Tikhon Ilitch was at home. In a Russian shirt of cotton print, huge and
powerful, swarthy of countenance, with white beard and grey frowning
brows, he was sitting with the samovar and brewing himself some tea.
“Ah! how are you, brother?” he exclaimed in welcome, but with his brows
still contracted. “So you have crawled out through God’s snow? Look
out: isn’t it rather early?”
“I was so deadly bored, brother,” replied Kuzma, as they kissed each
other.
“Well, if you were bored, come and warm yourself and we’ll have a
chat....”
After questioning each other as to whether there were any news, they
began in silence to drink tea, after which they started to smoke.
“You are growing very thin, dear brother!” remarked Tikhon Ilitch as he
inhaled his smoke and scrutinized Kuzma with a sidelong glance.
“One does get thin,” replied Kuzma quietly. “Don’t you read the
newspapers?”
Tikhon Ilitch smiled. “That nonsense? No, God preserve me.”
“If you only knew how many executions there are!”
“Executions? That’s all right. Haven’t you heard what happened near
Eletz? At the farm of the Bykoff brothers? Probably you remember--those
fellows who can’t pronounce their letters right? Well, those Bykoffs
were sitting, just as you and I are sitting together now, playing
checkers one evening. Suddenly--what was it? There was a stamping on
the porch and a shout of ‘Open the door!’ Well, brother, and before
those Bykoffs had time to blink an eye, in rolls their labourer, a
peasant after the pattern of Syery, and behind him two scalawags of
some breed or other--hooligan adventurers, in a word. And all of them
armed with crowbars. They brandished their crowbars and began to yell:
‘Put up your hands, curse your mother’s memory!’ Of course, the Bykoffs
were thoroughly scared--scared to death--and they leaped to their
feet and shouted: ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ And their nice little
peasant yells, ‘Put ’em oop, put ’em oop!’” Here Tikhon Ilitch smiled,
became thoughtful, and stopped talking.
“Well, tell the rest of it,” said Kuzma.
“There’s nothing more to tell. They stuck up their hands, as a matter
of course, and asked: ‘What do you want?’ ‘Give us some ham! Where are
your keys?’ ‘Damn you! As if you didn’t know! There they are yonder, on
the door lintel, hanging on the nail.’”
“And they said that with their hands raised?” interrupted Kuzma.
“Of course they had their hands raised. And those men are going to pay
heavily for those upraised hands! They’ll be hanged, naturally. They
are already in jail, the dear creatures--”
“Are they going to hang them on account of the ham?”
“No! for the fun of it, Lord forgive me for my sin,” retorted Tikhon
Ilitch, half angrily, half in jest. “For the love of God, do stop
talking balderdash and trying to pretend you’re a Balashkin! ’Tis time
to drop that.”
Kuzma pulled at his grey beard. His haggard, emaciated face, his
mournful eyes, his left brow, which slanted upward, all were reflected
in the mirror, and as he looked at himself he silently assented.
“Talking balderdash? Truly it is time--I ought to have dropped that
long ago....”
Then Tikhon Ilitch turned the conversation to business. Evidently he
had been thinking things over a little while previously, during the
story, merely because something far more important than executions had
occurred to him--a bit of business.
“Here now, I’ve already told Deniska that he is to finish off that
music as soon as possible,” he began firmly, clearly, and sternly,
sifting tea into the teapot from his fist. “And I beg you, brother,
to take a hand in it also--in that music. It is awkward for me, you
understand. And after it is over, you can move over here. ’Twill be
comfortable, brother! Once we have made up our mind to change our
entire investment, down to the last scrap, there’s no sense in your
stopping on there with nothing to do. It only doubles the expense. And
once we have removed elsewhere, why, get into harness alongside me.
Once we have shifted the burden from our shoulders, we’ll go off to the
town, God willing, to amass grain, and we’ll get into real business.
And then we’ll never come back to this hole of a place again. We’ll
shake the dust of it from our feet, and it may go to hell for all I
care. I don’t propose to rot in it! Bear in mind,” he said, contracting
his brows in a frown, stretching out his arms, and clenching his
fists, “you can’t wrest things out of my grasp yet a while. ’Tis too
early for me to take to lying on top of the oven! I’m still capable of
ripping the horns off the devil himself!”
Kuzma listened, staring almost in terror at his fixed, fairly crazed
eyes, at his mouth set awry, at his words distinctly uttered in a
rapacious sort of way--listened and held his peace. Later on he
inquired: “Brother, tell me, for Christ’s sake, what profit to you is
there in this marriage? I don’t understand; God is my witness, I don’t
understand it. I can’t bear even the sight of that Deniska of yours.
That’s a new type--new Russia will be worse than all the old types.
Don’t you make any mistake, thinking he is bashful and sentimental and
only pretends to be a fool: he’s an extremely cynical beast. People are
saying of me that I am living with the Bride--”
“Well, you don’t know moderation in anything,” interrupted Tikhon
Ilitch with a frown. “You’re for ever hammering away at the same thing:
‘an unhappy nation, an unhappy nation!’ And now--you call them brutes!”
“Yes, I do hammer at that idea, and I shall go on hammering at it!”
Kuzma broke in hotly. “But I’ve lost my wits completely! Nowadays I
don’t understand at all: whether it is an unhappy nation, or-- Come
now, listen to me. You know you hate that man yourself, that Deniska!
You both hate each other! He never speaks of you except to call you
a ‘bloodsucker who has gnawed himself into the very vitals of the
people,’ and here you are calling _him_ a bloodsucker! He is boasting
insolently about the village that now he is the equal of the king!”
“Well, I know that,” Tikhon Ilitch again interrupted.
“But do you know what he is saying about the Bride?” went on Kuzma, not
listening to him. “She’s handsome--she has, you know, such a white,
delicate complexion--but he, the stupid animal--do you know what he
is saying about her? ‘She’s all enameled, the trollop!’ And, by this
time, you must understand one thing: he certainly will not live in
the village. You couldn’t keep that vagabond in the country now with
a lasso. What sort of a farmer and what sort of a family man do you
suppose he’ll be? Yesterday, I heard, he was roaming about the village
and singing in a lewd voice: ‘She’s beautiful as an angel from heaven,
as sly as a damon from hell.’”
“I know it!” yelled Tikhon Ilitch. “He won’t live in the country--not
for any consideration on earth, he won’t! Well, and devil take him!
And as for his being no sort of a farmer, you and I are nice farmers
ourselves, ain’t we? I remember how I was talking to you about
business--in the eating-house, do you remember?--and all the while you
were listening to that quail. Well, go on; what comes next?”
“What do you mean? What has the quail to do with it?” inquired Kuzma.
Tikhon Ilitch began to drum on the table with his fingers and said
sternly, uttering each word with great distinctness: “Bear in mind: if
you grind water, you’ll be left with just water as the result. My word
is sacred to ages of ages. Once I have said I’ll do a thing--I’ll do
it. I won’t set a candle before the holy picture in atonement for my
sin, but I’ll do a good deed instead. Although I may give only a mite,
the Lord will remember me for that mite.”
Kuzma sprang from his seat. “The Lord, the Lord!” he cried, in a
falsetto tone. “What has the Lord to do with that affair of yours? What
can the Lord mean to Deniska, to Akimka, to Menshoff, to Syery, to you,
or to me?”
“Eh?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch severely. “What Akimka is that you’re
talking about?”
“When I lay there dying,” pursued Kuzma, paying no heed to him, “did
I think very much about Him? I thought just one thing: ‘I don’t know
anything about Him, and I don’t know how to think’!” shouted Kuzma.
“I’m an ignorant man!”
And glancing about him with roving, suffering eyes, as he buttoned and
unbuttoned his coat, he strode across the room and halted directly in
front of Tikhon Ilitch.
“Remember this, brother,” he said, his cheek-bones reddening. “Remember
this: your life and mine are finished. And no candles on earth will
save us. Do you hear? We are--Durnovka folk. We’re neither candle for
God nor oven-fork for the devil.” And, unable to find words in his
agitation, he fell silent.
But Tikhon Ilitch had again thought of something, and suddenly
assented: “Correct. ’Tis a good-for-nothing people! Just you
consider--” And, animated, carried away by his new idea:
“Just you consider: they’ve been tilling the soil for a whole thousand
years--what am I saying? for longer than that!--but how to till the
soil properly not a soul of them understands! They don’t know how to
do their one and only business! They don’t know the proper time to
begin field work! Nor when to sow, nor when to reap! ‘As the people
always have done, so will we always do’--that’s the whole story. Note
that!” Contracting his brows, he shouted sternly, as Kuzma had recently
shouted at him. “‘As the people always have done, so will we always
do!’ Not a single peasant woman knows how to bake bread--the top crust
is burned as black as the devil and falls off, and underneath that
crust--there’s nothing but sour water!”
Kuzma was dumbfounded. His thoughts were reduced to a jumble. “He
has lost his senses!” he said to himself, with uncomprehending eyes
watching his brother, who was lighting the lamp.
But Tikhon Ilitch, giving him no time to recover himself, continued
wrathfully: “The people! Lewd, lazy, liars, and so shameless that not
one of them believes another! Note this,” he roared, not perceiving
that the lighted wick was smoking and the soot billowing up almost to
the ceiling. “’Tis not us they refuse to trust, but one another! And
they are all like that--every one of them!” he shouted in a tearful
voice, as he jammed the chimney on the lamp with a crash.
The outdoor light was beginning to filter blue through the windows.
New, fresh snow was fluttering down on the pools of water and the
snowdrifts. Kuzma gazed at it and held his peace. The conversation
had taken such an unexpected turn that even Kuzma’s eagerness had
vanished. Not knowing what to say, unable to bring himself to look at
his brother’s furious eyes, he began to roll himself a cigarette.
“He has gone crazy!” he said to himself despairingly. “Well, so be it!
It makes no difference! Nothing--nothing makes any difference. Enough!”
He began to smoke, and Tikhon Ilitch also began to calm down. He seated
himself and, staring at the lamp, muttered softly: “You were talking
about ‘Deniska.’ Have you heard what Makar Ivanovitch, that pilgrim
fellow, has been up to? He and that friend of his caught a peasant
woman on the road and dragged her to the sentry-box at Kliutchiki, and
kept her there for four days, visiting her in turn. Well, and now they
are in jail--”
“Tikhon Ilitch,” said Kuzma amiably, “why do you talk nonsense? What’s
the object? You must be feeling ill. You keep jumping from one thing to
another; now you assert one thing, a minute later you assert something
different. Are you drinking too much, perhaps?”
Tikhon Ilitch remained silent for a while. He merely waved his hand,
and tears trembled in his eyes, which were riveted on the flame of the
lamp.
“Are you drinking?” repeated Kuzma quietly.
“Yes, I am,” quietly replied Tikhon Ilitch. “And ’tis enough to make
any one take to drink! Has it been easy for me to acquire this golden
cage, think you? Do you imagine that it has been easy for me to live
like a chained hound all my life, and with my old woman into the
bargain? I have never shown any pity to any one, brother. Well, and has
any one shown the least pity on me? Do you think I don’t know how I am
hated? Do you think they wouldn’t have murdered me in some fashion if
those peasants had once got the breeching under their tail in proper
style? If they had had luck in that revolution? Wait a bit, wait--
There’ll be something doing; it’s coming! We have cut their throats!”
“And they are to be hanged--on account of a little ham?” asked Kuzma.
“Well, as for the hanging,” replied Tikhon Ilitch in agonized tones,
“why, I just said the first thing that came to my tongue--”
“But they certainly will hang them!”
“Well--and that’s no affair of ours. They must answer for that to the
Most High.” And, frowning, he fell into thought and closed his eyes.
“Ah!” he said contritely, with a profound sigh. “Ah, my dear brother!
Soon, very soon, we also must appear before His throne for judgment!
I read the Trebnik[35] of an evening, and I weep and I wail over that
same book. I am greatly amazed; how was it possible to invent such
sweet words? But here, wait a minute--”
And he rose hastily, drew from behind the mirror a thick book in
ecclesiastical binding, with trembling hands donned his spectacles, and
with tears in his voice began to read, hurriedly, as if he feared to be
interrupted.
“‘I weep and I wail when I think upon death, and behold our beauty,
fashioned after the image of God, lying in the tomb disfigured,
dishonoured, bereft of form....
“‘Of a truth, all things are vanity, and life is but a shadow and
a dream. For in vain doth every one who is born of earth disquiet
himself, as saith the Scriptures: when we have acquired the world, then
do we take up our abode in the grave, where kings and beggars lie down
together....’
“‘Kings and beggars!’” repeated Tikhon Ilitch with ecstatic melancholy,
and shook his head. “Life is over, dear brother! I had, you understand,
a dumb cook; I gave her, the stupid thing, a kerchief from foreign
parts; and what does she do but _take and wear it completely to rags,
wrong side out_! Do you understand? Out of stupidity and greed. She
begrudged wearing it right side out on ordinary days--and when a
feast-day came along nothing was left of it but rags. And that’s
exactly the way it is with me and with my life. ’Tis truly so!”
On returning to Durnovka Kuzma was conscious of only one feeling--a
certain dull agony. And all the last days of his stay at Durnovka were
passed in that dull agony.