him, with a caressing, kindly regret, enraptured even by his defects.
“Of course, he’ll pick up, become stronger,--but just look what a
matted choate he is,--he doesn’t even wash his neck!” she would say,
smiling to her guests and pulling his soft, chestnut locks, trying to
get at the soft little spiral, curling like a girl’s, at the nape of
his neck,--dark, contrasting with the childishly white flesh visible
under the blouse that buttoned at the side, contrasting with the large
vertebræ under the fine, smooth skin. But he would sulkily turn his
head away from under her caressing hand, frowning and blushing. He grew
not by the day but by the hour, and as he walked he stooped, whistling
meditatively, angularly lumbering from side to side. He still ate
linden blossoms and the gum of cherry trees; he carried, although by
now secretly, a sling shot to shoot sparrows with, but he would have
been consumed with shame had this been revealed, and he constantly
kept his hands in his pockets. Only last winter he had played Redskins
with his little sister Lily. But in the spring, when through all the
streets of the town streams were running and shimmering with a blinding
dazzle; when the white window-sills in the class-rooms were aflame with
the sun; when the teacher’s room was shot through and through with
the sun, and the principal’s cat was lying in ambush for the first
finches in the high-school garden, still filled with silvery snow,--in
the spring he had gotten the notion that he had fallen in love with
the slender little Youshkova, a bookish, serious-minded high-school
girl; he had struck up a close friendship with Simashko, a spectacled
six-termer, and had determined to dedicate his entire summer vacation
to self-culture. But in the summer his dreams about self-culture were
already forgotten; a new resolve was taken,--to study the common
people; which resolve had soon passed into a passionate infatuation
with the _moujiks_.
On the evening before the Assumption, the high-school boy was heavy
with sleep while still at supper. Toward the end of every day, when
his head would grow heavy and fall down on his chest,--from fatigue,
from talking with the farm hands, from his rôle of a grown-up,--his
boyishness returned: he wanted to play a bit with Lily, to have a brief
reverie, before falling asleep, of some distant and unknown lands,
of extraordinary manifestations of passion and self-sacrifice, of
the lives of Livingston and Baker, and not of the _moujiks_ written
about by Naumov and Nephedov, whom he had given his word of honour to
Simashko to read; he wanted to sleep, for at least one night, at home,
instead of getting up before the sun, in the cold morning light, when
even dogs yawn and stretch so languorously.... But the maid entered,
saying that the farm hands had already gone to the threshing floor.
Without listening to his mother’s calls, the high-school lad threw his
uniform overcoat with its bobbing belt over his shoulders, and put on
his cap; grabbing the pillow out of the maid’s hands, he caught up with
the farm hands in the lane. He staggered from drowsiness as he walked,
dragging the pillow by a corner, and, as soon as he had stumbled up to
the heap of straw and had crawled under an old raccoon overcoat lying
there, he sailed off into some sweet, black darkness. But the tiny
dog-fleas began to burn him as with fire; the farm hands began talking
among themselves....
There were five of them: Khomut,[8] a kindly, shaggy old man;
Kiriushka, a lame, white-eyed, irresponsible lad, who gave himself up
to a childish vice, which fact everybody knew and which made Kiriushka
still more irresponsible, making him bear in silence all sorts of
jeers about his short leg, twisted at the knee; Pashka, a good-looking
_moujik_ of twenty-four and recently married; Theodot, an elderly
_moujik_, from another region, somewhere near Liebedyana, nick-named
Postnii;[9] and Ivan,--a very stupid fellow, but one who deemed himself
an amazingly clever, cunning, and mercilessly-scoffing man. This last
held in contempt all work, save work with agricultural machines; he
wore a blue blouse and had impressed everybody with the idea that he
was a born machinist, although everybody knew that he did not know a
blamed thing about the construction of even a simple winnowing machine.
He was always narrowing his morosely-ironic little eyes and pursing
up his thin lips, never letting a pipe out of his teeth. He generally
kept a portentous silence; but whenever he did speak, it was only to
annihilate somebody or something with a comment or a nick-name. He
scoffed at absolutely everything: at sense and folly, at simplicity and
slyness, at despondency and laughter; at God and his own mother, at
the gentry and the _moujiks_. The nick-names he bestowed were absurd
and incomprehensible, but he uttered them with such an enigmatic air
that it seemed to everybody that they had both a meaning and a caustic
aptness. He had not spared even himself, and had given himself a
nick-name: “Rogojkin,”[10] he had said once in reference to himself,
hinting at something so weightily, so maliciously, that everybody
rolled from laughter, and afterwards he was never known as anything but
Rogojkin. He had christened the high-school student as well, had said
something nonsensical about him as well: “Veretenkin.”
[8] “Horse-collar.” _Trans._
[9] “Lenten.” _Trans._
[10] “Made out of matting.” _Trans._
The school-boy,--so he thought,--had come to know these people
well during the summer, had become attached to all of them in
different ways,--even to Ivan, who unmercifully made fun of him.
He was learning one thing or another from them, was adapting their
pronunciation,--absolutely, as it proved, unlike the speech of the
_moujiks_ in books; adopting their unexpected, absurd, but unshakable
conclusions, the uniformity of their ready wisdom, their coarseness
and indifference, their capacity for work and their dislike of it. And,
had he gone to the city after the vacation, without reverting to his
infatuation for the life of the _moujiks_ during the next summer, he
would all his life have thought that he had observed the common people
of Russia very well,--if, by accident, a lengthy, frank conversation
had not sprung up among the farm hands on this night.
It was started by the old man who was lying alongside of the school-boy
and who was scratching more than anybody else.
“Pestering the life out of you, young master, hey? They’re nothing but
a misery, Khomut!” said he,--the word “Khomut” he used to characterize
not only his entire existence, but also all its weariness, all its
unpleasantness.
“Can’t stand it,” replied the school-boy. “The women and wenches now,
the devil take them, they won’t touch. But who would you think they
ought to be biting if not them?”
“Main thing is, whether a body wear drawers or no, it makes no
difference to them fleas,” indifferently agreed the old man, giving
off, as he tossed about, a strong odour,--of a body long unwashed, and
of a worn peasant’s coat that had become permeated with the smoke of a
chimneyless hut.
The others kept silence. Usually, they were jocose before falling
asleep, questioning Pashka about his conjugal life, while he answered
them with such unperturbed and gay shamelessness that even the
school-boy, who was constantly entranced by him, never taking his eyes
off his intelligent and animated face, was vexed over any one’s being
able to speak so of one’s own young wife. Now no one seemed about to
begin questioning, and the student wanted to do so himself, in order to
excite his imagination, forever empoisoned by the widow, and to hear
the self-assured voice of Pashka,--when the latter stretched himself,
sat up, and began rolling a crude cigarette. The old man raised up his
head, covered with a cap, and shook it.
“Eh, but you’ll burn this place down some day, young fellow!” said he.
“Watch out. It don’t take much to bring on trouble.”
“Well, I’ll get out of it by blamin’ the young master,” answered
Pashka, a trifle hoarse from a cold; and, having cleared his throat, he
started laughing. “He’s smoking all the time himself. Wonderful night
to-night, young master,” said he, changing his tone to a serious one
and turning around to the school-boy. “What’s the only thing lacking on
this night, you might say? Why, the moon.”
They all felt that he wanted to tell something. And, truly, having kept
silent for a while, without eliciting any reply, he suddenly added:
“Are you asleep, young master? What hour might it be now?”
The school-boy raised himself up, pulled his silver watch out of his
trousers’-pocket, and began inspecting it by the light of the stars.
“Half-past ten,” said he, bending over.
“Well, now, I just knew it was that,” concurred Pashka, gaily and
self-assuredly, lighting his cigarette, which was rolled somewhat in
the form of a pipe; it was gripped in one corner of his mouth between
his teeth, and he lit it with a stinking sulphur match flaming within
his cupped hands. “Just exactly at this time last year I killed a man.”
And the school-boy at once straightened up, letting his hands
drop,--and he seemed to be turned to stone during all the time that the
others talked. At rare intervals he would put in a word, but it was as
though it were not he, but some other who was talking in his stead.
Then everything within him began to shiver in an icy ague fit inducive
of senseless laughter, and his face began to burn, as though it were
aflame.
II
Ivan, as always, maintained a portentous silence. Kiriushka was not at
all interested in whatever they were talking about; he lay thinking
his own thoughts,--mostly about an accordeon, the purchase of which
was his most cherished dream. Theodot, too, who lay leaning upon his
elbow, was silent for a long while. He was a strong, flat-chested
_moujik_, who at the beginning of the summer had not been considered
by the farm hands as one of them, because he wore a short sheepskin
coat, without a waistline and without folds in its skirts,--which was
the kind worn by the Tartars of Kazan. He had seemed a stranger to the
school-boy as well. Just as he liked the cheerful composure of Pashka,
the smoothness of his mannerisms, his sun-burned face, so he was not
disposed to intimacy by the face of Theodot, also calm but devoid of
any expression, large, ashen-gray, wrinkled, with sparse moustaches,
always wet from the slavering caused by his pipe; his whitish,
weather-beaten lips were turned considerably outward. Theodot was
listening attentively, but did not put in a single word during Pashka’s
narrative,--only now and then he would give a consumptive cough and
spit into the straw. And at first the conversation was sustained only
by the dumbfounded school-boy and the old man.
“What are you lyin’ about nothin’ at all for?” said the old man
indifferently, upon hearing the boastful declaration of Pashka. “What
sort of a man could you have killed? Where?”
“Bust my eyes if I’m lyin’!” responded Pashka warmly, turning in the
old man’s direction. “Last year, on Assumption. Not only was it wrote
up in all the papers,--it was even in the order sent to the regiment.”
“Well, where was it you killed him?”
“Why, in the Caucasus, in the Zukhdens. Honest to God! Of course, I
ain’t agoin’ to lie about it; I didn’t do it all single-handed,--Koslov
also fired a shot; he’s also one of ours, from the Eletzkaya province.
I wasn’t the only one that got the thanks for it; the division
commander thanked him too, in front of all the men lined up, and
rewarded us with a rouble each, right off; but then, I know without any
mistake that it was me that winged him.”
“What him?” asked the high-school student.
“Why, a convict; this Cheorchian, now.”
“Hold on,” the old man interrupted him. “You just tell the whole thing
sensibly. Where was you stationed?”
“There he goes again!” said Pashka with assumed vexation. “There’s a
queer fellow,--won’t believe nothing. We was stationed at these New
Ceniyaks, now....”
“I know the place,” said the old man. “We, too, was stationed there for
eighteen days.”
“There, you see now,--that means I ain’t just making it up as I go
along, for I can tell you how this happened, just about. We wasn’t
stationed for no eighteen days then, brother, but for a whole year
and seven months; as for these here convicts, we was in duty bound to
escort them up to the very Zukhdens. These here convicts, now, was the
most important criminals what could possibly be,--rebels, they was. So
then, ten of them in all was caught in the mountains and put in our
keeping....”
“Hold on,” interrupted the high-school student, imitating the old man,
and feeling his hands turning to ice; “but how was it you told me that
you’d never get to shooting any rebels,--that you’d liefer shoot any
officer who might order you to fire at them?”
“Well, I wouldn’t let my own father off, when need be,” answered
Pashka, throwing a furtive glance at the student, and again turning
to the old man. “Maybe I’d never have laid a finger on him, even, if
he hadn’t taken it into his head to ruin us all; but no, he went in
for foxiness and we might all have been sentenced to hard labour for
a whole year. But as it turned out, it was all for the best; we got
thanks and turned out to be a bit smarter than him. Just you listen,
now,” he said, pretending that he was addressing the old man only. “We
was leading them along, all fair and square. We didn’t have any of
these carryings on, like beating them, now, for example, or urging
them on with the butt-end of a gun.... But one of them,--a sort of a
skinny fellow, short of stature,--was walking along and complaining
about his stomach all the time, asking us all the while to let him do
something.... He just barely managed to tinkle along in his leg-irons.
Then, at last, he approaches the superior officer: ‘Let me lie down in
the cart.’ Well, he was allowed to do so, like he was real sick. Only
by now we come to the Zukhdens. And the night’s as black as pitch, and
it’s raining cats and dogs. We made ’em sit down on the front entrance,
and watched ’em; each one of the soldiers had a little lantern in his
hands, of course, while the superior officer went off into the room,
to try the bars at the windows to see if they was all right, now, and
hadn’t been filed away by some hidden file.”
“Absolutely,” said the old man. “According to law he’s got to take over
everything in good shape.”
“That’s just what I’m talkin’ about,” confirmed Pashka, again hastily
hiding a lit sulphur match in his cupped hands. “You know all this
business, now, and that makes it interestin’ to be telling you about
it. Well, the superior officer had gone off,” he went on, squeezing out
the match and letting the smoke out of his nostrils, “he’d gone off,
inspecting things, while we stand around, nodding our heads,--we wanted
to sleep something dreadful,--when this here Cheorchian suddenly jumps
up, and off ’round the corner with him! That means, you understand,
that he had all this business figured out, while he was still in the
cart; he had cut the strap around his legs that held the shackles,
with the first thing that had come to his hand; had loosened them upon
him, then picked ’em up in his hand, so,--” Pashka bent over and,
spreading his legs, demonstrated how the prisoner had grabbed up the
shackles, “and then had taken to his heels! But me and Koslov was no
fools; we dropped our lanterns and took after him: Koslov ran around
the corner too, whilst I went straight ahead to cut him off. I keep
on running, but all the time I’m trying to catch the clink,--where
his chains might be clanking, that is. It ain’t even worthwhile to be
shootin’ at haphazard, thinks I. At last, I catch the sound,--and bang!
I feel it go past him. I fire another shot,--again I hear it go by
him. But Koslov is popping away right and left; like as not to get me
any minute.... Then I got riled: ‘Ah,’ thinks I, ‘may your eyes bust
out!’ I put the gun to my shoulder and I let’er go: glory be to the
Lord, I got him,--I hear by the sound that he must have fallen down.
I let out two more shots toward the same spot, and ran; and there he
was sitting on his bottom on the ground. He’s sitting down, propped up
with his hands in the dirt; his teeth are bared, and he’s rattlin’:
‘Quick,’ says he, ‘quick, Russ, stick your bayonet into me right
here....’ Meaning his chest, that is. I charged with my bayonet on a
run,--straight through his heart.... Why, the bayonet went right out at
his back!”
“Good work!” said the old man. “Let’s have just one good puff.... Well,
and where was Koslov at now?”
Pashka inhaled some smoke, deeply and quickly, and thrust the fag-end
into the old man’s hand.
“Why, Koslov,” he answered, hurriedly and gaily, flattered by the
praise, “why, Koslov is running, yelling with all his might: ‘Did you
do for him?’ ‘I’ve done for him,’ says I, ‘let’s drag the carcass
away....’ We took him by the shackles at once and dragged him back, to
the porch.... I cut him down like a weed,” said he, changing his tone
to a calmer and more self-satisfied one.
The old man cogitated for a while.
“And you say the officer rewarded you with a rouble each?”
“That’s straight,” answered Pashka. “He gave it to us right out of his
own hands, with all the battalion lined up on parade.”
The old man, shaking his cap-covered head, spat into his palm and
extinguished the cigarette end in the spittle.
Ivan, leisurely, through his teeth, drawled out:
“Well, it’s plain to be seen there’s lots of fools among the soldiers
too.”
“How do you make that out?”
“Why, here’s how,” said Ivan, “you durn fool! What should you have
done? You oughtn’t to have dragged him, but should have sent your mate
with a report, and stood guard with a gun over the dead body. D’you
understand now, or don’t you?”
III
Theodot began speaking even more plainly, after a general silence and a
muttering of: “Ye-es ... well done....”
“Well, now,” he began slowly, lying back on his elbow and casting an
occasional glance at the dark figure of the student, motionlessly stuck
before him against the background of the starry sky; “well, now, I
sinned absolutely over nothing. I killed a man over a mere trifle, you
might say; all on account of a she-goat I had.”
“What do you mean,--over a she-goat?” the old man, Pashka, and the
school-boy interrupted him in unison.
“Honest to God, that’s the truth,” answered Theodot. “But you just
listen a while to what sort of bane this she-goat was....”
The old man and Pashka again lighted cigarettes and began to stamp down
the straw, in preparation to listening. The student, too, wanted to
light up, but his icy hands would not stir, would not come out of his
pockets. As for Theodot, he continued seriously and calmly:
“The whole trouble was just on account of her. I didn’t do the murder
on purpose, of course.... He was the first to beat me up.... And there
was quarrelling, going to court.... He came, drunk, whilst I jumped
out, all heated up, and hit him with a whet-stone.... But what’s the
sense of talkin’ about it; as it was, I done penance for half a year
at a monastery on account of him; but if there hadn’t been this here
she-goat, nothing at all would have happened. Main thing was, none
of us had ever kept these here goats; they ain’t in the _moujik’s_
line, and we can’t understand the handling of them; and then, to top
it all, the goat turned out to be a bad one, and frisky. What carrion
she was,--the Lord save me from such another! Just the same as a
little _borzoi_ bitch, she was. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to get
her,--everybody was laughing, talking me out of it as it was; but I was
downright forced to it by need. We ain’t got any large, well-managed
farms, nor any sort of free land or forests.... We ain’t had a common
pasture land, of our own from time out of mind, and as to what small
live-stock we might have, it simply has to find forage on the
waste-lands. As for large cattle,--we used to put the cows into the big
owner’s grounds, and for all that sort of thing us little fellers was
supposed to mow, and bind in sheaves, two acres of grain, and plough
two acres of fallow-land; and put in three days with the old woman at
mowing, and three days at threshing.... Count it up,--and what don’t it
come to?”
“The Lord deliver us!” the old man supported him sympathetically.
“Whereas to buy a she-goat,” Theodot went on, “well, that meant
scraping off seven, or say eight, roubles to give away for her; on the
other hand, if she tried hard, she’d yield four bottles, no less, of
milk, and the milk she’d give was thicker and sweeter nor cow milk. The
hard part about her was, of course, that you couldn’t keep her together
with the sheep; a she-goat fights with them a lot, when she’s carrying
a kid, and once she starts in she gets fiercer’n a dog,--just can’t
bear to look at them. And what a creature she was for climbing,--it
didn’t mean nothin’ to her to get up on top of a hut, or a clump of
willows. Wherever there was a willow, she was dead sure to strip it
bare, would strip off all its tender bark--there was nothing she liked
better’n that!”
“But you wanted to tell us how you killed a man,” the school-boy
uttered with difficulty, looking all the while at Pashka, at Pashka’s
face, indistinct in the light of the stars; he was incredulous that
this very Pashka was a murderer, and he was picturing to himself a
small, dead Georgian, whom two soldiers were dragging along by his
chains, through the mud, surrounded by a dark rainy night.
“Well, and what else was I talking about?” answered Theodot, somewhat
rudely, and began speaking a trifle livelier. “You can’t understand
this business, you ain’t tried yet to live on your own; but to live
at home with mamma is a thing any one can do. That’s just what I was
talking about,--that a sin like that came about through just nothing
at all. I slaughtered three sheep all on account of her,” said he,
addressing the old man. “I took in nine and a half for the sheep, and
paid eight for her. She didn’t cost me cheap, at that.... And for
another thing, I started having rows with my old woman almost every
day. Well, as I was saying, I got a triflin’ sum, gave away eight for
the she-goat; then, too, I bought a thing or two for the household, a
matter here and there, got some little whistles for the youngsters,
and started off for home. I pegged along and pegged along, and came
home toward morning. I look,--and I am shy a half; that meant that I
must have shoved it in my pocket and sown it as I went. The old woman
started counting the money. ‘Where,’ says she, ‘is the half? Did you
swallow it? I told you, you fool, to sell the sheep as carcasses, and
to keep the skins for yourself....’ One word led to another, and then
a row began,--may the Lord save me from such another! My old woman, to
tell the truth, is such a dog as you’d have to look through all the
county to find the like of....”
“That goes without saying,” Pashka put it in a business-like manner.
“The more you beat ’em, the better they be.”
“That’s understood,” said Theodot. “Well, she came to her senses and
gave in. And when she had milked the she-goat, she became downright
glad: the goat turned out to be a good milker, and the milk was fine.
So we started in rejoicing. We drove it into the flock. I gave the
little shepherd boys something for tobacco, treated them to a cup of
vodka each.... Otherwise they would train her to butt the sheep in
the belly, the sons of bitches.... Only when the flock comes back at
evening,--I look, and my goat ain’t there. I ask the shepherd: ‘How is
it our she-goat ain’t here?’ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘we drove the herd to the
waste-land near the woods; your goat started playing with the cows,
and tackled the bull; she’d back away from him, get one good running
start, and then let herself fly straight between his eyes! He got so
petered out on account of her that he began hiding from her behind the
cows, and when we’d go for her to chase her off, she’d scoot into the
oats.... She just knocked us off our feet! And then she ran away: the
helper ran after her; he ran all through the forest, couldn’t find her
nowhere,--just like she’d fallen through the earth....’”
“Well, right you were ’bout that goat being poison!” remarked the old
man.