A little later my sister and I were walking along the street. I
covered her with the skirts of my coat; we hastened, choosing back
streets where there were no street lamps, avoiding passers-by; it
was as though we were running away. She was no longer crying, but
looked at me with dry eyes. To Karpovna's, where I took her, it was
only twenty minutes' walk, and, strange to say, in that short time
we succeeded in thinking of our whole life; we talked over everything,
considered our position, reflected. . . .
We decided we could not go on living in this town, and that when I
had earned a little money we would move to some other place. In
some houses everyone was asleep, in others they were playing cards;
we hated these houses; we were afraid of them. We talked of the
fanaticism, the coarseness of feeling, the insignificance of these
respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we had
so alarmed, and I kept asking in what way these stupid, cruel, lazy,
and dishonest people were superior to the drunken and superstitious
peasants of Kurilovka, or in what way they were better than animals,
who in the same way are thrown into a panic when some incident
disturbs the monotony of their life limited by their instincts.
What would have happened to my sister now if she had been left to
live at home?
What moral agonies would she have experienced, talking with my
father, meeting every day with acquaintances? I imagined this to
myself, and at once there came into my mind people, all people I
knew, who had been slowly done to death by their nearest relations.
I remembered the tortured dogs, driven mad, the live sparrows plucked
naked by boys and flung into the water, and a long, long series of
obscure lingering miseries which I had looked on continually from
early childhood in that town; and I could not understand what these
sixty thousand people lived for, what they read the gospel for, why
they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What good had they
gained from all that had been said and written hitherto if they
were still possessed by the same spiritual darkness and hatred of
liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred years ago? A
master carpenter spends his whole life building houses in the town,
and always, to the day of his death, calls a "gallery" a "galdery."
So these sixty thousand people have been reading and hearing of
truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet
from morning till night, till the day of their death, they are
lying, and tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate
it as a deadly foe.
"And so my fate is decided," said my sister, as we arrived home.
"After what has happened I cannot go back _there_. Heavens, how
good that is! My heart feels lighter."
She went to bed at once. Tears were glittering on her eyelashes,
but her expression was happy; she fell into a sound sweet sleep,
and one could see that her heart was lighter and that she was
resting. It was a long, long time since she had slept like that.
And so we began our life together. She was always singing and saying
that her life was very happy, and the books I brought her from the
public library I took back unread, as now she could not read; she
wanted to do nothing but dream and talk of the future, mending my
linen, or helping Karpovna near the stove; she was always singing,
or talking of her Vladimir, of his cleverness, of his charming
manners, of his kindness, of his extraordinary learning, and I
assented to all she said, though by now I disliked her doctor. She
wanted to work, to lead an independent life on her own account, and
she used to say that she would become a school-teacher or a doctor'
s assistant as soon as her health would permit her, and would herself
do the scrubbing and the washing. Already she was passionately
devoted to her child; he was not yet born, but she knew already the
colour of his eyes, what his hands would be like, and how he would
laugh. She was fond of talking about education, and as her Vladimir
was the best man in the world, all her discussion of education could
be summed up in the question how to make the boy as fascinating as
his father. There was no end to her talk, and everything she said
made her intensely joyful. Sometimes I was delighted, too, though
I could not have said why.
I suppose her dreaminess infected me. I, too, gave up reading, and
did nothing but dream. In the evenings, in spite of my fatigue, I
walked up and down the room, with my hands in my pockets, talking
of Masha.
"What do you think?" I would ask of my sister. "When will she come
back? I think she'll come back at Christmas, not later; what has
she to do there?"
"As she doesn't write to you, it's evident she will come back very
soon.
"That's true," I assented, though I knew perfectly well that Masha
would not return to our town.
I missed her fearfully, and could no longer deceive myself, and
tried to get other people to deceive me. My sister was expecting
her doctor, and I--Masha; and both of us talked incessantly,
laughed, and did not notice that we were preventing Karpovna from
sleeping. She lay on the stove and kept muttering:
"The samovar hummed this morning, it did hum! Oh, it bodes no good,
my dears, it bodes no good!"
No one ever came to see us but the postman, who brought my sister
letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who sometimes came in to see
us in the evening, and after looking at my sister without speaking
went away, and when he was in the kitchen said:
"Every class ought to remember its rules, and anyone, who is so
proud that he won't understand that, will find it a vale of tears."
He was very fond of the phrase "a vale of tears." One day--it was
in Christmas week, when I was walking by the bazaar--he called
me into the butcher's shop, and not shaking hands with me, announced
that he had to speak to me about something very important. His face
was red from the frost and vodka; near him, behind the counter,
stood Nikolka, with the expression of a brigand, holding a bloodstained
knife in his hand.
"I desire to express my word to you," Prokofy began. "This incident
cannot continue, because, as you understand yourself that for such
a vale, people will say nothing good of you or of us. Mamma, through
pity, cannot say something unpleasant to you, that your sister
should move into another lodging on account of her condition, but
I won't have it any more, because I can't approve of her behaviour."
I understood him, and I went out of the shop. The same day my sister
and I moved to Radish's. We had no money for a cab, and we walked
on foot; I carried a parcel of our belongings on my back; my sister
had nothing in her hands, but she gasped for breath and coughed,
and kept asking whether we should get there soon.