heard someone say with a laugh: "Kleopatra of
Egypt."
She was trying to assume society manners, to be unconstrained and at her
ease, and so seemed artificial and strange. She had lost simplicity and
sweetness.
"I told father just now that I was going to the rehearsal," she began,
coming up to me, "and he shouted that he would not give me his blessing,
and actually almost struck me. Only fancy, I don't know my part," she
said, looking at her manuscript. "I am sure to make a mess of it. So be
it, the die is cast," she went on in intense excitement. "The die is
cast. . . ."
It seemed to her that everyone was looking at her, and that all were
amazed at the momentous step she had taken, that everyone was expecting
something special of her, and it would have been impossible to convince
her that no one was paying attention to people so petty and
insignificant as she and I were.
She had nothing to do till the third act, and her part, that of a
visitor, a provincial crony, consisted only in standing at the door as
though listening, and then delivering a brief monologue. In the interval
before her appearance, an hour and a half at least, while they were
moving about on the stage reading their parts, drinking tea and arguing,
she did not leave my side, and was all the time muttering her part and
nervously crumpling up the manuscript. And imagining that everyone was
looking at her and waiting for her appearance, with a trembling hand she
smoothed back her hair and said to me:
"I shall certainly make a mess of it. . . . What a load on my heart, if
only you knew! I feel frightened, as though I were just going to be led
to execution."
At last her turn came.
"Kleopatra Alexyevna, it's your cue!" said the stage manager.
She came forward into the middle of the stage with an expression of
horror on her face, looking ugly and angular, and for half a minute
stood as though in a trance, perfectly motionless, and only her big
earrings shook in her ears.
"The first time you can read it," said someone.
It was clear to me that she was trembling, and trembling so much that
she could not speak, and could not unfold her manuscript, and that she
was incapable of acting her part; and I was already on the point of
going to her and saying something, when she suddenly dropped on her
knees in the middle of the stage and broke into loud sobs.
All was commotion and hubbub. I alone stood still, leaning against the
side scene, overwhelmed by what had happened, not understanding and not
knowing what to do. I saw them lift her up and lead her away. I saw
Anyuta Blagovo come up to me; I had not seen her in the room before, and
she seemed to have sprung out of the earth. She was wearing her hat and
veil, and, as always, had an air of having come only for a moment.
"I told her not to take a part," she said angrily, jerking out each word
abruptly and turning crimson. "It's insanity! You ought to have
prevented her!"
Madame Azhogin, in a short jacket with short sleeves, with cigarette ash
on her breast, looking thin and flat, came rapidly towards me.
"My dear, this is terrible," she brought out, wringing her hands, and,
as her habit was, looking intently into my face. "This is terrible! Your
sister is in a condition. . . . She is with child. Take her away, I
implore you. . . ."
She was breathless with agitation, while on one side stood her three
daughters, exactly like her, thin and flat, huddling together in a
scared way. They were alarmed, overwhelmed, as though a convict had been
caught in their house. What a disgrace, how dreadful! And yet this
estimable family had spent its life waging war on superstition;
evidently they imagined that all the superstition and error of humanity
was limited to the three candles, the thirteenth of the month, and to
the unluckiness of Monday!
"I beg you. . . I beg," repeated Madame Azhogin, pursing up her lips in
the shape of a heart on the syllable "you." "I beg you to take her
home." XVIII
A little later my sister and I were walking along the street. I covered
her with the skirts of my coat; we hastened, choosing back streets where
there were no street lamps, avoiding passers-by; it was as though we
were running away. She was no longer crying, but looked at me with dry
eyes. To Karpovna's, where I took her, it was only twenty minutes' walk,
and, strange to say, in that short time we succeeded in thinking of our
whole life; we talked over everything, considered our position,
reflected. . . .
We decided we could not go on living in this town, and that when I had
earned a little money we would move to some other place. In some houses
everyone was asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these
houses; we were afraid of them. We talked of the fanaticism, the
coarseness of feeling, the insignificance of these respectable families,
these amateurs of dramatic art whom we had so alarmed, and I kept asking
in what way these stupid, cruel, lazy, and dishonest people were
superior to the drunken and superstitious peasants of Kurilovka, or in
what way they were better than animals, who in the same way are thrown
into a panic when some incident disturbs the monotony of their life
limited by their instincts. What would have happened to my sister now if
she had been left to live at home?
What moral agonies would she have experienced, talking with my father,
meeting every day with acquaintances? I imagined this to myself, and at
once there came into my mind people, all people I knew, who had been
slowly done to death by their nearest relations. I remembered the
tortured dogs, driven mad, the live sparrows plucked naked by boys and
flung into the water, and a long, long series of obscure lingering
miseries which I had looked on continually from early childhood in that
town; and I could not understand what these sixty thousand people lived
for, what they read the gospel for, why they prayed, why they read books
and magazines. What good had they gained from all that had been said and
written hitherto if they were still possessed by the same spiritual
darkness and hatred of liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred
years ago? A master carpenter spends his whole life building houses in
the town, and always, to the day of his death, calls a "gallery" a
"galdery." So these sixty thousand people have been reading and hearing
of truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet from
morning till night, till the day of their death, they are lying, and
tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate it as a deadly
foe.
"And so my fate is decided," said my sister, as we arrived home. "After
what has happened I cannot go back there. Heavens, how good that is! My
heart feels lighter."
She went to bed at once. Tears were glittering on her eyelashes, but her
expression was happy; she fell into a sound sweet sleep, and one could
see that her heart was lighter and that she was resting. It was a long,
long time since she had slept like that.
And so we began our life together. She was always singing and saying
that her life was very happy, and the books I brought her from the
public library I took back unread, as now she could not read; she wanted
to do nothing but dream and talk of the future, mending my linen, or
helping Karpovna near the stove; she was always singing, or talking of
her Vladimir, of his cleverness, of his charming manners, of his
kindness, of his extraordinary learning, and I assented to all she said,
though by now I disliked her doctor. She wanted to work, to lead an
independent life on her own account, and she used to say that she would
become a school-teacher or a doctor's assistant as soon as her health
would permit her, and would herself do the scrubbing and the washing.
Already she was passionately devoted to her child; he was not yet born,
but she knew already the colour of his eyes, what his hands would be
like, and how he would laugh. She was fond of talking about education,
and as her Vladimir was the best man in the world, all her discussion of
education could be summed up in the question how to make the boy as
fascinating as his father. There was no end to her talk, and everything
she said made her intensely joyful. Sometimes I was delighted, too,
though I could not have said why.
I suppose her dreaminess infected me. I, too, gave up reading, and did
nothing but dream. In the evenings, in spite of my fatigue, I walked up
and down the room, with my hands in my pockets, talking of Masha.
"What do you think?" I would ask of my sister. "When will she come back?
I think she'll come back at Christmas, not later; what has she to do
there?"
"As she doesn't write to you, it's evident she will come back very
soon."
"That's true," I assented, though I knew perfectly well that Masha would
not return to our town.
I missed her fearfully, and could no longer deceive myself, and tried to
get other people to deceive me. My sister was expecting her doctor, and
I-Masha; and both of us talked incessantly, laughed, and did not notice
that we were preventing Karpovna from sleeping. She lay on the stove and
kept muttering:
"The samovar hummed this morning, it did hum! Oh, it bodes no good, my
dears, it bodes no good!"
No one ever came to see us but the postman, who brought my sister
letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who sometimes came in to see us in
the evening, and after looking at my sister without speaking went away,
and when he was in the kitchen said:
"Every class ought to remember its rules, and anyone, who is so proud
that he won't understand that, will find it a vale of tears."
He was very fond of the phrase "a vale of tears." One day-it was in
Christmas week, when I was walking by the bazaar-he called me into the
butcher's shop, and not shaking hands with me, announced that he had to
speak to me about something very important. His face was red from the
frost and vodka; near him, behind the counter, stood Nikolka, with the
expression of a brigand, holding a bloodstained knife in his hand.
"I desire to express my word to you," Prokofy began. "This incident
cannot continue, because, as you understand yourself that for such a
vale, people will say nothing good of you or of us. Mamma, through pity,
cannot say something unpleasant to you, that your sister should move
into another lodging on account of her condition, but I won't have it
any more, because I can't approve of her behaviour."
I understood him, and I went out of the shop. The same day my sister and
I moved to Radish's. We had no money for a cab, and we walked on foot; I
carried a parcel of our belongings on my back; my sister had nothing in
her hands, but she gasped for breath and coughed, and kept asking
whether we should get there soon. XIX
At last a letter came from Masha.
"Dear, good M. A." (she wrote), "our kind, gentle 'angel' as the old
painter calls you, farewell; I am going with my father to America for
the exhibition. In a few days I shall see the ocean-so far from
Dubetchnya, it's dreadful to think! It's far and unfathomable as the
sky, and I long to be there in freedom. I am triumphant, I am mad, and
you see how incoherent my letter is. Dear, good one, give me my freedom,
make haste to break the thread, which still holds, binding you and me
together. My meeting and knowing you was a ray from heaven that lighted
up my existence; but my becoming your wife was a mistake, you understand
that, and I am oppressed now by the consciousness of the mistake, and I
beseech you, on my knees, my generous friend, quickly, quickly, before I
start for the ocean, telegraph that you consent to correct our common
mistake, to remove the solitary stone from my wings, and my father, who
will undertake all the arrangements, promised me not to burden you too
much with formalities. And so I am free to fly whither I will? Yes?
"Be happy, and God bless you; forgive me, a sinner.
"I am well, I am wasting money, doing all sorts of silly things, and I
thank God every minute that such a bad woman as I has no children. I
sing and have success, but it's not an infatuation; no, it's my haven,
my cell to which I go for peace. King David had a ring with an
inscription on it: 'All things pass.' When one is sad those words make
one cheerful, and when one is cheerful it makes one sad. I have got
myself a ring like that with Hebrew letters on it, and this talisman
keeps me from infatuations. All things pass, life will pass, one wants
nothing. Or at least one wants nothing but the sense of freedom, for
when anyone is free, he wants nothing, nothing, nothing. Break the
thread. A warm hug to you and your sister. Forgive and forget your M."
My sister used to lie down in one room, and Radish, who had been ill
again and was now better, in another. Just at the moment when I received
this letter my sister went softly into the painter's room, sat down
beside him and began reading aloud. She read to him every day, Ostrovsky
or Gogol, and he listened, staring at one point, not laughing, but
shaking his head and muttering to himself from time to time:
"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"
If anything ugly or unseemly were depicted in the play he would say as
though vindictively, thrusting his finger into the book:
"There it is, lying! That's what it does, lying does."
The plays fascinated him, both from their subjects and their moral, and
from their skilful, complex construction, and he marvelled at "him,"
never calling the author by his name. How neatly he has put it all
together.
This time my sister read softly only one page, and could read no more:
her voice would not last out. Radish took her hand and, moving his
parched lips, said, hardly audibly, in a husky voice:
"The soul of a righteous man is white and smooth as chalk, but the soul
of a sinful man is like pumice stone. The soul of a righteous man is
like clear oil, but the soul of a sinful man is gas tar. We must labour,
we must sorrow, we must suffer sickness," he went on, "and he who does
not labour and sorrow will not gain the Kingdom of Heaven. Woe, woe to
them that are well fed, woe to the mighty, woe to the rich, woe to the
moneylenders! Not for them is the Kingdom of Heaven. Lice eat grass,
rust eats iron. . ."
"And lying the soul," my sister added laughing. I read the letter
through once more. At that moment there walked into the kitchen a
soldier who had been bringing us twice a week parcels of tea, French
bread and game, which smelt of scent, from some unknown giver. I had no
work. I had had to sit at home idle for whole days together, and
probably whoever sent us the French bread knew that we were in want.
I heard my sister talking to the soldier and laughing gaily. Then, lying
down, she ate some French bread and said to me:
"When you wouldn't go into the service, but became a house painter,
Anyuta Blagovo and I knew from the beginning that you were right, but we
were frightened to say so aloud. Tell me what force is it that hinders
us from saying what one thinks? Take Anyuta Blagovo now, for instance.
She loves you, she adores you, she knows you are right, she loves me
too, like a sister, and knows that I am right, and I daresay in her soul
envies me, but some force prevents her from coming to see us, she shuns
us, she is afraid."
My sister crossed her arms over her breast, and said passionately:
"How she loves you, if only you knew! She has confessed her love to no
one but me, and then very secretly in the dark. She led me into a dark
avenue in the garden, and began whispering how precious you were to her.
You will see, she'll never marry, because she loves you. Are you sorry
for her?"
"Yes."
"It's she who has sent the bread. She is absurd really, what is the use
of being so secret? I used to be absurd and foolish, but now I have got
away from that and am afraid of nobody. I think and say aloud what I
like, and am happy. When I lived at home I hadn't a conception of
happiness, and now I wouldn't change with a queen."
Dr. Blagovo arrived. He had taken his doctor's degree, and was now
staying in our town with his father; he was taking a rest, and said that
he would soon go back to Petersburg again. He wanted to study anti-
toxins against typhus, and, I believe, cholera; he wanted to go abroad
to perfect his training, and then to be appointed a professor. He had
already left the army service, and wore a roomy serge reefer jacket,
very full trousers, and magnificent neckties. My sister was in ecstasies
over his scarfpin, his studs, and the red silk handkerchief which he
wore, I suppose from foppishness, sticking out of the breast pocket of
his jacket. One day, having nothing to do, she and I counted up all the
suits we remembered him wearing, and came to the conclusion that he had
at least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister as before, but
he never once even in jest spoke of taking her with him to Petersburg or
abroad, and I could not picture to myself clearly what would become of
her if she remained alive and what would become of her child. She did
nothing but dream endlessly, and never thought seriously of the future;
she said he might go where he liked, and might abandon her even, so long
as he was happy himself; that what had been was enough for her.
As a rule he used to sound her very carefully on his arrival, and used
to insist on her taking milk and drops in his presence. It was the same
on this occasion. He sounded her and made her drink a glass of milk, and
there was a smell of creosote in our room afterwards.
"That's a good girl," he said, taking the glass from her. "You mustn't
talk too much now; you've taken to chattering like a magpie of late.
Please hold your tongue."
She laughed. Then he came into Radish's room where I was sitting and
affectionately slapped me on the shoulder.
"Well, how goes it, old man?" he said, bending down to the invalid.
"Your honour," said Radish, moving his lips slowly, "your honour, I
venture to submit. . . . We all walk in the fear of God, we all have to
die. . . . Permit me to tell you the truth. . . . Your honour, the
Kingdom of Heaven will not be for you!"
"There's no help for it," the doctor said jestingly; "there must be
somebody in hell, you know."
And all at once something happened with my consciousness; as though I
were in a dream, as though I were standing on a winter night in the
slaughterhouse yard, and Prokofy beside me, smelling of pepper cordial;
I made an effort to control myself, and rubbed my eyes, and at once it
seemed to me that I was going along the road to the interview with the
Governor. Nothing of the sort had happened to me before, or has happened
to me since, and these strange memories that were like dreams, I
ascribed to overexhaustion of my nerves. I lived through the scene at
the slaughterhouse, and the interview with the Governor, and at the same
time was dimly aware that it was not real.
When I came to myself I saw that I was no longer in the house, but in
the street, and was standing with the doctor near a lamp-post.
"It's sad, it's sad," he was saying, and tears were trickling down his
cheeks. "She is in good spirits, she's always laughing and hopeful, but
her position's hopeless, dear boy. Your Radish hates me, and is always
trying to make me feel that I have treated her badly. He is right from
his standpoint, but I have my point of view too; and I shall never
regret all that has happened. One must love; we ought all to love-
oughtn't we? There would be no life without love; anyone who fears and
avoids love is not free."
Little by little he passed to other subjects, began talking of science,
of his dissertation which had been liked in Petersburg. He was carried
away by his subject, and no longer thought of my sister, nor of his
grief, nor of me. Life was of absorbing interest to him. She has America
and her ring with the inscription on it, I thought, while this fellow
has his doctor's degree and a professor's chair to look forward to, and
only my sister and I are left with the old things.
When I said good-bye to him, I went up to the lamp-post and read the
letter once more. And I remembered, I remembered vividly how that spring
morning she had come to me at the mill, lain down and covered herself
with her jacket-she wanted to be like a simple peasant woman. And how,
another time-it was in the morning also-we drew the net out of the
water, and heavy drops of rain fell upon us from the riverside willows,
and we laughed.
It was dark in our house in Great Dvoryansky Street. I got over the
fence and, as I used to do in the old days, went by the back way to the
kitchen to borrow a lantern. There was no one in the kitchen. The
samovar hissed near the stove, waiting for my father. "Who pours out my
father's tea now?" I thought. Taking the lantern I went out to the shed,
built myself up a bed of old newspapers and lay down. The hooks on the
walls looked forbidding, as they used to of old, and their shadows
flickered. It was cold. I felt that my sister would come in in a minute,
and bring me supper, but at once I remembered that she was ill and was
lying at Radish's, and it seemed to me strange that I should have
climbed over the fence and be lying here in this unheated shed. My mind
was in a maze, and I saw all sorts of absurd things.
There was a ring. A ring familiar from childhood: first the wire rustled
against the wall, then a short plaintive ring in the kitchen. It was my
father come back from the club. I got up and went into the kitchen.
Axinya the cook clasped her hands on seeing me, and for some reason
burst into tears.
"My own!" she said softly. "My precious! O Lord!"
And she began crumpling up her apron in her agitation. In the window
there were standing jars of berries in vodka. I poured myself out a
teacupful and greedily drank it off, for I was intensely thirsty. Axinya
had quite recently scrubbed the table and benches, and there was that
smell in the kitchen which is found in bright, snug kitchens kept by
tidy cooks. And that smell and the chirp of the cricket used to lure us
as children into the kitchen, and put us in the mood for hearing fairy
tales and playing at "Kings" . . .
"Where's Kleopatra?" Axinya asked softly, in a fluster, holding her
breath; "and where is your cap, my dear? Your wife, you say, has gone to
Petersburg?"
She had been our servant in our mother's time, and used once to give
Kleopatra and me our baths, and to her we were still children who had to
be talked to for their good. For a quarter of an hour or so she laid
before me all the reflections which she had with the sagacity of an old
servant been accumulating in the stillness of that kitchen, all the time
since we had seen each other. She said that the doctor could be forced
to marry Kleopatra; he only needed to be thoroughly frightened; and that
if an appeal were promptly written the bishop would annul the first
marriage; that it would be a good thing for me to sell Dubetchnya
without my wife's knowledge, and put the money in the bank in my own
name; that if my sister and I were to bow down at my father's feet and
ask him properly, he might perhaps forgive us; that we ought to have a
service sung to the Queen of Heaven. . . .
"Come, go along, my dear, and speak to him," she said, when she heard my
father's cough. "Go along, speak to him; bow down, your head won't drop
off."
I went in. My father was sitting at the table sketching a plan of a
summer villa, with Gothic windows, and with a fat turret like a
fireman's watch tower-something peculiarly stiff and tasteless. Going
into the study I stood still where I could see this drawing. I did not
know why I had gone in to my father, but I remember that when I saw his
lean face, his red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw
myself on his neck, and as Axinya had told me, bow down at his feet; but
the sight of the summer villa with the Gothic windows, and the fat
turret, restrained me.
"Good evening," I said.
He glanced at me, and at once dropped his eyes on his drawing.
"What do you want?" he asked, after waiting a little.
"I have come to tell you my sister's very ill. She can't live very
long," I added in a hollow voice.
"Well," sighed my father, taking off his spectacles, and laying them on
the table. "What thou sowest that shalt thou reap. What thou sowest," he
repeated, getting up from the table, "that shalt thou reap. I ask you to
remember how you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I
begged you, I besought you to give up your errors; I reminded you of
your duty, of your honour, of what you owed to your forefathers whose
traditions we ought to preserve as sacred. Did you obey me? You scorned
my counsels, and obstinately persisted in clinging to your false ideals;
worse still you drew your sister into the path of error with you, and
led her to lose her moral principles and sense of shame. Now you are
both in a bad way. Well, as thou sowest, so shalt thou reap!"
As he said this he walked up and down the room. He probably imagined
that I had come to him to confess my wrong doings, and he probably
expected that I should begin begging him to forgive my sister and me. I
was cold, I was shivering as though I were in a fever, and spoke with
difficulty in a husky voice.
"And I beg you, too, to remember," I said, "on this very spot I besought
you to understand me, to reflect, to decide with me how and for what we
should live, and in answer you began talking about our forefathers,
about my grandfather who wrote poems. One tells you now that your only
daughter is hopelessly ill, and you go on again about your forefathers,
your traditions. . . . And such frivolity in your old age, when death is
close at hand, and you haven't more than five or ten years left!"
"What have you come here for?" my father asked sternly, evidently
offended at my reproaching him for his frivolity.
"I don't know. I love you, I am unutterably sorry that we are so far
apart-so you see I have come. I love you still, but my sister has broken
with you completely. She does not forgive you, and will never forgive
you now. Your very name arouses her aversion for the past, for life."
"And who is to blame for it?" cried my father. "It's your fault, you
scoundrel!"
"Well, suppose it is my fault?" I said. "I admit I have been to blame in
many things, but why is it that this life of yours, which you think
binding upon us, too-why is it so dreary, so barren? How is it that in
not one of these houses you have been building for the last thirty years
has there been anyone from whom I might have learnt how to live, so as
not to be to blame? There is not one honest man in the whole town! These
houses of yours are nests of damnation, where mothers and daughters are
made away with, where children are tortured. . . . My poor mother!" I
went on in despair. "My poor sister! One has to stupefy oneself with
vodka, with cards, with scandal; one must become a scoundrel, a
hypocrite, or go on drawing plans for years and years, so as not to
notice all the horrors that lie hidden in these houses. Our town has
existed for hundreds of years, and all that time it has not produced one
man of service to our country-not one. You have stifled in the germ
everything in the least living and bright. It's a town of shopkeepers,
publicans, counting-house clerks, canting hypocrites; it's a useless,
unnecessary town, which not one soul would regret if it suddenly sank
through the earth."
"I don't want to listen to you, you scoundrel!" said my father, and he
took up his ruler from the table. "You are drunk. Don't dare come and
see your father in such a state! I tell you for the last time, and you
can repeat it to your depraved sister, that you'll get nothing from me,
either of you. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and
if they suffer for their disobedience and obstinacy I do not pity them.
You can go whence you came. It has pleased God to chastise me with you,
but I will bear the trial with resignation, and, like Job, I will find
consolation in my sufferings and in unremitting labour. You must not
cross my threshold till you have mended your ways. I am a just man, all
I tell you is for your benefit, and if you desire your own good you
ought to remember all your life what I say and have said to you. . . ."
I waved my hand in despair and went away. I don't remember what happened
afterwards, that night and next day.
I am told that I walked about the streets bareheaded, staggering, and
singing aloud, while a crowd of boys ran after me, shouting:
"Better-than-nothing!" XX
If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose
would be: "Nothing passes away." I believe that nothing passes away
without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has
significance for our present and our future existence.
What I have been through has not been for nothing. My great troubles, my
patience, have touched people's hearts, and now they don't call me
"Better-than-nothing," they don't laugh at me, and when I walk by the
shops they don't throw water over me. They have grown used to my being a
workman, and see nothing strange in my carrying a pail of paint and
putting in windows, though I am of noble rank; on the contrary, people
are glad to give me orders, and I am now considered a first-rate
workman, and the best foreman after Radish, who, though he has regained
his health, and though, as before, he paints the cupola on the belfry
without scaffolding, has no longer the force to control the workmen;
instead of him I now run about the town looking for work, I engage the
workmen and pay them, borrow money at a high rate of interest, and now
that I myself am a contractor, I understand how it is that one may have
to waste three days racing about the town in search of tilers on account
of some twopenny-halfpenny job. People are civil to me, they address me
politely, and in the houses where I work, they offer me tea, and send to
enquire whether I wouldn't like dinner. Children and young girls often
come and look at me with curiosity and compassion.
One day I was working in the Governor's garden, painting an arbour there
to look like marble. The Governor, walking in the garden, came up to the
arbour and, having nothing to do, entered into conversation with me, and
I reminded him how he had once summoned me to an interview with him. He
looked into my face intently for a minute, then made his mouth like a
round "O," flung up his hands, and said: "I don't remember!"
I have grown older, have become silent, stern, and austere, I rarely
laugh, and I am told that I have grown like Radish, and that like him I
bore the workmen by my useless exhortations.
Mariya Viktorovna, my former wife, is living now abroad, while her
father is constructing a railway somewhere in the eastern provinces, and
is buying estates there. Dr. Blagovo is also abroad. Dubetchnya has
passed again into the possession of Madame Tcheprakov, who has bought it
after forcing the engineer to knock the price down twenty per cent.
Moisey goes about now in a bowler hat; he often drives into the town in
a racing droshky on business of some sort, and stops near the bank. They
say he has already bought up a mortgaged estate, and is constantly
making enquiries at the bank about Dubetchnya, which he means to buy
too. Poor Ivan Tcheprakov was for a long while out of work, staggering
about the town and drinking. I tried to get him into our work, and for a
time he painted roofs and put in window-panes in our company, and even
got to like it, and stole oil, asked for tips, and drank like a regular
painter. But he soon got sick of the work, and went back to Dubetchnya,
and afterwards the workmen confessed to me that he had tried to persuade
them to join him one night and murder Moisey and rob Madame Tcheprakov.
My father has greatly aged; he is very bent, and in the evenings walks
up and down near his house. I never go to see him.
During an epidemic of cholera Prokofy doctored some of the shopkeepers
with pepper cordial and pitch, and took money for doing so, and, as I
learned from the newspapers, was flogged for abusing the doctors as he
sat in his shop. His shop boy Nikolka died of cholera. Karpovna is still
alive and, as always, she loves and fears her Prokofy. When she sees me,
she always shakes her head mournfully, and says with a sigh: "Your life
is ruined."
On working days I am busy from morning till night. On holidays, in fine
weather, I take my tiny niece (my sister reckoned on a boy, but the
child is a girl) and walk in a leisurely way to the cemetery. There I
stand or sit down, and stay a long time gazing at the grave that is so
dear to me, and tell the child that her mother lies here.
Sometimes, by the graveside, I find Anyuta Blagovo. We greet each other
and stand in silence, or talk of Kleopatra, of her child, of how sad
life is in this world; then, going out of the cemetery we walk along in
silence and she slackens her pace on purpose to walk beside me a little
longer. The little girl, joyous and happy, pulls at her hand, laughing
and screwing up her eyes in the bright sunlight, and we stand still and
join in caressing the dear child.
When we reach the town Anyuta Blagovo, agitated and flushing crimson,
says good-bye to me and walks on alone, austere and respectable. . . .
And no one who met her could, looking at her, imagine that she had just
been walking beside me and even caressing the child. AT A COUNTRY HOUSE
PAVEL ILYITCH RASHEVITCH walked up and down, stepping softly on the
floor covered with little Russian plaids, and casting a long shadow on
the wall and ceiling while his guest, Meier, the deputy examining
magistrate, sat on the sofa with one leg drawn up under him smoking and
listening. The clock already pointed to eleven, and there were sounds of
the table being laid in the room next to the study.
"Say what you like," Rashevitch was saying, "from the standpoint of
fraternity, equality, and the rest of it, Mitka, the swineherd, is
perhaps a man the same as Goethe and Frederick the Great; but take your
stand on a scientific basis, have the courage to look facts in the face,
and it will be obvious to you that blue blood is not a mere prejudice,
that it is not a feminine invention. Blue blood, my dear fellow, has an
historical justification, and to refuse to recognize it is, to my
thinking, as strange as to refuse to recognize the antlers on a stag.
One must reckon with facts! You are a law student and have confined your
attention to the humane studies, and you can still flatter yourself with
illusions of equality, fraternity, and so on; I am an incorrigible
Darwinian, and for me words such as lineage, aristocracy, noble blood,
are not empty sounds."
Rashevitch was roused and spoke with feeling. His eyes sparkled, his
pince-nez would not stay on his nose, he kept nervously shrugging his
shoulders and blinking, and at the word "Darwinian" he looked jauntily
in the looking-glass and combed his grey beard with both hands. He was
wearing a very short and shabby reefer jacket and narrow trousers; the
rapidity of his movements, his jaunty air, and his abbreviated jacket
all seemed out of keeping with him, and his big comely head, with long
hair suggestive of a bishop or a veteran poet, seemed to have been fixed
on to the body of a tall, lanky, affected youth. When he stood with his
legs wide apart, his long shadow looked like a pair of scissors.
He was fond of talking, and he always fancied that he was saying
something new and original. In the presence of Meier he was conscious of
an unusual flow of spirits and rush of ideas. He found the examining
magistrate sympathetic, and was stimulated by his youth, his health, his
good manners, his dignity, and, above all, by his cordial attitude to
himself and his family. Rashevitch was not a favourite with his
acquaintances; as a rule they fought shy of him, and, as he knew,
declared that he had driven his wife into her grave with his talking,
and they called him, behind his back, a spiteful creature and a toad.
Meier, a man new to the district and unprejudiced, visited him often and
readily and had even been known to say that Rashevitch and his daughters
were the only people in the district with whom he felt as much at home
as with his own people. Rashevitch liked him too, because he was a young
man who might be a good match for his elder daughter, Genya.
And now, enjoying his ideas and the sound of his own voice, and looking
with pleasure at the plump but well-proportioned, neatly cropped,
correct Meier, Rashevitch dreamed of how he would arrange his daughter's
marriage with a good man, and then how all his worries over the estate
would pass to his son-in-law. Hateful worries! The interest owing to the
bank had not been paid for the last two quarters, and fines and arrears
of all sorts had mounted up to more than two thousand.
"To my mind there can be no doubt," Rashevitch went on, growing more and
more enthusiastic, "that if a Richard Coeur-de-Lion, or Frederick
Barbarossa, for instance, is brave and noble those qualities will pass
by heredity to his son, together with the convolutions and bumps of the
brain, and if that courage and nobility of soul are preserved in the son
by means of education and exercise, and if he marries a princess who is
also noble and brave, those qualities will be transmitted to his
grandson, and so on, until they become a generic characteristic and pass
organically into the flesh and blood. Thanks to a strict sexual
selection, to the fact that high-born families have instinctively
guarded themselves against marriage with their inferiors, and young men
of high rank have not married just anybody, lofty, spiritual qualities
have been transmitted from generation to generation in their full
purity, have been preserved, and as time goes on have, through exercise,
become more exalted and lofty. For the fact that there is good in
humanity we are indebted to nature, to the normal, natural, consistent
order of things, which has throughout the ages scrupulously segregated
blue blood from plebeian. Yes, my dear boy, no low lout, no cook's son
has given us literature, science, art, law, conceptions of honour and
duty . . . . For all these things mankind is indebted exclusively to the
aristocracy, and from that point of view, the point of view of natural
history, an inferior Sobakevitch by the very fact of his blue blood is
superior and more useful than the very best merchant, even though the
latter may have built fifteen museums. Say what you like! And when I
refuse to shake hands with a low lout or a cook's son, or to let him sit
down to table with me, by that very act I am safeguarding what is the
best thing on earth, and am carrying out one of Mother Nature's finest
designs for leading us up to perfection. . ."
Rashevitch stood still, combing his beard with both hands; his shadow,
too, stood still on the wall, looking like a pair of scissors.
"Take Mother-Russia now," he went on, thrusting his hands in his pockets
and standing first on his heels and then on his toes. "Who are her best
people? Take our first-rate painters, writers, composers . . . . Who are
they? They were all of aristocratic origin. Pushkin, Lermontov,
Turgenev, Gontcharov, Tolstoy, they were not sexton's children."
"Gontcharov was a merchant," said Meier.
"Well, the exception only proves the rule. Besides, Gontcharov's genius
is quite open to dispute. But let us drop names and turn to facts. What
would you say, my good sir, for instance, to this eloquent fact: when
one of the mob forces his way where he has not been permitted before,
into society, into the world of learning, of literature, into the
Zemstvo or the law courts, observe, Nature herself, first of all,
champions the higher rights of humanity, and is the first to wage war on
the rabble. As soon as the plebeian forces himself into a place he is
not fit for he begins to ail, to go into consumption, to go out of his
mind, and to degenerate, and nowhere do we find so many puny, neurotic
wrecks, consumptives, and starvelings of all sorts as among these
darlings. They die like flies in autumn. If it were not for this
providential degeneration there would not have been a stone left
standing of our civilization, the rabble would have demolished
everything. Tell me, if you please, what has the inroad of the
barbarians given us so far? What has the rabble brought with it?"
Rashevitch assumed a mysterious, frightened expression, and went on:
"Never has literature and learning been at such low ebb among us as now.
The men of to-day, my good sir, have neither ideas nor ideals, and all
their sayings and doings are permeated by one spirit-to get all they can
and to strip someone to his last thread. All these men of to-day who
give themselves out as honest and progressive people can be bought at a
rouble a piece, and the distinguishing mark of the 'intellectual' of to-
day is that you have to keep strict watch over your pocket when you talk
to him, or else he will run off with your purse." Rashevitch winked and
burst out laughing. "Upon my soul, he will!" he said, in a thin, gleeful
voice. "And morals! What of their morals?" Rashevitch looked round
towards the door. "No one is surprised nowadays when a wife robs and
leaves her husband. What's that, a trifle! Nowadays, my dear boy, a chit
of a girl of twelve is scheming to get a lover, and all these amateur
theatricals and literary evenings are only invented to make it easier to
get a rich merchant to take a girl on as his mistress. . . . Mothers
sell their daughters, and people make no bones about asking a husband at
what price he sells his wife, and one can haggle over the bargain, you
know, my dear. . . ."
Meier, who had been sitting motionless and silent all the time, suddenly
got up from the sofa and looked at his watch.
"I beg your pardon, Pavel Ilyitch," he said, "it is time for me to be
going."
But Pavel Ilyitch, who had not finished his remarks, put his arm round
him and, forcibly reseating him on the sofa, vowed that he would not let
him go without supper. And again Meier sat and listened, but he looked
at Rashevitch with perplexity and uneasiness, as though he were only now
beginning to understand him. Patches of red came into his face. And when
at last a maidservant came in to tell them that the young ladies asked
them to go to supper, he gave a sigh of relief and was the first to walk
out of the study.
At the table in the next room were Rashevitch's daughters, Genya and
Iraida, girls of four-and-twenty and two-and-twenty respectively, both
very pale, with black eyes, and exactly the same height. Genya had her
hair down, and Iraida had hers done up high on her head. Before eating
anything they each drank a wineglassful of bitter liqueur, with an air
as though they had drunk it by accident for the first time in their
lives and both were overcome with confusion and burst out laughing.
"Don't be naughty, girls," said Rashevitch.
Genya and Iraida talked French with each other, and Russian with their
father and their visitor. Interrupting one another, and mixing up French
words with Russian, they began rapidly describing how just at this time
in August, in previous years, they had set off to the boarding school
and what fun it had been. Now there was nowhere to go, and they had to
stay at their home in the country, summer and winter without change.
Such dreariness!
"Don't be naughty, girls," Rashevitch said again.
He wanted to be talking himself. If other people talked in his presence,
he suffered from a feeling like jealousy.
"So that's how it is, my dear boy," he began, looking affectionately at
Meier. "In the simplicity and goodness of our hearts, and from fear of
being suspected of being behind the times, we fraternize with, excuse
me, all sorts of riff-raff, we preach fraternity and equality with
money-lenders and innkeepers; but if we would only think, we should see
how criminal that good-nature is. We have brought things to such a pass,
that the fate of civilization is hanging on a hair. My dear fellow, what
our forefathers gained in the course of ages will be to-morrow, if not
to-day, outraged and destroyed by these modern Huns. . . ."
After supper they all went into the drawing-room. Genya and Iraida
lighted the candles on the piano, got out their music. . . . But their
father still went on talking, and there was no telling when he would
leave off. They looked with misery and vexation at their egoist-father,
to whom the pleasure of chattering and displaying his intelligence was
evidently more precious and important than his daughters' happiness.
Meier, the only young man who ever came to their house, came-they knew-
for the sake of their charming, feminine society, but the irrepressible
old man had taken possession of him, and would not let him move a step
away.
"Just as the knights of the west repelled the invasions of the Mongols,
so we, before it is too late, ought to unite and strike together against
our foe," Rashevitch went on in the tone of a preacher, holding up his
right hand. "May I appear to the riff-raff not as Pavel Ilyitch, but as
a mighty, menacing Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Let us give up sloppy
sentimentality; enough of it! Let us all make a compact, that as soon as
a plebeian comes near us we fling some careless phrase straight in his
ugly face: 'Paws off! Go back to your kennel, you cur!' straight in his
ugly face," Rashevitch went on gleefully, flicking his crooked finger in
front of him. "In his ugly face!"
"I can't do that," Meier brought out, turning away.
"Why not?" Rashevitch answered briskly, anticipating a prolonged and
interesting argument. "Why not?"
"Because I am of the artisan class myself!"
As he said this Meier turned crimson, and his neck seemed to swell, and
tears actually gleamed in his eyes.
"My father was a simple workman," he said, in a rough, jerky voice, "but
I see no harm in that."
Rashevitch was fearfully confused. Dumbfoundered, as though he had been
caught in the act of a crime, he gazed helplessly at Meier, and did not
know what to say. Genya and Iraida flushed crimson, and bent over their
music; they were ashamed of their tactless father. A minute passed in
silence, and there was a feeling of unbearable discomfort, when all at
once with a sort of painful stiffness and inappropriateness, there
sounded in the air the words:
"Yes, I am of the artisan class, and I am proud of it!"
Thereupon Meier, stumbling awkwardly among the furniture, took his
leave, and walked rapidly into the hall, though his carriage was not yet
at the door.
"You'll have a dark drive to-night," Rashevitch muttered, following him.
"The moon does not rise till late to-night."
They stood together on the steps in the dark, and waited for the horses
to be brought. It was cool.
"There's a falling star," said Meier, wrapping himself in his overcoat.
"There are a great many in August."
When the horses were at the door, Rashevitch gazed intently at the sky,
and said with a sigh:
"A phenomenon worthy of the pen of Flammarion. . . ."
After seeing his visitor off, he walked up and down the garden,
gesticulating in the darkness, reluctant to believe that such a queer,
stupid misunderstanding had only just occurred. He was ashamed and vexed
with himself. In the first place it had been extremely incautious and
tactless on his part to raise the damnable subject of blue blood,
without finding out beforehand what his visitor's position was.
Something of the same sort had happened to him before; he had, on one
occasion in a railway carriage, begun abusing the Germans, and it had
afterwards appeared that all the persons he had been conversing with
were German. In the second place he felt that Meier would never come and
see him again. These intellectuals who have risen from the people are
morbidly sensitive, obstinate and slow to forgive.
"It's bad, it's bad," muttered Rashevitch, spitting; he had a feeling of
discomfort and loathing as though he had eaten soap. "Ah, it's bad!"
He could see from the garden, through the drawing-room window, Genya by
the piano, very pale, and looking scared, with her hair down. She was
talking very, very rapidly. . . . Iraida was walking up and down the
room, lost in thought; but now she, too, began talking rapidly with her
face full of indignation. They were both talking at once. Rashevitch
could not hear a word, but he guessed what they were talking about.
Genya was probably complaining that her father drove away every decent
person from the house with his talk, and to-day he had driven away from
them their one acquaintance, perhaps a suitor, and now the poor young
man would not have one place in the whole district where he could find
rest for his soul. And judging by the despairing way in which she threw
up her arms, Iraida was talking probably on the subject of their dreary
existence, their wasted youth. . . .
When he reached his own room, Rashevitch sat down on his bed and began
to undress. He felt oppressed, and he was still haunted by the same
feeling as though he had eaten soap. He was ashamed. As he undressed he
looked at his long, sinewy, elderly legs, and remembered that in the
district they called him the "toad," and after every long conversation
he always felt ashamed. Somehow or other, by some fatality, it always
happened that he began mildly, amicably, with good intentions, calling
himself an old student, an idealist, a Quixote, but without being
himself aware of it, gradually passed into abuse and slander, and what
was most surprising, with perfect sincerity criticized science, art and
morals, though he had not read a book for the last twenty years, had
been nowhere farther than their provincial town, and did not really know
what was going on in the world. If he sat down to write anything, if it
were only a letter of congratulation, there would somehow be abuse in
the letter. And all this was strange, because in reality he was a man of
feeling, given to tears. Could he be possessed by some devil which hated
and slandered in him, apart from his own will?
"It's bad," he sighed, as he lay down under the quilt. "It's bad."
His daughters did not sleep either. There was a sound of laughter and
screaming, as though someone was being pursued; it was Genya in
hysterics. A little later Iraida was sobbing too. A maidservant ran
barefoot up and down the passage several times. . . .
"What a business! Good Lord! . . ." muttered Rashevitch, sighing and
tossing from side to side. "It's bad."
He had a nightmare. He dreamt he was standing naked, as tall as a
giraffe, in the middle of the room, and saying, as he flicked his finger
before him:
"In his ugly face! his ugly face! his ugly face!"
He woke up in a fright, and first of all remembered that a
misunderstanding had happened in the evening, and that Meier would
certainly not come again. He remembered, too, that he had to pay the
interest at the bank, to find husbands for his daughters, that one must
have food and drink, and close at hand were illness, old age,
unpleasantnesses, that soon it would be winter, and that there was no
wood. . . .
It was past nine o'clock in the morning. Rashevitch slowly dressed,
drank his tea and ate two hunks of bread and butter. His daughters did
not come down to breakfast; they did not want to meet him, and that
wounded him. He lay down on his sofa in his study, then sat down to his
table and began writing a letter to his daughters. His hand shook and
his eyes smarted. He wrote that he was old, and no use to anyone and
that nobody loved him, and he begged his daughters to forget him, and
when he died to bury him in a plain, deal coffin without ceremony, or to
send his body to Harkov to the dissecting theatre. He felt that every
line he wrote reeked of malice and affectation, but he could not stop,
and went on writing and writing.
"The toad!" he suddenly heard from the next room; it was the voice of
his elder daughter, a voice with a hiss of indignation. "The toad!"
"The toad!" the younger one repeated like an echo. "The toad!" A FATHER
"I ADMIT I have had a drop. . . . You must excuse me. I went into a beer
shop on the way here, and as it was so hot had a couple of bottles. It's
hot, my boy."
Old Musatov took a nondescript rag out of his pocket and wiped his
shaven, battered face with it.
"I have come only for a minute, Borenka, my angel," he went on, not
looking at his son, "about something very important. Excuse me, perhaps
I am hindering you. Haven't you ten roubles, my dear, you could let me
have till Tuesday? You see, I ought to have paid for my lodging
yesterday, and money, you see! . . . None! Not to save my life!"
Young Musatov went out without a word, and began whispering the other
side of the door with the landlady of the summer villa and his
colleagues who had taken the villa with him. Three minutes later he came
back, and without a word gave his father a ten-rouble note. The latter
thrust it carelessly into his pocket without looking at it, and said:
"Merci. Well, how are you getting on? It's a long time since we met."
"Yes, a long time, not since Easter."
"Half a dozen times I have been meaning to come to you, but I've never
had time. First one thing, then another. . . . It's simply awful! I am
talking nonsense though. . . . All that's nonsense. Don't you believe
me, Borenka. I said I would pay you back the ten roubles on Tuesday,
don't believe that either. Don't believe a word I say. I have nothing to
do at all, it's simply laziness, drunkenness, and I am ashamed to be
seen in such clothes in the street. You must excuse me, Borenka. Here I
have sent the girl to you three times for money and written you piteous
letters. Thanks for the money, but don't believe the letters; I was
telling fibs. I am ashamed to rob you, my angel; I know that you can
scarcely make both ends meet yourself, and feed on locusts, but my
impudence is too much for me. I am such a specimen of impudence-fit for
a show! . . . You must excuse me, Borenka. I tell you the truth, because
I can't see your angel face without emotion."
A minute passed in silence. The old man heaved a deep sigh and said:
"You might treat me to a glass of beer perhaps."
His son went out without a word, and again there was a sound of
whispering the other side of the door. When a little later the beer was
brought in, the old man seemed to revive at the sight of the bottles and
abruptly changed his tone.
"I was at the races the other day, my boy," he began telling him,
assuming a scared expression. "We were a party of three, and we pooled
three roubles on Frisky. And, thanks to that Frisky, we got thirty-two
roubles each for our rouble. I can't get on without the races, my boy.
It's a gentlemanly diversion. My virago always gives me a dressing over
the races, but I go. I love it, and that's all about it."
Boris, a fair-haired young man with a melancholy immobile face, was
walking slowly up and down, listening in silence. When the old man
stopped to clear his throat, he went up to him and said:
"I bought myself a pair of boots the other day, father, which turn out
to be too tight for me. Won't you take them? I'll let you have them
cheap."
"If you like," said the old man with a grimace, "only for the price you
gave for them, without any cheapening."
"Very well, I'll let you have them on credit."
The son groped under the bed and produced the new boots. The father took
off his clumsy, rusty, evidently second-hand boots and began trying on
the new ones.
"A perfect fit," he said. "Right, let me keep them. And on Tuesday, when
I get my pension, I'll send you the money for them. That's not true,
though," he went on, suddenly falling into the same tearful tone again.
"And it was a lie about the races, too, and a lie about the pension. And
you are deceiving me, Borenka. . . . I feel your generous tactfulness. I
see through you! Your boots were too small, because your heart is too
big. Ah, Borenka, Borenka! I understand it all and feel it!"
"Have you moved into new lodgings?" his son interrupted, to change the
conversation.
"Yes, my boy. I move every month. My virago can't stay long in the same
place with her temper."
"I went to your lodgings, I meant to ask you to stay here with me. In
your state of health it would do you good to be in the fresh air."
"No," said the old man, with a wave of his hand, "the woman wouldn't let
me, and I shouldn't care to myself. A hundred times you have tried to
drag me out of the pit, and I have tried myself, but nothing came of it.
Give it up. I must stick in my filthy hole. This minute, here I am
sitting, looking at your angel face, yet something is drawing me home to
my hole. Such is my fate. You can't draw a dung-beetle to a rose. But
it's time I was going, my boy. It's getting dark."
"Wait a minute then, I'll come with you. I have to go to town to-day
myself."
Both put on their overcoats and went out. When a little while afterwards
they were driving in a cab, it was already dark, and lights began to
gleam in the windows.
"I've robbed you, Borenka!" the father muttered. "Poor children, poor
children! It must be a dreadful trouble to have such a father! Borenka,
my angel, I cannot lie when I see your face. You must excuse me. . . .
What my depravity has come to, my God. Here I have just been robbing
you, and put you to shame with my drunken state; I am robbing your
brothers, too, and put them to shame, and you should have seen me
yesterday! I won't conceal it, Borenka. Some neighbours, a wretched
crew, came to see my virago; I got drunk, too, with them, and I
blackguarded you poor children for all I was worth. I abused you, and
complained that you had abandoned me. I wanted, you see, to touch the
drunken hussies' hearts, and pose as an unhappy father. It's my way, you
know, when I want to screen my vices I throw all the blame on my
innocent children. I can't tell lies and hide things from you, Borenka.
I came to see you as proud as a peacock, but when I saw your gentleness
and kind heart, my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and it upset my
conscience completely."
"Hush, father, let's talk of something else."
"Mother of God, what children I have," the old man went on, not heeding
his son. "What wealth God has bestowed on me. Such children ought not to
have had a black sheep like me for a father, but a real man with soul
and feeling! I am not worthy of you!"
The old man took off his cap with a button at the top and crossed
himself several times.
"Thanks be to Thee, O Lord!" he said with a sigh, looking from side to
side as though seeking for an ikon. "Remarkable, exceptional children! I
have three sons, and they are all like one. Sober, steady, hard-working,
and what brains! Cabman, what brains! Grigory alone has brains enough
for ten. He speaks French, he speaks German, and talks better than any
of your lawyers-one is never tired of listening. My children, my
children, I can't believe that you are mine! I can't believe it! You are
a martyr, my Borenka, I am ruining you, and I shall go on ruining you. .
. . You give to me endlessly, though you know your money is thrown away.
The other day I sent you a pitiful letter, I described how ill I was,
but you know I was lying, I wanted the money for rum. And you give to me
because you are afraid to wound me by refusing. I know all that, and
feel it. Grisha's a martyr, too. On Thursday I went to his office,
drunk, filthy, ragged, reeking of vodka like a cellar . . . I went
straight up, such a figure, I pestered him with nasty talk, while his
colleagues and superiors and petitioners were standing round. I have
disgraced him for life. And he wasn't the least confused, only turned a
bit pale, but smiled and came up to me as though there were nothing the
matter, even introduced me to his colleagues. Then he took me all the
way home, and not a word of reproach. I rob him worse than you. Take
your brother Sasha now, he's a martyr too! He married, as you know, a
colonel's daughter of an aristocratic circle, and got a dowry with her.
. . . You would think he would have nothing to do with me. No, brother,
after his wedding he came with his young wife and paid me the first
visit . . . in my hole. . . . Upon my soul!"
The old man gave a sob and then began laughing.
"And at that moment, as luck would have it, we were eating grated radish
with kvass and frying fish, and there was a stink enough in the flat to
make the devil sick. I was lying down-I'd had a drop-my virago bounced
out at the young people with her face crimson. . . . It was a disgrace
in fact. But Sasha rose superior to it all."
"Yes, our Sasha is a good fellow," said Boris.
"The most splendid fellow! You are all pure gold, you and Grisha and
Sasha and Sonya. I worry you, torment you, disgrace you, rob you, and
all my life I have not heard one word of reproach from you, you have
never given me one cross look. It would be all very well if I had been a
decent father to you-but as it is! You have had nothing from me but
harm. I am a bad, dissipated man. . . . Now, thank God, I am quieter and
I have no strength of will, but in old days when you were little I had
determination, will. Whatever I said or did I always thought it was
right. Sometimes I'd come home from the club at night, drunk and ill-
humoured, and scold at your poor mother for spending money. The whole
night I would be railing at her, and think it the right thing too; you
would get up in the morning and go to school, while I'd still be venting
my temper upon her. Heavens! I did torture her, poor martyr! When you
came back from school and I was asleep you didn't dare to have dinner
till I got up. At dinner again there would be a flare up. I daresay you
remember. I wish no one such a father; God sent me to you for a trial.
Yes, for a trial! Hold out, children, to the end! Honour thy father and
thy days shall be long. Perhaps for your noble conduct God will grant
you long life. Cabman, stop!"
The old man jumped out of the cab and ran into a tavern. Half an hour
later he came back, cleared his throat in a drunken way, and sat down
beside his son.
"Where's Sonya now?" he asked. "Still at boarding-school?"
"No, she left in May, and is living now with Sasha's mother-in-law."
"There!" said the old man in surprise. "She is a jolly good girl! So she
is following her brother's example. . . . Ah, Borenka, she has no
mother, no one to rejoice over her! I say, Borenka, does she . . . does
she know how I am living? Eh?"
Boris made no answer. Five minutes passed in profound silence. The old
man gave a sob, wiped his face with a rag and said:
"I love her, Borenka! She is my only daughter, you know, and in one's
old age there is no comfort like a daughter. Could I see her, Borenka?"
"Of course, when you like."
"Really? And she won't mind?"
"Of course not, she has been trying to find you so as to see you."
"Upon my soul! What children! Cabman, eh? Arrange it, Borenka darling!
She is a young lady now, delicatesse, consommé, and all the rest of it
in a refined way, and I don't want to show myself to her in such an
abject state. I'll tell you how we'll contrive to work it. For three
days I will keep away from spirits, to get my filthy, drunken phiz into
better order. Then I'll come to you, and you shall lend me for the time
some suit of yours; I'll shave and have my hair cut, then you go and
bring her to your flat. Will you?"
"Very well."
"Cabman, stop!"
The old man sprang out of the cab again and ran into a tavern. While
Boris was driving with him to his lodging he jumped out twice again,
while his son sat silent and waited patiently for him. When, after
dismissing the cab, they made their way across a long, filthy yard to
the "virago's" lodging, the old man put on an utterly shamefaced and
guilty air, and began timidly clearing his throat and clicking with his
lips.
"Borenka," he said in an ingratiating voice, "if my virago begins saying
anything, don't take any notice . . . and behave to her, you know,
affably. She is ignorant and impudent, but she's a good baggage. There
is a good, warm heart beating in her bosom!"
The long yard ended, and Boris found himself in a dark entry. The swing
door creaked, there was a smell of cooking and a smoking samovar. There
was a sound of harsh voices. Passing through the passage into the
kitchen Boris could see nothing but thick smoke, a line with washing on
it, and the chimney of the samovar through a crack of which golden
sparks were dropping.
"And here is my cell," said the old man, stooping down and going into a
little room with a low-pitched ceiling, and an atmosphere unbearably
stifling from the proximity of the kitchen.
Here three women were sitting at the table regaling themselves. Seeing
the visitors, they exchanged glances and left off eating.
"Well, did you get it?" one of them, apparently the "virago" herself,
asked abruptly.
"Yes, yes," muttered the old man. "Well, Boris, pray sit down.
Everything is plain here, young man . . . we live in a simple way."
He bustled about in an aimless way. He felt ashamed before his son, and
at the same time apparently he wanted to keep up before the women his
dignity as cock of the walk, and as a forsaken, unhappy father.
"Yes, young man, we live simply with no nonsense," he went on muttering.
"We are simple people, young man. . . . We are not like you, we don't
want to keep up a show before people. No! . . . Shall we have a drink of
vodka?"
One of the women (she was ashamed to drink before a stranger) heaved a
sigh and said:
"Well, I'll have another drink on account of the mushrooms. . . . They
are such mushrooms, they make you drink even if you don't want to. Ivan
Gerasimitch, offer the young gentleman, perhaps he will have a drink!"
The last word she pronounced in a mincing drawl.
"Have a drink, young man!" said the father, not looking at his son. "We
have no wine or liqueurs, my boy, we live in a plain way."
"He doesn't like our ways," sighed the "virago." "Never mind, never
mind, he'll have a drink."
Not to offend his father by refusing, Boris took a wineglass and drank
in silence. When they brought in the samovar, to satisfy the old man, he
drank two cups of disgusting tea in silence, with a melancholy face.
Without a word he listened to the virago dropping hints about there
being in this world cruel, heartless children who abandon their parents.
"I know what you are thinking now!" said the old man, after drinking
more and passing into his habitual state of drunken excitement. "You
think I have let myself sink into the mire, that I am to be pitied, but
to my thinking, this simple life is much more normal than your life, . .
. I don't need anybody, and . . . and I don't intend to eat humble pie.
. . . I can't endure a wretched boy's looking at me with compassion."
After tea he cleaned a herring and sprinkled it with onion, with such
feeling, that tears of emotion stood in his eyes. He began talking again
about the races and his winnings, about some Panama hat for which he had
paid sixteen roubles the day before. He told lies with the same relish
with which he ate herring and drank. His son sat on in silence for an
hour, and began to say good-bye.
"I don't venture to keep you," the old man said, haughtily. "You must
excuse me, young man, for not living as you would like!"
He ruffled up his feathers, snorted with dignity, and winked at the
women.
"Good-bye, young man," he said, seeing his son into the entry.
"Attendez."
In the entry, where it was dark, he suddenly pressed his face against
the young man's sleeve and gave a sob.
"I should like to have a look at Sonitchka," he whispered. "Arrange it,
Borenka, my angel. I'll shave, I'll put on your suit . . . I'll put on a
straight face . . . I'll hold my tongue while she is there. Yes, yes, I
will hold my tongue!"
He looked round timidly towards the door, through which the women's
voices were heard, checked his sobs, and said aloud:
"Good-bye, young man! Attendez." ON THE ROAD
"Upon the breast of a gigantic crag, A golden cloudlet rested for one
night." LERMONTOV.
IN the room which the tavern keeper, the Cossack Semyon Tchistopluy,
called the "travellers' room," that is kept exclusively for travellers,
a tall, broad-shouldered man of forty was sitting at the big unpainted
table. He was asleep with his elbows on the table and his head leaning
on his fist. An end of tallow candle, stuck into an old pomatum pot,
lighted up his light brown beard, his thick, broad nose, his sunburnt
cheeks, and the thick, black eyebrows overhanging his closed eyes. . . .
The nose and the cheeks and the eyebrows, all the features, each taken
separately, were coarse and heavy, like the furniture and the stove in
the "travellers' room," but taken all together they gave the effect of
something harmonious and even beautiful. Such is the lucky star, as it
is called, of the Russian face: the coarser and harsher its features the
softer and more good-natured it looks. The man was dressed in a
gentleman's reefer jacket, shabby, but bound with wide new braid, a
plush waistcoat, and full black trousers thrust into big high boots.
On one of the benches, which stood in a continuous row along the wall, a
girl of eight, in a brown dress and long black stockings, lay asleep on
a coat lined with fox. Her face was pale, her hair was flaxen, her
shoulders were narrow, her whole body was thin and frail, but her nose
stood out as thick and ugly a lump as the man's. She was sound asleep,
and unconscious that her semi-circular comb had fallen off her head and
was cutting her cheek.
The "travellers' room" had a festive appearance. The air was full of the
smell of freshly scrubbed floors, there were no rags hanging as usual on
the line that ran diagonally across the room, and a little lamp was
burning in the corner over the table, casting a patch of red light on
the ikon of St. George the Victorious. From the ikon stretched on each
side of the corner a row of cheap oleographs, which maintained a strict
and careful gradation in the transition from the sacred to the profane.
In the dim light of the candle end and the red ikon lamp the pictures
looked like one continuous stripe, covered with blurs of black. When the
tiled stove, trying to sing in unison with the weather, drew in the air
with a howl, while the logs, as though waking up, burst into bright
flame and hissed angrily, red patches began dancing on the log walls,
and over the head of the sleeping man could be seen first the Elder
Seraphim, then the Shah Nasir-ed-Din, then a fat, brown baby with goggle
eyes, whispering in the ear of a young girl with an extraordinarily
blank, and indifferent face. . . .
Outside a storm was raging. Something frantic and wrathful, but
profoundly unhappy, seemed to be flinging itself about the tavern with
the ferocity of a wild beast and trying to break in. Banging at the
doors, knocking at the windows and on the roof, scratching at the walls,
it alternately threatened and besought, then subsided for a brief
interval, and then with a gleeful, treacherous howl burst into the
chimney, but the wood flared up, and the fire, like a chained dog, flew
wrathfully to meet its foe, a battle began, and after it-sobs, shrieks,
howls of wrath. In all of this there was the sound of angry misery and
unsatisfied hate, and the mortified impatience of something accustomed
to triumph.
Bewitched by this wild, inhuman music the "travellers' room" seemed
spellbound for ever, but all at once the door creaked and the potboy, in
a new print shirt, came in. Limping on one leg, and blinking his sleepy
eyes, he snuffed the candle with his fingers, put some more wood on the
fire and went out. At once from the church, which was three hundred
paces from the tavern, the clock struck midnight. The wind played with
the chimes as with the snowflakes; chasing the sounds of the clock it
whirled them round and round over a vast space, so that some strokes
were cut short or drawn out in long, vibrating notes, while others were
completely lost in the general uproar. One stroke sounded as distinctly
in the room as though it had chimed just under the window. The child,
sleeping on the fox-skin, started and raised her head. For a minute she
stared blankly at the dark window, at Nasir-ed-Din over whom a crimson
glow from the fire flickered at that moment, then she turned her eyes
upon the sleeping man.
"Daddy," she said.
But the man did not move. The little girl knitted her brow angrily, lay
down, and curled up her legs. Someone in the tavern gave a loud,
prolonged yawn. Soon afterwards there was the squeak of the swing door
and the sound of indistinct voices. Someone came in, shaking the snow
off, and stamping in felt boots which made a muffled thud.
"What is it?" a woman's voice asked languidly.
"Mademoiselle Ilovaisky has come, . . ." answered a bass voice.
Again there was the squeak of the swing door. Then came the roar of the
wind rushing in. Someone, probably the lame boy, ran to the door leading
to the "travellers' room," coughed deferentially, and lifted the latch.
"This way, lady, please," said a woman's voice in dulcet tones. "It's
clean in here, my beauty. . . ."
The door was opened wide and a peasant with a beard appeared in the
doorway, in the long coat of a coachman, plastered all over with snow
from head to foot, and carrying a big trunk on his shoulder. He was
followed into the room by a feminine figure, scarcely half his height,
with no face and no arms, muffled and wrapped up like a bundle and also
covered with snow. A damp chill, as from a cellar, seemed to come to the
child from the coachman and the bundle, and the fire and the candles
flickered.
"What nonsense!" said the bundle angrily, "We could go perfectly well.
We have only nine more miles to go, mostly by the forest, and we should
not get lost. . . ."
"As for getting lost, we shouldn't, but the horses can't go on, lady!"
answered the coachman. "And it is Thy Will, O Lord! As though I had done
it on purpose!"
"God knows where you have brought me. . . . Well, be quiet. . . . There
are people asleep here, it seems. You can go. . . ."
The coachman put the portmanteau on the floor, and as he did so, a great
lump of snow fell off his shoulders. He gave a sniff and went out.
Then the little girl saw two little hands come out from the middle of
the bundle, stretch upwards and begin angrily disentangling the network
of shawls, kerchiefs, and scarves. First a big shawl fell on the ground,
then a hood, then a white knitted kerchief. After freeing her head, the
traveller took off her pelisse and at once shrank to half the size. Now
she was in a long, grey coat with big buttons and bulging pockets. From
one pocket she pulled out a paper parcel, from the other a bunch of big,
heavy keys, which she put down so carelessly that the sleeping man
started and opened his eyes. For some time he looked blankly round him
as though he didn't know where he was, then he shook his head, went to
the corner and sat down. . . . The newcomer took off her great coat,
which made her shrink to half her size again, she took off her big felt
boots, and sat down, too.
By now she no longer resembled a bundle: she was a thin little brunette
of twenty, as slim as a snake, with a long white face and curly hair.
Her nose was long and sharp, her chin, too, was long and sharp, her
eyelashes were long, the corners of her mouth were sharp, and, thanks to
this general sharpness, the expression of her face was biting. Swathed
in a closely fitting black dress with a mass of lace at her neck and
sleeves, with sharp elbows and long pink fingers, she recalled the
portraits of mediæval English ladies. The grave concentration of her
face increased this likeness.
The lady looked round at the room, glanced sideways at the man and the
little girl, shrugged her shoulders, and moved to the window. The dark
windows were shaking from the damp west wind. Big flakes of snow
glistening in their whiteness, lay on the window frame, but at once
disappeared, borne away by the wind. The savage music grew louder and
louder. . . .
After a long silence the little girl suddenly turned over, and said
angrily, emphasizing each word:
"Oh, goodness, goodness, how unhappy I am! Unhappier than anyone!"
The man got up and moved with little steps to the child with a guilty
air, which was utterly out of keeping with his huge figure and big
beard.
"You are not asleep, dearie?" he said, in an apologetic voice. "What do
you want?"
"I don't want anything, my shoulder aches! You are a wicked man, Daddy,
and God will punish you! You'll see He will punish you."
"My darling, I know your shoulder aches, but what can I do, dearie?"
said the man, in the tone in which men who have been drinking excuse
themselves to their stern spouses. "It's the journey has made your
shoulder ache, Sasha. To-morrow we shall get there and rest, and the
pain will go away. . . ."
"To-morrow, to-morrow. . . . Every day you say to-morrow. We shall be
going on another twenty days."
"But we shall arrive to-morrow, dearie, on your father's word of honour.
I never tell a lie, but if we are detained by the snowstorm it is not my
fault."
"I can't bear any more, I can't, I can't!"
Sasha jerked her leg abruptly and filled the room with an unpleasant
wailing. Her father made a despairing gesture, and looked hopelessly
towards the young lady. The latter shrugged her shoulders, and
hesitatingly went up to Sasha.
"Listen, my dear," she said, "it is no use crying. It's really naughty;
if your shoulder aches it can't be helped."
"You see, Madam," said the man quickly, as though defending himself, "we
have not slept for two nights, and have been travelling in a revolting
conveyance. Well, of course, it is natural she should be ill and
miserable, . . . and then, you know, we had a drunken driver, our
portmanteau has been stolen . . . the snowstorm all the time, but what's
the use of crying, Madam? I am exhausted, though, by sleeping in a
sitting position, and I feel as though I were drunk. Oh, dear! Sasha,
and I feel sick as it is, and then you cry!"
The man shook his head, and with a gesture of despair sat down.
"Of course you mustn't cry," said the young lady. "It's only little
babies cry. If you are ill, dear, you must undress and go to sleep. . .
. Let us take off your things!"
When the child had been undressed and pacified a silence reigned again.
The young lady seated herself at the window, and looked round
wonderingly at the room of the inn, at the ikon, at the stove. . . .
Apparently the room and the little girl with the thick nose, in her
short boy's nightgown, and the child's father, all seemed strange to
her. This strange man was sitting in a corner; he kept looking about him
helplessly, as though he were drunk, and rubbing his face with the palm
of his hand. He sat silent, blinking, and judging from his guilty-
looking figure it was difficult to imagine that he would soon begin to
speak. Yet he was the first to begin. Stroking his knees, he gave a
cough, laughed, and said:
"It's a comedy, it really is. . . . I look and I cannot believe my eyes:
for what devilry has destiny driven us to this accursed inn? What did
she want to show by it? Life sometimes performs such 'salto mortale,'
one can only stare and blink in amazement. Have you come from far,
Madam?"
"No, not from far," answered the young lady. "I am going from our
estate, fifteen miles from here, to our farm, to my father and brother.
My name is Ilovaisky, and the farm is called Ilovaiskoe. It's nine miles
away. What unpleasant weather!"
"It couldn't be worse."
The lame boy came in and stuck a new candle in the pomatum pot.
"You might bring us the samovar, boy," said the man, addressing him.
"Who drinks tea now?" laughed the boy. "It is a sin to drink tea before
mass. . . ."
"Never mind boy, you won't burn in hell if we do. . . ."
Over the tea the new acquaintances got into conversation.
Mlle. Ilovaisky learned that her companion was called Grigory Petrovitch
Liharev, that he was the brother of the Liharev who was Marshal of
Nobility in one of the neighbouring districts, and he himself had once
been a landowner, but had "run through everything in his time." Liharev
learned that her name was Marya Mihailovna, that her father had a huge
estate, but that she was the only one to look after it as her father and
brother looked at life through their fingers, were irresponsible, and
were too fond of harriers.
"My father and brother are all alone at the farm," she told him,
brandishing her fingers (she had the habit of moving her fingers before
her pointed face as she talked, and after every sentence moistened her
lips with her sharp little tongue). "They, I mean men, are an
irresponsible lot, and don't stir a finger for themselves. I can fancy
there will be no one to give them a meal after the fast! We have no
mother, and we have such servants that they can't lay the tablecloth
properly when I am away. You can imagine their condition now! They will
be left with nothing to break their fast, while I have to stay here all
night. How strange it all is."
She shrugged her shoulders, took a sip from her cup, and said:
"There are festivals that have a special fragrance: at Easter, Trinity
and Christmas there is a peculiar scent in the air. Even unbelievers are
fond of those festivals. My brother, for instance, argues that there is
no God, but he is the first to hurry to Matins at Easter."
Liharev raised his eyes to Mlle. Ilovaisky and laughed.
"They argue that there is no God," she went on, laughing too, "but why
is it, tell me, all the celebrated writers, the learned men, clever
people generally, in fact, believe towards the end of their life?"
"If a man does not know how to believe when he is young, Madam, he won't
believe in his old age if he is ever so much of a writer."
Judging from Liharev's cough he had a bass voice, but, probably from
being afraid to speak aloud, or from exaggerated shyness, he spoke in a
tenor. After a brief pause he heaved a sign and said:
"The way I look at it is that faith is a faculty of the spirit. It is
just the same as a talent, one must be born with it. So far as I can
judge by myself, by the people I have seen in my time, and by all that
is done around us, this faculty is present in Russians in its highest
degree. Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of
convictions and aspirations, and if you care to know, it has not yet the
faintest notion of lack of faith or scepticism. If a Russian does not
believe in God, it means he believes in something else."
Liharev took a cup of tea from Mlle. Ilovaisky, drank off half in one
gulp, and went on:
"I will tell you about myself. Nature has implanted in my breast an
extraordinary faculty for belief. Whisper it not to the night, but half
my life I was in the ranks of the Atheists and Nihilists, but there was
not one hour in my life in which I ceased to believe. All talents, as a
rule, show themselves in early childhood, and so my faculty showed
itself when I could still walk upright under the table. My mother liked
her children to eat a great deal, and when she gave me food she used to
say: 'Eat! Soup is the great thing in life!' I believed, and ate the
soup ten times a day, ate like a shark, ate till I was disgusted and
stupefied. My nurse used to tell me fairy tales, and I believed in
house-spirits, in wood-elves, and in goblins of all kinds. I used
sometimes to steal corrosive sublimate from my father, sprinkle it on
cakes, and carry them up to the attic that the house-spirits, you see,
might eat them and be killed. And when I was taught to read and
understand what I read, then there was a fine to-do. I ran away to
America and went off to join the brigands, and wanted to go into a
monastery, and hired boys to torture me for being a Christian. And note
that my faith was always active, never dead. If I was running away to
America I was not alone, but seduced someone else, as great a fool as I
was, to go with me, and was delighted when I was nearly frozen outside
the town gates and when I was thrashed; if I went to join the brigands I
always came back with my face battered. A most restless childhood, I
assure you! And when they sent me to the high school and pelted me with
all sorts of truths-that is, that the earth goes round the sun, or that
white light is not white, but is made up of seven colours-my poor little
head began to go round! Everything was thrown into a whirl in me: Navin
who made the sun stand still, and my mother who in the name of the
Prophet Elijah disapproved of lightning conductors, and my father who
was indifferent to the truths I had learned. My enlightenment inspired
me. I wandered about the house and stables like one possessed, preaching
my truths, was horrified by ignorance, glowed with hatred for anyone who
saw in white light nothing but white light. . . . But all that's
nonsense and childishness. Serious, so to speak, manly enthusiasms began
only at the university. You have, no doubt, Madam, taken your degree
somewhere?"
"I studied at Novotcherkask at the Don Institute."
"Then you have not been to a university? So you don't know what science
means. All the sciences in the world have the same passport, without
which they regard themselves as meaningless . . . the striving towards
truth! Every one of them, even pharmacology, has for its aim not
utility, not the alleviation of life, but truth. It's remarkable! When
you set to work to study any science, what strikes you first of all is
its beginning. I assure you there is nothing more attractive and
grander, nothing is so staggering, nothing takes a man's breath away
like the beginning of any science. From the first five or six lectures
you are soaring on wings of the brightest hopes, you already seem to
yourself to be welcoming truth with open arms. And I gave myself up to
science, heart and soul, passionately, as to the woman one loves. I was
its slave; I found it the sun of my existence, and asked for no other. I
studied day and night without rest, ruined myself over books, wept when
before my eyes men exploited science for their own personal ends. But my
enthusiasm did not last long. The trouble is that every science has a
beginning but not an end, like a recurring decimal. Zoology has
discovered 35,000 kinds of insects, chemistry reckons 60 elements. If in
time tens of noughts can be written after these figures, Zoology and
chemistry will be just as far from their end as now, and all
contemporary scientific work consists in increasing these numbers. I saw
through this trick when I discovered the 35,001-st and felt no
satisfaction. Well, I had no time to suffer from disillusionment, as I
was soon possessed by a new faith. I plunged into Nihilism, with its
manifestoes, its 'black divisions,' and all the rest of it. I 'went to
the people,' worked in factories, worked as an oiler, as a barge hauler.
Afterwards, when wandering over Russia, I had a taste of Russian life, I
turned into a fervent devotee of that life. I loved the Russian people
with poignant intensity; I loved their God and believed in Him, and in
their language, their creative genius. . . . And so on, and so on. . . .
I have been a Slavophile in my time, I used to pester Aksakov with
letters, and I was a Ukrainophile, and an archæologist, and a collector
of specimens of peasant art. . . . I was enthusiastic over ideas,
people, events, places . . . my enthusiasm was endless! Five years ago I
was working for the abolition of private property; my last creed was
non-resistance to evil."
Sasha gave an abrupt sigh and began moving. Liharev got up and went to
her.
"Won't you have some tea, dearie?" he asked tenderly.
"Drink it yourself," the child answered rudely. Liharev was
disconcerted, and went back to the table with a guilty step.
"Then you have had a lively time," said Mlle. Ilovaisky; "you have
something to remember."
"Well, yes, it's all very lively when one sits over tea and chatters to
a kind listener, but you should ask what that liveliness has cost me!
What price have I paid for the variety of my life? You see, Madam, I
have not held my convictions like a German doctor of philosophy,
zierlichmännerlich, I have not lived in solitude, but every conviction
I have had has bound my back to the yoke, has torn my body to pieces.
Judge, for yourself. I was wealthy like my brothers, but now I am a
beggar. In the delirium of my enthusiasm I smashed up my own fortune and
my wife's-a heap of other people's money. Now I am forty-two, old age is
close upon me, and I am homeless, like a dog that has dropped behind its
waggon at night. All my life I have not known what peace meant, my soul
has been in continual agitation, distressed even by its hopes . . . I
have been wearied out with heavy irregular work, have endured privation,
have five times been in prison, have dragged myself across the provinces
of Archangel and of Tobolsk . . . it's painful to think of it! I have
lived, but in my fever I have not even been conscious of the process of
life itself. Would you believe it, I don't remember a single spring, I
never noticed how my wife loved me, how my children were born. What more
can I tell you? I have been a misfortune to all who have loved me. . . .
My mother has worn mourning for me all these fifteen years, while my
proud brothers, who have had to wince, to blush, to bow their heads, to
waste their money on my account, have come in the end to hate me like
poison."
Liharev got up and sat down again.
"If I were simply unhappy I should thank God," he went on without
looking at his listener. "My personal unhappiness sinks into the
background when I remember how often in my enthusiasms I have been
absurd, far from the truth, unjust, cruel, dangerous! How often I have
hated and despised those whom I ought to have loved, and vice versa, I
have changed a thousand times. One day I believe, fall down and worship,
the next I flee like a coward from the gods and friends of yesterday,
and swallow in silence the 'scoundrel!' they hurl after me. God alone
has seen how often I have wept and bitten my pillow in shame for my
enthusiasms. Never once in my life have I intentionally lied or done
evil, but my conscience is not clear! I cannot even boast, Madam, that I
have no one's life upon my conscience, for my wife died before my eyes,
worn out by my reckless activity. Yes, my wife! I tell you they have two
ways of treating women nowadays. Some measure women's skulls to prove
woman is inferior to man, pick out her defects to mock at her, to look
original in her eyes, and to justify their sensuality. Others do their
utmost to raise women to their level, that is, force them to learn by
heart the 35,000 species, to speak and write the same foolish things as
they speak and write themselves."
Liharev's face darkened.
"I tell you that woman has been and always will be the slave of man," he
said in a bass voice, striking his fist on the table. "She is the soft,
tender wax which a man always moulds into anything he likes. . . . My
God! for the sake of some trumpery masculine enthusiasm she will cut off
her hair, abandon her family, die among strangers! . . . among the ideas
for which she has sacrificed herself there is not a single feminine one.
. . . An unquestioning, devoted slave! I have not measured skulls, but I
say this from hard, bitter experience: the proudest, most independent
women, if I have succeeded in communicating to them my enthusiasm, have
followed me without criticism, without question, and done anything I
chose; I have turned a nun into a Nihilist who, as I heard afterwards,
shot a gendarme; my wife never left me for a minute in my wanderings,
and like a weathercock changed her faith in step with my changing
enthusiasms."
Liharev jumped up and walked up and down the room.
"A noble, sublime slavery!" he said, clasping his hands. "It is just in
it that the highest meaning of woman's life lies! Of all the fearful
medley of thoughts and impressions accumulated in my brain from my
association with women my memory, like a filter, has retained no ideas,
no clever saying, no philosophy, nothing but that extraordinary,
resignation to fate, that wonderful mercifulness, forgiveness of
everything."
Liharev clenched his fists, stared at a fixed point, and with a sort of
passionate intensity, as though he were savouring each word as he
uttered it, hissed through his clenched teeth:
"That . . . that great-hearted fortitude, faithfulness unto death,
poetry of the heart. . . . The meaning of life lies in just that
unrepining martyrdom, in the tears which would soften a stone, in the
boundless, all-forgiving love which brings light and warmth into the
chaos of life. . . ."
Mlle. Ilovaisky got up slowly, took a step towards Liharev, and fixed
her eyes upon his face. From the tears that glittered on his eyelashes,
from his quivering, passionate voice, from the flush on his cheeks, it
was clear to her that women were not a chance, not a simple subject of
conversation. They were the object of his new enthusiasm, or, as he said
himself, his new faith! For the first time in her life she saw a man
carried away, fervently believing. With his gesticulations, with his
flashing eyes he seemed to her mad, frantic, but there was a feeling of
such beauty in the fire of his eyes, in his words, in all the movements
of his huge body, that without noticing what she was doing she stood
facing him as though rooted to the spot, and gazed into his face with
delight.
"Take my mother," he said, stretching out his hand to her with an
imploring expression on his face, "I poisoned her existence, according
to her ideas disgraced the name of Liharev, did her as much harm as the
most malignant enemy, and what do you think? My brothers give her little
sums for holy bread and church services, and outraging her religious
feelings, she saves that money and sends it in secret to her erring
Grigory. This trifle alone elevates and ennobles the soul far more than
all the theories, all the clever sayings and the 35,000 species. I can
give you thousands of instances. Take you, even, for instance! With
tempest and darkness outside you are going to your father and your
brother to cheer them with your affection in the holiday, though very
likely they have forgotten and are not thinking of you. And, wait a bit,
and you will love a man and follow him to the North Pole. You would,
wouldn't you?"
"Yes, if I loved him."
"There, you see," cried Liharev delighted, and he even stamped with his
foot. "Oh dear! How glad I am that I have met you! Fate is kind to me, I
am always meeting splendid people. Not a day passes but one makes
acquaintance with somebody one would give one's soul for. There are ever
so many more good people than bad in this world. Here, see, for
instance, how openly and from our hearts we have been talking as though
we had known each other a hundred years. Sometimes, I assure you, one
restrains oneself for ten years and holds one's tongue, is reserved with
one's friends and one's wife, and meets some cadet in a train and
babbles one's whole soul out to him. It is the first time I have the
honour of seeing you, and yet I have confessed to you as I have never
confessed in my life. Why is it?"
Rubbing his hands and smiling good-humouredly Liharev walked up and down
the room, and fell to talking about women again. Meanwhile they began
ringing for matins.
"Goodness," wailed Sasha. "He won't let me sleep with his talking!"
"Oh, yes!" said Liharev, startled. "I am sorry, darling, sleep, sleep. .
. . I have two boys besides her," he whispered. "They are living with
their uncle, Madam, but this one can't exist a day without her father.
She's wretched, she complains, but she sticks to me like a fly to honey.
I have been chattering too much, Madam, and it would do you no harm to
sleep. Wouldn't you like me to make up a bed for you?"
Without waiting for permission he shook the wet pelisse, stretched it on
a bench, fur side upwards, collected various shawls and scarves, put the
overcoat folded up into a roll for a pillow, and all this he did in
silence with a look of devout reverence, as though he were not handling
a woman's rags, but the fragments of holy vessels. There was something
apologetic, embarrassed about his whole figure, as though in the
presence of a weak creature he felt ashamed of his height and strength.
. . .
When Mlle. Ilovaisky had lain down, he put out the candle and sat down
on a stool by the stove.
"So, Madam," he whispered, lighting a fat cigarette and puffing the
smoke into the stove. "Nature has put into the Russian an extraordinary
faculty for belief, a searching intelligence, and the gift of
speculation, but all that is reduced to ashes by irresponsibility,
laziness, and dreamy frivolity. . . . Yes. . . ."
She gazed wonderingly into the darkness, and saw only a spot of red on
the ikon and the flicker of the light of the stove on Liharev's face.
The darkness, the chime of the bells, the roar of the storm, the lame
boy, Sasha with her fretfulness, unhappy Liharev and his sayings-all
this was mingled together, and seemed to grow into one huge impression,
and God's world seemed to her fantastic, full of marvels and magical
forces. All that she had heard was ringing in her ears, and human life
presented itself to her as a beautiful poetic fairy-tale without an end.
The immense impression grew and grew, clouded consciousness, and turned
into a sweet dream. She was asleep, though she saw the little ikon lamp
and a big nose with the light playing on it.
She heard the sound of weeping.
"Daddy, darling," a child's voice was tenderly entreating, "let's go
back to uncle! There is a Christmas-tree there! Styopa and Kolya are
there!"
"My darling, what can I do?" a man's bass persuaded softly. "Understand
me! Come, understand!"
And the man's weeping blended with the child's. This voice of human
sorrow, in the midst of the howling of the storm, touched the girl's ear
with such sweet human music that she could not bear the delight of it,
and wept too. She was conscious afterwards of a big, black shadow coming
softly up to her, picking up a shawl that had dropped on to the floor
and carefully wrapping it round her feet.
Mlle. Ilovaisky was awakened by a strange uproar. She jumped up and
looked about her in astonishment. The deep blue dawn was looking in at
the window half-covered with snow. In the room there was a grey
twilight, through which the stove and the sleeping child and Nasir-ed-
Din stood out distinctly. The stove and the lamp were both out. Through
the wide-open door she could see the big tavern room with a counter and
chairs. A man, with a stupid, gipsy face and astonished eyes, was
standing in the middle of the room in a puddle of melting snow, holding
a big red star on a stick. He was surrounded by a group of boys,
motionless as statues, and plastered over with snow. The light shone
through the red paper of the star, throwing a glow of red on their wet
faces. The crowd was shouting in disorder, and from its uproar Mlle.
Ilovaisky could make out only one couplet:
"Hi, you Little Russian lad, Bring your sharp knife, We will kill the
Jew, we will kill him, The son of tribulation. . ."
Liharev was standing near the counter, looking feelingly at the singers
and tapping his feet in time. Seeing Mlle. Ilovaisky, he smiled all over
his face and came up to her. She smiled too.
"A happy Christmas!" he said. "I saw you slept well."
She looked at him, said nothing, and went on smiling.
After the conversation in the night he seemed to her not tall and broad
shouldered, but little, just as the biggest steamer seems to us a little
thing when we hear that it has crossed the ocean.
"Well, it is time for me to set off," she said. "I must put on my
things. Tell me where you are going now?"
"I? To the station of Klinushki, from there to Sergievo, and from
Sergievo, with horses, thirty miles to the coal mines that belong to a
horrid man, a general called Shashkovsky. My brothers have got me the
post of superintendent there. . . . I am going to be a coal miner."
"Stay, I know those mines. Shashkovsky is my uncle, you know. But . . .
what are you going there for?" asked Mlle. Ilovaisky, looking at Liharev
in surprise.
"As superintendent. To superintend the coal mines."
"I don't understand!" she shrugged her shoulders. "You are going to the
mines. But you know, it's the bare steppe, a desert, so dreary that you
couldn't exist a day there! It's horrible coal, no one will buy it, and
my uncle's a maniac, a despot, a bankrupt . . . . You won't get your
salary!"
"No matter," said Liharev, unconcernedly, "I am thankful even for coal
mines."
She shrugged her shoulders, and walked about the room in agitation.
"I don't understand, I don't understand," she said, moving her fingers
before her face. "It's impossible, and . . . and irrational! You must
understand that it's . . . it's worse than exile. It is a living tomb! O
Heavens!" she said hotly, going up to Liharev and moving her fingers
before his smiling face; her upper lip was quivering, and her sharp face
turned pale, "Come, picture it, the bare steppe, solitude. There is no
one to say a word to there, and you . . . are enthusiastic over women!
Coal mines . . . and women!"
Mlle. Ilovaisky was suddenly ashamed of her heat and, turning away from
Liharev, walked to the window.
"No, no, you can't go there," she said, moving her fingers rapidly over
the pane.
Not only in her heart, but even in her spine she felt that behind her
stood an infinitely unhappy man, lost and outcast, while he, as though
he were unaware of his unhappiness, as though he had not shed tears in
the night, was looking at her with a kindly smile. Better he should go
on weeping! She walked up and down the room several times in agitation,
then stopped short in a corner and sank into thought. Liharev was saying
something, but she did not hear him. Turning her back on him she took
out of her purse a money note, stood for a long time crumpling it in her
hand, and looking round at Liharev, blushed and put it in her pocket.
The coachman's voice was heard through the door. With a stern,
concentrated face she began putting on her things in silence. Liharev
wrapped her up, chatting gaily, but every word he said lay on her heart
like a weight. It is not cheering to hear the unhappy or the dying jest.
When the transformation of a live person into a shapeless bundle had
been completed, Mlle. Ilovaisky looked for the last time round the
"travellers' room," stood a moment in silence, and slowly walked out.
Liharev went to see her off. . . .
Outside, God alone knows why, the winter was raging still. Whole clouds
of big soft snowflakes were whirling restlessly over the earth, unable
to find a resting-place. The horses, the sledge, the trees, a bull tied
to a post, all were white and seemed soft and fluffy.
"Well, God help you," muttered Liharev, tucking her into the sledge.
"Don't remember evil against me . . . ."
She was silent. When the sledge started, and had to go round a huge
snowdrift, she looked back at Liharev with an expression as though she
wanted to say something to him. He ran up to her, but she did not say a
word to him, she only looked at him through her long eyelashes with
little specks of snow on them.
Whether his finely intuitive soul were really able to read that look, or
whether his imagination deceived him, it suddenly began to seem to him
that with another touch or two that girl would have forgiven him his
failures, his age, his desolate position, and would have followed him
without question or reasonings. He stood a long while as though rooted
to the spot, gazing at the tracks left by the sledge runners. The
snowflakes greedily settled on his hair, his beard, his shoulders. . . .
Soon the track of the runners had vanished, and he himself covered with
snow, began to look like a white rock, but still his eyes kept seeking
something in the clouds of snow. ROTHSCHILD'S FIDDLE
THE town was a little one, worse than a village, and it was inhabited by
scarcely any but old people who died with an infrequency that was really
annoying. In the hospital and in the prison fortress very few coffins
were needed. In fact business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been an
undertaker in the chief town of the province he would certainly have had
a house of his own, and people would have addressed him as Yakov
Matveyitch; here in this wretched little town people called him simply
Yakov; his nickname in the street was for some reason Bronze, and he
lived in a poor way like a humble peasant, in a little old hut in which
there was only one room, and in this room he and Marfa, the stove, a
double bed, the coffins, his bench, and all their belongings were
crowded together.
Yakov made good, solid coffins. For peasants and working people he made
them to fit himself, and this was never unsuccessful, for there were
none taller and stronger than he, even in the prison, though he was
seventy. For gentry and for women he made them to measure, and used an
iron foot-rule for the purpose. He was very unwilling to take orders for
children's coffins, and made them straight off without measurements,
contemptuously, and when he was paid for the work he always said:
"I must confess I don't like trumpery jobs."
Apart from his trade, playing the fiddle brought him in a small income.
The Jews' orchestra conducted by Moisey Ilyitch Shahkes, the tinsmith,
who took more than half their receipts for himself, played as a rule at
weddings in the town. As Yakov played very well on the fiddle,
especially Russian songs, Shahkes sometimes invited him to join the
orchestra at a fee of half a rouble a day, in addition to tips from the
visitors. When Bronze sat in the orchestra first of all his face became
crimson and perspiring; it was hot, there was a suffocating smell of
garlic, the fiddle squeaked, the double bass wheezed close to his right
ear, while the flute wailed at his left, played by a gaunt, red-haired
Jew who had a perfect network of red and blue veins all over his face,
and who bore the name of the famous millionaire Rothschild. And this
accursed Jew contrived to play even the liveliest things plaintively.
For no apparent reason Yakov little by little became possessed by hatred
and contempt for the Jews, and especially for Rothschild; he began to
pick quarrels with him, rail at him in unseemly language and once even
tried to strike him, and Rothschild was offended and said, looking at
him ferociously:
"If it were not that I respect you for your talent, I would have sent
you flying out of the window."
Then he began to weep. And because of this Yakov was not often asked to
play in the orchestra; he was only sent for in case of extreme necessity
in the absence of one of the Jews.
Yakov was never in a good temper, as he was continually having to put up
with terrible losses. For instance, it was a sin to work on Sundays or
Saints' days, and Monday was an unlucky day, so that in the course of
the year there were some two hundred days on which, whether he liked it
or not, he had to sit with his hands folded. And only think, what a loss
that meant. If anyone in the town had a wedding without music, or if
Shahkes did not send for Yakov, that was a loss, too. The superintendent
of the prison was ill for two years and was wasting away, and Yakov was
impatiently waiting for him to die, but the superintendent went away to
the chief town of the province to be doctored, and there took and died.
There's a loss for you, ten roubles at least, as there would have been
an expensive coffin to make, lined with brocade. The thought of his
losses haunted Yakov, especially at night; he laid his fiddle on the bed
beside him, and when all sorts of nonsensical ideas came into his mind
he touched a string; the fiddle gave out a sound in the darkness, and he
felt better.
On the sixth of May of the previous year Marfa had suddenly been taken
ill. The old woman's breathing was laboured, she drank a great deal of
water, and she staggered as she walked, yet she lighted the stove in the
morning and even went herself to get water. Towards evening she lay
down. Yakov played his fiddle all day; when it was quite dark he took
the book in which he used every day to put down his losses, and, feeling
dull, he began adding up the total for the year. It came to more than a
thousand roubles. This so agitated him that he flung the reckoning beads
down, and trampled them under his feet. Then he picked up the reckoning
beads, and again spent a long time clicking with them and heaving deep,
strained sighs. His face was crimson and wet with perspiration. He
thought that if he had put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, the
interest for a year would have been at least forty roubles, so that
forty roubles was a loss too. In fact, wherever one turned there were
losses and nothing else.
"Yakov!" Marfa called unexpectedly. "I am dying."
He looked round at his wife. Her face was rosy with fever, unusually
bright and joyful-looking. Bronze, accustomed to seeing her face always
pale, timid, and unhappy-looking, was bewildered. It looked as if she
really were dying and were glad that she was going away for ever from
that hut, from the coffins, and from Yakov. . . . And she gazed at the
ceiling and moved her lips, and her expression was one of happiness, as
though she saw death as her deliverer and were whispering with him.
It was daybreak; from the windows one could see the flush of dawn.
Looking at the old woman, Yakov for some reason reflected that he had
not once in his life been affectionate to her, had had no feeling for
her, had never once thought to buy her a kerchief, or to bring her home
some dainty from a wedding, but had done nothing but shout at her, scold
her for his losses, shake his fists at her; it is true he had never
actually beaten her, but he had frightened her, and at such times she
had always been numb with terror. Why, he had forbidden her to drink tea
because they spent too much without that, and she drank only hot water.
And he understood why she had such a strange, joyful face now, and he
was overcome with dread.
As soon as it was morning he borrowed a horse from a neighbour and took
Marfa to the hospital. There were not many patients there, and so he had
not long to wait, only three hours. To his great satisfaction the
patients were not being received by the doctor, who was himself ill, but
by the assistant, Maxim Nikolaitch, an old man of whom everyone in the
town used to say that, though he drank and was quarrelsome, he knew more
than the doctor.
"I wish you good-day," said Yakov, leading his old woman into the
consulting room. "You must excuse us, Maxim Nikolaitch, we are always
troubling you with our trumpery affairs. Here you see my better half is
ailing, the partner of my life, as they say, excuse the expression. . .
."
Knitting his grizzled brows and stroking his whiskers the assistant
began to examine the old woman, and she sat on a stool, a wasted, bent
figure with a sharp nose and open mouth, looking like a bird that wants
to drink.
"H---m . . . Ah! . . ." the assistant said slowly, and he heaved a sigh.
"Influenza and possibly fever. There's typhus in the town now. Well, the
old woman has lived her life, thank God. . . . How old is she?"
"She'll be seventy in another year, Maxim Nikolaitch."
"Well, the old woman has lived her life, it's time to say good-bye."
"You are quite right in what you say, of course, Maxim Nikolaitch," said
Yakov, smiling from politeness, "and we thank you feelingly for your
kindness, but allow me to say every insect wants to live."
"To be sure," said the assistant, in a tone which suggested that it
depended upon him whether the woman lived or died. "Well, then, my good
fellow, put a cold compress on her head, and give her these powders
twice a day, and so good-bye. Bonjour."
From the expression of his face Yakov saw that it was a bad case, and
that no sort of powders would be any help; it was clear to him that
Marfa would die very soon, if not to-day, to-morrow. He nudged the
assistant's elbow, winked at him, and said in a low voice:
"If you would just cup her, Maxim Nikolaitch."
"I have no time, I have no time, my good fellow. Take your old woman and
go in God's name. Goodbye."
"Be so gracious," Yakov besought him. "You know yourself that if, let us
say, it were her stomach or her inside that were bad, then powders or
drops, but you see she had got a chill! In a chill the first thing is to
let blood, Maxim Nikolaitch."
But the assistant had already sent for the next patient, and a peasant
woman came into the consulting room with a boy.
"Go along! go along," he said to Yakov, frowning. "It's no use to-"
"In that case put on leeches, anyway! Make us pray for you for ever."
The assistant flew into a rage and shouted:
"You speak to me again! You blockhead. . . ."
Yakov flew into a rage too, and he turned crimson all over, but he did
not utter a word. He took Marfa on his arm and led her out of the room.
Only when they were sitting in the cart he looked morosely and
ironically at the hospital, and said:
"A nice set of artists they have settled here! No fear, but he would
have cupped a rich man, but even a leech he grudges to the poor. The
Herods!"
When they got home and went into the hut, Marfa stood for ten minutes
holding on to the stove. It seemed to her that if she were to lie down
Yakov would talk to her about his losses, and scold her for lying down
and not wanting to work. Yakov looked at her drearily and thought that
to-morrow was St. John the Divine's, and next day St. Nikolay the
Wonder-worker's, and the day after that was Sunday, and then Monday, an
unlucky day. For four days he would not be able to work, and most likely
Marfa would die on one of those days; so he would have to make the
coffin to-day. He picked up his iron rule, went up to the old woman and
took her measure. Then she lay down, and he crossed himself and began
making the coffin.
When the coffin was finished Bronze put on his spectacles and wrote in
his book: "Marfa Ivanov's coffin, two roubles, forty kopecks."
And he heaved a sigh. The old woman lay all the time silent with her
eyes closed. But in the evening, when it got dark, she suddenly called
the old man.
"Do you remember, Yakov," she asked, looking at him joyfully. "Do you
remember fifty years ago God gave us a little baby with flaxen hair? We
used always to be sitting by the river then, singing songs . . . under
the willows," and laughing bitterly, she added: "The baby girl died."
Yakov racked his memory, but could not remember the baby or the willows.
"It's your fancy," he said.
The priest arrived; he administered the sacrament and extreme unction.
Then Marfa began muttering something unintelligible, and towards morning
she died. Old women, neighbours, washed her, dressed her, and laid her
in the coffin. To avoid paying the sacristan, Yakov read the psalms over
the body himself, and they got nothing out of him for the grave, as the
grave-digger was a crony of his. Four peasants carried the coffin to the
graveyard, not for money, but from respect. The coffin was followed by
old women, beggars, and a couple of crazy saints, and the people who met
it crossed themselves piously. . . . And Yakov was very much pleased
that it was so creditable, so decorous, and so cheap, and no offence to
anyone. As he took his last leave of Marfa he touched the coffin and
thought: "A good piece of work!"
But as he was going back from the cemetery he was overcome by acute
depression. He didn't feel quite well: his breathing was laboured and
feverish, his legs felt weak, and he had a craving for drink. And
thoughts of all sorts forced themselves on his mind. He remembered again
that all his life he had never felt for Marfa, had never been
affectionate to her. The fifty-two years they had lived in the same hut
had dragged on a long, long time, but it had somehow happened that in
all that time he had never once thought of her, had paid no attention to
her, as though she had been a cat or a dog. And yet, every day, she had
lighted the stove, had cooked and baked, had gone for the water, had
chopped the wood, had slept with him in the same bed, and when he came
home drunk from the weddings always reverently hung his fiddle on the
wall and put him to bed, and all this in silence, with a timid, anxious
expression.
Rothschild, smiling and bowing, came to meet Yakov.
"I was looking for you, uncle," he said. "Moisey Ilyitch sends you his
greetings and bids you come to him at once."
Yakov felt in no mood for this. He wanted to cry.
"Leave me alone," he said, and walked on.
"How can you," Rothschild said, fluttered, running on in front. "Moisey
Ilyitch will be offended! He bade you come at once!"
Yakov was revolted at the Jew's gasping for breath and blinking, and
having so many red freckles on his face. And it was disgusting to look
at his green coat with black patches on it, and all his fragile, refined
figure.
"Why are you pestering me, garlic?" shouted Yakov. "Don't persist!"
The Jew got angry and shouted too:
"Not so noisy, please, or I'll send you flying over the fence!"
"Get out of my sight!" roared Yakov, and rushed at him with his fists.
"One can't live for you scabby Jews!"
Rothschild, half dead with terror, crouched down and waved his hands
over his head, as though to ward off a blow; then he leapt up and ran
away as fast as his legs could carry him: as he ran he gave little skips
and kept clasping his hands, and Yakov could see how his long thin spine
wriggled. Some boys, delighted at the incident, ran after him shouting
"Jew! Jew!" Some dogs joined in the chase barking. Someone burst into a
roar of laughter, then gave a whistle; the dogs barked with even more
noise and unanimity. Then a dog must have bitten Rothschild, as a
desperate, sickly scream was heard.
Yakov went for a walk on the grazing ground, then wandered on at random
in the outskirts of the town, while the street boys shouted:
"Here's Bronze! Here's Bronze!"
He came to the river, where the curlews floated in the air uttering
shrill cries and the ducks quacked. The sun was blazing hot, and there
was a glitter from the water, so that it hurt the eyes to look at it.
Yakov walked by a path along the bank and saw a plump, rosy-cheeked lady
come out of the bathing-shed, and thought about her: "Ugh! you otter!"
Not far from the bathing-shed boys were catching crayfish with bits of
meat; seeing him, they began shouting spitefully, "Bronze! Bronze!" And
then he saw an old spreading willow-tree with a big hollow in it, and a
crow's nest on it. . . . And suddenly there rose up vividly in Yakov's
memory a baby with flaxen hair, and the willow-tree Marfa had spoken of.
Why, that is it, the same willow-tree-green, still, and sorrowful. . . .
How old it has grown, poor thing!
He sat down under it and began to recall the past. On the other bank,
where now there was the water meadow, in those days there stood a big
birchwood, and yonder on the bare hillside that could be seen on the
horizon an old, old pine forest used to be a bluish patch in the
distance. Big boats used to sail on the river. But now it was all smooth
and unruffled, and on the other bank there stood now only one birch-
tree, youthful and slender like a young lady, and there was nothing on
the river but ducks and geese, and it didn't look as though there had
ever been boats on it. It seemed as though even the geese were fewer
than of old. Yakov shut his eyes, and in his imagination huge flocks of
white geese soared, meeting one another.
He wondered how it had happened that for the last forty or fifty years
of his life he had never once been to the river, or if he had been by it
he had not paid attention to it. Why, it was a decent sized river, not a
trumpery one; he might have gone in for fishing and sold the fish to
merchants, officials, and the bar-keeper at the station, and then have
put money in the bank; he might have sailed in a boat from one house to
another, playing the fiddle, and people of all classes would have paid
to hear him; he might have tried getting big boats afloat again-that
would be better than making coffins; he might have bred geese, killed
them and sent them in the winter to Moscow. Why, the feathers alone
would very likely mount up to ten roubles in the year. But he had wasted
his time, he had done nothing of this. What losses! Ah! What losses! And
if he had gone in for all those things at once-catching fish and playing
the fiddle, and running boats and killing geese-what a fortune he would
have made! But nothing of this had happened, even in his dreams; life
had passed uselessly without any pleasure, had been wasted for nothing,
not even a pinch of snuff; there was nothing left in front, and if one
looked back-there was nothing there but losses, and such terrible ones,
it made one cold all over. And why was it a man could not live so as to
avoid these losses and misfortunes? One wondered why they had cut down
the birch copse and the pine forest. Why was he walking with no reason
on the grazing ground? Why do people always do what isn't needful? Why
had Yakov all his life scolded, bellowed, shaken his fists, ill-treated
his wife, and, one might ask, what necessity was there for him to
frighten and insult the Jew that day? Why did people in general hinder
each other from living? What losses were due to it! what terrible
losses! If it were not for hatred and malice people would get immense
benefit from one another.
In the evening and the night he had visions of the baby, of the willow,
of fish, of slaughtered geese, and Marfa looking in profile like a bird
that wants to drink, and the pale, pitiful face of Rothschild, and faces
moved down from all sides and muttered of losses. He tossed from side to
side, and got out of bed five times to play the fiddle.
In the morning he got up with an effort and went to the hospital. The
same Maxim Nikolaitch told him to put a cold compress on his head, and
gave him some powders, and from his tone and expression of face Yakov
realized that it was a bad case and that no powders would be any use. As
he went home afterwards, he reflected that death would be nothing but a
benefit; he would not have to eat or drink, or pay taxes or offend
people, and, as a man lies in his grave not for one year but for
hundreds and thousands, if one reckoned it up the gain would be
enormous. A man's life meant loss: death meant gain. This reflection
was, of course, a just one, but yet it was bitter and mortifying; why
was the order of the world so strange, that life, which is given to man
only once, passes away without benefit?
He was not sorry to die, but at home, as soon as he saw his fiddle, it
sent a pang to his heart and he felt sorry. He could not take the fiddle
with him to the grave, and now it would be left forlorn, and the same
thing would happen to it as to the birch copse and the pine forest.
Everything in this world was wasted and would be wasted! Yakov went out
of the hut and sat in the doorway, pressing the fiddle to his bosom.
Thinking of his wasted, profitless life, he began to play, he did not
know what, but it was plaintive and touching, and tears trickled down
his cheeks. And the harder he thought, the more mournfully the fiddle
wailed.
The latch clicked once and again, and Rothschild appeared at the gate.
He walked across half the yard boldly, but seeing Yakov he stopped
short, and seemed to shrink together, and probably from terror, began
making signs with his hands as though he wanted to show on his fingers
what o'clock it was.
"Come along, it's all right," said Yakov in a friendly tone, and he
beckoned him to come up. "Come along!"
Looking at him mistrustfully and apprehensively, Rothschild began to
advance, and stopped seven feet off.
"Be so good as not to beat me," he said, ducking. "Moisey Ilyitch has
sent me again. 'Don't be afraid,' he said; 'go to Yakov again and tell
him,' he said, 'we can't get on without him.' There is a wedding on
Wednesday. . . . Ye--es! Mr. Shapovalov is marrying his daughter to a
good man. . . . And it will be a grand wedding, oo-oo!" added the Jew,
screwing up one eye.
"I can't come," said Yakov, breathing hard. "I'm ill, brother."
And he began playing again, and the tears gushed from his eyes on to the
fiddle. Rothschild listened attentively, standing sideways to him and
folding his arms on his chest. The scared and perplexed expression on
his face, little by little, changed to a look of woe and suffering; he
rolled his eyes as though he were experiencing an agonizing ecstasy, and
articulated, "Vachhh!" and tears slowly ran down his cheeks and trickled
on his greenish coat.
And Yakov lay in bed all the rest of the day grieving. In the evening,
when the priest confessing him asked, Did he remember any special sin he
had committed? straining his failing memory he thought again of Marfa's
unhappy face, and the despairing shriek of the Jew when the dog bit him,
and said, hardly audibly, "Give the fiddle to Rothschild."
"Very well," answered the priest.
And now everyone in the town asks where Rothschild got such a fine
fiddle. Did he buy it or steal it? Or perhaps it had come to him as a
pledge. He gave up the flute long ago, and now plays nothing but the
fiddle. As plaintive sounds flow now from his bow, as came once from his
flute, but when he tries to repeat what Yakov played, sitting in the
doorway, the effect is something so sad and sorrowful that his audience
weep, and he himself rolls his eyes and articulates "Vachhh! . . ." And
this new air was so much liked in the town that the merchants and
officials used to be continually sending for Rothschild and making him
play it over and over again a dozen times. IVAN MATVEYITCH
BETWEEN five and six in the evening. A fairly well-known man of
learning-we will call him simply the man of learning-is sitting in his
study nervously biting his nails.
"It's positively revolting," he says, continually looking at his watch.
"It shows the utmost disrespect for another man's time and work. In
England such a person would not earn a farthing, he would die of hunger.
You wait a minute, when you do come . . . ."
And feeling a craving to vent his wrath and impatience upon someone, the
man of learning goes to the door leading to his wife's room and knocks.
"Listen, Katya," he says in an indignant voice. "If you see Pyotr
Danilitch, tell him that decent people don't do such things. It's
abominable! He recommends a secretary, and does not know the sort of man
he is recommending! The wretched boy is two or three hours late with
unfailing regularity every day. Do you call that a secretary? Those two
or three hours are more precious to me than two or three years to other
people. When he does come I will swear at him like a dog, and won't pay
him and will kick him out. It's no use standing on ceremony with people
like that!"
"You say that every day, and yet he goes on coming and coming."
"But to-day I have made up my mind. I have lost enough through him. You
must excuse me, but I shall swear at him like a cabman."
At last a ring is heard. The man of learning makes a grave face; drawing
himself up, and, throwing back his head, he goes into the entry. There
his amanuensis Ivan Matveyitch, a young man of eighteen, with a face
oval as an egg and no moustache, wearing a shabby, mangy overcoat and no
goloshes, is already standing by the hatstand. He is in breathless
haste, and scrupulously wipes his huge clumsy boots on the doormat,
trying as he does so to conceal from the maidservant a hole in his boot
through which a white sock is peeping. Seeing the man of learning he
smiles with that broad, prolonged, somewhat foolish smile which is seen
only on the faces of children or very good-natured people.
"Ah, good evening!" he says, holding out a big wet hand. "Has your sore
throat gone?"
"Ivan Matveyitch," says the man of learning in a shaking voice, stepping
back and clasping his hands together. "Ivan Matveyitch."
Then he dashes up to the amanuensis, clutches him by the shoulders, and
begins feebly shaking him.
"What a way to treat me!" he says with despair in his voice. "You
dreadful, horrid fellow, what a way to treat me! Are you laughing at me,
are you jeering at me? Eh?"
Judging from the smile which still lingered on his face Ivan Matveyitch
had expected a very different reception, and so, seeing the man of
learning's countenance eloquent of indignation, his oval face grows
longer than ever, and he opens his mouth in amazement.
"What is . . . what is it?" he asks.
"And you ask that?" the man of learning clasps his hands. "You know how
precious time is to me, and you are so late. You are two hours late! . .
. Have you no fear of God?"
"I haven't come straight from home," mutters Ivan Matveyitch, untying
his scarf irresolutely. "I have been at my aunt's name-day party, and my
aunt lives five miles away. . . . If I had come straight from home, then
it would have been a different thing."
"Come, reflect, Ivan Matveyitch, is there any logic in your conduct?
Here you have work to do, work at a fixed time, and you go flying off
after name-day parties and aunts! But do make haste and undo your
wretched scarf! It's beyond endurance, really!"
The man of learning dashes up to the amanuensis again and helps him to
disentangle his scarf.
"You are done up like a peasant woman, . . . Come along, . . . Please
make haste!"
Blowing his nose in a dirty, crumpled-up handkerchief and pulling down
his grey reefer jacket, Ivan Matveyitch goes through the hall and the
drawing-room to the study. There a place and paper and even cigarettes
had been put ready for him long ago.
"Sit down, sit down," the man of learning urges him on, rubbing his
hands impatiently. "You are an unsufferable person. . . . You know the
work has to be finished by a certain time, and then you are so late. One
is forced to scold you. Come, write, . . . Where did we stop?"
Ivan Matveyitch smooths his bristling cropped hair and takes up his pen.
The man of learning walks up and down the room, concentrates himself,
and begins to dictate:
"The fact is . . . comma . . . that so to speak fundamental forms . . .
have you written it? . . . forms are conditioned entirely by the
essential nature of those principles . . . comma . . . which find in
them their expression and can only be embodied in them . . . . New line,
. . . There's a stop there, of course. . . . More independence is found
. . . is found . . . by the forms which have not so much a political . .
. comma . . . as a social character . ."
"The high-school boys have a different uniform now . . . a grey one,"
said Ivan Matveyitch, "when I was at school it was better: they used to
wear regular uniforms."
"Oh dear, write please!" says the man of learning wrathfully. "Character
. . . have you written it? Speaking of the forms relating to the
organization . . . of administrative functions, and not to the
regulation of the life of the people . . . comma . . . it cannot be said
that they are marked by the nationalism of their forms . . . the last
three words in inverted commas. . . . Aie, aie . . . tut, tut . . . so
what did you want to say about the high school?"
"That they used to wear a different uniform in my time."
"Aha! . . . indeed, . . . Is it long since you left the high school?"
"But I told you that yesterday. It is three years since I left school. .
. . I left in the fourth class."
"And why did you give up high school?" asks the man of learning, looking
at Ivan Matveyitch's writing.
"Oh, through family circumstances."
"Must I speak to you again, Ivan Matveyitch? When will you get over your
habit of dragging out the lines? There ought not to be less than forty
letters in a line."
"What, do you suppose I do it on purpose?" says Ivan Matveyitch,
offended. "There are more than forty letters in some of the other lines.
. . . You count them. And if you think I don't put enough in the line,
you can take something off my pay."
"Oh dear, that's not the point. You have no delicacy, really. . . . At
the least thing you drag in money. The great thing is to be exact, Ivan
Matveyitch, to be exact is the great thing. You ought to train yourself
to be exact."
The maidservant brings in a tray with two glasses of tea on it, and a
basket of rusks. . . . Ivan Matveyitch takes his glass awkwardly with
both hands, and at once begins drinking it. The tea is too hot. To avoid
burning his mouth Ivan Matveyitch tries to take a tiny sip. He eats one
rusk, then a second, then a third, and, looking sideways, with
embarrassment, at the man of learning, timidly stretches after a fourth.
. . . The noise he makes in swallowing, the relish with which he smacks
his lips, and the expression of hungry greed in his raised eyebrows
irritate the man of learning.
"Make haste and finish, time is precious."
"You dictate, I can drink and write at the same time. . . . I must
confess I was hungry."
"I should think so after your walk!"
"Yes, and what wretched weather! In our parts there is a scent of spring
by now. . . . There are puddles everywhere; the snow is melting."
"You are a southerner, I suppose?"
"From the Don region. . . . It's quite spring with us by March. Here it
is frosty, everyone's in a fur coat, . . . but there you can see the
grass . . . it's dry everywhere, and one can even catch tarantulas."
"And what do you catch tarantulas for?"
"Oh! . . . to pass the time . . ." says Ivan Matveyitch, and he sighs.
"It's fun catching them. You fix a bit of pitch on a thread, let it down
into their hole and begin hitting the tarantula on the back with the
pitch, and the brute gets cross, catches hold of the pitch with his
claws, and gets stuck. . . . And what we used to do with them! We used
to put a basinful of them together and drop a bihorka in with them."
"What is a bihorka?"
"That's another spider, very much the same as a tarantula. In a fight
one of them can kill a hundred tarantulas."
"H'm! . . . But we must write, . . . Where did we stop?"
The man of learning dictates another twenty lines, then sits plunged in
meditation.
Ivan Matveyitch, waiting while the other cogitates, sits and, craning
his neck, puts the collar of his shirt to rights. His tie will not set
properly, the stud has come out, and the collar keeps coming apart.
"H'm! . . ." says the man of learning. "Well, haven't you found a job
yet, Ivan Matveyitch?"
"No. And how is one to find one? I am thinking, you know, of
volunteering for the army. But my father advises my going into a
chemist's."
"H'm! . . . But it would be better for you to go into the university.
The examination is difficult, but with patience and hard work you could
get through. Study, read more. . . . Do you read much?"
"Not much, I must own . . ." says Ivan Matveyitch, lighting a cigarette.
"Have you read Turgenev?"
"N-no. . . ."
"And Gogol?"
"Gogol. H'm! . . . Gogol. . . . No, I haven't read him!"
"Ivan Matveyitch! Aren't you ashamed? Aie! aie! You are such a nice
fellow, so much that is original in you . . . you haven't even read
Gogol! You must read him! I will give you his works! It's essential to
read him! We shall quarrel if you don't!"
Again a silence follows. The man of learning meditates, half reclining
on a soft lounge, and Ivan Matveyitch, leaving his collar in peace,
concentrates his whole attention on his boots. He has not till then
noticed that two big puddles have been made by the snow melting off his
boots on the floor. He is ashamed.
"I can't get on to-day . . ." mutters the man of learning. "I suppose
you are fond of catching birds, too, Ivan Matveyitch?"
"That's in autumn, . . . I don't catch them here, but there at home I
always did."
"To be sure . . . very good. But we must write, though."
The man of learning gets up resolutely and begins dictating, but after
ten lines sits down on the lounge again.
"No. . . . Perhaps we had better put it off till to-morrow morning," he
says. "Come to-morrow morning, only come early, at nine o'clock. God
preserve you from being late!"
Ivan Matveyitch lays down his pen, gets up from the table and sits in
another chair. Five minutes pass in silence, and he begins to feel it is
time for him to go, that he is in the way; but in the man of learning's
study it is so snug and light and warm, and the impression of the nice
rusks and sweet tea is still so fresh that there is a pang at his heart
at the mere thought of home. At home there is poverty, hunger, cold, his
grumbling father, scoldings, and here it is so quiet and unruffled, and
interest even is taken in his tarantulas and birds.
The man of learning looks at his watch and takes up a book.
"So you will give me Gogol?' says Ivan Matveyitch, getting up.
"Yes, yes! But why are you in such a hurry, my dear boy? Sit down and
tell me something . . ."
Ivan Matveyitch sits down and smiles broadly. Almost every evening he
sits in this study and always feels something extraordinarily soft,
attracting him, as it were akin, in the voice and the glance of the man
of learning. There are moments when he even fancies that the man of
learning is becoming attached to him, used to him, and that if he scolds
him for being late, it's simply because he misses his chatter about
tarantulas and how they catch goldfinches on the Don. ZINOTCHKA
THE party of sportsmen spent the night in a peasant's hut on some newly
mown hay. The moon peeped in at the window; from the street came the
mournful wheezing of a concertina; from the hay came a sickly sweet,
faintly troubling scent. The sportsmen talked about dogs, about women,
about first love, and about snipe. After all the ladies of their
acquaintance had been picked to pieces, and hundreds of stories had been
told, the stoutest of the sportsmen, who looked in the darkness like a
haycock, and who talked in the mellow bass of a staff officer, gave a
loud yawn and said:
"It is nothing much to be loved; the ladies are created for the purpose
of loving us men. But, tell me, has any one of you fellows been hated-
passionately, furiously hated? Has any one of you watched the ecstasies
of hatred? Eh?"
No answer followed.
"Has no one, gentlemen?" asked the staff officer's bass voice. "But I,
now, have been hated, hated by a pretty girl, and have been able to
study the symptoms of first hatred directed against myself. It was the
first, because it was something exactly the converse of first love. What
I am going to tell, however, happened when I knew nothing about love or
hate. I was eight at the time, but that made no difference; in this case
it was not he but she that mattered. Well, I beg your attention. One
fine summer evening, just before sunset, I was sitting in the nursery,
doing my lesson with my governess, Zinotchka, a very charming and
poetical creature who had left boarding school not long before.
Zinotchka looked absent-mindedly towards the window and said:
"'Yes. We breathe in oxygen; now tell me, Petya, what do we breathe
out?'
"'Carbonic acid gas,' I answered, looking towards the same window.
"'Right,' assented Zinotchka. 'Plants, on the contrary, breathe in
carbonic acid gas, and breathe out oxygen. Carbonic acid gas is
contained in seltzer water, and in the fumes from the samovar. . . . It
is a very noxious gas. Near Naples there is the so-called Cave of Dogs,
which contains carbonic acid gas; a dog dropped into it is suffocated
and dies.'
"This luckless Cave of Dogs near Naples is a chemical marvel beyond
which no governess ventures to go. Zinotchka always hotly maintained the
usefulness of natural science, but I doubt if she knew any chemistry
beyond this Cave.
"Well, she told me to repeat it. I repeated it. She asked me what was
meant by the horizon. I answered. And meantime, while we were ruminating
over the horizon and the Cave, in the yard below, my father was just
getting ready to go shooting. The dogs yapped, the trace horses shifted
from one leg to another impatiently and coquetted with the coachman, the
footman packed the waggonette with parcels and all sorts of things.
Beside the waggonette stood a brake in which my mother and sisters were
sitting to drive to a name-day party at the Ivanetskys'. No one was left
in the house but Zinotchka, me, and my eldest brother, a student, who
had toothache. You can imagine my envy and my boredom.
"'Well, what do we breathe in?' asked Zinotchka, looking at the window.
"'Oxygen. . .'
"'Yes. And the horizon is the name given to the place where it seems to
us as though the earth meets the sky.'
"Then the waggonette drove off, and after it the brake. . . . I saw
Zinotchka take a note out of her pocket, crumple it up convulsively and
press it to her temple, then she flushed crimson and looked at her
watch.
"'So, remember,' she said, 'that near Naples is the so-called Cave of
Dogs. . . .' She glanced at her watch again and went on: 'where the sky
seems to us to meet the earth. . . .'
"The poor girl in violent agitation walked about the room, and once more
glanced at her watch. There was another half-hour before the end of our
lesson.
"'Now arithmetic,' she said, breathing hard and turning over the pages
of the sum-book with a trembling hand. 'Come, you work out problem 325
and I . . . will be back directly.'
"She went out. I heard her scurry down the stairs, and then I saw her
dart across the yard in her blue dress and vanish through the garden
gate. The rapidity of her movements, the flush on her cheeks and her
excitement, aroused my curiosity. Where had she run, and what for? Being
intelligent beyond my years I soon put two and two together, and
understood it all: she had run into the garden, taking advantage of the
absence of my stern parents, to steal in among the raspberry bushes, or
to pick herself some cherries. If that were so, dash it all, I would go
and have some cherries too. I threw aside the sum-book and ran into the
garden. I ran to the cherry orchard, but she was not there. Passing by
the raspberries, the gooseberries, and the watchman's shanty, she
crossed the kitchen garden and reached the pond, pale, and starting at
every sound. I stole after her, and what I saw, my friends, was this. At
the edge of the pond, between the thick stumps of two old willows, stood
my elder brother, Sasha; one could not see from his face that he had
toothache. He looked towards Zinotchka as she approached him, and his
whole figure was lighted up by an expression of happiness as though by
sunshine. And Zinotchka, as though she were being driven into the Cave
of Dogs, and were being forced to breathe carbonic acid gas, walked
towards him, scarcely able to move one leg before the other, breathing
hard, with her head thrown back. . . . To judge from appearances she was
going to a rendezous for the first time in her life. But at last she
reached him. . . . For half a minute they gazed at each other in
silence, as though they could not believe their eyes. Thereupon some
force seemed to shove Zinotchka; she laid her hands on Sasha's shoulders
and let her head droop upon his waistcoat. Sasha laughed, muttered
something incoherent, and with the clumsiness of a man head over ears in
love, laid both hands on Zinotchka's face. And the weather, gentlemen,
was exquisite. . . . The hill behind which the sun was setting, the two
willows, the green bank, the sky-all together with Sasha and Zinotchka
were reflected in the pond . . . perfect stillness . . . you can imagine
it. Millions of butterflies with long whiskers gleamed golden above the
reeds; beyond the garden they were driving the cattle. In fact, it was a
perfect picture.
"Of all I had seen the only thing I understood was that Sasha was
kissing Zinotchka. That was improper. If maman heard of it they would
both catch it. Feeling for some reason ashamed I went back to the
nursery, not waiting for the end of the rendezvous. There I sat over the
sum-book, pondered and reflected. A triumphant smile strayed upon my
countenance. On one side it was agreeable to be the possessor of another
person's secret; on the other it was also very agreeable that such
authorities as Sasha and Zinotchka might at any moment be convicted by
me of ignorance of the social proprieties. Now they were in my power,
and their peace was entirely dependent on my magnanimity. I'd let them
know.
"When I went to bed, Zinotchka came into the nursery as usual to find
out whether I had dropped asleep without undressing and whether I had
said my prayers. I looked at her pretty, happy face and grinned. I was
bursting with my secret and itching to let it out. I had to drop a hint
and enjoy the effect.
"'I know,' I said, grinning. 'Gy-y.'
"'What do you know?'
"'Gy-y! I saw you near the willows kissing Sasha. I followed you and saw
it all.'
"Zinotchka started, flushed all over, and overwhelmed by 'my hint' she
sank down on the chair, on which stood a glass of water and a
candlestick.
"'I saw you . . . kissing . . .' I repeated, sniggering and enjoying her
confusion. 'Aha! I'll tell mamma!'
"Cowardly Zinotchka gazed at me intently, and convincing herself that I
really did know all about it, clutched my hand in despair and muttered
in a trembling whisper:
"'Petya, it is low. . . . I beg of you, for God's sake. . . . Be a man .
. . don't tell anyone. . . . Decent people don't spy . . . . It's low. .
. . I entreat you.'
"The poor girl was terribly afraid of my mother, a stern and virtuous
lady-that was one thing; and the second was that my grinning countenance
could not but outrage her first love so pure and poetical, and you can
imagine the state of her heart. Thanks to me, she did not sleep a wink
all night, and in the morning she appeared at breakfast with blue rings
round her eyes. When I met Sasha after breakfast I could not refrain
from grinning and boasting:
"'I know! I saw you yesterday kissing Mademoiselle Zina!'
"Sasha looked at me and said:
"'You are a fool.'
"He was not so cowardly as Zinotchka, and so my effect did not come off.
That provoked me to further efforts. If Sasha was not frightened it was
evident that he did not believe that I had seen and knew all about it;
wait a bit, I would show him.
"At our lessons before dinner Zinotchka did not look at me, and her
voice faltered. Instead of trying to scare me she tried to propitiate me
in every way, giving me full marks, and not complaining to my father of
my naughtiness. Being intelligent beyond my years I exploited her
secret: I did not learn my lessons, walked into the schoolroom on my
head, and said all sorts of rude things. In fact, if I had remained in
that vein till to-day I should have become a famous blackmailer. Well, a
week passed. Another person's secret irritated and fretted me like a
splinter in my soul. I longed at all costs to blurt it out and gloat
over the effect. And one day at dinner, when we had a lot of visitors, I
gave a stupid snigger, looked fiendishly at Zinotchka and said:
"'I know. Gy-y! I saw! . . .'
"'What do you know?' asked my mother.
"I looked still more fiendishly at Zinotchka and Sasha. You ought to
have seen how the girl flushed up, and how furious Sasha's eyes were! I
bit my tongue and did not go on. Zinotchka gradually turned pale,
clenched her teeth, and ate no more dinner. At our evening lessons that
day I noticed a striking change in Zinotchka's face. It looked sterner,
colder, as it were, more like marble, while her eyes gazed strangely
straight into my face, and I give you my word of honour I have never
seen such terrible, annihilating eyes, even in hounds when they overtake
the wolf. I understood their expression perfectly, when in the middle of
a lesson she suddenly clenched her teeth and hissed through them:
"'I hate you! Oh, you vile, loathsome creature, if you knew how I hate
you, how I detest your cropped head, your vulgar, prominent ears!'
"But at once she took fright and said:
"'I am not speaking to you, I am repeating a part out of a play. . . .'
"Then, my friends, at night I saw her come to my bedside and gaze a long
time into my face. She hated me passionately, and could not exist away
from me. The contemplation of my hated pug of a face had become a
necessity to her. I remember a lovely summer evening . . . with the
scent of hay, perfect stillness, and so on. The moon was shining. I was
walking up and down the avenue, thinking of cherry jam. Suddenly
Zinotchka, looking pale and lovely, came up to me, she caught hold of my
hand, and breathlessly began expressing herself:
"'Oh, how I hate you! I wish no one harm as I do you! Let me tell you
that! I want you to understand that!'
"You understand, moonlight, her pale face, breathless with passion, the
stillness . . . little pig as I was I actually enjoyed it. I listened to
her, looked at her eyes. . . . At first I liked it, and enjoyed the
novelty. Then I was suddenly seized with terror, I gave a scream, and
ran into the house at breakneck speed.
"I made up my mind that the best thing to do was to complain to maman.
And I did complain, mentioning incidentally how Sasha had kissed
Zinotchka. I was stupid, and did not know what would follow, or I should
have kept the secret to myself. . . . After hearing my story maman
flushed with indignation and said:
"'It is not your business to speak about that, you are still very young.
. . . But, what an example for children.'
"My maman was not only virtuous but diplomatic. To avoid a scandal she
did not get rid of Zinotchka at once, but set to work gradually,
systematically, to pave the way for her departure, as one does with
well-bred but intolerable people. I remember that when Zinotchka did
leave us the last glance she cast at the house was directed at the
window at which I was sitting, and I assure you, I remember that glance
to this day.
"Zinotchka soon afterwards became my brother's wife. She is the Zinaida
Nikolaevna whom you know. The next time I met her I was already an
ensign. In spite of all her efforts she could not recognize the hated
Petya in the ensign with his moustache, but still she did not treat me
quite like a relation. . . . And even now, in spite of my good-humoured
baldness, meek corpulence, and unassuming air, she still looks askance
at me, and feels put out when I go to see my brother. Hatred it seems
can no more be forgotten than love. . . .
"Tchoo! I hear the cock crowing! Good-night. Milord! Lie down!" BAD
WEATHER
BIG raindrops were pattering on the dark windows. It was one of those
disgusting summer holiday rains which, when they have begun, last a long
time-for weeks, till the frozen holiday maker grows used to it, and
sinks into complete apathy. It was cold; there was a feeling of raw,
unpleasant dampness. The mother-in-law of a lawyer, called Kvashin, and
his wife, Nadyezhda Filippovna, dressed in waterproofs and shawls, were
sitting over the dinner table in the dining-room. It was written on the
countenance of the elder lady that she was, thank God, well-fed, well-
clothed and in good health, that she had married her only daughter to a
good man, and now could play her game of patience with an easy
conscience; her daughter, a rather short, plump, fair young woman of
twenty, with a gentle anæmic face, was reading a book with her elbows
on the table; judging from her eyes she was not so much reading as
thinking her own thoughts, which were not in the book. Neither of them
spoke. There was the sound of the pattering rain, and from the kitchen
they could hear the prolonged yawns of the cook.
Kvashin himself was not at home. On rainy days he did not come to the
summer villa, but stayed in town; damp, rainy weather affected his
bronchitis and prevented him from working. He was of the opinion that
the sight of the grey sky and the tears of rain on the windows deprived
one of energy and induced the spleen. In the town, where there was
greater comfort, bad weather was scarcely noticed.
After two games of patience, the old lady shuffled the cards and took a
glance at her daughter.
"I have been trying with the cards whether it will be fine to-morrow,
and whether our Alexey Stepanovitch will come," she said. "It is five
days since he was here. . . . The weather is a chastisement from God."
Nadyezhda Filippovna looked indifferently at her mother, got up, and
began walking up and down the room.
"The barometer was rising yesterday," she said doubtfully, "but they say
it is falling again to-day."
The old lady laid out the cards in three long rows and shook her head.
"Do you miss him?" she asked, glancing at her daughter.
"Of course."
"I see you do. I should think so. He hasn't been here for five days. In
May the utmost was two, or at most three days, and now it is serious,
five days! I am not his wife, and yet I miss him. And yesterday, when I
heard the barometer was rising, I ordered them to kill a chicken and
prepare a carp for Alexey Stepanovitch. He likes them. Your poor father
couldn't bear fish, but he likes it. He always eats it with relish."
"My heart aches for him," said the daughter. "We are dull, but it is
duller still for him, you know, mamma."
"I should think so! In the law-courts day in and day out, and in the
empty flat at night alone like an owl."
"And what is so awful, mamma, he is alone there without servants; there
is no one to set the samovar or bring him water. Why didn't he engage a
valet for the summer months? And what use is the summer villa at all if
he does not care for it? I told him there was no need to have it, but
no, 'It is for the sake of your health,' he said, and what is wrong with
my health? It makes me ill that he should have to put up with so much on
my account."
Looking over her mother's shoulder, the daughter noticed a mistake in
the patience, bent down to the table and began correcting it. A silence
followed. Both looked at the cards and imagined how their Alexey
Stepanovitch, utterly forlorn, was sitting now in the town in his
gloomy, empty study and working, hungry, exhausted, yearning for his
family. . . .
"Do you know what, mamma?" said Nadyezhda Filippovna suddenly, and her
eyes began to shine. "If the weather is the same to-morrow I'll go by
the first train and see him in town! Anyway, I shall find out how he is,
have a look at him, and pour out his tea."
And both of them began to wonder how it was that this idea, so simple
and easy to carry out, had not occurred to them before. It was only half
an hour in the train to the town, and then twenty minutes in a cab. They
said a little more, and went off to bed in the same room, feeling more
contented.
"Oho-ho-ho. . . . Lord, forgive us sinners!" sighed the old lady when
the clock in the hall struck two. "There is no sleeping."
"You are not asleep, mamma?" the daughter asked in a whisper. "I keep
thinking of Alyosha. I only hope he won't ruin his health in town.
Goodness knows where he dines and lunches. In restaurants and taverns."
"I have thought of that myself," sighed the old lady. "The Heavenly
Mother save and preserve him. But the rain, the rain!"
In the morning the rain was not pattering on the panes, but the sky was
still grey. The trees stood looking mournful, and at every gust of wind
they scattered drops. The footprints on the muddy path, the ditches and
the ruts were full of water. Nadyezhda Filippovna made up her mind to
go.
"Give him my love," said the old lady, wrapping her daughter up. "Tell
him not to think too much about his cases. . . . And he must rest. Let
him wrap his throat up when he goes out: the weather-God help us! And
take him the chicken; food from home, even if cold, is better than at a
restaurant."
The daughter went away, saying that she would come back by an evening
train or else next morning.
But she came back long before dinner-time, when the old lady was sitting
on her trunk in her bedroom and drowsily thinking what to cook for her
son-in-law's supper.
Going into the room her daughter, pale and agitated, sank on the bed
without uttering a word or taking off her hat, and pressed her head into
the pillow.
"But what is the matter," said the old lady in surprise, "why back so
soon? Where is Alexey Stepanovitch?"
Nadyezhda Filippovna raised her head and gazed at her mother with dry,
imploring eyes.
"He is deceiving us, mamma," she said.
"What are you saying? Christ be with you!" cried the old lady in alarm,
and her cap slipped off her head. "Who is going to deceive us? Lord,
have mercy on us!"
"He is deceiving us, mamma!" repeated her daughter, and her chin began
to quiver.
"How do you know?" cried the old lady, turning pale.
"Our flat is locked up. The porter tells me that Alyosha has not been
home once for these five days. He is not living at home! He is not at
home, not at home!"
She waved her hands and burst into loud weeping, uttering nothing but:
"Not at home! Not at home!"
She began to be hysterical.
"What's the meaning of it?" muttered the old woman in horror. "Why, he
wrote the day before yesterday that he never leaves the flat! Where is
he sleeping? Holy Saints!"
Nadyezhda Filippovna felt so faint that she could not take off her hat.
She looked about her blankly, as though she had been drugged, and
convulsively clutched at her mother's arms.
"What a person to trust: a porter!" said the old lady, fussing round her
daughter and crying. "What a jealous girl you are! He is not going to
deceive you, and how dare he? We are not just anybody. Though we are of
the merchant class, yet he has no right, for you are his lawful wife! We
can take proceedings! I gave twenty thousand roubles with you! You did
not want for a dowry!"
And the old lady herself sobbed and gesticulated, and she felt faint,
too, and lay down on her trunk. Neither of them noticed that patches of
blue had made their appearance in the sky, that the clouds were more
transparent, that the first sunbeam was cautiously gliding over the wet
grass in the garden, that with renewed gaiety the sparrows were hopping
about the puddles which reflected the racing clouds.
Towards evening Kvashin arrived. Before leaving town he had gone to his
flat and had learned from the porter that his wife had come in his
absence.
"Here I am," he said gaily, coming into his mother-in-law's room and
pretending not to notice their stern and tear-stained faces. "Here I am!
It's five days since we have seen each other!"
He rapidly kissed his wife's hand and his mother-in-law's, and with the
air of a man delighted at having finished a difficult task, he lolled in
an arm-chair.
"Ough!" he said, puffing out all the air from his lungs. "Here I have
been worried to death. I have scarcely sat down. For almost five days
now I have been, as it were, bivouacking. I haven't been to the flat
once, would you believe it? I have been busy the whole time with the
meeting of Shipunov's and Ivantchikov's creditors; I had to work in
Galdeyev's office at the shop. . . . I've had nothing to eat or to
drink, and slept on a bench, I was chilled through . . . . I hadn't a
free minute. I hadn't even time to go to the flat. That's how I came not
to be at home, Nadyusha. . . And Kvashin, holding his sides as though
his back were aching, glanced stealthily at his wife and mother-in-law
to see the effect of his lie, or as he called it, diplomacy. The mother-
in-law and wife were looking at each other in joyful astonishment, as
though beyond all hope and expectation they had found something
precious, which they had lost. . . . Their faces beamed, their eyes
glowed. . . .
"My dear man," cried the old lady, jumping up, "why am I sitting here?
Tea! Tea at once! Perhaps you are hungry?"
"Of course he is hungry," cried his wife, pulling off her head a bandage
soaked in vinegar. "Mamma, bring the wine, and the savouries. Natalya,
lay the table! Oh, my goodness, nothing is ready!"
And both of them, frightened, happy, and bustling, ran about the room.
The old lady could not look without laughing at her daughter who had
slandered an innocent man, and the daughter felt ashamed. . . .
The table was soon laid. Kvashin, who smelt of madeira and liqueurs and
who could scarcely breathe from repletion, complained of being hungry,
forced himself to munch and kept on talking of the meeting of Shipunov's
and Ivantchikov's creditors, while his wife and mother-in-law could not
take their eyes off his face, and both thought:
"How clever and kind he is! How handsome!"
"All serene," thought Kvashin, as he lay down on the well-filled feather
bed. "Though they are regular tradesmen's wives, though they are
Philistines, yet they have a charm of their own, and one can spend a day
or two of the week here with enjoyment. . . ."
He wrapped himself up, got warm, and as he dozed off, he said to
himself:
"All serene!" A GENTLEMAN FRIEND
THE charming Vanda, or, as she was described in her passport, the
"Honourable Citizen Nastasya Kanavkin," found herself, on leaving the
hospital, in a position she had never been in before: without a home to
go to or a farthing in her pocket. What was she to do?
The first thing she did was to visit a pawn-broker's and pawn her
turquoise ring, her one piece of jewellery. They gave her a rouble for
the ring . . . but what can you get for a rouble? You can't buy for that
sum a fashionable short jacket, nor a big hat, nor a pair of bronze
shoes, and without those things she had a feeling of being, as it were,
undressed. She felt as though the very horses and dogs were staring and
laughing at the plainness of her dress. And clothes were all she thought
about: the question what she should eat and where she should sleep did
not trouble her in the least.
"If only I could meet a gentleman friend," she thought to herself, "I
could get some money. . . . There isn't one who would refuse me, I know.
. ."
But no gentleman she knew came her way. It would be easy enough to meet
them in the evening at the "Renaissance," but they wouldn't let her in
at the "Renaissance" in that shabby dress and with no hat. What was she
to do?
After long hesitation, when she was sick of walking and sitting and
thinking, Vanda made up her mind to fall back on her last resource: to
go straight to the lodgings of some gentleman friend and ask for money.
She pondered which to go to. "Misha is out of the question; he's a
married man. . . . The old chap with the red hair will be at his office
at this time. . ."
Vanda remembered a dentist, called Finkel, a converted Jew, who six
months ago had given her a bracelet, and on whose head she had once
emptied a glass of beer at the supper at the German Club. She was
awfully pleased at the thought of Finkel.
"He'll be sure to give it me, if only I find him at home," she thought,
as she walked in his direction. "If he doesn't, I'll smash all the lamps
in the house."
Before she reached the dentist's door she thought out her plan of
action: she would run laughing up the stairs, dash into the dentist's
room and demand twenty-five roubles. But as she touched the bell, this
plan seemed to vanish from her mind of itself. Vanda began suddenly
feeling frightened and nervous, which was not at all her way. She was
bold and saucy enough at drinking parties, but now, dressed in everyday
clothes, feeling herself in the position of an ordinary person asking a
favour, who might be refused admittance, she felt suddenly timid and
humiliated. She was ashamed and frightened.
"Perhaps he has forgotten me by now," she thought, hardly daring to pull
the bell. "And how can I go up to him in such a dress, looking like a
beggar or some working girl?"
And she rang the bell irresolutely.
She heard steps coming: it was the porter.
"Is the doctor at home?" she asked.
She would have been glad now if the porter had said "No," but the
latter, instead of answering ushered her into the hall, and helped her
off with her coat. The staircase impressed her as luxurious, and
magnificent, but of all its splendours what caught her eye most was an
immense looking-glass, in which she saw a ragged figure without a
fashionable jacket, without a big hat, and without bronze shoes. And it
seemed strange to Vanda that, now that she was humbly dressed and looked
like a laundress or sewing girl, she felt ashamed, and no trace of her
usual boldness and sauciness remained, and in her own mind she no longer
thought of herself as Vanda, but as the Nastasya Kanavkin she used to be
in the old days. . . .
"Walk in, please," said a maidservant, showing her into the consulting-
room. "The doctor will be here in a minute. Sit down."
Vanda sank into a soft arm-chair.
"I'll ask him to lend it me," she thought; "that will be quite proper,
for, after all, I do know him. If only that servant would go. I don't
like to ask before her. What does she want to stand there for?"
Five minutes later the door opened and Finkel came in. He was a tall,
dark Jew, with fat cheeks and bulging eyes. His cheeks, his eyes, his
chest, his body, all of him was so well fed, so loathsome and repellent!
At the "Renaissance" and the German Club he had usually been rather
tipsy, and would spend his money freely on women, and be very long-
suffering and patient with their pranks (when Vanda, for instance,
poured the beer over his head, he simply smiled and shook his finger at
her): now he had a cross, sleepy expression and looked solemn and frigid
like a police captain, and he kept chewing something.
"What can I do for you?" he asked, without looking at Vanda.
Vanda looked at the serious countenance of the maid and the smug figure
of Finkel, who apparently did not recognize her, and she turned red.
"What can I do for you?" repeated the dentist a little irritably.
"I've got toothache," murmured Vanda.
"Aha! . . . Which is the tooth? Where?"
Vanda remembered she had a hole in one of her teeth.
"At the bottom . . . on the right . . ." she said.
"Hm! . . . Open your mouth."
Finkel frowned and, holding his breath, began examining the tooth.
"Does it hurt?" he asked, digging into it with a steel instrument.
"Yes," Vanda replied, untruthfully.
"Shall I remind him?" she was wondering. "He would be sure to remember
me. But that servant! Why will she stand there?"
Finkel suddenly snorted like a steam-engine right into her mouth, and
said:
"I don't advise you to have it stopped. That tooth will never be worth
keeping anyhow."
After probing the tooth a little more and soiling Vanda's lips and gums
with his tobacco-stained fingers, he held his breath again, and put
something cold into her mouth. Vanda suddenly felt a sharp pain, cried
out, and clutched at Finkel's hand.
"It's all right, it's all right," he muttered; "don't you be frightened!
That tooth would have been no use to you, anyway . . . you must be
brave. . ."
And his tobacco-stained fingers, smeared with blood, held up the tooth
to her eyes, while the maid approached and put a basin to her mouth.
"You wash out your mouth with cold water when you get home, and that
will stop the bleeding," said Finkel.
He stood before her with the air of a man expecting her to go, waiting
to be left in peace.
"Good-day," she said, turning towards the door.
"Hm! . . . and how about my fee?" enquired Finkel, in a jesting tone.
"Oh, yes!" Vanda remembered, blushing, and she handed the Jew the rouble
that had been given her for her ring.
When she got out into the street she felt more overwhelmed with shame
than before, but now it was not her poverty she was ashamed of. She was
unconscious now of not having a big hat and a fashionable jacket. She
walked along the street, spitting blood, and brooding on her life, her
ugly, wretched life, and the insults she had endured, and would have to
endure to-morrow, and next week, and all her life, up to the very day of
her death.
"Oh! how awful it is! My God, how fearful!"
Next day, however, she was back at the "Renaissance," and dancing there.
She had on an enormous new red hat, a new fashionable jacket, and bronze
shoes. And she was taken out to supper by a young merchant up from
Kazan. A TRIVIAL INCIDENT
IT was a sunny August midday as, in company with a Russian prince who
had come down in the world, I drove into the immense so-called Shabelsky
pine-forest where we were intending to look for woodcocks. In virtue of
the part he plays in this story my poor prince deserves a detailed
description. He was a tall, dark man, still youngish, though already
somewhat battered by life; with long moustaches like a police captain's;
with prominent black eyes, and with the manners of a retired army man.
He was a man of Oriental type, not very intelligent, but straightforward
and honest, not a bully, not a fop, and not a rake-virtues which, in the
eyes of the general public, are equivalent to a certificate of being a
nonentity and a poor creature. People generally did not like him (he was
never spoken of in the district, except as "the illustrious duffer"). I
personally found the poor prince extremely nice with his misfortunes and
failures, which made up indeed his whole life. First of all he was poor.
He did not play cards, did not drink, had no occupation, did not poke
his nose into anything, and maintained a perpetual silence but yet he
had somehow succeeded in getting through thirty to forty thousand
roubles left him at his father's death. God only knows what had become
of the money. All that I can say is that owing to lack of supervision a
great deal was stolen by stewards, bailiffs, and even footmen; a great
deal went on lending money, giving bail, and standing security. There
were few landowners in the district who did not owe him money. He gave
to all who asked, and not so much from good nature or confidence in
people as from exaggerated gentlemanliness as though he would say: "Take
it and feel how comme il faut I am!" By the time I made his acquaintance
he had got into debt himself, had learned what it was like to have a
second mortgage on his land, and had sunk so deeply into difficulties
that there was no chance of his ever getting out of them again. There
were days when he had no dinner, and went about with an empty cigar-
holder, but he was always seen clean and fashionably dressed, and always
smelt strongly of ylang-ylang.
The prince's second misfortune was his absolute solitariness. He was not
married, he had no friends nor relations. His silent and reserved
character and his comme il faut deportment, which became the more
conspicuous the more anxious he was to conceal his poverty, prevented
him from becoming intimate with people. For love affairs he was too
heavy, spiritless, and cold, and so rarely got on with women. . . .
When we reached the forest this prince and I got out of the chaise and
walked along a narrow woodland path which was hidden among huge ferns.
But before we had gone a hundred paces a tall, lank figure with a long
oval face, wearing a shabby reefer jacket, a straw hat, and patent
leather boots, rose up from behind a young fir-tree some three feet
high, as though he had sprung out of the ground. The stranger held in
one hand a basket of mushrooms, with the other he playfully fingered a
cheap watch-chain on his waistcoat. On seeing us he was taken aback,
smoothed his waistcoat, coughed politely, and gave an agreeable smile,
as though he were delighted to see such nice people as us. Then, to our
complete surprise, he came up to us, scraping with his long feet on the
grass, bending his whole person, and, still smiling agreeably, lifted
his hat and pronounced in a sugary voice with the intonations of a
whining dog:
"Aie, aie . . . gentlemen, painful as it is, it is my duty to warn you
that shooting is forbidden in this wood. Pardon me for venturing to
disturb you, though unacquainted, but . . . allow me to present myself.
I am Grontovsky, the head clerk on Madame Kandurin's estate."
"Pleased to make your acquaintance, but why can't we shoot?"
"Such is the wish of the owner of this forest!"
The prince and I exchanged glances. A moment passed in silence. The
prince stood looking pensively at a big fly agaric at his feet, which he
had crushed with his stick. Grontovsky went on smiling agreeably. His
whole face was twitching, exuding honey, and even the watch-chain on his
waistcoat seemed to be smiling and trying to impress us all with its
refinement. A shade of embarrassment passed over us like an angel
passing; all three of us felt awkward.
"Nonsense!" I said. "Only last week I was shooting here!"
"Very possible!" Grontovsky sniggered through his teeth. "As a matter of
fact everyone shoots here regardless of the prohibition. But once I have
met you, it is my duty . . . my sacred duty to warn you. I am a man in a
dependent position. If the forest were mine, on the word of honour of a
Grontovsky, I should not oppose your agreeable pleasure. But whose fault
is it that I am in a dependent position?"
The lanky individual sighed and shrugged his shoulders. I began arguing,
getting hot and protesting, but the more loudly and impressively I spoke
the more mawkish and sugary Grontovsky's face became. Evidently the
consciousness of a certain power over us afforded him the greatest
gratification. He was enjoying his condescending tone, his politeness,
his manners, and with peculiar relish pronounced his sonorous surname,
of which he was probably very fond. Standing before us he felt more than
at ease, but judging from the confused sideway glances he cast from time
to time at his basket, only one thing was spoiling his satisfaction-the
mushrooms, womanish, peasantish, prose, derogatory to his dignity.
"We can't go back!" I said. "We have come over ten miles!"
"What's to be done?" sighed Grontovsky. "If you had come not ten but a
hundred thousand miles, if the king even had come from America or from
some other distant land, even then I should think it my duty . . .
sacred, so to say, obligation . . ."
"Does the forest belong to Nadyezhda Lvovna?" asked the prince.
"Yes, Nadyezhda Lvovna . . ."
"Is she at home now?"
"Yes . . . I tell you what, you go to her, it is not more than half a
mile from here; if she gives you a note, then I. . . . I needn't say!
Ha-ha . . . he-he-!"
"By all means," I agreed. "It's much nearer than to go back. . . . You
go to her, Sergey Ivanitch," I said, addressing the prince. "You know
her."
The prince, who had been gazing the whole time at the crushed agaric,
raised his eyes to me, thought a minute, and said:
"I used to know her at one time, but . . . it's rather awkward for me to
go to her. Besides, I am in shabby clothes. . . . You go, you don't know
her. . . . It's more suitable for you to go."
I agreed. We got into our chaise and, followed by Grontovsky's smiles,
drove along the edge of the forest to the manor house. I was not
acquainted with Nadyezhda Lvovna Kandurin, née Shabelsky. I had never
seen her at close quarters, and knew her only by hearsay. I knew that
she was incredibly wealthy, richer than anyone else in the province.
After the death of her father, Shabelsky, who was a landowner with no
other children, she was left with several estates, a stud farm, and a
lot of money. I had heard that, though she was only twenty-five or
twenty-six, she was ugly, uninteresting, and as insignificant as
anybody, and was only distinguished from the ordinary ladies of the
district by her immense wealth.
It has always seemed to me that wealth is felt, and that the rich must
have special feelings unknown to the poor. Often as I passed by
Nadyezhda Lvovna's big fruit garden, in which stood the large, heavy
house with its windows always curtained, I thought: "What is she
thinking at this moment? Is there happiness behind those blinds?" and so
on. Once I saw her from a distance in a fine light cabriolet, driving a
handsome white horse, and, sinful man that I am, I not only envied her,
but even thought that in her poses, in her movements, there was
something special, not to be found in people who are not rich, just as
persons of a servile nature succeed in discovering "good family" at the
first glance in people of the most ordinary exterior, if they are a
little more distinguished than themselves. Nadyezhda Lvovna's inner life
was only known to me by scandal. It was said in the district that five
or six years ago, before she was married, during her father's lifetime,
she had been passionately in love with Prince Sergey Ivanitch, who was
now beside me in the chaise. The prince had been fond of visiting her
father, and used to spend whole days in his billiard room, where he
played pyramids indefatigably till his arms and legs ached. Six months
before the old man's death he had suddenly given up visiting the
Shabelskys. The gossip of the district having no positive facts to go
upon explained this abrupt change in their relations in various ways.
Some said that the prince, having observed the plain daughter's feeling
for him and being unable to reciprocate it, considered it the duty of a
gentleman to cut short his visits. Others maintained that old Shabelsky
had discovered why his daughter was pining away, and had proposed to the
poverty-stricken prince that he should marry her; the prince, imagining
in his narrow-minded way that they were trying to buy him together with
his title, was indignant, said foolish things, and quarrelled with them.
What was true and what was false in this nonsense was difficult to say.
But that there was a portion of truth in it was evident, from the fact
that the prince always avoided conversation about Nadyezhda Lvovna.
I knew that soon after her father's death Nadyezhda Lvovna had married
one Kandurin, a bachelor of law, not wealthy, but adroit, who had come
on a visit to the neighbourhood. She married him not from love, but
because she was touched by the love of the legal gentleman who, so it
was said, had cleverly played the love-sick swain. At the time I am
describing, Kandurin was for some reason living in Cairo, and writing
thence to his friend, the marshal of the district, "Notes of Travel,"
while she sat languishing behind lowered blinds, surrounded by idle
parasites, and whiled away her dreary days in petty philanthropy.
On the way to the house the prince fell to talking.
"It's three days since I have been at home," he said in a half whisper,
with a sidelong glance at the driver. "I am not a child, nor a silly
woman, and I have no prejudices, but I can't stand the bailiffs. When I
see a bailiff in my house I turn pale and tremble, and even have a
twitching in the calves of my legs. Do you know Rogozhin refused to
honour my note?"
The prince did not, as a rule, like to complain of his straitened
circumstances; where poverty was concerned he was reserved and
exceedingly proud and sensitive, and so this announcement surprised me.
He stared a long time at the yellow clearing, warmed by the sun, watched
a long string of cranes float in the azure sky, and turned facing me.
"And by the sixth of September I must have the money ready for the bank
. . . the interest for my estate," he said aloud, by now regardless of
the coachman. "And where am I to get it? Altogether, old man, I am in a
tight fix! An awfully tight fix!"
The prince examined the cock of his gun, blew on it for some reason, and
began looking for the cranes which by now were out of sight.
"Sergey Ivanitch," I asked, after a minute's silence, "imagine if they
sell your Shatilovka, what will you do?"
"I? I don't know! Shatilovka can't be saved, that's clear as daylight,
but I cannot imagine such a calamity. I can't imagine myself without my
daily bread secure. What can I do? I have had hardly any education; I
have not tried working yet; for government service it is late to begin,
. . . Besides, where could I serve? Where could I be of use? Admitting
that no great cleverness is needed for serving in our Zemstvo, for
example, yet I suffer from . . . the devil knows what, a sort of
faintheartedness, I haven't a ha'p'orth of pluck. If I went into the
Service I should always feel I was not in my right place. I am not an
idealist; I am not a Utopian; I haven't any special principles; but am
simply, I suppose, stupid and thoroughly incompetent, a neurotic and a
coward. Altogether not like other people. All other people are like
other people, only I seem to be something . . . a poor thing. . . . I
met Naryagin last Wednesday-you know him?-drunken, slovenly . . .
doesn't pay his debts, stupid" (the prince frowned and tossed his head)
. . . "a horrible person! He said to me, staggering: 'I'm being balloted
for as a justice of the peace!' Of course, they won't elect him, but,
you see, he believes he is fit to be a justice of the peace and
considers that position within his capacity. He has boldness and self-
confidence. I went to see our investigating magistrate too. The man gets
two hundred and fifty roubles a month, and does scarcely anything. All
he can do is to stride backwards and forwards for days together in
nothing but his underclothes, but, ask him, he is convinced he is doing
his work and honourably performing his duty. I couldn't go on like that!
I should be ashamed to look the clerk in the face."
At that moment Grontovsky, on a chestnut horse, galloped by us with a
flourish. On his left arm the basket bobbed up and down with the
mushrooms dancing in it. As he passed us he grinned and waved his hand,
as though we were old friends.
"Blockhead!" the prince filtered through his teeth, looking after him.
"It's wonderful how disgusting it sometimes is to see satisfied faces. A
stupid, animal feeling due to hunger, I expect. . . . What was I saying?
Oh, yes, about going into the Service, . . . I should be ashamed to take
the salary, and yet, to tell the truth, it is stupid. If one looks at it
from a broader point of view, more seriously, I am eating what isn't
mine now. Am I not? But why am I not ashamed of that. . . . It is a case
of habit, I suppose . . . and not being able to realize one's true
position. . . . But that position is most likely awful. . ."
I looked at him, wondering if the prince were showing off. But his face
was mild and his eyes were mournfully following the movements of the
chestnut horse racing away, as though his happiness were racing away
with it.
Apparently he was in that mood of irritation and sadness when women weep
quietly for no reason, and men feel a craving to complain of themselves,
of life, of God. . . .
When I got out of the chaise at the gates of the house the prince said
to me:
"A man once said, wanting to annoy me, that I have the face of a
cardsharper. I have noticed that cardsharpers are usually dark. Do you
know, it seems that if I really had been born a cardsharper I should
have remained a decent person to the day of my death, for I should never
have had the boldness to do wrong. I tell you frankly I have had the
chance once in my life of getting rich if I had told a lie, a lie to
myself and one woman . . . and one other person whom I know would have
forgiven me for lying; I should have put into my pocket a million. But I
could not. I hadn't the pluck!"
From the gates we had to go to the house through the copse by a long
road, level as a ruler, and planted on each side with thick, lopped
lilacs. The house looked somewhat heavy, tasteless, like a façade on
the stage. It rose clumsily out of a mass of greenery, and caught the
eye like a great stone thrown on the velvety turf. At the chief entrance
I was met by a fat old footman in a green swallow-tail coat and big
silver-rimmed spectacles; without making any announcement, only looking
contemptuously at my dusty figure, he showed me in. As I mounted the
soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of
india-rubber. At the top I was enveloped in an atmosphere found only in
museums, in signorial mansions and old-fashioned merchant houses; it
seemed like the smell of something long past, which had once lived and
died and had left its soul in the rooms. I passed through three or four
rooms on my way from the entry to the drawing-room. I remember bright
yellow, shining floors, lustres wrapped in stiff muslin, narrow, striped
rugs which stretched not straight from door to door, as they usually do,
but along the walls, so that not venturing to touch the bright floor
with my muddy boots I had to describe a rectangle in each room. In the
drawing-room, where the footman left me, stood old-fashioned ancestral
furniture in white covers, shrouded in twilight. It looked surly and
elderly, and, as though out of respect for its repose, not a sound was
audible.
Even the clock was silent . . . it seemed as though the Princess
Tarakanov had fallen asleep in the golden frame, and the water and the
rats were still and motionless through magic. The daylight, afraid of
disturbing the universal tranquillity, scarcely pierced through the
lowered blinds, and lay on the soft rugs in pale, slumbering streaks.
Three minutes passed and a big, elderly woman in black, with her cheek
bandaged up, walked noiselessly into the drawing-room. She bowed to me
and pulled up the blinds. At once, enveloped in the bright sunlight, the
rats and water in the picture came to life and movement, Princess
Tarakanov was awakened, and the old chairs frowned gloomily.
"Her honour will be here in a minute, sir . . ." sighed the old lady,
frowning too.
A few more minutes of waiting and I saw Nadyezhda Lvovna. What struck me
first of all was that she certainly was ugly, short, scraggy, and round-
shouldered. Her thick, chestnut hair was magnificent; her face, pure and
with a look of culture in it, was aglow with youth; there was a clear
and intelligent expression in her eyes; but the whole charm of her head
was lost through the thickness of her lips and the over-acute facial
angle.
I mentioned my name, and announced the object of my visit.
"I really don't know what I am to say!" she said, in hesitation,
dropping her eyes and smiling. "I don't like to refuse, and at the same
time. . . ."
"Do, please," I begged.
Nadyezhda Lvovna looked at me and laughed. I laughed too. She was
probably amused by what Grontovsky had so enjoyed-that is, the right of
giving or withholding permission; my visit suddenly struck me as queer
and strange.
"I don't like to break the long-established rules," said Madame
Kandurin. "Shooting has been forbidden on our estate for the last six
years. No!" she shook her head resolutely. "Excuse me, I must refuse
you. If I allow you I must allow others. I don't like unfairness. Either
let all or no one."
"I am sorry!" I sighed. "It's all the sadder because we have come more
than ten miles. I am not alone," I added, "Prince Sergey Ivanitch is
with me."
I uttered the prince's name with no arrière pensée, not prompted by
any special motive or aim; I simply blurted it out without thinking, in
the simplicity of my heart. Hearing the familiar name Madame Kandurin
started, and bent a prolonged gaze upon me. I noticed her nose turn
pale.
"That makes no difference . . ." she said, dropping her eyes.
As I talked to her I stood at the window that looked out on the
shrubbery. I could see the whole shrubbery with the avenues and the
ponds and the road by which I had come. At the end of the road, beyond
the gates, the back of our chaise made a dark patch. Near the gate, with
his back to the house, the prince was standing with his legs apart,
talking to the lanky Grontovsky.
Madame Kandurin had been standing all the time at the other window. She
looked from time to time towards the shrubbery, and from the moment I
mentioned the prince's name she did not turn away from the window.
"Excuse me," she said, screwing up her eyes as she looked towards the
road and the gate, "but it would be unfair to allow you only to shoot. .
. . And, besides, what pleasure is there in shooting birds? What's it
for? Are they in your way?"
A solitary life, immured within four walls, with its indoor twilight and
heavy smell of decaying furniture, disposes people to sentimentality.
Madame Kandurin's idea did her credit, but I could not resist saying:
"If one takes that line one ought to go barefoot. Boots are made out of
the leather of slaughtered animals."
"One must distinguish between a necessity and a caprice," Madame
Kandurin answered in a toneless voice.
She had by now recognized the prince, and did not take her eyes off his
figure. It is hard to describe the delight and the suffering with which
her ugly face was radiant! Her eyes were smiling and shining, her lips
were quivering and laughing, while her face craned closer to the panes.
Keeping hold of a flower-pot with both hands, with bated breath and with
one foot slightly lifted, she reminded me of a dog pointing and waiting
with passionate impatience for "Fetch it!"
I looked at her and at the prince who could not tell a lie once in his
life, and I felt angry and bitter against truth and falsehood, which
play such an elemental part in the personal happiness of men.
The prince started suddenly, took aim and fired. A hawk, flying over
him, fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow far away.
"He aimed too high!" I said. "And so, Nadyezhda Lvovna," I sighed,
moving away from the window, "you will not permit . . ."-Madame Kandurin
was silent.
"I have the honour to take my leave," I said, "and I beg you to forgive
my disturbing you. . ."
Madame Kandurin would have turned facing me, and had already moved
through a quarter of the angle, when she suddenly hid her face behind
the hangings, as though she felt tears in her eyes that she wanted to
conceal.
"Good-bye. . . . Forgive me . . ." she said softly.
I bowed to her back, and strode away across the bright yellow floors, no
longer keeping to the carpet. I was glad to get away from this little
domain of gilded boredom and sadness, and I hastened as though anxious
to shake off a heavy, fantastic dream with its twilight, its enchanted
princess, its lustres. . . .
At the front door a maidservant overtook me and thrust a note into my
hand: "Shooting is permitted on showing this. N. K.," I read.
Love and Oher Stories
LOVE
“THREE o’clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my
windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can’t sleep, I
am so happy!
“My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange,
incomprehensible feeling. I can’t analyse it just now—I haven’t the
time, I’m too lazy, and there—hang analysis! Why, is a man likely to
interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry,
or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand? Is he in a
state to do it?”
This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl of
nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times, and as
often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and copied it all
over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a novel I
had to write to order. And it was not because I tried to make it longer,
more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to
prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of
one’s study and communes with one’s own day-dreams while the spring
night looks in at one’s window. Between the lines I saw a beloved image,
and it seemed to me that there were, sitting at the same table writing
with me, spirits as naïvely happy, as foolish, and as blissfully
smiling as I. I wrote continually, looking at my hand, which still ached
deliciously where hers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes
away I had a vision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through
that trellis Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I
was saying good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply
admiring her figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I
saw through the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by
inspiration, knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between
us, and fully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to
carry out certain formalities.
It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting
on one’s hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the
treasure to the post. There are no stars in the sky now: in their place
there is a long whitish streak in the east, broken here and there by
clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses; from that streak the whole
sky is flooded with pale light. The town is asleep, but already the
water-carts have come out, and somewhere in a far-away factory a whistle
sounds to wake up the workpeople. Beside the postbox, slightly moist
with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter,
wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick. He is in a
condition akin to catalepsy: he is not asleep or awake, but something
between.
If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision of
their fate, they would not have such a humble air. I, anyway, almost
kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that the post is the
greatest of blessings.
I beg anyone who has ever been in love to remember how one usually
hurries home after dropping the letter in the box, rapidly gets into bed
and pulls up the quilt in the full conviction that as soon as one wakes
up in the morning one will be overwhelmed with memories of the previous
day and look with rapture at the window, where the daylight will be
eagerly making its way through the folds of the curtain.
Well, to facts. . . . Next morning at midday, Sasha’s maid brought me
the following answer: “I am delited be sure to come to us to day please
I shall expect you. Your S.”
Not a single comma. This lack of punctuation, and the misspelling of the
word “delighted,” the whole letter, and even the long, narrow envelope
in which it was put filled my heart with tenderness. In the sprawling
but diffident handwriting I recognised Sasha’s walk, her way of raising
her eyebrows when she laughed, the movement of her lips. . . . But the
contents of the letter did not satisfy me. In the first place, poetical
letters are not answered in that way, and in the second, why should I go
to Sasha’s house to wait till it should occur to her stout mamma, her
brothers, and poor relations to leave us alone together? It would never
enter their heads, and nothing is more hateful than to have to restrain
one’s raptures simply because of the intrusion of some animate trumpery
in the shape of a half-deaf old woman or little girl pestering one with
questions. I sent an answer by the maid asking Sasha to select some park
or boulevard for a rendezvous. My suggestion was readily accepted. I had
struck the right chord, as the saying is.
Between four and five o’clock in the afternoon I made my way to the
furthest and most overgrown part of the park. There was not a soul in
the park, and the tryst might have taken place somewhere nearer in one
of the avenues or arbours, but women don’t like doing it by halves in
romantic affairs; in for a penny, in for a pound—if you are in for a
tryst, let it be in the furthest and most impenetrable thicket, where
one runs the risk of stumbling upon some rough or drunken man. When I
went up to Sasha she was standing with her back to me, and in that back
I could read a devilish lot of mystery. It seemed as though that back
and the nape of her neck, and the black spots on her dress were saying:
Hush! . . . The girl was wearing a simple cotton dress over which she
had thrown a light cape. To add to the air of mysterious secrecy, her
face was covered with a white veil. Not to spoil the effect, I had to
approach on tiptoe and speak in a half whisper.
From what I remember now, I was not so much the essential point of the
rendezvous as a detail of it. Sasha was not so much absorbed in the
interview itself as in its romantic mysteriousness, my kisses, the
silence of the gloomy trees, my vows. . . . There was not a minute in
which she forgot herself, was overcome, or let the mysterious expression
drop from her face, and really if there had been any Ivan Sidoritch or
Sidor Ivanitch in my place she would have felt just as happy. How is one
to make out in such circumstances whether one is loved or not? Whether
the love is “the real thing” or not?
From the park I took Sasha home with me. The presence of the beloved
woman in one’s bachelor quarters affects one like wine and music.
Usually one begins to speak of the future, and the confidence and self-
reliance with which one does so is beyond bounds. You make plans and
projects, talk fervently of the rank of general though you have not yet
reached the rank of a lieutenant, and altogether you fire off such high-
flown nonsense that your listener must have a great deal of love and
ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately for men, women in love
are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life.
Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full
of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac’s words. Sasha listened to
me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on
her face, she did not understand me. The future of which I talked
interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time in
displaying my plans and projects before her. She was keenly interested
in knowing which would be her room, what paper she would have in the
room, why I had an upright piano instead of a grand piano, and so on.
She examined carefully all the little things on my table, looked at the
photographs, sniffed at the bottles, peeled the old stamps off the
envelopes, saying she wanted them for something.
“Please collect old stamps for me!” she said, making a grave face.
“Please do.”
Then she found a nut in the window, noisily cracked it and ate it.
“Why don’t you stick little labels on the backs of your books?” she
asked, taking a look at the bookcase.
“What for?”
“Oh, so that each book should have its number. And where am I to put my
books? I’ve got books too, you know.”
“What books have you got?” I asked.
Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment and said:
“All sorts.”
And if it had entered my head to ask her what thoughts, what
convictions, what aims she had, she would no doubt have raised her
eyebrows, thought a minute, and have said in the same way: “All sorts.”
Later I saw Sasha home and left her house regularly, officially engaged,
and was so reckoned till our wedding. If the reader will allow me to
judge merely from my personal experience, I maintain that to be engaged
is very dreary, far more so than to be a husband or nothing at all. An
engaged man is neither one thing nor the other, he has left one side of
the river and not reached the other, he is not married and yet he can’t
be said to be a bachelor, but is in something not unlike the condition
of the porter whom I have mentioned above.
Every day as soon as I had a free moment I hastened to my fiancée. As I
went I usually bore within me a multitude of hopes, desires, intentions,
suggestions, phrases. I always fancied that as soon as the maid opened
the door I should, from feeling oppressed and stifled, plunge at once up
to my neck into a sea of refreshing happiness. But it always turned out
otherwise in fact. Every time I went to see my fiancée I found all her
family and other members of the household busy over the silly trousseau.
(And by the way, they were hard at work sewing for two months and then
they had less than a hundred roubles’ worth of things). There was a
smell of irons, candle grease and fumes. Bugles scrunched under one’s
feet. The two most important rooms were piled up with billows of linen,
calico, and muslin and from among the billows peeped out Sasha’s little
head with a thread between her teeth. All the sewing party welcomed me
with cries of delight but at once led me off into the dining-room where
I could not hinder them nor see what only husbands are permitted to
behold. In spite of my feelings, I had to sit in the dining-room and
converse with Pimenovna, one of the poor relations. Sasha, looking
worried and excited, kept running by me with a thimble, a skein of wool
or some other boring object.
“Wait, wait, I shan’t be a minute,” she would say when I raised
imploring eyes to her. “Only fancy that wretch Stepanida has spoilt the
bodice of the barège dress!”
And after waiting in vain for this grace, I lost my temper, went out of
the house and walked about the streets in the company of the new cane I
had bought. Or I would want to go for a walk or a drive with my
fiancée, would go round and find her already standing in the hall with
her mother, dressed to go out and playing with her parasol.
“Oh, we are going to the Arcade,” she would say. “We have got to buy
some more cashmere and change the hat.”
My outing is knocked on the head. I join the ladies and go with them to
the Arcade. It is revoltingly dull to listen to women shopping, haggling
and trying to outdo the sharp shopman. I felt ashamed when Sasha, after
turning over masses of material and knocking down the prices to a
minimum, walked out of the shop without buying anything, or else told
the shopman to cut her some half rouble’s worth.
When they came out of the shop, Sasha and her mamma with scared and
worried faces would discuss at length having made a mistake, having
bought the wrong thing, the flowers in the chintz being too dark, and so
on.
Yes, it is a bore to be engaged! I’m glad it’s over.
Now I am married. It is evening. I am sitting in my study reading.
Behind me on the sofa Sasha is sitting munching something noisily. I
want a glass of beer.
“Sasha, look for the corkscrew. . . .” I say. “It’s lying about
somewhere.”
Sasha leaps up, rummages in a disorderly way among two or three heaps of
papers, drops the matches, and without finding the corkscrew, sits down
in silence. . . . Five minutes pass—ten. . . I begin to be fretted both
by thirst and vexation.
“Sasha, do look for the corkscrew,” I say.
Sasha leaps up again and rummages among the papers near me. Her munching
and rustling of the papers affects me like the sound of sharpening
knives against each other. . . . I get up and begin looking for the
corkscrew myself. At last it is found and the beer is uncorked. Sasha
remains by the table and begins telling me something at great length.
“You’d better read something, Sasha,” I say.
She takes up a book, sits down facing me and begins moving her lips . .
. . I look at her little forehead, moving lips, and sink into thought.
“She is getting on for twenty. . . .” I reflect. “If one takes a boy of
the educated class and of that age and compares them, what a difference!
The boy would have knowledge and convictions and some intelligence.”
But I forgive that difference just as the low forehead and moving lips
are forgiven. I remember in my old Lovelace days I have cast off women
for a stain on their stockings, or for one foolish word, or for not
cleaning their teeth, and now I forgive everything: the munching, the
muddling about after the corkscrew, the slovenliness, the long talking
about nothing that matters; I forgive it all almost unconsciously, with
no effort of will, as though Sasha’s mistakes were my mistakes, and many
things which would have made me wince in old days move me to tenderness
and even rapture. The explanation of this forgiveness of everything lies
in my love for Sasha, but what is the explanation of the love itself, I
really don’t know.
LIGHTS
THE dog was barking excitedly outside. And Ananyev the engineer, his
assistant called Von Schtenberg, and I went out of the hut to see at
whom it was barking. I was the visitor, and might have remained indoors,
but I must confess my head was a little dizzy from the wine I had drunk,
and I was glad to get a breath of fresh air.
“There is nobody here,” said Ananyev when we went out. “Why are you
telling stories, Azorka? You fool!”
There was not a soul in sight.
“The fool,” Azorka, a black house-dog, probably conscious of his guilt
in barking for nothing and anxious to propitiate us, approached us,
diffidently wagging his tail. The engineer bent down and touched him
between his ears.
“Why are you barking for nothing, creature?” he said in the tone in
which good-natured people talk to children and dogs. “Have you had a bad
dream or what? Here, doctor, let me commend to your attention,” he said,
turning to me, “a wonderfully nervous subject! Would you believe it, he
can’t endure solitude—he is always having terrible dreams and suffering
from nightmares; and when you shout at him he has something like an
attack of hysterics.”
“Yes, a dog of refined feelings,” the student chimed in.
Azorka must have understood that the conversation was concerning him. He
turned his head upwards and grinned plaintively, as though to say, “Yes,
at times I suffer unbearably, but please excuse it!”
It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark. Owing to the
fact that I had never in my life been in such exceptional surroundings,
as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night seemed to me gloomy,
inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality. I was on a railway line
which was still in process of construction. The high, half-finished
embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the holes, the wheel-
barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which
the workmen lived—all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness,
gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos.
There was so little order in all that lay before me that it was somehow
strange in the midst of the hideously excavated, grotesque-looking earth
to see the silhouettes of human beings and the slender telegraph posts.
Both spoiled the ensemble of the picture, and seemed to belong to a
different world. It was still, and the only sound came from the
telegraph wire droning its wearisome refrain somewhere very high above
our heads.
We climbed up on the embankment and from its height looked down upon the
earth. A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and mounds melted
into the darkness of the night, a dim light was twinkling. Beyond it
gleamed another light, beyond that a third, then a hundred paces away
two red eyes glowed side by side—probably the windows of some hut—and a
long series of such lights, growing continually closer and dimmer,
stretched along the line to the very horizon, then turned in a
semicircle to the left and disappeared in the darkness of the distance.
The lights were motionless. There seemed to be something in common
between them and the stillness of the night and the disconsolate song of
the telegraph wire. It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried
under the embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew
of it.
“How glorious, O Lord!” sighed Ananyev; “such space and beauty that one
can’t tear oneself away! And what an embankment! It’s not an embankment,
my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc. It’s costing millions. . . .”
Going into ecstasies over the lights and the embankment that was costing
millions, intoxicated by the wine and his sentimental mood, the engineer
slapped Von Schtenberg on the shoulder and went on in a jocose tone:
“Well, Mihail Mihailitch, lost in reveries? No doubt it is pleasant to
look at the work of one’s own hands, eh? Last year this very spot was
bare steppe, not a sight of human life, and now look: life . . .
civilisation. . . And how splendid it all is, upon my soul! You and I
are building a railway, and after we are gone, in another century or
two, good men will build a factory, a school, a hospital, and things
will begin to move! Eh!”
The student stood motionless with his hands thrust in his pockets, and
did not take his eyes off the lights. He was not listening to the
engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in which one
does not want to speak or to listen. After a prolonged silence he turned
to me and said quietly:
“Do you know what those endless lights are like? They make me think of
something long dead, that lived thousands of years ago, something like
the camps of the Amalekites or the Philistines. It is as though some
people of the Old Testament had pitched their camp and were waiting for
morning to fight with Saul or David. All that is wanting to complete the
illusion is the blare of trumpets and sentries calling to one another in
some Ethiopian language.”
And, as though of design, the wind fluttered over the line and brought a
sound like the clank of weapons. A silence followed. I don’t know what
the engineer and the student were thinking of, but it seemed to me
already that I actually saw before me something long dead and even heard
the sentry talking in an unknown tongue. My imagination hastened to
picture the tents, the strange people, their clothes, their armour.
“Yes,” muttered the student pensively, “once Philistines and Amalekites
were living in this world, making wars, playing their part, and now no
trace of them remains. So it will be with us. Now we are making a
railway, are standing here philosophising, but two thousand years will
pass—and of this embankment and of all those men, asleep after their
hard work, not one grain of dust will remain. In reality, it’s awful!”
“You must drop those thoughts . . .” said the engineer gravely and
admonishingly.
“Why?”
“Because. . . . Thoughts like that are for the end of life, not for the
beginning of it. You are too young for them.”
“Why so?” repeated the student.
“All these thoughts of the transitoriness, the insignificance and the
aimlessness of life, of the inevitability of death, of the shadows of
the grave, and so on, all such lofty thoughts, I tell you, my dear
fellow, are good and natural in old age when they come as the product of
years of inner travail, and are won by suffering and really are
intellectual riches; for a youthful brain on the threshold of real life
they are simply a calamity! A calamity!” Ananyev repeated with a wave of
his hand. “To my mind it is better at your age to have no head on your
shoulders at all than to think on these lines. I am speaking seriously,
Baron. And I have been meaning to speak to you about it for a long time,
for I noticed from the very first day of our acquaintance your
partiality for these damnable ideas!”
“Good gracious, why are they damnable?” the student asked with a smile,
and from his voice and his face I could see that he asked the question
from simple politeness, and that the discussion raised by the engineer
did not interest him in the least.
I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was dreaming that immediately after
our walk we should wish each other good-night and go to bed, but my
dream was not quickly realised. When we had returned to the hut the
engineer put away the empty bottles and took out of a large wicker
hamper two full ones, and uncorking them, sat down to his work-table
with the evident intention of going on drinking, talking, and working.
Sipping a little from his glass, he made pencil notes on some plans and
went on pointing out to the student that the latter’s way of thinking
was not what it should be. The student sat beside him checking accounts
and saying nothing. He, like me, had no inclination to speak or to
listen. That I might not interfere with their work, I sat away from the
table on the engineer’s crooked-legged travelling bedstead, feeling
bored and expecting every moment that they would suggest I should go to
bed. It was going on for one o’clock.
Having nothing to do, I watched my new acquaintances. I had never seen
Ananyev or the student before. I had only made their acquaintance on the
night I have described. Late in the evening I was returning on horseback
from a fair to the house of a landowner with whom I was staying, had got
on the wrong road in the dark and lost my way. Going round and round by
the railway line and seeing how dark the night was becoming, I thought
of the “barefoot railway roughs,” who lie in wait for travellers on foot
and on horseback, was frightened, and knocked at the first hut I came
to. There I was cordially received by Ananyev and the student. As is
usually the case with strangers casually brought together, we quickly
became acquainted, grew friendly and at first over the tea and afterward
over the wine, began to feel as though we had known each other for
years. At the end of an hour or so, I knew who they were and how fate
had brought them from town to the far-away steppe; and they knew who I
was, what my occupation and my way of thinking.
Nikolay Anastasyevitch Ananyev, the engineer, was a broad-shouldered,
thick-set man, and, judging from his appearance, he had, like Othello,
begun the “descent into the vale of years,” and was growing rather too
stout. He was just at that stage which old match-making women mean when
they speak of “a man in the prime of his age,” that is, he was neither
young nor old, was fond of good fare, good liquor, and praising the
past, panted a little as he walked, snored loudly when he was asleep,
and in his manner with those surrounding him displayed that calm
imperturbable good humour which is always acquired by decent people by
the time they have reached the grade of a staff officer and begun to
grow stout. His hair and beard were far from being grey, but already,
with a condescension of which he was unconscious, he addressed young men
as “my dear boy” and felt himself entitled to lecture them good-
humouredly about their way of thinking. His movements and his voice were
calm, smooth, and self-confident, as they are in a man who is thoroughly
well aware that he has got his feet firmly planted on the right road,
that he has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . . His
sunburnt, thick-nosed face and muscular neck seemed to say: “I am well
fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come when you
young people too, will be well-fed, healthy, and satisfied with
yourselves. . . .” He was dressed in a cotton shirt with the collar awry
and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots. From certain
trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted girdle, his
embroidered collar, and the patch on his elbow, I was able to guess that
he was married and in all probability tenderly loved by his wife.
Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was a
young man of about three or four and twenty. Only his fair hair and
scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity in his
features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the Baltic
provinces; everything else—his name, Mihail Mihailovitch, his religion,
his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his face were purely
Russian. Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and high boots, with his
round shoulders, his hair left uncut, and his sunburnt face, he did not
look like a student or a Baron, but like an ordinary Russian workman.
His words and gestures were few, he drank reluctantly without relish,
checked the accounts mechanically, and seemed all the while to be
thinking of something else. His movements and voice were calm, and
smooth too, but his calmness was of a different kind from the
engineer’s. His sunburnt, slightly ironical, dreamy face, his eyes which
looked up from under his brows, and his whole figure were expressive of
spiritual stagnatio—mental sloth. He looked as though it did not matter
to him in the least whether the light were burning before him or not,
whether the wine were nice or nasty, and whether the accounts he was
checking were correct or not. . . . And on his intelligent, calm face I
read: “I don’t see so far any good in definite work, a secure living,
and a settled outlook. It’s all nonsense. I was in Petersburg, now I am
sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to Petersburg,
then in the spring here again. . . . What sense there is in all that I
don’t know, and no one knows. . . . And so it’s no use talking about it.
. . .”
He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending
indifference with which cadets in the senior classes listen to an
effusive and good-natured old attendant. It seemed as though there were
nothing new to him in what the engineer said, and that if he had not
himself been too lazy to talk, he would have said something newer and
cleverer. Meanwhile Ananyev would not desist. He had by now laid aside
his good-humoured, jocose tone and spoke seriously, even with a fervour
which was quite out of keeping with his expression of calmness.
Apparently he had no distaste for abstract subjects, was fond of them,
indeed, but had neither skill nor practice in the handling of them. And
this lack of practice was so pronounced in his talk that I did not
always grasp his meaning at once.
“I hate those ideas with all my heart!” he said, “I was infected by them
myself in my youth, I have not quite got rid of them even now, and I
tell you—perhaps because I am stupid and such thoughts were not the
right food for my mind—they did me nothing but harm. That’s easy to
understand! Thoughts of the aimlessness of life, of the insignificance
and transitoriness of the visible world, Solomon’s 'vanity of vanities’
have been, and are to this day, the highest and final stage in the realm
of thought. The thinker reaches that stage and—comes to a halt! There is
nowhere further to go. The activity of the normal brain is completed
with this, and that is natural and in the order of things. Our
misfortune is that we begin thinking at that end. What normal people end
with we begin with. From the first start, as soon as the brain begins
working independently, we mount to the very topmost, final step and
refuse to know anything about the steps below.”
“What harm is there in that?” said the student.
“But you must understand that it’s abnormal,” shouted Ananyev, looking
at him almost wrathfully. “If we find means of mounting to the topmost
step without the help of the lower ones, then the whole long ladder,
that is the whole of life, with its colours, sounds, and thoughts, loses
all meaning for us. That at your age such reflections are harmful and
absurd, you can see from every step of your rational independent life.
Let us suppose you sit down this minute to read Darwin or Shakespeare,
you have scarcely read a page before the poison shows itself; and your
long life, and Shakespeare, and Darwin, seem to you nonsense, absurdity,
because you know you will die, that Shakespeare and Darwin have died
too, that their thoughts have not saved them, nor the earth, nor you,
and that if life is deprived of meaning in that way, all science,
poetry, and exalted thoughts seem only useless diversions, the idle
playthings of grown up people; and you leave off reading at the second
page. Now, let us suppose that people come to you as an intelligent man
and ask your opinion about war, for instance: whether it is desirable,
whether it is morally justifiable or not. In answer to that terrible
question you merely shrug your shoulders and confine yourself to some
commonplace, because for you, with your way of thinking, it makes
absolutely no difference whether hundreds of thousands of people die a
violent death, or a natural one: the results are the same—ashes and
oblivion. You and I are building a railway line. What’s the use, one may
ask, of our worrying our heads, inventing, rising above the hackneyed
thing, feeling for the workmen, stealing or not stealing, when we know
that this railway line will turn to dust within two thousand years, and
so on, and so on. . . . You must admit that with such a disastrous way
of looking at things there can be no progress, no science, no art, nor
even thought itself. We fancy that we are cleverer than the crowd, and
than Shakespeare. In reality our thinking leads to nothing because we
have no inclination to go down to the lower steps and there is nowhere
higher to go, so our brain stands at the freezing point—neither up nor
down; I was in bondage to these ideas for six years, and by all that is
holy, I never read a sensible book all that time, did not gain a
ha’porth of wisdom, and did not raise my moral standard an inch. Was not
that disastrous? Moreover, besides being corrupted ourselves, we bring
poison into the lives of those surrounding us. It would be all right if,
with our pessimism, we renounced life, went to live in a cave, or made
haste to die, but, as it is, in obedience to the universal law, we live,
feel, love women, bring up children, construct railways!”
“Our thoughts make no one hot or cold,” the student said reluctantly.
“Ah! there you are again!—do stop it! You have not yet had a good sniff
at life. But when you have lived as long as I have you will know a thing
or two! Our theory of life is not so innocent as you suppose. In
practical life, in contact with human beings, it leads to nothing but
horrors and follies. It has been my lot to pass through experiences
which I would not wish a wicked Tatar to endure.”
“For instance?” I asked.
“For instance?” repeated the engineer.
He thought a minute, smiled and said:
“For instance, take this example. More correctly, it is not an example,
but a regular drama, with a plot and a dénouement. An excellent lesson!
Ah, what a lesson!”
He poured out wine for himself and us, emptied his glass, stroked his
broad chest with his open hands, and went on, addressing himself more to
me than to the student.
“It was in the year 187—, soon after the war, and when I had just left
the University. I was going to the Caucasus, and on the way stopped for
five days in the seaside town of N. I must tell you that I was born and
grew up in that town, and so there is nothing odd in my thinking N.
extraordinarily snug, cosy, and beautiful, though for a man from
Petersburg or Moscow, life in it would be as dreary and comfortless as
in any Tchuhloma or Kashira. With melancholy I passed by the high school
where I had been a pupil; with melancholy I walked about the very
familiar park, I made a melancholy attempt to get a nearer look at
people I had not seen for a long time—all with the same melancholy.
“Among other things, I drove out one evening to the so-called
Quarantine. It was a small mangy copse in which, at some forgotten time
of plague, there really had been a quarantine station, and which was now
the resort of summer visitors. It was a drive of three miles from the
town along a good soft road. As one drove along one saw on the left the
blue sea, on the right the unending gloomy steppe; there was plenty of
air to breathe, and wide views for the eyes to rest on. The copse itself
lay on the seashore. Dismissing my cabman, I went in at the familiar
gates and first turned along an avenue leading to a little stone summer-
house which I had been fond of in my childhood. In my opinion that
round, heavy summer-house on its clumsy columns, which combined the
romantic charm of an old tomb with the ungainliness of a Sobakevitch,*
was the most poetical nook in the whole town. It stood at the edge above
the cliff, and from it there was a splendid view of the sea.
*A character in Gogol’s Dead Souls.—Translator’s Note.
“I sat down on the seat, and, bending over the parapet, looked down. A
path ran from the summer-house along the steep, almost overhanging
cliff, between the lumps of clay and tussocks of burdock. Where it
ended, far below on the sandy shore, low waves were languidly foaming
and softly purring. The sea was as majestic, as infinite, and as
forbidding as seven years before when I left the high school and went
from my native town to the capital; in the distance there was a dark
streak of smoke—a steamer was passing—and except for this hardly visible
and motionless streak and the sea-swallows that flitted over the water,
there was nothing to give life to the monotonous view of sea and sky. To
right and left of the summer-house stretched uneven clay cliffs.
“You know that when a man in a melancholy mood is left tête-à -tête
with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is
always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he
will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches up a pencil
and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy. And
that, I suppose, is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-
house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with penknives. I
remember as though it were to-day; looking at the parapet I read: ‘Ivan
Korolkov, May 16, 1876.’ Beside Korolkov some local dreamer had
scribbled freely, adding:
“‘He stood on the desolate ocean’s strand, While his soul was filled
with imaginings grand.’
And his handwriting was dreamy, limp like wet silk. An individual called
Kross, probably an insignificant, little man, felt his unimportance so
deeply that he gave full licence to his penknife and carved his name in
deep letters an inch high. I took a pencil out of my pocket
mechanically, and I too scribbled on one of the columns. All that is
irrelevant, however. . . You must forgive me—I don’t know how to tell a
story briefly.
“I was sad and a little bored. Boredom, the stillness, and the purring
of the sea gradually brought me to the line of thought we have been
discussing. At that period, towards the end of the 'seventies, it had
begun to be fashionable with the public, and later, at the beginning of
the ‘eighties, it gradually passed from the general public into
literature, science, and politics. I was no more than twenty-six at the
time, but I knew perfectly well that life was aimless and had no
meaning, that everything was a deception and an illusion, that in its
essential nature and results a life of penal servitude in Sahalin was
not in any way different from a life spent in Nice, that the difference
between the brain of a Kant and the brain of a fly was of no real
significance, that no one in this world is righteous or guilty, that
everything was stuff and nonsense and damn it all! I lived as though I
were doing a favour to some unseen power which compelled me to live, and
to which I seemed to say: ‘Look, I don’t care a straw for life, but I am
living!’ I thought on one definite line, but in all sorts of keys, and
in that respect I was like the subtle gourmand who could prepare a
hundred appetising dishes from nothing but potatoes. There is no doubt
that I was one-sided and even to some extent narrow, but I fancied at
the time that my intellectual horizon had neither beginning nor end, and
that my thought was as boundless as the sea. Well, as far as I can judge
by myself, the philosophy of which we are speaking has something
alluring, narcotic in its nature, like tobacco or morphia. It becomes a
habit, a craving. You take advantage of every minute of solitude to
gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of life and the darkness of the
grave. While I was sitting in the summer-house, Greek children with long
noses were decorously walking about the avenues. I took advantage of the
occasion and, looking at them, began reflecting in this style:
“‘Why are these children born, and what are they living for? Is there
any sort of meaning in their existence? They grow up, without themselves
knowing what for; they will live in this God-forsaken, comfortless hole
for no sort of reason, and then they will die. . . .’
“And I actually felt vexed with those children because they were walking
about decorously and talking with dignity, as though they did not hold
their little colourless lives so cheap and knew what they were living
for. . . . I remember that far away at the end of an avenue three
feminine figures came into sight. Three young ladies, one in a pink
dress, two in white, were walking arm-in-arm, talking and laughing.
Looking after them, I thought:
“‘It wouldn’t be bad to have an affair with some woman for a couple of
days in this dull place.’
“I recalled by the way that it was three weeks since I had visited my
Petersburg lady, and thought that a passing love affair would come in
very appropriately for me just now. The young lady in white in the
middle was rather younger and better looking than her companions, and
judging by her manners and her laugh, she was a high-school girl in an
upper form. I looked, not without impure thoughts, at her bust, and at
the same time reflected about her: 'She will be trained in music and
manners, she will be married to some Greek—God help us!—will lead a
grey, stupid, comfortless life, will bring into the world a crowd of
children without knowing why, and then will die. An absurd life!’
“I must say that as a rule I was a great hand at combining my lofty
ideas with the lowest prose.
“Thoughts of the darkness of the grave did not prevent me from giving
busts and legs their full due. Our dear Baron’s exalted ideas do not
prevent him from going on Saturdays to Vukolovka on amatory expeditions.
To tell the honest truth, as far as I remember, my attitude to women was
most insulting. Now, when I think of that high-school girl, I blush for
my thoughts then, but at the time my conscience was perfectly
untroubled. I, the son of honourable parents, a Christian, who had
received a superior education, not naturally wicked or stupid, felt not
the slightest uneasiness when I paid women Blutgeld, as the Germans call
it, or when I followed high-school girls with insulting looks. . . . The
trouble is that youth makes its demands, and our philosophy has nothing
in principle against those demands, whether they are good or whether
they are loathsome. One who knows that life is aimless and death
inevitable is not interested in the struggle against nature or the
conception of sin: whether you struggle or whether you don’t, you will
die and rot just the same. . . . Secondly, my friends, our philosophy
instils even into very young people what is called reasonableness. The
predominance of reason over the heart is simply overwhelming amongst us.
Direct feeling, inspiration—everything is choked by petty analysis.
Where there is reasonableness there is coldness, and cold people—it’s no
use to disguise it—know nothing of chastity. That virtue is only known
to those who are warm, affectionate, and capable of love. Thirdly, our
philosophy denies the significance of each individual personality. It’s
easy to see that if I deny the personality of some Natalya Stepanovna,
it’s absolutely nothing to me whether she is insulted or not. To-day one
insults her dignity as a human being and pays her Blutgeld, and next day
thinks no more of her.
“So I sat in the summer-house and watched the young ladies. Another
woman’s figure appeared in the avenue, with fair hair, her head
uncovered and a white knitted shawl on her shoulders. She walked along
the avenue, then came into the summer-house, and taking hold of the
parapet, looked indifferently below and into the distance over the sea.
As she came in she paid no attention to me, as though she did not notice
me. I scrutinised her from foot to head (not from head to foot, as one
scrutinises men) and found that she was young, not more than five-and-
twenty, nice-looking, with a good figure, in all probability married and
belonging to the class of respectable women. She was dressed as though
she were at home, but fashionably and with taste, as ladies are, as a
rule, in N.
“‘This one would do nicely,’ I thought, looking at her handsome figure
and her arms; ‘she is all right. . . . She is probably the wife of some
doctor or schoolmaster. . . .’
“But to make up to her—that is, to make her the heroine of one of those
impromptu affairs to which tourists are so prone—was not easy and,
indeed, hardly possible. I felt that as I gazed at her face. The way she
looked, and the expression of her face, suggested that the sea, the
smoke in the distance, and the sky had bored her long, long ago, and
wearied her sight. She seemed to be tired, bored, and thinking about
something dreary, and her face had not even that fussy, affectedly
indifferent expression which one sees in the face of almost every woman
when she is conscious of the presence of an unknown man in her vicinity.
“The fair-haired lady took a bored and passing glance at me, sat down on
a seat and sank into reverie, and from her face I saw that she had no
thoughts for me, and that I, with my Petersburg appearance, did not
arouse in her even simple curiosity. But yet I made up my mind to speak
to her, and asked: ‘Madam, allow me to ask you at what time do the
waggonettes go from here to the town?’
“‘At ten or eleven, I believe. . . .’”
“I thanked her. She glanced at me once or twice, and suddenly there was
a gleam of curiosity, then of something like wonder on her passionless
face. . . . I made haste to assume an indifferent expression and to fall
into a suitable attitude; she was catching on! She suddenly jumped up
from the seat, as though something had bitten her, and examining me
hurriedly, with a gentle smile, asked timidly:
“‘Oh, aren’t you Ananyev?’
“‘Yes, I am Ananyev,’ I answered.
“‘And don’t you recognise me? No?’
“I was a little confused. I looked intently at her, and—would you
believe it?—I recognised her not from her face nor her figure, but from
her gentle, weary smile. It was Natalya Stepanovna, or, as she was
called, Kisotchka, the very girl I had been head over ears in love with
seven or eight years before, when I was wearing the uniform of a high-
school boy. The doings of far, vanished days, the days of long ago. . .
. I remember this Kisotchka, a thin little high-school girl of fifteen
or sixteen, when she was something just for a schoolboy’s taste, created
by nature especially for Platonic love. What a charming little girl she
was! Pale, fragile, light—she looked as though a breath would send her
flying like a feather to the skies—a gentle, perplexed face, little
hands, soft long hair to her belt, a waist as thin as a
wasp’s—altogether something ethereal, transparent like moonlight—in
fact, from the point of view of a high-school boy a peerless beauty. . .
. Wasn’t I in love with her! I did not sleep at night. I wrote verses. .
. . Sometimes in the evenings she would sit on a seat in the park while
we schoolboys crowded round her, gazing reverently; in response to our
compliments, our sighing, and attitudinising, she would shrink nervously
from the evening damp, screw up her eyes, and smile gently, and at such
times she was awfully like a pretty little kitten. As we gazed at her
every one of us had a desire to caress her and stroke her like a cat,
hence her nickname of Kisotchka.
“In the course of the seven or eight years since we had met, Kisotchka
had greatly changed. She had grown more robust and stouter, and had
quite lost the resemblance to a soft, fluffy kitten. It was not that her
features looked old or faded, but they had somehow lost their brilliance
and looked sterner, her hair seemed shorter, she looked taller, and her
shoulders were quite twice as broad, and what was most striking, there
was already in her face the expression of motherliness and resignation
commonly seen in respectable women of her age, and this, of course, I
had never seen in her before. . . . In short, of the school-girlish and
the Platonic her face had kept the gentle smile and nothing more. . . .
“We got into conversation. Learning that I was already an engineer,
Kisotchka was immensely delighted.
“‘How good that is!’ she said, looking joyfully into my face. ‘Ah, how
good! And how splendid you all are! Of all who left with you, not one
has been a failure—they have all turned out well. One an engineer,
another a doctor, a third a teacher, another, they say, is a celebrated
singer in Petersburg. . . . You are all splendid, all of you. . . . Ah,
how good that is!’
“Kisotchka’s eyes shone with genuine goodwill and gladness. She was
admiring me like an elder sister or a former governess. ‘While I looked
at her sweet face and thought, It wouldn’t be bad to get hold of her to-
day!’
“‘Do you remember, Natalya Stepanovna,’ I asked her, ‘how I once brought
you in the park a bouquet with a note in it? You read my note, and such
a look of bewilderment came into your face. . . .’
“‘No, I don’t remember that,’ she said, laughing. ‘But I remember how
you wanted to challenge Florens to a duel over me. . . .’
“‘Well, would you believe it, I don’t remember that. . . .’
“‘Well, that’s all over and done with . . .’ sighed Kisotchka. ‘At one
time I was your idol, and now it is my turn to look up to all of you. .
. .’
“From further conversation I learned that two years after leaving the
high school, Kisotchka had been married to a resident in the town who
was half Greek, half Russian, had a post either in the bank or in the
insurance society, and also carried on a trade in corn. He had a strange
surname, something in the style of Populaki or Skarandopulo. . . .
Goodness only knows—I have forgotten. . . . As a matter of fact,
Kisotchka spoke little and with reluctance about herself. The
conversation was only about me. She asked me about the College of
Engineering, about my comrades, about Petersburg, about my plans, and
everything I said moved her to eager delight and exclamations of, ‘Oh,
how good that is!’
“We went down to the sea and walked over the sands; then when the night
air began to blow chill and damp from the sea we climbed up again. All
the while our talk was of me and of the past. We walked about until the
reflection of the sunset had died away from the windows of the summer
villas.
“‘Come in and have some tea,’ Kisotchka suggested. ‘The samovar must
have been on the table long ago. . . . I am alone at home,’ she said, as
her villa came into sight through the green of the acacias. ‘My husband
is always in the town and only comes home at night, and not always then,
and I must own that I am so dull that it’s simply deadly.’
“I followed her in, admiring her back and shoulders. I was glad that she
was married. Married women are better material for temporary love
affairs than girls. I was also pleased that her husband was not at home.
At the same time I felt that the affair would not come off. . . .
“We went into the house. The rooms were smallish and had low ceilings,
and the furniture was typical of the summer villa (Russians like having
at their summer villas uncomfortable heavy, dingy furniture which they
are sorry to throw away and have nowhere to put), but from certain
details I could observe that Kisotchka and her husband were not badly
off, and must be spending five or six thousand roubles a year. I
remember that in the middle of the room which Kisotchka called the
dining-room there was a round table, supported for some reason on six
legs, and on it a samovar and cups. At the edge of the table lay an open
book, a pencil, and an exercise book. I glanced at the book and
recognised it as ‘Malinin and Burenin’s Arithmetical Examples.’ It was
open, as I now remember, at the ‘Rules of Compound Interest.’
“‘To whom are you giving lessons?’ I asked Kisotchka.
“‘Nobody,’ she answered. ‘I am just doing some. . . . I have nothing to
do, and am so bored that I think of the old days and do sums.’
“‘Have you any children?’
“‘I had a baby boy, but he only lived a week.’
“We began drinking tea. Admiring me, Kisotchka said again how good it
was that I was an engineer, and how glad she was of my success. And the
more she talked and the more genuinely she smiled, the stronger was my
conviction that I should go away without having gained my object. I was
a connoisseur in love affairs in those days, and could accurately gauge
my chances of success. You can boldly reckon on success if you are
tracking down a fool or a woman as much on the look out for new
experiences and sensations as yourself, or an adventuress to whom you
are a stranger. If you come across a sensible and serious woman, whose
face has an expression of weary submission and goodwill, who is
genuinely delighted at your presence, and, above all, respects you, you
may as well turn back. To succeed in that case needs longer than one
day.
“And by evening light Kisotchka seemed even more charming than by day.
She attracted me more and more, and apparently she liked me too, and the
surroundings were most appropriate: the husband not at home, no servants
visible, stillness around. . . . Though I had little confidence in
success, I made up my mind to begin the attack anyway. First of all it
was necessary to get into a familiar tone and to change Kisotchka’s
lyrically earnest mood into a more frivolous one.
“‘Let us change the conversation, Natalya Stepanovna,’ I began. 'Let us
talk of something amusing. First of all, allow me, for the sake of old
times, to call you Kisotchka.’
“She allowed me.
“‘Tell me, please, Kisotchka,’ I went on, ‘what is the matter with all
the fair sex here. What has happened to them? In old days they were all
so moral and virtuous, and now, upon my word, if one asks about anyone,
one is told such things that one is quite shocked at human nature. . . .
One young lady has eloped with an officer; another has run away and
carried off a high-school boy with her; another—a married woman—has run
away from her husband with an actor; a fourth has left her husband and
gone off with an officer, and so on and so on. It’s a regular epidemic!
If it goes on like this there won’t be a girl or a young woman left in
your town!’
“I spoke in a vulgar, playful tone. If Kisotchka had laughed in response
I should have gone on in this style: ‘You had better look out,
Kisotchka, or some officer or actor will be carrying you off!’ She would
have dropped her eyes and said: ‘As though anyone would care to carry me
off; there are plenty younger and better looking . . . .’ And I should
have said: ‘Nonsense, Kisotchka—I for one should be delighted!’ And so
on in that style, and it would all have gone swimmingly. But Kisotchka
did not laugh in response; on the contrary, she looked grave and sighed.
“‘All you have been told is true,’ she said. ‘My cousin Sonya ran away
from her husband with an actor. Of course, it is wrong. . . . Everyone
ought to bear the lot that fate has laid on him, but I do not condemn
them or blame them. . . . Circumstances are sometimes too strong for
anyone!’
“‘That is so, Kisotchka, but what circumstances can produce a regular
epidemic?’
“‘It’s very simple and easy to understand,’ replied Kisotchka, raising
her eyebrows. ‘There is absolutely nothing for us educated girls and
women to do with ourselves. Not everyone is able to go to the
University, to become a teacher, to live for ideas, in fact, as men do.
They have to be married. . . . And whom would you have them marry? You
boys leave the high-school and go away to the University, never to
return to your native town again, and you marry in Petersburg or Moscow,
while the girls remain. . . . To whom are they to be married? Why, in
the absence of decent cultured men, goodness knows what sort of men they
marry—stockbrokers and such people of all kinds, who can do nothing but
drink and get into rows at the club. . . . A girl married like that, at
random. . . . And what is her life like afterwards? You can understand:
a well-educated, cultured woman is living with a stupid, boorish man; if
she meets a cultivated man, an officer, an actor, or a doctor—well, she
gets to love him, her life becomes unbearable to her, and she runs away
from her husband. And one can’t condemn her!’
“‘If that is so, Kisotchka, why get married?’ I asked.
“‘Yes, of course,’ said Kisotchka with a sigh, ‘but you know every girl
fancies that any husband is better than nothing. . . . Altogether life
is horrid here, Nikolay Anastasyevitch, very horrid! Life is stifling
for a girl and stifling when one is married. . . . Here they laugh at
Sonya for having run away from her husband, but if they could see into
her soul they would not laugh. . . .’”
Azorka began barking outside again. He growled angrily at some one, then
howled miserably and dashed with all his force against the wall of the
hut. . . . Ananyev’s face was puckered with pity; he broke off his story
and went out. For two minutes he could be heard outside comforting his
dog. “Good dog! poor dog!”
“Our Nikolay Anastasyevitch is fond of talking,” said Von Schtenberg,
laughing. “He is a good fellow,” he added after a brief silence.
Returning to the hut, the engineer filled up our glasses and, smiling
and stroking his chest, went on:
“And so my attack was unsuccessful. There was nothing for it, I put off
my unclean thoughts to a more favourable occasion, resigned myself to my
failure and, as the saying is, waved my hand. What is more, under the
influence of Kisotchka’s voice, the evening air, and the stillness, I
gradually myself fell into a quiet sentimental mood. I remember I sat in
an easy chair by the wide-open window and glanced at the trees and
darkened sky. The outlines of the acacias and the lime trees were just
the same as they had been eight years before; just as then, in the days
of my childhood, somewhere far away there was the tinkling of a wretched
piano, and the public had just the same habit of sauntering to and fro
along the avenues, but the people were not the same. Along the avenues
there walked now not my comrades and I and the object of my adoration,
but schoolboys and young ladies who were strangers. And I felt
melancholy. When to my inquiries about acquaintances I five times
received from Kisotchka the answer, ‘He is dead,’ my melancholy changed
into the feeling one has at the funeral service of a good man. And
sitting there at the window, looking at the promenading public and
listening to the tinkling piano, I saw with my own eyes for the first
time in my life with what eagerness one generation hastens to replace
another, and what a momentous significance even some seven or eight
years may have in a man’s life!
“Kisotchka put a bottle of red wine on the table. I drank it off, grew
sentimental, and began telling a long story about something or other.
Kisotchka listened as before, admiring me and my cleverness. And time
passed. The sky was by now so dark that the outlines of the acacias and
lime trees melted into one, the public was no longer walking up and down
the avenues, the piano was silent and the only sound was the even murmur
of the sea.
“Young people are all alike. Be friendly to a young man, make much of
him, regale him with wine, let him understand that he is attractive and
he will sit on and on, forget that it is time to go, and talk and talk
and talk. . . . His hosts cannot keep their eyes open, it’s past their
bedtime, and he still stays and talks. That was what I did. Once I
chanced to look at the clock; it was half-past ten. I began saying good-
bye.
“‘Have another glass before your walk,’ said Kisotchka.
“I took another glass, again I began talking at length, forgot it was
time to go, and sat down. Then there came the sound of men’s voices,
footsteps and the clank of spurs.
“‘I think my husband has come in . . . .’ said Kisotchka listening.
“The door creaked, two voices came now from the passage and I saw two
men pass the door that led into the dining-room: one a stout, solid,
dark man with a hooked nose, wearing a straw hat, and the other a young
officer in a white tunic. As they passed the door they both glanced
casually and indifferently at Kisotchka and me, and I fancied both of
them were drunk.
“‘She told you a lie then, and you believed her!’ we heard a loud voice
with a marked nasal twang say a minute later. ‘To begin with, it wasn’t
at the big club but at the little one.’
“‘You are angry, Jupiter, so you are wrong . . . .’ said another voice,
obviously the officer’s, laughing and coughing. ‘I say, can I stay the
night? Tell me honestly, shall I be in your way?’
“‘What a question! Not only you can, but you must. What will you have,
beer or wine?’
“They were sitting two rooms away from us, talking loudly, and
apparently feeling no interest in Kisotchka or her visitor. A
perceptible change came over Kisotchka on her husband’s arrival. At
first she flushed red, then her face wore a timid, guilty expression;
she seemed to be troubled by some anxiety, and I began to fancy that she
was ashamed to show me her husband and wanted me to go.
“I began taking leave. Kisotchka saw me to the front door. I remember
well her gentle mournful smile and kind patient eyes as she pressed my
hand and said:
“‘Most likely we shall never see each other again. Well, God give you
every blessing. Thank you!’
“Not one sigh, not one fine phrase. As she said good-bye she was holding
the candle in her hand; patches of light danced over her face and neck,
as though chasing her mournful smile. I pictured to myself the old
Kisotchka whom one used to want to stroke like a cat, I looked intently
at the present Kisotchka, and for some reason recalled her words:
‘Everyone ought to bear the lot that fate has laid on him.’ And I had a
pang at my heart. I instinctively guessed how it was, and my conscience
whispered to me that I, in my happiness and indifference, was face to
face with a good, warm-hearted, loving creature, who was broken by
suffering.
“I said good-bye and went to the gate. By now it was quite dark. In the
south the evenings draw in early in July and it gets dark rapidly.
Towards ten o’clock it is so dark that you can’t see an inch before your
nose. I lighted a couple of dozen matches before, almost groping, I
found my way to the gate.
“‘Cab!’ I shouted, going out of the gate; not a sound, not a sigh in
answer. . . . ‘Cab,’ I repeated, ‘hey, Cab!’
“But there was no cab of any description. The silence of the grave. I
could hear nothing but the murmur of the drowsy sea and the beating of
my heart from the wine. Lifting my eyes to the sky I found not a single
star. It was dark and sullen. Evidently the sky was covered with clouds.
For some reason I shrugged my shoulders, smiling foolishly, and once
more, not quite so resolutely, shouted for a cab.
“The echo answered me. A walk of three miles across open country and in
the pitch dark was not an agreeable prospect. Before making up my mind
to walk, I spent a long time deliberating and shouting for a cab; then,
shrugging my shoulders, I walked lazily back to the copse, with no
definite object in my mind. It was dreadfully dark in the copse. Here
and there between the trees the windows of the summer villas glowed a
dull red. A raven, disturbed by my steps and the matches with which I
lighted my way to the summer-house, flew from tree to tree and rustled
among the leaves. I felt vexed and ashamed, and the raven seemed to
understand this, and croaked 'krrra!’ I was vexed that I had to walk,
and ashamed that I had stayed on at Kisotchka’s, chatting like a boy.
“I made my way to the summer-house, felt for the seat and sat down. Far
below me, behind a veil of thick darkness, the sea kept up a low angry
growl. I remember that, as though I were blind, I could see neither sky
nor sea, nor even the summer-house in which I was sitting. And it seemed
to me as though the whole world consisted only of the thoughts that were
straying through my head, dizzy from the wine, and of an unseen power
murmuring monotonously somewhere below. And afterwards, as I sank into a
doze, it began to seem that it was not the sea murmuring, but my
thoughts, and that the whole world consisted of nothing but me. And
concentrating the whole world in myself in this way, I thought no more
of cabs, of the town, and of Kisotchka, and abandoned myself to the
sensation I was so fond of: that is, the sensation of fearful isolation
when you feel that in the whole universe, dark and formless, you alone
exist. It is a proud, demoniac sensation, only possible to Russians
whose thoughts and sensations are as large, boundless, and gloomy as
their plains, their forests, and their snow. If I had been an artist I
should certainly have depicted the expression of a Russian’s face when
he sits motionless and, with his legs under him and his head clasped in
his hands, abandons himself to this sensation. . . . And together with
this sensation come thoughts of the aimlessness of life, of death, and
of the darkness of the grave. . . . The thoughts are not worth a brass
farthing, but the expression of face must be fine. . . .
“While I was sitting and dozing, unable to bring myself to get up—I was
warm and comfortable—all at once, against the even monotonous murmur of
the sea, as though upon a canvas, sounds began to grow distinct which
drew my attention from myself. . . . Someone was coming hurriedly along
the avenue. Reaching the summer-house this someone stopped, gave a sob
like a little girl, and said in the voice of a weeping child: ‘My God,
when will it all end! Merciful Heavens!’
“Judging from the voice and the weeping I took it to be a little girl of
ten or twelve. She walked irresolutely into the summer-house, sat down,
and began half-praying, half-complaining aloud. . . .
“‘Merciful God!’ she said, crying, ‘it’s unbearable. It’s beyond all
endurance! I suffer in silence, but I want to live too. . . . Oh, my
God! My God!’
“And so on in the same style.
“I wanted to look at the child and speak to her. So as not to frighten
her I first gave a loud sigh and coughed, then cautiously struck a
match. . . . There was a flash of bright light in the darkness, which
lighted up the weeping figure. It was Kisotchka!”
“Marvels upon marvels!” said Von Schtenberg with a sigh. “Black night,
the murmur of the sea; she in grief, he with a sensation of
world—solitude. . . . It’s too much of a good thing. . . . You only want
Circassians with daggers to complete it.”
“I am not telling you a tale, but fact.”
“Well, even if it is a fact . . . it all proves nothing, and there is
nothing new in it. . . .”
“Wait a little before you find fault! Let me finish,” said Ananyev,
waving his hand with vexation; “don’t interfere, please! I am not
telling you, but the doctor. . . . Well,” he went on, addressing me and
glancing askance at the student who bent over his books and seemed very
well satisfied at having gibed at the engineer—“well, Kisotchka was not
surprised or frightened at seeing me. It seemed as though she had known
beforehand that she would find me in the summer-house. She was breathing
in gasps and trembling all over as though in a fever, while her tear-
stained face, so far as I could distinguish it as I struck match after
match, was not the intelligent, submissive weary face I had seen before,
but something different, which I cannot understand to this day. It did
not express pain, nor anxiety, nor misery—nothing of what was expressed
by her words and her tears. . . . I must own that, probably because I
did not understand it, it looked to me senseless and as though she were
drunk.
“‘I can’t bear it,’ muttered Kisotchka in the voice of a crying child.
‘It’s too much for me, Nikolay Anastasyitch. Forgive me, Nikolav
Anastasyitch. I can’t go on living like this. . . . I am going to the
town to my mother’s. . . . Take me there. . . . Take me there, for God’s
sake!’
“In the presence of tears I can neither speak nor be silent. I was
flustered and muttered some nonsense trying to comfort her.
“‘No, no; I will go to my mother’s,’ said Kisotchka resolutely, getting
up and clutching my arm convulsively (her hands and her sleeves were wet
with tears). ‘Forgive me, Nikolay Anastasyitch, I am going. . . . I can
bear no more. . . .’
“‘Kisotchka, but there isn’t a single cab,’ I said. ‘How can you go?’
“‘No matter, I’ll walk. . . . It’s not far. I can’t bear it. . . .’
“I was embarrassed, but not touched. Kisotchka’s tears, her trembling,
and the blank expression of her face suggested to me a trivial, French
or Little Russian melodrama, in which every ounce of cheap shallow
feeling is washed down with pints of tears.
“I didn’t understand her, and knew I did not understand her; I ought to
have been silent, but for some reason, most likely for fear my silence
might be taken for stupidity, I thought fit to try to persuade her not
to go to her mother’s, but to stay at home. When people cry, they don’t
like their tears to be seen. And I lighted match after match and went on
striking till the box was empty. What I wanted with this ungenerous
illumination, I can’t conceive to this day. Cold-hearted people are apt
to be awkward, and even stupid.
“In the end Kisotchka took my arm and we set off. Going out of the gate,
we turned to the right and sauntered slowly along the soft dusty road.
It was dark. As my eyes grew gradually accustomed to the darkness, I
began to distinguish the silhouettes of the old gaunt oaks and lime
trees which bordered the road. The jagged, precipitous cliffs,
intersected here and there by deep, narrow ravines and creeks, soon
showed indistinctly, a black streak on the right. Low bushes nestled by
the hollows, looking like sitting figures. It was uncanny. I looked
sideways suspiciously at the cliffs, and the murmur of the sea and the
stillness of the country alarmed my imagination. Kisotchka did not
speak. She was still trembling, and before she had gone half a mile she
was exhausted with walking and was out of breath. I too was silent.
“Three-quarters of a mile from the Quarantine Station there was a
deserted building of four storeys, with a very high chimney in which
there had once been a steam flour mill. It stood solitary on the cliff,
and by day it could be seen for a long distance, both by sea and by
land. Because it was deserted and no one lived in it, and because there
was an echo in it which distinctly repeated the steps and voices of
passers-by, it seemed mysterious. Picture me in the dark night arm-in-
arm with a woman who was running away from her husband near this tall
long monster which repeated the sound of every step I took and stared at
me fixedly with its hundred black windows. A normal young man would have
been moved to romantic feelings in such surroundings, but I looked at
the dark windows and thought: ‘All this is very impressive, but time
will come when of that building and of Kisotchka and her troubles and of
me with my thoughts, not one grain of dust will remain. . . . All is
nonsense and vanity. . . .’
“When we reached the flour mill Kisotchka suddenly stopped, took her arm
out of mine, and said, no longer in a childish voice, but in her own:
“‘Nikolay Anastasvitch, I know all this seems strange to you. But I am
terribly unhappy! And you cannot even imagine how unhappy! It’s
impossible to imagine it! I don’t tell you about it because one can’t
talk about it. . . . Such a life, such a life! . . .’
“Kisotchka did not finish. She clenched her teeth and moaned as though
she were doing her utmost not to scream with pain.
“‘Such a life!’ she repeated with horror, with the cadence and the
southern, rather Ukrainian accent which particularly in women gives to
emotional speech the effect of singing. ‘It is a life! Ah, my God, my
God! what does it mean? Oh, my God, my God!’
“As though trying to solve the riddle of her fate, she shrugged her
shoulders in perplexity, shook her head, and clasped her hands. She
spoke as though she were singing, moved gracefully, and reminded me of a
celebrated Little Russian actress.
“‘Great God, it is as though I were in a pit,’ she went on. ‘If one
could live for one minute in happiness as other people live! Oh, my God,
my God! I have come to such disgrace that before a stranger I am running
away from my husband by night, like some disreputable creature! Can I
expect anything good after that?’
“As I admired her movements and her voice, I began to feel annoyed that
she was not on good terms with her husband. ‘It would be nice to have
got on into relations with her!’ flitted through my mind; and this
pitiless thought stayed in my brain, haunted me all the way and grew
more and more alluring.
“About a mile from the flour mill we had to turn to the left by the
cemetery. At the turning by the corner of the cemetery there stood a
stone windmill, and by it a little hut in which the miller lived. We
passed the mill and the hut, turned to the left and reached the gates of
the cemetery. There Kisotchka stopped and said:
“‘I am going back, Nikolay Anastasyitch! You go home, and God bless you,
but I am going back. I am not frightened.’
“‘Well, what next!’ I said, disconcerted. ‘If you are going, you had
better go!’
“‘I have been too hasty. . . . It was all about nothing that mattered.
You and your talk took me back to the past and put all sort of ideas
into my head. . . . I was sad and wanted to cry, and my husband said
rude things to me before that officer, and I could not bear it. . . .
And what’s the good of my going to the town to my mother’s? Will that
make me any happier? I must go back. . . . But never mind . . . let us
go on,’ said Kisotchka, and she laughed. 'It makes no difference!’
“I remembered that over the gate of the cemetery there was an
inscription: ‘The hour will come wherein all they that lie in the grave
will hear the voice of the Son of God.’ I knew very well that sooner or
later I and Kisotchka and her husband and the officer in the white tunic
would lie under the dark trees in the churchyard; I knew that an unhappy
and insulted fellow-creature was walking beside me. All this I
recognised distinctly, but at the same time I was troubled by an
oppressive and unpleasant dread that Kisotchka would turn back, and that
I should not manage to say to her what had to be said. Never at any
other time in my life have thoughts of a higher order been so closely
interwoven with the basest animal prose as on that night. . . . It was
horrible!
“Not far from the cemetery we found a cab. When we reached the High
Street, where Kisotchka’s mother lived, we dismissed the cab and walked
along the pavement. Kisotchka was silent all the while, while I looked
at her, and I raged at myself, ‘Why don’t you begin? Now’s the time!’
About twenty paces from the hotel where I was staying, Kisotchka stopped
by the lamp-post and burst into tears.
“‘Nikolay Anastasyitch!’ she said, crying and laughing and looking at me
with wet shining eyes, ‘I shall never forget your sympathy . . . . How
good you are! All of you are so splendid—all of you! Honest, great-
hearted, kind, clever. . . . Ah, how good that is!’
“She saw in me a highly educated man, advanced in every sense of the
word, and on her tear-stained laughing face, together with the emotion
and enthusiasm aroused by my personality, there was clearly written
regret that she so rarely saw such people, and that God had not
vouchsafed her the bliss of being the wife of one of them. She muttered,
‘Ah, how splendid it is!’ The childish gladness on her face, the tears,
the gentle smile, the soft hair, which had escaped from under the
kerchief, and the kerchief itself thrown carelessly over her head, in
the light of the street lamp reminded me of the old Kisotchka whom one
had wanted to stroke like a kitten.
“I could not restrain myself, and began stroking her hair, her
shoulders, and her hands.
“‘Kisotchka, what do you want?’ I muttered. ‘I’ll go to the ends of the
earth with you if you like! I will take you out of this hole and give
you happiness. I love you. . . . Let us go, my sweet? Yes? Will you?’
“Kisotchka’s face was flooded with bewilderment. She stepped back from
the street lamp and, completely overwhelmed, gazed at me with wide-open
eyes. I gripped her by the arm, began showering kisses on her face, her
neck, her shoulders, and went on making vows and promises. In love
affairs vows and promises are almost a physiological necessity. There’s
no getting on without them. Sometimes you know you are lying and that
promises are not necessary, but still you vow and protest. Kisotchka,
utterly overwhelmed, kept staggering back and gazing at me with round
eyes.
“‘Please don’t! Please don’t!’ she muttered, holding me off with her
hands.
“I clasped her tightly in my arms. All at once she broke into hysterical
tears. And her face had the same senseless blank expression that I had
seen in the summer-house when I lighted the matches. Without asking her
consent, preventing her from speaking, I dragged her forcibly towards my
hotel. She seemed almost swooning and did not walk, but I took her under
the arms and almost carried her. . . . I remember, as we were going up
the stairs, some man with a red band in his cap looked wonderingly at me
and bowed to Kisotchka. . . .”
Ananyev flushed crimson and paused. He walked up and down near the table
in silence, scratched the back of his head with an air of vexation, and
several times shrugged his shoulders and twitched his shoulder-blades,
while a shiver ran down his huge back. The memory was painful and made
him ashamed, and he was struggling with himself.
“It’s horrible!” he said, draining a glass of wine and shaking his head.
“I am told that in every introductory lecture on women’s diseases the
medical students are admonished to remember that each one of them has a
mother, a sister, a fiancée, before undressing and examining a female
patient. . . . That advice would be very good not only for medical
students but for everyone who in one way or another has to deal with a
woman’s life. Now that I have a wife and a little daughter, oh, how well
I understand that advice! How I understand it, my God! You may as well
hear the rest, though. . . . As soon as she had become my mistress,
Kisotchka’s view of the position was very different from mine. First of
all she felt for me a deep and passionate love. What was for me an
ordinary amatory episode was for her an absolute revolution in her life.
I remember, it seemed to me that she had gone out of her mind. Happy for
the first time in her life, looking five years younger, with an inspired
enthusiastic face, not knowing what to do with herself for happiness,
she laughed and cried and never ceased dreaming aloud how next day we
would set off for the Caucasus, then in the autumn to Petersburg; how we
would live afterwards.
“‘Don’t worry yourself about my husband,’ she said to reassure me. 'He
is bound to give me a divorce. Everyone in the town knows that he is
living with the elder Kostovitch. We will get a divorce and be married.’
“When women love they become acclimatised and at home with people very
quickly, like cats. Kisotchka had only spent an hour and a half in my
room when she already felt as though she were at home and was ready to
treat my property as though it were her own. She packed my things in my
portmanteau, scolded me for not hanging my new expensive overcoat on a
peg instead of flinging it on a chair, and so on.
“I looked at her, listened, and felt weariness and vexation. I was
conscious of a slight twinge of horror at the thought that a
respectable, honest, and unhappy woman had so easily, after some three
or four hours, succumbed to the first man she met. As a respectable man,
you see, I didn’t like it. Then, too, I was unpleasantly impressed by
the fact that women of Kisotchka’s sort, not deep or serious, are too
much in love with life, and exalt what is in reality such a trifle as
love for a man to the level of bliss, misery, a complete revolution in
life. . . . Moreover, now that I was satisfied, I was vexed with myself
for having been so stupid as to get entangled with a woman whom I should
have to deceive. And in spite of my disorderly life I must observe that
I could not bear telling lies.
“I remember that Kisotchka sat down at my feet, laid her head on my
knees, and, looking at me with shining, loving eyes, asked:
“‘Kolya, do you love me? Very, very much?’
“And she laughed with happiness. . . . This struck me as sentimental,
affected, and not clever; and meanwhile I was already inclined to look
for ‘depth of thought’ before everything.
“‘Kisotchka, you had better go home,’ I said, or else your people will
be sure to miss you and will be looking for you all over the town; and
it would be awkward for you to go to your mother in the morning.’
“Kisotchka agreed. At parting we arranged to meet at midday next morning
in the park, and the day after to set off together to Pyatigorsk. I went
into the street to see her home, and I remember that I caressed her with
genuine tenderness on the way. There was a minute when I felt unbearably
sorry for her, for trusting me so implicitly, and I made up my mind that
I would really take her to Pyatigorsk, but remembering that I had only
six hundred roubles in my portmanteau, and that it would be far more
difficult to break it off with her in the autumn than now, I made haste
to suppress my compassion.
“We reached the house where Kisotchka’s mother lived. I pulled at the
bell. When footsteps were heard at the other side of the door Kisotchka
suddenly looked grave, glanced upwards to the sky, made the sign of the
Cross over me several times and, clutching my hand, pressed it to her
lips.
“‘Till to-morrow,’ she said, and disappeared into the house.
“I crossed to the opposite pavement and from there looked at the house.
At first the windows were in darkness, then in one of the windows there
was the glimmer of the faint bluish flame of a newly lighted candle; the
flame grew, gave more light, and I saw shadows moving about the rooms
together with it.
“‘They did not expect her,’ I thought.
“Returning to my hotel room I undressed, drank off a glass of red wine,
ate some fresh caviare which I had bought that day in the bazaar, went
to bed in a leisurely way, and slept the sound, untroubled sleep of a
tourist.
“In the morning I woke up with a headache and in a bad humour. Something
worried me.
“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked myself, trying to explain my uneasiness.
'What’s upsetting me?’
“And I put down my uneasiness to the dread that Kisotchka might turn up
any minute and prevent my going away, and that I should have to tell
lies and act a part before her. I hurriedly dressed, packed my things,
and left the hotel, giving instructions to the porter to take my luggage
to the station for the seven o’clock train in the evening. I spent the
whole day with a doctor friend and left the town that evening. As you
see, my philosophy did not prevent me from taking to my heels in a mean
and treacherous flight. . . .
“All the while that I was at my friend’s, and afterwards driving to the
station, I was tormented by anxiety. I fancied that I was afraid of
meeting with Kisotchka and a scene. In the station I purposely remained
in the toilet room till the second bell rang, and while I was making my
way to my compartment, I was oppressed by a feeling as though I were
covered all over with stolen things. With what impatience and terror I
waited for the third bell!
“At last the third bell that brought my deliverance rang at last, the
train moved; we passed the prison, the barracks, came out into the open
country, and yet, to my surprise, the feeling of uneasiness still
persisted, and still I felt like a thief passionately longing to escape.
It was queer. To distract my mind and calm myself I looked out of the
window. The train ran along the coast. The sea was smooth, and the
turquoise sky, almost half covered with the tender, golden crimson light
of sunset, was gaily and serenely mirrored in it. Here and there fishing
boats and rafts made black patches on its surface. The town, as clean
and beautiful as a toy, stood on the high cliff, and was already
shrouded in the mist of evening. The golden domes of its churches, the
windows and the greenery reflected the setting sun, glowing and melting
like shimmering gold. . . . The scent of the fields mingled with the
soft damp air from the sea.
“The train flew rapidly along. I heard the laughter of passengers and
guards. Everyone was good-humoured and light-hearted, yet my
unaccountable uneasiness grew greater and greater. . . . I looked at the
white mist that covered the town and I imagined how a woman with a
senseless blank face was hurrying up and down in that mist by the
churches and the houses, looking for me and moaning, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my
God!’ in the voice of a little girl or the cadences of a Little Russian
actress. I recalled her grave face and big anxious eyes as she made the
sign of the Cross over me, as though I belonged to her, and mechanically
I looked at the hand which she had kissed the day before.
“‘Surely I am not in love?’ I asked myself, scratching my hand.
“Only as night came on when the passengers were asleep and I was left
tête-à -tête with my conscience, I began to understand what I had not
been able to grasp before. In the twilight of the railway carriage the
image of Kisotchka rose before me, haunted me and I recognised clearly
that I had committed a crime as bad as murder. My conscience tormented
me. To stifle this unbearable feeling, I assured myself that everything
was nonsense and vanity, that Kisotchka and I would die and decay, that
her grief was nothing in comparison with death, and so on and so on . .
. and that if you come to that, there is no such thing as freewill, and
that therefore I was not to blame. But all these arguments only
irritated me and were extraordinarily quickly crowded out by other
thoughts. There was a miserable feeling in the hand that Kisotchka had
kissed. . . . I kept lying down and getting up again, drank vodka at the
stations, forced myself to eat bread and butter, fell to assuring myself
again that life had no meaning, but nothing was of any use. A strange
and if you like absurd ferment was going on in my brain. The most
incongruous ideas crowded one after another in disorder, getting more
and more tangled, thwarting each other, and I, the thinker, 'with my
brow bent on the earth,’ could make out nothing and could not find my
bearings in this mass of essential and non-essential ideas. It appeared
that I, the thinker, had not mastered the technique of thinking, and
that I was no more capable of managing my own brain than mending a
watch. For the first time in my life I was really thinking eagerly and
intensely, and that seemed to me so monstrous that I said to myself: ‘I
am going off my head.’ A man whose brain does not work at all times, but
only at painful moments, is often haunted by the thought of madness.
“I spent a day and a night in this misery, then a second night, and
learning from experience how little my philosophy was to me, I came to
my senses and realised at last what sort of a creature I was. I saw that
my ideas were not worth a brass farthing, and that before meeting
Kisotchka I had not begun to think and had not even a conception of what
thinking in earnest meant; now through suffering I realised that I had
neither convictions nor a definite moral standard, nor heart, nor
reason; my whole intellectual and moral wealth consisted of specialist
knowledge, fragments, useless memories, other people’s ideas—and nothing
else; and my mental processes were as lacking in complexity, as useless
and as rudimentary as a Yakut’s. . . . If I had disliked lying, had not
stolen, had not murdered, and, in fact, made obviously gross mistakes,
that was not owing to my convictions—I had none, but because I was in
bondage, hand and foot, to my nurse’s fairy tales and to copy-book
morals, which had entered into my flesh and blood and without my
noticing it guided me in life, though I looked on them as absurd. . . .
“I realised that I was not a thinker, not a philosopher, but simply a
dilettante. God had given me a strong healthy Russian brain with promise
of talent. And, only fancy, here was that brain at twenty-six,
undisciplined, completely free from principles, not weighed down by any
stores of knowledge, but only lightly sprinkled with information of a
sort in the engineering line; it was young and had a physiological
craving for exercise, it was on the look-out for it, when all at once
quite casually the fine juicy idea of the aimlessness of life and the
darkness beyond the tomb descends upon it. It greedily sucks it in, puts
its whole outlook at its disposal and begins playing with it, like a cat
with a mouse. There is neither learning nor system in the brain, but
that does not matter. It deals with the great ideas with its own innate
powers, like a self-educated man, and before a month has passed the
owner of the brain can turn a potato into a hundred dainty dishes, and
fancies himself a philosopher . . . .
“Our generation has carried this dilettantism, this playing with serious
ideas into science, into literature, into politics, and into everything
which it is not too lazy to go into, and with its dilettantism has
introduced, too, its coldness, its boredom, and its one-sidedness and,
as it seems to me, it has already succeeded in developing in the masses
a new hitherto non-existent attitude to serious ideas.
“I realised and appreciated my abnormality and utter ignorance, thanks
to a misfortune. My normal thinking, so it seems to me now, dates from
the day when I began again from the A, B, C, when my conscience sent me
flying back to N., when with no philosophical subleties I repented,
besought Kisotchka’s forgiveness like a naughty boy and wept with her. .
. .”
Ananyev briefly described his last interview with Kisotchka.
“H’m. . . .” the student filtered through his teeth when the engineer
had finished. “That’s the sort of thing that happens.”
His face still expressed mental inertia, and apparently Ananyev’s story
had not touched him in the least. Only when the engineer after a
moment’s pause, began expounding his view again and repeating what he
had said at first, the student frowned irritably, got up from the table
and walked away to his bed. He made his bed and began undressing.
“You look as though you have really convinced some one this time,” he
said irritably.
“Me convince anybody!” said the engineer. “My dear soul, do you suppose
I claim to do that? God bless you! To convince you is impossible. You
can reach conviction only by way of personal experience and suffering!”
“And then—it’s queer logic!” grumbled the student as he put on his
nightshirt. “The ideas which you so dislike, which are so ruinous for
the young are, according to you, the normal thing for the old; it’s as
though it were a question of grey hairs. . . . Where do the old get this
privilege? What is it based upon? If these ideas are poison, they are
equally poisonous for all?”
“Oh, no, my dear soul, don’t say so!” said the engineer with a sly wink.
“Don’t say so. In the first place, old men are not dilettanti. Their
pessimism comes to them not casually from outside, but from the depths
of their own brains, and only after they have exhaustively studied the
Hegels and Kants of all sorts, have suffered, have made no end of
mistakes, in fact—when they have climbed the whole ladder from bottom to
top. Their pessimism has both personal experience and sound philosophic
training behind it. Secondly, the pessimism of old thinkers does not
take the form of idle talk, as it does with you and me, but of
Weltschmertz, of suffering; it rests in them on a Christian foundation
because it is derived from love for humanity and from thoughts about
humanity, and is entirely free from the egoism which is noticeable in
dilettanti. You despise life because its meaning and its object are
hidden just from you, and you are only afraid of your own death, while
the real thinker is unhappy because the truth is hidden from all and he
is afraid for all men. For instance, there is living not far from here
the Crown forester, Ivan Alexandritch. He is a nice old man. At one time
he was a teacher somewhere, and used to write something; the devil only
knows what he was, but anyway he is a remarkably clever fellow and in
philosophy he is A1. He has read a great deal and he is continually
reading now. Well, we came across him lately in the Gruzovsky district.
. . . They were laying the sleepers and rails just at the time. It’s not
a difficult job, but Ivan Alexandritch, not being a specialist, looked
at it as though it were a conjuring trick. It takes an experienced
workman less than a minute to lay a sleeper and fix a rail on it. The
workmen were in good form and really were working smartly and rapidly;
one rascal in particular brought his hammer down with exceptional
smartness on the head of the nail and drove it in at one blow, though
the handle of the hammer was two yards or more in length and each nail
was a foot long. Ivan Alexandritch watched the workmen a long time, was
moved, and said to me with tears in his eyes:
“‘What a pity that these splendid men will die!’ Such pessimism I
understand.”
“All that proves nothing and explains nothing,” said the student,
covering himself up with a sheet; “all that is simply pounding liquid in
a mortar. No one knows anything and nothing can be proved by words.”
He peeped out from under the sheet, lifted up his head and, frowning
irritably, said quickly:
“One must be very naïve to believe in human words and logic and to
ascribe any determining value to them. You can prove and disprove
anything you like with words, and people will soon perfect the technique
of language to such a point that they will prove with mathematical
certainty that twice two is seven. I am fond of reading and listening,
but as to believing, no thank you; I can’t, and I don’t want to. I
believe only in God, but as for you, if you talk to me till the Second
Coming and seduce another five hundred Kisothchkas, I shall believe in
you only when I go out of my mind . . . . Goodnight.”
The student hid his head under the sheet and turned his face towards the
wall, meaning by this action to let us know that he did not want to
speak or listen. The argument ended at that.
Before going to bed the engineer and I went out of the hut, and I saw
the lights once more.
“We have tired you out with our chatter,” said Ananyev, yawning and
looking at the sky. “Well, my good sir! The only pleasure we have in
this dull hole is drinking and philosophising. . . . What an embankment,
Lord have mercy on us!” he said admiringly, as we approached the
embankment; “it is more like Mount Ararat than an embankment.”
He paused for a little, then said: “Those lights remind the Baron of the
Amalekites, but it seems to me that they are like the thoughts of man. .
. . You know the thoughts of each individual man are scattered like that
in disorder, stretch in a straight line towards some goal in the midst
of the darkness and, without shedding light on anything, without
lighting up the night, they vanish somewhere far beyond old age. But
enough philosophising! It’s time to go bye-bye.”
When we were back in the hut the engineer began begging me to take his
bed.
“Oh please!” he said imploringly, pressing both hands on his heart. “I
entreat you, and don’t worry about me! I can sleep anywhere, and,
besides, I am not going to bed just yet. Please do—it’s a favour!”
I agreed, undressed, and went to bed, while he sat down to the table and
set to work on the plans.
“We fellows have no time for sleep,” he said in a low voice when I had
got into bed and shut my eyes. “When a man has a wife and two children
he can’t think of sleep. One must think now of food and clothes and
saving for the future. And I have two of them, a little son and a
daughter. . . . The boy, little rascal, has a jolly little face. He’s
not six yet, and already he shows remarkable abilities, I assure you. .
. . I have their photographs here, somewhere. . . . Ah, my children, my
children!”
He rummaged among his papers, found their photographs, and began looking
at them. I fell asleep.
I was awakened by the barking of Azorka and loud voices. Von Schtenberg
with bare feet and ruffled hair was standing in the doorway dressed in
his underclothes, talking loudly with some one . . . . It was getting
light. A gloomy dark blue dawn was peeping in at the door, at the
windows, and through the crevices in the hut walls, and casting a faint
light on my bed, on the table with the papers, and on Ananyev. Stretched
on the floor on a cloak, with a leather pillow under his head, the
engineer lay asleep with his fleshy, hairy chest uppermost; he was
snoring so loudly that I pitied the student from the bottom of my heart
for having to sleep in the same room with him every night.
“Why on earth are we to take them?” shouted Von Schtenberg. “It has
nothing to do with us! Go to Tchalisov! From whom do the cauldrons
come?”
“From Nikitin . . .” a bass voice answered gruffly.
“Well, then, take them to Tchalisov. . . . That’s not in our department.
What the devil are you standing there for? Drive on!”
“Your honour, we have been to Tchalisov already,” said the bass voice
still more gruffly. “Yesterday we were the whole day looking for him
down the line, and were told at his hut that he had gone to the
Dymkovsky section. Please take them, your honour! How much longer are we
to go carting them about? We go carting them on and on along the line,
and see no end to it.”
“What is it?” Ananyev asked huskily, waking up and lifting his head
quickly.
“They have brought some cauldrons from Nikitin’s,” said the student,
“and he is begging us to take them. And what business is it of ours to
take them?”
“Do be so kind, your honour, and set things right! The horses have been
two days without food and the master, for sure, will be angry. Are we to
take them back, or what? The railway ordered the cauldrons, so it ought
to take them. . . .”
“Can’t you understand, you blockhead, that it has nothing to do with us?
Go on to Tchalisov!”
“What is it? Who’s there?” Ananyev asked huskily again. “Damnation take
them all,” he said, getting up and going to the door. “What is it?”
I dressed, and two minutes later went out of the hut. Ananyev and the
student, both in their underclothes and barefooted, were angrily and
impatiently explaining to a peasant who was standing before them bare-
headed, with his whip in his hand, apparently not understanding them.
Both faces looked preoccupied with workaday cares.
“What use are your cauldrons to me,” shouted Ananyev. “Am I to put them
on my head, or what? If you can’t find Tchalisov, find his assistant,
and leave us in peace!”
Seeing me, the student probably recalled the conversation of the
previous night. The workaday expression vanished from his sleepy face
and a look of mental inertia came into it. He waved the peasant off and
walked away absorbed in thought.
It was a cloudy morning. On the line where the lights had been gleaming
the night before, the workmen, just roused from sleep, were swarming.
There was a sound of voices and the squeaking of wheelbarrows. The
working day was beginning. One poor little nag harnessed with cord was
already plodding towards the embankment, tugging with its neck, and
dragging along a cartful of sand.
I began saying good-bye. . . . A great deal had been said in the night,
but I carried away with me no answer to any question, and in the
morning, of the whole conversation there remained in my memory, as in a
filter, only the lights and the image of Kisotchka. As I got on the
horse, I looked at the student and Ananyev for the last time, at the
hysterical dog with the lustreless, tipsy-looking eyes, at the workmen
flitting to and fro in the morning fog, at the embankment, at the little
nag straining with its neck, and thought:
“There is no making out anything in this world.”
And when I lashed my horse and galloped along the line, and when a
little later I saw nothing before me but the endless gloomy plain and
the cold overcast sky, I recalled the questions which were discussed in
the night. I pondered while the sun-scorched plain, the immense sky, the
oak forest, dark on the horizon and the hazy distance, seemed saying to
me:
“Yes, there’s no understanding anything in this world!”
The sun began to rise. . . .
A STORY WITHOUT AN END
SOON after two o’clock one night, long ago, the cook, pale and agitated,
rushed unexpectedly into my study and informed me that Madame Mimotih,
the old woman who owned the house next door, was sitting in her kitchen.
“She begs you to go in to her, sir . . .” said the cook, panting.
“Something bad has happened about her lodger. . . . He has shot himself
or hanged himself. . . .”
“What can I do?” said I. “Let her go for the doctor or for the police!”
“How is she to look for a doctor! She can hardly breathe, and she has
huddled under the stove, she is so frightened. . . . You had better go
round, sir.”
I put on my coat and hat and went to Madame Mimotih’s house. The gate
towards which I directed my steps was open. After pausing beside it,
uncertain what to do, I went into the yard without feeling for the
porter’s bell. In the dark and dilapidated porch the door was not
locked. I opened it and walked into the entry. Here there was not a
glimmer of light, it was pitch dark, and, moreover, there was a marked
smell of incense. Groping my way out of the entry I knocked my elbow
against something made of iron, and in the darkness stumbled against a
board of some sort which almost fell to the floor. At last the door
covered with torn baize was found, and I went into a little hall.
I am not at the moment writing a fairy tale, and am far from intending
to alarm the reader, but the picture I saw from the passage was
fantastic and could only have been drawn by death. Straight before me
was a door leading to a little drawing-room. Three five-kopeck wax
candles, standing in a row, threw a scanty light on the faded slate-
coloured wallpaper. A coffin was standing on two tables in the middle of
the little room. The two candles served only to light up a swarthy
yellow face with a half-open mouth and sharp nose. Billows of muslin
were mingled in disorder from the face to the tips of the two shoes, and
from among the billows peeped out two pale motionless hands, holding a
wax cross. The dark gloomy corners of the little drawing-room, the ikons
behind the coffin, the coffin itself, everything except the softly
glimmering lights, were still as death, as the tomb itself.
“How strange!” I thought, dumbfoundered by the unexpected panorama of
death. “Why this haste? The lodger has hardly had time to hang himself,
or shoot himself, and here is the coffin already!”
I looked round. On the left there was a door with a glass panel; on the
right a lame hat-stand with a shabby fur coat on it. . . .
“Water. . . .” I heard a moan.
The moan came from the left, beyond the door with the glass panel. I
opened the door and walked into a little dark room with a solitary
window, through which there came a faint light from a street lamp
outside.
“Is anyone here?” I asked.
And without waiting for an answer I struck a match. This is what I saw
while it was burning. A man was sitting on the blood-stained floor at my
very feet. If my step had been a longer one I should have trodden on
him. With his legs thrust forward and his hands pressed on the floor, he
was making an effort to raise his handsome face, which was deathly pale
against his pitch-black beard. In the big eyes which he lifted upon me,
I read unutterable terror, pain, and entreaty. A cold sweat trickled in
big drops down his face. That sweat, the expression of his face, the
trembling of the hands he leaned upon, his hard breathing and his
clenched teeth, showed that he was suffering beyond endurance. Near his
right hand in a pool of blood lay a revolver.
“Don’t go away,” I heard a faint voice when the match had gone out.
“There’s a candle on the table.”
I lighted the candle and stood still in the middle of the room not
knowing what to do next. I stood and looked at the man on the floor, and
it seemed to me that I had seen him before.
“The pain is insufferable,” he whispered, “and I haven’t the strength to
shoot myself again. Incomprehensible lack of will.”
I flung off my overcoat and attended to the sick man. Lifting him from
the floor like a baby, I laid him on the American-leather covered sofa
and carefully undressed him. He was shivering and cold when I took off
his clothes; the wound which I saw was not in keeping either with his
shivering nor the expression on his face. It was a trifling one. The
bullet had passed between the fifth and sixth ribs on the left side,
only piercing the skin and the flesh. I found the bullet itself in the
folds of the coat-lining near the back pocket. Stopping the bleeding as
best I could and making a temporary bandage of a pillow-case, a towel,
and two handkerchiefs, I gave the wounded man some water and covered him
with a fur coat that was hanging in the passage. We neither of us said a
word while the bandaging was being done. I did my work while he lay
motionless looking at me with his eyes screwed up as though he were
ashamed of his unsuccessful shot and the trouble he was giving me.
“Now I must trouble you to lie still,” I said, when I had finished the
bandaging, “while I run to the chemist and get something.”
“No need!” he muttered, clutching me by the sleeve and opening his eyes
wide.
I read terror in his eyes. He was afraid of my going away.
“No need! Stay another five minutes . . . ten. If it doesn’t disgust
you, do stay, I entreat you.”
As he begged me he was trembling and his teeth were chattering. I
obeyed, and sat down on the edge of the sofa. Ten minutes passed in
silence. I sat silent, looking about the room into which fate had
brought me so unexpectedly. What poverty! This man who was the possessor
of a handsome, effeminate face and a luxuriant well-tended beard, had
surroundings which a humble working man would not have envied. A sofa
with its American-leather torn and peeling, a humble greasy-looking
chair, a table covered with a little of paper, and a wretched oleograph
on the wall, that was all I saw. Damp, gloomy, and grey.
“What a wind!” said the sick man, without opening his eyes, “How it
whistles!”
“Yes,” I said. “I say, I fancy I know you. Didn’t you take part in some
private theatricals in General Luhatchev’s villa last year?”
“What of it?” he asked, quickly opening his eyes.
A cloud seemed to pass over his face.
“I certainly saw you there. Isn’t your name Vassilyev?”
“If it is, what of it? It makes it no better that you should know me.”
“No, but I just asked you.”
Vassilyev closed his eyes and, as though offended, turned his face to
the back of the sofa.
“I don’t understand your curiosity,” he muttered. “You’ll be asking me
next what it was drove me to commit suicide!”
Before a minute had passed, he turned round towards me again, opened his
eyes and said in a tearful voice:
“Excuse me for taking such a tone, but you’ll admit I’m right! To ask a
convict how he got into prison, or a suicide why he shot himself is not
generous . . . and indelicate. To think of gratifying idle curiosity at
the expense of another man’s nerves!”
“There is no need to excite yourself. . . . It never occurred to me to
question you about your motives.”
“You would have asked. . . . It’s what people always do. Though it would
be no use to ask. If I told you, you would not believe or understand. .
. . I must own I don’t understand it myself. . . . There are phrases
used in the police reports and newspapers such as: ‘unrequited love,’
and ‘hopeless poverty,’ but the reasons are not known. . . . They are
not known to me, nor to you, nor to your newspaper offices, where they
have the impudence to write ‘The diary of a suicide.’ God alone
understands the state of a man’s soul when he takes his own life; but
men know nothing about it.”
“That is all very nice,” I said, “but you oughtn’t to talk. . . .”
But my suicide could not be stopped, he leaned his head on his fist, and
went on in the tone of some great professor:
“Man will never understand the psychological subtleties of suicide! How
can one speak of reasons? To-day the reason makes one snatch up a
revolver, while to-morrow the same reason seems not worth a rotten egg.
It all depends most likely on the particular condition of the individual
at the given moment. . . . Take me for instance. Half an hour ago, I had
a passionate desire for death, now when the candle is lighted, and you
are sitting by me, I don’t even think of the hour of death. Explain that
change if you can! Am I better off, or has my wife risen from the dead?
Is it the influence of the light on me, or the presence of an outsider?”
“The light certainly has an influence . . .” I muttered for the sake of
saying something. “The influence of light on the organism . . . .”
“The influence of light. . . . We admit it! But you know men do shoot
themselves by candle-light! And it would be ignominious indeed for the
heroes of your novels if such a trifling thing as a candle were to
change the course of the drama so abruptly. All this nonsense can be
explained perhaps, but not by us. It’s useless to ask questions or give
explanations of what one does not understand. . . .”
“Forgive me,” I said, “but . . . judging by the expression of your face,
it seems to me that at this moment you . . . are posing.”
“Yes,” Vassilyev said, startled. “It’s very possible! I am naturally
vain and fatuous. Well, explain it, if you believe in your power of
reading faces! Half an hour ago I shot myself, and just now I am posing.
. . . Explain that if you can.”
These last words Vassilyev pronounced in a faint, failing voice. He was
exhausted, and sank into silence. A pause followed. I began scrutinising
his face. It was as pale as a dead man’s. It seemed as though life were
almost extinct in him, and only the signs of the suffering that the
“vain and fatuous” man was feeling betrayed that it was still alive. It
was painful to look at that face, but what must it have been for
Vassilyev himself who yet had the strength to argue and, if I were not
mistaken, to pose?
“You here—are you here?” he asked suddenly, raising himself on his
elbow. “My God, just listen!”
I began listening. The rain was pattering angrily on the dark window,
never ceasing for a minute. The wind howled plaintively and
lugubriously.
“‘And I shall be whiter than snow, and my ears will hear gladness and
rejoicing.’” Madame Mimotih, who had returned, was reading in the
drawing-room in a languid, weary voice, neither raising nor dropping the
monotonous dreary key.
“It is cheerful, isn’t it?” whispered Vassilyev, turning his frightened
eyes towards me. “My God, the things a man has to see and hear! If only
one could set this chaos to music! As Hamlet says, 'it would—
“Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed, The very faculties of eyes and
ears.”
“How well I should have understood that music then! How I should have
felt it! What time is it?”
“Five minutes to three.”
“Morning is still far off. And in the morning there’s the funeral. A
lovely prospect! One follows the coffin through the mud and rain. One
walks along, seeing nothing but the cloudy sky and the wretched scenery.
The muddy mutes, taverns, woodstacks. . . . One’s trousers drenched to
the knees. The never-ending streets. The time dragging out like
eternity, the coarse people. And on the heart a stone, a stone!”
After a brief pause he suddenly asked: “Is it long since you saw General
Luhatchev?”
“I haven’t seen him since last summer.”
“He likes to be cock of the walk, but he is a nice little old chap. And
are you still writing?”
“Yes, a little.”
“Ah. . . . Do you remember how I pranced about like a needle, like an
enthusiastic ass at those private theatricals when I was courting Zina?
It was stupid, but it was good, it was fun. . . . The very memory of it
brings back a whiff of spring. . . . And now! What a cruel change of
scene! There is a subject for you! Only don’t you go in for writing ‘the
diary of a suicide.’ That’s vulgar and conventional. You make something
humorous of it.”
“Again you are . . . posing,” I said. “There’s nothing humorous in your
position.”
“Nothing laughable? You say nothing laughable?” Vassilyev sat up, and
tears glistened in his eyes. An expression of bitter distress came into
his pale face. His chin quivered.
“You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives,” he
said, “but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate has
cheated me! I have been deceived as no bank depositor, no duped husband
has ever been deceived! Only realise what an absurd fool I have been
made! Last year before your eyes I did not know what to do with myself
for happiness. And now before your eyes. . . .”
Vassilyev’s head sank on the pillow and he laughed.
“Nothing more absurd and stupid than such a change could possibly be
imagined. Chapter one: spring, love, honeymoon . . . honey, in fact;
chapter two: looking for a job, the pawnshop, pallor, the chemist’s
shop, and . . . to-morrow’s splashing through the mud to the graveyard.”
He laughed again. I felt acutely uncomfortable and made up my mind to
go.
“I tell you what,” I said, “you lie down, and I will go to the
chemist’s.”
He made no answer. I put on my great-coat and went out of his room. As I
crossed the passage I glanced at the coffin and Madame Mimotih reading
over it. I strained my eyes in vain, I could not recognise in the
swarthy, yellow face Zina, the lively, pretty ingénue of Luhatchev’s
company.
“Sic transit,” I thought.
With that I went out, not forgetting to take the revolver, and made my
way to the chemist’s. But I ought not to have gone away. When I came
back from the chemist’s, Vassilyev lay on the sofa fainting. The
bandages had been roughly torn off, and blood was flowing from the
reopened wound. It was daylight before I succeeded in restoring him to
consciousness. He was raving in delirium, shivering, and looking with
unseeing eyes about the room till morning had come, and we heard the
booming voice of the priest as he read the service over the dead.
When Vassilyev’s rooms were crowded with old women and mutes, when the
coffin had been moved and carried out of the yard, I advised him to
remain at home. But he would not obey me, in spite of the pain and the
grey, rainy morning. He walked bareheaded and in silence behind the
coffin all the way to the cemetery, hardly able to move one leg after
the other, and from time to time clutching convulsively at his wounded
side. His face expressed complete apathy. Only once when I roused him
from his lethargy by some insignificant question he shifted his eyes
over the pavement and the grey fence, and for a moment there was a gleam
of gloomy anger in them.
“‘Weelright,’” he read on a signboard. “Ignorant, illiterate people,
devil take them!”
I led him home from the cemetery.
——
Only one year has passed since that night, and Vassilyev has hardly had
time to wear out the boots in which he tramped through the mud behind
his wife’s coffin.
At the present time as I finish this story, he is sitting in my drawing-
room and, playing on the piano, is showing the ladies how provincial
misses sing sentimental songs. The ladies are laughing, and he is
laughing too. He is enjoying himself.
I call him into my study. Evidently not pleased at my taking him from
agreeable company, he comes to me and stands before me in the attitude
of a man who has no time to spare. I give him this story, and ask him to
read it. Always condescending about my authorship, he stifles a sigh,
the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an armchair and begins upon it.
“Hang it all, what horrors,” he mutters with a smile.
But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face becomes.
At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns terribly pale,
he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When he has finished he
begins pacing from corner to corner.
“How does it end?” I ask him.
“How does it end? H’m. . . .”
He looks at the room, at me, at himself. . . . He sees his new
fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and . . . sinking on a
chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.
“Wasn’t I right when I told you it was all absurd? My God! I have had
burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant’s back; the devil
knows what I have suffered—no one could have suffered more, I think, and
where are the traces? It’s astonishing. One would have thought the
imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been everlasting, never
to be effaced or eradicated. And yet that imprint wears out as easily as
a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left, not a scrap. It’s as
though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka.
Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is
absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on a humorous end, my friend!”
“Pyotr Nikolaevitch, are you coming soon?” The impatient ladies call my
hero.
“This minute,” answers the “vain and fatuous” man, setting his tie
straight. “It’s absurd and pitiful, my friend, pitiful and absurd, but
what’s to be done? Homo sum. . . . And I praise Mother Nature all the
same for her transmutation of substances. If we retained an agonising
memory of toothache and of all the terrors which every one of us has had
to experience, if all that were everlasting, we poor mortals would have
a bad time of it in this life.”
I look at his smiling face and I remember the despair and the horror
with which his eyes were filled a year ago when he looked at the dark
window. I see him, entering into his habitual rôle of intellectual
chatterer, prepare to show off his idle theories, such as the
transmutation of substances before me, and at the same time I recall him
sitting on the floor in a pool of blood with his sick imploring eyes.
“How will it end?” I ask myself aloud.
Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the
drawing-room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason I
regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on that
man’s account on that terrible night. It is as though I had lost
something. . . .
MARI D’ELLE
IT was a free night. Natalya Andreyevna Bronin (her married name was
Nikitin), the opera singer, is lying in her bedroom, her whole being
abandoned to repose. She lies, deliciously drowsy, thinking of her
little daughter who lives somewhere far away with her grandmother or
aunt. . . . The child is more precious to her than the public, bouquets,
notices in the papers, adorers . . . and she would be glad to think
about her till morning. She is happy, at peace, and all she longs for is
not to be prevented from lying undisturbed, dozing and dreaming of her
little girl.
All at once the singer starts, and opens her eyes wide: there is a harsh
abrupt ring in the entry. Before ten seconds have passed the bell
tinkles a second time and a third time. The door is opened noisily and
some one walks into the entry stamping his feet like a horse, snorting
and puffing with the cold.
“Damn it all, nowhere to hang one’s coat!” the singer hears a husky bass
voice. “Celebrated singer, look at that! Makes five thousand a year, and
can’t get a decent hat-stand!”
“My husband!” thinks the singer, frowning. “And I believe he has brought
one of his friends to stay the night too. . . . Hateful!”
No more peace. When the loud noise of some one blowing his nose and
putting off his goloshes dies away, the singer hears cautious footsteps
in her bedroom. . . . It is her husband, mari d’elle, Denis Petrovitch
Nikitin. He brings a whiff of cold air and a smell of brandy. For a long
while he walks about the bedroom, breathing heavily, and, stumbling
against the chairs in the dark, seems to be looking for something. . . .
“What do you want?” his wife moans, when she is sick of his fussing
about. “You have woken me.”
“I am looking for the matches, my love. You . . . you are not asleep
then? I have brought you a message. . . . Greetings from that . . .
what’s-his-name? . . . red-headed fellow who is always sending you
bouquets. . . . Zagvozdkin. . . . I have just been to see him.”
“What did you go to him for?”
“Oh, nothing particular. . . . We sat and talked and had a drink. Say
what you like, Nathalie, I dislike that individual—I dislike him
awfully! He is a rare blockhead. He is a wealthy man, a capitalist; he
has six hundred thousand, and you would never guess it. Money is no more
use to him than a radish to a dog. He does not eat it himself nor give
it to others. Money ought to circulate, but he keeps tight hold of it,
is afraid to part with it. . . . What’s the good of capital lying idle?
Capital lying idle is no better than grass.”
Mari d’elle gropes his way to the edge of the bed and, puffing, sits
down at his wife’s feet.
“Capital lying idle is pernicious,” he goes on. “Why has business gone
downhill in Russia? Because there is so much capital lying idle among
us; they are afraid to invest it. It’s very different in England. . . .
There are no such queer fish as Zagvozdkin in England, my girl. . . .
There every farthing is in circulation . . . . Yes. . . . They don’t
keep it locked up in chests there . . . .”
“Well, that’s all right. I am sleepy.”
“Directly. . . . Whatever was it I was talking about? Yes. . . . In
these hard times hanging is too good for Zagvozdkin. . . . He is a fool
and a scoundrel. . . . No better than a fool. If I asked him for a loan
without security—why, a child could see that he runs no risk whatever.
He doesn’t understand, the ass! For ten thousand he would have got a
hundred. In a year he would have another hundred thousand. I asked, I
talked . . . but he wouldn’t give it me, the blockhead.”
“I hope you did not ask him for a loan in my name.”
“H’m. . . . A queer question. . . .” Mari d’elle is offended. “Anyway he
would sooner give me ten thousand than you. You are a woman, and I am a
man anyway, a business-like person. And what a scheme I propose to him!
Not a bubble, not some chimera, but a sound thing, substantial! If one
could hit on a man who would understand, one might get twenty thousand
for the idea alone! Even you would understand if I were to tell you
about it. Only you . . . don’t chatter about it . . . not a word . . .
but I fancy I have talked to you about it already. Have I talked to you
about sausage-skins?”
“M’m . . . by and by.”
“I believe I have. . . . Do you see the point of it? Now the provision
shops and the sausage-makers get their sausage-skins locally, and pay a
high price for them. Well, but if one were to bring sausage-skins from
the Caucasus where they are worth nothing, and where they are thrown
away, then . . . where do you suppose the sausage-makers would buy their
skins, here in the slaughterhouses or from me? From me, of course! Why,
I shall sell them ten times as cheap! Now let us look at it like this:
every year in Petersburg and Moscow and in other centres these same
skins would be bought to the . . . to the sum of five hundred thousand,
let us suppose. That’s the minimum. Well, and if. . . .”
“You can tell me to-morrow . . . later on. . . .”
“Yes, that’s true. You are sleepy, pardon, I am just going . . . say
what you like, but with capital you can do good business everywhere,
wherever you go. . . . With capital even out of cigarette ends one may
make a million. . . . Take your theatrical business now. Why, for
example, did Lentovsky come to grief? It’s very simple. He did not go
the right way to work from the very first. He had no capital and he went
headlong to the dogs. . . . He ought first to have secured his capital,
and then to have gone slowly and cautiously . . . . Nowadays, one can
easily make money by a theatre, whether it is a private one or a
people’s one. . . . If one produces the right plays, charges a low price
for admission, and hits the public fancy, one may put a hundred thousand
in one’s pocket the first year. . . . You don’t understand, but I am
talking sense. . . . You see you are fond of hoarding capital; you are
no better than that fool Zagvozdkin, you heap it up and don’t know what
for. . . . You won’t listen, you don’t want to. . . . If you were to put
it into circulation, you wouldn’t have to be rushing all over the place
. . . . You see for a private theatre, five thousand would be enough for
a beginning. . . . Not like Lentovsky, of course, but on a modest scale
in a small way. I have got a manager already, I have looked at a
suitable building. . . . It’s only the money I haven’t got. . . . If
only you understood things you would have parted with your Five per
cents . . . your Preference shares. . . .”
“No, merci. . . . You have fleeced me enough already. . . . Let me
alone, I have been punished already. . . .”
“If you are going to argue like a woman, then of course . . .” sighs
Nikitin, getting up. “Of course. . . .”
“Let me alone. . . . Come, go away and don’t keep me awake. . . . I am
sick of listening to your nonsense.”
“H’m. . . . To be sure . . . of course! Fleeced. . . plundered. . . .
What we give we remember, but we don’t remember what we take.”
“I have never taken anything from you.”
“Is that so? But when we weren’t a celebrated singer, at whose expense
did we live then? And who, allow me to ask, lifted you out of beggary
and secured your happiness? Don’t you remember that?”
“Come, go to bed. Go along and sleep it off.”
“Do you mean to say you think I am drunk? . . . if I am so low in the
eyes of such a grand lady. . . I can go away altogether.”
“Do. A good thing too.”
“I will, too. I have humbled myself enough. And I will go.”
“Oh, my God! Oh, do go, then! I shall be delighted!”
“Very well, we shall see.”
Nikitin mutters something to himself, and, stumbling over the chairs,
goes out of the bedroom. Then sounds reach her from the entry of
whispering, the shuffling of goloshes and a door being shut. Mari d’elle
has taken offence in earnest and gone out.
“Thank God, he has gone!” thinks the singer. “Now I can sleep.”
And as she falls asleep she thinks of her mari d’elle, “what sort of a
man he is, and how this affliction has come upon her. At one time he
used to live at Tchernigov, and had a situation there as a book-keeper.
As an ordinary obscure individual and not the mari d’elle, he had been
quite endurable: he used to go to his work and take his salary, and all
his whims and projects went no further than a new guitar, fashionable
trousers, and an amber cigarette-holder. Since he had become “the
husband of a celebrity” he was completely transformed. The singer
remembered that when first she told him she was going on the stage he
had made a fuss, been indignant, complained to her parents, turned her
out of the house. She had been obliged to go on the stage without his
permission. Afterwards, when he learned from the papers and from various
people that she was earning big sums, he had ‘forgiven her,’ abandoned
book-keeping, and become her hanger-on. The singer was overcome with
amazement when she looked at her hanger-on: when and where had he
managed to pick up new tastes, polish, and airs and graces? Where had he
learned the taste of oysters and of different Burgundies? Who had taught
him to dress and do his hair in the fashion and call her ‘Nathalie’
instead of Natasha?”
“It’s strange,” thinks the singer. “In old days he used to get his
salary and put it away, but now a hundred roubles a day is not enough
for him. In old days he was afraid to talk before schoolboys for fear of
saying something silly, and now he is overfamiliar even with princes . .
. wretched, contemptible little creature!”
But then the singer starts again; again there is the clang of the bell
in the entry. The housemaid, scolding and angrily flopping with her
slippers, goes to open the door. Again some one comes in and stamps like
a horse.
“He has come back!” thinks the singer. “When shall I be left in peace?
It’s revolting!” She is overcome by fury.
“Wait a bit. . . . I’ll teach you to get up these farces! You shall go
away. I’ll make you go away!”
The singer leaps up and runs barefoot into the little drawing-room where
her mari usually sleeps. She comes at the moment when he is undressing,
and carefully folding his clothes on a chair.
“You went away!” she says, looking at him with bright eyes full of
hatred. “What did you come back for?”
Nikitin remains silent, and merely sniffs.
“You went away! Kindly take yourself off this very minute! This very
minute! Do you hear?”
Mari d’elle coughs and, without looking at his wife, takes off his
braces.
“If you don’t go away, you insolent creature, I shall go,” the singer
goes on, stamping her bare foot, and looking at him with flashing eyes.
“I shall go! Do you hear, insolent . . . worthless wretch, flunkey, out
you go!”
“You might have some shame before outsiders,” mutters her husband . . .
.
The singer looks round and only then sees an unfamiliar countenance that
looks like an actor’s. . . . The countenance, seeing the singer’s
uncovered shoulders and bare feet, shows signs of embarrassment, and
looks ready to sink through the floor.
“Let me introduce . . .” mutters Nikitin, “Bezbozhnikov, a provincial
manager.”
The singer utters a shriek, and runs off into her bedroom.
“There, you see . . .” says mari d’elle, as he stretches himself on the
sofa, “it was all honey just now . . . my love, my dear, my darling,
kisses and embraces . . . but as soon as money is touched upon, then. .
. . As you see . . . money is the great thing. . . . Good night!”
A minute later there is a snore.
A LIVING CHATTEL
GROHOLSKY embraced Liza, kept kissing one after another all her little
fingers with their bitten pink nails, and laid her on the couch covered
with cheap velvet. Liza crossed one foot over the other, clasped her
hands behind her head, and lay down.
Groholsky sat down in a chair beside her and bent over. He was entirely
absorbed in contemplation of her.
How pretty she seemed to him, lighted up by the rays of the setting sun!
There was a complete view from the window of the setting sun, golden,
lightly flecked with purple.
The whole drawing-room, including Liza, was bathed by it with brilliant
light that did not hurt the eyes, and for a little while covered with
gold.
Groholsky was lost in admiration. Liza was so incredibly beautiful. It
is true her little kittenish face with its brown eyes, and turn up nose
was fresh, and even piquant, his scanty hair was black as soot and
curly, her little figure was graceful, well proportioned and mobile as
the body of an electric eel, but on the whole. . . . However my taste
has nothing to do with it. Groholsky who was spoilt by women, and who
had been in love and out of love hundreds of times in his life, saw her
as a beauty. He loved her, and blind love finds ideal beauty everywhere.
“I say,” he said, looking straight into her eyes, “I have come to talk
to you, my precious. Love cannot bear anything vague or indefinite. . .
. Indefinite relations, you know, I told you yesterday, Liza . . . we
will try to-day to settle the question we raised yesterday. Come, let us
decide together. . . .”
“What are we to do?”
Liza gave a yawn and scowling, drew her right arm from under her head.
“What are we to do?” she repeated hardly audibly after Groholsky.
“Well, yes, what are we to do? Come, decide, wise little head . . . I
love you, and a man in love is not fond of sharing. He is more than an
egoist. It is too much for me to go shares with your husband. I mentally
tear him to pieces, when I remember that he loves you too. In the second
place you love me. . . . Perfect freedom is an essential condition for
love. . . . And are you free? Are you not tortured by the thought that
that man towers for ever over your soul? A man whom you do not love,
whom very likely and quite naturally, you hate. . . . That’s the second
thing. . . . And thirdly. . . . What is the third thing? Oh yes. . . .
We are deceiving him and that . . . is dishonourable. Truth before
everything, Liza. Let us have done with lying!”
“Well, then, what are we to do?”
“You can guess. . . . I think it necessary, obligatory, to inform him of
our relations and to leave him, to begin to live in freedom. Both must
be done as quickly as possible. . . . This very evening, for instance. .
. . It’s time to make an end of it. Surely you must be sick of loving
like a thief?”
“Tell! tell Vanya?”
“Why, yes!”
“That’s impossible! I told you yesterday, Michel, that it is
impossible.”
“Why?”
“He will be upset. He’ll make a row, do all sorts of unpleasant things.
. . . Don’t you know what he is like? God forbid! There’s no need to
tell him. What an idea!”
Groholsky passed his hand over his brow, and heaved a sigh.
“Yes,” he said, “he will be more than upset. I am robbing him of his
happiness. Does he love you?”
“He does love me. Very much.”
“There’s another complication! One does not know where to begin. To
conceal it from him is base, telling him would kill him. . . . Goodness
knows what’s one to do. Well, how is it to be?”
Groholsky pondered. His pale face wore a frown.
“Let us go on always as we are now,” said Liza. “Let him find out for
himself, if he wants to.”
“But you know that . . . is sinful, and besides the fact is you are
mine, and no one has the right to think that you do not belong to me but
to someone else! You are mine! I will not give way to anyone! . . . I am
sorry for him—God knows how sorry I am for him, Liza! It hurts me to see
him! But . . . it can’t be helped after all. You don’t love him, do you?
What’s the good of your going on being miserable with him? We must have
it out! We will have it out with him, and you will come to me. You are
my wife, and not his. Let him do what he likes. He’ll get over his
troubles somehow. . . . He is not the first, and he won’t be the last. .
. . Will you run away? Eh? Make haste and tell me! Will you run away?”
Liza got up and looked inquiringly at Groholsky.
“Run away?”
“Yes. . . . To my estate. . . . Then to the Crimea. . . . We will tell
him by letter. . . . We can go at night. There is a train at half past
one. Well? Is that all right?”
Liza scratched the bridge of her nose, and hesitated.
“Very well,” she said, and burst into tears.
Patches of red came out of her cheeks, her eyes swelled, and tears
flowed down her kittenish face. . . .
“What is it?” cried Groholsky in a flutter. “Liza! what’s the matter?
Come! what are you crying for? What a girl! Come, what is it? Darling!
Little woman!”
Liza held out her hands to Groholsky, and hung on his neck. There was a
sound of sobbing.
“I am sorry for him . . .” muttered Liza. “Oh, I am so sorry for him!”
“Sorry for whom?”
“Va—Vanya. . . .”
“And do you suppose I’m not? But what’s to be done? We are causing him
suffering. . . . He will be unhappy, will curse us . . . but is it our
fault that we love one another?”
As he uttered the last word, Groholsky darted away from Liza as though
he had been stung and sat down in an easy chair. Liza sprang away from
his neck and rapidly—in one instant—dropped on the lounge.
They both turned fearfully red, dropped their eyes, and coughed.
A tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty, in the uniform of a government
clerk, had walked into the drawing-room. He had walked in unnoticed.
Only the bang of a chair which he knocked in the doorway had warned the
lovers of his presence, and made them look round. It was the husband.
They had looked round too late.
He had seen Groholsky’s arm round Liza’s waist, and had seen Liza
hanging on Groholsky’s white and aristocratic neck.
“He saw us!” Liza and Groholsky thought at the same moment, while they
did not know what to do with their heavy hands and embarrassed eyes. . .
.
The petrified husband, rosy-faced, turned white.
An agonising, strange, soul-revolting silence lasted for three minutes.
Oh, those three minutes! Groholsky remembers them to this day.
The first to move and break the silence was the husband. He stepped up
to Groholsky and, screwing his face into a senseless grimace like a
smile, gave him his hand. Groholsky shook the soft perspiring hand and
shuddered all over as though he had crushed a cold frog in his fist.
“Good evening,” he muttered.
“How are you?” the husband brought out in a faint husky, almost
inaudible voice, and he sat down opposite Groholsky, straightening his
collar at the back of his neck.
Again, an agonising silence followed . . . but that silence was no
longer so stupid. . . . The first step, most difficult and colourless,
was over.
All that was left now was for one of the two to depart in search of
matches or on some such trifling errand. Both longed intensely to get
away. They sat still, not looking at one another, and pulled at their
beards while they ransacked their troubled brains for some means of
escape from their horribly awkward position. Both were perspiring. Both
were unbearably miserable and both were devoured by hatred. They longed
to begin the tussle but how were they to begin and which was to begin
first? If only she would have gone out!
“I saw you yesterday at the Assembly Hall,” muttered Bugrov (that was
the husband’s name).
“Yes, I was there . . . the ball . . . did you dance?”
“M’m . . . yes . . . with that . . . with the younger Lyukovtsky . . . .
She dances heavily. . . . She dances impossibly. She is a great
chatterbox.” (Pause.) “She is never tired of talking.”
“Yes. . . . It was slow. I saw you too. . .”
Groholsky accidentally glanced at Bugrov. . . . He caught the shifting
eyes of the deceived husband and could not bear it. He got up quickly,
quickly seized Bugrov’s hand, shook it, picked up his hat, and walked
towards the door, conscious of his own back. He felt as though thousands
of eyes were looking at his back. It is a feeling known to the actor who
has been hissed and is making his exit from the stage, and to the young
dandy who has received a blow on the back of the head and is being led
away in charge of a policeman.
As soon as the sound of Groholsky’s steps had died away and the door in
the hall creaked, Bugrov leapt up, and after making two or three rounds
of the drawing-room, strolled up to his wife. The kittenish face
puckered up and began bKlinking its eyes as though expecting a slap. Her
husband went up to her, and with a pale, distorted face, with arms,
head, and shoulders shaking, stepped on her dress and knocked her knees
with his.
“If, you wretched creature,” he began in a hollow, wailing voice, “you
let him come here once again, I’ll. . . . Don’t let him dare to set his
foot. . . . I’ll kill you. Do you understand? A-a-ah . . . worthless
creature, you shudder! Fil-thy woman!”
Bugrov seized her by the elbow, shook her, and flung her like an
indiarubber ball towards the window. . . .
“Wretched, vulgar woman! you have no shame!”
She flew towards the window, hardly touching the floor with her feet,
and caught at the curtains with her hands.
“Hold your tongue,” shouted her husband, going up to her with flashing
eyes and stamping his foot.
She did hold her tongue, she looked at the ceiling, and whimpered while
her face wore the expression of a little girl in disgrace expecting to
be punished.
“So that’s what you are like! Eh? Carrying on with a fop! Good! And your
promise before the altar? What are you? A nice wife and mother. Hold
your tongue!”
And he struck her on her pretty supple shoulder. “Hold your tongue, you
wretched creature. I’ll give you worse than that! If that scoundrel
dares to show himself here ever again, if I see you—listen!—with that
blackguard ever again, don’t ask for mercy! I’ll kill you, if I go to
Siberia for it! And him too. I shouldn’t think twice about it! You can
go, I don’t want to see you!”
Bugrov wiped his eyes and his brow with his sleeve and strode about the
drawing-room, Liza sobbing more and more loudly, twitching her shoulders
and her little turned up nose, became absorbed in examining the lace on
the curtain.
“You are crazy,” her husband shouted. “Your silly head is full of
nonsense! Nothing but whims! I won’t allow it, Elizaveta, my girl! You
had better be careful with me! I don’t like it! If you want to behave
like a pig, then . . . then out you go, there is no place in my house
for you! Out you pack if. . . . You are a wife, so you must forget these
dandies, put them out of your silly head! It’s all foolishness! Don’t
let it happen again! You try defending yourself! Love your husband! You
have been given to your husband, so you must love him. Yes, indeed! Is
one not enough? Go away till . . . . Torturers!”
Bugrov paused; then shouted:
“Go away I tell you, go to the nursery! Why are you blubbering, it is
your own fault, and you blubber! What a woman! Last year you were after
Petka Totchkov, now you are after this devil. Lord forgive us! . . .
Tfoo, it’s time you understood what you are! A wife! A mother! Last year
there were unpleasantnesses, and now there will be unpleasantnesses. . .
. Tfoo!”
Bugrov heaved a loud sigh, and the air was filled with the smell of
sherry. He had come back from dining and was slightly drunk . . . .
“Don’t you know your duty? No! . . . you must be taught, you’ve not been
taught so far! Your mamma was a gad-about, and you . . . you can
blubber. Yes! blubber away. . . .”
Bugrov went up to his wife and drew the curtain out of her hands.
“Don’t stand by the window, people will see you blubbering. . . . Don’t
let it happen again. You’ll go from embracing to worse trouble. You’ll
come to grief. Do you suppose I like to be made a fool of? And you will
make a fool of me if you carry on with them, the low brutes. . . . Come,
that’s enough. . . . Don’t you. . . . Another time. . . . Of course I .
. Liza . . . stay. . . .”
Bugrov heaved a sigh and enveloped Liza in the fumes of sherry.
“You are young and silly, you don’t understand anything. . . . I am
never at home. . . . And they take advantage of it. You must be
sensible, prudent. They will deceive you. And then I won’t endure it. .
. . Then I may do anything. . . . Of course! Then you can just lie down,
and die. I . . . I am capable of doing anything if you deceive me, my
good girl. I might beat you to death. . . . And . . . I shall turn you
out of the house, and then you can go to your rascals.”
And Bugrov (horribile dictu) wiped the wet, tearful face of the
traitress Liza with his big soft hand. He treated his twenty-year-old
wife as though she were a child.
“Come, that’s enough. . . . I forgive you. Only God forbid it should
happen again! I forgive you for the fifth time, but I shall not forgive
you for the sixth, as God is holy. God does not forgive such as you for
such things.”
Bugrov bent down and put out his shining lips towards Liza’s little
head. But the kiss did not follow. The doors of the hall, of the dining-
room, of the parlour, and of the drawing-room all slammed, and Groholsky
flew into the drawing-room like a whirlwind. He was pale and trembling.
He was flourishing his arms and crushing his expensive hat in his hands.
His coat fluttered upon him as though it were on a peg. He was the
incarnation of acute fever. When Bugrov saw him he moved away from his
wife and began looking out of the other window. Groholsky flew up to
him, and waving his arms and breathing heavily and looking at no one, he
began in a shaking voice:
“Ivan Petrovitch! Let us leave off keeping up this farce with one
another! We have deceived each other long enough! It’s too much! I
cannot stand it. You must do as you like, but I cannot! It’s hateful and
mean, it’s revolting! Do you understand that it is revolting?”
Groholsky spluttered and gasped for breath.
“It’s against my principles. And you are an honest man. I love her! I
love her more than anything on earth! You have noticed it and . . . it’s
my duty to say this!”
“What am I to say to him?” Ivan Petrovitch wondered.
“We must make an end of it. This farce cannot drag on much longer! It
must be settled somehow.”
Groholsky drew a breath and went on:
“I cannot live without her; she feels the same. You are an educated man,
you will understand that in such circumstances your family life is
impossible. This woman is not yours, so . . . in short, I beg you to
look at the matter from an indulgent humane point of view. . . . Ivan
Petrovitch, you must understand at last that I love her—love her more
than myself, more than anything in the world, and to struggle against
that love is beyond my power!”
“And she?” Bugrov asked in a sullen, somewhat ironical tone.
“Ask her; come now, ask her! For her to live with a man she does not
love, to live with you is . . . is a misery!”
“And she?” Bugrov repeated, this time not in an ironical tone.
“She . . . she loves me! We love each other, Ivan Petrovitch! Kill us,
despise us, pursue us, do as you will, but we can no longer conceal it
from you. We are standing face to face—you may judge us with all the
severity of a man whom we . . . whom fate has robbed of happiness!”
Bugrov turned as red as a boiled crab, and looked out of one eye at
Liza. He began bKlinking. His fingers, his lips, and his eyelids
twitched. Poor fellow! The eyes of his weeping wife told him that
Groholsky was right, that it was a serious matter.
“Well!” he muttered. “If you. . . . In these days. . . . You are always.
. . .”
“As God is above,” Groholsky shrilled in his high tenor, “we understand
you. Do you suppose we have no sense, no feeling? I know what agonies I
am causing you, as God’s above! But be indulgent, I beseech you! We are
not to blame. Love is not a crime. No will can struggle against it. . .
. Give her up to me, Ivan Petrovitch! Let her go with me! Take from me
what you will for your sufferings. Take my life, but give me Liza. I am
ready to do anything. . . . Come, tell me how I can do something to make
up in part at least! To make up for that lost happiness, I can give you
other happiness. I can, Ivan Petrovitch; I am ready to do anything! It
would be base on my part to leave you without satisfaction. . . . I
understand you at this moment.”
Bugrov waved his hand as though to say, ‘For God’s sake, go away.’ His
eyes began to be dimmed by a treacherous moisture—in a moment they would
see him crying like a child.
“I understand you, Ivan Petrovitch. I will give you another happiness,
such as hitherto you have not known. What would you like? I have money,
my father is an influential man. . . . Will you? Come, how much do you
want?”
Bugrov’s heart suddenly began throbbing. . . . He clutched at the window
curtains with both hands. . . .
“Will you have fifty thousand? Ivan Petrovitch, I entreat you. . . .
It’s not a bribe, not a bargain. . . . I only want by a sacrifice on my
part to atone a little for your inevitable loss. Would you like a
hundred thousand? I am willing. A hundred thousand?”
My God! Two immense hammers began beating on the perspiring temples of
the unhappy Ivan Petrovitch. Russian sledges with tinkling bells began
racing in his ears. . . .
“Accept this sacrifice from me,” Groholsky went on, “I entreat you! You
will take a load off my conscience. . . . I implore you!”
My God! A smart carriage rolled along the road wet from a May shower,
passed the window through which Bugrov’s wet eyes were looking. The
horses were fine, spirited, well-trained beasts. People in straw hats,
with contented faces, were sitting in the carriage with long fishing-
rods and bags. . . . A schoolboy in a white cap was holding a gun. They
were driving out into the country to catch fish, to shoot, to walk about
and have tea in the open air. They were driving to that region of bliss
in which Bugrov as a boy—the barefoot, sunburnt, but infinitely happy
son of a village deacon—had once raced about the meadows, the woods, and
the river banks. Oh, how fiendishly seductive was that May! How happy
those who can take off their heavy uniforms, get into a carriage and fly
off to the country where the quails are calling and there is the scent
of fresh hay. Bugrov’s heart ached with a sweet thrill that made him
shiver. A hundred thousand! With the carriage there floated before him
all the secret dreams over which he had gloated, through the long years
of his life as a government clerk as he sat in the office of his
department or in his wretched little study. . . . A river, deep, with
fish, a wide garden with narrow avenues, little fountains, shade,
flowers, arbours, a luxurious villa with terraces and turrets with an
Aeolian harp and little silver bells (he had heard of the existence of
an Aeolian harp from German romances); a cloudless blue sky; pure limpid
air fragrant with the scents that recall his hungry, barefoot, crushed
childhood. . . . To get up at five, to go to bed at nine; to spend the
day catching fish, talking with the peasants. . . . What happiness!
“Ivan Petrovitch, do not torture me! Will you take a hundred thousand?”
“H’m . . . a hundred and fifty thousand!” muttered Bugrov in a hollow
voice, the voice of a husky bull. He muttered it, and bowed his head,
ashamed of his words, and awaiting the answer.
“Good,” said Groholsky, “I agree. I thank you, Ivan Petrovitch . . . .
In a minute. . . . I will not keep you waiting. . . .”
Groholsky jumped up, put on his hat, and staggering backwards, ran out
of the drawing-room.
Bugrov clutched the window curtains more tightly than ever. . . . He was
ashamed . . . . There was a nasty, stupid feeling in his soul, but, on
the other hand, what fair shining hopes swarmed between his throbbing
temples! He was rich!
Liza, who had grasped nothing of what was happening, darted through the
half-opened door trembling all over and afraid that he would come to her
window and fling her away from it. She went into the nursery, laid
herself down on the nurse’s bed, and curled herself up. She was
shivering with fever.
Bugrov was left alone. He felt stifled, and he opened the window. What
glorious air breathed fragrance on his face and neck! It would be good
to breathe such air lolling on the cushions of a carriage . . . . Out
there, far beyond the town, among the villages and the summer villas,
the air was sweeter still. . . . Bugrov actually smiled as he dreamed of
the air that would be about him when he would go out on the verandah of
his villa and admire the view. A long while he dreamed. . . . The sun
had set, and still he stood and dreamed, trying his utmost to cast out
of his mind the image of Liza which obstinately pursued him in all his
dreams.
“I have brought it, Ivan Petrovitch!” Groholsky, re-entering, whispered
above his ear. “I have brought it—take it. . . . Here in this roll there
are forty thousand. . . . With this cheque will you kindly get twenty
the day after to-morrow from Valentinov? . . . Here is a bill of
exchange . . . a cheque. . . . The remaining thirty thousand in a day or
two. . . . My steward will bring it to you.”
Groholsky, pink and excited, with all his limbs in motion, laid before
Bugrov a heap of rolls of notes and bundles of papers. The heap was big,
and of all sorts of hues and tints. Never in the course of his life had
Bugrov seen such a heap. He spread out his fat fingers and, not looking
at Groholsky, fell to going through the bundles of notes and bonds. . .
.
Groholsky spread out all the money, and moved restlessly about the room,
looking for the Dulcinea who had been bought and sold.
Filling his pockets and his pocket-book, Bugrov thrust the securities
into the table drawer, and, drinking off half a decanter full of water,
dashed out into the street.
“Cab!” he shouted in a frantic voice.
At half-past eleven that night he drove up to the entrance of the Paris
Hotel. He went noisily upstairs and knocked at the door of Groholsky’s
apartments. He was admitted. Groholsky was packing his things in a
portmanteau, Liza was sitting at the table trying on bracelets. They
were both frightened when Bugrov went in to them. They fancied that he
had come for Liza and had brought back the money which he had taken in
haste without reflection. But Bugrov had not come for Liza. Ashamed of
his new get-up and feeling frightfully awkward in it, he bowed and stood
at the door in the attitude of a flunkey. The get-up was superb. Bugrov
was unrecognisable. His huge person, which had never hitherto worn
anything but a uniform, was clothed in a fresh, brand-new suit of fine
French cloth and of the most fashionable cut. On his feet spats shone
with sparkling buckles. He stood ashamed of his new get-up, and with his
right hand covered the watch-chain for which he had, an hour before,
paid three hundred roubles.
“I have come about something,” he began. “A business agreement is beyond
price. I am not going to give up Mishutka. . . .”
“What Mishutka?” asked Groholsky.
“My son.”
Groholsky and Liza looked at each other. Liza’s eyes bulged, her cheeks
flushed, and her lips twitched. . . .
“Very well,” she said.
She thought of Mishutka’s warm little cot. It would be cruel to exchange
that warm little cot for a chilly sofa in the hotel, and she consented.
“I shall see him,” she said.
Bugrov bowed, walked out, and flew down the stairs in his splendour,
cleaving the air with his expensive cane. . . .
“Home,” he said to the cabman. “I am starting at five o’clock to-morrow
morning. . . . You will come; if I am asleep, you will wake me. We are
driving out of town.” II
It was a lovely August evening. The sun, set in a golden background
lightly flecked with purple, stood above the western horizon on the
point of sinking behind the far-away tumuli. In the garden, shadows and
half-shadows had vanished, and the air had grown damp, but the golden
light was still playing on the tree-tops. . . . It was warm. . . . Rain
had just fallen, and made the fresh, transparent fragrant air still
fresher.
I am not describing the August of Petersburg or Moscow, foggy, tearful,
and dark, with its cold, incredibly damp sunsets. God forbid! I am not
describing our cruel northern August. I ask the reader to move with me
to the Crimea, to one of its shores, not far from Feodosia, the spot
where stands the villa of one of our heroes. It is a pretty, neat villa
surrounded by flower-beds and clipped bushes. A hundred paces behind it
is an orchard in which its inmates walk. . . . Groholsky pays a high
rent for that villa, a thousand roubles a year, I believe. . . . The
villa is not worth that rent, but it is pretty. . . . Tall, with
delicate walls and very delicate parapets, fragile, slender, painted a
pale blue colour, hung with curtains, portières, draperies, it suggests
a charming, fragile Chinese lady. . . .
On the evening described above, Groholsky and Liza were sitting on the
verandah of this villa. Groholsky was reading Novoye Vremya and drinking
milk out of a green mug. A syphon of Seltzer water was standing on the
table before him. Groholsky imagined that he was suffering from catarrh
of the lungs, and by the advice of Dr. Dmitriev consumed an immense
quantity of grapes, milk, and Seltzer water. Liza was sitting in a soft
easy chair some distance from the table. With her elbows on the parapet,
and her little face propped on her little fists, she was gazing at the
villa opposite. . . . The sun was playing upon the windows of the villa
opposite, the glittering panes reflected the dazzling light. . . .
Beyond the little garden and the few trees that surrounded the villa
there was a glimpse of the sea with its waves, its dark blue colour, its
immensity, its white masts. . . . It was so delightful! Groholsky was
reading an article by Anonymous, and after every dozen lines he raised
his blue eyes to Liza’s back. . . . The same passionate, fervent love
was shining in those eyes still. . . . He was infinitely happy in spite
of his imaginary catarrh of the lungs. . . . Liza was conscious of his
eyes upon her back, and was thinking of Mishutka’s brilliant future, and
she felt so comfortable, so serene . . . .
She was not so much interested by the sea, and the glittering reflection
on the windows of the villa opposite as by the waggons which were
trailing up to that villa one after another.
The waggons were full of furniture and all sorts of domestic articles.
Liza watched the trellis gates and big glass doors of the villa being
opened and the men bustling about the furniture and wrangling
incessantly. Big armchairs and a sofa covered with dark raspberry
coloured velvet, tables for the hall, the drawing-room and the dining-
room, a big double bed and a child’s cot were carried in by the glass
doors; something big, wrapped up in sacking, was carried in too. A grand
piano, thought Liza, and her heart throbbed.
It was long since she had heard the piano, and she was so fond of it.
They had not a single musical instrument in their villa. Groholsky and
she were musicians only in soul, no more. There were a great many boxes
and packages with the words: “with care” upon them carried in after the
piano.
They were boxes of looking-glasses and crockery. A gorgeous and
luxurious carriage was dragged in, at the gate, and two white horses
were led in looking like swans.
“My goodness, what riches!” thought Liza, remembering her old pony which
Groholsky, who did not care for riding, had bought her for a hundred
roubles. Compared with those swan-like steeds, her pony seemed to her no
better than a bug. Groholsky, who was afraid of riding fast, had
purposely bought Liza a poor horse.
“What wealth!” Liza thought and murmured as she gazed at the noisy
carriers.
The sun hid behind the tumuli, the air began to lose its dryness and
limpidity, and still the furniture was being driven up and hauled into
the house. At last it was so dark that Groholsky left off reading the
newspaper while Liza still gazed and gazed.
“Shouldn’t we light the lamp?” said Groholsky, afraid that a fly might
drop into his milk and be swallowed in the darkness.
“Liza! shouldn’t we light the lamp? Shall we sit in darkness, my angel?”
Liza did not answer. She was interested in a chaise which had driven up
to the villa opposite. . . . What a charming little mare was in that
chaise. Of medium size, not large, but graceful. . . . A gentleman in a
top hat was sitting in the chaise, a child about three, apparently a
boy, was sitting on his knees waving his little hands. . . . He was
waving his little hands and shouting with delight.
Liza suddenly uttered a shriek, rose from her seat and lurched forward.
“What is the matter?” asked Groholsky.
“Nothing. . . I only . . . I fancied. . . .”
The tall, broad-shouldered gentleman in the top hat jumped out of the
chaise, lifted the boy down, and with a skip and a hop ran gaily in at
the glass door. The door opened noisily and he vanished into the
darkness of the villa apartments.
Two smart footmen ran up to the horse in the chaise, and most
respectfully led it to the gate. Soon the villa opposite was lighted up,
and the clatter of plates, knives, and forks was audible. The gentleman
in the top hat was having his supper, and judging by the duration of the
clatter of crockery, his supper lasted long. Liza fancied she could
smell chicken soup and roast duck. After supper discordant sounds of the
piano floated across from the villa. In all probability the gentleman in
the top hat was trying to amuse the child in some way, and allowing it
to strum on it.
Groholsky went up to Liza and put his arm round her waist.
“What wonderful weather!” he said. “What air! Do you feel it? I am very
happy, Liza, very happy indeed. My happiness is so great that I am
really afraid of its destruction. The greatest things are usually
destroyed, and do you know, Liza, in spite of all my happiness, I am not
absolutely . . . at peace. . . . One haunting thought torments me . . .
it torments me horribly. It gives me no peace by day or by night. . . .”
“What thought?”
“An awful thought, my love. I am tortured by the thought of your
husband. I have been silent hitherto. I have feared to trouble your
inner peace, but I cannot go on being silent. Where is he? What has
happened to him? What has become of him with his money? It is awful!
Every night I see his face, exhausted, suffering, imploring. . . . Why,
only think, my angel—can the money he so generously accepted make up to
him for you? He loved you very much, didn’t he?”
“Very much!”
“There you see! He has either taken to drink now, or . . . I am anxious
about him! Ah, how anxious I am! Should we write to him, do you think?
We ought to comfort him . . . a kind word, you know.”
Groholsky heaved a deep sigh, shook his head, and sank into an easy
chair exhausted by painful reflection. Leaning his head on his fists he
fell to musing. Judging from his face, his musings were painful.
“I am going to bed,” said Liza; “it’s time.”
Liza went to her own room, undressed, and dived under the bedclothes.
She used to go to bed at ten o’clock and get up at ten. She was fond of
her comfort.
She was soon in the arms of Morpheus. Throughout the whole night she had
the most fascinating dreams. . . . She dreamed whole romances, novels,
Arabian Nights. . . . The hero of all these dreams was the gentleman in
the top hat, who had caused her to utter a shriek that evening.
The gentleman in the top hat was carrying her off from Groholsky, was
singing, was beating Groholsky and her, was flogging the boy under the
window, was declaring his love, and driving her off in the chaise. . . .
Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes
live through more than ten years of happiness . . . . That night Liza
lived through a great variety of experiences, and very happy ones, even
in spite of the beating.
Waking up between six and seven, she flung on her clothes, hurriedly did
her hair, and without even putting on her Tatar slippers with pointed
toes, ran impulsively on to the verandah. Shading her eyes from the sun
with one hand, and with the other holding up her slipping clothes, she
gazed at the villa opposite. Her face beamed . . . . There could be no
further doubt it was he.
On the verandah in the villa opposite there was a table in front of the
glass door. A tea service was shining and glistening on the table with a
silver samovar at the head. Ivan Petrovitch was sitting at the table. He
had in his hand a glass in a silver holder, and was drinking tea. He was
drinking it with great relish. That fact could be deduced from the
smacking of his lips, the sound of which reached Liza’s ears. He was
wearing a brown dressing-gown with black flowers on it. Massive tassels
fell down to the ground. It was the first time in her life Liza had seen
her husband in a dressing-gown, and such an expensive-looking one.
Mishutka was sitting on one of his knees, and hindering him from
drinking his tea. The child jumped up and down and tried to clutch his
papa’s shining lip. After every three or four sips the father bent down
to his son and kissed him on the head. A grey cat with its tail in the
air was rubbing itself against one of the table legs, and with a
plaintive mew proclaiming its desire for food. Liza hid behind the
verandah curtain, and fastened her eyes upon the members of her former
family; her face was radiant with joy.
“Misha!” she murmured, “Misha! Are you really here, Misha? The darling!
And how he loves Vanya! Heavens!”
And Liza went off into a giggle when Mishutka stirred his father’s tea
with a spoon. “And how Vanya loves Misha! My darlings!”
Liza’s heart throbbed, and her head went round with joy and happiness.
She sank into an armchair and went on observing them, sitting down.
“How did they come here?” she wondered as she sent airy kisses to
Mishutka. “Who gave them the idea of coming here? Heavens! Can all that
wealth belong to them? Can those swan-like horses that were led in at
the gate belong to Ivan Petrovitch? Ah!”
When he had finished his tea, Ivan Petrovitch went into the house. Ten
minutes later, he appeared on the steps and Liza was astounded . . . .
He, who in his youth only seven years ago had been called Vanushka and
Vanka and had been ready to punch a man in the face and turn the house
upside down over twenty kopecks, was dressed devilishly well. He had on
a broad-brimmed straw hat, exquisite brilliant boots, a piqué
waistcoat. . . . Thousands of suns, big and little, glistened on his
watch-chain. With much chic he held in his right hand his gloves and
cane.
And what swagger, what style there was in his heavy figure when, with a
graceful motion of his hand, he bade the footman bring the horse round.
He got into the chaise with dignity, and told the footmen standing round
the chaise to give him Mishutka and the fishing tackle they had brought.
Setting Mishutka beside him, and putting his left arm round him, he held
the reins and drove off.
“Ge-ee up!” shouted Mishutka.
Liza, unaware of what she was doing, waved her handkerchief after them.
If she had looked in the glass she would have been surprised at her
flushed, laughing, and, at the same time, tear-stained face. She was
vexed that she was not beside her gleeful boy, and that she could not
for some reason shower kisses on him at once.
For some reason! . . . Away with all your petty delicacies!
“Grisha! Grisha!” Liza ran into Groholsky’s bedroom and set to work to
wake him. “Get up, they have come! The darling!”
“Who has come?” asked Groholsky, waking up.
“Our people . . . Vanya and Misha, they have come, they are in the villa
opposite. . . . I looked out, and there they were drinking tea. . . .
And Misha too. . . . What a little angel our Misha has grown! If only
you had seen him! Mother of God!”
“Seen whom? Why, you are. . . . Who has come? Come where?”
“Vanya and Misha. . . . I have been looking at the villa opposite, while
they were sitting drinking tea. Misha can drink his tea by himself now.
. . . Didn’t you see them moving in yesterday, it was they who arrived!”
Groholsky rubbed his forehead and turned pale.
“Arrived? Your husband?” he asked.
“Why, yes.”
“What for?”
“Most likely he is going to live here. They don’t know we are here. If
they did, they would have looked at our villa, but they drank their tea
and took no notice.”
“Where is he now? But for God’s sake do talk sense! Oh, where is he?”
“He has gone fishing with Misha in the chaise. Did you see the horses
yesterday? Those are their horses . . . Vanya’s . . . Vanya drives with
them. Do you know what, Grisha? We will have Misha to stay with us. . .
. We will, won’t we? He is such a pretty boy. Such an exquisite boy!”
Groholsky pondered, while Liza went on talking and talking.
“This is an unexpected meeting,” said Groholsky, after prolonged and, as
usual, harrassing reflection. “Well, who could have expected that we
should meet here? Well. . . There it is. . . . So be it. It seems that
it is fated. I can imagine the awkwardness of his position when he meets
us.”
“Shall we have Misha to stay with us?”
“Yes, we will. . . . It will be awkward meeting him. . . . Why, what can
I say to him? What can I talk of? It will be awkward for him and awkward
for me. . . . We ought not to meet. We will carry on communications, if
necessary, through the servants. . . . My head does ache so, Lizotchka.
My arms and legs too, I ache all over. Is my head feverish?”
Liza put her hand on his forehead and found that his head was hot.
“I had dreadful dreams all night . . . I shan’t get up to-day. I shall
stay in bed . . . I must take some quinine. Send me my breakfast here,
little woman.”
Groholsky took quinine and lay in bed the whole day. He drank warm
water, moaned, had the sheets and pillowcase changed, whimpered, and
induced an agonising boredom in all surrounding him.
He was insupportable when he imagined he had caught a chill. Liza had
continually to interrupt her inquisitive observations and run from the
verandah to his room. At dinner-time she had to put on mustard plasters.
How boring all this would have been, O reader, if the villa opposite had
not been at the service of my heroine! Liza watched that villa all day
long and was gasping with happiness.
At ten o’clock Ivan Petrovitch and Mishutka came back from fishing and
had breakfast. At two o’clock they had dinner, and at four o’clock they
drove off somewhere in a carriage. The white horses bore them away with
the swiftness of lightning. At seven o’clock visitors came to see
them—all of them men. They were playing cards on two tables in the
verandah till midnight. One of the men played superbly on the piano. The
visitors played, ate, drank, and laughed. Ivan Petrovitch guffawing
loudly, told them an anecdote of Armenian life at the top of his voice,
so that all the villas round could hear. It was very gay and Mishutka
sat up with them till midnight.
“Misha is merry, he is not crying,” thought Liza, “so he does not
remember his mamma. So he has forgotten me!”
And there was a horrible bitter feeling in Liza’s soul. She spent the
whole night crying. She was fretted by her little conscience, and by
vexation and misery, and the desire to talk to Mishutka and kiss him. .
. . In the morning she got up with a headache and tear-stained eyes. Her
tears Groholsky put down to his own account.
“Do not weep, darling,” he said to her, “I am all right to-day, my chest
is a little painful, but that is nothing.”
While they were having tea, lunch was being served at the villa
opposite. Ivan Petrovitch was looking at his plate, and seeing nothing
but a morsel of goose dripping with fat.
“I am very glad,” said Groholsky, looking askance at Bugrov, “very glad
that his life is so tolerable! I hope that decent surroundings anyway
may help to stifle his grief. Keep out of sight, Liza! They will see you
. . . I am not disposed to talk to him just now . . . God be with him!
Why trouble his peace?”
But the dinner did not pass off so quietly. During dinner precisely that
“awkward position” which Groholsky so dreaded occurred. Just when the
partridges, Groholsky’s favorite dish, had been put on the table, Liza
was suddenly overcome with confusion, and Groholsky began wiping his
face with his dinner napkin. On the verandah of the villa opposite they
saw Bugrov. He was standing with his arms leaning on the parapet, and
staring straight at them, with his eyes starting out of his head.
“Go in, Liza, go in,” Groholsky whispered. “I said we must have dinner
indoors! What a girl you are, really. . . .”
Bugrov stared and stared, and suddenly began shouting. Groholsky looked
at him and saw a face full of astonishment. . . .
“Is that you?” bawled Ivan Petrovitch, “you! Are you here too?”
Groholsky passed his fingers from one shoulder to another, as though to
say, “My chest is weak, and so I can’t shout across such a distance.”
Liza’s heart began throbbing, and everything turned round before her
eyes. Bugrov ran from his verandah, ran across the road, and a few
seconds later was standing under the verandah on which Groholsky and
Liza were dining. Alas for the partridges!
“How are you?” he began, flushing crimson, and stuffing his big hands in
his pockets. “Are you here? Are you here too?”
“Yes, we are here too. . . .”
“How did you get here?”
“Why, how did you?”
“I? It’s a long story, a regular romance, my good friend! But don’t put
yourselves out—eat your dinner! I’ve been living, you know, ever since
then . . . in the Oryol province. I rented an estate. A splendid estate!
But do eat your dinner! I stayed there from the end of May, but now I
have given it up. . . . It was cold there, and—well, the doctor advised
me to go to the Crimea. . . .”
“Are you ill, then?” inquired Groholsky.
“Oh, well. . . . There always seems, as it were . . . something gurgling
here. . . .”
And at the word “here” Ivan Petrovitch passed his open hand from his
neck down to the middle of his stomach.
“So you are here too. . . . Yes . . . that’s very pleasant. Have you
been here long?”
“Since July.”
“Oh, and you, Liza, how are you? Quite well?”
“Quite well,” answered Liza, and was embarrassed.
“You miss Mishutka, I’ll be bound. Eh? Well, he’s here with me. . . .
I’ll send him over to you directly with Nikifor. This is very nice.
Well, good-bye! I have to go off directly. . . . I made the acquaintance
of Prince Ter-Haimazov yesterday; delightful man, though he is an
Armenian. So he has a croquet party to-day; we are going to play
croquet. . . . Good-bye! The carriage is waiting . . . .”
Ivan Petrovitch whirled round, tossed his head, and, waving adieu to
them, ran home.
“Unhappy man,” said Groholsky, heaving a deep sigh as he watched him go
off.
“In what way is he unhappy?” asked Liza.
“To see you and not have the right to call you his!”
“Fool!” Liza was so bold to think. “Idiot!”
Before evening Liza was hugging and kissing Mishutka. At first the boy
howled, but when he was offered jam, he was all friendly smiles.
For three days Groholsky and Liza did not see Bugrov. He had disappeared
somewhere, and was only at home at night. On the fourth day he visited
them again at dinner-time. He came in, shook hands with both of them,
and sat down to the table. His face was serious.
“I have come to you on business,” he said. “Read this.” And he handed
Groholsky a letter. “Read it! Read it aloud!”
Groholsky read as follows:
“My beloved and consoling, never-forgotten son Ioann! I have received
the respectful and loving letter in which you invite your aged father to
the mild and salubrious Crimea, to breathe the fragrant air, and behold
strange lands. To that letter I reply that on taking my holiday, I will
come to you, but not for long. My colleague, Father Gerasim, is a frail
and delicate man, and cannot be left alone for long. I am very sensible
of your not forgetting your parents, your father and your mother. . . .
You rejoice your father with your affection, and you remember your
mother in your prayers, and so it is fitting to do. Meet me at Feodosia.
What sort of town is Feodosia—what is it like? It will be very agreeable
to see it. Your godmother, who took you from the font, is called
Feodosia. You write that God has been graciously pleased that you should
win two hundred thousand roubles. That is gratifying to me. But I cannot
approve of your having left the service while still of a grade of little
importance; even a rich man ought to be in the service. I bless you
always, now and hereafter. Ilya and Seryozhka Andronov send you their
greetings. You might send them ten roubles each—they are badly off!
“Your loving Father,
“Pyotr Bugrov, Priest.”
Groholsky read this letter aloud, and he and Liza both looked
inquiringly at Bugrov.
“You see what it is,” Ivan Petrovitch began hesitatingly. “I should like
to ask you, Liza, not to let him see you, to keep out of his sight while
he is here. I have written to him that you are ill and gone to the
Caucasus for a cure. If you meet him. . . You see yourself. . . . It’s
awkward. . . H’m. . . .”
“Very well,” said Liza.
“We can do that,” thought Groholsky, “since he makes sacrifices, why
shouldn’t we?”
“Please do. . . . If he sees you there will be trouble. . . . My father
is a man of strict principles. He would curse me in seven churches.
Don’t go out of doors, Liza, that is all. He won’t be here long. Don’t
be afraid.”
Father Pyotr did not long keep them waiting. One fine morning Ivan
Petrovitch ran in and hissed in a mysterious tone:
“He has come! He is asleep now, so please be careful.”
And Liza was shut up within four walls. She did not venture to go out
into the yard or on to the verandah. She could only see the sky from
behind the window curtain. Unluckily for her, Ivan Petrovitch’s papa
spent his whole time in the open air, and even slept on the verandah.
Usually Father Pyotr, a little parish priest, in a brown cassock and a
top hat with a curly brim, walked slowly round the villas and gazed with
curiosity at the “strange lands” through his grandfatherly spectacles.
Ivan Petrovitch with the Stanislav on a little ribbon accompanied him.
He did not wear a decoration as a rule, but before his own people he
liked to show off. In their society he always wore the Stanislav.
Liza was bored to death. Groholsky suffered too. He had to go for his
walks alone without a companion. He almost shed tears, but . . . had to
submit to his fate. And to make things worse, Bugrov would run across
every morning and in a hissing whisper would give some quite unnecessary
bulletin concerning the health of Father Pyotr. He bored them with those
bulletins.
“He slept well,” he informed them. “Yesterday he was put out because I
had no salted cucumbers. . . He has taken to Mishutka; he keeps patting
him on the head.”
At last, a fortnight later, little Father Pyotr walked for the last time
round the villas and, to Groholsky’s immense relief, departed. He had
enjoyed himself, and went off very well satisfied. Liza and Groholsky
fell back into their old manner of life. Groholsky once more blessed his
fate. But his happiness did not last for long. A new trouble worse than
Father Pyotr followed. Ivan Petrovitch took to coming to see them every
day. Ivan Petrovitch, to be frank, though a capital fellow, was a very
tedious person. He came at dinner-time, dined with them and stayed a
very long time. That would not have mattered. But they had to buy vodka,
which Groholsky could not endure, for his dinner. He would drink five
glasses and talk the whole dinner-time. That, too, would not have
mattered. . . . But he would sit on till two o’clock in the morning, and
not let them get to bed, and, worse still, he permitted himself to talk
of things about which he should have been silent. When towards two
o’clock in the morning he had drunk too much vodka and champagne, he
would take Mishutka in his arms, and weeping, say to him, before
Groholsky and Liza:
“Mihail, my son, what am I? I . . . am a scoundrel. I have sold your
mother! Sold her for thirty pieces of silver, may the Lord punish me!
Mihail Ivanitch, little sucking pig, where is your mother? Lost! Gone!
Sold into slavery! Well, I am a scoundrel.”
These tears and these words turned Groholsky’s soul inside out. He would
look timidly at Liza’s pale face and wring his hands.
“Go to bed, Ivan Petrovitch,” he would say timidly.
“I am going. . . . Come along, Mishutka. . . . The Lord be our judge! I
cannot think of sleep while I know that my wife is a slave . . . . But
it is not Groholsky’s fault. . . . The goods were mine, the money his. .
. . Freedom for the free and Heaven for the saved.”
By day Ivan Petrovitch was no less insufferable to Groholsky. To
Groholsky’s intense horror, he was always at Liza’s side. He went
fishing with her, told her stories, walked with her, and even on one
occasion, taking advantage of Groholsky’s having a cold, carried her off
in his carriage, goodness knows where, and did not bring her back till
night!
“It’s outrageous, inhuman,” thought Groholsky, biting his lips.
Groholsky liked to be continually kissing Liza. He could not exist
without those honeyed kisses, and it was awkward to kiss her before Ivan
Petrovitch. It was agony. The poor fellow felt forlorn, but fate soon
had compassion on him. Ivan Petrovitch suddenly went off somewhere for a
whole week. Visitors had come and carried him off with them . . . And
Mishutka was taken too.
One fine morning Groholsky came home from a walk good-humoured and
beaming.
“He has come,” he said to Liza, rubbing his hands. “I am very glad he
has come. Ha-ha-ha!”
“What are you laughing at?”
“There are women with him.”
“What women?”
“I don’t know. . . . It’s a good thing he has got women. . . . A capital
thing, in fact. . . . He is still young and fresh. Come here! Look!”
Groholsky led Liza on to the verandah, and pointed to the villa
opposite. They both held their sides, and roared with laughter. It was
funny. Ivan Petrovitch was standing on the verandah of the villa
opposite, smiling. Two dark-haired ladies and Mishutka were standing
below, under the verandah. The ladies were laughing, and loudly talking
French.
“French women,” observed Groholsky. “The one nearest us isn’t at all
bad-looking. Lively damsels, but that’s no matter. There are good women
to be found even among such. . . . But they really do go too far.”
What was funny was that Ivan Petrovitch bent across the verandah, and
stretching with his long arms, put them round the shoulders of one of
the French girls, lifted her in the air, and set her giggling on the
verandah. After lifting up both ladies on to the verandah, he lifted up
Mishutka too. The ladies ran down and the proceedings were repeated.
“Powerful muscles, I must say,” muttered Groholsky looking at this
scene. The operation was repeated some six times, the ladies were so
amiable as to show no embarrassment whatever when the boisterous wind
disposed of their inflated skirts as it willed while they were being
lifted. Groholsky dropped his eyes in a shamefaced way when the ladies
flung their legs over the parapet as they reached the verandah. But Liza
watched and laughed! What did she care? It was not a case of men
misbehaving themselves, which would have put her, as a woman, to shame,
but of ladies.
In the evening, Ivan Petrovitch flew over, and with some embarrassment
announced that he was now a man with a household to look after . . . .
“You mustn’t imagine they are just anybody,” he said. “It is true they
are French. They shout at the top of their voices, and drink . . . but
we all know! The French are brought up to be like that! It can’t be
helped. . . . The prince,” Ivan Petrovitch added, “let me have them
almost for nothing. . . . He said: ‘take them, take them. . . .’ I must
introduce you to the prince sometime. A man of culture! He’s for ever
writing, writing. . . . And do you know what their names are? One is
Fanny, the other Isabella. . . . There’s Europe, ha-ha-ha! . . . The
west! Good-bye!”
Ivan Petrovitch left Liza and Groholsky in peace, and devoted himself to
his ladies. All day long sound of talk, laughter, and the clatter of
crockery came from his villa. . . . The lights were not put out till far
into the night. . . . Groholsky was in bliss. . . . At last, after a
prolonged interval of agony, he felt happy and at peace again. Ivan
Petrovitch with his two ladies had no such happiness as he had with one.
But alas, destiny has no heart. She plays with the Groholskys, the
Lizas, the Ivans, and the Mishutkas as with pawns. . . . Groholsky lost
his peace again. . . .
One morning, about ten days afterwards, on waking up late, he went out
on to the verandah and saw a spectacle which shocked him, revolted him,
and moved him to intense indignation. Under the verandah of the villa
opposite stood the French women, and between them Liza. She was talking
and looking askance at her own villa as though to see whether that
tyrant, that despot were awake (so Groholsky interpreted those looks).
Ivan Petrovitch standing on the verandah with his sleeves tucked up,
lifted Isabella into the air, then Fanny, and then Liza. When he was
lifting Liza it seemed to Groholsky that he pressed her to himself. . .
. Liza too flung one leg over the parapet. . . . Oh these women! All
sphinxes, every one of them!
When Liza returned home from her husband’s villa and went into the
bedroom on tip-toe, as though nothing had happened, Groholsky, pale,
with hectic flushes on his cheeks, was lying in the attitude of a man at
his last gasp and moaning.
On seeing Liza, he sprang out of bed, and began pacing about the
bedroom.
“So that’s what you are like, is it?” he shrieked in a high tenor. “So
that’s it! Very much obliged to you! It’s revolting, madam! Immoral, in
fact! Let me tell you that!”
Liza turned pale, and of course burst into tears. When women feel that
they are in the right, they scold and shed tears; when they are
conscious of being in fault, they shed tears only.
“On a level with those depraved creatures! It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s .
. . lower than any impropriety! Why, do you know what they are? They are
kept women! Cocottes! And you a respectable woman go rushing off where
they are. . . And he . . . He! What does he want? What more does he want
of me? I don’t understand it! I have given him half of my property—I
have given him more! You know it yourself! I have given him what I have
not myself. . . . I have given him almost all. . . . And he! I’ve put up
with your calling him Vanya, though he has no right whatever to such
intimacy. I have put up with your walks, kisses after dinner. . . . I
have put up with everything, but this I will not put up with. . . .
Either he or I! Let him go away, or I go away! I’m not equal to living
like this any longer, no! You can see that for yourself! . . . Either he
or I. . . . Enough! The cup is brimming over. . . . I have suffered a
great deal as it is. . . . I am going to talk to him at once—this
minute! What is he, after all? What has he to be proud of? No, indeed. .
. . He has no reason to think so much of himself . . . .”
Groholsky said a great many more valiant and stinging things, but did
not “go at once”; he felt timid and abashed. . . . He went to Ivan
Petrovitch three days later.
When he went into his apartment, he gaped with astonishment. He was
amazed at the wealth and luxury with which Bugrov had surrounded
himself. Velvet hangings, fearfully expensive chairs. . . . One was
positively ashamed to step on the carpet. Groholsky had seen many rich
men in his day, but he had never seen such frenzied luxury. . . . And
the higgledy-piggledy muddle he saw when, with an inexplicable tremor,
he walked into the drawing-room—plates with bits of bread on them were
lying about on the grand piano, a glass was standing on a chair, under
the table there was a basket with a filthy rag in it. . . . Nut shells
were strewn about in the windows. Bugrov himself was not quite in his
usual trim when Groholsky walked in . . . . With a red face and uncombed
locks he was pacing about the room in deshabille, talking to himself,
apparently much agitated. Mishutka was sitting on the sofa there in the
drawing-room, and was making the air vibrate with a piercing scream.
“It’s awful, Grigory Vassilyevitch!” Bugrov began on seeing Groholsky,
“such disorder . . . such disorder . . . Please sit down. You must
excuse my being in the costume of Adam and Eve. . . . It’s of no
consequence. . . . Horrible disorderliness! I don’t understand how
people can exist here, I don’t understand it! The servants won’t do what
they are told, the climate is horrible, everything is expensive. . . .
Stop your noise,” Bugrov shouted, suddenly coming to a halt before
Mishutka; “stop it, I tell you! Little beast, won’t you stop it?”
And Bugrov pulled Mishutka’s ear.
“That’s revolting, Ivan Petrovitch,” said Groholsky in a tearful voice.
“How can you treat a tiny child like that? You really are. . .”
“Let him stop yelling then. . . . Be quiet—I’ll whip you!”
“Don’t cry, Misha darling. . . . Papa won’t touch you again. Don’t beat
him, Ivan Petrovitch; why, he is hardly more than a baby. . . . There,
there. . . . Would you like a little horse? I’ll send you a little
horse. . . . You really are hard-hearted. . . .”
Groholsky paused, and then asked:
“And how are your ladies getting on, Ivan Petrovitch?”
“Not at all. I’ve turned them out without ceremony. I might have gone on
keeping them, but it’s awkward. . . . The boy will grow up . . . . A
father’s example. . . . If I were alone, then it would be a different
thing. . . . Besides, what’s the use of my keeping them? Poof . . . it’s
a regular farce! I talk to them in Russian, and they answer me in
French. They don’t understand a thing—you can’t knock anything into
their heads.”
“I’ve come to you about something, Ivan Petrovitch, to talk things over.
. . . H’m. . . . It’s nothing very particular. But just . . . two or
three words. . . . In reality, I have a favour to ask of you.”
“What’s that?”
“Would you think it possible, Ivan Petrovitch, to go away? We are
delighted that you are here; it’s very agreeable for us, but it’s
inconvenient, don’t you know. . . . You will understand me. It’s awkward
in a way. . . . Such indefinite relations, such continual awkwardness in
regard to one another. . . . We must part. . . . It’s essential in fact.
Excuse my saying so, but . . . you must see for yourself, of course,
that in such circumstances to be living side by side leads to . . .
reflections . . . that is . . . not to reflections, but there is a
certain awkward feeling. . . .”
“Yes. . . . That is so, I have thought of it myself. Very good, I will
go away.”
“We shall be very grateful to you. . . . Believe me, Ivan Petrovitch, we
shall preserve the most flattering memory of you. The sacrifice which
you. . .”
“Very good. . . . Only what am I to do with all this? I say, you buy
this furniture of mine! What do you say? It’s not expensive, eight
thousand . . . ten. . . . The furniture, the carriage, the grand piano.
. . .”
“Very good. . . . I will give you ten thousand. . . .”
“Well, that is capital! I will set off to-morrow. I shall go to Moscow.
It’s impossible to live here. Everything is so dear! Awfully dear! The
money fairly flies. . . . You can’t take a step without spending a
thousand! I can’t go on like that. I have a child to bring up. . . .
Well, thank God that you will buy my furniture. . . . That will be a
little more in hand, or I should have been regularly bankrupt. . . .”
Groholsky got up, took leave of Bugrov, and went home rejoicing. In the
evening he sent him ten thousand roubles.
Early next morning Bugrov and Mishutka were already at Feodosia. III
Several months had passed; spring had come. With spring, fine bright
days had come too. Life was not so dull and hateful, and the earth was
more fair to look upon. . . . There was a warm breeze from the sea and
the open country. . . . The earth was covered with fresh grass, fresh
leaves were green upon the trees. Nature had sprung into new life, and
had put on new array.
It might be thought that new hopes and new desires would surge up in man
when everything in nature is renewed, and young and fresh . . . but it
is hard for man to renew life. . . .
Groholsky was still living in the same villa. His hopes and desires,
small and unexacting, were still concentrated on the same Liza, on her
alone, and on nothing else! As before, he could not take his eyes off
her, and gloated over the thought: how happy I am! The poor fellow
really did feel awfully happy. Liza sat as before on the verandah, and
unaccountably stared with bored eyes at the villa opposite and the trees
near it through which there was a peep at the dark blue sea. . . . As
before, she spent her days for the most part in silence, often in tears
and from time to time in putting mustard plasters on Groholsky. She
might be congratulated on one new sensation, however. There was a worm
gnawing at her vitals. . . . That worm was misery. . . . She was
fearfully miserable, pining for her son, for her old, her cheerful
manner of life. Her life in the past had not been particularly cheerful,
but still it was livelier than her present existence. When she lived
with her husband she used from time to time to go to a theatre, to an
entertainment, to visit acquaintances. But here with Groholsky it was
all quietness and emptiness. . . . Besides, here there was one man, and
he with his ailments and his continual mawkish kisses, was like an old
grandfather for ever shedding tears of joy.
It was boring! Here she had not Mihey Sergeyitch who used to be fond of
dancing the mazurka with her. She had not Spiridon Nikolaitch, the son
of the editor of the Provincial News. Spiridon Nikolaitch sang well and
recited poetry. Here she had not a table set with lunch for visitors.
She had not Gerasimovna, the old nurse who used to be continually
grumbling at her for eating too much jam. . . . She had no one! There
was simply nothing for her but to lie down and die of depression.
Groholsky rejoiced in his solitude, but . . . he was wrong to rejoice in
it. All too soon he paid for his egoism. At the beginning of May when
the very air seemed to be in love and faint with happiness, Groholsky
lost everything; the woman he loved and. . .
That year Bugrov, too, visited the Crimea. He did not take the villa
opposite, but pottered about, going from one town to another with
Mishutka. He spent his time eating, drinking, sleeping, and playing
cards. He had lost all relish for fishing, shooting and the French
women, who, between ourselves, had robbed him a bit. He had grown thin,
lost his broad and beaming smiles, and had taken to dressing in canvas.
Ivan Petrovitch from time to time visited Groholsky’s villa. He brought
Liza jam, sweets, and fruit, and seemed trying to dispel her ennui.
Groholsky was not troubled by these visits, especially as they were
brief and infrequent, and were apparently paid on account of Mishutka,
who could not under any circumstances have been altogether deprived of
the privilege of seeing his mother. Bugrov came, unpacked his presents,
and after saying a few words, departed. And those few words he said not
to Liza but to Groholsky . . . . With Liza he was silent and Groholsky’s
mind was at rest; but there is a Russian proverb which he would have
done well to remember: “Don’t fear the dog that barks, but fear the dog
that’s quiet. . . .” A fiendish proverb, but in practical life sometimes
indispensable.
As he was walking in the garden one day, Groholsky heard two voices in
conversation. One voice was a man’s, the other was a woman’s. One
belonged to Bugrov, the other to Liza. Groholsky listened, and turning
white as death, turned softly towards the speakers. He halted behind a
lilac bush, and proceeded to watch and listen. His arms and legs turned
cold. A cold sweat came out upon his brow. He clutched several branches
of the lilac that he might not stagger and fall down. All was over!
Bugrov had his arm round Liza’s waist, and was saying to her:
“My darling! what are we to do? It seems it was God’s will. . . . I am a
scoundrel. . . . I sold you. I was seduced by that Herod’s money, plague
take him, and what good have I had from the money? Nothing but anxiety
and display! No peace, no happiness, no position . . . . One sits like a
fat invalid at the same spot, and never a step forwarder. . . . Have you
heard that Andrushka Markuzin has been made a head clerk? Andrushka,
that fool! While I stagnate. . . . Good heavens! I have lost you, I have
lost my happiness. I am a scoundrel, a blackguard, how do you think I
shall feel at the dread day of judgment?”
“Let us go away, Vanya,” wailed Liza. “I am dull. . . . I am dying of
depression.”
“We cannot, the money has been taken. . . .”
“Well, give it back again.”
“I should be glad to, but . . . wait a minute. I have spent it all. We
must submit, my girl. God is chastising us. Me for my covetousness and
you for your frivolity. Well, let us be tortured. . . . It will be the
better for us in the next world.”
And in an access of religious feeling, Bugrov turned up his eyes to
heaven.
“But I cannot go on living here; I am miserable.”
“Well, there is no help for it. I’m miserable too. Do you suppose I am
happy without you? I am pining and wasting away! And my chest has begun
to be bad! . . . You are my lawful wife, flesh of my flesh . . . one
flesh. . . . You must live and bear it! While I . . . will drive over .
. . visit you.”
And bending down to Liza, Bugrov whispered, loudly enough, however, to
be heard several yards away:
“I will come to you at night, Lizanka. . . . Don’t worry. . . . I am
staying at Feodosia close by. . . . I will live here near you till I
have run through everything . . . and I soon shall be at my last
farthing! A-a-ah, what a life it is! Dreariness, ill . . . my chest is
bad, and my stomach is bad.”
Bugrov ceased speaking, and then it was Liza’s turn. . . . My God, the
cruelty of that woman! She began weeping, complaining, enumerating all
the defects of her lover and her own sufferings. Groholsky as he
listened to her, felt that he was a villain, a miscreant, a murderer.
“He makes me miserable. . . .” Liza said in conclusion.
After kissing Liza at parting, and going out at the garden gate, Bugrov
came upon Groholsky, who was standing at the gate waiting for him.
“Ivan Petrovitch,” said Groholsky in the tone of a dying man, “I have
seen and heard it all. . . It’s not honourable on your part, but I do
not blame you. . . . You love her too, but you must understand that she
is mine. Mine! I cannot live without her! How is it you don’t understand
that? Granted that you love her, that you are miserable. . . . Have I
not paid you, in part at least, for your sufferings? For God’s sake, go
away! For God’s sake, go away! Go away from here for ever, I implore
you, or you will kill me. . . .”
“I have nowhere to go,” Bugrov said thickly.
“H’m, you have squandered everything. . . . You are an impulsive man.
Very well. . . . Go to my estate in the province of Tchernigov. If you
like I will make you a present of the property. It’s a small estate, but
a good one. . . . On my honour, it’s a good one!”
Bugrov gave a broad grin. He suddenly felt himself in the seventh
heaven.
“I will give it you. . . . This very day I will write to my steward and
send him an authorisation for completing the purchase. You must tell
everyone you have bought it. . . . Go away, I entreat you.”
“Very good, I will go. I understand.”
“Let us go to a notary . . . at once,” said Groholsky, greatly cheered,
and he went to order the carriage.
On the following evening, when Liza was sitting on the garden seat where
her rendezvous with Ivan Petrovitch usually took place, Groholsky went
quietly to her. He sat down beside her, and took her hand.
“Are you dull, Lizotchka?” he said, after a brief silence. “Are you
depressed? Why shouldn’t we go away somewhere? Why is it we always stay
at home? We want to go about, to enjoy ourselves, to make acquaintances.
. . . Don’t we?”
“I want nothing,” said Liza, and turned her pale, thin face towards the
path by which Bugrov used to come to her.
Groholsky pondered. He knew who it was she expected, who it was she
wanted.
“Let us go home, Liza,” he said, “it is damp here. . . .”
“You go; I’ll come directly.”
Groholsky pondered again.
“You are expecting him?” he asked, and made a wry face as though his
heart had been gripped with red-hot pincers.
“Yes. . . . I want to give him the socks for Misha. . . .”
“He will not come.”
“How do you know?”
“He has gone away. . . .”
Liza opened her eyes wide. . . .
“He has gone away, gone to the Tchernigov province. I have given him my
estate. . . .”
Liza turned fearfully pale, and caught at Groholsky’s shoulder to save
herself from falling.
“I saw him off at the steamer at three o’clock.”
Liza suddenly clutched at her head, made a movement, and falling on the
seat, began shaking all over.
“Vanya,” she wailed, “Vanya! I will go to Vanya. . . . Darling!”
She had a fit of hysterics. . . .
And from that evening, right up to July, two shadows could be seen in
the park in which the summer visitors took their walks. The shadows
wandered about from morning till evening, and made the summer visitors
feel dismal. . . . After Liza’s shadow invariably walked the shadow of
Groholsky. . . . I call them shadows because they had both lost their
natural appearance. They had grown thin and pale and shrunken, and
looked more like shadows than living people. . . . Both were pining away
like fleas in the classic anecdote of the Jew who sold insect powder.
At the beginning of July, Liza ran away from Groholsky, leaving a note
in which she wrote that she was going for a time to “her son” . . . For
a time! She ran away by night when Groholsky was asleep . . . . After
reading her letter Groholsky spent a whole week wandering round about
the villa as though he were mad, and neither ate nor slept. In August,
he had an attack of recurrent fever, and in September he went abroad.
There he took to drink. . . . He hoped in drink and dissipation to find
comfort. . . . He squandered all his fortune, but did not succeed, poor
fellow, in driving out of his brain the image of the beloved woman with
the kittenish face . . . . Men do not die of happiness, nor do they die
of misery. Groholsky’s hair went grey, but he did not die: he is alive
to this day. . . . He came back from abroad to have “just a peep” at
Liza . . . . Bugrov met him with open arms, and made him stay for an
indefinite period. He is staying with Bugrov to this day.
This year I happened to be passing through Groholyovka, Bugrov’s estate.
I found the master and the mistress of the house having supper. . . .
Ivan Petrovitch was highly delighted to see me, and fell to pressing
good things upon me. . . . He had grown rather stout, and his face was a
trifle puffy, though it was still rosy and looked sleek and well-
nourished. . . . He was not bald. Liza, too, had grown fatter. Plumpness
did not suit her. Her face was beginning to lose the kittenish look, and
was, alas! more suggestive of the seal. Her cheeks were spreading
upwards, outwards, and to both sides. The Bugrovs were living in first-
rate style. They had plenty of everything. The house was overflowing
with servants and edibles. . . .
When we had finished supper we got into conversation. Forgetting that
Liza did not play, I asked her to play us something on the piano.
“She does not play,” said Bugrov; “she is no musician. . . . Hey, you
there! Ivan! call Grigory Vassilyevitch here! What’s he doing there?”
And turning to me, Bugrov added, “Our musician will come directly; he
plays the guitar. We keep the piano for Mishutka—we are having him
taught. . . .”
Five minutes later, Groholsky walked into the room—sleepy, unkempt, and
unshaven. . . . He walked in, bowed to me, and sat down on one side.
“Why, whoever goes to bed so early?” said Bugrov, addressing him. “What
a fellow you are really! He’s always asleep, always asleep . . . The
sleepy head! Come, play us something lively. . . .”
Groholsky turned the guitar, touched the strings, and began singing:
“Yesterday I waited for my dear one. . . .”
I listened to the singing, looked at Bugrov’s well-fed countenance, and
thought: “Nasty brute!” I felt like crying. . . . When he had finished
singing, Groholsky bowed to us, and went out.
“And what am I to do with him?” Bugrov said when he had gone away. “I do
have trouble with him! In the day he is always brooding and brooding. .
. . And at night he moans. . . . He sleeps, but he sighs and moans in
his sleep. . . . It is a sort of illness. . . . What am I to do with
him, I can’t think! He won’t let us sleep. . . . I am afraid that he
will go out of his mind. People think he is badly treated here. . . . In
what way is he badly treated? He eats with us, and he drinks with us. .
. . Only we won’t give him money. If we were to give him any he would
spend it on drink or waste it . . . . That’s another trouble for me!
Lord forgive me, a sinner!”
They made me stay the night. When I woke next morning, Bugrov was giving
some one a lecture in the adjoining room. . . .
“Set a fool to say his prayers, and he will crack his skull on the
floor! Why, who paints oars green! Do think, blockhead! Use your sense!
Why don’t you speak?”
“I . . . I . . . made a mistake,” said a husky tenor apologetically.
The tenor belonged to Groholsky.
Groholsky saw me to the station.
“He is a despot, a tyrant,” he kept whispering to me all the way. “He is
a generous man, but a tyrant! Neither heart nor brain are developed in
him. . . . He tortures me! If it were not for that noble woman, I should
have gone away long ago. I am sorry to leave her. It’s somehow easier to
endure together.”
Groholsky heaved a sigh, and went on:
“She is with child. . . . You notice it? It is really my child. . . .
Mine. . . . She soon saw her mistake, and gave herself to me again. She
cannot endure him. . . .”
“You are a rag,” I could not refrain from saying to Groholsky.
“Yes, I am a man of weak character. . . . That is quite true. I was born
so. Do you know how I came into the world? My late papa cruelly
oppressed a certain little clerk—it was awful how he treated him! He
poisoned his life. Well . . . and my late mama was tender-hearted. She
came from the people, she was of the working class. . . . She took that
little clerk to her heart from pity. . . . Well . . . and so I came into
the world. . . . The son of the ill-treated clerk. How could I have a
strong will? Where was I to get it from? But that’s the second bell. . .
. Good-bye. Come and see us again, but don’t tell Ivan Petrovitch what I
have said about him.”
I pressed Groholsky’s hand, and got into the train. He bowed towards the
carriage, and went to the water-barrel—I suppose he was thirsty!
THE DOCTOR
IT was still in the drawing-room, so still that a house-fly that had
flown in from outside could be distinctly heard brushing against the
ceiling. Olga Ivanovna, the lady of the villa, was standing by the
window, looking out at the flower-beds and thinking. Dr. Tsvyetkov, who
was her doctor as well as an old friend, and had been sent for to treat
her son Misha, was sitting in an easy chair and swinging his hat, which
he held in both hands, and he too was thinking. Except them, there was
not a soul in the drawing-room or in the adjoining rooms. The sun had
set, and the shades of evening began settling in the corners under the
furniture and on the cornices.
The silence was broken by Olga Ivanovna.
“No misfortune more terrible can be imagined,” she said, without turning
from the window. “You know that life has no value for me whatever apart
from the boy.”
“Yes, I know that,” said the doctor.
“No value whatever,” said Olga Ivanovna, and her voice quivered. “He is
everything to me. He is my joy, my happiness, my wealth. And if, as you
say, I cease to be a mother, if he . . . dies, there will be nothing
left of me but a shadow. I cannot survive it.”
Wringing her hands, Olga Ivanovna walked from one window to the other
and went on:
“When he was born, I wanted to send him away to the Foundling Hospital,
you remember that, but, my God, how can that time be compared with now?
Then I was vulgar, stupid, feather-headed, but now I am a mother, do you
understand? I am a mother, and that’s all I care to know. Between the
present and the past there is an impassable gulf.”
Silence followed again. The doctor shifted his seat from the chair to
the sofa and impatiently playing with his hat, kept his eyes fixed upon
Olga Ivanovna. From his face it could be seen that he wanted to speak,
and was waiting for a fitting moment.
“You are silent, but still I do not give up hope,” said the lady,
turning round. “Why are you silent?”
“I should be as glad of any hope as you, Olga, but there is none,”
Tsvyetkov answered, “we must look the hideous truth in the face. The boy
has a tumour on the brain, and we must try to prepare ourselves for his
death, for such cases never recover.”
“Nikolay, are you certain you are not mistaken?”
“Such questions lead to nothing. I am ready to answer as many as you
like, but it will make it no better for us.”
Olga Ivanovna pressed her face into the window curtains, and began
weeping bitterly. The doctor got up and walked several times up and down
the drawing-room, then went to the weeping woman, and lightly touched
her arm. Judging from his uncertain movements, from the expression of
his gloomy face, which looked dark in the dusk of the evening, he wanted
to say something.
“Listen, Olga,” he began. “Spare me a minute’s attention; there is
something I must ask you. You can’t attend to me now, though. I’ll come
later, afterwards. . . .” He sat down again, and sank into thought. The
bitter, imploring weeping, like the weeping of a little girl, continued.
Without waiting for it to end, Tsvyetkov heaved a sigh and walked out of
the drawing-room. He went into the nursery to Misha. The boy was lying
on his back as before, staring at one point as though he were listening.
The doctor sat down on his bed and felt his pulse.
“Misha, does your head ache?” he asked.
Misha answered, not at once: “Yes. I keep dreaming.”
“What do you dream?”
“All sorts of things. . . .”
The doctor, who did not know how to talk with weeping women or with
children, stroked his burning head, and muttered:
“Never mind, poor boy, never mind. . . . One can’t go through life
without illness. . . . Misha, who am I—do you know me?”
Misha did not answer.
“Does your head ache very badly?”
“Ve-ery. I keep dreaming.”
After examining him and putting a few questions to the maid who was
looking after the sick child, the doctor went slowly back to the
drawing-room. There it was by now dark, and Olga Ivanovna, standing by
the window, looked like a silhouette.
“Shall I light up?” asked Tsvyetkov.
No answer followed. The house-fly was still brushing against the
ceiling. Not a sound floated in from outside as though the whole world,
like the doctor, were thinking, and could not bring itself to speak.
Olga Ivanovna was not weeping now, but as before, staring at the flower-
bed in profound silence. When Tsvyetkov went up to her, and through the
twilight glanced at her pale face, exhausted with grief, her expression
was such as he had seen before during her attacks of acute, stupefying,
sick headache.
“Nikolay Trofimitch!” she addressed him, “and what do you think about a
consultation?”
“Very good; I’ll arrange it to-morrow.”
From the doctor’s tone it could be easily seen that he put little faith
in the benefit of a consultation. Olga Ivanovna would have asked him
something else, but her sobs prevented her. Again she pressed her face
into the window curtain. At that moment, the strains of a band playing
at the club floated in distinctly. They could hear not only the wind
instruments, but even the violins and the flutes.
“If he is in pain, why is he silent?” asked Olga Ivanovna. “All day
long, not a sound, he never complains, and never cries. I know God will
take the poor boy from us because we have not known how to prize him.
Such a treasure!”
The band finished the march, and a minute later began playing a lively
waltz for the opening of the ball.
“Good God, can nothing really be done?” moaned Olga Ivanovna. “Nikolay,
you are a doctor and ought to know what to do! You must understand that
I can’t bear the loss of him! I can’t survive it.”
The doctor, who did not know how to talk to weeping women, heaved a
sigh, and paced slowly about the drawing-room. There followed a
succession of oppressive pauses interspersed with weeping and the
questions which lead to nothing. The band had already played a
quadrille, a polka, and another quadrille. It got quite dark. In the
adjoining room, the maid lighted the lamp; and all the while the doctor
kept his hat in his hands, and seemed trying to say something. Several
times Olga Ivanovna went off to her son, sat by him for half an hour,
and came back again into the drawing-room; she was continually breaking
into tears and lamentations. The time dragged agonisingly, and it seemed
as though the evening had no end.
At midnight, when the band had played the cotillion and ceased
altogether, the doctor got ready to go.
“I will come again to-morrow,” he said, pressing the mother’s cold hand.
“You go to bed.”
After putting on his greatcoat in the passage and picking up his
walking-stick, he stopped, thought a minute, and went back into the
drawing-room.
“I’ll come to-morrow, Olga,” he repeated in a quivering voice. “Do you
hear?”
She did not answer, and it seemed as though grief had robbed her of all
power of speech. In his greatcoat and with his stick still in his hand,
the doctor sat down beside her, and began in a soft, tender half-
whisper, which was utterly out of keeping with his heavy, dignified
figure:
“Olga! For the sake of your sorrow which I share. . . . Now, when
falsehood is criminal, I beseech you to tell me the truth. You have
always declared that the boy is my son. Is that the truth?”
Olga Ivanovna was silent.
“You have been the one attachment in my life,” the doctor went on, “and
you cannot imagine how deeply my feeling is wounded by falsehood . . . .
Come, I entreat you, Olga, for once in your life, tell me the truth. . .
. At these moments one cannot lie. Tell me that Misha is not my son. I
am waiting.”
“He is.”
Olga Ivanovna’s face could not be seen, but in her voice the doctor
could hear hesitation. He sighed.
“Even at such moments you can bring yourself to tell a lie,” he said in
his ordinary voice. “There is nothing sacred to you! Do listen, do
understand me. . . . You have been the one only attachment in my life.
Yes, you were depraved, vulgar, but I have loved no one else but you in
my life. That trivial love, now that I am growing old, is the one
solitary bright spot in my memories. Why do you darken it with
deception? What is it for?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Oh my God!” cried Tsvyetkov. “You are lying, you understand very well!”
he cried more loudly, and he began pacing about the drawing-room,
angrily waving his stick. “Or have you forgotten? Then I will remind
you! A father’s rights to the boy are equally shared with me by Petrov
and Kurovsky the lawyer, who still make you an allowance for their son’s
education, just as I do! Yes, indeed! I know all that quite well! I
forgive your lying in the past, what does it matter? But now when you
have grown older, at this moment when the boy is dying, your lying
stifles me! How sorry I am that I cannot speak, how sorry I am!”
The doctor unbuttoned his overcoat, and still pacing about, said:
“Wretched woman! Even such moments have no effect on her! Even now she
lies as freely as nine years ago in the Hermitage Restaurant! She is
afraid if she tells me the truth I shall leave off giving her money, she
thinks that if she did not lie I should not love the boy! You are lying!
It’s contemptible!”
The doctor rapped the floor with his stick, and cried:
“It’s loathsome. Warped, corrupted creature! I must despise you, and I
ought to be ashamed of my feeling. Yes! Your lying has stuck in my
throat these nine years, I have endured it, but now it’s too much—too
much.”
From the dark corner where Olga Ivanovna was sitting there came the
sound of weeping. The doctor ceased speaking and cleared his throat. A
silence followed. The doctor slowly buttoned up his over-coat, and began
looking for his hat which he had dropped as he walked about.
“I lost my temper,” he muttered, bending down to the floor. “I quite
lost sight of the fact that you cannot attend to me now. . . . God knows
what I have said. . . . Don’t take any notice of it, Olga.”
He found his hat and went towards the dark corner.
“I have wounded you,” he said in a soft, tender half-whisper, “but once
more I entreat you, tell me the truth; there should not be lying between
us. . . . I blurted it out, and now you know that Petrov and Kurovsky
are no secret to me. So now it is easy for you to tell me the truth.”
Olga Ivanovna thought a moment, and with perceptible hesitation, said:
“Nikolay, I am not lying—Misha is your child.”
“My God,” moaned the doctor, “then I will tell you something more: I
have kept your letter to Petrov in which you call him Misha’s father!
Olga, I know the truth, but I want to hear it from you! Do you hear?”
Olga Ivanovna made no reply, but went on weeping. After waiting for an
answer the doctor shrugged his shoulders and went out.
“I will come to-morrow,” he called from the passage.
All the way home, as he sat in his carriage, he was shrugging his
shoulders and muttering:
“What a pity that I don’t know how to speak! I haven’t the gift of
persuading and convincing. It’s evident she does not understand me since
she lies! It’s evident! How can I make her see? How?”
TOO EARLY!
THE bells are ringing for service in the village of Shalmovo. The sun is
already kissing the earth on the horizon; it has turned crimson and will
soon disappear. In Semyon’s pothouse, which has lately changed its name
and become a restaurant—a title quite out of keeping with the wretched
little hut with its thatch torn off its roof, and its couple of dingy
windows—two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon
Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to
the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter. He has at one time been
employed in a nail factory, has been turned off for drunkenness and
idleness, and now lives upon his old wife, who begs for alms. He is thin
and weak, with a mangy-looking little beard, speaks with a hissing
sound, and after every word twitches the right side of his face and
jerkily shrugs his right shoulder. The other, Ignat Ryabov, a sturdy,
broad-shouldered peasant who never does anything and is everlastingly
silent, is sitting in the corner under a big string of bread rings. The
door, opening inwards, throws a thick shadow upon him, so that Slyunka
and Semyon the publican can see nothing but his patched knees, his long
fleshy nose, and a big tuft of hair which has escaped from the thick
uncombed tangle covering his head. Semyon, a sickly little man, with a
pale face and a long sinewy neck, stands behind his counter, looks
mournfully at the string of bread rings, and coughs meekly.
“You think it over now, if you have any sense,” Slyunka says to him,
twitching his cheek. “You have the thing lying by unused and get no sort
of benefit from it. While we need it. A sportsman without a gun is like
a sacristan without a voice. You ought to understand that, but I see you
don’t understand it, so you can have no real sense. . . . Hand it over!”
“You left the gun in pledge, you know!” says Semyon in a thin womanish
little voice, sighing deeply, and not taking his eyes off the string of
bread rings. “Hand over the rouble you borrowed, and then take your
gun.”
“I haven’t got a rouble. I swear to you, Semyon Mitritch, as God sees
me: you give me the gun and I will go to-day with Ignashka and bring it
you back again. I’ll bring it back, strike me dead. May I have happiness
neither in this world nor the next, if I don’t.”
“Semyon Mitritch, do give it,” Ignat Ryabov says in his bass, and his
voice betrays a passionate desire to get what he asks for.
“But what do you want the gun for?” sighs Semyon, sadly shaking his
head. “What sort of shooting is there now? It’s still winter outside,
and no game at all but crows and jackdaws.”
“Winter, indeed,” says Slyunka, hooing the ash out of his pipe with his
finger, “it is early yet of course, but you never can tell with the
snipe. The snipe’s a bird that wants watching. If you are unlucky, you
may sit waiting at home, and miss his flying over, and then you must
wait till autumn. . . . It is a business! The snipe is not a rook. . . .
Last year he was flying the week before Easter, while the year before we
had to wait till the week after Easter! Come, do us a favour, Semyon
Mitritch, give us the gun. Make us pray for you for ever. As ill-luck
would have it, Ignashka has pledged his gun for drink too. Ah, when you
drink you feel nothing, but now . . . ah, I wish I had never looked at
it, the cursed vodka! Truly it is the blood of Satan! Give it us, Semyon
Mitritch!”
“I won’t give it you,” says Semyon, clasping his yellow hands on his
breast as though he were going to pray. “You must act fairly,
Filimonushka. . . . A thing is not taken out of pawn just anyhow; you
must pay the money. . . . Besides, what do you want to kill birds for?
What’s the use? It’s Lent now—you are not going to eat them.”
Slyunka exchanges glances with Ryabov in embarrassment, sighs, and says:
“We would only go stand-shooting.”
“And what for? It’s all foolishness. You are not the sort of man to
spend your time in foolishness. . . . Ignashka, to be sure, is a man of
no understanding, God has afflicted him, but you, thank the Lord, are an
old man. It’s time to prepare for your end. Here, you ought to go to the
midnight service.”
The allusion to his age visibly stings Slyunka. He clears his throat,
wrinkles up his forehead, and remains silent for a full minute.
“I say, Semyon Mitritch,” he says hotly, getting up and twitching not
only in his right cheek but all over his face. “It’s God’s truth. . . .
May the Almighty strike me dead, after Easter I shall get something from
Stepan Kuzmitch for an axle, and I will pay you not one rouble but two!
May the Lord chastise me! Before the holy image, I tell you, only give
me the gun!”
“Gi-ive it,” Ryabov says in his growling bass; they can hear him
breathing hard, and it seems that he would like to say a great deal, but
cannot find the words. “Gi-ive it.”
“No, brothers, and don’t ask,” sighs Semyon, shaking his head
mournfully. “Don’t lead me into sin. I won’t give you the gun. It’s not
the fashion for a thing to be taken out of pawn and no money paid.
Besides—why this indulgence? Go your way and God bless you!”
Slyunka rubs his perspiring face with his sleeve and begins hotly
swearing and entreating. He crosses himself, holds out his hands to the
ikon, calls his deceased father and mother to bear witness, but Semyon
sighs and meekly looks as before at the string of bread rings. In the
end Ignashka Ryabov, hitherto motionless, gets up impulsively and bows
down to the ground before the innkeeper, but even that has no effect on
him.
“May you choke with my gun, you devil,” says Slyunka, with his face
twitching, and his shoulders, shrugging. “May you choke, you plague, you
scoundrelly soul.”
Swearing and shaking his fists, he goes out of the tavern with Ryabov
and stands still in the middle of the road.
“He won’t give it, the damned brute,” he says, in a weeping voice,
looking into Ryabov’s face with an injured air.
“He won’t give it,” booms Ryabov.
The windows of the furthest huts, the starling cote on the tavern, the
tops of the poplars, and the cross on the church are all gleaming with a
bright golden flame. Now they can see only half of the sun, which, as it
goes to its night’s rest, is winking, shedding a crimson light, and
seems laughing gleefully. Slyunka and Ryabov can see the forest lying, a
dark blur, to the right of the sun, a mile and a half from the village,
and tiny clouds flitting over the clear sky, and they feel that the
evening will be fine and still.
“Now is just the time,” says Slyunka, with his face twitching. “It would
be nice to stand for an hour or two. He won’t give it us, the damned
brute. May he . . .”
“For stand-shooting, now is the very time . . .” Ryabov articulated, as
though with an effort, stammering.
After standing still for a little they walk out of the village, without
saying a word to each other, and look towards the dark streak of the
forest. The whole sky above the forest is studded with moving black
spots, the rooks flying home to roost. The snow, lying white here and
there on the dark brown plough-land, is lightly flecked with gold by the
sun.
“This time last year I went stand-shooting in Zhivki,” says Slyunka,
after a long silence. “I brought back three snipe.”
Again there follows a silence. Both stand a long time and look towards
the forest, and then lazily move and walk along the muddy road from the
village.
“It’s most likely the snipe haven’t come yet,” says Slyunka, “but may be
they are here.”
“Kostka says they are not here yet.”
“Maybe they are not, who can tell; one year is not like another. But
what mud!”
“But we ought to stand.”
“To be sure we ought—why not?”
“We can stand and watch; it wouldn’t be amiss to go to the forest and
have a look. If they are there we will tell Kostka, or maybe get a gun
ourselves and come to-morrow. What a misfortune, God forgive me. It was
the devil put it in my mind to take my gun to the pothouse! I am more
sorry than I can tell you, Ignashka.”
Conversing thus, the sportsmen approach the forest. The sun has set and
left behind it a red streak like the glow of a fire, scattered here and
there with clouds; there is no catching the colours of those clouds:
their edges are red, but they themselves are one minute grey, at the
next lilac, at the next ashen.
In the forest, among the thick branches of fir-trees and under the birch
bushes, it is dark, and only the outermost twigs on the side of the sun,
with their fat buds and shining bark, stand out clearly in the air.
There is a smell of thawing snow and rotting leaves. It is still;
nothing stirs. From the distance comes the subsiding caw of the rooks.
“We ought to be standing in Zhivki now,” whispers Slyunka, looking with
awe at Ryabov; “there’s good stand-shooting there.”
Ryabov too looks with awe at Slyunka, with unbKlinking eyes and open
mouth.
“A lovely time,” Slyunka says in a trembling whisper. “The Lord is
sending a fine spring . . . and I should think the snipe are here by
now. . . . Why not? The days are warm now. . . . The cranes were flying
in the morning, lots and lots of them.”
Slyunka and Ryabov, splashing cautiously through the melting snow and
sticking in the mud, walk two hundred paces along the edge of the forest
and there halt. Their faces wear a look of alarm and expectation of
something terrible and extraordinary. They stand like posts, do not
speak nor stir, and their hands gradually fall into an attitude as
though they were holding a gun at the cock. . . .
A big shadow creeps from the left and envelops the earth. The dusk of
evening comes on. If one looks to the right, through the bushes and tree
trunks, there can be seen crimson patches of the after-glow. It is still
and damp. . . .
“There’s no sound of them,” whispers Slyunka, shrugging with the cold
and sniffing with his chilly nose.
But frightened by his own whisper, he holds his finger up at some one,
opens his eyes wide, and purses up his lips. There is a sound of a light
snapping. The sportsmen look at each other significantly, and tell each
other with their eyes that it is nothing. It is the snapping of a dry
twig or a bit of bark. The shadows of evening keep growing and growing,
the patches of crimson gradually grow dim, and the dampness becomes
unpleasant.
The sportsmen remain standing a long time, but they see and hear
nothing. Every instant they expect to see a delicate leaf float through
the air, to hear a hurried call like the husky cough of a child, and the
flutter of wings.
“No, not a sound,” Slyunka says aloud, dropping his hands and beginning
to bKlink. “So they have not come yet.”
“It’s early!”
“You are right there.”
The sportsmen cannot see each other’s faces, it is getting rapidly dark.
“We must wait another five days,” says Slyunka, as he comes out from
behind a bush with Ryabov. “It’s too early!”
They go homewards, and are silent all the way.
THE COSSACK
MAXIM TORTCHAKOV, a farmer in southern Russia, was driving home from
church with his young wife and bringing back an Easter cake which had
just been blessed. The sun had not yet risen, but the east was all
tinged with red and gold and had dissipated the haze which usually, in
the early morning, screens the blue of the sky from the eyes. It was
quiet. . . . The birds were hardly yet awake . . . . The corncrake
uttered its clear note, and far away above a little tumulus, a sleepy
kite floated, heavily flapping its wings, and no other living creature
could be seen all over the steppe.
Tortchakov drove on and thought that there was no better nor happier
holiday than the Feast of Christ’s Resurrection. He had only lately been
married, and was now keeping his first Easter with his wife. Whatever he
looked at, whatever he thought about, it all seemed to him bright,
joyous, and happy. He thought about his farming, and thought that it was
all going well, that the furnishing of his house was all the heart could
desire—there was enough of everything and all of it good; he looked at
his wife, and she seemed to him lovely, kind, and gentle. He was
delighted by the glow in the east, and the young grass, and his
squeaking chaise, and the kite. . . . And when on the way, he ran into a
tavern to light his cigarette and drank a glass, he felt happier still.
“It is said, ‘Great is the day,’” he chattered. “Yes, it is great! Wait
a bit, Lizaveta, the sun will begin to dance. It dances every Easter. So
it rejoices too!”
“It is not alive,” said his wife.
“But there are people on it!” exclaimed Tortchakov, “there are really!
Ivan Stepanitch told me that there are people on all the planets—on the
sun, and on the moon! Truly . . . but maybe the learned men tell
lies—the devil only knows! Stay, surely that’s not a horse? Yes, it is!”
At the Crooked Ravine, which was just half-way on the journey home,
Tortchakov and his wife saw a saddled horse standing motionless, and
sniffing last year’s dry grass. On a hillock beside the roadside a red-
haired Cossack was sitting doubled up, looking at his feet.
“Christ is risen!” Maxim shouted to him. “Wo-o-o!”
“Truly He is risen,” answered the Cossack, without raising his head.
“Where are you going?”
“Home on leave.”
“Why are you sitting here, then?”
“Why . . . I have fallen ill . . . I haven’t the strength to go on.”
“What is wrong?”
“I ache all over.”
“H’m. What a misfortune! People are keeping holiday, and you fall sick!
But you should ride on to a village or an inn, what’s the use of sitting
here!”
The Cossack raised his head, and with big, exhausted eyes, scanned
Maxim, his wife, and the horse.
“Have you come from church?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“The holiday found me on the high road. It was not God’s will for me to
reach home. I’d get on my horse at once and ride off, but I haven’t the
strength. . . . You might, good Christians, give a wayfarer some Easter
cake to break his fast!”
“Easter cake?” Tortchakov repeated, “That we can, to be sure. . . .
Stay, I’ll. . . .”
Maxim fumbled quickly in his pockets, glanced at his wife, and said:
“I haven’t a knife, nothing to cut it with. And I don’t like to break
it, it would spoil the whole cake. There’s a problem! You look and see
if you haven’t a knife?”
The Cossack got up groaning, and went to his saddle to get a knife.
“What an idea,” said Tortchakov’s wife angrily. “I won’t let you slice
up the Easter cake! What should I look like, taking it home already cut!
Ride on to the peasants in the village, and break your fast there!”
The wife took the napkin with the Easter cake in it out of her husband’s
hands and said:
“I won’t allow it! One must do things properly; it’s not a loaf, but a
holy Easter cake. And it’s a sin to cut it just anyhow.”
“Well, Cossack, don’t be angry,” laughed Tortchakov. “The wife forbids
it! Good-bye. Good luck on your journey!”
Maxim shook the reins, clicked to his horse, and the chaise rolled on
squeaking. For some time his wife went on grumbling, and declaring that
to cut the Easter cake before reaching home was a sin and not the proper
thing. In the east the first rays of the rising sun shone out, cutting
their way through the feathery clouds, and the song of the lark was
heard in the sky. Now not one but three kites were hovering over the
steppe at a respectful distance from one another. Grasshoppers began
churring in the young grass.
When they had driven three-quarters of a mile from the Crooked Ravine,
Tortchakov looked round and stared intently into the distance.
“I can’t see the Cossack,” he said. “Poor, dear fellow, to take it into
his head to fall ill on the road. There couldn’t be a worse misfortune,
to have to travel and not have the strength. . . . I shouldn’t wonder if
he dies by the roadside. We didn’t give him any Easter cake, Lizaveta,
and we ought to have given it. I’ll be bound he wants to break his fast
too.”
The sun had risen, but whether it was dancing or not Tortchakov did not
see. He remained silent all the way home, thinking and keeping his eyes
fixed on the horse’s black tail. For some unknown reason he felt
overcome by depression, and not a trace of the holiday gladness was left
in his heart. When he had arrived home and said, “Christ is risen” to
his workmen, he grew cheerful again and began talking, but when he had
sat down to break the fast and had taken a bite from his piece of Easter
cake, he looked regretfully at his wife, and said:
“It wasn’t right of us, Lizaveta, not to give that Cossack something to
eat.”
“You are a queer one, upon my word,” said Lizaveta, shrugging her
shoulders in surprise. “Where did you pick up such a fashion as giving
away the holy Easter cake on the high road? Is it an ordinary loaf? Now
that it is cut and lying on the table, let anyone eat it that likes—your
Cossack too! Do you suppose I grudge it?”
“That’s all right, but we ought to have given the Cossack some. . . .
Why, he was worse off than a beggar or an orphan. On the road, and far
from home, and sick too.”
Tortchakov drank half a glass of tea, and neither ate nor drank anything
more. He had no appetite, the tea seemed to choke him, and he felt
depressed again. After breaking their fast, his wife and he lay down to
sleep. When Lizaveta woke two hours later, he was standing by the
window, looking into the yard.
“Are you up already?” asked his wife.
“I somehow can’t sleep. . . . Ah, Lizaveta,” he sighed. “We were unkind,
you and I, to that Cossack!”
“Talking about that Cossack again!” yawned his wife. “You have got him
on the brain.”
“He has served his Tsar, shed his blood maybe, and we treated him as
though he were a pig. We ought to have brought the sick man home and fed
him, and we did not even give him a morsel of bread.”
“Catch me letting you spoil the Easter cake for nothing! And one that
has been blessed too! You would have cut it on the road, and shouldn’t I
have looked a fool when I got home?”
Without saying anything to his wife, Maxim went into the kitchen,
wrapped a piece of cake up in a napkin, together with half a dozen eggs,
and went to the labourers in the barn.
“Kuzma, put down your concertina,” he said to one of them. “Saddle the
bay, or Ivantchik, and ride briskly to the Crooked Ravine. There you
will see a sick Cossack with a horse, so give him this. Maybe he hasn’t
ridden away yet.”
Maxim felt cheerful again, but after waiting for Kuzma for some hours,
he could bear it no longer, so he saddled a horse and went off to meet
him. He met him just at the Ravine.
“Well, have you seen the Cossack?”
“I can’t find him anywhere, he must have ridden on.”
“H’m . . . a queer business.”
Tortchakov took the bundle from Kuzma, and galloped on farther. When he
reached Shustrovo he asked the peasants:
“Friends, have you seen a sick Cossack with a horse? Didn’t he ride by
here? A red-headed fellow on a bay horse.”
The peasants looked at one another, and said they had not seen the
Cossack.
“The returning postman drove by, it’s true, but as for a Cossack or
anyone else, there has been no such.”
Maxim got home at dinner time.
“I can’t get that Cossack out of my head, do what you will!” he said to
his wife. “He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if God meant to
try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a Cossack? It does
happen, you know. It’s bad, Lizaveta; we were unkind to the man!”
“What do you keep pestering me with that Cossack for?” cried Lizaveta,
losing patience at last. “You stick to it like tar!”
“You are not kind, you know . . .” said Maxim, looking into his wife’s
face.
And for the first time since his marriage he perceived that he wife was
not kind.
“I may be unkind,” cried Lizaveta, tapping angrily with her spoon, “but
I am not going to give away the holy Easter cake to every drunken man in
the road.”
“The Cossack wasn’t drunk!”
“He was drunk!”
“Well, you are a fool then!”
Maxim got up from the table and began reproaching his young wife for
hard-heartedness and stupidity. She, getting angry too, answered his
reproaches with reproaches, burst into tears, and went away into their
bedroom, declaring she would go home to her father’s. This was the first
matrimonial squabble that had happened in the Tortchakov’s married life.
He walked about the yard till the evening, picturing his wife’s face,
and it seemed to him now spiteful and ugly. And as though to torment him
the Cossack haunted his brain, and Maxim seemed to see now his sick
eyes, now his unsteady walk.
“Ah, we were unkind to the man,” he muttered.
When it got dark, he was overcome by an insufferable depression such as
he had never felt before. Feeling so dreary, and being angry with his
wife, he got drunk, as he had sometimes done before he was married. In
his drunkenness he used bad language and shouted to his wife that she
had a spiteful, ugly face, and that next day he would send her packing
to her father’s. On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to
sober himself, and got drunk again.
And with that his downfall began.
His horses, cows, sheep, and hives disappeared one by one from the yard;
Maxim was more and more often drunk, debts mounted up, he felt an
aversion for his wife. Maxim put down all his misfortunes to the fact
that he had an unkind wife, and above all, that God was angry with him
on account of the sick Cossack.
Lizaveta saw their ruin, but who was to blame for it she did not
understand.
ABORIGINES
BETWEEN nine and ten in the morning. Ivan Lyashkevsky, a lieutenant of
Polish origin, who has at some time or other been wounded in the head,
and now lives on his pension in a town in one of the southern provinces,
is sitting in his lodgings at the open window talking to Franz
Stepanitch Finks, the town architect, who has come in to see him for a
minute. Both have thrust their heads out of the window, and are looking
in the direction of the gate near which Lyashkevsky’s landlord, a plump
little native with pendulous perspiring cheeks, in full, blue trousers,
is sitting on a bench with his waistcoat unbuttoned. The native is
plunged in deep thought, and is absent-mindedly prodding the toe of his
boot with a stick.
“Extraordinary people, I tell you,” grumbled Lyashkevsky, looking
angrily at the native, “here he has sat down on the bench, and so he
will sit, damn the fellow, with his hands folded till evening. They do
absolutely nothing. The wastrels and loafers! It would be all right, you
scoundrel, if you had money lying in the bank, or had a farm of your own
where others would be working for you, but here you have not a penny to
your name, you eat the bread of others, you are in debt all round, and
you starve your family—devil take you! You wouldn’t believe me, Franz
Stepanitch, sometimes it makes me so cross that I could jump out of the
window and give the low fellow a good horse-whipping. Come, why don’t
you work? What are you sitting there for?”
The native looks indifferently at Lyashkevsky, tries to say something
but cannot; sloth and the sultry heat have paralysed his conversational
faculties. . . . Yawning lazily, he makes the sign of the cross over his
mouth, and turns his eyes up towards the sky where pigeons fly, bathing
in the hot air.
“You must not be too severe in your judgments, honoured friend,” sighs
Finks, mopping his big bald head with his handkerchief. “Put yourself in
their place: business is slack now, there’s unemployment all round, a
bad harvest, stagnation in trade.”
“Good gracious, how you talk!” cries Lyashkevsky in indignation, angrily
wrapping his dressing gown round him. “Supposing he has no job and no
trade, why doesn’t he work in his own home, the devil flay him! I say!
Is there no work for you at home? Just look, you brute! Your steps have
come to pieces, the plankway is falling into the ditch, the fence is
rotten; you had better set to and mend it all, or if you don’t know how,
go into the kitchen and help your wife. Your wife is running out every
minute to fetch water or carry out the slops. Why shouldn’t you run
instead, you rascal? And then you must remember, Franz Stepanitch, that
he has six acres of garden, that he has pigsties and poultry houses, but
it is all wasted and no use. The flower garden is overgrown with weeds
and almost baked dry, while the boys play ball in the kitchen garden.
Isn’t he a lazy brute? I assure you, though I have only the use of an
acre and a half with my lodgings, you will always find radishes, and
salad, and fennel, and onions, while that blackguard buys everything at
the market.”
“He is a Russian, there is no doing anything with him,” said Finks with
a condescending smile; “it’s in the Russian blood. . . . They are a very
lazy people! If all property were given to Germans or Poles, in a year’s
time you would not recognise the town.”
The native in the blue trousers beckons a girl with a sieve, buys a
kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds from her and begins cracking them.
“A race of curs!” says Lyashkevsky angrily. “That’s their only
occupation, they crack sunflower seeds and they talk politics! The devil
take them!”
Staring wrathfully at the blue trousers, Lyashkevsky is gradually roused
to fury, and gets so excited that he actually foams at the mouth. He
speaks with a Polish accent, rapping out each syllable venomously, till
at last the little bags under his eyes swell, and he abandons the
Russian “scoundrels, blackguards, and rascals,” and rolling his eyes,
begins pouring out a shower of Polish oaths, coughing from his efforts.
“Lazy dogs, race of curs. May the devil take them!”
The native hears this abuse distinctly, but, judging from the appearance
of his crumpled little figure, it does not affect him. Apparently he has
long ago grown as used to it as to the buzzing of the flies, and feels
it superfluous to protest. At every visit Finks has to listen to a
tirade on the subject of the lazy good-for-nothing aborigines, and every
time exactly the same one.
“But . . . I must be going,” he says, remembering that he has no time to
spare. “Good-bye!”
“Where are you off to?”
“I only looked in on you for a minute. The wall of the cellar has
cracked in the girls’ high school, so they asked me to go round at once
to look at it. I must go.”
“H’m. . . . I have told Varvara to get the samovar,” says Lyashkevsky,
surprised. “Stay a little, we will have some tea; then you shall go.”
Finks obediently puts down his hat on the table and remains to drink
tea. Over their tea Lyashkevsky maintains that the natives are
hopelessly ruined, that there is only one thing to do, to take them all
indiscriminately and send them under strict escort to hard labour.
“Why, upon my word,” he says, getting hot, “you may ask what does that
goose sitting there live upon! He lets me lodgings in his house for
seven roubles a month, and he goes to name-day parties, that’s all that
he has to live on, the knave, may the devil take him! He has neither
earnings nor an income. They are not merely sluggards and wastrels, they
are swindlers too, they are continually borrowing money from the town
bank, and what do they do with it? They plunge into some scheme such as
sending bulls to Moscow, or building oil presses on a new system; but to
send bulls to Moscow or to press oil you want to have a head on your
shoulders, and these rascals have pumpkins on theirs! Of course all
their schemes end in smoke . . . . They waste their money, get into a
mess, and then snap their fingers at the bank. What can you get out of
them? Their houses are mortgaged over and over again, they have no other
property—it’s all been drunk and eaten up long ago. Nine-tenths of them
are swindlers, the scoundrels! To borrow money and not return it is
their rule. Thanks to them the town bank is going smash!”
“I was at Yegorov’s yesterday,” Finks interrupts the Pole, anxious to
change the conversation, “and only fancy, I won six roubles and a half
from him at picquet.”
“I believe I still owe you something at picquet,” Lyashkevsky
recollects, “I ought to win it back. Wouldn’t you like one game?”
“Perhaps just one,” Finks assents. “I must make haste to the high
school, you know.”
Lyashkevsky and Finks sit down at the open window and begin a game of
picquet. The native in the blue trousers stretches with relish, and
husks of sunflower seeds fall in showers from all over him on to the
ground. At that moment from the gate opposite appears another native
with a long beard, wearing a crumpled yellowish-grey cotton coat. He
screws up his eyes affectionately at the blue trousers and shouts:
“Good-morning, Semyon Nikolaitch, I have the honour to congratulate you
on the Thursday.”
“And the same to you, Kapiton Petrovitch!”
“Come to my seat! It’s cool here!”
The blue trousers, with much sighing and groaning and waddling from side
to side like a duck, cross the street.
“Tierce major . . .” mutters Lyashkevsky, “from the queen. . . . Five
and fifteen. . . . The rascals are talking of politics. . . . Do you
hear? They have begun about England. I have six hearts.”
“I have the seven spades. My point.”
“Yes, it’s yours. Do you hear? They are abusing Beaconsfield. They don’t
know, the swine, that Beaconsfield has been dead for ever so long. So I
have twenty-nine. . . . Your lead.”
“Eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . . Yes, amazing people, these Russians!
Eleven . . . twelve. . . . The Russian inertia is unique on the
terrestrial globe.”
“Thirty . . . Thirty-one. . . . One ought to take a good whip, you know.
Go out and give them Beaconsfield. I say, how their tongues are wagging!
It’s easier to babble than to work. I suppose you threw away the queen
of clubs and I didn’t realise it.”
“Thirteen . . . Fourteen. . . . It’s unbearably hot! One must be made of
iron to sit in such heat on a seat in the full sun! Fifteen.”
The first game is followed by a second, the second by a third. . . .
Finks loses, and by degrees works himself up into a gambling fever and
forgets all about the cracking walls of the high school cellar. As
Lyashkevsky plays he keeps looking at the aborigines. He sees them,
entertaining each other with conversation, go to the open gate, cross
the filthy yard and sit down on a scanty patch of shade under an aspen
tree. Between twelve and one o’clock the fat cook with brown legs
spreads before them something like a baby’s sheet with brown stains upon
it, and gives them their dinner. They eat with wooden spoons, keep
brushing away the flies, and go on talking.
“The devil, it is beyond everything,” cries Lyashkevsky, revolted. “I am
very glad I have not a gun or a revolver or I should have a shot at
those cattle. I have four knaves—fourteen. . . . Your point. . . . It
really gives me a twitching in my legs. I can’t see those ruffians
without being upset.”
“Don’t excite yourself, it is bad for you.”
“But upon my word, it is enough to try the patience of a stone!”
When he has finished dinner the native in blue trousers, worn out and
exhausted, staggering with laziness and repletion, crosses the street to
his own house and sinks feebly on to his bench. He is struggling with
drowsiness and the gnats, and is looking about him as dejectedly as
though he were every minute expecting his end. His helpless air drives
Lyashkevsky out of all patience. The Pole pokes his head out of the
window and shouts at him, spluttering:
“Been gorging? Ah, the old woman! The sweet darling. He has been
stuffing himself, and now he doesn’t know what to do with his tummy! Get
out of my sight, you confounded fellow! Plague take you!”
The native looks sourly at him, and merely twiddles his fingers instead
of answering. A school-boy of his acquaintance passes by him with his
satchel on his back. Stopping him the native ponders a long time what to
say to him, and asks:
“Well, what now?”
“Nothing.”
“How, nothing?”
“Why, just nothing.”
“H’m. . . . And which subject is the hardest?”
“That’s according.” The school-boy shrugs his shoulders.
“I see—er . . . What is the Latin for tree?”
“Arbor.”
“Aha. . . . And so one has to know all that,” sighs the blue trousers.
“You have to go into it all. . . . It’s hard work, hard work. . . . Is
your dear Mamma well?”
“She is all right, thank you.”
“Ah. . . . Well, run along.”
After losing two roubles Finks remembers the high school and is
horrified.
“Holy Saints, why it’s three o’clock already. How I have been staying
on. Good-bye, I must run. . . .”
“Have dinner with me, and then go,” says Lyashkevsky. “You have plenty
of time.”
Finks stays, but only on condition that dinner shall last no more than
ten minutes. After dining he sits for some five minutes on the sofa and
thinks of the cracked wall, then resolutely lays his head on the cushion
and fills the room with a shrill whistling through his nose. While he is
asleep, Lyashkevsky, who does not approve of an afternoon nap, sits at
the window, stares at the dozing native, and grumbles:
“Race of curs! I wonder you don’t choke with laziness. No work, no
intellectual or moral interests, nothing but vegetating . . . .
disgusting. Tfoo!”
At six o’clock Finks wakes up.
“It’s too late to go to the high school now,” he says, stretching. “I
shall have to go to-morrow, and now. . . . How about my revenge? Let’s
have one more game. . . .”
After seeing his visitor off, between nine and ten, Lyashkevsky looks
after him for some time, and says:
“Damn the fellow, staying here the whole day and doing absolutely
nothing. . . . Simply get their salary and do no work; the devil take
them! . . . The German pig. . . .”
He looks out of the window, but the native is no longer there. He has
gone to bed. There is no one to grumble at, and for the first time in
the day he keeps his mouth shut, but ten minutes passes and he cannot
restrain the depression that overpowers him, and begins to grumble,
shoving the old shabby armchair:
“You only take up room, rubbishly old thing! You ought to have been
burnt long ago, but I keep forgetting to tell them to chop you up. It’s
a disgrace!”
And as he gets into bed he presses his hand on a spring of the mattress,
frowns and says peevishly:
“The con—found—ed spring! It will cut my side all night. I will tell
them to rip up the mattress to-morrow and get you out, you useless
thing.”
He falls asleep at midnight, and dreams that he is pouring boiling water
over the natives, Finks, and the old armchair.
AN INQUIRY
IT was midday. Voldyrev, a tall, thick-set country gentleman with a
cropped head and prominent eyes, took off his overcoat, mopped his brow
with his silk handkerchief, and somewhat diffidently went into the
government office. There they were scratching away. . . .
“Where can I make an inquiry here?” he said, addressing a porter who was
bringing a trayful of glasses from the furthest recesses of the office.
“I have to make an inquiry here and to take a copy of a resolution of
the Council.”
“That way please! To that one sitting near the window!” said the porter,
indicating with the tray the furthest window. Voldyrev coughed and went
towards the window; there, at a green table spotted like typhus, was
sitting a young man with his hair standing up in four tufts on his head,
with a long pimply nose, and a long faded uniform. He was writing,
thrusting his long nose into the papers. A fly was walking about near
his right nostril, and he was continually stretching out his lower lip
and blowing under his nose, which gave his face an extremely care-worn
expression.
“May I make an inquiry about my case here . . . of you? My name is
Voldyrev. And, by the way, I have to take a copy of the resolution of
the Council of the second of March.”
The clerk dipped his pen in the ink and looked to see if he had got too
much on it. Having satisfied himself that the pen would not make a blot,
he began scribbling away. His lip was thrust out, but it was no longer
necessary to blow: the fly had settled on his ear.
“Can I make an inquiry here?” Voldyrev repeated a minute later, “my name
is Voldyrev, I am a landowner. . . .”
“Ivan Alexeitch!” the clerk shouted into the air as though he had not
observed Voldyrev, “will you tell the merchant Yalikov when he comes to
sign the copy of the complaint lodged with the police! I’ve told him a
thousand times!”
“I have come in reference to my lawsuit with the heirs of Princess
Gugulin,” muttered Voldyrev. “The case is well known. I earnestly beg
you to attend to me.”
Still failing to observe Voldyrev, the clerk caught the fly on his lip,
looked at it attentively and flung it away. The country gentleman
coughed and blew his nose loudly on his checked pocket handkerchief. But
this was no use either. He was still unheard. The silence lasted for two
minutes. Voldyrev took a rouble note from his pocket and laid it on an
open book before the clerk. The clerk wrinkled up his forehead, drew the
book towards him with an anxious air and closed it.
“A little inquiry. . . . I want only to find out on what grounds the
heirs of Princess Gugulin. . . . May I trouble you?”
The clerk, absorbed in his own thoughts, got up and, scratching his
elbow, went to a cupboard for something. Returning a minute later to his
table he became absorbed in the book again: another rouble note was
lying upon it.
“I will trouble you for one minute only. . . . I have only to make an
inquiry.”
The clerk did not hear, he had begun copying something.
Voldyrev frowned and looked hopelessly at the whole scribbling
brotherhood.
“They write!” he thought, sighing. “They write, the devil take them
entirely!”
He walked away from the table and stopped in the middle of the room, his
hands hanging hopelessly at his sides. The porter, passing again with
glasses, probably noticed the helpless expression of his face, for he
went close up to him and asked him in a low voice:
“Well? Have you inquired?”
“I’ve inquired, but he wouldn’t speak to me.”
“You give him three roubles,” whispered the porter.
“I’ve given him two already.”
“Give him another.”
Voldyrev went back to the table and laid a green note on the open book.
The clerk drew the book towards him again and began turning over the
leaves, and all at once, as though by chance, lifted his eyes to
Voldyrev. His nose began to shine, turned red, and wrinkled up in a
grin.
“Ah . . . what do you want?” he asked.
“I want to make an inquiry in reference to my case. . . . My name is
Voldyrev.”
“With pleasure! The Gugulin case, isn’t it? Very good. What is it then
exactly?”
Voldyrev explained his business.
The clerk became as lively as though he were whirled round by a
hurricane. He gave the necessary information, arranged for a copy to be
made, gave the petitioner a chair, and all in one instant. He even spoke
about the weather and asked after the harvest. And when Voldyrev went
away he accompanied him down the stairs, smiling affably and
respectfully, and looking as though he were ready any minute to fall on
his face before the gentleman. Voldyrev for some reason felt
uncomfortable, and in obedience to some inward impulse he took a rouble
out of his pocket and gave it to the clerk. And the latter kept bowing
and smiling, and took the rouble like a conjuror, so that it seemed to
flash through the air.
“Well, what people!” thought the country gentleman as he went out into
the street, and he stopped and mopped his brow with his handkerchief.
MARTYRS
LIZOTCHKA KUDRINSKY, a young married lady who had many admirers, was
suddenly taken ill, and so seriously that her husband did not go to his
office, and a telegram was sent to her mamma at Tver. This is how she
told the story of her illness:
“I went to Lyesnoe to auntie’s. I stayed there a week and then I went
with all the rest to cousin Varya’s. Varya’s husband is a surly brute
and a despot (I’d shoot a husband like that), but we had a very jolly
time there. To begin with I took part in some private theatricals. It
was A Scandal in a Respectable Family. Hrustalev acted marvellously!
Between the acts I drank some cold, awfully cold, lemon squash, with the
tiniest nip of brandy in it. Lemon squash with brandy in it is very much
like champagne. . . . I drank it and I felt nothing. Next day after the
performance I rode out on horseback with that Adolf Ivanitch. It was
rather damp and there was a strong wind. It was most likely then that I
caught cold. Three days later I came home to see how my dear, good
Vassya was getting on, and while here to get my silk dress, the one that
has little flowers on it. Vassya, of course, I did not find at home. I
went into the kitchen to tell Praskovya to set the samovar, and there I
saw on the table some pretty little carrots and turnips like playthings.
I ate one little carrot and well, a turnip too. I ate very little, but
only fancy, I began having a sharp pain at once—spasms . . . spasms . .
. spasms . . . ah, I am dying. Vassya runs from the office. Naturally he
clutches at his hair and turns white. They run for the doctor. . . . Do
you understand, I am dying, dying.”
The spasms began at midday, before three o’clock the doctor came, and at
six Lizotchka fell asleep and slept soundly till two o’clock in the
morning.
It strikes two. . . . The light of the little night lamp filters
scantily through the pale blue shade. Lizotchka is lying in bed, her
white lace cap stands out sharply against the dark background of the red
cushion. Shadows from the blue lamp-shade lie in patterns on her pale
face and her round plump shoulders. Vassily Stepanovitch is sitting at
her feet. The poor fellow is happy that his wife is at home at last, and
at the same time he is terribly alarmed by her illness.
“Well, how do you feel, Lizotchka?” he asks in a whisper, noticing that
she is awake.
“I am better,” moans Lizotchka. “I don’t feel the spasms now, but there
is no sleeping. . . . I can’t get to sleep!”
“Isn’t it time to change the compress, my angel?”
Lizotchka sits up slowly with the expression of a martyr and gracefully
turns her head on one side. Vassily Stepanovitch with reverent awe,
scarcely touching her hot body with his fingers, changes the compress.
Lizotchka shrinks, laughs at the cold water which tickles her, and lies
down again.
“You are getting no sleep, poor boy!” she moans.
“As though I could sleep!”
“It’s my nerves, Vassya, I am a very nervous woman. The doctor has
prescribed for stomach trouble, but I feel that he doesn’t understand my
illness. It’s nerves and not the stomach, I swear that it is my nerves.
There is only one thing I am afraid of, that my illness may take a bad
turn.”
“No, Lizotchka, no, to-morrow you will be all right!”
“Hardly likely! I am not afraid for myself. . . . I don’t care, indeed,
I shall be glad to die, but I am sorry for you! You’ll be a widower and
left all alone.”
Vassitchka rarely enjoys his wife’s society, and has long been used to
solitude, but Lizotchka’s words agitate him.
“Goodness knows what you are saying, little woman! Why these gloomy
thoughts?”
“Well, you will cry and grieve, and then you will get used to it. You’ll
even get married again.”
The husband clutches his head.
“There, there, I won’t!” Lizotchka soothes him, “only you ought to be
prepared for anything.”
“And all of a sudden I shall die,” she thinks, shutting her eyes.
And Lizotchka draws a mental picture of her own death, how her mother,
her husband, her cousin Varya with her husband, her relations, the
admirers of her “talent” press round her death bed, as she whispers her
last farewell. All are weeping. Then when she is dead they dress her,
interestingly pale and dark-haired, in a pink dress (it suits her) and
lay her in a very expensive coffin on gold legs, full of flowers. There
is a smell of incense, the candles splutter. Her husband never leaves
the coffin, while the admirers of her talent cannot take their eyes off
her, and say: “As though living! She is lovely in her coffin!” The whole
town is talking of the life cut short so prematurely. But now they are
carrying her to the church. The bearers are Ivan Petrovitch, Adolf
Ivanitch, Varya’s husband, Nikolay Semyonitch, and the black-eyed
student who had taught her to drink lemon squash with brandy. It’s only
a pity there’s no music playing. After the burial service comes the
leave-taking. The church is full of sobs, they bring the lid with
tassels, and . . . Lizotchka is shut off from the light of day for ever,
there is the sound of hammering nails. Knock, knock, knock.
Lizotchka shudders and opens her eyes.
“Vassya, are you here?” she asks. “I have such gloomy thoughts.
Goodness, why am I so unlucky as not to sleep. Vassya, have pity, do
tell me something!”
“What shall I tell you?”
“Something about love,” Lizotchka says languidly. “Or some anecdote
about Jews. . . .”
Vassily Stepanovitch, ready for anything if only his wife will be
cheerful and not talk about death, combs locks of hair over his ears,
makes an absurd face, and goes up to Lizotchka.
“Does your vatch vant mending?” he asks.
“It does, it does,” giggles Lizotchka, and hands him her gold watch from
the little table. “Mend it.”
Vassya takes the watch, examines the mechanism for a long time, and
wriggling and shrugging, says: “She can not be mended . . . in vun veel
two cogs are vanting. . . .”
This is the whole performance. Lizotchka laughs and claps her hands.
“Capital,” she exclaims. “Wonderful. Do you know, Vassya, it’s awfully
stupid of you not to take part in amateur theatricals! You have a
remarkable talent! You are much better than Sysunov. There was an
amateur called Sysunov who played with us in It’s My Birthday. A first-
class comic talent, only fancy: a nose as thick as a parsnip, green
eyes, and he walks like a crane. . . . We all roared; stay, I will show
you how he walks.”
Lizotchka springs out of bed and begins pacing about the floor,
barefooted and without her cap.
“A very good day to you!” she says in a bass, imitating a man’s voice.
“Anything pretty? Anything new under the moon? Ha, ha, ha!” she laughs.
“Ha, ha, ha!” Vassya seconds her. And the young pair, roaring with
laughter, forgetting the illness, chase one another about the room. The
race ends in Vassya’s catching his wife by her nightgown and eagerly
showering kisses upon her. After one particularly passionate embrace
Lizotchka suddenly remembers that she is seriously ill. . . .
“What silliness!” she says, making a serious face and covering herself
with the quilt. “I suppose you have forgotten that I am ill! Clever, I
must say!”
“Sorry . . .” falters her husband in confusion.
“If my illness takes a bad turn it will be your fault. Not kind! not
good!”
Lizotchka closes her eyes and is silent. Her former languor and
expression of martyrdom return again, there is a sound of gentle moans.
Vassya changes the compress, and glad that his wife is at home and not
gadding off to her aunt’s, sits meekly at her feet. He does not sleep
all night. At ten o’clock the doctor comes.
“Well, how are we feeling?” he asks as he takes her pulse. “Have you
slept?”
“Badly,” Lizotchka’s husband answers for her, “very badly.”
The doctor walks away to the window and stares at a passing chimney-
sweep.
“Doctor, may I have coffee to-day?” asks Lizotchka.
“You may.”
“And may I get up?”
“You might, perhaps, but . . . you had better lie in bed another day.”
“She is awfully depressed,” Vassya whispers in his ear, “such gloomy
thoughts, such pessimism. I am dreadfully uneasy about her.”
The doctor sits down to the little table, and rubbing his forehead,
prescribes bromide of potassium for Lizotchka, then makes his bow, and
promising to look in again in the evening, departs. Vassya does not go
to the office, but sits all day at his wife’s feet.
At midday the admirers of her talent arrive in a crowd. They are
agitated and alarmed, they bring masses of flowers and French novels.
Lizotchka, in a snow-white cap and a light dressing jacket, lies in bed
with an enigmatic look, as though she did not believe in her own
recovery. The admirers of her talent see her husband, but readily
forgive his presence: they and he are united by one calamity at that
bedside!
At six o’clock in the evening Lizotchka falls asleep, and again sleeps
till two o’clock in the morning. Vassya as before sits at her feet,
struggles with drowsiness, changes her compress, plays at being a Jew,
and in the morning after a second night of suffering, Liza is prinking
before the looking-glass and putting on her hat.
“Wherever are you going, my dear?” asks Vassya, with an imploring look
at her.
“What?” says Lizotchka in wonder, assuming a scared expression, “don’t
you know that there is a rehearsal to-day at Marya Lvovna’s?”
After escorting her there, Vassya having nothing to do to while away his
boredom, takes his portfolio and goes to the office. His head aches so
violently from his sleepless nights that his left eye shuts of itself
and refuses to open. . . .
“What’s the matter with you, my good sir?” his chief asks him. “What is
it?”
Vassya waves his hand and sits down.
“Don’t ask me, your Excellency,” he says with a sigh. “What I have
suffered in these two days, what I have suffered! Liza has been ill!”
“Good heavens,” cried his chief in alarm. “Lizaveta Pavlovna, what is
wrong with her?”
Vassily Stepanovitch merely throws up his hands and raises his eyes to
the ceiling, as though he would say: “It’s the will of Providence.”
“Ah, my boy, I can sympathise with you with all my heart!” sighs his
chief, rolling his eyes. “I’ve lost my wife, my dear, I understand. That
is a loss, it is a loss! It’s awful, awful! I hope Lizaveta Pavlovna is
better now! What doctor is attending her?”
“Von Schterk.”
“Von Schterk! But you would have been better to have called in Magnus or
Semandritsky. But how very pale your face is. You are ill yourself! This
is awful!”
“Yes, your Excellency, I haven’t slept. What I have suffered, what I
have been through!”
“And yet you came! Why you came I can’t understand? One can’t force
oneself like that! One mustn’t do oneself harm like that. Go home and
stay there till you are well again! Go home, I command you! Zeal is a
very fine thing in a young official, but you mustn’t forget as the
Romans used to say: ‘mens sana in corpore sano,’ that is, a healthy
brain in a healthy body.”
Vassya agrees, puts his papers back in his portfolio, and, taking leave
of his chief, goes home to bed.
THE LION AND THE SUN
IN one of the towns lying on this side of the Urals a rumour was afloat
that a Persian magnate, called Rahat-Helam, was staying for a few days
in the town and putting up at the “Japan Hotel.” This rumour made no
impression whatever upon the inhabitants; a Persian had arrived, well,
so be it. Only Stepan Ivanovitch Kutsyn, the mayor of the town, hearing
of the arrival of the oriental gentleman from the secretary of the Town
Hall, grew thoughtful and inquired:
“Where is he going?”
“To Paris or to London, I believe.”
“H’m. . . . Then he is a big-wig, I suppose?”
“The devil only knows.”
As he went home from the Town Hall and had his dinner, the mayor sank
into thought again, and this time he went on thinking till the evening.
The arrival of the distinguished Persian greatly intrigued him. It
seemed to him that fate itself had sent him this Rahat-Helam, and that a
favourable opportunity had come at last for realising his passionate,
secretly cherished dream. Kutsyn had already two medals, and the
Stanislav of the third degree, the badge of the Red Cross, and the badge
of the Society of Saving from Drowning, and in addition to these he had
made himself a little gold gun crossed by a guitar, and this ornament,
hung from a buttonhole in his uniform, looked in the distance like
something special, and delightfully resembled a badge of distinction. It
is well known that the more orders and medals you have the more you
want—and the mayor had long been desirous of receiving the Persian order
of The Lion and the Sun; he desired it passionately, madly. He knew very
well that there was no need to fight, or to subscribe to an asylum, or
to serve on committees to obtain this order; all that was needed was a
favourable opportunity. And now it seemed to him that this opportunity
had come.
At noon on the following day he put on his chain and all his badges of
distinction and went to the ‘Japan.’ Destiny favoured him. When he
entered the distinguished Persian’s apartment the latter was alone and
doing nothing. Rahat-Helam, an enormous Asiatic, with a long nose like
the beak of a snipe, with prominent eyes, and with a fez on his head,
was sitting on the floor rummaging in his portmanteau.
“I beg you to excuse my disturbing you,” began Kutsyn, smiling. “I have
the honour to introduce myself, the hereditary, honourable citizen and
cavalier, Stepan Ivanovitch Kutsyn, mayor of this town. I regard it as
my duty to honour, in the person of your Highness, so to say, the
representative of a friendly and neighbourly state.”
The Persian turned and muttered something in very bad French, that
sounded like tapping a board with a piece of wood.
“The frontiers of Persia”—Kutsyn continued the greeting he had
previously learned by heart—“are in close contact with the borders of
our spacious fatherland, and therefore mutual sympathies impel me, so to
speak, to express my solidarity with you.”
The illustrious Persian got up and again muttered something in a wooden
tongue. Kutsyn, who knew no foreign language, shook his head to show
that he did not understand.
“Well, how am I to talk to him?” he thought. “It would be a good thing
to send for an interpreter at once, but it is a delicate matter, I can’t
talk before witnesses. The interpreter would be chattering all over the
town afterwards.”
And Kutsyn tried to recall the foreign words he had picked up from the
newspapers.
“I am the mayor of the town,” he muttered. “That is the lord mayor . . .
municipalais . . . Vwee? Kompreney?”
He wanted to express his social position in words or in gesture, and did
not know how. A picture hanging on the wall with an inscription in large
letters, “The Town of Venice,” helped him out of his difficulties. He
pointed with his finger at the town, then at his own head, and in that
way obtained, as he imagined, the phrase: “I am the head of the town.”
The Persian did not understand, but he gave a smile, and said:
“Goot, monsieur . . . goot . . . . .” Half-an-hour later the mayor was
slapping the Persian, first on the knee and then on the shoulder, and
saying:
“Kompreney? Vwee? As lord mayor and municipalais I suggest that you
should take a little promenage . . . kompreney? Promenage.”
Kutsyn pointed at Venice, and with two fingers represented walking legs.
Rahat-Helam who kept his eyes fixed on his medals, and was apparently
guessing that this was the most important person in the town, understood
the word promenage and grinned politely. Then they both put on their
coats and went out of the room. Downstairs near the door leading to the
restaurant of the ‘Japan,’ Kutsyn reflected that it would not be amiss
to entertain the Persian. He stopped and indicating the tables, said:
“By Russian custom it wouldn’t be amiss . . . puree, entrekot, champagne
and so on, kompreney.”
The illustrious visitor understood, and a little later they were both
sitting in the very best room of the restaurant, eating, and drinking
champagne.
“Let us drink to the prosperity of Persia!” said Kutsyn. “We Russians
love the Persians. Though we are of another faith, yet there are common
interests, mutual, so to say, sympathies . . . progress . . . Asiatic
markets. . . . The campaigns of peace so to say. . . .”
The illustrious Persian ate and drank with an excellent appetite, he
stuck his fork into a slice of smoked sturgeon, and wagging his head,
enthusiastically said: “Goot, bien.”
“You like it?” said the mayor delighted. “Bien, that’s capital.” And
turning to the waiter he said: “Luka, my lad, see that two pieces of
smoked sturgeon, the best you have, are sent up to his Highness’s room!”
Then the mayor and the Persian magnate went to look at the menagerie.
The townspeople saw their Stepan Ivanovitch, flushed with champagne, gay
and very well pleased, leading the Persian about the principal streets
and the bazaar, showing him the points of interest of the town, and even
taking him to the fire tower.
Among other things the townspeople saw him stop near some stone gates
with lions on it, and point out to the Persian first the lion, then the
sun overhead, and then his own breast; then again he pointed to the lion
and to the sun while the Persian nodded his head as though in sign of
assent, and smiling showed his white teeth. In the evening they were
sitting in the London Hotel listening to the harp-players, and where
they spent the night is not known.
Next day the mayor was at the Town Hall in the morning; the officials
there apparently already knew something and were making their
conjectures, for the secretary went up to him and said with an ironical
smile:
“It is the custom of the Persians when an illustrious visitor comes to
visit you, you must slaughter a sheep with your own hands.”
And a little later an envelope that had come by post was handed to him.
The mayor tore it open and saw a caricature in it. It was a drawing of
Rahat-Helam with the mayor on his knees before him, stretching out his
hands and saying:
“To prove our Russian friendship For Persia’s mighty realm, And show
respect for you, her envoy, Myself I’d slaughter like a lamb, But,
pardon me, for I’m a—donkey!”
The mayor was conscious of an unpleasant feeling like a gnawing in the
pit of the stomach, but not for long. By midday he was again with the
illustrious Persian, again he was regaling him and showing him the
points of interest in the town. Again he led him to the stone gates, and
again pointed to the lion, to the sun and to his own breast. They dined
at the ‘Japan’; after dinner, with cigars in their teeth, both, flushed
and blissful, again mounted the fire tower, and the mayor, evidently
wishing to entertain the visitor with an unusual spectacle, shouted from
the top to a sentry walking below:
“Sound the alarm!”
But the alarm was not sounded as the firemen were at the baths at the
moment.
They supped at the ‘London’ and, after supper, the Persian departed.
When he saw him off, Stepan Ivanovitch kissed him three times after the
Russian fashion, and even grew tearful. And when the train started, he
shouted:
“Give our greeting to Persia! Tell her that we love her!”
A year and four months had passed. There was a bitter frost, thirty-five
degrees, and a piercing wind was blowing. Stepan Ivanovitch was walking
along the street with his fur coat thrown open over his chest, and he
was annoyed that he met no one to see the Lion and the Sun upon his
breast. He walked about like this till evening with his fur coat open,
was chilled to the bone, and at night tossed from side to side and could
not get to sleep.
He felt heavy at heart.
There was a burning sensation inside him, and his heart throbbed
uneasily; he had a longing now to get a Serbian order. It was a painful,
passionate longing.
A DAUGHTER OF ALBION
A FINE carriage with rubber tyres, a fat coachman, and velvet on the
seats, rolled up to the house of a landowner called Gryabov. Fyodor
Andreitch Otsov, the district Marshal of Nobility, jumped out of the
carriage. A drowsy footman met him in the hall.
“Are the family at home?” asked the Marshal.
“No, sir. The mistress and the children are gone out paying visits,
while the master and mademoiselle are catching fish. Fishing all the
morning, sir.”
Otsov stood a little, thought a little, and then went to the river to
look for Gryabov. Going down to the river he found him a mile and a half
from the house. Looking down from the steep bank and catching sight of
Gryabov, Otsov gushed with laughter. . . . Gryabov, a large stout man,
with a very big head, was sitting on the sand, angling, with his legs
tucked under him like a Turk. His hat was on the back of his head and
his cravat had slipped on one side. Beside him stood a tall thin
Englishwoman, with prominent eyes like a crab’s, and a big bird-like
nose more like a hook than a nose. She was dressed in a white muslin
gown through which her scraggy yellow shoulders were very distinctly
apparent. On her gold belt hung a little gold watch. She too was
angling. The stillness of the grave reigned about them both. Both were
motionless, as the river upon which their floats were swimming.
“A desperate passion, but deadly dull!” laughed Otsov. “Good-day, Ivan
Kuzmitch.”
“Ah . . . is that you?” asked Gryabov, not taking his eyes off the
water. “Have you come?”
“As you see . . . . And you are still taken up with your crazy nonsense!
Not given it up yet?”
“The devil’s in it. . . . I begin in the morning and fish all day . . .
. The fishing is not up to much to-day. I’ve caught nothing and this
dummy hasn’t either. We sit on and on and not a devil of a fish! I could
scream!”
“Well, chuck it up then. Let’s go and have some vodka!”
“Wait a little, maybe we shall catch something. Towards evening the fish
bite better . . . . I’ve been sitting here, my boy, ever since the
morning! I can’t tell you how fearfully boring it is. It was the devil
drove me to take to this fishing! I know that it is rotten idiocy for me
to sit here. I sit here like some scoundrel, like a convict, and I stare
at the water like a fool. I ought to go to the haymaking, but here I sit
catching fish. Yesterday His Holiness held a service at Haponyevo, but I
didn’t go. I spent the day here with this . . . with this she-devil.”
“But . . . have you taken leave of your senses?” asked Otsov, glancing
in embarrassment at the Englishwoman. “Using such language before a lady
and she . . . .”
“Oh, confound her, it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t understand a syllable
of Russian, whether you praise her or blame her, it is all the same to
her! Just look at her nose! Her nose alone is enough to make one faint.
We sit here for whole days together and not a single word! She stands
like a stuffed image and rolls the whites of her eyes at the water.”
The Englishwoman gave a yawn, put a new worm on, and dropped the hook
into the water.
“I wonder at her not a little,” Gryabov went on, “the great stupid has
been living in Russia for ten years and not a word of Russian! . . . Any
little aristocrat among us goes to them and learns to babble away in
their lingo, while they . . . there’s no making them out. Just look at
her nose, do look at her nose!”
“Come, drop it . . . it’s uncomfortable. Why attack a woman?”
“She’s not a woman, but a maiden lady. . . . I bet she’s dreaming of
suitors. The ugly doll. And she smells of something decaying . . . .
I’ve got a loathing for her, my boy! I can’t look at her with
indifference. When she turns her ugly eyes on me it sends a twinge all
through me as though I had knocked my elbow on the parapet. She likes
fishing too. Watch her: she fishes as though it were a holy rite! She
looks upon everything with disdain . . . . She stands there, the wretch,
and is conscious that she is a human being, and that therefore she is
the monarch of nature. And do you know what her name is? Wilka
Charlesovna Fyce! Tfoo! There is no getting it out!”
The Englishwoman, hearing her name, deliberately turned her nose in
Gryabov’s direction and scanned him with a disdainful glance; she raised
her eyes from Gryabov to Otsov and steeped him in disdain. And all this
in silence, with dignity and deliberation.
“Did you see?” said Gryabov chuckling. “As though to say ‘take that.’
Ah, you monster! It’s only for the children’s sake that I keep that
triton. If it weren’t for the children, I wouldn’t let her come within
ten miles of my estate. . . . She has got a nose like a hawk’s . . . and
her figure! That doll makes me think of a long nail, so I could take
her, and knock her into the ground, you know. Stay, I believe I have got
a bite. . . .”
Gryabov jumped up and raised his rod. The line drew taut. . . . Gryabov
tugged again, but could not pull out the hook.
“It has caught,” he said, frowning, “on a stone I expect . . . damnation
take it . . . .”
There was a look of distress on Gryabov’s face. Sighing, moving
uneasily, and muttering oaths, he began tugging at the line.
“What a pity; I shall have to go into the water.”
“Oh, chuck it!”
“I can’t. . . . There’s always good fishing in the evening. . . . What a
nuisance. Lord, forgive us, I shall have to wade into the water, I must!
And if only you knew, I have no inclination to undress. I shall have to
get rid of the Englishwoman. . . . It’s awkward to undress before her.
After all, she is a lady, you know!”
Gryabov flung off his hat, and his cravat.
“Meess . . . er, er . . .” he said, addressing the Englishwoman, “Meess
Fyce, je voo pree . . . ? Well, what am I to say to her? How am I to
tell you so that you can understand? I say . . . over there! Go away
over there! Do you hear?”
Miss Fyce enveloped Gryabov in disdain, and uttered a nasal sound.
“What? Don’t you understand? Go away from here, I tell you! I must
undress, you devil’s doll! Go over there! Over there!”
Gryabov pulled the lady by her sleeve, pointed her towards the bushes,
and made as though he would sit down, as much as to say: Go behind the
bushes and hide yourself there. . . . The Englishwoman, moving her
eyebrows vigorously, uttered rapidly a long sentence in English. The
gentlemen gushed with laughter.
“It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard her voice. There’s no
denying, it is a voice! She does not understand! Well, what am I to do
with her?”
“Chuck it, let’s go and have a drink of vodka!”
“I can’t. Now’s the time to fish, the evening. . . . It’s evening . . .
. Come, what would you have me do? It is a nuisance! I shall have to
undress before her. . . .”
Gryabov flung off his coat and his waistcoat and sat on the sand to take
off his boots.
“I say, Ivan Kuzmitch,” said the marshal, chuckling behind his hand.
“It’s really outrageous, an insult.”
“Nobody asks her not to understand! It’s a lesson for these foreigners!”
Gryabov took off his boots and his trousers, flung off his undergarments
and remained in the costume of Adam. Otsov held his sides, he turned
crimson both from laughter and embarrassment. The Englishwoman twitched
her brows and bKlinked . . . . A haughty, disdainful smile passed over
her yellow face.
“I must cool off,” said Gryabov, slapping himself on the ribs. “Tell me
if you please, Fyodor Andreitch, why I have a rash on my chest every
summer.”
“Oh, do get into the water quickly or cover yourself with something, you
beast.”
“And if only she were confused, the nasty thing,” said Gryabov, crossing
himself as he waded into the water. “Brrrr . . . the water’s cold. . . .
Look how she moves her eyebrows! She doesn’t go away . . . she is far
above the crowd! He, he, he . . . . and she doesn’t reckon us as human
beings.”
Wading knee deep in the water and drawing his huge figure up to its full
height, he gave a wink and said:
“This isn’t England, you see!”
Miss Fyce coolly put on another worm, gave a yawn, and dropped the hook
in. Otsov turned away, Gryabov released his hook, ducked into the water
and, spluttering, waded out. Two minutes later he was sitting on the
sand and angling as before.
CHORISTERS
THE Justice of the Peace, who had received a letter from Petersburg, had
set the news going that the owner of Yefremovo, Count Vladimir
Ivanovitch, would soon be arriving. When he would arrive—there was no
saying.
“Like a thief in the night,” said Father Kuzma, a grey-headed little
priest in a lilac cassock. “And when he does come the place will be
crowded with the nobility and other high gentry. All the neighbours will
flock here. Mind now, do your best, Alexey Alexeitch. . . . I beg you
most earnestly.”
“You need not trouble about me,” said Alexey Alexeitch, frowning. “I
know my business. If only my enemy intones the litany in the right key.
He may . . . out of sheer spite. . . .”
“There, there. . . . I’ll persuade the deacon. . . I’ll persuade him.”
Alexey Alexeitch was the sacristan of the Yefremovo church. He also
taught the schoolboys church and secular singing, for which he received
sixty roubles a year from the revenues of the Count’s estate. The
schoolboys were bound to sing in church in return for their teaching.
Alexey Alexeitch was a tall, thick-set man of dignified deportment, with
a fat, clean-shaven face that reminded one of a cow’s udder. His
imposing figure and double chin made him look like a man occupying an
important position in the secular hierarchy rather than a sacristan. It
was strange to see him, so dignified and imposing, flop to the ground
before the bishop and, on one occasion, after too loud a squabble with
the deacon Yevlampy Avdiessov, remain on his knees for two hours by
order of the head priest of the district. Grandeur was more in keeping
with his figure than humiliation.
On account of the rumours of the Count’s approaching visit he had a
choir practice every day, morning and evening. The choir practice was
held at the school. It did not interfere much with the school work.
During the practice the schoolmaster, Sergey Makaritch, set the children
writing copies while he joined the tenors as an amateur.
This is how the choir practice was conducted. Alexey Alexeitch would
come into the school-room, slamming the door and blowing his nose. The
trebles and altos extricated themselves noisily from the school-tables.
The tenors and basses, who had been waiting for some time in the yard,
came in, tramping like horses. They all took their places. Alexey
Alexeitch drew himself up, made a sign to enforce silence, and struck a
note with the tuning fork.
“To-to-li-to-tom . . . Do-mi-sol-do!”
“Adagio, adagio. . . . Once more.”
After the “Amen” there followed “Lord have mercy upon us” from the Great
Litany. All this had been learned long ago, sung a thousand times and
thoroughly digested, and it was gone through simply as a formality. It
was sung indolently, unconsciously. Alexey Alexeitch waved his arms
calmly and chimed in now in a tenor, now in a bass voice. It was all
slow, there was nothing interesting. . . . But before the “Cherubim”
hymn the whole choir suddenly began blowing their noses, coughing and
zealously turning the pages of their music. The sacristan turned his
back on the choir and with a mysterious expression on his face began
tuning his violin. The preparations lasted a couple of minutes.
“Take your places. Look at your music carefully. . . . Basses, don’t
overdo it . . . rather softly.”
Bortnyansky’s “Cherubim” hymn, No. 7, was selected. At a given signal
silence prevailed. All eyes were fastened on the music, the trebles
opened their mouths. Alexey Alexeitch softly lowered his arm.
“Piano . . . piano. . . . You see ‘piano’ is written there. . . . More
lightly, more lightly.”
When they had to sing “piano” an expression of benevolence and
amiability overspread Alexey Alexeitch’s face, as though he was dreaming
of a dainty morsel.
“Forte . . . forte! Hold it!”
And when they had to sing “forte” the sacristan’s fat face expressed
alarm and even horror.
The “Cherubim” hymn was sung well, so well that the school-children
abandoned their copies and fell to watching the movements of Alexey
Alexeitch. People stood under the windows. The school-watchman, Vassily,
came in wearing an apron and carrying a dinner-knife in his hand and
stood listening. Father Kuzma, with an anxious face appeared suddenly as
though he had sprung from out of the earth. . . . After ‘Let us lay
aside all earthly cares’ Alexey Alexeitch wiped the sweat off his brow
and went up to Father Kuzma in excitement.
“It puzzles me, Father Kuzma,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “why is
it that the Russian people have no understanding? It puzzles me, may the
Lord chastise me! Such an uncultured people that you really cannot tell
whether they have a windpipe in their throats or some other sort of
internal arrangement. Were you choking, or what?” he asked, addressing
the bass Gennady Semitchov, the innkeeper’s brother.
“Why?”
“What is your voice like? It rattles like a saucepan. I bet you were
boozing yesterday! That’s what it is! Your breath smells like a tavern.
. . . E-ech! You are a clodhopper, brother! You are a lout! How can you
be a chorister if you keep company with peasants in the tavern? Ech, you
are an ass, brother!”
“It’s a sin, it’s a sin, brother,” muttered Father Kuzma. “God sees
everything . . . through and through . . . .”
“That’s why you have no idea of singing—because you care more for vodka
than for godliness, you fool.”
“Don’t work yourself up,” said Father Kuzma. “Don’t be cross. . . . I
will persuade him.”
Father Kuzma went up to Gennady Semitchov and began “persuading” him:
“What do you do it for? Try and put your mind to it. A man who sings
ought to restrain himself, because his throat is . . . er . . tender.”
Gennady scratched his neck and looked sideways towards the window as
though the words did not apply to him.
After the “Cherubim” hymn they sang the Creed, then “It is meet and
right”; they sang smoothly and with feeling, and so right on to “Our
Father.”
“To my mind, Father Kuzma,” said the sacristan, “the old ‘Our Father’ is
better than the modern. That’s what we ought to sing before the Count.”
“No, no. . . . Sing the modern one. For the Count hears nothing but
modern music when he goes to Mass in Petersburg or Moscow. . . . In the
churches there, I imagine . . . there’s very different sort of music
there, brother!”
After “Our Father” there was again a great blowing of noses, coughing
and turning over of pages. The most difficult part of the performance
came next: the “concert.” Alexey Alexeitch was practising two pieces,
“Who is the God of glory” and “Universal Praise.” Whichever the choir
learned best would be sung before the Count. During the “concert” the
sacristan rose to a pitch of enthusiasm. The expression of benevolence
was continually alternating with one of alarm.
“Forte!” he muttered. “Andante! let yourselves go! Sing, you image!
Tenors, you don’t bring it off! To-to-ti-to-tom. . . . Sol . . . si . .
. sol, I tell you, you blockhead! Glory! Basses, glo . . . o . . . ry.”
His bow travelled over the heads and shoulders of the erring trebles and
altos. His left hand was continually pulling the ears of the young
singers. On one occasion, carried away by his feelings he flipped the
bass Gennady under the chin with his bent thumb. But the choristers were
not moved to tears or to anger at his blows: they realised the full
gravity of their task.
After the “concert” came a minute of silence. Alexey Alexeitch, red,
perspiring and exhausted, sat down on the window-sill, and turned upon
the company lustreless, wearied, but triumphant eyes. In the listening
crowd he observed to his immense annoyance the deacon Avdiessov. The
deacon, a tall thick-set man with a red pock-marked face, and straw in
his hair, stood leaning against the stove and grinning contemptuously.
“That’s right, sing away! Perform your music!” he muttered in a deep
bass. “Much the Count will care for your singing! He doesn’t care
whether you sing with music or without. . . . For he is an atheist.”
Father Kuzma looked round in a scared way and twiddled his fingers.
“Come, come,” he muttered. “Hush, deacon, I beg.”
After the “concert” they sang “May our lips be filled with praise,” and
the choir practice was over. The choir broke up to reassemble in the
evening for another practice. And so it went on every day.
One month passed and then a second. . . . The steward, too, had by then
received a notice that the Count would soon be coming. At last the dusty
sun-blinds were taken off the windows of the big house, and Yefremovo
heard the strains of the broken-down, out-of-tune piano. Father Kuzma
was pining, though he could not himself have said why, or whether it was
from delight or alarm. . . . The deacon went about grinning.
The following Saturday evening Father Kuzma went to the sacristan’s
lodgings. His face was pale, his shoulders drooped, the lilac of his
cassock looked faded.
“I have just been at his Excellency’s,” he said to the sacristan,
stammering. “He is a cultivated gentleman with refined ideas. But . . .
er . . . it’s mortifying, brother. . . . ‘At what o’clock, your
Excellency, do you desire us to ring for Mass to-morrow?’ And he said:
‘As you think best. Only, couldn’t it be as short and quick as possible
without a choir.’ Without a choir! Er . . . do you understand, without,
without a choir. . . .”
Alexey Alexeitch turned crimson. He would rather have spent two hours on
his knees again than have heard those words! He did not sleep all night.
He was not so much mortified at the waste of his labours as at the fact
that the deacon would give him no peace now with his jeers. The deacon
was delighted at his discomfiture. Next day all through the service he
was casting disdainful glances towards the choir where Alexey Alexeitch
was booming responses in solitude. When he passed by the choir with the
censer he muttered:
“Perform your music! Do your utmost! The Count will give a ten-rouble
note to the choir!”
After the service the sacristan went home, crushed and ill with
mortification. At the gate he was overtaken by the red-faced deacon.
“Stop a minute, Alyosha!” said the deacon. “Stop a minute, silly, don’t
be cross! You are not the only one, I am in for it too! Immediately
after the Mass Father Kuzma went up to the Count and asked: ‘And what
did you think of the deacon’s voice, your Excellency. He has a deep
bass, hasn’t he?’ And the Count—do you know what he answered by way of
compliment? ‘Anyone can bawl,’ he said. ‘A man’s voice is not as
important as his brains.’ A learned gentleman from Petersburg! An
atheist is an atheist, and that’s all about it! Come, brother in
misfortune, let us go and have a drop to drown our troubles!”
And the enemies went out of the gate arm-in-arm.
NERVES
DMITRI OSIPOVITCH VAXIN, the architect, returned from town to his
holiday cottage greatly impressed by the spiritualistic séance at which
he had been present. As he undressed and got into his solitary bed
(Madame Vaxin had gone to an all-night service) he could not help
remembering all he had seen and heard. It had not, properly speaking,
been a séance at all, but the whole evening had been spent in
terrifying conversation. A young lady had begun it by talking, apropos
of nothing, about thought-reading. From thought-reading they had passed
imperceptibly to spirits, and from spirits to ghosts, from ghosts to
people buried alive. . . . A gentleman had read a horrible story of a
corpse turning round in the coffin. Vaxin himself had asked for a saucer
and shown the young ladies how to converse with spirits. He had called
up among others the spirit of his deceased uncle, Klavdy Mironitch, and
had mentally asked him:
“Has not the time come for me to transfer the ownership of our house to
my wife?”
To which his uncle’s spirit had replied:
“All things are good in their season.”
“There is a great deal in nature that is mysterious and . . . terrible .
. .” thought Vaxin, as he got into bed. “It’s not the dead but the
unknown that’s so horrible.”
It struck one o’clock. Vaxin turned over on the other side and peeped
out from beneath the bedclothes at the blue light of the lamp burning
before the holy ikon. The flame flickered and cast a faint light on the
ikon-stand and the big portrait of Uncle Klavdy that hung facing his
bed.
“And what if the ghost of Uncle Klavdy should appear this minute?”
flashed through Vaxin’s mind. “But, of course, that’s impossible.”
Ghosts are, we all know, a superstition, the offspring of undeveloped
intelligence, but Vaxin, nevertheless, pulled the bed-clothes over his
head, and shut his eyes very tight. The corpse that turned round in its
coffin came back to his mind, and the figures of his deceased mother-in-
law, of a colleague who had hanged himself, and of a girl who had
drowned herself, rose before his imagination. . . . Vaxin began trying
to dispel these gloomy ideas, but the more he tried to drive them away
the more haunting the figures and fearful fancies became. He began to
feel frightened.
“Hang it all!” he thought. “Here I am afraid in the dark like a child!
Idiotic!”
Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . he heard the clock in the next room.
The church-bell chimed the hour in the churchyard close by. The bell
tolled slowly, depressingly, mournfully. . . . A cold chill ran down
Vaxin’s neck and spine. He fancied he heard someone breathing heavily
over his head, as though Uncle Klavdy had stepped out of his frame and
was bending over his nephew. . . . Vaxin felt unbearably frightened. He
clenched his teeth and held his breath in terror.
At last, when a cockchafer flew in at the open window and began buzzing
over his bed, he could bear it no longer and gave a violent tug at the
bellrope.
“Dmitri Osipitch, was wollen Sie?” he heard the voice of the German
governess at his door a moment later.
“Ah, it’s you, Rosalia Karlovna!” Vaxin cried, delighted. “Why do you
trouble? Gavrila might just . . .”
“Yourself Gavrila to the town sent. And Glafira is somewhere all the
evening gone. . . . There’s nobody in the house. . . . Was wollen Sie
doch?”
“Well, what I wanted . . . it’s . . . but, please, come in . . . you
needn’t mind! . . . it’s dark.”
Rosalia Karlovna, a stout red-cheeked person, came in to the bedroom and
stood in an expectant attitude at the door.
“Sit down, please . . . you see, it’s like this. . . . What on earth am
I to ask her for?” he wondered, stealing a glance at Uncle Klavdy’s
portrait and feeling his soul gradually returning to tranquility.
“What I really wanted to ask you was . . . Oh, when the man goes to
town, don’t forget to tell him to . . . er . . . er . . . to get some
cigarette-papers. . . . But do, please sit down.”
“Cigarette-papers? good. . . . Was wollen Sie noch?”
“Ich will . . . there’s nothing I will, but. . . But do sit down! I
shall think of something else in a minute.”
“It is shocking for a maiden in a man’s room to remain. . . . Mr. Vaxin,
you are, I see, a naughty man. . . . I understand. . . . To order
cigarette-papers one does not a person wake. . . . I understand you. . .
.”
Rosalia Karlovna turned and went out of the room.
Somewhat reassured by his conversation with her and ashamed of his
cowardice, Vaxin pulled the bedclothes over his head and shut his eyes.
For about ten minutes he felt fairly comfortable, then the same nonsense
came creeping back into his mind. . . . He swore to himself, felt for
the matches, and without opening his eyes lighted a candle.
But even the light was no use. To Vaxin’ s excited imagination it seemed
as though someone were peeping round the corner and that his uncle’s
eyes were moving.
“I’ll ring her up again . . . damn the woman!” he decided. “I’ll tell
her I’m unwell and ask for some drops.”
Vaxin rang. There was no response. He rang again, and as though
answering his ring, he heard the church-bell toll the hour.
Overcome with terror, cold all over, he jumped out of bed, ran headlong
out of his bedroom, and making the sign of the cross and cursing himself
for his cowardice, he fled barefoot in his night-shirt to the
governess’s room.
“Rosalia Karlovna!” he began in a shaking voice as he knocked at her
door, “Rosalia Karlovna! . . . Are you asleep? . . . I feel . . . so . .
. er . . . er . . . unwell. . . . Drops! . . .”
There was no answer. Silence reigned.
“I beg you . . . do you understand? I beg you! Why this squeamishness, I
can’t understand . . . especially when a man . . . is ill . . . How
absurdly zierlich manierlich you are really . . . at your age. . . .”
“I to your wife shall tell. . . . Will not leave an honest maiden in
peace. . . . When I was at Baron Anzig’s, and the baron try to come to
me for matches, I understand at once what his matches mean and tell to
the baroness. . . . I am an honest maiden.”
“Hang your honesty! I am ill I tell you . . . and asking you for drops.
Do you understand? I’m ill!”
“Your wife is an honest, good woman, and you ought her to love! Ja! She
is noble! . . . I will not be her foe!”
“You are a fool! simply a fool! Do you understand, a fool?”
Vaxin leaned against the door-post, folded his arms and waited for his
panic to pass off. To return to his room where the lamp flickered and
his uncle stared at him from his frame was more than he could face, and
to stand at the governess’s door in nothing but his night-shirt was
inconvenient from every point of view. What could he do?
It struck two o’clock and his terror had not left him. There was no
light in the passage and something dark seemed to be peeping out from
every corner. Vaxin turned so as to face the door-post, but at that
instant it seemed as though somebody tweaked his night-shirt from behind
and touched him on the shoulder.
“Damnation! . . . Rosalia Karlovna!”
No answer. Vaxin hesitatingly opened the door and peeped into the room.
The virtuous German was sweetly slumbering. The tiny flame of a night-
light threw her solid buxom person into relief. Vaxin stepped into the
room and sat down on a wickerwork trunk near the door. He felt better in
the presence of a living creature, even though that creature was asleep.
“Let the German idiot sleep,” he thought, “I’ll sit here, and when it
gets light I’ll go back. . . . It’s daylight early now.”
Vaxin curled up on the trunk and put his arm under his head to await the
coming of dawn.
“What a thing it is to have nerves!” he reflected. “An educated,
intelligent man! . . . Hang it all! . . . It’s a perfect disgrace!”
As he listened to the gentle, even breathing of Rosalia Karlovna, he
soon recovered himself completely.
At six o’clock, Vaxin’s wife returned from the all-night service, and
not finding her husband in their bedroom, went to the governess to ask
her for some change for the cabman.
On entering the German’s room, a strange sight met her eyes.
On the bed lay stretched Rosalia Karlovna fast asleep, and a couple of
yards from her was her husband curled up on the trunk sleeping the sleep
of the just and snoring loudly.
What she said to her husband, and how he looked when he woke, I leave to
others to describe. It is beyond my powers.
A WORK OF ART
SASHA SMIRNOV, the only son of his mother, holding under his arm,
something wrapped up in No. 223 of the Financial News, assumed a
sentimental expression, and went into Dr. Koshelkov’s consulting-room.
“Ah, dear lad!” was how the doctor greeted him. “Well! how are we
feeling? What good news have you for me?”
Sasha bKlinked, laid his hand on his heart and said in an agitated
voice: “Mamma sends her greetings to you, Ivan Nikolaevitch, and told me
to thank you. . . . I am the only son of my mother and you have saved my
life . . . you have brought me through a dangerous illness and . . . we
do not know how to thank you.”
“Nonsense, lad!” said the doctor, highly delighted. “I only did what
anyone else would have done in my place.”
“I am the only son of my mother . . . we are poor people and cannot of
course repay you, and we are quite ashamed, doctor, although, however,
mamma and I . . . the only son of my mother, earnestly beg you to accept
in token of our gratitude . . . this object, which . . . An object of
great value, an antique bronze. . . . A rare work of art.”
“You shouldn’t!” said the doctor, frowning. “What’s this for!”
“No, please do not refuse,” Sasha went on muttering as he unpacked the
parcel. “You will wound mamma and me by refusing. . . . It’s a fine
thing . . . an antique bronze. . . . It was left us by my deceased
father and we have kept it as a precious souvenir. My father used to buy
antique bronzes and sell them to connoisseurs . . . Mamma and I keep on
the business now.”
Sasha undid the object and put it solemnly on the table. It was a not
very tall candelabra of old bronze and artistic workmanship. It
consisted of a group: on the pedestal stood two female figures in the
costume of Eve and in attitudes for the description of which I have
neither the courage nor the fitting temperament. The figures were
smiling coquettishly and altogether looked as though, had it not been
for the necessity of supporting the candlestick, they would have skipped
off the pedestal and have indulged in an orgy such as is improper for
the reader even to imagine.
Looking at the present, the doctor slowly scratched behind his ear,
cleared his throat and blew his nose irresolutely.
“Yes, it certainly is a fine thing,” he muttered, “but . . . how shall I
express it? . . . it’s . . . h’m . . . it’s not quite for family
reading. It’s not simply decolleté but beyond anything, dash it all. .
. .”
“How do you mean?”
“The serpent-tempter himself could not have invented anything worse . .
. . Why, to put such a phantasmagoria on the table would be defiling the
whole flat.”
“What a strange way of looking at art, doctor!” said Sasha, offended.
“Why, it is an artistic thing, look at it! There is so much beauty and
elegance that it fills one’s soul with a feeling of reverence and brings
a lump into one’s throat! When one sees anything so beautiful one
forgets everything earthly. . . . Only look, how much movement, what an
atmosphere, what expression!”
“I understand all that very well, my dear boy,” the doctor interposed,
“but you know I am a family man, my children run in here, ladies come
in.”
“Of course if you look at it from the point of view of the crowd,” said
Sasha, “then this exquisitely artistic work may appear in a certain
light. . . . But, doctor, rise superior to the crowd, especially as you
will wound mamma and me by refusing it. I am the only son of my mother,
you have saved my life. . . . We are giving you the thing most precious
to us and . . . and I only regret that I have not the pair to present to
you. . . .”
“Thank you, my dear fellow, I am very grateful . . . Give my respects to
your mother but really consider, my children run in here, ladies come. .
. . However, let it remain! I see there’s no arguing with you.”
“And there is nothing to argue about,” said Sasha, relieved. “Put the
candlestick here, by this vase. What a pity we have not the pair to it!
It is a pity! Well, good-bye, doctor.”
After Sasha’s departure the doctor looked for a long time at the
candelabra, scratched behind his ear and meditated.
“It’s a superb thing, there’s no denying it,” he thought, “and it would
be a pity to throw it away. . . . But it’s impossible for me to keep it.
. . . H’m! . . . Here’s a problem! To whom can I make a present of it,
or to what charity can I give it?”
After long meditation he thought of his good friend, the lawyer Uhov, to
whom he was indebted for the management of legal business.
“Excellent,” the doctor decided, “it would be awkward for him as a
friend to take money from me, and it will be very suitable for me to
present him with this. I will take him the devilish thing! Luckily he is
a bachelor and easy-going.”
Without further procrastination the doctor put on his hat and coat, took
the candelabra and went off to Uhov’s.
“How are you, friend!” he said, finding the lawyer at home. “I’ve come
to see you . . . to thank you for your efforts. . . . You won’t take
money so you must at least accept this thing here. . . . See, my dear
fellow. . . . The thing is magnificent!”
On seeing the bronze the lawyer was moved to indescribable delight.
“What a specimen!” he chuckled. “Ah, deuce take it, to think of them
imagining such a thing, the devils! Exquisite! Ravishing! Where did you
get hold of such a delightful thing?”
After pouring out his ecstasies the lawyer looked timidly towards the
door and said: “Only you must carry off your present, my boy . . . . I
can’t take it. . . .”
“Why?” cried the doctor, disconcerted.
“Why . . . because my mother is here at times, my clients . . . besides
I should be ashamed for my servants to see it.”
“Nonsense! Nonsense! Don’t you dare to refuse!” said the doctor,
gesticulating. “It’s piggish of you! It’s a work of art! . . . What
movement . . . what expression! I won’t even talk of it! You will offend
me!”
“If one could plaster it over or stick on fig-leaves . . .”
But the doctor gesticulated more violently than before, and dashing out
of the flat went home, glad that he had succeeded in getting the present
off his hands.
When he had gone away the lawyer examined the candelabra, fingered it
all over, and then, like the doctor, racked his brains over the question
what to do with the present.
“It’s a fine thing,” he mused, “and it would be a pity to throw it away
and improper to keep it. The very best thing would be to make a present
of it to someone. . . . I know what! I’ll take it this evening to
Shashkin, the comedian. The rascal is fond of such things, and by the
way it is his benefit tonight.”
No sooner said than done. In the evening the candelabra, carefully
wrapped up, was duly carried to Shashkin’s. The whole evening the comic
actor’s dressing-room was besieged by men coming to admire the present;
the dressing-room was filled with the hum of enthusiasm and laughter
like the neighing of horses. If one of the actresses approached the door
and asked: “May I come in?” the comedian’s husky voice was heard at
once: “No, no, my dear, I am not dressed!”
After the performance the comedian shrugged his shoulders, flung up his
hands and said: “Well what am I to do with the horrid thing? Why, I live
in a private flat! Actresses come and see me! It’s not a photograph that
you can put in a drawer!”
“You had better sell it, sir,” the hairdresser who was disrobing the
actor advised him. “There’s an old woman living about here who buys
antique bronzes. Go and enquire for Madame Smirnov . . . everyone knows
her.”
The actor followed his advice. . . . Two days later the doctor was
sitting in his consulting-room, and with his finger to his brow was
meditating on the acids of the bile. All at once the door opened and
Sasha Smirnov flew into the room. He was smiling, beaming, and his whole
figure was radiant with happiness. In his hands he held something
wrapped up in newspaper.
“Doctor!” he began breathlessly, “imagine my delight! Happily for you we
have succeeded in picking up the pair to your candelabra! Mamma is so
happy. . . . I am the only son of my mother, you saved my life. . . .”
And Sasha, all of a tremor with gratitude, set the candelabra before the
doctor. The doctor opened his mouth, tried to say something, but said
nothing: he could not speak.
A JOKE
IT was a bright winter midday. . . . There was a sharp snapping frost
and the curls on Nadenka’s temples and the down on her upper lip were
covered with silvery frost. She was holding my arm and we were standing
on a high hill. From where we stood to the ground below there stretched
a smooth sloping descent in which the sun was reflected as in a looking-
glass. Beside us was a little sledge lined with bright red cloth.
“Let us go down, Nadyezhda Petrovna!” I besought her. “Only once! I
assure you we shall be all right and not hurt.”
But Nadenka was afraid. The slope from her little goloshes to the bottom
of the ice hill seemed to her a terrible, immensely deep abyss. Her
spirit failed her, and she held her breath as she looked down, when I
merely suggested her getting into the sledge, but what would it be if
she were to risk flying into the abyss! She would die, she would go out
of her mind.
“I entreat you!” I said. “You mustn’t be afraid! You know it’s poor-
spirited, it’s cowardly!”
Nadenka gave way at last, and from her face I saw that she gave way in
mortal dread. I sat her in the sledge, pale and trembling, put my arm
round her and with her cast myself down the precipice.
The sledge flew like a bullet. The air cleft by our flight beat in our
faces, roared, whistled in our ears, tore at us, nipped us cruelly in
its anger, tried to tear our heads off our shoulders. We had hardly
strength to breathe from the pressure of the wind. It seemed as though
the devil himself had caught us in his claws and was dragging us with a
roar to hell. Surrounding objects melted into one long furiously racing
streak . . . another moment and it seemed we should perish.
“I love you, Nadya!” I said in a low voice.
The sledge began moving more and more slowly, the roar of the wind and
the whirr of the runners was no longer so terrible, it was easier to
breathe, and at last we were at the bottom. Nadenka was more dead than
alive. She was pale and scarcely breathing. . . . I helped her to get
up.
“Nothing would induce me to go again,” she said, looking at me with wide
eyes full of horror. “Nothing in the world! I almost died!”
A little later she recovered herself and looked enquiringly into my
eyes, wondering had I really uttered those four words or had she fancied
them in the roar of the hurricane. And I stood beside her smoking and
looking attentively at my glove.
She took my arm and we spent a long while walking near the ice-hill. The
riddle evidently would not let her rest. . . . Had those words been
uttered or not? . . . Yes or no? Yes or no? It was the question of
pride, or honour, of life—a very important question, the most important
question in the world. Nadenka kept impatiently, sorrowfully looking
into my face with a penetrating glance; she answered at random, waiting
to see whether I would not speak. Oh, the play of feeling on that sweet
face! I saw that she was struggling with herself, that she wanted to say
something, to ask some question, but she could not find the words; she
felt awkward and frightened and troubled by her joy. . . .
“Do you know what,” she said without looking at me.
“Well?” I asked.
“Let us . . . slide down again.”
We clambered up the ice-hill by the steps again. I sat Nadenka, pale and
trembling, in the sledge; again we flew into the terrible abyss, again
the wind roared and the runners whirred, and again when the flight of
our sledge was at its swiftest and noisiest, I said in a low voice:
“I love you, Nadenka!”
When the sledge stopped, Nadenka flung a glance at the hill down which
we had both slid, then bent a long look upon my face, listened to my
voice which was unconcerned and passionless, and the whole of her little
figure, every bit of it, even her muff and her hood expressed the utmost
bewilderment, and on her face was written: “What does it mean? Who
uttered those words? Did he, or did I only fancy it?”
The uncertainty worried her and drove her out of all patience. The poor
girl did not answer my questions, frowned, and was on the point of
tears.
“Hadn’t we better go home?” I asked.
“Well, I . . . I like this tobogganning,” she said, flushing. “Shall we
go down once more?”
She “liked” the tobogganning, and yet as she got into the sledge she
was, as both times before, pale, trembling, hardly able to breathe for
terror.
We went down for the third time, and I saw she was looking at my face
and watching my lips. But I put my handkerchief to my lips, coughed, and
when we reached the middle of the hill I succeeded in bringing out:
“I love you, Nadya!”
And the mystery remained a mystery! Nadenka was silent, pondering on
something. . . . I saw her home, she tried to walk slowly, slackened her
pace and kept waiting to see whether I would not say those words to her,
and I saw how her soul was suffering, what effort she was making not to
say to herself:
“It cannot be that the wind said them! And I don’t want it to be the
wind that said them!”
Next morning I got a little note:
“If you are tobogganning to-day, come for me.—N.”
And from that time I began going every day tobogganning with Nadenka,
and as we flew down in the sledge, every time I pronounced in a low
voice the same words: “I love you, Nadya!”
Soon Nadenka grew used to that phrase as to alcohol or morphia. She
could not live without it. It is true that flying down the ice-hill
terrified her as before, but now the terror and danger gave a peculiar
fascination to words of love—words which as before were a mystery and
tantalized the soul. The same two—the wind and I were still suspected. .
. . Which of the two was making love to her she did not know, but
apparently by now she did not care; from which goblet one drinks matters
little if only the beverage is intoxicating.
It happened I went to the skating-ground alone at midday; mingling with
the crowd I saw Nadenka go up to the ice-hill and look about for me . .
. then she timidly mounted the steps. . . . She was frightened of going
alone—oh, how frightened! She was white as the snow, she was trembling,
she went as though to the scaffold, but she went, she went without
looking back, resolutely. She had evidently determined to put it to the
test at last: would those sweet amazing words be heard when I was not
there? I saw her, pale, her lips parted with horror, get into the
sledge, shut her eyes and saying good-bye for ever to the earth, set
off. . . . “Whrrr!” whirred the runners. Whether Nadenka heard those
words I do not know. I only saw her getting up from the sledge looking
faint and exhausted. And one could tell from her face that she could not
tell herself whether she had heard anything or not. Her terror while she
had been flying down had deprived of her all power of hearing, of
discriminating sounds, of understanding.
But then the month of March arrived . . . the spring sunshine was more
kindly. . . . Our ice-hill turned dark, lost its brilliance and finally
melted. We gave up tobogganning. There was nowhere now where poor
Nadenka could hear those words, and indeed no one to utter them, since
there was no wind and I was going to Petersburg—for long, perhaps for
ever.
It happened two days before my departure I was sitting in the dusk in
the little garden which was separated from the yard of Nadenka’s house
by a high fence with nails in it. . . . It was still pretty cold, there
was still snow by the manure heap, the trees looked dead but there was
already the scent of spring and the rooks were cawing loudly as they
settled for their night’s rest. I went up to the fence and stood for a
long while peeping through a chink. I saw Nadenka come out into the
porch and fix a mournful yearning gaze on the sky. . . . The spring wind
was blowing straight into her pale dejected face. . . . It reminded her
of the wind which roared at us on the ice-hill when she heard those four
words, and her face became very, very sorrowful, a tear trickled down
her cheek, and the poor child held out both arms as though begging the
wind to bring her those words once more. And waiting for the wind I said
in a low voice:
“I love you, Nadya!”
Mercy! The change that came over Nadenka! She uttered a cry, smiled all
over her face and looking joyful, happy and beautiful, held out her arms
to meet the wind.
And I went off to pack up. . . .
That was long ago. Now Nadenka is married; she married—whether of her
own choice or not does not matter—a secretary of the Nobility Wardenship
and now she has three children. That we once went tobogganning together,
and that the wind brought her the words “I love you, Nadenka,” is not
forgotten; it is for her now the happiest, most touching, and beautiful
memory in her life. . . .
But now that I am older I cannot understand why I uttered those words,
what was my motive in that joke. . . .
A COUNTRY COTTAGE
Two young people who had not long been married were walking up and down
the platform of a little country station. His arm was round her waist,
her head was almost on his shoulder, and both were happy.
The moon peeped up from the drifting cloudlets and frowned, as it
seemed, envying their happiness and regretting her tedious and utterly
superfluous virginity. The still air was heavy with the fragrance of
lilac and wild cherry. Somewhere in the distance beyond the line a
corncrake was calling.
“How beautiful it is, Sasha, how beautiful!” murmured the young wife.
“It all seems like a dream. See, how sweet and inviting that little
copse looks! How nice those solid, silent telegraph posts are! They add
a special note to the landscape, suggesting humanity, civilization in
the distance. . . . Don’t you think it’s lovely when the wind brings the
rushing sound of a train?”
“Yes. . . . But what hot little hands you’ve got. . . That’s because
you’re excited, Varya. . . . What have you got for our supper to-night?”
“Chicken and salad. . . . It’s a chicken just big enough for two . . . .
Then there is the salmon and sardines that were sent from town.”
The moon as though she had taken a pinch of snuff hid her face behind a
cloud. Human happiness reminded her of her own loneliness, of her
solitary couch beyond the hills and dales.
“The train is coming!” said Varya, “how jolly!”
Three eyes of fire could be seen in the distance. The stationmaster came
out on the platform. Signal lights flashed here and there on the line.
“Let’s see the train in and go home,” said Sasha, yawning. “What a
splendid time we are having together, Varya, it’s so splendid, one can
hardly believe it’s true!”
The dark monster crept noiselessly alongside the platform and came to a
standstill. They caught glimpses of sleepy faces, of hats and shoulders
at the dimly lighted windows.
“Look! look!” they heard from one of the carriages. “Varya and Sasha
have come to meet us! There they are! . . . Varya! . . . Varya. . . .
Look!”
Two little girls skipped out of the train and hung on Varya’s neck. They
were followed by a stout, middle-aged lady, and a tall, lanky gentleman
with grey whiskers; behind them came two schoolboys, laden with bags,
and after the schoolboys, the governess, after the governess the
grandmother.
“Here we are, here we are, dear boy!” began the whiskered gentleman,
squeezing Sasha’s hand. “Sick of waiting for us, I expect! You have been
pitching into your old uncle for not coming down all this time, I
daresay! Kolya, Kostya, Nina, Fifa . . . children! Kiss your cousin
Sasha! We’re all here, the whole troop of us, just for three or four
days. . . . I hope we shan’t be too many for you? You mustn’t let us put
you out!”
At the sight of their uncle and his family, the young couple were
horror-stricken. While his uncle talked and kissed them, Sasha had a
vision of their little cottage: he and Varya giving up their three
little rooms, all the pillows and bedding to their guests; the salmon,
the sardines, the chicken all devoured in a single instant; the cousins
plucking the flowers in their little garden, spilling the ink, filled
the cottage with noise and confusion; his aunt talking continually about
her ailments and her papa’s having been Baron von Fintich. . . .
And Sasha looked almost with hatred at his young wife, and whispered:
“It’s you they’ve come to see! . . . Damn them!”
“No, it’s you,” answered Varya, pale with anger. “They’re your
relations! they’re not mine!”
And turning to her visitors, she said with a smile of welcome: “Welcome
to the cottage!”
The moon came out again. She seemed to smile, as though she were glad
she had no relations. Sasha, turning his head away to hide his angry
despairing face, struggled to give a note of cordial welcome to his
voice as he said:
“It is jolly of you! Welcome to the cottage!”
A BLUNDER
ILYA SERGEITCH PEPLOV and his wife Kleopatra Petrovna were standing at
the door, listening greedily. On the other side in the little drawing-
room a love scene was apparently taking place between two persons: their
daughter Natashenka and a teacher of the district school, called
Shchupkin.
“He’s rising!” whispered Peplov, quivering with impatience and rubbing
his hands. “Now, Kleopatra, mind; as soon as they begin talking of their
feelings, take down the ikon from the wall and we’ll go in and bless
them. . . . We’ll catch him. . . . A blessing with an ikon is sacred and
binding. . . He couldn’t get out of it, if he brought it into court.”
On the other side of the door this was the conversation:
“Don’t go on like that!” said Shchupkin, striking a match against his
checked trousers. “I never wrote you any letters!”
“I like that! As though I didn’t know your writing!” giggled the girl
with an affected shriek, continually peeping at herself in the glass. “I
knew it at once! And what a queer man you are! You are a writing master,
and you write like a spider! How can you teach writing if you write so
badly yourself?”
“H’m! . . . That means nothing. The great thing in writing lessons is
not the hand one writes, but keeping the boys in order. You hit one on
the head with a ruler, make another kneel down. . . . Besides, there’s
nothing in handwriting! Nekrassov was an author, but his handwriting’s a
disgrace, there’s a specimen of it in his collected works.”
“You are not Nekrassov. . . .” (A sigh). “I should love to marry an
author. He’d always be writing poems to me.”
“I can write you a poem, too, if you like.”
“What can you write about?”
“Love—passion—your eyes. You’ll be crazy when you read it. It would draw
a tear from a stone! And if I write you a real poem, will you let me
kiss your hand?”
“That’s nothing much! You can kiss it now if you like.”
Shchupkin jumped up, and making sheepish eyes, bent over the fat little
hand that smelt of egg soap.
“Take down the ikon,” Peplov whispered in a fluster, pale with
excitement, and buttoning his coat as he prodded his wife with his
elbow. “Come along, now!”
And without a second’s delay Peplov flung open the door.
“Children,” he muttered, lifting up his arms and bKlinking tearfully,
“the Lord bless you, my children. May you live—be fruitful—and
multiply.”
“And—and I bless you, too,” the mamma brought out, crying with
happiness. “May you be happy, my dear ones! Oh, you are taking from me
my only treasure!” she said to Shchupkin. “Love my girl, be good to her.
. . .”
Shchupkin’s mouth fell open with amazement and alarm. The parents’
attack was so bold and unexpected that he could not utter a single word.
“I’m in for it! I’m spliced!” he thought, going limp with horror. “It’s
all over with you now, my boy! There’s no escape!”
And he bowed his head submissively, as though to say, “Take me, I’m
vanquished.”
“Ble-blessings on you,” the papa went on, and he, too, shed tears.
“Natashenka, my daughter, stand by his side. Kleopatra, give me the
ikon.”
But at this point the father suddenly left off weeping, and his face was
contorted with anger.
“You ninny!” he said angrily to his wife. “You are an idiot! Is that the
ikon?”
“Ach, saints alive!”
What had happened? The writing master raised himself and saw that he was
saved; in her flutter the mamma had snatched from the wall the portrait
of Lazhetchnikov, the author, in mistake for the ikon. Old Peplov and
his wife stood disconcerted in the middle of the room, holding the
portrait aloft, not knowing what to do or what to say. The writing
master took advantage of the general confusion and slipped away.
FAT AND THIN
Two friends—one a fat man and the other a thin man—met at the
Nikolaevsky station. The fat man had just dined in the station and his
greasy lips shone like ripe cherries. He smelt of sherry and fleur
d’orange. The thin man had just slipped out of the train and was laden
with portmanteaus, bundles, and bandboxes. He smelt of ham and coffee
grounds. A thin woman with a long chin, his wife, and a tall schoolboy
with one eye screwed up came into view behind his back.
“Porfiry,” cried the fat man on seeing the thin man. “Is it you? My dear
fellow! How many summers, how many winters!”
“Holy saints!” cried the thin man in amazement. “Misha! The friend of my
childhood! Where have you dropped from?”
The friends kissed each other three times, and gazed at each other with
eyes full of tears. Both were agreeably astounded.
“My dear boy!” began the thin man after the kissing. “This is
unexpected! This is a surprise! Come have a good look at me! Just as
handsome as I used to be! Just as great a darling and a dandy! Good
gracious me! Well, and how are you? Made your fortune? Married? I am
married as you see. . . . This is my wife Luise, her maiden name was
Vantsenbach . . . of the Lutheran persuasion. . . . And this is my son
Nafanail, a schoolboy in the third class. This is the friend of my
childhood, Nafanya. We were boys at school together!”
Nafanail thought a little and took off his cap.
“We were boys at school together,” the thin man went on. “Do you
remember how they used to tease you? You were nicknamed Herostratus
because you burned a hole in a schoolbook with a cigarette, and I was
nicknamed Ephialtes because I was fond of telling tales. Ho—ho! . . . we
were children! . . . Don’t be shy, Nafanya. Go nearer to him. And this
is my wife, her maiden name was Vantsenbach, of the Lutheran persuasion.
. . .”
Nafanail thought a little and took refuge behind his father’s back.
“Well, how are you doing my friend?” the fat man asked, looking
enthusiastically at his friend. “Are you in the service? What grade have
you reached?”
“I am, dear boy! I have been a collegiate assessor for the last two
years and I have the Stanislav. The salary is poor, but that’s no great
matter! The wife gives music lessons, and I go in for carving wooden
cigarette cases in a private way. Capital cigarette cases! I sell them
for a rouble each. If any one takes ten or more I make a reduction of
course. We get along somehow. I served as a clerk, you know, and now I
have been transferred here as a head clerk in the same department. I am
going to serve here. And what about you? I bet you are a civil
councillor by now? Eh?”
“No dear boy, go higher than that,” said the fat man. “I have risen to
privy councillor already . . . I have two stars.”
The thin man turned pale and rigid all at once, but soon his face
twisted in all directions in the broadest smile; it seemed as though
sparks were flashing from his face and eyes. He squirmed, he doubled
together, crumpled up. . . . His portmanteaus, bundles and cardboard
boxes seemed to shrink and crumple up too. . . . His wife’s long chin
grew longer still; Nafanail drew himself up to attention and fastened
all the buttons of his uniform.
“Your Excellency, I . . . delighted! The friend, one may say, of
childhood and to have turned into such a great man! He—he!”
“Come, come!” the fat man frowned. “What’s this tone for? You and I were
friends as boys, and there is no need of this official obsequiousness!”
“Merciful heavens, your Excellency! What are you saying. . . ?”
sniggered the thin man, wriggling more than ever. “Your Excellency’s
gracious attention is like refreshing manna. . . . This, your
Excellency, is my son Nafanail, . . . my wife Luise, a Lutheran in a
certain sense.”
The fat man was about to make some protest, but the face of the thin man
wore an expression of such reverence, sugariness, and mawkish
respectfulness that the privy councillor was sickened. He turned away
from the thin man, giving him his hand at parting.
The thin man pressed three fingers, bowed his whole body and sniggered
like a Chinaman: “He—he—he!” His wife smiled. Nafanail scraped with his
foot and dropped his cap. All three were agreeably overwhelmed.
THE DEATH OF A GOVERNMENT CLERK
ONE fine evening, a no less fine government clerk called Ivan Dmitritch
Tchervyakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, gazing through
an opera glass at the Cloches de Corneville. He gazed and felt at the
acme of bliss. But suddenly. . . . In stories one so often meets with
this “But suddenly.” The authors are right: life is so full of
surprises! But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his
breathing was arrested . . . he took the opera glass from his eyes, bent
over and . . . “Aptchee!!” he sneezed as you perceive. It is not
reprehensible for anyone to sneeze anywhere. Peasants sneeze and so do
police superintendents, and sometimes even privy councillors. All men
sneeze. Tchervyakov was not in the least confused, he wiped his face
with his handkerchief, and like a polite man, looked round to see
whether he had disturbed any one by his sneezing. But then he was
overcome with confusion. He saw that an old gentleman sitting in front
of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head
and his neck with his glove and muttering something to himself. In the
old gentleman, Tchervyakov recognised Brizzhalov, a civilian general
serving in the Department of Transport.
“I have spattered him,” thought Tchervyakov, “he is not the head of my
department, but still it is awkward. I must apologise.”
Tchervyakov gave a cough, bent his whole person forward, and whispered
in the general’s ear.
“Pardon, your Excellency, I spattered you accidentally. . . .”
“Never mind, never mind.”
“For goodness sake excuse me, I . . . I did not mean to.”
“Oh, please, sit down! let me listen!”
Tchervyakov was embarrassed, he smiled stupidly and fell to gazing at
the stage. He gazed at it but was no longer feeling bliss. He began to
be troubled by uneasiness. In the interval, he went up to Brizzhalov,
walked beside him, and overcoming his shyness, muttered:
“I spattered you, your Excellency, forgive me . . . you see . . . I
didn’t do it to . . . .”
“Oh, that’s enough . . . I’d forgotten it, and you keep on about it!”
said the general, moving his lower lip impatiently.
“He has forgotten, but there is a fiendish light in his eye,” thought
Tchervyakov, looking suspiciously at the general. “And he doesn’t want
to talk. I ought to explain to him . . . that I really didn’t intend . .
. that it is the law of nature or else he will think I meant to spit on
him. He doesn’t think so now, but he will think so later!”
On getting home, Tchervyakov told his wife of his breach of good
manners. It struck him that his wife took too frivolous a view of the
incident; she was a little frightened, but when she learned that
Brizzhalov was in a different department, she was reassured.
“Still, you had better go and apologise,” she said, “or he will think
you don’t know how to behave in public.”
“That’s just it! I did apologise, but he took it somehow queerly . . .
he didn’t say a word of sense. There wasn’t time to talk properly.”
Next day Tchervyakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut and went to
Brizzhalov’s to explain; going into the general’s reception room he saw
there a number of petitioners and among them the general himself, who
was beginning to interview them. After questioning several petitioners
the general raised his eyes and looked at Tchervyakov.
“Yesterday at the Arcadia, if you recollect, your Excellency,” the
latter began, “I sneezed and . . . accidentally spattered . . . Exc. . .
.”
“What nonsense. . . . It’s beyond anything! What can I do for you,” said
the general addressing the next petitioner.
“He won’t speak,” thought Tchervyakov, turning pale; “that means that he
is angry. . . . No, it can’t be left like this. . . . I will explain to
him.”
When the general had finished his conversation with the last of the
petitioners and was turning towards his inner apartments, Tchervyakov
took a step towards him and muttered:
“Your Excellency! If I venture to trouble your Excellency, it is simply
from a feeling I may say of regret! . . . It was not intentional if you
will graciously believe me.”
The general made a lachrymose face, and waved his hand.
“Why, you are simply making fun of me, sir,” he said as he closed the
door behind him.
“Where’s the making fun in it?” thought Tchervyakov, “there is nothing
of the sort! He is a general, but he can’t understand. If that is how it
is I am not going to apologise to that fanfaron any more! The devil take
him. I’ll write a letter to him, but I won’t go. By Jove, I won’t.”
So thought Tchervyakov as he walked home; he did not write a letter to
the general, he pondered and pondered and could not make up that letter.
He had to go next day to explain in person.
“I ventured to disturb your Excellency yesterday,” he muttered, when the
general lifted enquiring eyes upon him, “not to make fun as you were
pleased to say. I was apologising for having spattered you in sneezing.
. . . And I did not dream of making fun of you. Should I dare to make
fun of you, if we should take to making fun, then there would be no
respect for persons, there would be. . . .”
“Be off!” yelled the general, turning suddenly purple, and shaking all
over.
“What?” asked Tchervyakov, in a whisper turning numb with horror.
“Be off!” repeated the general, stamping.
Something seemed to give way in Tchervyakov’s stomach. Seeing nothing
and hearing nothing he reeled to the door, went out into the street, and
went staggering along. . . . Reaching home mechanically, without taking
off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and died.
A PINK STOCKING
A DULL, rainy day. The sky is completely covered with heavy clouds, and
there is no prospect of the rain ceasing. Outside sleet, puddles, and
drenched jackdaws. Indoors it is half dark, and so cold that one wants
the stove heated.
Pavel Petrovitch Somov is pacing up and down his study, grumbling at the
weather. The tears of rain on the windows and the darkness of the room
make him depressed. He is insufferably bored and has nothing to do. . .
. The newspapers have not been brought yet; shooting is out of the
question, and it is not nearly dinner-time . . . .
Somov is not alone in his study. Madame Somov, a pretty little lady in a
light blouse and pink stockings, is sitting at his writing table. She is
eagerly scribbling a letter. Every time he passes her as he strides up
and down, Ivan Petrovitch looks over her shoulder at what she is
writing. He sees big sprawling letters, thin and narrow, with all sorts
of tails and flourishes. There are numbers of blots, smears, and finger-
marks. Madame Somov does not like ruled paper, and every line runs
downhill with horrid wriggles as it reaches the margin. . . .
“Lidotchka, who is it you are writing such a lot to?” Somov inquires,
seeing that his wife is just beginning to scribble the sixth page.
“To sister Varya.”
“Hm . . . it’s a long letter! I’m so bored—let me read it!”
“Here, you may read it, but there’s nothing interesting in it.”
Somov takes the written pages and, still pacing up and down, begins
reading. Lidotchka leans her elbows on the back of her chair and watches
the expression of his face. . . . After the first page his face
lengthens and an expression of something almost like panic comes into
it. . . . At the third page Somov frowns and scratches the back of his
head. At the fourth he pauses, looks with a scared face at his wife, and
seems to ponder. After thinking a little, he takes up the letter again
with a sigh. . . . His face betrays perplexity and even alarm. . . .”
“Well, this is beyond anything!” he mutters, as he finishes reading the
letter and flings the sheets on the table, “It’s positively incredible!”
“What’s the matter?” asks Lidotchka, flustered.
“What’s the matter! You’ve covered six pages, wasted a good two hours
scribbling, and there’s nothing in it at all! If there were one tiny
idea! One reads on and on, and one’s brain is as muddled as though one
were deciphering the Chinese wriggles on tea chests! Ough!”
“Yes, that’s true, Vanya, . . .” says Lidotchka, reddening. “I wrote it
carelessly. . . .”
“Queer sort of carelessness! In a careless letter there is some meaning
and style—there is sense in it—while yours . . . excuse me, but I don’t
know what to call it! It’s absolute twaddle! There are words and
sentences, but not the slightest sense in them. Your whole letter is
exactly like the conversation of two boys: ‘We had pancakes to-day! And
we had a soldier come to see us!’ You say the same thing over and over
again! You drag it out, repeat yourself . . . . The wretched ideas dance
about like devils: there’s no making out where anything begins, where
anything ends. . . . How can you write like that?”
“If I had been writing carefully,” Lidotchka says in self defence, “then
there would not have been mistakes. . . .”
“Oh, I’m not talking about mistakes! The awful grammatical howlers!
There’s not a line that’s not a personal insult to grammar! No stops nor
commas—and the spelling . . . brrr! ‘Earth’ has an a in it!! And the
writing! It’s desperate! I’m not joking, Lida. . . . I’m surprised and
appalled at your letter. . . . You mustn’t be angry, darling, but,
really, I had no idea you were such a duffer at grammar. . . . And yet
you belong to a cultivated, well-educated circle: you are the wife of a
University man, and the daughter of a general! Tell me, did you ever go
to school?”
“What next! I finished at the Von Mebke’s boarding school. . . .”
Somov shrugs his shoulders and continues to pace up and down, sighing.
Lidotchka, conscious of her ignorance and ashamed of it, sighs too and
casts down her eyes. . . . Ten minutes pass in silence.
“You know, Lidotchka, it really is awful!” says Somov, suddenly halting
in front of her and looking into her face with horror. “You are a mother
. . . do you understand? A mother! How can you teach your children if
you know nothing yourself? You have a good brain, but what’s the use of
it if you have never mastered the very rudiments of knowledge?
There—never mind about knowledge . . . the children will get that at
school, but, you know, you are very shaky on the moral side too! You
sometimes use such language that it makes my ears tingle!”
Somov shrugs his shoulders again, wraps himself in the folds of his
dressing-gown and continues his pacing. . . . He feels vexed and
injured, and at the same time sorry for Lidotchka, who does not protest,
but merely bKlinks. . . . Both feel oppressed and miserable . . . .
Absorbed in their woes, they do not notice how time is passing and the
dinner hour is approaching.
Sitting down to dinner, Somov, who is fond of good eating and of eating
in peace, drinks a large glass of vodka and begins talking about
something else. Lidotchka listens and assents, but suddenly over the
soup her eyes fill with tears and she begins whimpering.
“It’s all mother’s fault!” she says, wiping away her tears with her
dinner napkin. “Everyone advised her to send me to the high school, and
from the high school I should have been sure to go on to the
University!”
“University . . . high school,” mutters Somov. “That’s running to
extremes, my girl! What’s the good of being a blue stocking! A blue
stocking is the very deuce! Neither man nor woman, but just something
midway: neither one thing nor another. . . I hate blue stockings! I
would never have married a learned woman. . . .”
“There’s no making you out . . .”, says Lidotchka. “You are angry
because I am not learned, and at the same time you hate learned women;
you are annoyed because I have no ideas in my letter, and yet you
yourself are opposed to my studying. . . .”
“You do catch me up at a word, my dear,” yawns Somov, pouring out a
second glass of vodka in his boredom.
Under the influence of vodka and a good dinner, Somov grows more good-
humoured, lively, and soft. . . . He watches his pretty wife making the
salad with an anxious face and a rush of affection for her, of
indulgence and forgiveness comes over him.
“It was stupid of me to depress her, poor girl . . . ,” he thought. “Why
did I say such a lot of dreadful things? She is silly, that’s true,
uncivilised and narrow; but . . . there are two sides to the question,
and audiatur et altera pars. . . . Perhaps people are perfectly right
when they say that woman’s shallowness rests on her very vocation.
Granted that it is her vocation to love her husband, to bear children,
and to mix salad, what the devil does she want with learning? No,
indeed!”
At that point he remembers that learned women are usually tedious, that
they are exacting, strict, and unyielding; and, on the other hand, how
easy it is to get on with silly Lidotchka, who never pokes her nose into
anything, does not understand so much, and never obtrudes her criticism.
There is peace and comfort with Lidotchka, and no risk of being
interfered with.
“Confound them, those clever and learned women! It’s better and easier
to live with simple ones,” he thinks, as he takes a plate of chicken
from Lidotchka.
He recollects that a civilised man sometimes feels a desire to talk and
share his thoughts with a clever and well-educated woman. “What of it?”
thinks Somov. “If I want to talk of intellectual subjects, I’ll go to
Natalya Andreyevna . . . or to Marya Frantsovna. . . . It’s very simple!
But no, I shan’t go. One can discuss intellectual subjects with men,” he
finally decides.
AT A SUMMER VILLA
“I LOVE YOU. You are my life, my happiness—everything to me! Forgive the
avowal, but I have not the strength to suffer and be silent. I ask not
for love in return, but for sympathy. Be at the old arbour at eight
o’clock this evening. . . . To sign my name is unnecessary I think, but
do not be uneasy at my being anonymous. I am young, nice-looking . . .
what more do you want?”
When Pavel Ivanitch Vyhodtsev, a practical married man who was spending
his holidays at a summer villa, read this letter, he shrugged his
shoulders and scratched his forehead in perplexity.
“What devilry is this?” he thought. “I’m a married man, and to send me
such a queer . . . silly letter! Who wrote it?”
Pavel Ivanitch turned the letter over and over before his eyes, read it
through again, and spat with disgust.
“‘I love you’” . . . he said jeeringly. “A nice boy she has pitched on!
So I’m to run off to meet you in the arbour! . . . I got over all such
romances and fleurs d’amour years ago, my girl. . . . Hm! She must be
some reckless, immoral creature. . . . Well, these women are a set! What
a whirligig—God forgive us!—she must be to write a letter like that to a
stranger, and a married man, too! It’s real demoralisation!”
In the course of his eight years of married life Pavel Ivanitch had
completely got over all sentimental feeling, and he had received no
letters from ladies except letters of congratulation, and so, although
he tried to carry it off with disdain, the letter quoted above greatly
intrigued and agitated him.
An hour after receiving it, he was lying on his sofa, thinking:
“Of course I am not a silly boy, and I am not going to rush off to this
idiotic rendezvous; but yet it would be interesting to know who wrote
it! Hm. . . . It is certainly a woman’s writing. . . . The letter is
written with genuine feeling, and so it can hardly be a joke. . . . Most
likely it’s some neurotic girl, or perhaps a widow . . . widows are
frivolous and eccentric as a rule. Hm. . . . Who could it be?”
What made it the more difficult to decide the question was that Pavel
Ivanitch had not one feminine acquaintance among all the summer
visitors, except his wife.
“It is queer . . .” he mused. “‘I love you!’. . . When did she manage to
fall in love? Amazing woman! To fall in love like this, apropos of
nothing, without making any acquaintance and finding out what sort of
man I am. . . . She must be extremely young and romantic if she is
capable of falling in love after two or three looks at me. . . . But . .
. who is she?”
Pavel Ivanitch suddenly recalled that when he had been walking among the
summer villas the day before, and the day before that, he had several
times been met by a fair young lady with a light blue hat and a turn-up
nose. The fair charmer had kept looking at him, and when he sat down on
a seat she had sat down beside him. . . .
“Can it be she?” Vyhodtsev wondered. “It can’t be! Could a delicate
ephemeral creature like that fall in love with a worn-out old eel like
me? No, it’s impossible!”
At dinner Pavel Ivanitch looked blankly at his wife while he meditated:
“She writes that she is young and nice-looking. . . . So she’s not old.
. . . Hm. . . . To tell the truth, honestly I am not so old and plain
that no one could fall in love with me. My wife loves me! Besides, love
is blind, we all know. . . .”
“What are you thinking about?” his wife asked him.
“Oh. . . my head aches a little. . .” Pavel Ivanitch said, quite
untruly.
He made up his mind that it was stupid to pay attention to such a
nonsensical thing as a love-letter, and laughed at it and at its
authoress, but—alas!—powerful is the “dacha” enemy of mankind! After
dinner, Pavel Ivanitch lay down on his bed, and instead of going to
sleep, reflected:
“But there, I daresay she is expecting me to come! What a silly! I can
just imagine what a nervous fidget she’ll be in and how her tournure
will quiver when she does not find me in the arbour! I shan’t go,
though. . . . Bother her!”
But, I repeat, powerful is the enemy of mankind.
“Though I might, perhaps, just out of curiosity . . .” he was musing,
half an hour later. “I might go and look from a distance what sort of a
creature she is. . . . It would be interesting to have a look at her! It
would be fun, and that’s all! After all, why shouldn’t I have a little
fun since such a chance has turned up?”
Pavel Ivanitch got up from his bed and began dressing. “What are you
getting yourself up so smartly for?” his wife asked, noticing that he
was putting on a clean shirt and a fashionable tie.
“Oh, nothing. . . . I must have a walk. . . . My head aches. . . . Hm.”
Pavel Ivanitch dressed in his best, and waiting till eight o’clock, went
out of the house. When the figures of gaily dressed summer visitors of
both sexes began passing before his eyes against the bright green
background, his heart throbbed.
“Which of them is it? . . .” he wondered, advancing irresolutely. “Come,
what am I afraid of? Why, I am not going to the rendezvous! What . . . a
fool! Go forward boldly! And what if I go into the arbour? Well, well .
. . there is no reason I should.”
Pavel Ivanitch’s heart beat still more violently. . . . Involuntarily,
with no desire to do so, he suddenly pictured to himself the half-
darkness of the arbour. . . . A graceful fair girl with a little blue
hat and a turn-up nose rose before his imagination. He saw her, abashed
by her love and trembling all over, timidly approach him, breathing
excitedly, and . . . suddenly clasping him in her arms.
“If I weren’t married it would be all right . . .” he mused, driving
sinful ideas out of his head. “Though . . . for once in my life, it
would do no harm to have the experience, or else one will die without
knowing what. . . . And my wife, what will it matter to her? Thank God,
for eight years I’ve never moved one step away from her. . . . Eight
years of irreproachable duty! Enough of her. . . . It’s positively
vexatious. . . . I’m ready to go to spite her!”
Trembling all over and holding his breath, Pavel Ivanitch went up to the
arbour, wreathed with ivy and wild vine, and peeped into it . . . . A
smell of dampness and mildew reached him. . . .
“I believe there’s nobody . . .” he thought, going into the arbour, and
at once saw a human silhouette in the corner.
The silhouette was that of a man. . . . Looking more closely, Pavel
Ivanitch recognised his wife’s brother, Mitya, a student, who was
staying with them at the villa.
“Oh, it’s you . . .” he growled discontentedly, as he took off his hat
and sat down.
“Yes, it’s I” . . . answered Mitya.
Two minutes passed in silence.
“Excuse me, Pavel Ivanitch,” began Mitya: “but might I ask you to leave
me alone?? . . . I am thinking over the dissertation for my degree and .
. . and the presence of anybody else prevents my thinking.”
“You had better go somewhere in a dark avenue. . .” Pavel Ivanitch
observed mildly. “It’s easier to think in the open air, and, besides, .
. . er . . . I should like to have a little sleep here on this seat. . .
It’s not so hot here. . . .”
“You want to sleep, but it’s a question of my dissertation . . .” Mitya
grumbled. “The dissertation is more important.”
Again there was a silence. Pavel Ivanitch, who had given the rein to his
imagination and was continually hearing footsteps, suddenly leaped up
and said in a plaintive voice:
“Come, I beg you, Mitya! You are younger and ought to consider me . . .
. I am unwell and . . . I need sleep. . . . Go away!”
“That’s egoism. . . . Why must you be here and not I? I won’t go as a
matter of principle.”
“Come, I ask you to! Suppose I am an egoist, a despot and a fool . . .
but I ask you to go! For once in my life I ask you a favour! Show some
consideration!”
Mitya shook his head.
“What a beast! . . .” thought Pavel Ivanitch. “That can’t be a
rendezvous with him here! It’s impossible with him here!”
“I say, Mitya,” he said, “I ask you for the last time. . . . Show that
you are a sensible, humane, and cultivated man!”
“I don’t know why you keep on so!” . . . said Mitya, shrugging his
shoulders. “I’ve said I won’t go, and I won’t. I shall stay here as a
matter of principle. . . .”
At that moment a woman’s face with a turn-up nose peeped into the
arbour. . . .
Seeing Mitya and Pavel Ivanitch, it frowned and vanished.
“She is gone!” thought Pavel Ivanitch, looking angrily at Mitya. “She
saw that blackguard and fled! It’s all spoilt!”
After waiting a little longer, he got up, put on his hat and said:
“You’re a beast, a low brute and a blackguard! Yes! A beast! It’s mean .
. . and silly! Everything is at an end between us!”
“Delighted to hear it!” muttered Mitya, also getting up and putting on
his hat. “Let me tell you that by being here just now you’ve played me
such a dirty trick that I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.”
Pavel Ivanitch went out of the arbour, and beside himself with rage,
strode rapidly to his villa. Even the sight of the table laid for supper
did not soothe him.
“Once in a lifetime such a chance has turned up,” he thought in
agitation; “and then it’s been prevented! Now she is offended . . .
crushed!”
At supper Pavel Ivanitch and Mitya kept their eyes on their plates and
maintained a sullen silence. . . . They were hating each other from the
bottom of their hearts.
“What are you smiling at?” asked Pavel Ivanitch, pouncing on his wife.
“It’s only silly fools who laugh for nothing!”
His wife looked at her husband’s angry face, and went off into a peal of
laughter.
“What was that letter you got this morning?” she asked.
“I? . . . I didn’t get one. . . .” Pavel Ivanitch was overcome with
confusion. “You are inventing . . . imagination.”
“Oh, come, tell us! Own up, you did! Why, it was I sent you that letter!
Honour bright, I did! Ha ha!”
Pavel Ivanitch turned crimson and bent over his plate. “Silly jokes,” he
growled.
“But what could I do? Tell me that. . . . We had to scrub the rooms out
this evening, and how could we get you out of the house? There was no
other way of getting you out. . . . But don’t be angry, stupid. . . . I
didn’t want you to be dull in the arbour, so I sent the same letter to
Mitya too! Mitya, have you been to the arbour?”
Mitya grinned and left off glaring with hatred at his rival. The House
With The Mezzanine THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE
(A PAINTER'S STORY)
IT happened nigh on seven years ago, when I was living in one of the
districts of the J. province, on the estate of Bielokurov, a landowner,
a young man who used to get up early, dress himself in a long overcoat,
drink beer in the evenings, and all the while complain to me that he
could nowhere find any one in sympathy with his ideas. He lived in a
little house in the orchard, and I lived in the old manor-house, in a
huge pillared hall where there was no furniture except a large divan, on
which I slept, and a table at which I used to play patience. Even in
calm weather there was always a moaning in the chimney, and in a storm
the whole house would rock and seem as though it must split, and it was
quite terrifying, especially at night, when all the ten great windows
were suddenly lit up by a flash of lightning.
Doomed by fate to permanent idleness, I did positively nothing. For
hours together I would sit and look through the windows at the sky, the
birds, the trees and read my letters over and over again, and then for
hours together I would sleep. Sometimes I would go out and wander
aimlessly until evening.
Once on my way home I came unexpectedly on a strange farmhouse. The sun
was already setting, and the lengthening shadows were thrown over the
ripening corn. Two rows of closely planted tall fir-trees stood like two
thick walls, forming a sombre, magnificent avenue. I climbed the fence
and walked up the avenue, slipping on the fir needles which lay two
inches thick on the ground. It was still, dark, and only here and there
in the tops of the trees shimmered a bright gold light casting the
colours of the rainbow on a spider's web. The smell of the firs was
almost suffocating. Then I turned into an avenue of limes. And here too
were desolation and decay; the dead leaves rustled mournfully beneath my
feet, and there were lurking shadows among the trees. To the right, in
an old orchard, a goldhammer sang a faint reluctant song, and he too
must have been old. The lime-trees soon came to an end and I came to a
white house with a terrace and a mezzanine, and suddenly a vista opened
upon a farmyard with a pond and a bathing-shed, and a row of green
willows, with a village beyond, and above it stood a tall, slender
belfry, on which glowed a cross catching the light of the setting sun.
For a moment I was possessed with a sense of enchantment, intimate,
particular, as though I had seen the scene before in my childhood.
By the white-stone gate surmounted with stone lions, which led from the
yard into the field, stood two girls. One of them, the elder, thin,
pale, very handsome, with masses of chestnut hair and a little stubborn
mouth, looked rather prim and scarcely glanced at me; the other, who was
quite young—seventeen or eighteen, no more, also thin and pale, with a
big mouth and big eyes, looked at me in surprise, as I passed, said
something in English and looked confused, and it seemed to me that I had
always known their dear faces. And I returned home feeling as though I
had awoke from a pleasant dream.
Soon after that, one afternoon, when Bielokurov and I were walking near
the house, suddenly there came into the yard a spring-carriage in which
sat one of the two girls, the elder. She had come to ask for
subscriptions to a fund for those who had suffered in a recent fire.
Without looking at us, she told us very seriously how many houses had
been burned down in Sianov, how many men, women, and children had been
left without shelter, and what had been done by the committee of which
she was a member. She gave us the list for us to write our names, put it
away, and began to say good-bye.
"You have completely forgotten us, Piotr Petrovich," she said to
Bielokurov, as she gave him her hand. "Come and see us, and if Mr. N.
(she said my name) would like to see how the admirers of his talent live
and would care to come and see us, then mother and I would be very
pleased."
I bowed.
When she had gone Piotr Petrovich began to tell me about her. The girl,
he said, was of a good family and her name was Lydia Volchaninov, and
the estate, on which she lived with her mother and sister, was called,
like the village on the other side of the pond, Sholkovka. Her father
had once occupied an eminent position in Moscow and died a privy
councillor. Notwithstanding their large means, the Volchaninovs always
lived in the village, summer and winter, and Lydia was a teacher in the
Zemstvo School at Sholkovka and earned twenty-five roubles a month. She
only spent what she earned on herself and was proud of her independence.
"They are an interesting family," said Bielokurov. "We ought to go and
see them. They will be very glad to see you."
One afternoon, during a holiday, we remembered the Volchaninovs and went
over to Sholkovka. They were all at home. The mother, Ekaterina
Pavlovna, had obviously once been handsome, but now she was stouter than
her age warranted, suffered from asthma, was melancholy and absent-
minded as she tried to entertain me with talk about painting. When she
heard from her daughter that I might perhaps come over to Sholkovka, she
hurriedly called to mind a few of my landscapes which she had seen in
exhibitions in Moscow, and now she asked what I had tried to express in
them. Lydia, or as she was called at home, Lyda, talked more to
Bielokurov than to me. Seriously and without a smile, she asked him why
he did not work for the Zemstvo and why up till now he had never been to
a Zemstvo meeting.
"It is not right of you, Piotr Petrovich," she said reproachfully. "It
is not right. It is a shame."
"True, Lyda, true," said her mother. "It is not right."
"All our district is in Balaguin's hands," Lyda went on, turning to me.
"He is the chairman of the council and all the jobs in the district are
given to his nephews and brothers-in-law, and he does exactly as he
likes. We ought to fight him. The young people ought to form a strong
party; but you see what our young men are like. It is a shame, Piotr
Petrovich."
The younger sister, Genya, was silent during the conversation about the
Zemstvo. She did not take part in serious conversations, for by the
family she was not considered grown-up, and they gave her her baby-name,
Missyuss, because as a child she used to call her English governess
that. All the time she examined me curiously and when I looked at the
photograph-album she explained: "This is my uncle.... That is my
godfather," and fingered the portraits, and at the same time touched me
with her shoulder in a childlike way, and I could see her small,
undeveloped bosom, her thin shoulders, her long, slim waist tightly
drawn in by a belt.
We played croquet and lawn-tennis, walked in the garden, had tea, and
then a large supper. After the huge pillared hall, I felt out of tune in
the small cosy house, where there were no oleographs on the walls and
the servants were treated considerately, and everything seemed to me
young and pure, through the presence of Lyda and Missyuss, and
everything was decent and orderly. At supper Lyda again talked to
Bielokurov about the Zemstvo, about Balaguin, about school libraries.
She was a lively, sincere, serious girl, and it was interesting to
listen to her, though she spoke at length and in a loud voice—perhaps
because she was used to holding forth at school. On the other hand,
Piotr Petrovich, who from his university days had retained the habit of
reducing any conversation to a discussion, spoke tediously, slowly, and
deliberately, with an obvious desire to be taken for a clever and
progressive man. He gesticulated and upset the sauce with his sleeve and
it made a large pool on the table-cloth, though nobody but myself seemed
to notice it.
When we returned home the night was dark and still.
"I call it good breeding," said Bielokurov, with a sigh, "not so much
not to upset the sauce on the table, as not to notice it when some one
else has done it. Yes. An admirable intellectual family. I'm rather out
of touch with nice people. Ah! terribly. And all through business,
business, business!"
He went on to say what hard work being a good farmer meant. And I
thought: What a stupid, lazy lout! When we talked seriously he would
drag it out with his awful drawl—er, er, er—and he works just as he
talks—slowly, always behindhand, never up to time; and as for his being
businesslike, I don't believe it, for he often keeps letters given him
to post for weeks in his pocket.
"The worst of it is," he murmured as he walked along by my side, "the
worst of it is that you go working away and never get any sympathy from
anybody."
II
I began to frequent the Volchaninovs' house. Usually I sat on the bottom
step of the veranda. I was filled with dissatisfaction, vague discontent
with my life, which had passed so quickly and uninterestingly, and I
thought all the while how good it would be to tear out of my breast my
heart which had grown so weary. There would be talk going on on the
terrace, the rustling of dresses, the fluttering of the pages of a book.
I soon got used to Lyda receiving the sick all day long, and
distributing books, and I used often to go with her to the village,
bareheaded, under an umbrella. And in the evening she would hold forth
about the Zemstvo and schools. She was very handsome, subtle, correct,
and her lips were thin and sensitive, and whenever a serious
conversation started she would say to me drily:
"This won't interest you."
I was not sympathetic to her. She did not like me because I was a
landscape-painter, and in my pictures did not paint the suffering of the
masses, and I seemed to her indifferent to what she believed in. I
remember once driving along the shore of the Baikal and I met a Bouryat
girl, in shirt and trousers of Chinese cotton, on horseback: I asked her
if she would sell me her pipe and, while we were talking, she looked
with scorn at my European face and hat, and in a moment she got bored
with talking to me, whooped and galloped away. And in exactly the same
way Lyda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she never showed her
dislike of me, but I felt it, and, as I sat on the bottom step of the
terrace, I had a certain irritation and said that treating the peasants
without being a doctor meant deceiving them, and that it is easy to be a
benefactor when one owns four thousand acres.
Her sister, Missyuss, had no such cares and spent her time in complete
idleness, like myself. As soon as she got up in the morning she would
take a book and read it on the terrace, sitting far back in a lounge
chair so that her feet hardly touched the ground, or she would hide
herself with her book in the lime-walk, or she would go through the gate
into the field. She would read all day long, eagerly poring over the
book, and only through her looking fatigued, dizzy, and pale sometimes,
was it possible to guess how much her reading exhausted her. When she
saw me come she would blush a little and leave her book, and, looking
into my face with her big eyes, she would tell me of things that had
happened, how the chimney in the servants' room had caught fire, or how
the labourer had caught a large fish in the pond. On week-days she
usually wore a bright-coloured blouse and a dark-blue skirt. We used to
go out together and pluck cherries for jam, in the boat, and when she
jumped to reach a cherry, or pulled the oars, her thin, round arms would
shine through her wide sleeves. Or I would make a sketch and she would
stand and watch me breathlessly.
One Sunday, at the end of June, I went over to the Volchaninovs in the
morning about nine o'clock. I walked through the park, avoiding the
house, looking for mushrooms, which were very plentiful that summer, and
marking them so as to pick them later with Genya. A warm wind was
blowing. I met Genya and her mother, both in bright Sunday dresses,
going home from church, and Genya was holding her hat against the wind.
They told me they were going to have tea on the terrace.
As a man without a care in the world, seeking somehow to justify his
constant idleness, I have always found such festive mornings in a
country house universally attractive. When the green garden, still moist
with dew, shines in the sun and seems happy, and when the terrace smells
of mignonette and oleander, and the young people have just returned from
church and drink tea in the garden, and when they are all so gaily
dressed and so merry, and when you know that all these healthy,
satisfied, beautiful people will do nothing all day long, then you long
for all life to be like that. So I thought then as I walked through the
garden, quite prepared to drift like that without occupation or purpose,
all through the day, all through the summer.
Genya carried a basket and she looked as though she knew that she would
find me there. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and whenever she asked
me a question she stood in front of me to see my face.
"Yesterday," she said, "a miracle happened in our village. Pelagueya,
the cripple, has been ill for a whole year, and no doctors or medicines
were any good, but yesterday an old woman muttered over her and she got
better."
"That's nothing," I said. "One should not go to sick people and old
women for miracles. Is not health a miracle? And life itself? A miracle
is something incomprehensible."
"And you are not afraid of the incomprehensible?"
"No. I like to face things I do not understand and I do not submit to
them. I am superior to them. Man must think himself higher than lions,
tigers, stars, higher than anything in nature, even higher than that
which seems incomprehensible and miraculous. Otherwise he is not a man,
but a mouse which is afraid of everything."
Genya thought that I, as an artist, knew a great deal and could guess
what I did not know. She wanted me to lead her into the region of the
eternal and the beautiful, into the highest world, with which, as she
thought, I was perfectly familiar, and she talked to me of God, of
eternal life, of the miraculous. And I, who did not admit that I and my
imagination would perish for ever, would reply: "Yes. Men are immortal.
Yes, eternal life awaits us." And she would listen and believe me and
never asked for proof.
As we approached the house she suddenly stopped and said:
"Our Lyda is a remarkable person, isn't she? I love her dearly and would
gladly sacrifice my life for her at any time. But tell me"—Genya touched
my sleeve with her finger—"but tell me, why do you argue with her all
the time? Why are you so irritated?"
"Because she is not right."
Genya shook her head and tears came to her eyes.
"How incomprehensible!" she muttered.
At that moment Lyda came out, and she stood by the balcony with a
riding-whip in her hand, and looked very fine and pretty in the sunlight
as she gave some orders to a farm-hand. Bustling about and talking
loudly, she tended two or three of her patients, and then with a
businesslike, preoccupied look she walked through the house, opening one
cupboard after another, and at last went off to the attic; it took some
time to find her for dinner and she did not come until we had finished
the soup. Somehow I remember all these, little details and love to dwell
on them, and I remember the whole of that day vividly, though nothing
particular happened. After dinner Genya read, lying in her lounge chair,
and I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The sky was
overcast and a thin fine rain began to fall. It was hot, the wind had
dropped, and it seemed the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came
out on to the terrace with a fan, looking very sleepy.
"O, mamma," said Genya, kissing her hand. "It is not good for you to
sleep during the day."
They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other would
stand on the terrace and look at the trees and call: "Hello!" "Genya!"
or "Mamma, dear, where are you?" They always prayed together and shared
the same faith, and they understood each other very well, even when they
were silent. And they treated other people in exactly the same way.
Ekaterina Pavlovna also soon got used to me and became attached to me,
and when I did not turn up for a few days she would send to inquire if I
was well. And she too used to look admiringly at my sketches, and with
the same frank loquacity she would tell me things that happened, and she
would confide her domestic secrets to me.
She revered her elder daughter. Lyda never came to her for caresses, and
only talked about serious things: she went her own way and to her mother
and sister she was as sacred and enigmatic as the admiral, sitting in
his cabin, to his sailors.
"Our Lyda is a remarkable person," her mother would often say; "isn't
she?"
And, now, as the soft rain fell, we spoke of Lyda:
"She is a remarkable woman," said her mother, and added in a low voice
like a conspirator's as she looked round, "such as she have to be looked
for with a lamp in broad daylight, though you know, I am beginning to be
anxious. The school, pharmacies, books—all very well, but why go to such
extremes? She is twenty-three and it is time for her to think seriously
about herself. If she goes on with her books and her pharmacies she
won't know how life has passed.... She ought to marry."
Genya, pale with reading, and with her hair ruffled, looked up and said,
as if to herself, as she glanced at her mother:
"Mamma, dear, everything depends on the will of God."
And once more she plunged into her book.
Bielokurov came over in a poddiovka, wearing an embroidered shirt. We
played croquet and lawn-tennis, and when it grew dark we had a long
supper, and Lyda once more spoke of her schools and Balaguin, who had
got the whole district into his own hands. As I left the Volchaninovs
that night I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day, with a
sad consciousness that everything ends, however long it may be. Genya
took me to the gate, and perhaps, because she had spent the whole day
with me from the beginning to end, I felt somehow lonely without her,
and the whole kindly family was dear to me: and for the first time
during the whole of that summer I had a desire to work.
"Tell me why you lead such a monotonous life," I asked Bielokurov, as we
went home. "My life is tedious, dull, monotonous, because I am a
painter, a queer fish, and have been worried all my life with envy,
discontent, disbelief in my work: I am always poor, I am a vagabond, but
you are a wealthy, normal man, a landowner, a gentleman—why do you live
so tamely and take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven't you
fallen in love with Lyda or Genya?"
"You forget that I love another woman," answered Bielokurov.
He meant his mistress, Lyabor Ivanovna, who lived with him in the
orchard house. I used to see the lady every day, very stout, podgy,
pompous, like a fatted goose, walking in the garden in a Russian head-
dress, always with a sunshade, and the servants used to call her to
meals or tea. Three years ago she rented a part of his house for the
summer, and stayed on to live with Bielokurov, apparently for ever. She
was ten years older than he and managed him very strictly, so that he
had to ask her permission to go out. She would often sob and make
horrible noises like a man with a cold, and then I used to send and tell
her that I'm if she did not stop I would go away. Then she would stop.
When we reached home, Bielokurov sat down on the divan and frowned and
brooded, and I began to pace up and down the hall, feeling a sweet
stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I wanted to talk
about the Volchaninovs.
"Lyda could only fall in love with a Zemstvo worker like herself, some
one who is run off his legs with hospitals and schools," I said. "For
the sake of a girl like that a man might not only become a Zemstvo
worker, but might even become worn out, like the tale of the iron boots.
And Missyuss? How charming Missyuss is!"
Bielokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of
the disease of the century—pessimism. He spoke confidently and
argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened
steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that,
sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.
"The point is neither pessimism nor optimism," I said irritably, "but
that ninety-nine out of a hundred have no sense."
Bielokurov took this to mean himself, was offended, and went away.
III
"The Prince is on a visit to Malozyomov and sends you his regards," said
Lyda to her mother, as she came in and took off her gloves. "He told me
many interesting things. He promised to bring forward in the Zemstvo
Council the question of a medical station at Malozyomov, but he says
there is little hope." And turning to me, she said: "Forgive me, I keep
forgetting that you are not interested."
I felt irritated.
"Why not?" I asked and shrugged my shoulders. "You don't care about my
opinion, but I assure you, the question greatly interests me."
"Yes?"
"In my opinion there is absolutely no need for a medical station at
Malozyomov."
My irritation affected her: she gave a glance at me, half closed her
eyes and said:
"What is wanted then? Landscapes?"
"Not landscapes either. Nothing is wanted there."
She finished taking off her gloves and took up a newspaper which had
just come by post; a moment later, she said quietly, apparently
controlling herself:
"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if a medical man had been
available she would have lived. However, I suppose landscape-painters
are entitled to their opinions."
"I have a very definite opinion, I assure you," said I, and she took
refuge behind the newspaper, as though she did not wish to listen. "In
my opinion medical stations, schools, libraries, pharmacies, under
existing conditions, only lead to slavery. The masses are caught in a
vast chain: you do not cut it but only add new links to it. That is my
opinion."
She looked at me and smiled mockingly, and I went on, striving to catch
the thread of my ideas.
"It does not matter that Anna should die in childbirth, but it does
matter that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelagueyas, from dawn to sunset
should be grinding away, ill from overwork, all their lives worried
about their starving sickly children; all their lives they are afraid of
death and disease, and have to be looking after themselves; they fade in
youth, grow old very early, and die in filth and dirt; their children as
they grow up go the same way and hundreds of years slip by and millions
of people live worse than animals—in constant dread of never having a
crust to eat; but the horror of their position is that they have no time
to think of their souls, no time to remember that they are made in the
likeness of God; hunger, cold, animal fear, incessant work, like drifts
of snow block all the ways to spiritual activity, to the very thing that
distinguishes man from the animals, and is the only thing indeed that
makes life worth living. You come to their assistance with hospitals and
schools, but you do not free them from their fetters; on the contrary,
you enslave them even more, since by introducing new prejudices into
their lives, you increase the number of their demands, not to mention
the fact that they have to pay the Zemstvo for their drugs and
pamphlets, and therefore, have to work harder than ever."
"I will not argue with you," said Lyda. "I have heard all that." She put
down her paper. "I will only tell you one thing, it is no good sitting
with folded hands. It is true, we do not save mankind, and perhaps we do
make mistakes, but we do what we can and we are right. The highest and
most sacred truth for an educated being—is to help his neighbours, and
we do what we can to help. You do not like it, but it is impossible to
please everybody."
"True, Lyda, true," said her mother.
In Lyda's presence her courage always failed her, and as she talked she
would look timidly at her, for she was afraid of saying something
foolish or out of place: and she never contradicted, but would always
agree: "True, Lyda, true."
"Teaching peasants to read and write, giving them little moral pamphlets
and medical assistance, cannot decrease either ignorance or mortality,
just as the light from your windows cannot illuminate this huge garden,"
I said. "You give nothing by your interference in the lives of these
people. You only create new demands, and a new compulsion to work."
"Ah! My God, but we must do something!" said Lyda exasperatedly, and I
could tell by her voice that she thought my opinions negligible and
despised me.
"It is necessary," I said, "to free people from hard physical work. It
is necessary to relieve them of their yoke, to give them breathing
space, to save them from spending their whole lives in the kitchen or
the byre, in the fields; they should have time to take thought of their
souls, of God and to develop their spiritual capacities. Every human
being's salvation lies in spiritual activity—in his continual search for
truth and the meaning of life. Give them some relief from rough, animal
labour, let them feel free, then you will see how ridiculous at bottom
your pamphlets and pharmacies are. Once a human being is aware of his
vocation, then he can only be satisfied with religion, service, art, and
not with trifles like that."
"Free them from work?" Lyda gave a smile. "Is that possible?"
"Yes.... Take upon yourself a part of their work. If we all, in town and
country, without exception, agreed to share the work which is being
spent by mankind in the satisfaction of physical demands, then none of
us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us,
rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be
free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should
invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands
to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not
be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their
health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did
not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco
factories and distilleries—what a lot of free time we should have! We
should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all
work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work
together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of
it—truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual,
poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself."
"But you contradict yourself," said Lyda. "You talk about service and
deny education."
"I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on
the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of
understanding—the kind of education we have had from the time of Riurik:
and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not education is
wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual capacities. Not
schools are wanted but universities."
"You deny medicine too."
"Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as
natural phenomenon, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if
you don't cure their causes. Remove the chief cause—physical labour, and
there will be no diseases. I don't acknowledge the science which cures,"
I went on excitedly. "Science and art, when they are true, are directed
not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and the
general—they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the
soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, like
pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber life.
We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly educated
people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets.
All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing
needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and work, and thanks to
them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the
body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still
remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends
to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in
vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and
the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his
position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement of
the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and supporting the existing state
of things. And I don't want to work and will not.... Nothing is wanted,
so let the world go to hell."
"Missyuss, go away," said Lyda to her sister, evidently thinking my
words dangerous to so young a girl.
Genya looked sadly at her sister and mother and went out.
"People generally talk like that," said Lyda, "when they want to excuse
their indifference. It is easier to deny hospitals and schools than to
come and teach."
"True, Lyda, true," her mother agreed.
"You say you will not work," Lyda went on. "Apparently you set a high
price on your work, but do stop arguing. We shall never agree, since I
value the most imperfect library or pharmacy, of which you spoke so
scornfully just now, more than all the landscapes in the world." And at
once she turned to her mother and began to talk in quite a different
tone: "The Prince has got very thin, and is much changed since the last
time he was here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy."
She talked to her mother about the Prince to avoid talking to me. Her
face was burning, and, in order to conceal her agitation, she bent over
the table as if she were short-sighted and made a show of reading the
newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went
home.
IV
All was quiet outside: the village on the other side of the pond was
already asleep, not a single light was to be seen, and on the pond there
was only the faint reflection of the stars. By the gate with the stone
lions stood Genya, waiting to accompany me.
"The village is asleep," I said, trying to see her face in the darkness,
and I could see her dark sad eyes fixed on me. "The innkeeper and the
horse-stealers are sleeping quietly, and decent people like ourselves
quarrel and irritate each other."
It was a melancholy August night—melancholy because it already smelled
of the autumn: the moon rose behind a purple cloud and hardly lighted
the road and the dark fields of winter corn on either side. Stars fell
frequently, Genya walked beside me on the road and tried not to look at
the sky, to avoid seeing the falling stars, which somehow frightened
her.
"I believe you are right," she said, trembling in the evening chill. "If
people could give themselves to spiritual activity, they would soon
burst everything."
"Certainly. We are superior beings, and if we really knew all the power
of the human genius and lived only for higher purposes then we should
become like gods. But this will never be. Mankind will degenerate and of
their genius not a trace will be left."
When the gate was out of sight Genya stopped and hurriedly shook my
hand.
"Good night," she said, trembling; her shoulders were covered only with
a thin blouse and she was shivering with cold. "Come to-morrow."
I was filled with a sudden dread of being left alone with my inevitable
dissatisfaction with myself and people, and I, too, tried not to see the
falling stars.
"Stay with me a little longer," I said. "Please."
I loved Genya, and she must have loved me, because she used to meet me
and walk with me, and because she looked at me with tender admiration.
How thrillingly beautiful her pale face was, her thin nose, her arms,
her slenderness, her idleness, her constant reading. And her mind? I
suspected her of having an unusual intellect: I was fascinated by the
breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the
strong, handsome Lyda, who did not love me. Genya liked me as a painter,
I had conquered her heart by my talent, and I longed passionately to
paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen, who would
one day possess with me the trees, the fields, the river, the dawn, all
Nature, wonderful and fascinating, with whom, as with them, I have felt
helpless and useless.
"Stay with me a moment longer," I called. "I implore you."
I took off my overcoat and covered her childish shoulders. Fearing that
she would look queer and ugly in a man's coat, she began to laugh and
threw it off, and as she did so, I embraced her and began to cover her
face, her shoulders, her arms with kisses.
"Till to-morrow," she whispered timidly as though she was afraid to
break the stillness of the night. She embraced me: "We have no secrets
from one another. I must tell mamma and my sister.... Is it so terrible?
Mamma will be pleased. Mamma loves you, but Lyda!"
She ran to the gates.
"Good-bye," she called out.
For a couple of minutes I stood and heard her running. I had no desire
to go home, there was nothing there to go for. I stood for a while lost
in thought, and then quietly dragged myself back, to have one more look
at the house in which she lived, the dear, simple, old house, which
seemed to look at me with the windows of the mezzanine for eyes, and to
understand everything. I walked past the terrace, sat down on a bench by
the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm-tree, and looked
at the house. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyuss had her
room, shone a bright light, and then a faint green glow. The lamp had
been covered with a shade. Shadows began to move.... I was filled with
tenderness and a calm satisfaction, to think that I could let myself be
carried away and fall in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy at the
thought that only a few yards away in one of the rooms of the house lay
Lyda who did not love me, and perhaps hated me. I sat and waited to see
if Genya would come out. I listened attentively and it seemed to me they
were sitting in the mezzanine.
An hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no longer
visible. The moon hung high above the house and lit the sleeping garden
and the avenues: I could distinctly see the dahlias and roses in the
flower-bed in front of the house, and all seemed to be of one colour. It
was very cold. I left the garden, picked up my overcoat in the road, and
walked slowly home.
Next day after dinner when I went to the Volchaninovs', the glass door
was wide open. I sat down on the terrace expecting Genya to come from
behind the flower-bed or from one of the avenues, or to hear her voice
come from out of the rooms; then I went into the drawing-room and the
dining-room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I
went down a long passage into the hall, and then back again. There were
several doors in the passage and behind one of them I could hear Lyda's
voice:
"To the crow somewhere ... God ..."—she spoke slowly and distinctly, and
was probably dictating—" ... God sent a piece of cheese.... To the crow
... somewhere.... Who is there?" she called out suddenly as she heard my
footsteps.
"It is I."
"Oh! excuse me. I can't come out just now. I am teaching Masha."
"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"
"No. She and my sister left to-day for my Aunt's in Penga, and in the
winter they are probably going abroad." She added after a short silence:
"To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?"
I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and
looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:
"A piece of cheese.... To the crow somewhere God sent a piece of
cheese."
And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only
reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then
along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: "I
have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,"
I read. "I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you
happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried."
Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence....Over the fields
where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled
horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn
was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was
ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs', and once more it became
tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left that
evening for Petersburg.
I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Lately on my way to the Crimea I met
Bielokurov at a station. As of old he was in a poddiovka, wearing an
embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: "Quite
well, thanks be to God." He began to talk. He had sold his estate and
bought another, smaller one in the name of Lyabov Ivanovna. He told me a
little about the Volchaninovs. Lyda, he said, still lived at Sholkovka
and taught the children in the school; little by little she succeeded in
gathering round herself a circle of sympathetic people, who formed a
strong party, and at the last Zemstvo election they drove out Balaguin,
who up till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of Genya
Bielokurov said that she did not live at home and he did not know where
she was.
I have already begun to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and
only now and then, when I am working or reading, suddenly—without rhyme
or reason—I remember the green light in the window, and the sound of my
own footsteps as I walked through the fields that night, when I was in
love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And even more rarely, when I
am sad and lonely, I begin already to recollect and it seems to me that
I, too, am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet....
Missyuss, where are you? TYPHUS
IN a smoking-compartment of the mail-train from Petrograd to Moscow sat
a young lieutenant, Klimov by name. Opposite him sat an elderly man with
a clean-shaven, shipmaster's face, to all appearances a well-to-do Finn
or Swede, who all through the journey smoked a pipe and talked round and
round the same subject.
"Ha! you are an officer! My brother is also an officer, but he is a
sailor. He is a sailor and is stationed at Kronstadt. Why are you going
to Moscow?"
"I am stationed there."
"Ha! Are you married?"
"No. I live with my aunt and sister."
"My brother is also an officer, but he is married and has a wife and
three children. Ha!"
The Finn looked surprised at something, smiled broadly and fatuously as
he exclaimed, "Ha," and every now and then blew through the stem of his
pipe. Klimov, who was feeling rather unwell, and not at all inclined to
answer questions, hated him with all his heart. He thought how good it
would be to snatch his gurgling pipe out of his hands and throw it under
the seat and to order the Finn himself into another car.
"They are awful people, these Finns and ... Greeks," he thought.
"Useless, good-for-nothing, disgusting people. They only cumber the
earth. What is the good of them?"
And the thought of Finns and Greeks filled him with a kind of nausea. He
tried to compare them with the French and the Italians, but the idea of
those races somehow roused in him the notion of organ-grinders, naked
women, and the foreign oleographs which hung over the chest of drawers
in his aunt's house.
The young officer felt generally out of sorts. There seemed to be no
room for his arms and legs, though he had the whole seat to himself; his
mouth was dry and sticky, his head was heavy and his clouded thoughts
seemed to wander at random, not only in his head, but also outside it
among the seats and the people looming in the darkness. Through the
turmoil in his brain, as through a dream, he heard the murmur of voices,
the rattle of the wheels, the slamming of doors. Bells, whistles,
conductors, the tramp of the people on the platforms came oftener than
usual. The time slipped by quickly, imperceptibly, and it seemed that
the train stopped every minute at a station as now and then there would
come up the sound of metallic voices:
"Is the post ready?"
"Ready."
It seemed to him that the stove-neater came in too often to look at the
thermometer, and that trains never stopped passing and his own train was
always roaring over bridges. The noise, the whistle, the Finn, the
tobacco smoke—all mixed with the ominous shifting of misty shapes,
weighed on Klimov like an intolerable nightmare. In terrible anguish he
lifted up his aching head, looked at the lamp whose light was encircled
with shadows and misty spots; he wanted to ask for water, but his dry
tongue would hardly move, and he had hardly strength enough to answer
the Finn's questions. He tried to lie down more comfortably and sleep,
but he could not succeed; the Finn fell asleep several times, woke up
and lighted his pipe, talked to him with his "Ha!" and went to sleep
again; and the lieutenant could still not find room for his legs on the
seat, and all the while the ominous figures shifted before his eyes.
At Spirov he got out to have a drink of water. He saw some people
sitting at a table eating hurriedly.
"How can they eat?" he thought, trying to avoid the smell of roast meat
in the air and seeing the chewing mouths, for both seemed to him utterly
disgusting and made him feel sick.
A handsome lady was talking to a military man in a red cap, and she
showed magnificent white teeth when she smiled; her smile, her teeth,
the lady herself produced in Klimov the same impression of disgust as
the ham and the fried cutlets. He could not understand how the military
man in the red cap could bear to sit near her and look at her healthy
smiling face.
After he had drunk some water, he went back to his place. The Finn sat
and smoked. His pipe gurgled and sucked like a galoche full of holes in
dirty weather.
"Ha!" he said with some surprise. "What station is this?"
"I don't know," said Klimov, lying down and shutting his mouth to keep
out the acrid tobacco smoke.
"When do we get to Tver."
"I don't know. I am sorry, I ... I can't talk. I am not well. I have a
cold."
The Finn knocked out his pipe against the window-frame and began to talk
of his brother, the sailor. Klimov paid no more attention to him and
thought in agony of his soft, comfortable bed, of the bottle of cold
water, of his sister Katy, who knew so well how to tuck him up and
cosset him. He even smiled when there flashed across his mind his
soldier-servant Pavel, taking off his heavy, close-fitting boots and
putting water on the table. It seemed to him that he would only have to
lie on his bed and drink some water and his nightmare would give way to
a sound, healthy sleep.
"Is the post ready?" came a dull voice from a distance.
"Ready," answered a loud, bass voice almost by the very window.
It was the second or third station from Spirov.
Time passed quickly, seemed to gallop along, and there would be no end
to the bells, whistles, and stops. In despair Klimov pressed his face
into the corner of the cushion, held his head in his hands, and again
began to think of his sister Katy and his orderly Pavel; but his sister
and his orderly got mixed up with the looming figures and whirled about
and disappeared. His breath, thrown back from the cushion, burned his
face, and his legs ached and a draught from the window poured into his
back, but, painful though it was, he refused to change his position....
A heavy, drugging torpor crept over him and chained his limbs.
When at length he raised his head, the car was quite light. The
passengers were putting on their overcoats and moving about. The train
stopped. Porters in white aprons and number-plates bustled about the
passengers and seized their boxes. Klimov put on his greatcoat
mechanically and left the train, and he felt as though it were not
himself walking, but some one else, a stranger, and he felt that he was
accompanied by the heat of the train, his thirst, and the ominous,
lowering figures which all night long had prevented his sleeping.
Mechanically he got his luggage and took a cab. The cabman charged him
one rouble and twenty-five copecks for driving him to Povarska Street,
but he did not haggle and submissively took his seat in the sledge. He
could still grasp the difference in numbers, but money had no value to
him whatever.
At home Klimov was met by his aunt and his sister Katy, a girl of
eighteen. Katy had a copy-book and a pencil in her hands as she greeted
him, and he remembered that she was preparing for a teacher's
examination. He took no notice of their greetings and questions, but
gasped from the heat, and walked aimlessly through the rooms until he
reached his own, and then he fell prone on the bed. The Finn, the red
cap, the lady with the white teeth, the smell of roast meat, the
shifting spot in the lamp, filled his mind and he lost consciousness and
did not hear the frightened voices near him.
When he came to himself he found himself in bed, undressed, and noticed
the water-bottle and Pavel, but it did not make him any more comfortable
nor easy. His legs and arms, as before, felt cramped, his tongue clove
to his palate, and he could hear the chuckle of the Finn's pipe.... By
the bed, growing out of Pavel's broad back, a stout, black-bearded
doctor was bustling.
"All right, all right, my lad," he murmured. "Excellent, excellent....
Jist so, jist so...."
The doctor called Klimov "my lad." Instead of "just so," he said "jist
saow," and instead of "yes," "yies."
"Yies, yies, yies," he said. "Jist saow, jist saow.... Don't be
downhearted!"
The doctor's quick, careless way of speaking, his well-fed face, and the
condescending tone in which he said "my lad" exasperated Klimov.
"Why do you call me 'my lad'?" he moaned. "Why this familiarity, damn it
all?"
And he was frightened by the sound of his own voice. It was so dry,
weak, and hollow that he could hardly recognise it.
"Excellent, excellent," murmured the doctor, not at all offended. "Yies,
yies. You mustn't be cross."
And at home the time galloped away as alarmingly quickly as in the
train.... The light of day in his bedroom was every now and then changed
to the dim light of evening.... The doctor never seemed to leave the
bedside, and his "Yies, yies, yies," could be heard at every moment.
Through the room stretched an endless row of faces; Pavel, the Finn,
Captain Taroshevich, Sergeant Maximenko, the red cap, the lady with the
white teeth, the doctor. All of them talked, waved their hands, smoked,
ate. Once in broad daylight Klimov saw his regimental priest, Father
Alexander, in his stole and with the host in his hands, standing by the
bedside and muttering something with such a serious expression as Klimov
had never seen him wear before. The lieutenant remembered that Father
Alexander used to call all the Catholic officers Poles, and wishing to
make the priest laugh, he exclaimed:
"Father Taroshevich, the Poles have fled to the woods."
But Father Alexander, usually a gay, light-hearted man, did not laugh
and looked even more serious, and made the sign of the cross over
Klimov. At night, one after the other, there would come slowly creeping
in and out two shadows. They were his aunt and his sister. The shadow of
his sister would kneel down and pray; she would bow to the ikon, and her
grey shadow on the wall would bow, too, so that two shadows prayed to
God. And all the time there was a smell of roast meat and of the Finn's
pipe, but once Klimov could detect a distinct smell of incense. He
nearly vomited and cried:
"Incense! Take it away."
There was no reply. He could only hear priests chanting in an undertone
and some one running on the stairs.
When Klimov recovered from his delirium there was not a soul in the
bedroom. The morning sun flared through the window and the drawn
curtains, and a trembling beam, thin and keen as a sword, played on the
water-bottle. He could hear the rattle of wheels—that meant there was no
more snow in the streets. The lieutenant looked at the sunbeam, at the
familiar furniture and the door, and his first inclination was to laugh.
His chest and stomach trembled with a sweet, happy, tickling laughter.
From head to foot his whole body was filled with a feeling of infinite
happiness, like that which the first man must have felt when he stood
erect and beheld the world for the first time. Klimov had a passionate
longing for people, movement, talk. His body lay motionless; he could
only move his hands, but he hardly noticed it, for his whole attention
was fixed on little things. He was delighted with his breathing and with
his laughter; he was delighted with the existence of the water-bottle,
the ceiling, the sunbeam, the ribbon on the curtain. God's world, even
in such a narrow corner as his bedroom, seemed to him beautiful, varied,
great. When the doctor appeared the lieutenant thought how nice his
medicine was, how nice and sympathetic the doctor was, how nice and
interesting people were, on the whole.
"Yies, yies, yies," said the doctor. "Excellent, excellent. Now we are
well again. Jist saow. Jist saow."
The lieutenant listened and laughed gleefully. He remembered the Finn,
the lady with the white teeth, the train, and he wanted to eat and
smoke.
"Doctor," he said, "tell them to bring me a slice of rye bread and salt,
and some sardines...."
The doctor refused. Pavel did not obey his order and refused to go for
bread. The lieutenant could not bear it and began to cry like a thwarted
child.
"Ba-by," the doctor laughed. "Mamma! Hush-aby!"
Klimov also began to laugh, and when the doctor had gone, he fell sound
asleep. He woke up with the same feeling of joy and happiness. His aunt
was sitting by his bed.
"Oh, aunty!" He was very happy. "What has been the matter with me?"
"Typhus."
"I say! And now I am well, quite well! Where is Katy?"
"She is not at home. She has probably gone to see some one after her
examination."
The old woman bent over her stocking as she said this; her lips began to
tremble; she turned her face away and suddenly began to sob. In her
grief, she forgot the doctor's orders and cried:
"Oh! Katy! Katy! Our angel is gone from us! She is gone!"
She dropped her stocking and stooped down for it, and her cap fell off
her head. Klimov stared at her grey hair, could not understand, was
alarmed for Katy, and asked:
"But where is she, aunty?"
The old woman, who had already forgotten Klimov and remembered only her
grief, said:
"She caught typhus from you and ... and died. She was buried the day
before yesterday."
This sudden appalling piece of news came home to Klimov's mind, but
dreadful and shocking though it was it could not subdue the animal joy
which thrilled through the convalescent lieutenant. He cried, laughed,
and soon began to complain that he was given nothing to eat.
Only a week later, when, supported by Pavel, he walked in a dressing-
gown to the window, and saw the grey spring sky and heard the horrible
rattle of some old rails being carried by on a lorry, then his heart
ached with sorrow and he began to weep and pressed his forehead against
the window-frame.
"How unhappy I am!" he murmured. "My God, how unhappy I am!"
And joy gave way to his habitual weariness and a sense of his
irreparable loss. GOOSEBERRIES
FROM early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was
still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds
hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes. Ivan
Ivanich, the veterinary surgeon, and Bourkin, the schoolmaster, were
tired of walking and the fields seemed endless to them. Far ahead they
could just see the windmills of the village of Mirousky, to the right
stretched away to disappear behind the village a line of hills, and they
knew that it was the bank of the river; meadows, green willows,
farmhouses; and from one of the hills there could be seen a field as
endless, telegraph-posts, and the train, looking from a distance like a
crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the town. In the calm
weather when all Nature seemed gentle and melancholy, Ivan Ivanich and
Bourkin were filled with love for the fields and thought how grand and
beautiful the country was.
"Last time, when we stopped in Prokofyi's shed," said Bourkin, "you were
going to tell me a story."
"Yes. I wanted to tell you about my brother."
Ivan Ivanich took a deep breath and lighted his pipe before beginning
his story, but just then the rain began to fall. And in about five
minutes it came pelting down and showed no signs of stopping. Ivan
Ivanich stopped and hesitated; the dogs, wet through, stood with their
tails between their legs and looked at them mournfully.
"We ought to take shelter," said Bourkin. "Let us go to Aliokhin. It is
close by."
"Very well."
They took a short cut over a stubble-field and then bore to the right,
until they came to the road. Soon there appeared poplars, a garden, the
red roofs of granaries; the river began to glimmer and they came to a
wide road with a mill and a white bathing-shed. It was Sophino, where
Aliokhin lived.
The mill was working, drowning the sound of the rain, and the dam shook.
Round the carts stood wet horses, hanging their heads, and men were
walking about with their heads covered with sacks. It was wet, muddy,
and unpleasant, and the river looked cold and sullen. Ivan Ivanich and
Bourkin felt wet and uncomfortable through and through; their feet were
tired with walking in the mud, and they walked past the dam to the barn
in silence as though they were angry with each other.
In one of the barns a winnowing-machine was working, sending out clouds
of dust. On the threshold stood Aliokhin himself, a man of about forty,
tall and stout, with long hair, more like a professor or a painter than
a farmer. He was wearing a grimy white shirt and rope belt, and pants
instead of trousers; and his boots were covered with mud and straw. His
nose and eyes were black with dust. He recognised Ivan Ivanich and was
apparently very pleased.
"Please, gentlemen," he said, "go to the house. I'll be with you in a
minute."
The house was large and two-storied. Aliokhin lived down-stairs in two
vaulted rooms with little windows designed for the farm-hands; the
farmhouse was plain, and the place smelled of rye bread and vodka, and
leather. He rarely used the reception-rooms, only when guests arrived.
Ivan Ivanich and Bourkin were received by a chambermaid; such a pretty
young woman that both of them stopped and exchanged glances.
"You cannot imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen," said Aliokhin,
coming after them into the hall. "I never expected you. Pelagueya," he
said to the maid, "give my friends a change of clothes. And I will
change, too. But I must have a bath. I haven't had one since the spring.
Wouldn't you like to come to the bathing-shed? And meanwhile our things
will be got ready."
Pretty Pelagueya, dainty and sweet, brought towels and soap, and
Aliokhin led his guests to the bathing-shed.
"Yes," he said, "it is a long time since I had a bath. My bathing-shed
is all right, as you see. My father and I put it up, but somehow I have
no time to bathe."
He sat down on the step and lathered his long hair and neck, and the
water round him became brown.
"Yes. I see," said Ivan Ivanich heavily, looking at his head.
"It is a long time since I bathed," said Aliokhin shyly, as he soaped
himself again, and the water round him became dark blue, like ink.
Ivan Ivanich came out of the shed, plunged into the water with a splash,
and swam about in the rain, flapping his arms, and sending waves back,
and on the waves tossed white lilies; he swam out to the middle of the
pool and dived, and in a minute came up again in another place and kept
on swimming and diving, trying to reach the bottom. "Ah! how delicious!"
he shouted in his glee. "How delicious!" He swam to the mill, spoke to
the peasants, and came back, and in the middle of the pool he lay on his
back to let the rain fall on his face. Bourkin and Aliokhin were already
dressed and ready to go, but he kept on swimming and diving.
"Delicious," he said. "Too delicious!"
"You've had enough," shouted Bourkin.
They went to the house. And only when the lamp was lit in the large
drawing-room up-stairs, and Bourkin and Ivan Ivanich, dressed in silk
dressing-gowns and warm slippers, lounged in chairs, and Aliokhin
himself, washed and brushed, in a new frock coat, paced up and down
evidently delighting in the warmth and cleanliness and dry clothes and
slippers, and pretty Pelagueya, noiselessly tripping over the carpet and
smiling sweetly, brought in tea and jam on a tray, only then did Ivan
Ivanich begin his story, and it was as though he was being listened to
not only by Bourkin and Aliokhin, but also by the old and young ladies
and the officer who looked down so staidly and tranquilly from the
golden frames.
"We are two brothers," he began, "I, Ivan Ivanich, and Nicholai Ivanich,
two years younger. I went in for study and became a veterinary surgeon,
while Nicholai was at the Exchequer Court when he was nineteen. Our
father, Tchimasha-Himalaysky, was a cantonist, but he died with an
officer's rank and left us his title of nobility and a small estate.
After his death the estate went to pay his debts. However, we spent our
childhood there in the country. We were just like peasant's children,
spent days and nights in the fields and the woods, minded the house,
barked the lime-trees, fished, and so on.... And you know once a man has
fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in
the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to
the day of his death he will be drawn to the country. My brother pined
away in the Exchequer. Years passed and he sat in the same place, wrote
out the same documents, and thought of one thing, how to get back to the
country. And little by little his distress became a definite disorder, a
fixed idea—to buy a small farm somewhere by the bank of a river or a
lake.
"He was a good fellow and I loved him, but I never sympathised with the
desire to shut oneself up on one's own farm. It is a common saying that
a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a
man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and
want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To
leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide
yourself in a farmhouse is not life—it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind
of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six
feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full
liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free
spirit.
"My brother Nicholai, sitting in his office, would dream of eating his
own schi, with its savoury smell floating across the farmyard; and of
eating out in the open air, and of sleeping in the sun, and of sitting
for hours together on a seat by the gate and gazing at the field and the
forest. Books on agriculture and the hints in almanacs were his joy, his
favourite spiritual food; and he liked reading newspapers, but only the
advertisements of land to be sold, so many acres of arable and grass
land, with a farmhouse, river, garden, mill, and mill-pond. And he would
dream of garden-walls, flowers, fruits, nests, carp in the pond, don't
you know, and all the rest of it. These fantasies of his used to vary
according to the advertisements he found, but somehow there was always a
gooseberry-bush in every one. Not a house, not a romantic spot could he
imagine without its gooseberry-bush.
"'Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the
veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything
smells good ... and there are gooseberries.'
"He used to draw out a plan of his estate and always the same things
were shown on it: (a) Farmhouse, (b) cottage, (c) vegetable garden, (d)
gooseberry-bush. He used to live meagrely and never had enough to eat
and drink, dressed God knows how, exactly like a beggar, and always
saved and put his money into the bank. He was terribly stingy. It used
to hurt me to see him, and I used to give him money to go away for a
holiday, but he would put that away, too. Once a man gets a fixed idea,
there's nothing to be done.
"Years passed; he was transferred to another province. He completed his
fortieth year and was still reading advertisements in the papers and
saving up his money. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same
idea of buying a farmhouse with a gooseberry-bush, he married an
elderly, ugly widow, not out of any feeling for her, but because she had
money. With her he still lived stingily, kept her half-starved, and put
the money into the bank in his own name. She had been the wife of a
postmaster and was used to good living, but with her second husband she
did not even have enough black bread; she pined away in her new life,
and in three years or so gave up her soul to God. And my brother never
for a moment thought himself to blame for her death. Money, like vodka,
can play queer tricks with a man. Once in our town a merchant lay dying.
Before his death he asked for some honey, and he ate all his notes and
scrip with the honey so that nobody should get it. Once I was examining
a herd of cattle at a station and a horse-jobber fell under the engine,
and his foot was cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, with the
blood pouring down—a terrible business—and all the while he kept on
asking anxiously for his foot; he had twenty-five roubles in his boot
and did not want to lose them."
"Keep to your story," said Bourkin.
"After the death of his wife," Ivan Ivanich continued, after a long
pause, "my brother began to look out for an estate. Of course you may
search for five years, and even then buy a pig in a poke. Through an
agent my brother Nicholai raised a mortgage and bought three hundred
acres with a farmhouse, a cottage, and a park, but there was no orchard,
no gooseberry-bush, no duck-pond; there was a river but the water in it
was coffee-coloured because the estate lay between a brick-yard and a
gelatine factory. But my brother Nicholai was not worried about that; he
ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes and settled down to a country life.
"Last year I paid him a visit. I thought I'd go and see how things were
with him. In his letters my brother called his estate Tchimbarshov
Corner, or Himalayskoe. I arrived at Himalayskoe in the afternoon. It
was hot. There were ditches, fences, hedges, rows of young fir-trees,
trees everywhere, and there was no telling how to cross the yard or
where to put your horse. I went to the house and was met by a red-haired
dog, as fat as a pig. He tried to bark but felt too lazy. Out of the
kitchen came the cook, barefooted, and also as fat as a pig, and said
that the master was having his afternoon rest. I went in to my brother
and found him sitting on his bed with his knees covered with a blanket;
he looked old, stout, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous.
I half expected him to grunt like a pig.
"We embraced and shed a tear of joy and also of sadness to think that we
had once been young, but were now both going grey and nearing death. He
dressed and took me to see his estate.
"'Well? How are you getting on?' I asked.
"'All right, thank God. I am doing very well.'
"He was no longer the poor, tired official, but a real landowner and a
person of consequence. He had got used to the place and liked it, ate a
great deal, took Russian baths, was growing fat, had already gone to law
with the parish and the two factories, and was much offended if the
peasants did not call him 'Your Lordship.' And, like a good landowner,
he looked after his soul and did good works pompously, never simply.
What good works? He cured the peasants of all kinds of diseases with
soda and castor-oil, and on his birthday he would have a thanksgiving
service held in the middle of the village, and would treat the peasants
to half a bucket of vodka, which he thought the right thing to do. Ah!
Those horrible buckets of vodka. One day a greasy landowner will drag
the peasants before the Zembro Court for trespass, and the next, if it's
a holiday, he will give them a bucket of vodka, and they drink and shout
Hooray! and lick his boots in their drunkenness. A change to good eating
and idleness always fills a Russian with the most preposterous self-
conceit. Nicholai Ivanich who, when he was in the Exchequer, was
terrified to have an opinion of his own, now imagined that what he said
was law. 'Education is necessary for the masses, but they are not fit
for it.' 'Corporal punishment is generally harmful, but in certain cases
it is useful and indispensable.'
"'I know the people and I know how to treat them,' he would say. 'The
people love me. I have only to raise my finger and they will do as I
wish.'
"And all this, mark you, was said with a kindly smile of wisdom. He was
constantly saying: 'We noblemen,' or 'I, as a nobleman.' Apparently he
had forgotten that our grandfather was a peasant and our father a common
soldier. Even our family name, Tchimacha-Himalaysky, which is really an
absurd one, seemed to him full-sounding, distinguished, and very
pleasing.
"But my point does not concern him so much as myself. I want to tell you
what a change took place in me in those few hours while I was in his
house. In the evening, while we were having tea, the cook laid a
plateful of gooseberries on the table. They had not been bought, but
were his own gooseberries, plucked for the first time since the bushes
were planted. Nicholai Ivanich laughed with joy and for a minute or two
he looked in silence at the gooseberries with tears in his eyes. He
could not speak for excitement, then put one into his mouth, glanced at
me in triumph, like a child at last being given its favourite toy, and
said:
"'How good they are!'
"He went on eating greedily, and saying all the while:
"'How good they are! Do try one!'
"It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts
us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one
whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life,
who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with
himself. In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of sadness,
but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like
despair. And at night it grew on me. A bed was made up for me in the
room near my brother's and I could hear him, unable to sleep, going
again and again to the plate of gooseberries. I thought: 'After all,
what a lot of contented, happy people there must be! What an
overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the arrogance
and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the
weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness,
hypocrisy, falsehood.... Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets,
there is peace; out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there
is not one to kick against it all. Think of the people who go to the
market for food: during the day they eat; at night they sleep, talk
nonsense, marry, grow old, piously follow their dead to the cemetery;
one never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life
goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and
against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many
go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of
starvation.... And such a state of things is obviously what we want;
apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their
burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a
general hypnosis. Every happy man should have some one with a little
hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy
people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later
show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him—illness, poverty,
loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees
nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on
living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like
an aspen-tree in the wind—and everything is all right.'
"That night I was able to understand how I, too, had been content and
happy," Ivan Ivanich went on, getting up. "I, too, at meals or out
hunting, used to lay down the law about living, and religion, and
governing the masses. I, too, used to say that teaching is light, that
education is necessary, but that for simple folk reading and writing is
enough for the present. Freedom is a boon, I used to say, as essential
as the air we breathe, but we must wait. Yes—I used to say so, but now I
ask: 'Why do we wait?'" Ivan Ivanich glanced angrily at Bourkin. "Why do
we wait, I ask you? What considerations keep us fast? I am told that we
cannot have everything at once, and that every idea is realised in time.
But who says so? Where is the proof that it is so? You refer me to the
natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is there
order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature, should
stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could jump it
or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait? Wait,
when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full of the
desire to live!
"I left my brother early the next morning, and from that time on I found
it impossible to live in town. The peace and the quiet of it oppress me.
I dare not look in at the windows, for nothing is more dreadful to see
than the sight of a happy family, sitting round a table, having tea. I
am an old man now and am no good for the struggle. I commenced late. I
can only grieve within my soul, and fret and sulk. At night my head
buzzes with the rush of my thoughts and I cannot sleep.... Ah! If I were
young!"
Ivan Ivanich walked excitedly up and down the room and repeated:
"If I were young."
He suddenly walked up to Aliokhin and shook him first by one hand and
then by the other.
"Pavel Konstantinich," he said in a voice of entreaty, "don't be
satisfied, don't let yourself be lulled to sleep! While you are young,
strong, wealthy, do not cease to do good! Happiness does not exist, nor
should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not
in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand.
Do good!"
Ivan Ivanich said this with a piteous supplicating smile, as though he
were asking a personal favour.
Then they all three sat in different corners of the drawing-room and
were silent. Ivan Ivanich's story had satisfied neither Bourkin nor
Aliokhin. With the generals and ladies looking down from their gilt
frames, seeming alive in the firelight, it was tedious to hear the story
of a miserable official who ate gooseberries.... Somehow they had a
longing to hear and to speak of charming people, and of women. And the
mere fact of sitting in the drawing-room where everything—the lamp with
its coloured shade, the chairs, and the carpet under their feet—told how
the very people who now looked down at them from their frames once
walked, and sat and had tea there, and the fact that pretty Pelagueya
was near—was much better than any story.
Aliokhin wanted very much to go to bed; he had to get up for his work
very early, about two in the morning, and now his eyes were closing, but
he was afraid of his guests saying something interesting without his
hearing it, so he would not go. He did not trouble to think whether what
Ivan Ivanich had been saying was clever or right; his guests were
talking of neither groats, nor hay, nor tar, but of something which had
no bearing on his life, and he liked it and wanted them to go on....
"However, it's time to go to bed," said Bourkin, getting up. "I will
wish you good night."
Aliokhin said good night and went down-stairs, and left his guests. Each
had a large room with an old wooden bed and carved ornaments; in the
corner was an ivory crucifix; and their wide, cool beds, made by pretty
Pelagueya, smelled sweetly of clean linen.
Ivan Ivanich undressed in silence and lay down.
"God forgive me, a wicked sinner," he murmured, as he drew the clothes
over his head.
A smell of burning tobacco came from his pipe which lay on the table,
and Bourkin could not sleep for a long time and was worried because he
could not make out where the unpleasant smell came from.
The rain beat against the windows all night long. IN EXILE
OLD Simeon, whose nickname was Brains, and a young Tartar, whose name
nobody knew, were sitting on the bank of the river by a wood-fire. The
other three ferrymen were in the hut. Simeon who was an old man of about
sixty, skinny and toothless, but broad-shouldered and healthy, was
drunk. He would long ago have gone to bed, but he had a bottle in his
pocket and was afraid of his comrades asking him for vodka. The Tartar
was ill and miserable, and, pulling his rags about him, he went on
talking about the good things in the province of Simbirsk, and what a
beautiful and clever wife he had left at home. He was not more than
twenty-five, and now, by the light of the wood-fire, with his pale,
sorrowful, sickly face, he looked a mere boy.
"Of course, it is not a paradise here," said Brains, "you see, water,
the bare bushes by the river, clay everywhere—nothing else.... It is
long past Easter and there is still ice on the water and this morning
there was snow...."
"Bad! Bad!" said the Tartar with a frightened look.
A few yards away flowed the dark, cold river, muttering, dashing against
the holes in the clayey banks as it tore along to the distant sea. By
the bank they were sitting on, loomed a great barge, which the ferrymen
call a karbass. Far away and away, flashing out, flaring up, were fires
crawling like snakes—last year's grass being burned. And behind the
water again was darkness. Little banks of ice could be heard knocking
against the barge.... It was very damp and cold....
The Tartar glanced at the sky. There were as many stars as at home, and
the darkness was the same, but something was missing. At home in the
Simbirsk province the stars and the sky were altogether different.
"Bad! Bad!" he repeated.
"You will get used to it," said Brains with a laugh. "You are young yet
and foolish; the milk is hardly dry on your lips, and in your folly you
imagine that there is no one unhappier than you, but there will come a
time when you will say: God give every one such a life! Just look at me.
In a week's time the floods will be gone, and we will fix the ferry
here, and all of you will go away into Siberia and I shall stay here,
going to and fro. I have been living thus for the last two-and-twenty
years, but, thank God, I want nothing. God give everybody such a life."
The Tartar threw some branches onto the fire, crawled near to it and
said:
"My father is sick. When he dies, my mother and my wife have promised to
come here."
"What do you want your mother and your wife for?" asked Brains. "Just
foolishness, my friend. It's the devil tempting you, plague take him.
Don't listen to the Evil One. Don't give way to him. When he talks to
you about women you should answer him sharply: 'I don't want them!' When
he talks of freedom, you should stick to it and say: 'I don't want it. I
want nothing! No father, no mother, no wife, no freedom, no home, no
love! I want nothing.' Plague take 'em all."
Brains took a swig at his bottle and went on:
"My brother, I am not an ordinary peasant. I don't come from the servile
masses. I am the son of a deacon, and when I was a free man at Rursk, I
used to wear a frock coat, and now I have brought myself to such a point
that I can sleep naked on the ground and eat grass. God give such a life
to everybody. I want nothing. I am afraid of nobody and I think there is
no man richer or freer than I. When they sent me here from Russia I set
my teeth at once and said: 'I want nothing!' The devil whispers to me
about my wife and my kindred, and about freedom and I say to him: 'I
want nothing!' I stuck to it, and, you see, I live happily and have
nothing to grumble at. If a man gives the devil the least opportunity
and listens to him just once, then he is lost and has no hope of
salvation: he will be over ears in the mire and will never get out. Not
only peasants the like of you are lost, but the nobly born and the
educated also. About fifteen years ago a certain nobleman was sent here
from Russia. He had had some trouble with his brothers and had made a
forgery in a will. People said he was a prince or a baron, but perhaps
he was only a high official—who knows? Well, he came here and at once
bought a house and land in Moukhzyink. 'I want to live by my own work,'
said he, 'in the sweat of my brow, because I am no longer a nobleman but
an exile.' 'Why,' said I. 'God help you, for that is good.' He was a
young man then, ardent and eager; he used to mow and go fishing, and he
would ride sixty miles on horseback. Only one thing was wrong; from the
very beginning he was always driving to the post-office at Guyrin. He
used to sit in my boat and sigh: 'Ah! Simeon, it is a long time since
they sent me any money from home.' 'You are better without money,
Vassili Sergnevich,' said I. 'What's the good of it? You just throw away
the past, as though it had never happened, as though it were only a
dream, and start life afresh. Don't listen to the devil,' I said, 'he
won't do you any good, and he will only tighten the noose. You want
money now, but in a little while you will want something else, and then
more and more. If,' said I, 'you want to be happy you must want nothing.
Exactly.... If,' I said, 'fate has been hard on you and me, it is no
good asking her for charity and falling at her feet. We must ignore her
and laugh at her.' That's what I said to him.... Two years later I
ferried him over and he rubbed his hands and laughed. 'I'm going,' said
he, 'to Guyrin to meet my wife. She has taken pity on me, she says, and
she is coming here. She is very kind and good.' And he gave a gasp of
joy. Then one day he came with his wife, a beautiful young lady with a
little girl in her arms and a lot of luggage. And Vassili Andreich kept
turning and looking at her and could not look at her or praise her
enough. 'Yes, Simeon, my friend, even in Siberia people live.' Well,
thought I, all right, you won't be content. And from that time on, mark
you, he used to go to Guyrin every week to find out if money had been
sent from Russia. A terrible lot of money was wasted. 'She stays here,'
said he, 'for my sake, and her youth and beauty wither away here in
Siberia. She shares my bitter lot with me,' said he, 'and I must give
her all the pleasure I can for it....' To make his wife happier he took
up with the officials and any kind of rubbish. And they couldn't have
company without giving food and drink, and they must have a piano and a
fluffy little dog on the sofa—bad cess to it.... Luxury, in a word, all
kinds of tricks. My lady did not stay with him long. How could she?
Clay, water, cold, no vegetables, no fruit; uneducated people and
drunkards, with no manners, and she was a pretty pampered young lady
from the metropolis.... Of course she got bored. And her husband was no
longer a gentleman, but an exile—quite a different matter. Three years
later, I remember, on the eve of the Assumption, I heard shouts from the
other bank. I went over in the ferry and saw my lady, all wrapped up,
with a young gentleman, a government official, in a troika.... I ferried
them across, they got into the carriage and disappeared, and I saw no
more of them. Toward the morning Vassili Andreich came racing up in a
coach and pair. 'Has my wife been across, Simeon, with a gentleman in
spectacles?' 'She has,' said I, 'but you might as well look for the wind
in the fields.' He raced after them and kept it up for five days and
nights. When he came back he jumped on to the ferry and began to knock
his head against the side and to cry aloud. 'You see,' said I, 'there
you are.' And I laughed and reminded him: 'Even in Siberia people live.'
But he went on beating his head harder than ever.... Then he got the
desire for freedom. His wife had gone to Russia and he longed to go
there to see her and take her away from her lover. And he began to go to
the post-office every day, and then to the authorities of the town. He
was always sending applications or personally handing them to the
authorities, asking to have his term remitted and to be allowed to go,
and he told me that he had spent over two hundred roubles on telegrams.
He sold his land and mortgaged his house to the money-lenders. His hair
went grey, he grew round-shouldered, and his face got yellow and
consumptive-looking. He used to cough whenever he spoke and tears used
to come to his eyes. He spent eight years on his applications, and at
last he became happy again and lively: he had thought of a new dodge.
His daughter, you see, had grown up. He doted on her and could never
take his eyes off her. And, indeed, she was very pretty, dark and
clever. Every Sunday he used to go to church with her at Guyrin. They
would stand side by side on the ferry, and she would smile and he would
devour her with his eyes. 'Yes, Simeon,' he would say. 'Even in Siberia
people live. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Look what a fine
daughter I have. You wouldn't find one like her in a thousand miles'
journey.' 'She's a nice girl,' said I. 'Oh, yes.' ... And I thought to
myself: 'You wait.... She is young. Young blood will have its way; she
wants to live and what life is there here?' And she began to pine
away.... Wasting, wasting away, she withered away, fell ill and had to
keep to her bed.... Consumption. That's Siberian happiness, plague take
it; that's Siberian life.... He rushed all over the place after the
doctors and dragged them home with him. If he heard of a doctor or a
quack three hundred miles off he would rush off after him. He spent a
terrific amount of money on doctors and I think it would have been much
better spent on drink. All the same she had to die. No help for it. Then
it was all up with him. He thought of hanging himself, and of trying to
escape to Russia. That would be the end of him. He would try to escape:
he would be caught, tried, penal servitude, flogging."
"Good! Good!" muttered the Tartar with a shiver.
"What is good?" asked Brains.
"Wife and daughter. What does penal servitude and suffering matter? He
saw his wife and his daughter. You say one should want nothing. But
nothing—is evil! His wife spent three years with him. God gave him that.
Nothing is evil, and three years is good. Why don't you understand
that?"
Trembling and stammering as he groped for Russian words, of which he
knew only a few, the Tartar began to say: "God forbid he should fall ill
among strangers, and die and be buried in the cold sodden earth, and
then, if his wife could come to him if only for one day or even for one
hour, he would gladly endure any torture for such happiness, and would
even thank God. Better one day of happiness than nothing."
Then once more he said what a beautiful clever wife he had left at home,
and with his head in his hands he began to cry and assured Simeon that
he was innocent, and had been falsely accused. His two brothers and his
uncle had stolen some horses from a peasant and beat the old man nearly
to death, and the community never looked into the matter at all, and
judgment was passed by which all three brothers were exiled to Siberia,
while his uncle, a rich man, remained at home.
"You will get used to it," said Simeon.
The Tartar relapsed into silence and stared into the fire with his eyes
red from weeping; he looked perplexed and frightened, as if he could not
understand why he was in the cold and the darkness, among strangers, and
not in the province of Simbirsk. Brains lay down near the fire, smiled
at something, and began to say in an undertone:
"But what a joy she must be to your father," he muttered after a pause.
"He loves her and she is a comfort to him, eh? But, my man, don't tell
me. He is a strict, harsh old man. And girls don't want strictness; they
want kisses and laughter, scents and pomade. Yes.... Ah! What a life!"
Simeon swore heavily. "No more vodka! That means bedtime. What? I'm
going, my man."
Left alone, the Tartar threw more branches on the fire, lay down, and,
looking into the blaze, began to think of his native village and of his
wife; if she could come if only for a month, or even a day, and then, if
she liked, go back again! Better a month or even a day, than nothing.
But even if his wife kept her promise and came, how could he provide for
her? Where was she to live?
"If there is nothing to eat; how are we to live?" asked the Tartar
aloud.
For working at the oars day and night he was paid two copecks a day; the
passengers gave tips, but the ferrymen shared them out and gave nothing
to the Tartar, and only laughed at him. And he was poor, cold, hungry,
and fearful.... With his whole body aching and shivering he thought it
would be good to go into the hut and sleep; but there was nothing to
cover himself with, and it was colder there than on the bank. He had
nothing to cover himself with there, but he could make up a fire....
In a week's time, when the floods had subsided and the ferry would be
fixed up, all the ferrymen except Simeon would not be wanted any longer
and the Tartar would have to go from village to village, begging and
looking for work. His wife was only seventeen; beautiful, soft, and
shy.... Could she go unveiled begging through the villages? No. The idea
of it was horrible.
It was already dawn. The barges, the bushy willows above the water, the
swirling flood began to take shape, and up above in a clayey cliff a hut
thatched with straw, and above that the straggling houses of the
village, where the cocks had begun to crow.
The ginger-coloured clay cliff, the barge, the river, the strange wild
people, hunger, cold, illness—perhaps all these things did not really
exist. Perhaps, thought the Tartar, it was only a dream. He felt that he
must be asleep, and he heard his own snoring.... Certainly he was at
home in the Simbirsk province; he had but to call his wife and she would
answer; and his mother was in the next room.... But what awful dreams
there are! Why? The Tartar smiled and opened his eyes. What river was
that? The Volga?
It was snowing.
"Hi! Ferry!" some one shouted on the other bank. "Karba-a-ass!"
The Tartar awoke and went to fetch his mates to row over to the other
side. Hurrying into their sheepskins, swearing sleepily in hoarse
voices, and shivering from the cold, the four men appeared on the bank.
After their sleep, the river from which there came a piercing blast,
seemed to them horrible and disgusting. They stepped slowly into the
barge.... The Tartar and the three ferrymen took the long, broad-bladed
oars, which in the dim light looked like a crab's claw, and Simeon flung
himself with his belly against the tiller. And on the other side the
voice kept on shouting, and a revolver was fired twice, for the man
probably thought the ferrymen were asleep or gone to the village inn.
"All right. Plenty of time!" said Brains in the tone of one who was
convinced that there is no need for hurry in this world—and indeed there
is no reason for it.
The heavy, clumsy barge left the bank and heaved through the willows,
and by the willows slowly receding it was possible to tell that the
barge was moving. The ferrymen plied the oars with a slow measured
stroke; Brains hung over the tiller with his stomach pressed against it
and swung from side to side. In the dim light they looked like men
sitting on some antediluvian animal with long limbs, swimming out to a
cold dismal nightmare country.
They got clear of the willows and swung out into mid-stream. The thud of
the oars and the splash could be heard on the other bank and shouts
came: "Quicker! Quicker!" After another ten minutes the barge bumped
heavily against the landing-stage.
"And it is still snowing, snowing all the time," Simeon murmured, wiping
the snow off his face. "God knows where it comes from!"
On the other side a tall, lean old man was waiting in a short fox-fur
coat and a white astrachan hat. He was standing some distance from his
horses and did not move; he had a stern concentrated expression as if he
were trying to remember something and were furious with his recalcitrant
memory. When Simeon went up to him and took off his hat with a smile he
said:
"I'm in a hurry to get to Anastasievka. My daughter is worse again and
they tell me there's a new doctor at Anastasievka."
The coach was clamped onto the barge and they rowed back. All the while
as they rowed the man, whom Simeon called Vassili Andreich, stood
motionless, pressing his thick lips tight and staring in front of him.
When the driver craved leave to smoke in his presence, he answered
nothing, as if he did not hear. And Simeon hung over the rudder and
looked at him mockingly and said:
"Even in Siberia people live. L-i-v-e!"
On Brains's face was a triumphant expression as if he were proving
something, as if pleased that things had happened just as he thought
they would. The unhappy, helpless look of the man in the fox-fur coat
seemed to give him great pleasure.
"The roads are now muddy, Vassili Andreich," he said, when the horses
had been harnessed on the bank. "You'd better wait a couple of weeks,
until it gets dryer.... If there were any point in going—but you know
yourself that people are always on the move day and night and there's no
point in it. Sure!"
Vassili Andreich said nothing, gave him a tip, took his seat in the
coach and drove away.
"Look! He's gone galloping after the doctor!" said Simeon, shivering in
the cold. "Yes. To look for a real doctor, trying to overtake the wind
in the fields, and catch the devil by the tail, plague take him! What
queer fish there are! God forgive me, a miserable sinner."
The Tartar went up to Brains, and, looking at him with mingled hatred
and disgust, trembling, and mixing Tartar words up with his broken
Russian, said:
"He good ... good. And you ... bad! You are bad! The gentleman is a good
soul, very good, and you are a beast, you are bad! The gentleman is
alive and you are dead.... God made man that he should be alive, that he
should have happiness, sorrow, grief, and you want nothing, so you are
not alive, but a stone! A stone wants nothing and so do you.... You are
a stone—and God does not love you and the gentleman he does."
They all began to laugh: the Tartar furiously knit his brows, waved his
hand, drew his rags round him and went to the fire. The ferrymen and
Simeon went slowly to the hut.
"It's cold," said one of the ferrymen hoarsely, as he stretched himself
on the straw with which the damp, clay floor was covered.
"Yes. It's not warm," another agreed.... "It's a hard life."
All of them lay down. The wind blew the door open. The snow drifted into
the hut. Nobody could bring himself to get up and shut the door; it was
cold, but they put up with it.
"And I am happy," muttered Simeon as he fell asleep. "God give such a
life to everybody."
"You certainly are the devil's own. Even the devil don't need to take
you."
Sounds like the barking of a dog came from outside.
"Who is that? Who is there?"
"It's the Tartar crying."
"Oh! he's a queer fish."
"He'll get used to it!" said Simeon, and at once he fell asleep. Soon
the others slept too and the door was left open. THE LADY WITH THE TOY
DOG
IT was reported that a new face had been seen on the quay; a lady with a
little dog. Dimitri Dimitrich Gomov, who had been a fortnight at Talta
and had got used to it, had begun to show an interest in new faces. As
he sat in the pavilion at Verné's he saw a young lady, blond and fairly
tall, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, pass along the quay. After her
ran a white Pomeranian.
Later he saw her in the park and in the square several times a day. She
walked by herself, always in the same broad-brimmed hat, and with this
white dog. Nobody knew who she was, and she was spoken of as the lady
with the toy dog.
"If," thought Gomov, "if she is here without a husband or a friend, it
would be as well to make her acquaintance."
He was not yet forty, but he had a daughter of twelve and two boys at
school. He had married young, in his second year at the University, and
now his wife seemed half as old again as himself. She was a tall woman,
with dark eyebrows, erect, grave, stolid, and she thought herself an
intellectual woman. She read a great deal, called her husband not
Dimitri, but Demitri, and in his private mind he thought her short-
witted, narrow-minded, and ungracious. He was afraid of her and disliked
being at home. He had begun to betray her with other women long ago,
betrayed her frequently, and, probably for that reason nearly always
spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence he
would maintain that they were an inferior race.
It seemed to him that his experience was bitter enough to give him the
right to call them any name he liked, but he could not live a couple of
days without the "inferior race." With men he was bored and ill at ease,
cold and unable to talk, but when he was with women, he felt easy and
knew what to talk about, and how to behave, and even when he was silent
with them he felt quite comfortable. In his appearance as in his
character, indeed in his whole nature, there was something attractive,
indefinable, which drew women to him and charmed them; he knew it, and
he, too, was drawn by some mysterious power to them.
His frequent, and, indeed, bitter experiences had taught him long ago
that every affair of that kind, at first a divine diversion, a delicious
smooth adventure, is in the end a source of worry for a decent man,
especially for men like those at Moscow who are slow to move,
irresolute, domesticated, for it becomes at last an acute and
extraordinary complicated problem and a nuisance. But whenever he met
and was interested in a new woman, then his experience would slip away
from his memory, and he would long to live, and everything would seem so
simple and amusing.
And it so happened that one evening he dined in the gardens, and the
lady in the broad-brimmed hat came up at a leisurely pace and sat at the
next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, her coiffure told him
that she belonged to society, that she was married, that she was paying
her first visit to Talta, that she was alone, and that she was bored....
There is a great deal of untruth in the gossip about the immorality of
the place. He scorned such tales, knowing that they were for the most
part concocted by people who would be only too ready to sin if they had
the chance, but when the lady sat down at the next table, only a yard or
two away from him, his thoughts were filled with tales of easy
conquests, of trips to the mountains; and he was suddenly possessed by
the alluring idea of a quick transitory liaison, a moment's affair with
an unknown woman whom he knew not even by name.
He beckoned to the little dog, and when it came up to him, wagged his
finger at it. The dog began to growl. Gomov again wagged his finger.
The lady glanced at him and at once cast her eyes down.
"He won't bite," she said and blushed.
"May I give him a bone?"—and when she nodded emphatically, he asked
affably: "Have you been in Talta long?"
"About five days."
"And I am just dragging through my second week."
They were silent for a while.
"Time goes quickly," she said, "and it is amazingly boring here."
"It is the usual thing to say that it is boring here. People live quite
happily in dull holes like Bieliev or Zhidra, but as soon as they come
here they say: 'How boring it is! The very dregs of dullness!' One would
think they came from Spain."
She smiled. Then both went on eating in silence as though they did not
know each other; but after dinner they went off together—and then began
an easy, playful conversation as though they were perfectly happy, and
it was all one to them where they went or what they talked of. They
walked and talked of how the sea was strangely luminous; the water
lilac, so soft and warm, and athwart it the moon cast a golden streak.
They said how stifling it was after the hot day. Gomov told her how he
came from Moscow and was a philologist by education, but in a bank by
profession; and how he had once wanted to sing in opera, but gave it up;
and how he had two houses in Moscow.... And from her he learned that she
came from Petersburg, was born there, but married at S. where she had
been living for the last two years; that she would stay another month at
Talta, and perhaps her husband would come for her, because, he too,
needed a rest. She could not tell him what her husband was—Provincial
Administration or Zemstvo Council—and she seemed to think it funny. And
Gomov found out that her name was Anna Sergueyevna.
In his room at night, he thought of her and how they would meet next
day. They must do so. As he was going to sleep, it struck him that she
could only lately have left school, and had been at her lessons even as
his daughter was then; he remembered how bashful and gauche she was when
she laughed and talked with a stranger—it must be, he thought, the first
time she had been alone, and in such a place with men walking after her
and looking at her and talking to her, all with the same secret purpose
which she could not but guess. He thought of her slender white neck and
her pretty, grey eyes.
"There is something touching about her," he thought as he began to fall
asleep.
II
A week passed. It was a blazing day. Indoors it was stifling, and in the
streets the dust whirled along. All day long he was plagued with thirst
and he came into the pavilion every few minutes and offered Anna
Sergueyevna an iced drink or an ice. It was impossibly hot.
In the evening, when the air was fresher, they walked to the jetty to
see the steamer come in. There was quite a crowd all gathered to meet
somebody, for they carried bouquets. And among them were clearly marked
the peculiarities of Talta: the elderly ladies were youngly dressed and
there were many generals.
The sea was rough and the steamer was late, and before it turned into
the jetty it had to do a great deal of manœuvring. Anna Sergueyevna
looked through her lorgnette at the steamer and the passengers as though
she were looking for friends, and when she turned to Gomov, her eyes
shone. She talked much and her questions were abrupt, and she forgot
what she had said; and then she lost her lorgnette in the crowd.
The well-dressed people went away, the wind dropped, and Gomov and Anna
Sergueyevna stood as though they were waiting for somebody to come from
the steamer. Anna Sergueyevna was silent. She smelled her flowers and
did not look at Gomov.
"The weather has got pleasanter toward evening," he said. "Where shall
we go now? Shall we take a carriage?"
She did not answer.
He fixed his eyes on her and suddenly embraced her and kissed her lips,
and he was kindled with the perfume and the moisture of the flowers; at
once he started and looked round; had not some one seen?
"Let us go to your—" he murmured.
And they walked quickly away.
Her room was stifling, and smelled of scents which she had bought at the
Japanese shop. Gomov looked at her and thought: "What strange chances
there are in life!" From the past there came the memory of earlier good-
natured women, gay in their love, grateful to him for their happiness,
short though it might be; and of others—like his wife—who loved without
sincerity, and talked overmuch and affectedly, hysterically, as though
they were protesting that it was not love, nor passion, but something
more important; and of the few beautiful cold women, into whose eyes
there would flash suddenly a fierce expression, a stubborn desire to
take, to snatch from life more than it can give; they were no longer in
their first youth, they were capricious, unstable, domineering,
imprudent, and when Gomov became cold toward them then their beauty
roused him to hatred, and the lace on their lingerie reminded him of the
scales of fish.
But here there was the shyness and awkwardness of inexperienced youth, a
feeling of constraint; an impression of perplexity and wonder, as though
some one had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergueyevna, "the lady
with the toy dog" took what had happened somehow seriously, with a
particular gravity, as though thinking that this was her downfall and
very strange and improper. Her features seemed to sink and wither, and
on either side of her face her long hair hung mournfully down; she sat
crestfallen and musing, exactly like a woman taken in sin in some old
picture.
"It is not right," she said. "You are the first to lose respect for me."
There was a melon on the table. Gomov cut a slice and began to eat it
slowly. At least half an hour passed in silence.
Anna Sergueyevna was very touching; she irradiated the purity of a
simple, devout, inexperienced woman; the solitary candle on the table
hardly lighted her face, but it showed her very wretched.
"Why should I cease to respect you?" asked Gomov. "You don't know what
you are saying."
"God forgive me!" she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "It is
horrible."
"You seem to want to justify yourself."
"How can I justify myself? I am a wicked, low woman and I despise
myself. I have no thought of justifying myself. It is not my husband
that I have deceived, but myself. And not only now but for a long time
past. My husband may be a good honest man, but he is a lackey. I do not
know what work he does, but I do know that he is a lackey in his soul. I
was twenty when I married him. I was overcome by curiosity. I longed for
something. 'Surely,' I said to myself, 'there is another kind of life.'
I longed to live! To live, and to live.... Curiosity burned me up....
You do not understand it, but I swear by God, I could no longer control
myself. Something strange was going on in me. I could not hold myself
in. I told my husband that I was ill and came here.... And here I have
been walking about dizzily, like a lunatic.... And now I have become a
low, filthy woman whom everybody may despise."
Gomov was already bored; her simple words irritated him with their
unexpected and inappropriate repentance; but for the tears in her eyes
he might have thought her to be joking or playing a part.
"I do not understand," he said quietly. "What do you want?"
She hid her face in his bosom and pressed close to him.
"Believe, believe me, I implore you," she said. "I love a pure, honest
life, and sin is revolting to me. I don't know myself what I am doing.
Simple people say: 'The devil entrapped me,' and I can say of myself:
'The Evil One tempted me.'"
"Don't, don't," he murmured.
He looked into her staring, frightened eyes, kissed her, spoke quietly
and tenderly, and gradually quieted her and she was happy again, and
they both began to laugh.
Later, when they went out, there was not a soul on the quay; the town
with its cypresses looked like a city of the dead, but the sea still
roared and broke against the shore; a boat swung on the waves; and in it
sleepily twinkled the light of a lantern.
They found a cab and drove out to the Oreanda.
"Just now in the hall," said Gomov, "I discovered your name written on
the board—von Didenitz. Is your husband a German?"
"No. His grandfather, I believe, was a German, but he himself is an
Orthodox Russian."
At Oreanda they sat on a bench, not far from the church, looked down at
the sea and were silent. Talta was hardly visible through the morning
mist. The tops of the hills were shrouded in motionless white clouds.
The leaves of the trees never stirred, the cicadas trilled, and the
monotonous dull sound of the sea, coming up from below, spoke of the
rest, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So the sea roared when there was
neither Talta nor Oreanda, and so it roars and will roar, dully,
indifferently when we shall be no more. And in this continual
indifference to the life and death of each of us, lives pent up, the
pledge of our eternal salvation, of the uninterrupted movement of life
on earth and its unceasing perfection. Sitting side by side with a young
woman, who in the dawn seemed so beautiful, Gomov, appeased and
enchanted by the sight of the fairy scene, the sea, the mountains, the
clouds, the wide sky, thought how at bottom, if it were thoroughly
explored, everything on earth was beautiful, everything, except what we
ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and
our own human dignity.
A man came up—a coast-guard—gave a look at them, then went away. He,
too, seemed mysterious and enchanted. A steamer came over from
Feodossia, by the light of the morning star, its own lights already put
out.
"There is dew on the grass," said Anna Sergueyevna after a silence.
"Yes. It is time to go home."
They returned to the town.
Then every afternoon they met on the quay, and lunched together, dined,
walked, enjoyed the sea. She complained that she slept badly, that her
heart beat alarmingly. She would ask the same question over and over
again, and was troubled now by jealousy, now by fear that he did not
sufficiently respect her. And often in the square or the gardens, when
there was no one near, he would draw her close and kiss her
passionately. Their complete idleness, these kisses in the full
daylight, given timidly and fearfully lest any one should see, the heat,
the smell of the sea and the continual brilliant parade of leisured,
well-dressed, well-fed people almost regenerated him. He would tell Anna
Sergueyevna how delightful she was, how tempting. He was impatiently
passionate, never left her side, and she would often brood, and even
asked him to confess that he did not respect her, did not love her at
all, and only saw in her a loose woman. Almost every evening, rather
late, they would drive out of the town, to Oreanda, or to the waterfall;
and these drives were always delightful, and the impressions won during
them were always beautiful and sublime.
They expected her husband to come. But he sent a letter in which he said
that his eyes were bad and implored his wife to come home. Anna
Sergueyevna began to worry.
"It is a good thing I am going away," she would say to Gomov. "It is
fate."
She went in a carriage and he accompanied her. They drove for a whole
day. When she took her seat in the car of an express-train and when the
second bell sounded, she said:
"Let me have another look at you.... Just one more look. Just as you
are."
She did not cry, but was sad and low-spirited, and her lips trembled.
"I will think of you—often," she said. "Good-bye. Good-bye. Don't think
ill of me. We part for ever. We must, because we ought not to have met
at all. Now, good-bye."
The train moved off rapidly. Its lights disappeared, and in a minute or
two the sound of it was lost, as though everything were agreed to put an
end to this sweet, oblivious madness. Left alone on the platform,
looking into the darkness, Gomov heard the trilling of the grasshoppers
and the humming of the telegraph-wires, and felt as though he had just
woke up. And he thought that it had been one more adventure, one more
affair, and it also was finished and had left only a memory. He was
moved, sad, and filled with a faint remorse; surely the young woman,
whom he would never see again, had not been happy with him; he had been
kind to her, friendly, and sincere, but still in his attitude toward
her, in his tone and caresses, there had always been a thin shadow of
raillery, the rather rough arrogance of the successful male aggravated
by the fact that he was twice as old as she. And all the time she had
called him kind, remarkable, noble, so that he was never really himself
to her, and had involuntarily deceived her....
Here at the station, the smell of autumn was in the air, and the evening
was cool.
"It is time for me to go North," thought Gomov, as he left the platform.
"It is time."
III
At home in Moscow, it was already like winter; the stoves were heated,
and in the mornings, when the children were getting ready to go to
school, and had their tea, it was dark and their nurse lighted the lamp
for a short while. The frost had already begun. When the first snow
falls, the first day of driving in sledges, it is good to see the white
earth, the white roofs; one breathes easily, eagerly, and then one
remembers the days of youth. The old lime-trees and birches, white with
hoarfrost, have a kindly expression; they are nearer to the heart than
cypresses and palm-trees, and with the dear familiar trees there is no
need to think of mountains and the sea.
Gomov was a native of Moscow. He returned to Moscow on a fine frosty
day, and when he donned his fur coat and warm gloves, and took a stroll
through Petrovka, and when on Saturday evening he heard the church-bells
ringing, then his recent travels and the places he had visited lost all
their charm. Little by little he sank back into Moscow life, read
eagerly three newspapers a day, and said that he did not read Moscow
papers as a matter of principle. He was drawn into a round of
restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, parties, and he was flattered to
have his house frequented by famous lawyers and actors, and to play
cards with a professor at the University club. He could eat a whole
plateful of hot sielianka.
So a month would pass, and Anna Sergueyevna, he thought, would be lost
in the mists of memory and only rarely would she visit his dreams with
her touching smile, just as other women had done. But more than a month
passed, full winter came, and in his memory everything was clear, as
though he had parted from Anna Sergueyevna only yesterday. And his
memory was lit by a light that grew ever stronger. No matter how,
through the voices of his children saying their lessons, penetrating to
the evening stillness of his study, through hearing a song, or the music
in a restaurant, or the snow-storm howling in the chimney, suddenly the
whole thing would come to life again in his memory: the meeting on the
jetty, the early morning with the mists on the mountains, the steamer
from Feodossia and their kisses. He would pace up and down his room and
remember it all and smile, and then his memories would drift into
dreams, and the past was confused in his imagination with the future. He
did not dream at night of Anna Sergueyevna, but she followed him
everywhere, like a shadow, watching him. As he shut his eyes, he could
see her, vividly, and she seemed handsomer, tenderer, younger than in
reality; and he seemed to himself better than he had been at Talta. In
the evenings she would look at him from the bookcase, from the
fireplace, from the corner; he could hear her breathing and the soft
rustle of her dress. In the street he would gaze at women's faces to see
if there were not one like her....
He was filled with a great longing to share his memories with some one.
But at home it was impossible to speak of his love, and away from
home—there was no one. Impossible to talk of her to the other people in
the house and the men at the bank. And talk of what? Had he loved then?
Was there anything fine, romantic, or elevating or even interesting in
his relations with Anna Sergueyevna? And he would speak vaguely of love,
of women, and nobody guessed what was the matter, and only his wife
would raise her dark eyebrows and say:
"Demitri, the rôle of coxcomb does not suit you at all."
One night, as he was coming out of the club with his partner, an
official, he could not help saying:
"If only I could tell what a fascinating woman I met at Talta."
The official seated himself in his sledge and drove off, but suddenly
called:
"Dimitri Dimitrich!"
"Yes."
"You were right. The sturgeon was tainted."
These banal words suddenly roused Gomov's indignation. They seemed to
him degrading and impure. What barbarous customs and people!
What preposterous nights, what dull, empty days! Furious card-playing,
gourmandising, drinking, endless conversations about the same things,
futile activities and conversations taking up the best part of the day
and all the best of a man's forces, leaving only a stunted, wingless
life, just rubbish; and to go away and escape was impossible—one might
as well be in a lunatic asylum or in prison with hard labour.
Gomov did not sleep that night, but lay burning with indignation, and
then all next day he had a headache. And the following night he slept
badly, sitting up in bed and thinking, or pacing from corner to corner
of his room. His children bored him, the bank bored him, and he had no
desire to go out or to speak to any one.
In December when the holidays came he prepared to go on a journey and
told his wife he was going to Petersburg to present a petition for a
young friend of his—and went to S. Why? He did not know. He wanted to
see Anna Sergueyevna, to talk to her, and if possible to arrange an
assignation.
He arrived at S. in the morning and occupied the best room in the hotel,
where the whole floor was covered with a grey canvas, and on the table
there stood an inkstand grey with dust, adorned with a horseman on a
headless horse holding a net in his raised hand. The porter gave him the
necessary information: von Didenitz; Old Goucharno Street, his own
house—not far from the hotel; lives well, has his own horses, every one
knows him.
Gomov walked slowly to Old Goucharno Street and found the house. In
front of it was a long, grey fence spiked with nails.
"No getting over a fence like that," thought Gomov, glancing from the
windows to the fence.
He thought: "To-day is a holiday and her husband is probably at home.
Besides it would be tactless to call and upset her. If he sent a note
then it might fall into her husband's hands and spoil everything. It
would be better to wait for an opportunity." And he kept on walking up
and down the street, and round the fence, waiting for his opportunity.
He saw a beggar go in at the gate and the dogs attack him. He heard a
piano and the sounds came faintly to his ears. It must be Anna
Sergueyevna playing. The door suddenly opened and out of it came an old
woman, and after her ran the familiar white Pomeranian. Gomov wanted to
call the dog, but his heart suddenly began to thump and in his agitation
he could not remember the dog's name.
He walked on, and more and more he hated the grey fence and thought with
a gust of irritation that Anna Sergueyevna had already forgotten him,
and was perhaps already amusing herself with some one else, as would be
only natural in a young woman forced from morning to night to behold the
accursed fence. He returned to his room and sat for a long time on the
sofa, not knowing what to do. Then he dined and afterward slept for a
long while.
"How idiotic and tiresome it all is," he thought as he awoke and saw the
dark windows; for it was evening. "I've had sleep enough, and what shall
I do to-night?"
He sat on his bed which was covered with a cheap, grey blanket, exactly
like those used in a hospital, and tormented himself.
"So much for the lady with the toy dog.... So much for the great
adventure.... Here you sit."
However, in the morning, at the station, his eye had been caught by a
poster with large letters: "First Performance of 'The Geisha.'" He
remembered that and went to the theatre.
"It is quite possible she will go to the first performance," he thought.
The theatre was full and, as usual in all provincial theatres, there was
a thick mist above the lights, the gallery was noisily restless; in the
first row before the opening of the performance stood the local dandies
with their hands behind their backs, and there in the governor's box, in
front, sat the governor's daughter, and the governor himself sat
modestly behind the curtain and only his hands were visible. The curtain
quivered; the orchestra tuned up for a long time, and while the audience
were coming in and taking their seats, Gomov gazed eagerly round.
At last Anna Sergueyevna came in. She took her seat in the third row,
and when Gomov glanced at her his heart ached and he knew that for him
there was no one in the whole world nearer, dearer, and more important
than she; she was lost in this provincial rabble, the little
undistinguished woman, with a common lorgnette in her hands, yet she
filled his whole life; she was his grief, his joy, his only happiness,
and he longed for her; and through the noise of the bad orchestra with
its tenth-rate fiddles, he thought how dear she was to him. He thought
and dreamed.
With Anna Sergueyevna there came in a young man with short side-
whiskers, very tall, stooping; with every movement he shook and bowed
continually. Probably he was the husband whom in a bitter mood at Talta
she had called a lackey. And, indeed, in his long figure, his side-
whiskers, the little bald patch on the top of his head, there was
something of the lackey; he had a modest sugary smile and in his
buttonhole he wore a University badge exactly like a lackey's number.
In the first entr'acte the husband went out to smoke, and she was left
alone. Gomov, who was also in the pit, came up to her and said in a
trembling voice with a forced smile:
"How do you do?"
She looked up at him and went pale. Then she glanced at him again in
terror, not believing her eyes, clasped her fan and lorgnette tightly
together, apparently struggling to keep herself from fainting. Both were
silent. She sat, he stood; frightened by her emotion, not daring to sit
down beside her. The fiddles and flutes began to play and suddenly it
seemed to them as though all the people in the boxes were looking at
them. She got up and walked quickly to the exit; he followed, and both
walked absently along the corridors, down the stairs, up the stairs,
with the crowd shifting and shimmering before their eyes; all kinds of
uniforms, judges, teachers, crown-estates, and all with badges; ladies
shone and shimmered before them, like fur coats on moving rows of
clothes-pegs, and there was a draught howling through the place laden
with the smell of tobacco and cigar-ends. And Gomov, whose heart was
thudding wildly, thought:
"Oh, Lord! Why all these men and that beastly orchestra?"
At that very moment he remembered how when he had seen Anna Sergueyevna
off that evening at the station he had said to himself that everything
was over between them, and they would never meet again. And now how far
off they were from the end!
On a narrow, dark staircase over which was written: "This Way to the
Amphitheatre," she stopped:
"How you frightened me!" she said, breathing heavily, still pale and
apparently stupefied. "Oh! how you frightened me! I am nearly dead. Why
did you come? Why?"
"Understand me, Anna," he whispered quickly. "I implore you to
understand...."
She looked at him fearfully, in entreaty, with love in her eyes, gazing
fixedly to gather up in her memory every one of his features.
"I suffer so!" she went on, not listening to him. "All the time, I
thought only of you. I lived with thoughts of you.... And I wanted to
forget, to forget, but why, why did you come?"
A little above them, on the landing, two schoolboys stood and smoked and
looked down at them, but Gomov did not care. He drew her to him and
began to kiss her cheeks, her hands.
"What are you doing? What are you doing?" she said in terror, thrusting
him away.... "We were both mad. Go away to-night. You must go away at
once.... I implore you, by everything you hold sacred, I implore you....
The people are coming——-"
Some one passed them on the stairs.
"You must go away," Anna Sergueyevna went on in a whisper. "Do you hear,
Dimitri Dimitrich? I'll come to you in Moscow. I never was happy. Now I
am unhappy and I shall never, never be happy, never! Don't make me
suffer even more! I swear, I'll come to Moscow. And now let us part. My
dear, dearest darling, let us part!"
She pressed his hand and began to go quickly down-stairs, all the while
looking back at him, and in her eyes plainly showed that she was most
unhappy. Gomov stood for a while, listened, then, when all was quiet he
found his coat and left the theatre.
IV
And Anna Sergueyevna began to come to him in Moscow. Once every two or
three months she would leave S., telling her husband that she was going
to consult a specialist in women's diseases. Her husband half believed
and half disbelieved her. At Moscow she would stay at the "Slaviansky
Bazaar" and send a message at once to Gomov. He would come to her, and
nobody in Moscow knew.
Once as he was going to her as usual one winter morning—he had not
received her message the night before—he had his daughter with him, for
he was taking her to school which was on the way. Great wet flakes of
snow were falling.
"Three degrees above freezing," he said, "and still the snow is falling.
But the warmth is only on the surface of the earth. In the upper strata
of the atmosphere there is quite a different temperature."
"Yes, papa. Why is there no thunder in winter?"
He explained this too, and as he spoke he thought of his assignation,
and that not a living soul knew of it, or ever would know. He had two
lives; one obvious, which every one could see and know, if they were
sufficiently interested, a life full of conventional truth and
conventional fraud, exactly like the lives of his friends and
acquaintances; and another, which moved underground. And by a strange
conspiracy of circumstances, everything that was to him important,
interesting, vital, everything that enabled him to be sincere and denied
self-deception and was the very core of his being, must dwell hidden
away from others, and everything that made him false, a mere shape in
which he hid himself in order to conceal the truth, as for instance his
work in the bank, arguments at the club, his favourite gibe about women,
going to parties with his wife—all this was open. And, judging others by
himself, he did not believe the things he saw, and assumed that
everybody else also had his real vital life passing under a veil of
mystery as under the cover of the night. Every man's intimate existence
is kept mysterious, and perhaps, in part, because of that civilised
people are so nervously anxious that a personal secret should be
respected.
When he had left his daughter at school, Gomov went to the "Slaviansky
Bazaar." He took off his fur coat down-stairs, went up and knocked
quietly at the door. Anna Sergueyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress,
tired by the journey, had been expecting him to come all night. She was
pale, and looked at him without a smile, and flung herself on his breast
as soon as he entered. Their kiss was long and lingering as though they
had not seen each other for a couple of years.
"Well, how are you getting on down there?" he asked. "What is your
news?"
"Wait. I'll tell you presently.... I cannot."
She could not speak, for she was weeping. She turned her face from him
and dried her eyes.
"Well, let her cry a bit.... I'll wait," he thought, and sat down.
Then he rang and ordered tea, and then, as he drank it, she stood and
gazed out of the window.... She was weeping in distress, in the bitter
knowledge that their life had fallen out so sadly; only seeing each
other in secret, hiding themselves away like thieves! Was not their life
crushed?
"Don't cry.... Don't cry," he said.
It was clear to him that their love was yet far from its end, which
there was no seeing. Anna Sergueyevna was more and more passionately
attached to him; she adored him and it was inconceivable that he should
tell her that their love must some day end; she would not believe it.
He came up to her and patted her shoulder fondly and at that moment he
saw himself in the mirror.
His hair was already going grey. And it seemed strange to him that in
the last few years he should have got so old and ugly. Her shoulders
were warm and trembled to his touch. He was suddenly filled with pity
for her life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably beginning to
fade and wither, like his own. Why should she love him so much? He
always seemed to women not what he really was, and they loved in him,
not himself, but the creature of their imagination, the thing they
hankered for in life, and when they had discovered their mistake, still
they loved him. And not one of them was happy with him. Time passed; he
met women and was friends with them, went further and parted, but never
once did he love; there was everything but love.
And now at last when his hair was grey he had fallen in love, real
love—for the first time in his life.
Anna Sergueyevna and he loved one another, like dear kindred, like
husband and wife, like devoted friends; it seemed to them that Fate had
destined them for one another, and it was inconceivable that he should
have a wife, she a husband; they were like two birds of passage, a male
and a female, which had been caught and forced to live in separate
cages. They had forgiven each other all the past of which they were
ashamed; they forgave everything in the present, and they felt that
their love had changed both of them.
Formerly, when he felt a melancholy compunction, he used to comfort
himself with all kinds of arguments, just as they happened to cross his
mind, but now he was far removed from any such ideas; he was filled with
a profound pity, and he desired to be tender and sincere....
"Don't cry, my darling," he said. "You have cried enough.... Now let us
talk and see if we can't find some way out."
Then they talked it all over, and tried to discover some means of
avoiding the necessity for concealment and deception, and the torment of
living in different towns, and of not seeing each other for a long time.
How could they shake off these intolerable fetters?
"How? How?" he asked, holding his head in his hands. "How?"
And it seemed that but a little while and the solution would be found
and there would begin a lovely new life; and to both of them it was
clear that the end was still very far off, and that their hardest and
most difficult period was only just beginning. GOUSSIEV
IT was already dark and would soon be night.
Goussiev, a private on long leave, raised himself a little in his
hammock and said in a whisper:
"Can you hear me, Pavel Ivanich? A soldier at Souchan told me that their
boat ran into an enormous fish and knocked a hole in her bottom."
The man of condition unknown whom he addressed, and whom everybody in
the hospital-ship called Pavel Ivanich, was silent, as if he had not
heard.
And once more there was silence.... The wind whistled through the
rigging, the screw buzzed, the waves came washing, the hammocks
squeaked, but to all these sounds their ears were long since accustomed
and it seemed as though everything were wrapped in sleep and silence. It
was very oppressive. The three patients—two soldiers and a sailor—who
had played cards all day were now asleep and tossing to and fro.
The vessel began to shake. The hammock under Goussiev slowly heaved up
and down, as though it were breathing—one, two, three.... Something
crashed on the floor and began to tinkle: the jug must have fallen down.
"The wind has broken loose...." said Goussiev, listening attentively.
This time Pavel Ivanich coughed and answered irritably:
"You spoke just now of a ship colliding with a large fish, and now you
talk of the wind breaking loose.... Is the wind a dog to break loose?"
"That's what people say."
"Then people are as ignorant as you.... But what do they not say? You
should keep a head on your shoulders and think. Silly idiot!"
Pavel Ivanich was subject to seasickness. When the ship rolled he would
get very cross, and the least trifle would upset him, though Goussiev
could never see anything to be cross about. What was there unusual in
his story about the fish or in his saying that the wind had broken
loose? Suppose the fish were as big as a mountain and its back were as
hard as a sturgeon's, and suppose that at the end of the wood there were
huge stone walls with the snarling winds chained up to them.... If they
do not break loose, why then do they rage over the sea as though they
were possessed, and rush about like dogs? If they are not chained, what
happens to them when it is calm?
Goussiev thought for a long time of a fish as big as a mountain, and of
thick rusty chains; then he got tired of that and began to think of his
native place whither he was returning after five years' service in the
Far East. He saw with his mind's eye the great pond covered with
snow.... On one side of the pond was a brick-built pottery, with a tall
chimney belching clouds of black smoke, and on the other side was the
village.... From the yard of the fifth house from the corner came his
brother Alency in a sledge; behind him sat his little son Vanka in large
felt boots, and his daughter Akulka, also in felt boots. Alency is
tipsy, Vanka laughs, and Akulka's face is hidden—she is well wrapped up.
"The children will catch cold ..." thought Goussiev. "God grant them,"
he whispered, "a pure right mind that they may honour their parents and
be better than their father and mother...."
"The boots want soling," cried the sick sailor in a deep voice. "Aye,
aye."
The thread of Goussiev's thoughts was broken, and instead of the pond,
suddenly—without rhyme or reason—he saw a large bull's head without
eyes, and the horse and sledge did not move on, but went round and round
in a black mist. But still he was glad he had seen his dear ones. He
gasped for joy, and his limbs tingled and his fingers throbbed.
"God suffered me to see them!" he muttered, and opened his eyes and
looked round in the darkness for water.
He drank, then lay down again, and once more the sledge skimmed along,
and he saw the bull's head without eyes, black smoke, clouds of it. And
so on till dawn.
II
At first through the darkness there appeared only a blue circle, the
port-hole, then Goussiev began slowly to distinguish the man in the next
hammock, Pavel Ivanich. He was sleeping in a sitting position, for if he
lay down he could not breathe. His face was grey; his nose long and
sharp, and his eyes were huge, because he was so thin; his temples were
sunk, his beard scanty, the hair on his head long.... By his face it was
impossible to tell his class: gentleman, merchant, or peasant; judging
by his appearance and long hair he looked almost like a recluse, a lay-
brother, but when he spoke—he was not at all like a monk. He was losing
strength through his cough and his illness and the suffocating heat, and
he breathed heavily and was always moving his dry lips. Noticing that
Goussiev was looking at him, he turned toward him and said:
"I'm beginning to understand.... Yes.... Now I understand."
"What do you understand, Pavel Ivanich?"
"Yes.... It was strange to me at first, why you sick men, instead of
being kept quiet, should be on this steamer, where the heat is stifling,
and stinking, and pitching and tossing, and must be fatal to you; but
now it is all clear to me.... Yes. The doctors sent you to the steamer
to get rid of you. They got tired of all the trouble you gave them,
brutes like you.
...You don't pay them; you only give a lot of trouble, and if you die
you spoil their reports. Therefore you are just cattle, and there is no
difficulty in getting rid of you.... They only need to lack conscience
and humanity, and to deceive the owners of the steamer. We needn't worry
about the first, they are experts by nature; but the second needs a
certain amount of practice. In a crowd of four hundred healthy soldiers
and sailors—five sick men are never noticed; so you were carried up to
the steamer, mixed with a healthy lot who were counted in such a hurry
that nothing wrong was noticed, and when the steamer got away they saw
fever-stricken and consumptive men lying helpless on the deck...."
Goussiev could not make out what Pavel Ivanich was talking about;
thinking he was being taken to task, he said by way of excusing himself:
"I lay on the deck because when we were taken off the barge I caught a
chill."
"Shocking!" said Pavel Ivanich. "They know quite well that you can't
last out the voyage, and yet they send you here! You may get as far as
the Indian Ocean, but what then? It is awful to think of.... And that's
all the return you get for faithful unblemished service!"
Pavel Ivanich looked very angry, and smote his forehead and gasped:
"They ought to be shown up in the papers. There would be an awful row."
The two sick soldiers and the sailor were already up and had begun to
play cards, the sailor propped up in his hammock, and the soldiers
squatting uncomfortably on the floor. One soldier had his right arm in a
sling and his wrist was tightly bandaged so that he had to hold the
cards in his left hand or in the crook of his elbow. The boat was
rolling violently so that it was impossible to get up or to drink tea or
to take medicine.
"You were an orderly?" Pavel Ivanich asked Goussiev.
"That's it. An orderly."
"My God, my God!" said Pavel Ivanich sorrowfully. "To take a man from
his native place, drag him fifteen thousand miles, drive him into
consumption ... and what for? I ask you. To make him an orderly to some
Captain Farthing or Midshipman Hole! Where's the sense of it?"
"It's not a bad job, Pavel Ivanich. You get up in the morning, clean the
boots, boil the samovar, tidy up the room, and then there is nothing to
do. The lieutenant draws plans all day long, and you can pray to God if
you like—or read books—or go out into the streets. It's a good enough
life."
"Yes. Very good! The lieutenant draws plans, and you stay in the kitchen
all day long and suffer from homesickness.... Plans.... Plans don't
matter. It's human life that matters! Life doesn't come again. One
should be sparing of it."
"Certainly Pavel Ivanich. A bad man meets no quarter, either at home, or
in the army, but if you live straight, and do as you are told, then no
one will harm you. They are educated and they understand.... For five
years now I've never been in the cells and I've only been thrashed
once—touch wood!"
"What was that for?"
"Fighting. I have a heavy fist, Pavel Ivanich. Four Chinamen came into
our yard: they were carrying wood, I think, but I don't remember. Well,
I was bored. I went for them and one of them got a bloody nose. The
lieutenant saw it through the window and gave me a thick ear."
"You poor fool," muttered Pavel Ivanich. "You don't understand
anything."
He was completely exhausted with the tossing of the boat and shut his
eyes; his head fell back and then flopped forward onto his chest. He
tried several times to lie down, but in vain, for he could not breathe.
"And why did you go for the four Chinamen?" he asked after a while.
"For no reason. They came into the yard and I went for them."
Silence fell.... The gamblers played for a couple of hours, absorbed and
cursing, but the tossing of the ship tired even them; they threw the
cards away and laid down. Once more Goussiev thought of the big pond,
the pottery, the village. Once more the sledges skimmed along, once more
Vanka laughed, and that fool of an Akulka opened her fur coat, and
stretched out her feet; look, she seemed to say, look, poor people, my
felt boots are new and not like Vanka's.
"She's getting on for six and still she has no sense!" said Goussiev.
"Instead of showing your boots off, why don't you bring some water to
your soldier-uncle? I'll give you a present."
Then came Andrea, with his firelock on his shoulder, carrying a hare he
had shot, and he was followed by Tsaichik the cripple, who offered him a
piece of soap for the hare; and there was the black heifer in the yard,
and Domna sewing a shirt and crying over something, and there was the
eyeless bull's head and the black smoke....
Overhead there was shouting, sailors running; the sound of something
heavy being dragged along the deck, or something had broken.... More
running. Something wrong? Goussiev raised his head, listened and saw the
two soldiers and the sailor playing cards again; Pavel Ivanich sitting
up and moving his lips. It was very close, he could hardly breathe, he
wanted a drink, but the water was warm and disgusting.... The pitching
of the boat was now better.
Suddenly something queer happened to one of the soldiers.... He called
ace of diamonds, lost his reckoning and dropped his cards. He started
and laughed stupidly and looked round.
"In a moment, you fellows," he said and lay down on the floor.
All were at a loss. They shouted at him but he made no reply.
"Stiepan, are you ill?" asked the other soldier with the bandaged hand.
"Perhaps we'd better call the priest, eh?"
"Stiepan, drink some water," said the sailor. "Here, mate, have a
drink."
"What's the good of breaking his teeth with the jug," shouted Goussiev
angrily. "Don't you see, you fatheads?"
"What."
"What!" cried Goussiev. "He's snuffed it, dead. That's what! Good God,
what fools!..."
III
The rolling stopped and Pavel Ivanich cheered up. He was no longer
peevish. His face had an arrogant, impetuous, and mocking expression. He
looked as if he were on the point of saying: "I'll tell you a story that
will make you die of laughter." Their port-hole was open and a soft wind
blew in on Pavel Ivanich. Voices could be heard and the splash of oars
in the water.... Beneath the window some one was howling in a thin,
horrible voice; probably a Chinaman singing.
"Yes. We are in harbour," said Pavel Ivanich, smiling mockingly.
"Another month and we shall be in Russia. It's true; my gallant
warriors, I shall get to Odessa and thence I shall go straight to
Kharkhov. At Kharkhov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him
and I shall say, 'now, my friend, give up your rotten little love-
stories and descriptions of nature, and expose the vileness of the human
biped.... There's a subject for you.'"
He thought for a moment and then he said:
"Goussiev, do you know how I swindled them?"
"Who, Pavel Ivanich?"
"The lot out there.... You see there's only first and third class on the
steamer, and only peasants are allowed to go third. If you have a decent
suit, and look like a nobleman or a bourgeois, at a distance, then you
must go first. It may break you, but you have to lay down your five
hundred roubles. 'What's the point of such an arrangement?' I asked. 'Is
it meant to raise the prestige of Russian intellectuals?' 'Not a bit,'
said they. 'We don't let you go, simply because it is impossible for a
decent man to go third. It is so vile and disgusting.' 'Yes,' said I.
'Thanks for taking so much trouble about decent people. Anyhow, bad or
no, I haven't got five hundred roubles as I have neither robbed the
treasury nor exploited foreigners, nor dealt in contraband, nor flogged
any one to death, and, therefore, I think I have a right to go first-
class and to take rank with the intelligentsia of Russia.' But there's
no convincing them by logic.... I had to try fraud. I put on a peasant's
coat and long boots, and a drunken, stupid expression and went to the
agent and said: 'Give me a ticket, your Honour.'
"'What's your position?' says the agent.
"'Clerical,' said I. 'My father was an honest priest. He always told the
truth to the great ones of the earth, and so he suffered much.'"
Pavel Ivanich got tired with talking, and his breath failed him, but he
went on:
"Yes. I always tell the truth straight out.... I am afraid of nobody and
nothing. There's a great difference between myself and you in that
respect. You are dull, blind, stupid, you see nothing, and you don't
understand what you do see. You are told that the wind breaks its chain,
that you are brutes and worse, and you believe; you are thrashed and you
kiss the hand that thrashes you; a swine in a raccoon pelisse robs you,
and throws you sixpence for tea, and you say: 'Please, your Honour, let
me kiss your hand.' You are pariahs, skunks.... I am different. I live
consciously. I see everything, as an eagle or a hawk sees when it hovers
over the earth, and I understand everything. I am a living protest. I
see injustice—I protest; I see bigotry and hypocrisy—I protest; I see
swine triumphant—I protest, and I am unconquerable. No Spanish
inquisition can make me hold my tongue. Aye.... Cut my tongue out. I'll
protest by gesture.... Shut me up in a dungeon—I'll shout so loud that I
shall be heard for a mile round, or I'll starve myself, so that there
shall be a still heavier weight on their black consciences. Kill me—and
my ghost will return. All my acquaintances tell me: 'You are a most
insufferable man, Pavel Ivanich!' I am proud of such a reputation. I
served three years in the Far East, and have got bitter memories enough
for a hundred years. I inveighed against it all. My friends write from
Russia: 'Do not come.' But I'm going, to spite them.... Yes.... That is
life. I understand. You can call that life."
Goussiev was not listening, but lay looking out of the port-hole; on the
transparent lovely turquoise water swung a boat all shining in the
shimmering light; a fat Chinaman was sitting in it eating rice with
chop-sticks. The water murmured softly, and over it lazily soared white
sea-gulls.
"It would be fun to give that fat fellow one on the back of his
neck...." thought Goussiev, watching the fat Chinaman and yawning.
He dozed, and it seemed to him that all the world was slumbering. Time
slipped swiftly away. The day passed imperceptibly; imperceptibly the
twilight fell.... The steamer was still no longer but was moving on.
IV
Two days passed. Pavel Ivanich no longer sat up, but lay full length;
his eyes were closed and his nose seemed to be sharper than ever.
"Pavel Ivanich!" called Goussiev, "Pavel Ivanich."
Pavel Ivanich opened his eyes and moved his lips.
"Aren't you well?"
"It's nothing," answered Pavel Ivanich, breathing heavily. "It's
nothing. No. I'm much better. You see I can lie down now. I'm much
better."
"Thank God for it, Pavel Ivanich."
"When I compare myself with you, I am sorry for you ... poor devils. My
lungs are all right; my cough comes from indigestion ... I can endure
this hell, not to mention the Red Sea! Besides, I have a critical
attitude toward my illness, as well as to my medicine. But you ... you
are ignorant.... It's hard lines on you, very hard."
The ship was running smoothly; it was calm but still stifling and hot as
a Turkish bath; it was hard not only to speak but even to listen without
an effort. Goussiev clasped his knees, leaned his head on them and
thought of his native place. My God, in such heat it was a pleasure to
think of snow and cold! He saw himself driving on a sledge, and suddenly
the horses were frightened and bolted.... Heedless of roads, dikes,
ditches they rushed like mad through the village, across the pond, past
the works, through the fields.... "Hold them in!" cried the women and
the passers-by. "Hold them in!" But why hold them in? Let the cold wind
slap your face and cut your hands; let the lumps of snow thrown up by
the horses' hoofs fall on your hat, down your neck and chest; let the
runners of the sledge be buckled, and the traces and harness be torn and
be damned to it! What fun when the sledge topples over and you are flung
hard into a snow-drift; with your face slap into the snow, and you get
up all white with your moustaches covered with icicles, hatless,
gloveless, with your belt undone.... People laugh and dogs bark....
Pavel Ivanich, with one eye half open looked at Goussiev and asked
quietly:
"Goussiev, did your commander steal?"
"How do I know, Pavel Ivanich? The likes of us don't hear of it."
A long time passed in silence. Goussiev thought, dreamed, drank water;
it was difficult to speak, difficult to hear, and he was afraid of being
spoken to. One hour passed, a second, a third; evening came, then night;
but he noticed nothing as he sat dreaming of the snow.
He could hear some one coming into the ward; voices, but five minutes
passed and all was still.
"God rest his soul!" said the soldier with the bandaged hand. "He was a
restless man."
"What?" asked Goussiev. "Who?"
"He's dead. He has just been taken up-stairs."
"Oh, well," muttered Goussiev with a yawn. "God rest his soul."
"What do you think, Goussiev?" asked the bandaged soldier after some
time. "Will he go to heaven?"
"Who?"
"Pavel Ivanich."
"He will. He suffered much. Besides, he was a priest's son, and priests
have many relations. They will pray for his soul."
The bandaged soldier sat down on Goussiev's hammock and said in an
undertone:
"You won't live much longer, Goussiev. You'll never see Russia."
"Did the doctor or the nurse tell you that?" asked Goussiev.
"No one told me, but I can see it. You can always tell when a man is
going to die soon. You neither eat nor drink, and you have gone very
thin and awful to look at. Consumption. That's what it is. I'm not
saying this to make you uneasy, but because I thought you might like to
have the last sacrament. And if you have any money, you had better give
it to the senior officer."
"I have not written home," said Goussiev. "I shall die and they will
never know."
"They will know," said the sailor in his deep voice. "When you die they
will put you down in the log, and at Odessa they will give a note to the
military governor, and he will send it to your parish or wherever it
is...."
This conversation made Goussiev begin to feel unhappy and a vague desire
began to take possession of him. He drank water—it was not that; he
stretched out to the port-hole and breathed the hot, moist air—it was
not that; he tried to think of his native place and the snow—it was not
that.... At last he felt that he would choke if he stayed a moment
longer in the hospital.
"I feel poorly, mates," he said. "I want to go on deck. For Christ's
sake take me on deck."
Goussiev flung his arms round the soldier's neck and the soldier held
him with his free arm and supported him up the gangway. On deck there
were rows and rows of sleeping soldiers and sailors; so many of them
that it was difficult to pick a way through them.
"Stand up," said the bandaged soldier gently. "Walk after me slowly and
hold on to my shirt...."
It was dark. There was no light on deck or on the masts or over the sea.
In the bows a sentry stood motionless as a statue, but he looked as if
he were asleep. It was as though the steamer had been left to its own
sweet will, to go where it liked.
"They are going to throw Pavel Ivanich into the sea," said the bandaged
soldier. "They will put him in a sack and throw him overboard."
"Yes. That's the way they do."
"But it's better to lie at home in the earth. Then the mother can go to
the grave and weep over it."
"Surely."
There was a smell of dung and hay. With heads hanging there were oxen
standing by the bulwark—one, two, three ... eight beasts. And there was
a little horse. Goussiev put out his hand to pat it, but it shook its
head, showed its teeth and tried to bite his sleeve.
"Damn you," said Goussiev angrily.
He and the soldier slowly made their way to the bows and stood against
the bulwark and looked silently up and down. Above them was the wide
sky, bright with stars, peace and tranquillity—exactly as it was at home
in his village; but below—darkness and turbulence. Mysterious towering
waves. Each wave seemed to strive to rise higher than the rest; and they
pressed and jostled each other and yet others came, fierce and ugly, and
hurled themselves into the fray.
There is neither sense nor pity in the sea. Had the steamer been
smaller, and not made of tough iron, the waves would have crushed it
remorselessly and all the men in it, without distinction of good and
bad. The steamer too seemed cruel and senseless. The large-nosed monster
pressed forward and cut its way through millions of waves; it was afraid
neither of darkness, nor of the wind, nor of space, nor of loneliness;
it cared for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, the monster would
crush them without distinction of good and bad.
"Where are we now?" asked Goussiev.
"I don't know. Must be the ocean."
"There's no land in sight."
"Why, they say we shan't see land for another seven days."
The two soldiers looked at the white foam gleaming with phosphorescence.
Goussiev was the first to break the silence.
"Nothing is really horrible," he said. "You feel uneasy, as if you were
in a dark forest. Suppose a boat were lowered and I was ordered to go a
hundred miles out to sea to fish—I would go. Or suppose I saw a soul
fall into the water—I would go in after him. I wouldn't go in for a
German or a Chinaman, but I'd try to save a Russian."
"Aren't you afraid to die?"
"Yes. I'm afraid. I'm sorry for the people at home. I have a brother at
home, you know, and he is not steady; he drinks, beats his wife for
nothing at all, and my old father and mother may be brought to ruin. But
my legs are giving way, mate, and it is hot here.... Let me go to bed."
V
Goussiev went back to the ward and lay down in his hammock. As before, a
vague desire tormented him and he could not make out what it was. There
was a congestion in his chest; a noise in his head, and his mouth was so
dry that he could hardly move his tongue. He dozed and dreamed, and,
exhausted by the heat, his cough and the nightmares that haunted him,
toward morning he fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed he was in barracks,
and the bread had just been taken out of the oven, and he crawled into
the oven and lathered himself with a birch broom. He slept for two days
and on the third day in the afternoon two sailors came down and carried
him out of the ward.
He was sewn up in sail-cloth, and to make him heavier two iron bars were
sewn up with him. In the sail-cloth he looked like a carrot or a radish,
broad at the top, narrow at the bottom.... Just before sunset he was
taken on deck and laid on a board one end of which lay on the bulwark,
the other on a box, raised up by a stool. Round him stood the invalided
soldiers.
"Blessed is our God," began the priest; "always, now and for ever and
ever."
"Amen!" said three sailors.
The soldiers and the crew crossed themselves and looked askance at the
waves. It was strange that a man should be sewn up in sail-cloth and
dropped into the sea. Could it happen to any one?
The priest sprinkled Goussiev with earth and bowed. A hymn was sung.
The guard lifted up the end of the board, Goussiev slipped down it; shot
headlong, turned over in the air, then plop! The foam covered him, for a
moment it looked as though he was swathed in lace, but the moment
passed—and he disappeared beneath the waves.
He dropped down to the bottom. Would he reach it? The bottom is miles
down, they say. He dropped down almost sixty or seventy feet, then began
to go slower and slower, swung to and fro as though he were thinking;
then, borne along by the current; he moved more sideways than downward.
But soon he met a shoal of pilot-fish. Seeing a dark body, the fish
stopped dead and sudden, all together, turned and went back. Less than a
minute later, like arrows they darted at Goussiev, zigzagging through
the water around him....
Later came another dark body, a shark. Gravely and leisurely, as though
it had not noticed Goussiev, it swam up under him, and he rolled over on
its back; it turned its belly up, taking its ease in the warm,
translucent water, and slowly opened its mouth with its two rows of
teeth. The pilot-fish were wildly excited; they stopped to see what was
going to happen. The shark played with the body, then slowly opened its
mouth under it, touched it with its teeth, and the sail-cloth was ripped
open from head to foot; one of the bars fell out, frightening the pilot-
fish and striking the shark on its side, and sank to the bottom.
And above the surface, the clouds were huddling up about the setting
sun; one cloud was like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, another
like a pair of scissors.... From behind the clouds came a broad green
ray reaching up to the very middle of the sky; a little later a violet
ray was flung alongside this, and then others gold and pink.... The sky
was soft and lilac, pale and tender. At first beneath the lovely,
glorious sky the ocean frowned, but soon the ocean also took on
colour—sweet, joyful, passionate colours, almost impossible to name in
human language. MY LIFE
THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL
THE director said to me: "I only keep you out of respect for your worthy
father, or you would have gone long since." I replied: "You flatter me,
your Excellency, but I suppose I am in a position to go." And then I
heard him saying: "Take the fellow away, he is getting on my nerves."
Two days later I was dismissed. Ever since I had been grown up, to the
great sorrow of my father, the municipal architect, I had changed my
position nine times, going from one department to another, but all the
departments were as like each other as drops of water; I had to sit and
write, listen to inane and rude remarks, and just wait until I was
dismissed.
When I told my father, he was sitting back in his chair with his eyes
shut. His thin, dry face, with a dove-coloured tinge where he shaved
(his face was like that of an old Catholic organist), wore an expression
of meek submission. Without answering my greeting or opening his eyes,
he said:
"If my dear wife, your mother, were alive, your life would be a constant
grief to her. I can see the hand of Providence in her untimely death.
Tell me, you unhappy boy," he went on, opening his eyes, "what am I to
do with you?"
When I was younger my relations and friends knew what to do with me;
some advised me to go into the army as a volunteer, others were for
pharmacy, others for the telegraph service; but now that I was twenty-
four and was going grey at the temples and had already tried the army
and pharmacy and the telegraph service, and every possibility seemed to
be exhausted, they gave me no more advice, but only sighed and shook
their heads.
"What do you think of yourself?" my father went on. "At your age other
young men have a good social position, and just look at yourself: a lazy
lout, a beggar, living on your father!"
And, as usual, he went on to say that young men were going to the dogs
through want of faith, materialism, and conceit, and that amateur
theatricals should be prohibited because they seduce young people from
religion and their duty.
"To-morrow we will go together, and you shall apologise to the director
and promise to do your work conscientiously," he concluded. "You must
not be without a position in society for a single day."
"Please listen to me," said I firmly, though I did not anticipate
gaining anything by speaking. "What you call a position in society is
the privilege of capital and education. But people who are poor and
uneducated have to earn their living by hard physical labour, and I see
no reason why I should be an exception."
"It is foolish and trivial of you to talk of physical labour," said my
father with some irritation. "Do try to understand, you idiot, and get
it into your brainless head, that in addition to physical strength you
have a divine spirit; a sacred fire, by which you are distinguished from
an ass or a reptile and bringing you nigh to God. This sacred fire has
been kept alight for thousands of years by the best of mankind. Your
great-grandfather, General Pologniev, fought at Borodino; your
grandfather was a poet, an orator, and a marshal of the nobility; your
uncle was an educationalist; and I, your father, am an architect! Have
all the Polognievs kept the sacred fire alight for you to put it out?"
"There must be justice," said I. "Millions of people have to do manual
labour."
"Let them. They can do nothing else! Even a fool or a criminal can do
manual labour. It is the mark of a slave and a barbarian, whereas the
sacred fire is given only to a few!"
It was useless to go on with the conversation. My father worshipped
himself and would not be convinced by anything unless he said it
himself. Besides, I knew quite well that the annoyance with which he
spoke of unskilled labour came not so much from any regard for the
sacred fire, as from a secret fear that I should become a working man
and the talk of the town. But the chief thing was that all my
schoolfellows had long ago gone through the University and were making
careers for themselves, and the son of the director of the State Bank
was already a collegiate assessor, while I, an only son, was nothing! It
was useless and unpleasant to go on with the conversation, but I still
sat there and raised objections in the hope of making myself understood.
The problem was simple and clear: how was I to earn my living? But he
could not see its simplicity and kept on talking with sugary rounded
phrases about Borodino and the sacred fire, and my uncle, and the
forgotten poet who wrote bad, insincere verses, and he called me a
brainless fool. But how I longed to be understood! In spite of
everything, I loved my father and my sister, and from boyhood I have had
a habit of considering them, so strongly rooted that I shall probably
never get rid of it; whether I am right or wrong I am always afraid of
hurting them, and go in terror lest my father's thin neck should go red
with anger and he should have an apoplectic fit.
"It is shameful and degrading for a man of my age to sit in a stuffy
room and compete with a typewriting-machine," I said. "What has that to
do with the sacred fire?"
"Still, it is intellectual work," said my father. "But that's enough.
Let us drop the conversation and I warn you that if you refuse to return
to your office and indulge your contemptible inclinations, then you will
lose my love and your sister's. I shall cut you out of my will—that I
swear, by God!"
With perfect sincerity, in order to show the purity of my motives, by
which I hope to be guided all through my life, I said:
"The matter of inheritance does not strike me as important. I renounce
any rights I may have."
For some unexpected reason these words greatly offended my father. He
went purple in the face.
"How dare you talk to me like that, you fool!" he cried to me in a thin,
shrill voice. "You scoundrel!" And he struck me quickly and dexterously
with a familiar movement; once—twice. "You forget yourself!"
When I was a boy and my father struck me, I used to stand bolt upright
like a soldier and look him straight in the face; and, exactly as if I
were still a boy, I stood erect, and tried to look into his eyes. My
father was old and very thin, but his spare muscles must have been as
strong as whip-cord, for he hit very hard.
I returned to the hall, but there he seized his umbrella and struck me
several times over the head and shoulders; at that moment my sister
opened the drawing-room door to see what the noise was, but immediately
drew back with an expression of pity and horror, and said not one word
in my defence.
My intention not to return to the office, but to start a new working
life, was unshakable. It only remained to choose the kind of work—and
there seemed to be no great difficulty about that, because I was strong,
patient, and willing. I was prepared to face a monotonous, laborious
life, of semi-starvation, filth, and rough surroundings, always
overshadowed with the thought of finding a job and a living. And—who
knows—returning from work in the Great Gentry Street, I might often envy
Dolyhikov, the engineer, who lives by intellectual work, but I was happy
in thinking of my coming troubles. I used to dream of intellectual
activity, and to imagine myself a teacher, a doctor, a writer, but my
dreams remained only dreams. A liking for intellectual pleasures—like
the theatre and reading—grew into a passion with me, but I did not know
whether I had any capacity for intellectual work. At school I had an
unconquerable aversion for the Greek language, so that I had to leave
when I was in the fourth class. Teachers were got to coach me up for the
fifth class, and then I went into various departments, spending most of
my time in perfect idleness, and this, I was told, was intellectual
work.
My activity in the education department or in the municipal office
required neither mental effort, nor talent, nor personal ability, nor
creative spiritual impulse; it was purely mechanical, and such
intellectual work seemed to me lower than manual labour. I despise it
and I do not think that it for a moment justifies an idle, careless
life, because it is nothing but a swindle, and only a kind of idleness.
In all probability I have never known real intellectual work.
It was evening. We lived in Great Gentry Street—the chief street in the
town—and our rank and fashion walked up and down it in the evenings, as
there were no public gardens. The street was very charming, and was
almost as good as a garden, for it had two rows of poplar-trees, which
smelt very sweet, especially after rain, and acacias, and tall trees,
and apple-trees hung over the fences and hedges. May evenings, the scent
of the lilac, the hum of the cockchafers, the warm, still air—how new
and extraordinary it all is, though spring comes every year! I stood by
the gate and looked at the passers-by. With most of them I had grown up
and had played with them, but now my presence might upset them, because
I was poorly dressed, in unfashionable clothes, and people made fun of
my very narrow trousers and large, clumsy boots, and called them
macaroni-on-steamboats. And I had a bad reputation in the town because I
had no position and went to play billiards in low cafés, and had once
been taken up, for no particular offence, by the political police.
In a large house opposite, Dolyhikov's, the engineer's, some one was
playing the piano. It was beginning to get dark and the stars were
beginning to shine. And slowly, answering people's salutes, my father
passed with my sister on his arm. He was wearing an old top hat with a
broad curly brim.
"Look!" he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the very umbrella
with which he had just struck me. "Look at the sky! Even the smallest
stars are worlds! How insignificant man is in comparison with the
universe."
And he said this in a tone that seemed to convey that he found it
extremely flattering and pleasant to be so insignificant. What an
untalented man he was! Unfortunately, he was the only architect in the
town, and during the last fifteen or twenty years I could not remember
one decent house being built. When he had to design a house, as a rule
he would draw first the hall and the drawing-room; as in olden days
schoolgirls could only begin to dance by the fireplace, so his artistic
ideas could only evolve from the hall and drawing-room. To them he would
add the dining-room, nursery, study, connecting them with doors, so that
in the end they were just so many passages, and each room had two or
three doors too many. His houses were obscure, extremely confused, and
limited. Every time, as though he felt something was missing, he had
recourse to various additions, plastering them one on top of the other,
and there would be various lobbies, and passages, and crooked staircases
leading to the entresol, where it was only possible to stand in a
stooping position, and where instead of a floor there would be a thin
flight of stairs like a Russian bath, and the kitchen would always be
under the house with a vaulted ceiling and a brick floor. The front of
his houses always had a hard, stubborn expression, with stiff, French
lines, low, squat roofs, and fat, pudding-like chimneys surmounted with
black cowls and squeaking weathercocks. And somehow all the houses built
by my father were like each other, and vaguely reminded me of a top hat,
and the stiff, obstinate back of his head. In the course of time the
people of the town grew used to my father's lack of talent, which took
root and became our style.
My father introduced the style into my sister's life. To begin with, he
gave her the name of Cleopatra (and he called me Misail). When she was a
little girl he used to frighten her by telling her about the stars and
our ancestors; and explained the nature of life and duty to her at great
length; and now when she was twenty-six he went on in the same way,
allowing her to take no one's arm but his own, and somehow imagining
that sooner or later an ardent young man would turn up and wish to enter
into marriage with her out of admiration for his qualities. And she
adored my father, was afraid of him, and believed in his extraordinary
intellectual powers.
It got quite dark and the street grew gradually empty. In the house
opposite the music stopped. The gate was wide open and out into the
street, careering with all its bells jingling, came a troika. It was the
engineer and his daughter going for a drive. Time to go to bed!
I had a room in the house, but I lived in the courtyard in a hut, under
the same roof as the coach-house, which had been built probably as a
harness-room—for there were big nails in the walls—but now it was not
used, and my father for thirty years had kept his newspapers there,
which for some reason he had bound half-yearly and then allowed no one
to touch. Living there I was less in touch with my father and his
guests, and I used to think that if I did not live in a proper room and
did not go to the house every day for meals, my father's reproach that I
was living on him lost some of its sting.
My sister was waiting for me. She had brought me supper unknown to my
father; a small piece of cold veal and a slice of bread. In the family
there were sayings: "Money loves an account," or "A copeck saves a
rouble," and so on, and my sister, impressed by such wisdom, did her
best to cut down expenses and made us feed rather meagrely. She put the
plate on the table, sat on my bed, and began to cry.
"Misail," she said, "what are you doing to us?"
She did not cover her face, her tears ran down her cheeks and hands, and
her expression was sorrowful. She fell on the pillow, gave way to her
tears, trembling all over and sobbing.
"You have left your work again!" she said. "How awful!"
"Do try to understand, sister!" I said, and because she cried I was
filled with despair.
As though it were deliberately arranged, the paraffin in my little lamp
ran out, and the lamp smoked and guttered, and the old hooks in the wall
looked terrible and their shadows flickered.
"Spare us!" said my sister, rising up. "Father is in an awful state, and
I am ill. I shall go mad. What will become of you?" she asked, sobbing
and holding out her hands to me. "I ask you, I implore you, in the name
of our dear mother, to go back to your work."
"I cannot, Cleopatra," I said, feeling that only a little more would
make me give in. "I cannot."
"Why?" insisted my sister, "why? If you have not made it up with your
chief, look for another place. For instance, why shouldn't you work on
the railway? I have just spoken to Aniuta Blagovo, and she assures me
you would be taken on, and she even promised to do what she could for
you. For goodness sake, Misail, think! Think it over, I implore you!"
We talked a little longer and I gave in. I said that the thought of
working on the railway had never come into my head, and that I was ready
to try.
She smiled happily through her tears and clasped my hand, and still she
cried, because she could not stop, and I went into the kitchen for
paraffin.
II
Among the supporters of amateur theatricals, charity concerts, and
tableaux vivants the leaders were the Azhoguins, who lived in their own
house in Great Gentry house the Street. They used to lend their house
and assume the necessary trouble and expense. They were a rich
landowning family, and had about three thousand urskins, with a
magnificent farm in the neighbourhood, but they did not care for village
life and lived in the town summer and winter. The family consisted of a
mother, a tall, spare, delicate lady, who had short hair, wore a blouse
and a plain skirt à l'Anglais, and three daughters, who were spoken of,
not by their names, but as the eldest, the middle, and the youngest;
they all had ugly, sharp chins, and they were short-sighted, high-
shouldered, dressed in the same style as their mother, had an unpleasant
lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing
something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious
and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without
gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though they were engaged in
bookkeeping.
I loved our plays, especially the rehearsals, which were frequent,
rather absurd, and noisy, and we were always given supper after them. I
had no part in the selection of the pieces and the casting of the
characters. I had to look after the stage. I used to design the scenery
and copy out the parts, and prompt and make up. And I also had to look
after the various effects such as thunder, the singing of a nightingale,
and so on. Having no social position, I had no decent clothes, and
during rehearsals had to hold aloof from the others in the darkened
wings and shyly say nothing.
I used to paint the scenery in the Azhoguins' coach-house or yard. I was
assisted by a house-painter, or, as he called himself, a decorating
contractor, named Andrey Ivanov, a man of about fifty, tall and very
thin and pale, with a narrow chest, hollow temples, and dark rings under
his eyes, he was rather awful to look at. He had some kind of wasting
disease, and every spring and autumn he was said to be on the point of
death, but he would go to bed for a while and then get up and say with
surprise: "I'm not dead this time!"
In the town he was called Radish, and people said it was his real name.
He loved the theatre as much as I, and no sooner did he hear that a play
was in hand than he gave up all his work and went to the Azhoguins' to
paint scenery.
The day after my conversation with my sister I worked from morning till
night at the Azhoguins'. The rehearsal was fixed for seven o'clock, and
an hour before it began all the players were assembled, and the eldest,
the middle, and the youngest Miss Azhoguin were reading their parts on
the stage. Radish, in a long, brown overcoat with a scarf wound round
his neck, was standing, leaning with his head against the wall, looking
at the stage with a rapt expression. Mrs. Azhoguin went from guest to
guest saying something pleasant to every one. She had a way of gazing
into one's face and speaking in a hushed voice as though she were
telling a secret.
"It must be difficult to paint scenery," she said softly, coming up to
me. "I was just talking to Mrs. Mufke about prejudice when I saw you
come in. Mon Dieu! All my life I have struggled against prejudice. To
convince the servants that all their superstitions are nonsense I always
light three candles, and I begin all my important business on the
thirteenth."
The daughter of Dolyhikov, the engineer, was there, a handsome, plump,
fair girl, dressed, as people said in our town, in Parisian style. She
did not act, but at rehearsals a chair was put for her on the stage, and
the plays did not begin until she appeared in the front row, to astonish
everybody with the brilliance of her clothes. As coming from the
metropolis, she was allowed to make remarks during rehearsals, and she
did so with an affable, condescending smile, and it was clear that she
regarded our plays as a childish amusement. It was said that she had
studied singing at the Petersburg conservatoire and had sung for a
winter season in opera. I liked her very much, and during rehearsals or
the performance, I never took my eyes off her.
I had taken the book and began to prompt when suddenly my sister
appeared. Without taking off her coat and hat she came up to me and
said:
"Please come!"
I went. Behind the stage in the doorway stood Aniuta Blagovo, also
wearing a hat with a dark veil. She was the daughter of the vice-
president of the Court, who had been appointed to our town years ago,
almost as soon as the High Court was established. She was tall and had a
good figure, and was considered indispensable for the tableaux vivants,
and when she represented a fairy or a muse, her face would burn with
shame; but she took no part in the plays, and would only look in at
rehearsals, on some business, and never enter the hall. And it was
evident now that she had only looked in for a moment.
"My father has mentioned you," she said drily, not looking at me and
blushing.... "Dolyhikov has promised to find you something to do on the
railway. If you go to his house to-morrow, he will see you."
I bowed and thanked her for her kindness.
"And you must leave this," she said, pointing to my book.
She and my sister went up to Mrs. Azhoguin and began to whisper, looking
at me.
"Indeed," said Mrs. Azhoguin, coming up to me, and gazing into my face.
"Indeed, if it takes you from your more serious business"—she took the
book out of my hands—"then you must hand it over to some one else. Don't
worry, my friend. It will be all right."
I said good-bye and left in some confusion. As I went down-stairs I saw
my sister and Aniuta Blagovo going away; they were talking animatedly, I
suppose about my going on the railway, and they hurried away. My sister
had never been to a rehearsal before, and she was probably tortured by
her conscience and by her fear of my father finding out that she had
been to the Azhoguins' without permission.
The next day I went to see Dolyhikov at one o'clock. The man servant
showed me into a charming room, which was the engineer's drawing-room
and study. Everything in it was charming and tasteful, and to a man like
myself, unused to such things, very strange. Costly carpets, huge
chairs, bronzes, pictures in gold and velvet frames; photographs on the
walls of beautiful women, clever, handsome faces, and striking
attitudes; from the drawing-room a door led straight into the garden, by
a veranda, and I saw lilac and a table laid for breakfast, rolls, and a
bunch of roses; and there was a smell of spring, and good cigars, and
happiness—and everything seemed to say, here lives a man who has worked
and won the highest happiness here on earth. At the table the engineer's
daughter was sitting reading a newspaper.
"Do you want my father?" she asked. "He is having a shower-bath. He will
be down presently. Please take a chair."
I sat down.
"I believe you live opposite?" she asked after a short silence.
"Yes."
"When I have nothing to do I look out of the window. You must excuse
me," she added, turning to her newspaper, "and I often see you and your
sister. She has such a kind, wistful expression."
Dolyhikov came in. He was wiping his neck with a towel.
"Papa, this is Mr. Pologniev," said his daughter.
"Yes, yes. Blagovo spoke to me." He turned quickly to me, but did not
hold out his hand. "But what do you think I can give you? I'm not
bursting with situations. You are queer people!" he went on in a loud
voice and as though he were scolding me. "I get about twenty people
every day, as though I were a Department of State. I run a railway, sir.
I employ hard labour; I need mechanics, navvies, joiners, well-sinkers,
and you can only sit and write. That's all! You are all clerks!"
And he exhaled the same air of happiness as his carpets and chairs. He
was stout, healthy, with red cheeks and a broad chest; he looked clean
in his pink shirt and wide trousers, just like a china figure of a post-
boy. He had a round, bristling beard—and not a single grey hair—and a
nose with a slight bridge, and bright, innocent, dark eyes.
"What can you do?" he went on. "Nothing! I am an engineer and well-to-
do, but before I was given this railway I worked very hard for a long
time. I was an engine-driver for two years, I worked in Belgium as an
ordinary lubricator. Now, my dear man, just think—what work can I offer
you?"
"I quite agree," said I, utterly abashed, not daring to meet his bright,
innocent eyes.
"Are you any good with the telegraph?" he asked after some thought.
"Yes. I have been in the telegraph service."
"Hm.... Well, we'll see. Go to Dubechnia. There's a fellow there
already. But he is a scamp."
"And what will my duties be?" I asked.
"We'll see to that later. Go there now. I'll give orders. But please
don't drivel and don't bother me with petitions or I'll kick you out."
He turned away from me without even a nod. I bowed to him and his
daughter, who was reading the newspaper, and went out. I felt so
miserable that when my sister asked how the engineer had received me, I
could not utter a single word.
To go to Dubechnia I got up early in the morning at sunrise. There was
not a soul in the street, the whole town was asleep, and my footsteps
rang out with a hollow sound. The dewy poplars filled the air with a
soft scent. I was sad and had no desire to leave the town. It seemed so
nice and warm! I loved the green trees, the quiet sunny mornings, the
ringing of the bells, but the people in the town were alien to me,
tiresome and sometimes even loathsome. I neither liked nor understood
them.
I did not understand why or for what purpose those thirty-five thousand
people lived. I knew that Kimry made a living by manufacturing boots,
that Tula made samovars and guns, that Odessa was a port; but I did not
know what our town was or what it did. The people in Great Gentry Street
and two other clean streets had independent means and salaries paid by
the Treasury, but how the people lived in the other eight streets which
stretched parallel to each other for three miles and then were lost
behind the hill—that was always an insoluble problem to me. And I am
ashamed to think of the way they lived. They had neither public gardens,
nor a theatre, nor a decent orchestra; the town and club libraries are
used only by young Jews, so that books and magazines would lie for
months uncut. The rich and the intelligentsia slept in close, stuffy
bedrooms, with wooden beds infested with bugs; the children were kept in
filthy, dirty rooms called nurseries, and the servants, even when they
were old and respectable, slept on the kitchen floor and covered
themselves with rags. Except in Lent all the houses smelt of bortsch,
and during Lent of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. The food was
unsavoury, the water unwholesome. On the town council, at the
governor's, at the archbishop's, everywhere there had been talk for
years about there being no good, cheap water-supply and of borrowing two
hundred thousand roubles from the Treasury. Even the very rich people,
of whom there were about thirty in the town, people who would lose a
whole estate at cards, used to drink the bad water and talk passionately
about the loan—and I could never understand this, for it seemed to me it
would be simpler for them to pay up the two hundred thousand.
I did not know a single honest man in the whole town. My father took
bribes, and imagined they were given to him out of respect for his
spiritual qualities; the boys at the high school, in order to be
promoted, went to lodge with the masters and paid them large sums; the
wife of the military commandant took levies from the recruits during the
recruiting, and even allowed them to stand her drinks, and once she was
so drunk in church that she could not get up from her knees; during the
recruiting the doctors also took bribes, and the municipal doctor and
the veterinary surgeon levied taxes on the butcher shops and public
houses; the district school did a trade in certificates which gave
certain privileges in the civil service; the provosts took bribes from
the clergy and church-wardens whom they controlled, and on the town
council and various committees every one who came before them was
pursued with: "One expects thanks!"—and thereby forty copecks had to
change hands. And those who did not take bribes, like the High Court
officials, were stiff and proud, and shook hands with two fingers, and
were distinguished by their indifference and narrow-mindedness. They
drank and played cards, married rich women, and always had a bad,
insidious influence on those round them. Only the girls had any moral
purity; most of them had lofty aspirations and were pure and honest at
heart; but they knew nothing of life, and believed that bribes were
given to honour spiritual qualities; and when they married, they soon
grew old and weak, and were hopelessly lost in the mire of that vulgar,
bourgeois existence.
III
A railway was being built in our district. On holidays and thereabouts
the town was filled with crowds of ragamuffins called "railies," of whom
the people were afraid. I used often to see a miserable wretch with a
bloody face, and without a hat, being dragged off by the police, and
behind him was the proof of his crime, a samovar or some wet, newly
washed linen. The "railies" used to collect near the public houses and
on the squares; and they drank, ate, and swore terribly, and whistled
after the town prostitutes. To amuse these ruffians our shopkeepers used
to make the cats and dogs drink vodka, or tie a kerosene-tin to a dog's
tail, and whistle to make the dog come tearing along the street with the
tin clattering after him, and making him squeal with terror and think he
had some frightful monster hard at his heels, so that he would rush out
of the town and over the fields until he could run no more. We had
several dogs in the town which were left with a permanent shiver and
used to crawl about with their tails between their legs, and people said
that they could not stand such tricks and had gone mad.
The station was being built five miles from the town. It was said that
the engineer had asked for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles to bring
the station nearer, but the municipality would only agree to forty; they
would not give in to the extra ten thousand, and now the townspeople are
sorry because they had to make a road to the station which cost them
more. Sleepers and rails were fixed all along the line, and service-
trains were running to carry building materials and labourers, and they
were only waiting for the bridges upon which Dolyhikov was at work, and
here and there the stations were not ready.
Dubechnia—the name of our first station—was seventeen versts from the
town. I went on foot. The winter and spring corn was bright green,
shining in the morning sun. The road was smooth and bright, and in the
distance I could see in outline the station, the hills, and the remote
farmhouses.... How good it was out in the open! And how I longed to be
filled with the sense of freedom, if only for that morning, to stop
thinking of what was going on in the town, or of my needs, or even of
eating! Nothing has so much prevented my living as the feeling of acute
hunger, which make my finest thoughts get mixed up with thoughts of
porridge, cutlets, and fried fish. When I stand alone in the fields and
look up at the larks hanging marvellously in the air, and bursting with
hysterical song, I think: "It would be nice to have some bread and
butter." Or when I sit in the road and shut my eyes and listen to the
wonderful sounds of a May-day, I remember how good hot potatoes smell.
Being big and of a strong constitution I never have quite enough to eat,
and so my chief sensation during the day is hunger, and so I can
understand why so many people who are working for a bare living, can
talk of nothing but food.
At Dubechnia the station was being plastered inside, and the upper story
of the water-tank was being built. It was close and smelt of lime, and
the labourers were wandering lazily over piles of chips and rubbish. The
signalman was asleep near his box with the sun pouring straight into his
face. There was not a single tree. The telephone gave a faint hum, and
here and there birds had alighted on it. I wandered over the heaps, not
knowing what to do, and remembered how when I asked the engineer what my
duties would be, he had replied: "We will see there." But what was there
to see in such a wilderness? The plasterers were talking about the
foreman and about one Fedot Vassilievich. I could not understand and was
filled with embarrassment—physical embarrassment. I felt conscious of my
arms and legs, and of the whole of my big body, and did not know what to
do with them or where to go.
After walking for at least a couple of hours I noticed that from the
station to the right of the line there were telegraph-poles which after
about one and a half or two miles ended in a white stone wall. The
labourers said it was the office, and I decided at last that I must go
there.
It was a very old farmhouse, long unused. The wall of rough, white stone
was decayed, and in places had crumbled away, and the roof of the wing,
the blind wall of which looked toward the railway, had perished, and was
patched here and there with tin. Through the gates there was a large
yard, overgrown with tall grass, and beyond that, an old house with
Venetian blinds in the windows, and a high roof, brown with rot. On
either side of the house, to right and left, were two symmetrical wings;
the windows of one were boarded up, while by the other, the windows of
which were open, there were a number of calves grazing. The last
telegraph-pole stood in the yard, and the wire went from it to the wing
with the blind wall. The door was open and I went in. By the table at
the telegraph was sitting a man with a dark, curly head in a canvas
coat; he glared at me sternly and askance, but he immediately smiled and
said:
"How do you do, Profit?"
It was Ivan Cheprakov, my school friend, who was expelled, when he was
in the second class, for smoking. Once, during the autumn, we were out
catching goldfinches, starlings, and hawfinches, to sell them in the
market early in the morning when our parents were still asleep.
We beat up flocks of starlings and shot at them with pellets, and then
picked up the wounded, and some died in terrible agony—I can still
remember how they moaned at night in my case—and some recovered. And we
sold them, and swore black and blue that they were male birds. Once in
the market I had only one starling left, which I hawked about and
finally sold for a copeck. "A little profit!" I said to console myself,
and from that time at school I was always known as "Little Profit," and
even now, schoolboys and the townspeople sometimes use the name to tease
me, though no one but myself remembers how it came about.
Cheprakov never was strong. He was narrow-chested, round-shouldered,
long-legged. His tie looked like a piece of string, he had no waistcoat,
and his boots were worse than mine—with the heels worn down. He blinked
with his eyes and had an eager expression as though he were trying to
catch something and he was in a constant fidget.
"You wait," he said, bustling about. "Look here!... What was I saying
just now?"
We began to talk. I discovered that the estate had till recently
belonged to the Cheprakovs and only the previous autumn had passed to
Dolyhikov, who thought it more profitable to keep his money in land than
in shares, and had already bought three big estates in our district with
the transfer of all mortgages. When Cheprakov's mother sold, she
stipulated for the right to live in one of the wings for another two
years and got her son a job in the office.
"Why shouldn't he buy?" said Cheprakov of the engineer. "He gets a lot
from the contractors. He bribes them all."
Then he took me to dinner, deciding in his emphatic way that I was to
live with him in the wing and board with his mother.
"She is a screw," he said, "but she will not take much from you."
In the small rooms where his mother lived there was a queer jumble; even
the hall and the passage were stacked with furniture, which had been
taken from the house after the sale of the estate; and the furniture was
old, and of redwood. Mrs. Cheprakov, a very stout elderly lady, with
slanting, Chinese eyes, sat by the window, in a big chair, knitting a
stocking. She received me ceremoniously.
"It is Pologniev, mother," said Cheprakov, introducing me. "He is going
to work here."
"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice as though
she had boiling fat in her throat.
"Yes," I answered.
"Sit down."
The dinner was bad. It consisted only of a pie with unsweetened curds
and some milk soup. Elena Nikifirovna, my hostess, was perpetually
winking, first with one eye, then with the other. She talked and ate,
but in her whole aspect there was a deathlike quality, and one could
almost detect the smell of a corpse. Life hardly stirred in her, yet she
had the air of being the lady of the manor, who had once had her serfs,
and was the wife of a general, whose servants had to call him "Your
Excellency," and when these miserable embers of life flared up in her
for a moment, she would say to her son:
"Ivan, that is not the way to hold your knife!"
Or she would say, gasping for breath, with the preciseness of a hostess
labouring to entertain her guest:
"We have just sold our estate, you know. It is a pity, of course, we
have got so used to being here, but Dolyhikov promised to make Ivan
station-master at Dubechnia, so that we shan't have to leave. We shall
live here on the station, which is the same as living on the estate. The
engineer is such a nice man! Don't you think him very handsome?"
Until recently the Cheprakovs had been very well-to-do, but with the
general's death everything changed. Elena Nikifirovna began to quarrel
with the neighbours and to go to law, and she did not pay her bailiffs
and labourers; she was always afraid of being robbed—and in less than
ten years Dubechnia changed completely.
Behind the house there was an old garden run wild, overgrown with tall
grass and brushwood. I walked along the terrace which was still well-
kept and beautiful; through the glass door I saw a room with a parquet
floor, which must have been the drawing-room. It contained an ancient
piano, some engravings in mahogany frames on the walls—and nothing else.
There was nothing left of the flower-garden but peonies and poppies,
rearing their white and scarlet heads above the ground; on the paths,
all huddled together, were young maples and elm-trees, which had been
stripped by the cows. The growth was dense and the garden seemed
impassable, and only near the house, where there still stood poplars,
firs, and some old bricks, were there traces of the former avenues, and
further on the garden was being cleared for a hay-field, and here it was
no longer allowed to run wild, and one's mouth and eyes were no longer
filled with spiders' webs, and a pleasant air was stirring. The further
out one went, the more open it was, and there were cherry-trees, plum-
trees, wide-spreading old apple-trees, lichened and held up with props,
and the pear-trees were so tall that it was incredible that there could
be pears on them. This part of the garden was let to the market-women of
our town, and it was guarded from thieves and starlings by a peasant—an
idiot who lived in a hut.
The orchard grew thinner and became a mere meadow running down to the
river, which was overgrown with reeds and withy-beds. There was a pool
by the mill-dam, deep and full of fish, and a little mill with a straw
roof ground and roared, and the frogs croaked furiously. On the water,
which was as smooth as glass, circles appeared from time to time, and
water-lilies trembled on the impact of a darting fish. The village of
Dubechnia was on the other side of the river. The calm, azure pool was
alluring with its promise of coolness and rest. And now all this, the
pool, the mill, the comfortable banks of the river, belonged to the
engineer!
And here my new work began. I received and despatched telegrams, I wrote
out various accounts and copied orders, claims, and reports, sent in to
the office by our illiterate foremen and mechanics. But most of the day
I did nothing, walking up and down the room waiting for telegrams, or I
would tell the boy to stay in the wing, and go into the garden until the
boy came to say the bell was ringing. I had dinner with Mrs. Cheprakov.
Meat was served very rarely; most of the dishes were made of milk, and
on Wednesdays and Fridays we had Lenten fare, and the food was served in
pink plates, which were called Lenten. Mrs. Cheprakov was always
blinking—the habit grew on her, and I felt awkward and embarrassed in
her presence.
As there was not enough work for one, Cheprakov did nothing, but slept
or went down to the pool with his gun to shoot ducks. In the evenings he
got drunk in the village, or at the station, and before going to bed he
would look in the glass and say:
"How are you, Ivan Cheprakov?"
When he was drunk, he was very pale and used to rub his hands and laugh,
or rather neigh, He-he-he! Out of bravado he would undress himself and
run naked through the fields, and he used to eat flies and say they were
a bit sour.
IV
Once after dinner he came running into the wing, panting, to say:
"Your sister has come to see you."
I went out and saw a fly standing by the steps of the house. My sister
had brought Aniuta Blagovo and a military gentleman in a summer uniform.
As I approached I recognised the military gentleman as Aniuta's brother,
the doctor.
"We've come to take you for a picnic," he said, "if you've no
objection."
My sister and Aniuta wanted to ask how I was getting on, but they were
both silent and only looked at me. They felt that I didn't like my job,
and tears came into my sister's eyes and Aniuta Blagovo blushed. We went
into the orchard, the doctor first, and he said ecstatically:
"What air! By Jove, what air!"
He was just a boy to look at. He talked and walked like an
undergraduate, and the look in his grey eyes was as lively, simple, and
frank as that of a nice boy. Compared with his tall, handsome sister he
looked weak and slight, and his little beard was thin and so was his
voice—a thin tenor, though quite pleasant. He was away somewhere with
his regiment and had come home on leave, and said that he was going to
Petersburg in the autumn to take his M.D. He already had a family—a wife
and three children; he had married young, in his second year at the
University, and people said he was unhappily married and was not living
with his wife.
"What is the time?" My sister was uneasy. "We must go back soon, for my
father would only let me have until six o'clock."
"Oh, your father," sighed the doctor.
I made tea, and we drank it sitting on a carpet in front of the terrace,
and the doctor, kneeling, drank from his saucer, and said that he was
perfectly happy. Then Cheprakov fetched the key and unlocked the glass
door and we all entered the house. It was dark and mysterious and
smelled of mushrooms, and our footsteps made a hollow sound as though
there were a vault under the floor. The doctor stopped by the piano and
touched the keys and it gave out a faint, tremulous, cracked but still
melodious sound. He raised his voice and began to sing a romance,
frowning and impatiently stamping his foot when he touched a broken key.
My sister forgot about going home, but walked agitatedly up and down the
room and said:
"I am happy! I am very, very happy!"
There was a note of surprise in her voice as though it seemed impossible
to her that she should be happy. It was the first time in my life that I
had seen her so gay. She even looked handsome. Her profile was not good,
her nose and mouth somehow protruded and made her look as if she was
always blowing, but she had beautiful, dark eyes, a pale, very delicate
complexion, and a touching expression of kindness and sadness, and when
she spoke she seemed very charming and even beautiful. Both she and I
took after our mother; we were broad-shouldered, strong, and sturdy, but
her paleness was a sign of sickness, she often coughed, and in her eyes
I often noticed the expression common to people who are ill, but who for
some reason conceal it. In her present cheerfulness there was something
childish and naïve, as though all the joy which had been suppressed and
dulled during our childhood by a strict upbringing, had suddenly
awakened in her soul and rushed out into freedom.
But when evening came and the fly was brought round, my sister became
very quiet and subdued, and sat in the fly as though it were a prison-
van.
Soon they were all gone. The noise of the fly died away.... I remembered
that Aniuta Blagovo had said not a single word to me all day.
"A wonderful girl!" I thought "A wonderful girl."
Lent came and every day we had Lenten dishes. I was greatly depressed by
my idleness and the uncertainty of my position, and, slothful, hungry,
dissatisfied with myself, I wandered over the estate and only waited for
an energetic mood to leave the place.
Once in the afternoon when Radish was sitting in our wing, Dolyhikov
entered unexpectedly, very sunburnt, and grey with dust. He had been out
on the line for three days and had come to Dubechnia on a locomotive and
walked over. While he waited for the carriage which he had ordered to
come out to meet him he went over the estate with his bailiff, giving
orders in a loud voice, and then for a whole hour he sat in our wing and
wrote letters. When telegrams came through for him, he himself tapped
out the answers, while we stood there stiff and silent.
"What a mess!" he said, looking angrily through the accounts. "I shall
transfer the office to the station in a fortnight and I don't know what
I shall do with you then."
"I've done my best, sir," said Cheprakov.
"Quite so. I can see what your best is. You can only draw your wages."
The engineer looked at me and went on. "You rely on getting
introductions to make a career for yourself with as little trouble as
possible. Well, I don't care about introductions. Nobody helped me.
Before I had this line, I was an engine-driver. I worked in Belgium as
an ordinary lubricator. And what are you doing here, Panteley?" he
asked, turning to Radish. "Going out drinking?"
For some reason or other he called all simple people Panteley, while he
despised men like Cheprakov and myself, and called us drunkards, beasts,
canaille. As a rule he was hard on petty officials, and paid and
dismissed them ruthlessly without any explanation.
At last the carriage came for him. When he left he promised to dismiss
us all in a fortnight; called the bailiff a fool, stretched himself out
comfortably in the carriage, and drove away.
"Andrey Ivanich," I said to Radish, "will you take me on as a labourer?"
"What! Why?"
We went together toward the town, and when the station and the farm were
far behind us, I asked:
"Andrey Ivanich, why did you come to Dubechnia?"
"Firstly because some of my men are working on the line, and secondly to
pay interest to Mrs. Cheprakov. I borrowed fifty roubles from her last
summer, and now I pay her one rouble a month."
The decorator stopped and took hold of my coat.
"Misail Alereich, my friend," he went on, "I take it that if a common
man or a gentleman takes interest, he is a wrong-doer. The truth is not
in him."
Radish, looking thin, pale, and rather terrible, shut his eyes, shook
his head, and muttered in a philosophic tone:
"The grub eats grass, rust eats iron, lies devour the soul. God save us
miserable sinners!"
V
Radish was unpractical and he was no business man; he undertook more
work than he could do, and when he came to payment he always lost his
reckoning and so was always out on the wrong side. He was a painter, a
glazier, a paper-hanger, and would even take on tiling, and I remember
how he used to run about for days looking for tiles to make an
insignificant profit. He was an excellent workman and would sometimes
earn ten roubles a day, and but for his desire to be a master and to
call himself a contractor, he would probably have made quite a lot of
money.
He himself was paid by contract and paid me and the others by the day,
between seventy-five copecks and a rouble per day. When the weather was
hot and dry he did various outside jobs, chiefly painting roofs. Not
being used to it, my feet got hot, as though I were walking over a red-
hot oven, and when I wore felt boots my feet swelled. But this was only
at the beginning. Later on I got used to it and everything went all
right. I lived among the people, to whom work was obligatory and
unavoidable, people who worked like dray-horses, and knew nothing of the
moral value of labour, and never even used the word "labour" in their
talk. Among them I also felt like a dray-horse, more and more imbued
with the necessity and inevitability of what I was doing, and this made
my life easier, and saved me from doubt.
At first everything amused me, everything was new. It was like being
born again. I could sleep on the ground and go barefoot—and found it
exceedingly pleasant. I could stand in a crowd of simple folks, without
embarrassing them, and when a cab-horse fell down in the street, I used
to run and help it up without being afraid of soiling my clothes. But,
best of all, I was living independently and was not a burden on any one.
The painting of roofs, especially when we mixed our own paint, was
considered a very profitable business, and, therefore, even such good
workmen as Radish did not shun this rough and tiresome work. In short
trousers, showing his lean, muscular legs, he used to prowl over the
roof like a stork, and I used to hear him sigh wearily as he worked his
brush:
"Woe, woe to us, miserable sinners!"
He could walk as easily on a roof as on the ground. In spite of his
looking so ill and pale and corpse-like, his agility was extraordinary;
like any young man he would paint the cupola and the top of the church
without scaffolding, using only ladders and a rope, and it was queer and
strange when, standing there, far above the ground, he would rise to his
full height and cry to the world at large:
"Grubs eat grass, rust eats iron, lies devour the soul!"
Or, thinking of something, he would suddenly answer his own thought:
"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"
When I went home from work all the people sitting outside their doors,
the shop assistants, dogs, and their masters, used to shout after me and
jeer spitefully, and at first it seemed monstrous and distressed me
greatly.
"Little Profit," they used to shout. "House-painter! Yellow ochre!"
And no one treated me so unmercifully as those who had only just risen
above the people and had quite recently had to work for their living.
Once in the market-place as I passed the ironmonger's a can of water was
spilled over me as if by accident, and once a stick was thrown at me.
And once a fishmonger, a grey-haired old man, stood in my way and looked
at me morosely and said:
"It isn't you I'm sorry for, you fool, it's your father."
And when my acquaintances met me they got confused. Some regarded me as
a queer fish and a fool, and they were sorry for me; others did not know
how to treat me and it was difficult to understand them. Once, in the
daytime, in one of the streets off Great Gentry Street, I met Aniuta
Blagovo. I was on my way to my work and was carrying two long brushes
and a pot of paint. When she recognised me, Aniuta blushed.
"Please do not acknowledge me in the street," she said nervously,
sternly, in a trembling voice, without offering to shake hands with me,
and tears suddenly gleamed in her eyes. "If you must be like this, then,
so—so be it, but please avoid me in public!"
I had left Great Gentry Street and was living in a suburb called
Makarikha with my nurse Karpovna, a good-natured but gloomy old woman
who was always looking for evil, and was frightened by her dreams, and
saw omens and ill in the bees and wasps which flew into her room. And in
her opinion my having become a working man boded no good.
"You are lost!" she said mournfully, shaking her head. "Lost!"
With her in her little house lived her adopted son, Prokofyi, a butcher,
a huge, clumsy fellow, of about thirty, with ginger hair and scrubby
moustache. When he met me in the hall, he would silently and
respectfully make way for me, and when he was drunk he would salute me
with his whole hand. In the evenings he used to have supper, and through
the wooden partition I could hear him snorting and snuffling as he drank
glass after glass.
"Mother," he would say in an undertone.
"Well," Karpovna would reply. She was passionately fond of him. "What is
it, my son?"
"I'll do you a favour, mother. I'll feed you in your old age in this
vale of tears, and when you die I'll bury you at my own expense. So I
say and so I'll do."
I used to get up every day before sunrise and go to bed early. We
painters ate heavily and slept soundly, and only during the night would
we have any excitement. I never quarrelled with my comrades. All day
long there was a ceaseless stream of abuse, cursing and hearty good
wishes, as, for instance, that one's eyes should burst, or that one
might be carried off by cholera, but, all the same, among ourselves we
were very friendly. The men suspected me of being a religious crank and
used to laugh at me good-naturedly, saying that even my own father
denounced me, and they used to say that they very seldom went to church
and that many of them had not been to confession for ten years, and they
justified their laxness by saying that a decorator is among men like a
jackdaw among birds.
My mates respected me and regarded me with esteem; they evidently liked
my not drinking or smoking, and leading a quiet, steady life. They were
only rather disagreeably surprised at my not stealing the oil, or going
with them to ask our employers for a drink. The stealing of the
employers' oil and paint was a custom with house-painters, and was not
regarded as theft, and it was remarkable that even so honest a man as
Radish would always come away from work with some white lead and oil.
And even respectable old men who had their own houses in Makarikha were
not ashamed to ask for tips, and when the men, at the beginning or end
of a job, made up to some vulgar fool and thanked him humbly for a few
pence, I used to feel sick and sorry.
With the customers they behaved like sly courtiers, and almost every day
I was reminded of Shakespeare's Polonius.
"There will probably be rain," a customer would say, staring at the sky.
"It is sure to rain," the painters would agree.
"But the clouds aren't rain-clouds. Perhaps it won't rain."
"No, sir. It won't rain. It won't rain, sure."
Behind their backs they generally regarded the customers ironically, and
when, for instance, they saw a gentleman sitting on his balcony with a
newspaper, they would say:
"He reads newspapers, but he has nothing to eat."
I never visited my people. When I returned from work I often found
short, disturbing notes from my sister about my father; how he was very
absent-minded at dinner, and then slipped away and locked himself in his
study and did not come out for a long time. Such news upset me. I could
not sleep, and I would go sometimes at night and walk along Great Gentry
Street by our house, and look up at the dark windows, and try to guess
if all was well within. On Sundays my sister would come to see me, but
by stealth, as though she came not to see me, but my nurse. And if she
came into my room she would look pale, with her eyes red, and at once
she would begin to weep.
"Father cannot bear it much longer," she would say. "If, as God forbid,
something were to happen to him, it would be on your conscience all your
life. It is awful, Misail! For mother's sake I implore you to mend your
ways."
"My dear sister," I replied. "How can I reform when I am convinced that
I am acting according to my conscience? Do try to understand me!"
"I know you are obeying your conscience, but it ought to be possible to
do so without hurting anybody."
"Oh, saints above!" the old woman would sigh behind the door. "You are
lost. There will be a misfortune, my dear. It is bound to come."
VI
On Sunday, Doctor Blagovo came to see me unexpectedly. He was wearing a
white summer uniform over a silk shirt, and high glacé boots.
"I came to see you!" he began, gripping my hand in his hearty,
undergraduate fashion. "I hear of you every day and I have long intended
to go and see you to have a heart-to-heart, as they say. Things are
awfully boring in the town; there is not a living soul worth talking to.
How hot it is, by Jove!" he went on, taking off his tunic and standing
in his silk shirt. "My dear fellow, let us have a talk."
I was feeling bored and longing for other society than that of the
decorators. I was really glad to see him.
"To begin with," he said, sitting on my bed, "I sympathise with you
heartily, and I have a profound respect for your present way of living.
In the town you are misunderstood and there is nobody to understand you,
because, as you know, it is full of Gogolian pig-faces. But I guessed
what you were at the picnic. You are a noble soul, an honest, high-
minded man! I respect you and think it an honour to shake hands with
you. To change your life so abruptly and suddenly as you did, you must
have passed through a most trying spiritual process, and to go on with
it now, to live scrupulously by your convictions, you must have to toil
incessantly both in mind and in heart. Now, please tell me, don't you
think that if you spent all this force of will, intensity, and power on
something else, like trying to be a great scholar or an artist, that
your life would be both wider and deeper, and altogether more
productive?"
We talked and when we came to speak of physical labour, I expressed this
idea: that it was necessary that the strong should not enslave the weak,
and that the minority should not be a parasite on the majority, always
sucking up the finest sap, i. e., it was necessary that all without
exception—the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor—should share
equally in the struggle for existence, every man for himself, and in
that respect there was no better means of levelling than physical labour
and compulsory service for all.
"You think, then," said the doctor, "that all, without, exception,
should be employed in physical labour?"
"Yes."
"But don't you think that if everybody, including the best people,
thinkers and men of science, were to take part in the struggle for
existence, each man for himself, and took to breaking stones and
painting roofs, it would be a serious menace to progress?"
"Where is the danger?" I asked. "Progress consists in deeds of love, in
the fulfilment of the moral law. If you enslave no one, and are a burden
upon no one, what further progress do you want?"
"But look here!" said Blagovo, suddenly losing his temper and getting
up. "I say! If a snail in its shell is engaged in self-perfection in
obedience to the moral law—would you call that progress?"
"But why?" I was nettled. "If you make your neighbours feed you, clothe
you, carry you, defend you from your enemies, their life is built up on
slavery, and that is not progress. My view is that that is the most real
and, perhaps, the only possible, the only progress necessary."
"The limits of universal progress, which is common to all men, are in
infinity, and it seems to me strange to talk of a 'possible' progress
limited by our needs and temporal conceptions."
"If the limits of peoples are in infinity, as you say, then it means
that its goal is indefinite," I said. "Think of living without knowing
definitely what for!"
"Why not? Your 'not knowing' is not so boring as your 'knowing.' I am
walking up a ladder which is called progress, civilisation, culture. I
go on and on, not knowing definitely where I am going to, but surely it
is worth while living for the sake of the wonderful ladder alone. And
you know exactly what you are living for—that some should not enslave
others, that the artist and the man who mixes his colours for him should
dine together. But that is the bourgeois, kitchen side of life, and
isn't it disgusting only to live for that? If some insects devour
others, devil take them, let them! We need not think of them, they will
perish and rot, however you save them from slavery—we must think of that
great Cross which awaits all mankind in the distant future."
Blagovo argued hotly with me, but it was noticeable that he was
disturbed by some outside thought.
"Your sister is not coming," he said, consulting his watch. "Yesterday
she was at our house and said she was going to see you. You go on
talking about slavery, slavery," he went on, "but it is a special
question, and all these questions are solved by mankind gradually."
We began to talk of evolution. I said that every man decides the
question of good and evil for himself, and does not wait for mankind to
solve the question by virtue of gradual development. Besides, evolution
is a stick with two ends. Side by side with the gradual development of
humanitarian ideas, there is the gradual growth of ideas of a different
kind. Serfdom is past, and capitalism is growing. And with ideas of
liberation at their height the majority, just as in the days of Baty,
feeds, clothes, and defends the minority; and is left hungry, naked, and
defenceless. The state of things harmonises beautifully with all your
tendencies and movements, because the art of enslaving is also being
gradually developed. We no longer flog our servants in the stables, but
we give slavery more refined forms; at any rate, we are able to justify
it in each separate case. Ideas remain ideas with us, but if we could,
now, at the end of the nineteenth century, throw upon the working
classes all our most unpleasant physiological functions, we should do
so, and, of course, we should justify ourselves by saying that if the
best people, thinkers and great scholars, had to waste their time on
such functions, progress would be in serious jeopardy.
Just then my sister entered. When she saw the doctor, she was flurried
and excited, and at once began to say that it was time for her to go
home to her father.
"Cleopatra Alexeyevna," said Blagovo earnestly, laying his hands on his
heart, "what will happen to your father if you spend half an hour with
your brother and me?"
He was a simple kind of man and could communicate his cheerfulness to
others. My sister thought for a minute and began to laugh, and suddenly
got very happy, suddenly, unexpectedly, just as she did at the picnic.
We went out into the fields and lay on the grass, and went on with our
conversation and looked at the town, where all the windows facing the
west looked golden in the setting sun.
After that Blagovo appeared every time my sister came to see me, and
they always greeted each other as though their meeting was unexpected.
My sister used to listen while the doctor and I argued, and her face was
always joyful and rapturous, admiring and curious, and it seemed to me
that a new world was slowly being discovered before her eyes, a world
which she had not seen before even in her dreams, which now she was
trying to divine; when the doctor was not there she was quiet and sad,
and if, as she sat on my bed, she sometimes wept, it was for reasons of
which she did not speak.
In August Radish gave us orders to go to the railway. A couple of days
before we were "driven" out of town, my father came to see me. He sat
down and, without looking at me, slowly wiped his red face, then took
out of his pocket our local paper and read out with deliberate emphasis
on each word that a schoolfellow of my own age, the son of the director
of the State Bank, had been appointed chief clerk of the Court of the
Exchequer.
"And now, look at yourself," he said, folding up the newspaper. "You are
a beggar, a vagabond, a scoundrel! Even the bourgeoisie and other
peasants get education to make themselves decent people, while you, a
Pologniev, with famous, noble ancestors, go wallowing in the mire! But I
did not come here to talk to you. I have given you up already." He went
on in a choking voice, as he stood up: "I came here to find out where
your sister is, you scoundrel! She left me after dinner. It is now past
seven o'clock and she is not in. She has been going out lately without
telling me, and she has been disrespectful—and I see your filthy,
abominable influence at work. Where is she?"
He had in his hands the familiar umbrella, and I was already taken
aback, and I stood stiff and erect, like a schoolboy, waiting for my
father to thrash me, but he saw the glance I cast at the umbrella and
this probably checked him.
"Live as you like!" he said. "My blessing is gone from you."
"Good God!" muttered my old nurse behind the door. "You are lost. Oh! my
heart feels some misfortune coming. I can feel it."
I went to work on the railway. During the whole of August there was wind
and rain. It was damp and cold; the corn had now been gathered in the
fields, and on the big farms where the reaping was done with machines,
the wheat lay not in stacks, but in heaps; and I remember how those
melancholy heaps grew darker and darker every day, and the grain
sprouted. It was hard work; the pouring rain spoiled everything that we
succeeded in finishing. We were not allowed either to live or to sleep
in the station buildings and had to take shelter in dirty, damp, mud
huts where the "railies" had lived during the summer, and at night I
could not sleep from the cold and the bugs crawling over my face and
hands. And when we were working near the bridges, then the "railies"
used to come out in a crowd to fight the painters—which they regarded as
sport. They used to thrash us, steal our trousers, and to infuriate us
and provoke us to a fight; they used to spoil our work, as when they
smeared the signal-boxes with green paint. To add to all our miseries
Radish began to pay us very irregularly. All the painting on the line
was given to one contractor, who subcontracted with another, and he
again with Radish, stipulating for twenty per cent commission. The job
itself was unprofitable; then came the rains; time was wasted; we did no
work and Radish had to pay his men every day. The starving painters
nearly came to blows with him, called him a swindler, a bloodsucker, a
Judas, and he, poor man, sighed and in despair raised his hands to the
heavens and was continually going to Mrs. Cheprakov to borrow money.
VII
Came the rainy, muddy, dark autumn, bringing a slack time, and I used to
sit at home three days in the week without work, or did various jobs
outside painting; such as digging earth for ballast for twenty copecks a
day. Doctor Blagovo had gone to Petersburg. My sister did not come to
see me. Radish lay at home ill, expecting to die every day.
And my mood was also autumnal; perhaps because when I became a working
man I saw only the seamy side of the life of our town, and every day
made fresh discoveries which brought me to despair. My fellow townsmen,
both those of whom I had had a low opinion before, and those whom I had
thought fairly decent, now seemed to me base, cruel, and up to any dirty
trick. We poor people were tricked and cheated in the accounts, kept
waiting for hours in cold passages or in the kitchen, and we were
insulted and uncivilly treated. In the autumn I had to paper the library
and two rooms at the club. I was paid seven copecks a piece, but was
told to give a receipt for twelve copecks, and when I refused to do it,
a respectable gentleman in gold spectacles, one of the stewards of the
club, said to me:
"If you say another word, you scoundrel, I'll knock you down."
And when a servant whispered to him that I was the son of Pologniev, the
architect, then I got flustered and blushed, but he recovered himself at
once and said:
"Damn him."
In the shops we working men were sold bad meat, musty flour, and coarse
tea. In church we were jostled by the police, and in the hospitals we
were mulcted by the assistants and nurses, and if we could not give them
bribes through poverty, we were given food in dirty dishes. In the post-
office the lowest official considered it his duty to treat us as animals
and to shout rudely and insolently: "Wait! Don't you come pushing your
way in here!" Even the dogs, even they were hostile to us and hurled
themselves at us with a peculiar malignancy. But what struck me most of
all in my new position was the entire lack of justice, what the people
call "forgetting God." Rarely a day went by without some swindle. The
shopkeeper, who sold us oil, the contractor, the workmen, the customers
themselves, all cheated. It was an understood thing that our rights were
never considered, and we always had to pay for the money we had earned,
going with our hats off to the back door.
I was paper-hanging in one of the club-rooms, next the library, when,
one evening as I was on the point of leaving, Dolyhikov's daughter came
into the room carrying a bundle of books.
I bowed to her.
"Ah! How are you?" she said, recognising me at once and holding out her
hand. "I am very glad to see you."
She smiled and looked with a curious puzzled expression at my blouse and
the pail of paste and the papers lying on the floor; I was embarrassed
and she also felt awkward.
"Excuse my staring at you," she said. "I have heard so much about you.
Especially from Doctor Blagovo. He is enthusiastic about you. I have met
your sister; she is a dear, sympathetic girl, but I could not make her
see that there is nothing awful in your simple life. On the contrary,
you are the most interesting man in the town."
Once more she glanced at the pail of paste and the paper and said:
"I asked Doctor Blagovo to bring us together, but he either forgot or
had no time. However, we have met now. I should be very pleased if you
would call on me. I do so want to have a talk. I am a simple person,"
she said, holding out her hand, "and I hope you will come and see me
without ceremony. My father is away, in Petersburg."
She went into the reading-room, with her dress rustling, and for a long
time after I got home I could not sleep.
During that autumn some kind soul, wishing to relieve my existence, sent
me from time to time presents of tea and lemons, or biscuits, or roast
pigeons. Karpovna said the presents were brought by a soldier, though
from whom she did not know; and the soldier used to ask if I was well,
if I had dinner every day, and if I had warm clothes. When the frost
began the soldier came while I was out and brought a soft knitted scarf,
which gave out a soft, hardly perceptible scent, and I guessed who my
good fairy had been. For the scarf smelled of lily-of-the-valley, Aniuta
Blagovo's favourite scent.
Toward winter there was more work and things became more cheerful.
Radish came to life again and we worked together in the cemetery church,
where we scraped the holy shrine for gilding. It was a clean, quiet,
and, as our mates said, a specially good job. We could do a great deal
in one day, and so time passed quickly, imperceptibly. There was no
swearing, nor laughing, nor loud altercations. The place compelled quiet
and decency, and disposed one for tranquil, serious thoughts. Absorbed
in our work, we stood or sat immovably, like statues; there was a dead
silence, very proper to a cemetery, so that if a tool fell down, or the
oil in the lamp spluttered, the sound would be loud and startling, and
we would turn to see what it was. After a long silence one could hear a
humming like that of a swarm of bees; in the porch, in an undertone, the
funeral service was being read over a dead baby; or a painter painting a
moon surrounded with stars on the cupola would begin to whistle quietly,
and remembering suddenly that he was in a church, would stop; or Radish
would sigh at his own thoughts: "Anything may happen! Anything may
happen!" or above our heads there would be the slow, mournful tolling of
a bell, and the painters would say it must be a rich man being brought
to the church....
The days I spent in the peace of the little church, and during the
evenings I played billiards, or went to the gallery of the theatre in
the new serge suit I had bought with my own hard-earned money. They were
already beginning plays and concerts at the Azhoguins', and Radish did
the scenery by himself. He told me about the plays and tableaux vivants
at the Azhoguins', and I listened to him enviously. I had a great
longing to take part in the rehearsals, but I dared not go to the
Azhoguins'.
A week before Christmas Doctor Blagovo arrived, and we resumed our
arguments and played billiards in the evenings. When he played billiards
he used to take off his coat, and unfasten his shirt at the neck, and
generally try to look like a debauchee. He drank a little, but rowdily,
and managed to spend in a cheap tavern like the Volga as much as twenty
roubles in an evening.
Once more my sister came to see me, and when they met they expressed
surprise, but I could see by her happy, guilty face that these meetings
were not accidental. One evening when we were playing billiards the
doctor said to me:
"I say, why don't you call on Miss Dolyhikov? You don't know Maria
Victorovna. She is a clever, charming, simple creature."
I told him how the engineer had received me in the spring.
"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor. "The engineer is one thing and she is
another. Really, my good fellow, you mustn't offend her. Go and see her
some time. Let us go to-morrow evening. Will you?"
He persuaded me. Next evening I donned my serge suit and with some
perturbation set out to call on Miss Dolyhikov. The footman did not seem
to me so haughty and formidable, or the furniture so oppressive, as on
the morning when I had come to ask for work. Maria Victorovna was
expecting me and greeted me as an old friend and gave my hand a warm,
friendly grip. She was wearing a grey dress with wide sleeves, and had
her hair done in the style which when it became the fashion a year later
in our town, was called "dog's ears." The hair was combed back over the
ears, and it made Maria Victorovna's face look broader, and she looked
very like her father, whose face was broad and red and rather like a
coachman's. She was handsome and elegant, but not young; about thirty to
judge by her appearance, though she was not more than twenty-five.
"Dear doctor!" she said, making me sit down. "How grateful I am to him.
But for him, you would not have come. I am bored to death! My father has
gone and left me alone, and I do not know what to do with myself."
Then she began to ask where I was working, how much I got, and where I
lived.
"Do you only spend what you earn on yourself?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You are a happy man," she replied. "All the evil in life, it seems to
me, comes from boredom and idleness, and spiritual emptiness, which are
inevitable when one lives at other people's expense. Don't think I'm
showing off. I mean it sincerely. It is dull and unpleasant to be rich.
Win friends by just riches, they say, because as a rule there is and can
be no such thing as just riches."
She looked at the furniture with a serious, cold expression, as though
she was making an inventory of it, and went on:
"Ease and comfort possess a magic power. Little by little they seduce
even strong-willed people. Father and I used to live poorly and simply,
and now you see how we live. Isn't it strange?" she said with a shrug.
"We spend twenty thousand roubles a year! In the provinces!"
"Ease and comfort must not be regarded as the inevitable privilege of
capital and education," I said. "It seems to me possible to unite the
comforts of life with work, however hard and dirty it may be. Your
father is rich, but, as he says, he used to be a mechanic, and just a
lubricator."
She smiled and shook her head thoughtfully.
"Papa sometimes eats tiurya," she said, "but only out of caprice."
A bell rang and she got up.
"The rich and the educated ought to work like the rest," she went on,
"and if there is to be any comfort, it should be accessible to all.
There should be no privileges. However, that's enough philosophy. Tell
me something cheerful. Tell me about the painters. What are they like?
Funny?"
The doctor came. I began to talk about the painters, but, being unused
to it, I felt awkward and talked solemnly and ponderously like an
ethnographist. The doctor also told a few stories about working people.
He rocked to and fro and cried, and fell on his knees, and when he was
depicting a drunkard, lay flat on the floor. It was as good as a play,
and Maria Victorovna laughed until she cried. Then he played the piano
and sang in his high-pitched tenor, and Maria Victorovna stood by him
and told him what to sing and corrected him when he made a mistake.
"I hear you sing, too," said I.
"Too?" cried the doctor. "She is a wonderful singer, an artist, and you
say—too! Careful, careful!"
"I used to study seriously," she replied, "but I have given it up now."
She sat on a low stool and told us about her life in Petersburg, and
imitated famous singers, mimicking their voices and mannerisms; then she
sketched the doctor and myself in her album, not very well, but both
were good likenesses. She laughed and made jokes and funny faces, and
this suited her better than talking about unjust riches, and it seemed
to me that what she had said about "riches and comfort" came not from
herself, but was just mimicry. She was an admirable comedian. I compared
her mentally with the girls of our town, and not even the beautiful,
serious Aniuta Blagovo could stand up against her; the difference was as
vast as that between a wild and a garden rose.
We stayed to supper. The doctor and Maria Victorovna drank red wine,
champagne, and coffee with cognac; they touched glasses and drank to
friendship, to wit, to progress, to freedom, and never got drunk, but
went rather red and laughed for no reason until they cried. To avoid
being out of it I, too, drank red wine.
"People with talent and with gifted natures," said Miss Dolyhikov, "know
how to live and go their own way; but ordinary people like myself know
nothing and can do nothing by themselves; there is nothing for them but
to find some deep social current and let themselves be borne along by
it."
"Is it possible to find that which does not exist?" asked the doctor.
"It doesn't exist because we don't see it."
"Is that so? Social currents are the invention of modern literature.
They don't exist here."
A discussion began.
"We have no profound social movements; nor have we had them," said the
doctor. "Modern literature has invented a lot of things, and modern
literature invented intellectual working men in village life, but go
through all our villages and you will only find Mr. Cheeky Snout in a
jacket or black frock coat, who will make four mistakes in the word
'one.' Civilised life has not begun with us yet. We have the same
savagery, the same slavery, the same nullity as we had five hundred
years ago. Movements, currents—all that is so wretched and puerile mixed
up with such vulgar, catch-penny interests—and one cannot take it
seriously. You may think you have discovered a large social movement,
and you may follow it and devote your life in the modern fashion to such
problems as the liberation of vermin from slavery, or the abolition of
meat cutlets—and I congratulate you, madam. But we have to learn, learn,
learn, and there will be plenty of time for social movements; we are not
up to them yet, and upon my soul, we don't understand anything at all
about them."
"You don't understand, but I do," said Maria Victorovna. "Good Heavens!
What a bore you are to-night."
"It is our business to learn and learn, to try and accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, because serious social movements come where there
is knowledge, and the future happiness of mankind lies in science.
Here's to science!"
"One thing is certain. Life must somehow be arranged differently," said
Maria Victorovna, after some silence and deep thought, "and life as it
has been up to now is worthless. Don't let us talk about it."
When we left her the Cathedral clock struck two.
"Did you like her?" asked the doctor. "Isn't she a dear girl?"
We had dinner at Maria Victorovna's on Christmas Day, and then we went
to see her every day during the holidays. There was nobody besides
ourselves, and she was right when she said she had no friends in the
town but the doctor and me. We spent most of the time talking, and
sometimes the doctor would bring a book or a magazine and read aloud.
After all, he was the first cultivated man I had met. I could not tell
if he knew much, but he was always generous with his knowledge because
he wished others to know too. When he talked about medicine, he was not
like any of our local doctors, but he made a new and singular
impression, and it seemed to me that if he had wished he could have
become a genuine scientist. And perhaps he was the only person at that
time who had any real influence over me. Meeting him and reading the
books he gave me, I began gradually to feel a need for knowledge to
inspire the tedium of my work. It seemed strange to me that I had not
known before such things as that the whole world consisted of sixty
elements. I did not know what oil or paint was, and I could do without
knowing. My acquaintance with the doctor raised me morally too. I used
to argue with him, and though I usually stuck to my opinion, yet,
through him, I came gradually to perceive that everything was not clear
to me, and I tried to cultivate convictions as definite as possible so
that the promptings of my conscience should be precise and have nothing
vague about them. Nevertheless, educated and fine as he was, far and
away the best man in the town, he was by no means perfect. There was
something rather rude and priggish in his ways and in his trick of
dragging talk down to discussion, and when he took off his coat and sat
in his shirt and gave the footman a tip, it always seemed to me that
culture was just a part of him, with the rest untamed Tartar.
After the holidays he left once more for Petersburg. He went in the
morning and after dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off
her furs, she sat silent, very pale, staring in front of her. She began
to shiver and seemed to be fighting against some illness.
"You must have caught a cold," I said.
Her eyes filled with tears. She rose and went to Karpovna without a word
to me, as though I had offended her. And a little later I heard her
speaking in a tone of bitter reproach.
"Nurse, what have I been living for, up to now? What for? Tell me;
haven't I wasted my youth? During the last years I have had nothing but
making up accounts, pouring out tea, counting the copecks, entertaining
guests, without a thought that there was anything better in the world!
Nurse, try to understand me, I too have human desires and I want to live
and they have made a housekeeper of me. It is awful, awful!"
She flung her keys against the door and they fell with a clatter in my
room. They were the keys of the side-board, the larder, the cellar, and
the tea-chest—the keys my mother used to carry.
"Oh! Oh! Saints above!" cried my old nurse in terror. "The blessed
saints!"
When she left, my sister came into my room for her keys and said:
"Forgive me. Something strange has been going on in me lately."
VIII
One evening when I came home late from Maria Victorovna's I found a
young policeman in a new uniform in my room; he was sitting by the table
reading.
"At last!" he said getting up and stretching himself. "This is the third
time I have been to see you. The governor has ordered you to go and see
him to-morrow at nine o'clock sharp. Don't be late."
He made me give him a written promise to comply with his Excellency's
orders and went away. This policeman's visit and the unexpected
invitation to see the governor had a most depressing effect on me. From
my early childhood I have had a dread of gendarmes, police, legal
officials, and I was tormented with anxiety as though I had really
committed a crime and I could not sleep. Nurse and Prokofyi were also
upset and could not sleep. And, to make things worse, nurse had an
earache, and moaned and more than once screamed out. Hearing that I
could not sleep Prokofyi came quietly into my room with a little lamp
and sat by the table.
"You should have a drop of pepper-brandy...." he said after some
thought. "In this vale of tears things go on all right when you take a
drop. And if mother had some pepper-brandy poured into her ear she would
be much better."
About three he got ready to go to the slaughter-house to fetch some
meat. I knew I should not sleep until morning, and to use up the time
until nine, I went with him. We walked with a lantern, and his boy,
Nicolka, who was about thirteen, and had blue spots on his face and an
expression like a murderer's, drove behind us in a sledge, urging the
horse on with hoarse cries.
"You will probably be punished at the governor's," said Prokofyi as we
walked. "There is a governor's rank, and an archimandrite's rank, and an
officer's rank, and a doctor's rank, and every profession has its own
rank. You don't keep to yours and they won't allow it."
The slaughter-house stood behind the cemetery, and till then I had only
seen it at a distance. It consisted of three dark sheds surrounded by a
grey fence, from which, when the wind was in that direction in summer,
there came an overpowering stench. Now, as I entered the yard, I could
not see the sheds in the darkness; I groped through horses and sledges,
both empty and laden with meat; and there were men walking about with
lanterns and swearing disgustingly. Prokofyi and Nicolka swore as
filthily and there was a continuous hum from the swearing and coughing
and the neighing of the horses.
The place smelled of corpses and offal, the snow was thawing and already
mixed with mud, and in the darkness it seemed to me that I was walking
through a pool of blood.
When we had filled the sledge with meat, we went to the butcher's shop
in the market-place. Day was beginning to dawn. One after another the
cooks came with baskets and old women in mantles. With an axe in his
hand, wearing a white, blood-stained apron, Prokofyi swore terrifically
and crossed himself, turning toward the church, and shouted so loud that
he could be heard all over the market, avowing that he sold his meat at
cost price and even at a loss. He cheated in weighing and reckoning, the
cooks saw it, but, dazed by his shouting, they did not protest, but only
called him a gallows-bird.
Raising and dropping his formidable axe, he assumed picturesque
attitudes and constantly uttered the sound "Hak!" with a furious
expression, and I was really afraid of his cutting off some one's head
or hand.
I stayed in the butcher's shop the whole morning, and when at last I
went to the governor's my fur coat smelled of meat and blood. My state
of mind would have been appropriate for an encounter with a bear armed
with no more than a staff. I remember a long staircase with a striped
carpet, and a young official in a frock coat with shining buttons, who
silently indicated the door with both hands and went in to announce me.
I entered the hall, where the furniture was most luxurious, but cold and
tasteless, forming a most unpleasant impression—the tall, narrow pier-
glasses, and the bright, yellow hangings over the windows; one could see
that, though governors changed, the furniture remained the same. The
young official again pointed with both hands to the door and went toward
a large, green table, by which stood a general with the Order of
Vladimir at his neck.
"Mr. Pologniev," he began, holding a letter in his hand and opening his
mouth wide so that it made a round O. "I asked you to come to say this
to you: 'Your esteemed father has applied verbally and in writing to the
provincial marshal of nobility, to have you summoned and made to see the
incongruity of your conduct with the title of nobleman which you have
the honour to bear. His Excellency Alexander Pavlovich, justly thinking
that your conduct may be subversive, and finding that persuasion may not
be sufficient, without serious intervention on the part of the
authorities, has given me his decision as to your case, and I agree with
him.'"
He said this quietly, respectfully, standing erect as if I was his
superior, and his expression was not at all severe. He had a flabby,
tired face, covered with wrinkles, with pouches under his eyes; his hair
was dyed, and it was hard to guess his age from his appearance—fifty or
sixty.
"I hope," he went on, "that you will appreciate Alexander Pavlovich's
delicacy in applying to me, not officially, but privately. I have
invited you unofficially not as a governor, but as a sincere admirer of
your father's. And I ask you to change your conduct and to return to the
duties proper to your rank, or, to avoid the evil effects of your
example, to go to some other place where you are not known and where you
may do what you like. Otherwise I shall have to resort to extreme
measures."
For half a minute he stood in silence staring at me open-mouthed.
"Are you a vegetarian?" he asked.
"No, your Excellency, I eat meat."
He sat down and took up a document, and I bowed and left.
It was not worth while going to work before dinner. I went home and
tried to sleep, but could not because of the unpleasant, sickly feeling
from the slaughter-house and my conversation with the governor. And so I
dragged through till the evening and then, feeling gloomy and out of
sorts, I went to see Maria Victorovna. I told her about my visit to the
governor and she looked at me in bewilderment, as if she did not believe
me, and suddenly she began to laugh merrily, heartily, stridently, as
only good-natured, light-hearted people can.
"If I were to tell this in Petersburg!" she cried, nearly dropping with
laughter, bending over the table. "If I could tell them in Petersburg!"
IX
Now we saw each other often, sometimes twice a day. Almost every day,
after dinner, she drove up to the cemetery and, as she waited for me,
read the inscriptions on the crosses and monuments. Sometimes she came
into the church and stood by my side and watched me working. The
silence, the simple industry of the painters and gilders, Radish's good
sense, and the fact that outwardly I was no different from the other
artisans and worked as they did, in a waistcoat and old shoes, and that
they addressed me familiarly—were new to her, and she was moved by it
all. Once in her presence a painter who was working, at a door on the
roof, called down to me:
"Misail, fetch me the white lead."
I fetched him the white lead and as I came down the scaffolding she was
moved to tears and looked at me and smiled:
"What a dear you are!" she said.
I have always remembered how when I was a child a green parrot got out
of its cage in one of the rich people's houses and wandered about the
town for a whole month, flying from one garden to another, homeless and
lonely. And Maria Victorovna reminded me of the bird.
"Except to the cemetery," she said with a laugh, "I have absolutely
nowhere to go. The town bores me to tears. People read, sing, and
twitter at the Azhoguins', but I cannot bear them lately. Your sister is
shy, Miss Blagovo for some reason hates me. I don't like the theatre.
What can I do with myself?"
When I was at her house I smelled of paint and turpentine, and my hands
were stained. She liked that. She wanted me to come to her in my
ordinary working-clothes; but I felt awkward in them in her drawing-
room, and as if I were in uniform, and so I always wore my new serge
suit. She did not like that.
"You must confess," she said once, "that you have not got used to your
new rôle. A working-man's suit makes you feel awkward and embarrassed.
Tell me, isn't it because you are not sure of yourself and are
unsatisfied? Does this work you have chosen, this painting of yours,
really satisfy you?" she asked merrily. "I know paint makes things look
nicer and wear better, but the things themselves belong to the rich and
after all they are a luxury. Besides you have said more than once that
everybody should earn his living with his own hands and you earn money,
not bread. Why don't you keep to the exact meaning of what you say? You
must earn bread, real bread, you must plough, sow, reap, thrash, or do
something which has to do directly with agriculture, such as keeping
cows, digging, or building houses...."
She opened a handsome bookcase which stood by the writing-table and
said:
"I'm telling you all this because I'm going to let you into my secret.
Voilà. This is my agricultural library. Here are books on arable land,
vegetable-gardens, orchard-keeping, cattle-keeping, bee-keeping: I read
them eagerly and have studied the theory of everything thoroughly. It is
my dream to go to Dubechnia as soon as March begins. It is wonderful
there, amazing; isn't it? The first year I shall only be learning the
work and getting used to it, and in the second year I shall begin to
work thoroughly, without sparing myself. My father promised to give me
Dubechnia as a present, and I am to do anything I like with it."
She blushed and with mingled laughter and tears she dreamed aloud of her
life at Dubechnia and how absorbing it would be. And I envied her. March
would soon be here. The days were drawing out, and in the bright sunny
afternoons the snow dripped from the roofs, and the smell of spring was
in the air. I too longed for the country.
And when she said she was going to live at Dubechnia, I saw at once that
I should be left alone in the town, and I felt jealous of the bookcase
with her books about farming. I knew and cared nothing about farming and
I was on the point of telling her that agriculture was work for slaves,
but I recollected that my father had once said something of the sort and
I held my peace.
Lent began. The engineer, Victor Ivanich, came home from Petersburg. I
had begun to forget his existence. He came unexpectedly, not even
sending a telegram. When I went there as usual in the evening, he was
walking up and down the drawing-room, after a bath, with his hair cut,
looking ten years younger, and talking. His daughter was kneeling by his
trunks and taking out boxes, bottles, books, and handing them to Pavel
the footman. When I saw the engineer, I involuntarily stepped back and
he held out both his hands and smiled and showed his strong, white, cab-
driver's teeth.
"Here he is! Here he is! I'm very pleased to see you, Mr. House-painter!
Maria told me all about you and sang your praises. I quite understand
you and heartily approve." He took me by the arm and went on: "It is
much cleverer and more honest to be a decent workman than to spoil State
paper and to wear a cockade. I myself worked with my hands in Belgium. I
was an engine-driver for five years...."
He was wearing a short jacket and comfortable slippers, and he shuffled
along like a gouty man waving and rubbing his hands; humming and buzzing
and shrugging with pleasure at being at home again with his favourite
shower-bath.
"There's no denying," he said at supper, "there's no denying that you
are kind, sympathetic people, but somehow as soon as you gentlefolk take
on manual labour or try to spare the peasants, you reduce it all to
sectarianism. You are a sectarian. You don't drink vodka. What is that
but sectarianism?"
To please him I drank vodka. I drank wine, too. We ate cheese, sausages,
pastries, pickles, and all kinds of dainties that the engineer had
brought with him, and we sampled wines sent from abroad during his
absence. They were excellent. For some reason the engineer had wines and
cigars sent from abroad—duty free; somebody sent him caviare and baliki
gratis; he did not pay rent for his house because his landlord supplied
the railway with kerosene, and generally he and his daughter gave me the
impression of having all the best things in the world at their service
free of charge.
I went on visiting them, but with less pleasure than before. The
engineer oppressed me and I felt cramped in his presence. I could not
endure his clear, innocent eyes; his opinions bored me and were
offensive to me, and I was distressed by the recollection that I had so
recently been subordinate to this ruddy, well-fed man, and that he had
been mercilessly rude to me. True he would put his arm round my waist
and clap me kindly on the shoulder and approve of my way of living, but
I felt that he despised my nullity just as much as before and only
suffered me to please his daughter, but I could no longer laugh and talk
easily, and I thought myself ill-mannered, and all the time was
expecting him to call me Panteley as he did his footman Pavel. How my
provincial, bourgeois pride rode up against him! I, a working man, a
painter, going every day to the house of rich strangers, whom the whole
town regarded as foreigners, and drinking their expensive wines and
outlandish dishes! I could not reconcile this with my conscience. When I
went to see them I sternly avoided those whom I met on the way, and
looked askance at them like a real sectarian, and when I left the
engineer's house I was ashamed of feeling so well-fed.
But chiefly I was afraid of falling in love. Whether walking in the
street, or working, or talking to my mates, I thought all the time of
going to Maria Victorovna's in the evening, and always had her voice,
her laughter, her movements with me. And always as I got ready to go to
her, I would stand for a long time in front of the cracked mirror tying
my necktie; my serge suit seemed horrible to me, and I suffered, but at
the same time, despised myself for feeling so small. When she called to
me from another room to say that she was not dressed yet and to ask me
to wait a bit, and I could hear her dressing, I was agitated and felt as
though the floor was sinking under me. And when I saw a woman in the
street, even at a distance, I fell to comparing her figure with hers,
and it seemed to me that all our women and girls were vulgar, absurdly
dressed, and without manners; and such comparisons roused in me a
feeling of pride; Maria Victorovna was better than all of them. And at
night I dreamed of her and myself.
Once at supper the engineer and I ate a whole lobster. When I reached
home I remember that the engineer had twice called me "my dear fellow,"
and I thought that they treated me as they might have done a big,
unhappy dog, separated from his master, and that they were amusing
themselves with me, and that they would order me away like a dog when
they were bored with me. I began to feel ashamed and hurt; went to the
point of tears, as though I had been insulted, and, raising my eyes to
the heavens, I vowed to put an end to it all.
Next day I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. Late at night, when it was
quite dark and pouring with rain, I walked up and down Great Gentry
Street, looking at the windows. At the Azhoguins' everybody was asleep
and the only light was in one of the top windows; old Mrs. Azhoguin was
sitting in her room embroidering by candle-light and imagining herself
to be fighting against prejudice. It was dark in our house and opposite,
at the Dolyhikovs' the windows were lit up, but it was impossible to see
anything through the flowers and curtains. I kept on walking up and down
the street; I was soaked through with the cold March rain. I heard my
father come home from the club; he knocked at the door; in a minute a
light appeared at a window and I saw my sister walking quickly with her
lamp and hurriedly arranging her thick hair. Then my father paced up and
down the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, and my sister sat
still in a corner, lost in thought, not listening to him....
But soon they left the room and the light was put out.... I looked at
the engineer's house and that too was now dark. In the darkness and the
rain I felt desperately lonely. Cast out at the mercy of Fate, and I
felt how, compared with my loneliness, and my suffering, actual and to
come, all my work and all my desires and all that I had hitherto thought
and read, were vain and futile. Alas! The activities and thoughts of
human beings are not nearly so important as their sorrows! And not
knowing exactly what I was doing I pulled with all my might at the bell
at the Dolyhikovs' gate, broke it, and ran away down the street like a
little boy, full of fear, thinking they would rush out at once and
recognise me. When I stopped to take breath at the end of the street, I
could hear nothing but the falling rain and far away a night-watchman
knocking on a sheet of iron.
For a whole week I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. I sold my serge suit.
I had no work and I was once more half-starved, earning ten or twenty
copecks a day, when possible, by disagreeable work. Floundering knee-
deep in the mire, putting out all my strength, I tried to drown my
memories and to punish myself for all the cheeses and pickles to which I
had been treated at the engineer's. Still, no sooner did I go to bed,
wet and hungry, than my untamed imagination set to work to evolve
wonderful, alluring pictures, and to my amazement I confessed that I was
in love, passionately in love, and I fell sound asleep feeling that the
hard life had only made my body stronger and younger.
One evening it began, most unseasonably, to snow, and the wind blew from
the north, exactly as if winter had begun again. When I got home from
work I found Maria Victorovna in my room. She was in her furs with her
hands in her muff.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she asked, looking at me with her bright
sagacious eyes, and I was overcome with joy and stood stiffly in front
of her, just as I had done with my father when he was going to thrash
me; she looked straight into my face and I could see by her eyes that
she understood why I was overcome.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "You don't want to come? I
had to come to you."
She got up and came close to me.
"Don't leave me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
lonely, utterly lonely."
She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:
"Alone! Life is hard, very hard, and in the whole world I have no one
but you. Don't leave me!"
Looking for her handkerchief to dry her tears, she gave a smile; we were
silent for some time, then I embraced and kissed her, and the pin in her
hat scratched my face and drew blood.
And we began to talk as though we had been dear to each other for a
long, long time.
X
In a couple of days she sent me to Dubechnia and I was beyond words
delighted with it. As I walked to the station, and as I sat in the
train, I laughed for no reason and people thought me drunk. There were
snow and frost in the mornings still, but the roads were getting dark,
and there were rooks cawing above them.
At first I thought of arranging the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov's
for myself and Masha, but it appeared that doves and pigeons had taken
up their abode there and it would be impossible to cleanse it without
destroying a great number of nests. We would have to live willy-nilly in
the uncomfortable rooms with Venetian blinds in the big house. The
peasants called it a palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it,
and the only furniture was a piano and a child's chair, lying in the
attic, and even if Masha brought all her furniture from town we should
not succeed in removing the impression of frigid emptiness and coldness.
I chose three small rooms with windows looking on to the garden, and
from early morning till late at night I was at work in them, glazing the
windows, hanging paper, blocking up the chinks and holes in the floor.
It was an easy, pleasant job. Every now and then I would run to the
river to see if the ice was breaking and all the while I dreamed of the
starlings returning. And at night when I thought of Masha I would be
filled with an inexpressibly sweet feeling of an all-embracing joy to
listen to the rats and the wind rattling and knocking above the ceiling;
it was like an old hobgoblin coughing in the attic.
The snow was deep; there was a heavy fall at the end of March, but it
thawed rapidly, as if by magic, and the spring floods rushed down so
that by the beginning of April the starlings were already chattering and
yellow butterflies fluttered in the garden. The weather was wonderful.
Every day toward evening I walked toward the town to meet Masha, and how
delightful it was to walk along the soft, drying road with bare feet!
Half-way I would sit down and look at the town, not daring to go nearer.
The sight of it upset me, I was always wondering how my acquaintances
would behave toward me when they heard of my love. What would my father
say? I was particularly worried by the idea that my life was becoming
more complicated, and that I had entirely lost control of it, and that
she was carrying me off like a balloon, God knows whither. I had already
given up thinking how to make a living, and I thought—indeed, I cannot
remember what I thought.
Masha used to come in a carriage. I would take a seat beside her and
together, happy and free, we used to drive to Dubechnia. Or, having
waited till sunset, I would return home, weary and disconsolate,
wondering why Masha had not come, and then by the gate or in the garden
I would find my darling. She would come by the railway and walk over
from the station. What a triumph she had then! In her plain, woollen
dress, with a simple umbrella, but keeping a trim, fashionable figure
and expensive, Parisian boots—she was a gifted actress playing the
country girl. We used to go over the house, and plan out the rooms, and
the paths, and the vegetable-garden, and the beehives. We already had
chickens and ducks and geese which we loved because they were ours. We
had oats, clover, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds all ready for sowing,
and we used to examine them all and wonder what the crops would be like,
and everything Masha said to me seemed extraordinarily clever and fine.
This was the happiest time of my life.
Soon after Easter we were married in the parish church in the village of
Kurilovka three miles from Dubechnia. Masha wanted everything to be
simple; by her wish our bridesmen were peasant boys, only one deacon
sang, and we returned from the church in a little, shaky cart which she
drove herself. My sister was the only guest from the town. Masha had
sent her a note a couple of days before the wedding. My sister wore a
white dress and white gloves.... During the ceremony she cried softly
for joy and emotion, and her face had a maternal expression of infinite
goodness. She was intoxicated with our happiness and smiled as though
she were breathing a sweet perfume, and when I looked at her I
understood that there was nothing in the world higher in her eyes than
love, earthly love, and that she was always dreaming of love, secretly,
timidly, yet passionately. She embraced Masha and kissed her, and, not
knowing how to express her ecstasy, she said to her of me:
"He is a good man! A very good man."
Before she left us, she put on her ordinary clothes, and took me into
the garden to have a quiet talk.
"Father is very hurt that you have not written to him," she said. "You
should have asked for his blessing. But, at heart, he is very pleased.
He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of society, and
that under Maria Victorovna's influence you will begin to adopt a more
serious attitude toward life. In the evening now we talk about nothing
but you; and yesterday he even said, 'our Misail.' I was delighted. He
has evidently thought of a plan and I believe he wants to set you an
example of magnanimity, and that he will be the first to talk of
reconciliation. It is quite possible that one of these days he will come
and see you here."
She made the sign of the cross over me and said:
"Well, God bless you. Be happy. Aniuta Blagovo is a very clever girl.
She says of your marriage that God has sent you a new ordeal. Well?
Married life is not made up only of joy but of suffering as well. It is
impossible to avoid it."
Masha and I walked about three miles with her, and then walked home
quietly and silently, as though it were a rest for both of us. Masha had
her hand on my arm. We were at peace and there was no need to talk of
love; after the wedding we grew closer to each other and dearer, and it
seemed as though nothing could part us.
"Your sister is a dear, lovable creature," said Masha, "but looks as
though she had lived in torture. Your father must be a terrible man."
I began to tell her how my sister and I had been brought up and how
absurd and full of torture our childhood had been. When she heard that
my father had thrashed me quite recently she shuddered and clung to me:
"Don't tell me any more," she said. "It is too horrible."
And now she did not leave me. We lived in the big house, in three rooms,
and in the evenings we bolted the door that led to the empty part of the
house, as though some one lived there whom we did not know and feared. I
used to get up early, at dawn, and begin working. I repaired the carts;
made paths in the garden, dug the beds, painted the roofs. When the time
came to sow oats, I tried to plough and harrow, and sow and did it all
conscientiously, and did not leave it all to the labourer. I used to get
tired, and my face and feet used to burn with the rain and the sharp
cold wind. But work in the fields did not attract me. I knew nothing
about agriculture and did not like it; perhaps because my ancestors were
not tillers of the soil and pure town blood ran in my veins. I loved
nature dearly; I loved the fields and the meadows and the garden, but
the peasant who turns the earth with his plough, shouting at his
miserable horse, ragged and wet, with bowed shoulders, was to me an
expression of wild, rude, ugly force, and as I watched his clumsy
movements I could not help thinking of the long-passed legendary life,
when men did not yet know the use of fire. The fierce bull which led the
herd, and the horses that stampeded through the village, filled me with
terror, and all the large creatures, strong and hostile, a ram with
horns, a gander, or a watch-dog seemed to me to be symbolical of some
rough, wild force. These prejudices used to be particularly strong in me
in bad weather, when heavy clouds hung over the black plough-lands. But
worst of all was that when I was ploughing or sowing, and a few peasants
stood and watched how I did it, I no longer felt the inevitability and
necessity of the work and it seemed to me that I was trifling my time
away.
I used to go through the gardens and the meadow to the mill. It was
leased by Stiepan, a Kurilovka peasant; handsome, swarthy, with a black
beard—an athletic appearance. He did not care for mill work and thought
it tiresome and unprofitable, and he only lived at the mill to escape
from home. He was a saddler and always smelled of tan and leather. He
did not like talking, was slow and immovable, and used to hum "U-lu-lu-
lu," sitting on the bank or in the doorway of the mill. Sometimes his
wife and mother-in-law used to come from Kurilovka to see him; they were
both fair, languid, soft, and they used to bow to him humbly and call
him Stiepan Petrovich. And he would not answer their greeting with a
word or a sign, but would turn where he sat on the bank and hum quietly:
"U-lu-lu-lu." There would be a silence for an hour or two. His mother-
in-law and his wife would whisper to each other, get up and look
expectantly at him for some time, waiting for him to look at them, and
then they would bow humbly and say in sweet, soft voices:
"Good-bye, Stiepan Petrovich."
And they would go away. After that, Stiepan would put away the bundle of
cracknels or the shirt they had left for him and sigh and give a wink in
their direction and say:
"The female sex!"
The mill was worked with both wheels day and night. I used to help
Stiepan, I liked it, and when he went away I was glad to take his place.
XI
After a spell of warm bright weather we had a season of bad roads. It
rained and was cold all through May. The grinding of the millstones and
the drip of the rain induced idleness and sleep. The floor shook, the
whole place smelled of flour, and this too made one drowsy. My wife in a
short fur coat and high rubber boots used to appear twice a day and she
always said the same thing:
"Call this summer! It is worse than October!"
We used to have tea together and cook porridge, or sit together for
hours in silence thinking the rain would never stop. Once when Stiepan
went away to a fair, Masha stayed the night in the mill. When we got up
we could not tell what time it was for the sky was overcast; the sleepy
cocks at Dubechnia were crowing, and the corncrakes were trilling in the
meadow; it was very, very early.... My wife and I walked down to the
pool and drew up the bow-net that Stiepan had put out in our presence
the day before. There was one large perch in it and a crayfish angrily
stretched out his claws.
"Let them go," said Masha. "Let them be happy too."
Because we got up very early and had nothing to do, the day seemed very
long, the longest in my life. Stiepan returned before dusk and I went
back to the farmhouse.
"Your father came here to-day," said Masha.
"Where is he?"
"He has gone. I did not receive him."
Seeing my silence and feeling that I was sorry for my father, she said:
"We must be logical. I did not receive him and sent a message to ask him
not to trouble us again and not to come and see us."
In a moment I was outside the gates, striding toward the town to make it
up with my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time
since our marriage I suddenly felt sad, and through my brain, tired with
the long day, there flashed the thought that perhaps I was not living as
I ought; I got more and more tired and was gradually overcome with
weakness, inertia; I had no desire to move or to think, and after
walking for some time, I waved my hand and went home.
In the middle of the yard stood the engineer in a leather coat with a
hood. He was shouting:
"Where's the furniture? There was some good Empire furniture, pictures,
vases. There's nothing left! Damn it, I bought the place with the
furniture!"
Near him stood Moissey, Mrs. Cheprakov's bailiff, fumbling with his cap;
a lank fellow of about twenty-five, with a spotty face and little,
impudent eyes; one side of his face was larger than the other as though
he had been lain on.
"Yes, Right Honourable Sir, you bought it without the furniture," he
said sheepishly. "I remember that clearly."
"Silence!" shouted the engineer, going red in the face, and beginning to
shake, and his shout echoed through the garden.
XII
When I was busy in the garden or the yard, Moissey would stand with his
hands behind his back and stare at me impertinently with his little
eyes. And this used to irritate me to such an extent that I would put
aside my work and go away.
We learned from Stiepan that Moissey had been Mrs. Cheprakov's lover. I
noticed that when people went to her for money they used to apply to
Moissey first, and once I saw a peasant, a charcoal-burner, black all
over, grovel at his feet. Sometimes after a whispered conversation
Moissey would hand over the money himself without saying anything to his
mistress, from which I concluded that the transaction was settled on his
own account.
He used to shoot in our garden, under our very windows, steal food from
our larder, borrow our horses without leave, and we were furious,
feeling that Dubechnia was no longer ours, and Masha used to go pale and
say:
"Have we to live another year and a half with these creatures?"
Ivan Cheprakov, the son, was a guard on the railway. During the winter
he got very thin and weak, so that he got drunk on one glass of vodka,
and felt cold out of the sun. He hated wearing his guard's uniform and
was ashamed of it, but found his job profitable because he could steal
candles and sell them. My new position gave him a mixed feeling of
astonishment, envy, and vague hope that something of the sort might
happen to him. He used to follow Masha with admiring eyes, and to ask me
what I had for dinner nowadays, and his ugly, emaciated face used to
wear a sweet, sad expression, and he used to twitch his fingers as
though he could feel my happiness with them.
"I say, Little Profit," he would say excitedly, lighting and relighting
his cigarette; he always made a mess wherever he stood because he used
to waste a whole box of matches on one cigarette. "I say, my life is
about as beastly as it could be. Every little squirt of a soldier can
shout: 'Here guard! Here!' I have such a lot in the trains and you know,
mine's a rotten life! My mother has ruined me! I heard a doctor say in
the train, if the parents are loose, their children become drunkards or
criminals. That's it."
Once he came staggering into the yard. His eyes wandered aimlessly and
he breathed heavily; he laughed and cried, and said something in a kind
of frenzy, and through his thickly uttered words I could only hear: "My
mother? Where is my mother?" and he wailed like a child crying, because
it has lost its mother in a crowd. I led him away into the garden and
laid him down under a tree, and all that day and through the night Masha
and I took it in turns to stay with him. He was sick and Masha looked
with disgust at his pale, wet face and said:
"Are we to have these creatures on the place for another year and a
half? It is awful! Awful!"
And what a lot of trouble the peasants gave us! How many disappointments
we had at the outset, in the spring, when we so longed to be happy! My
wife built a school. I designed the school for sixty boys, and the
Zemstvo Council approved the design, but recommended our building the
school at Kurilovka, the big village, only three miles away; besides the
Kurilovka school, where the children of four villages, including that of
Dubechnia, were taught, was old and inadequate and the floor was so
rotten that the children were afraid to walk on it. At the end of March
Masha, by her own desire, was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school,
and at the beginning of April we called three parish meetings and
persuaded the peasants that the school was old and inadequate, and that
it was necessary to build a new one. A member of the Zemstvo Council and
the elementary school inspector came down too and addressed them. After
each meeting we were mobbed and asked for a pail of vodka; we felt
stifled in the crowd and soon got tired and returned home dissatisfied
and rather abashed. At last the peasants allotted a site for the school
and undertook to cart the materials from the town. And as soon as the
spring corn was sown, on the very first Sunday, carts set out from
Kurilovka and Dubechnia to fetch the bricks for the foundations. They
went at dawn and returned late in the evening. The peasants were drunk
and said they were tired out.
The rain and the cold continued, as though deliberately, all through
May. The roads were spoiled and deep in mud. When the carts came from
town they usually drove to our horror, into our yard! A horse would
appear in the gate, straddling its fore legs, with its big belly
heaving; before it came into the yard it would strain and heave and
after it would come a ten-yard beam in a four-wheeled wagon, wet and
slimy; alongside it, wrapped up to keep the rain out, never looking
where he was going and splashing through the puddles, a peasant would
walk with the skirt of his coat tucked up in his belt. Another cart
would appear with planks; then a third with a beam; then a fourth ...
and the yard in front of the house would gradually be blocked up with
horses, beams, planks. Peasants, men and women with their heads wrapped
up and their skirts tucked up, would stare morosely at our windows, kick
up a row and insist on the lady of the house coming out to them; and
they would curse and swear. And in a corner Moissey would stand, and it
seemed to us that he delighted in our discomfiture.
"We won't cart any more!" the peasants shouted. "We are tired to death!
Let her go and cart it herself!"
Pale and scared, thinking they would any minute break into the house,
Masha would send them money for a pail of vodka; after which the noise
would die down and the long beams would go jolting out of the yard.
When I went to look at the building my wife would get agitated and say:
"The peasants are furious. They might do something to you. No. Wait.
I'll go with you."
We used to drive over to Kurilovka together and then the carpenters
would ask for tips. The framework was ready for the foundations to be
laid, but the masons never came and when at last the masons did come it
was apparent that there was no sand; somehow it had been forgotten that
sand was wanted. Taking advantage of our helplessness, the peasants
asked thirty copecks a load, although it was less than a quarter of a
mile from the building to the river where the sand was to be fetched,
and more than five hundred loads were needed. There were endless
misunderstandings, wrangles, and continual begging. My wife was
indignant and the building contractor, Petrov, an old man of seventy,
took her by the hand and said:
"You look here! Look here! Just get me sand and I'll find ten men and
have the work done in two days. Look here!"
Sand was brought, but two, four days, a week passed and still there
yawned a ditch where the foundations were to be.
"I shall go mad," cried my wife furiously. "What wretches they are! What
wretches!"
During these disturbances Victor Ivanich used to come and see us. He
used to bring hampers of wine and dainties, and eat for a long time, and
then go to sleep on the terrace and snore so that the labourers shook
their heads and said:
"He's all right!"
Masha took no pleasure in his visits. She did not believe in him, and
yet she used to ask his advice; when, after a sound sleep after dinner,
he got up out of humour, and spoke disparagingly of our domestic
arrangements, and said he was sorry he had ever bought Dubechnia which
had cost him so much, and poor Masha looked miserably anxious and
complained to him, he would yawn and say the peasants ought to be
flogged.
He called our marriage and the life we were living a comedy, and used to
say it was a caprice, a whimsy.
"She did the same sort of thing once before," he told me. "She fancied
herself as an opera singer, and ran away from me. It took me two months
to find her, and my dear fellow, I wasted a thousand roubles on
telegrams alone."
He had dropped calling me a sectarian or the House-painter; and no
longer approved of my life as a working man, but he used to say:
"You are a queer fish! An abnormality. I don't venture to prophesy, but
you will end badly!"
Masha slept poorly at nights and would sit by the window of our bedroom
thinking. She no longer laughed and made faces at supper. I suffered,
and when it rained, every drop cut into my heart like a bullet, and I
could have gone on my knees to Masha and apologised for the weather.
When the peasants made a row in the yard, I felt that it was my fault. I
would sit for hours in one place, thinking only how splendid and how
wonderful Masha was. I loved her passionately, and I was enraptured by
everything she did and said. Her taste was for quiet indoor occupation;
she loved to read for hours and to study; she who knew about farm-work
only from books, surprised us all by her knowledge and the advice she
gave was always useful, and when applied was never in vain. And in
addition she had the fineness, the taste, and the good sense, the very
sound sense which only very well-bred people possess!
To such a woman, with her healthy, orderly mind, the chaotic environment
with its petty cares and dirty tittle-tattle, in which we lived, was
very painful. I could see that, and I, too, could not sleep at night. My
brain whirled and I could hardly choke back my tears. I tossed about,
not knowing what to do.
I used to rush to town and bring Masha books, newspapers, sweets,
flowers, and I used to go fishing with Stiepan, dragging for hours,
neck-deep in cold water, in the rain, to catch an eel by way of varying
our fare. I used humbly to ask the peasants not to shout, and I gave
them vodka, bribed them, promised them anything they asked. And what a
lot of other foolish things I did!
At last the rain stopped. The earth dried up. I used to get up in the
morning and go into the garden—dew shining on the flowers, birds and
insects shrilling, not a cloud in the sky, and the garden, the meadow,
the river were so beautiful, perfect but for the memory of the peasants
and the carts and the engineer. Masha and I used to drive out in a car
to see how the oats were coming on. She drove and I sat behind; her
shoulders were always a little hunched, and the wind would play with her
hair.
"Keep to the right!" she shouted to the passers-by.
"You are like a coachman!" I once said to her.
"Perhaps. My grandfather, my father's father, was a coachman. Didn't you
know?" she asked, turning round, and immediately she began to mimic the
way the coachmen shout and sing.
"Thank God!" I thought, as I listened to her. "Thank God!"
And again I remember the peasants, the carts, the engineer....
XIII
Doctor Blagovo came over on a bicycle. My sister began to come often.
Once more we talked of manual labour and progress, and the mysterious
Cross awaiting humanity in the remote future. The doctor did not like
our life, because it interfered with our discussions and he said it was
unworthy of a free man to plough, and reap, and breed cattle, and that
in time all such elementary forms of the struggle for existence would be
left to animals and machines, while men would devote themselves
exclusively to scientific investigation. And my sister always asked me
to let her go home earlier, and if she stayed late, or for the night,
she was greatly distressed.
"Good gracious, what a baby you are," Masha used to say reproachfully.
"It is quite ridiculous."
"Yes, it is absurd," my sister would agree. "I admit it is absurd, but
what can I do if I have not the power to control myself. It always seems
to me that I am doing wrong."
During the haymaking my body, not being used to it, ached all over;
sitting on the terrace in the evening, I would suddenly fall asleep and
they would all laugh at me. They would wake me up and make me sit down
to supper. I would be overcome with drowsiness and in a stupor saw
lights, faces, plates, and heard voices without understanding what they
were saying. And I used to get up early in the morning and take my
scythe, or go to the school and work there all day.
When I was at home on holidays I noticed that my wife and sister were
hiding something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was
tender with me as always, but she had some new thought of her own which
she did not communicate to me. Certainly her exasperation with the
peasants had increased and life was growing harder and harder for her,
but she no longer complained to me. She talked more readily to the
doctor than to me, and I could not understand why.
It was the custom in our province for the labourers to come to the farm
in the evenings to be treated to vodka, even the girls having a glass.
We did not keep the custom; the haymakers and the women used to come
into the yard and stay until late in the evening, waiting for vodka, and
then they went away cursing. And then Masha used to frown and relapse
into silence or whisper irritably to the doctor:
"Savages! Barbarians!"
Newcomers to the villages were received ungraciously, almost with
hostility; like new arrivals at a school. At first we were looked upon
as foolish, soft-headed people who had bought the estate because we did
not know what to do with our money. We were laughed at. The peasants
grazed their cattle in our pasture and even in our garden, drove our
cows and horses into the village and then came and asked for
compensation. The whole village used to come into our yard and declare
loudly that in mowing we had cut the border of common land which did not
belong to us; and as we did not know our boundaries exactly we used to
take their word for it and pay a fine. But afterward it appeared that we
had been in the right. They used to bark the young lime-trees in our
woods. A Dubechnia peasant, a money-lender, who sold vodka without a
licence, bribed our labourers to help him cheat us in the most
treacherous way; he substituted old wheels for the new on our wagons,
stole our ploughing yokes and sold them back to us, and so on. But worst
of all was the building at Kurilovka. There the women at night stole
planks, bricks, tiles, iron; the bailiff and his assistants made a
search; the women were each fined two roubles by the village council,
and then the whole lot of them got drunk on the money.
When Masha found out, she would say to the doctor and my sister:
"What beasts! It is horrible! Horrible!"
And more than once I heard her say she was sorry she had decided to
build the school.
"You must understand," the doctor tried to point out, "that if you build
a school or undertake any good work, it is not for the peasants, but for
the sake of culture and the future. The worse the peasants are the more
reason there is for building a school. Do understand!"
There was a loss of confidence in his voice, and it seemed to me that he
hated the peasants as much as Masha.
Masha used often to go to the mill with my sister and they would say
jokingly that they were going to have a look at Stiepan because he was
so handsome. Stiepan it appeared was reserved and silent only with men,
and in the company of women was free and talkative. Once when I went
down to the river to bathe I involuntarily overheard a conversation.
Masha and Cleopatra, both in white, were sitting on the bank under the
broad shade of a willow and Stiepan was standing near with his hands
behind his back, saying:
"But are peasants human beings? Not they; they are, excuse me, brutes,
beasts, and thieves. What does a peasant's life consist of? Eating and
drinking, crying for cheaper food, bawling in taverns, without decent
conversation, or behaviour or manners. Just an ignorant beast! He lives
in filth, his wife and children live in filth; he sleeps in his clothes;
takes the potatoes out of the soup with his fingers, drinks down a black
beetle with his kvass—because he won't trouble to fish it out!"
"It is because of their poverty!" protested my sister.
"What poverty? Of course there is want, but there are different kinds of
necessity. If a man is in prison, or is blind, say, or has lost his
legs, then he is in a bad way and God help him; but if he is at liberty
and in command of his senses, if he has eyes and hands and strength,
then, good God, what more does he want? It is lamentable, my lady,
ignorance, but not poverty. If you kind people, with your education, out
of charity try to help him, then he will spend your money in drink, like
the swine he is, or worse still, he will open a tavern and begin to rob
the people on the strength of your money. You say—poverty. But does a
rich peasant live any better? He lives like a pig, too, excuse me, a
clodhopper, a blusterer, a big-bellied blockhead, with a swollen red
mug—makes me want to hit him in the eye, the blackguard. Look at Larion
of Dubechnia—he is rich, but all the same he barks the trees in your
woods just like the poor; and he is a foul-mouthed brute, and his
children are foul-mouthed, and when he is drunk he falls flat in the mud
and goes to sleep. They are all worthless, my lady. It is just hell to
live with them in the village. The village sticks in my gizzard, and I
thank God, the King of heaven, that I am well fed and clothed, and that
I am a free man; I can live where I like, I don't want to live in the
village and nobody can force me to do it. They say: 'You have a wife.'
They say: 'You are obliged to live at home with your wife.' Why? I have
not sold myself to her."
"Tell me, Stiepan. Did you marry for love?" asked Masha.
"What love is there in a village?" Stiepan answered with a smile. "If
you want to know, my lady, it is my second marriage. I do not come from
Kurilovka, but from Zalegosch, and I went to Kurilovka when I married.
My father did not want to divide the land up between us—there are five
of us. So I bowed to it and cut adrift and went to another village to my
wife's family. My first wife died when she was young."
"What did she die of?"
"Foolishness. She used to sit and cry. She was always crying for no
reason at all and so she wasted away. She used to drink herbs to make
herself prettier and it must have ruined her inside. And my second wife
at Kurilovka—what about her? A village woman, a peasant; that's all.
When the match was being made I was nicely had; I thought she was young,
nice to look at and clean. Her mother was clean enough, drank coffee
and, chiefly because they were a clean lot, I got married. Next day we
sat down to dinner and I told my mother-in-law to fetch me a spoon. She
brought me a spoon and I saw her wipe it with her finger. So that,
thought I, is their cleanliness! I lived with them for a year and went
away. Perhaps I ought to have married a town girl"—he went on after a
silence. "They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want
with a helpmate? I can look after myself. But you talk to me sensibly
and soberly, without giggling all the while. He—he—he! What is life
without a good talk?"
Stiepan suddenly stopped and relapsed into his dreary, monotonous "U-lu-
lu-lu." That meant that he had noticed me.
Masha used often to visit the mill, she evidently took pleasure in her
talks with Stiepan; he abused the peasants so sincerely and
convincingly—and this attracted her to him. When she returned from the
mill the idiot who looked after the garden used to shout after her:
"Paloshka! Hullo, Paloshka!" And he would bark at her like a dog: "Bow,
wow!"
And she would stop and stare at him as if she found in the idiot's
barking an answer to her thought, and perhaps he attracted her as much
as Stiepan's abuse. And at home she would find some unpleasant news
awaiting her, as that the village geese had ruined the cabbages in the
kitchen-garden, or that Larion had stolen the reins, and she would shrug
her shoulders with a smile and say:
"What can you expect of such people?"
She was exasperated and a fury was gathering in her soul, and I, on the
other hand, was getting used to the peasants and more and more attracted
to them. For the most part, they were nervous, irritable, absurd people;
they were people with suppressed imaginations, ignorant, with a bare,
dull outlook, always dazed by the same thought of the grey earth, grey
days, black bread; they were people driven to cunning, but, like birds,
they only hid their heads behind the trees—they could not reason. They
did not come to us for the twenty roubles earned by haymaking, but for
the half-pail of vodka, though they could buy four pails of vodka for
the twenty roubles. Indeed they were dirty, drunken, and dishonest, but
for all that one felt that the peasant life as a whole was sound at the
core. However clumsy and brutal the peasant might look as he followed
his antiquated plough, and however he might fuddle himself with vodka,
still, looking at him more closely, one felt that there was something
vital and important in him, something that was lacking in Masha and the
doctor, for instance, namely, that he believes that the chief thing on
earth is truth, that his and everybody's salvation lies in truth, and
therefore above all else on earth he loves justice. I used to say to my
wife that she was seeing the stain on the window, but not the glass
itself; and she would be silent or, like Stiepan, she would hum, "U-lu-
lu-lu...." When she, good, clever actress that she was, went pale with
fury and then harangued the doctor in a trembling voice about
drunkenness and dishonesty; her blindness confounded and appalled me.
How could she forget that her father, the engineer, drank, drank
heavily, and that the money with which he bought Dubechnia was acquired
by means of a whole series of impudent, dishonest swindles? How could
she forget?
XIV
And my sister, too, was living with her own private thoughts which she
hid from me. She used often to sit whispering with Masha. When I went up
to her, she would shrink away, and her eyes would look guilty and full
of entreaty. Evidently there was something going on in her soul of which
she was afraid or ashamed. To avoid meeting me in the garden or being
left alone with me she clung to Masha and I hardly ever had a chance to
talk to her except at dinner.
One evening, on my way home from the school, I came quietly through the
garden. It had already begun to grow dark. Without noticing me or
hearing footsteps, my sister walked round an old wide-spreading apple-
tree, perfectly noiselessly like a ghost. She was in black, and walked
very quickly, up and down, up and down, with her eyes on the ground. An
apple fell from the tree, she started at the noise, stopped and pressed
her hands to her temples. At that moment I went up to her.
In an impulse of tenderness, which suddenly came rushing to my heart,
with tears in my eyes, somehow remembering our mother and our childhood,
I took hold of her shoulders and kissed her.
"What is the matter?" I asked. "You are suffering. I have seen it for a
long time now. Tell me, what is the matter?"
"I am afraid...." she murmured, with a shiver.
"What's the matter with you?" I inquired. "For God's sake, be frank!"
"I will, I will be frank. I will tell you the whole truth. It is so
hard, so painful to conceal anything from you!... Misail, I am in love."
She went on in a whisper. "Love, love.... I am happy, but I am afraid."
I heard footsteps and Doctor Blagovo appeared among the trees. He was
wearing a silk shirt and high boots. Clearly they had arranged a
rendezvous by the apple-tree. When she saw him she flung herself
impulsively into his arms with a cry of anguish, as though he was being
taken away from her:
"Vladimir! Vladimir!"
She clung to him, and gazed eagerly at him and only then I noticed how
thin and pale she had become. It was especially noticeable through her
lace collar, which I had known for years, for it now hung loosely about
her slim neck. The doctor was taken aback, but controlled himself at
once, and said, as he stroked her hair:
"That's enough. Enough!... Why are you so nervous? You see, I have
come."
We were silent for a time, bashfully glancing at each other. Then we all
moved away and I heard the doctor saying to me:
"Civilised life has not yet begun with us. The old console themselves
with saying that, if there is nothing now, there was something in the
forties and the sixties; that is all right for the old ones, but we are
young and our brains are not yet touched with senile decay. We cannot
console ourselves with such illusions. The beginning of Russia was in
862, and civilised Russia, as I understand it, has not yet begun."
But I could not bother about what he was saying. It was very strange,
but I could not believe that my sister was in love, that she had just
been walking with her hand on the arm of a stranger and gazing at him
tenderly. My sister, poor, frightened, timid, downtrodden creature as
she was, loved a man who was already married and had children! I was
full of pity without knowing why; the doctor's presence was distasteful
to me and I could not make out what was to come of such a love.
XV
Masha and I drove over to Kurilovka for the opening of the school.
"Autumn, autumn, autumn...." said Masha, looking about her. Summer had
passed. There were no birds and only the willows were green.
Yes. Summer had passed. The days were bright and warm, but it was fresh
in the mornings; the shepherds went out in their sheepskins, and the dew
never dried all day on the asters in the garden. There were continual
mournful sounds and it was impossible to tell whether it was a shutter
creaking on its rusty hinges or the cranes flying—and one felt so well
and so full of the desire for life!
"Summer has passed...." said Masha. "Now we can both make up our
accounts. We have worked hard and thought a great deal and we are the
better for it—all honour and praise to us; we have improved ourselves;
but have our successes had any perceptible influence on the life around
us, have they been of any use to a single person? No! Ignorance, dirt,
drunkenness, a terribly high rate of infant mortality—everything is just
as it was, and no one is any the better for your having ploughed and
sown and my having spent money and read books. Evidently we have only
worked and broadened our minds for ourselves."
I was abashed by such arguments and did not know what to think.
"From beginning to end we have been sincere," I said, "and if a man is
sincere, he is right."
"Who denies that? We have been right but we have been wrong in our way
of setting about it. First of all, are not our very ways of living
wrong? You want to be useful to people, but by the mere fact of buying
an estate you make it impossible to be so. Further, if you work, dress,
and eat like a peasant you lend your authority and approval to the
clumsy clothes, and their dreadful houses and their dirty beards.... On
the other hand, suppose you work for a long, long time, all you life,
and in the end obtain some practical results—what will your results
amount to, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale
ignorance, hunger, cold, and degeneracy? A drop in the ocean! Other
methods of fighting are necessary, strong, bold, quick! If you want to
be useful then you must leave the narrow circle of common activity and
try to act directly on the masses! First of all, you need vigorous,
noisy, propaganda. Why are art and music, for instance, so much alive
and so popular and so powerful? Because the musician or the singer
influences thousands directly. Art, wonderful art!" She looked wistfully
at the sky and went on: "Art gives wings and carries you far, far away.
If you are bored with dirt and pettifogging interests, if you are
exasperated and outraged and indignant, rest and satisfaction are only
to be found in beauty."
As we approached Kurilovka the weather was fine, clear, and joyous. In
the yards the peasants were thrashing and there was a smell of corn and
straw. Behind the wattled hedges the fruit-trees were reddening and all
around the trees were red or golden. In the church-tower the bells were
ringing, the children were carrying ikons to the school and singing the
Litany of the Virgin. And how clear the air was, and how high the doves
soared!
The Te Deum was sung in the schoolroom. Then the Kurilovka peasants
presented Masha with an ikon, and the Dubechnia peasants gave her a
large cracknel and a gilt salt-cellar. And Masha began to weep.
"And if we have said anything out of the way or have been discontented,
please forgive us," said an old peasant, bowing to us both.
As we drove home Masha looked back at the school. The green roof which I
had painted glistened in the sun, and we could see it for a long time.
And I felt that Masha's glances were glances of farewell.
XVI
In the evening she got ready to go to town.
She had often been to town lately to stay the night. In her absence I
could not work, and felt listless and disheartened; our big yard seemed
dreary, disgusting, and deserted; there were ominous noises in the
garden, and without her the house, the trees, the horses were no longer
"ours."
I never went out but sat all the time at her writing-table among her
books on farming and agriculture, those deposed favourites, wanted no
more, which looked out at me so shamefacedly from the bookcase. For
hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, and the autumn night
crept up as black as soot to the windows, I sat brooding over an old
glove of hers, or the pen she always used, and her little scissors. I
did nothing and saw clearly that everything I had done before,
ploughing, sowing, and felling trees, had only been because she wanted
it. And if she told me to clean out a well, when I had to stand waist-
deep in water, I would go and do it, without trying to find out whether
the well wanted cleaning or not. And now, when she was away, Dubechnia
with its squalor, its litter, its slamming shutters, with thieves
prowling about it day and night, seemed to me like a chaos in which work
was entirely useless. And why should I work, then? Why trouble and worry
about the future, when I felt that the ground was slipping away from
under me, that my position at Dubechnia was hollow, that, in a word, the
same fate awaited me as had befallen the books on agriculture? Oh! what
anguish it was at night, in the lonely hours, when I lay listening
uneasily, as though I expected some one any minute to call out that it
was time for me to go away. I was not sorry to leave Dubechnia, my
sorrow was for my love, for which it seemed that autumn had already
begun. What a tremendous happiness it is to love and to be loved, and
what a horror it is to feel that you are beginning to topple down from
that lofty tower!
Masha returned from town toward evening on the following day. She was
dissatisfied with something, but concealed it and said only: "Why have
the winter windows been put in? It will be stifling." I opened two of
the windows. We did not feel like eating, but we sat down and had
supper.
"Go and wash your hands," she said. "You smell of putty."
She had brought some new illustrated magazines from town and we both
read them after supper. They had supplements with fashion-plates and
patterns. Masha just glanced at them and put them aside to look at them
carefully later on; but one dress, with a wide, bell-shaped skirt and
big sleeves interested her, and for a moment she looked at it seriously
and attentively.
"That's not bad," she said.
"Yes, it would suit you very well," said I. "Very well."
And I admired the dress, only because she liked it, and went on
tenderly:
"A wonderful, lovely dress! Lovely, wonderful, Masha. My dear Masha!"
And tears began to drop on the fashion-plate.
"Wonderful Masha...." I murmured. "Dear, darling Masha...."
She went and lay down and I sat still for an hour and looked at the
illustrations.
"You should not have opened the windows," she called from the bedroom.
"I'm afraid it will be cold. Look how the wind is blowing in!"
I read the miscellany, about the preparation of cheap fish, and the size
of the largest diamond in the world. Then I chanced on the picture of
the dress she had liked and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, and
bare shoulders, a brilliant, dazzling figure, well up in music and
painting and literature, and how insignificant and brief my share in her
life seemed to be!
Our coming together, our marriage, was only an episode, one of many in
the life of this lively, highly gifted creature. All the best things in
the world, as I have said, were at her service, and she had them for
nothing; even ideas and fashionable intellectual movements served her
pleasure, a diversion in her existence, and I was only the coachman who
drove her from one infatuation to another. Now I was no longer necessary
to her; she would fly away and I should be left alone.
As if in answer to my thoughts a desperate scream suddenly came from the
yard:
"Mur-der!"
It was a shrill female voice, and exactly as though it were trying to
imitate it, the wind also howled dismally in the chimney. Half a minute
passed and again it came through the sound of the wind, but as though
from the other end of the yard:
"Mur-der!"
"Misail, did you hear that?" said my wife in a hushed voice. "Did you
hear?"
She came out of the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and
stood listening and staring out of the dark window.
"Somebody is being murdered!" she muttered. "It only wanted that!"
I took my gun and went out; it was very dark outside; a violent wind was
blowing so that it was hard to stand up. I walked to the gate and
listened; the trees were moaning; the wind went whistling through them,
and in the garden the idiot's dog was howling. Beyond the gate it was
pitch dark; there was not a light on the railway. And just by the wing,
where the offices used to be, I suddenly heard a choking cry:
"Mur-der!"
"Who is there?" I called.
Two men were locked in a struggle. One had nearly thrown the other, who
was resisting with all his might. And both were breathing heavily.
"Let go!" said one of them and I recognised Ivan Cheprakov. It was he
who had cried out in a thin, falsetto voice. "Let go, damn you, or I'll
bite your hands!"
The other man I recognised as Moissey. I parted them and could not
resist hitting Moissey in the face twice. He fell down, then got up, and
I struck him again.
"He tried to kill me," he muttered. "I caught him creeping to his
mother's drawer.... I tried to shut him up in the wing for safety."
Cheprakov was drunk and did not recognise me. He stood gasping for
breath as though trying to get enough wind to shriek again.
I left them and went back to the house. My wife was lying on the bed,
fully dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard and did not keep
back the fact that I had struck Moissey.
"Living in the country is horrible," she said. "And what a long night it
is!"
"Mur-der!" we heard again, a little later.
"I'll go and part them," I said.
"No. Let them kill each other," she said with an expression of disgust.
She lay staring at the ceiling, listening, and I sat near her, not
daring to speak and feeling that it was my fault that screams of
"murder" came from the yard and the night was so long.
We were silent and I waited impatiently for the light to peep in at the
window. And Masha looked as though she had wakened from a long sleep and
was astonished to find herself, so clever, so educated, so refined, cast
away in this miserable provincial hole, among a lot of petty, shallow
people, and to think that she could have so far forgotten herself as to
have been carried away by one of them and to have been his wife for more
than half a year. It seemed to me that we were all the same to
her—myself, Moissey, Cheprakov; all swept together into the drunken,
wild scream of "murder"—myself, our marriage, our work, and the muddy
roads of autumn; and when she breathed or stirred to make herself more
comfortable I could read in her eyes: "Oh, if the morning would come
quicker!"
In the morning she went away.
I stayed at Dubechnia for another three days, waiting for her; then I
moved all our things into one room, locked it, and went to town. When I
rang the bell at the engineer's, it was evening, and the lamps were
alight in Great Gentry Street. Pavel told me that nobody was at home;
Victor Ivanich had gone to Petersburg and Maria Victorovna must be at a
rehearsal at the Azhoguins'. I remember the excitement with which I went
to the Azhoguins', and how my heart thumped and sank within me, as I
went up-stairs and stood for a long while on the landing, not daring to
enter that temple of the Muses! In the hall, on the table, on the piano,
on the stage, there were candles burning; all in threes, for the first
performance was fixed for the thirteenth, and the dress rehearsal was on
Monday—the unlucky day. A fight against prejudice! All the lovers of
dramatic art were assembled; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest
Miss Azhoguin were walking about the stage, reading their parts. Radish
was standing still in a corner all by himself, with his head against the
wall, looking at the stage with adoring eyes, waiting for the beginning
of the rehearsal. Everything was just the same!
I went toward my hostess to greet her, when suddenly everybody began to
say "Ssh" and to wave their hands to tell me not to make such a noise.
There was a silence. The top of the piano was raised, a lady sat down,
screwing up her short-sighted eyes at the music, and Masha stood by the
piano, dressed up, beautiful, but beautiful in an odd new way, not at
all like the Masha who used to come to see me at the mill in the spring.
She began to sing:
"Why do I love thee, straight night?"
It was the first time since I had known her that I had heard her sing.
She had a fine, rich, powerful voice, and to hear her sing was like
eating a ripe, sweet-scented melon. She finished the song and was
applauded. She smiled and looked pleased, made play with her eyes,
stared at the music, plucked at her dress exactly like a bird which has
broken out of its cage and preens its wings at liberty. Her hair was
combed back over her ears, and she had a sly defiant expression on her
face, as though she wished to challenge us all, or to shout at us, as
though we were horses: "Gee up, old things!"
And at that moment she must have looked very like her grandfather, the
coachman.
"You here, too?" she asked, giving me her hand. "Did you hear me sing?
How did you like it?" And, without waiting for me to answer she went on:
"You arrived very opportunely. I'm going to Petersburg for a short time
to-night. May I?"
At midnight I took her to the station. She embraced me tenderly,
probably out of gratitude, because I did not pester her with useless
questions, and she promised to write to me, and I held her hands for a
long time and kissed them, finding it hard to keep back my tears, and
not saying a word.
And when the train moved, I stood looking at the receding lights, kissed
her in my imagination and whispered:
"Masha dear, wonderful Masha!..."
I spent the night at Mikhokhov, at Karpovna's, and in the morning I
worked with Radish, upholstering the furniture at a rich merchant's, who
had married his daughter to a doctor.
XVII
On Sunday afternoon my sister came to see me and had tea with me.
"I read a great deal now," she said, showing me the books she had got
out of the town library on her way. "Thanks to your wife and Vladimir.
They awakened my self-consciousness. They saved me and have made me feel
that I am a human being. I used not to sleep at night for worrying:
'What a lot of sugar has been wasted during the week.' 'The cucumbers
must not be oversalted!' I don't sleep now, but I have quite different
thoughts. I am tormented with the thought that half my life has passed
so foolishly and half-heartedly. I despise my old life. I am ashamed of
it. And I regard my father now as an enemy. Oh, how grateful I am to
your wife! And Vladimir. He is such a wonderful man! They opened my
eyes."
"It is not good that you can't sleep," I said.
"You think I am ill? Not a bit. Vladimir sounded me and says I am
perfectly healthy. But health is not the point. That doesn't matter so
much.... Tell me, am I right?"
She needed moral support. That was obvious. Masha had gone, Doctor
Blagovo was in Petersburg, and there was no one except myself in the
town, who could tell her that she was right. She fixed her eyes on me,
trying to read my inmost thoughts, and if I were sad in her presence,
she always took it upon herself and was depressed. I had to be
continually on my guard, and when she asked me if she was right, I
hastened to assure her that she was right and that I had a profound
respect for her.
"You know, they have given me a part at the Azhoguins'," she went on. "I
wanted to act. I want to live. I want to drink deep of life; I have no
talent whatever, and my part is only ten lines, but it is immeasurably
finer and nobler than pouring out tea five times a day and watching to
see that the cook does not eat the sugar left over. And most of all I
want to let father see that I too can protest."
After tea she lay down on my bed and stayed there for some time, with
her eyes closed, and her face very pale.
"Just weakness!" she said, as she got up. "Vladimir said all town girls
and women are anæmic from lack of work. What a clever man Vladimir is!
He is right; wonderfully right! We do need work!"
Two days later she came to rehearsal at the Azhoguins' with her part in
her hand. She was in black, with a garnet necklace, and a brooch that
looked at a distance like a pasty, and she had enormous earrings, in
each of which sparkled a diamond. I felt uneasy when I saw her; I was
shocked by her lack of taste. The others noticed too that she was
unsuitably dressed and that her earrings and diamonds were out of place.
I saw their smiles and heard some one say jokingly:
"Cleopatra of Egypt!"
She was trying to be fashionable, and easy, and assured, and she seemed
affected and odd. She lost her simplicity and her charm.
"I just told father that I was going to a rehearsal," she began, coming
up to me, "and he shouted that he would take his blessing from me, and
he nearly struck me. Fancy," she added, glancing at her part, "I don't
know my part. I'm sure to make a mistake. Well, the die is cast," she
said excitedly; "the die is cast."
She felt that all the people were looking at her and were all amazed at
the important step she had taken and that they were all expecting
something remarkable from her, and it was impossible to convince her
that nobody took any notice of such small uninteresting persons as she
and I.
She had nothing to do until the third act, and her part, a guest, a
country gossip, consisted only in standing by the door, as if she were
overhearing something, and then speaking a short monologue. For at least
an hour and a half before her cue, while the others were walking,
reading, having tea, quarrelling, she never left me and kept on mumbling
her part, and dropping her written copy, imagining that everybody was
looking at her, and waiting for her to come on, and she patted her hair
with a trembling hand and said:
"I'm sure to make a mistake.... You don't know how awful I feel! I am as
terrified as if I were going to the scaffold."
At last her cue came.
"Cleopatra Alexeyevna—your cue!" said the manager.
She walked on to the middle of the stage with an expression of terror on
her face; she looked ugly and stiff, and for half a minute was
speechless, perfectly motionless, except for her large earrings which
wabbled on either side of her face.
"You can read your part, the first time," said some one.
I could see that she was trembling so that she could neither speak nor
open her part, and that she had entirely forgotten the words and I had
just made up my mind to go up and say something to her when she suddenly
dropped down on her knees in the middle of the stage and sobbed loudly.
There was a general stir and uproar. And I stood quite still by the
wings, shocked by what had happened, not understanding at all, not
knowing what to do. I saw them lift her up and lead her away. I saw
Aniuta Blagovo come up to me. I had not seen her in the hall before and
she seemed to have sprung up from the floor. She was wearing a hat and
veil, and as usual looked as if she had only dropped in for a minute.
"I told her not to try to act," she said angrily, biting out each word,
with her cheeks blushing. "It is folly! You ought to have stopped her!"
Mrs. Azhoguin came up in a short jacket with short sleeves. She had
tobacco ash on her thin, flat bosom.
"My dear, it is too awful!" she said, wringing her hands, and as usual,
staring into my face. "It is too awful!... Your sister is in a
condition.... She is going to have a baby! You must take her away at
once...."
In her agitation she breathed heavily. And behind her, stood her three
daughters, all thin and flat-chested like herself, and all huddled
together in their dismay. They were frightened, overwhelmed just as if a
convict had been caught in the house. What a shame! How awful! And this
was the family that had been fighting the prejudices and superstitions
of mankind all their lives; evidently they thought that all the
prejudices and superstitions of mankind were to be found in burning
three candles and in the number thirteen, or the unlucky day—Monday.
"I must request ... request ..." Mrs. Azhoguin kept on saying,
compressing her lips and accentuating the quest. "I must request you to
take her away."
XVIII
A little later my sister and I were walking along the street. I covered
her with the skirt of my overcoat; we hurried along through by-streets,
where there were no lamps, avoiding the passers-by, and it was like a
flight. She did not weep any more, but stared at me with dry eyes. It
was about twenty minutes' walk to Mikhokhov, whither I was taking her,
and in that short time we went over the whole of our lives, and talked
over everything, and considered the position and pondered....
We decided that we could not stay in the town, and that when I could get
some money, we would go to some other place. In some of the houses the
people were asleep already, and in others they were playing cards; we
hated those houses, were afraid of them, and we talked of the
fanaticism, callousness, and nullity of these respectable families,
these lovers of dramatic art whom we had frightened so much, and I
wondered how those stupid, cruel, slothful, dishonest people were better
than the drunken and superstitious peasants of Kurilovka, or how they
were better than animals, which also lose their heads when some accident
breaks the monotony of their lives, which are limited by their
instincts. What would happen to my sister if she stayed at home? What
moral torture would she have to undergo, talking to my father and
meeting acquaintances every day? I imagined it all and there came into
my memory people I had known who had been gradually dropped by their
friends and relations, and I remember the tortured dogs which had gone
mad, and sparrows plucked alive and thrown into the water—and a whole
long series of dull, protracted sufferings which I had seen going on in
the town since my childhood; and I could not conceive what the sixty
thousand inhabitants lived for, why they read the Bible, why they
prayed, why they skimmed books and magazines. What good was all that had
been written and said, if they were in the same spiritual darkness and
had the same hatred of freedom, as if they were living hundreds and
hundreds of years ago? The builder spends his time putting up houses all
over the town, and yet would go down to his grave saying "galdary" for
"gallery." And the sixty thousand inhabitants had read and heard of
truth and mercy and freedom for generations, but to the bitter end they
would go on lying from morning to night, tormenting one another, fearing
and hating freedom as a deadly enemy.
"And so, my fate is decided," said my sister when we reached home.
"After what has happened I can never go there again. My God, how good it
is! I feel at peace."
She lay down at once. Tears shone on her eyelashes, but her expression
was happy. She slept soundly and softly, and it was clear that her heart
was easy and that she was at rest. For a long, long time she had not
slept so well.
So we began to live together. She was always singing and said she felt
very well, and I took back the books we had borrowed from the library
unread, because she gave up reading; she only wanted to dream and to
talk of the future. She would hum as she mended my clothes or helped
Karpovna with the cooking, or talk of her Vladimir, of his mind, and his
goodness, and his fine manners, and his extraordinary learning. And I
agreed with her, though I no longer liked the doctor. She wanted to
work, to be independent, and to live by herself, and she said she would
become a school-teacher or a nurse as soon as her health allowed, and
she would scrub the floors and do her own washing. She loved her unborn
baby passionately, and she knew already the colour of his eyes and the
shape of his hands and how he laughed. She liked to talk of his
upbringing, and since the best man on earth was Vladimir, all her ideas
were reduced to making the boy as charming as his father. There was no
end to her chatter, and everything she talked about filled her with a
lively joy. Sometimes I, too, rejoiced, though I knew not why.
She must have infected me with her dreaminess, for I, too, read nothing
and just dreamed. In the evenings, in spite of being tired, I used to
pace up and down the room with my hands in my pockets, talking about
Masha.
"When do you think she will return?" I used to ask my sister. "I think
she'll be back at Christmas. Not later. What is she doing there?"
"If she doesn't write to you, it means she must be coming soon."
"True," I would agree, though I knew very well that there was nothing to
make Masha return to our town.
I missed her very much, but I could not help deceiving myself and wanted
others to deceive me. My sister was longing for her doctor, I for Masha,
and we both laughed and talked and never saw that we were keeping
Karpovna from sleeping. She would lie on the stove and murmur:
"The samovar tinkled this morning. Tink-led! That bodes nobody any good,
my merry friends!"
Nobody came to the house except the postman who brought my sister
letters from the doctor, and Prokofyi, who used to come in sometimes in
the evening and glance secretly at my sister, and then go into the
kitchen and say:
"Every class has its ways, and if you're too proud to understand that,
the worse for you in this vale of tears."
He loved the expression—vale of tears. And—about Christmas time—when I
was going through the market, he called me into his shop, and without
giving me his hand, declared that he had some important business to
discuss. He was red in the face with the frost and with vodka; near him
by the counter stood Nicolka of the murderous face, holding a bloody
knife in his hand.
"I want to be blunt with you," began Prokofyi. "This business must not
happen because, as you know, people will neither forgive you nor us for
such a vale of tears. Mother, of course, is too dutiful to say anything
unpleasant to you herself, and tell you that your sister must go
somewhere else because of her condition, but I don't want it either,
because I do not approve of her behaviour."
I understood and left the shop. That very day my sister and I went to
Radish's. We had no money for a cab, so we went on foot; I carried a
bundle with all our belongings on my back, my sister had nothing in her
hands, and she was breathless and kept coughing and asking if we would
soon be there.
XIX
At last there came a letter from Masha.
"My dear, kind M. A.," she wrote, "my brave, sweet angel, as the old
painter calls you, good-bye. I am going to America with my father for
the exhibition. In a few days I shall be on the ocean—so far from
Dubechnia. It is awful to think of! It is vast and open like the sky and
I long for it and freedom. I rejoice and dance about and you see how
incoherent my letter is. My dear Misail, give me my freedom. Quick, tear
the thread which still holds and binds us. My meeting and knowing you
was a ray from heaven, which brightened my existence. But, you know, my
becoming your wife was a mistake, and the knowledge of the mistake
weighs me down, and I implore you on my knees, my dear, generous friend,
quick—quick—before I go over the sea—wire that you will agree to correct
our mutual mistake, remove then the only burden on my wings, and my
father, who will be responsible for the whole business, has promised me
not to overwhelm you with formalities. So, then, I am free of the whole
world? Yes?
"Be happy. God bless you. Forgive my wickedness.
"I am alive and well. I am squandering money on all sorts of follies,
and every minute I thank God that such a wicked woman as I am has no
children. I am singing and I am a success, but it is not a passing whim.
No. It is my haven, my convent cell where I go for rest. King David had
a ring with an inscription: 'Everything passes.' When one is sad, these
words make one cheerful; and when one is cheerful, they make one sad.
And I have got a ring with the words written in Hebrew, and this
talisman will keep me from losing my heart and head. Or does one need
nothing but consciousness of freedom, because, when one is free, one
wants nothing, nothing, nothing. Snap the thread then. I embrace you and
your sister warmly. Forgive and forget your M."
My sister had one room. Radish, who had been ill and was recovering, was
in the other. Just as I received this letter, my sister went into the
painter's room and sat by his side and began to read to him. She read
Ostrovsky or Gogol to him every day, and he used to listen, staring
straight in front of him, never laughing, shaking his head, and every
now and then muttering to himself:
"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"
If there was anything ugly in what she read, he would say vehemently,
pointing to the book:
"There it is! Lies! That's what lies do!"
Stories used to attract him by their contents as well as by their moral
and their skilfully complicated plot, and he used to marvel at him,
though he never called him by his name.
"How well he has managed it."
Now my sister read a page quickly and then stopped, because her breath
failed her. Radish held her hand, and moving his dry lips he said in a
hoarse, hardly audible voice:
"The soul of the righteous is white and smooth as chalk; and the soul of
the sinner is as a pumice-stone. The soul of the righteous is clear oil,
and the soul of the sinner is coal-tar. We must work and sorrow and
pity," he went on. "And if a man does not work and sorrow he will not
enter the kingdom of heaven. Woe, woe to the well fed, woe to the
strong, woe to the rich, woe to the usurers! They will not see the
kingdom of heaven. Grubs eat grass, rust eats iron...."
"And lies devour the soul," said my sister, laughing.
I read the letter once more. At that moment the soldier came into the
kitchen who had brought in twice a week, without saying from whom, tea,
French bread, and pigeons, all smelling of scent. I had no work and used
to sit at home for days together, and probably the person who sent us
the bread knew that we were in want.
I heard my sister talking to the soldier and laughing merrily. Then she
lay down and ate some bread and said to me:
"When you wanted to get away from the office and become a house-painter,
Aniuta Blagovo and I knew from the very beginning that you were right,
but we were afraid to say so. Tell me what power is it that keeps us
from saying what we feel? There's Aniuta Blagovo. She loves you, adores
you, and she knows that you are right. She loves me, too, like a sister,
and she knows that I am right, and in her heart she envies me, but some
power prevents her coming to see us. She avoids us. She is afraid."
My sister folded her hands across her bosom and said rapturously:
"If you only knew how she loves you! She confessed it to me and to no
one else, very hesitatingly, in the dark. She used to take me out into
the garden, into the dark, and begin to tell me in a whisper how dear
you were to her. You will see that she will never marry because she
loves you. Are you sorry for her?"
"Yes."
"It was she sent the bread. She is funny. Why should she hide herself? I
used to be silly and stupid, but I left all that and I am not afraid of
any one, and I think and say aloud what I like—and I am happy. When I
lived at home I had no notion of happiness, and now I would not change
places with a queen."
Doctor Blagovo came. He had got his diploma and was now living in the
town, at his father's, taking a rest. After which he said he would go
back to Petersburg. He wanted to devote himself to vaccination against
typhus, and, I believe, cholera; he wanted to go abroad to increase his
knowledge and then to become a University professor. He had already left
the army and wore serge clothes, with well-cut coats, wide trousers, and
expensive ties. My sister was enraptured with his pins and studs and his
red-silk handkerchief, which, out of swagger, he wore in his outside
breast-pocket. Once, when we had nothing to do, she and I fell to
counting up his suits and came to the conclusion that he must have at
least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister, but never once,
even in joke, did he talk of taking her to Petersburg or abroad with
him, and I could not imagine what would happen to her if she lived, or
what was to become of her child. But she was happy in her dreams and
would not think seriously of the future. She said he could go wherever
he liked and even cast her aside, if only he were happy himself, and
what had been was enough for her.
Usually when he came to see us he would sound her very carefully, and
ask her to drink some milk with some medicine in it. He did so now. He
sounded her and made her drink a glass of milk, and the room began to
smell of creosote.
"That's a good girl," he said, taking the glass from her. "You must not
talk much, and you have been chattering like a magpie lately. Please, be
quiet."
She began to laugh and he came into Radish's room, where I was sitting,
and tapped me affectionately on the shoulder.
"Well, old man, how are you?" he asked, bending over the patient.
"Sir," said Radish, only just moving his lips. "Sir, I make so bold....
We are all in the hands of God, and we must all die.... Let me tell you
the truth, sir.... You will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
And suddenly I lost consciousness and was caught up into a dream: it was
winter, at night, and I was standing in the yard of the slaughter-house
with Prokofyi by my side, smelling of pepper-brandy; I pulled myself
together and rubbed my eyes and then I seemed to be going to the
governor's for an explanation. Nothing of the kind ever happened to me,
before or after, and I can only explain these strange dreams like
memories, by ascribing them to overstrain of the nerves. I lived again
through the scene in the slaughter-house and the conversation with the
governor, and at the same time I was conscious of its unreality.
When I came to myself I saw that I was not at home, but standing with
the doctor by a lamp in the street.
"It is sad, sad," he was saying with tears running down his cheeks. "She
is happy and always laughing and full of hope. But, poor darling, her
condition is hopeless. Old Radish hates me and keeps trying to make me
understand that I have wronged her. In his way he is right, but I have
my point of view, too, and I do not repent of what has happened. It is
necessary to love. We must all love. That's true, isn't it? Without love
there would be no life, and a man who avoids and fears love is not
free."
We gradually passed to other subjects. He began to speak of science and
his dissertation which had been very well received in Petersburg. He
spoke enthusiastically and thought no more of my sister, or of his
going, or of myself. Life was carrying him away. She has America and a
ring with an inscription, I thought, and he has his medical degree and
his scientific career, and my sister and I are left with the past.
When we parted I stood beneath the lamp and read my letter again. And I
remembered vividly how she came to me at the mill that spring morning
and lay down and covered herself with my fur coat—pretending to be just
a peasant woman. And another time—also in the early morning—when we
pulled the bow-net out of the water, and the willows on the bank
showered great drops of water on us and we laughed....
All was dark in our house in Great Gentry Street. I climbed the fence,
and, as I used to do in old days, I went into the kitchen by the back
door to get a little lamp. There was nobody in the kitchen. On the stove
the samovar was singing merrily, all ready for my father. "Who pours out
my father's tea now?" I thought. I took the lamp and went on to the shed
and made a bed of old newspapers and lay down. The nails in the wall
looked ominous as before and their shadows flickered. It was cold. I
thought I saw my sister coming in with my supper, but I remembered at
once that she was ill at Radish's, and it seemed strange to me that I
should have climbed the fence and be lying in the cold shed. My mind was
blurred and filled with fantastic imaginations.
A bell rang; sounds familiar from childhood; first the wire rustled
along the wall, and then there was a short, melancholy tinkle in the
kitchen. It was my father returning from the club. I got up and went
into the kitchen. Akhsinya, the cook, clapped her hands when she saw me
and began to cry:
"Oh, my dear," she said in a whisper. "Oh, my dear! My God!"
And in her agitation she began to pluck at her apron. On the window-sill
were two large bottles of berries soaking in vodka. I poured out a cup
and gulped it down, for I was very thirsty. Akhsinya had just scrubbed
the table and the chairs, and the kitchen had the good smell which
kitchens always have when the cook is clean and tidy. This smell and the
trilling of the cricket used to entice us into the kitchen when we were
children, and there we used to be told fairy-tales, and we played at
kings and queens....
"And where is Cleopatra?" asked Akhsinya hurriedly, breathlessly. "And
where is your hat, sir? And they say your wife has gone to Petersburg."
She had been with us in my mother's time and used to bathe Cleopatra and
me in a tub, and we were still children to her, and it was her duty to
correct us. In a quarter of an hour or so she laid bare all her
thoughts, which she had been storing up in her quiet kitchen all the
time I had been away. She said the doctor ought to be made to marry
Cleopatra—we would only have to frighten him a bit and make him send in
a nicely written application, and then the archbishop would dissolve his
first marriage, and it would be a good thing to sell Dubechnia without
saying anything to my wife, and to bank the money in my own name; and if
my sister and I went on our knees to our father and asked him nicely,
then perhaps he would forgive us; and we ought to pray to the Holy
Mother to intercede for us....
"Now, sir, go and talk to him," she said, when we heard my father's
cough. "Go, speak to him, and beg his pardon. He won't bite your head
off."
I went in. My father was sitting at his desk working on the plan of a
bungalow with Gothic windows and a stumpy tower like the lookout of a
fire-station—an immensely stiff and inartistic design. As I entered the
study I stood so that I could not help seeing the plan. I did not know
why I had come to my father, but I remember that when I saw his thin
face, red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw my arms
round him and, as Akhsinya had bid me, to beg his pardon humbly; but the
sight of the bungalow with the Gothic windows and the stumpy tower
stopped me.
"Good evening," I said.
He glanced at me and at once cast his eyes down on his plan.
"What do you want?" he asked after a while.
"I came to tell you that my sister is very ill. She is dying," I said
dully.
"Well?" My father sighed, took off his spectacles and laid them on the
table. "As you have sown, so you must reap. I want you to remember how
you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I asked you to give
up your delusions, and I reminded you of your honour, your duty, your
obligations to your ancestors, whose traditions must be kept sacred. Did
you listen to me? You spurned my advice and clung to your wicked
opinions; furthermore, you dragged your sister into your abominable
delusions and brought about her downfall and her shame. Now you are both
suffering for it. As you have sown, so you must reap."
He paced up and down the study as he spoke. Probably he thought that I
had come to him to admit that I was wrong, and probably he was waiting
for me to ask his help for my sister and myself. I was cold, but I shook
as though I were in a fever, and I spoke with difficulty in a hoarse
voice.
"And I must ask you to remember," I said, "that on this very spot I
implored you to try to understand me, to reflect, and to think what we
were living for and to what end, and your answer was to talk about my
ancestors and my grandfather who wrote verses. Now you are told that
your only daughter is in a hopeless condition and you talk of ancestors
and traditions!... And you can maintain such frivolity when death is
near and you have only five or ten years left to live!"
"Why did you come here?" asked my father sternly, evidently affronted at
my reproaching him with frivolity.
"I don't know. I love you. I am more sorry than I can say that we are so
far apart. That is why I came. I still love you, but my sister has
finally broken with you. She does not forgive you and will never forgive
you. Your very name fills her with hatred of her past life."
"And who is to blame?" cried my father. "You, you scoundrel!"
"Yes. Say that I am to blame," I said. "I admit that I am to blame for
many things, but why is your life, which you have tried to force on us,
so tedious and frigid, and ungracious, why are there no people in any of
the houses you have built during the last thirty years from whom I could
learn how to live and how to avoid such suffering? These houses of yours
are infernal dungeons in which mothers and daughters are persecuted,
children are tortured.... My poor mother! My unhappy sister! One needs
to drug oneself with vodka, cards, scandal; cringe, play the hypocrite,
and go on year after year designing rotten houses, not to see the horror
that lurks in them. Our town has been in existence for hundreds of
years, and during the whole of that time it has not given the country
one useful man—not one! You have strangled in embryo everything that was
alive and joyous! A town of shopkeepers, publicans, clerks, and
hypocrites, an aimless, futile town, and not a soul would be the worse
if it were suddenly razed to the ground."
"I don't want to hear you, you scoundrel," said my father, taking a
ruler from his desk. "You are drunk! You dare come into your father's
presence in such a state! I tell you for the last time, and you can tell
this to your strumpet of a sister, that you will get nothing from me. I
have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer
through their disobedience and obstinacy I have no pity for them. You
may go back where you came from! God has been pleased to punish me
through you. I will humbly bear my punishment and, like Job, I find
consolation in suffering and unceasing toil. You shall not cross my
threshold until you have mended your ways. I am a just man, and
everything I say is practical good sense, and if you had any regard for
yourself, you would remember what I have said, and what I am saying
now."
I threw up my hands and went out; I do not remember what happened that
night or next day.
They say that I went staggering through the street without a hat,
singing aloud, with crowds of little boys shouting after me:
"Little Profit! Little Profit!"
XX
If I wanted to order a ring, I would have it inscribed: "Nothing
passes." I believe that nothing passes without leaving some trace, and
that every little step has some meaning for the present and the future
life.
What I lived through was not in vain. My great misfortunes, my patience,
moved the hearts of the people of the town and they no longer call me
"Little Profit," they no longer laugh at me and throw water over me as I
walk through the market. They got used to my being a working man and see
nothing strange in my carrying paint-pots and glazing windows; on the
contrary, they give me orders, and I am considered a good workman and
the best contractor, after Radish, who, though he recovered and still
paints the cupolas of the church without scaffolding, is not strong
enough to manage the men, and I have taken his place and go about the
town touting for orders, and take on and sack the men, and lend money at
exorbitant interest. And now that I am a contractor I can understand how
it is possible to spend several days hunting through the town for
slaters to carry out a trifling order. People are polite to me, and
address me respectfully and give me tea in the houses where I work, and
send the servant to ask me if I would like dinner. Children and girls
often come and watch me with curious, sad eyes.
Once I was working in the governor's garden, painting the summer-house
marble. The governor came into the summer-house, and having nothing
better to do, began to talk to me, and I reminded him how he had once
sent for me to caution me. For a moment he stared at my face, opened his
mouth like a round O, waved his hands, and said:
"I don't remember."
I am growing old, taciturn, crotchety, strict; I seldom laugh, and
people say I am growing like Radish, and, like him, I bore the men with
my aimless moralising.
Maria Victorovna, my late wife, lives abroad, and her father is making a
railway somewhere in the Eastern provinces and buying land there. Doctor
Blagovo is also abroad. Dubechnia has passed to Mrs. Cheprakov, who
bought it from the engineer after haggling him into a twenty-per-cent
reduction in the price. Moissey walks about in a bowler hat; he often
drives into town in a trap and stops outside the bank. People say he has
already bought an estate on a mortgage, and is always inquiring at the
bank about Dubechnia, which he also intends to buy. Poor Ivan Cheprakov
used to hang about the town, doing nothing and drinking. I tried to give
him a job in our business, and for a time he worked with us painting
roofs and glazing, and he rather took to it, and, like a regular house-
painter, he stole the oil, and asked for tips, and got drunk. But it
soon bored him. He got tired of it and went back to Dubechnia, and some
time later I was told by the peasants that he had been inciting them to
kill Moissey one night and rob Mrs. Cheprakov.
My father has got very old and bent, and just takes a little walk in the
evening near his house.
When we had the cholera, Prokofyi cured the shopkeepers with pepper-
brandy and tar and took money for it, and as I read in the newspaper, he
was flogged for libelling the doctors as he sat in his shop. His boy
Nicolka died of cholera. Karpovna is still alive, and still loves and
fears her Prokofyi. Whenever she sees me she sadly shakes her head and
says with a sigh:
"Poor thing. You are lost!"
On week-days I am busy from early morning till late at night. And on
Sundays and holidays I take my little niece (my sister expected a boy,
but a girl was born) and go with her to the cemetery, where I stand or
sit and look at the grave of my dear one, and tell the child that her
mother is lying there.
Sometimes I find Aniuta Blagovo by the grave. We greet each other and
stand silently, or we talk of Cleopatra, and the child, and the sadness
of this life. Then we leave the cemetery and walk in silence and she
lags behind—on purpose, to avoid staying with me. The little girl,
joyful, happy, with her eyes half-closed against the brilliant sunlight,
laughs and holds out her little hands to her, and we stop and together
we fondle the darling child.
And when we reach the town, Aniuta Blagovo, blushing and agitated, says
good-bye, and walks on alone, serious and circumspect.... And, to look
at her, none of the passers-by could imagine that she had just been
walking by my side and even fondling the child.
The Bet and Other Stories
THE BET I
It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to
corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the
autumn fifteen years ago. There were many clever people at the party and
much interesting conversation. They talked among other things of capital
punishment. The guests, among them not a few scholars and journalists,
for the most part disapproved of capital punishment. They found it
obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to a Christian State and
immoral. Some of them thought that capital punishment should be replaced
universally by life-imprisonment.
"I don't agree with you," said the host. "I myself have experienced
neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may judge a
priori, then in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and more
humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment
kills by degrees. Who is the more humane executioner, one who kills you
in a few seconds or one who draws the life out of you incessantly, for
years?"
"They're both equally immoral," remarked one of the guests, "because
their purpose is the same, to take away life. The State is not God. It
has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should
so desire."
Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. On
being asked his opinion, he said:
"Capital punishment and life-imprisonment are equally immoral; but if I
were offered the choice between them, I would certainly choose the
second. It's better to live somehow than not to live at all."
There ensued a lively discussion. The banker who was then younger and
more nervous suddenly lost his temper, banged his fist on the table, and
turning to the young lawyer, cried out:
"It's a lie. I bet you two millions you wouldn't stick in a cell even
for five years."
"If that's serious," replied the lawyer, "then I bet I'll stay not five
but fifteen."
"Fifteen! Done!" cried the banker. "Gentlemen, I stake two millions."
"Agreed. You stake two millions, I my freedom," said the lawyer.
So this wild, ridiculous bet came to pass. The banker, who at that time
had too many millions to count, spoiled and capricious, was beside
himself with rapture. During supper he said to the lawyer jokingly:
"Come to your senses, young man, before it's too late. Two millions are
nothing to me, but you stand to lose three or four of the best years of
your life. I say three or four, because you'll never stick it out any
longer. Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary is much
heavier than enforced imprisonment. The idea that you have the right to
free yourself at any moment will poison the whole of your life in the
cell. I pity you."
And now the banker pacing from corner to corner, recalled all this and
asked himself:
"Why did I make this bet? What's the good? The lawyer loses fifteen
years of his life and I throw away two millions. Will it convince people
that capital punishment is worse or better than imprisonment for life.
No, No! all stuff and rubbish. On my part, it was the caprice of a well-
fed man; on the lawyer's, pure greed of gold."
He recollected further what happened after the evening party. It was
decided that the lawyer must undergo his imprisonment under the
strictest observation, in a garden-wing of the banker's house. It was
agreed that during the period he would be deprived of the right to cross
the threshold, to see living people, to hear human voices, and to
receive letters and newspapers. He was permitted to have a musical
instrument, to read books, to write letters, to drink wine and smoke
tobacco. By the agreement he could communicate, but only in silence,
with the outside world through a little window specially constructed for
this purpose. Everything necessary, books, music, wine, he could receive
in any quantity by sending a note through the window. The agreement
provided for all the minutest details, which made the confinement
strictly solitary, and it obliged the lawyer to remain exactly fifteen
years from twelve o'clock of November 14th 1870 to twelve o'clock of
November 14th 1885. The least attempt on his part to violate the
conditions, to escape if only for two minutes before the time freed the
banker from the obligation to pay him the two millions.
During the first year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was
possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from
loneliness and boredom. From his wing day and night came the sound of
the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco. "Wine," he wrote, "excites
desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing
is more boring than to drink good wine alone," and tobacco spoils the
air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a
light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of
crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on.
In the second year the piano was heard no longer and the lawyer asked
only for classics. In the fifth year, music was heard again, and the
prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him said that during the
whole of that year he was only eating, drinking, and lying on his bed.
He yawned often and talked angrily to himself. Books he did not read.
Sometimes at nights he would sit down to write. He would write for a
long time and tear it all up in the morning. More than once he was heard
to weep.
In the second half of the sixth year, the prisoner began zealously to
study languages, philosophy, and history. He fell on these subjects so
hungrily that the banker hardly had time to get books enough for him. In
the space of four years about six hundred volumes were bought at his
request. It was while that passion lasted that the banker received the
following letter from the prisoner: "My dear gaoler, I am writing these
lines in six languages. Show them to experts. Let them read them. If
they do not find one single mistake, I beg you to give orders to have a
gun fired off in the garden. By the noise I shall know that my efforts
have not been in vain. The geniuses of all ages and countries speak in
different languages; but in them all burns the same flame. Oh, if you
knew my heavenly happiness now that I can understand them!" The
prisoner's desire was fulfilled. Two shots were fired in the garden by
the banker's order.
Later on, after the tenth year, the lawyer sat immovable before his
table and read only the New Testament. The banker found it strange that
a man who in four years had mastered six hundred erudite volumes, should
have spent nearly a year in reading one book, easy to understand and by
no means thick. The New Testament was then replaced by the history of
religions and theology.
During the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an
extraordinary amount, quite haphazard. Now he would apply himself to the
natural sciences, then would read Byron or Shakespeare. Notes used to
come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on
chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on
philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea
among the broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life
was eagerly grasping one piece after another. II
The banker recalled all this, and thought:
"To-morrow at twelve o'clock he receives his freedom. Under the
agreement, I shall have to pay him two millions. If I pay, it's all over
with me. I am ruined for ever...."
Fifteen years before he had too many millions to count, but now he was
afraid to ask himself which he had more of, money or debts. Gambling on
the Stock-Exchange, risky speculation, and the recklessness of which he
could not rid himself even in old age, had gradually brought his
business to decay; and the fearless, self-confident, proud man of
business had become an ordinary banker, trembling at every rise and fall
in the market.
"That cursed bet," murmured the old man clutching his head in
despair.... "Why didn't the man die? He's only forty years old. He will
take away my last farthing, marry, enjoy life, gamble on the Exchange,
and I will look on like an envious beggar and hear the same words from
him every day: 'I'm obliged to you for the happiness of my life. Let me
help you.' No, it's too much! The only escape from bankruptcy and
disgrace—is that the man should die."
The clock had just struck three. The banker was listening. In Ike house
everyone was asleep, and one could hear only the frozen trees whining
outside the windows. Trying to make no sound, he took out of his safe
the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years, put on
his overcoat, and went out of the house. The garden was dark and cold.
It was raining. A keen damp wind hovered howling over all the garden and
gave the trees no rest. Though he strained his eyes, the banker could
see neither the ground, nor the white statues, nor the garden-wing, nor
the trees. Approaching the place where the garden wing stood, he called
the watchman twice. There was no answer. Evidently the watchman had
taken shelter from the bad weather and was now asleep somewhere in the
kitchen or the greenhouse.
"If I have the courage to fulfil my intention," thought the old man,
"the suspicion will fall on the watchman first of all."
In the darkness he groped for the stairs and the door and entered the
hall of the gardenwing, then poked his way into a narrow passage and
struck a match. Not a soul was there. Someone's bed, with no bedclothes
on it, stood there, and an iron stove was dark in the corner. The seals
on the door that led into the prisoner's room were unbroken.
When the match went out, the old man, trembling from agitation, peeped
into the little window.
In the prisoner's room a candle was burning dim. The prisoner himself
sat by the table. Only his back, the hair on his head and his hands were
visible. On the table, the two chairs, the carpet by the table open
books were strewn.
Five minutes passed and the prisoner never once stirred. Fifteen years
confinement had taught him to sit motionless. The banker tapped on the
window with his finger, but the prisoner gave no movement in reply. Then
the banker cautiously tore the seals from the door and put the key into
the lock. The rusty lock gave a hoarse groan and the door creaked. The
banker expected instantly to hear a cry of surprise and the sound of
steps. Three minutes passed and it was as quiet behind the door as it
had been before. He made up his mind to enter. Before the table sat a
man, unlike an ordinary human being. It was a skeleton, with tight-drawn
skin, with a woman's long curly hair, and a shaggy beard. The colour of
his face was yellow, of an earthy shade; the cheeks were sunken, the
back long and narrow, and the hand upon which he leaned his hairy head
was so lean and skinny that it was painful to look upon. His hair was
already silvering with grey, and no one who glanced at the senile
emaciation of the face would have believed that he was only forty years
old. On the table, before his bended head, lay a sheet of paper on which
something was written in a tiny hand.
"Poor devil," thought the banker, "he's asleep and probably seeing
millions in his dreams. I have only to take and throw this half-dead
thing on the bed, smother him a moment with the pillow, and the most
careful examination will find no trace of unnatural death. But, first,
let us read what he has written here."
The banker took the sheet from the table and read:
"To-morrow at twelve o'clock midnight, I shall obtain my freedom and the
right to mix with people. But before I leave this room and see the sun I
think it necessary to say a few words to you. On my own clear conscience
and before God who sees me I declare to you that I despise freedom,
life, health, and all that your books call the blessings of the world.
"For fifteen years I have diligently studied earthly life. True, I saw
neither the earth nor the people, but in your books I drank fragrant
wine, sang songs, hunted deer and wild boar in the forests, loved
women.... And beautiful women, like clouds ethereal, created by the
magic of your poets' genius, visited me by night and whispered me
wonderful tales, which made my head drunken. In your books I climbed the
summits of Elbruz and Mont Blanc and saw from thence how the sun rose in
the morning, and in the evening overflowed the sky, the ocean and the
mountain ridges with a purple gold. I saw from thence how above me
lightnings glimmered cleaving the clouds; I saw green forests, fields,
rivers, lakes, cities; I heard syrens singing, and the playing of the
pipes of Pan; I touched the wings of beautiful devils who came flying to
me to speak of God.... In your books I cast myself into bottomless
abysses, worked miracles, burned cities to the ground, preached new
religions, conquered whole countries....
"Your books gave me wisdom. All that unwearying human thought created in
the centuries is compressed to a little lump in my skull. I know that I
am more clever than you all.
"And I despise your books, despise all wordly blessings and wisdom.
Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive like a mirage. Though
you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the
face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your
history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen
slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.
"You are mad, and gone the wrong way. You take lie for truth and
ugliness for beauty. You would marvel if by certain conditions there
should suddenly grow on apple and orange trees, instead of fruit, frogs
and lizards, and if roses should begin to breathe the odour of a
sweating horse. So do I marvel at you, who have bartered heaven for
earth. I do not want to understand you.
"That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I
waive the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and which
I now despise. That I may deprive myself of my right to them, I shall
come out from here five minutes before the stipulated term, and thus
shall violate the agreement."
When he had read, the banker put the sheet on the table, kissed the head
of the strange man, and began to weep. He went out of the wing. Never at
any other time, not even after his terrible losses on the Exchange, had
he felt such contempt for himself as now. Coming home, he lay down on
his bed, but agitation and tears kept him long from sleep....
The next morning the poor watchman came running to him and told him that
they had seen the man who lived in the wing climbing through the window
into the garden. He had gone to the gate and disappeared. Together with
his servants the banker went instantly to the wing and established the
escape of his prisoner. To avoid unnecessary rumours he took the paper
with the renunciation from the table and, on his return, locked it in
his safe. A TEDIOUS STORY (FROM AN OLD MAN'S JOURNAL) I
There lives in Russia an emeritus professor, Nicolai Stiepanovich ...
privy councillor and knight. He has so many Russian and foreign Orders
that when he puts them on the students call him "the holy picture." His
acquaintance is most distinguished. Not a single famous scholar lived or
died during the last twenty-five or thirty years but he was intimately
acquainted with him. Now he has no one to be friendly with, but speaking
of the past the long list of his eminent friends would end with such
names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and the poet Nekrasov, who bestowed upon him
their warmest and most sincere friendship. He is a member of all the
Russian and of three foreign universities, et cetera, et cetera. All
this, and a great deal besides, forms what is known as my name.
This name of mine is very popular. It is known to every literate person
in Russia; abroad it is mentioned from professorial chairs with the
epithets "eminent and esteemed." It is reckoned among those fortunate
names which to mention in vain or to abuse in public or in the Press is
considered a mark of bad breeding. Indeed, it should be so; because with
my name is inseparably associated the idea of a famous, richly gifted,
and indubitably useful person. I am a steady worker, with the endurance
of a camel, which is important. I am also endowed with talent, which is
still more important. In passing, I would add that I am a well-educated,
modest, and honest fellow. I have never poked my nose into letters or
politics, never sought popularity in disputes with the ignorant, and
made no speeches either at dinners or at my colleagues' funerals.
Altogether there is not a single spot on my learned name, and it has
nothing to complain of. It is fortunate.
The bearer of this name, that is myself, is a man of sixty-two, with a
bald head, false teeth and an incurable tic. My name is as brilliant and
prepossessing, as I, myself am dull and ugly. My head and hands tremble
from weakness; my neck, like that of one of Turgeniev's heroines,
resembles the handle of a counter-bass; my chest is hollow and my back
narrow. When I speak or read my mouth twists, and when I smile my whole
face is covered with senile, deathly wrinkles. There is nothing imposing
in my pitiable face, save that when I suffer from the tic, I have a
singular expression which compels anyone who looks at me to think: "This
man will die soon, for sure."
I can still read pretty well; I can still hold the attention of my
audience for two hours. My passionate manner, the literary form of my
exposition and my humour make the defects of my voice almost
unnoticeable, though it is dry, harsh, and hard like a hypocrite's. But
I write badly. The part of my brain which governs the ability to write
refused office. My memory has weakened, and my thoughts are too
inconsequent; and when I expound them on paper, I always have a feeling
that I have lost the sense of their organic connection. The construction
is monotonous, and the sentence feeble and timid. I often do not write
what I want to, and when I write the end I cannot remember the
beginning. I often forget common words, and in writing a letter I always
have to waste much energy in order to avoid superfluous sentences and
unnecessary incidental statements; both bear clear witness of the decay
of my intellectual activity. And it is remarkable that, the simpler the
letter, the more tormenting is my effort. When writing a scientific
article I fed much freer and much more intelligent than in writing a
letter of welcome or a report. One thing more: it is easier for me to
write German or English than Russian.
As regards my present life, I must first of all note insomnia, from
which I have begun to suffer lately. If I were asked: "What is now the
chief and fundamental fact of your existence?" I would answer:
"Insomnia." From habit, I still undress at midnight precisely and get
into bed. I soon fall asleep but wake just after one with the feeling
that I have not slept at all. I must get out of bed and light the lamp.
For an hour or two I walk about the room from corner to corner and
inspect the long familiar pictures. When I am weary of walking I sit
down to the table. I sit motionless thinking of nothing, feeling no
desires; if a book lies before me I draw it mechanically towards me and
read without interest. Thus lately in one night I read mechanically a
whole novel with a strange title, "Of What the Swallow Sang." Or in
order to occupy my attention I make myself count to a thousand, or I
imagine the face of some one of my friends, and begin to remember in
what year and under what circumstances he joined the faculty. I love to
listen to sounds. Now, two rooms away from me my daughter Liza will say
something quickly, in her sleep; then my wife will walk through the
drawing-room with a candle and infallibly drop the box of matches. Then
the shrinking wood of the cupboard squeaks or the burner of the lamp
tinkles suddenly, and all these sounds somehow agitate me.
Not to sleep of nights confesses one abnormal; and therefore I wait
impatiently for the morning and the day, when I have the right not to
sleep. Many oppressive hours pass before the cock crows. He is my
harbinger of good. As soon as he has crowed I know that in an hour's
time the porter downstairs will awake and for some reason or other go up
the stairs, coughing angrily; and later beyond the windows the air
begins to pale gradually and voices echo in the street.
The day begins with the coming of my wife. She comes in to me in a
petticoat, with her hair undone, but already washed and smelling of eau
de Cologne, and looking as though she came in by accident, saying the
same thing every time: "Pardon, I came in for a moment. You haven't
slept again?" Then she puts the lamp out, sits by the table and begins
to talk. I am not a prophet but I know beforehand what the subject of
conversation will be, every morning the same. Usually, after breathless
inquiries after my health, she suddenly remembers our son, the officer,
who is serving in Warsaw. On the twentieth of each month we send him
fifty roubles. This is our chief subject of conversation.
"Of course it is hard on us," my wife sighs. "But until he is finally
settled we are obliged to help him. The boy is among strangers; the pay
is small. But if you like, next month we'll send him forty roubles
instead of fifty. What do you think?"
Daily experience might have convinced my wife that expenses do not grow
less by talking of them. But my wife does not acknowledge experience and
speaks about our officer punctually every day, about bread, thank
Heaven, being cheaper and sugar a half-penny dearer—and all this in a
tone as though it were news to me.
I listen and agree mechanically. Probably because I have not slept
during the night strange idle thoughts take hold of me. I look at my
wife and wonder like a child. In perplexity I ask myself: This old,
stout, clumsy woman, with sordid cares and anxiety about bread and
butter written in the dull expression of her face, her eyes tired with
eternal thoughts of debts and poverty, who can talk only of expenses and
smile only when things are cheap—was this once the slim Varya whom I
loved passionately for her fine clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty,
and as Othello loved Desdemona, for her "compassion" of my science? Is
she really the same, my wife Varya, who bore me a son?
I gaze intently into the fat, clumsy old woman's face. I seek in her my
Varya; but from the past nothing remains but her fear for my health and
her way of calling my salary "our" salary and my hat "our" hat. It pains
me to look at her, and to console her, if only a little, I let her talk
as she pleases, and I am silent even when she judges people unjustly, or
scolds me because I do not practise and do not publish text-books.
Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers
that I have not yet had tea, and gives a start:
"Why am I sitting down?" she says, getting up. "The samovar has been on
the table a long while, and I sit chatting. How forgetful I am? Good
gracious!"
She hurries away, but stops at the door to say:
"We owe Yegor five months' wages. Do you realise it? It's a bad thing to
let the servants' wages run on. I've said so often. It's much easier to
pay ten roubles every month than fifty for five!"
Outside the door she stops again:
"I pity our poor Liza more than anybody. The girl studies at the
Conservatoire. She's always in good society, and the Lord only knows how
she's dressed. That fur-coat of hers! It's a sin to show yourself in the
street in it. If she had a different father, it would do, but everyone
knows he is a famous professor, a privy councillor."
So, having reproached me for my name and title, she goes away at last.
Thus begins my day. It does not improve.
When I have drunk my tea, Liza comes in, in a fur-coat and hat, with her
music, ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is twenty-two. She looks
younger. She is pretty, rather like my wife when she was young. She
kisses me tenderly on my forehead and my hand.
"Good morning, Papa. Quite well?"
As a child she adored ice-cream, and I often had to take her to a
confectioner's. Ice-cream was her standard of beauty. If she wanted to
praise me, she used to say: "Papa, you are ice-creamy." One finger she
called the pistachio, the other the cream, the third the raspberry
finger and so on. And when she came to say good morning, I used to lift
her on to my knees and kiss her fingers, and say:
"The cream one, the pistachio one, the lemon one."
And now from force of habit I kiss Liza's fingers and murmur:
"Pistachio one, cream one, lemon one." But it does not sound the same. I
am cold like the ice-cream and I feel ashamed. When my daughter comes in
and touches my forehead with her lips I shudder as though a bee had
stung my forehead, I smile constrainedly and turn away my face. Since my
insomnia began a question has been driving like a nail into my brain. My
daughter continually sees how terribly I, an old man, blush because I
owe the servant his wages; she sees how often the worry of small debts
forces me to leave my work and to pace the room from corner to corner
for hours, thinking; but why hasn't she, even once, come to me without
telling her mother and whispered: "Father, here's my watch, bracelets,
earrings, dresses.... Pawn them all.... You need money"? Why, seeing how
I and her mother try to hide our poverty, out of false pride—why does
she not deny herself the luxury of music lessons? I would not accept the
watch, the bracelets, or her sacrifices—God forbid!—I do not want that.
Which reminds me of my son, the Warsaw officer. He is a clever, honest,
and sober fellow. But that doesn't mean very much. If I had an old
father, and I knew that there were moments when he was ashamed of his
poverty, I think I would give up my commission to someone else and hire
myself out as a navvy. These thoughts of the children poison me. What
good are they? Only a mean and irritable person Can take refuge in
thinking evil of ordinary people because they are not heroes. But enough
of that.
At a quarter to ten I have to go and lecture to my dear boys. I dress
myself and walk the road I have known these thirty years. For me it has
a history of its own. Here is a big grey building with a chemist's shop
beneath. A tiny house once stood there, and it was a beer-shop. In this
beer-shop I thought out my thesis, and wrote my first love-letter to
Varya. I wrote it in pencil on a scrap of paper that began "Historia
Morbi." Here is a grocer's shop. It used to belong to a little Jew who
sold me cigarettes on credit, and later on to a fat woman who loved
students "because every one of them had a mother." Now a red-headed
merchant sits there, a very nonchalant man, who drinks tea from a copper
tea-pot. And here are the gloomy gates of the University that have not
been repaired for years; a weary porter in a sheepskin coat, a broom,
heaps of snow ... Such gates cannot produce a good impression on a boy
who comes fresh from the provinces and imagines that the temple of
science is really a temple. Certainly, in the history of Russian
pessimism, the age of university buildings, the dreariness of the
corridors, the smoke-stains on the walls, the meagre light, the dismal
appearance of the stairs, the clothes-pegs and the benches, hold one of
the foremost places in the series of predisposing causes. Here is our
garden. It does not seem to have grown any better or any worse since I
was a student. I do not like it. It would be much more sensible if tall
pine-trees and fine oaks grew there instead of consumptive lime-trees,
yellow acacias and thin clipped lilac. The student's mood is created
mainly by every one of the surroundings in which he studies; therefore
he must see everywhere before him only what is great and strong and
exquisite. Heaven preserve him from starveling trees, broken windows,
and drab walls and doors covered with tom oilcloth.
As I approach my main staircase the door is open wide. I am met by my
old friend, of the same age and name as I, Nicolas the porter. He grunts
as he lets me in:
"It's frosty, Your Excellency."
Or if my coat is wet:
"It's raining a bit, Your Excellency."
Then he runs in front of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the
study he carefully takes off my coat and at the same time manages to
tell me some university news. Because of the close acquaintance that
exists between all the University porters and keepers, he knows all that
happens in the four faculties, in the registry, in the chancellor's
cabinet, and the library. He knows everything. When, for instance, the
resignation of the rector or dean is under discussion, I hear him
talking to the junior porters, naming candidates and explaining offhand
that so and so will not be approved by the Minister, so and so will
himself refuse the honour; then he plunges into fantastic details of
some mysterious papers received in the registry, of a secret
conversation which appears to have taken place between the Minister and
the curator, and so on. These details apart, he is almost always right.
The impressions he forms of each candidate are original, but also true.
If you want to know who read his thesis, joined the staff, resigned or
died in a particular year, then you must seek the assistance of this
veteran's colossal memory. He will not only name you the year, month,
and day, but give you the accompanying details of this or any other
event. Such memory is the privilege of love.
He is the guardian of the university traditions. From the porters before
him he inherited many legends of the life of the university. He added to
this wealth much of his own and if you like he will tell you many
stories, long or short. He can tell you of extraordinary savants who
knew everything, of remarkable scholars who did not sleep for weeks on
end, of numberless martyrs to science; good triumphs over evil with him.
The weak always conquer the strong, the wise man the fool, the modest
the proud, the young the old. There is no need to take all these legends
and stories for sterling; but filter them, and you will find what you
want in your filter, a noble tradition and the names of true heroes
acknowledged by all.
In our society all the information about the learned world consists
entirely of anecdotes of the extraordinary absent-mindedness of old
professors, and of a handful of jokes, which are ascribed to Guber or to
myself or to Baboukhin. But this is too little for an educated society.
If it loved science, savants and students as Nicolas loves them, it
would long ago have had a literature of whole epics, stories, and
biographies. But unfortunately this is yet to be.
The news told, Nicolas looks stem and we begin to talk business. If an
outsider were then to hear how freely Nicolas uses the jargon, he would
be inclined to think that he was a scholar, posing as a soldier. By the
way, the rumours of the university-porter's erudition are very
exaggerated. It is true that Nicolas knows more than a hundred Latin
tags, can put a skeleton together and on occasion make a preparation,
can make the students laugh with a long learned quotation, but the
simple theory of the circulation of the blood is as dark to him now as
it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my room, bent low over a book or a preparation, sits my
dissector, Peter Ignatievich. He is a hardworking, modest man of thirty-
five without any gifts, already bald and with a big belly. He works from
morning to night, reads tremendously and remembers everything he has
read. In this respect he is not merely an excellent man, but a man of
gold; but in all others he is a cart-horse, or if you like a learned
blockhead. The characteristic traits of a cart-horse which distinguish
him from a creature of talent are these. His outlook is narrow,
absolutely bounded by his specialism. Apart from his own subject he is
as naive as a child. I remember once entering the room and saying:
"Think what bad luck! They say, Skobielev is dead."
Nicolas crossed himself; but Peter Ignatievich turned to me:
"Which Skobielev do you mean?"
Another time,—some time earlier—I announced that Professor Pierov was
dead. That darling Peter Ignatievich asked:
"What was his subject?"
I imagine that if Patti sang into his ear, or Russia were attacked by
hordes of Chinamen, or there was an earthquake, he would not lift a
finger, but would go on in the quietest way with his eye screwed over
his microscope. In a word: "What's Hecuba to him?" I would give anything
to see how this dry old stick goes to bed with his wife.
Another trait: a fanatical belief in the infallibility of science, above
all in everything that the Germans write. He is sure of himself and his
preparations, knows the purpose of life, is absolutely ignorant of the
doubts and disillusionments that turn talents grey,—a slavish worship of
the authorities, and not a shadow of need to think for himself. It is
hard to persuade him and quite impossible to discuss with him. Just try
a discussion with a man who is profoundly convinced that the best
science is medicine, the best men doctors, the best traditions—the
medical! From the ugly past of medicine only one tradition has
survived,—the white necktie that doctors wear still. For a learned, and
more generally for an educated person there can exist only a general
university tradition, without any division into traditions of medicine,
of law, and so on. But it's quite impossible for Peter Ignatievich to
agree with that; and he is ready to argue it with you till doomsday.
His future is quite plain to me. During the whole of his life he will
make several hundred preparations of extraordinary purity, will write
any number of dry, quite competent, essays, will make about ten
scrupulously accurate translations; but he won't invent gunpowder. For
gunpowder, imagination is wanted, inventiveness, and a gift for
divination, and Peter Ignatievich has nothing of the kind. In short, he
is not a master of science but a labourer.
Peter Ignatievich, Nicolas, and I whisper together. We are rather
strange to ourselves. One feels something quite particular, when the
audience booms like the sea behind the door. In thirty years I have not
grown used to this feeling, and I have it every morning. I button up my
frock-coat nervously, ask Nicolas unnecessary questions, get angry....
It is as though I were afraid; but it is not fear, but something else
which I cannot name nor describe.
Unnecessarily, I look at my watch and say:
"Well, it's time to go."
And we march in, in this order: Nicolas with the preparations or the
atlases in front, myself next, and after me, the cart-horse, modestly
hanging his head; or, if necessary, a corpse on a stretcher in front and
behind the corpse Nicolas and so on. The students rise when I appear,
then sit down and the noise of the sea is suddenly still. Calm begins.
I know what I will lecture about, but I know nothing of how I will
lecture, where I will begin and where I will end. There is not a single
sentence ready in my brain. But as soon as I glance at the audience,
sitting around me in an amphitheatre, and utter the stereotyped "In our
last lecture we ended with...." and the sentences fly out of my soul in
a long line—then it is full steam ahead. I speak with irresistible
speed, and with passion, and it seems as though no earthly power could
check the current of my speech. In order to lecture well, that is
without being wearisome and to the listener's profit, besides talent you
must have the knack of it and experience; you must have a clear idea
both of your own powers, of the people to whom you are lecturing, and of
the subject of your remarks. Moreover, you must be quick in the uptake,
keep a sharp eye open, and never for a moment lose your field of vision.
When he presents the composer's thought, a good conductor does twenty
things at once. He reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer
makes a gesture now towards the drum, now to the double-bass, and so on.
It is the same with me when lecturing. I have some hundred and fifty
faces before me, quite unlike each other, and three hundred eyes staring
me straight in the face. My purpose is to conquer this many-headed
hydra. If I have a clear idea how far they are attending and how much
they are comprehending every minute while I am lecturing, then the hydra
is in my power. My other opponent is within me. This is the endless
variety of forms, phenomena and laws, and the vast number of ideas,
whether my own or others', which depend upon them. Every moment I must
be skilful enough to choose what is most important and necessary from
this enormous material, and just as swiftly as my speech flows to clothe
my thought in a form which will penetrate the hydra's understanding and
excite its attention. Besides I must watch carefully to see that my
thoughts shall not be presented as they have been accumulated, but in a
certain order, necessary for the correct composition of the picture
which I wish to paint. Further, I endeavour to make my speech literary,
my definitions brief and exact, my sentences as simple and elegant as
possible. Every moment I must hold myself in and remember that I have
only an hour and forty minutes to spend. In other words, it is a heavy
labour. At one and the same time you have to be a savant, a
schoolmaster, and an orator, and it is a failure if the orator triumphs
over the schoolmaster in you or the schoolmaster over the orator.
After lecturing for a quarter, for half an hour, I notice suddenly that
the students have begun to stare at the ceiling or Peter Ignatievich.
One will feel for his handkerchief, another settle himself comfortably,
another smile at his own thoughts. This means their attention is tried.
I must take steps. I seize the first opening and make a pun. All the
hundred and fifty faces have a broad smile, their eyes flash merrily,
and for a while you can hear the boom of the sea. I laugh too. Their
attention is refreshed and I can go on.
No sport, no recreation, no game ever gave me such delight as reading a
lecture. Only in a lecture could I surrender myself wholly to passion
and understand that inspiration is not a poet's fiction, but exists
indeed. And I do not believe that Hercules, even after the most
delightful of his exploits, felt such a pleasant weariness as I
experienced every time after a lecture.
This was in the past. Now at lectures I experience only torture. Not
half an hour passes before I begin to feel an invincible weakness in my
legs and shoulders. I sit down in my chair, but I am not used to lecture
sitting. In a moment I am up again, and lecture standing. Then I sit
down again. Inside my mouth is dry, my voice is hoarse, my head feels
dizzy. To hide my state from my audience I drink some water now and
then, cough, wipe my nose continually, as though I was troubled by a
cold, make inopportune puns, and finally announce the interval earlier
than I should. But chiefly I feel ashamed.
Conscience and reason tell me that the best thing I could do now is to
read my farewell lecture to the boys, give them my last word, bless them
and give up my place to someone younger and stronger than I. But, heaven
be my judge, I have not the courage to act up to my conscience.
Unfortunately, I am neither philosopher nor theologian. I know quite
well I have no more than six months to live; and it would seem that now
I ought to be mainly occupied with questions of the darkness beyond the
grave, and the visions which will visit my sleep in the earth. But
somehow my soul is not curious of these questions, though my mind grants
every atom of their importance. Now before my death it is just as it was
twenty or thirty years ago. Only science interests me.—When I take my
last breath I shall still believe that Science is the most important,
the most beautiful, the most necessary thing in the life of man; that
she has always been and always will be the highest manifestation of
love, and that by her alone will man triumph over nature and himself.
This faith is, perhaps, at bottom naive and unfair, but I am not to
blame if this and not another is my faith. To conquer this faith within
me is for me impossible.
But this is beside the point. I only ask that you should incline to my
weakness and understand that to tear a man who is more deeply concerned
with the destiny of a brain tissue than the final goal of creation away
from his rostrum and his students is like taking him and nailing him up
in a coffin without waiting until he is dead.
Because of my insomnia and the intense struggle with my increasing
weakness a strange thing happens inside me. In the middle of my lecture
tears rise to my throat, my eyes begin to ache, and I have a passionate
and hysterical desire to stretch out my hands and moan aloud. I want to
cry out that fate has doomed me, a famous man, to death; that in some
six months here in the auditorium another will be master. I want to cry
out that I am poisoned; that new ideas that I did not know before have
poisoned the last days of my life, and sting my brain incessantly like
mosquitoes. At that moment my position seems so terrible to me that I
want all my students to be terrified, to jump from their seats and rush
panic-stricken to the door, shrieking in despair.
It is not easy to live through such moments. II
After the lecture I sit at home and work. I read reviews, dissertations,
or prepare for the next lecture, and sometimes I write something. I work
with interruptions, since I have to receive visitors.
The bell rings. It is a friend who has come to talk over some business.
He enters with hat and stick. He holds them both in front of him and
says:
"Just a minute, a minute. Sit down, cher confrère. Only a word or two."
First we try to show each other that we are both extraordinarily polite
and very glad to see each other. I make him sit down in the chair, and
he makes me sit down; and then we touch each other's waists, and put our
hands on each other's buttons, as though we were feeling each other and
afraid to bum ourselves. We both laugh, though we say nothing funny.
Sitting down, we bend our heads together and begin to whisper to each
other. We must gild our conversation with such Chinese formalities as:
"You remarked most justly" or "I have already had the occasion to say."
We must giggle if either of us makes a pun, though it's a bad one. When
we have finished with the business, my friend gets up with a rush, waves
his hat towards my work, and begins to take his leave. We feel each
other once more and laugh. I accompany him down to the hall. There I
help my friend on with his coat, but he emphatically declines so great
an honour. Then, when Yegor opens the door my friend assures me that I
will catch cold, and I pretend to be ready to follow him into the
street. And when I finally return to my study my face keeps smiling
still, it must be from inertia.
A little later another ring. Someone enters the hall, spends a long time
taking off his coat and coughs. Yegor brings me word that a student has
come. I tell him to show him up. In a minute a pleasant-faced young man
appears. For a year we have been on these forced terms together. He
sends in abominable answers at examinations, and I mark him gamma. Every
year I have about seven of these people to whom, to use the students'
slang, "I give a plough" or "haul them through." Those of them who fail
because of stupidity or illness, usually bear their cross in patience
and do not bargain with me; only sanguine temperaments, "open natures,"
bargain with me and come to my house, people whose appetite is spoiled
or who are prevented from going regularly to the opera by a delay in
their examinations. With the first I am over-indulgent; the second kind
I keep on the run for a year.
"Sit down," I say to my guest. "What was it you wished to say?"
"Forgive me for troubling you, Professor...." he begins, stammering and
never looking me in the face. "I would not venture to trouble you
unless.... I was up for my examination before you for the fifth time ...
and I failed. I implore you to be kind, and give me a 'satis,'
because...."
The defence which all idlers make of themselves is always the same. They
have passed in every other subject with distinction, and failed only in
mine, which is all the more strange because they had always studied my
subject most diligently and know it thoroughly. They failed through some
inconceivable misunderstanding.
"Forgive me, my friend," I say to my guest. "But I can't give you a
'satis'—impossible. Go and read your lectures again, and then come. Then
we'll see."
Pause. I get a desire to torment the student a little, because he
prefers beer and the opera to science; and I say with a sigh:
"In my opinion, the best thing for you now is to give up the Faculty of
Medicine altogether. With your abilities, if you find it impossible to
pass the examination, then it seems you have neither the desire nor the
vocation to be a doctor."
My sanguine friend's face grows grave.
"Excuse me, Professor," he smiles, "but it would be strange, to say the
least, on my part. Studying medicine for five years and suddenly—to
throw it over."
"Yes, but it's better to waste five years than to spend your whole life
afterwards in an occupation which you dislike."
Immediately I begin to feel sorry for him and hasten to say:
"Well, do as you please. Read a little and come again."
"When?" the idler asks, dully.
"Whenever you like. To-morrow, even."
And I read in his pleasant eyes. "I can come again; but you'll send me
away again, you beast."
"Of course," I say, "you won't become more learned because you have to
come up to me fifteen times for examination; but this will form your
character. You must be thankful for that."
Silence. I rise and wait for my guest to leave. But he stands there,
looking at the window, pulling at his little beard and thinking. It
becomes tedious.
My sanguine friend has a pleasant, succulent voice, clever, amusing
eyes, a good-natured face, rather puffed by assiduity to beer and much
resting on the sofa. Evidently he could tell me many interesting things
about the opera, about his love affairs, about the friends he adores;
but, unfortunately, it is not the thing. And I would so eagerly listen!
"On my word of honour, Professor, if you give me a 'satis' I'll...."
As soon as it gets to "my word of honour," I wave my hands and sit down
to the table. The student thinks for a while and says, dejectedly:
"In that case, good-bye.... Forgive me!"
"Good-bye, my friend.... Good-bye!"
He walks irresolutely into the hall, slowly puts on his coat, and, when
he goes into the street, probably thinks again for a long while; having
excogitated nothing better than "old devil" for me, he goes to a cheap
restaurant to drink beer and dine, and then home to sleep. Peace be to
your ashes, honest labourer!
A third ring. Enters a young doctor in a new black suit, gold-rimmed
spectacles and the inevitable white necktie. He introduces himself. I
ask him to take a seat and inquire his business. The young priest of
science begins to tell me, not without agitation, that he passed his
doctor's examination this year, and now has only to write his
dissertation. He would like to work with me, under my guidance; and I
would do him a great kindness if I would suggest a subject for his
dissertation.
"I should be delighted to be of use to you, mon cher confrère," I say.
"But first of all, let us come to an agreement as to what is a
dissertation. Generally we understand by this, work produced as the
result of an independent creative power. Isn't that so? But a work
written on another's subject, under another's guidance, has a different
name."
The aspirant is silent. I fire up and jump out of my seat. "Why do you
all come to me? I can't understand," I cry out angrily. "Do I keep a
shop? I don't sell theses across the counter. For the one thousandth
time I ask you all to leave me alone. Forgive my rudeness, but I've got
tired of it at last!"
The aspirant is silent. Only, a tinge of colour shows on his cheek. His
face expresses his profound respect for my famous name and my erudition,
but I see in his eyes that he despises my voice, my pitiable figure, my
nervous gestures. When I am angry I seem to him a very queer fellow.
"I do not keep a shop," I storm. "It's an amazing business! Why don't
you want to be independent? Why do you find freedom so objectionable?"
I say a great deal, but he is silent. At last by degrees I grow calm,
and, of course, surrender. The aspirant will receive a valueless subject
from me, will write under my observation a needless thesis, will pass
his tedious disputation cum laude and will get a useless and learned
degree.
The rings follow in endless succession, but here I confine myself to
four. The fourth ring sounds, and I hear the familiar steps, the
rustling dress, the dear voice.
Eighteen years ago my dear friend, the oculist, died and left behind him
a seven year old daughter, Katy, and sixty thousand roubles. By his will
he made me guardian. Katy lived in my family till she was ten.
Afterwards she was sent to College and lived with me only in her
holidays in the summer months. I had no time to attend to her education.
I watched only by fits and starts; so that I can say very little about
her childhood.
The chief thing I remember, the one I love to dwell upon in memory, is
the extraordinary confidence which she had when she entered my house,
when she had to have the doctor,—a confidence which was always shining
in her darling face. She would sit in a corner somewhere with her face
tied up, and would be sure to be absorbed in watching something. Whether
she was watching me write and read books, or my wife bustling about, or
the cook peeling the potatoes in the kitchen or the dog playing
about—her eyes invariably expressed the same thing: "Everything that
goes on in this world,—everything is beautiful and clever." She was
inquisitive and adored to talk to me. She would sit at the table
opposite me, watching my movements and asking questions. She is
interested to know what I read, what I do at the University, if I'm not
afraid of corpses, what I do with my money.
"Do the students fight at the University?" she would ask.
"They do, my dear."
"You make them go down on their knees?"
"I do."
And it seemed funny to her that the students fought and that I made them
go down on their knees, and she laughed. She was a gentle, good, patient
child.
Pretty often I happened to see how something was taken away from her, or
she was unjustly punished, or her curiosity was not satisfied. At such
moments sadness would be added to her permanent expression of
confidence—nothing more. I didn't know how to take her part, but when I
saw her sadness, I always had the desire to draw her close to me and
comfort her in an old nurse's voice: "My darling little orphan!"
I remember too she loved to be well dressed and to sprinkle herself with
scents. In this she was like me. I also love good clothes and fine
scents.
I regret that I had neither the time nor the inclination to watch the
beginnings and the growth of the passion which had completely taken hold
of Katy when she was no more than fourteen or fifteen. I mean her
passionate love for the theatre. When she used to come from the College
for her holidays and live with us, nothing gave her such pleasure and
enthusiasm to talk about as plays and actors. She used to tire us with
her incessant conversation about the theatre. I alone hadn't the courage
to deny her my attention. My wife and children did not listen to her.
When she felt the desire to share her raptures she would come to my
study and coax: "Nicolai Stiepanich, do let me speak to you about the
theatre."
I used to show her the time and say:
"I'll give you half an hour. Fire away!"
Later on she used to bring in pictures of the actors and actresses she
worshipped—whole dozens of them. Then several times she tried to take
part in amateur theatricals, and finally when she left College she
declared to me she was born to be an actress.
I never shared Katy's enthusiasms for the theatre. My opinion is that if
a play is good then there's no need to trouble the actors for it to make
the proper impression; you can be satisfied merely by reading it. If the
play is bad, no acting will make it good.
When I was young I often went to the theatre, and nowadays my family
takes a box twice a year and carries me off for an airing there. Of
course this is not enough to give me the right to pass verdicts on the
theatre; but I will say a few words about it. In my opinion the theatre
hasn't improved in the last thirty or forty years. I can't find any more
than I did then, a glass of dean water, either in the corridors or the
foyer. Just as they did then, the attendants fine me sixpence for my
coat, though there's nothing illegal in wearing a warm coat in winter.
Just as it did then, the orchestra plays quite unnecessarily in the
intervals, and adds a new, gratuitous impression to the one received
from the play. Just as they did then, men go to the bar in the intervals
and drink spirits. If there is no perceptible improvement in little
things, it will be useless to look for it in the bigger things. When an
actor, hide-bound in theatrical traditions and prejudices, tries to read
simple straightforward monologue: "To be or not to be," not at all
simply, but with an incomprehensible and inevitable hiss and convulsions
over his whole body, or when he tries to convince me that Chazky, who is
always talking to fools and is in love with a fool, is a very clever man
and that "The Sorrows of Knowledge" is not a boring play,—then I get
from the stage a breath of the same old routine that exasperated me
forty years ago when I was regaled with classical lamentation and
beating on the breast. Every time I come out of the theatre a more
thorough conservative than I went in.
It's quite possible to convince the sentimental, self-confident crowd
that the theatre in its present state is an education. But not a man who
knows what true education is would swallow this. I don't know what it
may be in fifty or a hundred years, but under present conditions the
theatre can only be a recreation. But the recreation is too expensive
for continual use, and robs the country of thousands of young, healthy,
gifted men and women, who if they had not devoted themselves to the
theatre would be excellent doctors, farmers, schoolmistresses, or
officers. It robs the public of its evenings, the best time for
intellectual work and friendly conversation. I pass over the waste of
money and the moral injuries to the spectator when he sees murder,
adultery, or slander wrongly treated on the stage.
But Katy's opinion was quite the opposite. She assured me that even in
its present state the theatre is above lecture-rooms and books, above
everything else in the world. The theatre is a power that unites in
itself all the arts, and the actors are men with a mission. No separate
art or science can act on the human soul so strongly and truly as the
stage; and therefore it is reasonable that a medium actor should enjoy
much greater popularity than the finest scholar or painter. No public
activity can give such delight and satisfaction as the theatrical.
So one fine day Katy joined a theatrical company and went away, I
believe, to Ufa, taking with her a lot of money, a bagful of rainbow
hopes, and some very high-class views on the business.
Her first letters on the journey were wonderful. When I read them I was
simply amazed that little sheets of paper could contain so much youth,
such transparent purity, such divine innocence, and at the same time so
many subtle, sensible judgments, that would do honour to a sound
masculine intelligence. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her
friends, her successes and failures—she did not write about them, she
sang. Every line breathed the confidence which I used to see in her
face; and with all this a mass of grammatical mistakes and hardly a
single stop.
Scarce six months passed before I received a highly poetical
enthusiastic letter, beginning, "I have fallen in love." She enclosed a
photograph of a young man with a clean-shaven face, in a broad-brimmed
hat, with a plaid thrown over his shoulders. The next letters were just
as splendid, but stops already began to appear and the grammatical
mistakes to vanish. They had a strong masculine scent. Katy began to
write about what a good thing it would be to build a big theatre
somewhere in the Volga, but on a cooperative basis, and to attract the
rich business-men and shipowners to the undertaking. There would be
plenty of money, huge receipts, and the actors would work in
partnership.... Perhaps all this is really a good thing, but I can't
help thinking such schemes could only come from a man's head.
Anyhow for eighteen months or a couple of years everything seemed to be
all right. Katy was in love, had her heart in her business and was
happy. But later on I began to notice dear symptoms of a decline in her
letters. It began with Katy complaining about her friends. This is the
first and most ominous sign. If a young scholar or litterateur begins
his career by complaining bitterly about other scholars or
littérateurs, it means that he is tired already and not fit for his
business. Katy wrote to me that her friends would not come to rehearsals
and never knew their parts; that they showed an utter contempt for the
public in the absurd plays they staged and the manner they behaved. To
swell the box-office receipts—the only topic of conversation—serious
actresses degrade themselves by singing sentimentalities, and tragic
actors sing music-hall songs, laughing at husbands who are deceived and
unfaithful wives who are pregnant. In short, it was amazing that the
profession, in the provinces, was not absolutely dead. The marvel was
that it could exist at all with such thin, rotten blood in its veins.
In reply I sent Katy a long and, I confess, a very tedious letter. Among
other things I wrote: "I used to talk fairly often to actors in the
past, men of the noblest character, who honoured me with their
friendship. From my conversations with them I understood that their
activities were guided rather by the whim and fashion of society than by
the free working of their own minds. The best of them in their lifetime
had to play in tragedy, in musical comedy, in French farce, and in
pantomime; yet all through they considered that they were treading the
right path and being useful. You see that this means that you must look
for the cause of the evil, not in the actors, but deeper down, in the
art itself and the attitude of society towards it." This letter of mine
only made Katy cross. "You and I are playing in different operas. I
didn't write to you about men of the noblest character, but about a lot
of sharks who haven't a spark of nobility in them. They are a horde of
savages who came on the stage only because they wouldn't be allowed
anywhere else. The only ground they have for calling themselves artists
is their impudence. Not a single talent among them, but any number of
incapables, drunkards, intriguers, and slanderers. I can't tell you how
bitterly I feel it that the art I love so much is fallen into the hands
of people I despise. It hurts me that the best men should be content to
look at evil from a distance and not want to come nearer. Instead of
taking an active part, they write ponderous platitudes and useless
sermons...." and more in the same strain.
A little while after I received the following: "I have been inhumanly
deceived. I can't go on living any more. Do as you think fit with my
money. I loved you as a father and as my only friend. Forgive me."
So it appeared that he too belonged to the horde of savages. Later on, I
gathered from various hints, that there was an attempt at suicide.
Apparently, Katy tried to poison herself. I think she must have been
seriously ill afterwards, for I got the following letter from Yalta,
where most probably the doctors had sent her. Her last letter to me
contained a request that I should send her at Yalta a thousand roubles,
and it ended with the words: "Forgive me for writing such a sad letter.
I buried my baby yesterday." After she had spent about a year in the
Crimea she returned home.
She had been travelling for about four years, and during these four
years I confess that I occupied a strange and unenviable position in
regard to her. When she announced to me that she was going on to the
stage and afterwards wrote to me about her love; when the desire to
spend took hold of her, as it did periodically, and I had to send her
every now and then one or two thousand roubles at her request; when she
wrote that she intended to die, and afterwards that her baby was dead,—-
I was at a loss every time. All my sympathy with her fate consisted in
thinking hard and writing long tedious letters which might as well never
have been written. But then I was in loco parentis and I loved her as a
daughter.
Katy lives half a mile away from me now. She took a five-roomed house
and furnished it comfortably, with the taste that was born in her. If
anyone were to undertake to depict her surroundings, then the dominating
mood of the picture would be indolence. Soft cushions, soft chairs for
her indolent body; carpets for her indolent feet; faded, dim, dull
colours for her indolent eyes; for her indolent soul, a heap of cheap
fans and tiny pictures on the walls, pictures in which novelty of
execution was more noticeable than content; plenty of little tables and
stands, set out with perfectly useless and worthless things, shapeless
scraps instead of curtains.... All this, combined with a horror of
bright colours, of symmetry, and space, betokened a perversion of the
natural taste as well as indolence of the soul. For whole days Katy lies
on the sofa and reads books, mostly novels and stories. She goes outside
her house but once in the day, to come and see me.
I work. Katy sits on the sofa at my side. She is silent, and wraps
herself up in her shawl as though she were cold. Either because she is
sympathetic to me, or I because I had got used to her continual visits
while she was still a little girl, her presence does not prevent me from
concentrating on my work. At long intervals I ask her some question or
other, mechanically, and she answers very curtly; or, for a moment's
rest, I turn towards her and watch how she is absorbed in looking
through some medical review or newspaper. And then I see that the old
expression of confidence in her face is there no more. Her expression
now is cold, indifferent, distracted, like that of a passenger who has
to wait a long while for his train. She dresses as she used—well and
simply, but carelessly. Evidently her clothes and her hair suffer not a
little from the sofas and hammocks on which she lies for days together.
And she is not curious any more. She doesn't ask me questions any more,
as if she had experienced everything in life and did not expect to hear
anything new.
About four o'clock there is a sound of movement in the hall and the
drawing-room. It's Liza come back from the Conservatoire, bringing her
friends with her. You can hear them playing the piano, trying their
voices and giggling. Yegor is laying the table in the dining-room and
making a noise with the plates.
"Good-bye," says Katy. "I shan't go in to see your people. They must
excuse me. I haven't time. Come and see me."
When I escort her into the hall, she looks me over sternly from head to
foot, and says in vexation:
"You get thinner and thinner. Why don't you take a cure? I'll go to
Sergius Fiodorovich and ask him to come. You must let him see you."
"It's not necessary, Katy."
"I can't understand why your family does nothing. They're a nice lot."
She puts on her jacket with her rush. Inevitably, two or three hair-pins
fall out of her careless hair on to the floor. It's too much bother to
tidy her hair now; besides she is in a hurry. She pushes the straggling
strands of hair untidily under her hat and goes away.
As soon as I come into the dining-room, my wife asks:
"Was that Katy with you just now? Why didn't she come to see us. It
really is extraordinary...."
"Mamma!" says Liza reproachfully, "If she doesn't want to come, that's
her affair. There's no need for us to go on our knees."
"Very well; but it's insulting. To sit in the study for three hours,
without thinking of us. But she can do as she likes."
Varya and Liza both hate Katy. This hatred is unintelligible to me;
probably you have to be a woman to understand it. I'll bet my life on it
that you'll hardly find a single one among the hundred and fifty young
men I see almost every day in my audience, or the hundred old ones I
happen to meet every week, who would be able to understand why women
hate and abhor Katy's past, her being pregnant and unmarried and her
illegitimate child. Yet at the same time I cannot bring to mind a single
woman or girl of my acquaintance who would not cherish such feelings,
either consciously or instinctively. And it's not because women are
purer and more virtuous than men. If virtue and purity are not free from
evil feeling, there's precious little difference between them and vice.
I explain it simply by the backward state of women's development. The
sorrowful sense of compassion and the torment of conscience, which the
modern man experiences when he sees distress have much more to tell me
about culture and moral development than have hatred and repulsion. The
modern woman is as lachrymose and as coarse in heart as she was in the
middle ages. And in my opinion those who advise her to be educated like
a man have wisdom on their side.
But still my wife does not like Katy, because she was an actress, and
for her ingratitude, her pride, her extravagances, and all the
innumerable vices one woman can always discover in another.
Besides myself and my family we have two or three of my daughter's girl
friends to dinner and Alexander Adolphovich Gnekker, Liza's admirer and
suitor. He is a fair young man, not more than thirty years old, of
middle height, very fat, broad shouldered, with reddish hair round his
ears and a little stained moustache, which give his smooth chubby face
the look of a doll's. He wears a very short jacket, a fancy waistcoat,
large-striped trousers, very full on the hip and very narrow in the leg,
and brown boots without heels. His eyes stick out like a lobster's, his
tie is like a lobster's tail, and I can't help thinking even that the
smell of lobster soup clings about the whole of this young man. He
visits us every day; but no one in the family knows where he comes from,
where he was educated, or how he lives. He cannot play or sing, but he
has a certain connection with music as well as singing, for he is agent
for somebody's pianos, and is often at the Academy. He knows all the
celebrities, and he manages concerts. He gives his opinion on music with
great authority and I have noticed that everybody hastens to agree with
him.
Rich men always have parasites about them. So do the sciences and the
arts. It seems that there is no science or art in existence, which is
free from such "foreign bodies" as this Mr. Gnekker. I am not a musician
and perhaps I am mistaken about Gnekker, besides I don't know him very
well. But I can't help suspecting the authority and dignity with which
he stands beside the piano and listens when anyone is singing or
playing.
You may be a gentleman and a privy councillor a hundred times over; but
if you have a daughter you can't be guaranteed against the pettinesses
that are so often brought into your house and into your own humour, by
courtings, engagements, and weddings. For instance, I cannot reconcile
myself to my wife's solemn expression every time Gnekker comes to our
house, nor to those bottles of Château Lafitte, port, and sherry which
are put on the table only for him, to convince him beyond doubt of the
generous luxury in which we live. Nor can I stomach the staccato
laughter which Liza learned at the Academy, and her way of screwing up
her eyes, when men are about the house. Above all, I can't understand
why it is that such a creature should come to me every day and have
dinner with me—a creature perfectly foreign to my habits, my science,
and the whole tenour of my life, a creature absolutely unlike the men I
love. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that that is "the
bridegroom," but still I can't understand why he's there. It disturbs my
mind just as much as if a Zulu were put next to me at table. Besides, it
seems strange to me that my daughter whom I used to think of as a baby
should be in love with that necktie, those eyes, those chubby cheeks.
Formerly, I either enjoyed my dinner or was indifferent about it. Now it
does nothing but bore and exasperate me. Since I was made an Excellency
and Dean of the Faculty, for some reason or other my family found it
necessary to make a thorough change in our menu and the dinner
arrangements. Instead of the simple food I was used to as a student and
a doctor, I am now fed on potage-puree, with some sossoulki swimming
about in it, and kidneys in Madeira. The title of General and my renown
have robbed me for ever of schi and savoury pies, and roast goose with
apple sauce, and bream with kasha. They robbed me as well of my maid
servant Agasha, a funny, talkative old woman, instead of whom I am now
waited on by Yegor, a stupid, conceited fellow who always has a white
glove in his right hand. The intervals between the courses are short,
but they seem terribly long. There is nothing to fill them. We don't
have any more of the old good-humour, the familiar conversations, the
jokes and the laughter; no more mutual endearments, or the gaiety that
used to animate my children, my wife, and myself when we met at the
dinner table. For a busy man like me dinner was a time to rest and meet
my friends, and a feast for my wife and children, not a very long feast,
to be sure, but a gay and happy one, for they knew that for half an hour
I did not belong to science and my students, but solely to them and to
no one else. No more chance of getting tipsy on a single glass of wine,
no more Agasha, no more bream with kasha, no more the old uproar to
welcome our little contretemps at dinner, when the cat fought the dog
under the table, or Katy's head-band fell down her cheek into her soup.
Our dinner nowadays is as nasty to describe as to eat. On my wife's face
there is pompousness, an assumed gravity, and the usual anxiety. She
eyes our plates nervously: "I see you don't like the meat?... Honestly,
don't you like it?" And I must answer, "Don't worry, my dear. The meat
is very good." She: "You're always taking my part, Nicolai Stiepanich.
You never tell the truth. Why has Alexander Adolphovich eaten so
little?" and the same sort of conversation for the whole of dinner. Liza
laughs staccato and screws up her eyes. I look at both of them, and at
this moment at dinner here I can see quite clearly that their inner
lives have slipped out of my observation long ago. I feel as though once
upon a time I lived at home with a real family, but now I am dining as a
guest with an unreal wife and looking at an unreal Liza. There has been
an utter change in both of them, while I have lost sight of the long
process that led up to the change. No wonder I don't understand
anything. What was the reason of the change? I don't know. Perhaps the
only trouble is that God did not give my wife and daughter the strength
He gave me. From my childhood I have been accustomed to resist outside
influences and have been hardened enough. Such earthly catastrophes as
fame, being made General, the change from comfort to living above my
means, acquaintance with high society, have scarcely touched me. I have
survived safe and sound. But it all fell down like an avalanche on my
weak, unhardened wife and Liza, and crushed them.
Gnekker and the girls talk of fugues and counter-fugues; singers and
pianists, Bach and Brahms, and my wife, frightened of being suspected of
musical ignorance, smiles sympathetically and murmurs: "Wonderful.... Is
it possible?... Why?..." Gnekker eats steadily, jokes gravely, and
listens condescendingly to the ladies' remarks. Now and then he has the
desire to talk bad French, and then he finds it necessary for some
unknown reason to address me magnificently, "Votre Excellence."
And I am morose. Apparently I embarrass them all and they embarrass me.
I never had any intimate acquaintance with class antagonism before, but
now something of the kind torments me indeed. I try to find only bad
traits in Gnekker. It does not take long and then I am tormented because
one of my friends has not taken his place as bridegroom. In another way
too his presence has a bad effect upon me. Usually, when I am left alone
with myself or when I am in the company of people I love, I never think
of my merits; and if I begin to think about them they seem as trivial as
though I had become a scholar only yesterday. But in the presence of a
man like Gnekker my merits appear to me like an extremely high mountain,
whose summit is lost in the clouds, while Gnekkers move about the foot,
so small as hardly to be seen.
After dinner I go up to my study and light my little pipe, the only one
during the whole day, the sole survivor of my old habit of smoking from
morning to night. My wife comes into me while I am smoking and sits down
to speak to me. Just as in the morning, I know beforehand what the
conversation will be.
"We ought to talk seriously, Nicolai Stiepanovich," she begins. "I mean
about Liza. Why won't you attend?"
"Attend to what?"
"You pretend you don't notice anything. It's not right: It's not right
to be unconcerned. Gnekker has intentions about Liza. What do you say to
that?"
"I can't say he's a bad man, because I don't know him; but I've told you
a thousand times already that I don't like him."
"But that's impossible ... impossible...." She rises and walks about in
agitation.
"It's impossible to have such an attitude to a serious matter," she
says. "When our daughter's happiness is concerned, we must put
everything personal aside. I know you don't like him.... Very well....
But if we refuse him now and upset everything, how can you guarantee
that Liza won't have a grievance against us for the rest of her life?
Heaven knows there aren't many young men nowadays. It's quite likely
there won't be another chance. He loves Liza very much and she likes
him, evidently. Of course he hasn't a settled position. But what is
there to do? Please God, he'll get a position in time. He comes of a
good family, and he's rich."
"How did you find that out?"
"He said so himself. His father has a big house in Kharkov and an estate
outside. You must certainly go to Kharkov."
"Why?"
"You'll find out there. You have acquaintances among the professors
there. I'd go myself. But I'm a woman. I can't."
"I will not go to Kharkov," I say morosely.
My wife gets frightened; a tormented expression comes over her face.
"For God's sake, Nicolai Stiepanich," she implores, sobbing, "For God's
sake help me with this burden! It hurts me."
It is painful to look at her.
"Very well, Varya," I say kindly, "If you like—very well I'll go to
Kharkov, and do everything you want."
She puts her handkerchief to her eyes and goes to cry in her room. I am
left alone.
A little later they bring in the lamp. The familiar shadows that have
wearied me for years fall from the chairs and the lamp-shade on to the
walls and the floor. When I look at them it seems that it's night
already, and the cursed insomnia has begun. I lie down on the bed; then
I get up and walk about the room then lie down again. My nervous
excitement generally reaches its highest after dinner, before the
evening. For no reason I begin to cry and hide my head in the pillow.
All the while I am afraid somebody may come in; I am afraid I shall die
suddenly; I am ashamed of my tears; altogether, something intolerable is
happening in my soul. I feel I cannot look at the lamp or the books or
the shadows on the floor, or listen to the voices in the drawing-room
any more. Some invisible, mysterious force pushes me rudely out of my
house. I jump up, dress hurriedly, and go cautiously out into the street
so that the household shall not notice me. Where shall I go?
The answer to this question has long been there in my brain: "To Katy."
III
As usual she is lying on the Turkish divan or the couch and reading
something. Seeing me she lifts her head languidly, sits down, and gives
me her hand.
"You are always lying down like that," I say after a reposeful silence.
"It's unhealthy. You'd far better be doing something."
"Ah?"
"You'd far better be doing something, I say."
"What?... A woman can be either a simple worker or an actress."
"Well, then—if you can't become a worker, be an actress."
She is silent.
"You had better marry," I say, half-joking.
"There's no one to marry: and no use if I did."
"You can't go on living like this."
"Without a husband? As if that mattered. There are as many men as you
like, if you only had the will."
"This isn't right, Katy."
"What isn't right?"
"What you said just now."
Katy sees that I am chagrined, and desires to soften the bad impression.
"Come. Let's come here. Here."
She leads me into a small room, very cosy, and points to the writing
table.
"There. I made it for you. You'll work here. Come every day and bring
your work with you. They only disturb you there at home.... Will you
work here? Would you like to?"
In order not to hurt her by refusing, I answer that I shall work with
her and that I like the room immensely. Then we both sit down in the
cosy room and begin to talk.
The warmth, the cosy surroundings, the presence of a sympathetic being,
rouses in me now not a feeling of pleasure as it used but a strong
desire to complain and grumble. Anyhow it seems to me that if I moan and
complain I shall feel better.
"It's a bad business, my dear," I begin with a sigh. "Very bad."
"What is the matter?"
"I'll tell you what is the matter. The best and most sacred right of
kings is the right to pardon. And I have always felt myself a king so
long as I used this right prodigally. I never judged, I was
compassionate, I pardoned everyone right and left. Where others
protested and revolted I only advised and persuaded. All my life I've
tried to make my society tolerable to the family of students, friends
and servants. And this attitude of mine towards people, I know, educated
every one who came into contact with me. But now I am king no more.
There's something going on in me which belongs only to slaves. Day and
night evil thoughts roam about in my head, and feelings which I never
knew before have made their home in my soul. I hate and despise; I'm
exasperated, disturbed, and afraid. I've become strict beyond measure,
exacting, unkind, and suspicious. Even the things which in the past gave
me the chance of making an extra pun, now bring me a feeling of
oppression. My logic has changed too. I used to despise money alone; now
I cherish evil feelings, not to money, but to the rich, as if they were
guilty. I used to hate violence and arbitrariness; now I hate the people
who employ violence, as if they alone are to blame and not all of us,
who cannot educate one another. What does it all mean? If my new
thoughts and feelings come from a change of my convictions, where could
the change have come from? Has the world grown worse and I better, or
was I blind and indifferent before? But if the change is due to the
general decline of my physical and mental powers—I am sick and losing
weight every day—then I'm in a pitiable position. It means that my new
thoughts are abnormal and unhealthy, that I must be ashamed of them and
consider them valueless...."
"Sickness hasn't anything to do with it," Katy interrupts. "Your eyes
are opened—that's all. You've begun to notice things you didn't want to
notice before for some reason. My opinion is that you must break with
your family finally first of all and then go away."
"You're talking nonsense."
"You don't love them any more. Then, why do you behave unfairly? And is
it a family! Mere nobodies. If they died to-day, no one would notice
their absence to-morrow."
Katy despises my wife and daughter as much as they hate her. It's
scarcely possible nowadays to speak of the right of people to despise
one another. But if you accept Katy's point of view and own that such a
right exists, you will notice that she has the same right to despise my
wife and Liza as they have to hate her.
"Mere nobodies!" she repeats. "Did you have any dinner to-day? It's a
wonder they didn't forget to tell you dinner was ready. I don't know how
they still remember that you exist."
"Katy!" I say sternly. "Please be quiet."
"You don't think it's fun for me to talk about them, do you? I wish I
didn't know them at all. You listen to me, dear. Leave everything and go
away: go abroad—the quicker, the better."
"What nonsense! What about the University?"
"And the University, too. What is it to you? There's no sense in it all.
You've been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your pupils? Have
you many famous scholars? Count them up. But to increase the number of
doctors who exploit the general ignorance and make hundreds of
thousands,—there's no need to be a good and gifted man. You aren't
wanted."
"My God, how bitter you are!" I get terrified. "How bitter you are. Be
quiet, or I'll go away. I can't reply to the bitter things you say."
The maid enters and calls us to tea. Thank God, our conversation changes
round the samovar. I have made my moan, and now I want to indulge
another senile weakness—reminiscences. I tell Katy about my past, to my
great surprise with details that I never suspected I had kept safe in my
memory. And she listens to me with emotion, with pride, holding her
breath. I like particularly to tell how I once was a student at a
seminary and how I dreamed of entering the University.
"I used to walk in the seminary garden," I tell her, "and the wind would
bring the sound of a song and the thrumming of an accordion from a
distant tavern, or a troika with bells would pass quickly by the
seminary fence. That would be quite enough to fill not only my breast
with a sense of happiness, but my stomach, legs, and hands. As I heard
the sound of the accordion or the bells fading away, I would see myself
a doctor and paint pictures, one more glorious than another. And, you
see, my dreams came true. There were more things I dared to dream of. I
have been a favourite professor thirty years, I have had excellent
friends and an honourable reputation. I loved and married when I was
passionately in love. I had children. Altogether, when I look back the
whole of my life seems like a nice, clever composition. The only thing I
have to do now is not to spoil the finale. For this, I must die like a
man. If death is really a danger then I must meet it as becomes a
teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of a Christian State. But I am
spoiling the finale. I am drowning, and I run to you and beg for help,
and you say: 'Drown. It's your duty.'"
At this point a ring at the bell sounds in the hall. Katy and I both
recognise it and say:
"That must be Mikhail Fiodorovich."
And indeed in a minute Mikhail Fiodorovich, my colleague, the
philologist, enters. He is a tall, well-built man about fifty years old,
clean shaven, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He is a good man
and an admirable friend. He belongs to an old aristocratic family, a
prosperous and gifted house which has played a notable rôle in the
history of our literature and education. He himself is clever, gifted,
and highly educated, but not without his eccentricities. To a certain
extent we are all eccentric, queer fellows, but his eccentricities have
an element of the exceptional, not quite safe for his friends. Among the
latter I know not a few who cannot see his many merits clearly because
of his eccentricities.
As he walks in he slowly removes his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
"How do you do? Drinking tea. Just in time. It's hellishly cold."
Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass of tea and immediately
begins to talk. What chiefly marks his way of talking is his invariably
ironical tone, a mixture of philosophy and jest, like Shakespeare's
grave-diggers. He always talks of serious matters; but never seriously.
His opinions are always acid and provocative, but thanks to his tender,
easy, jesting tone, it somehow happens that his acidity and
provocativeness don't tire one's ears, and one very soon gets used to
it. Every evening he brings along some half-dozen stories of the
university life and generally begins with them when he sits down at the
table.
"O Lord," he sighs with an amusing movement of his black eyebrows,
"there are some funny people in the world."
"Who?" asks Katy.
"I was coming down after my lecture to-day and I met that old idiot N——
on the stairs. He walks along, as usual pushing out that horse jowl of
his, looking for some one to bewail his headaches, his wife, and his
students, who won't come to his lectures. 'Well,' I think to myself,
'he's seen me. It's all up—no hope for And so on in the same strain. Or
he begins like this,
"Yesterday I was at Z's public lecture. Tell it not in Gath, but I do
wonder how our alma mater dares to show the public such an ass, such a
double-dyed blockhead as Z. Why he's a European fool. Good Lord, you
won't find one like him in all Europe—not even if you looked in daytime,
and with a lantern. Imagine it: he lectures as though he were sucking a
stick of barley-sugar—su—su—su. He gets a fright because he can't make
out his manuscript. His little thoughts will only just keep moving,
hardly moving, like a bishop riding a bicycle. Above all you can't make
out a word he says. The flies die of boredom, it's so terrific. It can
only be compared with the boredom in the great Hall at the
Commemoration, when the traditional speech is made. To hell with it!"
Immediately an abrupt change of subject.
"I had to make the speech; three years ago. Nicolai Stiepanovich will
remember. It was hot, close. My full uniform was tight under my arms,
tight as death. I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half,
two hours. 'Well,' I thought, 'thank God I've only ten pages left.' And
I had four pages of peroration that I needn't read at all. 'Only six
pages then,' I thought. Imagine it. I just gave a glance in front of me
and saw sitting next to each other in the front row a general with a
broad ribbon and a bishop. The poor devils were bored stiff. They were
staring about madly to stop themselves from going to sleep. For all that
they are still trying to look attentive, to make some appearance of
understanding what I'm reading, and look as though they like it. 'Well,'
I thought, 'if you like it, then you shall have it. I'll spite you.' So
I set to and read the four pages, every word."
When he speaks only his eyes and eyebrows smile as it is generally with
the ironical. At such moments there is no hatred or malice in his eyes
but a great deal of acuteness and that peculiar fox-cunning which you
can catch only in very observant people. Further, about his eyes I have
noticed one more peculiarity. When he takes his glass from Katy, or
listens to her remarks, or follows her with a glance as she goes out of
the room for a little while, then I catch in his look something humble,
prayerful, pure....
The maid takes the samovar away and puts on the table a big piece of
cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne, a thoroughly bad
wine which Katy got to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail
Fiodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelves and sets them out
for patience. If one may believe his assurances, some games of patience
demand a great power of combination and concentration. Nevertheless
while he sets out the cards he amuses himself by talking continually.
Katy follows his cards carefully, helping him more by mimicry than
words. In the whole evening she drinks no more than two small glasses of
wine, I drink only a quarter of a glass, the remainder of the bottle
falls to Mikhail Fiodorovich, who can drink any amount without ever
getting drunk.
During patience we solve all kinds of questions, mostly of the lofty
order, and our dearest love, science, comes off second best.
"Science, thank God, has had her day," says Mikhail Fiodorovich very
slowly. "She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel the
desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the soil of
prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence of
prejudices as were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics and
philosophy. As between European scholars and the Chinese who have no
sciences at all the difference is merely trifling, a matter only of
externals. The Chinese had no scientific knowledge, but what have they
lost by that?"
"Flies haven't any scientific knowledge either," I say; "but what does
that prove?"
"It's no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between
ourselves. I'm more cautious than you think. I shan't proclaim it from
the housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that
science and art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to
crafts. Our persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It's not for
you and me to destroy it. God forbid!"
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
"Our public is degenerate nowadays," Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. "I don't
speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should be able to
work and think decently. 'Sadly I look at the men of our time'—it's
quite true in this connection."
"Yes, they're frightfully degenerate," Katy agrees. "Tell me, had you
one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?"
"I don't know how it is with the other professors,—but somehow I don't
recollect that it ever happened to me."
"In my lifetime I've seen a great many of your students and young
scholars, a great many actors.... What happened? I never once had the
luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily
interesting person. Everything's dull and incapable, swollen and
pretentious...."
All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression
that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my
daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale and
are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such penny-
dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons with the
glorious past. Any indictment, even if it's made in a company of ladies,
should be formulated with all possible precision; otherwise it isn't an
indictment, but an empty calumny, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, and have served for the last thirty years; but I don't
see any sign either of degeneracy or the lack of ideals. I don't find it
any worse now than before. My porter, Nicolas, whose experience in this
case has its value, says that students nowadays are neither better nor
worse than their predecessors.
If I were asked what was the thing I did not like about my present
pupils, I wouldn't say offhand or answer at length, but with a certain
precision. I know their defects and there's no need for me to take
refuge in a mist of commonplaces. I don't like the way they smoke, and
drink spirits, and marry late; or the way they are careless and
indifferent to the point of allowing students to go hungry in their
midst, and not paying their debts into "The Students' Aid Society." They
are ignorant of modern languages and express themselves incorrectly in
Russian. Only yesterday my colleague, the hygienist, complained to me
that he had to lecture twice as often because of their incompetent
knowledge of physics and their complete ignorance of meteorology. They
are readily influenced by the most modern writers, and some of those not
the best, but they are absolutely indifferent to classics like
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pascal; and their worldly
unpracticality shows itself mostly in their inability to distinguish
between great and small. They solve all difficult questions which have a
more or less social character (emigration, for instance) by getting up
subscriptions, but not by the method of scientific investigation and
experiment, though this is at their full disposal, and, above all,
corresponds to their vocation. They readily become house-doctors,
assistant house-doctors, clinical assistants, or consulting doctors, and
they are prepared to keep these positions until they are forty, though
independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are quite as
necessary in science, as, for instance, in art or commerce. I have
pupils and listeners, but I have no helpers or successors. Therefore I
love them and am concerned for them, but I'm not proud of them ... and
so on.
However great the number of such defects may be, it's only in a cowardly
and timid person that they give rise to pessimism and distraction. All
of them are by nature accidental and transitory, and are completely
dependent on the conditions of life. Ten years will be enough for them
to disappear or give place to new and different defects, which are quite
indispensable, but will in their turn give the timid a fright. Students'
shortcomings often annoy me, but the annoyance is nothing in comparison
with the joy I have had these thirty years in speaking with my pupils,
lecturing to them, studying their relations and comparing them with
people of a different class.
Mikhail Fiodorovich is a slanderer. Katy listens and neither of them
notices how deep is the pit into which they are drawn by such an
outwardly innocuous recreation as condemning one's neighbours. They
don't realise how a simple conversation gradually turns into mockery and
derision, or how they both begin even to employ the manners of calumny.
"There are some queer types to be found," says Mikhail Fiodorovich.
"Yesterday I went to see our friend Yegor Pietrovich. There I found a
student, one of your medicos, a third-year man, I think. His face ...
rather in the style of Dobroliubov—the stamp of profound thought on his
brow. We began to talk. 'My dear fellow—an extraordinary business. I've
just read that some German or other—can't remember his name—has
extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain—idiotine.' Do you know he
really believed it, and produced an expression of respect on his face,
as much as to say, 'See, what a power we are.'"
"The other day I went to the theatre. I sat down. Just in front of me in
the next row two people were sitting: one, 'one of the chosen,'
evidently a law student, the other a whiskery medico. The medico was as
drunk as a cobbler. Not an atom of attention to the stage. Dozing and
nodding. But the moment some actor began to deliver a loud monologue, or
just raised his voice, my medico thrills, digs his neighbour in the
ribs. 'What's he say? Something noble?' 'Noble,' answers 'the chosen.'
"'Brrravo!' bawls the medico. 'No—ble. Bravo.' You see the drunken
blockhead didn't come to the theatre for art, but for something noble.
He wants nobility."
Katy listens and laughs. Her laugh is rather strange. She breathes out
in swift, rhythmic, and regular alternation with her inward breathing.
It's as though she were playing an accordion. Of her face, only her
nostrils laugh. My heart fails me. I don't know what to say. I lose my
temper, crimson, jump up from my seat and cry:
"Be quiet, won't you? Why do you sit here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? I've had enough."
In vain I wait for them to stop their slanders. I prepare to go home.
And it's time, too. Past ten o'clock.
"I'll sit here a little longer," says Mikhail Fiodorovich, "if you give
me leave, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?"
"You have my leave," Katy answers.
"Bene. In that case, order another bottle, please."
Together they escort me to the hall with candles in their hands. While
I'm putting on my overcoat, Mikhail Fiodorovich says:
"You've grown terribly thin and old lately. Nicolai Stiepanovich. What's
the matter with you? Ill?
"Yes, a little."
"And he will not look after himself," Katy puts in sternly.
"Why don't you look after yourself? How can you go on like this? God
helps those who help themselves, my dear man. Give my regards to your
family and make my excuses for not coming. One of these days, before I
go abroad, I'll come to say good-bye. Without fail. I'm off next week."
I came away from Katy's irritated, frightened by the talk about my
illness and discontented with myself. "And why," I ask myself,
"shouldn't I be attended by one of my colleagues?" Instantly I see how
my friend, after sounding me, will go to the window silently, think a
little while, turn towards me and say, indifferently, trying to prevent
me from reading the truth in his face: "At the moment I don't see
anything particular; but still, cher confrère, I would advise you to
break off your work...." And that will take my last hope away.
Who doesn't have hopes? Nowadays, when I diagnose and treat myself, I
sometimes hope that my ignorance deceives me, that I am mistaken about
the albumen and sugar which I find, as well as about my heart, and also
about the anasarca which I have noticed twice in the morning. While I
read over the therapeutic text-books again with the eagerness of a
hypochondriac, and change the prescriptions every day, I still believe
that I will come across something hopeful. How trivial it all is!
Whether the sky is cloudy all over or the moon and stars are shining in
it, every time I come back home I look at it and think that death will
take me soon. Surely at that moment my thoughts should be as deep as the
sky, as bright, as striking ... but no! I think of myself, of my wife,
Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general. My thoughts are not
good, they are mean; I juggle with myself, and at this moment my
attitude towards life can be expressed in the words the famous Arakheev
wrote in one of his intimate letters: "All good in the world is
inseparably linked to bad, and there is always more bad than good."
Which means that everything is ugly, there's nothing to live for, and
the sixty-two years I have lived out must be counted as lost. I surprise
myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself they are accidental
and temporary and not deeply rooted in me, but I think immediately:
"If that's true, why am I drawn every evening to those two toads." And I
swear to myself never to go to Katy any more, though I know I will go to
her again to-morrow.
As I pull my door bell and go upstairs, I feel already that I have no
family and no desire to return to it. It is plain my new, Arakheev
thoughts are not accidental or temporary in me, but possess my whole
being. With a bad conscience, dull, indolent, hardly able to move my
limbs, as though I had a ten ton weight upon me, I lie down in my bed
and soon fall asleep.
And then—insomnia. IV
The summer comes and life changes.
One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a joking tone:
"Come, Your Excellency. It's all ready."
They lead My Excellency into the street, put me into a cab and drive me
away. For want of occupation I read the signboards backwards as I go.
The word "Tavern" becomes "Nrevat." That would do for a baron's name:
Baroness Nrevat. Beyond, I drive across the field by the cemetery, which
produces no impression upon me whatever, though I'll soon lie there.
After a two hours' drive, My Excellency is led into the ground-floor of
the bungalow, and put into a small, lively room with a light-blue paper.
Insomnia at night as before, but I am no more wakeful in the morning and
don't listen to my wife, but lie in bed. I don't sleep, but I am in a
sleepy state, half-forgetfulness, when you know you are not asleep, but
have dreams. I get up in the afternoon, and sit down at the table by
force of habit, but now I don't work any more but amuse myself with
French yellow-backs sent me by Katy. Of course it would be more
patriotic to read Russian authors, but to tell the truth I'm not
particularly disposed to them. Leaving out two or three old ones, all
the modern literature doesn't seem to me to be literature but a unique
home industry which exists only to be encouraged, but the goods are
bought with reluctance. The best of these homemade goods can't be called
remarkable and it's impossible to praise it sincerely without a saving
"but"; and the same must be said of all the literary novelties I've read
during the last ten or fifteen years. Not one remarkable, and you can't
dispense with "but." They have cleverness, nobility, and no talent;
talent, nobility and no cleverness; or finally, talent, cleverness, but
no nobility.
I would not say that French books have talent, cleverness, and nobility.
Nor do they satisfy me. But they are not so boring as the Russian; and
it is not rare to find in them the chief constituent of creative
genius—the sense of personal freedom, which is lacking to Russian
authors. I do not recall one single new book in which from the very
first page the author did not try to tie himself up in all manner of
conventions and contracts with his conscience. One is frightened to
speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological
analysis, a third must have "a kindly attitude to his fellow-men," the
fourth heaps up whole pages with descriptions of nature on purpose to
avoid any suspicion of a tendency.... One desires to be in his books a
bourgeois at all costs, another at all costs an aristocrat.
Deliberation, cautiousness, cunning: but no freedom, no courage to write
as one likes, and therefore no creative genius.
All this refers to belles-lettres, so-called.
As for serious articles in Russian, on sociology, for instance, or art
and so forth, I don't read them, simply out of timidity. For some reason
in my childhood and youth I had a fear of porters and theatre
attendants, and this fear has remained with me up till now. Even now I
am afraid of them. It is said that only that which one cannot understand
seems terrible. And indeed it is very difficult to understand why hall-
porters and theatre attendants are so pompous and haughty and
importantly polite. When I read serious articles, I have exactly the
same indefinable fear. Their portentous gravity, their playfulness, like
an archbishop's, their over-familiar attitude to foreign authors, their
capacity for talking dignified nonsense—"filling a vacuum with
emptiness"—it is all inconceivable to me and terrifying, and quite
unlike the modesty and the calm and gentlemanly tone to which I am
accustomed when reading our writers on medicine and the natural
sciences. Not only articles; I have difficulty also in reading
translations even when they are edited by serious Russians. The
presumptuous benevolence of the prefaces, the abundance of notes by the
translator (which prevents one from concentrating), the parenthetical
queries and sics, which are so liberally scattered over the book or the
article by the translator—seem to me an assault on the author's person,
as well as on my independence as a reader.
Once I was invited as an expert to the High Court. In the interval one
of my fellow-experts called my attention to the rude behaviour of the
public prosecutor to the prisoners, among whom were two women
intellectuals. I don't think I exaggerated at all when I replied to my
colleague that he was not behaving more rudely than authors of serious
articles behave to one another. Indeed their behaviour is so rude that
one speaks of them with bitterness. They behave to each other or to the
writers whom they criticise either with too much deference, careless of
their own dignity, or, on the other hand, they treat them much worse
than I have treated Gnekker, my future son-in-law, in these notes and
thoughts of mine. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions,
of any kind of crime even, are the usual adornment of serious articles.
And this, as our young medicos love to say in their little
articles—quite ultima ratio. Such an attitude must necessarily be
reflected in the character of the young generation of writers, and
therefore I'm not at all surprised that in the new books which, have
been added to our belles lettres in the last ten or fifteen years, the
heroes drink a great deal of vodka and the heroines are not sufficiently
chaste.
I read French books and look out of the window, which is open—I see the
pointed palings of my little garden, two or three skinny trees, and
there, beyond the garden, the road, fields, then a wide strip of young
pine-forest. I often delight in watching a little boy and girl, both
white-haired and ragged, climb on the garden fence and laugh at my
baldness. In their shining little eyes I read, "Come out, thou bald-
head." These are almost the only people who don't care a bit about my
reputation or my title.
I don't have visitors everyday now. I'll mention only the visits of
Nicolas and Piotr Ignatievich. Nicolas comes to me usually on holidays,
pretending to come on business, but really to see me. He is very
hilarious, a thing which never happens to him in the winter.
"Well, what have you got to say?" I ask him, coming out into the
passage.
"Your Excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking
at me with a lover's rapture. "Your Excellency! So help me God! God
strike me where I stand! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus."
And he kisses me eagerly on the shoulders, on my sleeves, and buttons.
"Is everything all right over there?" I ask.
"Your Excellency! I swear to God...."
He never stops swearing, quite unnecessarily, and I soon get bored, and
send him to the kitchen, where they give him dinner. Piotr Ignatievich
also comes on holidays specially to visit me and communicate his
thoughts to me. He usually sits by the table in my room, modest, clean,
judicious, without daring to cross his legs or lean his elbows on the
table, all the while telling me in a quiet, even voice what he considers
very piquant items of news gathered from journals and pamphlets.
These items are all alike and can be reduced to the following type: A
Frenchman made a discovery. Another—a German—exposed him by showing that
this discovery had been made as long ago as 1870 by some American. Then
a third—also a German—outwitted them both by showing that both of them
had been confused, by taking spherules of air under a microscope for
dark pigment. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Piotr Ignatievich
tells his story at great length, very much as though he were defending a
thesis, enumerating his literary sources in detail, with every effort to
avoid mistakes in the dates, the particular number of the journal and
the names. Moreover, he does not say Petit simply but inevitably, Jean
Jacques Petit. If he happens to stay to dinner, he will tell the same
sort of piquant stories and drive all the company to despondency. If
Gnekker and Liza begin to speak of fugues and counter-fugues in his
presence he modestly lowers his eyes, and his face falls. He is ashamed
that such trivialities should be spoken of in the presence of such
serious men as him and me.
In my present state of mind five minutes are enough for him to bore me
as though I had seen and listened to him for a whole eternity. I hate
the poor man. I wither away beneath his quiet, even voice and his
bookish language. His stories make me stupid.... He cherishes the
kindliest feelings towards me and talks to me only to give me pleasure.
I reward him by staring at his face as if I wanted to hypnotise him, and
thinking "Go away. Go, go...." But he is proof against my mental
suggestion and sits, sits, sits....
While he sits with me I cannot rid myself of the idea: "When I die, it's
quite possible that he will be appointed in my place." Then my poor
audience appears to me as an oasis where the stream has dried, up, and I
am unkind to Piotr Ignatievich, and silent and morose as if he were
guilty of such thoughts and not I myself. When he begins, as usual, to
glorify the German scholars, I no longer jest good-naturedly, but murmur
sternly:
"They're fools, your Germans...."
It's like the late Professor Nikita Krylov when he was bathing with
Pirogov at Reval. He got angry with the water, which was very cold, and
swore about "These scoundrelly Germans." I behave badly to Piotr
Ignatievich; and it's only when he is going away and I see through the
window his grey hat disappearing behind the garden fence, that I want to
call him back and say: "Forgive me, my dear fellow."
The dinner goes yet more wearily than in winter. The same Gnekker, whom
I now hate and despise, dines with me every day. Before, I used to
suffer his presence in silence, but now I say biting things to him,
which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by an evil feeling, I
often say things that are merely foolish, end don't know why I say them.
Thus it happened once that after looking at Gnekker contemptuously for a
long while, I suddenly fired off, for no reason at all:
"Eagles than barnyard-fowls may lower bend; But fowls shall never to the
heav'ns ascend."
More's the pity that the fowl Gnekker shows himself more clever than the
eagle professor. Knowing my wife and daughter are on his side he
maintains these tactics. He replies to my shafts with a condescending
silence ("The old man's off his head.... What's the good of talking to
him?"), or makes good-humoured fun of me. It is amazing to what depths
of pettiness a man may descend. During the whole dinner I can dream how
Gnekker will be shown to be an adventurer, how Liza and my wife will
realise their mistake, and I will tease them—ridiculous dreams like
these at a time when I have one foot in the grave.
Now there occur misunderstandings, of a kind which I formerly knew only
by hearsay. Though it is painful I will describe one which occurred
after dinner the other day. I sit in my room smoking a little pipe.
Enters my wife, as usual, sits down and begins to talk. What a good idea
it would be to go to Kharkov now while the weather is warm and there is
the time, and inquire what kind of man our Gnekker is.
"Very well. I'll go," I agree.
My wife gets up, pleased with me, and walks to the door; but immediately
returns:
"By-the bye, I've one more favour to ask. I know you'll be angry; but
it's my duty to warn you.... Forgive me, Nicolai,—but all our neighbours
have begun to talk about the way you go to Katy's continually. I don't
deny that she's clever and educated. It's pleasant to spend the time
with her. But at your age and in your position it's rather strange to
find pleasure in her society.... Besides she has a reputation enough
to...."
All my blood rushes instantly from my brain. My eyes flash fire. I catch
hold of my hair, and stamp and cry, in a voice that is not mine:
"Leave me alone, leave me, leave me...."
My face is probably terrible, and my voice strange, for my wife suddenly
gets pale, and calls aloud, with a despairing voice, also not her own.
At our cries rush in Liza and Gnekker, then Yegor.
My feet grow numb, as though they did not exist. I feel that I am
falling into somebody's arms. Then I hear crying for a little while and
sink into a faint which lasts for two or three hours.
Now for Katy. She comes to see me before evening every day, which of
course must be noticed by my neighbours and my friends. After a minute
she takes me with her for a drive. She has her own horse and a new buggy
she bought this summer. Generally she lives like a princess. She has
taken an expensive detached bungalow with a big garden, and put into it
all her town furniture. She has two maids and a coachman. I often ask
her:
"Katy, what will you live on when you've spent all your father's money?"
"We'll see, then," she answers.
"But this money deserves to be treated more seriously, my dear. It was
earned by a good man and honest labour."
"You've told me that before. I know."
First we drive by the field, then by a young pine forest, which you can
see from my window. Nature seems to me as beautiful as she used,
although the devil whispers to me that all these pines and firs, the
birds and white clouds in the sky will not notice my absence in three or
four months when I am dead. Katy likes to take the reins, and it is good
that the weather is fine and I am sitting by her side. She is in a happy
mood, and does not say bitter things.
"You're a very good man, Nicolai," she says. "You are a rare bird.
There's no actor who could play your part. Mine or Mikhail's, for
instance—even a bad actor could manage, but yours—there's nobody. I envy
you, envy you terribly I What am I? What?"
She thinks for a moment, and asks:
"I'm a negative phenomenon, aren't I?"
"Yes," I answer.
"H'm ... what's to be done then?"
What answer can I give? It's easy to say "Work," or "Give your property
to the poor," or "Know yourself," and because it's so easy to say this I
don't know what to answer.
My therapeutist colleagues, when teaching methods of cure, advise one
"to individualise each particular case." This advice must be followed in
order to convince one's self that the remedies recommended in the text-
books as the best and most thoroughly suitable as a general rule, are
quite unsuitable in particular cases. It applies to moral affections as
well. But I must answer something. So I say:
"You've too much time on your hands, my dear. You must take up
something.... In fact, why shouldn't you go on the stage again, if you
have a vocation."
"I can't."
"You have the manner and tone of a victim. I don't like it, my dear. You
have yourself to blame. Remember, you began by getting angry with people
and things in general; but you never did anything to improve either of
them. You didn't put up a struggle against the evil. You got tired.
You're not a victim of the struggle but of your own weakness. Certainly
you were young then and inexperienced. But now everything can be
different. Come on, be an actress. You will work; you will serve in the
temple of art."...
"Don't be so clever, Nicolai," she interrupts. "Let's agree once for
all: let's speak about actors, actresses, writers, but let us leave art
out of it. You're a rare and excellent man. But you don't understand
enough about art to consider it truly sacred. You have no flair, no ear
for art. You've been busy all your life, and you never had time to
acquire the flair. Really ... I don't love these conversations about
art!" she continues nervously. "I don't love them. They've vulgarised it
enough already, thank you."
"Who's vulgarised it?"
"They vulgarised it by their drunkenness, newspapers by their over-
familiarity, clever people by philosophy."
"What's philosophy got to do with it?"
"A great deal. If a man philosophises, it means he doesn't understand."
So that it should not come to bitter words, I hasten to change the
subject, and then keep silence for a long while. It's not till we come
out of the forest and drive towards Katy's bungalow, I return to the
subject and ask:
"Still, you haven't answered me why you don't want to go on the stage?"
"Really, it's cruel," she cries out, and suddenly blushes all over. "You
want me to tell you the truth outright. Very well if ... if you will
have it I I've no talent! No talent and ... much ambition! There you
are!"
After this confession, she turns her face away from me, and to hide the
trembling of her hands, tugs at the reins.
As we approach her bungalow, from a distance we see Mikhail already,
walking about by the gate, impatiently awaiting us.
"This Fiodorovich again," Katy says with annoyance. "Please take him
away from me. I'm sick of him. He's flat.... Let him go to the deuce."
Mikhail Fiodorovich ought to have gone abroad long ago, but he has
postponed his departure every week. There have been some changes in him
lately. He's suddenly got thin, begun to be affected by drink—a thing
that never happened to him before, and his black eyebrows have begun to
get grey. When our buggy stops at the gate he cannot hide his joy and
impatience. Anxiously he helps Katy and me from the buggy, hastily asks
us questions, laughs, slowly rubs his hands, and that gentle, prayerful,
pure something that I used to notice only in his eyes is now poured over
all his face. He is happy and at the same time ashamed of his happiness,
ashamed of his habit of coming to Katy's every evening, and he finds it
necessary to give a reason for his coming, some obvious absurdity, like:
"I was passing on business, and I thought I'd just drop in for a
second."
All three of us go indoors. First we drink tea, then our old friends,
the two packs of cards, appear on the table, with a big piece of cheese,
some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne. The subjects of
conversation are not new, but all exactly the same as they were in the
winter. The university, the students, literature, the theatre—all of
them come in for it. The air thickens with slanders, and grows more
dose. It is poisoned by the breath, not of two toads as in winter, but
now by all three. Besides the velvety, baritone laughter and the
accordion-like giggle, the maid who waits upon us hears also the
unpleasant jarring laugh of a musical comedy general: "He, he, he!" V
There sometimes come fearful nights with thunder, lightning, rain, and
wind, which the peasants call "sparrow-nights." There was one such
sparrow-night in my own personal life....
I wake after midnight and suddenly leap out of bed. Somehow it seems to
me that I am going to die immediately. I do not know why, for there is
no single sensation in my body which points to a quick end; but a terror
presses on my soul as though I had suddenly seen a huge, ill-boding fire
in the sky.
I light the lamp quickly and drink some water straight out of the
decanter. Then I hurry to the window. The weather is magnificent. The
air smells of hay and some delicious thing besides. I see the spikes of
my garden fence, the sleepy starveling trees by the window, the road,
the dark strip of forest. There is a calm and brilliant moon in the sky
and not a single cloud. Serenity. Not a leaf stirs. To me it seems that
everything is looking at me and listening for me to die.
Dread seizes me. I shut the window and run to the bed, I feel for my
pulse. I cannot find it in my wrist; I seek it in my temples, my chin,
my hand again. They are all cold and slippery with sweat. My breathing
comes quicker and quicker; my body trembles, all my bowels are stirred,
and my face and forehead feel as though a cobweb had settled on them.
What shall I do? Shall I call my family? No use. I do not know what my
wife and Liza will do when they come in to me.
I hide my head under the pillow, shut my eyes and wait, wait.... My
spine is cold. It almost contracts within me. And I feel that death will
approach me only from behind, very quietly.
"Kivi, kivi." A squeak sounds in the stillness of the night. I do not
know whether it is in my heart or in the street.
God, how awful! I would drink some more water; but now I dread opening
my eyes, and fear to raise my head. The terror is unaccountable, animal.
I cannot understand why I am afraid. Is it because I want to live, or
because a new and unknown pain awaits me?
Upstairs, above the ceiling, a moan, then a laugh ... I listen. A little
after steps sound on the staircase. Someone hurries down, then up again.
In a minute steps sound downstairs again. Someone stops by my door and
listens.
"Who's there?" I call.
The door opens. I open my eyes boldly and see my wife. Her face is pale
and her eyes red with weeping.
"You're not asleep, Nicolai Stiepanovich?" she asks.
"What is it?"
"For God's sake go down to Liza. Something is wrong with her."
"Very well ... with pleasure," I murmur, very glad that I am not alone.
"Very well ... immediately."
As I follow my wife I hear what she tells me, and from agitation
understand not a word. Bright spots from her candle dance over the steps
of the stairs; our long shadows tremble; my feet catch in the skirts of
my dressing-gown. My breath goes, and it seems to me that someone is
chasing me, trying to seize my back. "I shall die here on the staircase,
this second," I think, "this second." But we have passed the staircase,
the dark hall with the Italian window and we go into Liza's room. She
sits in bed in her chemise; her bare legs hang down and she moans.
"Oh, my God ... oh, my God!" she murmurs, half shutting her eyes from
our candles. "I can't, I can't."
"Liza, my child," I say, "what's the matter?"
Seeing me, she calls out and falls on my neck.
"Papa darling," she sobs. "Papa dearest ... my sweet. I don't know what
it is.... It hurts."
She embraces me, kisses me and lisps endearments which I heard her lisp
when she was still a baby.
"Be calm, my child. God's with you," I say. "You mustn't cry. Something
hurts me too."
I try to cover her with the bedclothes; my wife gives her to drink; and
both of us jostle in confusion round the bed. My shoulders push into
hers, and at that moment I remember how we used to bathe our children.
"But help her, help her!" my wife implores. "Do something!" And what can
I do? Nothing. There is some weight on the girl's soul; but I understand
nothing, know nothing and can only murmur:
"It's nothing, nothing.... It will pass.... Sleep, sleep."
As if on purpose a dog suddenly howls in the yard, at first low and
irresolute, then aloud, in two voices. I never put any value on such
signs as dogs' whining or screeching owls; but now my heart contracts
painfully, and I hasten to explain the howling.
"Nonsense," I think. "It's the influence of one organism on another. My
great nervous strain was transmitted to my wife, to Liza, and to the
dog. That's all. Such transmissions explain presentiments and
previsions."
A little later when I return to my room to write a prescription for Liza
I no longer think that I shall die soon. My soul simply feels heavy and
dull, so that I am even sad that I did not die suddenly. For a long
while I stand motionless in the middle of the room, pondering what I
shall prescribe for Liza; but the moans above the ceiling are silent and
I decide not to write a prescription, but stand there still.
There is a dead silence, a silence, as one man wrote, that rings in
one's ears. The time goes slowly. The bars of moonshine on the
windowsill do not move from their place, as though congealed.... The
dawn is still far away.
But the garden-gate creaks; someone steals in, and strips a twig from
the starveling trees, and cautiously knocks with it on my window.
"Nicolai Stiepanovich!" I hear a whisper. "Nicolai Stiepanovich!"
I open the window, and I think that I am dreaming. Under the window,
close against the wall stands a woman in a blade dress. She is brightly
lighted by the moon and looks at me with wide eyes. Her face is pale,
stem and fantastic in the moon, like marble. Her chin trembles.
"It is I...." she says, "I ... Katy!"
In the moon all women's eyes are big and black, people are taller and
paler. Probably that is the reason why I did not recognise her in the
first moment.
"What's the matter?"
"Forgive me," she says. "I suddenly felt so dreary ... I could not bear
it. So I came here. There's a light in your window ... and I decided to
knock.... Forgive me.... Ah, if you knew how dreary I felt! What are you
doing now?"
"Nothing. Insomnia."
Her eyebrows lift, her eyes shine with tears and all her face is
illumined as with light, with the familiar, but long unseen, look of
confidence.
"Nicolai Stiepanovich!" she says imploringly, stretching out both her
hands to me. "Dear, I beg you ... I implore.... If you do not despise my
friendship and my respect for you, then do what I implore you."
"What is it?"
"Take my money."
"What next? What's the good of your money to me?"
"You will go somewhere to be cured. You must cure yourself. You will
take it? Yes? Dear ... Yes?"
She looks into my face eagerly and repeats:
"Yes? You will take it?"
"No, my dear, I won't take it....", I say. "Thank you."
She turns her back to me and lowers her head. Probably the tone of my
refusal would not allow any further talk of money.
"Go home to sleep," I say. "I'll see you to-morrow."
"It means, you don't consider me your friend?" she asks sadly.
"I don't say that. But your money is no good to me."
"Forgive me," she says lowering her voice by a full octave. "I
understand you. To be obliged to a person like me ... a retired
actress... But good-bye."
And she walks away so quickly that I have no time even to say "Good-
bye." VI
I am in Kharkov.
Since it would be useless to fight against my present mood, and I have
no power to do it, I made up my mind that the last days of my life shall
be irreproachable, on the formal side. If I am not right with my family,
which I certainly admit, I will try at least to do as it wishes. Besides
I am lately become so indifferent that it's positively all the same, to
me whether I go to Kharkov, or Paris, or Berditshev.
I arrived here at noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral.
The train made me giddy, the draughts blew through me, and now I am
sitting on the bed with my head in my hands waiting for the tic. I ought
to go to my professor friends to-day, but I have neither the will nor
the strength.
The old hall-porter comes in to ask whether I have brought my own bed-
clothes. I keep him about five minutes asking him questions about
Gnekker, on whose account I came here. The porter happens to be Kharkov-
born, and knows the town inside out; but he doesn't remember any family
with the name of Gnekker. I inquire about the estate. The answer is the
same.
The clock in the passage strikes one,... two,... three.... The last
months of my life, while I wait for death, seem to me far longer than my
whole life. Never before could I reconcile myself to the slowness of
time as I can now. Before, when I had to wait for a train at the
station, or to sit at an examination, a quarter of an hour would seem an
eternity. Now I can sit motionless in bed the whole night long, quite
calmly thinking that there will be the same long, colourless night to-
morrow, and the next day....
In the passage the clock strikes five, six, seven.... It grows dark.
There is dull pain in my cheek—the beginning of the tic. To occupy
myself with thoughts, I return to my old point of view, when I was not
indifferent, and ask: Why do I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sit in
this little room, on this bed with a strange grey blanket? Why do I look
at this cheap tin washstand and listen to the wretched clock jarring in
the passage? Is all this worthy of my fame and my high position among
people? And I answer these questions with a smile. My naïveté seems
funny to me—the naïveté with which as a young man I exaggerated the
value of fame and of the exclusive position which famous men enjoy. I am
famous, my name is spoken with reverence. My portrait has appeared in
"Niva" and in "The Universal Illustration." I've even read my biography
in a German paper, but what of that? I sit lonely, by myself, in a
strange city, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm....
Family scandals, the hardness of creditors, the rudeness of railway men,
the discomforts of the passport system, the expensive and unwholesome
food at the buffets, the general coarseness and roughness of people,—all
this and a great deal more that would take too long to put down,
concerns me as much as it concerns any bourgeois who is known only in
his own little street. Where is the exclusiveness of my position then?
We will admit that I am infinitely famous, that I am a hero of whom my
country is proud. All the newspapers give bulletins of my illness, the
post is already bringing in sympathetic addresses from my friends, my
pupils, and the public. But all this will not save me from dying in
anguish on a stranger's bed in utter loneliness. Of course there is no
one to blame for this. But I must confess I do not like my popularity. I
feel that it has deceived me.
At about ten I fall asleep, and, in spite of the tic sleep soundly, and
would sleep for a long while were I not awakened. Just after one there
is a sudden knock on my door.
"Who's there?"
"A telegram."
"You could have brought it to-morrow," I storm, as I take the telegram
from the porter. "Now I shan't sleep again."
"I'm sorry. There was a light in your room. I thought you were not
asleep."
I open the telegram and look first at the signature—my wife's. What does
she want?
"Gnekker married Liza secretly yesterday. Return."
I read the telegram. For a long while I am not startled. Not Gnekker's
or Liza's action frightens me, but the indifference with which I receive
the news of their marriage. Men say that philosophers and true savants
are indifferent. It is untrue. Indifference is the paralysis of the
soul, premature death.
I go to bed again and begin to ponder with what thoughts I can occupy
myself. What on earth shall I think of? I seem to have thought over
everything, and now there is nothing powerful enough to rouse my
thought.
When the day begins to dawn, I sit in bed clasping my knees and, for
want of occupation I try to know myself. "Know yourself" is good, useful
advice; but it is a pity that the ancients did not think of showing us
the way to avail ourselves of it.
Before, when I had the desire to understand somebody else, or myself, I
used not to take into consideration actions, wherein everything is
conditional, but desires. Tell me what you want, and I will tell you
what you are.
And now I examine myself. What do I want?
I want our wives, children, friends, and pupils to love in us, not the
name or the firm or the label, but the ordinary human beings. What
besides? I should like to have assistants and successors. What more? I
should like to wake in a hundred years' time, and take a look, if only
with one eye, at what has happened to science. I should like to live ten
years more.... What further?
Nothing further. I think, think a long while and cannot make out
anything else. However much I were to think, wherever my thoughts should
stray, it is clear to me that the chief, all-important something is
lacking in my desires. In my infatuation for science, my desire to live,
my sitting here on a strange bed, my yearning to know myself, in all the
thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form about anything, there is wanting
the something universal which could bind all these together in one
whole. Each feeling and thought lives detached in me, and in all my
opinions about science, the theatre, literature, and my pupils, and in
all the little pictures which my imagination paints, not even the most
cunning analyst will discover what is called the general idea, or the
god of the living man.
And if this is not there, then nothing is there.
In poverty such as this a serious infirmity, fear of death, influence of
circumstances and people would have been enough to overthrow and shatter
all that I formerly considered as my conception of the world, and all
wherein I saw the meaning and joy of my life. Therefore, it is nothing
strange that I have darkened the last months of my life by thoughts and
feelings worthy of a slave or a savage, and that I am now indifferent
and do not notice the dawn. If there is lacking in a man that which is
higher and stronger than all outside influences, then verily a good cold
in the head is enough to upset his balance and to make him see each bird
an owl and hear a dog's whine in every sound; and all his pessimism or
his optimism with their attendant thoughts, great and small, seem then
to be merely symptoms and no more.
I am beaten. Then it's no good going on thinking, no good talking. I
shall sit and wait in silence for what will come.
In the morning the porter brings me tea and the local paper.
Mechanically I read the advertisements on the first page, the leader,
the extracts from newspapers and magazines, the local news ... Among
other things I find in the local news an item like this: "Our famous
scholar, emeritus professor Nicolai Stiepanovich arrived in Kharkov
yesterday by the express, and stayed at——hotel."
Evidently big names are created to live detached from those who bear
them. Now my name walks in Kharkov undisturbed. In some three months it
will shine as bright as the sun itself, inscribed in letters of gold on
my tombstone—at a time when I myself will be under the sod....
A faint knock at the door. Somebody wants me.
"Who's there? Come in!"
The door opens. I step back in astonishment, and hasten to pull my
dressing gown together. Before me stands Katy.
"How do you do?" she says, panting from running up the stairs. "You
didn't expect me? I ... I've come too."
She sits down and continues, stammering and looking away from me. "Why
don't you say 'Good morning'? I arrived too ... to-day. I found out you
were at this hotel, and came to see you."
"I'm delighted to see you," I say shrugging my shoulders. "But I'm
surprised. You might have dropped straight from heaven. What are you
doing here?"
"I?... I just came."
Silence. Suddenly she gets up impetuously and comes over to me.
"Nicolai Stiepanich!" she says, growing pale and pressing her hands to
her breast. "Nicolai Stiepanich! I can't go on like this any longer. I
can't. For God's sake tell me now, immediately. What shall I do? Tell
me, what shall I do?"
"What can I say? I am beaten. I can say nothing."
"But tell me, I implore you," she continues, out of breath and trembling
all over her body. "I swear to you, I can't go on like this any longer.
I haven't the strength."
She drops into a chair and begins to sob. She throws her head back,
wrings her hands, stamps with her feet; her hat falls from her head and
dangles by its string, her hair is loosened.
"Help me, help," she implores. "I can't bear it any more."
She takes a handkerchief out of her little travelling bag and with it
pulls out some letters which fall from her knees to the floor. I pick
them up from the floor and recognise on one of them Mikhail
Fiodorovich's hand-writing, and accidentally read part of a word:
"passionat...."
"There's nothing that I can say to you, Katy," I say.
"Help me," she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. "You're my father,
my only friend. You're wise and learned, and you've lived long! You were
a teacher. Tell me what to do."
I am bewildered and surprised, stirred by her sobbing, and I can hardly
stand upright.
"Let's have some breakfast, Katy," I say with a constrained smile.
Instantly I add in a sinking voice:
"I shall be dead soon, Katy...."
"Only one word, only one word," she weeps and stretches out her hands to
me. "What shall I do?"
"You're a queer thing, really....", I murmur. "I can't understand it.
Such a clever woman and suddenly—weeping...."
Comes silence. Katy arranges her hair, puts on her hat, then crumples
her letters and stuffs them in her little bag, all in silence and
unhurried. Her face, her bosom and her gloves are wet with tears, but
her expression is dry already, stern.... I look at her and am ashamed
that I am happier than she. It was but a little while before my death,
in the ebb of my life, that I noticed in myself the absence of what our
friends the philosophers call the general idea; but this poor thing's
soul has never known and never will know shelter all her life, all her
life.
"Katy, let's have breakfast," I say.
"No, thank you," she answers coldly.
One minute more passes in silence.
"I don't like Kharkov," I say. "It's too grey. A grey city."
"Yes ... ugly.... I'm not here for long.... On my way. I leave to-day."
"For where?"
"For the Crimea ... I mean, the Caucasus."
"So. For long?"
"I don't know."
Katy gets up and gives me her hand with a cold smile, looking away from
me.
I would like to ask her: "That means you won't be at my funeral?" But
she does not look at me; her hand is cold and like a stranger's. I
escort her to the door in silenqe.... She goes out of my room and walks
down the long passage, without looking back. She knows that my eyes are
following her, and probably on the landing she will look back.
No, she did not look back. The black dress showed for the last time, her
steps were stilled.... Goodbye, my treasure! THE FIT I
The medical student Mayer, and Ribnikov, a student at the Moscow school
of painting, sculpture, and architecture, came one evening to their
friend Vassiliev, law student, and proposed that he should go with them
to S——v Street. For a long while Vassiliev did not agree, but eventually
dressed himself and went with them.
Unfortunate women he knew only by hearsay and from books, and never once
in his life had he been in the houses where they live. He knew there
were immoral women who were forced by the pressure of disastrous
circumstances—environment, bad up-bringing, poverty, and the like—to
sell their honour for money. They do not know pure love, have no
children and no legal rights; mothers and sisters mourn them for dead,
science treats them as an evil, men are familiar with them. But
notwithstanding all this they do not lose the image and likeness of God.
They all acknowledge their sin and hope for salvation. They are free to
avail themselves of every means of salvation. True, Society does not
forgive people their past, but with God Mary of Egypt is not lower than
the other saints. Whenever Vassiliev recognised an unfortunate woman in
the street by her costume or her manner, or saw a picture of one in a
comic paper, there came into his mind every time a story he once read
somewhere: a pure and heroic young man falls in love with an unfortunate
woman and asks her to be his wife, but she, considering herself unworthy
of such happiness, poisons herself.
Vassiliev lived in one of the streets off the Tverskoi boulevard. When
he and his friends came out of the house it was about eleven o'clock—the
first snow had just fallen and all nature was under the spell of this
new snow; The air smelt of snow, the snow cracked softly under foot, the
earth, the roofs, the trees, the benches on the boulevards—all were
soft, white, and young. Owing to this the houses had a different look
from yesterday, the lamps burned brighter, the air was more transparent,
the clatter of the cabs was dulled and there entered into the soul with
the fresh, easy, frosty air a feeling like the white, young, feathery
snow. "To these sad shores unknowing" the medico began to sing in a
pleasant tenor, "An unknown power entices...."
"Behold the mill" ... the painter's voice took him up, "it is now fall'n
to ruin."
"Behold the mill, it is now fall'n to ruin," the medico repeated,
raising his eyebrows and sadly shaking his head.
He was silent for a while, passed his hand over his forehead trying to
recall the words, and began to sing in a loud voice and so well that the
passers-by looked back.
"Here, long ago, came free, free love to me"...
All three went into a restaurant and without taking off their coats they
each had two thimblefuls of vodka at the bar. Before drinking the
second, Vassiliev noticed a piece of cork in his Vodka, lifted the glass
to his eye, looked at it for a long while with a short-sighted frown.
The medico misunderstood his expression and said—
"Well, what are you staring at? No philosophy, please. Vodka's made to
be drunk, caviare to be eaten, women to sleep with, snow to walk on.
Live like a man for one evening."
"Well, I've nothing to say," said Vassiliev laughingly, "I'm not
refusing?"
The vodka warmed his breast. He looked at his friends, admired and
envied them. How balanced everything is in these healthy, strong,
cheerful people. Everything in their minds and souls is smooth and
rounded off. They sing, have a passion for the theatre, paint, talk
continually, and drink, and they never have a headache the next day.
They are romantic and dissolute, sentimental and insolent; they can work
and go on the loose and laugh at nothing and talk rubbish; they are hot-
headed, honest, heroic and as human beings not a bit worse than
Vassiliev, who watches his every step and word, who is careful,
cautious, and able to give the smallest trifle the dignity of a problem.
And he made tip his mind if only for one evening to live like his
friends, to let himself go, and be free from his own control. Must he
drink vodka? He'll drink, even if his head falls to pieces to-morrow.
Must he be taken to women? He'll go. He'll laugh, play the fool, and
give a joking answer to disapproving passers-by.
He came out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends—one in a
battered hat with a wide brim who aped aesthetic disorder; the other in
a sealskin cap, not very poor, with a pretence of learned Bohemia. He
liked the snow, the paleness, the lamp-lights, the dear black prints
which the passers' feet left on the snow. He liked the air, and above
all the transparent, tender, naive, virgin tone which can be seen in
nature only twice in the year: when everything is covered in snow, on
the bright days in spring, and on moonlight nights when the ice breaks
on the river.
"To these sad shores unknowing," he began to sing sotto-voce, "An
unknown power entices."
And all the way for some reason or other he and his friends had this
melody on their lips. All three hummed it mechanically out of time with
each other.
Vassiliev Imagined how in about ten minutes he and his friends would
knock at a door, how they would stealthily walk through-the narrow
little passages and dark rooms to the women, how he would take advantage
of the dark, suddenly strike a match, and see lit up a suffering face
and a guilty smile. There he will surely find a fair or a dark woman in
a white nightgown with her hair loose. She will be frightened of the
light, dreadfully confused and say: "Good God! What are you doing? Blow
it out!" All this was frightening, but curious and novel. II
The friends turned out of Trubnoi Square into the Grachovka and soon
arrived at the street which Vassiliev knew only from hearsay. Seeing two
rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide open doors, and
hearing the gay sound of pianos and fiddles—sounds which flew out of all
the doors and mingled in a strange confusion, as if somewhere in the
darkness over the roof-tops an unseen orchestra were tuning, Vassiliev
was bewildered and said:
"What a lot of houses!"
"What's that?" said the medico. "There are ten times as many in London.
There are a hundred thousand of these women there."
The cabmen sat on their boxes quiet and indifferent as in other streets;
on the pavement walked the same passers-by. No one was in a hurry; no
one hid his face in his collar; no one shook his head reproachfully. And
in this indifference, in the confused sound of the pianos and fiddles,
in the bright windows and wide-open doors, something very free,
impudent, bold and daring could be felt. It must have been the same as
this in the old times on the slave-markets, as gay and as noisy; people
looked and walked with the same indifference.
"Let's begin right at the beginning," said the painter.
The friends walked into a narrow little passage lighted by a single lamp
with a reflector. When they opened the door a man in a black jacket rose
lazily from the yellow sofa in the hall. He had an unshaven lackey's
face and sleepy eyes. The place smelt like a laundry, and of vinegar.
From the hall a door led into a brightly lighted room. The medico and
the painter stopped in the doorway, stretched out their necks and peeped
into the room together:
"Buona sera, signore, Rigoletto—huguenote—traviata!—" the painter began,
making a theatrical bow.
"Havanna—blackbeetlano—pistoletto!" said the medico, pressing his hat to
his heart and bowing low.
Vassiliev kept behind them. He wanted to bow theatrically too and say
something silly. But he only smiled, felt awkward and ashamed, and
awaited impatiently what was to follow. In the door appeared a little
fair girl of seventeen or eighteen, with short hair, wearing a short
blue dress with a white bow on her breast.
"What are you standing in the door for?" she said. "Take off your
overcoats and come into the salon."
The medico and the painter went into the salon, still speaking Italian.
Vassiliev followed them irresolutely.
"Gentlemen, take off your overcoats," said the lackey stiffly. "You're
not allowed in as you are."
Besides the fair girl there was another woman in the salon, very stout
and tall, with a foreign face and bare arms. She sat by the piano, with
a game of patience spread on her knees. She took no notice of the
guests.
"Where are the other girls?" asked the medico.
"They're drinking tea," said the fair one. "Stiepan," she called out.
"Go and tell the girls some students have come!"
A little later a third girl entered, in a bright red dress with blue
stripes. Her face was thickly and unskilfully painted. Her forehead was
hidden under her hair. She stared with dull, frightened eyes. As she
came she immediately began to sing in a strong hoarse contralto. After
her a fourth girl. After her a fifth.
In all this Vassiliev saw nothing new or curious. It seemed to him that
he had seen before, and more than once, this salon, piano, cheap gilt
mirror, the white bow, the dress with blue stripes and the stupid,
indifferent faces. But of darkness, quiet, mystery, and guilty smile—of
all he had expected to meet here and which frightened him—he did not see
even a shadow.
Everything was commonplace, prosaic, and dull. Only one thing provoked
his curiosity a little, that was the terrible, as it were intentional
lack of taste, which was seen in the overmantels, the absurd pictures,
the dresses and the White bow. In this lack of taste there was something
characteristic and singular.
"How poor and foolish it all is!" thought Vassiliev. "What is there in
all this rubbish to tempt a normal man, to provoke him into committing a
frightful sin, to buy a living soul for a rouble? I can understand
anyone sinning for the sake of splendour, beauty, grace, passion; but
what is there here? What tempts people here? But ... it's no good
thinking!"
"Whiskers, stand me champagne." The fair one turned to him.
Vassiliev suddenly blushed.
"With pleasure," he said, bowing politely. "But excuse me if I ... I
don't drink with you, I don't drink."
Five minutes after the friends were off to another house.
"Why did you order drinks?" stormed the medico. "What a millionaire,
flinging six roubles into the gutter like that for nothing at all."
"Why shouldn't I give her pleasure if she wants it?" said Vassiliev,
justifying himself.
"You didn't give her any pleasure. Madame got that. It's Madame who
tells them to ask the guests for drinks. She makes by it."
"Behold the mill," the painter began to sing, "Now fall'n to ruin...."
When they came to another house the friends stood outside in the
vestibule, but did not enter the salon. As in the first house, a figure
rose up from the sofa in the hall, in a black jacket, with a sleepy
lackey's face. As he looked at this lackey, at his face and shabby
jacket, Vassiliev thought: "What must an ordinary simple Russian go
through before Fate casts him up here? Where was he before, and what was
he doing? What awaits him? Is he married, where's his mother, and does
she know he's a lackey here?" Thenceforward in every house Vassiliev
involuntarily turned his attention to the lackey first of all.
In one of the houses, it seemed to be the fourth, the lackey was a dry
little, puny fellow, with a chain across his waistcoat. He was reading a
newspaper and took no notice of the guests at all. Glancing at his face,
Vassiliev had the idea that a fellow with a face like that could steal
and murder and perjure. And indeed the face was interesting: a big
forehead, grey eyes, a flat little nose, small close-set teeth, and the
expression on his face dull and impudent at once, like a puppy hard on a
hare. Vassiliev had the thought that he would like to touch this
lackey's hair: is it rough or soft f It must be rough like a dog's. III
Because he had had two glasses the painter suddenly got rather drunk,
and unnaturally lively.
"Let's go to another place," he added, waving his hands. "I'll introduce
you to the best!"
When he had taken his friends into the house which was according to him
the best, he proclaimed a persistent desire to dance a quadrille. The
medico began to grumble that they would have to pay the musicians a
rouble but agreed to be his vis-Ã -vis. The dance began.
It was just as bad in the best house as in the worst. Just the same
mirrors and pictures were here, the same coiffures and dresses. Looking
round at the furniture and the costumes Vassiliev now understood that it
was not lack of taste, but something that might be called the particular
taste and style of S——v Street, quite impossible to find anywhere else,
something complete, not accidental, evolved in time. After he had been
to eight houses he no longer wondered at the colour of the dresses or
the long trains, or at the bright bows, or the sailor dresses, or the
thick violent painting of the cheeks; he understood that all this was in
harmony, that if only one woman dressed herself humanly, or one decent
print hung on the wall, then the general tone of the whole street would
suffer.
How badly they manage the business? Can't they really understand that
vice is only fascinating when it is beautiful and secret, hidden under
the cloak of virtue? Modest black dresses, pale faces, sad smiles, and
darkness act more strongly than this clumsy tinsel. Idiots! If they
don't understand it themselves, their guests ought to teach them....
A girl in a Polish costume trimmed with white fur came up close to him
and sat down by his side.
"Why don't you dance, my brown-haired darling?" she asked. "What do you
fed so bored about?"
"Because it is boring."
"Stand me a Château Lafitte, then you won't be bored."
Vassiliev made no answer. For a little while he was silent, then he
asked:
"What time do you go to bed as a rule?"
"Six."
"When do you get up?"
"Sometimes two, sometimes three."
"And after you get up what do you do?"
"We drink coffee. We have dinner at seven."
"And what do you have for dinner?"
"Soup or schi as a rule, beef-steak, dessert. Our madame keeps the girls
well. But what are you asking all this for?"
"Just to have a talk...."
Vassiliev wanted to ask about all sorts of things. He had a strong
desire to find out where she came from, were her parents alive, and did
they know she was here; how she got into the house; was she happy and
contented, or gloomy and depressed with dark thoughts. Does she ever
hope to escape.... But he could not possibly think how to begin, or how
to put his questions without seeming indiscreet. He thought for a long
while and asked:
"How old are you?"
"Eighty," joked the girl, looking and laughing at the tricks the painter
was doing with his hands and feet.
She suddenly giggled and uttered a long filthy expression aloud so that
every one could hear.
Vassiliev, terrified, not knowing how to look, began to laugh uneasily.
He alone smiled: all the others, his friends, the musicians and the
women—paid no attention to his neighbour. They might never have heard.
"Stand me a Lafitte," said the girl again.
Vassiliev was suddenly repelled by her white trimming and her voice and
left her. It seemed to him close and hot. His heart began to beat slowly
and violently, like a hammer, one, two, three.
"Let's get out of here," he said, pulling the painter's sleeve.
"Wait. Let's finish it."
While the medico and the painter were finishing their quadrille,
Vassiliev, in order to avoid the women, eyed the musicians. The pianist
was a nice old man with spectacles, with a face like Marshal Basin; the
fiddler a young man with a short, fair beard dressed in the latest
fashion. The young man was not stupid or starved, on the contrary he
looked clever, young and fresh. He was dressed with a touch of
originality, and played with emotion. Problem: how did he and the decent
old man get here? Why aren't they ashamed to sit here? What do they
think about when they look at the women?
If the piano and the fiddle were played by ragged, hungry, gloomy,
drunken creatures, with thin stupid faces, then their presence would
perhaps be intelligible. As it was, Vassiliev could understand. nothing.
Into his memory came the story that he had read about the unfortunate
woman, and now he found that the human figure with the guilty smile had
nothing to do with this. It seemed to him that they were not unfortunate
women that he saw, but they belonged to another, utterly different
world, foreign and inconceivable to him; if he had seen this world on
the stage or read about it in a book he would never have believed it....
The girl with the white trimming giggled again and said something
disgusting aloud. He felt sick, blushed, and went out:
"Wait. We're coming too," cried the painter. IV
"I had a talk with my mam'selle while we were dancing," said the medico
when all three came into the street. "The subject was her first love. He
was a bookkeeper in Smolensk with a wife and five children. She was
seventeen and lived with her pa and ma who kept a soap and candle shop."
"How did he conquer her heart?" asked Vassiliev.
"He bought her fifty roubles'-worth of underclothes—Lord knows what!"
"However could he get her love-story out of his girl?" thought
Vassiliev. "I can't. My dear chaps, I'm off home," he said.
"Why?"
"Because I don't know how to get on here. I'm bored and disgusted. What
is there amusing about it? If they were only human beings; but they're
savages and beasts. I'm going, please."
"Grisha darling, please," the painter said with a sob in his voice,
pressing close to Vassiliev, "let's go to one more—then to Hell with
them. Do come, Grigor."
They prevailed on Vassiliev and led him up a staircase. The carpet and
the gilded balustrade, the porter who opened the door, the panels which
decorated the hall, were still in the same S——v Street style, but here
it was perfected and imposing.
"Really I'm going home," said Vassiliev, taking off his overcoat.
"Darling, please, please," said the painter and kissed him on the neck.
"Don't be so faddy, Grigri—be a pal. Together we came, together we go.
What a beast you are though!"
"I can wait for you in the street. My God, it's disgusting here."
"Please, please.... You just look on, see, just look on."
"One should look at things objectively," said the medico seriously.
Vassiliev entered the salon and sat down. There were many more guests
besides him and his friends: two infantry officers, a grey, bald-headed
gentleman with gold spectacles, two young clean-shaven men from the
Surveyors' Institute, and a very drunk man with an actor's face. All the
girls were looking after these guests and took no notice of Vassiliev.
Only one of them dressed like Aïda glanced at him sideways, smiled at
something and said with a yawn:
"So the dark one's come."
Vassiliev's heart was beating and his face was burning. He felt ashamed
for being there, disgusted and tormented. He was tortured by the thought
that he, a decent and affectionate man (so he considered himself up till
now), despised these women and felt nothing towards them but repulsion.
He could not feel pity for them or for the musicians or the lackeys.
"It's because I don't try to understand them," he thought. "They're all
more like beasts than human beings; but all the same they are human
beings. They've got souls. One should understand them first, then judge
them."
"Grisha, don't go away. Wait for us," called the painter; and he
disappeared somewhere.
Soon the medico disappeared also.
"Yes, one should try to understand. It's no good, otherwise," thought
Vassiliev, and he began to examine intently the face of each girl,
looking for the guilty smile. But whether he could not read faces or
because none of these women felt guilty he saw in each face only a dull
look of common, vulgar boredom and satiety. Stupid eyes, stupid smiles,
harsh, stupid voices, impudent gestures—and nothing else. Evidently
every woman had in her past a love romance with a bookkeeper and fifty
roubles'-worth of underclothes. And in the present the only good things
in life were coffee, a three-course dinner, wine, quadrilles, and
sleeping till two in the afternoon....
Finding not one guilty smile, Vassiliev began to examine them to see if
even one looked clever and his attention was arrested by one pale,
rather tired face. It was that of a dark woman no longer young, wearing
a dress scattered with spangles. She sat in a chair staring at the floor
and thinking of something. Vassiliev paced up and down and then sat down
beside her as if by accident.
"One must begin with something trivial," he thought, "and gradually pass
on to serious conversation...."
"What a beautiful little dress you have on," he said, and touched the
gold fringe of her scarf with his finger.
"It's all right," said the dark woman.
"Where do you come from?"
"I? A long way. From Tchernigov."
"It's a nice part."
"It always is, where you don't happen to be."
"What a pity I can't describe nature," thought Vassiliev. "I'd move her
by descriptions of Tchernigov. She must love it if she was born there."
"Do you feel lonely here?" he asked.
"Of course I'm lonely."
"Why don't you go away from here, if you're lonely?"
"Where shall I go to? Start begging, eh?"
"It's easier to beg than to live here."
"Where did you get that idea? Have you been a beggar?"
"I begged, when I hadn't enough to pay my university fees; and even if I
hadn't begged it's easy enough to understand. A beggar is a free man, at
any rate, and you're a slave."
The dark woman stretched herself, and followed with sleepy eyes the
lackey who carried a tray of glasses and soda-water.
"Stand us a champagne," she said, and yawned again.
"Champagne," said Vassiliev. "What would happen if your mother or your
brother suddenly came in? What would you say? And what would they say?
You would say 'champagne' then."
Suddenly the noise of crying was heard. From the next room where the
lackey had carried the soda-water, a fair man rushed out with a red face
and angry eyes. He was followed by the tall, stout madame, who screamed
in a squeaky voice:
"No one gave you permission to slap the girls in the face. Better class
than you come here, and never slap a girl. You bounder!"
Followed an uproar. Vassiliev was scared and went white. In the next
room some one wept, sobbing, sincerely, as only the insulted weep. And
he understood that indeed human beings lived here, actually human
beings, who get offended, suffer, weep, and ask for help. The
smouldering hatred, the feeling of repulsion, gave way to an acute sense
of pity and anger against the wrong-doer. He rushed into the room from
which the weeping came. Through the rows of bottles which stood on the
marble table-top he saw a suffering tear-stained face, stretched out his
hands towards this face, stepped to the table and instantly gave a leap
back in terror. The sobbing woman was dead-drunk.
As he made his way through the noisy crowd, gathered round the fair man,
his heart failed him, he lost his courage like a boy, and it seemed to
him that in this foreign, inconceivable world, they wanted to run after
him, to beat him, to abuse him with foul words. He tore down his coat
from the peg and rushed headlong down the stairs. V
Pressing dose to the fence, he stood near to the house and waited for
his friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and fiddles, gay,
bold, impudent and sad, mingled into chaos in the air, and this
confusion was, as before, as if an unseen orchestra were tuning in the
dark over the roof-tops. If he looked up towards the darkness, then all
the background was scattered with white, moving points: it was snowing.
The flakes, coming into the light, spun lazily in the air like feathers,
and still more lazily fell. Flakes of snow crowded whirling about
Vassiliev, and hung on his beard, his eyelashes, his eyebrows. The
cabmen, the horses, and the passers-by, all were white.
"How dare the snow fall in this street?" thought Vassiliev. "A curse on
these houses."
Because of his headlong rush down the staircase his feet failed him from
weariness; he was out of breath as if he had climbed a mountain. His
heart beat so loud that he could hear it. A longing came over him to get
out of this street as soon as possible and go home; but still stronger
was his desire to wait for his friends and to vent upon them his feeling
of heaviness.
He had not understood many things in the houses. The souls of the
perishing women were to him a mystery as before; but it was dear to him
that the business was much worse than one would have thought. If the
guilty woman who poisoned herself was called a prostitute, then it was
hard to find a suitable name for all these creatures, who danced to the
muddling music and said long, disgusting phrases. They were not
perishing; they were already done for.
"Vice is here," he thought; "but there is neither confession of sin nor
hope of salvation. They are bought and sold, drowned in wine and torpor,
and they are dull and indifferent as sheep and do not understand. My
God, my God!"
It was so dear to him that all that which is called human dignity,
individuality, the image and likeness of God, was here dragged down to
the gutter, as they say of drunkards, and that not only the street and
the stupid women were to blame for it.
A crowd of students white with snow, talking and laughing gaily, passed
by. One of them, a tall, thin man, peered into Vassiliev's face and said
drunkenly, "He's one of ours. Logged, old man? Aha! my lad. Never mind.
Walk up, never say die, uncle."
He took Vassiliev by the shoulders and pressed his cold wet moustaches
to his cheek, then slipped, staggered, brandished his arms, and cried
out:
"Steady there—don't fall."
Laughing, he ran to join his comrades.
Through the noise the painter's voice became audible.
"You dare beat women! I won't have it. Go to Hell. You're regular
swine."
The medico appeared at the door of the house. He glanced round and on
seeing Vassiliev, said in alarm:
"Is that you? My God, it's simply impossible to go anywhere with Yegor.
I can't understand a chap like that. He kicked up a row—can't you hear?
Yegor," he called from the door. "Yegor!"
"I won't have you hitting women." The painter's shrill voice was audible
again from upstairs.
Something heavy and bulky tumbled down the staircase. It was the painter
coming head over heels. He had evidently been thrown out.
He lifted himself up from the ground, dusted his hat, and with an angry
indignant face, shook his fist at the upstairs.
"Scoundrels! Butchers! Bloodsuckers! I won't have you hitting a weak,
drunken woman. Ah, you...."
"Yegor ... Yegor!" the medico began to implore, "I give my word I'll
never go out with you again. Upon my honour, I won't."
The painter gradually calmed, and the friends went home.
"To these sad shores unknowing"—the medico began—"An unknown power
entices...."
"Behold the mill," the painter sang with him after a pause, "Now fallen
into ruin." How the snow is falling, most Holy Mother. Why did you go
away, Grisha? You're a coward; you're only an old woman."
Vassiliev was walking behind his friends. He stared at their backs and
thought: "One of two things: either prostitution only seems to us an
evil and we exaggerate it, or if prostitution is really such an evil as
is commonly thought, these charming friends of mine are just as much
slavers, violators, and murderers as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo
whose photographs appear in 'The Field.' They're singing, laughing,
arguing soundly now, but haven't they just been exploiting starvation,
ignorance, and stupidity? They have, I saw them at it. Where does their
humanity, their science, and their painting come in, then? The science,
art, and lofty sentiments of these murderers remind me of the lump of
fat in the story. Two robbers killed a beggar in a forest; they began to
divide his clothes between themselves and found in his bag a lump of
pork fat. 'In the nick of time,' said one of them. 'Let's have a bite!'
'How can you?' the other cried in terror. 'Have you forgotten to-day's
Friday?' So they refrained from eating. After having cut the man's
throat they walked out of the forest confident that they were pious
fellows. These two are just the same. When they've paid for women they
go and imagine they're painters and scholars....
"Listen, you two," he said angrily and sharply. "Why do you go to those
places? Can't you understand how horrible they are? Your medicine tells
you every one of these women dies prematurely from consumption or
something else; your arts tell you that she died morally still earlier.
Each of them dies because during her lifetime she accepts on an average,
let us say, five hundred men. Each of them is killed by five hundred
men, and you're amongst the five hundred. Now if each of you comes here
and to places like this two hundred and fifty times in his lifetime,
then it means that between you you have killed one woman. Can't you
understand that? Isn't it horrible?"
"Ah, isn't this awful, my God?"
"There, I knew it would end like this," said the painter frowning. "We
oughtn't to have had anything to do with this fool of a blockhead. I
suppose you think your head's full of great thoughts and great ideas
now. Devil knows what they are, but they're not ideas. You're staring at
me now with hatred and disgust; but if you want my opinion you'd better
build twenty more of the houses than look like that. There's more vice
in your look than in the whole street. Let's dear out, Volodya, damn
him! He's a fool. He's a blockhead, and that's all he is."
"Human beings are always killing each other," said the medico. "That is
immoral, of course. But philosophy won't help you. Good-bye!"
The friends parted at Trubnoi Square and went their way. Left alone,
Vassiliev began to stride along the boulevard. He was frightened of the
dark, frightened of the snow, which fell to the earth in little flakes,
but seemed to long to cover the whole world; he was frightened of the
street-lamps, which glimmered faintly through the clouds of snow. An
inexplicable faint-hearted fear possessed his soul. Now and then people
passed him; but he gave a start and stepped aside. It seemed to him that
from everywhere there came and stared at him women, only women....
"It's coming on," he thought, "I'm going to have a fit." VI
At home he lay on his bed and began to talk, shivering all over his
body.
"Live women, live.... My God, they're alive."
He sharpened the edge of his imagination in every possible way. Now he
was the brother of an unfortunate, now her father. Now he was himself a
fallen woman, with painted cheeks; and all this terrified him.
It seemed to him somehow that he must solve this question immediately,
at all costs, and that the problem was not strange to him, but was his
own. He made a great effort, conquered his despair, and, sitting on the
side of the bed, his head clutched in his hands, he began to think:
How could all the women he had seen that night be saved? The process of
solving a problem was familiar to him as to a learned person; and
notwithstanding all his excitement he kept strictly to this process. He
recalled to mind the history of the question, its literature, and just
after three o'clock he was pacing up and down, trying to remember all
the experiments which are practised nowadays for the salvation of women.
He had a great many good friends who lived in furnished rooms, Falzfein,
Galyashkin, Nechaiev, Yechkin ... not a few among them were honest and
self-sacrificing, and some of them had attempted to save these women....
All these few attempts, thought Vassiliev, rare attempts, may be divided
into three groups. Some having rescued a woman from a brothel hired a
room for her, bought her a sewing-machine and she became a dressmaker,
and the man who saved her kept her for his mistress, openly or
otherwise, but later when he had finished his studies and was going
away, he would hand her over to another decent fellow. So the fallen
woman remained fallen. Others after having bought her out also hired a
room for her, bought the inevitable sewing-machine and started her off
reading and writing and preached at her. The woman sits and sews as long
as it is novel and amusing, but later, when she is bored, she begins to
receive men secretly, or runs back to where she can sleep till three in
the afternoon, drink coffee, and eat till she is full. Finally, the most
ardent and self-sacrificing take a bold, determined step. They marry,
and when the impudent, self-indulgent, stupefied creature becomes a
wife, a lady of the house, and then a mother, her life and outlook are
utterly changed, and in the wife and mother it is hard to recognise the
unfortunate woman. Yes, marriage is the best, it may be the only,
resource.
"But it's impossible," Vassiliev said aloud and threw himself down on
his bed. "First of all, I could not marry one. One would have to be a
saint to be able to do it, unable to hate, not knowing disgust. But let
us suppose that the painter, the medico, and I got the better of our
feelings and married, that all these women got married, what is the
result? What kind of effect follows? The result is that while the women
get married here in Moscow, the Smolensk bookkeeper seduces a fresh lot,
and these will pour into the empty places, together with women from
Saratov, Nijni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what happens to the hundred
thousand in London? What can be done with those in Hamburg?
The oil in the lamp was used up and the lamp began to smell. Vassiliev
did not notice it. Again he began to pace up and down, thinking. Now he
put the question differently. What can be done to remove the demand for
fallen women? For this it is necessary that the men who buy and kill
them should at once begin to feel all the immorality of their rôle of
slave-owners, and this should terrify them. It is necessary to save the
men.
Science and art apparently won't do, thought Vassiliev. There is only
one way out—to be an apostle.
And he began to dream how he would stand to-morrow evening at the corner
of the street and say to each passer-by: "Where are you going and what
for? Fear God!"
He would turn to the indifferent cabmen and say to them:
"Why are you standing here? Why don't you revolt? You do believe in God,
don't you? And you do know that this is a crime, and that people will go
to Hell for this? Why do you keep quiet, then? True, the women are
strangers to you, but they have fathers and brothers exactly the same as
you...."
Some friend of Vassiliev's once said of him that he was a man of talent.
There is a talent for writing, for the theatre, for painting; but
Vassiliev's was peculiar, a talent for humanity. He had a fine and noble
flair for every kind of suffering. As a good actor reflects in himself
the movement and voice of another, so Vassiliev could reflect in himself
another's pain. Seeing tears, he wept. With a sick person, he himself
became sick and moaned. If he saw violence done, it seemed to him that
he was the victim. He was frightened like a child, and, frightened, ran
for help. Another's pain roused him, excited him, threw him into a state
of ecstasy....
Whether the friend was right I do not know, but what happened to
Vassiliev when it seemed to him that the question was solved was very
much like an ecstasy. He sobbed, laughed, said aloud the things he would
say to-morrow, felt a burning love for the men who would listen to him
and stand by his side at the corner of the street, preaching. He sat
down to write to them; he made vows.
All this was the more like an ecstasy in that it did not last. Vassiliev
was soon tired. The London women, the Hamburg women, those from Warsaw,
crushed him with their mass, as the mountains crush the earth. He
quailed before this mass; he lost himself; he remembered he had no gift
for speaking, that he was timid and faint-hearted, that strange people
would hardly want to listen to and understand him, a law-student in his
third year, a frightened and insignificant figure. The true apostleship
consisted, not only in preaching, but also in deeds....
When daylight came and the carts rattled on the streets, Vassiliev lay
motionless on the sofa, staring at one point. He did not think any more
of women, or men, or apostles. All his attention was fixed on the pain
of his soul which tormented him. It was a dull pain, indefinite, vague;
it was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair. He could say
where the pain was. It was in his breast, under the heart. It could not
be compared to anything. Once on a time he used to have violent
toothache. Once, he had pleurisy and neuralgia. But all these pains were
as nothing beside the pain of his soul. Beneath this pain life seemed
repulsive. The thesis, his brilliant work already written, the people he
loved, the salvation of fallen women, all that which only yesterday he
loved or was indifferent to, remembered now, irritated him in the same
way as the noise of the carts, the running about of the porters and the
daylight.... If someone now were to perform before his eyes a deed of
mercy or an act of revolting violence, both would produce upon him an
equally repulsive impression. Of all the thoughts which roved lazily in
his head, two only did not irritate him: one—at any moment he had the
power to kill himself, the other—that the pain would not last more than
three days. The second he knew from experience.
After having lain down for a while he got up and walked wringing his
hands, not from corner to corner as usually, but in a square along the
walls. He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass. His face was pale
and haggard, his temples hollow, his eyes bigger, darker, more immobile,
as if they were not his own, and they expressed the intolerable
suffering of his soul.
In the afternoon the painter knocked at the door.
"Gregory, are you at home?" he asked.
Receiving no answer, he stood musing for a while, and said to himself
good-naturedly:
"Out. He's gone to the University. Damn him."
And went away.
Vassiliev lay down on his bed and burying his head in the pillow he
began to cry with the pain. But the faster his tears flowed, the more
terrible was the pain. When it was dark, he got into his mind the idea
of the horrible night which was awaiting him and awful despair seized
him. He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, leaving the door wide
open, and into the street without reason or purpose. Without asking
himself where he was going, he walked quickly to Sadovaia Street.
Snow was falling as yesterday. It was thawing. Putting his hands into
his sleeves, shivering, and frightened of the noises and the bells of
the trams and of passers-by, Vassiliev walked from Sadovaia to Sukhariev
Tower then to the Red Gates, and from here he turned and went to
Basmannaia. He went into a public-house and gulped down a big glass of
vodka, but felt no better. Arriving at Razgoulyai, he turned to the
right and began to stride down streets that he had never in his life
been down before. He came to that old bridge under which the river
Yaouza roars and from whence long rows of lights are seen in the windows
of the Red Barracks. In order to distract the pain of his soul by a new
sensation or another pain, not knowing what to do, weeping and
trembling, Vassiliev unbuttoned his coat and jacket, baring his naked
breast to the damp snow and the wind. Neither lessened the pain. Then he
bent over the rail of the bridge and stared down at the black, turbulent
Yaouza, and he suddenly wanted to throw himself head-first, not from
hatred of life, not for the sake of suicide, but only to hurt himself
and so to kill one pain by another. But the black water, the dark,
deserted banks covered with snow were frightening. He shuddered and went
on. He walked as far as the Red Barracks, then back and into a wood,
from the wood to the bridge again.
"No! Home, home," he thought. "At home I believe it's easier."
And he went back. On returning home he tore off his wet clothes and hat,
began to pace along the walls, and paced incessantly until the very
morning. VII
The next morning when the painter and the medico came to see him, they
found him in a shirt torn to ribbons, his hands bitten all over, tossing
about in the room and moaning with pain.
"For God's sake!" he began to sob, seeing his comrades, "Take me
anywhere you like, do what you like, but save me, for God's sake now,
now! I'll kill myself."
The painter went pale and was bewildered. The medico, too, nearly began
to cry; but, believing that medical men must be cool and serious on
every occasion of life, he said coldly:
"It's a fit you've got. But never mind. Come to the doctor, at once."
"Anywhere you like, but quickly, for God's sake!"
"Don't be agitated. You must struggle with yourself."
The painter and the medico dressed Vassiliev with trembling hands and
led him into the street.
"Mikhail Sergueyich has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a
long while," the medico said on the way. "He's a very nice man, and
knows his job splendidly. He took his degree in '82, and has got a huge
practice already. He keeps friends with the students."
"Quicker, quicker...." urged Vassiliev. Mikhail Sergueyich, a stout
doctor with fair hair, received the friends politely, firmly, coldly,
and smiled with one cheek only.
"The painter and Mayer have told me of your disease already," he said.
"Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, please."
He made Vassiliev sit down in a big chair by the table, and put a box of
cigarettes in front of him.
"Well?" he began, stroking his knees. "Let's make a start. How old are
you?"
He put questions and the medico answered. He asked whether Vassiliev's
father suffered from any peculiar diseases, if he had fits of drinking,
was he distinguished by his severity or any other eccentricities. He
asked the same questions about his grandfather, mother, sisters, and
brothers. Having ascertained that his mother had a fine voice and
occasionally appeared on the stage, he suddenly brightened up and asked:
"Excuse me, but could you recall whether the theatre was not a passion
with your mother?"
About twenty minutes passed. Vassiliev was bored by the doctor stroking
his knees and talking of the same thing all the while.
"As far as I can understand your questions, Doctor," he said. "You want
to know whether my disease is hereditary or not. It is not hereditary."
The doctor went on to ask if Vassiliev had not any secret vices in his
early youth, any blows on the head, any love passions, eccentricities,
or exceptional infatuations. To half the questions habitually asked by
careful doctors you may return no answer without any injury to your
health; but Mikhail Sergueyich, the medico and the painter looked as
though, if Vassiliev failed to answer even one single question,
everything would be ruined. For some reason the doctor wrote down the
answers he received on a scrap of paper. Discovering that Vassiliev had
already passed through the faculty of natural science and was now in the
Law faculty, the doctor began to be pensive....
"He wrote a brilliant thesis last year...." said the medico.
"Excuse me. You mustn't interrupt me; you prevent me from
concentrating," the doctor said, smiling with one cheek. "Yes, certainly
that is important for the anamnesis.... Yes, yes.... And do you drink
vodka?" he turned to Vassiliev.
"Very rarely."
Another twenty minutes passed. The medico began sotto voce to give his
opinion of the immediate causes of the fit and told how he, the painter
and Vassiliev went to S——v Street the day before yesterday.
The indifferent, reserved, cold tone in which his friends and the doctor
were speaking of the women and the miserable street seemed to him in the
highest degree strange....
"Doctor, tell me this one thing," he said, restraining himself from
being rude. "Is prostitution an evil or not?"
"My dear fellow, who disputes it?" the doctor said with an expression as
though he had long ago solved all these questions for himself. "Who
disputes it?"
"Are you a psychiatrist?"
"Yes-s, a psychiatrist."
"Perhaps all of you are right," said Vassiliev, rising and beginning to
walk from corner to corner. "It may be. But to me all this seems
amazing. They see a great achievement in my having passed through two
faculties at the university; they praise me to the skies because I have
written a work that will be thrown away and forgotten in three years'
time, but became I can't speak of prostitutes as indifferently as I can
about these chairs, they send me to doctors, call me a lunatic, and pity
me."
For some reason Vassiliev suddenly began to feel an intolerable pity for
himself, his friends, and everybody whom he had seen the day before
yesterday, and for the doctor. He began to sob and fell into the chair.
The friends looked interrogatively at the doctor. He, looking as though
he magnificently understood the tears and the despair, and knew himself
a specialist in this line, approached Vassiliev and gave him some drops
to drink, and then when Vassiliev grew calm undressed him and began to
examine the sensitiveness of his skin, of the knee reflexes....
And Vassiliev felt better. When he was coming out of the doctor's he was
already ashamed; the noise of the traffic did not seem irritating, and
the heaviness beneath his heart became easier and easier as though it
were thawing. In his hand were two prescriptions. One was for kali-
bromatum, the other—morphia. He used to take both before.
He stood still in the street for a while, pensive, and then, taking
leave of his friends, lazily dragged on towards the university.
MISFORTUNE
Sophia Pietrovna, the wife of the solicitor Loubianzev, a handsome young
woman of about twenty-five, was walking quickly along a forest path with
her bungalow neighbour, the barrister Ilyin. It was just after four. In
the distance, above the path, white feathery clouds gathered; from
behind them some bright blue pieces of cloud showed through. The clouds
were motionless, as if caught on the tops of the tall, aged fir trees.
It was calm and warm.
In the distance the path was cut across by a low railway embankment,
along which at this hour, for some reason or other, a sentry strode.
Just behind the embankment a big, six-towered church with a rusty roof
shone white.
"I did not expect to meet you here," Sophia Pietrovna was saying,
looking down and touching the last year's leaves with the end of her
parasol. "But now I am glad to have met you. I want to speak to you
seriously and finally. Ivan Mikhailovich, if you really love and respect
me I implore you to stop pursuing me i You follow me like a
shadow—there's such a wicked look in your eye—you make love to me—write
extraordinary letters and ... I don't know how all this is going to
end—Good Heavens! What can all this lead to?"
Ilyin was silent. Sophia Pietrovna took a few steps and continued:
"And this sudden complete change has happened in two or three weeks
after five years of friendship. I do not know you any more, Ivan
Mikhailovich."
Sophia Pietrovna glanced sideways at her companion. He was staring
intently, screwing up his eyes at the feathery clouds. The expression of
his face was angry, capricious and distracted, like that of a man who
suffers and at the same time must listen to nonsense.
"It is annoying that you yourself can't realise it!" Madame Loubianzev
continued, shrugging her shoulders. "Please understand that you're not
playing a very nice game. I am married, I love and respect my husband. I
have a daughter. Don't you really care in the slightest for all this?
Besides, as an old friend, you know my views on family life ... on the
sanctity of the home, generally."
Ilyin gave an angry grunt and sighed:
"The sanctity of the home," he murmured, "Good Lord!"
"Yes, yes. I love and respect my husband and at any rate the peace of my
family life is precious to me. I'd sooner let myself be killed than be
the cause of Andrey's or his daughter's unhappiness. So, please, Ivan
Mikhailovich, for goodness' sake, leave me alone. Let us be good and
dear friends, and give up these sighings and gaspings which don't suit
you. It's settled and done with! Not another word about it. Let us talk
of something else!"
Sophia Pietrovna again glanced sideways at Ilyin. He was looking up. He
was pale, and angrily he bit his trembling lips. Madame Loubianzev could
not understand why he was disturbed and angry, but his pallor moved her.
"Don't be cross. Let's be friends," she said, sweetly.
"Agreed! Here is my hand."
Ilyin took her tiny plump hand in both his, pressed it and slowly raised
it to his lips.
"I'm not a schoolboy," he murmured. "I'm not in the least attracted by
the idea of friendship with the woman I love."
"That's enough. Stop! It is all settled and done with. We have come as
far as the bench. Let us sit down...."
A sweet sense of repose filled Sophia Pietrovna's soul. The most
difficult and delicate thing was already said. The tormenting question
was settled and done with. Now she could breathe easily and look
straight at Ilyin. She looked at him, and the egotistical sense of
superiority that a woman feels over her lover caressed her pleasantly.
She liked the way this big strong man with a virile angry face and a
huge black beard sat obediently at her side and hung his head. They were
silent for a little while. "Nothing is yet settled and done with," Ilyin
began. "You are reading me a sermon. 'I love and respect my husband ...
the sanctity of the home....' I know all that for myself and I can tell
you more. Honestly and sincerely I confess that I consider my conduct as
criminal and immoral. What else? But why say what is known already?
Instead of sermonizing you had far better tell me what I am to do."
"I have already told you. Go away."
"I have gone. You know quite well. I have started five times and half-
way there I have come back again. I can show you the through tickets. I
have kept them all safe. But I haven't the power to run away from you. I
struggle frightfully, but what in Heaven's name is the use? If I cannot
harden myself, if I'm weak and faint-hearted. I can't fight nature. Do
you understand? I cannot! I run away from her and she holds me back by
my coattails. Vile, vulgar weakness."
Ilyin blushed, got up, and began walking by the bench:
"How I hate and despise myself. Good Lord, I'm like a vicious
boy—running after another man's wife, writing idiotic letters, degrading
myself. Ach!" He clutched his head, grunted and sit down.
"And now comes your lack of sincerity into the bargain," he continued
with bitterness. "If you don't think I am playing a nice game—why are
you here? What drew you? In my letters I only ask you for a
straightforward answer: Yes, or No; and instead of giving it me, every
day you contrive that we shall meet 'by chance' and you treat me to
quotations from a moral copy-book."
Madame Loubianzev reddened and got frightened. She suddenly felt the
kind of awkwardness that a modest woman would feel at being suddenly
discovered naked.
"You seem to suspect some deceit on my side," she murmured. "I have
always given you a straight answer; and I asked you for one to-day."
"Ah, does one ask such things? If you had said to me at once 'Go away,'
I would have gone long ago, but you never told me to. Never once have
you been frank. Strange irresolution. My God, either you're playing with
me, or...."
Ilyin did not finish, and rested his head in his hands. Sophia Pietrovna
recalled her behaviour all through. She remembered that she had felt all
these days not only in deed but even in her most intimate thoughts
opposed to Ilyin's love. But at the same moment she knew that there was
a grain of truth in the barrister's words. And not knowing what kind of
truth it was she could not think, no matter how much she thought about
it, what to say to him in answer to his complaint. It was awkward being
silent, so she said shrugging her shoulders:
"So I'm to blame for that too?"
"I don't blame you for your insincerity," sighed Ilyin. "It slipped out
unconsciously. Your insincerity is natural to you, in the natural order
of things as well. If all mankind were to agree suddenly to become
serious, everything would go to the Devil, to ruin."
Sophia Pietrovna was not in the mood for philosophy; but she was glad of
the opportunity to change the conversation and asked:
"Why indeed?"
"Because only savages and animals are sincere. Since civilisation
introduced into society the demand, for instance, for such a luxury as
woman's virtue, sincerity has been out of place."
Angrily Ilyin began to thrust his stick into the sand. Madame Loubianzev
listened without understanding much of it; she liked the conversation.
First of all, she was pleased that a gifted man should speak to her, an
average woman, about intellectual things; also it gave her great
pleasure to watch how the pale, lively, still angry, young face was
working. Much she did not understand; but the fine courage of modern man
was revealed to her, the courage by which he without reflection or
surmise solves the great questions and constructs his simple
conclusions.
Suddenly she discovered that she was admiring him, and it frightened
her.
"Pardon, but I don't really understand," she hastened to say. "Why did
you mention insincerity? I entreat you once more, be a dear, good friend
and leave me alone. Sincerely, I ask it."
"Good—I'll do my best. But hardly anything will come of it. Either I'll
put a bullet through my brains or ... I'll start drinking in the
stupidest possible way. Things will end badly for me. Everything has its
limit, even a struggle with nature. Tell me now, how can one struggle
with madness? If you've drunk wine, how can you get over the excitement?
What can I do if your image has grown into my soul, and stands
incessantly before my eyes, night and day, as plain as that fir tree
there? Tell me then what thing I must do to get out of this wretched,
unhappy state, when all my thoughts, desires, and dreams belong, not to
me, but to some devil that has got hold of me? I love you, I love you so
much that I've turned away from my path, given up my career and my
closest friends, forgot my God. Never in my life have I loved so much."
Sophia Pietrovna, who was not expecting this turn, drew her body away
from Ilyin, and glanced at him frightened. Tears shone in his eyes. His
lips trembled, and a hungry, suppliant expression showed over all his
face.
"I love you," he murmured, bringing his own eyes near to her big,
frightened ones. "You are so beautiful. I'm suffering now; but I swear I
could remain so all my life, suffering and looking into your eyes,
but.... Keep silent, I implore you."
Sophia Pietrovna as if taken unawares began, quickly, quickly, to think
out words with which to stop him. "I shall go away," she decided, but no
sooner had she moved to get up, than Ilyin was on his knees at her feet
already. He embraced her knees, looked into her eyes and spoke
passionately, ardently, beautifully. She did not hear his words, for her
fear and agitation. Somehow now at this dangerous moment when her knees
pleasantly contracted, as in a warm bath, she sought with evil intention
to read some meaning into her sensation. She was angry because the whole
of her instead of protesting virtue was filled with weakness, laziness,
and emptiness, like a drunken man to whom the ocean is but knee-deep;
only in the depths of her soul, a little remote malignant voice teased:
"Why don't you go away? Then this is right, is it?"
Seeking in herself an explanation she could not understand why she had
not withdrawn the hand to which Ilyin's lips clung like a leech, nor
why, at the same time as Ilyin, she looked hurriedly right and left to
see that they were not observed.
The fir-trees and the clouds stood motionless, and gazed at them
severely like broken-down masters who see something going on, but have
been bribed not to report to the head. The sentry on the embankment
stood like a stick and seemed to be staring at the bench. "Let him
look!" thought Sophia Pietrovna.
"But ... But listen," she said at last with despair in her voice. "What
will this lead to? What will happen afterwards?"
"I don't know. I don't know," he began to whisper, waving these
unpleasant questions aside.
The hoarse, jarring whistle of a railway engine became audible. This
cold, prosaic sound of the everyday world made Madame Loubianzev start.
"It's time, I must go," she said, getting up quickly. "The train is
coming. Audrey is arriving. He will want his dinner."
Sophia Pietrovna turned her blazing cheeks to the embankment. First the
engine came slowly into sight, after it the carriages. It was not a
bungalow train, but a goods train. In a long row, one after another like
the days of man's life, the cars drew past the white background of the
church, and there seemed to be no end to them.
But at last the train disappeared, and the end car with the guard and
the lighted lamps disappeared into the green. Sophia Pietrovna turned
sharply and not looking at Ilyin began to walk quickly back along the
path. She had herself in control again. Red with shame, offended, not by
Ilyin, no I but by the cowardice and shamelessness with which she, a
good, respectable woman allowed a stranger to embrace her knees. She had
only one thought now, to reach her bungalow and her family as quickly as
possible. The barrister could hardly keep up with her. Turning from the
path on to a little track, she glanced at him so quickly that she
noticed only the sand on his knees, and she motioned with her hand at
him to let her be.
Running into the house Sophia Pietrovna stood for about five minutes
motionless in her room, looking now at the window then at the writing
table.... "You disgraceful woman," she scolded herself; "disgraceful!"
In spite of herself she recollected every detail, hiding nothing, how
all these days she had been against Ilyin's love-making, yet she was
somehow drawn to meet him and explain; but besides this when he was
lying at her feet she felt an extraordinary pleasure. She recalled
everything, not sparing herself, and now, stifled with shame, she could
have slapped her own face.
"Poor Andrey," she thought, trying, as she remembered her husband, to
give her face the tenderest possible expression—"Varya, my poor darling
child, does not know what a mother she has. Forgive me, my dears. I love
you very much ... very much!..."
And wishing to convince herself that she was still a good wife and
mother, that corruption had not yet touched those "sanctities" of hers,
of which she had spoken to Ilyin, Sophia Pietrovna ran into the kitchen
and scolded the cook for not having laid the table for Andrey Ilyitch.
She tried to imagine her husband's tired, hungry look, and pitying him
aloud, she laid the table herself, a thing which she had never done
before. Then she found her daughter Varya, lifted her up in her hands
and kissed her passionately; the child seemed to her heavy and cold, but
she would not own it to herself, and she began to tell her what a good,
dear, splendid father she had.
But when, soon after, Andrey. Ilyitch arrived, she barely greeted him.
The flow of imaginary feelings had ebbed away without convincing her of
anything; she was only exasperated and enraged by the lie. She sat at
the window, suffered, and raged. Only in distress can people understand
how difficult it is to master their thoughts and feelings. Sophia
Pietrovna said afterwards a confusion was going on inside her as hard to
define as to count a cloud of swiftly flying sparrows. Thus from the
fact that she was delighted at her husband's arrival and pleased with
the way he behaved at dinner, she suddenly concluded that she had begun
to hate him. Andrey Ilyitch, languid with hunger and fatigue, while
waiting for the soup, fell upon the sausage and ate it greedily, chewing
loudly and moving his temples.
"My God," thought Sophia Pietrovna. "I do love and respect him, but ...
why does he chew so disgustingly."
Her thoughts were no less disturbed than her feelings. Madame
Loubianzev, like all who have no experience of the struggle with
unpleasant thought, did her best not to think of her unhappiness, and
the more zealously she tried, the more vivid Ilyin became to her
imagination, the sand on his knees, the feathery clouds, the train....
"Why did I—idiot—go to-day?" she teased herself. "And am I really a
person who can't answer for herself?"
Fear has big eyes. When Andrey Ilyitch had finished the last course, she
had already resolved to tell him everything and so escape from danger.
"Andrey, I want to speak to you seriously," she began after dinner, when
her husband was taking off his coat and boots in order to have a lie
down.
"Well?"
"Let's go away from here!"
"How—where to? It's still too early to go to town."
"No. Travel or something like that."
"Travel," murmured the solicitor, stretching himself. "I dream of it
myself, but where shall I get the money, and who'll look after my
business."
After a little reflection he added:
"Yes, really you are bored. Go by yourself if you want to."
Sophia Pietrovna agreed; but at the same time she saw that Ilyin would
be glad of the opportunity to travel in the same train with her, in the
same carriage....
She pondered and looked at her husband, who was full fed but still
languid. For some reason her eyes stopped on his feet, tiny, almost
womanish, in stupid socks. On the toe of both socks little threads were
standing out. Under the drawn blind a bumble bee was knocking against
the window pane and buzzing. Sophia Pietrovna stared at the threads,
listened to the bumble bee and pictured her journey.... Day and night
Ilyin sits opposite, without taking his eyes from her, angry with his
weakness and pale with the pain of his soul. He brands himself as a
libertine, accuses her, tears his hair; but when the dark comes he
seizes the chance when the passengers go to sleep or alight at a station
and falls on his knees before her and clasps her feet, as he did by the
bench....
She realised that she was dreaming....
"Listen. I am not going by myself," she said. "You must come, too!"
"Sophochka, that's all imagination!" sighed Loubianzev. "You must be
serious and only ask for the possible...."
"You'll come when you And out!" thought Sophia Pietrovna.
Having decided to go away at all costs, she began to feel free from
danger; her thoughts fell gradually into order, she became cheerful and
even allowed herself to think about everything. Whatever she may think
or dream about, she is going all the same. While her husband still
slept, little by little, evening came....
She sat in the drawing-room playing the piano. Outside the window the
evening animation, the sound of music, but chiefly the thought of her
own cleverness in mastering her misery gave the final touch to her joy.
Other women, her easy conscience told her, in a position like her own
would surely not resist, they would spin round like a whirlwind; but she
was nearly burnt up with shame, she suffered and now she had escaped
from a danger which perhaps was nonexistent! Her virtue and resolution
moved her so much that she even glanced at herself in the glass three
times.
When it was dark visitors came. The men sat down to cards in the dining-
room, the ladies were in the drawing room and on the terrace. Ilyin came
last, he was stem and gloomy and looked ill. He sat down on a corner of
the sofa and did not get up for the whole evening. Usually cheerful and
full of conversation, he was now silent, frowning, and rubbing his eyes.
When he had to answer a question he smiled with difficulty and only with
his upper lip, answering abruptly and spitefully. He made about five
jokes in all, but his jokes seemed crude and insolent. It seemed to
Sophia Pietrovna that he was on the brink of hysteria. But only now as
she sat at the piano did she acknowledge that the unhappy man was not in
the mood to joke, that he was sick in his soul, he could find no place
for himself. It was for her sake he was ruining the best days of his
career and his youth, wasting his last farthing on a bungalow, had left
his mother and sisters uncared for, and, above all, was breaking down
under the martyrdom of his struggle. From simple, common humanity she
ought to take him seriously....
All this was dear to her, even to paining her. If she were to go up to
Ilyin now and say to him "No," there would be such strength in her voice
that it would be hard to disobey. But she did not go up to him and she
did not say it, did not even think it.... The petty selfishness of a
young nature seemed never to have been revealed in her as strongly as
that evening. She admitted that Byin was unhappy and that he sat on the
sofa as if on hot coals. She was sorry for him, but at the same time the
presence of the man who loved her so desperately filled her with a
triumphant sense of her own power. She felt her youth, her beauty, her
inaccessibility, and—since she had decided to go away—she gave herself
full rein this evening. She coquetted, laughed continually, she sang
with singular emotion, and as one inspired. Everything made her gay and
everything seemed funny. It amused her to recall the incident of the
bench, the sentry looking on. The visitors seemed funny to her, Ilyin's
insolent jokes, his tie pin which she had never seen before. The pin was
a little red snake with tiny diamond eyes; the snake seemed so funny
that she was ready to kiss and kiss it.
Sophia Pietrovna, nervously sang romantic songs, with a kind of half-
intoxication, and as if jeering at another's sorrow she chose sad,
melancholy songs that spoke of lost hopes, of the past, of old age....
"And old age is approaching nearer and nearer," she sang. What had she
to do with old age?
"There's something wrong going on in me," she thought now and then
through laughter and singing.
At twelve o'clock the visitors departed. Ilyin was the last to go. She
still felt warm enough about him to go with him to the lower step of the
terrace. She had the idea of telling him that she was going away with
her husband, just to see what effect this news would have upon him.
The moon was hiding behind the clouds, but it was so bright that Sophia
Pietrovna could see the wind playing with the tails of his overcoat and
with the creepers on the terrace. It was also plain how pale Ilyin was,
and how he twisted his upper-lip, trying to smile. "Sonia, Sonichka, my
dear little woman," he murmured, not letting her speak. "My darling, my
pretty one."
In a paroxysm of tenderness with tears in his voice, he showered her
with endearing words each tenderer than the other, and was already
speaking to her as if she were his wife or his mistress. Suddenly and
unexpectedly to her, he put one arm round her and with the other hand he
seized her elbow.
"My dear one, my beauty," he began to whisper, kissing the nape of her
neck; "be sincere, come to me now."
She slipped out of his embrace and lifted her head to break out in
indignation and revolt. But indignation did not come, and of all her
praiseworthy virtue and purity, there was left only enough for her to
say that which all average women say in similar circumstances:
"You must be mad."
"But really let us go," continued Ilyin. "Just now and over there by the
bench I felt convinced that you, Sonia, were as helpless as myself. You
too will be all the worse for it. You love me, and you are making a
useless bargain with your conscience."
Seeing that she was leaving him he seized her by her lace sleeve and
ended quickly:
"If not to-day, then to-morrow; but you will have to give in. What's the
good of putting if off? My dear, my darling Sonia, the verdict has been
pronounced. Why postpone the execution? Why deceive yourself?"
Sophia Pietrovna broke away from him and suddenly disappeared inside the
door. She returned to the drawing-room, shut the piano mechanically,
stared for a long time at the cover of a music book, and sat down. She
could neither stand nor think.... From her agitation and passion
remained only an awful weakness mingled with laziness and tiredness. Her
conscience whispered to her that she had behaved wickedly and foolishly
to-night, like a madwoman; that just now she had been kissed on the
terrace, and even now she had some strange sensation in her waist and in
her elbow. Not a soul was in the drawing-room. Only a single candle was
burning. Madame Loubianzev sat on a little round stool before the piano
without stirring as if waiting for something, and as if taking advantage
of her extreme exhaustion and the dark a heavy unconquerable desire
began to possess her. Like a boa-constrictor, it enchained her limbs and
soul. It grew every second and was no longer threatening, but stood
clear before her in all its nakedness.
She sat thus for half an hour, not moving, and not stopping herself from
thinking of Ilyin. Then she got up lazily and went slowly into the bed-
room. Andrey Ilyitch was in bed already. She sat by the window and gave
herself to her desire. She felt no more "confusion." All her feelings
and thoughts pressed lovingly round some clear purpose. She still had a
mind to struggle, but instantly she waved her hand impotently, realising
the strength and the determination of the foe. To fight him power and
strength were necessary, but her birth, up-bringing and life had given
her nothing on which to lean.
"You're immoral, you're horrible," she tormented herself for her
weakness. "You're a nice sort, you are!"
So indignant was her insulted modesty at this weakness that she called
herself all the bad names that she knew and she related to herself many
insulting, degrading truths. Thus she told herself that she never was
moral, and she had not fallen before only because there was no pretext,
that her day-long struggle had been nothing but a game and a comedy....
"Let us admit that I struggled," she thought, "but what kind of a fight
was it? Even prostitutes struggle before they sell themselves, and still
they do sell themselves. It's a pretty sort of fight. Like milk, turns
in a day." She realised that it was not love that drew her from her home
nor Ilyin's personality, but the sensations which await her.... A little
week-end type like the rest of them.
"When the young bird's mother was killed," a hoarse tenor finished
singing.
If I am going, it's time, thought Sophia Pietrovna. Her heart began to
beat with a frightful force.
"Andrey," she almost cried. "Listen. Shall we go away? Shall we? Yes?"
"Yes.... I've told you already. You go alone."
"But listen," she said, "if you don't come too, you may lose me. I seem
to be in love already."
"Who with?" Andrey Ilyitch asked.
"It must be all the same for you, who with," Sophia Pietrovna cried out.
Andrey Ilyitch got up, dangled his feet over the side of the bed, with a
look of surprise at the dark form of his wife.
"Imagination," he yawned.
He could not believe her, but all the same he was frightened. After
having thought for a while, and asked his wife some unimportant
questions, he gave his views of the family, of infidelity.... He spoke
sleepily for about ten minutes and then lay down again. His remarks had
no success. There are a great many opinions in this world, and more than
half of them belong to people who have never known misery.
In spite of the late hour, the bungalow people were still moving behind
their windows. Sophia Pietrovna put on a long coat and stood for a
while, thinking. She still had force of mind to say to her sleepy
husband:
"Are you asleep? I'm going for a little walk. Would you like to come
with me?"
That was her last hope. Receiving no answer, she walked out. It was
breezy and cool. She did not feel the breeze or the darkness but walked
on and on.... An irresistible power drove her, and it seemed to her that
if she stopped that power would push her in the back. "You're an immoral
woman," she murmured mechanically. "You're horrible."
She was choking for breath, burning with shame, did not feel her feet
under her, for that which drove her along was stronger than her shame,
her reason, her fear.... AFTER THE THEATRE
Nadya Zelenina had just returned with her mother from the theatre, where
they had been to see a performance of "Eugene Oniegin." Entering her
room, she quickly threw off her dress, loosened her hair, and sat down
hurriedly in her petticoat and a white blouse to write a letter in the
style of Tatiana.
"I love you,"—she wrote—"but you don't love me; no, you don't!"
The moment she had written this, she smiled.
She was only sixteen years old, and so far she had not been in love. She
knew that Gorny, the officer, and Gronsdiev, the student, loved her; but
now, after the theatre, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved
and unhappy—how interesting. There is something beautiful, affecting,
romantic in the fact that one loves deeply while the other is
indifferent. Oniegin is interesting because he does not love at all, and
Tatiana is delightful because she is very much in love; but if they
loved each other equally and were happy, they would seem boring,
instead.
"Don't go on protesting that you love me," Nadya wrote on, thinking of
Gorny, the officer, "I can't believe you. You're very clever, educated,
serious; you have a great talent, and perhaps, a splendid future
waiting, but I am an uninteresting poor-spirited girl, and you yourself
know quite well that I shall only be a drag upon your life. It's true I
carried you off your feet, and you thought you had met your ideal in me,
but that was a mistake. Already you are asking yourself in despair, 'Why
did I meet this girl?' Only your kindness prevents you from confessing
it."
Nadya pitied herself. She wept and went on.
"If it were not so difficult for me to leave mother and brother I would
put on a nun's gown and go where my eyes direct me. You would then be
free to love another. If I were to die!"
Through her tears she could not make out what she had written. Brief
rainbows trembled on the table, on the floor and the ceiling, as though
Nadya were looking through a prism. Impossible to write. She sank back
in her chair and began to think of Gorny.
Oh, how fascinating, how interesting men are! Nadya remembered the
beautiful expression of Gorny's face, appealing, guilty, and tender,
when someone discussed music with him,—the efforts he made to prevent
the passion from sounding in his voice. Passion must be concealed in a
society where cold reserve and indifference are the signs of good
breeding. And he does try to conceal it, but he does not succeed, and
everybody knows quite well that he has a passion for music. Never-ending
discussions about music, blundering pronouncements by men who do not
understand—keep him in incessant tension. He is scared, timid, silent.
He plays superbly, as an ardent pianist. If he were not an officer, he
would be a famous musician.
The tears dried in her eyes. Nadya remembered how Gorny told her of his
love at a symphony concert, and again downstairs by the cloak-room.
"I am so glad you have at last made the acquaintance of the student
Gronsdiev," she continued to write. "He is a very clever man, and you
are sure to love him. Yesterday he was sitting with us till two o'clock
in the morning. We were all so happy. I was sorry that you hadn't come
to us. He said a lot of remarkable things."
Nadya laid her hands on the table and lowered her head. Her hair covered
the letter. She remembered that Gronsdiev also loved her, and that he
had the same right to her letter as Gorny. Perhaps she had better write
to Gronsdiev? For no cause, a happiness began to quicken in her breast.
At first it was a little one, rolling about in her breast like a rubber
ball. Then it grew broader and bigger, and broke forth like a wave.
Nadya had already forgotten about Gorny and Gronsdiev. Her thoughts
became confused. The happiness grew more and more. From her breast it
ran into her arms and legs, and it seemed that a light fresh breeze blew
over her head, stirring her hair. Her shoulders trembled with quiet
laughter. The table and the lampglass trembled. Tears from her eyes
splashed the letter. She was powerless to stop her laughter; and to
convince herself that she had a reason for it, she hastened to remember
something funny.
"What a funny poodle!" she cried, feeling that she was choking with
laughter. "What a funny poodle!"
She remembered how Gronsdiev was playing with Maxim the poodle after tea
yesterday; how he told a story afterwards of a very clever poodle who
was chasing a crow in the yard. The crow gave him a look and said:
"Oh, you swindler!"
The poodle did not know he had to do with a learned crow. He was
terribly confused, and ran away dumfounded. Afterwards he began to bark.
"No, I'd better love Gronsdiev," Nadya decided and tore up the letter.
She began to think of the student, of his love, of her own love, with
the result that the thoughts in her head swam apart and she thought
about everything, about her mother, the street, the pencil, the piano.
She was happy thinking, and found that everything was good, magnificent.
Her happiness told her that this was not all, that a little later it
would be still better. Soon it will be spring, summer. They will go with
mother to Gorbiki in the country. Gorny will come for his holidays. He
will walk in the orchard with her, and make love to her. Gronsdiev will
come too. He will play croquet with her and bowls. He will tell funny,
wonderful stories. She passionately longed for the orchard, the
darkness, the pure sky, the stars. Again her shoulders trembled with
laughter and she seemed to awake to a smell of wormwood in the room; and
a branch was tapping at the window.
She went to her bed and sat down. She did not know what to do with her
great happiness. It overwhelmed her. She stared at the crucifix which
hung at the head of her bed and saying:
"Dear God, dear God, dear God." THAT WRETCHED BOY
Ivan Ivanich Lapkin, a pleasant looking young man, and Anna Zamblizky, a
young girl with a little snub nose, walked down the sloping bank and sat
down on the bench. The bench was close to the water's edge, among thick
bushes of young willow. A heavenly spot! You sat down, and you were
hidden from the world. Only the fish could see you and the catspaws
which flashed over the water like lightning. The two young persons were
equipped with rods, fish hooks, bags, tins of worms and everything else
necessary. Once seated, they immediately began to fish.
"I am glad that we're left alone at last," said Lapkin, looking round.
I've got a lot to tell you, Anna—tremendous ... when I saw you for the
first time ... you've got a nibble ... I understood then—why I am alive,
I knew where my idol was, to whom I can devote my honest, hardworking
life.... It must be a big one ... it is biting.... When I saw you—for
the first time in my life I fell in love—fell in love passionately I
Don't pull. Let it go on biting.... Tell me, darling, tell me—will you
let me hope? No! I'm not worth it. I dare not even think of it—may I
hope for.... Pull!
Anna lifted her hand that held the rod—pulled, cried out. A silvery
green fish shone in the air.
"Goodness! it's a perch! Help—quick! It's slipping off." The perch tore
itself from the hook—danced in the grass towards its native element and
... leaped into the water.
But instead of the little fish that he was chasing, Lapkin quite by
accident caught hold of Anna's hand—quite by accident pressed it to his
lips. She drew back, but it was too late; quite by accident their lips
met and kissed; yes, it was an absolute accident! They kissed and
kissed. Then came vows and assurances.... Blissful moments! But there is
no such thing as absolute happiness in this life. If happiness itself
does not contain a poison, poison will enter in from without. Which
happened this time. Suddenly, while the two were kissing, a laugh was
heard. They looked at the river and were paralysed. The schoolboy Kolia,
Anna's brother, was standing in the water, watching the young people and
maliciously laughing.
"Ah—ha! Kissing!" said he. "Right O, I'll tell Mother."
"I hope that you—as a man of honour," Lapkin muttered, blushing. "It's
disgusting to spy on us, it's loathsome to tell tales, it's rotten. As a
man of honour...."
"Give me a shilling, then I'll shut up!" the man of honour retorted. "If
you don't, I'll tell."
Lapkin took a shilling out of his pocket and gave it to Kolia, who
squeezed it in his wet fist, whistled, and swam away. And the young
people did not kiss any more just then.
Next day Lapkin brought Kolia some paints and a ball from town, and his
sister gave him all her empty pill boxes. Then they had to present him
with a set of studs like dogs' heads. The wretched boy enjoyed this game
immensely, and to keep it going he began to spy on them. Wherever Lapkin
and Anna went, he was there too. He did not leave them alone for a
single moment.
"Beast!" Lapkin gnashed his teeth. "So young and yet such a full fledged
scoundrel. What on earth will become of him later!"
During the whole of July the poor lovers had no life apart from him. He
threatened to tell on them; he dogged them and demanded more presents.
Nothing satisfied him—finally he hinted at a gold watch. All right, they
had to promise the watch.
Once, at table, when biscuits were being handed round, he burst out
laughing and said to Lapkin: "Shall I let on? Ah—ha!"
Lapkin blushed fearfully and instead of a biscuit he began to chew his
table napkin. Anna jumped up from the table and rushed out of the room.
And this state of things went on until the end of August, up to the day
when Lapkin at last proposed to Anna. Ah! What a happy day that was!
When he had spoken to her parents and obtained their consent Lapkin
rushed into the garden after Kolia. When he found him he nearly cried
for joy and caught hold of the wretched boy by the ear. Anna, who was
also looking for Kolia came running up and grabbed him by the other ear.
You should have seen the happiness depicted on their faces while Kolia
roared and begged them:
"Darling, precious pets, I won't do it again. O-oh—O-oh! Forgive me!"
And both of them confessed afterwards that during all the time they were
in love with each other they never experienced such happiness, such
overwhelming joy as during those moments when they pulled the wretched
boy's ears. ENEMIES
About ten o'clock of a dark September evening the Zemstvo doctor
Kirilov's only son, six-year-old Andrey, died of diphtheria. As the
doctor's wife dropped on to her knees before the dead child's cot and
the first paroxysm of despair took hold of her, the bell rang sharply in
the hall.
When the diphtheria came all the servants were sent away from the house,
that very morning. Kirilov himself went to the door, just as he was, in
his shirt-sleeves with his waistcoat unbuttoned, without wiping his wet
face or hands, which had been burnt with carbolic acid. It was dark in
the hall, and of the person who entered could be distinguished only his
middle height, a white scarf and a big, extraordinarily pale face, so
pale that it seemed as though its appearance made the hall brighter....
"Is the doctor in?" the visitor asked abruptly.
"I'm at home," answered Kirilov. "What do you want?"
"Oh, you're the doctor? I'm so glad!" The visitor was overjoyed and
began to seek for the doctor's hand in the darkness. He found it and
squeezed it hard in his own. "I'm very ... very glad! We were introduced
... I am Aboguin ... had the pleasure of meeting you this summer at Mr.
Gnouchev's. I am very glad to have found you at home.... For God's sake,
don't say you won't come with me immediately.... My wife has been taken
dangerously ill.... I have the carriage with me...."
From the visitor's voice and movements it was evident that he had been
in a state of violent agitation. Exactly as though he had been
frightened by a fire or a mad dog, he could hardly restrain his hurried
breathing, and he spoke quickly in a trembling voice. In his speech
there sounded a note of real sincerity, of childish fright. Like all men
who are frightened and dazed, he spoke in short, abrupt phrases and
uttered many superfluous, quite unnecessary, words.
"I was afraid I shouldn't find you at home," he continued. "While I was
coming to you I suffered terribly.... Dress yourself and let us go, for
God's sake.... It happened like this. Papchinsky came to me—Alexander
Siemionovich, you know him.... We were chatting.... Then we sat down to
tea. Suddenly my wife cries out, presses her hands to her heart, and
falls back in her chair. We carried her off to her bed and ... and I
rubbed her forehead with sal-volatile, and splashed her with water....
She lies like a corpse.... I'm afraid that her heart's failed.... Let us
go.... Her father too died of heart-failure."
Kirilov listened in silence as though he did not understand the Russian
language.
When Aboguin once more mentioned Papchinsky and his wife's father, and
once more began to seek for the doctor's hand in the darkness, the
doctor shook his head and said, drawling each word listlessly:
"Excuse me, but I can't go.... Five minutes ago my ... my son died."
"Is that true?" Aboguin whispered, stepping back. "My God, what an awful
moment to come! It's a terribly fated day ... terribly! What a
coincidence ... and it might have been on purpose!"
Aboguin took hold of the door handle and drooped his head in meditation.
Evidently he was hesitating, not knowing whether to go away, or to ask
the doctor once more.
"Listen," he said eagerly, seizing Kirilov by the sleeve. "I fully
understand your state! God knows I'm ashamed to try to hold your
attention at such a moment, but what can I do? Think yourself—who can I
go to? There isn't another doctor here besides you. For heaven's sake
come. I'm not asking for myself. It's not I that's ill!"
Silence began. Kirilov turned his back to Aboguin, stood still for a
while and slowly went out of the hall into the drawing-room. To judge by
his uncertain, machine-like movement, and by the attentiveness with
which he arranged the hanging shade on the unlighted lamp in the
drawing-room and consulted a thick book which lay on the table—at such a
moment he had neither purpose nor desire, nor did he think of anything,
and probably had already forgotten that there was a stranger standing in
his hall. The gloom and the quiet of the drawing-room apparently
increased his insanity. As he went from the drawing-room to his study he
raised his right foot higher than he need, felt with his hands for the
door-posts, and then one felt a certain perplexity in his whole figure,
as though he had entered a strange house by chance, or for the first
time in his life had got drunk, and now was giving himself up in
bewilderment to the new sensation. A wide line of light stretched across
the bookshelves on one wall of the study; this light, together with the
heavy stifling smell of carbolic acid and ether came from the door ajar
that led from the study into the bed-room.... The doctor sank into a
chair before the table; for a while he looked drowsily at the shining
books, then rose and went into the bed-room.
Here, in the bed-room, dead quiet reigned. Everything, down to the last
trifle, spoke eloquently of the tempest undergone, of weariness, and
everything rested. The candle which stood among a close crowd of phials,
boxes and jars on the stool and the big lamp on the chest of drawers
brightly lit the room. On the bed, by the window, the boy lay open-eyed,
with a look of wonder on his face. He did not move, but it seemed that
his open eyes became darker and darker every second and sank into his
skull. Having laid her hands on his body and hid her face in the folds
of the bed-clothes, the mother now was on her knees before the bed. Like
the boy she did not move, but how much living movement was felt in the
coil of her body and in her hands! She was pressing close to the bed
with her whole being, with eager vehemence, as though she were afraid to
violate the quiet and comfortable pose which she had found at last for
her weary body. Blankets, cloths, basins, splashes on the floor, brushes
and spoons scattered everywhere, a white bottle of lime-water, the
stifling heavy air itself—everything died away, and as it were plunged
into quietude.
The doctor stopped by his wife, thrust his hands into his trouser
pockets and bending his head on one side looked fixedly at his son. His
face showed indifference; only the drops which glistened on his beard
revealed that he had been lately weeping.
The repulsive terror of which we think when we speak of death was absent
from the bed-room. In the pervading dumbness, in the mother's pose, in
the indifference of the doctor's face was something attractive that
touched the heart, the subtle and elusive beauty of human grief, which
it will take men long to understand and describe, and only music, it
seems, is able to express. Beauty too was felt in the stern stillness.
Kirilov and his wife were silent and did not weep, as though they
confessed all the poetry of their condition. As once the season of their
youth passed away, so now in this boy their right to bear children had
passed away, alas! for ever to eternity. The doctor is forty-four years
old, already grey and looks like an old man; his faded sick wife is
thirty-five. Audrey was not merely the only son but the last.
In contrast to his wife the doctor's nature belonged to those which feel
the necessity of movement when their soul is in pain. After standing by
his wife for about five minutes, he passed from the bed-room, lifting
his right foot too high, into a little room half filled with a big broad
divan. From there he went to the kitchen. After wandering about the
fireplace and the cook's bed, he stooped through a little door and came
into the hall.
Here he saw the white scarf and the pale face again.
"At last," sighed Aboguin, seizing the doorhandle. "Let us go, please."
The doctor shuddered, glanced at him and remembered.
"Listen. I've told you already that I can't go," he said, livening.
"What a strange idea!"
"Doctor, I'm made of flesh and blood, too. I fully understand your
condition. I sympathise with you," Aboguin said in an imploring voice,
putting his hand to his scarf. "But I am not asking for myself. My wife
is dying. If you had heard her cry, if you'd seen her face, you would
understand my insistence! My God—and I thought that you'd gone to dress
yourself. The time is precious, Doctor! Let us go, I beg of you."
"I can't come," Kirilov said after a pause, and stepped into his
drawing-room.
Aboguin followed him and seized him by the sleeve.
"You're in sorrow. I understand. But I'm not asking you to cure a
toothache, or to give expert evidence,—but to save a human life." He
went on imploring like a beggar. "This life is more than any personal
grief. I ask you for courage, for a brave deed—in the name of humanity."
"Humanity cuts both ways," Kirilov said irritably. "In the name of the
same humanity I ask you not to take me away. My God, what a strange
idea! I can hardly stand on my feet and you frighten me with humanity.
I'm not fit for anything now. I won't go for anything. With whom shall I
leave my wife? No, no...."
Kirilov flung out his open hands and drew back.
"And ... and don't ask me," he continued, disturbed. "I'm sorry....
Under the Laws, Volume XIII., I'm obliged to go and you have the right
to drag me by the neck.... Well, drag me, but ... I'm not fit.... I'm
not even able to speak. Excuse me."
"It's quite unfair to speak to me in that tone, Doctor," said Aboguin,
again taking the doctor by the sleeve. "The thirteenth volume be damned!
I have no right to do violence to your will. If you want to, come; if
you don't, then God be with you; but it's not to your will that I apply,
but to your feelings. A young woman is dying! You say your son died just
now. Who could understand my terror better than you?"
Aboguin's voice trembled with agitation. His tremor and his tone were
much more convincing than his words. Aboguin was sincere, but it is
remarkable that every phrase he used came out stilted, soulless,
inopportunely florid, and as it were insulted the atmosphere of the
doctor's house and the woman who was dying. He felt it himself, and in
his fear of being misunderstood he exerted himself to the utmost to make
his voice soft and tender so as to convince by the sincerity of his tone
at least, if not by his words. As a rule, however deep and beautiful the
words they affect only the unconcerned. They cannot always satisfy those
who are happy or distressed because the highest expression of happiness
or distress is most often silence. Lovers understand each other best
when they are silent, and a fervent passionate speech at the graveside
affects only outsiders. To the widow and children it seems cold and
trivial.
Kirilov stood still and was silent. When Aboguin uttered some more words
on the higher vocation of a doctor, and self-sacrifice, the doctor
sternly asked:
"Is it far?"
"Thirteen or fourteen versts. I've got good horses, doctor. I give you
my word of honour that I'll take you there and back in an hour. Only an
hour."
The last words impressed the doctor more strongly than the references to
humanity or the doctor's vocation. He thought for a while and said with
a sigh.
"Well, let us go!"
He went off quickly, with a step that was now sure, to his study and
soon after returned in a long coat. Aboguin, delighted, danced
impatiently round him, helped him on with his overcoat, and accompanied
him out of the house.
Outside it was dark, but brighter than in the hall. Now in the darkness
the tall stooping figure of the doctor was clearly visible with the
long, narrow beard and the aquiline nose. Besides his pale face
Aboguin's big face could now be seen and a little student's cap which
hardly covered the crown of his head. The scarf showed white only in
front, but behind it was hid under his long hair.
"Believe me, I'm able to appreciate your magnanimity," murmured Aboguin,
as he helped the doctor to a seat in the carriage. "We'll whirl away.
Luke, dear man, drive as fast as you can, do!"
The coachman drove quickly. First appeared a row of bare buildings,
which stood along the hospital yard. It was dark everywhere, save that
at the end of the yard a bright light from someone's window broke
through the garden fence, and three windows in the upper story of the
separate house seemed to be paler than the air. Then the carriage drove
into dense obscurity where you could smell mushroom damp, and hear the
whisper of the trees. The noise of the wheels awoke the rooks who began
to stir in the leaves and raised a doleful, bewildered cry as if they
knew that the doctor's son was dead and Aboguin's wife ill. Then began
to appear separate trees, a shrub. Sternly gleamed the pond, where big
black shadows slept. The carriage rolled along over an even plain. Now
the cry of the rooks was but faintly heard far away behind. Soon it
became completely still.
Almost all the way Kirilov and Aboguin were silent; save that once
Aboguin sighed profoundly and murmured.
"It's terrible pain. One never loves his nearest so much as when there
is the risk of losing them."
And when the carriage was quietly passing through the river, Kirilov
gave a sudden start, as though the dashing of the water frightened him,
and he began to move impatiently.
"Let me go," he said in anguish. "I'll come to you later. I only want to
send the attendant to my wife. She is all alone."
Aboguin was silent. The carriage, swaying and rattling against the
stones, drove over the sandy bank and went on. Kirilov began to toss
about in anguish, and glanced around. Behind the road was visible in the
scant light of the stars and the willows that fringed the bank
disappearing into the darkness. To the right the plain stretched smooth
and boundless as heaven. On it in the distance here and there dim lights
were burning, probably on the turf-pits. To the left, parallel with the
road stretched a little hill, tufted with tiny shrubs, and on the hill a
big half-moon stood motionless, red, slightly veiled with a mist, and
surrounded with fine clouds which seemed to be gazing upon it from every
side, and guarding it, lest it should disappear.
In all nature one felt something hopeless and sick. Like a fallen woman
who sits alone in a dark room trying not to think of her past, the earth
languished with reminiscence of spring and summer and waited in apathy
for ineluctable winter. Wherever one's glance turned nature showed
everywhere like a dark, cold, bottomless pit, whence neither Kirilov nor
Aboguin nor the red half-moon could escape....
The nearer the carriage approached the destination the more impatient
did Aboguin become. He moved about, jumped up and stared over the
driver's shoulder in front of him. And when at last the carriage drew up
at the foot of the grand staircase, nicely covered with a striped linen
awning and he looked up at the lighted windows of the first floor one
could hear his breath trembling.
"If anything happens ... I shan't survive it," he said entering the hall
with the doctor and slowly rubbing his hands in his agitation. "But I
can't hear any noise. That means it's all right so far," he added,
listening to the stillness.
No voices or steps were heard in the hall. For all the bright
illumination the whole house seemed asleep. Now the doctor and Aboguin
who had been in darkness up till now could examine each other. The
doctor was tall, with a stoop, slovenly dressed, and his face was plain.
There was something unpleasantly sharp, ungracious, and severe in his
thick negro lips, his aquiline nose and his faded, indifferent look. His
tangled hair, his sunken temples, the early grey in his long thin beard,
that showed his shining chin, his pale grey complexion and the slipshod
awkwardness of his manners—the hardness of it all suggested to the mind
bad times undergone, an unjust lot and weariness of life and men. To
look at the hard figure of the man, you could not believe that he had a
wife and could weep over his child. Aboguin revealed something
different. He was robust, solid and fair-haired, with a big head and
large, yet soft, features, exquisitely dressed in the latest fashion. In
his carriage, his tight-buttoned coat and his mane of hair you felt
something noble and leonine. He walked with his head straight and his
chest prominent, he spoke in a pleasant baritone, and in his manner of
removing his scarf or arranging his hair there appeared a subtle, almost
feminine, elegance. Even his pallor and childish fear as he glanced
upwards to the staircase while taking off his coat, did not disturb his
carriage or take from the satisfaction, the health and aplomb which his
figure breathed.
"There's no one about, nothing I can hear," he said walking upstairs.
"No commotion. May God be good!"
He accompanied the doctor through the hall to a large salon, where a big
piano showed dark and a lustre hung in a white cover. Thence they both
passed into a small and beautiful drawing-room, very cosy, filled with a
pleasant, rosy half-darkness.
"Please sit here a moment, Doctor," said Aboguin, "I ... I won't be a
second. I'll just have a look and tell them."
Kirilov was left alone. The luxury of the drawing-room, the pleasant
half-darkness, even his presence in a stranger's unfamiliar house
evidently did not move him. He sat in a chair looking at his hands burnt
with carbolic acid. He had no more than a glimpse of the bright red
lampshade, the cello case, and when he looked sideways across the room
to where the dock was ticking, he noticed a stuffed wolf, as solid and
satisfied as Aboguin himself.
It was still.... Somewhere far away in the other rooms someone uttered a
loud "Ah!" A glass door, probably a cupboard door, rang, and again
everything was still. After five minutes had passed, Kirilov did not
look at his hands any more. He raised his eyes to the door through which
Aboguin had disappeared.
Aboguin was standing on the threshold, but not the same man as went out.
The expression of satisfaction and subtle elegance had disappeared from
him. His face and hands, the attitude of his body were distorted with a
disgusting expression either of horror or of tormenting physical pain.
His nose, lips, moustache, all his features were moving and as it were
trying to tear themselves away from his face, but the eyes were as
though laughing from pain.
Aboguin took a long heavy step into the middle of the room, stooped,
moaned, and shook his fists.
"Deceived!" he cried, emphasising the syllable cei. "She deceived me!
She's gone! She fell ill and sent me for the doctor only to run away
with this fool Papchinsky. My God!" Aboguin stepped heavily towards the
doctor, thrust his white soft fists before his face, and went on
wailing, shaking his fists the while.
"She's gone off! She's deceived me! But why this lie? My God, my God!
Why this dirty, foul trick, this devilish, serpent's game? What have I
done to her? She's gone off." Tears gushed from his eyes. He turned on
his heel and began to pace the drawing-room. Now in his short jacket and
his fashionable narrow trousers in which his legs seemed too thin for
his body, he was extraordinarily like a lion. Curiosity kindled in the
doctor's impassive face. He rose and eyed Aboguin.
"Well, where's the patient?"
"The patient, the patient," cried Aboguin, laughing, weeping, and still
shaking his fists. "She's not ill, but accursed. Vile—dastardly. The
Devil himself couldn't have planned a fouler trick. She sent me so that
she could run away with a fool, an utter clown, an Alphonse! My God, far
better she should have died. I'll not bear it. I shall not bear it."
The doctor stood up straight. His eyes began to blink, filled with
tears; his thin beard began to move with his jaw right and left.
"What's this?" he asked, looking curiously about. "My child's dead. My
wife in anguish, alone in all the house.... I can hardly stand on my
feet, I haven't slept for three nights ... and I'm made to play in a
vulgar comedy, to play the part of a stage property! I don't ... I don't
understand it!"
Aboguin opened one fist, flung a crumpled note on the floor and trod on
it, as upon an insect he wished to crush.
"And I didn't see ... didn't understand," he said through his set teeth,
brandishing one fist round his head, with an expression as though
someone had trod on a corn. "I didn't notice how he came to see us every
day. I didn't notice that he came in a carriage to-day! What was the
carriage for? And I didn't see! Innocent!"
"I don't ... I don't understand," the doctor murmured. "What's it all
mean? It's jeering at a man, laughing at a man's suffering! That's
impossible.... I've never seen it in my life before!"
With the dull bewilderment of a man who has just begun to understand
that someone has bitterly offended him, the doctor shrugged his
shoulders, waved his hands and not knowing what to say or do, dropped
exhausted into a chair.
"Well, she didn't love me any more. She loved another man. Very well.
But why the deceit, why this foul treachery?" Aboguin spoke with tears
in his voice. "Why, why? What have I done to you? Listen, doctor," he
said passionately approaching Kirilov. "You were the unwilling witness
of my misfortune, and I am not going to hide the truth from you. I swear
I loved this woman. I loved her with devotion, like a slave. I
sacrificed everything for her. I broke with my family, I gave up the
service and my music. I forgave her things I could not have forgiven my
mother and sister.... I never once gave her an angry look ... I never
gave her any cause. Why this lie then? I do not demand love, but why
this abominable deceit? If you don't love any more then speak out
honestly, above all when you know what I feel about this matter...."
With tears in his eyes and trembling in all his bones, Aboguin was
pouring out his soul to the doctor. He spoke passionately, pressing both
hands to his heart. He revealed all the family secrets without
hesitation, as though he were glad that these secrets were being tom
from his heart. Had he spoken thus for an hour or two and poured out all
his soul, he would surely have been easier.
Who can say whether, had the doctor listened and given him friendly
sympathy, he would not, as so often happens, have been reconciled to his
grief unprotesting, without turning to unprofitable follies? But it
happened otherwise. While Aboguin was speaking the offended doctor
changed countenance visibly. The indifference and amazement in his face
gradually gave way to an expression of bitter outrage, indignation, and
anger. His features became still sharper, harder, and more forbidding.
When Aboguin put before his eyes the photograph of his young wife, with
a pretty, but dry, inexpressive face like a nun's, and asked if it were
possible to look at that face and grant that it could express a lie, the
doctor suddenly started away, with flashing eyes, and said, coarsely
forging out each several word:
"Why do you tell me all this? I do not want to hear! I don't want to,"
he cried and banged his fist upon the table. "I don't want your trivial
vulgar secrets—to Hell with them. You dare not tell me such
trivialities. Or do you think I have not yet been insulted enough! That
I'm a lackey to whom you can give the last insult? Yes?"
Aboguin drew back from Kirilov and stared at him in surprise.
"Why did you bring me here?" the doctor went on, shaking his beard. "You
marry out of high spirits, get angry out of high spirits, and make a
melodrama—but where do I come in? What have I got to do with your
romances? Leave me alone I Get on with your noble grabbing, parade your
humane ideas, play—" the doctor gave a side-glance at the cello-
case—"the double-bass and the trombone, stuff yourselves like capons,
but don't dare to jeer at a real man! If you can't respect him, then you
can at least spare him your attentions."
"What does all this mean?" Aboguin asked, blushing.
"It means that it's vile and foul to play with a man I I'm a doctor. You
consider doctors and all men who work and don't reek of scent and
harlotry, your footmen, your mauvais tons. Very well, but no one gave
you the right to turn a man who suffers into a property."
"How dare you say that?" Aboguin asked quietly. Again his face began to
twist about, this time in visible anger.
"How dare you bring me here to listen to trivial rubbish, when you know
that I'm in sorrow?" the doctor cried and banged his fists on the table
once more. "Who gave you the right to jeer at another's grief?"
"You're mad," cried Aboguin. "You're ungenerous. I too am deeply unhappy
and ... and ..."
"Unhappy"—the doctor gave a sneering laugh—"Don't touch the word, it's
got nothing to do with you. Wasters who can't get money on a bill call
themselves unhappy too. A capon's unhappy, oppressed with all its
superfluous fat. You worthless lot!"
"Sir, you're forgetting yourself," Aboguin gave a piercing scream. "For
words like those, people are beaten. Do you understand?"
Aboguin thrust his hand into his side pocket, took out a pocket-book,
found two notes and flung them on the table.
"There's your fee," he said, and his nostrils trembled. "You're paid."
"You dare not offer me money," said the doctor, and brushed the notes
from the table to the floor. "You don't settle an insult with money."
Aboguin and the doctor stood face to face, heaping each other with
undeserved insults. Never in their lives, even in a frenzy, had they
said so much that was unjust and cruel and absurd. In both the
selfishness of the unhappy is violently manifest. Unhappy men are
selfish, wicked, unjust, and less able to understand each other than
fools. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them; and just
where one would imagine that people should be united by the community of
grief, there is more injustice and cruelty done than among the
comparatively contented.
"Send me home, please," the doctor cried, out of breath.
Aboguin rang the bell violently. Nobody came. He rang once more; then
flung the bell angrily to the floor. It struck dully on the carpet and
gave out a mournful sound like a death-moan. The footman appeared.
"Where have you been hiding, damn you?" The master sprang upon him with
clenched fists. "Where have you been just now? Go away and tell them to
said the carriage round for this gentleman, and get the brougham ready
for me. Wait," he called out as the footman turned to go. "Not a single
traitor remains to-morrow. Pack off all of you! I will engage new ones
... Rabble!"
While they waited Aboguin and the doctor were silent. Already the
expression of satisfaction and the subtle elegance had returned to the
former. He paced the drawing-room, shook his head elegantly and
evidently was planning something. His anger was not yet cool, but he
tried to make as if he did not notice his enemy.... The doctor stood
with one hand on the edge of the table, looking at Aboguin with that
deep, rather cynical, ugly contempt with which only grief and an unjust
lot can look, when they see satiety and elegance before them.
A little later, when the doctor took his seat in the carriage and drove
away, his eyes still glanced contemptuously. It was dark, much darker
than an hour ago. The red half-moon had now disappeared behind the
little hill, and the clouds which watched it lay in dark spots round the
stars. The brougham with the red lamps began to rattle on the road and
passed the doctor. It was Aboguin on his way to protest, to commit all
manner of folly.
All the way the doctor thought not of his wife or Andrey, but only of
Aboguin and those who lived in the house he just left. His thoughts were
unjust, inhuman, and cruel. He passed sentence on Aboguin, his wife,
Papchinsky, and all those who live in rosy semi-darkness and smell of
scent. All the way he hated them, and his heart ached with his contempt
for them. The conviction he formed about them would last his life long.
Time will pass and Kirilov's sorrow, but this conviction, unjust and
unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain in the
doctor's mind until the grave. A TRIFLING OCCURRENCE
Nicolai Ilyich Byelyaev, a Petersburg landlord, very fond of the
racecourse, a well fed, pink young man of about thirty-two, once called
towards evening on Madame Irnin—Olga Ivanovna—with whom he had a
liaison, or, to use his own phrase, spun out a long and tedious romance.
And indeed the first pages of this romance, pages of interest and
inspiration, had been read long ago; now they dragged on and on, and
presented neither novelty nor interest.
Finding that Olga Ivanovna was not at home, my hero lay down a moment on
the drawing-room sofa and began to wait.
"Good evening, Nicolai Ilyich," he suddenly heard a child's voice say.
"Mother will be in in a moment. She's gone to the dressmaker's with
Sonya."
In the same drawing-room on the sofa lay Olga Vassilievna's son,
Alyosha, a boy about eight years old, well built, well looked after,
dressed up like a picture in a velvet jacket and long black stockings.
He lay on a satin pillow, and apparently imitating an acrobat whom he
had lately seen in the circus, lifted up first one leg then the other.
When his elegant legs began to be tired, he moved his hands, or he
jumped up impetuously and then went on all fours, trying to stand with
his legs in the air. All this he did with a most serious face, breathing
heavily, as if he himself found no happiness in God's gift of such a
restless body.
"Ah, how do you do, my friend?" said Byelyaev. "Is it you? I didn't
notice you. Is your mother well?"
At the moment Alyosha had just taken hold of the toe of his left foot in
his right hand and got into a most awkward pose. He turned head over
heels, jumped up, and glanced from under the big, fluffy lampshade at
Byelyaev.
"How can I put it?" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "As a matter of
plain fact mother is never well. You see she's a woman, and women,
Nicolai Ilyich, have always some pain or another."
For something to do, Byelyaev began to examine Alyosha's face. All the
time he had been acquainted with Olga Ivanovna he had never once turned
his attention to the boy and had completely ignored his existence. A boy
is stuck in front of your eyes, but what is he doing here, what is his
rôle?—you don't want to give a single thought to the question.
In the evening dusk Alyosha's face with a pale forehead and steady black
eyes unexpectedly reminded Byelyaev of Olga Vassilievna as she was in
the first pages of the romance. He had the desire to be affectionate to
the boy.
"Come here, whipper-snapper," he said. "Come and let me have a good look
at you, quite close."
The boy jumped off the sofa and ran to Byelyaev.
"Well?" Nicolai Ilyich began, putting his hand on the thin shoulders.
"And how are things with you?"
"How shall I put it?... They used to be much better before."
"How?"
"Quite simple. Before, Sonya and I only had to do music and reading, and
now we're given French verses to learn. You've had your hair cut
lately?"
"Yes, just lately."
"That's why I noticed it. Your beard's shorter. May I touch it ...
doesn't it hurt?"
"No, not a bit."
"Why is it that it hurts if you pull one hair, and when you pull a whole
lot, it doesn't hurt a bit? Ah, ah I You know it's a pity you don't have
side-whiskers. You should shave here, and at the sides ... and leave the
hair just here."
The boy pressed close to Byelyaev and began to play with his watch-
chain.
"When I go to the gymnasium," he said, "Mother is going to buy me a
watch. I'll ask her to buy me a chain just like this. What a fine locket
I Father has one just the same, but yours has stripes, here, and his has
got letters.... Inside it's mother's picture. Father has another chain
now, not in links, but like a ribbon...."
"How do you know? Do you see your father?"
"I? Mm ... no ... I ..."
Alyosha blushed and in the violent confusion of being detected in a lie
began to scratch the locket busily with his finger-nail. Byelyaev looked
steadily at his face and asked:
"Do you see your father?"
"No ... no!"
"But, be honest—on your honour. By your face I can see you're not
telling me the truth. If you made a slip of the tongue by mistake,
what's the use of shuffling. Tell me, do you see him? As one friend to
another."
Alyosha mused.
"And you won't tell Mother?" he asked.
"What next."
"On your word of honour."
"My word of honour."
"Swear an oath."
"What a nuisance you are! What do you take me for?"
Alyosha looked round, made big eyes and began to whisper.
"Only for God's sake don't tell Mother! Never tell it to anyone at all,
because it's a secret. God forbid that Mother should ever get to know;
then I and Sonya and Pelagueia will pay for it.... Listen. Sonya and I
meet Father every Tuesday and Friday. When Pelagueia takes us for a walk
before dinner, we go into Apfel's sweet-shop and Father's waiting for
us. He always sits in a separate room, you know, where there's a
splendid marble table and an ash-tray shaped like a goose without a
back...."
"And what do you do there?"
"Nothing!—First, we welcome one another, then we sit down at a little
table and Father begins to treat us to coffee and cakes. You know, Sonya
eats meat-pies, and I can't bear pies with meat in them! I like them
made of cabbage and eggs. We eat so much that afterwards at dinner we
try to eat as much as we possibly can so that Mother shan't notice."
"What do you talk about there?"
"To Father? About anything. He kisses us and cuddles us, tells us all
kinds of funny stories. You know, he says that he will take us to live
with him when we are grown up. Sonya doesn't want to go, but I say
'Yes.' Of course, it'll be lonely without Mother; but I'll write letters
to her. How funny: we could go to her for our holidays then—couldn't we?
Besides, Father says that he'll buy me a horse. He's a splendid man. I
can't understand why Mother doesn't invite him to live with her or why
she says we mustn't meet him. He loves Mother very much indeed. He's
always asking us how she is and what she's doing. When she was ill, he
took hold of his head like this ... and ran, ran, all the time. He is
always telling us to obey and respect her. Tell me, is it true that
we're unlucky?"
"H'm ... how?"
"Father says so. He says: 'You are unlucky children.' It's quite strange
to listen to him. He says: 'You are unhappy, I'm unhappy, and Mother's
unhappy.' He says: 'Pray to God for yourselves and for her.'" Alyosha's
eyes rested upon the stuffed bird and he mused.
"Exactly...." snorted Byelyaev. "This is what you do. You arrange
conferences in sweet-shops. And your mother doesn't know?" "N—no.... How
could she know? Pelagueia won't tell for anything. The day before
yesterday Father stood us pears. Sweet, like jam. I had two."
"H'm ... well, now ... tell me, doesn't your father speak about me?"
"About you? How shall I put it?" Alyosha gave a searching glance to
Byelyaev's face and shrugged his shoulders.
"He doesn't say anything in particular."
"What does he say, for instance?"
"You won't be offended?"
"What next? Why, does he abuse me?"
"He doesn't abuse you, but you know ... he is cross with you. He says
that it's through you that Mother's unhappy and that you ... ruined
Mother. But he is so queer! I explain to him that you are good and never
shout at Mother, but he only shakes his head."
"Does he say those very words: that I ruined her?"
"Yes. Don't be offended, Nicolai Ilyich!"
Byelyaev got up, stood still a moment, and then began to walk about the
drawing-room.
"This is strange, and ... funny," he murmured, shrugging his shoulders
and smiling ironically. "He is to blame all round, and now I've ruined
her, eh? What an innocent lamb! Did he say those very words to you: that
I ruined your mother?"
"Yes, but ... you said that you wouldn't get offended."
"I'm not offended, and ... and it's none of your business! No, it ...
it's quite funny though. I fell, into the trap, yet I'm to be blamed as
well."
The bell rang. The boy dashed from his place and ran out. In a minute a
lady entered the room with a little girl. It was Olga Ivanovna,
Alyosha's mother. After her, hopping, humming noisily, and waving his
hands, followed Alyosha.
"Of course, who is there to accuse except me?" he murmured, sniffing.
"He's right, he's the injured husband."
"What's the matter?" asked Olga Ivanovna.
"What's the matter! Listen to the kind of sermon your dear husband
preaches. It appears I'm a scoundrel and a murderer, I've ruined you and
the children. All of you are unhappy, and only I am awfully happy!
Awfully, awfully happy!"
"I don't understand, Nicolai! What is it?"
"Just listen to this young gentleman," Byelyaev said, pointing to
Alyosha.
Alyosha blushed, then became pale suddenly and his whole face was
twisted in fright.
"Nicolai Ilyich," he whispered loudly. "Shh!"
Olga Ivanovna glanced in surprise at Alyosha, at Byelyaev, and then
again at Alyosha.
"Ask him, if you please," went on Byelyaev. "That stupid fool Pelagueia
of yours, takes them to sweet-shops and arranges meetings with their
dear father there. But that's not the point. The point is that the dear
father is a martyr, and I'm a murderer, I'm a scoundrel, who broke the
lives of both of you...."
"Nicolai Ilyich!" moaned Alyosha. "You gave your word of honour!"
"Ah, let me alone!" Byelyaev waved his hand. "This is something more
important than any words of honour. The hypocrisy revolts me, the lie!"
"I don't understand," muttered Olga Ivanovna, and tears began to glimmer
in her eyes. "Tell me, Lyolka,"—she turned to her son, "Do you see your
father?"
Alyosha did not hear and looked with horror at Byelyaev.
"It's impossible," said the mother. "I'll go and ask Pelagueia."
Olga Ivanovna went out.
"But, but you gave me your word of honour," Alyosha said trembling all
over.
Byelyaev waved his hand at him and went on walking up and down. He was
absorbed in his insult, and now, as before, he did not notice the
presence of the boy. He, a big serious man, had nothing to do with boys.
And Alyosha sat down in a corner and in terror told Sonya how he had
been deceived. He trembled, stammered, wept. This was the first time in
his life that he had been set, roughly, face to face with a lie. He had
never known before that in this world besides sweet pears and cakes and
expensive watches, there exist many other things which have no name in
children's language. A GENTLEMAN FRIEND
When she came out of the hospital the charming Vanda, or, according to
her passport, "the honourable lady-citizen Nastasya Kanavkina," found
herself in a position in which she had never been before: without a roof
and without a son. What was to be done?
First of all, she went to a pawnshop to pledge her turquoise ring, her
only jewellery. They gave her a rouble for the ring ... but what can you
buy for a rouble? For that you can't get a short jacket à la mode, or
an elaborate hat, or a pair of brown shoes; yet without these things she
felt naked. She felt as though, not only the people, but even the horses
and dogs were staring at her and laughing at the plainness of her
clothes. And her only thought was for her clothes; she did not care at
all what she ate or where she slept.
"If only I were to meet a gentleman friend...." she thought. "I could
get some money ... Nobody would say 'No,' because...."
But she came across no gentleman Mends. It's easy to find them of nights
in the Renaissance, but they wouldn't let her go into the Renaissance in
that plain dress and without a hat. What's to be done? After a long time
of anguish, vexed and weary with walking, sitting, and thinking, Vanda
made up her mind to play her last card: to go straight to the rooms of
some gentleman friend and ask him for money.
"But who shall I go to?" she pondered. "I can't possibly go to Misha ...
he's got a family.... The ginger-headed old man is at his office...."
Vanda recollected Finkel, the dentist, the converted Jew, who gave her a
bracelet three months ago. Once she poured a glass of beer on his head
at the German dub. She was awfully glad that she had thought of Finkel.
"He'll be certain to give me some, if only I find him in..." she
thought, on her way to him. "And if he won't, then I'll break every
single thing there."
She had her plan already prepared. She approached the dentist's door.
She would run up the stairs, with a laugh, fly into his private room and
ask for twenty-five roubles.... But when she took hold of the bell-pull,
the plan went clean out of her head. Vanda suddenly began to be afraid
and agitated, a thing which had never happened to her before. She was
never anything but bold and independent in drunken company; but now,
dressed in common clothes, and just like any ordinary person begging a
favour, she felt timid and humble.
"Perhaps he has forgotten me..." she thought, not daring to pull the
bell. "And how can I go up to him in a dress like this? As if I were a
pauper, or a dowdy respectable..."
She rang the bell irresolutely.
There were steps behind the door. It was the porter.
"Is the doctor at home?" she asked.
She would have been very pleased now if the porter had said "No," but
instead of answering he showed her into the hall, and took her jacket.
The stairs seemed to her luxurious and magnificent, but what she noticed
first of all in all the luxury was a large mirror in which she saw a
ragged creature without an elaborate hat, without a modish jacket, and
without a pair of brown shoes. And Vanda found it strange that, now that
she was poorly dressed and looking more like a seamstress or a
washerwoman, for the first time she felt ashamed, and had no more
assurance or boldness left. In her thoughts she began to call herself
Nastya Kanavkina, instead of Vanda as she used.
"This way, please!" said the maid-servant, leading her to the private
room. "The doctor will be here immediately.... Please, take a seat."
Vanda dropped into an easy chair.
"I'll say: 'Lend me ...'" she thought. "That's the right thing, because
we are acquainted. But the maid must go out of the room.... It's awkward
in front of the maid.... What is she standing there for?"
In five minutes the door opened and Finkel entered—a tall, swarthy,
convert Jew, with fat cheeks and goggle-eyes. His cheeks, eyes, belly,
fleshy hips—were all so full, repulsive, and coarse! At the Renaissance
and the German club he used always to be a little drunk, to spend a lot
of money on women, patiently put up with all their tricks—for instance,
when Vanda poured the beer on his head, he only smiled and shook his
finger at her—but now he looked dull and sleepy; he had the pompous,
chilly expression of a superior, and he was chewing something.
"What is the matter?" he asked, without looking at Vanda. Vanda glanced
at the maid's serious face, at the blown-out figure of Finkel, who
obviously did not recognise her, and she blushed.
"What's the matter?" the dentist repeated, irritated.
"To ... oth ache...." whispered Vanda.
"Ah ... which tooth ... where?"
Vanda remembered she had a tooth with a hole.
"At the bottom ... to the right," she said.
"H'm ... open your mouth."
Finkel frowned, held his breath, and began to work the aching tooth
loose.
"Do you feel any pain?" he asked, picking at her tooth with some
instrument.
"Yes, I do...." Vanda lied. "Shall I remind him?" she thought, "he'll be
sure to remember.... But ... the maid ... what is she standing there
for?"
Finkel suddenly snorted like a steam-engine straight into her mouth, and
said:
"I don't advise you to have a stopping.... Anyhow the tooth is quite
useless."
Again he picked at the tooth for a little, and soiled Vanda's lips and
gums with his tobacco-stained fingers. Again he held his breath and
dived into her mouth with something cold....
Vanda suddenly felt a terrible pain, shrieked and seized Finkel's
hand....
"Never mind...." he murmured. "Don't be frightened.... This tooth isn't
any use."
And his tobacco-stained fingers, covered with blood, held up the
extracted tooth before her eyes. The maid came forward and put a bowl to
her lips.
"Rinse your mouth with cold water at home," said Finkel. "That will make
the blood stop."
He stood before her in the attitude of a man impatient to be left alone
at last.
"Good-bye ..." she said, turning to the door.
"H'm! And who's to pay me for the work?" Finkel asked laughingly.
"Ah ... yes!" Vanda recollected, blushed and gave the dentist the rouble
she had got for the turquoise ring.
When she came into the street she felt still more ashamed than before,
but she was not ashamed of her poverty any more. Nor did she notice any
more that she hadn't an elaborate hat or a modish jacket. She walked
along the street spitting blood and each red spittle told her about her
life, a bad, hard life; about the insults she had suffered and had still
to suffer-to-morrow, a week, a year hence—her whole life, till death....
"Oh, how terrible it is!" she whispered. "My God, how terrible!"
But the next day she was at the Renaissance and she danced there. She
wore a new, immense red hat, a new jacket à la mode and a pair of brown
shoes. She was treated to supper by a young merchant from Kazan.
OVERWHELMING SENSATIONS
This happened not so very long ago in the Moscow Circuit Court. The
jurymen, left in court for the night, before going to bed, began a
conversation about overwhelming sensations. It was occasioned by
someone's recollection of a witness who became a stammerer and turned
grey, owing, as he said, to one dreadful moment. The jurymen decided
before going to bed that each one of them should dig into his memories
and tell a story. Life is short; but still there is not a single man who
can boast that he had not had some dreadful moments in his past.
One juryman related how he was nearly drowned. A second told how one
night he poisoned his own child, in a place where there was neither
doctor nor chemist, by giving the child white copperas in mistake for
soda. The child did not die, but the father nearly went mad. A third,
not an old man, but sickly, described his two attempts to commit
suicide. Once he shot himself; the second time he threw himself in front
of a train.
The fourth, a short, stout man, smartly dressed, told the following
story:
"I was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, when I fell
head over heels in love with my present wife and proposed to her. Now, I
would gladly give myself a thrashing for that early marriage; but
then—well, I don't know what would have happened to me if Natasha had
refused. My love was most ardent, the kind described in novels as mad,
passionate, and so on. My happiness choked me, and I did not know how to
escape from it. I bored my father, my friends, the servants by
continually telling them how desperately I was in love. Happy people are
quite the most tiresome and boring. I used to be awfully exasperating.
Even now I'm ashamed.
"At the time I had a newly-called barrister among my friends. The
barrister is now known all over Russia, but then he was only at the
beginning of his popularity, and he was not rich or famous enough to
have the right not to recognise a friend when he met him or not to raise
his hat. I used to go and see him once or twice a week.
"When I came, we used both to stretch ourselves upon the sofas and begin
to philosophise.
"Once I lay on the sofa, harping on the theme that there is no more
ungrateful profession than a barrister's. I tried to show that after the
witnesses have been heard the Court can easily dispense with the Crown
Prosecutor and the barrister, because they are equally unnecessary and
only hindrances. If an adult juryman, sound in spirit and mind, is
convinced that this ceiling is white, or that Ivanov is guilty, no
Demosthenes has the power to fight and overcome his conviction. Who can
convince me that my moustache is carroty when I know it is black? When I
listen to an orator I may perhaps get sentimental and even shed a tear,
but my rooted convictions, for the most part based on the obvious and on
facts, will not be changed an atom. My friend the barrister contended
that I was still young and silly and was talking childish nonsense. In
his opinion an obvious fact when illumined by conscientious experts
became still more obvious. That was his first point. His second was that
a talent is a force, an elemental power, a hurricane, that is able to
turn even stones to dust, not to speak of such trifles as the
convictions of householders and small shopkeepers. It is as hard for
human frailty to struggle against a talent as it is to look at the sun
without being blinded or to stop the wind. By the power of the word one
single mortal converts thousands of convinced savages to Christianity.
Ulysses was the most convinced person in the world, but he was all
submission before the Syrens, and so on. All history is made up of such
instances. In life we meet them at every turn. And so it ought to be;
otherwise a clever person of talent would not be preferred before the
stupid and untalented.
"I persisted and continued to argue that a conviction is stronger than
any talent, though, speaking frankly, I myself could not define what
exactly is a conviction and what is a talent. Probably I talked only for
the sake of talking.
"'Take even your own case' ... said the barrister. 'You are convinced
that your fiancée is an angel and that there's not a man in all the
town happier than you. I tell you, ten or twenty minutes would be quite
enough for me to make you sit down at this very table and write to break
off the engagement.'
"I began to laugh.
"'Don't laugh. I'm talking seriously,' said my friend. 'If I only had
the desire, in twenty minutes you would be happy in the thought that you
have been saved from marriage. My talent is not great, but neither are
you strong?'
"'Well, try, please,' I said.
"'No, why should I? I only said it in passing. You're a good boy. It
would be a pity to expose you to such an experiment. Besides, I'm not in
the mood, to-day.'
"We sat down to supper. The wine and thoughts of Natasha and my love
utterly filled me with a sense of youth and happiness. My happiness was
so infinitely great that the green-eyed barrister opposite me seemed so
unhappy, so little, so grey!"
"'But do try,' I pressed him. 'I beg you.'
"The barrister shook his head and knit his brows. Evidently I had begun
to bore him.
"'I know,' he said, 'that when the experiment is over you will thank me
and call me saviour, but one must think of your sweetheart too. She
loves you, and your refusal would make her suffer. But what a beauty she
is 'I envy you.'
"The barrister sighed, swallowed some wine, and began to speak of what a
wonderful creature my Natasha was. He had an uncommon gift for
description. He could pour out a whole heap of words about a woman's
eyelashes or her little finger. I listened to him with delight.
"'I've seen many women in my life-time;' he said, 'but I give you my
word of honour, I tell you as a friend, your Natasha Andreevna is a gem,
a rare girl! Of course, there are defects, even a good many, I grant
you, but still she is charming.'
"And the barrister began to speak of the defects of my sweetheart. Now I
quite understand it was a general conversation about women, one about
their weak points in general; but it appeared to me then as though he
was speaking only of Natasha. He went into raptures about her snub-nose,
her excited voice, her shrill laugh, her affectation—indeed, about
everything I particularly disliked in her. All this was in his opinion
infinitely amiable, gracious and feminine. Imperceptibly he changed from
enthusiasm first to paternal edification, then to a light, sneering
tone.... There was no Chairman of the Bench with us to stop the
barrister riding the high horse. I hadn't a chance of opening my
mouth—and what could I have said? My friend said nothing new, his truths
were long familiar. The poison was not at all in what he said, but
altogether in the devilish form in which he said it. A form of Satan's
own invention! As I listened to him I was convinced that one and the
same word had a thousand meanings and nuances according to the way it is
pronounced and the turn given to the sentence. I certainly cannot
reproduce the tone or the form. I can only say that as I listened to my
friend and paced from corner to corner of my room, I was revolted,
exasperated, contemptuous according as he felt. I even believed him
when, with tears in his eyes, he declared to me that I was a great man,
deserving a better fate, and destined in the future to accomplish some
remarkable exploit, from which I might be prevented by my marriage.
"'My dear friend,' he exclaimed, firmly grasping my hand, 'I implore
you, I command you: stop before it is too late. Stop! God save you from
this strange and terrible mistake! My friend, don't ruin your youth.'
"Believe me or not as you will, but finally I sat down at the table and
wrote to my sweetheart breaking off the engagement. I wrote and rejoiced
that there was still time to repair my mistake. When the envelope was
sealed I hurried into the street to put it in a pillar box. The
barrister came with me.
"'Splendid! Superb!' he praised me when my letter to Natasha disappeared
into the darkness of the pillar-box. 'I congratulate you with all my
heart. I'm delighted for your sake.'
"After we had gone about ten steps together, the barrister continued:
"'Of course, marriage has its bright side too. I, for instance, belong
to the kind of men for whom marriage and family life are everything.'
"He was already describing his life: all the ugliness of a lonely
bachelor existence appeared before me.
"He spoke with enthusiasm of his future wife, of the pleasures of an
ordinary family life, and his transports were so beautiful and sincere
that I was in absolute despair by the time we reached his door.
"'What are you doing with me, you damnable man?' I said panting. 'You've
ruined me! Why did you make me write that cursed letter? I love her! I
love her!'
"And I swore that I was in love. I was terrified of my action. It
already seemed wild and absurd to me. Gentlemen, it is quite impossible
to imagine a more overwhelming sensation than mine at that moment! If a
kind man had happened to slip a revolver into my hand I would have put a
bullet through my head gladly.
"'Well, that's enough, enough!' the advocate said, patting my shoulder
and beginning to laugh. 'Stop crying! The letter won't reach your
sweetheart. It was I, not you, wrote the address on the envelope, and I
muddled it up so that they won't be able to make anything of it at the
post-office. But let this be a lesson to you. Don't discuss things you
don't understand.'"
"Now, gentlemen, next, please."
The fifth juryman had settled himself comfortably and already opened his
mouth to begin his story, when we heard the dock striking from Spaisky
Church-tower.
"Twelve...." one of the jurymen counted. "To which class, gentlemen,
would you assign the sensations which our prisoner at the bar is now
feeling? The murderer passes the night here in a prisoner's cell, either
lying or sitting, certainly without sleeping and all through the
sleepless night listens to the striking of the hours. What does he think
of? What dreams visit him?"
And all the jurymen suddenly forgot about overwhelming sensations. The
experience of their friend, who once wrote the letter to his Natasha,
seemed unimportant, and not even amusing. Nobody told any more stories;
but they began to go to bed quietly, in silence. EXPENSIVE LESSONS
It is a great bore for an educated person not to know foreign languages.
Vorotov felt it strongly, when on leaving the university after he had
got his degree he occupied himself with a little scientific research.
"It's awful!" he used to say, losing his breath (for although only
twenty-six he was stout, heavy, and short of breath). "It's awful.
Without knowing languages I'm like a bird without wings. I'll simply
have to chuck the work."
So he decided, come what might, to conquer his natural laziness and to
study French and German, and he began to look out for a teacher.
One winter afternoon, as Vorotov sat working in his study, the servant
announced a lady to see him.
"Show her in," said Vorotov.
And a young lady, exquisitely dressed in the latest fashion, entered the
study. She introduced herself as Alice Ossipovna Enquette, a teacher of
French, and said that a friend of Vorotov's had sent her to him.
"Very glad! Sit down!" said Vorotov, losing his breath, and clutching at
the collar of his night shirt. (He always worked in a night shirt in
order to breathe more easily.) "You were sent to me by Peter
Sergueyevich? Yes.... Yes ... I asked him.... Very glad!"
While he discussed the matter with Mademoiselle Enquette he glanced at
her shyly, with curiosity. She was a genuine Frenchwoman, very elegant,
and still quite young. From her pale and languid face, from her short,
curly hair and unnaturally small waist, you would not think her more
than eighteen, but looking at her broad, well-developed shoulders, her
charming back and severe eyes, Vorotov decided that she was certainly
not less than twenty-three, perhaps even twenty-five; but then again it
seemed to him that she was only eighteen. Her face had the cold,
business-like expression of one who had come to discuss a business
matter. Never once did she smile or frown, and only once a look of
perplexity flashed into her eyes, when she discovered that she was not
asked to teach children but a grown up, stout young man.
"So, Alice Ossipovna," Vorotov said to her, "you will give me a lesson
daily from seven to eight o'clock in the evening. With regard to your
wish to receive a rouble a lesson, I have no objection at all. A
rouble—well, let it be a rouble...."
And he went on asking her if she wanted tea or coffee, if the weather
was fine, and, smiling good naturedly, stroking the tablecloth with the
palm of his hand, he asked her kindly who she was, where she had
completed her education, and how she earned her living.
In a cold, business-like tone Alice Ossipovna answered that she had
completed her education at a private school, and had then qualified as a
domestic teacher, that her father had died recently of scarlet fever,
her mother was alive and made artificial flowers, that she, Mademoiselle
Enquette, gave private lessons at a pension in the morning, and from one
o'clock right until the evening she taught in respectable private
houses.
She went, leaving a slight and almost imperceptible perfume of a woman's
dress behind her. Vorotov did not work for a long time afterwards but
sat at the table stroking the green cloth and thinking.
"It's very pleasant to see girls earning their own living," he thought.
"On the other hand it is very unpleasant to realise that poverty does
not spare even such elegant and pretty girls as Alice Ossipovna; she,
too, must struggle for her existence. Rotten luck!..."
Having never seen virtuous Frenchwomen he also thought that this
exquisitely dressed Alice Ossipovna, with her well-developed shoulders
and unnaturally small waist was in all probability, engaged in something
else besides teaching.
Next evening when the clock pointed to five minutes to seven, Alice
Ossipovna arrived, rosy from the cold; she opened Margot (an elementary
text-book) and began without any preamble:
"The French grammar has twenty-six letters. The first is called A, the
second B...."
"Pardon," interrupted Vorotov, smiling, "I must warn you, Mademoiselle,
that you will have to change your methods somewhat in my case. The fact
is that I know Russian, Latin and Greek very well. I have studied
comparative philology, and it seems to me that we may leave out Margot
and begin straight off to read some author." And he explained to the
Frenchwoman how grown-up people study languages.
"A friend of mine," said he, "who wished to know modern languages put a
French, German and Latin gospel in front of him and then minutely
analysed one word after another. The result—he achieved his purpose in
less than a year. Let us take some author and start reading."
The Frenchwoman gave him a puzzled look. It was evident that Vorotov's
proposal appeared to her naive and absurd. If he had not been grown up
she would certainly have got angry and stormed at him, but as he was a
very stout, adult man at whom she could not storm, she only shrugged her
shoulders half-perceptibly and said:
"Just as you please."
Vorotov ransacked his bookshelves and produced a ragged French book.
"Will this do?" he asked.
"It's all the same."
"In that case let us begin. Let us start from the title, Mémoires."
"Reminiscences...." translated Mademoiselle Enquette.
"Reminiscences...." repeated Vorotov.
Smiling good naturedly and breathing heavily, he passed a quarter of an
hour over the word mémoires and the same with the word de. This tired
Alice Ossipovna out. She answered his questions carelessly, got confused
and evidently neither understood her pupil nor tried to. Vorotov asked
her questions, and at the same time glanced furtively at her fair hair,
thinking:
"The hair is not naturally curly. She waves it. Marvellous! She works
from morning till night and yet she finds time to wave her hair."
At eight o'clock sharp she got up, gave him a dry, cold "Au revoir,
Monsieur," and left the study. After her lingered the same sweet,
subtle, agitating perfume. The pupil again did nothing for a long time,
but sat by the table and thought.
During the following days he became convinced that his teacher was a
charming girl serious and punctual, but very uneducated and incapable of
teaching grown up people; so he decided he would not waste his time, but
part with her and engage someone else. When she came for the seventh
lesson he took an envelope containing seven roubles out of his pocket.
Holding it in his hands and blushing furiously, he began:
"I am sorry, Alice Ossipovna, but I must tell you.... I am placed in an
awkward position...."
The Frenchwoman glanced at the envelope and guessed what was the matter.
For the first time during the lessons a shiver passed over her face and
the cold, business-like expression disappeared. She reddened faintly,
and casting her eyes down, began to play absently with her thin gold
chain. And Vorotov, noticing her confusion, understood how precious this
rouble was to her, how hard it would be for her to lose this money.
"I must tell you," he murmured, getting still more confused. His heart
gave a thump. Quickly he put the envelope back into his pocket and
continued:
"Excuse me. I ... I will leave you for ten minutes...."
And as though he did not want to dismiss her at all, but had only asked
permission to retire for a moment he went into another room and sat
there for ten minutes. Then he returned, more confused than ever; he
thought that his leaving her like that would be explained by her in a
certain way and this made him awkward.
The lessons began again.
Vorotov wanted them no more. Knowing that they would lead to nothing he
gave the Frenchwoman a free hand; he did not question or interrupt her
any more. She translated at her own sweet will, ten pages a lesson, but
he did not listen. He breathed heavily and for want of occupation gazed
now and then at her curly little head, her neck, her soft white hands,
and inhaled the perfume of her dress.
He caught himself thinking about her as he ought not and it shamed him,
or admiring her, and then he felt aggrieved and angry because she
behaved so coldly towards him, in such a businesslike way, never smiling
and as if afraid that he might suddenly touch her. All the while he
thought: How could he inspire her with confidence in him, how could he
get to know her better, to help her, to make her realise how badly she
taught, poor little soul?
Once Alice Ossipovna came to the lesson in a dainty pink dress, a little
décolleté, and such a sweet scent came from her that you might have
thought she was wrapped in a cloud, that you had only to blow on her for
her to fly away or dissolve like smoke. She apologised, saying she could
only stay for half an hour, because she had to go straight from the
lesson to a ball.
He gazed at her neck, at her bare shoulders and he thought he understood
why Frenchwomen were known to be light-minded and easily won; he was
drowned in this cloud of scent, beauty, and nudity, and she, quite
unaware of his thoughts and probably not in the least interested in
them, read over the pages quickly and translated full steam ahead:
"He walked over the street and met the gentleman of his friend and said:
where do you rush? seeing your face so pale it makes me pain."
The Mémoires had been finished long ago; Alice was now translating
another book. Once she came to the lesson an hour earlier, apologising
because she had to go to the Little Theatre at seven o'clock. When the
lesson was over Vorotov dressed and he too went to the theatre. It
seemed to him only for the sake of rest and distraction, and he did not
even think of Alice. He would not admit that a serious man, preparing
for a scientific career, a stay-at-home, should brush aside his book and
rush to the theatre for the sake of meeting an unintellectual, stupid
girl whom he hardly knew.
But somehow, dining the intervals his heart beat, and, without noticing
it, he ran about the foyer and the corridors like a boy, looking
impatiently for someone. Every time the interval was over he was tired,
but when he discovered the familiar pink dress and the lovely shoulders
veiled with tulle his heart jumped as if from a presentiment of
happiness, he smiled joyfully, and for the first time in his life he
felt jealous.
Alice was with two ugly students and an officer. She was laughing,
talking loudly and evidently flirting. Vorotov had never seen her like
that. Apparently she was happy, contented, natural, warm. Why? What was
the reason? Perhaps because these people were dear to her and belonged
to the same class as she. Vorotov felt the huge abyss between him and
that class. He bowed to his teacher, but she nodded coldly and quietly
passed by. It was plain she did not want her cavaliers to know that she
had pupils and gave lessons because she was poor.
After the meeting at the theatre Vorotov knew that he was in love.
During lessons that followed he devoured his elegant teacher with his
eyes, and no longer struggling, he gave full rein to his pure and impure
thoughts. Alice's face was always cold. Exactly at eight o'clock every
evening she said calmly, "Au revoir, Monsieur," and he felt that she was
indifferent to him and would remain indifferent, that—his position was
hopeless.
Sometimes in the middle of a lesson he would begin dreaming, hoping,
building plans; he composed an amorous declaration, remembering that
Frenchwomen were frivolous and complaisant, but he had only to give his
teacher one glance for his thoughts to be blown out like a candle, when
you carry it on to the verandah of a bungalow and the wind is blowing.
Once, overcome, forgetting everything, in a frenzy, he could stand it no
longer. He barred her way when she came from the study into the hall
after the lesson and, losing his breath and stammering, began to declare
his love:
"You are dear to me!... I love you. Please let me speak!"
Alice grew pale: probably she was afraid that after this declaration she
would not be able to come to him any more and receive a rouble a lesson.
She looked at him with terrified eyes and began in a loud whisper:
"Ah, it's impossible! Do not speak, I beg you! Impossible!"
Afterwards Vorotov did not sleep all night; he tortured himself with
shame, abused himself, thinking feverishly. He thought that his
declaration had offended the girl and that she would not come any more.
He made up his mind to find out where she lived from the Address Bureau
and to write her an apology. But Alice came without the letter. For a
moment she felt awkward, and then opened the book and began to translate
quickly, in an animated voice, as always:
"'Oh, young gentleman, do not rend these flowers in my garden which I
want to give to my sick daughter.'"
She still goes. Four books have been translated by now but Vorotov knows
nothing beyond the word mémoires, and when he is asked about his
scientific research work he waves his hand, leaves the question
unanswered, and begins to talk about the weather. A LIVING CALENDAR
State-Councillor Sharamykin's drawing-room is wrapped in a pleasant
half-darkness. The big bronze lamp with the green shade, makes the
walls, the furniture, the faces, all green, couleur "Nuit d'Ukraine"
Occasionally a smouldering log flares up in the dying fire and for a
moment casts a red glow over the faces; but this does not spoil the
general harmony of light. The general tone, as the painters say, is well
sustained.
Sharamykin sits in a chair in front of the fireplace, in the attitude of
a man who has just dined. He is an elderly man with a high official's
grey side whiskers and meek blue eyes. Tenderness is shed over his face,
and his lips are set in a melancholy smile. At his feet, stretched out
lazily, with his legs towards the fire-place, Vice-Governor Lopniev sits
on a little stool. He is a brave-looking man of about forty.
Sharamykin's children are moving about round the piano; Nina, Kolya,
Nadya, and Vanya. The door leading to Madame Sharamykin's room is
slightly open and the light breaks through timidly. There behind the
door sits Sharamykin's wife, Anna Pavlovna, in front of her writing-
table. She is president of the local ladies' committee, a lively,
piquant lady of thirty years and a little bit over. Through her pince-
nez her vivacious black eyes are running over the pages of a French
novel. Beneath the novel lies a tattered copy of the report of the
committee for last year.
"Formerly our town was much better off in these things," says
Sharamykin, screwing up his meek eyes at the glowing coals. "Never a
winter passed but some star would pay us a visit. Famous actors and
singers used to come ... but now, besides acrobats and organ-grinders,
the devil only knows what comes. There's no aesthetic pleasure at
all.... We might be living in a forest. Yes.... And does your Excellency
remember that Italian tragedian?... What's his name?... He was so dark,
and tall.... Let me think.... Oh, yes! Luigi Ernesto di Ruggiero....
Remarkable talent.... And strength. He had only to say one word and the
whole theatre was on the qui vive. My darling Anna used to take a great
interest in his talent. She hired the theatre for him and sold tickets
for the performances in advance.... In return he taught her elocution
and gesture. A first-rate fellow! He came here ... to be quite exact ...
twelve years ago.... No, that's not true.... Less, ten years.... Anna
dear, how old is our Nina?"
"She'll be ten next birthday," calls Anna Pavlovna from her room. "Why?"
"Nothing in particular, my dear. I was just curious.... And good singers
used to come. Do you remember Prilipchin, the tenore di grazia? What a
charming fellow he was! How good looking! Fair ... a very expressive
face, Parisian manners.... And what a voice, your Excellency! Only one
weakness: he would sing some notes with his stomach and would take re
falsetto—otherwise everything was good. Tamberlik, he said, had taught
him.... My dear Anna and I hired a hall for him at the Social Club, and
in gratitude for that he used to sing to us for whole days and
nights.... He taught dear Anna to sing. He came—I remember it as though
it were last night—in Lent, some twelve years ago. No, it's more.... How
bad my memory is getting, Heaven help me! Anna dear, how old is our
darling Nadya?
"Twelve."
"Twelve ... then we've got to add ten months.... That makes it exact ...
thirteen. Somehow there used to be more life in our town then.... Take,
for instance, the charity soirées. What enjoyable soirées we used to
have before! How elegant! There were singing, playing, and
recitation.... After the war, I remember, when the Turkish prisoners
were here, dear Anna arranged a soiree on behalf of the wounded. We
collected eleven hundred roubles. I remember the Turkish officers were
passionately fond of dear Anna's voice, and kissed her hand incessantly.
He-he! Asiatics, but a grateful nation. Would you believe me, the soiree
was such a success that I wrote an account of it in my diary? It was,—I
remember it as though it had only just happened,—in '76,... no, in
'77.... No! Pray, when were the Turks here? Anna dear, how old is our
little Kolya?"
"I'm seven, Papa!" says Kolya, a brat with a swarthy face and coal black
hair.
"Yes, we're old, and we've lost the energy we used to have," Lopniev
agreed with a sigh. "That's the real cause. Old age, my friend. No new
moving spirits arrive, and the old ones grow old.... The old fire is
dull now. When I was younger I did not like company to be bored.... I
was your Anna Pavlovna's first assistant. Whether it was a charity
soirée or a tombola to support a star who was going to arrive, whatever
Anna Pavlovna was arranging, I used to throw over everything and begin
to bustle about. One winter, I remember, I bustled and ran so much that
I even got ill.... I shan't forget that winter.... Do you remember what
a performance we arranged with Anna Pavlovna in aid of the victims of
the fire?"
"What year was it?"
"Not so very long ago.... In '79. No, in '80, I believe! Tell me how old
is your Vanya?"
"Five," Anna Pavlovna calls from the study.
"Well, that means it was six years ago. Yes, my dear friend, that was a
time. It's all over now. The old fire's quite gone."
Lopniev and Sharamykin grew thoughtful. The smouldering log flares up
for the last time, and then is covered in ash. OLD AGE
State-Councillor Usielkov, architect, arrived in his native town, where
he had been summoned to restore the cemetery church. He was born in the
town, he had grown up and been married there, and yet when he got out of
the train he hardly recognised it. Everything was changed. For instance,
eighteen years ago, when he left the town to settle in Petersburg, where
the railway station is now boys used to hunt for marmots: now as you
come into the High Street there is a four storied "Hotel Vienna," with
apartments, where there was of old an ugly grey fence. But not the fence
or the houses, or anything had changed so much as the people.
Questioning the hall-porter, Usielkov discovered that more than half of
the people he remembered were dead or paupers or forgotten.
"Do you remember Usielkov?" he asked the porter. "Usielkov, the
architect, who divorced his wife.... He had a house in Sviribev
Street.... Surely you remember."
"No, I don't remember anyone of the name."
"Why, it's impossible not to remember. It was an exciting case. All the
cabmen knew, even. Try to remember. His divorce was managed by the
attorney, Shapkin, the swindler ... the notorious sharper, the man who
was thrashed at the dub...."
"You mean Ivan Nicolaich?"
"Yes.... Is he alive? dead?"
"Thank heaven, his honour's alive. His honour's a notary now, with an
office. Well-to-do. Two houses in Kirpichny Street. Just lately married
his daughter off."
Usielkov strode from one corner of the room to another. An idea flashed
into his mind. From boredom, he decided to see Shapkin. It was afternoon
when he left the hotel and quietly walked to Kirpichny Street. He found
Shapkin in his office and hardly recognised him. From the well-built,
alert attorney with a quick, impudent, perpetually tipsy expression,
Shapkin had become a modest, grey-haired, shrunken old man.
"You don't recognise me.... You have forgotten ...." Usielkov began.
"I'm your old client, Usielkov."
"Usielkov? Which Usielkov? Ah!" Remembrance came to Shapkin: he
recognised him and was confused. Began exclamations, questions,
recollections.
"Never expected ... never thought...." chuckled Shapkin. "What will you
have? Would you like champagne? Perhaps you'd like oysters. My dear man,
what a lot of money I got out of you in the old days—so much that I
can't think what I ought to stand you."
"Please don't trouble," said Usielkov. "I haven't time. I must go to the
cemetery and examine the church. I have a commission."
"Splendid. We'll have something to eat and a drink and go together. I've
got some splendid horses! I'll take you there and introduce you to the
churchwarden.... I'll fix up everything.... But what's the matter, my
dearest man? You're not avoiding me, not afraid? Please sit nearer.
There's nothing to be afraid of now.... Long ago, I really was pretty
sharp, a bit of a rogue ... but now I'm quieter than water, humbler than
grass. I've grown old; got a family. There are children.... Time to
die!"
The friends had something to eat and drink, and went in a coach and pair
to the cemetery.
"Yes, it was a good time," Shapkin was reminiscent, sitting in the
sledge. "I remember, but I simply can't believe it. Do you remember how
you divorced your wife? It's almost twenty years ago, and you've
probably forgotten everything, but I remember it as though I conducted
the petition yesterday. My God, how rotten I was! Then I was a smart,
casuistical devil, full of sharp practice and devilry.... and I used to
run into some shady affairs, particularly when there was a good fee, as
in your case, for instance. What was it you paid me then? Five—six
hundred. Enough to upset anybody! By the time you left for Petersburg
you'd left the whole affair completely in my hands. 'Do what you like!'
And your former wife, Sophia Mikhailovna, though she did come from a
merchant family, was proud and selfish. To bribe her to take the guilt
on herself was difficult—extremely difficult. I used to come to her for
a business talk, and when she saw me, she would say to her maid: 'Masha,
surely I told you I wasn't at home to scoundrels.' I tried one way, then
another ... wrote letters to her, tried to meet her accidentally—no
good. I had to work through a third person. For a long time I had
trouble with her, and she only yielded when you agreed to give her ten
thousand. She could not stand out against ten thousand. She
succumbed.... She began to weep, spat in my face, but she yielded and
took the guilt on herself."
"If I remember it was fifteen, not ten thousand she took from me," said
Usielkov.
"Yes, of course ... fifteen, my mistake." Shapkin was disconcerted.
"Anyway it's all past and done with now. Why shouldn't I confess,
frankly? Ten I gave to her, and the remaining five I bargained out of
you for my own share. I deceived both of you.... It's all past, why be
ashamed of it? And who else was there to take from, Boris Pietrovich, if
not from you? I ask you.... You were rich and well-to-do. You married in
caprice: you were divorced in caprice. You were making a fortune. I
remember you got twenty thousand out of a single contract. Whom was I to
tap, if not you? And I must confess, I was tortured by envy. If you got
hold of a nice lot of money, people would take off their hats to you:
but the same people would beat me for shillings and smack my face in the
club. But why recall it? It's time to forget."
"Tell me, please, how did Sophia Mikhailovna live afterwards?"
"With her ten thousand? On ne peut plus badly.... God knows whether it
was frenzy or pride and conscience that tortured her, because she had
sold herself for money—or perhaps she loved you; but, she took to drink,
you know. She received the money and began to gad about with officers in
troikas.... Drunkenness, philandering, debauchery.... She would come
into a tavern with an officer, and instead of port or a light wine, she
would drink the strongest cognac to drive her into a frenzy."
"Yes, she was eccentric. I suffered enough with her. She would take
offence at some trifle and then get nervous.... And what happened
afterwards?"
"A week passed, a fortnight.... I was sitting at home writing. Suddenly,
the door opened and she comes in. 'Take your cursed money,' she said,
and threw the parcel in my face.... She could not resist it.... Five
hundred were missing. She had only got rid of five hundred."
"And what did you do with the money?"
"It's all past and done with. What's the good of concealing it?... I
certainly took it. What are you staring at me like that for? Wait for
the sequel. It's a complete novel, the sickness of a soul! Two months
passed by. One night I came home drunk, in a wicked mood.... I turned on
the light and saw Sophia Mikhailovna sitting on my sofa, drunk too,
wandering a bit, with something savage in her face as if she had just
escaped from the mad-house. 'Give me my money back,' she said. 'I've
changed my mind. If I'm going to the dogs, I want to go madly,
passionately. Make haste, you scoundrel, give me the money.' How
indecent it was!"
"And you ... did you give it her?"
"I remember I gave her ten roubles."
"Oh ... is it possible?" Usielkov frowned. "If you couldn't do it
yourself, or you didn't want to, you could have written to me.... And I
didn't know ... I didn't know."
"My dear man, why should I write, when she wrote herself afterwards when
she was in hospital?"
"I was so taken up with the new marriage that I paid no attention to
letters.... But you were an outsider; you had no antagonism to Sophia
Mikhailovna.... Why didn't you help her?"
"We can't judge by our present standards, Boris Pietrovich. Now we think
in this way; but then we thought quite differently.... Now I might
perhaps give her a thousand roubles; but then even ten roubles ... she
didn't get them for nothing. It's a terrible story. It's time to
forget.... But here you are!"
The sledge stopped at the churchyard gate. Usielkov and Shapkin got out
of the sledge, went through the gate and walked along a long, broad
avenue. The bare cherry trees, the acacias, the grey crosses and
monuments sparkled with hoar-frost. In each flake of snow the bright
sunny day was reflected. There was the smell you find in all cemeteries
of incense and fresh-dug earth.
"You have a beautiful cemetery," said Usielkov. "It's almost an
orchard."
"Yes, but it's a pity the thieves steal the monuments. Look, there,
behind that cast-iron memorial, on the right, Sophia Mikhailovna is
buried. Would you like to see?"
The friends turned to the right, stepping in deep snow towards the cast-
iron memorial.
"Down here," said Shapkin, pointing to a little stone of white marble.
"Some subaltern or other put up the monument on her grave." Usielkov
slowly took off his hat and showed his bald pate to the snow. Eying him,
Shapkin also took off his hat, and another baldness shone beneath the
sun. The silence round about was like the tomb, as though the air were
dead, too. The friends looked at the stone, silent, thinking.
"She is asleep!" Shapkin broke the silence. "And she cares very little
that she took the guilt upon herself and drank cognac. Confess, Boris
Pietrovich!"
"What?" asked Usielkov, sternly.
"That, however loathsome the past may be, it's better than this." And
Shapkin pointed to his grey hairs.
"In the old days I did not even think of death.... If I'd met her, I
would have circumvented her, but now ... well, now!"
Sadness took hold of Usielkov. Suddenly he wanted to cry, passionately,
as he once desired to love.... And he felt that these tears would be
exquisite, refreshing. Moisture came out of his eyes and a lump rose in
his throat, but.... Shapkin was standing by his side, and Usielkov felt
ashamed of his weakness before a witness. He turned back quickly and
walked towards the church.
Two hours later, having arranged with the churchwarden and examined the
church, he seized the opportunity while Shapkin was talking away to the
priest, and ran to shed a tear. He walked to the stone surreptitiously,
with stealthy steps, looking round all the time. The little white
monument stared at him absently, so sadly and innocently, as though a
girl and not a wanton divorcée were beneath.
"If I could weep, could weep!" thought Usielkov.
But the moment for weeping had been lost. Though the old man managed to
make his eyes shine, and tried to bring himself to the right pitch, the
tears did not flow and the lump did not rise in his throat.... After
waiting for about ten minutes, Usielkov waved his arm and went to look
for + Shapkin.
The Darling and Other Stories
THE DARLING
OLENKA, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor, Plemyanniakov,
was sitting in her back porch, lost in thought. It was hot, the flies
were persistent and teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it
would soon be evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering from the east, and
bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in the air.
Kukin, who was the manager of an open-air theatre called the Tivoli, and
who lived in the lodge, was standing in the middle of the garden looking
at the sky.
"Again!" he observed despairingly. "It's going to rain again! Rain every
day, as though to spite me. I might as well hang myself! It's ruin!
Fearful losses every day."
He flung up his hands, and went on, addressing Olenka:
"There! that's the life we lead, Olga Semyonovna. It's enough to make
one cry. One works and does one's utmost, one wears oneself out, getting
no sleep at night, and racks one's brain what to do for the best. And
then what happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I
give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall
artists. But do you suppose that's what they want! They don't understand
anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is
vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost every evening it rains.
It started on the tenth of May, and it's kept it up all May and June.
It's simply awful! The public doesn't come, but I've to pay the rent
just the same, and pay the artists."
The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Kukin would say with
an hysterical laugh:
"Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck in this
world and the next! Let the artists have me up! Send me to prison!--to
Siberia!--the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!"
And next day the same thing.
Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came
into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love
him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and curls combed
forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his
mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair
on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her. She was
always fond of some one, and could not exist without loving. In earlier
days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing
with difficulty; she had loved her aunt who used to come every other
year from Bryansk; and before that, when she was at school, she had
loved her French master. She was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate
girl, with mild, tender eyes and very good health. At the sight of her
full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and
the kind, naïve smile, which came into her face when she listened to
anything pleasant, men thought, "Yes, not half bad," and smiled too,
while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the
middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, "You
darling!"
The house in which she had lived from her birth upwards, and which was
left her in her father's will, was at the extreme end of the town, not
far from the Tivoli. In the evenings and at night she could head the
band playing, and the crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed
to her that it was Kukin struggling with his destiny, storming the
entrenchments of his chief foe, the indifferent public; there was a
sweet thrill at her heart, she had no desire to sleep, and when he
returned home at day-break, she tapped softly at her bedroom window, and
showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, she gave
him a friendly smile. . . .
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer view
of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hands, and
said:
"You darling!"
He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding, his
face still retained an expression of despair.
They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to look
after things in the Tivoli, to put down the accounts and pay the wages.
And her rosy cheeks, her sweet, naïve, radiant smile, were to be seen
now at the office window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the
scenes of the theatre. And already she used to say to her acquaintances
that the theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that
it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and
become cultivated and humane.
"But do you suppose the public understands that?" she used to say. "What
they want is a clown. Yesterday we gave 'Faust Inside Out,' and almost
all the boxes were empty; but if Vanitchka and I had been producing some
vulgar thing, I assure you the theatre would have been packed. Tomorrow
Vanitchka and I are doing 'Orpheus in Hell.' Do come."
And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like
him she despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference
to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she
kept an eye on the behaviour of the musicians, and when there was an
unfavourable notice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to
the editor's office to set things right.
The actors were fond of her and used to call her "Vanitchka and I," and
"the darling"; she was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums
of money, and if they deceived her, she used to shed a few tears in
private, but did not complain to her husband.
They got on well in the winter too. They took the theatre in the town
for the whole winter, and let it for short terms to a Little Russian
company, or to a conjurer, or to a local dramatic society. Olenka grew
stouter, and was always beaming with satisfaction, while Kukin grew
thinner and yellower, and continually complained of their terrible
losses, although he had not done badly all the winter. He used to cough
at night, and she used to give him hot raspberry tea or lime-flower
water, to rub him with eau-de-Cologne and to wrap him in her warm
shawls.
"You're such a sweet pet!" she used to say with perfect sincerity,
stroking his hair. "You're such a pretty dear!"
Towards Lent he went to Moscow to collect a new troupe, and without him
she could not sleep, but sat all night at her window, looking at the
stars, and she compared herself with the hens, who are awake all night
and uneasy when the cock is not in the hen-house. Kukin was detained in
Moscow, and wrote that he would be back at Easter, adding some
instructions about the Tivoli. But on the Sunday before Easter, late in
the evening, came a sudden ominous knock at the gate; some one was
hammering on the gate as though on a barrel-- boom, boom, boom! The
drowsy cook went flopping with her bare feet through the puddles, as she
ran to open the gate.
"Please open," said some one outside in a thick bass. "There is a
telegram for you."
Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time for
some reason she felt numb with terror. With shaking hands she opened the
telegram and read as follows:
"IVAN PETROVITCH DIED SUDDENLY TO-DAY. AWAITING IMMATE INSTRUCTIONS
FUFUNERAL TUESDAY."
That was how it was written in the telegram--"fufuneral," and the
utterly incomprehensible word "immate." It was signed by the stage
manager of the operatic company.
"My darling!" sobbed Olenka. "Vanka, my precious, my darling! Why did I
ever meet you! Why did I know you and love you! Your poor heart-broken
Olenka is alone without you!"
Kukin's funeral took place on Tuesday in Moscow, Olenka returned home on
Wednesday, and as soon as she got indoors, she threw herself on her bed
and sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door, and in the
street.
"Poor darling!" the neighbours said, as they crossed themselves. "Olga
Semyonovna, poor darling! How she does take on!"
Three months later Olenka was coming home from mass, melancholy and in
deep mourning. It happened that one of her neighbours, Vassily Andreitch
Pustovalov, returning home from church, walked back beside her. He was
the manager at Babakayev's, the timber merchant's. He wore a straw hat,
a white waistcoat, and a gold watch-chain, and looked more a country
gentleman than a man in trade.
"Everything happens as it is ordained, Olga Semyonovna," he said
gravely, with a sympathetic note in his voice; "and if any of our dear
ones die, it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought have
fortitude and bear it submissively."
After seeing Olenka to her gate, he said good-bye and went on. All day
afterwards she heard his sedately dignified voice, and whenever she shut
her eyes she saw his dark beard. She liked him very much. And apparently
she had made an impression on him too, for not long afterwards an
elderly lady, with whom she was only slightly acquainted, came to drink
coffee with her, and as soon as she was seated at table began to talk
about Pustovalov, saying that he was an excellent man whom one could
thoroughly depend upon, and that any girl would be glad to marry him.
Three days later Pustovalov came himself. He did not stay long, only
about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left, Olenka
loved him--loved him so much that she lay awake all night in a perfect
fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was
quickly arranged, and then came the wedding.
Pustovalov and Olenka got on very well together when they were married.
Usually he sat in the office till dinner-time, then he went out on
business, while Olenka took his place, and sat in the office till
evening, making up accounts and booking orders.
"Timber gets dearer every year; the price rises twenty per cent," she
would say to her customers and friends. "Only fancy we used to sell
local timber, and now Vassitchka always has to go for wood to the
Mogilev district. And the freight!" she would add, covering her cheeks
with her hands in horror. "The freight!"
It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and
ages, and that the most important and necessary thing in life was
timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the very
sound of words such as "baulk," "post," "beam," "pole," "scantling,"
"batten," "lath," "plank," etc.
At night when she was asleep she dreamed of perfect mountains of planks
and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber somewhere far
away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of six-inch beams forty feet
high, standing on end, was marching upon the timber-yard; that logs,
beams, and boards knocked together with the resounding crash of dry
wood, kept falling and getting up again, piling themselves on each
other. Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her
tenderly: "Olenka, what's the matter, darling? Cross yourself!"
Her husband's ideas were hers. If he thought the room was too hot, or
that business was slack, she thought the same. Her husband did not care
for entertainments, and on holidays he stayed at home. She did likewise.
"You are always at home or in the office," her friends said to her. "You
should go to the theatre, darling, or to the circus."
"Vassitchka and I have no time to go to theatres," she would answer
sedately. "We have no time for nonsense. What's the use of these
theatres?"
On Saturdays Pustovalov and she used to go to the evening service; on
holidays to early mass, and they walked side by side with softened faces
as they came home from church. There was a pleasant fragrance about them
both, and her silk dress rustled agreeably. At home they drank tea, with
fancy bread and jams of various kinds, and afterwards they ate pie.
Every day at twelve o'clock there was a savoury smell of beet-root soup
and of mutton or duck in their yard, and on fast-days of fish, and no
one could pass the gate without feeling hungry. In the office the
samovar was always boiling, and customers were regaled with tea and
cracknels. Once a week the couple went to the baths and returned side by
side, both red in the face.
"Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God," Olenka used to say to
her acquaintances. "I wish every one were as well off as Vassitchka and
I."
When Pustovalov went away to buy wood in the Mogilev district, she
missed him dreadfully, lay awake and cried. A young veterinary surgeon
in the army, called Smirnin, to whom they had let their lodge, used
sometimes to come in in the evening. He used to talk to her and play
cards with her, and this entertained her in her husband's absence. She
was particularly interested in what he told her of his home life. He was
married and had a little boy, but was separated from his wife because
she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her and used to send
her forty roubles a month for the maintenance of their son. And hearing
of all this, Olenka sighed and shook her head. She was sorry for him.
"Well, God keep you," she used to say to him at parting, as she lighted
him down the stairs with a candle. "Thank you for coming to cheer me up,
and may the Mother of God give you health."
And she always expressed herself with the same sedateness and dignity,
the same reasonableness, in imitation of her husband. As the veterinary
surgeon was disappearing behind the door below, she would say:
"You know, Vladimir Platonitch, you'd better make it up with your wife.
You should forgive her for the sake of your son. You may be sure the
little fellow understands."
And when Pustovalov came back, she told him in a low voice about the
veterinary surgeon and his unhappy home life, and both sighed and shook
their heads and talked about the boy, who, no doubt, missed his father,
and by some strange connection of ideas, they went up to the holy ikons,
bowed to the ground before them and prayed that God would give them
children.
And so the Pustovalovs lived for six years quietly and peaceably in love
and complete harmony.
But behold! one winter day after drinking hot tea in the office, Vassily
Andreitch went out into the yard without his cap on to see about sending
off some timber, caught cold and was taken ill. He had the best doctors,
but he grew worse and died after four months' illness. And Olenka was a
widow once more.
"I've nobody, now you've left me, my darling," she sobbed, after her
husband's funeral. "How can I live without you, in wretchedness and
misery! Pity me, good people, all alone in the world!"
She went about dressed in black with long "weepers," and gave up wearing
hat and gloves for good. She hardly ever went out, except to church, or
to her husband's grave, and led the life of a nun. It was not till six
months later that she took off the weepers and opened the shutters of
the windows. She was sometimes seen in the mornings, going with her cook
to market for provisions, but what went on in her house and how she
lived now could only be surmised. People guessed, from seeing her
drinking tea in her garden with the veterinary surgeon, who read the
newspaper aloud to her, and from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew
at the post-office, she said to her:
"There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town, and that's the
cause of all sorts of epidemics. One is always hearing of people's
getting infection from the milk supply, or catching diseases from horses
and cows. The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for
as the health of human beings."
She repeated the veterinary surgeon's words, and was of the same opinion
as he about everything. It was evident that she could not live a year
without some attachment, and had found new happiness in the lodge. In
any one else this would have been censured, but no one could think ill
of Olenka; everything she did was so natural. Neither she nor the
veterinary surgeon said anything to other people of the change in their
relations, and tried, indeed, to conceal it, but without success, for
Olenka could not keep a secret. When he had visitors, men serving in his
regiment, and she poured out tea or served the supper, she would begin
talking of the cattle plague, of the foot and mouth disease, and of the
municipal slaughterhouses. He was dreadfully embarrassed, and when the
guests had gone, he would seize her by the hand and hiss angrily:
"I've asked you before not to talk about what you don't understand. When
we veterinary surgeons are talking among ourselves, please don't put
your word in. It's really annoying."
And she would look at him with astonishment and dismay, and ask him in
alarm: "But, Voloditchka, what _am_ I to talk about?"
And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him, begging him not to be
angry, and they were both happy.
But this happiness did not last long. The veterinary surgeon departed,
departed for ever with his regiment, when it was transferred to a
distant place--to Siberia, it may be. And Olenka was left alone.
Now she was absolutely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his
armchair lay in the attic, covered with dust and lame of one leg. She
got thinner and plainer, and when people met her in the street they did
not look at her as they used to, and did not smile to her; evidently her
best years were over and left behind, and now a new sort of life had
begun for her, which did not bear thinking about. In the evening Olenka
sat in the porch, and heard the band playing and the fireworks popping
in the Tivoli, but now the sound stirred no response. She looked into
her yard without interest, thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and
afterwards, when night came on she went to bed and dreamed of her empty
yard. She ate and drank as it were unwillingly.
And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the
objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any
opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful
it is not to have any opinions! One sees a bottle, for instance, or the
rain, or a peasant driving in his cart, but what the bottle is for, or
the rain, or the peasant, and what is the meaning of it, one can't say,
and could not even for a thousand roubles. When she had Kukin, or
Pustovalov, or the veterinary surgeon, Olenka could explain everything,
and give her opinion about anything you like, but now there was the same
emptiness in her brain and in her heart as there was in her yard
outside. And it was as harsh and as bitter as wormwood in the mouth.
Little by little the town grew in all directions. The road became a
street, and where the Tivoli and the timber-yard had been, there were
new turnings and houses. How rapidly time passes! Olenka's house grew
dingy, the roof got rusty, the shed sank on one side, and the whole yard
was overgrown with docks and stinging-nettles. Olenka herself had grown
plain and elderly; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul, as
before, was empty and dreary and full of bitterness. In winter she sat
at her window and looked at the snow. When she caught the scent of
spring, or heard the chime of the church bells, a sudden rush of
memories from the past came over her, there was a tender ache in her
heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears; but this was only for a
minute, and then came emptiness again and the sense of the futility of
life. The black kitten, Briska, rubbed against her and purred softly,
but Olenka was not touched by these feline caresses. That was not what
she needed. She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her
whole soul and reason--that would give her ideas and an object in life,
and would warm her old blood. And she would shake the kitten off her
skirt and say with vexation:
"Get along; I don't want you!"
And so it was, day after day and year after year, and no joy, and no
opinions. Whatever Mavra, the cook, said she accepted.
One hot July day, towards evening, just as the cattle were being driven
away, and the whole yard was full of dust, some one suddenly knocked at
the gate. Olenka went to open it herself and was dumbfounded when she
looked out: she saw Smirnin, the veterinary surgeon, grey-headed, and
dressed as a civilian. She suddenly remembered everything. She could not
help crying and letting her head fall on his breast without uttering a
word, and in the violence of her feeling she did not notice how they
both walked into the house and sat down to tea.
"My dear Vladimir Platonitch! What fate has brought you?" she muttered,
trembling with joy.
"I want to settle here for good, Olga Semyonovna," he told her. "I have
resigned my post, and have come to settle down and try my luck on my own
account. Besides, it's time for my boy to go to school. He's a big boy.
I am reconciled with my wife, you know."
"Where is she?' asked Olenka.
"She's at the hotel with the boy, and I'm looking for lodgings."
"Good gracious, my dear soul! Lodgings? Why not have my house? Why
shouldn't that suit you? Why, my goodness, I wouldn't take any rent!"
cried Olenka in a flutter, beginning to cry again. "You live here, and
the lodge will do nicely for me. Oh dear! how glad I am!"
Next day the roof was painted and the walls were whitewashed, and
Olenka, with her arms akimbo walked about the yard giving directions.
Her face was beaming with her old smile, and she was brisk and alert as
though she had waked from a long sleep. The veterinary's wife arrived--a
thin, plain lady, with short hair and a peevish expression. With her was
her little Sasha, a boy of ten, small for his age, blue-eyed, chubby,
with dimples in his cheeks. And scarcely had the boy walked into the
yard when he ran after the cat, and at once there was the sound of his
gay, joyous laugh.
"Is that your puss, auntie?" he asked Olenka. "When she has little ones,
do give us a kitten. Mamma is awfully afraid of mice."
Olenka talked to him, and gave him tea. Her heart warmed and there was a
sweet ache in her bosom, as though the boy had been her own child. And
when he sat at the table in the evening, going over his lessons, she
looked at him with deep tenderness and pity as she murmured to herself:
"You pretty pet! . . . my precious! . . . Such a fair little thing, and
so clever."
"'An island is a piece of land which is entirely surrounded by water,'"
he read aloud.
"An island is a piece of land," she repeated, and this was the first
opinion to which she gave utterance with positive conviction after so
many years of silence and dearth of ideas.
Now she had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked to Sasha's
parents, saying how difficult the lessons were at the high schools, but
that yet the high school was better than a commercial one, since with a
high-school education all careers were open to one, such as being a
doctor or an engineer.
Sasha began going to the high school. His mother departed to Harkov to
her sister's and did not return; his father used to go off every day to
inspect cattle, and would often be away from home for three days
together, and it seemed to Olenka as though Sasha was entirely
abandoned, that he was not wanted at home, that he was being starved,
and she carried him off to her lodge and gave him a little room there.
And for six months Sasha had lived in the lodge with her. Every morning
Olenka came into his bedroom and found him fast asleep, sleeping
noiselessly with his hand under his cheek. She was sorry to wake him.
"Sashenka," she would say mournfully, "get up, darling. It's time for
school."
He would get up, dress and say his prayers, and then sit down to
breakfast, drink three glasses of tea, and eat two large cracknels and a
half a buttered roll. All this time he was hardly awake and a little
ill-humoured in consequence.
"You don't quite know your fable, Sashenka," Olenka would say, looking
at him as though he were about to set off on a long journey. "What a lot
of trouble I have with you! You must work and do your best, darling, and
obey your teachers."
"Oh, do leave me alone!" Sasha would say.
Then he would go down the street to school, a little figure, wearing a
big cap and carrying a satchel on his shoulder. Olenka would follow him
noiselessly.
"Sashenka!" she would call after him, and she would pop into his hand a
date or a caramel. When he reached the street where the school was, he
would feel ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman, he would
turn round and say:
"You'd better go home, auntie. I can go the rest of the way alone."
She would stand still and look after him fixedly till he had disappeared
at the school-gate.
Ah, how she loved him! Of her former attachments not one had been so
deep; never had her soul surrendered to any feeling so spontaneously, so
disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts were
aroused. For this little boy with the dimple in his cheek and the big
school cap, she would have given her whole life, she would have given it
with joy and tears of tenderness. Why? Who can tell why?
When she had seen the last of Sasha, she returned home, contented and
serene, brimming over with love; her face, which had grown younger
during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked
at her with pleasure.
"Good-morning, Olga Semyonovna, darling. How are you, darling?"
"The lessons at the high school are very difficult now," she would
relate at the market. "It's too much; in the first class yesterday they
gave him a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation and a
problem. You know it's too much for a little chap."
And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons, and the
school books, saying just what Sasha said.
At three o'clock they had dinner together: in the evening they learned
their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed, she would
stay a long time making the Cross over him and murmuring a prayer; then
she would go to bed and dream of that far-away misty future when Sasha
would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have
a big house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and
have children. . . . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same
thing, and tears would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes, while
the black cat lay purring beside her: "Mrr, mrr, mrr."
Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate.
Olenka would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing. Half a
minute later would come another knock.
"It must be a telegram from Harkov," she would think, beginning to
tremble from head to foot. "Sasha's mother is sending for him from
Harkov. . . . Oh, mercy on us!"
She was in despair. Her head, her hands, and her feet would turn chill,
and she would feel that she was the most unhappy woman in the world. But
another minute would pass, voices would be heard: it would turn out to
be the veterinary surgeon coming home from the club.
"Well, thank God!" she would think.
And gradually the load in her heart would pass off, and she would feel
at ease. She would go back to bed thinking of Sasha, who lay sound
asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep:
"I'll give it you! Get away! Shut up!"
ARIADNE
ON the deck of a steamer sailing from Odessa to Sevastopol, a rather
good-looking gentleman, with a little round beard, came up to me to
smoke, and said:
"Notice those Germans sitting near the shelter? Whenever Germans or
Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool,
or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians
get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects--
but especially women."
This gentleman's face was familiar to me already. We had returned from
abroad the evening before in the same train, and at Volotchisk when the
luggage was being examined by the Customs, I saw him standing with a
lady, his travelling companion, before a perfect mountain of trunks and
baskets filled with ladies' clothes, and I noticed how embarrassed and
downcast he was when he had to pay duty on some piece of silk frippery,
and his companion protested and threatened to make a complaint.
Afterwards, on the way to Odessa, I saw him carrying little pies and
oranges to the ladies' compartment.
It was rather damp; the vessel swayed a little, and the ladies had
retired to their cabins.
The gentleman with the little round beard sat down beside me and
continued:
"Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract
subjects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter
nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order. The
Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity
even in a farce. We're just the same: when we have got to talk of
trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view. It comes from
a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We talk so often about
women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied. We take too ideal a view of
women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give
us; we get something utterly different from what we want, and the result
is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, and inward suffering, and if any
one is suffering, he's bound to talk of it. It does not bore you to go
on with this conversation?
"No, not in the least."
"In that case, allow me to introduce myself," said my companion, rising
from his seat a little:
"Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort. . . . You I know
very well."
He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly
expression:
"A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant
conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it
down to our having been slave-owners and so on; I take quite a different
view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We
want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and
to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and poeticize
those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms.
Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised, sensuality is
ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by
those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and
exalted; and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over
Raphael's Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure
you there is no affectation about it. But the trouble is that when we
have been married or been intimate with a woman for some two or three
years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with
others, and again--disappointment, again--repulsion, and in the long run
we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair,
undeveloped, cruel--in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably
inferior to us men. And in our dissatisfaction and disappointment there
is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk about what we've been so
cruelly deceived in."
While Shamohin was talking I noticed that the Russian language and our
Russian surroundings gave him great pleasure. This was probably because
he had been very homesick abroad. Though he praised the Russians and
ascribed to them a rare idealism, he did not disparage foreigners, and
that I put down to his credit. It could be seen, too, that there was
some uneasiness in his soul, that he wanted to talk more of himself than
of women, and that I was in for a long story in the nature of a
confession. And when we had asked for a bottle of wine and had each of
us drunk a glass, this was how he did in fact begin:
"I remember in a novel of Weltmann's some one says, 'So that's the
story!' and some one else answers, 'No, that's not the story-- that's
only the introduction to the story.' In the same way what I've said so
far is only the introduction; what I really want to tell you is my own
love story. Excuse me, I must ask you again; it won't bore you to
listen?"
I told him it would not, and he went on:
The scene of my story is laid in the Moscow province in one of its
northern districts. The scenery there, I must tell you, is exquisite.
Our homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream, where the water
chatters noisily day and night: imagine a big old garden, neat flower-
beds, beehives, a kitchen-garden, and below it a river with leafy
willows, which, when there is a heavy dew on them, have a lustreless
look as though they had turned grey; and on the other side a meadow, and
beyond the meadow on the upland a terrible, dark pine forest. In that
forest delicious, reddish agarics grow in endless profusion, and elks
still live in its deepest recesses. When I am nailed up in my coffin I
believe I shall still dream of those early mornings, you know, when the
sun hurts your eyes: or the wonderful spring evenings when the
nightingales and the landrails call in the garden and beyond the garden,
and sounds of the harmonica float across from the village, while they
play the piano indoors and the stream babbles . . . when there is such
music, in fact, that one wants at the same time to cry and to sing
aloud.
We have not much arable land, but our pasture makes up for it, and with
the forest yields about two thousand roubles a year. I am the only son
of my father; we are both modest persons, and with my father's pension
that sum was amply sufficient for us.
The first three years after finishing at the university I spent in the
country, looking after the estate and constantly expecting to be elected
on some local assembly; but what was most important, I was violently in
love with an extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating girl. She was the
sister of our neighbour, Kotlovitch, a ruined landowner who had on his
estate pine-apples, marvellous peaches, lightning conductors, a fountain
in the courtyard, and at the same time not a farthing in his pocket. He
did nothing and knew how to do nothing. He was as flabby as though he
had been made of boiled turnip; he used to doctor the peasants by
homeopathy and was interested in spiritualism. He was, however, a man of
great delicacy and mildness, and by no means a fool, but I have no
fondness for these gentlemen who converse with spirits and cure peasant
women by magnetism. In the first place, the ideas of people who are not
intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult
to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have
nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect
on sensitive people. I did not care for his appearance either. He was
tall, stout, white-skinned, with a little head, little shining eyes, and
chubby white fingers. He did not shake hands, but kneaded one's hands in
his. And he was always apologising. If he asked for anything it was
"Excuse me"; if he gave you anything it was "Excuse me" too.
As for his sister, she was a character out of a different opera. I must
explain that I had not been acquainted with the Kotlovitches in my
childhood and early youth, for my father had been a professor at N., and
we had for many years lived away. When I did make their acquaintance the
girl was twenty-two, had left school long before, and had spent two or
three years in Moscow with a wealthy aunt who brought her out into
society. When I was introduced and first had to talk to her, what struck
me most of all was her rare and beautiful name--Ariadne. It suited her
so wonderfully! She was a brunette, very thin, very slender, supple,
elegant, and extremely graceful, with refined and exceedingly noble
features. Her eyes were shining, too, but her brother's shone with a
cold sweetness, mawkish as sugar-candy, while hers had the glow of
youth, proud and beautiful. She conquered me on the first day of our
acquaintance, and indeed it was inevitable. My first impression was so
overwhelming that to this day I cannot get rid of my illusions; I am
still tempted to imagine that nature had some grand, marvellous design
when she created that girl.
Ariadne's voice, her walk, her hat, even her footprints on the sandy
bank where she used to angle for gudgeon, filled me with delight and a
passionate hunger for life. I judged of her spiritual being from her
lovely face and lovely figure, and every word, every smile of Ariadne's
bewitched me, conquered me and forced me to believe in the loftiness of
her soul. She was friendly, ready to talk, gay and simple in her
manners. She had a poetic belief in God, made poetic reflections about
death, and there was such a wealth of varying shades in her spiritual
organisation that even her faults seemed in her to carry with them
peculiar, charming qualities. Suppose she wanted a new horse and had no
money--what did that matter? Something might be sold or pawned, or if
the steward swore that nothing could possibly be sold or pawned, the
iron roofs might be torn off the lodges and taken to the factory, or at
the very busiest time the farm-horses might be driven to the market and
sold there for next to nothing. These unbridled desires reduced the
whole household to despair at times, but she expressed them with such
refinement that everything was forgiven her; all things were permitted
her as to a goddess or to Cæsar's wife. My love was pathetic and was
soon noticed by every one--my father, the neighbours, and the peasants--
and they all sympathised with me. When I stood the workmen vodka, they
would bow and say: "May the Kotlovitch young lady be your bride, please
God!"
And Ariadne herself knew that I loved her. She would often ride over on
horseback or drive in the char-Ã -banc to see us, and would spend whole
days with me and my father. She made great friends with the old man, and
he even taught her to bicycle, which was his favourite amusement.
I remember helping her to get on the bicycle one evening, and she looked
so lovely that I felt as though I were burning my hands when I touched
her. I shuddered with rapture, and when the two of them, my old father
and she, both looking so handsome and elegant, bicycled side by side
along the main road, a black horse ridden by the steward dashed aside on
meeting them, and it seemed to me that it dashed aside because it too
was overcome by her beauty. My love, my worship, touched Ariadne and
softened her; she had a passionate longing to be captivated like me and
to respond with the same love. It was so poetical!
But she was incapable of really loving as I did, for she was cold and
already somewhat corrupted. There was a demon in her, whispering to her
day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having no definite
idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose life had been
given her, she never pictured herself in the future except as very
wealthy and distinguished, she had visions of balls, races, liveries, of
sumptuous drawing-rooms, of a salon of her own, and of a perfect swarm
of counts, princes, ambassadors, celebrated painters and artists, all of
them adoring her and in ecstasies over her beauty and her dresses. . . .
This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of
the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to
me, to nature, and to music. Meanwhile time was passing, and still there
were no ambassadors on the scene. Ariadne went on living with her
brother, the spiritualist: things went from bad to worse, so that she
had nothing to buy hats and dresses with, and had to resort to all sorts
of tricks and dodges to conceal her poverty.
As luck would have it, a certain Prince Maktuev, a wealthy man but an
utterly insignificant person, had paid his addresses to her when she was
living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him, point-blank. But
now she was fretted by the worm of repentance that she had refused him;
just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of kvass with
cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the
recollection of the prince, and yet she would say to me: "Say what you
like, there is something inexplicable, fascinating, in a title. . . ."
She dreamed of a title, of a brilliant position, and at the same time
she did not want to let me go. However one may dream of ambassadors
one's heart is not a stone, and one has wistful feelings for one's
youth. Ariadne tried to fall in love, made a show of being in love, and
even swore that she loved me. But I am a highly strung and sensitive
man; when I am loved I feel it even at a distance, without vows and
assurances; at once I felt as it were a coldness in the air, and when
she talked to me of love, it seemed to me as though I were listening to
the singing of a metal nightingale. Ariadne was herself aware that she
was lacking in something. She was vexed and more than once I saw her
cry. Another time--can you imagine it?--all of a sudden she embraced me
and kissed me. It happened in the evening on the river-bank, and I saw
by her eyes that she did not love me, but was embracing me from
curiosity, to test herself and to see what came of it. And I felt
dreadful. I took her hands and said to her in despair: "These caresses
without love cause me suffering!"
"What a queer fellow you are!" she said with annoyance, and walked away.
Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should
have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate was pleased
to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a new personage
appeared on our horizon. Ariadne's brother had a visit from an old
university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom
coachmen and footmen used to say: "An entertaining gentleman." He was a
man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured
bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff,
well-kept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple.
He used to wear pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not
pronounce either _r_ or _l_. He was always in good spirits, everything
amused him.
He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had acquired
two houses in Moscow as part of his wife's dowry. He began doing them up
and building a bath-house, and was completely ruined. Now his wife and
four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he had
to support them--and this amused him. He was thirty-six and his wife was
by now forty-two, and that, too, amused him. His mother, a conceited,
sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and
lived apart with a perfect menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to
allow her seventy-five roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of
taste, liked lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the
Hermitage; he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed
him two thousand roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days
together he would run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying
is, looking for some one to borrow from--and this, too, amused him. He
had come to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest
from family life. At dinner, at supper, and on our walks, he talked
about his wife, about his mother, about his creditors, about the
bailiffs, and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and assured us
that, thanks to his talent for borrowing, he had made a great number of
agreeable acquaintances. He laughed without ceasing and we laughed too.
Moreover, in his company we spent our time differently. I was more
inclined to quiet, so to say idyllic pleasures; I liked fishing, evening
walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks,
hunting. He used to get up picnics three times a week, and Ariadne, with
an earnest and inspired face, used to write a list of oysters,
champagne, sweets, and used to send me into Moscow to get them, without
inquiring, of course, whether I had money. And at the picnics there were
toasts and laughter, and again mirthful descriptions of how old his wife
was, what fat lap-dogs his mother had, and what charming people his
creditors were.
Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar
and at the same time, in reality, infinitely beneath himself and created
for his pleasure. He would sometimes stand still before some magnificent
landscape and say: "It would be nice to have tea here."
One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he
nodded towards her and said:
"She's thin, and that's what I like; I don't like fat women."
This made me wince. I asked him not to speak like that about women
before me. He looked at me in surprise and said:
"What is there amiss in my liking thin women and not caring for fat
ones?"
I made no answer. Afterwards, being in very good spirits and a trifle
elevated, he said:
"I've noticed Ariadne Grigoryevna likes you. I can't understand why you
don't go in and win."
His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment I told
him how I looked at love and women.
"I don't know," he sighed; "to my thinking, a woman's a woman and a
man's a man. Ariadne Grigoryevna may be poetical and exalted, as you
say, but it doesn't follow that she must be superior to the laws of
nature. You see for yourself that she has reached the age when she must
have a husband or a lover. I respect women as much as you do, but I
don't think certain relations exclude poetry. Poetry's one thing and
love is another. It's just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of
nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite
another."
When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close by
and make fun of me, or lecture me on the conduct of life.
"I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair," he
would say. "You are young, handsome, interesting--in fact, you're a man
not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och! I can't stand these
fellows who are old at twenty-eight! I'm nearly ten years older than you
are, and yet which of us is the younger? Ariadne Grigoryevna, which?"
"You, of course," Ariadne answered him.
And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which we
stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me angrily:
"You're really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me! A man ought to be
able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad,
to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and
insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!"
She was angry in earnest, and went on:
"To succeed, a man must be resolute and bold. Lubkov is not so handsome
as you are, but he is more interesting. He will always succeed with
women because he's not like you; he's a man. . . ."
And there was actually a note of exasperation in her voice.
One day at supper she began saying, not addressing me, that if she were
a man she would not stagnate in the country, but would travel, would
spend the winter somewhere aboard--in Italy, for instance. Oh, Italy! At
this point my father unconsciously poured oil on the flames; he began
telling us at length about Italy, how splendid it was there, the
exquisite scenery, the museums. Ariadne suddenly conceived a burning
desire to go to Italy. She positively brought her fist down on the table
and her eyes flashed as she said: "I must go!"
After that came conversations every day about Italy: how splendid it
would be in Italy--ah, Italy!--oh, Italy! And when Ariadne looked at me
over her shoulder, from her cold and obstinate expression I saw that in
her dreams she had already conquered Italy with all its salons,
celebrated foreigners and tourists, and there was no holding her back
now. I advised her to wait a little, to put off her tour for a year or
two, but she frowned disdainfully and said:
"You're as prudent as an old woman!"
Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very cheaply,
and he, too, would go to Italy and have a rest there from family life.
I behaved, I confess, as naïvely as a schoolboy.
Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of something terrible and
extraordinary, I tried as far as possible not to leave them alone
together, and they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in they
would pretend they had just been kissing one another, and so on. But lo
and behold, one fine morning, her plump, white-skinned brother, the
spiritualist, made his appearance and expressed his desire to speak to
me alone.
He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy he
could never resist reading another person's letter, if it lay before him
on the table. And now he admitted that he had by chance read a letter of
Lubkov's to Ariadne.
"From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad. My
dear fellow, I am very much upset! Explain it to me for goodness' sake.
I can make nothing of it!"
As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and
smelling of boiled beef.
"Excuse me for revealing the secret of this letter to you, but you are
Ariadne's friend, she respects you. Perhaps you know something of it.
She wants to go away, but with whom? Mr. Lubkov is proposing to go with
her. Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lubkov; he is a married
man, he has children, and yet he is making a declaration of love; he is
writing to Ariadne 'darling.' Excuse me, but it is so strange!"
I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an ache
in my chest, as if a three-cornered stone had been driven into it.
Kotlovitch sank helplessly into an easy-chair, and his hands fell limply
at his sides.
"What can I do?" I inquired.
"Persuade her. . . . Impress her mind. . . . Just consider, what is
Lubkov to her? Is he a match for her? Oh, good God! How awful it is, how
awful it is!" he went on, clutching his head. "She has had such splendid
offers--Prince Maktuev and . . . and others. The prince adores her, and
only last Wednesday week his late grandfather, Ilarion, declared
positively that Ariadne would be his wife--positively! His grandfather
Ilarion is dead, but he is a wonderfully intelligent person; we call up
his spirit every day."
After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting
myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up. Then I
sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father and set
off for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.
Of course, a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that be as
simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be that I, a
cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to
explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact
that her bodily formation is different from mine? Oh, how awful that
would be! I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius
of man has struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that,
if he has not conquered it, he has at least succeeded in tangling it in
a net-work of illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at any
rate, it is no longer a simple instinct of my animal nature as with a
dog or a toad, but is real love, and every embrace is spiritualised by a
pure impulse of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality, a
disgust for the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of
generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of my
nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural and inevitable in
our day as my ears' not being able to move and my not being covered with
fur? I fancy that's how the majority of civilised people look at it, so
that the absence of the moral, poetical element in love is treated in
these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of atavism; they say it is a
symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity. It is true that, in
poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in
them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries
for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better
to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and
man being man.
In Tiflis I received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne
Grigoryevna had on such a day gone abroad, intending to spend the whole
winter away. A month later I returned home. It was by now autumn. Every
week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting letters on scented
paper, written in an excellent literary style. It is my opinion that
every woman can be a writer. Ariadne described in great detail how it
had not been easy for her to make it up with her aunt and induce the
latter to give her a thousand roubles for the journey, and what a long
time she had spent in Moscow trying to find an old lady, a distant
relation, in order to persuade her to go with her. Such a profusion of
detail suggested fiction, and I realised, of course, that she had no
chaperon with her.
Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her, also scented and
literary. She wrote that she had missed me, missed my beautiful,
intelligent, loving eyes. She reproached me affectionately for wasting
my youth, for stagnating in the country when I might, like her, be
living in paradise under the palms, breathing the fragrance of the
orange-trees. And she signed herself "Your forsaken Ariadne." Two days
later came another letter in the same style, signed "Your forgotten
Ariadne." My mind was confused. I loved her passionately, I dreamed of
her every night, and then this "your forsaken," "your forgotten"--what
did it mean? What was it for? And then the dreariness of the country,
the long evenings, the disquieting thoughts of Lubkov. . . . The
uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned my days and nights; it became
unendurable. I could not bear it and went abroad.
Ariadne summoned me to Abbazzia. I arrived there on a bright warm day
after rain; the rain-drops were still hanging on the trees and
glistening on the huge, barrack-like dépendance where Ariadne and
Lubkov were living.
They were not at home. I went into the park; wandered about the avenues,
then sat down. An Austrian General, with his hands behind him, walked
past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as our generals wear. A
baby was wheeled by in a perambulator and the wheels squeaked on the
damp sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice passed, then a crowd of
Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then the Austrian General again. A
military band, only just arrived from Fiume, with glittering brass
instruments, sauntered by to the bandstand--they began playing.
Have you ever been at Abbazzia? It's a filthy little Slav town with only
one street, which stinks, and in which one can't walk after rain without
goloshes. I had read so much and always with such intense feeling about
this earthly paradise that when afterwards, holding up my trousers, I
cautiously crossed the narrow street, and in my ennui bought some hard
pears from an old peasant woman who, recognising me as a Russian, said:
"Tcheeteery" for "tchetyry" (four)--"davadtsat" for "dvadtsat" (twenty),
and when I wondered in perplexity where to go and what to do here, and
when I inevitably met Russians as disappointed as I was, I began to feel
vexed and ashamed. There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats
with coloured sails. From there I could see Fiume and the distant
islands covered with lilac mist, and it would have been picturesque if
the view over the bay had not been hemmed in by the hotels and their
dépendances--buildings in an absurd, trivial style of architecture,
with which the whole of that green shore has been covered by greedy
money grubbers, so that for the most part you see nothing in this little
paradise but windows, terraces, and little squares with tables and
waiters' black coats. There is a park such as you find now in every
watering-place abroad. And the dark, motionless, silent foliage of the
palms, and the bright yellow sand in the avenue, and the bright green
seats, and the glitter of the braying military horns--all this sickened
me in ten minutes! And yet one is obliged for some reason to spend ten
days, ten weeks, there!
Having been dragged reluctantly from one of these watering-places to
another, I have been more and more struck by the inconvenient and
niggardly life led by the wealthy and well-fed, the dulness and
feebleness of their imagination, the lack of boldness in their tastes
and desires. And how much happier are those tourists, old and young,
who, not having the money to stay in hotels, live where they can, admire
the view of the sea from the tops of the mountains, lying on the green
grass, walk instead of riding, see the forests and villages at close
quarters, observe the customs of the country, listen to its songs, fall
in love with its women. . . .
While I was sitting in the park, it began to get dark, and in the
twilight my Ariadne appeared, elegant and dressed like a princess; after
her walked Lubkov, wearing a new loose-fitting suit, bought probably in
Vienna.
"Why are you cross with me?" he was saying. "What have I done to you?"
Seeing me, she uttered a cry of joy, and probably, if we had not been in
the park, would have thrown herself on my neck. She pressed my hands
warmly and laughed; and I laughed too and almost cried with emotion.
Questions followed, of the village, of my father, whether I had seen her
brother, and so on. She insisted on my looking her straight in the face,
and asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics.
. . .
"How nice it all was really!" she sighed. "But we're not having a slow
time here either. We have a great many acquaintances, my dear, my best
of friends! To-morrow I will introduce you to a Russian family here, but
please buy yourself another hat." She scrutinised me and frowned.
"Abbazzia is not the country," she said; "here one must be _comme il
faut_."
Then we went to the restaurant. Ariadne was laughing and mischievous all
the time; she kept calling me "dear," "good," "clever," and seemed as
though she could not believe her eyes that I was with her. We sat on
till eleven o'clock, and parted very well satisfied both with the supper
and with each other.
Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as: "The son of a
distinguished professor whose estate is next to ours."
She talked to this family about nothing but estates and crops, and kept
appealing to me. She wanted to appear to be a very wealthy landowner,
and did, in fact, succeed in doing so. Her manner was superb like that
of a real aristocrat, which indeed she was by birth.
"But what a person my aunt is!" she said suddenly, looking at me with a
smile. "We had a slight tiff, and she has bolted off to Meran. What do
you say to that?"
Afterwards when we were walking in the park I asked her:
"What aunt were you talking of just now? What aunt is that?"
"That was a saving lie," laughed Ariadne. "They must not know I'm
without a chaperon."
After a moment's silence she came closer to me and said:
"My dear, my dear, do be friends with Lubkov. He is so unhappy! His wife
and mother are simply awful."
She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lubkov, and when she
was going up to bed she said good-night to him exactly as she did to me,
and their rooms were on different floors. All this made me hope that it
was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of love affair between
them, and I felt at ease when I met him. And when one day he asked me
for the loan of three hundred roubles, I gave it to him with the
greatest pleasure.
Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves and in nothing but enjoying
ourselves; we strolled in the park, we ate, we drank. Every day there
were conversations with the Russian family. By degrees I got used to the
fact that if I went into the park I should be sure to meet the old man
with jaundice, the Catholic priest, and the Austrian General, who always
carried a pack of little cards, and wherever it was possible sat down
and played patience, nervously twitching his shoulders. And the band
played the same thing over and over again.
At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants when
I was fishing or on a picnic party on a working day; here too I was
ashamed at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the workmen who
met us. It always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking:
"Why are you doing nothing?" And I was conscious of this feeling of
shame every day from morning to night. It was a strange, unpleasant,
monotonous time; it was only varied by Lubkov's borrowing from me now a
hundred, now fifty guldens, and being suddenly revived by the money as a
morphia-maniac is by morphia, beginning to laugh loudly at his wife, at
himself, at his creditors.
At last it began to be rainy and cold. We went to Italy, and I
telegraphed to my father begging him for mercy's sake to send me eight
hundred roubles to Rome. We stayed in Venice, in Bologna, in Florence,
and in every town invariably put up at an expensive hotel, where we were
charged separately for lights, and for service, and for heating, and for
bread at lunch, and for the right of having dinner by ourselves. We ate
enormously. In the morning they gave us _café complet_; at one o'clock
lunch: meat, fish, some sort of omelette, cheese, fruits, and wine. At
six o'clock dinner of eight courses with long intervals, during which we
drank beer and wine. At nine o'clock tea. At midnight Ariadne would
declare she was hungry, and ask for ham and boiled eggs. We would eat to
keep her company.
In the intervals between meals we used to rush about the museums and
exhibitions in continual anxiety for fear we should be late for dinner
or lunch. I was bored at the sight of the pictures; I longed to be at
home to rest; I was exhausted, looked about for a chair and
hypocritically repeated after other people: "How exquisite, what
atmosphere!" Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most
glaring objects. The shop windows hypnotised us; we went into ecstasies
over imitation brooches and bought a mass of useless trumpery.
The same thing happened in Rome, where it rained and there was a cold
wind. After a heavy lunch we went to look at St. Peter's, and thanks to
our replete condition and perhaps the bad weather, it made no sort of
impression on us, and detecting in each other an indifference to art, we
almost quarrelled.
The money came from my father. I went to get it, I remember, in the
morning. Lubkov went with me.
"The present cannot be full and happy when one has a past," said he. "I
have heavy burdens left on me by the past. However, if only I get the
money, it's no great matter, but if not, I'm in a fix. Would you believe
it, I have only eight francs left, yet I must send my wife a hundred and
my mother another. And we must live here too. Ariadne's like a child;
she won't enter into the position, and flings away money like a duchess.
Why did she buy a watch yesterday? And, tell me, what object is there in
our going on playing at being good children? Why, our hiding our
relations from the servants and our friends costs us from ten to fifteen
francs a day, as I have to have a separate room. What's the object of
it?"
I felt as though a sharp stone had been turned round in my chest. There
was no uncertainty now; it was all clear to me. I turned cold all over,
and at once made a resolution to give up seeing them, to run away from
them, to go home at once. . . .
"To get on terms with a woman is easy enough," Lubkov went on. "You have
only to undress her; but afterwards what a bore it is, what a silly
business!"
When I counted over the money I received he said:
"If you don't lend me a thousand francs, I am faced with complete ruin.
Your money is the only resource left to me."
I gave him the money, and he at once revived and began laughing about
his uncle, a queer fish, who could never keep his address secret from
his wife. When I reached the hotel I packed and paid my bill. I had
still to say good-bye to Ariadne.
I knocked at the door.
"Entrez!"
In her room was the usual morning disorder: tea-things on the table, an
unfinished roll, an eggshell; a strong overpowering reek of scent. The
bed had not been made, and it was evident that two had slept in it.
Ariadne herself had only just got out of bed and was now with her hair
down in a flannel dressing-jacket.
I said good-morning to her, and then sat in silence for a minute while
she tried to put her hair tidy, and then I asked her, trembling all
over:
"Why . . . why . . . did you send for me here?"
Evidently she guessed what I was thinking; she took me by the hand and
said:
"I want you to be here, you are so pure."
I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling. And I was afraid I might
begin sobbing, too! I went out without saying another word, and within
an hour I was sitting in the train. All the journey, for some reason, I
imagined Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting to me, and all
the women I saw in the trains and at the stations looked to me, for some
reason, as if they too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting
and pitiable. I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who
should suddenly discover that all his gold coins were false. The pure,
gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for
so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman-
-all now were jeering and putting out their tongues at me. "Ariadne," I
kept asking with horror, "that young, intellectual, extraordinarily
beautiful girl, the daughter of a senator, carrying on an intrigue with
such an ordinary, uninteresting vulgarian? But why should she not love
Lubkov?" I answered myself. "In what is he inferior to me? Oh, let her
love any one she likes, but why lie to me? But why is she bound to be
open with me?" And so I went on over and over again till I was
stupefied.
It was cold in the train; I was travelling first class, but even so
there were three on a side, there were no double windows, the outer door
opened straight into the compartment, and I felt as though I were in the
stocks, cramped, abandoned, pitiful, and my legs were fearfully numb,
and at the same time I kept recalling how fascinating she had been that
morning in her dressing-jacket and with her hair down, and I was
suddenly overcome by such acute jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so
that my neighbours stared at me in wonder and positive alarm.
At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of the
winter; I'm fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts,
it's particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on one's fur jacket
and felt overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden
or in the yard, or to read in a well warmed room, to sit in my father's
study before the open fire, to wash in my country bath-house. . . . Only
if there is no mother in the house, no sister and no children, it is
somehow dreary on winter evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long
and quiet. And the warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely is this
lack felt. In the winter when I came back from abroad, the evenings were
endlessly long, I was intensely depressed, so depressed that I could not
even read; in the daytime I was coming and going, clearing away the snow
in the garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the evening
it was all up with me.
I had never cared for visitors before, but now I was glad of them, for I
knew there was sure to be talk of Ariadne. Kotlovitch, the spiritualist,
used often to come to talk about his sister, and sometimes he brought
with him his friend Prince Maktuev, who was as much in love with Ariadne
as I was. To sit in Ariadne's room, to finger the keys of her piano, to
look at her music was a necessity for the prince--he could not live
without it; and the spirit of his grandfather Ilarion was still
predicting that sooner or later she would be his wife. The prince
usually stayed a long time with us, from lunch to midnight, saying
nothing all the time; in silence he would drink two or three bottles of
beer, and from time to time, to show that he too was taking part in the
conversation, he would laugh an abrupt, melancholy, foolish laugh.
Before going home he would always take me aside and ask me in an
undertone: "When did you see Ariadne Grigoryevna last? Was she quite
well? I suppose she's not tired of being out there?"
Spring came on. There was the harrowing to do and then the sowing of
spring corn and clover. I was sad, but there was the feeling of spring.
One longed to accept the inevitable. Working in the fields and listening
to the larks, I asked myself: "Couldn't I have done with this question
of personal happiness once and for all? Couldn't I lay aside my fancy
and marry a simple peasant girl?"
Suddenly when we were at our very busiest, I got a letter with the
Italian stamp, and the clover and the beehives and the calves and the
peasant girl all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote that
she was profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached me for not
holding out a helping hand to her, for looking down upon her from the
heights of my virtue and deserting her at the moment of danger. All this
was written in a large, nervous handwriting with blots and smudges, and
it was evident that she wrote in haste and distress. In conclusion she
besought me to come and save her. Again my anchor was hauled up and I
was carried away. Ariadne was in Rome. I arrived late in the evening,
and when she saw me, she sobbed and threw herself on my neck. She had
not changed at all that winter, and was just as young and charming. We
had supper together and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all
the time she kept telling me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was.
"Don't remind me of that creature!" she cried. "He is loathsome and
disgusting to me!"
"But I thought you loved him," I said.
"Never," she said. "At first he struck me as original and aroused my
pity, that was all. He is insolent and takes a woman by storm. And
that's attractive. But we won't talk about him. That is a melancholy
page in my life. He has gone to Russia to get money. Serve him right! I
told him not to dare to come back."
She was living then, not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of two
rooms which she had decorated in her own taste, frigidly and
luxuriously.
After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances about
five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one salvation for
her.
I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed
in that. She was homesick for her native place, but her recollections of
the poverty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof
on her brother's house, roused a shudder of disgust, and when I
suggested going home to her, she squeezed my hands convulsively and
said:
"No, no, I shall die of boredom there!"
Then my love entered upon its final phase.
"Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little," said Ariadne,
bending over to me. "You're sulky and prudent, you're afraid to yield to
impulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that's dull. Come, I beg
you, I beseech you, be nice to me! . . . My pure one, my holy one, my
dear one, I love you so!"
I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of
nothing but rapture. To hold in one's arms a young and lovely body, with
bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and to
remember that she was there--she, my Ariadne!-- oh, it was not easy to
get used to that! But yet I did get used to it, and by degrees became
capable of reflecting on my new position. First of all, I realised, as
before, that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in
love, she was afraid of solitude, and, above all, I was healthy, young,
vigorous; she was sensual, like all cold people, as a rule--and we both
made a show of being united by a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I
realised something else, too.
We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we went to Paris, but there
we thought it cold and went back to Italy. We introduced ourselves
everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People readily made
our acquaintance and Ariadne had great social success everywhere. As she
took lessons in painting, she was called an artist, and only imagine,
that quite suited her, though she had not the slightest trace of talent.
She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee
and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat,
asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up
something, for instance roast beef, and she would eat it with a
melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would
eat apples and oranges.
The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an
amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute,
apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an
impulse such as makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its
antennæ. She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter,
with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one
conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation and
pretence. A man had only to come into our room--whoever it might be, a
waiter, or a baron--for her eyes, her expression, her voice to change,
even the contour of her figure was transformed. At the very first glance
at her then, you would have said there were no more wealthy and
fashionable people in Italy than we. She never met an artist or a
musician without telling him all sorts of lies about his remarkable
talent.
"You have such a talent!" she would say, in honeyed cadences, "I'm
really afraid of you. I think you must see right through people."
And all this simply in order to please, to be successful, to be
fascinating! She waked up every morning with the one thought of
"pleasing"! It was the aim and object of her life. If I had told her
that in such a house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not
attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted
every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I
was in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms
gave her the same sort of satisfaction that visitors used to feel in
tournaments. My subjection was not enough, and at nights, stretched out
like a tigress, uncovered--she was always too hot--she would read the
letters sent her by Lubkov; he besought her to return to Russia, vowing
if she did not he would rob or murder some one to get the money to come
to her. She hated him, but his passionate, slavish letters excited her.
She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if
somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully
she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all
Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended
me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, to vex me, say
all sorts of vulgar things, taunting me. One day when we were at the
summer villa of a lady of our acquaintance, and she lost her temper, she
even went so far as to say: "If you don't leave off boring me with your
sermons, I'll undress this minute and lie naked here on these flowers."
Often looking at her asleep, or eating, or trying to assume a naïve
expression, I wondered why that extraordinary beauty, grace, and
intelligence had been given her by God. Could it simply be for lolling
in bed, eating and lying, lying endlessly? And was she intelligent
really? She was afraid of three candles in a row, of the number
thirteen, was terrified of spells and bad dreams. She argued about free
love and freedom in general like a bigoted old woman, declared that
Boleslav Markevitch was a better writer than Turgenev. But she was
diabolically cunning and sharp, and knew how to seem a highly educated,
advanced person in company.
Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant or
kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to read
about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.
For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of
money. My poor father sent me his pension, all the little sums he
received, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one day he
answered me: "Non habeo," I sent him a desperate telegram in which I
besought him to mortgage the estate. A little later I begged him to get
money somehow on a second mortgage. He did this too without a murmur and
sent me every farthing. Ariadne despised the practical side of life; all
this was no concern of hers, and when flinging away thousands of francs
to satisfy her mad desires I groaned like an old tree, she would be
singing "Addio bella Napoli" with a light heart.
Little by little I grew cold to her and began to be ashamed of our tie.
I am not fond of pregnancy and confinements, but now I sometimes dreamed
of a child who would have been at least a formal justification of our
life. That I might not be completely disgusted with myself, I began
reading and visiting museums and galleries, gave up drinking and took to
eating very little. If one keeps oneself well in hand from morning to
night, one's heart seems lighter. I began to bore Ariadne too. The
people with whom she won her triumphs were, by the way, all of the
middling sort; as before, there were no ambassadors, there was no salon,
the money did not run to it, and this mortified her and made her sob,
and she announced to me at last that perhaps she would not be against
our returning to Russia.
And here we are on our way. For the last few months she has been
zealously corresponding with her brother; she evidently has some secret
projects, but what they are--God knows! I am sick of trying to fathom
her underhand schemes! But we're going, not to the country, but to Yalta
and afterwards to the Caucasus. She can only exist now at watering-
places, and if you knew how I hate all these watering-places, how
suffocated and ashamed I am in them. If I could be in the country now!
If I could only be working now, earning my bread by the sweat of my
brow, atoning for my follies. I am conscious of a superabundance of
energy and I believe that if I were to put that energy to work I could
redeem my estate in five years. But now, as you see, there is a
complication. Here we're not abroad, but in mother Russia; we shall have
to think of lawful wedlock. Of course, all attraction is over; there is
no trace left of my old love, but, however that may be, I am bound in
honour to marry her.
----
Shamohin, excited by his story, went below with me and we continued
talking about women. It was late. It appeared that he and I were in the
same cabin.
"So far it is only in the village that woman has not fallen behind man,"
said Shamohin. "There she thinks and feels just as man does, and
struggles with nature in the name of culture as zealously as he. In the
towns the woman of the bourgeois or intellectual class has long since
fallen behind, and is returning to her primitive condition. She is half
a human beast already, and, thanks to her, a great deal of what had been
won by human genius has been lost again; the woman gradually disappears
and in her place is the primitive female. This dropping-back on the part
of the educated woman is a real danger to culture; in her retrogressive
movement she tries to drag man after her and prevents him from moving
forward. That is incontestable."
I asked: "Why generalise? Why judge of all women from Ariadne alone? The
very struggle of women for education and sexual equality, which I look
upon as a struggle for justice, precludes any hypothesis of a retrograde
movement."
But Shamohin scarcely listened to me and he smiled distrustfully. He was
a passionate, convinced misogynist, and it was impossible to alter his
convictions.
"Oh, nonsense!" he interrupted. "When once a woman sees in me, not a
man, not an equal, but a male, and her one anxiety all her life is to
attract me--that is, to take possession of me--how can one talk of their
rights? Oh, don't you believe them; they are very, very cunning! We men
make a great stir about their emancipation, but they don't care about
their emancipation at all, they only pretend to care about it; they are
horribly cunning things, horribly cunning!"
I began to feel sleepy and weary of discussion. I turned over with my
face to the wall.
"Yes," I heard as I fell asleep--"yes, and it's our education that's at
fault, sir. In our towns, the whole education and bringing up of women
in its essence tends to develop her into the human beast --that is, to
make her attractive to the male and able to vanquish him. Yes, indeed"--
Shamohiri sighed--"little girls ought to be taught and brought up with
boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained
so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or
she always thinks she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her
cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover,
but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think
logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs
less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the
sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The
apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller
size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in
the general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the
physiological aspect, too--to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in
the first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all
women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the
fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then
there ought to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a
lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her
repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family
helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water--"
I heard no more, for I fell asleep.
Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp,
unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me,
brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their coat-
collars turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below;
a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the
Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with
the expression of a naughty, fretful child:
"Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick."
Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing
about on horseback with a couple of officers hardly able to keep up with
her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian cap,
sketching on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a little way
off. I too was introduced to her. She pressed my hand with great warmth,
and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in honeyed cadences for the
pleasure I had given her by my writings.
"Don't you believe her," Shamohin whispered to me, "she has never read a
word of them."
When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening Shamohin met me
with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.
"Prince Maktuev is here!" he said joyfully. "He came yesterday with her
brother, the spiritualist! Now I understand what she was writing to him
about! Oh, Lord!" he went on, gazing up to heaven, and pressing his
parcels to his bosom. "If she hits it off with the prince, it means
freedom, then I can go back to the country with my father!"
And he ran on.
"I begin to believe in spirits," he called to me, looking back. "The
spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the truth! Oh, if
only it is so!"
----
The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin's story ended I
don't know.
POLINKA
IT is one o'clock in the afternoon. Shopping is at its height at the
"Nouveauté's de Paris," a drapery establishment in one of the Arcades.
There is a monotonous hum of shopmen's voices, the hum one hears at
school when the teacher sets the boys to learn something by heart. This
regular sound is not interrupted by the laughter of lady customers nor
the slam of the glass door, nor the scurrying of the boys.
Polinka, a thin fair little person whose mother is the head of a
dressmaking establishment, is standing in the middle of the shop looking
about for some one. A dark-browed boy runs up to her and asks, looking
at her very gravely:
"What is your pleasure, madam?"
"Nikolay Timofeitch always takes my order," answers Polinka.
Nikolay Timofeitch, a graceful dark young man, fashionably dressed, with
frizzled hair and a big pin in his cravat, has already cleared a place
on the counter and is craning forward, looking at Polinka with a smile.
"Morning, Pelagea Sergeevna!" he cries in a pleasant, hearty baritone
voice. "What can I do for you?"
"Good-morning!" says Polinka, going up to him. "You see, I'm back again.
. . . Show me some gimp, please."
"Gimp--for what purpose?"
"For a bodice trimming--to trim a whole dress, in fact."
"Certainly."
Nickolay Timofeitch lays several kinds of gimp before Polinka; she looks
at the trimmings languidly and begins bargaining over them.
"Oh, come, a rouble's not dear," says the shopman persuasively, with a
condescending smile. "It's a French trimming, pure silk. . . . We have a
commoner sort, if you like, heavier. That's forty-five kopecks a yard;
of course, it's nothing like the same quality."
"I want a bead corselet, too, with gimp buttons," says Polinka, bending
over the gimp and sighing for some reason. "And have you any bead motifs
to match?"
"Yes."
Polinka bends still lower over the counter and asks softly:
"And why did you leave us so early on Thursday, Nikolay Timofeitch?"
"Hm! It's queer you noticed it," says the shopman, with a smirk. "You
were so taken up with that fine student that . . . it's queer you
noticed it!"
Polinka flushes crimson and remains mute. With a nervous quiver in his
fingers the shopman closes the boxes, and for no sort of object piles
them one on the top of another. A moment of silence follows.
"I want some bead lace, too," says Polinka, lifting her eyes guiltily to
the shopman.
"What sort? Black or coloured? Bead lace on tulle is the most
fashionable trimming."
"And how much is it?"
"The black's from eighty kopecks and the coloured from two and a half
roubles. I shall never come and see you again," Nikolay Timofeitch adds
in an undertone.
"Why?"
"Why? It's very simple. You must understand that yourself. Why should I
distress myself? It's a queer business! Do you suppose it's a pleasure
to me to see that student carrying on with you? I see it all and I
understand. Ever since autumn he's been hanging about you and you go for
a walk with him almost every day; and when he is with you, you gaze at
him as though he were an angel. You are in love with him; there's no one
to beat him in your eyes. Well, all right, then, it's no good talking."
Polinka remains dumb and moves her finger on the counter in
embarrassment.
"I see it all," the shopman goes on. "What inducement have I to come and
see you? I've got some pride. It's not every one likes to play
gooseberry. What was it you asked for?"
"Mamma told me to get a lot of things, but I've forgotten. I want some
feather trimming too."
"What kind would you like?"
"The best, something fashionable."
"The most fashionable now are real bird feathers. If you want the most
fashionable colour, it's heliotrope or _kanak_--that is, claret with a
yellow shade in it. We have an immense choice. And what all this affair
is going to lead to, I really don't understand. Here you are in love,
and how is it to end?"
Patches of red come into Nikolay Timofeitch's face round his eyes. He
crushes the soft feather trimming in his hand and goes on muttering:
"Do you imagine he'll marry you--is that it? You'd better drop any such
fancies. Students are forbidden to marry. And do you suppose he comes to
see you with honourable intentions? A likely idea! Why, these fine
students don't look on us as human beings . . . they only go to see
shopkeepers and dressmakers to laugh at their ignorance and to drink.
They're ashamed to drink at home and in good houses, but with simple
uneducated people like us they don't care what any one thinks; they'd be
ready to stand on their heads. Yes! Well, which feather trimming will
you take? And if he hangs about and carries on with you, we know what he
is after. . . . When he's a doctor or a lawyer he'll remember you: 'Ah,'
he'll say, 'I used to have a pretty fair little thing! I wonder where
she is now?' Even now I bet you he boasts among his friends that he's
got his eye on a little dressmaker."
Polinka sits down and gazes pensively at the pile of white boxes.
"No, I won't take the feather trimming," she sighs. "Mamma had better
choose it for herself; I may get the wrong one. I want six yards of
fringe for an overcoat, at forty kopecks the yard. For the same coat I
want cocoa-nut buttons, perforated, so they can be sown on firmly. . .
."
Nikolay Timofeitch wraps up the fringe and the buttons. She looks at him
guiltily and evidently expects him to go on talking, but he remains
sullenly silent while he tidies up the feather trimming.
"I mustn't forget some buttons for a dressing-gown . . ." she says after
an interval of silence, wiping her pale lips with a handkerchief.
"What kind?"
"It's for a shopkeeper's wife, so give me something rather striking."
"Yes, if it's for a shopkeeper's wife, you'd better have something
bright. Here are some buttons. A combination of colours--red, blue, and
the fashionable gold shade. Very glaring. The more refined prefer dull
black with a bright border. But I don't understand. Can't you see for
yourself? What can these . . . walks lead to?"
"I don't know," whispers Polinka, and she bends over the buttons; "I
don't know myself what's come to me, Nikolay Timofeitch."
A solid shopman with whiskers forces his way behind Nikolay Timofeitch's
back, squeezing him to the counter, and beaming with the choicest
gallantry, shouts:
"Be so kind, madam, as to step into this department. We have three kinds
of jerseys: plain, braided, and trimmed with beads! Which may I have the
pleasure of showing you?"
At the same time a stout lady passes by Polinka, pronouncing in a rich,
deep voice, almost a bass:
"They must be seamless, with the trade mark stamped in them, please."
"Pretend to be looking at the things," Nikolay Timofeitch whispers,
bending down to Polinka with a forced smile. "Dear me, you do look pale
and ill; you are quite changed. He'll throw you over, Pelagea Sergeevna!
Or if he does marry you, it won't be for love but from hunger; he'll be
tempted by your money. He'll furnish himself a nice home with your
dowry, and then be ashamed of you. He'll keep you out of sight of his
friends and visitors, because you're uneducated. He'll call you 'my
dummy of a wife.' You wouldn't know how to behave in a doctor's or
lawyer's circle. To them you're a dressmaker, an ignorant creature."
"Nikolay Timofeitch!" somebody shouts from the other end of the shop.
"The young lady here wants three yards of ribbon with a metal stripe.
Have we any?"
Nikolay Timofeitch turns in that direction, smirks and shouts:
"Yes, we have! Ribbon with a metal stripe, ottoman with a satin stripe,
and satin with a moiré stripe!"
"Oh, by the way, I mustn't forget, Olga asked me to get her a pair of
stays!" says Polinka.
"There are tears in your eyes," says Nikolay Timofeitch in dismay.
"What's that for? Come to the corset department, I'll screen you --it
looks awkward."
With a forced smile and exaggeratedly free and easy manner, the shopman
rapidly conducts Polinka to the corset department and conceals her from
the public eye behind a high pyramid of boxes.
"What sort of corset may I show you?" he asks aloud, whispering
immediately: "Wipe your eyes!"
"I want . . . I want . . . size forty-eight centimetres. Only she wanted
one, lined . . . with real whalebone . . . I must talk to you, Nikolay
Timofeitch. Come to-day!"
"Talk? What about? There's nothing to talk about."
"You are the only person who . . . cares about me, and I've no one to
talk to but you."
"These are not reed or steel, but real whalebone. . . . What is there
for us to talk about? It's no use talking. . . . You are going for a
walk with him to-day, I suppose?"
"Yes; I . . . I am."
"Then what's the use of talking? Talk won't help. . . . You are in love,
aren't you?"
"Yes . . ." Polinka whispers hesitatingly, and big tears gush from her
eyes.
"What is there to say?" mutters Nikolay Timofeitch, shrugging his
shoulders nervously and turning pale. "There's no need of talk. . . .
Wipe your eyes, that's all. I . . . I ask for nothing."
At that moment a tall, lanky shopman comes up to the pyramid of boxes,
and says to his customer:
"Let me show you some good elastic garters that do not impede the
circulation, certified by medical authority . . ."
Nikolay Timofeitch screens Polinka, and, trying to conceal her emotion
and his own, wrinkles his face into a smile and says aloud:
"There are two kinds of lace, madam: cotton and silk! Oriental, English,
Valenciennes, crochet, torchon, are cotton. And rococo, soutache,
Cambray, are silk. . . . For God's sake, wipe your eyes! They're coming
this way!"
And seeing that her tears are still gushing he goes on louder than ever:
"Spanish, Rococo, soutache, Cambray . . . stockings, thread, cotton,
silk . . ."
ANYUTA
IN the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan
Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro,
zealously conning his anatomy. His mouth was dry and his forehead
perspiring from the unceasing effort to learn it by heart.
In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who
shared his room--Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very
pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy
embroidering with red thread the collar of a man's shirt. She was
working against time. . . . The clock in the passage struck two
drowsily, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the
morning. Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a
big filthy slop-pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette ends were
swimming, and the litter on the floor--all seemed as though purposely
jumbled together in one confusion. . . .
"The right lung consists of three parts . . ." Klotchkov repeated.
"Boundaries! Upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches the fourth or
fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib . . . behind to the
_spina scapulæ_. . ."
Klotchkov raised his eyes to the ceiling, striving to visualise what he
had just read. Unable to form a clear picture of it, he began feeling
his upper ribs through his waistcoat.
"These ribs are like the keys of a piano," he said. "One must
familiarise oneself with them somehow, if one is not to get muddled over
them. One must study them in the skeleton and the living body . . . . I
say, Anyuta, let me pick them out."
Anyuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened
herself up. Klotchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began counting
her ribs.
"H'm! . . . One can't feel the first rib; it's behind the shoulder-blade
. . . . This must be the second rib. . . . Yes . . . this is the third .
. . this is the fourth. . . . H'm! . . . yes. . . . Why are you
wriggling?"
"Your fingers are cold!"
"Come, come . . . it won't kill you. Don't twist about. That must be the
third rib, then . . . this is the fourth. . . . You look such a skinny
thing, and yet one can hardly feel your ribs. That's the second . . .
that's the third. . . . Oh, this is muddling, and one can't see it
clearly. . . . I must draw it. . . . Where's my crayon?"
Klotchkov took his crayon and drew on Anyuta's chest several parallel
lines corresponding with the ribs.
"First-rate. That's all straightforward. . . . Well, now I can sound
you. Stand up!"
Anyuta stood up and raised her chin. Klotchkov began sounding her, and
was so absorbed in this occupation that he did not notice how Anyuta's
lips, nose, and fingers turned blue with cold. Anyuta shivered, and was
afraid the student, noticing it, would leave off drawing and sounding
her, and then, perhaps, might fail in his exam.
"Now it's all clear," said Klotchkov when he had finished. "You sit like
that and don't rub off the crayon, and meanwhile I'll learn up a little
more."
And the student again began walking to and fro, repeating to himself.
Anyuta, with black stripes across her chest, looking as though she had
been tattooed, sat thinking, huddled up and shivering with cold. She
said very little as a rule; she was always silent, thinking and
thinking. . . .
In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to
another, she had known five students like Klotchkov. Now they had all
finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of course,
like respectable people, had long ago forgotten her. One of them was
living in Paris, two were doctors, the fourth was an artist, and the
fifth was said to be already a professor. Klotchkov was the sixth. . . .
Soon he, too, would finish his studies and go out into the world. There
was a fine future before him, no doubt, and Klotchkov probably would
become a great man, but the present was anything but bright; Klotchkov
had no tobacco and no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left.
She must make haste and finish her embroidery, take it to the woman who
had ordered it, and with the quarter rouble she would get for it, buy
tea and tobacco.
"Can I come in?" asked a voice at the door.
Anyuta quickly threw a woollen shawl over her shoulders. Fetisov, the
artist, walked in.
"I have come to ask you a favour," he began, addressing Klotchkov, and
glaring like a wild beast from under the long locks that hung over his
brow. "Do me a favour; lend me your young lady just for a couple of
hours! I'm painting a picture, you see, and I can't get on without a
model."
"Oh, with pleasure," Klotchkov agreed. "Go along, Anyuta."
"The things I've had to put up with there," Anyuta murmured softly.
"Rubbish! The man's asking you for the sake of art, and not for any sort
of nonsense. Why not help him if you can?"
Anyuta began dressing.
"And what are you painting?" asked Klotchkov.
"Psyche; it's a fine subject. But it won't go, somehow. I have to keep
painting from different models. Yesterday I was painting one with blue
legs. 'Why are your legs blue?' I asked her. 'It's my stockings stain
them,' she said. And you're still grinding! Lucky fellow! You have
patience."
"Medicine's a job one can't get on with without grinding."
"H'm! . . . Excuse me, Klotchkov, but you do live like a pig! It's awful
the way you live!"
"How do you mean? I can't help it. . . . I only get twelve roubles a
month from my father, and it's hard to live decently on that."
"Yes . . . yes . . ." said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust;
"but, still, you might live better. . . . An educated man is in duty
bound to have taste, isn't he? And goodness knows what it's like here!
The bed not made, the slops, the dirt . . . yesterday's porridge in the
plates. . . Tfoo!"
"That's true," said the student in confusion; "but Anyuta has had no
time to-day to tidy up; she's been busy all the while."
When Anyuta and the artist had gone out Klotchkov lay down on the sofa
and began learning, lying down; then he accidentally dropped asleep, and
waking up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and sank into
gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist's words that an educated man
was in duty bound to have taste, and his surroundings actually struck
him now as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it were in his mind's
eye, his own future, when he would see his patients in his consulting-
room, drink tea in a large dining-room in the company of his wife, a
real lady. And now that slop-pail in which the cigarette ends were
swimming looked incredibly disgusting. Anyuta, too, rose before his
imagination--a plain, slovenly, pitiful figure . . . and he made up his
mind to part with her at once, at all costs.
When, on coming back from the artist's, she took off her coat, he got up
and said to her seriously:
"Look here, my good girl . . . sit down and listen. We must part! The
fact is, I don't want to live with you any longer."
Anyuta had come back from the artist's worn out and exhausted. Standing
so long as a model had made her face look thin and sunken, and her chin
sharper than ever. She said nothing in answer to the student's words,
only her lips began to tremble.
"You know we should have to part sooner or later, anyway," said the
student. "You're a nice, good girl, and not a fool; you'll understand. .
. ."
Anyuta put on her coat again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery in
paper, gathered together her needles and thread: she found the screw of
paper with the four lumps of sugar in the window, and laid it on the
table by the books.
"That's . . . your sugar . . ." she said softly, and turned away to
conceal her tears.
"Why are you crying?" asked Klotchkov.
He walked about the room in confusion, and said:
"You are a strange girl, really. . . . Why, you know we shall have to
part. We can't stay together for ever."
She had gathered together all her belongings, and turned to say good-bye
to him, and he felt sorry for her.
"Shall I let her stay on here another week?" he thought. "She really may
as well stay, and I'll tell her to go in a week;" and vexed at his own
weakness, he shouted to her roughly:
"Come, why are you standing there? If you are going, go; and if you
don't want to, take off your coat and stay! You can stay!"
Anyuta took off her coat, silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also
stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly returned to her invariable position
on her stool by the window.
The student drew his textbook to him and began again pacing from corner
to corner. "The right lung consists of three parts," he repeated; "the
upper part, on anterior wall of thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib
. . . ."
In the passage some one shouted at the top of his voice: "Grigory! The
samovar!"
THE TWO VOLODYAS
"LET me; I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver!" Sofya Lvovna
said in a loud voice. "Wait a minute, driver; I'll get up on the box
beside you."
She stood up in the sledge, and her husband, Vladimir Nikititch, and the
friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, held her arms to prevent
her falling. The three horses were galloping fast.
"I said you ought not to have given her brandy," Vladimir Nikititch
whispered to his companion with vexation. "What a fellow you are,
really!"
The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya
Lvovna, after a little too much wine, turbulent gaiety was followed by
hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they got
home, instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be administering
compresses and drops.
"Wo!" cried Sofya Lvovna. "I want to drive myself!"
She felt genuinely gay and triumphant. For the last two months, ever
since her wedding, she had been tortured by the thought that she had
married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is said, _par
dépit_; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become
convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four
years, he was so slim, agile, supple, he made puns and hummed to the
gipsies' tunes so charmingly. Really, the older men were nowadays a
thousand times more interesting than the young. It seemed as though age
and youth had changed parts. The Colonel was two years older than her
father, but could there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking,
there were infinitely more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in
herself, though she was only twenty-three?
"Oh, my darling!" she thought. "You are wonderful!"
She had become convinced in the restaurant, too, that not a spark of her
old feeling remained. For the friend of her childhood, Vladimir
Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day before she had
been madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing but complete
indifference. All that evening he had seemed to her spiritless, torpid,
uninteresting, and insignificant, and the _sangfroid_ with which he
habitually avoided paying at restaurants on this occasion revolted her,
and she had hardly been able to resist saying, "If you are poor, you
should stay at home." The Colonel paid for all.
Perhaps because trees, telegraph posts, and drifts of snow kept flitting
past her eyes, all sorts of disconnected ideas came rushing into her
mind. She reflected: the bill at the restaurant had been a hundred and
twenty roubles, and a hundred had gone to the gipsies, and to-morrow she
could fling away a thousand roubles if she liked; and only two months
ago, before her wedding, she had not had three roubles of her own, and
had to ask her father for every trifle. What a change in her life!
Her thoughts were in a tangle. She recalled, how, when she was a child
of ten, Colonel Yagitch, now her husband, used to make love to her aunt,
and every one in the house said that he had ruined her. And her aunt
had, in fact, often come down to dinner with her eyes red from crying,
and was always going off somewhere; and people used to say of her that
the poor thing could find no peace anywhere. He had been very handsome
in those days, and had an extraordinary reputation as a lady-killer. So
much so that he was known all over the town, and it was said of him that
he paid a round of visits to his adorers every day like a doctor
visiting his patients. And even now, in spite of his grey hair, his
wrinkles, and his spectacles, his thin face looked handsome, especially
in profile.
Sofya Lvovna's father was an army doctor, and had at one time served in
the same regiment with Colonel Yagitch. Volodya's father was an army
doctor too, and he, too, had once been in the same regiment as her
father and Colonel Yagitch. In spite of many amatory adventures, often
very complicated and disturbing, Volodya had done splendidly at the
university, and had taken a very good degree. Now he was specialising in
foreign literature, and was said to be writing a thesis. He lived with
his father, the army doctor, in the barracks, and had no means of his
own, though he was thirty. As children Sofya and he had lived under the
same roof, though in different flats. He often came to play with her,
and they had dancing and French lessons together. But when he grew up
into a graceful, remarkably handsome young man, she began to feel shy of
him, and then fell madly in love with him, and had loved him right up to
the time when she was married to Yagitch. He, too, had been renowned for
his success with women almost from the age of fourteen, and the ladies
who deceived their husbands on his account excused themselves by saying
that he was only a boy. Some one had told a story of him lately that
when he was a student living in lodgings so as to be near the
university, it always happened if one knocked at his door, that one
heard his footstep, and then a whispered apology: "_Pardon, je ne suis
pas setul._" Yagitch was delighted with him, and blessed him as a worthy
successor, as Derchavin blessed Pushkin; he appeared to be fond of him.
They would play billiards or picquet by the hour together without
uttering a word, if Yagitch drove out on any expedition he always took
Volodya with him, and Yagitch was the only person Volodya initiated into
the mysteries of his thesis. In earlier days, when Yagitch was rather
younger, they had often been in the position of rivals, but they had
never been jealous of one another. In the circle in which they moved
Yagitch was nicknamed Big Volodya, and his friend Little Volodya.
Besides Big Volodya, Little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was a
fourth person in the sledge--Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as every one
called her, Rita, a cousin of Madame Yagitch--a very pale girl over
thirty, with black eyebrows and a pince-nez, who was for ever smoking
cigarettes, even in the bitterest frost, and who always had her knees
and the front of her blouse covered with cigarette ash. She spoke
through her nose, drawling every word, was of a cold temperament, could
drink any amount of wine and liquor without being drunk, and used to
tell scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless way. At home she
spent her days reading thick magazines, covering them with cigarette
ash, or eating frozen apples.
"Sonia, give over fooling," she said, drawling. "It's really silly."
As they drew near the city gates they went more slowly, and began to
pass people and houses. Sofya Lvovna subsided, nestled up to her
husband, and gave herself up to her thoughts. Little Volodya sat
opposite. By now her light-hearted and cheerful thoughts were mingled
with gloomy ones. She thought that the man sitting opposite knew that
she loved him, and no doubt he believed the gossip that she married the
Colonel _par dépit_. She had never told him of her love; she had not
wanted him to know, and had done her best to hide her feeling, but from
her face she knew that he understood her perfectly --and her pride
suffered. But what was most humiliating in her position was that, since
her wedding, Volodya had suddenly begun to pay her attention, which he
had never done before, spending hours with her, sitting silent or
chattering about trifles; and even now in the sledge, though he did not
talk to her, he touched her foot with his and pressed her hand a little.
Evidently that was all he wanted, that she should be married; and it was
evident that he despised her and that she only excited in him an
interest of a special kind as though she were an immoral and
disreputable woman. And when the feeling of triumph and love for her
husband were mingled in her soul with humiliation and wounded pride, she
was overcome by a spirit of defiance, and longed to sit on the box, to
shout and whistle to the horses.
Just as they passed the nunnery the huge hundred-ton bell rang out. Rita
crossed herself.
"Our Olga is in that nunnery," said Sofya Lvovna, and she, too, crossed
herself and shuddered.
"Why did she go into the nunnery?" said the Colonel.
"_Par dépit_," Rita answered crossly, with obvious allusion to Sofya's
marrying Yagitch. "_Par dépit_ is all the fashion nowadays. Defiance of
all the world. She was always laughing, a desperate flirt, fond of
nothing but balls and young men, and all of a sudden off she went--to
surprise every one!"
"That's not true," said Volodya, turning down the collar of his fur coat
and showing his handsome face. "It wasn't a case of _par dépit_; it was
simply horrible, if you like. Her brother Dmitri was sent to penal
servitude, and they don't know where he is now. And her mother died of
grief."
He turned up his collar again.
"Olga did well," he added in a muffled voice. "Living as an adopted
child, and with such a paragon as Sofya Lvovna,--one must take that into
consideration too!"
Sofya Lvovna heard a tone of contempt in his voice, and longed to say
something rude to him, but she said nothing. The spirit of defiance came
over her again; she stood up again and shouted in a tearful voice:
"I want to go to the early service! Driver, back! I want to see Olga."
They turned back. The nunnery bell had a deep note, and Sofya Lvovna
fancied there was something in it that reminded her of Olga and her
life. The other church bells began ringing too. When the driver stopped
the horses, Sofya Lvovna jumped out of the sledge and, unescorted and
alone, went quickly up to the gate.
"Make haste, please!" her husband called to her. "It's late already."
She went in at the dark gateway, then by the avenue that led from the
gate to the chief church. The snow crunched under her feet, and the
ringing was just above her head, and seemed to vibrate through her whole
being. Here was the church door, then three steps down, and an ante-room
with ikons of the saints on both sides, a fragrance of juniper and
incense, another door, and a dark figure opening it and bowing very low.
The service had not yet begun. One nun was walking by the ikon-screen
and lighting the candles on the tall standard candlesticks, another was
lighting the chandelier. Here and there, by the columns and the side
chapels, there stood black, motionless figures. "I suppose they must
remain standing as they are now till the morning," thought Sofya Lvovna,
and it seemed to her dark, cold, and dreary--drearier than a graveyard.
She looked with a feeling of dreariness at the still, motionless figures
and suddenly felt a pang at her heart. For some reason, in one short
nun, with thin shoulders and a black kerchief on her head, she
recognised Olga, though when Olga went into the nunnery she had been
plump and had looked taller. Hesitating and extremely agitated, Sofya
Lvovna went up to the nun, and looking over her shoulder into her face,
recognised her as Olga.
"Olga!" she cried, throwing up her hands, and could not speak from
emotion. "Olga!"
The nun knew her at once; she raised her eyebrows in surprise, and her
pale, freshly washed face, and even, it seemed, the white headcloth that
she wore under her wimple, beamed with pleasure.
"What a miracle from God!" she said, and she, too, threw up her thin,
pale little hands.
Sofya Lvovna hugged her and kissed her warmly, and was afraid as she did
so that she might smell of spirits.
"We were just driving past, and we thought of you," she said, breathing
hard, as though she had been running. "Dear me! How pale you are! I . .
. I'm very glad to see you. Well, tell me how are you? Are you dull?"
Sofya Lvovna looked round at the other nuns, and went on in a subdued
voice:
"There've been so many changes at home . . . you know, I'm married to
Colonel Yagitch. You remember him, no doubt. . . . I am very happy with
him."
"Well, thank God for that. And is your father quite well?"
"Yes, he is quite well. He often speaks of you. You must come and see us
during the holidays, Olga, won't you?"
"I will come," said Olga, and she smiled. "I'll come on the second day."
Sofya Lvovna began crying, she did not know why, and for a minute she
shed tears in silence, then she wiped her eyes and said:
"Rita will be very sorry not to have seen you. She is with us too. And
Volodya's here. They are close to the gate. How pleased they'd be if
you'd come out and see them. Let's go out to them; the service hasn't
begun yet."
"Let us," Olga agreed. She crossed herself three times and went out with
Sofya Lvovna to the entrance.
"So you say you're happy, Sonitchka?" she asked when they came out at
the gate.
"Very."
"Well, thank God for that."
The two Volodyas, seeing the nun, got out of the sledge and greeted her
respectfully. Both were visibly touched by her pale face and her black
monastic dress, and both were pleased that she had remembered them and
come to greet them. That she might not be cold, Sofya Lvovna wrapped her
up in a rug and put one half of her fur coat round her. Her tears had
relieved and purified her heart, and she was glad that this noisy,
restless, and, in reality, impure night should unexpectedly end so
purely and serenely. And to keep Olga by her a little longer she
suggested:
"Let us take her for a drive! Get in, Olga; we'll go a little way."
The men expected the nun to refuse--saints don't dash about in three-
horse sledges; but to their surprise, she consented and got into the
sledge. And while the horses were galloping to the city gate all were
silent, and only tried to make her warm and comfortable, and each of
them was thinking of what she had been in the past and what she was now.
Her face was now passionless, inexpressive, cold, pale, and transparent,
as though there were water, not blood, in her veins. And two or three
years ago she had been plump and rosy, talking about her suitors and
laughing at every trifle.
Near the city gate the sledge turned back; when it stopped ten minutes
later near the nunnery, Olga got out of the sledge. The bell had begun
to ring more rapidly.
"The Lord save you," said Olga, and she bowed low as nuns do.
"Mind you come, Olga."
"I will, I will."
She went and quickly disappeared through the gateway. And when after
that they drove on again, Sofya Lvovna felt very sad. Every one was
silent. She felt dispirited and weak all over. That she should have made
a nun get into a sledge and drive in a company hardly sober seemed to
her now stupid, tactless, and almost sacrilegious. As the intoxication
passed off, the desire to deceive herself passed away also. It was clear
to her now that she did not love her husband, and never could love him,
and that it all had been foolishness and nonsense. She had married him
from interested motives, because, in the words of her school friends, he
was madly rich, and because she was afraid of becoming an old maid like
Rita, and because she was sick of her father, the doctor, and wanted to
annoy Volodya.
If she could have imagined when she got married, that it would be so
oppressive, so dreadful, and so hideous, she would not have consented to
the marriage for all the wealth in the world. But now there was no
setting it right. She must make up her mind to it.
They reached home. Getting into her warm, soft bed, and pulling the bed-
clothes over her, Sofya Lvovna recalled the dark church, the smell of
incense, and the figures by the columns, and she felt frightened at the
thought that these figures would be standing there all the while she was
asleep. The early service would be very, very long; then there would be
"the hours," then the mass, then the service of the day.
"But of course there is a God--there certainly is a God; and I shall
have to die, so that sooner or later one must think of one's soul, of
eternal life, like Olga. Olga is saved now; she has settled all
questions for herself. . . . But if there is no God? Then her life is
wasted. But how is it wasted? Why is it wasted?"
And a minute later the thought came into her mind again:
"There is a God; death must come; one must think of one's soul. If Olga
were to see death before her this minute she would not be afraid. She is
prepared. And the great thing is that she has already solved the problem
of life for herself. There is a God . . . yes . . . . But is there no
other solution except going into a monastery? To go into the monastery
means to renounce life, to spoil it . . . ."
Sofya Lvovna began to feel rather frightened; she hid her head under her
pillow.
"I mustn't think about it," she whispered. "I mustn't. . . ."
Yagitch was walking about on the carpet in the next room with a soft
jingle of spurs, thinking about something. The thought occurred to Sofya
Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only for one reason--that
his name, too, was Vladimir. She sat up in bed and called tenderly:
"Volodya!"
"What is it?" her husband responded.
"Nothing."
She lay down again. She heard a bell, perhaps the same nunnery bell.
Again she thought of the vestibule and the dark figures, and thoughts of
God and of inevitable death strayed through her mind, and she covered
her ears that she might not hear the bell. She thought that before old
age and death there would be a long, long life before her, and that day
by day she would have to put up with being close to a man she did not
love, who had just now come into the bedroom and was getting into bed,
and would have to stifle in her heart her hopeless love for the other
young, fascinating, and, as she thought, exceptional man. She looked at
her husband and tried to say good-night to him, but suddenly burst out
crying instead. She was vexed with herself.
"Well, now then for the music!" said Yagitch.
She was not pacified till ten o'clock in the morning. She left off
crying and trembling all over, but she began to have a splitting
headache. Yagitch was in haste to go to the late mass, and in the next
room was grumbling at his orderly, who was helping him to dress. He came
into the bedroom once with the soft jingle of his spurs to fetch
something, and then a second time wearing his epaulettes, and his orders
on his breast, limping slightly from rheumatism; and it struck Sofya
Lvovna that he looked and walked like a bird of prey.
She heard Yagitch ring the telephone bell.
"Be so good as to put me on to the Vassilevsky barracks," he said; and a
minute later: "Vassilevsky barracks? Please ask Doctor Salimovitch to
come to the telephone . . ." And a minute later: "With whom am I
speaking? Is it you, Volodya? Delighted. Ask your father to come to us
at once, dear boy; my wife is rather shattered after yesterday. Not at
home, you say? H'm! . . . Thank you. Very good. I shall be much obliged
. . . _Merci_."
Yagitch came into the bedroom for the third time, bent down to his wife,
made the sign of the cross over her, gave her his hand to kiss (the
women who had been in love with him used to kiss his hand and he had got
into the habit of it), and saying that he should be back to dinner, went
out.
At twelve o'clock the maid came in to announce that Vladimir Mihalovitch
had arrived. Sofya Lvovna, staggering with fatigue and headache,
hurriedly put on her marvellous new lilac dressing-gown trimmed with
fur, and hastily did up her hair after a fashion. She was conscious of
an inexpressible tenderness in her heart, and was trembling with joy and
with fear that he might go away. She wanted nothing but to look at him.
Volodya came dressed correctly for calling, in a swallow-tail coat and
white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came in he kissed her hand and expressed
his genuine regret that she was ill. Then when they had sat down, he
admired her dressing-gown.
"I was upset by seeing Olga yesterday," she said. "At first I felt it
dreadful, but now I envy her. She is like a rock that cannot be
shattered; there is no moving her. But was there no other solution for
her, Volodya? Is burying oneself alive the only solution of the problem
of life? Why, it's death, not life!"
At the thought of Olga, Volodya's face softened.
"Here, you are a clever man, Volodya," said Sofya Lvovna. "Show me how
to do what Olga has done. Of course, I am not a believer and should not
go into a nunnery, but one can do something equivalent. Life isn't easy
for me," she added after a brief pause. "Tell me what to do. . . . Tell
me something I can believe in. Tell me something, if it's only one
word."
"One word? By all means: tararaboomdeeay."
"Volodya, why do you despise me?" she asked hotly. "You talk to me in a
special, fatuous way, if you'll excuse me, not as one talks to one's
friends and women one respects. You are so good at your work, you are
fond of science; why do you never talk of it to me? Why is it? Am I not
good enough?"
Volodya frowned with annoyance and said:
"Why do you want science all of a sudden? Don't you perhaps want
constitutional government? Or sturgeon and horse-radish?"
"Very well, I am a worthless, trivial, silly woman with no convictions.
I have a mass, a mass of defects. I am neurotic, corrupt, and I ought to
be despised for it. But you, Volodya, are ten years older than I am, and
my husband is thirty years older. I've grown up before your eyes, and if
you would, you could have made anything you liked of me--an angel. But
you"--her voice quivered-- "treat me horribly. Yagitch has married me in
his old age, and you . . ."
"Come, come," said Volodya, sitting nearer her and kissing both her
hands. "Let the Schopenhauers philosophise and prove whatever they like,
while we'll kiss these little hands."
"You despise me, and if only you knew how miserable it makes me," she
said uncertainly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe her. "And
if you only knew how I want to change, to begin another life! I think of
it with enthusiasm!" and tears of enthusiasm actually came into her
eyes. "To be good, honest, pure, not to be lying; to have an object in
life."
"Come, come, come, please don't be affected! I don't like it!" said
Volodya, and an ill-humoured expression came into his face. "Upon my
word, you might be on the stage. Let us behave like simple people."
To prevent him from getting cross and going away, she began defending
herself, and forced herself to smile to please him; and again she began
talking of Olga, and of how she longed to solve the problem of her life
and to become something real.
"Ta-ra-ra-boomdee-ay," he hummed. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!"
And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without
knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for a
minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical
face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.
"You have known that I love you for ever so long," she confessed to him,
and she blushed painfully, and felt that her lips were twitching with
shame. "I love you. Why do you torture me?"
She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for a
long while, a full minute, could not take her lips away, though she knew
it was unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of her, that a
servant might come in.
"Oh, how you torture me!" she repeated.
When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was sitting
at lunch in the dining-room, she was kneeling before him, gazing
greedily into his face, and he told her that she was like a little dog
waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his
knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed:
"Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . . Tara-raboom-dee-ay." And when he was getting
ready to go she asked him in a passionate whisper:
"When? To-day? Where?" And held out both hands to his mouth as though
she wanted to seize his answer in them.
"To-day it will hardly be convenient," he said after a minute's thought.
"To-morrow, perhaps."
And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to see
Olga, but there she was told that Olga was reading the psalter somewhere
over the dead. From the nunnery she went to her father's and found that
he, too, was out. Then she took another sledge and drove aimlessly about
the streets till evening. And for some reason she kept thinking of the
aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and who could find no peace
anywhere.
And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant out
of town and listened to the gipsies. And driving back past the nunnery
again, Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast at the thought
that for the girls and women of her class there was no solution but to
go on driving about and telling lies, or going into a nunnery to mortify
the flesh. . . . And next day she met her lover, and again Sofya Lvovna
drove about the town alone in a hired sledge thinking about her aunt.
A week later Volodya threw her over. And after that life went on as
before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising. The
Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet, Rita told
anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya Lvovna went
about alone in hired sledges and kept begging her husband to take her
for a good drive with three horses.
Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining of
her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that she
brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby. And
Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by rote,
that all this was of no consequence, that it would all pass and God
would forgive her.
THE TROUSSEAU
I HAVE seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and old,
built of stone and of wood, but of one house I have kept a very vivid
memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than a house--a tiny
cottage of one story, with three windows, looking extraordinarily like a
little old hunchback woman with a cap on. Its white stucco walls, its
tiled roof, and dilapidated chimney, were all drowned in a perfect sea
of green. The cottage was lost to sight among the mulberry-trees,
acacias, and poplars planted by the grandfathers and great-grandfathers
of its present occupants. And yet it is a town house. Its wide courtyard
stands in a row with other similar green courtyards, and forms part of a
street. Nothing ever drives down that street, and very few persons are
ever seen walking through it.
The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants do not
care for sunlight--the light is no use to them. The windows are never
opened, for they are not fond of fresh air. People who spend their lives
in the midst of acacias, mulberries, and nettles have no passion for
nature. It is only to the summer visitor that God has vouchsafed an eye
for the beauties of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in
profound ignorance of the existence of such beauties. People never prize
what they have always had in abundance. "What we have, we do not
treasure," and what's more we do not even love it.
The little house stands in an earthly paradise of green trees with happy
birds nesting in them. But inside . . . alas . . . ! In summer, it is
close and stifling within; in winter, hot as a Turkish bath, not one
breath of air, and the dreariness! . . .
The first time I visited the little house was many years ago on
business. I brought a message from the Colonel who was the owner of the
house to his wife and daughter. That first visit I remember very
distinctly. It would be impossible, indeed, to forget it.
Imagine a limp little woman of forty, gazing at you with alarm and
astonishment while you walk from the passage into the parlour. You are a
stranger, a visitor, "a young man"; that's enough to reduce her to a
state of terror and bewilderment. Though you have no dagger, axe, or
revolver in your hand, and though you smile affably, you are met with
alarm.
"Whom have I the honour and pleasure of addressing?" the little lady
asks in a trembling voice.
I introduced myself and explained why I had come. The alarm and
amazement were at once succeeded by a shrill, joyful "Ach!" and she
turned her eyes upwards to the ceiling. This "Ach!" was caught up like
an echo and repeated from the hall to the parlour, from the parlour to
the kitchen, and so on down to the cellar. Soon the whole house was
resounding with "Ach!" in various voices.
Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the
drawing-room listening to the "Ach!" echoing all down the street. There
was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay
on a chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were
geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on the curtains were torpid flies.
On the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the
glass broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors
with lemon-coloured faces of a gipsy type. On the table lay a thimble, a
reel of cotton, and a half-knitted stocking, and paper patterns and a
black blouse, tacked together, were lying on the floor. In the next room
two alarmed and fluttered old women were hurriedly picking up similar
patterns and pieces of tailor's chalk from the floor.
"You must, please, excuse us; we are dreadfully untidy," said the little
lady.
While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other
room where the patterns were still being picked up. The door, too,
seemed embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.
"What's the matter?" said the little lady, addressing the door.
_"Où est mon cravatte lequel mon père m'avait envoyé de Koursk?"_
asked a female voice at the door.
_"Ah, est-ce que, Marie . . . que_. . . Really, it's impossible . . . .
_Nous avons donc chez nous un homme peu connu de nous._ Ask Lukerya."
"How well we speak French, though!" I read in the eyes of the little
lady, who was flushing with pleasure.
Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen,
in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a
mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson.
Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red
first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.
"My daughter," chanted the little lady, "and, Manetchka, this is a young
gentleman who has come," etc.
I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper
patterns. Mother and daughter dropped their eyes.
"We had a fair here at Ascension," said the mother; "we always buy
materials at the fair, and then it keeps us busy with sewing till the
next year's fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made.
My husband's pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit
ourselves luxuries. So we have to make up everything ourselves."
"But who will ever wear such a number of things? There are only two of
you?"
"Oh . . . as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be
worn; they are for the trousseau!"
"Ah, _mamam_, what are you saying?" said the daughter, and she crimsoned
again. "Our visitor might suppose it was true. I don't intend to be
married. Never!"
She said this, but at the very word "married" her eyes glowed.
Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries
and cream. At seven o'clock, we had supper, consisting of six courses,
and while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I
looked with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only
come from a man.
"That's my husband's brother, Yegor Semyonitch," the little lady
explained, noticing my surprise. "He's been living with us for the last
year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an
unsociable person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a
monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the
disappointment has preyed on his mind."
After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor Semyonitch
was embroidering with his own hands as an offering for the Church.
Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the tobacco-
pouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be
greatly struck by her work, she flushed crimson and whispered something
in her mother's ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to go
with her to the store-room. There I was shown five large trunks, and a
number of smaller trunks and boxes.
"This is her trousseau," her mother whispered; "we made it all
ourselves."
After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable
hostesses. They made me promise to come and see them again some day.
It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my
first visit, I was sent down to the little town to give expert evidence
in a case that was being tried there.
As I entered the little house I heard the same "Ach!" echo through it.
They recognised me at once. . . . Well they might! My first visit had
been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long
remembered.
I walked into the drawing-room: the mother, who had grown stouter and
was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out
some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.
There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns,
the same portrait with the broken glass. But yet there was a change.
Beside the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and
the ladies were in mourning. The Colonel's death had occurred a week
after his promotion to be a general.
Reminiscences began. . . . The widow shed tears.
"We have had a terrible loss," she said. "My husband, you know, is dead.
We are alone in the world now, and have no one but ourselves to look to.
Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They
would not have him in the monastery on account of--of intoxicating
beverages. And now in his disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am
thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a complaint. Would
you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and . . .
taken Manetchka's trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken
everything out of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my
Manetchka will be left without a trousseau at all."
"What are you saying, _mamam_?" said Manetchka, embarrassed. "Our
visitor might suppose . . . there's no knowing what he might suppose . .
. . I shall never--never marry."
Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and
aspiration, evidently not for a moment believing what she said.
A little bald-headed masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes
instead of boots darted like a mouse across the passage and disappeared.
"Yegor Semyonitch, I suppose," I thought.
I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much
older and terribly changed. The mother's hair was silvered, but the
daughter was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken
for her elder sister, not more than five years her senior.
"I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal," the mother said to me,
forgetting she had told me this already. "I mean to make a complaint.
Yegor Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it up
for the sake of his soul. My Manetchka is left without a trousseau."
Manetchka flushed again, but this time she said nothing.
"We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so well
off. We are all alone in the world now."
"We are alone in the world," repeated Manetchka.
A year ago fate brought me once more to the little house.
Walking into the drawing-room, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black
with heavy crape _pleureuses_, she was sitting on the sofa sewing.
Beside her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes
instead of boots. On seeing me, he jumped up and ran out of the room.
In response to my greeting, the old lady smiled and said:
_"Je suis charmée de vous revoir, monsieur."_
"What are you making?" I asked, a little later.
"It's a blouse. When it's finished I shall take it to the priest's to be
put away, or else Yegor Semyonitch would carry it off. I store
everything at the priest's now," she added in a whisper.
And looking at the portrait of her daughter which stood before her on
the table, she sighed and said:
"We are all alone in the world."
And where was the daughter? Where was Manetchka? I did not ask. I did
not dare to ask the old mother dressed in her new deep mourning. And
while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka came out
to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid footstep. . .
.
I understood, and my heart was heavy.
THE HELPMATE
"I'VE asked you not to tidy my table," said Nikolay Yevgrafitch.
"There's no finding anything when you've tidied up. Where's the
telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It's
from Kazan, dated yesterday."
The maid--a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression --found
several telegrams in the basket under the table, and handed them to the
doctor without a word; but all these were telegrams from patients. Then
they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga Dmitrievna's room.
It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be
home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her,
and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the
same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and
her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley
which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused
the sickly fragrance of a florist's shop all over the house. On such
nights he became petty, ill-humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that
it was very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the
day before from his brother, though it contained nothing but Christmas
greetings.
On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found a
telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his wife, care
of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel . . . . The
doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign
language, apparently English.
"Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her mother?"
During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being
suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several times
occurred to him, that his exercise at home had qualified him to become
an excellent detective. Going into his study and beginning to reflect,
he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year
and a half ago, and had lunched with an old school-fellow, a civil
engineer, and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a
young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail Ivanovitch, with
rather a curious short surname--Riss. Two months later the doctor had
seen the young man's photograph in his wife's album, with an inscription
in French: "In remembrance of the present and in hope of the future."
Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-law's. And
that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent
and coming home at four or five o'clock in the morning, and was
constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept
refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house which made him
feel ashamed to face the servants.
Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going into
consumption, and advised him to throw up everything and go to the
Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much
alarmed; she began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring
him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and that he had much
better go to Nice, and that she would go with him, and there would nurse
him, look after him, take care of him.
Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to
Nice: her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.
He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing
their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: "I
drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a
thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival." He pictured
the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to
Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and
began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great
agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted.
Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the
son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain,
straightforward man, a surgeon by profession--how could he have let
himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak,
worthless, mercenary, low creature.
"'Little foot'!" he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram;
"'little foot'!"
Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven
years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory
was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet,
which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed
as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and
silk upon his hands and face--and nothing more. Nothing more--that is,
not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies--brazen,
treacherous lies. He remembered how in his father's house in the village
a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house
and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset
things; so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into
his life and made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had
been spent as though in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and
turned into a mockery, his health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their
atmosphere as a cocotte's, and of the ten thousand he earned every year
he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the village,
and his debts were already about fifteen thousand. It seemed that if a
band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have
been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this
woman.
He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed
and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms, or sat
down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling
mechanically on a paper.
"Trying a pen. . . . A little foot."
By five o'clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It
seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married some one else who
might have had a good influence over her--who knows?-- she might after
all have become a good, straightforward woman. He was a poor
psychologist, and knew nothing of the female heart; besides, he was
churlish, uninteresting. . . .
"I haven't long to live now," he thought. "I am a dead man, and ought
not to stand in the way of the living. It would be strange and stupid to
insist upon one's rights now. I'll have it out with her; let her go to
the man she loves. . . . I'll give her a divorce. I'll take the blame on
myself."
Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and sank
into a chair just as she was in her white cloak, hat, and overboots.
"The nasty, fat boy," she said with a sob, breathing hard. "It's really
dishonest; it's disgusting." She stamped. "I can't put up with it; I
can't, I can't!"
"What's the matter?" asked Nikolay Yevgrafitch, going up to her.
"That student, Azarbekov, was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and
there was fifteen roubles in it. I borrowed it from mamma."
She was crying in a most genuine way, like a little girl, and not only
her handkerchief, but even her gloves, were wet with tears.
"It can't be helped!" said the doctor. "If he's lost it, he's lost it,
and it's no good worrying over it. Calm yourself; I want to talk to
you."
"I am not a millionaire to lose money like that. He says he'll pay it
back, but I don't believe him; he's poor . . ."
Her husband begged her to calm herself and to listen to him, but she
kept on talking of the student and of the fifteen roubles she had lost.
"Ach! I'll give you twenty-five roubles to-morrow if you'll only hold
your tongue!" he said irritably.
"I must take off my things!" she said, crying. "I can't talk seriously
in my fur coat! How strange you are!"
He helped her off with her coat and overboots, detecting as he did so
the smell of the white wine she liked to drink with oysters (in spite of
her etherealness she ate and drank a great deal). She went into her room
and came back soon after, having changed her things and powdered her
face, though her eyes still showed traces of tears. She sat down,
retreating into her light, lacy dressing-gown, and in the mass of
billowy pink her husband could see nothing but her hair, which she had
let down, and her little foot wearing a slipper.
"What do you want to talk about?" she asked, swinging herself in a
rocking-chair.
"I happened to see this;" and he handed her the telegram.
She read it and shrugged her shoulders.
"Well?" she said, rocking herself faster. "That's the usual New Year's
greeting and nothing else. There are no secrets in it."
"You are reckoning on my not knowing English. No, I don't know it; but I
have a dictionary. That telegram is from Riss; he drinks to the health
of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that,"
the doctor went on hurriedly. "I don't in the least want to reproach you
or make a scene. We've had scenes and reproaches enough; it's time to
make an end of them. . . . This is what I want to say to you: you are
free, and can live as you like."
There was a silence. She began crying quietly.
"I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences,"
Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. "If you love that young man, love him; if
you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young, healthy, and I am a
wreck, and haven't long to live. In short . . . you understand me."
He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and
speaking in a voice of self-pity, acknowledged that she loved Riss, and
used to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms, and now she
really did long to go abroad.
"You see, I hide nothing from you," she added, with a sigh. "My whole
soul lies open before you. And I beg you again, be generous, get me a
passport."
"I repeat, you are free."
She moved to another seat nearer him to look at the expression of his
face. She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret
meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their
intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish
object in them. And when she looked searchingly into his face, it seemed
to him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes as in a cat's.
"When shall I get the passport?" she asked softly.
He suddenly had an impulse to say "Never"; but he restrained himself and
said:
"When you like."
"I shall only go for a month."
"You'll go to Riss for good. I'll get you a divorce, take the blame on
myself, and Riss can marry you."
"But I don't want a divorce!" Olga Dmitrievna retorted quickly, with an
astonished face. "I am not asking you for a divorce! Get me a passport,
that's all."
"But why don't you want the divorce?" asked the doctor, beginning to
feel irritated. "You are a strange woman. How strange you are! If you
are fond of him in earnest and he loves you too, in your position you
can do nothing better than get married. Can you really hesitate between
marriage and adultery?"
"I understand you," she said, walking away from him, and a spiteful,
vindictive expression came into her face. "I understand you perfectly.
You are sick of me, and you simply want to get rid of me, to force this
divorce on me. Thank you very much; I am not such a fool as you think. I
won't accept the divorce and I won't leave you--I won't, I won't! To
begin with, I don't want to lose my position in society," she continued
quickly, as though afraid of being prevented from speaking. "Secondly, I
am twenty-seven and Riss is only twenty-three; he'll be tired of me in a
year and throw me over. And what's more, if you care to know, I'm not
certain that my feeling will last long . . . so there! I'm not going to
leave you."
"Then I'll turn you out of the house!" shouted Nikolay Yevgrafitch,
stamping. "I shall turn you out, you vile, loathsome woman!"
"We shall see!" she said, and went out.
It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table
moving the pencil over the paper and writing mechanically.
"My dear Sir. . . . Little foot."
Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph
taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage, and looked at it for a
long time. It was a family group: his father-in-law, his mother-in-law,
his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the rôle
of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a clean-shaven, dropsical
privy councillor, crafty and avaricious; his mother-in-law, a stout lady
with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to
distraction and helped her in everything; if her daughter were
strangling some one, the mother would not have protested, but would only
have screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small
predatory-looking features, but more expressive and bolder than her
mother's; she was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale! And
Nikolay Yevgrafitch himself in the photograph looked such a guileless
soul, such a kindly, good fellow, so open and simple-hearted; his whole
face was relaxed in the naïve, good-natured smile of a divinity
student, and he had had the simplicity to believe that that company of
beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give
him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he
used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart
is cold and loveless."
And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a
village priest, with his democratic bringing up--a plain, blunt,
straightforward man--could have so helplessly surrendered to the power
of this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature, whose nature was so
utterly alien to him.
When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital the
servant came into his study.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The mistress has got up and asks you for the twenty-five roubles you
promised her yesterday."
TALENT
AN artist called Yegor Savvitch, who was spending his summer holidays at
the house of an officer's widow, was sitting on his bed, given up to the
depression of morning. It was beginning to look like autumn out of
doors. Heavy, clumsy clouds covered the sky in thick layers; there was a
cold, piercing wind, and with a plaintive wail the trees were all
bending on one side. He could see the yellow leaves whirling round in
the air and on the earth. Farewell, summer! This melancholy of nature is
beautiful and poetical in its own way, when it is looked at with the
eyes of an artist, but Yegor Savvitch was in no humour to see beauty. He
was devoured by ennui and his only consolation was the thought that by
to-morrow he would not be there. The bed, the chairs, the tables, the
floor, were all heaped up with cushions, crumpled bed-clothes, boxes.
The floor had not been swept, the cotton curtains had been taken down
from the windows. Next day he was moving, to town.
His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire
horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the absence of
her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time
been sitting in the young man's room. Next day the painter was going
away, and she had a great deal to say to him. She kept talking, talking,
and yet she felt that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to
say. With her eyes full of tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at
it with rapture and sadness. And Yegor Savvitch was shaggy to a hideous
extent, so that he looked like a wild animal. His hair hung down to his
shoulder-blades, his beard grew from his neck, from his nostrils, from
his ears; his eyes were lost under his thick overhanging brows. It was
all so thick, so matted, that if a fly or a beetle had been caught in
his hair, it would never have found its way out of this enchanted
thicket. Yegor Savvitch listened to Katya, yawning. He was tired. When
Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging
eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass:
"I cannot marry."
"Why not?" Katya asked softly.
"Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage
is out of the question. An artist must be free."
"But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?"
"I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general. . . . Famous
authors and painters have never married."
"And you, too, will be famous--I understand that perfectly. But put
yourself in my place. I am afraid of my mother. She is stern and
irritable. When she knows that you won't marry me, and that it's all
nothing . . . she'll begin to give it to me. Oh, how wretched I am! And
you haven't paid for your rooms, either! . . . ."
"Damn her! I'll pay."
Yegor Savvitch got up and began walking to and fro.
"I ought to be abroad!" he said. And the artist told her that nothing
was easier than to go abroad. One need do nothing but paint a picture
and sell it.
"Of course!" Katya assented. "Why haven't you painted one in the
summer?"
"Do you suppose I can work in a barn like this?" the artist said ill-
humouredly. "And where should I get models?"
Some one banged the door viciously in the storey below. Katya, who was
expecting her mother's return from minute to minute, jumped up and ran
away. The artist was left alone. For a long time he walked to and fro,
threading his way between the chairs and the piles of untidy objects of
all sorts. He heard the widow rattling the crockery and loudly abusing
the peasants who had asked her two roubles for each cart. In his disgust
Yegor Savvitch stopped before the cupboard and stared for a long while,
frowning at the decanter of vodka.
"Ah, blast you!" he heard the widow railing at Katya. "Damnation take
you!"
The artist drank a glass of vodka, and the dark cloud in his soul
gradually disappeared, and he felt as though all his inside was smiling
within him. He began dreaming. . . . His fancy pictured how he would
become great. He could not imagine his future works but he could see
distinctly how the papers would talk of him, how the shops would sell
his photographs, with what envy his friends would look after him. He
tried to picture himself in a magnificent drawing-room surrounded by
pretty and adoring women; but the picture was misty, vague, as he had
never in his life seen a drawing-room. The pretty and adoring women were
not a success either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not
even one respectable girl. People who know nothing about life usually
picture life from books, but Yegor Savvitch knew no books either. He had
tried to read Gogol, but had fallen asleep on the second page.
"It won't burn, drat the thing!" the widow bawled down below, as she set
the samovar. "Katya, give me some charcoal!"
The dreamy artist felt a longing to share his hopes and dreams with some
one. He went downstairs into the kitchen, where the stout widow and
Katya were busy about a dirty stove in the midst of charcoal fumes from
the samovar. There he sat down on a bench close to a big pot and began:
"It's a fine thing to be an artist! I can go just where I like, do what
I like. One has not to work in an office or in the fields. I've no
superiors or officers over me. . . . I'm my own superior. And with all
that I'm doing good to humanity!"
And after dinner he composed himself for a "rest." He usually slept till
the twilight of evening. But this time soon after dinner he felt that
some one was pulling at his leg. Some one kept laughing and shouting his
name. He opened his eyes and saw his friend Ukleikin, the landscape
painter, who had been away all the summer in the Kostroma district.
"Bah!" he cried, delighted. "What do I see?"
There followed handshakes, questions.
"Well, have you brought anything? I suppose you've knocked off hundreds
of sketches?" said Yegor Savvitch, watching Ukleikin taking his
belongings out of his trunk.
"H'm! . . . Yes. I have done something. And how are you getting on? Have
you been painting anything?"
Yegor Savvitch dived behind the bed, and crimson in the face, extracted
a canvas in a frame covered with dust and spider webs.
"See here. . . . A girl at the window after parting from her betrothed.
In three sittings. Not nearly finished yet."
The picture represented Katya faintly outlined sitting at an open
window, from which could be seen a garden and lilac distance. Ukleikin
did not like the picture.
"H'm! . . . There is air and . . . and there is expression," he said.
"There's a feeling of distance, but . . . but that bush is screaming . .
. screaming horribly!"
The decanter was brought on to the scene.
Towards evening Kostyliov, also a promising beginner, an historical
painter, came in to see Yegor Savvitch. He was a friend staying at the
next villa, and was a man of five-and-thirty. He had long hair, and wore
a blouse with a Shakespeare collar, and had a dignified manner. Seeing
the vodka, he frowned, complained of his chest, but yielding to his
friends' entreaties, drank a glass.
"I've thought of a subject, my friends," he began, getting drunk. "I
want to paint some new . . . Herod or Clepentian, or some blackguard of
that description, you understand, and to contrast with him the idea of
Christianity. On the one side Rome, you understand, and on the other
Christianity. . . . I want to represent the spirit, you understand? The
spirit!"
And the widow downstairs shouted continually:
"Katya, give me the cucumbers! Go to Sidorov's and get some kvass, you
jade!"
Like wolves in a cage, the three friends kept pacing to and fro from one
end of the room to the other. They talked without ceasing, talked, hotly
and genuinely; all three were excited, carried away. To listen to them
it would seem they had the future, fame, money, in their hands. And it
never occurred to either of them that time was passing, that every day
life was nearing its close, that they had lived at other people's
expense a great deal and nothing yet was accomplished; that they were
all bound by the inexorable law by which of a hundred promising
beginners only two or three rise to any position and all the others draw
blanks in the lottery, perish playing the part of flesh for the cannon.
. . . They were gay and happy, and looked the future boldly in the face!
At one o'clock in the morning Kostyliov said good-bye, and smoothing out
his Shakespeare collar, went home. The landscape painter remained to
sleep at Yegor Savvitch's. Before going to bed, Yegor Savvitch took a
candle and made his way into the kitchen to get a drink of water. In the
dark, narrow passage Katya was sitting, on a box, and, with her hands
clasped on her knees, was looking upwards. A blissful smile was straying
on her pale, exhausted face, and her eyes were beaming.
"Is that you? What are you thinking about?" Yegor Savvitch asked her.
"I am thinking of how you'll be famous," she said in a half-whisper. "I
keep fancying how you'll become a famous man. . . . I overheard all your
talk. . . . I keep dreaming and dreaming. . . ."
Katya went off into a happy laugh, cried, and laid her hands reverently
on her idol's shoulders.
AN ARTIST'S STORY
I
IT was six or seven years ago when I was living in one of the districts
of the province of T----, on the estate of a young landowner called
Byelokurov, who used to get up very early, wear a peasant tunic, drink
beer in the evenings, and continually complain to me that he never met
with sympathy from any one. He lived in the lodge in the garden, and I
in the old seigniorial house, in a big room with columns, where there
was no furniture except a wide sofa on which I used to sleep, and a
table on which I used to lay out patience. There was always, even in
still weather, a droning noise in the old Amos stoves, and in thunder-
storms the whole house shook and seemed to be cracking into pieces; and
it was rather terrifying, especially at night, when all the ten big
windows were suddenly lit up by lightning.
Condemned by destiny to perpetual idleness, I did absolutely nothing.
For hours together I gazed out of window at the sky, at the birds, at
the avenue, read everything that was brought me by post, slept.
Sometimes I went out of the house and wandered about till late in the
evening.
One day as I was returning home, I accidentally strayed into a place I
did not know. The sun was already sinking, and the shades of evening lay
across the flowering rye. Two rows of old, closely planted, very tall
fir-trees stood like two dense walls forming a picturesque, gloomy
avenue. I easily climbed over the fence and walked along the avenue,
slipping over the fir-needles which lay two inches deep on the ground.
It was still and dark, and only here and there on the high tree-tops the
vivid golden light quivered and made rainbows in the spiders' webs.
There was a strong, almost stifling smell of resin. Then I turned into a
long avenue of limes. Here, too, all was desolation and age; last year's
leaves rusted mournfully under my feet and in the twilight shadows
lurked between the trees. From the old orchard on the right came the
faint, reluctant note of the golden oriole, who must have been old too.
But at last the limes ended. I walked by an old white house of two
storeys with a terrace, and there suddenly opened before me a view of a
courtyard, a large pond with a bathing-house, a group of green willows,
and a village on the further bank, with a high, narrow belfry on which
there glittered a cross reflecting the setting sun.
For a moment it breathed upon me the fascination of something near and
very familiar, as though I had seen that landscape at some time in my
childhood.
At the white stone gates which led from the yard to the fields, old-
fashioned solid gates with lions on them, were standing two girls. One
of them, the elder, a slim, pale, very handsome girl with a perfect
haystack of chestnut hair and a little obstinate mouth, had a severe
expression and scarcely took notice of me, while the other, who was
still very young, not more than seventeen or eighteen, and was also slim
and pale, with a large mouth and large eyes, looked at me with
astonishment as I passed by, said something in English, and was overcome
with embarrassment. And it seemed to me that these two charming faces,
too, had long been familiar to me. And I returned home feeling as though
I had had a delightful dream.
One morning soon afterwards, as Byelokurov and I were walking near the
house, a carriage drove unexpectedly into the yard, rustling over the
grass, and in it was sitting one of those girls. It was the elder one.
She had come to ask for subscriptions for some villagers whose cottages
had been burnt down. Speaking with great earnestness and precision, and
not looking at us, she told us how many houses in the village of
Siyanovo had been burnt, how many men, women, and children were left
homeless, and what steps were proposed, to begin with, by the Relief
Committee, of which she was now a member. After handing us the
subscription list for our signatures, she put it away and immediately
began to take leave of us.
"You have quite forgotten us, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said to Byelokurov
as she shook hands with him. "Do come, and if Monsieur N. (she mentioned
my name) cares to make the acquaintance of admirers of his work, and
will come and see us, mother and I will be delighted."
I bowed.
When she had gone Pyotr Petrovitch began to tell me about her. The girl
was, he said, of good family, and her name was Lidia Voltchaninov, and
the estate on which she lived with her mother and sister, like the
village on the other side of the pond, was called Shelkovka. Her father
had once held an important position in Moscow, and had died with the
rank of privy councillor. Although they had ample means, the
Voltchaninovs lived on their estate summer and winter without going
away. Lidia was a teacher in the Zemstvo school in her own village, and
received a salary of twenty-five roubles a month. She spent nothing on
herself but her salary, and was proud of earning her own living.
"An interesting family," said Byelokurov. "Let us go over one day. They
will be delighted to see you."
One afternoon on a holiday we thought of the Voltchaninovs, and went to
Shelkovka to see them. They--the mother and two daughters --were at
home. The mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, who at one time had been handsome,
but now, asthmatic, depressed, vague, and over-feeble for her years,
tried to entertain me with conversation about painting. Having heard
from her daughter that I might come to Shelkovka, she had hurriedly
recalled two or three of my landscapes which she had seen in exhibitions
in Moscow, and now asked what I meant to express by them. Lidia, or as
they called her Lida, talked more to Byelokurov than to me. Earnest and
unsmiling, she asked him why he was not on the Zemstvo, and why he had
not attended any of its meetings.
"It's not right, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said reproachfully. "It's not
right. It's too bad."
"That's true, Lida--that's true," the mother assented. "It isn't right."
"Our whole district is in the hands of Balagin," Lida went on,
addressing me. "He is the chairman of the Zemstvo Board, and he has
distributed all the posts in the district among his nephews and sons-in-
law; and he does as he likes. He ought to be opposed. The young men
ought to make a strong party, but you see what the young men among us
are like. It's a shame, Pyotr Petrovitch!"
The younger sister, Genya, was silent while they were talking of the
Zemstvo. She took no part in serious conversation. She was not looked
upon as quite grown up by her family, and, like a child, was always
called by the nickname of Misuce, because that was what she had called
her English governess when she was a child. She was all the time looking
at me with curiosity, and when I glanced at the photographs in the
album, she explained to me: "That's uncle . . . that's god-father,"
moving her finger across the photograph. As she did so she touched me
with her shoulder like a child, and I had a close view of her delicate,
undeveloped chest, her slender shoulders, her plait, and her thin little
body tightly drawn in by her sash.
We played croquet and lawn tennis, we walked about the garden, drank
tea, and then sat a long time over supper. After the huge empty room
with columns, I felt, as it were, at home in this small snug house where
there were no oleographs on the walls and where the servants were spoken
to with civility. And everything seemed to me young and pure, thanks to
the presence of Lida and Misuce, and there was an atmosphere of
refinement over everything. At supper Lida talked to Byelokurov again of
the Zemstvo, of Balagin, and of school libraries. She was an energetic,
genuine girl, with convictions, and it was interesting to listen to her,
though she talked a great deal and in a loud voice--perhaps because she
was accustomed to talking at school. On the other hand, Pyotr
Petrovitch, who had retained from his student days the habit of turning
every conversation into an argument, was tedious, flat, long-winded, and
unmistakably anxious to appear clever and advanced. Gesticulating, he
upset a sauce-boat with his sleeve, making a huge pool on the
tablecloth, but no one except me appeared to notice it.
It was dark and still as we went home.
"Good breeding is shown, not by not upsetting the sauce, but by not
noticing it when somebody else does," said Byelokurov, with a sigh.
"Yes, a splendid, intellectual family! I've dropped out of all decent
society; it's dreadful how I've dropped out of it! It's all through
work, work, work!"
He talked of how hard one had to work if one wanted to be a model
farmer. And I thought what a heavy, sluggish fellow he was! Whenever he
talked of anything serious he articulated "Er-er" with intense effort,
and worked just as he talked--slowly, always late and behind-hand. I had
little faith in his business capacity if only from the fact that when I
gave him letters to post he carried them about in his pocket for weeks
together.
"The hardest thing of all," he muttered as he walked beside me-- "the
hardest thing of all is that, work as one may, one meets with no
sympathy from any one. No sympathy!"
II
I took to going to see the Voltchaninovs. As a rule I sat on the lower
step of the terrace; I was fretted by dissatisfaction with myself; I was
sorry at the thought of my life passing so rapidly and uninterestingly,
and felt as though I would like to tear out of my breast the heart which
had grown so heavy. And meanwhile I heard talk on the terrace, the
rustling of dresses, the pages of a book being turned. I soon grew
accustomed to the idea that during the day Lida received patients, gave
out books, and often went into the village with a parasol and no hat,
and in the evening talked aloud of the Zemstvo and schools. This slim,
handsome, invariably austere girl, with her small well-cut mouth, always
said dryly when the conversation turned on serious subjects:
"That's of no interest to you."
She did not like me. She disliked me because I was a landscape painter
and did not in my pictures portray the privations of the peasants, and
that, as she fancied, I was indifferent to what she put such faith in. I
remember when I was travelling on the banks of Lake Baikal, I met a
Buriat girl on horseback, wearing a shirt and trousers of blue Chinese
canvas; I asked her if she would sell me her pipe. While we talked she
looked contemptuously at my European face and hat, and in a moment she
was bored with talking to me; she shouted to her horse and galloped on.
And in just the same way Lida despised me as an alien. She never
outwardly expressed her dislike for me, but I felt it, and sitting on
the lower step of the terrace, I felt irritated, and said that doctoring
peasants when one was not a doctor was deceiving them, and that it was
easy to be benevolent when one had six thousand acres.
Meanwhile her sister Misuce had no cares, and spent her life in complete
idleness just as I did. When she got up in the morning she immediately
took up a book and sat down to read on the terrace in a deep arm-chair,
with her feet hardly touching the ground, or hid herself with her book
in the lime avenue, or walked out into the fields. She spent the whole
day reading, poring greedily over her book, and only from the tired,
dazed look in her eyes and the extreme paleness of her face one could
divine how this continual reading exhausted her brain. When I arrived
she would flush a little, leave her book, and looking into my face with
her big eyes, would tell me eagerly of anything that had happened--for
instance, that the chimney had been on fire in the servants' hall, or
that one of the men had caught a huge fish in the pond. On ordinary days
she usually went about in a light blouse and a dark blue skirt. We went
for walks together, picked cherries for making jam, went out in the
boat. When she jumped up to reach a cherry or sculled in the boat, her
thin, weak arms showed through her transparent sleeves. Or I painted a
sketch, and she stood beside me watching rapturously.
One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Voltchaninovs about nine o
clock in the morning. I walked about the park, keeping a good distance
from the house, looking for white mushrooms, of which there was a great
number that summer, and noting their position so as to come and pick
them afterwards with Genya. There was a warm breeze. I saw Genya and her
mother both in light holiday dresses coming home from church, Genya
holding her hat in the wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the
terrace.
For a careless person like me, trying to find justification for my
perpetual idleness, these holiday mornings in our country-houses in the
summer have always had a particular charm. When the green garden, still
wet with dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks radiant with
happiness, when there is a scent of mignonette and oleander near the
house, when the young people have just come back from church and are
having breakfast in the garden, all so charmingly dressed and gay, and
one knows that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people are going to
do nothing the whole long day, one wishes that all life were like that.
Now, too, I had the same thought, and walked about the garden prepared
to walk about like that, aimless and unoccupied, the whole day, the
whole summer.
Genya came out with a basket; she had a look in her face as though she
knew she would find me in the garden, or had a presentiment of it. We
gathered mushrooms and talked, and when she asked a question she walked
a little ahead so as to see my face.
"A miracle happened in the village yesterday," she said. "The lame woman
Pelagea has been ill the whole year. No doctors or medicines did her any
good; but yesterday an old woman came and whispered something over her,
and her illness passed away."
"That's nothing much," I said. "You mustn't look for miracles only among
sick people and old women. Isn't health a miracle? And life itself?
Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle."
"And aren't you afraid of what is beyond understanding?"
"No. Phenomena I don't understand I face boldly, and am not overwhelmed
by them. I am above them. Man ought to recognise himself as superior to
lions, tigers, stars, superior to everything in nature, even what seems
miraculous and is beyond his understanding, or else he is not a man, but
a mouse afraid of everything."
Genya believed that as an artist I knew a very great deal, and could
guess correctly what I did not know. She longed for me to initiate her
into the domain of the Eternal and the Beautiful--into that higher world
in which, as she imagined, I was quite at home. And she talked to me of
God, of the eternal life, of the miraculous. And I, who could never
admit that my self and my imagination would be lost forever after death,
answered: "Yes, men are immortal"; "Yes, there is eternal life in store
for us." And she listened, believed, and did not ask for proofs.
As we were going home she stopped suddenly and said:
"Our Lida is a remarkable person--isn't she? I love her very dearly, and
would be ready to give my life for her any minute. But tell me"--Genya
touched my sleeve with her finger--"tell me, why do you always argue
with her? Why are you irritated?"
"Because she is wrong."
Genya shook her head and tears came into her eyes.
"How incomprehensible that is!" she said. At that minute Lida had just
returned from somewhere, and standing with a whip in her hand, a slim,
beautiful figure in the sunlight, at the steps, she was giving some
orders to one of the men. Talking loudly, she hurriedly received two or
three sick villagers; then with a busy and anxious face she walked about
the rooms, opening one cupboard after another, and went upstairs. It was
a long time before they could find her and call her to dinner, and she
came in when we had finished our soup. All these tiny details I remember
with tenderness, and that whole day I remember vividly, though nothing
special happened. After dinner Genya lay in a long arm-chair reading,
while I sat upon the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The
whole sky was overcast with clouds, and it began to spot with fine rain.
It was hot; the wind had dropped, and it seemed as though the day would
never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace, looking drowsy
and carrying a fan.
"Oh, mother," said Genya, kissing her hand, "it's not good for you to
sleep in the day."
They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other would
stand on the terrace, and, looking towards the trees, call "Aa--oo,
Genya!" or "Mother, where are you?" They always said their prayers
together, and had the same faith; and they understood each other
perfectly even when they did not speak. And their attitude to people was
the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used to me and fond of
me, and when I did not come for two or three days, sent to ask if I were
well. She, too, gazed at my sketches with enthusiasm, and with the same
openness and readiness to chatter as Misuce, she told me what had
happened, and confided to me her domestic secrets.
She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not care
for endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she lived her life
apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred and enigmatic a person
as the admiral, always sitting in his cabin, is to the sailors.
"Our Lida is a remarkable person," the mother would often say. "Isn't
she?"
Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.
"She is a remarkable girl," said her mother, and added in an undertone,
like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: "You wouldn't easily find
another like her; only, do you know, I am beginning to be a little
uneasy. The school, the dispensary, books --all that's very good, but
why go to extremes? She is three-and-twenty, you know; it's time for her
to think seriously of herself. With her books and her dispensary she
will find life has slipped by without having noticed it. . . . She must
be married."
Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her head and
said as it were to herself, looking at her mother:
"Mother, everything is in God's hands."
And again she buried herself in her book.
Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played croquet
and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long time over supper and
talked again about schools, and about Balagin, who had the whole
district under his thumb. As I went away from the Voltchaninovs that
evening, I carried away the impression of a long, long idle day, with a
melancholy consciousness that everything ends in this world, however
long it may be.
Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been with me
all day, from morning till night, I felt dull without her, and that all
that charming family were near and dear to me, and for the first time
that summer I had a yearning to paint.
"Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?" I asked
Byelokurov as I went home. "My life is dreary, difficult, and monotonous
because I am an artist, a strange person. From my earliest days I've
been wrung by envy, self-dissatisfaction, distrust in my work. I'm
always poor, I'm a wanderer, but you--you're a healthy, normal man, a
landowner, and a gentleman. Why do you live in such an uninteresting
way? Why do you get so little out of life? Why haven't you, for
instance, fallen in love with Lida or Genya?"
"You forget that I love another woman," answered Byelokurov.
He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge with
him. Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund, and dignified, not
unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the Russian national
dress and beads, always carrying a parasol; and the servant was
continually calling her in to dinner or to tea. Three years before she
had taken one of the lodges for a summer holiday, and had settled down
at Byelokurov's apparently forever. She was ten years older than he was,
and kept a sharp hand over him, so much so that he had to ask her
permission when he went out of the house. She often sobbed in a deep
masculine note, and then I used to send word to her that if she did not
leave off, I should give up my rooms there; and she left off.
When we got home Byelokurov sat down on the sofa and frowned
thoughtfully, and I began walking up and down the room, conscious of a
soft emotion as though I were in love. I wanted to talk about the
Voltchaninovs.
"Lida could only fall in love with a member of the Zemstvo, as devoted
to schools and hospitals as she is," I said. "Oh, for the sake of a girl
like that one might not only go into the Zemstvo, but even wear out iron
shoes, like the girl in the fairy tale. And Misuce? What a sweet
creature she is, that Misuce!"
Byelokurov, drawling out "Er--er," began a long-winded disquisition on
the malady of the age--pessimism. He talked confidently, in a tone that
suggested that I was opposing him. Hundreds of miles of desolate,
monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one
man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go.
"It's not a question of pessimism or optimism," I said irritably; "its
simply that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no sense."
Byelokurov took this as aimed at himself, was offended, and went away.
III
"The prince is staying at Malozyomovo, and he asks to be remembered to
you," said Lida to her mother. She had just come in, and was taking off
her gloves. "He gave me a great deal of interesting news . . . . He
promised to raise the question of a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo
again at the provincial assembly, but he says there is very little hope
of it." And turning to me, she said: "Excuse me, I always forget that
this cannot be interesting to you."
I felt irritated.
"Why not interesting to me?" I said, shrugging my shoulders. "You do not
care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question has great
interest for me."
"Yes?"
"Yes. In my opinion a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo is quite
unnecessary."
My irritation infected her; she looked at me, screwing up her eyes, and
asked:
"What is necessary? Landscapes?"
"Landscapes are not, either. Nothing is."
She finished taking off her gloves, and opened the newspaper, which had
just been brought from the post. A minute later she said quietly,
evidently restraining herself:
"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if there had been a medical
relief centre near, she would have lived. And I think even landscape-
painters ought to have some opinions on the subject."
"I have a very definite opinion on that subject, I assure you," I
answered; and she screened herself with the newspaper, as though
unwilling to listen to me. "To my mind, all these schools, dispensaries,
libraries, medical relief centres, under present conditions, only serve
to aggravate the bondage of the people. The peasants are fettered by a
great chain, and you do not break the chain, but only add fresh links to
it--that's my view of it."
She raised her eyes to me and smiled ironically, and I went on trying to
formulate my leading idea.
"What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these
Annas, Mavras, Pelageas, toil from early morning till dark, fall ill
from working beyond their strength, all their lives tremble for their
sick and hungry children, all their lives are being doctored, and in
dread of death and disease, fade and grow old early, and die in filth
and stench. Their children begin the same story over again as soon as
they grow up, and so it goes on for hundreds of years and milliards of
men live worse than beasts-- in continual terror, for a mere crust of
bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never having
time to think of their souls, of their image and semblance. Cold,
hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like avalanches of snow, block
for them every way to spiritual activity--that is, to what distinguishes
man from the brutes and what is the only thing which makes life worth
living. You go to their help with hospitals and schools, but you don't
free them from their fetters by that; on the contrary, you bind them in
closer bonds, as, by introducing new prejudices, you increase the number
of their wants, to say nothing of the fact that they've got to pay the
Zemstvo for drugs and books, and so toil harder than ever."
"I am not going to argue with you," said Lida, putting down the paper.
"I've heard all that before. I will only say one thing: one cannot sit
with one's hands in one's lap. It's true that we are not saving
humanity, and perhaps we make a great many mistakes; but we do what we
can, and we are right. The highest and holiest task for a civilised
being is to serve his neighbours, and we try to serve them as best we
can. You don't like it, but one can't please every one."
"That's true, Lida," said her mother--"that's true."
In Lida's presence she was always a little timid, and looked at her
nervously as she talked, afraid of saying something superfluous or
inopportune. And she never contradicted her, but always assented:
"That's true, Lida--that's true."
"Teaching the peasants to read and write, books of wretched precepts and
rhymes, and medical relief centres, cannot diminish either ignorance or
the death-rate, just as the light from your windows cannot light up this
huge garden," said I. "You give nothing. By meddling in these people's
lives you only create new wants in them, and new demands on their
labour."
"Ach! Good heavens! But one must do something!" said Lida with vexation,
and from her tone one could see that she thought my arguments worthless
and despised them.
"The people must be freed from hard physical labour," said I. "We must
lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they may not
spend all their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and in the fields,
but may also have time to think of their souls, of God--may have time to
develop their spiritual capacities. The highest vocation of man is
spiritual activity--the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of
life. Make coarse animal labour unnecessary for them, let them feel
themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery these dispensaries
and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he can only be
satisfied by religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles."
"Free them from labour?" laughed Lida. "But is that possible?"
"Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us,
townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree to
divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of
their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for two
or three hours a day. Imagine that we all, rich and poor, work only for
three hours a day, and the rest of our time is free. Imagine further
that in order to depend even less upon our bodies and to labour less, we
invent machines to replace our work, we try to cut down our needs to the
minimum. We would harden ourselves and our children that they should not
be afraid of hunger and cold, and that we shouldn't be continually
trembling for their health like Anna, Mavra, and Pelagea. Imagine that
we don't doctor ourselves, don't keep dispensaries, tobacco factories,
distilleries--what a lot of free time would be left us after all! All of
us together would devote our leisure to science and art. Just as the
peasants sometimes work, the whole community together mending the roads,
so all of us, as a community, would search for truth and the meaning of
life, and I am convinced that the truth would be discovered very
quickly; man would escape from this continual, agonising, oppressive
dread of death, and even from death itself."
"You contradict yourself, though," said Lida. "You talk about science,
and are yourself opposed to elementary education."
"Elementary education when a man has nothing to read but the signs on
public houses and sometimes books which he cannot understand-- such
education has existed among us since the times of Rurik; Gogol's
Petrushka has been reading for ever so long, yet as the village was in
the days of Rurik so it has remained. What is needed is not elementary
education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities.
What are wanted are not schools, but universities."
"You are opposed to medicine, too."
"Yes. It would be necessary only for the study of diseases as natural
phenomena, and not for the cure of them. If one must cure, it should not
be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause --
physical labour, and then there will be no disease. I don't believe in a
science that cures disease," I went on excitedly. "When science and art
are real, they aim not at temporary private ends, but at eternal and
universal--they seek for truth and the meaning of life, they seek for
God, for the soul, and when they are tied down to the needs and evils of
the day, to dispensaries and libraries, they only complicate and hamper
life. We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can
read and write, but we are quite without biologists, mathematicians,
philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our
spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs.
Scientific men, writers, artists, are hard at work; thanks to them, the
conveniences of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical
demands increase, yet truth is still a long way off, and man still
remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to
the degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all
fitness for life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning,
and the more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is
his position, as when one looks into it, it is evident that he is
working for the amusement of a rapacious and unclean animal, and is
supporting the existing order. And I don't care to work and I won't
work. . . . Nothing is any use; let the earth sink to perdition!"
"Misuce, go out of the room!" said Lida to her sister, apparently
thinking my words pernicious to the young girl.
Genya looked mournfully at her mother and sister, and went out of the
room.
"These are the charming things people say when they want to justify
their indifference," said Lida. "It is easier to disapprove of schools
and hospitals, than to teach or heal."
"That's true, Lida--that's true," the mother assented.
"You threaten to give up working," said Lida. "You evidently set a high
value on your work. Let us give up arguing; we shall never agree, since
I put the most imperfect dispensary or library of which you have just
spoken so contemptuously on a higher level than any landscape." And
turning at once to her mother, she began speaking in quite a different
tone: "The prince is very much changed, and much thinner than when he
was with us last. He is being sent to Vichy."
She told her mother about the prince in order to avoid talking to me.
Her face glowed, and to hide her feeling she bent low over the table as
though she were short-sighted, and made a show of reading the newspaper.
My presence was disagreeable to her. I said good-bye and went home.
IV
It was quite still out of doors; the village on the further side of the
pond was already asleep; there was not a light to be seen, and only the
stars were faintly reflected in the pond. At the gate with the lions on
it Genya was standing motionless, waiting to escort me.
"Every one is asleep in the village," I said to her, trying to make out
her face in the darkness, and I saw her mournful dark eyes fixed upon
me. "The publican and the horse-stealers are asleep, while we, well-bred
people, argue and irritate each other."
It was a melancholy August night--melancholy because there was already a
feeling of autumn; the moon was rising behind a purple cloud, and it
shed a faint light upon the road and on the dark fields of winter corn
by the sides. From time to time a star fell. Genya walked beside me
along the road, and tried not to look at the sky, that she might not see
the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.
"I believe you are right," she said, shivering with the damp night air.
"If people, all together, could devote themselves to spiritual ends,
they would soon know everything."
"Of course. We are higher beings, and if we were really to recognise the
whole force of human genius and lived only for higher ends, we should in
the end become like gods. But that will never be--mankind will
degenerate till no traces of genius remain."
When the gates were out of sight, Genya stopped and shook hands with me.
"Good-night," she said, shivering; she had nothing but her blouse over
her shoulders and was shrinking with cold. "Come to-morrow."
I felt wretched at the thought of being left alone, irritated and
dissatisfied with myself and other people; and I, too, tried not to look
at the falling stars. "Stay another minute," I said to her, "I entreat
you."
I loved Genya. I must have loved her because she met me when I came and
saw me off when I went away; because she looked at me tenderly and
enthusiastically. How touchingly beautiful were her pale face, slender
neck, slender arms, her weakness, her idleness, her reading. And
intelligence? I suspected in her intelligence above the average. I was
fascinated by the breadth of her views, perhaps because they were
different from those of the stern, handsome Lida, who disliked me. Genya
liked me, because I was an artist. I had conquered her heart by my
talent, and had a passionate desire to paint for her sake alone; and I
dreamed of her as of my little queen who with me would possess those
trees, those fields, the mists, the dawn, the exquisite and beautiful
scenery in the midst of which I had felt myself hopelessly solitary and
useless.
"Stay another minute," I begged her. "I beseech you."
I took off my overcoat and put it over her chilly shoulders; afraid of
looking ugly and absurd in a man's overcoat, she laughed, threw it off,
and at that instant I put my arms round her and covered her face,
shoulders, and hands with kisses.
"Till to-morrow," she whispered, and softly, as though afraid of
breaking upon the silence of the night, she embraced me. "We have no
secrets from one another. I must tell my mother and my sister at once. .
. . It's so dreadful! Mother is all right; mother likes you--but Lida!"
She ran to the gates.
"Good-bye!" she called.
And then for two minutes I heard her running. I did not want to go home,
and I had nothing to go for. I stood still for a little time hesitating,
and made my way slowly back, to look once more at the house in which she
lived, the sweet, simple old house, which seemed to be watching me from
the windows of its upper storey, and understanding all about it. I
walked by the terrace, sat on the seat by the tennis ground, in the dark
under the old elm-tree, and looked from there at the house. In the
windows of the top storey where Misuce slept there appeared a bright
light, which changed to a soft green--they had covered the lamp with the
shade. Shadows began to move. . . . I was full of tenderness, peace, and
satisfaction with myself--satisfaction at having been able to be carried
away by my feelings and having fallen in love, and at the same time I
felt uncomfortable at the thought that only a few steps away from me, in
one of the rooms of that house there was Lida, who disliked and perhaps
hated me. I went on sitting there wondering whether Genya would come
out; I listened and fancied I heard voices talking upstairs.
About an hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no
longer visible. The moon was standing high above the house, and lighting
up the sleeping garden and the paths; the dahlias and the roses in front
of the house could be seen distinctly, and looked all the same colour.
It began to grow very cold. I went out of the garden, picked up my coat
on the road, and slowly sauntered home.
When next day after dinner I went to the Voltchaninovs, the glass door
into the garden was wide open. I sat down on the terrace, expecting
Genya every minute, to appear from behind the flower-beds on the lawn,
or from one of the avenues, or that I should hear her voice from the
house. Then I walked into the drawing-room, the dining-room. There was
not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I walked along the long
corridor to the hall and back. In this corridor there were several
doors, and through one of them I heard the voice of Lida:
"'God . . . sent . . . a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice,
probably dictating--"'God sent a crow a piece of cheese . . . . A crow .
. . a piece of cheese.' . . . Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing
my steps.
"It's I."
"Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to you this minute; I'm giving Dasha
her lesson."
"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"
"No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the
province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad," she
added after a pause. "'God sent . . . the crow . . . a piece . . . of
cheese.' . . . Have you written it?"
I went into the hall, and stared vacantly at the pond and the village,
and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese. . . . God sent the crow
a piece of cheese."
And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time-- first
from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of
lime-trees. . . . At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave
me a note:
"I told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you," I
read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness.
Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"
Then there was the dark fir avenue, the broken-down fence. . . . On the
field where then the rye was in flower and the corncrakes were calling,
now there were cows and hobbled horses. On the slope there were bright
green patches of winter corn. A sober workaday feeling came over me and
I felt ashamed of all I had said at the Voltchaninovs', and felt bored
with life as I had been before. When I got home, I packed and set off
that evening for Petersburg.
----
I never saw the Voltchaninovs again. Not long ago, on my way to the
Crimea, I met Byelokurov in the train. As before, he was wearing a
jerkin and an embroidered shirt, and when I asked how he was, he replied
that, God be praised, he was well. We began talking. He had sold his old
estate and bought another smaller one, in the name of Liubov Ivanovna.
He could tell me little about the Voltchaninovs. Lida, he said, was
still living in Shelkovka and teaching in the school; she had by degrees
succeeded in gathering round her a circle of people sympathetic to her
who made a strong party, and at the last election had turned out
Balagin, who had till then had the whole district under his thumb. About
Genya he only told me that she did not live at home, and that he did not
know where she was.
I am beginning to forget the old house, and only sometimes when I am
painting or reading I suddenly, apropos of nothing, remember the green
light in the window, the sound of my footsteps as I walked home through
the fields in the night, with my heart full of love, rubbing my hands in
the cold. And still more rarely, at moments when I am sad and depressed
by loneliness, I have dim memories, and little by little I begin to feel
that she is thinking of me, too --that she is waiting for me, and that
we shall meet. . . .
Misuce, where are you?
THREE YEARS
I
IT was dark, and already lights had begun to gleam here and there in the
houses, and a pale moon was rising behind the barracks at the end of the
street. Laptev was sitting on a bench by the gate waiting for the end of
the evening service at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. He was
reckoning that Yulia Sergeyevna would pass by on her way from the
service, and then he would speak to her, and perhaps spend the whole
evening with her.
He had been sitting there for an hour and a half already, and all that
time his imagination had been busy picturing his Moscow rooms, his
Moscow friends, his man Pyotr, and his writing-table. He gazed half
wonderingly at the dark, motionless trees, and it seemed strange to him
that he was living now, not in his summer villa at Sokolniki, but in a
provincial town in a house by which a great herd of cattle was driven
every morning and evening, accompanied by terrible clouds of dust and
the blowing of a horn. He thought of long conversations in which he had
taken part quite lately in Moscow--conversations in which it had been
maintained that one could live without love, that passionate love was an
obsession, that finally there is no such love, but only a physical
attraction between the sexes--and so on, in the same style; he
remembered them and thought mournfully that if he were asked now what
love was, he could not have found an answer.
The service was over, the people began to appear. Laptev strained his
eyes gazing at the dark figures. The bishop had been driven by in his
carriage, the bells had stopped ringing, and the red and green lights in
the belfry were one after another extinguished-- there had been an
illumination, as it was dedication day--but the people were still coming
out, lingering, talking, and standing under the windows. But at last
Laptev heard a familiar voice, his heart began beating violently, and he
was overcome with despair on seeing that Yulia Sergeyevna was not alone,
but walking with two ladies.
"It's awful, awful!" he whispered, feeling jealous. "It's awful!"
At the corner of the lane, she stopped to say good-bye to the ladies,
and while doing so glanced at Laptev.
"I was coming to see you," he said. "I'm coming for a chat with your
father. Is he at home?"
"Most likely," she answered. "It's early for him to have gone to the
club."
There were gardens all along the lane, and a row of lime-trees growing
by the fence cast a broad patch of shadow in the moonlight, so that the
gate and the fences were completely plunged in darkness on one side,
from which came the sounds of women whispering, smothered laughter, and
someone playing softly on a balalaika. There was a fragrance of lime-
flowers and of hay. This fragrance and the murmur of the unseen whispers
worked upon Laptev. He was all at once overwhelmed with a passionate
longing to throw his arms round his companion, to shower kisses on her
face, her hands, her shoulders, to burst into sobs, to fall at her feet
and to tell her how long he had been waiting for her. A faint scarcely
perceptible scent of incense hung about her; and that scent reminded him
of the time when he, too, believed in God and used to go to evening
service, and when he used to dream so much of pure romantic love. And it
seemed to him that, because this girl did not love him, all possibility
of the happiness he had dreamed of then was lost to him forever.
She began speaking sympathetically of the illness of his sister, Nina
Fyodorovna. Two months before his sister had undergone an operation for
cancer, and now every one was expecting a return of the disease.
"I went to see her this morning," said Yulia Sergeyevna, "and it seemed
to me that during the last week she has, not exactly grown thin, but
has, as it were, faded."
"Yes, yes," Laptev agreed. "There's no return of the symptoms, but every
day I notice she grows weaker and weaker, and is wasting before my eyes.
I don't understand what's the matter with her."
"Oh dear! And how strong she used to be, plump and rosy!" said Yulia
Sergeyevna after a moment's silence. "Every one here used to call her
the Moscow lady. How she used to laugh! On holidays she used to dress up
like a peasant girl, and it suited her so well."
Doctor Sergey Borisovitch was at home; he was a stout, red-faced man,
wearing a long coat that reached below his knees, and looking as though
he had short legs. He was pacing up and down his study, with his hands
in his pockets, and humming to himself in an undertone, "Ru-ru-ru-ru."
His grey whiskers looked unkempt, and his hair was unbrushed, as though
he had just got out of bed. And his study with pillows on the sofa, with
stacks of papers in the corners, and with a dirty invalid poodle lying
under the table, produced the same impression of unkemptness and
untidiness as himself.
"M. Laptev wants to see you," his daughter said to him, going into his
study.
"Ru-ru-ru-ru," he hummed louder than ever, and turning into the drawing-
room, gave his hand to Laptev, and asked: "What good news have you to
tell me?"
It was dark in the drawing-room. Laptev, still standing with his hat in
his hand, began apologising for disturbing him; he asked what was to be
done to make his sister sleep at night, and why she was growing so thin;
and he was embarrassed by the thought that he had asked those very
questions at his visit that morning.
"Tell me," he said, "wouldn't it be as well to send for some specialist
on internal diseases from Moscow? What do you think of it?"
The doctor sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and made a vague gesture with
his hands.
It was evident that he was offended. He was a very huffy man, prone to
take offence, and always ready to suspect that people did not believe in
him, that he was not recognised or properly respected, that his patients
exploited him, and that his colleagues showed him ill-will. He was
always jeering at himself, saying that fools like him were only made for
the public to ride rough-shod over them.
Yulia Sergeyevna lighted the lamp. She was tired out with the service,
and that was evident from her pale, exhausted face, and her weary step.
She wanted to rest. She sat down on the sofa, put her hands on her lap,
and sank into thought. Laptev knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as
though he were conscious of his ugliness all over his body. He was
short, thin, with ruddy cheeks, and his hair had grown so thin that his
head felt cold. In his expression there was none of that refined
simplicity which makes even rough, ugly faces attractive; in the society
of women, he was awkward, over-talkative, affected. And now he almost
despised himself for it. He must talk that Yulia Sergeyevna might not be
bored in his company. But what about? About his sister's illness again?
And he began to talk about medicine, saying what is usually said. He
approved of hygiene, and said that he had long ago wanted to found a
night-refuge in Moscow--in fact, he had already calculated the cost of
it. According to his plan the workmen who came in the evening to the
night-refuge were to receive a supper of hot cabbage soup with bread, a
warm, dry bed with a rug, and a place for drying their clothes and their
boots.
Yulia Sergeyevna was usually silent in his presence, and in a strange
way, perhaps by the instinct of a lover, he divined her thoughts and
intentions. And now, from the fact that after the evening service she
had not gone to her room to change her dress and drink tea, he deduced
that she was going to pay some visit elsewhere.
"But I'm in no hurry with the night-refuge," he went on, speaking with
vexation and irritability, and addressing the doctor, who looked at him,
as it were, blankly and in perplexity, evidently unable to understand
what induced him to raise the question of medicine and hygiene. "And
most likely it will be a long time, too, before I make use of our
estimate. I fear our night-shelter will fall into the hands of our pious
humbugs and philanthropic ladies, who always ruin any undertaking."
Yulia Sergeyevna got up and held out her hand to Laptev.
"Excuse me," she said, "it's time for me to go. Please give my love to
your sister."
"Ru-ru-ru-ru," hummed the doctor. "Ru-ru-ru-ru."
Yulia Sergeyevna went out, and after staying a little longer, Laptev
said good-bye to the doctor and went home. When a man is dissatisfied
and feels unhappy, how trivial seem to him the shapes of the lime-trees,
the shadows, the clouds, all the beauties of nature, so complacent, so
indifferent! By now the moon was high up in the sky, and the clouds were
scudding quickly below. "But how naïve and provincial the moon is, how
threadbare and paltry the clouds!" thought Laptev. He felt ashamed of
the way he had talked just now about medicine, and the night-refuge. He
felt with horror that next day he would not have will enough to resist
trying to see her and talk to her again, and would again be convinced
that he was nothing to her. And the day after--it would be the same.
With what object? And how and when would it all end?
At home he went in to see his sister. Nina Fyodorovna still looked
strong and gave the impression of being a well-built, vigorous woman,
but her striking pallor made her look like a corpse, especially when, as
now, she was lying on her back with her eyes closed; her eldest daughter
Sasha, a girl of ten years old, was sitting beside her reading aloud
from her reading-book.
"Alyosha has come," the invalid said softly to herself.
There had long been established between Sasha and her uncle a tacit
compact, to take turns in sitting with the patient. On this occasion
Sasha closed her reading-book, and without uttering a word, went softly
out of the room. Laptev took an historical novel from the chest of
drawers, and looking for the right page, sat down and began reading it
aloud.
Nina Fyodorovna was born in Moscow of a merchant family. She and her two
brothers had spent their childhood and early youth, living at home in
Pyatnitsky Street. Their childhood was long and wearisome; her father
treated her sternly, and had even on two or three occasions flogged her,
and her mother had had a long illness and died. The servants were
coarse, dirty, and hypocritical; the house was frequented by priests and
monks, also hypocritical; they ate and drank and coarsely flattered her
father, whom they did not like. The boys had the good-fortune to go to
school, while Nina was left practically uneducated. All her life she
wrote an illegible scrawl, and had read nothing but historical novels.
Seventeen years ago, when she was twenty-two, on a summer holiday at
Himki, she made the acquaintance of her present husband, a landowner
called Panaurov, had fallen in love with him, and married him secretly
against her father's will. Panaurov, a handsome, rather impudent fellow,
who whistled and lighted his cigarette from the holy lamp, struck the
father as an absolutely worthless person. And when the son-in-law began
in his letters demanding a dowry, the old man wrote to his daughter that
he would send her furs, silver, and various articles that had been left
at her mother's death, as well as thirty thousand roubles, but without
his paternal blessing. Later he sent another twenty thousand. This
money, as well as the dowry, was spent; the estate had been sold and
Panaurov moved with his family to the town and got a job in a provincial
government office. In the town he formed another tie, and had a second
family, and this was the subject of much talk, as his illicit family was
not a secret.
Nina Fyodorovna adored her husband. And now, listening to the historical
novel, she was thinking how much she had gone through in her life, how
much she had suffered, and that if any one were to describe her life it
would make a very pathetic story. As the tumour was in her breast, she
was persuaded that love and her domestic grief were the cause of her
illness, and that jealousy and tears had brought her to her hopeless
state.
At last Alexey Fyodorovitch closed the book and said:
"That's the end, and thank God for it. To-morrow we'll begin a new one."
Nina Fyodorovna laughed. She had always been given to laughter, but of
late Laptev had begun to notice that at moments her mind seemed weakened
by illness, and she would laugh at the smallest trifle, and even without
any cause at all.
"Yulia came before dinner while you were out," she said. "So far as I
can see, she hasn't much faith in her papa. 'Let papa go on treating
you,' she said, 'but write in secret to the holy elder to pray for you,
too.' There is a holy man somewhere here. Yulia forgot her parasol here;
you must take it to her to-morrow," she went on after a brief pause.
"No, when the end comes, neither doctors nor holy men are any help."
"Nina, why can't you sleep at night?" Laptev asked, to change the
subject.
"Oh, well, I don't go to sleep--that's all. I lie and think."
"What do you think about, dear?"
"About the children, about you . . . about my life. I've gone through a
great deal, Alyosha, you know. When one begins to remember and remember.
. . . My God!" She laughed. "It's no joke to have borne five children as
I have, to have buried three. . . Sometimes I was expecting to be
confined while my Grigory Nikolaitch would be sitting at that very time
with another woman. There would be no one to send for the doctor or the
midwife. I would go into the passage or the kitchen for the servant, and
there Jews, tradesmen, moneylenders, would be waiting for him to come
home. My head used to go round . . . . He did not love me, though he
never said so openly. Now I've grown calmer--it doesn't weigh on my
heart; but in old days, when I was younger, it hurt me--ach! how it hurt
me, darling! Once-- while we were still in the country--I found him in
the garden with a lady, and I walked away. . . I walked on aimlessly,
and I don't know how, but I found myself in the church porch. I fell on
my knees: 'Queen of Heaven!' I said. And it was night, the moon was
shining. . . ."
She was exhausted, she began gasping for breath. Then, after resting a
little, she took her brother's hand and went on in a weak, toneless
voice:
"How kind you are, Alyosha! . . . And how clever! . . . What a good man
you've grown up into!"
At midnight Laptev said good-night to her, and as he went away he took
with him the parasol that Yulia Sergeyevna had forgotten. In spite of
the late hour, the servants, male and female, were drinking tea in the
dining-room. How disorderly! The children were not in bed, but were
there in the dining-room, too. They were all talking softly in
undertones, and had not noticed that the lamp was smoking and would soon
go out. All these people, big and little, were disturbed by a whole
succession of bad omens and were in an oppressed mood. The glass in the
hall had been broken, the samovar had been buzzing every day, and, as
though on purpose, was even buzzing now. They were describing how a
mouse had jumped out of Nina Fyodorovna's boot when she was dressing.
And the children were quite aware of the terrible significance of these
omens. The elder girl, Sasha, a thin little brunette, was sitting
motionless at the table, and her face looked scared and woebegone, while
the younger, Lida, a chubby fair child of seven, stood beside her sister
looking from under her brows at the light.
Laptev went downstairs to his own rooms in the lower storey, where under
the low ceilings it was always close and smelt of geraniums. In his
sitting-room, Panaurov, Nina Fyodorovna's husband, was sitting reading
the newspaper. Laptev nodded to him and sat down opposite. Both sat
still and said nothing. They used to spend whole evenings like this
without speaking, and neither of them was in the least put out by this
silence.
The little girls came down from upstairs to say good-night. Deliberately
and in silence, Panaurov made the sign of the cross over them several
times, and gave them his hand to kiss. They dropped curtsies, and then
went up to Laptev, who had to make the sign of the cross and give them
his hand to kiss also. This ceremony with the hand-kissing and curtsying
was repeated every evening.
When the children had gone out Panaurov laid aside the newspaper and
said:
"It's not very lively in our God-fearing town! I must confess, my dear
fellow," he added with a sigh, "I'm very glad that at last you've found
some distraction."
"What do you mean?" asked Laptev.
"I saw you coming out of Dr. Byelavin's just now. I expect you don't go
there for the sake of the papa."
"Of course not," said Laptev, and he blushed.
"Well, of course not. And by the way, you wouldn't find such another old
brute as that papa if you hunted by daylight with a candle. You can't
imagine what a foul, stupid, clumsy beast he is! You cultured people in
the capitals are still interested in the provinces only on the lyrical
side, only from the _paysage_ and _Poor Anton_ point of view, but I can
assure you, my boy, there's nothing logical about it; there's nothing
but barbarism, meanness, and nastiness--that's all. Take the local
devotees of science--the local intellectuals, so to speak. Can you
imagine there are here in this town twenty-eight doctors? They've all
made their fortunes, and they are living in houses of their own, and
meanwhile the population is in just as helpless a condition as ever.
Here, Nina had to have an operation, quite an ordinary one really, yet
we were obliged to get a surgeon from Moscow; not one doctor here would
undertake it. It's beyond all conception. They know nothing, they
understand nothing. They take no interest in anything. Ask them, for
instance, what cancer is--what it is, what it comes from."
And Panaurov began to explain what cancer was. He was a specialist on
all scientific subjects, and explained from a scientific point of view
everything that was discussed. But he explained it all in his own way.
He had a theory of his own about the circulation of the blood, about
chemistry, about astronomy. He talked slowly, softly, convincingly.
"It's beyond all conception," he pronounced in an imploring voice,
screwing up his eyes, sighing languidly, and smiling as graciously as a
king, and it was evident that he was very well satisfied with himself,
and never gave a thought to the fact that he was fifty.
"I am rather hungry," said Laptev. "I should like something savoury."
"Well, that can easily be managed."
Not long afterwards Laptev and his brother-in-law were sitting upstairs
in the dining-room having supper. Laptev had a glass of vodka, and then
began drinking wine. Panaurov drank nothing. He never drank, and never
gambled, yet in spite of that he had squandered all his own and his
wife's property, and had accumulated debts. To squander so much in such
a short time, one must have, not passions, but a special talent.
Panaurov liked dainty fare, liked a handsome dinner service, liked music
after dinner, speeches, bowing footmen, to whom he would carelessly
fling tips of ten, even twenty-five roubles. He always took part in all
lotteries and subscriptions, sent bouquets to ladies of his acquaintance
on their birthdays, bought cups, stands for glasses, studs, ties,
walking-sticks, scents, cigarette-holders, pipes, lap-dogs, parrots,
Japanese bric-Ã -brac, antiques; he had silk nightshirts, and a bedstead
made of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. His dressing-gown was a
genuine Bokhara, and everything was to correspond; and on all this there
went every day, as he himself expressed, "a deluge" of money.
At supper he kept sighing and shaking his head.
"Yes, everything on this earth has an end," he said softly, screwing up
his dark eyes. "You will fall in love and suffer. You will fall out of
love; you'll be deceived, for there is no woman who will not deceive;
you will suffer, will be brought to despair, and will be faithless too.
But the time will come when all this will be a memory, and when you will
reason about it coldly and look upon it as utterly trivial. . . ."
Laptev, tired, a little drunk, looked at his handsome head, his clipped
black beard, and seemed to understand why women so loved this pampered,
conceited, and physically handsome creature.
After supper Panaurov did not stay in the house, but went off to his
other lodgings. Laptev went out to see him on his way. Panaurov was the
only man in the town who wore a top-hat, and his elegant, dandified
figure, his top-hat and tan gloves, beside the grey fences, the pitiful
little houses, with their three windows and the thickets of nettles,
always made a strange and mournful impression.
After saying good-bye to him Laptev returned home without hurrying. The
moon was shining brightly; one could distinguish every straw on the
ground, and Laptev felt as though the moonlight were caressing his bare
head, as though some one were passing a feather over his hair.
"I love!" he pronounced aloud, and he had a sudden longing to run to
overtake Panaurov, to embrace him, to forgive him, to make him a present
of a lot of money, and then to run off into the open country, into a
wood, to run on and on without looking back.
At home he saw lying on the chair the parasol Yulia Sergeyevna had
forgotten; he snatched it up and kissed it greedily. The parasol was a
silk one, no longer new, tied round with old elastic. The handle was a
cheap one, of white bone. Laptev opened it over him, and he felt as
though there were the fragrance of happiness about him.
He settled himself more comfortably in his chair, and still keeping hold
of the parasol, began writing to Moscow to one of his friends:
"DEAR PRECIOUS KOSTYA,
"Here is news for you: I'm in love again! I say _again_, because six
years ago I fell in love with a Moscow actress, though I didn't even
succeed in making her acquaintance, and for the last year and a half I
have been living with a certain person you know--a woman neither young
nor good-looking. Ah, my dear boy, how unlucky I am in love. I've never
had any success with women, and if I say _again_ it's simply because
it's rather sad and mortifying to acknowledge even to myself that my
youth has passed entirely without love, and that I'm in love in a real
sense now for the first time in my life, at thirty-four. Let it stand
that I love _again_.
"If only you knew what a girl she was! She couldn't be called a beauty--
she has a broad face, she is very thin, but what a wonderful expression
of goodness she has when she smiles! When she speaks, her voice is as
clear as a bell. She never carries on a conversation with me--I don't
know her; but when I'm beside her I feel she's a striking, exceptional
creature, full of intelligence and lofty aspirations. She is religious,
and you cannot imagine how deeply this touches me and exalts her in my
eyes. On that point I am ready to argue with you endlessly. You may be
right, to your thinking; but, still, I love to see her praying in
church. She is a provincial, but she was educated in Moscow. She loves
our Moscow; she dresses in the Moscow style, and I love her for that--
love her, love her . . . . I see you frowning and getting up to read me
a long lecture on what love is, and what sort of woman one can love, and
what sort one cannot, and so on, and so on. But, dear Kostya, before I
was in love I, too, knew quite well what love was.
"My sister thanks you for your message. She often recalls how she used
to take Kostya Kotchevoy to the preparatory class, and never speaks of
you except as _poor Kostya_, as she still thinks of you as the little
orphan boy she remembers. And so, poor orphan, I'm in love. While it's a
secret, don't say anything to a 'certain person.' I think it will all
come right of itself, or, as the footman says in Tolstoy, will 'come
round.'"
When he had finished his letter Laptev went to bed. He was so tired that
he couldn't keep his eyes open, but for some reason he could not get to
sleep; the noise in the street seemed to prevent him. The cattle were
driven by to the blowing of a horn, and soon afterwards the bells began
ringing for early mass. At one minute a cart drove by creaking; at the
next, he heard the voice of some woman going to market. And the sparrows
twittered the whole time.
II
The next morning was a cheerful one; it was a holiday. At ten o'clock
Nina Fyodorovna, wearing a brown dress and with her hair neatly
arranged, was led into the drawing-room, supported on each side. There
she walked about a little and stood by the open window, and her smile
was broad and naïve, and, looking at her, one recalled a local artist,
a great drunkard, who wanted her to sit to him for a picture of the
Russian carnival. And all of them--the children, the servants, her
brother, Alexey Fyodorovitch, and she herself-- were suddenly convinced,
that she was certainly going to get well. With shrieks of laughter the
children ran after their uncle, chasing him and catching him, and
filling the house with noise.
People called to ask how she was, brought her holy bread, told her that
in almost all the churches they were offering up prayers for her that
day. She had been conspicuous for her benevolence in the town, and was
liked. She was very ready with her charity, like her brother Alexey, who
gave away his money freely, without considering whether it was necessary
to give it or not. Nina Fyodorovna used to pay the school fees for poor
children; used to give away tea, sugar, and jam to old women; used to
provide trousseaux for poor brides; and if she picked up a newspaper,
she always looked first of all to see if there were any appeals for
charity or a paragraph about somebody's being in a destitute condition.
She was holding now in her hand a bundle of notes, by means of which
various poor people, her protégés, had procured goods from a grocer's
shop.
They had been sent her the evening before by the shopkeeper with a
request for the payment of the total--eighty-two roubles.
"My goodness, what a lot they've had! They've no conscience!" she said,
deciphering with difficulty her ugly handwriting. "It's no joke! Eighty-
two roubles! I declare I won't pay it."
"I'll pay it to-day," said Laptev.
"Why should you? Why should you?" cried Nina Fyodorovna in agitation.
"It's quite enough for me to take two hundred and fifty every month from
you and our brother. God bless you!" she added, speaking softly, so as
not to be overheard by the servants.
"Well, but I spend two thousand five hundred a month," he said. "I tell
you again, dear: you have just as much right to spend it as I or Fyodor.
Do understand that, once for all. There are three of us, and of every
three kopecks of our father's money, one belongs to you."
But Nina Fyodorovna did not understand, and her expression looked as
though she were mentally solving some very difficult problem. And this
lack of comprehension in pecuniary matters, always made Laptev feel
uneasy and troubled. He suspected that she had private debts in addition
which worried her and of which she scrupled to tell him.
Then came the sound of footsteps and heavy breathing; it was the doctor
coming up the stairs, dishevelled and unkempt as usual.
"Ru-ru-ru," he was humming. "Ru-ru."
To avoid meeting him, Laptev went into the dining-room, and then went
downstairs to his own room. It was clear to him that to get on with the
doctor and to drop in at his house without formalities was impossible;
and to meet the "old brute," as Panaurov called him, was distasteful.
That was why he so rarely saw Yulia. He reflected now that the father
was not at home, that if he were to take Yulia Sergeyevna her parasol,
he would be sure to find her at home alone, and his heart ached with
joy. Haste, haste!
He took the parasol and, violently agitated, flew on the wings of love.
It was hot in the street. In the big courtyard of the doctor's house,
overgrown with coarse grass and nettles, some twenty urchins were
playing ball. These were all the children of working-class families who
tenanted the three disreputable-looking lodges, which the doctor was
always meaning to have done up, though he put it off from year to year.
The yard resounded with ringing, healthy voices. At some distance on one
side, Yulia Sergeyevna was standing at her porch, her hands folded,
watching the game.
"Good-morning!" Laptev called to her.
She looked round. Usually he saw her indifferent, cold, or tired as she
had been the evening before. Now her face looked full of life and
frolic, like the faces of the boys who were playing ball.
"Look, they never play so merrily in Moscow," she said, going to meet
him. "There are no such big yards there, though; they've no place to run
there. Papa has only just gone to you," she added, looking round at the
children.
"I know; but I've not come to see him, but to see you," said Laptev,
admiring her youthfulness, which he had not noticed till then, and
seemed only that day to have discovered in her; it seemed to him as
though he were seeing her slender white neck with the gold chain for the
first time. "I've come to see you . . ." he repeated. "My sister has
sent you your parasol; you forgot it yesterday."
She put out her hand to take the parasol, but he pressed it to his bosom
and spoke passionately, without restraint, yielding again to the sweet
ecstasy he had felt the night before, sitting under the parasol.
"I entreat you, give it me. I shall keep it in memory of you . . . of
our acquaintance. It's so wonderful!"
"Take it," she said, and blushed; "but there's nothing wonderful about
it."
He looked at her in ecstasy, in silence, not knowing what to say.
"Why am I keeping you here in the heat?" she said after a brief pause,
laughing. "Let us go indoors."
"I am not disturbing you?"
They went into the hall. Yulia Sergeyevna ran upstairs, her white dress
with blue flowers on it rustling as she went.
"I can't be disturbed," she answered, stopping on the landing. "I never
do anything. Every day is a holiday for me, from morning till night."
"What you say is inconceivable to me," he said, going up to her. "I grew
up in a world in which every one without exception, men and women alike,
worked hard every day."
"But if one has nothing to do?" she asked.
"One has to arrange one's life under such conditions, that work is
inevitable. There can be no clean and happy life without work."
Again he pressed the parasol to his bosom, and to his own surprise spoke
softly, in a voice unlike his own:
"If you would consent to be my wife I would give everything--I would
give everything. There's no price I would not pay, no sacrifice I would
not make."
She started and looked at him with wonder and alarm.
"What are you saying!" she brought out, turning pale. "It's impossible,
I assure you. Forgive me."
Then with the same rustle of her skirts she went up higher, and vanished
through the doorway.
Laptev grasped what this meant, and his mood was transformed,
completely, abruptly, as though a light in his soul had suddenly been
extinguished. Filled with the shame of a man humiliated, of a man who is
disdained, who is not liked, who is distasteful, perhaps disgusting, who
is shunned, he walked out of the house.
"I would give everything," he thought, mimicking himself as he went home
through the heat and recalled the details of his declaration. "I would
give everything--like a regular tradesman. As though she wanted your
_everything_!"
All he had just said seemed to him repulsively stupid. Why had he lied,
saying that he had grown up in a world where every one worked, without
exception? Why had he talked to her in a lecturing tone about a clean
and happy life? It was not clever, not interesting; it was false--false
in the Moscow style. But by degrees there followed that mood of
indifference into which criminals sink after a severe sentence. He began
thinking that, thank God! everything was at an end and that the terrible
uncertainty was over; that now there was no need to spend whole days in
anticipation, in pining, in thinking always of the same thing. Now
everything was clear; he must give up all hope of personal happiness,
live without desires, without hopes, without dreams, or expectations,
and to escape that dreary sadness which he was so sick of trying to
soothe, he could busy himself with other people's affairs, other
people's happiness, and old age would come on imperceptibly, and life
would reach its end--and nothing more was wanted. He did not care, he
wished for nothing, and could reason about it coolly, but there was a
sort of heaviness in his face especially under his eyes, his forehead
felt drawn tight like elastic--and tears were almost starting into his
eyes. Feeling weak all over, he lay down on his bed, and in five minutes
was sound asleep.
III
The proposal Laptev had made so suddenly threw Yulia Sergeyevna into
despair.
She knew Laptev very little, had made his acquaintance by chance; he was
a rich man, a partner in the well-known Moscow firm of "Fyodor Laptev
and Sons"; always serious, apparently clever, and anxious about his
sister's illness. It had seemed to her that he took no notice of her
whatever, and she did not care about him in the least --and then all of
a sudden that declaration on the stairs, that pitiful, ecstatic face. .
. .
The offer had overwhelmed her by its suddenness and by the fact that the
word wife had been uttered, and by the necessity of rejecting it. She
could not remember what she had said to Laptev, but she still felt
traces of the sudden, unpleasant feeling with which she had rejected
him. He did not attract her; he looked like a shopman; he was not
interesting; she could not have answered him except with a refusal, and
yet she felt uncomfortable, as though she had done wrong.
"My God! without waiting to get into the room, on the stairs," she said
to herself in despair, addressing the ikon which hung over her pillow;
"and no courting beforehand, but so strangely, so oddly. . . ."
In her solitude her agitation grew more intense every hour, and it was
beyond her strength to master this oppressive feeling alone. She needed
some one to listen to her story and to tell her that she had done right.
But she had no one to talk to. She had lost her mother long before; she
thought her father a queer man, and could not talk to him seriously. He
worried her with his whims, his extreme readiness to take offence, and
his meaningless gestures; and as soon as one began to talk to him, he
promptly turned the conversation on himself. And in her prayer she was
not perfectly open, because she did not know for certain what she ought
to pray for.
The samovar was brought in. Yulia Sergeyevna, very pale and tired,
looking dejected, came into the dining-room to make tea--it was one of
her duties--and poured out a glass for her father. Sergey Borisovitch,
in his long coat that reached below his knees, with his red face and
unkempt hair, walked up and down the room with his hands in his pockets,
pacing, not from corner to corner, but backwards and forwards at random,
like a wild beast in its cage. He would stand still by the table, sip
his glass of tea with relish, and pace about again, lost in thought.
"Laptev made me an offer to-day," said Yulia Sergeyevna, and she flushed
crimson.
The doctor looked at her and did not seem to understand.
"Laptev?" he queried. "Panaurov's brother-in-law?"
He was fond of his daughter; it was most likely that she would sooner or
later be married, and leave him, but he tried not to think about that.
He was afraid of being alone, and for some reason fancied, that if he
were left alone in that great house, he would have an apoplectic stroke,
but he did not like to speak of this directly.
"Well, I'm delighted to hear it," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I
congratulate you with all my heart. It offers you a splendid opportunity
for leaving me, to your great satisfaction. And I quite understand your
feelings. To live with an old father, an invalid, half crazy, must be
very irksome at your age. I quite understand you. And the sooner I'm
laid out and in the devil's clutches, the better every one will be
pleased. I congratulate you with all my heart."
"I refused him."
The doctor felt relieved, but he was unable to stop himself and went on:
"I wonder, I've long wondered, why I've not yet been put into a
madhouse--why I'm still wearing this coat instead of a strait-waistcoat?
I still have faith in justice, in goodness. I am a fool, an idealist,
and nowadays that's insanity, isn't it? And how do they repay me for my
honesty? They almost throw stones at me and ride rough-shod over me. And
even my nearest kith and kin do nothing but try to get the better of me.
It's high time the devil fetched an old fool like me. . . ."
"There's no talking to you like a rational being!" said Yulia.
She got up from the table impulsively, and went to her room in great
wrath, remembering how often her father had been unjust to her. But a
little while afterwards she felt sorry for her father, too, and when he
was going to the club she went downstairs with him, and shut the door
after him. It was a rough and stormy night; the door shook with the
violence of the wind, and there were draughts in all directions in the
passage, so that the candle was almost blown out. In her own domain
upstairs Yulia Sergeyevna went the round of all the rooms, making the
sign of the cross over every door and window; the wind howled, and it
sounded as though some one were walking on the roof. Never had it been
so dreary, never had she felt so lonely.
She asked herself whether she had done right in rejecting a man, simply
because his appearance did not attract her. It was true he was a man she
did not love, and to marry him would mean renouncing forever her dreams,
her conceptions of happiness in married life, but would she ever meet
the man of whom she dreamed, and would he love her? She was twenty-one
already. There were no eligible young men in the town. She pictured all
the men she knew--government clerks, schoolmasters, officers, and some
of them were married already, and their domestic life was conspicuous
for its dreariness and triviality; others were uninteresting,
colourless, unintelligent, immoral. Laptev was, anyway, a Moscow man,
had taken his degree at the university, spoke French. He lived in the
capital, where there were lots of clever, noble, remarkable people;
where there was noise and bustle, splendid theatres, musical evenings,
first-rate dressmakers, confectioners. . . . In the Bible it was written
that a wife must love her husband, and great importance was given to
love in novels, but wasn't there exaggeration in it? Was it out of the
question to enter upon married life without love? It was said, of
course, that love soon passed away, and that nothing was left but habit,
and that the object of married life was not to be found in love, nor in
happiness, but in duties, such as the bringing up of one's children, the
care of one's household, and so on. And perhaps what was meant in the
Bible was love for one's husband as one's neighbour, respect for him,
charity.
At night Yulia Sergeyevna read the evening prayers attentively, then
knelt down, and pressing her hands to her bosom, gazing at the flame of
the lamp before the ikon, said with feeling:
"Give me understanding, Holy Mother, our Defender! Give me
understanding, O Lord!"
She had in the course of her life come across elderly maiden ladies,
poor and of no consequence in the world, who bitterly repented and
openly confessed their regret that they had refused suitors in the past.
Would not the same thing happen to her? Had not she better go into a
convent or become a Sister of Mercy?
She undressed and got into bed, crossing herself and crossing the air
around her. Suddenly the bell rang sharply and plaintively in the
corridor.
"Oh, my God!" she said, feeling a nervous irritation all over her at the
sound. She lay still and kept thinking how poor this provincial life was
in events, monotonous and yet not peaceful. One was constantly having to
tremble, to feel apprehensive, angry or guilty, and in the end one's
nerves were so strained, that one was afraid to peep out of the
bedclothes.
A little while afterwards the bell rang just as sharply again. The
servant must have been asleep and had not heard. Yulia Sergeyevna
lighted a candle, and feeling vexed with the servant, began with a
shiver to dress, and when she went out into the corridor, the maid was
already closing the door downstairs.
"I thought it was the master, but it's some one from a patient," she
said.
Yulia Sergeyevna went back to her room. She took a pack of cards out of
the chest of drawers, and decided that if after shuffling the cards well
and cutting, the bottom card turned out to be a red one, it would mean
_yes_--that is, she would accept Laptev's offer; and that if it was a
black, it would mean _no_. The card turned out to be the ten of spades.
That relieved her mind--she fell asleep; but in the morning, she was
wavering again between _yes_ and _no_, and she was dwelling on the
thought that she could, if she chose, change her life. The thought
harassed her, she felt exhausted and unwell; but yet, soon after eleven,
she dressed and went to see Nina Fyodorovna. She wanted to see Laptev:
perhaps now he would seem more attractive to her; perhaps she had been
wrong about him hitherto. . . .
She found it hard to walk against the wind. She struggled along, holding
her hat on with both hands, and could see nothing for the dust.
IV
Going into his sister's room, and seeing to his surprise Yulia
Sergeyevna, Laptev had again the humiliating sensation of a man who
feels himself an object of repulsion. He concluded that if after what
had happened yesterday she could bring herself so easily to visit his
sister and meet him, it must be because she was not concerned about him,
and regarded him as a complete nonentity. But when he greeted her, and
with a pale face and dust under her eyes she looked at him mournfully
and remorsefully, he saw that she, too, was miserable.
She did not feel well. She only stayed ten minutes, and began saying
good-bye. And as she went out she said to Laptev:
"Will you see me home, Alexey Fyodorovitch?"
They walked along the street in silence, holding their hats, and he,
walking a little behind, tried to screen her from the wind. In the lane
it was more sheltered, and they walked side by side.
"Forgive me if I was not nice yesterday;" and her voice quavered as
though she were going to cry. "I was so wretched! I did not sleep all
night."
"I slept well all night," said Laptev, without looking at her; "but that
doesn't mean that I was happy. My life is broken. I'm deeply unhappy,
and after your refusal yesterday I go about like a man poisoned. The
most difficult thing was said yesterday. To-day I feel no embarrassment
and can talk to you frankly. I love you more than my sister, more than
my dead mother. . . . I can live without my sister, and without my
mother, and I have lived without them, but life without you--is
meaningless to me; I can't face it. . . ."
And now too, as usual, he guessed her intention.
He realised that she wanted to go back to what had happened the day
before, and with that object had asked him to accompany her, and now was
taking him home with her. But what could she add to her refusal? What
new idea had she in her head? From everything, from her glances, from
her smile, and even from her tone, from the way she held her head and
shoulders as she walked beside him, he saw that, as before, she did not
love him, that he was a stranger to her. What more did she want to say?
Doctor Sergey Borisovitch was at home.
"You are very welcome. I'm always glad to see you, Fyodor Alexeyitch,"
he said, mixing up his Christian name and his father's. "Delighted,
delighted!"
He had never been so polite before, and Laptev saw that he knew of his
offer; he did not like that either. He was sitting now in the drawing-
room, and the room impressed him strangely, with its poor, common
decorations, its wretched pictures, and though there were arm-chairs in
it, and a huge lamp with a shade over it, it still looked like an
uninhabited place, a huge barn, and it was obvious that no one could
feel at home in such a room, except a man like the doctor. The next
room, almost twice as large, was called the reception-room, and in it
there were only rows of chairs, as though for a dancing class. And while
Laptev was sitting in the drawing-room talking to the doctor about his
sister, he began to be tortured by a suspicion. Had not Yulia Sergeyevna
been to his sister Nina's, and then brought him here to tell him that
she would accept him? Oh, how awful it was! But the most awful thing of
all was that his soul was capable of such a suspicion. And he imagined
how the father and the daughter had spent the evening, and perhaps the
night before, in prolonged consultation, perhaps dispute, and at last
had come to the conclusion that Yulia had acted thoughtlessly in
refusing a rich man. The words that parents use in such cases kept
ringing in his ears:
"It is true you don't love him, but think what good you could do!"
The doctor was going out to see patients. Laptev would have gone with
him, but Yulia Sergeyevna said:
"I beg you to stay."
She was distressed and dispirited, and told herself now that to refuse
an honourable, good man who loved her, simply because he was not
attractive, especially when marrying him would make it possible for her
to change her mode of life, her cheerless, monotonous, idle life in
which youth was passing with no prospect of anything better in the
future--to refuse him under such circumstances was madness, caprice and
folly, and that God might even punish her for it.
The father went out. When the sound of his steps had died away, she
suddenly stood up before Laptev and said resolutely, turning horribly
white as she did so:
"I thought for a long time yesterday, Alexey Fyodorovitch. . . . I
accept your offer."
He bent down and kissed her hand. She kissed him awkwardly on the head
with cold lips.
He felt that in this love scene the chief thing--her love--was lacking,
and that there was a great deal that was not wanted; and he longed to
cry out, to run away, to go back to Moscow at once. But she was close to
him, and she seemed to him so lovely, and he was suddenly overcome by
passion. He reflected that it was too late for deliberation now; he
embraced her passionately, and muttered some words, calling her _thou_;
he kissed her on the neck, and then on the cheek, on the head. . . .
She walked away to the window, dismayed by these demonstrations, and
both of them were already regretting what they had said and both were
asking themselves in confusion:
"Why has this happened?"
"If only you knew how miserable I am!" she said, wringing her hands.
"What is it?" he said, going up to her, wringing his hands too. "My
dear, for God's sake, tell me--what is it? Only tell the truth, I
entreat you--nothing but the truth!"
"Don't pay any attention to it," she said, and forced herself to smile.
"I promise you I'll be a faithful, devoted wife. . . . Come this
evening."
Sitting afterwards with his sister and reading aloud an historical
novel, he recalled it all and felt wounded that his splendid, pure, rich
feeling was met with such a shallow response. He was not loved, but his
offer had been accepted--in all probability because he was rich: that
is, what was thought most of in him was what he valued least of all in
himself. It was quite possible that Yulia, who was so pure and believed
in God, had not once thought of his money; but she did not love him--did
not love him, and evidently she had interested motives, vague, perhaps,
and not fully thought out--still, it was so. The doctor's house with its
common furniture was repulsive to him, and he looked upon the doctor
himself as a wretched, greasy miser, a sort of operatic Gaspard from
"Les Cloches de Corneville." The very name "Yulia" had a vulgar sound.
He imagined how he and his Yulia would stand at their wedding, in
reality complete strangers to one another, without a trace of feeling on
her side, just as though their marriage had been made by a professional
matchmaker; and the only consolation left him now, as commonplace as the
marriage itself, was the reflection that he was not the first, and would
not be the last; that thousands of people were married like that; and
that with time, when Yulia came to know him better, she would perhaps
grow fond of him.
"Romeo and Juliet!" he said, as he shut the novel, and he laughed. "I am
Romeo, Nina. You may congratulate me. I made an offer to Yulia Byelavin
to-day."
Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but when she believed it, she
began to cry; she was not pleased at the news.
"Well, I congratulate you," she said. "But why is it so sudden?"
"No, it's not sudden. It's been going on since March, only you don't
notice anything. . . . I fell in love with her last March when I made
her acquaintance here, in your rooms."
"I thought you would marry some one in our Moscow set," said Nina
Fyodorovna after a pause. "Girls in our set are simpler. But what
matters, Alyosha, is that you should be happy--that matters most. My
Grigory Nikolaitch did not love me, and there's no concealing it; you
can see what our life is. Of course any woman may love you for your
goodness and your brains, but, you see, Yulitchka is a girl of good
family from a high-class boarding-school; goodness and brains are not
enough for her. She is young, and, you, Alyosha, are not so young, and
are not good-looking."
To soften the last words, she stroked his head and said:
"You're not good-looking, but you're a dear."
She was so agitated that a faint flush came into her cheeks, and she
began discussing eagerly whether it would be the proper thing for her to
bless Alyosha with the ikon at the wedding. She was, she reasoned, his
elder sister, and took the place of his mother; and she kept trying to
convince her dejected brother that the wedding must be celebrated in
proper style, with pomp and gaiety, so that no one could find fault with
it.
Then he began going to the Byelavins' as an accepted suitor, three or
four times a day; and now he never had time to take Sasha's place and
read aloud the historical novel. Yulia used to receive him in her two
rooms, which were at a distance from the drawing-room and her father's
study, and he liked them very much. The walls in them were dark; in the
corner stood a case of ikons; and there was a smell of good scent and of
the oil in the holy lamp. Her rooms were at the furthest end of the
house; her bedstead and dressing-table were shut off by a screen. The
doors of the bookcase were covered on the inside with a green curtain,
and there were rugs on the floor, so that her footsteps were noiseless--
and from this he concluded that she was of a reserved character, and
that she liked a quiet, peaceful, secluded life. In her own home she was
treated as though she were not quite grown up. She had no money of her
own, and sometimes when they were out for walks together, she was
overcome with confusion at not having a farthing. Her father allowed her
very little for dress and books, hardly ten pounds a year. And, indeed,
the doctor himself had not much money in spite of his good practice. He
played cards every night at the club, and always lost. Moreover, he
bought mortgaged houses through a building society, and let them. The
tenants were irregular in paying the rent, but he was convinced that
such speculations were profitable. He had mortgaged his own house in
which he and his daughter were living, and with the money so raised had
bought a piece of waste ground, and had already begun to build on it a
large two-storey house, meaning to mortgage it, too, as soon as it was
finished.
Laptev now lived in a sort of cloud, feeling as though he were not
himself, but his double, and did many things which he would never have
brought himself to do before. He went three or four times to the club
with the doctor, had supper with him, and offered him money for house-
building. He even visited Panaurov at his other establishment. It
somehow happened that Panaurov invited him to dinner, and without
thinking, Laptev accepted. He was received by a lady of five-and-thirty.
She was tall and thin, with hair touched with grey, and black eyebrows,
apparently not Russian. There were white patches of powder on her face.
She gave him a honeyed smile and pressed his hand jerkily, so that the
bracelets on her white hands tinkled. It seemed to Laptev that she
smiled like that because she wanted to conceal from herself and from
others that she was unhappy. He also saw two little girls, aged five and
three, who had a marked likeness to Sasha. For dinner they had milk-
soup, cold veal, and chocolate. It was insipid and not good; but the
table was splendid, with gold forks, bottles of Soyer, and cayenne
pepper, an extraordinary bizarre cruet-stand, and a gold pepper-pot.
It was only as he was finishing the milk-soup that Laptev realised how
very inappropriate it was for him to be dining there. The lady was
embarrassed, and kept smiling, showing her teeth. Panaurov expounded
didactically what being in love was, and what it was due to.
"We have in it an example of the action of electricity," he said in
French, addressing the lady. "Every man has in his skin microscopic
glands which contain currents of electricity. If you meet with a person
whose currents are parallel with your own, then you get love."
When Laptev went home and his sister asked him where he had been he felt
awkward, and made no answer.
He felt himself in a false position right up to the time of the wedding.
His love grew more intense every day, and Yulia seemed to him a poetic
and exalted creature; but, all the same, there was no mutual love, and
the truth was that he was buying her and she was selling herself.
Sometimes, thinking things over, he fell into despair and asked himself:
should he run away? He did not sleep for nights together, and kept
thinking how he should meet in Moscow the lady whom he had called in his
letters "a certain person," and what attitude his father and his
brother, difficult people, would take towards his marriage and towards
Yulia. He was afraid that his father would say something rude to Yulia
at their first meeting. And something strange had happened of late to
his brother Fyodor. In his long letters he had taken to writing of the
importance of health, of the effect of illness on the mental condition,
of the meaning of religion, but not a word about Moscow or business.
These letters irritated Laptev, and he thought his brother's character
was changing for the worse.
The wedding was in September. The ceremony took place at the Church of
St. Peter and St. Paul, after mass, and the same day the young couple
set off for Moscow. When Laptev and his wife, in a black dress with a
long train, already looking not a girl but a married woman, said good-
bye to Nina Fyodorovna, the invalid's face worked, but there was no tear
in her dry eyes. She said:
"If--which God forbid--I should die, take care of my little girls."
"Oh, I promise!" answered Yulia Sergeyevna, and her lips and eyelids
began quivering too.
"I shall come to see you in October," said Laptev, much moved. "You must
get better, my darling."
They travelled in a special compartment. Both felt depressed and
uncomfortable. She sat in the corner without taking off her hat, and
made a show of dozing, and he lay on the seat opposite, and he was
disturbed by various thoughts--of his father, of "a certain person,"
whether Yulia would like her Moscow flat. And looking at his wife, who
did not love him, he wondered dejectedly "why this had happened."
V
The Laptevs had a wholesale business in Moscow, dealing in fancy goods:
fringe, tape, trimmings, crochet cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross
receipts reached two millions a year; what the net profit was, no one
knew but the old father. The sons and the clerks estimated the profits
at approximately three hundred thousand, and said that it would have
been a hundred thousand more if the old man had not "been too free-
handed"--that is, had not allowed credit indiscriminately. In the last
ten years alone the bad debts had mounted up to the sum of a million;
and when the subject was referred to, the senior clerk would wink slyly
and deliver himself of sentences the meaning of which was not clear to
every one:
"The psychological sequences of the age."
Their chief commercial operations were conducted in the town market in a
building which was called the warehouse. The entrance to the warehouse
was in the yard, where it was always dark, and smelt of matting and
where the dray-horses were always stamping their hoofs on the asphalt. A
very humble-looking door, studded with iron, led from the yard into a
room with walls discoloured by damp and scrawled over with charcoal,
lighted up by a narrow window covered by an iron grating. Then on the
left was another room larger and cleaner with an iron stove and a couple
of chairs, though it, too, had a prison window: this was the office, and
from it a narrow stone staircase led up to the second storey, where the
principal room was. This was rather a large room, but owing to the
perpetual darkness, the low-pitched ceiling, the piles of boxes and
bales, and the numbers of men that kept flitting to and fro in it, it
made as unpleasant an impression on a newcomer as the others. In the
offices on the top storey the goods lay in bales, in bundles and in
cardboard boxes on the shelves; there was no order nor neatness in the
arrangement of it, and if crimson threads, tassels, ends of fringe, had
not peeped out here and there from holes in the paper parcels, no one
could have guessed what was being bought and sold here. And looking at
these crumpled paper parcels and boxes, no one would have believed that
a million was being made out of such trash, and that fifty men were
employed every day in this warehouse, not counting the buyers.
When at midday, on the day after his arrival at Moscow, Laptev went into
the warehouse, the workmen packing the goods were hammering so loudly
that in the outer room and the office no one heard him come in. A
postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle of letters in
his hand; he was wincing at the noise, and he did not notice Laptev
either. The first person to meet him upstairs was his brother Fyodor
Fyodorovitch, who was so like him that they passed for twins. This
resemblance always reminded Laptev of his own personal appearance, and
now, seeing before him a short, red-faced man with rather thin hair,
with narrow plebeian hips, looking so uninteresting and so
unintellectual, he asked himself: "Can I really look like that?"
"How glad I am to see you!" said Fyodor, kissing his brother and
pressing his hand warmly. "I have been impatiently looking forward to
seeing you every day, my dear fellow. When you wrote that you were
getting married, I was tormented with curiosity, and I've missed you,
too, brother. Only fancy, it's six months since we saw each other. Well?
How goes it? Nina's very bad? Awfully bad?"
"Awfully bad."
"It's in God's hands," sighed Fyodor. "Well, what of your wife? She's a
beauty, no doubt? I love her already. Of course, she is my little sister
now. We'll make much of her between us."
Laptev saw the broad, bent back--so familiar to him--of his father,
Fyodor Stepanovitch. The old man was sitting on a stool near the
counter, talking to a customer.
"Father, God has sent us joy!" cried Fyodor. "Brother has come!"
Fyodor Stepanovitch was a tall man of exceptionally powerful build, so
that, in spite of his wrinkles and eighty years, he still looked a hale
and vigorous man. He spoke in a deep, rich, sonorous voice, that
resounded from his broad chest as from a barrel. He wore no beard, but a
short-clipped military moustache, and smoked cigars. As he was always
too hot, he used all the year round to wear a canvas coat at home and at
the warehouse. He had lately had an operation for cataract. His sight
was bad, and he did nothing in the business but talk to the customers
and have tea and jam with them.
Laptev bent down and kissed his head and then his lips.
"It's a good long time since we saw you, honoured sir," said the old
man--"a good long time. Well, am I to congratulate you on entering the
state of holy matrimony? Very well, then; I congratulate you."
And he put his lips out to be kissed. Laptev bent down and kissed him.
"Well, have you brought your young lady?" the old man asked, and without
waiting for an answer, he said, addressing the customer: "'Herewith I
beg to inform you, father, that I'm going to marry such and such a young
lady.' Yes. But as for asking for his father's counsel or blessing,
that's not in the rules nowadays. Now they go their own way. When I
married I was over forty, but I went on my knees to my father and asked
his advice. Nowadays we've none of that."
The old man was delighted to see his son, but thought it unseemly to
show his affection or make any display of his joy. His voice and his
manner of saying "your young lady" brought back to Laptev the depression
he had always felt in the warehouse. Here every trifling detail reminded
him of the past, when he used to be flogged and put on Lenten fare; he
knew that even now boys were thrashed and punched in the face till their
noses bled, and that when those boys grew up they would beat others. And
before he had been five minutes in the warehouse, he always felt as
though he were being scolded or punched in the face.
Fyodor slapped the customer on the shoulder and said to his brother:
"Here, Alyosha, I must introduce our Tambov benefactor, Grigory
Timofeitch. He might serve as an example for the young men of the day;
he's passed his fiftieth birthday, and he has tiny children."
The clerks laughed, and the customer, a lean old man with a pale face,
laughed too.
"Nature above the normal capacity," observed the head-clerk, who was
standing at the counter close by. "It always comes out when it's there."
The head-clerk--a tall man of fifty, in spectacles, with a dark beard,
and a pencil behind his ear--usually expressed his ideas vaguely in
roundabout hints, while his sly smile betrayed that he attached
particular significance to his words. He liked to obscure his utterances
with bookish words, which he understood in his own way, and many such
words he used in a wrong sense. For instance, the word "except." When he
had expressed some opinion positively and did not want to be
contradicted, he would stretch out his hand and pronounce:
"Except!"
And what was most astonishing, the customers and the other clerks
understood him perfectly. His name was Ivan Vassilitch Potchatkin, and
he came from Kashira. Now, congratulating Laptev, he expressed himself
as follows:
"It's the reward of valour, for the female heart is a strong opponent."
Another important person in the warehouse was a clerk called Makeitchev-
-a stout, solid, fair man with whiskers and a perfectly bald head. He
went up to Laptev and congratulated him respectfully in a low voice:
"I have the honour, sir. . . The Lord has heard your parent's prayer.
Thank God."
Then the other clerks began coming up to congratulate him on his
marriage. They were all fashionably dressed, and looked like perfectly
well-bred, educated men. Since between every two words they put in a
"sir," their congratulations--something like "Best wishes, sir, for
happiness, sir," uttered very rapidly in a low voice--sounded rather
like the hiss of a whip in the air--"Shshsh-s s s s s!" Laptev was soon
bored and longing to go home, but it was awkward to go away. He was
obliged to stay at least two hours at the warehouse to keep up
appearances. He walked away from the counter and began asking Makeitchev
whether things had gone well while he was away, and whether anything new
had turned up, and the clerk answered him respectfully, avoiding his
eyes. A boy with a cropped head, wearing a grey blouse, handed Laptev a
glass of tea without a saucer; not long afterwards another boy, passing
by, stumbled over a box, and almost fell down, and Makeitchev's face
looked suddenly spiteful and ferocious like a wild beast's, and he
shouted at him:
"Keep on your feet!"
The clerks were pleased that their young master was married and had come
back at last; they looked at him with curiosity and friendly feeling,
and each one thought it his duty to say something agreeable when he
passed him. But Laptev was convinced that it was not genuine, and that
they were only flattering him because they were afraid of him. He never
could forget how fifteen years before, a clerk, who was mentally
deranged, had run out into the street with nothing on but his shirt and
shaking his fists at the windows, shouted that he had been ill-treated;
and how, when the poor fellow had recovered, the clerks had jeered at
him for long afterwards, reminding him how he had called his employers
"planters" instead of "exploiters." Altogether the employees at Laptevs'
had a very poor time of it, and this fact was a subject of conversation
for the whole market. The worst of it was that the old man, Fyodor
Stepanovitch, maintained something of an Asiatic despotism in his
attitude to them. Thus, no one knew what wages were paid to the old
man's favourites, Potchatkin and Makeitchev. They received no more than
three thousand a year, together with bonuses, but he made out that he
paid then seven. The bonuses were given to all the clerks every year,
but privately, so that the man who got little was bound from vanity to
say he had got more. Not one boy knew when he would be promoted to be a
clerk; not one of the men knew whether his employer was satisfied with
him or not. Nothing was directly forbidden, and so the clerks never knew
what was allowed, and what was not. They were not forbidden to marry,
but they did not marry for fear of displeasing their employer and losing
their place. They were allowed to have friends and pay visits, but the
gates were shut at nine o'clock, and every morning the old man scanned
them all suspiciously, and tried to detect any smell of vodka about
them:
"Now then, breathe," he would say.
Every clerk was obliged to go to early service, and to stand in church
in such a position that the old man could see them all. The fasts were
strictly observed. On great occasions, such as the birthday of their
employer or of any member of his family, the clerks had to subscribe and
present a cake from Fley's, or an album. The clerks lived three or four
in a room in the lower storey, and in the lodges of the house in
Pyatnitsky Street, and at dinner ate from a common bowl, though there
was a plate set before each of them. If one of the family came into the
room while they were at dinner, they all stood up.
Laptev was conscious that only, perhaps, those among them who had been
corrupted by the old man's training could seriously regard him as their
benefactor; the others must have looked on him as an enemy and a
"planter." Now, after six months' absence, he saw no change for the
better; there was indeed something new which boded nothing good. His
brother Fyodor, who had always been quiet, thoughtful, and extremely
refined, was now running about the warehouse with a pencil behind his
ear making a show of being very busy and businesslike, slapping
customers on the shoulder and shouting "Friends!" to the clerks.
Apparently he had taken up a new role, and Alexey did not recognise him
in the part.
The old man's voice boomed unceasingly. Having nothing to do, he was
laying down the law to a customer, telling him how he should order his
life and his business, always holding himself up as an example. That
boastfulness, that aggressive tone of authority, Laptev had heard ten,
fifteen, twenty years ago. The old man adored himself; from what he said
it always appeared that he had made his wife and all her relations
happy, that he had been munificent to his children, and a benefactor to
his clerks and employés, and that every one in the street and all his
acquaintances remembered him in their prayers. Whatever he did was
always right, and if things went wrong with people it was because they
did not take his advice; without his advice nothing could succeed. In
church he stood in the foremost place, and even made observations to the
priests, if in his opinion they were not conducting the service
properly, and believed that this was pleasing God because God loved him.
At two o'clock every one in the warehouse was hard at work, except the
old man, who still went on booming in his deep voice. To avoid standing
idle, Laptev took some trimmings from a workgirl and let her go; then
listened to a customer, a merchant from Vologda, and told a clerk to
attend to him.
"T. V. A.!" resounded on all sides (prices were denoted by letters in
the warehouse and goods by numbers). "R. I. T.!" As he went away, Laptev
said good-bye to no one but Fyodor.
"I shall come to Pyatnitsky Street with my wife to-morrow," he said;
"but I warn you, if father says a single rude thing to her, I shall not
stay there another minute."
"You're the same as ever," sighed Fyodor. "Marriage has not changed you.
You must be patient with the old man. So till eleven o'clock, then. We
shall expect you impatiently. Come directly after mass, then."
"I don't go to mass."
"That does not matter. The great thing is not to be later than eleven,
so you may be in time to pray to God and to lunch with us. Give my
greetings to my little sister and kiss her hand for me. I have a
presentiment that I shall like her," Fyodor added with perfect
sincerity. "I envy you, brother!" he shouted after him as Alexey went
downstairs.
"And why does he shrink into himself in that shy way as though he
fancied he was naked?" thought Laptev, as he walked along Nikolsky
Street, trying to understand the change that had come over his brother.
"And his language is new, too: 'Brother, dear brother, God has sent us
joy; to pray to God'--just like Iudushka in Shtchedrin."
VI
At eleven o'clock the next day, which was Sunday, he was driving with
his wife along Pyatnitsky Street in a light, one-horse carriage. He was
afraid of his father's doing something outrageous, and was already ill
at ease. After two nights in her husband's house Yulia Sergeyevna
considered her marriage a mistake and a calamity, and if she had had to
live with her husband in any other town but Moscow, it seemed to her
that she could not have endured the horror of it. Moscow entertained
her--she was delighted with the streets, the churches; and if it had
been possible to drive about Moscow in those splendid sledges with
expensive horses, to drive the whole day from morning till night, and
with the swift motion to feel the cold autumn air blowing upon her, she
would perhaps not have felt herself so unhappy.
Near a white, lately stuccoed two-storey house the coachman pulled up
his horse, and began to turn to the right. They were expected, and near
the gate stood two policemen and the porter in a new full-skirted coat,
high boots, and goloshes. The whole space, from the middle of the street
to the gates and all over the yard from the porch, was strewn with fresh
sand. The porter took off his hat, the policemen saluted. Near the
entrance Fyodor met them with a very serious face.
"Very glad to make your acquaintance, little sister," he said, kissing
Yulia's hand. "You're very welcome."
He led her upstairs on his arm, and then along a corridor through a
crowd of men and women. The anteroom was crowded too, and smelt of
incense.
"I will introduce you to our father directly," whispered Fyodor in the
midst of a solemn, deathly silence. "A venerable old man, _pater-
familias_."
In the big drawing-room, by a table prepared for service, Fyodor
Stepanovitch stood, evidently waiting for them, and with him the priest
in a calotte, and a deacon. The old man shook hands with Yulia without
saying a word. Every one was silent. Yulia was overcome with confusion.
The priest and the deacon began putting on their vestments. A censer was
brought in, giving off sparks and fumes of incense and charcoal. The
candles were lighted. The clerks walked into the drawing-room on tiptoe
and stood in two rows along the wall. There was perfect stillness, no
one even coughed.
"The blessing of God," began the deacon. The service was read with great
solemnity; nothing was left out and two canticles were sung --to
sweetest Jesus and the most Holy Mother of God. The singers sang very
slowly, holding up the music before them. Laptev noticed how confused
his wife was. While they were singing the canticles, and the singers in
different keys brought out "Lord have mercy on us," he kept expecting in
nervous suspense that the old man would make some remark such as, "You
don't know how to cross yourself," and he felt vexed. Why this crowd,
and why this ceremony with priests and choristers? It was too bourgeois.
But when she, like the old man, put her head under the gospel and
afterwards several times dropped upon her knees, he realised that she
liked it all, and was reassured.
At the end of the service, during "Many, many years," the priest gave
the old man and Alexey the cross to kiss, but when Yulia went up, he put
his hand over the cross, and showed he wanted to speak. Signs were made
to the singers to stop.
"The prophet Samuel," began the priest, "went to Bethlehem at the
bidding of the Lord, and there the elders of the town with fear and
trembling asked him: 'Comest thou peaceably?' And the prophet answered:
'Peaceably: I am come to sacrifice unto the Lord: sanctify yourselves
and come with me to the sacrifice.' Even so, Yulia, servant of God,
shall we ask of thee, Dost thou come bringing peace into this house?"
Yulia flushed with emotion. As he finished, the priest gave her the
cross to kiss, and said in quite a different tone of voice:
"Now Fyodor Fyodorovitch must be married; it's high time."
The choir began singing once more, people began moving, and the room was
noisy again. The old man, much touched, with his eyes full of tears,
kissed Yulia three times, made the sign of the cross over her face, and
said:
"This is your home. I'm an old man and need nothing."
The clerks congratulated her and said something, but the choir was
singing so loud that nothing else could be heard. Then they had lunch
and drank champagne. She sat beside the old father, and he talked to
her, saying that families ought not to be parted but live together in
one house; that separation and disunion led to permanent rupture.
"I've made money and the children only do the spending of it," he said.
"Now, you live with me and save money. It's time for an old man like me
to rest."
Yulia had all the time a vision of Fyodor flitting about so like her
husband, but shyer and more restless; he fussed about her and often
kissed her hand.
"We are plain people, little sister," he said, and patches of red came
into his face as he spoke. "We live simply in Russian style, like
Christians, little sister."
As they went home, Laptev felt greatly relieved that everything had gone
off so well, and that nothing outrageous had happened as he had
expected. He said to his wife:
"You're surprised that such a stalwart, broad-shouldered father should
have such stunted, narrow-chested sons as Fyodor and me. Yes; but it's
easy to explain! My father married my mother when he was forty-five, and
she was only seventeen. She turned pale and trembled in his presence.
Nina was born first--born of a comparatively healthy mother, and so she
was finer and sturdier than we were. Fyodor and I were begotten and born
after mother had been worn out by terror. I can remember my father
correcting me--or, to speak plainly, beating me--before I was five years
old. He used to thrash me with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on the
head, and every morning when I woke up my first thought was whether he
would beat me that day. Play and childish mischief was forbidden us. We
had to go to morning service and to early mass. When we met priests or
monks we had to kiss their hands; at home we had to sing hymns. Here you
are religious and love all that, but I'm afraid of religion, and when I
pass a church I remember my childhood, and am overcome with horror. I
was taken to the warehouse as soon as I was eight years old. I worked
like a working boy, and it was bad for my health, for I used to be
beaten there every day. Afterwards when I went to the high school, I
used to go to school till dinner-time, and after dinner I had to sit in
that warehouse till evening; and things went on like that till I was
twenty-two, till I got to know Yartsev, and he persuaded me to leave my
father's house. That Yartsev did a great deal for me. I tell you what,"
said Laptev, and he laughed with pleasure: "let us go and pay Yartsev a
visit at once. He's a very fine fellow! How touched he will be!"
VII
On a Saturday in November Anton Rubinstein was conducting in a symphony
concert. It was very hot and crowded. Laptev stood behind the columns,
while his wife and Kostya Kotchevoy were sitting in the third or fourth
row some distance in front. At the very beginning of an interval a
"certain person," Polina Nikolaevna Razsudin, quite unexpectedly passed
by him. He had often since his marriage thought with trepidation of a
possible meeting with her. When now she looked at him openly and
directly, he realised that he had all this time shirked having things
out with her, or writing her two or three friendly lines, as though he
had been hiding from her; he felt ashamed and flushed crimson. She
pressed his hand tightly and impulsively and asked:
"Have you seen Yartsev?"
And without waiting for an answer she went striding on impetuously as
though some one were pushing her on from behind.
She was very thin and plain, with a long nose; her face always looked
tired, and exhausted, and it seemed as though it were an effort to her
to keep her eyes open, and not to fall down. She had fine, dark eyes,
and an intelligent, kind, sincere expression, but her movements were
awkward and abrupt. It was hard to talk to her, because she could not
talk or listen quietly. Loving her was not easy. Sometimes when she was
alone with Laptev she would go on laughing for a long time, hiding her
face in her hands, and would declare that love was not the chief thing
in life for her, and would be as whimsical as a girl of seventeen; and
before kissing her he would have to put out all the candles. She was
thirty. She was married to a schoolmaster, but had not lived with her
husband for years. She earned her living by giving music lessons and
playing in quartettes.
During the ninth symphony she passed again as though by accident, but
the crowd of men standing like a thick wall behind the columns prevented
her going further, and she remained beside him. Laptev saw that she was
wearing the same little velvet blouse she had worn at concerts last year
and the year before. Her gloves were new, and her fan, too, was new, but
it was a common one. She was fond of fine clothes, but she did not know
how to dress, and grudged spending money on it. She dressed so badly and
untidily that when she was going to her lessons striding hurriedly down
the street, she might easily have been taken for a young monk.
The public applauded and shouted encore.
"You'll spend the evening with me," said Polina Nikolaevna, going up to
Laptev and looking at him severely. "When this is over we'll go and have
tea. Do you hear? I insist on it. You owe me a great deal, and haven't
the moral right to refuse me such a trifle."
"Very well; let us go," Laptev assented.
Endless calls followed the conclusion of the concert. The audience got
up from their seats and went out very slowly, and Laptev could not go
away without telling his wife. He had to stand at the door and wait.
"I'm dying for some tea," Polina Nikolaevna said plaintively. "My very
soul is parched."
"You can get something to drink here," said Laptev. "Let's go to the
buffet."
"Oh, I've no money to fling away on waiters. I'm not a shopkeeper."
He offered her his arm; she refused, in a long, wearisome sentence which
he had heard many times, to the effect that she did not class herself
with the feebler fair sex, and did not depend on the services of
gentlemen.
As she talked to him she kept looking about at the audience and greeting
acquaintances; they were her fellow-students at the higher courses and
at the conservatorium, and her pupils. She gripped their hands abruptly,
as though she were tugging at them. But then she began twitching her
shoulders, and trembling as though she were in a fever, and at last said
softly, looking at Laptev with horror:
"Who is it you've married? Where were your eyes, you mad fellow? What
did you see in that stupid, insignificant girl? Why, I loved you for
your mind, for your soul, but that china doll wants nothing but your
money!"
"Let us drop that, Polina," he said in a voice of supplication. "All
that you can say to me about my marriage I've said to myself many times
already. Don't cause me unnecessary pain."
Yulia Sergeyevna made her appearance, wearing a black dress with a big
diamond brooch, which her father-in-law had sent her after the service.
She was followed by her suite--Kotchevoy, two doctors of their
acquaintance, an officer, and a stout young man in student's uniform,
called Kish.
"You go on with Kostya," Laptev said to his wife. "I'm coming later."
Yulia nodded and went on. Polina Nikolaevna gazed after her, quivering
all over and twitching nervously, and in her eyes there was a look of
repulsion, hatred, and pain.
Laptev was afraid to go home with her, foreseeing an unpleasant
discussion, cutting words, and tears, and he suggested that they should
go and have tea at a restaurant. But she said:
"No, no. I want to go home. Don't dare to talk to me of restaurants."
She did not like being in a restaurant, because the atmosphere of
restaurants seemed to her poisoned by tobacco smoke and the breath of
men. Against all men she did not know she cherished a strange prejudice,
regarding them all as immoral rakes, capable of attacking her at any
moment. Besides, the music played at restaurants jarred on her nerves
and gave her a headache.
Coming out of the Hall of Nobility, they took a sledge in Ostozhenka and
drove to Savelovsky Lane, where she lodged. All the way Laptev thought
about her. It was true that he owed her a great deal. He had made her
acquaintance at the flat of his friend Yartsev, to whom she was giving
lessons in harmony. Her love for him was deep and perfectly
disinterested, and her relations with him did not alter her habits; she
went on giving her lessons and wearing herself out with work as before.
Through her he came to understand and love music, which he had scarcely
cared for till then.
"Half my kingdom for a cup of tea!" she pronounced in a hollow voice,
covering her mouth with her muff that she might not catch cold. "I've
given five lessons, confound them! My pupils are as stupid as posts; I
nearly died of exasperation. I don't know how long this slavery can go
on. I'm worn out. As soon as I can scrape together three hundred
roubles, I shall throw it all up and go to the Crimea, to lie on the
beach and drink in ozone. How I love the sea--oh, how I love the sea!"
"You'll never go," said Laptev. "To begin with, you'll never save the
money; and, besides, you'd grudge spending it. Forgive me, I repeat
again: surely it's quite as humiliating to collect the money by
farthings from idle people who have music lessons to while away their
time, as to borrow it from your friends."
"I haven't any friends," she said irritably. "And please don't talk
nonsense. The working class to which I belong has one privilege: the
consciousness of being incorruptible--the right to refuse to be indebted
to wretched little shopkeepers, and to treat them with scorn. No,
indeed, you don't buy me! I'm not a Yulitchka!"
Laptev did not attempt to pay the driver, knowing that it would call
forth a perfect torrent of words, such as he had often heard before. She
paid herself.
She had a little furnished room in the flat of a solitary lady who
provided her meals. Her big Becker piano was for the time at Yartsev's
in Great Nikitsky Street, and she went there every day to play on it. In
her room there were armchairs in loose covers, a bed with a white summer
quilt, and flowers belonging to the landlady; there were oleographs on
the walls, and there was nothing that would have suggested that there
was a woman, and a woman of university education, living in it. There
was no toilet table; there were no books; there was not even a writing-
table. It was evident that she went to bed as soon as she got home, and
went out as soon as she got up in the morning.
The cook brought in the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea, and, still
shivering--the room was cold--began abusing the singers who had sung in
the ninth symphony. She was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes
open. She drank one glass of tea, then a second, and then a third.
"And so you are married," she said. "But don't be uneasy; I'm not going
to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my heart. Only it's
annoying and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible as every one
else; that what you want in a woman is not brains or intellect, but
simply a body, good looks, and youth. . . . Youth!" she pronounced
through her nose, as though mimicking some one, and she laughed. "Youth!
You must have purity, _reinheit! reinheit!_" she laughed, throwing
herself back in her chair. "_Reinheit!_"
When she left off laughing her eyes were wet with tears.
"You're happy, at any rate?" she asked.
"No."
"Does she love you?"
Laptev, agitated, and feeling miserable, stood up and began walking
about the room.
"No," he repeated. "If you want to know, Polina, I'm very unhappy.
There's no help for it; I've done the stupid thing, and there's no
correcting it now. I must look at it philosophically. She married me
without love, stupidly, perhaps with mercenary motives, but without
understanding, and now she evidently sees her mistake and is miserable.
I see it. At night we sleep together, but by day she is afraid to be
left alone with me for five minutes, and tries to find distraction,
society. With me she feels ashamed and frightened."
"And yet she takes money from you?"
"That's stupid, Polina!" cried Laptev. "She takes money from me because
it makes absolutely no difference to her whether she has it or not. She
is an honest, pure girl. She married me simply because she wanted to get
away from her father, that's all."
"And are you sure she would have married you if you had not been rich?"
asked Polina.
"I'm not sure of anything," said Laptev dejectedly. "Not of anything. I
don't understand anything. For God's sake, Polina, don't let us talk
about it."
"Do you love her?"
"Desperately."
A silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he paced up and
down, thinking that by now his wife was probably having supper at the
doctors' club.
"But is it possible to love without knowing why?" asked Polina,
shrugging her shoulders. "No; it's the promptings of animal passion! You
are poisoned, intoxicated by that beautiful body, that _reinheit!_ Go
away from me; you are unclean! Go to her!"
She brandished her hand at him, then took up his hat and hurled it at
him. He put on his fur coat without speaking and went out, but she ran
after him into the passage, clutched his arm above the elbow, and broke
into sobs.
"Hush, Polina! Don't!" he said, and could not unclasp her fingers. "Calm
yourself, I entreat you."
She shut her eyes and turned pale, and her long nose became an
unpleasant waxy colour like a corpse's, and Laptev still could not
unclasp her fingers. She had fainted. He lifted her up carefully, laid
her on her bed, and sat by her for ten minutes till she came to herself.
Her hands were cold, her pulse was weak and uneven.
"Go home," she said, opening her eyes. "Go away, or I shall begin
howling again. I must take myself in hand."
When he came out, instead of going to the doctors' club where his
friends were expecting him, he went home. All the way home he was asking
himself reproachfully why he had not settled down to married life with
that woman who loved him so much, and was in reality his wife and
friend. She was the one human being who was devoted to him; and,
besides, would it not have been a grateful and worthy task to give
happiness, peace, and a home to that proud, clever, overworked creature?
Was it for him, he asked himself, to lay claim to youth and beauty, to
that happiness which could not be, and which, as though in punishment or
mockery, had kept him for the last three months in a state of gloom and
oppression. The honeymoon was long over, and he still, absurd to say,
did not know what sort of person his wife was. To her school friends and
her father she wrote long letters of five sheets, and was never at a
loss for something to say to them, but to him she never spoke except
about the weather or to tell him that dinner was ready, or that it was
supper-time. When at night she said her lengthy prayers and then kissed
her crosses and ikons, he thought, watching her with hatred, "Here she's
praying. What's she praying about? What about?" In his thoughts he
showered insults on himself and her, telling himself that when he got
into bed and took her into his arms, he was taking what he had paid for;
but it was horrible. If only it had been a healthy, reckless, sinful
woman; but here he had youth, piety, meekness, the pure eyes of
innocence. . . . While they were engaged her piety had touched him; now
the conventional definiteness of her views and convictions seemed to him
a barrier, behind which the real truth could not be seen. Already
everything in his married life was agonising. When his wife, sitting
beside him in the theatre, sighed or laughed spontaneously, it was
bitter to him that she enjoyed herself alone and would not share her
delight with him. And it was remarkable that she was friendly with all
his friends, and they all knew what she was like already, while he knew
nothing about her, and only moped and was dumbly jealous.
When he got home Laptev put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and sat
down in his study to read a novel. His wife was not at home. But within
half an hour there was a ring at the hall door, and he heard the muffled
footsteps of Pyotr running to open it. It was Yulia. She walked into the
study in her fur coat, her cheeks rosy with the frost,
"There's a great fire in Pryesnya," she said breathlessly. "There's a
tremendous glow. I'm going to see it with Konstantin Ivanovitch."
"Well, do, dear!"
The sight of her health, her freshness, and the childish horror in her
eyes, reassured Laptev. He read for another half-hour and went to bed.
Next day Polina Nikolaevna sent to the warehouse two books she had
borrowed from him, all his letters and his photographs; with them was a
note consisting of one word--_"basta."_
VIII
Towards the end of October Nina Fyodorovna had unmistakable symptoms of
a relapse. There was a change in her face, and she grew rapidly thinner.
In spite of acute pain she still imagined that she was getting better,
and got up and dressed every morning as though she were well, and then
lay on her bed, fully dressed, for the rest of the day. And towards the
end she became very talkative. She would lie on her back and talk in a
low voice, speaking with an effort and breathing painfully. She died
suddenly under the following circumstances.
It was a clear moonlight evening. In the street people were tobogganing
in the fresh snow, and their clamour floated in at the window. Nina
Fyodorovna was lying on her back in bed, and Sasha, who had no one to
take turns with her now, was sitting beside her half asleep.
"I don't remember his father's name," Nina Fyodorovna was saying softly,
"but his name was Ivan Kotchevoy--a poor clerk. He was a sad drunkard,
the Kingdom of Heaven be his! He used to come to us, and every month we
used to give him a pound of sugar and two ounces of tea. And money, too,
sometimes, of course. Yes. . . . And then, this is what happened. Our
Kotchevoy began drinking heavily and died, consumed by vodka. He left a
little son, a boy of seven. Poor little orphan! . . . We took him and
hid him in the clerk's quarters, and he lived there for a whole year,
without father's knowing. And when father did see him, he only waved his
hand and said nothing. When Kostya, the little orphan, was nine years
old--by that time I was engaged to be married--I took him round to all
the day schools. I went from one to the other, and no one would take
him. And he cried. . . . 'What are you crying for, little silly?' I
said. I took him to Razgulyay to the second school, where--God bless
them for it!--they took him, and the boy began going every day on foot
from Pyatnitsky Street to Razgulyay Street and back again . . . .
Alyosha paid for him. . . . By God's grace the boy got on, was good at
his lessons, and turned out well. . . . He's a lawyer now in Moscow, a
friend of Alyosha's, and so good in science. Yes, we had compassion on a
fellow-creature and took him into our house, and now I daresay, he
remembers us in his prayers. . . Yes. . . ."
Nina Fyodorovna spoke more and more slowly with long pauses, then after
a brief silence she suddenly raised herself and sat up.
"There's something the matter with me . . . something seems wrong," she
said. "Lord have mercy on me! Oh, I can't breathe!"
Sasha knew that her mother would soon die; seeing now how suddenly her
face looked drawn, she guessed that it was the end, and she was
frightened.
"Mother, you mustn't!" she began sobbing. "You mustn't."
"Run to the kitchen; let them go for father. I am very ill indeed."
Sasha ran through all the rooms calling, but there were none of the
servants in the house, and the only person she found was Lida asleep on
a chest in the dining-room with her clothes on and without a pillow.
Sasha ran into the yard just as she was without her goloshes, and then
into the street. On a bench at the gate her nurse was sitting watching
the tobogganing. From beyond the river, where the tobogganing slope was,
came the strains of a military band.
"Nurse, mother's dying!" sobbed Sasha. "You must go for father! . . ."
The nurse went upstairs, and, glancing at the sick woman, thrust a
lighted wax candle into her hand. Sasha rushed about in terror and
besought some one to go for her father, then she put on a coat and a
kerchief, and ran into the street. From the servants she knew already
that her father had another wife and two children with whom he lived in
Bazarny Street. She ran out of the gate and turned to the left, crying,
and frightened of unknown people. She soon began to sink into the snow
and grew numb with cold.
She met an empty sledge, but she did not take it: perhaps, she thought,
the man would drive her out of town, rob her, and throw her into the
cemetery (the servants had talked of such a case at tea). She went on
and on, sobbing and panting with exhaustion. When she got into Bazarny
Street, she inquired where M. Panaurov lived. An unknown woman spent a
long time directing her, and seeing that she did not understand, took
her by the hand and led her to a house of one storey that stood back
from the street. The door stood open. Sasha ran through the entry, along
the corridor, and found herself at last in a warm, lighted room where
her father was sitting by the samovar with a lady and two children. But
by now she was unable to utter a word, and could only sob. Panaurov
understood.
"Mother's worse?" he asked. "Tell me, child: is mother worse?"
He was alarmed and sent for a sledge.
When they got home, Nina Fyodorovna was sitting propped up with pillows,
with a candle in her hand. Her face looked dark and her eyes were
closed. Crowding in the doorway stood the nurse, the cook, the
housemaid, a peasant called Prokofy and a few persons of the humbler
class, who were complete strangers. The nurse was giving them orders in
a whisper, and they did not understand. Inside the room at the window
stood Lida, with a pale and sleepy face, gazing severely at her mother.
Panaurov took the candle out of Nina Fyodorovna's hand, and, frowning
contemptuously, flung it on the chest of drawers.
"This is awful!" he said, and his shoulders quivered. "Nina, you must
lie down," he said affectionately. "Lie down, dear."
She looked at him, but did not know him. They laid her down on her back.
When the priest and the doctor, Sergey Borisovitch, arrived, the
servants crossed themselves devoutly and prayed for her.
"What a sad business!" said the doctor thoughtfully, coming out into the
drawing-room. "Why, she was still young--not yet forty."
They heard the loud sobbing of the little girls. Panaurov, with a pale
face and moist eyes, went up to the doctor and said in a faint, weak
voice:
"Do me a favour, my dear fellow. Send a telegram to Moscow. I'm not
equal to it."
The doctor fetched the ink and wrote the following telegram to his
daughter:
"Madame Panaurov died at eight o'clock this evening. Tell your husband:
a mortgaged house for sale in Dvoryansky Street, nine thousand cash.
Auction on twelfth. Advise him not miss opportunity."
IX
Laptev lived in one of the turnings out of Little Dmitrovka. Besides the
big house facing the street, he rented also a two-storey lodge in the
yard at the back of his friend Kotchevoy, a lawyer's assistant whom all
the Laptevs called Kostya, because he had grown up under their eyes.
Facing this lodge stood another, also of two storeys, inhabited by a
French family consisting of a husband and wife and five daughters.
There was a frost of twenty degrees. The windows were frozen over.
Waking up in the morning, Kostya, with an anxious face, took twenty
drops of a medicine; then, taking two dumb-bells out of the bookcase, he
did gymnastic exercises. He was tall and thin, with big reddish
moustaches; but what was most noticeable in his appearance was the
length of his legs.
Pyotr, a middle-aged peasant in a reefer jacket and cotton breeches
tucked into his high boots, brought in the samovar and made the tea.
"It's very nice weather now, Konstantin Ivanovitch," he said.
"It is, but I tell you what, brother, it's a pity we can't get on, you
and I, without such exclamations."
Pyotr sighed from politeness.
"What are the little girls doing?" asked Kotchevoy.
"The priest has not come. Alexey Fyodorovitch is giving them their
lesson himself."
Kostya found a spot in the window that was not covered with frost, and
began looking through a field-glass at the windows of the house where
the French family lived.
"There's no seeing," he said.
Meanwhile Alexey Fyodorovitch was giving Sasha and Lida a scripture
lesson below. For the last six weeks they had been living in Moscow, and
were installed with their governess in the lower storey of the lodge.
And three times a week a teacher from a school in the town, and a
priest, came to give them lessons. Sasha was going through the New
Testament and Lida was going through the Old. The time before Lida had
been set the story up to Abraham to learn by heart.
"And so Adam and Eve had two sons," said Laptev. "Very good. But what
were they called? Try to remember them!"
Lida, still with the same severe face, gazed dumbly at the table. She
moved her lips, but without speaking; and the elder girl, Sasha, looked
into her face, frowning.
"You know it very well, only you mustn't be nervous," said Laptev.
"Come, what were Adam's sons called?"
"Abel and Canel," Lida whispered.
"Cain and Abel," Laptev corrected her.
A big tear rolled down Lida's cheek and dropped on the book. Sasha
looked down and turned red, and she, too, was on the point of tears.
Laptev felt a lump in his throat, and was so sorry for them he could not
speak. He got up from the table and lighted a cigarette. At that moment
Kotchevoy came down the stairs with a paper in his hand. The little
girls stood up, and without looking at him, made curtsies.
"For God's sake, Kostya, give them their lessons," said Laptev, turning
to him. "I'm afraid I shall cry, too, and I have to go to the warehouse
before dinner."
"All right."
Alexey Fyodorovitch went away. Kostya, with a very serious face, sat
down to the table and drew the Scripture history towards him.
"Well," he said; "where have you got to?"
"She knows about the Flood," said Sasha.
"The Flood? All right. Let's peg in at the Flood. Fire away about the
Flood." Kostya skimmed through a brief description of the Flood in the
book, and said: "I must remark that there really never was a flood such
as is described here. And there was no such person as Noah. Some
thousands of years before the birth of Christ, there was an
extraordinary inundation of the earth, and that's not only mentioned in
the Jewish Bible, but in the books of other ancient peoples: the Greeks,
the Chaldeans, the Hindoos. But whatever the inundation may have been,
it couldn't have covered the whole earth. It may have flooded the
plains, but the mountains must have remained. You can read this book, of
course, but don't put too much faith in it."
Tears trickled down Lida's face again. She turned away and suddenly
burst into such loud sobs, that Kostya started and jumped up from his
seat in great confusion.
"I want to go home," she said, "to papa and to nurse."
Sasha cried too. Kostya went upstairs to his own room, and spoke on the
telephone to Yulia Sergeyevna.
"My dear soul," he said, "the little girls are crying again; there's no
doing anything with them."
Yulia Sergeyevna ran across from the big house in her indoor dress, with
only a knitted shawl over her shoulders, and chilled through by the
frost, began comforting the children.
"Do believe me, do believe me," she said in an imploring voice, hugging
first one and then the other. "Your papa's coming to-day; he has sent a
telegram. You're grieving for mother, and I grieve too. My heart's torn,
but what can we do? We must bow to God's will!"
When they left off crying, she wrapped them up and took them out for a
drive. They stopped near the Iverskoy chapel, put up candles at the
shrine, and, kneeling down, prayed. On the way back they went in
Filippov's, and had cakes sprinkled with poppy-seeds.
The Laptevs had dinner between two and three. Pyotr handed the dishes.
This Pyotr waited on the family, and by day ran to the post, to the
warehouse, to the law courts for Kostya; he spent his evenings making
cigarettes, ran to open the door at night, and before five o'clock in
the morning was up lighting the stoves, and no one knew where he slept.
He was very fond of opening seltzer-water bottles and did it easily,
without a bang and without spilling a drop.
"With God's blessing," said Kostya, drinking off a glass of vodka before
the soup.
At first Yulia Sergeyevna did not like Kostya; his bass voice, his
phrases such as "Landed him one on the beak," "filth," "produce the
samovar," etc., his habit of clinking glasses and making sentimental
speeches, seemed to her trivial. But as she got to know him better, she
began to feel very much at home with him. He was open with her; he liked
talking to her in a low voice in the evening, and even gave her novels
of his own composition to read, though these had been kept a secret even
from such friends as Laptev and Yartsev. She read these novels and
praised them, so that she might not disappoint him, and he was delighted
because he hoped sooner or later to become a distinguished author.
In his novels he described nothing but country-house life, though he had
only seen the country on rare occasions when visiting friends at a
summer villa, and had only been in a real country-house once in his
life, when he had been to Volokolamsk on law business. He avoided any
love interest as though he were ashamed of it; he put in frequent
descriptions of nature, and in them was fond of using such expressions
as, "the capricious lines of the mountains, the miraculous forms of the
clouds, the harmony of mysterious rhythms . . . ." His novels had never
been published, and this he attributed to the censorship.
He liked the duties of a lawyer, but yet he considered that his most
important pursuit was not the law but these novels. He believed that he
had a subtle, æsthetic temperament, and he always had leanings towards
art. He neither sang nor played on any musical instrument, and was
absolutely without an ear for music, but he attended all the symphony
and philharmonic concerts, got up concerts for charitable objects, and
made the acquaintance of singers. . . .
They used to talk at dinner.
"It's a strange thing," said Laptev, "my Fyodor took my breath away
again! He said we must find out the date of the centenary of our firm,
so as to try and get raised to noble rank; and he said it quite
seriously. What can be the matter with him? I confess I begin to feel
worried about him."
They talked of Fyodor, and of its being the fashion nowadays to adopt
some pose or other. Fyodor, for instance, tried to appear like a plain
merchant, though he had ceased to be one; and when the teacher came from
the school, of which old Laptev was the patron, to ask Fyodor for his
salary, the latter changed his voice and deportment, and behaved with
the teacher as though he were some one in authority.
There was nothing to be done; after dinner they went into the study.
They talked about the decadents, about "The Maid of Orleans," and Kostya
delivered a regular monologue; he fancied that he was very successful in
imitating Ermolova. Then they sat down and played whist. The little
girls had not gone back to the lodge but were sitting together in one
arm-chair, with pale and mournful faces, and were listening to every
noise in the street, wondering whether it was their father coming. In
the evening when it was dark and the candles were lighted, they felt
deeply dejected. The talk over the whist, the footsteps of Pyotr, the
crackling in the fireplace, jarred on their nerves, and they did not
like to look at the fire. In the evenings they did not want to cry, but
they felt strange, and there was a load on their hearts. They could not
understand how people could talk and laugh when their mother was dead.
"What did you see through the field-glasses today?" Yulia Sergeyevna
asked Kostya.
"Nothing to-day, but yesterday I saw the old Frenchman having his bath."
At seven o'clock Yulia and Kostya went to the Little Theatre. Laptev was
left with the little girls.
"It's time your father was here," he said, looking at his watch. "The
train must be late."
The children sat in their arm-chair dumb and huddling together like
animals when they are cold, while he walked about the room looking
impatiently at his watch. It was quiet in the house. But just before
nine o'clock some one rang at the bell. Pyotr went to open the door.
Hearing a familiar voice, the children shrieked, burst into sobs, and
ran into the hall. Panaurov was wearing a sumptuous coat of antelope
skin, and his head and moustaches were white with hoar frost. "In a
minute, in a minute," he muttered, while Sasha and Lida, sobbing and
laughing, kissed his cold hands, his hat, his antelope coat. With the
languor of a handsome man spoilt by too much love, he fondled the
children without haste, then went into the study and said, rubbing his
hands:
"I've not come to stay long, my friends. I'm going to Petersburg to-
morrow. They've promised to transfer me to another town."
He was staying at the Dresden Hotel.
X
A friend who was often at the Laptevs' was Ivan Gavrilitch Yartsev. He
was a strong, healthy man with black hair and a clever, pleasant face.
He was considered to be handsome, but of late he had begun to grow
stout, and that rather spoilt his face and figure; another thing that
spoilt him was that he wore his hair cut so close that the skin showed
through.
At the University his tall figure and physical strength had won him the
nickname of "the pounder" among the students. He had taken his degree
with the Laptev brothers in the faculty of philology--then he went in
for science and now had the degree of _magister_ in chemistry. But he
had never given a lecture or even been a demonstrator. He taught physics
and natural history in the modern school, and in two girls' high
schools. He was enthusiastic over his pupils, especially the girls, and
used to maintain that a remarkable generation was growing up. At home he
spent his time studying sociology and Russian history, as well as
chemistry, and he sometimes published brief notes in the newspapers and
magazines, signing them "Y." When he talked of some botanical or
zoological subject, he spoke like an historian; when he was discussing
some historical question, he approached it as a man of science.
Kish, nicknamed "the eternal student," was also like one of the family
at the Laptevs'. He had been for three years studying medicine. Then he
took up mathematics, and spent two years over each year's course. His
father, a provincial druggist, used to send him forty roubles a month,
to which his mother, without his father's knowledge, added another ten.
And this sum was not only sufficient for his board and lodging, but even
for such luxuries as an overcoat lined with Polish beaver, gloves,
scent, and photographs (he often had photographs taken of himself and
used to distribute them among his friends). He was neat and demure,
slightly bald, with golden side-whiskers, and he had the air of a man
nearly always ready to oblige. He was always busy looking after other
people's affairs. At one time he would be rushing about with a
subscription list; at another time he would be freezing in the early
morning at a ticket office to buy tickets for ladies of his
acquaintance, or at somebody's request would be ordering a wreath or a
bouquet. People simply said of him: "Kish will go, Kish will do it, Kish
will buy it." He was usually unsuccessful in carrying out his
commissions. Reproaches were showered upon him, people frequently forgot
to pay him for the things he bought, but he simply sighed in hard cases
and never protested. He was never particularly delighted nor
disappointed; his stories were always long and boring; and his jokes
invariably provoked laughter just because they were not funny. Thus, one
day, for instance, intending to make a joke, he said to Pyotr: "Pyotr,
you're not a sturgeon;" and this aroused a general laugh, and he, too,
laughed for a long time, much pleased at having made such a successful
jest. Whenever one of the professors was buried, he walked in front with
the mutes.
Yartsev and Kish usually came in the evening to tea. If the Laptevs were
not going to the theatre or a concert, the evening tea lingered on till
supper. One evening in February the following conversation took place:
"A work of art is only significant and valuable when there are some
serious social problems contained in its central idea," said Kostya,
looking wrathfully at Yartsev. "If there is in the work a protest
against serfdom, or the author takes up arms against the vulgarity of
aristocratic society, the work is significant and valuable. The novels
that are taken up with 'Ach!' and 'Och!' and 'she loved him, while he
ceased to love her,' I tell you, are worthless, and damn them all, I
say!"
"I agree with you, Konstantin Ivanovitch," said Yulia Sergeyevna. "One
describes a love scene; another, a betrayal; and the third, meeting
again after separation. Are there no other subjects? Why, there are many
people sick, unhappy, harassed by poverty, to whom reading all that must
be distasteful."
It was disagreeable to Laptev to hear his wife, not yet twenty-two,
speaking so seriously and coldly about love. He understood why this was
so.
"If poetry does not solve questions that seem so important," said
Yartsev, "you should turn to works on technical subjects, criminal law,
or finance, read scientific pamphlets. What need is there to discuss in
'Romeo and Juliet,' liberty of speech, or the disinfecting of prisons,
instead of love, when you can find all that in special articles and
textbooks?"
"That's pushing it to the extreme," Kostya interrupted. "We are not
talking of giants like Shakespeare or Goethe; we are talking of the
hundreds of talented mediocre writers, who would be infinitely more
valuable if they would let love alone, and would employ themselves in
spreading knowledge and humane ideas among the masses."
Kish, lisping and speaking a little through his nose, began telling the
story of a novel he had lately been reading. He spoke circumstantially
and without haste. Three minutes passed, then five, then ten, and no one
could make out what he was talking about, and his face grew more and
more indifferent, and his eyes more and more blank.
"Kish, do be quick over it," Yulia Sergeyevna could not resist saying;
"it's really agonizing!"
"Shut up, Kish!" Kostya shouted to him.
They all laughed, and Kish with them.
Fyodor came in. Flushing red in patches, he greeted them all in a
nervous flurry, and led his brother away into the study. Of late he had
taken to avoiding the company of more than one person at once.
"Let the young people laugh, while we speak from the heart in here," he
said, settling himself in a deep arm-chair at a distance from the lamp.
"It's a long time, my dear brother, since we've seen each other. How
long is it since you were at the warehouse? I think it must be a week."
"Yes, there's nothing for me to do there. And I must confess that the
old man wearies me."
"Of course, they could get on at the warehouse without you and me, but
one must have some occupation. 'In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat
bread,' as it is written. God loves work."
Pyotr brought in a glass of tea on a tray. Fyodor drank it without
sugar, and asked for more. He drank a great deal of tea, and could get
through as many as ten glasses in the evening.
"I tell you what, brother," he said, getting up and going to his
brother. "Laying aside philosophic subtleties, you must get elected on
to the town council, and little by little we will get you on to the
local Board, and then to be an alderman. And as time goes on --you are a
clever man and well-educated--you will be noticed in Petersburg and
asked to go there--active men on the provincial assemblies and town
councils are all the fashion there now--and before you are fifty you'll
be a privy councillor, and have a ribbon across your shoulders."
Laptev made no answer; he knew that all this--being a privy councillor
and having a ribbon over his shoulder--was what Fyodor desired for
himself, and he did not know what to say.
The brothers sat still and said nothing. Fyodor opened his watch and for
a long, long time gazed into it with strained attention, as though he
wanted to detect the motion of the hand, and the expression of his face
struck Laptev as strange.
They were summoned to supper. Laptev went into the dining-room, while
Fyodor remained in the study. The argument was over and Yartsev was
speaking in the tones of a professor giving a lecture:
"Owing to differences of climate, of energy, of tastes, of age, equality
among men is physically impossible. But civilised man can make this
inequality innocuous, as he has already done with bogs and bears. A
learned man succeeded in making a cat, a mouse, a falcon, a sparrow, all
eat out of one plate; and education, one must hope, will do the same
thing with men. Life continually progresses, civilisation makes enormous
advances before our eyes, and obviously a time will come when we shall
think, for instance, the present condition of the factory population as
absurd as we now do the state of serfdom, in which girls were exchanged
for dogs."
"That won't be for a long while, a very long while," said Kostya, with a
laugh, "not till Rothschild thinks his cellars full of gold absurd, and
till then the workers may bend their backs and die of hunger. No; that's
not it. We mustn't wait for it; we must struggle for it. Do you suppose
because the cat eats out of the same saucer as the mouse--do you suppose
that she is influenced by a sense of conscious intelligence? Not a bit
of it! She's made to do it by force."
"Fyodor and I are rich; our father's a capitalist, a millionaire. You
will have to struggle with us," said Laptev, rubbing his forehead with
his hand. "Struggle with me is an idea I cannot grasp. I am rich, but
what has money given me so far? What has this power given me? In what
way am I happier than you? My childhood was slavery, and money did not
save me from the birch. When Nina was ill and died, my money did not
help her. If people don't care for me, I can't make them like me if I
spend a hundred million."
"But you can do a great deal of good," said Kish.
"Good, indeed! You spoke to me yesterday of a mathematical man who is
looking for a job. Believe me, I can do as little for him as you can. I
can give money, but that's not what he wants--I asked a well-known
musician to help a poor violinist, and this is what he answered: 'You
apply to me just because you are not a musician yourself.' In the same
way I say to you that you apply for help to me so confidently because
you've never been in the position of a rich man."
"Why you bring in the comparison with a well-known musician I don't
understand!" said Yulia Sergeyevna, and she flushed crimson. "What has
the well-known musician to do with it!"
Her face was quivering with hatred, and she dropped her eyes to conceal
the feeling. And not only her husband, but all the men sitting at the
table, knew what the look in her face meant.
"What has the well-known musician got to do with it?" she said slowly.
"Why, nothing's easier than helping some one poor."
Silence followed. Pyotr handed the woodcock, but they all refused it,
and ate nothing but salad. Laptev did not remember what he had said, but
it was clear to him that it was not his words that were hateful, but the
fact of his meddling in the conversation at all.
After supper he went into his study; intently, with a beating heart,
expecting further humiliation, he listened to what was going on in the
hall. An argument had sprung up there again. Then Yartsev sat down to
the piano and played a sentimental song. He was a man of varied
accomplishments; he could play and sing, and even perform conjuring
tricks.
"You may please yourselves, my friends, but I'm not going to stay at
home," said Yulia. "We must go somewhere."
They decided to drive out of town, and sent Kish to the merchant's club
to order a three-horse sledge. They did not ask Laptev to go with them
because he did not usually join these expeditions, and because his
brother was sitting with him; but he took it to mean that his society
bored them, and that he was not wanted in their light-hearted youthful
company. And his vexation, his bitter feeling, was so intense that he
almost shed tears. He was positively glad that he was treated so
ungraciously, that he was scorned, that he was a stupid, dull husband, a
money-bag; and it seemed to him, that he would have been even more glad
if his wife were to deceive him that night with his best friend, and
were afterwards to acknowledge it, looking at him with hatred. . . . He
was jealous on her account of their student friends, of actors, of
singers, of Yartsev, even of casual acquaintances; and now he had a
passionate longing for her really to be unfaithful to him. He longed to
find her in another man's arms, and to be rid of this nightmare forever.
Fyodor was drinking tea, gulping it noisily. But he, too, got up to go.
"Our old father must have got cataract," he said, as he put on his fur
coat. "His sight has become very poor."
Laptev put on his coat, too, and went out. After seeing his brother part
of the way home, he took a sledge and drove to Yar's.
"And this is family happiness!" he said, jeering at himself. "This is
love!"
His teeth were chattering, and he did not know if it were jealousy or
something else. He walked about near the tables; listened to a comic
singer in the hall. He had not a single phrase ready if he should meet
his own party; and he felt sure beforehand that if he met his wife, he
would only smile pitifully and not cleverly, and that every one would
understand what feeling had induced him to come here. He was bewildered
by the electric light, the loud music, the smell of powder, and the fact
that the ladies he met looked at him. He stood at the doors trying to
see and to hear what was going on in the private rooms, and it seemed to
him that he was somehow playing a mean, contemptible part on a level
with the comic singers and those ladies. Then he went to Strelna, but he
found none of his circle there, either; and only when on the way home he
was again driving up to Yar's, a three-horse sledge noisily overtook
him. The driver was drunk and shouting, and he could hear Yartsev
laughing: "Ha, ha, ha!"
Laptev returned home between three and four. Yulia Sergeyevna was in
bed. Noticing that she was not asleep, he went up to her and said
sharply:
"I understand your repulsion, your hatred, but you might spare me before
other people; you might conceal your feelings."
She got up and sat on the bed with her legs dangling. Her eyes looked
big and black in the lamplight.
"I beg your pardon," she said.
He could not utter a single word from excitement and the trembling of
his whole body; he stood facing her and was dumb. She trembled, too, and
sat with the air of a criminal waiting for explanations.
"How I suffer!" he said at last, and he clutched his head. "I'm in hell,
and I'm out of my mind."
"And do you suppose it's easy for me?" she asked, with a quiver in her
voice. "God alone knows what I go through."
"You've been my wife for six months, but you haven't a spark of love for
me in your heart. There's no hope, not one ray of light! Why did you
marry me?" Laptev went on with despair. "Why? What demon thrust you into
my arms? What did you hope for? What did you want?"
She looked at him with terror, as though she were afraid he would kill
her.
"Did I attract you? Did you like me?" he went on, gasping for breath.
"No. Then what? What? Tell me what?" he cried. "Oh, the cursed money!
The cursed money!"
"I swear to God, no!" she cried, and she crossed herself. She seemed to
shrink under the insult, and for the first time he heard her crying. "I
swear to God, no!" she repeated. "I didn't think about your money; I
didn't want it. I simply thought I should do wrong if I refused you. I
was afraid of spoiling your life and mine. And now I am suffering for my
mistake. I'm suffering unbearably!"
She sobbed bitterly, and he saw that she was hurt; and not knowing what
to say, dropped down on the carpet before her.
"That's enough; that's enough," he muttered. "I insulted you because I
love you madly." He suddenly kissed her foot and passionately hugged it.
"If only a spark of love," he muttered. "Come, lie to me; tell me a lie!
Don't say it's a mistake! . . ."
But she went on crying, and he felt that she was only enduring his
caresses as an inevitable consequence of her mistake. And the foot he
had kissed she drew under her like a bird. He felt sorry for her.
She got into bed and covered her head over; he undressed and got into
bed, too. In the morning they both felt confused and did not know what
to talk about, and he even fancied she walked unsteadily on the foot he
had kissed.
Before dinner Panaurov came to say good-bye. Yulia had an irresistible
desire to go to her own home; it would be nice, she thought, to go away
and have a rest from married life, from the embarrassment and the
continual consciousness that she had done wrong. It was decided at
dinner that she should set off with Panaurov, and stay with her father
for two or three weeks until she was tired of it.
XI
She travelled with Panaurov in a reserved compartment; he had on his
head an astrachan cap of peculiar shape.
"Yes, Petersburg did not satisfy me," he said, drawling, with a sigh.
"They promise much, but nothing definite. Yes, my dear girl. I have been
a Justice of the Peace, a member of the local Board, chairman of the
Board of Magistrates, and finally councillor of the provincial
administration. I think I have served my country and have earned the
right to receive attention; but--would you believe it?--I can never
succeed in wringing from the authorities a post in another town. . . ."
Panaurov closed his eyes and shook his head.
"They don't recognise me," he went on, as though dropping asleep. "Of
course I'm not an administrator of genius, but, on the other hand, I'm a
decent, honest man, and nowadays even that's something rare. I regret to
say I have not been always quite straightforward with women, but in my
relations with the Russian government I've always been a gentleman. But
enough of that," he said, opening his eyes; "let us talk of you. What
put it into your head to visit your papa so suddenly?"
"Well. . . . I had a little misunderstanding with my husband," said
Yulia, looking at his cap.
"Yes. What a queer fellow he is! All the Laptevs are queer. Your
husband's all right--he's nothing out of the way, but his brother Fyodor
is a perfect fool."
Panaurov sighed and asked seriously:
"And have you a lover yet?"
Yulia looked at him in amazement and laughed.
"Goodness knows what you're talking about."
It was past ten o'clock when they got out at a big station and had
supper. When the train went on again Panaurov took off his greatcoat and
his cap, and sat down beside Yulia.
"You are very charming, I must tell you," he began. "Excuse me for the
eating-house comparison, but you remind me of fresh salted cucumber; it
still smells of the hotbed, so to speak, and yet has a smack of the salt
and a scent of fennel about it. As time goes on you will make a
magnificent woman, a wonderful, exquisite woman. If this trip of ours
had happened five years ago," he sighed, "I should have felt it my duty
to join the ranks of your adorers, but now, alas, I'm a veteran on the
retired list."
He smiled mournfully, but at the same time graciously, and put his arm
round her waist.
"You must be mad!" she said; she flushed crimson and was so frightened
that her hands and feet turned cold.
"Leave off, Grigory Nikolaevitch!"
"What are you afraid of, dear?" he asked softly. "What is there dreadful
about it? It's simply that you're not used to it."
If a woman protested he always interpreted it as a sign that he had made
an impression on her and attracted her. Holding Yulia round the waist,
he kissed her firmly on the cheek, then on the lips, in the full
conviction that he was giving her intense gratification. Yulia recovered
from her alarm and confusion, and began laughing. He kissed her once
more and said, as he put on his ridiculous cap:
"That is all that the old veteran can give you. A Turkish Pasha, a kind-
hearted old fellow, was presented by some one--or inherited, I fancy it
was--a whole harem. When his beautiful young wives drew up in a row
before him, he walked round them, kissed each one of them, and said:
'That is all that I am equal to giving you.' And that's just what I say,
too."
All this struck her as stupid and extraordinary, and amused her. She
felt mischievous. Standing up on the seat and humming, she got a box of
sweets from the shelf, and throwing him a piece of chocolate, shouted:
"Catch!"
He caught it. With a loud laugh she threw him another sweet, then a
third, and he kept catching them and putting them into his mouth,
looking at her with imploring eyes; and it seemed to her that in his
face, his features, his expression, there was a great deal that was
feminine and childlike. And when, out of breath, she sat down on the
seat and looked at him, laughing, he tapped her cheek with two fingers,
and said as though he were vexed:
"Naughty girl!"
"Take it," she said, giving him the box. "I don't care for sweet
things."
He ate up the sweets--every one of them, and locked the empty box in his
trunk; he liked boxes with pictures on them.
"That's mischief enough, though," he said. "It's time for the veteran to
go bye-bye."
He took out of his hold-all a Bokhara dressing-gown and a pillow, lay
down, and covered himself with the dressing-gown.
"Good-night, darling!" he said softly, and sighed as though his whole
body ached.
And soon a snore was heard. Without the slightest feeling of constraint,
she, too, lay down and went to sleep.
When next morning she drove through her native town from the station
homewards, the streets seemed to her empty and deserted. The snow looked
grey, and the houses small, as though some one had squashed them. She
was met by a funeral procession: the dead body was carried in an open
coffin with banners.
"Meeting a funeral, they say, is lucky," she thought.
There were white bills pasted in the windows of the house where Nina
Fyodorovna used to live.
With a sinking at her heart she drove into her own courtyard and rang at
the door. It was opened by a servant she did not know--a plump, sleepy-
looking girl wearing a warm wadded jacket. As she went upstairs Yulia
remembered how Laptev had declared his love there, but now the staircase
was unscrubbed, covered with foot-marks. Upstairs in the cold passage
patients were waiting in their out-door coats. And for some reason her
heart beat violently, and she was so excited she could scarcely walk.
The doctor, who had grown even stouter, was sitting with a brick-red
face and dishevelled hair, drinking tea. Seeing his daughter, he was
greatly delighted, and even lacrymose. She thought that she was the only
joy in this old man's life, and much moved, she embraced him warmly, and
told him she would stay a long time--till Easter. After taking off her
things in her own room, she went back to the dining-room to have tea
with him. He was pacing up and down with his hands in his pockets,
humming, "Ru-ru-ru"; this meant that he was dissatisfied with something.
"You have a gay time of it in Moscow," he said. "I am very glad for your
sake. . . . I'm an old man and I need nothing. I shall soon give up the
ghost and set you all free. And the wonder is that my hide is so tough,
that I'm alive still! It's amazing!"
He said that he was a tough old ass that every one rode on. They had
thrust on him the care of Nina Fyodorovna, the worry of her children,
and of her burial; and that coxcomb Panaurov would not trouble himself
about it, and had even borrowed a hundred roubles from him and had never
paid it back.
"Take me to Moscow and put me in a madhouse," said the doctor. "I'm mad;
I'm a simple child, as I still put faith in truth and justice."
Then he found fault with her husband for his short-sightedness in not
buying houses that were being sold so cheaply. And now it seemed to
Yulia that she was not the one joy in this old man's life. While he was
seeing his patients, and afterwards going his rounds, she walked through
all the rooms, not knowing what to do or what to think about. She had
already grown strange to her own town and her own home. She felt no
inclination to go into the streets or see her friends; and at the
thought of her old friends and her life as a girl, she felt no sadness
nor regret for the past.
In the evening she dressed a little more smartly and went to the evening
service. But there were only poor people in the church, and her splendid
fur coat and hat made no impression. And it seemed to her that there was
some change in the church as well as in herself. In old days she had
loved it when they read the prayers for the day at evening service, and
the choir sang anthems such as "I will open my lips." She liked moving
slowly in the crowd to the priest who stood in the middle of the church,
and then to feel the holy oil on her forehead; now she only waited for
the service to be over. And now, going out of the church, she was only
afraid that beggars would ask for alms; it was such a bore to have to
stop and feel for her pockets; besides, she had no coppers in her pocket
now--nothing but roubles.
She went to bed early, and was a long time in going to sleep. She kept
dreaming of portraits of some sort, and of the funeral procession she
had met that morning. The open coffin with the dead body was carried
into the yard, and brought to a standstill at the door; then the coffin
was swung backwards and forwards on a sheet, and dashed violently
against the door. Yulia woke and jumped up in alarm. There really was a
bang at the door, and the wire of the bell rustled against the wall,
though no ring was to be heard.
The doctor coughed. Then she heard the servant go downstairs, and then
come back.
"Madam!" she said, and knocked at the door. "Madam!"
"What is it?" said Yulia.
"A telegram for you!"
Yulia went out to her with a candle. Behind the servant stood the
doctor, in his night-clothes and greatcoat, and he, too, had a candle in
his hand. "Our bell is broken," he said, yawning sleepily. "It ought to
have been mended long ago."
Yulia broke open the telegram and read:
"We drink to your health.--YARTSEV, KOTCHEVOY."
"Ah, what idiots!" she said, and burst out laughing; and her heart felt
light and gay.
Going back into her room, she quietly washed and dressed, then she spent
a long time in packing her things, until it was daylight, and at midday
she set off for Moscow.
XII
In Holy Week the Laptevs went to an exhibition of pictures in the school
of painting. The whole family went together in the Moscow fashion, the
little girls, the governess, Kostya, and all.
Laptev knew the names of all the well-known painters, and never missed
an exhibition. He used sometimes to paint little landscape paintings
when he was in the country in the summer, and he fancied he had a good
deal of taste, and that if he had studied he might have made a good
painter. When he was abroad he sometimes used to go to curio shops,
examining the antiques with the air of a connoisseur and giving his
opinion on them. When he bought any article he gave just what the
shopkeeper liked to ask for it and his purchase remained afterwards in a
box in the coach-house till it disappeared altogether. Or going into a
print shop, he would slowly and attentively examine the engravings and
the bronzes, making various remarks on them, and would buy a common
frame or a box of wretched prints. At home he had pictures always of
large dimensions but of inferior quality; the best among them were badly
hung. It had happened to him more than once to pay large sums for things
which had afterwards turned out to be forgeries of the grossest kind.
And it was remarkable that, though as a rule timid in the affairs of
life, he was exceedingly bold and self-confident at a picture
exhibition. Why?
Yulia Sergeyevna looked at the pictures as her husband did, through her
open fist or an opera-glass, and was surprised that the people in the
pictures were like live people, and the trees like real trees. But she
did not understand art, and it seemed to her that many pictures in the
exhibition were alike, and she imagined that the whole object in
painting was that the figures and objects should stand out as though
they were real, when you looked at the picture through your open fist.
"That forest is Shiskin's," her husband explained to her. "He always
paints the same thing. . . . But notice snow's never such a lilac colour
as that. . . . And that boy's left arm is shorter than his right."
When they were all tired and Laptev had gone to look for Kostya, that
they might go home, Yulia stopped indifferently before a small
landscape. In the foreground was a stream, over it a little wooden
bridge; on the further side a path that disappeared in the dark grass; a
field on the right; a copse; near it a camp fire--no doubt of watchers
by night; and in the distance there was a glow of the evening sunset.
Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then along
the little path further and further, while all round was stillness, the
drowsy landrails calling and the fire flickering in the distance. And
for some reason she suddenly began to feel that she had seen those very
clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and that copse,
and that field before, many times before. She felt lonely, and longed to
walk on and on along the path; and there, in the glow of sunset was the
calm reflection of something unearthly, eternal.
"How finely that's painted!" she said, surprised that the picture had
suddenly become intelligible to her.
"Look, Alyosha! Do you see how peaceful it is?"
She began trying to explain why she liked the landscape so much, but
neither Kostya nor her husband understood her. She kept looking at the
picture with a mournful smile, and the fact that the others saw nothing
special in it troubled her. Then she began walking through the rooms and
looking at the pictures again. She tried to understand them and no
longer thought that a great many of them were alike. When, on returning
home, for the first time she looked attentively at the big picture that
hung over the piano in the drawing-room, she felt a dislike for it, and
said:
"What an idea to have pictures like that!"
And after that the gilt cornices, the Venetian looking-glasses with
flowers on them, the pictures of the same sort as the one that hung over
the piano, and also her husband's and Kostya's reflections upon art,
aroused in her a feeling of dreariness and vexation, even of hatred.
Life went on its ordinary course from day to day with no promise of
anything special. The theatrical season was over, the warm days had
come. There was a long spell of glorious weather. One morning the
Laptevs attended the district court to hear Kostya, who had been
appointed by the court to defend some one. They were late in starting,
and reached the court after the examination of the witnesses had begun.
A soldier in the reserve was accused of theft and housebreaking. There
were a great number of witnesses, washerwomen; they all testified that
the accused was often in the house of their employer--a woman who kept a
laundry. At the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross he came late in the
evening and began asking for money; he wanted a pick-me-up, as he had
been drinking, but no one gave him anything. Then he went away, but an
hour afterwards he came back, and brought with him some beer and a soft
gingerbread cake for the little girl. They drank and sang songs almost
till daybreak, and when in the morning they looked about, the lock of
the door leading up into the attic was broken, and of the linen three
men's shirts, a petticoat, and two sheets were missing. Kostya asked
each witness sarcastically whether she had not drunk the beer the
accused had brought. Evidently he was insinuating that the washerwomen
had stolen the linen themselves. He delivered his speech without the
slightest nervousness, looking angrily at the jury.
He explained what robbery with housebreaking meant, and the difference
between that and simple theft. He spoke very circumstantially and
convincingly, displaying an unusual talent for speaking at length and in
a serious tone about what had been know to every one long before. And it
was difficult to make out exactly what he was aiming at. From his long
speech the foreman of the jury could only have deduced "that it was
housebreaking but not robbery, as the washerwomen had sold the linen for
drink themselves; or, if there had been robbery, there had not been
housebreaking." But obviously, he said just what was wanted, as his
speech moved the jury and the audience, and was very much liked. When
they gave a verdict of acquittal, Yulia nodded to Kostya, and afterwards
pressed his hand warmly.
In May the Laptevs moved to a country villa at Sokolniki. By that time
Yulia was expecting a baby.
XIII
More than a year had passed. Yulia and Yartsev were lying on the grass
at Sokolniki not far from the embankment of the Yaroslav railway; a
little distance away Kotchevoy was lying with hands under his head,
looking at the sky. All three had been for a walk, and were waiting for
the six o'clock train to pass to go home to tea.
"Mothers see something extraordinary in their children, that is ordained
by nature," said Yulia. "A mother will stand for hours together by the
baby's cot looking at its little ears and eyes and nose, and fascinated
by them. If any one else kisses her baby the poor thing imagines that it
gives him immense pleasure. And a mother talks of nothing but her baby.
I know that weakness in mothers, and I keep watch over myself, but my
Olga really is exceptional. How she looks at me when I'm nursing her!
How she laughs! She's only eight months old, but, upon my word, I've
never seen such intelligent eyes in a child of three."
"Tell me, by the way," asked Yartsev: "which do you love most-- your
husband or your baby?"
Yulia shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't know," she said. "I never was so very fond of my husband, and
Olga is in reality my first love. You know that I did not marry Alexey
for love. In old days I was foolish and miserable, and thought that I
had ruined my life and his, and now I see that love is not necessary--
that it is all nonsense."
"But if it is not love, what feeling is it that binds you to your
husband? Why do you go on living with him?"
"I don't know. . . . I suppose it must be habit. I respect him, I miss
him when he's away for long, but that's--not love. He is a clever,
honest man, and that's enough to make me happy. He is very kind and
good-hearted. . . ."
"Alyosha's intelligent, Alyosha's good," said Kostya, raising his head
lazily; "but, my dear girl, to find out that he is intelligent, good,
and interesting, you have to eat a hundredweight of salt with him. . . .
And what's the use of his goodness and intelligence? He can fork out
money as much as you want, but when character is needed to resist
insolence or aggressiveness, he is faint-hearted and overcome with
nervousness. People like your amiable Alyosha are splendid people, but
they are no use at all for fighting. In fact, they are no use for
anything."
At last the train came in sight. Coils of perfectly pink smoke from the
funnels floated over the copse, and two windows in the last compartment
flashed so brilliantly in the sun, that it hurt their eyes to look at
it.
"Tea-time!" said Yulia Sergeyevna, getting up.
She had grown somewhat stouter of late, and her movements were already a
little matronly, a little indolent.
"It's bad to be without love though," said Yartsev, walking behind her.
"We talk and read of nothing else but love, but we do very little loving
ourselves, and that's really bad."
"All that's nonsense, Ivan Gavrilitch," said Yulia. "That's not what
gives happiness."
They had tea in the little garden, where mignonette, stocks, and tobacco
plants were in flower, and spikes of early gladiolus were just opening.
Yartsev and Kotchevoy could see from Yulia's face that she was passing
through a happy period of inward peace and serenity, that she wanted
nothing but what she had, and they, too, had a feeling of peace and
comfort in their hearts. Whatever was said sounded apt and clever; the
pines were lovely--the fragrance of them was exquisite as it had never
been before; and the cream was very nice; and Sasha was a good,
intelligent child.
After tea Yartsev sang songs, accompanying himself on the piano, while
Yulia and Kotchevoy sat listening in silence, though Yulia got up from
time to time, and went softly indoors, to take a look at the baby and at
Lida, who had been in bed for the last two days feverish and eating
nothing.
"My friend, my tender friend," sang Yartsev. "No, my friends, I'll be
hanged if I understand why you are all so against love!" he said,
flinging back his head. "If I weren't busy for fifteen hours of the
twenty-four, I should certainly fall in love."
Supper was served on the verandah; it was warm and still, but Yulia
wrapped herself in a shawl and complained of the damp. When it got dark,
she seemed not quite herself; she kept shivering and begging her
visitors to stay a little longer. She regaled them with wine, and after
supper ordered brandy to keep them from going. She didn't want to be
left alone with the children and the servants.
"We summer visitors are getting up a performance for the children," she
said. "We have got everything--a stage and actors; we are only at a loss
for a play. Two dozen plays of different sorts have been sent us, but
there isn't one that is suitable. Now, you are fond of the theatre, and
are so good at history," she said, addressing Yartsev. "Write an
historical play for us."
"Well, I might."
The men drank up all the brandy, and prepared to go.
It was past ten, and for summer-villa people that was late.
"How dark it is! One can't see a bit," said Yulia, as she went with them
to the gate. "I don't know how you'll find your way. But, isn't it
cold?"
She wrapped herself up more closely and walked back to the porch.
"I suppose my Alexey's playing cards somewhere," she called to them.
"Good-night!"
After the lighted rooms nothing could be seen. Yartsev and Kostya groped
their way like blind men to the railway embankment and crossed it.
"One can't see a thing," said Kostya in his bass voice, standing still
and gazing at the sky. "And the stars, the stars, they are like new
three-penny-bits. Gavrilitch!"
"Ah?" Yartsev responded somewhere in the darkness.
"I say, one can't see a thing. Where are you?"
Yartsev went up to him whistling, and took his arm.
"Hi, there, you summer visitors!" Kostya shouted at the top of his
voice. "We've caught a socialist."
When he was exhilarated he was always very rowdy, shouting, wrangling
with policemen and cabdrivers, singing, and laughing violently.
"Nature be damned," he shouted.
"Come, come," said Yartsev, trying to pacify him. "You mustn't. Please
don't."
Soon the friends grew accustomed to the darkness, and were able to
distinguish the outlines of the tall pines and telegraph posts. From
time to time the sound of whistles reached them from the station and the
telegraph wires hummed plaintively. From the copse itself there came no
sound, and there was a feeling of pride, strength, and mystery in its
silence, and on the right it seemed that the tops of the pines were
almost touching the sky. The friends found their path and walked along
it. There it was quite dark, and it was only from the long strip of sky
dotted with stars, and from the firmly trodden earth under their feet,
that they could tell they were walking along a path. They walked along
side by side in silence, and it seemed to both of them that people were
coming to meet them. Their tipsy exhilaration passed off. The fancy came
into Yartsev's mind that perhaps that copse was haunted by the spirits
of the Muscovite Tsars, boyars, and patriarchs, and he was on the point
of telling Kostya about it, but he checked himself.
When they reached the town gate there was a faint light of dawn in the
sky. Still in silence, Yartsev and Kotchevoy walked along the wooden
pavement, by the cheap summer cottages, eating-houses, timber-stacks.
Under the arch of interlacing branches, the damp air was fragrant of
lime-trees, and then a broad, long street opened before them, and on it
not a soul, not a light. . . . When they reached the Red Pond, it was
daylight.
"Moscow--it's a town that will have to suffer a great deal more," said
Yartsev, looking at the Alexyevsky Monastery.
"What put that into your head?"
"I don't know. I love Moscow."
Both Yartsev and Kostya had been born in Moscow, and adored the town,
and felt for some reason antagonistic to every other town. Both were
convinced that Moscow was a remarkable town, and Russia a remarkable
country. In the Crimea, in the Caucasus, and abroad, they felt dull,
uncomfortable, and ill at ease, and they thought their grey Moscow
weather very pleasant and healthy. And when the rain lashed at the
window-panes and it got dark early, and when the walls of the churches
and houses looked a drab, dismal colour, days when one doesn't know what
to put on when one is going out--such days excited them agreeably.
At last near the station they took a cab.
"It really would be nice to write an historical play," said Yartsev,
"but not about the Lyapunovs or the Godunovs, but of the times of
Yaroslav or of Monomach. . . . I hate all historical plays except the
monologue of Pimen. When you have to do with some historical authority
or even read a textbook of Russian history, you feel that every one in
Russia is exceptionally talented, gifted, and interesting; but when I
see an historical play at the theatre, Russian life begins to seem
stupid, morbid, and not original."
Near Dmitrovka the friends separated, and Yartsev went on to his lodging
in Nikitsky Street. He sat half dozing, swaying from side to side, and
pondering on the play. He suddenly imagined a terrible din, a clanging
noise, and shouts in some unknown language, that might have been
Kalmuck, and a village wrapped in flames, and forests near covered with
hoarfrost and soft pink in the glow of the fire, visible for miles
around, and so clearly that every little fir-tree could be
distinguished, and savage men darting about the village on horseback and
on foot, and as red as the glow in the sky.
"The Polovtsy," thought Yartsev.
One of them, a terrible old man with a bloodstained face all scorched
from the fire, binds to his saddle a young girl with a white Russian
face, and the girl looks sorrowful, understanding. Yartsev flung back
his head and woke up.
"My friend, my tender friend . . ." he hummed.
As he paid the cabman and went up his stairs, he could not shake off his
dreaminess; he saw the flames catching the village, and the forest
beginning to crackle and smoke. A huge, wild bear frantic with terror
rushed through the village. . . . And the girl tied to the saddle was
still looking.
When at last he went into his room it was broad daylight. Two candles
were burning by some open music on the piano. On the sofa lay Polina
Razsudin wearing a black dress and a sash, with a newspaper in her hand,
fast asleep. She must have been playing late, waiting for Yartsev to
come home, and, tired of waiting, fell asleep.
"Hullo, she's worn out," he thought.
Carefully taking the newspaper out of her hands, he covered her with a
rug. He put out the candles and went into his bedroom. As he got into
bed, he still thought of his historical play, and the tune of "My
friend, my tender friend" was still ringing in his head. . . .
Two days later Laptev looked in upon him for a moment to tell him that
Lida was ill with diphtheria, and that Yulia Sergeyevna and her baby had
caught it from her, and five days later came the news that Lida and
Yulia were recovering, but the baby was dead, and that the Laptevs had
left their villa at Sokolniki and had hastened back to Moscow.
XIV
It had become distasteful to Laptev to be long at home. His wife was
constantly away in the lodge declaring that she had to look after the
little girls, but he knew that she did not go to the lodge to give them
lessons but to cry in Kostya's room. The ninth day came, then the
twentieth, and then the fortieth, and still he had to go to the cemetery
to listen to the requiem, and then to wear himself out for a whole day
and night thinking of nothing but that unhappy baby, and trying to
comfort his wife with all sorts of commonplace expressions. He went
rarely to the warehouse now, and spent most of his time in charitable
work, seizing upon every pretext requiring his attention, and he was
glad when he had for some trivial reason to be out for the whole day. He
had been intending of late to go abroad, to study night-refuges, and
that idea attracted him now.
It was an autumn day. Yulia had just gone to the lodge to cry, while
Laptev lay on a sofa in the study thinking where he could go. Just at
that moment Pyotr announced Polina Razsudin. Laptev was delighted; he
leapt up and went to meet the unexpected visitor, who had been his
closest friend, though he had almost begun to forget her. She had not
changed in the least since that evening when he had seen her for the
last time, and was just the same as ever.
"Polina," he said, holding out both hands to her. "What ages! If you
only knew how glad I am to see you! Do come in!"
Polina greeted him, jerked him by the hand, and without taking off her
coat and hat, went into the study and sat down.
"I've come to you for one minute," she said. "I haven't time to talk of
any nonsense. Sit down and listen. Whether you are glad to see me or not
is absolutely nothing to me, for I don't care a straw for the gracious
attentions of you lords of creation. I've only come to you because I've
been to five other places already to-day, and everywhere I was met with
a refusal, and it's a matter that can't be put off. Listen," she went
on, looking into his face. "Five students of my acquaintance, stupid,
unintelligent people, but certainly poor, have neglected to pay their
fees, and are being excluded from the university. Your wealth makes it
your duty to go straight to the university and pay for them."
"With pleasure, Polina."
"Here are their names," she said, giving him a list. "Go this minute;
you'll have plenty of time to enjoy your domestic happiness afterwards."
At that moment a rustle was heard through the door that led into the
drawing-room; probably the dog was scratching itself. Polina turned
crimson and jumped up.
"Your Dulcinea's eavesdropping," she said. "That's horrid!"
Laptev was offended at this insult to Yulia.
"She's not here; she's in the lodge," he said. "And don't speak of her
like that. Our child is dead, and she is in great distress."
"You can console her," Polina scoffed, sitting down again; "she'll have
another dozen. You don't need much sense to bring children into the
world."
Laptev remembered that he had heard this, or something very like it,
many times in old days, and it brought back a whiff of the romance of
the past, of solitary freedom, of his bachelor life, when he was young
and thought he could do anything he chose, when he had neither love for
his wife nor memory of his baby.
"Let us go together," he said, stretching.
When they reached the university Polina waited at the gate, while Laptev
went into the office; he came back soon afterwards and handed Polina
five receipts.
"Where are you going now?" he asked.
"To Yartsev's."
"I'll come with you."
"But you'll prevent him from writing."
"No, I assure you I won't," he said, and looked at her imploringly.
She had on a black hat trimmed with crape, as though she were in
mourning, and a short, shabby coat, the pockets of which stuck out. Her
nose looked longer than it used to be, and her face looked bloodless in
spite of the cold. Laptev liked walking with her, doing what she told
him, and listening to her grumbling. He walked along thinking about her,
what inward strength there must be in this woman, since, though she was
so ugly, so angular, so restless, though she did not know how to dress,
and always had untidy hair, and was always somehow out of harmony, she
was yet so fascinating.
They went into Yartsev's flat by the back way through the kitchen, where
they were met by the cook, a clean little old woman with grey curls; she
was overcome with embarrassment, and with a honeyed smile which made her
little face look like a pie, said:
"Please walk in."
Yartsev was not at home. Polina sat down to the piano, and beginning
upon a tedious, difficult exercise, told Laptev not to hinder her. And
without distracting her attention by conversation, he sat on one side
and began turning over the pages of a "The Messenger of Europe." After
practising for two hours--it was the task she set herself every day--she
ate something in the kitchen and went out to her lessons. Laptev read
the continuation of a story, then sat for a long time without reading
and without being bored, glad to think that he was too late for dinner
at home.
"Ha, ha, ha!" came Yartsev's laugh, and he walked in with ruddy cheeks,
looking strong and healthy, wearing a new coat with bright buttons. "Ha,
ha, ha!"
The friends dined together. Then Laptev lay on the sofa while Yartsev
sat near and lighted a cigar. It got dark.
"I must be getting old," said Laptev. "Ever since my sister Nina died,
I've taken to constantly thinking of death."
They began talking of death, of the immortality of the soul, of how nice
it would be to rise again and fly off somewhere to Mars, to be always
idle and happy, and, above all, to think in a new special way, not as on
earth.
"One doesn't want to die," said Yartsev softly. "No sort of philosophy
can reconcile me to death, and I look on it simply as annihilation. One
wants to live."
"You love life, Gavrilitch?"
"Yes, I love it."
"Do you know, I can never understand myself about that. I'm always in a
gloomy mood or else indifferent. I'm timid, without self-confidence; I
have a cowardly conscience; I never can adapt myself to life, or become
its master. Some people talk nonsense or cheat, and even so enjoy life,
while I consciously do good, and feel nothing but uneasiness or complete
indifference. I explain all that, Gavrilitch, by my being a slave, the
grandson of a serf. Before we plebeians fight our way into the true
path, many of our sort will perish on the way."
"That's all quite right, my dear fellow," said Yartsev, and he sighed.
"That only proves once again how rich and varied Russian life is. Ah,
how rich it is! Do you know, I feel more convinced every day that we are
on the eve of the greatest triumph, and I should like to live to take
part in it. Whether you like to believe it or not, to my thinking a
remarkable generation is growing up. It gives me great enjoyment to
teach the children, especially the girls. They are wonderful children!"
Yartsev went to the piano and struck a chord.
"I'm a chemist, I think in chemical terms, and I shall die a chemist,"
he went on. "But I am greedy, and I am afraid of dying unsatisfied; and
chemistry is not enough for me, and I seize upon Russian history,
history of art, the science of teaching music. . . . Your wife asked me
in the summer to write an historical play, and now I'm longing to write
and write. I feel as though I could sit for three days and three nights
without moving, writing all the time. I am worn out with ideas--my
brain's crowded with them, and I feel as though there were a pulse
throbbing in my head. I don't in the least want to become anything
special, to create something great. I simply want to live, to dream, to
hope, to be in the midst of everything . . . . Life is short, my dear
fellow, and one must make the most of everything."
After this friendly talk, which was not over till midnight, Laptev took
to coming to see Yartsev almost every day. He felt drawn to him. As a
rule he came towards evening, lay down on the sofa, and waited patiently
for Yartsev to come in, without feeling in the least bored. When Yartsev
came back from his work, he had dinner, and sat down to work; but Laptev
would ask him a question, a conversation would spring up, and there was
no more thought of work and at midnight the friends parted very well
pleased with one another.
But this did not last long. Arriving one day at Yartsev's, Laptev found
no one there but Polina, who was sitting at the piano practising her
exercises. She looked at him with a cold, almost hostile expression, and
asked without shaking hands:
"Tell me, please: how much longer is this going on?"
"This? What?" asked Laptev, not understanding.
"You come here every day and hinder Yartsev from working. Yartsev is not
a tradesman; he is a scientific man, and every moment of his life is
precious. You ought to understand and to have some little delicacy!"
"If you think that I hinder him," said Laptev, mildly, disconcerted, "I
will give up my visits."
"Quite right, too. You had better go, or he may be home in a minute and
find you here."
The tone in which this was said, and the indifference in Polina's eyes,
completely disconcerted him. She had absolutely no sort of feeling for
him now, except the desire that he should go as soon as possible--and
what a contrast it was to her old love for him! He went out without
shaking hands with her, and he fancied she would call out to him, bring
him back, but he heard the scales again, and as he slowly went down the
stairs he realised that he had become a stranger to her now.
Three days later Yartsev came to spend the evening with him.
"I have news," he said, laughing. "Polina Nikolaevna has moved into my
rooms altogether." He was a little confused, and went on in a low voice:
"Well, we are not in love with each other, of course, but I suppose that
. . . that doesn't matter. I am glad I can give her a refuge and peace
and quiet, and make it possible for her not to work if she's ill. She
fancies that her coming to live with me will make things more orderly,
and that under her influence I shall become a great scientist. That's
what she fancies. And let her fancy it. In the South they have a saying:
'Fancy makes the fool a rich man.' Ha, ha, ha!"
Laptev said nothing. Yartsev walked up and down the study, looking at
the pictures he had seen so many times before, and said with a sigh:
"Yes, my dear fellow, I am three years older than you are, and it's too
late for me to think of real love, and in reality a woman like Polina
Nikolaevna is a godsend to me, and, of course, I shall get on capitally
with her till we're both old people; but, goodness knows why, one still
regrets something, one still longs for something, and I still feel as
though I am lying in the Vale of Daghestan and dreaming of a ball. In
short, man's never satisfied with what he has."
He went into the drawing-room and began singing as though nothing had
happened, and Laptev sat in his study with his eyes shut, and tried to
understand why Polina had gone to live with Yartsev. And then he felt
sad that there were no lasting, permanent attachments. And he felt vexed
that Polina Nikolaevna had gone to live with Yartsev, and vexed with
himself that his feeling for his wife was not what it had been.
XV
Laptev sat reading and swaying to and fro in a rocking-chair; Yulia was
in the study, and she, too, was reading. It seemed there was nothing to
talk about; they had both been silent all day. From time to time he
looked at her from over his book and thought: "Whether one marries from
passionate love, or without love at all, doesn't it come to the same
thing?" And the time when he used to be jealous, troubled, distressed,
seemed to him far away. He had succeeded in going abroad, and now he was
resting after the journey and looking forward to another visit in the
spring to England, which he had very much liked.
And Yulia Sergeyevna had grown used to her sorrow, and had left off
going to the lodge to cry. That winter she had given up driving out
shopping, had given up the theatres and concerts, and had stayed at
home. She never cared for big rooms, and always sat in her husband's
study or in her own room, where she had shrines of ikons that had come
to her on her marriage, and where there hung on the wall the landscape
that had pleased her so much at the exhibition. She spent hardly any
money on herself, and was almost as frugal now as she had been in her
father's house.
The winter passed cheerlessly. Card-playing was the rule everywhere in
Moscow, and if any other recreation was attempted, such as singing,
reading, drawing, the result was even more tedious. And since there were
few talented people in Moscow, and the same singers and reciters
performed at every entertainment, even the enjoyment of art gradually
palled and became for many people a tiresome and monotonous social duty.
Moreover, the Laptevs never had a day without something vexatious
happening. Old Laptev's eyesight was failing; he no longer went to the
warehouse, and the oculist told them that he would soon be blind. Fyodor
had for some reason given up going to the warehouse and spent his time
sitting at home writing something. Panaurov had got a post in another
town, and had been promoted an actual civil councillor, and was now
staying at the Dresden. He came to the Laptevs' almost every day to ask
for money. Kish had finished his studies at last, and while waiting for
Laptev to find him a job, used to spend whole days at a time with them,
telling them long, tedious stories. All this was irritating and
exhausting, and made daily life unpleasant.
Pyotr came into the study, and announced an unknown lady. On the card he
brought in was the name "Josephina Iosefovna Milan."
Yulia Sergeyevna got up languidly and went out limping slightly, as her
foot had gone to sleep. In the doorway appeared a pale, thin lady with
dark eyebrows, dressed altogether in black. She clasped her hands on her
bosom and said supplicatingly:
"M. Laptev, save my children!"
The jingle of her bracelets sounded familiar to him, and he knew the
face with patches of powder on it; he recognised her as the lady with
whom he had once so inappropriately dined before his marriage. It was
Panaurov's second wife.
"Save my children," she repeated, and her face suddenly quivered and
looked old and pitiful. "You alone can save us, and I have spent my last
penny coming to Moscow to see you! My children are starving!"
She made a motion as though she were going to fall on her knees. Laptev
was alarmed, and clutched her by the arm.
"Sit down, sit down . . ." he muttered, making her sit down. "I beg you
to be seated."
"We have no money to buy bread," she said. "Grigory Nikolaevitch is
going away to a new post, but he will not take the children and me with
him, and the money which you so generously send us he spends only on
himself. What are we to do? What? My poor, unhappy children!"
"Calm yourself, I beg. I will give orders that that money shall be made
payable to you."
She began sobbing, and then grew calmer, and he noticed that the tears
had made little pathways through the powder on her cheeks, and that she
was growing a moustache.
"You are infinitely generous, M. Laptev. But be our guardian angel, our
good fairy, persuade Grigory Nikolaevitch not to abandon me, but to take
me with him. You know I love him--I love him insanely; he's the comfort
of my life."
Laptev gave her a hundred roubles, and promised to talk to Panaurov, and
saw her out to the hall in trepidation the whole time, for fear she
should break into sobs or fall on her knees.
After her, Kish made his appearance. Then Kostya came in with his
photographic apparatus. Of late he had been attracted by photography and
took photographs of every one in the house several times a day. This new
pursuit caused him many disappointments, and he had actually grown
thinner.
Before evening tea Fyodor arrived. Sitting in a corner in the study, he
opened a book and stared for a long time at a page, obviously not
reading. Then he spent a long time drinking tea; his face turned red. In
his presence Laptev felt a load on his heart; even his silence was
irksome to him.
"Russia may be congratulated on the appearance of a new author," said
Fyodor. "Joking apart, though, brother, I have turned out a little
article--the firstfruits of my pen, so to say--and I've brought it to
show you. Read it, dear boy, and tell me your opinion --but sincerely."
He took a manuscript out of his pocket and gave it to his brother. The
article was called "The Russian Soul"; it was written tediously, in the
colourless style in which people with no talent, but full of secret
vanity, usually write. The leading idea of it was that the intellectual
man has the right to disbelieve in the supernatural, but it is his duty
to conceal his lack of faith, that he may not be a stumbling-block and
shake the faith of others. Without faith there is no idealism, and
idealism is destined to save Europe and guide humanity into the true
path.
"But you don't say what Europe has to be saved from," said Laptev.
"That's intelligible of itself."
"Nothing is intelligible," said Laptev, and he walked about the room in
agitation. "It's not intelligible to me why you wrote it. But that's
your business."
"I want to publish it in pamphlet form."
"That's your affair."
They were silent for a minute. Fyodor sighed and said:
"It's an immense regret to me, dear brother, that we think differently.
Oh, Alyosha, Alyosha, my darling brother! You and I are true Russians,
true believers, men of broad nature; all of these German and Jewish
crochets are not for us. You and I are not wretched upstarts, you know,
but representatives of a distinguished merchant family."
"What do you mean by a distinguished family?" said Laptev, restraining
his irritation. "A distinguished family! The landowners beat our
grandfather and every low little government clerk punched him in the
face. Our grandfather thrashed our father, and our father thrashed us.
What has your distinguished family done for us? What sort of nerves,
what sort of blood, have we inherited? For nearly three years you've
been arguing like an ignorant deacon, and talking all sorts of nonsense,
and now you've written--this slavish drivel here! While I, while I! Look
at me. . . . No elasticity, no boldness, no strength of will; I tremble
over every step I take as though I should be flogged for it. I am timid
before nonentities, idiots, brutes, who are immeasurably my inferiors
mentally and morally; I am afraid of porters, doorkeepers, policemen,
gendarmes. I am afraid of every one, because I was born of a mother who
was terrified, and because from a child I was beaten and frightened! . .
. You and I will do well to have no children. Oh, God, grant that this
distinguished merchant family may die with us!"
Yulia Sergeyevna came into the study and sat down at the table.
"Are you arguing about something here?" she asked. "Am I interrupting?"
"No, little sister," answered Fyodor. "Our discussion was of principles.
Here, you are abusing the family," he added, turning to his brother.
"That family has created a business worth a million, though. That stands
for something, anyway!"
"A great distinction--a business worth a million! A man with no
particular brains, without abilities, by chance becomes a trader, and
then when he has grown rich he goes on trading from day to day, with no
sort of system, with no aim, without having any particular greed for
money. He trades mechanically, and money comes to him of itself, without
his going to meet it. He sits all his life at his work, likes it only
because he can domineer over his clerks and get the better of his
customers. He's a churchwarden because he can domineer over the
choristers and keep them under his thumb; he's the patron of a school
because he likes to feel the teacher is his subordinate and enjoys
lording it over him. The merchant does not love trading, he loves
dominating, and your warehouse is not so much a commercial establishment
as a torture chamber! And for a business like yours, you want clerks who
have been deprived of individual character and personal life--and you
make them such by forcing them in childhood to lick the dust for a crust
of bread, and you've trained them from childhood to believe that you are
their benefactors. No fear of your taking a university man into your
warehouse!"
"University men are not suitable for our business."
"That's not true," cried Laptev. "It's a lie!"
"Excuse me, it seems to me you spit into the well from which you drink
yourself," said Fyodor, and he got up. "Our business is hateful to you,
yet you make use of the income from it."
"Aha! We've spoken our minds," said Laptev, and he laughed, looking
angrily at his brother. "Yes, if I didn't belong to your distinguished
family--if I had an ounce of will and courage, I should long ago have
flung away that income, and have gone to work for my living. But in your
warehouse you've destroyed all character in me from a child! I'm your
product."
Fyodor looked at the clock and began hurriedly saying good-bye. He
kissed Yulia's hand and went out, but instead of going into the hall,
walked into the drawing-room, then into the bedroom.
"I've forgotten how the rooms go," he said in extreme confusion. "It's a
strange house. Isn't it a strange house!"
He seemed utterly overcome as he put on his coat, and there was a look
of pain on his face. Laptev felt no more anger; he was frightened, and
at the same time felt sorry for Fyodor, and the warm, true love for his
brother, which seemed to have died down in his heart during those three
years, awoke, and he felt an intense desire to express that love.
"Come to dinner with us to-morrow, Fyodor," he said, and stroked him on
the shoulder. "Will you come?"
"Yes, yes; but give me some water."
Laptev ran himself to the dining-room to take the first thing he could
get from the sideboard. This was a tall beer-jug. He poured water into
it and brought it to his brother. Fyodor began drinking, but bit a piece
out of the jug; they heard a crunch, and then sobs. The water ran over
his fur coat and his jacket, and Laptev, who had never seen men cry,
stood in confusion and dismay, not knowing what to do. He looked on
helplessly while Yulia and the servant took off Fyodor's coat and helped
him back again into the room, and went with him, feeling guilty.
Yulia made Fyodor lie down on the sofa and knelt beside him.
"It's nothing," she said, trying to comfort him. "It's your nerves. . .
."
"I'm so miserable, my dear!" he said. "I am so unhappy, unhappy . . .
but all the time I've been hiding it, I've been hiding it!"
He put his arm round her neck and whispered in her ear:
"Every night I see my sister Nina. She comes and sits in the chair near
my bed. . . ."
When, an hour later, he put on his fur coat in the hall, he was smiling
again and ashamed to face the servant. Laptev went with him to
Pyatnitsky Street.
"Come and have dinner with us to-morrow," he said on the way, holding
him by the arm, "and at Easter we'll go abroad together. You absolutely
must have a change, or you'll be getting quite morbid."
When he got home Laptev found his wife in a state of great nervous
agitation. The scene with Fyodor had upset her, and she could not
recover her composure. She wasn't crying but kept tossing on the bed,
clutching with cold fingers at the quilt, at the pillows, at her
husband's hands. Her eyes looked big and frightened.
"Don't go away from me, don't go away," she said to her husband. "Tell
me, Alyosha, why have I left off saying my prayers? What has become of
my faith? Oh, why did you talk of religion before me? You've shaken my
faith, you and your friends. I never pray now."
He put compresses on her forehead, chafed her hands, gave her tea to
drink, while she huddled up to him in terror. . . .
Towards morning she was worn out and fell asleep, while Laptev sat
beside her and held her hand. So that he could get no sleep. The whole
day afterwards he felt shattered and dull, and wandered listlessly about
the rooms without a thought in his head.
XVI
The doctor said that Fyodor's mind was affected. Laptev did not know
what to do in his father's house, while the dark warehouse in which
neither his father nor Fyodor ever appeared now seemed to him like a
sepulchre. When his wife told him that he absolutely must go every day
to the warehouse and also to his father's, he either said nothing, or
began talking irritably of his childhood, saying that it was beyond his
power to forgive his father for his past, that the warehouse and the
house in Pyatnitsky Street were hateful to him, and so on.
One Sunday morning Yulia went herself to Pyatnitsky Street. She found
old Fyodor Stepanovitch in the same big drawing-room in which the
service had been held on her first arrival. Wearing slippers, and
without a cravat, he was sitting motionless in his arm-chair, blinking
with his sightless eyes.
"It's I--your daughter-in-law," she said, going up to him. "I've come to
see how you are."
He began breathing heavily with excitement.
Touched by his affliction and his loneliness, she kissed his hand; and
he passed his hand over her face and head, and having satisfied himself
that it was she, made the sign of the cross over her.
"Thank you, thank you," he said. "You know I've lost my eyes and can see
nothing. . . . I can dimly see the window and the fire, but people and
things I cannot see at all. Yes, I'm going blind, and Fyodor has fallen
ill, and without the master's eye things are in a bad way now. If there
is any irregularity there's no one to look into it; and folks soon get
spoiled. And why is it Fyodor has fallen ill? Did he catch cold? Here I
have never ailed in my life and never taken medicine. I never saw
anything of doctors."
And, as he always did, the old man began boasting. Meanwhile the
servants hurriedly laid the table and brought in lunch and bottles of
wine.
Ten bottles were put on the table; one of them was in the shape of the
Eiffel Tower. There was a whole dish of hot pies smelling of jam, rice,
and fish.
"I beg my dear guest to have lunch," said the old man.
She took him by the arm, led him to the table, and poured him out a
glass of vodka.
"I will come to you again to-morrow," she said, "and I'll bring your
grandchildren, Sasha and Lida. They will be sorry for you, and fondle
you."
"There's no need. Don't bring them. They are illegitimate."
"Why are they illegitimate? Why, their father and mother were married."
"Without my permission. I do not bless them, and I don't want to know
them. Let them be."
"You speak strangely, Fyodor Stepanovitch," said Yulia, with a sigh.
"It is written in the Gospel: children must fear and honour their
parents."
"Nothing of the sort. The Gospel tells us that we must forgive even our
enemies."
"One can't forgive in our business. If you were to forgive every one,
you would come to ruin in three years."
"But to forgive, to say a kind, friendly word to any one, even a sinner,
is something far above business, far above wealth."
Yulia longed to soften the old man, to awaken a feeling of compassion in
him, to move him to repentance; but he only listened condescendingly to
all she said, as a grown-up person listens to a child.
"Fyodor Stepanovitch," said Yulia resolutely, "you are an old man, and
God soon will call you to Himself. He won't ask you how you managed your
business, and whether you were successful in it, but whether you were
gracious to people; or whether you were harsh to those who were weaker
than you, such as your servants, your clerks."
"I was always the benefactor of those that served me; they ought to
remember me in their prayers forever," said the old man, with
conviction, but touched by Yulia's tone of sincerity, and anxious to
give her pleasure, he said: "Very well; bring my grandchildren to-
morrow. I will tell them to buy me some little presents for them."
The old man was slovenly in his dress, and there was cigar ash on his
breast and on his knees; apparently no one cleaned his boots, or brushed
his clothes. The rice in the pies was half cooked, the tablecloth smelt
of soap, the servants tramped noisily about the room. And the old man
and the whole house had a neglected look, and Yulia, who felt this, was
ashamed of herself and of her husband.
"I will be sure to come and see you to-morrow," she said.
She walked through the rooms, and gave orders for the old man's bedroom
to be set to rights, and the lamp to be lighted under the ikons in it.
Fyodor, sitting in his own room, was looking at an open book without
reading it. Yulia talked to him and told the servants to tidy his room,
too; then she went downstairs to the clerks. In the middle of the room
where the clerks used to dine, there was an unpainted wooden post to
support the ceiling and to prevent its coming down. The ceilings in the
basement were low, the walls covered with cheap paper, and there was a
smell of charcoal fumes and cooking. As it was a holiday, all the clerks
were at home, sitting on their bedsteads waiting for dinner. When Yulia
went in they jumped up, and answered her questions timidly, looking up
at her from under their brows like convicts.
"Good heavens! What a horrid room you have!" she said, throwing up her
hands. "Aren't you crowded here?"
"Crowded, but not aggrieved," said Makeitchev. "We are greatly indebted
to you, and will offer up our prayers for you to our Heavenly Father."
"The congruity of life with the conceit of the personality," said
Potchatkin.
And noticing that Yulia did not understand Potchatkin, Makeitchev
hastened to explain:
"We are humble people and must live according to our position."
She inspected the boys' quarters, and then the kitchen, made
acquaintance with the housekeeper, and was thoroughly dissatisfied.
When she got home she said to her husband:
"We ought to move into your father's house and settle there for good as
soon as possible. And you will go every day to the warehouse."
Then they both sat side by side in the study without speaking. His heart
was heavy, and he did not want to move into Pyatnitsky Street or to go
into the warehouse; but he guessed what his wife was thinking, and could
not oppose her. He stroked her cheek and said:
"I feel as though our life is already over, and that a grey half-life is
beginning for us. When I knew that my brother Fyodor was hopelessly ill,
I shed tears; we spent our childhood and youth together, when I loved
him with my whole soul. And now this catastrophe has come, and it seems,
too, as though, losing him, I am finally cut away from my past. And when
you said just now that we must move into the house in Pyatnitsky Street,
to that prison, it began to seem to me that there was no future for me
either."
He got up and walked to the window.
"However that may be, one has to give up all thoughts of happiness," he
said, looking out into the street. "There is none. I never have had any,
and I suppose it doesn't exist at all. I was happy once in my life,
though, when I sat at night under your parasol. Do you remember how you
left your parasol at Nina's?" he asked, turning to his wife. "I was in
love with you then, and I remember I spent all night sitting under your
parasol, and was perfectly blissful."
Near the book-case in the study stood a mahogany chest with bronze
fittings where Laptev kept various useless things, including the
parasol. He took it out and handed it to his wife.
"Here it is."
Yulia looked for a minute at the parasol, recognised it, and smiled
mournfully.
"I remember," she said. "When you proposed to me you held it in your
hand." And seeing that he was preparing to go out, she said: "Please
come back early if you can. I am dull without you."
And then she went into her own room, and gazed for a long time at the
parasol.
XVII
In spite of the complexity of the business and the immense turnover,
there were no bookkeepers in the warehouse, and it was impossible to
make anything out of the books kept by the cashier in the office. Every
day the warehouse was visited by agents, German and English, with whom
the clerks talked politics and religion. A man of noble birth, ruined by
drink, an ailing, pitiable creature, used to come to translate the
foreign correspondence in the office; the clerks used to call him a
midge, and put salt in his tea. And altogether the whole concern struck
Laptev as a very queer business.
He went to the warehouse every day and tried to establish a new order of
things; he forbade them to thrash the boys and to jeer at the buyers,
and was violently angry when the clerks gleefully despatched to the
provinces worthless shop-soiled goods as though they were new and
fashionable. Now he was the chief person in the warehouse, but still, as
before, he did not know how large his fortune was, whether his business
was doing well, how much the senior clerks were paid, and so on.
Potchatkin and Makeitchev looked upon him as young and inexperienced,
concealed a great deal from him, and whispered mysteriously every
evening with his blind old father.
It somehow happened at the beginning of June that Laptev went into the
Bubnovsky restaurant with Potchatkin to talk business with him over
lunch. Potchatkin had been with the Laptevs a long while, and had
entered their service at eight years old. He seemed to belong to them--
they trusted him fully; and when on leaving the warehouse he gathered up
all the takings from the till and thrust them into his pocket, it never
aroused the slightest suspicion. He was the head man in the business and
in the house, and also in the church, where he performed the duties of
churchwarden in place of his old master. He was nicknamed Malyuta
Skuratov on account of his cruel treatment of the boys and clerks under
him.
When they went into the restaurant he nodded to a waiter and said:
"Bring us, my lad, half a bodkin and twenty-four unsavouries."
After a brief pause the waiter brought on a tray half a bottle of vodka
and some plates of various kinds of savouries.
"Look here, my good fellow," said Potchatkin. "Give us a plateful of the
source of all slander and evil-speaking, with mashed potatoes."
The waiter did not understand; he was puzzled, and would have said
something, but Potchatkin looked at him sternly and said:
"Except."
The waiter thought intently, then went to consult with his colleagues,
and in the end guessing what was meant, brought a plateful of tongue.
When they had drunk a couple of glasses and had had lunch, Laptev asked:
"Tell me, Ivan Vassilitch, is it true that our business has been
dropping off for the last year?"
"Not a bit of it."
"Tell me frankly and honestly what income we have been making and are
making, and what our profits are. We can't go on in the dark. We had a
balancing of the accounts at the warehouse lately, but, excuse me, I
don't believe in it; you think fit to conceal something from me and only
tell the truth to my father. You have been used to being diplomatic from
your childhood, and now you can't get on without it. And what's the use
of it? So I beg you to be open. What is our position?"
"It all depends upon the fluctuation of credit," Potchatkin answered
after a moment's pause.
"What do you understand by the fluctuation of credit?"
Potchatkin began explaining, but Laptev could make nothing of it, and
sent for Makeitchev. The latter promptly made his appearance, had some
lunch after saying grace, and in his sedate, mellow baritone began
saying first of all that the clerks were in duty bound to pray night and
day for their benefactors.
"By all means, only allow me not to consider myself your benefactor,"
said Laptev.
"Every man ought to remember what he is, and to be conscious of his
station. By the grace of God you are a father and benefactor to us, and
we are your slaves."
"I am sick of all that!" said Laptev, getting angry. "Please be a
benefactor to me now. Please explain the position of our business. Give
up looking upon me as a boy, or to-morrow I shall close the business. My
father is blind, my brother is in the asylum, my nieces are only
children. I hate the business; I should be glad to go away, but there's
no one to take my place, as you know. For goodness' sake, drop your
diplomacy!"
They went to the warehouse to go into the accounts; then they went on
with them at home in the evening, the old father himself assisting.
Initiating his son into his commercial secrets, the old man spoke as
though he were engaged, not in trade, but in sorcery. It appeared that
the profits of the business were increasing approximately ten per cent.
per annum, and that the Laptevs' fortune, reckoning only money and paper
securities, amounted to six million roubles.
When at one o'clock at night, after balancing the accounts, Laptev went
out into the open air, he was still under the spell of those figures. It
was a still, sultry, moonlight night. The white walls of the houses
beyond the river, the heavy barred gates, the stillness and the black
shadows, combined to give the impression of a fortress, and nothing was
wanting to complete the picture but a sentinel with a gun. Laptev went
into the garden and sat down on a seat near the fence, which divided
them from the neighbour's yard, where there was a garden, too. The bird-
cherry was in bloom. Laptev remembered that the tree had been just as
gnarled and just as big when he was a child, and had not changed at all
since then. Every corner of the garden and of the yard recalled the far-
away past. And in his childhood, too, just as now, the whole yard bathed
in moonlight could be seen through the sparse trees, the shadows had
been mysterious and forbidding, a black dog had lain in the middle of
the yard, and the clerks' windows had stood wide open. And all these
were cheerless memories.
The other side of the fence, in the neighbour's yard, there was a sound
of light steps.
"My sweet, my precious . . ." said a man's voice so near the fence that
Laptev could hear the man's breathing.
Now they were kissing. Laptev was convinced that the millions and the
business which was so distasteful to him were ruining his life, and
would make him a complete slave. He imagined how, little by little, he
would grow accustomed to his position; would, little by little, enter
into the part of the head of a great firm; would begin to grow dull and
old, die in the end, as the average man usually does die, in a decrepit,
soured old age, making every one about him miserable and depressed. But
what hindered him from giving up those millions and that business, and
leaving that yard and garden which had been hateful to him from his
childhood?
The whispering and kisses the other side of the fence disturbed him. He
moved into the middle of the yard, and, unbuttoning his shirt over his
chest, looked at the moon, and it seemed to him that he would order the
gate to be unlocked, and would go out and never come back again. His
heart ached sweetly with the foretaste of freedom; he laughed joyously,
and pictured how exquisite, poetical, and even holy, life might be. . .
.
But he still stood and did not go away, and kept asking himself: "What
keeps me here?" And he felt angry with himself and with the black dog,
which still lay stretched on the stone yard, instead of running off to
the open country, to the woods, where it would have been free and happy.
It was clear that that dog and he were prevented from leaving the yard
by the same thing; the habit of bondage, of servitude. . . .
At midday next morning he went to see his wife, and that he might not be
dull, asked Yartsev to go with him. Yulia Sergeyevna was staying in a
summer villa at Butovo, and he had not been to see her for five days.
When they reached the station the friends got into a carriage, and all
the way there Yartsev was singing and in raptures over the exquisite
weather. The villa was in a great park not far from the station. At the
beginning of an avenue, about twenty paces from the gates, Yulia
Sergeyevna was sitting under a broad, spreading poplar, waiting for her
guests. She had on a light, elegant dress of a pale cream colour trimmed
with lace, and in her hand she had the old familiar parasol. Yartsev
greeted her and went on to the villa from which came the sound of
Sasha's and Lida's voices, while Laptev sat down beside her to talk of
business matters.
"Why is it you haven't been for so long?" she said, keeping his hand in
hers. "I have been sitting here for days watching for you to come. I
miss you so when you are away!"
She stood up and passed her hand over his hair, and scanned his face,
his shoulders, his hat, with interest.
"You know I love you," she said, and flushed crimson. "You are precious
to me. Here you've come. I see you, and I'm so happy I can't tell you.
Well, let us talk. Tell me something."
She had told him she loved him, and he could only feel as though he had
been married to her for ten years, and that he was hungry for his lunch.
She had put her arm round his neck, tickling his cheek with the silk of
her dress; he cautiously removed her hand, stood up, and without
uttering a single word, walked to the villa. The little girls ran to
meet him.
"How they have grown!" he thought. "And what changes in these three
years. . . . But one may have to live another thirteen years, another
thirty years. . . . What is there in store for us in the future? If we
live, we shall see."
He embraced Sasha and Lida, who hung upon his neck, and said:
"Grandpapa sends his love. . . . Uncle Fyodor is dying. Uncle Kostya has
sent a letter from America and sends you his love in it. He's bored at
the exhibition and will soon be back. And Uncle Alyosha is hungry."
Then he sat on the verandah and saw his wife walking slowly along the
avenue towards the house. She was deep in thought; there was a mournful,
charming expression in her face, and her eyes were bright with tears.
She was not now the slender, fragile, pale-faced girl she used to be;
she was a mature, beautiful, vigorous woman. And Laptev saw the
enthusiasm with which Yartsev looked at her when he met her, and the way
her new, lovely expression was reflected in his face, which looked
mournful and ecstatic too. One would have thought that he was seeing her
for the first time in his life. And while they were at lunch on the
verandah, Yartsev smiled with a sort of joyous shyness, and kept gazing
atYulia and at her beautiful neck. Laptev could not help watching them
while he thought that he had perhaps another thirteen, another thirty
years of life before him. . . . And what would he have to live through
in that time? What is in store for us in the future?
And he thought:
"Let us live, and we shall see."
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov" ***
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