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The forged coupon, and other stories

by graf Leo Tolstoy · English · Gutenberg #243 · 341,626 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The forged coupon, and other stories

Author: graf Leo Tolstoy

Editor: C. T. Hagberg Wright


        
Release date: March 15, 2006 [eBook #243]
                Most recently updated: October 17, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORGED COUPON, AND OTHER STORIES ***




THE FORGED COUPON

And Other Stories

By Leo Tolstoy




CONTENTS

     INTRODUCTION
     THE FORGED COUPON
     AFTER THE DANCE
     ALYOSHA THE POT
     MY DREAM
     THERE ARE NO GUILTY PEOPLE
     THE YOUNG TSAR




INTRODUCTION

IN an age of materialism like our own the phenomenon of spiritual power
is as significant and inspiring as it is rare. No longer associated with
the “divine right” of kings, it has survived the downfall of feudal and
theocratic systems as a mystic personal emanation in place of a coercive
weapon of statecraft.

Freed from its ancient shackles of dogma and despotism it eludes
analysis. We know not how to gauge its effect on others, nor even upon
ourselves. Like the wind, it permeates the atmosphere we breathe, and
baffles while it stimulates the mind with its intangible but compelling
force.

This psychic power, which the dead weight of materialism is impotent
to suppress, is revealed in the lives and writings of men of the most
diverse creeds and nationalities. Apart from those who, like Buddha
and Mahomet, have been raised to the height of demi-gods by worshipping
millions, there are names which leap inevitably to the mind--such names
as Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, Rousseau--which stand for types and
exemplars of spiritual aspiration. To this high priesthood of the quick
among the dead, who can doubt that time will admit Leo Tolstoy--a genius
whose greatness has been obscured from us rather than enhanced by his
duality; a realist who strove to demolish the mysticism of Christianity,
and became himself a mystic in the contemplation of Nature; a man of
ardent temperament and robust physique, keenly susceptible to human
passions and desires, who battled with himself from early manhood until
the spirit, gathering strength with years, inexorably subdued the flesh.

Tolstoy the realist steps without cavil into the front rank of modern
writers; Tolstoy the idealist has been constantly derided and scorned by
men of like birth and education with himself--his altruism denounced as
impracticable, his preaching compared with his mode of life to prove
him inconsistent, if not insincere. This is the prevailing attitude of
politicians and literary men.

Must one conclude that the mass of mankind has lost touch with idealism?
On the contrary, in spite of modern materialism, or even because of it,
many leaders of spiritual thought have arisen in our times, and have won
the ear of vast audiences. Their message is a call to a simpler life, to
a recognition of the responsibilities of wealth, to the avoidance of war
by arbitration, and sinking of class hatred in a deep sense of universal
brotherhood.

Unhappily, when an idealistic creed is formulated in precise and
dogmatic language, it invariably loses something of its pristine beauty
in the process of transmutation. Hence the Positivist philosophy
of Comte, though embodying noble aspirations, has had but a limited
influence. Again, the poetry of Robert Browning, though less frankly
altruistic than that of Cowper or Wordsworth, is inherently ethical, and
reveals strong sympathy with sinning and suffering humanity, but it is
masked by a manner that is sometimes uncouth and frequently obscure.
Owing to these, and other instances, idealism suggests to the world
at large a vague sentimentality peculiar to the poets, a bloodless
abstraction toyed with by philosophers, which must remain a closed book
to struggling humanity.

Yet Tolstoy found true idealism in the toiling peasant who believed in
God, rather than in his intellectual superior who believed in himself
in the first place, and gave a conventional assent to the existence of a
deity in the second. For the peasant was still religious at heart with
a naive unquestioning faith--more characteristic of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century than of to-day--and still fervently aspired to God
although sunk in superstition and held down by the despotism of the
Greek Church. It was the cumbrous ritual and dogma of the orthodox state
religion which roused Tolstoy to impassioned protests, and led him step
by step to separate the core of Christianity from its sacerdotal shell,
thus bringing upon himself the ban of excommunication.

The signal mark of the reprobation of “Holy Synod” was slow in
coming--it did not, in fact, become absolute until a couple of years
after the publication of “Resurrection,” in 1901, in spite of the
attitude of fierce hostility to Church and State which Tolstoy had
maintained for so long. This hostility, of which the seeds were
primarily sown by the closing of his school and inquisition of his
private papers in the summer of 1862, soon grew to proportions
far greater than those arising from a personal wrong. The dumb and
submissive moujik found in Tolstoy a living voice to express his
sufferings.

Tolstoy was well fitted by nature and circumstances to be the peasant’s
spokesman. He had been brought into intimate contact with him in the
varying conditions of peace and war, and he knew him at his worst and
best. The old home of the family, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy, his
brothers and sister, spent their early years in charge of two guardian
aunts, was not only a halting-place for pilgrims journeying to and from
the great monastic shrines, but gave shelter to a number of persons of
enfeebled minds belonging to the peasant class, with whom the devout and
kindly Aunt Alexandra spent many hours daily in religious conversation
and prayer.

In “Childhood” Tolstoy apostrophises with feeling one of those
“innocents,” a man named Grisha, “whose faith was so strong that you
felt the nearness of God, your love so ardent that the words flowed from
your lips uncontrolled by your reason. And how did you celebrate his
Majesty when, words failing you, you prostrated yourself on the ground,
bathed in tears” This picture of humble religious faith was amongst
Tolstoy’s earliest memories, and it returned to comfort him and uplift
his soul when it was tossed and engulfed by seas of doubt. But the
affection he felt in boyhood towards the moujiks became tinged with
contempt when his attempts to improve their condition--some of which are
described in “Anna Karenina” and in the “Landlord’s Morning”--ended in
failure, owing to the ignorance and obstinacy of the people. It was not
till he passed through the ordeal of war in Turkey and the Crimea
that he discovered in the common soldier who fought by his side an
unconscious heroism, an unquestioning faith in God, a kindliness and
simplicity of heart rarely possessed by his commanding officer.

The impressions made upon Tolstoy during this period of active service
gave vivid reality to the battle-scenes in “War and Peace,” and are
traceable in the reflections and conversation of the two heroes, Prince
Andre and Pierre Besukhov. On the eve of the battle of Borodino,
Prince Andre, talking with Pierre in the presence of his devoted
soldier-servant Timokhine, says,--“‘Success cannot possibly be, nor has
it ever been, the result of strategy or fire-arms or numbers.’

“‘Then what does it result from?’ said Pierre.

“‘From the feeling that is in me, that is in him’--pointing to
Timokhine--‘and that is in each individual soldier.’”

He then contrasts the different spirit animating the officers and the
men.

“‘The former,’ he says, ‘have nothing in view but their personal
interests. The critical moment for them is the moment at which they are
able to supplant a rival, to win a cross or a new order. I see only one
thing. To-morrow one hundred thousand Russians and one hundred thousand
Frenchmen will meet to fight; they who fight the hardest and spare
themselves the least will win the day.’

“‘There’s the truth, your Excellency, the real truth,’ murmurs
Timokhine; ‘it is not a time to spare oneself. Would you believe it, the
men of my battalion have not tasted brandy? “It’s not a day for that,”
 they said.’”

During the momentous battle which followed, Pierre was struck by the
steadfastness under fire which has always distinguished the Russian
soldier.

“The fall of each man acted as an increasing stimulus. The faces of the
soldiers brightened more and more, as if challenging the storm let loose
on them.”

In contrast with this picture of fine “morale” is that of the young
white-faced officer, looking nervously about him as he walks backwards
with lowered sword.

In other places Tolstoy does full justice to the courage and patriotism
of all grades in the Russian army, but it is constantly evident that
his sympathies are most heartily with the rank and file. What genuine
feeling and affection rings in this sketch of Plato, a common soldier,
in “War and Peace!”

“Plato Karataev was about fifty, judging by the number of campaigns in
which he had served; he could not have told his exact age himself, and
when he laughed, as he often did, he showed two rows of strong, white
teeth. There was not a grey hair on his head or in his beard, and his
bearing wore the stamp of activity, resolution, and above all, stoicism.
His face, though much lined, had a touching expression of simplicity,
youth, and innocence. When he spoke, in his soft sing-song voice, his
speech flowed as from a well-spring. He never thought about what he
had said or was going to say next, and the vivacity and the rhythmical
inflections of his voice gave it a penetrating persuasiveness. Night and
morning, when going to rest or getting up, he said, ‘O God, let me
sleep like a stone and rise up like a loaf.’ And, sure enough, he had no
sooner lain down than he slept like a lump of lead, and in the morning
on waking he was bright and lively, and ready for any work. He could
do anything, just not very well nor very ill; he cooked, sewed, planed
wood, cobbled his boots, and was always occupied with some job or other,
only allowing himself to chat and sing at night. He sang, not like a
singer who knows he has listeners, but as the birds sing to God, the
Father of all, feeling it as necessary as walking or stretching himself.
His singing was tender, sweet, plaintive, almost feminine, in keeping
with his serious countenance. When, after some weeks of captivity his
beard had grown again, he seemed to have got rid of all that was not his
true self, the borrowed face which his soldiering life had given him,
and to have become, as before, a peasant and a man of the people. In the
eyes of the other prisoners Plato was just a common soldier, whom they
chaffed at times and sent on all manner of errands; but to Pierre he
remained ever after the personification of simplicity and truth, such as
he had divined him to be since the first night spent by his side.”

This clearly is a study from life, a leaf from Tolstoy’s “Crimean
Journal.” It harmonises with the point of view revealed in the “Letters
from Sebastopol” (especially in the second and third series), and shows,
like them, the change effected by the realities of war in the intolerant
young aristocrat, who previously excluded all but the comme-il-faut from
his consideration. With widened outlook and new ideals he returned to
St. Petersburg at the close of the Crimean campaign, to be welcomed by
the elite of letters and courted by society. A few years before he would
have been delighted with such a reception. Now it jarred on his awakened
sense of the tragedy of existence. He found himself entirely out of
sympathy with the group of literary men who gathered round him, with
Turgenev at their head. In Tolstoy’s eyes they were false, paltry, and
immoral, and he was at no pains to disguise his opinions. Dissension,
leading to violent scenes, soon broke out between Turgenev and Tolstoy;
and the latter, completely disillusioned both in regard to his great
contemporary and to the literary world of St. Petersburg, shook off the
dust of the capital, and, after resigning his commission in the army,
went abroad on a tour through Germany, Switzerland, and France.

In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became
intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful
thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive
spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among
beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he
enjoyed a respite from mental strain.

“A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit; to
the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed
me had succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a
confident hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive.”

Those halcyon days ushered in the dawn of an intimate friendship between
himself and a lady who in the correspondence which ensued usually
styled herself his aunt, but was in fact a second cousin. This lady, the
Countess Alexandra A. Tolstoy, a Maid of Honour of the Bedchamber, moved
exclusively in Court circles. She was intelligent and sympathetic, but
strictly orthodox and mondaine, so that, while Tolstoy’s view of
life gradually shifted from that of an aristocrat to that of a social
reformer, her own remained unaltered; with the result that at the end
of some forty years of frank and affectionate interchange of ideas,
they awoke to the painful consciousness that the last link of mutual
understanding had snapped and that their friendship was at an end.

But the letters remain as a valuable and interesting record of one
of Tolstoy’s rare friendships with women, revealing in his unguarded
confidences fine shades of his many-sided nature, and throwing light on
the impression he made both on his intimates and on those to whom he was
only known as a writer, while his moral philosophy was yet in embryo.
They are now about to appear in book form under the auspices of M.
Stakhovich, to whose kindness in giving me free access to the originals
I am indebted for the extracts which follow. From one of the countess’s
first letters we learn that the feelings of affection, hope, and
happiness which possessed Tolstoy in Switzerland irresistibly
communicated themselves to those about him.

“You are good in a very uncommon way,” she writes, “and that is why
it is difficult to feel unhappy in your company. I have never seen you
without wishing to be a better creature. Your presence is a consoling
idea . . . know all the elements in you that revive one’s heart,
possibly without your being even aware of it.”

A few years later she gives him an amusing account of the impression his
writings had already made on an eminent statesman.

“I owe you a small episode. Not long ago, when lunching with the
Emperor, I sat next our little Bismarck, and in a spirit of mischief I
began sounding him about you. But I had hardly uttered your name when he
went off at a gallop with the greatest enthusiasm, firing off the list
of your perfections left and right, and so long as he declaimed your
praises with gesticulations, cut and thrust, powder and shot, it was
all very well and quite in character; but seeing that I listened with
interest and attention my man took the bit in his teeth, and flung
himself into a psychic apotheosis. On reaching full pitch he began to
get muddled, and floundered so helplessly in his own phrases! all the
while chewing an excellent cutlet to the bone, that at last I realised
nothing but the tips of his ears--those two great ears of his. What a
pity I can’t repeat it verbatim! but how? There was nothing left but a
jumble of confused sounds and broken words.”

Tolstoy on his side is equally expansive, and in the early stages of the
correspondence falls occasionally into the vein of self-analysis which
in later days became habitual.

“As a child I believed with passion and without any thought. Then at the
age of fourteen I began to think about life and preoccupied myself with
religion, but it did not adjust itself to my theories and so I broke
with it. Without it I was able to live quite contentedly for ten years
. . . everything in my life was evenly distributed, and there was no
room for religion. Then came a time when everything grew intelligible;
there were no more secrets in life, but life itself had lost its
significance.”

He goes on to tell of the two years that he spent in the Caucasus before
the Crimean War, when his mind, jaded by youthful excesses, gradually
regained its freshness, and he awoke to a sense of communion with Nature
which he retained to his life’s end.

“I have my notes of that time, and now reading them over I am not able
to understand how a man could attain to the state of mental exaltation
which I arrived at. It was a torturing but a happy time.”

Further on he writes,--“In those two years of intellectual work, I
discovered a truth which is ancient and simple, but which yet I know
better than others do. I found out that immortal life is a reality, that
love is a reality, and that one must live for others if one would be
unceasingly happy.”

At this point one realises the gulf which divides the Slavonic from
the English temperament. No average Englishman of seven-and-twenty (as
Tolstoy was then) would pursue reflections of this kind, or if he did,
he would in all probability keep them sedulously to himself.

To Tolstoy and his aunt, on the contrary, it seemed the most natural
thing in the world to indulge in egoistic abstractions and to expatiate
on them; for a Russian feels none of the Anglo-Saxon’s mauvaise honte
in describing his spiritual condition, and is no more daunted by
metaphysics than the latter is by arguments on politics and sport.

To attune the Anglo-Saxon reader’s mind to sympathy with a mentality
so alien to his own, requires that Tolstoy’s environment should be
described more fully than most of his biographers have cared to do. This
prefatory note aims, therefore, at being less strictly biographical
than illustrative of the contributory elements and circumstances which
sub-consciously influenced Tolstoy’s spiritual evolution, since it is
apparent that in order to judge a man’s actions justly one must be able
to appreciate the motives from which they spring; those motives in turn
requiring the key which lies in his temperament, his associations, his
nationality. Such a key is peculiarly necessary to English or American
students of Tolstoy, because of the marked contrast existing between the
Russian and the Englishman or American in these respects, a contrast
by which Tolstoy himself was forcibly struck during the visit to
Switzerland, of which mention has been already made. It is difficult
to restrain a smile at the poignant mental discomfort endured by
the sensitive Slav in the company of the frigid and silent English
frequenters of the Schweitzerhof (“Journal of Prince D. Nekhludov,”
 Lucerne, 1857), whose reserve, he realised, was “not based on pride,
but on the absence of any desire to draw nearer to each other”; while he
looked back regretfully to the pension in Paris where the table d’ hote
was a scene of spontaneous gaiety. The problem of British taciturnity
passed his comprehension; but for us the enigma of Tolstoy’s temperament
is half solved if we see him not harshly silhouetted against a
blank wall, but suffused with his native atmosphere, amid his native
surroundings. Not till we understand the main outlines of the Russian
temperament can we realise the individuality of Tolstoy himself: the
personality that made him lovable, the universality that made him great.

So vast an agglomeration of races as that which constitutes the Russian
empire cannot obviously be represented by a single type, but it will
suffice for our purposes to note the characteristics of the inhabitants
of Great Russia among whom Tolstoy spent the greater part of his
lifetime and to whom he belonged by birth and natural affinities.

It may be said of the average Russian that in exchange for a precocious
childhood he retains much of a child’s lightness of heart throughout
his later years, alternating with attacks of morbid despondency. He
is usually very susceptible to feminine charm, an ardent but unstable
lover, whose passions are apt to be as shortlived as they are violent.
Story-telling and long-winded discussions give him keen enjoyment,
for he is garrulous, metaphysical, and argumentative. In money
matters careless and extravagant, dilatory and venal in affairs; fond,
especially in the peasant class, of singing, dancing, and carousing; but
his irresponsible gaiety and heedlessness of consequences balanced by
a fatalistic courage and endurance in the face of suffering and danger.
Capable, besides, of high flights of idealism, which result in epics,
but rarely in actions, owing to the Slavonic inaptitude for sustained
and organised effort. The Englishman by contrast appears cold and
calculating, incapable of rising above questions of practical utility;
neither interested in other men’s antecedents and experiences nor
willing to retail his own. The catechism which Plato puts Pierre
through on their first encounter (“War and Peace”) as to his family,
possessions, and what not, are precisely similar to those to which
I have been subjected over and over again by chance acquaintances in
country-houses or by fellow travellers on journeys by boat or train. The
naivete and kindliness of the questioner makes it impossible to resent,
though one may feebly try to parry his probing. On the other hand he
offers you free access to the inmost recesses of his own soul, and
stupefies you with the candour of his revelations. This, of course,
relates more to the landed and professional classes than to the peasant,
who is slower to express himself, and combines in a curious way a firm
belief in the omnipotence and wisdom of his social superiors with a
rooted distrust of their intentions regarding himself. He is like a
beast of burden who flinches from every approach, expecting always a
kick or a blow. On the other hand, his affection for the animals
who share his daily work is one of the most attractive points
in his character, and one which Tolstoy never wearied of
emphasising--describing, with the simple pathos of which he was master,
the moujik inured to his own privations but pitiful to his horse,
shielding him from the storm with his own coat, or saving him from
starvation with his own meagre ration; and mindful of him even in his
prayers, invoking, like Plato, the blessings of Florus and Laura, patron
saints of horses, because “one mustn’t forget the animals.”

The characteristics of a people so embedded in the soil bear a closer
relation to their native landscape than our own migratory populations,
and patriotism with them has a deep and vital meaning, which is
expressed unconsciously in their lives.

This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudiated is none the less
the animating power of the noble epic, “War and Peace,” and of his
peasant-tales, of his rare gift of reproducing the expressive Slav
vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing his pictures of Russian
scenery not merely with beauty, but with spiritual significance. I can
think of no prose writer, unless it be Thoreau, so wholly under the
spell of Nature as Tolstoy; and while Thoreau was preoccupied with
the normal phenomena of plant and animal life, Tolstoy, coming near to
Pantheism, found responses to his moods in trees, and gained spiritual
expansion from the illimitable skies and plains. He frequently brings
his heroes into touch with Nature, and endows them with all the innate
mysticism of his own temperament, for to him Nature was “a guide to
God.” So in the two-fold incident of Prince Andre and the oak tree (“War
and Peace”) the Prince, though a man of action rather than of sentiment
and habitually cynical, is ready to find in the aged oak by the
roadside, in early spring, an animate embodiment of his own despondency.

“‘Springtime, love, happiness?--are you still cherishing those deceptive
illusions?’ the old oak seemed to say. ‘Isn’t it the same fiction ever?
There is neither spring, nor love, nor happiness! Look at those poor
weather-beaten firs, always the same . . . look at the knotty arms
issuing from all up my poor mutilated trunk--here I am, such as they
have made me, and I do not believe either in your hopes or in your
illusions.’”

And after thus exercising his imagination, Prince Andre still casts
backward glances as he passes by, “but the oak maintained its obstinate
and sullen immovability in the midst of the flowers and grass growing at
its feet. ‘Yes, that oak is right, right a thousand times over. One must
leave illusions to youth. But the rest of us know what life is worth; it
has nothing left to offer us.’”

Six weeks later he returns homeward the same way, roused from his
melancholy torpor by his recent meeting with Natasha.

“The day was hot, there was storm in the air; a slight shower watered
the dust on the road and the grass in the ditch; the left side of the
wood remained in the shade; the right side, lightly stirred by the wind,
glittered all wet in the sun; everything was in flower, and from near
and far the nightingales poured forth their song. ‘I fancy there was an
oak here that understood me,’ said Prince Andre to himself, looking
to the left and attracted unawares by the beauty of the very tree he
sought. The transformed old oak spread out in a dome of deep, luxuriant,
blooming verdure, which swayed in a light breeze in the rays of the
setting sun. There were no longer cloven branches nor rents to be seen;
its former aspect of bitter defiance and sullen grief had disappeared;
there were only the young leaves, full of sap that had pierced through
the centenarian bark, making the beholder question with surprise if this
patriarch had really given birth to them. ‘Yes, it is he, indeed!’ cried
Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which
the springtime and this new life gave him . . . ‘No, my life cannot end
at thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is within me,
others must know it too! Pierre and that “slip” of a girl, who would
have fled into cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour
theirs, and their lives must mingle with mine!’”

In letters to his wife, to intimate friends, and in his diary, Tolstoy’s
love of Nature is often-times expressed. The hair shirt of the ascetic
and the prophet’s mantle fall from his shoulders, and all the poet in
him wakes when, “with a feeling akin to ecstasy,” he looks up from his
smooth-running sledge at “the enchanting, starry winter sky overhead,”
 or in early spring feels on a ramble “intoxicated by the beauty of the
morning,” while he notes that the buds are swelling on the lilacs, and
“the birds no longer sing at random,” but have begun to converse.

But though such allusions abound in his diary and private
correspondence, we must turn to “The Cossacks,” and “Conjugal Happiness”
 for the exquisitely elaborated rural studies, which give those early
romances their fresh idyllic charm.

What is interesting to note is that this artistic freshness and joy in
Nature coexisted with acute intermittent attacks of spiritual lassitude.
In “The Cossacks,” the doubts, the mental gropings of Olenine--whose
personality but thinly veils that of Tolstoy--haunt him betimes even
among the delights of the Caucasian woodland; Serge, the fatalistic
hero of “Conjugal Happiness,” calmly acquiesces in the inevitableness
of “love’s sad satiety” amid the scent of roses and the songs of
nightingales.

Doubt and despondency, increased by the vexations and failures attending
his philanthropic endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to the verge of
suicide.

“The disputes over arbitration had become so painful to me, the
schoolwork so vague, my doubts arising from the wish to teach others,
while dissembling my own ignorance of what should be taught, were so
heartrending that I fell ill. I might then have reached the despair to
which I all but succumbed fifteen years later, if there had not been a
side of life as yet unknown to me which promised me salvation: this was
family life” (“My Confession”).

In a word, his marriage with Mademoiselle Sophie Andreevna Bers
(daughter of Dr. Bers of Moscow) was consummated in the autumn of
1862--after a somewhat protracted courtship, owing to her extreme
youth--and Tolstoy entered upon a period of happiness and mental peace
such as he had never known. His letters of this period to Countess A. A.
Tolstoy, his friend Fet, and others, ring with enraptured allusions to
his new-found joy. Lassitude and indecision, mysticism and altruism, all
were swept aside by the impetus of triumphant love and of all-sufficing
conjugal happiness. When in June of the following year a child was born,
and the young wife, her features suffused with “a supernatural beauty”
 lay trying to smile at the husband who knelt sobbing beside her, Tolstoy
must have realised that for once his prophetic intuition had been
unequal to its task. If his imagination could have conceived in
prenuptial days what depths of emotion might be wakened by fatherhood,
he would not have treated the birth of Masha’s first child in “Conjugal
Happiness” as a trivial material event, in no way affecting the mutual
relations of the disillusioned pair. He would have understood that at
this supreme crisis, rather than in the vernal hour of love’s avowal,
the heart is illumined with a joy which is fated “never to return.”

The parting of the ways, so soon reached by Serge and Masha, was in fact
delayed in Tolstoy’s own life by his wife’s intelligent assistance in
his literary work as an untiring amanuensis, and in the mutual anxieties
and pleasures attending the care of a large family of young children.
Wider horizons opened to his mental vision, his whole being was
quickened and invigorated. “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina,” all the
splendid fruit of the teeming years following upon his marriage, bear
witness to the stimulus which his genius had received. His dawning
recognition of the power and extent of female influence appears
incidentally in the sketches of high society in those two masterpieces
as well as in the eloquent closing passages of “What then must we do?”
 (1886). Having affirmed that “it is women who form public opinion, and
in our day women are particularly powerful,” he finally draws a picture
of the ideal wife who shall urge her husband and train her children
to self-sacrifice. “Such women rule men and are their guiding stars. O
women--mothers! The salvation of the world lies in your hands!” In that
appeal to the mothers of the world there lurks a protest which in
later writings developed into overwhelming condemnation. True, he chose
motherhood for the type of self-sacrificing love in the treatise “On
Life,” which appeared soon after “What then must we do?” but maternal
love, as exemplified in his own home and elsewhere, appeared to him as a
noble instinct perversely directed.

The roots of maternal love are sunk deep in conservatism. The child’s
physical well-being is the first essential in the mother’s eyes--the
growth of a vigorous body by which a vigorous mind may be fitly
tenanted--and this form of materialism which Tolstoy as a father
accepted, Tolstoy as idealist condemned; while the penury he courted as
a lightening of his soul’s burden was averted by the strenuous exertions
of his wife. So a rift grew without blame attaching to either, and
Tolstoy henceforward wandered solitary in spirit through a wilderness
of thought, seeking rest and finding none, coming perilously near to
suicide before he reached haven.

To many it will seem that the finest outcome of that period of mental
groping, internal struggle, and contending with current ideas, lies in
the above-mentioned “What then must we do?” Certain it is that no human
document ever revealed the soul of its author with greater sincerity.
Not for its practical suggestions, but for its impassioned humanity, its
infectious altruism, “What then must we do?” takes its rank among the
world’s few living books. It marks that stage of Tolstoy’s evolution
when he made successive essays in practical philanthropy which filled
him with discouragement, yet were “of use to his soul” in teaching him
how far below the surface lie the seeds of human misery. The slums of
Moscow, crowded with beings sunk beyond redemption; the famine-stricken
plains of Samara where disease and starvation reigned, notwithstanding
the stream of charity set flowing by Tolstoy’s appeals and
notwithstanding his untiring personal devotion, strengthened further the
conviction, so constantly affirmed in his writings, of the impotence of
money to alleviate distress. Whatever negations of this dictum our own
systems of charitable organizations may appear to offer, there can be no
question but that in Russia it held and holds true.

The social condition of Russia is like a tideless sea, whose sullen
quiescence is broken from time to time by terrific storms which spend
themselves in unavailing fury. Reaction follows upon every forward
motion, and the advance made by each succeeding generation is barely
perceptible.

But in the period of peace following upon the close of the Crimean
War the soul of the Russian people was deeply stirred by the spirit of
Progress, and hope rose high on the accession of Alexander II.

The emancipation of the serfs was only one among a number of projected
reforms which engaged men’s minds. The national conscience awoke and
echoed the cry of the exiled patriot Herzen, “Now or never!” Educational
enterprise was aroused, and some forty schools for peasant children
were started on the model of that opened by Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana
(1861). The literary world throbbed with new life, and a brilliant
company of young writers came to the surface, counting among them names
of European celebrity, such as Dostoevsky, Nekrassov, and Saltykov.
Unhappily the reign of Progress was short. The bureaucratic circle
hemming in the Czar took alarm, and made haste to secure their
ascendancy by fresh measures of oppression. Many schools were closed,
including that of Tolstoy, and the nascent liberty of the Press was
stifled by the most rigid censorship.

In this lamentable manner the history of Russia’s internal misrule
and disorder has continued to repeat itself for the last sixty
years, revolving in the same vicious circle of fierce repression and
persecution and utter disregard of the rights of individuals, followed
by fierce reprisals on the part of the persecuted; the voice of protest
no sooner raised than silenced in a prison cell or among Siberian
snow-fields, yet rising again and again with inextinguishable
reiteration; appeals for political freedom, for constitutional
government, for better systems and wider dissemination of education, for
liberty of the Press, and for an enlightened treatment of the masses,
callously received and rejected. The answer with which these appeals
have been met by the rulers of Russia is only too well known to the
civilised world, but the obduracy of Pharoah has called forth the
plagues of Egypt. Despite the unrivalled agrarian fertility of Russia,
famines recur with dire frequency, with disease and riot in their train,
while the ignominious termination of the Russo-Japanese war showed that
even the magnificent morale of the Russian soldier had been undermined
and was tainted by the rottenness of the authorities set over him. What
in such circumstances as these can a handful of philanthropists achieve,
and what avails alms-giving or the scattering of largesse to a people on
the point of spiritual dissolution?

In these conditions Tolstoy’s abhorrence of money, and his assertion
of its futility as a panacea for human suffering, appears not merely
comprehensible but inevitable, and his renunciation of personal property
the strictly logical outcome of his conclusions. The partition of his
estates between his wife and children, shortly before the outbreak of
the great famine in 1892, served to relieve his mind partially; and
the writings of Henry George, with which he became acquainted at this
critical time, were an additional incentive to concentrate his thoughts
on the land question. He began by reading the American propagandist’s
“Social Problems,” which arrested his attention by its main principles
and by the clearness and novelty of his arguments. Deeply impressed by
the study of this book, no sooner had he finished it than he possessed
himself of its forerunner, “Progress and Poverty,” in which the essence
of George’s revolutionary doctrines is worked out.

The plan of land nationalisation there explained provided Tolstoy with
well thought-out and logical reasons for a policy that was already more
than sympathetic to him. Here at last was a means of ensuring economic
equality for all, from the largest landowner to the humblest peasant--a
practical suggestion how to reduce the inequalities between rich and
poor.

Henry George’s ideas and methods are easy of comprehension. The land was
made by God for every human creature that was born into the world, and
therefore to confine the ownership of land to the few is wrong. If a man
wants a piece of land, he ought to pay the rest of the community for the
enjoyment of it. This payment or rent should be the only tax paid into
the Treasury of the State. Taxation on men’s own property (the produce
of their own labour) should be done away with, and a rent graduated
according to the site-value of the land should be substituted.
Monopolies would cease without violently and unjustly disturbing society
with confiscation and redistribution. No one would keep land idle if he
were taxed according to its value to the community, and not according
to the use to which he individually wished to put it. A man would then
readily obtain possession of land, and could turn it to account and
develop it without being taxed on his own industry. All human beings
would thus become free in their lives and in their labour. They would no
longer be forced to toil at demoralising work for low wages; they
would be independent producers instead of earning a living by providing
luxuries for the rich, who had enslaved them by monopolising the land.
The single tax thus created would ultimately overthrow the present
“civilisation” which is chiefly built up on wage-slavery.

Tolstoy gave his whole-hearted adhesion to this doctrine, predicting a
day of enlightenment when men would no longer tolerate a form of slavery
which he considered as revolting as that which had so recently been
abolished. Some long conversations with Henry George, while he was on
a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, gave additional strength to Tolstoy’s
conviction that in these theories lay the elements essential to the
transformation and rejuvenation of human nature, going far towards
the levelling of social inequalities. But to inoculate the landed
proprietors of Russia as a class with those theories was a task which
even his genius could not hope to accomplish.

He recognised the necessity of proceeding from the particular to the
general, and that the perfecting of human institutions was impossible
without a corresponding perfection in the individual. To this end
therefore the remainder of his life was dedicated. He had always held in
aversion what he termed external epidemic influences: he now endeavoured
to free himself not only from all current conventions, but from every
association which he had formerly cherished. Self-analysis and general
observation had taught him that men are sensual beings, and that
sensualism must die for want of food if it were not for sex instincts,
if it were not for Art, and especially for Music. This view of life he
forcibly expressed in the “Kreutzer Sonata,” in which Woman and Music,
the two magnets of his youth, were impeached as powers of evil. Already,
in “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina,” his descriptions of female
charms resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm
himself or perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming
shoulders, her faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently
an object of aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with
her petty coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera
and elsewhere, is a target for his contempt. “Woman is a stumbling-block
in a man’s career,” remarks a philosophical husband in “Anna Karenina.”
 “It is difficult to love a woman and do any good work, and the only way
to escape being reduced to inaction is to marry.”

Even in his correspondence with the Countess A. A. Tolstoy this
slighting tone prevails. “A woman has but one moral weapon instead
of the whole male arsenal. That is love, and only with this weapon is
feminine education successfully carried forward.” Tolstoy, in fact,
betrayed a touch of orientalism in his attitude towards women. In part
no doubt as a result of his motherless youth, in part to the fact
that his idealism was never stimulated by any one woman as it was by
individual men, his views retained this colouring on sex questions while
they became widened and modified in almost every other field of human
philosophy. It was only that, with a revulsion of feeling not seldom
experienced by earnest thinkers, attraction was succeeded by a repulsion
which reached the high note of exasperation when he wrote to a man
friend, “A woman in good health--why, she is a regular beast of prey!”

None the less, he showed great kindness and sympathy to the women who
sought his society, appealing to him for guidance. One of these (an
American, and herself a practical philanthropist), Miss Jane Addams,
expressed with feeling her sense of his personal influence. “The glimpse
of Tolstoy has made a profound impression on me, not so much by what he
said, as the life, the gentleness, the soul of him. I am sure you will
understand my saying that I got more of Tolstoy’s philosophy from our
conversations than I had gotten from our books.” (Quoted by Aylmer Maude
in his “Life of Tolstoy.”)

As frequently happens in the lives of reformers, Tolstoy found himself
more often in affinity with strangers than with his own kin. The
estrangement of his ideals from those of his wife necessarily affected
their conjugal relations, and the decline of mutual sympathy inevitably
induced physical alienation. The stress of mental anguish arising from
these conditions found vent in pages of his diaries (much of which I
have been permitted to read), pages containing matter too sacred and
intimate to use. The diaries shed a flood of light on Tolstoy’s ideas,
motives, and manner of life, and have modified some of my opinions,
explaining many hitherto obscure points, while they have also enhanced
my admiration for the man. They not only touch on many delicate
subjects--on his relations to his wife and family--but they also give
the true reasons for leaving his home at last, and explain why he did
not do so before. The time, it seems to me, is not ripe for disclosures
of this nature, which so closely concern the living.

Despite a strong rein of restraint his mental distress permeates the
touching letter of farewell which he wrote some sixteen years before his
death. He, however, shrank from acting upon it, being unable to satisfy
himself that it was a right step. This letter has already appeared in
foreign publications,* but it is quoted here because “I have suffered
long, dear Sophie, from the discord between my life and my beliefs.

     * And in Birukov’s short Life of Tolstoy, 1911.  of the
     light which it throws on the character and disposition of
     the writer, the workings of his mind being of greater moment
     to us than those impulsive actions by which he was too often
     judged.

“I cannot constrain you to alter your life or your accustomed ways.
Neither have I had the strength to leave you ere this, for I thought
my absence might deprive the little ones, still so young, of whatever
influence I may have over them, and above all that I should grieve
you. But I can no longer live as I have lived these last sixteen years,
sometimes battling with you and irritating you, sometimes myself giving
way to the influences and seductions to which I am accustomed and which
surround me. I have now resolved to do what I have long desired: to go
away . . . Even as the Hindoos, at the age of sixty, betake themselves
to the jungle; even as every aged and religious-minded man desires to
consecrate the last years of his life to God and not to idle talk, to
making jokes, to gossiping, to lawn-tennis; so I, having reached the
age of seventy, long with all my soul for calm and solitude, and if not
perfect harmony, at least a cessation from this horrible discord between
my whole life and my conscience.

“If I had gone away openly there would have been entreaties,
discussions: I should have wavered, and perhaps failed to act on my
decision, whereas it must be so. I pray of you to forgive me if my
action grieves you. And do you, Sophie, in particular let me go, neither
seeking me out, nor bearing me ill-will, nor blaming me . . . the
fact that I have left you does not mean that I have cause of complaint
against you . . . I know you were not able, you were incapable of
thinking and seeing as I do, and therefore you could not change your
life and make sacrifices to that which you did not accept. Besides, I do
not blame you; on the contrary, I remember with love and gratitude the
thirty-five long years of our life in common, and especially the first
half of the time when, with the courage and devotion of your maternal
nature, you bravely bore what you regarded as your mission. You have
given largely of maternal love and made some heavy sacrifices . . . but
during the latter part of our life together, during the last fifteen
years, our ways have parted. I cannot think myself the guilty one; I
know that if I have changed it is not owing to you, or to the world,
but because I could not do otherwise; nor can I judge you for not having
followed me, and I thank you for what you have given me and will ever
remember it with affection.

“Adieu, my dear Sophie, I love you.”

The personal isolation he craved was never to be his; but the isolation
of spirit essential to leadership, whether of thought or action, grew
year by year, so that in his own household he was veritably “in it but
not of it.”

At times his loneliness weighed upon him, as when he wrote: “You would
find it difficult to imagine how isolated I am, to what an extent my
true self is despised by those who surround me.” But he must, none
the less, have realised, as all prophets and seers have done, that
solitariness of soul and freedom from the petty complexities of social
life are necessary to the mystic whose constant endeavour is to simplify
and to winnow, the transient from the eternal.

Notwithstanding the isolation of his inner life he remained--or it might
more accurately be said he became--the most accessible of men.

Appeals for guidance came to him from all parts of the world--America,
France, China, Japan--while Yasnaya Polyana was the frequent resort of
those needing advice, sympathy, or practical assistance. None appealed
to him in vain; at the same time, he was exceedingly chary of explicit
rules of conduct. It might be said of Tolstoy that he became a spiritual
leader in spite of himself, so averse was he from assuming authority.
His aim was ever to teach his followers themselves to hear the inward
monitory voice, and to obey it of their own accord. “To know the meaning
of Life, you must first know the meaning of Love,” he would say; “and
then see that you do what love bids you.” His distrust of “epidemic
ideas” extended to religious communities and congregations.

“We must not go to meet each other, but go each of us to God. You say
it is easier to go all together? Why yes, to dig or to mow. But one can
only draw near to God in isolation . . . I picture the world to myself
as a vast temple, in which the light falls from above in the very
centre. To meet together all must go towards the light. There we shall
find ourselves, gathered from many quarters, united with men we did not
expect to see; therein is joy.”

The humility which had so completely supplanted his youthful arrogance,
and which made him shrink from impelling others to follow in his steps,
endued him also with the teachableness of a child towards those whom
he accepted as his spiritual mentors. It was a peasant nonconformist
writer, Soutaev, who by conversing with him on the revelations of the
Gospels helped him to regain his childhood’s faith, and incidentally
brought him into closer relations with religious, but otherwise
untaught, men of the people. He saw how instead of railing against fate
after the manner of their social superiors, they endured sickness and
misfortune with a calm confidence that all was by the will of God, as it
must be and should be. From his peasant teachers he drew the watchwords
Faith, Love, and Labour, and by their light he established that concord
in his own life without which the concord of the universe remains
impossible to realise. The process of inward struggle--told with
unsparing truth in “Confession”--is finely painted in “Father Serge,”
 whose life story points to the conclusion at which Tolstoy ultimately
arrived, namely, that not in withdrawal from the common trials and
temptations of men, but in sharing them, lies our best fulfilment of our
duty towards mankind and towards God. Tolstoy gave practical effect to
this principle, and to this long-felt desire to be of use to the poor of
the country, by editing and publishing, aided by his friend Chertkov,*
modern literature has awakened so universal a sense of sympathy and
admiration, perhaps because none has been so entirely a labour of love.

     * In Russia and out of it Mr. Chertkov has been the subject
     of violent attack.  Many of the misunderstandings of
     Tolstoy’s later years have also been attributed by critics,
     and by those who hate or belittle his ideas, to the
     influence of this friend. These attacks are very regrettable
     and require a word of protest. From tales, suited to the
     means and intelligence of the humblest peasant. The
     undertaking was initiated in 1885, and continued for many
     years to occupy much of Tolstoy’s time and energies. He
     threw himself with ardour into his editorial duties; reading
     and correcting manuscripts, returning them sometimes to the
     authors with advice as to their reconstruction, and making
     translations from foreign works--all this in addition to his
     own original contributions, in which he carried out the
     principle which he constantly laid down for his
     collaborators, that literary graces must be set aside, and
     that the mental calibre of those for whom the books were
     primarily intended must be constantly borne in mind. He
     attained a splendid fulfilment of his own theories,
     employing the moujik’s expressive vernacular in portraying
     his homely wisdom, religious faith, and goodness of nature.
     Sometimes the prevailing simplicity of style and motive is
     tinged with a vague colouring of oriental legend, but the
     personal accent is marked throughout. No similar achievement
     in the beginning Mr. Chertkov has striven to spread the
     ideas of Tolstoy, and has won neither glory nor money from
     his faithful and single-hearted devotion.  He has carried on
     his work with a rare love and sympathy in spite of
     difficulties. No one appreciated or valued his friendship
     and self-sacrifice more than Tolstoy himself, who was firmly
     attached to him from the date of his first meeting,
     consulting him and confiding in him at every moment, even
     during Mr. Chertkov’s long exile.

The series of educational primers which Tolstoy prepared and published
concurrently with the “Popular Tales” have had an equally large, though
exclusively Russian, circulation, being admirably suited to their
purpose--that of teaching young children the rudiments of history,
geography, and science. Little leisure remained for the service of Art.

The history of Tolstoy as a man of letters forms a separate page of his
biography, and one into which it is not possible to enter in the brief
compass of this introduction. It requires, however, a passing allusion.
Tolstoy even in his early days never seems to have approached near to
that manner of life which the literary man leads: neither to have shut
himself up in his study, nor to have barred the entrance to disturbing
friends. On the one hand, he was fond of society, and during his brief
residence in St. Petersburg was never so engrossed in authorship as to
forego the pleasure of a ball or evening entertainment. Little wonder,
when one looks back at the brilliant young officer surrounded and petted
by the great hostesses of Russia. On the other hand, he was no devotee
at the literary altar. No patron of literature could claim him as his
constant visitor; no inner circle of men of letters monopolised his idle
hours. Afterwards, when he left the capital and settled in the country,
he was almost entirely cut off from the association of literary men, and
never seems to have sought their companionship. Nevertheless, he had all
through his life many fast friends, among them such as the poet Fet,
the novelist Chekhov, and the great Russian librarian Stassov, who often
came to him. These visits always gave him pleasure. The discussions,
whether on the literary movements of the day or on the merits of Goethe
or the humour of Gogol, were welcome interruptions to his ever-absorbing
metaphysical studies. In later life, also, though never in touch with
the rising generation of authors, we find him corresponding with them,
criticising their style and subject matter. When Andreev, the most
modern of all modern Russian writers, came to pay his respects to
Tolstoy some months before his death, he was received with cordiality,
although Tolstoy, as he expressed himself afterwards, felt that there
was a great gulf fixed between them.

Literature, as literature, had lost its charm for him. “You are
perfectly right,” he writes to a friend; “I care only for the idea, and
I pay no attention to my style.” The idea was the important thing to
Tolstoy in everything that he read or wrote. When his attention was
drawn to an illuminating essay on the poet Lermontov he was pleased with
it, not because it demonstrated Lermontov’s position in the literary
history of Russia, but because it pointed out the moral aims which
underlay the wild Byronism of his works. He reproached the novelist
Leskov, who had sent him his latest novel, for the “exuberance” of his
flowers of speech and for his florid sentences--beautiful in their way,
he says, but inexpedient and unnecessary. He even counselled the younger
generation to give up poetry as a form of expression and to use prose
instead. Poetry, he maintained, was always artificial and obscure.
His attitude towards the art of writing remained to the end one of
hostility. Whenever he caught himself working for art he was wont to
reproach himself, and his diaries contain many recriminations against
his own weakness in yielding to this besetting temptation. Yet to these
very lapses we are indebted for this collection of fragments.

The greater number of stories and plays contained in these volumes
date from the years following upon Tolstoy’s pedagogic activity. Long
intervals, however, elapsed in most cases between the original synopsis
and the final touches. Thus “Father Serge,” of which he sketched the
outline to Mr. Chertkov in 1890, was so often put aside to make way for
purely ethical writings that not till 1898 does the entry occur in his
diary, “To-day, quite unexpectedly, I finished Serge.” A year previously
a dramatic incident had come to his knowledge, which he elaborated
in the play entitled “The Man who was dead.” It ran on the lines
familiarised by Enoch Arden and similar stories, of a wife deserted
by her husband and supported in his absence by a benefactor, whom
she subsequently marries. In this instance the supposed dead man was
suddenly resuscitated as the result of his own admissions in his
cups, the wife and her second husband being consequently arrested and
condemned to a term of imprisonment. Tolstoy seriously attacked the
subject during the summer of 1900, and having brought it within a
measurable distance of completion in a shorter time than was usual with
him, submitted it to the judgment of a circle of friends. The drama made
a deep impression on the privileged few who read it, and some mention of
it appeared in the newspapers.

Shortly afterwards a young man came to see Tolstoy in private. He begged
him to refrain from publishing “The Man who was dead,” as it was the
history of his mother’s life, and would distress her gravely, besides
possibly occasioning further police intervention. Tolstoy promptly
consented, and the play remained, as it now appears, in an unfinished
condition. He had already felt doubtful whether “it was a thing God
would approve,” Art for Art’s sake having in his eyes no right to
existence. For this reason a didactic tendency is increasingly evident
in these later stories. “After the Ball” gives a painful picture of
Russian military cruelty; “The Forged Coupon” traces the cancerous
growth of evil, and demonstrates with dramatic force the cumulative
misery resulting from one apparently trivial act of wrongdoing.

Of the three plays included in these volumes, “The Light that shines
in Darkness” has a special claim to our attention as an example of
autobiography in the guise of drama. It is a specimen of Tolstoy’s gift
of seeing himself as others saw him, and viewing a question in all
its bearings. It presents not actions but ideas, giving with entire
impartiality the opinions of his home circle, of his friends, of the
Church and of the State, in regard to his altruistic propaganda and
to the anarchism of which he has been accused. The scene of the
renunciation of the estates of the hero may be taken as a literal
version of what actually took place in regard to Tolstoy himself,
while the dialogues by which the piece is carried forward are more like
verbatim records than imaginary conversations.

This play was, in addition, a medium by which Tolstoy emphasised
his abhorrence of military service, and probably for this reason its
production is absolutely forbidden in Russia. A word may be said here on
Tolstoy’s so-called Anarchy, a term admitting of grave misconstruction.
In that he denied the benefit of existing governments to the people
over whom they ruled, and in that he stigmatised standing armies as
“collections of disciplined murderers,” Tolstoy was an Anarchist; but in
that he reprobated the methods of violence, no matter how righteous
the cause at stake, and upheld by word and deed the gospel of Love
and submission, he cannot be judged guilty of Anarchism in its full
significance. He could not, however, suppress the sympathy which he
felt with those whose resistance to oppression brought them into deadly
conflict with autocracy. He found in the Caucasian chieftain, Hadji
Murat, a subject full of human interest and dramatic possibilities; and
though some eight years passed before he corrected the manuscript for
the last time (in 1903), it is evident from the numbers of entries in
his diary that it had greatly occupied his thoughts so far back even
as the period which he spent in Tiflis prior to the Crimean war. It was
then that the final subjugation of the Caucasus took place, and Shamil
and his devoted band made their last struggle for freedom. After the
lapse of half a century, Tolstoy gave vent in “Hadji Murat” to the
resentment which the military despotism of Nicholas I. had roused in his
sensitive and fearless spirit.

Courage was the dominant note in Tolstoy’s character, and none have
excelled him in portraying brave men. His own fearlessness was of the
rarest, in that it was both physical and moral. The mettle tried and
proved at Sebastopol sustained him when he had drawn on himself the
bitter animosity of “Holy Synod” and the relentless anger of Czardom.
In spite of his nonresistance doctrine, Tolstoy’s courage was not of
the passive order. It was his natural bent to rouse his foes to combat,
rather than wait for their attack, to put on the defensive every
falsehood and every wrong of which he was cognisant. Truth in himself
and in others was what he most desired, and that to which he strove at
all costs to attain. He was his own severest critic, weighing his own
actions, analysing his own thoughts, and baring himself to the eyes
of the world with unflinching candour. Greatest of autobiographers, he
extenuates nothing: you see the whole man with his worst faults and
best qualities; weaknesses accentuated by the energy with which they
are charactered, apparent waste of mental forces bent on solving the
insoluble, inherited tastes and prejudices, altruistic impulses
and virile passions, egoism and idealism, all strangely mingled and
continually warring against each other, until from the death-throes of
spiritual conflict issued a new birth and a new life. In the ancient
Scripture “God is love” Tolstoy discerned fresh meaning, and strove with
superhuman energy to bring home that meaning to the world at large. His
doctrine in fact appears less as a new light in the darkness than as a
revival of the pure flame of “the Mystic of the Galilean hills,” whose
teaching he accepted while denying His divinity.

Of Tolstoy’s beliefs in regard to the Christian religion it may be said
that with advancing years he became more and more disposed to regard
religious truth as one continuous stream of spiritual thought flowing
through the ages of man’s history, emanating principally from the
inspired prophets and seers of Israel, India, and China. Finally,
in 1909, in a letter to a friend he summed up his conviction in the
following words:--“For me the doctrine of Jesus is simply one of those
beautiful religious doctrines which we have received from Egyptian,
Jewish, Hindoo, Chinese, and Greek antiquity. The two great principles
of Jesus: love of God--in a word absolute perfection--and love of one’s
neighbour, that is to say, love of all men without distinction, have
been preached by all the sages of the world--Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tse,
Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and among the
moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others.
Religious and moral truth is everywhere and always the same. I have
no predilection whatever for Christianity. If I have been particularly
interested in the doctrine of Jesus it is, firstly, because I was born
in that religion and have lived among Christians; secondly, because I
have found a great spiritual joy in freeing the doctrine in its purity
from the astounding falsifications wrought by the Churches.”

Tolstoy’s life-work was indeed a splendid striving to free truth from
falsehood, to simplify the complexities of civilisation and demonstrate
their futility. Realists as gifted have come and gone and left but
little trace. It is conceivable that the great trilogy of “Anna
Karenina,” “War and Peace,” and “Resurrection” may one day be forgotten,
but Tolstoy’s teaching stands on firmer foundations, and has stirred the
hearts of thousands who are indifferent to the finest display of psychic
analysis. He has taught men to venture beyond the limits set by reason,
to rise above the actual and to find the meaning of life in love. It was
his mission to probe our moral ulcers to the roots and to raise moribund
ideals from the dust, breathing his own vitality into them, till they
rose before our eyes as living aspirations. The spiritual joy of
which he wrote was no rhetorical hyperbole; it was manifest in the man
himself, and was the fount of the lofty idealism which made him not only
“the Conscience of Russia” but of the civilised world.

Idealism is one of those large abstractions which are invested by
various minds with varying shades of meaning, and which find expression
in an infinite number of forms. Ideals bred and fostered in the heart of
man receive at birth an impress from the life that engenders them, and
when that life is tempest-tossed the thought that springs from it
must bear a birth-mark of the storm. That birth-mark is stamped on all
Tolstoy’s utterances, the simplest and the most metaphysical. But though
he did not pass scathless through the purging fires, nor escape with
eyes undimmed from the mystic light which flooded his soul, his ideal is
not thereby invalidated. It was, he admitted, unattainable, but none
the less a state of perfection to which we must continually aspire,
undaunted by partial failure.

“There is nothing wrong in not living up to the ideal which you have
made for yourself, but what is wrong is, if on looking back, you cannot
see that you have made the least step nearer to your ideal.”

How far Tolstoy’s doctrines may influence succeeding generations it is
impossible to foretell; but when time has extinguished what is merely
personal or racial, the divine spark which he received from his great
spiritual forerunners in other times and countries will undoubtedly be
found alight. His universality enabled him to unite himself closely with
them in mental sympathy; sometimes so closely, as in the case of J. J.
Rousseau, as to raise analogies and comparisons designed to show that he
merely followed in a well-worn pathway. Yet the similarity of Tolstoy’s
ideas to those of the author of the “Contrat Social” hardly goes beyond
a mutual distrust of Art and Science as aids to human happiness
and virtue, and a desire to establish among mankind a true sense of
brotherhood. For the rest, the appeals which they individually made to
Humanity were as dissimilar as the currents of their lives, and equally
dissimilar in effect.

The magic flute of Rousseau’s eloquence breathed fanaticism into his
disciples, and a desire to mass themselves against the foes of liberty.
Tolstoy’s trumpet-call sounds a deeper note. It pierces the heart,
summoning each man to the inquisition of his own conscience, and to
justify his existence by labour, that he may thereafter sleep the sleep
of peace.

The exaltation which he awakens owes nothing to rhythmical language
nor to subtle interpretations of sensuous emotion; it proceeds from a
perception of eternal truth, the truth that has love, faith, courage,
and self-sacrifice for the cornerstones of its enduring edifice.

                                                    C. HAGBERG WRIGHT.


     NOTE--Owing to circumstances entirely outside the control of
     the editor some of these translations have been done in
     haste and there has not been sufficient time for revision.

     The translators were chosen by an agent of the executor and
     not by the editor.


LIST OF POSTHUMOUS WORKS, GIVING DATE WHEN EACH WAS FINISHED OR LENGTH
OF TIME OCCUPIED IN WRITING.

     Father Serge. 1890-98.
     Introduction to the History of a Mother.  1894.
     Memoirs of a Mother. 1894.
     The Young Czar. 1894.
     Diary of a Lunatic. 1896.
     Hadji Murat. 1896-1904.
     The Light that shines in Darkness. 1898-1901.
     The Man who was dead. 1900.
     After the Ball.  1903.
     The Forged Coupon. 1904.
     Alexis. 1905.
     Diary of Alexander I. 1905.
     The Dream. 1906.
     Father Vassily. 1906.
     There are no Guilty People. 1909.
     The Wisdom of Children. 1909.
     The Cause of it All. 1910.
     Chodynko. 1910.
     Two Travellers. Date uncertain.




THE FORGED COUPON




PART FIRST


I

FEDOR MIHAILOVICH SMOKOVNIKOV, the president of the local Income Tax
Department, a man of unswerving honesty--and proud of it, too--a
gloomy Liberal, a free-thinker, and an enemy to every manifestation of
religious feeling, which he thought a relic of superstition, came home
from his office feeling very much annoyed. The Governor of the province
had sent him an extraordinarily stupid minute, almost assuming that his
dealings had been dishonest.

Fedor Mihailovich felt embittered, and wrote at once a sharp answer. On
his return home everything seemed to go contrary to his wishes.

It was five minutes to five, and he expected the dinner to be served at
once, but he was told it was not ready. He banged the door and went to
his study. Somebody knocked at the door. “Who the devil is that?” he
thought; and shouted,--“Who is there?”

The door opened and a boy of fifteen came in, the son of Fedor
Mihailovich, a pupil of the fifth class of the local school.

“What do you want?”

“It is the first of the month to-day, father.”

“Well! You want your money?”

It had been arranged that the father should pay his son a monthly
allowance of three roubles as pocket money. Fedor Mihailovich frowned,
took out of his pocket-book a coupon of two roubles fifty kopeks which
he found among the bank-notes, and added to it fifty kopeks in silver
out of the loose change in his purse. The boy kept silent, and did not
take the money his father proffered him.

“Father, please give me some more in advance.”

“What?”

“I would not ask for it, but I have borrowed a small sum from a friend,
and promised upon my word of honour to pay it off. My honour is dear to
me, and that is why I want another three roubles. I don’t like asking
you; but, please, father, give me another three roubles.”

“I have told you--”

“I know, father, but just for once.”

“You have an allowance of three roubles and you ought to be content. I
had not fifty kopeks when I was your age.”

“Now, all my comrades have much more. Petrov and Ivanitsky have fifty
roubles a month.”

“And I tell you that if you behave like them you will be a scoundrel.
Mind that.”

“What is there to mind? You never understand my position. I shall be
disgraced if I don’t pay my debt. It is all very well for you to speak
as you do.”

“Be off, you silly boy! Be off!”

Fedor Mihailovich jumped from his seat and pounced upon his son. “Be
off, I say!” he shouted. “You deserve a good thrashing, all you boys!”

His son was at once frightened and embittered. The bitterness was even
greater than the fright. With his head bent down he hastily turned to
the door. Fedor Mihailovich did not intend to strike him, but he was
glad to vent his wrath, and went on shouting and abusing the boy till he
had closed the door.

When the maid came in to announce that dinner was ready, Fedor
Mihailovich rose.

“At last!” he said. “I don’t feel hungry any longer.”

He went to the dining-room with a sullen face. At table his wife made
some remark, but he gave her such a short and angry answer that she
abstained from further speech. The son also did not lift his eyes from
his plate, and was silent all the time. The trio finished their dinner
in silence, rose from the table and separated, without a word.

After dinner the boy went to his room, took the coupon and the change
out of his pocket, and threw the money on the table. After that he took
off his uniform and put on a jacket.

He sat down to work, and began to study Latin grammar out of a
dog’s-eared book. After a while he rose, closed and bolted the door,
shifted the money into a drawer, took out some cigarette papers, rolled
one up, stuffed it with cotton wool, and began to smoke.

He spent nearly two hours over his grammar and writing books without
understanding a word of what he saw before him; then he rose and began
to stamp up and down the room, trying to recollect all that his father
had said to him. All the abuse showered upon him, and worst of all his
father’s angry face, were as fresh in his memory as if he saw and heard
them all over again. “Silly boy! You ought to get a good thrashing!” And
the more he thought of it the angrier he grew. He remembered also how
his father said: “I see what a scoundrel you will turn out. I know you
will. You are sure to become a cheat, if you go on like that.” He had
certainly forgotten how he felt when he was young! “What crime have I
committed, I wonder? I wanted to go to the theatre, and having no money
borrowed some from Petia Grouchetsky. Was that so very wicked of me?
Another father would have been sorry for me; would have asked how it all
happened; whereas he just called me names. He never thinks of anything
but himself. When it is he who has not got something he wants--that is a
different matter! Then all the house is upset by his shouts. And I--I am
a scoundrel, a cheat, he says. No, I don’t love him, although he is my
father. It may be wrong, but I hate him.”

There was a knock at the door. The servant brought a letter--a message
from his friend. “They want an answer,” said the servant.

The letter ran as follows: “I ask you now for the third time to pay me
back the six roubles you have borrowed; you are trying to avoid me. That
is not the way an honest man ought to behave. Will you please send the
amount by my messenger? I am myself in a frightful fix. Can you not get
the money somewhere?--Yours, according to whether you send the money or
not, with scorn, or love, Grouchetsky.”

“There we have it! Such a pig! Could he not wait a while? I will have
another try.”

Mitia went to his mother. This was his last hope. His mother was very
kind, and hardly ever refused him anything. She would probably have
helped him this time also out of his trouble, but she was in great
anxiety: her younger child, Petia, a boy of two, had fallen ill. She got
angry with Mitia for rushing so noisily into the nursery, and refused
him almost without listening to what he had to say. Mitia muttered
something to himself and turned to go. The mother felt sorry for him.
“Wait, Mitia,” she said; “I have not got the money you want now, but I
will get it for you to-morrow.”

But Mitia was still raging against his father.

“What is the use of having it to-morrow, when I want it to-day? I am
going to see a friend. That is all I have got to say.”

He went out, banging the door. . . .

“Nothing else is left to me. He will tell me how to pawn my watch,” he
thought, touching his watch in his pocket.

Mitia went to his room, took the coupon and the watch from the drawer,
put on his coat, and went to Mahin.

II

MAHIN was his schoolfellow, his senior, a grown-up young man with a
moustache. He gambled, had a large feminine acquaintance, and always had
ready cash. He lived with his aunt. Mitia quite realised that Mahin was
not a respectable fellow, but when he was in his company he could not
help doing what he wished. Mahin was in when Mitia called, and was just
preparing to go to the theatre. His untidy room smelt of scented soap
and eau-de-Cologne.

“That’s awful, old chap,” said Mahin, when Mitia telling him about his
troubles, showed the coupon and the fifty kopeks, and added that he
wanted nine roubles more. “We might, of course, go and pawn your watch.
But we might do something far better.” And Mahin winked an eye.

“What’s that?”

“Something quite simple.” Mahin took the coupon in his hand. “Put ONE
before the 2.50 and it will be 12.50.”

“But do such coupons exist?”

“Why, certainly; the thousand roubles notes have coupons of 12.50. I
have cashed one in the same way.”

“You don’t say so?”

“Well, yes or no?” asked Mahin, taking the pen and smoothing the coupon
with the fingers of his left hand.

“But it is wrong.”

“Nonsense!”

“Nonsense, indeed,” thought Mitia, and again his father’s hard words
came back to his memory. “Scoundrel! As you called me that, I might as
well be it.” He looked into Mahin’s face. Mahin looked at him, smiling
with perfect ease.

“Well?” he said.

“All right. I don’t mind.”

Mahin carefully wrote the unit in front of 2.50.

“Now let us go to the shop across the road; they sell photographers’
materials there. I just happen to want a frame--for this young person
here.” He took out of his pocket a photograph of a young lady with large
eyes, luxuriant hair, and an uncommonly well-developed bust.

“Is she not sweet? Eh?”

“Yes, yes . . . of course . . .”

“Well, you see.--But let us go.”

Mahin took his coat, and they left the house.

III

THE two boys, having rung the door-bell, entered the empty shop,
which had shelves along the walls and photographic appliances on them,
together with show-cases on the counters. A plain woman, with a kind
face, came through the inner door and asked from behind the counter what
they required.

“A nice frame, if you please, madam.”

“At what price?” asked the woman; she wore mittens on her swollen
fingers with which she rapidly handled picture-frames of different
shapes.

“These are fifty kopeks each; and these are a little more expensive.
There is rather a pretty one, of quite a new style; one rouble and
twenty kopeks.”

“All right, I will have this. But could not you make it cheaper? Let us
say one rouble.”

“We don’t bargain in our shop,” said the shopkeeper with a dignified
air.

“Well, I will take it,” said Mahin, and put the coupon on the counter.
“Wrap up the frame and give me change. But please be quick. We must be
off to the theatre, and it is getting late.”

“You have plenty of time,” said the shopkeeper, examining the coupon
very closely because of her shortsightedness.

“It will look lovely in that frame, don’t you think so?” said Mahin,
turning to Mitia.

“Have you no small change?” asked the shop-woman.

“I am sorry, I have not. My father gave me that, so I have to cash it.”

“But surely you have one rouble twenty?”

“I have only fifty kopeks in cash. But what are you afraid of? You don’t
think, I suppose, that we want to cheat you and give you bad money?”

“Oh, no; I don’t mean anything of the sort.”

“You had better give it to me back. We will cash it somewhere else.”

“How much have I to pay you back? Eleven and something.”

She made a calculation on the counter, opened the desk, took out
a ten-roubles note, looked for change and added to the sum six
twenty-kopeks coins and two five-kopek pieces.

“Please make a parcel of the frame,” said Mahin, taking the money in a
leisurely fashion.

“Yes, sir.” She made a parcel and tied it with a string.

Mitia only breathed freely when the door bell rang behind them, and they
were again in the street.

“There are ten roubles for you, and let me have the rest. I will give it
back to you.”

Mahin went off to the theatre, and Mitia called on Grouchetsky to repay
the money he had borrowed from him.

IV

AN hour after the boys were gone Eugene Mihailovich, the owner of the
shop, came home, and began to count his receipts.

“Oh, you clumsy fool! Idiot that you are!” he shouted, addressing his
wife, after having seen the coupon and noticed the forgery.

“But I have often seen you, Eugene, accepting coupons in payment, and
precisely twelve rouble ones,” retorted his wife, very humiliated,
grieved, and all but bursting into tears. “I really don’t know how they
contrived to cheat me,” she went on. “They were pupils of the school,
in uniform. One of them was quite a handsome boy, and looked so comme il
faut.”

“A comme il faut fool, that is what you are!” The husband went on
scolding her, while he counted the cash. . . . When I accept coupons, I
see what is written on them. And you probably looked only at the boys’
pretty faces. “You had better behave yourself in your old age.”

His wife could not stand this, and got into a fury.

“That is just like you men! Blaming everybody around you. But when it is
you who lose fifty-four roubles at cards--that is of no consequence in
your eyes.”

“That is a different matter

“I don’t want to talk to you,” said his wife, and went to her room.
There she began to remind herself that her family was opposed to her
marriage, thinking her present husband far below her in social rank, and
that it was she who insisted on marrying him. Then she went on thinking
of the child she had lost, and how indifferent her husband had been to
their loss. She hated him so intensely at that moment that she wished
for his death. Her wish frightened her, however, and she hurriedly began
to dress and left the house. When her husband came from the shop to the
inner rooms of their flat she was gone. Without waiting for him she had
dressed and gone off to friends--a teacher of French in the school, a
Russified Pole, and his wife--who had invited her and her husband to a
party in their house that evening.

V

THE guests at the party had tea and cakes offered to them, and sat down
after that to play whist at a number of card-tables.

The partners of Eugene Mihailovich’s wife were the host himself, an
officer, and an old and very stupid lady in a wig, a widow who owned a
music-shop; she loved playing cards and played remarkably well. But it
was Eugene Mihailovich’s wife who was the winner all the time. The best
cards were continually in her hands. At her side she had a plate with
grapes and a pear and was in the best of spirits.

“And Eugene Mihailovich? Why is he so late?” asked the hostess, who
played at another table.

“Probably busy settling accounts,” said Eugene Mihailovich’s wife. “He
has to pay off the tradesmen, to get in firewood.” The quarrel she had
with her husband revived in her memory; she frowned, and her hands, from
which she had not taken off the mittens, shook with fury against him.

“Oh, there he is.--We have just been speaking of you,” said the hostess
to Eugene Mihailovich, who came in at that very moment. “Why are you so
late?”

“I was busy,” answered Eugene Mihailovich, in a gay voice, rubbing his
hands. And to his wife’s surprise he came to her side and said,--“You
know, I managed to get rid of the coupon.”

“No! You don’t say so!”

“Yes, I used it to pay for a cartload of firewood I bought from a
peasant.”

And Eugene Mihailovich related with great indignation to the company
present--his wife adding more details to his narrative--how his wife had
been cheated by two unscrupulous schoolboys.

“Well, and now let us sit down to work,” he said, taking his place at
one of the whist-tables when his turn came, and beginning to shuffle the
cards.


VI

EUGENE MIHAILOVICH had actually used the coupon to buy firewood from the
peasant Ivan Mironov, who had thought of setting up in business on the
seventeen roubles he possessed. He hoped in this way to earn another
eight roubles, and with the twenty-five roubles thus amassed he intended
to buy a good strong horse, which he would want in the spring for work
in the fields and for driving on the roads, as his old horse was almost
played out.

Ivan Mironov’s commercial method consisted in buying from the stores a
cord of wood and dividing it into five cartloads, and then driving about
the town, selling each of these at the price the stores charged for
a quarter of a cord. That unfortunate day Ivan Mironov drove out very
early with half a cartload, which he soon sold. He loaded up again with
another cartload which he hoped to sell, but he looked in vain for a
customer; no one would buy it. It was his bad luck all that day to come
across experienced towns-people, who knew all the tricks of the peasants
in selling firewood, and would not believe that he had actually brought
the wood from the country as he assured them. He got hungry, and felt
cold in his ragged woollen coat. It was nearly below zero when evening
came on; his horse which he had treated without mercy, hoping soon to
sell it to the knacker’s yard, refused to move a step. So Ivan Mironov
was quite ready to sell his firewood at a loss when he met Eugene
Mihailovich, who was on his way home from the tobacconist.

“Buy my cartload of firewood, sir. I will give it to you cheap. My poor
horse is tired, and can’t go any farther.”

“Where do you come from?”

“From the country, sir. This firewood is from our place. Good dry wood,
I can assure you.”

“Good wood indeed! I know your tricks. Well, what is your price?”

Ivan Mironov began by asking a high price, but reduced it once, and
finished by selling the cartload for just what it had cost him.

“I’m giving it to you cheap, just to please you, sir.--Besides, I am
glad it is not a long way to your house,” he added.

Eugene Mihailovich did not bargain very much. He did not mind paying a
little more, because he was delighted to think he could make use of the
coupon and get rid of it. With great difficulty Ivan Mironov managed
at last, by pulling the shafts himself, to drag his cart into the
courtyard, where he was obliged to unload the firewood unaided and pile
it up in the shed. The yard-porter was out. Ivan Mironov hesitated at
first to accept the coupon, but Eugene Mihailovich insisted, and as he
looked a very important person the peasant at last agreed.

He went by the backstairs to the servants’ room, crossed himself before
the ikon, wiped his beard which was covered with icicles, turned up the
skirts of his coat, took out of his pocket a leather purse, and out
of the purse eight roubles and fifty kopeks, and handed the change
to Eugene Mihailovich. Carefully folding the coupon, he put it in the
purse. Then, according to custom, he thanked the gentleman for his
kindness, and, using the whip-handle instead of the lash, he belaboured
the half-frozen horse that he had doomed to an early death, and betook
himself to a public-house.

Arriving there, Ivan Mironov called for vodka and tea for which he paid
eight kopeks. Comfortable and warm after the tea, he chatted in the very
best of spirits with a yard-porter who was sitting at his table. Soon
he grew communicative and told his companion all about the conditions
of his life. He told him he came from the village Vassilievsky, twelve
miles from town, and also that he had his allotment of land given to
him by his family, as he wanted to live apart from his father and his
brothers; that he had a wife and two children; the elder boy went to
school, and did not yet help him in his work. He also said he lived in
lodgings and intended going to the horse-fair the next day to look for a
good horse, and, may be, to buy one. He went on to state that he had now
nearly twenty-five roubles--only one rouble short--and that half of it
was a coupon. He took the coupon out of his purse to show to his new
friend. The yard-porter was an illiterate man, but he said he had had
such coupons given him by lodgers to change; that they were good; but
that one might also chance on forged ones; so he advised the peasant,
for the sake of security, to change it at once at the counter. Ivan
Mironov gave the coupon to the waiter and asked for change. The waiter,
however, did not bring the change, but came back with the manager, a
bald-headed man with a shining face, who was holding the coupon in his
fat hand.

“Your money is no good,” he said, showing the coupon, but apparently
determined not to give it back.

“The coupon must be all right. I got it from a gentleman.”

“It is bad, I tell you. The coupon is forged.”

“Forged? Give it back to me.”

“I will not. You fellows have got to be punished for such tricks. Of
course, you did it yourself--you and some of your rascally friends.”

“Give me the money. What right have you--”

“Sidor! Call a policeman,” said the barman to the waiter. Ivan Mironov
was rather drunk, and in that condition was hard to manage. He seized
the manager by the collar and began to shout.

“Give me back my money, I say. I will go to the gentleman who gave it to
me. I know where he lives.”

The manager had to struggle with all his force to get loose from Ivan
Mironov, and his shirt was torn,--“Oh, that’s the way you behave! Get
hold of him.”

The waiter took hold of Ivan Mironov; at that moment the policeman
arrived. Looking very important, he inquired what had happened, and
unhesitatingly gave his orders:

“Take him to the police-station.”

As to the coupon, the policeman put it in his pocket; Ivan Mironov,
together with his horse, was brought to the nearest station.


VII

IVAN MIRONOV had to spend the night in the police-station, in the
company of drunkards and thieves. It was noon of the next day when he
was summoned to the police officer; put through a close examination,
and sent in the care of a policeman to Eugene Mihailovich’s shop. Ivan
Mironov remembered the street and the house.

The policeman asked for the shopkeeper, showed him the coupon and
confronted him with Ivan Mironov, who declared that he had received the
coupon in that very place. Eugene Mihailovich at once assumed a very
severe and astonished air.

“You are mad, my good fellow,” he said. “I have never seen this man
before in my life,” he added, addressing the policeman.

“It is a sin, sir,” said Ivan Mironov. “Think of the hour when you will
die.”

“Why, you must be dreaming! You have sold your firewood to some one
else,” said Eugene Mihailovich. “But wait a minute. I will go and ask my
wife whether she bought any firewood yesterday.” Eugene Mihailovich left
them and immediately called the yard-porter Vassily, a strong, handsome,
quick, cheerful, well-dressed man.

He told Vassily that if any one should inquire where the last supply of
firewood was bought, he was to say they’d got it from the stores, and
not from a peasant in the street.

“A peasant has come,” he said to Vassily, “who has declared to the
police that I gave him a forged coupon. He is a fool and talks nonsense,
but you, are a clever man. Mind you say that we always get the firewood
from the stores. And, by the way, I’ve been thinking some time of giving
you money to buy a new jacket,” added Eugene Mihailovich, and gave the
man five roubles. Vassily looking with pleasure first at the five rouble
note, then at Eugene Mihailovich’s face, shook his head and smiled.

“I know, those peasant folks have no brains. Ignorance, of course. Don’t
you be uneasy. I know what I have to say.”

Ivan Mironov, with tears in his eyes, implored Eugene Mihailovich over
and over again to acknowledge the coupon he had given him, and the
yard-porter to believe what he said, but it proved quite useless; they
both insisted that they had never bought firewood from a peasant in the
street. The policeman brought Ivan Mironov back to the police-station,
and he was charged with forging the coupon. Only after taking the advice
of a drunken office clerk in the same cell with him, and bribing the
police officer with five roubles, did Ivan Mironov get out of jail,
without the coupon, and with only seven roubles left out of the
twenty-five he had the day before.

Of these seven roubles he spent three in the public-house and came home
to his wife dead drunk, with a bruised and swollen face.

His wife was expecting a child, and felt very ill. She began to scold
her husband; he pushed her away, and she struck him. Without answering a
word he lay down on the plank and began to weep bitterly.

Not till the next day did he tell his wife what had actually happened.
She believed him at once, and thoroughly cursed the dastardly rich man
who had cheated Ivan. He was sobered now, and remembering the advice
a workman had given him, with whom he had many a drink the day before,
decided to go to a lawyer and tell him of the wrong the owner of the
photograph shop had done him.


VIII

THE lawyer consented to take proceedings on behalf of Ivan Mironov, not
so much for the sake of the fee, as because he believed the peasant, and
was revolted by the wrong done to him.

Both parties appeared in the court when the case was tried, and the
yard-porter Vassily was summoned as witness. They repeated in the court
all they had said before to the police officials. Ivan Mironov again
called to his aid the name of the Divinity, and reminded the shopkeeper
of the hour of death. Eugene Mihailovich, although quite aware of his
wickedness, and the risks he was running, despite the rebukes of his
conscience, could not now change his testimony, and went on calmly to
deny all the allegations made against him.

The yard-porter Vassily had received another ten roubles from his
master, and, quite unperturbed, asserted with a smile that he did not
know anything about Ivan Mironov. And when he was called upon to take
the oath, he overcame his inner qualms, and repeated with assumed ease
the terms of the oath, read to him by the old priest appointed to the
court. By the holy Cross and the Gospel, he swore that he spoke the
whole truth.

The case was decided against Ivan Mironov, who was sentenced to pay five
roubles for expenses. This sum Eugene Mihailovich generously paid for
him. Before dismissing Ivan Mironov, the judge severely admonished him,
saying he ought to take care in the future not to accuse respectable
people, and that he also ought to be thankful that he was not forced to
pay the costs, and that he had escaped a prosecution for slander, for
which he would have been condemned to three months’ imprisonment.

“I offer my humble thanks,” said Ivan Mironov; and, shaking his head,
left the court with a heavy sigh.

The whole thing seemed to have ended well for Eugene Mihailovich and
the yard-porter Vassily. But only in appearance. Something had happened
which was not noticed by any one, but which was much more important than
all that had been exposed to view.

Vassily had left his village and settled in town over two years ago. As
time went on he sent less and less money to his father, and he did not
ask his wife, who remained at home, to join him. He was in no need of
her; he could in town have as many wives as he wished, and much better
ones too than that clumsy, village-bred woman. Vassily, with each
recurring year, became more and more familiar with the ways of the town
people, forgetting the conventions of a country life. There everything
was so vulgar, so grey, so poor and untidy. Here, in town, all seemed on
the contrary so refined, nice, clean, and rich; so orderly too. And he
became more and more convinced that people in the country live just like
wild beasts, having no idea of what life is, and that only life in
town is real. He read books written by clever writers, and went to the
performances in the Peoples’ Palace. In the country, people would not
see such wonders even in dreams. In the country old men say: “Obey the
law, and live with your wife; work; don’t eat too much; don’t care for
finery,” while here, in town, all the clever and learned people--those,
of course, who know what in reality the law is--only pursue their own
pleasures. And they are the better for it.

Previous to the incident of the forged coupon, Vassily could not
actually believe that rich people lived without any moral law. But after
that, still more after having perjured himself, and not being the worse
for it in spite of his fears--on the contrary, he had gained ten roubles
out of it--Vassily became firmly convinced that no moral laws whatever
exist, and that the only thing to do is to pursue one’s own interests
and pleasures. This he now made his rule in life. He accordingly got as
much profit as he could out of purchasing goods for lodgers. But this
did not pay all his expenses. Then he took to stealing, whenever chance
offered--money and all sorts of valuables. One day he stole a purse full
of money from Eugene Mihailovich, but was found out. Eugene Mihailovich
did not hand him over to the police, but dismissed him on the spot.

Vassily had no wish whatever to return home to his village, and remained
in Moscow with his sweetheart, looking out for a new job. He got one as
yard-porter at a grocer’s, but with only small wages. The next day after
he had entered that service he was caught stealing bags. The grocer did
not call in the police, but gave him a good thrashing and turned him
out. After that he could not find work. The money he had left was soon
gone; he had to sell all his clothes and went about nearly in rags. His
sweetheart left him. But notwithstanding, he kept up his high spirits,
and when the spring came he started to walk home.


IX

PETER NIKOLAEVICH SVENTIZKY, a short man in black spectacles (he had
weak eyes, and was threatened with complete blindness), got up, as was
his custom, at dawn of day, had a cup of tea, and putting on his short
fur coat trimmed with astrachan, went to look after the work on his
estate.

Peter Nikolaevich had been an official in the Customs, and had gained
eighteen thousand roubles during his service. About twelve years ago he
quitted the service--not quite of his own accord: as a matter of fact he
had been compelled to leave--and bought an estate from a young landowner
who had dissipated his fortune. Peter Nikolaevich had married at an
earlier period, while still an official in the Customs. His wife, who
belonged to an old noble family, was an orphan, and was left without
money. She was a tall, stoutish, good-looking woman. They had no
children. Peter Nikolaevich had considerable practical talents and a
strong will. He was the son of a Polish gentleman, and knew nothing
about agriculture and land management; but when he acquired an estate of
his own, he managed it so well that after fifteen years the waste piece
of land, consisting of three hundred acres, became a model estate. All
the buildings, from the dwelling-house to the corn stores and the shed
for the fire engine were solidly built, had iron roofs, and were painted
at the right time. In the tool house carts, ploughs, harrows, stood in
perfect order, the harness was well cleaned and oiled. The horses were
not very big, but all home-bred, grey, well fed, strong and devoid of
blemish.

The threshing machine worked in a roofed barn, the forage was kept in
a separate shed, and a paved drain was made from the stables. The cows
were home-bred, not very large, but giving plenty of milk; fowls were
also kept in the poultry yard, and the hens were of a special kind,
laying a great quantity of eggs. In the orchard the fruit trees were
well whitewashed and propped on poles to enable them to grow straight.
Everything was looked after--solid, clean, and in perfect order. Peter
Nikolaevich rejoiced in the perfect condition of his estate, and was
proud to have achieved it--not by oppressing the peasants, but, on the
contrary, by the extreme fairness of his dealings with them.

Among the nobles of his province he belonged to the advanced party, and
was more inclined to liberal than conservative views, always taking the
side of the peasants against those who were still in favour of serfdom.
“Treat them well, and they will be fair to you,” he used to say. Of
course, he did not overlook any carelessness on the part of those who
worked on his estate, and he urged them on to work if they were lazy;
but then he gave them good lodging, with plenty of good food, paid their
wages without any delay, and gave them drinks on days of festival.

Walking cautiously on the melting snow--for the time of the year was
February--Peter Nikolaevich passed the stables, and made his way to the
cottage where his workmen were lodged. It was still dark, the darker
because of the dense fog; but the windows of the cottage were lighted.
The men had already got up. His intention was to urge them to begin
work. He had arranged that they should drive out to the forest and bring
back the last supply of firewood he needed before spring.

“What is that?” he thought, seeing the door of the stable wide open.
“Hallo, who is there?”

No answer. Peter Nikolaevich stepped into the stable. It was dark; the
ground was soft under his feet, and the air smelt of dung; on the right
side of the door were two loose boxes for a pair of grey horses. Peter
Nikolaevich stretched out his hand in their direction--one box was
empty. He put out his foot--the horse might have been lying down. But
his foot did not touch anything solid. “Where could they have taken the
horse?” he thought. They certainly had not harnessed it; all the sledges
stood still outside. Peter Nikolaevich went out of the stable.

“Stepan, come here!” he called.

Stepan was the head of the workmen’s gang. He was just stepping out of
the cottage.

“Here I am!” he said, in a cheerful voice. “Oh, is that you, Peter
Nikolaevich? Our men are coming.”

“Why is the stable door open?

“Is it? I don’t know anything about it. I say, Proshka, bring the
lantern!”

Proshka came with the lantern. They all went to the stable, and Stepan
knew at once what had happened.

“Thieves have been here, Peter Nikolaevich,” he said. “The lock is
broken.”

“No; you don’t say so!”

“Yes, the brigands! I don’t see ‘Mashka.’ ‘Hawk’ is here. But ‘Beauty’
is not. Nor yet ‘Dapple-grey.’”

Three horses had been stolen!

Peter Nikolaevich did not utter a word at first. He only frowned and
took deep breaths.

“Oh,” he said after a while. “If only I could lay hands on them! Who was
on guard?”

“Peter. He evidently fell asleep.”

Peter Nikolaevich called in the police, and making an appeal to all the
authorities, sent his men to track the thieves. But the horses were not
to be found.

“Wicked people,” said Peter Nikolaevich. “How could they! I was always
so kind to them. Now, wait! Brigands! Brigands the whole lot of them. I
will no longer be kind.”


X

IN the meanwhile the horses, the grey ones, had all been disposed of;
Mashka was sold to the gipsies for eighteen roubles; Dapple-grey was
exchanged for another horse, and passed over to another peasant who
lived forty miles away from the estate; and Beauty died on the way.
The man who conducted the whole affair was--Ivan Mironov. He had
been employed on the estate, and knew all the whereabouts of Peter
Nikolaevich. He wanted to get back the money he had lost, and stole the
horses for that reason.

After his misfortune with the forged coupon, Ivan Mironov took to drink;
and all he possessed would have gone on drink if it had not been for his
wife, who locked up his clothes, the horses’ collars, and all the rest
of what he would otherwise have squandered in public-houses. In his
drunken state Ivan Mironov was continually thinking, not only of the man
who had wronged him, but of all the rich people who live on robbing
the poor. One day he had a drink with some peasants from the suburbs
of Podolsk, and was walking home together with them. On the way the
peasants, who were completely drunk, told him they had stolen a horse
from a peasant’s cottage. Ivan Mironov got angry, and began to abuse the
horse-thieves.

“What a shame!” he said. “A horse is like a brother to the peasant. And
you robbed him of it? It is a great sin, I tell you. If you go in for
stealing horses, steal them from the landowners. They are worse than
dogs, and deserve anything.”

The talk went on, and the peasants from Podolsk told him that it
required a great deal of cunning to steal a horse on an estate.

“You must know all the ins and outs of the place, and must have somebody
on the spot to help you.”

Then it occurred to Ivan Mironov that he knew a landowner--Sventizky;
he had worked on his estate, and Sventizky, when paying him off, had
deducted one rouble and a half for a broken tool. He remembered well the
grey horses which he used to drive at Sventizky’s.

Ivan Mironov called on Peter Nikolaevich pretending to ask for
employment, but really in order to get the information he wanted. He
took precautions to make sure that the watchman was absent, and that
the horses were standing in their boxes in the stable. He brought the
thieves to the place, and helped them to carry off the three horses.

They divided their gains, and Ivan Mironov returned to his wife with
five roubles in his pocket. He had nothing to do at home, having no
horse to work in the field, and therefore continued to steal horses in
company with professional horse-thieves and gipsies.


XI

PETER NIKOLAEVICH SVENTIZKY did his best to discover who had stolen his
horses. He knew somebody on the estate must have helped the thieves,
and began to suspect all his staff. He inquired who had slept out that
night, and the gang of the working men told him Proshka had not been in
the whole night. Proshka, or Prokofy Nikolaevich, was a young fellow who
had just finished his military service, handsome, and skilful in all he
did; Peter Nikolaevich employed him at times as coachman. The district
constable was a friend of Peter Nikolaevich, as were the provincial
head of the police, the marshal of the nobility, and also the rural
councillor and the examining magistrate. They all came to his house
on his saint’s day, drinking the cherry brandy he offered them with
pleasure, and eating the nice preserved mushrooms of all kinds to
accompany the liqueurs. They all sympathised with him in his trouble and
tried to help him.

“You always used to take the side of the peasants,” said the district
constable, “and there you are! I was right in saying they are worse than
wild beasts. Flogging is the only way to keep them in order. Well,
you say it is all Proshka’s doings. Is it not he who was your coachman
sometimes?”

“Yes, that is he.”

“Will you kindly call him?”

Proshka was summoned before the constable, who began to examine him.

“Where were you that night?”

Proshka pushed back his hair, and his eyes sparkled.

“At home.”

“How so? All the men say you were not in.”

“Just as you please, your honour.”

“My pleasure has nothing to do with the matter. Tell me where you were
that night.”

“At home.”

“Very well. Policeman, bring him to the police-station.”

The reason why Proshka did not say where he had been that night was that
he had spent it with his sweetheart, Parasha, and had promised not to
give her away. He kept his word. No proofs were discovered against him,
and he was soon discharged. But Peter Nikolaevich was convinced that
Prokofy had been at the bottom of the whole affair, and began to hate
him. One day Proshka bought as usual at the merchant’s two measures of
oats. One and a half he gave to the horses, and half a measure he
gave back to the merchant; the money for it he spent in drink. Peter
Nikolaevich found it out, and charged Prokofy with cheating. The judge
sentenced the man to three months’ imprisonment.

Prokofy had a rather proud nature, and thought himself superior to
others. Prison was a great humiliation for him. He came out of it very
depressed; there was nothing more to be proud of in life. And more than
that, he felt extremely bitter, not only against Peter Nikolaevich, but
against the whole world.

On the whole, as all the people around him noticed, Prokofy became
another man after his imprisonment, both careless and lazy; he took to
drink, and he was soon caught stealing clothes at some woman’s house,
and found himself again in prison.

All that Peter Nikolaevich discovered about his grey horses was the hide
of one of them, Beauty, which had been found somewhere on the estate.
The fact that the thieves had got off scot-free irritated Peter
Nikolaevich still more. He was unable now to speak of the peasants or
to look at them without anger. And whenever he could he tried to oppress
them.


XII

AFTER having got rid of the coupon, Eugene Mihailovich forgot all about
it; but his wife, Maria Vassilievna, could not forgive herself for
having been taken in, nor yet her husband for his cruel words. And most
of all she was furious against the two boys who had so skilfully cheated
her. From the day she had accepted the forged coupon as payment, she
looked closely at all the schoolboys who came in her way in the streets.
One day she met Mahin, but did not recognise him, for on seeing her
he made a face which quite changed his features. But when, a fortnight
after the incident with the coupon, she met Mitia Smokovnikov face to
face, she knew him at once.

She let him pass her, then turned back and followed him, and arriving
at his house she made inquiries as to whose son he was. The next day she
went to the school and met the divinity instructor, the priest Michael
Vedensky, in the hall. He asked her what she wanted. She answered that
she wished to see the head of the school. “He is not quite well,” said
the priest. “Can I be of any use to you, or give him your message?”

Maria Vassilievna thought that she might as well tell the priest what
was the matter. Michael Vedensky was a widower, and a very ambitious
man. A year ago he had met Mitia Smokovnikov’s father in society, and
had had a discussion with him on religion. Smokovnikov had beaten
him decisively on all points; indeed, he had made him appear quite
ridiculous. Since that time the priest had decided to pay special
attention to Smokovnikov’s son; and, finding him as indifferent to
religious matters as his father was, he began to persecute him, and even
brought about his failure in examinations.

When Maria Vassilievna told him what young Smokovnikov had done to her,
Vedensky could not help feeling an inner satisfaction. He saw in the
boy’s conduct a proof of the utter wickedness of those who are not
guided by the rules of the Church. He decided to take advantage of this
great opportunity of warning unbelievers of the perils that threatened
them. At all events, he wanted to persuade himself that this was the
only motive that guided him in the course he had resolved to take. But
at the bottom of his heart he was only anxious to get his revenge on the
proud atheist.

“Yes, it is very sad indeed,” said Father Michael, toying with the cross
he was wearing over his priestly robes, and passing his hands over its
polished sides. “I am very glad you have given me your confidence. As a
servant of the Church I shall admonish the young man--of course with the
utmost kindness. I shall certainly do it in the way that befits my holy
office,” said Father Michael to himself, really thinking that he had
forgotten the ill-feeling the boy’s father had towards him. He firmly
believed the boy’s soul to be the only object of his pious care.

The next day, during the divinity lesson which Father Michael was giving
to Mitia Smokovnikov’s class, he narrated the incident of the forged
coupon, adding that the culprit had been one of the pupils of the
school. “It was a very wicked thing to do,” he said; “but to deny the
crime is still worse. If it is true that the sin has been committed by
one of you, let the guilty one confess.” In saying this, Father Michael
looked sharply at Mitia Smokovnikov. All the boys, following his glance,
turned also to Mitia, who blushed, and felt extremely ill at ease, with
large beads of perspiration on his face. Finally, he burst into tears,
and ran out of the classroom. His mother, noticing his trouble, found
out the truth, ran at once to the photographer’s shop, paid over the
twelve roubles and fifty kopeks to Maria Vassilievna, and made her
promise to deny the boy’s guilt. She further implored Mitia to hide the
truth from everybody, and in any case to withhold it from his father.

Accordingly, when Fedor Mihailovich had heard of the incident in
the divinity class, and his son, questioned by him, had denied all
accusations, he called at once on the head of the school, told him what
had happened, expressed his indignation at Father Michael’s conduct, and
said he would not let matters remain as they were.

Father Michael was sent for, and immediately fell into a hot dispute
with Smokovnikov.

“A stupid woman first falsely accused my son, then retracts her
accusation, and you of course could not hit on anything more sensible to
do than to slander an honest and truthful boy!”

“I did not slander him, and I must beg you not to address me in such a
way. You forget what is due to my cloth.”

“Your cloth is of no consequence to me.”

“Your perversity in matters of religion is known to everybody in the
town!” replied Father Michael; and he was so transported with anger that
his long thin head quivered.

“Gentlemen! Father Michael!” exclaimed the director of the school,
trying to appease their wrath. But they did not listen to him.

“It is my duty as a priest to look after the religious and moral
education of our pupils.”

“Oh, cease your pretence to be religious! Oh, stop all this humbug
of religion! As if I did not know that you believe neither in God nor
Devil.”

“I consider it beneath my dignity to talk to a man like you,” said
Father Michael, very much hurt by Smokovnikov’s last words, the more so
because he knew they were true.

Michael Vedensky carried on his studies in the academy for priests,
and that is why, for a long time past, he ceased to believe in what he
confessed to be his creed and in what he preached from the pulpit; he
only knew that men ought to force themselves to believe in what he tried
to make himself believe.

Smokovnikov was not shocked by Father Michael’s conduct; he only thought
it illustrative of the influence the Church was beginning to exercise
on society, and he told all his friends how his son had been insulted by
the priest.

Seeing not only young minds, but also the elder generation, contaminated
by atheistic tendencies, Father Michael became more and more convinced
of the necessity of fighting those tendencies. The more he condemned the
unbelief of Smokovnikov, and those like him, the more confident he
grew in the firmness of his own faith, and the less he felt the need
of making sure of it, or of bringing his life into harmony with it. His
faith, acknowledged as such by all the world around him, became Father
Michael’s very best weapon with which to fight those who denied it.

The thoughts aroused in him by his conflict with Smokovnikov, together
with the annoyance of being blamed by his chiefs in the school, made him
carry out the purpose he had entertained ever since his wife’s death--of
taking monastic orders, and of following the course carried out by some
of his fellow-pupils in the academy. One of them was already a bishop,
another an archimandrite and on the way to become a bishop.

At the end of the term Michael Vedensky gave up his post in the school,
took orders under the name of Missael, and very soon got a post as
rector in a seminary in a town on the river Volga.


XIII

MEANWHILE the yard-porter Vassily was marching on the open road down to
the south.

He walked in daytime, and when night came some policeman would get
him shelter in a peasant’s cottage. He was given bread everywhere, and
sometimes he was asked to sit down to the evening meal. In a village in
the Orel district, where he had stayed for the night, he heard that
a merchant who had hired the landowner’s orchard for the season,
was looking out for strong and able men to serve as watchmen for the
fruit-crops. Vassily was tired of tramping, and as he had also no desire
whatever to go back to his native village, he went to the man who owned
the orchard, and got engaged as watchman for five roubles a month.

Vassily found it very agreeable to live in his orchard shed, and all the
more so when the apples and pears began to grow ripe, and when the men
from the barn supplied him every day with large bundles of fresh straw
from the threshing machine. He used to lie the whole day long on the
fragrant straw, with fresh, delicately smelling apples in heaps at his
side, looking out in every direction to prevent the village boys from
stealing fruit; and he used to whistle and sing meanwhile, to amuse
himself. He knew no end of songs, and had a fine voice. When peasant
women and young girls came to ask for apples, and to have a chat with
him, Vassily gave them larger or smaller apples according as he liked
their looks, and received eggs or money in return. The rest of the time
he had nothing to do, but to lie on his back and get up for his meals
in the kitchen. He had only one shirt left, one of pink cotton, and that
was in holes. But he was strongly built and enjoyed excellent health.
When the kettle with black gruel was taken from the stove and served to
the working men, Vassily used to eat enough for three, and filled the
old watchman on the estate with unceasing wonder. At nights Vassily
never slept. He whistled or shouted from time to time to keep off
thieves, and his piercing, cat-like eyes saw clearly in the darkness.

One night a company of young lads from the village made their way
stealthily to the orchard to shake down apples from the trees. Vassily,
coming noiselessly from behind, attacked them; they tried to escape, but
he took one of them prisoner to his master.

Vassily’s first shed stood at the farthest end of the orchard, but after
the pears had been picked he had to remove to another shed only forty
paces away from the house of his master. He liked this new place very
much. The whole day long he could see the young ladies and gentlemen
enjoying themselves; going out for drives in the evenings and quite late
at nights, playing the piano or the violin, and singing and dancing.
He saw the ladies sitting with the young students on the window sills,
engaged in animated conversation, and then going in pairs to walk the
dark avenue of lime trees, lit up only by streaks of moonlight. He saw
the servants running about with food and drink, he saw the cooks, the
stewards, the laundresses, the gardeners, the coachmen, hard at work
to supply their masters with food and drink and constant amusement.
Sometimes the young people from the master’s house came to the shed,
and Vassily offered them the choicest apples, juicy and red. The young
ladies used to take large bites out of the apples on the spot, praising
their taste, and spoke French to one another--Vassily quite understood
it was all about him--and asked Vassily to sing for them.

Vassily felt the greatest admiration for his master’s mode of living,
which reminded him of what he had seen in Moscow; and he became more and
more convinced that the only thing that mattered in life was money.
He thought and thought how to get hold of a large sum of money. He
remembered his former ways of making small profits whenever he could,
and came to the conclusion that that was altogether wrong. Occasional
stealing is of no use, he thought. He must arrange a well-prepared plan,
and after getting all the information he wanted, carry out his purpose
so as to avoid detection.

After the feast of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the last crop
of autumn apples was gathered; the master was content with the results,
paid off Vassily, and gave him an extra sum as reward for his faithful
service.

Vassily put on his new jacket, and a new hat--both were presents from
his master’s son--but did not make his way homewards. He hated the very
thought of the vulgar peasants’ life. He went back to Moscow in company
of some drunken soldiers, who had been watchmen in the orchard together
with him. On his arrival there he at once resolved, under cover of
night, to break into the shop where he had been employed, and beaten,
and then turned out by the proprietor without being paid. He knew the
place well, and knew where the money was locked up. So he bade the
soldiers, who helped him, keep watch outside, and forcing the courtyard
door entered the shop and took all the money he could lay his hands on.
All this was done very cleverly, and no trace was left of the burglary.
The money Vassily had found in the shop amounted to 370 roubles. He gave
a hundred roubles to his assistants, and with the rest left for another
town where he gave way to dissipation in company of friends of both
sexes. The police traced his movements, and when at last he was arrested
and put into prison he had hardly anything left out of the money which
he had stolen.


XIV

IVAN MIRONOV had become a very clever, fearless and successful
horse-thief. Afimia, his wife, who at first used to abuse him for his
evil ways, as she called it, was now quite content and felt proud of her
husband, who possessed a new sheepskin coat, while she also had a warm
jacket and a new fur cloak.

In the village and throughout the whole district every one knew quite
well that Ivan Mironov was at the bottom of all the horse-stealing; but
nobody would give him away, being afraid of the consequences. Whenever
suspicion fell on him, he managed to clear his character. Once during
the night he stole horses from the pasture ground in the village
Kolotovka. He generally preferred to steal horses from landowners or
tradespeople. But this was a harder job, and when he had no chance of
success he did not mind robbing peasants too. In Kolotovka he drove off
the horses without making sure whose they were. He did not go himself
to the spot, but sent a young and clever fellow, Gerassim, to do the
stealing for him. The peasants only got to know of the theft at dawn;
they rushed in all directions to hunt for the robbers. The horses,
meanwhile, were hidden in a ravine in the forest lands belonging to the
state.

Ivan Mironov intended to leave them there till the following night, and
then to transport them with the utmost haste a hundred miles away to
a man he knew. He visited Gerassim in the forest, to see how he was
getting on, brought him a pie and some vodka, and was returning home
by a side track in the forest where he hoped to meet nobody. But by
ill-luck, he chanced on the keeper of the forest, a retired soldier.

“I say! Have you been looking for mushrooms?” asked the soldier.

“There were none to be found,” answered Ivan Mironov, showing the basket
of lime bark he had taken with him in case he might want it.

“Yes, mushrooms are scarce this summer,” said the soldier. He stood
still for a moment, pondered, and then went his way. He clearly saw that
something was wrong. Ivan Mironov had no business whatever to take early
morning walks in that forest. The soldier went back after a while and
looked round. Suddenly he heard the snorting of horses in the ravine. He
made his way cautiously to the place whence the sounds came. The grass
in the ravine was trodden down, and the marks of horses’ hoofs were
clearly to be seen. A little further he saw Gerassim, who was sitting
and eating his meal, and the horses tied to a tree.

The soldier ran to the village and brought back the bailiff, a police
officer, and two witnesses. They surrounded on three sides the spot
where Gerassim was sitting and seized the man. He did not deny anything;
but, being drunk, told them at once how Ivan Mironov had given him
plenty of drink, and induced him to steal the horses; he also said that
Ivan Mironov had promised to come that night in order to take the horses
away. The peasants left the horses and Gerassim in the ravine, and
hiding behind the trees prepared to lie in ambush for Ivan Mironov. When
it grew dark, they heard a whistle. Gerassim answered it with a similar
sound. The moment Ivan Mironov descended the slope, the peasants
surrounded him and brought him back to the village. The next morning
a crowd assembled in front of the bailiff’s cottage. Ivan Mironov was
brought out and subjected to a close examination. Stepan Pelageushkine,
a tall, stooping man with long arms, an aquiline nose, and a gloomy
face was the first to put questions to him. Stepan had terminated
his military service, and was of a solitary turn of mind. When he had
separated from his father, and started his own home, he had his first
experience of losing a horse. After that he worked for two years in
the mines, and made money enough to buy two horses. These two had been
stolen by Ivan Mironov.

“Tell me where my horses are!” shouted Stepan, pale with fury,
alternately looking at the ground and at Ivan Mironov’s face.

Ivan Mironov denied his guilt. Then Stepan aimed so violent a blow at
his face that he smashed his nose and the blood spurted out.

“Tell the truth, I say, or I’ll kill you!”

Ivan Mironov kept silent, trying to avoid the blows by stooping. Stepan
hit him twice more with his long arm. Ivan Mironov remained silent,
turning his head backwards and forwards.

“Beat him, all of you!” cried the bailiff, and the whole crowd rushed
upon Ivan Mironov. He fell without a word to the ground, and then
shouted,--“Devils, wild beasts, kill me if that’s what you want! I am
not afraid of you!”

Stepan seized a stone out of those that had been collected for the
purpose, and with a heavy blow smashed Ivan Mironov’s head.


XV

IVAN MIRONOV’S murderers were brought to trial, Stepan Pelageushkine
among them. He had a heavier charge to answer than the others, all the
witnesses having stated that it was he who had smashed Ivan Mironov’s
head with a stone. Stepan concealed nothing when in court. He contented
himself with explaining that, having been robbed of his two last horses,
he had informed the police. Now it was comparatively easy at that time
to trace the horses with the help of professional thieves among the
gipsies. But the police officer would not even permit him, and no search
had been ordered.

“Nothing else could be done with such a man. He has ruined us all.”

“But why did not the others attack him. It was you alone who broke his
head open.”

“That is false. We all fell upon him. The village agreed to kill him.
I only gave the final stroke. What is the use of inflicting unnecessary
sufferings on a man?”

The judges were astonished at Stepan’s wonderful coolness in narrating
the story of his crime--how the peasants fell upon Ivan Mironov, and
how he had given the final stroke. Stepan actually did not see anything
particularly revolting in this murder. During his military service
he had been ordered on one occasion to shoot a soldier, and, now with
regard to Ivan Mironov, he saw nothing loathsome in it. “A man shot is
a dead man--that’s all. It was him to-day, it might be me to-morrow,” he
thought. Stepan was only sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, which was
a mild punishment for what he had done. His peasant’s dress was taken
away from him and put in the prison stores, and he had a prison suit and
felt boots given to him instead. Stepan had never had much respect for
the authorities, but now he became quite convinced that all the chiefs,
all the fine folk, all except the Czar--who alone had pity on the
peasants and was just--all were robbers who suck blood out of the
people. All he heard from the deported convicts, and those sentenced to
hard labour, with whom he had made friends in prisons, confirmed him
in his views. One man had been sentenced to hard labour for having
convicted his superiors of a theft; another for having struck an
official who had unjustly confiscated the property of a peasant; a third
because he forged bank notes. The well-to-do-people, the merchants,
might do whatever they chose and come to no harm; but a poor peasant,
for a trumpery reason or for none at all, was sent to prison to become
food for vermin.

He had visits from his wife while in prison. Her life without him was
miserable enough, when, to make it worse, her cottage was destroyed by
fire. She was completely ruined, and had to take to begging with her
children. His wife’s misery embittered Stepan still more. He got on very
badly with all the people in the prison; was rude to every one; and
one day he nearly killed the cook with an axe, and therefore got an
additional year in prison. In the course of that year he received the
news that his wife was dead, and that he had no longer a home.

When Stepan had finished his time in prison, he was taken to the prison
stores, and his own dress was taken down from the shelf and handed to
him.

“Where am I to go now?” he asked the prison officer, putting on his old
dress.

“Why, home.”

“I have no home. I shall have to go on the road. Robbery will not be a
pleasant occupation.”

“In that case you will soon be back here.”

“I am not so sure of that.”

And Stepan left the prison. Nevertheless he took the road to his own
place. He had nowhere else to turn.

On his way he stopped for a night’s rest in an inn that had a public bar
attached to it. The inn was kept by a fat man from the town, Vladimir,
and he knew Stepan. He knew that Stepan had been put into prison through
ill luck, and did not mind giving him shelter for the night. He was a
rich man, and had persuaded his neighbour’s wife to leave her husband
and come to live with him. She lived in his house as his wife, and
helped him in his business as well.

Stepan knew all about the innkeeper’s affairs--how he had wronged the
peasant, and how the woman who was living with him had left her husband.
He saw her now sitting at the table in a rich dress, and looking very
hot as she drank her tea. With great condescension she asked Stepan to
have tea with her. No other travellers were stopping in the inn that
night. Stepan was given a place in the kitchen where he might sleep.
Matrena--that was the woman’s name--cleared the table and went to her
room. Stepan went to lie down on the large stove in the kitchen, but
he could not sleep, and the wood splinters put on the stove to dry were
crackling under him, as he tossed from side to side. He could not help
thinking of his host’s fat paunch protruding under the belt of his
shirt, which had lost its colour from having been washed ever so many
times. Would not it be a good thing to make a good clean incision in
that paunch. And that woman, too, he thought.

One moment he would say to himself, “I had better go from here
to-morrow, bother them all!” But then again Ivan Mironov came back
to his mind, and he went on thinking of the innkeeper’s paunch and
Matrena’s white throat bathed in perspiration. “Kill I must, and it must
be both!”

He heard the cock crow for the second time.

“I must do it at once, or dawn will be here.” He had seen in the evening
before he went to bed a knife and an axe. He crawled down from the
stove, took the knife and axe, and went out of the kitchen door. At that
very moment he heard the lock of the entrance door open. The innkeeper
was going out of the house to the courtyard. It all turned out contrary
to what Stepan desired. He had no opportunity of using the knife;
he just swung the axe and split the innkeeper’s head in two. The man
tumbled down on the threshold of the door, then on the ground.

Stepan stepped into the bedroom. Matrena jumped out of bed, and remained
standing by its side. With the same axe Stepan killed her also.

Then he lighted the candle, took the money out of the desk, and left the
house.


XVI

IN a small district town, some distance away from the other buildings,
an old man, a former official, who had taken to drink, lived in his own
house with his two daughters and his son-in-law. The married daughter
was also addicted to drink and led a bad life, and it was the elder
daughter, the widow Maria Semenovna, a wrinkled woman of fifty, who
supported the whole family. She had a pension of two hundred and fifty
roubles a year, and the family lived on this. Maria Semenovna did all
the work in the house, looked after the drunken old father, who was very
weak, attended to her sister’s child, and managed all the cooking and
the washing of the family. And, as is always the case, whatever there
was to do, she was expected to do it, and was, moreover, continually
scolded by all the three people in the house; her brother-in-law used
even to beat her when he was drunk. She bore it all patiently, and as
is also always the case, the more work she had to face, the quicker
she managed to get through it. She helped the poor, sacrificing her own
wants; she gave them her clothes, and was a ministering angel to the
sick.

Once the lame, crippled village tailor was working in Maria Semenovna’s
house. He had to mend her old father’s coat, and to mend and repair
Maria Semenovna’s fur-jacket for her to wear in winter when she went to
market.

The lame tailor was a clever man, and a keen observer: he had seen many
different people owing to his profession, and was fond of reflection,
condemned as he was to a sedentary life.

Having worked a week at Maria Semenovna’s, he wondered greatly about
her life. One day she came to the kitchen, where he was sitting with his
work, to wash a towel, and began to ask him how he was getting on. He
told her of the wrong he had suffered from his brother, and how he now
lived on his own allotment of land, separated from that of his brother.

“I thought I should have been better off that way,” he said. “But I am
now just as poor as before.”

“It is much better never to change, but to take life as it comes,” said
Maria Semenovna. “Take life as it comes,” she repeated.

“Why, I wonder at you, Maria Semenovna,” said the lame tailor. “You
alone do the work, and you are so good to everybody. But they don’t
repay you in kind, I see.”

Maria Semenovna did not utter a word in answer.

“I dare say you have found out in books that we are rewarded in heaven
for the good we do here.”

“We don’t know that. But we must try to do the best we can.”

“Is it said so in books?”

“In books as well,” she said, and read to him the Sermon on the Mount.
The tailor was much impressed. When he had been paid for his job and
gone home, he did not cease to think about Maria Semenovna, both what
she had said and what she had read to him.


XVII

PETER NIKOLAEVICH SVENTIZKY’S views of the peasantry had now changed for
the worse, and the peasants had an equally bad opinion of him. In the
course of a single year they felled twenty-seven oaks in his forest, and
burnt a barn which had not been insured. Peter Nikolaevich came to the
conclusion that there was no getting on with the people around him.

At that very time the landowner, Liventsov, was trying to find a manager
for his estate, and the Marshal of the Nobility recommended Peter
Nikolaevich as the ablest man in the district in the management of land.
The estate owned by Liventsov was an extremely large one, but there was
no revenue to be got out of it, as the peasants appropriated all
its wealth to their own profit. Peter Nikolaevich undertook to bring
everything into order; rented out his own land to somebody else; and
settled with his wife on the Liventsov estate, in a distant province on
the river Volga.

Peter Nikolaevich was always fond of order, and wanted things to be
regulated by law; and now he felt less able of allowing those raw and
rude peasants to take possession, quite illegally too, of property that
did not belong to them. He was glad of the opportunity of giving them a
good lesson, and set seriously to work at once. One peasant was sent to
prison for stealing wood; to another he gave a thrashing for not having
made way for him on the road with his cart, and for not having lifted
his cap to salute him. As to the pasture ground which was a subject of
dispute, and was considered by the peasants as their property, Peter
Nikolaevich informed the peasants that any of their cattle grazing on it
would be driven away by him.

The spring came and the peasants, just as they had done in previous
years, drove their cattle on to the meadows belonging to the landowner.
Peter Nikolaevich called some of the men working on the estate and
ordered them to drive the cattle into his yard. The peasants were
working in the fields, and, disregarding the screaming of the women,
Peter Nikolaevich’s men succeeded in driving in the cattle. When they
came home the peasants went in a crowd to the cattle-yard on the estate,
and asked for their cattle. Peter Nikolaevich came out to talk to them
with a gun slung on his shoulder; he had just returned from a ride of
inspection. He told them that he would not let them have their cattle
unless they paid a fine of fifty kopeks for each of the horned cattle,
and twenty kopeks for each sheep. The peasants loudly declared that
the pasture ground was their property, because their fathers and
grandfathers had used it, and protested that he had no right whatever to
lay hand on their cattle.

“Give back our cattle, or you will regret it,” said an old man coming up
to Peter Nikolaevich.

“How shall I regret it?” cried Peter Nikolaevich, turning pale, and
coming close to the old man.

“Give them back, you villain, and don’t provoke us.”

“What?” cried Peter Nikolaevich, and slapped the old man in the face.

“You dare to strike me? Come along, you fellows, let us take back our
cattle by force.”

The crowd drew close to him. Peter Nikolaevich tried to push his way,
through them, but the peasants resisted him. Again he tried force.

His gun, accidentally discharged in the melee, killed one of the
peasants. Instantly the fight began. Peter Nikolaevich was trodden down,
and five minutes later his mutilated body was dragged into the ravine.

The murderers were tried by martial law, and two of them sentenced to
the gallows.


XVIII

IN the village where the lame tailor lived, in the Zemliansk district
of the Voronesh province, five rich peasants hired from the landowner a
hundred and five acres of rich arable land, black as tar, and let it out
on lease to the rest of the peasants at fifteen to eighteen roubles
an acre. Not one acre was given under twelve roubles. They got a very
profitable return, and the five acres which were left to each of their
company practically cost them nothing. One of the five peasants died,
and the lame tailor received an offer to take his place.

When they began to divide the land, the tailor gave up drinking vodka,
and, being consulted as to how much land was to be divided, and to
whom it should be given, he proposed to give allotments to all on equal
terms, not taking from the tenants more than was due for each piece of
land out of the sum paid to the landowner.

“Why so?”

“We are no heathens, I should think,” he said. “It is all very well for
the masters to be unfair, but we are true Christians. We must do as God
bids. Such is the law of Christ.”

“Where have you got that law from?

“It is in the Book, in the Gospels; just come to me on Sunday, I will
read you a few passages, and we will have a talk afterwards.”

They did not all come to him on Sunday, but three came, and he began
reading to them.

He read five chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and they talked. One man
only, Ivan Chouev, accepted the lesson and carried it out completely,
following the rule of Christ in everything from that day. His family
did the same. Out of the arable land he took only what was his due, and
refused to take more.

The lame tailor and Ivan had people calling on them, and some of these
people began to grasp the meaning of the Gospels, and in consequence
gave up smoking, drinking, swearing, and using bad language and tried to
help one another. They also ceased to go to church, and took their
ikons to the village priest, saying they did not want them any more. The
priest was frightened, and reported what had occurred to the bishop.
The bishop was at a loss what to do. At last he resolved to send the
archimandrite Missael to the village, the one who had formerly been
Mitia Smokovnikov’s teacher of religion.


XIX

ASKING Father Missael on his arrival to take a seat, the bishop told him
what had happened in his diocese.

“It all comes from weakness of spirit and from ignorance. You are a
learned man, and I rely on you. Go to the village, call the parishioners
together, and convince them of their error.”

“If your Grace bids me go, and you give me your blessing, I will do my
best,” said Father Missael. He was very pleased with the task entrusted
to him. Every opportunity he could find to demonstrate the firmness of
his faith was a boon to him. In trying to convince others he was chiefly
intent on persuading himself that he was really a firm believer.

“Do your best. I am greatly distressed about my flock,” said the bishop,
leisurely taking a cup with his white plump hands from the servant who
brought in the tea.

“Why is there only one kind of jam? Bring another,” he said to the
servant. “I am greatly distressed,” he went on, turning to Father
Missael.

Missael earnestly desired to prove his zeal; but, being a man of small
means, he asked to be paid for the expenses of his journey; and being
afraid of the rough people who might be ill-dis-posed towards him,
he also asked the bishop to get him an order from the governor of the
province, so that the local police might help him in case of need. The
bishop complied with his wishes, and Missael got his things ready with
the help of his servant and his cook. They furnished him with a case
full of wine, and a basket with the victuals he might need in going to
such a lonely place. Fully provided with all he wanted, he started for
the village to which he was commissioned. He was pleasantly conscious of
the importance of his mission. All his doubts as to his own faith passed
away, and he was now fully convinced of its reality.

His thoughts, far from being concerned with the real foundation of his
creed--this was accepted as an axiom--were occupied with the arguments
used against the forms of worship.


XX

THE village priest and his wife received Father Missael with great
honours, and the next day after he had arrived the parishioners were
invited to assemble in the church. Missael in a new silk cassock, with
a large cross on his chest, and his long hair carefully combed, ascended
the pulpit; the priest stood at his side, the deacons and the choir at
a little distance behind him, and the side entrances were guarded by the
police. The dissenters also came in their dirty sheepskin coats.

After the service Missael delivered a sermon, admonishing the dissenters
to return to the bosom of their mother, the Church, threatening them
with the torments of hell, and promising full forgiveness to those who
would repent.

The dissenters kept silent at first. Then, being asked questions, they
gave answers. To the question why they dissented, they said that their
chief reason was the fact that the Church worshipped gods made of wood,
which, far from being ordained, were condemned by the Scriptures.

When asked by Missael whether they actually considered the holy ikons to
be mere planks of wood, Chouev answered,--“Just look at the back of any
ikon you choose and you will see what they are made of.”

When asked why they turned against the priests, their answer was that
the Scripture says: “As you have received it without fee, so you must
give it to the others; whereas the priests require payment for the grace
they bestow by the sacraments.” To all attempts which Missael made
to oppose them by arguments founded on Holy Writ, the tailor and Ivan
Chouev gave calm but very firm answers, contradicting his assertions by
appeal to the Scriptures, which they knew uncommonly well.

Missael got angry and threatened them with persecution by the
authorities. Their answer was: It is said, I have been persecuted and so
will you be.

The discussion came to nothing, and all would have ended well if Missael
had not preached the next day at mass, denouncing the wicked seducers of
the faithful and saying that they deserved the worst punishment. Coming
out of the church, the crowd of peasants began to consult whether it
would not be well to give the infidels a good lesson for disturbing the
minds of the community. The same day, just when Missael was enjoying
some salmon and gangfish, dining at the village priest’s in company with
the inspector, a violent brawl arose in the village. The peasants came
in a crowd to Chouev’s cottage, and waited for the dissenters to come
out in order to give them a thrashing.

The dissenters assembled in the cottage numbered about twenty men and
women. Missael’s sermon and the attitude of the orthodox peasants,
together with their threats, aroused in the mind of the dissenters angry
feelings, to which they had before been strangers. It was near evening,
the women had to go and milk the cows, and the peasants were still
standing and waiting at the door.

A boy who stepped out of the door was beaten and driven back into the
house. The people within began consulting what was to be done, and could
come to no agreement. The tailor said, “We must bear whatever is done to
us, and not resist.” Chouev replied that if they decided on that course
they would, all of them, be beaten to death. In consequence, he seized
a poker and went out of the house. “Come!” he shouted, “let us follow the
law of Moses!” And, falling upon the peasants, he knocked out one man’s
eye, and in the meanwhile all those who had been in his house contrived
to get out and make their way home.

Chouev was thrown into prison and charged with sedition and blasphemy.


XXI

Two years previous to those events a strong and handsome young girl
of an eastern type, Katia Turchaninova, came from the Don military
settlements to St. Petersburg to study in the university college for
women. In that town she met a student, Turin, the son of a district
governor in the Simbirsk province, and fell in love with him. But her
love was not of the ordinary type, and she had no desire to become his
wife and the mother of his children. He was a dear comrade to her, and
their chief bond of union was a feeling of revolt they had in common,
as well as the hatred they bore, not only to the existing forms of
government, but to all those who represented that government. They
had also in common the sense that they both excelled their enemies
in culture, in brains, as well as in morals. Katia Turchaninova was a
gifted girl, possessed of a good memory, by means of which she
easily mastered the lectures she attended. She was successful in her
examinations, and, apart from that, read all the newest books. She was
certain that her vocation was not to bear and rear children, and even
looked on such a task with disgust and contempt. She thought herself
chosen by destiny to destroy the present government, which was fettering
the best abilities of the nation, and to reveal to the people a higher
standard of life, inculcated by the latest writers of other countries.
She was handsome, a little inclined to stoutness: she had a good
complexion, shining black eyes, abundant black hair. She inspired the
men she knew with feelings she neither wished nor had time to share,
busy as she was with propaganda work, which consisted chiefly in mere
talking. She was not displeased, however, to inspire these feelings;
and, without dressing too smartly, did not neglect her appearance. She
liked to be admired, as it gave her opportunities of showing how little
she prized what was valued so highly by other women.

In her views concerning the method of fighting the government she went
further than the majority of her comrades, and than her friend Turin;
all means, she taught, were justified in such a struggle, not excluding
murder. And yet, with all her revolutionary ideas, Katia Turchaninova
was in her soul a very kind girl, ready to sacrifice herself for the
welfare and the happiness of other people, and sincerely pleased when
she could do a kindness to anybody, a child, an old person, or an
animal.

She went in the summer to stay with a friend, a schoolmistress in
a small town on the river Volga. Turin lived near that town, on his
father’s estate. He often came to see the two girls; they gave each
other books to read, and had long discussions, expressing their common
indignation with the state of affairs in the country. The district
doctor, a friend of theirs, used also to join them on many occasions.

The estate of the Turins was situated in the neighbourhood of the
Liventsov estate, the one that was entrusted to the management of Peter
Nikolaevich Sventizky. Soon after Peter Nikolaevich had settled there,
and begun to enforce order, young Turin, having observed an independent
tendency in the peasants on the Liventsov estate, as well as their
determination to uphold their rights, became interested in them. He came
often to the village to talk with the men, and developed his socialistic
theories, insisting particularly on the nationalisation of the land.

After Peter Nikolaevich had been murdered, and the murderers sent
to trial, the revolutionary group of the small town boiled over with
indignation, and did not shrink from openly expressing it. The fact
of Turin’s visits to the village and his propaganda work among the
students, became known to the authorities during the trial. A search was
made in his house; and, as the police found a few revolutionary leaflets
among his effects, he was arrested and transferred to prison in St.
Petersburg.

Katia Turchaninova followed him to the metropolis, and went to visit
him in prison. She was not admitted on the day she came, and was told to
come on the day fixed by regulations for visits to the prisoners. When
that day arrived, and she was finally allowed to see him, she had
to talk to him through two gratings separating the prisoner from his
visitor. This visit increased her indignation against the authorities.
And her feelings become all the more revolutionary after a visit she
paid to the office of a gendarme officer who had to deal with the Turin
case. The officer, a handsome man, seemed obviously disposed to grant
her exceptional favours in visiting the prisoner, if she would allow him
to make love to her. Disgusted with him, she appealed to the chief of
police. He pretended--just as the officer did when talking officially
to her--to be powerless himself, and to depend entirely on orders coming
from the minister of state. She sent a petition to the minister asking
for an interview, which was refused.

Then she resolved to do a desperate thing and bought a revolver.


XXII

THE minister was receiving petitioners at the usual hour appointed for
the reception. He had talked successively to three of them, and now a
pretty young woman with black eyes, who was holding a petition in her
left hand, approached. The minister’s eyes gleamed when he saw how
attractive the petitioner was, but recollecting his high position he put
on a serious face.

“What do you want?” he asked, coming down to where she stood. Without
answering his question the young woman quickly drew a revolver from
under her cloak and aiming it at the minister’s chest fired--but missed
him.

The minister rushed at her, trying to seize her hand, but she escaped,
and taking a step back, fired a second time. The minister ran out of the
room. The woman was immediately seized. She was trembling violently, and
could not utter a single word; after a while she suddenly burst into a
hysterical laugh. The minister was not even wounded.

That woman was Katia Turchaninova. She was put into the prison of
preliminary detention. The minister received congratulations and
marks of sympathy from the highest quarters, and even from the emperor
himself, who appointed a commission to investigate the plot that had led
to the attempted assassination. As a matter of fact there was no plot
whatever, but the police officials and the detectives set to work
with the utmost zeal to discover all the threads of the non-existing
conspiracy. They did everything to deserve the fees they were paid;
they got up in the small hours of the morning, searched one house after
another, took copies of papers and of books they found, read diaries,
personal letters, made extracts from them on the very best notepaper and
in beautiful handwriting, interrogated Katia Turchaninova ever so
many times, and confronted her with all those whom they suspected of
conspiracy, in order to extort from her the names of her accomplices.

The minister, a good-natured man at heart, was sincerely sorry for the
pretty girl. But he said to himself that he was bound to consider his
high state duties imposed upon him, even though they did not imply much
work and trouble. So, when his former colleague, a chamberlain and a
friend of the Turins, met him at a court ball and tried to rouse his
pity for Turin and the girl Turchaninova, he shrugged his shoulders,
stretching the red ribbon on his white waistcoat, and said: “Je ne
demanderais pas mieux que de relacher cette pauvre fillette, mais vous
savez le devoir.” And in the meantime Katia Turchaninova was kept
in prison. She was at times in a quiet mood, communicated with her
fellow-prisoners by knocking on the walls, and read the books that were
sent to her. But then came days when she had fits of desperate fury,
knocking with her fists against the wall, screaming and laughing like a
mad-woman.


XXIII

ONE day Maria Semenovna came home from the treasurer’s office, where she
had received her pension. On her way she met a schoolmaster, a friend of
hers.

“Good day, Maria Semenovna! Have you received your money?” the
schoolmaster asked, in a loud voice from the other side of the street.

“I have,” answered Maria Semenovna. “But it was not much; just enough to
fill the holes.”

“Oh, there must be some tidy pickings out of such a lot of money,” said
the schoolmaster, and passed on, after having said good-bye.

“Good-bye,” said Maria Semenovna. While she was looking at her friend,
she met a tall man face to face, who had very long arms and a stern look
in his eyes. Coming to her house, she was very startled on again seeing
the same man with the long arms, who had evidently followed her. He
remained standing another moment after she had gone in, then turned and
walked away.

Maria Semenovna felt somewhat frightened at first. But when she had
entered the house, and had given her father and her nephew Fedia the
presents she had brought for them, and she had patted the dog Treasure,
who whined with joy, she forgot her fears. She gave the money to her
father and began to work, as there was always plenty for her to do.

The man she met face to face was Stepan.

After he had killed the innkeeper, he did not return to town. Strange to
say, he was not sorry to have committed that murder. His mind went back
to the murdered man over and over again during the following day; and
he liked the recollection of having done the thing so skilfully, so
cleverly, that nobody-would ever discover it, and he would not therefore
be prevented from murdering other people in the same way. Sitting in the
public-house and having his tea, he looked at the people around him with
the same thought how he should murder them. In the evening he called at
a carter’s, a man from his village, to spend the night at his house. The
carter was not in. He said he would wait for him, and in the meanwhile
began talking to the carter’s wife. But when she moved to the stove,
with her back turned to him, the idea entered his mind to kill her. He
marvelled at himself at first, and shook his head; but the next moment
he seized the knife he had hidden in his boot, knocked the woman down
on the floor, and cut her throat. When the children began to scream, he
killed them also and went away. He did not look out for another place to
spend the night, but at once left the town. In a village some distance
away he went to the inn and slept there. The next day he returned to the
district town, and there he overheard in the street Maria Semenovna’s
talk with the schoolmaster. Her look frightened him, but yet he made
up his mind to creep into her house, and rob her of the money she had
received. When the night came he broke the lock and entered the house.
The first person who heard his steps was the younger daughter, the
married one. She screamed. Stepan stabbed her immediately with his
knife. Her husband woke up and fell upon Stepan, seized him by his
throat, and struggled with him desperately. But Stepan was the stronger
man and overpowered him. After murdering him, Stepan, excited by the
long fight, stepped into the next room behind a partition. That was
Maria Semenovna’s bedroom. She rose in her bed, looked at Stepan with
her mild frightened eyes, and crossed herself.

Once more her look scared Stepan. He dropped his eyes.

“Where is your money?” he asked, without raising his face.

She did not answer.

“Where is the money?” asked Stepan again, showing her his knife.

“How can you . . .” she said.

“You will see how.”

Stepan came close to her, in order to seize her hands and prevent her
struggling with him, but she did not even try to lift her arms or offer
any resistance; she pressed her hands to her chest, and sighed heavily.

“Oh, what a great sin!” she cried. “How can you! Have mercy on yourself.
To destroy somebody’s soul . . . and worse, your own! . . .”

Stepan could not stand her voice any longer, and drew his knife sharply
across her throat. “Stop that talk!” he said. She fell back with a
hoarse cry, and the pillow was stained with blood. He turned away, and
went round the rooms in order to collect all he thought worth taking.
Having made a bundle of the most valuable things, he lighted a
cigarette, sat down for a while, brushed his clothes, and left the
house. He thought this murder would not matter to him more than those
he had committed before; but before he got a night’s lodging, he felt
suddenly so exhausted that he could not walk any farther. He stepped
down into the gutter and remained lying there the rest of the night, and
the next day and the next night.




PART SECOND


I

THE whole time he was lying in the gutter Stepan saw continually before
his eyes the thin, kindly, and frightened face of Maria Semenovna,
and seemed to hear her voice. “How can you?” she went on saying in his
imagination, with her peculiar lisping voice. Stepan saw over again
and over again before him all he had done to her. In horror he shut
his eyes, and shook his hairy head, to drive away these thoughts and
recollections. For a moment he would get rid of them, but in their
place horrid black faces with red eyes appeared and frightened him
continuously. They grinned at him, and kept repeating, “Now you have
done away with her you must do away with yourself, or we will not leave
you alone.” He opened his eyes, and again he saw HER and heard her
voice; and felt an immense pity for her and a deep horror and
disgust with himself. Once more he shut his eyes, and the black faces
reappeared. Towards the evening of the next day he rose and went, with
hardly any strength left, to a public-house. There he ordered a drink,
and repeated his demands over and over again, but no quantity of liquor
could make him intoxicated. He was sitting at a table, and swallowed
silently one glass after another.

A police officer came in. “Who are you?” he asked Stepan.

“I am the man who murdered all the Dobrotvorov people last night,” he
answered.

He was arrested, bound with ropes, and brought to the nearest
police-station; the next day he was transferred to the prison in the
town. The inspector of the prison recognised him as an old inmate, and a
very turbulent one; and, hearing that he had now become a real criminal,
accosted him very harshly.

“You had better be quiet here,” he said in a hoarse voice, frowning, and
protruding his lower jaw. “The moment you don’t behave, I’ll flog you to
death! Don’t try to escape--I will see to that!”

“I have no desire to escape,” said Stepan, dropping his eyes. “I
surrendered of my own free will.”

“Shut up! You must look straight into your superior’s eyes when you talk
to him,” cried the inspector, and struck Stepan with his fist under the
jaw.

At that moment Stepan again saw the murdered woman before him, and
heard her voice; he did not pay attention, therefore, to the inspector’s
words.

“What?” he asked, coming to his senses when he felt the blow on his
face.

“Be off! Don’t pretend you don’t hear.”

The inspector expected Stepan to be violent, to talk to the other
prisoners, to make attempts to escape from prison. But nothing of the
kind ever happened. Whenever the guard or the inspector himself looked
into his cell through the hole in the door, they saw Stepan sitting on a
bag filled with straw, holding his head with his hands and whispering to
himself. On being brought before the examining magistrate charged with
the inquiry into his case, he did not behave like an ordinary convict.
He was very absent-minded, hardly listening to the questions; but when
he heard what was asked, he answered truthfully, causing the utmost
perplexity to the magistrate, who, accustomed as he was to the necessity
of being very clever and very cunning with convicts, felt a strange
sensation just as if he were lifting up his foot to ascend a step and
found none. Stepan told him the story of all his murders; and did it
frowning, with a set look, in a quiet, businesslike voice, trying to
recollect all the circumstances of his crimes. “He stepped out of the
house,” said Stepan, telling the tale of his first murder, “and stood
barefooted at the door; I hit him, and he just groaned; I went to his
wife, . . .” And so on.

One day the magistrate, visiting the prison cells, asked Stepan whether
there was anything he had to complain of, or whether he had any wishes
that might be granted him. Stepan said he had no wishes whatever,
and had nothing to complain of the way he was treated in prison. The
magistrate, on leaving him, took a few steps in the foul passage, then
stopped and asked the governor who had accompanied him in his visit how
this prisoner was behaving.

“I simply wonder at him,” said the governor, who was very pleased with
Stepan, and spoke kindly of him. “He has now been with us about two
months, and could be held up as a model of good behaviour. But I
am afraid he is plotting some mischief. He is a daring man, and
exceptionally strong.”


II

DURING the first month in prison Stepan suffered from the same agonising
vision. He saw the grey wall of his cell, he heard the sounds of the
prison; the noise of the cell below him, where a number of convicts were
confined together; the striking of the prison clock; the steps of the
sentry in the passage; but at the same time he saw HER with that kindly
face which conquered his heart the very first time he met her in the
street, with that thin, strongly-marked neck, and he heard her soft,
lisping, pathetic voice: “To destroy somebody’s soul . . . and, worst of
all, your own. . . . How can you? . . .”

After a while her voice would die away, and then black faces would
appear. They would appear whether he had his eyes open or shut. With his
closed eyes he saw them more distinctly. When he opened his eyes they
vanished for a moment, melting away into the walls and the door; but
after a while they reappeared and surrounded him from three sides,
grinning at him and saying over and over: “Make an end! Make an end!
Hang yourself! Set yourself on fire!” Stepan shook all over when he
heard that, and tried to say all the prayers he knew: “Our Lady” or “Our
Father.” At first this seemed to help. In saying his prayers he began to
recollect his whole life; his father, his mother, the village, the dog
“Wolf,” the old grandfather lying on the stove, the bench on which the
children used to play; then the girls in the village with their songs,
his horses and how they had been stolen, and how the thief was caught
and how he killed him with a stone. He recollected also the first prison
he was in and his leaving it, and the fat innkeeper, the carter’s wife
and the children. Then again SHE came to his mind and again he was
terrified. Throwing his prison overcoat off his shoulders, he jumped out
of bed, and, like a wild animal in a cage, began pacing up and down his
tiny cell, hastily turning round when he had reached the damp walls.
Once more he tried to pray, but it was of no use now.

The autumn came with its long nights. One evening when the wind whistled
and howled in the pipes, Stepan, after he had paced up and down his cell
for a long time, sat down on his bed. He felt he could not struggle any
more; the black demons had overpowered him, and he had to submit. For
some time he had been looking at the funnel of the oven. If he could fix
on the knob of its lid a loop made of thin shreds of narrow linen straps
it would hold. . . . But he would have to manage it very cleverly. He
set to work, and spent two days in making straps out of the linen bag
on which he slept. When the guard came into the cell he covered the
bed with his overcoat. He tied the straps with big knots and made them
double, in order that they might be strong enough to hold his weight.
During these preparations he was free from tormenting visions. When the
straps were ready he made a slip-knot out of them, and put it round his
neck, stood up in his bed, and hanged himself. But at the very moment
that his tongue began to protrude the straps got loose, and he fell
down. The guard rushed in at the noise. The doctor was called in, Stepan
was brought to the infirmary. The next day he recovered, and was removed
from the infirmary, no more to solitary confinement, but to share the
common cell with other prisoners.

In the common cell he lived in the company of twenty men, but felt as if
he were quite alone. He did not notice the presence of the rest; did not
speak to anybody, and was tormented by the old agony. He felt it most of
all when the men were sleeping and he alone could not get one moment of
sleep. Continually he saw HER before his eyes, heard her voice, and then
again the black devils with their horrible eyes came and tortured him in
the usual way.

He again tried to say his prayers, but, just as before, it did not help
him. One day when, after his prayers, she was again before his eyes, he
began to implore her dear soul to forgive him his sin, and release him.
Towards morning, when he fell down quite exhausted on his crushed linen
bag, he fell asleep at once, and in his dream she came to him with her
thin, wrinkled, and severed neck. “Will you forgive me?” he asked. She
looked at him with her mild eyes and did not answer. “Will you forgive
me?” And so he asked her three times. But she did not say a word, and
he awoke. From that time onwards he suffered less, and seemed to come to
his senses, looked around him, and began for the first time to talk to
the other men in the cell.


III

STEPAN’S cell was shared among others by the former yard-porter,
Vassily, who had been sentenced to deportation for robbery, and by
Chouev, sentenced also to deportation. Vassily sang songs the whole day
long with his fine voice, or told his adventures to the other men in the
cell. Chouev was working at something all day, mending his clothes, or
reading the Gospel and the Psalter.

Stepan asked him why he was put into prison, and Chouev answered that he
was being persecuted because of his true Christian faith by the priests,
who were all of them hypocrites and hated those who followed the law of
Christ. Stepan asked what that true law was, and Chouev made clear to
him that the true law consists in not worshipping gods made with hands,
but worshipping the spirit and the truth. He told him how he had learnt
the truth from the lame tailor at the time when they were dividing the
land.

“And what will become of those who have done evil?” asked Stepan.

“The Scriptures give an answer to that,” said Chouev, and read aloud to
him Matthew xxv. 31:--“When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and
all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of
His glory: and before Him shall be gathered all nations: and He shall
separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth His sheep from
the goats: and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats
on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on His right hand, Come,
ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world: for I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat: I
was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me
in: naked, and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited Me: I was
in prison, and ye came unto Me. Then shall the righteous answer Him,
saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an hungred, and fed Thee? or thirsty,
and gave Thee drink? When saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in? or
naked, and clothed Thee? Or when saw we Thee sick, or in prison, and
came unto Thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I
say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
My brethren, ye have done it unto Me. Then shall He say also unto them
on the left hand, Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire,
prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was an hungred, and ye gave
Me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink: I was a stranger and
ye took Me not in: naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick, and in prison,
and ye visited Me not. Then shall they also answer Him, saying, Lord,
when saw we Thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or
sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto Thee? Then shall He answer
them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one
of the least of these, ye did it not to Me. And these shall go away into
everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”

Vassily, who was sitting on the floor at Chouev’s side, and was
listening to his reading the Gospel, nodded his handsome head in
approval. “True,” he said in a resolute tone. “Go, you cursed villains,
into everlasting punishment, since you did not give food to the hungry,
but swallowed it all yourself. Serves them right! I have read the holy
Nikodim’s writings,” he added, showing off his erudition.

“And will they never be pardoned?” asked Stepan, who had listened
silently, with his hairy head bent low down.

“Wait a moment, and be silent,” said Chouev to Vassily, who went on
talking about the rich who had not given meat to the stranger, nor
visited him in the prison.

“Wait, I say!” said Chouev, again turning over the leaves of the Gospel.
Having found what he was looking for, Chouev smoothed the page with his
large and strong hand, which had become exceedingly white in prison:

“And there were also two other malefactors, led with Him”--it means with
Christ--“to be put to death. And when they were come to the place, which
is called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the malefactors, one
on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus,--‘Father,
forgive them; for they know not what they do.’ And the people stood
beholding. And the rulers also with them derided Him, saying,--‘He saved
others; let Him save Himself if He be Christ, the chosen of God.’ And
the soldiers also mocked Him, coming to Him, and offering Him vinegar,
and saying, ‘If Thou be the King of the Jews save Thyself.’ And a
superscription also was written over Him in letters of Greek, and Latin,
and Hebrew, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’ And one of the malefactors
which were hanged railed on Him, saying, ‘If thou be Christ, save
Thyself and us.’ But the other answering rebuked Him, saying, ‘Dost not
thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed
justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath
done nothing amiss.’ And he said unto Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when
Thou comest into Thy kingdom.’ And Jesus said unto him, ‘Verily I say
unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise.’”

Stepan did not say anything, and was sitting in thought, as if he were
listening.

Now he knew what the true faith was. Those only will be saved who have
given food and drink to the poor and visited the prisoners; those who
have not done it, go to hell. And yet the malefactor had repented on
the cross, and went nevertheless to paradise. This did not strike him as
being inconsistent. Quite the contrary. The one confirmed the other: the
fact that the merciful will go to Heaven, and the unmerciful to hell,
meant that everybody ought to be merciful, and the malefactor having
been forgiven by Christ meant that Christ was merciful. This was all new
to Stepan, and he wondered why it had been hidden from him so long.

From that day onward he spent all his free time with Chouev, asking him
questions and listening to him. He saw but a single truth at the bottom
of the teaching of Christ as revealed to him by Chouev: that all men are
brethren, and that they ought to love and pity one another in order that
all might be happy. And when he listened to Chouev, everything that was
consistent with this fundamental truth came to him like a thing he had
known before and only forgotten since, while whatever he heard that
seemed to contradict it, he would take no notice of, as he thought that
he simply had not understood the real meaning. And from that time Stepan
was a different man.


IV

STEPAN had been very submissive and meek ever since he came to
the prison, but now he made the prison authorities and all his
fellow-prisoners wonder at the change in him. Without being ordered, and
out of his proper turn he would do all the very hardest work in prison,
and the dirtiest too. But in spite of his humility, the other prisoners
stood in awe of him, and were afraid of him, as they knew he was a
resolute man, possessed of great physical strength. Their respect for
him increased after the incident of the two tramps who fell upon him; he
wrenched himself loose from them and broke the arm of one of them in the
fight. These tramps had gambled with a young prisoner of some means and
deprived him of all his money. Stepan took his part, and deprived the
tramps of their winnings. The tramps poured their abuse on him; but when
they attacked him, he got the better of them. When the Governor asked
how the fight had come about, the tramps declared that it was Stepan
who had begun it. Stepan did not try to exculpate himself, and bore
patiently his sentence which was three days in the punishment-cell, and
after that solitary confinement.

In his solitary cell he suffered because he could no longer listen to
Chouev and his Gospel. He was also afraid that the former visions of HER
and of the black devils would reappear to torment him. But the visions
were gone for good. His soul was full of new and happy ideas. He felt
glad to be alone if only he could read, and if he had the Gospel. He
knew that he might have got hold of the Gospel, but he could not read.

He had started to learn the alphabet in his boyhood, but could not grasp
the joining of the syllables, and remained illiterate. He made up
his mind to start reading anew, and asked the guard to bring him the
Gospels. They were brought to him, and he sat down to work. He contrived
to recollect the letters, but could not join them into syllables. He
tried as hard as he could to understand how the letters ought to be put
together to form words, but with no result whatever. He lost his sleep,
had no desire to eat, and a deep sadness came over him, which he was
unable to shake off.

“Well, have you not yet mastered it?” asked the guard one day.

“No.”

“Do you know ‘Our Father’?”

“I do.”

“Since you do, read it in the Gospels. Here it is,” said the guard,
showing him the prayer in the Gospels. Stepan began to read it,
comparing the letters he knew with the familiar sounds.

And all of a sudden the mystery of the syllables was revealed to him,
and he began to read. This was a great joy. From that moment he could
read, and the meaning of the words, spelt out with such great pains,
became more significant.

Stepan did not mind any more being alone. He was so full of his work
that he did not feel glad when he was transferred back to the common
cell, his private cell being needed for a political prisoner who had
been just sent to prison.


V

IN the meantime Mahin, the schoolboy who had taught his friend
Smokovnikov to forge the coupon, had finished his career at school and
then at the university, where he had studied law. He had the advantage
of being liked by women, and as he had won favour with a vice-minister’s
former mistress, he was appointed when still young as examining
magistrate. He was dishonest, had debts, had gambled, and had seduced
many women; but he was clever, sagacious, and a good magistrate. He was
appointed to the court of the district where Stepan Pelageushkine
had been tried. When Stepan was brought to him the first time to give
evidence, his sincere and quiet answers puzzled the magistrate. He
somehow unconsciously felt that this man, brought to him in fetters and
with a shorn head, guarded by two soldiers who were waiting to take
him back to prison, had a free soul and was immeasurably superior to
himself. He was in consequence somewhat troubled, and had to summon up
all his courage in order to go on with the inquiry and not blunder in
his questions. He was amazed that Stepan should narrate the story of his
crimes as if they had been things of long ago, and committed not by him
but by some different man.

“Had you no pity for them?” asked Mahin.

“No. I did not know then.”

“Well, and now?”

Stepan smiled with a sad smile. “Now,” he said, “I would not do it even
if I were to be burned alive.”

“But why?

“Because I have come to know that all men are brethren.”

“What about me? Am I your brother also?”

“Of course you are.”

“And how is it that I, your brother, am sending you to hard labour?”

“It is because you don’t know.”

“What do I not know?”

“Since you judge, it means obviously that you don’t know.”

“Go on. . . . What next?”


VI

Now it was not Chouev, but Stepan who used to read the gospel in the
common cell. Some of the prisoners were singing coarse songs, while
others listened to Stepan reading the gospel and talking about what he
had read. The most attentive among those who listened were two of the
prisoners, Vassily, and a convict called Mahorkin, a murderer who had
become a hangman. Twice during his stay in this prison he was called
upon to do duty as hangman, and both times in far-away places where
nobody could be found to execute the sentences.

Two of the peasants who had killed Peter Nikolaevich Sventizky, had been
sentenced to the gallows, and Mahorkin was ordered to go to Pensa to
hang them. On all previous occasions he used to write a petition to the
governor of the province--he knew well how to read and to write--stating
that he had been ordered to fulfil his duty, and asking for money
for his expenses. But now, to the greatest astonishment of the prison
authorities, he said he did not intend to go, and added that he would
not be a hangman any more.

“And what about being flogged?” cried the governor of the prison.

“I will have to bear it, as the law commands us not to kill.”

“Did you get that from Pelageushkine? A nice sort of a prison prophet!
You just wait and see what this will cost you!”

When Mahin was told of that incident, he was greatly impressed by the
fact of Stepan’s influence on the hangman, who refused to do his duty,
running the risk of being hanged himself for insubordination.


VII

AT an evening party at the Eropkins, Mahin, who was paying attentions
to the two young daughters of the house--they were rich matches, both of
them--having earned great applause for his fine singing and playing
the piano, began telling the company about the strange convict who had
converted the hangman. Mahin told his story very accurately, as he had a
very good memory, which was all the more retentive because of his
total indifference to those with whom he had to deal. He never paid the
slightest attention to other people’s feelings, and was therefore better
able to keep all they did or said in his memory. He got interested in
Stepan Pelageushkine, and, although he did not thoroughly understand
him, yet asked himself involuntarily what was the matter with the
man? He could not find an answer, but feeling that there was certainly
something remarkable going on in Stepan’s soul, he told the company
at the Eropkins all about Stepan’s conversion of the hangman, and also
about his strange behaviour in prison, his reading the Gospels and his
great influence on the rest of the prisoners. All this made a special
impression on the younger daughter of the family, Lisa, a girl of
eighteen, who was just recovering from the artificial life she had
been living in a boarding-school; she felt as if she had emerged out of
water, and was taking in the fresh air of true life with ecstasy. She
asked Mahin to tell her more about the man Pelageushkine, and to explain
to her how such a great change had come over him. Mahin told her what he
knew from the police official about Stepan’s last murder, and also what
he had heard from Pelageushkine himself--how he had been conquered by
the humility, mildness, and fearlessness of a kind woman, who had been
his last victim, and how his eyes had been opened, while the reading of
the Gospels had completed the change in him.

Lisa Eropkin was not able to sleep that night. For a couple of months a
struggle had gone on in her heart between society life, into which her
sister was dragging her, and her infatuation for Mahin, combined with
a desire to reform him. This second desire now became the stronger. She
had already heard about poor Maria Semenovna. But, after that kind woman
had been murdered in such a ghastly way, and after Mahin, who learnt
it from Stepan, had communicated to her all the facts concerning Maria
Semenovna’s life, Lisa herself passionately desired to become like her.
She was a rich girl, and was afraid that Mahin had been courting her
because of her money. So she resolved to give all she possessed to the
poor, and told Mahin about it.

Mahin was very glad to prove his disinterestedness, and told Lisa that
he loved her and not her money. Such proof of his innate nobility made
him admire himself greatly. Mahin helped Lisa to carry out her decision.
And the more he did so, the more he came to realise the new world of
Lisa’s spiritual ambitions, quite unknown to him heretofore.


VIII

ALL were silent in the common cell. Stepan was lying in his bed, but
was not yet asleep. Vassily approached him, and, pulling him by his leg,
asked him in a whisper to get up and to come to him. Stepan stepped out
of his bed, and came up to Vassily.

“Do me a kindness, brother,” said Vassily. “Help me!”

“In what?”

“I am going to fly from the prison.”

Vassily told Stepan that he had everything ready for his flight.

“To-morrow I shall stir them up--” He pointed to the prisoners asleep in
their beds. “They will give me away, and I shall be transferred to the
cell in the upper floor. I know my way from there. What I want you for
is to unscrew the prop in the door of the mortuary.” “I can do that. But
where will you go?”

“I don’t care where. Are not there plenty of wicked people in every
place?”

“Quite so, brother. But it is not our business to judge them.”

“I am not a murderer, to be sure. I have not destroyed a living soul in
my life. As for stealing, I don’t see any harm in that. As if they have
not robbed us!”

“Let them answer for it themselves, if they do.”

“Bother them all! Suppose I rob a church, who will be hurt? This time
I will take care not to break into a small shop, but will get hold of a
lot of money, and then I will help people with it. I will give it to all
good people.”

One of the prisoners rose in his bed and listened. Stepan and Vassily
broke off their conversation. The next day Vassily carried out his idea.
He began complaining of the bread in prison, saying it was moist, and
induced the prisoners to call the governor and to tell him of their
discontent. The governor came, abused them all, and when he heard it
was Vassily who had stirred up the men, he ordered him to be transferred
into solitary confinement in the cell on the upper floor. This was all
Vassily wanted.


IX

VASSILY knew well that cell on the upper floor. He knew its floor, and
began at once to take out bits of it. When he had managed to get under
the floor he took out pieces of the ceiling beneath, and jumped down
into the mortuary a floor below. That day only one corpse was lying on
the table. There in the corner of the room were stored bags to make hay
mattresses for the prisoners. Vassily knew about the bags, and that
was why the mortuary served his purposes. The prop in the door had been
unscrewed and put in again. He took it out, opened the door, and went
out into the passage to the lavatory which was being built. In the
lavatory was a large hole connecting the third floor with the basement
floor. After having found the door of the lavatory he went back to the
mortuary, stripped the sheet off the dead body which was as cold as ice
(in taking off the sheet Vassily touched his hand), took the bags, tied
them together to make a rope, and carried the rope to the lavatory. Then
he attached it to the cross-beam, and climbed down along it. The rope
did not reach the ground, but he did not know how much was wanting.
Anyhow, he had to take the risk. He remained hanging in the air, and
then jumped down. His legs were badly hurt, but he could still walk on.
The basement had two windows; he could have climbed out of one of them
but for the grating protecting them. He had to break the grating, but
there was no tool to do it with. Vassily began to look around him, and
chanced on a piece of plank with a sharp edge; armed with that weapon he
tried to loosen the bricks which held the grating. He worked a long time
at that task. The cock crowed for the second time, but the grating still
held. At last he had loosened one side; and then he pushed the plank
under the loosened end and pressed with all his force. The grating gave
way completely, but at that moment one of the bricks fell down heavily.
The noise could have been heard by the sentry. Vassily stood motionless.
But silence reigned. He climbed out of the window. His way of escape was
to climb the wall. An outhouse stood in the corner of the courtyard. He
had to reach its roof, and pass thence to the top of the wall. But he
would not be able to reach the roof without the help of the plank; so he
had to go back through the basement window to fetch it. A moment later
he came out of the window with the plank in his hands; he stood still
for a while listening to the steps of the sentry. His expectations were
justified. The sentry was walking up and down on the other side of the
courtyard. Vassily came up to the outhouse, leaned the plank against it,
and began climbing. The plank slipped and fell on the ground. Vassily
had his stockings on; he took them off so that he could cling with his
bare feet in coming down. Then he leaned the plank again against the
house, and seized the water-pipe with his hands. If only this time
the plank would hold! A quick movement up the water-pipe, and his knee
rested on the roof. The sentry was approaching. Vassily lay motionless.
The sentry did not notice him, and passed on. Vassily leaped to his
feet; the iron roof cracked under him. Another step or two, and he would
reach the wall. He could touch it with his hand now. He leaned forward
with one hand, then with the other, stretched out his body as far as
he could, and found himself on the wall. Only, not to break his legs in
jumping down, Vassily turned round, remained hanging in the air by his
hands, stretched himself out, loosened the grip of one hand, then the
other. “Help, me, God!” He was on the ground. And the ground was soft.
His legs were not hurt, and he ran at the top of his speed. In a suburb,
Malania opened her door, and he crept under her warm coverlet, made of
small pieces of different colours stitched together.


X

THE wife of Peter Nikolaevich Sventizky, a tall and handsome woman, as
quiet and sleek as a well-fed heifer, had seen from her window how her
husband had been murdered and dragged away into the fields. The horror
of such a sight to Natalia Ivanovna was so intense--how could it be
otherwise?--that all her other feelings vanished. No sooner had the
crowd disappeared from view behind the garden fence, and the voices had
become still; no sooner had the barefooted Malania, their servant, run
in with her eyes starting out of her head, calling out in a voice
more suited to the proclamation of glad tidings the news that Peter
Nikolaevich had been murdered and thrown into the ravine, than Natalia
Ivanovna felt that behind her first sensation of horror, there was
another sensation; a feeling of joy at her deliverance from the tyrant,
who through all the nineteen years of their married life had made her
work without a moment’s rest. Her joy made her aghast; she did not
confess it to herself, but hid it the more from those around. When
his mutilated, yellow and hairy body was being washed and put into the
coffin, she cried with horror, and wept and sobbed. When the coroner--a
special coroner for serious cases--came and was taking her evidence, she
noticed in the room, where the inquest was taking place, two peasants in
irons, who had been charged as the principal culprits. One of them was
an old man with a curly white beard, and a calm and severe countenance.
The other was rather young, of a gipsy type, with bright eyes and curly
dishevelled hair. She declared that they were the two men who had first
seized hold of Peter Nikolaevich’s hands. In spite of the gipsy-like
peasant looking at her with his eyes glistening from under his moving
eyebrows, and saying reproachfully: “A great sin, lady, it is. Remember
your death hour!”--in spite of that, she did not feel at all sorry for
them. On the contrary, she began to hate them during the inquest, and
wished desperately to take revenge on her husband’s murderers.

A month later, after the case, which was committed for trial by
court-martial, had ended in eight men being sentenced to hard labour,
and in two--the old man with the white beard, and the gipsy boy, as she
called the other--being condemned to be hanged, Natalia felt vaguely
uneasy. But unpleasant doubts soon pass away under the solemnity of a
trial. Since such high authorities considered that this was the right
thing to do, it must be right.

The execution was to take place in the village itself. One Sunday
Malania came home from church in her new dress and her new boots, and
announced to her mistress that the gallows were being erected, and that
the hangman was expected from Moscow on Wednesday. She also announced
that the families of the convicts were raging, and that their cries
could be heard all over the village.

Natalia Ivanovna did not go out of her house; she did not wish to see
the gallows and the people in the village; she only wanted what had to
happen to be over quickly. She only considered her own feelings, and did
not care for the convicts and their families.

On Tuesday the village constable called on Natalia Ivanovna. He was a
friend, and she offered him vodka and preserved mushrooms of her
own making. The constable, after eating a little, told her that the
execution was not to take place the next day.

“Why?”

“A very strange thing has happened. There is no hangman to be found.
They had one in Moscow, my son told me, but he has been reading the
Gospels a good deal and says: ‘I will not commit a murder.’ He had
himself been sentenced to hard labour for having committed a murder, and
now he objects to hang when the law orders him. He was threatened with
flogging. ‘You may flog me,’ he said, ‘but I won’t do it.’”

Natalia Ivanovna grew red and hot at the thought which suddenly came
into her head.

“Could not the death sentence be commuted now?”

“How so, since the judges have passed it? The Czar alone has the right
of amnesty.”

“But how would he know?”

“They have the right of appealing to him.”

“But it is on my account they are to die,” said that stupid woman,
Natalia Ivanovna. “And I forgive them.”

The constable laughed. “Well--send a petition to the Czar.”

“May I do it?”

“Of course you may.”

“But is it not too late?”

“Send it by telegram.”

“To the Czar himself?”

“To the Czar, if you like.”

The story of the hangman having refused to do his duty, and preferring
to take the flogging instead, suddenly changed the soul of Natalia
Ivanovna. The pity and the horror she felt the moment she heard that the
peasants were sentenced to death, could not be stifled now, but filled
her whole soul.

“Filip Vassilievich, my friend. Write that telegram for me. I want to
appeal to the Czar to pardon them.”

The constable shook his head. “I wonder whether that would not involve
us in trouble?”

“I do it upon my own responsibility. I will not mention your name.”

“Is not she a kind woman,” thought the constable. “Very kind-hearted,
to be sure. If my wife had such a heart, our life would be a paradise,
instead of what it is now.” And he wrote the telegram,--“To his Imperial
Majesty, the Emperor. Your Majesty’s loyal subject, the widow of Peter
Nikolaevich Sventizky, murdered by the peasants, throws herself at the
sacred feet (this sentence, when he wrote it down, pleased the constable
himself most of all) of your Imperial Majesty, and implores you to grant
an amnesty to the peasants so and so, from such a province, district,
and village, who have been sentenced to death.”

The telegram was sent by the constable himself, and Natalia Ivanovna
felt relieved and happy. She had a feeling that since she, the widow of
the murdered man, had forgiven the murderers, and was applying for an
amnesty, the Czar could not possibly refuse it.


XI

LISA EROPKIN lived in a state of continual excitement. The longer she
lived a true Christian life as it had been revealed to her, the more
convinced she became that it was the right way, and her heart was full
of joy.

She had two immediate aims before her. The one was to convert Mahin; or,
as she put it to herself, to arouse his true nature, which was good
and kind. She loved him, and the light of her love revealed the divine
element in his soul which is at the bottom of all souls. But, further,
she saw in him an exceptionally kind and tender heart, as well as a
noble mind. Her other aim was to abandon her riches. She had first
thought of giving away what she possessed in order to test Mahin; but
afterwards she wanted to do so for her own sake, for the sake of her own
soul. She began by simply giving money to any one who wanted it. But her
father stopped that; besides which, she felt disgusted at the crowd of
supplicants who personally, and by letters, besieged her with demands
for money. Then she resolved to apply to an old man, known to be a
saint by his life, and to give him her money to dispose of in the way
he thought best. Her father got angry with her when he heard about it.
During a violent altercation he called her mad, a raving lunatic, and
said he would take measures to prevent her from doing injury to herself.

Her father’s irritation proved contagious. Losing all control
over herself, and sobbing with rage, she behaved with the greatest
impertinence to her father, calling him a tyrant and a miser.

Then she asked his forgiveness. He said he did not mind what she said;
but she saw plainly that he was offended, and in his heart did not
forgive her. She did not feel inclined to tell Mahin about her quarrel
with her father; as to her sister, she was very cold to Lisa, being
jealous of Mahin’s love for her.

“I ought to confess to God,” she said to herself. As all this happened
in Lent, she made up her mind to fast in preparation for the communion,
and to reveal all her thoughts to the father confessor, asking his
advice as to what she ought to decide for the future.

At a small distance from her town a monastery was situated, where an old
monk lived who had gained a great reputation by his holy life, by his
sermons and prophecies, as well as by the marvellous cures ascribed to
him.

The monk had received a letter from Lisa’s father announcing the visit
of his daughter, and telling him in what a state of excitement the young
girl was. He also expressed the hope in that letter that the monk would
influence her in the right way, urging her not to depart from the golden
mean, and to live like a good Christian without trying to upset the
present conditions of her life.

The monk received Lisa after he had seen many other people, and being
very tired, began by quietly recommending her to be modest and to submit
to her present conditions of life and to her parents. Lisa listened
silently, blushing and flushed with excitement. When he had finished
admonishing her, she began saying with tears in her eyes, timidly
at first, that Christ bade us leave father and mother to follow Him.
Getting more and more excited, she told him her conception of Christ.
The monk smiled slightly, and replied as he generally did when
admonishing his penitents; but after a while he remained silent,
repeating with heavy sighs, “O God!” Then he said, “Well, come to
confession to-morrow,” and blessed her with his wrinkled hands.

The next day Lisa came to confession, and without renewing their
interrupted conversation, he absolved her and refused to dispose of her
fortune, giving no reasons for doing so.

Lisa’s purity, her devotion to God and her ardent soul, impressed the
monk deeply. He had desired long ago to renounce the world entirely; but
the brotherhood, which drew a large income from his work as a preacher,
insisted on his continuing his activity. He gave way, although he had a
vague feeling that he was in a false position. It was rumoured that he
was a miracle-working saint, whereas in reality he was a weak man, proud
of his success in the world. When the soul of Lisa was revealed to him,
he saw clearly into his own soul. He discovered how different he was to
what he wanted to be, and realised the desire of his heart.

Soon after Lisa’s visit he went to live in a separate cell as a hermit,
and for three weeks did not officiate again in the church of the friary.
After the celebration of the mass, he preached a sermon denouncing his
own sins and those of the world, and urging all to repent.

From that day he preached every fortnight, and his sermons attracted
increasing audiences. His fame as a preacher spread abroad. His sermons
were extraordinarily fearless and sincere, and deeply impressed all who
listened to him.


XII

VASSILY was actually carrying out the object he had in leaving the
prison. With the help of a few friends he broke into the house of the
rich merchant Krasnopuzov, whom he knew to be a miser and a debauchee.
Vassily took out of his writing-desk thirty thousand roubles, and began
disposing of them as he thought right. He even gave up drink, so as
not to spend that money on himself, but to distribute it to the poor;
helping poor girls to get married; paying off people’s debts, and doing
this all without ever revealing himself to those he helped; his only
desire was to distribute his money in the right way. As he also gave
bribes to the police, he was left in peace for a long time.

His heart was singing for joy. When at last he was arrested and put to
trial, he confessed with pride that he had robbed the fat merchant. “The
money,” he said, “was lying idle in that fool’s desk, and he did not
even know how much he had, whereas I have put it into circulation and
helped a lot of good people.”

The counsel for the defence spoke with such good humour and kindness
that the jury felt inclined to discharge Vassily, but sentenced him
nevertheless to confinement in prison. He thanked the jury, and assured
them that he would find his way out of prison before long.

XIII

NATALIA IVANOVNA SVENTIZKY’S telegram proved useless. The committee
appointed to deal with the petitions in the Emperor’s name, decided not
even to make a report to the Czar. But one day when the Sventizky case
was discussed at the Emperor’s luncheon-table, the chairman of the
committee, who was present, mentioned the telegram which had been
received from Sve

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