The samovar had long since grown cold, the candle had guttered down,
smoke hung over the room in a dull blue cloud, the slop-basin was
filled to the very brim with soggy, reeking cigarette butts. The
ventilator--a tin pipe in the upper corner of the window--was open,
and once in a while a squeaking and a whirling and a terribly tiresome
wailing proceeded from it--just like the one in the District offices,
Tikhon Ilitch said to himself. But the smoke was so dense that ten
ventilators would have been of no avail. The rain rattled on the roof
and Kuzma strode from corner to corner and talked:
“Ye-es! a nice state of things, there’s no denying it! Indescribable
kindliness! If you read history, your hair rises upright in horror:
brother pitted against brother, kinsman against kinsman, son against
father--treachery and murder, murder and treachery. The Epic legends,
too, are a sheer delight: ‘he slit his white breast,’ ‘he let his
bowels out on the ground,’ ‘Ilya did not spare his own daughter; he
stepped on her left foot, and pulled her right foot.’ And the songs?
The same thing, always the same: the stepmother is ‘wicked and greedy’;
the father-in-law, ‘harsh and quarrelsome,’ sits on the sleeping-shelf
above the stove, ‘just like a dog on a rope’; the mother-in-law,
equally wicked, sits on the stove ‘just like a bitch on a chain’;
the sisters-in-law are invariably ‘young dogs and tricksters’; the
brothers-in-law are ‘malicious scoffers’; the husband is ‘either a
fool or a drunkard’; the ‘old father-in-law bids him beat his wife
soundly, until her hide drops off to her heels’; while the wife, having
‘scrubbed the floor’ for this same old man, ‘ladled out the sour
cabbage-soup, scraped the threshold clean, and baked turnover-patties,’
addresses this sort of a speech to her husband: ‘Get up, you disgusting
fellow, wake up: here’s dish-water, wash yourself; here are your
leg-wrappers, wipe yourself; here’s a bit of rope, hang yourself.’
And our adages, Tikhon Ilitch! Could anything more lewd and filthy be
invented? And our proverbs! ‘One man who has been soundly thrashed is
worth two who have not been.’ ‘Simplicity is worse than thieving.’”
“So, according to you, the best way for a man to live is like an arrant
fool?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch with a sneer.
And Kuzma joyfully snapped up his words: “Well, that’s right, that’s
the idea! There’s nothing in the whole world so beggar-bare as we
are, and on the other hand there’s nobody more insolent on the ground
of that same nakedness. What’s the vicious way to insult a person?
Accuse ’em of poverty! Say: ‘You devil! You haven’t a morsel to eat.’
Here’s an illustration: Deniska--well, I mean the son of Syery, he’s a
cobbler--said to me the other day--”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Tikhon Ilitch. “How’s Syery himself
getting on?”
“Deniska says he’s ‘perishing with hunger.’”
“A good-for-nothing peasant!” said Tikhon Ilitch with conviction.
“Don’t sing any of your songs about him to me.”
“I’m not singing!” retorted Kuzma angrily. “But I ought to do it.
For his name is Krasoff. However, that’s another story. You’d better
listen to what I have to say about Deniska. Well, he told me this:
‘Sometimes, in a famine year, we foremen would go to the neighbourhood
of the cemetery in the Black Suburb; and there those public women
were--regular troops of them. And they were hungry, the lean hags,
extremely hungry! If you gave one of them half a pound of bread for
her work she’d devour it to the last crumb, there under you. It was
downright ridiculous!’ Take note,” cried Kuzma sternly, pausing: “‘It
was downright ridiculous’!”
“Oh, stop it, for Christ’s sake!” Tikhon Ilitch interrupted again.
“Give me a chance to say a word about business!”
Kuzma stopped short. “Well, talk away,” said he. “Only, what are you
going to say? Tell him ‘You ought to do thus and so’? Not a bit of it!
If you give him money--that’s the end of it. Just think it over: they
have no fuel, they have nothing to eat, nothing to pay for a funeral.
That means, ’tis your most sacred duty to give them some money--well,
and something more to boot: a few potatoes, a wagon-load or two of
straw. And hire the Bride. Send her here as my cook.”
And immediately Tikhon Ilitch felt as though a stone had been rolled
off his breast. He hastily drew out his purse, plucked out a ten-ruble
banknote, joyfully assented also to all the other suggestions. And
suddenly he asked once more, in a rapid distressed voice: “But didn’t
she poison him?”
Kuzma merely shrugged his shoulders by way of reply.
Whether she had poisoned him or not, it was a terrible matter to think
about. And Tikhon Ilitch went home as soon as it was light, through
the chill, misty morning, when the odour of damp threshing-floors and
smoke still hung in the air, while the cocks were crowing sleepily in
the haze-wrapped village, and the dogs lay sleeping on the porches, and
the old faded-yellow turkey still snoozed roosting on the bough of an
apple tree half stripped of its discoloured dead autumn leaves, by the
side of a house. In the fields nothing could be seen at a distance of
two paces, thanks to the dense white fog driven before the wind. Tikhon
Ilitch felt no desire to sleep, but he did feel exhausted, and as usual
whipped up his horse, a large brown mare with her tail tied up; she
was soaked with the moisture and appeared leaner, more dandified, and
blacker because of it. He turned his head away from the wind and raised
the cold wet collar of his overcoat on the right side, all glistening
like silver under tiny pearls of rain which covered it with a thick
veil. He observed, through the cold little drops which hung on his
eyelashes, how the sticky black loam was churned up in ever-increasing
density by his swiftly-revolving wheels, and how clods of mud, spurting
high in a regular fountain, hung in the air and did not disperse; how
they already began to adhere to his boots and knees. And he darted a
glance at the heaving haunches of his horse; at her ears laid flat back
against her head and darkened by the rain. And when, at last, his face
streaked with mud, he dashed up to his own house, the first thing that
met his eyes was Yakoff’s horse at the hitching-bar. Hastily knotting
the reins on the fore-carriage, he sprang from the runabout, ran to the
open door of the shop--and halted abruptly in terror.
“Blo-ockhead!” Nastasya Petrovna was saying from her place behind
the counter, in evident imitation of himself, Tikhon Ilitch, but in
an ailing, caressing voice, as she bent lower and lower over the
money-drawer and fumbled along the jingling coppers, unable, in the
darkness, to find coins for change. “Blockhead! Where could you get it
any cheaper, at the present time?” And, not finding the change, she
straightened up and looked at Yakoff, who stood before her in cap and
overcoat, but barefoot. She stared at his slightly elevated face and
scraggy beard of indeterminate hue, and added: “But didn’t she poison
him?”
And Yakoff mumbled in haste: “That’s no affair of ours, Petrovna.
The devil only knows. It’s none of our business. Our business, for
example--”
And Tikhon Ilitch’s hands shook all day long as that mumbling answer
recurred to his mind. Everybody, _everybody_, thought she had poisoned
him!
Fortunately, the secret remained a secret. The Sacrament was
administered to Rodka before he died. And the Bride wailed so sincerely
as she followed the coffin that it was positively indecent--for, of
course, that wailing should not be an expression of the feelings,
but the fulfilment of a rite. And little by little Tikhon Ilitch’s
perturbation subsided. But for a long time still he continued to go
about more gloomy than a thunder-cloud.