and trembling all over. "God forbid! If you feel doubtful, then never
mind, never mind. You see, I could do the work between whiles, . . so as
to increase my income. . . . Never mind, don't disturb yourself!"
"H'm! . . . your income. . . . But you know, I only pay my secretary
twenty roubles a month."
"Good heavens! I would take ten," whispered Father Yakov, looking about
him. "Ten would be enough! You . . . you are astonished, and everyone is
astonished. The greedy priest, the grasping priest, what does he do with
his money? I feel myself I am greedy, . . . and I blame myself, I
condemn myself. . . . I am ashamed to look people in the face. . . . I
tell you on my conscience, Pavel Mihailovitch. . . . I call the God of
truth to witness. . . ."
Father Yakov took breath and went on:
"On the way here I prepared a regular confession to make you, but . . .
I've forgotten it all; I cannot find a word now. I get a hundred and
fifty roubles a year from my parish, and everyone wonders what I do with
the money. . . . But I'll explain it all truly. . . . I pay forty
roubles a year to the clerical school for my brother Pyotr. He has
everything found there, except that I have to provide pens and paper."
"Oh, I believe you; I believe you! But what's the object of all this?"
said Kunin, with a wave of the hand, feeling terribly oppressed by this
outburst of confidence on the part of his visitor, and not knowing how
to get away from the tearful gleam in his eyes.
"Then I have not yet paid up all that I owe to the consistory for my
place here. They charged me two hundred roubles for the living, and I
was to pay ten roubles a month. . . . You can judge what is left! And,
besides, I must allow Father Avraamy at least three roubles a month."
"What Father Avraamy?"
"Father Avraamy who was priest at Sinkino before I came. He was deprived
of the living on account of . . . his failing, but you know, he is still
living at Sinkino! He has nowhere to go. There is no one to keep him.
Though he is old, he must have a corner, and food and clothing--I can't
let him go begging on the roads in his position! It would be on my
conscience if anything happened! It would be my fault! He is. . . in
debt all round; but, you see, I am to blame for not paying for him."
Father Yakov started up from his seat and, looking frantically at the
floor, strode up and down the room.
"My God, my God!" he muttered, raising his hands and dropping them
again. "Lord, save us and have mercy upon us! Why did you take such a
calling on yourself if you have so little faith and no strength? There
is no end to my despair! Save me, Queen of Heaven!"
"Calm yourself, Father," said Kunin.
"I am worn out with hunger, Pavel Mihailovitch," Father Yakov went on.
"Generously forgive me, but I am at the end of my strength . . . . I
know if I were to beg and to bow down, everyone would help, but . . . I
cannot! I am ashamed. How can I beg of the peasants? You are on the
Board here, so you know. . . . How can one beg of a beggar? And to beg
of richer people, of landowners, I cannot! I have pride! I am ashamed!"
Father Yakov waved his hand, and nervously scratched his head with both
hands.
"I am ashamed! My God, I am ashamed! I am proud and can't bear people to
see my poverty! When you visited me, Pavel Mihailovitch, I had no tea in
the house! There wasn't a pinch of it, and you know it was pride
prevented me from telling you! I am ashamed of my clothes, of these
patches here. . . . I am ashamed of my vestments, of being hungry. . . .
And is it seemly for a priest to be proud?"
Father Yakov stood still in the middle of the study, and, as though he
did not notice Kunin's presence, began reasoning with himself.
"Well, supposing I endure hunger and disgrace--but, my God, I have a
wife! I took her from a good home! She is not used to hard work; she is
soft; she is used to tea and white bread and sheets on her bed. . . . At
home she used to play the piano. . . . She is young, not twenty yet. . .
. She would like, to be sure, to be smart, to have fun, go out to see
people. . . . And she is worse off with me than any cook; she is ashamed
to show herself in the street. My God, my God! Her only treat is when I
bring an apple or some biscuit from a visit. . . ."
Father Yakov scratched his head again with both hands.
"And it makes us feel not love but pity for each other. . . . I cannot
look at her without compassion! And the things that happen in this life,
O Lord! Such things that people would not believe them if they saw them
in the newspaper. . . . And when will there be an end to it all!"
"Hush, Father!" Kunin almost shouted, frightened at his tone. "Why take
such a gloomy view of life?"
"Generously forgive me, Pavel Mihailovitch . . ." muttered Father Yakov
as though he were drunk, "Forgive me, all this . . . doesn't matter, and
don't take any notice of it. . . . Only I do blame myself, and always
shall blame myself . . . always."
Father Yakov looked about him and began whispering:
"One morning early I was going from Sinkino to Lutchkovo; I saw a woman
standing on the river bank, doing something. . . . I went up close and
could not believe my eyes. . . . It was horrible! The wife of the
doctor, Ivan Sergeitch, was sitting there washing her linen. . . . A
doctor's wife, brought up at a select boarding-school! She had got up
you see, early and gone half a mile from the village that people should
not see her. . . . She couldn't get over her pride! When she saw that I
was near her and noticed her poverty, she turned red all over. . . . I
was flustered--I was frightened, and ran up to help her, but she hid her
linen from me; she was afraid I should see her ragged chemises. . . ."
"All this is positively incredible," said Kunin, sitting down and
looking almost with horror at Father Yakov's pale face.
"Incredible it is! It's a thing that has never been! Pavel Mihailovitch,
that a doctor's wife should be rinsing the linen in the river! Such a
thing does not happen in any country! As her pastor and spiritual
father, I ought not to allow it, but what can I do? What? Why, I am
always trying to get treated by her husband for nothing myself! It is
true that, as you say, it is all incredible! One can hardly believe
one's eyes. During Mass, you know, when I look out from the altar and
see my congregation, Avraamy starving, and my wife, and think of the
doctor's wife--how blue her hands were from the cold water--would you
believe it, I forget myself and stand senseless like a fool, until the
sacristan calls to me. . . . It's awful!"
Father Yakov began walking about again.
"Lord Jesus!" he said, waving his hands, "holy Saints! I can't officiate
properly. . . . Here you talk to me about the school, and I sit like a
dummy and don't understand a word, and think of nothing but food. . . .
Even before the altar. . . . But . . . what am I doing?" Father Yakov
pulled himself up suddenly. "You want to go out. Forgive me, I meant
nothing. . . . Excuse . . ."
Kunin shook hands with Father Yakov without speaking, saw him into the
hall, and going back into his study, stood at the window. He saw Father
Yakov go out of the house, pull his wide-brimmed rusty-looking hat over
his eyes, and slowly, bowing his head, as though ashamed of his
outburst, walk along the road.
"I don't see his horse," thought Kunin.
Kunin did not dare to think that the priest had come on foot every day
to see him; it was five or six miles to Sinkino, and the mud on the road
was impassable. Further on he saw the coachman Andrey and the boy
Paramon, jumping over the puddles and splashing Father Yakov with mud,
run up to him for his blessing. Father Yakov took off his hat and slowly
blessed Andrey, then blessed the boy and stroked his head.
Kunin passed his hand over his eyes, and it seemed to him that his hand
was moist. He walked away from the window and with dim eyes looked round
the room in which he still seemed to hear the timid droning voice. He
glanced at the table. Luckily, Father Yakov, in his haste, had forgotten
to take the sermons. Kunin rushed up to them, tore them into pieces, and
with loathing thrust them under the table.
"And I did not know!" he moaned, sinking on to the sofa. "After being
here over a year as member of the Rural Board, Honorary Justice of the
Peace, member of the School Committee! Blind puppet, egregious idiot! I
must make haste and help them, I must make haste!"
He turned from side to side uneasily, pressed his temples and racked his
brains.
"On the twentieth I shall get my salary, two hundred roubles. . . . On
some good pretext I will give him some, and some to the doctor's wife. .
. . I will ask them to perform a special service here, and will get up
an illness for the doctor. . . . In that way I shan't wound their pride.
And I'll help Father Avraamy too. . . ."
He reckoned his money on his fingers, and was afraid to own to himself
that those two hundred roubles would hardly be enough for him to pay his
steward, his servants, the peasant who brought the meat. . . . He could
not help remembering the recent past when he was senselessly squandering
his father's fortune, when as a puppy of twenty he had given expensive
fans to prostitutes, had paid ten roubles a day to Kuzma, his cab-
driver, and in his vanity had made presents to actresses. Oh, how useful
those wasted rouble, three-rouble, ten-rouble notes would have been now!
"Father Avraamy lives on three roubles a month!" thought Kunin. "For a
rouble the priest's wife could get herself a chemise, and the doctor's
wife could hire a washerwoman. But I'll help them, anyway! I must help
them."
Here Kunin suddenly recalled the private information he had sent to the
bishop, and he writhed as from a sudden draught of cold air. This
remembrance filled him with overwhelming shame before his inner self and
before the unseen truth.
So had begun and had ended a sincere effort to be of public service on
the part of a well-intentioned but unreflecting and over-comfortable
person.
THE MURDER I
The evening service was being celebrated at Progonnaya Station. Before
the great ikon, painted in glaring colours on a background of gold,
stood the crowd of railway servants with their wives and children, and
also of the timbermen and sawyers who worked close to the railway line.
All stood in silence, fascinated by the glare of the lights and the
howling of the snow-storm which was aimlessly disporting itself outside,
regardless of the fact that it was the Eve of the Annunciation. The old
priest from Vedenyapino conducted the service; the sacristan and Matvey
Terehov were singing.
Matvey's face was beaming with delight; he sang stretching out his neck
as though he wanted to soar upwards. He sang tenor and chanted the
"Praises" too in a tenor voice with honied sweetness and persuasiveness.
When he sang "Archangel Voices" he waved his arms like a conductor, and
trying to second the sacristan's hollow bass with his tenor, achieved
something extremely complex, and from his face it could be seen that he
was experiencing great pleasure.
At last the service was over, and they all quietly dispersed, and it was
dark and empty again, and there followed that hush which is only known
in stations that stand solitary in the open country or in the forest
when the wind howls and nothing else is heard and when all the emptiness
around, all the dreariness of life slowly ebbing away is felt.
Matvey lived not far from the station at his cousin's tavern. But he did
not want to go home. He sat down at the refreshment bar and began
talking to the waiter in a low voice.
"We had our own choir in the tile factory. And I must tell you that
though we were only workmen, our singing was first-rate, splendid. We
were often invited to the town, and when the Deputy Bishop, Father Ivan,
took the service at Trinity Church, the bishop's singers sang in the
right choir and we in the left. Only they complained in the town that we
kept the singing on too long: 'the factory choir drag it out,' they used
to say. It is true we began St. Andrey's prayers and the Praises between
six and seven, and it was past eleven when we finished, so that it was
sometimes after midnight when we got home to the factory. It was good,"
sighed Matvey. "Very good it was, indeed, Sergey Nikanoritch! But here
in my father's house it is anything but joyful. The nearest church is
four miles away; with my weak health I can't get so far; there are no
singers there. And there is no peace or quiet in our family; day in day
out, there is an uproar, scolding, uncleanliness; we all eat out of one
bowl like peasants; and there are beetles in the cabbage soup. . . . God
has not given me health, else I would have gone away long ago, Sergey
Nikanoritch."
Matvey Terehov was a middle-aged man about forty-five, but he had a look
of ill-health; his face was wrinkled and his lank, scanty beard was
quite grey, and that made him seem many years older. He spoke in a weak
voice, circumspectly, and held his chest when he coughed, while his eyes
assumed the uneasy and anxious look one sees in very apprehensive
people. He never said definitely what was wrong with him, but he was
fond of describing at length how once at the factory he had lifted a
heavy box and had ruptured himself, and how this had led to "the
gripes," and had forced him to give up his work in the tile factory and
come back to his native place; but he could not explain what he meant by
"the gripes."
"I must own I am not fond of my cousin," he went on, pouring himself out
some tea. "He is my elder; it is a sin to censure him, and I fear the
Lord, but I cannot bear it in patience. He is a haughty, surly, abusive
man; he is the torment of his relations and workmen, and constantly out
of humour. Last Sunday I asked him in an amiable way, 'Brother, let us
go to Pahomovo for the Mass!' but he said 'I am not going; the priest
there is a gambler;' and he would not come here to-day because, he said,
the priest from Vedenyapino smokes and drinks vodka. He doesn't like the
clergy! He reads Mass himself and the Hours and the Vespers, while his
sister acts as sacristan; he says, 'Let us pray unto the Lord'! and she,
in a thin little voice like a turkey-hen, 'Lord, have mercy upon us! . .
.' It's a sin, that's what it is. Every day I say to him, 'Think what
you are doing, brother! Repent, brother!' and he takes no notice."
Sergey Nikanoritch, the waiter, poured out five glasses of tea and
carried them on a tray to the waiting-room. He had scarcely gone in when
there was a shout:
"Is that the way to serve it, pig's face? You don't know how to wait!"
It was the voice of the station-master. There was a timid mutter, then
again a harsh and angry shout:
"Get along!"
The waiter came back greatly crestfallen.
"There was a time when I gave satisfaction to counts and princes," he
said in a low voice; "but now I don't know how to serve tea. . . . He
called me names before the priest and the ladies!"
The waiter, Sergey Nikanoritch, had once had money of his own, and had
kept a buffet at a first-class station, which was a junction, in the
principal town of a province. There he had worn a swallow-tail coat and
a gold chain. But things had gone ill with him; he had squandered all
his own money over expensive fittings and service; he had been robbed by
his staff, and getting gradually into difficulties, had moved to another
station less bustling. Here his wife had left him, taking with her all
the silver, and he moved to a third station of a still lower class,
where no hot dishes were served. Then to a fourth. Frequently changing
his situation and sinking lower and lower, he had at last come to
Progonnaya, and here he used to sell nothing but tea and cheap vodka,
and for lunch hard-boiled eggs and dry sausages, which smelt of tar, and
which he himself sarcastically said were only fit for the orchestra. He
was bald all over the top of his head, and had prominent blue eyes and
thick bushy whiskers, which he often combed out, looking into the little
looking-glass. Memories of the past haunted him continually; he could
never get used to sausage "only fit for the orchestra," to the rudeness
of the station-master, and to the peasants who used to haggle over the
prices, and in his opinion it was as unseemly to haggle over prices in a
refreshment room as in a chemist's shop. He was ashamed of his poverty
and degradation, and that shame was now the leading interest of his
life.
"Spring is late this year," said Matvey, listening. "It's a good job; I
don't like spring. In spring it is very muddy, Sergey Nikanoritch. In
books they write: Spring, the birds sing, the sun is setting, but what
is there pleasant in that? A bird is a bird, and nothing more. I am fond
of good company, of listening to folks, of talking of religion or
singing something agreeable in chorus; but as for nightingales and
flowers--bless them, I say!"
He began again about the tile factory, about the choir, but Sergey
Nikanoritch could not get over his mortification, and kept shrugging his
shoulders and muttering. Matvey said good-bye and went home.
There was no frost, and the snow was already melting on the roofs,
though it was still falling in big flakes; they were whirling rapidly
round and round in the air and chasing one another in white clouds along
the railway line. And the oak forest on both sides of the line, in the
dim light of the moon which was hidden somewhere high up in the clouds,
resounded with a prolonged sullen murmur. When a violent storm shakes
the trees, how terrible they are! Matvey walked along the causeway
beside the line, covering his face and his hands, while the wind beat on
his back. All at once a little nag, plastered all over with snow, came
into sight; a sledge scraped along the bare stones of the causeway, and
a peasant, white all over, too, with his head muffled up, cracked his
whip. Matvey looked round after him, but at once, as though it had been
a vision, there was neither sledge nor peasant to be seen, and he
hastened his steps, suddenly scared, though he did not know why.
Here was the crossing and the dark little house where the signalman
lived. The barrier was raised, and by it perfect mountains had drifted
and clouds of snow were whirling round like witches on broomsticks. At
that point the line was crossed by an old highroad, which was still
called "the track." On the right, not far from the crossing, by the
roadside stood Terehov's tavern, which had been a posting inn. Here
there was always a light twinkling at night.
When Matvey reached home there was a strong smell of incense in all the
rooms and even in the entry. His cousin Yakov Ivanitch was still reading
the evening service. In the prayer-room where this was going on, in the
corner opposite the door, there stood a shrine of old-fashioned
ancestral ikons in gilt settings, and both walls to right and to left
were decorated with ikons of ancient and modern fashion, in shrines and
without them. On the table, which was draped to the floor, stood an ikon
of the Annunciation, and close by a cyprus-wood cross and the censer;
wax candles were burning. Beside the table was a reading desk. As he
passed by the prayer-room, Matvey stopped and glanced in at the door.
Yakov Ivanitch was reading at the desk at that moment, his sister
Aglaia, a tall lean old woman in a dark-blue dress and white kerchief,
was praying with him. Yakov Ivanitch's daughter Dashutka, an ugly
freckled girl of eighteen, was there, too, barefoot as usual, and
wearing the dress in which she had at nightfall taken water to the
cattle.
"Glory to Thee Who hast shown us the light!" Yakov Ivanitch boomed out
in a chant, bowing low.
Aglaia propped her chin on her hand and chanted in a thin, shrill,
drawling voice. And upstairs, above the ceiling, there was the sound of
vague voices which seemed menacing or ominous of evil. No one had lived
on the storey above since a fire there a long time ago. The windows were
boarded up, and empty bottles lay about on the floor between the beams.
Now the wind was banging and droning, and it seemed as though someone
were running and stumbling over the beams.
Half of the lower storey was used as a tavern, while Terehov's family
lived in the other half, so that when drunken visitors were noisy in the
tavern every word they said could be heard in the rooms. Matvey lived in
a room next to the kitchen, with a big stove, in which, in old days,
when this had been a posting inn, bread had been baked every day.
Dashutka, who had no room of her own, lived in the same room behind the
stove. A cricket chirped there always at night and mice ran in and out.
Matvey lighted a candle and began reading a book which he had borrowed
from the station policeman. While he was sitting over it the service
ended, and they all went to bed. Dashutka lay down, too. She began
snoring at once, but soon woke up and said, yawning:
"You shouldn't burn a candle for nothing, Uncle Matvey."
"It's my candle," answered Matvey; "I bought it with my own money."
Dashutka turned over a little and fell asleep again. Matvey sat up a
good time longer--he was not sleepy--and when he had finished the last
page he took a pencil out of a box and wrote on the book:
"I, Matvey Terehov, have read this book, and think it the very best of
all the books I have read, for which I express my gratitude to the non-
commissioned officer of the Police Department of Railways, Kuzma
Nikolaev Zhukov, as the possessor of this priceless book."
He considered it an obligation of politeness to make such inscriptions
in other people's books. II
On Annunciation Day, after the mail train had been sent off, Matvey was
sitting in the refreshment bar, talking and drinking tea with lemon in
it.
The waiter and Zhukov the policeman were listening to him.