Kuzma spent the evening and the night in the garden, in the old
bath-house. The superintendent, on arriving from the fields on
horseback, had remarked angrily that the garden had been “leased long
ago,” and in reply to a request for lodging over-night had expressed
insolent amazement. “Well, but you are a sensible fellow!” he had
shouted, without either rhyme or reason. “A nice posting-station you’ve
picked out! Are there many of your stamp roving about at present?” But
he took pity on Kuzma in the end, and gave him permission to go into
the bath-house. Kuzma paid off Menshoff and walked past the manor-house
to the gate into the linden avenue. Through the unlighted open windows,
from beyond the wire fly-screens, thundered a grand piano, drowned by
a magnificent baritone-tenor voice, lifted in intricate vocalizations
which were completely out of harmony with both the evening and the
manor. Along the muddy sand of the sloping avenue, at the end of
which, as if at the end of the world, the cloud-flecked sky gleamed
dully white, there advanced toward Kuzma a poor-looking peasant, short
of stature, with dark reddish hair, his shirt minus a belt; he was
capless, wore heavy boots, and was carrying a bucket in his hand.
“Oho, ho!” he said, jeeringly, as he listened to the singing while he
walked on. “Oho, he’s going it strong, may his belly burst!”
“Who is going it strong?” inquired Kuzma.
The peasant raised his head and halted. “Why, that young gentleman of
ours,” he said, merrily, making havoc with his consonants. “They say he
has been doing that these seven years.”
“Which one--the one who was chasing the dogs?”
“N-no, another one. But that’s not all! Sometimes he takes to
screeching, ‘To-day ’tis your turn, to-morrow ’twill be mine’--regular
calamity!”
“He’s taking lessons, of course?”
“Nice lessons they must be!”
“And that other one--what does he do?”
“That fellow?” The peasant drew a long breath, smiling in a discreetly
jeering manner the while. “Why, nothing. Why should he? he has good
victuals and amusement: Fedka tosses bottles, and he shoots at them;
sometimes he buys a peasant’s beard, cuts it off, and stuffs it into
his gun, for fun. Then again, there are the dogs: we have an immense
number of them. On Sundays, when the church bells begin to peal, the
whole pack of them sets to howling; ’tis an awful row they make! Day
before yesterday they chewed up a peasant’s dog, and the peasants went
to the courtyard of the manor. ‘Give us enough to buy a vedro[30] of
liquor, and we’ll call it quits. Otherwise, we’ll go on strike at
once.’”
“Well, did he give the money?”
“Of course he didn’t! Gi-ive, indeed, brother!--There is a miller here.
He came straight out on the porch and said: ‘The wind is blowing from
the fields, gentlemen-nobles!’ Catch him napping, forsooth! The young
gentleman started to bully them: ‘What sort of a wind is that you’re
talking about?’ ‘Just a certain sort,’ says he. ‘I’ve propounded a
riddle to you; now you just think it over!’ That brought him to a dead
standstill, brother!”
All this was uttered in a careless sort of way, passed over lightly,
with intervening pauses, but accompanied by such a malignant smile
and such torturing of his consonants that Kuzma began to look more
attentively at the man whom he had thus casually encountered. In
appearance he resembled a fool. His hair was straight, cut in a round
crop, and long. His face was small, insignificant, of ancient Russian
type, like the holy pictures of the Suzdal school. His boots were huge,
his body lean and somehow wooden. His eyes, beneath large, sleepy lids,
were like those of a hawk, with a golden ring around the iris. When he
lowered his lids he was a lisping idiot; when he raised them one felt a
certain fear of him.
“Do you live in the garden?” asked Kuzma.
“Yes. Where else should I live?”
“And what’s your name?”
“My name? Akim. And who are you?”
“I wanted to lease the garden.”
“There, now--that is an idea!” And Akim, wagging his head scoffingly,
went on his way.
The wind blew with ever increasing vehemence, scattering showers
of rain from the brilliantly green trees; beyond the park, in some
low-lying region, the thunder rumbled dully, pale blue flashes of
aurora borealis lighted up the avenue, and nightingales were singing
everywhere about. It was utterly incomprehensible how they were able
so sedulously, in such complete disregard of surrounding conditions,
to warble, trill, and scatter their notes broadcast so sweetly and
vigorously beneath that heavy sky, veiled in leaden clouds, amid the
trees bending in the wind, as they perched in the dense, wet bushes.
But still more incomprehensible was it how the watchmen managed to pass
the night in such a gale, how they could sleep on damp straw beneath
the sloping roof of the rotten hut.
There were three watchmen. And all of them were sick men. One, young,
emaciated, sympathetic, formerly a baker by trade, but dismissed the
preceding autumn for taking part in a strike, was now a beggar. He
had not as yet lost the peasant look, and he complained of fever. The
second, also a beggar, but already middle-aged, had tuberculosis,
although he declared that there was nothing the matter with him except
that he felt “cold between his shoulders.” Akim was afflicted with
night-blindness--he could not see well in the half-light of twilight.
When Kuzma approached, the baker, pale and amiable of manner, was
squatting on his heels near the hut. With the sleeves of a woman’s
wadded dressing gown tucked up on his thin, weak arms, he was engaged
in washing millet in a wooden bowl. Consumptive Mitrofan, a man of
medium size, broad and dark complexioned, who resembled a native of
Dahomey, garbed entirely in wet rags and leg-wrappers which were worn
out and stiff as an old horse’s hoof, was standing beside the baker
and, with hunched-up shoulders, staring at the latter’s work with
brilliant brown eyes, strained wide open but devoid of all expression.
Akim had brought a bucket of water and was making a fire in a little
clay oven-niche opposite the hut; he was blowing the fire into life.
He entered the hut, selected the driest tufts of straw he could find,
and again approached the fire, which was now fragrantly smoking
beneath the iron kettle, muttering to himself the while, breathing
with a whistling sound, smiling in a mockingly mysterious way at the
bantering of his comrades, and occasionally bringing them up short
with a venomous and clever remark. Kuzma shut his eyes and listened
now to the conversation, now to the nightingales, as he sat on a wet
bench beside the hut, besprinkled with icy spatterings of rain whenever
the damp wind rushed through the avenue beneath the gloomy sky, which
quivered with pale flashes of lightning, while the thunder rumbled. He
felt a pain in his stomach, from hunger and tobacco. It seemed as if
the porridge would never be cooked, and he could not banish from his
mind the thought that perhaps he himself would be obliged to live just
such a wild beast’s life as that of these watchmen, and that ahead of
him lay nothing but old age, sickness, loneliness, and poverty. His
body ached, and the gusts of wind, the far-away monotonous grumbling of
the thunder, the nightingales, and the leisurely, carelessly malicious
lisping of Akim and his squeaking voice, all irritated him.
“You ought to buy yourself at least a belt, Akimushka,” said the baker
with affected simplicity, as he lighted a cigarette. He kept casting
glances at Kuzma, by way of inviting him to listen to Akim.
“Just you wait,” replied Akim in an absent-minded, scoffing tone, as
he poured the fluid porridge from the boiling kettle into a cup. “When
we’ve lived here with the proprietor through the summer, I’ll buy you
boots with a squeak in them.”
“‘With a skvvvveak’! Well, I’m not asking you to do anything of the
sort.”
“You’re wearing leg-wrappers now.” And Akim began anxiously to take a
test sip of the porridge from the spoon.
The baker was disconcerted, and heaved a sigh: “Why should the likes of
us wear boots?”
“Oh, stop that,” said Kuzma. “You had better tell me whether you have
this porridge day in and day out, for ever and ever, as I think you do.”
“Well, and what would you like--fish, and ham?” inquired Akim, without
turning round, as he licked the spoon. “That really wouldn’t be so bad:
a dram of vodka, about three pounds of sturgeon, a knuckle of ham, a
little glass of fruit cordial. But this isn’t porridge: it’s called
thin gruel. The porridge is for the appetizer snack.”
“But do you make cabbage soup, or any other sort of soup?”
“We have had that, brother--cabbage soup; and what soup it was! If you
were to spill it on the dog his hair would peel off!”
“Well, you might make a little soup.”
“But where would we get the potatoes? You can’t buy any from a peasant,
any more than from the devil, brother! You couldn’t wheedle even snow
out of a peasant in the middle of winter.”
Kuzma shook his head.
“Probably ’tis your illness that makes you so bitter! You ought to get
a little treatment--”
Akim, without replying, squatted down on his heels in front of the
fire. The fire had already died down; only a little heap of thin coals
glowed red under the kettle; the garden grew darker and darker, and
the blue aurora had already begun faintly to illuminate their faces, as
the gusts of wind inflated Akim’s shirt. Mitrofan was sitting beside
Kuzma, leaning on his stick; the baker sat on a stump under a linden
tree. On hearing Kuzma’s last words, he grew serious.
“This is the way I look at it,” he said submissively and sadly: “that
nothing can be otherwise than as the Lord decrees. If the Lord does not
grant health, then all the doctors cannot help. Akim, yonder, speaks
the truth: no one can die before his death-hour comes.”
“Doctors!” interposed Akim, staring at the coals and pronouncing the
word in a specially vicious way--“doktogga!” “Doctors, brother, have an
eye on their pockets. I’d let out his guts for him, for such a doctor,
so I would!”
“Not all of them are thinking of their pockets,” said Kuzma.
“I haven’t seen all of them.”
“Well, then, don’t chatter nonsense about what you haven’t seen,” said
Mitrofan severely, and turned to the baker: “Yes, and you’re a nice
one, too: making yourself out a hopeless beggar! Perchance, if you
didn’t wallow round on the ground, dog-fashion, you wouldn’t have that
acute pain.”
“Why, you see, I--” the baker began.
But at this point Akim’s scoffing composure deserted him of a sudden.
And, rolling his stupid hawk-like eyes, he abruptly leaped to his feet
and began to yell, with the irascibility of an idiot: “What? So I’m
chattering nonsense, am I? Have you been in the hospital? Have you? And
I have been there! I spent seven days there--and did he give me any
white-bread rolls, that doctor of yours? Did he?”
“Yes, you’re a fool,” interposed Mitrofan: “white rolls are not given
to every sick person: it depends on their disease.”
“Ah! It depends on their disease! Well, let him go burst with his
disease, devil take him!” shouted Akim.
And, casting furious glances about him, he flung his spoon into the
“thin gruel” and strode off into the hut.
X
There, breathing with his whistling breath, he lighted the lamp, and
the hut assumed a cosy air. Then he fished out spoons from some niche
close under the roof, threw them on the table, and shouted: “Bring
on that porridge, can’t you?” The baker rose and stepped over to the
kettle. “Pray be our guest,” he said, as he passed Kuzma. But Kuzma
found it unpleasant to eat with Akim. He asked for a bit of bread,
salted it heavily, and, chewing it with delight, returned to his seat
on the bench. It had become completely dark. The pale blue light
illuminated the trees more and more extensively, swiftly, and clearly,
as if blown into life by the wind, and at each flash of the aurora the
foliage, in its death-like green, became for a moment as distinctly
visible as in the daytime; then everything was again inundated
by blackness as of the tomb. The nightingales had ceased their
song--only one, directly above the hut, continued to warble sweetly
and powerfully. In the hut, around the lamp, a peaceably ironical
conversation was flowing on once more. “They did not even ask who I am,
whence I come,” said Kuzma to himself. “What a people, may the devil
take it.” And he shouted, jestingly, into the hut: “Akim! You haven’t
even asked who I am, and whence I come.”
“And why should I want to know?” replied Akim indifferently.
“Well, I’m going to ask him about something else,” said the baker’s
voice--“how much land he expects to receive from the Duma. What think
you, Akimushka? Hey?”
“I’m no clever one at interpreting writing,” said Akim. “You can see it
better from the dung-heap.”
And the baker must have been disconcerted once more: silence ensued,
for a minute.
“He is referring to us, the likes of himself,” remarked Mitrofan. “I
happened to mention that in Rostoff the poor folks--the proletariat,
that is to say--save themselves in winter time in the manure--”
“They go outside the town,” cut in Akim cheerfully, “and--into the
manure with them! They burrow in exactly like the pigs--and there’s no
harm done.”
“Fool!” Mitrofan snapped him up, and so sternly that Kuzma turned
round. “What are you gobbling about? You stupid fool, you rickety
bandy-legs! When poverty overtakes you, you’ll burrow too.”
Akim, dropping his spoon, gazed sleepily at him and, with the same
sudden irascibility which he had recently exhibited, opened wide his
empty hawk-like eyes and yelled furiously: “A--ah! Poverty! Did you
want to work at so much the hour?”
“Of course!” angrily shouted Mitrofan, inflating his Dahomey-like
nostrils and staring point-blank at Akim with blazing eyes. “Twenty
hours for twenty kopeks?”
“A--ah! But you wanted a ruble an hour? You’re a greedy one, devil take
you!”
But the wrangle subsided as quickly as it had flared up. A minute later
Mitrofan was talking quietly and scalding himself with the porridge:
“As if he weren’t greedy himself! Why, he, that blind devil, would
strangle himself in the sanctuary for the sake of a kopek. If you’ll
believe it, he sold his wife for fifteen kopeks! God is my witness that
I am not jesting. Off yonder in our village of Lipetzk there’s a little
old man, Pankoff by name, who also used to work as gardener--well, and
now he has retired and is very fond of that sort of affair.”
“Why, doesn’t Akim come from over Lipetzk way?” interrupted Kuzma.
“From Studenko, from the village,” said Akim indifferently, exactly as
if they were not discussing him at all.
“Right, right,” Mitrofan confirmed his statement.
“A peasant from the roots up. He lives with his brother, controls the
land and the farmyard in common with him, but nevertheless somewhat in
the position of a fool; and, of course, his wife has already run away
from him. But we learned the reason why she ran away, from the man
himself: he made a bargain with Pankoff, for fifteen kopeks, to admit
him of a night, instead of himself, into the chamber--and he did it.”
Akim remained silent, tapping the table with his spoon and staring at
the lamp. He had already eaten his fill, wiped his mouth, and was now
engaged in thinking over something.
“Jabbering is not working, young man,” he said at last. “And what if
I did admit him: my wife is withering, isn’t she?” And as he listened
to hear what they would say to that, he bared his teeth in a grin,
elevated his eyebrows, and his tiny face, which was like a Suzdal holy
picture, assumed a joyously sad expression and became covered with
large wooden wrinkles. “I’d like to get that fellow with a gun!” he
said with a specially strong squeak and twisting of his consonants.
“Wouldn’t he go head over heels!”
“Of whom are you speaking?” inquired Kuzma.
“Why, that nightingale--”
Kuzma set his teeth and, after reflection, said: “Well, you are a
putrid peasant. A wild beast.”
“Well, and who cares for what you think?” retorted Akim. And, giving
vent to a hiccough, he rose to his feet. “Well, what’s the use of
burning the lamp for nothing?”
Mitrofan began to roll a cigarette. The baker gathered up the spoons.
Crawling from under the table, he turned his back on the lamp and,
hurriedly crossing himself thrice, with a flourish he bent low to the
holy picture, in the direction of the dark corner of the hut, shook
back his straight hair, which resembled bast, and, raising his face,
murmured a prayer. His large shadow fell upon some chests made of
boards and broke across them, while he himself seemed to Kuzma even
smaller than a short time previously. Kuzma remembered how he had once
been called for conscription. Five hundred men had been summoned, only
one hundred and twenty being wanted. He had drawn Number 492: yet he
had almost been obliged to undress, so many of those naked youths--they
resembled sparrows, with arms as thin as whiplashes and huge, solid
bellies--had been rejected. Akim hastily crossed himself once more,
and once more made a flourishing reverence--and Kuzma gazed at him
with a feeling akin to hatred. There was Akim praying--but just try
asking him whether he believed in God! His hawk eyes would leap out
of their sockets! Evidently he had the idea that no one in all the
world believed as he did. He was convinced to the very bottom of his
soul that, in order to please God and avoid the condemnation of men,
it was necessary to comply in the strictest possible manner with even
the smallest fraction of what was appointed in regard to the Church,
fasts, feasts, good deeds; that for the salvation of his soul--not out
of good feeling, naturally!--those acts must be fulfilled punctually;
candles must be placed before the holy pictures, he must eat fish,
and oil instead of butter; and on feast-days he must celebrate, and
conciliate the priest with patties and chickens. And every one was
firmly convinced that Akim was a profound believer, although Akim
himself had never in the whole course of his life wondered what his God
was actually like, just as he had never pondered upon either heaven or
earth, birth or death. Why should he think? His thinking had been done
for him! He knew all the answers--calm answers, prepared a thousand
years ago. Didn’t he know that in heaven were paradise, angels, the
saints; in hell, devils and sinners; on earth, men who cultivate the
earth, and build houses, and trade, and accumulate money, and marry,
and live for their pleasure? Not all of them, certainly--far from
all--but what was to be done about that? All the same, people ought to
strive toward that--and when the right time arrived, Akim, too, would
show of what he was capable! So said Kuzma to himself, recalling, as
always, with amazement and fear, the massacres. Well, and the mystery
of birth and death--that did not concern him. After one was born, it
was necessary to be baptized, and to live according to our own manner,
the Russian manner, not after the manner of dogs--that is, like Turks
and Frenchmen. When one died, it was indispensable to receive the
Sacrament--otherwise one could not escape hell--and the best of all
was to receive the Holy Unction with Oil.[31] That was all. There
are also on the earth insects, flowers, birds, animals. But Akim did
not condescend to think about flowers and insects--he simply crushed
them. Among plants he noticed only those which bore fruit or berries
or furnished food. Birds fly, sing--and ’tis a most gallant thing to
shoot for food those which are fit for such use, but those which are
not fit should be shot for amusement. All wild beasts, to the very last
one, must be exterminated, but procedure with regard to animals varies:
one’s own should be kept in good condition, that they may be of service
to the owner, but old animals and animals which belong to other people
should have their eyes lashed out with a whip, and their legs should be
broken.
“And what does he care,” thought Kuzma sadly, “what is it to him,
seeing that he has no establishment of his own, that it rains or hails,
or that the thunder rumbles for a week, that the lightnings flash; that
perchance at this very moment they are lighting up a dead, blue little
face in the dark fly-filled hut where that blind girl lies sleeping?”
It seemed as if he had set out from the town a year ago; as if, now, he
should never be able to drag himself back to it. His wet cap weighed
heavily; his cold feet ached, cramped in his muddy boots. In that
one day his face had become weather-beaten and burned. His body had
been lamed by the springless cart, by discomfort, by the longing for
rest. But sleep--no, one could not get to sleep yet. Rising from the
bench, Kuzma went out against the damp gale, to the gate which led
into the fields, to the waste spaces of the long-abandoned cemetery.
A faint light from the hut fell upon the mud; but as soon as Kuzma had
taken his departure, Akim blew out the lamp, the light vanished, and
night immediately closed in. The bluish lightning flashed out still
more vividly and unexpectedly, laid bare the whole sky, the extreme
recesses of the orchard to the most distant apple trees, where stood
the bath-house, and suddenly inundated everything with such blackness
that one’s head swam. And once more, somewhere low down, the dull,
far-away thunder began to rumble; and from behind the rustling of the
trees and the droning of the rain came the abrupt whining, barking, and
snarling of the dogs, feasting outside the orchard on a cow which had
died. After standing still for a while, until he made out the dim light
which filtered under the gate, Kuzma emerged into the road which ran
past the earth wall, past rustling ancient lindens and maple trees, and
began to stroll slowly to and fro. The rain began to patter down once
more on his cap and his hands. But he wanted to think out what he had
begun. Suddenly the black darkness was again deeply rent; the raindrops
glistened; and on the waste land, in a corpse-like blue light, the
figure of a dripping, thin-necked horse stood out in sharp lines. A
field of oats, of a pallid, metallic green hue, flashed into momentary
sight beyond the waste land, against an inky black background; and the
horse raised his head. Dread overpowered Kuzma. The horse was promptly
swallowed up in the darkness. But--to whom did he belong? why was he
not hobbled? why was he thus roaming about without oversight? And
Kuzma turned back toward the gate. In the ditch alongside the earthen
wall, among the dock-weeds and nettles, some one was half growling,
half snoring. Stumbling along with his hands outstretched, as if he
were a blind man, Kuzma approached the ditch.
“Who’s there?” he shouted.
But the snore was that of a person dead drunk, powerful and choking.
Everything else round about was wrapped in profound slumber. The
lightning flashes had ceased; the trees, invisible in the darkness,
rustled dully and gloomily under the increasing downpour. And when,
at last, Kuzma had found his way to the bath-house by the sense of
feeling alone, the rain was pouring down upon the earth with such
force that he began to be assailed, as he had been in his childhood,
by terrible thoughts about the Flood. He struck a match, and beheld a
broad sleeping-ledge near the tiny window. Rolling up his overcoat, he
threw it on the head end. In the darkness he crawled upon the ledge
and with a deep sigh stretched himself out on it; he lay, after the
fashion of old people, on his back, and shut his weary eyes. Great God,
what a stupid and toilsome journey! And how had he chanced to come
hither? In the manor-house also darkness now reigned, and the flashes
of lightning were fleetingly, stealthily reflected in the mirrors. In
the hut, beneath the heavy downpour of the rain, Akim was sleeping.
Here in this bath-house devils had frequently been seen, as a matter
of course: did Akim possess a proper faith in devils? No. People had
so believed a thousand years ago, and Akim had merely accepted his
heritage mechanically. But, even though he did not believe, he could
nevertheless narrate how, once on a time, his deceased grandfather had
gone to the grain crib for some bran and had found the devil, as shaggy
as a dog, sitting, his legs twisted into a knot, on one of the girders.
Crooking one knee, Kuzma laid his wrist on his forehead and began to
doze, sighing and grieving the while.