I
The evening service was being celebrated at Progonnaya Station.
Before the great ikon, painted in glaring colours on a background
of gold, stood the crowd of railway servants with their wives and
children, and also of the timbermen and sawyers who worked close
to the railway line. All stood in silence, fascinated by the glare
of the lights and the howling of the snow-storm which was aimlessly
disporting itself outside, regardless of the fact that it was the
Eve of the Annunciation. The old priest from Vedenyapino conducted
the service; the sacristan and Matvey Terehov were singing.
Matvey's face was beaming with delight; he sang stretching out his
neck as though he wanted to soar upwards. He sang tenor and chanted
the "Praises" too in a tenor voice with honied sweetness and
persuasiveness. When he sang "Archangel Voices" he waved his arms
like a conductor, and trying to second the sacristan's hollow bass
with his tenor, achieved something extremely complex, and from his
face it could be seen that he was experiencing great pleasure.
At last the service was over, and they all quietly dispersed, and
it was dark and empty again, and there followed that hush which is
only known in stations that stand solitary in the open country or
in the forest when the wind howls and nothing else is heard and
when all the emptiness around, all the dreariness of life slowly
ebbing away is felt.
Matvey lived not far from the station at his cousin's tavern. But
he did not want to go home. He sat down at the refreshment bar and
began talking to the waiter in a low voice.
"We had our own choir in the tile factory. And I must tell you that
though we were only workmen, our singing was first-rate, splendid.
We were often invited to the town, and when the Deputy Bishop,
Father Ivan, took the service at Trinity Church, the bishop's singers
sang in the right choir and we in the left. Only they complained
in the town that we kept the singing on too long: 'the factory choir
drag it out,' they used to say. It is true we began St. Andrey's
prayers and the Praises between six and seven, and it was past
eleven when we finished, so that it was sometimes after midnight
when we got home to the factory. It was good," sighed Matvey. "Very
good it was, indeed, Sergey Nikanoritch! But here in my father's
house it is anything but joyful. The nearest church is four miles
away; with my weak health I can't get so far; there are no singers
there. And there is no peace or quiet in our family; day in day
out, there is an uproar, scolding, uncleanliness; we all eat out
of one bowl like peasants; and there are beetles in the cabbage
soup. . . . God has not given me health, else I would have gone
away long ago, Sergey Nikanoritch."
Matvey Terehov was a middle-aged man about forty-five, but he had
a look of ill-health; his face was wrinkled and his lank, scanty
beard was quite grey, and that made him seem many years older. He
spoke in a weak voice, circumspectly, and held his chest when he
coughed, while his eyes assumed the uneasy and anxious look one
sees in very apprehensive people. He never said definitely what was
wrong with him, but he was fond of describing at length how once
at the factory he had lifted a heavy box and had ruptured himself,
and how this had led to "the gripes," and had forced him to give
up his work in the tile factory and come back to his native place;
but he could not explain what he meant by "the gripes."
"I must own I am not fond of my cousin," he went on, pouring himself
out some tea. "He is my elder; it is a sin to censure him, and I
fear the Lord, but I cannot bear it in patience. He is a haughty,
surly, abusive man; he is the torment of his relations and workmen,
and constantly out of humour. Last Sunday I asked him in an amiable
way, 'Brother, let us go to Pahomovo for the Mass!' but he said 'I
am not going; the priest there is a gambler;' and he would not come
here to-day because, he said, the priest from Vedenyapino smokes
and drinks vodka. He doesn't like the clergy! He reads Mass himself
and the Hours and the Vespers, while his sister acts as sacristan;
he says, 'Let us pray unto the Lord'! and she, in a thin little
voice like a turkey-hen, 'Lord, have mercy upon us! . . .' It's a
sin, that's what it is. Every day I say to him, 'Think what you are
doing, brother! Repent, brother!' and he takes no notice."
Sergey Nikanoritch, the waiter, poured out five glasses of tea and
carried them on a tray to the waiting-room. He had scarcely gone
in when there was a shout:
"Is that the way to serve it, pig's face? You don't know how to
wait!"
It was the voice of the station-master. There was a timid mutter,
then again a harsh and angry shout:
"Get along!"
The waiter came back greatly crestfallen.
"There was a time when I gave satisfaction to counts and princes,"
he said in a low voice; "but now I don't know how to serve tea. . . .
He called me names before the priest and the ladies!"
The waiter, Sergey Nikanoritch, had once had money of his own, and
had kept a buffet at a first-class station, which was a junction,
in the principal town of a province. There he had worn a swallow-tail
coat and a gold chain. But things had gone ill with him; he had
squandered all his own money over expensive fittings and service;
he had been robbed by his staff, and getting gradually into
difficulties, had moved to another station less bustling. Here his
wife had left him, taking with her all the silver, and he moved to
a third station of a still lower class, where no hot dishes were
served. Then to a fourth. Frequently changing his situation and
sinking lower and lower, he had at last come to Progonnaya, and
here he used to sell nothing but tea and cheap vodka, and for lunch
hard-boiled eggs and dry sausages, which smelt of tar, and which
he himself sarcastically said were only fit for the orchestra. He
was bald all over the top of his head, and had prominent blue eyes
and thick bushy whiskers, which he often combed out, looking into
the little looking-glass. Memories of the past haunted him continually;
he could never get used to sausage "only fit for the orchestra,"
to the rudeness of the station-master, and to the peasants who used
to haggle over the prices, and in his opinion it was as unseemly
to haggle over prices in a refreshment room as in a chemist's shop.
He was ashamed of his poverty and degradation, and that shame was
now the leading interest of his life.
"Spring is late this year," said Matvey, listening. "It's a good
job; I don't like spring. In spring it is very muddy, Sergey
Nikanoritch. In books they write: Spring, the birds sing, the sun
is setting, but what is there pleasant in that? A bird is a bird,
and nothing more. I am fond of good company, of listening to folks,
of talking of religion or singing something agreeable in chorus;
but as for nightingales and flowers--bless them, I say!"
He began again about the tile factory, about the choir, but Sergey
Nikanoritch could not get over his mortification, and kept shrugging
his shoulders and muttering. Matvey said good-bye and went home.
There was no frost, and the snow was already melting on the roofs,
though it was still falling in big flakes; they were whirling rapidly
round and round in the air and chasing one another in white clouds
along the railway line. And the oak forest on both sides of the
line, in the dim light of the moon which was hidden somewhere high
up in the clouds, resounded with a prolonged sullen murmur. When a
violent storm shakes the trees, how terrible they are! Matvey walked
along the causeway beside the line, covering his face and his hands,
while the wind beat on his back. All at once a little nag, plastered
all over with snow, came into sight; a sledge scraped along the
bare stones of the causeway, and a peasant, white all over, too,
with his head muffled up, cracked his whip. Matvey looked round
after him, but at once, as though it had been a vision, there was
neither sledge nor peasant to be seen, and he hastened his steps,
suddenly scared, though he did not know why.
Here was the crossing and the dark little house where the signalman
lived. The barrier was raised, and by it perfect mountains had
drifted and clouds of snow were whirling round like witches on
broomsticks. At that point the line was crossed by an old highroad,
which was still called "the track." On the right, not far from the
crossing, by the roadside stood Terehov's tavern, which had been a
posting inn. Here there was always a light twinkling at night.
When Matvey reached home there was a strong smell of incense in all
the rooms and even in the entry. His cousin Yakov Ivanitch was still
reading the evening service. In the prayer-room where this was going
on, in the corner opposite the door, there stood a shrine of
old-fashioned ancestral ikons in gilt settings, and both walls to
right and to left were decorated with ikons of ancient and modern
fashion, in shrines and without them. On the table, which was draped
to the floor, stood an ikon of the Annunciation, and close by a
cyprus-wood cross and the censer; wax candles were burning. Beside
the table was a reading desk. As he passed by the prayer-room,
Matvey stopped and glanced in at the door. Yakov Ivanitch was reading
at the desk at that moment, his sister Aglaia, a tall lean old woman
in a dark-blue dress and white kerchief, was praying with him. Yakov
Ivanitch's daughter Dashutka, an ugly freckled girl of eighteen,
was there, too, barefoot as usual, and wearing the dress in which
she had at nightfall taken water to the cattle.
"Glory to Thee Who hast shown us the light!" Yakov Ivanitch boomed
out in a chant, bowing low.
Aglaia propped her chin on her hand and chanted in a thin, shrill,
drawling voice. And upstairs, above the ceiling, there was the sound
of vague voices which seemed menacing or ominous of evil. No one
had lived on the storey above since a fire there a long time ago.
The windows were boarded up, and empty bottles lay about on the
floor between the beams. Now the wind was banging and droning, and
it seemed as though someone were running and stumbling over the
beams.
Half of the lower storey was used as a tavern, while Terehov's
family lived in the other half, so that when drunken visitors were
noisy in the tavern every word they said could be heard in the
rooms. Matvey lived in a room next to the kitchen, with a big stove,
in which, in old days, when this had been a posting inn, bread had
been baked every day. Dashutka, who had no room of her own, lived
in the same room behind the stove. A cricket chirped there always
at night and mice ran in and out.
Matvey lighted a candle and began reading a book which he had
borrowed from the station policeman. While he was sitting over it
the service ended, and they all went to bed. Dashutka lay down,
too. She began snoring at once, but soon woke up and said, yawning:
"You shouldn't burn a candle for nothing, Uncle Matvey."
"It's my candle," answered Matvey; "I bought it with my own money."
Dashutka turned over a little and fell asleep again. Matvey sat up
a good time longer--he was not sleepy--and when he had finished
the last page he took a pencil out of a box and wrote on the book:
"I, Matvey Terehov, have read this book, and think it the very best
of all the books I have read, for which I express my gratitude to
the non-commissioned officer of the Police Department of Railways,
Kuzma Nikolaev Zhukov, as the possessor of this priceless book."
He considered it an obligation of politeness to make such inscriptions
in other people's books.