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The Little Angel, and Other Stories

by Leonid Andreyev · English · Gutenberg #49598 · 309,558 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Little Angel, and Other Stories

Author: Leonid Andreyev

Translator: W. H. Lowe


        
Release date: August 4, 2015 [eBook #49598]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE ANGEL, AND OTHER STORIES ***
cover




The Little Angel
AND OTHER STORIES

TRANSLATED FROM
 THE RUSSIAN OF

_L. N. ANDREYEV_

By W. H. LOWE

ALFRED A. KNOPF
 NEW YORK MCMXVI


title page


Contents


 PREFACE
 THE LITTLE ANGEL
 AT THE ROADSIDE STATION
 SNAPPER
 THE LIE
 AN ORIGINAL
 PETKA AT THE BUNGALOW
 SILENCE
 LAUGHTER
 THE FRIEND
 IN THE BASEMENT
 THE CITY
 THE MARSEILLAISE
 THE TOCSIN
 BARGAMOT AND GARASKA
 STEPPING-STONES
 THE SPY


PREFACE

Leonid Nikolaivich Andreyev was born in Orel in 1871. After his
father’s death he was thrown upon his own resources, but managed to
study at both Petrograd and Moscow Universities, graduating in Law in
1897. During this period he endured great hardship—often even actual
hunger—and was the victim of deep melancholia. His first writings were
unsuccessful; and, for a time, he devoted himself to painting. Later he
came into touch with the Russian press as police-court reporter for a
leading newspaper.

Then “Silence” was published, and brought him immediate recognition.
This terrible story may serve as an example of his method. The silence
of the frightened girl, dying with her secret, and of her mother,
stricken, through shock, with paralysis, crushes the pride of the
priest whose training has so stiffened his nature that he cannot
express or welcome affection. He cries for help; he entreats them to
show him pity. His daughter lies dead; his wife motionless. An abstract
idea is the germ of each tale; around it are woven both characters and
incident—a process which is in marked contrast to the work of his
contemporary Maxim Gorky whose people with their actions come directly
from life—mostly, indeed, from his own personal experiences. Sometimes
the double note is tragic; oftener, the abstract idea redeems the gloom
or horror of the actual tale, as in “The Little Angel” and “In the
Basement,” for, while the stories of Andreyev are tinged with more than
even the ordinary tone of sadness of the Russian writer, there seems to
be in his mind a balancing, a search for some kind of compensation, as
though he would say, “No man is wholly good or wholly bad.” Perhaps it
is the weakness of a method by which his characters become the
puppets—however real—illustrating an idea; perhaps it is the strength
of the author’s vision, that makes his people sometimes morbid and
unhealthy. They are driven by a relentless creator, as in Masefield’s
“Nan,” to their destiny. Nevertheless, the beauty of his style, the
clear imagination, and the perfect form of his stories come not only
from an artist but from a philosopher and poet. His work is not for
babes. Deep truths are presented not more realistically in the
anomalies and terrors of life than in the symbolism of his short
stories and, in its more elaborate form, of his plays. Touches of
tenderness, beauty, and sympathetic insight are found on every page
side by side with brutality and coarseness, for Andreyev draws Life
without hiding, without shirking. But, beyond and behind, his mind is
working ceaselessly, struggling to coordinate the whole.

His works comprise a large number of stories, including beside the
present collection “Judas Iscariot,” “The Red Laugh,” “The Seven Who
Were Hanged,” and some powerful studies in madness; and of plays most
of which are performed upon the Russian, though not yet upon the
English, stage. Among the latter are “The Life of Man,” “Anathema,”
“The Black Maskers,” “The Sabine Women,” and “The Tragedy of Belgium.”



THE LITTLE ANGEL

I

At times Sashka wished to give up what is called living: to cease to
wash every morning in cold water, on which thin sheets of ice floated
about; to go no more to the grammar school, and there to have to listen
to every one scolding him; no more to experience the pain in the small
of his back and indeed over his whole body when his mother made him
kneel in the corner all the evening. But, since he was only thirteen
years of age, and did not know all the means by which people abandon
life at will, he continued to go to the grammar school and to kneel in
the corner, and it seemed to him as if life would never end. A year
would go by, and another, and yet another, and still he would be going
to school, and be made to kneel in the corner. And since Sashka
possessed an indomitable and bold spirit, he could not supinely
tolerate evil, and so found means to avenge himself on life. With this
object in view he would thrash his companions, be rude to the Head,
impertinent to the masters, and tell lies all day long to his teachers
and to his mother—but to his father only he never lied. If in a fight
he got his nose broken, he would purposely make the damage worse, and
howl, without shedding a single tear, but so loudly that all who heard
him were fain to stop their ears to keep out the disagreeable sound.
When he had howled as long as thought advisable, he would suddenly
cease, and, putting out his tongue, draw in his copy-book a caricature
of himself howling at an usher who pressed his fingers to his ears,
while the victor stood trembling with fear. The whole copy-book was
filled with caricatures, the one which most frequently occurred being
that of a short stout woman beating a boy as thin as a lucifer-match
with a rolling pin. Below in a large scrawling hand would be written
the legend: “Beg my pardon, puppy!” and the reply, “Won’t! blow’d if I
do!”

Before Christmas Sashka was expelled from school, and when his mother
attempted to thrash him, he bit her finger. This action gave him his
liberty. He left off washing in the morning, ran about all day bullying
the other boys, and had but one fear, and that was hunger, for his
mother entirely left off providing for him, so that he came to depend
upon the pieces of bread and potatoes which his father secreted for
him. On these conditions Sashka found existence tolerable.

One Friday (it was Christmas Eve) he had been playing with the other
boys, until they had dispersed to their homes, followed by the squeak
of the rusty frozen wicket gate as it closed behind the last of them.
It was already growing dark, and a grey snowy mist was travelling up
from the country, along a dark alley; in a low black building, which
stood fronting the end of the alley, a lamp was burning with a reddish,
unblinking light. The frost had become more intense, and when Sashka
reached the circle of light cast by the lamp, he saw that fine dry
flakes of snow were floating slowly on the air. It was high time to be
getting home.

“Where have you been knocking about all night, puppy?” exclaimed his
mother doubling her fist, without, however, striking. Her sleeves were
turned up, exposing her fat white arms, and on her forehead, almost
devoid of eyebrows, stood beads of perspiration. As Sashka passed by
her he recognized the familiar smell of vodka. His mother scratched her
head with the short dirty nail of her thick fore-finger, and since it
was no good scolding, she merely spat, and cried: “Statisticians!
that’s what they are!”

Sashka shuffled contemptuously, and went behind the partition, from
whence might be heard the heavy breathing of his father, Ivan Savvich,
who was in a chronic state of shivering, and was now trying to warm
himself by sitting on the heated bench of the stove with his hands
under him, palms downwards.

“Sashka! the Svetchnikovs have invited you to the Christmas tree. The
housemaid came,” he whispered.

“Get along with you!” said Sashka with incredulity.

“Fact! The old woman there has purposely not told you, but she has
mended your jacket all the same.”

“Non—sense,” Sashka replied, still more surprised.

The Svetchnikovs were rich people, who had put him to the grammar
school, and after his expulsion had forbidden him their house.

His father once more took his oath to the truth of his statement, and
Sashka became meditative.

“Well then, move, shift a bit,” he said to his father, as he leapt upon
the short bench, adding:

“I won’t go to those devils. I should prove jolly well too much for
them, if I were to turn up. _Depraved boy_,” drawled Sashka in
imitation of his patrons. “They are none too good themselves, the
smug-faced prigs!”

“Oh! Sashka, Sashka,” his father complained, sitting hunched up with
cold, “you’ll come to a bad end.”

“What about yourself, then?” was Sashka’s rude rejoinder. “Better shut
up. Afraid of the old woman. Ba! old muff!”

His father sat on in silence and shivered. A faint light found its way
through a broad clink at the top, where the partition failed to meet
the ceiling by a quarter of an inch, and lay in bright patches upon his
high forehead, beneath which the deep cavities of his eyes showed
black.

In times gone by Ivan Savvich had been used to drink heavily, and then
his wife had feared and hated him. But when he had begun to develop
unmistakable signs of consumption, and could drink no longer, she took
to drink in her turn, and gradually accustomed herself to vodka. Then
she avenged herself for all she had suffered at the hands of that tall
narrow-chested man, who used incomprehensible words, had lost his place
through disobedience and drunkenness, and who brought home with him
just such long-haired, debauched and conceited fellows as himself.

In contradistinction to her husband, the more Feoktista Petrovna drank
the healthier she became, and the heavier became her fists. Now she
said what she pleased, brought men and women to the house just as she
chose, and sang with them noisy songs, while he lay silent behind the
partition huddled together with perpetual cold, and meditating on the
injustice and sorrow of human life. To every one, with whom she talked,
she complained that she had no such enemies in the world as her husband
and son, they were stuck-up statisticians!

For the space of an hour his mother kept drumming into Sashka’s ears:

“But I say you shall go,” punctuating each word with a heavy blow on
the table, which made the tumblers, placed on it after washing, jump
and rattle again.

“But I say I won’t!” Sashka coolly replied, dragging down the corners
of his mouth with the will to show his teeth—a habit which had earned
for him at school the nickname of Wolfkin.

“I’ll thrash you, won’t I just!” cried his mother.

“All right! thrash away!”

But Feoktista Petrovna knew that she could no longer strike her son now
that he had begun to retaliate by biting, and that if she drove him
into the street he would go off larking, and sooner get frost-bitten
than go to the Svetchnikovs, therefore she appealed to her husband’s
authority.

“Calls himself a father, and can’t protect the mother from insult!”

“Really, Sashka, go. Why are you so obstinate?” he jerked out from the
bench. “They will perhaps take you up again. They are kind people.”
Sashka only laughed in an insulting manner.

His father, long ago, before Sashka was born, had been tutor at the
Svetchnikovs’, and had ever since looked on them as the best people in
the world. At that time he had held also an appointment in the
statistical office of the _Zemstvo,_ and had not yet taken to drink.
Eventually he was compelled through his own fault to marry his
landlady’s daughter. From that time he severed his connection with the
Svetchnikovs, and took to drink. Indeed, he let himself go to such an
extent, that he was several times picked up drunk in the streets and
taken to the police station. But the Svetchnikovs did not cease to
assist him with money, and Feoktista Petrovna, although she hated them,
together with books and everything connected with her husband’s past,
still valued their acquaintance, and was in the habit of boasting of
it.

“Perhaps you might bring something for me too from the Christmas tree,”
continued his father. He was using craft to induce his son to go, and
Sashka knew it, and despised his father for his weakness and want of
straightforwardness; though he really did wish to bring back something
for the poor sickly old man, who had for a long time been without even
good tobacco.

“All right!” he blurted out; “give me my jacket. Have you put the
buttons on? No fear! I know you too well!”

II

The children had not yet been admitted to the drawing-room, where the
Christmas tree stood, but remained chattering in the nursery. Sashka,
with lofty superciliousness, stood listening to their naive talk, and
fingering in his breeches pocket the broken cigarettes which he had
managed to abstract from his host’s study. At this moment there came up
to him the youngest of the Svetchnikovs, Kolya, and stood motionless
before him, a look of surprise on his face, his toes turned in, and a
finger stuck in the corner of his pouting mouth. Six months ago, at the
instance of his relatives, he had given up this bad habit of putting
his finger in his mouth, but he could not quite break himself of it. He
had blonde locks cut in a fringe on his forehead and falling in
ringlets on his shoulders, and blue, wondering eyes; in fact, he was
just such a boy in appearance as Sashka particularly loved to bully.

“Are ”oo weally a naughty boy?” he inquired of Sashka. “Miss said ”oo
was. I’m a dood boy.”

“That you are!” replied Sashka, considering the other’s short velvet
trousers and great turndown collars.

“Would ”oo like to have a dun? There!” and he pointed at him a little
pop-gun with a cork tied to it. The Wolfkin took the gun, pressed down
the spring, and, aiming at the nose of the unsuspecting Kolya, pulled
the trigger. The cork struck his nose, and rebounding, hung by the
string. Kolya’s blue eyes opened wider than ever, and filled with
tears. Transferring his finger from his mouth to his reddening nose he
blinked his long eyelashes and whispered:

“Bad—bad boy!”

A young lady of striking appearance, with her hair dressed in the
simplest and the most becoming fashion, now entered the nursery. She
was sister to the lady of the house, the very one indeed to whom
Sashka’s father had formerly given lessons.

“Here’s the boy,” said she, pointing out Sashka to the bald-headed man
who accompanied her. “Bow, Sashka, you should not be so rude!”

But Sashka would bow neither to her, nor to her companion of the bald
head. She little suspected how much he knew. But, as a fact, Sashka did
know that his miserable father had loved her, and that she had married
another; and, though this had taken place subsequent to his father’s
marriage, Sashka could not bring himself to forgive what seemed to him
like treachery.

“Takes after his father!” sighed Sofia Dmitrievna. “Could not you,
Plutov Michailovich, do something for him? My husband says that a
commercial school would suit him better than the grammar school.
Sashka, would you like to go to a technical school?”

“No!” curtly replied Sashka, who had caught the offensive word
“husband.”

“Do you want to be a shepherd, then?” asked the gentleman.

“Not likely!” said Sashka, in an offended tone.

“What then?”

Now Sashka did not know what he would like to be, but upon reflection
replied: “Well, it’s all the same to me, even a shepherd, if you like.”

The bald-headed gentleman regarded the strange boy with a look of
perplexity. When his eyes had travelled up from his patched boots to
his face, Sashka put out his tongue and quickly drew it back again, so
that Sofia Dmitrievna did not notice anything, but the old gentleman
showed an amount of irascibility that she could not understand.

“I should not mind going to a commercial school,” bashfully suggested
Sashka.

The lady was overjoyed at Sashka’s decision, and meditated with a sigh
on the beneficial influence exercised by an old love.

“I don’t know whether there will be a vacancy,” dryly remarked the old
man avoiding looking at Sashka, and smoothing down the ridge of hair
which stuck up on the back of his head. “However, we shall see.”

Meanwhile the children were becoming noisy, and in a great state of
excitement were waiting impatiently for the Christmas tree.

The excellent practice with the pop-gun made in the hands of a boy, who
commanded respect both for his stature and for his reputation for
naughtiness, found imitators, and many a little button of a nose was
made red. The tiny maids, holding their sides, bent almost double with
laughter, as their little cavaliers with manly contempt of fear and
pain, but all the same wrinkling up their faces in suspense, received
the impact of the cork.

At length the doors were opened, and a voice said: “Come in, children;
gently, not so fast!” Opening their little eyes wide, and holding their
breath in anticipation, the children filed into the brightly illumined
drawing-room in orderly pairs, and quietly walked round the glittering
tree. It cast a strong, shadowless light on their eager faces, with
rounded eyes and mouths. For a minute there reigned the silence of
profound enchantment, which all at once broke out into a chorus of
delighted exclamation. One of the little girls, unable to restrain her
delight, kept dancing up and down in the same place, her little tress
braided with blue ribbon beating meanwhile rhythmically against her
shoulders. Sashka remained morose and gloomy—something evil was working
in his little wounded breast. The tree blinded him with its red,
shriekingly insolent glitter of countless candles. It was foreign,
hostile to him, even as the crowd of smart, pretty children which
surrounded it. He would have liked to give it a shove, and topple it
over on their shining heads. It seemed as though some iron hand were
gripping his heart, and wringing out of it every drop of blood. He
crept behind the piano, and sat down there in a corner unconsciously
crumpling to pieces in his pocket the last of the cigarettes, and
thinking that though he had a father and mother and a home, it came to
the same thing as if he had none, and nowhere to go to. He tried to
recall to his imagination his little penknife, which he had acquired by
a swap not long ago, and was very fond of; but his knife all at once
seemed to him a very poor affair with its ground-down blade and only
half of a yellow haft. To-morrow he would smash it up, and then he
would have nothing left at all!

But suddenly Sashka’s narrow eyes gleamed with astonishment, and his
face in a moment resumed its ordinary expression of audacity and
self-confidence. On the side of the tree turned towards him—which was
the back of it, and less brightly illumined than the other side—he
discovered something such as had never come within the circle of his
existence, and without which all his surroundings appeared as empty as
though peopled by persons without life. It was a little angel in wax
carelessly hung in the thickest of the dark boughs, and looking as if
it were floating in the air. His transparent dragon-fly wings trembled
in the light, and he seemed altogether alive and ready to fly away. The
rosy fingers of his exquisitely formed hands were stretched upwards,
and from his head there floated just such locks as Kolya’s. But there
was something here that was wanting in Kolya’s face, and in all other
faces and things. The face of the little angel did not shine with joy,
nor was it clouded by grief; but there lay on it the impress of another
feeling, not to be explained in words, nor defined by thought, but to
be attained only by the sympathy of a kindred feeling. Sashka was not
conscious of the force of the mysterious influence which attracted him
towards the little angel, but he felt that he had known him all his
life, and had always loved him, loved him more than his penknife, more
than his father, more than anything else. Filled with doubt, alarm, and
a delight which he could not comprehend, Sashka clasped his hands to
his bosom and whispered:

“Dear—dear little angel!”

The more intently he looked the more fraught with significance the
expression of the little angel’s face became. He was so infinitely far
off, so unlike everything which surrounded him there. The other toys
seemed to take a pride in hanging there pretty, and decked out, upon
the glittering tree, but he was pensive, and fearing the intrusive
light purposely hid himself in the dark greenery, so that none might
see him. It would be a mad cruelty to touch his dainty little wings.

“Dear—dear!” whispered Sashka.

His head became feverish. He clasped his hands behind his back, and in
full readiness to fight to the death to win the little angel, he walked
to and fro with cautious, stealthy steps. He avoided looking at the
little angel, lest he should direct the attention of others towards
him, but he felt that he was still there, and had not flown away.

Now the hostess appeared in the doorway, a tall, stately lady with a
bright aureole of grey hair dressed high upon her head. The children
trooped round her with expressions of delight, and the little girl—the
same that had danced about in her place—hung wearily on her hand,
blinking heavily with sleepy eyes.

As Sashka approached her he seemed almost choking with emotion.

“Auntie—auntie!”[1] said he, trying to speak caressingly, but his voice
sounded harsher than ever. “Auntie, dear!”

She did not hear him, so he tugged impatiently at her dress.

“What’s the matter with you? Why are you pulling my dress?” said the
grey-haired lady in surprise. “It’s rude.”

“Auntie—auntie, do give me one thing from the tree; give me the little
angel.”

“Impossible,” replied the lady in a tone of indifference. “We are going
to keep the tree decorated till the New Year. But you are no longer a
child; you should call me by name—Maria Dmitrievna.”

Sashka, feeling as if he were falling down a precipice, grasped the
last means of saving himself.

“I am sorry I have been naughty. I’ll be more industrious for the
future,” he blurted out. But this formula, which had always paid with
his masters, made no impression upon the lady of the grey hair.

“A good thing, too, my friend,” she said, as unconcernedly as before.

“Give me the little angel,” demanded Sashka, gruffly.

“But it’s impossible. Can’t you understand that?”

But Sashka did not understand, and when the lady turned to go out of
the room he followed her, his gaze fixed without conscious thought upon
her black silk dress. In his surging brain there glimmered a
recollection of how one of the boys in his class had asked the master
to mark him 3,[2] and when the master refused he had knelt down before
him, and putting his hands together as in prayer, had begun to cry. The
master was angry, but gave him 3 all the same. At the time Sashka had
immortalised this episode in a caricature, but now his only means left
was to follow the boy’s example. Accordingly he plucked at the lady’s
dress again, and when she turned round, dropped with a bang on to his
knees, and folded his hands as described above. But he could not
squeeze out a single tear!

“Are you out of your mind?” exclaimed the grey-haired lady, casting a
searching look round the room; but luckily no one was present.

“What is the matter with you?”

Kneeling there with clasped hands, Sashka looked at her with dislike,
and rudely repeated:

“Give me the little angel.”

His eyes, fixed intently on the lady to catch the first word she should
utter, were anything but good to look at, and the hostess answered
hurriedly:

“Well, then, I’ll give it to you. Ah! what a stupid you are! I will
give you what you want, but why could you not wait till the New Year?”

“Stand up! And never,” she added in a didactic tone, “never kneel to
any one: it is humiliating. Kneel before God alone.”

“Talk away!” thought Sashka, trying to get in front of her, and merely
succeeding in treading on her dress.

When she had taken the toy from the tree, Sashka devoured her with his
eyes, but stretched out his hands for it with a painful pucker of the
nose. It seemed to him that the tall lady would break the little angel.

“Beautiful thing!” said the lady, who was sorry to part with such a
dainty and presumably expensive toy. “Who can have hung it there? Well,
what do you want with such a thing? Are you not too big to know what to
do with it? Look, there are some picture-books. But this I promised to
give to Kolya; he begged so earnestly for it.” But this was not the
truth.

Sashka’s agony became unbearable. He clenched his teeth convulsively,
and seemed almost to grind them. The lady of the grey hair feared
nothing so much as a scene, so she slowly held out the little angel to
Sashka.

“There now, take it!” she said in a displeased tone; “what a persistent
boy you are!”

Sashka’s hands as they seized the little angel seemed like tentacles,
and were tense as steel springs, but withal so soft and careful that
the little angel might have imagined himself to be flying in the air.

“A-h-h!” escaped in a long _diminuendo_ sigh from Sashka’s breast,
while in his eyes glistened two little tear-drops, which stood still
there as though unused to the light. Slowly drawing the little angel to
his bosom, he kept his shining eyes on the hostess, with a quiet,
tender smile which died away in a feeling of unearthly bliss. It
seemed, when the dainty wings of the little angel touched Sashka’s
sunken breast, as if he experienced something so blissful, so bright,
the like of which had never before been experienced in this sorrowful,
sinful, suffering world.

“A-h-h!” sighed he once more as the little angel’s wings touched him.
And at the shining of his face the absurdly decorated and insolently
growing tree seemed to be extinguished, and the grey-haired, portly
dame smiled with gladness, and the parchment-like face of the
bald-headed gentleman twitched, and the children fell into a vivid
silence as though touched by a breath of human happiness.

For one short moment all observed a mysterious likeness between the
awkward boy who had outgrown his clothes, and the lineaments of the
little angel, which had been spiritualised by the hand of an unknown
artist.

But the next moment the picture was entirely changed. Crouching like a
panther preparing to spring, Sashka surveyed the surrounding company,
on the look-out for some one who should dare wrest his little angel
from him.

“I’m going home,” he said in a dull voice, having in view a way of
escape through the crowd, “home to Father.”

[1] This is, of course, only a child’s way of addressing an
elder.—_Tr._]


[2] In Russian schools 5 is the maximum mark.—TV.]

III

His mother was asleep worn out with a whole day’s work and
vodka-drinking. In the little room behind the partition there stood a
small cooking-lamp burning on the table. Its feeble yellow light, with
difficulty penetrating the sooty glass, threw a strange shadow over the
faces of Sashka and his father.

“Is it not pretty?” asked Sashka in a whisper, holding the little angel
at a distance from his father, so as not to allow him to touch it.

“Yes, there’s something most remarkable about him,” whispered the
father, gazing thoughtfully at the toy. And his face expressed the same
concentrated attention and delight, as did Sashka’s.

“Look, he is going to fly.”

“I see it too,” replied Sashka in an ecstasy. “Think I’m blind? But
look at his little wings! Ah! don’t touch!”

The father withdrew his hand, and with troubled eyes studied the
details of the little angel, while Sashka whispered with the air of a
pedagogue:

“Father, what a bad habit you have of touching everything! You might
break it.”

There fell upon the wall the shadows of two grotesque, motionless heads
bending towards one another, one big and shaggy, the other small and
round.

Within the big head strange torturing thoughts, though at the same time
full of delight, were seething. His eyes unblinkingly regarded the
little angel, and under his steadfast gaze it seemed to grow larger and
brighter, and its wings to tremble with a noiseless trepidation, and
all the surroundings—the timber-built, soot-stained wall, the dirty
table, Sashka—everything became fused into one level grey mass without
light or shade. It seemed to the broken man that he heard a pitying
voice from the world of wonders, wherein once he had dwelt, and whence
he had been cast out forever. There they knew nothing of dirt, of weary
quarrelling, of the blindly-cruel strife of egotism, there they knew
nothing of the tortures of a man arrested in the streets with callous
laughter, and beaten by the rough hand of the night-watchman. There
everything is pure, joyful, bright. And all this purity found an asylum
in the soul of her whom he loved more than life, and had lost—when he
had kept his hold upon his own useless life. With the smell of wax,
which emanated from the toy, was mingled a subtle aroma, and it seemed
to the broken man that her dear fingers touched the angel, those
fingers which he would fain have caressed in one long kiss, till death
should close his lips forever. This was why the little toy was so
beautiful, this was why there was in it something specially attractive,
which defied description. The little angel had descended from that
heaven which her soul was to him, and had brought a ray of light into
the damp room, steeped in sulphurous fumes, and to the dark soul of the
man from whom had been taken all: love, and happiness, and life.

On a level with the eyes of the man, who had lived his life, sparkled
the eyes of the boy, who was beginning his life, and embraced the
little angel in their caress. For them present and future had
disappeared: the ever-sorrowful, piteous father, the rough, unendurable
mother, the black darkness of insults, of cruelty, of humiliations, and
of spiteful grief. The thoughts of Sashka were formless, nebulous, but
all the more deeply for that did they move his agitated soul.
Everything that is good and bright in the world, all profound grief,
and the hope of a soul that sighs for God—the little angel absorbed
them all into himself, and that was why he glowed with such a soft
divine radiance, that was why his little dragonfly wings trembled with
a noiseless trepidation.

The father and son did not look at one another: their sick hearts
grieved, wept, and rejoiced apart. But there was a something in their
thoughts which fused their hearts in one, and annihilated that
bottomless abyss which separates man from man and makes him so lonely,
unhappy, and weak. The father with an unconscious motion put his arm
around the neck of his son, and the son’s head rested equally without
conscious volition upon his father’s consumptive chest.

“_She_ it was who gave it to thee, was it not?” whispered the father,
without taking his eyes off the little angel.

At another time Sashka would have replied with a rude negation, but now
the only reply possible resounded of itself within his soul, and he
calmly pronounced the pious fraud: “Who else? of course she did.”

The father made no reply, and Sashka relapsed into silence.

Something grated in the adjoining room, then clicked, and then was
silent for a moment, and then noisily and hurriedly the clock struck
“One, two, three.”

“Sashka, do you ever dream?” asked the father in a meditative tone.

“No! Oh, yes,” he admitted, “once I had one, in which I fell down from
the roof. We were climbing after the pigeons, and I fell down.”

“But I dream always. Strange things are dreams. One sees the whole
past, one loves and suffers as though it were reality.”

Again he was silent, and Sashka felt his arm tremble as it lay upon his
neck. The trembling and pressure of his father’s arm became stronger
and stronger, and the sensitive silence of the night was all at once
broken by the pitiful sobbing sound of suppressed weeping. Sashka
sternly puckered his brow, and cautiously—so as not to disturb the
heavy trembling arm—wiped away a tear from his eyes. So strange was it
to see a big old man crying.

“Ah! Sashka, Sashka,” sobbed the father, “what is the meaning of
everything?”

“Why, what’s the matter?” sternly whispered Sashka. “You’re crying just
like a little boy.”

“Well, I won’t, then,” said the father with, a piteous smile of excuse.
“What’s the good?”

Feoktista Petrovna turned on her bed. She sighed, cleared her throat,
and mumbled incoherent sounds in a loud and strangely persistent
manner.

It was time to go to bed. But before doing so the little angel must be
disposed of for the night. He could not be left on the floor, so he was
hung up by his string, which was fastened to the flue of the stove.
There it stood out accurately delineated against the white Dutch-tiles.
And so they could both see him, Sashka and his father.

Hurriedly throwing into a corner the various rags on which he was in
the habit of sleeping, Sashka lay down on his back, in order as quickly
as possible to look again at the little angel.

“Why don’t you undress?” asked his father as he shivered and wrapped
himself up in his tattered blanket, and arranged his clothes, which he
had thrown over his feet.

“What’s the good? I shall soon be up again.”

Sashka wished to add that he did not care to go to sleep at all, but he
had no time to do so, since he fell to sleep as suddenly as though he
had sunk to the bottom of a deep swift river.

His father presently fell asleep also. And gentle sleep and restfulness
lay upon the weary face of the man who had lived his life, and upon the
brave face of the little man who was just beginning his life.

But the little angel hanging by the hot stove began to melt. The lamp,
which had been left burning at the entreaty of Sashka, filled the room
with the smell of kerosene, and through its smoked glass threw a
melancholy light upon a scene of gradual dissolution. The little angel
seemed to stir. Over his rosy fingers there rolled thick drops which
fell upon the bench. To the smell of kerosene was added the stifling
scent of melting wax. The little angel gave a tremble as though on the
point of flight, and—fell with a soft thud upon the hot flags.

An inquisitive cockroach singed its wings as it ran round the formless
lump of melted wax, climbed up the dragon-fly wings, and twitching its
feelers went on its way.

Through the curtained window the grey-blue light of coming day crept
in, and the frozen water-carrier was already making a noise in the
courtyard with his iron scoop.



AT THE ROADSIDE STATION

It was early spring when I went to the bungalow. On the road still lay
last year’s darkened leaves. I was unaccompanied; and alone I wandered
through the still empty bungalow, the windows of which reflected the
April sun. I mounted the broad bright terraces, and wondered who would
live here under the green canopy of birch and oak. And when I closed my
eyes I seemed to hear quick, cheerful footsteps, youthful song, and the
ringing sound of women’s laughter.

I used often to go to the station to meet the passenger trains. I was
not expecting any one, for there was no one to come and see me; but I
am fond of those iron giants, when they rush past, rolling their
shoulders, tearing along the rails with colossal momentum, and carrying
somewhither persons unknown to me, but still my fellow-creatures. They
seem to me alive and uncanny. In their speed I recognize the immensity
of the world and the might of man, and when they whistle with such
abandon and in so imperious a manner, I think how they are whistling in
the same way in America, and Asia, maybe in torrid Africa.

The station was a small one, with two short sidings, and when the
passenger train had left it became still and deserted. The forest and
the streaming sunshine dominated the little low platform and the
desolate track, and blended the rails in silence and light. On one of
the sidings under an empty sleeping-car fowls wandered about, swarming
round the iron wheels, and one could hardly believe, as one watched
their peaceful, fussy activity, that it would be much the same in
America, in Asia, or in torrid Africa.... In a week I became acquainted
with all the inhabitants of this little corner, and saluted as
acquaintances the watchmen in their blue blouses, and the silent
pointsmen with their dull countenances and their brass horns, which
glittered in the sun.

Every day I saw at the station a gendarme. He was a healthy, strong
fellow, as are they all, with broad back, in a tightly stretched blue
uniform, with enormous arms and a youthful countenance, upon which,
from behind a severe official dignity, there still looked out the
blue-eyed naïveté of the country. At first he used to scan me all over
with a gloomy suspicion, and put on a look of unapproachable severity
without a touch of indulgence, and when he passed me would clank his
spurs in a peculiarly sharp and eloquent manner. But he soon became
used to me, just as he had become used to the pillars which supported
the roof of the platform, to the desolate track, and to the discarded
sleeping-car under which the fowls kept running about. In such quiet
corners a habit is soon formed. And when he left off observing me, I
perceived that this man was bored—bored as no one else in the world. He
was bored with the wearisome station, bored by the absence of thoughts,
bored by his strength-devouring inactivity, bored by the exclusiveness
of his position, somewhere in the void between the station-master, who
was unapproachable to him, and the lower employés to whom he was
himself unapproachable. His soul lived on breaches of the peace, but at
this tiny station no one ever committed a breach of the peace, and
every time the passenger train departed without any adventure there
passed over the face of the gendarme the expression of annoyance and
vexation of a person who has been deprived of his due. For some minutes
he would stand still in indecision, and then with listless gait walk to
the other end of the platform without any aim or object. On his way he
might stop for a second in front of some peasant woman who had been
waiting for the train—but she was only a peasant woman like any
other—and so knitting his brows the gendarme would pass on his way.

Then he would sit down stout and listless, as though he had been boiled
soft, and felt how soft and flabby were his useless arms under the
cloth of his uniform, and how his powerful body, created for work, grew
weary with the torturing fatigue of doing nothing. We are bored only in
the head, but he was bored in every part of him, from head to foot: his
cap, cocked on one side with youthful lack of purpose, was bored, his
spurs were bored and tinkled inharmoniously and irregularly as though
muffled. Then he began to yawn. How he yawned! his mouth became
contorted, expanded from ear to ear, grew broader and broader, till it
swallowed up his whole face, it seemed that in another second, through
the ever enlarging aperture, you would be able to see down his throat,
choke-full of greasy soup. How he yawned! He went away in a hurry, but
for long that awful yawn seemed to put my jaw-bone out of joint, and
the trees were broken and bobbing about to my tear-filled eyes.

Once from the mail train they took a passenger travelling without a
ticket, and this was a very festival for the bored gendarme. He drew
himself up, his spurs jingled with precision and austerity, his face
became concentrated and angry; but his happiness was but short-lived.
The passenger paid his fare, and with a hasty oath got back into the
car, and in the rear the metal rowels of the gendarme’s spurs gave a
disconcerted and piteous rattle, as his enervated body swayed feebly
over them.

And at times when he yawned he became to me something terrible.

For some days workmen had been busy about the station clearing the
site, and when I returned from town after a stay of a couple of days,
the masons were laying the third row of bricks; a brand-new building
was arising. These masons were numerous, and worked quickly and
skilfully; and it was a strange pleasure to watch the straight, even
wall springing up out of the ground. When they had covered one row with
mortar they laid on a second row, adjusting the bricks according to
their dimensions, laying them now on the broad side, now on the narrow,
and cutting off the corners to make them fit. They worked meditatively,
and though the course of their meditation was evident enough, and their
problem clear, still it gave an additional charm and interest to the
work. I was looking at them with enjoyment when an authoritative voice
at my elbow shouted:

“Look here, you. What’s your name! Why don’t you put this right?”

It was the voice of the gendarme, squeezing himself through the iron
railings, which separated the asphalt platform from the workmen; he was
pointing to a certain brick and insisting: “You with the beard! lay
that brick properly. Don’t you see, it’s a half-brick?”

The mason with the beard, which was in places whitened with lime,
turned round in silence—the gendarme’s face was severe and imposing—in
silence he followed the direction of the gendarme’s finger, took up the
brick, trimmed it, and in silence put it back in its place. The
gendarme gave me a severe look and went away; but the seductive
interest in the work was stronger than his sense of dignity. When he
had made a couple of turns on the platform, he again came to a
standstill in front of the workmen, adopting a somewhat careless and
contemptuous pose. But his face no longer showed signs of boredom.

I went to the wood, and when I was returning through the station it was
one o’clock, the workmen were resting, and the place was empty as
usual. But some one was busying himself about the unfinished wall; it
was the gendarme. He was taking up bricks, and finishing the fifth row.
I could only catch a sight of his broad, tightly stretched back, but it
was expressive of intent thought, and indecision. Evidently the work
was more complicated than he had imagined. His unaccustomed eye was
playing him false; he stepped back, shook his head, stooped for a fresh
brick, striking the ground with his sabre as he bent down. Once he
raised his finger, in the classic gesture of one who has discovered the
solution of a problem, such as might have been used by Archimedes
himself, and his back once more assumed the erect attitude of greater
self-confidence and certainty. But immediately it became once more
doubled up in the consciousness of the undignified nature of the work
undertaken. There was in his whole, full-grown figure something
secretive as with children, when they are afraid they will be found
out.

I carelessly struck a match to light a cigarette, and the gendarme
turned round startled. For a moment he looked at me in confusion, and
suddenly his youthful countenance was illumined by a slightly
solicitous, confiding, and kindly smile. But the very next moment he
resumed his austere, unapproachable look, and his hand went up to his
little thin moustache—but in it, in that very hand, there still lay
that unlucky brick! And I saw how painfully ashamed he was of that
brick, and of his involuntary, compromising smile. Apparently he did
not know how to blush, otherwise he would have become as red as the
brick which he still held helplessly in his hand.

They had carried the wall up half way, and it was no longer possible to
see what the skilful masons were doing on their scaffolding. Once more
the gendarme oscillated from end to end of the platform, yawning, and
when he turned round and passed me I could feel that he was ashamed—and
that he hated me. And as I looked at his powerful arms listlessly
swinging in their sleeves, at his inharmoniously jingling spurs and
trailing sabre, it seemed to me that it was all unreal—that in the
scabbard there was no sabre at all with which he might cut a man down,
in the case no revolver, with which he might shoot a man dead. And his
very uniform, that too was unreal, and seemed as though it was all just
some strange masquerade taking place in full daylight, in the face of
the honest April sun, and amidst ordinary working people, and busy
fowls picking up grains under the sleeping-car.

But at times—at times I began to fear for some one. He was so terribly
bored....



SNAPPER

I

He belonged to no one, he had no name of his own, and none could say
where he spent the long, frosty winter, or how he was fed. The house
dogs hungry as himself, but proud and strong from the consciousness of
belonging to a house, would chase him away from the warm cottages. When
driven by hunger or an instinctive need of company, he showed himself
in the street, the boys pelted him with stones and sticks, while the
grown-ups gave a merry whoop, or a terribly piercing whistle.
Distraught with fear he would dart about from side to side, and
stumbling against the fences and people’s legs, would run as as fast as
he could to the end of the village, and hide himself in the depths of a
large garden in a place known only to himself. There he would lick his
bruises and wounds, and in solitude heap up terror and malice.

Once only had he been pitied and petted. This was by a peasant, a
drunkard, who was returning from the public house. Just then he loved
all things, and pitied all, and said something in his beard about kind
people, and the trust he himself put in kind people. He pitied even the
dirty, unlovely dog, on which by chance his drunken, aimless glance had
fallen.

“Doggie,” said he, calling it by a name common to all dogs; “Doggie,
come here, don’t be afraid.”

Doggie wanted very much to come. He wagged his tail, but could not make
up his mind. The peasant patted his knee with his hand, and repeated
reassuringly:

“Come along, then, silly. I swear I won’t hurt you.”

But while the dog was hesitating, wagging its tail more and more
energetically, and advancing with short steps, the humour of the
drunkard changed. He recalled all the insults that had been heaped on
him by kind people, and felt angry and dully malicious, so that when
Doggie lay on his back before him, he gave him a vicious kick in the
side with the toe of his heavy boot.

“Garn! Dirty! Where are you coming to!”

The dog began to whimper, more from surprise and the insult, than from
pain, and the peasant staggered home, where he gave his wife a savage
beating, and tore to pieces a new kerchief which he had bought for her
as a present the week before.

From this time forth the dog ceased to trust people who wished to pet
it, and either put his tail between his legs and ran away, or sometimes
would fly at them angrily and try to bite them, until they succeeded in
driving him away with stones or a stick. For one winter he had taken up
his abode under the verandah of an unoccupied bungalow which was
without a caretaker, and took care of it for nothing. By night he ran
about the streets and barked till he was hoarse, and long after he had
lain himself down in his place, he would keep up an angry growl, but
beneath the anger there was apparent a certain amount of content, and
even pride, in himself.

The winter nights dragged themselves out slowly, and the black windows
of the empty bungalow gazed grimly on the motionless, icy garden.
Sometimes blue lights seemed to kindle in them, at others a falling
star would be reflected in the panes, or again the sharp-horned moon
would throw on them its timid ray.

II

Spring came on, and the quiet bungalow was all a-voice with loud talk,
the creaking of wheels, and the stamping of people moving heavy things.
The owners had arrived from the city, a whole merry troop of grown-up
people, of half-grown ups and children, all intoxicated with the air,
the warmth and the light. Some shouted, some sang, and some laughed
with shrill female voices.

The first with whom the dog made acquaintance was a pretty girl, who
ran out into the garden in a formal, cinnamon-coloured dress.[3]
Greedily and impatiently desiring to seize and hug in her embrace
everything visible, she looked at the clear sky, at the reddish cherry
twigs, and lay quickly down on the grass with her face towards the
burning sun. Then she got up again as suddenly, and hugging herself,
and kissing the Spring air with her fresh lips, said expressively and
seriously:

“Well, this _is_ jolly!”

She spoke, and then suddenly turned round. At this very moment the dog
noiselessly approached, and furiously seized the extended skirt of her
dress in its teeth and tore it, and then as noiselessly disappeared
into the thick gooseberry and currant bushes.

“Oh! bad dog!” cried the girl, running away, and for long might be
heard her agitated voice: “Mamma! children! don’t go into the garden.
There is a dog there, such a great, big, fierce one!”

At night the dog crept up to the sleeping bungalow, and noiselessly lay
down in its place under the verandah. It smelt of people, and through
the open windows was borne the soft sound of gentle breathing. The
people were asleep, they were powerless and no longer terrible, and the
dog jealously guarded them. He slept with one eye open, and at every
rustle stretched out his head with its two motionless phosphorescent
eyes. But the alarming noises were so many in the sensitive Spring
night: in the grass something small and unseen rustled, and came quite
close to the shiny nose of the dog; last year’s twigs crackled under
the feet of sleeping birds, and on the neighbouring road a cart
rumbled, and heavily-laden wains creaked. And afar off round about in
the motionless air was diffused the sweet, fresh scent of resin, and
lured one into the lightening distance.

The owners who had arrived at the bungalow were very kind people, and
all the more so now that they were far from the city, breathing pure
air, seeing around them everything green, and blue and harmless. The
sunlight went into them in warmth, and came out again in laughter and
goodwill towards all things living. At first they wished to drive away
the dog, of which they were afraid, and even shot at it with a
revolver, when it would not take itself off; but later they became
accustomed to its barking at night, and even sometimes remembered it in
the morning:

“But where’s our Snapper?”

And this new name “Snapper” stuck to it. Sometimes even by day they
would notice among the bushes its dark body, which would fall flat on
the ground at the first motion of a hand throwing bread—as though it
were a stone, not bread,—and soon all became accustomed to Snapper, and
called him “our dog,” and joked about the cause of his shyness and
unreasonable fear. Each day Snapper diminished by one step the distance
which separated him from the people; he grew accustomed to their faces,
and adopted their habits. Half an hour before dinner he would be
already standing in the shrubs, blinking with a conciliatory air. And
that same little schoolgirl it was, who, forgetting the former outrage,
brought the dog definitely into the happy circle of cheerful, restful
people.

“Snapper, come here,” said she, calling him. “Good dog, come here. Do
you like sugar? I’ll give you a lump. Come along, then.”

But Snapper would not come; he was afraid. Then cautiously patting her
knee, and speaking with all the caressing kindness of a beautiful voice
and a pretty face, Lelya approached the dog, but was in her turn
afraid; suddenly he snapped.

“I am so fond of you, Snapper, dear; you have such a nice little nose,
and such expressive eyes. Won’t you trust me, Snapperkin?”

Lelya raised her eyebrows, and her own little nose was so pretty and
her eyes so expressive, that the sun acted wisely in covering all her
little youthful, naïvely charming face with hot kisses, till her cheeks
were red.

Snapper for the second time in his life turned on his back and closed
his eyes, not knowing for a certainty whether he was to be kicked or
petted. But he was petted. Small warm hands touched irresolutely his
woolly head, and as though this were a sign of undeniable authority,
began freely and boldly to run over the whole of his hairy body,
rumpling, petting, and tickling.

“Mamma! children! look here, I’m petting Snapper,” cried Lelya.

When the children ran up, noisy, loud-voiced, quick and bright as drops
of uncontrollable mercury, Snapper cowed down in fear and helpless
expectancy: he knew that if any one struck him now, he would no longer
be in a position to fix his sharp teeth in the body of the offender:
his unappeasable malice had been taken from him. And when they all
began to vie in caressing him, he for a long time could not help
trembling at each touch of the caressing hand, and the unwonted
fondling hurt him as though it had been a blow.

[3] Such as is worn by schoolgirls and girl students.—TV.]

III

All Snapper’s doggy nature expanded. He had now a name, at the sound of
which he rushed headlong from the green depths of the garden; he
belonged to people, and could serve them. What more did a dog need to
make him happy!

Being accustomed to the moderation induced by years of a vagrant,
hungry life, he ate but little, but that little changed him out of
recognition. His long coat, which formerly had hung in foxy dry tufts
on his back and on his belly, which had been covered eternally with
dried mud, now became clean, and grew black, and became as glossy as
velvet. And when he, having nothing better to do, would run to the
gates and stand on the threshold, looking up and down the street with a
dignified air, no one ever took it into his head to tease him or throw
stones at him.

But such pride and independence he could enjoy only to himself. Fear
had not as yet been wholly evaporated from his heart by the fire of
caresses, and so every time people appeared, or approached him, he hid
himself expecting a beating. And still for a long time every caress
came to him as a surprise, and a wonder, which he could neither
understand, nor respond to. He did not know how to receive caresses.
Other dogs could stand and walk about on their hind legs and even
smile, and thus express their feelings, but he did not know how.

The one only thing that Snapper was able to do was to roll on his back,
shut his eyes, and whimper gently. But this was insufficient, it could
not express his delight, his thankfulness and love. By a sudden
inspiration, however, Snapper began to do something, which maybe he had
seen done by other dogs, but had long since forgotten. He turned absurd
somersaults, leapt awkwardly, and ran after his tail; and his body,
which had been always so supple and active, became stiff, ridiculous,
and pitiful.

“Mamma! children! look, Snapper is performing,” cried Lelya, and
choking with laughter, said: “Once more, Snapper, once more. That’s
right!”

And they gathered together and laughed, and Snapper kept on twisting
round, and turning somersaults and falling, and no one saw the strange
entreating look in his eyes. And as formerly they used to howl and
shout at the dog to see his despairing fear, so now they caressed him
on purpose to excite in him an ebullition of love, so infinitely
laughable in its awkward, absurd manifestations. Hardly an hour passed
but some one of the half-grown-ups or the children would cry:

“Now then, Snapper dear, perform!”

And Snapper would twist about, turn somersaults, and fall, amid merry,
irrepressible laughter. They praised him to his face and behind his
back, and lamented only one thing, viz., that he would not show off his
tricks before strangers, who came to visit, but would run away into the
garden, or hide himself under the verandah.

Gradually Snapper became accustomed to not being obliged to trouble
himself about his food, since at the appointed hour the cook would give
him scraps and bones, while he confidently and quietly lay in his place
under the verandah, and even sought and asked for caresses. And he grew
heavy: he seldom ran away from the bungalow, and when the little
children called him to go with them to the forest, he would wag an
evasive tail, and disappear unseen. But all the same at night his bark
would be loud and wakeful as ever.

IV

Autumn began to glow with yellow fires, and the sky to weep with heavy
rain, and the bungalows became quickly empty, and silent, as though the
incessant rain and wind had extinguished them one by one, like candles.

“What are we to do with Snapper?” asked Lelya, with hesitation. She was
sitting embracing her knees and looking sorrowfully out of the window,
down which were rolling glistening drops of rain.

“What a position you’re in, Lelya; that’s not the way to sit!” said her
mother, and added: “Snapper must be left behind, poor fellow.”

“That’s—a—pity,” said Lelya lingeringly.

“But what can one do? We have no courtyard at home, and we can’t keep
him in the house, that you must very well understand.”

“It’s—a—pity,” repeated Lelya, ready to cry. Her dark brows were
raised, like a swallow’s wings, and her pretty little nose puckered
piteously, when her mother said:

“The Dogayevs offered me a puppy some time ago. They say that it is
very well bred, and ready trained. Do you see? But this is only a
yard-dog.”

“A—pity,” repeated Lelya, but she did not cry.

Once, more strangers arrived, and wagons creaked, and the floors
groaned beneath heavy footsteps, but there was less talk, and no
laughter was heard at all. Terrified by the strange people, and dimly
prescient of calamity, Snapper fled to the extreme end of the garden,
and thence through the thinning bushes gazed unceasingly at that corner
of the verandah which was open to his view, and at the figures in red
shirts which were moving about on it.

“You there! my poor Snapper,” said Lelya as she came out. She was
already dressed for the journey in the same cinnamon skirt, out of
which Snapper had torn a piece, and a black jacket. “Come along!”

And they went out into the road. The rain kept coming and going, and
the whole expanse between the blackened earth and the sky was full of
clubbed, swiftly-moving clouds. From below it could be seen how heavy
they were, impenetrable to the light on account of the water which
saturated them, and how weary the sun must be behind that solid wall.

To the left of the road stretched the darkened stubble field, and only
on the near hummocky horizon short uneven trees and shrubs appeared in
lonesome patches. In front, not far off, was the barrier, and near it a
wine-shop with red iron roof, and by it was a group of people teasing
the village idiot Ilyusha.

“Give us a ha’penny,” snuffled the idiot in a drawling voice, and evil,
jeering voices replied all together:

“Will you chop up some wood?”

Ilyusha reviled foully and cynically, and the others laughed without
mirth. A sunray broke through, yellow and anaemic, as though the sun
were hopelessly sick; and the foggy Autumn distance became wider, and
more melancholy.

“I’m sorry, Snapper!” Lelya gently let fall the words, and went back
without looking round. It was not till she reached the station that she
remembered that she had not said good-bye to Snapper.

Snapper long followed the track of the people as they went away, he ran
as far as the station, and wet through and muddy, returned to the
bungalow. There he performed one more new trick, which no one, however,
was there to see. For the first time he went on to the verandah, stood
on his hind legs, looked in at the glass door, and even scratched at
it. But the rooms were all empty, and no one answered him.

A violent rain poured down, and on all sides the darkness of the long
Autumn night began to close in. Quickly and dully it filled the empty
bungalow: noiselessly it crept out from the shrubs and in company with
the rain, poured down from the uninviting sky. On the verandah, from
which the awning had been taken away, and which for that reason looked
like a broad and unknown waste, the light had long been in conflict
with the darkness, and mournfully illumined the marks of dirty feet;
but soon it gave in.

Night had come on.

When there was no longer any doubt that the night was upon him, the dog
began to howl in loud complaint. With a note resonant, and sharp as
despair, that howl broke into the monotonous, sullenly persistent sound
of the rain, rending the darkness, and then dying down was carried over
the dark naked fields.

The dog howled—regularly, persistently, desperately, soberly—and to any
one who heard that howling it seemed as though the impenetrable dark
night itself were groaning and longing for the light, and he would wish
himself with his wife by his warm fireside.

The dog howled.



THE LIE

I

“You lie! I know you lie!”

“What are you shouting for? Is it necessary that every one should hear
us?”

And here again she lied, for I had not shouted, but spoken in the
quietest voice, holding her hand and speaking quite gently while that
venomous word “lie” hissed like a little serpent.

“I love you,” she continued, “and you ought to believe me. Does not
this convince you?”

And she kissed me. But when I was about to take hold of her hand and
press it—she was already gone. She left the semi-dark corridor, and I
followed her once more to the place where a gay party was just coming
to an end. How did I know where it was? She had told me that I might go
there, and I went there and watched the dancing all the night through.
No one came near me, or spoke to me, I was a stranger to all, and sat
in the corner near the band. Pointed straight at me was the mouth of a
great brass instrument, through which some one hidden in the depths of
it kept bellowing, and every minute or so would give a rude staccato
laugh: “Ho! ho! ho!”

From time to time a scented white cloud would come close to me. It was
she, I knew not how she managed to caress me without being observed,
but for one short little second her shoulder would press mine, and for
one short little second I would lower my eyes and see a white neck in
the opening of a white dress. And when I raised my eyes I saw a profile
as white, severe, and truthful as that of a pensive angel on the tomb
of the long-forgotten dead. And I saw her eyes. They were large, greedy
of the light, beautiful and calm. From their blue-white setting the
pupils shone black, and the more I looked at them the blacker they
seemed, and the more unfathomable their depths. Maybe I looked at them
for so short a time that my heart failed to make the slightest
impression, but certainly never did I understand so profoundly and
terribly the meaning of Infinity, nor ever realised it with such force.
I felt in fear and pain that my very life was passing out in a slender
ray into her eyes, until I became a stranger to myself—desolated,
speechless, almost dead. Then she would leave me, taking my life with
her, and dance again with a certain tall, haughty, but handsome partner
of hers. I studied his every characteristic—the shape of his shoes, the
width of his rather high shoulders, the rhythmic sway of one of his
locks, which separated itself from the rest, while with his
indifferent, unseeing glance he, as it were, crushed me against the
wall, and I felt myself as flat and lifeless to look at as the wall
itself.

When they began to extinguish the lights, I went up to her and said:

“It is time to go. I will accompany you.”

But she expressed surprise.

“But certainly I am going with him,” and she pointed to the tall,
handsome man, who was not looking at us. She led me out into an empty
room and kissed me.

“You lie,” I said very softly.

“We shall meet again to-morrow. You must come,” was her answer.

When I drove home, the green frosty dawn was looking out from behind
the high roofs. In the whole street there were only we two, the
sledge-driver and I. He sat with bent head and wrapped-up face, and I
sat behind him wrapped up to the very eyes. The sledge-driver had his
thoughts, and I had mine, and there behind the thick walls thousands of
people were sleeping, and they had their own dreams and thoughts. I
thought of her, and of how she lied. I thought of death, and it seemed
to me that those dimly-lightened walls had already looked upon my
death, and that was why they were so cold and upright. I know not what
the thoughts of the sledge-driver may have been, neither do I know of
what those hidden by the walls were dreaming. But then, neither did
they know my thoughts and reveries.

And so we drove on through the long and straight streets, and the dawn
rose from behind the roofs, and all around was motionless and white. A
cold scented cloud came close to me, and straight into my ear some one
unseen laughed:

“Ho! ho! ho!”

II

She had lied. She did not come, and I waited for her in vain. The grey,
uniform, frozen semi-darkness descended from the lightless sky, and I
was not conscious of when the twilight passed into evening, and when
the evening passed into night—to me it was all one long night. I kept
walking backwards and forwards with the same even, measured steps of
hope deferred. I did not come close up to the tall house, where my
beloved dwelt, nor to its glazed door which shone yellow at the end of
the iron covered way, but I walked on the opposite side of the street
with the same measured strides—backwards and forwards, backwards and
forwards. In going forward I did not take my eye off the glazed door,
and when I turned back I stopped frequently and turned my head round,
and then the snow pricked my face with its sharp needles. And so long
were those sharp cold needles that they penetrated to my very heart,
and pierced it with grief and anger at my useless waiting. The cold
wind blew uninterruptedly from the bright north to the dark south, and
whistled playfully on the icy roofs, and rebounding cut my face with
sharp little snow-flakes, and softly tapped the glasses of the empty
lanterns, in which the lonely yellow flame, shivering with cold, bent
to the draught. And I felt sorry for the lonely flame which lived only
by night, and I thought to myself, when I go away all life will end in
this street, and only the snowflakes will fly through the empty space;
but still the yellow flame will continue to shiver and bend in
loneliness and cold.

I waited for her, but she came not. And it seemed to me that the lonely
flame and I were like one another, only that my lamp was not empty, for
in that void, which I kept measuring with my strides, there did
sometimes appear people. They grew up unheard behind my back, big and
dark; they passed me, and like ghosts suddenly disappeared round the
corner of the white building. Then again they would come out from round
the corner, come up alongside of me and then gradually melt away in the
great distance, obscured by the silently falling snow. Muffled up,
formless, silent, they were so like to one another and to myself that
it seemed as if scores of people were walking backwards and forwards
and waiting, as I was, shivering and silent, and were thinking their
own enigmatic sad thoughts.

I waited for her, but she came not. I know not why I did not cry out
and weep for pain. I know not why I laughed and was glad, and crooked
my fingers like claws, as though I held in them that little venomous
thing which kept hissing like a snake: a lie! It wriggled in my hands,
and bit my heart, and my head reeled with its poison. Everything was a
lie! The boundary line between the future and the present, the present
and the past, vanished. The boundary line between the time when I did
not yet exist, and the time when I began to be, vanished, and I thought
that I must have always been alive, or else never have lived at all.
And always, before I lived and when I began to live, she had ruled over
me, and I felt it strange that she should have a name and a body, and
that her existence should have a beginning and an end. She had no name,
she was always the one that lies, that makes eternally to wait, and
never comes. And I knew not why, but I laughed, and the sharp needles
pierced my heart, and right into my ear some one unseen laughed:

“Ho! ho! ho!”

Opening my eyes I looked at the lighted windows of the lofty house, and
they quietly said to me in their blue and red language:

“Thou art deceived by her. At this very moment whilst thou art
wandering, waiting, and suffering, she, all bright, lovely, and
treacherous, is there, listening to the whispers of that tall, handsome
man, who despises thee. If thou wert to break in there and kill her,
thou wouldst be doing a good deed, for thou wouldst slay a lie.”

I gripped the knife I held in my hand tighter, and answered laughingly:
“Yes, I will kill her.”

But the windows gazed at me mournfully, and added sadly: “Thou wilt
never kill her. Never! because the weapon thou holdest in thy hand is
as much a lie as are her kisses.”

The silent shadows of my fellow-watchers had disappeared long ago, and
I was left alone in the cold void, I—and the lonely tongues of fire
shivering with cold and despair. The clock in the neighbouring
church-tower began to strike, and its dismal metallic sound trembled
and wept, flying away into the void, and being lost in the maze of
silently whirling snowflakes. I began to count the strokes, and went
into a fit of laughter. The clock struck 15! The belfry was old, and
so, too, was the clock, and although it indicated the right time, it
struck spasmodically, sometimes so often that the grey, ancient
bell-ringer had to clamber up and stop the convulsive strokes of the
hammer with his hand. For whom did those senilely tremulous, melancholy
sounds, which were embraced and throttled by the frosty darkness, tell
a lie? So pitiable and inept was that useless lie.

With the last lying sounds of the clock the glazed door slammed, and a
tall man made his way down the steps.

I saw only his back, but I recognized it as I had seen it only last
evening, proud and contemptuous. I recognized his walk, and it was
lighter and more confident than in the evening: thus had I often left
that door. He walked, as those do, whom the lying lips of a woman have
just kissed.

III

I threatened and entreated, grinding my teeth:

“Tell me the truth!”

But with a face cold as snow, while from beneath her brows, lifted in
surprise, her dark, inscrutable eyes shone passionless and mysterious
as ever, she assured me:

“But I am not lying to you.”

She knew that I could not prove her lie, and that all my heavy massive
structure of torturing thought would crumble at one word from her, even
one lying word. I waited for it—and it came forth from her lips,
sparkling on the surface with the colours of truth, but dark in its
innermost depths:

“I love thee! Am not I all thine?”

We were far from the town, and the snow-clad plain looked in at the
dark windows. Upon it was darkness, and around it was darkness, gross,
motionless, silent, but the plain shone with its own latent
coruscation, like the face of a corpse in the dark. In the over-heated
room only one candle was burning, and on its reddening flame there
appeared the white reflection of the deathlike plain.

“However sad the truth may be, I want to know it. Maybe I shall die
when I know it, but death rather than ignorance of the truth. In your
kisses and embraces I feel a lie. In your eyes I see it. Tell me the
truth and I will leave you forever,” said I.

But she was silent. Her coldly searching look penetrated my inmost
depths, and drawing out my soul, regarded it with strange curiosity.

And I cried: “Answer, or I will kill you!”

“Yes, do!” she quietly replied; “sometimes life is so wearisome. But
the truth is not to be extracted by threat.”

And then I knelt to her. Clasping her hand I wept, and prayed for pity
and the truth.

“Poor fellow!” said she, putting her hand on my head, “poor fellow!”

“Pity me,” I prayed, “I want so much to know the truth.”

And as I looked at her pure forehead, I thought that truth must be
there behind that slender barrier. And I madly wished to smash the
skull to get at the truth. There, too, behind a white bosom beat a
heart, and I madly wished to tear her bosom with my nails, to see but
for once an unveiled human heart. And the pointed, motionless flames of
the expiring candle burnt yellow—and the walls grew dark and seemed
farther apart—and it felt so sad, so lonely, so eery.

“Poor fellow!” she said. “Poor fellow!”

And the yellow flame of the candle shivered spasmodically, burnt low,
and became blue. Then it went out—and darkness enveloped us. I could
not see her face, nor her eyes, for her arms embraced my head—and I no
longer felt the lie. Closing my eyes, I neither thought nor lived, but
only absorbed the touch of her hands, and it seemed to me true. And in
the darkness she whispered in a strangely fearsome voice:

“Put your arms round me—I’m afraid.”

Again there was silence, and again the gentle whisper fraught with
fear!

“You desire the truth—but do I know it myself? And oh! don’t I wish I
did? Take care of me; oh! I’m so frightened!”

I opened my eyes. The paling darkness of the room fled in fear from the
lofty windows, and gathering near the walls hid itself in the corners.
But through the windows there silently looked in a something huge,
deadly-white. It seemed as though some one’s dead eyes were searching
for us, and enveloping us in their icy gaze. Presently we pressed close
together, while she whispered:

“Oh! I am so frightened!”

IV

I killed her. I killed her, and when she lay a flat, lifeless heap by
the window, beyond which shone the dead-white plain, I put my foot on
her corpse, and burst into a fit of laughter. It was not the laugh of a
madman; oh, no! I laughed because my bosom heaved lightly and evenly,
and within it all was cheerful, peaceful, and void, and because from my
heart had fallen the worm which had been gnawing it. And bending down I
looked into her dead eyes. Great, greedy of the light, they remained
open, and were like the eyes of a wax doll—so round and dull were they,
as though covered with mica. I was able to touch them with my fingers,
open and shut them, and I was not afraid, because in those black,
inscrutable pupils there lived no longer that demon of lying and doubt,
which so long, so greedily, had sucked my blood.

When they arrested me I laughed. And this seemed terrible and wild to
those who seized me. Some of them turned away from me in disgust, and
went aside; others advanced threateningly straight towards me, with
condemnation on their lips, but when my bright, cheerful glance met
their eyes, their faces blanched, and their feet became rooted to the
ground.

“Mad!” they said, and it seemed to me that they found comfort in the
word, because it helped to solve the enigma of how I could love and yet
kill the beloved—and laugh. One of them only, a man of full habit and
sanguine temperament, called me by another name, which I felt as a
blow, and which extinguished the light in my eyes.

“Poor man!” said he in compassion, although devoid of anger—for he was
stout and cheerful. “Poor fellow!”

“Don’t!” cried I. “Don’t call me that!”

I know not why I threw myself upon him. Indeed, I had no desire to kill
him, or even to touch him; but all these cowed people who looked on me
as a madman and a villain, were all the more frightened, and cried out
so that it seemed to me again quite ludicrous.

When they were leading me out of the room where the corpse lay, I
repeated loudly and persistently, looking at the stout, cheerful man:

“I am happy, happy!”

And that was the truth.

V

Once, when I was a child, I saw in a menagerie a panther, which struck
my imagination and for long held my thoughts captive. It was not like
the other wild beasts, which dozed without thought or angrily gazed at
the visitors. It walked from corner to corner, in one and the same
line, with mathematical precision, each time turning on exactly the
same spot, each time grazing with its tawny side one and the same metal
bar of the cage. Its sharp, ravenous head was bent down, and its eyes
looked straight before it, never once turning aside. For whole days a
noisily chattering crowd trooped before its cage, but it kept up its
tramp, and never once turned an eye on the spectators. A few of the
crowd laughed, but the majority looked seriously, even sadly, at that
living picture of heavy, hopeless brooding, and went away with a sigh.
And as they retired, they cast once more round at her a doubting,
inquiring glance and sighed—as though there was something in common
between their own lot, free as they were, and that of the unhappy,
eager wild beast. And when later on I was grown up, and people, or
books, spoke to me of eternity, I called to mind the panther, and it
seemed to me that I knew eternity and its pains.

Such a panther did I become in my stone cage. I walked and thought. I
walked in one line right across my cage from corner to corner, and
along one short line travelled my thoughts, so heavy that it seemed
that my shoulders carried not a head, but a whole world. But it
consisted of but one word, but what an immense, what a torturing, what
an ominous word it was.

“Lie!” that was the word.

Once more it crept forth hissing from all the corners, and twined
itself about my soul; but it had ceased to be a little snake, it had
developed into a great, glittering, fierce serpent. It bit me, and
stifled me in its iron coils, and when I began to cry out with pain, as
though my whole bosom were swarming with reptiles, I could only utter
that abominable, hissing, serpent-like sound: “Lie!”

And as I walked, and thought, the grey level asphalt of the floor
changed before my eyes into a grey, transparent abyss. My feet ceased
to feel the touch of the floor, and I seemed to be soaring at a
limitless height above the fog and mist. And when my bosom gave forth
its hissing groan, thence—from below—from under that rarifying, but
still impenetrable shroud, there slowly issued a terrible echo. So slow
and dull was it, as though it were passing through a thousand years.
And every now and then, as the fog lifted, the sound became less loud,
and I understood that there—below—it was still whistling like a wind,
that tears down the trees, while it reached my ears in a short, ominous
whisper:

“Lie!”

This mean whisper worked me up into a rage, and I stamped on the floor
and cried:

“There is no lie! I killed the lie.”

Then I purposely turned aside, for I knew what it would reply. And it
did reply slowly from the depths of the bottomless abyss:

“Lie!”

The fact is, as you perceive, that I had made a grievous mistake. I had
killed the woman, but made the lie immortal. Kill not a woman till you
have, by prayer, by fire, and torture, torn from her soul the truth!

So thought I, and continued my endless tramp from corner to corner of
the cell.

VI

Dark and terrible is the place to which she carried the truth, and the
lie—and I am going thither. At the very throne of Satan I shall
overtake her, and falling on my knees will weep; and cry:

“Tell me the truth!”

But God! This is also a lie. There, there is darkness, there is the
void of ages and of infinity, and there she is not—she is nowhere. But
the lie remains, it is immortal. I feel it in every atom of the air,
and when I breathe, it enters my bosom with a hissing, and then rends
it—yes, rends!

Oh! what madness it is—to be man and to seek the truth! What pain!

Help! Help!



AN ORIGINAL

A moment of silence had fallen on the company and amid the clatter of
knives on plates, and the confused talk at distant tables, the froufrou
of a dress, and the creaking of the floor under the brisk steps of the
waiters, some one’s quiet, meek voice was heard:

“But I _do_ love negresses.”

Anton Ivanovich coughed over himself the vodka he was in the act of
swallowing, and a waiter, who was collecting the plates, cast a glance
of indiscriminate curiosity from under his brows. All turned with
surprise to the speaker, and then for the first time took notice of the
irregular little face with its red moustache, the ends of which were
wet with vodka and soup, of the two dull, colourless little eyes, and
of the carefully brushed head of Semyon Vasilyevich Kotel’nikov. For
five years they had been in the same service as Kotel’nikov, every day
they had said “How do you do?” and “Good-bye” to him, and talked to him
about something or other; on the 20th of every month, after receiving
their stipends, they had dined at the same restaurant as Kotel’nikov,
as they were doing to-day; and now for the first time they were really
conscious of his presence. They perceived him, and were astonished. It
seemed that Semyon Vasilyevich was not so bad looking after all, if you
did not count the moustache, and the freckles which were like splashes
of mud from a rubber tyre, that he was decently well dressed, and his
tall white collar, though a paper one, was at all events clean.

Anton Ivanovich, head of the office, coughing and still red with the
exertion, looked at the confused Semyon Vasilyevich attentively, with
curiosity in his prominent eyes, and still choking, asked with
emphasis:

“So you, Semyon, ah!—I beg your pardon, I forget.”

“Semyon Vasilyevich,” Kotel’nikov reminded him, pronouncing it, not
“Vasilich,” but fully “Vasilyevich”; and this pronunciation was
pleasing to all as expressive of a feeling of worth and self-respect.

“So you, Semyon Vasilyevich—love negresses?”

“Yes, I do, indeed.”

And his voice, although rather weak, and, so to speak, somewhat
wrinkled like a shrivelled turnip, was nevertheless pleasant. Anton
Ivanovich pursed up his lower lip so that his grey moustache pressed
against the tip of his red pitted nose, took in all the officials with
his rounded eyes, and after an unavoidable pause emitted a fat unctuous
laugh.

“Ha, ha, ha! He loves negresses! Ha, ha, ha!”

And all laughed in a friendly manner, even the stout dour Polzikov, who
as a rule knew not how to laugh, gave a sickly neigh: “Hee, hee! hee!”

Semyon Vasilyevich laughed also, with a low staccato laugh, like a
parched pea; he blushed with pleasure, but at the same time was rather
afraid that some unpleasantness might arise.

“Are you really serious?” asked Anton Ivanovich, when he had done
laughing.

“Perfectly serious, sir. In them, those black women, there is something
so ardent, or—so to speak—_exotic_.”

“Exotic?”

And once more all spluttered with laughter. But, though they laughed,
they considered Semyon Vasilyevich quite a clever and educated man,
since he knew such a rare word as “exotic.” Then they began to argue
with warmth that it was impossible for any one to love a negress: they
were black and greasy, they had such impossible thick lips, and smelt
too strong of musk.

“But I love them,” modestly persisted Semyon Vasilyevich.

“Every one to his choice,” said Anton Ivanovich with decision; “but I
would rather fall in love with a nanny-goat than with one of those
blacks.”

But all were pleased that among them in the person of one of their own
comrades there was to be found such an original person, that he loved
negresses, and to honour the occasion they ordered another half-dozen
of beer, and began to look with a certain contempt on the neighbouring
tables, at which there sat no original people. They began to talk
louder and with more freedom, and Semyon Vasilyevich left off striking
matches for his cigarette, but waited till the attendant offered him a
light. When the beer was all drunk up, and they had ordered more, the
stout Polzikov looked sternly at Semyon Vasilyevich, and said
reproachfully:

“How is it, Mr. Kotel’nikov, that we have never got beyond the “you’
stage? Do not we serve in the same office? We must drink to
Comradeship, since you are such an excellent fellow.”

“Certainly, I shall be delighted,” Semyon Vasilyevich consented. He
beamed now with delight that at last they recognized and appreciated
him, and then again feared somehow that they would thrash him; at all
events he kept his arm across his breast, to be ready, in case of need,
to protect his face and well-brushed hair. After Polzikov he drank to
Comradeship with Troitzky and Novosyolov and the rest, and kissed them
so heartily that his lips became swollen. Anton Ivanovich did not offer
to drink to Comradeship, but politely remarked:

“When you are passing our way, please call. Although you love
negresses, still I have daughters, and it will interest them to see
you. So you are really in earnest?”

Semyon Vasilyevich bowed, and although he was a bit unsteady from the
amount of beer he had drunk, still all remarked that his manners were
good. When Anton Ivanovich went away they were still drinking, and
afterwards went noisily, the whole company, on to the Nevsky, where
they gave way to none, but made all give way to them. Semyon
Vasilyevich walked in the middle, arm in arm with Troitzky and the
sombre Polzikov, and explained to them:

“Nay, friend Kostya, you don’t understand the matter. In negresses
there is something peculiar, something, so to speak, _exotic_.”

“And I don’t want to understand! They are black—black—nothing else.”

“Nay, friend Kostya, this is a matter requiring taste. Negresses are——”

Until that day Semyon Vasilyevich had never even thought of negresses,
and could not more exactly define what there was so desirable about
them, so he repeated:

“My friend, they are ardent.”

“Now, then, Kostya, what are you quarrelling about?” angrily asked
Troitzky, as he tripped up, and sploshed in a big swapped galoche. “You
are a wonderful fellow for arguing; you never agree with any one. Of
course, he knows why he loves negresses. Drive on, Senya![4] love away!
don’t listen to fools! You’re a brave fellow; we’ll get up a scandal
before long. Lord! what a devil he is!”

“Black—black—nothing more,” Polzikov morosely insisted.

“Nay, Kostya, you don’t understand the matter,” Semyon Vasilyevich
mildly declared; and so they went on, rolling and racketting,
quarrelling, and jostling one another, but thoroughly contented.

At the end of a week the whole Department knew that the civil servant,
Kotel’nikov, was very fond of negresses. By the end of a month the
porters of the neighbouring houses, the petitioners, and the policeman
on duty at the corner, knew it too. The ladies who worked the
typewriters took to looking at Semyon Vasilyevich from the adjoining
rooms; but he sat quiet and modest, and still was not sure whether he
would be praised or thrashed. Already he had been at an evening party
at Anton Ivanovich’s, had drunk tea with cherry jam upon a new damask
table-cloth, and had explained that about negresses there was something
_exotic._ The ladies looked confused, but the hostess’s daughter
Nastenka, who had read novels, blinked her shortsighted eyes, and,
adjusting her curls, asked:

“But, why?”

And all were very much pleased; but when the interesting guest had
departed they spoke of him with the greatest compassion, and Nastenka
him the victim of a pernicious passion.

Semyon Vasilyevich had been taken with Nastenka; but since he loved
only negresses, he determined not to show his liking, and was cold and
stand-offish, though strictly polite. And all the way home he thought
of negresses, how black and greasy and objectionable they were, and at
the thought of kissing one of them, he felt a sort of heart-burn, and
was inclined to weep quietly and to write to his mother in the country
to come to him. But in the night he overcame this attack of
pusillanimity, and when he appeared at the office in the morning, by
his whole appearance, by his red tie, and by the mysterious expression
of his face, it was abundantly clear that this man was very fond indeed
of negresses.

Soon after this, Anton Ivanovich, who took an interest in his fate,
introduced him to a theatrical reporter; the reporter took him and
treated him at a _café-chantant,_ where he presented him to the
Manager, Monsieur Jacques Ducquelau.

“Here is a gentleman,” said the reporter, as he brought forward the
modestly bowing Semyon Vasilyevich, “here is a gentleman who is much
enamoured of negresses; no one but negresses. He is an extraordinary
original. Give him encouragement, Jacques Ivanovich, for of such people
be not encouraged, who should be? This, Jacques Ivanovich, is a public
matter.”

The reporter slapped Semyon Vasilyevich patronizingly on his narrow
back, in its creaseless, tightly-fitting coat, and the Manager, a
Frenchman, with a fierce black moustache, cast his eyes up to the sky,
as though looking for something there, made a gesture of decision, and
transfixing the still bowing civil servant with his black eyes, said:

“Negresses! Excellent! I have here at present three beautiful
negresses.”

Semyon Vasilyevich blanched slightly, but M. Jacques was very fond of
his own establishment, and took no notice. The reporter requested:
“Give him a free ticket, Jacques Ivanovich; a season.”

From that evening Semyon Vasilyevich began to pay court to a negress,
Miss Korraito, the whites of whose eyes were like saucers, with pupils
no larger than sloes. And when she turned on all this battery and made
eyes at him, his feet turned cold, and, as he bowed hastily, his
well-pomatumed head glistened under the electric light, and he thought
with grief of his poor mother who lived in the country.

Of Russian Miss Korraito understood not a word, but happily they found
plenty of willing interpreters, who took to heart the interests of the
young couple, and accurately transmitted to Semyon Vasilyevich the
gushing exclamations of the dusky fair.

“She says: “She has never seen such a kind, handsome gentleman.” Is not
that right, Miss?”

Miss Korraito would incline her head again and again, show her teeth,
which were as wide as the keys of a piano, and roll her saucers round
on every side. And Semyon Vasilyevich would unconsciously incline his
head too, and mutter:

“Tell her, please, that there is something _exotic_ about negresses.”

And all were satisfied. When Semyon Vasilyevich for the first time
kissed the hand of the negress, there assembled to see it, not only all
the _artistes_, but many of the spectators, and one in particular, an
old merchant, Bogdan Kornyeich Seliverstov, burst into tears from
tenderness and patriotic feelings. Then they drank champagne. For two
days Semyon Vasilyevich suffered from a painful palpitation of the
heart, and did not go to the office. Several times he began a letter,
“Dear Mamma,” but he was too weak to finish it. When he went back to
the office they invited him to the private room of his Excellency.
Semyon Vasilyevich smoothed with a comb his hair, which had begun to
stick up during his illness, arranged the dark ends of his moustache,
so as to speak more clearly, and collapsing with dread, went in.

“Look here, is it true, what they tell me, that you——” His Excellency
hesitated, “is it true that you love negresses?”

“Quite true, your Excellency.”

The general concentrated his gaze on his poll, on the smooth centre of
which two thin locks obstinately stuck up and trembled, and with some
surprise, but at the same time with approval, asked:

“But why do you love them?”

“I cannot say, your Excellency,” replied Semyon Vasilyevich, whose
courage had evaporated.

“What do you mean by? “I can’t say’? Who, then, can say? But don’t be
embarrassed, my dear sir. I like my subordinates to show self-reliance
and initiative in general, provided, of course, they do not exceed
certain legal bounds. Tell me candidly, as though you were talking to
your father, why do you love negresses?”

“There is in them, your Excellency, something _exotic_.”

That same evening at the general’s whist table at the English Club, his
Excellency, when he had dealt the cards with his puffy white hands,
remarked with assumed carelessness:

“There’s in my office an official who is terribly enamoured of
negresses. An ordinary clerk, if you please.”

The other three generals were jealous: each of them had at his office
many officials, but they were the most ordinary, colourless,
un-original people imaginable, of whom nothing could be said.

The choleric Anaton Petrovich considered long, scored only one out of a
certain four, and after the next deal said:

“I too—I have a subordinate, whose beard is half black and half red.”

But all understood that the victory was on the side of his Excellency;
the subordinate mentioned was in no respect responsible for the fact
that his beard was half black and half red, and probably was not even
pleased to have it so; while the official in point, independently and
of his own free will, loved negresses; and such a predilection
undoubtedly testified to his originality of taste. But his Excellency,
as though he remarked nothing, continued:

“He affirms that in negresses there is something _exotic_

The existence in the Second Department of an extraordinary original
obtained for it the most flattering popularity among official circles
in the Capital, and begat, as is always the case, many unsuccessful and
pitiful imitators. A certain grey-haired clerk in the Sixth Department,
with a large family, who had sat unremarked at his table for
twenty-eight years, proclaimed publicly that he could bark like a dog;
and when they only laughed at him, and in all the rooms began to bark,
and grunt, and neigh, he was put out of countenance, and took to a
fortnight’s drink, forgetting even to send in a report of sickness, as
he had always done for the past twenty-eight years. Another official, a
youngish man, pretended to fall in love with the wife of the Chinese
Ambassador, and for some time attracted universal observation, and even
sympathy. But experienced eyes soon distinguished the pitiful,
dishonest pretence from the true originality, and the failure was
contemptuously consigned to the abyss of his former obscurity. There
were other attempts of the same kind, and among the officials in
general there was remarked this year a peculiar elation of spirit, and
a long-hidden desire for originality seized the youths of the service
with particular severity, and in some cases even led to tragic
consequences. Thus one clerk, of good birth, being unable to invent
anything original, had the impudence to insult his superior, and was
promptly cashiered. Even against Semyon Vasilyevich there rose up
enemies, who openly affirmed that he knew nothing whatever about
negresses. But as an answer to them there appeared in one of the
dailies an interview in which Semyon Vasilyevich publicly declared,
with the permission of his chief, that he loved negresses because there
was something _exotic_ in them. And the star of Semyon Vasilyevich
shone out with a new, undimming light.

At Anton Ivanovich’s evenings he was now the most desirable guest, and
Nastenka more than once wept bitterly, so sorry was she for his ruined
youth; but he would sit proudly at the very middle of the table, and
feeling himself the cynosure of all eyes, put on a somewhat melancholy,
but at the same time exotic face. And to all, to Anton Ivanovich
himself, to his guests, and even to the deaf old woman who washed up
the dirty things in the kitchen, it was a pleasure to know that such an
original man visited their house quite without ceremony. But Semyon
Vasilyevich went home and wept upon his pillow, because he loved
Nastenka exceedingly, and hated the damned Miss Korraito with all his
soul.

Before Easter there was a report that Semyon Vasilyevich was going to
marry Miss Korraito the negress, who for that reason would adopt
Orthodoxy and leave the service of M. Jacques Ducquelau, and that his
Excellency himself would give away the bride. Fellow civil-servants,
petitioners, and porters congratulated Semyon Vasilyevich; and he
bowed, only not so low as before, but still more politely, and his
bald, polished head glistened in the rays of the spring sunshine.

At the last evening party given by Anton Ivanovich before the wedding,
he was a positive hero; but Nastenka every half-hour or so ran off to
her own rooms to cry, and then so powdered herself, that the powder was
scattered from her face like flour from a millstone, and both her
neighbours became correspondingly whitened. At supper all congratulated
the bridegroom and drank his health; but Anton Ivanovich, as he took
his leave of his guests, said:

“There is one interesting question, my friend, what colour will your
children be?”

“Striped,” glumly said Polzikov.

“How striped?” asked the guests in surprise. “Why, in this way: one
stripe white, and one black, then another white, and so on,” Polzikov
explained quite despondently, for he was sorry with all his heart for
his old friend.

“That’s impossible!” excitedly exclaimed Semyon Vasilyevich, who had
grown pale at the thought. But Nastenka, no longer able to contain
herself, burst out sobbing and ran out of the room, whereby she caused
universal confusion.

For two years Semyon Vasilyevich was the happiest of men, and all
rejoiced when they looked at him, and recalled his unusual fate. Once
he was invited, together with his spouse, to his Excellency’s; and on
the birth of a boy he received considerable assistance from the reserve
fund, and soon after that he was promoted, out of his turn, to be
assistant secretary of the fourth office of the department. And the
child was born not striped, but only slightly grey, or rather
olive-coloured. Everywhere Semyon Vasilyevich talked of his warm love
for his wife and son; but he was never in a hurry to return home, and
when he did get there he was in no hurry to pull the bell-handle. But
when there met him on the threshold those teeth broad as piano-keys,
and the white saucers rolled, and when his smoothly brushed head was
pressed against something black, greasy, and smelling like musk, he
felt quite faint with grief, and thought of those happy people who had
white wives and white children.

“Dear!” said he submissively, and on the insistence of the happy mother
went to look at the baby. He hated that thick-lipped baby of a greyish
colour like asphalt, but he obediently nursed it, meditating in the
depths of his soul on the possibility of dropping it suddenly on the
floor.

After long vacillation and hidden sighs he wrote to his mother in the
country about his marriage, and to his surprise received from her a
most joyful answer. She also was pleased at having such an original for
her son, and that his Excellency himself had given away the bride. But
with regard to the colour, and other disabilities of the bride, she
expressed herself thus:

“Let her face be that of a sheep, if only her soul be human.”

At the end of two years Semyon Vasilyevich died of typhus fever. Before
the end he sent for the parish priest, who looked with curiosity on the
quondam Miss Korraito, stroked his full beard, and said meaningly, “N
... y ... es!” But it was evident that he respected Semyon Vasilyevich
for his originality, although he looked on it as sinful.

When his reverence stooped down to the dying man, the latter gathered
together the remnants of his strength, and opened his mouth wide to
cry:

“I hate that black devil!”

But he recalled his Excellency, and the help from the reserve fund, he
recalled the kindly Anton Ivanovich, and Nastenka, and looking at the
black weeping countenance, said softly:

“Father, I love negresses very much. In them there is something
_exotic_.”

With his last efforts he gave to his emaciated face the semblance of a
happy smile, and expired with it on his lips.

And the earth received him without emotion, not asking whether he loved
negresses or no, brought his body to corruption, mingled his bones with
those of other dead people, and annihilated every trace of the white
paper-collar.

But the Second Department long cherished the memory of Semyon
Vasilyevich, and when the waiting petitioners began to grow weary, the
porter would take them to his room to smoke, and would tell them tales
of the wonderful civil-servant who was so awfully fond of negresses.
And all, narrator and listeners, were pleased.

[4] Short of Semyon.—_Tr._]



PETKA AT THE BUNGALOW

Osip Abramovich, the barber, arranged a dirty sheeting on his
customer’s chest, and tucking it into his collar, shouted abruptly in a
sharp tone, “Boy! water!”

The customer, examining his face in the glass with that sharpened
intentness and interest which is exhibited only at the barber’s,
observed that another pimple had appeared on his chin, and turning his
eyes away in dissatisfaction they fell straight on a thin little hand,
which stretched out from somewhere at the side, and put a tin of hot
water down on the ledge below the looking-glass. When he raised his
eyes still higher, they caught the strange and distorted looking
reflection of the barber, and he noticed the sharp threatening glance
which he was casting down on the head of some one, and the silent
movements of his lips, caused by an inaudible but expressive whisper.
If the master himself was not doing the shaving but one of the
assistants, Prokopy or Mikhailo, then the whisper would become loud,
and take the form of a vague threat:

“Just you wait!”

This meant that the boy was not quick enough with the water, and that
punishment awaited him. “Serve ”m right too,” thought the customer,
bending his head down sideways, and contemplating the great moist hand
by the side of his nose, three fingers of which were spread out, while
the fore-finger and thumb, all sticky and smelly, gently touched cheek
and chin as the blunt razor, with a disagreeable grating noise, took
off the lather, and with it the stiff bristles of his beard.

At this barber’s shop, permeated with the oppressive smell of cheap
scents, full of tiresome flies and dirt, the customers were not very
exacting. They consisted of hall-porters, overseers, and sometimes
minor officials, or workmen, and often coarsely handsome but
suspicious-looking fellows with ruddy cheeks, slender moustaches, and
insolent oleaginous eyes.

Close by was a quarter full of houses of cheap debauchery. They lorded
it over the whole neighbourhood, and gave to it a special character of
something dirty, disorderly and disquieting.

The boy, who was called out to most frequently, was named Petka, and
was the smallest of all who served in the establishment. The other boy
Nikolka was his elder by three years, and would soon develop into an
assistant. Already when a more than ordinarily humble customer looked
in, and the assistants in the absence of the master were too lazy to
work, they would set Nikolka to cut his hair, and laugh when he had to
raise himself on tiptoe to see the back hair of some fat _dvornik._
Sometimes the customer would be offended that his hair was badly cut
and utter a loud complaint, and then the assistants would scold
Nikolka, not seriously, but only to satisfy the cropped lout. But such
cases were not of frequent occurrence, and Nikolka gave himself the
airs of a man; he smoked cigarettes, spat through his teeth, used bad
language, and even boasted to Petka that he drank vodka; but there he
probably lied. In company with the assistants he would run to the
neighbouring street to look on at a coarse fight, and when he came back
laughing with delight, Osip Abramovich would give him a couple of
smacks, one on each cheek.

Petka was only ten years old. He did not smoke, or drink vodka, or
swear, though he knew plenty of bad words, and in all these respects he
envied his companion. When there were no customers, and Prokopy, who
usually had spent a sleepless night somewhere or other, and in the
daytime would drowsily stumble about and throw himself into the dark
corner behind the partition, and Mikhailo was reading the _Police
News_, and amongst the accounts of thefts and robberies was looking out
for the name of some regular customer, Petka and Nikolka would chat
together. The latter was kinder when the two were alone together, and
used to explain to the younger the meaning of the terms used to
describe the various styles of hair-cutting.

Sometimes they sat at the window, by the side of a half-length figure
of a female in wax with pink cheeks, staring glass eyes, and straight
sparse eyelashes, and looked out on the boulevard, where life had been
stirring since the early morning. The trees of the boulevard, powdered
with dust, drooped motionless under the merciless burning rays of the
sun, and afforded an equally grey, unrefreshing shade. On all the
benches were seated men and women in dirty, uncouth attire, without
kerchiefs or hats, just as though they lived there and had no other
home. Whether the faces were indifferent, malignant, or dissolute, on
all alike was impressed the stamp of utter weariness and contempt of
their surroundings. Ofttimes a frowsy head would nod helplessly on a
shoulder, and the body would try to stretch itself out to sleep like a
third-class passenger after an unbroken journey of one thousand versts,
but there was nowhere to lie down. The park-keeper, in a bright blune
uniform with a cane in his hand, walked up and down the pathways,
looking out that no one lay down on the benches, or threw himself upon
the grass, which, though parched by the sun, was still so soft, so
cool. The women, for the most part more neatly dressed, and even with a
hint at fashion, were seemingly all of one type of countenance and of
one age; although here and there might be found some old, and others
quite young, almost children. All of these talked with hoarse, harsh
voices; and scolded, embracing the men as simply as though they were
alone on the boulevard. Sometimes they would take a snack and a drop of
vodka. It might happen that a drunken man would beat an equally drunken
woman. She would fall down, and get up again, and fall down again, but
no one would take her part. Only the faces of the crowd as they
gathered round the couple would light up with some intelligence and
animation, and wear a broader grin. But when the blue-coated keeper
drew near, they would listlessly disperse to their former places. Only
the ill-used woman would keep on weeping, uttering meaningless oaths,
with her rumpled hair covered with sand, and her semi-made bust looking
dirty and yellow in the morning light, cynically and piteously exposed.
They would put her on the bottom of a cab and drive her off with her
head hanging down, and swaying, as if she were dead.

Nikolka knew several of the men and women by name, and told Petka nasty
stories about them, and laughed showing his sharp teeth. And Petka
admired his knowledge and daring, and thought that some day he would be
like him. But meanwhile he wanted to be somewhere else. Wanted badly!

Petka’s days dragged on wonderfully monotonously, as like to one
another as two brothers. Summer and winter alike he saw the same
mirrors, one of which was cracked, and another was contorted and
amusing. On the stained wall hung one and the same picture,
representing two half-dressed women on the sea-shore, the only
difference being that their pink bodies became more spotted with fly
dirt, and that the black patch of soot became larger above the place
where the common kerosene lamp gleamed all the whole winter’s day. And
morning, evening, and the whole livelong day, there hung over Petka the
one and the same abrupt cry, “Boy, water!” and he was always bringing
it—always. There were no holidays. On Sundays, when the windows of the
stores and shops ceased to illuminate the street, those of the
hair-dresser’s till late at night cast a bright sheaf of light upon the
pavement, and the passer-by might observe a little thin figure huddled
upon his seat in the corner, and immersed in something between thought
and a heavy slumber. Petka slept a great deal, but still for some
reason or other he was always wanting to sleep, and it often seemed to
him that all around him was not real, but a very unpleasant dream.
Ofttimes he would spill the water, or fail to hear the sharp call,
“Boy, water!” He grew thinner and thinner, and unsightly scabs came out
on his closely-cropped head. Even the not too fastidious customers
looked with aversion on this thin, freckled boy, whose eyes were always
sleepy, his mouth half-open, and his hands and neck ingrained with
dirt. Round his eyes and under his nose faint lines were forming as
though traced by a sharp needle, and they made him look like an aged
dwarf.

Petka did not know whether he was happy or unhappy, but he did want to
go to some other place; but where, or what, that place was he could not
have told you. When his mother, the cook, Nadejda, paid him a visit, he
would eat listlessly the sweets she brought him. He never, never
complained, but only asked to be taken away from the place. But he soon
forgot his request, and would coolly take leave of his mother, without
asking when she was coming again. And Nadejda thought with sorrow that
she had only one son—and that one an imbecile.

How long he had lived in this fashion, Petka did not know, when
suddenly one day his mother came to dinner, had a talk with Osip
Abramovich, and told Petka that he was to be allowed to go to the
bungalow at Tzaritzyno, where her master and mistress were living. At
first, Petka could not realize the good news, but after a time his face
broke out into faint wrinkles of soft laughter, and he began to hasten
his mother’s departure. But for decency’s sake she had to talk to Osip
Abramovich about his wife’s health, while Petka was gently dragging her
by the hand and shoving her towards the door. He had no idea what a
bungalow was like, but he supposed that it must be the very place which
he had so longed to go to. With simple egotism he quite forgot Nikolka,
who was standing there with his hands in his pockets endeavouring to
regard Nadejda with his usual insolence. But instead of insolence there
shone in his eyes a profound grief. He had no mother, and at that
moment he would not have objected to having just such a stout one as
Nadejda. The fact was that he too had never been at a bungalow.

The railway station with its many voices, with its bustle and the
rumble of incoming trains, and the whistles of the engines, some thick
and irate like the voice of Osip Abramovich, others thin and shrill
like the voice of his sickly wife, with its hurrying passengers who
kept coming and going in a continuous stream, as if there were no end
to them—all this presented itself for the first time to the puzzled
gaze of Petka, and filled him with a feeling of excitement and
impatience. Like his mother, he was afraid of being late, though it
wanted a good half-hour to the time of the departure of the suburban
train. But when they were once seated in the carriage, and the train
had started, he stuck to the window, and only his cropped head kept
turning about on his thin neck, as though on a metal spindle.

Petka had been born and bred in the city, and was now in the country
for the first time in his life, and everything there was to him
strikingly new and strange; that you could see so far; that the world
looked like a lawn; and that the sky of this new world was so
wonderfully bright and far-stretching—just as if you were looking at it
from the roof of a house! Petka looked at it from his own side, and
when he turned to his mother, there was the same sky shining blue
through the opposite window, and on its surface were flocking—like
little angels—small, merry white flecks of clouds. Now Petka would turn
back to his own window, now run over to the other side of the carriage,
with confidence laying his ill-washed little hands on the shoulders and
knees of strangers, who answered him back with a smile. But one
gentleman who was reading a newspaper, and yawning all the time, either
from excessive fatigue or from ennui, looked askance at the boy once or
twice in not too friendly a manner, and Nadejda hastened to apologise:

“It is his first journey by rail—and he is interested.”

“Humph,” growled the gentleman, and buried himself in his newspaper.

Nadejda would very much have liked to tell him, how that Petka had
lived three years with a barber, who had promised to set him upon his
feet; and that this would be a very good thing, since she was a lone
weak woman, with no other means of support in case of sickness or when
she became old. But the expression of his face was so uninviting, that
she kept all this to herself.

To the right of the railway there was a broad stretch of undulating
plain, dark green with the continual moisture, and on its edge there
stood grey little houses, just like toys, and upon a high green hill,
at the foot of which flowed a silvery river, was perched a similarly
toy-like white church. When the train, with a noisy metallic clanking,
which suddenly became intensified, rushed on to a bridge, and seemed to
hang suspended in the air over the mirror-like surface of a river,
Petka gave a little shiver of fright and surprise, and started back
from the window; but immediately turned to it again, for fear of losing
a single detail of the journey. His eyes had long ceased to look
sleepy, and the lines had disappeared from his face. It was as though
some one had passed a hot flat-iron over his face, smoothing out the
wrinkles, and leaving the surface white and shining.

For the first two days of his sojourn at the bungalow the wealth and
force of the new impressions which inundated him from above and from
below confused his timid little soul. In contradistinction to the
savages of a former age, who felt lost on coming into a city from the
wilderness, this modern savage, who had been snatched away from the
stony embrace of the massive city, felt weak and impotent in the face
of nature. Here everything was to him living, sentient, and possessed
of conscious will. He was afraid of the forest, which gently rustled
over his head, and was so dark, so passive, so terrible in its
immensity. But the bright green joyful meadows, which seemed to be
singing with all their bright flowers, he loved, and wished to fondle
them as a sister; and the dark blue sky called him to itself, and
laughed like a mother. Petka would become agitated, shudder, and grow
pale, would smile at something, and slowly, like an old man, walk along
the outskirts of the forest, and on the wooded shore of the pond.
There, weary and out of breath, he would fling himself down on the
thick damp grass, and sink into it, only his little freckled nose
appearing above the green surface. For the first two days he was always
going back to his mother, and nestling up to her: and when the master
of the house asked him whether he liked being at the bungalow, he would
smile in confusion and answer:

“Very much!”

And then he would go off again to the threatening forest, and the still
water, and it was as though he were questioning them.

But after two days Petka had arrived at a complete understanding with
Nature. This was brought about by the co-operation of a schoolboy named
Mitya from old Tzaritzyno. The schoolboy had a swarthy countenance, the
colour of a second-class carriage. His hair stood erect on the crown of
his head, and was quite white, so bleached was it by the sun. He was
fishing in the pond, when Petka caught sight of him and unceremoniously
entered into conversation with him. They came to terms with wonderful
promptitude; he allowed Petka to hold one of the rods, and afterwards
took him some distance off to bathe. Petka was very much afraid of
going into the water, but when once in, he did not wish to come out
again, but pretended to swim, putting his forehead and nose above the
water. Then he got a great gulp of water in his mouth, and beat the
water with his hands and made a great splashing. At this moment he was
very like a puppy, that had for the first time fallen into the water.
When Petka dressed himself he was as blue as a corpse with the cold,
and as he talked his teeth chattered. At the proposal of Mitya, who was
of inexhaustible resource, they next explored the ruins of a mansion.
They clambered upon the roof overgrown with shoots, and wandered
between the broken-down walls of the great building. They did enjoy
themselves there! All about heaps of stones were piled up, on which
they climbed with difficulty, and between which grew young rowan and
birch trees. It was still as death, and it seemed as though some one
suddenly jumped out from a corner, or that some horrible, terrible face
appeared through the aperture left by a broken window. By degrees Petka
began to feel quite at home at the bungalow, and he forgot that there
was any Osip Abramovich or barber’s shop in the world.

“Just look how he is putting on flesh! He’s a regular merchant!”
Nadejda at this time would exclaim with delight.

She was stout enough herself and her face shone with the heat of the
kitchen like a copper samovar. She attributed his improvement to the
fact that she gave him plenty to eat. But in reality Petka ate very
little indeed, not because he did not care for his food, but because he
could scarcely find time for it. If only it had been possible to bolt
his food without mastication!—but one must masticate, and during the
intervals swing one’s feet, since Nadejda ate deuced slowly, polishing
the bones and wiping her fingers on her apron, while she kept up a
perpetual chatter. But he was up to the neck in business: he had to
bathe four times, to cut a fishing-rod in the hazel coppice, to dig for
worms—all this required time. Now Petka ran about bare-foot, and that
was a thousand times pleasanter than wearing boots with thick soles:
the rustling ground now warmed, now cooled his feet so deliciously. He
had even discarded his second-hand school-jacket, in which he looked
like a full-grown master-barber, and thereby became amazingly
rejuvenated. He put it on only in the evening, when he went and stood
on the dam to watch the Master and Mistress boating. Well-dressed and
cheerful they would laughingly take their seats in the rocking boat,
which leisurely ploughed the mirror-like surface of the water on which
the reflection of the trees swayed as though agitated by a breeze.

At the end of the week the Master brought from the city a letter
addressed “to Cook Nadejda.” When he had read it over to her she began
to cry, and smeared her face all over with the soot which was on her
apron. From the fragmentary remarks which accompanied this operation,
it might be deduced that the contents of the letter affected Petka.
This took place in the evening. Petka was playing athletic sports by
himself in the back court, and puffing out his cheeks, because that
made it considerably easier to jump. The schoolboy Mitya had taught him
this stupid but interesting occupation, and now Petka, like a true
“sportsman,” was practising alone. The master came out, and laying his
hand on his shoulder, said:

“Well, my friend, you have to go!”

Petka smiled in confusion and said nothing. “What a strange lad,”
thought the master.

“Yes, have to go.”

Petka smiled. Nadejda coming up with tears in her eyes repeated:

“You have to go, sonny.”

“Where?” said Petka in surprise. He had forgotten the city; and the
other place, to which he had always so wanted to go away—was found.

“To your master, Osip Abramovich.”

Still Petka failed to understand, though the matter was as clear as
daylight. But his mouth felt suddenly dry, and his tongue moved with
difficulty as he asked:

“How then can I go fishing to-morrow? Look, here is the rod.”

“But what can one do? He wants you. Prokopy, he says, is ill, and has
been taken to the hospital. He says he has not enough hands. Don’t cry!
See, he’ll be sure to let you come again. He is kind is Osip
Abramovich.”

But Petka was not thinking of crying, and still did not understand. On
one side there was the fact, the fishing-rod—on the other the phantom,
Osip Abramovich. But gradually Petka’s thoughts began to clear and a
strange metamorphosis took place: Osip Abramovich became the fact, and
the fishing-rod, which had not yet had time to dry, was changed into
the phantom. And then Petka surprised his mother, and distressed the
master and his wife, and would have been surprised himself if he had
been capable of self-analysis. He did not begin to cry, as town
children, thin and half-starved, cry; he simply bawled louder than the
strongest-voiced man; and began to roll on the ground, as the drunken
women rolled on the boulevard. He clenched his skinny fists, and struck
his mother’s hands and the ground, in fact everything he came across,
feeling, indeed, the pain caused by the pebbles and sharp stones, but
striving, as it were, to increase it.

In course of time Petka became calm again, and the master said to his
wife, who was standing before the glass arranging a white rose in her
hair:

“You see he has left off. Children’s grief is not long-lived.”

“All the same I am very sorry for the poor little boy.”

“Yes, indeed! they live under terrible conditions, but there are people
who are still worse off. Are you ready?”

And they went off to Bigman’s Gardens, where dances had been arranged
for the evening, and a military band was already playing.

The next day Petka started for Moscow by the 7 a.m. train. Again he saw
the green fields, grey with the night’s dew, only they did not now run
in the same direction as before, but in the opposite. The second-hand
school jacket enveloped his thin body, and from the opening at the neck
stuck out the corner of a white paper collar. Petka did not turn to the
window, indeed, he hardly looked at it, but sat so still and modest,
with his little hands primly folded upon his knees. His eyes were
sleepy and apathetic, and fine wrinkles, as in the case of an old man,
gathered about his eyes and under his nose. Suddenly the pillars and
the planks of the platform flashed before the window, and the train
stopped.

They pressed through the hurrying crowd, and came out into the noisy
street; and the great, greedy city callously swallowed up its little
victim.

“Put away the fishing tackle for me,” said Petka, when his mother
deposited him at the door of the barber’s shop.

“Trust me for that, sonny! Maybe you will come again.”

And once more in the dirty, stuffy shop was heard the sharp call, “Boy,
water!” and the customer saw a small, dirty hand thrust out to the
ledge below the mirror, and heard the vague, threatening whisper. “Just
you wait a bit!” This meant that the sleepy boy had either spilled the
water, or had bungled the orders. But at nights from the place where
Nikolka and Petka lay side by side, a little low and agitated voice
might be heard telling about the bungalow, and speaking of what is not,
and what no one has ever seen or heard. And when silence supervened,
and only the irregular breathing of the children was audible, another
voice, unusually deep and strong for a child, would exclaim:

“The devils! May they bu’st!”

“Who are devils?”

“Why, the whole blooming lot, of course!”

A string of cars passed by, and drowned the boys’ voices with its noisy
rumbling; and then that distant cry of complaint was heard, which had
for long been borne in from the boulevard, where a drunken man was
beating an equally drunken woman.



SILENCE

I

On a moonlight night in May, when the nightingales were singing, his
wife came to Father Ignaty who was sitting in his study. Her face was
expressive of suffering, and the small lamp trembled in her hand. She
came up to her husband, touched him on the shoulder, and said sobbing:

“Father, let us go to Verochka!”

Without turning his head, Father Ignaty frowned at his wife over his
spectacles, and looked long and fixedly, until she made a motion of
discomfort with her free hand, and sat down on a low divan.

“How pitiless you _both_ are,” said she slowly and with strong emphasis
on the word “both,” and her kindly puffed face was contorted with a
look of pain and hardness, as though she wished to express by her looks
how hard people were—her husband and her daughter.

Father Ignaty gave a laugh and stood up. Closing his book, he took off
his spectacles, put them into their case, and fell into a brown study.
His big black beard, shot with silver threads, lay in a graceful curve
upon his chest, and rose and fell slowly under his deep breathing.

“Well, then, we will go!” said he.

Olga Stepanovna rose quickly, and asked in a timid, ingratiating voice:

“Only don’t scold her, father! You know what she is.”

Vera’s room was in a belvedere at the top of the house, and the narrow
wooden stairs bent and groaned under the heavy steps of Father Ignaty.
Tall and ponderous, he was obliged to stoop so as not to hit his head
against the ceiling above, and he frowned fastidiously when his wife’s
white jacket touched his face. He knew that nothing would come of their
conversation with Vera.

“What, is that you?” asked Vera, lifting one bare arm to her eyes. The
other arm lay on the top of the white summer counterpane, from which it
was scarcely distinguishable, so white, transparent and cold was it.

“Verochka!” the mother began, but gave a sob and was silent.

“Vera!” said the father, endeavouring to soften his dry, hard voice.
“Vera, tell us what is the matter with you?”

Vera was silent.

“Vera, are your mother and I undeserving of your confidence? Do we not
love you? Have you any one nearer to you than ourselves? Speak to us of
your grief, and believe me, an old and experienced man, you will feel
the better for it. And so shall we. Look at your old mother, how she is
suffering.”

“Verochka——!”

“And to me——” his voice trembled, as though something in it had broken
in two, “and to me, is it easy, think you? As though I did not see that
you were devoured by some grief, but what is it? And I, your father, am
kept in ignorance. Is it right?”

Vera still kept silence. Father Ignaty stroked his beard with special
precaution, as though he feared that his fingers would involuntarily
begin to tear it, and continued:

“Against my wishes you went to St. Petersburg—did I curse you for your
disobedience? Or did I refuse you money? Or do you say I was not kind?
Well, why don’t you speak? See, the good your St. Petersburg has done
you!”

Father Ignaty ceased speaking, and there rose before his mind’s eye
something big, granite-built, terrible, full of unknown dangers, and of
strange callous people. And there alone and weak was his Vera, and
there she had been ruined. An angry hatred of that terrible
incomprehensible city arose in Father Ignaty’s soul, together with
anger towards his daughter, who kept silent, so obstinately silent.

“St. Petersburg has nothing to do with it,” said Vera crossly, and
closed her eyes. “But there is nothing the matter with me. You had
better go to bed, it’s late.”

“Verochka!” groaned her mother. “My little daughter, confide in me!”

“Oh! mamma!” said Vera, impatiently interrupting her.

Father Ignaty sat down on a chair and began to laugh.

“Well then, nothing is the matter after all?” he asked ironically.

“Father,” said Vera, in a sharp voice, raising herself up on her bed,
“you know that I love you and mamma. But—I do feel so dull. All this
will pass away. Really, you had better go to bed. I want to sleep, too.
To-morrow, or sometime, we will have a talk.”

Father Ignaty rose abruptly, so that his chair bumped against the wall,
and took his wife’s arm.

“Let’s go!”

“Verochka!”

“Let’s go—I tell you,” cried Father Ignaty. “If she has forgotten God,
shall we too! Why should we!”

He drew Olga Stepanovna away, almost by main force, and as they were
descending the stairs, she, dragging her steps more slowly, said in an
angry whisper:

“Ugh! pope, it’s you who have made her so. It’s from you she has got
this manner. And you’ll have to answer for it. Ah! how wretched I am——”

And she began to cry, and kept blinking her eyes, so that she could not
see the steps, and letting her feet go down as it were into an abyss
below into which she wished to precipitate herself.

From that day forward Father Ignaty ceased to talk to his daughter, and
she seemed not to notice the change. As before, she would now lie in
her room, now go about, frequently wiping her eyes with the palms of
her hands, as though they were obstructed. And oppressed by the silence
of these two people, the pope’s wife, who was fond of jokes and
laughter, became lost and timid, hardly knowing what to say or do.

Sometimes Vera went out for a walk. About a week after the conversation
related above, she went out in the evening as usual. They never saw her
again alive, for that evening she threw herself under a train, which
cut her in two.

Father Ignaty buried her himself. His wife was not present at the
church, because at the news of Vera’s death she had had a stroke. She
had lost the use of her feet and hands and tongue, and lay motionless
in a semi-darkened room, while close by her the bells tolled in the
belfry. She heard them all coming out of church, heard the choristers
singing before their house, and tried to raise her hand to cross
herself, but the hand would not obey her will. She wished to say:
“Good-bye, Vera,” but her tongue lay inert in her mouth, swollen and
heavy. She lay so still that any one who saw her would have thought
that she was resting, or asleep. Only—her eyes were open.

There were many people in the church at the funeral, both acquaintances
of Father Ignaty’s and strangers. All present compassionated Vera, who
had died such a terrible death, and they tried in Father Ignaty’s
movements and voice to find signs of profound grief. They were not fond
of Father Ignaty, because he was rough and haughty in his manners,
harsh and unforgiving with his penitents, while, himself jealous and
greedy, he availed himself of every chance to take more than his dues
from a parishioner. They all wished to see him suffering, broken-down;
they wished to see him acknowledge that he was doubly guilty of his
daughter’s death—as a harsh father, and as a bad priest, who could not
protect his own flesh and blood from sin. So they all watched him with
curiosity, but he, feeling their eyes directed on his broad powerful
back, endeavoured to straighten it, and thought not so much of his dead
daughter as of not compromising his dignity.

“A well-seasoned pope,” Karzenov the carpenter, to whom he still owed
money for some frames, said with a nod in his direction.

And so, firm and upright, Father Ignaty went to the cemetery, and came
back the same. And not till he reached the door of his wife’s room did
his back bend a little; but that might have been because the door was
not high enough for his stature. Coming in from the light he could only
with difficulty distinguish his wife’s face, and when he succeeded in
so doing, he perceived that it was perfectly still and that there were
no tears in her eyes. In them was there neither anger nor grief; they
were dumb, and painfully, obstinately silent, as was also her whole
obese feeble body that was pressed against the bed-rail.

“Well, what? How are you feeling?” Father Ignaty inquired.

But her lips were dumb, and her eyes were silent. Father Ignaty laid
his hand on her forehead; it was cold and damp, and Olga Stepanovna
gave no sign whatever that she had felt his touch. And when he removed
his hands from her forehead, two deep, grey eyes looked at him without
blinking; they seemed almost black on account of the dilation of the
pupils, and in them was neither grief nor anger.

“Well, I will go to my own room,” said Father Ignaty, who had turned
cold and frightened.

He went through the guest-chamber, where everything was clean and
orderly as ever, and the high-backed chairs stood swathed in white
covers, like corpses in their shrouds. At one of the windows hung a
wire cage, but it was empty and the door was open.

“Nastasya!” Father Ignaty called, and his voice seemed to him rough,
and he felt awkward, that he had called so loud in those quiet rooms,
so soon after the funeral of their daughter. “Nastasya,” he called more
gently, “where’s the canary?”

The cook, who had cried so much that her nose was swollen and become as
red as a beet, answered rudely:

“Don’t know. It flew away.”

“Why did you let it go?” said Father Ignaty, angrily knitting his
brows.

Nastasya burst out crying, and wiping her eyes with the ends of a print
handkerchief she wore over her head, said through her tears:

“The dear little soul of the young mistress. How could I keep it?”

And it seemed even to Father Ignaty that the happy little yellow
canary, which used to sing always with its head thrown back, was really
the soul of Vera, and that if it had not flown away it would have been
impossible to say that Vera was dead. And he became still more angry
with the cook, and shouted:

“Get along!” and when Nastasya did not at once make for the door, added
“Fool!”

II

From the day of the funeral silence reigned in the little house. It was
not stillness, for that is the mere absence of noise, but it was
_silence_ which means that those who kept silence could, apparently,
have spoken if they had pleased. So thought Father Ignaty when,
entering his wife’s chamber, he would meet an obstinate glance, so
heavy that it was as though the whole air were turned to lead, and was
pressing on his head and back. So he thought when he examined his
daughter’s music, on which her very voice was impressed; her books, and
her portrait, a large one painted in colours which she had brought with
her from St. Petersburg. In examining her portrait a certain order was
evolved.

First he would look at her neck, on which the light was thrown in the
portrait, and would imagine to himself a scratch on it, such as was on
the neck of the dead Vera, and the origin of which he could not
understand. And every time he meditated on the cause. If it had been
the train which struck it, it would have shattered her whole head, and
the head of the dead Vera was quite uninjured.

Could it be that some one had touched it with his foot when carrying
home the corpse; or was it done unintentionally with the nail?

But to think long about the details of her death was horrible to Father
Ignaty, so he would pass on to the eyes of the portrait. They were
black and beautiful, with long eyelashes, the thick shadow of which lay
below, so that the whites seemed peculiarly bright, and the two eyes
were as though enclosed in black mourning frames. The unknown artist, a
man of talent, had given to them a strange expression. It was as though
between the eyes, and that on which they rested, there was a thin,
transparent film. It reminded one of the black top of a grand piano, on
which the summer dust lay in a thin layer, almost imperceptible, but
still dimming the brightness of the polished wood. And wherever Father
Ignaty placed the portrait, the eyes continually followed him, not
speaking, but silent; and the silence was so clear that it seemed
possible to hear it. And by degrees Father Ignaty came to think that he
did hear the silence.

Every morning after the Eucharist Father Ignaty would go to the
sitting-room, would take in at a glance the empty cage, and all the
well-known arrangement of the room, sit down in an arm-chair, close his
eyes and listen to the silence of the house. It was something strange.
The cage was gently and tenderly silent; and grief and tears, and
far-away dead laughter were felt in that silence. The silence of his
wife, softened by the intervening walls, was obstinate, heavy as lead;
and terrible, so terrible that Father Ignaty turned cold on the hottest
day. Endless, cold as the grave, mysterious as death, was the silence
of his daughter. It was as though the silence were a torture to itself,
and as though it longed passionately to pass into speech, but that
something strong and dull as a machine, held it motionless, and
stretched it like a wire. And then somewhere in the far distance, the
wire began to vibrate and emit a soft, timid, pitiful sound. Father
Ignaty, with a mixture of joy and fear, would catch this incipient
sound, and pressing his hands on the arms of the chair, would stretch
his head forward and wait for the sound to reach him. But it would
break off, and lapse into silence.

“Nonsense!” Father Ignaty would angrily exclaim, and rise from the
chair, tall and upright as ever. From the window was to be seen the
market-place, bathed in sunlight, paved with round, even stones, and on
the other side the stone wall of a long, windowless storehouse. At the
corner stood a cab like a statue in clay, and it was incomprehensible
why it continued to stand there, when for whole hours together not a
single passer-by was to be seen.

III

Out of the house Father Ignaty had much talking to do: with his
ecclesiastical subordinates, and with his parishioners when he was
performing his duties; and sometimes with acquaintances when he played
with them at “Preference.” But when he returned home he thought that he
had been all the day silent. This came of the fact that with none of
these people could he speak of the question which was the chief and
most important of all to him, which racked his thoughts every night:
Why had Vera died?

Father Ignaty was unwilling to admit to himself that it was impossible
now to solve this difficulty, and kept on thinking that it was still
possible.

Every night—and they were all now for him sleepless—he would recall the
moment when he and his wife had stood by Vera’s bed at darkest
midnight, and he had entreated her “Speak!” And when in his
recollections he arrived at that word, even the rest of the scene
presented itself to him as different to what it had really been. His
closed eyes preserved in their darkness a vivid, unblurred picture of
that night; they saw distinctly Vera lifting herself upon her bed and
saying with a smile—— But what did she say? And that unuttered word of
hers, which would solve the whole question, seemed so near, that if he
were to stretch his ear and still the beating of his heart, then, then
he would hear it—and at the same time it was so infinitely, so
desperately far.

Father Ignaty would rise from his bed, and stretching forth his clasped
hands in a gesture of supplication, entreat:

“Vera!”

And silence was the answer he received.

One evening Father Ignaty went to Olga Stepanovna’s room, where he had
not been for about a week, and sitting down near the head of her bed,
he turned away from her doleful, obstinate gaze, and said:

“Mother! I want to talk to you about Vera. Do you hear?”

Her eyes were silent, and Father Ignaty raising his voice began to
speak in the loud and severe tones with which he addressed his
penitents:

“I know you think that I was the cause of Vera’s death. But consider,
did I love her less than you? You judge strangely——I was strict, but
did that prevent her from doing as she pleased? I made little of the
respect due to a father; I meekly bowed my neck, when she, with no fear
of my curse, went away—thither. And you——mother——did not you with tears
entreat her to remain, until I ordered you to be silent. Am I
responsible for her being born hard-hearted? Did I not teach her of
God, of humility, and of love?”

Father Ignaty gave a swift glance into his wife’s eyes, and turned
away.

“What could I do with her, if she would not open her grief to me.
Command? I commanded her. Intreat? I intreated. What? Do you think I
ought to have gone down on my knees before the little chit of a girl,
and wept, like an old woman! What she had got in her head, and where
she got it, I know not. Cruel, heartless daughter!”

Father Ignaty smote his knees with his fists.

“She was devoid of love—that’s what it was! I know well enough what she
called me—a tyrant. You she did love, didn’t she? You who wept,
and——humbled yourself?”

Father Ignaty laughed noiselessly.

“Lo—o—ved! That’s it, to comfort you she chose such a death—a cruel,
disgraceful death! She died on the ballast, in the dirt——like a d—d—og,
to which some one gives a kick on the muzzle.”

Father Ignaty’s voice sounded low and hoarse:

“I’m ashamed! I’m ashamed to go out into the street! I’m ashamed to
come out of the chancel! I’m ashamed before God. Cruel, unworthy
daughter! One could curse you in your grave——”

When Father Ignaty glanced again at his wife, she had fainted, and did
not come to herself for some hours. And when she did come to herself
her eyes were silent, and it was impossible to know whether she
understood what Father Ignaty had said to her, or no.

That same night—it was a moonlight night in July, still, warm,
soundless—Father Ignaty crept on tiptoe, so that his wife and her nurse
should not hear him, up the stairs to Vera’s room. The window of the
belvedere had not been opened since the death of Vera, and the
atmosphere was dry and hot, with a slight smell of scorching from the
iron roof, which had become heated during the day. There was an
uninhabited and deserted feeling about the apartment from which man had
been absent so long, and in which the wood of the walls, the furniture
and other objects gave out a faint smell of growing decay.

The moonlight fell in a bright stripe across the window and floor, and
reflected by the carefully washed white boards it illumined the corners
with a dim semi-light, and the clean white bed with its two pillows, a
big one and a little one, looked unearthly and ghostly. Father Ignaty
opened the window, and the fresh air poured into the room in a broad
stream, smelling of dust, of the neighbouring river, and the flowering
lime, and bore on it a scarcely audible chorus, apparently, of people
rowing a boat, and singing as they rowed.

Stepping silently on his naked feet, like a white ghost, Father Ignaty
approached the empty bed, and bending his knees fell face-down on the
pillows, and embraced them—the place where Vera’s face ought to have
been.

He lay long so. The song became louder, and then gradually became
inaudible; but he still lay there, with his long black hair dishevelled
over his shoulders and on the bed.

The moon had moved on, and the room had become darker, when Father
Ignaty raised his head, and throwing into his voice all the force of a
long suppressed and long unacknowledged love, and listening to his
words, as though not he, but Vera, were listening to them, exclaimed:

“Vera, my daughter! Do you understand what it means, daughter! Little
daughter! My heart! my blood, my life! Your father, your poor old
father, already grey and feeble.”

His shoulders shook, and all his heavy frame was convulsed. With a
shudder Father Ignaty whispered tenderly, as to a little child:

“Your poor old father asks you. Yes, Verochka, he entreats. He weeps.
He who never was so wont. Your grief, my little daughter, your
suffering, are my own. More than mine.”

Father Ignaty shook his head.

“More, Verochka. What is death to me, an old man? But you——. If only
you had realized, how tender, weak and timid you were! Do you remember
how when you pricked your finger and the blood came, you began to cry.
My little daughter! And you do indeed love me, love me dearly, I know.
Every morning you kiss my hand. Speak, speak of what is grieving
you—and I with these two hands will strangle your grief. They are still
strong, Vera, these hands.”

His locks shook.

“Speak!”

He fixed his eyes on the wall, and stretching out his hands, cried:

“Speak!”

But the chamber was silent, and from the far distance was borne in the
sound of the long and short whistles of a locomotive.

Father Ignaty, rolling his distended eyes, as though there stood before
him the frightful ghost of a mutilated corpse, slowly raised himself
from his knees, and with uncertain movement lifted his hand, with the
fingers separated and nervously stretched out, to his head. Going out
by the door, Father Ignaty sharply whispered the word:

“Speak!”

And silence was the answer he received.

IV

The next day, after an early and solitary dinner, Father Ignaty went to
the cemetery—for the first time since the death of his daughter. It was
close, deserted, and still, as though the hot day were but an illumined
night; but Father Ignaty as his habit was, with an effort straightened
his back, looked sternly from side to side, and thought that he was the
same as heretofore. He did not regard the new, but terrible, weakness
of his legs, nor that his long beard had grown completely white, as
though bitten by a hard frost. The way to the cemetery led through the
long, straight street, which sloped gently upwards, and at the end of
which gleamed white the roof of the lych-gate, which was like a black,
ever-open mouth edged with gleaming teeth.

Vera’s grave lay in the very depth of the cemetery, where the gravelled
pathways ended; and Father Ignaty had to wander for long on the narrow
tracks, along a broken line of little mounds which protruded from the
grass, forgotten of all, deserted of all. Here and there he came upon
monuments sloping and green with age, broken-down railings, and great
heavy stones cast upon the ground, and pressing it with a sort of grim
senile malignity.

Vera’s grave was next to one of these stones. It was covered with new
sods, already turning yellow, while all around it was green. A rowan
tree was intertwined with a maple, and a widely spreading clump of
hazel stretched its pliant branches with rough furred leaves over the
grave. Sitting down on the neighbouring tomb, and sighing repeatedly,
Father Ignaty looked round, cast a glance at the cloudless desert sky,
in which the red-hot disc of the sun hung suspended in perfect
immobility—and then only did he become conscious of that profound
stillness, like nothing else in the world, which holds sway over a
cemetery, when there is not a breath of wind to rustle the dead leaves.
And once more the thought came to Father Ignaty, that this was not
stillness, but silence. It overflowed to the very brick walls of the
cemetery, climbed heavily over them, and submerged the city. And its
end was only there—in those grey, stubbornly, obstinately silent eyes.

Father Ignaty shrugged his shoulders, which were becoming cold, and let
his eyes fall on Vera’s grave. He gazed long at the short little seared
stalks of grass, which had been torn from the ground somewhere in the
wide wind-swept fields, and had failed to take root in the new soil;
and he could not realize that there, under that grass, at a few feet
from him, lay Vera. And this nearness seemed incomprehensible, and
imbued his soul with a confusion and strange alarm. She, of whom he was
accustomed to think as having for ever disappeared in the dark depth of
infinity, was here, close—and it was difficult to understand that
nevertheless she was not, and never would be again. And it seemed to
Father Ignaty that if he spoke some word, which he almost felt upon his
lips, or if he made some movement, Vera would come forth from the tomb,
and stand up as tall and beautiful as ever. And that not only would she
arise; but that all the dead, who could be felt, so awesome in their
solemn cold silence, would rise too.

Father Ignaty took off his black wide-brimmed hat, smoothed his wavy
locks, and said in a whisper:

“Vera!”

He became uneasy lest he should be heard by some stranger, and stood
upon the tomb and looked over the crosses. But there was no one near,
and he repeated aloud:

“Vera!”

It was Father Ignaty’s old voice, dry and exacting, and it was strange
that a demand made with such force remained without answer.

“Vera!”

Loud and persistently the voice called, and when it was silent for a
moment it seemed as though somewhere below a vague answer resounded.
And Father Ignaty looked once more around, removed his hair from his
ears, and laid them on the rough prickly sod.

“Vera! Speak!”

And Father Ignaty felt with horror that something cold as the tomb
penetrated his ear, and froze the brain, and that Vera spoke—but what
she said was ever the same long silence. It became ever more and more
alarming and terrible, and when Father Ignaty dragged his head with an
effort from the ground, pale as that of a corpse, it seemed to him that
the whole air trembled and vibrated with a resonant silence, as though
a wild storm had arisen on that terrible sea. The silence choked him:
it kept rolling backwards and forwards through his head in icy waves,
and stirred his hair; it broke against his bosom, which groaned beneath
the shocks. Trembling all over, casting from side to side quick,
nervous glances, he slowly raised himself, and strove with torturing
efforts to straighten his back and to restore the proud carriage to his
trembling body. And in this he succeeded. With slow deliberation he
shook the dust from his knees, put on his hat, made the sign of the
cross three times over the grave, and went with even, firm gait, and
yet did not recognize the well-known cemetery, and lost his way.

“Lost my way!” he laughed, and stood still at the branching paths.

He stood still for a moment, and then without thinking turned to the
left, because it was impossible to stand still and wait. The silence
pursued him. It rose from the green graves; the grim grey crosses
breathed it; it came forth in thin suffocating streams from every pore
of the ground, which was sated with corpses. Father Ignaty’s steps
became quicker and quicker. Dazed, he went round the same paths again
and again, he leapt the graves, stumbled against the railings, grasped
the prickly tin wreaths, and the soft stuff tore to pieces in his
hands. Only one thought, that of getting out, was left in his head. He
rushed from side to side, and at last ran noiselessly, a tall figure,
almost unrecognizable in his streaming cassock, with his hair floating
on the air. More frightened than at the sight of a corpse risen from
the grave, would have been any one who had met this wild figure of a
man running, leaping, waving his arms—if he had recognized his mad,
distorted face, and heard the dull rattle that escaped from his open
mouth.

At full run Father Ignaty jumped out upon the little square at the end
of which stood the low white mortuary chapel. In the porch on a little
bench there dozed an old man who looked like a pilgrim from afar, and
near him two old beggar-women were flying at one another, quarrelling
and scolding.

When Father Ignaty reached home, it was already getting dark, and the
lamp was lit in Olga Stepanovna’s room. Without change of clothes or
removing his hat, torn and dusty, he came hurriedly to his wife and
fell on his knees.

“Mother—Olga—pity me!” he sobbed; “I am going out of my mind.”

He beat his head against the edge of the table, and sobbed
tumultuously, painfully, as a man does who never weeps. He lifted his
head, confident that in a moment a miracle would be performed, and that
his wife would speak, and pity him.

“Dear!”

With his whole big body he stretched out towards his wife, and met the
look of the grey eyes. In them there was neither compassion nor anger.
Maybe his wife forgave and pitied him, but in those eyes there was
neither pity nor forgiveness. They were dumb and silent.

And the whole desolate house was silent.



LAUGHTER

I

AT 6:30 I was certain that she would come, and I was desperately happy.
My coat was fastened only by the top button, and fluttered in the cold
wind; but I felt no cold. My head was proudly thrown back, and my
student’s cap was cocked on the back of my head; my eyes with respect
to the men they met were expressive of patronage and boldness, with
respect to the women of a seductive tenderness. Although she had been
my only love for four whole days, I was so young, and my heart was so
rich in love, that I could not remain perfectly indifferent to other
women. My steps were quick, bold and free.

At 6:45 my coat was fastened by two buttons, and I looked only at the
women, but no longer with a seductive tenderness, but rather with
disgust. I only wanted _one_ woman—the others might go to the devil;
they only confused me, and with their seeming resemblance to Her gave
to my movements an uncertain and jerky indecision.

At 6:55 I felt warm.

At 6:58 I felt cold.

As it struck seven I was convinced that she would not come.

By 8:30 I presented the appearance of the most pitiful creature in the
world. My coat was fastened with all its buttons, collar turned up, cap
tilted over my nose, which was blue with cold; my hair was over my
forehead, my moustache and eyelashes were whitening with rime, and my
teeth gently chattered. From my shambling gait, and bowed back, I might
have been taken for a fairly hale old man returning from a party at the
almshouse.

And She was the cause of all this—She! “Oh, the Dev——! No, I won’t.
Perhaps she could not get away, or she is ill, or dead. She’s
dead!”—and I swore.

II

“Eugenia Nikolaevna will be there to-night,” one of my companions, a
student, remarked to me, without the slightest _arrière pensée._ He
could not know how that I had waited for her in the frost from seven to
half-past eight.

“Indeed,” I replied, as in deep thought, but within my soul there leapt
out: “Oh, the Dev——!” “There” meant at the Polozovs’ evening party. Now
the Polozovs were people with whom I was not upon visiting terms. But
this evening I would be there.

“You fellows!” I shouted cheerfully, “to-day is Christmas Day, when
everybody enjoys himself. Let us do so too.”

“But how?” one of them mournfully replied.

“And where?” continued another.

“We will dress up, and go round to all the evening parties,” I decided.

And these insensate individuals actually became cheerful. They shouted,
leapt, and sang. They thanked me for my suggestion, and counted up the
amount of “the ready” available. In the course of half an hour we had
collected all the lonely, disconsolate students in town; and when we
had recruited a cheerful dozen or so of leaping devils, we repaired to
a hair-dresser’s—he was also a costumier—and let in there the cold, and
youth, and laughter.

I wanted something sombre and handsome, with a shade of elegant
sadness; so I requested:

“Give me the dress of a Spanish grandee.”

Apparently this grandee had been very tall, for I was altogether
swallowed up in his dress, and felt there as absolutely alone as though
I had been in a wide, empty hall. Getting out of this costume, I asked
for something else.

“Would you like to be a clown? Motley with bells.”

“A clown, indeed!” I exclaimed with contempt.

“Well, then, a bandit. Such a hat and dagger!”

Oh! dagger! Yes, that would suit my purpose. But unfortunately the
bandit whose clothes they gave me had scarcely grown to full stature.
Most probably he had been a corrupt youth of eight years. His little
hat would not cover the back of my head, and I had to be dragged out of
his velvet breeks as out of a trap. A page’s dress was no go: it was
all spotted like the pard. The monk”s cowl was all in holes.

“Look sharp; it’s late,” said my companions, who were already dressed,
trying to hurry me up.

There was but one costume left—that of a distinguished Chinaman. “Give
me the Chinaman’s,” said I with a wave of my hand. And they gave it me.
It was the devil knows what! I am not speaking of the costume itself. I
pass over in silence those idiotic flowered boots, which were too short
for me, and reached only half-way to my knees; but in the remaining, by
far the most essential part, stuck out like two incomprehensible
adjuncts on either side of my feet. I say nothing of the pink rag which
covered my head like a wig, and was tied by threads to my ears, so that
they protruded and stood up like a bat’s. But the mask!

It was, if one may use the expression, a face _in the abstract._ It had
nose, eyes, and mouth all right enough, and all in the proper places;
but there was nothing human about it. A human being could not look so
placid—even in his coffin. It was expressive neither of sorrow, nor
cheerfulness, nor surprise—it expressed absolutely nothing! It looked
at you squarely, and placidly—and an uncontrollable laughter
overwhelmed you. My companions rolled about on the sofas, sank
impotently down on the chairs, and gesticulated.

“It will be the most original mask of the evening,” they declared.

I was ready to weep; but no sooner did I glance in the mirror than I
too was convulsed with laughter. Yes, it will be a most original mask!

“In no circumstances are we to take off our masks,” said my companions
on the way. “We will give our word.”

“Honour bright!”

III

Positively it was the most original mask. People followed me in crowds,
turned me about, jostled me, pinched me. But when, harried, I turned on
my persecutors in anger—uncontrollable laughter seized them. Wherever I
went, a roaring cloud of laughter encompassed and pressed on me; it
moved together with me, and I could not escape from this circle of mad
mirth. Sometimes it seized even myself, and I shouted, sang, and danced
till everything seemed to go round before me, as if I was drunk. But
how remote everything was from me! And how solitary was I under that
mask! At last they left me in peace. With anger and fear, with malice
and tenderness intermingling, I looked at her.

“”Tis I.”

Her long eyelashes were lifted slowly in surprise, and a whole sheaf of
black rays flashed upon me, and a laugh, resonant, joyous, bright as
the spring sunshine—a laugh answered me.

“Yes, it is I; I, I say,” I insisted with a smile. “Why did you not
come this evening?”

But she only laughed, laughed joyously.

“I suffered so much; I felt so hurt,” said I, imploring an answer.

But she only laughed. The black sheen of her eyes was extinguished, and
still more brightly her smile lit up. It was the sun indeed, but
burning, pitiless, cruel.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Is it really you?” said she, restraining herself. “How comical you
are!”

My shoulders were bowed, and my head hung down—such despair was there
in my pose. And while she, with the expiring afterglow of the smile
upon her face, looked at the happy young couples that hurried by us, I
said: “It’s not nice to laugh. Do you not feel that there is a living,
suffering face behind my ridiculous mask—and can’t you see that it was
only for the opportunity it gave me of seeing you that I put it on? You
gave me reason to hope for your love, and then so quickly, so cruelly
deprived me of it. Why did you not come?”

With a protest on her tender, smiling lips, she turned sharply to me,
and a cruel laugh utterly overwhelmed her. Choking, almost weeping,
covering her face with a fragrant lace handkerchief, she brought out
with difficulty: “Look at yourself in the mirror behind. Oh, how droll
you are!”

Contracting my brows, clenching my teeth with pain, with a face grown
cold, from which all the blood had fled, I looked at the mirror. There
gazed out at me an idiotically placid, stolidly complacent, inhumanly
immovable face. And I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. And
with the laughter not yet subsided, but already with the trembling of
rising anger, with the madness of despair, I said—nay, almost shouted:

“You ought not to laugh!”

And when she was quiet again I went on speaking in a whisper of my
love. I had never spoken so well, for I had never loved so strongly. I
spoke of the tortures of expectation, of the venomous tears of mad
jealousy and grief, of my own soul which was all love. And I saw how
her drooping eyelashes cast thick dark shadow over her blanched cheeks.
I saw how across their dull pallor the fire, bursting into flame, threw
a red reflection, and how her whole pliant body involuntarily bent
towards me.

She was dressed as the Goddess of Night, and was all mysterious, clad
in a black, mist-like face, which twinkled with stars of brilliants.
She was beautiful as a forgotten dream of far-off childhood. As I spoke
my eyes filled with tears, and my heart beat with gladness. And I
perceived, I perceived at last, how a tender, piteous smile parted her
lips, and her eyelashes were lifted all a-tremble. Slowly, timorously,
but with infinite confidence, she turned her head towards me, and—

And such a shriek of laughter I never heard!

“No, no, I can’t,” she almost groaned, and throwing back her head, she
burst into a resonant cascade of laughter.

Oh, if but for a moment I could have had a human face! I bit my lips,
tears rolled over my heated face; but it—that idiotic mask, on which
everything was in its right place, nose, eyes, and lips—looked with a
complacency staidly horrible in its absurdity. And when I went out,
swaying on my flowered feet, it was long before I got out of reach of
that ringing laugh. It was as though a silvery stream of water were
falling from an immense height, and breaking in cheerful song upon the
hard rock.

IV

Scattered over the whole sleeping street and rousing the stillness of
the night with our lusty, excited voices, we walked home. A companion
said to me:

“You have had a colossal success. I never saw people laugh so—— Halloa!
what are you up to? Why are you tearing your mask? I say, you fellows,
he’s gone mad! Look, he’s tearing his costume to pieces! By Jove! he’s
actually crying.”



THE FRIEND

When late at night he rang at his own door, the first sound after that
of the bell was a resonant dog”s bark, in which might be distinguished
both fear that it might have been a stranger, and joy that it was his
own master, who had arrived.

Then there followed the squish-squash of goloshes, and the squeak of
the key taken out of the lock.

He came in, and taking off his wrappers in the dark, was conscious of a
silent female figure close by, while the nails of a dog caressingly
scratched at his knees, and a hot tongue licked his chilled hand.

“Well, what is it?” a sleepy voice asked in a tone of perfunctory
interest.

“Nothing! I’m tired,” curtly replied Vladimir Mikhailovich, and went to
his own room. The dog followed him, his nails striking sharply on the
waxed floor, and jumped on to the bed. When the light of the lamp which
he lit filled the room, his glance met the steady gaze of the dog”s
black eyes. They seemed to say: “Come now, pet me.” And to make the
request better understood the dog stretched out his fore-paws, and laid
his head sideways upon them, while his hinder quarters wriggled
comically, and his tail kept twirling round like the handle of a
barrel-organ.

“My only friend!” said Vladimir Mikhailovich, as he stroked the black,
glossy coat. As though from excess of feeling the dog turned on his
back, showed his white teeth, and growled gently, joyful and excited.
But Vladimir Mikhailovich sighed, petted the dog, and thought to
himself, how that there was no one else in the world that would ever
love him.

If he happened to return home early, and not tired out with work, he
would sit down to write, and the dog curled himself into a ball on a
chair somewhere near to him, opened one black eye now and again, and
sleepily wagged his tail. And when excited by the process of
authorship, tortured by the sufferings of his own heroes, and choking
with a plethora of thoughts and mental pictures, he walked about in his
room, and smoked cigarette after cigarette, the dog would follow him
with an anxious look, and wag his tail more vigorously than ever.

“Shall we become famous, you and I, Vasyuk?” he would inquire of the
dog, who would wag his tail in affirmation. “We’ll eat liver then, is
that right?”

“Right!” the dog would reply, stretching himself luxuriously. He was
very fond of liver.

Vladimir Mikhailovich often had visitors. Then his aunt, with whom he
lived, would borrow china from her neighbour, and give them tea,
setting on samovar after samovar. She would go and buy vodka and
sausages, and sigh heavily as she drew out from the bottom of her
pocket a greasy rouble-note. In the room with its smoke-laden
atmosphere loud voices resounded. They quarrelled and laughed, said
droll and sharp things, complained of their fate and envied one
another. They advised Vladimir Mikhailovich to give up literature and
take to some more lucrative occupation. Some said that he ought to
consult a doctor, others clinked glasses with him, while they bewailed
the injury that vodka was doing to his health. He was so sickly, so
continually nervous. This was why he had such fits of depression, and
why he demanded of life the impossible. All addressed him as “thou,”
and their voices expressed their interest in him, and in the
friendliest manner, they would invite him to drive beyond the city with
them, and prolong the conviviality. And when he drove off merry, making
more noise than the others, and laughing at nothing, there followed him
two pairs of eyes: the grey eyes of his aunt, angry and reproachful,
and the anxiously caressing black eyes of the dog.

He did not remember what he did, when he had been drinking, and
returned home in the morning bespattered with mud and marl, and without
his hat.

They would tell him afterwards how in his cups he had insulted his
friend; at home had reviled his Aunt, who had wept and said she could
not bear such a life any longer, but must do away with herself; and how
he had tortured his dog, when he refused to come to him and be petted;
and that when, terrified and trembling, he showed his teeth, he had
beaten him with a strap.

And the following day all would have finished their day’s work before
he woke up sick and miserable. His heart would beat unevenly and feel
faint, filling him with dread of an early death, while his hands
trembled. On the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, his Aunt would
stump about, the sound of her steps re-echoing through the cold, empty
flat. She would not speak to Vladimir Mikhailovich, but austere and
unforgiving, gave him water in silence. And he too would keep silence,
looking at the ceiling, at a particular stain long known to him, and
thinking how he was wasting his life, and that he would never gain fame
and happiness. He confessed to himself that he was weak, worthless and
terribly lonesome. The boundless world seethed with moving human
beings, and yet there was not one single soul who would come to him and
share his pains—madly arrogant thoughts of fame, coupled with a deadly
consciousness of worthlessness. With trembling, bungling hand he would
grip his forehead, and press his eyelids, but however firmly he
pressed, still the tears would ooze through, and creep down over his
cheeks, which still retained the scent of purchased kisses. And when he
dropped his hand, it would fall upon another forehead, hairy and
smooth, and his gaze, confused with tears, would meet the caressing
black eyes of the dog, and his ears would catch his soft sighs. And
touched and comforted he would whisper:

“My friend, my only friend!”

When he recovered, his friends used to come to him, and softly reprove
him, giving advice and speaking of the evils of drink. But some of his
friends, whom he had insulted when drunk, ceased to notice him in the
streets. They understood that he did not wish them any harm, but they
preferred not to run the risk of further unpleasantnesses. Thus he
spent the oppressive fume-laden nights and the sternly avenging sun-lit
days at war with himself, his obscurity and loneliness. And ofttimes
the steps of his Aunt resounded through the deserted flat, while from
the bed was heard a whisper, which resembled a sigh:

“My friend, my only friend!”

Eventually his illusive fame came, came unguessed at, and unexpected,
and filled the empty apartments with light and life. His Aunt’s steps
were drowned in the tramp of friendly footsteps, and the spectre of
loneliness vanished, and the soft whisper ceased. Vodka, too,
disappeared, that ominous companion of the solitary, and Vladimir
Mikhailovich ceased to insult his Aunt and his friends.

The dog too was glad. Still louder became his bark on the occasion of
their belated meetings, when his master, his only friend, came home
kind, happy, and laughing. The dog himself learnt to smile; his upper
lip would be drawn up exposing his white teeth, and his nose would
pucker up into funny little wrinkles. Happy and frolicsome he began to
play; he would seize hold of things and make as though he would carry
them away, and when his master stretched out his hands to catch him, he
would let him approach to within a stride of him, and then run away
again, while his black eyes sparkled with artfulness.

Sometimes Vladimir Mikhailovich would point to his Aunt and say, “Bite
her!” and the dog would fly at her in feigned anger, shake her
petticoat, and then, out of breath, glance sideways at his friend with
his roguish black eyes. The Aunt’s thin lips would be contorted into an
austere smile, and stroking the dog, now tired out with play, on his
glossy head, would say:

“Sensible dog!—only he does not like soup.”

And at night, when Vladimir Mikhailovich was at work, and only the
jarring of the window-panes, caused by the street traffic, broke the
stillness, the dog would doze near to him on the alert, and wake at his
slightest movement.

“What, laddie, would you like some liver?” he would ask.

“Yes,” would Vasyuk reply, wagging his tail in the affirmative.

“Well, wait a bit, I’ll buy you some. What do you want? To be petted? I
have no time now, I am busy; go to sleep, laddie!”

Every night he asked the dog about liver, but he continually forgot to
buy it, because his head was full of plans for a new work, and of
thoughts of a woman he was in love with. Only once did he remember the
liver. It was in the evening; he was passing a butcher’s shop, arm in
arm with a pretty woman who pressed her shoulder close against his. He
jokingly told her about his dog, and praised his sense and
intelligence. Showing off somewhat, he went on to tell her that there
were terrible, distressing moments, when he regarded his dog as his
only friend, and laughingly related his promise to buy liver for his
friend, when he should have attained happiness—and he pressed the
girl’s hand closer to him.

“You clever fellow,” cried she, laughing; “you would make even stones
speak. But I don’t like dogs at all: they are so apt to carry
infection.”

Vladimir Mikhailovich agreed that that was the case, and held his
tongue with regard to his habit of sometimes kissing that black shiny
muzzle.

One day, Vasyuk played more than usual during the daytime, but in the
evening, when Vladimir Mikhailovich came home, he did not turn up to
meet him, and his Aunt said that the dog was ill. Vladimir Mikhailovich
was alarmed, and went into the kitchen, where the dog lay on a bed of
soft litter. His nose was dry and hot, and his eyes were troubled. He
made a slight movement of his tail, and looked piteously at his friend.

“What is it, boy; ill? My poor fellow!”

The tail made a feeble motion, and the black eyes became moist.

“Lie still, then; lie still!”

“He will have to be taken to the veterinary: but to-morrow, I have no
time. But it will pass off—” thought Vladimir Mikhailovich, and he
forgot the dog in thinking of the happiness the pretty girl might give
him. All the next day he was away from home. When he returned his hand
fumbled long in searching for the bell-handle, and when it was found
hesitated long as to what to do with the wooden thing.

“Ah, yes! I must ring,” he laughed, and then began singing, “Open—ye!”

The bell gave a solitary ring, goloshes squish-squashed, and the key
squeaked as it was taken out of the lock.

Vladimir Mikhailovich, still humming, passed through into his room, and
walked about a long time before it occurred to him that he ought to
light the lamp. Then he undressed, but for a long time he kept in his
hands the boots he had taken off, and looked at them as though they
were the pretty girl, who had only that day said so simply and
sincerely, “Yes! I love you!” And when he had got into bed, he still
saw her speaking face, until side by side with it there appeared the
black shiny muzzle of his dog, and with a sharp pain there crept into
his heart the question:

“But where is Vasyuk?”

He became ashamed of having forgotten the sick dog—but not particularly
so: for had not Vasyuk been ill several times before, and nothing had
come of it. But to-morrow the veterinary must be sent for. At all
events he need not think of the dog, and of his own ingratitude—that
would do no good, and would only diminish his own happiness.

When morning came the dog became worse. He was troubled with nausea,
and being a well-mannered dog, he rose with difficulty from his litter,
and went to the courtyard, staggering like a drunken man. His little
black body was sleek as ever, but his head hung feebly, and his eyes,
which now looked grey, gazed in mournful surprise.

At first Vladimir Mikhailovich himself, with the help of his Aunt,
opened wide the dog”s mouth, with its yellowing gums, and poured in
medicine: but the dog was in such pain and suffered so, that it became
too distressing to him to look at him, and he left him to the care of
his Aunt. And when the dog”s feeble, helpless moan penetrated through
the wall, he stuffed his fingers into his ears, and was surprised at
the extent of his love for this poor dog.

In the evening he went out. Before doing so he gave a look in at the
kitchen. His Aunt was on her knees stroking the hot, trembling head
with her dry hand.

With his legs stretched out like sticks, the dog lay heavy and
motionless, and only by putting one’s ear down close to his muzzle
could one catch the low, frequent moans.

His eyes, now quite grey, fixed themselves on his master as he came in,
and when he carefully passed his hand over the dog”s forehead, his
groans became clearer and more piteous.

“What, laddie, are you so bad? But wait a bit, when you are well I will
buy you some liver.”

“I’ll make him eat soup!” jokingly threatened the Aunt.

The dog closed his eyes, and Vladimir Mikhailovich with a forced joke
went out in haste; and when he got into the street he hired a cab,
since he was afraid of being late at the rendez-vous with Natalya
Lavrentyevna.

That autumn’s evening the air was so fresh and pure, and so many stars
twinkled in the dark sky! They kept falling, leaving behind them a
fiery track, and burst kindling with a bluish light a pretty girl’s
face, and were reflected in her dark eyes—as though a glow-worm had
appeared at the bottom of a deep dark well. And greedy lips noiselessly
kissed those eyes, those lips fresh as the night air, and those cool
cheeks. Voices exultant, and trembling with love, whispered, prattling
of joy and life.

When Vladimir Mikhailovich drove up to his house, he remembered the
dog, and his breast ached with a dark foreboding.

When his Aunt opened the door, he asked:

“Well, how’s Vasyuk?”

“Dead. He died about an hour after you left.”

The dead dog had been already removed to some outhouse, and the litter
bed cleared away. But Vladimir Mikhailovich did not even wish to see
the body; it would be too distressing a sight. When he lay down in bed,
and all noises were stilled in the empty flat, he began to weep
restrainedly. His lips puckered up silently, and tears forced their way
through his closed eyelids, and rolled quickly down on to his bosom. He
was ashamed that he was kissing a woman at the very moment when he, who
had been his friend, lay a-dying on the floor alone. And he dreaded
what his Aunt would think of him, a serious man, if she heard that he
had been crying about a dog.

Much time had elapsed since these events. Mysterious, outrageous fame
had left Vladimir Mikhailovich just as it had come to him. He had
disappointed the hopes that had been built on him, and all were angry
at this disappointment, and avenged themselves on him by exasperating
remarks and cold jeers. And then they had shut down on him dead, heavy
oblivion, like the lid of a coffin.

The young woman had dropped him. She too considered herself taken in.

The oppressive fume-laden nights, and the pitilessly vengeful sun-lit
days, went by: and frequently, more frequently than formerly, the
Aunt’s steps resounded through the empty flat, while he lay on his bed
looking at the well-known stain on the ceiling, and whispered:

“My friend, my friend, my only friend!”

And his trembling hand fell feebly on an empty place.



IN THE BASEMENT

I

He drank hard, lost his work and his acquaintances, and took up his
abode in a cellar in the company of thieves and unfortunates, living on
the last things he had.

His was a sickly, anaemic body, worn out with work, eaten up by
sufferings and vodka. Death was already on the watch for him, like a
grey bird-of-prey blind in the sunshine, sharp-eyed in the black night.
By day death hid itself in the dark corners, but at night it took its
seat noiselessly by his bedside, and sat long, till the very dawn, and
was quiet, patient, and persistent. When at the first streak of light
he put out his pale head from under the blankets, his eyes gleaming
like those of a hunted wild animal, the room was already empty. But he
did not trust this deceptive emptiness, which others believe in. He
suspiciously looked round into all the corners; with crafty suddenness
he cast a glance behind his back, and then leaning upon his elbows he
gazed intently before him into the melting darkness of the departing
night. And then he saw something, such as ordinary people do not see:
the rocking of a monster grey body, shapeless, terrible. It was
transparent, embraced all things, and objects were seen in it as behind
a glass wall. But now he feared it not; and it departed until the next
night, leaving behind it a cold impression.

For a short time he was wrapped in oblivion, and terrible,
extraordinary dreams came to him. He saw a white room, with white floor
and walls, illumined by a bright, white light, and a black serpent
which was creeping away under the door with a gentle rustling-like
laughter. Pressing its sharp flat head to the floor, it wriggled and
quickly glided away, and was lost somewhere or other, and then again
its black flattened nose appeared through a crevice under the door, and
its body drew itself out in a black ribbon—and so again and again. Once
in his sleep he dreamed of something pleasant, and laughed, but the
sound seemed strange, and more like a suppressed sob—it was terrible to
hear it—his soul somewhere in the unknown depths laughing, or perhaps
weeping, while the body lay motionless as the dead.

By degrees the sounds of nascent day began to invade his consciousness:
the indistinct talk of passers-by, the distant squeaking of a door, the
swish of the _dvornik”s_ broom as he brushed away the snow from the
window-sill—all the undefined bustle of a great city awakening. And
then there came upon him the most horrible, mercilessly clear
consciousness that a new day had arrived, and that he would soon have
to get up, in order to struggle for life without any hope of victory.

One must live.

He turned his back to the light, threw the blanket over his head, so
that not the minutest ray might penetrate to his eyes, squeezed himself
together into a small ball, drawing his legs up to his very chin, and
so lay motionless, dreading to stir and to stretch out his legs. A
whole mountain of clothes lay upon him as a protection against the cold
of the basement, but he did not feel their weight, and his body
remained cold. And at every sound speaking of life he seemed to himself
to be monstrous and unveiled, and he hugged himself together all the
tighter, and silently groaned—neither with voice nor in thought—since
he feared now his own voice and his own thoughts. He prayed to some one
that the day might not come, so that he might always lie under the heap
of rags, without movement or thought, and he concentrated his whole
will to keep back the coming day, and to persuade himself that it was
still night. And more than anything in the world he wished that some
one from behind would put a revolver to the back of his head, just at
the place where there is a cavity, and blow his brains out.

But daylight unfolded, broad, irresistible, calling forcibly to life,
and all the world began to move, to talk, to work, to think. The first
in the basement to wake was the landlady, old Matryona. She got up from
the side of her twenty-five-year-old lover, and began to stamp about
the kitchen, clatter with the buckets, and busy herself about something
close to Khinyakov”s very door. He felt her approach, and lay quiet,
determined not to answer if she called him. But she kept silence, and
went away somewhere. In the course of an hour or two the two other
lodgers woke up, an unfortunate named Dunyasha, and the old woman’s
lover Abram Petrovich. He was so called in spite of his youth out of
respect, because he was a daring and skilful thief, and something else
besides, which was guessed at, but not spoken about.

The waking up of these terrified Khinyakov more than anything, since
they had a hold on him, and the right to come in and sit on his bed, to
touch him, and recall him to thought and speech. He had become intimate
with Dunyasha one day when he was drunk, and had promised her marriage,
and although she had laughed and slapped him on the back, she sincerely
considered him as her lover, and patronized him, although she was
herself a stupid, dirty, unwashed slut, who had spent many a night at
the police-station. With Abram Petrovich he had only the day before
yesterday been drinking, and they had kissed one another and sworn
eternal friendship.

When the fresh loud voice of Abram Petrovich and his quick steps
resounded near the door, Khinyakov”s heart’s blood curdled with fear
and suspense, and he could not help groaning aloud, and then was all
the more frightened. In one distinct picture that drinking-bout passed
before him: how they had sat in some dark tavern or other, illumined by
a single lamp, amid dark people who kept whispering together about
something, while they themselves also whispered together. Abram
Petrovich was pale and excited, and complained of the hardships of a
thief”s life; for some reason or other he had bared his arms and
allowed him to feel the badly-mended bones of his once broken arm, and
Khinyakov had kissed him and said:

“I love thieves, they are so bold,” and proposed to him that they
should drink to “brotherhood,” although they had for long been on quite
intimate terms.

“And I love you, because you are educated, and understand us so well,”
replied Abram Petrovich.

“Look again at my arm; here it is, eh?”

And again the white arm had passed before his eyes, seeming to be sorry
for its own whiteness, and suddenly realizing something (which he did
not now remember or understand), he had kissed that arm, and Abram
Petrovich had proudly cried:

“Indeed, brother, death before surrender!”

And then something dirty whirling round and round, howls, whistles, and
jumping lights. Then he had felt cheerful, but now when death was
hiding in the corners, and when day was rushing in upon him from every
direction with the inexorable necessity to live and do something, to
struggle after something and ask for something—he felt tortured and
inexpressibly frightened.

“Are you asleep, sir?” Abram Petrovich inquired sarcastically through
the door, and receiving no answer, added:

“Well, then, sleep away; devil take you!”

Many acquaintances visited Abram Petrovich, and throughout the day the
door squeaked on its hinges, and bass voices were to be heard. And it
seemed to Khinyakov at every sound that they were coming for him, and
he buried himself the deeper in his bedclothes, and listened long to
catch to whom the voice belonged. He waited and waited in agony,
trembling all over his body, although there was no one in the whole
world who would come to fetch him.

He had once had a wife—long ago—but she was dead. Still further back in
the past he had had brothers and sisters, and still earlier—something
indistinct and beautiful, which he called Mother. All these were dead,
or possibly some one of them might be still alive, only so lost in the
wide, wide world, that he was as though dead. And he himself would soon
be dead too—he knew it. When he should get up to-day his legs would
tremble and give way under him, and his hands would make uncertain
strange motions—and this was death. But meanwhile he must need live,
and that is such a serious task for a man who has neither money,
health, nor will, that Khinyakov was seized with despair. He threw off
his blanket, clasped his hands, and breathed out into the void such
prolonged groans, that they seemed to proceed from a thousand suffering
breasts, therefore was it that they were so full, brimming over with
insupportable torture.

“Open, you devil!” cried Dunyasha from the other side of the door,
pounding it with her fists. “Or I’ll break the door down!”

Trembling with tottering steps, Khinyakov reached the door, opened it,
and quickly lay down again, nay almost fell, on his bed. Dunyasha,
already befrizzled and bepowdered, sat down at his side, shoving him
against the wall, and, crossing her legs, said with an air of
importance:

“I have brought you news. Katya expired yesterday?”

“What Katya?” asked Khinyakov, using his tongue clumsily and
uncertainly, as though it did not belong to him.

“Come, now, you can’t have forgotten!” laughed Dunyasha. “The Katya who
used to live here. How can you have forgotten her, when she has been
gone only a week?”

“Died?”

“Why, of course died, as all die.” Dunyasha moistened the tip of her
little finger and wiped the powder from her thin eye-lashes.

“What of?”

“What all die of. Who knows what? They told me yesterday at the cafe,
Katya was dead.”

“Did you love her?”

“Certainly I loved her! What are you talking about!”

Dunyasha’s stupid eyes looked at Khinyakov in dull indifference as she
swung her fat leg. She did not know what more to say, and tried to look
at him, as he lay there, in such a manner as to show to him her love,
and with that intent she gently winked her eye, and dropped the corners
of her full lips.

The day had begun.

II

That day, a Saturday, the frost was so severe that the boys did not go
to school, and the horse-races were postponed for fear of the horses
catching cold. When Natalya Vladimirovna came out from the lying-in
hospital, she was for the first moment glad that it was evening, that
there was no one on the embankment, that none met her—an unmarried
girl, with a six-day-old child in her arms. It had seemed to her that,
as soon as she should cross the threshold, she would be met by a
shouting, hissing crowd, among whom would be her senile, paralytic, and
almost blind father, her acquaintances, students, officers and their
young ladies; and that all these would point the finger at her and cry:

“There goes a girl who has passed through six classes at the
high-school, had acquaintances among the students both intellectual and
of good birth, who used to blush at a word spoken unadvisedly, and who
six days ago gave birth to a child, in the lying-in hospital, side by
side with other fallen women.”

But the embankment was deserted. Along it the icy wind traveled
unrestrained, lifted a grey cloud of snow, ground by the frost into a
biting dust, and covered with it everything living and dead which met
it in its path. With a gentle whistle it wove itself round the metal
pillars of the railings, so that they shone again, and looked so cold
and lonely that it was a pain to look at them. And the girl felt
herself to be just such a cold thing, an outcast from mankind and life.
She had on a little short jacket, the one which she usually wore
skating, and which she had hurriedly thrown on when she left her home
suffering the premonitory pains of childbirth. And when the wind seized
her, and wrapped her thin skirt about her ankles, and chilled her head,
she began to fear that she might be frozen to death; and her fear of a
crowd disappeared, and the world expanded into a boundless icy
wilderness, in which was neither man, nor light, nor warmth. Two
burning tear-drops gathered in her eyes, and froze there. Bending her
head down, she wiped them away with the formless bundle she was
carrying, and went on faster. Now she no longer loved herself nor the
child, and both lives seemed to her worthless; only certain words,
which had, as it were, sunk into her brain, persistently repeated
themselves, and went before her calling:

“Nyemchinovskaya Street, the second house from the corner.
Nyemchinovskaya Street, the second house from the corner.”

These words she had repeated for six days as she lay on the bed and fed
her infant. They meant, that she must go to Nyemchinovskaya Street,
where her foster-sister, an unfortunate, lived, because only with her
could she find an asylum for herself and her child. A year ago, when
all was still well and she was continually laughing and singing, she
had visited Katya, who was ill, and had helped her with money, and now
she was the only human being remaining before whom she was not ashamed.

“Nyemchinovskaya Street, the second house from the corner.
Nyemchinovskaya Street, the second house from the corner.”

She walked on, and the wind whirled angrily round her; and when she
came upon the bridge it greedily dashed at her bosom, and dug its iron
nails into her cold face. Vanquished, it dropped noisily from the
bridge, and circled along the snow-covered surface of the river, and
again swept upwards, overshadowing the road with cold, trembling wings.
Natalya Vladimirovna stood still, and in utter weakness leaned against
the rail. From the depth below there looked up at her a dull black
eye—a spot of unfrozen water—and its gaze was mysterious and terrible.
But before her resounded and called persistently the words:

“Nyemchinovskaya Street, the second house from the corner.
Nyemchinovskaya Street, the second house from the corner.”

Khinyakov dressed, and lay down again on his bed rolled to the very
eyes in a warm overcoat, his sole remaining possession. The room was
cold, there was ice in the corners, but he breathed into the astrakhan
collar, and so became warm and comfortable. The whole long day he kept
deceiving himself, that to-morrow he would go and seek work, and ask
for something; but meanwhile he was content not to think at all, but
merely to tremble at the sound of a raised voice the other side of the
wall, or at the sound of a sharply slammed door. He had lain long in
this way, perfectly still, when at the entrance door he heard an uneven
rapping, timid, and yet hurried and sharp, as if some one was knocking
with the back of the hand. His room was the one next to the entrance
door, and by craning his head and pricking up his ears he could
distinguish everything which took place near it. Matryona went to the
door and opened it, let some one in and closed it again. Then followed
an expectant silence.

“Whom do you want?” asked Matryona in a hoarse, unfriendly tone. A
stranger’s voice, gentle and broken, bashfully replied:

“I want Katya Nyechayeva. She lives here?”

“She did. But what do you want with her?”

“I want her very badly. Is she not at home?” and in her voice there was
a note of fear.

“Katya is dead. She died, I say—in the hospital.”

Again there was a long silence, so long indeed that Khinyakov felt a
pain at his back; but he did not dare to move it, while the people
there kept silence.

Then the stranger’s voice pronounced gently and without expression, the
one word:

“Good-bye!”

But evidently she did not go away, since in the course of a minute
Matryona asked: “What have you there? Have you brought something for
Katya?”

Some one knelt down, striking her knees on the floor, and the
stranger’s voice, convulsed with suppressed sobs, uttered quickly the
words:

“Take it, take it! For the love of God, take it! And then I—I’ll go
away.”

“But what is it?”

Again there was a long silence, and then a gentle weeping, broken, and
hopeless. There was in it a deadly weariness, and a black despair,
without a single gleam of hope. It was as though a hand had impotently
drawn the bow across the over-tightened, the last remaining, string of
an expensive instrument, and when the string snapped the soft wailing
note had been silenced for ever.

“Why, you have nearly smothered it!” exclaimed Matryona in a rough,
angry tone. “You see what sort of people undertake to bear children.
How could you do it? Whoever would wrap up babies like that? Come now,
come along; do, I say. How could you do such a thing?”

Once more all was silent near the door.

Khinyakov listened a little longer and then lay down, delighted that no
one had come to fetch him, and not taking the trouble to guess the
truth about what he had not understood in that which had just taken
place. He began already to feel the approach of night, and wished that
some one would turn the lamp up higher. He became restless, and,
clenching his teeth, he endeavoured to restrain his thoughts. In the
past there was nothing but mire, falls, and horror, and—there was the
same horror in the future. He was just beginning by degrees to snuggle
himself together, and draw up his hands and feet, when Dunyasha came
in, dressed to go out in a red blouse, and already slightly
intoxicated. She plopped down on the bed, and said with a gesture of
surprise:

“Oh Lord!” She shook her head and smiled. “They have brought a little
baby here. Such a tiny one, my friend, but he shouts just like a
police-inspector. Just like a police-inspector!”

She swore whimsically, and coquettishly flipped Khinyakov”s nose.

“Let’s go and see. Why not, indeed! Yes, we’ll just take a look at him.
Matryona is going to bathe it; she is boiling the samovar. Abram
Petrovich is blowing up the charcoal with his boot. How funny it all
is. And the baby is crying: “Wa, wa, wa!””

Dunyasha made a face which she meant to represent the baby, and again
went on puling: ““Wa, wa, wa!” Just like a police-inspector! Let’s go.
Don’t you want to?—well, then devil take you! Turn up your toes where
you are, rotten egg, you!”

And she danced out of the room. But half an hour after Khinyakov,
tottering on his weak legs and hanging on to the doorposts,
hesitatingly opened the door of the kitchen.

“Shut it! You’ve made a draught,” cried Abram Petrovich.

Khinyakov hastily slammed the door behind him, and looked round
apologetically; but no one took any notice of him, so he calmed down.
The combined heat of the stove, the urn, and the company made the
kitchen pretty warm, and the vapour rose, and then rolled down the
colder walls in thick drops. Matryona with a severe and irritated mien
was washing the child in a trough, and with pock-marked hands was
splashing the water over him, while she crooned:

“Little lambkin, then, it s’all be clean. It s’all be white.”

Whether it was because the kitchen was light and cheerful, or because
the water was warm and caressing, at all events the child was quiet,
and wrinkled up its little red face as though about to sneeze. Dunyasha
looked at the tub over Matryona’s shoulder, and seizing her
opportunity, splashed the little one with three fingers.

“Get away!” the old woman cried in a threatening tone, “where are you
coming to? I know what to do without your help. I have had children of
my own.”

“Don’t meddle. She’s quite right, children are such tender things,”
said Abram Petrovich, in support of her; “they want some handling.”

He sat down on the table, and with condescending satisfaction
contemplated the little rosy body. The baby wriggled its fingers, and
Dunyasha with wild delight wagged her head and laughed.

“Just like a police-inspector!”

“But have you seen a police-inspector in a trough?” asked Abram
Petrovich.

All laughed, and even Khinyakov smiled; but almost immediately the
smile left his face affright, and he looked round at the mother. She
was sitting wearily on the bench, with her head thrown back, and her
black eyes, abnormally large from sickness and suffering, lighted up
with a peaceful gleam, and on her pale lips hovered the proud smile of
a mother. And when he saw this Khinyakov burst into a solitary, belated
laugh:

“He! he! he!”

He even looked proudly round on all sides. Matryona took the baby out
of the tub, and wrapped it in a bath-sheet. The child burst into loud
crying, but was soon quieted again, and Matryona, unrolling the sheet,
smiled in confusion, and said:

“What a dear little body, just like velvet.”

“Let me feel,” entreated Dunyasha.

“What next!”

Dunyasha began suddenly to tremble all over, and stamped her feet;
choking with longing, and mad with the desire, which overwhelmed her,
she cried in such a shrill voice as none had ever heard from her:

“Let me! let me!”

“Yes, let her,” entreated Natalya Vladimirovna in a fright. And
Dunyasha just as suddenly became quiet again. She cautiously touched
the child’s little shoulder with two fingers, and following her
example, Abram Petrovich, with a condescending wink, also reached out
to that little red shoulder.

“Yes, indeed, children are tender things,” said he in
self-justification.

Last of all Khinyakov tried it. His fingers felt for a moment the touch
of something living, downy like velvet, and withal so tender and feeble
that his fingers seemed no longer to belong to him, and became as
tender as the something he touched. And thus, craning their necks, and
unconsciously lighting up into a smile of strange happiness, stood the
three, the thief, the prostitute, and the lonely broken man, and that
little life, feeble as a distant light on the steppe, was vaguely
calling them somewhither, and promising them something beautiful,
bright, immortal. And the happy mother looked proudly on, while above
the low ceiling the house rose in a heavy mass of stone, and in the
upper flats the rich sauntered about, and yawned with ennui.

Night had come on, black, malign, as all nights are, and had pitched
her tent in darkness over the distant snowy fields; and the lonely
branches of trees became chilled with fear, just those branches which
first welcomed the morning sun. With feeble artificial light man fought
against her, but strong and malign she girded the isolated lights in a
hopeless circle, and filled the hearts of men with darkness. And in
many a heart she extinguished the feeble flickering sparks.

Khinyakov did not sleep. Huddled up together into a little ball, he hid
himself under a soft heap of rags from the cold and from the night, and
wept, without effort, without pain or convulsion, as those weep whose
heart is pure and without sin, as the heart of a little child. He
pitied himself huddled up into a heap, and it seemed to him that he
pitied all mankind and the whole of human life, and in this feeling
there was a secret, profound gladness. He saw the child, just born, and
it seemed to him that he himself was reborn to a new life, and would
live long, and that his life would be beautiful. He loved and yet
pitied this new life, and he felt so happy, that he laughed so that he
shook the heap of rags, and then asked himself:

“Why am I weeping?”

But he could not discover the answer to his own question, and so
replied:

“So!”

And such a profound thought was conveyed by this short word, that this
wreck of a man, whose life was so pitiable and lonely, was convulsed
with a fresh burst of scalding tears.

But at his bedside rapacious death was noiselessly taking its seat, and
waiting—quietly, patiently, persistently.



THE CITY

It was an immense city in which they lived: Petrov, clerk in a
commercial bank, and he, the other,—name unknown.

They used to m

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