From early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was
still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds
hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes. Ivan
Ivanich, the veterinary surgeon, and Bourkin, the schoolmaster, were
tired of walking and the fields seemed endless to them. Far ahead they
could just see the windmills of the village of Mirousky, to the right
stretched away to disappear behind the village a line of hills, and they
knew that it was the bank of the river; meadows, green willows,
farmhouses; and from one of the hills there could be seen a field as
endless, telegraph-posts, and the train, looking from a distance like a
crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the town. In the calm
weather when all Nature seemed gentle and melancholy, Ivan Ivanich and
Bourkin were filled with love for the fields and thought how grand and
beautiful the country was.
"Last time, when we stopped in Prokofyi's shed," said Bourkin, "you were
going to tell me a story."
"Yes. I wanted to tell you about my brother."
Ivan Ivanich took a deep breath and lighted his pipe before beginning
his story, but just then the rain began to fall. And in about five
minutes it came pelting down and showed no signs of stopping. Ivan
Ivanich stopped and hesitated; the dogs, wet through, stood with their
tails between their legs and looked at them mournfully.
"We ought to take shelter," said Bourkin. "Let us go to Aliokhin. It is
close by."
"Very well."
They took a short cut over a stubble-field and then bore to the right,
until they came to the road. Soon there appeared poplars, a garden, the
red roofs of granaries; the river began to glimmer and they came to a
wide road with a mill and a white bathing-shed. It was Sophino, where
Aliokhin lived.
The mill was working, drowning the sound of the rain, and the dam shook.
Round the carts stood wet horses, hanging their heads, and men were
walking about with their heads covered with sacks. It was wet, muddy,
and unpleasant, and the river looked cold and sullen. Ivan Ivanich and
Bourkin felt wet and uncomfortable through and through; their feet were
tired with walking in the mud, and they walked past the dam to the barn
in silence as though they were angry with each other.
In one of the barns a winnowing-machine was working, sending out clouds
of dust. On the threshold stood Aliokhin himself, a man of about forty,
tall and stout, with long hair, more like a professor or a painter than
a farmer. He was wearing a grimy white shirt and rope belt, and pants
instead of trousers; and his boots were covered with mud and straw. His
nose and eyes were black with dust. He recognised Ivan Ivanich and was
apparently very pleased.
"Please, gentlemen," he said, "go to the house. I'll be with you in a
minute."
The house was large and two-storied. Aliokhin lived down-stairs in two
vaulted rooms with little windows designed for the farm-hands; the
farmhouse was plain, and the place smelled of rye bread and vodka, and
leather. He rarely used the reception-rooms, only when guests arrived.
Ivan Ivanich and Bourkin were received by a chambermaid; such a pretty
young woman that both of them stopped and exchanged glances.
"You cannot imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen," said Aliokhin,
coming after them into the hall. "I never expected you. Pelagueya," he
said to the maid, "give my friends a change of clothes. And I will
change, too. But I must have a bath. I haven't had one since the spring.
Wouldn't you like to come to the bathing-shed? And meanwhile our things
will be got ready."
Pretty Pelagueya, dainty and sweet, brought towels and soap, and
Aliokhin led his guests to the bathing-shed.
"Yes," he said, "it is a long time since I had a bath. My bathing-shed
is all right, as you see. My father and I put it up, but somehow I have
no time to bathe."
He sat down on the step and lathered his long hair and neck, and the
water round him became brown.
"Yes. I see," said Ivan Ivanich heavily, looking at his head.
"It is a long time since I bathed," said Aliokhin shyly, as he soaped
himself again, and the water round him became dark blue, like ink.
Ivan Ivanich came out of the shed, plunged into the water with a splash,
and swam about in the rain, flapping his arms, and sending waves back,
and on the waves tossed white lilies; he swam out to the middle of the
pool and dived, and in a minute came up again in another place and kept
on swimming and diving, trying to reach the bottom. "Ah! how delicious!"
he shouted in his glee. "How delicious!" He swam to the mill, spoke to
the peasants, and came back, and in the middle of the pool he lay on his
back to let the rain fall on his face. Bourkin and Aliokhin were already
dressed and ready to go, but he kept on swimming and diving.
"Delicious," he said. "Too delicious!"
"You've had enough," shouted Bourkin.
They went to the house. And only when the lamp was lit in the large
drawing-room up-stairs, and Bourkin and Ivan Ivanich, dressed in silk
dressing-gowns and warm slippers, lounged in chairs, and Aliokhin
himself, washed and brushed, in a new frock coat, paced up and down
evidently delighting in the warmth and cleanliness and dry clothes and
slippers, and pretty Pelagueya, noiselessly tripping over the carpet and
smiling sweetly, brought in tea and jam on a tray, only then did Ivan
Ivanich begin his story, and it was as though he was being listened to
not only by Bourkin and Aliokhin, but also by the old and young ladies
and the officer who looked down so staidly and tranquilly from the
golden frames.
"We are two brothers," he began, "I, Ivan Ivanich, and Nicholai Ivanich,
two years younger. I went in for study and became a veterinary surgeon,
while Nicholai was at the Exchequer Court when he was nineteen. Our
father, Tchimasha-Himalaysky, was a cantonist, but he died with an
officer's rank and left us his title of nobility and a small estate.
After his death the estate went to pay his debts. However, we spent our
childhood there in the country. We were just like peasant's children,
spent days and nights in the fields and the woods, minded the house,
barked the lime-trees, fished, and so on.... And you know once a man has
fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in
the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to
the day of his death he will be drawn to the country. My brother pined
away in the Exchequer. Years passed and he sat in the same place, wrote
out the same documents, and thought of one thing, how to get back to the
country. And little by little his distress became a definite disorder, a
fixed idea--to buy a small farm somewhere by the bank of a river or a
lake.
"He was a good fellow and I loved him, but I never sympathised with the
desire to shut oneself up on one's own farm. It is a common saying that
a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a
man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and
want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To
leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide
yourself in a farmhouse is not life--it is egoism, laziness; it is a
kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not
six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in
full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free
spirit.
"My brother Nicholai, sitting in his office, would dream of eating his
own _schi_, with its savoury smell floating across the farmyard; and of
eating out in the open air, and of sleeping in the sun, and of sitting
for hours together on a seat by the gate and gazing at the field and the
forest. Books on agriculture and the hints in almanacs were his joy, his
favourite spiritual food; and he liked reading newspapers, but only the
advertisements of land to be sold, so many acres of arable and grass
land, with a farmhouse, river, garden, mill, and mill-pond. And he would
dream of garden-walls, flowers, fruits, nests, carp in the pond, don't
you know, and all the rest of it. These fantasies of his used to vary
according to the advertisements he found, but somehow there was always a
gooseberry-bush in every one. Not a house, not a romantic spot could he
imagine without its gooseberry-bush.
"'Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the
veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything
smells good ... and there are gooseberries.'
"He used to draw out a plan of his estate and always the same things
were shown on it: (_a_) Farmhouse, (_b_) cottage, (_c_) vegetable
garden, (_d_) gooseberry-bush. He used to live meagrely and never had
enough to eat and drink, dressed God knows how, exactly like a beggar,
and always saved and put his money into the bank. He was terribly
stingy. It used to hurt me to see him, and I used to give him money to
go away for a holiday, but he would put that away, too. Once a man gets
a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.
"Years passed; he was transferred to another province. He completed his
fortieth year and was still reading advertisements in the papers and
saving up his money. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same
idea of buying a farmhouse with a gooseberry-bush, he married an
elderly, ugly widow, not out of any feeling for her, but because she had
money. With her he still lived stingily, kept her half-starved, and put
the money into the bank in his own name. She had been the wife of a
postmaster and was used to good living, but with her second husband she
did not even have enough black bread; she pined away in her new life,
and in three years or so gave up her soul to God. And my brother never
for a moment thought himself to blame for her death. Money, like vodka,
can play queer tricks with a man. Once in our town a merchant lay dying.
Before his death he asked for some honey, and he ate all his notes and
scrip with the honey so that nobody should get it. Once I was examining
a herd of cattle at a station and a horse-jobber fell under the engine,
and his foot was cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, with the
blood pouring down--a terrible business--and all the while he kept on
asking anxiously for his foot; he had twenty-five roubles in his boot
and did not want to lose them."
"Keep to your story," said Bourkin.
"After the death of his wife," Ivan Ivanich continued, after a long
pause, "my brother began to look out for an estate. Of course you may
search for five years, and even then buy a pig in a poke. Through an
agent my brother Nicholai raised a mortgage and bought three hundred
acres with a farmhouse, a cottage, and a park, but there was no orchard,
no gooseberry-bush, no duck-pond; there was a river but the water in it
was coffee-coloured because the estate lay between a brick-yard and a
gelatine factory. But my brother Nicholai was not worried about that;
he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes and settled down to a country life.
"Last year I paid him a visit. I thought I'd go and see how things were
with him. In his letters my brother called his estate Tchimbarshov
Corner, or Himalayskoe. I arrived at Himalayskoe in the afternoon. It
was hot. There were ditches, fences, hedges, rows of young fir-trees,
trees everywhere, and there was no telling how to cross the yard or
where to put your horse. I went to the house and was met by a red-haired
dog, as fat as a pig. He tried to bark but felt too lazy. Out of the
kitchen came the cook, barefooted, and also as fat as a pig, and said
that the master was having his afternoon rest. I went in to my brother
and found him sitting on his bed with his knees covered with a blanket;
he looked old, stout, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous.
I half expected him to grunt like a pig.
"We embraced and shed a tear of joy and also of sadness to think that
we had once been young, but were now both going grey and nearing death.
He dressed and took me to see his estate.
"'Well? How are you getting on?' I asked.
"'All right, thank God. I am doing very well.'
"He was no longer the poor, tired official, but a real landowner and a
person of consequence. He had got used to the place and liked it, ate a
great deal, took Russian baths, was growing fat, had already gone to law
with the parish and the two factories, and was much offended if the
peasants did not call him 'Your Lordship.' And, like a good landowner,
he looked after his soul and did good works pompously, never simply.
What good works? He cured the peasants of all kinds of diseases with
soda and castor-oil, and on his birthday he would have a thanksgiving
service held in the middle of the village, and would treat the peasants
to half a bucket of vodka, which he thought the right thing to do. Ah!
Those horrible buckets of vodka. One day a greasy landowner will drag
the peasants before the Zembro Court for trespass, and the next, if
it's a holiday, he will give them a bucket of vodka, and they drink and
shout Hooray! and lick his boots in their drunkenness. A change to good
eating and idleness always fills a Russian with the most preposterous
self-conceit. Nicholai Ivanich who, when he was in the Exchequer, was
terrified to have an opinion of his own, now imagined that what he said
was law. 'Education is necessary for the masses, but they are not fit
for it.' 'Corporal punishment is generally harmful, but in certain cases
it is useful and indispensable.'
"'I know the people and I know how to treat them,' he would say. 'The
people love me. I have only to raise my finger and they will do as I
wish.'
"And all this, mark you, was said with a kindly smile of wisdom. He was
constantly saying: 'We noblemen,' or 'I, as a nobleman.' Apparently he
had forgotten that our grandfather was a peasant and our father a common
soldier. Even our family name, Tchimacha-Himalaysky, which is really an
absurd one, seemed to him full-sounding, distinguished, and very
pleasing.
"But my point does not concern him so much as myself. I want to tell you
what a change took place in me in those few hours while I was in his
house. In the evening, while we were having tea, the cook laid a
plateful of gooseberries on the table. They had not been bought, but
were his own gooseberries, plucked for the first time since the bushes
were planted. Nicholai Ivanich laughed with joy and for a minute or two
he looked in silence at the gooseberries with tears in his eyes. He
could not speak for excitement, then put one into his mouth, glanced at
me in triumph, like a child at last being given its favourite toy, and
said:
"'How good they are!'
"He went on eating greedily, and saying all the while:
"'How good they are! Do try one!'
"It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts
us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one
whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life,
who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with
himself. In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of sadness,
but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like
despair. And at night it grew on me. A bed was made up for me in the
room near my brother's and I could hear him, unable to sleep, going
again and again to the plate of gooseberries. I thought: 'After all,
what a lot of contented, happy people there must be! What an
overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the arrogance
and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the
weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness,
hypocrisy, falsehood.... Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets,
there is peace; out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there
is not one to kick against it all. Think of the people who go to the
market for food: during the day they eat; at night they sleep, talk
nonsense, marry, grow old, piously follow their dead to the cemetery;
one never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life
goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and
against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many
go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of
starvation.... And such a state of things is obviously what we want;
apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their
burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a
general hypnosis. Every happy man should have some one with a little
hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy
people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later
show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him--illness, poverty,
loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees
nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on
living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like
an aspen-tree in the wind--and everything is all right.'
"That night I was able to understand how I, too, had been content and
happy," Ivan Ivanich went on, getting up. "I, too, at meals or out
hunting, used to lay down the law about living, and religion, and
governing the masses. I, too, used to say that teaching is light, that
education is necessary, but that for simple folk reading and writing is
enough for the present. Freedom is a boon, I used to say, as essential
as the air we breathe, but we must wait. Yes--I used to say so, but now
I ask: 'Why do we wait?'" Ivan Ivanich glanced angrily at Bourkin. "Why
do we wait, I ask you? What considerations keep us fast? I am told that
we cannot have everything at once, and that every idea is realised in
time. But who says so? Where is the proof that it is so? You refer me to
the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is
there order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature,
should stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could
jump it or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait?
Wait, when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full
of the desire to live!
"I left my brother early the next morning, and from that time on I found
it impossible to live in town. The peace and the quiet of it oppress me.
I dare not look in at the windows, for nothing is more dreadful to see
than the sight of a happy family, sitting round a table, having tea. I
am an old man now and am no good for the struggle. I commenced late. I
can only grieve within my soul, and fret and sulk. At night my head
buzzes with the rush of my thoughts and I cannot sleep.... Ah! If I were
young!"
Ivan Ivanich walked excitedly up and down the room and repeated:
"If I were young."
He suddenly walked up to Aliokhin and shook him first by one hand and
then by the other.
"Pavel Konstantinich," he said in a voice of entreaty, "don't be
satisfied, don't let yourself be lulled to sleep! While you are young,
strong, wealthy, do not cease to do good! Happiness does not exist, nor
should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not
in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand.
Do good!"
Ivan Ivanich said this with a piteous supplicating smile, as though he
were asking a personal favour.
Then they all three sat in different corners of the drawing-room and
were silent. Ivan Ivanich's story had satisfied neither Bourkin nor
Aliokhin. With the generals and ladies looking down from their gilt
frames, seeming alive in the firelight, it was tedious to hear the story
of a miserable official who ate gooseberries.... Somehow they had a
longing to hear and to speak of charming people, and of women. And the
mere fact of sitting in the drawing-room where everything--the lamp with
its coloured shade, the chairs, and the carpet under their feet--told
how the very people who now looked down at them from their frames once
walked, and sat and had tea there, and the fact that pretty Pelagueya
was near--was much better than any story.
Aliokhin wanted very much to go to bed; he had to get up for his work
very early, about two in the morning, and now his eyes were closing,
but he was afraid of his guests saying something interesting without his
hearing it, so he would not go. He did not trouble to think whether what
Ivan Ivanich had been saying was clever or right; his guests were
talking of neither groats, nor hay, nor tar, but of something which had
no bearing on his life, and he liked it and wanted them to go on....
"However, it's time to go to bed," said Bourkin, getting up. "I will
wish you good night."
Aliokhin said good night and went down-stairs, and left his guests. Each
had a large room with an old wooden bed and carved ornaments; in the
corner was an ivory crucifix; and their wide, cool beds, made by pretty
Pelagueya, smelled sweetly of clean linen.
Ivan Ivanich undressed in silence and lay down.
"God forgive me, a wicked sinner," he murmured, as he drew the clothes
over his head.
A smell of burning tobacco came from his pipe which lay on the table,
and Bourkin could not sleep for a long time and was worried because he
could not make out where the unpleasant smell came from.
The rain beat against the windows all night long.