state of feelings. Had he not been born with a golden spoon in his
mouth? He would order new boots two or three times in a year; he never
ran short of money or of polly-seeds; he would promenade the main
street with the teacher, and he played on the harmonica better and
more spiritedly than everybody else; the wenches used to sing their
“heart-breaking” songs without taking their languishing eyes off him.
While in the fall, in the winter, he would pay court at evening parties
to the coquettish daughters of the priest, to the daughters of the
police inspector, dancing with them to the sounds of a talking machine;
he was usher at weddings, donning a frock-coat, starched shirt, and
new, tight shoes. But then, even his courting was somehow caustic,
offhand. But what’s the use! Even when all by himself, looking in the
mirror as he whipped up his browny fleece with a metallic comb, he
would squint at himself like some monster. His nose was squashed, his
voice hoarse, his appearance that of a convict,--the _moujiks_ used
to call him a hangman.... No great honour, that, you would think.
But no,--he took a delight even in that. “The low-down devil!” the
_moujiks_ would say. “Nothing ever pleases him; everything ain’t his
way, everything ain’t right!” And he, with all his might, tried to
justify these by-names. “Who? Is it Shasha you mean by low-down?” Roman
would ask with indignation. “Why, you can pave a pavement with blocks
the likes of him! He’s a fool, a play-actor, a born loafer,--and that’s
all there is to it! What’s he putting on airs for? What the devil is
he after?” But Shasha just looked on with a venomous smile, and never
let a word out. “Well, now, just take a look at him,--do!” Roman was
saying. “Just look what he’s trying to make out of himself!” But Shasha
only knit his eye-brows, making them turn up higher and higher; more
and more rapidly did he bite his nails, and by now was convinced even
himself that something dreadful was coming to a head within him. “Oh,
father!” he would say, as though unable to hold out. “Oh, but I would
like to tell you a certain thing!” Roman, despondent, with sagging
pouches under his eyes, would smile like a martyr: “Well, what sort of
a thing is it? Eh? Well, now, say it?” “Who, me?” Shasha would ask,
throwing a glance at him from underneath his eyebrows. “Yes, you!” “My
ashes when I’m laid in my grave shall know it all!” “But what is it
that they’ll know? Are you drunk, you good-for-nought?” “Drunk!” Shasha
would answer. “Drunk? I say nothing. I al-ways say nothing!” And,
almost weeping, Roman would again advance upon him, like a bear; would
again catch him by the head, and, bending it down, would drag him by
the hair in an excruciating transport.
From his twentieth year to his twenty-fifth, Shasha was almost never
beaten,--unless it were sort of casually, of course. But he made
up for this with something else. He sought other occasions for
self-torture,--and of occasions there were as many as he wanted.
He married--and it was a splendid match--the daughter of the manager
of a great estate which belonged to a nobleman; his bride was a
laughing, freckled girl, rather pretty. His marriage was celebrated
magnificently. The owners of the estate resided abroad; therefore
Shasha was able to go to the wedding ceremony in their carriage, and
the priest, out of respect to this carriage, felicitated him upon his
lawful marriage with especial eloquence and servility, although it
did seem to Shasha that he was being made fun of. The wedding feast,
too, was held in the owners’ house. Wine flowed like a river. Roman,
amid the general clamour of delight, started in to dance, shaking the
parquetry, the mirrors and the chandeliers. The owners’ flunky gave
an excellent imitation of a railroad train: he began with a rumbling
whistle through his fingers, then started in beating out, with his
feet, the slow and heavy clatter of a train constantly increasing
its momentum, and wound up with a riotous gallop. The sexton, having
imbibed too much cognac at the feast, died on his way home. The deacon,
having fallen down in his own yard into some half-liquid manure,
was almost trampled to death by his sheep. The nastiest of autumn
dawns, pallidly blue, looked in through the fog into the smoke-filled
seigniorial halls,--but the lights were still burning there; the
talking machine, now grown hoarse, was still gurgling out now the
_Lezguinka_, now _The Lancers_; the ushers, all moist from the heat
and their exertions, were still yelling as they supervised the dances;
while the eyes of the young ladies grew glazed from fatigue, and the
soles of their white slippers flew off as they danced.... But Shasha
did not spare even his own high celebration; having convinced himself
that he was infernally jealous of his young wife and a certain rather
young land-owner, he, feigning intoxication, suddenly stepped upon the
long train of her dress during a waltz, and tore it off with a ripping
sound. And after that he made a rush for a knife, trying to cut his
own throat, and, upon being disarmed, he sobbed wildly, tearing off
his starched collar and his white tie, calling upon the memory of his
departed mother.... As for his behaviour after the wedding,--Shasha did
everything that lay in his power to wreck his own domestic well-being,
and to hasten the ruin of Roman.
Having attained the zenith, Roman was inevitably bound, as is always
the case in Russia, to start rolling downward again, toward his
former lowly lair. Soon after the wedding it turned out that he was
entirely entangled, head and foot, in the toils of debt. He became
awesome. His grizzled beard turned white. His face came to resemble
a dirty-gray, milked-out udder. His eyes died out. His belly, grown
flabby, hung down. But Shasha rejoiced malignantly: “I told you so! I
told you so!”--and was finishing him off; he rioted, kicked up rows,
demanded a winding up of Roman’s affairs. And Roman, turning green
from wrath, would rise up against him like a bear, thirsting to maim
him,--but he no longer could; he no longer could! Crushed down by the
thought of approaching disgrace, of approaching poverty, he took to
drinking harder and harder. Having lost all shame, he got his mistress
(a cook and a soldier’s wife), into his own house. Shasha, not being
contented with his wife, lived with her too, just to spite him. As
for his wife, he used to exhaust her with his jealousy and his scares;
he used to stay away from the house and to send _moujiks_ with notes
to her, upon which notes would be written: “Forgive me in death; I
send my blessings to the children,”--and below there would be drawn a
grave with a cross. His wife was for a long while deluged with tears.
And then she got together with the teacher, and now gave Shasha every
reason to be saying “All r-r-right! Only my ashes when I’m laid in
my grave will know it all!” The upshot of it all was, that Roman was
laid low by a stroke of paralysis; that only the wind-mill beyond the
settlement was left out of all his wealth; that Shasha’s wife, taking
the children with her, fled to her father, who had gone to the city of
Skopin. The while Shasha, drinking deep of the delicious draught of his
misfortunes, treating everything and everybody with merciless criticism
and opprobrium, was absenting himself in the village, drinking every
bit as hard as his father, she pulled up stakes and disappeared.
Roman left the settlement for his mill beggared and barely alive.
Beggared and widowed, gnashing his teeth with rage, Shasha followed him
out of the village. What with toiling and moiling, even the mill would
not have been a bad thing to live by. But how was Shasha to be bothered
with it! How could you expect him to have the strength of getting up
on his feet after the awful finishing stroke fate had dealt him! Even
formerly he,--not understood, not appreciated, condemned to live in the
midst of enemies and ill-wishers,--had had but one recourse left him:
to say nothing, and again to say nothing, and to say nothing without
end. And now? Why, he could have piled up thousands from this mill
alone; there would have been no getting into it for the carts full of
grain surrounding it,--if he only had two or three hundred to get him a
new shaft and new mill-stones.... Yes, but where was a body to get that
money? It’s only into the hands of fools that good luck plays; but you
take an able, sensible man, and Fate will twist him into a ram’s horn.
Well, let it,--let it! “I say nothing,” Shasha would say, malignantly
rejoicing; “I al-ways say nothing!”
The broken trough,[14] familiar to him and appropriate to his former
status of a _moujik_, again appeared before Roman in place of palatial
chambers. Nor did the rub lie at all in the fact that, instead of
smoked sprats and Tsimliyan wine, a big slice of black bread and a
wooden vessel of water turned up on his table,--he would have eaten
such food with his former relish; the rub was in the torments of his
pride,--the most cruel of all human torments. In a big hut, leaning
all to one side, with an earthen floor and with holes in its corners,
atop the bare oven,--there did Roman sleep now. In the morning he would
crawl out beyond the threshold, with a tall staff in his hands. With
pig-weeds and high rank grass was the outside of the hut overgrown;
stinging nettles choked up the huge shell of the wide-open wind-mill.
All this stood out on the bare ridge of the plains, nigh the highway.
And Roman would go out to the edge of the road, and would place his
trembling, cold paws upon his staff. He was without a hat; the wind
tangled up his gray, shaggy locks, his gray beard,--the beard of a
_moujik_ Job. He was bare-footed, in short drawers of striped ticking,
in a long blouse filthy from cinders and the rubbish of the oven. His
legs were black and thin, his torso huge and emaciated. Those whom he
had regaled and lectured at one time now rode past him. And Roman--it
was not for nothing that Shasha had sprung from his loins--even
rejoiced that folks saw him in poverty, in disgrace, and he bowed to
the ground before them. And of evenings he would stand in the dark hut
before a little painted board hung up in a corner, and with heavy sighs
bowed before it still lower then he did before men, saying his prayers
now in a whisper, now loudly--warmly and grievously thanking God for
all that He had visited upon him, a miserable, stricken old man....
Shasha, now, enjoyed his humiliation in a gayer fashion, in low-down
inns, in low-down pot-houses, drinking away the last scanty remnants
of their former prosperity, and paying for his long tongue by being
beaten....
[14] The reference here is to a famous folk-tale,--best known in
Pushkin’s version, _The Little Gold Fish_. A fisherman, having caught
a little gold fish, is promised the fulfillment of all his wishes for
its release. All his demands, instigated by his wife, are granted,
beginning with a substitution of a new trough for a broken one, and
up to the attainment of rank and wealth; but finally the wife insists
upon the fulfillment of a wish so insolent that, upon his return from
interviewing his benefactress, the fisherman finds his wife sitting at
the same old broken trough, before his former humble hut. _Trans._
Then, from his twenty-fifth year on, his beatings became regular,
administered to him upon a previously designated day; and no longer was
he beaten the way his father used to beat him; he was beaten with heels
now, until he would lose consciousness.
The soldier’s wife remained faithful to the house of Roman. She
also moved to the mill. And when Roman died--oh, how proud (with a
malignantly joyous pride) Shasha was over this calamity,--she passed
into Shasha’s hands openly. But in the meanwhile her lawful husband
had come home from service. She was as needful to him as snow in
the summertime; but never the less he held it to be his most sacred
duty and his inalienable right to avenge his sullied honour. And he
ingeniously timed this revenge with the day of the folk-festival at
Limovo.
Every year, on the fifteenth of July, on a great holiday popularly
called the Kiriki, a fair is held in Limovo. Rain pours down in chill
torrents; one is reminded of the summer only by the rooks in the
fields, by the height and the density of the grains and the grasses,
and also by the sky-larks, that sing above them in the rain and are
blown aslant by the wind. But on the common at Limovo a little nomadic
city of tents is already springing up. The traders from the city have
arrived,--and it is an unaccustomed, strange sight to see in the
settlement these city people, in their long-skirted coats. In building
upon the common, and making it congested, they have changed the simple
village picture with their thronging, their big, strong carts laden
with goods; together with these goods they have brought the atmosphere
of an Asiatic bazaar; their samovars smoke, and their braziers emit the
fumes of frying mutton.... On the fifteenth, since the early morn, they
are already standing behind their counters; while the _moujiks_ with
their women-folk and little ones keep on streaming in, flocking from
all directions toward the village; they have dammed up the common so
that there isn’t room for a pin to fall. And above all this swarming,
babel, hubbub, and creak of carts, booms the festal pealing of bells,
summoning to mass.
To the sound of these bells, in full view of all the folks riding
through the dirty by-lane that leads past the wind-mill, Shasha
is standing nigh his threshold; his belt is loose, and, bending
downward, he holds a wooden vessel with water in one hand and with
the other hand, which is wet, he is rubbing his bearded, pock-marked
face, all puffy from sleep. How little does this thick-set _moujik_
in broken boots resemble the former Shasha! He appears calmer than
before, yet still more morose. His hair is fearfully thick even now,
but it is already shaggy, like a _moujik’s_. Having washed himself,
he tears his hair apart with a wooden comb, combs out his tangled
round beard, clears his throat hoarsely, and eyes his little mirror
askance,--eyes his broad, porous face, with the squashed nose. He
hasn’t forgotten that he looks like a hangman. And really, he does
look like one,--especially now. Having combed himself, he puts on a
blouse that he saves for gala occasions,--it is of red calico, and its
dye will come off on his body when he will begin to perspire. On week
days he becomes stultified from ennui, from over-sleeping, from the
fact that no one any longer pays any attention to him, or listens to
him; his boasting about his former state, his hints about that which
was supposed to lurk within his soul, and his foul tattling about his
runaway wife, have all long since palled upon everybody. But to-day
is a holiday; to-day people would look with curiosity upon him, the
erstwhile man of wealth now walking around on his uppers; to-day he
would be playing before an enormous crowd, to-day he would be fearfully
beaten,--beaten until he would lose conscience,--right before the eyes
of all this crowd.... And lo, he is already entering into his rôle;
he is already excited; his jaws are tightly clenched; his eye-brows
are distorted.... Having togged himself out, he puts on a rusty cap,
and, with a constrained step, resolutely and steadily sets out for the
village.
The strangest part of all is the piety with which he begins this
day. He goes directly toward the church, and, without looking at
anybody, but with all his being feeling upon him the eyes of everybody
surrounding him, he bows and makes the sign of the cross with all his
might. In the church he shoves his way to the very ambo, where at one
time he had had his own rightful place, and at that moment he is filled
to the marrow of his bones with contempt for the _moujiks_, reminding
them briefly and sternly, like one having authority, that it wouldn’t
be a bad idea for them to wake up and stand aside. And the _moujiks_
hastily comply. Glowering like a bull from underneath his eye-brows
at the officiating priests and the icons, he prays frenziedly and
austerely until the very end of the mass, haughtily demonstrating to
everybody that he is the only one who knows just the right time to
bow and to make the sign of the cross. Just as austerely does he walk
through the fair after the mass, proud of the fact that he had already
had a drink or two, that he could approach some trader in his tent as
an equal, shaking his hand and leaning over the counter, scooping up a
handful of polly-seeds and bothering the trader with his conversations
about the city, and about the state of trade.... He was also proud of
the fact that he could at times yell at the droves of wenches, pressing
one another against the counter, like sheep; or at some _moujik_ that,
with a bag under his arm,--there would be a young pig squirming around
in that bag,--has already tested all the penny whistles, all the mouth
organs, and could not, for the life of him, decide which one to take.
The people, pouring out of the church, have flooded the common; the
belfries are pealing forth their chimes; the beggars are snufflingly
clamorous; the live-stock--which is also bought and sold during the
Kiriki--bleats and hee-haws; and in the dense crowd, spitting out
polly-seed shells and slipping up in the mire between the tents, there
are already many intoxicated men. Shasha has already managed to drink
some more, and feels that the right time has come. Having had his
fill of talking with the traders, he goes with resolute steps toward
the carrousels. A countless multitude of people has gathered there,
watching, until their heads, too, begin to go ’round and ’round,
the wooden horses and their riders. Almost all of Limovo is there,
and, towering a head taller above everybody, is the soldier’s wife’s
husband. Shasha’s hands grow cold; his lips quiver; but he pretends not
to notice his foe. He approaches his acquaintances, pulls a bottle out
of his pocket, regales anybody who comes along, and drinks himself. He
talks a great deal, and loudly; he smokes, and laughs unnaturally and
malevolently; but all the while he is on the alert, waiting.... And
now, pretending to be hopelessly drunk, in a new cap with the store’s
price tag still showing white upon it, clean shaven, well-fed, with
sleepy blue eyes, the soldier advances straight upon Shasha, and
with all his momentum, as though without seeing him, strikes him in
the chest with his shoulder. Shasha, gritting his teeth, steps to one
side and continues his conversation. But the soldier comes back, again
passes him,--and once more hits him in the chest with his shoulder!
Whereupon, as though unable to bear such insolence, Shasha distorts his
face,--distorted enough without that,--and drawls out through his teeth:
“E-eh, young fellow! Watch out that I don’t shove you in my own way!”
And the soldier, instantly checking his headlong progress, suddenly
staggers backward and roars out furiously:
“What’s ’at?”
Amid the hubbub and rumble of the fair, amid the clanging of the
carrousel bells and the delighted, hypocritically-sympathizing shouts
of the oh’ing and parting crowd, the soldier stuns Shasha and draws his
blood with the very first blow. Shasha, trying to get his fingers into
the soldier’s mouth, true to an old usage of the _moujiks_, in order to
tear his lips, pounces upon him like a beast,--and instantly falls down
in the mire as if he were dead, underneath the iron-shod heels that
beat heavily upon his chest, upon his shaggy head, upon his nose, upon
his eyes,--already glazed, as in a ram with his throat cut. And all
the folks “oh” and “ah” and wonder: “There’s a queer, incomprehensible
fellow for you! Why, he knew, he knew beforehand how this matter would
end! Why did he go into it, then?” And truly,--why did he? And toward
what, in general, is he so insistently and undeviatingly heading,
as he devastates his ruined dwelling from day to day, endeavouring
to eradicate even to the last atom the very traces of that which
was created, in such an unprecedented manner, by the uncouth genius
of Roman, and ceaselessly thirsts after humiliations, disgrace, and
beatings?
Within the church enclosure, on the way to the door of the chapel,
there were some horrible specimens of humanity, standing ranged in two
files. In her yearning for self-torture; in her yearning-loathing of
the curbing bit, of toil, of her mode of existence; in her infatuation
with all sorts of hideous visages (both those of the tragedian and
of the scaramouche), in her dark, criminal desires, in her lack of
will power, her eternal disquiet, in her misfortunes, sorrows and
poverty,--Russia breeds these people from of old, and without end.
In Limovo alone some half-hundred of them gather. And what faces are
these, what heads! Just as if they had come out of the crude wood-cuts
made in Kiev, which depict both fiends and the striving anchorites of
the Mother-Desert. There are ancients with such withered heads, with
such scant locks of long gray hair, with such noses, as thin as thin
can be, and with the slits of their unseeing eyes so deeply fallen in,
that they seem to have lain for centuries in the caverns where they had
been walled up still in the time of the Kiev princes.... And they had
come out of there in half-rotted tatters; they had thrown upon their
remains their beggars’ wallets, fastening them cross-wise behind their
shoulders with odd bits of rope, and had set off on their wanderings
from one end of Russia to the other, through her forests, over her
steppes, in the winds of her steppes....
There are lantern-jawed blind men,--sturdy and squat _moujiks_, that
look just like pilloried convicts who have killed their scores of
souls,--these have solid, square heads, their faces seem to have been
hacked out by an axe, and their bare legs are swollen with livid blood
and are unnaturally short, even as their arms are. There are common
idiots, huge of shoulder and of leg. There are malignant dwarfs with
bird-like faces. There are wedge-headed hunch-backs, who seem to be
wearing pointed caps made out of horse-hair. There are monstrous
marasmi, squatting back on their crooked legs like terriers. There are
foreheads squeezed in at the sides and forming skulls that look like
the cap of an acorn. There are bony old women, without a vestige of
a nose,--for all the world like Death itself.... And all this mass,
prominently displaying its tatters, its sores and cankers, vociferate
in a Bulgarian, old-church sing-song, vociferates in rough basses,
and castrated altos, and indescribably depraved tenors, about Lazarus
and his sores, about Alexei the Man of God, who also, thirsting after
poverty and martyrdom, did forsake his father’s roof, “knowing not
whither he went....”
All these people, with their eye-brows writhing above their dark eyes,
with an intuition, an instinct, as keen as that of certain primary
sea creatures, instantly sense, surmise, the approach of a generous
hand; and by now they have already grabbed up a not unconsiderable
quantity of bread-crusts, of round cracknels, and of the _moujiks’_
coppers, grown green from contact with their execrable tobacco. After
mass, with a chanting still more vigorous and importunate, they spread
through the sea of the people, through the fair. The cripples, too,
move after them,--legless creatures, crawling on their bottoms and
on all fours, or lying in their eternal beds, in little carts. Here
is one of these little carts. In it is a little bit of a man, about
forty years of age, with his ears tied up in a woman’s kerchief; his
milky-blue eyes are calm, and he has stuck out of his old rags a thin
little hand,--violet-coloured, six-fingered. He is pulled about by
a bright-eyed little lad, with exceedingly pointed little ears, and
with fox-like down upon his head. All around him is a multitude of the
fraternity, all of them, for some reason or other, also tied up with
kerchiefs. And out of all this fraternity one _moujik_ with a large
white face stands out he is all broken up, all maimed; there is no
bottom to him at all, and he has on but one fusty bast shoe. Probably,
he, too, had been beaten-up somewheres as thoroughly as Shasha: his
entire kerchief, his ear, his neck and one shoulder are all in caked
blood. In his long bag there are pieces of raw meat, cooked bits of
mutton, bread crusts, and millet. His seat, now, is sewn up with a bit
of leather,--and twisting himself all up, he squirms and starts off, on
and on over the mire, extending in front of him his unshod foot, his
leg half-bare, in lime-covered scabs that are oozing with matter and
pasted over with strips of burdock.
“Look ye, ye faithful,--look and behold ye! This is reckoned, from of
old, as the disease of leprosy!” a freckled tatterdemallion beside him
is shouting in a rapid recitave, which is right rollicking....
And it is toward these people that Shasha is heading. He lives for some
two or three years more in his mill; he celebrates three or four fairs
more; he again enters into battle with the soldier three or four times:
kind-hearted folks bring him to by throwing water out of wooden tubs
upon him as he lies without breath or speech; without opening his eyes,
he drags his wet head over the ground, back and forth, and moans out
painfully through his clenched teeth.
“All r-r-right, good folks! I say nothing! I al-ways say nothing!”