place. I led the architect through the empty rooms, and between our
business talk told him various stories. The tattered wallpapers, the
dingy windows, the dark stoves, all bore the traces of recent habitation
and evoked memories. On that staircase, for instance, drunken men were
once carrying down a dead body when they stumbled and flew headlong
downstairs together with the coffin; the living were badly bruised,
while the dead man looked very serious, as though nothing had happened,
and shook his head when they lifted him up from the ground and put him
back in the coffin. You see those three doors in a row: in there lived
young ladies who were always receiving visitors, and so were better
dressed than any other lodgers, and could pay their rent regularly. The
door at the end of the corridor leads to the wash-house, where by day
they washed clothes and at night made an uproar and drank beer. And in
that flat of three rooms everything is saturated with bacteria and
bacilli. It's not nice there. Many lodgers have died there, and I can
positively assert that that flat was at some time cursed by someone, and
that together with its human lodgers there was always another lodger,
unseen, living in it. I remember particularly the fate of one family.
Picture to yourself an ordinary man, not remarkable in any way, with a
wife, a mother, and four children. His name was Putohin; he was a
copying clerk at a notary's, and received thirty-five roubles a month.
He was a sober, religious, serious man. When he brought me his rent for
the flat he always apologised for being badly dressed; apologised for
being five days late, and when I gave him a receipt he would smile good-
humouredly and say: "Oh yes, there's that too, I don't like those
receipts." He lived poorly but decently. In that middle room, the
grandmother used to be with the four children; there they used to cook,
sleep, receive their visitors, and even dance. This was Putohin's own
room; he had a table in it, at which he used to work doing private jobs,
copying parts for the theatre, advertisements, and so on. This room on
the right was let to his lodger, Yegoritch, a locksmith--a steady fellow,
but given to drink; he was always too hot, and so used to go about in
his waistcoat and barefoot. Yegoritch used to mend locks, pistols,
children's bicycles, would not refuse to mend cheap clocks and make
skates for a quarter-rouble, but he despised that work, and looked on
himself as a specialist in musical instruments. Amongst the litter of
steel and iron on his table there was always to be seen a concertina
with a broken key, or a trumpet with its sides bent in. He paid Putohin
two and a half roubles for his room; he was always at his work-table,
and only came out to thrust some piece of iron into the stove.
On the rare occasions when I went into that flat in the evening, this
was always the picture I came upon: Putohin would be sitting at his
little table, copying something; his mother and his wife, a thin woman
with an exhausted-looking face, were sitting near the lamp, sewing;
Yegoritch would be making a rasping sound with his file. And the hot,
still smouldering embers in the stove filled the room with heat and
fumes; the heavy air smelt of cabbage soup, swaddling-clothes, and
Yegoritch. It was poor and stuffy, but the working-class faces, the
children's little drawers hung up along by the stove, Yegoritch's bits
of iron had yet an air of peace, friendliness, content. . . . In the
corridor outside the children raced about with well-combed heads, merry
and profoundly convinced that everything was satisfactory in this world,
and would be so endlessly, that one had only to say one's prayers every
morning and at bedtime.
Now imagine in the midst of that same room, two paces from the stove,
the coffin in which Putohin's wife is lying. There is no husband whose
wife will live for ever, but there was something special about this
death. When, during the requiem service, I glanced at the husband's
grave face, at his stern eyes, I thought: "Oho, brother!"
It seemed to me that he himself, his children, the grandmother and
Yegoritch, were already marked down by that unseen being which lived
with them in that flat. I am a thoroughly superstitious man, perhaps,
because I am a houseowner and for forty years have had to do with
lodgers. I believe if you don't win at cards from the beginning you will
go on losing to the end; when fate wants to wipe you and your family off
the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its persecution, and the
first misfortune is commonly only the first of a long series. . . .
Misfortunes are like stones. One stone has only to drop from a high
cliff for others to be set rolling after it. In short, as I came away
from the requiem service at Putohin's, I believed that he and his family
were in a bad way.
And, in fact, a week afterwards the notary quite unexpectedly dismissed
Putohin, and engaged a young lady in his place. And would you believe
it, Putohin was not so much put out at the loss of his job as at being
superseded by a young lady and not by a man. Why a young lady? He so
resented this that on his return home he thrashed his children, swore at
his mother, and got drunk. Yegoritch got drunk, too, to keep him
company.
Putohin brought me the rent, but did not apologise this time, though it
was eighteen days overdue, and said nothing when he took the receipt
from me. The following month the rent was brought by his mother; she
only brought me half, and promised to bring the remainder a week later.
The third month, I did not get a farthing, and the porter complained to
me that the lodgers in No. 23 were "not behaving like gentlemen."
These were ominous symptoms.
Picture this scene. A sombre Petersburg morning looks in at the dingy
windows. By the stove, the granny is pouring out the children's tea.
Only the eldest, Vassya, drinks out of a glass, for the others the tea
is poured out into saucers. Yegoritch is squatting on his heels before
the stove, thrusting a bit of iron into the fire. His head is heavy and
his eyes are lustreless from yesterday's drinking-bout; he sighs and
groans, trembles and coughs.
"He has quite put me off the right way, the devil," he grumbles; "he
drinks himself and leads others into sin."
Putohin sits in his room, on the bedstead from which the bedclothes and
the pillows have long ago disappeared, and with his hands straying in
his hair looks blankly at the floor at his feet. He is tattered,
unkempt, and ill.
"Drink it up, make haste or you will be late for school," the old woman
urges on Vassya, "and it's time for me, too, to go and scrub the floors
for the Jews. . . ."
The old woman is the only one in the flat who does not lose heart. She
thinks of old times, and goes out to hard dirty work. On Fridays she
scrubs the floors for the Jews at the crockery shop, on Saturdays she
goes out washing for shopkeepers, and on Sundays she is racing about the
town from morning to night, trying to find ladies who will help her.
Every day she has work of some sort; she washes and scrubs, and is by
turns a midwife, a matchmaker, or a beggar. It is true she, too, is not
disinclined to drown her sorrows, but even when she has had a drop she
does not forget her duties. In Russia there are many such tough old
women, and how much of its welfare rests upon them!
When he has finished his tea, Vassya packs up his books in a satchel and
goes behind the stove; his greatcoat ought to be hanging there beside
his granny's clothes. A minute later he comes out from behind the stove
and asks:
"Where is my greatcoat?"
The grandmother and the other children look for the greatcoat together,
they waste a long time in looking for it, but the greatcoat has utterly
vanished. Where is it? The grandmother and Vassya are pale and
frightened. Even Yegoritch is surprised. Putohin is the only one who
does not move. Though he is quick to notice anything irregular or
disorderly, this time he makes a pretence of hearing and seeing nothing.
That is suspicious.
"He's sold it for drink," Yegoritch declares.
Putohin says nothing, so it is the truth. Vassya is overcome with
horror. His greatcoat, his splendid greatcoat, made of his dead mother's
cloth dress, with a splendid calico lining, gone for drink at the
tavern! And with the greatcoat is gone too, of course, the blue pencil
that lay in the pocket, and the note-book with "Nota bene" in gold
letters on it! There's another pencil with india-rubber stuck into the
note-book, and, besides that, there are transfer pictures lying in it.
Vassya would like to cry, but to cry is impossible. If his father, who
has a headache, heard crying he would shout, stamp with his feet, and
begin fighting, and after drinking he fights horribly. Granny would
stand up for Vassya, and his father would strike granny too; it would
end in Yegoritch getting mixed up in it too, clutching at his father and
falling on the floor with him. The two would roll on the floor,
struggling together and gasping with drunken animal fury, and granny
would cry, the children would scream, the neighbours would send for the
porter. No, better not cry.
Because he mustn't cry, or give vent to his indignation aloud, Vassya
moans, wrings his hands and moves his legs convulsively, or biting his
sleeve shakes it with his teeth as a dog does a hare. His eyes are
frantic, and his face is distorted with despair. Looking at him, his
granny all at once takes the shawl off her head, and she too makes queer
movements with her arms and legs in silence, with her eyes fixed on a
point in the distance. And at that moment I believe there is a definite
certainty in the minds of the boy and the old woman that their life is
ruined, that there is no hope. . . .
Putohin hears no crying, but he can see it all from his room. When, half
an hour later, Vassya sets off to school, wrapped in his grandmother's
shawl, he goes out with a face I will not undertake to describe, and
walks after him. He longs to call the boy, to comfort him, to beg his
forgiveness, to promise him on his word of honour, to call his dead
mother to witness, but instead of words, sobs break from him. It is a
grey, cold morning. When he reaches the town school Vassya untwists his
granny's shawl, and goes into the school with nothing over his jacket
for fear the boys should say he looks like a woman. And when he gets
home Putohin sobs, mutters some incoherent words, bows down to the
ground before his mother and Yegoritch, and the locksmith's table. Then,
recovering himself a little, he runs to me and begs me breathlessly, for
God's sake, to find him some job. I give him hopes, of course.
"At last I am myself again," he said. "It's high time, indeed, to come
to my senses. I've made a beast of myself, and now it's over."
He is delighted and thanks me, while I, who have studied these gentry
thoroughly during the years I have owned the house, look at him, and am
tempted to say:
"It's too late, dear fellow! You are a dead man already."
From me, Putohin runs to the town school. There he paces up and down,
waiting till his boy comes out.
"I say, Vassya," he says joyfully, when the boy at last comes out, "I
have just been promised a job. Wait a bit, I will buy you a splendid
fur-coat. . . . I'll send you to the high school! Do you understand? To
the high school! I'll make a gentleman of you! And I won't drink any
more. On my honour I won't."
And he has intense faith in the bright future. But the evening comes on.
The old woman, coming back from the Jews with twenty kopecks, exhausted
and aching all over, sets to work to wash the children's clothes. Vassya
is sitting doing a sum. Yegoritch is not working. Thanks to Putohin he
has got into the way of drinking, and is feeling at the moment an
overwhelming desire for drink. It's hot and stuffy in the room. Steam
rises in clouds from the tub where the old woman is washing.
"Are we going?" Yegoritch asks surlily.
My lodger does not answer. After his excitement he feels insufferably
dreary. He struggles with the desire to drink, with acute depression and
. . . and, of course, depression gets the best of it. It is a familiar
story.
Towards night, Yegoritch and Putohin go out, and in the morning Vassya
cannot find granny's shawl.
That is the drama that took place in that flat. After selling the shawl
for drink, Putohin did not come home again. Where he disappeared to I
don't know. After he disappeared, the old woman first got drunk, then
took to her bed. She was taken to the hospital, the younger children
were fetched by relations of some sort, and Vassya went into the wash-
house here. In the day-time he handed the irons, and at night fetched
the beer. When he was turned out of the wash-house he went into the
service of one of the young ladies, used to run about at night on
errands of some sort, and began to be spoken of as "a dangerous
customer."
What has happened to him since I don't know.
And in this room here a street musician lived for ten years. When he
died they found twenty thousand roubles in his feather bed.
IN PASSION WEEK
"Go along, they are ringing already; and mind, don't be naughty in
church or God will punish you."
My mother thrusts a few copper coins upon me, and, instantly forgetting
about me, runs into the kitchen with an iron that needs reheating. I
know well that after confession I shall not be allowed to eat or drink,
and so, before leaving the house, I force myself to eat a crust of white
bread, and to drink two glasses of water. It is quite spring in the
street. The roads are all covered with brownish slush, in which future
paths are already beginning to show; the roofs and side-walks are dry;
the fresh young green is piercing through the rotting grass of last
year, under the fences. In the gutters there is the merry gurgling and
foaming of dirty water, in which the sunbeams do not disdain to bathe.
Chips, straws, the husks of sunflower seeds are carried rapidly along in
the water, whirling round and sticking in the dirty foam. Where, where
are those chips swimming to? It may well be that from the gutter they
may pass into the river, from the river into the sea, and from the sea
into the ocean. I try to imagine to myself that long terrible journey,
but my fancy stops short before reaching the sea.
A cabman drives by. He clicks to his horse, tugs at the reins, and does
not see that two street urchins are hanging on the back of his cab. I
should like to join them, but think of confession, and the street
urchins begin to seem to me great sinners.
"They will be asked on the day of judgment: 'Why did you play pranks and
deceive the poor cabman?'" I think. "They will begin to defend
themselves, but evil spirits will seize them, and drag them to fire
everlasting. But if they obey their parents, and give the beggars a
kopeck each, or a roll, God will have pity on them, and will let them
into Paradise."
The church porch is dry and bathed in sunshine. There is not a soul in
it. I open the door irresolutely and go into the church. Here, in the
twilight which seems to me thick and gloomy as at no other time, I am
overcome by the sense of sinfulness and insignificance. What strikes the
eye first of all is a huge crucifix, and on one side of it the Mother of
God, and on the other, St. John the Divine. The candelabra and the
candlestands are draped in black mourning covers, the lamps glimmer
dimly and faintly, and the sun seems intentionally to pass by the church
windows. The Mother of God and the beloved disciple of Jesus Christ,
depicted in profile, gaze in silence at the insufferable agony and do
not observe my presence; I feel that to them I am alien, superfluous,
unnoticed, that I can be no help to them by word or deed, that I am a
loathsome, dishonest boy, only capable of mischief, rudeness, and tale-
bearing. I think of all the people I know, and they all seem to me
petty, stupid, and wicked, and incapable of bringing one drop of relief
to that intolerable sorrow which I now behold.
The twilight of the church grows darker and more gloomy. And the Mother
of God and St. John look lonely and forlorn to me.
Prokofy Ignatitch, a veteran soldier, the church verger's assistant, is
standing behind the candle cupboard. Raising his eyebrows and stroking
his beard he explains in a half-whisper to an old woman: "Matins will be
in the evening to-day, directly after vespers. And they will ring for
the 'hours' to-morrow between seven and eight. Do you understand?
Between seven and eight."
Between the two broad columns on the right, where the chapel of Varvara
the Martyr begins, those who are going to confess stand beside the
screen, awaiting their turn. And Mitka is there too-- a ragged boy with
his head hideously cropped, with ears that jut out, and little spiteful
eyes. He is the son of Nastasya the charwoman, and is a bully and a
ruffian who snatches apples from the women's baskets, and has more than
once carried off my knuckle-bones. He looks at me angrily, and I fancy
takes a spiteful pleasure in the fact that he, not I, will first go
behind the screen. I feel boiling over with resentment, I try not to
look at him, and, at the bottom of my heart, I am vexed that this
wretched boy's sins will soon be forgiven.
In front of him stands a grandly dressed, beautiful lady, wearing a hat
with a white feather. She is noticeably agitated, is waiting in strained
suspense, and one of her cheeks is flushed red with excitement.
I wait for five minutes, for ten. . . . A well-dressed young man with a
long thin neck, and rubber goloshes, comes out from behind the screen. I
begin dreaming how, when I am grown up, I will buy goloshes exactly like
them. I certainly will! The lady shudders and goes behind the screen. It
is her turn.
In the crack, between the two panels of the screen, I can see the lady
go up to the lectern and bow down to the ground, then get up, and,
without looking at the priest, bow her head in anticipation. The priest
stands with his back to the screen, and so I can only see his grey curly
head, the chain of the cross on his chest, and his broad back. His face
is not visible. Heaving a sigh, and not looking at the lady, he begins
speaking rapidly, shaking his head, alternately raising and dropping his
whispering voice. The lady listens meekly as though conscious of guilt,
answers meekly, and looks at the floor.
"In what way can she be sinful?" I wonder, looking reverently at her
gentle, beautiful face. "God forgive her sins, God send her happiness."
But now the priest covers her head with the stole. "And I, unworthy
priest . . ." I hear his voice, ". . . by His power given unto me, do
forgive and absolve thee from all thy sins. . . ."
The lady bows down to the ground, kisses the cross, and comes back. Both
her cheeks are flushed now, but her face is calm and serene and
cheerful.
"She is happy now," I think to myself, looking first at her and then at
the priest who had forgiven her sins. "But how happy the man must be who
has the right to forgive sins!"
Now it is Mitka's turn, but a feeling of hatred for that young ruffian
suddenly boils up in me. I want to go behind the screen before him, I
want to be the first. Noticing my movement he hits me on the head with
his candle, I respond by doing the same, and, for half a minute, there
is a sound of panting, and, as it were, of someone breaking candles. . .
. We are separated. My foe goes timidly up to the lectern, and bows down
to the floor without bending his knees, but I do not see what happens
after that; the thought that my turn is coming after Mitka's makes
everything grow blurred and confused before my eyes; Mitka's protruding
ears grow large, and melt into his dark head, the priest sways, the
floor seems to be undulating. . . .
The priest's voice is audible: "And I, unworthy priest . . ."
Now I too move behind the screen. I do not feel the ground under my
feet, it is as though I were walking on air. . . . I go up to the
lectern which is taller than I am. For a minute I have a glimpse of the
indifferent, exhausted face of the priest. But after that I see nothing
but his sleeve with its blue lining, the cross, and the edge of the
lectern. I am conscious of the close proximity of the priest, the smell
of his cassock; I hear his stern voice, and my cheek turned towards him
begins to burn. . . . I am so troubled that I miss a great deal that he
says, but I answer his questions sincerely in an unnatural voice, not my
own. I think of the forlorn figures of the Holy Mother and St. John the
Divine, the crucifix, my mother, and I want to cry and beg forgiveness.
"What is your name?" the priest asks me, covering my head with the soft
stole.
How light-hearted I am now, with joy in my soul!
I have no sins now, I am holy, I have the right to enter Paradise! I
fancy that I already smell like the cassock. I go from behind the screen
to the deacon to enter my name, and sniff at my sleeves. The dusk of the
church no longer seems gloomy, and I look indifferently, without malice,
at Mitka.
"What is your name?" the deacon asks.
"Fedya."
"And your name from your father?"
"I don't know."
"What is your papa's name?"
"Ivan Petrovitch."
"And your surname?"
I make no answer.
"How old are you?"
"Nearly nine."
When I get home I go to bed quickly, that I may not see them eating
supper; and, shutting my eyes, dream of how fine it would be to endure
martyrdom at the hands of some Herod or Dioskorus, to live in the
desert, and, like St. Serafim, feed the bears, live in a cell, and eat
nothing but holy bread, give my property to the poor, go on a pilgrimage
to Kiev. I hear them laying the table in the dining-room--they are going
to have supper, they will eat salad, cabbage pies, fried and baked fish.
How hungry I am! I would consent to endure any martyrdom, to live in the
desert without my mother, to feed bears out of my own hands, if only I
might first eat just one cabbage pie!
"Lord, purify me a sinner," I pray, covering my head over. "Guardian
angel, save me from the unclean spirit."
The next day, Thursday, I wake up with my heart as pure and clean as a
fine spring day. I go gaily and boldly into the church, feeling that I
am a communicant, that I have a splendid and expensive shirt on, made
out of a silk dress left by my grandmother. In the church everything has
an air of joy, happiness, and spring. The faces of the Mother of God and
St. John the Divine are not so sorrowful as yesterday. The faces of the
communicants are radiant with hope, and it seems as though all the past
is forgotten, all is forgiven. Mitka, too, has combed his hair, and is
dressed in his best. I look gaily at his protruding ears, and to show
that I have nothing against him, I say:
"You look nice to-day, and if your hair did not stand up so, and you
weren't so poorly dressed, everybody would think that your mother was
not a washerwoman but a lady. Come to me at Easter, we will play
knuckle-bones."
Mitka looks at me mistrustfully, and shakes his fist at me on the sly.
And the lady I saw yesterday looks lovely. She is wearing a light blue
dress, and a big sparkling brooch in the shape of a horse-shoe. I admire
her, and think that, when I am grown-up, I will certainly marry a woman
like that, but remembering that getting married is shameful, I leave off
thinking about it, and go into the choir where the deacon is already
reading the "hours."
WHITEBROW
A HUNGRY she-wolf got up to go hunting. Her cubs, all three of them,
were sound asleep, huddled in a heap and keeping each other warm. She
licked them and went off.
It was already March, a month of spring, but at night the trees snapped
with the cold, as they do in December, and one could hardly put one's
tongue out without its being nipped. The wolf-mother was in delicate
health and nervous; she started at the slightest sound, and kept hoping
that no one would hurt the little ones at home while she was away. The
smell of the tracks of men and horses, logs, piles of faggots, and the
dark road with horse-dung on it frightened her; it seemed to her that
men were standing behind the trees in the darkness, and that dogs were
howling somewhere beyond the forest.
She was no longer young and her scent had grown feebler, so that it
sometimes happened that she took the track of a fox for that of a dog,
and even at times lost her way, a thing that had never been in her
youth. Owing to the weakness of her health she no longer hunted calves
and big sheep as she had in old days, and kept her distance now from
mares with colts; she fed on nothing but carrion; fresh meat she tasted
very rarely, only in the spring when she would come upon a hare and take
away her young, or make her way into a peasant's stall where there were
lambs.