_(A Story told by a Houseowner)_
THE old house had to be pulled down that a new one might be built
in its place. I led the architect through the empty rooms, and
between our business talk told him various stories. The tattered
wallpapers, the dingy windows, the dark stoves, all bore the traces
of recent habitation and evoked memories. On that staircase, for
instance, drunken men were once carrying down a dead body when they
stumbled and flew headlong downstairs together with the coffin; the
living were badly bruised, while the dead man looked very serious,
as though nothing had happened, and shook his head when they lifted
him up from the ground and put him back in the coffin. You see those
three doors in a row: in there lived young ladies who were always
receiving visitors, and so were better dressed than any other
lodgers, and could pay their rent regularly. The door at the end
of the corridor leads to the wash-house, where by day they washed
clothes and at night made an uproar and drank beer. And in that
flat of three rooms everything is saturated with bacteria and
bacilli. It's not nice there. Many lodgers have died there, and I
can positively assert that that flat was at some time cursed by
someone, and that together with its human lodgers there was always
another lodger, unseen, living in it. I remember particularly the
fate of one family. Picture to yourself an ordinary man, not
remarkable in any way, with a wife, a mother, and four children.
His name was Putohin; he was a copying clerk at a notary's, and
received thirty-five roubles a month. He was a sober, religious,
serious man. When he brought me his rent for the flat he always
apologised for being badly dressed; apologised for being five days
late, and when I gave him a receipt he would smile good-humouredly
and say: "Oh yes, there's that too, I don't like those receipts."
He lived poorly but decently. In that middle room, the grandmother
used to be with the four children; there they used to cook, sleep,
receive their visitors, and even dance. This was Putohin's own room;
he had a table in it, at which he used to work doing private jobs,
copying parts for the theatre, advertisements, and so on. This room
on the right was let to his lodger, Yegoritch, a locksmith--a
steady fellow, but given to drink; he was always too hot, and so
used to go about in his waistcoat and barefoot. Yegoritch used to
mend locks, pistols, children's bicycles, would not refuse to mend
cheap clocks and make skates for a quarter-rouble, but he despised
that work, and looked on himself as a specialist in musical
instruments. Amongst the litter of steel and iron on his table there
was always to be seen a concertina with a broken key, or a trumpet
with its sides bent in. He paid Putohin two and a half roubles for
his room; he was always at his work-table, and only came out to
thrust some piece of iron into the stove.
On the rare occasions when I went into that flat in the evening,
this was always the picture I came upon: Putohin would be sitting
at his little table, copying something; his mother and his wife, a
thin woman with an exhausted-looking face, were sitting near the
lamp, sewing; Yegoritch would be making a rasping sound with his
file. And the hot, still smouldering embers in the stove filled the
room with heat and fumes; the heavy air smelt of cabbage soup,
swaddling-clothes, and Yegoritch. It was poor and stuffy, but the
working-class faces, the children's little drawers hung up along
by the stove, Yegoritch's bits of iron had yet an air of peace,
friendliness, content. . . . In the corridor outside the children
raced about with well-combed heads, merry and profoundly convinced
that everything was satisfactory in this world, and would be so
endlessly, that one had only to say one's prayers every morning and
at bedtime.
Now imagine in the midst of that same room, two paces from the
stove, the coffin in which Putohin's wife is lying. There is no
husband whose wife will live for ever, but there was something
special about this death. When, during the requiem service, I glanced
at the husband's grave face, at his stern eyes, I thought: "Oho,
brother!"
It seemed to me that he himself, his children, the grandmother and
Yegoritch, were already marked down by that unseen being which lived
with them in that flat. I am a thoroughly superstitious man, perhaps,
because I am a houseowner and for forty years have had to do with
lodgers. I believe if you don't win at cards from the beginning you
will go on losing to the end; when fate wants to wipe you and your
family off the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its
persecution, and the first misfortune is commonly only the first
of a long series. . . . Misfortunes are like stones. One stone has
only to drop from a high cliff for others to be set rolling after
it. In short, as I came away from the requiem service at Putohin's,
I believed that he and his family were in a bad way.
And, in fact, a week afterwards the notary quite unexpectedly
dismissed Putohin, and engaged a young lady in his place. And would
you believe it, Putohin was not so much put out at the loss of his
job as at being superseded by a young lady and not by a man. Why a
young lady? He so resented this that on his return home he thrashed
his children, swore at his mother, and got drunk. Yegoritch got
drunk, too, to keep him company.
Putohin brought me the rent, but did not apologise this time, though
it was eighteen days overdue, and said nothing when he took the
receipt from me. The following month the rent was brought by his
mother; she only brought me half, and promised to bring the remainder
a week later. The third month, I did not get a farthing, and the
porter complained to me that the lodgers in No. 23 were "not behaving
like gentlemen."
These were ominous symptoms.
Picture this scene. A sombre Petersburg morning looks in at the
dingy windows. By the stove, the granny is pouring out the children's
tea. Only the eldest, Vassya, drinks out of a glass, for the others
the tea is poured out into saucers. Yegoritch is squatting on his
heels before the stove, thrusting a bit of iron into the fire. His
head is heavy and his eyes are lustreless from yesterday's
drinking-bout; he sighs and groans, trembles and coughs.
"He has quite put me off the right way, the devil," he grumbles;
"he drinks himself and leads others into sin."
Putohin sits in his room, on the bedstead from which the bedclothes
and the pillows have long ago disappeared, and with his hands
straying in his hair looks blankly at the floor at his feet. He is
tattered, unkempt, and ill.
"Drink it up, make haste or you will be late for school," the old
woman urges on Vassya, "and it's time for me, too, to go and scrub
the floors for the Jews. . . ."
The old woman is the only one in the flat who does not lose heart.
She thinks of old times, and goes out to hard dirty work. On Fridays
she scrubs the floors for the Jews at the crockery shop, on Saturdays
she goes out washing for shopkeepers, and on Sundays she is racing
about the town from morning to night, trying to find ladies who
will help her. Every day she has work of some sort; she washes and
scrubs, and is by turns a midwife, a matchmaker, or a beggar. It
is true she, too, is not disinclined to drown her sorrows, but even
when she has had a drop she does not forget her duties. In Russia
there are many such tough old women, and how much of its welfare
rests upon them!
When he has finished his tea, Vassya packs up his books in a satchel
and goes behind the stove; his greatcoat ought to be hanging there
beside his granny's clothes. A minute later he comes out from behind
the stove and asks:
"Where is my greatcoat?"
The grandmother and the other children look for the greatcoat
together, they waste a long time in looking for it, but the greatcoat
has utterly vanished. Where is it? The grandmother and Vassya are
pale and frightened. Even Yegoritch is surprised. Putohin is the
only one who does not move. Though he is quick to notice anything
irregular or disorderly, this time he makes a pretence of hearing
and seeing nothing. That is suspicious.
"He's sold it for drink," Yegoritch declares.
Putohin says nothing, so it is the truth. Vassya is overcome with
horror. His greatcoat, his splendid greatcoat, made of his dead
mother's cloth dress, with a splendid calico lining, gone for drink
at the tavern! And with the greatcoat is gone too, of course, the
blue pencil that lay in the pocket, and the note-book with "_Nota
bene_" in gold letters on it! There's another pencil with india-rubber
stuck into the note-book, and, besides that, there are transfer
pictures lying in it.
Vassya would like to cry, but to cry is impossible. If his father,
who has a headache, heard crying he would shout, stamp with his
feet, and begin fighting, and after drinking he fights horribly.
Granny would stand up for Vassya, and his father would strike granny
too; it would end in Yegoritch getting mixed up in it too, clutching
at his father and falling on the floor with him. The two would roll
on the floor, struggling together and gasping with drunken animal
fury, and granny would cry, the children would scream, the neighbours
would send for the porter. No, better not cry.
Because he mustn't cry, or give vent to his indignation aloud,
Vassya moans, wrings his hands and moves his legs convulsively, or
biting his sleeve shakes it with his teeth as a dog does a hare.
His eyes are frantic, and his face is distorted with despair. Looking
at him, his granny all at once takes the shawl off her head, and
she too makes queer movements with her arms and legs in silence,
with her eyes fixed on a point in the distance. And at that moment
I believe there is a definite certainty in the minds of the boy and
the old woman that their life is ruined, that there is no
hope. . . .
Putohin hears no crying, but he can see it all from his room. When,
half an hour later, Vassya sets off to school, wrapped in his
grandmother's shawl, he goes out with a face I will not undertake
to describe, and walks after him. He longs to call the boy, to
comfort him, to beg his forgiveness, to promise him on his word of
honour, to call his dead mother to witness, but instead of words,
sobs break from him. It is a grey, cold morning. When he reaches
the town school Vassya untwists his granny's shawl, and goes into
the school with nothing over his jacket for fear the boys should
say he looks like a woman. And when he gets home Putohin sobs,
mutters some incoherent words, bows down to the ground before his
mother and Yegoritch, and the locksmith's table. Then, recovering
himself a little, he runs to me and begs me breathlessly, for God's
sake, to find him some job. I give him hopes, of course.
"At last I am myself again," he said. "It's high time, indeed, to
come to my senses. I've made a beast of myself, and now it's over."
He is delighted and thanks me, while I, who have studied these
gentry thoroughly during the years I have owned the house, look at
him, and am tempted to say:
"It's too late, dear fellow! You are a dead man already."
From me, Putohin runs to the town school. There he paces up and
down, waiting till his boy comes out.
"I say, Vassya," he says joyfully, when the boy at last comes out,
"I have just been promised a job. Wait a bit, I will buy you a
splendid fur-coat. . . . I'll send you to the high school! Do you
understand? To the high school! I'll make a gentleman of you! And
I won't drink any more. On my honour I won't."
And he has intense faith in the bright future. But the evening comes
on. The old woman, coming back from the Jews with twenty kopecks,
exhausted and aching all over, sets to work to wash the children's
clothes. Vassya is sitting doing a sum. Yegoritch is not working.
Thanks to Putohin he has got into the way of drinking, and is feeling
at the moment an overwhelming desire for drink. It's hot and stuffy
in the room. Steam rises in clouds from the tub where the old woman
is washing.
"Are we going?" Yegoritch asks surlily.
My lodger does not answer. After his excitement he feels insufferably
dreary. He struggles with the desire to drink, with acute depression
and . . . and, of course, depression gets the best of it. It is a
familiar story.
Towards night, Yegoritch and Putohin go out, and in the morning
Vassya cannot find granny's shawl.
That is the drama that took place in that flat. After selling the
shawl for drink, Putohin did not come home again. Where he disappeared
to I don't know. After he disappeared, the old woman first got
drunk, then took to her bed. She was taken to the hospital, the
younger children were fetched by relations of some sort, and Vassya
went into the wash-house here. In the day-time he handed the irons,
and at night fetched the beer. When he was turned out of the
wash-house he went into the service of one of the young ladies,
used to run about at night on errands of some sort, and began to
be spoken of as "a dangerous customer."
What has happened to him since I don't know.
And in this room here a street musician lived for ten years. When
he died they found twenty thousand roubles in his feather bed.