It was growing dark, the thick layers of clouds were turning blue
and cold, and there was a touch of winter in the air. The mud was
congealing. Having got rid of Makarka, Tikhon Ilitch stamped his
frost-bitten feet on the porch and entered the house. There, without
removing his coat and cap, he seated himself on a chair near the
little window, began to smoke, and again became immersed in thought.
He recalled to mind the summer, the rebellion, the Bride, his brother,
his wife--and that, so far, he had not paid off his farmhands for
their season’s work. It was his custom to delay payment. The young
girls and children who came to him on daily wages stood for days on
end at his threshold, complained of their extreme need, waxed angry,
sometimes made insolent remarks. But he was inexorable. He shouted and
called upon God to witness that he had only two coppers in his house.
“Search and see if you can find any more!”--and he turned his pockets
and his purse inside out and spat in feigned wrath, as though amazed
by the distrust, the “dishonesty” of the suppliants. But now that
custom seemed to him the opposite of good. He had been ruthlessly harsh
with his wife, and cold, and so complete a stranger to her that, at
times, he utterly forgot her existence. And now, all of a sudden, this
astonished him: good God, why, he had not even the least idea what sort
of person she was! If she were to die that day, he would not be able to
say two words as to why she had lived, what she had thought, what she
had felt throughout all the long years she had lived with him--those
years which had merged themselves into a single year, and had flashed
past in ceaseless cares and anxieties. And what had he to show for all
those worries? He threw away his cigarette, and lighted a fresh one.
Ugh, but that Makarka was a clever beast! and, once granted that he
was clever, why wasn’t it possible that he might be able to foresee
things--when something was coming, and what it was, and to whom?
Something abominable was, indubitably, awaiting him, Tikhon Ilitch. For
one thing, he was no longer a young man. How many of his contemporaries
were in the other world! And from death and old age there is no escape!
Not even children would have saved him. And he would not have known the
children, and the children would have found him as much of a stranger
as he had been to all those, alive or dead, who had been nearly
connected with him. There were as many people on the earth as there
are stars in the sky; but life is short, people come into being, grow
up, and die so rapidly, are so slightly acquainted with one another,
and so quickly forget all that has happened to them, that it is enough
to drive a man crazy if he once sets about considering the matter
attentively! Only quite recently he had said to himself: “My life ought
to be written up....” But what was there to write about? Nothing.
Nothing at all, or nothing of any consequence. Why, he himself could
recall scarcely anything of that life. For example, he had completely
forgotten his childhood: once in a while, it is true, a fleeting memory
would flash across his mind of some summer day, some incident, some
playfellow. Once he had singed somebody’s cat--and had been whipped for
it. Some one had given him a little whip with a bird-call whistle in
the handle, and it had made him indescribably happy. His drunken father
had a special way of calling to him--caressingly, his voice laden with
sadness: “Come to me, Tisha, come, dear lad!” Then, suddenly, he would
grab him by the hair....
If Ilya Mironoff, the huckster, had still been alive, Tikhon Ilitch
would have supported him out of kindness, and would have known nothing
about him, and would barely have noticed his existence. It had been the
same way with his mother. Ask him now: “Do you remember your mother?”
and he would answer: “I remember some crooked old woman who dried
the manure and kept the stove hot, tippled in secret, and grumbled.”
Nothing more. He had served nearly ten years with Matorin, but that
decade had melted together into about a day or two: the fine April
rain pattering down and speckling the sheets of iron which, rattling
and clanging, were being loaded into a cart alongside the neighbouring
shop; a grey, frosty noonday, the pigeons alighting in a noisy flock
upon the snow beside the shop of another neighbour who dealt in flour,
groats, and bran, crowding together, cooing and flapping their wings,
while he and his brother whipped with an ox-tail a peg-top spinning on
the threshold. Matorin was young, then, and robust, and purplish-red of
complexion, with his chin cleanly shaven and sandy side-whiskers cut
down to half-length. Now he was poor; he ambled about with the walk of
an old man, his great-coat faded by the sun, and his capacious cap;
ambled from shop to shop, from one acquaintance to another, played
checkers, lounged in Daeff’s eating-house, drank a little, got tipsy
and loquacious: “We are pretty folks: we’ve drunk, and eaten, and paid
our score--and off we go, home!” And, on encountering Tikhon Ilitch, he
did not immediately recognize him, but would smile woefully and say:
“Is that really you, Tisha?”
And Tikhon Ilitch himself had not recognized his own brother when first
they met that autumn: “Can that be Kuzma, with whom I roamed for so
many years about the fields, the villages, and the bye-lanes?”
(“How old you have grown, brother!”
“I have, a bit.”
“And how early!”
“That’s because I’m a Russian. That happens quickly with us.”)
And, great heavens, how everything had changed since the days when they
had been roving peddlers! How dreadfully unlike was the present Tikhon
Ilitch to the half-gipsy huckster Tisha, swarthy as a black-beetle,
reckless, and merry!
As he lighted his third cigarette, Tikhon Ilitch stared fixedly and
questioningly out of the tiny window:
“Can it be like this in other lands?”
No, it could not be the same. Men of his acquaintance had been
abroad--there was merchant Rukavishnikoff, for instance--and they
had told him things. And even aside from Rukavishnikoff, one could
put things together. Take the Germans of the towns, or the Jews: all
conduct themselves reasonably, are punctual, all know one another, all
are friends--and that not alone in a state of intoxication--and all
are mutually helpful: if they are separated, they write letters to
one another all their lives long and exchange portraits of fathers,
mothers, acquaintances from family to family; they teach their
children, love them, walk with them, talk with them as with equals so
that the child has something to remember. But with us, all are enemies
of one another, every one envies and slanders every one else, goes to
see acquaintances once a year, sits apart, each in his kennel; all
bustle about like madmen when any one drops in for a visit, and dash
around to put the rooms in order. But what’s the truth of the matter?
They begrudge the guest a spoonful of preserves! The guest will not
drink a second cup of tea without being specially invited. Ugh, you
slant-eyed Kirghizi! You yellow-haired Mordvinians! You savages!
Some one’s troika-team drove past the windows. Tikhon Ilitch
scrutinized it attentively. The horses were emaciated but obviously
mettlesome. The tarantas was in good condition. Whose could it be?
No one in the immediate neighbourhood owned such a troika. The
neighbouring landed proprietors were so indignant that they sat for
three days at a stretch without bread, had sold the last scrap of
vestments from their holy pictures, had not a farthing wherewith to
replace broken glass or mend the roof; instead they stuffed cushions
into the window-frames and set bread-troughs and buckets all over the
floor when rain came on--and it poured through the ceilings as through
a sieve. Then Deniska the cobbler passed. Where was he going? And what
was that he had with him? That couldn’t be a valise he was carrying?
Okh, there’s a fool for you, forgive my sin, O Lord!