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+Project Gutenberg’s The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Schoolmistress and Other Stories
+
+Author: Anton Chekhov
+
+Release Date: February 21, 2006 [EBook #1732]
+Last Updated: September 10, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCHOOLMISTRESS AND OTHER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James Rusk and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCHOOLMISTRESS AND OTHER STORIES
+
+By Anton Chekhov
+
+
+
+FROM THE TALES OF CHEKHOV, VOLUME 9
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     THE SCHOOLMISTRESS
+     A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
+     MISERY
+     CHAMPAGNE
+     AFTER THE THEATRE
+     A LADY’S STORY
+     IN EXILE
+     THE CATTLE-DEALERS
+     SORROW
+     ON OFFICIAL DUTY
+     THE FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER
+     A TRAGIC ACTOR
+     A TRANSGRESSION
+     SMALL FRY
+     THE REQUIEM
+     IN THE COACH-HOUSE
+     PANIC FEARS
+     THE BET
+     THE HEAD-GARDENER’S STORY
+     THE BEAUTIES
+     THE SHOEMAKER AND THE DEVIL
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCHOOLMISTRESS
+
+AT half-past eight they drove out of the town.
+
+The highroad was dry, a lovely April sun was shining warmly, but the
+snow was still lying in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, dark,
+long, and spiteful, was hardly over; spring had come all of a sudden.
+But neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the
+breath of spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge
+puddles that were like lakes, nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into
+which it seemed one would have gone away so joyfully, presented anything
+new or interesting to Marya Vassilyevna who was sitting in the cart. For
+thirteen years she had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning
+how many times during all those years she had been to the town for her
+salary; and whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or
+winter, it was all the same to her, and she always--invariably--longed
+for one thing only, to get to the end of her journey as quickly as could
+be.
+
+She felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for
+ages and ages, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew
+every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Her
+past was here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other
+future than the school, the road to the town and back again, and again
+the school and again the road....
+
+She had got out of the habit of thinking of her past before she became
+a schoolmistress, and had almost forgotten it. She had once had a father
+and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big flat near the Red Gate,
+but of all that life there was left in her memory only something vague
+and fluid like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old,
+and her mother had died soon after.... She had a brother, an officer;
+at first they used to write to each other, then her brother had given up
+answering her letters, he had got out of the way of writing. Of her old
+belongings, all that was left was a photograph of her mother, but it had
+grown dim from the dampness of the school, and now nothing could be seen
+but the hair and the eyebrows.
+
+When they had driven a couple of miles, old Semyon, who was driving,
+turned round and said:
+
+“They have caught a government clerk in the town. They have taken him
+away. The story is that with some Germans he killed Alexeyev, the Mayor,
+in Moscow.”
+
+“Who told you that?”
+
+“They were reading it in the paper, in Ivan Ionov’s tavern.”
+
+And again they were silent for a long time. Marya Vassilyevna thought of
+her school, of the examination that was coming soon, and of the girl and
+four boys she was sending up for it. And just as she was thinking about
+the examination, she was overtaken by a neighboring landowner called
+Hanov in a carriage with four horses, the very man who had been examiner
+in her school the year before. When he came up to her he recognized her
+and bowed.
+
+“Good-morning,” he said to her. “You are driving home, I suppose.”
+
+This Hanov, a man of forty with a listless expression and a face that
+showed signs of wear, was beginning to look old, but was still handsome
+and admired by women. He lived in his big homestead alone, and was not
+in the service; and people used to say of him that he did nothing at
+home but walk up and down the room whistling, or play chess with his
+old footman. People said, too, that he drank heavily. And indeed at the
+examination the year before the very papers he brought with him smelt of
+wine and scent. He had been dressed all in new clothes on that occasion,
+and Marya Vassilyevna thought him very attractive, and all the while
+she sat beside him she had felt embarrassed. She was accustomed to see
+frigid and sensible examiners at the school, while this one did not
+remember a single prayer, or know what to ask questions about, and
+was exceedingly courteous and delicate, giving nothing but the highest
+marks.
+
+“I am going to visit Bakvist,” he went on, addressing Marya Vassilyevna,
+“but I am told he is not at home.”
+
+They turned off the highroad into a by-road to the village, Hanov
+leading the way and Semyon following. The four horses moved at a walking
+pace, with effort dragging the heavy carriage through the mud. Semyon
+tacked from side to side, keeping to the edge of the road, at one time
+through a snowdrift, at another through a pool, often jumping out of the
+cart and helping the horse. Marya Vassilyevna was still thinking
+about the school, wondering whether the arithmetic questions at the
+examination would be difficult or easy. And she felt annoyed with
+the Zemstvo board at which she had found no one the day before. How
+unbusiness-like! Here she had been asking them for the last two years
+to dismiss the watchman, who did nothing, was rude to her, and hit
+the schoolboys; but no one paid any attention. It was hard to find the
+president at the office, and when one did find him he would say with
+tears in his eyes that he hadn’t a moment to spare; the inspector
+visited the school at most once in three years, and knew nothing
+whatever about his work, as he had been in the Excise Duties Department,
+and had received the post of school inspector through influence. The
+School Council met very rarely, and there was no knowing where it met;
+the school guardian was an almost illiterate peasant, the head of
+a tanning business, unintelligent, rude, and a great friend of the
+watchman’s--and goodness knows to whom she could appeal with complaints
+or inquiries....
+
+“He really is handsome,” she thought, glancing at Hanov.
+
+The road grew worse and worse.... They drove into the wood. Here
+there was no room to turn round, the wheels sank deeply in, water
+splashed and gurgled through them, and sharp twigs struck them in the
+face.
+
+“What a road!” said Hanov, and he laughed.
+
+The schoolmistress looked at him and could not understand why this queer
+man lived here. What could his money, his interesting appearance, his
+refined bearing do for him here, in this mud, in this God-forsaken,
+dreary place? He got no special advantages out of life, and here, like
+Semyon, was driving at a jog-trot on an appalling road and enduring
+the same discomforts. Why live here if one could live in Petersburg or
+abroad? And one would have thought it would be nothing for a rich man
+like him to make a good road instead of this bad one, to avoid enduring
+this misery and seeing the despair on the faces of his coachman and
+Semyon; but he only laughed, and apparently did not mind, and wanted no
+better life. He was kind, soft, naive, and he did not understand this
+coarse life, just as at the examination he did not know the prayers.
+He subscribed nothing to the schools but globes, and genuinely regarded
+himself as a useful person and a prominent worker in the cause of
+popular education. And what use were his globes here?
+
+“Hold on, Vassilyevna!” said Semyon.
+
+The cart lurched violently and was on the point of upsetting; something
+heavy rolled on to Marya Vassilyevna’s feet--it was her parcel of
+purchases. There was a steep ascent uphill through the clay; here in the
+winding ditches rivulets were gurgling. The water seemed to have gnawed
+away the road; and how could one get along here! The horses breathed
+hard. Hanov got out of his carriage and walked at the side of the road
+in his long overcoat. He was hot.
+
+“What a road!” he said, and laughed again. “It would soon smash up one’s
+carriage.”
+
+“Nobody obliges you to drive about in such weather,” said Semyon
+surlily. “You should stay at home.”
+
+“I am dull at home, grandfather. I don’t like staying at home.”
+
+Beside old Semyon he looked graceful and vigorous, but yet in his walk
+there was something just perceptible which betrayed in him a being
+already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin. And all at once
+there was a whiff of spirits in the wood. Marya Vassilyevna was filled
+with dread and pity for this man going to his ruin for no visible cause
+or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or
+sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin.
+His wife! Life was so ordered that here he was living in his great house
+alone, and she was living in a God-forsaken village alone, and yet
+for some reason the mere thought that he and she might be close to one
+another and equals seemed impossible and absurd. In reality, life was
+arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all
+understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one’s
+heart sank.
+
+“And it is beyond all understanding,” she thought, “why God gives
+beauty, this graciousness, and sad, sweet eyes to weak, unlucky, useless
+people--why they are so charming.”
+
+“Here we must turn off to the right,” said Hanov, getting into his
+carriage. “Good-by! I wish you all things good!”
+
+And again she thought of her pupils, of the examination, of the
+watchman, of the School Council; and when the wind brought the sound
+of the retreating carriage these thoughts were mingled with others. She
+longed to think of beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness which would
+never be....
+
+His wife? It was cold in the morning, there was no one to heat the
+stove, the watchman disappeared; the children came in as soon as it
+was light, bringing in snow and mud and making a noise: it was all so
+inconvenient, so comfortless. Her abode consisted of one little room and
+the kitchen close by. Her head ached every day after her work, and
+after dinner she had heart-burn. She had to collect money from the
+school-children for wood and for the watchman, and to give it to
+the school guardian, and then to entreat him--that overfed, insolent
+peasant--for God’s sake to send her wood. And at night she dreamed of
+examinations, peasants, snowdrifts. And this life was making her grow
+old and coarse, making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she
+were made of lead. She was always afraid, and she would get up from
+her seat and not venture to sit down in the presence of a member of
+the Zemstvo or the school guardian. And she used formal, deferential
+expressions when she spoke of any one of them. And no one thought her
+attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without
+friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances. How awful it would
+have been in her position if she had fallen in love!
+
+“Hold on, Vassilyevna!”
+
+Again a sharp ascent uphill....
+
+She had become a schoolmistress from necessity, without feeling any
+vocation for it; and she had never thought of a vocation, of serving the
+cause of enlightenment; and it always seemed to her that what was most
+important in her work was not the children, nor enlightenment, but the
+examinations. And what time had she for thinking of vocation, of serving
+the cause of enlightenment? Teachers, badly paid doctors, and their
+assistants, with their terribly hard work, have not even the comfort of
+thinking that they are serving an idea or the people, as their heads are
+always stuffed with thoughts of their daily bread, of wood for the fire,
+of bad roads, of illnesses. It is a hard-working, an uninteresting life,
+and only silent, patient cart-horses like Mary Vassilyevna could put up
+with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked
+about vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up
+the work.
+
+Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a meadow,
+then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place the peasants
+would not let them pass, in another it was the priest’s land and they
+could not cross it, in another Ivan Ionov had bought a plot from the
+landowner and had dug a ditch round it. They kept having to turn back.
+
+They reached Nizhneye Gorodistche. Near the tavern on the dung-strewn
+earth, where the snow was still lying, there stood wagons that had
+brought great bottles of crude sulphuric acid. There were a great many
+people in the tavern, all drivers, and there was a smell of vodka,
+tobacco, and sheepskins. There was a loud noise of conversation and
+the banging of the swing-door. Through the wall, without ceasing for a
+moment, came the sound of a concertina being played in the shop.
+Marya Vassilyevna sat down and drank some tea, while at the next table
+peasants were drinking vodka and beer, perspiring from the tea they had
+just swallowed and the stifling fumes of the tavern.
+
+“I say, Kuzma!” voices kept shouting in confusion. “What there!” “The
+Lord bless us!” “Ivan Dementyitch, I can tell you that!” “Look out, old
+man!”
+
+A little pock-marked man with a black beard, who was quite drunk, was
+suddenly surprised by something and began using bad language.
+
+“What are you swearing at, you there?” Semyon, who was sitting some way
+off, responded angrily. “Don’t you see the young lady?”
+
+“The young lady!” someone mimicked in another corner.
+
+“Swinish crow!”
+
+“We meant nothing...” said the little man in confusion. “I beg
+your pardon. We pay with our money and the young lady with hers.
+Good-morning!”
+
+“Good-morning,” answered the schoolmistress.
+
+“And we thank you most feelingly.”
+
+Marya Vassilyevna drank her tea with satisfaction, and she, too,
+began turning red like the peasants, and fell to thinking again about
+firewood, about the watchman....
+
+“Stay, old man,” she heard from the next table, “it’s the schoolmistress
+from Vyazovye.... We know her; she’s a good young lady.”
+
+“She’s all right!”
+
+The swing-door was continually banging, some coming in, others going
+out. Marya Vassilyevna sat on, thinking all the time of the same
+things, while the concertina went on playing and playing. The patches of
+sunshine had been on the floor, then they passed to the counter, to the
+wall, and disappeared altogether; so by the sun it was past midday. The
+peasants at the next table were getting ready to go. The little man,
+somewhat unsteadily, went up to Marya Vassilyevna and held out his hand
+to her; following his example, the others shook hands, too, at parting,
+and went out one after another, and the swing-door squeaked and slammed
+nine times.
+
+“Vassilyevna, get ready,” Semyon called to her.
+
+They set off. And again they went at a walking pace.
+
+“A little while back they were building a school here in their Nizhneye
+Gorodistche,” said Semyon, turning round. “It was a wicked thing that
+was done!”
+
+“Why, what?”
+
+“They say the president put a thousand in his pocket, and the school
+guardian another thousand in his, and the teacher five hundred.”
+
+“The whole school only cost a thousand. It’s wrong to slander people,
+grandfather. That’s all nonsense.”
+
+“I don’t know,... I only tell you what folks say.”
+
+But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The
+peasants did not believe her. They always thought she received too large
+a salary, twenty-one roubles a month (five would have been enough), and
+that of the money that she collected from the children for the firewood
+and the watchman the greater part she kept for herself. The guardian
+thought the same as the peasants, and he himself made a profit off
+the firewood and received payments from the peasants for being a
+guardian--without the knowledge of the authorities.
+
+The forest, thank God! was behind them, and now it would be flat, open
+ground all the way to Vyazovye, and there was not far to go now. They
+had to cross the river and then the railway line, and then Vyazovye was
+in sight.
+
+“Where are you driving?” Marya Vassilyevna asked Semyon. “Take the road
+to the right to the bridge.”
+
+“Why, we can go this way as well. It’s not deep enough to matter.”
+
+“Mind you don’t drown the horse.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Look, Hanov is driving to the bridge,” said Marya Vassilyevna, seeing
+the four horses far away to the right. “It is he, I think.”
+
+“It is. So he didn’t find Bakvist at home. What a pig-headed fellow he
+is. Lord have mercy upon us! He’s driven over there, and what for? It’s
+fully two miles nearer this way.”
+
+They reached the river. In the summer it was a little stream easily
+crossed by wading. It usually dried up in August, but now, after the
+spring floods, it was a river forty feet in breadth, rapid, muddy, and
+cold; on the bank and right up to the water there were fresh tracks of
+wheels, so it had been crossed here.
+
+“Go on!” shouted Semyon angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the
+reins and jerking his elbows as a bird does its wings. “Go on!”
+
+The horse went on into the water up to his belly and stopped, but at
+once went on again with an effort, and Marya Vassilyevna was aware of a
+keen chilliness in her feet.
+
+“Go on!” she, too, shouted, getting up. “Go on!”
+
+They got out on the bank.
+
+“Nice mess it is, Lord have mercy upon us!” muttered Semyon, setting
+straight the harness. “It’s a perfect plague with this Zemstvo....”
+
+Her shoes and goloshes were full of water, the lower part of her dress
+and of her coat and one sleeve were wet and dripping: the sugar and
+flour had got wet, and that was worst of all, and Marya Vassilyevna
+could only clasp her hands in despair and say:
+
+“Oh, Semyon, Semyon! How tiresome you are really!...”
+
+The barrier was down at the railway crossing. A train was coming out
+of the station. Marya Vassilyevna stood at the crossing waiting till
+it should pass, and shivering all over with cold. Vyazovye was in sight
+now, and the school with the green roof, and the church with its crosses
+flashing in the evening sun: and the station windows flashed too, and
+a pink smoke rose from the engine... and it seemed to her that
+everything was trembling with cold.
+
+Here was the train; the windows reflected the gleaming light like the
+crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. On the
+little platform between two first-class carriages a lady was standing,
+and Marya Vassilyevna glanced at her as she passed. Her mother! What a
+resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a
+brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first
+time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture
+of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the
+aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard
+the sound of the piano, her father’s voice; she felt as she had been
+then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her
+own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her,
+she pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstacy, and called softly,
+beseechingly:
+
+“Mother!”
+
+And she began crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov
+drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined
+happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as
+an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her
+triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on
+the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a
+schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had
+awakened....
+
+“Vassilyevna, get in!”
+
+And at once it all vanished. The barrier was slowly raised. Marya
+Vassilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart. The
+carriage with the four horses crossed the railway line; Semyon followed
+it. The signalman took off his cap.
+
+“And here is Vyazovye. Here we are.”
+
+
+
+
+A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
+
+A MEDICAL student called Mayer, and a pupil of the Moscow School of
+Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture called Rybnikov, went one evening
+to see their friend Vassilyev, a law student, and suggested that he
+should go with them to S. Street. For a long time Vassilyev would not
+consent to go, but in the end he put on his greatcoat and went with
+them.
+
+He knew nothing of fallen women except by hearsay and from books, and
+he had never in his life been in the houses in which they live. He
+knew that there are immoral women who, under the pressure of fatal
+circumstances--environment, bad education, poverty, and so on--are
+forced to sell their honor for money. They know nothing of pure love,
+have no children, have no civil rights; their mothers and sisters weep
+over them as though they were dead, science treats of them as an evil,
+men address them with contemptuous familiarity. But in spite of
+all that, they do not lose the semblance and image of God. They all
+acknowledge their sin and hope for salvation. Of the means that lead to
+salvation they can avail themselves to the fullest extent. Society, it
+is true, will not forgive people their past, but in the sight of God St.
+Mary of Egypt is no lower than the other saints. When it had happened
+to Vassilyev in the street to recognize a fallen woman as such, by her
+dress or her manners, or to see a picture of one in a comic paper,
+he always remembered a story he had once read: a young man, pure and
+self-sacrificing, loves a fallen woman and urges her to become his wife;
+she, considering herself unworthy of such happiness, takes poison.
+
+Vassilyev lived in one of the side streets turning out of Tverskoy
+Boulevard. When he came out of the house with his two friends it was
+about eleven o’clock. The first snow had not long fallen, and all nature
+was under the spell of the fresh snow. There was the smell of snow in
+the air, the snow crunched softly under the feet; the earth, the roofs,
+the trees, the seats on the boulevard, everything was soft, white,
+young, and this made the houses look quite different from the day
+before; the street lamps burned more brightly, the air was more
+transparent, the carriages rumbled with a deeper note, and with the
+fresh, light, frosty air a feeling stirred in the soul akin to the
+white, youthful, feathery snow. “Against my will an unknown force,”
+ hummed the medical student in his agreeable tenor, “has led me to these
+mournful shores.”
+
+“Behold the mill...” the artist seconded him, “in ruins now....”
+
+“Behold the mill... in ruins now,” the medical student repeated,
+raising his eyebrows and shaking his head mournfully.
+
+He paused, rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the words, and then
+sang aloud, so well that passers-by looked round:
+
+     “Here in old days when I was free,
+     Love, free, unfettered, greeted me.”
+
+The three of them went into a restaurant and, without taking off their
+greatcoats, drank a couple of glasses of vodka each. Before drinking the
+second glass, Vassilyev noticed a bit of cork in his vodka, raised the
+glass to his eyes, and gazed into it for a long time, screwing up
+his shortsighted eyes. The medical student did not understand his
+expression, and said:
+
+“Come, why look at it? No philosophizing, please. Vodka is given us to
+be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked
+upon. For one evening anyway live like a human being!”
+
+“But I haven’t said anything...” said Vassilyev, laughing. “Am I
+refusing to?”
+
+There was a warmth inside him from the vodka. He looked with softened
+feelings at his friends, admired them and envied them. In these strong,
+healthy, cheerful people how wonderfully balanced everything is, how
+finished and smooth is everything in their minds and souls! They sing,
+and have a passion for the theatre, and draw, and talk a great deal,
+and drink, and they don’t have headaches the day after; they are both
+poetical and debauched, both soft and hard; they can work, too, and be
+indignant, and laugh without reason, and talk nonsense; they are warm,
+honest, self-sacrificing, and as men are in no way inferior to himself,
+Vassilyev, who watched over every step he took and every word he
+uttered, who was fastidious and cautious, and ready to raise every
+trifle to the level of a problem. And he longed for one evening to
+live as his friends did, to open out, to let himself loose from his own
+control. If vodka had to be drunk, he would drink it, though his head
+would be splitting next morning. If he were taken to the women he would
+go. He would laugh, play the fool, gaily respond to the passing advances
+of strangers in the street....
+
+He went out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends--one in a
+crushed broad-brimmed hat, with an affectation of artistic untidiness;
+the other in a sealskin cap, a man not poor, though he affected to
+belong to the Bohemia of learning. He liked the snow, the pale street
+lamps, the sharp black tracks left in the first snow by the feet of the
+passers-by. He liked the air, and especially that limpid, tender, naive,
+as it were virginal tone, which can be seen in nature only twice in the
+year--when everything is covered with snow, and in spring on bright days
+and moonlight evenings when the ice breaks on the river.
+
+     “Against my will an unknown force,
+     Has led me to these mournful shores,”
+
+he hummed in an undertone.
+
+And the tune for some reason haunted him and his friends all the way,
+and all three of them hummed it mechanically, not in time with one
+another.
+
+Vassilyev’s imagination was picturing how, in another ten minutes, he
+and his friends would knock at a door; how by little dark passages and
+dark rooms they would steal in to the women; how, taking advantage of
+the darkness, he would strike a match, would light up and see the
+face of a martyr and a guilty smile. The unknown, fair or dark, would
+certainly have her hair down and be wearing a white dressing-jacket; she
+would be panic-stricken by the light, would be fearfully confused, and
+would say: “For God’s sake, what are you doing! Put it out!” It would
+all be dreadful, but interesting and new.
+
+The friends turned out of Trubnoy Square into Gratchevka, and soon
+reached the side street which Vassilyev only knew by reputation. Seeing
+two rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide-open doors,
+and hearing gay strains of pianos and violins, sounds which floated
+out from every door and mingled in a strange chaos, as though an unseen
+orchestra were tuning up in the darkness above the roofs, Vassilyev was
+surprised and said:
+
+“What a lot of houses!”
+
+“That’s nothing,” said the medical student. “In London there are ten
+times as many. There are about a hundred thousand such women there.”
+
+The cabmen were sitting on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as
+in any other side street; the same passers-by were walking along the
+pavement as in other streets. No one was hurrying, no one was hiding his
+face in his coat-collar, no one shook his head reproachfully.... And
+in this indifference to the noisy chaos of pianos and violins, to the
+bright windows and wide-open doors, there was a feeling of something
+very open, insolent, reckless, and devil-may-care. Probably it was as
+gay and noisy at the slave-markets in their day, and people’s faces and
+movements showed the same indifference.
+
+“Let us begin from the beginning,” said the artist.
+
+The friends went into a narrow passage lighted by a lamp with a
+reflector. When they opened the door a man in a black coat, with an
+unshaven face like a flunkey’s, and sleepy-looking eyes, got up lazily
+from a yellow sofa in the hall. The place smelt like a laundry with an
+odor of vinegar in addition. A door from the hall led into a brightly
+lighted room. The medical student and the artist stopped at this door
+and, craning their necks, peeped into the room.
+
+“Buona sera, signori, rigolleto--hugenotti--traviata!” began the artist,
+with a theatrical bow.
+
+“Havanna--tarakano--pistoleto!” said the medical student, pressing his
+cap to his breast and bowing low.
+
+Vassilyev was standing behind them. He would have liked to make a
+theatrical bow and say something silly, too, but he only smiled, felt an
+awkwardness that was like shame, and waited impatiently for what would
+happen next.
+
+A little fair girl of seventeen or eighteen, with short hair, in a short
+light-blue frock with a bunch of white ribbon on her bosom, appeared in
+the doorway.
+
+“Why do you stand at the door?” she said. “Take off your coats and come
+into the drawing-room.”
+
+The medical student and the artist, still talking Italian, went into the
+drawing-room. Vassilyev followed them irresolutely.
+
+“Gentlemen, take off your coats!” the flunkey said sternly; “you can’t
+go in like that.”
+
+In the drawing-room there was, besides the girl, another woman, very
+stout and tall, with a foreign face and bare arms. She was sitting near
+the piano, laying out a game of patience on her lap. She took no notice
+whatever of the visitors.
+
+“Where are the other young ladies?” asked the medical student.
+
+“They are having their tea,” said the fair girl. “Stepan,” she called,
+“go and tell the young ladies some students have come!”
+
+A little later a third young lady came into the room. She was wearing
+a bright red dress with blue stripes. Her face was painted thickly
+and unskillfully, her brow was hidden under her hair, and there was an
+unblinking, frightened stare in her eyes. As she came in, she began
+at once singing some song in a coarse, powerful contralto. After her a
+fourth appeared, and after her a fifth....
+
+In all this Vassilyev saw nothing new or interesting. It seemed to him
+that that room, the piano, the looking-glass in its cheap gilt frame,
+the bunch of white ribbon, the dress with the blue stripes, and the
+blank indifferent faces, he had seen before and more than once. Of the
+darkness, the silence, the secrecy, the guilty smile, of all that he had
+expected to meet here and had dreaded, he saw no trace.
+
+Everything was ordinary, prosaic, and uninteresting. Only one thing
+faintly stirred his curiosity--the terrible, as it were intentionally
+designed, bad taste which was visible in the cornices, in the absurd
+pictures, in the dresses, in the bunch of ribbons. There was something
+characteristic and peculiar in this bad taste.
+
+“How poor and stupid it all is!” thought Vassilyev. “What is there in
+all this trumpery I see now that can tempt a normal man and excite
+him to commit the horrible sin of buying a human being for a rouble?
+I understand any sin for the sake of splendor, beauty, grace, passion,
+taste; but what is there here? What is there here worth sinning for?
+But... one mustn’t think!”
+
+“Beardy, treat me to some porter!” said the fair girl, addressing him.
+
+Vassilyev was at once overcome with confusion.
+
+“With pleasure,” he said, bowing politely. “Only excuse me, madam,
+I.... I won’t drink with you. I don’t drink.”
+
+Five minutes later the friends went off into another house.
+
+“Why did you ask for porter?” said the medical student angrily. “What
+a millionaire! You have thrown away six roubles for no reason
+whatever--simply waste!”
+
+“If she wants it, why not let her have the pleasure?” said Vassilyev,
+justifying himself.
+
+“You did not give pleasure to her, but to the ‘Madam.’ They are told
+to ask the visitors to stand them treat because it is a profit to the
+keeper.”
+
+“Behold the mill...” hummed the artist, “in ruins now....”
+
+Going into the next house, the friends stopped in the hall and did not
+go into the drawing-room. Here, as in the first house, a figure in a
+black coat, with a sleepy face like a flunkey’s, got up from a sofa
+in the hall. Looking at this flunkey, at his face and his shabby black
+coat, Vassilyev thought: “What must an ordinary simple Russian have gone
+through before fate flung him down as a flunkey here? Where had he been
+before and what had he done? What was awaiting him? Was he married?
+Where was his mother, and did she know that he was a servant here?”
+ And Vassilyev could not help particularly noticing the flunkey in each
+house. In one of the houses--he thought it was the fourth--there was a
+little spare, frail-looking flunkey with a watch-chain on his waistcoat.
+He was reading a newspaper, and took no notice of them when they went
+in. Looking at his face Vassilyev, for some reason, thought that a man
+with such a face might steal, might murder, might bear false witness.
+But the face was really interesting: a big forehead, gray eyes, a little
+flattened nose, thin compressed lips, and a blankly stupid and at the
+same time insolent expression like that of a young harrier overtaking
+a hare. Vassilyev thought it would be nice to touch this man’s hair, to
+see whether it was soft or coarse. It must be coarse like a dog’s.
+
+III
+
+Having drunk two glasses of porter, the artist became suddenly tipsy and
+grew unnaturally lively.
+
+“Let’s go to another!” he said peremptorily, waving his hands. “I will
+take you to the best one.”
+
+When he had brought his friends to the house which in his opinion was
+the best, he declared his firm intention of dancing a quadrille.
+The medical student grumbled something about their having to pay
+the musicians a rouble, but agreed to be his _vis-a-vis_. They began
+dancing.
+
+It was just as nasty in the best house as in the worst. Here there were
+just the same looking-glasses and pictures, the same styles of coiffure
+and dress. Looking round at the furnishing of the rooms and the
+costumes, Vassilyev realized that this was not lack of taste, but
+something that might be called the taste, and even the style, of S.
+Street, which could not be found elsewhere--something intentional in its
+ugliness, not accidental, but elaborated in the course of years. After
+he had been in eight houses he was no longer surprised at the color of
+the dresses, at the long trains, the gaudy ribbons, the sailor dresses,
+and the thick purplish rouge on the cheeks; he saw that it all had to
+be like this, that if a single one of the women had been dressed like a
+human being, or if there had been one decent engraving on the wall, the
+general tone of the whole street would have suffered.
+
+“How unskillfully they sell themselves!” he thought. “How can they
+fail to understand that vice is only alluring when it is beautiful and
+hidden, when it wears the mask of virtue? Modest black dresses, pale
+faces, mournful smiles, and darkness would be far more effective than
+this clumsy tawdriness. Stupid things! If they don’t understand it of
+themselves, their visitors might surely have taught them....”
+
+A young lady in a Polish dress edged with white fur came up to him and
+sat down beside him.
+
+“You nice dark man, why aren’t you dancing?” she asked. “Why are you so
+dull?”
+
+“Because it is dull.”
+
+“Treat me to some Lafitte. Then it won’t be dull.”
+
+Vassilyev made no answer. He was silent for a little, and then asked:
+
+“What time do you get to sleep?”
+
+“At six o’clock.”
+
+“And what time do you get up?”
+
+“Sometimes at two and sometimes at three.”
+
+“And what do you do when you get up?”
+
+“We have coffee, and at six o’clock we have dinner.”
+
+“And what do you have for dinner?”
+
+“Usually soup, beefsteak, and dessert. Our madam keeps the girls well.
+But why do you ask all this?”
+
+“Oh, just to talk....”
+
+Vassilyev longed to talk to the young lady about many things. He felt an
+intense desire to find out where she came from, whether her parents were
+living, and whether they knew that she was here; how she had come
+into this house; whether she were cheerful and satisfied, or sad and
+oppressed by gloomy thoughts; whether she hoped some day to get out of
+her present position.... But he could not think how to begin or
+in what shape to put his questions so as not to seem impertinent. He
+thought for a long time, and asked:
+
+“How old are you?”
+
+“Eighty,” the young lady jested, looking with a laugh at the antics of
+the artist as he danced.
+
+All at once she burst out laughing at something, and uttered a long
+cynical sentence loud enough to be heard by everyone. Vassilyev was
+aghast, and not knowing how to look, gave a constrained smile. He was
+the only one who smiled; all the others, his friends, the musicians, the
+women, did not even glance towards his neighbor, but seemed not to have
+heard her.
+
+“Stand me some Lafitte,” his neighbor said again.
+
+Vassilyev felt a repulsion for her white fur and for her voice, and
+walked away from her. It seemed to him hot and stifling, and his heart
+began throbbing slowly but violently, like a hammer--one! two! three!
+
+“Let us go away!” he said, pulling the artist by his sleeve.
+
+“Wait a little; let me finish.”
+
+While the artist and the medical student were finishing the quadrille,
+to avoid looking at the women, Vassilyev scrutinized the musicians. A
+respectable-looking old man in spectacles, rather like Marshal Bazaine,
+was playing the piano; a young man with a fair beard, dressed in the
+latest fashion, was playing the violin. The young man had a face that
+did not look stupid nor exhausted, but intelligent, youthful, and fresh.
+He was dressed fancifully and with taste; he played with feeling. It was
+a mystery how he and the respectable-looking old man had come here. How
+was it they were not ashamed to sit here? What were they thinking about
+when they looked at the women?
+
+If the violin and the piano had been played by men in rags, looking
+hungry, gloomy, drunken, with dissipated or stupid faces, then one could
+have understood their presence, perhaps. As it was, Vassilyev could not
+understand it at all. He recalled the story of the fallen woman he had
+once read, and he thought now that that human figure with the guilty
+smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing now. It seemed to
+him that he was seeing not fallen women, but some different world quite
+apart, alien to him and incomprehensible; if he had seen this world
+before on the stage, or read of it in a book, he would not have believed
+in it....
+
+The woman with the white fur burst out laughing again and uttered a
+loathsome sentence in a loud voice. A feeling of disgust took possession
+of him. He flushed crimson and went out of the room.
+
+“Wait a minute, we are coming too!” the artist shouted to him.
+
+IV
+
+“While we were dancing,” said the medical student, as they all three
+went out into the street, “I had a conversation with my partner. We
+talked about her first romance. He, the hero, was an accountant at
+Smolensk with a wife and five children. She was seventeen, and she lived
+with her papa and mamma, who sold soap and candles.”
+
+“How did he win her heart?” asked Vassilyev.
+
+“By spending fifty roubles on underclothes for her. What next!”
+
+“So he knew how to get his partner’s story out of her,” thought
+Vassilyev about the medical student. “But I don’t know how to.”
+
+“I say, I am going home!” he said.
+
+“What for?”
+
+“Because I don’t know how to behave here. Besides, I am bored,
+disgusted. What is there amusing in it? If they were human beings--but
+they are savages and animals. I am going; do as you like.”
+
+“Come, Grisha, Grigory, darling...” said the artist in a tearful
+voice, hugging Vassilyev, “come along! Let’s go to one more together and
+damnation take them!... Please do, Grisha!”
+
+They persuaded Vassilyev and led him up a staircase. In the carpet and
+the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels
+that decorated the hall, the same S. Street style was apparent, but
+carried to a greater perfection, more imposing.
+
+“I really will go home!” said Vassilyev as he was taking off his coat.
+
+“Come, come, dear boy,” said the artist, and he kissed him on the neck.
+“Don’t be tiresome.... Gri-gri, be a good comrade! We came together,
+we will go back together. What a beast you are, really!”
+
+“I can wait for you in the street. I think it’s loathsome, really!”
+
+“Come, come, Grisha.... If it is loathsome, you can observe it! Do
+you understand? You can observe!”
+
+“One must take an objective view of things,” said the medical student
+gravely.
+
+Vassilyev went into the drawing-room and sat down. There were a number
+of visitors in the room besides him and his friends: two infantry
+officers, a bald, gray-haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless
+youths from the institute of land-surveying, and a very tipsy man who
+looked like an actor. All the young ladies were taken up with these
+visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev.
+
+Only one of them, dressed _a la Aida,_ glanced sideways at him, smiled,
+and said, yawning: “A dark one has come....”
+
+Vassilyev’s heart was throbbing and his face burned. He felt ashamed
+before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and
+miserable. He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and loving
+man (such as he had hitherto considered himself), hated these women and
+felt nothing but repulsion towards them. He felt pity neither for the
+women nor the musicians nor the flunkeys.
+
+“It is because I am not trying to understand them,” he thought. “They
+are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are
+human beings all the same, they have souls. One must understand them
+and then judge....”
+
+“Grisha, don’t go, wait for us,” the artist shouted to him and
+disappeared.
+
+The medical student disappeared soon after.
+
+“Yes, one must make an effort to understand, one mustn’t be like
+this....” Vassilyev went on thinking.
+
+And he began gazing at each of the women with strained attention,
+looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their
+faces, or not one of these women felt herself to be guilty; he read on
+every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and
+complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent
+movements, and nothing else. Apparently each of them had in the past a
+romance with an accountant based on underclothes for fifty roubles, and
+looked for no other charm in the present but coffee, a dinner of three
+courses, wines, quadrilles, sleeping till two in the afternoon....
+
+Finding no guilty smile, Vassilyev began to look whether there was not
+one intelligent face. And his attention was caught by one pale, rather
+sleepy, exhausted-looking face.... It was a dark woman, not very
+young, wearing a dress covered with spangles; she was sitting in an
+easy-chair, looking at the floor lost in thought. Vassilyev walked from
+one corner of the room to the other, and, as though casually, sat down
+beside her.
+
+“I must begin with something trivial,” he thought, “and pass to what is
+serious....”
+
+“What a pretty dress you have,” and with his finger he touched the gold
+fringe of her fichu.
+
+“Oh, is it?...” said the dark woman listlessly.
+
+“What province do you come from?”
+
+“I? From a distance.... From Tchernigov.”
+
+“A fine province. It’s nice there.”
+
+“Any place seems nice when one is not in it.”
+
+“It’s a pity I cannot describe nature,” thought Vassilyev. “I might
+touch her by a description of nature in Tchernigov. No doubt she loves
+the place if she has been born there.”
+
+“Are you dull here?” he asked.
+
+“Of course I am dull.”
+
+“Why don’t you go away from here if you are dull?”
+
+“Where should I go to? Go begging or what?”
+
+“Begging would be easier than living here.”
+
+“How do you know that? Have you begged?”
+
+“Yes, when I hadn’t the money to study. Even if I hadn’t anyone could
+understand that. A beggar is anyway a free man, and you are a slave.”
+
+The dark woman stretched, and watched with sleepy eyes the footman who
+was bringing a trayful of glasses and seltzer water.
+
+“Stand me a glass of porter,” she said, and yawned again.
+
+“Porter,” thought Vassilyev. “And what if your brother or mother walked
+in at this moment? What would you say? And what would they say? There
+would be porter then, I imagine....”
+
+All at once there was the sound of weeping. From the adjoining room,
+from which the footman had brought the seltzer water, a fair man with
+a red face and angry eyes ran in quickly. He was followed by the tall,
+stout “madam,” who was shouting in a shrill voice:
+
+“Nobody has given you leave to slap girls on the cheeks! We have
+visitors better than you, and they don’t fight! Impostor!”
+
+A hubbub arose. Vassilyev was frightened and turned pale. In the next
+room there was the sound of bitter, genuine weeping, as though of
+someone insulted. And he realized that there were real people living
+here who, like people everywhere else, felt insulted, suffered, wept,
+and cried for help. The feeling of oppressive hate and disgust gave way
+to an acute feeling of pity and anger against the aggressor. He rushed
+into the room where there was weeping. Across rows of bottles on a
+marble-top table he distinguished a suffering face, wet with tears,
+stretched out his hands towards that face, took a step towards the
+table, but at once drew back in horror. The weeping girl was drunk.
+
+As he made his way though the noisy crowd gathered about the fair man,
+his heart sank and he felt frightened like a child; and it seemed to him
+that in this alien, incomprehensible world people wanted to pursue him,
+to beat him, to pelt him with filthy words.... He tore down his coat
+from the hatstand and ran headlong downstairs.
+
+V
+
+Leaning against the fence, he stood near the house waiting for his
+friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and violins, gay,
+reckless, insolent, and mournful, mingled in the air in a sort of chaos,
+and this tangle of sounds seemed again like an unseen orchestra tuning
+up on the roofs. If one looked upwards into the darkness, the black
+background was all spangled with white, moving spots: it was snow
+falling. As the snowflakes came into the light they floated round lazily
+in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. The
+snowflakes whirled thickly round Vassilyev and hung upon his beard,
+his eyelashes, his eyebrows.... The cabmen, the horses, and the
+passers-by were white.
+
+“And how can the snow fall in this street!” thought Vassilyev.
+“Damnation take these houses!”
+
+His legs seemed to be giving way from fatigue, simply from having run
+down the stairs; he gasped for breath as though he had been climbing
+uphill, his heart beat so loudly that he could hear it. He was consumed
+by a desire to get out of the street as quickly as possible and to go
+home, but even stronger was his desire to wait for his companions and
+vent upon them his oppressive feeling.
+
+There was much he did not understand in these houses, the souls of
+ruined women were a mystery to him as before; but it was clear to him
+that the thing was far worse than could have been believed. If that
+sinful woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, it was
+difficult to find a fitting name for all these who were dancing now to
+this tangle of sound and uttering long, loathsome sentences. They were
+not on the road to ruin, but ruined.
+
+“There is vice,” he thought, “but neither consciousness of sin nor
+hope of salvation. They are sold and bought, steeped in wine and
+abominations, while they, like sheep, are stupid, indifferent, and don’t
+understand. My God! My God!”
+
+It was clear to him, too, that everything that is called human dignity,
+personal rights, the Divine image and semblance, were defiled to their
+very foundations--“to the very marrow,” as drunkards say--and that not
+only the street and the stupid women were responsible for it.
+
+A group of students, white with snow, passed him laughing and talking
+gaily; one, a tall thin fellow, stopped, glanced into Vassilyev’s face,
+and said in a drunken voice:
+
+“One of us! A bit on, old man? Aha-ha! Never mind, have a good time!
+Don’t be down-hearted, old chap!”
+
+He took Vassilyev by the shoulder and pressed his cold wet mustache
+against his cheek, then he slipped, staggered, and, waving both hands,
+cried:
+
+“Hold on! Don’t upset!”
+
+And laughing, he ran to overtake his companions.
+
+Through the noise came the sound of the artist’s voice:
+
+“Don’t you dare to hit the women! I won’t let you, damnation take you!
+You scoundrels!”
+
+The medical student appeared in the doorway. He looked from side to
+side, and seeing Vassilyev, said in an agitated voice:
+
+“You here! I tell you it’s really impossible to go anywhere with Yegor!
+What a fellow he is! I don’t understand him! He has got up a scene! Do
+you hear? Yegor!” he shouted at the door. “Yegor!”
+
+“I won’t allow you to hit women!” the artist’s piercing voice sounded
+from above. Something heavy and lumbering rolled down the stairs. It was
+the artist falling headlong. Evidently he had been pushed downstairs.
+
+He picked himself up from the ground, shook his hat, and, with an angry
+and indignant face, brandished his fist towards the top of the stairs
+and shouted:
+
+“Scoundrels! Torturers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t allow you to hit them! To
+hit a weak, drunken woman! Oh, you brutes!...”
+
+“Yegor!... Come, Yegor!...” the medical student began imploring
+him. “I give you my word of honor I’ll never come with you again. On my
+word of honor I won’t!”
+
+Little by little the artist was pacified and the friends went homewards.
+
+“Against my will an unknown force,” hummed the medical student, “has led
+me to these mournful shores.”
+
+“Behold the mill,” the artist chimed in a little later, “in ruins now.
+What a lot of snow, Holy Mother! Grisha, why did you go? You are a funk,
+a regular old woman.”
+
+Vassilyev walked behind his companions, looked at their backs, and
+thought:
+
+“One of two things: either we only fancy prostitution is an evil, and
+we exaggerate it; or, if prostitution really is as great an evil as is
+generally assumed, these dear friends of mine are as much slaveowners,
+violators, and murderers, as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo, that
+are described in the ‘Neva.’ Now they are singing, laughing, talking
+sense, but haven’t they just been exploiting hunger, ignorance, and
+stupidity? They have--I have been a witness of it. What is the use of
+their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and
+lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of the piece of
+bacon in the story. Two brigands murdered a beggar in a forest; they
+began sharing his clothes between them, and found in his wallet a piece
+of bacon. ‘Well found,’ said one of them, ‘let us have a bit.’ ‘What do
+you mean? How can you?’ cried the other in horror. ‘Have you forgotten
+that to-day is Wednesday?’ And they would not eat it. After murdering a
+man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were
+keeping the fast. In the same way these men, after buying women, go
+their way imagining that they are artists and men of science....”
+
+“Listen!” he said sharply and angrily. “Why do you come here? Is it
+possible--is it possible you don’t understand how horrible it is? Your
+medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of
+consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even
+earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain
+five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed
+by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in
+the course of your lives visits this place or others like it two hundred
+and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of
+you! Can’t you understand that? Isn’t it horrible to murder, two of you,
+three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! Ah! isn’t it awful,
+my God!”
+
+“I knew it would end like that,” the artist said frowning. “We ought not
+to have gone with this fool and ass! You imagine you have grand notions
+in your head now, ideas, don’t you? No, it’s the devil knows what, but
+not ideas. You are looking at me now with hatred and repulsion, but I
+tell you it’s better you should set up twenty more houses like those
+than look like that. There’s more vice in your expression than in the
+whole street! Come along, Volodya, let him go to the devil! He’s a fool
+and an ass, and that’s all....”
+
+“We human beings do murder each other,” said the medical student. “It’s
+immoral, of course, but philosophizing doesn’t help it. Good-by!”
+
+At Trubnoy Square the friends said good-by and parted. When he was left
+alone, Vassilyev strode rapidly along the boulevard. He felt frightened
+of the darkness, of the snow which was falling in heavy flakes on the
+ground, and seemed as though it would cover up the whole world; he
+felt frightened of the street lamps shining with pale light through
+the clouds of snow. His soul was possessed by an unaccountable,
+faint-hearted terror. Passers-by came towards him from time to time,
+but he timidly moved to one side; it seemed to him that women, none but
+women, were coming from all sides and staring at him....
+
+“It’s beginning,” he thought, “I am going to have a breakdown.”
+
+VI
+
+At home he lay on his bed and said, shuddering all over: “They are
+alive! Alive! My God, those women are alive!”
+
+He encouraged his imagination in all sorts of ways to picture himself
+the brother of a fallen woman, or her father; then a fallen woman
+herself, with her painted cheeks; and it all moved him to horror.
+
+It seemed to him that he must settle the question at once at all costs,
+and that this question was not one that did not concern him, but was his
+own personal problem. He made an immense effort, repressed his despair,
+and, sitting on the bed, holding his head in his hands, began thinking
+how one could save all the women he had seen that day. The method for
+attacking problems of all kinds was, as he was an educated man, well
+known to him. And, however excited he was, he strictly adhered to that
+method. He recalled the history of the problem and its literature, and
+for a quarter of an hour he paced from one end of the room to the other
+trying to remember all the methods practiced at the present time for
+saving women. He had very many good friends and acquaintances who lived
+in lodgings in Petersburg.... Among them were a good many honest and
+self-sacrificing men. Some of them had attempted to save women....
+
+“All these not very numerous attempts,” thought Vassilyev, “can be
+divided into three groups. Some, after buying the woman out of the
+brothel, took a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine, and she
+became a semptress. And whether he wanted to or not, after having bought
+her out he made her his mistress; then when he had taken his degree, he
+went away and handed her into the keeping of some other decent man as
+though she were a thing. And the fallen woman remained a fallen woman.
+Others, after buying her out, took a lodging apart for her, bought the
+inevitable sewing-machine, and tried teaching her to read, preaching at
+her and giving her books. The woman lived and sewed as long as it was
+interesting and a novelty to her, then getting bored, began receiving
+men on the sly, or ran away and went back where she could sleep till
+three o’clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. The third class, the
+most ardent and self-sacrificing, had taken a bold, resolute step.
+They had married them. And when the insolent and spoilt, or stupid and
+crushed animal became a wife, the head of a household, and afterwards a
+mother, it turned her whole existence and attitude to life upside down,
+so that it was hard to recognize the fallen woman afterwards in the wife
+and the mother. Yes, marriage was the best and perhaps the only means.”
+
+“But it is impossible!” Vassilyev said aloud, and he sank upon his bed.
+“I, to begin with, could not marry one! To do that one must be a saint
+and be unable to feel hatred or repulsion. But supposing that I,
+the medical student, and the artist mastered ourselves and did marry
+them--suppose they were all married. What would be the result? The
+result would be that while here in Moscow they were being married, some
+Smolensk accountant would be debauching another lot, and that lot would
+be streaming here to fill the vacant places, together with others from
+Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what is one to do with the
+hundred thousand in London? What’s one to do with those in Hamburg?”
+
+The lamp in which the oil had burnt down began to smoke. Vassilyev did
+not notice it. He began pacing to and fro again, still thinking. Now he
+put the question differently: what must be done that fallen women should
+not be needed? For that, it was essential that the men who buy them
+and do them to death should feel all the immorality of their share in
+enslaving them and should be horrified. One must save the men.
+
+“One won’t do anything by art and science, that is clear...” thought
+Vassilyev. “The only way out of it is missionary work.”
+
+And he began to dream how he would the next evening stand at the corner
+of the street and say to every passer-by: “Where are you going and what
+for? Have some fear of God!”
+
+He would turn to the apathetic cabmen and say to them: “Why are you
+staying here? Why aren’t you revolted? Why aren’t you indignant? I
+suppose you believe in God and know that it is a sin, that people go to
+hell for it? Why don’t you speak? It is true that they are strangers
+to you, but you know even they have fathers, brothers like
+yourselves....”
+
+One of Vassilyev’s friends had once said of him that he was a talented
+man. There are all sorts of talents--talent for writing, talent for
+the stage, talent for art; but he had a peculiar talent--a talent for
+_humanity_. He possessed an extraordinarily fine delicate scent for pain
+in general. As a good actor reflects in himself the movements and voice
+of others, so Vassilyev could reflect in his soul the sufferings of
+others. When he saw tears, he wept; beside a sick man, he felt sick
+himself and moaned; if he saw an act of violence, he felt as though he
+himself were the victim of it, he was frightened as a child, and in his
+fright ran to help. The pain of others worked on his nerves, excited
+him, roused him to a state of frenzy, and so on.
+
+Whether this friend were right I don’t know, but what Vassilyev
+experienced when he thought this question was settled was something like
+inspiration. He cried and laughed, spoke aloud the words that he should
+say next day, felt a fervent love for those who would listen to him and
+would stand beside him at the corner of the street to preach; he sat
+down to write letters, made vows to himself....
+
+All this was like inspiration also from the fact that it did not last
+long. Vassilyev was soon tired. The cases in London, in Hamburg, in
+Warsaw, weighed upon him by their mass as a mountain weighs upon the
+earth; he felt dispirited, bewildered, in the face of this mass; he
+remembered that he had not a gift for words, that he was cowardly
+and timid, that indifferent people would not be willing to listen
+and understand him, a law student in his third year, a timid and
+insignificant person; that genuine missionary work included not only
+teaching but deeds...
+
+
+When it was daylight and carriages were already beginning to rumble in
+the street, Vassilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into
+space. He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of
+missionary work. His whole attention was turned upon the spiritual agony
+which was torturing him. It was a dull, vague, undefined anguish akin to
+misery, to an extreme form of terror and to despair. He could point
+to the place where the pain was, in his breast under his heart; but
+he could not compare it with anything. In the past he had had acute
+toothache, he had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but all that was
+insignificant compared with this spiritual anguish. In the presence of
+that pain life seemed loathsome. The dissertation, the excellent work
+he had written already, the people he loved, the salvation of fallen
+women--everything that only the day before he had cared about or been
+indifferent to, now when he thought of them irritated him in the same
+way as the noise of the carriages, the scurrying footsteps of the
+waiters in the passage, the daylight.... If at that moment someone
+had performed a great deed of mercy or had committed a revolting
+outrage, he would have felt the same repulsion for both actions. Of all
+the thoughts that strayed through his mind only two did not irritate
+him: one was that at every moment he had the power to kill himself, the
+other that this agony would not last more than three days. This last he
+knew by experience.
+
+After lying for a while he got up and, wringing his hands, walked about
+the room, not as usual from corner to corner, but round the room beside
+the walls. As he passed he glanced at himself in the looking-glass. His
+face looked pale and sunken, his temples looked hollow, his eyes were
+bigger, darker, more staring, as though they belonged to someone else,
+and they had an expression of insufferable mental agony.
+
+At midday the artist knocked at the door.
+
+“Grigory, are you at home?” he asked.
+
+Getting no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered
+himself in Little Russian: “Nay. The confounded fellow has gone to the
+University.”
+
+And he went away. Vassilyev lay down on the bed and, thrusting his head
+under the pillow, began crying with agony, and the more freely his tears
+flowed the more terrible his mental anguish became. As it began to get
+dark, he thought of the agonizing night awaiting him, and was overcome
+by a horrible despair. He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, and,
+leaving his door wide open, for no object or reason, went out into the
+street. Without asking himself where he should go, he walked quickly
+along Sadovoy Street.
+
+Snow was falling as heavily as the day before; it was thawing. Thrusting
+his hands into his sleeves, shuddering and frightened at the noises,
+at the trambells, and at the passers-by, Vassilyev walked along Sadovoy
+Street as far as Suharev Tower; then to the Red Gate; from there he
+turned off to Basmannya Street. He went into a tavern and drank off
+a big glass of vodka, but that did not make him feel better. When he
+reached Razgulya he turned to the right, and strode along side streets
+in which he had never been before in his life. He reached the old bridge
+by which the Yauza runs gurgling, and from which one can see long rows
+of lights in the windows of the Red Barracks. To distract his spiritual
+anguish by some new sensation or some other pain, Vassilyev, not knowing
+what to do, crying and shuddering, undid his greatcoat and jacket and
+exposed his bare chest to the wet snow and the wind. But that did not
+lessen his suffering either. Then he bent down over the rail of the
+bridge and looked down into the black, yeasty Yauza, and he longed to
+plunge down head foremost; not from loathing for life, not for the sake
+of suicide, but in order to bruise himself at least, and by one pain to
+ease the other. But the black water, the darkness, the deserted banks
+covered with snow were terrifying. He shivered and walked on. He walked
+up and down by the Red Barracks, then turned back and went down to a
+copse, from the copse back to the bridge again.
+
+“No, home, home!” he thought. “At home I believe it’s better...”
+
+And he went back. When he reached home he pulled off his wet coat and
+cap, began pacing round the room, and went on pacing round and round
+without stopping till morning.
+
+VII
+
+When next morning the artist and the medical student went in to him,
+he was moving about the room with his shirt torn, biting his hands and
+moaning with pain.
+
+“For God’s sake!” he sobbed when he saw his friends, “take me where you
+please, do what you can; but for God’s sake, save me quickly! I shall
+kill myself!”
+
+The artist turned pale and was helpless. The medical student, too,
+almost shed tears, but considering that doctors ought to be cool and
+composed in every emergency said coldly:
+
+“It’s a nervous breakdown. But it’s nothing. Let us go at once to the
+doctor.”
+
+“Wherever you like, only for God’s sake, make haste!”
+
+“Don’t excite yourself. You must try and control yourself.”
+
+The artist and the medical student with trembling hands put Vassilyev’s
+coat and hat on and led him out into the street.
+
+“Mihail Sergeyitch has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long
+time,” the medical student said on the way. “He is a very nice man and
+thoroughly good at his work. He took his degree in 1882, and he has
+an immense practice already. He treats students as though he were one
+himself.”
+
+“Make haste, make haste!...” Vassilyev urged.
+
+Mihail Sergeyitch, a stout, fair-haired doctor, received the friends
+with politeness and frigid dignity, and smiled only on one side of his
+face.
+
+“Rybnikov and Mayer have spoken to me of your illness already,” he said.
+“Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, I beg....”
+
+He made Vassilyev sit down in a big armchair near the table, and moved a
+box of cigarettes towards him.
+
+“Now then!” he began, stroking his knees. “Let us get to work.... How
+old are you?”
+
+He asked questions and the medical student answered them. He asked
+whether Vassilyev’s father had suffered from certain special diseases,
+whether he drank to excess, whether he were remarkable for cruelty or
+any peculiarities. He made similar inquiries about his grandfather,
+mother, sisters, and brothers. On learning that his mother had a
+beautiful voice and sometimes acted on the stage, he grew more animated
+at once, and asked:
+
+“Excuse me, but don’t you remember, perhaps, your mother had a passion
+for the stage?”
+
+Twenty minutes passed. Vassilyev was annoyed by the way the doctor kept
+stroking his knees and talking of the same thing.
+
+“So far as I understand your questions, doctor,” he said, “you want to
+know whether my illness is hereditary or not. It is not.”
+
+The doctor proceeded to ask Vassilyev whether he had had any secret
+vices as a boy, or had received injuries to his head; whether he had had
+any aberrations, any peculiarities, or exceptional propensities. Half
+the questions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left
+unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail
+Sergeyitch, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though
+if Vassilyev failed to answer one question all would be lost. As he
+received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip
+of paper. On learning that Vassilyev had taken his degree in natural
+science, and was now studying law, the doctor pondered.
+
+“He wrote a first-rate piece of original work last year,...” said the
+medical student.
+
+“I beg your pardon, but don’t interrupt me; you prevent me from
+concentrating,” said the doctor, and he smiled on one side of his
+face. “Though, of course, that does enter into the diagnosis. Intense
+intellectual work, nervous exhaustion.... Yes, yes.... And do you
+drink vodka?” he said, addressing Vassilyev.
+
+“Very rarely.”
+
+Another twenty minutes passed. The medical student began telling the
+doctor in a low voice his opinion as to the immediate cause of
+the attack, and described how the day before yesterday the artist,
+Vassilyev, and he had visited S. Street.
+
+The indifferent, reserved, and frigid tone in which his friends and the
+doctor spoke of the women and that miserable street struck Vassilyev as
+strange in the extreme....
+
+“Doctor, tell me one thing only,” he said, controlling himself so as not
+to speak rudely. “Is prostitution an evil or not?”
+
+“My dear fellow, who disputes it?” said the doctor, with an expression
+that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long
+ago. “Who disputes it?”
+
+“You are a mental doctor, aren’t you?” Vassilyev asked curtly.
+
+“Yes, a mental doctor.”
+
+“Perhaps all of you are right!” said Vassilyev, getting up and beginning
+to walk from one end of the room to the other. “Perhaps! But it all
+seems marvelous to me! That I should have taken my degree in two
+faculties you look upon as a great achievement; because I have written
+a work which in three years will be thrown aside and forgotten, I am
+praised up to the skies; but because I cannot speak of fallen women as
+unconcernedly as of these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am
+called mad, I am pitied!”
+
+Vassilyev for some reason felt all at once unutterably sorry for
+himself, and his companions, and all the people he had seen two days
+before, and for the doctor; he burst into tears and sank into a chair.
+
+His friends looked inquiringly at the doctor. The latter, with the
+air of completely comprehending the tears and the despair, of feeling
+himself a specialist in that line, went up to Vassilyev and, without
+a word, gave him some medicine to drink; and then, when he was calmer,
+undressed him and began to investigate the degree of sensibility of the
+skin, the reflex action of the knees, and so on.
+
+And Vassilyev felt easier. When he came out from the doctor’s he
+was beginning to feel ashamed; the rattle of the carriages no longer
+irritated him, and the load at his heart grew lighter and lighter as
+though it were melting away. He had two prescriptions in his hand:
+one was for bromide, one was for morphia.... He had taken all these
+remedies before.
+
+In the street he stood still and, saying good-by to his friends, dragged
+himself languidly to the University.
+
+
+
+
+MISERY
+
+“To whom shall I tell my grief?”
+
+THE twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily
+about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a
+thin soft layer on roofs, horses’ backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov,
+the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost. He sits on the box without
+stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent. If a regular
+snowdrift fell on him it seems as though even then he would not think it
+necessary to shake it off.... His little mare is white and motionless
+too. Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like
+straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread
+horse. She is probably lost in thought. Anyone who has been torn away
+from the plough, from the familiar gray landscapes, and cast into this
+slough, full of monstrous lights, of unceasing uproar and hurrying
+people, is bound to think.
+
+It is a long time since Iona and his nag have budged. They came out of
+the yard before dinnertime and not a single fare yet. But now the shades
+of evening are falling on the town. The pale light of the street lamps
+changes to a vivid color, and the bustle of the street grows noisier.
+
+“Sledge to Vyborgskaya!” Iona hears. “Sledge!”
+
+Iona starts, and through his snow-plastered eyelashes sees an officer in
+a military overcoat with a hood over his head.
+
+“To Vyborgskaya,” repeats the officer. “Are you asleep? To Vyborgskaya!”
+
+In token of assent Iona gives a tug at the reins which sends cakes of
+snow flying from the horse’s back and shoulders. The officer gets into
+the sledge. The sledge-driver clicks to the horse, cranes his neck like
+a swan, rises in his seat, and more from habit than necessity brandishes
+his whip. The mare cranes her neck, too, crooks her stick-like legs, and
+hesitatingly sets of....
+
+“Where are you shoving, you devil?” Iona immediately hears shouts from
+the dark mass shifting to and fro before him. “Where the devil are you
+going? Keep to the r-right!”
+
+“You don’t know how to drive! Keep to the right,” says the officer
+angrily.
+
+A coachman driving a carriage swears at him; a pedestrian crossing
+the road and brushing the horse’s nose with his shoulder looks at him
+angrily and shakes the snow off his sleeve. Iona fidgets on the box as
+though he were sitting on thorns, jerks his elbows, and turns his eyes
+about like one possessed as though he did not know where he was or why
+he was there.
+
+“What rascals they all are!” says the officer jocosely. “They are simply
+doing their best to run up against you or fall under the horse’s feet.
+They must be doing it on purpose.”
+
+Iona looks as his fare and moves his lips.... Apparently he means to
+say something, but nothing comes but a sniff.
+
+“What?” inquires the officer.
+
+Iona gives a wry smile, and straining his throat, brings out huskily:
+“My son... er... my son died this week, sir.”
+
+“H’m! What did he die of?”
+
+Iona turns his whole body round to his fare, and says:
+
+“Who can tell! It must have been from fever.... He lay three days in
+the hospital and then he died.... God’s will.”
+
+“Turn round, you devil!” comes out of the darkness. “Have you gone
+cracked, you old dog? Look where you are going!”
+
+“Drive on! drive on!...” says the officer. “We shan’t get there till
+to-morrow going on like this. Hurry up!”
+
+The sledge-driver cranes his neck again, rises in his seat, and with
+heavy grace swings his whip. Several times he looks round at the
+officer, but the latter keeps his eyes shut and is apparently
+disinclined to listen. Putting his fare down at Vyborgskaya, Iona stops
+by a restaurant, and again sits huddled up on the box.... Again
+the wet snow paints him and his horse white. One hour passes, and then
+another....
+
+Three young men, two tall and thin, one short and hunchbacked, come up,
+railing at each other and loudly stamping on the pavement with their
+goloshes.
+
+“Cabby, to the Police Bridge!” the hunchback cries in a cracked voice.
+“The three of us,... twenty kopecks!”
+
+Iona tugs at the reins and clicks to his horse. Twenty kopecks is not a
+fair price, but he has no thoughts for that. Whether it is a rouble or
+whether it is five kopecks does not matter to him now so long as he
+has a fare.... The three young men, shoving each other and using bad
+language, go up to the sledge, and all three try to sit down at once.
+The question remains to be settled: Which are to sit down and which one
+is to stand? After a long altercation, ill-temper, and abuse, they
+come to the conclusion that the hunchback must stand because he is the
+shortest.
+
+“Well, drive on,” says the hunchback in his cracked voice, settling
+himself and breathing down Iona’s neck. “Cut along! What a cap you’ve
+got, my friend! You wouldn’t find a worse one in all Petersburg....”
+
+“He-he!... he-he!...” laughs Iona. “It’s nothing to boast of!”
+
+“Well, then, nothing to boast of, drive on! Are you going to drive like
+this all the way? Eh? Shall I give you one in the neck?”
+
+“My head aches,” says one of the tall ones. “At the Dukmasovs’ yesterday
+Vaska and I drank four bottles of brandy between us.”
+
+“I can’t make out why you talk such stuff,” says the other tall one
+angrily. “You lie like a brute.”
+
+“Strike me dead, it’s the truth!...”
+
+“It’s about as true as that a louse coughs.”
+
+“He-he!” grins Iona. “Me-er-ry gentlemen!”
+
+“Tfoo! the devil take you!” cries the hunchback indignantly. “Will you
+get on, you old plague, or won’t you? Is that the way to drive? Give her
+one with the whip. Hang it all, give it her well.”
+
+Iona feels behind his back the jolting person and quivering voice of
+the hunchback. He hears abuse addressed to him, he sees people, and the
+feeling of loneliness begins little by little to be less heavy on his
+heart. The hunchback swears at him, till he chokes over some elaborately
+whimsical string of epithets and is overpowered by his cough. His tall
+companions begin talking of a certain Nadyezhda Petrovna. Iona looks
+round at them. Waiting till there is a brief pause, he looks round once
+more and says:
+
+“This week... er... my... er... son died!”
+
+“We shall all die,...” says the hunchback with a sigh, wiping his
+lips after coughing. “Come, drive on! drive on! My friends, I simply
+cannot stand crawling like this! When will he get us there?”
+
+“Well, you give him a little encouragement... one in the neck!”
+
+“Do you hear, you old plague? I’ll make you smart. If one stands on
+ceremony with fellows like you one may as well walk. Do you hear, you
+old dragon? Or don’t you care a hang what we say?”
+
+And Iona hears rather than feels a slap on the back of his neck.
+
+“He-he!...” he laughs. “Merry gentlemen.... God give you
+health!”
+
+“Cabman, are you married?” asks one of the tall ones.
+
+“I? He he! Me-er-ry gentlemen. The only wife for me now is the damp
+earth.... He-ho-ho!.... The grave that is!... Here my son’s dead
+and I am alive.... It’s a strange thing, death has come in at the
+wrong door.... Instead of coming for me it went for my son....”
+
+And Iona turns round to tell them how his son died, but at that point
+the hunchback gives a faint sigh and announces that, thank God! they
+have arrived at last. After taking his twenty kopecks, Iona gazes for a
+long while after the revelers, who disappear into a dark entry. Again he
+is alone and again there is silence for him.... The misery which has
+been for a brief space eased comes back again and tears his heart more
+cruelly than ever. With a look of anxiety and suffering Iona’s eyes
+stray restlessly among the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the
+street: can he not find among those thousands someone who will listen
+to him? But the crowds flit by heedless of him and his misery.... His
+misery is immense, beyond all bounds. If Iona’s heart were to burst and
+his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but
+yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant
+shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight....
+
+Iona sees a house-porter with a parcel and makes up his mind to address
+him.
+
+“What time will it be, friend?” he asks.
+
+“Going on for ten.... Why have you stopped here? Drive on!”
+
+Iona drives a few paces away, bends himself double, and gives himself
+up to his misery. He feels it is no good to appeal to people. But before
+five minutes have passed he draws himself up, shakes his head as though
+he feels a sharp pain, and tugs at the reins.... He can bear it no
+longer.
+
+“Back to the yard!” he thinks. “To the yard!”
+
+And his little mare, as though she knew his thoughts, falls to trotting.
+An hour and a half later Iona is sitting by a big dirty stove. On the
+stove, on the floor, and on the benches are people snoring. The air
+is full of smells and stuffiness. Iona looks at the sleeping figures,
+scratches himself, and regrets that he has come home so early....
+
+“I have not earned enough to pay for the oats, even,” he thinks. “That’s
+why I am so miserable. A man who knows how to do his work,... who has
+had enough to eat, and whose horse has had enough to eat, is always at
+ease....”
+
+In one of the corners a young cabman gets up, clears his throat
+sleepily, and makes for the water-bucket.
+
+“Want a drink?” Iona asks him.
+
+“Seems so.”
+
+“May it do you good.... But my son is dead, mate.... Do you hear?
+This week in the hospital.... It’s a queer business....”
+
+Iona looks to see the effect produced by his words, but he sees nothing.
+The young man has covered his head over and is already asleep. The old
+man sighs and scratches himself.... Just as the young man had been
+thirsty for water, he thirsts for speech. His son will soon have been
+dead a week, and he has not really talked to anybody yet.... He
+wants to talk of it properly, with deliberation.... He wants to tell
+how his son was taken ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died,
+how he died.... He wants to describe the funeral, and how he went to
+the hospital to get his son’s clothes. He still has his daughter Anisya
+in the country.... And he wants to talk about her too.... Yes, he
+has plenty to talk about now. His listener ought to sigh and exclaim and
+lament.... It would be even better to talk to women. Though they are
+silly creatures, they blubber at the first word.
+
+“Let’s go out and have a look at the mare,” Iona thinks. “There is
+always time for sleep.... You’ll have sleep enough, no fear....”
+
+He puts on his coat and goes into the stables where his mare is
+standing. He thinks about oats, about hay, about the weather.... He
+cannot think about his son when he is alone.... To talk about
+him with someone is possible, but to think of him and picture him is
+insufferable anguish....
+
+“Are you munching?” Iona asks his mare, seeing her shining eyes. “There,
+munch away, munch away.... Since we have not earned enough for oats,
+we will eat hay.... Yes,... I have grown too old to drive....
+My son ought to be driving, not I.... He was a real cabman.... He
+ought to have lived....”
+
+Iona is silent for a while, and then he goes on:
+
+“That’s how it is, old girl.... Kuzma Ionitch is gone.... He said
+good-by to me.... He went and died for no reason.... Now, suppose
+you had a little colt, and you were own mother to that little colt.
+... And all at once that same little colt went and died.... You’d
+be sorry, wouldn’t you?...”
+
+The little mare munches, listens, and breathes on her master’s hands.
+Iona is carried away and tells her all about it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAMPAGNE
+
+A WAYFARER’S STORY
+
+IN the year in which my story begins I had a job at a little station on
+one of our southwestern railways. Whether I had a gay or a dull life
+at the station you can judge from the fact that for fifteen miles
+round there was not one human habitation, not one woman, not one decent
+tavern; and in those days I was young, strong, hot-headed, giddy, and
+foolish. The only distraction I could possibly find was in the windows
+of the passenger trains, and in the vile vodka which the Jews drugged
+with thorn-apple. Sometimes there would be a glimpse of a woman’s
+head at a carriage window, and one would stand like a statue without
+breathing and stare at it until the train turned into an almost
+invisible speck; or one would drink all one could of the loathsome vodka
+till one was stupefied and did not feel the passing of the long hours
+and days. Upon me, a native of the north, the steppe produced the
+effect of a deserted Tatar cemetery. In the summer the steppe with its
+solemn calm, the monotonous chur of the grasshoppers, the transparent
+moonlight from which one could not hide, reduced me to listless
+melancholy; and in the winter the irreproachable whiteness of the
+steppe, its cold distance, long nights, and howling wolves oppressed me
+like a heavy nightmare. There were several people living at the
+station: my wife and I, a deaf and scrofulous telegraph clerk, and three
+watchmen. My assistant, a young man who was in consumption, used to go
+for treatment to the town, where he stayed for months at a time, leaving
+his duties to me together with the right of pocketing his salary. I had
+no children, no cake would have tempted visitors to come and see me, and
+I could only visit other officials on the line, and that no oftener than
+once a month.
+
+I remember my wife and I saw the New Year in. We sat at table, chewed
+lazily, and heard the deaf telegraph clerk monotonously tapping on his
+apparatus in the next room. I had already drunk five glasses of
+drugged vodka, and, propping my heavy head on my fist, thought of my
+overpowering boredom from which there was no escape, while my wife sat
+beside me and did not take her eyes off me. She looked at me as no
+one can look but a woman who has nothing in this world but a handsome
+husband. She loved me madly, slavishly, and not merely my good looks,
+or my soul, but my sins, my ill-humor and boredom, and even my cruelty
+when, in drunken fury, not knowing how to vent my ill-humor, I tormented
+her with reproaches.
+
+In spite of the boredom which was consuming me, we were preparing to see
+the New Year in with exceptional festiveness, and were awaiting midnight
+with some impatience. The fact is, we had in reserve two bottles of
+champagne, the real thing, with the label of Veuve Clicquot; this
+treasure I had won the previous autumn in a bet with the station-master
+of D. when I was drinking with him at a christening. It sometimes
+happens during a lesson in mathematics, when the very air is still with
+boredom, a butterfly flutters into the class-room; the boys toss their
+heads and begin watching its flight with interest, as though they saw
+before them not a butterfly but something new and strange; in the same
+way ordinary champagne, chancing to come into our dreary station,
+roused us. We sat in silence looking alternately at the clock and at the
+bottles.
+
+When the hands pointed to five minutes to twelve I slowly began
+uncorking a bottle. I don’t know whether I was affected by the vodka,
+or whether the bottle was wet, but all I remember is that when the cork
+flew up to the ceiling with a bang, my bottle slipped out of my hands
+and fell on the floor. Not more than a glass of the wine was spilt, as I
+managed to catch the bottle and put my thumb over the foaming neck.
+
+“Well, may the New Year bring you happiness!” I said, filling two
+glasses. “Drink!”
+
+My wife took her glass and fixed her frightened eyes on me. Her face was
+pale and wore a look of horror.
+
+“Did you drop the bottle?” she asked.
+
+“Yes. But what of that?”
+
+“It’s unlucky,” she said, putting down her glass and turning paler
+still. “It’s a bad omen. It means that some misfortune will happen to us
+this year.”
+
+“What a silly thing you are,” I sighed. “You are a clever woman, and yet
+you talk as much nonsense as an old nurse. Drink.”
+
+“God grant it is nonsense, but... something is sure to happen! You’ll
+see.”
+
+She did not even sip her glass, she moved away and sank into thought.
+I uttered a few stale commonplaces about superstition, drank half a
+bottle, paced up and down, and then went out of the room.
+
+Outside there was the still frosty night in all its cold, inhospitable
+beauty. The moon and two white fluffy clouds beside it hung just over
+the station, motionless as though glued to the spot, and looked as
+though waiting for something. A faint transparent light came from them
+and touched the white earth softly, as though afraid of wounding
+her modesty, and lighted up everything--the snowdrifts, the
+embankment.... It was still.
+
+I walked along the railway embankment.
+
+“Silly woman,” I thought, looking at the sky spangled with brilliant
+stars. “Even if one admits that omens sometimes tell the truth, what
+evil can happen to us? The misfortunes we have endured already, and
+which are facing us now, are so great that it is difficult to imagine
+anything worse. What further harm can you do a fish which has been
+caught and fried and served up with sauce?”
+
+A poplar covered with hoar frost looked in the bluish darkness like a
+giant wrapt in a shroud. It looked at me sullenly and dejectedly, as
+though like me it realized its loneliness. I stood a long while looking
+at it.
+
+“My youth is thrown away for nothing, like a useless cigarette end,”
+ I went on musing. “My parents died when I was a little child; I was
+expelled from the high school, I was born of a noble family, but I have
+received neither education nor breeding, and I have no more knowledge
+than the humblest mechanic. I have no refuge, no relations, no friends,
+no work I like. I am not fitted for anything, and in the prime of my
+powers I am good for nothing but to be stuffed into this little station;
+I have known nothing but trouble and failure all my life. What can
+happen worse?”
+
+Red lights came into sight in the distance. A train was moving towards
+me. The slumbering steppe listened to the sound of it. My thoughts were
+so bitter that it seemed to me that I was thinking aloud and that the
+moan of the telegraph wire and the rumble of the train were expressing
+my thoughts.
+
+“What can happen worse? The loss of my wife?” I wondered. “Even that is
+not terrible. It’s no good hiding it from my conscience: I don’t love my
+wife. I married her when I was only a wretched boy; now I am young and
+vigorous, and she has gone off and grown older and sillier, stuffed from
+her head to her heels with conventional ideas. What charm is there in
+her maudlin love, in her hollow chest, in her lusterless eyes? I put
+up with her, but I don’t love her. What can happen? My youth is being
+wasted, as the saying is, for a pinch of snuff. Women flit before my
+eyes only in the carriage windows, like falling stars. Love I never had
+and have not. My manhood, my courage, my power of feeling are going to
+ruin.... Everything is being thrown away like dirt, and all my wealth
+here in the steppe is not worth a farthing.”
+
+The train rushed past me with a roar and indifferently cast the glow
+of its red lights upon me. I saw it stop by the green lights of the
+station, stop for a minute and rumble off again. After walking a mile
+and a half I went back. Melancholy thoughts haunted me still. Painful
+as it was to me, yet I remember I tried as it were to make my thoughts
+still gloomier and more melancholy. You know people who are vain and not
+very clever have moments when the consciousness that they are miserable
+affords them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their
+misery for their own entertainment. There was a great deal of truth
+in what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was absurd and
+conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant in my question:
+“What could happen worse?”
+
+“And what is there to happen?” I asked myself. “I think I have endured
+everything. I’ve been ill, I’ve lost money, I get reprimanded by my
+superiors every day, and I go hungry, and a mad wolf has run into the
+station yard. What more is there? I have been insulted, humiliated,...
+and I have insulted others in my time. I have not been a criminal,
+it is true, but I don’t think I am capable of crime--I am not afraid of
+being hauled up for it.”
+
+The two little clouds had moved away from the moon and stood at a little
+distance, looking as though they were whispering about something which
+the moon must not know. A light breeze was racing across the steppe,
+bringing the faint rumble of the retreating train.
+
+My wife met me at the doorway. Her eyes were laughing gaily and her
+whole face was beaming with good-humor.
+
+“There is news for you!” she whispered. “Make haste, go to your room and
+put on your new coat; we have a visitor.”
+
+“What visitor?”
+
+“Aunt Natalya Petrovna has just come by the train.”
+
+“What Natalya Petrovna?”
+
+“The wife of my uncle Semyon Fyodoritch. You don’t know her. She is a
+very nice, good woman.”
+
+Probably I frowned, for my wife looked grave and whispered rapidly:
+
+“Of course it is queer her having come, but don’t be cross, Nikolay, and
+don’t be hard on her. She is unhappy, you know; Uncle Semyon Fyodoritch
+really is ill-natured and tyrannical, it is difficult to live with him.
+She says she will only stay three days with us, only till she gets a
+letter from her brother.”
+
+My wife whispered a great deal more nonsense to me about her despotic
+uncle; about the weakness of mankind in general and of young wives in
+particular; about its being our duty to give shelter to all, even great
+sinners, and so on. Unable to make head or tail of it, I put on my new
+coat and went to make acquaintance with my “aunt.”
+
+A little woman with large black eyes was sitting at the table. My table,
+the gray walls, my roughly-made sofa, everything to the tiniest grain of
+dust seemed to have grown younger and more cheerful in the presence
+of this new, young, beautiful, and dissolute creature, who had a most
+subtle perfume about her. And that our visitor was a lady of easy virtue
+I could see from her smile, from her scent, from the peculiar way in
+which she glanced and made play with her eyelashes, from the tone in
+which she talked with my wife--a respectable woman. There was no need to
+tell me she had run away from her husband, that her husband was old and
+despotic, that she was good-natured and lively; I took it all in at
+the first glance. Indeed, it is doubtful whether there is a man in
+all Europe who cannot spot at the first glance a woman of a certain
+temperament.
+
+“I did not know I had such a big nephew!” said my aunt, holding out her
+hand to me and smiling.
+
+“And I did not know I had such a pretty aunt,” I answered.
+
+Supper began over again. The cork flew with a bang out of the second
+bottle, and my aunt swallowed half a glassful at a gulp, and when my
+wife went out of the room for a moment my aunt did not scruple to drain
+a full glass. I was drunk both with the wine and with the presence of a
+woman. Do you remember the song?
+
+     “Eyes black as pitch, eyes full of passion,
+     Eyes burning bright and beautiful,
+     How I love you,
+     How I fear you!”
+
+I don’t remember what happened next. Anyone who wants to know how love
+begins may read novels and long stories; I will put it shortly and in
+the words of the same silly song:
+
+     “It was an evil hour
+     When first I met you.”
+
+Everything went head over heels to the devil. I remember a fearful,
+frantic whirlwind which sent me flying round like a feather. It lasted
+a long while, and swept from the face of the earth my wife and my aunt
+herself and my strength. From the little station in the steppe it has
+flung me, as you see, into this dark street.
+
+Now tell me what further evil can happen to me?
+
+
+
+
+AFTER THE THEATRE
+
+NADYA ZELENIN had just come back with her mamma from the theatre where
+she had seen a performance of “Yevgeny Onyegin.” As soon as she reached
+her own room she threw off her dress, let down her hair, and in her
+petticoat and white dressing-jacket hastily sat down to the table to
+write a letter like Tatyana’s.
+
+“I love you,” she wrote, “but you do not love me, do not love me!”
+
+She wrote it and laughed.
+
+She was only sixteen and did not yet love anyone. She knew that an
+officer called Gorny and a student called Gruzdev loved her, but now
+after the opera she wanted to be doubtful of their love. To be unloved
+and unhappy--how interesting that was. There is something beautiful,
+touching, and poetical about it when one loves and the other is
+indifferent. Onyegin was interesting because he was not in love at all,
+and Tatyana was fascinating because she was so much in love; but if they
+had been equally in love with each other and had been happy, they would
+perhaps have seemed dull.
+
+“Leave off declaring that you love me,” Nadya went on writing, thinking
+of Gorny. “I cannot believe it. You are very clever, cultivated,
+serious, you have immense talent, and perhaps a brilliant future awaits
+you, while I am an uninteresting girl of no importance, and you know
+very well that I should be only a hindrance in your life. It is true
+that you were attracted by me and thought you had found your ideal in
+me, but that was a mistake, and now you are asking yourself in despair:
+‘Why did I meet that girl?’ And only your goodness of heart prevents you
+from owning it to yourself....”
+
+Nadya felt sorry for herself, she began to cry, and went on:
+
+“It is hard for me to leave my mother and my brother, or I should take a
+nun’s veil and go whither chance may lead me. And you would be left free
+and would love another. Oh, if I were dead!”
+
+She could not make out what she had written through her tears; little
+rainbows were quivering on the table, on the floor, on the ceiling, as
+though she were looking through a prism. She could not write, she sank
+back in her easy-chair and fell to thinking of Gorny.
+
+My God! how interesting, how fascinating men were! Nadya recalled the
+fine expression, ingratiating, guilty, and soft, which came into the
+officer’s face when one argued about music with him, and the effort he
+made to prevent his voice from betraying his passion. In a society where
+cold haughtiness and indifference are regarded as signs of good breeding
+and gentlemanly bearing, one must conceal one’s passions. And he did
+try to conceal them, but he did not succeed, and everyone knew very well
+that he had a passionate love of music. The endless discussions about
+music and the bold criticisms of people who knew nothing about it kept
+him always on the strain; he was frightened, timid, and silent. He
+played the piano magnificently, like a professional pianist, and if he
+had not been in the army he would certainly have been a famous musician.
+
+The tears on her eyes dried. Nadya remembered that Gorny had declared
+his love at a Symphony concert, and again downstairs by the hatstand
+where there was a tremendous draught blowing in all directions.
+
+“I am very glad that you have at last made the acquaintance of Gruzdev,
+our student friend,” she went on writing. “He is a very clever man, and
+you will be sure to like him. He came to see us yesterday and stayed
+till two o’clock. We were all delighted with him, and I regretted that
+you had not come. He said a great deal that was remarkable.”
+
+Nadya laid her arms on the table and leaned her head on them, and her
+hair covered the letter. She recalled that the student, too, loved her,
+and that he had as much right to a letter from her as Gorny. Wouldn’t it
+be better after all to write to Gruzdev? There was a stir of joy in her
+bosom for no reason whatever; at first the joy was small, and rolled
+in her bosom like an india-rubber ball; then it became more massive,
+bigger, and rushed like a wave. Nadya forgot Gorny and Gruzdev; her
+thoughts were in a tangle and her joy grew and grew; from her bosom it
+passed into her arms and legs, and it seemed as though a light, cool
+breeze were breathing on her head and ruffling her hair. Her shoulders
+quivered with subdued laughter, the table and the lamp chimney shook,
+too, and tears from her eyes splashed on the letter. She could not
+stop laughing, and to prove to herself that she was not laughing about
+nothing she made haste to think of something funny.
+
+“What a funny poodle,” she said, feeling as though she would choke with
+laughter. “What a funny poodle!”
+
+She thought how, after tea the evening before, Gruzdev had played with
+Maxim the poodle, and afterwards had told them about a very intelligent
+poodle who had run after a crow in the yard, and the crow had looked
+round at him and said: “Oh, you scamp!”
+
+The poodle, not knowing he had to do with a learned crow, was fearfully
+confused and retreated in perplexity, then began barking....
+
+“No, I had better love Gruzdev,” Nadya decided, and she tore up the
+letter to Gorny.
+
+She fell to thinking of the student, of his love, of her love; but the
+thoughts in her head insisted on flowing in all directions, and she
+thought about everything--about her mother, about the street, about the
+pencil, about the piano.... She thought of them joyfully, and felt
+that everything was good, splendid, and her joy told her that this was
+not all, that in a little while it would be better still. Soon it would
+be spring, summer, going with her mother to Gorbiki. Gorny would come
+for his furlough, would walk about the garden with her and make love
+to her. Gruzdev would come too. He would play croquet and skittles with
+her, and would tell her wonderful things. She had a passionate longing
+for the garden, the darkness, the pure sky, the stars. Again her
+shoulders shook with laughter, and it seemed to her that there was a
+scent of wormwood in the room and that a twig was tapping at the window.
+
+She went to her bed, sat down, and not knowing what to do with the
+immense joy which filled her with yearning, she looked at the holy image
+hanging at the back of her bed, and said:
+
+“Oh, Lord God! Oh, Lord God!”
+
+
+
+
+A LADY’S STORY
+
+NINE years ago Pyotr Sergeyitch, the deputy prosecutor, and I were
+riding towards evening in hay-making time to fetch the letters from the
+station.
+
+The weather was magnificent, but on our way back we heard a peal of
+thunder, and saw an angry black storm-cloud which was coming straight
+towards us. The storm-cloud was approaching us and we were approaching
+it.
+
+Against the background of it our house and church looked white and the
+tall poplars shone like silver. There was a scent of rain and mown hay.
+My companion was in high spirits. He kept laughing and talking all sorts
+of nonsense. He said it would be nice if we could suddenly come upon a
+medieval castle with turreted towers, with moss on it and owls, in
+which we could take shelter from the rain and in the end be killed by a
+thunderbolt....
+
+Then the first wave raced through the rye and a field of oats, there
+was a gust of wind, and the dust flew round and round in the air. Pyotr
+Sergeyitch laughed and spurred on his horse.
+
+“It’s fine!” he cried, “it’s splendid!”
+
+Infected by his gaiety, I too began laughing at the thought that in
+a minute I should be drenched to the skin and might be struck by
+lightning.
+
+Riding swiftly in a hurricane when one is breathless with the wind, and
+feels like a bird, thrills one and puts one’s heart in a flutter. By the
+time we rode into our courtyard the wind had gone down, and big drops of
+rain were pattering on the grass and on the roofs. There was not a soul
+near the stable.
+
+Pyotr Sergeyitch himself took the bridles off, and led the horses to
+their stalls. I stood in the doorway waiting for him to finish, and
+watching the slanting streaks of rain; the sweetish, exciting scent of
+hay was even stronger here than in the fields; the storm-clouds and the
+rain made it almost twilight.
+
+“What a crash!” said Pyotr Sergeyitch, coming up to me after a very loud
+rolling peal of thunder when it seemed as though the sky were split in
+two. “What do you say to that?”
+
+He stood beside me in the doorway and, still breathless from his rapid
+ride, looked at me. I could see that he was admiring me.
+
+“Natalya Vladimirovna,” he said, “I would give anything only to stay
+here a little longer and look at you. You are lovely to-day.”
+
+His eyes looked at me with delight and supplication, his face was pale.
+On his beard and mustache were glittering raindrops, and they, too,
+seemed to be looking at me with love.
+
+“I love you,” he said. “I love you, and I am happy at seeing you. I know
+you cannot be my wife, but I want nothing, I ask nothing; only know that
+I love you. Be silent, do not answer me, take no notice of it, but only
+know that you are dear to me and let me look at you.”
+
+His rapture affected me too; I looked at his enthusiastic face, listened
+to his voice which mingled with the patter of the rain, and stood as
+though spellbound, unable to stir.
+
+I longed to go on endlessly looking at his shining eyes and listening.
+
+“You say nothing, and that is splendid,” said Pyotr Sergeyitch. “Go on
+being silent.”
+
+I felt happy. I laughed with delight and ran through the drenching rain
+to the house; he laughed too, and, leaping as he went, ran after me.
+
+Both drenched, panting, noisily clattering up the stairs like children,
+we dashed into the room. My father and brother, who were not used to
+seeing me laughing and light-hearted, looked at me in surprise and began
+laughing too.
+
+The storm-clouds had passed over and the thunder had ceased, but the
+raindrops still glittered on Pyotr Sergeyitch’s beard. The whole evening
+till supper-time he was singing, whistling, playing noisily with the dog
+and racing about the room after it, so that he nearly upset the servant
+with the samovar. And at supper he ate a great deal, talked nonsense,
+and maintained that when one eats fresh cucumbers in winter there is the
+fragrance of spring in one’s mouth.
+
+When I went to bed I lighted a candle and threw my window wide open, and
+an undefined feeling took possession of my soul. I remembered that I was
+free and healthy, that I had rank and wealth, that I was beloved; above
+all, that I had rank and wealth, rank and wealth, my God! how nice that
+was!... Then, huddling up in bed at a touch of cold which reached me
+from the garden with the dew, I tried to discover whether I loved Pyotr
+Sergeyitch or not,... and fell asleep unable to reach any conclusion.
+
+And when in the morning I saw quivering patches of sunlight and the
+shadows of the lime trees on my bed, what had happened yesterday rose
+vividly in my memory. Life seemed to me rich, varied, full of charm.
+Humming, I dressed quickly and went out into the garden....
+
+And what happened afterwards? Why--nothing. In the winter when we lived
+in town Pyotr Sergeyitch came to see us from time to time. Country
+acquaintances are charming only in the country and in summer; in the
+town and in winter they lose their charm. When you pour out tea for them
+in the town it seems as though they are wearing other people’s coats,
+and as though they stirred their tea too long. In the town, too, Pyotr
+Sergeyitch spoke sometimes of love, but the effect was not at all the
+same as in the country. In the town we were more vividly conscious of
+the wall that stood between us. I had rank and wealth, while he was
+poor, and he was not even a nobleman, but only the son of a deacon and
+a deputy public prosecutor; we both of us--I through my youth and he for
+some unknown reason--thought of that wall as very high and thick, and
+when he was with us in the town he would criticize aristocratic society
+with a forced smile, and maintain a sullen silence when there was
+anyone else in the drawing-room. There is no wall that cannot be broken
+through, but the heroes of the modern romance, so far as I know them,
+are too timid, spiritless, lazy, and oversensitive, and are too ready to
+resign themselves to the thought that they are doomed to failure, that
+personal life has disappointed them; instead of struggling they merely
+criticize, calling the world vulgar and forgetting that their criticism
+passes little by little into vulgarity.
+
+I was loved, happiness was not far away, and seemed to be almost
+touching me; I went on living in careless ease without trying to
+understand myself, not knowing what I expected or what I wanted from
+life, and time went on and on.... People passed by me with their
+love, bright days and warm nights flashed by, the nightingales sang, the
+hay smelt fragrant, and all this, sweet and overwhelming in remembrance,
+passed with me as with everyone rapidly, leaving no trace, was not
+prized, and vanished like mist.... Where is it all?
+
+My father is dead, I have grown older; everything that delighted me,
+caressed me, gave me hope--the patter of the rain, the rolling of
+the thunder, thoughts of happiness, talk of love--all that has become
+nothing but a memory, and I see before me a flat desert distance; on
+the plain not one living soul, and out there on the horizon it is dark
+and terrible....
+
+A ring at the bell.... It is Pyotr Sergeyitch. When in the winter I
+see the trees and remember how green they were for me in the summer I
+whisper:
+
+“Oh, my darlings!”
+
+And when I see people with whom I spent my spring-time, I feel sorrowful
+and warm and whisper the same thing.
+
+He has long ago by my father’s good offices been transferred to town.
+He looks a little older, a little fallen away. He has long given up
+declaring his love, has left off talking nonsense, dislikes his official
+work, is ill in some way and disillusioned; he has given up trying to
+get anything out of life, and takes no interest in living. Now he has
+sat down by the hearth and looks in silence at the fire....
+
+Not knowing what to say I ask him:
+
+“Well, what have you to tell me?”
+
+“Nothing,” he answers.
+
+And silence again. The red glow of the fire plays about his melancholy
+face.
+
+I thought of the past, and all at once my shoulders began quivering, my
+head dropped, and I began weeping bitterly. I felt unbearably sorry for
+myself and for this man, and passionately longed for what had passed
+away and what life refused us now. And now I did not think about rank
+and wealth.
+
+I broke into loud sobs, pressing my temples, and muttered:
+
+“My God! my God! my life is wasted!”
+
+And he sat and was silent, and did not say to me: “Don’t weep.” He
+understood that I must weep, and that the time for this had come.
+
+I saw from his eyes that he was sorry for me; and I was sorry for him,
+too, and vexed with this timid, unsuccessful man who could not make a
+life for me, nor for himself.
+
+When I saw him to the door, he was, I fancied, purposely a long while
+putting on his coat. Twice he kissed my hand without a word, and looked
+a long while into my tear-stained face. I believe at that moment he
+recalled the storm, the streaks of rain, our laughter, my face that day;
+he longed to say something to me, and he would have been glad to say it;
+but he said nothing, he merely shook his head and pressed my hand. God
+help him!
+
+After seeing him out, I went back to my study and again sat on the
+carpet before the fireplace; the red embers were covered with ash and
+began to grow dim. The frost tapped still more angrily at the windows,
+and the wind droned in the chimney.
+
+The maid came in and, thinking I was asleep, called my name.
+
+
+
+
+IN EXILE
+
+OLD SEMYON, nicknamed Canny, and a young Tatar, whom no one knew by
+name, were sitting on the river-bank by the camp-fire; the other
+three ferrymen were in the hut. Semyon, an old man of sixty, lean and
+toothless, but broad shouldered and still healthy-looking, was drunk;
+he would have gone in to sleep long before, but he had a bottle in his
+pocket and he was afraid that the fellows in the hut would ask him for
+vodka. The Tatar was ill and weary, and wrapping himself up in his rags
+was describing how nice it was in the Simbirsk province, and what a
+beautiful and clever wife he had left behind at home. He was not more
+than twenty five, and now by the light of the camp-fire, with his pale
+and sick, mournful face, he looked like a boy.
+
+“To be sure, it is not paradise here,” said Canny. “You can see for
+yourself, the water, the bare banks, clay, and nothing else....
+Easter has long passed and yet there is ice on the river, and this
+morning there was snow...”
+
+“It’s bad! it’s bad!” said the Tatar, and looked round him in terror.
+
+The dark, cold river was flowing ten paces away; it grumbled, lapped
+against the hollow clay banks and raced on swiftly towards the far-away
+sea. Close to the bank there was the dark blur of a big barge, which the
+ferrymen called a “karbos.” Far away on the further bank, lights, dying
+down and flickering up again, zigzagged like little snakes; they were
+burning last year’s grass. And beyond the little snakes there was
+darkness again. There little icicles could be heard knocking against the
+barge. It was damp and cold....
+
+The Tatar glanced at the sky. There were as many stars as at home, and
+the same blackness all round, but something was lacking. At home in the
+Simbirsk province the stars were quite different, and so was the sky.
+
+“It’s bad! it’s bad!” he repeated.
+
+“You will get used to it,” said Semyon, and he laughed. “Now you are
+young and foolish, the milk is hardly dry on your lips, and it seems to
+you in your foolishness that you are more wretched than anyone; but the
+time will come when you will say to yourself: ‘I wish no one a better
+life than mine.’ You look at me. Within a week the floods will be over
+and we shall set up the ferry; you will all go wandering off about
+Siberia while I shall stay and shall begin going from bank to bank. I’ve
+been going like that for twenty-two years, day and night. The pike and
+the salmon are under the water while I am on the water. And thank God
+for it, I want nothing; God give everyone such a life.”
+
+The Tatar threw some dry twigs on the camp-fire, lay down closer to the
+blaze, and said:
+
+“My father is a sick man. When he dies my mother and wife will come
+here. They have promised.”
+
+“And what do you want your wife and mother for?” asked Canny. “That’s
+mere foolishness, my lad. It’s the devil confounding you, damn his soul!
+Don’t you listen to him, the cursed one. Don’t let him have his way. He
+is at you about the women, but you spite him; say, ‘I don’t want them!’
+He is on at you about freedom, but you stand up to him and say: ‘I
+don’t want it!’ I want nothing, neither father nor mother, nor wife, nor
+freedom, nor post, nor paddock; I want nothing, damn their souls!”
+
+Semyon took a pull at the bottle and went on:
+
+“I am not a simple peasant, not of the working class, but the son of
+a deacon, and when I was free I lived at Kursk; I used to wear a
+frockcoat, and now I have brought myself to such a pass that I can sleep
+naked on the ground and eat grass. And I wish no one a better life. I
+want nothing and I am afraid of nobody, and the way I look at it is that
+there is nobody richer and freer than I am. When they sent me here from
+Russia from the first day I stuck it out; I want nothing! The devil was
+at me about my wife and about my home and about freedom, but I told him:
+‘I want nothing.’ I stuck to it, and here you see I live well, and I
+don’t complain, and if anyone gives way to the devil and listens to him,
+if but once, he is lost, there is no salvation for him: he is sunk in
+the bog to the crown of his head and will never get out.
+
+“It is not only a foolish peasant like you, but even gentlemen,
+well-educated people, are lost. Fifteen years ago they sent a gentleman
+here from Russia. He hadn’t shared something with his brothers and had
+forged something in a will. They did say he was a prince or a baron, but
+maybe he was simply an official--who knows? Well, the gentleman
+arrived here, and first thing he bought himself a house and land in
+Muhortinskoe. ‘I want to live by my own work,’ says he, ‘in the sweat
+of my brow, for I am not a gentleman now,’ says he, ‘but a settler.’
+‘Well,’ says I, ‘God help you, that’s the right thing.’ He was a young
+man then, busy and careful; he used to mow himself and catch fish and
+ride sixty miles on horseback. Only this is what happened: from the very
+first year he took to riding to Gyrino for the post; he used to stand on
+my ferry and sigh: ‘Ech, Semyon, how long it is since they sent me any
+money from home!’ ‘You don’t want money, Vassily Sergeyitch,’ says I.
+‘What use is it to you? You cast away the past, and forget it as though
+it had never been at all, as though it had been a dream, and begin to
+live anew. Don’t listen to the devil,’ says I; ‘he will bring you to no
+good, he’ll draw you into a snare. Now you want money,’ says I, ‘but in
+a very little while you’ll be wanting something else, and then more and
+more. If you want to be happy,’ says I, the chief thing is not to
+want anything. Yes.... If,’ says I, ‘if Fate has wronged you and me
+cruelly it’s no good asking for her favor and bowing down to her, but
+you despise her and laugh at her, or else she will laugh at you.’ That’s
+what I said to him....
+
+“Two years later I ferried him across to this side, and he was rubbing
+his hands and laughing. ‘I am going to Gyrino to meet my wife,’ says
+he. ‘She was sorry for me,’ says he; ‘she has come. She is good and
+kind.’ And he was breathless with joy. So a day later he came with his
+wife. A beautiful young lady in a hat; in her arms was a baby girl.
+And lots of luggage of all sorts. And my Vassily Sergeyitch was fussing
+round her; he couldn’t take his eyes off her and couldn’t say enough in
+praise of her. ‘Yes, brother Semyon, even in Siberia people can live!’
+‘Oh, all right,’ thinks I, ‘it will be a different tale presently.’
+And from that time forward he went almost every week to inquire whether
+money had not come from Russia. He wanted a lot of money. ‘She is losing
+her youth and beauty here in Siberia for my sake,’ says he, ‘and sharing
+my bitter lot with me, and so I ought,’ says he, ‘to provide her with
+every comfort....’
+
+“To make it livelier for the lady he made acquaintance with the
+officials and all sorts of riff-raff. And of course he had to give food
+and drink to all that crew, and there had to be a piano and a
+shaggy lapdog on the sofa--plague take it!... Luxury, in fact,
+self-indulgence. The lady did not stay with him long. How could she? The
+clay, the water, the cold, no vegetables for you, no fruit. All around
+you ignorant and drunken people and no sort of manners, and she was
+a spoilt lady from Petersburg or Moscow.... To be sure she moped.
+Besides, her husband, say what you like, was not a gentleman now, but a
+settler--not the same rank.
+
+“Three years later, I remember, on the eve of the Assumption, there was
+shouting from the further bank. I went over with the ferry, and what do
+I see but the lady, all wrapped up, and with her a young gentleman, an
+official. A sledge with three horses.... I ferried them across here,
+they got in and away like the wind. They were soon lost to sight. And
+towards morning Vassily Sergeyitch galloped down to the ferry. ‘Didn’t
+my wife come this way with a gentleman in spectacles, Semyon?’ ‘She
+did,’ said I; ‘you may look for the wind in the fields!’ He galloped in
+pursuit of them. For five days and nights he was riding after them. When
+I ferried him over to the other side afterwards, he flung himself on
+the ferry and beat his head on the boards of the ferry and howled. ‘So
+that’s how it is,’ says I. I laughed, and reminded him ‘people can live
+even in Siberia!’ And he beat his head harder than ever....
+
+“Then he began longing for freedom. His wife had slipped off to Russia,
+and of course he was drawn there to see her and to get her away from her
+lover. And he took, my lad, to galloping almost every day, either to
+the post or the town to see the commanding officer; he kept sending in
+petitions for them to have mercy on him and let him go back home; and
+he used to say that he had spent some two hundred roubles on telegrams
+alone. He sold his land and mortgaged his house to the Jews. He grew
+gray and bent, and yellow in the face, as though he was in consumption.
+If he talked to you he would go, khee--khee--khee,... and there were
+tears in his eyes. He kept rushing about like this with petitions for
+eight years, but now he has grown brighter and more cheerful again: he
+has found another whim to give way to. You see, his daughter has grown
+up. He looks at her, and she is the apple of his eye. And to tell the
+truth she is all right, good-looking, with black eyebrows and a lively
+disposition. Every Sunday he used to ride with her to church in Gyrino.
+They used to stand on the ferry, side by side, she would laugh and he
+could not take his eyes off her. ‘Yes, Semyon,’ says he, ‘people can
+live even in Siberia. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Look,’ says
+he, ‘what a daughter I have got! I warrant you wouldn’t find another
+like her for a thousand versts round.’ ‘Your daughter is all right,’
+says I, ‘that’s true, certainly.’ But to myself I thought: ‘Wait a bit,
+the wench is young, her blood is dancing, she wants to live, and there
+is no life here.’ And she did begin to pine, my lad.... She faded and
+faded, and now she can hardly crawl about. Consumption.
+
+“So you see what Siberian happiness is, damn its soul! You see how
+people can live in Siberia.... He has taken to going from one doctor
+to another and taking them home with him. As soon as he hears that two
+or three hundred miles away there is a doctor or a sorcerer, he will
+drive to fetch him. A terrible lot of money he spent on doctors, and to
+my thinking he had better have spent the money on drink.... She’ll
+die just the same. She is certain to die, and then it will be all over
+with him. He’ll hang himself from grief or run away to Russia--that’s a
+sure thing. He’ll run away and they’ll catch him, then he will be tried,
+sent to prison, he will have a taste of the lash....”
+
+“Good! good!” said the Tatar, shivering with cold.
+
+“What is good?” asked Canny.
+
+“His wife, his daughter.... What of prison and what of
+sorrow!--anyway, he did see his wife and his daughter.... You say,
+want nothing. But ‘nothing’ is bad! His wife lived with him three
+years--that was a gift from God. ‘Nothing’ is bad, but three years is
+good. How not understand?”
+
+Shivering and hesitating, with effort picking out the Russian words of
+which he knew but few, the Tatar said that God forbid one should fall
+sick and die in a strange land, and be buried in the cold and dark
+earth; that if his wife came to him for one day, even for one hour, that
+for such happiness he would be ready to bear any suffering and to thank
+God. Better one day of happiness than nothing.
+
+Then he described again what a beautiful and clever wife he had left
+at home. Then, clutching his head in both hands, he began crying and
+assuring Semyon that he was not guilty, and was suffering for nothing.
+His two brothers and an uncle had carried off a peasant’s horses, and
+had beaten the old man till he was half dead, and the commune had not
+judged fairly, but had contrived a sentence by which all the three
+brothers were sent to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, was left at
+home.
+
+“You will get used to it!” said Semyon.
+
+The Tatar was silent, and stared with tear-stained eyes at the fire;
+his face expressed bewilderment and fear, as though he still did
+not understand why he was here in the darkness and the wet, beside
+strangers, and not in the Simbirsk province.
+
+Canny lay near the fire, chuckled at something, and began humming a song
+in an undertone.
+
+“What joy has she with her father?” he said a little later. “He loves
+her and he rejoices in her, that’s true; but, mate, you must mind your
+ps and qs with him, he is a strict old man, a harsh old man. And young
+wenches don’t want strictness. They want petting and ha-ha-ha! and
+ho-ho-ho! and scent and pomade. Yes.... Ech! life, life,” sighed
+Semyon, and he got up heavily. “The vodka is all gone, so it is time to
+sleep. Eh? I am going, my lad....”
+
+Left alone, the Tatar put on more twigs, lay down and stared at the
+fire; he began thinking of his own village and of his wife. If his wife
+could only come for a month, for a day; and then if she liked she might
+go back again. Better a month or even a day than nothing. But if his
+wife kept her promise and came, what would he have to feed her on? Where
+could she live here?
+
+“If there were not something to eat, how could she live?” the Tatar
+asked aloud.
+
+He was paid only ten kopecks for working all day and all night at the
+oar; it is true that travelers gave him tips for tea and for vodkas but
+the men shared all they received among themselves, and gave nothing
+to the Tatar, but only laughed at him. And from poverty he was hungry,
+cold, and frightened.... Now, when his whole body was aching and
+shivering, he ought to go into the hut and lie down to sleep; but he had
+nothing to cover him there, and it was colder than on the river-bank;
+here he had nothing to cover him either, but at least he could make up
+the fire....
+
+In another week, when the floods were quite over and they set the ferry
+going, none of the ferrymen but Semyon would be wanted, and the Tatar
+would begin going from village to village begging for alms and for work.
+His wife was only seventeen; she was beautiful, spoilt, and shy; could
+she possibly go from village to village begging alms with her face
+unveiled? No, it was terrible even to think of that....
+
+It was already getting light; the barge, the bushes of willow on the
+water, and the waves could be clearly discerned, and if one looked round
+there was the steep clay slope; at the bottom of it the hut thatched
+with dingy brown straw, and the huts of the village lay clustered higher
+up. The cocks were already crowing in the village.
+
+The rusty red clay slope, the barge, the river, the strange, unkind
+people, hunger, cold, illness, perhaps all that was not real. Most
+likely it was all a dream, thought the Tatar. He felt that he was
+asleep and heard his own snoring.... Of course he was at home in the
+Simbirsk province, and he had only to call his wife by name for her to
+answer; and in the next room was his mother.... What terrible dreams
+there are, though! What are they for? The Tatar smiled and opened his
+eyes. What river was this, the Volga?
+
+Snow was falling.
+
+“Boat!” was shouted on the further side. “Boat!”
+
+The Tatar woke up, and went to wake his mates and row over to the other
+side. The ferrymen came on to the river-bank, putting on their torn
+sheepskins as they walked, swearing with voices husky from sleepiness
+and shivering from the cold. On waking from their sleep, the river, from
+which came a breath of piercing cold, seemed to strike them as revolting
+and horrible. They jumped into the barge without hurrying themselves....
+The Tatar and the three ferrymen took the long, broad-bladed oars,
+which in the darkness looked like the claws of crabs; Semyon leaned his
+stomach against the tiller. The shout on the other side still continued,
+and two shots were fired from a revolver, probably with the idea that
+the ferrymen were asleep or had gone to the pot-house in the village.
+
+“All right, you have plenty of time,” said Semyon in the tone of a man
+convinced that there was no necessity in this world to hurry--that it
+would lead to nothing, anyway.
+
+The heavy, clumsy barge moved away from the bank and floated between the
+willow-bushes, and only the willows slowly moving back showed that the
+barge was not standing still but moving. The ferrymen swung the
+oars evenly in time; Semyon lay with his stomach on the tiller and,
+describing a semicircle in the air, flew from one side to the other.
+In the darkness it looked as though the men were sitting on some
+antediluvian animal with long paws, and were moving on it through
+a cold, desolate land, the land of which one sometimes dreams in
+nightmares.
+
+They passed beyond the willows and floated out into the open. The creak
+and regular splash of the oars was heard on the further shore, and a
+shout came: “Make haste! make haste!”
+
+Another ten minutes passed, and the barge banged heavily against the
+landing-stage.
+
+“And it keeps sprinkling and sprinkling,” muttered Semyon, wiping the
+snow from his face; “and where it all comes from God only knows.”
+
+On the bank stood a thin man of medium height in a jacket lined with fox
+fur and in a white lambskin cap. He was standing at a little distance
+from his horses and not moving; he had a gloomy, concentrated
+expression, as though he were trying to remember something and angry
+with his untrustworthy memory. When Semyon went up to him and took off
+his cap, smiling, he said:
+
+“I am hastening to Anastasyevka. My daughter’s worse again, and they say
+that there is a new doctor at Anastasyevka.”
+
+They dragged the carriage on to the barge and floated back. The man whom
+Semyon addressed as Vassily Sergeyitch stood all the time motionless,
+tightly compressing his thick lips and staring off into space; when his
+coachman asked permission to smoke in his presence he made no answer, as
+though he had not heard. Semyon, lying with his stomach on the tiller,
+looked mockingly at him and said:
+
+“Even in Siberia people can live--can li-ive!”
+
+There was a triumphant expression on Canny’s face, as though he had
+proved something and was delighted that things had happened as he
+had foretold. The unhappy helplessness of the man in the foxskin coat
+evidently afforded him great pleasure.
+
+“It’s muddy driving now, Vassily Sergeyitch,” he said when the horses
+were harnessed again on the bank. “You should have put off going for
+another fortnight, when it will be drier. Or else not have gone at all.
+... If any good would come of your going--but as you know yourself,
+people have been driving about for years and years, day and night, and
+it’s always been no use. That’s the truth.”
+
+Vassily Sergeyitch tipped him without a word, got into his carriage and
+drove off.
+
+“There, he has galloped off for a doctor!” said Semyon, shrinking from
+the cold. “But looking for a good doctor is like chasing the wind in the
+fields or catching the devil by the tail, plague take your soul! What a
+queer chap, Lord forgive me a sinner!”
+
+The Tatar went up to Canny, and, looking at him with hatred and
+repulsion, shivering, and mixing Tatar words with his broken Russian,
+said: “He is good... good; but you are bad! You are bad! The
+gentleman is a good soul, excellent, and you are a beast, bad! The
+gentleman is alive, but you are a dead carcass.... God created man to
+be alive, and to have joy and grief and sorrow; but you want nothing,
+so you are not alive, you are stone, clay! A stone wants nothing and you
+want nothing. You are a stone, and God does not love you, but He loves
+the gentleman!”
+
+Everyone laughed; the Tatar frowned contemptuously, and with a wave
+of his hand wrapped himself in his rags and went to the campfire. The
+ferrymen and Semyon sauntered to the hut.
+
+“It’s cold,” said one ferryman huskily as he stretched himself on the
+straw with which the damp clay floor was covered.
+
+“Yes, it’s not warm,” another assented. “It’s a dog’s life....”
+
+They all lay down. The door was thrown open by the wind and the snow
+drifted into the hut; nobody felt inclined to get up and shut the door:
+they were cold, and it was too much trouble.
+
+“I am all right,” said Semyon as he began to doze. “I wouldn’t wish
+anyone a better life.”
+
+“You are a tough one, we all know. Even the devils won’t take you!”
+
+Sounds like a dog’s howling came from outside.
+
+“What’s that? Who’s there?”
+
+“It’s the Tatar crying.”
+
+“I say.... He’s a queer one!”
+
+“He’ll get u-used to it!” said Semyon, and at once fell asleep.
+
+The others were soon asleep too. The door remained unclosed.
+
+
+
+
+THE CATTLE-DEALERS
+
+THE long goods train has been standing for hours in the little station.
+The engine is as silent as though its fire had gone out; there is not a
+soul near the train or in the station yard.
+
+A pale streak of light comes from one of the vans and glides over the
+rails of a siding. In that van two men are sitting on an outspread cape:
+one is an old man with a big gray beard, wearing a sheepskin coat and a
+high lambskin hat, somewhat like a busby; the other a beardless youth
+in a threadbare cloth reefer jacket and muddy high boots. They are the
+owners of the goods. The old man sits, his legs stretched out before
+him, musing in silence; the young man half reclines and softly strums
+on a cheap accordion. A lantern with a tallow candle in it is hanging on
+the wall near them.
+
+The van is quite full. If one glances in through the dim light of
+the lantern, for the first moment the eyes receive an impression of
+something shapeless, monstrous, and unmistakably alive, something very
+much like gigantic crabs which move their claws and feelers, crowd
+together, and noiselessly climb up the walls to the ceiling; but if
+one looks more closely, horns and their shadows, long lean backs, dirty
+hides, tails, eyes begin to stand out in the dusk. They are cattle and
+their shadows. There are eight of them in the van. Some turn round and
+stare at the men and swing their tails. Others try to stand or lie down
+more comfortably. They are crowded. If one lies down the others must
+stand and huddle closer. No manger, no halter, no litter, not a wisp of
+hay....*
+
+At last the old man pulls out of his pocket a silver watch and looks at
+the time: a quarter past two.
+
+“We have been here nearly two hours,” he says, yawning. “Better go and
+stir them up, or we may be here till morning. They have gone to sleep,
+or goodness knows what they are up to.”
+
+The old man gets up and, followed by his long shadow, cautiously gets
+down from the van into the darkness. He makes his way along beside the
+train to the engine, and after passing some two dozen vans sees a red
+open furnace; a human figure sits motionless facing it; its peaked cap,
+nose, and knees are lighted up by the crimson glow, all the rest is
+black and can scarcely be distinguished in the darkness.
+
+“Are we going to stay here much longer?” asks the old man.
+
+No answer. The motionless figure is evidently asleep. The old man clears
+his throat impatiently and, shrinking from the penetrating damp, walks
+round the engine, and as he does so the brilliant light of the two
+engine lamps dazzles his eyes for an instant and makes the night even
+blacker to him; he goes to the station.
+
+The platform and steps of the station are wet. Here and there are white
+patches of freshly fallen melting snow. In the station itself it is
+light and as hot as a steam-bath. There is a smell of paraffin. Except
+for the weighing-machine and a yellow seat on which a man wearing a
+guard’s uniform is asleep, there is no furniture in the place at all.
+On the left are two wide-open doors. Through one of them the telegraphic
+apparatus and a lamp with a green shade on it can be seen; through the
+other, a small room, half of it taken up by a dark cupboard. In
+this room the head guard and the engine-driver are sitting on the
+window-sill. They are both feeling a cap with their fingers and
+disputing.
+
+“That’s not real beaver, it’s imitation,” says the engine-driver. “Real
+beaver is not like that. Five roubles would be a high price for the
+whole cap, if you care to know!”
+
+“You know a great deal about it,...” the head guard says, offended.
+“Five roubles, indeed! Here, we will ask the merchant. Mr. Malahin,” he
+says, addressing the old man, “what do you say: is this imitation beaver
+or real?”
+
+Old Malahin takes the cap into his hand, and with the air of a
+connoisseur pinches the fur, blows on it, sniffs at it, and a
+contemptuous smile lights up his angry face.
+
+“It must be imitation!” he says gleefully. “Imitation it is.”
+
+A dispute follows. The guard maintains that the cap is real beaver, and
+the engine-driver and Malahin try to persuade him that it is not. In the
+middle of the argument the old man suddenly remembers the object of his
+coming.
+
+“Beaver and cap is all very well, but the train’s standing still,
+gentlemen!” he says. “Who is it we are waiting for? Let us start!”
+
+“Let us,” the guard agrees. “We will smoke another cigarette and go on.
+But there is no need to be in a hurry.... We shall be delayed at the
+next station anyway!”
+
+“Why should we?”
+
+“Oh, well.... We are too much behind time.... If you are late at
+one station you can’t help being delayed at the other stations to let
+the trains going the opposite way pass. Whether we set off now or in
+the morning we shan’t be number fourteen. We shall have to be number
+twenty-three.”
+
+“And how do you make that out?”
+
+“Well, there it is.”
+
+Malahin looks at the guard, reflects, and mutters mechanically as though
+to himself:
+
+“God be my judge, I have reckoned it and even jotted it down in a
+notebook; we have wasted thirty-four hours standing still on the
+journey. If you go on like this, either the cattle will die, or they
+won’t pay me two roubles for the meat when I do get there. It’s not
+traveling, but ruination.”
+
+The guard raises his eyebrows and sighs with an air that seems to say:
+“All that is unhappily true!” The engine-driver sits silent, dreamily
+looking at the cap. From their faces one can see that they have a secret
+thought in common, which they do not utter, not because they want to
+conceal it, but because such thoughts are much better expressed by signs
+than by words. And the old man understands. He feels in his pocket,
+takes out a ten-rouble note, and without preliminary words, without any
+change in the tone of his voice or the expression of his face, but with
+the confidence and directness with which probably only Russians give and
+take bribes, he gives the guard the note. The latter takes it, folds it
+in four, and without undue haste puts it in his pocket. After that all
+three go out of the room, and waking the sleeping guard on the way, go
+on to the platform.
+
+“What weather!” grumbles the head guard, shrugging his shoulders. “You
+can’t see your hand before your face.”
+
+“Yes, it’s vile weather.”
+
+From the window they can see the flaxen head of the telegraph clerk
+appear beside the green lamp and the telegraphic apparatus; soon after
+another head, bearded and wearing a red cap, appears beside it--no doubt
+that of the station-master. The station-master bends down to the table,
+reads something on a blue form, rapidly passing his cigarette along the
+lines.... Malahin goes to his van.
+
+The young man, his companion, is still half reclining and hardly audibly
+strumming on the accordion. He is little more than a boy, with no
+trace of a mustache; his full white face with its broad cheek-bones is
+childishly dreamy; his eyes have a melancholy and tranquil look unlike
+that of a grown-up person, but he is broad, strong, heavy and rough like
+the old man; he does not stir nor shift his position, as though he is
+not equal to moving his big body. It seems as though any movement he
+made would tear his clothes and be so noisy as to frighten both him and
+the cattle. From under his big fat fingers that clumsily pick out the
+stops and keys of the accordion comes a steady flow of thin, tinkling
+sounds which blend into a simple, monotonous little tune; he listens to
+it, and is evidently much pleased with his performance.
+
+A bell rings, but with such a muffled note that it seems to come from
+far away. A hurried second bell soon follows, then a third and the
+guard’s whistle. A minute passes in profound silence; the van does not
+move, it stands still, but vague sounds begin to come from beneath it,
+like the crunch of snow under sledge-runners; the van begins to shake
+and the sounds cease. Silence reigns again. But now comes the clank of
+buffers, the violent shock makes the van start and, as it were, give a
+lurch forward, and all the cattle fall against one another.
+
+“May you be served the same in the world to come,” grumbles the old man,
+setting straight his cap, which had slipped on the back of his head from
+the jolt. “He’ll maim all my cattle like this!”
+
+Yasha gets up without a word and, taking one of the fallen beasts by the
+horns, helps it to get on to its legs.... The jolt is followed by a
+stillness again. The sounds of crunching snow come from under the van
+again, and it seems as though the train had moved back a little.
+
+“There will be another jolt in a minute,” says the old man. And the
+convulsive quiver does, in fact, run along the train, there is a
+crashing sound and the bullocks fall on one another again.
+
+“It’s a job!” says Yasha, listening. “The train must be heavy. It seems
+it won’t move.”
+
+“It was not heavy before, but now it has suddenly got heavy. No, my
+lad, the guard has not gone shares with him, I expect. Go and take him
+something, or he will be jolting us till morning.”
+
+Yasha takes a three-rouble note from the old man and jumps out of the
+van. The dull thud of his heavy footsteps resounds outside the van and
+gradually dies away. Stillness.... In the next van a bullock utters a
+prolonged subdued “moo,” as though it were singing.
+
+Yasha comes back. A cold damp wind darts into the van.
+
+“Shut the door, Yasha, and we will go to bed,” says the old man. “Why
+burn a candle for nothing?”
+
+Yasha moves the heavy door; there is a sound of a whistle, the engine
+and the train set off.
+
+
+“It’s cold,” mutters the old man, stretching himself on the cape and
+laying his head on a bundle. “It is very different at home! It’s warm
+and clean and soft, and there is room to say your prayers, but here
+we are worse off than any pigs. It’s four days and nights since I have
+taken off my boots.”
+
+Yasha, staggering from the jolting of the train, opens the lantern and
+snuffs out the wick with his wet fingers. The light flares up, hisses
+like a frying pan and goes out.
+
+“Yes, my lad,” Malahin goes on, as he feels Yasha lie down beside him
+and the young man’s huge back huddle against his own, “it’s cold. There
+is a draught from every crack. If your mother or your sister were to
+sleep here for one night they would be dead by morning. There it is, my
+lad, you wouldn’t study and go to the high school like your brothers, so
+you must take the cattle with your father. It’s your own fault, you have
+only yourself to blame.... Your brothers are asleep in their beds
+now, they are snug under the bedclothes, but you, the careless and lazy
+one, are in the same box as the cattle.... Yes.... ”
+
+The old man’s words are inaudible in the noise of the train, but for a
+long time he goes on muttering, sighing and clearing his throat....
+The cold air in the railway van grows thicker and more stifling. The
+pungent odor of fresh dung and smoldering candle makes it so repulsive
+and acrid that it irritates Yasha’s throat and chest as he falls asleep.
+He coughs and sneezes, while the old man, being accustomed to it,
+breathes with his whole chest as though nothing were amiss, and merely
+clears his throat.
+
+To judge from the swaying of the van and the rattle of the wheels the
+train is moving rapidly and unevenly. The engine breathes heavily,
+snorting out of time with the pulsation of the train, and altogether
+there is a medley of sounds. The bullocks huddle together uneasily and
+knock their horns against the walls.
+
+When the old man wakes up, the deep blue sky of early morning is peeping
+in at the cracks and at the little uncovered window. He feels unbearably
+cold, especially in the back and the feet. The train is standing still;
+Yasha, sleepy and morose, is busy with the cattle.
+
+The old man wakes up out of humor. Frowning and gloomy, he clears his
+throat angrily and looks from under his brows at Yasha who, supporting a
+bullock with his powerful shoulder and slightly lifting it, is trying to
+disentangle its leg.
+
+“I told you last night that the cords were too long,” mutters the old
+man; “but no, ‘It’s not too long, Daddy.’ There’s no making you do
+anything, you will have everything your own way.... Blockhead!”
+
+He angrily moves the door open and the light rushes into the van. A
+passenger train is standing exactly opposite the door, and behind it a
+red building with a roofed-in platform--a big station with a refreshment
+bar. The roofs and bridges of the trains, the earth, the sleepers, all
+are covered with a thin coating of fluffy, freshly fallen snow. In the
+spaces between the carriages of the passenger train the passengers can
+be seen moving to and fro, and a red-haired, red-faced gendarme walking
+up and down; a waiter in a frock-coat and a snow-white shirt-front,
+looking cold and sleepy, and probably very much dissatisfied with his
+fate, is running along the platform carrying a glass of tea and two
+rusks on a tray.
+
+The old man gets up and begins saying his prayers towards the east.
+Yasha, having finished with the bullock and put down the spade in the
+corner, stands beside him and says his prayers also. He merely moves
+his lips and crosses himself; the father prays in a loud whisper and
+pronounces the end of each prayer aloud and distinctly.
+
+“... And the life of the world to come. Amen,” the old man says aloud,
+draws in a breath, and at once whispers another prayer, rapping out
+clearly and firmly at the end: “... and lay calves upon Thy altar!”
+
+After saying his prayers, Yasha hurriedly crosses himself and says:
+“Five kopecks, please.”
+
+And on being given the five-kopeck piece, he takes a red copper teapot
+and runs to the station for boiling water. Taking long jumps over
+the rails and sleepers, leaving huge tracks in the feathery snow,
+and pouring away yesterday’s tea out of the teapot he runs to the
+refreshment room and jingles his five-kopeck piece against his teapot.
+From the van the bar-keeper can be seen pushing away the big teapot and
+refusing to give half of his samovar for five kopecks, but Yasha
+turns the tap himself and, spreading wide his elbows so as not to be
+interfered with fills his teapot with boiling water.
+
+“Damned blackguard!” the bar-keeper shouts after him as he runs back to
+the railway van.
+
+The scowling face of Malahin grows a little brighter over the tea.
+
+“We know how to eat and drink, but we don’t remember our work. Yesterday
+we could do nothing all day but eat and drink, and I’ll be bound we
+forgot to put down what we spent. What a memory! Lord have mercy on us!”
+
+The old man recalls aloud the expenditure of the day before, and writes
+down in a tattered notebook where and how much he had given to guards,
+engine-drivers, oilers....
+
+Meanwhile the passenger train has long ago gone off, and an engine
+runs backwards and forwards on the empty line, apparently without any
+definite object, but simply enjoying its freedom. The sun has risen and
+is playing on the snow; bright drops are falling from the station roof
+and the tops of the vans.
+
+Having finished his tea, the old man lazily saunters from the van to the
+station. Here in the middle of the first-class waiting-room he sees the
+familiar figure of the guard standing beside the station-master, a young
+man with a handsome beard and in a magnificent rough woollen overcoat.
+The young man, probably new to his position, stands in the same place,
+gracefully shifting from one foot to the other like a good racehorse,
+looks from side to side, salutes everyone that passes by, smiles and
+screws up his eyes.... He is red-cheeked, sturdy, and good-humored;
+his face is full of eagerness, and is as fresh as though he had just
+fallen from the sky with the feathery snow. Seeing Malahin, the guard
+sighs guiltily and throws up his hands.
+
+“We can’t go number fourteen,” he says. “We are very much behind time.
+Another train has gone with that number.”
+
+The station-master rapidly looks through some forms, then turns his
+beaming blue eyes upon Malahin, and, his face radiant with smiles and
+freshness, showers questions on him:
+
+“You are Mr. Malahin? You have the cattle? Eight vanloads? What is to be
+done now? You are late and I let number fourteen go in the night. What
+are we to do now?”
+
+The young man discreetly takes hold of the fur of Malahin’s coat with
+two pink fingers and, shifting from one foot to the other, explains
+affably and convincingly that such and such numbers have gone already,
+and that such and such are going, and that he is ready to do for Malahin
+everything in his power. And from his face it is evident that he is
+ready to do anything to please not only Malahin, but the whole world--he
+is so happy, so pleased, and so delighted! The old man listens, and
+though he can make absolutely nothing of the intricate system of
+numbering the trains, he nods his head approvingly, and he, too, puts
+two fingers on the soft wool of the rough coat. He enjoys seeing and
+hearing the polite and genial young man. To show goodwill on his side
+also, he takes out a ten-rouble note and, after a moment’s thought, adds
+a couple of rouble notes to it, and gives them to the station-master.
+The latter takes them, puts his finger to his cap, and gracefully
+thrusts them into his pocket.
+
+“Well, gentlemen, can’t we arrange it like this?” he says, kindled by a
+new idea that has flashed on him. “The troop train is late,... as you
+see, it is not here,... so why shouldn’t you go as the troop train?**
+And I will let the troop train go as twenty-eight. Eh?”
+
+“If you like,” agrees the guard.
+
+“Excellent!” the station-master says, delighted. “In that case there is
+no need for you to wait here; you can set off at once. I’ll dispatch you
+immediately. Excellent!”
+
+He salutes Malahin and runs off to his room, reading forms as he goes.
+The old man is very much pleased by the conversation that has just
+taken place; he smiles and looks about the room as though looking for
+something else agreeable.
+
+“We’ll have a drink, though,” he says, taking the guard’s arm.
+
+“It seems a little early for drinking.”
+
+“No, you must let me treat you to a glass in a friendly way.”
+
+They both go to the refreshment bar. After having a drink the guard
+spends a long time selecting something to eat.
+
+He is a very stout, elderly man, with a puffy and discolored face. His
+fatness is unpleasant, flabby-looking, and he is sallow as people are
+who drink too much and sleep irregularly.
+
+“And now we might have a second glass,” says Malahin. “It’s cold now,
+it’s no sin to drink. Please take some. So I can rely upon you, Mr.
+Guard, that there will be no hindrance or unpleasantness for the rest
+of the journey. For you know in moving cattle every hour is precious.
+To-day meat is one price; and to-morrow, look you, it will be another.
+If you are a day or two late and don’t get your price, instead of a
+profit you get home--excuse my saying it--without your breeches. Pray
+take a little.... I rely on you, and as for standing you something or
+what you like, I shall be pleased to show you my respect at any time.”
+
+After having fed the guard, Malahin goes back to the van.
+
+“I have just got hold of the troop train,” he says to his son. “We shall
+go quickly. The guard says if we go all the way with that number we
+shall arrive at eight o’clock to-morrow evening. If one does not bestir
+oneself, my boy, one gets nothing.... That’s so.... So you watch
+and learn....”
+
+After the first bell a man with a face black with soot, in a blouse and
+filthy frayed trousers hanging very slack, comes to the door of the van.
+This is the oiler, who had been creeping under the carriages and tapping
+the wheels with a hammer.
+
+“Are these your vans of cattle?” he asks.
+
+“Yes. Why?”
+
+“Why, because two of the vans are not safe. They can’t go on, they must
+stay here to be repaired.”
+
+“Oh, come, tell us another! You simply want a drink, to get something
+out of me.... You should have said so.”
+
+“As you please, only it is my duty to report it at once.”
+
+Without indignation or protest, simply, almost mechanically, the old man
+takes two twenty-kopeck pieces out of his pocket and gives them to the
+oiler. He takes them very calmly, too, and looking good-naturedly at the
+old man enters into conversation.
+
+“You are going to sell your cattle, I suppose.... It’s good
+business!”
+
+Malahin sighs and, looking calmly at the oiler’s black face, tells him
+that trading in cattle used certainly to be profitable, but now it has
+become a risky and losing business.
+
+“I have a mate here,” the oiler interrupts him. “You merchant gentlemen
+might make him a little present....”
+
+Malahin gives something to the mate too. The troop train goes quickly
+and the waits at the stations are comparatively short. The old man is
+pleased. The pleasant impression made by the young man in the rough
+overcoat has gone deep, the vodka he has drunk slightly clouds his
+brain, the weather is magnificent, and everything seems to be going
+well. He talks without ceasing, and at every stopping place runs to the
+refreshment bar. Feeling the need of a listener, he takes with him first
+the guard, and then the engine-driver, and does not simply drink, but
+makes a long business of it, with suitable remarks and clinking of
+glasses.
+
+“You have your job and we have ours,” he says with an affable smile.
+“May God prosper us and you, and not our will but His be done.”
+
+The vodka gradually excites him and he is worked up to a great pitch of
+energy. He wants to bestir himself, to fuss about, to make inquiries,
+to talk incessantly. At one minute he fumbles in his pockets and bundles
+and looks for some form. Then he thinks of something and cannot remember
+it; then takes out his pocketbook, and with no sort of object counts
+over his money. He bustles about, sighs and groans, clasps his hands....
+Laying out before him the letters and telegrams from the meat
+salesmen in the city, bills, post office and telegraphic receipt forms,
+and his note book, he reflects aloud and insists on Yasha’s listening.
+
+And when he is tired of reading over forms and talking about prices, he
+gets out at the stopping places, runs to the vans where his cattle are,
+does nothing, but simply clasps his hands and exclaims in horror.
+
+“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” he says in a complaining voice. “Holy Martyr
+Vlassy! Though they are bullocks, though they are beasts, yet they want
+to eat and drink as men do.... It’s four days and nights since they
+have drunk or eaten. Oh, dear! oh, dear!”
+
+Yasha follows him and does what he is told like an obedient son. He does
+not like the old man’s frequent visits to the refreshment bar. Though he
+is afraid of his father, he cannot refrain from remarking on it.
+
+“So you have begun already!” he says, looking sternly at the old man.
+“What are you rejoicing at? Is it your name-day or what?”
+
+“Don’t you dare teach your father.”
+
+“Fine goings on!”
+
+When he has not to follow his father along the other vans Yasha sits on
+the cape and strums on the accordion. Occasionally he gets out and walks
+lazily beside the train; he stands by the engine and turns a prolonged,
+unmoving stare on the wheels or on the workmen tossing blocks of wood
+into the tender; the hot engine wheezes, the falling blocks come down
+with the mellow, hearty thud of fresh wood; the engine-driver and
+his assistant, very phlegmatic and imperturbable persons, perform
+incomprehensible movements and don’t hurry themselves. After standing
+for a while by the engine, Yasha saunters lazily to the station; here
+he looks at the eatables in the refreshment bar, reads aloud some quite
+uninteresting notice, and goes back slowly to the cattle van. His face
+expresses neither boredom nor desire; apparently he does not care where
+he is, at home, in the van, or by the engine.
+
+Towards evening the train stops near a big station. The lamps have only
+just been lighted along the line; against the blue background in the
+fresh limpid air the lights are bright and pale like stars; they are
+only red and glowing under the station roof, where it is already dark.
+All the lines are loaded up with carriages, and it seems that if another
+train came in there would be no place for it. Yasha runs to the station
+for boiling water to make the evening tea. Well-dressed ladies and
+high-school boys are walking on the platform. If one looks into the
+distance from the platform there are far-away lights twinkling in the
+evening dusk on both sides of the station--that is the town. What town?
+Yasha does not care to know. He sees only the dim lights and wretched
+buildings beyond the station, hears the cabmen shouting, feels a
+sharp, cold wind on his face, and imagines that the town is probably
+disagreeable, uncomfortable, and dull.
+
+While they are having tea, when it is quite dark and a lantern is
+hanging on the wall again as on the previous evening, the train quivers
+from a slight shock and begins moving backwards. After going a little
+way it stops; they hear indistinct shouts, someone sets the chains
+clanking near the buffers and shouts, “Ready!” The train moves and goes
+forward. Ten minutes later it is dragged back again.
+
+Getting out of the van, Malahin does not recognize his train. His eight
+vans of bullocks are standing in the same row with some trolleys which
+were not a part of the train before. Two or three of these are loaded
+with rubble and the others are empty. The guards running to and fro on
+the platform are strangers. They give unwilling and indistinct answers
+to his questions. They have no thoughts to spare for Malahin; they are
+in a hurry to get the train together so as to finish as soon as possible
+and be back in the warmth.
+
+“What number is this?” asks Malahin
+
+“Number eighteen.”
+
+“And where is the troop train? Why have you taken me off the troop
+train?”
+
+Getting no answer, the old man goes to the station. He looks first for
+the familiar figure of the head guard and, not finding him, goes to
+the station-master. The station-master is sitting at a table in his own
+room, turning over a bundle of forms. He is busy, and affects not to
+see the newcomer. His appearance is impressive: a cropped black head,
+prominent ears, a long hooked nose, a swarthy face; he has a forbidding
+and, as it were, offended expression. Malahin begins making his
+complaint at great length.
+
+“What?” queries the station-master. “How is this?” He leans against the
+back of his chair and goes on, growing indignant: “What is it? and
+why shouldn’t you go by number eighteen? Speak more clearly, I don’t
+understand! How is it? Do you want me to be everywhere at once?”
+
+He showers questions on him, and for no apparent reason grows
+sterner and sterner. Malahin is already feeling in his pocket for his
+pocketbook, but in the end the station-master, aggrieved and indignant,
+for some unknown reason jumps up from his seat and runs out of the room.
+Malahin shrugs his shoulders, and goes out to look for someone else to
+speak to.
+
+From boredom or from a desire to put the finishing stroke to a busy day,
+or simply that a window with the inscription “Telegraph!” on it catches
+his eye, he goes to the window and expresses a desire to send off a
+telegram. Taking up a pen, he thinks for a moment, and writes on a blue
+form: “Urgent. Traffic Manager. Eight vans of live stock. Delayed at
+every station. Kindly send an express number. Reply paid. Malahin.”
+
+Having sent off the telegram, he goes back to the station-master’s
+room. There he finds, sitting on a sofa covered with gray cloth, a
+benevolent-looking gentleman in spectacles and a cap of raccoon fur; he
+is wearing a peculiar overcoat very much like a lady’s, edged with fur,
+with frogs and slashed sleeves. Another gentleman, dried-up and sinewy,
+wearing the uniform of a railway inspector, stands facing him.
+
+“Just think of it,” says the inspector, addressing the gentleman in the
+queer overcoat. “I’ll tell you an incident that really is A1! The Z.
+railway line in the coolest possible way stole three hundred trucks
+from the N. line. It’s a fact, sir! I swear it! They carried them off,
+repainted them, put their letters on them, and that’s all about it. The
+N. line sends its agents everywhere, they hunt and hunt. And then--can
+you imagine it?--the Company happen to come upon a broken-down carriage
+of the Z. line. They repair it at their depot, and all at once, bless my
+soul! see their own mark on the wheels What do you say to that? Eh? If
+I did it they would send me to Siberia, but the railway companies simply
+snap their fingers at it!”
+
+It is pleasant to Malahin to talk to educated, cultured people. He
+strokes his beard and joins in the conversation with dignity.
+
+“Take this case, gentlemen, for instance,” he says. “I am transporting
+cattle to X. Eight vanloads. Very good.... Now let us say they charge
+me for each vanload as a weight of ten tons; eight bullocks don’t weigh
+ten tons, but much less, yet they don’t take any notice of that....”
+
+At that instant Yasha walks into the room looking for his father. He
+listens and is about to sit down on a chair, but probably thinking of
+his weight goes and sits on the window-sill.
+
+“They don’t take any notice of that,” Malahin goes on, “and charge me
+and my son the third-class fare, too, forty-two roubles, for going in
+the van with the bullocks. This is my son Yakov. I have two more at
+home, but they have gone in for study. Well and apart from that it is my
+opinion that the railways have ruined the cattle trade. In old days when
+they drove them in herds it was better.”
+
+The old man’s talk is lengthy and drawn out. After every sentence he
+looks at Yasha as though he would say: “See how I am talking to clever
+people.”
+
+“Upon my word!” the inspector interrupts him. “No one is indignant, no
+one criticizes. And why? It is very simple. An abomination strikes
+the eye and arouses indignation only when it is exceptional, when the
+established order is broken by it. Here, where, saving your presence, it
+constitutes the long-established program and forms and enters into the
+basis of the order itself, where every sleeper on the line bears the
+trace of it and stinks of it, one too easily grows accustomed to it!
+Yes, sir!”
+
+The second bell rings, the gentlemen in the queer overcoat gets up. The
+inspector takes him by the arm and, still talking with heat, goes off
+with him to the platform. After the third bell the station-master runs
+into his room, and sits down at his table.
+
+“Listen, with what number am I to go?” asks Malahin.
+
+The station-master looks at a form and says indignantly:
+
+“Are you Malahin, eight vanloads? You must pay a rouble a van and
+six roubles and twenty kopecks for stamps. You have no stamps. Total,
+fourteen roubles, twenty kopecks.”
+
+Receiving the money, he writes something down, dries it with sand, and,
+hurriedly snatching up a bundle of forms, goes quickly out of the room.
+
+At ten o’clock in the evening Malahin gets an answer from the traffic
+manager: “Give precedence.”
+
+Reading the telegram through, the old man winks significantly and, very
+well pleased with himself, puts it in his pocket.
+
+“Here,” he says to Yasha, “look and learn.”
+
+At midnight his train goes on. The night is dark and cold like the
+previous one; the waits at the stations are long. Yasha sits on the cape
+and imperturbably strums on the accordion, while the old man is still
+more eager to exert himself. At one of the stations he is overtaken by
+a desire to lodge a complaint. At his request a gendarme sits down and
+writes:
+
+“November 10, 188-.--I, non-commissioned officer of the Z. section of
+the N. police department of railways, Ilya Tchered, in accordance with
+article II of the statute of May 19, 1871, have drawn up this protocol
+at the station of X. as herewith follows.... ”
+
+“What am I to write next?” asks the gendarme.
+
+Malahin lays out before him forms, postal and telegraph receipts,
+accounts.... He does not know himself definitely what he wants of the
+gendarme; he wants to describe in the protocol not any separate episode
+but his whole journey, with all his losses and conversations with
+station-masters--to describe it lengthily and vindictively.
+
+“At the station of Z.,” he says, “write that the station-master unlinked
+my vans from the troop train because he did not like my countenance.”
+
+And he wants the gendarme to be sure to mention his countenance. The
+latter listens wearily, and goes on writing without hearing him to the
+end. He ends his protocol thus:
+
+“The above deposition I, non-commissioned officer Tchered, have written
+down in this protocol with a view to present it to the head of the Z.
+section, and have handed a copy thereof to Gavril Malahin.”
+
+The old man takes the copy, adds it to the papers with which his side
+pocket is stuffed, and, much pleased, goes back to his van.
+
+In the morning Malahin wakes up again in a bad humor, but his wrath
+vents itself not on Yasha but the cattle.
+
+“The cattle are done for!” he grumbles. “They are done for! They are at
+the last gasp! God be my judge! they will all die. Tfoo!”
+
+The bullocks, who have had nothing to drink for many days, tortured by
+thirst, are licking the hoar frost on the walls, and when Malachin goes
+up to them they begin licking his cold fur jacket. From their clear,
+tearful eyes it can be seen that they are exhausted by thirst and the
+jolting of the train, that they are hungry and miserable.
+
+“It’s a nice job taking you by rail, you wretched brutes!” mutters
+Malahin. “I could wish you were dead to get it over! It makes me sick to
+look at you!”
+
+At midday the train stops at a big station where, according to the
+regulations, there was drinking water provided for cattle.
+
+Water is given to the cattle, but the bullocks will not drink it: the
+water is too cold....
+
+* * * * *
+
+Two more days and nights pass, and at last in the distance in the murky
+fog the city comes into sight. The journey is over. The train comes
+to a standstill before reaching the town, near a goods’ station. The
+bullocks, released from the van, stagger and stumble as though they were
+walking on slippery ice.
+
+Having got through the unloading and veterinary inspection, Malahin and
+Yasha take up their quarters in a dirty, cheap hotel in the outskirts
+of the town, in the square in which the cattle-market is held. Their
+lodgings are filthy and their food is disgusting, unlike what they
+ever have at home; they sleep to the harsh strains of a wretched steam
+hurdy-gurdy which plays day and night in the restaurant under their
+lodging.
+
+The old man spends his time from morning till night going about looking
+for purchasers, and Yasha sits for days in the hotel room, or goes out
+into the street to look at the town. He sees the filthy square heaped
+up with dung, the signboards of restaurants, the turreted walls of a
+monastery in the fog. Sometimes he runs across the street and looks into
+the grocer’s shop, admires the jars of cakes of different colors, yawns,
+and lazily saunters back to his room. The city does not interest him.
+
+At last the bullocks are sold to a dealer. Malahin hires drovers. The
+cattle are divided into herds, ten in each, and driven to the other end
+of the town. The bullocks, exhausted, go with drooping heads through the
+noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and
+last time in their lives. The tattered drovers walk after them, their
+heads drooping too. They are bored.... Now and then some drover
+starts out of his brooding, remembers that there are cattle in front
+of him intrusted to his charge, and to show that he is doing his duty
+brings a stick down full swing on a bullock’s back. The bullock staggers
+with the pain, runs forward a dozen paces, and looks about him as though
+he were ashamed at being beaten before people.
+
+After selling the bullocks and buying for his family presents such as
+they could perfectly well have bought at home, Malahin and Yasha get
+ready for their journey back. Three hours before the train goes the old
+man, who has already had a drop too much with the purchaser and so is
+fussy, goes down with Yasha to the restaurant and sits down to drink
+tea. Like all provincials, he cannot eat and drink alone: he must have
+company as fussy and as fond of sedate conversation as himself.
+
+“Call the host!” he says to the waiter; “tell him I should like to
+entertain him.”
+
+The hotel-keeper, a well-fed man, absolutely indifferent to his lodgers,
+comes and sits down to the table.
+
+“Well, we have sold our stock,” Malahin says, laughing. “I have swapped
+my goat for a hawk. Why, when we set off the price of meat was three
+roubles ninety kopecks, but when we arrived it had dropped to three
+roubles twenty-five. They tell us we are too late, we should have been
+here three days earlier, for now there is not the same demand for meat,
+St. Philip’s fast has come.... Eh? It’s a nice how-do-you-do! It
+meant a loss of fourteen roubles on each bullock. Yes. But only think
+what it costs to bring the stock! Fifteen roubles carriage, and you must
+put down six roubles for each bullock, tips, bribes, drinks, and one
+thing and another....”
+
+The hotel-keeper listens out of politeness and reluctantly drinks tea.
+Malahin sighs and groans, gesticulates, jests about his ill-luck, but
+everything shows that the loss he has sustained does not trouble him
+much. He doesn’t mind whether he has lost or gained as long as he has
+listeners, has something to make a fuss about, and is not late for his
+train.
+
+An hour later Malahin and Yasha, laden with bags and boxes, go
+downstairs from the hotel room to the front door to get into a sledge
+and drive to the station. They are seen off by the hotel-keeper, the
+waiter, and various women. The old man is touched. He thrusts ten-kopeck
+pieces in all directions, and says in a sing-song voice:
+
+“Good by, good health to you! God grant that all may be well with
+you. Please God if we are alive and well we shall come again in Lent.
+Good-by. Thank you. God bless you!”
+
+Getting into the sledge, the old man spends a long time crossing himself
+in the direction in which the monastery walls make a patch of darkness
+in the fog. Yasha sits beside him on the very edge of the seat with his
+legs hanging over the side. His face as before shows no sign of emotion
+and expresses neither boredom nor desire. He is not glad that he is
+going home, nor sorry that he has not had time to see the sights of the
+city.
+
+“Drive on!”
+
+The cabman whips up the horse and, turning round, begins swearing at the
+heavy and cumbersome luggage.
+
+     * On many railway lines, in order to avoid accidents, it is
+     against the regulations to carry hay on the trains, and so
+     live stock are without fodder on the journey.--Author’s
+     Note.
+
+     **The train destined especially for the transport of troops
+     is called the troop train; when there are no troops it takes
+     goods, and goes more rapidly than ordinary goods train.
+     --Author’s Note.
+
+
+
+
+SORROW
+
+THE turner, Grigory Petrov, who had been known for years past as a
+splendid craftsman, and at the same time as the most senseless peasant
+in the Galtchinskoy district, was taking his old woman to the hospital.
+He had to drive over twenty miles, and it was an awful road. A
+government post driver could hardly have coped with it, much less an
+incompetent sluggard like Grigory. A cutting cold wind was blowing
+straight in his face. Clouds of snowflakes were whirling round and
+round in all directions, so that one could not tell whether the snow was
+falling from the sky or rising from the earth. The fields, the telegraph
+posts, and the forest could not be seen for the fog of snow. And when a
+particularly violent gust of wind swooped down on Grigory, even the yoke
+above the horse’s head could not be seen. The wretched, feeble little
+nag crawled slowly along. It took all its strength to drag its legs out
+of the snow and to tug with its head. The turner was in a hurry. He kept
+restlessly hopping up and down on the front seat and lashing the horse’s
+back.
+
+“Don’t cry, Matryona,...” he muttered. “Have a little patience.
+Please God we shall reach the hospital, and in a trice it will be the
+right thing for you.... Pavel Ivanitch will give you some little
+drops, or tell them to bleed you; or maybe his honor will be pleased to
+rub you with some sort of spirit--it’ll... draw it out of your side.
+Pavel Ivanitch will do his best. He will shout and stamp about, but he
+will do his best.... He is a nice gentleman, affable, God give him
+health! As soon as we get there he will dart out of his room and will
+begin calling me names. ‘How? Why so?’ he will cry. ‘Why did you not
+come at the right time? I am not a dog to be hanging about waiting on
+you devils all day. Why did you not come in the morning? Go away! Get
+out of my sight. Come again to-morrow.’ And I shall say: ‘Mr. Doctor!
+Pavel Ivanitch! Your honor!’ Get on, do! plague take you, you devil! Get
+on!”
+
+The turner lashed his nag, and without looking at the old woman went on
+muttering to himself:
+
+“‘Your honor! It’s true as before God.... Here’s the Cross for you,
+I set off almost before it was light. How could I be here in time if
+the Lord.... The Mother of God... is wroth, and has sent such a
+snowstorm? Kindly look for yourself.... Even a first-rate horse could
+not do it, while mine--you can see for yourself--is not a horse but a
+disgrace.’ And Pavel Ivanitch will frown and shout: ‘We know you! You
+always find some excuse! Especially you, Grishka; I know you of old!
+I’ll be bound you have stopped at half a dozen taverns!’ And I shall
+say: ‘Your honor! am I a criminal or a heathen? My old woman is giving
+up her soul to God, she is dying, and am I going to run from tavern to
+tavern! What an idea, upon my word! Plague take them, the taverns!’ Then
+Pavel Ivanitch will order you to be taken into the hospital, and I shall
+fall at his feet.... ‘Pavel Ivanitch! Your honor, we thank you most
+humbly! Forgive us fools and anathemas, don’t be hard on us peasants! We
+deserve a good kicking, while you graciously put yourself out and mess
+your feet in the snow!’ And Pavel Ivanitch will give me a look as
+though he would like to hit me, and will say: ‘You’d much better not be
+swilling vodka, you fool, but taking pity on your old woman instead
+of falling at my feet. You want a thrashing!’ ‘You are right there--a
+thrashing, Pavel Ivanitch, strike me God! But how can we help bowing
+down at your feet if you are our benefactor, and a real father to us?
+Your honor! I give you my word,... here as before God,... you
+may spit in my face if I deceive you: as soon as my Matryona, this same
+here, is well again and restored to her natural condition, I’ll make
+anything for your honor that you would like to order! A cigarette-case,
+if you like, of the best birchwood,... balls for croquet, skittles of
+the most foreign pattern I can turn.... I will make anything for you!
+I won’t take a farthing from you. In Moscow they would charge you four
+roubles for such a cigarette-case, but I won’t take a farthing.’ The
+doctor will laugh and say: ‘Oh, all right, all right.... I see! But
+it’s a pity you are a drunkard....’ I know how to manage the gentry,
+old girl. There isn’t a gentleman I couldn’t talk to. Only God grant we
+don’t get off the road. Oh, how it is blowing! One’s eyes are full of
+snow.”
+
+And the turner went on muttering endlessly. He prattled on mechanically
+to get a little relief from his depressing feelings. He had plenty of
+words on his tongue, but the thoughts and questions in his brain
+were even more numerous. Sorrow had come upon the turner unawares,
+unlooked-for, and unexpected, and now he could not get over it, could
+not recover himself. He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though
+in drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he
+was suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler
+and drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man,
+weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even struggling with nature.
+
+The turner remembered that his trouble had begun the evening before.
+When he had come home yesterday evening, a little drunk as usual, and
+from long-established habit had begun swearing and shaking his fists,
+his old woman had looked at her rowdy spouse as she had never looked
+at him before. Usually, the expression in her aged eyes was that of a
+martyr, meek like that of a dog frequently beaten and badly fed; this
+time she had looked at him sternly and immovably, as saints in the holy
+pictures or dying people look. From that strange, evil look in her eyes
+the trouble had begun. The turner, stupefied with amazement, borrowed a
+horse from a neighbor, and now was taking his old woman to the hospital
+in the hope that, by means of powders and ointments, Pavel Ivanitch
+would bring back his old woman’s habitual expression.
+
+“I say, Matryona,...” the turner muttered, “if Pavel Ivanitch asks
+you whether I beat you, say, ‘Never!’ and I never will beat you again. I
+swear it. And did I ever beat you out of spite? I just beat you without
+thinking. I am sorry for you. Some men wouldn’t trouble, but here I am
+taking you.... I am doing my best. And the way it snows, the way it
+snows! Thy Will be done, O Lord! God grant we don’t get off the road....
+Does your side ache, Matryona, that you don’t speak? I ask you,
+does your side ache?”
+
+It struck him as strange that the snow on his old woman’s face was not
+melting; it was queer that the face itself looked somehow drawn, and had
+turned a pale gray, dingy waxen hue and had grown grave and solemn.
+
+“You are a fool!” muttered the turner.... “I tell you on my
+conscience, before God,... and you go and... Well, you are a fool!
+I have a good mind not to take you to Pavel Ivanitch!”
+
+The turner let the reins go and began thinking. He could not bring
+himself to look round at his old woman: he was frightened. He was
+afraid, too, of asking her a question and not getting an answer. At
+last, to make an end of uncertainty, without looking round he felt his
+old woman’s cold hand. The lifted hand fell like a log.
+
+“She is dead, then! What a business!”
+
+And the turner cried. He was not so much sorry as annoyed. He thought
+how quickly everything passes in this world! His trouble had hardly
+begun when the final catastrophe had happened. He had not had time to
+live with his old woman, to show her he was sorry for her before she
+died. He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had
+passed by as it were in a fog. What with drunkenness, quarreling, and
+poverty, there had been no feeling of life. And, as though to spite him,
+his old woman died at the very time when he felt he was sorry for her,
+that he could not live without her, and that he had behaved dreadfully
+badly to her.
+
+“Why, she used to go the round of the village,” he remembered. “I sent
+her out myself to beg for bread. What a business! She ought to have
+lived another ten years, the silly thing; as it is I’ll be bound she
+thinks I really was that sort of man.... Holy Mother! but where the
+devil am I driving? There’s no need for a doctor now, but a burial. Turn
+back!”
+
+Grigory turned back and lashed the horse with all his might. The road
+grew worse and worse every hour. Now he could not see the yoke at
+all. Now and then the sledge ran into a young fir tree, a dark object
+scratched the turner’s hands and flashed before his eyes, and the field
+of vision was white and whirling again.
+
+“To live over again,” thought the turner.
+
+He remembered that forty years ago Matryona had been young, handsome,
+merry, that she had come of a well-to-do family. They had married her
+to him because they had been attracted by his handicraft. All the
+essentials for a happy life had been there, but the trouble was that,
+just as he had got drunk after the wedding and lay sprawling on the
+stove, so he had gone on without waking up till now. His wedding he
+remembered, but of what happened after the wedding--for the life of him
+he could remember nothing, except perhaps that he had drunk, lain on the
+stove, and quarreled. Forty years had been wasted like that.
+
+The white clouds of snow were beginning little by little to turn gray.
+It was getting dusk.
+
+“Where am I going?” the turner suddenly bethought him with a start.
+“I ought to be thinking of the burial, and I am on the way to the
+hospital.... It as is though I had gone crazy.”
+
+Grigory turned round again, and again lashed his horse. The little nag
+strained its utmost and, with a snort, fell into a little trot. The
+turner lashed it on the back time after time.... A knocking was
+audible behind him, and though he did not look round, he knew it was the
+dead woman’s head knocking against the sledge. And the snow kept turning
+darker and darker, the wind grew colder and more cutting....
+
+“To live over again!” thought the turner. “I should get a new lathe,
+take orders,... give the money to my old woman....”
+
+And then he dropped the reins. He looked for them, tried to pick them
+up, but could not--his hands would not work....
+
+“It does not matter,” he thought, “the horse will go of itself, it knows
+the way. I might have a little sleep now.... Before the funeral or
+the requiem it would be as well to get a little rest....”
+
+The turner closed his eyes and dozed. A little later he heard the horse
+stop; he opened his eyes and saw before him something dark like a hut or
+a haystack....
+
+He would have got out of the sledge and found out what it was, but he
+felt overcome by such inertia that it seemed better to freeze than move,
+and he sank into a peaceful sleep.
+
+He woke up in a big room with painted walls. Bright sunlight was
+streaming in at the windows. The turner saw people facing him, and his
+first feeling was a desire to show himself a respectable man who knew
+how things should be done.
+
+“A requiem, brothers, for my old woman,” he said. “The priest should be
+told....”
+
+“Oh, all right, all right; lie down,” a voice cut him short.
+
+“Pavel Ivanitch!” the turner cried in surprise, seeing the doctor before
+him. “Your honor, benefactor!”
+
+He wanted to leap up and fall on his knees before the doctor, but felt
+that his arms and legs would not obey him.
+
+“Your honor, where are my legs, where are my arms!”
+
+“Say good-by to your arms and legs.... They’ve been frozen off. Come,
+come!... What are you crying for? You’ve lived your life, and thank
+God for it! I suppose you have had sixty years of it--that’s enough for
+you!...”
+
+“I am grieving.... Graciously forgive me! If I could have another
+five or six years!...”
+
+“What for?”
+
+“The horse isn’t mine, I must give it back.... I must bury my old
+woman.... How quickly it is all ended in this world! Your honor,
+Pavel Ivanitch! A cigarette-case of birchwood of the best! I’ll turn you
+croquet balls....”
+
+The doctor went out of the ward with a wave of his hand. It was all over
+with the turner.
+
+
+
+
+ON OFFICIAL DUTY
+
+THE deputy examining magistrate and the district doctor were going to an
+inquest in the village of Syrnya. On the road they were overtaken by a
+snowstorm; they spent a long time going round and round, and arrived,
+not at midday, as they had intended, but in the evening when it was
+dark. They put up for the night at the Zemstvo hut. It so happened
+that it was in this hut that the dead body was lying--the corpse of the
+Zemstvo insurance agent, Lesnitsky, who had arrived in Syrnya three days
+before and, ordering the samovar in the hut, had shot himself, to the
+great surprise of everyone; and the fact that he had ended his life
+so strangely, after unpacking his eatables and laying them out on the
+table, and with the samovar before him, led many people to suspect that
+it was a case of murder; an inquest was necessary.
+
+In the outer room the doctor and the examining magistrate shook the snow
+off themselves and knocked it off their boots. And meanwhile the old
+village constable, Ilya Loshadin, stood by, holding a little tin lamp.
+There was a strong smell of paraffin.
+
+“Who are you?” asked the doctor.
+
+“Conshtable,...” answered the constable.
+
+He used to spell it “conshtable” when he signed the receipts at the post
+office.
+
+“And where are the witnesses?”
+
+“They must have gone to tea, your honor.”
+
+On the right was the parlor, the travelers’ or gentry’s room; on the
+left the kitchen, with a big stove and sleeping shelves under the
+rafters. The doctor and the examining magistrate, followed by the
+constable, holding the lamp high above his head, went into the parlor.
+Here a still, long body covered with white linen was lying on the floor
+close to the table-legs. In the dim light of the lamp they could clearly
+see, besides the white covering, new rubber goloshes, and everything
+about it was uncanny and sinister: the dark walls, and the silence, and
+the goloshes, and the stillness of the dead body. On the table stood a
+samovar, cold long ago; and round it parcels, probably the eatables.
+
+“To shoot oneself in the Zemstvo hut, how tactless!” said the doctor.
+“If one does want to put a bullet through one’s brains, one ought to do
+it at home in some outhouse.”
+
+He sank on to a bench, just as he was, in his cap, his fur coat, and his
+felt overboots; his fellow-traveler, the examining magistrate, sat down
+opposite.
+
+“These hysterical, neurasthenic people are great egoists,” the doctor
+went on hotly. “If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he
+rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he gets up a scene
+with his wife without troubling about your presence; and when he feels
+inclined to shoot himself, he shoots himself in a village in a Zemstvo
+hut, so as to give the maximum of trouble to everybody. These gentlemen
+in every circumstance of life think of no one but themselves! That’s why
+the elderly so dislike our ‘nervous age.’”
+
+“The elderly dislike so many things,” said the examining magistrate,
+yawning. “You should point out to the elder generation what the
+difference is between the suicides of the past and the suicides of
+to-day. In the old days the so-called gentleman shot himself because he
+had made away with Government money, but nowadays it is because he is
+sick of life, depressed.... Which is better?”
+
+“Sick of life, depressed; but you must admit that he might have shot
+himself somewhere else.”
+
+“Such trouble!” said the constable, “such trouble! It’s a real
+affliction. The people are very much upset, your honor; they haven’t
+slept these three nights. The children are crying. The cows ought to be
+milked, but the women won’t go to the stall--they are afraid... for
+fear the gentleman should appear to them in the darkness. Of course they
+are silly women, but some of the men are frightened too. As soon as
+it is dark they won’t go by the hut one by one, but only in a flock
+together. And the witnesses too....”
+
+Dr. Startchenko, a middle-aged man in spectacles with a dark beard, and
+the examining magistrate Lyzhin, a fair man, still young, who had only
+taken his degree two years before and looked more like a student than an
+official, sat in silence, musing. They were vexed that they were late.
+Now they had to wait till morning, and to stay here for the night,
+though it was not yet six o’clock; and they had before them a long
+evening, a dark night, boredom, uncomfortable beds, beetles, and cold
+in the morning; and listening to the blizzard that howled in the chimney
+and in the loft, they both thought how unlike all this was the life
+which they would have chosen for themselves and of which they had once
+dreamed, and how far away they both were from their contemporaries, who
+were at that moment walking about the lighted streets in town without
+noticing the weather, or were getting ready for the theatre, or sitting
+in their studies over a book. Oh, how much they would have given now
+only to stroll along the Nevsky Prospect, or along Petrovka in Moscow,
+to listen to decent singing, to sit for an hour or so in a restaurant!
+
+“Oo-oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm in the loft, and something outside slammed
+viciously, probably the signboard on the hut. “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
+
+“You can do as you please, but I have no desire to stay here,” said
+Startchenko, getting up. “It’s not six yet, it’s too early to go to bed;
+I am off. Von Taunitz lives not far from here, only a couple of
+miles from Syrnya. I shall go to see him and spend the evening there.
+Constable, run and tell my coachman not to take the horses out. And what
+are you going to do?” he asked Lyzhin.
+
+“I don’t know; I expect I shall go to sleep.”
+
+The doctor wrapped himself in his fur coat and went out. Lyzhin could
+hear him talking to the coachman and the bells beginning to quiver on
+the frozen horses. He drove off.
+
+“It is not nice for you, sir, to spend the night in here,” said the
+constable; “come into the other room. It’s dirty, but for one night it
+won’t matter. I’ll get a samovar from a peasant and heat it directly.
+I’ll heap up some hay for you, and then you go to sleep, and God bless
+you, your honor.”
+
+A little later the examining magistrate was sitting in the kitchen
+drinking tea, while Loshadin, the constable, was standing at the door
+talking. He was an old man about sixty, short and very thin, bent and
+white, with a naive smile on his face and watery eyes, and he kept
+smacking with his lips as though he were sucking a sweetmeat. He was
+wearing a short sheepskin coat and high felt boots, and held his stick
+in his hands all the time. The youth of the examining magistrate aroused
+his compassion, and that was probably why he addressed him familiarly.
+
+“The elder gave orders that he was to be informed when the police
+superintendent or the examining magistrate came,” he said, “so I suppose
+I must go now.... It’s nearly three miles to the _volost_, and the
+storm, the snowdrifts, are something terrible--maybe one won’t get there
+before midnight. Ough! how the wind roars!”
+
+“I don’t need the elder,” said Lyzhin. “There is nothing for him to do
+here.”
+
+He looked at the old man with curiosity, and asked:
+
+“Tell me, grandfather, how many years have you been constable?”
+
+“How many? Why, thirty years. Five years after the Freedom I began going
+as constable, that’s how I reckon it. And from that time I have been
+going every day since. Other people have holidays, but I am always
+going. When it’s Easter and the church bells are ringing and Christ has
+risen, I still go about with my bag--to the treasury, to the post, to
+the police superintendent’s lodgings, to the rural captain, to the tax
+inspector, to the municipal office, to the gentry, to the peasants, to
+all orthodox Christians. I carry parcels, notices, tax papers, letters,
+forms of different sorts, circulars, and to be sure, kind gentleman,
+there are all sorts of forms nowadays, so as to note down the
+numbers--yellow, white, and red--and every gentleman or priest or
+well-to-do peasant must write down a dozen times in the year how much
+he has sown and harvested, how many quarters or poods he has of rye, how
+many of oats, how many of hay, and what the weather’s like, you know,
+and insects, too, of all sorts. To be sure you can write what you like,
+it’s only a regulation, but one must go and give out the notices and
+then go again and collect them. Here, for instance, there’s no need to
+cut open the gentleman; you know yourself it’s a silly thing, it’s only
+dirtying your hands, and here you have been put to trouble, your honor;
+you have come because it’s the regulation; you can’t help it. For thirty
+years I have been going round according to regulation. In the summer
+it is all right, it is warm and dry; but in winter and autumn it’s
+uncomfortable. At times I have been almost drowned and almost frozen; all
+sorts of things have happened--wicked people set on me in the forest and
+took away my bag; I have been beaten, and I have been before a court of
+law.”
+
+“What were you accused of?”
+
+“Of fraud.”
+
+“How do you mean?”
+
+“Why, you see, Hrisanf Grigoryev, the clerk, sold the contractor some
+boards belonging to someone else--cheated him, in fact. I was mixed up
+in it. They sent me to the tavern for vodka; well, the clerk did not
+share with me--did not even offer me a glass; but as through my poverty
+I was--in appearance, I mean--not a man to be relied upon, not a man of
+any worth, we were both brought to trial; he was sent to prison, but,
+praise God! I was acquitted on all points. They read a notice, you know,
+in the court. And they were all in uniforms--in the court, I mean. I
+can tell you, your honor, my duties for anyone not used to them are
+terrible, absolutely killing; but to me it is nothing. In fact, my feet
+ache when I am not walking. And at home it is worse for me. At home one
+has to heat the stove for the clerk in the _volost_ office, to fetch
+water for him, to clean his boots.”
+
+“And what wages do you get?” Lyzhin asked.
+
+“Eighty-four roubles a year.”
+
+“I’ll bet you get other little sums coming in. You do, don’t you?”
+
+“Other little sums? No, indeed! Gentlemen nowadays don’t often give
+tips. Gentlemen nowadays are strict, they take offense at anything.
+If you bring them a notice they are offended, if you take off your cap
+before them they are offended. ‘You have come to the wrong entrance,’
+they say. ‘You are a drunkard,’ they say. ‘You smell of onion; you are a
+blockhead; you are the son of a bitch.’ There are kind-hearted ones, of
+course; but what does one get from them? They only laugh and call one
+all sorts of names. Mr. Altuhin, for instance, he is a good-natured
+gentleman; and if you look at him he seems sober and in his right mind,
+but so soon as he sees me he shouts and does not know what he means
+himself. He gave me such a name ‘You,’ said he,...” The constable
+uttered some word, but in such a low voice that it was impossible to
+make out what he said.
+
+“What?” Lyzhin asked. “Say it again.”
+
+“‘Administration,’” the constable repeated aloud. “He has been
+calling me that for a long while, for the last six years. ‘Hullo,
+Administration!’ But I don’t mind; let him, God bless him! Sometimes a
+lady will send one a glass of vodka and a bit of pie and one drinks to
+her health. But peasants give more; peasants are more kind-hearted,
+they have the fear of God in their hearts: one will give a bit of bread,
+another a drop of cabbage soup, another will stand one a glass. The
+village elders treat one to tea in the tavern. Here the witnesses have
+gone to their tea. ‘Loshadin,’ they said, ‘you stay here and keep watch
+for us,’ and they gave me a kopeck each. You see, they are frightened,
+not being used to it, and yesterday they gave me fifteen kopecks and
+offered me a glass.”
+
+“And you, aren’t you frightened?”
+
+“I am, sir; but of course it is my duty, there is no getting away from
+it. In the summer I was taking a convict to the town, and he set upon
+me and gave me such a drubbing! And all around were fields, forest--how
+could I get away from him? It’s just the same here. I remember the
+gentleman, Mr. Lesnitsky, when he was so high, and I knew his father and
+mother. I am from the village of Nedoshtchotova, and they, the Lesnitsky
+family, were not more than three-quarters of a mile from us and less
+than that, their ground next to ours, and Mr. Lesnitsky had a sister, a
+God-fearing and tender-hearted lady. Lord keep the soul of Thy servant
+Yulya, eternal memory to her! She was never married, and when she was
+dying she divided all her property; she left three hundred acres to the
+monastery, and six hundred to the commune of peasants of Nedoshtchotova
+to commemorate her soul; but her brother hid the will, they do say burnt
+it in the stove, and took all this land for himself. He thought, to be
+sure, it was for his benefit; but--nay, wait a bit, you won’t get on
+in the world through injustice, brother. The gentleman did not go to
+confession for twenty years after. He kept away from the church, to be
+sure, and died impenitent. He burst. He was a very fat man, so he
+burst lengthways. Then everything was taken from the young master, from
+Seryozha, to pay the debts--everything there was. Well, he had not gone
+very far in his studies, he couldn’t do anything, and the president of
+the Rural Board, his uncle--‘I’ll take him’--Seryozha, I mean--thinks
+he, ‘for an agent; let him collect the insurance, that’s not a difficult
+job,’ and the gentleman was young and proud, he wanted to be living on
+a bigger scale and in better style and with more freedom. To be sure it
+was a come-down for him to be jolting about the district in a wretched
+cart and talking to the peasants; he would walk and keep looking on the
+ground, looking on the ground and saying nothing; if you called his name
+right in his ear, ‘Sergey Sergeyitch!’ he would look round like this,
+‘Eh?’ and look down on the ground again, and now you see he has laid
+hands on himself. There’s no sense in it, your honor, it’s not right,
+and there’s no making out what’s the meaning of it, merciful Lord! Say
+your father was rich and you are poor; it is mortifying, there’s no
+doubt about it, but there, you must make up your mind to it. I used to
+live in good style, too; I had two horses, your honor, three cows, I
+used to keep twenty head of sheep; but the time has come, and I am
+left with nothing but a wretched bag, and even that is not mine but
+Government property. And now in our Nedoshtchotova, if the truth is to
+be told, my house is the worst of the lot. Makey had four footmen, and
+now Makey is a footman himself. Petrak had four laborers, and now Petrak
+is a laborer himself.”
+
+“How was it you became poor?” asked the examining magistrate.
+
+“My sons drink terribly. I could not tell you how they drink, you
+wouldn’t believe it.”
+
+Lyzhin listened and thought how he, Lyzhin, would go back sooner or
+later to Moscow, while this old man would stay here for ever, and would
+always be walking and walking. And how many times in his life he would
+come across such battered, unkempt old men, not “men of any worth,” in
+whose souls fifteen kopecks, glasses of vodka, and a profound belief
+that you can’t get on in this life by dishonesty, were equally firmly
+rooted.
+
+Then he grew tired of listening, and told the old man to bring him some
+hay for his bed, There was an iron bedstead with a pillow and a quilt in
+the traveler’s room, and it could be fetched in; but the dead man had
+been lying by it for nearly three days (and perhaps sitting on it just
+before his death), and it would be disagreeable to sleep upon it
+now....
+
+“It’s only half-past seven,” thought Lyzhin, glancing at his watch. “How
+awful it is!”
+
+He was not sleepy, but having nothing to do to pass away the time,
+he lay down and covered himself with a rug. Loshadin went in and out
+several times, clearing away the tea-things; smacking his lips and
+sighing, he kept tramping round the table; at last he took his little
+lamp and went out, and, looking at his long, gray-headed, bent figure
+from behind, Lyzhin thought:
+
+“Just like a magician in an opera.”
+
+It was dark. The moon must have been behind the clouds, as the windows
+and the snow on the window-frames could be seen distinctly.
+
+“Oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm, “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
+
+“Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!” wailed a woman in the loft, or it sounded like it.
+“Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!”
+
+“B-booh!” something outside banged against the wall. “Trah!”
+
+The examining magistrate listened: there was no woman up there, it was
+the wind howling. It was rather cold, and he put his fur coat over his
+rug. As he got warm he thought how remote all this--the storm, and the
+hut, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room--how
+remote it all was from the life he desired for himself, and how alien
+it all was to him, how petty, how uninteresting. If this man had killed
+himself in Moscow or somewhere in the neighborhood, and he had had to
+hold an inquest on him there, it would have been interesting, important,
+and perhaps he might even have been afraid to sleep in the next room to
+the corpse. Here, nearly a thousand miles from Moscow, all this was
+seen somehow in a different light; it was not life, they were not human
+beings, but something only existing “according to the regulation,” as
+Loshadin said; it would leave not the faintest trace in the memory, and
+would be forgotten as soon as he, Lyzhin, drove away from Syrnya. The
+fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but here he was in
+the provinces, the colonies. When one dreamed of playing a leading
+part, of becoming a popular figure, of being, for instance, examining
+magistrate in particularly important cases or prosecutor in a circuit
+court, of being a society lion, one always thought of Moscow. To live,
+one must be in Moscow; here one cared for nothing, one grew easily
+resigned to one’s insignificant position, and only expected one thing of
+life--to get away quickly, quickly. And Lyzhin mentally moved about
+the Moscow streets, went into the familiar houses, met his kindred, his
+comrades, and there was a sweet pang at his heart at the thought that
+he was only twenty-six, and that if in five or ten years he could break
+away from here and get to Moscow, even then it would not be too late
+and he would still have a whole life before him. And as he sank into
+unconsciousness, as his thoughts began to be confused, he imagined the
+long corridor of the court at Moscow, himself delivering a speech, his
+sisters, the orchestra which for some reason kept droning: “Oo-oo-oo-oo!
+Oo-oooo-oo!”
+
+“Booh! Trah!” sounded again. “Booh!”
+
+And he suddenly recalled how one day, when he was talking to the
+bookkeeper in the little office of the Rural Board, a thin, pale
+gentleman with black hair and dark eyes walked in; he had a disagreeable
+look in his eyes such as one sees in people who have slept too long
+after dinner, and it spoilt his delicate, intelligent profile; and
+the high boots he was wearing did not suit him, but looked clumsy. The
+bookkeeper had introduced him: “This is our insurance agent.”
+
+“So that was Lesnitsky,... this same man,” Lyzhin reflected now.
+
+He recalled Lesnitsky’s soft voice, imagined his gait, and it seemed
+to him that someone was walking beside him now with a step like
+Lesnitsky’s.
+
+All at once he felt frightened, his head turned cold.
+
+“Who’s there?” he asked in alarm.
+
+“The conshtable!”
+
+“What do you want here?”
+
+“I have come to ask, your honor--you said this evening that you did not
+want the elder, but I am afraid he may be angry. He told me to go to
+him. Shouldn’t I go?”
+
+“That’s enough, you bother me,” said Lyzhin with vexation, and he
+covered himself up again.
+
+“He may be angry.... I’ll go, your honor. I hope you will be
+comfortable,” and Loshadin went out.
+
+In the passage there was coughing and subdued voices. The witnesses must
+have returned.
+
+“We’ll let those poor beggars get away early to-morrow,...” thought
+the examining magistrate; “we’ll begin the inquest as soon as it is
+daylight.”
+
+He began sinking into forgetfulness when suddenly there were steps
+again, not timid this time but rapid and noisy. There was the slam of a
+door, voices, the scratching of a match....
+
+“Are you asleep? Are you asleep?” Dr. Startchenko was asking him
+hurriedly and angrily as he struck one match after another; he was
+covered with snow, and brought a chill air in with him. “Are you asleep?
+Get up! Let us go to Von Taunitz’s. He has sent his own horses for you.
+Come along. There, at any rate, you will have supper, and sleep like
+a human being. You see I have come for you myself. The horses are
+splendid, we shall get there in twenty minutes.”
+
+“And what time is it now?”
+
+“A quarter past ten.”
+
+Lyzhin, sleepy and discontented, put on his felt overboots, his fur-lined
+coat, his cap and hood, and went out with the doctor. There was not
+a very sharp frost, but a violent and piercing wind was blowing and
+driving along the street the clouds of snow which seemed to be racing
+away in terror: high drifts were heaped up already under the fences and
+at the doorways. The doctor and the examining magistrate got into the
+sledge, and the white coachman bent over them to button up the cover.
+They were both hot.
+
+“Ready!”
+
+They drove through the village. “Cutting a feathery furrow,” thought
+the examining magistrate, listlessly watching the action of the trace
+horse’s legs. There were lights in all the huts, as though it were the
+eve of a great holiday: the peasants had not gone to bed because they
+were afraid of the dead body. The coachman preserved a sullen silence,
+probably he had felt dreary while he was waiting by the Zemstvo hut, and
+now he, too, was thinking of the dead man.
+
+“At the Von Taunitz’s,” said Startchenko, “they all set upon me when
+they heard that you were left to spend the night in the hut, and asked
+me why I did not bring you with me.”
+
+As they drove out of the village, at the turning the coachman suddenly
+shouted at the top of his voice: “Out of the way!”
+
+They caught a glimpse of a man: he was standing up to his knees in
+the snow, moving off the road and staring at the horses. The examining
+magistrate saw a stick with a crook, and a beard and a bag, and he
+fancied that it was Loshadin, and even fancied that he was smiling. He
+flashed by and disappeared.
+
+The road ran at first along the edge of the forest, then along a broad
+forest clearing; they caught glimpses of old pines and a young birch
+copse, and tall, gnarled young oak trees standing singly in the
+clearings where the wood had lately been cut; but soon it was all merged
+in the clouds of snow. The coachman said he could see the forest; the
+examining magistrate could see nothing but the trace horse. The wind
+blew on their backs.
+
+All at once the horses stopped.
+
+“Well, what is it now?” asked Startchenko crossly.
+
+The coachman got down from the box without a word and began running
+round the sledge, treading on his heels; he made larger and larger
+circles, getting further and further away from the sledge, and it looked
+as though he were dancing; at last he came back and began to turn off to
+the right.
+
+“You’ve got off the road, eh?” asked Startchenko.
+
+“It’s all ri-ight....”
+
+Then there was a little village and not a single light in it. Again the
+forest and the fields. Again they lost the road, and again the coachman
+got down from the box and danced round the sledge. The sledge flew
+along a dark avenue, flew swiftly on. And the heated trace horse’s hoofs
+knocked against the sledge. Here there was a fearful roaring sound from
+the trees, and nothing could be seen, as though they were flying on into
+space; and all at once the glaring light at the entrance and the windows
+flashed upon their eyes, and they heard the good-natured, drawn-out
+barking of dogs. They had arrived.
+
+While they were taking off their fur coats and their felt boots below,
+“Un Petit Verre de Clicquot” was being played upon the piano overhead,
+and they could hear the children beating time with their feet.
+Immediately on going in they were aware of the snug warmth and special
+smell of the old apartments of a mansion where, whatever the weather
+outside, life is so warm and clean and comfortable.
+
+“That’s capital!” said Von Taunitz, a fat man with an incredibly thick
+neck and with whiskers, as he shook the examining magistrate’s
+hand. “That’s capital! You are very welcome, delighted to make your
+acquaintance. We are colleagues to some extent, you know. At one time I
+was deputy prosecutor; but not for long, only two years. I came here to
+look after the estate, and here I have grown old--an old fogey, in fact.
+You are very welcome,” he went on, evidently restraining his voice so as
+not to speak too loud; he was going upstairs with his guests. “I have no
+wife, she’s dead. But here, I will introduce my daughters,” and turning
+round, he shouted down the stairs in a voice of thunder: “Tell Ignat to
+have the sledge ready at eight o’clock to-morrow morning.”
+
+His four daughters, young and pretty girls, all wearing gray dresses and
+with their hair done up in the same style, and their cousin, also young
+and attractive, with her children, were in the drawing-room. Startchenko,
+who knew them already, began at once begging them to sing something, and
+two of the young ladies spent a long time declaring they could not sing
+and that they had no music; then the cousin sat down to the piano, and
+with trembling voices, they sang a duet from “The Queen of Spades.”
+ Again “Un Petit Verre de Clicquot” was played, and the children skipped
+about, beating time with their feet. And Startchenko pranced about too.
+Everybody laughed.
+
+Then the children said good-night and went off to bed. The examining
+magistrate laughed, danced a quadrille, flirted, and kept wondering
+whether it was not all a dream? The kitchen of the Zemstvo hut, the
+heap of hay in the corner, the rustle of the beetles, the revolting
+poverty-stricken surroundings, the voices of the witnesses, the wind,
+the snow storm, the danger of being lost; and then all at once this
+splendid, brightly lighted room, the sounds of the piano, the lovely
+girls, the curly-headed children, the gay, happy laughter--such a
+transformation seemed to him like a fairy tale, and it seemed incredible
+that such transitions were possible at the distance of some two miles in
+the course of one hour. And dreary thoughts prevented him from enjoying
+himself, and he kept thinking this was not life here, but bits of life
+fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no
+conclusions from it; and he even felt sorry for these girls, who were
+living and would end their lives in the wilds, in a province far away
+from the center of culture, where nothing is accidental, but everything
+is in accordance with reason and law, and where, for instance, every
+suicide is intelligible, so that one can explain why it has happened and
+what is its significance in the general scheme of things. He imagined
+that if the life surrounding him here in the wilds were not intelligible
+to him, and if he did not see it, it meant that it did not exist at all.
+
+At supper the conversation turned on Lesnitsky.
+
+“He left a wife and child,” said Startchenko. “I would forbid
+neurasthenics and all people whose nervous system is out of order to
+marry, I would deprive them of the right and possibility of multiplying
+their kind. To bring into the world nervous, invalid children is a
+crime.”
+
+“He was an unfortunate young man,” said Von Taunitz, sighing gently and
+shaking his head. “What a lot one must suffer and think about before
+one brings oneself to take one’s own life,... a young life! Such a
+misfortune may happen in any family, and that is awful. It is hard to
+bear such a thing, insufferable....”
+
+And all the girls listened in silence with grave faces, looking at their
+father. Lyzhin felt that he, too, must say something, but he couldn’t
+think of anything, and merely said:
+
+“Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon.”
+
+He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed covered with a quilt under
+which there were fine clean sheets, but for some reason did not feel
+comfortable: perhaps because the doctor and Von Taunitz were, for a long
+time, talking in the adjoining room, and overhead he heard, through the
+ceiling and in the stove, the wind roaring just as in the Zemstvo hut,
+and as plaintively howling: “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
+
+Von Taunitz’s wife had died two years before, and he was still unable
+to resign himself to his loss and, whatever he was talking about, always
+mentioned his wife; and there was no trace of a prosecutor left about
+him now.
+
+“Is it possible that I may some day come to such a condition?” thought
+Lyzhin, as he fell asleep, still hearing through the wall his host’s
+subdued, as it were bereaved, voice.
+
+The examining magistrate did not sleep soundly. He felt hot and
+uncomfortable, and it seemed to him in his sleep that he was not at
+Von Taunitz’s, and not in a soft clean bed, but still in the hay at the
+Zemstvo hut, hearing the subdued voices of the witnesses; he fancied
+that Lesnitsky was close by, not fifteen paces away. In his dreams he
+remembered how the insurance agent, black-haired and pale, wearing
+dusty high boots, had come into the bookkeeper’s office. “This is our
+insurance agent....”
+
+Then he dreamed that Lesnitsky and Loshadin the constable were walking
+through the open country in the snow, side by side, supporting each
+other; the snow was whirling about their heads, the wind was blowing on
+their backs, but they walked on, singing: “We go on, and on, and
+on....”
+
+The old man was like a magician in an opera, and both of them were
+singing as though they were on the stage:
+
+“We go on, and on, and on!... You are in the warmth, in the light
+and snugness, but we are walking in the frost and the storm, through the
+deep snow.... We know nothing of ease, we know nothing of joy....
+We bear all the burden of this life, yours and ours.... Oo-oo-oo! We
+go on, and on, and on....”
+
+Lyzhin woke and sat up in bed. What a confused, bad dream! And why did
+he dream of the constable and the agent together? What nonsense! And now
+while Lyzhin’s heart was throbbing violently and he was sitting on his
+bed, holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him that there really
+was something in common between the lives of the insurance agent and the
+constable. Don’t they really go side by side holding each other up? Some
+tie unseen, but significant and essential, existed between them, and
+even between them and Von Taunitz and between all men--all men; in this
+life, even in the remotest desert, nothing is accidental, everything
+is full of one common idea, everything has one soul, one aim, and to
+understand it it is not enough to think, it is not enough to reason, one
+must have also, it seems, the gift of insight into life, a gift which is
+evidently not bestowed on all. And the unhappy man who had broken
+down, who had killed himself--the “neurasthenic,” as the doctor called
+him--and the old peasant who spent every day of his life going from one
+man to another, were only accidental, were only fragments of life for
+one who thought of his own life as accidental, but were parts of one
+organism--marvelous and rational--for one who thought of his own life as
+part of that universal whole and understood it. So thought Lyzhin, and
+it was a thought that had long lain hidden in his soul, and only now it
+was unfolded broadly and clearly to his consciousness.
+
+He lay down and began to drop asleep; and again they were going along
+together, singing: “We go on, and on, and on.... We take from life
+what is hardest and bitterest in it, and we leave you what is easy and
+joyful; and sitting at supper, you can coldly and sensibly discuss why
+we suffer and perish, and why we are not as sound and as satisfied as
+you.”
+
+What they were singing had occurred to his mind before, but the thought
+was somewhere in the background behind his other thoughts, and flickered
+timidly like a faraway light in foggy weather. And he felt that this
+suicide and the peasant’s sufferings lay upon his conscience, too; to
+resign himself to the fact that these people, submissive to their fate,
+should take up the burden of what was hardest and gloomiest in life--how
+awful it was! To accept this, and to desire for himself a life full
+of light and movement among happy and contented people, and to be
+continually dreaming of such, means dreaming of fresh suicides of men
+crushed by toil and anxiety, or of men weak and outcast whom people only
+talk of sometimes at supper with annoyance or mockery, without going to
+their help.... And again:
+
+“We go on, and on, and on...” as though someone were beating with a
+hammer on his temples.
+
+He woke early in the morning with a headache, roused by a noise; in the
+next room Von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:
+
+“It’s impossible for you to go now. Look what’s going on outside.
+Don’t argue, you had better ask the coachman; he won’t take you in such
+weather for a million.”
+
+“But it’s only two miles,” said the doctor in an imploring voice.
+
+“Well, if it were only half a mile. If you can’t, then you can’t.
+Directly you drive out of the gates it is perfect hell, you would be off
+the road in a minute. Nothing will induce me to let you go, you can say
+what you like.”
+
+“It’s bound to be quieter towards evening,” said the peasant who was
+heating the stove.
+
+And in the next room the doctor began talking of the rigorous climate
+and its influence on the character of the Russian, of the long
+winters which, by preventing movement from place to place, hinder
+the intellectual development of the people; and Lyzhin listened with
+vexation to these observations and looked out of window at the snow
+drifts which were piled on the fence. He gazed at the white dust which
+covered the whole visible expanse, at the trees which bowed their heads
+despairingly to right and then to left, listened to the howling and the
+banging, and thought gloomily:
+
+“Well, what moral can be drawn from it? It’s a blizzard and that is all
+about it....”
+
+At midday they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house; they
+went to the windows.
+
+“And Lesnitsky is lying there,” thought Lyzhin, watching the whirling
+snow, which raced furiously round and round upon the drifts. “Lesnitsky
+is lying there, the witnesses are waiting....”
+
+They talked of the weather, saying that the snowstorm usually lasted
+two days and nights, rarely longer. At six o’clock they had dinner, then
+they played cards, sang, danced; at last they had supper. The day was
+over, they went to bed.
+
+In the night, towards morning, it all subsided. When they got up and
+looked out of window, the bare willows with their weakly drooping
+branches were standing perfectly motionless; it was dull and still, as
+though nature now were ashamed of its orgy, of its mad nights, and the
+license it had given to its passions. The horses, harnessed tandem, had
+been waiting at the front door since five o’clock in the morning. When
+it was fully daylight the doctor and the examining magistrate put on
+their fur coats and felt boots, and, saying good-by to their host, went
+out.
+
+At the steps beside the coachman stood the familiar figure of the
+constable, Ilya Loshadin, with an old leather bag across his shoulder
+and no cap on his head, covered with snow all over, and his face was
+red and wet with perspiration. The footman who had come out to help the
+gentlemen and cover their legs looked at him sternly and said:
+
+“What are you standing here for, you old devil? Get away!”
+
+“Your honor, the people are anxious,” said Loshadin, smiling naively all
+over his face, and evidently pleased at seeing at last the people he
+had waited for so long. “The people are very uneasy, the children are
+crying.... They thought, your honor, that you had gone back to the
+town again. Show us the heavenly mercy, our benefactors!...”
+
+The doctor and the examining magistrate said nothing, got into the
+sledge, and drove to Syrnya.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER
+
+A FIRST-CLASS passenger who had just dined at the station and drunk a
+little too much lay down on the velvet-covered seat, stretched himself
+out luxuriously, and sank into a doze. After a nap of no more than five
+minutes, he looked with oily eyes at his _vis-a-vis,_ gave a smirk, and
+said:
+
+“My father of blessed memory used to like to have his heels tickled by
+peasant women after dinner. I am just like him, with this difference,
+that after dinner I always like my tongue and my brains gently
+stimulated. Sinful man as I am, I like empty talk on a full stomach.
+Will you allow me to have a chat with you?”
+
+“I shall be delighted,” answered the _vis-a-vis._
+
+“After a good dinner the most trifling subject is sufficient to arouse
+devilishly great thoughts in my brain. For instance, we saw just now
+near the refreshment bar two young men, and you heard one congratulate
+the other on being celebrated. ‘I congratulate you,’ he said; ‘you are
+already a celebrity and are beginning to win fame.’ Evidently actors or
+journalists of microscopic dimensions. But they are not the point. The
+question that is occupying my mind at the moment, sir, is exactly what
+is to be understood by the word _fame_ or _charity_. What do you
+think? Pushkin called fame a bright patch on a ragged garment; we all
+understand it as Pushkin does--that is, more or less subjectively--but
+no one has yet given a clear, logical definition of the word.... I
+would give a good deal for such a definition!”
+
+“Why do you feel such a need for it?”
+
+“You see, if we knew what fame is, the means of attaining it might
+also perhaps be known to us,” said the first-class passenger, after a
+moment’s thought. “I must tell you, sir, that when I was younger I strove
+after celebrity with every fiber of my being. To be popular was my
+craze, so to speak. For the sake of it I studied, worked, sat up at
+night, neglected my meals. And I fancy, as far as I can judge without
+partiality, I had all the natural gifts for attaining it. To begin with,
+I am an engineer by profession. In the course of my life I have built
+in Russia some two dozen magnificent bridges, I have laid aqueducts
+for three towns; I have worked in Russia, in England, in Belgium....
+Secondly, I am the author of several special treatises in my own
+line. And thirdly, my dear sir, I have from a boy had a weakness for
+chemistry. Studying that science in my leisure hours, I discovered
+methods of obtaining certain organic acids, so that you will find my
+name in all the foreign manuals of chemistry. I have always been in the
+service, I have risen to the grade of actual civil councilor, and I have
+an unblemished record. I will not fatigue your attention by enumerating
+my works and my merits, I will only say that I have done far more than
+some celebrities. And yet here I am in my old age, I am getting ready
+for my coffin, so to say, and I am as celebrated as that black dog
+yonder running on the embankment.”
+
+“How can you tell? Perhaps you are celebrated.”
+
+“H’m! Well, we will test it at once. Tell me, have you ever heard the
+name Krikunov?”
+
+The _vis-a-vis_ raised his eyes to the ceiling, thought a minute, and
+laughed.
+
+“No, I haven’t heard it,...” he said.
+
+“That is my surname. You, a man of education, getting on in years, have
+never heard of me--a convincing proof! It is evident that in my efforts
+to gain fame I have not done the right thing at all: I did not know the
+right way to set to work, and, trying to catch fame by the tail, got on
+the wrong side of her.”
+
+“What is the right way to set to work?”
+
+“Well, the devil only knows! Talent, you say? Genius? Originality? Not
+a bit of it, sir!... People have lived and made a career side by side
+with me who were worthless, trivial, and even contemptible compared with
+me. They did not do one-tenth of the work I did, did not put themselves
+out, were not distinguished for their talents, and did not make
+an effort to be celebrated, but just look at them! Their names are
+continually in the newspapers and on men’s lips! If you are not tired of
+listening I will illustrate it by an example. Some years ago I built
+a bridge in the town of K. I must tell you that the dullness of that
+scurvy little town was terrible. If it had not been for women and cards
+I believe I should have gone out of my mind. Well, it’s an old story:
+I was so bored that I got into an affair with a singer. Everyone was
+enthusiastic about her, the devil only knows why; to my thinking she
+was--what shall I say?--an ordinary, commonplace creature, like lots
+of others. The hussy was empty-headed, ill-tempered, greedy, and what’s
+more, she was a fool.
+
+“She ate and drank a vast amount, slept till five o clock in the
+afternoon--and I fancy did nothing else. She was looked upon as a
+cocotte, and that was indeed her profession; but when people wanted to
+refer to her in a literary fashion, they called her an actress and
+a singer. I used to be devoted to the theatre, and therefore this
+fraudulent pretense of being an actress made me furiously indignant. My
+young lady had not the slightest right to call herself an actress or
+a singer. She was a creature entirely devoid of talent, devoid of
+feeling--a pitiful creature one may say. As far as I can judge she sang
+disgustingly. The whole charm of her ‘art’ lay in her kicking up her
+legs on every suitable occasion, and not being embarrassed when
+people walked into her dressing-room. She usually selected translated
+vaudevilles, with singing in them, and opportunities for disporting
+herself in male attire, in tights. In fact it was--ough! Well, I ask
+your attention. As I remember now, a public ceremony took place to
+celebrate the opening of the newly constructed bridge. There was a
+religious service, there were speeches, telegrams, and so on. I hung
+about my cherished creation, you know, all the while afraid that my
+heart would burst with the excitement of an author. It’s an old story and
+there’s no need for false modesty, and so I will tell you that my bridge
+was a magnificent work! It was not a bridge but a picture, a perfect
+delight! And who would not have been excited when the whole town came to
+the opening? ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘now the eyes of all the public will be
+on me! Where shall I hide myself?’ Well, I need not have worried myself,
+sir--alas! Except the official personages, no one took the slightest
+notice of me. They stood in a crowd on the river-bank, gazed like sheep
+at the bridge, and did not concern themselves to know who had built
+it. And it was from that time, by the way, that I began to hate our
+estimable public--damnation take them! Well, to continue. All at once
+the public became agitated; a whisper ran through the crowd,... a
+smile came on their faces, their shoulders began to move. ‘They must
+have seen me,’ I thought. A likely idea! I looked, and my singer, with a
+train of young scamps, was making her way through the crowd. The eyes of
+the crowd were hurriedly following this procession. A whisper began in a
+thousand voices: ‘That’s so-and-so.... Charming! Bewitching!’ Then it
+was they noticed me.... A couple of young milksops, local amateurs
+of the scenic art, I presume, looked at me, exchanged glances,
+and whispered: ‘That’s her lover!’ How do you like that? And an
+unprepossessing individual in a top-hat, with a chin that badly needed
+shaving, hung round me, shifting from one foot to the other, then turned
+to me with the words:
+
+“‘Do you know who that lady is, walking on the other bank? That’s
+so-and-so.... Her voice is beneath all criticism, but she has a most
+perfect mastery of it!...’
+
+“‘Can you tell me,’ I asked the unprepossessing individual, ‘who built
+this bridge?’
+
+“‘I really don’t know,’ answered the individual; some engineer, I
+expect.’
+
+“‘And who built the cathedral in your town?’ I asked again.
+
+“‘I really can’t tell you.’
+
+“Then I asked him who was considered the best teacher in K., who the
+best architect, and to all my questions the unprepossessing individual
+answered that he did not know.
+
+“‘And tell me, please,’ I asked in conclusion, with whom is that singer
+living?’
+
+“‘With some engineer called Krikunov.’
+
+“Well, how do you like that, sir? But to proceed. There are no
+minnesingers or bards nowadays, and celebrity is created almost
+exclusively by the newspapers. The day after the dedication of the
+bridge, I greedily snatched up the local _Messenger,_ and looked for
+myself in it. I spent a long time running my eyes over all the four
+pages, and at last there it was--hurrah! I began reading: ‘Yesterday in
+beautiful weather, before a vast concourse of people, in the presence
+of His Excellency the Governor of the province, so-and-so, and other
+dignitaries, the ceremony of the dedication of the newly constructed
+bridge took place,’ and so on.... Towards the end: Our talented
+actress so-and-so, the favorite of the K. public, was present at the
+dedication looking very beautiful. I need not say that her arrival
+created a sensation. The star was wearing...’ and so on. They might
+have given me one word! Half a word. Petty as it seems, I actually cried
+with vexation!
+
+“I consoled myself with the reflection that the provinces are stupid,
+and one could expect nothing of them and for celebrity one must go
+to the intellectual centers--to Petersburg and to Moscow. And as it
+happened, at that very time there was a work of mine in Petersburg which
+I had sent in for a competition. The date on which the result was to be
+declared was at hand.
+
+“I took leave of K. and went to Petersburg. It is a long journey from
+K. to Petersburg, and that I might not be bored on the journey I took a
+reserved compartment and--well--of course, I took my singer. We set off,
+and all the way we were eating, drinking champagne, and--tra-la-la! But
+behold, at last we reach the intellectual center. I arrived on the very
+day the result was declared, and had the satisfaction, my dear sir, of
+celebrating my own success: my work received the first prize. Hurrah!
+Next day I went out along the Nevsky and spent seventy kopecks on
+various newspapers. I hastened to my hotel room, lay down on the sofa,
+and, controlling a quiver of excitement, made haste to read. I ran
+through one newspaper--nothing. I ran through a second--nothing either;
+my God! At last, in the fourth, I lighted upon the following paragraph:
+‘Yesterday the well-known provincial actress so-and-so arrived by
+express in Petersburg. We note with pleasure that the climate of the
+South has had a beneficial effect on our fair friend; her charming stage
+appearance...’ and I don’t remember the rest! Much lower down than
+that paragraph I found, printed in the smallest type: ‘First prize in the
+competition was adjudged to an engineer called so-and-so.’ That was
+all! And to make things better, they even misspelt my name: instead of
+Krikunov it was Kirkutlov. So much for your intellectual center! But
+that was not all.... By the time I left Petersburg, a month later,
+all the newspapers were vying with one another in discussing our
+incomparable, divine, highly talented actress, and my mistress was
+referred to, not by her surname, but by her Christian name and her
+father’s....
+
+“Some years later I was in Moscow. I was summoned there by a letter, in
+the mayor’s own handwriting, to undertake a work for which Moscow, in
+its newspapers, had been clamoring for over a hundred years. In
+the intervals of my work I delivered five public lectures, with a
+philanthropic object, in one of the museums there. One would have
+thought that was enough to make one known to the whole town for three
+days at least, wouldn’t one? But, alas! not a single Moscow gazette
+said a word about me. There was something about houses on fire, about
+an operetta, sleeping town councilors, drunken shop keepers--about
+everything; but about my work, my plans, my lectures--mum. And a nice
+set they are in Moscow! I got into a tram.... It was packed full;
+there were ladies and military men and students of both sexes, creatures
+of all sorts in couples.
+
+“‘I am told the town council has sent for an engineer to plan such and
+such a work!’ I said to my neighbor, so loudly that all the tram could
+hear. ‘Do you know the name of the engineer?’
+
+“My neighbor shook his head. The rest of the public took a cursory
+glance at me, and in all their eyes I read: ‘I don’t know.’
+
+“‘I am told that there is someone giving lectures in such and such a
+museum?’ I persisted, trying to get up a conversation. ‘I hear it is
+interesting.’
+
+“No one even nodded. Evidently they had not all of them heard of the
+lectures, and the ladies were not even aware of the existence of the
+museum. All that would not have mattered, but imagine, my dear sir, the
+people suddenly leaped to their feet and struggled to the windows. What
+was it? What was the matter?
+
+“‘Look, look!’ my neighbor nudged me. ‘Do you see that dark man getting
+into that cab? That’s the famous runner, King!’
+
+“And the whole tram began talking breathlessly of the runner who was
+then absorbing the brains of Moscow.
+
+“I could give you ever so many other examples, but I think that is
+enough. Now let us assume that I am mistaken about myself, that I am
+a wretchedly boastful and incompetent person; but apart from myself
+I might point to many of my contemporaries, men remarkable for their
+talent and industry, who have nevertheless died unrecognized.
+Are Russian navigators, chemists, physicists, mechanicians, and
+agriculturists popular with the public? Do our cultivated masses know
+anything of Russian artists, sculptors, and literary men? Some old
+literary hack, hard-working and talented, will wear away the doorstep of
+the publishers’ offices for thirty-three years, cover reams of paper, be
+had up for libel twenty times, and yet not step beyond his ant-heap. Can
+you mention to me a single representative of our literature who would
+have become celebrated if the rumor had not been spread over the earth
+that he had been killed in a duel, gone out of his mind, been sent into
+exile, or had cheated at cards?”
+
+The first-class passenger was so excited that he dropped his cigar out
+of his mouth and got up.
+
+“Yes,” he went on fiercely, “and side by side with these people I can
+quote you hundreds of all sorts of singers, acrobats, buffoons, whose
+names are known to every baby. Yes!”
+
+The door creaked, there was a draught, and an individual of forbidding
+aspect, wearing an Inverness coat, a top-hat, and blue spectacles,
+walked into the carriage. The individual looked round at the seats,
+frowned, and went on further.
+
+“Do you know who that is?” there came a timid whisper from the furthest
+corner of the compartment.
+
+“That is N. N., the famous Tula cardsharper who was had up in connection
+with the Y. bank affair.”
+
+“There you are!” laughed the first-class passenger. “He knows a Tula
+cardsharper, but ask him whether he knows Semiradsky, Tchaykovsky, or
+Solovyov the philosopher--he’ll shake his head.... It swinish!”
+
+Three minutes passed in silence.
+
+“Allow me in my turn to ask you a question,” said the _vis-a-vis_
+timidly, clearing his throat. “Do you know the name of Pushkov?”
+
+“Pushkov? H’m! Pushkov.... No, I don’t know it!”
+
+“That is my name,...” said the _vis-a-vis,_, overcome with
+embarrassment. “Then you don’t know it? And yet I have been a professor
+at one of the Russian universities for thirty-five years,... a member
+of the Academy of Sciences,... have published more than one work....”
+
+The first-class passenger and the _vis-a-vis_ looked at each other and
+burst out laughing.
+
+
+
+
+A TRAGIC ACTOR
+
+IT was the benefit night of Fenogenov, the tragic actor. They were
+acting “Prince Serebryany.” The tragedian himself was playing Vyazemsky;
+Limonadov, the stage manager, was playing Morozov; Madame Beobahtov,
+Elena. The performance was a grand success. The tragedian accomplished
+wonders indeed. When he was carrying off Elena, he held her in one hand
+above his head as he dashed across the stage. He shouted, hissed, banged
+with his feet, tore his coat across his chest. When he refused to fight
+Morozov, he trembled all over as nobody ever trembles in reality, and
+gasped loudly. The theatre shook with applause. There were endless
+calls. Fenogenov was presented with a silver cigarette-case and a
+bouquet tied with long ribbons. The ladies waved their handkerchiefs and
+urged their men to applaud, many shed tears.... But the one who was
+the most enthusiastic and most excited was Masha, daughter of Sidoretsky
+the police captain. She was sitting in the first row of the stalls
+beside her papa; she was ecstatic and could not take her eyes off the
+stage even between the acts. Her delicate little hands and feet were
+quivering, her eyes were full of tears, her cheeks turned paler and
+paler. And no wonder--she was at the theatre for the first time in her
+life.
+
+“How well they act! how splendidly!” she said to her papa the police
+captain, every time the curtain fell. “How good Fenogenov is!”
+
+And if her papa had been capable of reading faces he would have read
+on his daughter’s pale little countenance a rapture that was
+almost anguish. She was overcome by the acting, by the play, by the
+surroundings. When the regimental band began playing between the acts,
+she closed her eyes, exhausted.
+
+“Papa!” she said to the police captain during the last interval, “go
+behind the scenes and ask them all to dinner to-morrow!”
+
+The police captain went behind the scenes, praised them for all their
+fine acting, and complimented Madame Beobahtov.
+
+“Your lovely face demands a canvas, and I only wish I could wield the
+brush!”
+
+And with a scrape, he thereupon invited the company to dinner.
+
+“All except the fair sex,” he whispered. “I don’t want the actresses,
+for I have a daughter.”
+
+Next day the actors dined at the police captain’s. Only three turned
+up, the manager Limonadov, the tragedian Fenogenov, and the comic
+man Vodolazov; the others sent excuses. The dinner was a dull affair.
+Limonadov kept telling the police captain how much he respected him, and
+how highly he thought of all persons in authority; Vodolazov mimicked
+drunken merchants and Armenians; and Fenogenov (on his passport his name
+was Knish), a tall, stout Little Russian with black eyes and frowning
+brow, declaimed “At the portals of the great,” and “To be or not to
+be.” Limonadov, with tears in his eyes, described his interview with the
+former Governor, General Kanyutchin. The police captain listened, was
+bored, and smiled affably. He was well satisfied, although Limonadov
+smelt strongly of burnt feathers, and Fenogenov was wearing a hired
+dress coat and boots trodden down at heel. They pleased his daughter and
+made her lively, and that was enough for him. And Masha never took her
+eyes off the actors. She had never before seen such clever, exceptional
+people!
+
+In the evening the police captain and Masha were at the theatre again.
+A week later the actors dined at the police captain’s again, and after
+that came almost every day either to dinner or supper. Masha became more
+and more devoted to the theatre, and went there every evening.
+
+She fell in love with the tragedian. One fine morning, when the police
+captain had gone to meet the bishop, Masha ran away with Limonadov’s
+company and married her hero on the way. After celebrating the wedding,
+the actors composed a long and touching letter and sent it to the police
+captain.
+
+It was the work of their combined efforts.
+
+“Bring out the motive, the motive!” Limonadov kept saying as he dictated
+to the comic man. “Lay on the respect.... These official chaps like
+it. Add something of a sort... to draw a tear.”
+
+The answer to this letter was most discomforting. The police captain
+disowned his daughter for marrying, as he said, “a stupid, idle Little
+Russian with no fixed home or occupation.”
+
+And the day after this answer was received Masha was writing to her
+father.
+
+“Papa, he beats me! Forgive us!”
+
+He had beaten her, beaten her behind the scenes, in the presence of
+Limonadov, the washerwoman, and two lighting men. He remembered how,
+four days before the wedding, he was sitting in the London Tavern with
+the whole company, and all were talking about Masha. The company were
+advising him to “chance it,” and Limonadov, with tears in his
+eyes urged: “It would be stupid and irrational to let slip such an
+opportunity! Why, for a sum like that one would go to Siberia, let alone
+getting married! When you marry and have a theatre of your own, take me
+into your company. I shan’t be master then, you’ll be master.”
+
+Fenogenov remembered it, and muttered with clenched fists:
+
+“If he doesn’t send money I’ll smash her! I won’t let myself be made a
+fool of, damn my soul!”
+
+At one provincial town the company tried to give Masha the slip, but
+Masha found out, ran to the station, and got there when the second bell
+had rung and the actors had all taken their seats.
+
+“I’ve been shamefully treated by your father,” said the tragedian; “all
+is over between us!”
+
+And though the carriage was full of people, she went down on her knees
+and held out her hands, imploring him:
+
+“I love you! Don’t drive me away, Kondraty Ivanovitch,” she besought
+him. “I can’t live without you!”
+
+They listened to her entreaties, and after consulting together, took
+her into the company as a “countess”--the name they used for the minor
+actresses who usually came on to the stage in crowds or in dumb parts.
+To begin with Masha used to play maid-servants and pages, but when
+Madame Beobahtov, the flower of Limonadov’s company, eloped, they made
+her _ingenue_. She acted badly, lisped, and was nervous. She soon grew
+used to it, however, and began to be liked by the audience. Fenogenov
+was much displeased.
+
+“To call her an actress!” he used to say. “She has no figure, no
+deportment, nothing whatever but silliness.”
+
+In one provincial town the company acted Schiller’s “Robbers.”
+ Fenogenov played Franz, Masha, Amalie. The tragedian shouted and
+quivered. Masha repeated her part like a well-learnt lesson, and the
+play would have gone off as they generally did had it not been for
+a trifling mishap. Everything went well up to the point where Franz
+declares his love for Amalie and she seizes his sword. The tragedian
+shouted, hissed, quivered, and squeezed Masha in his iron embrace. And
+Masha, instead of repulsing him and crying “Hence!” trembled in his
+arms like a bird and did not move,... she seemed petrified.
+
+“Have pity on me!” she whispered in his ear. “Oh, have pity on me! I am
+so miserable!”
+
+“You don’t know your part! Listen to the prompter!” hissed the
+tragedian, and he thrust his sword into her hand.
+
+After the performance, Limonadov and Fenogenov were sitting in the
+ticket box-office engaged in conversation.
+
+“Your wife does not learn her part, you are right there,” the manager
+was saying. “She doesn’t know her line.... Every man has his own
+line,... but she doesn’t know hers....”
+
+Fenogenov listened, sighed, and scowled and scowled.
+
+Next morning, Masha was sitting in a little general shop writing:
+
+“Papa, he beats me! Forgive us! Send us some money!”
+
+
+
+
+A TRANSGRESSION
+
+A COLLEGIATE assessor called Miguev stopped at a telegraph-post in the
+course of his evening walk and heaved a deep sigh. A week before, as he
+was returning home from his evening walk, he had been overtaken at that
+very spot by his former housemaid, Agnia, who said to him viciously:
+
+“Wait a bit! I’ll cook you such a crab that’ll teach you to ruin
+innocent girls! I’ll leave the baby at your door, and I’ll have the law
+of you, and I’ll tell your wife, too....”
+
+And she demanded that he should put five thousand roubles into the
+bank in her name. Miguev remembered it, heaved a sigh, and once
+more reproached himself with heartfelt repentance for the momentary
+infatuation which had caused him so much worry and misery.
+
+When he reached his bungalow, he sat down to rest on the doorstep. It
+was just ten o’clock, and a bit of the moon peeped out from behind
+the clouds. There was not a soul in the street nor near the bungalows;
+elderly summer visitors were already going to bed, while young ones were
+walking in the wood. Feeling in both his pockets for a match to light
+his cigarette, Miguev brought his elbow into contact with something
+soft. He looked idly at his right elbow, and his face was instantly
+contorted by a look of as much horror as though he had seen a snake
+beside him. On the step at the very door lay a bundle. Something oblong
+in shape was wrapped up in something--judging by the feel of it,
+a wadded quilt. One end of the bundle was a little open, and the
+collegiate assessor, putting in his hand, felt something damp and warm.
+He leaped on to his feet in horror, and looked about him like a criminal
+trying to escape from his warders....
+
+“She has left it!” he muttered wrathfully through his teeth, clenching
+his fists. “Here it lies.... Here lies my transgression! O Lord!”
+
+He was numb with terror, anger, and shame... What was he to do now?
+What would his wife say if she found out? What would his colleagues at
+the office say? His Excellency would be sure to dig him in the ribs,
+guffaw, and say: “I congratulate you!... He-he-he! Though your beard
+is gray, your heart is gay.... You are a rogue, Semyon Erastovitch!”
+ The whole colony of summer visitors would know his secret now, and
+probably the respectable mothers of families would shut their doors to
+him. Such incidents always get into the papers, and the humble name of
+Miguev would be published all over Russia....
+
+The middle window of the bungalow was open and he could distinctly hear
+his wife, Anna Filippovna, laying the table for supper; in the yard
+close to the gate Yermolay, the porter, was plaintively strumming on the
+balalaika. The baby had only to wake up and begin to cry, and the secret
+would be discovered. Miguev was conscious of an overwhelming desire to
+make haste.
+
+“Haste, haste!...” he muttered, “this minute, before anyone sees.
+I’ll carry it away and lay it on somebody’s doorstep....”
+
+Miguev took the bundle in one hand and quietly, with a deliberate step
+to avoid awakening suspicion, went down the street....
+
+“A wonderfully nasty position!” he reflected, trying to assume an air of
+unconcern. “A collegiate assessor walking down the street with a baby!
+Good heavens! if anyone sees me and understands the position, I am
+done for.... I’d better put it on this doorstep.... No, stay, the
+windows are open and perhaps someone is looking. Where shall I put it?
+I know! I’ll take it to the merchant Myelkin’s.... Merchants are rich
+people and tenderhearted; very likely they will say thank you and adopt
+it.”
+
+And Miguev made up his mind to take the baby to Myelkin’s, although the
+merchant’s villa was in the furthest street, close to the river.
+
+“If only it does not begin screaming or wriggle out of the bundle,”
+ thought the collegiate assessor. “This is indeed a pleasant surprise!
+Here I am carrying a human being under my arm as though it were a
+portfolio. A human being, alive, with soul, with feelings like anyone
+else.... If by good luck the Myelkins adopt him, he may turn out
+somebody.... Maybe he will become a professor, a great general, an
+author.... Anything may happen! Now I am carrying him under my arm
+like a bundle of rubbish, and perhaps in thirty or forty years I may not
+dare to sit down in his presence....”
+
+As Miguev was walking along a narrow, deserted alley, beside a long
+row of fences, in the thick black shade of the lime trees, it suddenly
+struck him that he was doing something very cruel and criminal.
+
+“How mean it is really!” he thought. “So mean that one can’t imagine
+anything meaner.... Why are we shifting this poor baby from door to
+door? It’s not its fault that it’s been born. It’s done us no harm. We
+are scoundrels.... We take our pleasure, and the innocent babies have
+to pay the penalty. Only to think of all this wretched business! I’ve
+done wrong and the child has a cruel fate before it. If I lay it at the
+Myelkins’ door, they’ll send it to the foundling hospital, and there it
+will grow up among strangers, in mechanical routine,... no love,
+no petting, no spoiling.... And then he’ll be apprenticed to a
+shoemaker,... he’ll take to drink, will learn to use filthy language,
+will go hungry. A shoemaker! and he the son of a collegiate assessor, of
+good family.... He is my flesh and blood,... ”
+
+Miguev came out of the shade of the lime trees into the bright moonlight
+of the open road, and opening the bundle, he looked at the baby.
+
+“Asleep!” he murmured. “You little rascal! why, you’ve an aquiline nose
+like your father’s.... He sleeps and doesn’t feel that it’s his own
+father looking at him!... It’s a drama, my boy... Well, well, you
+must forgive me. Forgive me, old boy.... It seems it’s your fate....”
+
+The collegiate assessor blinked and felt a spasm running down his
+cheeks.... He wrapped up the baby, put him under his arm, and strode
+on. All the way to the Myelkins’ villa social questions were swarming in
+his brain and conscience was gnawing in his bosom.
+
+“If I were a decent, honest man,” he thought, “I should damn everything,
+go with this baby to Anna Filippovna, fall on my knees before her,
+and say: ‘Forgive me! I have sinned! Torture me, but we won’t ruin an
+innocent child. We have no children; let us adopt him!’ She’s a good
+sort, she’d consent.... And then my child would be with me....
+Ech!”
+
+He reached the Myelkins’ villa and stood still hesitating. He imagined
+himself in the parlor at home, sitting reading the paper while a little
+boy with an aquiline nose played with the tassels of his dressing gown.
+At the same time visions forced themselves on his brain of his winking
+colleagues, and of his Excellency digging him in the ribs and
+guffawing.... Besides the pricking of his conscience, there was
+something warm, sad, and tender in his heart....
+
+Cautiously the collegiate assessor laid the baby on the verandah step
+and waved his hand. Again he felt a spasm run over his face....
+
+“Forgive me, old fellow! I am a scoundrel,” he muttered. “Don’t remember
+evil against me.”
+
+He stepped back, but immediately cleared his throat resolutely and said:
+
+“Oh, come what will! Damn it all! I’ll take him, and let people say what
+they like!”
+
+Miguev took the baby and strode rapidly back.
+
+“Let them say what they like,” he thought. “I’ll go at once, fall on
+my knees, and say: ‘Anna Filippovna!’ Anna is a good sort, she’ll
+understand.... And we’ll bring him up.... If it’s a boy we’ll call
+him Vladimir, and if it’s a girl we’ll call her Anna! Anyway, it will be
+a comfort in our old age.”
+
+And he did as he determined. Weeping and almost faint with shame and
+terror, full of hope and vague rapture, he went into his bungalow, went
+up to his wife, and fell on his knees before her.
+
+“Anna Filippovna!” he said with a sob, and he laid the baby on the
+floor. “Hear me before you punish.... I have sinned! This is my
+child.... You remember Agnia? Well, it was the devil drove me to it.
+...”
+
+And, almost unconscious with shame and terror, he jumped up without
+waiting for an answer, and ran out into the open air as though he had
+received a thrashing....
+
+“I’ll stay here outside till she calls me,” he thought. “I’ll give her
+time to recover, and to think it over....”
+
+The porter Yermolay passed him with his balalaika, glanced at him and
+shrugged his shoulders. A minute later he passed him again, and again he
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Here’s a go! Did you ever!” he muttered grinning. “Aksinya, the
+washer-woman, was here just now, Semyon Erastovitch. The silly woman
+put her baby down on the steps here, and while she was indoors with me,
+someone took and carried off the baby... Who’d have thought it!”
+
+“What? What are you saying?” shouted Miguev at the top of his voice.
+
+Yermolay, interpreting his master’s wrath in his own fashion, scratched
+his head and heaved a sigh.
+
+“I am sorry, Semyon Erastovitch,” he said, “but it’s the summer
+holidays,... one can’t get on without... without a woman, I mean....”
+
+And glancing at his master’s eyes glaring at him with anger and
+astonishment, he cleared his throat guiltily and went on:
+
+“It’s a sin, of course, but there--what is one to do?... You’ve
+forbidden us to have strangers in the house, I know, but we’ve none of
+our own now. When Agnia was here I had no women to see me, for I had one
+at home; but now, you can see for yourself, sir,... one can’t
+help having strangers. In Agnia’s time, of course, there was nothing
+irregular, because...”
+
+“Be off, you scoundrel!” Miguev shouted at him, stamping, and he went
+back into the room.
+
+Anna Filippovna, amazed and wrathful, was sitting as before, her
+tear-stained eyes fixed on the baby....
+
+“There! there!” Miguev muttered with a pale face, twisting his lips
+into a smile. “It was a joke.... It’s not my baby,... it’s
+the washer-woman’s!... I... I was joking.... Take it to the
+porter.”
+
+
+
+
+SMALL FRY
+
+“HONORED Sir, Father and Benefactor!” a petty clerk called Nevyrazimov
+was writing a rough copy of an Easter congratulatory letter. “I trust
+that you may spend this Holy Day even as many more to come, in good
+health and prosperity. And to your family also I...”
+
+The lamp, in which the kerosene was getting low, was smoking and
+smelling. A stray cockroach was running about the table in alarm near
+Nevyrazimov’s writing hand. Two rooms away from the office Paramon the
+porter was for the third time cleaning his best boots, and with such
+energy that the sound of the blacking-brush and of his expectorations
+was audible in all the rooms.
+
+“What else can I write to him, the rascal?” Nevyrazimov wondered,
+raising his eyes to the smutty ceiling.
+
+On the ceiling he saw a dark circle--the shadow of the lamp-shade. Below
+it was the dusty cornice, and lower still the wall, which had once been
+painted a bluish muddy color. And the office seemed to him such a place
+of desolation that he felt sorry, not only for himself, but even for the
+cockroach.
+
+“When I am off duty I shall go away, but he’ll be on duty here all his
+cockroach-life,” he thought, stretching. “I am bored! Shall I clean my
+boots?”
+
+And stretching once more, Nevyrazimov slouched lazily to the porter’s
+room. Paramon had finished cleaning his boots. Crossing himself with
+one hand and holding the brush in the other, he was standing at the open
+window-pane, listening.
+
+“They’re ringing,” he whispered to Nevyrazimov, looking at him with eyes
+intent and wide open. “Already!”
+
+Nevyrazimov put his ear to the open pane and listened. The Easter chimes
+floated into the room with a whiff of fresh spring air. The booming of
+the bells mingled with the rumble of carriages, and above the chaos
+of sounds rose the brisk tenor tones of the nearest church and a loud
+shrill laugh.
+
+“What a lot of people!” sighed Nevyrazimov, looking down into
+the street, where shadows of men flitted one after another by the
+illumination lamps. “They’re all hurrying to the midnight service....
+Our fellows have had a drink by now, you may be sure, and are strolling
+about the town. What a lot of laughter, what a lot of talk! I’m the
+only unlucky one, to have to sit here on such a day: And I have to do it
+every year!”
+
+“Well, nobody forces you to take the job. It’s not your turn to be on
+duty today, but Zastupov hired you to take his place. When other folks
+are enjoying themselves you hire yourself out. It’s greediness!”
+
+“Devil a bit of it! Not much to be greedy over--two roubles is all he
+gives me; a necktie as an extra.... It’s poverty, not greediness.
+And it would be jolly, now, you know, to be going with a party to the
+service, and then to break the fast.... To drink and to have a bit
+of supper and tumble off to sleep.... One sits down to the table,
+there’s an Easter cake and the samovar hissing, and some charming little
+thing beside you.... You drink a glass and chuck her under the chin,
+and it’s first-rate.... You feel you’re somebody.... Ech h-h!...
+I’ve made a mess of things! Look at that hussy driving by in her
+carriage, while I have to sit here and brood.”
+
+“We each have our lot in life, Ivan Danilitch. Please God, you’ll be
+promoted and drive about in your carriage one day.”
+
+“I? No, brother, not likely. I shan’t get beyond a ‘titular,’ not if I
+try till I burst. I’m not an educated man.”
+
+“Our General has no education either, but...”
+
+“Well, but the General stole a hundred thousand before he got his
+position. And he’s got very different manners and deportment from me,
+brother. With my manners and deportment one can’t get far! And such a
+scoundrelly surname, Nevyrazimov! It’s a hopeless position, in fact. One
+may go on as one is, or one may hang oneself...”
+
+He moved away from the window and walked wearily about the rooms. The
+din of the bells grew louder and louder.... There was no need to
+stand by the window to hear it. And the better he could hear the bells
+and the louder the roar of the carriages, the darker seemed the muddy
+walls and the smutty cornice and the more the lamp smoked.
+
+“Shall I hook it and leave the office?” thought Nevyrazimov.
+
+But such a flight promised nothing worth having.... After coming out
+of the office and wandering about the town, Nevyrazimov would have gone
+home to his lodging, and in his lodging it was even grayer and more
+depressing than in the office.... Even supposing he were to spend
+that day pleasantly and with comfort, what had he beyond? Nothing but
+the same gray walls, the same stop-gap duty and complimentary
+letters....
+
+Nevyrazimov stood still in the middle of the office and sank into
+thought. The yearning for a new, better life gnawed at his heart with an
+intolerable ache. He had a passionate longing to find himself suddenly
+in the street, to mingle with the living crowd, to take part in the
+solemn festivity for the sake of which all those bells were clashing
+and those carriages were rumbling. He longed for what he had known in
+childhood--the family circle, the festive faces of his own people, the
+white cloth, light, warmth...! He thought of the carriage in which
+the lady had just driven by, the overcoat in which the head clerk was
+so smart, the gold chain that adorned the secretary’s chest....
+He thought of a warm bed, of the Stanislav order, of new boots, of
+a uniform without holes in the elbows.... He thought of all those
+things because he had none of them.
+
+“Shall I steal?” he thought. “Even if stealing is an easy matter,
+hiding is what’s difficult. Men run away to America, they say, with what
+they’ve stolen, but the devil knows where that blessed America is. One
+must have education even to steal, it seems.”
+
+The bells died down. He heard only a distant noise of carriages and
+Paramon’s cough, while his depression and anger grew more and more
+intense and unbearable. The clock in the office struck half-past twelve.
+
+“Shall I write a secret report? Proshkin did, and he rose rapidly.”
+
+Nevyrazimov sat down at his table and pondered. The lamp in which the
+kerosene had quite run dry was smoking violently and threatening to go
+out. The stray cockroach was still running about the table and had found
+no resting-place.
+
+“One can always send in a secret report, but how is one to make it up?
+I should want to make all sorts of innuendoes and insinuations, like
+Proshkin, and I can’t do it. If I made up anything I should be the first
+to get into trouble for it. I’m an ass, damn my soul!”
+
+And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for a means of escape from his
+hopeless position, stared at the rough copy he had written. The letter
+was written to a man whom he feared and hated with his whole soul, and
+from whom he had for the last ten years been trying to wring a post
+worth eighteen roubles a month, instead of the one he had at sixteen
+roubles.
+
+“Ah, I’ll teach you to run here, you devil!” He viciously slapped the
+palm of his hand on the cockroach, who had the misfortune to catch his
+eye. “Nasty thing!”
+
+The cockroach fell on its back and wriggled its legs in despair.
+Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp
+flared up and spluttered.
+
+And Nevyrazimov felt better.
+
+
+
+
+THE REQUIEM
+
+IN the village church of Verhny Zaprudy mass was just over. The people
+had begun moving and were trooping out of church. The only one who
+did not move was Andrey Andreyitch, a shopkeeper and old inhabitant of
+Verhny Zaprudy. He stood waiting, with his elbows on the railing of the
+right choir. His fat and shaven face, covered with indentations left
+by pimples, expressed on this occasion two contradictory feelings:
+resignation in the face of inevitable destiny, and stupid, unbounded
+disdain for the smocks and striped kerchiefs passing by him. As it was
+Sunday, he was dressed like a dandy. He wore a long cloth overcoat with
+yellow bone buttons, blue trousers not thrust into his boots, and sturdy
+goloshes--the huge clumsy goloshes only seen on the feet of practical
+and prudent persons of firm religious convictions.
+
+His torpid eyes, sunk in fat, were fixed upon the ikon stand. He saw the
+long familiar figures of the saints, the verger Matvey puffing out his
+cheeks and blowing out the candles, the darkened candle stands, the
+threadbare carpet, the sacristan Lopuhov running impulsively from the
+altar and carrying the holy bread to the churchwarden.... All these
+things he had seen for years, and seen over and over again like the five
+fingers of his hand.... There was only one thing, however, that was
+somewhat strange and unusual. Father Grigory, still in his vestments,
+was standing at the north door, twitching his thick eyebrows angrily.
+
+“Who is it he is winking at? God bless him!” thought the shopkeeper.
+“And he is beckoning with his finger! And he stamped his foot! What
+next! What’s the matter, Holy Queen and Mother! Whom does he mean it
+for?”
+
+Andrey Andreyitch looked round and saw the church completely deserted.
+There were some ten people standing at the door, but they had their
+backs to the altar.
+
+“Do come when you are called! Why do you stand like a graven image?” he
+heard Father Grigory’s angry voice. “I am calling you.”
+
+The shopkeeper looked at Father Grigory’s red and wrathful face, and
+only then realized that the twitching eyebrows and beckoning finger
+might refer to him. He started, left the railing, and hesitatingly
+walked towards the altar, tramping with his heavy goloshes.
+
+“Andrey Andreyitch, was it you asked for prayers for the rest of
+Mariya’s soul?” asked the priest, his eyes angrily transfixing the
+shopkeeper’s fat, perspiring face.
+
+“Yes, Father.”
+
+“Then it was you wrote this? You?” And Father Grigory angrily thrust
+before his eyes the little note.
+
+And on this little note, handed in by Andrey Andreyitch before mass, was
+written in big, as it were staggering, letters:
+
+“For the rest of the soul of the servant of God, the harlot Mariya.”
+
+“Yes, certainly I wrote it,...” answered the shopkeeper.
+
+“How dared you write it?” whispered the priest, and in his husky whisper
+there was a note of wrath and alarm.
+
+The shopkeeper looked at him in blank amazement; he was perplexed, and
+he, too, was alarmed. Father Grigory had never in his life spoken in
+such a tone to a leading resident of Verhny Zaprudy. Both were silent
+for a minute, staring into each other’s face. The shopkeeper’s amazement
+was so great that his fat face spread in all directions like spilt
+dough.
+
+“How dared you?” repeated the priest.
+
+“Wha... what?” asked Andrey Andreyitch in bewilderment.
+
+“You don’t understand?” whispered Father Grigory, stepping back
+in astonishment and clasping his hands. “What have you got on your
+shoulders, a head or some other object? You send a note up to the altar,
+and write a word in it which it would be unseemly even to utter in the
+street! Why are you rolling your eyes? Surely you know the meaning of
+the word?”
+
+“Are you referring to the word harlot?” muttered the shopkeeper,
+flushing crimson and blinking. “But you know, the Lord in His mercy...
+forgave this very thing,... forgave a harlot.... He has prepared
+a place for her, and indeed from the life of the holy saint, Mariya of
+Egypt, one may see in what sense the word is used--excuse me...”
+
+The shopkeeper wanted to bring forward some other argument in his
+justification, but took fright and wiped his lips with his sleeve.
+
+“So that’s what you make of it!” cried Father Grigory, clasping his
+hands. “But you see God has forgiven her--do you understand? He has
+forgiven, but you judge her, you slander her, call her by an unseemly
+name, and whom! Your own deceased daughter! Not only in Holy Scripture,
+but even in worldly literature you won’t read of such a sin! I tell
+you again, Andrey, you mustn’t be over-subtle! No, no, you mustn’t be
+over-subtle, brother! If God has given you an inquiring mind, and if you
+cannot direct it, better not go into things.... Don’t go into things,
+and hold your peace!”
+
+“But you know, she,... excuse my mentioning it, was an actress!”
+ articulated Andrey Andreyitch, overwhelmed.
+
+“An actress! But whatever she was, you ought to forget it all now she is
+dead, instead of writing it on the note.”
+
+“Just so,...” the shopkeeper assented.
+
+“You ought to do penance,” boomed the deacon from the depths of the
+altar, looking contemptuously at Andrey Andreyitch’s embarrassed face,
+“that would teach you to leave off being so clever! Your daughter was
+a well-known actress. There were even notices of her death in the
+newspapers.... Philosopher!”
+
+“To be sure,... certainly,” muttered the shopkeeper, “the word is not
+a seemly one; but I did not say it to judge her, Father Grigory, I only
+meant to speak spiritually,... that it might be clearer to you for
+whom you were praying. They write in the memorial notes the various
+callings, such as the infant John, the drowned woman Pelagea, the
+warrior Yegor, the murdered Pavel, and so on.... I meant to do the
+same.”
+
+“It was foolish, Andrey! God will forgive you, but beware another time.
+Above all, don’t be subtle, but think like other people. Make ten bows
+and go your way.”
+
+“I obey,” said the shopkeeper, relieved that the lecture was over, and
+allowing his face to resume its expression of importance and dignity.
+“Ten bows? Very good, I understand. But now, Father, allow me to ask
+you a favor.... Seeing that I am, anyway, her father,... you know
+yourself, whatever she was, she was still my daughter, so I was,...
+excuse me, meaning to ask you to sing the requiem today. And allow me to
+ask you, Father Deacon!”
+
+“Well, that’s good,” said Father Grigory, taking off his vestments.
+“That I commend. I can approve of that! Well, go your way. We will come
+out immediately.”
+
+Andrey Andreyitch walked with dignity from the altar, and with a solemn,
+requiem-like expression on his red face took his stand in the middle
+of the church. The verger Matvey set before him a little table with the
+memorial food upon it, and a little later the requiem service began.
+
+There was perfect stillness in the church. Nothing could be heard but
+the metallic click of the censer and slow singing.... Near Andrey
+Andreyitch stood the verger Matvey, the midwife Makaryevna, and her
+one-armed son Mitka. There was no one else. The sacristan sang badly in
+an unpleasant, hollow bass, but the tune and the words were so mournful
+that the shopkeeper little by little lost the expression of dignity and
+was plunged in sadness. He thought of his Mashutka,... he remembered
+she had been born when he was still a lackey in the service of the owner
+of Verhny Zaprudy. In his busy life as a lackey he had not noticed
+how his girl had grown up. That long period during which she was being
+shaped into a graceful creature, with a little flaxen head and dreamy
+eyes as big as kopeck-pieces passed unnoticed by him. She had been
+brought up like all the children of favorite lackeys, in ease and
+comfort in the company of the young ladies. The gentry, to fill up their
+idle time, had taught her to read, to write, to dance; he had had no
+hand in her bringing up. Only from time to time casually meeting her at
+the gate or on the landing of the stairs, he would remember that she was
+his daughter, and would, so far as he had leisure for it, begin teaching
+her the prayers and the scripture. Oh, even then he had the reputation
+of an authority on the church rules and the holy scriptures! Forbidding
+and stolid as her father’s face was, yet the girl listened readily. She
+repeated the prayers after him yawning, but on the other hand, when he,
+hesitating and trying to express himself elaborately, began telling her
+stories, she was all attention. Esau’s pottage, the punishment of Sodom,
+and the troubles of the boy Joseph made her turn pale and open her blue
+eyes wide.
+
+Afterwards when he gave up being a lackey, and with the money he had
+saved opened a shop in the village, Mashutka had gone away to Moscow
+with his master’s family....
+
+Three years before her death she had come to see her father. He had
+scarcely recognized her. She was a graceful young woman with the manners
+of a young lady, and dressed like one. She talked cleverly, as though
+from a book, smoked, and slept till midday. When Andrey Andreyitch asked
+her what she was doing, she had announced, looking him boldly straight
+in the face: “I am an actress.” Such frankness struck the former flunkey
+as the acme of cynicism. Mashutka had begun boasting of her successes
+and her stage life; but seeing that her father only turned crimson and
+threw up his hands, she ceased. And they spent a fortnight together
+without speaking or looking at one another till the day she went away.
+Before she went away she asked her father to come for a walk on the bank
+of the river. Painful as it was for him to walk in the light of day, in
+the sight of all honest people, with a daughter who was an actress, he
+yielded to her request.
+
+“What a lovely place you live in!” she said enthusiastically. “What
+ravines and marshes! Good heavens, how lovely my native place is!”
+
+And she had burst into tears.
+
+“The place is simply taking up room,...” Andrey Andreyvitch
+had thought, looking blankly at the ravines, not understanding his
+daughter’s enthusiasm. “There is no more profit from them than milk from
+a billy-goat.”
+
+And she had cried and cried, drawing her breath greedily with her whole
+chest, as though she felt she had not a long time left to breathe.
+
+Andrey Andreyitch shook his head like a horse that has been bitten, and
+to stifle painful memories began rapidly crossing himself....
+
+“Be mindful, O Lord,” he muttered, “of Thy departed servant, the harlot
+Mariya, and forgive her sins, voluntary or involuntary....”
+
+The unseemly word dropped from his lips again, but he did not notice
+it: what is firmly imbedded in the consciousness cannot be driven out by
+Father Grigory’s exhortations or even knocked out by a nail. Makaryevna
+sighed and whispered something, drawing in a deep breath, while
+one-armed Mitka was brooding over something....
+
+“Where there is no sickness, nor grief, nor sighing,” droned the
+sacristan, covering his right cheek with his hand.
+
+Bluish smoke coiled up from the censer and bathed in the broad, slanting
+patch of sunshine which cut across the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the
+church. And it seemed as though the soul of the dead woman were soaring
+into the sunlight together with the smoke. The coils of smoke like a
+child’s curls eddied round and round, floating upwards to the window
+and, as it were, holding aloof from the woes and tribulations of which
+that poor soul was full.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE COACH-HOUSE
+
+IT was between nine and ten o’clock in the evening. Stepan the coachman,
+Mihailo the house-porter, Alyoshka the coachman’s grandson, who had come
+up from the village to stay with his grandfather, and Nikandr, an old
+man of seventy, who used to come into the yard every evening to sell
+salt herrings, were sitting round a lantern in the big coach-house,
+playing “kings.” Through the wide-open door could be seen the whole
+yard, the big house, where the master’s family lived, the gates, the
+cellars, and the porter’s lodge. It was all shrouded in the darkness of
+night, and only the four windows of one of the lodges which was let
+were brightly lit up. The shadows of the coaches and sledges with their
+shafts tipped upwards stretched from the walls to the doors, quivering
+and cutting across the shadows cast by the lantern and the players....
+On the other side of the thin partition that divided the coach-house
+from the stable were the horses. There was a scent of hay, and a
+disagreeable smell of salt herrings coming from old Nikandr.
+
+The porter won and was king; he assumed an attitude such as was in his
+opinion befitting a king, and blew his nose loudly on a red-checked
+handkerchief.
+
+“Now if I like I can chop off anybody’s head,” he said. Alyoshka, a
+boy of eight with a head of flaxen hair, left long uncut, who had only
+missed being king by two tricks, looked angrily and with envy at the
+porter. He pouted and frowned.
+
+“I shall give you the trick, grandfather,” he said, pondering over his
+cards; “I know you have got the queen of diamonds.”
+
+“Well, well, little silly, you have thought enough!”
+
+Alyoshka timidly played the knave of diamonds. At that moment a ring was
+heard from the yard.
+
+“Oh, hang you!” muttered the porter, getting up. “Go and open the gate,
+O king!”
+
+When he came back a little later, Alyoshka was already a prince, the
+fish-hawker a soldier, and the coachman a peasant.
+
+“It’s a nasty business,” said the porter, sitting down to the cards
+again. “I have just let the doctors out. They have not extracted it.”
+
+“How could they? Just think, they would have to pick open the brains. If
+there is a bullet in the head, of what use are doctors?”
+
+“He is lying unconscious,” the porter went on. “He is bound to die.
+Alyoshka, don’t look at the cards, you little puppy, or I will pull your
+ears! Yes, I let the doctors out, and the father and mother in... They
+have only just arrived. Such crying and wailing, Lord preserve us! They
+say he is the only son.... It’s a grief!”
+
+All except Alyoshka, who was absorbed in the game, looked round at the
+brightly lighted windows of the lodge.
+
+“I have orders to go to the police station tomorrow,” said the porter.
+“There will be an inquiry... But what do I know about it? I saw
+nothing of it. He called me this morning, gave me a letter, and said:
+‘Put it in the letter-box for me.’ And his eyes were red with crying.
+His wife and children were not at home. They had gone out for a walk. So
+when I had gone with the letter, he put a bullet into his forehead from
+a revolver. When I came back his cook was wailing for the whole yard to
+hear.”
+
+“It’s a great sin,” said the fish-hawker in a husky voice, and he shook
+his head, “a great sin!”
+
+“From too much learning,” said the porter, taking a trick; “his wits
+outstripped his wisdom. Sometimes he would sit writing papers all
+night.... Play, peasant!... But he was a nice gentleman. And so white
+skinned, black-haired and tall!... He was a good lodger.”
+
+“It seems the fair sex is at the bottom of it,” said the coachman,
+slapping the nine of trumps on the king of diamonds. “It seems he was
+fond of another man’s wife and disliked his own; it does happen.”
+
+“The king rebels,” said the porter.
+
+At that moment there was again a ring from the yard. The rebellious king
+spat with vexation and went out. Shadows like dancing couples flitted
+across the windows of the lodge. There was the sound of voices and
+hurried footsteps in the yard.
+
+“I suppose the doctors have come again,” said the coachman. “Our Mihailo
+is run off his legs....”
+
+A strange wailing voice rang out for a moment in the air. Alyoshka
+looked in alarm at his grandfather, the coachman; then at the windows,
+and said:
+
+“He stroked me on the head at the gate yesterday, and said, ‘What
+district do you come from, boy?’ Grandfather, who was that howled just
+now?”
+
+His grandfather trimmed the light in the lantern and made no answer.
+
+“The man is lost,” he said a little later, with a yawn. “He is lost, and
+his children are ruined, too. It’s a disgrace for his children for the
+rest of their lives now.”
+
+The porter came back and sat down by the lantern.
+
+“He is dead,” he said. “They have sent to the almshouse for the old
+women to lay him out.”
+
+“The kingdom of heaven and eternal peace to him!” whispered the
+coachman, and he crossed himself.
+
+Looking at him, Alyoshka crossed himself too.
+
+“You can’t pray for such as him,” said the fish-hawker.
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“It’s a sin.”
+
+“That’s true,” the porter assented. “Now his soul has gone straight to
+hell, to the devil....”
+
+“It’s a sin,” repeated the fish-hawker; “such as he have no funeral, no
+requiem, but are buried like carrion with no respect.”
+
+The old man put on his cap and got up.
+
+“It was the same thing at our lady’s,” he said, pulling his cap on
+further. “We were serfs in those days; the younger son of our mistress,
+the General’s lady, shot himself through the mouth with a pistol, from
+too much learning, too. It seems that by law such have to be buried
+outside the cemetery, without priests, without a requiem service; but to
+save disgrace our lady, you know, bribed the police and the doctors,
+and they gave her a paper to say her son had done it when delirious, not
+knowing what he was doing. You can do anything with money. So he had
+a funeral with priests and every honor, the music played, and he was
+buried in the church; for the deceased General had built that church
+with his own money, and all his family were buried there. Only this is
+what happened, friends. One month passed, and then another, and it was
+all right. In the third month they informed the General’s lady that the
+watchmen had come from that same church. What did they want? They were
+brought to her, they fell at her feet. ‘We can’t go on serving, your
+excellency,’ they said. ‘Look out for other watchmen and graciously
+dismiss us.’ ‘What for?’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘we can’t possibly; your son
+howls under the church all night.’”
+
+Alyoshka shuddered, and pressed his face to the coachman’s back so as
+not to see the windows.
+
+“At first the General’s lady would not listen,” continued the old man.
+“‘All this is your fancy, you simple folk have such notions,’ she said.
+‘A dead man cannot howl.’ Some time afterwards the watchmen came to her
+again, and with them the sacristan. So the sacristan, too, had heard
+him howling. The General’s lady saw that it was a bad job; she locked
+herself in her bedroom with the watchmen. ‘Here, my friends, here are
+twenty-five roubles for you, and for that go by night in secret, so that
+no one should hear or see you, dig up my unhappy son, and bury him,’ she
+said, ‘outside the cemetery.’ And I suppose she stood them a glass...
+And the watchmen did so. The stone with the inscription on it is there
+to this day, but he himself, the General’s son, is outside the
+cemetery.... O Lord, forgive us our transgressions!” sighed the
+fish-hawker. “There is only one day in the year when one may pray for
+such people: the Saturday before Trinity.... You mustn’t give alms to
+beggars for their sake, it is a sin, but you may feed the birds for the
+rest of their souls. The General’s lady used to go out to the crossroads
+every three days to feed the birds. Once at the cross-roads a black dog
+suddenly appeared; it ran up to the bread, and was such a... we all know
+what that dog was. The General’s lady was like a half-crazy creature for
+five days afterwards, she neither ate nor drank.... All at once she fell
+on her knees in the garden, and prayed and prayed.... Well, good-by,
+friends, the blessing of God and the Heavenly Mother be with you. Let us
+go, Mihailo, you’ll open the gate for me.”
+
+The fish-hawker and the porter went out. The coachman and Alyoshka went
+out too, so as not to be left in the coach-house.
+
+“The man was living and is dead!” said the coachman, looking towards the
+windows where shadows were still flitting to and fro. “Only this morning
+he was walking about the yard, and now he is lying dead.”
+
+“The time will come and we shall die too,” said the porter, walking away
+with the fish-hawker, and at once they both vanished from sight in the
+darkness.
+
+The coachman, and Alyoshka after him, somewhat timidly went up to the
+lighted windows. A very pale lady with large tear stained eyes, and a
+fine-looking gray headed man were moving two card-tables into the middle
+of the room, probably with the intention of laying the dead man upon
+them, and on the green cloth of the table numbers could still be seen
+written in chalk. The cook who had run about the yard wailing in the
+morning was now standing on a chair, stretching up to try and cover the
+looking glass with a towel.
+
+“Grandfather what are they doing?” asked Alyoshka in a whisper.
+
+“They are just going to lay him on the tables,” answered his
+grandfather. “Let us go, child, it is bedtime.”
+
+The coachman and Alyoshka went back to the coach-house. They said their
+prayers, and took off their boots. Stepan lay down in a corner on the
+floor, Alyoshka in a sledge. The doors of the coach house were shut,
+there was a horrible stench from the extinguished lantern. A little
+later Alyoshka sat up and looked about him; through the crack of the
+door he could still see a light from those lighted windows.
+
+“Grandfather, I am frightened!” he said.
+
+“Come, go to sleep, go to sleep!...”
+
+“I tell you I am frightened!”
+
+“What are you frightened of? What a baby!”
+
+They were silent.
+
+Alyoshka suddenly jumped out of the sledge and, loudly weeping, ran to
+his grandfather.
+
+“What is it? What’s the matter?” cried the coachman in a fright, getting
+up also.
+
+“He’s howling!”
+
+“Who is howling?”
+
+“I am frightened, grandfather, do you hear?”
+
+The coachman listened.
+
+“It’s their crying,” he said. “Come! there, little silly! They are sad,
+so they are crying.”
+
+“I want to go home,...” his grandson went on sobbing and trembling
+all over. “Grandfather, let us go back to the village, to mammy; come,
+grandfather dear, God will give you the heavenly kingdom for it....”
+
+“What a silly, ah! Come, be quiet, be quiet! Be quiet, I will light the
+lantern,... silly!”
+
+The coachman fumbled for the matches and lighted the lantern. But the
+light did not comfort Alyoshka.
+
+“Grandfather Stepan, let’s go to the village!” he besought him, weeping.
+“I am frightened here; oh, oh, how frightened I am! And why did you
+bring me from the village, accursed man?”
+
+“Who’s an accursed man? You mustn’t use such disrespectable words to
+your lawful grandfather. I shall whip you.”
+
+“Do whip me, grandfather, do; beat me like Sidor’s goat, but only take
+me to mammy, for God’s mercy!...”
+
+“Come, come, grandson, come!” the coachman said kindly. “It’s all
+right, don’t be frightened....I am frightened myself.... Say your
+prayers!”
+
+The door creaked and the porter’s head appeared. “Aren’t you asleep,
+Stepan?” he asked. “I shan’t get any sleep all night,” he said, coming
+in. “I shall be opening and shutting the gates all night.... What are
+you crying for, Alyoshka?”
+
+“He is frightened,” the coachman answered for his grandson.
+
+Again there was the sound of a wailing voice in the air. The porter
+said:
+
+“They are crying. The mother can’t believe her eyes.... It’s dreadful
+how upset she is.”
+
+“And is the father there?”
+
+“Yes.... The father is all right. He sits in the corner and says
+nothing. They have taken the children to relations.... Well, Stepan,
+shall we have a game of trumps?”
+
+“Yes,” the coachman agreed, scratching himself, “and you, Alyoshka, go
+to sleep. Almost big enough to be married, and blubbering, you rascal.
+Come, go along, grandson, go along....”
+
+The presence of the porter reassured Alyoshka. He went, not very
+resolutely, towards the sledge and lay down. And while he was falling
+asleep he heard a half-whisper.
+
+“I beat and cover,” said his grandfather.
+
+“I beat and cover,” repeated the porter.
+
+The bell rang in the yard, the door creaked and seemed also saying: “I
+beat and cover.” When Alyoshka dreamed of the gentleman and, frightened
+by his eyes, jumped up and burst out crying, it was morning, his
+grandfather was snoring, and the coach-house no longer seemed terrible.
+
+
+
+
+PANIC FEARS
+
+DURING all the years I have been living in this world I have only three
+times been terrified.
+
+The first real terror, which made my hair stand on end and made shivers
+run all over me, was caused by a trivial but strange phenomenon. It
+happened that, having nothing to do one July evening, I drove to the
+station for the newspapers. It was a still, warm, almost sultry evening,
+like all those monotonous evenings in July which, when once they have
+set in, go on for a week, a fortnight, or sometimes longer, in
+regular unbroken succession, and are suddenly cut short by a violent
+thunderstorm and a lavish downpour of rain that refreshes everything for
+a long time.
+
+The sun had set some time before, and an unbroken gray dusk lay all over
+the land. The mawkishly sweet scents of the grass and flowers were heavy
+in the motionless, stagnant air.
+
+I was driving in a rough trolley. Behind my back the gardener’s son
+Pashka, a boy of eight years old, whom I had taken with me to look after
+the horse in case of necessity, was gently snoring, with his head on a
+sack of oats. Our way lay along a narrow by-road, straight as a ruler,
+which lay hid like a great snake in the tall thick rye. There was a
+pale light from the afterglow of sunset; a streak of light cut its way
+through a narrow, uncouth-looking cloud, which seemed sometimes like a
+boat and sometimes like a man wrapped in a quilt....
+
+I had driven a mile and a half, or two miles, when against the pale
+background of the evening glow there came into sight one after another
+some graceful tall poplars; a river glimmered beyond them, and a
+gorgeous picture suddenly, as though by magic, lay stretched before me.
+I had to stop the horse, for our straight road broke off abruptly and
+ran down a steep incline overgrown with bushes. We were standing on the
+hillside and beneath us at the bottom lay a huge hole full of twilight,
+of fantastic shapes, and of space. At the bottom of this hole, in a wide
+plain guarded by the poplars and caressed by the gleaming river, nestled
+a village. It was now sleeping.... Its huts, its church with
+the belfry, its trees, stood out against the gray twilight and were
+reflected darkly in the smooth surface of the river.
+
+I waked Pashka for fear he should fall out and began cautiously going
+down.
+
+“Have we got to Lukovo?” asked Pashka, lifting his head lazily.
+
+“Yes. Hold the reins!...”
+
+I led the horse down the hill and looked at the village. At the first
+glance one strange circumstance caught my attention: at the very top of
+the belfry, in the tiny window between the cupola and the bells, a light
+was twinkling. This light was like that of a smoldering lamp, at one
+moment dying down, at another flickering up. What could it come from?
+
+Its source was beyond my comprehension. It could not be burning at the
+window, for there were neither ikons nor lamps in the top turret of
+the belfry; there was nothing there, as I knew, but beams, dust, and
+spiders’ webs. It was hard to climb up into that turret, for the passage
+to it from the belfry was closely blocked up.
+
+It was more likely than anything else to be the reflection of some
+outside light, but though I strained my eyes to the utmost, I could not
+see one other speck of light in the vast expanse that lay before
+me. There was no moon. The pale and, by now, quite dim streak of the
+afterglow could not have been reflected, for the window looked not to
+the west, but to the east. These and other similar considerations were
+straying through my mind all the while that I was going down the slope
+with the horse. At the bottom I sat down by the roadside and looked
+again at the light. As before it was glimmering and flaring up.
+
+“Strange,” I thought, lost in conjecture. “Very strange.”
+
+And little by little I was overcome by an unpleasant feeling. At first
+I thought that this was vexation at not being able to explain a simple
+phenomenon; but afterwards, when I suddenly turned away from the light
+in horror and caught hold of Pashka with one hand, it became clear that
+I was overcome with terror....
+
+I was seized with a feeling of loneliness, misery, and horror, as though
+I had been flung down against my will into this great hole full of
+shadows, where I was standing all alone with the belfry looking at me
+with its red eye.
+
+“Pashka!” I cried, closing my eyes in horror.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Pashka, what’s that gleaming on the belfry?”
+
+Pashka looked over my shoulder at the belfry and gave a yawn.
+
+“Who can tell?”
+
+This brief conversation with the boy reassured me for a little, but not
+for long. Pashka, seeing my uneasiness, fastened his big eyes upon the
+light, looked at me again, then again at the light....
+
+“I am frightened,” he whispered.
+
+At this point, beside myself with terror, I clutched the boy with one
+hand, huddled up to him, and gave the horse a violent lash.
+
+“It’s stupid!” I said to myself. “That phenomenon is only terrible
+because I don’t understand it; everything we don’t understand is
+mysterious.”
+
+I tried to persuade myself, but at the same time I did not leave off
+lashing the horse. When we reached the posting station I purposely
+stayed for a full hour chatting with the overseer, and read through two
+or three newspapers, but the feeling of uneasiness did not leave me.
+On the way back the light was not to be seen, but on the other hand the
+silhouettes of the huts, of the poplars, and of the hill up which I had
+to drive, seemed to me as though animated. And why the light was there I
+don’t know to this day.
+
+The second terror I experienced was excited by a circumstance no less
+trivial.... I was returning from a romantic interview. It was one
+o’clock at night, the time when nature is buried in the soundest,
+sweetest sleep before the dawn. That time nature was not sleeping,
+and one could not call the night a still one. Corncrakes, quails,
+nightingales, and woodcocks were calling, crickets and grasshoppers
+were chirruping. There was a light mist over the grass, and clouds were
+scurrying straight ahead across the sky near the moon. Nature was awake,
+as though afraid of missing the best moments of her life.
+
+I walked along a narrow path at the very edge of a railway embankment.
+The moonlight glided over the lines which were already covered with dew.
+Great shadows from the clouds kept flitting over the embankment. Far
+ahead, a dim green light was glimmering peacefully.
+
+“So everything is well,” I thought, looking at them.
+
+I had a quiet, peaceful, comfortable feeling in my heart. I was
+returning from a tryst, I had no need to hurry; I was not sleepy, and
+I was conscious of youth and health in every sigh, every step I took,
+rousing a dull echo in the monotonous hum of the night. I don’t know
+what I was feeling then, but I remember I was happy, very happy.
+
+I had gone not more than three-quarters of a mile when I suddenly heard
+behind me a monotonous sound, a rumbling, rather like the roar of a
+great stream. It grew louder and louder every second, and sounded nearer
+and nearer. I looked round; a hundred paces from me was the dark copse
+from which I had only just come; there the embankment turned to the
+right in a graceful curve and vanished among the trees. I stood still in
+perplexity and waited. A huge black body appeared at once at the turn,
+noisily darted towards me, and with the swiftness of a bird flew past
+me along the rails. Less than half a minute passed and the blur had
+vanished, the rumble melted away into the noise of the night.
+
+It was an ordinary goods truck. There was nothing peculiar about it in
+itself, but its appearance without an engine and in the night puzzled
+me. Where could it have come from and what force sent it flying so
+rapidly along the rails? Where did it come from and where was it flying
+to?
+
+If I had been superstitious I should have made up my mind it was a party
+of demons and witches journeying to a devils’ sabbath, and should
+have gone on my way; but as it was, the phenomenon was absolutely
+inexplicable to me. I did not believe my eyes, and was entangled in
+conjectures like a fly in a spider’s web....
+
+I suddenly realized that I was utterly alone on the whole vast plain;
+that the night, which by now seemed inhospitable, was peeping into my
+face and dogging my footsteps; all the sounds, the cries of the birds,
+the whisperings of the trees, seemed sinister, and existing simply to
+alarm my imagination. I dashed on like a madman, and without realizing
+what I was doing I ran, trying to run faster and faster. And at once I
+heard something to which I had paid no attention before: that is, the
+plaintive whining of the telegraph wires.
+
+“This is beyond everything,” I said, trying to shame myself. “It’s
+cowardice! it’s silly!”
+
+But cowardice was stronger than common sense. I only slackened my pace
+when I reached the green light, where I saw a dark signal-box, and near
+it on the embankment the figure of a man, probably the signalman.
+
+“Did you see it?” I asked breathlessly.
+
+“See whom? What?”
+
+“Why, a truck ran by.”
+
+“I saw it,...” the peasant said reluctantly. “It broke away from the
+goods train. There is an incline at the ninetieth mile...; the train
+is dragged uphill. The coupling on the last truck gave way, so it broke
+off and ran back.... There is no catching it now!...”
+
+The strange phenomenon was explained and its fantastic character
+vanished. My panic was over and I was able to go on my way.
+
+My third fright came upon me as I was going home from stand shooting in
+early spring. It was in the dusk of evening. The forest road was covered
+with pools from a recent shower of rain, and the earth squelched
+under one’s feet. The crimson glow of sunset flooded the whole forest,
+coloring the white stems of the birches and the young leaves. I was
+exhausted and could hardly move.
+
+Four or five miles from home, walking along the forest road, I suddenly
+met a big black dog of the water spaniel breed. As he ran by, the dog
+looked intently at me, straight in my face, and ran on.
+
+“A nice dog!” I thought. “Whose is it?”
+
+I looked round. The dog was standing ten paces off with his eyes fixed
+on me. For a minute we scanned each other in silence, then the dog,
+probably flattered by my attention, came slowly up to me and wagged his
+tail.
+
+I walked on, the dog following me.
+
+“Whose dog can it be?” I kept asking myself. “Where does he come from?”
+
+I knew all the country gentry for twenty or thirty miles round, and knew
+all their dogs. Not one of them had a spaniel like that. How did he
+come to be in the depths of the forest, on a track used for nothing
+but carting timber? He could hardly have dropped behind someone passing
+through, for there was nowhere for the gentry to drive to along that
+road.
+
+I sat down on a stump to rest, and began scrutinizing my companion. He,
+too, sat down, raised his head, and fastened upon me an intent stare. He
+gazed at me without blinking. I don’t know whether it was the influence
+of the stillness, the shadows and sounds of the forest, or perhaps a
+result of exhaustion, but I suddenly felt uneasy under the steady gaze
+of his ordinary doggy eyes. I thought of Faust and his bulldog, and
+of the fact that nervous people sometimes when exhausted have
+hallucinations. That was enough to make me get up hurriedly and
+hurriedly walk on. The dog followed me.
+
+“Go away!” I shouted.
+
+The dog probably liked my voice, for he gave a gleeful jump and ran
+about in front of me.
+
+“Go away!” I shouted again.
+
+The dog looked round, stared at me intently, and wagged his tail
+good-humoredly. Evidently my threatening tone amused him. I ought to
+have patted him, but I could not get Faust’s dog out of my head, and the
+feeling of panic grew more and more acute... Darkness was coming on,
+which completed my confusion, and every time the dog ran up to me and
+hit me with his tail, like a coward I shut my eyes. The same thing
+happened as with the light in the belfry and the truck on the railway: I
+could not stand it and rushed away.
+
+At home I found a visitor, an old friend, who, after greeting me, began
+to complain that as he was driving to me he had lost his way in the
+forest, and a splendid valuable dog of his had dropped behind.
+
+
+
+
+THE BET
+
+IT WAS a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his
+study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party
+one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had
+been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked of
+capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many
+journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They
+considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable
+for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty
+ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.
+
+“I don’t agree with you,” said their host the banker. “I have not tried
+either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may
+judge _a priori_, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than
+imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but
+lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more
+humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out
+of you in the course of many years?”
+
+“Both are equally immoral,” observed one of the guests, “for they both
+have the same object--to take away life. The State is not God. It has
+not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.”
+
+Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty.
+When he was asked his opinion, he said:
+
+“The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if
+I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I
+would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at
+all.”
+
+A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous
+in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the
+table with his fist and shouted at the young man:
+
+“It’s not true! I’ll bet you two millions you wouldn’t stay in solitary
+confinement for five years.”
+
+“If you mean that in earnest,” said the young man, “I’ll take the bet,
+but I would stay not five but fifteen years.”
+
+“Fifteen? Done!” cried the banker. “Gentlemen, I stake two millions!”
+
+“Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!” said the young
+man.
+
+And this wild, senseless bet was carried out! The banker, spoilt and
+frivolous, with millions beyond his reckoning, was delighted at the bet.
+At supper he made fun of the young man, and said:
+
+“Think better of it, young man, while there is still time. To me two
+millions are a trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best
+years of your life. I say three or four, because you won’t stay longer.
+Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a
+great deal harder to bear than compulsory. The thought that you have
+the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole
+existence in prison. I am sorry for you.”
+
+And now the banker, walking to and fro, remembered all this, and asked
+himself: “What was the object of that bet? What is the good of that
+man’s losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two
+millions? Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than
+imprisonment for life? No, no. It was all nonsensical and meaningless.
+On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man, and on his part simple
+greed for money....”
+
+Then he remembered what followed that evening. It was decided that the
+young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest
+supervision in one of the lodges in the banker’s garden. It was agreed
+that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of
+the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive
+letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument and
+books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke.
+By the terms of the agreement, the only relations he could have with the
+outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object. He
+might have anything he wanted--books, music, wine, and so on--in any
+quantity he desired by writing an order, but could only receive them
+through the window. The agreement provided for every detail and every
+trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary, and bound the
+young man to stay there _exactly_ fifteen years, beginning from twelve
+o’clock of November 14, 1870, and ending at twelve o’clock of November
+14, 1885. The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions, if
+only two minutes before the end, released the banker from the obligation
+to pay him two millions.
+
+For the first year of his confinement, as far as one could judge from
+his brief notes, the prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and
+depression. The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day
+and night from his lodge. He refused wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote,
+excites the desires, and desires are the worst foes of the prisoner; and
+besides, nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing
+no one. And tobacco spoilt the air of his room. In the first year the
+books he sent for were principally of a light character; novels with a
+complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories, and so on.
+
+In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge, and the prisoner
+asked only for the classics. In the fifth year music was audible again,
+and the prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him through the
+window said that all that year he spent doing nothing but eating and
+drinking and lying on his bed, frequently yawning and angrily talking to
+himself. He did not read books. Sometimes at night he would sit down to
+write; he would spend hours writing, and in the morning tear up all that
+he had written. More than once he could be heard crying.
+
+In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously
+studying languages, philosophy, and history. He threw himself eagerly
+into these studies--so much so that the banker had enough to do to get
+him the books he ordered. In the course of four years some six hundred
+volumes were procured at his request. It was during this period that the
+banker received the following letter from his prisoner:
+
+“My dear Jailer, I write you these lines in six languages. Show them to
+people who know the languages. Let them read them. If they find not one
+mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden. That shot will show
+me that my efforts have not been thrown away. The geniuses of all ages
+and of all lands speak different languages, but the same flame burns in
+them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels
+now from being able to understand them!” The prisoner’s desire was
+fulfilled. The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.
+
+Then after the tenth year, the prisoner sat immovably at the table and
+read nothing but the Gospel. It seemed strange to the banker that a man
+who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste
+nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension. Theology and
+histories of religion followed the Gospels.
+
+In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense
+quantity of books quite indiscriminately. At one time he was busy with
+the natural sciences, then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare. There
+were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and
+a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or
+theology. His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the
+wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching
+first at one spar and then at another.
+
+II
+
+The old banker remembered all this, and thought:
+
+“To-morrow at twelve o’clock he will regain his freedom. By our
+agreement I ought to pay him two millions. If I do pay him, it is all
+over with me: I shall be utterly ruined.”
+
+Fifteen years before, his millions had been beyond his reckoning; now he
+was afraid to ask himself which were greater, his debts or his assets.
+Desperate gambling on the Stock Exchange, wild speculation and the
+excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years, had
+by degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud, fearless,
+self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,
+trembling at every rise and fall in his investments. “Cursed bet!”
+ muttered the old man, clutching his head in despair. “Why didn’t the man
+die? He is only forty now. He will take my last penny from me, he will
+marry, will enjoy life, will gamble on the Exchange; while I shall look
+at him with envy like a beggar, and hear from him every day the same
+sentence: ‘I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life, let
+me help you!’ No, it is too much! The one means of being saved from
+bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man!”
+
+It struck three o’clock, the banker listened; everyone was asleep in the
+house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled
+trees. Trying to make no noise, he took from a fireproof safe the key
+of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years, put on his
+overcoat, and went out of the house.
+
+It was dark and cold in the garden. Rain was falling. A damp cutting
+wind was racing about the garden, howling and giving the trees no rest.
+The banker strained his eyes, but could see neither the earth nor the
+white statues, nor the lodge, nor the trees. Going to the spot where the
+lodge stood, he twice called the watchman. No answer followed. Evidently
+the watchman had sought shelter from the weather, and was now asleep
+somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.
+
+“If I had the pluck to carry out my intention,” thought the old man,
+“Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.”
+
+He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door, and went into the
+entry of the lodge. Then he groped his way into a little passage and
+lighted a match. There was not a soul there. There was a bedstead with
+no bedding on it, and in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.
+The seals on the door leading to the prisoner’s rooms were intact.
+
+When the match went out the old man, trembling with emotion, peeped
+through the little window. A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner’s
+room. He was sitting at the table. Nothing could be seen but his back,
+the hair on his head, and his hands. Open books were lying on the table,
+on the two easy-chairs, and on the carpet near the table.
+
+Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir. Fifteen years’
+imprisonment had taught him to sit still. The banker tapped at the
+window with his finger, and the prisoner made no movement whatever in
+response. Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and
+put the key in the keyhole. The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the
+door creaked. The banker expected to hear at once footsteps and a cry
+of astonishment, but three minutes passed and it was as quiet as ever in
+the room. He made up his mind to go in.
+
+At the table a man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless. He
+was a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones, with long curls
+like a woman’s and a shaggy beard. His face was yellow with an earthy
+tint in it, his cheeks were hollow, his back long and narrow, and the
+hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate
+that it was dreadful to look at it. His hair was already streaked with
+silver, and seeing his emaciated, aged-looking face, no one would have
+believed that he was only forty. He was asleep.... In front of his
+bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was
+something written in fine handwriting.
+
+“Poor creature!” thought the banker, “he is asleep and most likely
+dreaming of the millions. And I have only to take this half-dead man,
+throw him on the bed, stifle him a little with the pillow, and the most
+conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death. But let us
+first read what he has written here....”
+
+The banker took the page from the table and read as follows:
+
+“To-morrow at twelve o’clock I regain my freedom and the right to
+associate with other men, but before I leave this room and see the
+sunshine, I think it necessary to say a few words to you. With a clear
+conscience I tell you, as before God, who beholds me, that I despise
+freedom and life and health, and all that in your books is called the
+good things of the world.
+
+“For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is
+true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk
+fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars
+in the forests, have loved women.... Beauties as ethereal as clouds,
+created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at
+night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my
+brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz
+and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched
+it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold
+and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my
+head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields,
+rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the
+strains of the shepherds’ pipes; I have touched the wings of comely
+devils who flew down to converse with me of God.... In your books I
+have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain,
+burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms....
+
+“Your books have given me wisdom. All that the unresting thought of man
+has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.
+I know that I am wiser than all of you.
+
+“And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this
+world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a
+mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off
+the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing
+under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal
+geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.
+
+“You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies
+for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to
+strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple
+and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a
+sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I
+don’t want to understand you.
+
+“To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by, I
+renounce the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise and
+which now I despise. To deprive myself of the right to the money I shall
+go out from here five hours before the time fixed, and so break the
+compact....”
+
+When the banker had read this he laid the page on the table, kissed the
+strange man on the head, and went out of the lodge, weeping. At no other
+time, even when he had lost heavily on the Stock Exchange, had he felt
+so great a contempt for himself. When he got home he lay on his bed, but
+his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.
+
+Next morning the watchmen ran in with pale faces, and told him they had
+seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the
+garden, go to the gate, and disappear. The banker went at once with the
+servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner. To
+avoid arousing unnecessary talk, he took from the table the writing in
+which the millions were renounced, and when he got home locked it up in
+the fireproof safe.
+
+
+
+
+THE HEAD-GARDENER’S STORY
+
+A SALE of flowers was taking place in Count N.’s greenhouses. The
+purchasers were few in number--a landowner who was a neighbor of mine,
+a young timber-merchant, and myself. While the workmen were carrying out
+our magnificent purchases and packing them into the carts, we sat at the
+entry of the greenhouse and chatted about one thing and another. It
+is extremely pleasant to sit in a garden on a still April morning,
+listening to the birds, and watching the flowers brought out into the
+open air and basking in the sunshine.
+
+The head-gardener, Mihail Karlovitch, a venerable old man with a full
+shaven face, wearing a fur waistcoat and no coat, superintended the
+packing of the plants himself, but at the same time he listened to
+our conversation in the hope of hearing something new. He was an
+intelligent, very good-hearted man, respected by everyone. He was
+for some reason looked upon by everyone as a German, though he was in
+reality on his father’s side Swedish, on his mother’s side Russian, and
+attended the Orthodox church. He knew Russian, Swedish, and German. He
+had read a good deal in those languages, and nothing one could do gave
+him greater pleasure than lending him some new book or talking to him,
+for instance, about Ibsen.
+
+He had his weaknesses, but they were innocent ones: he called himself
+the head gardener, though there were no under-gardeners; the expression
+of his face was unusually dignified and haughty; he could not endure to
+be contradicted, and liked to be listened to with respect and attention.
+
+“That young fellow there I can recommend to you as an awful rascal,”
+ said my neighbor, pointing to a laborer with a swarthy, gipsy face, who
+drove by with the water-barrel. “Last week he was tried in the town for
+burglary and was acquitted; they pronounced him mentally deranged, and
+yet look at him, he is the picture of health. Scoundrels are very often
+acquitted nowadays in Russia on grounds of abnormality and aberration,
+yet these acquittals, these unmistakable proofs of an indulgent attitude
+to crime, lead to no good. They demoralize the masses, the sense of
+justice is blunted in all as they become accustomed to seeing vice
+unpunished, and you know in our age one may boldly say in the words of
+Shakespeare that in our evil and corrupt age virtue must ask forgiveness
+of vice.”
+
+“That’s very true,” the merchant assented. “Owing to these frequent
+acquittals, murder and arson have become much more common. Ask the
+peasants.”
+
+Mihail Karlovitch turned towards us and said:
+
+“As far as I am concerned, gentlemen, I am always delighted to meet with
+these verdicts of not guilty. I am not afraid for morality and justice
+when they say ‘Not guilty,’ but on the contrary I feel pleased. Even
+when my conscience tells me the jury have made a mistake in acquitting
+the criminal, even then I am triumphant. Judge for yourselves,
+gentlemen; if the judges and the jury have more faith in _man_ than in
+evidence, material proofs, and speeches for the prosecution, is not that
+faith _in man_ in itself higher than any ordinary considerations? Such
+faith is only attainable by those few who understand and feel Christ.”
+
+“A fine thought,” I said.
+
+“But it’s not a new one. I remember a very long time ago I heard a
+legend on that subject. A very charming legend,” said the gardener,
+and he smiled. “I was told it by my grandmother, my father’s mother, an
+excellent old lady. She told me it in Swedish, and it does not sound so
+fine, so classical, in Russian.”
+
+But we begged him to tell it and not to be put off by the coarseness of
+the Russian language. Much gratified, he deliberately lighted his pipe,
+looked angrily at the laborers, and began:
+
+“There settled in a certain little town a solitary, plain, elderly
+gentleman called Thomson or Wilson--but that does not matter; the
+surname is not the point. He followed an honorable profession: he was
+a doctor. He was always morose and unsociable, and only spoke when
+required by his profession. He never visited anyone, never extended his
+acquaintance beyond a silent bow, and lived as humbly as a hermit. The
+fact was, he was a learned man, and in those days learned men were not
+like other people. They spent their days and nights in contemplation, in
+reading and in healing disease, looked upon everything else as trivial,
+and had no time to waste a word. The inhabitants of the town understood
+this, and tried not to worry him with their visits and empty chatter.
+They were very glad that God had sent them at last a man who could heal
+diseases, and were proud that such a remarkable man was living in their
+town. ‘He knows everything,’ they said about him.
+
+“But that was not enough. They ought to have also said, ‘He loves
+everyone.’ In the breast of that learned man there beat a wonderful
+angelic heart. Though the people of that town were strangers and not his
+own people, yet he loved them like children, and did not spare himself
+for them. He was himself ill with consumption, he had a cough, but when
+he was summoned to the sick he forgot his own illness he did not spare
+himself and, gasping for breath, climbed up the hills however high they
+might be. He disregarded the sultry heat and the cold, despised thirst
+and hunger. He would accept no money and strange to say, when one of his
+patients died, he would follow the coffin with the relations, weeping.
+
+“And soon he became so necessary to the town that the inhabitants
+wondered how they could have got on before without the man. Their
+gratitude knew no bounds. Grown-up people and children, good and bad
+alike, honest men and cheats--all in fact, respected him and knew his
+value. In the little town and all the surrounding neighborhood there
+was no man who would allow himself to do anything disagreeable to him;
+indeed, they would never have dreamed of it. When he came out of his
+lodging, he never fastened the doors or windows, in complete confidence
+that there was no thief who could bring himself to do him wrong.
+He often had in the course of his medical duties to walk along the
+highroads, through the forests and mountains haunted by numbers of
+hungry vagrants; but he felt that he was in perfect security.
+
+“One night he was returning from a patient when robbers fell upon him
+in the forest, but when they recognized him, they took off their hats
+respectfully and offered him something to eat. When he answered that he
+was not hungry, they gave him a warm wrap and accompanied him as far as
+the town, happy that fate had given them the chance in some small way
+to show their gratitude to the benevolent man. Well, to be sure, my
+grandmother told me that even the horses and the cows and the dogs knew
+him and expressed their joy when they met him.
+
+“And this man who seemed by his sanctity to have guarded himself from
+every evil, to whom even brigands and frenzied men wished nothing but
+good, was one fine morning found murdered. Covered with blood, with
+his skull broken, he was lying in a ravine, and his pale face wore an
+expression of amazement. Yes, not horror but amazement was the emotion
+that had been fixed upon his face when he saw the murderer before him.
+You can imagine the grief that overwhelmed the inhabitants of the town
+and the surrounding districts. All were in despair, unable to believe
+their eyes, wondering who could have killed the man. The judges who
+conducted the inquiry and examined the doctor’s body said: ‘Here we
+have all the signs of a murder, but as there is not a man in the world
+capable of murdering our doctor, obviously it was not a case of murder,
+and the combination of evidence is due to simple chance. We must suppose
+that in the darkness he fell into the ravine of himself and was mortally
+injured.’
+
+“The whole town agreed with this opinion. The doctor was buried, and
+nothing more was said about a violent death. The existence of a man
+who could have the baseness and wickedness to kill the doctor seemed
+incredible. There is a limit even to wickedness, isn’t there?
+
+“All at once, would you believe it, chance led them to discovering the
+murderer. A vagrant who had been many times convicted, notorious for his
+vicious life, was seen selling for drink a snuff-box and watch that
+had belonged to the doctor. When he was questioned he was confused,
+and answered with an obvious lie. A search was made, and in his bed was
+found a shirt with stains of blood on the sleeves, and a doctor’s lancet
+set in gold. What more evidence was wanted? They put the criminal in
+prison. The inhabitants were indignant, and at the same time said:
+
+“‘It’s incredible! It can’t be so! Take care that a mistake is not
+made; it does happen, you know, that evidence tells a false tale.’
+
+“At his trial the murderer obstinately denied his guilt. Everything was
+against him, and to be convinced of his guilt was as easy as to believe
+that this earth is black; but the judges seem to have gone mad: they
+weighed every proof ten times, looked distrustfully at the witnesses,
+flushed crimson and sipped water.... The trial began early in the
+morning and was only finished in the evening.
+
+“‘Accused!’ the chief judge said, addressing the murderer, ‘the court
+has found you guilty of murdering Dr. So-and-so, and has sentenced you
+to....’
+
+“The chief judge meant to say ‘to the death penalty,’ but he dropped
+from his hands the paper on which the sentence was written, wiped the
+cold sweat from his face, and cried out:
+
+“‘No! May God punish me if I judge wrongly, but I swear he is not
+guilty. I cannot admit the thought that there exists a man who would
+dare to murder our friend the doctor! A man could not sink so low!’
+
+“‘There cannot be such a man!’ the other judges assented.
+
+“‘No,’ the crowd cried. ‘Let him go!’
+
+“The murderer was set free to go where he chose, and not one soul blamed
+the court for an unjust verdict. And my grandmother used to say that for
+such faith in humanity God forgave the sins of all the inhabitants of
+that town. He rejoices when people believe that man is His image and
+semblance, and grieves if, forgetful of human dignity, they judge worse
+of men than of dogs. The sentence of acquittal may bring harm to the
+inhabitants of the town, but on the other hand, think of the beneficial
+influence upon them of that faith in man--a faith which does not remain
+dead, you know; it raises up generous feelings in us, and always impels
+us to love and respect every man. Every man! And that is important.”
+
+Mihail Karlovitch had finished. My neighbor would have urged some
+objection, but the head-gardener made a gesture that signified that he
+did not like objections; then he walked away to the carts, and, with an
+expression of dignity, went on looking after the packing.
+
+
+
+
+THE BEAUTIES
+
+I
+
+I REMEMBER, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, I
+was driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshoe Kryepkoe in
+the Don region to Rostov-on-the-Don. It was a sultry, languidly dreary
+day of August. Our eyes were glued together, and our mouths were parched
+from the heat and the dry burning wind which drove clouds of dust to
+meet us; one did not want to look or speak or think, and when our drowsy
+driver, a Little Russian called Karpo, swung his whip at the horses
+and lashed me on my cap, I did not protest or utter a sound, but only,
+rousing myself from half-slumber, gazed mildly and dejectedly into the
+distance to see whether there was a village visible through the dust.
+We stopped to feed the horses in a big Armenian village at a rich
+Armenian’s whom my grandfather knew. Never in my life have I seen a
+greater caricature than that Armenian. Imagine a little shaven head with
+thick overhanging eyebrows, a beak of a nose, long gray mustaches, and
+a wide mouth with a long cherry-wood chibouk sticking out of it. This
+little head was clumsily attached to a lean hunch-back carcass attired
+in a fantastic garb, a short red jacket, and full bright blue trousers.
+This figure walked straddling its legs and shuffling with its slippers,
+spoke without taking the chibouk out of its mouth, and behaved with
+truly Armenian dignity, not smiling, but staring with wide-open eyes and
+trying to take as little notice as possible of its guests.
+
+There was neither wind nor dust in the Armenian’s rooms, but it was just
+as unpleasant, stifling, and dreary as in the steppe and on the road.
+I remember, dusty and exhausted by the heat, I sat in the corner on a
+green box. The unpainted wooden walls, the furniture, and the floors
+colored with yellow ocher smelt of dry wood baked by the sun. Wherever
+I looked there were flies and flies and flies.... Grandfather and the
+Armenian were talking about grazing, about manure, and about oats....
+I knew that they would be a good hour getting the samovar; that
+grandfather would be not less than an hour drinking his tea, and then
+would lie down to sleep for two or three hours; that I should waste a
+quarter of the day waiting, after which there would be again the heat,
+the dust, the jolting cart. I heard the muttering of the two voices, and
+it began to seem to me that I had been seeing the Armenian, the cupboard
+with the crockery, the flies, the windows with the burning sun beating
+on them, for ages and ages, and should only cease to see them in the
+far-off future, and I was seized with hatred for the steppe, the sun,
+the flies....
+
+A Little Russian peasant woman in a kerchief brought in a tray of
+tea-things, then the samovar. The Armenian went slowly out into the
+passage and shouted: “Mashya, come and pour out tea! Where are you,
+Mashya?”
+
+Hurried footsteps were heard, and there came into the room a girl of
+sixteen in a simple cotton dress and a white kerchief. As she washed the
+crockery and poured out the tea, she was standing with her back to me,
+and all I could see was that she was of a slender figure, barefooted,
+and that her little bare heels were covered by long trousers.
+
+The Armenian invited me to have tea. Sitting down to the table, I
+glanced at the girl, who was handing me a glass of tea, and felt all at
+once as though a wind were blowing over my soul and blowing away all
+the impressions of the day with their dust and dreariness. I saw the
+bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real
+life or in my dreams. Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at
+the first glance as I should have recognized lightning.
+
+I am ready to swear that Masha--or, as her father called her,
+Mashya--was a real beauty, but I don’t know how to prove it. It
+sometimes happens that clouds are huddled together in disorder on the
+horizon, and the sun hiding behind them colors them and the sky with
+tints of every possible shade--crimson, orange, gold, lilac, muddy pink;
+one cloud is like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a
+turban. The glow of sunset enveloping a third of the sky gleams on
+the cross on the church, flashes on the windows of the manor house, is
+reflected in the river and the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far
+away against the background of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is
+flying homewards.... And the boy herding the cows, and the surveyor
+driving in his chaise over the dam, and the gentleman out for a walk,
+all gaze at the sunset, and every one of them thinks it terribly
+beautiful, but no one knows or can say in what its beauty lies.
+
+I was not the only one to think the Armenian girl beautiful. My
+grandfather, an old man of seventy, gruff and indifferent to women and
+the beauties of nature, looked caressingly at Masha for a full minute,
+and asked:
+
+“Is that your daughter, Avert Nazaritch?”
+
+“Yes, she is my daughter,” answered the Armenian.
+
+“A fine young lady,” said my grandfather approvingly.
+
+An artist would have called the Armenian girl’s beauty classical and
+severe, it was just that beauty, the contemplation of which--God
+knows why!--inspires in one the conviction that one is seeing correct
+features; that hair, eyes, nose, mouth, neck, bosom, and every movement
+of the young body all go together in one complete harmonious accord in
+which nature has not blundered over the smallest line. You fancy for
+some reason that the ideally beautiful woman must have such a nose as
+Masha’s, straight and slightly aquiline, just such great dark eyes, such
+long lashes, such a languid glance; you fancy that her black curly hair
+and eyebrows go with the soft white tint of her brow and cheeks as
+the green reeds go with the quiet stream. Masha’s white neck and her
+youthful bosom were not fully developed, but you fancy the sculptor
+would need a great creative genius to mold them. You gaze, and little
+by little the desire comes over you to say to Masha something
+extraordinarily pleasant, sincere, beautiful, as beautiful as she
+herself was.
+
+At first I felt hurt and abashed that Masha took no notice of me, but
+was all the time looking down; it seemed to me as though a peculiar
+atmosphere, proud and happy, separated her from me and jealously
+screened her from my eyes.
+
+“That’s because I am covered with dust,” I thought, “am sunburnt, and am
+still a boy.”
+
+But little by little I forgot myself, and gave myself up entirely to the
+consciousness of beauty. I thought no more now of the dreary steppe, of
+the dust, no longer heard the buzzing of the flies, no longer tasted the
+tea, and felt nothing except that a beautiful girl was standing only the
+other side of the table.
+
+I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy,
+nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant
+sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some
+reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian,
+even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four
+had lost something important and essential to life which we should never
+find again. My grandfather, too, grew melancholy; he talked no more
+about manure or about oats, but sat silent, looking pensively at Masha.
+
+After tea my grandfather lay down for a nap while I went out of the
+house into the porch. The house, like all the houses in the Armenian
+village stood in the full sun; there was not a tree, not an awning, no
+shade. The Armenian’s great courtyard, overgrown with goosefoot and
+wild mallows, was lively and full of gaiety in spite of the great heat.
+Threshing was going on behind one of the low hurdles which intersected
+the big yard here and there. Round a post stuck into the middle of the
+threshing-floor ran a dozen horses harnessed side by side, so that they
+formed one long radius. A Little Russian in a long waistcoat and full
+trousers was walking beside them, cracking a whip and shouting in a tone
+that sounded as though he were jeering at the horses and showing off his
+power over them.
+
+“A--a--a, you damned brutes!... A--a--a, plague take you! Are you
+frightened?”
+
+The horses, sorrel, white, and piebald, not understanding why they
+were made to run round in one place and to crush the wheat straw, ran
+unwillingly as though with effort, swinging their tails with an offended
+air. The wind raised up perfect clouds of golden chaff from under their
+hoofs and carried it away far beyond the hurdle. Near the tall fresh
+stacks peasant women were swarming with rakes, and carts were moving,
+and beyond the stacks in another yard another dozen similar horses were
+running round a post, and a similar Little Russian was cracking his whip
+and jeering at the horses.
+
+The steps on which I was sitting were hot; on the thin rails and here
+and there on the window-frames sap was oozing out of the wood from the
+heat; red ladybirds were huddling together in the streaks of shadow
+under the steps and under the shutters. The sun was baking me on my
+head, on my chest, and on my back, but I did not notice it, and was
+conscious only of the thud of bare feet on the uneven floor in the
+passage and in the rooms behind me. After clearing away the tea-things,
+Masha ran down the steps, fluttering the air as she passed, and like
+a bird flew into a little grimy outhouse--I suppose the kitchen--from
+which came the smell of roast mutton and the sound of angry talk in
+Armenian. She vanished into the dark doorway, and in her place there
+appeared on the threshold an old bent, red-faced Armenian woman wearing
+green trousers. The old woman was angry and was scolding someone. Soon
+afterwards Masha appeared in the doorway, flushed with the heat of
+the kitchen and carrying a big black loaf on her shoulder; swaying
+gracefully under the weight of the bread, she ran across the yard to the
+threshing-floor, darted over the hurdle, and, wrapt in a cloud of golden
+chaff, vanished behind the carts. The Little Russian who was driving the
+horses lowered his whip, sank into silence, and gazed for a minute in
+the direction of the carts. Then when the Armenian girl darted again by
+the horses and leaped over the hurdle, he followed her with his
+eyes, and shouted to the horses in a tone as though he were greatly
+disappointed:
+
+“Plague take you, unclean devils!”
+
+And all the while I was unceasingly hearing her bare feet, and seeing
+how she walked across the yard with a grave, preoccupied face. She ran
+now down the steps, swishing the air about me, now into the kitchen, now
+to the threshing-floor, now through the gate, and I could hardly turn my
+head quickly enough to watch her.
+
+And the oftener she fluttered by me with her beauty, the more acute
+became my sadness. I felt sorry both for her and for myself and for the
+Little Russian, who mournfully watched her every time she ran through
+the cloud of chaff to the carts. Whether it was envy of her beauty, or
+that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be,
+or that I was a stranger to her; or whether I vaguely felt that her rare
+beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and, like everything on earth,
+of short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar
+feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real beauty, God
+only knows.
+
+The three hours of waiting passed unnoticed. It seemed to me that I had
+not had time to look properly at Masha when Karpo drove up to the river,
+bathed the horse, and began to put it in the shafts. The wet horse
+snorted with pleasure and kicked his hoofs against the shafts. Karpo
+shouted to it: “Ba--ack!” My grandfather woke up. Masha opened the
+creaking gates for us, we got into the chaise and drove out of the yard.
+We drove in silence as though we were angry with one another.
+
+When, two or three hours later, Rostov and Nahitchevan appeared in
+the distance, Karpo, who had been silent the whole time, looked round
+quickly, and said:
+
+“A fine wench, that at the Armenian’s.”
+
+And he lashed his horses.
+
+II
+
+Another time, after I had become a student, I was traveling by rail to
+the south. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe it was between
+Byelgorod and Harkov, I got out of the tram to walk about the platform.
+
+The shades of evening were already lying on the station garden, on the
+platform, and on the fields; the station screened off the sunset, but on
+the topmost clouds of smoke from the engine, which were tinged with rosy
+light, one could see the sun had not yet quite vanished.
+
+As I walked up and down the platform I noticed that the greater
+number of the passengers were standing or walking near a second-class
+compartment, and that they looked as though some celebrated person were
+in that compartment. Among the curious whom I met near this compartment
+I saw, however, an artillery officer who had been my fellow-traveler, an
+intelligent, cordial, and sympathetic fellow--as people mostly are
+whom we meet on our travels by chance and with whom we are not long
+acquainted.
+
+“What are you looking at there?” I asked.
+
+He made no answer, but only indicated with his eyes a feminine figure.
+It was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, wearing a Russian dress,
+with her head bare and a little shawl flung carelessly on one
+shoulder; not a passenger, but I suppose a sister or daughter of the
+station-master. She was standing near the carriage window, talking to an
+elderly woman who was in the train. Before I had time to realize what
+I was seeing, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling I had once
+experienced in the Armenian village.
+
+The girl was remarkably beautiful, and that was unmistakable to me and
+to those who were looking at her as I was.
+
+If one is to describe her appearance feature by feature, as the practice
+is, the only really lovely thing was her thick wavy fair hair, which
+hung loose with a black ribbon tied round her head; all the other
+features were either irregular or very ordinary. Either from a peculiar
+form of coquettishness, or from short-sightedness, her eyes were screwed
+up, her nose had an undecided tilt, her mouth was small, her profile was
+feebly and insipidly drawn, her shoulders were narrow and undeveloped
+for her age--and yet the girl made the impression of being really
+beautiful, and looking at her, I was able to feel convinced that the
+Russian face does not need strict regularity in order to be lovely; what
+is more, that if instead of her turn-up nose the girl had been given a
+different one, correct and plastically irreproachable like the Armenian
+girl’s, I fancy her face would have lost all its charm from the change.
+
+Standing at the window talking, the girl, shrugging at the evening damp,
+continually looking round at us, at one moment put her arms akimbo, at
+the next raised her hands to her head to straighten her hair, talked,
+laughed, while her face at one moment wore an expression of wonder, the
+next of horror, and I don’t remember a moment when her face and body
+were at rest. The whole secret and magic of her beauty lay just in these
+tiny, infinitely elegant movements, in her smile, in the play of her
+face, in her rapid glances at us, in the combination of the subtle grace
+of her movements with her youth, her freshness, the purity of her soul
+that sounded in her laugh and voice, and with the weakness we love so
+much in children, in birds, in fawns, and in young trees.
+
+It was that butterfly’s beauty so in keeping with waltzing, darting
+about the garden, laughter and gaiety, and incongruous with serious
+thought, grief, and repose; and it seemed as though a gust of wind
+blowing over the platform, or a fall of rain, would be enough to wither
+the fragile body and scatter the capricious beauty like the pollen of a
+flower.
+
+“So--o!...” the officer muttered with a sigh when, after the second
+bell, we went back to our compartment.
+
+And what that “So--o” meant I will not undertake to decide.
+
+Perhaps he was sad, and did not want to go away from the beauty and
+the spring evening into the stuffy train; or perhaps he, like me, was
+unaccountably sorry for the beauty, for himself, and for me, and for all
+the passengers, who were listlessly and reluctantly sauntering back to
+their compartments. As we passed the station window, at which a pale,
+red-haired telegraphist with upstanding curls and a faded, broad-cheeked
+face was sitting beside his apparatus, the officer heaved a sigh and
+said:
+
+“I bet that telegraphist is in love with that pretty girl. To live out
+in the wilds under one roof with that ethereal creature and not fall in
+love is beyond the power of man. And what a calamity, my friend! what an
+ironical fate, to be stooping, unkempt, gray, a decent fellow and not a
+fool, and to be in love with that pretty, stupid little girl who would
+never take a scrap of notice of you! Or worse still: imagine that
+telegraphist is in love, and at the same time married, and that his wife
+is as stooping, as unkempt, and as decent a person as himself.”
+
+On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was
+standing with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of
+the beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face,
+exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look
+of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw
+happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though
+he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not
+his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and
+his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as
+far away as heaven....
+
+The third bell rang, the whistles sounded, and the train slowly moved
+off. First the guard, the station-master, then the garden, the beautiful
+girl with her exquisitely sly smile, passed before our windows....
+
+Putting my head out and looking back, I saw how, looking after the
+train, she walked along the platform by the window where the telegraph
+clerk was sitting, smoothed her hair, and ran into the garden. The
+station no longer screened off the sunset, the plain lay open before us,
+but the sun had already set and the smoke lay in black clouds over the
+green, velvety young corn. It was melancholy in the spring air, and in
+the darkening sky, and in the railway carriage.
+
+The familiar figure of the guard came into the carriage, and he began
+lighting the candles.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHOEMAKER AND THE DEVIL
+
+IT was Christmas Eve. Marya had long been snoring on the stove; all the
+paraffin in the little lamp had burnt out, but Fyodor Nilov still sat at
+work. He would long ago have flung aside his work and gone out into the
+street, but a customer from Kolokolny Lane, who had a fortnight before
+ordered some boots, had been in the previous day, had abused him
+roundly, and had ordered him to finish the boots at once before the
+morning service.
+
+“It’s a convict’s life!” Fyodor grumbled as he worked. “Some people have
+been asleep long ago, others are enjoying themselves, while you sit here
+like some Cain and sew for the devil knows whom....”
+
+To save himself from accidentally falling asleep, he kept taking a
+bottle from under the table and drinking out of it, and after every pull
+at it he twisted his head and said aloud:
+
+“What is the reason, kindly tell me, that customers enjoy themselves
+while I am forced to sit and work for them? Because they have money and
+I am a beggar?”
+
+He hated all his customers, especially the one who lived in Kolokolny
+Lane. He was a gentleman of gloomy appearance, with long hair, a yellow
+face, blue spectacles, and a husky voice. He had a German name which one
+could not pronounce. It was impossible to tell what was his calling
+and what he did. When, a fortnight before, Fyodor had gone to take his
+measure, he, the customer, was sitting on the floor pounding something
+in a mortar. Before Fyodor had time to say good-morning the contents of
+the mortar suddenly flared up and burned with a bright red flame; there
+was a stink of sulphur and burnt feathers, and the room was filled
+with a thick pink smoke, so that Fyodor sneezed five times; and as he
+returned home afterwards, he thought: “Anyone who feared God would not
+have anything to do with things like that.”
+
+When there was nothing left in the bottle Fyodor put the boots on the
+table and sank into thought. He leaned his heavy head on his fist and
+began thinking of his poverty, of his hard life with no glimmer of
+light in it. Then he thought of the rich, of their big houses and their
+carriages, of their hundred-rouble notes.... How nice it would be
+if the houses of these rich men--the devil flay them!--were smashed,
+if their horses died, if their fur coats and sable caps got shabby! How
+splendid it would be if the rich, little by little, changed into beggars
+having nothing, and he, a poor shoemaker, were to become rich, and were
+to lord it over some other poor shoemaker on Christmas Eve.
+
+Dreaming like this, Fyodor suddenly thought of his work, and opened his
+eyes.
+
+“Here’s a go,” he thought, looking at the boots. “The job has been
+finished ever so long ago, and I go on sitting here. I must take the
+boots to the gentleman.”
+
+He wrapped up the work in a red handkerchief, put on his things, and
+went out into the street. A fine hard snow was falling, pricking the
+face as though with needles. It was cold, slippery, dark, the gas-lamps
+burned dimly, and for some reason there was a smell of paraffin in the
+street, so that Fyodor coughed and cleared his throat. Rich men were
+driving to and fro on the road, and every rich man had a ham and a
+bottle of vodka in his hands. Rich young ladies peeped at Fyodor out of
+the carriages and sledges, put out their tongues and shouted, laughing:
+
+“Beggar! Beggar!”
+
+Students, officers, and merchants walked behind Fyodor, jeering at him
+and crying:
+
+“Drunkard! Drunkard! Infidel cobbler! Soul of a boot-leg! Beggar!”
+
+All this was insulting, but Fyodor held his tongue and only spat in
+disgust. But when Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw, a master-bootmaker, met
+him and said: “I’ve married a rich woman and I have men working under
+me, while you are a beggar and have nothing to eat,” Fyodor could not
+refrain from running after him. He pursued him till he found himself in
+Kolokolny Lane. His customer lived in the fourth house from the corner
+on the very top floor. To reach him one had to go through a long, dark
+courtyard, and then to climb up a very high slippery stair-case which
+tottered under one’s feet. When Fyodor went in to him he was sitting
+on the floor pounding something in a mortar, just as he had been the
+fortnight before.
+
+“Your honor, I have brought your boots,” said Fyodor sullenly.
+
+The customer got up and began trying on the boots in silence. Desiring
+to help him, Fyodor went down on one knee and pulled off his old, boot,
+but at once jumped up and staggered towards the door in horror. The
+customer had not a foot, but a hoof like a horse’s.
+
+“Aha!” thought Fyodor; “here’s a go!”
+
+The first thing should have been to cross himself, then to leave
+everything and run downstairs; but he immediately reflected that he was
+meeting a devil for the first and probably the last time, and not to
+take advantage of his services would be foolish. He controlled himself
+and determined to try his luck. Clasping his hands behind him to avoid
+making the sign of the cross, he coughed respectfully and began:
+
+“They say that there is nothing on earth more evil and impure than the
+devil, but I am of the opinion, your honor, that the devil is highly
+educated. He has--excuse my saying it--hoofs and a tail behind, but he
+has more brains than many a student.”
+
+“I like you for what you say,” said the devil, flattered. “Thank you,
+shoemaker! What do you want?”
+
+And without loss of time the shoemaker began complaining of his lot. He
+began by saying that from his childhood up he had envied the rich. He
+had always resented it that all people did not live alike in big houses
+and drive with good horses. Why, he asked, was he poor? How was he worse
+than Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw, who had his own house, and whose wife
+wore a hat? He had the same sort of nose, the same hands, feet, head,
+and back, as the rich, and so why was he forced to work when others
+were enjoying themselves? Why was he married to Marya and not to a
+lady smelling of scent? He had often seen beautiful young ladies in
+the houses of rich customers, but they either took no notice of him
+whatever, or else sometimes laughed and whispered to each other: “What
+a red nose that shoemaker has!” It was true that Marya was a good, kind,
+hard-working woman, but she was not educated; her hand was heavy and
+hit hard, and if one had occasion to speak of politics or anything
+intellectual before her, she would put her spoke in and talk the most
+awful nonsense.
+
+“What do you want, then?” his customer interrupted him.
+
+“I beg you, your honor Satan Ivanitch, to be graciously pleased to make
+me a rich man.”
+
+“Certainly. Only for that you must give me up your soul! Before the
+cocks crow, go and sign on this paper here that you give me up your
+soul.”
+
+“Your honor,” said Fyodor politely, “when you ordered a pair of boots
+from me I did not ask for the money in advance. One has first to carry
+out the order and then ask for payment.”
+
+“Oh, very well!” the customer assented.
+
+A bright flame suddenly flared up in the mortar, a pink thick smoke came
+puffing out, and there was a smell of burnt feathers and sulphur. When
+the smoke had subsided, Fyodor rubbed his eyes and saw that he was no
+longer Fyodor, no longer a shoemaker, but quite a different man, wearing
+a waistcoat and a watch-chain, in a new pair of trousers, and that he
+was sitting in an armchair at a big table. Two foot men were handing him
+dishes, bowing low and saying:
+
+“Kindly eat, your honor, and may it do you good!”
+
+What wealth! The footmen handed him a big piece of roast mutton and a
+dish of cucumbers, and then brought in a frying-pan a roast goose, and
+a little afterwards boiled pork with horse-radish cream. And how
+dignified, how genteel it all was! Fyodor ate, and before each dish
+drank a big glass of excellent vodka, like some general or some count.
+After the pork he was handed some boiled grain moistened with goose fat,
+then an omelette with bacon fat, then fried liver, and he went on eating
+and was delighted. What more? They served, too, a pie with onion and
+steamed turnip with kvass.
+
+“How is it the gentry don’t burst with such meals?” he thought.
+
+In conclusion they handed him a big pot of honey. After dinner the devil
+appeared in blue spectacles and asked with a low bow:
+
+“Are you satisfied with your dinner, Fyodor Pantelyeitch?”
+
+But Fyodor could not answer one word, he was so stuffed after his
+dinner. The feeling of repletion was unpleasant, oppressive, and to
+distract his thoughts he looked at the boot on his left foot.
+
+“For a boot like that I used not to take less than seven and a half
+roubles. What shoemaker made it?” he asked.
+
+“Kuzma Lebyodkin,” answered the footman.
+
+“Send for him, the fool!”
+
+Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw soon made his appearance. He stopped in a
+respectful attitude at the door and asked:
+
+“What are your orders, your honor?”
+
+“Hold your tongue!” cried Fyodor, and stamped his foot. “Don’t dare to
+argue; remember your place as a cobbler! Blockhead! You don’t know how
+to make boots! I’ll beat your ugly phiz to a jelly! Why have you come?”
+
+“For money.”
+
+“What money? Be off! Come on Saturday! Boy, give him a cuff!”
+
+But he at once recalled what a life the customers used to lead him, too,
+and he felt heavy at heart, and to distract his attention he took a fat
+pocketbook out of his pocket and began counting his money. There was a
+great deal of money, but Fyodor wanted more still. The devil in the blue
+spectacles brought him another notebook fatter still, but he wanted even
+more; and the more he counted it, the more discontented he became.
+
+In the evening the evil one brought him a full-bosomed lady in a red
+dress, and said that this was his new wife. He spent the whole evening
+kissing her and eating gingerbreads, and at night he went to bed on a
+soft, downy feather-bed, turned from side to side, and could not go to
+sleep. He felt uncanny.
+
+“We have a great deal of money,” he said to his wife; “we must look
+out or thieves will be breaking in. You had better go and look with a
+candle.”
+
+He did not sleep all night, and kept getting up to see if his box was
+all right. In the morning he had to go to church to matins. In church
+the same honor is done to rich and poor alike. When Fyodor was poor he
+used to pray in church like this: “God, forgive me, a sinner!” He said
+the same thing now though he had become rich. What difference was
+there? And after death Fyodor rich would not be buried in gold, not
+in diamonds, but in the same black earth as the poorest beggar. Fyodor
+would burn in the same fire as cobblers. Fyodor resented all this, and,
+too, he felt weighed down all over by his dinner, and instead of prayer
+he had all sorts of thoughts in his head about his box of money, about
+thieves, about his bartered, ruined soul.
+
+He came out of church in a bad temper. To drive away his unpleasant
+thoughts as he had often done before, he struck up a song at the top of
+his voice. But as soon as he began a policeman ran up and said, with his
+fingers to the peak of his cap:
+
+“Your honor, gentlefolk must not sing in the street! You are not a
+shoemaker!”
+
+Fyodor leaned his back against a fence and fell to thinking: what could
+he do to amuse himself?
+
+“Your honor,” a porter shouted to him, “don’t lean against the fence,
+you will spoil your fur coat!”
+
+Fyodor went into a shop and bought himself the very best concertina,
+then went out into the street playing it. Everybody pointed at him and
+laughed.
+
+“And a gentleman, too,” the cabmen jeered at him; “like some
+cobbler....”
+
+“Is it the proper thing for gentlefolk to be disorderly in the street?”
+ a policeman said to him. “You had better go into a tavern!”
+
+“Your honor, give us a trifle, for Christ’s sake,” the beggars wailed,
+surrounding Fyodor on all sides.
+
+In earlier days when he was a shoemaker the beggars took no notice of
+him, now they wouldn’t let him pass.
+
+And at home his new wife, the lady, was waiting for him, dressed in a
+green blouse and a red skirt. He meant to be attentive to her, and had
+just lifted his arm to give her a good clout on the back, but she said
+angrily:
+
+“Peasant! Ignorant lout! You don’t know how to behave with ladies! If
+you love me you will kiss my hand; I don’t allow you to beat me.”
+
+“This is a blasted existence!” thought Fyodor. “People do lead a life!
+You mustn’t sing, you mustn’t play the concertina, you mustn’t have a
+lark with a lady.... Pfoo!”
+
+He had no sooner sat down to tea with the lady when the evil spirit in
+the blue spectacles appeared and said:
+
+“Come, Fyodor Pantelyeitch, I have performed my part of the bargain. Now
+sign your paper and come along with me!”
+
+And he dragged Fyodor to hell, straight to the furnace, and devils flew
+up from all directions and shouted:
+
+“Fool! Blockhead! Ass!”
+
+There was a fearful smell of paraffin in hell, enough to suffocate one.
+And suddenly it all vanished. Fyodor opened his eyes and saw his table,
+the boots, and the tin lamp. The lamp-glass was black, and from the
+faint light on the wick came clouds of stinking smoke as from a chimney.
+Near the table stood the customer in the blue spectacles, shouting
+angrily:
+
+“Fool! Blockhead! Ass! I’ll give you a lesson, you scoundrel! You took
+the order a fortnight ago and the boots aren’t ready yet! Do you suppose
+I want to come trapesing round here half a dozen times a day for my
+boots? You wretch! you brute!”
+
+Fyodor shook his head and set to work on the boots. The customer went on
+swearing and threatening him for a long time. At last when he subsided,
+Fyodor asked sullenly:
+
+“And what is your occupation, sir?”
+
+“I make Bengal lights and fireworks. I am a pyrotechnician.”
+
+They began ringing for matins. Fyodor gave the customer the boots, took
+the money for them, and went to church.
+
+Carriages and sledges with bearskin rugs were dashing to and fro in
+the street; merchants, ladies, officers were walking along the pavement
+together with the humbler folk.... But Fyodor did not envy them nor
+repine at his lot. It seemed to him now that rich and poor were equally
+badly off. Some were able to drive in a carriage, and others to sing
+songs at the top of their voice and to play the concertina, but one and
+the same thing, the same grave, was awaiting all alike, and there was
+nothing in life for which one would give the devil even a tiny scrap of
+one’s soul.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, by
+Anton Chekhov
+
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