Soon after this unsuccessful attempt to draw near to a human being
Yevsey was one evening awakened by talking in his master's room. He
listened and thought he distinguished Rayisa's voice. Desiring to
convince himself of her presence there he rose and quietly slipped over
to the tightly closed door, and put his eyes to the keyhole.
His sleepy glance first perceived the light of the candle, which blinded
him. Then he saw the large rotund body of the woman on the black sofa.
She lay face upward entirely naked. Her hair was spread over her breast,
and her long fingers slowly weaved it into a braid. The light quivered
on her fair body. Clean and bright, it seemed like a light cloud which
rocked and breathed. It was very beautiful. She was saying something.
Yevsey could not catch the words, but heard only the singing, tired,
plaintive voice. The master was sitting in his nightgown upon a chair by
the sofa, and was pouring wine into a glass with a trembling hand. The
tuft of grey hair on his chin also trembled. He had removed his glasses,
and his face was loathsome.
"Yes, yes, yes! Hm! What a woman you are!"
Yevsey moved away from the door, lay down on his bed, and thought:
"They have gotten married."
He pitied Rayisa Petrovna for having become the wife of a man who spoke
ill of her, and he pitied her because it must have been very cold for
her to lie naked on the leather sofa. An evil thought flashed through
his mind, which confirmed the words of the old man about her, but Yevsey
anxiously drove it away.
The evening of the next day Rayisa Petrovna brought in supper as always,
and said in her usual voice:
"I am going."
The master, too, spoke to her in his usual voice, dry and careless.
Several days passed by. The relation between the master and Rayisa did
not change, and Yevsey began to think he had seen the naked woman in a
dream. He was very reluctant to believe his master's words about her.
Once his Uncle Piotr appeared unexpectedly and, so it seemed to Yevsey,
needlessly. He had grown grey, wrinkled, and shorter.
"I am getting blind, Orphan," he said sipping tea from a saucer noisily
and smiling with his wet eyes. "I cannot work anymore, so I will have to
go begging. Yashka is unmanageable. He wants to go to the city, and if I
don't let him, he will run away. That's the kind of a chap he is."
Everything the blacksmith said was wearisome and difficult to listen to.
He seemed to have grown duller. He looked guilty, and Yevsey felt
awkward and ashamed for him in the presence of his master. When he got
ready to go, Yevsey quietly thrust three rubles into his hand, and saw
him out with pleasure.
Though Yevsey endeavored as before to please his master in every way, he
became afraid to agree with him. The bookshop after a time aroused a dim
suspicion by its resemblance to a tomb tightly packed with dead books.
They were all loose, chewed up, and sucked out, and emanated a mouldy,
putrid odor. Few were sold; which did not surprise Yevsey. What stirred
his curiosity was the attitude of the master to the purchasers and the
books.
The old man would take a book in his hand, carefully turn over its musty
pages, stroke the covers with his dark fingers, smile quietly, and nod
his head. He seemed to fondle the book as though it were alive, to play
with it as with a kitten or a puppy. While reading a book he carried on
with it a quiet, querulous conversation, like Uncle Piotr with the
furnace-fire. His lips moved in good-humored derision, his head kept
nodding, and now and then he mumbled and laughed.
"So, so--yes--hmm--see--what's that? Ha, ha! Ah, the impudence--I
understand, I understand--it'll never come about--no-o-o--ha, ha!"
These strange exclamations coming from the old man as if he were
disputing with somebody both astonished and frightened Yevsey, and
pointed to the secret duplicity in his master's life.
"You don't read books," said the master to him once. "That's good. Books
are always lechery, the child of a prostituted mind. They deal with
everything, they excite the imagination, and create useless agitation
and disturbance. Formerly we used to have good historical books, stories
of quiet people about the past. But now every book wants to inspire you
with hostility to life and to lay bare man, who ought always to be
covered up both in the flesh and in the spirit in order to defend him
from the devil, from curiosity, and from the imagination, which destroys
faith. It's only in old age that books do no harm to a man, when he is
guarded against their violence by his experience."
Though Yevsey did not understand these talks he remembered them well,
and though they met with no response in him, they confirmed his sense of
mystery--the mystery that invested all human life, as it were, in a
hostile envelope.
When he sold a book, the old man regarded it with regret, and fairly
smelled the purchaser, with whom he talked in an extremely loud and
rapid voice. Sometimes, however, he lowered his voice to a whisper, when
his dark glasses would fix themselves upon the face of the customer.
Often on seeing to the door a student who had bought a book, he followed
him with a smile, and nodded his head queerly. Once he shook his finger
at the back of a man who had just left, a short, handsome fellow with
fine black tendrils on a pale face. The largest number of customers were
students and people having a certain resemblance to them. Sometimes old
men came. These rummaged long among the books, and haggled sharply over
the prices.
An almost daily visitor was a man who wore a chimney-pot and on his
right hand a large gold ring set with a stone. He had a broad pimply
nose on a stout flat shaven face. When Dorimedont Lukin played chess
with the master, he snuffled loud and tugged at his ear with his left
hand. He often brought books and paper parcels, over which the master
nodded his head approvingly and smiled quietly. He would then hide them
in the table, or in a corner on a shelf in back of him. Yevsey did not
see his master pay for these books, but he did see him sell them.
One of the students began to visit the shop more frequently than the
others. He was a tall, blue-eyed young man with a carrot-colored
mustache and a cap stuck back on his neck, leaving bare a large white
forehead. He spoke in a thick voice, laughed aloud, and always bought
many old journals.
Once the master pointed out a book to him that Dorimedont had brought;
and while the student glanced through it, the old man told him something
in a quick whisper.
"Interesting!" exclaimed the student, smiling amiably. "Ah, you old
sinner, aren't you afraid, eh?"
The master sighed and answered:
"If you absolutely feel it's the truth, you ought to help it along in
whatever little ways you can."
They whispered a long time. Finally the student said aloud:
"Well, then, agreed! Remember my address."
The old man took the address down on a piece of paper, and when
Dorimedont came and asked, "Well, what's new, Matvey Matveyevich?" the
master handed him the address, and said with a smile:
"There's the new thing."
"S-so--Nikodim Arkhangelsky," read Dorimedont. "That's business. We'll
look up this Nikodim."
Sometime after, upon sitting down to play chess, he announced to the
master:
"That Nikodim turned out to be a fish with plenty of roe. We found
something of pretty nearly everything in his place."
"Return the books to me," said the master.
"Certainly," and Dorimedont snuffled.
The blue-eyed student never appeared again. The short young man with the
black mustache also vanished after the master had given Dorimedont his
address. All this was strange. It fed the boy's suspicions, and
indicated some mystery and enigma.
Once, when the master was absent from the shop, Yevsey, while dusting
the shelves, saw the books brought by Dorimedont. They were small,
soiled, and ragged. He carefully and quickly put them back in the same
order, scenting something dangerous in them. Books in general did not
arouse his interest. He tried to read, but never succeeded in
concentrating his mind, which, already burdened by a mass of
observation, dwelt upon minutiæ. His thoughts drifted apart, and finally
disappeared evaporating like a thin stream of water upon a stone on a
hot day. When he worked and stirred about he was altogether incapable of
thinking; the motion, as it were, tore the cobweb of his ideas. The boy
did his work slowly and accurately, like an automaton, without putting
anything of himself into it, and scarcely understanding its meaning.
When he was free and sat motionless he was carried away by a pleasant
sensation of flight in a transparent mist, which enveloped the whole of
life and softened everything, changing the boisterous reality into a
quiet, sweetly sounding half-slumber.
When Yevsey was in this mood the days passed rapidly, in a flight not to
be stayed. His external life was monotonous. Thought-stirring events
happened rarely, and his brain insensibly became clogged with the dust
of the work-day. He seldom went about in the city, for he did not like
it. The ceaseless motion tired his eyes, the noise filled his head with
heavy, dulling confusion. The endless city at first seemed like a
monster in a fairy-tale, displaying a hundred greedy mouths, bellowing
with hundreds of insatiable throats. But when Yevsey regarded the varied
tumult of the street life he saw in it merely painful and wearisome
monotony.
In the morning when he tidied his master's room, Yevsey put his head out
of the window for several minutes, and looked down to the bottom of the
deep, narrow street. Everywhere he saw the same people, and already knew
what each of them would be doing in an hour or the next day. The cabmen
drove in the same indolent fashion, and sat on the box each like the
other; the shop boys, all of whom he knew, were unpleasant. Their
insolence was a source of danger. Every man seemed chained to his
business like a dog to his kennel. Occasionally something new flashed
by, or whispered to him, but it was difficult for him to see and
understand it in the thick mass of all that was familiar, ordinary, and
unpleasant.
Even the churches in the city did not please him. They were not cosy,
nor bright, but close and penetrated by extremely powerful odors of
incense, oil, and sweat. Yevsey could not bear strong smells. They made
his head turn, and filled him with confused anxious desires.
Sometimes on a holiday the master closed the shop, and took Yevsey
through the city. They walked long and slowly. The old man pointed out
the houses of the rich and eminent people, and told of their lives. His
recitals were replete with accounts of women who ran away from their
husbands, of dead people, and of funerals. He talked about them in a dry
solemn voice, criticizing and condemning everything. He grew animated
only when telling how and from what this or that man died. In his
opinion, apparently, matters of disease and death were the most edifying
and interesting of earthly subjects.
At the end of every walk he treated Yevsey to tea in a tavern, where
musical machines played. Here everybody knew the old man, and behaved
toward him with timid respect. Yevsey grown tired, his brain dizzied by
the cloud of heavy odors, would fall into drowsy silence under the
rattle and din of the music.
Once, however, the master took him to a house which contained numerous
articles of gold and silver, marvellous weapons, and garments of silk
brocade. Suddenly the mother's forgotten tales began to beat in the
boy's breast, and a winged hope trembled in his heart. He walked
silently through the rooms for a long time, disconcertedly blinking his
eyes, which burned greedily.
When they returned home he asked the master:
"Whose are they?"
"They are public property--the Czar's," the old man explained
impressively.
The boy put more questions.
"Who wore such coats and sabres?"
"Czars, boyars, and various imperial persons."
"There are no such people to-day?"
"How so? Of course there are. It would be impossible to be without them.
Only now they dress differently."
"Why differently?"
"More cheaply. Formerly Russia was richer. But now it has been robbed by
various foreign people, Jews, Poles, and Germans."
Raspopov talked for a long time about how nobody loved Russia, how all
robbed it, and wished it every kind of harm. When he spoke much Yevsey
ceased to believe him or understand him. Nevertheless he asked:
"Am I an imperial person, too?"
"In a sense. In our country all are imperial people, all are subjects of
the Czar. The whole earth is God's, and the whole of Russia is the
Czar's."
Before Yevsey's eyes handsome, stately personages in glittering garb
circled in a bright, many-colored round dance. They belonged to another
fabulous life, which remained with him after he had lain down to sleep.
He saw himself in this life clad in a sky-blue robe embroidered with
gold, with red boots of Morocco leather on his feet. Rayisa was there,
too, in brocade and adorned with precious gems.
"So it will pass away," he thought.
To-day this thought gave rise not to hope in a different future but to
quiet regret for the past.
On the other side of the door he heard the dry even voice of his master:
"Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain--"