During the Fast of St. Peter Tikhon Ilitch spent four days in the town
at the Fair and got still more out of tune, thanks to his worries,
the heat, and sleepless nights. Ordinarily he set out for the Fair
with great gusto. At twilight the carts were greased and heaped with
hay. Behind one, that in which the manager of his farm rode, were
hitched the horses or cows destined for sale; in the other, in which
the master himself was to ride, were placed cushions and a peasant
overcoat. Making a late start, they journeyed squeaking all night long
until daybreak. First of all they indulged in friendly discussion and
smoking. The men told each other frightful old tales of merchants
murdered on the road and at halting places for the night. Then Tikhon
Ilitch disposed himself for sleep; and it was extremely pleasant to
hear through his dreams the voices of those whom they met, to feel the
vigorous swaying of the cart, as if it were constantly descending a
hill, and his cheeks slipping deep into a pillow while his cap fell
off and the night chill cooled his head. It was agreeable, too, to
wake up before sunrise in the rosy, dewy morning, in the midst of
the dull-green grain, and to see, far away in the blue lowlands, the
town shining as a cheerful white spot, and the gleam of its churches;
to yawn mightily, cross himself at the faint sound of the bells, and
take the reins from the hands of the half-slumbering old man, who sat
relaxed like a child in the morning chill and was as white as chalk in
the light of the dawn.
But on this occasion Tikhon Ilitch sent off the carts with his head
man and drove himself in a runabout. The night was warm and bright;
there was a rosy tone in the moonlight. He drove fast, but became
extremely weary. The lights on the Fair buildings, the jail and the
hospital, were visible from the steppe at a distance of ten versts as
one approached the town, and it seemed as if one would never reach
them--those distant, sleepy lights. And at the posting-house on the
Ststchepnoy Square it was so hot, and the fleas bit so viciously, and
voices rang out so frequently at the entrance-gate, and the carts
rattled so as they drove into the stone-paved courtyard, and the cocks
began to screech and the pigeons to start their rumbling coo so early,
and the sky to grow white beyond the open windows, that he never closed
an eye. He slept little the second night, too, which he tried to pass
at the Fair in his cart. The horses neighed, lights blazed in the
stalls, people walked and talked all around him; and at dawn, when his
eyelids were fairly sticking together with sleep, the bells on the jail
and the hospital began to ring. And right over his head the horrible
bellow of a cow boomed out. “Might as well be a criminal condemned to
hard labour in prison!” was a thought which recurred incessantly during
those days and nights. “Struggling--getting all snarled up--and going
to destruction over trifles, absurdities!”
The Fair, scattered over the town pasture land for a whole verst, was,
as usual, noisy and muddled. Brooms, scythes, wooden tubs with handles,
shovels, wheels lay about in heaps. A dull, discordant roar hung over
it all--the neighing of horses, the shrilling of children’s whistles,
the polkas and marches thundered out by the orchestrions of the
merry-go-rounds. An idle, chattering throng of peasant men and women
surged about in waves from morning till night on the dusty, dung-strewn
alleyways among the carts and stalls, the horses and the cows, the
amusement sheds and the eating booths, whence were wafted fetid odours
of frying grease. As always, there was a huge throng of horse-dealers,
who injected a terrible irritability into all discussion and barter.
Blind men and paupers, beggars, cripples on crutches and in carts,
filed past in endless bands, chanting their snuffling ballads. The
troika team of the rural police chief moved slowly through the crowd,
its bells jingling, restrained by a coachman in a sleeveless velveteen
coat and a hat adorned with peacock feathers.
Tikhon Ilitch had many customers. But nothing beyond empty chaffer
resulted. Gipsies came, blue-black of face; Jews from the south-west,
grey of countenance, red-haired, covered with dust, in long, wide
coats of canvas and boots down at the heel; sun-browned members of
the gentry class of small estates, in sleeveless peasant over-jackets
and caps; the commissary of rural police and the village policeman;
the wealthy merchant Safonoff, an old man wearing a sort of overcoat
affected by the lower classes, fat, clean-shaven, and smoking a cigar.
The handsome hussar officer, Prince Bakhtin, came also, accompanied
by his wife in an English walking suit, and Khvostoff, the decrepit
hero of the Sevastopol campaign, tall, bony, with large features and
a dark, wrinkled face, wearing a long uniform coat, sagging trousers,
broad-toed boots, and a big uniform cap with a yellow band beneath
which his dyed locks, of a dead dark-brown shade, were combed forward
on his temples.
All these people gave themselves the air of being expert judges, talked
fluently about colours, paces, discoursed about the horses they owned.
The petty landed gentry lied and boasted. Bakhtin did not condescend
to speak to Tikhon Ilitch, although the latter rose respectfully at
his approach and said: “’Tis a suitable horse for Your Illustrious
Highness, sir.” Bakhtin merely fell back a pace as he inspected
the horse, smiled gravely into his moustache, which he wore with
side-supplements, and exchanged brief suggestions with his wife as he
wriggled his leg in his cherry-coloured cavalry breeches.
But Khvostoff, shuffling up to the horse and casting a sidelong fiery
glance at it, came to a halt in such a posture that it seemed as if he
were on the point of falling down, elevated his crutch, and for the
tenth time demanded in a dull, absolutely expressionless voice: “How
much do you ask for him?”
And Tikhon Ilitch was obliged to answer them all. Out of sheer boredom
he bought a little book entitled “Oï, Schmul and Rivke: Collection
of fashionable farces, puns, and stories, from the wanderings of
our worthy Hebrews”--and, as he sat in his cart, he dipped into it
frequently. But no sooner did he begin to read: “Iveryboady knows,
zhentelmen, zat vee, ze Zhews, iss ferightfully foand of beezness,”
than some one hailed him. And Tikhon Ilitch raised his eyes and
answered, although with an effort and with clenched jaws.
He grew extremely thin, sunburned, yet pallid, flew into bad tempers,
and was conscious of being bored to death and of feeling weak all over.
He got his stomach so badly out of order that he had cramps. He was
compelled to resort to the hospital; and there he waited two hours for
his turn, seated in a resounding corridor, inhaling the repulsive odour
of carbolic acid and feeling as if he were not Tikhon Ilitch and a
person of consequence, but rather as if he were waiting humbly in the
ante-room of his master or of some official. And when the doctor--who
resembled a deacon, a red-faced, bright-eyed man in a bob-tailed coat,
redolent of soap, with a sniff--applied his cold ear to his chest, he
made haste to say that his belly-ache was almost gone, and did not
refuse a dose of castor oil simply because he was too timid to do so.
When he returned to the Fair ground he gulped down a glass of vodka
flavoured with pepper and salt, and began once more to eat sausage,
sour black rye bread made of second-rate flour, and to drink tea, raw
vodka, and sour cabbage soup--and he was still unable to quench his
thirst. His acquaintances advised him to refresh himself with beer, and
he went for some. The lame kvas-dealer shouted: “Here’s your fine kvas,
the sort that makes your nose sting! A kopek a glass--prime lemonade!”
And Tikhon Ilitch bade the kvas-peddler halt. “He-ere’s your ices!”
chanted in a tenor voice a bald, perspiring vendor, a paunch-bellied
old man in a red shirt. And Tikhon Ilitch ate, with the little bone
spoon, ices which were hardly more than snow, and which made his head
ache cruelly.
Dusty, ground to powder by feet, wheels, and hoofs, littered and
covered with dung, the pasture was already being deserted--the Fair
was dispersing. But Tikhon Ilitch, as if with deliberate intent to
spite some one or other, persisted in keeping his unsold horses there
in the heat, and sat on and on in his cart. It seemed as if he were
overwhelmed not so much by illness as by the spectacle of the great
poverty, the vast wretchedness which, from time immemorial, had
reigned over this town and its whole county. Lord God, what a country!
Black-loam soil over three feet deep! But--what of that? Never did five
years pass without a famine. The town was famous throughout all Russia
as a grain mart--but not more than a hundred persons in the whole town
ate their fill of the grain. And the Fair? Beggars, idiots, blind men,
cripples--a whole regiment of them--and such monstrosities as it made
one frightened and sick at the stomach to behold!
V
On a hot, sunny morning Tikhon Ilitch started homeward through the big
Old Town. First he drove through the town and the bazaar, past the
cathedral, across the shallow little river, which reeked with the
sourly fetid odour of the tanyards, and beyond the river, up the hill,
through the Black Suburb. In the bazaar he and his brother had once
worked in Matorin’s shop. Now every one in the bazaar bowed low before
him. In the Black Suburb his childhood had been passed. There, halfway
up the hill, among the mud huts embedded in the ground, with their
black and decaying roofs, in the midst of dung which lay drying in the
sun for use as fuel, amid litter, ashes, and rags, it had been his
great delight to race, with shrill shouting and whistling, after the
poverty-stricken teacher of the county school--a malicious, depraved
old man, long since expelled from his post, who wore felt boots summer
and winter, under-drawers, and a short overcoat with a beaver collar
which was peeling off. He had been known to the town by the peculiar
nickname of “the Dog’s Pistol.”
Not a trace was now left of that mud hut in which Tikhon Ilitch had
been born and had grown up. On its site stood a small new house of
planking, with a rusty sign over the entrance: “Ecclesiastical Tailor
Soboleff.” Everything else in the Suburb was precisely as it had
always been--pigs and hens in the narrow alleys; tall poles at the
gateways, and on each pole a ram’s horn; the big pallid faces of the
lace-makers peering forth from behind the pots of flowers in the tiny
windows; bare-legged little urchins with one suspender over a shoulder,
launching a paper snake with a tail of bast fibre; quiet flaxen-haired
little girls engaged in their favourite play, burying a doll, beside
the mound of earth encircling the house.
On the plain at the crest of the hill, he crossed himself before the
cemetery, behind the fence of which, among the trees, was the grave
which had once been such a source of terror to him--that of the rich
miser Zykoff, which had caved in at the very moment when they were
filling it. And, after a moment’s reflection, he turned the horse in at
the gate of the cemetery.
By the side of that large white gate had been wont to sit
uninterruptedly, jingling a little bell to which were attached a handle
and a small bag, a squint-eyed monk garbed in a black cassock and boots
red with age--an extremely powerful, shaggy, and fierce fellow, to
judge by appearances; a drunkard, with a remarkable command of abusive
language. No monk was there now. In his place sat an old woman, busy
knitting a stocking. She looked like the ancient crone of a fairy tale,
with spectacles, a beak, and sunken lips. She was one of the widows who
lived in the asylum by the cemetery.
“’Morning, my good woman!” Tikhon Ilitch called out pleasantly, as
he hitched his horse to a post near the gate. “Can you look after my
horse?”
The old woman rose to her feet, made a deep reverence, and mumbled:
“Yes, batiushka.”[4]
Tikhon Ilitch removed his cap, crossed himself once more, rolling his
eyes upward as he did so before the holy picture of the Assumption of
the Mother of God over the gateway, and added: “Are there many of you
nowadays?”
“Twelve old women in all, batiushka.”
“Well, and do you squabble often?”
“Yes, often, batiushka.”
Tikhon Ilitch walked at a leisurely pace among the trees and the
crosses along the alley leading to the ancient wooden church, once
painted in ochre. During the Fair he had had his hair cut close and
his beard trimmed and shortened, and he was looking much younger.
His leanness and sunburn also contributed to the youthfulness of his
appearance. The delicate skin shone white on the recently clipped
triangles on his temples. The memories of his childhood and youth
made him younger; so did his new peaked canvas cap. His face was
thoughtful. He glanced from side to side. How brief, how devoid of
meaning, was life! And what peace, what repose, was round about, in
that sunny stillness within the enclosure of the ancient churchyard! A
hot breeze drifted across the crests of the bright trees which pierced
the cloudless sky, their foliage made scanty before its season by the
torrid heat, their light, transparent shadows cast in waves athwart the
stones and monuments. And when it died away the sun once more heated
up the flowers and the grass; birds warbled sweetly in the languor;
sumptuously-hued butterflies sank motionless upon the hot paths. On one
cross Tikhon Ilitch read:
“What terrible quit-rents
Doth Death collect from men!”
But there was nothing awful about the spot. He strolled on, even
noticing with considerable satisfaction that the cemetery was growing;
that many new and excellent mausoleums had made their appearance among
those ancient stones in the shapes of coffins on legs, heavy cast-iron
plates, and huge rough crosses, already in process of decay, which
now filled it. “Died in the year 1819, on November 7, at five o’clock
in the morning”--it was painful to read such inscriptions: death was
repulsive at dawn of a stormy autumnal day, in that old county town!
But alongside it a marble angel gleamed white through the trees, as
he stood there with eyes fixed upon the blue sky; and beneath it, on
the mirror-smooth black granite, were cut in gold letters the words:
“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.” On the iron monument of
some Collegiate Assessor, tinted in rainbow hues by foul weather and
the hand of time, one could decipher the verses:
“His Tsar he honourably served,
His neighbour cordially loved,
And was revered of men.”
And these verses struck Tikhon Ilitch as hypocritical. But in this
place even a lie was touching. For--where is truth? Yonder in the
bushes lies a human jawbone, neglected, looking as if it were made of
dirty wax--all that remains of a man. But is it all? Flowers, ribbons,
crosses, coffins, and bones in the earth decay--all is death and
corruption. But Tikhon Ilitch walked on further and read: “Thus it is
in the resurrection of the dead; it is sown in corruption, it is raised
in incorruption.”--“Our darling son, thy memory will never die in our
hearts to all eternity!”
His brow furrowed even more severely; he removed his cap and made the
sign of the cross. He was pale, and still weak from his illness. He
recalled his childhood--his youth--Kuzma. He walked to the far corner
of the cemetery where all his relatives were buried--father, mother,
the sister who had died when a little girl. The inscriptions spoke
touchingly and peacefully of rest, repose; of tenderness towards
fathers, mothers, husbands and wives; of a love which, apparently,
does not exist and never will exist on this earth; of that devotion
to one another and submission to God, that fervent faith in a future
life, that meeting once more in another and blessed land, in which one
believes only here; and of that equality which death alone confers--of
those moments when folk bestow the last kiss upon the lips of the dead
beggar as on a brother’s, compare him with kings and prelates, say over
him the loftiest and most solemn words.
And there in a distant corner of the enclosure, among bushes of elder
which dozed in the parching heat--there where formerly had been graves,
but now were only mounds and hollows, overgrown with grass and white
flowers--Tikhon Ilitch saw a fresh little grave, the grave of a child,
and on the cross a couplet:
“Softly, leaves: do not rustle,
Do not wake my Kostya dear.”
And as he recalled his own child, crushed in its sleep by the dumb
cook, he began to blink back the welling tears.