The Professor received a telegram from the Lyalikovs’ factory; he
was asked to come as quickly as possible. The daughter of some
Madame Lyalikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was ill, and
that was all that one could make out of the long, incoherent telegram.
And the Professor did not go himself, but sent instead his assistant,
Korolyov.

It was two stations from Moscow, and there was a drive of three
miles from the station. A carriage with three horses had been sent
to the station to meet Korolyov; the coachman wore a hat with a
peacock’s feather on it, and answered every question in a loud voice
like a soldier: “No, sir!” “Certainly, sir!”

It was Saturday evening; the sun was setting, the workpeople were
coming in crowds from the factory to the station, and they bowed
to the carriage in which Korolyov was driving. And he was charmed
with the evening, the farmhouses and villas on the road, and the
birch-trees, and the quiet atmosphere all around, when the fields
and woods and the sun seemed preparing, like the workpeople now on
the eve of the holiday, to rest, and perhaps to pray. . . .

He was born and had grown up in Moscow; he did not know the country,
and he had never taken any interest in factories, or been inside
one, but he had happened to read about factories, and had been in
the houses of manufacturers and had talked to them; and whenever
he saw a factory far or near, he always thought how quiet and
peaceable it was outside, but within there was always sure to be
impenetrable ignorance and dull egoism on the side of the owners,
wearisome, unhealthy toil on the side of the workpeople, squabbling,
vermin, vodka. And now when the workpeople timidly and respectfully
made way for the carriage, in their faces, their caps, their walk,
he read physical impurity, drunkenness, nervous exhaustion,
bewilderment.

They drove in at the factory gates. On each side he caught glimpses
of the little houses of workpeople, of the faces of women, of quilts
and linen on the railings. “Look out!” shouted the coachman, not
pulling up the horses. It was a wide courtyard without grass, with
five immense blocks of buildings with tall chimneys a little distance
one from another, warehouses and barracks, and over everything a
sort of grey powder as though from dust. Here and there, like oases
in the desert, there were pitiful gardens, and the green and red
roofs of the houses in which the managers and clerks lived. The
coachman suddenly pulled up the horses, and the carriage stopped
at the house, which had been newly painted grey; here was a flower
garden, with a lilac bush covered with dust, and on the yellow steps
at the front door there was a strong smell of paint.

“Please come in, doctor,” said women’s voices in the passage and
the entry, and at the same time he heard sighs and whisperings.
“Pray walk in. . . . We’ve been expecting you so long . . . we’re
in real trouble. Here, this way.”

Madame Lyalikov–a stout elderly lady wearing a black silk dress
with fashionable sleeves, but, judging from her face, a simple
uneducated woman–looked at the doctor in a flutter, and could
not bring herself to hold out her hand to him; she did not dare.
Beside her stood a personage with short hair and a pince-nez; she
was wearing a blouse of many colours, and was very thin and no
longer young. The servants called her Christina Dmitryevna, and
Korolyov guessed that this was the governess. Probably, as the
person of most education in the house, she had been charged to meet
and receive the doctor, for she began immediately, in great haste,
stating the causes of the illness, giving trivial and tiresome
details, but without saying who was ill or what was the matter.

The doctor and the governess were sitting talking while the lady
of the house stood motionless at the door, waiting. From the
conversation Korolyov learned that the patient was Madame Lyalikov’s
only daughter and heiress, a girl of twenty, called Liza; she had
been ill for a long time, and had consulted various doctors, and
the previous night she had suffered till morning from such violent
palpitations of the heart, that no one in the house had slept, and
they had been afraid she might die.

“She has been, one may say, ailing from a child,” said Christina
Dmitryevna in a sing-song voice, continually wiping her lips with
her hand. “The doctors say it is nerves; when she was a little girl
she was scrofulous, and the doctors drove it inwards, so I think
it may be due to that.”

They went to see the invalid. Fully grown up, big and tall, but
ugly like her mother, with the same little eyes and disproportionate
breadth of the lower part of the face, lying with her hair in
disorder, muffled up to the chin, she made upon Korolyov at the
first minute the impression of a poor, destitute creature, sheltered
and cared for here out of charity, and he could hardly believe that
this was the heiress of the five huge buildings.

“I am the doctor come to see you,” said Korolyov. “Good evening.”

He mentioned his name and pressed her hand, a large, cold, ugly
hand; she sat up, and, evidently accustomed to doctors, let herself
be sounded, without showing the least concern that her shoulders
and chest were uncovered.

“I have palpitations of the heart,” she said, “It was so awful all
night. . . . I almost died of fright! Do give me something.”

“I will, I will; don’t worry yourself.”

Korolyov examined her and shrugged his shoulders.

“The heart is all right,” he said; “it’s all going on satisfactorily;
everything is in good order. Your nerves must have been playing
pranks a little, but that’s so common. The attack is over by now,
one must suppose; lie down and go to sleep.”

At that moment a lamp was brought into the bed-room. The patient
screwed up her eyes at the light, then suddenly put her hands to
her head and broke into sobs. And the impression of a destitute,
ugly creature vanished, and Korolyov no longer noticed the little
eyes or the heavy development of the lower part of the face. He saw
a soft, suffering expression which was intelligent and touching:
she seemed to him altogether graceful, feminine, and simple; and
he longed to soothe her, not with drugs, not with advice, but with
simple, kindly words. Her mother put her arms round her head and
hugged her. What despair, what grief was in the old woman’s face!
She, her mother, had reared her and brought her up, spared nothing,
and devoted her whole life to having her daughter taught French,
dancing, music: had engaged a dozen teachers for her; had consulted
the best doctors, kept a governess. And now she could not make out
the reason of these tears, why there was all this misery, she could
not understand, and was bewildered; and she had a guilty, agitated,
despairing expression, as though she had omitted something very
important, had left something undone, had neglected to call in
somebody–and whom, she did not know.

“Lizanka, you are crying again . . . again,” she said, hugging her
daughter to her. “My own, my darling, my child, tell me what it is!
Have pity on me! Tell me.”

Both wept bitterly. Korolyov sat down on the side of the bed and
took Liza’s hand.

“Come, give over; it’s no use crying,” he said kindly. “Why, there
is nothing in the world that is worth those tears. Come, we won’t
cry; that’s no good. . . .”

And inwardly he thought:

“It’s high time she was married. . . .”

“Our doctor at the factory gave her kalibromati,” said the governess,
“but I notice it only makes her worse. I should have thought that
if she is given anything for the heart it ought to be drops. . . .
I forget the name. . . . Convallaria, isn’t it?”

And there followed all sorts of details. She interrupted the doctor,
preventing his speaking, and there was a look of effort on her face,
as though she supposed that, as the woman of most education in the
house, she was duty bound to keep up a conversation with the doctor,
and on no other subject but medicine.

Korolyov felt bored.

“I find nothing special the matter,” he said, addressing the mother
as he went out of the bedroom. “If your daughter is being attended
by the factory doctor, let him go on attending her. The treatment
so far has been perfectly correct, and I see no reason for changing
your doctor. Why change? It’s such an ordinary trouble; there’s
nothing seriously wrong.”

He spoke deliberately as he put on his gloves, while Madame Lyalikov
stood without moving, and looked at him with her tearful eyes.

“I have half an hour to catch the ten o’clock train,” he said. “I
hope I am not too late.”

“And can’t you stay?” she asked, and tears trickled down her cheeks
again. “I am ashamed to trouble you, but if you would be so good
. . . . For God’s sake,” she went on in an undertone, glancing towards
the door, “do stay to-night with us! She is all I have . . . my
only daughter. . . . She frightened me last night; I can’t get over
it. . . . Don’t go away, for goodness’ sake! . . .”

He wanted to tell her that he had a great deal of work in Moscow,
that his family were expecting him home; it was disagreeable to him
to spend the evening and the whole night in a strange house quite
needlessly; but he looked at her face, heaved a sigh, and began
taking off his gloves without a word.

All the lamps and candles were lighted in his honour in the
drawing-room and the dining-room. He sat down at the piano and began
turning over the music. Then he looked at the pictures on the walls,
at the portraits. The pictures, oil-paintings in gold frames, were
views of the Crimea–a stormy sea with a ship, a Catholic monk
with a wineglass; they were all dull, smooth daubs, with no trace
of talent in them. There was not a single good-looking face among
the portraits, nothing but broad cheekbones and astonished-looking
eyes. Lyalikov, Liza’s father, had a low forehead and a self-satisfied
expression; his uniform sat like a sack on his bulky plebeian figure;
on his breast was a medal and a Red Cross Badge. There was little
sign of culture, and the luxury was senseless and haphazard, and
was as ill fitting as that uniform. The floors irritated him with
their brilliant polish, the lustres on the chandelier irritated
him, and he was reminded for some reason of the story of the merchant
who used to go to the baths with a medal on his neck. . . .

He heard a whispering in the entry; some one was softly snoring.
And suddenly from outside came harsh, abrupt, metallic sounds, such
as Korolyov had never heard before, and which he did not understand
now; they roused strange, unpleasant echoes in his soul.

“I believe nothing would induce me to remain here to live . . .”
he thought, and went back to the music-books again.

“Doctor, please come to supper!” the governess called him in a low
voice.

He went into supper. The table was large and laid with a vast number
of dishes and wines, but there were only two to supper: himself and
Christina Dmitryevna. She drank Madeira, ate rapidly, and talked,
looking at him through her pince-nez:

“Our workpeople are very contented. We have performances at the
factory every winter; the workpeople act themselves. They have
lectures with a magic lantern, a splendid tea-room, and everything
they want. They are very much attached to us, and when they heard
that Lizanka was worse they had a service sung for her. Though they
have no education, they have their feelings, too.”

“It looks as though you have no man in the house at all,” said
Korolyov.

“Not one. Pyotr Nikanoritch died a year and a half ago, and left
us alone. And so there are the three of us. In the summer we live
here, and in winter we live in Moscow, in Polianka. I have been
living with them for eleven years–as one of the family.”

At supper they served sterlet, chicken rissoles, and stewed fruit;
the wines were expensive French wines.

“Please don’t stand on ceremony, doctor,” said Christina Dmitryevna,
eating and wiping her mouth with her fist, and it was evident she
found her life here exceedingly pleasant. “Please have some more.”

After supper the doctor was shown to his room, where a bed had been
made up for him, but he did not feel sleepy. The room was stuffy
and it smelt of paint; he put on his coat and went out.

It was cool in the open air; there was already a glimmer of dawn,
and all the five blocks of buildings, with their tall chimneys,
barracks, and warehouses, were distinctly outlined against the damp
air. As it was a holiday, they were not working, and the windows
were dark, and in only one of the buildings was there a furnace
burning; two windows were crimson, and fire mixed with smoke came
from time to time from the chimney. Far away beyond the yard the
frogs were croaking and the nightingales singing.

Looking at the factory buildings and the barracks, where the
workpeople were asleep, he thought again what he always thought
when he saw a factory. They may have performances for the workpeople,
magic lanterns, factory doctors, and improvements of all sorts,
but, all the same, the workpeople he had met that day on his way
from the station did not look in any way different from those he
had known long ago in his childhood, before there were factory
performances and improvements. As a doctor accustomed to judging
correctly of chronic complaints, the radical cause of which was
incomprehensible and incurable, he looked upon factories as something
baffling, the cause of which also was obscure and not removable,
and all the improvements in the life of the factory hands he looked
upon not as superfluous, but as comparable with the treatment of
incurable illnesses.

“There is something baffling in it, of course . . .” he thought,
looking at the crimson windows. “Fifteen hundred or two thousand
workpeople are working without rest in unhealthy surroundings,
making bad cotton goods, living on the verge of starvation, and
only waking from this nightmare at rare intervals in the tavern; a
hundred people act as overseers, and the whole life of that hundred
is spent in imposing fines, in abuse, in injustice, and only two
or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don’t work
at all, and despise the wretched cotton. But what are the profits,
and how do they enjoy them? Madame Lyalikov and her daughter are
unhappy–it makes one wretched to look at them; the only one who
enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, a stupid, middle-aged
maiden lady in pince-nez. And so it appears that all these five
blocks of buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in the
Eastern markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet
and drink Madeira.”

Suddenly there came a strange noise, the same sound Korolyov had
heard before supper. Some one was striking on a sheet of metal near
one of the buildings; he struck a note, and then at once checked
the vibrations, so that short, abrupt, discordant sounds were
produced, rather like “Dair . . . dair . . . dair. . . .” Then there
was half a minute of stillness, and from another building there
came sounds equally abrupt and unpleasant, lower bass notes: “Drin
. . . drin . . . drin. . .” Eleven times. Evidently it was the
watchman striking the hour. Near the third building he heard: “Zhuk
. . . zhuk . . . zhuk. . . .” And so near all the buildings, and
then behind the barracks and beyond the gates. And in the stillness
of the night it seemed as though these sounds were uttered by a
monster with crimson eyes–the devil himself, who controlled the
owners and the work-people alike, and was deceiving both.

Korolyov went out of the yard into the open country.

“Who goes there?” some one called to him at the gates in an abrupt
voice.

“It’s just like being in prison,” he thought, and made no answer.

Here the nightingales and the frogs could be heard more distinctly,
and one could feel it was a night in May. From the station came the
noise of a train; somewhere in the distance drowsy cocks were
crowing; but, all the same, the night was still, the world was
sleeping tranquilly. In a field not far from the factory there could
be seen the framework of a house and heaps of building material:

Korolyov sat down on the planks and went on thinking.

“The only person who feels happy here is the governess, and the
factory hands are working for her gratification. But that’s only
apparent: she is only the figurehead. The real person, for whom
everything is being done, is the devil.”

And he thought about the devil, in whom he did not believe, and he
looked round at the two windows where the fires were gleaming. It
seemed to him that out of those crimson eyes the devil himself was
looking at him–that unknown force that had created the mutual
relation of the strong and the weak, that coarse blunder which one
could never correct. The strong must hinder the weak from living
–such was the law of Nature; but only in a newspaper article or
in a school book was that intelligible and easily accepted. In the
hotchpotch which was everyday life, in the tangle of trivialities
out of which human relations were woven, it was no longer a law,
but a logical absurdity, when the strong and the weak were both
equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting
to some directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from
man.

So thought Korolyov, sitting on the planks, and little by little
he was possessed by a feeling that this unknown and mysterious force
was really close by and looking at him. Meanwhile the east was
growing paler, time passed rapidly; when there was not a soul
anywhere near, as though everything were dead, the five buildings
and their chimneys against the grey background of the dawn had a
peculiar look–not the same as by day; one forgot altogether that
inside there were steam motors, electricity, telephones, and kept
thinking of lake-dwellings, of the Stone Age, feeling the presence
of a crude, unconscious force. . . .

And again there came the sound: “Dair . . . dair . . . dair . . .
dair . . .” twelve times. Then there was stillness, stillness for
half a minute, and at the other end of the yard there rang out.

“Drin . . . drin . . . drin. . . .”

“Horribly disagreeable,” thought Korolyov.

“Zhuk . . . zhuk . . .” there resounded from a third place, abruptly,
sharply, as though with annoyance–”Zhuk . . . zhuk. . . .”

And it took four minutes to strike twelve. Then there was a hush;
and again it seemed as though everything were dead.

Korolyov sat a little longer, then went to the house, but sat up
for a good while longer. In the adjoining rooms there was whispering,
there was a sound of shuffling slippers and bare feet.

“Is she having another attack?” thought Korolyov.

He went out to have a look at the patient. By now it was quite light
in the rooms, and a faint glimmer of sunlight, piercing through the
morning mist, quivered on the floor and on the wall of the drawing-room.
The door of Liza’s room was open, and she was sitting in a low chair
beside her bed, with her hair down, wearing a dressing-gown and
wrapped in a shawl. The blinds were down on the windows.

“How do you feel?” asked Korolyov.

“Well, thank you.”

He touched her pulse, then straightened her hair, that had fallen
over her forehead.

“You are not asleep,” he said. “It’s beautiful weather outside.
It’s spring. The nightingales are singing, and you sit in the dark
and think of something.”

She listened and looked into his face; her eyes were sorrowful and
intelligent, and it was evident she wanted to say something to him.

“Does this happen to you often?” he said.

She moved her lips, and answered:

“Often, I feel wretched almost every night.”

At that moment the watchman in the yard began striking two o’clock.
They heard: “Dair . . . dair . . .” and she shuddered.

“Do those knockings worry you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Everything here worries me,” she answered, and
pondered. “Everything worries me. I hear sympathy in your voice;
it seemed to me as soon as I saw you that I could tell you all about
it.”

“Tell me, I beg you.”

“I want to tell you of my opinion. It seems to me that I have no
illness, but that I am weary and frightened, because it is bound
to be so and cannot be otherwise. Even the healthiest person can’t
help being uneasy if, for instance, a robber is moving about under
his window. I am constantly being doctored,” she went on, looking
at her knees, and she gave a shy smile. “I am very grateful, of
course, and I do not deny that the treatment is a benefit; but I
should like to talk, not with a doctor, but with some intimate
friend who would understand me and would convince me that I was
right or wrong.”

“Have you no friends?” asked Korolyov.

“I am lonely. I have a mother; I love her, but, all the same, I am
lonely. That’s how it happens to be. . . . Lonely people read a
great deal, but say little and hear little. Life for them is
mysterious; they are mystics and often see the devil where he is
not. Lermontov’s Tamara was lonely and she saw the devil.”

“Do you read a great deal?”

“Yes. You see, my whole time is free from morning till night. I
read by day, and by night my head is empty; instead of thoughts
there are shadows in it.”

“Do you see anything at night?” asked Korolyov.

“No, but I feel. . . .”

She smiled again, raised her eyes to the doctor, and looked at him
so sorrowfully, so intelligently; and it seemed to him that she
trusted him, and that she wanted to speak frankly to him, and that
she thought the same as he did. But she was silent, perhaps waiting
for him to speak.

And he knew what to say to her. It was clear to him that she needed
as quickly as possible to give up the five buildings and the million
if she had it–to leave that devil that looked out at night; it
was clear to him, too, that she thought so herself, and was only
waiting for some one she trusted to confirm her.

But he did not know how to say it. How? One is shy of asking men
under sentence what they have been sentenced for; and in the same
way it is awkward to ask very rich people what they want so much
money for, why they make such a poor use of their wealth, why they
don’t give it up, even when they see in it their unhappiness; and
if they begin a conversation about it themselves, it is usually
embarrassing, awkward, and long.

“How is one to say it?” Korolyov wondered. “And is it necessary to
speak?”

And he said what he meant in a roundabout way:

“You in the position of a factory owner and a wealthy heiress are
dissatisfied; you don’t believe in your right to it; and here now
you can’t sleep. That, of course, is better than if you were
satisfied, slept soundly, and thought everything was satisfactory.
Your sleeplessness does you credit; in any case, it is a good sign.
In reality, such a conversation as this between us now would have
been unthinkable for our parents. At night they did not talk, but
slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly, are restless, but
talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle whether we are
right or not. For our children or grandchildren that question–
whether they are right or not–will have been settled. Things
will be clearer for them than for us. Life will be good in fifty
years’ time; it’s only a pity we shall not last out till then. It
would be interesting to have a peep at it.”

“What will our children and grandchildren do?” asked Liza.

“I don’t know. . . . I suppose they will throw it all up and go
away.”

“Go where?”

“Where? . . . Why, where they like,” said Korolyov; and he laughed.
“There are lots of places a good, intelligent person can go to.”

He glanced at his watch.

“The sun has risen, though,” he said. “It is time you were asleep.
Undress and sleep soundly. Very glad to have made your acquaintance,”
he went on, pressing her hand. “You are a good, interesting woman.
Good-night!”

He went to his room and went to bed.

In the morning when the carriage was brought round they all came
out on to the steps to see him off. Liza, pale and exhausted, was
in a white dress as though for a holiday, with a flower in her hair;
she looked at him, as yesterday, sorrowfully and intelligently,
smiled and talked, and all with an expression as though she wanted
to tell him something special, important–him alone. They could
hear the larks trilling and the church bells pealing. The windows
in the factory buildings were sparkling gaily, and, driving across
the yard and afterwards along the road to the station, Korolyov
thought neither of the workpeople nor of lake dwellings, nor of the
devil, but thought of the time, perhaps close at hand, when life
would be as bright and joyous as that still Sunday morning; and he
thought how pleasant it was on such a morning in the spring to drive
with three horses in a good carriage, and to bask in the sunshine.

Two peasant constables — one a stubby, black-bearded individual
with such exceptionally short legs that if you looked at him from
behind it seemed as though his legs began much lower down than in
other people; the other, long, thin, and straight as a stick,
with a scanty beard of dark reddish colour — were escorting to
the district town a tramp who refused to remember his name. The
first waddled along, looking from side to side, chewing now a
straw, now his own sleeve, slapping himself on the haunches and
humming, and altogether had a careless and frivolous air; the
other, in spite of his lean face and narrow shoulders, looked
solid, grave, and substantial; in the lines and expression of his
whole figure he was like the priests among the Old Believers, or
the warriors who are painted on old-fashioned ikons. “For his
wisdom God had added to his forehead” — that is, he was bald –
which increased the resemblance referred to. The first was called
Andrey Ptaha, the second Nikandr Sapozhnikov.

The man they were escorting did not in the least correspond with
the conception everyone has of a tramp. He was a frail little
man, weak and sickly-looking, with small, colourless, and
extremely indefinite features. His eyebrows were scanty, his
expression mild and submissive; he had scarcely a trace of a
moustache, though he was over thirty. He walked along timidly,
bent forward, with his hands thrust into his sleeves. The collar
of his shabby cloth overcoat, which did not look like a
peasant’s, was turned up to the very brim of his cap, so that
only his little red nose ventured to peep out into the light of
day. He spoke in an ingratiating tenor, continually coughing. It
was very, very difficult to believe that he was a tramp
concealing his surname. He was more like an unsuccessful priest’s
son, stricken by God and reduced to beggary; a clerk discharged
for drunkenness; a merchant’s son or nephew who had tried his
feeble powers in a theatrical career, and was now going home to
play the last act in the parable of the prodigal son; perhaps,
judging by the dull patience with which he struggled with the
hopeless autumn mud, he might have been a fanatical monk,
wandering from one Russian monastery to another, continually
seeking “a peaceful life, free from sin,” and not finding it. . .
.

The travellers had been a long while on their way, but they
seemed to be always on the same small patch of ground. In front
of them there stretched thirty feet of muddy black-brown mud,
behind them the same, and wherever one looked further, an
impenetrable wall of white fog. They went on and on, but the
ground remained the same, the wall was no nearer, and the patch
on which they walked seemed still the same patch. They got a
glimpse of a white, clumsy-looking stone, a small ravine, or a
bundle of hay dropped by a passer-by, the brief glimmer of a
great muddy puddle, or, suddenly, a shadow with vague outlines
would come into view ahead of them; the nearer they got to it the
smaller and darker it became; nearer still, and there stood up
before the wayfarers a slanting milestone with the number rubbed
off, or a wretched birch-tree drenched and bare like a wayside
beggar. The birch-tree would whisper something with what remained
of its yellow leaves, one leaf would break off and float lazily
to the ground. . . . And then again fog, mud, the brown grass at
the edges of the road. On the grass hung dingy, unfriendly tears.
They were not the tears of soft joy such as the earth weeps at
welcoming the summer sun and parting from it, and such as she
gives to drink at dawn to the corncrakes, quails, and graceful,
long-beaked crested snipes. The travellers’ feet stuck in the
heavy, clinging mud. Every step cost an effort.

Andrey Ptaha was somewhat excited. He kept looking round at the
tramp and trying to understand how a live, sober man could fail
to remember his name.

“You are an orthodox Christian, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” the tramp answered mildly.

“H’m. . . then you’ve been christened?”

“Why, to be sure! I’m not a Turk. I go to church and to the
sacrament, and do not eat meat when it is forbidden. And I
observe my religious duties punctually. . . .”

“Well, what are you called, then?”

“Call me what you like, good man.”

Ptaha shrugged his shoulders and slapped himself on the haunches
in extreme perplexity. The other constable, Nikandr Sapozhnikov,
maintained a staid silence. He was not so naive as Ptaha, and
apparently knew very well the reasons which might induce an
orthodox Christian to conceal his name from other people. His
expressive face was cold and stern. He walked apart and did not
condescend to idle chatter with his companions, but, as it were,
tried to show everyone, even the fog, his sedateness and
discretion.

“God knows what to make of you,” Ptaha persisted in addressing
the tramp. “Peasant you are not, and gentleman you are not, but
some sort of a thing between. . . . The other day I was washing a
sieve in the pond and caught a reptile — see, as long as a
finger, with gills and a tail. The first minute I thought it was
a fish, then I looked — and, blow it! if it hadn’t paws. It was
not a fish, it was a viper, and the deuce only knows what it was.
. . . So that’s like you. . . . What’s your calling?”

“I am a peasant and of peasant family,” sighed the tramp. “My
mamma was a house serf. I don’t look like a peasant, that’s true,
for such has been my lot, good man. My mamma was a nurse with the
gentry, and had every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and
blood, I lived with her in the master’s house. She petted and
spoiled me, and did her best to take me out of my humble class
and make a gentleman of me. I slept in a bed, every day I ate a
real dinner, I wore breeches and shoes like a gentleman’s child.
What my mamma ate I was fed on, too; they gave her stuffs as a
present, and she dressed me up in them. . . . We lived well! I
ate so many sweets and cakes in my childish years that if they
could be sold now it would be enough to buy a goo d horse. Mamma
taught me to read and write, she instilled the fear of God in me
from my earliest years, and she so trained me that now I can’t
bring myself to utter an unrefined peasant word. And I don’t
drink vodka, my lad, and am neat in my dress, and know how to
behave with decorum in good society. If she is still living, God
give her health; and if she is dead, then, O Lord, give her soul
peace in Thy Kingdom, wherein the just are at rest.”

The tramp bared his head with the scanty hair standing up like a
brush on it, turned his eyes upward and crossed himself twice.

“Grant her, O Lord, a verdant and peaceful resting-place,” he
said in a drawling voice, more like an old woman’s than a man’s.
“Teach Thy servant Xenia Thy justifications, O Lord! If it had
not been for my beloved mamma I should have been a peasant with
no sort of understanding! Now, young man, ask me about anything
and I understand it all: the holy Scriptures and profane
writings, and every prayer and catechism. I live according to the
Scriptures. . . . I don’t injure anyone, I keep my flesh in
purity and continence, I observe the fasts, I eat at fitting
times. Another man will take no pleasure in anything but vodka
and lewd talk, but when I have time I sit in a corner and read a
book. I read and I weep and weep.”

“What do you weep for?”

“They write so patheticallyl For some books one gives but a
five-kopeck piece, and yet one weeps and sighs exceedingly over
it.”

“Is your father dead?” asked Ptaha.

“I don’t know, good man. I don’t know my parent; it is no use
concealing it. I judge that I was mamma’s illegitimate son. My
mamma lived all her life with the gentry, and did not want to
marry a simple peasant. . . .”

“And so she fell into the master’s hands,” laughed Ptaha.

“She did transgress, that’s true. She was pious, God-fearing, but
she did not keep her maiden purity. It is a sin, of course, a
great sin, there’s no doubt about it, but to make up for it there
is, maybe, noble blood in me. Maybe I am only a peasant by class,
but in nature a noble gentleman.”

The “noble gentleman” uttered all this in a soft, sugary tenor,
wrinkling up his narrow forehead and emitting creaking sounds
from his red, frozen little nose. Ptaha listened and looked
askance at him in wonder, continually shrugging his shoulders.

After going nearly five miles the constables and the tramp sat
down on a mound to rest.

“Even a dog knows his name,” Ptaha muttered. “My name is
Andryushka, his is Nikandr; every man has his holy name, and it
can’t be forgotten. Nohow.”

“Who has any need to know my name?” sighed the tramp, leaning his
cheek on his fist. “And what advantage would it be to me if they
did know it? If I were allowed to go where I would — but it
would only make things worse. I know the law, Christian brothers.
Now I am a tramp who doesn’t remember his name, and it’s the very
most if they send me to Eastern Siberia and give me thirty or
forty lashes; but if I were to tell them my real name and
description they would send me back to hard labour, I know!”

“Why, have you been a convict?”

“I have, dear friend. For four years I went about with my head
shaved and fetters on my legs.”

“What for?”

“For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or
so, my mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid
into my master’s glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the
storeroom, numbers of them; it was easy to make a mistake over
them.”

The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:

“She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man’s soul is a
slumbering forest! It may have been an accident, or maybe she
could not endure the affront of seeing the master prefer another
servant. . . . Perhaps she put it in on purpose, God knows! I was
young then, and did not understand it all . . . now I remember
that our master had taken another mistress and mamma was greatly
disturbed. Our trial lasted nearly two years. . . . Mamma was
condemned to penal servitude for twenty years, and I, on account
of my youth, only to seven.”

“And why were you sentenced?”

“As an accomplice. I handed the glass to the master. That was
always the custom. Mamma prepared the soda and I handed it to
him. Only I tell you all this as a Christian, brothers, as I
would say it before God. Don’t you tell anybody. . . .”

“Oh, nobody’s going to ask us,” said Ptaha. “So you’ve run away
from prison, have you?”

“I have, dear friend. Fourteen of us ran away. Some folks, God
bless them! ran away and took me with them. Now you tell me, on
your conscience, good man, what reason have I to disclose my
name? They will send me back to penal servitude, you know! And I
am not fit for penal servitude! I am a refined man in delicate
health. I like to sleep and eat in cleanliness. When I pray to
God I like to light a little lamp or a candle, and not to have a
noise around me. When I bow down to the ground I like the floor
not to be dirty or spat upon. And I bow down forty times every
morning and evening, praying for mamma.”

The tramp took off his cap and crossed himself.

“And let them send me to Eastern Siberia,” he said; “I am not
afraid of that.”

“Surely that’s no better?”

“It is quite a different thing. In penal servitude you are like a
crab in a basket: crowding, crushing, jostling, there’s no room
to breathe; it’s downright hell — such hell, may the Queen of
Heaven keep us from it! You are a robber and treated like a
robber — worse than any dog. You can’t sleep, you can’t eat or
even say your prayers. But it’s not like that in a settlement. In
a settlement I shall be a member of a commune like other people.
The authorities are bound by law to give me my share . . . ye-es!
They say the land costs nothing, no more than snow; you can take
what you like! They will give me corn land and building land and
garden. . . . I shall plough my fields like other people, sow
seed. I shall have cattle and stock of all sorts, bees, sheep,
and dogs. . . . A Siberian cat, that rats and mice may not devour
my goods. . . . I will put up a house, I shall buy ikons. . . .
Please God, I’ll get married, I shall have children. . . .”

The tramp muttered and looked, not at his listeners, but away
into the distance. Naive as his dreams were, they were uttered in
such a genuine and heartfelt tone that it was difficult not to
believe in them. The tramp’s little mouth was screwed up in a
smile. His eyes and little nose and his whole face were fixed and
blank with blissful anticipation of happiness in the distant
future. The constables listened and looked at him gravely, not
without sympathy. They, too, believed in his dreams.

“I am not afraid of Siberia,” the tramp went on muttering.
“Siberia is just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as
here. They are just as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only
there is more freedom there and people are better off. Everything
is better there. Take the rivers there, for instance; they are
far better than those here. There’s no end of fish; and all sorts
of wild fowl. And my greatest pleasure, brothers, is fishing.
Give me no bread to eat, but let me sit with a fishhook. Yes,
indeed! I fish with a hook and with a wire line, and set creels,
and when the ice comes I catch with a net. I am not strong to
draw up the net, so I shall hire a man for five kopecks. And,
Lord, what a pleasure it is! You catch an eel-pout or a roach of
some sort and are as pleased as though you had met your own
brother. And would you believe it, there’s a special art for
every fish: you catch one with a live bait, you catch another
with a grub, the third with a frog or a grasshopper. One has to
understand all that, of course! For example, take the eel-pout.
It is not a delicate fish — it will take a perch; and a pike
loves a gudgeon, the _shilishper_ likes a butterfly. If you fish
for a roach in a rapid stream there is no greater pleasure. You
throw the line of seventy feet without lead, with a butterfly or
a beetle, so that the bait floats on the surface; you stand in
the water without your trousers and let it go with the current,
and tug! the roach pulls at it! Only you have got to be artful
that he doesn’t carry off the b ait, the damned rascal. As soon
as he tugs at your line you must whip it up; it’s no good
waiting. It’s wonderful what a lot of fish I’ve caught in my
time. When we were running away the other convicts would sleep in
the forest; I could not sleep, but I was off to the river. The
rivers there are wide and rapid, the banks are steep — awfully!
It’s all slumbering forests on the bank. The trees are so tall
that if you look to the top it makes you dizzy. Every pine would
be worth ten roubles by the prices here.”

In the overwhelming rush of his fancies, of artistic images of
the past and sweet presentiments of happiness in the future, the
poor wretch sank into silence, merely moving his lips as though
whispering to himself. The vacant, blissful smile never left his
lips. The constables were silent. They were pondering with bent
heads. In the autumn stillness, when the cold, sullen mist that
rises from the earth lies like a weight on the heart, when it
stands like a prison wall before the eyes, and reminds man of the
limitation of his freedom, it is sweet to think of the broad,
rapid rivers, with steep banks wild and luxuriant, of the
impenetrable forests, of the boundless steppes. Slowly and
quietly the fancy pictures how early in the morning, before the
flush of dawn has left the sky, a man makes his way along the
steep deserted bank like a tiny speck: the ancient, mast-like
pines rise up in terraces on both sides of the torrent, gaze
sternly at the free man and murmur menacingly; rocks, huge
stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is strong in body
and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees, nor
stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which
repeats the sound of every footstep that he takes.

The peasants called up a picture of a free life such as they had
never lived; whether they vaguely recalled the images of stories
heard long ago or whether notions of a free life had been handed
down to them with their flesh and blood from far-off free
ancestors, God knows!

The first to break the silence was Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who had
not till then let fall a single word. Whether he envied the
tramp’s transparent happiness, or whether he felt in his heart
that dreams of happiness were out of keeping with the grey fog
and the dirty brown mud — anyway, he looked sternly at the tramp
and said:

“It’s all very well, to be sure, only you won’t reach those
plenteous regions, brother. How could you? Before you’d gone two
hundred miles you’d give up your soul to God. Just look what a
weakling you are! Here you’ve hardly gone five miles and you
can’t get your breath.”

The tramp turned slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile
vanished from his face. He looked with a scared and guilty air at
the peasant’s staid face, apparently remembered something, and
bent his head. A silence followed again. . . . All three were
pondering. The peasants were racking their brains in the effort
to grasp in their imagination what can be grasped by none but God
– that is, the vast expanse dividing them from the land of
freedom. Into the tramp’s mind thronged clear and distinct
pictures more terrible than that expanse. Before him rose vividly
the picture of the long legal delays and procrastinations, the
temporary and permanent prisons, the convict boats, the wearisome
stoppages on the way, the frozen winters, illnesses, deaths of
companions. . . .

The tramp blinked guiltily, wiped the tiny drops of sweat from
his forehead with his sleeve, drew a deep breath as though he had
just leapt out of a very hot bath, then wiped his forehead with
the other sleeve and looked round fearfully.

“That’s true; you won’t get there!” Ptaha agreed. “You are not
much of a walker! Look at you — nothing but skin and bone!
You’ll die, brother!”

“Of course he’ll die! What could he do?” said Nikandr. “He’s fit
for the hospital now. . . . For sure!”

The man who had forgotten his name looked at the stern,
unconcerned faces of his sinister companions, and without taking
off his cap, hurriedly crossed himself, staring with wide-open
eyes. . . . He trembled, his head shook, and he began twitching
all over, like a caterpillar when it is stepped upon. . . .

“Well, it’s time to go,” said Nikandr, getting up; “we’ve had a
rest.”

A minute later they were stepping along the muddy road. The tramp
was more bent than ever, and he thrust his hands further up his
sleeves. Ptaha was silent.

I was standing on the bank of the River Goltva, waiting for the
ferry-boat from the other side. At ordinary times the Goltva is a
humble stream of moderate size, silent and pensive, gently glimmering
from behind thick reeds; but now a regular lake lay stretched out
before me. The waters of spring, running riot, had overflowed both
banks and flooded both sides of the river for a long distance,
submerging vegetable gardens, hayfields and marshes, so that it was
no unusual thing to meet poplars and bushes sticking out above the
surface of the water and looking in the darkness like grim solitary
crags.

The weather seemed to me magnificent. It was dark, yet I could see
the trees, the water and the people. . . . The world was lighted
by the stars, which were scattered thickly all over the sky. I don’t
remember ever seeing so many stars. Literally one could not have
put a finger in between them. There were some as big as a goose’s
egg, others tiny as hempseed. . . . They had come out for the
festival procession, every one of them, little and big, washed,
renewed and joyful, and everyone of them was softly twinkling its
beams. The sky was reflected in the water; the stars were bathing
in its dark depths and trembling with the quivering eddies. The air
was warm and still. . . . Here and there, far away on the further
bank in the impenetrable darkness, several bright red lights were
gleaming. . . .

A couple of paces from me I saw the dark silhouette of a peasant
in a high hat, with a thick knotted stick in his hand.

“How long the ferry-boat is in coming!” I said.

“It is time it was here,” the silhouette answered.

“You are waiting for the ferry-boat, too?”

“No I am not,” yawned the peasant–”I am waiting for the illumination.
I should have gone, but to tell you the truth, I haven’t the five
kopecks for the ferry.”

“I’ll give you the five kopecks.”

“No; I humbly thank you. . . . With that five kopecks put up a
candle for me over there in the monastery. . . . That will be more
interesting, and I will stand here. What can it mean, no ferry-boat,
as though it had sunk in the water!”

The peasant went up to the water’s edge, took the rope in his hands,
and shouted; “Ieronim! Ieron–im!”

As though in answer to his shout, the slow peal of a great bell
floated across from the further bank. The note was deep and low,
as from the thickest string of a double bass; it seemed as though
the darkness itself had hoarsely uttered it. At once there was the
sound of a cannon shot. It rolled away in the darkness and ended
somewhere in the far distance behind me. The peasant took off his
hat and crossed himself.

‘”Christ is risen,” he said.

Before the vibrations of the first peal of the bell had time to die
away in the air a second sounded, after it at once a third, and the
darkness was filled with an unbroken quivering clamour. Near the
red lights fresh lights flashed, and all began moving together and
twinkling restlessly.

“Ieron–im!” we heard a hollow prolonged shout.

“They are shouting from the other bank,” said the peasant, “so there
is no ferry there either. Our Ieronim has gone to sleep.”

The lights and the velvety chimes of the bell drew one towards them.
. . . I was already beginning to lose patience and grow anxious,
but behold at last, staring into the dark distance, I saw the outline
of something very much like a gibbet. It was the long-expected
ferry. It moved towards us with such deliberation that if it had
not been that its lines grew gradually more definite, one might
have supposed that it was standing still or moving to the other
bank.

“Make haste! Ieronim!” shouted my peasant. “The gentleman’s tired
of waiting!”

The ferry crawled to the bank, gave a lurch and stopped with a
creak. A tall man in a monk’s cassock and a conical cap stood on
it, holding the rope.

“Why have you been so long?” I asked jumping upon the ferry.

“Forgive me, for Christ’s sake,” Ieronim answered gently. “Is there
no one else?”

“No one. . . .”

Ieronim took hold of the rope in both hands, bent himself to the
figure of a mark of interrogation, and gasped. The ferry-boat creaked
and gave a lurch. The outline of the peasant in the high hat began
slowly retreating from me–so the ferry was moving off. Ieronim
soon drew himself up and began working with one hand only. We were
silent, gazing towards the bank to which we were floating. There
the illumination for which the peasant was waiting had begun. At
the water’s edge barrels of tar were flaring like huge camp fires.
Their reflections, crimson as the rising moon, crept to meet us in
long broad streaks. The burning barrels lighted up their own smoke
and the long shadows of men flitting about the fire; but further
to one side and behind them from where the velvety chime floated
there was still the same unbroken black gloom. All at once, cleaving
the darkness, a rocket zigzagged in a golden ribbon up the sky; it
described an arc and, as though broken to pieces against the sky,
was scattered crackling into sparks. There was a roar from the bank
like a far-away hurrah.

“How beautiful!” I said.

“Beautiful beyond words!” sighed Ieronim. “Such a night, sir! Another
time one would pay no attention to the fireworks, but to-day one
rejoices in every vanity. Where do you come from?”

I told him where I came from.

“To be sure . . . a joyful day to-day. . . .” Ieronim went on in a
weak sighing tenor like the voice of a convalescent. “The sky is
rejoicing and the earth and what is under the earth. All the creatures
are keeping holiday. Only tell me kind sir, why, even in the time
of great rejoicing, a man cannot forget his sorrows?”

I fancied that this unexpected question was to draw me into one of
those endless religious conversations which bored and idle monks
are so fond of. I was not disposed to talk much, and so I only
asked:

“What sorrows have you, father?”

“As a rule only the same as all men, kind sir, but to-day a special
sorrow has happened in the monastery: at mass, during the reading
of the Bible, the monk and deacon Nikolay died.”

“Well, it’s God’s will!” I said, falling into the monastic tone.
“We must all die. To my mind, you ought to rejoice indeed. . . .
They say if anyone dies at Easter he goes straight to the kingdom
of heaven.”

“That’s true.”

We sank into silence. The figure of the peasant in the high hat
melted into the lines of the bank. The tar barrels were flaring up
more and more.

“The Holy Scripture points clearly to the vanity of sorrow and so
does reflection,” said Ieronim, breaking the silence, “but why does
the heart grieve and refuse to listen to reason? Why does one want
to weep bitterly?”

Ieronim shrugged his shoulders, turned to me and said quickly:

“If I died, or anyone else, it would not be worth notice perhaps;
but, you see, Nikolay is dead! No one else but Nikolay! Indeed,
it’s hard to believe that he is no more! I stand here on my ferry-boat
and every minute I keep fancying that he will lift up his voice
from the bank. He always used to come to the bank and call to me
that I might not be afraid on the ferry. He used to get up from his
bed at night on purpose for that. He was a kind soul. My God! how
kindly and gracious! Many a mother is not so good to her child as
Nikolay was to me! Lord, save his soul!”

Ieronim took hold of the rope, but turned to me again at once.

“And such a lofty intelligence, your honour,” he said in a vibrating
voice. “Such a sweet and harmonious tongue! Just as they will sing
immediately at early matins: ‘Oh lovely! oh sweet is Thy Voice!’
Besides all other human qualities, he had, too, an extraordinary
gift!”

“What gift?” I asked.

The monk scrutinized me, and as though he had convinced himself
that he could trust me with a secret, he laughed good-humouredly.

“He had a gift for writing hymns of praise,” he said. “It was a
marvel, sir; you couldn’t call it anything else! You would be amazed
if I tell you about it. Our Father Archimandrite comes from Moscow,
the Father Sub-Prior studied at the Kazan academy, we have wise
monks and elders, but, would you believe it, no one could write
them; while Nikolay, a simple monk, a deacon, had not studied
anywhere, and had not even any outer appearance of it, but he wrote
them! A marvel! A real marvel!” Ieronim clasped his hands and,
completely forgetting the rope, went on eagerly:

“The Father Sub-Prior has great difficulty in composing sermons;
when he wrote the history of the monastery he worried all the
brotherhood and drove a dozen times to town, while Nikolay wrote
canticles! Hymns of praise! That’s a very different thing from a
sermon or a history!”

“Is it difficult to write them?” I asked.

“There’s great difficulty!” Ieronim wagged his head. “You can do
nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift.
The monks who don’t understand argue that you only need to know the
life of the saint for whom you are writing the hymn, and to make
it harmonize with the other hymns of praise. But that’s a mistake,
sir. Of course, anyone who writes canticles must know the life of
the saint to perfection, to the least trivial detail. To be sure,
one must make them harmonize with the other canticles and know where
to begin and what to write about. To give you an instance, the first
response begins everywhere with ‘the chosen’ or ‘the elect.’ . . .
The first line must always begin with the ‘angel.’ In the canticle
of praise to Jesus the Most Sweet, if you are interested in the
subject, it begins like this: ‘Of angels Creator and Lord of all
powers!’ In the canticle to the Holy Mother of God: ‘Of angels the
foremost sent down from on high,’ to Nikolay, the Wonder-worker–
‘An angel in semblance, though in substance a man,’ and so on.
Everywhere you begin with the angel. Of course, it would be impossible
without making them harmonize, but the lives of the saints and
conformity with the others is not what matters; what matters is the
beauty and sweetness of it. Everything must be harmonious, brief
and complete. There must be in every line softness, graciousness
and tenderness; not one word should be harsh or rough or unsuitable.
It must be written so that the worshipper may rejoice at heart and
weep, while his mind is stirred and he is thrown into a tremor. In
the canticle to the Holy Mother are the words: ‘Rejoice, O Thou too
high for human thought to reach! Rejoice, O Thou too deep for angels’
eyes to fathom!’ In another place in the same canticle: ‘Rejoice,
O tree that bearest the fair fruit of light that is the food of the
faithful! Rejoice, O tree of gracious spreading shade, under which
there is shelter for multitudes!’”

Ieronim hid his face in his hands, as though frightened at something
or overcome with shame, and shook his head.

“Tree that bearest the fair fruit of light . . . tree of gracious
spreading shade. . . .” he muttered. “To think that a man should
find words like those! Such a power is a gift from God! For brevity
he packs many thoughts into one phrase, and how smooth and complete
it all is! ‘Light-radiating torch to all that be . . .’ comes in
the canticle to Jesus the Most Sweet. ‘Light-radiating!’ There is
no such word in conversation or in books, but you see he invented
it, he found it in his mind! Apart from the smoothness and grandeur
of language, sir, every line must be beautified in every way, there
must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects
of the visible world. And every exclamation ought to be put so as
to be smooth and easy for the ear. ‘Rejoice, thou flower of heavenly
growth!’ comes in the hymn to Nikolay the Wonder-worker. It’s not
simply ‘heavenly flower,’ but ‘flower of heavenly growth.’ It’s
smoother so and sweet to the ear. That was just as Nikolay wrote
it! Exactly like that! I can’t tell you how he used to write!”

“Well, in that case it is a pity he is dead,” I said; “but let us
get on, father, or we shall be late.”

Ieronim started and ran to the rope; they were beginning to peal
all the bells. Probably the procession was already going on near
the monastery, for all the dark space behind the tar barrels was
now dotted with moving lights.

“Did Nikolay print his hymns?” I asked Ieronim.

“How could he print them?” he sighed. “And indeed, it would be
strange to print them. What would be the object? No one in the
monastery takes any interest in them. They don’t like them. They
knew Nikolay wrote them, but they let it pass unnoticed. No one
esteems new writings nowadays, sir!”

“Were they prejudiced against him?”

“Yes, indeed. If Nikolay had been an elder perhaps the brethren
would have been interested, but he wasn’t forty, you know. There
were some who laughed and even thought his writing a sin.”

“What did he write them for?”

“Chiefly for his own comfort. Of all the brotherhood, I was the
only one who read his hymns. I used to go to him in secret, that
no one else might know of it, and he was glad that I took an interest
in them. He would embrace me, stroke my head, speak to me in caressing
words as to a little child. He would shut his cell, make me sit
down beside him, and begin to read. . . .”

Ieronim left the rope and came up to me.

“We were dear friends in a way,” he whispered, looking at me with
shining eyes. “Where he went I would go. If I were not there he
would miss me. And he cared more for me than for anyone, and all
because I used to weep over his hymns. It makes me sad to remember.
Now I feel just like an orphan or a widow. You know, in our monastery
they are all good people, kind and pious, but . . . there is no one
with softness and refinement, they are just like peasants. They all
speak loudly, and tramp heavily when they walk; they are noisy,
they clear their throats, but Nikolay always talked softly,
caressingly, and if he noticed that anyone was asleep or praying
he would slip by like a fly or a gnat. His face was tender,
compassionate. . . .”

Ieronim heaved a deep sigh and took hold of the rope again. We were
by now approaching the bank. We floated straight out of the darkness
and stillness of the river into an enchanted realm, full of stifling
smoke, crackling lights and uproar. By now one could distinctly see
people moving near the tar barrels. The flickering of the lights
gave a strange, almost fantastic, expression to their figures and
red faces. From time to time one caught among the heads and faces
a glimpse of a horse’s head motionless as though cast in copper.

“They’ll begin singing the Easter hymn directly, . . .” said Ieronim,
“and Nikolay is gone; there is no one to appreciate it. . . . There
was nothing written dearer to him than that hymn. He used to take
in every word! You’ll be there, sir, so notice what is sung; it
takes your breath away!”

“Won’t you be in church, then?”

“I can’t; . . . I have to work the ferry. . . .”

“But won’t they relieve you?”

“I don’t know. . . . I ought to have been relieved at eight; but,
as you see, they don’t come! . . . And I must own I should have liked
to be in the church. . . .”

“Are you a monk?”

“Yes . . . that is, I am a lay-brother.”

The ferry ran into the bank and stopped. I thrust a five-kopeck
piece into Ieronim’s hand for taking me across and jumped on land.
Immediately a cart with a boy and a sleeping woman in it drove
creaking onto the ferry. Ieronim, with a faint glow from the lights
on his figure, pressed on the rope, bent down to it, and started
the ferry back. . . .

I took a few steps through mud, but a little farther walked on a
soft freshly trodden path. This path led to the dark monastery
gates, that looked like a cavern through a cloud of smoke, through
a disorderly crowd of people, unharnessed horses, carts and chaises.
All this crowd was rattling, snorting, laughing, and the crimson
light and wavering shadows from the smoke flickered over it all
. . . . A perfect chaos! And in this hubbub the people yet found room
to load a little cannon and to sell cakes. There was no less commotion
on the other side of the wall in the monastery precincts, but there
was more regard for decorum and order. Here there was a smell of
juniper and incense. They talked loudly, but there was no sound of
laughter or snorting. Near the tombstones and crosses people pressed
close to one another with Easter cakes and bundles in their arms.
Apparently many had come from a long distance for their cakes to
be blessed and now were exhausted. Young lay brothers, making a
metallic sound with their boots, ran busily along the iron slabs
that paved the way from the monastery gates to the church door.
They were busy and shouting on the belfry, too.

“What a restless night!” I thought. “How nice!”

One was tempted to see the same unrest and sleeplessness in all
nature, from the night darkness to the iron slabs, the crosses on
the tombs and the trees under which the people were moving to and
fro. But nowhere was the excitement and restlessness so marked as
in the church. An unceasing struggle was going on in the entrance
between the inflowing stream and the outflowing stream. Some were
going in, others going out and soon coming back again to stand still
for a little and begin moving again. People were scurrying from
place to place, lounging about as though they were looking for
something. The stream flowed from the entrance all round the church,
disturbing even the front rows, where persons of weight and dignity
were standing. There could be no thought of concentrated prayer.
There were no prayers at all, but a sort of continuous, childishly
irresponsible joy, seeking a pretext to break out and vent itself
in some movement, even in senseless jostling and shoving.

The same unaccustomed movement is striking in the Easter service
itself. The altar gates are flung wide open, thick clouds of incense
float in the air near the candelabra; wherever one looks there are
lights, the gleam and splutter of candles. . . . There is no reading;
restless and lighthearted singing goes on to the end without ceasing.
After each hymn the clergy change their vestments and come out to
burn the incense, which is repeated every ten minutes.

I had no sooner taken a place, when a wave rushed from in front and
forced me back. A tall thick-set deacon walked before me with a
long red candle; the grey-headed archimandrite in his golden mitre
hurried after him with the censer. When they had vanished from sight
the crowd squeezed me back to my former position. But ten minutes
had not passed before a new wave burst on me, and again the deacon
appeared. This time he was followed by the Father Sub-Prior, the
man who, as Ieronim had told me, was writing the history of the
monastery.

As I mingled with the crowd and caught the infection of the universal
joyful excitement, I felt unbearably sore on Ieronim’s account. Why
did they not send someone to relieve him? Why could not someone of
less feeling and less susceptibility go on the ferry? ‘Lift up thine
eyes, O Sion, and look around,’ they sang in the choir, ‘for thy
children have come to thee as to a beacon of divine light from north
and south, and from east and from the sea. . . .’

I looked at the faces; they all had a lively expression of triumph,
but not one was listening to what was being sung and taking it in,
and not one was ‘holding his breath.’ Why was not Ieronim released?
I could fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending
forward and hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase. All
this that glided by the ears of the people standing by me he would
have eagerly drunk in with his delicately sensitive soul, and would
have been spell-bound to ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there
would not have been a man happier than he in all the church. Now
he was plying to and fro over the dark river and grieving for his
dead friend and brother.

The wave surged back. A stout smiling monk, playing with his rosary
and looking round behind him, squeezed sideways by me, making way
for a lady in a hat and velvet cloak. A monastery servant hurried
after the lady, holding a chair over our heads.

I came out of the church. I wanted to have a look at the dead
Nikolay, the unknown canticle writer. I walked about the monastery
wall, where there was a row of cells, peeped into several windows,
and, seeing nothing, came back again. I do not regret now that I
did not see Nikolay; God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I should
have lost the picture my imagination paints for me now. I imagine
the lovable poetical figure solitary and not understood, who went
out at nights to call to Ieronim over the water, and filled his
hymns with flowers, stars and sunbeams, as a pale timid man with
soft mild melancholy features. His eyes must have shone, not only
with intelligence, but with kindly tenderness and that hardly
restrained childlike enthusiasm which I could hear in Ieronim’s
voice when he quoted to me passages from the hymns.

When we came out of church after mass it was no longer night. The
morning was beginning. The stars had gone out and the sky was a
morose greyish blue. The iron slabs, the tombstones and the buds
on the trees were covered with dew There was a sharp freshness in
the air. Outside the precincts I did not find the same animated
scene as I had beheld in the night. Horses and men looked exhausted,
drowsy, scarcely moved, while nothing was left of the tar barrels
but heaps of black ash. When anyone is exhausted and sleepy he
fancies that nature, too, is in the same condition. It seemed to
me that the trees and the young grass were asleep. It seemed as
though even the bells were not pealing so loudly and gaily as at
night. The restlessness was over, and of the excitement nothing was
left but a pleasant weariness, a longing for sleep and warmth.

Now I could see both banks of the river; a faint mist hovered over
it in shifting masses. There was a harsh cold breath from the water.
When I jumped on to the ferry, a chaise and some two dozen men and
women were standing on it already. The rope, wet and as I fancied
drowsy, stretched far away across the broad river and in places
disappeared in the white mist.

“Christ is risen! Is there no one else?” asked a soft voice.

I recognized the voice of Ieronim. There was no darkness now to
hinder me from seeing the monk. He was a tall narrow-shouldered man
of five-and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed
listless-looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard. He had an
extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.

“They have not relieved you yet?” I asked in surprise.

“Me?” he answered, turning to me his chilled and dewy face with a
smile. “There is no one to take my place now till morning. They’ll
all be going to the Father Archimandrite’s to break the fast
directly.”

With the help of a little peasant in a hat of reddish fur that
looked like the little wooden tubs in which honey is sold, he threw
his weight on the rope; they gasped simultaneously, and the ferry
started.

We floated across, disturbing on the way the lazily rising mist.
Everyone was silent. Ieronim worked mechanically with one hand. He
slowly passed his mild lustreless eyes over us; then his glance
rested on the rosy face of a young merchant’s wife with black
eyebrows, who was standing on the ferry beside me silently shrinking
from the mist that wrapped her about. He did not take his eyes off
her face all the way.

There was little that was masculine in that prolonged gaze. It
seemed to me that Ieronim was looking in the woman’s face for the
soft and tender features of his dead friend.

On the red velvet seat of a first-class railway carriage a pretty
lady sits half reclining. An expensive fluffy fan trembles in her
tightly closed fingers, a pince-nez keeps dropping off her pretty
little nose, the brooch heaves and falls on her bosom, like a boat
on the ocean. She is greatly agitated.

On the seat opposite sits the Provincial Secretary of Special
Commissions, a budding young author, who from time to time publishes
long stories of high life, or “Novelli” as he calls them, in the
leading paper of the province. He is gazing into her face, gazing
intently, with the eyes of a connoisseur. He is watching, studying,
catching every shade of this exceptional, enigmatic nature. He
understands it, he fathoms it. Her soul, her whole psychology lies
open before him.

“Oh, I understand, I understand you to your inmost depths!” says
the Secretary of Special Commissions, kissing her hand near the
bracelet. “Your sensitive, responsive soul is seeking to escape
from the maze of —- Yes, the struggle is terrific, titanic. But
do not lose heart, you will be triumphant! Yes!”

“Write about me, Voldemar!” says the pretty lady, with a mournful
smile. “My life has been so full, so varied, so chequered. Above
all, I am unhappy. I am a suffering soul in some page of Dostoevsky.
Reveal my soul to the world, Voldemar. Reveal that hapless soul.
You are a psychologist. We have not been in the train an hour
together, and you have already fathomed my heart.”

“Tell me! I beseech you, tell me!”

“Listen. My father was a poor clerk in the Service. He had a good
heart and was not without intelligence; but the spirit of the age
–of his environment–_vous comprenez?_–I do not blame my
poor father. He drank, gambled, took bribes. My mother–but why
say more? Poverty, the struggle for daily bread, the consciousness
of insignificance–ah, do not force me to recall it! I had to
make my own way. You know the monstrous education at a boarding-school,
foolish novel-reading, the errors of early youth, the first timid
flutter of love. It was awful! The vacillation! And the agonies of
losing faith in life, in oneself! Ah, you are an author. You know
us women. You will understand. Unhappily I have an intense nature.
I looked for happiness–and what happiness! I longed to set my
soul free. Yes. In that I saw my happiness!”

“Exquisite creature!” murmured the author, kissing her hand close
to the bracelet. “It’s not you I am kissing, but the suffering of
humanity. Do you remember Raskolnikov and his kiss?”

“Oh, Voldemar, I longed for glory, renown, success, like every–
why affect modesty?–every nature above the commonplace. I yearned
for something extraordinary, above the common lot of woman! And
then–and then–there crossed my path–an old general–very
well off. Understand me, Voldemar! It was self-sacrifice, renunciation!
You must see that! I could do nothing else. I restored the family
fortunes, was able to travel, to do good. Yet how I suffered, how
revolting, how loathsome to me were his embraces–though I will
be fair to him–he had fought nobly in his day. There were moments
–terrible moments–but I was kept up by the thought that from
day to day the old man might die, that then I would begin to live
as I liked, to give myself to the man I adore–be happy. There
is such a man, Voldemar, indeed there is!”

The pretty lady flutters her fan more violently. Her face takes a
lachrymose expression. She goes on:

“But at last the old man died. He left me something. I was free as
a bird of the air. Now is the moment for me to be happy, isn’t it,
Voldemar? Happiness comes tapping at my window, I had only to let
it in–but–Voldemar, listen, I implore you! Now is the time
for me to give myself to the man I love, to become the partner of
his life, to help, to uphold his ideals, to be happy–to find
rest–but–how ignoble, repulsive, and senseless all our life
is! How mean it all is, Voldemar. I am wretched, wretched, wretched!
Again there is an obstacle in my path! Again I feel that my happiness
is far, far away! Ah, what anguish!–if only you knew what anguish!”

“But what–what stands in your way? I implore you tell me! What
is it?”

“Another old general, very well off—-”

The broken fan conceals the pretty little face. The author props
on his fist his thought–heavy brow and ponders with the air of
a master in psychology. The engine is whistling and hissing while
the window curtains flush red with the glow of the setting sun.

Once upon a time there lived in Moscow a man called Vladimir
Semyonitch Liadovsky. He took his degree at the university in the
faculty of law and had a post on the board of management of some
railway; but if you had asked him what his work was, he would look
candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his
gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone:

“My work is literature.”

After completing his course at the university, Vladimir Semyonitch
had had a paragraph of theatrical criticism accepted by a newspaper.
From this paragraph he passed on to reviewing, and a year later he
had advanced to writing a weekly article on literary matters for
the same paper. But it does not follow from these facts that he was
an amateur, that his literary work was of an ephemeral, haphazard
character. Whenever I saw his neat spare figure, his high forehead
and long mane of hair, when I listened to his speeches, it always
seemed to me that his writing, quite apart from what and how he
wrote, was something organically part of him, like the beating of
his heart, and that his whole literary programme must have been an
integral part of his brain while he was a baby in his mother’s womb.
Even in his walk, his gestures, his manner of shaking off the ash
from his cigarette, I could read this whole programme from A to Z,
with all its claptrap, dulness, and honourable sentiments. He was
a literary man all over when with an inspired face he laid a wreath
on the coffin of some celebrity, or with a grave and solemn face
collected signatures for some address; his passion for making the
acquaintance of distinguished literary men, his faculty for finding
talent even where it was absent, his perpetual enthusiasm, his pulse
that went at one hundred and twenty a minute, his ignorance of life,
the genuinely feminine flutter with which he threw himself into
concerts and literary evenings for the benefit of destitute students,
the way in which he gravitated towards the young–all this would
have created for him the reputation of a writer even if he had not
written his articles.

He was one of those writers to whom phrases like, “We are but few,”
or “What would life be without strife? Forward!” were pre-eminently
becoming, though he never strove with any one and never did go
forward. It did not even sound mawkish when he fell to discoursing
of ideals. Every anniversary of the university, on St. Tatiana’s
Day, he got drunk, chanted Gaudeamus out of tune, and his beaming
and perspiring countenance seemed to say: “See, I’m drunk; I’m
keeping it up!” But even that suited him.

Vladimir Semyonitch had genuine faith in his literary vocation and
his whole programme. He had no doubts, and was evidently very well
pleased with himself. Only one thing grieved him–the paper for
which he worked had a limited circulation and was not very influential.
But Vladimir Semyonitch believed that sooner or later he would
succeed in getting on to a solid magazine where he would have scope
and could display himself–and what little distress he felt on
this score was pale beside the brilliance of his hopes.

Visiting this charming man, I made the acquaintance of his sister,
Vera Semyonovna, a woman doctor. At first sight, what struck me
about this woman was her look of exhaustion and extreme ill-health.
She was young, with a good figure and regular, rather large features,
but in comparison with her agile, elegant, and talkative brother
she seemed angular, listless, slovenly, and sullen. There was
something strained, cold, apathetic in her movements, smiles, and
words; she was not liked, and was thought proud and not very
intelligent.

In reality, I fancy, she was resting.

“My dear friend,” her brother would often say to me, sighing and
flinging back his hair in his picturesque literary way, “one must
never judge by appearances! Look at this book: it has long ago been
read. It is warped, tattered, and lies in the dust uncared for; but
open it, and it will make you weep and turn pale. My sister is like
that book. Lift the cover and peep into her soul, and you will be
horror-stricken. Vera passed in some three months through experiences
that would have been ample for a whole lifetime!”

Vladimir Semyonitch looked round him, took me by the sleeve, and
began to whisper:

“You know, after taking her degree she married, for love, an
architect. It’s a complete tragedy! They had hardly been married a
month when–whew–her husband died of typhus. But that was not
all. She caught typhus from him, and when, on her recovery, she
learnt that her Ivan was dead, she took a good dose of morphia. If
it had not been for vigorous measures taken by her friends, my Vera
would have been by now in Paradise. Tell me, isn’t it a tragedy?
And is not my sister like an ingenue, who has played already all
the five acts of her life? The audience may stay for the farce, but
the ingenue must go home to rest.”

After three months of misery Vera Semyonovna had come to live with
her brother. She was not fitted for the practice of medicine, which
exhausted her and did not satisfy her; she did not give one the
impression of knowing her subject, and I never once heard her say
anything referring to her medical studies.

She gave up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she
were a prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colourless
apathy, with bowed head and hanging hands. The only thing to which
she was not completely indifferent, and which brought some brightness
into the twilight of her life, was the presence of her brother,
whom she loved. She loved him himself and his programme, she was
full of reverence for his articles; and when she was asked what her
brother was doing, she would answer in a subdued voice as though
afraid of waking or distracting him: “He is writing. . . .” Usually
when he was at his work she used to sit beside him, her eyes fixed
on his writing hand. She used at such moments to look like a sick
animal warming itself in the sun. . . .

One winter evening Vladimir Semyonitch was sitting at his table
writing a critical article for his newspaper: Vera Semyonovna was
sitting beside him, staring as usual at his writing hand. The critic
wrote rapidly, without erasures or corrections. The pen scratched
and squeaked. On the table near the writing hand there lay open a
freshly-cut volume of a thick magazine, containing a story of peasant
life, signed with two initials. Vladimir Semyonitch was enthusiastic;
he thought the author was admirable in his handling of the subject,
suggested Turgenev in his descriptions of nature, was truthful, and
had an excellent knowledge of the life of the peasantry. The critic
himself knew nothing of peasant life except from books and hearsay,
but his feelings and his inner convictions forced him to believe
the story. He foretold a brilliant future for the author, assured
him he should await the conclusion of the story with great impatience,
and so on.

“Fine story!” he said, flinging himself back in his chair and closing
his eyes with pleasure. “The tone is extremely good.”

Vera Semyonovna looked at him, yawned aloud, and suddenly asked an
unexpected question. In the evening she had a habit of yawning
nervously and asking short, abrupt questions, not always relevant.

“Volodya,” she asked, “what is the meaning of non-resistance to
evil?”

“Non-resistance to evil!” repeated her brother, opening his eyes.

“Yes. What do you understand by it?”

“You see, my dear, imagine that thieves or brigands attack you, and
you, instead of . . .”

“No, give me a logical definition.

“A logical definition? Um! Well.” Vladimir Semyonitch pondered.
“Non-resistance to evil means an attitude of non-interference with
regard to all that in the sphere of mortality is called evil.”

Saying this, Vladimir Semyonitch bent over the table and took up a
novel. This novel, written by a woman, dealt with the painfulness
of the irregular position of a society lady who was living under
the same roof with her lover and her illegitimate child. Vladimir
Semyonitch was pleased with the excellent tendency of the story,
the plot and the presentation of it. Making a brief summary of the
novel, he selected the best passages and added to them in his
account: “How true to reality, how living, how picturesque! The
author is not merely an artist; he is also a subtle psychologist
who can see into the hearts of his characters. Take, for example,
this vivid description of the emotions of the heroine on meeting
her husband,” and so on.

“Volodya,” Vera Semyonovna interrupted his critical effusions, “I’ve
been haunted by a strange idea since yesterday. I keep wondering
where we should all be if human life were ordered on the basis of
non-resistance to evil?

“In all probability, nowhere. Non-resistance to evil would give the
full rein to the criminal will, and, to say nothing of civilisation,
this would leave not one stone standing upon another anywhere on
earth.”

“What would be left?”

“Bashi-Bazouke and brothels. In my next article I’ll talk about
that perhaps. Thank you for reminding me.”

And a week later my friend kept his promise. That was just at the
period–in the eighties–when people were beginning to talk and
write of non-resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make
war; when some people in our set were beginning to do without
servants, to retire into the country, to work on the land, and to
renounce animal food and carnal love.

After reading her brother’s article, Vera Semyonovna pondered and
hardly perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.

“Very nice!” she said. “But still there’s a great deal I don’t
understand. For instance, in Leskov’s story ‘Belonging to the
Cathedral’ there is a queer gardener who sows for the benefit of
all–for customers, for beggars, and any who care to steal. Did
he behave sensibly?”

From his sister’s tone and expression Vladimir Semyonitch saw that
she did not like his article, and, almost for the first time in his
life, his vanity as an author sustained a shock. With a shade of
irritation he answered:

“Theft is immoral. To sow for thieves is to recognise the right of
thieves to existence. What would you think if I were to establish
a newspaper and, dividing it into sections, provide for blackmailing
as well as for liberal ideas? Following the example of that gardener,
I ought, logically, to provide a section for blackmailers, the
intellectual scoundrels? Yes.”

Vera Semyonovna made no answer. She got up from the table, moved
languidly to the sofa and lay down.

“I don’t know, I know nothing about it,” she said musingly. “You
are probably right, but it seems to me, I feel somehow, that there’s
something false in our resistance to evil, as though there were
something concealed or unsaid. God knows, perhaps our methods of
resisting evil belong to the category of prejudices which have
become so deeply rooted in us, that we are incapable of parting
with them, and therefore cannot form a correct judgment of them.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain to you. Perhaps man is mistaken in
thinking that he is obliged to resist evil and has a right to do
so, just as he is mistaken in thinking, for instance, that the heart
looks like an ace of hearts. It is very possible in resisting evil
we ought not to use force, but to use what is the very opposite of
force–if you, for instance, don’t want this picture stolen from
you, you ought to give it away rather than lock it up. . . .”

“That’s clever, very clever! If I want to marry a rich, vulgar
woman, she ought to prevent me from such a shabby action by hastening
to make me an offer herself!”

The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding
each other. If any outsider had overheard them he would hardly have
been able to make out what either of them was driving at.

They usually spent the evening at home. There were no friends’
houses to which they could go, and they felt no need for friends;
they only went to the theatre when there was a new play–such was
the custom in literary circles–they did not go to concerts, for
they did not care for music.

“You may think what you like,” Vera Semyonovna began again the next
day, “but for me the question is to a great extent settled. I am
firmly convinced that I have no grounds for resisting evil directed
against me personally. If they want to kill me, let them. My defending
myself will not make the murderer better. All I have now to decide
is the second half of the question: how I ought to behave to evil
directed against my neighbours?”

“Vera, mind you don’t become rabid!” said Vladimir Semyonitch,
laughing. “I see non-resistance is becoming your idee fixe!”

He wanted to turn off these tedious conversations with a jest, but
somehow it was beyond a jest; his smile was artificial and sour.
His sister gave up sitting beside his table and gazing reverently
at his writing hand, and he felt every evening that behind him on
the sofa lay a person who did not agree with him. And his back grew
stiff and numb, and there was a chill in his soul. An author’s
vanity is vindictive, implacable, incapable of forgiveness, and his
sister was the first and only person who had laid bare and disturbed
that uneasy feeling, which is like a big box of crockery, easy to
unpack but impossible to pack up again as it was before.

Weeks and months passed by, and his sister clung to her ideas, and
did not sit down by the table. One spring evening Vladimir Semyonitch
was sitting at his table writing an article. He was reviewing a
novel which described how a village schoolmistress refused the man
whom she loved and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual,
simply because marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible.
Vera Semyonovna lay on the sofa and brooded.

“My God, how slow it is!” she said, stretching. “How insipid and
empty life is! I don’t know what to do with myself, and you are
wasting your best years in goodness knows what. Like some alchemist,
you are rummaging in old rubbish that nobody wants. My God!”

Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his
sister.

“It’s depressing to look at you!” said his sister. “Wagner in ‘Faust’
dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you
are looking for worms for the sake of the worms.”

“That’s vague!”

“Yes, Volodya; all these days I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking
painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that
you are hopelessly reactionary and conventional. Come, ask yourself
what is the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me,
what is it? Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can
be extracted from that rubbish in which you are always rummaging.
You may pound water in a mortar and analyse it as long as you like,
you’ll make nothing more of it than the chemists have made
already. . . .”

“Indeed!” drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up. “Yes, all this
is old rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you
consider new, then?”

“You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to
think of something new. It’s not for me to teach you.”

“Me–an alchemist!” the critic cried in wonder and indignation,
screwing up his eyes ironically. “Art, progress–all that is
alchemy?”

“You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people
had set yourselves to solving great problems, all these little
questions that you fuss about now would solve themselves by the
way. If you go up in a balloon to see a town, you will incidentally,
without any effort, see the fields and the villages and the rivers
as well. When stearine is manufactured, you get glycerine as a
by-product. It seems to me that contemporary thought has settled
on one spot and stuck to it. It is prejudiced, apathetic, timid,
afraid to take a wide titanic flight, just as you and I are afraid
to climb on a high mountain; it is conservative.”

Such conversations could not but leave traces. The relations of the
brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother
became unable to work in his sister’s presence, and grew irritable
when he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back;
while the sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to
bring back the past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with
her. Every evening she complained of being bored, and talked about
independence of mind and those who are in the rut of tradition.
Carried away by her new ideas, Vera Semyonovna proved that the work
that her brother was so engrossed in was conventional, that it was
a vain effort of conservative minds to preserve what had already
served its turn and was vanishing from the scene of action. She
made no end of comparisons. She compared her brother at one time
to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who would sooner die
than listen to reason. By degrees there was a perceptible change
in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying on the sofa
all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a cold,
dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong faith.
She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and tidied
her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.
Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred
at her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work,
which was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something
strained and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected.
And knowing he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her
and teased her like a schoolboy.

“You won’t resist evil, but you resist my having servants!” he
taunted her. “If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That’s
inconsistent!”

He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when
his sister began doing odd things before strangers.

“It’s awful, my dear fellow,” he said to me in private, waving his
hands in despair. “It seems that our ingenue has remained to play
a part in the farce, too. She’s become morbid to the marrow of her
bones! I’ve washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but
why does she talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what
it means for me to listen to her. What I feel when in my presence
she has the effrontery to support her errors by blasphemously quoting
the teaching of Christ! It chokes me! It makes me hot all over to
hear my sister propounding her doctrines and trying to distort the
Gospel to suit her, when she purposely refrains from mentioning how
the moneychangers were driven out of the Temple. That’s, my dear
fellow, what comes of being half educated, undeveloped! That’s what
comes of medical studies which provide no general culture!”

One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found
his sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed,
wringing her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks.
The critic’s good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his
eyes, too, and he longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg
her forgiveness, and to live as they used to before. . . . He knelt
down and kissed her head, her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled,
smiled bitterly, unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped
up, seized the magazine from the table and said warmly:

“Hurrah! We’ll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God’s blessing!
And I’ve such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the
occasion with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid,
wonderful thing!”

“Oh, no, no!” cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
“I’ve read it already! I don’t want it, I don’t want it!”

“When did you read it?”

“A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it,
I know it!”

“H’m! . . . You’re a fanatic!” her brother said coldly, flinging
the magazine on to the table.

“No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!” And Vera Semyonovna dissolved
into tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her
quivering shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies
of loneliness endured by any one who begins to think in a new way
of their own, not of the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual
revolution, but of the outrage of his programme, the outrage to his
author’s vanity.

From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony,
and he endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence
of old women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off
disputing with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks
with a condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.

One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a
satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed
him on the forehead.

“Where are you going?” he asked with surprise.

“To the province of N. to do vaccination work.” Her brother went
out into the street with her.

“So that’s what you’ve decided upon, you queer girl,” he muttered.
“Don’t you want some money?”

“No, thank you. Good-bye.”

The sister shook her brother’s hand and set off.

“Why don’t you have a cab?” cried Vladimir Semyonitch.

She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her
rusty-looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched
along, forced himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a
feeling of regret. His sister had become a stranger to him. And he
was a stranger to her. Anyway, she did not once look round.

Going back to his room, Vladimir Semyonitch at once sat down to the
table and began to work at his article.

I never saw Vera Semyonovna again. Where she is now I do not know.
And Vladimir Semyonitch went on writing his articles, laying wreaths
on coffins, singing Gaudeamus, busying himself over the Mutual
Aid Society of Moscow Journalists.

He fell ill with inflammation of the lungs; he was ill in bed for
three months–at first at home, and afterwards in the Golitsyn
Hospital. An abscess developed in his knee. People said he ought
to be sent to the Crimea, and began getting up a collection for
him. But he did not go to the Crimea–he died. We buried him in
the Vagankovsky Cemetery, on the left side, where artists and
literary men are buried.

One day we writers were sitting in the Tatars’ restaurant. I mentioned
that I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen
Vladimir Semyonitch’s grave there. It was utterly neglected and
almost indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had
fallen; it was necessary to collect a few roubles to put it in
order.

But they listened to what I said unconcernedly, made no answer, and
I could not collect a farthing. No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch.
He was utterly forgotten.

For a cultivated man to be ignorant of foreign languages is a great
inconvenience. Vorotov became acutely conscious of it when, after
taking his degree, he began upon a piece of research work.

“It’s awful,” he said, breathing hard (although he was only twenty-six
he was fat, heavy, and suffered from shortness of breath).

“It’s awful! Without languages I’m like a bird without wings. I
might just as well give up the work.”

And he made up his mind at all costs to overcome his innate laziness,
and to learn French and German; and began to look out for a teacher.

One winter noon, as Vorotov was sitting in his study at work, the
servant told him that a young lady was inquiring for him.

“Ask her in,” said Vorotov.

And a young lady elaborately dressed in the last fashion walked in.
She introduced herself as a teacher of French, Alice Osipovna
Enquete, and told Vorotov that she had been sent to him by one of
his friends.

“Delighted! Please sit down,” said Vorotov, breathing hard and
putting his hand over the collar of his nightshirt (to breathe more
freely he always wore a nightshirt at work instead of a stiff linen
one with collar). “It was Pyotr Sergeitch sent you? Yes, yes . . .
I asked him about it. Delighted!”

As he talked to Mdlle. Enquete he looked at her shyly and with
curiosity. She was a genuine Frenchwoman, very elegant and still
quite young. Judging from her pale, languid face, her short curly
hair, and her unnaturally slim waist, she might have been eighteen;
but looking at her broad, well-developed shoulders, the elegant
lines of her back and her severe eyes, Vorotov thought that she was
not less than three-and-twenty and might be twenty-five; but then
again he began to think she was not more than eighteen. Her face
looked as cold and business-like as the face of a person who has
come to speak about money. She did not once smile or frown, and
only once a look of perplexity flitted over her face when she learnt
that she was not required to teach children, but a stout grown-up
man.

“So, Alice Osipovna,” said Vorotov, “we’ll have a lesson every
evening from seven to eight. As regards your terms–a rouble a
lesson–I’ve nothing to say against that. By all means let it be
a rouble. . . .”

And he asked her if she would not have some tea or coffee, whether
it was a fine day, and with a good-natured smile, stroking the baize
of the table, he inquired in a friendly voice who she was, where
she had studied, and what she lived on.

With a cold, business-like expression, Alice Osipovna answered that
she had completed her studies at a private school and had the diploma
of a private teacher, that her father had died lately of scarlet
fever, that her mother was alive and made artificial flowers; that
she, Mdlle. Enquete, taught in a private school till dinnertime,
and after dinner was busy till evening giving lessons in different
good families.

She went away leaving behind her the faint fragrance of a woman’s
clothes. For a long time afterwards Vorotov could not settle to
work, but, sitting at the table stroking its green baize surface,
he meditated.

“It’s very pleasant to see a girl working to earn her own living,”
he thought. “On the other hand, it’s very unpleasant to think that
poverty should not spare such elegant and pretty girls as Alice
Osipovna, and that she, too, should have to struggle for existence.
It’s a sad thing!”

Having never seen virtuous Frenchwomen before, he reflected also
that this elegantly dressed young lady with her well-developed
shoulders and exaggeratedly small waist in all probability followed
another calling as well as giving French lessons.

The next evening when the clock pointed to five minutes to seven,
Mdlle. Enquete appeared, rosy from the frost. She opened Margot,
which she had brought with her, and without introduction began:

“French grammar has twenty-six letters. The first letter is called
A, the second B . . .”

“Excuse me,” Vorotov interrupted, smiling. “I must warn you,
mademoiselle, that you must change your method a little in my case.
You see, I know Russian, Greek, and Latin well. . . . I’ve studied
comparative philology, and I think we might omit Margot and pass
straight to reading some author.”

And he explained to the French girl how grown-up people learn
languages.

“A friend of mine,” he said, “wanting to learn modern languages,
laid before him the French, German, and Latin gospels, and read
them side by side, carefully analysing each word, and would you
believe it, he attained his object in less than a year. Let us do
the same. We’ll take some author and read him.”

The French girl looked at him in perplexity. Evidently the suggestion
seemed to her very naive and ridiculous. If this strange proposal
had been made to her by a child, she would certainly have been angry
and have scolded it, but as he was a grown-up man and very stout
and she could not scold him, she only shrugged her shoulders hardly
perceptibly and said:

“As you please.”

Vorotov rummaged in his bookcase and picked out a dog’s-eared French
book.

“Will this do?”

“It’s all the same,” she said.

“In that case let us begin, and good luck to it! Let’s begin with
the title . . . ‘Memoires.’”

“Reminiscences,” Mdlle. Enquete translated.

With a good-natured smile, breathing hard, he spent a quarter of
an hour over the word “Memoires,” and as much over the word de,
and this wearied the young lady. She answered his questions languidly,
grew confused, and evidently did not understand her pupil well, and
did not attempt to understand him. Vorotov asked her questions, and
at the same time kept looking at her fair hair and thinking:

“Her hair isn’t naturally curly; she curls it. It’s a strange thing!
She works from morning to night, and yet she has time to curl her
hair.”

At eight o’clock precisely she got up, and saying coldly and dryly,
“Au revoir, monsieur,” walked out of the study, leaving behind her
the same tender, delicate, disturbing fragrance. For a long time
again her pupil did nothing; he sat at the table meditating.

During the days that followed he became convinced that his teacher
was a charming, conscientious, and precise young lady, but that she
was very badly educated, and incapable of teaching grown-up people,
and he made up his mind not to waste his time, to get rid of her,
and to engage another teacher. When she came the seventh time he
took out of his pocket an envelope with seven roubles in it, and
holding it in his hand, became very confused and began:

“Excuse me, Alice Osipovna, but I ought to tell you . . . I’m under
painful necessity . . .”

Seeing the envelope, the French girl guessed what was meant, and
for the first time during their lessons her face quivered and her
cold, business-like expression vanished. She coloured a little, and
dropping her eyes, began nervously fingering her slender gold chain.
And Vorotov, seeing her perturbation, realised how much a rouble
meant to her, and how bitter it would be to her to lose what she
was earning.

“I ought to tell you,” he muttered, growing more and more confused,
and quavering inwardly; he hurriedly stuffed the envelope into his
pocket and went on: “Excuse me, I . . . I must leave you for ten
minutes.”

And trying to appear as though he had not in the least meant to get
rid of her, but only to ask her permission to leave her for a short
time, he went into the next room and sat there for ten minutes. And
then he returned more embarrassed than ever: it struck him that she
might have interpreted his brief absence in some way of her own,
and he felt awkward.

The lessons began again. Yorotov felt no interest in them. Realising
that he would gain nothing from the lessons, he gave the French
girl liberty to do as she liked, asking her nothing and not
interrupting her. She translated away as she pleased ten pages
during a lesson, and he did not listen, breathed hard, and having
nothing better to do, gazed at her curly head, or her soft white
hands or her neck and sniffed the fragrance of her clothes. He
caught himself thinking very unsuitable thoughts, and felt ashamed,
or he was moved to tenderness, and then he felt vexed and wounded
that she was so cold and business-like with him, and treated him
as a pupil, never smiling and seeming afraid that he might accidentally
touch her. He kept wondering how to inspire her with confidence and
get to know her better, and to help her, to make her understand how
badly she taught, poor thing.

One day Mdlle. Enquete came to the lesson in a smart pink dress,
slightly decollete, and surrounded by such a fragrance that she
seemed to be wrapped in a cloud, and, if one blew upon her, ready
to fly away into the air or melt away like smoke. She apologised
and said she could stay only half an hour for the lesson, as she
was going straight from the lesson to a dance.

He looked at her throat and the back of her bare neck, and thought
he understood why Frenchwomen had the reputation of frivolous
creatures easily seduced; he was carried away by this cloud of
fragrance, beauty, and bare flesh, while she, unconscious of his
thoughts and probably not in the least interested in them, rapidly
turned over the pages and translated at full steam:

“‘He was walking the street and meeting a gentleman his friend and
saying, “Where are you striving to seeing your face so pale it makes
me sad.”‘”

The “Memoires” had long been finished, and now Alice was translating
some other book. One day she came an hour too early for the lesson,
apologizing and saying that she wanted to leave at seven and go to
the Little Theatre. Seeing her out after the lesson, Vorotov dressed
and went to the theatre himself. He went, and fancied that he was
going simply for change and amusement, and that he was not thinking
about Alice at all. He could not admit that a serious man, preparing
for a learned career, lethargic in his habits, could fling up his
work and go to the theatre simply to meet there a girl he knew very
little, who was unintelligent and utterly unintellectual.

Yet for some reason his heart was beating during the intervals, and
without realizing what he was doing, he raced about the corridors
and foyer like a boy impatiently looking for some one, and he was
disappointed when the interval was over. And when he saw the familiar
pink dress and the handsome shoulders under the tulle, his heart
quivered as though with a foretaste of happiness; he smiled joyfully,
and for the first time in his life experienced the sensation of
jealousy.

Alice was walking with two unattractive-looking students and an
officer. She was laughing, talking loudly, and obviously flirting.
Vorotov had never seen her like that. She was evidently happy,
contented, warm, sincere. What for? Why? Perhaps because these men
were her friends and belonged to her own circle. And Vorotov felt
there was a terrible gulf between himself and that circle. He bowed
to his teacher, but she gave him a chilly nod and walked quickly
by; she evidently did not care for her friends to know that she had
pupils, and that she had to give lessons to earn money.

After the meeting at the theatre Vorotov realised that he was in
love. . . . During the subsequent lessons he feasted his eyes on
his elegant teacher, and without struggling with himself, gave full
rein to his imaginations, pure and impure. Mdlle. Enquete’s face
did not cease to be cold; precisely at eight o’clock every evening
she said coldly, “Au revoir, monsieur,” and he felt she cared nothing
about him, and never would care anything about him, and that his
position was hopeless.

Sometimes in the middle of a lesson he would begin dreaming, hoping,
making plans. He inwardly composed declarations of love, remembered
that Frenchwomen were frivolous and easily won, but it was enough
for him to glance at the face of his teacher for his ideas to be
extinguished as a candle is blown out when you bring it into the
wind on the verandah. Once, overcome, forgetting himself as though
in delirium, he could not restrain himself, and barred her way as
she was going from the study into the entry after the lesson, and,
gasping for breath and stammering, began to declare his love:

“You are dear to me! I . . . I love you! Allow me to speak.”

And Alice turned pale–probably from dismay, reflecting that after
this declaration she could not come here again and get a rouble a
lesson. With a frightened look in her eyes she said in a loud
whisper:

“Ach, you mustn’t! Don’t speak, I entreat you! You mustn’t!”

And Vorotov did not sleep all night afterwards; he was tortured by
shame; he blamed himself and thought intensely. It seemed to him
that he had insulted the girl by his declaration, that she would
not come to him again.

He resolved to find out her address from the address bureau in the
morning, and to write her a letter of apology. But Alice came without
a letter. For the first minute she felt uncomfortable, then she
opened a book and began briskly and rapidly translating as usual:

“‘Oh, young gentleman, don’t tear those flowers in my garden which
I want to be giving to my ill daughter. . . .’”

She still comes to this day. Four books have already been translated,
but Vorotov knows no French but the word “Memoires,” and when he
is asked about his literary researches, he waves his hand, and
without answering, turns the conversation to the weather.

“I admit I have had a drop. . . . You must excuse me. I went into
a beer shop on the way here, and as it was so hot had a couple of
bottles. It’s hot, my boy.”

Old Musatov took a nondescript rag out of his pocket and wiped his
shaven, battered face with it.

“I have come only for a minute, Borenka, my angel,” he went on, not
looking at his son, “about something very important. Excuse me,
perhaps I am hindering you. Haven’t you ten roubles, my dear, you
could let me have till Tuesday? You see, I ought to have paid for
my lodging yesterday, and money, you see! . . . None! Not to save
my life!”

Young Musatov went out without a word, and began whispering the
other side of the door with the landlady of the summer villa and
his colleagues who had taken the villa with him. Three minutes later
he came back, and without a word gave his father a ten-rouble note.
The latter thrust it carelessly into his pocket without looking at
it, and said:

“Merci. Well, how are you getting on? It’s a long time since we
met.”

“Yes, a long time, not since Easter.”

“Half a dozen times I have been meaning to come to you, but I’ve
never had time. First one thing, then another. . . . It’s simply
awful! I am talking nonsense though. . . . All that’s nonsense.
Don’t you believe me, Borenka. I said I would pay you back the ten
roubles on Tuesday, don’t believe that either. Don’t believe a word
I say. I have nothing to do at all, it’s simply laziness, drunkenness,
and I am ashamed to be seen in such clothes in the street. You must
excuse me, Borenka. Here I have sent the girl to you three times
for money and written you piteous letters. Thanks for the money,
but don’t believe the letters; I was telling fibs. I am ashamed to
rob you, my angel; I know that you can scarcely make both ends meet
yourself, and feed on locusts, but my impudence is too much for me.
I am such a specimen of impudence–fit for a show! . . . You must
excuse me, Borenka. I tell you the truth, because I can’t see your
angel face without emotion.”

A minute passed in silence. The old man heaved a deep sigh and said:

“You might treat me to a glass of beer perhaps.”

His son went out without a word, and again there was a sound of
whispering the other side of the door. When a little later the beer
was brought in, the old man seemed to revive at the sight of the
bottles and abruptly changed his tone.

“I was at the races the other day, my boy,” he began telling him,
assuming a scared expression. “We were a party of three, and we
pooled three roubles on Frisky. And, thanks to that Frisky, we got
thirty-two roubles each for our rouble. I can’t get on without the
races, my boy. It’s a gentlemanly diversion. My virago always gives
me a dressing over the races, but I go. I love it, and that’s all
about it.”

Boris, a fair-haired young man with a melancholy immobile face, was
walking slowly up and down, listening in silence. When the old man
stopped to clear his throat, he went up to him and said:

“I bought myself a pair of boots the other day, father, which turn
out to be too tight for me. Won’t you take them? I’ll let you have
them cheap.”

“If you like,” said the old man with a grimace, “only for the price
you gave for them, without any cheapening.”

“Very well, I’ll let you have them on credit.”

The son groped under the bed and produced the new boots. The father
took off his clumsy, rusty, evidently second-hand boots and began
trying on the new ones.

“A perfect fit,” he said. “Right, let me keep them. And on Tuesday,
when I get my pension, I’ll send you the money for them. That’s not
true, though,” he went on, suddenly falling into the same tearful
tone again. “And it was a lie about the races, too, and a lie about
the pension. And you are deceiving me, Borenka. . . . I feel your
generous tactfulness. I see through you! Your boots were too small,
because your heart is too big. Ah, Borenka, Borenka! I understand
it all and feel it!”

“Have you moved into new lodgings?” his son interrupted, to change
the conversation.

“Yes, my boy. I move every month. My virago can’t stay long in the
same place with her temper.”

“I went to your lodgings, I meant to ask you to stay here with me.
In your state of health it would do you good to be in the fresh
air.”

“No,” said the old man, with a wave of his hand, “the woman wouldn’t
let me, and I shouldn’t care to myself. A hundred times you have
tried to drag me out of the pit, and I have tried myself, but nothing
came of it. Give it up. I must stick in my filthy hole. This minute,
here I am sitting, looking at your angel face, yet something is
drawing me home to my hole. Such is my fate. You can’t draw a
dung-beetle to a rose. But it’s time I was going, my boy. It’s
getting dark.”

“Wait a minute then, I’ll come with you. I have to go to town to-day
myself.”

Both put on their overcoats and went out. When a little while
afterwards they were driving in a cab, it was already dark, and
lights began to gleam in the windows.

“I’ve robbed you, Borenka!” the father muttered. “Poor children,
poor children! It must be a dreadful trouble to have such a father!
Borenka, my angel, I cannot lie when I see your face. You must
excuse me. . . . What my depravity has come to, my God. Here I have
just been robbing you, and put you to shame with my drunken state;
I am robbing your brothers, too, and put them to shame, and you
should have seen me yesterday! I won’t conceal it, Borenka. Some
neighbours, a wretched crew, came to see my virago; I got drunk,
too, with them, and I blackguarded you poor children for all I was
worth. I abused you, and complained that you had abandoned me. I
wanted, you see, to touch the drunken hussies’ hearts, and pose as
an unhappy father. It’s my way, you know, when I want to screen my
vices I throw all the blame on my innocent children. I can’t tell
lies and hide things from you, Borenka. I came to see you as proud
as a peacock, but when I saw your gentleness and kind heart, my
tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and it upset my conscience
completely.”

“Hush, father, let’s talk of something else.”

“Mother of God, what children I have,” the old man went on, not
heeding his son. “What wealth God has bestowed on me. Such children
ought not to have had a black sheep like me for a father, but a
real man with soul and feeling! I am not worthy of you!”

The old man took off his cap with a button at the top and crossed
himself several times.

“Thanks be to Thee, O Lord!” he said with a sigh, looking from side
to side as though seeking for an ikon. “Remarkable, exceptional
children! I have three sons, and they are all like one. Sober,
steady, hard-working, and what brains! Cabman, what brains! Grigory
alone has brains enough for ten. He speaks French, he speaks German,
and talks better than any of your lawyers–one is never tired of
listening. My children, my children, I can’t believe that you are
mine! I can’t believe it! You are a martyr, my Borenka, I am ruining
you, and I shall go on ruining you. . . . You give to me endlessly,
though you know your money is thrown away. The other day I sent you
a pitiful letter, I described how ill I was, but you know I was
lying, I wanted the money for rum. And you give to me because you
are afraid to wound me by refusing. I know all that, and feel it.
Grisha’s a martyr, too. On Thursday I went to his office, drunk,
filthy, ragged, reeking of vodka like a cellar . . . I went straight
up, such a figure, I pestered him with nasty talk, while his
colleagues and superiors and petitioners were standing round. I
have disgraced him for life. And he wasn’t the least confused, only
turned a bit pale, but smiled and came up to me as though there
were nothing the matter, even introduced me to his colleagues. Then
he took me all the way home, and not a word of reproach. I rob him
worse than you. Take your brother Sasha now, he’s a martyr too! He
married, as you know, a colonel’s daughter of an aristocratic circle,
and got a dowry with her. . . . You would think he would have nothing
to do with me. No, brother, after his wedding he came with his young
wife and paid me the first visit . . . in my hole. . . . Upon my
soul!”

The old man gave a sob and then began laughing.

“And at that moment, as luck would have it, we were eating grated
radish with kvass and frying fish, and there was a stink enough in
the flat to make the devil sick. I was lying down–I’d had a drop
–my virago bounced out at the young people with her face crimson,
. . . It was a disgrace in fact. But Sasha rose superior to it all.”

“Yes, our Sasha is a good fellow,” said Boris.

“The most splendid fellow! You are all pure gold, you and Grisha
and Sasha and Sonya. I worry you, torment you, disgrace you, rob
you, and all my life I have not heard one word of reproach from
you, you have never given me one cross look. It would be all very
well if I had been a decent father to you–but as it is! You have
had nothing from me but harm. I am a bad, dissipated man. . . .
Now, thank God, I am quieter and I have no strength of will, but
in old days when you were little I had determination, will. Whatever
I said or did I always thought it was right. Sometimes I’d come
home from the club at night, drunk and ill-humoured, and scold at
your poor mother for spending money. The whole night I would be
railing at her, and think it the right thing too; you would get up
in the morning and go to school, while I’d still be venting my
temper upon her. Heavens! I did torture her, poor martyr! When you
came back from school and I was asleep you didn’t dare to have
dinner till I got up. At dinner again there would be a flare up. I
daresay you remember. I wish no one such a father; God sent me to
you for a trial. Yes, for a trial! Hold out, children, to the end!
Honour thy father and thy days shall be long. Perhaps for your noble
conduct God will grant you long life. Cabman, stop!”

The old man jumped out of the cab and ran into a tavern. Half an
hour later he came back, cleared his throat in a drunken way, and
sat down beside his son.

“Where’s Sonya now?” he asked. “Still at boarding-school?”

“No, she left in May, and is living now with Sasha’s mother-in-law.”

“There!” said the old man in surprise. “She is a jolly good girl!
So she is following her brother’s example. . . . Ah, Borenka, she
has no mother, no one to rejoice over her! I say, Borenka, does she
. . . does she know how I am living? Eh?”

Boris made no answer. Five minutes passed in profound silence. The
old man gave a sob, wiped his face with a rag and said:

“I love her, Borenka! She is my only daughter, you know, and in
one’s old age there is no comfort like a daughter. Could I see her,
Borenka?”

“Of course, when you like.”

“Really? And she won’t mind?”

“Of course not, she has been trying to find you so as to see you.”

“Upon my soul! What children! Cabman, eh? Arrange it, Borenka
darling! She is a young lady now, delicatesse, consomme, and all
the rest of it in a refined way, and I don’t want to show myself
to her in such an abject state. I’ll tell you how we’ll contrive
to work it. For three days I will keep away from spirits, to get
my filthy, drunken phiz into better order. Then I’ll come to you,
and you shall lend me for the time some suit of yours; I’ll shave
and have my hair cut, then you go and bring her to your flat. Will
you?”

“Very well.”

“Cabman, stop!”

The old man sprang out of the cab again and ran into a tavern. While
Boris was driving with him to his lodging he jumped out twice again,
while his son sat silent and waited patiently for him. When, after
dismissing the cab, they made their way across a long, filthy yard
to the “virago’s” lodging, the old man put on an utterly shamefaced
and guilty air, and began timidly clearing his throat and clicking
with his lips.

“Borenka,” he said in an ingratiating voice, “if my virago begins
saying anything, don’t take any notice . . . and behave to her, you
know, affably. She is ignorant and impudent, but she’s a good
baggage. There is a good, warm heart beating in her bosom!”

The long yard ended, and Boris found himself in a dark entry. The
swing door creaked, there was a smell of cooking and a smoking
samovar. There was a sound of harsh voices. Passing through the
passage into the kitchen Boris could see nothing but thick smoke,
a line with washing on it, and the chimney of the samovar through
a crack of which golden sparks were dropping.

“And here is my cell,” said the old man, stooping down and going
into a little room with a low-pitched ceiling, and an atmosphere
unbearably stifling from the proximity of the kitchen.

Here three women were sitting at the table regaling themselves.
Seeing the visitors, they exchanged glances and left off eating.

“Well, did you get it?” one of them, apparently the “virago” herself,
asked abruptly.

“Yes, yes,” muttered the old man. “Well, Boris, pray sit down.
Everything is plain here, young man . . . we live in a simple way.”

He bustled about in an aimless way. He felt ashamed before his son,
and at the same time apparently he wanted to keep up before the
women his dignity as cock of the walk, and as a forsaken, unhappy
father.

“Yes, young man, we live simply with no nonsense,” he went on
muttering. “We are simple people, young man. . . . We are not like
you, we don’t want to keep up a show before people. No! . . . Shall
we have a drink of vodka?”

One of the women (she was ashamed to drink before a stranger) heaved
a sigh and said:

“Well, I’ll have another drink on account of the mushrooms. . . .
They are such mushrooms, they make you drink even if you don’t want
to. Ivan Gerasimitch, offer the young gentleman, perhaps he will
have a drink!”

The last word she pronounced in a mincing drawl.

“Have a drink, young man!” said the father, not looking at his son.
“We have no wine or liqueurs, my boy, we live in a plain way.”

“He doesn’t like our ways,” sighed the “virago.” “Never mind, never
mind, he’ll have a drink.”

Not to offend his father by refusing, Boris took a wineglass and
drank in silence. When they brought in the samovar, to satisfy the
old man, he drank two cups of disgusting tea in silence, with a
melancholy face. Without a word he listened to the virago dropping
hints about there being in this world cruel, heartless children who
abandon their parents.

“I know what you are thinking now!” said the old man, after drinking
more and passing into his habitual state of drunken excitement.
“You think I have let myself sink into the mire, that I am to be
pitied, but to my thinking, this simple life is much more normal
than your life, . . . I don’t need anybody, and . . . and I don’t
intend to eat humble pie. . . . I can’t endure a wretched boy’s
looking at me with compassion.”

After tea he cleaned a herring and sprinkled it with onion, with
such feeling, that tears of emotion stood in his eyes. He began
talking again about the races and his winnings, about some Panama
hat for which he had paid sixteen roubles the day before. He told
lies with the same relish with which he ate herring and drank. His
son sat on in silence for an hour, and began to say good-bye.

“I don’t venture to keep you,” the old man said, haughtily. “You
must excuse me, young man, for not living as you would like!”

He ruffled up his feathers, snorted with dignity, and winked at the
women.

“Good-bye, young man,” he said, seeing his son into the entry.
“Attendez.”

In the entry, where it was dark, he suddenly pressed his face against
the young man’s sleeve and gave a sob.

“I should like to have a look at Sonitchka,” he whispered. “Arrange
it, Borenka, my angel. I’ll shave, I’ll put on your suit . . . I’ll
put on a straight face . . . I’ll hold my tongue while she is there.
Yes, yes, I will hold my tongue!”

He looked round timidly towards the door, through which the women’s
voices were heard, checked his sobs, and said aloud:

“Good-bye, young man! Attendez.”

A FIRST-CLASS passenger who had just dined at the station and
drunk a little too much lay down on the velvet-covered seat,
stretched himself out luxuriously, and sank into a doze. After a
nap of no more than five minutes, he looked with oily eyes at
his _vis-a-vis,_ gave a smirk, and said:

“My father of blessed memory used to like to have his heels
tickled by peasant women after dinner. I am just like him, with
this difference, that after dinner I always like my tongue and my
brains gently stimulated. Sinful man as I am, I like empty
talk on a full stomach. Will you allow me to have a chat with
you?”

“I shall be delighted,” answered the _vis-a-vis._

“After a good dinner the most trifling subject is sufficient to
arouse devilishly great thoughts in my brain. For instance, we
saw just now near the refreshment bar two young men, and you
heard one congratulate the other on being celebrated. ‘I
congratulate you,’ he said; ‘you are already a celebrity and are
beginning to win fame.’ Evidently actors or journalists of
microscopic dimensions. But they are not the point. The question
that is occupying my mind at the moment, sir, is exactly what is
to be understood by the word _fame_ or _charity_. What do you
think? Pushkin called fame a bright patch on a ragged garment; we
all understand it as Pushkin does — that is, more or less
subjectively — but no one has yet given a clear, logical
definition of the word. . . . I would give a good deal for such a
definition!”

“Why do you feel such a need for it?”

“You see, if we knew what fame is, the means of attaining it
might also perhaps be known to us,” said the first-class
passenger, after a moment’s thought. I must tell you, sir, that
when I was younger I strove after celebrity with every fiber of
my being. To be popular was my craze, so to speak. For the sake of
it I studied, worked, sat up at night, neglected my meals. And I
fancy, as far as I can judge without partiality, I had all the
natural gifts for attaining it. To begin with, I am an engineer
by profession. In the course of my life I have built in Russia
some two dozen magnificent bridges, I have laid aqueducts for
three towns; I have worked in Russia, in England, in Belgium. . .
. Secondly, I am the author of several special treatises in my
own line. And thirdly, my dear sir, I have from a boy had a
weakness for chemistry. Studying that science in my leisure
hours, I discovered methods of obtaining certain organic acids,
so that you will find my name in all the foreign manuals of
chemistry. I have always been in the service, I have risen to the
grade of actual civil councilor, and I have an unblemished
record. I will not fatigue your attention by enumerating my works
and my merits, I will only say that I have done far more than some
celebrities. And yet here I am in my old age, I am getting ready
for my coffin, so to say, and I am as celebrated as that black dog
yonder running on the embankment.”

“How can you tell? Perhaps you are celebrated.”

“H’m! Well, we will test it at once. Tell me, have you ever heard
the name Krikunov?”

The _vis-a-vis_ raised his eyes to the ceiling, thought a minute,
and laughed.

“No, I haven’t heard it, . . .” he said.

“That is my surname. You, a man of education, getting on in
years, have never heard of me — a convincing proof! It is
evident that in my efforts to gain fame I have not done the right
thing at all: I did not know the right way to set to work, and,
trying to catch fame by the tail, got on the wrong side of her.”

“What is the right way to set to work?”

“Well, the devil only knows! Talent, you say? Genius?
Originality? Not a bit of it, sir!. . . People have lived and
made a career side by side with me who were worthless, trivial,
and even contemptible compared with me. They did not do one-tenth
of the work I did, did not put themselves out, were not
distinguished for their talents, and did not make an effort to be
celebrated, but just look at them! Their names are continually in
the newspapers and on men’s lips! If you are not tired of
listening I will illustrate it by an example. Some years ago I
built a bridge in the town of K. I must tell you that the
dullness of that scurvy little town was terrible. If it had not
been for women and cards I believe I should have gone out of my
mind. Well, it’s an old story: I was so bored that I got into an
affair with a singer. Everyone was enthusiastic about her, the
devil only knows why; to my thinking she was — what shall I say?
– an ordinary, commonplace creature, like lots of others. The
hussy was empty-headed, ill-tempered, greedy, and what’s more,
she was a fool.

“She ate and drank a vast amount, slept till five o clock in the
afternoon — and I fancy did nothing else. She was looked upon as
a cocotte, and that was indeed her profession; but when people
wanted to refer to her in a literary fashion, they called her an
actress and a singer. I used to be devoted to the theatre, and
therefore this fraudulent pretense of being an actress made me
furiously indignant. My young lady had not the slightest right to
call herself an actress or a singer. She was a creature entirely
devoid of talent, devoid of feeling — a pitiful creature one may
say. As far as I can judge she sang disgustingly. The whole charm
of her ‘art’ lay in her kicking up her legs on every suitable
occasion, and not being embarrassed when people walked into her
dressing-room. She usually selected translated vaudevilles, with
singing in them, and opportunities for disporting herself in male
attire, in tights. In fact it was — ough! Well, I ask your
attention. As I remember now, a public ceremony took place to
celebrate the opening of the newly constructed bridge. There was
a religious service, there were speeches, telegrams, and so on. I
hung about my cherished creation, you know, all the while afraid
that my heart would burst with the excitement of an author. Its
an old story and there’s no need for false modesty, and so I will
tell you that my bridge was a magnificent work! It was not a
bridge but a picture, a perfect delight! And who would not have
been excited when the whole town came to the opening? ‘Oh,’ I
thought, ‘now the eyes of all the public will be on me! Where
shall I hide myself?’ Well, I need not have worried myself, sir
– alas! Except the official personages, no one took the
slightest notice of me. They stood in a crowd on the river-bank,
gazed like sheep at the bridge, and did not concern themselves to
know who had built it. And it was from that time, by the way,
that I began to hate our estimable public — damnation take
them! Well, to continue. All at once the public became agitated;
a whisper ran through the crowd, . . . a smile came on their
faces, their shoulders began to move. ‘They must have seen me,’ I
thought. A likely idea! I looked, and my singer, with a train of
young scamps, was making her way through the crowd. The eyes of
the crowd were hurriedly following this procession. A whisper
began in a thousand voices: ‘That’s so-and-so. . . . Charming!
Bewitching!’ Then it was they noticed me. . . . A couple of
young milksops, local amateurs of the scenic art, I presume,
looked at me, exchanged glances, and whispered: ‘That’s her
lover!’ How do you like that? And an unprepossessing individual
in a top-hat, with a chin that badly needed shaving, hung round
me, shifting from one foot to the other, then turned to me with
the words:

“‘Do you know who that lady is, walking on the other bank? That’s
so-and-so. . . . Her voice is beneath all criticism, but she has
a most perfect mastery of it! . . .’

“ ‘Can you tell me,’ I asked the unprepossessing individual, ‘who
built this bridge?’

“ ‘I really don’t know,’ answered the individual; some engineer,
I expect.’

“ ‘And who built the cathedral in your town?’ I asked again.

“ ‘I really can’t tell you.’

“Then I asked him who was considered the best teacher in K., who
the best architect, and to all my questions the unprepossessing
individual answered that he did not know.

“ ‘And tell me, please,’ I asked in conclusion, with whom is that
singer living?’

“ ‘With some engineer called Krikunov.’

“Well, how do you like that, sir? But to proceed. There are no
minnesingers or bards nowadays, and celebrity is created almost
exclusively by the newspapers. The day after the dedication of
the bridge, I greedily snatched up the local _Messenger,_ and
looked for myself in it. I spent a long time running my eyes over
all the four pages, and at last there it was — hurrah! I began
reading: ‘Yesterday in beautiful weather, before a vast concourse
of people, in the presence of His Excellency the Governor of the
province, so-and-so, and other dignitaries, the ceremony of the
dedication of the newly constructed bridge took place,’ and so
on. . . . Towards the end: Our talented actress so-and-so, the
favorite of the K. public, was present at the dedication looking
very beautiful. I need not say that her arrival created a
sensation. The star was wearing . . .’ and so on. They might have
given me one word! Half a word. Petty as it seems, I actually
cried with vexation!

“I consoled myself with the reflection that the provinces are
stupid, and one could expect nothing of them and for celebrity
one must go to the intellectual centers — to Petersburg and to
Moscow. And as it happened, at that very time there was a work
of mine in Petersburg which I had sent in for a competition. The
date on which the result was to be declared was at hand.

“I took leave of K. and went to Petersburg. It is a long journey
from K. to Petersburg, and that I might not be bored on the
journey I took a reserved compartment and — well — of course, I
took my singer. We set off, and all the way we were eating,
drinking champagne, and — tra-la–la! But behold, at last we
reach the intellectual center. I arrived on the very day the
result was declared, and had the satisfaction, my dear sir, of
celebrating my own success: my work received the first prize.
Hurrah! Next day I went out along the Nevsky and spent seventy
kopecks on various newspapers. I hastened to my hotel room, lay
down on the sofa, and, controlling a quiver of excitement, made
haste to read. I ran through one newspaper — nothing. I ran
through a second — nothing either; my God! At last, in the
fourth, I lighted upon the following paragraph: ‘Yesterday the
well-known provincial actress so-and-so arrived by express in
Petersburg. We note with pleasure that the climate of the South
has had a beneficial effect on our fair friend; her charming
stage appearance. . .’ and I don’t remember the rest! Much lower
down than that paragraph I found, printed in the smallest type:
first prize in the competition was adjudged to an engineer
called so-and-so.’ That was all! And to make things better, they
even misspelt my name: instead of Krikunov it was Kirkutlov. So
much for your intellectual center! But that was not all. . . . By
the time I left Petersburg, a month later, all the newspapers
were vying with one another in discussing our incomparable,
divine, highly talented actress, and my mistress was referred to,
not by her surname, but by her Christian name and her father’s. .
. .

“Some years later I was in Moscow. I was summoned there by a
letter, in the mayor’s own handwriting, to undertake a work for
which Moscow, in its newspapers, had been clamoring for over a
hundred years. In the intervals of my work I delivered five
public lectures, with a philanthropic object, in one of the
museums there. One would have thought that was enough to make one
known to the whole town for three days at least, wouldn’t one?
But, alas! not a single Moscow gazette said a word about me
There was something about houses on fire, about an operetta,
sleeping town councilors, dr unken shop keepers — about
everything; but about my work, my plans, my lectures — mum. And
a nice set they are in Moscow! I got into a tram. . . . It was
packed full; there were ladies and military men and students of
both sexes, creatures of all sorts in couples.

“‘I am told the town council has sent for an engineer to plan
such and such a work!’ I said to my neighbor, so loudly that all
the tram could hear. ‘Do you know the name of the engineer?’

“My neighbor shook his head. The rest of the public took a
cursory glance at me, and in all their eyes I read: ‘I don’t
know.’

“‘I am told that there is someone giving lectures in such and
such a museum?’ I persisted, trying to get up a conversation. ‘I
hear it is interesting.’

“No one even nodded. Evidently they had not all of them heard of
the lectures, and the ladies were not even aware of the existence
of the museum. All that would not have mattered, but imagine, my
dear sir, the people suddenly leaped to their feet and struggled
to the windows. What was it? What was the matter?

“‘Look, look!’ my neighbor nudged me. ‘Do you see that dark man
getting into that cab? That’s the famous runner, King!’

“And the whole tram began talking breathlessly of the runner who
was then absorbing the brains of Moscow.

“I could give you ever so many other examples, but I think that
is enough. Now let us assume that I am mistaken about myself,
that I am a wretchedly boastful and incompetent person; but apart
from myself I might point to many of my contemporaries, men
remarkable for their talent and industry, who have nevertheless
died unrecognized. Are Russian navigators, chemists, physicists,
mechanicians, and agriculturists popular with the public? Do our
cultivated masses know anything of Russian artists,
sculptors, and literary men? Some old literary hack,
hard-working and talented, will wear away the doorstep of the
publishers’ offices for thirty-three years, cover reams of paper,
be had up for libel twenty times, and yet not step beyond his
ant-heap. Can you mention to me a single representative of our
literature who would have become celebrated if the rumor had not
been spread over the earth that he had been killed in a duel,
gone out of his mind, been sent into exile, or had cheated at
cards?”

The first-class passenger was so excited that he dropped his
cigar out of his mouth and got up.

“Yes,” he went on fiercely, “and side by side with these people I
can quote you hundreds of all sorts of singers, acrobats,
buffoons, whose names are known to every baby. Yes!”

The door creaked, there was a draught, and an individual of
forbidding aspect, wearing an Inverness coat, a top-hat, and blue
spectacles, walked into the carriage. The individual looked round
at the seats, frowned, and went on further.

“Do you know who that is?” there came a timid whisper from the
furthest corner of the compartment.

That is N. N., the famous Tula cardsharper who was had up in
connection with the Y. bank affair.”

“There you are!” laughed the first-class passenger. He knows a
Tula cardsharper, but ask him whether he knows Semiradsky,
Tchaykovsky, or Solovyov the philosopher — he’ll shake his head.
. . . It swinish!”

Three minutes passed in silence.

“Allow me in my turn to ask you a question,” said the _vis-a-vis_
timidly, clearing his throat. Do you know the name of Pushkov?”

“Pushkov? H’m! Pushkov. . . . No, I don’t know it!”

“That is my name,. . .” said the _vis-a-vis,_, overcome with
embarrassment. “Then you don’t know it? And yet I have been a
professor at one of the Russian universities for thirty-five
years, . . . a member of the Academy of Sciences, . . . have
published more than one work. . . .”

The first-class passenger and the _vis-a-vis_ looked at each
other and burst out laughing.

A summer morning. The air is still; there is no sound but the
churring of a grasshopper on the river bank, and somewhere the timid
cooing of a turtle-dove. Feathery clouds stand motionless in the
sky, looking like snow scattered about. . . . Gerassim, the carpenter,
a tall gaunt peasant, with a curly red head and a face overgrown
with hair, is floundering about in the water under the green willow
branches near an unfinished bathing shed. . . . He puffs and pants
and, blinking furiously, is trying to get hold of something under
the roots of the willows. His face is covered with perspiration. A
couple of yards from him, Lubim, the carpenter, a young hunchback
with a triangular face and narrow Chinese-looking eyes, is standing
up to his neck in water. Both Gerassim and Lubim are in shirts and
linen breeches. Both are blue with cold, for they have been more
than an hour already in the water.

“But why do you keep poking with your hand?” cries the hunchback
Lubim, shivering as though in a fever. “You blockhead! Hold him,
hold him, or else he’ll get away, the anathema! Hold him, I tell
you!”

“He won’t get away. . . . Where can he get to? He’s under a root,”
says Gerassim in a hoarse, hollow bass, which seems to come not
from his throat, but from the depths of his stomach. “He’s slippery,
the beggar, and there’s nothing to catch hold of.”

“Get him by the gills, by the gills!”

“There’s no seeing his gills. . . . Stay, I’ve got hold of something
. . . . I’ve got him by the lip. . . He’s biting, the brute!”

“Don’t pull him out by the lip, don’t–or you’ll let him go! Take
him by the gills, take him by the gills. . . . You’ve begun poking
with your hand again! You are a senseless man, the Queen of Heaven
forgive me! Catch hold!”

“Catch hold!” Gerassim mimics him. “You’re a fine one to give orders
. . . . You’d better come and catch hold of him yourself, you hunchback
devil. . . . What are you standing there for?”

“I would catch hold of him if it were possible. But can I stand by
the bank, and me as short as I am? It’s deep there.”

“It doesn’t matter if it is deep. . . . You must swim.”

The hunchback waves his arms, swims up to Gerassim, and catches
hold of the twigs. At the first attempt to stand up, he goes into
the water over his head and begins blowing up bubbles.

“I told you it was deep,” he says, rolling his eyes angrily. “Am I
to sit on your neck or what?”

“Stand on a root . . . there are a lot of roots like a ladder.” The
hunchback gropes for a root with his heel, and tightly gripping
several twigs, stands on it. . . . Having got his balance, and
established himself in his new position, he bends down, and trying
not to get the water into his mouth, begins fumbling with his right
hand among the roots. Getting entangled among the weeds and slipping
on the mossy roots he finds his hand in contact with the sharp
pincers of a crayfish.

“As though we wanted to see you, you demon!” says Lubim, and he
angrily flings the crayfish on the bank.

At last his hand feels Gerassim’ s arm, and groping its way along
it comes to something cold and slimy.

“Here he is!” says Lubim with a grin. “A fine fellow! Move your
fingers, I’ll get him directly . . . by the gills. Stop, don’t prod
me with your elbow. . . . I’ll have him in a minute, in a minute,
only let me get hold of him. . . . The beggar has got a long way
under the roots, there is nothing to get hold of. . . . One can’t
get to the head . . . one can only feel its belly . . . . kill that
gnat on my neck–it’s stinging! I’ll get him by the gills, directly
. . . . Come to one side and give him a push! Poke him with your
finger!”

The hunchback puffs out his cheeks, holds his breath, opens his
eyes wide, and apparently has already got his fingers in the gills,
but at that moment the twigs to which he is holding on with his
left hand break, and losing his balance he plops into the water!
Eddies race away from the bank as though frightened, and little
bubbles come up from the spot where he has fallen in. The hunchback
swims out and, snorting, clutches at the twigs.

“You’ll be drowned next, you stupid, and I shall have to answer for
you,” wheezes Gerassim. “Clamber out, the devil take you! I’ll get
him out myself.”

High words follow. . . . The sun is baking hot. The shadows begin
to grow shorter and to draw in on themselves, like the horns of a
snail. . . . The high grass warmed by the sun begins to give out a
strong, heavy smell of honey. It will soon be midday, and Gerassim
and Lubim are still floundering under the willow tree. The husky
bass and the shrill, frozen tenor persistently disturb the stillness
of the summer day.

“Pull him out by the gills, pull him out! Stay, I’ll push him out!
Where are you shoving your great ugly fist? Poke him with your
finger–you pig’s face! Get round by the side! get to the left,
to the left, there’s a big hole on the right! You’ll be a supper
for the water-devil! Pull it by the lip!”

There is the sound of the flick of a whip. . . . A herd of cattle,
driven by Yefim, the shepherd, saunter lazily down the sloping bank
to drink. The shepherd, a decrepit old man, with one eye and a
crooked mouth, walks with his head bowed, looking at his feet. The
first to reach the water are the sheep, then come the horses, and
last of all the cows.

“Push him from below!” he hears Lubim’s voice. “Stick your finger
in! Are you deaf, fellow, or what? Tfoo!”

“What are you after, lads?” shouts Yefim.

“An eel-pout! We can’t get him out! He’s hidden under the roots.
Get round to the side! To the side!”

For a minute Yefim screws up his eye at the fishermen, then he takes
off his bark shoes, throws his sack off his shoulders, and takes
off his shirt. He has not the patience to take off his breeches,
but, making the sign of the cross, he steps into the water, holding
out his thin dark arms to balance himself. . . . For fifty paces
he walks along the slimy bottom, then he takes to swimming.

“Wait a minute, lads!” he shouts. “Wait! Don’t be in a hurry to
pull him out, you’ll lose him. You must do it properly!”

Yefim joins the carpenters and all three, shoving each other with
their knees and their elbows, puffing and swearing at one another,
bustle about the same spot. Lubim, the hunchback, gets a mouthful
of water, and the air rings with his hard spasmodic coughing.

“Where’s the shepherd?” comes a shout from the bank. “Yefim! Shepherd!
Where are you? The cattle are in the garden! Drive them out, drive
them out of the garden! Where is he, the old brigand?”

First men’s voices are heard, then a woman’s. The master himself,
Andrey Andreitch, wearing a dressing-gown made of a Persian shawl
and carrying a newspaper in his hand, appears from behind the garden
fence. He looks inquiringly towards the shouts which come from the
river, and then trips rapidly towards the bathing shed.

“What’s this? Who’s shouting?” he asks sternly, seeing through the
branches of the willow the three wet heads of the fishermen. “What
are you so busy about there?”

“Catching a fish,” mutters Yefim, without raising his head.

“I’ll give it to you! The beasts are in the garden and he is fishing!
. . . When will that bathing shed be done, you devils? You’ve been
at work two days, and what is there to show for it?”

“It . . . will soon be done,” grunts Gerassim; summer is long,
you’ll have plenty of time to wash, your honour. . . . Pfrrr! . . .
We can’t manage this eel-pout here anyhow. . . . He’s got under
a root and sits there as if he were in a hole and won’t budge one
way or another . . . .”

“An eel-pout?” says the master, and his eyes begin to glisten. “Get
him out quickly then.”

“You’ll give us half a rouble for it presently if we oblige you
. . . . A huge eel-pout, as fat as a merchant’s wife. . . . It’s worth
half a rouble, your honour, for the trouble. . . . Don’t squeeze
him, Lubim, don’t squeeze him, you’ll spoil him! Push him up from
below! Pull the root upwards, my good man . . . what’s your name?
Upwards, not downwards, you brute! Don’t swing your legs!”

Five minutes pass, ten. . . . The master loses all patience.

“Vassily!” he shouts, turning towards the garden. “Vaska! Call
Vassily to me!”

The coachman Vassily runs up. He is chewing something and breathing
hard.

“Go into the water,” the master orders him. “Help them to pull out
that eel-pout. They can’t get him out.”

Vassily rapidly undresses and gets into the water.

“In a minute. . . . I’ll get him in a minute,” he mutters. “Where’s
the eel-pout? We’ll have him out in a trice! You’d better go, Yefim.
An old man like you ought to be minding his own business instead
of being here. Where’s that eel-pout? I’ll have him in a minute
. . . . Here he is! Let go.”

“What’s the good of saying that? We know all about that! You get
it out!”

But there is no getting it out like this! One must get hold of it
by the head.”

“And the head is under the root! We know that, you fool!”

“Now then, don’t talk or you’ll catch it! You dirty cur!”

“Before the master to use such language,” mutters Yefim. “You won’t
get him out, lads! He’s fixed himself much too cleverly!”

“Wait a minute, I’ll come directly,” says the master, and he begins
hurriedly undressing. “Four fools, and can’t get an eel-pout!”

When he is undressed, Andrey Andreitch gives himself time to cool
and gets into the water. But even his interference leads to nothing.

“We must chop the root off,” Lubim decides at last. “Gerassim, go
and get an axe! Give me an axe!”

“Don’t chop your fingers off,” says the master, when the blows of
the axe on the root under water are heard. “Yefim, get out of this!
Stay, I’ll get the eel-pout. . . . You’ll never do it.”

The root is hacked a little. They partly break it off, and Andrey
Andreitch, to his immense satisfaction, feels his fingers under the
gills of the fish.

“I’m pulling him out, lads! Don’t crowd round . . . stand still
. . . . I am pulling him out!”

The head of a big eel-pout, and behind it its long black body,
nearly a yard long, appears on the surface of the water. The fish
flaps its tail heavily and tries to tear itself away.

“None of your nonsense, my boy! Fiddlesticks! I’ve got you! Aha!”

A honied smile overspreads all the faces. A minute passes in silent
contemplation.

“A famous eel-pout,” mutters Yefim, scratching under his shoulder-blades.
“I’ll be bound it weighs ten pounds.”

“Mm! . . . Yes,” the master assents. “The liver is fairly swollen!
It seems to stand out! A-ach!”

The fish makes a sudden, unexpected upward movement with its tail
and the fishermen hear a loud splash . . . they all put out their
hands, but it is too late; they have seen the last of the eel-pout.

A “popular” fete with a philanthropic object had been arranged on
the Feast of Epiphany in the provincial town of N—-. They had
selected a broad part of the river between the market and the
bishop’s palace, fenced it round with a rope, with fir-trees and
with flags, and provided everything necessary for skating, sledging,
and tobogganing. The festivity was organized on the grandest scale
possible. The notices that were distributed were of huge size and
promised a number of delights: skating, a military band, a lottery
with no blank tickets, an electric sun, and so on. But the whole
scheme almost came to nothing owing to the hard frost. From the eve
of Epiphany there were twenty-eight degrees of frost with a strong
wind; it was proposed to put off the fete, and this was not done
only because the public, which for a long while had been looking
forward to the fete impatiently, would not consent to any postponement.

“Only think, what do you expect in winter but a frost!” said the
ladies persuading the governor, who tried to insist that the fete
should be postponed. “If anyone is cold he can go and warm himself.”

The trees, the horses, the men’s beards were white with frost; it
even seemed that the air itself crackled, as though unable to endure
the cold; but in spite of that the frozen public were skating.
Immediately after the blessing of the waters and precisely at one
o’clock the military band began playing.

Between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, when the festivity
was at its height, the select society of the place gathered together
to warm themselves in the governor’s pavilion, which had been put
up on the river-bank. The old governor and his wife, the bishop,
the president of the local court, the head master of the high school,
and many others, were there. The ladies were sitting in armchairs,
while the men crowded round the wide glass door, looking at the
skating.

“Holy Saints!” said the bishop in surprise; “what flourishes they
execute with their legs! Upon my soul, many a singer couldn’t do a
twirl with his voice as those cut-throats do with their legs. Aie!
he’ll kill himself!”

“That’s Smirnov. . . . That’s Gruzdev . . .” said the head master,
mentioning the names of the schoolboys who flew by the pavilion.

“Bah! he’s all alive-oh!” laughed the governor. “Look, gentlemen,
our mayor is coming. . . . He is coming this way. . . . That’s a
nuisance, he will talk our heads off now.”

A little thin old man, wearing a big cap and a fur-lined coat hanging
open, came from the opposite bank towards the pavilion, avoiding
the skaters. This was the mayor of the town, a merchant, Eremeyev
by name, a millionaire and an old inhabitant of N—-. Flinging
wide his arms and shrugging at the cold, he skipped along, knocking
one golosh against the other, evidently in haste to get out of the
wind. Half-way he suddenly bent down, stole up to some lady, and
plucked at her sleeve from behind. When she looked round he skipped
away, and probably delighted at having succeeded in frightening
her, went off into a loud, aged laugh.

“Lively old fellow,” said the governor. “It’s a wonder he’s not
skating.”

As he got near the pavilion the mayor fell into a little tripping
trot, waved his hands, and, taking a run, slid along the ice in his
huge golosh boots up to the very door.

“Yegor Ivanitch, you ought to get yourself some skates!” the governor
greeted him.

“That’s just what I am thinking,” he answered in a squeaky, somewhat
nasal tenor, taking off his cap. “I wish you good health, your
Excellency! Your Holiness! Long life to all the other gentlemen and
ladies! Here’s a frost! Yes, it is a frost, bother it! It’s deadly!”

Winking with his red, frozen eyes, Yegor Ivanitch stamped on the
floor with his golosh boots and swung his arms together like a
frozen cabman.

“Such a damnable frost, worse than any dog!” he went on talking,
smiling all over his face. “It’s a real affliction!”

“It’s healthy,” said the governor; “frost strengthens a man and
makes him vigorous. . . .”

“Though it may be healthy, it would be better without it at all,”
said the mayor, wiping his wedge-shaped beard with a red handkerchief.
“It would be a good riddance! To my thinking, your Excellency, the
Lord sends it us as a punishment–the frost, I mean. We sin in
the summer and are punished in the winter. . . . Yes!”

Yegor Ivanitch looked round him quickly and flung up his hands.

“Why, where’s the needful . . . to warm us up?” he asked, looking
in alarm first at the governor and then at the bishop. “Your
Excellency! Your Holiness! I’ll be bound, the ladies are frozen
too! We must have something, this won’t do!”

Everyone began gesticulating and declaring that they had not come
to the skating to warm themselves, but the mayor, heeding no one,
opened the door and beckoned to someone with his crooked finger. A
workman and a fireman ran up to him.

“Here, run off to Savatin,” he muttered, “and tell him to make haste
and send here . . . what do you call it? . . . What’s it to be?
Tell him to send a dozen glasses . . . a dozen glasses of mulled
wine, the very hottest, or punch, perhaps. . . .”

There was laughter in the pavilion.

“A nice thing to treat us to!”

“Never mind, we will drink it,” muttered the mayor; “a dozen glasses,
then . . . and some Benedictine, perhaps . . . and tell them to
warm two bottles of red wine. . . . Oh, and what for the ladies?
Well, you tell them to bring cakes, nuts . . . sweets of some sort,
perhaps. . . . There, run along, look sharp!”

The mayor was silent for a minute and then began again abusing the
frost, banging his arms across his chest and thumping with his
golosh boots.

“No, Yegor Ivanitch,” said the governor persuasively, “don’t be
unfair, the Russian frost has its charms. I was reading lately that
many of the good qualities of the Russian people are due to the
vast expanse of their land and to the climate, the cruel struggle
for existence . . . that’s perfectly true!”

“It may be true, your Excellency, but it would be better without
it. The frost did drive out the French, of course, and one can
freeze all sorts of dishes, and the children can go skating–
that’s all true! For the man who is well fed and well clothed the
frost is only a pleasure, but for the working man, the beggar, the
pilgrim, the crazy wanderer, it’s the greatest evil and misfortune.
It’s misery, your Holiness! In a frost like this poverty is twice
as hard, and the thief is more cunning and evildoers more violent.
There’s no gainsaying it! I am turned seventy, I’ve a fur coat now,
and at home I have a stove and rums and punches of all sorts. The
frost means nothing to me now; I take no notice of it, I don’t care
to know of it, but how it used to be in old days, Holy Mother! It’s
dreadful to recall it! My memory is failing me with years and I
have forgotten everything; my enemies, and my sins and troubles of
all sorts–I forget them all, but the frost–ough! How I remember
it! When my mother died I was left a little devil–this high–
a homeless orphan . . . no kith nor kin, wretched, ragged, little
clothes, hungry, nowhere to sleep–in fact, ‘we have here no
abiding city, but seek the one to come.’ In those days I used to
lead an old blind woman about the town for five kopecks a day . . .
the frosts were cruel, wicked. One would go out with the old woman
and begin suffering torments. My Creator! First of all you would
be shivering as in a fever, shrugging and dancing about. Then your
ears, your fingers, your feet, would begin aching. They would ache
as though someone were squeezing them with pincers. But all that
would have been nothing, a trivial matter, of no great consequence.
The trouble was when your whole body was chilled. One would walk
for three blessed hours in the frost, your Holiness, and lose all
human semblance. Your legs are drawn up, there is a weight on your
chest, your stomach is pinched; above all, there is a pain in your
heart that is worse than anything. Your heart aches beyond all
endurance, and there is a wretchedness all over your body as though
you were leading Death by the hand instead of an old woman. You are
numb all over, turned to stone like a statue; you go on and feel
as though it were not you walking, but someone else moving your
legs instead of you. When your soul is frozen you don’t know what
you are doing: you are ready to leave the old woman with no one to
guide her, or to pull a hot roll from off a hawker’s tray, or to
fight with someone. And when you come to your night’s lodging into
the warmth after the frost, there is not much joy in that either!
You lie awake till midnight, crying, and don’t know yourself what
you are crying for. . . .”

“We must walk about the skating-ground before it gets dark,” said
the governor’s wife, who was bored with listening. “Who’s coming
with me?”

The governor’s wife went out and the whole company trooped out of
the pavilion after her. Only the governor, the bishop, and the mayor
remained.

“Queen of Heaven! and what I went through when I was a shopboy in
a fish-shop!” Yegor Ivanitch went on, flinging up his arms so that
his fox-lined coat fell open. “One would go out to the shop almost
before it was light . . . by eight o’clock I was completely frozen,
my face was blue, my fingers were stiff so that I could not fasten
my buttons nor count the money. One would stand in the cold, turn
numb, and think, ‘Lord, I shall have to stand like this right on
till evening!’ By dinner-time my stomach was pinched and my heart
was aching. . . . Yes! And I was not much better afterwards when I
had a shop of my own. The frost was intense and the shop was like
a mouse-trap with draughts blowing in all directions; the coat I
had on was, pardon me, mangy, as thin as paper, threadbare. . . .
One would be chilled through and through, half dazed, and turn as
cruel as the frost oneself: I would pull one by the ear so that I
nearly pulled the ear off; I would smack another on the back of the
head; I’d glare at a customer like a ruffian, a wild beast, and be
ready to fleece him; and when I got home in the evening and ought
to have gone to bed, I’d be ill-humoured and set upon my family,
throwing it in their teeth that they were living upon me; I would
make a row and carry on so that half a dozen policemen couldn’t
have managed me. The frost makes one spiteful and drives one to
drink.”

Yegor Ivanitch clasped his hands and went on:

“And when we were taking fish to Moscow in the winter, Holy Mother!”
And spluttering as he talked, he began describing the horrors he
endured with his shopmen when he was taking fish to Moscow. . . .

“Yes,” sighed the governor, “it is wonderful what a man can endure!
You used to take wagon-loads of fish to Moscow, Yegor Ivanitch,
while I in my time was at the war. I remember one extraordinary
instance. . . .”

And the governor described how, during the last Russo-Turkish War,
one frosty night the division in which he was had stood in the snow
without moving for thirteen hours in a piercing wind; from fear of
being observed the division did not light a fire, nor make a sound
or a movement; they were forbidden to smoke. . . .

Reminiscences followed. The governor and the mayor grew lively and
good-humoured, and, interrupting each other, began recalling their
experiences. And the bishop told them how, when he was serving in
Siberia, he had travelled in a sledge drawn by dogs; how one day,
being drowsy, in a time of sharp frost he had fallen out of the
sledge and been nearly frozen; when the Tunguses turned back and
found him he was barely alive. Then, as by common agreement, the
old men suddenly sank into silence, sat side by side, and mused.

“Ech!” whispered the mayor; “you’d think it would be time to forget,
but when you look at the water-carriers, at the schoolboys, at the
convicts in their wretched gowns, it brings it all back! Why, only
take those musicians who are playing now. I’ll be bound, there is
a pain in their hearts; a pinch at their stomachs, and their trumpets
are freezing to their lips. . . . They play and think: ‘Holy Mother!
we have another three hours to sit here in the cold.’”

The old men sank into thought. They thought of that in man which
is higher than good birth, higher than rank and wealth and learning,
of that which brings the lowest beggar near to God: of the helplessness
of man, of his sufferings and his patience. . . .

Meanwhile the air was turning blue . . . the door opened and two
waiters from Savatin’s walked in, carrying trays and a big muffled
teapot. When the glasses had been filled and there was a strong
smell of cinnamon and clove in the air, the door opened again, and
there came into the pavilion a beardless young policeman whose nose
was crimson, and who was covered all over with frost; he went up
to the governor, and, saluting, said: “Her Excellency told me to
inform you that she has gone home.”

Looking at the way the policeman put his stiff, frozen fingers to
his cap, looking at his nose, his lustreless eyes, and his hood
covered with white frost near the mouth, they all for some reason
felt that this policeman’s heart must be aching, that his stomach
must feel pinched, and his soul numb. . . .

“I say,” said the governor hesitatingly, “have a drink of mulled
wine!”

“It’s all right . . . it’s all right! Drink it up!” the mayor urged
him, gesticulating; “don’t be shy!”

The policeman took the glass in both hands, moved aside, and, trying
to drink without making any sound, began discreetly sipping from
the glass. He drank and was overwhelmed with embarrassment while
the old men looked at him in silence, and they all fancied that the
pain was leaving the young policeman’s heart, and that his soul was
thawing. The governor heaved a sigh.

“It’s time we were at home,” he said, getting up. “Good-bye! I say,”
he added, addressing the policeman, “tell the musicians there to
. . . leave off playing, and ask Pavel Semyonovitch from me to see
they are given . . . beer or vodka.”

The governor and the bishop said good-bye to the mayor and went out
of the pavilion.

Yegor Ivanitch attacked the mulled wine, and before the policeman
had finished his glass succeeded in telling him a great many
interesting things. He could not be silent.