“Well, that was a fine tale!” Kuzma meditated within himself, for a
long time after that evening. And the weather turned bad, to boot. He
did not feel like writing; his melancholy increased in strength. The
poverty and lack of practical common sense on the part of Syery and
Deniska amazed him: the village was rotting! The beastly tale of the
Bride’s experience in the orchard, the death of Rodka, stupefied him.
The life of Tikhon Ilitch astonished him. And it certainly took a good
deal to astonish him! Didn’t he know his country, his people? With
grief and anger he poured out his heart to Tikhon Ilitch, exhorted him,
stung him. But if Tikhon Ilitch had only known with what joy Kuzma
rushed to the window when he espied on the porch his overcoat, his
peaked cap, and his grey beard! How afraid he was lest his brother
would not spend the night with him, how he tried to detain him as long
as possible, dragged him into discussions, reminiscences! Kuzma found
the situation tiresome late in the autumn; ugh, how boresome! The
sole joy he had was when some one presented himself with a petition.
Gololoby from Baskova came several times--a peasant with a perfectly
bald head and a huge cap--to write a complaint against his daughter’s
father-in-law for breaking his collar-bone. The widow Butylotchka came
from the promontory to have a letter written to her son; and she was a
mass of rags, wet through and icy cold with the rain. She was tearful
when she began to dictate.
“Town of Serpukhoff, at the Nobility Bath-Zheltukhin house--”
Here she burst out weeping.
“Well, what next?” asked Kuzma, sorrowfully gazing sidewise at
Butylotchka, after the fashion of old people, over his eyeglasses.
“Well, I’ve written that. What more?”
“What more?” inquired Butylotchka in a whisper, and, making an effort
to control her voice, she went on: “Write further, my dear, in your
very best style: To be given to Mikhail Nazarytch Khlusoff--into his
own hands, you understand--” Then she began--now with pauses, now
entirely without: “A letter to our dear and beloved son, Misha, why
have you forgotten us, Misha, we haven’t had a word from you. You know
yourself that we are living in lodgings, and now they are turning us
out, and where are we to go now. Our dear little son Misha, we beg you,
for the Lord God’s sake, that you will come home as fast as you can--”
And once more, through her tears, in a whisper: “Then you and we will
dig out an earthen hut, and so we shall be in a home of our own....”
The storms and icy downpours of rain, the days that seemed all
twilight, the mud at the manor-farm, all besprinkled with the fine
yellow foliage of the acacias, the boundless ploughed fields and
fields of winter grain round about Durnovka, and the dark clouds which
endlessly hung over them--all began once more to oppress him with a
fierce hatred for this accursed country where there were eight months
of snow-storms and four of rain-storms; where for the commonest needs
of nature one was forced to go to the barn or the cherry-shed. When the
bad weather set in it became necessary to board up the drawing-room
closely and move into the hall, so as to sleep all winter long there,
and dine, and smoke, and pass the long evenings by the light of a dim
kitchen lamp, pacing from corner to corner, muffled up in overcoat and
cap, which barely protected one from the cold and the wind that blew in
through the crevices. Sometimes it happened that they forgot to renew
the supply of kerosene, and Kuzma passed the twilight hours wholly
without a light; and at times, of an evening, he lighted a candle
end merely for the purpose of supping off potato soup and warm wheat
groats, which the Bride served in silence and with a stern countenance.
“Whither can I go?” Kuzma said to himself, once in a while.
There were only three neighbours in the immediate vicinity: old
Princess Shakova, who did not receive even the Marshal of Nobility,
because she regarded him as ill-bred; the retired gendarme Zakrzhevsky,
a hæmorrhoidally vicious and self-conceitedly stupid man who would not
have permitted Kuzma to cross his threshold; and, finally, a member of
the gentry, Basoff, a petty landed proprietor who lived in a peasant
cottage, had married the dissipated widow of a soldier, and could talk
of nothing but horse-collars and cattle. Father Petr, the priest from
Kolodeza, of which Durnovka was a parish, called once upon Kuzma. But
neither the one nor the other cared to continue the acquaintance.
Kuzma entertained the priest with nothing stronger than tea--and the
priest laughed harshly and awkwardly when he saw the samovar on the
table. “A samovar-man! Capital! You, I see, are no match for your good
brother--you’re not lavish in your entertainment!” Kuzma announced
frankly that he never went to church, out of conviction. The priest
began to shout with laughter in more amazement than ever, and still
more harshly and loudly: “A--ah! Those nice little new ideas! Capital!
And it’s cheaper, too!” Laughter was not in the least becoming to
him: it was as if some one else were laughing for that tall, lean man
with the big cheek-bones and coarse black hair, the furtive greedy
eyes--anxiously absent-minded eyes, for ever meditating something
offensive and tactlessly free of manner. “But at night, surely, at
night you cross yourself, nevertheless--you get scared?” he said,
loudly and hurriedly, as he put on his coat and overshoes in the
ante-room, amazing Kuzma by his queries concerning the management of
the farm, and suddenly beginning to address him as “thou.”
“Yes, I make the sign of the cross,” admitted Kuzma, with a melancholy
smile. “But, you know, fear is not faith, and I don’t cross myself to
your God.”
Kuzma did not go often to visit his brother. And the latter came to him
only when he was perturbed over something. Altogether, the loneliness
was so desperate that at times Kuzma called himself Dreyfus on Devil’s
Island. He compared himself to Syery. Ah, and he too, like Syery, was
poor, weak of will, forced out of his proper course, and all his life
had been waiting for some happy days, for work.
An unpleasant memory lingered of drunken Syery’s bravery, his story,
his boastfulness. But, ordinarily, Syery was not like that, even when
he was intoxicated: he was merely loquacious, troubled by something,
and merry in a timid way. Moreover, he did not have an opportunity
to get drunk more than five times in the course of a year. He was
not eager for liquor--not at all as he was for tobacco. For the sake
of tobacco he was ready to endure any and all humiliations; ready
to sit for hours by the side of a man who was smoking, agree with
everything he said, flatter him, do anything in order that he might,
after awaiting a favourable moment, say as if quite accidentally:
“Pray, gossip, give me a filling for my pipe.” He was passionately
fond, also, of cards, long conversations, evening reunions in the
cottages--in those cottages where there were large families, where it
was warm, and where a light was burning; where itinerant wool-carders
prepared the wool, and roving tailors made winter coats. But people
were not, as yet, assembling thus in the cottages, and Syery sat at
home. After Kuzma had been to see him a few times he felt that it was
not right to bear malice toward Syery or to make fun of him. Syery
lived on what was earned by day-labour during the working season--by
his wife, a peaceable, silent, rather crack-brained woman--and on what
he managed to beg from Deniska (who now and then made his appearance
in Durnovka with his valise, white bread, and sausage, of which he
was inordinately fond, cursing the Tsar and the gentry without the
slightest restraint). At the first snowfall Syery went away somewhere
and was gone for a week. He returned home in a gloomy mood.
“Have you been at Rusanoff’s again?” the neighbours inquired.
“Yes, I have,” replied Syery.
“Why?”
“He was urging me to hire with him.”
“Just so. You did not consent?”
“More stupid than he I have never been and never shall be, for ever and
a day. You don’t suppose I signed the contract with my own blood?”
And Syery sat there on the bench for a long time, without removing
his cap. And the mere sight of his cottage in the twilight made one
sad at heart. In the twilight, beyond the broad snow-covered ravine,
Durnovka lay in melancholy blackness, with its grain-ricks and bushes
in the back yards. But when darkness fully descended, and the little
lights began to twinkle, it seemed as if all were peaceful and cosy
in the cottages. Syery’s hut alone remained disagreeably black. It
was dull, dead. Kuzma knew all about it: if you entered its half-open
ante-room, you felt almost as if you were on the threshold of some
wild beast’s lair. There was an odour of snow; through the holes in
the roof the gloomy sky was visible; the wind rustled the manure and
the dry branches which had been tossed at haphazard upon the rafters;
if, by feeling about, you found the slanting wall and opened door, you
would encounter cold, darkness, a frost-covered little window barely
discernible through the gloom. No one was to be seen, but one could
guess how things were: the master of the house was sitting on the
bench--his pipe glowed with a tiny fire; the housewife was quietly
rocking a squeaking cradle in which a pale child with the rickets, and
drowsy with hunger, was jolting about. The brood of small children
had taken refuge on top of the oven, which was barely warm, and were
vivaciously narrating something to one another in a whisper. In the
rotten straw beneath the sleeping-board, the goat and the suckling pig,
which were great chums, were rustling about. It was necessary to bend
down terribly, in order to avoid knocking one’s head on the ceiling.
Then, too, you could not turn about without taking precautions: the
distance between the threshold and the opposite wall was not more than
five paces.
“Who’s there?” a low voice resounded from the darkness.
“I.”
“It can’t be Kuzma Ilitch, can it?”
“’Tis he himself.”
Syery moves aside, makes room on the bench. Kuzma sits down and lights
his pipe. Oppressed by the darkness, Syery is simple, sad, confesses to
his weaknesses. Now and then his voice quivers.