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The Witch, and Other Stories

by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov · English · Gutenberg #1944 · 423,117 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Witch, and Other Stories

Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov


        
Release date: February 26, 2006 [eBook #1944]
                Most recently updated: September 10, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1944

Credits: Produced by James Rusk and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WITCH, AND OTHER STORIES ***




Produced by James Rusk and David Widger





THE WITCH AND OTHER STORIES

By Anton Chekhov



CONTENTS:

     THE WITCH
     PEASANT WIVES
     THE POST
     THE NEW VILLA
     DREAMS
     THE PIPE
     AGAFYA
     AT CHRISTMAS TIME
     GUSEV
     THE STUDENT
     IN THE RAVINE
     THE HUNTSMAN
     HAPPINESS
     A MALEFACTOR
     PEASANTS





THE WITCH

IT was approaching nightfall. The sexton, Savely Gykin, was lying in his
huge bed in the hut adjoining the church. He was not asleep, though it
was his habit to go to sleep at the same time as the hens. His coarse
red hair peeped from under one end of the greasy patchwork quilt, made
up of coloured rags, while his big unwashed feet stuck out from the
other. He was listening. His hut adjoined the wall that encircled the
church and the solitary window in it looked out upon the open country.
And out there a regular battle was going on. It was hard to say who
was being wiped off the face of the earth, and for the sake of whose
destruction nature was being churned up into such a ferment; but,
judging from the unceasing malignant roar, someone was getting it very
hot. A victorious force was in full chase over the fields, storming in
the forest and on the church roof, battering spitefully with its fists
upon the windows, raging and tearing, while something vanquished was
howling and wailing.... A plaintive lament sobbed at the window, on the
roof, or in the stove. It sounded not like a call for help, but like a
cry of misery, a consciousness that it was too late, that there was no
salvation. The snowdrifts were covered with a thin coating of ice; tears
quivered on them and on the trees; a dark slush of mud and melting snow
flowed along the roads and paths. In short, it was thawing, but through
the dark night the heavens failed to see it, and flung flakes of fresh
snow upon the melting earth at a terrific rate. And the wind staggered
like a drunkard. It would not let the snow settle on the ground, and
whirled it round in the darkness at random.

Savely listened to all this din and frowned. The fact was that he knew,
or at any rate suspected, what all this racket outside the window was
tending to and whose handiwork it was.

“I know!” he muttered, shaking his finger menacingly under the
bedclothes; “I know all about it.”

On a stool by the window sat the sexton’s wife, Raissa Nilovna. A tin
lamp standing on another stool, as though timid and distrustful of its
powers, shed a dim and flickering light on her broad shoulders, on the
handsome, tempting-looking contours of her person, and on her thick
plait, which reached to the floor. She was making sacks out of coarse
hempen stuff. Her hands moved nimbly, while her whole body, her eyes,
her eyebrows, her full lips, her white neck were as still as though they
were asleep, absorbed in the monotonous, mechanical toil. Only from time
to time she raised her head to rest her weary neck, glanced for a moment
towards the window, beyond which the snowstorm was raging, and bent
again over her sacking. No desire, no joy, no grief, nothing was
expressed by her handsome face with its turned-up nose and its dimples.
So a beautiful fountain expresses nothing when it is not playing.

But at last she had finished a sack. She flung it aside, and, stretching
luxuriously, rested her motionless, lack-lustre eyes on the window. The
panes were swimming with drops like tears, and white with short-lived
snowflakes which fell on the window, glanced at Raissa, and melted....

“Come to bed!” growled the sexton. Raissa remained mute. But suddenly
her eyelashes flickered and there was a gleam of attention in her eye.
Savely, all the time watching her expression from under the quilt, put
out his head and asked:

“What is it?”

“Nothing.... I fancy someone’s coming,” she answered quietly.

The sexton flung the quilt off with his arms and legs, knelt up in bed,
and looked blankly at his wife. The timid light of the lamp illuminated
his hirsute, pock-marked countenance and glided over his rough matted
hair.

“Do you hear?” asked his wife.

Through the monotonous roar of the storm he caught a scarcely audible
thin and jingling monotone like the shrill note of a gnat when it wants
to settle on one’s cheek and is angry at being prevented.

“It’s the post,” muttered Savely, squatting on his heels.

Two miles from the church ran the posting road. In windy weather, when
the wind was blowing from the road to the church, the inmates of the hut
caught the sound of bells.

“Lord! fancy people wanting to drive about in such weather,” sighed
Raissa.

“It’s government work. You’ve to go whether you like or not.”

The murmur hung in the air and died away.

“It has driven by,” said Savely, getting into bed.

But before he had time to cover himself up with the bedclothes he heard
a distinct sound of the bell. The sexton looked anxiously at his wife,
leapt out of bed and walked, waddling, to and fro by the stove. The
bell went on ringing for a little, then died away again as though it had
ceased.

“I don’t hear it,” said the sexton, stopping and looking at his wife
with his eyes screwed up.

But at that moment the wind rapped on the window and with it floated
a shrill jingling note. Savely turned pale, cleared his throat, and
flopped about the floor with his bare feet again.

“The postman is lost in the storm,” he wheezed out glancing malignantly
at his wife. “Do you hear? The postman has lost his way!... I... I know!
Do you suppose I... don’t understand?” he muttered. “I know all about
it, curse you!”

“What do you know?” Raissa asked quietly, keeping her eyes fixed on the
window.

“I know that it’s all your doing, you she-devil! Your doing, damn you!
This snowstorm and the post going wrong, you’ve done it all--you!”

“You’re mad, you silly,” his wife answered calmly.

“I’ve been watching you for a long time past and I’ve seen it. From the
first day I married you I noticed that you’d bitch’s blood in you!”

“Tfoo!” said Raissa, surprised, shrugging her shoulders and crossing
herself. “Cross yourself, you fool!”

“A witch is a witch,” Savely pronounced in a hollow, tearful voice,
hurriedly blowing his nose on the hem of his shirt; “though you are my
wife, though you are of a clerical family, I’d say what you are even at
confession.... Why, God have mercy upon us! Last year on the Eve of the
Prophet Daniel and the Three Young Men there was a snowstorm, and
what happened then? The mechanic came in to warm himself. Then on St.
Alexey’s Day the ice broke on the river and the district policeman
turned up, and he was chatting with you all night... the damned brute!
And when he came out in the morning and I looked at him, he had rings
under his eyes and his cheeks were hollow! Eh? During the August fast
there were two storms and each time the huntsman turned up. I saw it
all, damn him! Oh, she is redder than a crab now, aha!”

“You didn’t see anything.”

“Didn’t I! And this winter before Christmas on the Day of the Ten
Martyrs of Crete, when the storm lasted for a whole day and night--do
you remember?--the marshal’s clerk was lost, and turned up here, the
hound.... Tfoo! To be tempted by the clerk! It was worth upsetting God’s
weather for him! A drivelling scribbler, not a foot from the ground,
pimples all over his mug and his neck awry! If he were good-looking,
anyway--but he, tfoo! he is as ugly as Satan!”

The sexton took breath, wiped his lips and listened. The bell was not to
be heard, but the wind banged on the roof, and again there came a tinkle
in the darkness.

“And it’s the same thing now!” Savely went on. “It’s not for nothing the
postman is lost! Blast my eyes if the postman isn’t looking for you! Oh,
the devil is a good hand at his work; he is a fine one to help! He will
turn him round and round and bring him here. I know, I see! You can’t
conceal it, you devil’s bauble, you heathen wanton! As soon as the storm
began I knew what you were up to.”

“Here’s a fool!” smiled his wife. “Why, do you suppose, you thick-head,
that I make the storm?”

“H’m!... Grin away! Whether it’s your doing or not, I only know that
when your blood’s on fire there’s sure to be bad weather, and when
there’s bad weather there’s bound to be some crazy fellow turning up
here. It happens so every time! So it must be you!”

To be more impressive the sexton put his finger to his forehead, closed
his left eye, and said in a singsong voice:

“Oh, the madness! oh, the unclean Judas! If you really are a human being
and not a witch, you ought to think what if he is not the mechanic,
or the clerk, or the huntsman, but the devil in their form! Ah! You’d
better think of that!”

“Why, you are stupid, Savely,” said his wife, looking at him
compassionately. “When father was alive and living here, all sorts of
people used to come to him to be cured of the ague: from the village,
and the hamlets, and the Armenian settlement. They came almost every
day, and no one called them devils. But if anyone once a year comes in
bad weather to warm himself, you wonder at it, you silly, and take all
sorts of notions into your head at once.”

His wife’s logic touched Savely. He stood with his bare feet wide apart,
bent his head, and pondered. He was not firmly convinced yet of the
truth of his suspicions, and his wife’s genuine and unconcerned tone
quite disconcerted him. Yet after a moment’s thought he wagged his head
and said:

“It’s not as though they were old men or bandy-legged cripples; it’s
always young men who want to come for the night.... Why is that? And if
they only wanted to warm themselves----But they are up to mischief. No,
woman; there’s no creature in this world as cunning as your female
sort! Of real brains you’ve not an ounce, less than a starling, but for
devilish slyness--oo-oo-oo! The Queen of Heaven protect us! There is the
postman’s bell! When the storm was only beginning I knew all that was in
your mind. That’s your witchery, you spider!”

“Why do you keep on at me, you heathen?” His wife lost her patience at
last. “Why do you keep sticking to it like pitch?”

“I stick to it because if anything--God forbid--happens to-night...
do you hear?... if anything happens to-night, I’ll go straight off
to-morrow morning to Father Nikodim and tell him all about it. ‘Father
Nikodim,’ I shall say, ‘graciously excuse me, but she is a witch.’ ‘Why
so?’ ‘H’m! do you want to know why?’ ‘Certainly....’ And I shall tell
him. And woe to you, woman! Not only at the dread Seat of Judgment, but
in your earthly life you’ll be punished, too! It’s not for nothing there
are prayers in the breviary against your kind!”

Suddenly there was a knock at the window, so loud and unusual that
Savely turned pale and almost dropped backwards with fright. His wife
jumped up, and she, too, turned pale.

“For God’s sake, let us come in and get warm!” they heard in a trembling
deep bass. “Who lives here? For mercy’s sake! We’ve lost our way.”

“Who are you?” asked Raissa, afraid to look at the window.

“The post,” answered a second voice.

“You’ve succeeded with your devil’s tricks,” said Savely with a wave of
his hand. “No mistake; I am right! Well, you’d better look out!”

The sexton jumped on to the bed in two skips, stretched himself on the
feather mattress, and sniffing angrily, turned with his face to the
wall. Soon he felt a draught of cold air on his back. The door creaked
and the tall figure of a man, plastered over with snow from head to
foot, appeared in the doorway. Behind him could be seen a second figure
as white.

“Am I to bring in the bags?” asked the second in a hoarse bass voice.

“You can’t leave them there.” Saying this, the first figure began
untying his hood, but gave it up, and pulling it off impatiently with
his cap, angrily flung it near the stove. Then taking off his greatcoat,
he threw that down beside it, and, without saying good-evening, began
pacing up and down the hut.

He was a fair-haired, young postman wearing a shabby uniform and black
rusty-looking high boots. After warming himself by walking to and fro,
he sat down at the table, stretched out his muddy feet towards the sacks
and leaned his chin on his fist. His pale face, reddened in places by
the cold, still bore vivid traces of the pain and terror he had just
been through. Though distorted by anger and bearing traces of recent
suffering, physical and moral, it was handsome in spite of the melting
snow on the eyebrows, moustaches, and short beard.

“It’s a dog’s life!” muttered the postman, looking round the walls
and seeming hardly able to believe that he was in the warmth. “We were
nearly lost! If it had not been for your light, I don’t know what would
have happened. Goodness only knows when it will all be over! There’s
no end to this dog’s life! Where have we come?” he asked, dropping his
voice and raising his eyes to the sexton’s wife.

“To the Gulyaevsky Hill on General Kalinovsky’s estate,” she answered,
startled and blushing.

“Do you hear, Stepan?” The postman turned to the driver, who was wedged
in the doorway with a huge mail-bag on his shoulders. “We’ve got to
Gulyaevsky Hill.”

“Yes... we’re a long way out.” Jerking out these words like a hoarse
sigh, the driver went out and soon after returned with another bag, then
went out once more and this time brought the postman’s sword on a
big belt, of the pattern of that long flat blade with which Judith is
portrayed by the bedside of Holofernes in cheap woodcuts. Laying the
bags along the wall, he went out into the outer room, sat down there and
lighted his pipe.

“Perhaps you’d like some tea after your journey?” Raissa inquired.

“How can we sit drinking tea?” said the postman, frowning. “We must make
haste and get warm, and then set off, or we shall be late for the mail
train. We’ll stay ten minutes and then get on our way. Only be so good
as to show us the way.”

“What an infliction it is, this weather!” sighed Raissa.

“H’m, yes.... Who may you be?”

“We? We live here, by the church.... We belong to the clergy.... There
lies my husband. Savely, get up and say good-evening! This used to be
a separate parish till eighteen months ago. Of course, when the gentry
lived here there were more people, and it was worth while to have the
services. But now the gentry have gone, and I need not tell you there’s
nothing for the clergy to live on. The nearest village is Markovka, and
that’s over three miles away. Savely is on the retired list now, and has
got the watchman’s job; he has to look after the church....”

And the postman was immediately informed that if Savely were to go to
the General’s lady and ask her for a letter to the bishop, he would be
given a good berth. “But he doesn’t go to the General’s lady because he
is lazy and afraid of people. We belong to the clergy all the same...”
 added Raissa.

“What do you live on?” asked the postman.

“There’s a kitchen garden and a meadow belonging to the church. Only
we don’t get much from that,” sighed Raissa. “The old skinflint, Father
Nikodim, from the next village celebrates here on St. Nicolas’ Day in
the winter and on St. Nicolas’ Day in the summer, and for that he takes
almost all the crops for himself. There’s no one to stick up for us!”

“You are lying,” Savely growled hoarsely. “Father Nikodim is a saintly
soul, a luminary of the Church; and if he does take it, it’s the
regulation!”

“You’ve a cross one!” said the postman, with a grin. “Have you been
married long?”

“It was three years ago the last Sunday before Lent. My father was
sexton here in the old days, and when the time came for him to die,
he went to the Consistory and asked them to send some unmarried man to
marry me that I might keep the place. So I married him.”

“Aha, so you killed two birds with one stone!” said the postman, looking
at Savely’s back. “Got wife and job together.”

Savely wriggled his leg impatiently and moved closer to the wall.
The postman moved away from the table, stretched, and sat down on the
mail-bag. After a moment’s thought he squeezed the bags with his hands,
shifted his sword to the other side, and lay down with one foot touching
the floor.

“It’s a dog’s life,” he muttered, putting his hands behind his head and
closing his eyes. “I wouldn’t wish a wild Tatar such a life.”

Soon everything was still. Nothing was audible except the sniffing
of Savely and the slow, even breathing of the sleeping postman, who
uttered a deep prolonged “h-h-h” at every breath. From time to time
there was a sound like a creaking wheel in his throat, and his twitching
foot rustled against the bag.

Savely fidgeted under the quilt and looked round slowly. His wife was
sitting on the stool, and with her hands pressed against her cheeks was
gazing at the postman’s face. Her face was immovable, like the face of
some one frightened and astonished.

“Well, what are you gaping at?” Savely whispered angrily.

“What is it to you? Lie down!” answered his wife without taking her eyes
off the flaxen head.

Savely angrily puffed all the air out of his chest and turned abruptly
to the wall. Three minutes later he turned over restlessly again, knelt
up on the bed, and with his hands on the pillow looked askance at his
wife. She was still sitting motionless, staring at the visitor. Her
cheeks were pale and her eyes were glowing with a strange fire. The
sexton cleared his throat, crawled on his stomach off the bed, and going
up to the postman, put a handkerchief over his face.

“What’s that for?” asked his wife.

“To keep the light out of his eyes.”

“Then put out the light!”

Savely looked distrustfully at his wife, put out his lips towards the
lamp, but at once thought better of it and clasped his hands.

“Isn’t that devilish cunning?” he exclaimed. “Ah! Is there any creature
slyer than womenkind?”

“Ah, you long-skirted devil!” hissed his wife, frowning with vexation.
“You wait a bit!”

And settling herself more comfortably, she stared at the postman again.

It did not matter to her that his face was covered. She was not so much
interested in his face as in his whole appearance, in the novelty of
this man. His chest was broad and powerful, his hands were slender and
well formed, and his graceful, muscular legs were much comelier than
Savely’s stumps. There could be no comparison, in fact.

“Though I am a long-skirted devil,” Savely said after a brief interval,
“they’ve no business to sleep here.... It’s government work; we shall
have to answer for keeping them. If you carry the letters, carry them,
you can’t go to sleep.... Hey! you!” Savely shouted into the outer
room. “You, driver. What’s your name? Shall I show you the way? Get up;
postmen mustn’t sleep!”

And Savely, thoroughly roused, ran up to the postman and tugged him by
the sleeve.

“Hey, your honour, if you must go, go; and if you don’t, it’s not the
thing.... Sleeping won’t do.”

The postman jumped up, sat down, looked with blank eyes round the hut,
and lay down again.

“But when are you going?” Savely pattered away. “That’s what the post is
for--to get there in good time, do you hear? I’ll take you.”

The postman opened his eyes. Warmed and relaxed by his first sweet
sleep, and not yet quite awake, he saw as through a mist the white neck
and the immovable, alluring eyes of the sexton’s wife. He closed his
eyes and smiled as though he had been dreaming it all.

“Come, how can you go in such weather!” he heard a soft feminine voice;
“you ought to have a sound sleep and it would do you good!”

“And what about the post?” said Savely anxiously. “Who’s going to take
the post? Are you going to take it, pray, you?”

The postman opened his eyes again, looked at the play of the dimples
on Raissa’s face, remembered where he was, and understood Savely.
The thought that he had to go out into the cold darkness sent a chill
shudder all down him, and he winced.

“I might sleep another five minutes,” he said, yawning. “I shall be
late, anyway....”

“We might be just in time,” came a voice from the outer room. “All days
are not alike; the train may be late for a bit of luck.”

The postman got up, and stretching lazily began putting on his coat.

Savely positively neighed with delight when he saw his visitors were
getting ready to go.

“Give us a hand,” the driver shouted to him as he lifted up a mail-bag.

The sexton ran out and helped him drag the post-bags into the yard. The
postman began undoing the knot in his hood. The sexton’s wife gazed into
his eyes, and seemed trying to look right into his soul.

“You ought to have a cup of tea...” she said.

“I wouldn’t say no... but, you see, they’re getting ready,” he assented.
“We are late, anyway.”

“Do stay,” she whispered, dropping her eyes and touching him by the
sleeve.

The postman got the knot undone at last and flung the hood over his
elbow, hesitating. He felt it comfortable standing by Raissa.

“What a... neck you’ve got!...” And he touched her neck with two
fingers. Seeing that she did not resist, he stroked her neck and
shoulders.

“I say, you are...”

“You’d better stay... have some tea.”

“Where are you putting it?” The driver’s voice could be heard outside.
“Lay it crossways.”

“You’d better stay.... Hark how the wind howls.”

And the postman, not yet quite awake, not yet quite able to shake off
the intoxicating sleep of youth and fatigue, was suddenly overwhelmed
by a desire for the sake of which mail-bags, postal trains... and
all things in the world, are forgotten. He glanced at the door in a
frightened way, as though he wanted to escape or hide himself, seized
Raissa round the waist, and was just bending over the lamp to put out
the light, when he heard the tramp of boots in the outer room, and the
driver appeared in the doorway. Savely peeped in over his shoulder. The
postman dropped his hands quickly and stood still as though irresolute.

“It’s all ready,” said the driver. The postman stood still for a
moment, resolutely threw up his head as though waking up completely, and
followed the driver out. Raissa was left alone.

“Come, get in and show us the way!” she heard.

One bell sounded languidly, then another, and the jingling notes in a
long delicate chain floated away from the hut.

When little by little they had died away, Raissa got up and nervously
paced to and fro. At first she was pale, then she flushed all over.
Her face was contorted with hate, her breathing was tremulous, her eyes
gleamed with wild, savage anger, and, pacing up and down as in a cage,
she looked like a tigress menaced with red-hot iron. For a moment she
stood still and looked at her abode. Almost half of the room was
filled up by the bed, which stretched the length of the whole wall and
consisted of a dirty feather-bed, coarse grey pillows, a quilt, and
nameless rags of various sorts. The bed was a shapeless ugly mass
which suggested the shock of hair that always stood up on Savely’s head
whenever it occurred to him to oil it. From the bed to the door that led
into the cold outer room stretched the dark stove surrounded by pots
and hanging clouts. Everything, including the absent Savely himself, was
dirty, greasy, and smutty to the last degree, so that it was strange to
see a woman’s white neck and delicate skin in such surroundings.

Raissa ran up to the bed, stretched out her hands as though she wanted
to fling it all about, stamp it underfoot, and tear it to shreds. But
then, as though frightened by contact with the dirt, she leapt back and
began pacing up and down again.

When Savely returned two hours later, worn out and covered with snow,
she was undressed and in bed. Her eyes were closed, but from the slight
tremor that ran over her face he guessed that she was not asleep. On his
way home he had vowed inwardly to wait till next day and not to touch
her, but he could not resist a biting taunt at her.

“Your witchery was all in vain: he’s gone off,” he said, grinning with
malignant joy.

His wife remained mute, but her chin quivered. Savely undressed slowly,
clambered over his wife, and lay down next to the wall.

“To-morrow I’ll let Father Nikodim know what sort of wife you are!” he
muttered, curling himself up.

Raissa turned her face to him and her eyes gleamed.

“The job’s enough for you, and you can look for a wife in the
forest, blast you!” she said. “I am no wife for you, a clumsy lout, a
slug-a-bed, God forgive me!”

“Come, come... go to sleep!”

“How miserable I am!” sobbed his wife. “If it weren’t for you, I might
have married a merchant or some gentleman! If it weren’t for you, I
should love my husband now! And you haven’t been buried in the snow, you
haven’t been frozen on the highroad, you Herod!”

Raissa cried for a long time. At last she drew a deep sigh and was
still. The storm still raged without. Something wailed in the stove, in
the chimney, outside the walls, and it seemed to Savely that the wailing
was within him, in his ears. This evening had completely confirmed him
in his suspicions about his wife. He no longer doubted that his wife,
with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges.
But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird
power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm of
which he had not been conscious before. The fact that in his stupidity
he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her seem, as it
were, whiter, sleeker, more unapproachable.

“Witch!” he muttered indignantly. “Tfoo, horrid creature!”

Yet, waiting till she was quiet and began breathing evenly, he touched
her head with his finger... held her thick plait in his hand for a
minute. She did not feel it. Then he grew bolder and stroked her neck.

“Leave off!” she shouted, and prodded him on the nose with her elbow
with such violence that he saw stars before his eyes.

The pain in his nose was soon over, but the torture in his heart
remained.




PEASANT WIVES

IN the village of Reybuzh, just facing the church, stands a two-storeyed
house with a stone foundation and an iron roof. In the lower storey the
owner himself, Filip Ivanov Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives with his
family, and on the upper floor, where it is apt to be very hot in summer
and very cold in winter, they put up government officials, merchants, or
landowners, who chance to be travelling that way. Dyudya rents some bits
of land, keeps a tavern on the highroad, does a trade in tar, honey,
cattle, and jackdaws, and has already something like eight thousand
roubles put by in the bank in the town.

His elder son, Fyodor, is head engineer in the factory, and, as the
peasants say of him, he has risen so high in the world that he is quite
out of reach now. Fyodor’s wife, Sofya, a plain, ailing woman, lives at
home at her father-in-law’s. She is for ever crying, and every Sunday
she goes over to the hospital for medicine. Dyudya’s second son, the
hunchback Alyoshka, is living at home at his father’s. He has only
lately been married to Varvara, whom they singled out for him from
a poor family. She is a handsome young woman, smart and buxom. When
officials or merchants put up at the house, they always insist on having
Varvara to bring in the samovar and make their beds.

One June evening when the sun was setting and the air was full of the
smell of hay, of steaming dung-heaps and new milk, a plain-looking cart
drove into Dyudya’s yard with three people in it: a man of about thirty
in a canvas suit, beside him a little boy of seven or eight in a long
black coat with big bone buttons, and on the driver’s seat a young
fellow in a red shirt.

The young fellow took out the horses and led them out into the street to
walk them up and down a bit, while the traveller washed, said a prayer,
turning towards the church, then spread a rug near the cart and sat down
with the boy to supper. He ate without haste, sedately, and Dyudya, who
had seen a good many travellers in his time, knew him from his manners
for a businesslike man, serious and aware of his own value.

Dyudya was sitting on the step in his waistcoat without a cap on,
waiting for the visitor to speak first. He was used to hearing all kinds
of stories from the travellers in the evening, and he liked listening
to them before going to bed. His old wife, Afanasyevna, and his
daughter-in-law Sofya, were milking in the cowshed. The other
daughter-in-law, Varvara, was sitting at the open window of the upper
storey, eating sunflower seeds.

“The little chap will be your son, I’m thinking?” Dyudya asked the
traveller.

“No; adopted. An orphan. I took him for my soul’s salvation.”

They got into conversation. The stranger seemed to be a man fond of
talking and ready of speech, and Dyudya learned from him that he was
from the town, was of the tradesman class, and had a house of his own,
that his name was Matvey Savitch, that he was on his way now to look at
some gardens that he was renting from some German colonists, and that
the boy’s name was Kuzka. The evening was hot and close, no one felt
inclined for sleep. When it was getting dark and pale stars began to
twinkle here and there in the sky, Matvey Savitch began to tell how
he had come by Kuzka. Afanasyevna and Sofya stood a little way off,
listening. Kuzka had gone to the gate.

“It’s a complicated story, old man,” began Matvey Savitch, “and if I
were to tell you all just as it happened, it would take all night and
more. Ten years ago in a little house in our street, next door to me,
where now there’s a tallow and oil factory, there was living an old
widow, Marfa Semyonovna Kapluntsev, and she had two sons: one was a
guard on the railway, but the other, Vasya, who was just my own age,
lived at home with his mother. Old Kapluntsev had kept five pair of
horses and sent carriers all over the town; his widow had not given up
the business, but managed the carriers as well as her husband had done,
so that some days they would bring in as much as five roubles from their
rounds.

“The young fellow, too, made a trifle on his own account. He used to
breed fancy pigeons and sell them to fanciers; at times he would stand
for hours on the roof, waving a broom in the air and whistling; his
pigeons were right up in the clouds, but it wasn’t enough for him, and
he’d want them to go higher yet. Siskins and starlings, too, he used to
catch, and he made cages for sale. All trifles, but, mind you, he’d pick
up some ten roubles a month over such trifles. Well, as time went
on, the old lady lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. In
consequence of which event the house was left without a woman to look
after it, and that’s for all the world like a man without an eye. The
old lady bestirred herself and made up her mind to marry Vasya. They
called in a matchmaker at once, the women got to talking of one thing
and another, and Vasya went off to have a look at the girls. He picked
out Mashenka, a widow’s daughter. They made up their minds without loss
of time and in a week it was all settled. The girl was a little slip of
a thing, seventeen, but fair-skinned and pretty-looking, and like a lady
in all her ways; and a decent dowry with her, five hundred roubles, a
cow, a bed.... Well, the old lady--it seemed as though she had known
it was coming--three days after the wedding, departed to the Heavenly
Jerusalem where is neither sickness nor sighing. The young people gave
her a good funeral and began their life together. For just six months
they got on splendidly, and then all of a sudden another misfortune. It
never rains but it pours: Vasya was summoned to the recruiting office to
draw lots for the service. He was taken, poor chap, for a soldier, and
not even granted exemption. They shaved his head and packed him off to
Poland. It was God’s will; there was nothing to be done. When he said
good-bye to his wife in the yard, he bore it all right; but as he
glanced up at the hay-loft and his pigeons for the last time, he burst
out crying. It was pitiful to see him.

“At first Mashenka got her mother to stay with her, that she mightn’t
be dull all alone; she stayed till the baby--this very Kuzka here--was
born, and then she went off to Oboyan to another married daughter’s
and left Mashenka alone with the baby. There were five peasants--the
carriers--a drunken saucy lot; horses, too, and dray-carts to see
to, and then the fence would be broken or the soot afire in the
chimney--jobs beyond a woman, and through our being neighbours, she got
into the way of turning to me for every little thing.... Well, I’d go
over, set things to rights, and give advice.... Naturally, not without
going indoors, drinking a cup of tea and having a little chat with her.
I was a young fellow, intellectual, and fond of talking on all sorts of
subjects; she, too, was well-bred and educated. She was always neatly
dressed, and in summer she walked out with a sunshade. Sometimes I would
begin upon religion or politics with her, and she was flattered and
would entertain me with tea and jam.... In a word, not to make a long
story of it, I must tell you, old man, a year had not passed before the
Evil One, the enemy of all mankind, confounded me. I began to notice
that any day I didn’t go to see her, I seemed out of sorts and dull. And
I’d be continually making up something that I must see her about: ‘It’s
high time,’ I’d say to myself, ‘to put the double windows in for the
winter,’ and the whole day I’d idle away over at her place putting in
the windows and take good care to leave a couple of them over for the
next day too.

“‘I ought to count over Vasya’s pigeons, to see none of them have
strayed,’ and so on. I used always to be talking to her across the
fence, and in the end I made a little gate in the fence so as not to
have to go so far round. From womankind comes much evil into the world
and every kind of abomination. Not we sinners only; even the saints
themselves have been led astray by them. Mashenka did not try to keep
me at a distance. Instead of thinking of her husband and being on her
guard, she fell in love with me. I began to notice that she was dull
without me, and was always walking to and fro by the fence looking into
my yard through the cracks.

“My brains were going round in my head in a sort of frenzy. On Thursday
in Holy Week I was going early in the morning--it was scarcely light--to
market. I passed close by her gate, and the Evil One was by me--at my
elbow. I looked--she had a gate with open trellis work at the top--and
there she was, up already, standing in the middle of the yard, feeding
the ducks. I could not restrain myself, and I called her name. She came
up and looked at me through the trellis.... Her little face was white,
her eyes soft and sleepy-looking.... I liked her looks immensely, and
I began paying her compliments, as though we were not at the gate, but
just as one does on namedays, while she blushed, and laughed, and kept
looking straight into my eyes without winking.... I lost all sense and
began to declare my love to her.... She opened the gate, and from that
morning we began to live as man and wife....”

The hunchback Alyoshka came into the yard from the street and ran out of
breath into the house, not looking at any one. A minute later he ran out
of the house with a concertina. Jingling some coppers in his pocket, and
cracking sunflower seeds as he ran, he went out at the gate.

“And who’s that, pray?” asked Matvey Savitch.

“My son Alexey,” answered Dyudya. “He’s off on a spree, the rascal. God
has afflicted him with a hump, so we are not very hard on him.”

“And he’s always drinking with the other fellows, always drinking,”
 sighed Afanasyevna. “Before Carnival we married him, thinking he’d be
steadier, but there! he’s worse than ever.”

“It’s been no use. Simply keeping another man’s daughter for nothing,”
 said Dyudya.

Somewhere behind the church they began to sing a glorious, mournful
song. The words they could not catch and only the voices could be
heard--two tenors and a bass. All were listening; there was complete
stillness in the yard.... Two voices suddenly broke off with a loud roar
of laughter, but the third, a tenor, still sang on, and took so high a
note that every one instinctively looked upwards, as though the voice
had soared to heaven itself.

Varvara came out of the house, and screening her eyes with her hand, as
though from the sun, she looked towards the church.

“It’s the priest’s sons with the schoolmaster,” she said.

Again all the three voices began to sing together. Matvey Savitch sighed
and went on:

“Well, that’s how it was, old man. Two years later we got a letter from
Vasya from Warsaw. He wrote that he was being sent home sick. He was
ill. By that time I had put all that foolishness out of my head, and I
had a fine match picked out all ready for me, only I didn’t know how to
break it off with my sweetheart. Every day I’d make up my mind to have
it out with Mashenka, but I didn’t know how to approach her so as not
to have a woman’s screeching about my ears. The letter freed my hands. I
read it through with Mashenka; she turned white as a sheet, while I said
to her: ‘Thank God; now,’ says I, ‘you’ll be a married woman again.’
But says she: ‘I’m not going to live with him.’ ‘Why, isn’t he your
husband?’ said I. ‘Is it an easy thing?... I never loved him and I
married him not of my own free will. My mother made me.’ ‘Don’t try to
get out of it, silly,’ said I, ‘but tell me this: were you married to
him in church or not?’ ‘I was married,’ she said, ‘but it’s you that I
love, and I will stay with you to the day of my death. Folks may jeer.
I don’t care....’ ‘You’re a Christian woman,’ said I, ‘and have read the
Scriptures; what is written there?’

“Once married, with her husband she must live,” said Dyudya.

“‘Man and wife are one flesh. We have sinned,’ I said, ‘you and I, and
it is enough; we must repent and fear God. We must confess it all to
Vasya,’ said I; ‘he’s a quiet fellow and soft--he won’t kill you. And
indeed,’ said I, ‘better to suffer torments in this world at the hands
of your lawful master than to gnash your teeth at the dread Seat of
Judgment.’ The wench wouldn’t listen; she stuck to her silly, ‘It’s you
I love!’ and nothing more could I get out of her.

“Vasya came back on the Saturday before Trinity, early in the morning.
From my fence I could see everything; he ran into the house, and came
back a minute later with Kuzka in his arms, and he was laughing and
crying all at once; he was kissing Kuzka and looking up at the hay-loft,
and hadn’t the heart to put the child down, and yet he was longing to go
to his pigeons. He was always a soft sort of chap--sentimental. That day
passed off very well, all quiet and proper. They had begun ringing
the church bells for the evening service, when the thought struck me:
‘To-morrow’s Trinity Sunday; how is it they are not decking the gates
and the fence with green? Something’s wrong,’ I thought. I went over to
them. I peeped in, and there he was, sitting on the floor in the middle
of the room, his eyes staring like a drunken man’s, the tears streaming
down his cheeks and his hands shaking; he was pulling cracknels,
necklaces, gingerbread nuts, and all sorts of little presents out of
his bundle and flinging them on the floor. Kuzka--he was three years
old--was crawling on the floor, munching the gingerbreads, while
Mashenka stood by the stove, white and shivering all over, muttering:
‘I’m not your wife; I can’t live with you,’ and all sorts of
foolishness. I bowed down at Vasya’s feet, and said: ‘We have sinned
against you, Vassily Maximitch; forgive us, for Christ’s sake!’ Then I
got up and spoke to Mashenka: ‘You, Marya Semyonovna, ought now to wash
Vassily Maximitch’s feet and drink the water. Do you be an obedient
wife to him, and pray to God for me, that He in His mercy may forgive
my transgression.’ It came to me like an inspiration from an angel of
Heaven; I gave her solemn counsel and spoke with such feeling that
my own tears flowed too. And so two days later Vasya comes to me:
‘Matyusha,’ says he, ‘I forgive you and my wife; God have mercy on you!
She was a soldier’s wife, a young thing all alone; it was hard for
her to be on her guard. She’s not the first, nor will she be the last.
Only,’ he says, ‘I beg you to behave as though there had never been
anything between you, and to make no sign, while I,’ says he, ‘will
do my best to please her in every way, so that she may come to love me
again.’ He gave me his hand on it, drank a cup of tea, and went away
more cheerful.

“‘Well,’ thought I, ‘thank God!’ and I did feel glad that everything
had gone off so well. But no sooner had Vasya gone out of the yard, when
in came Mashenka. Ah! What I had to suffer! She hung on my neck, weeping
and praying: ‘For God’s sake, don’t cast me off; I can’t live without
you!’”

“The vile hussy!” sighed Dyudya.

“I swore at her, stamped my foot, and dragging her into the passage, I
fastened the door with the hook. ‘Go to your husband,’ I cried. ‘Don’t
shame me before folks. Fear God!’ And every day there was a scene of
that sort.

“One morning I was standing in my yard near the stable cleaning a
bridle. All at once I saw her running through the little gate into my
yard, with bare feet, in her petticoat, and straight towards me; she
clutched at the bridle, getting all smeared with the pitch, and shaking
and weeping, she cried: ‘I can’t stand him; I loathe him; I can’t bear
it! If you don’t love me, better kill me!’ I was angry, and I struck her
twice with the bridle, but at that instant Vasya ran in at the gate, and
in a despairing voice he shouted: ‘Don’t beat her! Don’t beat her!’ But
he ran up himself, and waving his arms, as though he were mad, he let
fly with his fists at her with all his might, then flung her on the
ground and kicked her. I tried to defend her, but he snatched up the
reins and thrashed her with them, and all the while, like a colt’s
whinny, he went: ‘He--he--he!’”

“I’d take the reins and let you feel them,” muttered Varvara, moving
away; “murdering our sister, the damned brutes!...”

“Hold your tongue, you jade!” Dyudya shouted at her.

“‘He--he--he!’” Matvey Savitch went on. “A carrier ran out of his
yard; I called to my workman, and the three of us got Mashenka away from
him and carried her home in our arms. The disgrace of it! The same day
I went over in the evening to see how things were. She was lying in bed,
all wrapped up in bandages, nothing but her eyes and nose to be
seen; she was looking at the ceiling. I said: ‘Good-evening, Marya
Semyonovna!’ She did not speak. And Vasya was sitting in the next room,
his head in his hands, crying and saying: ‘Brute that I am! I’ve ruined
my life! O God, let me die!’ I sat for half an hour by Mashenka and gave
her a good talking-to. I tried to frighten her a bit. ‘The righteous,’
said I, ‘after this life go to Paradise, but you will go to a Gehenna of
fire, like all adulteresses. Don’t strive against your husband, go and
lay yourself at his feet.’ But never a word from her; she didn’t so
much as blink an eyelid, for all the world as though I were talking to
a post. The next day Vasya fell ill with something like cholera, and
in the evening I heard that he was dead. Well, so they buried him,
and Mashenka did not go to the funeral; she didn’t care to show her
shameless face and her bruises. And soon there began to be talk all over
the district that Vasya had not died a natural death, that Mashenka had
made away with him. It got to the ears of the police; they had Vasya dug
up and cut open, and in his stomach they found arsenic. It was clear he
had been poisoned; the police came and took Mashenka away, and with her
the innocent Kuzka. They were put in prison.... The woman had gone too
far--God punished her.... Eight months later they tried her. She sat,
I remember, on a low stool, with a little white kerchief on her head,
wearing a grey gown, and she was so thin, so pale, so sharp-eyed it made
one sad to look at her. Behind her stood a soldier with a gun. She
would not confess her guilt. Some in the court said she had poisoned her
husband and others declared he had poisoned himself for grief. I was
one of the witnesses. When they questioned me, I told the whole truth
according to my oath. ‘Hers,’ said I, ‘is the guilt. It’s no good to
conceal it; she did not love her husband, and she had a will of her
own....’ The trial began in the morning and towards night they passed
this sentence: to send her to hard labour in Siberia for thirteen years.
After that sentence Mashenka remained three months longer in prison. I
went to see her, and from Christian charity I took her a little tea and
sugar. But as soon as she set eyes on me she began to shake all over,
wringing her hands and muttering: ‘Go away! go away!’ And Kuzka she
clasped to her as though she were afraid I would take him away. ‘See,’
said I, ‘what you have come to! Ah, Masha, Masha! you would not listen
to me when I gave you good advice, and now you must repent it. You are
yourself to blame,’ said I; ‘blame yourself!’ I was giving her good
counsel, but she: ‘Go away, go away!’ huddling herself and Kuzka against
the wall, and trembling all over.

“When they were taking her away to the chief town of our province, I
walked by the escort as far as the station and slipped a rouble into
her bundle for my soul’s salvation. But she did not get as far as
Siberia.... She fell sick of fever and died in prison.”

“Live like a dog and you must die a dog’s death,” said Dyudya.

“Kuzka was sent back home.... I thought it over and took him to bring
up. After all--though a convict’s child--still he was a living soul, a
Christian.... I was sorry for him. I shall make him my clerk, and if I
have no children of my own, I’ll make a merchant of him. Wherever I go
now, I take him with me; let him learn his work.”

All the while Matvey Savitch had been telling his story, Kuzka had sat
on a little stone near the gate. His head propped in both hands, he
gazed at the sky, and in the distance he looked in the dark like a stump
of wood.

“Kuzka, come to bed,” Matvey Savitch bawled to him.

“Yes, it’s time,” said Dyudya, getting up; he yawned loudly and added:

“Folks will go their own way, and that’s what comes of it.”

Over the yard the moon was floating now in the heavens; she was moving
one way, while the clouds beneath moved the other way; the clouds were
disappearing into the darkness, but still the moon could be seen high
above the yard.

Matvey Savitch said a prayer, facing the church, and saying good-night,
he lay down on the ground near his cart. Kuzka, too, said a prayer, lay
down in the cart, and covered himself with his little overcoat; he
made himself a little hole in the hay so as to be more comfortable, and
curled up so that his elbows looked like knees. From the yard Dyudya
could be seen lighting a candle in his room below, putting on his
spectacles and standing in the corner with a book. He was a long while
reading and crossing himself.

The travellers fell asleep. Afanasyevna and Sofya came up to the cart
and began looking at Kuzka.

“The little orphan’s asleep,” said the old woman. “He’s thin and frail,
nothing but bones. No mother and no one to care for him properly.”

“My Grishutka must be two years older,” said Sofya. “Up at the factory
he lives like a slave without his mother. The foreman beats him, I
dare say. When I looked at this poor mite just now, I thought of my own
Grishutka, and my heart went cold within me.”

A minute passed in silence.

“Doesn’t remember his mother, I suppose,” said the old woman.

“How could he remember?”

And big tears began dropping from Sofya’s eyes.

“He’s curled himself up like a cat,” she said, sobbing and laughing with
tenderness and sorrow.... “Poor motherless mite!”

Kuzka started and opened his eyes. He saw before him an ugly, wrinkled,
tear-stained face, and beside it another, aged and toothless, with a
sharp chin and hooked nose, and high above them the infinite sky with
the flying clouds and the moon. He cried out in fright, and Sofya, too,
uttered a cry; both were answered by the echo, and a faint stir passed
over the stifling air; a watchman tapped somewhere near, a dog barked.
Matvey Savitch muttered something in his sleep and turned over on the
other side.

Late at night when Dyudya and the old woman and the neighbouring
watchman were all asleep, Sofya went out to the gate and sat down on the
bench. She felt stifled and her head ached from weeping. The street was
a wide and long one; it stretched for nearly two miles to the right and
as far to the left, and the end of it was out of sight. The moon was
now not over the yard, but behind the church. One side of the street was
flooded with moonlight, while the other side lay in black shadow. The
long shadows of the poplars and the starling-cotes stretched right
across the street, while the church cast a broad shadow, black and
terrible that enfolded Dyudya’s gates and half his house. The street
was still and deserted. From time to time the strains of music floated
faintly from the end of the street--Alyoshka, most likely, playing his
concertina.

Someone moved in the shadow near the church enclosure, and Sofya could
not make out whether it were a man or a cow, or perhaps merely a big
bird rustling in the trees. But then a figure stepped out of the shadow,
halted, and said something in a man’s voice, then vanished down the
turning by the church. A little later, not three yards from the gate,
another figure came into sight; it walked straight from the church to
the gate and stopped short, seeing Sofya on the bench.

“Varvara, is that you?” said Sofya.

“And if it were?”

It was Varvara. She stood still a minute, then came up to the bench and
sat down.

“Where have you been?” asked Sofya.

Varvara made no answer.

“You’d better mind you don’t get into trouble with such goings-on, my
girl,” said Sofya. “Did you hear how Mashenka was kicked and lashed with
the reins? You’d better look out, or they’ll treat you the same.”

“Well, let them!”

Varvara laughed into her kerchief and whispered:

“I have just been with the priest’s son.”

“Nonsense!”

“I have!”

“It’s a sin!” whispered Sofya.

“Well, let it be.... What do I care? If it’s a sin, then it is a sin,
but better be struck dead by thunder than live like this. I’m young and
strong, and I’ve a filthy crooked hunchback for a husband, worse than
Dyudya himself, curse him! When I was a girl, I hadn’t bread to eat, or
a shoe to my foot, and to get away from that wretchedness I was tempted
by Alyoshka’s money, and got caught like a fish in a net, and I’d rather
have a viper for my bedfellow than that scurvy Alyoshka. And what’s your
life? It makes me sick to look at it. Your Fyodor sent you packing from
the factory and he’s taken up with another woman. They have robbed you
of your boy and made a slave of him. You work like a horse, and never
hear a kind word. I’d rather pine all my days an old maid, I’d rather
get half a rouble from the priest’s son, I’d rather beg my bread, or
throw myself into the well...

“It’s a sin!” whispered Sofya again.

“Well, let it be.”

Somewhere behind the church the same three voices, two tenors and a
bass, began singing again a mournful song. And again the words could not
be distinguished.

“They are not early to bed,” Varvara said, laughing.

And she began telling in a whisper of her midnight walks with the
priest’s son, and of the stories he had told her, and of his comrades,
and of the fun she had with the travellers who stayed in the house. The
mournful song stirred a longing for life and freedom. Sofya began to
laugh; she thought it sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and
she felt envious and sorry that she, too, had not been a sinner when she
was young and pretty.

In the churchyard they heard twelve strokes beaten on the watchman’s
board.

“It’s time we were asleep,” said Sofya, getting up, “or, maybe, we shall
catch it from Dyudya.”

They both went softly into the yard.

“I went away without hearing what he was telling about Mashenka,” said
Varvara, making herself a bed under the window.

“She died in prison, he said. She poisoned her husband.”

Varvara lay down beside Sofya a while, and said softly:

“I’d make away with my Alyoshka and never regret it.”

“You talk nonsense; God forgive you.”

When Sofya was just dropping asleep, Varvara, coming close, whispered in
her ear:

“Let us get rid of Dyudya and Alyoshka!”

Sofya started and said nothing. Then she opened her eyes and gazed a
long while steadily at the sky.

“People would find out,” she said.

“No, they wouldn’t. Dyudya’s an old man, it’s time he did die; and
they’d say Alyoshka died of drink.”

“I’m afraid... God would chastise us.”

“Well, let Him....”

Both lay awake thinking in silence.

“It’s cold,” said Sofya, beginning to shiver all over. “It will soon be
morning.... Are you asleep?”

“No.... Don’t you mind what I say, dear,” whispered Varvara; “I get so
mad with the damned brutes, I don’t know what I do say. Go to sleep, or
it will be daylight directly.... Go to sleep.”

Both were quiet and soon they fell asleep.

Earlier than all woke the old woman. She waked up Sofya and they went
together into the cowshed to milk the cows. The hunchback Alyoshka came
in hopelessly drunk without his concertina; his breast and knees had
been in the dust and straw--he must have fallen down in the road.
Staggering, he went into the cowshed, and without undressing he rolled
into a sledge and began to snore at once. When first the crosses on the
church and then the windows were flashing in the light of the rising
sun, and shadows stretched across the yard over the dewy grass from
the trees and the top of the well, Matvey Savitch jumped up and began
hurrying about:

“Kuzka! get up!” he shouted. “It’s time to put in the horses! Look
sharp!”

The bustle of morning was beginning. A young Jewess in a brown gown
with flounces led a horse into the yard to drink. The pulley of the well
creaked plaintively, the bucket knocked as it went down....

Kuzka, sleepy, tired, covered with dew, sat up in the cart, lazily
putting on his little overcoat, and listening to the drip of the water
from the bucket into the well as he shivered with the cold.

“Auntie!” shouted Matvey Savitch to Sofya, “tell my lad to hurry up and
to harness the horses!”

And Dyudya at the same instant shouted from the window:

“Sofya, take a farthing from the Jewess for the horse’s drink! They’re
always in here, the mangy creatures!”

In the street sheep were running up and down, baaing; the peasant women
were shouting at the shepherd, while he played his pipes, cracked his
whip, or answered them in a thick sleepy bass. Three sheep strayed into
the yard, and not finding the gate again, pushed at the fence.

Varvara was waked by the noise, and bundling her bedding up in her arms,
she went into the house.

“You might at least drive the sheep out!” the old woman bawled after
her, “my lady!”

“I dare say! As if I were going to slave for you Herods!” muttered
Varvara, going into the house.

Dyudya came out of the house with his accounts in his hands, sat down
on the step, and began reckoning how much the traveller owed him for the
night’s lodging, oats, and watering his horses.

“You charge pretty heavily for the oats, my good man,” said Matvey
Savitch.

“If it’s too much, don’t take them. There’s no compulsion, merchant.”

When the travellers were ready to start, they were detained for a
minute. Kuzka had lost his cap.

“Little swine, where did you put it?” Matvey Savitch roared angrily.
“Where is it?”

Kuzka’s face was working with terror; he ran up and down near the cart,
and not finding it there, ran to the gate and then to the shed. The old
woman and Sofya helped him look.

“I’ll pull your ears off!” yelled Matvey Savitch. “Dirty brat!”

The cap was found at the bottom of the cart.

Kuzka brushed the hay off it with his sleeve, put it on, and timidly he
crawled into the cart, still with an expression of terror on his face as
though he were afraid of a blow from behind.

Matvey Savitch crossed himself. The driver gave a tug at the reins and
the cart rolled out of the yard.




THE POST

IT was three o’clock in the night. The postman, ready to set off, in his
cap and his coat, with a rusty sword in his hand, was standing near the
door, waiting for the driver to finish putting the mail bags into the
cart which had just been brought round with three horses. The sleepy
postmaster sat at his table, which was like a counter; he was filling up
a form and saying:

“My nephew, the student, wants to go to the station at once. So look
here, Ignatyev, let him get into the mail cart and take him with you to
the station: though it is against the regulations to take people with
the mail, what’s one to do? It’s better for him to drive with you free
than for me to hire horses for him.”

“Ready!” they heard a shout from the yard.

“Well, go then, and God be with you,” said the postmaster. “Which driver
is going?”

“Semyon Glazov.”

“Come, sign the receipt.”

The postman signed the receipt and went out. At the entrance of the
post-office there was the dark outline of a cart and three horses.
The horses were standing still except that one of the tracehorses kept
uneasily shifting from one leg to the other and tossing its head, making
the bell clang from time to time. The cart with the mail bags looked
like a patch of darkness. Two silhouettes were moving lazily beside it:
the student with a portmanteau in his hand and a driver. The latter was
smoking a short pipe; the light of the pipe moved about in the darkness,
dying away and flaring up again; for an instant it lighted up a bit of
a sleeve, then a shaggy moustache and big copper-red nose, then
stern-looking, overhanging eyebrows. The postman pressed down the mail
bags with his hands, laid his sword on them and jumped into the cart.
The student clambered irresolutely in after him, and accidentally
touching him with his elbow, said timidly and politely: “I beg your
pardon.”

The pipe went out. The postmaster came out of the post-office just as
he was, in his waistcoat and slippers; shrinking from the night dampness
and clearing his throat, he walked beside the cart and said:

“Well, God speed! Give my love to your mother, Mihailo. Give my love to
them all. And you, Ignatyev, mind you don’t forget to give the parcel to
Bystretsov.... Off!”

The driver took the reins in one hand, blew his nose, and, arranging the
seat under himself, clicked to the horses.

“Give them my love,” the postmaster repeated.

The big bell clanged something to the little bells, the little bells
gave it a friendly answer. The cart squeaked, moved. The big bell
lamented, the little bells laughed. Standing up in his seat the driver
lashed the restless tracehorse twice, and the cart rumbled with a hollow
sound along the dusty road. The little town was asleep. Houses and trees
stood black on each side of the broad street, and not a light was to be
seen. Narrow clouds stretched here and there over the star-spangled
sky, and where the dawn would soon be coming there was a narrow
crescent moon; but neither the stars, of which there were many, nor the
half-moon, which looked white, lighted up the night air. It was cold and
damp, and there was a smell of autumn.

The student, who thought that politeness required him to talk affably to
a man who had not refused to let him accompany him, began:

“In summer it would be light at this time, but now there is not even a
sign of the dawn. Summer is over!”

The student looked at the sky and went on:

“Even from the sky one can see that it is autumn. Look to the right.
Do you see three stars side by side in a straight line? That is the
constellation of Orion, which, in our hemisphere, only becomes visible
in September.”

The postman, thrusting his hands into his sleeves and retreating up to
his ears into his coat collar, did not stir and did not glance at the
sky. Apparently the constellation of Orion did not interest him. He was
accustomed to see the stars, and probably he had long grown weary of
them. The student paused for a while and then said:

“It’s cold! It’s time for the dawn to begin. Do you know what time the
sun rises?”

“What?”

“What time does the sun rise now?”

“Between five and six,” said the driver.

The mail cart drove out of the town. Now nothing could be seen on either
side of the road but the fences of kitchen gardens and here and there
a solitary willow-tree; everything in front of them was shrouded in
darkness. Here in the open country the half-moon looked bigger and the
stars shone more brightly. Then came a scent of dampness; the postman
shrank further into his collar, the student felt an unpleasant chill
first creeping about his feet, then over the mail bags, over his hands
and his face. The horses moved more slowly; the bell was mute as though
it were frozen. There was the sound of the splash of water, and stars
reflected in the water danced under the horses’ feet and round the
wheels.

But ten minutes later it became so dark that neither the stars nor the
moon could be seen. The mail cart had entered the forest. Prickly pine
branches were continually hitting the student on his cap and a spider’s
web settled on his face. Wheels and hoofs knocked against huge roots,
and the mail cart swayed from side to side as though it were drunk.

“Keep to the road,” said the postman angrily. “Why do you run up the
edge? My face is scratched all over by the twigs! Keep more to the
right!”

But at that point there was nearly an accident. The cart suddenly
bounded as though in the throes of a convulsion, began trembling, and,
with a creak, lurched heavily first to the right and then to the left,
and at a fearful pace dashed along the forest track. The horses had
taken fright at something and bolted.

“Wo! wo!” the driver cried in alarm. “Wo... you devils!”

The student, violently shaken, bent forward and tried to find something
to catch hold of so as to keep his balance and save himself from being
thrown out, but the leather mail bags were slippery, and the driver,
whose belt the student tried to catch at, was himself tossed up and down
and seemed every moment on the point of flying out. Through the rattle
of the wheels and the creaking of the cart they heard the sword fall
with a clank on the ground, then a little later something fell with two
heavy thuds behind the mail cart.

“Wo!” the driver cried in a piercing voice, bending backwards. “Stop!”

The student fell on his face and bruised his forehead against the
driver’s seat, but was at once tossed back again and knocked his spine
violently against the back of the cart.

“I am falling!” was the thought that flashed through his mind, but at
that instant the horses dashed out of the forest into the open, turned
sharply to the right, and rumbling over a bridge of logs, suddenly
stopped dead, and the suddenness of this halt flung the student forward
again.

The driver and the student were both breathless. The postman was not in
the cart. He had been thrown out, together with his sword, the student’s
portmanteau, and one of the mail bags.

“Stop, you rascal! Sto-op!” they heard him shout from the forest. “You
damned blackguard!” he shouted, running up to the cart, and there was a
note of pain and fury in his tearful voice. “You anathema, plague take
you!” he roared, dashing up to the driver and shaking his fist at him.

“What a to-do! Lord have mercy on us!” muttered the driver in a
conscience-stricken voice, setting right something in the harness at the
horses’ heads. “It’s all that devil of a tracehorse. Cursed filly; it
is only a week since she has run in harness. She goes all right, but as
soon as we go down hill there is trouble! She wants a touch or two on
the nose, then she wouldn’t play about like this... Stea-eady! Damn!”

While the driver was setting the horses to rights and looking for the
portmanteau, the mail bag, and the sword on the road, the postman in a
plaintive voice shrill with anger ejaculated oaths. After replacing the
luggage the driver for no reason whatever led the horses for a hundred
paces, grumbled at the restless tracehorse, and jumped up on the box.

When his fright was over the student felt amused and good-humoured. It
was the first time in his life that he had driven by night in a mail
cart, and the shaking he had just been through, the postman’s having
been thrown out, and the pain in his own back struck him as interesting
adventures. He lighted a cigarette and said with a laugh:

“Why you know, you might break your neck like that! I very nearly flew
out, and I didn’t even notice you had been thrown out. I can fancy what
it is like driving in autumn!”

The postman did not speak.

“Have you been going with the post for long?” the student asked.

“Eleven years.”

“Oho; every day?”

“Yes, every day. I take this post and drive back again at once. Why?”

Making the journey every day, he must have had a good many interesting
adventures in eleven years. On bright summer and gloomy autumn nights,
or in winter when a ferocious snowstorm whirled howling round the mail
cart, it must have been hard to avoid feeling frightened and uncanny. No
doubt more than once the horses had bolted, the mail cart had stuck in
the mud, they had been attacked by highwaymen, or had lost their way in
the blizzard....

“I can fancy what adventures you must have had in eleven years!” said
the student. “I expect it must be terrible driving?”

He said this and expected that the postman would tell him something,
but the latter preserved a sullen silence and retreated into his collar.
Meanwhile it began to get light. The sky changed colour imperceptibly;
it still seemed dark, but by now the horses and the driver and the road
could be seen. The crescent moon looked bigger and bigger, and the cloud
that stretched below it, shaped like a cannon in a gun-carriage, showed
a faint yellow on its lower edge. Soon the postman’s face was visible.
It was wet with dew, grey and rigid as the face of a corpse. An
expression of dull, sullen anger was set upon it, as though the postman
were still in pain and still angry with the driver.

“Thank God it is daylight!” said the student, looking at his chilled and
angry face. “I am quite frozen. The nights are cold in September, but as
soon as the sun rises it isn’t cold. Shall we soon reach the station?”

The postman frowned and made a wry face.

“How fond you are of talking, upon my word!” he said. “Can’t you keep
quiet when you are travelling?”

The student was confused, and did not approach him again all the
journey. The morning came on rapidly. The moon turned pale and melted
away into the dull grey sky, the cloud turned yellow all over, the stars
grew dim, but the east was still cold-looking and the same colour as the
rest of the sky, so that one could hardly believe the sun was hidden in
it.

The chill of the morning and the surliness of the postman gradually
infected the student. He looked apathetically at the country around
him, waited for the warmth of the sun, and thought of nothing but how
dreadful and horrible it must be for the poor trees and the grass
to endure the cold nights. The sun rose dim, drowsy, and cold. The
tree-tops were not gilded by the rays of the rising sun, as usually
described, the sunbeams did not creep over the earth and there was no
sign of joy in the flight of the sleepy birds. The cold remained just
the same now that the sun was up as it had been in the night.

The student looked drowsily and ill-humouredly at the curtained windows
of a mansion by which the mail cart drove. Behind those windows, he
thought, people were most likely enjoying their soundest morning sleep
not hearing the bells, nor feeling the cold, nor seeing the postman’s
angry face; and if the bell did wake some young lady, she would turn
over on the other side, smile in the fulness of her warmth and comfort,
and, drawing up her feet and putting her hand under her cheek, would go
off to sleep more soundly than ever.

The student looked at the pond which gleamed near the house and
thought of the carp and the pike which find it possible to live in cold
water....

“It’s against the regulations to take anyone with the post....” the
postman said unexpectedly. “It’s not allowed! And since it is not
allowed, people have no business... to get in.... Yes. It makes no
difference to me, it’s true, only I don’t like it, and I don’t wish it.”

“Why didn’t you say so before, if you don’t like it?”

The postman made no answer but still had an unfriendly, angry
expression. When, a little later, the horses stopped at the entrance of
the station the student thanked him and got out of the cart. The mail
train had not yet come in. A long goods train stood in a siding; in the
tender the engine driver and his assistant, with faces wet with dew,
were drinking tea from a dirty tin teapot. The carriages, the platforms,
the seats were all wet and cold. Until the train came in the student
stood at the buffet drinking tea while the postman, with his hands
thrust up his sleeves and the same look of anger still on his face,
paced up and down the platform in solitude, staring at the ground under
his feet.

With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the
autumn nights?




THE NEW VILLA

I

Two miles from the village of Obrutchanovo a huge bridge was being
built. From the village, which stood up high on the steep river-bank,
its trellis-like skeleton could be seen, and in foggy weather and
on still winter days, when its delicate iron girders and all the
scaffolding around was covered with hoar frost, it presented a
picturesque and even fantastic spectacle. Kutcherov, the engineer who
was building the bridge, a stout, broad-shouldered, bearded man in a
soft crumpled cap drove through the village in his racing droshky or his
open carriage. Now and then on holidays navvies working on the bridge
would come to the village; they begged for alms, laughed at the women,
and sometimes carried off something. But that was rare; as a rule the
days passed quietly and peacefully as though no bridge-building were
going on, and only in the evening, when camp fires gleamed near the
bridge, the wind faintly wafted the songs of the navvies. And by day
there was sometimes the mournful clang of metal, don-don-don.

It happened that the engineer’s wife came to see him. She was pleased
with the river-banks and the gorgeous view over the green valley with
trees, churches, flocks, and she began begging her husband to buy a
small piece of ground and to build them a cottage on it. Her husband
agreed. They bought sixty acres of land, and on the high bank in a
field, where in earlier days the cows of Obrutchanovo used to wander,
they built a pretty house of two storeys with a terrace and a verandah,
with a tower and a flagstaff on which a flag fluttered on Sundays--they
built it in about three months, and then all the winter they were
planting big trees, and when spring came and everything began to be
green there were already avenues to the new house, a gardener and two
labourers in white aprons were digging near it, there was a little
fountain, and a globe of looking-glass flashed so brilliantly that it
was painful to look at. The house had already been named the New Villa.

On a bright, warm morning at the end of May two horses were brought to
Obrutchanovo to the village blacksmith, Rodion Petrov. They came from
the New Villa. The horses were sleek, graceful beasts, as white as snow,
and strikingly alike.

“Perfect swans!” said Rodion, gazing at them with reverent admiration.

His wife Stepanida, his children and grandchildren came out into the
street to look at them. By degrees a crowd collected. The Lytchkovs,
father and son, both men with swollen faces and entirely beardless, came
up bareheaded. Kozov, a tall, thin old man with a long, narrow beard,
came up leaning on a stick with a crook handle: he kept winking with his
crafty eyes and smiling ironically as though he knew something.

“It’s only that they are white; what is there in them?” he said. “Put
mine on oats, and they will be just as sleek. They ought to be in a
plough and with a whip, too....”

The coachman simply looked at him with disdain, but did not utter a
word. And afterwards, while they were blowing up the fire at the forge,
the coachman talked while he smoked cigarettes. The peasants learned
from him various details: his employers were wealthy people; his
mistress, Elena Ivanovna, had till her marriage lived in Moscow in a
poor way as a governess; she was kind-hearted, compassionate, and fond
of helping the poor. On the new estate, he told them, they were not
going to plough or to sow, but simply to live for their pleasure, live
only to breathe the fresh air. When he had finished and led the horses
back a crowd of boys followed him, the dogs barked, and Kozov, looking
after him, winked sarcastically.

“Landowners, too-oo!” he said. “They have built a house and set up
horses, but I bet they are nobodies--landowners, too-oo.”

Kozov for some reason took a dislike from the first to the new house,
to the white horses, and to the handsome, well-fed coachman. Kozov was
a solitary man, a widower; he had a dreary life (he was prevented from
working by a disease which he sometimes called a rupture and sometimes
worms) he was maintained by his son, who worked at a confectioner’s
in Harkov and sent him money; and from early morning till evening he
sauntered at leisure about the river or about the village; if he saw,
for instance, a peasant carting a log, or fishing, he would say: “That
log’s dry wood--it is rotten,” or, “They won’t bite in weather like
this.” In times of drought he would declare that there would not be a
drop of rain till the frost came; and when the rains came he would say
that everything would rot in the fields, that everything was ruined. And
as he said these things he would wink as though he knew something.

At the New Villa they burned Bengal lights and sent up fireworks in the
evenings, and a sailing-boat with red lanterns floated by Obrutchanovo.
One morning the engineer’s wife, Elena Ivanovna, and her little daughter
drove to the village in a carriage with yellow wheels and a pair of dark
bay ponies; both mother and daughter were wearing broad-brimmed straw
hats, bent down over their ears.

This was exactly at the time when they were carting manure, and the
blacksmith Rodion, a tall, gaunt old man, bareheaded and barefooted,
was standing near his dirty and repulsive-looking cart and, flustered,
looked at the ponies, and it was evident by his face that he had never
seen such little horses before.

“The Kutcherov lady has come!” was whispered around. “Look, the
Kutcherov lady has come!”

Elena Ivanovna looked at the huts as though she were selecting one, and
then stopped at the very poorest, at the windows of which there were so
many children’s heads--flaxen, red, and dark. Stepanida, Rodion’s wife,
a stout woman, came running out of the hut; her kerchief slipped off
her grey head; she looked at the carriage facing the sun, and her face
smiled and wrinkled up as though she were blind.

“This is for your children,” said Elena Ivanovna, and she gave her three
roubles.

Stepanida suddenly burst into tears and bowed down to the ground.
Rodion, too, flopped to the ground, displaying his brownish bald head,
and as he did so he almost caught his wife in the ribs with the fork.
Elena Ivanovna was overcome with confusion and drove back.

II


The Lytchkovs, father and son, caught in their meadows two cart-horses,
a pony, and a broad-faced Aalhaus bull-calf, and with the help of
red-headed Volodka, son of the blacksmith Rodion, drove them to the
village. They called the village elder, collected witnesses, and went to
look at the damage.

“All right, let ‘em!” said Kozov, winking, “le-et em! Let them get out
of it if they can, the engineers! Do you think there is no such thing as
law? All right! Send for the police inspector, draw up a statement!...”

“Draw up a statement,” repeated Volodka.

“I don’t want to let this pass!” shouted the younger Lytchkov. He
shouted louder and louder, and his beardless face seemed to be more and
more swollen. “They’ve set up a nice fashion! Leave them free, and they
will ruin all the meadows! You’ve no sort of right to ill-treat people!
We are not serfs now!”

“We are not serfs now!” repeated Volodka.

“We got on all right without a bridge,” said the elder Lytchkov
gloomily; “we did not ask for it. What do we want a bridge for? We don’t
want it!”

“Brothers, good Christians, we cannot leave it like this!”

“All right, let ‘em!” said Kozov, winking. “Let them get out of it if
they can! Landowners, indeed!”

They went back to the village, and as they walked the younger Lytchkov
beat himself on the breast with his fist and shouted all the way, and
Volodka shouted, too, repeating his words. And meanwhile quite a crowd
had gathered in the village round the thoroughbred bull-calf and the
horses. The bullcalf was embarrassed and looked up from under his brows,
but suddenly lowered his muzzle to the ground and took to his heels,
kicking up his hind legs; Kozov was frightened and waved his stick at
him, and they all burst out laughing. Then they locked up the beasts and
waited.

In the evening the engineer sent five roubles for the damage, and the
two horses, the pony and the bull-calf, without being fed or given
water, returned home, their heads hanging with a guilty air as though
they were convicted criminals.

On getting the five roubles the Lytchkovs, father and son, the village
elder and Volodka, punted over the river in a boat and went to a
hamlet on the other side where there was a tavern, and there had a long
carousal. Their singing and the shouting of the younger Lytchkov could
be heard from the village. Their women were uneasy and did not sleep all
night. Rodion did not sleep either.

“It’s a bad business,” he said, sighing and turning from side to side.
“The gentleman will be angry, and then there will be trouble.... They
have insulted the gentleman.... Oh, they’ve insulted him. It’s a bad
business...”

It happened that the peasants, Rodion amongst them, went into their
forest to divide the clearings for mowing, and as they were returning
home they were met by the engineer. He was wearing a red cotton shirt
and high boots; a setter dog with its long tongue hanging out, followed
behind him.

“Good-day, brothers,” he said.

The peasants stopped and took off their hats.

“I have long wanted to have a talk with you, friends,” he went on. “This
is what it is. Ever since the early spring your cattle have been in my
copse and garden every day. Everything is trampled down; the pigs have
rooted up the meadow, are ruining everything in the kitchen garden, and
all the undergrowth in the copse is destroyed. There is no getting on
with your herdsmen; one asks them civilly, and they are rude. Damage is
done on my estate every day and I do nothing--I don’t fine you or make
a complaint; meanwhile you impounded my horses and my bull calf and
exacted five roubles. Was that right? Is that neighbourly?” he went
on, and his face was so soft and persuasive, and his expression was not
forbidding. “Is that the way decent people behave? A week ago one of
your people cut down two oak saplings in my copse. You have dug up
the road to Eresnevo, and now I have to go two miles round. Why do you
injure me at every step? What harm have I done you? For God’s sake, tell
me! My wife and I do our utmost to live with you in peace and harmony;
we help the peasants as we can. My wife is a kind, warm-hearted woman;
she never refuses you help. That is her dream--to be of use to you and
your children. You reward us with evil for our good. You are unjust, my
friends. Think of that. I ask you earnestly to think it over. We treat
you humanely; repay us in the same coin.”

He turned and went away. The peasants stood a little longer, put on
their caps and walked away. Rodion, who always understood everything
that was said to him in some peculiar way of his own, heaved a sigh and
said:

“We must pay. ‘Repay in coin, my friends’... he said.”

They walked to the village in silence. On reaching home Rodion said his
prayer, took off his boots, and sat down on the bench beside his wife.
Stepanida and he always sat side by side when they were at home, and
always walked side by side in the street; they ate and they drank and
they slept always together, and the older they grew the more they
loved one another. It was hot and crowded in their hut, and there were
children everywhere--on the floors, in the windows, on the stove.... In
spite of her advanced years Stepanida was still bearing children, and
now, looking at the crowd of children, it was hard to distinguish which
were Rodion’s and which were Volodka’s. Volodka’s wife, Lukerya, a plain
young woman with prominent eyes and a nose like the beak of a bird, was
kneading dough in a tub; Volodka was sitting on the stove with his legs
hanging.

“On the road near Nikita’s buckwheat... the engineer with his dog...”
 Rodion began, after a rest, scratching his ribs and his elbow. “‘You
must pay,’ says he... ‘coin,’ says he.... Coin or no coin, we shall have
to collect ten kopecks from every hut. We’ve offended the gentleman very
much. I am sorry for him....”

“We’ve lived without a bridge,” said Volodka, not looking at anyone,
“and we don’t want one.”

“What next; the bridge is a government business.”

“We don’t want it.”

“Your opinion is not asked. What is it to you?”

“‘Your opinion is not asked,’” Volodka mimicked him. “We don’t want
to drive anywhere; what do we want with a bridge? If we have to, we can
cross by the boat.”

Someone from the yard outside knocked at the window so violently that it
seemed to shake the whole hut.

“Is Volodka at home?” he heard the voice of the younger Lytchkov.
“Volodka, come out, come along.”

Volodka jumped down off the stove and began looking for his cap.

“Don’t go, Volodka,” said Rodion diffidently. “Don’t go with them, son.
You are foolish, like a little child; they will teach you no good; don’t
go!”

“Don’t go, son,” said Stepanida, and she blinked as though about to shed
tears. “I bet they are calling you to the tavern.”

“‘To the tavern,’” Volodka mimicked.

“You’ll come back drunk again, you currish Herod,” said Lukerya, looking
at him angrily. “Go along, go along, and may you burn up with vodka, you
tailless Satan!”

“You hold your tongue,” shouted Volodka.

“They’ve married me to a fool, they’ve ruined me, a luckless orphan,
you red-headed drunkard...” wailed Lukerya, wiping her face with a hand
covered with dough. “I wish I had never set eyes on you.”

Volodka gave her a blow on the ear and went off.

III

Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter visited the village on foot. They
were out for a walk. It was a Sunday, and the peasant women and girls
were walking up and down the street in their brightly-coloured dresses.
Rodion and Stepanida, sitting side by side at their door, bowed and
smiled to Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter as to acquaintances.
From the windows more than a dozen children stared at them; their faces
expressed amazement and curiosity, and they could be heard whispering:

“The Kutcherov lady has come! The Kutcherov lady!”

“Good-morning,” said Elena Ivanovna, and she stopped; she paused, and
then asked: “Well, how are you getting on?”

“We get along all right, thank God,” answered Rodion, speaking rapidly.
“To be sure we get along.”

“The life we lead!” smiled Stepanida. “You can see our poverty
yourself, dear lady! The family is fourteen souls in all, and only two
bread-winners. We are supposed to be blacksmiths, but when they bring us
a horse to shoe we have no coal, nothing to buy it with. We are worried
to death, lady,” she went on, and laughed. “Oh, oh, we are worried to
death.”

Elena Ivanovna sat down at the entrance and, putting her arm round her
little girl, pondered something, and judging from the little girl’s
expression, melancholy thoughts were straying through her mind, too; as
she brooded she played with the sumptuous lace on the parasol she had
taken out of her mother’s hands.

“Poverty,” said Rodion, “a great deal of anxiety--you see no end to it.
Here, God sends no rain... our life is not easy, there is no denying
it.”

“You have a hard time in this life,” said Elena Ivanovna, “but in the
other world you will be happy.”

Rodion did not understand her, and simply coughed into his clenched hand
by way of reply. Stepanida said:

“Dear lady, the rich men will be all right in the next world, too. The
rich put up candles, pay for services; the rich give to beggars, but
what can the poor man do? He has no time to make the sign of the cross.
He is the beggar of beggars himself; how can he think of his soul? And
many sins come from poverty; from trouble we snarl at one another like
dogs, we haven’t a good word to say to one another, and all sorts of
things happen, dear lady--God forbid! It seems we have no luck in this
world nor the next. All the luck has fallen to the rich.”

She spoke gaily; she was evidently used to talking of her hard life. And
Rodion smiled, too; he was pleased that his old woman was so clever, so
ready of speech.

“It is only on the surface that the rich seem to be happy,” said Elena
Ivanovna. “Every man has his sorrow. Here my husband and I do not live
poorly, we have means, but are we happy? I am young, but I have had
four children; my children are always being ill. I am ill, too, and
constantly being doctored.”

“And what is your illness?” asked Rodion.

“A woman’s complaint. I get no sleep; a continual headache gives me no
peace. Here I am sitting and talking, but my head is bad, I am weak all
over, and I should prefer the hardest labour to such a condition. My
soul, too, is troubled; I am in continual fear for my children, my
husband. Every family has its own trouble of some sort; we have ours.
I am not of noble birth. My grandfather was a simple peasant, my father
was a tradesman in Moscow; he was a plain, uneducated man, too, while my
husband’s parents were wealthy and distinguished. They did not want him
to marry me, but he disobeyed them, quarrelled with them, and they have
not forgiven us to this day. That worries my husband; it troubles him
and keeps him in constant agitation; he loves his mother, loves her
dearly. So I am uneasy, too, my soul is in pain.”

Peasants, men and women, were by now standing round Rodion’s hut and
listening. Kozov came up, too, and stood twitching his long, narrow
beard. The Lytchkovs, father and son, drew near.

“And say what you like, one cannot be happy and satisfied if one does
not feel in one’s proper place.” Elena Ivanovna went on. “Each of you
has his strip of land, each of you works and knows what he is working
for; my husband builds bridges--in short, everyone has his place, while
I, I simply walk about. I have not my bit to work. I don’t work, and
feel as though I were an outsider. I am saying all this that you may not
judge from outward appearances; if a man is expensively dressed and has
means it does not prove that he is satisfied with his life.”

She got up to go away and took her daughter by the hand.

“I like your place here very much,” she said, and smiled, and from that
faint, diffident smile one could tell how unwell she really was, how
young and how pretty; she had a pale, thinnish face with dark eyebrows
and fair hair. And the little girl was just such another as her mother:
thin, fair, and slender. There was a fragrance of scent about them.

“I like the river and the forest and the village,” Elena Ivanovna went
on; “I could live here all my life, and I feel as though here I
should get strong and find my place. I want to help you--I want to
dreadfully--to be of use, to be a real friend to you. I know your need,
and what I don’t know I feel, my heart guesses. I am sick, feeble, and
for me perhaps it is not possible to change my life as I would. But I
have children. I will try to bring them up that they may be of use to
you, may love you. I shall impress upon them continually that their life
does not belong to them, but to you. Only I beg you earnestly, I beseech
you, trust us, live in friendship with us. My husband is a kind, good
man. Don’t worry him, don’t irritate him. He is sensitive to every
trifle, and yesterday, for instance, your cattle were in our vegetable
garden, and one of your people broke down the fence to the bee-hives,
and such an attitude to us drives my husband to despair. I beg you,”
 she went on in an imploring voice, and she clasped her hands on her
bosom--“I beg you to treat us as good neighbours; let us live in peace!
There is a saying, you know, that even a bad peace is better than a
good quarrel, and, ‘Don’t buy property, but buy neighbours.’ I repeat
my husband is a kind man and good; if all goes well we promise to do
everything in our power for you; we will mend the roads, we will build a
school for your children. I promise you.”

“Of course we thank you humbly, lady,” said Lytchkov the father, looking
at the ground; “you are educated people; it is for you to know best.
Only, you see, Voronov, a rich peasant at Eresnevo, promised to build
a school; he, too, said, ‘I will do this for you,’ ‘I will do that for
you,’ and he only put up the framework and refused to go on. And then
they made the peasants put the roof on and finish it; it cost them a
thousand roubles. Voronov did not care; he only stroked his beard, but
the peasants felt it a bit hard.”

“That was a crow, but now there’s a rook, too,” said Kozov, and he
winked.

There was the sound of laughter.

“We don’t want a school,” said Volodka sullenly. “Our children go to
Petrovskoe, and they can go on going there; we don’t want it.”

Elena Ivanovna seemed suddenly intimidated; her face looked paler and
thinner, she shrank into herself as though she had been touched with
something coarse, and walked away without uttering another word. And she
walked more and more quickly, without looking round.

“Lady,” said Rodion, walking after her, “lady, wait a bit; hear what I
would say to you.”

He followed her without his cap, and spoke softly as though begging.

“Lady, wait and hear what I will say to you.”

They had walked out of the village, and Elena Ivanovna stopped beside a
cart in the shade of an old mountain ash.

“Don’t be offended, lady,” said Rodion. “What does it mean? Have
patience. Have patience for a couple of years. You will live here, you
will have patience, and it will all come round. Our folks are good and
peaceable; there’s no harm in them; it’s God’s truth I’m telling you.
Don’t mind Kozov and the Lytchkovs, and don’t mind Volodka. He’s a fool;
he listens to the first that speaks. The others are quiet folks; they
are silent. Some would be glad, you know, to say a word from the heart
and to stand up for themselves, but cannot. They have a heart and a
conscience, but no tongue. Don’t be offended... have patience.... What
does it matter?”

Elena Ivanovna looked at the broad, tranquil river, pondering, and
tears flowed down her cheeks. And Rodion was troubled by those tears; he
almost cried himself.

“Never mind...” he muttered. “Have patience for a couple of years. You
can have the school, you can have the roads, only not all at once. If
you went, let us say, to sow corn on that mound you would first have to
weed it out, to pick out all the stones, and then to plough, and work
and work... and with the people, you see, it is the same... you must
work and work until you overcome them.”

The crowd had moved away from Rodion’s hut, and was coming along the
street towards the mountain ash. They began singing songs and playing
the concertina, and they kept coming closer and closer....

“Mamma, let us go away from here,” said the little girl, huddling up to
her mother, pale and shaking all over; “let us go away, mamma!

“Where?”

“To Moscow.... Let us go, mamma.”

The child began crying.

Rodion was utterly overcome; his face broke into profuse perspiration;
he took out of his pocket a little crooked cucumber, like a half-moon,
covered with crumbs of rye bread, and began thrusting it into the little
girl’s hands.

“Come, come,” he muttered, scowling severely; “take the little cucumber,
eat it up.... You mustn’t cry. Mamma will whip you.... She’ll tell your
father of you when you get home. Come, come....”

They walked on, and he still followed behind them, wanting to say
something friendly and persuasive to them. And seeing that they were
both absorbed in their own thoughts and their own griefs, and not
noticing him, he stopped and, shading his eyes from the sun, looked
after them for a long time till they disappeared into their copse.


IV


The engineer seemed to grow irritable and petty, and in every trivial
incident saw an act of robbery or outrage. His gate was kept bolted even
by day, and at night two watchmen walked up and down the garden beating
a board; and they gave up employing anyone from Obrutchanovo as a
labourer. As ill-luck would have it someone (either a peasant or one of
the workmen) took the new wheels off the cart and replaced them by
old ones, then soon afterwards two bridles and a pair of pincers were
carried off, and murmurs arose even in the village. People began to say
that a search should be made at the Lytchkovs’ and at Volodka’s, and
then the bridles and the pincers were found under the hedge in the
engineer’s garden; someone had thrown them down there.

It happened that the peasants were coming in a crowd out of the forest,
and again they met the engineer on the road. He stopped, and without
wishing them good-day he began, looking angrily first at one, then at
another:

“I have begged you not to gather mushrooms in the park and near the
yard, but to leave them for my wife and children, but your girls come
before daybreak and there is not a mushroom left....Whether one asks
you or not it makes no difference. Entreaties, and friendliness, and
persuasion I see are all useless.”

He fixed his indignant eyes on Rodion and went on:

“My wife and I behaved to you as human beings, as to our equals, and
you? But what’s the use of talking! It will end by our looking down upon
you. There is nothing left!”

And making an effort to restrain his anger, not to say too much, he
turned and went on.

On getting home Rodion said his prayer, took off his boots, and sat down
beside his wife.

“Yes...” he began with a sigh. “We were walking along just now, and Mr.
Kutcherov met us.... Yes.... He saw the girls at daybreak... ‘Why don’t
they bring mushrooms,’... he said ‘to my wife and children?’ he said....
And then he looked at me and he said: ‘I and my wife will look after
you,’ he said. I wanted to fall down at his feet, but I hadn’t the
courage.... God give him health... God bless him!...”

Stephania crossed herself and sighed.

“They are kind, simple-hearted people,” Rodion went on. “‘We shall look
after you.’... He promised me that before everyone. In our old age...
it wouldn’t be a bad thing.... I should always pray for them.... Holy
Mother, bless them....”

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the fourteenth of September,
was the festival of the village church. The Lytchkovs, father and son,
went across the river early in the morning and returned to dinner drunk;
they spent a long time going about the village, alternately singing and
swearing; then they had a fight and went to the New Villa to complain.
First Lytchkov the father went into the yard with a long ashen stick in
his hands. He stopped irresolutely and took off his hat. Just at
that moment the engineer and his family were sitting on the verandah,
drinking tea.

“What do you want?” shouted the engineer.

“Your honour...” Lytchkov began, and burst into tears. “Show the Divine
mercy, protect me... my son makes my life a misery... your honour...”

Lytchkov the son walked up, too; he, too, was bareheaded and had a stick
in his hand; he stopped and fixed his drunken senseless eyes on the
verandah.

“It is not my business to settle your affairs,” said the engineer. “Go
to the rural captain or the police officer.”

“I have been everywhere.... I have lodged a petition...” said Lytchkov
the father, and he sobbed. “Where can I go now? He can kill me now, it
seems. He can do anything. Is that the way to treat a father? A father?”

He raised his stick and hit his son on the head; the son raised his
stick and struck his father just on his bald patch such a blow that
the stick bounced back. The father did not even flinch, but hit his
son again and again on the head. And so they stood and kept hitting one
another on the head, and it looked not so much like a fight as some sort
of a game. And peasants, men and women, stood in a crowd at the gate and
looked into the garden, and the faces of all were grave. They were the
peasants who had come to greet them for the holiday, but seeing the
Lytchkovs, they were ashamed and did not go in.

The next morning Elena Ivanovna went with the children to Moscow. And
there was a rumour that the engineer was selling his house....

V

The peasants had long ago grown used to the sight of the bridge, and it
was difficult to imagine the river at that place without a bridge. The
heap of rubble left from the building of it had long been overgrown with
grass, the navvies were forgotten, and instead of the strains of the
“Dubinushka” that they used to sing, the peasants heard almost every
hour the sounds of a passing train.

The New Villa has long ago been sold; now it belongs to a government
clerk who comes here from the town for the holidays with his family,
drinks tea on the terrace, and then goes back to the town again. He
wears a cockade on his cap; he talks and clears his throat as though
he were a very important official, though he is only of the rank of a
collegiate secretary, and when the peasants bow he makes no response.

In Obrutchanovo everyone has grown older; Kozov is dead. In Rodion’s hut
there are even more children. Volodka has grown a long red beard. They
are still as poor as ever.

In the early spring the Obrutchanovo peasants were sawing wood near the
station. And after work they were going home; they walked without haste
one after the other. Broad saws curved over their shoulders; the sun was
reflected in them. The nightingales were singing in the bushes on the
bank, larks were trilling in the heavens. It was quiet at the New Villa;
there was not a soul there, and only golden pigeons--golden because the
sunlight was streaming upon them--were flying over the house. All of
them--Rodion, the two Lytchkovs, and Volodka--thought of the white
horses, the little ponies, the fireworks, the boat with the lanterns;
they remembered how the engineer’s wife, so beautiful and so grandly
dressed, had come into the village and talked to them in such a friendly
way. And it seemed as though all that had never been; it was like a
dream or a fairy-tale.

They trudged along, tired out, and mused as they went.... In their
village, they mused, the people were good, quiet, sensible, fearing God,
and Elena Ivanovna, too, was quiet, kind, and gentle; it made one sad to
look at her, but why had they not got on together? Why had they parted
like enemies? How was it that some mist had shrouded from their eyes
what mattered most, and had let them see nothing but damage done by
cattle, bridles, pincers, and all those trivial things which now, as
they remembered them, seemed so nonsensical? How was it that with the
new owner they lived in peace, and yet had been on bad terms with the
engineer?

And not knowing what answer to make to these questions they were all
silent except Volodka, who muttered something.

“What is it?” Rodion asked.

“We lived without a bridge...” said Volodka gloomily. “We lived without
a bridge, and did not ask for one... and we don’t want it....”

No one answered him and they walked on in silence with drooping heads.




DREAMS

Two peasant constables--one a stubby, black-bearded individual with such
exceptionally short legs that if you looked at him from behind it seemed
as though his legs began much lower down than in other people; the
other, long, thin, and straight as a stick, with a scanty beard of dark
reddish colour--were escorting to the district town a tramp who refused
to remember his name. The first waddled along, looking from side to
side, chewing now a straw, now his own sleeve, slapping himself on the
haunches and humming, and altogether had a careless and frivolous air;
the other, in spite of his lean face and narrow shoulders, looked solid,
grave, and substantial; in the lines and expression of his whole figure
he was like the priests among the Old Believers, or the warriors who
are painted on old-fashioned ikons. “For his wisdom God had added to
his forehead”--that is, he was bald--which increased the resemblance
referred to. The first was called Andrey Ptaha, the second Nikandr
Sapozhnikov.

The man they were escorting did not in the least correspond with the
conception everyone has of a tramp. He was a frail little man, weak
and sickly-looking, with small, colourless, and extremely indefinite
features. His eyebrows were scanty, his expression mild and submissive;
he had scarcely a trace of a moustache, though he was over thirty.
He walked along timidly, bent forward, with his hands thrust into his
sleeves. The collar of his shabby cloth overcoat, which did not look
like a peasant’s, was turned up to the very brim of his cap, so that
only his little red nose ventured to peep out into the light of day. He
spoke in an ingratiating tenor, continually coughing. It was very, very
difficult to believe that he was a tramp concealing his surname. He was
more like an unsuccessful priest’s son, stricken by God and reduced to
beggary; a clerk discharged for drunkenness; a merchant’s son or nephew
who had tried his feeble powers in a theatrical career, and was now
going home to play the last act in the parable of the prodigal son;
perhaps, judging by the dull patience with which he struggled with the
hopeless autumn mud, he might have been a fanatical monk, wandering from
one Russian monastery to another, continually seeking “a peaceful life,
free from sin,” and not finding it....

The travellers had been a long while on their way, but they seemed to
be always on the same small patch of ground. In front of them there
stretched thirty feet of muddy black-brown mud, behind them the same,
and wherever one looked further, an impenetrable wall of white fog.
They went on and on, but the ground remained the same, the wall was no
nearer, and the patch on which they walked seemed still the same patch.
They got a glimpse of a white, clumsy-looking stone, a small ravine,
or a bundle of hay dropped by a passer-by, the brief glimmer of a great
muddy puddle, or, suddenly, a shadow with vague outlines would come into
view ahead of them; the nearer they got to it the smaller and darker it
became; nearer still, and there stood up before the wayfarers a slanting
milestone with the number rubbed off, or a wretched birch-tree drenched
and bare like a wayside beggar. The birch-tree would whisper something
with what remained of its yellow leaves, one leaf would break off and
float lazily to the ground.... And then again fog, mud, the brown grass
at the edges of the road. On the grass hung dingy, unfriendly tears.
They were not the tears of soft joy such as the earth weeps at welcoming
the summer sun and parting from it, and such as she gives to drink
at dawn to the corncrakes, quails, and graceful, long-beaked crested
snipes. The travellers’ feet stuck in the heavy, clinging mud. Every
step cost an effort.

Andrey Ptaha was somewhat excited. He kept looking round at the tramp
and trying to understand how a live, sober man could fail to remember
his name.

“You are an orthodox Christian, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” the tramp answered mildly.

“H’m... then you’ve been christened?”

“Why, to be sure! I’m not a Turk. I go to church and to the sacrament,
and do not eat meat when it is forbidden. And I observe my religious
duties punctually....”

“Well, what are you called, then?”

“Call me what you like, good man.”

Ptaha shrugged his shoulders and slapped himself on the haunches in
extreme perplexity. The other constable, Nikandr Sapozhnikov, maintained
a staid silence. He was not so naive as Ptaha, and apparently knew very
well the reasons which might induce an orthodox Christian to conceal
his name from other people. His expressive face was cold and stern. He
walked apart and did not condescend to idle chatter with his companions,
but, as it were, tried to show everyone, even the fog, his sedateness
and discretion.

“God knows what to make of you,” Ptaha persisted in addressing the
tramp. “Peasant you are not, and gentleman you are not, but some sort of
a thing between.... The other day I was washing a sieve in the pond and
caught a reptile--see, as long as a finger, with gills and a tail. The
first minute I thought it was a fish, then I looked--and, blow it! if it
hadn’t paws. It was not a fish, it was a viper, and the deuce only knows
what it was.... So that’s like you.... What’s your calling?”

“I am a peasant and of peasant family,” sighed the tramp. “My mamma was
a house serf. I don’t look like a peasant, that’s true, for such has
been my lot, good man. My mamma was a nurse with the gentry, and had
every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and blood, I lived with her in
the master’s house. She petted and spoiled me, and did her best to take
me out of my humble class and make a gentleman of me. I slept in a
bed, every day I ate a real dinner, I wore breeches and shoes like a
gentleman’s child. What my mamma ate I was fed on, too; they gave her
stuffs as a present, and she dressed me up in them.... We lived well! I
ate so many sweets and cakes in my childish years that if they could
be sold now it would be enough to buy a good horse. Mamma taught me
to read and write, she instilled the fear of God in me from my earliest
years, and she so trained me that now I can’t bring myself to utter an
unrefined peasant word. And I don’t drink vodka, my lad, and am neat in
my dress, and know how to behave with decorum in good society. If she
is still living, God give her health; and if she is dead, then, O Lord,
give her soul peace in Thy Kingdom, wherein the just are at rest.”

The tramp bared his head with the scanty hair standing up like a brush
on it, turned his eyes upward and crossed himself twice.

“Grant her, O Lord, a verdant and peaceful resting-place,” he said in
a drawling voice, more like an old woman’s than a man’s. “Teach Thy
servant Xenia Thy justifications, O Lord! If it had not been for
my beloved mamma I should have been a peasant with no sort of
understanding! Now, young man, ask me about anything and I understand
it all: the holy Scriptures and profane writings, and every prayer and
catechism. I live according to the Scriptures.... I don’t injure anyone,
I keep my flesh in purity and continence, I observe the fasts, I eat at
fitting times. Another man will take no pleasure in anything but vodka
and lewd talk, but when I have time I sit in a corner and read a book. I
read and I weep and weep.”

“What do you weep for?”

“They write so pathetically! For some books one gives but a five-kopeck
piece, and yet one weeps and sighs exceedingly over it.”

“Is your father dead?” asked Ptaha.

“I don’t know, good man. I don’t know my parent; it is no use concealing
it. I judge that I was mamma’s illegitimate son. My mamma lived all her
life with the gentry, and did not want to marry a simple peasant....”

“And so she fell into the master’s hands,” laughed Ptaha.

“She did transgress, that’s true. She was pious, God-fearing, but she
did not keep her maiden purity. It is a sin, of course, a great sin,
there’s no doubt about it, but to make up for it there is, maybe, noble
blood in me. Maybe I am only a peasant by class, but in nature a noble
gentleman.”

The “noble gentleman” uttered all this in a soft, sugary tenor,
wrinkling up his narrow forehead and emitting creaking sounds from his
red, frozen little nose. Ptaha listened and looked askance at him in
wonder, continually shrugging his shoulders.

After going nearly five miles the constables and the tramp sat down on a
mound to rest.

“Even a dog knows his name,” Ptaha muttered. “My name is Andryushka,
his is Nikandr; every man has his holy name, and it can’t be forgotten.
Nohow.”

“Who has any need to know my name?” sighed the tramp, leaning his cheek
on his fist. “And what advantage would it be to me if they did know it?
If I were allowed to go where I would--but it would only make things
worse. I know the law, Christian brothers. Now I am a tramp who doesn’t
remember his name, and it’s the very most if they send me to Eastern
Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if I were to tell them
my real name and description they would send me back to hard labour, I
know!”

“Why, have you been a convict?”

“I have, dear friend. For four years I went about with my head shaved
and fetters on my legs.”

“What for?”

“For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so,
my mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into my
master’s glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the storeroom, numbers
of them; it was easy to make a mistake over them.”

The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:

“She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man’s soul is a
slumbering forest! It may have been an accident, or maybe she could
not endure the affront of seeing the master prefer another servant....
Perhaps she put it in on purpose, God knows! I was young then, and
did not understand it all... now I remember that our master had taken
another mistress and mamma was greatly disturbed. Our trial lasted
nearly two years.... Mamma was condemned to penal servitude for twenty
years, and I, on account of my youth, only to seven.”

“And why were you sentenced?”

“As an accomplice. I handed the glass to the master. That was always the
custom. Mamma prepared the soda and I handed it to him. Only I tell you
all this as a Christian, brothers, as I would say it before God. Don’t
you tell anybody....”

“Oh, nobody’s going to ask us,” said Ptaha. “So you’ve run away from
prison, have you?”

“I have, dear friend. Fourteen of us ran away. Some folks, God
bless them! ran away and took me with them. Now you tell me, on your
conscience, good man, what reason have I to disclose my name? They will
send me back to penal servitude, you know! And I am not fit for penal
servitude! I am a refined man in delicate health. I like to sleep and
eat in cleanliness. When I pray to God I like to light a little lamp
or a candle, and not to have a noise around me. When I bow down to the
ground I like the floor not to be dirty or spat upon. And I bow down
forty times every morning and evening, praying for mamma.”

The tramp took off his cap and crossed himself.

“And let them send me to Eastern Siberia,” he said; “I am not afraid of
that.”

“Surely that’s no better?”

“It is quite a different thing. In penal servitude you are like a crab
in a basket: crowding, crushing, jostling, there’s no room to breathe;
it’s downright hell--such hell, may the Queen of Heaven keep us from
it! You are a robber and treated like a robber--worse than any dog. You
can’t sleep, you can’t eat or even say your prayers. But it’s not like
that in a settlement. In a settlement I shall be a member of a commune
like other people. The authorities are bound by law to give me my
share... ye-es! They say the land costs nothing, no more than snow; you
can take what you like! They will give me corn land and building land
and garden.... I shall plough my fields like other people, sow seed. I
shall have cattle and stock of all sorts, bees, sheep, and dogs.... A
Siberian cat, that rats and mice may not devour my goods.... I will put
up a house, I shall buy ikons.... Please God, I’ll get married, I shall
have children....”

The tramp muttered and looked, not at his listeners, but away into the
distance. Naive as his dreams were, they were uttered in such a genuine
and heartfelt tone that it was difficult not to believe in them. The
tramp’s little mouth was screwed up in a smile. His eyes and little nose
and his whole face were fixed and blank with blissful anticipation of
happiness in the distant future. The constables listened and looked at
him gravely, not without sympathy. They, too, believed in his dreams.

“I am not afraid of Siberia,” the tramp went on muttering. “Siberia is
just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as here. They are just
as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only there is more freedom there
and people are better off. Everything is better there. Take the rivers
there, for instance; they are far better than those here. There’s no end
of fish; and all sorts of wild fowl. And my greatest pleasure, brothers,
is fishing. Give me no bread to eat, but let me sit with a fishhook.
Yes, indeed! I fish with a hook and with a wire line, and set creels,
and when the ice comes I catch with a net. I am not strong to draw
up the net, so I shall hire a man for five kopecks. And, Lord, what a
pleasure it is! You catch an eel-pout or a roach of some sort and are
as pleased as though you had met your own brother. And would you believe
it, there’s a special art for every fish: you catch one with a live
bait, you catch another with a grub, the third with a frog or a
grasshopper. One has to understand all that, of course! For example,
take the eel-pout. It is not a delicate fish--it will take a perch; and
a pike loves a gudgeon, the _shilishper_ likes a butterfly. If you fish
for a roach in a rapid stream there is no greater pleasure. You throw
the line of seventy feet without lead, with a butterfly or a beetle, so
that the bait floats on the surface; you stand in the water without your
trousers and let it go with the current, and tug! the roach pulls at it!
Only you have got to be artful that he doesn’t carry off the bait, the
damned rascal. As soon as he tugs at your line you must whip it up; it’s
no good waiting. It’s wonderful what a lot of fish I’ve caught in my
time. When we were running away the other convicts would sleep in the
forest; I could not sleep, but I was off to the river. The rivers there
are wide and rapid, the banks are steep--awfully! It’s all slumbering
forests on the bank. The trees are so tall that if you look to the top
it makes you dizzy. Every pine would be worth ten roubles by the prices
here.”

In the overwhelming rush of his fancies, of artistic images of the past
and sweet presentiments of happiness in the future, the poor wretch sank
into silence, merely moving his lips as though whispering to himself.
The vacant, blissful smile never left his lips. The constables were
silent. They were pondering with bent heads. In the autumn stillness,
when the cold, sullen mist that rises from the earth lies like a weight
on the heart, when it stands like a prison wall before the eyes, and
reminds man of the limitation of his freedom, it is sweet to think of
the broad, rapid rivers, with steep banks wild and luxuriant, of the
impenetrable forests, of the boundless steppes. Slowly and quietly the
fancy pictures how early in the morning, before the flush of dawn has
left the sky, a man makes his way along the steep deserted bank like
a tiny speck: the ancient, mast-like pines rise up in terraces on
both sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur
menacingly; rocks, huge stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he
is strong in body and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees,
nor stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which
repeats the sound of every footstep that he takes.

The peasants called up a picture of a free life such as they had never
lived; whether they vaguely recalled the images of stories heard long
ago or whether notions of a free life had been handed down to them with
their flesh and blood from far-off free ancestors, God knows!

The first to break the silence was Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who had not till
then let fall a single word. Whether he envied the tramp’s transparent
happiness, or whether he felt in his heart that dreams of happiness were
out of keeping with the grey fog and the dirty brown mud--anyway, he
looked sternly at the tramp and said:

“It’s all very well, to be sure, only you won’t reach those plenteous
regions, brother. How could you? Before you’d gone two hundred miles
you’d give up your soul to God. Just look what a weakling you are! Here
you’ve hardly gone five miles and you can’t get your breath.”

The tramp turned slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile vanished
from his face. He looked with a scared and guilty air at the peasant’s
staid face, apparently remembered something, and bent his head. A
silence followed again.... All three were pondering. The peasants were
racking their brains in the effort to grasp in their imagination what
can be grasped by none but God--that is, the vast expanse dividing
them from the land of freedom. Into the tramp’s mind thronged clear
and distinct pictures more terrible than that expanse. Before him rose
vividly the picture of the long legal delays and procrastinations,
the temporary and permanent prisons, the convict boats, the wearisome
stoppages on the way, the frozen winters, illnesses, deaths of
companions....

The tramp blinked guiltily, wiped the tiny drops of sweat from his
forehead with his sleeve, drew a deep breath as though he had just leapt
out of a very hot bath, then wiped his forehead with the other sleeve
and looked round fearfully.

“That’s true; you won’t get there!” Ptaha agreed. “You are not much of a
walker! Look at you--nothing but skin and bone! You’ll die, brother!”

“Of course he’ll die! What could he do?” said Nikandr. “He’s fit for the
hospital now.... For sure!”

The man who had forgotten his name looked at the stern, unconcerned
faces of his sinister companions, and without taking off his cap,
hurriedly crossed himself, staring with wide-open eyes.... He trembled,
his head shook, and he began twitching all over, like a caterpillar when
it is stepped upon....

“Well, it’s time to go,” said Nikandr, getting up; “we’ve had a rest.”

A minute later they were stepping along the muddy road. The tramp was
more bent than ever, and he thrust his hands further up his sleeves.
Ptaha was silent.




THE PIPE

MELITON SHISHKIN, a bailiff from the Dementyev farm, exhausted by
the sultry heat of the fir-wood and covered with spiders’ webs and
pine-needles, made his way with his gun to the edge of the wood. His
Damka--a mongrel between a yard dog and a setter--an extremely thin
bitch heavy with young, trailed after her master with her wet tail
between her legs, doing all she could to avoid pricking her nose. It was
a dull, overcast morning. Big drops dripped from the bracken and from
the trees that were wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell
of decay from the dampness of the wood.

There were birch-trees ahead of him where the wood ended, and between
their stems and branches he could see the misty distance. Beyond the
birch-trees someone was playing on a shepherd’s rustic pipe. The player
produced no more than five or six notes, dragged them out languidly
with no attempt at forming a tune, and yet there was something harsh and
extremely dreary in the sound of the piping.

As the copse became sparser, and the pines were interspersed with young
birch-trees, Meliton saw a herd. Hobbled horses, cows, and sheep were
wandering among the bushes and, snapping the dry branches, sniffed at
the herbage of the copse. A lean old shepherd, bareheaded, in a torn
grey smock, stood leaning against the wet trunk of a birch-tree. He
stared at the ground, pondering something, and played his pipe, it
seemed, mechanically.

“Good-day, grandfather! God help you!” Meliton greeted him in a thin,
husky voice which seemed incongruous with his huge stature and big,
fleshy face. “How cleverly you are playing your pipe! Whose herd are you
minding?”

“The Artamonovs’,” the shepherd answered reluctantly, and he thrust the
pipe into his bosom.

“So I suppose the wood is the Artamonovs’ too?” Meliton inquired,
looking about him. “Yes, it is the Artamonovs’; only fancy... I
had completely lost myself. I got my face scratched all over in the
thicket.”

He sat down on the wet earth and began rolling up a bit of newspaper
into a cigarette.

Like his voice, everything about the man was small and out of keeping
with his height, his breadth, and his fleshy face: his smiles, his
eyes, his buttons, his tiny cap, which would hardly keep on his big,
closely-cropped head. When he talked and smiled there was something
womanish, timid, and meek about his puffy, shaven face and his whole
figure.

“What weather! God help us!” he said, and he turned his head from side
to side. “Folk have not carried the oats yet, and the rain seems as
though it had been taken on for good, God bless it.”

The shepherd looked at the sky, from which a drizzling rain was falling,
at the wood, at the bailif’s wet clothes, pondered, and said nothing.

“The whole summer has been the same,” sighed Meliton. “A bad business
for the peasants and no pleasure for the gentry.”

The shepherd looked at the sky again, thought a moment, and said
deliberately, as though chewing each word:

“It’s all going the same way.... There is nothing good to be looked
for.”

“How are things with you here?” Meliton inquired, lighting his
cigarette. “Haven’t you seen any coveys of grouse in the Artamonovs’
clearing?”

The shepherd did not answer at once. He looked again at the sky and to
right and left, thought a little, blinked.... Apparently he attached no
little significance to his words, and to increase their value tried to
pronounce them with deliberation and a certain solemnity. The expression
of his face had the sharpness and staidness of old age, and the fact
that his nose had a saddle-shaped depression across the middle and his
nostrils turned upwards gave him a sly and sarcastic look.

“No, I believe I haven’t,” he said. “Our huntsman Eryomka was saying
that on Elijah’s Day he started one covey near Pustoshye, but I dare say
he was lying. There are very few birds.”

“Yes, brother, very few.... Very few everywhere! The shooting here,
if one is to look at it with common sense, is good for nothing and not
worth having. There is no game at all, and what there is is not worth
dirtying your hands over--it is not full-grown. It is such poor stuff
that one is ashamed to look at it.”

Meliton gave a laugh and waved his hands.

“Things happen so queerly in this world that it is simply laughable and
nothing else. Birds nowadays have become so unaccountable: they sit late
on their eggs, and there are some, I declare, that have not hatched them
by St. Peter’s Day!”

“It’s all going the same,” said the shepherd, turning his face upwards.
“There was little game last year, this year there are fewer birds still,
and in another five years, mark my words, there will be none at all. As
far as I can see there will soon be not only no game, but no birds at
all.”

“Yes,” Meliton assented, after a moment’s thought. “That’s true.”

The shepherd gave a bitter smile and shook his head.

“It’s a wonder,” he said, “what has become of them all! I remember
twenty years ago there used to be geese here, and cranes and ducks and
grouse--clouds and clouds of them! The gentry used to meet together
for shooting, and one heard nothing but pouf-pouf-pouf! pouf-pouf-pouf!
There was no end to the woodcocks, the snipe, and the little teals,
and the water-snipe were as common as starlings, or let us say
sparrows--lots and lots of them! And what has become of them all? We
don’t even see the birds of prey. The eagles, the hawks, and the owls
have all gone.... There are fewer of every sort of wild beast, too.
Nowadays, brother, even the wolf and the fox have grown rare, let alone
the bear or the otter. And you know in old days there were even elks!
For forty years I have been observing the works of God from year to
year, and it is my opinion that everything is going the same way.”

“What way?”

“To the bad, young man. To ruin, we must suppose... The time has come
for God’s world to perish.”

The old man put on his cap and began gazing at the sky.

“It’s a pity,” he sighed, after a brief silence. “O God, what a pity! Of
course it is God’s will; the world was not created by us, but yet it is
a pity, brother. If a single tree withers away, or let us say a single
cow dies, it makes one sorry, but what will it be, good man, if the
whole world crumbles into dust? Such blessings, Lord Jesus! The sun, and
the sky, and the forest, and the rivers, and the creatures--all these
have been created, adapted, and adjusted to one another. Each has
been put to its appointed task and knows its place. And all that must
perish.”

A mournful smile gleamed on the shepherd’s face, and his eyelids
quivered.

“You say--the world is perishing,” said Meliton, pondering. “It may be
that the end of the world is near at hand, but you can’t judge by the
birds. I don’t think the birds can be taken as a sign.”

“Not the birds only,” said the shepherd. “It’s the wild beasts, too, and
the cattle, and the bees, and the fish.... If you don’t believe me ask
the old people; every old man will tell you that the fish are not at
all what they used to be. In the seas, in the lakes, and in the rivers,
there are fewer fish from year to year. In our Pestchanka, I remember,
pike used to be caught a yard long, and there were eel-pouts, and roach,
and bream, and every fish had a presentable appearance; while nowadays,
if you catch a wretched little pikelet or perch six inches long you
have to be thankful. There are not any gudgeon even worth talking about.
Every year it is worse and worse, and in a little while there will be
no fish at all. And take the rivers now... the rivers are drying up, for
sure.”

“It is true; they are drying up.”

“To be sure, that’s what I say. Every year they are shallower and
shallower, and there are not the deep holes there used to be. And do you
see the bushes yonder?” the old man asked, pointing to one side. “Beyond
them is an old river-bed; it’s called a backwater. In my father’s time
the Pestchanka flowed there, but now look; where have the evil spirits
taken it to? It changes its course, and, mind you, it will go on
changing till such time as it has dried up altogether. There used to be
marshes and ponds beyond Kurgasovo, and where are they now? And what has
become of the streams? Here in this very wood we used to have a stream
flowing, and such a stream that the peasants used to set creels in it
and caught pike; wild ducks used to spend the winter by it, and nowadays
there is no water in it worth speaking of, even at the spring
floods. Yes, brother, look where you will, things are bad everywhere.
Everywhere!”

A silence followed. Meliton sank into thought, with his eyes fixed on
one spot. He wanted to think of some one part of nature as yet untouched
by the all-embracing ruin. Spots of light glistened on the mist and the
slanting streaks of rain as though on opaque glass, and immediately died
away again--it was the rising sun trying to break through the clouds and
peep at the earth.

“Yes, the forests, too...” Meliton muttered.

“The forests, too,” the shepherd repeated. “They cut them down, and they
catch fire, and they wither away, and no new ones are growing. Whatever
does grow up is cut down at once; one day it shoots up and the next it
has been cut down--and so on without end till nothing’s left. I have
kept the herds of the commune ever since the time of Freedom, good man;
before the time of Freedom I was shepherd of the master’s herds. I have
watched them in this very spot, and I can’t remember a summer day in
all my life that I have not been here. And all the time I have been
observing the works of God. I have looked at them in my time till I know
them, and it is my opinion that all things growing are on the decline.
Whether you take the rye, or the vegetables, or flowers of any sort,
they are all going the same way.”

“But people have grown better,” observed the bailiff.

“In what way better?”

“Cleverer.”

“Cleverer, maybe, that’s true, young man; but what’s the use of that?
What earthly good is cleverness to people on the brink of ruin? One can
perish without cleverness. What’s the good of cleverness to a huntsman
if there is no game? What I think is that God has given men brains and
taken away their strength. People have grown weak, exceedingly weak.
Take me, for instance... I am not worth a halfpenny, I am the humblest
peasant in the whole village, and yet, young man, I have strength. Mind
you, I am in my seventies, and I tend my herd day in and day out, and
keep the night watch, too, for twenty kopecks, and I don’t sleep, and
I don’t feel the cold; my son is cleverer than I am, but put him in my
place and he would ask for a raise next day, or would be going to the
doctors. There it is. I eat nothing but bread, for ‘Give us this day our
daily bread,’ and my father ate nothing but bread, and my grandfather;
but the peasant nowadays must have tea and vodka and white loaves, and
must sleep from sunset to dawn, and he goes to the doctor and pampers
himself in all sorts of ways. And why is it? He has grown weak; he
has not the strength to endure. If he wants to stay awake, his eyes
close--there is no doing anything.”

“That’s true,” Meliton agreed; “the peasant is good for nothing
nowadays.”

“It’s no good hiding what is wrong; we get worse from year to year. And
if you take the gentry into consideration, they’ve grown feebler
even more than the peasants have. The gentleman nowadays has mastered
everything; he knows what he ought not to know, and what is the sense
of it? It makes you feel pitiful to look at him.... He is a thin, puny
little fellow, like some Hungarian or Frenchman; there is no dignity nor
air about him; it’s only in name he is a gentleman. There is no place
for him, poor dear, and nothing for him to do, and there is no making
out what he wants. Either he sits with a hook catching fish, or he lolls
on his back reading, or trots about among the peasants saying all sorts
of things to them, and those that are hungry go in for being clerks. So
he spends his life in vain. And he has no notion of doing something
real and useful. The gentry in old days were half of them generals, but
nowadays they are--a poor lot.”

“They are badly off nowadays,” said Meliton.

“They are poorer because God has taken away their strength. You can’t go
against God.”

Meliton stared at a fixed point again. After thinking a little he heaved
a sigh as staid, reasonable people do sigh, shook his head, and said:

“And all because of what? We have sinned greatly, we have forgotten
God.. and it seems that the time has come for all to end. And, after
all, the world can’t last for ever--it’s time to know when to take
leave.”

The shepherd sighed and, as though wishing to cut short an unpleasant
conversation, he walked away from the birch-tree and began silently
reckoning over the cows.

“Hey-hey-hey!” he shouted. “Hey-hey-hey! Bother you, the plague take
you! The devil has taken you into the thicket. Tu-lu-lu!”

With an angry face he went into the bushes to collect his herd. Meliton
got up and sauntered slowly along the edge of the wood. He looked at the
ground at his feet and pondered; he still wanted to think of something
which had not yet been touched by death. Patches of light crept upon the
slanting streaks of rain again; they danced on the tops of the trees and
died away among the wet leaves. Damka found a hedgehog under a bush, and
wanting to attract her master’s attention to it, barked and howled.

“Did you have an eclipse or not?” the shepherd called from the bushes.

“Yes, we had,” answered Meliton.

“Ah! Folks are complaining all about that there was one. It shows there
is disorder even in the heavens! It’s not for nothing.... Hey-hey-hey!
Hey!”

Driving his herd together to the edge of the wood, the shepherd leaned
against the birch-tree, looked up at the sky, without haste took his
pipe from his bosom and began playing. As before, he played mechanically
and took no more than five or six notes; as though the pipe had
come into his hands for the first time, the sounds floated from it
uncertainly, with no regularity, not blending into a tune, but to
Meliton, brooding on the destruction of the world, there was a sound in
it of something very depressing and revolting which he would much rather
not have heard. The highest, shrillest notes, which quivered and broke,
seemed to be weeping disconsolately, as though the pipe were sick and
frightened, while the lowest notes for some reason reminded him of the
mist, the dejected trees, the grey sky. Such music seemed in keeping
with the weather, the old man and his sayings.

Meliton wanted to complain. He went up to the old man and, looking at
his mournful, mocking face and at the pipe, muttered:

“And life has grown worse, grandfather. It is utterly impossible to
live. Bad crops, want.... Cattle plague continually, diseases of all
sorts.... We are crushed by poverty.”

The bailiff’s puffy face turned crimson and took a dejected, womanish
expression. He twirled his fingers as though seeking words to convey his
vague feeling and went on:

“Eight children, a wife... and my mother still living, and my whole
salary ten roubles a month and to board myself. My wife has become a
Satan from poverty.... I go off drinking myself. I am a sensible, steady
man; I have education. I ought to sit at home in peace, but I stray
about all day with my gun like a dog because it is more than I can
stand; my home is hateful to me!”

Feeling that his tongue was uttering something quite different from what
he wanted to say, the bailiff waved his hand and said bitterly:

“If the world’s going to end I wish it would make haste about it.
There’s no need to drag it out and make folks miserable for nothing....”

The old man took the pipe from his lips and, screwing up one eye, looked
into its little opening. His face was sad and covered with thick drops
like tears. He smiled and said:

“It’s a pity, my friend! My goodness, what a pity! The earth, the
forest, the sky, the beasts of all sorts--all this has been created,
you know, adapted; they all have their intelligence. It is all going to
ruin. And most of all I am sorry for people.”

There was the sound in the wood of heavy rain coming nearer. Meliton
looked in the direction of the sound, did up all his buttons, and said:

“I am going to the village. Good-bye, grandfather. What is your name?”

“Luka the Poor.”

“Well, good-bye, Luka! Thank you for your good words. Damka, ici!”

After parting from the shepherd Meliton made his way along the edge of
the wood, and then down hill to a meadow which by degrees turned into a
marsh. There was a squelch of water under his feet, and the rusty marsh
sedge, still green and juicy, drooped down to the earth as though
afraid of being trampled underfoot. Beyond the marsh, on the bank of the
Pestchanka, of which the old man had spoken, stood a row of willows, and
beyond the willows a barn looked dark blue in the mist. One could feel
the approach of that miserable, utterly inevitable season, when the
fields grow dark and the earth is muddy and cold, when the weeping
willow seems still more mournful and tears trickle down its stem, and
only the cranes fly away from the general misery, and even they, as
though afraid of insulting dispirited nature by the expression of their
happiness, fill the air with their mournful, dreary notes.

Meliton plodded along to the river, and heard the sounds of the pipe
gradually dying away behind him. He still wanted to complain. He looked
dejectedly about him, and he felt insufferably sorry for the sky and
the earth and the sun and the woods and his Damka, and when the highest
drawn-out note of the pipe floated quivering in the air, like a voice
weeping, he felt extremely bitter and resentful of the impropriety in
the conduct of nature.

The high note quivered, broke off, and the pipe was silent.




AGAFYA

DURING my stay in the district of S. I often used to go to see the
watchman Savva Stukatch, or simply Savka, in the kitchen gardens of
Dubovo. These kitchen gardens were my favorite resort for so-called
“mixed” fishing, when one goes out without knowing what day or hour one
may return, taking with one every sort of fishing tackle as well as a
store of provisions. To tell the truth, it was not so much the fishing
that attracted me as the peaceful stroll, the meals at no set time, the
talk with Savka, and being for so long face to face with the calm
summer nights. Savka was a young man of five-and-twenty, well grown and
handsome, and as strong as a flint. He had the reputation of being a
sensible and reasonable fellow. He could read and write, and very rarely
drank, but as a workman this strong and healthy young man was not worth
a farthing. A sluggish, overpowering sloth was mingled with the strength
in his muscles, which were strong as cords. Like everyone else in his
village, he lived in his own hut, and had his share of land, but neither
tilled it nor sowed it, and did not work at any sort of trade. His old
mother begged alms at people’s windows and he himself lived like a bird
of the air; he did not know in the morning what he would eat at midday.
It was not that he was lacking in will, or energy, or feeling for his
mother; it was simply that he felt no inclination for work and did not
recognize the advantage of it. His whole figure suggested unruffled
serenity, an innate, almost artistic passion for living carelessly,
never with his sleeves tucked up. When Savka’s young, healthy body had
a physical craving for muscular work, the young man abandoned himself
completely for a brief interval to some free but nonsensical pursuit,
such as sharpening skates not wanted for any special purpose, or
racing about after the peasant women. His favorite attitude was one
of concentrated immobility. He was capable of standing for hours at a
stretch in the same place with his eyes fixed on the same spot without
stirring. He never moved except on impulse, and then only when an
occasion presented itself for some rapid and abrupt action: catching
a running dog by the tail, pulling off a woman’s kerchief, or jumping
over a big hole. It need hardly be said that with such parsimony of
movement Savka was as poor as a mouse and lived worse than any homeless
outcast. As time went on, I suppose he accumulated arrears of taxes
and, young and sturdy as he was, he was sent by the commune to do an old
man’s job--to be watchman and scarecrow in the kitchen gardens. However
much they laughed at him for his premature senility he did not object
to it. This position, quiet and convenient for motionless contemplation,
exactly fitted his temperament.

It happened I was with this Savka one fine May evening. I remember I was
lying on a torn and dirty sackcloth cover close to the shanty from which
came a heavy, fragrant scent of hay. Clasping my hands under my head I
looked before me. At my feet was lying a wooden fork. Behind it Savka’s
dog Kutka stood out like a black patch, and not a dozen feet from Kutka
the ground ended abruptly in the steep bank of the little river. Lying
down I could not see the river; I could only see the tops of the young
willows growing thickly on the nearer bank, and the twisting, as it were
gnawed away, edges of the opposite bank. At a distance beyond the bank
on the dark hillside the huts of the village in which Savka lived lay
huddling together like frightened young partridges. Beyond the hill the
afterglow of sunset still lingered in the sky. One pale crimson streak
was all that was left, and even that began to be covered by little
clouds as a fire with ash.

A copse with alder-trees, softly whispering, and from time to time
shuddering in the fitful breeze, lay, a dark blur, on the right of
the kitchen gardens; on the left stretched the immense plain. In the
distance, where the eye could not distinguish between the sky and the
plain, there was a bright gleam of light. A little way off from me sat
Savka. With his legs tucked under him like a Turk and his head hanging,
he looked pensively at Kutka. Our hooks with live bait on them had
long been in the river, and we had nothing left to do but to abandon
ourselves to repose, which Savka, who was never exhausted and always
rested, loved so much. The glow had not yet quite died away, but the
summer night was already enfolding nature in its caressing, soothing
embrace.

Everything was sinking into its first deep sleep except some night bird
unfamiliar to me, which indolently uttered a long, protracted cry in
several distinct notes like the phrase, “Have you seen Ni-ki-ta?” and
immediately answered itself, “Seen him, seen him, seen him!”

“Why is it the nightingales aren’t singing tonight?” I asked Savka.

He turned slowly towards me. His features were large, but his face was
open, soft, and expressive as a woman’s. Then he gazed with his mild,
dreamy eyes at the copse, at the willows, slowly pulled a whistle out
of his pocket, put it in his mouth and whistled the note of a
hen-nightingale. And at once, as though in answer to his call, a
landrail called on the opposite bank.

“There’s a nightingale for you...” laughed Savka. “Drag-drag! drag-drag!
just like pulling at a hook, and yet I bet he thinks he is singing,
too.”

“I like that bird,” I said. “Do you know, when the birds are migrating
the landrail does not fly, but runs along the ground? It only flies over
the rivers and the sea, but all the rest it does on foot.”

“Upon my word, the dog...” muttered Savka, looking with respect in the
direction of the calling landrail.

Knowing how fond Savka was of listening, I told him all I had learned
about the landrail from sportsman’s books. From the landrail I passed
imperceptibly to the migration of the birds. Savka listened attentively,
looking at me without blinking, and smiling all the while with pleasure.

“And which country is most the bird’s home? Ours or those foreign
parts?” he asked.

“Ours, of course. The bird itself is hatched here, and it hatches out
its little ones here in its native country, and they only fly off there
to escape being frozen.”

“It’s interesting,” said Savka. “Whatever one talks about it is always
interesting. Take a bird now, or a man... or take this little stone;
there’s something to learn about all of them.... Ah, sir, if I had
known you were coming I wouldn’t have told a woman to come here this
evening.... She asked to come to-day.”

“Oh, please don’t let me be in your way,” I said. “I can lie down in the
wood....”

“What next! She wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t come till to-morrow....
If only she would sit quiet and listen, but she always wants to be
slobbering.... You can’t have a good talk when she’s here.”

“Are you expecting Darya?” I asked, after a pause.

“No... a new one has asked to come this evening... Agafya, the
signalman’s wife.”

Savka said this in his usual passionless, somewhat hollow voice, as
though he were talking of tobacco or porridge, while I started with
surprise. I knew Agafya.... She was quite a young peasant woman of
nineteen or twenty, who had been married not more than a year before to
a railway signalman, a fine young fellow. She lived in the village, and
her husband came home there from the line every night.

“Your goings on with the women will lead to trouble, my boy,” said I.

“Well, may be....”

And after a moment’s thought Savka added:

“I’ve said so to the women; they won’t heed me....They don’t trouble
about it, the silly things!”

Silence followed.... Meanwhile the darkness was growing thicker and
thicker, and objects began to lose their contours. The streak behind the
hill had completely died away, and the stars were growing brighter
and more luminous.... The mournfully monotonous chirping of the
grasshoppers, the call of the landrail, and the cry of the quail did
not destroy the stillness of the night, but, on the contrary, gave it an
added monotony. It seemed as though the soft sounds that enchanted the
ear came, not from birds or insects, but from the stars looking down
upon us from the sky....

Savka was the first to break the silence. He slowly turned his eyes from
black Kutka and said:

“I see you are dull, sir. Let’s have supper.”

And without waiting for my consent he crept on his stomach into the
shanty, rummaged about there, making the whole edifice tremble like a
leaf; then he crawled back and set before me my vodka and an earthenware
bowl; in the bowl there were baked eggs, lard scones made of rye, pieces
of black bread, and something else.... We had a drink from a little
crooked glass that wouldn’t stand, and then we fell upon the food....
Coarse grey salt, dirty, greasy cakes, eggs tough as india-rubber, but
how nice it all was!

“You live all alone, but what lots of good things you have,” I said,
pointing to the bowl. “Where do you get them from?”

“The women bring them,” mumbled Savka.

“What do they bring them to you for?”

“Oh... from pity.”

Not only Savka’s menu, but his clothing, too, bore traces of feminine
“pity.” Thus I noticed that he had on, that evening, a new woven belt
and a crimson ribbon on which a copper cross hung round his dirty neck.
I knew of the weakness of the fair sex for Savka, and I knew that he
did not like talking about it, and so I did not carry my inquiries any
further. Besides there was not time to talk.... Kutka, who had been
fidgeting about near us and patiently waiting for scraps, suddenly
pricked up his ears and growled. We heard in the distance repeated
splashing of water.

“Someone is coming by the ford,” said Savka.

Three minutes later Kutka growled again and made a sound like a cough.

“Shsh!” his master shouted at him.

In the darkness there was a muffled thud of timid footsteps, and the
silhouette of a woman appeared out of the copse. I recognized her,
although it was dark--it was Agafya. She came up to us diffidently and
stopped, breathing hard. She was breathless, probably not so much from
walking as from fear and the unpleasant sensation everyone experiences
in wading across a river at night. Seeing near the shanty not one but
two persons, she uttered a faint cry and fell back a step.

“Ah... that is you!” said Savka, stuffing a scone into his mouth.

“Ye-es... I,” she muttered, dropping on the ground a bundle of some
sort and looking sideways at me. “Yakov sent his greetings to you and
told me to give you... something here....”

“Come, why tell stories? Yakov!” laughed Savka. “There is no need for
lying; the gentleman knows why you have come! Sit down; you shall have
supper with us.”

Agafya looked sideways at me and sat down irresolutely.

“I thought you weren’t coming this evening,” Savka said, after a
prolonged silence. “Why sit like that? Eat! Or shall I give you a drop
of vodka?”

“What an idea!” laughed Agafya; “do you think you have got hold of a
drunkard?...”

“Oh, drink it up.... Your heart will feel warmer.... There!”

Savka gave Agafya the crooked glass. She slowly drank the vodka, ate
nothing with it, but drew a deep breath when she had finished.

“You’ve brought something,” said Savka, untying the bundle and throwing
a condescending, jesting shade into his voice. “Women can never come
without bringing something. Ah, pie and potatoes.... They live well,”
 he sighed, turning to me. “They are the only ones in the whole village
who have got potatoes left from the winter!”

In the darkness I did not see Agafya’s face, but from the movement of
her shoulders and head it seemed to me that she could not take her
eyes off Savka’s face. To avoid being the third person at this tryst, I
decided to go for a walk and got up. But at that moment a nightingale in
the wood suddenly uttered two low contralto notes. Half a minute later
it gave a tiny high trill and then, having thus tried its voice, began
singing. Savka jumped up and listened.

“It’s the same one as yesterday,” he said. “Wait a minute.”

And, getting up, he went noiselessly to the wood.

“Why, what do you want with it?” I shouted out after him, “Stop!”

Savka shook his hand as much as to say, “Don’t shout,” and vanished into
the darkness. Savka was an excellent sportsman and fisherman when he
liked, but his talents in this direction were as completely thrown away
as his strength. He was too slothful to do things in the routine way,
and vented his passion for sport in useless tricks. For instance, he
would catch nightingales only with his hands, would shoot pike with a
fowling piece, he would spend whole hours by the river trying to catch
little fish with a big hook.

Left alone with me, Agafya coughed and passed her hand several times
over her forehead.... She began to feel a little drunk from the vodka.

“How are you getting on, Agasha?” I asked her, after a long silence,
when it began to be awkward to remain mute any longer.

“Very well, thank God.... Don’t tell anyone, sir, will you?” she added
suddenly in a whisper.

“That’s all right,” I reassured her. “But how reckless you are,
Agasha!... What if Yakov finds out?”

“He won’t find out.”

“But what if he does?”

“No... I shall be at home before he is. He is on the line now, and he
will come back when the mail train brings him, and from here I can hear
when the train’s coming....”

Agafya once more passed her hand over her forehead and looked away in
the direction in which Savka had vanished. The nightingale was singing.
Some night bird flew low down close to the ground and, noticing us, was
startled, fluttered its wings and flew across to the other side of the
river.

Soon the nightingale was silent, but Savka did not come back. Agafya got
up, took a few steps uneasily, and sat down again.

“What is he doing?” she could not refrain from saying. “The train’s not
coming in to-morrow! I shall have to go away directly.”

“Savka,” I shouted. “Savka.”

I was not answered even by an echo. Agafya moved uneasily and sat down
again.

“It’s time I was going,” she said in an agitated voice. “The train will
be here directly! I know when the trains come in.”

The poor woman was not mistaken. Before a quarter of an hour had passed
a sound was heard in the distance.

Agafya kept her eyes fixed on the copse for a long time and moved her
hands impatiently.

“Why, where can he be?” she said, laughing nervously. “Where has the
devil carried him? I am going! I really must be going.”

Meanwhile the noise was growing more and more distinct. By now one could
distinguish the rumble of the wheels from the heavy gasps of the engine.
Then we heard the whistle, the train crossed the bridge with a hollow
rumble... another minute and all was still.

“I’ll wait one minute more,” said Agafya, sitting down resolutely. “So
be it, I’ll wait.”

At last Savka appeared in the darkness. He walked noiselessly on the
crumbling earth of the kitchen gardens and hummed something softly to
himself.

“Here’s a bit of luck; what do you say to that now?” he said gaily. “As
soon as I got up to the bush and began taking aim with my hand it left
off singing! Ah, the bald dog! I waited and waited to see when it would
begin again, but I had to give it up.”

Savka flopped clumsily down to the ground beside Agafya and, to keep his
balance, clutched at her waist with both hands.

“Why do you look cross, as though your aunt were your mother?” he asked.

With all his soft-heartedness and good-nature, Savka despised women.
He behaved carelessly, condescendingly with them, and even stooped to
scornful laughter of their feelings for himself. God knows, perhaps this
careless, contemptuous manner was one of the causes of his irresistible
attraction for the village Dulcineas. He was handsome and well-built; in
his eyes there was always a soft friendliness, even when he was looking
at the women he so despised, but the fascination was not to be explained
by merely external qualities. Apart from his happy exterior and original
manner, one must suppose that the touching position of Savka as an
acknowledged failure and an unhappy exile from his own hut to the
kitchen gardens also had an influence upon the women.

“Tell the gentleman what you have come here for!” Savka went on, still
holding Agafya by the waist. “Come, tell him, you good married woman!
Ho-ho! Shall we have another drop of vodka, friend Agasha?”

I got up and, threading my way between the plots, I walked the length of
the kitchen garden. The dark beds looked like flattened-out graves. They
smelt of dug earth and the tender dampness of plants beginning to be
covered with dew.... A red light was still gleaming on the left. It
winked genially and seemed to smile.

I heard a happy laugh. It was Agafya laughing.

“And the train?” I thought. “The train has come in long ago.”

Waiting a little longer, I went back to the shanty. Savka was sitting
motionless, his legs crossed like a Turk, and was softly, scarcely
audibly humming a song consisting of words of one syllable something
like: “Out on you, fie on you... I and you.” Agafya, intoxicated by the
vodka, by Savka’s scornful caresses, and by the stifling warmth of the
night, was lying on the earth beside him, pressing her face convulsively
to his knees. She was so carried away by her feelings that she did not
even notice my arrival.

“Agasha, the train has been in a long time,” I said.

“It’s time--it’s time you were gone,” Savka, tossing his head, took up
my thought. “What are you sprawling here for? You shameless hussy!”

Agafya started, took her head from his knees, glanced at me, and sank
down beside him again.

“You ought to have gone long ago,” I said.

Agafya turned round and got up on one knee.... She was unhappy.... For
half a minute her whole figure, as far as I could distinguish it through
the darkness, expressed conflict and hesitation. There was an instant
when, seeming to come to herself, she drew herself up to get upon her
feet, but then some invincible and implacable force seemed to push her
whole body, and she sank down beside Savka again.

“Bother him!” she said, with a wild, guttural laugh, and reckless
determination, impotence, and pain could be heard in that laugh.

I strolled quietly away to the copse, and from there down to the
river, where our fishing lines were set. The river slept. Some soft,
fluffy-petalled flower on a tall stalk touched my cheek tenderly like a
child who wants to let one know it’s awake. To pass the time I felt
for one of the lines and pulled at it. It yielded easily and hung
limply--nothing had been caught.... The further bank and the village
could not be seen. A light gleamed in one hut, but soon went out. I felt
my way along the bank, found a hollow place which I had noticed in the
daylight, and sat down in it as in an arm-chair. I sat there a long
time.... I saw the stars begin to grow misty and lose their brightness;
a cool breath passed over the earth like a faint sigh and touched the
leaves of the slumbering osiers....

“A-ga-fya!” a hollow voice called from the village. “Agafya!”

It was the husband, who had returned home, and in alarm was looking
for his wife in the village. At that moment there came the sound of
unrestrained laughter: the wife, forgetful of everything, sought in
her intoxication to make up by a few hours of happiness for the misery
awaiting her next day.

I dropped asleep.

When I woke up Savka was sitting beside me and lightly shaking my
shoulder. The river, the copse, both banks, green and washed, trees and
fields--all were bathed in bright morning light. Through the slim trunks
of the trees the rays of the newly risen sun beat upon my back.

“So that’s how you catch fish?” laughed Savka. “Get up!”

I got up, gave a luxurious stretch, and began greedily drinking in the
damp and fragrant air.

“Has Agasha gone?” I asked.

“There she is,” said Savka, pointing in the direction of the ford.

I glanced and saw Agafya. Dishevelled, with her kerchief dropping off
her head, she was crossing the river, holding up her skirt. Her legs
were scarcely moving....

“The cat knows whose meat it has eaten,” muttered Savka, screwing up his
eyes as he looked at her. “She goes with her tail hanging down.... They
are sly as cats, these women, and timid as hares.... She didn’t go,
silly thing, in the evening when we told her to! Now she will catch it,
and they’ll flog me again at the peasant court... all on account of the
women....”

Agafya stepped upon the bank and went across the fields to the village.
At first she walked fairly boldly, but soon terror and excitement got
the upper hand; she turned round fearfully, stopped and took breath.

“Yes, you are frightened!” Savka laughed mournfully, looking at the
bright green streak left by Agafya in the dewy grass. “She doesn’t want
to go! Her husband’s been standing waiting for her for a good hour....
Did you see him?”

Savka said the last words with a smile, but they sent a chill to my
heart. In the village, near the furthest hut, Yakov was standing in the
road, gazing fixedly at his returning wife. He stood without stirring,
and was as motionless as a post. What was he thinking as he looked at
her? What words was he preparing to greet her with? Agafya stood still
a little while, looked round once more as though expecting help from us,
and went on. I have never seen anyone, drunk or sober, move as she did.
Agafya seemed to be shrivelled up by her husband’s eyes. At one time
she moved in zigzags, then she moved her feet up and down without
going forward, bending her knees and stretching out her hands, then she
staggered back. When she had gone another hundred paces she looked round
once more and sat down.

“You ought at least to hide behind a bush...” I said to Savka. “If the
husband sees you...”

“He knows, anyway, who it is Agafya has come from.... The women don’t go
to the kitchen garden at night for cabbages--we all know that.”

I glanced at Savka’s face. It was pale and puckered up with a look
of fastidious pity such as one sees in the faces of people watching
tortured animals.

“What’s fun for the cat is tears for the mouse...” he muttered.

Agafya suddenly jumped up, shook her head, and with a bold step went
towards her husband. She had evidently plucked up her courage and made
up her mind.




AT CHRISTMAS TIME

I

“WHAT shall I write?” said Yegor, and he dipped his pen in the ink.

Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years. Her daughter Yefimya
had gone after her wedding to Petersburg, had sent them two letters, and
since then seemed to vanish out of their lives; there had been no sight
nor sound of her. And whether the old woman were milking her cow at
dawn, or heating her stove, or dozing at night, she was always thinking
of one and the same thing--what was happening to Yefimya, whether she
were alive out yonder. She ought to have sent a letter, but the old
father could not write, and there was no one to write.

But now Christmas had come, and Vasilisa could not bear it any longer,
and went to the tavern to Yegor, the brother of the innkeeper’s wife,
who had sat in the tavern doing nothing ever since he came back from
the army; people said that he could write letters very well if he were
properly paid. Vasilisa talked to the cook at the tavern, then to the
mistress of the house, then to Yegor himself. They agreed upon fifteen
kopecks.

And now--it happened on the second day of the holidays, in the tavern
kitchen--Yegor was sitting at the table, holding the pen in his hand.
Vasilisa was standing before him, pondering with an expression of
anxiety and woe on her face. Pyotr, her husband, a very thin old man
with a brownish bald patch, had come with her; he stood looking straight
before him like a blind man. On the stove a piece of pork was being
braised in a saucepan; it was spurting and hissing, and seemed to be
actually saying: “Flu-flu-flu.” It was stifling.

“What am I to write?” Yegor asked again.

“What?” asked Vasilisa, looking at him angrily and suspiciously. “Don’t
worry me! You are not writing for nothing; no fear, you’ll be paid for
it. Come, write: ‘To our dear son-in-law, Andrey Hrisanfitch, and to our
only beloved daughter, Yefimya Petrovna, with our love we send a low bow
and our parental blessing abiding for ever.’”

“Written; fire away.”

“‘And we wish them a happy Christmas; we are alive and well, and I wish
you the same, please the Lord... the Heavenly King.’”

Vasilisa pondered and exchanged glances with the old man.

“‘And I wish you the same, please the Lord the Heavenly King,’” she
repeated, beginning to cry.

She could say nothing more. And yet before, when she lay awake thinking
at night, it had seemed to her that she could not get all she had to
say into a dozen letters. Since the time when her daughter had gone away
with her husband much water had flowed into the sea, the old people had
lived feeling bereaved, and sighed heavily at night as though they had
buried their daughter. And how many events had occurred in the village
since then, how many marriages and deaths! How long the winters had
been! How long the nights!

“It’s hot,” said Yegor, unbuttoning his waistcoat. “It must be seventy
degrees. What more?” he asked.

The old people were silent.

“What does your son-in-law do in Petersburg?” asked Yegor.

“He was a soldier, my good friend,” the old man answered in a weak
voice. “He left the service at the same time as you did. He was a
soldier, and now, to be sure, he is at Petersburg at a hydropathic
establishment. The doctor treats the sick with water. So he, to be sure,
is house-porter at the doctor’s.”

“Here it is written down,” said the old woman, taking a letter out of
her pocket. “We got it from Yefimya, goodness knows when. Maybe they are
no longer in this world.”

Yegor thought a little and began writing rapidly:

“At the present time”--he wrote--“since your destiny through your own
doing allotted you to the Military Career, we counsel you to look
into the Code of Disciplinary Offences and Fundamental Laws of the War
Office, and you will see in that law the Civilization of the Officials
of the War Office.”

He wrote and kept reading aloud what was written, while Vasilisa
considered what she ought to write: how great had been their want the
year before, how their corn had not lasted even till Christmas, how they
had to sell their cow. She ought to ask for money, ought to write that
the old father was often ailing and would soon no doubt give up his soul
to God... but how to express this in words? What must be said first and
what afterwards?

“Take note,” Yegor went on writing, “in volume five of the Army
Regulations soldier is a common noun and a proper one, a soldier of the
first rank is called a general, and of the last a private....”

The old man stirred his lips and said softly:

“It would be all right to have a look at the grandchildren.”

“What grandchildren?” asked the old woman, and she looked angrily at
him; “perhaps there are none.”

“Well, but perhaps there are. Who knows?”

“And thereby you can judge,” Yegor hurried on, “what is the enemy
without and what is the enemy within. The foremost of our enemies within
is Bacchus.” The pen squeaked, executing upon the paper flourishes like
fish-hooks. Yegor hastened and read over every line several times.
He sat on a stool sprawling his broad feet under the table, well-fed,
bursting with health, with a coarse animal face and a red bull neck.
He was vulgarity itself: coarse, conceited, invincible, proud of having
been born and bred in a pot-house; and Vasilisa quite understood the
vulgarity, but could not express it in words, and could only look
angrily and suspiciously at Yegor. Her head was beginning to ache,
and her thoughts were in confusion from the sound of his voice and his
unintelligible words, from the heat and the stuffiness, and she said
nothing and thought nothing, but simply waited for him to finish
scribbling. But the old man looked with full confidence. He believed in
his old woman who had brought him there, and in Yegor; and when he
had mentioned the hydropathic establishment it could be seen that he
believed in the establishment and the healing efficacy of water.

Having finished the letter, Yegor got up and read the whole of it
through from the beginning. The old man did not understand, but he
nodded his head trustfully.

“That’s all right; it is smooth...” he said. “God give you health.
That’s all right....”

They laid on the table three five-kopeck pieces and went out of the
tavern; the old man looked immovably straight before him as though he
were blind, and perfect trustfulness was written on his face; but as
Vasilisa came out of the tavern she waved angrily at the dog, and said
angrily:

“Ugh, the plague.”

The old woman did not sleep all night; she was disturbed by thoughts,
and at daybreak she got up, said her prayers, and went to the station to
send off the letter.

It was between eight and nine miles to the station.

II


Dr. B. O. Mozelweiser’s hydropathic establishment worked on New Year’s
Day exactly as on ordinary days; the only difference was that the
porter, Andrey Hrisanfitch, had on a uniform with new braiding, his
boots had an extra polish, and he greeted every visitor with “A Happy
New Year to you!”

It was the morning; Andrey Hrisanfitch was standing at the door, reading
the newspaper. Just at ten o’clock there arrived a general, one of
the habitual visitors, and directly after him the postman; Andrey
Hrisanfitch helped the general off with his great-coat, and said:

“A Happy New Year to your Excellency!”

“Thank you, my good fellow; the same to you.”

And at the top of the stairs the general asked, nodding towards the door
(he asked the same question every day and always forgot the answer):

“And what is there in that room?”

“The massage room, your Excellency.”

When the general’s steps had died away Andrey Hrisanfitch looked at the
post that had come, and found one addressed to himself. He tore it open,
read several lines, then, looking at the newspaper, he walked without
haste to his own room, which was downstairs close by at the end of the
passage. His wife Yefimya was sitting on the bed, feeding her baby;
another child, the eldest, was standing by, laying its curly head on her
knee; a third was asleep on the bed.

Going into the room, Andrey gave his wife the letter and said:

“From the country, I suppose.”

Then he walked out again without taking his eyes from the paper. He
could hear Yefimya with a shaking voice reading the first lines. She
read them and could read no more; these lines were enough for her. She
burst into tears, and hugging her eldest child, kissing him, she began
saying--and it was hard to say whether she were laughing or crying:

“It’s from granny, from grandfather,” she said. “From the country....
The Heavenly Mother, Saints and Martyrs! The snow lies heaped up under
the roofs now... the trees are as white as white. The boys slide on
little sledges... and dear old bald grandfather is on the stove... and
there is a little yellow dog.... My own darlings!”

Andrey Hrisanfitch, hearing this, recalled that his wife had on three
or four occasions given him letters and asked him to send them to the
country, but some important business had always prevented him; he had
not sent them, and the letters somehow got lost.

“And little hares run about in the fields,” Yefimya went on chanting,
kissing her boy and shedding tears. “Grandfather is kind and gentle;
granny is good, too--kind-hearted. They are warm-hearted in the country,
they are God-fearing... and there is a little church in the village; the
peasants sing in the choir. Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother and Defender,
take us away from here!”

Andrey Hrisanfitch returned to his room to smoke a little till there
was another ring at the door, and Yefimya ceased speaking, subsided, and
wiped her eyes, though her lips were still quivering. She was very
much frightened of him--oh, how frightened of him! She trembled and was
reduced to terror by the sound of his steps, by the look in his eyes,
and dared not utter a word in his presence.

Andrey Hrisanfitch lighted a cigarette, but at that very moment there
was a ring from upstairs. He put out his cigarette, and, assuming a very
grave face, hastened to his front door.

The general was coming downstairs, fresh and rosy from his bath.

“And what is there in that room?” he asked, pointing to a door.

Andrey Hrisanfitch put his hands down swiftly to the seams of his
trousers, and pronounced loudly:

“Charcot douche, your Excellency!”




GUSEV

I

IT was getting dark; it would soon be night.

Gusev, a discharged soldier, sat up in his hammock and said in an
undertone:

“I say, Pavel Ivanitch. A soldier at Sutchan told me: while they were
sailing a big fish came into collision with their ship and stove a hole
in it.”

The nondescript individual whom he was addressing, and whom everyone in
the ship’s hospital called Pavel Ivanitch, was silent, as though he had
not heard.

And again a stillness followed... The wind frolicked with the rigging,
the screw throbbed, the waves lashed, the hammocks creaked, but the
ear had long ago become accustomed to these sounds, and it seemed
that everything around was asleep and silent. It was dreary. The three
invalids--two soldiers and a sailor--who had been playing cards all the
day were asleep and talking in their dreams.

It seemed as though the ship were beginning to rock. The hammock slowly
rose and fell under Gusev, as though it were heaving a sigh, and this
was repeated once, twice, three times.... Something crashed on to the
floor with a clang: it must have been a jug falling down.

“The wind has broken loose from its chain...” said Gusev, listening.

This time Pavel Ivanitch cleared his throat and answered irritably:

“One minute a vessel’s running into a fish, the next, the wind’s
breaking loose from its chain. Is the wind a beast that it can break
loose from its chain?”

“That’s how christened folk talk.”

“They are as ignorant as you are then. They say all sorts of things.
One must keep a head on one’s shoulders and use one’s reason. You are a
senseless creature.”

Pavel Ivanitch was subject to sea-sickness. When the sea was rough
he was usually ill-humoured, and the merest trifle would make him
irritable. And in Gusev’s opinion there was absolutely nothing to be
vexed about. What was there strange or wonderful, for instance, in the
fish or in the wind’s breaking loose from its chain? Suppose the fish
were as big as a mountain and its back were as hard as a sturgeon: and
in the same way, supposing that away yonder at the end of the world
there stood great stone walls and the fierce winds were chained up to
the walls... if they had not broken loose, why did they tear about all
over the sea like maniacs, and struggle to escape like dogs? If they
were not chained up, what did become of them when it was calm?

Gusev pondered for a long time about fishes as big as a mountain and
stout, rusty chains, then he began to feel dull and thought of his
native place to which he was returning after five years’ service in the
East. He pictured an immense pond covered with snow.... On one side of
the pond the red-brick building of the potteries with a tall chimney
and clouds of black smoke; on the other side--a village.... His brother
Alexey comes out in a sledge from the fifth yard from the end; behind
him sits his little son Vanka in big felt over-boots, and his little
girl Akulka, also in big felt boots. Alexey has been drinking, Vanka is
laughing, Akulka’s face he could not see, she had muffled herself up.

“You never know, he’ll get the children frozen...” thought Gusev. “Lord
send them sense and judgment that they may honour their father and
mother and not be wiser than their parents.”

“They want re-soleing,” a delirious sailor says in a bass voice. “Yes,
yes!”

Gusev’s thoughts break off, and instead of a pond there suddenly appears
apropos of nothing a huge bull’s head without eyes, and the horse and
sledge are not driving along, but are whirling round and round in a
cloud of smoke. But still he was glad he had seen his own folks. He
held his breath from delight, shudders ran all over him, and his fingers
twitched.

“The Lord let us meet again,” he muttered feverishly, but he at once
opened his eyes and sought in the darkness for water.

He drank and lay back, and again the sledge was moving, then again the
bull’s head without eyes, smoke, clouds.... And so on till daybreak.

II

The first outline visible in the darkness was a blue circle--the
little round window; then little by little Gusev could distinguish his
neighbour in the next hammock, Pavel Ivanitch. The man slept sitting up,
as he could not breathe lying down. His face was grey, his nose was long
and sharp, his eyes looked huge from the terrible thinness of his face,
his temples were sunken, his beard was skimpy, his hair was long....
Looking at him you could not make out of what class he was, whether he
were a gentleman, a merchant, or a peasant. Judging from his expression
and his long hair he might have been a hermit or a lay brother in a
monastery--but if one listened to what he said it seemed that he could
not be a monk. He was worn out by his cough and his illness and by the
stifling heat, and breathed with difficulty, moving his parched lips.
Noticing that Gusev was looking at him he turned his face towards him
and said:

“I begin to guess.... Yes.... I understand it all perfectly now.”

“What do you understand, Pavel Ivanitch?”

“I’ll tell you.... It has always seemed to me strange that terribly
ill as you are you should be here in a steamer where it is so hot and
stifling and we are always being tossed up and down, where, in fact,
everything threatens you with death; now it is all clear to me....
Yes.... Your doctors put you on the steamer to get rid of you. They
get sick of looking after poor brutes like you.... You don’t pay them
anything, they have a bother with you, and you damage their records with
your deaths--so, of course, you are brutes! It’s not difficult to get
rid of you.... All that is necessary is, in the first place, to have
no conscience or humanity, and, secondly, to deceive the steamer
authorities. The first condition need hardly be considered, in that
respect we are artists; and one can always succeed in the second with a
little practice. In a crowd of four hundred healthy soldiers and sailors
half a dozen sick ones are not conspicuous; well, they drove you all on
to the steamer, mixed you with the healthy ones, hurriedly counted
you over, and in the confusion nothing amiss was noticed, and when the
steamer had started they saw that there were paralytics and consumptives
in the last stage lying about on the deck....”

Gusev did not understand Pavel Ivanitch; but supposing he was being
blamed, he said in self-defence:

“I lay on the deck because I had not the strength to stand; when we were
unloaded from the barge on to the ship I caught a fearful chill.”

“It’s revolting,” Pavel Ivanitch went on. “The worst of it is they know
perfectly well that you can’t last out the long journey, and yet they
put you here. Supposing you get as far as the Indian Ocean, what then?
It’s horrible to think of it.... And that’s their gratitude for your
faithful, irreproachable service!”

Pavel Ivanitch’s eyes looked angry; he frowned contemptuously and said,
gasping:

“Those are the people who ought to be plucked in the newspapers till the
feathers fly in all directions.”

The two sick soldiers and the sailor were awake and already playing
cards. The sailor was half reclining in his hammock, the soldiers were
sitting near him on the floor in the most uncomfortable attitudes. One
of the soldiers had his right arm in a sling, and the hand was swathed
up in a regular bundle so that he held his cards under his right arm or
in the crook of his elbow while he played with the left. The ship was
rolling heavily. They could not stand up, nor drink tea, nor take their
medicines.

“Were you an officer’s servant?” Pavel Ivanitch asked Gusev.

“Yes, an officer’s servant.”

“My God, my God!” said Pavel Ivanitch, and he shook his head mournfully.
“To tear a man out of his home, drag him twelve thousand miles away,
then to drive him into consumption and... and what is it all for,
one wonders? To turn him into a servant for some Captain Kopeikin or
midshipman Dirka! How logical!”

“It’s not hard work, Pavel Ivanitch. You get up in the morning and clean
the boots, get the samovar, sweep the rooms, and then you have nothing
more to do. The lieutenant is all the day drawing plans, and if you like
you can say your prayers, if you like you can read a book or go out into
the street. God grant everyone such a life.”

“Yes, very nice, the lieutenant draws plans all the day and you sit in
the kitchen and pine for home.... Plans indeed!... It is not plans that
matter, but a human life. Life is not given twice, it must be treated
mercifully.”

“Of course, Pavel Ivanitch, a bad man gets no mercy anywhere, neither at
home nor in the army, but if you live as you ought and obey orders, who
has any need to insult you? The officers are educated gentlemen, they
understand.... In five years I was never once in prison, and I was never
struck a blow, so help me God, but once.”

“What for?”

“For fighting. I have a heavy hand, Pavel Ivanitch. Four Chinamen
came into our yard; they were bringing firewood or something, I don’t
remember. Well, I was bored and I knocked them about a bit, one’s nose
began bleeding, damn the fellow.... The lieutenant saw it through the
little window, he was angry and gave me a box on the ear.”

“Foolish, pitiful man...” whispered Pavel Ivanitch. “You don’t
understand anything.”

He was utterly exhausted by the tossing of the ship and closed his
eyes; his head alternately fell back and dropped forward on his
breast. Several times he tried to lie down but nothing came of it; his
difficulty in breathing prevented it.

“And what did you hit the four Chinamen for?” he asked a little while
afterwards.

“Oh, nothing. They came into the yard and I hit them.”

And a stillness followed.... The card-players had been playing for two
hours with enthusiasm and loud abuse of one another, but the motion of
the ship overcame them, too; they threw aside the cards and lay down.
Again Gusev saw the big pond, the brick building, the village.... Again
the sledge was coming along, again Vanka was laughing and Akulka, silly
little thing, threw open her fur coat and stuck her feet out, as much as
to say: “Look, good people, my snowboots are not like Vanka’s, they are
new ones.”

“Five years old, and she has no sense yet,” Gusev muttered in delirium.
“Instead of kicking your legs you had better come and get your soldier
uncle a drink. I will give you something nice.”

Then Andron with a flintlock gun on his shoulder was carrying a hare he
had killed, and he was followed by the decrepit old Jew Isaitchik, who
offers to barter the hare for a piece of soap; then the black calf in
the shed, then Domna sewing at a shirt and crying about something, and
then again the bull’s head without eyes, black smoke....

Overhead someone gave a loud shout, several sailors ran by, they seemed
to be dragging something bulky over the deck, something fell with a
crash. Again they ran by.... Had something gone wrong? Gusev raised
his head, listened, and saw that the two soldiers and the sailor were
playing cards again; Pavel Ivanitch was sitting up moving his lips. It
was stifling, one hadn’t strength to breathe, one was thirsty, the water
was warm, disgusting. The ship heaved as much as ever.

Suddenly something strange happened to one of the soldiers playing
cards.... He called hearts diamonds, got muddled in his score, and
dropped his cards, then with a frightened, foolish smile looked round at
all of them.

“I shan’t be a minute, mates, I’ll...” he said, and lay down on the
floor.

Everybody was amazed. They called to him, he did not answer.

“Stephan, maybe you are feeling bad, eh?” the soldier with his arm in a
sling asked him. “Perhaps we had better bring the priest, eh?”

“Have a drink of water, Stepan...” said the sailor. “Here, lad, drink.”

“Why are you knocking the jug against his teeth?” said Gusev angrily.
“Don’t you see, turnip head?”

“What?”

“What?” Gusev repeated, mimicking him. “There is no breath in him, he is
dead! That’s what! What nonsensical people, Lord have mercy on us...!”

III


The ship was not rocking and Pavel Ivanitch was more cheerful. He was
no longer ill-humoured. His face had a boastful, defiant, mocking
expression. He looked as though he wanted to say: “Yes, in a minute
I will tell you something that will make you split your sides with
laughing.” The little round window was open and a soft breeze was
blowing on Pavel Ivanitch. There was a sound of voices, of the plash of
oars in the water.... Just under the little window someone began droning
in a high, unpleasant voice: no doubt it was a Chinaman singing.

“Here we are in the harbour,” said Pavel Ivanitch, smiling ironically.
“Only another month and we shall be in Russia. Well, worthy gentlemen
and warriors! I shall arrive at Odessa and from there go straight to
Harkov. In Harkov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him and
say, ‘Come, old man, put aside your horrid subjects, ladies’ amours and
the beauties of nature, and show up human depravity.’”

For a minute he pondered, then said:

“Gusev, do you know how I took them in?”

“Took in whom, Pavel Ivanitch?”

“Why, these fellows.... You know that on this steamer there is only a
first-class and a third-class, and they only allow peasants--that is the
rift-raft--to go in the third. If you have got on a reefer jacket and
have the faintest resemblance to a gentleman or a bourgeois you must go
first-class, if you please. You must fork out five hundred roubles if
you die for it. Why, I ask, have you made such a rule? Do you want to
raise the prestige of educated Russians thereby? Not a bit of it. We
don’t let you go third-class simply because a decent person can’t go
third-class; it is very horrible and disgusting. Yes, indeed. I am very
grateful for such solicitude for decent people’s welfare. But in any
case, whether it is nasty there or nice, five hundred roubles I haven’t
got. I haven’t pilfered government money. I haven’t exploited the
natives, I haven’t trafficked in contraband, I have flogged no one to
death, so judge whether I have the right to travel first-class and even
less to reckon myself of the educated class? But you won’t catch them
with logic.... One has to resort to deception. I put on a workman’s coat
and high boots, I assumed a drunken, servile mug and went to the agents:
‘Give us a little ticket, your honour,’ said I....”

“Why, what class do you belong to?” asked a sailor.

“Clerical. My father was an honest priest, he always told the great ones
of the world the truth to their faces; and he had a great deal to put up
with in consequence.”

Pavel Ivanitch was exhausted with talking and gasped for breath, but
still went on:

“Yes, I always tell people the truth to their faces. I am not afraid of
anyone or anything. There is a vast difference between me and all of you
in that respect. You are in darkness, you are blind, crushed; you see
nothing and what you do see you don’t understand.... You are told the
wind breaks loose from its chain, that you are beasts, Petchenyegs, and
you believe it; they punch you in the neck, you kiss their hands; some
animal in a sable-lined coat robs you and then tips you fifteen
kopecks and you: ‘Let me kiss your hand, sir.’ You are pariahs, pitiful
people.... I am a different sort. My eyes are open, I see it all as
clearly as a hawk or an eagle when it floats over the earth, and I
understand it all. I am a living protest. I see irresponsible tyranny--I
protest. I see cant and hypocrisy--I protest. I see swine triumphant--I
protest. And I cannot be suppressed, no Spanish Inquisition can make
me hold my tongue. No.... Cut out my tongue and I would protest in dumb
show; shut me up in a cellar--I will shout from it to be heard half a
mile away, or I will starve myself to death that they may have another
weight on their black consciences. Kill me and I will haunt them with
my ghost. All my acquaintances say to me: ‘You are a most insufferable
person, Pavel Ivanitch.’ I am proud of such a reputation. I have served
three years in the far East, and I shall be remembered there for a
hundred years: I had rows with everyone. My friends write to me from
Russia, ‘Don’t come back,’ but here I am going back to spite them...
yes.... That is life as I understand it. That is what one can call
life.”

Gusev was looking at the little window and was not listening. A boat
was swaying on the transparent, soft, turquoise water all bathed in hot,
dazzling sunshine. In it there were naked Chinamen holding up cages with
canaries and calling out:

“It sings, it sings!”

Another boat knocked against the first; the steam cutter darted by. And
then there came another boat with a fat Chinaman sitting in it, eating
rice with little sticks.

Languidly the water heaved, languidly the white seagulls floated over
it.

“I should like to give that fat fellow one in the neck,” thought Gusev,
gazing at the stout Chinaman, with a yawn.

He dozed off, and it seemed to him that all nature was dozing, too.
Time flew swiftly by; imperceptibly the day passed, imperceptibly the
darkness came on.... The steamer was no longer standing still, but
moving on further.

IV

Two days passed, Pavel Ivanitch lay down instead of sitting up; his eyes
were closed, his nose seemed to have grown sharper.

“Pavel Ivanitch,” Gusev called to him. “Hey, Pavel Ivanitch.”

Pavel Ivanitch opened his eyes and moved his lips.

“Are you feeling bad?”

“No... it’s nothing...” answered Pavel Ivanitch, gasping. “Nothing;
on the contrary--I am rather better.... You see I can lie down. I am a
little easier....”

“Well, thank God for that, Pavel Ivanitch.”

“When I compare myself with you I am sorry for you... poor fellow. My
lungs are all right, it is only a stomach cough.... I can stand hell,
let alone the Red Sea. Besides I take a critical attitude to my illness
and to the medicines they give me for it. While you... you are in
darkness.... It’s hard for you, very, very hard!”

The ship was not rolling, it was calm, but as hot and stifling as a
bath-house; it was not only hard to speak but even hard to listen. Gusev
hugged his knees, laid his head on them and thought of his home. Good
heavens, what a relief it was to think of snow and cold in that stifling
heat! You drive in a sledge, all at once the horses take fright at
something and bolt.... Regardless of the road, the ditches, the ravines,
they dash like mad things, right through the village, over the pond by
the pottery works, out across the open fields. “Hold on,” the pottery
hands and the peasants shout, meeting them. “Hold on.” But why? Let the
keen, cold wind beat in one’s face and bite one’s hands; let the lumps
of snow, kicked up by the horses’ hoofs, fall on one’s cap, on one’s
back, down one’s collar, on one’s chest; let the runners ring on the
snow, and the traces and the sledge be smashed, deuce take them one and
all! And how delightful when the sledge upsets and you go flying full
tilt into a drift, face downwards in the snow, and then you get up white
all over with icicles on your moustaches; no cap, no gloves, your belt
undone.... People laugh, the dogs bark....

Pavel Ivanitch half opened one eye, looked at Gusev with it, and asked
softly:

“Gusev, did your commanding officer steal?”

“Who can tell, Pavel Ivanitch! We can’t say, it didn’t reach us.”

And after that a long time passed in silence. Gusev brooded, muttered
something in delirium, and kept drinking water; it was hard for him to
talk and hard to listen, and he was afraid of being talked to. An hour
passed, a second, a third; evening came on, then night, but he did not
notice it. He still sat dreaming of the frost.

There was a sound as though someone came into the hospital, and voices
were audible, but a few minutes passed and all was still again.

“The Kingdom of Heaven and eternal peace,” said the soldier with his arm
in a sling. “He was an uncomfortable man.”

“What?” asked Gusev. “Who?”

“He is dead, they have just carried him up.”

“Oh, well,” muttered Gusev, yawning, “the Kingdom of Heaven be his.”

“What do you think?” the soldier with his arm in a sling asked Gusev.
“Will he be in the Kingdom of Heaven or not?”

“Who is it you are talking about?”

“Pavel Ivanitch.”

“He will be... he suffered so long. And there is another thing, he
belonged to the clergy, and the priests always have a lot of relations.
Their prayers will save him.”

The soldier with the sling sat down on a hammock near Gusev and said in
an undertone:

“And you, Gusev, are not long for this world. You will never get to
Russia.”

“Did the doctor or his assistant say so?” asked Gusev.

“It isn’t that they said so, but one can see it.... One can see directly
when a man’s going to die. You don’t eat, you don’t drink; it’s dreadful
to see how thin you’ve got. It’s consumption, in fact. I say it, not to
upset you, but because maybe you would like to have the sacrament and
extreme unction. And if you have any money you had better give it to the
senior officer.”

“I haven’t written home...” Gusev sighed. “I shall die and they won’t
know.”

“They’ll hear of it,” the sick sailor brought out in a bass voice. “When
you die they will put it down in the _Gazette,_ at Odessa they will send
in a report to the commanding officer there and he will send it to the
parish or somewhere....”

Gusev began to be uneasy after such a conversation and to feel a vague
yearning. He drank water--it was not that; he dragged himself to the
window and breathed the hot, moist air--it was not that; he tried to
think of home, of the frost--it was not that.... At last it seemed to
him one minute longer in the ward and he would certainly expire.

“It’s stifling, mates...” he said. “I’ll go on deck. Help me up, for
Christ’s sake.”

“All right,” assented the soldier with the sling. “I’ll carry you, you
can’t walk, hold on to my neck.”

Gusev put his arm round the soldier’s neck, the latter put his unhurt
arm round him and carried him up. On the deck sailors and time-expired
soldiers were lying asleep side by side; there were so many of them it
was difficult to pass.

“Stand down,” the soldier with the sling said softly. “Follow me
quietly, hold on to my shirt....”

It was dark. There was no light on deck, nor on the masts, nor anywhere
on the sea around. At the furthest end of the ship the man on watch was
standing perfectly still like a statue, and it looked as though he were
asleep. It seemed as though the steamer were abandoned to itself and
were going at its own will.

“Now they will throw Pavel Ivanitch into the sea,” said the soldier with
the sling. “In a sack and then into the water.”

“Yes, that’s the rule.”

“But it’s better to lie at home in the earth. Anyway, your mother comes
to the grave and weeps.”

“Of course.”

There was a smell of hay and of dung. There were oxen standing with
drooping heads by the ship’s rail. One, two, three; eight of them! And
there was a little horse. Gusev put out his hand to stroke it, but it
shook its head, showed its teeth, and tried to bite his sleeve.

“Damned brute...” said Gusev angrily.

The two of them, he and the soldier, threaded their way to the head of
the ship, then stood at the rail and looked up and down. Overhead
deep sky, bright stars, peace and stillness, exactly as at home in the
village, below darkness and disorder. The tall waves were resounding, no
one could tell why. Whichever wave you looked at each one was trying to
rise higher than all the rest and to chase and crush the next one; after
it a third as fierce and hideous flew noisily, with a glint of light on
its white crest.

The sea has no sense and no pity. If the steamer had been smaller
and not made of thick iron, the waves would have crushed it to pieces
without the slightest compunction, and would have devoured all the
people in it with no distinction of saints or sinners. The steamer had
the same cruel and meaningless expression. This monster with its huge
beak was dashing onwards, cutting millions of waves in its path; it had
no fear of the darkness nor the wind, nor of space, nor of solitude,
caring for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, this monster would
have crushed them, too, without distinction of saints or sinners.

“Where are we now?” asked Gusev.

“I don’t know. We must be in the ocean.”

“There is no sight of land...”

“No indeed! They say we shan’t see it for seven days.”

The two soldiers watched the white foam with the phosphorus light on it
and were silent, thinking. Gusev was the first to break the silence.

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” he said, “only one is full of dread
as though one were sitting in a dark forest; but if, for instance, they
let a boat down on to the water this minute and an officer ordered me to
go a hundred miles over the sea to catch fish, I’d go. Or, let’s say,
if a Christian were to fall into the water this minute, I’d go in after
him. A German or a Chinaman I wouldn’t save, but I’d go in after a
Christian.”

“And are you afraid to die?”

“Yes. I am sorry for the folks at home. My brother at home, you know,
isn’t steady; he drinks, he beats his wife for nothing, he does not
honour his parents. Everything will go to ruin without me, and father
and my old mother will be begging their bread, I shouldn’t wonder. But
my legs won’t bear me, brother, and it’s hot here. Let’s go to sleep.”

V

Gusev went back to the ward and got into his hammock. He was again
tormented by a vague craving, and he could not make out what he wanted.
There was an oppression on his chest, a throbbing in his head, his mouth
was so dry that it was difficult for him to move his tongue. He dozed,
and murmured in his sleep, and, worn out with nightmares, his cough,
and the stifling heat, towards morning he fell into a sound sleep. He
dreamed that they were just taking the bread out of the oven in the
barracks and he climbed into the stove and had a steam bath in it,
lashing himself with a bunch of birch twigs. He slept for two days, and
at midday on the third two sailors came down and carried him out.

He was sewn up in sailcloth and to make him heavier they put with him
two iron weights. Sewn up in the sailcloth he looked like a carrot or a
radish: broad at the head and narrow at the feet.... Before sunset they
brought him up to the deck and put him on a plank; one end of the plank
lay on the side of the ship, the other on a box, placed on a stool.
Round him stood the soldiers and the officers with their caps off.

“Blessed be the Name of the Lord...” the priest began. “As it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”

“Amen,” chanted three sailors.

The soldiers and the officers crossed themselves and looked away at
the waves. It was strange that a man should be sewn up in sailcloth and
should soon be flying into the sea. Was it possible that such a thing
might happen to anyone?

The priest strewed earth upon Gusev and bowed down. They sang “Eternal
Memory.”

The man on watch duty tilted up the end of the plank, Gusev slid off and
flew head foremost, turned a somersault in the air and splashed into the
sea. He was covered with foam and for a moment looked as though he were
wrapped in lace, but the minute passed and he disappeared in the waves.

He went rapidly towards the bottom. Did he reach it? It was said to be
three miles to the bottom. After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he began
moving more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though he were
hesitating and, carried along by the current, moved more rapidly
sideways than downwards.

Then he was met by a shoal of the fish called harbour pilots. Seeing
the dark body the fish stopped as though petrified, and suddenly turned
round and disappeared. In less than a minute they flew back swift as an
arrow to Gusev, and began zig-zagging round him in the water.

After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under
Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice
him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking
in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two
rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see
what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark
nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its
teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one
of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking
the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.

Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where
the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a
lion, a third like a pair of scissors.... From behind the clouds a
broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle
of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it;
next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured.... The sky turns a
soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean
scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for
which it is hard to find a name in human speech.




THE STUDENT

AT first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and
in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound
like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed
at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But
when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew
inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles
of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and
lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical
academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path
in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning
with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on
had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt
ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more
rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy.
The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ 

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