← catalogue

Through Russia

by Maksim Gorky · English · Gutenberg #2288 · 579,705 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Through Russia
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Through Russia

Author: Maksim Gorky

Translator: C. J. Hogarth


        
Release date: August 1, 2000 [eBook #2288]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2288

Credits: Produced by Martin Adamson.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH RUSSIA ***




Produced by Martin Adamson.  HTML version by Al Haines.










Through Russia


by

Maxim Gorky




Translated by C. J. Hogarth




CONTENTS

  THE BIRTH OF A MAN
  THE ICEBREAKER
  GUBIN
  NILUSHKA
  THE CEMETERY
  ON A RIVER STEAMER
  A WOMAN
  IN A MOUNTAIN DEFILE
  KALININ
  THE DEAD MAN




THE BIRTH OF A MAN

The year was the year '92--the year of leanness--the scene a spot
between Sukhum and Otchenchiri, on the river Kodor, a spot so near to
the sea that amid the joyous babble of a sparkling rivulet the ocean's
deep-voiced thunder was plainly distinguishable.

Also, the season being autumn, leaves of wild laurel were glistening
and gyrating on the white foam of the Kodor like a quantity of
mercurial salmon fry. And as I sat on some rocks overlooking the river
there occurred to me the thought that, as likely as not, the cause of
the gulls' and cormorants' fretful cries where the surf lay moaning
behind a belt of trees to the right was that, like myself, they kept
mistaking the leaves for fish, and as often finding themselves
disappointed.

Over my head hung chestnut trees decked with gold; at my feet lay a
mass of chestnut leaves which resembled the amputated palms of human
hands; on the opposite bank, where there waved, tanglewise, the
stripped branches of a hornbeam, an orange-tinted woodpecker was
darting to and fro, as though caught in the mesh of foliage, and, in
company with a troupe of nimble titmice and blue tree-creepers
(visitors from the far-distant North), tapping the bark of the stem
with a black beak, and hunting for insects.

To the left, the tops of the mountains hung fringed with dense, fleecy
clouds of the kind which presages rain; and these clouds were sending
their shadows gliding over slopes green and overgrown with boxwood and
that peculiar species of hollow beech-stump which once came near to
effecting the downfall of Pompey's host, through depriving his
iron-built legions of the use of their legs as they revelled in the
intoxicating sweetness of the "mead" or honey which wild bees make from
the blossoms of the laurel and the azalea, and travellers still gather
from those hollow stems to knead into lavashi or thin cakes of millet
flour.

On the present occasion I too (after suffering sundry stings from
infuriated bees) was thus engaged as I sat on the rocks beneath the
chestnuts. Dipping morsels of bread into a potful of honey, I was
munching them for breakfast, and enjoying, at the same time, the
indolent beams of the moribund autumn sun.

In the fall of the year the Caucasus resembles a gorgeous cathedral
built by great craftsmen (always great craftsmen are great sinners) to
conceal their past from the prying eyes of conscience. Which cathedral
is a sort of intangible edifice of gold and turquoise and emerald, and
has thrown over its hills rare carpets silk-embroidered by Turcoman
weavers of Shemi and Samarkand, and contains, heaped everywhere,
plunder brought from all the quarters of the world for the delectation
of the sun. Yes, it is as though men sought to say to the Sun God: "All
things here are thine. They have been brought hither for thee by thy
people."

Yes, mentally I see long-bearded, grey-headed supermen, beings
possessed of the rounded eyes of happy children, descending from the
hills, and decking the earth, and sowing it with sheerly kaleidoscopic
treasures, and coating the tops of the mountains with massive layers of
silver, and the lower edges with a living web of trees. Yes, I see
those beings decorating and fashioning the scene until, thanks to their
labours, this gracious morsel of the earth has become fair beyond all
conception.

And what a privilege it is to be human! How much that is wonderful
leaps to the eye-how the presence of beauty causes. the heart to throb
with a voluptuous rapture that is almost pain!

And though there are occasions when life seems hard, and the breast
feels filled with fiery rancour, and melancholy dries and renders
athirst the heart's blood, this is not a mood sent us in perpetuity.
For at times even the sun may feel sad as he contemplates men, and sees
that, despite all that he has done for them, they have done so little
in return....

No, it is not that good folk are lacking. It is that they need to be
rounded off--better still, to be made anew.

      *      *      *      *      *

Suddenly there came into view over the bushes to my left a file of dark
heads, while through the surging of the waves and the babble of the
stream I caught the sound of human voices, a sound emanating from a
party of "famine people" or folk who were journeying from Sukhum to
Otchenchiri to obtain work on a local road then in process of
construction.

The owners of the voices I knew to be immigrants from the province of
Orlov. I knew them to be so for the reason that I myself had lately
been working in company with the male members of the party, and had
taken leave of them only yesterday in order that I might set out
earlier than they, and, after walking through the night, greet the sun
when he should arise above the sea.

The members of the party comprised four men and a woman--the latter a
young female with high cheek-bones, a figure swollen with manifest
pregnancy, and a pair of greyish-blue eyes that had fixed in them a
stare of apprehension. At the present moment her head and yellow scarf
were just showing over the tops of the bushes; and while I noted that
now it was swaying from side to side like a sunflower shaken by the
wind, I recalled the fact that she was a woman whose husband had been
carried off at Sukhum by a surfeit of fruit--this fact being known to
me through the circumstance that in the workmen's barraque where we had
shared quarters these folk had observed the good old Russian custom of
confiding to a stranger the whole of their troubles, and had done so in
tones of such amplitude and penetration that the querulous words must
have been audible for five versts around.

And as I had talked to these forlorn people, these human beings who lay
crushed beneath the misfortune which had uprooted them from their
barren and exhausted lands, and blown them, like autumn leaves, towards
the Caucasus where nature's luxuriant, but unfamiliar, aspect had
blinded and bewildered them, and with its onerous conditions of labour
quenched their last spark of courage; as I had talked to these poor
people I had seen them glancing about with dull, troubled, despondent
eyes, and heard them say to one another softly, and with pitiful smiles:

"What a country!"

"Aye,--that it is!--a country to make one sweat!"

"As hard as a stone it is!"

"Aye, an evil country!"

After which they had gone on to speak of their native haunts, where
every handful of soil had represented to them the dust of their
ancestors, and every grain of that soil had been watered with the sweat
of their brows, and become charged with dear and intimate recollections.

Previously there had joined the party a woman who, tall and straight,
had had breasts as flat as a board, and jawbones like the jawbones of a
horse, and a glance in her dull, sidelong black eyes like a gleaming,
smouldering fire.

And every evening this woman had been wont to step outside the barraque
with the woman in the yellow scarf and to seat herself on a rubbish
heap, and, resting her cheeks on the palms of her hands, and inclining
her head sideways, to sing in a high and shrewish voice:

  Behind the graveyard wall,
  Where fair green bushes stand.
  I'll spread me on the sand
  A shroud as white as snow.
  And not long will it be
  Before my heart's adored,
  My master and my lord,
  Shall answer my curtsey low.

Usually her companion, the woman in the yellow scarf, had, with head
bent forward and eyes fixed upon her stomach, remained silent; but on
rare, unexpected occasions she had, in the hoarse, sluggish voice of a
peasant, sung a song with the sobbing refrain:

  Ah, my beloved, sweetheart of mine,
  Never again will these eyes seek thine!

Nor amid the stifling blackness of the southern night had these voices
ever failed to bring back to my memory the snowy wastes of the North,
and the icy, wailing storm-wind, and the distant howling of unseen
wolves.

In time, the squint-eyed woman had been taken ill of a fever, and
removed to the town in a tilted ambulance; and as she had lain
quivering and moaning on the stretcher she had seemed still to be
singing her little ditty about the graveyard and the sand.

The head with the yellow scarf rose, dipped, and disappeared.

After I had finished my breakfast I thatched the honey-pot with some
leaves, fastened down the lid, and indolently resumed my way in the
wake of the party, my blackthorn staff tiptapping against the hard
tread of the track as I proceeded.

The track loomed--a grey, narrow strip--before me, while on my right
the restless, dark blue sea had the air of being ceaselessly planed by
thousands of invisible carpenters; so regularly did the stress of a
wind as moist and sweet and warm as the breath of a healthy woman cause
ever-rustling curls of foam to drift towards the beach. Also, careening
on to its port quarter under a full set of bellying sails, a Turkish
felucca was gliding towards Sukhum; and, as it held on its course, it
put me in mind of a certain pompous engineer of the town who had been
wont to inflate his fat cheeks and say: "Be quiet, you, or I will have
you locked up!" This man had, for some reason or another, an
extraordinary weakness for causing arrests to be made; and, exceedingly
do I rejoice to think that by now the worms of the graveyard must have
consumed him down to the very marrow of his bones. Would that certain
other acquaintances of mine were similarly receiving beneficent
attention!

Walking proved an easy enough task, for I seemed to be borne on air,
while a chorus of pleasant thoughts, of many-coloured recollections,
kept singing gently in my breast--a chorus resembling, indeed, the
white-maned billows in the regularity with which now it rose, and now
it fell, to reveal in, as it were, soft, peaceful depths the bright,
supple hopes of youth, like so many silver fish cradled in the bosom of
the ocean.

Suddenly, as it trended seawards, the road executed a half-turn, and
skirted a strip of the sandy margin to which the waves kept rolling in
such haste. And in that spot even the bushes seemed to have a mind to
look the waves in the eyes--so strenuously did they lean across the
riband-like path, and nod in the direction of the blue, watery waste,
while from the hills a wind was blowing that presaged rain.

      *      *      *      *      *

But hark! From some point among the bushes a low moan arose--the sound
which never fails to thrill the soul and move it to responsive quivers!

Thrusting aside the foliage, I beheld before me the woman in the yellow
scarf. Seated with her back resting against the stem of a hazel-bush,
she had her head sunken deeply between her shoulders, her mouth
hideously agape, her eyes staring vaguely before her, her hands pressed
to her swollen stomach, her breath issuing with unnatural vehemence,
and her abdomen convulsively, spasmodically rising and falling.
Meanwhile from her throat were issuing moans which at times caused her
yellow teeth to show bare like those of a wolf.

"What is the matter?" I said as I bent over her. "Has anyone assaulted
you?"

The only result was that, shuffling bare feet in the sand like a fly,
she shook her nerveless hand, and gasped:

"Away, villain! Away with you!"

Then I understood what was the matter, for I had seen a similar case
before. Yet for the moment a certain feeling of shyness made me edge
away from her a little; and as I did so, she uttered a prolonged moan,
and her almost bursting eyeballs vented hot, murky tears which trickled
down her tense and livid features.

Thereupon I turned to her again, and, throwing down cooking-pot,
teapot, and wallet, laid her on her back, and strove to bend her knees
upwards in the direction of her body. Meanwhile she sought to repel me
with blows on face and breast, and at length rolled on to her stomach.
Then, raising herself on all fours, she, sobbing, gasping, and cursing
in a breath, crawled away like a bear into a remoter portion of the
thicket.

"Beast!" she panted. "Oh, you devil!"

Yet, even as the words escaped her lips, her arms gave way beneath her,
and she collapsed upon her face, with legs stretched out, and her lips
emitting a fresh series of convulsive moans.

Excited now to fever pitch, I hurriedly recalled my small store of
knowledge of such cases and finally decided to turn her on her back,
and, as before, to strive to bend her knees upwards in the direction of
her body. Already signs of imminent parturition were not wanting.

"Lie still," I said, "and if you do that it will not be long before you
are delivered of the child."

Whereafter, running down to the sea, I pulled up my sleeves, and, on
returning, embarked upon my role, of accoucheur.

Scoring the earth with her fingers, uprooting tufts of withered grass,
and struggling to thrust them into her mouth, scattering soil over her
terrible, inhuman face and bloodshot eyes, the woman writhed like a
strip of birch bark in a wood fire. Indeed, by this time a little head
was coming into view, and it needed all my efforts to quell the
twitchings of her legs, to help the child to issue, and to prevent its
mother from thrusting grass down her distorted, moaning throat.
Meanwhile we cursed one another--she through her teeth, and I in an
undertone; she, I should surmise, out of pain and shame, and I, I feel
certain, out of nervousness, mingled with a perfect agony of compassion.

"O Lord!" she gasped with blue lips flecked with foam as her eyes
(suddenly bereft of their colour in the sunlight) shed tears born of
the intolerable anguish of the maternal function, and her body writhed
and twisted as though her frame had been severed in the middle.

"Away, you brute!" was her oft-repeated cry as with her weak hands,
hands seemingly dislocated at the wrists, she strove to thrust me to a
distance. Yet all the time I kept saying persuasively: "You fool! Bring
forth as quickly as you can!" and, as a matter of fact, was feeling so
sorry for her that tears continued to spurt from my eyes as much as
from hers, and my very heart contracted with pity. Also, never did I
cease to feel that I ought to keep saying something; wherefore, I
repeated, and again repeated: "Now then! Bring forth as quickly as ever
you can!"

And at last my hands did indeed hold a human creature in all its
pristine beauty. Nor could even the mist of tears prevent me from
seeing that that human creature was red in the face, and that to judge
from the manner in which it kept kicking and resisting and uttering
hoarse wails (while still bound to its mother by the ligament), it was
feeling dissatisfied in advance with the world. Yes, blue-eyed, and
with a nose absurdly sunken between a pair of scarlet, rumpled cheeks
and lips which ceaselessly quivered and contracted, it kept bawling:
"A-aah! A-a-ah!"

Moreover, so slippery was it that, as I knelt and looked at it and
laughed with relief at the fact that it had arrived safely, I came near
to letting it fall upon the ground: wherefore I entirely forgot what
next I ought to have done.

"Cut it!" at length whispered the mother with eyes closed, and features
suddenly swollen and resembling those of a corpse.

"A knife!" again she whispered with her livid lips. "Cut it!"

My pocket-knife I had had stolen from me in the workmen's barraque; but
with my teeth I severed the caul, and then the child gave renewed
tongue in true Orlovian fashion, while the mother smiled.  Also, in
some curious fashion, the mother's unfathomable eyes regained their
colour, and became filled as with blue fire as, plunging a hand into
her bodice and feeling for the pocket, she contrived to articulate with
raw and blood-flecked lips:

"I have not a single piece of string or riband to bind the caul with."

Upon that I set to, and managed to produce a piece of riband, and to
fasten it in the required position.

Thereafter she smiled more brightly than ever. So radiantly did she
smile that my eyes came near to being blinded with the spectacle.

"And now rearrange yourself," I said, "and in the meanwhile I will go
and wash the baby."

"Yes, yes," she murmured uneasily. "But be very careful with him--be
very gentle."

Yet it was little enough care that the rosy little homunculus seemed to
require, so strenuously did he clench his fists, and bawl as though he
were minded to challenge the whole world to combat.

"Come, now!" at length I said. "You must have done, or your very head
will drop off."

Yet no sooner did he feel the touch of the ocean spray, and begin to be
sprinkled With its joyous caresses, than he lamented more loudly and
vigorously than ever, and so continued throughout the process of being
slapped on the back and breast as, frowning and struggling, he vented
squall after squall while the waves laved his tiny limbs.

"Shout, young Orlovian!" said I encouragingly. "Let fly with all the
power of your lungs!"

And with that, I took him back to his mother. I found her with eyes
closed and lips drawn between her teeth as she writhed in the torment
of expelling the after-birth. But presently I detected through the
sighs and groans a whispered:

"Give him to me! Give him to me!"

"You had better wait a little," I urged.

"Oh no! Give him to me now!"

And with tremulous, unsteady hands she unhooked the bosom of her
bodice, and, freeing (with my assistance) the breast which nature had
prepared for at least a dozen children, applied the mutinous young
Orlovian to the nipple. As for him, he at once understood the matter,
and ceased to send forth further lamentation.

"O pure and holy Mother of God!" she gasped in a long-drawn, quivering
sigh as she bent a dishevelled head over the little one, and, between
intervals of silence, fell to uttering soft, abrupt exclamations. Then,
opening her ineffably beautiful blue eyes, the hallowed eyes of a
mother, she raised them towards the azure heavens, while in their
depths there was coming and going a flame of joy and gratitude. Lastly,
lifting a languid hand, she with a slow movement made the sign of the
cross over both herself and her babe.

"Thanks to thee O purest Mother of God!" she murmured. "Thanks indeed
to thee!"

Then her eyes grew dim and vague again, and after a pause (during which
she seemed to be scarcely breathing) she said in a hard and
matter-of-fact tone:

"Young fellow, unfasten my satchel."

And whilst I was so engaged she continued to regard me with a steady
gaze; but, when the task was completed she smiled shamefacedly, and on
her sunken cheeks and sweat-flecked temples there dawned the ghost of a
blush.

"Now," said she, "do you, for the present, go away."

"And if I do so, see that in the meanwhile you do not move about too
much."

"No, I will not. But please go away."

So I withdrew a little. In my breast a sort of weariness was lurking,
but also in my breast there was echoing a soft and glorious chorus of
birds, a chorus so exquisitely in accord with the never-ceasing splash
of the sea that for ever could I have listened to it, and to the
neighbouring brook as it purled on its way like a maiden engaged in
relating confidences about her lover.

Presently, the woman's yellow-scarfed head (the scarf now tidily
rearranged) reappeared over the bushes.

"Come, come, good woman!" was my exclamation. "I tell you that you must
not move about so soon."

And certainly her attitude now was one of utter languor, and she had
perforce to grasp the stem of a bush with one hand to support herself.
Yet while the blood was gone from her face, there had formed in the
hollows where her eyes had been two lakes of blue.

"See how he is sleeping!" she murmured.

And, true enough, the child was sound asleep, though to my eyes he
looked much as any other baby might have done, save that the couch of
autumn leaves on which he was ensconced consisted of leaves of a kind
which could not have been discovered in the faraway forests of Orlov.

"Now, do you yourself lie down awhile," was my advice.

"Oh, no," she replied with a shake of her head on its sinuous neck;
"for I must be collecting my things before I move on towards--"

"Towards Otchenchiri"

"Yes. By now my folk will have gone many a verst in that direction."

"And can you walk so far?"

"The Holy Mother will help me."

Yes, she was to journey in the company of the Mother of God. So no more
on the point required to be said.

Glancing again at the tiny, inchoate face under the bushes, her eyes
diffused rays of warm and kindly light as, licking her lips, she, with
a slow movement, smoothed the breast of the little one.

Then I arranged sticks for a fire, and also adjusted stones to support
the kettle.

"Soon I will have tea ready for you," I remarked.

"And thankful indeed I shall be," she responded, "for my breasts are
dried up."

"Why have your companions deserted you?" I said next.

"They have not deserted me. It was I that left them of my own accord.
How could I have exposed myself in their presence?"

And with a glance at me she raised a hand to her face as, spitting a
gout of blood, she smiled a sort of bashful smile.

"This is your first child, I take it?"

"It is.... And who are you?"

"A man."

"Yes, a man, of course; but, are you a MARRIED man?"

"No, I have never been able to marry."

"That cannot be true."

"Why not?"

With lowered eyes she sat awhile in thought.

"Because, if so, how do you come to know so much about women's affairs?"

This time I DID lie, for I replied:

"Because they have been my study. In fact, I am a medical student."

"Ah! Our priest's son also was a student, but a student for the Church."

"Very well. Then you know what I am. Now I will go and fetch some
water."

Upon this she inclined her head towards her little son and listened for
a moment to his breathing. Then she said with a glance towards the sea:

"I too should like to have a wash, but I do not know what the water is
like. What is it? Brackish or salt?"

"No; quite good water--fit for you to wash in."

"Is it really?"

"Yes, really. Moreover, it is warmer than the water of the streams
hereabouts, which is as cold as ice."

"Ah! Well, you know best."

Here a shaggy-eared pony, all skin and bone, was seen approaching us at
a foot's pace. Trembling, and drooping its head, it scanned us, as it
drew level, with a round black eye, and snorted. Upon that, its rider
pushed back a ragged fur cap, glanced warily in our direction, and
again sank his head.

"The folk of these parts are ugly to look at," softly commented the
woman from Orlov.

Then I departed in quest of water. After I had washed my face and hands
I filled the kettle from a stream bright and lively as quicksilver (a
stream presenting, as the autumn leaves tossed in the eddies which went
leaping and singing over the stones, a truly enchanting spectacle),
and, returning, and peeping through the bushes, perceived the woman to
be crawling on hands and knees over the stones, and anxiously peering
about, as though in search of something.

"What is it?" I inquired, and thereupon, turning grey in the face with
confusion she hastened to conceal some article under her person,
although I had already guessed the nature of the article.

"Give it to me," was my only remark. "I will go and bury it."

"How so? For, as a matter of fact, it ought to be buried under the
floor in front of some stove."

"Are we to build a stove HERE?  Build it in five minutes?" I retorted.

"Ah, I was jesting. But really, I would rather not have it buried here,
lest some wild beast should come and devour it... Yet it ought to be
committed only to the earth."

That said, she, with averted eyes, handed me a moist and heavy bundle;
and as she did so she said under her breath, with an air of confusion:

"I beg of you for Christ's sake to bury it as well, as deeply, as you
can. Out of pity for my son do as I bid you."

I did as she had requested; and, just as the task had been completed, I
perceived her returning from the margin of the sea with unsteady gait,
and an arm stretched out before her, and a petticoat soaked to the
middle with the sea water. Yet all her face was alight with inward
fire, and as I helped her to regain the spot where I had prepared some
sticks I could not help reflecting with some astonishment:

"How strong indeed she is!"

Next, as we drank a mixture of tea and honey, she inquired:

"Have you now ceased to be a student?"

"Yes."

"And why so? Through too much drink?"

"Even so, good mother."

"Dear me! Well, your face is familiar to me. Yes, I remember that I
noticed you in Sukhum when once you were arguing with the barraque
superintendent over the question of rations. As I did so the thought
occurred to me: 'Surely that bold young fellow must have gone and spent
his means on drink? Yes, that is how it must be.'"

Then, as from her swollen lips she licked a drop of honey, she again
bent her blue eyes in the direction of the bush under which the
slumbering, newly-arrived Orlovian was couched.

"How will he live?" thoughtfully she said with a sigh--then added:

"You have helped me, and I thank you. Yes, my thanks are yours, though
I cannot tell whether or not your assistance will have helped HIM."

And, drinking the rest of her tea, she ate a morsel of bread, then made
the sign of the cross. And subsequently, as I was putting up my things,
she continued to rock herself to and fro, to give little starts and
cries, and to gaze thoughtfully at the ground with eyes which had now
regained their original colour. At last she rose to her feet.

"You are not going yet?" I queried protestingly.

"Yes, I must."

"But--"

"The Blessed Virgin will go with me. So please hand me over the child."

"No, I will carry him."

And, after a contest for the honour, she yielded, and we walked away
side by side.

"I only wish I were a little steadier on my feet," she remarked with an
apologetic smile as she laid a hand upon my shoulder.

Meanwhile, the new citizen of Russia, the little human being of an
unknown future, was snoring soundly in my arms as the sea plashed and
murmured, and threw off its white shavings, and the bushes whispered
together, and the sun (now arrived at the meridian) shone brightly upon
us all.

In calm content it was that we walked; save that now and then the
mother would halt, draw a deep breath, raise her head, scan the sea and
the forest and the hills, and peer into her son's face. And as she did
so, even the mist begotten of tears of suffering could not dim the
wonderful brilliancy and clearness of her eyes. For with the sombre
fire of inexhaustible love were those eyes aflame.

Once, as she halted, she exclaimed:

"O God, O Mother of God, how good it all is! Would that for ever I
could walk thus, yes, walk and walk unto the very end of the world! All
that I should need would be that thou, my son, my darling son,
shouldst, borne upon thy mother's breast, grow and wax strong!"

And the sea murmured and murmured.




THE ICEBREAKER

On a frozen river near a certain Russian town, a gang of seven
carpenters were hastily repairing an icebreaker which the townsfolk had
stripped for firewood.

That year spring happened to be late in arriving, and youthful March
looked more like October, and only at noon, and that not on every day,
did the pale, wintry sun show himself in the overcast heavens, or,
glimmering in blue spaces between clouds, contemplate the earth with a
squinting, malevolent eye.

The day in question was the Friday in Holy Week, and, as night drew on,
drippings were becoming congealed into icicles half an arshin long, and
in the snow-stripped ice of the river only the dun hue of the wintry
clouds was reflected.

As the carpenters worked there kept mournfully, insistently echoing
from the town the coppery note of bells; and at intervals heads would
raise themselves, and blue eyes would gleam thoughtfully through the
same grey fog in which the town lay enveloped, and an axe uplifted
would hover a moment in the air as though fearing with its descent to
cleave the luscious flood of sound.

Scattered over the spacious river-track were dark pine branches,
projecting obliquely from the ice, to mark paths, open spaces, and
cracks on the surface; and where they reared themselves aloft, these
branches looked like the cramped, distorted arms of drowning men.

From the river came a whiff of gloom and depression. Covered over with
sodden slush, it stretched with irksome rigidity towards the misty
quarter whence blew a languid, sluggish, damp, cold wind.

Suddenly the foreman, one Ossip, a cleanly built, upright little
peasant with a neatly curling, silvery beard, ruddy cheeks, and a
flexible neck, a man everywhere and always in evidence, shouted:

"Look alive there, my hearties!"

Presently he turned his attention to myself, and smiled insinuatingly.

"Inspector," he said, "what are you trying to poke out of the sky with
that squat nose of yours? And why are you here at all? You come from
the contractor, you say?--from Vasili Sergeitch? Well, well! Then your
job is to hurry us up, to keep barking out, 'Mind what you are doing,
such-and-such gang!' Yet there you stand-blinking over your task like
an object dried stiff! It's not to blink that you're here, but to play
the watchdog upon us, and to keep an eye open, and your tongue on the
wag. So issue your commands, young cockerel."

Then he shouted to the workmen:

"Now, then! No shirking!  Is the job going to be finished tonight, or
is it not?"

As a matter of fact, he himself was the worst shirker in the artel
[Workman's union].  True, he was also a first-rate hand at his trade,
and a man who could work quickly and well and with skill and
concentration; but, unfortunately, he hated putting himself out, and
preferred to spend his time spinning arresting yarns. For instance, on
the present occasion he chose the moment when work was proceeding with
a swing, when everyone was busily and silently and wholeheartedly
labouring with the object of running the job through to the end, to
begin in his musical voice:

"Look here, lads. Once upon a time--"

And though for the first two or three minutes the men appeared not to
hear him, and continued their planing and chopping as before, the
moment came when the soft tenor accents caught and held the men's
attention, as they trickled and burbled forth. Then, screwing up his
bright eyes with a humorous air, and twisting his curly beard between
his fingers, Ossip gave a complacent click of his tongue, and continued
measuredly, and with deliberation:

"So he seized hold of the tench, and thrust it back into the cave. And
as he turned to proceed through the forest he thought to himself: 'Now
I must keep my eyes about me.' And suddenly, from somewhere (no one
could have said where), a woman's voice shrieked: 'Elesi-a-ah!
Elesia-ah!'"

Here a tall, lanky Morduine named Leuka, with, as surname, Narodetz, a
young fellow whose small eyes wore always an expression of
astonishment, laid aside his axe, and stood gaping.

"And from the cave a deep bass voice replied: 'Elesi-a-ah!' while at
the same moment the tench sprang from the cave, and, champing its jaws,
wriggled and wriggled back to the slough."

Here an old soldier named Saniavin, a morose man, a tippler, and a
sufferer from asthma and an inexplicable grudge against life in
general, croaked out:

"How could your tench have wriggled across dry land if it was a fish?"

"Can, for that matter, a fish speak?" was Ossip's good-humoured retort.

All of which inspired Mokei Budirin, a grey-headed muzhik of a cast of
countenance canine in the prominence of his jaws and the recession of
his forehead, and taciturn withal, though not otherwise remarkable, to
give slow, nasal utterance to his favourite formula.

"That is true enough," he said.

For never could anything be spoken of that was grim or marvellous or
lewd or malicious, but Budirin at once re-echoed softly, but in a tone
of unshakable conviction: "That is true enough."

Thereafter he would tap me on the breast with his hard and ponderous
fist.

Presently work again underwent an interruption through the fact that
Yakov Boev, a man who possessed both a stammer and a squint, became
similarly filled with a desire to tell us something about a fish. Yet
from the moment that he began his narrative everyone declined to
believe it, and laughed at his broken verbiage as, frequently invoking
the Deity, and cursing, and brandishing his awl, and viciously
swallowing spittle, he shouted amid general ridicule:

"Once-once upon a time there lived a man. Yes, other folk before YOU
have believed my tale. Indeed, it is no more than the truth that I'm
going to tell you. Very well! Cackle away, and be damned!"

Here everyone without exception dropped his work to shout with
merriment and clap his hands: with the result that, doffing his cap,
and thereby disclosing a silvered, symmetrically shaped head with one
bald spot amid its one dark portion, Ossip was forced to shout severely:

"Hi, you Budirin! You've had your say, and given us some fun, and there
must be no more of it."

"But I had only just begun what I want to say," the old soldier
grumbled, spitting upon the palms of his hands.

Next, Ossip turned to myself.

"Inspector," he began...

It is my opinion that in thus hindering the men from work through his
tale-telling, Ossip had some definite end in view. I could not say
precisely what that end was, but it must have been the object either of
cloaking his own laziness or of giving the men a rest. On the other
hand, whenever the contractor was present he, Ossip, bore himself with
humble obsequiousness, and continued to assume a guise of simplicity
which none the less did not prevent him, on the advent of each
Saturday, from inducing his employer to bestow a pourboire upon the
artel.

And though this same Ossip was an artelui, and a director of the artel,
his senior co-members bore him no affection, but, rather, looked upon
him as a wag or trifler, and treated him as of no importance. And,
similarly, the younger members of the artel liked well enough to listen
to his tales, but declined to take him seriously, and, in some cases,
regarded him with ill-concealed, or openly expressed, distrust.

Once the Morduine, a man of education with whom, on occasions, I held
discussions on intimate subjects, replied to a question of mine on the
subject of Ossip:

"I scarcely know. Goodness alone knows! No, I do not know anything
about him."

To which, after a pause, he added:

"Once a fellow named Mikhailo, a clever fellow who is now dead,
insulted Ossip by saying to him: 'Do you call yourself a man? Why,
regarded as a workman, you're as lifeless as a doornail, while, seeing
that you weren't born to be a master, you'll all your life continue
chattering in corners, like a plummet swinging at the end of a string!'
Yes, and that was true enough."

Lastly, after another pause the Morduine concluded:

"No matter. He is not such a bad sort."

My own position among these men was a position of some awkwardness,
for, a young fellow of only fifteen, I had been appointed by the
contractor, a distant relative of mine, to the task of superintending
the expenditure of material. That is to say, I had to see to it that
the carpenters did not make away with nails, or dispose of planks in
return for drink. Yet all the time my presence was practically useless,
seeing that the men stole nails as though I were not even in existence
and strove to show me that among them I was a person too many, a sheer
incubus, and seized every opportunity of giving me covert jogs with a
beam, and similarly affronting me.

This, of course, made my relations with them highly difficult,
embarrassing, and irksome; and though moments occurred when I longed to
say something that might ingratiate me, and endeavoured to effect an
advance in that direction, the words always failed me at the necessary
juncture, and I found myself lying crushed as before under a burdensome
sense of the superfluity of my existence.

Again, if ever I tried to make an entry as to some material which had
been used, Ossip would approach me, and, for instance, say:

"Is it jotted down, eh? Then let me look at it."

And, eyeing the notebook with a frown, he would add vaguely:

"What a nice hand you write!" (He himself could write only in printing
fashion, in the large scriptory characters of the Ecclesiastical
Rubric, not in those of the ordinary kind.)

"For example, that scoop there--what does IT say?"

"It is the word 'Good.'"

"'Good'? But what a slip-knot of a thing! And what are those words
THERE, on THAT line?"

"They say, 'Planks, 1 vershok by 9 arshini, 5.'"

"No, six was the number used."

"No, five."

"Five? Why, the soldier broke one, didn't he?"

"Yes, but never mind--at least it wasn't a plank that was wanted."

"Oh! Well, I may tell you that he took the two pieces to the tavern to
get drink with."

Then, glancing into my face with his cornflower-blue eyes and quiet,
quizzical smile, he would say without the least confusion as he twisted
the ringlets of his beard:

"Put down '6.' And see here, young cockerel. The weather has turned wet
and cold, and the work is hard, and sometimes folk need to have their
spirits cheered and raised with a drop of liquor. So don't you be too
hard upon us, for God won't think the more of you for being strict."

And as he thus talked to me in his slow and kindly, but semi-affected,
fashion--bespattering me, as it were, with wordy sawdust--I would
suddenly grow blind of an eye and silently show him the corrected
figure.

"That's it--that's right. And how fine the figure looks now, as it
squats there like a merchant's buxom, comely dame!"

Then he would be seen triumphantly telling his mates of his success;
then, I would find myself feeling acutely conscious of the fact that
everyone was despising me for my complacence Yes, grown sick beyond
endurance with a yearning for some thing which it could not descry, my
fifteen-year-old heart would dissolve in a flood of mortified tears,
and there would pass through my brain the despondent, aching thought:

"Oh, what a sad, uncomfortable world is this! How should Ossip have
known so well that I should not re-correct the 6 into a 5, or that I
should not tell the contractor that the men have bartered a plank for
liquor?"

Again, there befell an occasion when the men stole two pounds' weight
of five vershok mandrels and bolts.

"Look here," I said to Ossip warningly. "I am going to report this."

"All right," he agreed with a twitch of his grey eyebrows. "Though what
such a trifle can matter I fail to see. Yes, go and report every
mother's son of them."

And to the men themselves he shouted:

"Hi, boobies! Each of you now stands docked for some mandrels and
bolts."

"Why?" was the old soldier's grim inquiry.

"Because you DO so stand," carelessly retorted the other.

With snarls thereafter, the men eyed me covertly, until I began to feel
that very likely I should not do as I had threatened, and even that so
to do might not be expedient.

"But look here," said I to Ossip. "I am going to give the contractor
notice, and let all of you go to the devil. For if I were to remain
with you much longer I too should become a thief."

Ossip stroked his beard awhile, and pondered. Then he seated himself
beside me, and said in an undertone:

"That is true."

"Well?"

"But things are always so. The truth is that it's time you departed.
What sort of a watchman, of a checker, are you? In jobs of this kind
what a man needs to know is the meaning of property. He needs to have
in him the spirit of a dog, so that he shall look after his master's
stuff as he would look after the skin which his mother has put on to
his own body. But you, you young puppy, haven't the slightest notion of
what property means. In fact, were anyone to go and tell Vasili
Sergeitch about the way in which you keep letting us off, he'd give it
you in the neck. Yes, you're no good to him at all, but just an
expense: whereas when a man serves a master he ought, do you
understand, to be PROFITABLE to that master."

He rolled and handed me a cigarette.

"Smoke this," said he, "and perhaps it'll make your brain work easier.
If only you had been of a less awkward, uncomfortable nature, I should
have said to you, 'Go and join the priests; but, as things are, you
aren't the right sort for that--you're too stiff and unbending, and
would never make headway even with an abbot. No, you're not the sort to
play cards with. A monk is like a jackdaw--he chatters without knowing
what he is chattering about, and pays no heed to the root of things, so
busy is he with stuffing himself full with the grain. I say this to you
with absolute earnestness, for I perceive you to be strange to our
ways--a cuckoo that has blundered into the wrong nest."

And, doffing his cap, a gesture which he never failed to execute when
he had something particularly important to say, he added humbly and
sonorously as he glanced at the grey firmament:

"In the sight of the Lord our ways are the ways of thieves, and such as
will never gain of Him salvation."

"And that is true enough," responded Mokei Budirin after the fashion of
a clarionet.

From that time forth, Ossip of the curly, silvered head, bright eyes,
and shadowy soul became an object of agreeable interest for me. Indeed,
there grew up between us a species of friendship, even though I could
see that a civil bearing towards me in public was a thing that it hurt
him to maintain. At all events, in the presence of others he avoided my
glance, and his eyes, clear, unsullied, and fight blue in tint, wavered
unsteadily, and his lips twitched and assumed an artificially
unpleasant expression, while he uttered some such speech as:

"Hi, you Makarei, see that you keep your eyes open, and cam your pay,
or that pig of a soldier will be making away with more nails!"

But at other times, when we were alone together, he would speak to me
kindly and instructively, while his eyes would dance and gleam with a
faint, grave, knowing smile, and dart blue rays direct into mine, while
for my part, as I listened to his words, I took every one of them to be
absolutely true and balanced, despite their strange delivery.

"A man's duty consists in being good," I remarked on one occasion.

"Yes, of course," assented Ossip, though the next moment he veiled his
eyes with a smile, and added in an undertone: "But what do you
understand by the term 'good'? In my opinion, unless virtue be to their
advantage, folk spit upon that 'goodness,' that 'honourableness,' of
yours. Hence, the better plan is to pay folk court, and be civil to
them, and flatter and cajole every mother's son of them. Yes, do that,
and your 'goodness' will have a chance of bringing you in some return.
Not that I do not say that to be 'good,' to be able to look your own
ugly jowl in the face in a mirror, is pleasant enough; but, as I see
the matter, it is all one to other people whether you be a cardsharper
or a priest so long as you're polite, and let down your neighbours
lightly. That's what they want."

For my part I never, at that period, grew weary of watching my fellows,
for it was my constant idea that some day one of them would be able to
raise me to a higher level, and to bring me to an understanding of this
unintelligible and complicated existence of ours. Hence I kept asking
myself the restless, the importunate question:

"What precisely is the human soul?"

Certain souls, I thought, existed which seemed like balls of copper,
for, solid and immovable, they reflected things from their own point of
view alone, in a dull and irregular and distorted fashion. And souls, I
thought, existed which seemed as flat as mirrors, and, for all intents
and purposes, had no existence at all.

And in every case the human soul seemed formless, like a cloud, and as
murkily mutable as an imitation opal, a thing which altered according
to the colour of what adjoined it.

Only as regarded the soul of the intelligent Ossip was I absolutely at
a loss, absolutely unable to reach a conclusion.

Pondering these and similar matters in my mind, I, on the day of which
I speak, stood gazing at the river, and at the town under the hill, as
I listened to the bells. Rearing themselves aloft like the organ pipes
in my favourite Polish-Roman Catholic church, the steeples of the town
had their crosses dimly sparkling as though the latter had been stars
imprisoned in a murky sky. Yet it was as though those stars hoped
eventually to ascend into the purer firmament above the wind-torn
clouds that they sparkled; and as I stood watching the clouds glide
onward, and momentarily efface with their shadows, the town's
multifarious hues, I marked the fact that although, whenever dark-blue
cavities in their substance permitted the beams of the sun to
illuminate the buildings below, those buildings' roofs assumed tints of
increased cheerfulness. The clouds seemed to glide the faster to veil
the beams, while the humid shadows grew more opaque--and the scene
darkened as though only for a moment had it assumed a semblance of joy.

The buildings of the town (looking like heaps of muddy snow), the
black, naked earth around those buildings, the trees in the gardens,
the hummocks of piled-up soil, the dull grey glimmer of the window
panes of the houses--all these things reminded me of winter, even
though the misty breath of the northern spring was beginning to steal
over the whole.

Presently a young fellow with flaxen hair, a pendent underlip, and a
tall, ungainly figure, by name Mishuk Diatlov, essayed to troll the
stanza:

  "That morn to him the maiden came,
  To find his soul had fled."

Whereupon the old soldier shouted:

"Hi, you! Have you forgotten the day?"

And even Boev saw fit to take umbrage at the singing, and, threatening
Diatlov with his fist, to rap out:

"Ah, sobatchnia dusha!" ["Soul of a dog."]

"What a rude, rough, primitive lot we Russians are!" commented Ossip,
seating himself atop of the icebreaker, and screwing up his eyes to
measure its fall. "To speak plainly, we Russians are sheer barbarians.
Once upon a time, I may tell you, an anchorite happened to be on his
travels; and as the people came pressing around him, and kneeling to
him, and tearfully beseeching him with the words, 'Oh holy father,
intercede for us with the wolves which are devouring our substance!' he
replied: 'Ha! Are you, or are you not, Orthodox Christians? See that I
assign you not to condign perdition!' Yes, angry, in very truth he was.
Nay, he even spat in the people's faces. Yet in reality he was a kindly
old man, for his eyes kept shedding tears equally with theirs."

Twenty sazheni below the icebreaker was a gang of barefooted sailors,
engaged in hacking out the floes from under their barges; and as they
shattered the brittle, greyish-blue crust on the river, the mattocks
rang out, and the sharp blades of the icecutters gleamed as they thrust
the broken fragments under the surface. Meanwhile, there could be heard
a bubbling of water, and the sound of rivulets trickling down to the
sandy margin of the river. And similarly among our own gang was there
audible a scraping of planes, and a screeching of saws, and a
clattering of iron braces as they were driven into the smooth yellow
wood, while through all the web of these sounds there ran the ceaseless
song of the bells, a song so softened by distance as to thrill the
soul, much as though dingy, burdensome labour were holding revel in
honour of spring, and calling upon the latter to spread itself over the
starved, naked surface of the gradually thawing ground.

At this point someone shouted hoarsely:

"Go and fetch the German. We have not got hands enough."

And from the bank someone bawled in reply:

"Where IS he?"

"In the tavern. That is where you must go and look for him."

And as they made themselves heard, the voices floated up turgidly into
the sodden air, spread themselves over the river's mournful void, and
died away.

Meanwhile our men worked with industry and speed, but not without a
fault or two, for their thoughts were fixed upon the town and its
washhouses and churches. And particularly restless was Sashok Diatlov,
a man whose hair, as flaxen as that of his brother, seemed to have been
boiled in lye. At intervals, glancing up-river, this well-built, sturdy
young fellow would say softly to his brother:

"It's cracking now, eh?"

And, certainly, the ice had "moved" two nights ago, so that since
yesterday morning the river watchmen had refused to permit horsed
vehicles to cross, and only a few beadlike pedestrians now were making
their way along the marked-out ice paths, while, as they proceeded, one
could hear the water slapping against the planks as the latter bent
under the travellers' weight.

"Yes, it IS cracking," at length Mishuk replied with a hoist of his
ginger eyebrows.

Ossip too scanned the river from under his hand. Then he said to Mishuk:

"Pah! It is the dry squeak of the planes in your own hand that you keep
hearing, so go on with your work, you son of a beldame. And as for you,
Inspector, do you help me to speed up the men instead of burying your
nose in your notebook."

By this time there remained only two more hours for work, and the arch
of the icebreaker had been wholly sheathed in butter-tinted scantlings,
and nothing required to be added to it save the great iron braces.
Unfortunately, Boev and Saniavin, the men who had been engaged upon the
task of cutting out the sockets for the braces, had worked so amiss,
and run their lines so straight, that, when it came to the point, the
arms of the braces refused to sink properly into the wood.

"Oh, you cock-eyed fool of a Morduine!" shouted Ossip, smiting his fist
against the side of his cap. "Do you call THAT sort of thing work?"

At this juncture there came from somewhere on the bank a seemingly
exultant shout of:

"Ah! NOW it's giving way!"

And almost at the same moment, there stole over the river a sort of
rustle, a sort of quiet crunching which made the projecting pine
branches quiver as though they were trying to catch at something,
while, shouldering their mattocks, the barefooted sailors noisily
hastened aboard their barges with the aid of rope ladders.

And then curious indeed was it to see how many people suddenly came
into view on the river--to see how they appeared to issue from below
the very ice itself, and, hurrying to and fro like jackdaws startled by
the shot of a gun, to dart hither and thither, and to seize up planks
and boathooks, and to throw them down again, and once more to seize
them up.

"Put the tools together," Ossip shouted. "And look alive there, and
make for the bank."

"Aye, and a fine Easter Day it will be for us on THAT bank!" growled
Sashok.

Meanwhile, it was the river rather than the town that seemed to be
motionless--the latter had begun, as it were, to quiver and reel, and,
with the hill above it, to appear to be gliding slowly up stream, even
as the grey, sandy bank some ten sazheni from us was beginning to grow
tremulous, and to recede.

"Run, all of you!" shouted Ossip, giving me a violent push as he did
so. Then to myself in particular he added: "Why stand gaping there?"

This caused a keen sense of danger to strike home in my heart, and to
make my feet feel as though already the ice was escaping their tread.
So, automatically picking themselves up, those feet started to bear my
body in the direction of a spot on the sandy bank where the
winter-stripped branches of a willow tree were writhing, and whither
there were betaking themselves also Boev, the old soldier, Budirin, and
the brothers Diatlov. Meanwhile the Morduine ran by my side, cursing
vigorously as he did so, and Ossip followed us, walking backwards.

"No, no, Narodetz," he said.

"But, my good Ossip--"

"Never mind. What has to be, has to be."

"But, as likely as not, we may remain stuck here for two days!"

"Never mind even if we DO remain stuck here."

"But what of the festival?"

"It will have, for this year at least, to be kept without you."

Seating himself on the sand, the old soldier lit his pipe and growled:

"What cowards you all are! The bank was only fifteen sazheni from us,
yet you ran as though possessed!"

"With you yourself as leader," put in Mokei.

The old soldier took no notice, but added:

"What were you all afraid of? Once upon a time Christ Himself, Our
Little Father, died."

"And rose again," muttered the Morduine with a tinge of resentment.
Which led Boev to exclaim:

"Puppy, hold your tongue! What right have you to air your opinions?"

"Besides, this is Good Friday, not Easter Day," the old soldier
concluded with severe, didactical mien.

In a gap of blue between the clouds there was shining the March sun,
and everywhere the ice was sparkling as though in derision of
ourselves. Shading his eyes, Ossip gazed at the dissolving river, and
said:

"Yes, it IS rising--but that will not last for long."

"No, but long enough to make us miss the festival," grumbled Sashok.

Upon this the smooth, beardless face of the youthful Morduine, a face
dark and angular like the skin of an unpeeled potato, assumed a
resentful frown, and, blinking his eyes, he muttered:

"Yes, here we may have to sit--here where there's neither food nor
money! Other folk will be enjoying themselves, but we shall have to
remain hugging our hungry stomachs like a pack of dogs!"

Meanwhile Ossip's eyes had remained fixed upon the river, for evidently
his thoughts were far away, and it was in absentminded fashion that he
replied:

"Hunger cannot be considered where necessity impels. By the way, what
use are our damned icebreakers? For the protection of barges and such?
Why, the ice hasn't the sense to care. It just goes sliding over a
barge, and farewell is the word to THAT bit of property!"

"Damn it, but none of us have a barge for property, have we?

"You had better go and talk to a fool."

"The truth is that the icebreaker ought to have been taken in hand
sooner."

Finally, the old soldier made a queer grimace, and ejaculated:

"Blockhead!"

From a barge a knot of sailors shouted something, and at the same
moment the river sent forth a sort of whiff of cruel chilliness and
brooding calm. The disposition of the pine boughs now had changed. Nay,
everything in sight was beginning to assume a different air, as though
everything were charged with tense expectancy.

One of the younger men asked diffidently, beneath his breath:

"Mate Ossip, what are we going to do?"

"What do you say?" Ossip queried absent-mindedly.

"I say, what are we going to do? Just to sit here?"

To this Boev responded, with loud, nasal derision in his tone:

"Yes, my lad, for the Lord has seen fit to prevent you from
participating in His most holy festival."

And the old soldier, in support of his mate, extended his pipe towards
the river, and muttered with a grin:

"You want to cross to the town, do you? Well, be off with you, and
though the ice may give way beneath your feet and drown you, at least
you'll be taken to the police station, and so get to your festival. For
that's what you want, I suppose?"

"True enough," Mokei re-echoed.

Then the sun went in, and the river grew darker, while the town stood
out more clearly. Ceaselessly, the younger men gazed towards the town
with wistful, gloomy eyes, though silently they remained where they
were.

Similarly, I myself was beginning to find things irksome and
uncomfortable, as always happens when a number of companions are
thinking different thoughts, and contain in themselves none of that
unity of will which alone can join men into a direct, uniform force.
Rather, I felt as though I could gladly leave my companions and start
out upon the ice alone.

Suddenly Ossip recovered his faculties. Rising, then doffing his cap
and making the sign of the cross in the direction of the town, he said
with a quiet, simple, yet somehow authoritative, air:

"Very well, my mates. Go in peace, and may the Lord go with you!"

"But whither?" asked Sashok, leaping to his feet. "To the town?"

"Whither else?"

The old soldier was the only one not to rise, and with conviction he
remarked:

"It will result but in our getting drowned."

"Then stay where you are."

Ossip glanced around the party. Then he continued:

"Bestir yourselves! Look alive!"

Upon which all crowded together, and Boev, thrusting the tools into a
hole in the bank, groaned:

"The order 'go' has been given, so go we MUST, well though a man in
receipt of such an order might ask himself, 'How is it going to be
done?'"

Ossip seemed, in some way, to have grown younger and more active, while
the habitually shy, though good-humoured, expression of his countenance
was gone from his ruddy features, and his darkened eyes had assumed an
air of stern activity. Nay, even his indolent, rolling gait had
disappeared, and in his step there was more firmness, more assurance,
than had ever before been the case.

"Let every man take a plank," he said, "and hold it in front of him.
Then, should anyone fall in (which God forbid!), the plank-ends will
catch upon the ice to either side of him, and hold him up. Also, every
man must avoid cracks in the ice. Yes, and is there a rope handy? Here,
Narodetz! Reach me that spirit-level. Is everyone ready? I will walk
first, and next there must come--well, which is the heaviest?--you,
soldier, and then Mokei, and then the Morduine, and then Boev, and then
Mishuk, and then Sashok, and then Makarei, the lightest of all. And do
you all take off your caps before starting, and say a prayer to the
Mother of God. Ha! Here is Old Father Sun coming out to greet us."

Readily did the men bare their tousled grey or flaxen heads as
momentarily the sun glanced through a bank of thin white vapour before
again concealing himself, as though averse to arousing any false hopes.

"Now!" sharply commanded Ossip in his new-found voice. "And may God go
with us! Watch my feet, and don't crowd too much upon one another, but
keep each at a sazhen's distance or more--in fact, the more the better.
Yes, come, mates!"

With which, stuffing his cap into his bosom, and grasping the
spirit-level in his hands, Ossip set foot upon the ice with a sliding,
cautious, shuffling gait. At the same moment, there came from the bank
behind us a startled cry of:

"Where are you off to, you fools?"

"Never mind," said Ossip to ourselves. "Come along with you, and don't
stand staring."

"You blockheads!" the voice repeated. "You had far better return."

"No, no! come on!" was Ossip's counter-command. "And as you move think
of God, or you'll never find yourselves among the invited guests at His
holy festival of Eastertide."

Next Ossip sounded a police whistle, which act led the old soldier to
exclaim:

"Oh, that's the way, mate! Good! Yes, you know what to do.  Now notice
will have been given to the police on the further bank, and, if we're
not drowned, we shall find ourselves clapped in gaol when we get there.
However, I'm not responsible."

In spite of this remonstrance, Ossip's sturdy voice drew his companions
after him as though they had been tied to a rope.

"Watch your feet carefully," once more he cried.

Our line of march was directed obliquely, and in the opposite direction
to the current. Also, I, as the rearmost of the party, found it
pleasant to note how the wary little Ossip of the silvery head went
looping over the ice with the deftness of a hare, and practically no
raising of the feet, while behind him there trailed, in wild-goose
fashion, and as though tied to a single invisible string, six dark and
undulating figures the shadows of which kept making themselves visible
on the ice, from those figures' feet to points indefinitely remote. And
as we proceeded, all of us kept our heads lowered as though we had been
descending from a mountain in momentary fear of a false step.

Also, though the shouting in our rear kept growing in volume, and we
could tell that by this time a crowd had gathered, not a word could we
distinguish, but only a sort of ugly din.

In time our cautious march became for me a mere, mechanical, wearisome
task, for on ordinary occasions it was my custom to maintain a pace of
greater rapidity. Thus, eventually I sank into the semiconscious
condition amid which the soul turns to vacuity, and one no longer
thinks of oneself, but, on the contrary issues from one's personality,
and begins to see objects with unwonted clarity, and to hear sounds
with unwonted precision. Under my feet the seams in the blue-grey,
leaden ice lay full of water, while as for the ice itself, it was
blinding in its expansive glitter, even though in places it had come to
be either cracked or bulbous, or had ground itself into powder with its
own movement, or had become heaped into slushy hummocks of pumice-like
sponginess and the consistency of broken glass. And everywhere around
me I could discern the chilly, gaping smile of blue crevices which
caught at my feet, and rendered the tread of my boot-soles unstable.
And ever, as we marched, could the voices of Boev and the old soldier
be heard speaking in antiphony, like two pipes being fluted by one and
the same pair of lips.

"I won't be responsible," said the one voice.

"Nor I," responded the other.

"The only reason why I have come is that I was told to do so. That's
all about it."

"Yes, and the same with me."

"One man gives an order, and another man, perhaps a man a thousand
times more sensible than he, is forced to obey it."

"Is any man, in these days, sensible, seeing what a racket we have to
live among?"

By this time Ossip had tucked the skirts of his greatcoat into his
belt, while beneath those skirts his legs (clad in grey cloth gaiters
of a military pattern) were shuffling along as lightly and easily as
springs, and in a manner that suggested that there was turning and
twisting in front of him some person whom, though desirous of barring
to him the direct course, the shortest route, Ossip successfully
opposed and evaded by dint of dodges and deviations to right and left,
and occasional turns about, and the execution of dance steps and loops
and semicircles. Meanwhile in the tones of Ossip's voice there was a
soft, musical ring that struck agreeably upon the ear, and harmonised
to admiration with the song of the bells just when we were approaching
the middle of the river's breadth of four hundred sazheni. There
resounded over the surface of the ice a vicious rustle while a piece of
ice slid from under my feet. Stumbling, and powerless to retain my
footing, I blundered down upon my knees in helpless astonishment; and
then, as I glanced upstream, fear gripped at my throat, deprived me of
speech, and darkened all my vision. For the whole substance of the grey
ice-core had come to life and begun to heave itself upwards! Yes, the
hitherto level surface was thrusting forth sharp angular ridges, and
the air seemed full of a strange sound like the trampling of some heavy
being over broken glass.

With a quiet trickle there came a swirl of water around me, while an
adjacent pine bough cracked and squeaked as though it too had come to
life. My companions shouted, and collected into a knot; whereupon, at
once dominating and quelling the tense, painful hubbub of sounds, there
rang forth the voice of Ossip.

"Mother of God!" he shouted. "Scatter, lads! Get away from one another,
and keep each to himself! Now! Courage!"

With that, springing towards us as though wasps had been after him, and
grasping the spirit-level as though it had been a weapon, he jabbed it
to every side, as though fighting invisible foes, while, just as the
quivering town began, seemingly, to glide past us, and the ice at my
feet gave a screech and crumbled to fragments beneath me, so that water
bubbled to my knees. I leapt up from where I was, and rushed blindly in
Ossip's direction.

"Where are you coming to, fool?" was his shout as he brandished the
spirit-level. "Stand still where you are!"

Indeed, Ossip seemed no longer to be Ossip at all, but a person
curiously younger, a person in whom all that had been familiar in Ossip
had become effaced. Yes, the once blue eyes had turned to grey, and the
figure added half an arshin to its stature as, standing as erect as a
newly made nail, and pressing both feet together, the foreman stretched
himself to his full height, and shouted with his mouth open to its
widest extent:

"Don't shuffle about, nor crowd upon one another, or I'll break your
heads!"

Whereafter, of myself in particular, he inquired as he raised the
spirit-level:

"What is the matter with YOU, pray?"

"I am feeling frightened," I muttered in response.

"Feeling frightened of WHAT, indeed?"

"Of being drowned."

"Pooh! Just you hold your tongue."

Yet the next moment he glanced at me, and added in a gentler, quieter
tone:

"None but a fool gets drowned. Pick yourself up and come along."

Then once more he shouted full-throated words of encouragement to his
men; and as he did so, his chest swelled and his head rocked with the
effort.

Yet, crackling and cracking, the ice was breaking up; and soon it began
slowly to bear us past the town. 'Twas as though some unknown force
ashore had awakened, and was striving to tear the banks of the river in
two, so much did the portion of the landscape downstream seem to be
standing still while the portion level with us seemed to be receding in
the opposite direction, and thus causing a break to take place in the
middle of the picture.

And soon this movement, a movement agonisingly slow, deprived me of my
sense of being connected with the rest of the world, until, as the
whole receded, despair again gripped my heart and unnerved my limbs.
Roseate clouds were gliding across the sky and causing stray fragments
of the ice, which, seemingly, yearned to engulf me, to assume reflected
tints of a similar hue. Yes, it was as though the birth of spring had
reawakened the universe, and was causing it to stretch itself, and to
emit deep, hurried, broken pants that cracked its bones as the river,
embedded in the earth's stout framework, revivified the whole with
thick, turbulent, ebullient blood.

And this sense of littleness, of impotence amid the calm, assured
movement of the earth's vast bulk, weighed upon my soul, and evoked,
and momentarily fanned to flame in me, the shameless human question:
"What if I should stretch forth my hand and lay it upon the hill and
the banks of the river, and say, 'Halt until I come to you!'?"

Meanwhile the bells continued the mournful moaning of their resonant,
coppery notes; and that moaning led me to reflect that within two days
(on the night of the morrow) they would be pealing a joyous welcome to
the Resurrection Feast.

"Oh that all of us may live to hear that sound!" was my unspoken
thought.

Before my vision there kept quavering seven dark figures--figures
shuffling over the ice, and brandishing planks like oars. And,
wriggling like a lamprey in front of them was a little old fellow, an
old fellow resembling Saint Nicholas the Wonder-Worker, an old fellow
who kept crying softly, but authoritatively:

"Do not stare about you!"

And ever the river was growing rougher and ruder; ever its backbone was
beginning to puiver and flounder like a whale underfoot, with its
liquescent body of cold, grey, murky water bursting with increasing
frequency from its shell of ice, and lapping hungrily at our feet.

Yes, we were human beings traversing, as it were, a slender pole over a
bottomless abyss; and as we walked, the water's soft, cantabile splash
set me in mind of the depths below, of the infinite time during which a
body would continue sinking through dense, chilly bulk until sight
faded and the heart stopped beating. Yes, before my mind's eye there
arose men drowned and devoured by crayfish, men with crumbling skulls
and swollen features, and glassy, bulging eyes and puffy hands and
outstretched fingers and palms of which the skin had rotted off with
the damp.

The first to fall in was Mokei Budirin. He had been walking next ahead
of the Morduine, and, as a man habitually silent and absorbed,
proceeding on his way more quietly than the rest. Suddenly something
had seemed to catch at his legs, and he had disappeared until only his
head and his hands, as the latter clutched at his plank, had been left
above-level.

"Run and help him, somebody!" was Ossip's instant cry. "Yes, but not
all of you--just one or two. Help him I say!"

The spluttering Mokei, however, said to the Morduine and myself:

"No; do you move away, mates, for I shall best help myself. Never you
mind."

And, sure enough, he did succeed in drawing himself out on to the ice
without assistance. Whereafter he remarked as he shook himself:

"A nice pickle, this, to be in! I might as well have been drowned!"

And, in fact, at the moment he looked, with his chattering teeth and
great tongue licking a dripping moustache, precisely like a large,
good-natured dog.

Then I remembered how, a month earlier, he had accidentally driven the
blade of his axe through the joint of his left thumb, and, merely
picking up the white fragment of flesh with the nail turning blue, and
scanning it with his unfathomable eyes, had remarked, as though it was
he himself that had been at fault:

"How often before I have injured that thumb, I could not say. And when
once I dislocated it, I went on working with it longer than was right....
Now I will go and bury it."

With which, carefully wrapping up the fragment in some shavings, he had
thrust the whole into his pocket, and bandaged the wounded hand.

Similarly, after that, did Boev, the man next in order behind Mokei,
contrive to wrest himself from the grasp of the ice, though, on
immersion, he started bawling, "Mates, I shall drown! I am dead
already! Help me, help me!" and became so cramped with terror as to be
extricated only with great difficulty, while amid the general confusion
the Morduine too nearly slipped into the water.

"A narrow shave of saying Vespers tonight with the devils in Hell!" he
remarked as he clambered back, and stood grinning with an even more
angular and attenuated appearance than usual.

The next moment Boev achieved a second plunge, and screamed, as before,
for help.

"Don't shout, you goat of a Yashka!" Ossip exclaimed as he threatened
him with the spirit-level. "Why scare people? I'll give it you! Look
here, lads. Let every man take off his belt and turn out his pockets.
Then he'll walk lighter."

Toothed jaws gaped and crunched at us at every step, and vomited thick
spittle; at every tenth step their keen blue fangs reached for our
lives. Meanwhile, the soaked condition of our boots and clothes had
rendered us as slimy as though smeared with paste. Also, it so weighed
us down as to hinder any active movement, and to cause each step to be
taken cautiously, slowly, silently, and with ponderous diffidence.

Yet, soaked though we were, Ossip might verily have known the number of
cracks in advance, so smooth and harelike was his progress from floe to
floe as at intervals he faced about, watched us, and cried sonorously:

"That's the way to do it, eh?"

Yes, he absolutely played with the river, and though it kept catching
at his diminutive form, he always evaded it, circumvented its
movements, and avoided its snares. Nay, capable even of directing its
trend did he seem, and of thrusting under our feet only the largest and
firmest floes.

"Lads, there is no need to be downhearted," he would cry at intervals.

"Ah, that brave Ossip!" the Morduine once ejaculated. "In very truth is
he a man, and no mistake! Just look at him!"

The closer we approached the further shore, the thinner and the more
brittle did the ice become, and the more liable we to break through it.
By this time the town had nearly passed us, and we were bidding fair to
be carried out into the Volga, where the ice would still be sound, and,
as likely as not, draw us under itself.

"By your leave, we are going to be drowned," the Morduine murmured as
he glanced at the blue shadow of eventide on our left.

And simultaneously, as though compassionating our lot, a large floe
grounded upon the bank, glided upwards with a cracking and a crashing,
and there held fast!

"Run, all of you!" came a furious shout from Ossip. "Hurry up, now! Put
your very best legs foremost!"

For myself, as I sprang upon the floe I lost my footing, and, falling
headlong and remaining seated on the hither end of the floe amid a
shower of spray, saw five of my seven comrades rush past, pushing and
jostling, as they made for the shore. But presently the Morduine turned
and halted beside me, with the intention of rendering Ossip assistance.

"Run, you young fools!" the latter exclaimed. "Come! Be off with you!"

Somehow in his face there was now a livid, uncertain air, while his
eyes had lost their fire, and his mouth was curiously agape.

"No, mate. Do YOU get up," was my counter-adjuration.

"Unfortunately, I have hurt my leg," he replied with his head bent
down. "In fact, I am not sure that I can get up."

However, we contrived to raise him and carry him ashore with an arm of
his resting on each of our necks. Meanwhile he growled with chattering
teeth:

"Aha, you river devils! Drown me if you can! But I've not given you a
chance, the Lord be thanked! Hi, look out! The ice won't bear the three
of us. Mind how you step, and choose places where the ice is bare of
snow. There it's firmer. No, a better plan still would be to leave me
where I am."

Next, with a frowning scrutiny of my face, he inquired:

"That notebook of our misdeeds--hasn't it had a wetting and got done
for?"

That very moment, as we stepped from the stranded floe (in grounding,
it had crushed and shattered a small boat), such part of it as lay in
the water gave a loud crack, and, swaying to and fro, and emitting a
gurgling sound, floated clear of the rest.

"Ah!" was the Morduine's quizzical comment. "YOU knew well enough what
needed to be done."

Wet, and chilled to the bone, though relieved in spirit, we stepped
ashore to find a crowd of townspeople in conversation with Boev and the
old soldier. And as we deposited our charge under the lea of a pile of
logs he shouted cheerfully:

"Mates, Makarei's notebook is done for, soaked through!"  And since the
notebook in question was weighing upon my breast like a brick, I pulled
it out unseen, and hurled it far into the river with a plop like that
of a frog.

As for the Diatlovs, they lost no time in setting out in search of
vodka in the tavern on the hill, and slapped one another on the back as
they ran, and could be heard shouting, "Hurrah, hurrah!"

Upon this, a tall old man with the beard of an apostle and the eyes of
a brigand muttered:

"Infidels, why disturb peaceful folk like this? You ought to be
thrashed!"

Whereupon Boev, who was changing his clothes, retorted:

"What do you mean by 'disturb'?"

"Besides," put in the old soldier, "even though we are Christians like
yourself, we might as well have been drowned for all that you did to
help us."

"What could we have done?"

Meanwhile Ossip had remained lying on the ground with one leg stretched
out at full length, and tremulous hands fumbling at his greatcoat as
under his breath he muttered:

"Holy Mother, how wet I am! My clothes, though I have only worn them a
year, are ruined for ever!"

Moreover, he seemed now to have shrunken again in stature--to have
become crumpled up like a man run over. Indeed, as he lay he seemed
actually to be melting, so continuously was his bulk decreasing in size.

But suddenly he raised himself to a sitting posture, groaned, and
exclaimed in high-pitched, wrathful accents:

"May the devil take you all! Be off with you to your washhouses and
churches! Yes, be off, for it seems that, as God couldn't keep His holy
festival without you, I've had to stand within an ace of death and to
spoil my clothes-yes, all that you fellows should be got out of your
fix!"

Nevertheless, the men merely continued taking off their boots, and
wringing out their clothes, and conversing with sundry gasps and grunts
with the bystanders. So presently Ossip resumed:

"What are you thinking of, you fools? The washhouse is the best place
for you, for if the police get you, they'll soon find you a lodging,
and no mistake!"

One of the townspeople put in officiously:

"Aye, aye. The police have been sent for."

And this led Boev to exclaim to Ossip:

"Why pretend like that?"

"Pretend? I?"

"Yes--you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that it was you who egged us on to cross the river."

"You say that it was I?"

"I do."

"Indeed?"

"Aye," put in Budirin quietly, but incisively. And him the Morduine
supported by saying in a sullen undertone:

"It was you, mate. By God it was. It would seem that you have
forgotten."

"Yes, you started all this business," the old soldier corroborated, in
dour, ponderous accents.

"Forgotten, indeed? HE?" was Boev's heated exclamation.

"How can you say such a thing? Well, let him not try to shift the
responsibility on to others--that's all! WE'LL see, right enough, that
he goes through with it!"

To this Ossip made no reply, but gazed frowningly at his dripping,
half-clad men.

All at once, with a curious outburst of mingled smiles and tears (it
would be hard to say which), he shrugged his shoulders, threw up his
hands, and muttered:

"Yes, it IS true. If it please you, it was I that contrived the idea."

"Of COURSE it was!" the old soldier cried triumphantly.

Ossip turned his eyes again to where the river was seething like a bowl
of porridge, and, letting his eyes fall with a frown, continued:

"In a moment of forgetfulness I did it. Yet how is it that we were not
all drowned? Well, you wouldn't understand even if I were to tell you.
No, by God, you wouldn't!... Don't be angry with me, mates. Pardon
me for the festival's sake, for I am feeling uneasy of mind. Yes, I it
was that egged you on to cross the river, the old fool that I was!"

"Aha!" exclaimed Boev. "But, had I been drowned, what should you have
said THEN?"

In fact, by this time Ossip seemed conscious to the full of the
futility and the senselessness of what he had done: and in his state of
sliminess, as he sat nodding his head, picking at the sand, looking at
no one, and emitting a torrent of remorseful words, he reminded me
strongly of a new-born calf.

And as I watched him I thought to myself:

"Where now is the leader of men who could draw his fellows in his train
with so much care and skill and authority?"

And into my soul there trickled an uneasy sense of something lacking.
Seating myself beside Ossip (for I desired still to retain a measure of
my late impression of him), I said to him in an undertone:

"Soon you will be all right again."

With a sideways glance he muttered in reply, as he combed his beard:

"Well, you saw what happened just now. Always do things so happen."

While for the benefit of the men he added:

"That was a good jest of mine, eh?"

The summit of the hill which lay crouching, like a great beast, on the
brink of the river was standing out clearly against the fast darkening
sky; while a clump of trees thereon had grown black, and everywhere
blue shadows of the spring eventide were coming into view, and looming
between the housetops where the houses lay pressed like scabs against
the hill's opaque surface, and peering from the moist, red jaws of the
ravine which, gaping towards the river, seemed as though it were
stretching forth for a draught of water.

Also, by now the rustling and crunching of the ice on the similarly
darkening river was beginning to assume a deeper note, and at times a
floe would thrust one of its extremities into the bank as a pig thrusts
its snout into the earth, and there remain motionless before once more
beginning to sway, tearing itself free, and floating away down the
river as another such floe glided into its place.

And ever more and more swiftly was the water rising, and washing away
soil from the bank, and spreading a thick sediment over the dark blue
surface of the river. And as it did so, there resounded in the air a
strange noise as of chewing and champing, a noise as though some huge
wild animal were masticating, and licking itself with its great long
tongue.

And still there continued to come from the town the melancholy,
distance-softened, sweet-toned song of the bells.

Presently, the brothers Diatlov appeared descending from the hill with
bottles in their hands, and sporting like a couple of joyous puppies,
while to intercept them there could be seen advancing along the bank of
the river a grey-coated police sergeant and two black-coated constables.

"Oh Lord!" groaned Ossip as he rubbed his knee.

As for the townsfolk, they had no love for the police, so hastened to
withdraw to a little distance, where they silently awaited the
officers' approach. Before long the sergeant, a little, withered sort
of a fellow with diminutive features and a sandy, stubby moustache,
called out in gruff, stern, hoarse, laboured accents:

"So here you are, you rascals!"

Ossip prised himself up from the ground with his elbow, and said
hurriedly:

"It was I that contrived the idea of the thing, your Excellency; but,
pray let me off in honour of the festival."

"What do you say, you--?" the sergeant began, but his bluster was lost
amid the swift flow of Ossip's further conciliatory words.

"We are folk of this town," Ossip continued, "who tonight found
ourselves stranded on the further bank, with nothing to buy bread with,
even though the day after tomorrow will be Christ's day, the day when
Christians like ourselves wish to clean themselves up a little, and to
go to church. So I said to my mates, 'Be off with you, my good fellows,
and may God send that no mishap befall you!' And for this
presumptuousness of mine I have been punished already, for, as you can
see, have as good as broken my leg."

"Yes," ejaculated the sergeant grimly. "But if you had been drowned,
what then?"

Ossip sighed wearily.

"What then, do you say, your Excellency? Why, then, nothing, with your
permission."

This led the officer to start railing at the culprit, while the crowd
listened as silently and attentively as though he had been saying
something worthy to be heard and heeded, rather than foully and
cynically miscalling their mothers.

Lastly, our names having been noted, the police withdrew, while each of
us drank a dram of vodka (and thereby gained a measure of warmth and
comfort), and then began to make for our several homes. Ossip followed
the police with derisive eyes; whereafter, he leapt to his feet with a
nimble, adroit movement, and crossed himself with punctilious piety.

"That's all about it, thank God!" he exclaimed.

"What?" sniggered Boev, now both disillusioned and astonished. "Do you
really mean to say that that leg of yours is better already? Or do you
mean that it never was injured at all?"

"Ah! So you wish that it HAD been injured, eh?"

"The rascal of a Petrushka!" the other exclaimed.

"Now," commanded Ossip, "do all of you be off, mates." And with that he
pulled his wet cap on to his head.

I accompanied him--walking a little behind the rest. As he limped
along, he said in an undertone-said kindly--and as though he were
communicating a secret known only to himself:

"Whatsoever one may do, and whithersoever one may turn, one will find
that life cannot be lived without a measure of fraud and deceit. For
that is what life IS, Makarei, the devil fly away with it!... I
suppose you're making for the hill? Well, I'll keep you company."

Darkness had fallen, but at a certain spot some red and yellow lamps,
lamps the beams of which seemed to be saying, "Come up hither!" were
shining through the obscurity.

Meanwhile, as we proceeded in the direction of the bells that were
ringing on the hill, rivulets of water flowed with a murmur under our
feet, and Ossip's kindly voice kept mingling with their sound.

"See," he continued, "how easily I befooled that sergeant! That is how
things have to be done, Makarei--one has to keep folk from knowing
one's business, yet to make them think that they are the chief persons
concerned, and the persons whose wit has put the cap on the whole."

Yet as I listened to his speech, while supporting his steps, I could
make little of it.

Nor did I care to make very much of it, for I was of a simple and
easygoing nature. And though at the moment I could not have told
whether I really liked Ossip, I would still have followed his lead in
any direction--yes, even across the river again, though the ice had
been giving way beneath me.

And as we proceeded, and the bells echoed and re-echoed, I thought to
myself with a spasm of joy:

"Ah, many times may I thus walk to greet the spring!"

While Ossip said with a sigh:

"The human soul is a winged thing. Even in sleep it flies."

      *      *      *      *      *

A winged thing? Yes, and a thing of wonder.




GUBIN

The place where I first saw him was a tavern wherein, ensconced in the
chimney-corner, and facing a table, he was exclaiming stutteringly,
"Oh, I know the truth about you all! Yes, I know the truth about you!"
while standing in a semicircle in front of him, and unconsciously
rendering him more and more excited with their sarcastic
interpolations, were some tradesmen of the superior sort--five in
number. One of them remarked indifferently:

"How should you NOT know the truth about us, seeing that you do nothing
but slander us?"

Shabby, in fact in rags, Gubin at that moment reminded me of a homeless
dog which, having strayed into a strange street, has found itself held
up by a band of dogs of superior strength, and, seized with
nervousness, is sitting back on its haunches and sweeping the dust with
its tail; and, with growls, and occasional barings of its fangs, and
sundry barkings, attempting now to intimidate its adversaries, and now
to conciliate them. Meanwhile, having perceived the stranger's
helplessness and insignificance, the native pack is beginning to
moderate its attitude, in the conviction that, though continued
maintenance of dignity is imperative, it is not worthwhile to pick a
quarrel so long as an occasional yelp be vented in the stranger's face.

"To whom are you of any use?" one of the tradesmen at length inquired.

"Not a man of us but may be of use."

"To whom, then?"...

I had long since grown familiar with tavern disputes concerning
verities, and not infrequently seen those disputes develop into open
brawls; but never had I permitted myself to be drawn into their toils,
or to be set wandering amid their tangles like a blind man negotiating
a number of hillocks. Moreover, just before this encounter with Gubin,
I had arrived at a dim surmise that when such differences were carried
to the point of madness and bloodshed. Really, they constituted an
expression of the unmeaning, hopeless, melancholy life that is lived in
the wilder and more remote districts of Russia--of the life that is
lived on swampy banks of dingy rivers, and in our smaller and more
God-forgotten towns. For it would seem that in such places men have
nothing to look for, nor any knowledge of how to look for anything;
wherefore, they brawl and shout in vain attempts to dissipate
despondency....

I myself was sitting near Gubin, but on the other side of the table.
Yet, this was not because his outbursts and the tradesmen's retorts
thereto were a pleasure to listen to, since to me both the one and the
other seemed about as futile as beating the air.

"To whom are YOU of use?"

"To himself every man can be useful."

"But what good can one do oneself?"...

The windows of the tavern were open, while in the pendent, undulating
cloud of blue smoke that the flames of the lamps emitted, those lamps
looked like so many yellow pitchers floating amid the waters of a
stagnant pond. Out of doors there was brooding the quiet of an August
night, and not a rustle, not a whisper was there to be heard. Hence, as
numbed with melancholy, I gazed at the inky heavens and limpid stars I
thought to myself:

"Surely, never were the sky and the stars meant to look down upon a
life like this, a life like this?"

Suddenly someone said with the subdued assurance of a person reading
aloud from a written document:

"Unless the peasants of Kubarovo keep a watch upon their timber lands,
the sun will fire them tomorrow, and then the Birkins' forest also will
catch alight."

For a moment the dispute died down. Then, as it were cleaving the
silence, a voice said stutteringly:

"Who cares about the significance of the word 'truth'?"

And the words--heavy, jumbled, and clumsy--filled me with despondent
reflections. Then again the voices rose--this time in louder and more
venomous accents, and with their din recalled to me, by some accident,
the foolish lines:

  The gods did give men water
  To wash in, and to drink;
  Yet man has made it but a pool
  In which his woes to sink.

Presently I moved outside and, seating myself on the steps of the
veranda, fell to contemplating the dull, blurred windows of the
Archpriest's house on the other side of the square, and to watching how
black shadows kept flitting to and fro behind their panes as the faint,
lugubrious notes of a guitar made themselves heard. And a high-pitched,
irritable voice kept repeating at intervals: "Allow me. Pray, permit me
to speak," and being answered by a voice which intermittently shot into
the silence, as into a bottomless sack, the words: "No, do you wait a
moment, do you wait a moment."

Surrounded by the darkness, the houses looked stunted like gravestones,
with a line of black trees above their roofs that loomed shadowy and
cloud-like. Only in the furthest corner of the expanse was the light of
a solitary street lamp bearing a resemblance to the disk of a
stationary, resplendent dandelion.

Over everything was melancholy. Far from inviting was the general
outlook. So much was this the case that, had, at that moment, anyone
stolen upon me from behind the bushes and dealt me a sudden blow on the
head, I should merely have sunk to earth without attempting to see who
my assailant had been.

Often, in those days, was I in this mood, for it clave to me as
faithfully as a dog--never did it wholly leave me.

"It was for men like THOSE that this fair earth of ours was bestowed
upon us!" I thought to myself.

Suddenly, with a clatter, someone ran out of the door of the tavern,
slid down the steps, fell headlong at their foot, quickly regained his
equilibrium, and disappeared in the darkness after exclaiming in a
threatening voice:

"Oh, I'LL pay you out! I'LL skin you, you damned...!"

Whereafter two figures that also appeared in the doorway said as they
stood talking to one another:

"You heard him threaten to fire the place, did you not?"

"Yes, I did. But why should he want to fire it?"

"Because he is a dangerous rascal."

Presently, slinging my wallet upon my back, I pursued my onward way
along a street that was fenced on either side with a tall palisade. As
I proceeded, long grasses kept catching at my feet and rustling drily.
And so warm was the night as to render the payment of a lodging fee
superfluous; and the more so since in the neighbourhood of the
cemetery, where an advanced guard of young pines had pushed forward to
the cemetery wall and littered the sandy ground, with a carpet of red,
dry cones, there were sleeping-places prepared in advance.

Suddenly from the darkness there emerged, to recoil again, a man's tall
figure.

"Who is that? Who is it?" asked the hoarse, nervous voice of Gubin in
dissipation of the deathlike stillness.

Which said, he and I fell into step with one another. As we proceeded
he inquired whence I had come, and why I was still abroad. Whereafter
he extended to me, as to an old acquaintance, the invitation:

"Will you come and sleep at my place? My house is near here, and as for
work, I will find you a job tomorrow. In fact, as it happens, I am
needing a man to help me clean out a well at the Birkins' place. Will
the job suit you? Very well, then. Always I like to settle things
overnight, as it is at night that I can best see through people."

The "house" turned out to be nothing more than an old one-eyed,
hunchbacked washhouse or shanty which, bulging of wall, stood wedged
against the clayey slope of a ravine as though it would fain bury
itself amid the boughs of the neighbouring arbutus trees and elders.

Without striking a light, Gubin flung himself upon some mouldy hay that
littered a threshold as narrow as the threshold of a dog-kennel, and
said to me with an air of authority as he did so:

"I will sleep with my head towards the door, for the atmosphere here is
a trifle confined."

And, true enough, the place reeked of elderberries, soap, burnt stuff,
and decayed leaves. I could not conceive why I had come to such a spot.

The twisted branches of the neighbouring trees hung motionless athwart
the sky, and concealed from view the golden dust of the Milky Way,
while across the Oka an owl kept screeching, and the strange, arresting
remarks of my companion pelted me like showers of peas.

"Do not be surprised that I should live in a remote ravine," he said.
"I, whose hand is against every man, can at least feel lord of what I
survey here."

Too dark was it for me to see my host's face, but my memory recalled
his bald cranium, and the yellow light of the lamps falling upon a nose
as long as a woodpecker's beak, a pair of grey and stubbly cheeks, a
pair of thin lips covered by a bristling moustache, a mouth sharp-cut
as with a knife, and full of black, evil-looking stumps, a pair of
pointed, sensitive, mouse-like ears, and a clean-shaven chin. The last
feature in no way consorted with his visage, or with his whole
appearance; but at least it rendered him worthy of remark, and enabled
one to realise that one had to deal with neither a peasant nor a
soldier nor a tradesman, but with a man peculiar to himself. Also, his
frame was lanky, with long arms and legs, and pointed knees and elbows.
In fact, so like a piece of string was his body that to twist it round
and round, or even to tie it into a knot, would, seemingly, have been
easy enough.

For awhile I found his speech difficult to follow; wherefore, silently
I gazed at the sky, where the stars appeared to be playing at
follow-my-leader.

"Are you asleep?" at length he inquired.

"No, I am not. Why do you shave your beard?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Because, if you will pardon me, I think your face would look better
bearded."

With a short laugh he exclaimed:

"Bearded? Ah, sloven! Bearded, indeed!"

To which he added more gravely:

"Both Peter the Great and Nicholas I were wiser than you, for they
ordained that whosoever should be bearded should have his nose slit,
and be fined a hundred roubles. Did you ever hear of that?"

"No."

"And from the same source, from the beard, arose also the Great Schism."

His manner of speaking was too rapid to be articulate, and, in leaving
his mouth, his words caused his lips to bare stumps and gums amid which
they lost their way, became disintegrated, and issued, as it were, in
an incomplete state.

"Everyone," he continued, "knows that life is lived more easily with a
beard than without one, since with a beard lies are more easily
told--they can be told, and then hidden in the masses of hair. Hence we
ought to go through life with our faces naked, since such faces render
untruthfulness more difficult, and prevent their owners from
prevaricating without the fact becoming plain to all."

"But what about women?"

"What about women? Well, women can always lie to their husbands
successfully, but not to all the town, to all the world, to folk in
general. Moreover, since a woman's real business in life is the same as
that of the hen, to rear young, what can it matter if she DOES cackle a
few falsehoods, provided that she be neither a priest nor a mayor nor a
tchinovnik, and does not possess any authority, and cannot establish
laws? For the really important point is that the law itself should not
lie, but ever uphold truth pure and simple. Long has the prevalent
illegality disgusted me."

The door of the shanty was standing open, and amid the outer darkness,
as in a church, the trees looked like pillars, and the white stems of
the birches like silver candelabra tipped with a thousand lights, or
dimly-seen choristers with faces showing pale above sacramental
vestments of black. All my soul was full of a sort of painful
restlessness. It was a feeling as though I should live to rise and go
forth into the darkness, and offer battle to the terrors of the night;
yet ever, as my companion's torrential speech caught and held my
attention, it detained me where I was.

"My father was a man of no little originality and character," he went
on. "Wherefore, none of the townsfolk liked him. By the age of twenty
he had risen to be an alderman, yet never to the end could get the
better of folk's stubbornness and stupidity, even though he made it his
custom to treat all and sundry to food and drink, and to reason with
them. No, not even at the last did he attain his due. People feared him
because he revolutionised everything, revolutionised it down to the
very roots; the truth being that he had grasped the one essential fact
that law and order must be driven, like nails, into the people's very
vitals."

Mice squeaked under the floor, and on the further side of the Oka an
owl screeched, while amid the pitch-black heavens I could see a number
of blotches intermittently lightening to an elusive red and blurring
the faint glitter of the stars.

"It was one o'clock in the morning when my father died," Gubin
continued. "And upon myself, who was seventeen and had just finished my
course at the municipal school of Riazan, there devolved, naturally
enough, all the enmity that my father had incurred during his lifetime.
'He is just like his sire,' folk said. Also, I was alone, absolutely
alone, in the world, since my mother had lost her reason two years
before my father's death, and passed away in a frenzy. However, I had
an uncle, a retired unter-officier who was both a sluggard, a tippler,
and a hero (a hero because he had had his eyes shot out at Plevna, and
his left arm injured in a manner which had induced paralysis, and his
breast adorned with the military cross and a set of medals). And
sometimes, this uncle of mine would rally me on my learning. For
instance, 'Scholar,' he would say, 'what does "tiversia" mean?' 'No
such word exists,' would be my reply, and thereupon he would seize me
by the hair, for he was rather an awkward person to deal with. Another
factor as concerned making me ashamed of my scholarship was the
ignorance of the townspeople in general, and in the end I became the
common butt, a sort of 'holy idiot.'"

So greatly did these recollections move Gubin that he rose and
transferred his position to the door of the hut, where, a dark blur
against the square of blue, he lit a gurgling pipe, and puffed thereat
until his long, conical nose glowed. Presently the surging stream of
words began again:

"At twenty I married an orphan, and when she fell ill and died
childless I found myself alone once more, and without an adviser or a
friend. However, still I continued both to live and to look about me.
And in time, I perceived that life is not lived wholly as it should be."

"What in life is 'not lived wholly as it should be'?"

"Everything in life. For life is mere folly, mere fatuous nonsense. The
truth is that our dogs do not bark always at the right moment. For
instance, when I said to folk, 'How would it be if we were to open a
technical school for girls?' They merely laughed and replied, 'Trade
workers are hopeless drunkards. Already have we enough of them.
Besides, hitherto women have contrived to get on WITHOUT education.'
And when next I conceived a scheme for instituting a match factory, it
befell that the factory was burnt down during its first year of
existence, and I found myself once more at a loose end. Next a certain
woman got hold of me, and I flitted about her like a martin around a
belfry, and so lost my head as to live life as though I were not on
earth at all--for three years I did not know even what I was doing, and
only when I recovered my senses did I perceive myself to be a pauper,
and my all, every single thing that I had possessed, to have passed
into HER white hands. Yes, at twenty-eight I found myself a beggar. Yet
I have never wholly regretted the fact, for certainly for a time I
lived life as few men ever live it. 'Take my all--take it!' I used to
say to her. And, truly enough, I should never have done much good with
my father's fortune, whereas she--well, so it befell. Somehow I think
that in those days my opinions must have been different from now--now
that I have lost everything.... Yet the woman used to say, 'You have
NOT lost everything,' and she had wit enough to fit out a whole townful
of people."

"This woman--who was she?"

"The wife of a merchant. Whenever she unrobed and said, 'Come! What is
this body of mine worth?' I used to make reply, 'A price that is beyond
compute.'... So within three years everything that I possessed
vanished like smoke. Sometimes, of course, folk laughed at and jibed at
me; nor did I ever refute them. But now that I have come to have a
better understanding of life's affairs, I see that life is not wholly
lived as it should be. For that matter, too, I do not hold my tongue on
the subject, for that is not my way--still left to me I have a tongue
and my soul. The same reason accounts for the fact that no one likes
me, and that by everyone I am looked upon as a fool."

"How, in your opinion, ought life to be lived?"

Without answering me at once, Gubin sucked at his pipe until his nose
made a glowing red blur in the darkness. Then he muttered slowly:

"How life ought to be lived no one could say exactly. And this though I
have given much thought to the subject, and still am doing so."

I found it no difficult matter to form a mental picture of the desolate
existence which this man must be leading--this man whom all his fellows
both derided and shunned. For at that time I too was bidding fair to
fail in life, and had my heart in the grip of ceaseless despondency.

The truth is that of futile people Russia is over-full. Many such I
myself have known, and always they have attracted me as strongly and
mysteriously as a magnet. Always they have struck me more favourably
than the provincial-minded majority who live for food and work alone,
and put away from them all that could conceivably render their
bread-winning difficult, or prevent them from snatching bread out of
the hands of their weaker neighbours. For most such folk are gloomy and
self-contained, with hearts that have turned to wood, and an outlook
that ever reverts to the past; unless, indeed, they be folk of spurious
good nature, an addition to talkativeness, and an apparent bonhomie
which veils a frigid, grey interior, and conveys an impression of
cruelty and greed of all that life contains.

Always, in the end, I have detected in such folk something wintry,
something that makes them seem, as it were, to be spending spring and
summer in expectation solely of the winter season, with its long
nights, and its cold of an austerity which forces one for ever to be
consuming food.

Yet seldom among this distasteful and wearisome crowd of wintry folk is
there to be encountered a man who has altogether proved a failure. But
if he has done so, he will be found to be a man whose nature is of a
more thoughtful, a more truly existent, a more clear-sighted cast than
that of his fellows--a man who at least can look beyond the boundaries
of the trite and commonplace, and whose mentality has a greater
capacity for attaining spiritual fulfilment, and is more desirous of
doing so, than the mentality of his compeers. That is to say, in such a
man one can always detect a striving for space, as a man who, loving
light, carries light in himself.

Unfortunately, all too often is that light only the fugitive
phosphorescence of putrefaction; wherefore as one contemplates him one
soon begins to realise with bitterness and vexation and disappointment
that he is but a sluggard, but a braggart, but one who is petty and
weak and blinded with conceit and distorted with envy, but one between
whose word and whose deed there gapes a disparity even wider and deeper
than the disparity which divides the word from the deed of the man of
winter, of the man who, though he be as tardy as a snail, at least is
making some way in the world, in contradistinction from the failure who
revolves ever in a single spot, like some barren old maid before the
reflection in her looking-glass.

Hence, as I listened to Gubin, there recurred to me more than one
instance of his type.

"Yes, I have succeeded in observing life throughout," he muttered
drowsily as his head sank slowly upon his breast.

And sleep overtook myself with similar suddenness. Apparently that
slumber was of a few minutes' duration only, yet what aroused me was
Gubin pulling at my leg.

"Get up now," he said. "It is time that we were off."

And as his bluish-grey eyes peered into my face, somehow I derived from
their mournful expression a sense of intellectuality. Beneath the hair
on his hollow cheeks were reddish veins, while similar veins, bluish in
tint, covered with a network his temples, and his bare arms had the
appearance of being made of tanned leather.

Dawn had not yet broken when we rose and proceeded through the
slumbering streets beneath a sky that was of a dull yellow, and amid an
atmosphere that was full of the smell of burning.

"Five days now has the forest been on fire," observed Gubin. "Yet the
fools cannot succeed in putting it out."

Presently the establishment of the merchants Birkin lay before us, an
establishment of curious aspect, since it constituted, rather, a
conglomeration of appendages to a main building of ground floor and
attics, with four windows facing on to the street, and a series of
underpropping annexes. That series extended to the wing, and was solid
and permanent, and bade fair to overflow into the courtyard, and
through the entrance-gates, and across the street, and to the very
kitchen-garden and flower-garden themselves. Also, it seemed to have
been stolen piecemeal from somewhere, and at different periods, and
from different localities, and tacked at haphazard on to the walls of
the parent erection. Moreover, all the windows of the latter were
small, and in their green panes, as they confronted the world, there
was a timid and suspicious air, while, in particular, the three windows
which faced upon the courtyard had iron bars to them. Lastly, there
were posted, sentinel-like on the entrance-steps, two water-butts as a
precaution against fire.

"What think you of the place?" Gubin muttered as he peered into the
well. "Isn't it a barbarous hole? The right thing would be to pull it
down wholesale, and then rebuild it on larger and less restricted
lines. Yet these fools merely go tacking new additions on to the old."

For awhile his lips moved as in an incantation. Then he frowned,
glanced shrewdly at the structures in question, and continued softly:

"I may say in passing that the place is MINE."

"YOURS?"

"Yes, mine. At all events, so it used to be."

And he pulled a grimace as though he had got the toothache before
adding with an air of command:

"Come! I will pump out the water, and YOU shall carry it to the
entrance-steps and fill the water-butts. Here is a pail, and here a
ladder."

Whereafter, with a considerable display of strength, he set about his
portion of the task, whilst I myself took pail in hand and advanced
towards the steps to find that the water-butts were so rotten that,
instead of retaining the water, they let it leak out into the
courtyard. Gubin said with an oath:

"Fine masters these--masters who grudge one a groat, and squander a
rouble! What if a fire WERE to break out? Oh, the blockheads!"

Presently, the proprietors in person issued into the courtyard--the
stout, bald Peter Birkin, a man whose face was flushed even to the
whites of his shifty eyes, and, close behind him, eke his shadow, Jonah
Birkin--a person of sandy, sullen mien, and overhanging brows, and
dull, heavy eyes.

"Good day, dear sir," said Peter Birkin thinly, as with a puffy hand he
raised from his head a cloth cap, while Jonah nodded. And then, with a
sidelong glance at myself, asked in a deep bass voice:

"Who is this young man?"

Large and important like peacocks, the pair then shuffled across the
wet yard, and in so doing, went to much trouble to avoid soiling their
polished shoes. Next Peter said to his brother:

"Have you noticed that the water-butts are rotted? Oh, that fine
Yakinika! He ought long ago to have been dismissed."

"Who is that young man over there?" Jonah repeated with an air of
asperity.

"The son of his father and mother," Gubin replied quietly, and without
so much as a glance at the brothers.

"Well, come along," snuffled Peter with a drawling of his vowels. "It
is high time that we were moving. It doesn't matter who the young man
may be."

And with that they slip-slopped across to the entrance gates, while
Gubin gazed after them with knitted brows, and as the brothers were
disappearing through the wicket said carelessly:

"The old sheep! They live solely by the wits of their stepmother, and
if it were not for her, they would long ago have come to grief. Yes,
she is a woman beyond words clever. Once upon a time there were three
brothers--Peter, Alexis, and Jonah; but, unfortunately, Alexis got
killed in a brawl. A fine, tall fellow HE was, whereas these two are a
pair of gluttons, like everyone else in this town. Not for nothing do
three loaves figure on the municipal arms! Now, to work again! Or shall
we take a rest?"

Here there stepped on to the veranda a tall, well-grown young woman in
an open pink bodice and a blue skirt who, shading blue eyes with her
hand, scanned the courtyard and the steps, and said with some
diffidence:

"Good day, Yakov Vasilitch."

With a good-humoured glance in response, and his mouth open, Gubin
waved a hand in greeting:

"Good day to YOU, Nadezhda Ivanovna," he replied. "How are you this
morning?"

Somehow this made her blush, and cross her arms upon her ample bosom,
while her kindly, rounded, eminently Russian face evinced the ghost of
a shy smile. At the same time, it was a face wherein not a single
feature was of a kind to remain fixed in the memory, a face as vacant
as though nature had forgotten to stamp thereon a single wish. Hence,
even when the woman smiled there seemed to remain a doubt whether the
smile had really materialised.

"How is Natalia Vasilievna?" continued Gubin.

"Much as usual," the woman answered softly.

Whereafter hesitantly, and with downcast eyes, she essayed to cross the
courtyard. As she passed me I caught a whiff of raspberries and
currants.

Disappearing into the grey mist through a small door with iron staples,
she soon reissued thence with a hencoop, and, seating herself on the
steps of the doorway, and setting the coop on her knees, took between
her two large palms some fluttering, chirping, downy, golden chicks,
and raised them to her ruddy lips and cheeks with a murmur of:

"Oh my little darlings! Oh my little darlings!"

And in her voice, somehow, there was a note as of intoxication, of
abandonment. Meanwhile dull, reddish sunbeams were beginning to peer
through the fence, and to warm the long, pointed staples with which it
was fastened together. While in a stream of water that was dripping
from the eaves, and trickling over the floor of the court, and around
the woman's feet, a single beam was bathing and quivering as though it
would fain effect an advance to the woman's lap and the hencoop, and,
with the soft, downy chicks, enjoy the caresses of the woman's bare
white arms.

"Ah, little things!" again she murmured. "Ah, little children of mine!"

Upon that Gubin suddenly desisted from his task of hauling up the
bucket, and, as he steadied the rope with his arms raised above his
head, said quickly:

"Nadezhda Ivanovna, you ought indeed to have had some children--six at
the least!"

Yet no reply came, nor did the woman even look at him.

The rays of the sun were now spreading, smokelike and greyish-yellow,
over the silver river. Above the river's calm bed a muslin texture of
mist was coiling. Against the nebulous heavens the blue of the forest
was rearing itself amid the fragrant, pungent fumes from the burning
timber.

Yet still asleep amid its sheltering half-circle of forest was the
quiet little town of Miamlin, while behind it, and encompassing it as
with a pair of dark wings, the forest in question looked as though it
were ruffling its feathers in preparation for further flight beyond the
point where, the peaceful Oka reached, the trees stood darkening,
overshadowing the water's clear depths, and looking at themselves
therein.

Yet, though the hour was so early, everything seemed to have about it
an air of sadness, a mien as though the day lacked promise, as though
its face were veiled and mournful, as though, not yet come to birth, it
nevertheless were feeling weary in advance.

Seating myself by Gubin on some trampled straw in the hut ordinarily
used by the watchman of the Birkins' extensive orchard, I found that,
owing to the orchard being set on a hillside, I could see over the tops
of the apple and pear and fig trees, where their tops hung bespangled
with dew as with quicksilver, and view the whole town and its
multicoloured churches, yellow, newly-painted prison, and
yellow-painted bank.

And while in the town's lurid, four-square buildings I could trace a
certain resemblance to the aces of clubs stamped upon convicts' backs,
in the grey strips of the streets I could trace a certain resemblance
to a number of rents in an old, ragged, faded, dusty coat. Indeed, that
morning all comparisons seemed to take on a tinge of melancholy; the
reason being that throughout the previous evening there had been
moaning in my soul a mournful dirge on the future life.

With nothing, however, were the churches of the town of which I am
speaking exactly comparable, for many of them had attained a degree of
beauty the contemplation of which caused the town to assume
throughout--a different, a more pleasing and seductive, aspect. Thought
I to myself: "Would that men had fashioned all other buildings in the
town as the churches have been fashioned!"

One of the latter, an old, squat edifice the blank windows of which
were deeply sunken in the stuccoed walls, was known as the "Prince's
Church," for the reason that it enshrined the remains of a local Prince
and his wife, persons of whom it stood recorded that "they did pass all
their lives in kindly, unchanging love."...

The following night Gubin and I chanced to see Peter Birkin's tall,
pale, timid young wife traverse the garden on her way to a tryst in the
washhouse with her lover, the precentor of the Prince's Church. And as
clad in a simple gown, and barefooted, and having her ample shoulders
swathed in an old, gold jacket or shawl of some sort, she crossed the
orchard by a path running between two lines of apple trees; she walked
with the unhasting gait of a cat which is crossing a yard after a
shower of rain, and from time to time, whenever a puddle is
encountered, lifts and shakes fastidiously one of its soft paws.
Probably, in the woman's case, this came of the fact that things kept
pricking and tickling her soles as she proceeded. Also, her knees, I
could see, were trembling, and her step had in it a certain hesitancy,
a certain lack of assurance.

Meanwhile, bending over the garden from the warm night sky, the moon's
kindly visage, though on the wane, was shining brightly; and when the
woman emerged from the shadow of the trees I could discern the dark
patches of her eyes, her rounded, half-parted lips, and the thick plait
of hair which lay across her bosom. Also, in the moonlight her bodice
had assumed a bluish tinge, so that she looked almost phantasmal; and
when soundlessly, moving as though on air, she stepped back into the
shadow of the trees, that shadow seemed to lighten.

All this happened at midnight, or thereabouts, but neither of us was
yet asleep, owing to the fact that Gubin had been telling me some
interesting stories concerning the town and its families and
inhabitants. However, as soon as he descried the woman looming like a
ghost, he leapt to his feet in comical terror, then subsided on to the
straw again, contracted his body as though he were in convulsions, and
hurriedly made the sign of the cross.

"Oh Jesus our Lord!" he gasped. "Tell me what that is, tell me what
that is!"

"Keep quiet, you," I urged.

Instead, lurching in my direction, he nudged me with his arm,

"Is it Nadezhda, think you?" he whispered.

"It is."

"Phew! The scene seems like a dream. Just in the same way, and in the
very same place, did her mother-in-law, Petrushka's stepmother, use to
come and walk. Yes, it was just like this."

Then, rolling over, face downwards, he broke into subdued, malicious
chuckles; whereafter, seizing my hand and sawing it up and down, he
whispered amid his exultant pants:

"I expect Petrushka is asleep, for probably he has taken too much
liquor at the Bassanov's smotrini. [A festival at which a fiance pays
his first visit to the house of the parents of his betrothed.]  Aye, he
will be asleep. And as for Jonah, HE will have gone to Vaska Klochi. So
tonight, until morning, Nadezhda will be able to kick up her heels to
her heart's content."

I too had begun to surmise that the woman was come thither for purposes
of her own. Yet the scene was almost dreamlike in its beauty. It
thrilled me to the soul to watch how the woman's blue eyes gazed about
her--gazed as though she were ardently, caressingly whispering to all
living creatures, asleep or awake:

"Oh my darlings! Oh my darlings!"

Beside me the uncouth, broken-down Gubin went on in hoarse accents:

"You must know that she is Petrushka's THIRD wife, a woman whom he took
to himself from the family of a merchant of Murom. Yet the town has it
that not only Petrushka, but also Jonah, makes use of her--that she
acts as wife to both brothers, and therefore lacks children. Also has
it been said of her that one Trinity Sunday she was seen by a party of
women to misconduct herself in this garden with a police sergeant, and
then to sit on his lap and weep. Yet this last I do not wholly believe,
for the sergeant in question is a veteran scarcely able to put one foot
before the other. Also, Jonah, though a brute, lives in abject fear of
his stepmother."

Here a worm-eaten apple fell to the ground, and the woman paused;
whereafter, with head a little raised, she resumed her way with greater
speed.

As for Gubin, he continued, unchecked, though with a trifle less
animosity, rather as though he were reading aloud a manuscript which he
found wearisome:

"See how a man like Peter Birkin may pride himself upon his wealth, and
receive honour during his lifetime, yet all the while have the devil
grinning over his shoulder!"

Then he, Gubin, kept silent awhile, and merely breathed heavily, and
twisted his body about. But suddenly, he resumed in a strange whisper:

"Fifteen years ago--no, surely it was longer ago than that?--Madame
Nadkin, Nadezhda's mother-in-law, made it her practice to come to this
spot to meet her lover. And a fine gallant HE was!"

Somehow, as I watched the woman creeping along, and looking as though
she were intending to commit a theft, or as though she fancied that at
any moment she might see the plump brothers Birkin issue from the
courtyard into the garden and come shuffling ponderously over the
darkened ground, with ropes and cudgels grasped in coarse, red hands
which knew no pity; somehow, as I watched her, I felt saddened, and
paid little heed to Gubin's whispered remarks, so intently were my eyes
fixed upon the granary wall as, after gliding along it awhile, the
woman bent her head and disappeared through the dark blue of the
washhouse door. As for Gubin, he went to sleep with a last drowsy
remark of:

"Life is all falsity. Husbands, wives, fathers, children--all of them
practise deceit."

In the east, portions of the sky were turning to light purple, and
other portions to a darker hue, while from time to time I could see,
looming black against those portions, coils of smoke the density of
which kept being stabbed with fiery spikes of flame, so that the vague,
towering forest looked like a hill on the top of which a fiery dragon
was crawling about, and writhing, and intermittently raising tremulous,
scarlet wings, and as often relapsing into, becoming submerged in, the
bank of vapour. And, in contemplating the spectacle, I seemed actually
to be able to hear the cruel, hissing din of combat between red and
black, and to see pale, frightened rabbits scudding from underneath the
roots of trees amid showers of sparks, and panting, half-suffocated
birds fluttering wildly amid the branches as further and further
afield, and more and more triumphantly, the scarlet dragon unfurled its
wings, and consumed the darkness, and devoured the rain-soaked timber.

Presently from the dark, blurred doorway in the wall of the washhouse
there emerged a dark figure which went flitting away among the trees,
while after it someone called in a sharp, incisive whisper:

"Do not forget. You MUST come."

"Oh, I shall be only too glad!"

"Very well. In the morning the lame woman shall call upon you. Do you
hear?"

And as the woman disappeared from view the other person sauntered
across the garden, and scaled the fence with a clatter.

That night I could not sleep, but, until dawn, lay watching the burning
forest as gradually the weary moon declined, and the lamp of Venus,
cold and green as an emerald, came into view over the crosses on the
Prince's Church. Indeed was the latter a fitting place for Venus to
illumine if really it had been the case that the Prince and Princess
had "passed their lives in kindly, unchanging love"!

Gradually, the dew cleared the trees of the night darkness, and caused
the damp, grey foliage to smile once more with aniseed and red
raspberry, and to sparkle with the gold of their mildew. Also, there
came hovering about us goldfinches with their little red-hooded crests,
and fussy tomtits in their cravats of yellow, while a nimble, dark,
blue woodpecker scaled the stem of an apple tree. And everywhere,
yellow leaves fluttered to earth, and, in doing so, so closely
resembled birds as to make it not always easy to distinguish whether a
leaf or a tomtit had glimmered for a moment in the air.

Gubin awoke, sighed, and with his gnarled knuckles gave his puffy eyes
a rub. Then he raised himself upon all-fours, and, crawling, much
dishevelled with sleep, out of the watchman's hut, snuffed the air (a
process in which his movements approximated comically to those of a
keen-nosed watch-dog). Finally he rose to his feet, and, in the act,
shook one of the trees so violently as to cause a bough to shed its
burden of ripe fruit, and disperse the apples hither and thither over
the dry surface of the ground, or cause them to bury themselves among
the long grass. Three of the juiciest apples he duly recovered, and,
after examination of their exterior, probed with his teeth, while
kicking away from him as many of the remainder as he could descry.

"Why spoil those apples?" I queried

"Oh, so you are NOT asleep?" he countered with a nod of his
melon-shaped cranium. "As a matter of fact, a few apples won't be
missed, for there are too many of them about. My own father it was that
planted the trees which have grown them."

Then, turning upon me a keen, good-humoured eye, and chuckling, he
added:

"What about that Nadezhda? Ah, she is a clever woman indeed! Yet I have
a surprise in store for her and her lover."

"Why should you have?"

"Because I desire to benefit mankind at large" (this was said
didactically, and with a frown). "For, no matter where I detect evil or
underhandedness, it is my duty--I feel it to be my duty--to expose that
evil, and to lay it bare. There exist people who need to be taught a
lesson, and to whom I long to cry: 'Sinners that you are, do you lead
more righteous lives!'"

From behind some clouds the sun was rising with a disk as murky and
mournful as the face of an ailing child. It was as though he were
feeling conscious that he had done amiss in so long delaying to shed
light upon the world, in so long dallying on his bed of soft clouds
amid the smoke of the forest fire. But gradually the cheering beams
suffused the garden throughout, and evoked from the ripening fruit an
intoxicating wave of scent in which there could be distinguished also
the bracing breath of autumn.

Simultaneously there rose into the sky, in the wake of the sun, a dense
stratum of cloud which, blue and snow-white in colour, lay with its
soft hummocks reflected in the calm Oka, and so wrought therein a
secondary firmament as profound and impalpable as its original.

"Now then, Makar!" was Gubin's command, and once more I posted myself
at the bottom of the well. About three sazheni in depth, and lined with
cold, damp mud to above the level of my middle, the orifice was charged
with a stifling odour both of rotten wood and of something more
intolerable still. Also, whenever I had filled the pail with mud, and
then emptied it into the bucket and shouted "Right away!" the bucket
would start swinging against my person and bumping it, as unwillingly
it went aloft, and thereafter discharge upon my head and shoulders
clots of filth and drippings of water--meanwhile screening, with its
circular bottom, the glowing sun and now scarce visible stars. In
passing, the spectacle of those stars' waning both pained and cheered
me, for it meant that for a companion in the firmament they now had the
sun. Hence it was until my neck felt almost fractured, and my spine and
the nape of my neck were aching as though clamped in a cast of plaster
of paris, that I kept my eyes turned aloft. Yes, anything to gain a
sight of the stars! From them I could not remove my vision, for they
seemed to exhibit the heavens in a new guise, and to convey to me the
joyful tidings that in the sky there was present also the sun.

Yet though, meanwhile, I tried to ponder on something great, I never
failed to find myself cherishing the absurd, obstinate apprehension
that soon the Birkins would leave their beds, enter the courtyard, and
have Nadezhda betrayed to them by Gubin.

And throughout there kept descending to me from above the latter's
inarticulate, as it were damp-sodden, observations.

"Another rat!" I heard him exclaim. "To think that those two fellows,
men of money, should neglect for two whole years to clean out their
well! Why, what can the brutes have been drinking meanwhile? Look out
below, you!"

And once more, with a creaking of the pulley, the bucket would
descend--bumping and thudding against the lining of the well as it did
so, and bespattering afresh my head and shoulders with its filth.
Rightly speaking, the Birkins ought to have cleared out the well
themselves!

"Let us exchange places," I cried at length.

"What is wrong?" inquired Gubin in response

"Down here it is cold--I can't stand it any longer."

"Gee up!" exclaimed Gubin to the old horse which supplied the leverage
power for the bucket; whereupon I seated myself upon the edge of the
receptacle and went aloft, where everything was looking so bright and
warm as to bear a new and unwontedly pleasing appearance.

So now it was Gubin's turn to stand at the bottom of the well. And
soon, in addition to the odour of decay, and a subdued sound of
splashing, and the rumblings and bumpings of the iron bucket against
its chain, there began to come up from the damp, black cavity a perfect
stream of curses.

"The infernal skinflints!" I heard my companion exclaim.

"Hullo, here is something! A dog or a baby, eh? The damned old
barbarians!"

And the bucket ascended with, among its contents, a sodden and most
ancient hat. With the passage of time Gubin's temper grew worse and
worse.

"If I SHOULD find a baby here," next he exclaimed, "I shall report the
matter to the police, and get those blessed old brothers into trouble."

Each movement of the leathern-hided, wall-eyed steed which did our
bidding was accompanied by a swishing of a sandy tail which had for its
object the brushing away of autumn's harbingers, the bluebottles.
Almost with the tranquil gait of a religious did the animal accomplish
its periodical journeys from the wall to the entrance gates and back
again; after which it always heaved a profound sigh, and stood with its
bony crest lowered.

Presently, from a corner of the yard that lay screened behind some
rank, pale, withered, trampled herbage a door screeched. Into the yard
there issued Nadezhda Birkin, carrying a bunch of keys, and followed by
a lady who, elderly and rotund of figure, had a few dark hairs growing
on her full and rather haughty upper lip. As the two walked towards the
cellar (Nadezhda being clad only in an under-petticoat, with a chemise
half-covering her shoulders, and slippers thrust on to bare feet), I
perceived from the languor of the younger woman's gait that she was
feeling weary indeed.

"Why do you look at us like that?" her senior inquired of me as she
drew level. And as she did so the eyes that peered at me from above the
full and, somehow, displaced-looking cheeks bid in them a dim, misty,
half-blind expression.

"That must be Peter Birkin's mother-in-law," was my unspoken reflection.

At the door of the cellar Nadezhda handed the keys to her companion,
and with a slow step which set her ample bosom swaying, and increased
the disarray of the bodice on her round, but broad, shoulders,
approached myself, and said quietly:

"Please open the gutter-sluice and let out the water into the street,
or the yard will soon be flooded. Oh, the smell of it! What is that
thing there? A rat? Oh batinshka, what a horrible mess!"

Her face had about it a drawn look, and under her eyes there were a
pair of dark patches, and in their depths the dry glitter of a person
who has spent a night of waking. True, it was a face still fresh of
hue; yet beads of sweat were standing on the forehead, and her
shoulders looked grey and heavy--as grey and heavy as unleavened bread
which the fire has coated with a thin crust, yet failed to bake
throughout.

"Please, also, open the wicket," she continued. "And, in case a lame
old beggar-woman should call, come and tell me. I am the Nadezhda
Ivanovna for whom she will inquire. Do you understand?"

From the well, at this point, there issued the words:

"Who is that speaking?"

"It is the mistress," I replied.

"What? Nadezhda? With her I have a bone to pick."

"What did he say?" the woman asked tensely as she raised her dark,
thinly pencilled brows, and made as though to go and lean over the
well. Independently of my own volition I forestalled what Gubin might
next have been going to say by remarking:

"I must tell you that last night he saw you walking in the garden here."

"Indeed?" she ejaculated, and drew herself to her full height. Yet in
doing so she blushed to her shoulders, and, clapping plump hands to her
bosom, and opening dark eyes to their fullest, said in a hasty and
confused whisper as, again paling and shrinking in stature, she
subsided like a piece of pastry that is turning heavy:

"Good Lord! WHAT did he see?... If the lame woman should call, you
must not admit her. No, tell her that she will not be wanted, that I
cannot, that I must not--But see here. Here is a rouble for you. Oh,
good Lord!"

By this time even louder and more angry exclamations had begun to
ascend from Gubin. Yet the only sound to reach my ears was the woman's
muttered whispering, and as I glanced into her face I perceived that
its hitherto high-coloured and rounded contours had fallen in, and
turned grey, and that her flushed lips were trembling to such an extent
as almost to prevent the articulation of her words. Lastly, her eyes
were frozen into an expression of pitiful, doglike terror.

Suddenly she shrugged her shoulders, straightened her form, put away
from her the expression of terror, and said quietly, but incisively:

"You will not need to say anything about this. Allow me."

And with a swaying step she departed--a step so short as almost to
convey the impression that her legs were bound together. Yet while the
gait was the gait of a person full of suppressed fury, it was also the
gait of a person who can scarcely see an inch in advance.

"Haul away, you!" shouted Gubin.

I hauled him up in a state of cold and wet; whereafter he fell to
stamping around the coping of the well, cursing, and waving his arms.

"What have you been thinking of all this time?" he vociferated. "Why,
for ever so long I shouted and shouted to you!"

"I have been telling Nadezhda that last night you saw her walking in
the garden."

He sprang towards me with a vicious scowl.

"Who gave you leave to do so?" he exclaimed.

"Wait a moment. I said that it was only in a dream, that you saw her
crossing the garden to the washhouse."

"Indeed? And why did you do that?"

Somehow, as, barelegged and dripping with mud, he stood blinking his
eyes at me with a most disagreeable expression, he looked extremely
comical.

"See here," I remarked, "you have only to go and tell her husband about
her for me to go and tell him the same story about your having seen the
whole thing in a dream."

"Why?" cried Gubin, now almost beside himself. Presently, however, he
recovered sufficient self-possession to grin and ask in an undertone:

"HOW MUCH DID SHE GIVE YOU?"

I explained to him that my sole reason for what I had done had been
that I pitied the woman, and feared lest the brothers Birkin should do
an injury to one who at least ought not to be betrayed. Gubin began by
declining to believe me, but eventually, after the matter had been
thought out, said:

"Acceptance of money for doing what is right is certainly irregular;
but at least is it better than acceptance of money for conniving at
sin. Well, you have spoilt my scheme, young fellow. Hired only to clean
out the well, I would nevertheless have cleaned out the establishment
as a whole, and taken pleasure in doing so."

Then once more he relapsed into fury, and muttered as he scurried round
and round the well:

"How DARED you poke your nose into other people's affairs? Who are YOU
in this establishment?"

The air was hot and arid, yet still the sky was as dull as though
coated throughout with the dust of summer, and, as yet, one could gaze
at the sun's purple, rayless orb without blinking, and as easily as one
could have gazed at the glowing embers of a wood fire.

Seated on the fence, a number of rooks were directing intelligent black
eyes upon the heaps of mud which lay around the coping of the well. And
from time to time they fluttered their wings impatiently, and cawed.

"I got you some work," Gubin continued in a grumbling tone, "and put
heart into you with the prospect of employment. And now you have gone
and treated me like--"

At this point I caught the sound of a horse trotting towards the
entrance-gates, and heard someone shout, as the animal drew level with
the house:

"YOUR timber too has caught alight!"

Instantly, frightened by the shout, the rooks took to their wings and
flew away. Also, a window sash squeaked, and the courtyard resounded
with sudden bustle--the culinary regions vomiting the elderly lady and
the tousled, half-clad Jonah; and an open window the upper half of the
red-headed Peter.

"Men, harness up as quickly as possible!" the latter cried, his voice
charged with a plaintive note.

And, indeed, he had hardly spoken before Gubin led out a fat roan pony,
and Jonah pulled from a shelter a light buggy or britchka. Meanwhile
Nadezhda called from the veranda to Jonah:

"Do you first go in and dress yourself!"

The elderly lady then unfastened the gates; whereupon a stunted, oldish
muzhik in a red shirt limped into the yard with a foam-flecked steed,
and exclaimed:

"It is caught in two places--at the Savelkin clearing and near the
cemetery!"

Immediately the company pressed around him with groans and
ejaculations, and Gubin alone continued to harness the pony with swift
and dexterous hands--saying to me through his teeth as he did so, and
without looking at anyone:

"That is how those wretched folk ALWAYS defer things until too late."

The next person to present herself at the entrance gates was a
beggar-woman. Screwing up her eyes in a furtive manner, she droned:

"For the sake of Lord Je-e-esus!"

"God will give you alms! God will give you alms!" was Nadezhda's reply
as, turning pale, she flung out her arms in the old woman's direction.
"You see, a terrible thing has happened--our timber lands have caught
fire. You must come again later."

Upon that Peter's bulky form (which had entirely filled the window from
which it had been leaning), disappeared with a jerk, and in its stead
there came into view the figure of a woman. Said she contemptuously:

"See the visitation with which God has tried us, you men of faint
hearts and indolent hands!"

The woman's hair was grey at the temples, and had resting upon it a
silken cap which so kept changing colour in the sunlight as to convey
to one the impression that her head was bonneted with steel, while in
her face, picturesque but dark (seemingly blackened with smoke), there
gleamed two pupil-less blue eyes of a kind which I had never before
beheld.

"Fools," she continued, "how often have I not pointed out to you the
necessity of cutting a wider space between the timber and the cemetery?"

From a furrow above the woman's small but prominent nose, a pair of
heavy brows extended to temples that were silvered over. As she spoke
there fell a strange silence amid which save for the pony's pawing of
the mire no sound mingled with the sarcastic reproaches of the deep,
almost masculine voice.

"That again is the mother-in-law," was my inward reflection.

Gubin finished the harnessing--then said to Jonah in the tone of a
superior addressing a servant:

"Go in and dress yourself, you object!"

Nevertheless, the Birkins drove out of the yard precisely as they were,
while the peasant mounted his belathered steed and followed them at a
trot; and the elderly lady disappeared from the window, leaving its
panes even darker and blacker than they had previously been. Gubin,
slip-slopping through the puddles with bare feet, said to me with a
sharp glance as he moved to shut the entrance gates:

"I presume that I can now take in hand the little affair of which you
know."

"Yakov!" at this juncture someone shouted from the house.

Gubin straightened himself a la militaire.

"Yes, I am coming," he replied.

Whereafter, padding on bare soles, he ascended the steps. Nadezhda,
standing at their top, turned away with a frown of repulsion at his
approach, and nodded and beckoned to myself.

"What has Yakov said to you?" she inquired

"He has been reproaching me."

"Reproaching you for what?"

"For having spoken to you."

She heaved a sigh.

"Ah, the mischief-maker!" she exclaimed. "And what is it that he wants?"

As she pouted her displeasure her round and vacant face looked almost
childlike.

"Good Lord!" she added. "What DO such men as he want?"

Meanwhile the heavens were becoming overspread with dark grey clouds,
and presaging a flood of autumn rain, while from the window near the
steps the voice of Peter's mother-in-law was issuing in a steady
stream. At first, however, nothing was distinguishable save a sound
like the humming of a spindle.

"It is my mother that is speaking," Nadezhda explained softly. "She'll
give it him! Yes, SHE will protect me!"

Yet I scarcely heard Nadezhda's words, so greatly was I feeling struck
with the quiet forcefulness, the absolute assurance, of what was being
said within the window.

"Enough, enough!" said the voice. "Only through lack of occupation have
you joined the company of the righteous."

Upon this I made a move to approach closer to the window; whereupon
Nadezhda whispered:

"Whither are you going? You must not listen."

While she was yet speaking I heard come from the window:

"Similarly your revolt against mankind has come of idleness, of lack of
an interest in life. To you the world has been wearisome, so, while
devising this revolt as a resource, you have excused it on the ground
of service of God and love of equity, while in reality constituting
yourself the devil's workman."

Here Nadezhda plucked at my sleeve, and tried to pull me away, but I
remarked:

"I MUST learn what Gubin has got to say in answer."

This made Nadezhda smile, and then whisper with a confiding glance at
my face:

"You see, I have made a full confession to her. I went and said to her:
'Mamenka, I have had a misfortune.' And her only reply as she stroked
my hair was, 'Ah, little fool!' Thus you see that she pities me. And
what makes her care the less that I should stray in that direction is
that she yearns for me to bear her a child, a grandchild, as an heir to
her property."

Next, Gubin was heard saying within the room:

"Whensoever an offence is done against the law I..."

At once a stream of impressive words from the other drowned his
utterance:

"An offence is not always an offence of moment, since sometimes a
person outgrows the law, and finds it too restrictive. No one person
ought to be rated against another. For whom alone ought we to fear?
Only the God in whose sight all of us have erred!"

And though in the elderly lady's voice there was weariness and
distaste, the words were spoken slowly and incisively. Upon this Gubin
tried to murmur something or another, but again his utterance failed to
edge its way into his interlocutor's measured periods:

"No great achievement is it," she said, "to condemn a fellow creature.
For always it is easy to sit in judgment upon our fellows. And even if
a fellow creature be allowed to pursue an evil course unchecked, his
offence may yet prove productive of good. Remember how in every case
the Saints reached God. Yet how truly sanctified, by the time that they
did so reach Him, were they? Let this ever be borne in mind, for we are
over-apt to condemn and punish!"

"In former days, Natalia Vassilievna, you took away from me my
substance, you took my all. Also, let me recount to you how we fell
into disagreement."

"No; there is no need for that."

"Thereafter, I ceased to be able to bear the contemplation of myself; I
ceased to consider myself as of any value."

"Let the past remain the past. That which must be is not to be avoided."

"Through you, I say, I lost my peace of mind."

Nadezhda nudged me, and whispered with gay malice:

"That is probably true, for they say that once he was one of her
lovers."

Then she recollected herself and, clapping her hands to her face, cried
through her fingers:

"Oh good Lord! What have I said? No, no, you must not believe these
tales. They are only slanders, for she is the best of women."

"When evil has been done," continued the quiet voice within the window,
"it can never be set right by recounting it to others. He upon whom a
burden has been laid should try to bear it. And, should he fail to bear
it, the fact will mean that the burden has been beyond his strength."

"It was through you that I lost everything. It was you that stripped me
bare."

"But to that which you lost I added movement. Nothing in life is ever
lost; it merely passes from one hand to another--from the unskilled
hand to the experienced--so that even the bone picked of a dog may
ultimately become of value."

"Yes, a bone--that is what I am."

"Why should you say that? You are still a man."

"Yes, a man, but a man useful for what?"

"Useful, even though the use may not yet be fully apparent."

To this, after a pause, the speaker added:

"Now, depart in peace, and make no further attempt against this woman.
Nay, do not even speak ill of her if you can help it, but consider
everything that you saw to have been seen in a dream."

"Ah!" was Gubin's contrite cry. "It shall be as you say. Yet, though I
should hate, I could not bear, to grieve you, I must confess that the
height whereon you stand is--"

"Is what, Oh friend of mine?"

"Nothing; save that of all souls in this world you are, without
exception, the best."

"Yakov Petrovitch, in this world you and I might have ended our lives
together in honourable partnership. And even now, if God be willing, we
might do so."

"No. Rather must farewell be said."

All became quiet within the window, except that after a prolonged
silence there came from the woman a deep sigh, and then a whisper of,
"Oh Lord!"

Treading softly, like a cat, Nadezhda darted away towards the steps;
whereas I, less fortunate, was caught by the departing Gubin in the
very act of leaving the neighbourhood of the window. Upon that he
inflated his cheeks, ruffled up his sandy hair, turned red in the face
like a man who has been through a fight, and cried in strange,
querulous, high-pitched accents:

"Hi! What were you doing just now? Long-legged devil that you are, I
have no further use for you--I do not intend to work with you any more.
So you can go."

At the same moment the dim face, with its great blue eyes, showed
itself at the window, and the stem voice inquired:

"What does the noise mean?"

"What does it mean? It means that I do not intend--"

"You must not, if you wish to create a disturbance, do it anywhere but
in the street. It must not be created here."

"What is all this?" Nadezhda put in with a stamp of her foot. "What--"

At this point, the cook rushed out with a toasting-fork and militantly
ranged herself by Nadezhda's side, exclaiming:

"See what comes of not having a single muzhik in the house!"

I now prepared to withdraw, but, in doing so, glanced once more at the
features of the elderly lady, and saw that the blue pupils were dilated
so as almost to fill the eyes in their entirety, and to leave only a
bluish margin. And strange and painful were those eyes--eyes fixed
blindly, eyes which seemed to have strayed from their orbits through
yielding to emotion and a consequent overstrain--while the apple of the
throat had swelled like the crop of a bird, and the sheen of the silken
head-dress become as the sheen of metal. Involuntarily, I thought to
myself:

"It is a head that must be made of iron."

By this time Gubin had penitently subsided, and was exchanging harmless
remarks with the cook, while carefully avoiding my glance.

"Good day to you, madame," at length I said as I passed the window.

Not at once did she reply, but when she did so she said kindly:

"And good day to YOU, my friend. Yes, I wish you good day."

To which she added an inclination of the head which resembled nothing
so much as a hammer which much percussion upon an anvil has wrought to
a fine polish.




NILUSHKA

The timber-built town of Buev, a town which has several times been
burnt to the ground, lies huddled upon a hillock above the river
Obericha. Its houses, with their many-coloured shutters, stand so
crowded together as to form around the churches and gloomy law courts a
perfect maze--the streets which intersect the dark masses of houses
meandering aimlessly hither and thither, and throwing off alleyways as
narrow as sleeves, and feeling their way along plot-fences and
warehouse walls, until, viewed from the hillock above, the town looks
as though someone has stirred it up with a stick and dispersed and
confused everything that it contains. Only from the point where Great
Zhitnaia Street takes its rise from the river do the stone mansions of
the local merchants (for the most part German colonists) cut a grim,
direct line through the packed clusters of buildings constructed of
wood, and skirt the green islands of gardens, and thrust aside the
churches; whereafter, continuing its way through Council Square (still
running inexorably straight), the thoroughfare stretches to, and
traverses, a barren plain of scrub, and so reaches the pine plantation
belonging to the Monastery of St. Michael the Archangel where the
latter is lurking behind a screen of old red spruces of which the
denseness seems to prop the very heavens, and which on clear, sunny
days can be seen rising to mark the spot whence the monastery's
crosses, like the gilded birds of the forest of eternal silence,
scintillate a constant welcome.

At a distance of some ten houses before Zhitnaia Street debouches upon
the plain which I have mentioned there begin to diverge from the street
and to trend towards a ravine, and eventually to lose themselves in the
latter's recesses, the small, squat shanties with one or two windows
apiece which constitute the suburb of Tolmachikha. This suburb, it may
be said, had as its original founders the menials of a landowner named
Tolmachev--a landowner who, after emancipating his serfs some thirteen
years before all serfs were legally emancipated, [In the year 1861]
was, for his action, visited with such bitter revilement that, in dire
offence at the same, he ended by becoming an inmate of the monastery,
and there spending ten years under the vow of silence, until death
overtook him amid a peaceful obscurity born of the fact that the
authorities had forbidden his exhibition to pilgrims or strangers.

It is in the very cots originally apportioned to Tolmachev's menials,
at the time, fifty years ago, when those menials were converted into
citizens, that the present inhabitants of the suburb dwell. And never
have they been burnt out of those homes, although the same period has
seen all Buev save Zhitnaia Street consumed, and everywhere that one
may delve within the township one will be sure to come across
undestroyed hearthstones.

The suburb, as I have said, stands at the hither end and on the sloping
side of one of the arms of a deep, wooded ravine, with its windows
facing towards the ravine's yawning mouth, and affording a view direct
to the Mokrie (certain marshes beyond the Obericha) and the swampy
forest of firs into which the dim red sun declines. Further on, the
ravine trends across the plain, then bends round towards the western
side of the town, cats away the clayey soil with an appetite which each
spring increases, and which, carrying the soil down to the river, is
gradually clogging the river's flow, diverting the muddy water towards
the marshes, and converting those marshes into a lagoon outright. The
fissure in question is named "The Great Ravine," and has its steep
flanks so overgrown with chestnuts and laburnums that even in
summertime its recesses are cool and moist, and so serve as a
convenient trysting place for the poorer lovers of the suburb and the
town, and witness their tea drinkings and frequently fatal quarrels, as
well as being used by the more well-to-do for a dumping ground for
rubbish of the nature of deceased dogs, cats, and horses.

Pleasantly singing, there scours the bottom of the ravine the brook
known as the Zhandarmski Spring, a brook celebrated throughout Buev for
its crystal-cold water, which is so icy of temperature that even on a
burning day it will make the teeth ache. This water the denizens of
Tolmachikha account to be their peculiar property; wherefore they are
proud of it, and drink it to the exclusion of any other, and so live to
a green old age which in some cases cannot even reckon its years. And
by way of a livelihood, the men of the suburb indulge in hunting,
fishing, fowling, and thieving (not a single artisan proper does the
suburb contain, save the cobbler Gorkov--a thin, consumptive skeleton
of surname Tchulan); while, as regards the women, they, in winter, sew
and make sacks for Zimmel's mill, and pull tow, and in summer they
scour the plantation of the monastery for truffles and other produce,
and the forest on the other side of the river for huckleberries. Also,
two of the suburb's women practise as fortune tellers, while two others
conduct an easy and highly lucrative trade in prostitution.

The result is that the town, as distinguished from the suburb, believes
the men of the latter to be one and all thieves, and the women and
girls of the suburb to be one and all disreputable characters. Hence
the town strives always to restrict and extirpate the suburb, while the
suburbans retaliate upon the townsfolk with robbery and arson and
murder, while despising those townsfolk for their parsimony, decorum,
and avarice, and detesting the settled, comfortable mode of life which
they lead.

So poor, for that matter, is the suburb that never do even beggars
resort thither, save when drunk. No, the only creatures which resort
thither are dogs which subsist no one knows how as predatorily they
roam from court to court with tails tucked between their flanks, and
bloodless tongues hanging down, and legs ever prepared, on sighting a
human being, to bolt into the ravine, or to let down their owners upon
subservient bellies in expectation of a probable kick or curse.

In short, every cranny of every cot in the place, with the grimy panes
of their windows, and their lathed roofs overgrown with velvety moss,
breathes forth the universal, deadly hopelessness induced by Russia's
crushing poverty.

In the Tolmachikhans' backyards grow only alders, elders, and weeds.
Everywhere docks thrust up heads through cracks in the fences to catch
at the legs or the skirts of passers-by, while masses of nettles
squeeze their way under fences to sting little children. Apropos, the
latter are all thin and hungry, in the highest degree quarrelsome, and
addicted to prolonged lamentation. Also, each spring sees a certain
proportion of their number carried off by diphtheria, while scarlatina
and measles are as epidemic among them as is typhoid among their elders.

Thus the sounds of life most to be heard throughout the suburb are the
sounds either of weeping or of mad cursing. In general, however, life
in Tolmachikha is lived quietly and lethargically. So much is this the
case that in spring even the cats forbear to squall save in crushed and
subdued accents. The only local person to sing is Felitzata; and even
she does so only when she is drunk. It may be said that Felitzata is a
saucy, cunning procuress, and does her singing in a peculiarly thick
and rasping voice which, with many croaks and hiatuses, necessitates
much closing of the eyes, and a great protruding of the apple of the
throat. Indeed, it is only the women of the place who, turbulently
quarrelsome and hysterically noisy, spend most of the day in scouring
the streets with skirts tucked up, and never cease begging for pinches
of salt or flour or spoonfuls of oil as they rail and screech at and
beat their children, and thrust withered breasts into their babies'
mouths, and rush and fling themselves about, and bawl in a constant
endeavour to right their woebegone condition. Yes, all are dishevelled
and dirty, and have wizened, bony faces, and the restless eyes of
thieves. Never, indeed, is a woman plump of figure, save at the period
when she is ill, and her eyes are dim, and her gait is laboured. Yet
until they are forty, the majority of the women become pregnant with
every winter, and on the arrival of spring may be seen walking abroad
with large stomachs and blue hollows under the eyes. And even this does
not prevent them from working with the same desperate energy as when
they are not with child. In short, the inhabitants of the place
resemble needles and threads with which some rough, clumsy, and
impatient hand is for ever trying to darn a ragged cloth which as
constantly parts and rends.

      *      *      *      *      *

The chief person of repute in the suburb is my landlord, one Antipa
Vologonov--a little old man who keeps a shop of "odd wares," and also
lends money on pledge.

Unfortunately, Antipa is a sufferer from a long-standing tendency to
rheumatism, which has left him bow-legged, and has twisted and swollen
his fingers to the extent that they will not bend. Hence, he always
keeps his hands tucked into his sleeves, though seemingly he has the
less use for them in that, even when he withdraws them from their
shelter, he does so as cautiously as though he were afraid of their
becoming dislocated.

On the other hand, he never loses his temper, and he never grows
excited.

"Neither of those things suits me," he will say, "for my heart is
dilated, and might at any moment fail."

As for his face, it has high cheekbones which in places blossom into
dark red blotches; an expression as calm as that of the face of a
Khirghiz; a chin whence dangle wisps of mingled grey, red, and flaxen
hair of a perpetually moist appearance; oblique and ever-changing eyes
which are permanently contracted; a pair of thick, parti-coloured
eyebrows which cast deep shadows over the eyes; and temples whereon a
number of blue veins struggle with an irregular, sparse coating of
bristles. Finally, about his whole personality there is something ever
variable and intangible.

Also, his gait is irritatingly slow; and the more so owing to his coat,
which, of a cut devised by himself, consists, as it were, of cassock,
sarafan [jacket], and waistcoat in one. As often as not he finds the
skirts of the garment cumbering his legs; whereupon he has to stop and
give them a kick. And thus it comes about that permanently the skirts
are ragged and torn.

"No need for hurry," is his customary remark. "Always, in time, does
one win to one's pitch in the marketplace."

His speech is cast in rounded periods, and displays a great love for
ecclesiastical terms. On the occurrence of one such term, he pauses
thereafter as though mentally he were adding to the term a very thick,
a very black, full stop. Yet always he will converse with anyone, and
at great length--his probable motive being a desire to leave behind him
the reputation of a wise old man.

In his shanty are three windows facing on to the street, and a
partition-wall which divides it into two rooms of unequal size. In the
larger room, which contains a Russian stove, he himself lives; in the
smaller room I have my abode. By a passage the two are separated from a
storeroom where, closeted behind a door to which there are a heavy,
old-fashioned bolt and many iron and brass screws, Antipa preserves
pledges left by his neighbours, such as samovars, ikons, winter
clothing and the like. Of this storeroom he always carries the great
indentated key at the back of the strap which upholds his cloth
breeches; and, whenever the police call to ascertain whether he is
harbouring any stolen goods, a long time ensues whilst he is shifting
the key round to his stomach, and again a long time whilst he is
unfastening it from the belt. Meanwhile, he says pompously to the
Superintendent or the Deputy Superintendent:

"Never do I take in goods of that kind. Of the truth of what I say,
your honour, you have more than once assured yourself in person."

Also, whenever Antipa sits down the key rattles against the back or the
seat of his chair; whereupon he bends his arm with difficulty, and
feels to see whether or not the key has come unslung. This I know for
the reason that the partition-wall is not so thick but that I can hear
his every breath drawn, and divine his every movement.

Of an evening, when the misty sun is slanting across the river towards
the auburn belt of pines, and distilling pink vapours from the sombre
vista to be seen through the shaggy mouth of the ravine, Antipa
Vologonov sets out a squat samovar that is dinted of side, and plated
with green oxide on handle, turncock, and spout. Then he seats himself
at his table by the window.

At intervals I hear the evening stillness broken by questions put in a
tone which implies always an expectation of a precise answer.

"Where is Darika?"

"He has gone to the spring for water." The answer is given whiningly,
and in a thin voice.

"And how is your sister?

"Still in pain."

"Yes? Well, you can go now."

Giving a slight cough to clear his throat, the old man begins to sing
in a quavering falsetto:

  Once a bullet smote my breast,
  And scarce the pang I felt.
  But ne'er the pang could be express'd
  Which love's flame since hath dealt!

As the samovar hisses and bubbles, heavy footsteps resound in the
street, and an indistinct voice says:

"He thinks that because he is a Town Councillor he is also clever."

"Yes; such folk are apt to grow very proud."

"Why, all his brains put together wouldn't grease one of my boots!"

And as the voices die away the old man's falsetto trickles forth anew,
humming:

"The poor man's anger... Minika! Hi, you! Come in here, and I will give
you a bit of sugar. How is your father getting on? Is he drunk at
present?"

"No, sober, for he is taking nothing but kvas and cabbage soup."

"And what is he doing for a living?"

"Sitting at the table, and thinking."

"And has your mother been beating him again?"

"No--not again."

"And she--how is she?"

"Obliged to keep indoors."

"Well, run along with you."

Softly there next presents herself before the window Felitzata, a woman
of about forty with a hawk-like gleam in her coldly civil eyes, and a
pair of handsome lips compressed into a covert smile. She is well known
throughout the suburb, and once had a son, Nilushka, who was the local
"God's fool." Also she has the reputation of knowing what is correct
procedure on all and sundry occasions, as well as of being skilled in
lamentations, funeral rites, and festivities in connection with the
musterings of recruits. Lastly she has had a hip broken, so that she
walks with an inclination towards the left.

Her fellow women say of her that her veins contain "a drop of gentle
blood";  but probably the statement is inspired by no more than the
fact that she treats everyone with the same cold civility.
Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about her, for her hands are
slender and have long fingers, and her head is haughtily poised, and
her voice has a metallic ring, even though the metal has, as it were,
grown dull and rusty. Also, she speaks of everyone, herself included,
in the most rough and downright terms, yet terms which are so simple
that, though her talk may be disconcerting to listen to, it could never
be called obscene.

For instance, once I overheard Vologonov reproach her for not leading a
more becoming life:

"You ought to have more self-restraint," said he, "seeing that you are
a lady, and also your own mistress."

"That is played out, my friend," she replied. "You see, I have had very
much to bear, for there was a time when such hunger used to gnaw at my
belly as you would never believe. It was then that my eyes became
dazzled with the tokens of shame. So I took my fill of love, as does
every woman. And once a woman has become a light-o'-love she may as
well doff her shift altogether, and use the body which God has given
her. And, after all, an independent life is the best life; so I hawk
myself about like a pot of beer, and say, 'Drink of this, anyone who
likes, while it still contains liquor.'"

"It makes one feel ashamed to hear such talk," said Vologonov with a
sigh. In response she burst out laughing.

"What a virtuous man!" was her comment upon his remark.

Until now Antipa had spoken cautiously, and in an undertone, whereas
the woman had replied in loud accents of challenge.

"Will you come in and have some tea?" he said next as he leant out of
the window.

"No, I thank you. In passing, what a thing I have heard about you!"

"Do not shout so loud. Of what are you speaking?"

"Oh, of SUCH a thing!"

"Of NOTHING, I imagine."

"Yes, of EVERYTHING."

"God, who created all things, alone knows everything."

Whereafter the pair whispered together awhile. Then Felitzata
disappeared as suddenly as she had come, leaving the old man sitting
motionless. At length he heaved a profound sigh, and muttered to
himself.

"Into that Eve's ears be there poured the poison of the asp!... Yet
pardon me, Oh God! Yea, pardon me!"

The words contained not a particle of genuine contrition. Rather, I
believe, he uttered them because he had a weakness not for words which
signified anything, but for words which, being out of the way, were not
used by the common folk of the suburb.

      *      *      *      *      *

Sometimes Vologonov knocks at the partition-wall with a superannuated
arshin measure which has only fifteen vershoki of its length remaining.
He knocks, and shouts:

"Lodger, would you care to join me in a pot of tea?"

During the early days of our acquaintanceship he regarded me with
marked and constant suspicion. Clearly he deemed me to be a police
detective. But subsequently he took to scanning my face with critical
curiosity, until at length he said with an air of imparting instruction:

"Have you ever read Paradise Lost and Destroyed?"

"No," I replied. "Only Paradise Regained."

This led him to wag his parti-coloured beard in token that 'he
disagreed with my choice', and to observe:

"The reason why Adam lost Paradise is that he allowed Eve to corrupt
him. And never did the Lord permit him to regain it. For who is worthy
to return to the gates of Paradise? Not a single human being."

And, indeed, I found it a waste of time to dispute the matter, for he
merely listened to what I had to say, and then, without an attempt at
refutation, repeated in the same tone as before, and exactly in the
same words, his statement that "Adam lost Paradise for the reason that
he allowed Eve to corrupt him."

Similarly did women constitute our most usual subject of conversation.

"You are young," once he said, "and therefore a human being bound to
find forbidden fruit blocking your way at every step. This because the
human race is a slave to its love of sin, or, in other words, to love
of the Serpent. Yes, woman constitutes the prime impediment to
everything in life, as history has many times affirmed. And first and
foremost is she the source of restlessness. 'Charged with poison, the
Serpent shall plunge in thee her fangs.' Which Serpent is, of course,
our desire of the flesh, the Serpent at whose instigation the Greeks
razed towns to the ground, and ravaged Troy and Carthagena and Egypt,
and the Serpent which caused an amorous passion for the sister of
Alexander Pavlovitch [The Emperor Alexander I] to bring about
Napoleon's invasion of Russia. On the other hand, both the Mohammedan
nations and the Jews have from earliest times grasped the matter
aright, and kept their women shut up in their back premises; whereas WE
permit the foulest of profligacy to exist, and walk hand in hand with
our women, and allow them to graduate as female doctors and to pull
teeth, and all the rest of it. The truth is that they ought not to be
allowed to advance beyond midwife, since it is woman's business either
to serve as a breeding animal or opprobriously to be called
neiskusobrachnaia neviesta [Maid who hast never tasted of marriage.]
Yes, woman's business should end there."

Near the stove there ticks and clicks on the grimy wall that is papered
with "rules and regulations" and sheets of yellow manuscript the
pendulum of a small clock, with, hanging to one of its weights, a
hammer and a horseshoe, and, to the other, a copper pestle. Also, in a
corner of the room a number of ikons make a glittering show with their
silver applique and the gilded halos which surmount their figures'
black visages, while a stove with a ponderous grate glowers out of the
window at the greenery in Zhitnaia Street and beyond the ravine (beyond
the ravine everything looks bright and beautiful), and the dusty, dimly
lighted storeroom across the passage emits a perennial odour of dried
mushroom, tobacco leaves, and hemp oil.

Vologonov stirs his strong, stewed tea with a battered old teaspoon,
and says with a sigh as he sips a little:

"All my life I have been engaged in gaining experience so that now I
know most things, and ought to be listened to with attention. Usually
folk do so listen to me, but though here and there one may find a
living soul, of the rest it may be said: 'In the House of David shall
terrible things come to pass, and fire shall consume the spirit of
lechery.'"

The words resemble bricks in that they seem, if possible, to increase
the height of the walls of strange and extraneous events, and even
stranger dramas, which loom for ever around, me.

"For example," continues the old man, "why is Mitri Ermolaev Polukonov,
our ex-mayor, lying dead before his time? Because he conceived a number
of arrogant projects. For example, he sent his eldest son to study at
Kazan--with the result that during the son's second year at the
University he, the son, brought home with him a curly-headed Jewess,
and said to his father: 'Without this woman I cannot live--in her are
bound up my whole soul and strength.' Yes, a pass indeed! And from that
day forth nothing but misfortune befell in that Yashka took to drink,
the Jewess gave way to repining, and Mitri had to go perambulating the
town with piteous invitations to 'come and see, my brethren, to what
depths I have sunk!' And though, eventually, the Jewess died of a
bloody flux, of a miscarriage, the past was beyond mending, and, while
the son went to the bad, and took to drink for good and all, the father
'fell a victim by night to untimely death.' Yes, the lives of two folk
were thus undone by 'the thorn-bearing company of Judaea.' Like
ourselves, the Hebrew has a destiny of his own. And destiny cannot be
driven out with a stick. Of each of us the destiny is unhasting. It
moves slowly and quietly, and can never be avoided. 'Wait,' it says.
'Seek not to press onward.'"

As he discourses, Vologonov's eyes ceaselessly change colour--now
turning to a dull grey, and wearing a tired expression, and now
becoming blue, and assuming a mournful air, and now (and most
frequently of all) beginning to emit green flashes of an impartial
malevolence.

"Similarly, the Kapustins, once a powerful family, came at length to
dust-became as nothing. It was a family the members of which were ever
in favour of change, and devoted to anything that was new. In fact,
they went and set up a piano! Well, of them only Valentine is still on
his legs, and he (he is a doctor of less than forty years of age) is a
hopeless drunkard, and saturated with dropsy, and fallen a prey to
asthma, so that his cancerous eyes protrude horribly. Yes, the
Kapustins, like the Polukonovs, may be 'written down as dead.'"

Throughout, Vologonov speaks in a tone of unassailable conviction, in a
tone implying that never could things happen, never could things have
happened, otherwise than as he has stated. In fact, in his hands even
the most inexplicable, the most grievous, phenomena of life become such
as a law has inevitably decreed.

"And the same thing will befall the Osmukhins," he next remarks. "Let
them be a warning to you never to make friends with Germans, and never
to engage in business with them. In Russia any housewife may brew beer;
yet our people will not drink it--they are more used to spirits. Also,
Russian folk like to attain their object in drinking AT ONCE; and a
shkalik of vodka will do more to sap wit than five kruzhki of beer.
Once our people liked uniform simplicity; but now they are become like
a man who was born blind, and has suddenly acquired sight. A change
indeed! For thirty-three years did Ilya of Murom [Ilya Murometz, the
legendary figure most frequently met with In Russian bilini (folk
songs), and probably identical with Elijah the Prophet, though credited
with many of the attributes proper, rather, to the pagan god Perun the
Thunderer.] sit waiting for his end before it came; and all who cannot
bide patiently in a state of humility..."

Meanwhile clouds shaped like snow-white swans are traversing the
roseate heavens and disappearing into space, while below them, on
earth, the ravine can be seen spread out like the pelt of a bear which
the broad shoulders of some fabulous giant have sloughed before taking
refuge in the marshes and forest. In fact the landscape reminds me of
sundry ancient tales of marvels, as also does Antipa Vologonov, the man
who is so strangely conversant with the shortcomings of human life, and
so passionately addicted to discussing them.

For a moment or two he remains silent as sibilantly he purses his lips
and drinks some saffron-coloured tea from the saucer which the splayed
fingers of his right hand are balancing on their tips. Whereafter, when
his wet moustache has been dried, his level voice resumes its speech in
tones as measured as those of one reading aloud from the Psalter.

"Have you noticed a shop in Zhitnaia Street kept by an old man named
Asiev? Once that man had ten sons. Six of them, however, died in
infancy. Of the remainder the eldest, a fine singer, was at once
extravagant and a bookworm; wherefore, whilst an officer's servant at
Tashkend, he cut the throats of his master and mistress, and for doing
so was executed by shooting. As a matter of fact, the tale has it that
he had been making love to his mistress, and then been thrown over in
favour of his master once more. And another son, Grigori, after being
given a high school education at St. Petersburg, became a lunatic. And
another, Alexei, entered the army as a cavalryman, but is now acting as
a circus rider, and probably has also become a drunkard. And the
youngest son of all, Nikolai, ran away as a boy, and, eventually
arriving in Norway with a precious scheme for catching fish in the
Arctic Ocean, met with failure through the fact that he had overlooked
the circumstance that we Russians have fish of our own and to spare,
and had to have his interest assigned by his father to a local
monastery. So much for fish of the Arctic Seas! Yet if Nikolai had only
waited, if he had only been more patient, he--"

Here Vologonov lowers his voice, and continues with something of the
growl of an angry dog:

"I too have had sons, one of whom was killed at Kushka (a document has
certified to that effect), another was drowned whilst drunk, three more
died in infancy, and only two are still alive. Of these last, I know
that one is acting as a waiter in a hotel at Smolensk, while the other,
Melenti, was educated for the Church, sent to study in a seminary,
induced to abscond and get into trouble, and eventually dispatched to
Siberia. There now! Yes, the Russian is what might be called a
'lightweighted' individual, an individual who, unless he holds himself
down by the head, is soon carried off by the wind like a chicken's
feather--for we are too self-confident and restless. Before now, I
myself have been a gull, a man lacking balance: for never does youth
realise its own insignificance, or know how to wait."

Dissertations of the kind drop from the old man like water from a leaky
pipe on a cold, blustery day in autumn. Wagging his grey beard, he
talks and talks, until I begin to think that he must be an evil wizard,
and master of this remote, barren, swampy, ravine-pitted region--that
he it is who originally planted the town in this uncomfortable, clayey
hollow, and has thrown the houses into heaps, and entangled the
streets, and wantonly created the town's unaccountably rude and rough
and deadly existence, and addled men's brains with disconnected
nonsense, and consumed their hearts with a fear of life. Yes, it comes
to me that it must be he who, during the long six months of winter,
causes cruel snowstorms from the plain to invade the town, and with
frost compresses the buildings of the town until their rafters crack,
and stinging cold brings birds to the ground. Lastly, I become seized
with the idea that it must be he who, almost every summer, envelops the
town in those terrible visitations of heat by night which seem almost
to cause the houses to melt.

However, as a rule he maintains complete silence, and merely makes
chewing motions with his strong-toothed jaws as he sits wagging his
beard from side to side. At such times there is in his eyes a bluish
fire like the gleam of charcoal, while his crooked fingers writhe like
worms, and his outward appearance becomes sheerly that of a magician of
iniquity.

Once I asked him:

"What in particular ought men to wait for?"

For a while he sat clasping his beard, and, with contracted eyes,
gazing as at something behind me. Then he said quietly and didactically:

"Someday there will arise a Strange Man who will proclaim to the world
the Word to which there never was a beginning. But to which of us is
the hour when that Man will arise known? To none of us... And to which
of us are known the miracles which that Word will perform? To none of
us."

      *      *      *      *      *

Once upon a time there used to glide past the window of my room the
fair, curly, wavering, golden head of Nilushka the idiot, a lad looking
like a thing which the earth has begotten of love. Yes, Nilushka was
like an angel in some sacred picture adorning the southern or the
northern gates of an ancient church, as, with his flushed face smeared
with wax-smoke and oil, and his light blue eyes gleaming in a cold,
unearthly smile, and a frame clad in a red smock reaching to below his
knees, and the soles of his feet showing black (always he walked on
tiptoe), and his thin calves, as straight and white as the calves of a
woman, covered with golden down, he walked the streets.

Sometimes hopping along on one leg, and smiling, and waving his arms,
and causing the ample folds and sleeves of his smock to flutter until
he seemed to be moving in the midst of a nimbus, Nilushka would sing in
a halting whisper the childish ditty:

  Oh Lo-ord, pardon me!
  Wo-olves run,
  And do-ogs run,
  And the hunters wait
  To kill the wolves.
  Oh Lo-ord, pardon me!

Meanwhile, he would diffuse a cheering atmosphere of happiness with
which no one in the locality had anything in common. For he was ever a
lighthearted, winning, essentially pure innocent of the type which
never fails to evoke good-natured smiles and kindly emotions. Indeed,
as he roamed the streets, the suburb seemed to live its life with less
clamour, to appear more decent of outward guise, since the local folk
looked upon the imbecile with far more indulgence than they did upon
their own children; and he was intimate with, and beloved by, even the
worst. Probably the reason for this was that the semblance of flight
amid an atmosphere of golden dust which was his combined with his
straight, slender little figure to put all who beheld him in mind of
churches, angels, God, and Paradise. At all events, all viewed him in a
manner contemplative, interested, and more than a little deferential.

A curious fact was the circumstance that whenever Nilushka sighted a
stray gleam from a piece of glass, or the glitter of a morsel of copper
in sunlight, he would halt dead where he was, turn grey with the
ashiness of death, lose his smile, and remain dilating to an unnatural
extent his clouded and troubled eyes. And so, with his whole form
distorted with horror, and his thin hand crossing himself, and his
knees trembling, and his smock fluttering around his frail wisp of a
body, and his features growing stonelike, he would, for an hour or
more, continue to stand, until at length someone laid a hand in his,
and led him home.

The tale had it that, in the first instance, born "soft-headed," he
finally lost his reason, five years before the period of which I am
writing, when a great fire occurred, and that thenceforth anything,
save sunlight, that in any way resembled fire plunged him into this
torpor of dumb dread. Naturally the people of the suburb devoted to him
a great deal of attention.

"There goes God's fool," would be their remark. "It will not be long
before he dies and becomes a Saint, and we fall down and worship him."

Yet there were persons who would go so far as to crack rude jests at
his expense. For instance, as he would be skipping along, with his
childish voice raised in his little ditty, some idler or another would
shout from a window, or through the cranny of a fence:

"Hi, Nilushka! Fire! Fire!"

Whereupon the angel-faced imbecile would sink to earth as though his
legs had been cut away at the knee from under him, and he would huddle,
frantically clutching his golden head in his permanently soiled hands,
and exposing his youthful form to the dust, under the nearest house or
fence.

Only then would the person who had given him the fright repent, and say
with a laugh:

"God in heaven, what a stupid lad this is!"

And, should that person have been asked why he had thus terrified the
boy, he would probably have replied:

"Because it is such sport to do so. As a lad who cannot feel things as
other human beings do, he inclines folk to make fun of him."

As for the omniscient Antipa Vologonov, the following was his frequent
comment on Nilushka:

"Christ also had to walk in terror. Christ also was persecuted. Why so?
Because ever He endured in rectitude and strength. Men need to learn
what is real and what is unreal. Many are the sins of earth come of the
fact that the seeming is mistaken for the actual, and that men keep
pressing forward when they ought to be waiting, to be proving
themselves."

Hence Vologonov, like the rest, bestowed much attention upon Nilushka,
and frequently held conversations with him.

"Do you now pray to God," he said once as he pointed to heaven with one
of his crooked fingers, and with the disengaged hand clasped his
dishevelled, variously coloured beard.

Whereupon Nilushka glanced fearfully at the mysteriously pointing
finger, and, plucking sharply at his forehead, shoulders, and stomach
with two fingers and a thumb, intoned in thin, plaintive accents:

"Our Father in Heaven--"

"WHICH ART in Heaven."

"Yes, in the Heaven of Heavens."

"Ah, well! God will understand. He is the friend of all blessed ones."
[Idiots; since persons mentally deficient are popularly deemed to stand
in a peculiarly close relation to the Almighty.]


Again, great was Nilushka's interest in anything spherical. Also, he
had a love for handling the heads of children; when, softly approaching
a group from behind, he would, with his bright, quiet smile, lay
slender, bony fingers upon a close-cropped little poll; with the result
that the children, not relishing such fingering, would take alarm at
the same, and, bolting to a discreet distance, thence abuse the idiot,
put out their tongues at him, and drawl in a nasal chorus:

"Nilka, the bottle-neck, the neck without a nape to it" [Probably the
attractiveness of this formula lay rather in the rhyming of the Russian
words: "Nilka, butilka, bashka bez zatilka!" than in their actual
meaning].

Yet their fear of him was in no way reciprocated, nor, for that matter,
did they ever assault him, despite the fact that occasionally they
would throw an old boot or a chip of wood in his direction-throw it
aimlessly, and without really desiring to hit the mark aimed at.

Also, anything circular--for example, a plate or the wheel of a toy,
engaged Nilushka's attention and led him to caress it as eagerly as he
did globes and balls. Evidently the rotundity of the object was the
point that excited his interest. And as he turned the object over and
over, and felt the flat part of it, he would mutter:

"But what about the other one?"

What "the other one" meant I could never divine. Nor could Antipa.
Once, drawing the idiot to him, he said:

"Why do you always say 'What about the other one'?"

Troubled and nervous, Nilushka merely muttered some unintelligible
reply as his fingers turned and turned about the circular object which
he was holding.

"Nothing," at length he replied.

"Nothing of what?

"Nothing here."

"Ah, he is too foolish to understand," said Vologonov with a sigh as
his eyes darkened in meditative fashion.

"Yes, though it may seem foolish to say so," he added, "some people
would envy him."

"Why should they?"

"For more than one reason. To begin with, he lives a life free from
care--he is kept comfortably, and even held in respect. Since no one
can properly understand him, and everyone fears him, through a belief
that folk without wit, the 'blessed ones of God,' are more especially
the Almighty's favourites than persons possessed of understanding. Only
a very wise man could deal with such a matter, and the less so in that
it must be remembered that more than one 'blessed one' has become a
Saint, while some of those possessed of understanding have gone--well,
have gone whither? Yes, indeed!"

And, thoughtfully contracting the bushy eyebrows which looked as though
they had been taken from the face of another man, Vologonov thrust his
hands up his sleeves, and stood eyeing Nilushka shrewdly with his
intangible gaze.

Never did Felitzata say for certain who the boy's father had been, but
at least it was known to me that in vague terms she had designated two
men as such--the one a young "survey student," and the other a merchant
by name Viporotkov, a man notorious to the whole town as a most
turbulent rake and bully. But once when she and Antipa and I were
seated gossiping at the entrance-gates, and I inquired of her whether
Nilushka's father were still surviving, she replied in a careless way:

"He is so, damn him!"

"Then who is he?"

Felitzata, as usual, licked her faded, but still comely, lips with the
tip of her tongue before she replied:

"A monk."

"Ah!" Vologonov exclaimed with unexpected animation. "That, then,
explains things. At all events, we have in it an intelligible THEORY of
things."

Whereafter, he expounded to us at length, and with no sparing of
details, the reason why a monk should have been Nilushka's father
rather than either the merchant or the young "survey student." And as
Vologonov proceeded he grew unwontedly enthusiastic, and went so far as
to clench his fists until presently he heaved a sigh, as though
mentally hurt, and said frowningly and reproachfully to the woman:

"Why did you never tell us this before? It was exceedingly negligent of
you."

Felitzata looked at the old man with sarcasm and sauciness gleaming in
her brown eyes. Suddenly, however, she contracted her brows,
counterfeited a sigh, and whined:

"Ah, I was good-looking then, and desired of all. In those days I had
both a good heart and a happy nature."

"But the monk may prove to have been an important factor in the
question," was Antipa's thoughtful remark.

"Yes, and many another man than he has run after me for his pleasure,"
continued Felitzata in a tone of reminiscence. This led Vologonov to
cough, rise to his feet, lay his hand upon the woman's claret-coloured
sleeve of satin, and say sternly:

"Do you come into my room, for I have business to transact with you."

As she complied she smiled and winked at me. And so the pair
departed--he shuffling carefully with his bandy legs, and she watching
her steps as though at any moment she might collapse on to her left
side.

Thenceforth, Felitzata visited Vologonov almost daily; and once during
the time of two hours or so that the pair were occupied in drinking tea
I heard, through the partition-wall, the old man say in vigorous,
level, didactical tones:

"These tales and rumours ought not to be dismissed save with caution.
At least ought they to be given the benefit of the doubt. For, though
all that he says may SEEM to us unintelligible, there may yet be
enshrined therein a meaning, such as--"

"You say a meaning?"

"Yes, a meaning which, eventually, will be vouchsafed to you in a
vision. For example, you may one day see issue from a dense forest a
man of God, and hear him cry aloud: Felitzata, Oh servant of God, Oh
sinner most dark of soul--"

"What a croaking, to be sure!"

"Be silent! No nonsense! Do you blame yourself rather than sing your
own praises. And in that vision you may hear the man of God cry:
'Felitzata, go you forth and do that which one who shall meet you may
request you to perform!' And, having gone forth, you may find the man
of God to be the monk whom we have spoken of."

"A-a-ah!" the woman drawled with an air of being about to say something
more.

"Come, fool!"

"You see--"

"Have I, this time, abused you?"

"No, but--"

"I have an idea that the man of God will be holding a crook."

"Of course," assented Felitzata.

Similarly, on another occasion, did I hear Antipa mutter confidentially
to his companion:

"The fact that all his sayings are so simple is not a favourable sign.
For, you see, they do not harmonise with the affair in its entirety--in
such a connection words should be mysterious, and so, able to be
interpreted in more than one way, seeing that the more meanings words
possess, the more are those words respected and heeded by mankind."

"Why so?" queried Felitzata.

"Why so?" re-echoed Vologonov irritably. "Are we not, then, to respect
ANYONE or ANYTHING? Only he is worthy of respect who does not harm his
fellows; and of those who do not harm their fellows there are but few.
To this point you must pay attention--you must teach him words of
variable import, words more abstract, as well as more sonorous."

"But I know no such words."

"I will repeat to you a few, and every night, when he goes to bed, you
shall repeat them to HIM. For example: 'Adom ispolneni, pokaites'[Do ye
people who are filled with venom repent].  And mark that the exact
words of the Church be adhered to. For instance, 'Dushenbitzi,
pozhaleite Boga, okayannie,' [Murderers of the soul, accursed ones,
repent ye before God.] must be said rather than 'Dushenbitzi,
pozhaleite Boga, okayanni,' since the latter, though the shorter form,
is also not the correct one. But perhaps I had better instruct the lad
myself."

"Certainly that would be the better plan."

So from that time onwards Vologonov fell to stopping Nilushka in the
street, and repeating to him something or another in his kindly
fashion. Once he even took him by the hand, and, leading him to his
room, and giving him something to cat, said persuasively:

"Say this after me. 'Do not hasten, Oh ye people.' Try if you can say
that."

"'A lantern,'" began Nilushka civilly.

"'A lantern?' Yes. Well, go on, and say, 'I am a lantern unto thee--"

"I want to sing, it."

"There is no need for that, though presently you shall sing it. For the
moment your task is to learn the correct speaking of things. So say
after me--"

"O Lo-ord, have mercy!" came in a quiet, thoughtful chant from the
idiot. Whereafter he added in the coaxing tone of a child:

"We shall all of us have to die."

"Yes, but come, come!" expostulated Vologonov. "What are you blurting
out NOW? That much I know without your telling me--always have I known,
little friend, that each of us is hastening towards his death. Yet your
want of understanding exceeds what should be."

"Dogs run-"

"Dogs? Now, enough, little fellow."

"Dogs run like chickens. They run here, in the ravine," continued
Nilushka in the murmuring accents of a child of three.

"Nevertheless," mused Vologonov, "even that seeming nothing of his may
mean something. Yes, there may lie in it a great deal. Now, say:
'Perdition will arise before him who shall hasten.'"

"No, I want to SING something."

With a splutter Vologonov said:

"Truly you are a difficult subject to deal with!"

And with that he fell to pacing the floor with long, thoughtful strides
as the idiot's voice cried in quavering accents:

"O Lo-ord, have me-ercy upon us!"

      *      *      *      *      *

Thus the winsome Nilushka proved indispensable to the foul, mean,
unhealthy life of the suburb. Of that life he coloured and rounded off
the senselessness, the ugliness, the superfluity.  He resembled an
apple hanging forgotten on a gnarled old worm-eaten tree, whence all
the fruit and the leaves have fallen until only the branches wave in
the autumn wind. Rather, he resembled a sole-surviving picture in the
pages of a ragged, soiled old book which has neither a beginning nor an
ending, and therefore can no longer be read, is no longer worth the
reading, since now its pages contain nothing intelligible.

And as smiling his gracious smile, the lad's pathetic, legendary figure
flitted past the mouldy buts and cracked fences and riotous beds of
nettles, there would readily recur to the memory, and succeed one
another, visions of some of the finer and more reputable personages of
Russian lore--there would file before one's mental vision, in endless
sequence, men whose biographies inform us how, in fear for their souls,
they left the life of the world, and, hieing them to the forests and
the caves, abandoned mankind for the wild things of nature. And at the
same time would there recur to one's memory poems concerning the blind
and the poor-in particular, the poem concerning Alexei the Man of God,
and all the multitude of other fair, but unsubstantial, forms wherein
Russia has embodied her sad and terrified soul, her humble and
protesting grief. Yet it was a process to depress one almost to the
point of distraction.

Once, forgetting that Nilushka was imbecile, I conceived an
irrepressible desire to talk with him, and to read him good poetry, and
to tell him both of the world's youthful hopes and of my own personal
thoughts.

The occasion happened on a day when, as I was sitting on the edge of
the ravine, and dangling my legs over the ravine's depths, the lad came
floating towards me as though on air. In his hands, with their fingers
as slender as a girl's, he was holding a large leaf; and as he gazed at
it the smile of his clear blue eyes was, as it were, pervading him from
head to foot.

"Whither, Nilushka?" said I.

With a start he raised his head and eyes heavenward. Then timidly he
glanced at the blue shadow of the ravine, and extended to me his leaf,
over the veins of which there was crawling a ladybird.

"A bukan," he observed.

"It is so. And whither are you going to take it?"

"We shall all of us die. I was going to take and bury it."

"But it is alive; and one does not bury things before they are dead."

Nilushka closed and opened his eyes once or twice.

"I should like to sing something," he remarked.

"Rather, do you SAY something."

He glanced at the ravine again--his pink nostrils quivering and
dilating--then sighed as though he was weary, and in all
unconsciousness muttered a foul expression. As he did so I noticed that
on the portion of his neck below his right ear there was a large
birthmark, and that, covered with golden down like velvet, and
resembling in shape a bee, it seemed to be endowed with a similitude of
life, through the faint beating of a vein in its vicinity.

Presently the ladybird raised her upper wings as though she were
preparing for flight; whereupon Nilushka sought with a finger to detain
her, and, in so doing, let fall the leaf, and enabled the insect to
detach itself and fly away at a low level. Upon that, bending forward
with arms outstretched, the idiot went softly in pursuit, much as
though he himself were launching his body into leisurely flight, but,
when ten paces away, stopped, raised his face to heaven, and, with arms
pendent before him, and the palms of his hands turned outwards as
though resting on something which I could not see, remained fixed and
motionless.

From the ravine there were tending upwards towards the sunlight some
green sprigs of willow, with dull yellow flowers and a clump of grey
wormwood, while the damp cracks which seamed the clay of the ravine
were lined with round leaves of the "mother-stepmother plant," and
round about us little birds were hovering, and from both the bushes and
the bed of the ravine there was ascending the moist smell of decay. Yet
over our heads the sky was clear, as the sun, now sole occupant of the
heavens, declined slowly in the direction of the dark marshes across
the river; only above the roofs of Zhitnaia Street could there be seen
fluttering about in alarm a flock of snow-white pigeons, while waving
below them was the black besom which had, as it were, swept them into
the air, and from afar one could hear the sound of an angry murmur, the
mournful, mysterious murmur of the town.

Whiningly, like an old man, a child of the suburb was raising its voice
in lamentation; and as I listened to the sound, it put me in mind of a
clerk reading Vespers amid the desolation of an empty church. Presently
a brown dog passed us with shaggy head despondently pendent, and eyes
as beautiful as those of a drunken woman.

And, to complete the picture, there was standing--outlined against the
nearest shanty of the suburb, a shanty which lay at the extreme edge of
the ravine-there was standing, face to the sun, and back to the town,
as though preparing for flight, the straight, slender form of the boy
who, while alien to all, caressed all with the eternally
incomprehensible smile of his angel-like eyes. Yes, that golden
birthmark so like a bee I can see to this day!

      *      *      *      *      *

Two weeks later, on a Sunday at mid-day, Nilushka passed into the other
world. That day, after returning home from late Mass, and handing to
his mother a couple of wafers which had been given him as a mark of
charity, the lad said:

"Mother, please lay out my bed on the chest, for I think that I am
going to lie down for the last time."

Yet the words in no way surprised Felitzata, for he had often before
remarked, before retiring to rest:

"Some day we shall all of us have to die."

At the same time, whereas, on previous occasions, Nilushka had never
gone to sleep without first of all singing to himself his little song,
and then chanting the eternal, universal "Lord, have mercy upon us!"
he, on this occasion, merely folded his hands upon his breast, closed
his eyes, and relapsed into slumber.

That day Felitzata had dinner, and then departed on business of her
own; and when she returned in the evening, she was astonished to find
that her son was still asleep. Next, on looking closer at him, she
perceived that he was dead.

"I looked," she related plaintively to some of the suburban residents
who came running to her cot, "and perceived his little feet to be blue;
and since it was only just before Mass that I had washed his hands with
soap, I remarked the more readily that his feet were become less white
than his hands. And when I felt one of those hands, I found that it had
stiffened."

On Felitzata's face, as she recounted this, there was manifest a
nervous expression. Likewise, her features were a trifle flushed. Yet
gleaming also through the te

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2288