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Title: The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories

Author: Anton Tchekoff

Translator: S.S. Koteliansky
            Gilbert Cannan

Release Date: December 4, 2008 [EBook #27411]

Language: English

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THE HOUSE

WITH THE MEZZANINE

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

ANTON TCHEKOFF

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY

S. S. KOTELIANSKY
AND
GILBERT CANNAN

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1917

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published August, 1917




CONTENTS


THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE

TYPHUS

GOOSEBERRIES

IN EXILE

THE LADY WITH THE TOY DOG

GOUSSIEV

MY LIFE




THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE

(A PAINTER'S STORY)


It happened nigh on seven years ago, when I was living in one of the
districts of the J. province, on the estate of Bielokurov, a landowner,
a young man who used to get up early, dress himself in a long overcoat,
drink beer in the evenings, and all the while complain to me that he
could nowhere find any one in sympathy with his ideas. He lived in a
little house in the orchard, and I lived in the old manor-house, in a
huge pillared hall where there was no furniture except a large divan, on
which I slept, and a table at which I used to play patience. Even in
calm weather there was always a moaning in the chimney, and in a storm
the whole house would rock and seem as though it must split, and it was
quite terrifying, especially at night, when all the ten great windows
were suddenly lit up by a flash of lightning.

Doomed by fate to permanent idleness, I did positively nothing. For
hours together I would sit and look through the windows at the sky, the
birds, the trees and read my letters over and over again, and then for
hours together I would sleep. Sometimes I would go out and wander
aimlessly until evening.

Once on my way home I came unexpectedly on a strange farmhouse. The sun
was already setting, and the lengthening shadows were thrown over the
ripening corn. Two rows of closely planted tall fir-trees stood like two
thick walls, forming a sombre, magnificent avenue. I climbed the fence
and walked up the avenue, slipping on the fir needles which lay two
inches thick on the ground. It was still, dark, and only here and there
in the tops of the trees shimmered a bright gold light casting the
colours of the rainbow on a spider's web. The smell of the firs was
almost suffocating. Then I turned into an avenue of limes. And here too
were desolation and decay; the dead leaves rustled mournfully beneath my
feet, and there were lurking shadows among the trees. To the right, in
an old orchard, a goldhammer sang a faint reluctant song, and he too
must have been old. The lime-trees soon came to an end and I came to a
white house with a terrace and a mezzanine, and suddenly a vista opened
upon a farmyard with a pond and a bathing-shed, and a row of green
willows, with a village beyond, and above it stood a tall, slender
belfry, on which glowed a cross catching the light of the setting sun.
For a moment I was possessed with a sense of enchantment, intimate,
particular, as though I had seen the scene before in my childhood.

By the white-stone gate surmounted with stone lions, which led from the
yard into the field, stood two girls. One of them, the elder, thin,
pale, very handsome, with masses of chestnut hair and a little stubborn
mouth, looked rather prim and scarcely glanced at me; the other, who was
quite young--seventeen or eighteen, no more, also thin and pale, with a
big mouth and big eyes, looked at me in surprise, as I passed, said
something in English and looked confused, and it seemed to me that I had
always known their dear faces. And I returned home feeling as though I
had awoke from a pleasant dream.

Soon after that, one afternoon, when Bielokurov and I were walking near
the house, suddenly there came into the yard a spring-carriage in which
sat one of the two girls, the elder. She had come to ask for
subscriptions to a fund for those who had suffered in a recent fire.
Without looking at us, she told us very seriously how many houses had
been burned down in Sianov, how many men, women, and children had been
left without shelter, and what had been done by the committee of which
she was a member. She gave us the list for us to write our names, put it
away, and began to say good-bye.

"You have completely forgotten us, Piotr Petrovich," she said to
Bielokurov, as she gave him her hand. "Come and see us, and if Mr. N.
(she said my name) would like to see how the admirers of his talent live
and would care to come and see us, then mother and I would be very
pleased."

I bowed.

When she had gone Piotr Petrovich began to tell me about her. The girl,
he said, was of a good family and her name was Lydia Volchaninov, and
the estate, on which she lived with her mother and sister, was called,
like the village on the other side of the pond, Sholkovka. Her father
had once occupied an eminent position in Moscow and died a privy
councillor. Notwithstanding their large means, the Volchaninovs always
lived in the village, summer and winter, and Lydia was a teacher in the
Zemstvo School at Sholkovka and earned twenty-five roubles a month. She
only spent what she earned on herself and was proud of her independence.

"They are an interesting family," said Bielokurov. "We ought to go and
see them. They will be very glad to see you."

One afternoon, during a holiday, we remembered the Volchaninovs and went
over to Sholkovka. They were all at home. The mother, Ekaterina
Pavlovna, had obviously once been handsome, but now she was stouter
than her age warranted, suffered from asthma, was melancholy and
absent-minded as she tried to entertain me with talk about painting.
When she heard from her daughter that I might perhaps come over to
Sholkovka, she hurriedly called to mind a few of my landscapes which she
had seen in exhibitions in Moscow, and now she asked what I had tried to
express in them. Lydia, or as she was called at home, Lyda, talked more
to Bielokurov than to me. Seriously and without a smile, she asked him
why he did not work for the Zemstvo and why up till now he had never
been to a Zemstvo meeting.

"It is not right of you, Piotr Petrovich," she said reproachfully. "It
is not right. It is a shame."

"True, Lyda, true," said her mother. "It is not right."

"All our district is in Balaguin's hands," Lyda went on, turning to me.
"He is the chairman of the council and all the jobs in the district are
given to his nephews and brothers-in-law, and he does exactly as he
likes. We ought to fight him. The young people ought to form a strong
party; but you see what our young men are like. It is a shame, Piotr
Petrovich."

The younger sister, Genya, was silent during the conversation about the
Zemstvo. She did not take part in serious conversations, for by the
family she was not considered grown-up, and they gave her her baby-name,
Missyuss, because as a child she used to call her English governess
that. All the time she examined me curiously and when I looked at the
photograph-album she explained: "This is my uncle.... That is my
godfather," and fingered the portraits, and at the same time touched me
with her shoulder in a childlike way, and I could see her small,
undeveloped bosom, her thin shoulders, her long, slim waist tightly
drawn in by a belt.

We played croquet and lawn-tennis, walked in the garden, had tea, and
then a large supper. After the huge pillared hall, I felt out of tune in
the small cosy house, where there were no oleographs on the walls and
the servants were treated considerately, and everything seemed to me
young and pure, through the presence of Lyda and Missyuss, and
everything was decent and orderly. At supper Lyda again talked to
Bielokurov about the Zemstvo, about Balaguin, about school libraries.
She was a lively, sincere, serious girl, and it was interesting to
listen to her, though she spoke at length and in a loud voice--perhaps
because she was used to holding forth at school. On the other hand,
Piotr Petrovich, who from his university days had retained the habit of
reducing any conversation to a discussion, spoke tediously, slowly, and
deliberately, with an obvious desire to be taken for a clever and
progressive man. He gesticulated and upset the sauce with his sleeve and
it made a large pool on the table-cloth, though nobody but myself seemed
to notice it.

When we returned home the night was dark and still.

"I call it good breeding," said Bielokurov, with a sigh, "not so much
not to upset the sauce on the table, as not to notice it when some one
else has done it. Yes. An admirable intellectual family. I'm rather out
of touch with nice people. Ah! terribly. And all through business,
business, business!"

He went on to say what hard work being a good farmer meant. And I
thought: What a stupid, lazy lout! When we talked seriously he would
drag it out with his awful drawl--er, er, er--and he works just as he
talks--slowly, always behindhand, never up to time; and as for his being
businesslike, I don't believe it, for he often keeps letters given him
to post for weeks in his pocket.

"The worst of it is," he murmured as he walked along by my side, "the
worst of it is that you go working away and never get any sympathy from
anybody."


II

I began to frequent the Volchaninovs' house. Usually I sat on the bottom
step of the veranda. I was filled with dissatisfaction, vague discontent
with my life, which had passed so quickly and uninterestingly, and I
thought all the while how good it would be to tear out of my breast my
heart which had grown so weary. There would be talk going on on the
terrace, the rustling of dresses, the fluttering of the pages of a
book. I soon got used to Lyda receiving the sick all day long, and
distributing books, and I used often to go with her to the village,
bareheaded, under an umbrella. And in the evening she would hold forth
about the Zemstvo and schools. She was very handsome, subtle, correct,
and her lips were thin and sensitive, and whenever a serious
conversation started she would say to me drily:

"This won't interest you."

I was not sympathetic to her. She did not like me because I was a
landscape-painter, and in my pictures did not paint the suffering of the
masses, and I seemed to her indifferent to what she believed in. I
remember once driving along the shore of the Baikal and I met a Bouryat
girl, in shirt and trousers of Chinese cotton, on horseback: I asked her
if she would sell me her pipe and, while we were talking, she looked
with scorn at my European face and hat, and in a moment she got bored
with talking to me, whooped and galloped away. And in exactly the same
way Lyda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she never showed her
dislike of me, but I felt it, and, as I sat on the bottom step of the
terrace, I had a certain irritation and said that treating the peasants
without being a doctor meant deceiving them, and that it is easy to be
a benefactor when one owns four thousand acres.

Her sister, Missyuss, had no such cares and spent her time in complete
idleness, like myself. As soon as she got up in the morning she would
take a book and read it on the terrace, sitting far back in a lounge
chair so that her feet hardly touched the ground, or she would hide
herself with her book in the lime-walk, or she would go through the gate
into the field. She would read all day long, eagerly poring over the
book, and only through her looking fatigued, dizzy, and pale sometimes,
was it possible to guess how much her reading exhausted her. When she
saw me come she would blush a little and leave her book, and, looking
into my face with her big eyes, she would tell me of things that had
happened, how the chimney in the servants' room had caught fire, or how
the labourer had caught a large fish in the pond. On week-days she
usually wore a bright-coloured blouse and a dark-blue skirt. We used to
go out together and pluck cherries for jam, in the boat, and when she
jumped to reach a cherry, or pulled the oars, her thin, round arms would
shine through her wide sleeves. Or I would make a sketch and she would
stand and watch me breathlessly.

One Sunday, at the end of June, I went over to the Volchaninovs in the
morning about nine o'clock. I walked through the park, avoiding the
house, looking for mushrooms, which were very plentiful that summer,
and marking them so as to pick them later with Genya. A warm wind was
blowing. I met Genya and her mother, both in bright Sunday dresses,
going home from church, and Genya was holding her hat against the wind.
They told me they were going to have tea on the terrace.

As a man without a care in the world, seeking somehow to justify his
constant idleness, I have always found such festive mornings in a
country house universally attractive. When the green garden, still moist
with dew, shines in the sun and seems happy, and when the terrace smells
of mignonette and oleander, and the young people have just returned from
church and drink tea in the garden, and when they are all so gaily
dressed and so merry, and when you know that all these healthy,
satisfied, beautiful people will do nothing all day long, then you long
for all life to be like that. So I thought then as I walked through the
garden, quite prepared to drift like that without occupation or purpose,
all through the day, all through the summer.

Genya carried a basket and she looked as though she knew that she would
find me there. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and whenever she asked
me a question she stood in front of me to see my face.

"Yesterday," she said, "a miracle happened in our village. Pelagueya,
the cripple, has been ill for a whole year, and no doctors or medicines
were any good, but yesterday an old woman muttered over her and she got
better."

"That's nothing," I said. "One should not go to sick people and old
women for miracles. Is not health a miracle? And life itself? A miracle
is something incomprehensible."

"And you are not afraid of the incomprehensible?"

"No. I like to face things I do not understand and I do not submit to
them. I am superior to them. Man must think himself higher than lions,
tigers, stars, higher than anything in nature, even higher than that
which seems incomprehensible and miraculous. Otherwise he is not a man,
but a mouse which is afraid of everything."

Genya thought that I, as an artist, knew a great deal and could guess
what I did not know. She wanted me to lead her into the region of the
eternal and the beautiful, into the highest world, with which, as she
thought, I was perfectly familiar, and she talked to me of God, of
eternal life, of the miraculous. And I, who did not admit that I and my
imagination would perish for ever, would reply: "Yes. Men are immortal.
Yes, eternal life awaits us." And she would listen and believe me and
never asked for proof.

As we approached the house she suddenly stopped and said:

"Our Lyda is a remarkable person, isn't she? I love her dearly and would
gladly sacrifice my life for her at any time. But tell me"--Genya
touched my sleeve with her finger--"but tell me, why do you argue with
her all the time? Why are you so irritated?"

"Because she is not right."

Genya shook her head and tears came to her eyes.

"How incomprehensible!" she muttered.

At that moment Lyda came out, and she stood by the balcony with a
riding-whip in her hand, and looked very fine and pretty in the
sunlight as she gave some orders to a farm-hand. Bustling about and
talking loudly, she tended two or three of her patients, and then with a
businesslike, preoccupied look she walked through the house, opening one
cupboard after another, and at last went off to the attic; it took some
time to find her for dinner and she did not come until we had finished
the soup. Somehow I remember all these, little details and love to dwell
on them, and I remember the whole of that day vividly, though nothing
particular happened. After dinner Genya read, lying in her lounge chair,
and I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The sky was
overcast and a thin fine rain began to fall. It was hot, the wind had
dropped, and it seemed the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came
out on to the terrace with a fan, looking very sleepy.

"O, mamma," said Genya, kissing her hand. "It is not good for you to
sleep during the day."

They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other would
stand on the terrace and look at the trees and call: "Hello!" "Genya!"
or "Mamma, dear, where are you?" They always prayed together and shared
the same faith, and they understood each other very well, even when they
were silent. And they treated other people in exactly the same way.
Ekaterina Pavlovna also soon got used to me and became attached to me,
and when I did not turn up for a few days she would send to inquire if I
was well. And she too used to look admiringly at my sketches, and with
the same frank loquacity she would tell me things that happened, and she
would confide her domestic secrets to me.

She revered her elder daughter. Lyda never came to her for caresses, and
only talked about serious things: she went her own way and to her mother
and sister she was as sacred and enigmatic as the admiral, sitting in
his cabin, to his sailors.

"Our Lyda is a remarkable person," her mother would often say; "isn't
she?"

And, now, as the soft rain fell, we spoke of Lyda:

"She is a remarkable woman," said her mother, and added in a low voice
like a conspirator's as she looked round, "such as she have to be looked
for with a lamp in broad daylight, though you know, I am beginning to be
anxious. The school, pharmacies, books--all very well, but why go to
such extremes? She is twenty-three and it is time for her to think
seriously about herself. If she goes on with her books and her
pharmacies she won't know how life has passed.... She ought to marry."

Genya, pale with reading, and with her hair ruffled, looked up and said,
as if to herself, as she glanced at her mother:

"Mamma, dear, everything depends on the will of God."

And once more she plunged into her book.

Bielokurov came over in a _poddiovka_, wearing an embroidered shirt. We
played croquet and lawn-tennis, and when it grew dark we had a long
supper, and Lyda once more spoke of her schools and Balaguin, who had
got the whole district into his own hands. As I left the Volchaninovs
that night I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day, with a
sad consciousness that everything ends, however long it may be. Genya
took me to the gate, and perhaps, because she had spent the whole day
with me from the beginning to end, I felt somehow lonely without her,
and the whole kindly family was dear to me: and for the first time
during the whole of that summer I had a desire to work.

"Tell me why you lead such a monotonous life," I asked Bielokurov, as we
went home. "My life is tedious, dull, monotonous, because I am a
painter, a queer fish, and have been worried all my life with envy,
discontent, disbelief in my work: I am always poor, I am a vagabond, but
you are a wealthy, normal man, a landowner, a gentleman--why do you live
so tamely and take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven't you
fallen in love with Lyda or Genya?"

"You forget that I love another woman," answered Bielokurov.

He meant his mistress, Lyabor Ivanovna, who lived with him in the
orchard house. I used to see the lady every day, very stout, podgy,
pompous, like a fatted goose, walking in the garden in a Russian
head-dress, always with a sunshade, and the servants used to call her to
meals or tea. Three years ago she rented a part of his house for the
summer, and stayed on to live with Bielokurov, apparently for ever. She
was ten years older than he and managed him very strictly, so that he
had to ask her permission to go out. She would often sob and make
horrible noises like a man with a cold, and then I used to send and tell
her that I'm if she did not stop I would go away. Then she would stop.

When we reached home, Bielokurov sat down on the divan and frowned and
brooded, and I began to pace up and down the hall, feeling a sweet
stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I wanted to talk
about the Volchaninovs.

"Lyda could only fall in love with a Zemstvo worker like herself, some
one who is run off his legs with hospitals and schools," I said. "For
the sake of a girl like that a man might not only become a Zemstvo
worker, but might even become worn out, like the tale of the iron boots.
And Missyuss? How charming Missyuss is!"

Bielokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of
the disease of the century--pessimism. He spoke confidently and
argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened
steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that,
sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.

"The point is neither pessimism nor optimism," I said irritably, "but
that ninety-nine out of a hundred have no sense."

Bielokurov took this to mean himself, was offended, and went away.


III

"The Prince is on a visit to Malozyomov and sends you his regards," said
Lyda to her mother, as she came in and took off her gloves. "He told me
many interesting things. He promised to bring forward in the Zemstvo
Council the question of a medical station at Malozyomov, but he says
there is little hope." And turning to me, she said: "Forgive me, I keep
forgetting that you are not interested."

I felt irritated.

"Why not?" I asked and shrugged my shoulders. "You don't care about my
opinion, but I assure you, the question greatly interests me."

"Yes?"

"In my opinion there is absolutely no need for a medical station at
Malozyomov."

My irritation affected her: she gave a glance at me, half closed her
eyes and said:

"What is wanted then? Landscapes?"

"Not landscapes either. Nothing is wanted there."

She finished taking off her gloves and took up a newspaper which had
just come by post; a moment later, she said quietly, apparently
controlling herself:

"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if a medical man had been
available she would have lived. However, I suppose landscape-painters
are entitled to their opinions."

"I have a very definite opinion, I assure you," said I, and she took
refuge behind the newspaper, as though she did not wish to listen. "In
my opinion medical stations, schools, libraries, pharmacies, under
existing conditions, only lead to slavery. The masses are caught in a
vast chain: you do not cut it but only add new links to it. That is my
opinion."

She looked at me and smiled mockingly, and I went on, striving to catch
the thread of my ideas.

"It does not matter that Anna should die in childbirth, but it does
matter that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelagueyas, from dawn to sunset
should be grinding away, ill from overwork, all their lives worried
about their starving sickly children; all their lives they are afraid of
death and disease, and have to be looking after themselves; they fade in
youth, grow old very early, and die in filth and dirt; their children as
they grow up go the same way and hundreds of years slip by and millions
of people live worse than animals--in constant dread of never having a
crust to eat; but the horror of their position is that they have no time
to think of their souls, no time to remember that they are made in the
likeness of God; hunger, cold, animal fear, incessant work, like drifts
of snow block all the ways to spiritual activity, to the very thing that
distinguishes man from the animals, and is the only thing indeed that
makes life worth living. You come to their assistance with hospitals and
schools, but you do not free them from their fetters; on the contrary,
you enslave them even more, since by introducing new prejudices into
their lives, you increase the number of their demands, not to mention
the fact that they have to pay the Zemstvo for their drugs and
pamphlets, and therefore, have to work harder than ever."

"I will not argue with you," said Lyda. "I have heard all that." She put
down her paper. "I will only tell you one thing, it is no good sitting
with folded hands. It is true, we do not save mankind, and perhaps we do
make mistakes, but we do what we can and we are right. The highest and
most sacred truth for an educated being--is to help his neighbours, and
we do what we can to help. You do not like it, but it is impossible to
please everybody."

"True, Lyda, true," said her mother.

In Lyda's presence her courage always failed her, and as she talked she
would look timidly at her, for she was afraid of saying something
foolish or out of place: and she never contradicted, but would always
agree: "True, Lyda, true."

"Teaching peasants to read and write, giving them little moral pamphlets
and medical assistance, cannot decrease either ignorance or mortality,
just as the light from your windows cannot illuminate this huge garden,"
I said. "You give nothing by your interference in the lives of these
people. You only create new demands, and a new compulsion to work."

"Ah! My God, but we must do something!" said Lyda exasperatedly, and I
could tell by her voice that she thought my opinions negligible and
despised me.

"It is necessary," I said, "to free people from hard physical work. It
is necessary to relieve them of their yoke, to give them breathing
space, to save them from spending their whole lives in the kitchen or
the byre, in the fields; they should have time to take thought of their
souls, of God and to develop their spiritual capacities. Every human
being's salvation lies in spiritual activity--in his continual search
for truth and the meaning of life. Give them some relief from rough,
animal labour, let them feel free, then you will see how ridiculous at
bottom your pamphlets and pharmacies are. Once a human being is aware of
his vocation, then he can only be satisfied with religion, service, art,
and not with trifles like that."

"Free them from work?" Lyda gave a smile. "Is that possible?"

"Yes.... Take upon yourself a part of their work. If we all, in town and
country, without exception, agreed to share the work which is being
spent by mankind in the satisfaction of physical demands, then none of
us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us,
rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be
free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should
invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands
to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not
be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their
health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did
not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco
factories and distilleries--what a lot of free time we should have! We
should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all
work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work
together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of
it--truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual,
poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself."

"But you contradict yourself," said Lyda. "You talk about service and
deny education."

"I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on
the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of
understanding--the kind of education we have had from the time of
Riurik: and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not
education is wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual
capacities. Not schools are wanted but universities."

"You deny medicine too."

"Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as
natural phenomenon, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if
you don't cure their causes. Remove the chief cause--physical labour,
and there will be no diseases. I don't acknowledge the science which
cures," I went on excitedly. "Science and art, when they are true, are
directed not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and
the general--they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God,
the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,
like pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber
life. We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly
educated people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians,
philosophers, poets. All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted
on temporary passing needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and
work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day,
the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the
truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals,
and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more
and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an
artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the more strange and
incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working
for the amusement of the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and
supporting the existing state of things. And I don't want to work and
will not.... Nothing is wanted, so let the world go to hell."

"Missyuss, go away," said Lyda to her sister, evidently thinking my
words dangerous to so young a girl.

Genya looked sadly at her sister and mother and went out.

"People generally talk like that," said Lyda, "when they want to excuse
their indifference. It is easier to deny hospitals and schools than to
come and teach."

"True, Lyda, true," her mother agreed.

"You say you will not work," Lyda went on. "Apparently you set a high
price on your work, but do stop arguing. We shall never agree, since I
value the most imperfect library or pharmacy, of which you spoke so
scornfully just now, more than all the landscapes in the world." And at
once she turned to her mother and began to talk in quite a different
tone: "The Prince has got very thin, and is much changed since the last
time he was here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy."

She talked to her mother about the Prince to avoid talking to me. Her
face was burning, and, in order to conceal her agitation, she bent over
the table as if she were short-sighted and made a show of reading the
newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went
home.


IV

All was quiet outside: the village on the other side of the pond was
already asleep, not a single light was to be seen, and on the pond
there was only the faint reflection of the stars. By the gate with the
stone lions stood Genya, waiting to accompany me.

"The village is asleep," I said, trying to see her face in the darkness,
and I could see her dark sad eyes fixed on me. "The innkeeper and the
horse-stealers are sleeping quietly, and decent people like ourselves
quarrel and irritate each other."

It was a melancholy August night--melancholy because it already smelled
of the autumn: the moon rose behind a purple cloud and hardly lighted
the road and the dark fields of winter corn on either side. Stars fell
frequently, Genya walked beside me on the road and tried not to look at
the sky, to avoid seeing the falling stars, which somehow frightened
her.

"I believe you are right," she said, trembling in the evening chill. "If
people could give themselves to spiritual activity, they would soon
burst everything."

"Certainly. We are superior beings, and if we really knew all the power
of the human genius and lived only for higher purposes then we should
become like gods. But this will never be. Mankind will degenerate and of
their genius not a trace will be left."

When the gate was out of sight Genya stopped and hurriedly shook my
hand.

"Good night," she said, trembling; her shoulders were covered only with
a thin blouse and she was shivering with cold. "Come to-morrow."

I was filled with a sudden dread of being left alone with my inevitable
dissatisfaction with myself and people, and I, too, tried not to see the
falling stars.

"Stay with me a little longer," I said. "Please."

I loved Genya, and she must have loved me, because she used to meet me
and walk with me, and because she looked at me with tender admiration.
How thrillingly beautiful her pale face was, her thin nose, her arms,
her slenderness, her idleness, her constant reading. And her mind? I
suspected her of having an unusual intellect: I was fascinated by the
breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the
strong, handsome Lyda, who did not love me. Genya liked me as a painter,
I had conquered her heart by my talent, and I longed passionately to
paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen, who would
one day possess with me the trees, the fields, the river, the dawn, all
Nature, wonderful and fascinating, with whom, as with them, I have felt
helpless and useless.

"Stay with me a moment longer," I called. "I implore you."

I took off my overcoat and covered her childish shoulders. Fearing that
she would look queer and ugly in a man's coat, she began to laugh and
threw it off, and as she did so, I embraced her and began to cover her
face, her shoulders, her arms with kisses.

"Till to-morrow," she whispered timidly as though she was afraid to
break the stillness of the night. She embraced me: "We have no secrets
from one another. I must tell mamma and my sister.... Is it so terrible?
Mamma will be pleased. Mamma loves you, but Lyda!"

She ran to the gates.

"Good-bye," she called out.

For a couple of minutes I stood and heard her running. I had no desire
to go home, there was nothing there to go for. I stood for a while lost
in thought, and then quietly dragged myself back, to have one more look
at the house in which she lived, the dear, simple, old house, which
seemed to look at me with the windows of the mezzanine for eyes, and to
understand everything. I walked past the terrace, sat down on a bench by
the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm-tree, and looked
at the house. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyuss had her
room, shone a bright light, and then a faint green glow. The lamp had
been covered with a shade. Shadows began to move.... I was filled with
tenderness and a calm satisfaction, to think that I could let myself be
carried away and fall in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy at the
thought that only a few yards away in one of the rooms of the house lay
Lyda who did not love me, and perhaps hated me. I sat and waited to see
if Genya would come out. I listened attentively and it seemed to me they
were sitting in the mezzanine.

An hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no longer
visible. The moon hung high above the house and lit the sleeping garden
and the avenues: I could distinctly see the dahlias and roses in the
flower-bed in front of the house, and all seemed to be of one colour. It
was very cold. I left the garden, picked up my overcoat in the road, and
walked slowly home.

Next day after dinner when I went to the Volchaninovs', the glass door
was wide open. I sat down on the terrace expecting Genya to come from
behind the flower-bed or from one of the avenues, or to hear her voice
come from out of the rooms; then I went into the drawing-room and the
dining-room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I
went down a long passage into the hall, and then back again. There were
several doors in the passage and behind one of them I could hear Lyda's
voice:

"To the crow somewhere ... God ..."--she spoke slowly and distinctly,
and was probably dictating--" ... God sent a piece of cheese.... To the
crow ... somewhere.... Who is there?" she called out suddenly as she
heard my footsteps.

"It is I."

"Oh! excuse me. I can't come out just now. I am teaching Masha."

"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"

"No. She and my sister left to-day for my Aunt's in Penga, and in the
winter they are probably going abroad." She added after a short silence:
"To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?"

I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and
looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:

"A piece of cheese.... To the crow somewhere God sent a piece of
cheese."

And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only
reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then
along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: "I
have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,"
I read. "I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you
happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried."

Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence. ...Over the fields
where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled
horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn
was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was
ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs', and once more it became
tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left that
evening for Petersburg.

* * *

I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Lately on my way to the Crimea I met
Bielokurov at a station. As of old he was in a _poddiovka_, wearing an
embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied:
"Quite well, thanks be to God." He began to talk. He had sold his estate
and bought another, smaller one in the name of Lyabov Ivanovna. He told
me a little about the Volchaninovs. Lyda, he said, still lived at
Sholkovka and taught the children in the school; little by little she
succeeded in gathering round herself a circle of sympathetic people, who
formed a strong party, and at the last Zemstvo election they drove out
Balaguin, who up till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of
Genya Bielokurov said that she did not live at home and he did not know
where she was.

I have already begun to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and
only now and then, when I am working or reading, suddenly--without rhyme
or reason--I remember the green light in the window, and the sound of my
own footsteps as I walked through the fields that night, when I was in
love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And even more rarely, when I
am sad and lonely, I begin already to recollect and it seems to me that
I, too, am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet....

Missyuss, where are you?





TYPHUS


In a smoking-compartment of the mail-train from Petrograd to Moscow sat
a young lieutenant, Klimov by name. Opposite him sat an elderly man with
a clean-shaven, shipmaster's face, to all appearances a well-to-do Finn
or Swede, who all through the journey smoked a pipe and talked round and
round the same subject.

"Ha! you are an officer! My brother is also an officer, but he is a
sailor. He is a sailor and is stationed at Kronstadt. Why are you going
to Moscow?"

"I am stationed there."

"Ha! Are you married?"

"No. I live with my aunt and sister."

"My brother is also an officer, but he is married and has a wife and
three children. Ha!"

The Finn looked surprised at something, smiled broadly and fatuously as
he exclaimed, "Ha," and every now and then blew through the stem of his
pipe. Klimov, who was feeling rather unwell, and not at all inclined to
answer questions, hated him with all his heart. He thought how good it
would be to snatch his gurgling pipe out of his hands and throw it under
the seat and to order the Finn himself into another car.

"They are awful people, these Finns and ... Greeks," he thought.
"Useless, good-for-nothing, disgusting people. They only cumber the
earth. What is the good of them?"

And the thought of Finns and Greeks filled him with a kind of nausea. He
tried to compare them with the French and the Italians, but the idea of
those races somehow roused in him the notion of organ-grinders, naked
women, and the foreign oleographs which hung over the chest of drawers
in his aunt's house.

The young officer felt generally out of sorts. There seemed to be no
room for his arms and legs, though he had the whole seat to himself; his
mouth was dry and sticky, his head was heavy and his clouded thoughts
seemed to wander at random, not only in his head, but also outside it
among the seats and the people looming in the darkness. Through the
turmoil in his brain, as through a dream, he heard the murmur of
voices, the rattle of the wheels, the slamming of doors. Bells,
whistles, conductors, the tramp of the people on the platforms came
oftener than usual. The time slipped by quickly, imperceptibly, and it
seemed that the train stopped every minute at a station as now and then
there would come up the sound of metallic voices:

"Is the post ready?"

"Ready."

It seemed to him that the stove-neater came in too often to look at the
thermometer, and that trains never stopped passing and his own train was
always roaring over bridges. The noise, the whistle, the Finn, the
tobacco smoke--all mixed with the ominous shifting of misty shapes,
weighed on Klimov like an intolerable nightmare. In terrible anguish he
lifted up his aching head, looked at the lamp whose light was encircled
with shadows and misty spots; he wanted to ask for water, but his dry
tongue would hardly move, and he had hardly strength enough to answer
the Finn's questions. He tried to lie down more comfortably and sleep,
but he could not succeed; the Finn fell asleep several times, woke up
and lighted his pipe, talked to him with his "Ha!" and went to sleep
again; and the lieutenant could still not find room for his legs on the
seat, and all the while the ominous figures shifted before his eyes.

At Spirov he got out to have a drink of water. He saw some people
sitting at a table eating hurriedly.

"How can they eat?" he thought, trying to avoid the smell of roast meat
in the air and seeing the chewing mouths, for both seemed to him utterly
disgusting and made him feel sick.

A handsome lady was talking to a military man in a red cap, and she
showed magnificent white teeth when she smiled; her smile, her teeth,
the lady herself produced in Klimov the same impression of disgust as
the ham and the fried cutlets. He could not understand how the military
man in the red cap could bear to sit near her and look at her healthy
smiling face.

After he had drunk some water, he went back to his place. The Finn sat
and smoked. His pipe gurgled and sucked like a galoche full of holes in
dirty weather.

"Ha!" he said with some surprise. "What station is this?"

"I don't know," said Klimov, lying down and shutting his mouth to keep
out the acrid tobacco smoke.

"When do we get to Tver."

"I don't know. I am sorry, I ... I can't talk. I am not well. I have a
cold."

The Finn knocked out his pipe against the window-frame and began to talk
of his brother, the sailor. Klimov paid no more attention to him and
thought in agony of his soft, comfortable bed, of the bottle of cold
water, of his sister Katy, who knew so well how to tuck him up and
cosset him. He even smiled when there flashed across his mind his
soldier-servant Pavel, taking off his heavy, close-fitting boots and
putting water on the table. It seemed to him that he would only have to
lie on his bed and drink some water and his nightmare would give way to
a sound, healthy sleep.

"Is the post ready?" came a dull voice from a distance.

"Ready," answered a loud, bass voice almost by the very window.

It was the second or third station from Spirov.

Time passed quickly, seemed to gallop along, and there would be no end
to the bells, whistles, and stops. In despair Klimov pressed his face
into the corner of the cushion, held his head in his hands, and again
began to think of his sister Katy and his orderly Pavel; but his sister
and his orderly got mixed up with the looming figures and whirled about
and disappeared. His breath, thrown back from the cushion, burned his
face, and his legs ached and a draught from the window poured into his
back, but, painful though it was, he refused to change his position....
A heavy, drugging torpor crept over him and chained his limbs.

When at length he raised his head, the car was quite light. The
passengers were putting on their overcoats and moving about. The train
stopped. Porters in white aprons and number-plates bustled about the
passengers and seized their boxes. Klimov put on his greatcoat
mechanically and left the train, and he felt as though it were not
himself walking, but some one else, a stranger, and he felt that he was
accompanied by the heat of the train, his thirst, and the ominous,
lowering figures which all night long had prevented his sleeping.
Mechanically he got his luggage and took a cab. The cabman charged him
one rouble and twenty-five copecks for driving him to Povarska Street,
but he did not haggle and submissively took his seat in the sledge. He
could still grasp the difference in numbers, but money had no value to
him whatever.

At home Klimov was met by his aunt and his sister Katy, a girl of
eighteen. Katy had a copy-book and a pencil in her hands as she greeted
him, and he remembered that she was preparing for a teacher's
examination. He took no notice of their greetings and questions, but
gasped from the heat, and walked aimlessly through the rooms until he
reached his own, and then he fell prone on the bed. The Finn, the red
cap, the lady with the white teeth, the smell of roast meat, the
shifting spot in the lamp, filled his mind and he lost consciousness
and did not hear the frightened voices near him.

When he came to himself he found himself in bed, undressed, and noticed
the water-bottle and Pavel, but it did not make him any more comfortable
nor easy. His legs and arms, as before, felt cramped, his tongue clove
to his palate, and he could hear the chuckle of the Finn's pipe.... By
the bed, growing out of Pavel's broad back, a stout, black-bearded
doctor was bustling.

"All right, all right, my lad," he murmured. "Excellent, excellent....
Jist so, jist so...."

The doctor called Klimov "my lad." Instead of "just so," he said "jist
saow," and instead of "yes," "yies."

"Yies, yies, yies," he said. "Jist saow, jist saow.... Don't be
downhearted!"

The doctor's quick, careless way of speaking, his well-fed face, and the
condescending tone in which he said "my lad" exasperated Klimov.

"Why do you call me 'my lad'?" he moaned. "Why this familiarity, damn it
all?"

And he was frightened by the sound of his own voice. It was so dry,
weak, and hollow that he could hardly recognise it.

"Excellent, excellent," murmured the doctor, not at all offended. "Yies,
yies. You mustn't be cross."

And at home the time galloped away as alarmingly quickly as in the
train.... The light of day in his bedroom was every now and then changed
to the dim light of evening.... The doctor never seemed to leave the
bedside, and his "Yies, yies, yies," could be heard at every moment.
Through the room stretched an endless row of faces; Pavel, the Finn,
Captain Taroshevich, Sergeant Maximenko, the red cap, the lady with the
white teeth, the doctor. All of them talked, waved their hands, smoked,
ate. Once in broad daylight Klimov saw his regimental priest, Father
Alexander, in his stole and with the host in his hands, standing by the
bedside and muttering something with such a serious expression as Klimov
had never seen him wear before. The lieutenant remembered that Father
Alexander used to call all the Catholic officers Poles, and wishing to
make the priest laugh, he exclaimed:

"Father Taroshevich, the Poles have fled to the woods."

But Father Alexander, usually a gay, light-hearted man, did not laugh
and looked even more serious, and made the sign of the cross over
Klimov. At night, one after the other, there would come slowly creeping
in and out two shadows. They were his aunt and his sister. The shadow of
his sister would kneel down and pray; she would bow to the ikon, and her
grey shadow on the wall would bow, too, so that two shadows prayed to
God. And all the time there was a smell of roast meat and of the Finn's
pipe, but once Klimov could detect a distinct smell of incense. He
nearly vomited and cried:

"Incense! Take it away."

There was no reply. He could only hear priests chanting in an undertone
and some one running on the stairs.

When Klimov recovered from his delirium there was not a soul in the
bedroom. The morning sun flared through the window and the drawn
curtains, and a trembling beam, thin and keen as a sword, played on the
water-bottle. He could hear the rattle of wheels--that meant there was
no more snow in the streets. The lieutenant looked at the sunbeam, at
the familiar furniture and the door, and his first inclination was to
laugh. His chest and stomach trembled with a sweet, happy, tickling
laughter. From head to foot his whole body was filled with a feeling of
infinite happiness, like that which the first man must have felt when he
stood erect and beheld the world for the first time. Klimov had a
passionate longing for people, movement, talk. His body lay motionless;
he could only move his hands, but he hardly noticed it, for his whole
attention was fixed on little things. He was delighted with his
breathing and with his laughter; he was delighted with the existence of
the water-bottle, the ceiling, the sunbeam, the ribbon on the curtain.
God's world, even in such a narrow corner as his bedroom, seemed to him
beautiful, varied, great. When the doctor appeared the lieutenant
thought how nice his medicine was, how nice and sympathetic the doctor
was, how nice and interesting people were, on the whole.

"Yies, yies, yies," said the doctor. "Excellent, excellent. Now we are
well again. Jist saow. Jist saow."

The lieutenant listened and laughed gleefully. He remembered the Finn,
the lady with the white teeth, the train, and he wanted to eat and
smoke.

"Doctor," he said, "tell them to bring me a slice of rye bread and salt,
and some sardines...."

The doctor refused. Pavel did not obey his order and refused to go for
bread. The lieutenant could not bear it and began to cry like a thwarted
child.

"Ba-by," the doctor laughed. "Mamma! Hush-aby!"

Klimov also began to laugh, and when the doctor had gone, he fell sound
asleep. He woke up with the same feeling of joy and happiness. His aunt
was sitting by his bed.

"Oh, aunty!" He was very happy. "What has been the matter with me?"

"Typhus."

"I say! And now I am well, quite well! Where is Katy?"

"She is not at home. She has probably gone to see some one after her
examination."

The old woman bent over her stocking as she said this; her lips began to
tremble; she turned her face away and suddenly began to sob. In her
grief, she forgot the doctor's orders and cried:

"Oh! Katy! Katy! Our angel is gone from us! She is gone!"

She dropped her stocking and stooped down for it, and her cap fell off
her head. Klimov stared at her grey hair, could not understand, was
alarmed for Katy, and asked:

"But where is she, aunty?"

The old woman, who had already forgotten Klimov and remembered only her
grief, said:

"She caught typhus from you and ... and died. She was buried the day
before yesterday."

This sudden appalling piece of news came home to Klimov's mind, but
dreadful and shocking though it was it could not subdue the animal joy
which thrilled through the convalescent lieutenant. He cried, laughed,
and soon began to complain that he was given nothing to eat.

Only a week later, when, supported by Pavel, he walked in a
dressing-gown to the window, and saw the grey spring sky and heard the
horrible rattle of some old rails being carried by on a lorry, then his
heart ached with sorrow and he began to weep and pressed his forehead
against the window-frame.

"How unhappy I am!" he murmured. "My God, how unhappy I am!"

And joy gave way to his habitual weariness and a sense of his
irreparable loss.





GOOSEBERRIES


From early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was
still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds
hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes. Ivan
Ivanich, the veterinary surgeon, and Bourkin, the schoolmaster, were
tired of walking and the fields seemed endless to them. Far ahead they
could just see the windmills of the village of Mirousky, to the right
stretched away to disappear behind the village a line of hills, and they
knew that it was the bank of the river; meadows, green willows,
farmhouses; and from one of the hills there could be seen a field as
endless, telegraph-posts, and the train, looking from a distance like a
crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the town. In the calm
weather when all Nature seemed gentle and melancholy, Ivan Ivanich and
Bourkin were filled with love for the fields and thought how grand and
beautiful the country was.

"Last time, when we stopped in Prokofyi's shed," said Bourkin, "you were
going to tell me a story."

"Yes. I wanted to tell you about my brother."

Ivan Ivanich took a deep breath and lighted his pipe before beginning
his story, but just then the rain began to fall. And in about five
minutes it came pelting down and showed no signs of stopping. Ivan
Ivanich stopped and hesitated; the dogs, wet through, stood with their
tails between their legs and looked at them mournfully.

"We ought to take shelter," said Bourkin. "Let us go to Aliokhin. It is
close by."

"Very well."

They took a short cut over a stubble-field and then bore to the right,
until they came to the road. Soon there appeared poplars, a garden, the
red roofs of granaries; the river began to glimmer and they came to a
wide road with a mill and a white bathing-shed. It was Sophino, where
Aliokhin lived.

The mill was working, drowning the sound of the rain, and the dam shook.
Round the carts stood wet horses, hanging their heads, and men were
walking about with their heads covered with sacks. It was wet, muddy,
and unpleasant, and the river looked cold and sullen. Ivan Ivanich and
Bourkin felt wet and uncomfortable through and through; their feet were
tired with walking in the mud, and they walked past the dam to the barn
in silence as though they were angry with each other.

In one of the barns a winnowing-machine was working, sending out clouds
of dust. On the threshold stood Aliokhin himself, a man of about forty,
tall and stout, with long hair, more like a professor or a painter than
a farmer. He was wearing a grimy white shirt and rope belt, and pants
instead of trousers; and his boots were covered with mud and straw. His
nose and eyes were black with dust. He recognised Ivan Ivanich and was
apparently very pleased.

"Please, gentlemen," he said, "go to the house. I'll be with you in a
minute."

The house was large and two-storied. Aliokhin lived down-stairs in two
vaulted rooms with little windows designed for the farm-hands; the
farmhouse was plain, and the place smelled of rye bread and vodka, and
leather. He rarely used the reception-rooms, only when guests arrived.
Ivan Ivanich and Bourkin were received by a chambermaid; such a pretty
young woman that both of them stopped and exchanged glances.

"You cannot imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen," said Aliokhin,
coming after them into the hall. "I never expected you. Pelagueya," he
said to the maid, "give my friends a change of clothes. And I will
change, too. But I must have a bath. I haven't had one since the spring.
Wouldn't you like to come to the bathing-shed? And meanwhile our things
will be got ready."

Pretty Pelagueya, dainty and sweet, brought towels and soap, and
Aliokhin led his guests to the bathing-shed.

"Yes," he said, "it is a long time since I had a bath. My bathing-shed
is all right, as you see. My father and I put it up, but somehow I have
no time to bathe."

He sat down on the step and lathered his long hair and neck, and the
water round him became brown.

"Yes. I see," said Ivan Ivanich heavily, looking at his head.

"It is a long time since I bathed," said Aliokhin shyly, as he soaped
himself again, and the water round him became dark blue, like ink.

Ivan Ivanich came out of the shed, plunged into the water with a splash,
and swam about in the rain, flapping his arms, and sending waves back,
and on the waves tossed white lilies; he swam out to the middle of the
pool and dived, and in a minute came up again in another place and kept
on swimming and diving, trying to reach the bottom. "Ah! how delicious!"
he shouted in his glee. "How delicious!" He swam to the mill, spoke to
the peasants, and came back, and in the middle of the pool he lay on his
back to let the rain fall on his face. Bourkin and Aliokhin were already
dressed and ready to go, but he kept on swimming and diving.

"Delicious," he said. "Too delicious!"

"You've had enough," shouted Bourkin.

They went to the house. And only when the lamp was lit in the large
drawing-room up-stairs, and Bourkin and Ivan Ivanich, dressed in silk
dressing-gowns and warm slippers, lounged in chairs, and Aliokhin
himself, washed and brushed, in a new frock coat, paced up and down
evidently delighting in the warmth and cleanliness and dry clothes and
slippers, and pretty Pelagueya, noiselessly tripping over the carpet and
smiling sweetly, brought in tea and jam on a tray, only then did Ivan
Ivanich begin his story, and it was as though he was being listened to
not only by Bourkin and Aliokhin, but also by the old and young ladies
and the officer who looked down so staidly and tranquilly from the
golden frames.

"We are two brothers," he began, "I, Ivan Ivanich, and Nicholai Ivanich,
two years younger. I went in for study and became a veterinary surgeon,
while Nicholai was at the Exchequer Court when he was nineteen. Our
father, Tchimasha-Himalaysky, was a cantonist, but he died with an
officer's rank and left us his title of nobility and a small estate.
After his death the estate went to pay his debts. However, we spent our
childhood there in the country. We were just like peasant's children,
spent days and nights in the fields and the woods, minded the house,
barked the lime-trees, fished, and so on.... And you know once a man has
fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in
the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to
the day of his death he will be drawn to the country. My brother pined
away in the Exchequer. Years passed and he sat in the same place, wrote
out the same documents, and thought of one thing, how to get back to the
country. And little by little his distress became a definite disorder, a
fixed idea--to buy a small farm somewhere by the bank of a river or a
lake.

"He was a good fellow and I loved him, but I never sympathised with the
desire to shut oneself up on one's own farm. It is a common saying that
a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a
man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and
want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To
leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide
yourself in a farmhouse is not life--it is egoism, laziness; it is a
kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not
six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in
full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free
spirit.

"My brother Nicholai, sitting in his office, would dream of eating his
own _schi_, with its savoury smell floating across the farmyard; and of
eating out in the open air, and of sleeping in the sun, and of sitting
for hours together on a seat by the gate and gazing at the field and the
forest. Books on agriculture and the hints in almanacs were his joy, his
favourite spiritual food; and he liked reading newspapers, but only the
advertisements of land to be sold, so many acres of arable and grass
land, with a farmhouse, river, garden, mill, and mill-pond. And he would
dream of garden-walls, flowers, fruits, nests, carp in the pond, don't
you know, and all the rest of it. These fantasies of his used to vary
according to the advertisements he found, but somehow there was always a
gooseberry-bush in every one. Not a house, not a romantic spot could he
imagine without its gooseberry-bush.

"'Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the
veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything
smells good ... and there are gooseberries.'

"He used to draw out a plan of his estate and always the same things
were shown on it: (_a_) Farmhouse, (_b_) cottage, (_c_) vegetable
garden, (_d_) gooseberry-bush. He used to live meagrely and never had
enough to eat and drink, dressed God knows how, exactly like a beggar,
and always saved and put his money into the bank. He was terribly
stingy. It used to hurt me to see him, and I used to give him money to
go away for a holiday, but he would put that away, too. Once a man gets
a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

"Years passed; he was transferred to another province. He completed his
fortieth year and was still reading advertisements in the papers and
saving up his money. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same
idea of buying a farmhouse with a gooseberry-bush, he married an
elderly, ugly widow, not out of any feeling for her, but because she had
money. With her he still lived stingily, kept her half-starved, and put
the money into the bank in his own name. She had been the wife of a
postmaster and was used to good living, but with her second husband she
did not even have enough black bread; she pined away in her new life,
and in three years or so gave up her soul to God. And my brother never
for a moment thought himself to blame for her death. Money, like vodka,
can play queer tricks with a man. Once in our town a merchant lay dying.
Before his death he asked for some honey, and he ate all his notes and
scrip with the honey so that nobody should get it. Once I was examining
a herd of cattle at a station and a horse-jobber fell under the engine,
and his foot was cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, with the
blood pouring down--a terrible business--and all the while he kept on
asking anxiously for his foot; he had twenty-five roubles in his boot
and did not want to lose them."

"Keep to your story," said Bourkin.

"After the death of his wife," Ivan Ivanich continued, after a long
pause, "my brother began to look out for an estate. Of course you may
search for five years, and even then buy a pig in a poke. Through an
agent my brother Nicholai raised a mortgage and bought three hundred
acres with a farmhouse, a cottage, and a park, but there was no orchard,
no gooseberry-bush, no duck-pond; there was a river but the water in it
was coffee-coloured because the estate lay between a brick-yard and a
gelatine factory. But my brother Nicholai was not worried about that;
he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes and settled down to a country life.

"Last year I paid him a visit. I thought I'd go and see how things were
with him. In his letters my brother called his estate Tchimbarshov
Corner, or Himalayskoe. I arrived at Himalayskoe in the afternoon. It
was hot. There were ditches, fences, hedges, rows of young fir-trees,
trees everywhere, and there was no telling how to cross the yard or
where to put your horse. I went to the house and was met by a red-haired
dog, as fat as a pig. He tried to bark but felt too lazy. Out of the
kitchen came the cook, barefooted, and also as fat as a pig, and said
that the master was having his afternoon rest. I went in to my brother
and found him sitting on his bed with his knees covered with a blanket;
he looked old, stout, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous.
I half expected him to grunt like a pig.

"We embraced and shed a tear of joy and also of sadness to think that
we had once been young, but were now both going grey and nearing death.
He dressed and took me to see his estate.

"'Well? How are you getting on?' I asked.

"'All right, thank God. I am doing very well.'

"He was no longer the poor, tired official, but a real landowner and a
person of consequence. He had got used to the place and liked it, ate a
great deal, took Russian baths, was growing fat, had already gone to law
with the parish and the two factories, and was much offended if the
peasants did not call him 'Your Lordship.' And, like a good landowner,
he looked after his soul and did good works pompously, never simply.
What good works? He cured the peasants of all kinds of diseases with
soda and castor-oil, and on his birthday he would have a thanksgiving
service held in the middle of the village, and would treat the peasants
to half a bucket of vodka, which he thought the right thing to do. Ah!
Those horrible buckets of vodka. One day a greasy landowner will drag
the peasants before the Zembro Court for trespass, and the next, if
it's a holiday, he will give them a bucket of vodka, and they drink and
shout Hooray! and lick his boots in their drunkenness. A change to good
eating and idleness always fills a Russian with the most preposterous
self-conceit. Nicholai Ivanich who, when he was in the Exchequer, was
terrified to have an opinion of his own, now imagined that what he said
was law. 'Education is necessary for the masses, but they are not fit
for it.' 'Corporal punishment is generally harmful, but in certain cases
it is useful and indispensable.'

"'I know the people and I know how to treat them,' he would say. 'The
people love me. I have only to raise my finger and they will do as I
wish.'

"And all this, mark you, was said with a kindly smile of wisdom. He was
constantly saying: 'We noblemen,' or 'I, as a nobleman.' Apparently he
had forgotten that our grandfather was a peasant and our father a common
soldier. Even our family name, Tchimacha-Himalaysky, which is really an
absurd one, seemed to him full-sounding, distinguished, and very
pleasing.

"But my point does not concern him so much as myself. I want to tell you
what a change took place in me in those few hours while I was in his
house. In the evening, while we were having tea, the cook laid a
plateful of gooseberries on the table. They had not been bought, but
were his own gooseberries, plucked for the first time since the bushes
were planted. Nicholai Ivanich laughed with joy and for a minute or two
he looked in silence at the gooseberries with tears in his eyes. He
could not speak for excitement, then put one into his mouth, glanced at
me in triumph, like a child at last being given its favourite toy, and
said:

"'How good they are!'

"He went on eating greedily, and saying all the while:

"'How good they are! Do try one!'

"It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts
us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one
whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life,
who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with
himself. In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of sadness,
but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like
despair. And at night it grew on me. A bed was made up for me in the
room near my brother's and I could hear him, unable to sleep, going
again and again to the plate of gooseberries. I thought: 'After all,
what a lot of contented, happy people there must be! What an
overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the arrogance
and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the
weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness,
hypocrisy, falsehood.... Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets,
there is peace; out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there
is not one to kick against it all. Think of the people who go to the
market for food: during the day they eat; at night they sleep, talk
nonsense, marry, grow old, piously follow their dead to the cemetery;
one never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life
goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and
against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many
go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of
starvation.... And such a state of things is obviously what we want;
apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their
burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a
general hypnosis. Every happy man should have some one with a little
hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy
people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later
show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him--illness, poverty,
loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees
nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on
living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like
an aspen-tree in the wind--and everything is all right.'

"That night I was able to understand how I, too, had been content and
happy," Ivan Ivanich went on, getting up. "I, too, at meals or out
hunting, used to lay down the law about living, and religion, and
governing the masses. I, too, used to say that teaching is light, that
education is necessary, but that for simple folk reading and writing is
enough for the present. Freedom is a boon, I used to say, as essential
as the air we breathe, but we must wait. Yes--I used to say so, but now
I ask: 'Why do we wait?'" Ivan Ivanich glanced angrily at Bourkin. "Why
do we wait, I ask you? What considerations keep us fast? I am told that
we cannot have everything at once, and that every idea is realised in
time. But who says so? Where is the proof that it is so? You refer me to
the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is
there order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature,
should stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could
jump it or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait?
Wait, when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full
of the desire to live!

"I left my brother early the next morning, and from that time on I found
it impossible to live in town. The peace and the quiet of it oppress me.
I dare not look in at the windows, for nothing is more dreadful to see
than the sight of a happy family, sitting round a table, having tea. I
am an old man now and am no good for the struggle. I commenced late. I
can only grieve within my soul, and fret and sulk. At night my head
buzzes with the rush of my thoughts and I cannot sleep.... Ah! If I were
young!"

Ivan Ivanich walked excitedly up and down the room and repeated:

"If I were young."

He suddenly walked up to Aliokhin and shook him first by one hand and
then by the other.

"Pavel Konstantinich," he said in a voice of entreaty, "don't be
satisfied, don't let yourself be lulled to sleep! While you are young,
strong, wealthy, do not cease to do good! Happiness does not exist, nor
should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not
in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand.
Do good!"

Ivan Ivanich said this with a piteous supplicating smile, as though he
were asking a personal favour.

Then they all three sat in different corners of the drawing-room and
were silent. Ivan Ivanich's story had satisfied neither Bourkin nor
Aliokhin. With the generals and ladies looking down from their gilt
frames, seeming alive in the firelight, it was tedious to hear the story
of a miserable official who ate gooseberries.... Somehow they had a
longing to hear and to speak of charming people, and of women. And the
mere fact of sitting in the drawing-room where everything--the lamp with
its coloured shade, the chairs, and the carpet under their feet--told
how the very people who now looked down at them from their frames once
walked, and sat and had tea there, and the fact that pretty Pelagueya
was near--was much better than any story.

Aliokhin wanted very much to go to bed; he had to get up for his work
very early, about two in the morning, and now his eyes were closing,
but he was afraid of his guests saying something interesting without his
hearing it, so he would not go. He did not trouble to think whether what
Ivan Ivanich had been saying was clever or right; his guests were
talking of neither groats, nor hay, nor tar, but of something which had
no bearing on his life, and he liked it and wanted them to go on....

"However, it's time to go to bed," said Bourkin, getting up. "I will
wish you good night."

Aliokhin said good night and went down-stairs, and left his guests. Each
had a large room with an old wooden bed and carved ornaments; in the
corner was an ivory crucifix; and their wide, cool beds, made by pretty
Pelagueya, smelled sweetly of clean linen.

Ivan Ivanich undressed in silence and lay down.

"God forgive me, a wicked sinner," he murmured, as he drew the clothes
over his head.

A smell of burning tobacco came from his pipe which lay on the table,
and Bourkin could not sleep for a long time and was worried because he
could not make out where the unpleasant smell came from.

The rain beat against the windows all night long.




IN EXILE


Old Simeon, whose nickname was Brains, and a young Tartar, whose name
nobody knew, were sitting on the bank of the river by a wood-fire. The
other three ferrymen were in the hut. Simeon who was an old man of about
sixty, skinny and toothless, but broad-shouldered and healthy, was
drunk. He would long ago have gone to bed, but he had a bottle in his
pocket and was afraid of his comrades asking him for vodka. The Tartar
was ill and miserable, and, pulling his rags about him, he went on
talking about the good things in the province of Simbirsk, and what a
beautiful and clever wife he had left at home. He was not more than
twenty-five, and now, by the light of the wood-fire, with his pale,
sorrowful, sickly face, he looked a mere boy.

"Of course, it is not a paradise here," said Brains, "you see, water,
the bare bushes by the river, clay everywhere--nothing else.... It is
long past Easter and there is still ice on the water and this morning
there was snow...."

"Bad! Bad!" said the Tartar with a frightened look.

A few yards away flowed the dark, cold river, muttering, dashing against
the holes in the clayey banks as it tore along to the distant sea. By
the bank they were sitting on, loomed a great barge, which the ferrymen
call a _karbass_. Far away and away, flashing out, flaring up, were
fires crawling like snakes--last year's grass being burned. And behind
the water again was darkness. Little banks of ice could be heard
knocking against the barge.... It was very damp and cold....

The Tartar glanced at the sky. There were as many stars as at home, and
the darkness was the same, but something was missing. At home in the
Simbirsk province the stars and the sky were altogether different.

"Bad! Bad!" he repeated.

"You will get used to it," said Brains with a laugh. "You are young yet
and foolish; the milk is hardly dry on your lips, and in your folly you
imagine that there is no one unhappier than you, but there will come a
time when you will say: God give every one such a life! Just look at me.
In a week's time the floods will be gone, and we will fix the ferry
here, and all of you will go away into Siberia and I shall stay here,
going to and fro. I have been living thus for the last two-and-twenty
years, but, thank God, I want nothing. God give everybody such a life."

The Tartar threw some branches onto the fire, crawled near to it and
said:

"My father is sick. When he dies, my mother and my wife have promised to
come here."

"What do you want your mother and your wife for?" asked Brains. "Just
foolishness, my friend. It's the devil tempting you, plague take him.
Don't listen to the Evil One. Don't give way to him. When he talks to
you about women you should answer him sharply: 'I don't want them!' When
he talks of freedom, you should stick to it and say: 'I don't want it. I
want nothing! No father, no mother, no wife, no freedom, no home, no
love! I want nothing.' Plague take 'em all."

Brains took a swig at his bottle and went on:

"My brother, I am not an ordinary peasant. I don't come from the servile
masses. I am the son of a deacon, and when I was a free man at Rursk, I
used to wear a frock coat, and now I have brought myself to such a point
that I can sleep naked on the ground and eat grass. God give such a life
to everybody. I want nothing. I am afraid of nobody and I think there is
no man richer or freer than I. When they sent me here from Russia I set
my teeth at once and said: 'I want nothing!' The devil whispers to me
about my wife and my kindred, and about freedom and I say to him: 'I
want nothing!' I stuck to it, and, you see, I live happily and have
nothing to grumble at. If a man gives the devil the least opportunity
and listens to him just once, then he is lost and has no hope of
salvation: he will be over ears in the mire and will never get out. Not
only peasants the like of you are lost, but the nobly born and the
educated also. About fifteen years ago a certain nobleman was sent here
from Russia. He had had some trouble with his brothers and had made a
forgery in a will. People said he was a prince or a baron, but perhaps
he was only a high official--who knows? Well, he came here and at once
bought a house and land in Moukhzyink. 'I want to live by my own work,'
said he, 'in the sweat of my brow, because I am no longer a nobleman but
an exile.' 'Why,' said I. 'God help you, for that is good.' He was a
young man then, ardent and eager; he used to mow and go fishing, and he
would ride sixty miles on horseback. Only one thing was wrong; from the
very beginning he was always driving to the post-office at Guyrin. He
used to sit in my boat and sigh: 'Ah! Simeon, it is a long time since
they sent me any money from home.' 'You are better without money,
Vassili Sergnevich,' said I. 'What's the good of it? You just throw away
the past, as though it had never happened, as though it were only a
dream, and start life afresh. Don't listen to the devil,' I said, 'he
won't do you any good, and he will only tighten the noose. You want
money now, but in a little while you will want something else, and then
more and more. If,' said I, 'you want to be happy you must want nothing.
Exactly.... If,' I said, 'fate has been hard on you and me, it is no
good asking her for charity and falling at her feet. We must ignore her
and laugh at her.' That's what I said to him.... Two years later I
ferried him over and he rubbed his hands and laughed. 'I'm going,' said
he, 'to Guyrin to meet my wife. She has taken pity on me, she says, and
she is coming here. She is very kind and good.' And he gave a gasp of
joy. Then one day he came with his wife, a beautiful young lady with a
little girl in her arms and a lot of luggage. And Vassili Andreich kept
turning and looking at her and could not look at her or praise her
enough. 'Yes, Simeon, my friend, even in Siberia people live.' Well,
thought I, all right, you won't be content. And from that time on, mark
you, he used to go to Guyrin every week to find out if money had been
sent from Russia. A terrible lot of money was wasted. 'She stays here,'
said he, 'for my sake, and her youth and beauty wither away here in
Siberia. She shares my bitter lot with me,' said he, 'and I must give
her all the pleasure I can for it....' To make his wife happier he took
up with the officials and any kind of rubbish. And they couldn't have
company without giving food and drink, and they must have a piano and a
fluffy little dog on the sofa--bad cess to it.... Luxury, in a word, all
kinds of tricks. My lady did not stay with him long. How could she?
Clay, water, cold, no vegetables, no fruit; uneducated people and
drunkards, with no manners, and she was a pretty pampered young lady
from the metropolis.... Of course she got bored. And her husband was no
longer a gentleman, but an exile--quite a different matter. Three years
later, I remember, on the eve of the Assumption, I heard shouts from the
other bank. I went over in the ferry and saw my lady, all wrapped up,
with a young gentleman, a government official, in a troika.... I ferried
them across, they got into the carriage and disappeared, and I saw no
more of them. Toward the morning Vassili Andreich came racing up in a
coach and pair. 'Has my wife been across, Simeon, with a gentleman in
spectacles?' 'She has,' said I, 'but you might as well look for the wind
in the fields.' He raced after them and kept it up for five days and
nights. When he came back he jumped on to the ferry and began to knock
his head against the side and to cry aloud. 'You see,' said I, 'there
you are.' And I laughed and reminded him: 'Even in Siberia people live.'
But he went on beating his head harder than ever.... Then he got the
desire for freedom. His wife had gone to Russia and he longed to go
there to see her and take her away from her lover. And he began to go to
the post-office every day, and then to the authorities of the town. He
was always sending applications or personally handing them to the
authorities, asking to have his term remitted and to be allowed to go,
and he told me that he had spent over two hundred roubles on telegrams.
He sold his land and mortgaged his house to the money-lenders. His hair
went grey, he grew round-shouldered, and his face got yellow and
consumptive-looking. He used to cough whenever he spoke and tears used
to come to his eyes. He spent eight years on his applications, and at
last he became happy again and lively: he had thought of a new dodge.
His daughter, you see, had grown up. He doted on her and could never
take his eyes off her. And, indeed, she was very pretty, dark and
clever. Every Sunday he used to go to church with her at Guyrin. They
would stand side by side on the ferry, and she would smile and he would
devour her with his eyes. 'Yes, Simeon,' he would say. 'Even in Siberia
people live. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Look what a fine
daughter I have. You wouldn't find one like her in a thousand miles'
journey.' 'She's a nice girl,' said I. 'Oh, yes.' ... And I thought to
myself: 'You wait.... She is young. Young blood will have its way; she
wants to live and what life is there here?' And she began to pine
away.... Wasting, wasting away, she withered away, fell ill and had to
keep to her bed.... Consumption. That's Siberian happiness, plague take
it; that's Siberian life.... He rushed all over the place after the
doctors and dragged them home with him. If he heard of a doctor or a
quack three hundred miles off he would rush off after him. He spent a
terrific amount of money on doctors and I think it would have been much
better spent on drink. All the same she had to die. No help for it. Then
it was all up with him. He thought of hanging himself, and of trying to
escape to Russia. That would be the end of him. He would try to escape:
he would be caught, tried, penal servitude, flogging."

"Good! Good!" muttered the Tartar with a shiver.

"What is good?" asked Brains.

"Wife and daughter. What does penal servitude and suffering matter? He
saw his wife and his daughter. You say one should want nothing. But
nothing--is evil! His wife spent three years with him. God gave him
that. Nothing is evil, and three years is good. Why don't you understand
that?"

Trembling and stammering as he groped for Russian words, of which he
knew only a few, the Tartar began to say: "God forbid he should fall ill
among strangers, and die and be buried in the cold sodden earth, and
then, if his wife could come to him if only for one day or even for one
hour, he would gladly endure any torture for such happiness, and would
even thank God. Better one day of happiness than nothing."

Then once more he said what a beautiful clever wife he had left at home,
and with his head in his hands he began to cry and assured Simeon that
he was innocent, and had been falsely accused. His two brothers and his
uncle had stolen some horses from a peasant and beat the old man nearly
to death, and the community never looked into the matter at all, and
judgment was passed by which all three brothers were exiled to Siberia,
while his uncle, a rich man, remained at home.

"You will get used to it," said Simeon.

The Tartar relapsed into silence and stared into the fire with his eyes
red from weeping; he looked perplexed and frightened, as if he could not
understand why he was in the cold and the darkness, among strangers, and
not in the province of Simbirsk. Brains lay down near the fire, smiled
at something, and began to say in an undertone:

"But what a joy she must be to your father," he muttered after a pause.
"He loves her and she is a comfort to him, eh? But, my man, don't tell
me. He is a strict, harsh old man. And girls don't want strictness; they
want kisses and laughter, scents and pomade. Yes.... Ah! What a life!"
Simeon swore heavily. "No more vodka! That means bedtime. What? I'm
going, my man."

Left alone, the Tartar threw more branches on the fire, lay down, and,
looking into the blaze, began to think of his native village and of his
wife; if she could come if only for a month, or even a day, and then, if
she liked, go back again! Better a month or even a day, than nothing.
But even if his wife kept her promise and came, how could he provide for
her? Where was she to live?

"If there is nothing to eat; how are we to live?" asked the Tartar
aloud.

For working at the oars day and night he was paid two copecks a day; the
passengers gave tips, but the ferrymen shared them out and gave nothing
to the Tartar, and only laughed at him. And he was poor, cold, hungry,
and fearful.... With his whole body aching and shivering he thought it
would be good to go into the hut and sleep; but there was nothing to
cover himself with, and it was colder there than on the bank. He had
nothing to cover himself with there, but he could make up a fire....

In a week's time, when the floods had subsided and the ferry would be
fixed up, all the ferrymen except Simeon would not be wanted any longer
and the Tartar would have to go from village to village, begging and
looking for work. His wife was only seventeen; beautiful, soft, and
shy.... Could she go unveiled begging through the villages? No. The idea
of it was horrible.

It was already dawn. The barges, the bushy willows above the water, the
swirling flood began to take shape, and up above in a clayey cliff a hut
thatched with straw, and above that the straggling houses of the
village, where the cocks had begun to crow.

The ginger-coloured clay cliff, the barge, the river, the strange wild
people, hunger, cold, illness--perhaps all these things did not really
exist. Perhaps, thought the Tartar, it was only a dream. He felt that he
must be asleep, and he heard his own snoring.... Certainly he was at
home in the Simbirsk province; he had but to call his wife and she would
answer; and his mother was in the next room.... But what awful dreams
there are! Why? The Tartar smiled and opened his eyes. What river was
that? The Volga?

It was snowing.

"Hi! Ferry!" some one shouted on the other bank. "_Karba-a-ass!_"

The Tartar awoke and went to fetch his mates to row over to the other
side. Hurrying into their sheepskins, swearing sleepily in hoarse
voices, and shivering from the cold, the four men appeared on the bank.
After their sleep, the river from which there came a piercing blast,
seemed to them horrible and disgusting. They stepped slowly into the
barge.... The Tartar and the three ferrymen took the long, broad-bladed
oars, which in the dim light looked like a crab's claw, and Simeon flung
himself with his belly against the tiller. And on the other side the
voice kept on shouting, and a revolver was fired twice, for the man
probably thought the ferrymen were asleep or gone to the village inn.

"All right. Plenty of time!" said Brains in the tone of one who was
convinced that there is no need for hurry in this world--and indeed
there is no reason for it.

The heavy, clumsy barge left the bank and heaved through the willows,
and by the willows slowly receding it was possible to tell that the
barge was moving. The ferrymen plied the oars with a slow measured
stroke; Brains hung over the tiller with his stomach pressed against it
and swung from side to side. In the dim light they looked like men
sitting on some antediluvian animal with long limbs, swimming out to a
cold dismal nightmare country.

They got clear of the willows and swung out into mid-stream. The thud of
the oars and the splash could be heard on the other bank and shouts
came: "Quicker! Quicker!" After another ten minutes the barge bumped
heavily against the landing-stage.

"And it is still snowing, snowing all the time," Simeon murmured, wiping
the snow off his face. "God knows where it comes from!"

On the other side a tall, lean old man was waiting in a short fox-fur
coat and a white astrachan hat. He was standing some distance from his
horses and did not move; he had a stern concentrated expression as if he
were trying to remember something and were furious with his recalcitrant
memory. When Simeon went up to him and took off his hat with a smile he
said:

"I'm in a hurry to get to Anastasievka. My daughter is worse again and
they tell me there's a new doctor at Anastasievka."

The coach was clamped onto the barge and they rowed back. All the while
as they rowed the man, whom Simeon called Vassili Andreich, stood
motionless, pressing his thick lips tight and staring in front of him.
When the driver craved leave to smoke in his presence, he answered
nothing, as if he did not hear. And Simeon hung over the rudder and
looked at him mockingly and said:

"Even in Siberia people live. L-i-v-e!"

On Brains's face was a triumphant expression as if he were proving
something, as if pleased that things had happened just as he thought
they would. The unhappy, helpless look of the man in the fox-fur coat
seemed to give him great pleasure.

"The roads are now muddy, Vassili Andreich," he said, when the horses
had been harnessed on the bank. "You'd better wait a couple of weeks,
until it gets dryer.... If there were any point in going--but you know
yourself that people are always on the move day and night and there's no
point in it. Sure!"

Vassili Andreich said nothing, gave him a tip, took his seat in the
coach and drove away.

"Look! He's gone galloping after the doctor!" said Simeon, shivering in
the cold. "Yes. To look for a real doctor, trying to overtake the wind
in the fields, and catch the devil by the tail, plague take him! What
queer fish there are! God forgive me, a miserable sinner."

The Tartar went up to Brains, and, looking at him with mingled hatred
and disgust, trembling, and mixing Tartar words up with his broken
Russian, said:

"He good ... good. And you ... bad! You are bad! The gentleman is a good
soul, very good, and you are a beast, you are bad! The gentleman is
alive and you are dead.... God made man that he should be alive, that he
should have happiness, sorrow, grief, and you want nothing, so you are
not alive, but a stone! A stone wants nothing and so do you.... You are
a stone--and God does not love you and the gentleman he does."

They all began to laugh: the Tartar furiously knit his brows, waved his
hand, drew his rags round him and went to the fire. The ferrymen and
Simeon went slowly to the hut.

"It's cold," said one of the ferrymen hoarsely, as he stretched himself
on the straw with which the damp, clay floor was covered.

"Yes. It's not warm," another agreed.... "It's a hard life."

All of them lay down. The wind blew the door open. The snow drifted into
the hut. Nobody could bring himself to get up and shut the door; it was
cold, but they put up with it.

"And I am happy," muttered Simeon as he fell asleep. "God give such a
life to everybody."

"You certainly are the devil's own. Even the devil don't need to take
you."

Sounds like the barking of a dog came from outside.

"Who is that? Who is there?"

"It's the Tartar crying."

"Oh! he's a queer fish."

"He'll get used to it!" said Simeon, and at once he fell asleep. Soon
the others slept too and the door was left open.




THE LADY WITH THE TOY DOG


It was reported that a new face had been seen on the quay; a lady with a
little dog. Dimitri Dimitrich Gomov, who had been a fortnight at Talta
and had got used to it, had begun to show an interest in new faces. As
he sat in the pavilion at Verne's he saw a young lady, blond and fairly
tall, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, pass along the quay. After her
ran a white Pomeranian.

Later he saw her in the park and in the square several times a day. She
walked by herself, always in the same broad-brimmed hat, and with this
white dog. Nobody knew who she was, and she was spoken of as the lady
with the toy dog.

"If," thought Gomov, "if she is here without a husband or a friend, it
would be as well to make her acquaintance."

He was not yet forty, but he had a daughter of twelve and two boys at
school. He had married young, in his second year at the University, and
now his wife seemed half as old again as himself. She was a tall woman,
with dark eyebrows, erect, grave, stolid, and she thought herself an
intellectual woman. She read a great deal, called her husband not
Dimitri, but Demitri, and in his private mind he thought her
short-witted, narrow-minded, and ungracious. He was afraid of her and
disliked being at home. He had begun to betray her with other women long
ago, betrayed her frequently, and, probably for that reason nearly
always spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence
he would maintain that they were an inferior race.

It seemed to him that his experience was bitter enough to give him the
right to call them any name he liked, but he could not live a couple of
days without the "inferior race." With men he was bored and ill at ease,
cold and unable to talk, but when he was with women, he felt easy and
knew what to talk about, and how to behave, and even when he was silent
with them he felt quite comfortable. In his appearance as in his
character, indeed in his whole nature, there was something attractive,
indefinable, which drew women to him and charmed them; he knew it, and
he, too, was drawn by some mysterious power to them.

His frequent, and, indeed, bitter experiences had taught him long ago
that every affair of that kind, at first a divine diversion, a delicious
smooth adventure, is in the end a source of worry for a decent man,
especially for men like those at Moscow who are slow to move,
irresolute, domesticated, for it becomes at last an acute and
extraordinary complicated problem and a nuisance. But whenever he met
and was interested in a new woman, then his experience would slip away
from his memory, and he would long to live, and everything would seem so
simple and amusing.

And it so happened that one evening he dined in the gardens, and the
lady in the broad-brimmed hat came up at a leisurely pace and sat at the
next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, her coiffure told him
that she belonged to society, that she was married, that she was paying
her first visit to Talta, that she was alone, and that she was bored....
There is a great deal of untruth in the gossip about the immorality of
the place. He scorned such tales, knowing that they were for the most
part concocted by people who would be only too ready to sin if they had
the chance, but when the lady sat down at the next table, only a yard or
two away from him, his thoughts were filled with tales of easy
conquests, of trips to the mountains; and he was suddenly possessed by
the alluring idea of a quick transitory liaison, a moment's affair with
an unknown woman whom he knew not even by name.

He beckoned to the little dog, and when it came up to him, wagged his
finger at it. The dog began to growl. Gomov again wagged his finger.

The lady glanced at him and at once cast her eyes down.

"He won't bite," she said and blushed.

"May I give him a bone?"--and when she nodded emphatically, he asked
affably: "Have you been in Talta long?"

"About five days."

"And I am just dragging through my second week."

They were silent for a while.

"Time goes quickly," she said, "and it is amazingly boring here."

"It is the usual thing to say that it is boring here. People live quite
happily in dull holes like Bieliev or Zhidra, but as soon as they come
here they say: 'How boring it is! The very dregs of dullness!' One would
think they came from Spain."

She smiled. Then both went on eating in silence as though they did not
know each other; but after dinner they went off together--and then
began an easy, playful conversation as though they were perfectly happy,
and it was all one to them where they went or what they talked of. They
walked and talked of how the sea was strangely luminous; the water
lilac, so soft and warm, and athwart it the moon cast a golden streak.
They said how stifling it was after the hot day. Gomov told her how he
came from Moscow and was a philologist by education, but in a bank by
profession; and how he had once wanted to sing in opera, but gave it up;
and how he had two houses in Moscow.... And from her he learned that she
came from Petersburg, was born there, but married at S. where she had
been living for the last two years; that she would stay another month at
Talta, and perhaps her husband would come for her, because, he too,
needed a rest. She could not tell him what her husband was--Provincial
Administration or Zemstvo Council--and she seemed to think it funny. And
Gomov found out that her name was Anna Sergueyevna.

In his room at night, he thought of her and how they would meet next
day. They must do so. As he was going to sleep, it struck him that she
could only lately have left school, and had been at her lessons even as
his daughter was then; he remembered how bashful and gauche she was when
she laughed and talked with a stranger--it must be, he thought, the
first time she had been alone, and in such a place with men walking
after her and looking at her and talking to her, all with the same
secret purpose which she could not but guess. He thought of her slender
white neck and her pretty, grey eyes.

"There is something touching about her," he thought as he began to fall
asleep.


II

A week passed. It was a blazing day. Indoors it was stifling, and in the
streets the dust whirled along. All day long he was plagued with thirst
and he came into the pavilion every few minutes and offered Anna
Sergueyevna an iced drink or an ice. It was impossibly hot.

In the evening, when the air was fresher, they walked to the jetty to
see the steamer come in. There was quite a crowd all gathered to meet
somebody, for they carried bouquets. And among them were clearly marked
the peculiarities of Talta: the elderly ladies were youngly dressed and
there were many generals.

The sea was rough and the steamer was late, and before it turned into
the jetty it had to do a great deal of manoeuvring. Anna Sergueyevna
looked through her lorgnette at the steamer and the passengers as though
she were looking for friends, and when she turned to Gomov, her eyes
shone. She talked much and her questions were abrupt, and she forgot
what she had said; and then she lost her lorgnette in the crowd.

The well-dressed people went away, the wind dropped, and Gomov and Anna
Sergueyevna stood as though they were waiting for somebody to come from
the steamer. Anna Sergueyevna was silent. She smelled her flowers and
did not look at Gomov.

"The weather has got pleasanter toward evening," he said. "Where shall
we go now? Shall we take a carriage?"

She did not answer.

He fixed his eyes on her and suddenly embraced her and kissed her lips,
and he was kindled with the perfume and the moisture of the flowers; at
once he started and looked round; had not some one seen?

"Let us go to your--" he murmured.

And they walked quickly away.

Her room was stifling, and smelled of scents which she had bought at the
Japanese shop. Gomov looked at her and thought: "What strange chances
there are in life!" From the past there came the memory of earlier
good-natured women, gay in their love, grateful to him for their
happiness, short though it might be; and of others--like his wife--who
loved without sincerity, and talked overmuch and affectedly,
hysterically, as though they were protesting that it was not love, nor
passion, but something more important; and of the few beautiful cold
women, into whose eyes there would flash suddenly a fierce expression, a
stubborn desire to take, to snatch from life more than it can give; they
were no longer in their first youth, they were capricious, unstable,
domineering, imprudent, and when Gomov became cold toward them then
their beauty roused him to hatred, and the lace on their lingerie
reminded him of the scales of fish.

But here there was the shyness and awkwardness of inexperienced youth, a
feeling of constraint; an impression of perplexity and wonder, as though
some one had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergueyevna, "the lady
with the toy dog" took what had happened somehow seriously, with a
particular gravity, as though thinking that this was her downfall and
very strange and improper. Her features seemed to sink and wither, and
on either side of her face her long hair hung mournfully down; she sat
crestfallen and musing, exactly like a woman taken in sin in some old
picture.

"It is not right," she said. "You are the first to lose respect for me."

There was a melon on the table. Gomov cut a slice and began to eat it
slowly. At least half an hour passed in silence.

Anna Sergueyevna was very touching; she irradiated the purity of a
simple, devout, inexperienced woman; the solitary candle on the table
hardly lighted her face, but it showed her very wretched.

"Why should I cease to respect you?" asked Gomov. "You don't know what
you are saying."

"God forgive me!" she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "It is
horrible."

"You seem to want to justify yourself."

"How can I justify myself? I am a wicked, low woman and I despise
myself. I have no thought of justifying myself. It is not my husband
that I have deceived, but myself. And not only now but for a long time
past. My husband may be a good honest man, but he is a lackey. I do not
know what work he does, but I do know that he is a lackey in his soul. I
was twenty when I married him. I was overcome by curiosity. I longed for
something. 'Surely,' I said to myself, 'there is another kind of life.'
I longed to live! To live, and to live.... Curiosity burned me up....
You do not understand it, but I swear by God, I could no longer control
myself. Something strange was going on in me. I could not hold myself
in. I told my husband that I was ill and came here.... And here I have
been walking about dizzily, like a lunatic.... And now I have become a
low, filthy woman whom everybody may despise."

Gomov was already bored; her simple words irritated him with their
unexpected and inappropriate repentance; but for the tears in her eyes
he might have thought her to be joking or playing a part.

"I do not understand," he said quietly. "What do you want?"

She hid her face in his bosom and pressed close to him.

"Believe, believe me, I implore you," she said. "I love a pure, honest
life, and sin is revolting to me. I don't know myself what I am doing.
Simple people say: 'The devil entrapped me,' and I can say of myself:
'The Evil One tempted me.'"

"Don't, don't," he murmured.

He looked into her staring, frightened eyes, kissed her, spoke quietly
and tenderly, and gradually quieted her and she was happy again, and
they both began to laugh.

Later, when they went out, there was not a soul on the quay; the town
with its cypresses looked like a city of the dead, but the sea still
roared and broke against the shore; a boat swung on the waves; and in
it sleepily twinkled the light of a lantern.

They found a cab and drove out to the Oreanda.

"Just now in the hall," said Gomov, "I discovered your name written on
the board--von Didenitz. Is your husband a German?"

"No. His grandfather, I believe, was a German, but he himself is an
Orthodox Russian."

At Oreanda they sat on a bench, not far from the church, looked down at
the sea and were silent. Talta was hardly visible through the morning
mist. The tops of the hills were shrouded in motionless white clouds.
The leaves of the trees never stirred, the cicadas trilled, and the
monotonous dull sound of the sea, coming up from below, spoke of the
rest, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So the sea roared when there was
neither Talta nor Oreanda, and so it roars and will roar, dully,
indifferently when we shall be no more. And in this continual
indifference to the life and death of each of us, lives pent up, the
pledge of our eternal salvation, of the uninterrupted movement of life
on earth and its unceasing perfection. Sitting side by side with a young
woman, who in the dawn seemed so beautiful, Gomov, appeased and
enchanted by the sight of the fairy scene, the sea, the mountains, the
clouds, the wide sky, thought how at bottom, if it were thoroughly
explored, everything on earth was beautiful, everything, except what we
ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and
our own human dignity.

A man came up--a coast-guard--gave a look at them, then went away. He,
too, seemed mysterious and enchanted. A steamer came over from
Feodossia, by the light of the morning star, its own lights already put
out.

"There is dew on the grass," said Anna Sergueyevna after a silence.

"Yes. It is time to go home."

They returned to the town.

Then every afternoon they met on the quay, and lunched together, dined,
walked, enjoyed the sea. She complained that she slept badly, that her
heart beat alarmingly. She would ask the same question over and over
again, and was troubled now by jealousy, now by fear that he did not
sufficiently respect her. And often in the square or the gardens, when
there was no one near, he would draw her close and kiss her
passionately. Their complete idleness, these kisses in the full
daylight, given timidly and fearfully lest any one should see, the heat,
the smell of the sea and the continual brilliant parade of leisured,
well-dressed, well-fed people almost regenerated him. He would tell Anna
Sergueyevna how delightful she was, how tempting. He was impatiently
passionate, never left her side, and she would often brood, and even
asked him to confess that he did not respect her, did not love her at
all, and only saw in her a loose woman. Almost every evening, rather
late, they would drive out of the town, to Oreanda, or to the waterfall;
and these drives were always delightful, and the impressions won during
them were always beautiful and sublime.

They expected her husband to come. But he sent a letter in which he said
that his eyes were bad and implored his wife to come home. Anna
Sergueyevna began to worry.

"It is a good thing I am going away," she would say to Gomov. "It is
fate."

She went in a carriage and he accompanied her. They drove for a whole
day. When she took her seat in the car of an express-train and when the
second bell sounded, she said:

"Let me have another look at you.... Just one more look. Just as you
are."

She did not cry, but was sad and low-spirited, and her lips trembled.

"I will think of you--often," she said. "Good-bye. Good-bye. Don't think
ill of me. We part for ever. We must, because we ought not to have met
at all. Now, good-bye."

The train moved off rapidly. Its lights disappeared, and in a minute or
two the sound of it was lost, as though everything were agreed to put an
end to this sweet, oblivious madness. Left alone on the platform,
looking into the darkness, Gomov heard the trilling of the grasshoppers
and the humming of the telegraph-wires, and felt as though he had just
woke up. And he thought that it had been one more adventure, one more
affair, and it also was finished and had left only a memory. He was
moved, sad, and filled with a faint remorse; surely the young woman,
whom he would never see again, had not been happy with him; he had been
kind to her, friendly, and sincere, but still in his attitude toward
her, in his tone and caresses, there had always been a thin shadow of
raillery, the rather rough arrogance of the successful male aggravated
by the fact that he was twice as old as she. And all the time she had
called him kind, remarkable, noble, so that he was never really himself
to her, and had involuntarily deceived her....

Here at the station, the smell of autumn was in the air, and the evening
was cool.

"It is time for me to go North," thought Gomov, as he left the platform.
"It is time."


III

At home in Moscow, it was already like winter; the stoves were heated,
and in the mornings, when the children were getting ready to go to
school, and had their tea, it was dark and their nurse lighted the lamp
for a short while. The frost had already begun. When the first snow
falls, the first day of driving in sledges, it is good to see the white
earth, the white roofs; one breathes easily, eagerly, and then one
remembers the days of youth. The old lime-trees and birches, white with
hoarfrost, have a kindly expression; they are nearer to the heart than
cypresses and palm-trees, and with the dear familiar trees there is no
need to think of mountains and the sea.

Gomov was a native of Moscow. He returned to Moscow on a fine frosty
day, and when he donned his fur coat and warm gloves, and took a stroll
through Petrovka, and when on Saturday evening he heard the church-bells
ringing, then his recent travels and the places he had visited lost all
their charm. Little by little he sank back into Moscow life, read
eagerly three newspapers a day, and said that he did not read Moscow
papers as a matter of principle. He was drawn into a round of
restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, parties, and he was flattered to
have his house frequented by famous lawyers and actors, and to play
cards with a professor at the University club. He could eat a whole
plateful of hot _sielianka_.

So a month would pass, and Anna Sergueyevna, he thought, would be lost
in the mists of memory and only rarely would she visit his dreams with
her touching smile, just as other women had done. But more than a month
passed, full winter came, and in his memory everything was clear, as
though he had parted from Anna Sergueyevna only yesterday. And his
memory was lit by a light that grew ever stronger. No matter how,
through the voices of his children saying their lessons, penetrating to
the evening stillness of his study, through hearing a song, or the music
in a restaurant, or the snow-storm howling in the chimney, suddenly the
whole thing would come to life again in his memory: the meeting on the
jetty, the early morning with the mists on the mountains, the steamer
from Feodossia and their kisses. He would pace up and down his room and
remember it all and smile, and then his memories would drift into
dreams, and the past was confused in his imagination with the future. He
did not dream at night of Anna Sergueyevna, but she followed him
everywhere, like a shadow, watching him. As he shut his eyes, he could
see her, vividly, and she seemed handsomer, tenderer, younger than in
reality; and he seemed to himself better than he had been at Talta. In
the evenings she would look at him from the bookcase, from the
fireplace, from the corner; he could hear her breathing and the soft
rustle of her dress. In the street he would gaze at women's faces to see
if there were not one like her....

He was filled with a great longing to share his memories with some one.
But at home it was impossible to speak of his love, and away from
home--there was no one. Impossible to talk of her to the other people in
the house and the men at the bank. And talk of what? Had he loved then?
Was there anything fine, romantic, or elevating or even interesting in
his relations with Anna Sergueyevna? And he would speak vaguely of love,
of women, and nobody guessed what was the matter, and only his wife
would raise her dark eyebrows and say:

"Demitri, the role of coxcomb does not suit you at all."

One night, as he was coming out of the club with his partner, an
official, he could not help saying:

"If only I could tell what a fascinating woman I met at Talta."

The official seated himself in his sledge and drove off, but suddenly
called:

"Dimitri Dimitrich!"

"Yes."

"You were right. The sturgeon was tainted."

These banal words suddenly roused Gomov's indignation. They seemed to
him degrading and impure. What barbarous customs and people!

What preposterous nights, what dull, empty days! Furious card-playing,
gourmandising, drinking, endless conversations about the same things,
futile activities and conversations taking up the best part of the day
and all the best of a man's forces, leaving only a stunted, wingless
life, just rubbish; and to go away and escape was impossible--one might
as well be in a lunatic asylum or in prison with hard labour.

Gomov did not sleep that night, but lay burning with indignation, and
then all next day he had a headache. And the following night he slept
badly, sitting up in bed and thinking, or pacing from corner to corner
of his room. His children bored him, the bank bored him, and he had no
desire to go out or to speak to any one.

In December when the holidays came he prepared to go on a journey and
told his wife he was going to Petersburg to present a petition for a
young friend of his--and went to S. Why? He did not know. He wanted to
see Anna Sergueyevna, to talk to her, and if possible to arrange an
assignation.

He arrived at S. in the morning and occupied the best room in the hotel,
where the whole floor was covered with a grey canvas, and on the table
there stood an inkstand grey with dust, adorned with a horseman on a
headless horse holding a net in his raised hand. The porter gave him the
necessary information: von Didenitz; Old Goucharno Street, his own
house--not far from the hotel; lives well, has his own horses, every one
knows him.

Gomov walked slowly to Old Goucharno Street and found the house. In
front of it was a long, grey fence spiked with nails.

"No getting over a fence like that," thought Gomov, glancing from the
windows to the fence.

He thought: "To-day is a holiday and her husband is probably at home.
Besides it would be tactless to call and upset her. If he sent a note
then it might fall into her husband's hands and spoil everything. It
would be better to wait for an opportunity." And he kept on walking up
and down the street, and round the fence, waiting for his opportunity.
He saw a beggar go in at the gate and the dogs attack him. He heard a
piano and the sounds came faintly to his ears. It must be Anna
Sergueyevna playing. The door suddenly opened and out of it came an old
woman, and after her ran the familiar white Pomeranian. Gomov wanted to
call the dog, but his heart suddenly began to thump and in his agitation
he could not remember the dog's name.

He walked on, and more and more he hated the grey fence and thought with
a gust of irritation that Anna Sergueyevna had already forgotten him,
and was perhaps already amusing herself with some one else, as would be
only natural in a young woman forced from morning to night to behold the
accursed fence. He returned to his room and sat for a long time on the
sofa, not knowing what to do. Then he dined and afterward slept for a
long while.

"How idiotic and tiresome it all is," he thought as he awoke and saw the
dark windows; for it was evening. "I've had sleep enough, and what shall
I do to-night?"

He sat on his bed which was covered with a cheap, grey blanket, exactly
like those used in a hospital, and tormented himself.

"So much for the lady with the toy dog.... So much for the great
adventure.... Here you sit."

However, in the morning, at the station, his eye had been caught by a
poster with large letters: "First Performance of 'The Geisha.'" He
remembered that and went to the theatre.

"It is quite possible she will go to the first performance," he thought.


The theatre was full and, as usual in all provincial theatres, there was
a thick mist above the lights, the gallery was noisily restless; in the
first row before the opening of the performance stood the local dandies
with their hands behind their backs, and there in the governor's box, in
front, sat the governor's daughter, and the governor himself sat
modestly behind the curtain and only his hands were visible. The curtain
quivered; the orchestra tuned up for a long time, and while the audience
were coming in and taking their seats, Gomov gazed eagerly round.

At last Anna Sergueyevna came in. She took her seat in the third row,
and when Gomov glanced at her his heart ached and he knew that for him
there was no one in the whole world nearer, dearer, and more important
than she; she was lost in this provincial rabble, the little
undistinguished woman, with a common lorgnette in her hands, yet she
filled his whole life; she was his grief, his joy, his only happiness,
and he longed for her; and through the noise of the bad orchestra with
its tenth-rate fiddles, he thought how dear she was to him. He thought
and dreamed.

With Anna Sergueyevna there came in a young man with short
side-whiskers, very tall, stooping; with every movement he shook and
bowed continually. Probably he was the husband whom in a bitter mood at
Talta she had called a lackey. And, indeed, in his long figure, his
side-whiskers, the little bald patch on the top of his head, there was
something of the lackey; he had a modest sugary smile and in his
buttonhole he wore a University badge exactly like a lackey's number.

In the first entr'acte the husband went out to smoke, and she was left
alone. Gomov, who was also in the pit, came up to her and said in a
trembling voice with a forced smile:

"How do you do?"

She looked up at him and went pale. Then she glanced at him again in
terror, not believing her eyes, clasped her fan and lorgnette tightly
together, apparently struggling to keep herself from fainting. Both were
silent. She sat, he stood; frightened by her emotion, not daring to sit
down beside her. The fiddles and flutes began to play and suddenly it
seemed to them as though all the people in the boxes were looking at
them. She got up and walked quickly to the exit; he followed, and both
walked absently along the corridors, down the stairs, up the stairs,
with the crowd shifting and shimmering before their eyes; all kinds of
uniforms, judges, teachers, crown-estates, and all with badges; ladies
shone and shimmered before them, like fur coats on moving rows of
clothes-pegs, and there was a draught howling through the place laden
with the smell of tobacco and cigar-ends. And Gomov, whose heart was
thudding wildly, thought:

"Oh, Lord! Why all these men and that beastly orchestra?"

At that very moment he remembered how when he had seen Anna Sergueyevna
off that evening at the station he had said to himself that everything
was over between them, and they would never meet again. And now how far
off they were from the end!

On a narrow, dark staircase over which was written: "This Way to the
Amphitheatre," she stopped:

"How you frightened me!" she said, breathing heavily, still pale and
apparently stupefied. "Oh! how you frightened me! I am nearly dead. Why
did you come? Why?"

"Understand me, Anna," he whispered quickly. "I implore you to
understand...."

She looked at him fearfully, in entreaty, with love in her eyes, gazing
fixedly to gather up in her memory every one of his features.

"I suffer so!" she went on, not listening to him. "All the time, I
thought only of you. I lived with thoughts of you.... And I wanted to
forget, to forget, but why, why did you come?"

A little above them, on the landing, two schoolboys stood and smoked and
looked down at them, but Gomov did not care. He drew her to him and
began to kiss her cheeks, her hands.

"What are you doing? What are you doing?" she said in terror, thrusting
him away.... "We were both mad. Go away to-night. You must go away at
once.... I implore you, by everything you hold sacred, I implore you....
The people are coming-----"

Some one passed them on the stairs.

"You must go away," Anna Sergueyevna went on in a whisper. "Do you hear,
Dimitri Dimitrich? I'll come to you in Moscow. I never was happy. Now I
am unhappy and I shall never, never be happy, never! Don't make me
suffer even more! I swear, I'll come to Moscow. And now let us part. My
dear, dearest darling, let us part!"

She pressed his hand and began to go quickly down-stairs, all the while
looking back at him, and in her eyes plainly showed that she was most
unhappy. Gomov stood for a while, listened, then, when all was quiet he
found his coat and left the theatre.


IV

And Anna Sergueyevna began to come to him in Moscow. Once every two or
three months she would leave S., telling her husband that she was going
to consult a specialist in women's diseases. Her husband half believed
and half disbelieved her. At Moscow she would stay at the "Slaviansky
Bazaar" and send a message at once to Gomov. He would come to her, and
nobody in Moscow knew.

Once as he was going to her as usual one winter morning--he had not
received her message the night before--he had his daughter with him, for
he was taking her to school which was on the way. Great wet flakes of
snow were falling.

"Three degrees above freezing," he said, "and still the snow is falling.
But the warmth is only on the surface of the earth. In the upper strata
of the atmosphere there is quite a different temperature."

"Yes, papa. Why is there no thunder in winter?"

He explained this too, and as he spoke he thought of his assignation,
and that not a living soul knew of it, or ever would know. He had two
lives; one obvious, which every one could see and know, if they were
sufficiently interested, a life full of conventional truth and
conventional fraud, exactly like the lives of his friends and
acquaintances; and another, which moved underground. And by a strange
conspiracy of circumstances, everything that was to him important,
interesting, vital, everything that enabled him to be sincere and denied
self-deception and was the very core of his being, must dwell hidden
away from others, and everything that made him false, a mere shape in
which he hid himself in order to conceal the truth, as for instance his
work in the bank, arguments at the club, his favourite gibe about women,
going to parties with his wife--all this was open. And, judging others
by himself, he did not believe the things he saw, and assumed that
everybody else also had his real vital life passing under a veil of
mystery as under the cover of the night. Every man's intimate existence
is kept mysterious, and perhaps, in part, because of that civilised
people are so nervously anxious that a personal secret should be
respected.

When he had left his daughter at school, Gomov went to the "Slaviansky
Bazaar." He took off his fur coat down-stairs, went up and knocked
quietly at the door. Anna Sergueyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress,
tired by the journey, had been expecting him to come all night. She was
pale, and looked at him without a smile, and flung herself on his breast
as soon as he entered. Their kiss was long and lingering as though they
had not seen each other for a couple of years.

"Well, how are you getting on down there?" he asked. "What is your
news?"

"Wait. I'll tell you presently.... I cannot."

She could not speak, for she was weeping. She turned her face from him
and dried her eyes.

"Well, let her cry a bit.... I'll wait," he thought, and sat down.

Then he rang and ordered tea, and then, as he drank it, she stood and
gazed out of the window.... She was weeping in distress, in the bitter
knowledge that their life had fallen out so sadly; only seeing each
other in secret, hiding themselves away like thieves! Was not their life
crushed?

"Don't cry.... Don't cry," he said.

It was clear to him that their love was yet far from its end, which
there was no seeing. Anna Sergueyevna was more and more passionately
attached to him; she adored him and it was inconceivable that he should
tell her that their love must some day end; she would not believe it.

He came up to her and patted her shoulder fondly and at that moment he
saw himself in the mirror.

His hair was already going grey. And it seemed strange to him that in
the last few years he should have got so old and ugly. Her shoulders
were warm and trembled to his touch. He was suddenly filled with pity
for her life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably beginning to
fade and wither, like his own. Why should she love him so much? He
always seemed to women not what he really was, and they loved in him,
not himself, but the creature of their imagination, the thing they
hankered for in life, and when they had discovered their mistake, still
they loved him. And not one of them was happy with him. Time passed; he
met women and was friends with them, went further and parted, but never
once did he love; there was everything but love.

And now at last when his hair was grey he had fallen in love, real
love--for the first time in his life.

Anna Sergueyevna and he loved one another, like dear kindred, like
husband and wife, like devoted friends; it seemed to them that Fate had
destined them for one another, and it was inconceivable that he should
have a wife, she a husband; they were like two birds of passage, a male
and a female, which had been caught and forced to live in separate
cages. They had forgiven each other all the past of which they were
ashamed; they forgave everything in the present, and they felt that
their love had changed both of them.

Formerly, when he felt a melancholy compunction, he used to comfort
himself with all kinds of arguments, just as they happened to cross his
mind, but now he was far removed from any such ideas; he was filled with
a profound pity, and he desired to be tender and sincere....

"Don't cry, my darling," he said. "You have cried enough.... Now let us
talk and see if we can't find some way out."

Then they talked it all over, and tried to discover some means of
avoiding the necessity for concealment and deception, and the torment of
living in different towns, and of not seeing each other for a long time.
How could they shake off these intolerable fetters?

"How? How?" he asked, holding his head in his hands. "How?"

And it seemed that but a little while and the solution would be found
and there would begin a lovely new life; and to both of them it was
clear that the end was still very far off, and that their hardest and
most difficult period was only just beginning.




GOUSSIEV


It was already dark and would soon be night.

Goussiev, a private on long leave, raised himself a little in his
hammock and said in a whisper:

"Can you hear me, Pavel Ivanich? A soldier at Souchan told me that their
boat ran into an enormous fish and knocked a hole in her bottom."

The man of condition unknown whom he addressed, and whom everybody in
the hospital-ship called Pavel Ivanich, was silent, as if he had not
heard.

And once more there was silence.... The wind whistled through the
rigging, the screw buzzed, the waves came washing, the hammocks
squeaked, but to all these sounds their ears were long since accustomed
and it seemed as though everything were wrapped in sleep and silence.
It was very oppressive. The three patients--two soldiers and a
sailor--who had played cards all day were now asleep and tossing to and
fro.

The vessel began to shake. The hammock under Goussiev slowly heaved up
and down, as though it were breathing--one, two, three.... Something
crashed on the floor and began to tinkle: the jug must have fallen down.

"The wind has broken loose...." said Goussiev, listening attentively.

This time Pavel Ivanich coughed and answered irritably:

"You spoke just now of a ship colliding with a large fish, and now you
talk of the wind breaking loose.... Is the wind a dog to break loose?"

"That's what people say."

"Then people are as ignorant as you.... But what do they not say? You
should keep a head on your shoulders and think. Silly idiot!"

Pavel Ivanich was subject to seasickness. When the ship rolled he would
get very cross, and the least trifle would upset him, though Goussiev
could never see anything to be cross about. What was there unusual in
his story about the fish or in his saying that the wind had broken
loose? Suppose the fish were as big as a mountain and its back were as
hard as a sturgeon's, and suppose that at the end of the wood there were
huge stone walls with the snarling winds chained up to them.... If they
do not break loose, why then do they rage over the sea as though they
were possessed, and rush about like dogs? If they are not chained, what
happens to them when it is calm?

Goussiev thought for a long time of a fish as big as a mountain, and of
thick rusty chains; then he got tired of that and began to think of his
native place whither he was returning after five years' service in the
Far East. He saw with his mind's eye the great pond covered with
snow.... On one side of the pond was a brick-built pottery, with a tall
chimney belching clouds of black smoke, and on the other side was the
village.... From the yard of the fifth house from the corner came his
brother Alency in a sledge; behind him sat his little son Vanka in large
felt boots, and his daughter Akulka, also in felt boots. Alency is
tipsy, Vanka laughs, and Akulka's face is hidden--she is well wrapped
up.

"The children will catch cold ..." thought Goussiev. "God grant them,"
he whispered, "a pure right mind that they may honour their parents and
be better than their father and mother...."

"The boots want soling," cried the sick sailor in a deep voice. "Aye,
aye."

The thread of Goussiev's thoughts was broken, and instead of the pond,
suddenly--without rhyme or reason--he saw a large bull's head without
eyes, and the horse and sledge did not move on, but went round and round
in a black mist. But still he was glad he had seen his dear ones. He
gasped for joy, and his limbs tingled and his fingers throbbed.

"God suffered me to see them!" he muttered, and opened his eyes and
looked round in the darkness for water.

He drank, then lay down again, and once more the sledge skimmed along,
and he saw the bull's head without eyes, black smoke, clouds of it. And
so on till dawn.


II

At first through the darkness there appeared only a blue circle, the
port-hole, then Goussiev began slowly to distinguish the man in the next
hammock, Pavel Ivanich. He was sleeping in a sitting position, for if he
lay down he could not breathe. His face was grey; his nose long and
sharp, and his eyes were huge, because he was so thin; his temples were
sunk, his beard scanty, the hair on his head long.... By his face it was
impossible to tell his class: gentleman, merchant, or peasant; judging
by his appearance and long hair he looked almost like a recluse, a
lay-brother, but when he spoke--he was not at all like a monk. He was
losing strength through his cough and his illness and the suffocating
heat, and he breathed heavily and was always moving his dry lips.
Noticing that Goussiev was looking at him, he turned toward him and
said:

"I'm beginning to understand.... Yes.... Now I understand."

"What do you understand, Pavel Ivanich?"

"Yes.... It was strange to me at first, why you sick men, instead of
being kept quiet, should be on this steamer, where the heat is stifling,
and stinking, and pitching and tossing, and must be fatal to you; but
now it is all clear to me.... Yes. The doctors sent you to the steamer
to get rid of you. They got tired of all the trouble you gave them,
brutes like you.

...You don't pay them; you only give a lot of trouble, and if you die
you spoil their reports. Therefore you are just cattle, and there is no
difficulty in getting rid of you.... They only need to lack conscience
and humanity, and to deceive the owners of the steamer. We needn't worry
about the first, they are experts by nature; but the second needs a
certain amount of practice. In a crowd of four hundred healthy soldiers
and sailors--five sick men are never noticed; so you were carried up to
the steamer, mixed with a healthy lot who were counted in such a hurry
that nothing wrong was noticed, and when the steamer got away they saw
fever-stricken and consumptive men lying helpless on the deck...."

Goussiev could not make out what Pavel Ivanich was talking about;
thinking he was being taken to task, he said by way of excusing himself:

"I lay on the deck because when we were taken off the barge I caught a
chill."

"Shocking!" said Pavel Ivanich. "They know quite well that you can't
last out the voyage, and yet they send you here! You may get as far as
the Indian Ocean, but what then? It is awful to think of.... And that's
all the return you get for faithful unblemished service!"

Pavel Ivanich looked very angry, and smote his forehead and gasped:

"They ought to be shown up in the papers. There would be an awful row."

The two sick soldiers and the sailor were already up and had begun to
play cards, the sailor propped up in his hammock, and the soldiers
squatting uncomfortably on the floor. One soldier had his right arm in a
sling and his wrist was tightly bandaged so that he had to hold the
cards in his left hand or in the crook of his elbow. The boat was
rolling violently so that it was impossible to get up or to drink tea or
to take medicine.

"You were an orderly?" Pavel Ivanich asked Goussiev.

"That's it. An orderly."

"My God, my God!" said Pavel Ivanich sorrowfully. "To take a man from
his native place, drag him fifteen thousand miles, drive him into
consumption ... and what for? I ask you. To make him an orderly to some
Captain Farthing or Midshipman Hole! Where's the sense of it?"

"It's not a bad job, Pavel Ivanich. You get up in the morning, clean the
boots, boil the samovar, tidy up the room, and then there is nothing to
do. The lieutenant draws plans all day long, and you can pray to God if
you like--or read books--or go out into the streets. It's a good enough
life."

"Yes. Very good! The lieutenant draws plans, and you stay in the kitchen
all day long and suffer from homesickness.... Plans.... Plans don't
matter. It's human life that matters! Life doesn't come again. One
should be sparing of it."

"Certainly Pavel Ivanich. A bad man meets no quarter, either at home, or
in the army, but if you live straight, and do as you are told, then no
one will harm you. They are educated and they understand.... For five
years now I've never been in the cells and I've only been thrashed
once--touch wood!"

"What was that for?"

"Fighting. I have a heavy fist, Pavel Ivanich. Four Chinamen came into
our yard: they were carrying wood, I think, but I don't remember. Well,
I was bored. I went for them and one of them got a bloody nose. The
lieutenant saw it through the window and gave me a thick ear."

"You poor fool," muttered Pavel Ivanich. "You don't understand
anything."

He was completely exhausted with the tossing of the boat and shut his
eyes; his head fell back and then flopped forward onto his chest. He
tried several times to lie down, but in vain, for he could not breathe.

"And why did you go for the four Chinamen?" he asked after a while.

"For no reason. They came into the yard and I went for them."

Silence fell.... The gamblers played for a couple of hours, absorbed and
cursing, but the tossing of the ship tired even them; they threw the
cards away and laid down. Once more Goussiev thought of the big pond,
the pottery, the village. Once more the sledges skimmed along, once more
Vanka laughed, and that fool of an Akulka opened her fur coat, and
stretched out her feet; look, she seemed to say, look, poor people, my
felt boots are new and not like Vanka's.

"She's getting on for six and still she has no sense!" said Goussiev.
"Instead of showing your boots off, why don't you bring some water to
your soldier-uncle? I'll give you a present."

Then came Andrea, with his firelock on his shoulder, carrying a hare he
had shot, and he was followed by Tsaichik the cripple, who offered him a
piece of soap for the hare; and there was the black heifer in the yard,
and Domna sewing a shirt and crying over something, and there was the
eyeless bull's head and the black smoke....

Overhead there was shouting, sailors running; the sound of something
heavy being dragged along the deck, or something had broken.... More
running. Something wrong? Goussiev raised his head, listened and saw the
two soldiers and the sailor playing cards again; Pavel Ivanich sitting
up and moving his lips. It was very close, he could hardly breathe, he
wanted a drink, but the water was warm and disgusting.... The pitching
of the boat was now better.

Suddenly something queer happened to one of the soldiers.... He called
ace of diamonds, lost his reckoning and dropped his cards. He started
and laughed stupidly and looked round.

"In a moment, you fellows," he said and lay down on the floor.

All were at a loss. They shouted at him but he made no reply.

"Stiepan, are you ill?" asked the other soldier with the bandaged hand.
"Perhaps we'd better call the priest, eh?"

"Stiepan, drink some water," said the sailor. "Here, mate, have a
drink."

"What's the good of breaking his teeth with the jug," shouted Goussiev
angrily. "Don't you see, you fatheads?"

"What."

"What!" cried Goussiev. "He's snuffed it, dead. That's what! Good God,
what fools!..."


III

The rolling stopped and Pavel Ivanich cheered up. He was no longer
peevish. His face had an arrogant, impetuous, and mocking expression. He
looked as if he were on the point of saying: "I'll tell you a story that
will make you die of laughter." Their port-hole was open and a soft
wind blew in on Pavel Ivanich. Voices could be heard and the splash of
oars in the water.... Beneath the window some one was howling in a thin,
horrible voice; probably a Chinaman singing.

"Yes. We are in harbour," said Pavel Ivanich, smiling mockingly.
"Another month and we shall be in Russia. It's true; my gallant
warriors, I shall get to Odessa and thence I shall go straight to
Kharkhov. At Kharkhov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him
and I shall say, 'now, my friend, give up your rotten little
love-stories and descriptions of nature, and expose the vileness of the
human biped.... There's a subject for you.'"

He thought for a moment and then he said:

"Goussiev, do you know how I swindled them?"

"Who, Pavel Ivanich?"

"The lot out there.... You see there's only first and third class on the
steamer, and only peasants are allowed to go third. If you have a decent
suit, and look like a nobleman or a bourgeois, at a distance, then you
must go first. It may break you, but you have to lay down your five
hundred roubles. 'What's the point of such an arrangement?' I asked. 'Is
it meant to raise the prestige of Russian intellectuals?' 'Not a bit,'
said they. 'We don't let you go, simply because it is impossible for a
decent man to go third. It is so vile and disgusting.' 'Yes,' said I.
'Thanks for taking so much trouble about decent people. Anyhow, bad or
no, I haven't got five hundred roubles as I have neither robbed the
treasury nor exploited foreigners, nor dealt in contraband, nor flogged
any one to death, and, therefore, I think I have a right to go
first-class and to take rank with the intelligentsia of Russia.' But
there's no convincing them by logic.... I had to try fraud. I put on a
peasant's coat and long boots, and a drunken, stupid expression and went
to the agent and said: 'Give me a ticket, your Honour.'

"'What's your position?' says the agent.

"'Clerical,' said I. 'My father was an honest priest. He always told the
truth to the great ones of the earth, and so he suffered much.'"

Pavel Ivanich got tired with talking, and his breath failed him, but he
went on:

"Yes. I always tell the truth straight out.... I am afraid of nobody and
nothing. There's a great difference between myself and you in that
respect. You are dull, blind, stupid, you see nothing, and you don't
understand what you do see. You are told that the wind breaks its chain,
that you are brutes and worse, and you believe; you are thrashed and you
kiss the hand that thrashes you; a swine in a raccoon pelisse robs you,
and throws you sixpence for tea, and you say: 'Please, your Honour, let
me kiss your hand.' You are pariahs, skunks.... I am different. I live
consciously. I see everything, as an eagle or a hawk sees when it hovers
over the earth, and I understand everything. I am a living protest. I
see injustice--I protest; I see bigotry and hypocrisy--I protest; I see
swine triumphant--I protest, and I am unconquerable. No Spanish
inquisition can make me hold my tongue. Aye.... Cut my tongue out. I'll
protest by gesture.... Shut me up in a dungeon--I'll shout so loud that
I shall be heard for a mile round, or I'll starve myself, so that there
shall be a still heavier weight on their black consciences. Kill me--and
my ghost will return. All my acquaintances tell me: 'You are a most
insufferable man, Pavel Ivanich!' I am proud of such a reputation. I
served three years in the Far East, and have got bitter memories enough
for a hundred years. I inveighed against it all. My friends write from
Russia: 'Do not come.' But I'm going, to spite them.... Yes.... That is
life. I understand. You can call that life."

Goussiev was not listening, but lay looking out of the port-hole; on the
transparent lovely turquoise water swung a boat all shining in the
shimmering light; a fat Chinaman was sitting in it eating rice with
chop-sticks. The water murmured softly, and over it lazily soared white
sea-gulls.

"It would be fun to give that fat fellow one on the back of his
neck...." thought Goussiev, watching the fat Chinaman and yawning.

He dozed, and it seemed to him that all the world was slumbering. Time
slipped swiftly away. The day passed imperceptibly; imperceptibly the
twilight fell.... The steamer was still no longer but was moving on.


IV

Two days passed. Pavel Ivanich no longer sat up, but lay full length;
his eyes were closed and his nose seemed to be sharper than ever.

"Pavel Ivanich!" called Goussiev, "Pavel Ivanich."

Pavel Ivanich opened his eyes and moved his lips.

"Aren't you well?"

"It's nothing," answered Pavel Ivanich, breathing heavily. "It's
nothing. No. I'm much better. You see I can lie down now. I'm much
better."

"Thank God for it, Pavel Ivanich."

"When I compare myself with you, I am sorry for you ... poor devils. My
lungs are all right; my cough comes from indigestion ... I can endure
this hell, not to mention the Red Sea! Besides, I have a critical
attitude toward my illness, as well as to my medicine. But you ... you
are ignorant.... It's hard lines on you, very hard."

The ship was running smoothly; it was calm but still stifling and hot as
a Turkish bath; it was hard not only to speak but even to listen without
an effort. Goussiev clasped his knees, leaned his head on them and
thought of his native place. My God, in such heat it was a pleasure to
think of snow and cold! He saw himself driving on a sledge, and suddenly
the horses were frightened and bolted.... Heedless of roads, dikes,
ditches they rushed like mad through the village, across the pond, past
the works, through the fields.... "Hold them in!" cried the women and
the passers-by. "Hold them in!" But why hold them in? Let the cold wind
slap your face and cut your hands; let the lumps of snow thrown up by
the horses' hoofs fall on your hat, down your neck and chest; let the
runners of the sledge be buckled, and the traces and harness be torn and
be damned to it! What fun when the sledge topples over and you are flung
hard into a snow-drift; with your face slap into the snow, and you get
up all white with your moustaches covered with icicles, hatless,
gloveless, with your belt undone.... People laugh and dogs bark....

Pavel Ivanich, with one eye half open looked at Goussiev and asked
quietly:

"Goussiev, did your commander steal?"

"How do I know, Pavel Ivanich? The likes of us don't hear of it."

A long time passed in silence. Goussiev thought, dreamed, drank water;
it was difficult to speak, difficult to hear, and he was afraid of being
spoken to. One hour passed, a second, a third; evening came, then night;
but he noticed nothing as he sat dreaming of the snow.

He could hear some one coming into the ward; voices, but five minutes
passed and all was still.

"God rest his soul!" said the soldier with the bandaged hand. "He was a
restless man."

"What?" asked Goussiev. "Who?"

"He's dead. He has just been taken up-stairs."

"Oh, well," muttered Goussiev with a yawn. "God rest his soul."

"What do you think, Goussiev?" asked the bandaged soldier after some
time. "Will he go to heaven?"

"Who?"

"Pavel Ivanich."

"He will. He suffered much. Besides, he was a priest's son, and priests
have many relations. They will pray for his soul."

The bandaged soldier sat down on Goussiev's hammock and said in an
undertone:

"You won't live much longer, Goussiev. You'll never see Russia."

"Did the doctor or the nurse tell you that?" asked Goussiev.

"No one told me, but I can see it. You can always tell when a man is
going to die soon. You neither eat nor drink, and you have gone very
thin and awful to look at. Consumption. That's what it is. I'm not
saying this to make you uneasy, but because I thought you might like to
have the last sacrament. And if you have any money, you had better give
it to the senior officer."

"I have not written home," said Goussiev. "I shall die and they will
never know."

"They will know," said the sailor in his deep voice. "When you die they
will put you down in the log, and at Odessa they will give a note to the
military governor, and he will send it to your parish or wherever it
is...."

This conversation made Goussiev begin to feel unhappy and a vague desire
began to take possession of him. He drank water--it was not that; he
stretched out to the port-hole and breathed the hot, moist air--it was
not that; he tried to think of his native place and the snow--it was not
that.... At last he felt that he would choke if he stayed a moment
longer in the hospital.

"I feel poorly, mates," he said. "I want to go on deck. For Christ's
sake take me on deck."

Goussiev flung his arms round the soldier's neck and the soldier held
him with his free arm and supported him up the gangway. On deck there
were rows and rows of sleeping soldiers and sailors; so many of them
that it was difficult to pick a way through them.

"Stand up," said the bandaged soldier gently. "Walk after me slowly and
hold on to my shirt...."

It was dark. There was no light on deck or on the masts or over the sea.
In the bows a sentry stood motionless as a statue, but he looked as if
he were asleep. It was as though the steamer had been left to its own
sweet will, to go where it liked.

"They are going to throw Pavel Ivanich into the sea," said the bandaged
soldier. "They will put him in a sack and throw him overboard."

"Yes. That's the way they do."

"But it's better to lie at home in the earth. Then the mother can go to
the grave and weep over it."

"Surely."

There was a smell of dung and hay. With heads hanging there were oxen
standing by the bulwark--one, two, three ... eight beasts. And there was
a little horse. Goussiev put out his hand to pat it, but it shook its
head, showed its teeth and tried to bite his sleeve.

"Damn you," said Goussiev angrily.

He and the soldier slowly made their way to the bows and stood against
the bulwark and looked silently up and down. Above them was the wide
sky, bright with stars, peace and tranquillity--exactly as it was at
home in his village; but below--darkness and turbulence. Mysterious
towering waves. Each wave seemed to strive to rise higher than the rest;
and they pressed and jostled each other and yet others came, fierce and
ugly, and hurled themselves into the fray.

There is neither sense nor pity in the sea. Had the steamer been
smaller, and not made of tough iron, the waves would have crushed it
remorselessly and all the men in it, without distinction of good and
bad. The steamer too seemed cruel and senseless. The large-nosed monster
pressed forward and cut its way through millions of waves; it was
afraid neither of darkness, nor of the wind, nor of space, nor of
loneliness; it cared for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, the
monster would crush them without distinction of good and bad.

"Where are we now?" asked Goussiev.

"I don't know. Must be the ocean."

"There's no land in sight."

"Why, they say we shan't see land for another seven days."

The two soldiers looked at the white foam gleaming with phosphorescence.
Goussiev was the first to break the silence.

"Nothing is really horrible," he said. "You feel uneasy, as if you were
in a dark forest. Suppose a boat were lowered and I was ordered to go a
hundred miles out to sea to fish--I would go. Or suppose I saw a soul
fall into the water--I would go in after him. I wouldn't go in for a
German or a Chinaman, but I'd try to save a Russian."

"Aren't you afraid to die?"

"Yes. I'm afraid. I'm sorry for the people at home. I have a brother at
home, you know, and he is not steady; he drinks, beats his wife for
nothing at all, and my old father and mother may be brought to ruin. But
my legs are giving way, mate, and it is hot here.... Let me go to bed."


V

Goussiev went back to the ward and lay down in his hammock. As before, a
vague desire tormented him and he could not make out what it was. There
was a congestion in his chest; a noise in his head, and his mouth was so
dry that he could hardly move his tongue. He dozed and dreamed, and,
exhausted by the heat, his cough and the nightmares that haunted him,
toward morning he fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed he was in barracks,
and the bread had just been taken out of the oven, and he crawled into
the oven and lathered himself with a birch broom. He slept for two days
and on the third day in the afternoon two sailors came down and carried
him out of the ward.

He was sewn up in sail-cloth, and to make him heavier two iron bars were
sewn up with him. In the sail-cloth he looked like a carrot or a radish,
broad at the top, narrow at the bottom.... Just before sunset he was
taken on deck and laid on a board one end of which lay on the bulwark,
the other on a box, raised up by a stool. Round him stood the invalided
soldiers.

"Blessed is our God," began the priest; "always, now and for ever and
ever."

"Amen!" said three sailors.

The soldiers and the crew crossed themselves and looked askance at the
waves. It was strange that a man should be sewn up in sail-cloth and
dropped into the sea. Could it happen to any one?

The priest sprinkled Goussiev with earth and bowed. A hymn was sung.

The guard lifted up the end of the board, Goussiev slipped down it; shot
headlong, turned over in the air, then plop! The foam covered him, for a
moment it looked as though he was swathed in lace, but the moment
passed--and he disappeared beneath the waves.

He dropped down to the bottom. Would he reach it? The bottom is miles
down, they say. He dropped down almost sixty or seventy feet, then began
to go slower and slower, swung to and fro as though he were thinking;
then, borne along by the current; he moved more sideways than downward.

But soon he met a shoal of pilot-fish. Seeing a dark body, the fish
stopped dead and sudden, all together, turned and went back. Less than a
minute later, like arrows they darted at Goussiev, zigzagging through
the water around him....

Later came another dark body, a shark. Gravely and leisurely, as though
it had not noticed Goussiev, it swam up under him, and he rolled over on
its back; it turned its belly up, taking its ease in the warm,
translucent water, and slowly opened its mouth with its two rows of
teeth. The pilot-fish were wildly excited; they stopped to see what was
going to happen. The shark played with the body, then slowly opened its
mouth under it, touched it with its teeth, and the sail-cloth was ripped
open from head to foot; one of the bars fell out, frightening the
pilot-fish and striking the shark on its side, and sank to the bottom.

And above the surface, the clouds were huddling up about the setting
sun; one cloud was like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, another
like a pair of scissors.... From behind the clouds came a broad green
ray reaching up to the very middle of the sky; a little later a violet
ray was flung alongside this, and then others gold and pink.... The sky
was soft and lilac, pale and tender. At first beneath the lovely,
glorious sky the ocean frowned, but soon the ocean also took on
colour--sweet, joyful, passionate colours, almost impossible to name in
human language.




MY LIFE

THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL


The director said to me: "I only keep you out of respect for your worthy
father, or you would have gone long since." I replied: "You flatter me,
your Excellency, but I suppose I am in a position to go." And then I
heard him saying: "Take the fellow away, he is getting on my nerves."

Two days later I was dismissed. Ever since I had been grown up, to the
great sorrow of my father, the municipal architect, I had changed my
position nine times, going from one department to another, but all the
departments were as like each other as drops of water; I had to sit and
write, listen to inane and rude remarks, and just wait until I was
dismissed.

When I told my father, he was sitting back in his chair with his eyes
shut. His thin, dry face, with a dove-coloured tinge where he shaved
(his face was like that of an old Catholic organist), wore an expression
of meek submission. Without answering my greeting or opening his eyes,
he said:

"If my dear wife, your mother, were alive, your life would be a constant
grief to her. I can see the hand of Providence in her untimely death.
Tell me, you unhappy boy," he went on, opening his eyes, "what am I to
do with you?"

When I was younger my relations and friends knew what to do with me;
some advised me to go into the army as a volunteer, others were for
pharmacy, others for the telegraph service; but now that I was
twenty-four and was going grey at the temples and had already tried the
army and pharmacy and the telegraph service, and every possibility
seemed to be exhausted, they gave me no more advice, but only sighed and
shook their heads.

"What do you think of yourself?" my father went on. "At your age other
young men have a good social position, and just look at yourself: a lazy
lout, a beggar, living on your father!"

And, as usual, he went on to say that young men were going to the dogs
through want of faith, materialism, and conceit, and that amateur
theatricals should be prohibited because they seduce young people from
religion and their duty.

"To-morrow we will go together, and you shall apologise to the director
and promise to do your work conscientiously," he concluded. "You must
not be without a position in society for a single day."

"Please listen to me," said I firmly, though I did not anticipate
gaining anything by speaking. "What you call a position in society is
the privilege of capital and education. But people who are poor and
uneducated have to earn their living by hard physical labour, and I see
no reason why I should be an exception."

"It is foolish and trivial of you to talk of physical labour," said my
father with some irritation. "Do try to understand, you idiot, and get
it into your brainless head, that in addition to physical strength you
have a divine spirit; a sacred fire, by which you are distinguished from
an ass or a reptile and bringing you nigh to God. This sacred fire has
been kept alight for thousands of years by the best of mankind. Your
great-grandfather, General Pologniev, fought at Borodino; your
grandfather was a poet, an orator, and a marshal of the nobility; your
uncle was an educationalist; and I, your father, am an architect! Have
all the Polognievs kept the sacred fire alight for you to put it out?"

"There must be justice," said I. "Millions of people have to do manual
labour."

"Let them. They can do nothing else! Even a fool or a criminal can do
manual labour. It is the mark of a slave and a barbarian, whereas the
sacred fire is given only to a few!"

It was useless to go on with the conversation. My father worshipped
himself and would not be convinced by anything unless he said it
himself. Besides, I knew quite well that the annoyance with which he
spoke of unskilled labour came not so much from any regard for the
sacred fire, as from a secret fear that I should become a working man
and the talk of the town. But the chief thing was that all my
schoolfellows had long ago gone through the University and were making
careers for themselves, and the son of the director of the State Bank
was already a collegiate assessor, while I, an only son, was nothing! It
was useless and unpleasant to go on with the conversation, but I still
sat there and raised objections in the hope of making myself understood.
The problem was simple and clear: how was I to earn my living? But he
could not see its simplicity and kept on talking with sugary rounded
phrases about Borodino and the sacred fire, and my uncle, and the
forgotten poet who wrote bad, insincere verses, and he called me a
brainless fool. But how I longed to be understood! In spite of
everything, I loved my father and my sister, and from boyhood I have had
a habit of considering them, so strongly rooted that I shall probably
never get rid of it; whether I am right or wrong I am always afraid of
hurting them, and go in terror lest my father's thin neck should go red
with anger and he should have an apoplectic fit.

"It is shameful and degrading for a man of my age to sit in a stuffy
room and compete with a typewriting-machine," I said. "What has that to
do with the sacred fire?"

"Still, it is intellectual work," said my father. "But that's enough.
Let us drop the conversation and I warn you that if you refuse to
return to your office and indulge your contemptible inclinations, then
you will lose my love and your sister's. I shall cut you out of my
will--that I swear, by God!"

With perfect sincerity, in order to show the purity of my motives, by
which I hope to be guided all through my life, I said:

"The matter of inheritance does not strike me as important. I renounce
any rights I may have."

For some unexpected reason these words greatly offended my father. He
went purple in the face.

"How dare you talk to me like that, you fool!" he cried to me in a thin,
shrill voice. "You scoundrel!" And he struck me quickly and dexterously
with a familiar movement; once--twice. "You forget yourself!"

When I was a boy and my father struck me, I used to stand bolt upright
like a soldier and look him straight in the face; and, exactly as if I
were still a boy, I stood erect, and tried to look into his eyes. My
father was old and very thin, but his spare muscles must have been as
strong as whip-cord, for he hit very hard.

I returned to the hall, but there he seized his umbrella and struck me
several times over the head and shoulders; at that moment my sister
opened the drawing-room door to see what the noise was, but immediately
drew back with an expression of pity and horror, and said not one word
in my defence.

My intention not to return to the office, but to start a new working
life, was unshakable. It only remained to choose the kind of work--and
there seemed to be no great difficulty about that, because I was strong,
patient, and willing. I was prepared to face a monotonous, laborious
life, of semi-starvation, filth, and rough surroundings, always
overshadowed with the thought of finding a job and a living. And--who
knows--returning from work in the Great Gentry Street, I might often
envy Dolyhikov, the engineer, who lives by intellectual work, but I was
happy in thinking of my coming troubles. I used to dream of intellectual
activity, and to imagine myself a teacher, a doctor, a writer, but my
dreams remained only dreams. A liking for intellectual pleasures--like
the theatre and reading--grew into a passion with me, but I did not know
whether I had any capacity for intellectual work. At school I had an
unconquerable aversion for the Greek language, so that I had to leave
when I was in the fourth class. Teachers were got to coach me up for the
fifth class, and then I went into various departments, spending most of
my time in perfect idleness, and this, I was told, was intellectual
work.

My activity in the education department or in the municipal office
required neither mental effort, nor talent, nor personal ability, nor
creative spiritual impulse; it was purely mechanical, and such
intellectual work seemed to me lower than manual labour. I despise it
and I do not think that it for a moment justifies an idle, careless
life, because it is nothing but a swindle, and only a kind of idleness.
In all probability I have never known real intellectual work.

It was evening. We lived in Great Gentry Street--the chief street in the
town--and our rank and fashion walked up and down it in the evenings, as
there were no public gardens. The street was very charming, and was
almost as good as a garden, for it had two rows of poplar-trees, which
smelt very sweet, especially after rain, and acacias, and tall trees,
and apple-trees hung over the fences and hedges. May evenings, the scent
of the lilac, the hum of the cockchafers, the warm, still air--how new
and extraordinary it all is, though spring comes every year! I stood by
the gate and looked at the passers-by. With most of them I had grown up
and had played with them, but now my presence might upset them, because
I was poorly dressed, in unfashionable clothes, and people made fun of
my very narrow trousers and large, clumsy boots, and called them
macaroni-on-steamboats. And I had a bad reputation in the town because I
had no position and went to play billiards in low cafes, and had once
been taken up, for no particular offence, by the political police.

In a large house opposite, Dolyhikov's, the engineer's, some one was
playing the piano. It was beginning to get dark and the stars were
beginning to shine. And slowly, answering people's salutes, my father
passed with my sister on his arm. He was wearing an old top hat with a
broad curly brim.

"Look!" he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the very umbrella
with which he had just struck me. "Look at the sky! Even the smallest
stars are worlds! How insignificant man is in comparison with the
universe."

And he said this in a tone that seemed to convey that he found it
extremely flattering and pleasant to be so insignificant. What an
untalented man he was! Unfortunately, he was the only architect in the
town, and during the last fifteen or twenty years I could not remember
one decent house being built. When he had to design a house, as a rule
he would draw first the hall and the drawing-room; as in olden days
schoolgirls could only begin to dance by the fireplace, so his artistic
ideas could only evolve from the hall and drawing-room. To them he would
add the dining-room, nursery, study, connecting them with doors, so that
in the end they were just so many passages, and each room had two or
three doors too many. His houses were obscure, extremely confused, and
limited. Every time, as though he felt something was missing, he had
recourse to various additions, plastering them one on top of the other,
and there would be various lobbies, and passages, and crooked staircases
leading to the entresol, where it was only possible to stand in a
stooping position, and where instead of a floor there would be a thin
flight of stairs like a Russian bath, and the kitchen would always be
under the house with a vaulted ceiling and a brick floor. The front of
his houses always had a hard, stubborn expression, with stiff, French
lines, low, squat roofs, and fat, pudding-like chimneys surmounted with
black cowls and squeaking weathercocks. And somehow all the houses
built by my father were like each other, and vaguely reminded me of a
top hat, and the stiff, obstinate back of his head. In the course of
time the people of the town grew used to my father's lack of talent,
which took root and became our style.

My father introduced the style into my sister's life. To begin with, he
gave her the name of Cleopatra (and he called me Misail). When she was a
little girl he used to frighten her by telling her about the stars and
our ancestors; and explained the nature of life and duty to her at great
length; and now when she was twenty-six he went on in the same way,
allowing her to take no one's arm but his own, and somehow imagining
that sooner or later an ardent young man would turn up and wish to enter
into marriage with her out of admiration for his qualities. And she
adored my father, was afraid of him, and believed in his extraordinary
intellectual powers.

It got quite dark and the street grew gradually empty. In the house
opposite the music stopped. The gate was wide open and out into the
street, careering with all its bells jingling, came a troika. It was the
engineer and his daughter going for a drive. Time to go to bed!

I had a room in the house, but I lived in the courtyard in a hut, under
the same roof as the coach-house, which had been built probably as a
harness-room--for there were big nails in the walls--but now it was not
used, and my father for thirty years had kept his newspapers there,
which for some reason he had bound half-yearly and then allowed no one
to touch. Living there I was less in touch with my father and his
guests, and I used to think that if I did not live in a proper room and
did not go to the house every day for meals, my father's reproach that I
was living on him lost some of its sting.

My sister was waiting for me. She had brought me supper unknown to my
father; a small piece of cold veal and a slice of bread. In the family
there were sayings: "Money loves an account," or "A copeck saves a
rouble," and so on, and my sister, impressed by such wisdom, did her
best to cut down expenses and made us feed rather meagrely. She put the
plate on the table, sat on my bed, and began to cry.

"Misail," she said, "what are you doing to us?"

She did not cover her face, her tears ran down her cheeks and hands, and
her expression was sorrowful. She fell on the pillow, gave way to her
tears, trembling all over and sobbing.

"You have left your work again!" she said. "How awful!"

"Do try to understand, sister!" I said, and because she cried I was
filled with despair.

As though it were deliberately arranged, the paraffin in my little lamp
ran out, and the lamp smoked and guttered, and the old hooks in the wall
looked terrible and their shadows flickered.

"Spare us!" said my sister, rising up. "Father is in an awful state, and
I am ill. I shall go mad. What will become of you?" she asked, sobbing
and holding out her hands to me. "I ask you, I implore you, in the name
of our dear mother, to go back to your work."

"I cannot, Cleopatra," I said, feeling that only a little more would
make me give in. "I cannot."

"Why?" insisted my sister, "why? If you have not made it up with your
chief, look for another place. For instance, why shouldn't you work on
the railway? I have just spoken to Aniuta Blagovo, and she assures me
you would be taken on, and she even promised to do what she could for
you. For goodness sake, Misail, think! Think it over, I implore you!"

We talked a little longer and I gave in. I said that the thought of
working on the railway had never come into my head, and that I was ready
to try.

She smiled happily through her tears and clasped my hand, and still she
cried, because she could not stop, and I went into the kitchen for
paraffin.


II

Among the supporters of amateur theatricals, charity concerts, and
_tableaux vivants_ the leaders were the Azhoguins, who lived in their
own house in Great Gentry house the Street. They used to lend their
house and assume the necessary trouble and expense. They were a rich
landowning family, and had about three thousand _urskins_, with a
magnificent farm in the neighbourhood, but they did not care for village
life and lived in the town summer and winter. The family consisted of a
mother, a tall, spare, delicate lady, who had short hair, wore a blouse
and a plain skirt a l'Anglais, and three daughters, who were spoken of,
not by their names, but as the eldest, the middle, and the youngest;
they all had ugly, sharp chins, and they were short-sighted,
high-shouldered, dressed in the same style as their mother, had an
unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were
always doing something for charity--acting, reciting, singing. They were
very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they
acted without gaiety and with a businesslike air, as though they were
engaged in bookkeeping.

I loved our plays, especially the rehearsals, which were frequent,
rather absurd, and noisy, and we were always given supper after them. I
had no part in the selection of the pieces and the casting of the
characters. I had to look after the stage. I used to design the scenery
and copy out the parts, and prompt and make up. And I also had to look
after the various effects such as thunder, the singing of a nightingale,
and so on. Having no social position, I had no decent clothes, and
during rehearsals had to hold aloof from the others in the darkened
wings and shyly say nothing.

I used to paint the scenery in the Azhoguins' coach-house or yard. I was
assisted by a house-painter, or, as he called himself, a decorating
contractor, named Andrey Ivanov, a man of about fifty, tall and very
thin and pale, with a narrow chest, hollow temples, and dark rings under
his eyes, he was rather awful to look at. He had some kind of wasting
disease, and every spring and autumn he was said to be on the point of
death, but he would go to bed for a while and then get up and say with
surprise: "I'm not dead this time!"

In the town he was called Radish, and people said it was his real name.
He loved the theatre as much as I, and no sooner did he hear that a play
was in hand than he gave up all his work and went to the Azhoguins' to
paint scenery.

The day after my conversation with my sister I worked from morning till
night at the Azhoguins'. The rehearsal was fixed for seven o'clock, and
an hour before it began all the players were assembled, and the eldest,
the middle, and the youngest Miss Azhoguin were reading their parts on
the stage. Radish, in a long, brown overcoat with a scarf wound round
his neck, was standing, leaning with his head against the wall, looking
at the stage with a rapt expression. Mrs. Azhoguin went from guest to
guest saying something pleasant to every one. She had a way of gazing
into one's face and speaking in a hushed voice as though she were
telling a secret.

"It must be difficult to paint scenery," she said softly, coming up to
me. "I was just talking to Mrs. Mufke about prejudice when I saw you
come in. Mon Dieu! All my life I have struggled against prejudice. To
convince the servants that all their superstitions are nonsense I always
light three candles, and I begin all my important business on the
thirteenth."

The daughter of Dolyhikov, the engineer, was there, a handsome, plump,
fair girl, dressed, as people said in our town, in Parisian style. She
did not act, but at rehearsals a chair was put for her on the stage, and
the plays did not begin until she appeared in the front row, to astonish
everybody with the brilliance of her clothes. As coming from the
metropolis, she was allowed to make remarks during rehearsals, and she
did so with an affable, condescending smile, and it was clear that she
regarded our plays as a childish amusement. It was said that she had
studied singing at the Petersburg conservatoire and had sung for a
winter season in opera. I liked her very much, and during rehearsals or
the performance, I never took my eyes off her.

I had taken the book and began to prompt when suddenly my sister
appeared. Without taking off her coat and hat she came up to me and
said:

"Please come!"

I went. Behind the stage in the doorway stood Aniuta Blagovo, also
wearing a hat with a dark veil. She was the daughter of the
vice-president of the Court, who had been appointed to our town years
ago, almost as soon as the High Court was established. She was tall and
had a good figure, and was considered indispensable for the _tableaux
vivants_, and when she represented a fairy or a muse, her face would
burn with shame; but she took no part in the plays, and would only look
in at rehearsals, on some business, and never enter the hall. And it was
evident now that she had only looked in for a moment.

"My father has mentioned you," she said drily, not looking at me and
blushing.... "Dolyhikov has promised to find you something to do on the
railway. If you go to his house to-morrow, he will see you."

I bowed and thanked her for her kindness.

"And you must leave this," she said, pointing to my book.

She and my sister went up to Mrs. Azhoguin and began to whisper, looking
at me.

"Indeed," said Mrs. Azhoguin, coming up to me, and gazing into my face.
"Indeed, if it takes you from your more serious business"--she took the
book out of my hands--"then you must hand it over to some one else.
Don't worry, my friend. It will be all right."

I said good-bye and left in some confusion. As I went down-stairs I saw
my sister and Aniuta Blagovo going away; they were talking animatedly, I
suppose about my going on the railway, and they hurried away. My sister
had never been to a rehearsal before, and she was probably tortured by
her conscience and by her fear of my father finding out that she had
been to the Azhoguins' without permission.

The next day I went to see Dolyhikov at one o'clock. The man servant
showed me into a charming room, which was the engineer's drawing-room
and study. Everything in it was charming and tasteful, and to a man like
myself, unused to such things, very strange. Costly carpets, huge
chairs, bronzes, pictures in gold and velvet frames; photographs on the
walls of beautiful women, clever, handsome faces, and striking
attitudes; from the drawing-room a door led straight into the garden, by
a veranda, and I saw lilac and a table laid for breakfast, rolls, and a
bunch of roses; and there was a smell of spring, and good cigars, and
happiness--and everything seemed to say, here lives a man who has worked
and won the highest happiness here on earth. At the table the engineer's
daughter was sitting reading a newspaper.

"Do you want my father?" she asked. "He is having a shower-bath. He will
be down presently. Please take a chair."

I sat down.

"I believe you live opposite?" she asked after a short silence.

"Yes."

"When I have nothing to do I look out of the window. You must excuse
me," she added, turning to her newspaper, "and I often see you and your
sister. She has such a kind, wistful expression."

Dolyhikov came in. He was wiping his neck with a towel.

"Papa, this is Mr. Pologniev," said his daughter.

"Yes, yes. Blagovo spoke to me." He turned quickly to me, but did not
hold out his hand. "But what do you think I can give you? I'm not
bursting with situations. You are queer people!" he went on in a loud
voice and as though he were scolding me. "I get about twenty people
every day, as though I were a Department of State. I run a railway, sir.
I employ hard labour; I need mechanics, navvies, joiners, well-sinkers,
and you can only sit and write. That's all! You are all clerks!"

And he exhaled the same air of happiness as his carpets and chairs. He
was stout, healthy, with red cheeks and a broad chest; he looked clean
in his pink shirt and wide trousers, just like a china figure of a
post-boy. He had a round, bristling beard--and not a single grey
hair--and a nose with a slight bridge, and bright, innocent, dark eyes.

"What can you do?" he went on. "Nothing! I am an engineer and
well-to-do, but before I was given this railway I worked very hard for a
long time. I was an engine-driver for two years, I worked in Belgium as
an ordinary lubricator. Now, my dear man, just think--what work can I
offer you?"

"I quite agree," said I, utterly abashed, not daring to meet his bright,
innocent eyes.

"Are you any good with the telegraph?" he asked after some thought.

"Yes. I have been in the telegraph service."

"Hm.... Well, we'll see. Go to Dubechnia. There's a fellow there
already. But he is a scamp."

"And what will my duties be?" I asked.

"We'll see to that later. Go there now. I'll give orders. But please
don't drivel and don't bother me with petitions or I'll kick you out."

He turned away from me without even a nod. I bowed to him and his
daughter, who was reading the newspaper, and went out. I felt so
miserable that when my sister asked how the engineer had received me, I
could not utter a single word.

To go to Dubechnia I got up early in the morning at sunrise. There was
not a soul in the street, the whole town was asleep, and my footsteps
rang out with a hollow sound. The dewy poplars filled the air with a
soft scent. I was sad and had no desire to leave the town. It seemed so
nice and warm! I loved the green trees, the quiet sunny mornings, the
ringing of the bells, but the people in the town were alien to me,
tiresome and sometimes even loathsome. I neither liked nor understood
them.

I did not understand why or for what purpose those thirty-five thousand
people lived. I knew that Kimry made a living by manufacturing boots,
that Tula made samovars and guns, that Odessa was a port; but I did not
know what our town was or what it did. The people in Great Gentry Street
and two other clean streets had independent means and salaries paid by
the Treasury, but how the people lived in the other eight streets which
stretched parallel to each other for three miles and then were lost
behind the hill--that was always an insoluble problem to me. And I am
ashamed to think of the way they lived. They had neither public gardens,
nor a theatre, nor a decent orchestra; the town and club libraries are
used only by young Jews, so that books and magazines would lie for
months uncut. The rich and the intelligentsia slept in close, stuffy
bedrooms, with wooden beds infested with bugs; the children were kept in
filthy, dirty rooms called nurseries, and the servants, even when they
were old and respectable, slept on the kitchen floor and covered
themselves with rags. Except in Lent all the houses smelt of _bortsch_,
and during Lent of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. The food was
unsavoury, the water unwholesome. On the town council, at the
governor's, at the archbishop's, everywhere there had been talk for
years about there being no good, cheap water-supply and of borrowing two
hundred thousand roubles from the Treasury. Even the very rich people,
of whom there were about thirty in the town, people who would lose a
whole estate at cards, used to drink the bad water and talk passionately
about the loan--and I could never understand this, for it seemed to me
it would be simpler for them to pay up the two hundred thousand.

I did not know a single honest man in the whole town. My father took
bribes, and imagined they were given to him out of respect for his
spiritual qualities; the boys at the high school, in order to be
promoted, went to lodge with the masters and paid them large sums; the
wife of the military commandant took levies from the recruits during the
recruiting, and even allowed them to stand her drinks, and once she was
so drunk in church that she could not get up from her knees; during the
recruiting the doctors also took bribes, and the municipal doctor and
the veterinary surgeon levied taxes on the butcher shops and public
houses; the district school did a trade in certificates which gave
certain privileges in the civil service; the provosts took bribes from
the clergy and church-wardens whom they controlled, and on the town
council and various committees every one who came before them was
pursued with: "One expects thanks!"--and thereby forty copecks had to
change hands. And those who did not take bribes, like the High Court
officials, were stiff and proud, and shook hands with two fingers, and
were distinguished by their indifference and narrow-mindedness. They
drank and played cards, married rich women, and always had a bad,
insidious influence on those round them. Only the girls had any moral
purity; most of them had lofty aspirations and were pure and honest at
heart; but they knew nothing of life, and believed that bribes were
given to honour spiritual qualities; and when they married, they soon
grew old and weak, and were hopelessly lost in the mire of that vulgar,
bourgeois existence.


III

A railway was being built in our district. On holidays and thereabouts
the town was filled with crowds of ragamuffins called "railies," of whom
the people were afraid. I used often to see a miserable wretch with a
bloody face, and without a hat, being dragged off by the police, and
behind him was the proof of his crime, a samovar or some wet, newly
washed linen. The "railies" used to collect near the public houses and
on the squares; and they drank, ate, and swore terribly, and whistled
after the town prostitutes. To amuse these ruffians our shopkeepers used
to make the cats and dogs drink vodka, or tie a kerosene-tin to a dog's
tail, and whistle to make the dog come tearing along the street with the
tin clattering after him, and making him squeal with terror and think he
had some frightful monster hard at his heels, so that he would rush out
of the town and over the fields until he could run no more. We had
several dogs in the town which were left with a permanent shiver and
used to crawl about with their tails between their legs, and people said
that they could not stand such tricks and had gone mad.

The station was being built five miles from the town. It was said that
the engineer had asked for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles to bring
the station nearer, but the municipality would only agree to forty; they
would not give in to the extra ten thousand, and now the townspeople are
sorry because they had to make a road to the station which cost them
more. Sleepers and rails were fixed all along the line, and
service-trains were running to carry building materials and labourers,
and they were only waiting for the bridges upon which Dolyhikov was at
work, and here and there the stations were not ready.

Dubechnia--the name of our first station--was seventeen versts from the
town. I went on foot. The winter and spring corn was bright green,
shining in the morning sun. The road was smooth and bright, and in the
distance I could see in outline the station, the hills, and the remote
farmhouses.... How good it was out in the open! And how I longed to be
filled with the sense of freedom, if only for that morning, to stop
thinking of what was going on in the town, or of my needs, or even of
eating! Nothing has so much prevented my living as the feeling of acute
hunger, which make my finest thoughts get mixed up with thoughts of
porridge, cutlets, and fried fish. When I stand alone in the fields and
look up at the larks hanging marvellously in the air, and bursting with
hysterical song, I think: "It would be nice to have some bread and
butter." Or when I sit in the road and shut my eyes and listen to the
wonderful sounds of a May-day, I remember how good hot potatoes smell.
Being big and of a strong constitution I never have quite enough to eat,
and so my chief sensation during the day is hunger, and so I can
understand why so many people who are working for a bare living, can
talk of nothing but food.

At Dubechnia the station was being plastered inside, and the upper story
of the water-tank was being built. It was close and smelt of lime, and
the labourers were wandering lazily over piles of chips and rubbish. The
signalman was asleep near his box with the sun pouring straight into
his face. There was not a single tree. The telephone gave a faint hum,
and here and there birds had alighted on it. I wandered over the heaps,
not knowing what to do, and remembered how when I asked the engineer
what my duties would be, he had replied: "We will see there." But what
was there to see in such a wilderness? The plasterers were talking about
the foreman and about one Fedot Vassilievich. I could not understand and
was filled with embarrassment--physical embarrassment. I felt conscious
of my arms and legs, and of the whole of my big body, and did not know
what to do with them or where to go.

After walking for at least a couple of hours I noticed that from the
station to the right of the line there were telegraph-poles which after
about one and a half or two miles ended in a white stone wall. The
labourers said it was the office, and I decided at last that I must go
there.

It was a very old farmhouse, long unused. The wall of rough, white stone
was decayed, and in places had crumbled away, and the roof of the wing,
the blind wall of which looked toward the railway, had perished, and
was patched here and there with tin. Through the gates there was a large
yard, overgrown with tall grass, and beyond that, an old house with
Venetian blinds in the windows, and a high roof, brown with rot. On
either side of the house, to right and left, were two symmetrical wings;
the windows of one were boarded up, while by the other, the windows of
which were open, there were a number of calves grazing. The last
telegraph-pole stood in the yard, and the wire went from it to the wing
with the blind wall. The door was open and I went in. By the table at
the telegraph was sitting a man with a dark, curly head in a canvas
coat; he glared at me sternly and askance, but he immediately smiled and
said:

"How do you do, Profit?"

It was Ivan Cheprakov, my school friend, who was expelled, when he was
in the second class, for smoking. Once, during the autumn, we were out
catching goldfinches, starlings, and hawfinches, to sell them in the
market early in the morning when our parents were still asleep.

We beat up flocks of starlings and shot at them with pellets, and then
picked up the wounded, and some died in terrible agony--I can still
remember how they moaned at night in my case--and some recovered. And we
sold them, and swore black and blue that they were male birds. Once in
the market I had only one starling left, which I hawked about and
finally sold for a copeck. "A little profit!" I said to console myself,
and from that time at school I was always known as "Little Profit," and
even now, schoolboys and the townspeople sometimes use the name to tease
me, though no one but myself remembers how it came about.

Cheprakov never was strong. He was narrow-chested, round-shouldered,
long-legged. His tie looked like a piece of string, he had no waistcoat,
and his boots were worse than mine--with the heels worn down. He blinked
with his eyes and had an eager expression as though he were trying to
catch something and he was in a constant fidget.

"You wait," he said, bustling about. "Look here!... What was I saying
just now?"

We began to talk. I discovered that the estate had till recently
belonged to the Cheprakovs and only the previous autumn had passed to
Dolyhikov, who thought it more profitable to keep his money in land than
in shares, and had already bought three big estates in our district with
the transfer of all mortgages. When Cheprakov's mother sold, she
stipulated for the right to live in one of the wings for another two
years and got her son a job in the office.

"Why shouldn't he buy?" said Cheprakov of the engineer. "He gets a lot
from the contractors. He bribes them all."

Then he took me to dinner, deciding in his emphatic way that I was to
live with him in the wing and board with his mother.

"She is a screw," he said, "but she will not take much from you."

In the small rooms where his mother lived there was a queer jumble; even
the hall and the passage were stacked with furniture, which had been
taken from the house after the sale of the estate; and the furniture was
old, and of redwood. Mrs. Cheprakov, a very stout elderly lady, with
slanting, Chinese eyes, sat by the window, in a big chair, knitting a
stocking. She received me ceremoniously.

"It is Pologniev, mother," said Cheprakov, introducing me. "He is going
to work here."

"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice as though
she had boiling fat in her throat.

"Yes," I answered.

"Sit down."

The dinner was bad. It consisted only of a pie with unsweetened curds
and some milk soup. Elena Nikifirovna, my hostess, was perpetually
winking, first with one eye, then with the other. She talked and ate,
but in her whole aspect there was a deathlike quality, and one could
almost detect the smell of a corpse. Life hardly stirred in her, yet she
had the air of being the lady of the manor, who had once had her serfs,
and was the wife of a general, whose servants had to call him "Your
Excellency," and when these miserable embers of life flared up in her
for a moment, she would say to her son:

"Ivan, that is not the way to hold your knife!"

Or she would say, gasping for breath, with the preciseness of a hostess
labouring to entertain her guest:

"We have just sold our estate, you know. It is a pity, of course, we
have got so used to being here, but Dolyhikov promised to make Ivan
station-master at Dubechnia, so that we shan't have to leave. We shall
live here on the station, which is the same as living on the estate. The
engineer is such a nice man! Don't you think him very handsome?"

Until recently the Cheprakovs had been very well-to-do, but with the
general's death everything changed. Elena Nikifirovna began to quarrel
with the neighbours and to go to law, and she did not pay her bailiffs
and labourers; she was always afraid of being robbed--and in less than
ten years Dubechnia changed completely.

Behind the house there was an old garden run wild, overgrown with tall
grass and brushwood. I walked along the terrace which was still
well-kept and beautiful; through the glass door I saw a room with a
parquet floor, which must have been the drawing-room. It contained an
ancient piano, some engravings in mahogany frames on the walls--and
nothing else. There was nothing left of the flower-garden but peonies
and poppies, rearing their white and scarlet heads above the ground; on
the paths, all huddled together, were young maples and elm-trees, which
had been stripped by the cows. The growth was dense and the garden
seemed impassable, and only near the house, where there still stood
poplars, firs, and some old bricks, were there traces of the former
avenues, and further on the garden was being cleared for a hay-field,
and here it was no longer allowed to run wild, and one's mouth and eyes
were no longer filled with spiders' webs, and a pleasant air was
stirring. The further out one went, the more open it was, and there were
cherry-trees, plum-trees, wide-spreading old apple-trees, lichened and
held up with props, and the pear-trees were so tall that it was
incredible that there could be pears on them. This part of the garden
was let to the market-women of our town, and it was guarded from thieves
and starlings by a peasant--an idiot who lived in a hut.

The orchard grew thinner and became a mere meadow running down to the
river, which was overgrown with reeds and withy-beds. There was a pool
by the mill-dam, deep and full of fish, and a little mill with a straw
roof ground and roared, and the frogs croaked furiously. On the water,
which was as smooth as glass, circles appeared from time to time, and
water-lilies trembled on the impact of a darting fish. The village of
Dubechnia was on the other side of the river. The calm, azure pool was
alluring with its promise of coolness and rest. And now all this, the
pool, the mill, the comfortable banks of the river, belonged to the
engineer!

And here my new work began. I received and despatched telegrams, I wrote
out various accounts and copied orders, claims, and reports, sent in to
the office by our illiterate foremen and mechanics. But most of the day
I did nothing, walking up and down the room waiting for telegrams, or I
would tell the boy to stay in the wing, and go into the garden until the
boy came to say the bell was ringing. I had dinner with Mrs. Cheprakov.
Meat was served very rarely; most of the dishes were made of milk, and
on Wednesdays and Fridays we had Lenten fare, and the food was served in
pink plates, which were called Lenten. Mrs. Cheprakov was always
blinking--the habit grew on her, and I felt awkward and embarrassed in
her presence.

As there was not enough work for one, Cheprakov did nothing, but slept
or went down to the pool with his gun to shoot ducks. In the evenings he
got drunk in the village, or at the station, and before going to bed he
would look in the glass and say:

"How are you, Ivan Cheprakov?"

When he was drunk, he was very pale and used to rub his hands and laugh,
or rather neigh, He-he-he! Out of bravado he would undress himself and
run naked through the fields, and he used to eat flies and say they were
a bit sour.


IV

Once after dinner he came running into the wing, panting, to say:

"Your sister has come to see you."

I went out and saw a fly standing by the steps of the house. My sister
had brought Aniuta Blagovo and a military gentleman in a summer uniform.
As I approached I recognised the military gentleman as Aniuta's brother,
the doctor.

"We've come to take you for a picnic," he said, "if you've no
objection."

My sister and Aniuta wanted to ask how I was getting on, but they were
both silent and only looked at me. They felt that I didn't like my job,
and tears came into my sister's eyes and Aniuta Blagovo blushed. We went
into the orchard, the doctor first, and he said ecstatically:

"What air! By Jove, what air!"

He was just a boy to look at. He talked and walked like an
undergraduate, and the look in his grey eyes was as lively, simple, and
frank as that of a nice boy. Compared with his tall, handsome sister he
looked weak and slight, and his little beard was thin and so was his
voice--a thin tenor, though quite pleasant. He was away somewhere with
his regiment and had come home on leave, and said that he was going to
Petersburg in the autumn to take his M.D. He already had a family--a
wife and three children; he had married young, in his second year at the
University, and people said he was unhappily married and was not living
with his wife.

"What is the time?" My sister was uneasy. "We must go back soon, for my
father would only let me have until six o'clock."

"Oh, your father," sighed the doctor.

I made tea, and we drank it sitting on a carpet in front of the terrace,
and the doctor, kneeling, drank from his saucer, and said that he was
perfectly happy. Then Cheprakov fetched the key and unlocked the glass
door and we all entered the house. It was dark and mysterious and
smelled of mushrooms, and our footsteps made a hollow sound as though
there were a vault under the floor. The doctor stopped by the piano and
touched the keys and it gave out a faint, tremulous, cracked but still
melodious sound. He raised his voice and began to sing a romance,
frowning and impatiently stamping his foot when he touched a broken key.
My sister forgot about going home, but walked agitatedly up and down the
room and said:

"I am happy! I am very, very happy!"

There was a note of surprise in her voice as though it seemed impossible
to her that she should be happy. It was the first time in my life that I
had seen her so gay. She even looked handsome. Her profile was not good,
her nose and mouth somehow protruded and made her look as if she was
always blowing, but she had beautiful, dark eyes, a pale, very delicate
complexion, and a touching expression of kindness and sadness, and when
she spoke she seemed very charming and even beautiful. Both she and I
took after our mother; we were broad-shouldered, strong, and sturdy, but
her paleness was a sign of sickness, she often coughed, and in her eyes
I often noticed the expression common to people who are ill, but who for
some reason conceal it. In her present cheerfulness there was something
childish and naive, as though all the joy which had been suppressed and
dulled during our childhood by a strict upbringing, had suddenly
awakened in her soul and rushed out into freedom.

But when evening came and the fly was brought round, my sister became
very quiet and subdued, and sat in the fly as though it were a
prison-van.

Soon they were all gone. The noise of the fly died away.... I remembered
that Aniuta Blagovo had said not a single word to me all day.

"A wonderful girl!" I thought "A wonderful girl."

Lent came and every day we had Lenten dishes. I was greatly depressed by
my idleness and the uncertainty of my position, and, slothful, hungry,
dissatisfied with myself, I wandered over the estate and only waited for
an energetic mood to leave the place.

Once in the afternoon when Radish was sitting in our wing, Dolyhikov
entered unexpectedly, very sunburnt, and grey with dust. He had been out
on the line for three days and had come to Dubechnia on a locomotive and
walked over. While he waited for the carriage which he had ordered to
come out to meet him he went over the estate with his bailiff, giving
orders in a loud voice, and then for a whole hour he sat in our wing and
wrote letters. When telegrams came through for him, he himself tapped
out the answers, while we stood there stiff and silent.

"What a mess!" he said, looking angrily through the accounts. "I shall
transfer the office to the station in a fortnight and I don't know what
I shall do with you then."

"I've done my best, sir," said Cheprakov.

"Quite so. I can see what your best is. You can only draw your wages."
The engineer looked at me and went on. "You rely on getting
introductions to make a career for yourself with as little trouble as
possible. Well, I don't care about introductions. Nobody helped me.
Before I had this line, I was an engine-driver. I worked in Belgium as
an ordinary lubricator. And what are you doing here, Panteley?" he
asked, turning to Radish. "Going out drinking?"

For some reason or other he called all simple people Panteley, while he
despised men like Cheprakov and myself, and called us drunkards, beasts,
canaille. As a rule he was hard on petty officials, and paid and
dismissed them ruthlessly without any explanation.

At last the carriage came for him. When he left he promised to dismiss
us all in a fortnight; called the bailiff a fool, stretched himself out
comfortably in the carriage, and drove away.

"Andrey Ivanich," I said to Radish, "will you take me on as a labourer?"

"What! Why?"

We went together toward the town, and when the station and the farm were
far behind us, I asked:

"Andrey Ivanich, why did you come to Dubechnia?"

"Firstly because some of my men are working on the line, and secondly to
pay interest to Mrs. Cheprakov. I borrowed fifty roubles from her last
summer, and now I pay her one rouble a month."

The decorator stopped and took hold of my coat.

"Misail Alereich, my friend," he went on, "I take it that if a common
man or a gentleman takes interest, he is a wrong-doer. The truth is not
in him."

Radish, looking thin, pale, and rather terrible, shut his eyes, shook
his head, and muttered in a philosophic tone:

"The grub eats grass, rust eats iron, lies devour the soul. God save us
miserable sinners!"


V

Radish was unpractical and he was no business man; he undertook more
work than he could do, and when he came to payment he always lost his
reckoning and so was always out on the wrong side. He was a painter, a
glazier, a paper-hanger, and would even take on tiling, and I remember
how he used to run about for days looking for tiles to make an
insignificant profit. He was an excellent workman and would sometimes
earn ten roubles a day, and but for his desire to be a master and to
call himself a contractor, he would probably have made quite a lot of
money.

He himself was paid by contract and paid me and the others by the day,
between seventy-five copecks and a rouble per day. When the weather was
hot and dry he did various outside jobs, chiefly painting roofs. Not
being used to it, my feet got hot, as though I were walking over a
red-hot oven, and when I wore felt boots my feet swelled. But this was
only at the beginning. Later on I got used to it and everything went all
right. I lived among the people, to whom work was obligatory and
unavoidable, people who worked like dray-horses, and knew nothing of the
moral value of labour, and never even used the word "labour" in their
talk. Among them I also felt like a dray-horse, more and more imbued
with the necessity and inevitability of what I was doing, and this made
my life easier, and saved me from doubt.

At first everything amused me, everything was new. It was like being
born again. I could sleep on the ground and go barefoot--and found it
exceedingly pleasant. I could stand in a crowd of simple folks, without
embarrassing them, and when a cab-horse fell down in the street, I used
to run and help it up without being afraid of soiling my clothes. But,
best of all, I was living independently and was not a burden on any one.

The painting of roofs, especially when we mixed our own paint, was
considered a very profitable business, and, therefore, even such good
workmen as Radish did not shun this rough and tiresome work. In short
trousers, showing his lean, muscular legs, he used to prowl over the
roof like a stork, and I used to hear him sigh wearily as he worked his
brush:

"Woe, woe to us, miserable sinners!"

He could walk as easily on a roof as on the ground. In spite of his
looking so ill and pale and corpse-like, his agility was extraordinary;
like any young man he would paint the cupola and the top of the church
without scaffolding, using only ladders and a rope, and it was queer and
strange when, standing there, far above the ground, he would rise to his
full height and cry to the world at large:

"Grubs eat grass, rust eats iron, lies devour the soul!"

Or, thinking of something, he would suddenly answer his own thought:

"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"

When I went home from work all the people sitting outside their doors,
the shop assistants, dogs, and their masters, used to shout after me and
jeer spitefully, and at first it seemed monstrous and distressed me
greatly.

"Little Profit," they used to shout. "House-painter! Yellow ochre!"

And no one treated me so unmercifully as those who had only just risen
above the people and had quite recently had to work for their living.
Once in the market-place as I passed the ironmonger's a can of water was
spilled over me as if by accident, and once a stick was thrown at me.
And once a fishmonger, a grey-haired old man, stood in my way and looked
at me morosely and said:

"It isn't you I'm sorry for, you fool, it's your father."

And when my acquaintances met me they got confused. Some regarded me as
a queer fish and a fool, and they were sorry for me; others did not know
how to treat me and it was difficult to understand them. Once, in the
daytime, in one of the streets off Great Gentry Street, I met Aniuta
Blagovo. I was on my way to my work and was carrying two long brushes
and a pot of paint. When she recognised me, Aniuta blushed.

"Please do not acknowledge me in the street," she said nervously,
sternly, in a trembling voice, without offering to shake hands with me,
and tears suddenly gleamed in her eyes. "If you must be like this, then,
so--so be it, but please avoid me in public!"

I had left Great Gentry Street and was living in a suburb called
Makarikha with my nurse Karpovna, a good-natured but gloomy old woman
who was always looking for evil, and was frightened by her dreams, and
saw omens and ill in the bees and wasps which flew into her room. And in
her opinion my having become a working man boded no good.

"You are lost!" she said mournfully, shaking her head. "Lost!"

With her in her little house lived her adopted son, Prokofyi, a butcher,
a huge, clumsy fellow, of about thirty, with ginger hair and scrubby
moustache. When he met me in the hall, he would silently and
respectfully make way for me, and when he was drunk he would salute me
with his whole hand. In the evenings he used to have supper, and
through the wooden partition I could hear him snorting and snuffling as
he drank glass after glass.

"Mother," he would say in an undertone.

"Well," Karpovna would reply. She was passionately fond of him. "What is
it, my son?"

"I'll do you a favour, mother. I'll feed you in your old age in this
vale of tears, and when you die I'll bury you at my own expense. So I
say and so I'll do."

I used to get up every day before sunrise and go to bed early. We
painters ate heavily and slept soundly, and only during the night would
we have any excitement. I never quarrelled with my comrades. All day
long there was a ceaseless stream of abuse, cursing and hearty good
wishes, as, for instance, that one's eyes should burst, or that one
might be carried off by cholera, but, all the same, among ourselves we
were very friendly. The men suspected me of being a religious crank and
used to laugh at me good-naturedly, saying that even my own father
denounced me, and they used to say that they very seldom went to church
and that many of them had not been to confession for ten years, and
they justified their laxness by saying that a decorator is among men
like a jackdaw among birds.

My mates respected me and regarded me with esteem; they evidently liked
my not drinking or smoking, and leading a quiet, steady life. They were
only rather disagreeably surprised at my not stealing the oil, or going
with them to ask our employers for a drink. The stealing of the
employers' oil and paint was a custom with house-painters, and was not
regarded as theft, and it was remarkable that even so honest a man as
Radish would always come away from work with some white lead and oil.
And even respectable old men who had their own houses in Makarikha were
not ashamed to ask for tips, and when the men, at the beginning or end
of a job, made up to some vulgar fool and thanked him humbly for a few
pence, I used to feel sick and sorry.

With the customers they behaved like sly courtiers, and almost every day
I was reminded of Shakespeare's Polonius.

"There will probably be rain," a customer would say, staring at the sky.


"It is sure to rain," the painters would agree.

"But the clouds aren't rain-clouds. Perhaps it won't rain."

"No, sir. It won't rain. It won't rain, sure."

Behind their backs they generally regarded the customers ironically, and
when, for instance, they saw a gentleman sitting on his balcony with a
newspaper, they would say:

"He reads newspapers, but he has nothing to eat."

I never visited my people. When I returned from work I often found
short, disturbing notes from my sister about my father; how he was very
absent-minded at dinner, and then slipped away and locked himself in his
study and did not come out for a long time. Such news upset me. I could
not sleep, and I would go sometimes at night and walk along Great
Gentry Street by our house, and look up at the dark windows, and try to
guess if all was well within. On Sundays my sister would come to see me,
but by stealth, as though she came not to see me, but my nurse. And if
she came into my room she would look pale, with her eyes red, and at
once she would begin to weep.

"Father cannot bear it much longer," she would say. "If, as God forbid,
something were to happen to him, it would be on your conscience all your
life. It is awful, Misail! For mother's sake I implore you to mend your
ways."

"My dear sister," I replied. "How can I reform when I am convinced that
I am acting according to my conscience? Do try to understand me!"

"I know you are obeying your conscience, but it ought to be possible to
do so without hurting anybody."

"Oh, saints above!" the old woman would sigh behind the door. "You are
lost. There will be a misfortune, my dear. It is bound to come."


VI

On Sunday, Doctor Blagovo came to see me unexpectedly. He was wearing a
white summer uniform over a silk shirt, and high glace boots.

"I came to see you!" he began, gripping my hand in his hearty,
undergraduate fashion. "I hear of you every day and I have long intended
to go and see you to have a heart-to-heart, as they say. Things are
awfully boring in the town; there is not a living soul worth talking to.
How hot it is, by Jove!" he went on, taking off his tunic and standing
in his silk shirt. "My dear fellow, let us have a talk."

I was feeling bored and longing for other society than that of the
decorators. I was really glad to see him.

"To begin with," he said, sitting on my bed, "I sympathise with you
heartily, and I have a profound respect for your present way of living.
In the town you are misunderstood and there is nobody to understand you,
because, as you know, it is full of Gogolian pig-faces. But I guessed
what you were at the picnic. You are a noble soul, an honest,
high-minded man! I respect you and think it an honour to shake hands
with you. To change your life so abruptly and suddenly as you did, you
must have passed through a most trying spiritual process, and to go on
with it now, to live scrupulously by your convictions, you must have to
toil incessantly both in mind and in heart. Now, please tell me, don't
you think that if you spent all this force of will, intensity, and power
on something else, like trying to be a great scholar or an artist, that
your life would be both wider and deeper, and altogether more
productive?"

We talked and when we came to speak of physical labour, I expressed this
idea: that it was necessary that the strong should not enslave the weak,
and that the minority should not be a parasite on the majority, always
sucking up the finest sap, _i. e._, it was necessary that all without
exception--the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor--should share
equally in the struggle for existence, every man for himself, and in
that respect there was no better means of levelling than physical labour
and compulsory service for all.

"You think, then," said the doctor, "that all, without, exception,
should be employed in physical labour?"

"Yes."

"But don't you think that if everybody, including the best people,
thinkers and men of science, were to take part in the struggle for
existence, each man for himself, and took to breaking stones and
painting roofs, it would be a serious menace to progress?"

"Where is the danger?" I asked. "Progress consists in deeds of love, in
the fulfilment of the moral law. If you enslave no one, and are a burden
upon no one, what further progress do you want?"

"But look here!" said Blagovo, suddenly losing his temper and getting
up. "I say! If a snail in its shell is engaged in self-perfection in
obedience to the moral law--would you call that progress?"

"But why?" I was nettled. "If you make your neighbours feed you, clothe
you, carry you, defend you from your enemies, their life is built up on
slavery, and that is not progress. My view is that that is the most real
and, perhaps, the only possible, the only progress necessary."

"The limits of universal progress, which is common to all men, are in
infinity, and it seems to me strange to talk of a 'possible' progress
limited by our needs and temporal conceptions."

"If the limits of peoples are in infinity, as you say, then it means
that its goal is indefinite," I said. "Think of living without knowing
definitely what for!"

"Why not? Your 'not knowing' is not so boring as your 'knowing.' I am
walking up a ladder which is called progress, civilisation, culture. I
go on and on, not knowing definitely where I am going to, but surely it
is worth while living for the sake of the wonderful ladder alone. And
you know exactly what you are living for--that some should not enslave
others, that the artist and the man who mixes his colours for him should
dine together. But that is the bourgeois, kitchen side of life, and
isn't it disgusting only to live for that? If some insects devour
others, devil take them, let them! We need not think of them, they will
perish and rot, however you save them from slavery--we must think of
that great Cross which awaits all mankind in the distant future."

Blagovo argued hotly with me, but it was noticeable that he was
disturbed by some outside thought.

"Your sister is not coming," he said, consulting his watch. "Yesterday
she was at our house and said she was going to see you. You go on
talking about slavery, slavery," he went on, "but it is a special
question, and all these questions are solved by mankind gradually."

We began to talk of evolution. I said that every man decides the
question of good and evil for himself, and does not wait for mankind to
solve the question by virtue of gradual development. Besides, evolution
is a stick with two ends. Side by side with the gradual development of
humanitarian ideas, there is the gradual growth of ideas of a different
kind. Serfdom is past, and capitalism is growing. And with ideas of
liberation at their height the majority, just as in the days of Baty,
feeds, clothes, and defends the minority; and is left hungry, naked, and
defenceless. The state of things harmonises beautifully with all your
tendencies and movements, because the art of enslaving is also being
gradually developed. We no longer flog our servants in the stables, but
we give slavery more refined forms; at any rate, we are able to justify
it in each separate case. Ideas remain ideas with us, but if we could,
now, at the end of the nineteenth century, throw upon the working
classes all our most unpleasant physiological functions, we should do
so, and, of course, we should justify ourselves by saying that if the
best people, thinkers and great scholars, had to waste their time on
such functions, progress would be in serious jeopardy.

Just then my sister entered. When she saw the doctor, she was flurried
and excited, and at once began to say that it was time for her to go
home to her father.

"Cleopatra Alexeyevna," said Blagovo earnestly, laying his hands on his
heart, "what will happen to your father if you spend half an hour with
your brother and me?"

He was a simple kind of man and could communicate his cheerfulness to
others. My sister thought for a minute and began to laugh, and suddenly
got very happy, suddenly, unexpectedly, just as she did at the picnic.
We went out into the fields and lay on the grass, and went on with our
conversation and looked at the town, where all the windows facing the
west looked golden in the setting sun.

After that Blagovo appeared every time my sister came to see me, and
they always greeted each other as though their meeting was unexpected.
My sister used to listen while the doctor and I argued, and her face was
always joyful and rapturous, admiring and curious, and it seemed to me
that a new world was slowly being discovered before her eyes, a world
which she had not seen before even in her dreams, which now she was
trying to divine; when the doctor was not there she was quiet and sad,
and if, as she sat on my bed, she sometimes wept, it was for reasons of
which she did not speak.

In August Radish gave us orders to go to the railway. A couple of days
before we were "driven" out of town, my father came to see me. He sat
down and, without looking at me, slowly wiped his red face, then took
out of his pocket our local paper and read out with deliberate emphasis
on each word that a schoolfellow of my own age, the son of the director
of the State Bank, had been appointed chief clerk of the Court of the
Exchequer.

"And now, look at yourself," he said, folding up the newspaper. "You are
a beggar, a vagabond, a scoundrel! Even the bourgeoisie and other
peasants get education to make themselves decent people, while you, a
Pologniev, with famous, noble ancestors, go wallowing in the mire! But I
did not come here to talk to you. I have given you up already." He went
on in a choking voice, as he stood up: "I came here to find out where
your sister is, you scoundrel! She left me after dinner. It is now past
seven o'clock and she is not in. She has been going out lately without
telling me, and she has been disrespectful--and I see your filthy,
abominable influence at work. Where is she?"

He had in his hands the familiar umbrella, and I was already taken
aback, and I stood stiff and erect, like a schoolboy, waiting for my
father to thrash me, but he saw the glance I cast at the umbrella and
this probably checked him.

"Live as you like!" he said. "My blessing is gone from you."

"Good God!" muttered my old nurse behind the door. "You are lost. Oh! my
heart feels some misfortune coming. I can feel it."

I went to work on the railway. During the whole of August there was wind
and rain. It was damp and cold; the corn had now been gathered in the
fields, and on the big farms where the reaping was done with machines,
the wheat lay not in stacks, but in heaps; and I remember how those
melancholy heaps grew darker and darker every day, and the grain
sprouted. It was hard work; the pouring rain spoiled everything that we
succeeded in finishing. We were not allowed either to live or to sleep
in the station buildings and had to take shelter in dirty, damp, mud
huts where the "railies" had lived during the summer, and at night I
could not sleep from the cold and the bugs crawling over my face and
hands. And when we were working near the bridges, then the "railies"
used to come out in a crowd to fight the painters--which they regarded
as sport. They used to thrash us, steal our trousers, and to infuriate
us and provoke us to a fight; they used to spoil our work, as when they
smeared the signal-boxes with green paint. To add to all our miseries
Radish began to pay us very irregularly. All the painting on the line
was given to one contractor, who subcontracted with another, and he
again with Radish, stipulating for twenty per cent commission. The job
itself was unprofitable; then came the rains; time was wasted; we did no
work and Radish had to pay his men every day. The starving painters
nearly came to blows with him, called him a swindler, a bloodsucker, a
Judas, and he, poor man, sighed and in despair raised his hands to the
heavens and was continually going to Mrs. Cheprakov to borrow money.


VII

Came the rainy, muddy, dark autumn, bringing a slack time, and I used to
sit at home three days in the week without work, or did various jobs
outside painting; such as digging earth for ballast for twenty copecks
a day. Doctor Blagovo had gone to Petersburg. My sister did not come to
see me. Radish lay at home ill, expecting to die every day.

And my mood was also autumnal; perhaps because when I became a working
man I saw only the seamy side of the life of our town, and every day
made fresh discoveries which brought me to despair. My fellow townsmen,
both those of whom I had had a low opinion before, and those whom I had
thought fairly decent, now seemed to me base, cruel, and up to any dirty
trick. We poor people were tricked and cheated in the accounts, kept
waiting for hours in cold passages or in the kitchen, and we were
insulted and uncivilly treated. In the autumn I had to paper the library
and two rooms at the club. I was paid seven copecks a piece, but was
told to give a receipt for twelve copecks, and when I refused to do it,
a respectable gentleman in gold spectacles, one of the stewards of the
club, said to me:

"If you say another word, you scoundrel, I'll knock you down."

And when a servant whispered to him that I was the son of Pologniev, the
architect, then I got flustered and blushed, but he recovered himself at
once and said:

"Damn him."

In the shops we working men were sold bad meat, musty flour, and coarse
tea. In church we were jostled by the police, and in the hospitals we
were mulcted by the assistants and nurses, and if we could not give them
bribes through poverty, we were given food in dirty dishes. In the
post-office the lowest official considered it his duty to treat us as
animals and to shout rudely and insolently: "Wait! Don't you come
pushing your way in here!" Even the dogs, even they were hostile to us
and hurled themselves at us with a peculiar malignancy. But what struck
me most of all in my new position was the entire lack of justice, what
the people call "forgetting God." Rarely a day went by without some
swindle. The shopkeeper, who sold us oil, the contractor, the workmen,
the customers themselves, all cheated. It was an understood thing that
our rights were never considered, and we always had to pay for the money
we had earned, going with our hats off to the back door.

I was paper-hanging in one of the club-rooms, next the library, when,
one evening as I was on the point of leaving, Dolyhikov's daughter came
into the room carrying a bundle of books.

I bowed to her.

"Ah! How are you?" she said, recognising me at once and holding out her
hand. "I am very glad to see you."

She smiled and looked with a curious puzzled expression at my blouse and
the pail of paste and the papers lying on the floor; I was embarrassed
and she also felt awkward.

"Excuse my staring at you," she said. "I have heard so much about you.
Especially from Doctor Blagovo. He is enthusiastic about you. I have met
your sister; she is a dear, sympathetic girl, but I could not make her
see that there is nothing awful in your simple life. On the contrary,
you are the most interesting man in the town."

Once more she glanced at the pail of paste and the paper and said:

"I asked Doctor Blagovo to bring us together, but he either forgot or
had no time. However, we have met now. I should be very pleased if you
would call on me. I do so want to have a talk. I am a simple person,"
she said, holding out her hand, "and I hope you will come and see me
without ceremony. My father is away, in Petersburg."

She went into the reading-room, with her dress rustling, and for a long
time after I got home I could not sleep.

During that autumn some kind soul, wishing to relieve my existence, sent
me from time to time presents of tea and lemons, or biscuits, or roast
pigeons. Karpovna said the presents were brought by a soldier, though
from whom she did not know; and the soldier used to ask if I was well,
if I had dinner every day, and if I had warm clothes. When the frost
began the soldier came while I was out and brought a soft knitted scarf,
which gave out a soft, hardly perceptible scent, and I guessed who my
good fairy had been. For the scarf smelled of lily-of-the-valley, Aniuta
Blagovo's favourite scent.

Toward winter there was more work and things became more cheerful.
Radish came to life again and we worked together in the cemetery church,
where we scraped the holy shrine for gilding. It was a clean, quiet,
and, as our mates said, a specially good job. We could do a great deal
in one day, and so time passed quickly, imperceptibly. There was no
swearing, nor laughing, nor loud altercations. The place compelled quiet
and decency, and disposed one for tranquil, serious thoughts. Absorbed
in our work, we stood or sat immovably, like statues; there was a dead
silence, very proper to a cemetery, so that if a tool fell down, or the
oil in the lamp spluttered, the sound would be loud and startling, and
we would turn to see what it was. After a long silence one could hear a
humming like that of a swarm of bees; in the porch, in an undertone, the
funeral service was being read over a dead baby; or a painter painting a
moon surrounded with stars on the cupola would begin to whistle quietly,
and remembering suddenly that he was in a church, would stop; or Radish
would sigh at his own thoughts: "Anything may happen! Anything may
happen!" or above our heads there would be the slow, mournful tolling of
a bell, and the painters would say it must be a rich man being brought
to the church....

The days I spent in the peace of the little church, and during the
evenings I played billiards, or went to the gallery of the theatre in
the new serge suit I had bought with my own hard-earned money. They were
already beginning plays and concerts at the Azhoguins', and Radish did
the scenery by himself. He told me about the plays and tableaux vivants
at the Azhoguins', and I listened to him enviously. I had a great
longing to take part in the rehearsals, but I dared not go to the
Azhoguins'.

A week before Christmas Doctor Blagovo arrived, and we resumed our
arguments and played billiards in the evenings. When he played billiards
he used to take off his coat, and unfasten his shirt at the neck, and
generally try to look like a debauchee. He drank a little, but rowdily,
and managed to spend in a cheap tavern like the Volga as much as twenty
roubles in an evening.

Once more my sister came to see me, and when they met they expressed
surprise, but I could see by her happy, guilty face that these meetings
were not accidental. One evening when we were playing billiards the
doctor said to me:

"I say, why don't you call on Miss Dolyhikov? You don't know Maria
Victorovna. She is a clever, charming, simple creature."

I told him how the engineer had received me in the spring.

"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor. "The engineer is one thing and she is
another. Really, my good fellow, you mustn't offend her. Go and see her
some time. Let us go to-morrow evening. Will you?"

He persuaded me. Next evening I donned my serge suit and with some
perturbation set out to call on Miss Dolyhikov. The footman did not seem
to me so haughty and formidable, or the furniture so oppressive, as on
the morning when I had come to ask for work. Maria Victorovna was
expecting me and greeted me as an old friend and gave my hand a warm,
friendly grip. She was wearing a grey dress with wide sleeves, and had
her hair done in the style which when it became the fashion a year later
in our town, was called "dog's ears." The hair was combed back over the
ears, and it made Maria Victorovna's face look broader, and she looked
very like her father, whose face was broad and red and rather like a
coachman's. She was handsome and elegant, but not young; about thirty to
judge by her appearance, though she was not more than twenty-five.

"Dear doctor!" she said, making me sit down. "How grateful I am to him.
But for him, you would not have come. I am bored to death! My father has
gone and left me alone, and I do not know what to do with myself."

Then she began to ask where I was working, how much I got, and where I
lived.

"Do you only spend what you earn on yourself?" she asked.

"Yes."

"You are a happy man," she replied. "All the evil in life, it seems to
me, comes from boredom and idleness, and spiritual emptiness, which are
inevitable when one lives at other people's expense. Don't think I'm
showing off. I mean it sincerely. It is dull and unpleasant to be rich.
Win friends by just riches, they say, because as a rule there is and can
be no such thing as just riches."

She looked at the furniture with a serious, cold expression, as though
she was making an inventory of it, and went on:

"Ease and comfort possess a magic power. Little by little they seduce
even strong-willed people. Father and I used to live poorly and simply,
and now you see how we live. Isn't it strange?" she said with a shrug.
"We spend twenty thousand roubles a year! In the provinces!"

"Ease and comfort must not be regarded as the inevitable privilege of
capital and education," I said. "It seems to me possible to unite the
comforts of life with work, however hard and dirty it may be. Your
father is rich, but, as he says, he used to be a mechanic, and just a
lubricator."

She smiled and shook her head thoughtfully.

"Papa sometimes eats _tiurya_," she said, "but only out of caprice."

A bell rang and she got up.

"The rich and the educated ought to work like the rest," she went on,
"and if there is to be any comfort, it should be accessible to all.
There should be no privileges. However, that's enough philosophy. Tell
me something cheerful. Tell me about the painters. What are they like?
Funny?"

The doctor came. I began to talk about the painters, but, being unused
to it, I felt awkward and talked solemnly and ponderously like an
ethnographist. The doctor also told a few stories about working people.
He rocked to and fro and cried, and fell on his knees, and when he was
depicting a drunkard, lay flat on the floor. It was as good as a play,
and Maria Victorovna laughed until she cried. Then he played the piano
and sang in his high-pitched tenor, and Maria Victorovna stood by him
and told him what to sing and corrected him when he made a mistake.

"I hear you sing, too," said I.

"Too?" cried the doctor. "She is a wonderful singer, an artist, and you
say--too! Careful, careful!"

"I used to study seriously," she replied, "but I have given it up now."

She sat on a low stool and told us about her life in Petersburg, and
imitated famous singers, mimicking their voices and mannerisms; then she
sketched the doctor and myself in her album, not very well, but both
were good likenesses. She laughed and made jokes and funny faces, and
this suited her better than talking about unjust riches, and it seemed
to me that what she had said about "riches and comfort" came not from
herself, but was just mimicry. She was an admirable comedian. I compared
her mentally with the girls of our town, and not even the beautiful,
serious Aniuta Blagovo could stand up against her; the difference was as
vast as that between a wild and a garden rose.

We stayed to supper. The doctor and Maria Victorovna drank red wine,
champagne, and coffee with cognac; they touched glasses and drank to
friendship, to wit, to progress, to freedom, and never got drunk, but
went rather red and laughed for no reason until they cried. To avoid
being out of it I, too, drank red wine.

"People with talent and with gifted natures," said Miss Dolyhikov, "know
how to live and go their own way; but ordinary people like myself know
nothing and can do nothing by themselves; there is nothing for them but
to find some deep social current and let themselves be borne along by
it."

"Is it possible to find that which does not exist?" asked the doctor.

"It doesn't exist because we don't see it."

"Is that so? Social currents are the invention of modern literature.
They don't exist here."

A discussion began.

"We have no profound social movements; nor have we had them," said the
doctor. "Modern literature has invented a lot of things, and modern
literature invented intellectual working men in village life, but go
through all our villages and you will only find Mr. Cheeky Snout in a
jacket or black frock coat, who will make four mistakes in the word
'one.' Civilised life has not begun with us yet. We have the same
savagery, the same slavery, the same nullity as we had five hundred
years ago. Movements, currents--all that is so wretched and puerile
mixed up with such vulgar, catch-penny interests--and one cannot take it
seriously. You may think you have discovered a large social movement,
and you may follow it and devote your life in the modern fashion to such
problems as the liberation of vermin from slavery, or the abolition of
meat cutlets--and I congratulate you, madam. But we have to learn,
learn, learn, and there will be plenty of time for social movements; we
are not up to them yet, and upon my soul, we don't understand anything
at all about them."

"You don't understand, but I do," said Maria Victorovna. "Good Heavens!
What a bore you are to-night."

"It is our business to learn and learn, to try and accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, because serious social movements come where there
is knowledge, and the future happiness of mankind lies in science.
Here's to science!"

"One thing is certain. Life must somehow be arranged differently," said
Maria Victorovna, after some silence and deep thought, "and life as it
has been up to now is worthless. Don't let us talk about it."

When we left her the Cathedral clock struck two.

"Did you like her?" asked the doctor. "Isn't she a dear girl?"

We had dinner at Maria Victorovna's on Christmas Day, and then we went
to see her every day during the holidays. There was nobody besides
ourselves, and she was right when she said she had no friends in the
town but the doctor and me. We spent most of the time talking, and
sometimes the doctor would bring a book or a magazine and read aloud.
After all, he was the first cultivated man I had met. I could not tell
if he knew much, but he was always generous with his knowledge because
he wished others to know too. When he talked about medicine, he was not
like any of our local doctors, but he made a new and singular
impression, and it seemed to me that if he had wished he could have
become a genuine scientist. And perhaps he was the only person at that
time who had any real influence over me. Meeting him and reading the
books he gave me, I began gradually to feel a need for knowledge to
inspire the tedium of my work. It seemed strange to me that I had not
known before such things as that the whole world consisted of sixty
elements. I did not know what oil or paint was, and I could do without
knowing. My acquaintance with the doctor raised me morally too. I used
to argue with him, and though I usually stuck to my opinion, yet,
through him, I came gradually to perceive that everything was not clear
to me, and I tried to cultivate convictions as definite as possible so
that the promptings of my conscience should be precise and have nothing
vague about them. Nevertheless, educated and fine as he was, far and
away the best man in the town, he was by no means perfect. There was
something rather rude and priggish in his ways and in his trick of
dragging talk down to discussion, and when he took off his coat and sat
in his shirt and gave the footman a tip, it always seemed to me that
culture was just a part of him, with the rest untamed Tartar.

After the holidays he left once more for Petersburg. He went in the
morning and after dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off
her furs, she sat silent, very pale, staring in front of her. She began
to shiver and seemed to be fighting against some illness.

"You must have caught a cold," I said.

Her eyes filled with tears. She rose and went to Karpovna without a
word to me, as though I had offended her. And a little later I heard her
speaking in a tone of bitter reproach.

"Nurse, what have I been living for, up to now? What for? Tell me;
haven't I wasted my youth? During the last years I have had nothing but
making up accounts, pouring out tea, counting the copecks, entertaining
guests, without a thought that there was anything better in the world!
Nurse, try to understand me, I too have human desires and I want to live
and they have made a housekeeper of me. It is awful, awful!"

She flung her keys against the door and they fell with a clatter in my
room. They were the keys of the side-board, the larder, the cellar, and
the tea-chest--the keys my mother used to carry.

"Oh! Oh! Saints above!" cried my old nurse in terror. "The blessed
saints!"

When she left, my sister came into my room for her keys and said:

"Forgive me. Something strange has been going on in me lately."


VIII

One evening when I came home late from Maria Victorovna's I found a
young policeman in a new uniform in my room; he was sitting by the table
reading.

"At last!" he said getting up and stretching himself. "This is the third
time I have been to see you. The governor has ordered you to go and see
him to-morrow at nine o'clock sharp. Don't be late."

He made me give him a written promise to comply with his Excellency's
orders and went away. This policeman's visit and the unexpected
invitation to see the governor had a most depressing effect on me. From
my early childhood I have had a dread of gendarmes, police, legal
officials, and I was tormented with anxiety as though I had really
committed a crime and I could not sleep. Nurse and Prokofyi were also
upset and could not sleep. And, to make things worse, nurse had an
earache, and moaned and more than once screamed out. Hearing that I
could not sleep Prokofyi came quietly into my room with a little lamp
and sat by the table.

"You should have a drop of pepper-brandy...." he said after some
thought. "In this vale of tears things go on all right when you take a
drop. And if mother had some pepper-brandy poured into her ear she
would be much better."

About three he got ready to go to the slaughter-house to fetch some
meat. I knew I should not sleep until morning, and to use up the time
until nine, I went with him. We walked with a lantern, and his boy,
Nicolka, who was about thirteen, and had blue spots on his face and an
expression like a murderer's, drove behind us in a sledge, urging the
horse on with hoarse cries.

"You will probably be punished at the governor's," said Prokofyi as we
walked. "There is a governor's rank, and an archimandrite's rank, and an
officer's rank, and a doctor's rank, and every profession has its own
rank. You don't keep to yours and they won't allow it."

The slaughter-house stood behind the cemetery, and till then I had only
seen it at a distance. It consisted of three dark sheds surrounded by a
grey fence, from which, when the wind was in that direction in summer,
there came an overpowering stench. Now, as I entered the yard, I could
not see the sheds in the darkness; I groped through horses and sledges,
both empty and laden with meat; and there were men walking about with
lanterns and swearing disgustingly. Prokofyi and Nicolka swore as
filthily and there was a continuous hum from the swearing and coughing
and the neighing of the horses.

The place smelled of corpses and offal, the snow was thawing and already
mixed with mud, and in the darkness it seemed to me that I was walking
through a pool of blood.

When we had filled the sledge with meat, we went to the butcher's shop
in the market-place. Day was beginning to dawn. One after another the
cooks came with baskets and old women in mantles. With an axe in his
hand, wearing a white, blood-stained apron, Prokofyi swore terrifically
and crossed himself, turning toward the church, and shouted so loud that
he could be heard all over the market, avowing that he sold his meat at
cost price and even at a loss. He cheated in weighing and reckoning, the
cooks saw it, but, dazed by his shouting, they did not protest, but only
called him a gallows-bird.

Raising and dropping his formidable axe, he assumed picturesque
attitudes and constantly uttered the sound "Hak!" with a furious
expression, and I was really afraid of his cutting off some one's head
or hand.

I stayed in the butcher's shop the whole morning, and when at last I
went to the governor's my fur coat smelled of meat and blood. My state
of mind would have been appropriate for an encounter with a bear armed
with no more than a staff. I remember a long staircase with a striped
carpet, and a young official in a frock coat with shining buttons, who
silently indicated the door with both hands and went in to announce me.
I entered the hall, where the furniture was most luxurious, but cold and
tasteless, forming a most unpleasant impression--the tall, narrow
pier-glasses, and the bright, yellow hangings over the windows; one
could see that, though governors changed, the furniture remained the
same. The young official again pointed with both hands to the door and
went toward a large, green table, by which stood a general with the
Order of Vladimir at his neck.

"Mr. Pologniev," he began, holding a letter in his hand and opening his
mouth wide so that it made a round O. "I asked you to come to say this
to you: 'Your esteemed father has applied verbally and in writing to the
provincial marshal of nobility, to have you summoned and made to see the
incongruity of your conduct with the title of nobleman which you have
the honour to bear. His Excellency Alexander Pavlovich, justly thinking
that your conduct may be subversive, and finding that persuasion may not
be sufficient, without serious intervention on the part of the
authorities, has given me his decision as to your case, and I agree with
him.'"

He said this quietly, respectfully, standing erect as if I was his
superior, and his expression was not at all severe. He had a flabby,
tired face, covered with wrinkles, with pouches under his eyes; his hair
was dyed, and it was hard to guess his age from his appearance--fifty or
sixty.

"I hope," he went on, "that you will appreciate Alexander Pavlovich's
delicacy in applying to me, not officially, but privately. I have
invited you unofficially not as a governor, but as a sincere admirer of
your father's. And I ask you to change your conduct and to return to the
duties proper to your rank, or, to avoid the evil effects of your
example, to go to some other place where you are not known and where you
may do what you like. Otherwise I shall have to resort to extreme
measures."

For half a minute he stood in silence staring at me open-mouthed.

"Are you a vegetarian?" he asked.

"No, your Excellency, I eat meat."

He sat down and took up a document, and I bowed and left.

It was not worth while going to work before dinner. I went home and
tried to sleep, but could not because of the unpleasant, sickly feeling
from the slaughter-house and my conversation with the governor. And so I
dragged through till the evening and then, feeling gloomy and out of
sorts, I went to see Maria Victorovna. I told her about my visit to the
governor and she looked at me in bewilderment, as if she did not believe
me, and suddenly she began to laugh merrily, heartily, stridently, as
only good-natured, light-hearted people can.

"If I were to tell this in Petersburg!" she cried, nearly dropping with
laughter, bending over the table. "If I could tell them in Petersburg!"


IX

Now we saw each other often, sometimes twice a day. Almost every day,
after dinner, she drove up to the cemetery and, as she waited for me,
read the inscriptions on the crosses and monuments. Sometimes she came
into the church and stood by my side and watched me working. The
silence, the simple industry of the painters and gilders, Radish's good
sense, and the fact that outwardly I was no different from the other
artisans and worked as they did, in a waistcoat and old shoes, and that
they addressed me familiarly--were new to her, and she was moved by it
all. Once in her presence a painter who was working, at a door on the
roof, called down to me:

"Misail, fetch me the white lead."

I fetched him the white lead and as I came down the scaffolding she was
moved to tears and looked at me and smiled:

"What a dear you are!" she said.

I have always remembered how when I was a child a green parrot got out
of its cage in one of the rich people's houses and wandered about the
town for a whole month, flying from one garden to another, homeless and
lonely. And Maria Victorovna reminded me of the bird.

"Except to the cemetery," she said with a laugh, "I have absolutely
nowhere to go. The town bores me to tears. People read, sing, and
twitter at the Azhoguins', but I cannot bear them lately. Your sister is
shy, Miss Blagovo for some reason hates me. I don't like the theatre.
What can I do with myself?"

When I was at her house I smelled of paint and turpentine, and my hands
were stained. She liked that. She wanted me to come to her in my
ordinary working-clothes; but I felt awkward in them in her
drawing-room, and as if I were in uniform, and so I always wore my new
serge suit. She did not like that.

"You must confess," she said once, "that you have not got used to your
new role. A working-man's suit makes you feel awkward and embarrassed.
Tell me, isn't it because you are not sure of yourself and are
unsatisfied? Does this work you have chosen, this painting of yours,
really satisfy you?" she asked merrily. "I know paint makes things look
nicer and wear better, but the things themselves belong to the rich and
after all they are a luxury. Besides you have said more than once that
everybody should earn his living with his own hands and you earn money,
not bread. Why don't you keep to the exact meaning of what you say? You
must earn bread, real bread, you must plough, sow, reap, thrash, or do
something which has to do directly with agriculture, such as keeping
cows, digging, or building houses...."

She opened a handsome bookcase which stood by the writing-table and
said:

"I'm telling you all this because I'm going to let you into my secret.
Voila. This is my agricultural library. Here are books on arable land,
vegetable-gardens, orchard-keeping, cattle-keeping, bee-keeping: I read
them eagerly and have studied the theory of everything thoroughly. It is
my dream to go to Dubechnia as soon as March begins. It is wonderful
there, amazing; isn't it? The first year I shall only be learning the
work and getting used to it, and in the second year I shall begin to
work thoroughly, without sparing myself. My father promised to give me
Dubechnia as a present, and I am to do anything I like with it."

She blushed and with mingled laughter and tears she dreamed aloud of her
life at Dubechnia and how absorbing it would be. And I envied her. March
would soon be here. The days were drawing out, and in the bright sunny
afternoons the snow dripped from the roofs, and the smell of spring was
in the air. I too longed for the country.

And when she said she was going to live at Dubechnia, I saw at once that
I should be left alone in the town, and I felt jealous of the bookcase
with her books about farming. I knew and cared nothing about farming and
I was on the point of telling her that agriculture was work for slaves,
but I recollected that my father had once said something of the sort
and I held my peace.

Lent began. The engineer, Victor Ivanich, came home from Petersburg. I
had begun to forget his existence. He came unexpectedly, not even
sending a telegram. When I went there as usual in the evening, he was
walking up and down the drawing-room, after a bath, with his hair cut,
looking ten years younger, and talking. His daughter was kneeling by his
trunks and taking out boxes, bottles, books, and handing them to Pavel
the footman. When I saw the engineer, I involuntarily stepped back and
he held out both his hands and smiled and showed his strong, white,
cab-driver's teeth.

"Here he is! Here he is! I'm very pleased to see you, Mr. House-painter!
Maria told me all about you and sang your praises. I quite understand
you and heartily approve." He took me by the arm and went on: "It is
much cleverer and more honest to be a decent workman than to spoil State
paper and to wear a cockade. I myself worked with my hands in Belgium. I
was an engine-driver for five years...."

He was wearing a short jacket and comfortable slippers, and he shuffled
along like a gouty man waving and rubbing his hands; humming and buzzing
and shrugging with pleasure at being at home again with his favourite
shower-bath.

"There's no denying," he said at supper, "there's no denying that you
are kind, sympathetic people, but somehow as soon as you gentlefolk take
on manual labour or try to spare the peasants, you reduce it all to
sectarianism. You are a sectarian. You don't drink vodka. What is that
but sectarianism?"

To please him I drank vodka. I drank wine, too. We ate cheese, sausages,
pastries, pickles, and all kinds of dainties that the engineer had
brought with him, and we sampled wines sent from abroad during his
absence. They were excellent. For some reason the engineer had wines and
cigars sent from abroad--duty free; somebody sent him caviare and
_baliki_ gratis; he did not pay rent for his house because his landlord
supplied the railway with kerosene, and generally he and his daughter
gave me the impression of having all the best things in the world at
their service free of charge.

I went on visiting them, but with less pleasure than before. The
engineer oppressed me and I felt cramped in his presence. I could not
endure his clear, innocent eyes; his opinions bored me and were
offensive to me, and I was distressed by the recollection that I had so
recently been subordinate to this ruddy, well-fed man, and that he had
been mercilessly rude to me. True he would put his arm round my waist
and clap me kindly on the shoulder and approve of my way of living, but
I felt that he despised my nullity just as much as before and only
suffered me to please his daughter, but I could no longer laugh and talk
easily, and I thought myself ill-mannered, and all the time was
expecting him to call me Panteley as he did his footman Pavel. How my
provincial, bourgeois pride rode up against him! I, a working man, a
painter, going every day to the house of rich strangers, whom the whole
town regarded as foreigners, and drinking their expensive wines and
outlandish dishes! I could not reconcile this with my conscience. When I
went to see them I sternly avoided those whom I met on the way, and
looked askance at them like a real sectarian, and when I left the
engineer's house I was ashamed of feeling so well-fed.

But chiefly I was afraid of falling in love. Whether walking in the
street, or working, or talking to my mates, I thought all the time of
going to Maria Victorovna's in the evening, and always had her voice,
her laughter, her movements with me. And always as I got ready to go to
her, I would stand for a long time in front of the cracked mirror tying
my necktie; my serge suit seemed horrible to me, and I suffered, but at
the same time, despised myself for feeling so small. When she called to
me from another room to say that she was not dressed yet and to ask me
to wait a bit, and I could hear her dressing, I was agitated and felt as
though the floor was sinking under me. And when I saw a woman in the
street, even at a distance, I fell to comparing her figure with hers,
and it seemed to me that all our women and girls were vulgar, absurdly
dressed, and without manners; and such comparisons roused in me a
feeling of pride; Maria Victorovna was better than all of them. And at
night I dreamed of her and myself.

Once at supper the engineer and I ate a whole lobster. When I reached
home I remember that the engineer had twice called me "my dear fellow,"
and I thought that they treated me as they might have done a big,
unhappy dog, separated from his master, and that they were amusing
themselves with me, and that they would order me away like a dog when
they were bored with me. I began to feel ashamed and hurt; went to the
point of tears, as though I had been insulted, and, raising my eyes to
the heavens, I vowed to put an end to it all.

Next day I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. Late at night, when it was
quite dark and pouring with rain, I walked up and down Great Gentry
Street, looking at the windows. At the Azhoguins' everybody was asleep
and the only light was in one of the top windows; old Mrs. Azhoguin was
sitting in her room embroidering by candle-light and imagining herself
to be fighting against prejudice. It was dark in our house and opposite,
at the Dolyhikovs' the windows were lit up, but it was impossible to see
anything through the flowers and curtains. I kept on walking up and down
the street; I was soaked through with the cold March rain. I heard my
father come home from the club; he knocked at the door; in a minute a
light appeared at a window and I saw my sister walking quickly with her
lamp and hurriedly arranging her thick hair. Then my father paced up and
down the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, and my sister sat
still in a corner, lost in thought, not listening to him....

But soon they left the room and the light was put out.... I looked at
the engineer's house and that too was now dark. In the darkness and the
rain I felt desperately lonely. Cast out at the mercy of Fate, and I
felt how, compared with my loneliness, and my suffering, actual and to
come, all my work and all my desires and all that I had hitherto thought
and read, were vain and futile. Alas! The activities and thoughts of
human beings are not nearly so important as their sorrows! And not
knowing exactly what I was doing I pulled with all my might at the bell
at the Dolyhikovs' gate, broke it, and ran away down the street like a
little boy, full of fear, thinking they would rush out at once and
recognise me. When I stopped to take breath at the end of the street, I
could hear nothing but the falling rain and far away a night-watchman
knocking on a sheet of iron.

For a whole week I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. I sold my serge suit.
I had no work and I was once more half-starved, earning ten or twenty
copecks a day, when possible, by disagreeable work. Floundering
knee-deep in the mire, putting out all my strength, I tried to drown my
memories and to punish myself for all the cheeses and pickles to which I
had been treated at the engineer's. Still, no sooner did I go to bed,
wet and hungry, than my untamed imagination set to work to evolve
wonderful, alluring pictures, and to my amazement I confessed that I was
in love, passionately in love, and I fell sound asleep feeling that the
hard life had only made my body stronger and younger.

One evening it began, most unseasonably, to snow, and the wind blew from
the north, exactly as if winter had begun again. When I got home from
work I found Maria Victorovna in my room. She was in her furs with her
hands in her muff.

"Why don't you come to see me?" she asked, looking at me with her bright
sagacious eyes, and I was overcome with joy and stood stiffly in front
of her, just as I had done with my father when he was going to thrash
me; she looked straight into my face and I could see by her eyes that
she understood why I was overcome.

"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "You don't want to come? I
had to come to you."

She got up and came close to me.

"Don't leave me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
lonely, utterly lonely."

She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:

"Alone! Life is hard, very hard, and in the whole world I have no one
but you. Don't leave me!"

Looking for her handkerchief to dry her tears, she gave a smile; we were
silent for some time, then I embraced and kissed her, and the pin in her
hat scratched my face and drew blood.

And we began to talk as though we had been dear to each other for a
long, long time.


X

In a couple of days she sent me to Dubechnia and I was beyond words
delighted with it. As I walked to the station, and as I sat in the
train, I laughed for no reason and people thought me drunk. There were
snow and frost in the mornings still, but the roads were getting dark,
and there were rooks cawing above them.

At first I thought of arranging the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov's
for myself and Masha, but it appeared that doves and pigeons had taken
up their abode there and it would be impossible to cleanse it without
destroying a great number of nests. We would have to live willy-nilly in
the uncomfortable rooms with Venetian blinds in the big house. The
peasants called it a palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it,
and the only furniture was a piano and a child's chair, lying in the
attic, and even if Masha brought all her furniture from town we should
not succeed in removing the impression of frigid emptiness and coldness.
I chose three small rooms with windows looking on to the garden, and
from early morning till late at night I was at work in them, glazing the
windows, hanging paper, blocking up the chinks and holes in the floor.
It was an easy, pleasant job. Every now and then I would run to the
river to see if the ice was breaking and all the while I dreamed of the
starlings returning. And at night when I thought of Masha I would be
filled with an inexpressibly sweet feeling of an all-embracing joy to
listen to the rats and the wind rattling and knocking above the ceiling;
it was like an old hobgoblin coughing in the attic.

The snow was deep; there was a heavy fall at the end of March, but it
thawed rapidly, as if by magic, and the spring floods rushed down so
that by the beginning of April the starlings were already chattering and
yellow butterflies fluttered in the garden. The weather was wonderful.
Every day toward evening I walked toward the town to meet Masha, and how
delightful it was to walk along the soft, drying road with bare feet!
Half-way I would sit down and look at the town, not daring to go nearer.
The sight of it upset me, I was always wondering how my acquaintances
would behave toward me when they heard of my love. What would my father
say? I was particularly worried by the idea that my life was becoming
more complicated, and that I had entirely lost control of it, and that
she was carrying me off like a balloon, God knows whither. I had already
given up thinking how to make a living, and I thought--indeed, I cannot
remember what I thought.

Masha used to come in a carriage. I would take a seat beside her and
together, happy and free, we used to drive to Dubechnia. Or, having
waited till sunset, I would return home, weary and disconsolate,
wondering why Masha had not come, and then by the gate or in the garden
I would find my darling. She would come by the railway and walk over
from the station. What a triumph she had then! In her plain, woollen
dress, with a simple umbrella, but keeping a trim, fashionable figure
and expensive, Parisian boots--she was a gifted actress playing the
country girl. We used to go over the house, and plan out the rooms, and
the paths, and the vegetable-garden, and the beehives. We already had
chickens and ducks and geese which we loved because they were ours. We
had oats, clover, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds all ready for sowing,
and we used to examine them all and wonder what the crops would be like,
and everything Masha said to me seemed extraordinarily clever and fine.
This was the happiest time of my life.

Soon after Easter we were married in the parish church in the village of
Kurilovka three miles from Dubechnia. Masha wanted everything to be
simple; by her wish our bridesmen were peasant boys, only one deacon
sang, and we returned from the church in a little, shaky cart which she
drove herself. My sister was the only guest from the town. Masha had
sent her a note a couple of days before the wedding. My sister wore a
white dress and white gloves.... During the ceremony she cried softly
for joy and emotion, and her face had a maternal expression of infinite
goodness. She was intoxicated with our happiness and smiled as though
she were breathing a sweet perfume, and when I looked at her I
understood that there was nothing in the world higher in her eyes than
love, earthly love, and that she was always dreaming of love, secretly,
timidly, yet passionately. She embraced Masha and kissed her, and, not
knowing how to express her ecstasy, she said to her of me:

"He is a good man! A very good man."

Before she left us, she put on her ordinary clothes, and took me into
the garden to have a quiet talk.

"Father is very hurt that you have not written to him," she said. "You
should have asked for his blessing. But, at heart, he is very pleased.
He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of society, and
that under Maria Victorovna's influence you will begin to adopt a more
serious attitude toward life. In the evening now we talk about nothing
but you; and yesterday he even said, 'our Misail.' I was delighted. He
has evidently thought of a plan and I believe he wants to set you an
example of magnanimity, and that he will be the first to talk of
reconciliation. It is quite possible that one of these days he will come
and see you here."

She made the sign of the cross over me and said:

"Well, God bless you. Be happy. Aniuta Blagovo is a very clever girl.
She says of your marriage that God has sent you a new ordeal. Well?
Married life is not made up only of joy but of suffering as well. It is
impossible to avoid it."

Masha and I walked about three miles with her, and then walked home
quietly and silently, as though it were a rest for both of us. Masha had
her hand on my arm. We were at peace and there was no need to talk of
love; after the wedding we grew closer to each other and dearer, and it
seemed as though nothing could part us.

"Your sister is a dear, lovable creature," said Masha, "but looks as
though she had lived in torture. Your father must be a terrible man."

I began to tell her how my sister and I had been brought up and how
absurd and full of torture our childhood had been. When she heard that
my father had thrashed me quite recently she shuddered and clung to me:


"Don't tell me any more," she said. "It is too horrible."

And now she did not leave me. We lived in the big house, in three rooms,
and in the evenings we bolted the door that led to the empty part of the
house, as though some one lived there whom we did not know and feared. I
used to get up early, at dawn, and begin working. I repaired the carts;
made paths in the garden, dug the beds, painted the roofs. When the time
came to sow oats, I tried to plough and harrow, and sow and did it all
conscientiously, and did not leave it all to the labourer. I used to get
tired, and my face and feet used to burn with the rain and the sharp
cold wind. But work in the fields did not attract me. I knew nothing
about agriculture and did not like it; perhaps because my ancestors were
not tillers of the soil and pure town blood ran in my veins. I loved
nature dearly; I loved the fields and the meadows and the garden, but
the peasant who turns the earth with his plough, shouting at his
miserable horse, ragged and wet, with bowed shoulders, was to me an
expression of wild, rude, ugly force, and as I watched his clumsy
movements I could not help thinking of the long-passed legendary life,
when men did not yet know the use of fire. The fierce bull which led the
herd, and the horses that stampeded through the village, filled me with
terror, and all the large creatures, strong and hostile, a ram with
horns, a gander, or a watch-dog seemed to me to be symbolical of some
rough, wild force. These prejudices used to be particularly strong in me
in bad weather, when heavy clouds hung over the black plough-lands. But
worst of all was that when I was ploughing or sowing, and a few peasants
stood and watched how I did it, I no longer felt the inevitability and
necessity of the work and it seemed to me that I was trifling my time
away.

I used to go through the gardens and the meadow to the mill. It was
leased by Stiepan, a Kurilovka peasant; handsome, swarthy, with a black
beard--an athletic appearance. He did not care for mill work and thought
it tiresome and unprofitable, and he only lived at the mill to escape
from home. He was a saddler and always smelled of tan and leather. He
did not like talking, was slow and immovable, and used to hum
"U-lu-lu-lu," sitting on the bank or in the doorway of the mill.
Sometimes his wife and mother-in-law used to come from Kurilovka to see
him; they were both fair, languid, soft, and they used to bow to him
humbly and call him Stiepan Petrovich. And he would not answer their
greeting with a word or a sign, but would turn where he sat on the bank
and hum quietly: "U-lu-lu-lu." There would be a silence for an hour or
two. His mother-in-law and his wife would whisper to each other, get up
and look expectantly at him for some time, waiting for him to look at
them, and then they would bow humbly and say in sweet, soft voices:

"Good-bye, Stiepan Petrovich."

And they would go away. After that, Stiepan would put away the bundle of
cracknels or the shirt they had left for him and sigh and give a wink in
their direction and say:

"The female sex!"

The mill was worked with both wheels day and night. I used to help
Stiepan, I liked it, and when he went away I was glad to take his place.


XI

After a spell of warm bright weather we had a season of bad roads. It
rained and was cold all through May. The grinding of the millstones and
the drip of the rain induced idleness and sleep. The floor shook, the
whole place smelled of flour, and this too made one drowsy. My wife in a
short fur coat and high rubber boots used to appear twice a day and she
always said the same thing:

"Call this summer! It is worse than October!"

We used to have tea together and cook porridge, or sit together for
hours in silence thinking the rain would never stop. Once when Stiepan
went away to a fair, Masha stayed the night in the mill. When we got up
we could not tell what time it was for the sky was overcast; the sleepy
cocks at Dubechnia were crowing, and the corncrakes were trilling in the
meadow; it was very, very early.... My wife and I walked down to the
pool and drew up the bow-net that Stiepan had put out in our presence
the day before. There was one large perch in it and a crayfish angrily
stretched out his claws.

"Let them go," said Masha. "Let them be happy too."

Because we got up very early and had nothing to do, the day seemed very
long, the longest in my life. Stiepan returned before dusk and I went
back to the farmhouse.

"Your father came here to-day," said Masha.

"Where is he?"

"He has gone. I did not receive him."

Seeing my silence and feeling that I was sorry for my father, she said:

"We must be logical. I did not receive him and sent a message to ask him
not to trouble us again and not to come and see us."

In a moment I was outside the gates, striding toward the town to make it
up with my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time
since our marriage I suddenly felt sad, and through my brain, tired with
the long day, there flashed the thought that perhaps I was not living as
I ought; I got more and more tired and was gradually overcome with
weakness, inertia; I had no desire to move or to think, and after
walking for some time, I waved my hand and went home.

In the middle of the yard stood the engineer in a leather coat with a
hood. He was shouting:

"Where's the furniture? There was some good Empire furniture, pictures,
vases. There's nothing left! Damn it, I bought the place with the
furniture!"

Near him stood Moissey, Mrs. Cheprakov's bailiff, fumbling with his cap;
a lank fellow of about twenty-five, with a spotty face and little,
impudent eyes; one side of his face was larger than the other as though
he had been lain on.

"Yes, Right Honourable Sir, you bought it without the furniture," he
said sheepishly. "I remember that clearly."

"Silence!" shouted the engineer, going red in the face, and beginning to
shake, and his shout echoed through the garden.


XII

When I was busy in the garden or the yard, Moissey would stand with his
hands behind his back and stare at me impertinently with his little
eyes. And this used to irritate me to such an extent that I would put
aside my work and go away.

We learned from Stiepan that Moissey had been Mrs. Cheprakov's lover. I
noticed that when people went to her for money they used to apply to
Moissey first, and once I saw a peasant, a charcoal-burner, black all
over, grovel at his feet. Sometimes after a whispered conversation
Moissey would hand over the money himself without saying anything to his
mistress, from which I concluded that the transaction was settled on his
own account.

He used to shoot in our garden, under our very windows, steal food from
our larder, borrow our horses without leave, and we were furious,
feeling that Dubechnia was no longer ours, and Masha used to go pale and
say:

"Have we to live another year and a half with these creatures?"

Ivan Cheprakov, the son, was a guard on the railway. During the winter
he got very thin and weak, so that he got drunk on one glass of vodka,
and felt cold out of the sun. He hated wearing his guard's uniform and
was ashamed of it, but found his job profitable because he could steal
candles and sell them. My new position gave him a mixed feeling of
astonishment, envy, and vague hope that something of the sort might
happen to him. He used to follow Masha with admiring eyes, and to ask me
what I had for dinner nowadays, and his ugly, emaciated face used to
wear a sweet, sad expression, and he used to twitch his fingers as
though he could feel my happiness with them.

"I say, Little Profit," he would say excitedly, lighting and relighting
his cigarette; he always made a mess wherever he stood because he used
to waste a whole box of matches on one cigarette. "I say, my life is
about as beastly as it could be. Every little squirt of a soldier can
shout: 'Here guard! Here!' I have such a lot in the trains and you know,
mine's a rotten life! My mother has ruined me! I heard a doctor say in
the train, if the parents are loose, their children become drunkards or
criminals. That's it."

Once he came staggering into the yard. His eyes wandered aimlessly and
he breathed heavily; he laughed and cried, and said something in a kind
of frenzy, and through his thickly uttered words I could only hear: "My
mother? Where is my mother?" and he wailed like a child crying, because
it has lost its mother in a crowd. I led him away into the garden and
laid him down under a tree, and all that day and through the night Masha
and I took it in turns to stay with him. He was sick and Masha looked
with disgust at his pale, wet face and said:

"Are we to have these creatures on the place for another year and a
half? It is awful! Awful!"

And what a lot of trouble the peasants gave us! How many disappointments
we had at the outset, in the spring, when we so longed to be happy! My
wife built a school. I designed the school for sixty boys, and the
Zemstvo Council approved the design, but recommended our building the
school at Kurilovka, the big village, only three miles away; besides the
Kurilovka school, where the children of four villages, including that of
Dubechnia, were taught, was old and inadequate and the floor was so
rotten that the children were afraid to walk on it. At the end of March
Masha, by her own desire, was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school,
and at the beginning of April we called three parish meetings and
persuaded the peasants that the school was old and inadequate, and that
it was necessary to build a new one. A member of the Zemstvo Council and
the elementary school inspector came down too and addressed them. After
each meeting we were mobbed and asked for a pail of vodka; we felt
stifled in the crowd and soon got tired and returned home dissatisfied
and rather abashed. At last the peasants allotted a site for the school
and undertook to cart the materials from the town. And as soon as the
spring corn was sown, on the very first Sunday, carts set out from
Kurilovka and Dubechnia to fetch the bricks for the foundations. They
went at dawn and returned late in the evening. The peasants were drunk
and said they were tired out.

The rain and the cold continued, as though deliberately, all through
May. The roads were spoiled and deep in mud. When the carts came from
town they usually drove to our horror, into our yard! A horse would
appear in the gate, straddling its fore legs, with its big belly
heaving; before it came into the yard it would strain and heave and
after it would come a ten-yard beam in a four-wheeled wagon, wet and
slimy; alongside it, wrapped up to keep the rain out, never looking
where he was going and splashing through the puddles, a peasant would
walk with the skirt of his coat tucked up in his belt. Another cart
would appear with planks; then a third with a beam; then a fourth ...
and the yard in front of the house would gradually be blocked up with
horses, beams, planks. Peasants, men and women with their heads wrapped
up and their skirts tucked up, would stare morosely at our windows, kick
up a row and insist on the lady of the house coming out to them; and
they would curse and swear. And in a corner Moissey would stand, and it
seemed to us that he delighted in our discomfiture.

"We won't cart any more!" the peasants shouted. "We are tired to death!
Let her go and cart it herself!"

Pale and scared, thinking they would any minute break into the house,
Masha would send them money for a pail of vodka; after which the noise
would die down and the long beams would go jolting out of the yard.

When I went to look at the building my wife would get agitated and say:

"The peasants are furious. They might do something to you. No. Wait.
I'll go with you."

We used to drive over to Kurilovka together and then the carpenters
would ask for tips. The framework was ready for the foundations to be
laid, but the masons never came and when at last the masons did come it
was apparent that there was no sand; somehow it had been forgotten that
sand was wanted. Taking advantage of our helplessness, the peasants
asked thirty copecks a load, although it was less than a quarter of a
mile from the building to the river where the sand was to be fetched,
and more than five hundred loads were needed. There were endless
misunderstandings, wrangles, and continual begging. My wife was
indignant and the building contractor, Petrov, an old man of seventy,
took her by the hand and said:

"You look here! Look here! Just get me sand and I'll find ten men and
have the work done in two days. Look here!"

Sand was brought, but two, four days, a week passed and still there
yawned a ditch where the foundations were to be.

"I shall go mad," cried my wife furiously. "What wretches they are! What
wretches!"

During these disturbances Victor Ivanich used to come and see us. He
used to bring hampers of wine and dainties, and eat for a long time, and
then go to sleep on the terrace and snore so that the labourers shook
their heads and said:

"He's all right!"

Masha took no pleasure in his visits. She did not believe in him, and
yet she used to ask his advice; when, after a sound sleep after dinner,
he got up out of humour, and spoke disparagingly of our domestic
arrangements, and said he was sorry he had ever bought Dubechnia which
had cost him so much, and poor Masha looked miserably anxious and
complained to him, he would yawn and say the peasants ought to be
flogged.

He called our marriage and the life we were living a comedy, and used to
say it was a caprice, a whimsy.

"She did the same sort of thing once before," he told me. "She fancied
herself as an opera singer, and ran away from me. It took me two months
to find her, and my dear fellow, I wasted a thousand roubles on
telegrams alone."

He had dropped calling me a sectarian or the House-painter; and no
longer approved of my life as a working man, but he used to say:

"You are a queer fish! An abnormality. I don't venture to prophesy, but
you will end badly!"

Masha slept poorly at nights and would sit by the window of our bedroom
thinking. She no longer laughed and made faces at supper. I suffered,
and when it rained, every drop cut into my heart like a bullet, and I
could have gone on my knees to Masha and apologised for the weather.
When the peasants made a row in the yard, I felt that it was my fault. I
would sit for hours in one place, thinking only how splendid and how
wonderful Masha was. I loved her passionately, and I was enraptured by
everything she did and said. Her taste was for quiet indoor occupation;
she loved to read for hours and to study; she who knew about farm-work
only from books, surprised us all by her knowledge and the advice she
gave was always useful, and when applied was never in vain. And in
addition she had the fineness, the taste, and the good sense, the very
sound sense which only very well-bred people possess!

To such a woman, with her healthy, orderly mind, the chaotic environment
with its petty cares and dirty tittle-tattle, in which we lived, was
very painful. I could see that, and I, too, could not sleep at night. My
brain whirled and I could hardly choke back my tears. I tossed about,
not knowing what to do.

I used to rush to town and bring Masha books, newspapers, sweets,
flowers, and I used to go fishing with Stiepan, dragging for hours,
neck-deep in cold water, in the rain, to catch an eel by way of varying
our fare. I used humbly to ask the peasants not to shout, and I gave
them vodka, bribed them, promised them anything they asked. And what a
lot of other foolish things I did!

* * *

At last the rain stopped. The earth dried up. I used to get up in the
morning and go into the garden--dew shining on the flowers, birds and
insects shrilling, not a cloud in the sky, and the garden, the meadow,
the river were so beautiful, perfect but for the memory of the peasants
and the carts and the engineer. Masha and I used to drive out in a car
to see how the oats were coming on. She drove and I sat behind; her
shoulders were always a little hunched, and the wind would play with her
hair.

"Keep to the right!" she shouted to the passers-by.

"You are like a coachman!" I once said to her.

"Perhaps. My grandfather, my father's father, was a coachman. Didn't you
know?" she asked, turning round, and immediately she began to mimic the
way the coachmen shout and sing.

"Thank God!" I thought, as I listened to her. "Thank God!"

And again I remember the peasants, the carts, the engineer....


XIII

Doctor Blagovo came over on a bicycle. My sister began to come often.
Once more we talked of manual labour and progress, and the mysterious
Cross awaiting humanity in the remote future. The doctor did not like
our life, because it interfered with our discussions and he said it was
unworthy of a free man to plough, and reap, and breed cattle, and that
in time all such elementary forms of the struggle for existence would be
left to animals and machines, while men would devote themselves
exclusively to scientific investigation. And my sister always asked me
to let her go home earlier, and if she stayed late, or for the night,
she was greatly distressed.

"Good gracious, what a baby you are," Masha used to say reproachfully.
"It is quite ridiculous."

"Yes, it is absurd," my sister would agree. "I admit it is absurd, but
what can I do if I have not the power to control myself. It always seems
to me that I am doing wrong."

During the haymaking my body, not being used to it, ached all over;
sitting on the terrace in the evening, I would suddenly fall asleep and
they would all laugh at me. They would wake me up and make me sit down
to supper. I would be overcome with drowsiness and in a stupor saw
lights, faces, plates, and heard voices without understanding what they
were saying. And I used to get up early in the morning and take my
scythe, or go to the school and work there all day.

When I was at home on holidays I noticed that my wife and sister were
hiding something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was
tender with me as always, but she had some new thought of her own which
she did not communicate to me. Certainly her exasperation with the
peasants had increased and life was growing harder and harder for her,
but she no longer complained to me. She talked more readily to the
doctor than to me, and I could not understand why.

It was the custom in our province for the labourers to come to the farm
in the evenings to be treated to vodka, even the girls having a glass.
We did not keep the custom; the haymakers and the women used to come
into the yard and stay until late in the evening, waiting for vodka, and
then they went away cursing. And then Masha used to frown and relapse
into silence or whisper irritably to the doctor:

"Savages! Barbarians!"

Newcomers to the villages were received ungraciously, almost with
hostility; like new arrivals at a school. At first we were looked upon
as foolish, soft-headed people who had bought the estate because we did
not know what to do with our money. We were laughed at. The peasants
grazed their cattle in our pasture and even in our garden, drove our
cows and horses into the village and then came and asked for
compensation. The whole village used to come into our yard and declare
loudly that in mowing we had cut the border of common land which did not
belong to us; and as we did not know our boundaries exactly we used to
take their word for it and pay a fine. But afterward it appeared that we
had been in the right. They used to bark the young lime-trees in our
woods. A Dubechnia peasant, a money-lender, who sold vodka without a
licence, bribed our labourers to help him cheat us in the most
treacherous way; he substituted old wheels for the new on our wagons,
stole our ploughing yokes and sold them back to us, and so on. But worst
of all was the building at Kurilovka. There the women at night stole
planks, bricks, tiles, iron; the bailiff and his assistants made a
search; the women were each fined two roubles by the village council,
and then the whole lot of them got drunk on the money.

When Masha found out, she would say to the doctor and my sister:

"What beasts! It is horrible! Horrible!"

And more than once I heard her say she was sorry she had decided to
build the school.

"You must understand," the doctor tried to point out, "that if you build
a school or undertake any good work, it is not for the peasants, but for
the sake of culture and the future. The worse the peasants are the more
reason there is for building a school. Do understand!"

There was a loss of confidence in his voice, and it seemed to me that he
hated the peasants as much as Masha.

Masha used often to go to the mill with my sister and they would say
jokingly that they were going to have a look at Stiepan because he was
so handsome. Stiepan it appeared was reserved and silent only with men,
and in the company of women was free and talkative. Once when I went
down to the river to bathe I involuntarily overheard a conversation.
Masha and Cleopatra, both in white, were sitting on the bank under the
broad shade of a willow and Stiepan was standing near with his hands
behind his back, saying:

"But are peasants human beings? Not they; they are, excuse me, brutes,
beasts, and thieves. What does a peasant's life consist of? Eating and
drinking, crying for cheaper food, bawling in taverns, without decent
conversation, or behaviour or manners. Just an ignorant beast! He lives
in filth, his wife and children live in filth; he sleeps in his clothes;
takes the potatoes out of the soup with his fingers, drinks down a black
beetle with his _kvass_--because he won't trouble to fish it out!"

"It is because of their poverty!" protested my sister.

"What poverty? Of course there is want, but there are different kinds of
necessity. If a man is in prison, or is blind, say, or has lost his
legs, then he is in a bad way and God help him; but if he is at liberty
and in command of his senses, if he has eyes and hands and strength,
then, good God, what more does he want? It is lamentable, my lady,
ignorance, but not poverty. If you kind people, with your education, out
of charity try to help him, then he will spend your money in drink, like
the swine he is, or worse still, he will open a tavern and begin to rob
the people on the strength of your money. You say--poverty. But does a
rich peasant live any better? He lives like a pig, too, excuse me, a
clodhopper, a blusterer, a big-bellied blockhead, with a swollen red
mug--makes me want to hit him in the eye, the blackguard. Look at Larion
of Dubechnia--he is rich, but all the same he barks the trees in your
woods just like the poor; and he is a foul-mouthed brute, and his
children are foul-mouthed, and when he is drunk he falls flat in the mud
and goes to sleep. They are all worthless, my lady. It is just hell to
live with them in the village. The village sticks in my gizzard, and I
thank God, the King of heaven, that I am well fed and clothed, and that
I am a free man; I can live where I like, I don't want to live in the
village and nobody can force me to do it. They say: 'You have a wife.'
They say: 'You are obliged to live at home with your wife.' Why? I have
not sold myself to her."

"Tell me, Stiepan. Did you marry for love?" asked Masha.

"What love is there in a village?" Stiepan answered with a smile. "If
you want to know, my lady, it is my second marriage. I do not come from
Kurilovka, but from Zalegosch, and I went to Kurilovka when I married.
My father did not want to divide the land up between us--there are five
of us. So I bowed to it and cut adrift and went to another village to my
wife's family. My first wife died when she was young."

"What did she die of?"

"Foolishness. She used to sit and cry. She was always crying for no
reason at all and so she wasted away. She used to drink herbs to make
herself prettier and it must have ruined her inside. And my second wife
at Kurilovka--what about her? A village woman, a peasant; that's all.
When the match was being made I was nicely had; I thought she was young,
nice to look at and clean. Her mother was clean enough, drank coffee
and, chiefly because they were a clean lot, I got married. Next day we
sat down to dinner and I told my mother-in-law to fetch me a spoon. She
brought me a spoon and I saw her wipe it with her finger. So that,
thought I, is their cleanliness! I lived with them for a year and went
away. Perhaps I ought to have married a town girl"--he went on after a
silence. "They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want
with a helpmate? I can look after myself. But you talk to me sensibly
and soberly, without giggling all the while. He--he--he! What is life
without a good talk?"

Stiepan suddenly stopped and relapsed into his dreary, monotonous
"U-lu-lu-lu." That meant that he had noticed me.

Masha used often to visit the mill, she evidently took pleasure in her
talks with Stiepan; he abused the peasants so sincerely and
convincingly--and this attracted her to him. When she returned from the
mill the idiot who looked after the garden used to shout after her:

"Paloshka! Hullo, Paloshka!" And he would bark at her like a dog: "Bow,
wow!"

And she would stop and stare at him as if she found in the idiot's
barking an answer to her thought, and perhaps he attracted her as much
as Stiepan's abuse. And at home she would find some unpleasant news
awaiting her, as that the village geese had ruined the cabbages in the
kitchen-garden, or that Larion had stolen the reins, and she would shrug
her shoulders with a smile and say:

"What can you expect of such people?"

She was exasperated and a fury was gathering in her soul, and I, on the
other hand, was getting used to the peasants and more and more attracted
to them. For the most part, they were nervous, irritable, absurd people;
they were people with suppressed imaginations, ignorant, with a bare,
dull outlook, always dazed by the same thought of the grey earth, grey
days, black bread; they were people driven to cunning, but, like birds,
they only hid their heads behind the trees--they could not reason. They
did not come to us for the twenty roubles earned by haymaking, but for
the half-pail of vodka, though they could buy four pails of vodka for
the twenty roubles. Indeed they were dirty, drunken, and dishonest, but
for all that one felt that the peasant life as a whole was sound at the
core. However clumsy and brutal the peasant might look as he followed
his antiquated plough, and however he might fuddle himself with vodka,
still, looking at him more closely, one felt that there was something
vital and important in him, something that was lacking in Masha and the
doctor, for instance, namely, that he believes that the chief thing on
earth is truth, that his and everybody's salvation lies in truth, and
therefore above all else on earth he loves justice. I used to say to my
wife that she was seeing the stain on the window, but not the glass
itself; and she would be silent or, like Stiepan, she would hum,
"U-lu-lu-lu...." When she, good, clever actress that she was, went pale
with fury and then harangued the doctor in a trembling voice about
drunkenness and dishonesty; her blindness confounded and appalled me.
How could she forget that her father, the engineer, drank, drank
heavily, and that the money with which he bought Dubechnia was acquired
by means of a whole series of impudent, dishonest swindles? How could
she forget?


XIV

And my sister, too, was living with her own private thoughts which she
hid from me. She used often to sit whispering with Masha. When I went up
to her, she would shrink away, and her eyes would look guilty and full
of entreaty. Evidently there was something going on in her soul of which
she was afraid or ashamed. To avoid meeting me in the garden or being
left alone with me she clung to Masha and I hardly ever had a chance to
talk to her except at dinner.

One evening, on my way home from the school, I came quietly through the
garden. It had already begun to grow dark. Without noticing me or
hearing footsteps, my sister walked round an old wide-spreading
apple-tree, perfectly noiselessly like a ghost. She was in black, and
walked very quickly, up and down, up and down, with her eyes on the
ground. An apple fell from the tree, she started at the noise, stopped
and pressed her hands to her temples. At that moment I went up to her.

In an impulse of tenderness, which suddenly came rushing to my heart,
with tears in my eyes, somehow remembering our mother and our childhood,
I took hold of her shoulders and kissed her.

"What is the matter?" I asked. "You are suffering. I have seen it for a
long time now. Tell me, what is the matter?"

"I am afraid...." she murmured, with a shiver.

"What's the matter with you?" I inquired. "For God's sake, be frank!"

"I will, I will be frank. I will tell you the whole truth. It is so
hard, so painful to conceal anything from you!... Misail, I am in love."
She went on in a whisper. "Love, love.... I am happy, but I am afraid."

I heard footsteps and Doctor Blagovo appeared among the trees. He was
wearing a silk shirt and high boots. Clearly they had arranged a
rendezvous by the apple-tree. When she saw him she flung herself
impulsively into his arms with a cry of anguish, as though he was being
taken away from her:

"Vladimir! Vladimir!"

She clung to him, and gazed eagerly at him and only then I noticed how
thin and pale she had become. It was especially noticeable through her
lace collar, which I had known for years, for it now hung loosely about
her slim neck. The doctor was taken aback, but controlled himself at
once, and said, as he stroked her hair:

"That's enough. Enough!... Why are you so nervous? You see, I have
come."

We were silent for a time, bashfully glancing at each other. Then we all
moved away and I heard the doctor saying to me:

"Civilised life has not yet begun with us. The old console themselves
with saying that, if there is nothing now, there was something in the
forties and the sixties; that is all right for the old ones, but we are
young and our brains are not yet touched with senile decay. We cannot
console ourselves with such illusions. The beginning of Russia was in
862, and civilised Russia, as I understand it, has not yet begun."

But I could not bother about what he was saying. It was very strange,
but I could not believe that my sister was in love, that she had just
been walking with her hand on the arm of a stranger and gazing at him
tenderly. My sister, poor, frightened, timid, downtrodden creature as
she was, loved a man who was already married and had children! I was
full of pity without knowing why; the doctor's presence was distasteful
to me and I could not make out what was to come of such a love.


XV

Masha and I drove over to Kurilovka for the opening of the school.

"Autumn, autumn, autumn...." said Masha, looking about her. Summer had
passed. There were no birds and only the willows were green.

Yes. Summer had passed. The days were bright and warm, but it was fresh
in the mornings; the shepherds went out in their sheepskins, and the dew
never dried all day on the asters in the garden. There were continual
mournful sounds and it was impossible to tell whether it was a shutter
creaking on its rusty hinges or the cranes flying--and one felt so well
and so full of the desire for life!

"Summer has passed...." said Masha. "Now we can both make up our
accounts. We have worked hard and thought a great deal and we are the
better for it--all honour and praise to us; we have improved ourselves;
but have our successes had any perceptible influence on the life around
us, have they been of any use to a single person? No! Ignorance, dirt,
drunkenness, a terribly high rate of infant mortality--everything is
just as it was, and no one is any the better for your having ploughed
and sown and my having spent money and read books. Evidently we have
only worked and broadened our minds for ourselves."

I was abashed by such arguments and did not know what to think.

"From beginning to end we have been sincere," I said, "and if a man is
sincere, he is right."

"Who denies that? We have been right but we have been wrong in our way
of setting about it. First of all, are not our very ways of living
wrong? You want to be useful to people, but by the mere fact of buying
an estate you make it impossible to be so. Further, if you work, dress,
and eat like a peasant you lend your authority and approval to the
clumsy clothes, and their dreadful houses and their dirty beards.... On
the other hand, suppose you work for a long, long time, all you life,
and in the end obtain some practical results--what will your results
amount to, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale
ignorance, hunger, cold, and degeneracy? A drop in the ocean! Other
methods of fighting are necessary, strong, bold, quick! If you want to
be useful then you must leave the narrow circle of common activity and
try to act directly on the masses! First of all, you need vigorous,
noisy, propaganda. Why are art and music, for instance, so much alive
and so popular and so powerful? Because the musician or the singer
influences thousands directly. Art, wonderful art!" She looked wistfully
at the sky and went on: "Art gives wings and carries you far, far away.
If you are bored with dirt and pettifogging interests, if you are
exasperated and outraged and indignant, rest and satisfaction are only
to be found in beauty."

As we approached Kurilovka the weather was fine, clear, and joyous. In
the yards the peasants were thrashing and there was a smell of corn and
straw. Behind the wattled hedges the fruit-trees were reddening and all
around the trees were red or golden. In the church-tower the bells were
ringing, the children were carrying ikons to the school and singing the
Litany of the Virgin. And how clear the air was, and how high the doves
soared!

The Te Deum was sung in the schoolroom. Then the Kurilovka peasants
presented Masha with an ikon, and the Dubechnia peasants gave her a
large cracknel and a gilt salt-cellar. And Masha began to weep.

"And if we have said anything out of the way or have been discontented,
please forgive us," said an old peasant, bowing to us both.

As we drove home Masha looked back at the school. The green roof which I
had painted glistened in the sun, and we could see it for a long time.
And I felt that Masha's glances were glances of farewell.


XVI

In the evening she got ready to go to town.

She had often been to town lately to stay the night. In her absence I
could not work, and felt listless and disheartened; our big yard seemed
dreary, disgusting, and deserted; there were ominous noises in the
garden, and without her the house, the trees, the horses were no longer
"ours."

I never went out but sat all the time at her writing-table among her
books on farming and agriculture, those deposed favourites, wanted no
more, which looked out at me so shamefacedly from the bookcase. For
hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, and the autumn night
crept up as black as soot to the windows, I sat brooding over an old
glove of hers, or the pen she always used, and her little scissors. I
did nothing and saw clearly that everything I had done before,
ploughing, sowing, and felling trees, had only been because she wanted
it. And if she told me to clean out a well, when I had to stand
waist-deep in water, I would go and do it, without trying to find out
whether the well wanted cleaning or not. And now, when she was away,
Dubechnia with its squalor, its litter, its slamming shutters, with
thieves prowling about it day and night, seemed to me like a chaos in
which work was entirely useless. And why should I work, then? Why
trouble and worry about the future, when I felt that the ground was
slipping away from under me, that my position at Dubechnia was hollow,
that, in a word, the same fate awaited me as had befallen the books on
agriculture? Oh! what anguish it was at night, in the lonely hours, when
I lay listening uneasily, as though I expected some one any minute to
call out that it was time for me to go away. I was not sorry to leave
Dubechnia, my sorrow was for my love, for which it seemed that autumn
had already begun. What a tremendous happiness it is to love and to be
loved, and what a horror it is to feel that you are beginning to topple
down from that lofty tower!

Masha returned from town toward evening on the following day. She was
dissatisfied with something, but concealed it and said only: "Why have
the winter windows been put in? It will be stifling." I opened two of
the windows. We did not feel like eating, but we sat down and had
supper.

"Go and wash your hands," she said. "You smell of putty."

She had brought some new illustrated magazines from town and we both
read them after supper. They had supplements with fashion-plates and
patterns. Masha just glanced at them and put them aside to look at them
carefully later on; but one dress, with a wide, bell-shaped skirt and
big sleeves interested her, and for a moment she looked at it seriously
and attentively.

"That's not bad," she said.

"Yes, it would suit you very well," said I. "Very well."

And I admired the dress, only because she liked it, and went on
tenderly:

"A wonderful, lovely dress! Lovely, wonderful, Masha. My dear Masha!"

And tears began to drop on the fashion-plate.

"Wonderful Masha...." I murmured. "Dear, darling Masha...."

She went and lay down and I sat still for an hour and looked at the
illustrations.

"You should not have opened the windows," she called from the bedroom.
"I'm afraid it will be cold. Look how the wind is blowing in!"

I read the miscellany, about the preparation of cheap fish, and the size
of the largest diamond in the world. Then I chanced on the picture of
the dress she had liked and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, and
bare shoulders, a brilliant, dazzling figure, well up in music and
painting and literature, and how insignificant and brief my share in her
life seemed to be!

Our coming together, our marriage, was only an episode, one of many in
the life of this lively, highly gifted creature. All the best things in
the world, as I have said, were at her service, and she had them for
nothing; even ideas and fashionable intellectual movements served her
pleasure, a diversion in her existence, and I was only the coachman who
drove her from one infatuation to another. Now I was no longer necessary
to her; she would fly away and I should be left alone.

As if in answer to my thoughts a desperate scream suddenly came from the
yard:

"Mur-der!"

It was a shrill female voice, and exactly as though it were trying to
imitate it, the wind also howled dismally in the chimney. Half a minute
passed and again it came through the sound of the wind, but as though
from the other end of the yard:

"Mur-der!"

"Misail, did you hear that?" said my wife in a hushed voice. "Did you
hear?"

She came out of the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and
stood listening and staring out of the dark window.

"Somebody is being murdered!" she muttered. "It only wanted that!"

I took my gun and went out; it was very dark outside; a violent wind was
blowing so that it was hard to stand up. I walked to the gate and
listened; the trees were moaning; the wind went whistling through them,
and in the garden the idiot's dog was howling. Beyond the gate it was
pitch dark; there was not a light on the railway. And just by the wing,
where the offices used to be, I suddenly heard a choking cry:

"Mur-der!"

"Who is there?" I called.

Two men were locked in a struggle. One had nearly thrown the other, who
was resisting with all his might. And both were breathing heavily.

"Let go!" said one of them and I recognised Ivan Cheprakov. It was he
who had cried out in a thin, falsetto voice. "Let go, damn you, or I'll
bite your hands!"

The other man I recognised as Moissey. I parted them and could not
resist hitting Moissey in the face twice. He fell down, then got up, and
I struck him again.

"He tried to kill me," he muttered. "I caught him creeping to his
mother's drawer.... I tried to shut him up in the wing for safety."

Cheprakov was drunk and did not recognise me. He stood gasping for
breath as though trying to get enough wind to shriek again.

I left them and went back to the house. My wife was lying on the bed,
fully dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard and did not keep
back the fact that I had struck Moissey.

"Living in the country is horrible," she said. "And what a long night it
is!"

"Mur-der!" we heard again, a little later.

"I'll go and part them," I said.

"No. Let them kill each other," she said with an expression of disgust.

She lay staring at the ceiling, listening, and I sat near her, not
daring to speak and feeling that it was my fault that screams of
"murder" came from the yard and the night was so long.

We were silent and I waited impatiently for the light to peep in at the
window. And Masha looked as though she had wakened from a long sleep and
was astonished to find herself, so clever, so educated, so refined, cast
away in this miserable provincial hole, among a lot of petty, shallow
people, and to think that she could have so far forgotten herself as to
have been carried away by one of them and to have been his wife for more
than half a year. It seemed to me that we were all the same to
her--myself, Moissey, Cheprakov; all swept together into the drunken,
wild scream of "murder"--myself, our marriage, our work, and the muddy
roads of autumn; and when she breathed or stirred to make herself more
comfortable I could read in her eyes: "Oh, if the morning would come
quicker!"

In the morning she went away.

I stayed at Dubechnia for another three days, waiting for her; then I
moved all our things into one room, locked it, and went to town. When I
rang the bell at the engineer's, it was evening, and the lamps were
alight in Great Gentry Street. Pavel told me that nobody was at home;
Victor Ivanich had gone to Petersburg and Maria Victorovna must be at a
rehearsal at the Azhoguins'. I remember the excitement with which I went
to the Azhoguins', and how my heart thumped and sank within me, as I
went up-stairs and stood for a long while on the landing, not daring to
enter that temple of the Muses! In the hall, on the table, on the piano,
on the stage, there were candles burning; all in threes, for the first
performance was fixed for the thirteenth, and the dress rehearsal was on
Monday--the unlucky day. A fight against prejudice! All the lovers of
dramatic art were assembled; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest
Miss Azhoguin were walking about the stage, reading their parts. Radish
was standing still in a corner all by himself, with his head against the
wall, looking at the stage with adoring eyes, waiting for the beginning
of the rehearsal. Everything was just the same!

I went toward my hostess to greet her, when suddenly everybody began to
say "Ssh" and to wave their hands to tell me not to make such a noise.
There was a silence. The top of the piano was raised, a lady sat down,
screwing up her short-sighted eyes at the music, and Masha stood by the
piano, dressed up, beautiful, but beautiful in an odd new way, not at
all like the Masha who used to come to see me at the mill in the spring.
She began to sing:

    "Why do I love thee, straight night?"

It was the first time since I had known her that I had heard her sing.
She had a fine, rich, powerful voice, and to hear her sing was like
eating a ripe, sweet-scented melon. She finished the song and was
applauded. She smiled and looked pleased, made play with her eyes,
stared at the music, plucked at her dress exactly like a bird which has
broken out of its cage and preens its wings at liberty. Her hair was
combed back over her ears, and she had a sly defiant expression on her
face, as though she wished to challenge us all, or to shout at us, as
though we were horses: "Gee up, old things!"

And at that moment she must have looked very like her grandfather, the
coachman.

"You here, too?" she asked, giving me her hand. "Did you hear me sing?
How did you like it?" And, without waiting for me to answer she went on:
"You arrived very opportunely. I'm going to Petersburg for a short time
to-night. May I?"

At midnight I took her to the station. She embraced me tenderly,
probably out of gratitude, because I did not pester her with useless
questions, and she promised to write to me, and I held her hands for a
long time and kissed them, finding it hard to keep back my tears, and
not saying a word.

And when the train moved, I stood looking at the receding lights, kissed
her in my imagination and whispered:

"Masha dear, wonderful Masha!..."

I spent the night at Mikhokhov, at Karpovna's, and in the morning I
worked with Radish, upholstering the furniture at a rich merchant's, who
had married his daughter to a doctor.


XVII

On Sunday afternoon my sister came to see me and had tea with me.

"I read a great deal now," she said, showing me the books she had got
out of the town library on her way. "Thanks to your wife and Vladimir.
They awakened my self-consciousness. They saved me and have made me feel
that I am a human being. I used not to sleep at night for worrying:
'What a lot of sugar has been wasted during the week.' 'The cucumbers
must not be oversalted!' I don't sleep now, but I have quite different
thoughts. I am tormented with the thought that half my life has passed
so foolishly and half-heartedly. I despise my old life. I am ashamed of
it. And I regard my father now as an enemy. Oh, how grateful I am to
your wife! And Vladimir. He is such a wonderful man! They opened my
eyes."

"It is not good that you can't sleep," I said.

"You think I am ill? Not a bit. Vladimir sounded me and says I am
perfectly healthy. But health is not the point. That doesn't matter so
much.... Tell me, am I right?"

She needed moral support. That was obvious. Masha had gone, Doctor
Blagovo was in Petersburg, and there was no one except myself in the
town, who could tell her that she was right. She fixed her eyes on me,
trying to read my inmost thoughts, and if I were sad in her presence,
she always took it upon herself and was depressed. I had to be
continually on my guard, and when she asked me if she was right, I
hastened to assure her that she was right and that I had a profound
respect for her.

"You know, they have given me a part at the Azhoguins'," she went on. "I
wanted to act. I want to live. I want to drink deep of life; I have no
talent whatever, and my part is only ten lines, but it is immeasurably
finer and nobler than pouring out tea five times a day and watching to
see that the cook does not eat the sugar left over. And most of all I
want to let father see that I too can protest."

After tea she lay down on my bed and stayed there for some time, with
her eyes closed, and her face very pale.

"Just weakness!" she said, as she got up. "Vladimir said all town girls
and women are anaemic from lack of work. What a clever man Vladimir is!
He is right; wonderfully right! We do need work!"

Two days later she came to rehearsal at the Azhoguins' with her part in
her hand. She was in black, with a garnet necklace, and a brooch that
looked at a distance like a pasty, and she had enormous earrings, in
each of which sparkled a diamond. I felt uneasy when I saw her; I was
shocked by her lack of taste. The others noticed too that she was
unsuitably dressed and that her earrings and diamonds were out of place.
I saw their smiles and heard some one say jokingly:

"Cleopatra of Egypt!"

She was trying to be fashionable, and easy, and assured, and she seemed
affected and odd. She lost her simplicity and her charm.

"I just told father that I was going to a rehearsal," she began, coming
up to me, "and he shouted that he would take his blessing from me, and
he nearly struck me. Fancy," she added, glancing at her part, "I don't
know my part. I'm sure to make a mistake. Well, the die is cast," she
said excitedly; "the die is cast."

She felt that all the people were looking at her and were all amazed at
the important step she had taken and that they were all expecting
something remarkable from her, and it was impossible to convince her
that nobody took any notice of such small uninteresting persons as she
and I.

She had nothing to do until the third act, and her part, a guest, a
country gossip, consisted only in standing by the door, as if she were
overhearing something, and then speaking a short monologue. For at least
an hour and a half before her cue, while the others were walking,
reading, having tea, quarrelling, she never left me and kept on mumbling
her part, and dropping her written copy, imagining that everybody was
looking at her, and waiting for her to come on, and she patted her hair
with a trembling hand and said:

"I'm sure to make a mistake.... You don't know how awful I feel! I am as
terrified as if I were going to the scaffold."

At last her cue came.

"Cleopatra Alexeyevna--your cue!" said the manager.

She walked on to the middle of the stage with an expression of terror on
her face; she looked ugly and stiff, and for half a minute was
speechless, perfectly motionless, except for her large earrings which
wabbled on either side of her face.

"You can read your part, the first time," said some one.

I could see that she was trembling so that she could neither speak nor
open her part, and that she had entirely forgotten the words and I had
just made up my mind to go up and say something to her when she suddenly
dropped down on her knees in the middle of the stage and sobbed loudly.

There was a general stir and uproar. And I stood quite still by the
wings, shocked by what had happened, not understanding at all, not
knowing what to do. I saw them lift her up and lead her away. I saw
Aniuta Blagovo come up to me. I had not seen her in the hall before and
she seemed to have sprung up from the floor. She was wearing a hat and
veil, and as usual looked as if she had only dropped in for a minute.

"I told her not to try to act," she said angrily, biting out each word,
with her cheeks blushing. "It is folly! You ought to have stopped her!"

Mrs. Azhoguin came up in a short jacket with short sleeves. She had
tobacco ash on her thin, flat bosom.

"My dear, it is too awful!" she said, wringing her hands, and as usual,
staring into my face. "It is too awful!... Your sister is in a
condition.... She is going to have a baby! You must take her away at
once...."

In her agitation she breathed heavily. And behind her, stood her three
daughters, all thin and flat-chested like herself, and all huddled
together in their dismay. They were frightened, overwhelmed just as if a
convict had been caught in the house. What a shame! How awful! And this
was the family that had been fighting the prejudices and superstitions
of mankind all their lives; evidently they thought that all the
prejudices and superstitions of mankind were to be found in burning
three candles and in the number thirteen, or the unlucky day--Monday.

"I must request ... request ..." Mrs. Azhoguin kept on saying,
compressing her lips and accentuating the _quest_. "I must request you
to take her away."


XVIII

A little later my sister and I were walking along the street. I covered
her with the skirt of my overcoat; we hurried along through by-streets,
where there were no lamps, avoiding the passers-by, and it was like a
flight. She did not weep any more, but stared at me with dry eyes. It
was about twenty minutes' walk to Mikhokhov, whither I was taking her,
and in that short time we went over the whole of our lives, and talked
over everything, and considered the position and pondered....

We decided that we could not stay in the town, and that when I could get
some money, we would go to some other place. In some of the houses the
people were asleep already, and in others they were playing cards; we
hated those houses, were afraid of them, and we talked of the
fanaticism, callousness, and nullity of these respectable families,
these lovers of dramatic art whom we had frightened so much, and I
wondered how those stupid, cruel, slothful, dishonest people were better
than the drunken and superstitious peasants of Kurilovka, or how they
were better than animals, which also lose their heads when some accident
breaks the monotony of their lives, which are limited by their
instincts. What would happen to my sister if she stayed at home? What
moral torture would she have to undergo, talking to my father and
meeting acquaintances every day? I imagined it all and there came into
my memory people I had known who had been gradually dropped by their
friends and relations, and I remember the tortured dogs which had gone
mad, and sparrows plucked alive and thrown into the water--and a whole
long series of dull, protracted sufferings which I had seen going on in
the town since my childhood; and I could not conceive what the sixty
thousand inhabitants lived for, why they read the Bible, why they
prayed, why they skimmed books and magazines. What good was all that had
been written and said, if they were in the same spiritual darkness and
had the same hatred of freedom, as if they were living hundreds and
hundreds of years ago? The builder spends his time putting up houses all
over the town, and yet would go down to his grave saying "galdary" for
"gallery." And the sixty thousand inhabitants had read and heard of
truth and mercy and freedom for generations, but to the bitter end they
would go on lying from morning to night, tormenting one another, fearing
and hating freedom as a deadly enemy.

"And so, my fate is decided," said my sister when we reached home.
"After what has happened I can never go _there_ again. My God, how good
it is! I feel at peace."

She lay down at once. Tears shone on her eyelashes, but her expression
was happy. She slept soundly and softly, and it was clear that her heart
was easy and that she was at rest. For a long, long time she had not
slept so well.

So we began to live together. She was always singing and said she felt
very well, and I took back the books we had borrowed from the library
unread, because she gave up reading; she only wanted to dream and to
talk of the future. She would hum as she mended my clothes or helped
Karpovna with the cooking, or talk of her Vladimir, of his mind, and his
goodness, and his fine manners, and his extraordinary learning. And I
agreed with her, though I no longer liked the doctor. She wanted to
work, to be independent, and to live by herself, and she said she would
become a school-teacher or a nurse as soon as her health allowed, and
she would scrub the floors and do her own washing. She loved her unborn
baby passionately, and she knew already the colour of his eyes and the
shape of his hands and how he laughed. She liked to talk of his
upbringing, and since the best man on earth was Vladimir, all her ideas
were reduced to making the boy as charming as his father. There was no
end to her chatter, and everything she talked about filled her with a
lively joy. Sometimes I, too, rejoiced, though I knew not why.

She must have infected me with her dreaminess, for I, too, read nothing
and just dreamed. In the evenings, in spite of being tired, I used to
pace up and down the room with my hands in my pockets, talking about
Masha.

"When do you think she will return?" I used to ask my sister. "I think
she'll be back at Christmas. Not later. What is she doing there?"

"If she doesn't write to you, it means she must be coming soon."

"True," I would agree, though I knew very well that there was nothing to
make Masha return to our town.

I missed her very much, but I could not help deceiving myself and wanted
others to deceive me. My sister was longing for her doctor, I for Masha,
and we both laughed and talked and never saw that we were keeping
Karpovna from sleeping. She would lie on the stove and murmur:

"The samovar tinkled this morning. Tink-led! That bodes nobody any good,
my merry friends!"

Nobody came to the house except the postman who brought my sister
letters from the doctor, and Prokofyi, who used to come in sometimes in
the evening and glance secretly at my sister, and then go into the
kitchen and say:

"Every class has its ways, and if you're too proud to understand that,
the worse for you in this vale of tears."

He loved the expression--vale of tears. And--about Christmas time--when
I was going through the market, he called me into his shop, and without
giving me his hand, declared that he had some important business to
discuss. He was red in the face with the frost and with vodka; near him
by the counter stood Nicolka of the murderous face, holding a bloody
knife in his hand.

"I want to be blunt with you," began Prokofyi. "This business must not
happen because, as you know, people will neither forgive you nor us for
such a vale of tears. Mother, of course, is too dutiful to say anything
unpleasant to you herself, and tell you that your sister must go
somewhere else because of her condition, but I don't want it either,
because I do not approve of her behaviour."

I understood and left the shop. That very day my sister and I went to
Radish's. We had no money for a cab, so we went on foot; I carried a
bundle with all our belongings on my back, my sister had nothing in her
hands, and she was breathless and kept coughing and asking if we would
soon be there.


XIX

At last there came a letter from Masha.

"My dear, kind M. A.," she wrote, "my brave, sweet angel, as the old
painter calls you, good-bye. I am going to America with my father for
the exhibition. In a few days I shall be on the ocean--so far from
Dubechnia. It is awful to think of! It is vast and open like the sky and
I long for it and freedom. I rejoice and dance about and you see how
incoherent my letter is. My dear Misail, give me my freedom. Quick, tear
the thread which still holds and binds us. My meeting and knowing you
was a ray from heaven, which brightened my existence. But, you know, my
becoming your wife was a mistake, and the knowledge of the mistake
weighs me down, and I implore you on my knees, my dear, generous friend,
quick--quick--before I go over the sea--wire that you will agree to
correct our mutual mistake, remove then the only burden on my wings, and
my father, who will be responsible for the whole business, has promised
me not to overwhelm you with formalities. So, then, I am free of the
whole world? Yes?

"Be happy. God bless you. Forgive my wickedness.

"I am alive and well. I am squandering money on all sorts of follies,
and every minute I thank God that such a wicked woman as I am has no
children. I am singing and I am a success, but it is not a passing whim.
No. It is my haven, my convent cell where I go for rest. King David had
a ring with an inscription: 'Everything passes.' When one is sad, these
words make one cheerful; and when one is cheerful, they make one sad.
And I have got a ring with the words written in Hebrew, and this
talisman will keep me from losing my heart and head. Or does one need
nothing but consciousness of freedom, because, when one is free, one
wants nothing, nothing, nothing. Snap the thread then. I embrace you and
your sister warmly. Forgive and forget your M."

My sister had one room. Radish, who had been ill and was recovering, was
in the other. Just as I received this letter, my sister went into the
painter's room and sat by his side and began to read to him. She read
Ostrovsky or Gogol to him every day, and he used to listen, staring
straight in front of him, never laughing, shaking his head, and every
now and then muttering to himself:

"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"

If there was anything ugly in what she read, he would say vehemently,
pointing to the book:

"There it is! Lies! That's what lies do!"

Stories used to attract him by their contents as well as by their moral
and their skilfully complicated plot, and he used to marvel at _him_,
though he never called _him_ by his name.

"How well _he_ has managed it."

Now my sister read a page quickly and then stopped, because her breath
failed her. Radish held her hand, and moving his dry lips he said in a
hoarse, hardly audible voice:

"The soul of the righteous is white and smooth as chalk; and the soul of
the sinner is as a pumice-stone. The soul of the righteous is clear oil,
and the soul of the sinner is coal-tar. We must work and sorrow and
pity," he went on. "And if a man does not work and sorrow he will not
enter the kingdom of heaven. Woe, woe to the well fed, woe to the
strong, woe to the rich, woe to the usurers! They will not see the
kingdom of heaven. Grubs eat grass, rust eats iron...."

"And lies devour the soul," said my sister, laughing.

I read the letter once more. At that moment the soldier came into the
kitchen who had brought in twice a week, without saying from whom, tea,
French bread, and pigeons, all smelling of scent. I had no work and used
to sit at home for days together, and probably the person who sent us
the bread knew that we were in want.

I heard my sister talking to the soldier and laughing merrily. Then she
lay down and ate some bread and said to me:

"When you wanted to get away from the office and become a house-painter,
Aniuta Blagovo and I knew from the very beginning that you were right,
but we were afraid to say so. Tell me what power is it that keeps us
from saying what we feel? There's Aniuta Blagovo. She loves you, adores
you, and she knows that you are right. She loves me, too, like a sister,
and she knows that I am right, and in her heart she envies me, but some
power prevents her coming to see us. She avoids us. She is afraid."

My sister folded her hands across her bosom and said rapturously:

"If you only knew how she loves you! She confessed it to me and to no
one else, very hesitatingly, in the dark. She used to take me out into
the garden, into the dark, and begin to tell me in a whisper how dear
you were to her. You will see that she will never marry because she
loves you. Are you sorry for her?"

"Yes."

"It was she sent the bread. She is funny. Why should she hide herself? I
used to be silly and stupid, but I left all that and I am not afraid of
any one, and I think and say aloud what I like--and I am happy. When I
lived at home I had no notion of happiness, and now I would not change
places with a queen."

Doctor Blagovo came. He had got his diploma and was now living in the
town, at his father's, taking a rest. After which he said he would go
back to Petersburg. He wanted to devote himself to vaccination against
typhus, and, I believe, cholera; he wanted to go abroad to increase his
knowledge and then to become a University professor. He had already left
the army and wore serge clothes, with well-cut coats, wide trousers, and
expensive ties. My sister was enraptured with his pins and studs and his
red-silk handkerchief, which, out of swagger, he wore in his outside
breast-pocket. Once, when we had nothing to do, she and I fell to
counting up his suits and came to the conclusion that he must have at
least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister, but never once,
even in joke, did he talk of taking her to Petersburg or abroad with
him, and I could not imagine what would happen to her if she lived, or
what was to become of her child. But she was happy in her dreams and
would not think seriously of the future. She said he could go wherever
he liked and even cast her aside, if only he were happy himself, and
what had been was enough for her.

Usually when he came to see us he would sound her very carefully, and
ask her to drink some milk with some medicine in it. He did so now. He
sounded her and made her drink a glass of milk, and the room began to
smell of creosote.

"That's a good girl," he said, taking the glass from her. "You must not
talk much, and you have been chattering like a magpie lately. Please, be
quiet."

She began to laugh and he came into Radish's room, where I was sitting,
and tapped me affectionately on the shoulder.

"Well, old man, how are you?" he asked, bending over the patient.

"Sir," said Radish, only just moving his lips. "Sir, I make so bold....
We are all in the hands of God, and we must all die.... Let me tell you
the truth, sir.... You will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

And suddenly I lost consciousness and was caught up into a dream: it was
winter, at night, and I was standing in the yard of the slaughter-house
with Prokofyi by my side, smelling of pepper-brandy; I pulled myself
together and rubbed my eyes and then I seemed to be going to the
governor's for an explanation. Nothing of the kind ever happened to me,
before or after, and I can only explain these strange dreams like
memories, by ascribing them to overstrain of the nerves. I lived again
through the scene in the slaughter-house and the conversation with the
governor, and at the same time I was conscious of its unreality.

When I came to myself I saw that I was not at home, but standing with
the doctor by a lamp in the street.

"It is sad, sad," he was saying with tears running down his cheeks. "She
is happy and always laughing and full of hope. But, poor darling, her
condition is hopeless. Old Radish hates me and keeps trying to make me
understand that I have wronged her. In his way he is right, but I have
my point of view, too, and I do not repent of what has happened. It is
necessary to love. We must all love. That's true, isn't it? Without love
there would be no life, and a man who avoids and fears love is not
free."

We gradually passed to other subjects. He began to speak of science and
his dissertation which had been very well received in Petersburg. He
spoke enthusiastically and thought no more of my sister, or of his
going, or of myself. Life was carrying him away. She has America and a
ring with an inscription, I thought, and he has his medical degree and
his scientific career, and my sister and I are left with the past.

When we parted I stood beneath the lamp and read my letter again. And I
remembered vividly how she came to me at the mill that spring morning
and lay down and covered herself with my fur coat--pretending to be just
a peasant woman. And another time--also in the early morning--when we
pulled the bow-net out of the water, and the willows on the bank
showered great drops of water on us and we laughed....

All was dark in our house in Great Gentry Street. I climbed the fence,
and, as I used to do in old days, I went into the kitchen by the back
door to get a little lamp. There was nobody in the kitchen. On the stove
the samovar was singing merrily, all ready for my father. "Who pours out
my father's tea now?" I thought. I took the lamp and went on to the shed
and made a bed of old newspapers and lay down. The nails in the wall
looked ominous as before and their shadows flickered. It was cold. I
thought I saw my sister coming in with my supper, but I remembered at
once that she was ill at Radish's, and it seemed strange to me that I
should have climbed the fence and be lying in the cold shed. My mind was
blurred and filled with fantastic imaginations.

A bell rang; sounds familiar from childhood; first the wire rustled
along the wall, and then there was a short, melancholy tinkle in the
kitchen. It was my father returning from the club. I got up and went
into the kitchen. Akhsinya, the cook, clapped her hands when she saw me
and began to cry:

"Oh, my dear," she said in a whisper. "Oh, my dear! My God!"

And in her agitation she began to pluck at her apron. On the window-sill
were two large bottles of berries soaking in vodka. I poured out a cup
and gulped it down, for I was very thirsty. Akhsinya had just scrubbed
the table and the chairs, and the kitchen had the good smell which
kitchens always have when the cook is clean and tidy. This smell and the
trilling of the cricket used to entice us into the kitchen when we were
children, and there we used to be told fairy-tales, and we played at
kings and queens....

"And where is Cleopatra?" asked Akhsinya hurriedly, breathlessly. "And
where is your hat, sir? And they say your wife has gone to Petersburg."

She had been with us in my mother's time and used to bathe Cleopatra and
me in a tub, and we were still children to her, and it was her duty to
correct us. In a quarter of an hour or so she laid bare all her
thoughts, which she had been storing up in her quiet kitchen all the
time I had been away. She said the doctor ought to be made to marry
Cleopatra--we would only have to frighten him a bit and make him send in
a nicely written application, and then the archbishop would dissolve his
first marriage, and it would be a good thing to sell Dubechnia without
saying anything to my wife, and to bank the money in my own name; and if
my sister and I went on our knees to our father and asked him nicely,
then perhaps he would forgive us; and we ought to pray to the Holy
Mother to intercede for us....

"Now, sir, go and talk to him," she said, when we heard my father's
cough. "Go, speak to him, and beg his pardon. He won't bite your head
off."

I went in. My father was sitting at his desk working on the plan of a
bungalow with Gothic windows and a stumpy tower like the lookout of a
fire-station--an immensely stiff and inartistic design. As I entered the
study I stood so that I could not help seeing the plan. I did not know
why I had come to my father, but I remember that when I saw his thin
face, red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw my arms
round him and, as Akhsinya had bid me, to beg his pardon humbly; but the
sight of the bungalow with the Gothic windows and the stumpy tower
stopped me.

"Good evening," I said.

He glanced at me and at once cast his eyes down on his plan.

"What do you want?" he asked after a while.

"I came to tell you that my sister is very ill. She is dying," I said
dully.

"Well?" My father sighed, took off his spectacles and laid them on the
table. "As you have sown, so you must reap. I want you to remember how
you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I asked you to give
up your delusions, and I reminded you of your honour, your duty, your
obligations to your ancestors, whose traditions must be kept sacred. Did
you listen to me? You spurned my advice and clung to your wicked
opinions; furthermore, you dragged your sister into your abominable
delusions and brought about her downfall and her shame. Now you are both
suffering for it. As you have sown, so you must reap."

He paced up and down the study as he spoke. Probably he thought that I
had come to him to admit that I was wrong, and probably he was waiting
for me to ask his help for my sister and myself. I was cold, but I shook
as though I were in a fever, and I spoke with difficulty in a hoarse
voice.

"And I must ask you to remember," I said, "that on this very spot I
implored you to try to understand me, to reflect, and to think what we
were living for and to what end, and your answer was to talk about my
ancestors and my grandfather who wrote verses. Now you are told that
your only daughter is in a hopeless condition and you talk of ancestors
and traditions!... And you can maintain such frivolity when death is
near and you have only five or ten years left to live!"

"Why did you come here?" asked my father sternly, evidently affronted at
my reproaching him with frivolity.

"I don't know. I love you. I am more sorry than I can say that we are so
far apart. That is why I came. I still love you, but my sister has
finally broken with you. She does not forgive you and will never forgive
you. Your very name fills her with hatred of her past life."

"And who is to blame?" cried my father. "You, you scoundrel!"

"Yes. Say that I am to blame," I said. "I admit that I am to blame for
many things, but why is your life, which you have tried to force on us,
so tedious and frigid, and ungracious, why are there no people in any of
the houses you have built during the last thirty years from whom I could
learn how to live and how to avoid such suffering? These houses of yours
are infernal dungeons in which mothers and daughters are persecuted,
children are tortured.... My poor mother! My unhappy sister! One needs
to drug oneself with vodka, cards, scandal; cringe, play the hypocrite,
and go on year after year designing rotten houses, not to see the horror
that lurks in them. Our town has been in existence for hundreds of
years, and during the whole of that time it has not given the country
one useful man--not one! You have strangled in embryo everything that
was alive and joyous! A town of shopkeepers, publicans, clerks, and
hypocrites, an aimless, futile town, and not a soul would be the worse
if it were suddenly razed to the ground."

"I don't want to hear you, you scoundrel," said my father, taking a
ruler from his desk. "You are drunk! You dare come into your father's
presence in such a state! I tell you for the last time, and you can tell
this to your strumpet of a sister, that you will get nothing from me. I
have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer
through their disobedience and obstinacy I have no pity for them. You
may go back where you came from! God has been pleased to punish me
through you. I will humbly bear my punishment and, like Job, I find
consolation in suffering and unceasing toil. You shall not cross my
threshold until you have mended your ways. I am a just man, and
everything I say is practical good sense, and if you had any regard for
yourself, you would remember what I have said, and what I am saying
now."

I threw up my hands and went out; I do not remember what happened that
night or next day.

They say that I went staggering through the street without a hat,
singing aloud, with crowds of little boys shouting after me:

"Little Profit! Little Profit!"


XX

If I wanted to order a ring, I would have it inscribed: "Nothing
passes." I believe that nothing passes without leaving some trace, and
that every little step has some meaning for the present and the future
life.

What I lived through was not in vain. My great misfortunes, my patience,
moved the hearts of the people of the town and they no longer call me
"Little Profit," they no longer laugh at me and throw water over me as I
walk through the market. They got used to my being a working man and see
nothing strange in my carrying paint-pots and glazing windows; on the
contrary, they give me orders, and I am considered a good workman and
the best contractor, after Radish, who, though he recovered and still
paints the cupolas of the church without scaffolding, is not strong
enough to manage the men, and I have taken his place and go about the
town touting for orders, and take on and sack the men, and lend money at
exorbitant interest. And now that I am a contractor I can understand how
it is possible to spend several days hunting through the town for
slaters to carry out a trifling order. People are polite to me, and
address me respectfully and give me tea in the houses where I work, and
send the servant to ask me if I would like dinner. Children and girls
often come and watch me with curious, sad eyes.

Once I was working in the governor's garden, painting the summer-house
marble. The governor came into the summer-house, and having nothing
better to do, began to talk to me, and I reminded him how he had once
sent for me to caution me. For a moment he stared at my face, opened his
mouth like a round O, waved his hands, and said:

"I don't remember."

I am growing old, taciturn, crotchety, strict; I seldom laugh, and
people say I am growing like Radish, and, like him, I bore the men with
my aimless moralising.

Maria Victorovna, my late wife, lives abroad, and her father is making a
railway somewhere in the Eastern provinces and buying land there. Doctor
Blagovo is also abroad. Dubechnia has passed to Mrs. Cheprakov, who
bought it from the engineer after haggling him into a twenty-per-cent
reduction in the price. Moissey walks about in a bowler hat; he often
drives into town in a trap and stops outside the bank. People say he has
already bought an estate on a mortgage, and is always inquiring at the
bank about Dubechnia, which he also intends to buy. Poor Ivan Cheprakov
used to hang about the town, doing nothing and drinking. I tried to give
him a job in our business, and for a time he worked with us painting
roofs and glazing, and he rather took to it, and, like a regular
house-painter, he stole the oil, and asked for tips, and got drunk. But
it soon bored him. He got tired of it and went back to Dubechnia, and
some time later I was told by the peasants that he had been inciting
them to kill Moissey one night and rob Mrs. Cheprakov.

My father has got very old and bent, and just takes a little walk in the
evening near his house.

When we had the cholera, Prokofyi cured the shopkeepers with
pepper-brandy and tar and took money for it, and as I read in the
newspaper, he was flogged for libelling the doctors as he sat in his
shop. His boy Nicolka died of cholera. Karpovna is still alive, and
still loves and fears her Prokofyi. Whenever she sees me she sadly
shakes her head and says with a sigh:

"Poor thing. You are lost!"

On week-days I am busy from early morning till late at night. And on
Sundays and holidays I take my little niece (my sister expected a boy,
but a girl was born) and go with her to the cemetery, where I stand or
sit and look at the grave of my dear one, and tell the child that her
mother is lying there.

Sometimes I find Aniuta Blagovo by the grave. We greet each other and
stand silently, or we talk of Cleopatra, and the child, and the sadness
of this life. Then we leave the cemetery and walk in silence and she
lags behind--on purpose, to avoid staying with me. The little girl,
joyful, happy, with her eyes half-closed against the brilliant sunlight,
laughs and holds out her little hands to her, and we stop and together
we fondle the darling child.

And when we reach the town, Aniuta Blagovo, blushing and agitated, says
good-bye, and walks on alone, serious and circumspect.... And, to look
at her, none of the passers-by could imagine that she had just been
walking by my side and even fondling the child.


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