night was like every other night. Except the birds and the wild beasts,
not one soul appeared near the monastery. The nearest human habitation
was far away, and to reach it from the monastery, or to reach the
monastery from it, meant a journey of over seventy miles across the
desert. Only men who despised life, who had renounced it, and who came
to the monastery as to the grave, ventured to cross the desert.
What was the amazement of the monks, therefore, when one night there
knocked at their gate a man who turned out to be from the town, and the
most ordinary sinner who loved life. Before saying his prayers and
asking for the Father Superior's blessing, this man asked for wine and
food. To the question how he had come from the town into the desert, he
answered by a long story of hunting; he had gone out hunting, had drunk
too much, and lost his way. To the suggestion that he should enter the
monastery and save his soul, he replied with a smile: "I am not a fit
companion for you!"
When he had eaten and drunk he looked at the monks who were serving him,
shook his head reproachfully, and said:
"You don't do anything, you monks. You are good for nothing but eating
and drinking. Is that the way to save one's soul? Only think, while you
sit here in peace, eat and drink and dream of beatitude, your neighbours
are perishing and going to hell. You should see what is going on in the
town! Some are dying of hunger, others, not knowing what to do with
their gold, sink into profligacy and perish like flies stuck in honey.
There is no faith, no truth in men. Whose task is it to save them? Whose
work is it to preach to them? It is not for me, drunk from morning till
night as I am. Can a meek spirit, a loving heart, and faith in God have
been given you for you to sit here within four walls doing nothing?"
The townsman's drunken words were insolent and unseemly, but they had a
strange effect upon the Father Superior. The old man exchanged glances
with his monks, turned pale, and said:
"My brothers, he speaks the truth, you know. Indeed, poor people in
their weakness and lack of understanding are perishing in vice and
infidelity, while we do not move, as though it did not concern us. Why
should I not go and remind them of the Christ whom they have forgotten?"
The townsman's words had carried the old man away. The next day he took
his staff, said farewell to the brotherhood, and set off for the town.
And the monks were left without music, and without his speeches and
verses. They spent a month drearily, then a second, but the old man did
not come back. At last after three months had passed the familiar tap of
his staff was heard. The monks flew to meet him and showered questions
upon him, but instead of being delighted to see them he wept bitterly
and did not utter a word. The monks noticed that he looked greatly aged
and had grown thinner; his face looked exhausted and wore an expression
of profound sadness, and when he wept he had the air of a man who has
been outraged.
The monks fell to weeping too, and began with sympathy asking him why he
was weeping, why his face was so gloomy, but he locked himself in his
cell without uttering a word. For seven days he sat in his cell, eating
and drinking nothing, weeping and not playing on his organ. To knocking
at his door and to the entreaties of the monks to come out and share his
grief with them he replied with unbroken silence.
At last he came out. Gathering all the monks around him, with a tear-
stained face and with an expression of grief and indignation, he began
telling them of what had befallen him during those three months. His
voice was calm and his eyes were smiling while he described his journey
from the monastery to the town. On the road, he told them, the birds
sang to him, the brooks gurgled, and sweet youthful hopes agitated his
soul; he marched on and felt like a soldier going to battle and
confident of victory; he walked on dreaming, and composed poems and
hymns, and reached the end of his journey without noticing it.
But his voice quivered, his eyes flashed, and he was full of wrath when
he came to speak of the town and of the men in it. Never in his life had
he seen or even dared to imagine what he met with when he went into the
town. Only then for the first time in his life, in his old age, he saw
and understood how powerful was the devil, how fair was evil and how
weak and faint-hearted and worthless were men. By an unhappy chance the
first dwelling he entered was the abode of vice. Some fifty men in
possession of much money were eating and drinking wine beyond measure.
Intoxicated by the wine, they sang songs and boldly uttered terrible,
revolting words such as a God-fearing man could not bring himself to
pronounce; boundlessly free, self-confident, and happy, they feared
neither God nor the devil, nor death, but said and did what they liked,
and went whither their lust led them. And the wine, clear as amber,
flecked with sparks of gold, must have been irresistibly sweet and
fragrant, for each man who drank it smiled blissfully and wanted to
drink more. To the smile of man it responded with a smile and sparkled
joyfully when they drank it, as though it knew the devilish charm it
kept hidden in its sweetness.
The old man, growing more and more incensed and weeping with wrath, went
on to describe what he had seen. On a table in the midst of the
revellers, he said, stood a sinful, half-naked woman. It was hard to
imagine or to find in nature anything more lovely and fascinating. This
reptile, young, longhaired, dark-skinned, with black eyes and full lips,
shameless and insolent, showed her snow-white teeth and smiled as though
to say: "Look how shameless, how beautiful I am." Silk and brocade fell
in lovely folds from her shoulders, but her beauty would not hide itself
under her clothes, but eagerly thrust itself through the folds, like the
young grass through the ground in spring. The shameless woman drank
wine, sang songs, and abandoned herself to anyone who wanted her.
Then the old man, wrathfully brandishing his arms, described the horse-
races, the bull-fights, the theatres, the artists' studios where they
painted naked women or moulded them of clay. He spoke with inspiration,
with sonorous beauty, as though he were playing on unseen chords, while
the monks, petrified, greedily drank in his words and gasped with
rapture. . . .
After describing all the charms of the devil, the beauty of evil, and
the fascinating grace of the dreadful female form, the old man cursed
the devil, turned and shut himself up in his cell. . . .
When he came out of his cell in the morning there was not a monk left in
the monastery; they had all fled to the town.
IN TROUBLE
PYOTR SEMYONITCH, the bank manager, together with the book-keeper, his
assistant, and two members of the board, were taken in the night to
prison. The day after the upheaval the merchant Avdeyev, who was one of
the committee of auditors, was sitting with his friends in the shop
saying:
"So it is God's will, it seems. There is no escaping your fate. Here to-
day we are eating caviare and to-morrow, for aught we know, it will be
prison, beggary, or maybe death. Anything may happen. Take Pyotr
Semyonitch, for instance. . . ."
He spoke, screwing up his drunken eyes, while his friends went on
drinking, eating caviare, and listening. Having described the disgrace
and helplessness of Pyotr Semyonitch, who only the day before had been
powerful and respected by all, Avdeyev went on with a sigh:
"The tears of the mouse come back to the cat. Serve them right, the
scoundrels! They could steal, the rooks, so let them answer for it!"
"You'd better look out, Ivan Danilitch, that you don't catch it too!"
one of his friends observed.
"What has it to do with me?"
"Why, they were stealing, and what were you auditors thinking about?
I'll be bound, you signed the audit."
"It's all very well to talk!" laughed Avdeyev: "Signed it, indeed! They
used to bring the accounts to my shop and I signed them. As though I
understood! Give me anything you like, I'll scrawl my name to it. If you
were to write that I murdered someone I'd sign my name to it. I haven't
time to go into it; besides, I can't see without my spectacles."
After discussing the failure of the bank and the fate of Pyotr
Semyonitch, Avdeyev and his friends went to eat pie at the house of a
friend whose wife was celebrating her name-day. At the name-day party
everyone was discussing the bank failure. Avdeyev was more excited than
anyone, and declared that he had long foreseen the crash and knew two
years before that things were not quite right at the bank. While they
were eating pie he described a dozen illegal operations which had come
to his knowledge.
"If you knew, why did you not give information?" asked an officer who
was present.
"I wasn't the only one: the whole town knew of it," laughed Avdeyev.
"Besides, I haven't the time to hang about the law courts, damn them!"
He had a nap after the pie and then had dinner, then had another nap,
then went to the evening service at the church of which he was a warden;
after the service he went back to the name-day party and played
preference till midnight. Everything seemed satisfactory.
But when Avdeyev hurried home after midnight the cook, who opened the
door to him, looked pale, and was trembling so violently that she could
not utter a word. His wife, Elizaveta Trofimovna, a flabby, overfed
woman, with her grey hair hanging loose, was sitting on the sofa in the
drawing-room quivering all over, and vacantly rolling her eyes as though
she were drunk. Her elder son, Vassily, a high-school boy, pale too, and
extremely agitated, was fussing round her with a glass of water.
"What's the matter?" asked Avdeyev, and looked angrily sideways at the
stove (his family was constantly being upset by the fumes from it).
"The examining magistrate has just been with the police," answered
Vassily; "they've made a search."
Avdeyev looked round him. The cupboards, the chests, the
tables--everything bore traces of the recent search. For a minute Avdeyev
stood motionless as though petrified, unable to understand; then his
whole inside quivered and seemed to grow heavy, his left leg went numb,
and, unable to endure his trembling, he lay down flat on the sofa. He
felt his inside heaving and his rebellious left leg tapping against the
back of the sofa.
In the course of two or three minutes he recalled the whole of his past,
but could not remember any crime deserving of the attention of the
police.
"It's all nonsense," he said, getting up. "They must have slandered me.
To-morrow I must lodge a complaint of their having dared to do such a
thing."
Next morning after a sleepless night Avdeyev, as usual, went to his
shop. His customers brought him the news that during the night the
public prosecutor had sent the deputy manager and the head-clerk to
prison as well. This news did not disturb Avdeyev. He was convinced that
he had been slandered, and that if he were to lodge a complaint to-day
the examining magistrate would get into trouble for the search of the
night before.
Between nine and ten o'clock he hurried to the town hall to see the
secretary, who was the only educated man in the town council.
"Vladimir Stepanitch, what's this new fashion?" he said, bending down to
the secretary's ear. "People have been stealing, but how do I come in?
What has it to do with me? My dear fellow," he whispered, "there has
been a search at my house last night! Upon my word! Have they gone
crazy? Why touch me?"
"Because one shouldn't be a sheep," the secretary answered calmly.
"Before you sign you ought to look."
"Look at what? But if I were to look at those accounts for a thousand
years I could not make head or tail of them! It's all Greek to me! I am
no book-keeper. They used to bring them to me and I signed them."
"Excuse me. Apart from that you and your committee are seriously
compromised. You borrowed nineteen thousand from the bank, giving no
security."
"Lord have mercy upon us!" cried Avdeyev in amazement. "I am not the
only one in debt to the bank! The whole town owes it money. I pay the
interest and I shall repay the debt. What next! And besides, to tell the
honest truth, it wasn't I myself borrowed the money. Pyotr Semyonitch
forced it upon me. 'Take it,' he said, 'take it. If you don't take it,'
he said, 'it means that you don't trust us and fight shy of us. You take
it,' he said, 'and build your father a mill.' So I took it."
"Well, you see, none but children or sheep can reason like that. In any
case, signor, you need not be anxious. You can't escape trial, of
course, but you are sure to be acquitted."
The secretary's indifference and calm tone restored Avdeyev's composure.
Going back to his shop and finding friends there, he again began
drinking, eating caviare, and airing his views. He almost forgot the
police search, and he was only troubled by one circumstance which he
could not help noticing: his left leg was strangely numb, and his
stomach for some reason refused to do its work.
That evening destiny dealt another overwhelming blow at Avdeyev: at an
extraordinary meeting of the town council all members who were on the
staff of the bank, Avdeyev among them, were asked to resign, on the
ground that they were charged with a criminal offence. In the morning he
received a request to give up immediately his duties as churchwarden.
After that Avdeyev lost count of the blows dealt him by fate, and
strange, unprecedented days flitted rapidly by, one after another, and
every day brought some new, unexpected surprise. Among other things, the
examining magistrate sent him a summons, and he returned home after the
interview, insulted and red in the face.
"He gave me no peace, pestering me to tell him why I had signed. I
signed, that's all about it. I didn't do it on purpose. They brought the
papers to the shop and I signed them. I am no great hand at reading
writing."
Young men with unconcerned faces arrived, sealed up the shop, and made
an inventory of all the furniture of the house. Suspecting some intrigue
behind this, and, as before, unconscious of any wrongdoing, Avdeyev in
his mortification ran from one Government office to another lodging
complaints. He spent hours together in waiting-rooms, composed long
petitions, shed tears, swore. To his complaints the public prosecutor
and the examining magistrate made the indifferent and rational reply:
"Come to us when you are summoned: we have not time to attend to you
now." While others answered: "It is not our business."
The secretary, an educated man, who, Avdeyev thought, might have helped
him, merely shrugged his shoulders and said:
"It's your own fault. You shouldn't have been a sheep."
The old man exerted himself to the utmost, but his left leg was still
numb, and his digestion was getting worse and worse. When he was weary
of doing nothing and was getting poorer and poorer, he made up his mind
to go to his father's mill, or to his brother, and begin dealing in
corn. His family went to his father's and he was left alone. The days
flitted by, one after another. Without a family, without a shop, and
without money, the former churchwarden, an honoured and respected man,
spent whole days going the round of his friends' shops, drinking,
eating, and listening to advice. In the mornings and in the evenings, to
while away the time, he went to church. Looking for hours together at
the ikons, he did not pray, but pondered. His conscience was clear, and
he ascribed his position to mistake and misunderstanding; to his mind,
it was all due to the fact that the officials and the examining
magistrates were young men and inexperienced. It seemed to him that if
he were to talk it over in detail and open his heart to some elderly
judge, everything would go right again. He did not understand his
judges, and he fancied they did not understand him.
The days raced by, and at last, after protracted, harassing delays, the
day of the trial came. Avdeyev borrowed fifty roubles, and providing
himself with spirit to rub on his leg and a decoction of herbs for his
digestion, set off for the town where the circuit court was being held.
The trial lasted for ten days. Throughout the trial Avdeyev sat among
his companions in misfortune with the stolid composure and dignity
befitting a respectable and innocent man who is suffering for no fault
of his own: he listened and did not understand a word. He was in an
antagonistic mood. He was angry at being detained so long in the court,
at being unable to get Lenten food anywhere, at his defending counsel's
not understanding him, and, as he thought, saying the wrong thing. He
thought that the judges did not understand their business. They took
scarcely any notice of Avdeyev, they only addressed him once in three
days, and the questions they put to him were of such a character that
Avdeyev raised a laugh in the audience each time he answered them. When
he tried to speak of the expenses he had incurred, of his losses, and of
his meaning to claim his costs from the court, his counsel turned round
and made an incomprehensible grimace, the public laughed, and the judge
announced sternly that that had nothing to do with the case. The last
words that he was allowed to say were not what his counsel had
instructed him to say, but something quite different, which raised a
laugh again.
During the terrible hour when the jury were consulting in their room he
sat angrily in the refreshment bar, not thinking about the jury at all.
He did not understand why they were so long deliberating when everything
was so clear, and what they wanted of him.
Getting hungry, he asked the waiter to give him some cheap Lenten dish.
For forty kopecks they gave him some cold fish and carrots. He ate it
and felt at once as though the fish were heaving in a chilly lump in his
stomach; it was followed by flatulence, heartburn, and pain.
Afterwards, as he listened to the foreman of the jury reading out the
questions point by point, there was a regular revolution taking place in
his inside, his whole body was bathed in a cold sweat, his left leg was
numb; he did not follow, understood nothing, and suffered unbearably at
not being able to sit or lie down while the foreman was reading. At
last, when he and his companions were allowed to sit down, the public
prosecutor got up and said something unintelligible, and all at once, as
though they had sprung out of the earth, some police officers appeared
on the scene with drawn swords and surrounded all the prisoners. Avdeyev
was told to get up and go.
Now he understood that he was found guilty and in charge of the police,
but he was not frightened nor amazed; such a turmoil was going on in his
stomach that he could not think about his guards.
"So they won't let us go back to the hotel?" he asked one of his
companions. "But I have three roubles and an untouched quarter of a
pound of tea in my room there."
He spent the night at the police station; all night he was aware of a
loathing for fish, and was thinking about the three roubles and the
quarter of a pound of tea. Early in the morning, when the sky was
beginning to turn blue, he was told to dress and set off. Two soldiers
with bayonets took him to prison. Never before had the streets of the
town seemed to him so long and endless. He walked not on the pavement
but in the middle of the road in the muddy, thawing snow. His inside was
still at war with the fish, his left leg was numb; he had forgotten his
goloshes either in the court or in the police station, and his feet felt
frozen.
Five days later all the prisoners were brought before the court again to
hear their sentence. Avdeyev learnt that he was sentenced to exile in
the province of Tobolsk. And that did not frighten nor amaze him either.
He fancied for some reason that the trial was not yet over, that there
were more adjournments to come, and that the final decision had not been
reached yet. . . . He went on in the prison expecting this final
decision every day.
Only six months later, when his wife and his son Vassily came to say
good-bye to him, and when in the wasted, wretchedly dressed old woman he
scarcely recognized his once fat and dignified Elizaveta Trofimovna, and
when he saw his son wearing a short, shabby reefer-jacket and cotton
trousers instead of the high-school uniform, he realized that his fate
was decided, and that whatever new "decision" there might be, his past
would never come back to him. And for the first time since the trial and
his imprisonment the angry expression left his face, and he wept
bitterly.
FROST
A "POPULAR" f?e with a philanthropic object had been arranged on the
Feast of Epiphany in the provincial town of N----. They had selected a
broad part of the river between the market and the bishop's palace,
fenced it round with a rope, with fir-trees and with flags, and provided
everything necessary for skating, sledging, and tobogganing. The
festivity was organized on the grandest scale possible. The notices that
were distributed were of huge size and promised a number of delights:
skating, a military band, a lottery with no blank tickets, an electric
sun, and so on. But the whole scheme almost came to nothing owing to the
hard frost. From the eve of Epiphany there were twenty-eight degrees of
frost with a strong wind; it was proposed to put off the f?e, and this
was not done only because the public, which for a long while had been
looking forward to the f?e impatiently, would not consent to any
postponement.
"Only think, what do you expect in winter but a frost!" said the ladies
persuading the governor, who tried to insist that the f?e should be
postponed. "If anyone is cold he can go and warm himself."
The trees, the horses, the men's beards were white with frost; it even
seemed that the air itself crackled, as though unable to endure the
cold; but in spite of that the frozen public were skating. Immediately
after the blessing of the waters and precisely at one o'clock the
military band began playing.
Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, when the festivity was
at its height, the select society of the place gathered together to warm
themselves in the governor's pavilion, which had been put up on the
river-bank. The old governor and his wife, the bishop, the president of
the local court, the head master of the high school, and many others,
were there. The ladies were sitting in armchairs, while the men crowded
round the wide glass door, looking at the skating.
"Holy Saints!" said the bishop in surprise; "what flourishes they
execute with their legs! Upon my soul, many a singer couldn't do a twirl
with his voice as those cut-throats do with their legs. Aie! he'll kill
himself!"
"That's Smirnov. . . . That's Gruzdev . . ." said the head master,
mentioning the names of the schoolboys who flew by the pavilion.
"Bah! he's all alive-oh!" laughed the governor. "Look, gentlemen, our
mayor is coming. . . . He is coming this way. . . . That's a nuisance,
he will talk our heads off now."
A little thin old man, wearing a big cap and a fur-lined coat hanging
open, came from the opposite bank towards the pavilion, avoiding the
skaters. This was the mayor of the town, a merchant, Eremeyev by name, a
millionaire and an old inhabitant of N----. Flinging wide his arms and
shrugging at the cold, he skipped along, knocking one golosh against the
other, evidently in haste to get out of the wind. Half-way he suddenly
bent down, stole up to some lady, and plucked at her sleeve from behind.
When she looked round he skipped away, and probably delighted at having
succeeded in frightening her, went off into a loud, aged laugh.
"Lively old fellow," said the governor. "It's a wonder he's not
skating."
As he got near the pavilion the mayor fell into a little tripping trot,
waved his hands, and, taking a run, slid along the ice in his huge
golosh boots up to the very door.
"Yegor Ivanitch, you ought to get yourself some skates!" the governor
greeted him.
"That's just what I am thinking," he answered in a squeaky, somewhat
nasal tenor, taking off his cap. "I wish you good health, your
Excellency! Your Holiness! Long life to all the other gentlemen and
ladies! Here's a frost! Yes, it is a frost, bother it! It's deadly!"
Winking with his red, frozen eyes, Yegor Ivanitch stamped on the floor
with his golosh boots and swung his arms together like a frozen cabman.