_(A Story)_
I
_Misbehaviour_
A YOUNG dog, a reddish mongrel, between a dachshund and a "yard-dog,"
very like a fox in face, was running up and down the pavement looking
uneasily from side to side. From time to time she stopped and,
whining and lifting first one chilled paw and then another, tried
to make up her mind how it could have happened that she was lost.
She remembered very well how she had passed the day, and how, in
the end, she had found herself on this unfamiliar pavement.
The day had begun by her master Luka Alexandritch's putting on his
hat, taking something wooden under his arm wrapped up in a red
handkerchief, and calling: "Kashtanka, come along!"
Hearing her name the mongrel had come out from under the work-table,
where she slept on the shavings, stretched herself voluptuously and
run after her master. The people Luka Alexandritch worked for lived
a very long way off, so that, before he could get to any one of
them, the carpenter had several times to step into a tavern to
fortify himself. Kashtanka remembered that on the way she had behaved
extremely improperly. In her delight that she was being taken for
a walk she jumped about, dashed barking after the trains, ran into
yards, and chased other dogs. The carpenter was continually losing
sight of her, stopping, and angrily shouting at her. Once he had
even, with an expression of fury in his face, taken her fox-like
ear in his fist, smacked her, and said emphatically: "Pla-a-ague
take you, you pest!"
After having left the work where it had been bespoken, Luka
Alexandritch went into his sister's and there had something to eat
and drink; from his sister's he had gone to see a bookbinder he
knew; from the bookbinder's to a tavern, from the tavern to another
crony's, and so on. In short, by the time Kashtanka found herself
on the unfamiliar pavement, it was getting dusk, and the carpenter
was as drunk as a cobbler. He was waving his arms and, breathing
heavily, muttered:
"In sin my mother bore me! Ah, sins, sins! Here now we are walking
along the street and looking at the street lamps, but when we die,
we shall burn in a fiery Gehenna. . . ."
Or he fell into a good-natured tone, called Kashtanka to him, and
said to her: "You, Kashtanka, are an insect of a creature, and
nothing else. Beside a man, you are much the same as a joiner beside
a cabinet-maker. . . ."
While he talked to her in that way, there was suddenly a burst of
music. Kashtanka looked round and saw that a regiment of soldiers
was coming straight towards her. Unable to endure the music, which
unhinged her nerves, she turned round and round and wailed. To her
great surprise, the carpenter, instead of being frightened, whining
and barking, gave a broad grin, drew himself up to attention, and
saluted with all his five fingers. Seeing that her master did not
protest, Kashtanka whined louder than ever, and dashed across the
road to the opposite pavement.
When she recovered herself, the band was not playing and the regiment
was no longer there. She ran across the road to the spot where she
had left her master, but alas, the carpenter was no longer there.
She dashed forward, then back again and ran across the road once
more, but the carpenter seemed to have vanished into the earth.
Kashtanka began sniffing the pavement, hoping to find her master
by the scent of his tracks, but some wretch had been that way just
before in new rubber goloshes, and now all delicate scents were
mixed with an acute stench of india-rubber, so that it was impossible
to make out anything.
Kashtanka ran up and down and did not find her master, and meanwhile
it had got dark. The street lamps were lighted on both sides of the
road, and lights appeared in the windows. Big, fluffy snowflakes
were falling and painting white the pavement, the horses' backs and
the cabmen's caps, and the darker the evening grew the whiter were
all these objects. Unknown customers kept walking incessantly to
and fro, obstructing her field of vision and shoving against her
with their feet. (All mankind Kashtanka divided into two uneven
parts: masters and customers; between them there was an essential
difference: the first had the right to beat her, and the second she
had the right to nip by the calves of their legs.) These customers
were hurrying off somewhere and paid no attention to her.
When it got quite dark, Kashtanka was overcome by despair and horror.
She huddled up in an entrance and began whining piteously. The long
day's journeying with Luka Alexandritch had exhausted her, her ears
and her paws were freezing, and, what was more, she was terribly
hungry. Only twice in the whole day had she tasted a morsel: she
had eaten a little paste at the bookbinder's, and in one of the
taverns she had found a sausage skin on the floor, near the counter
--that was all. If she had been a human being she would have
certainly thought: "No, it is impossible to live like this! I must
shoot myself!"