heavy rolled on to Marya Vassilyevna's feet--it was her parcel of
purchases. There was a steep ascent uphill through the clay; here in the
winding ditches rivulets were gurgling. The water seemed to have gnawed
away the road; and how could one get along here! The horses breathed
hard. Hanov got out of his carriage and walked at the side of the road
in his long overcoat. He was hot.
"What a road!" he said, and laughed again. "It would soon smash up one's
carriage."
"Nobody obliges you to drive about in such weather," said Semyon
surlily. "You should stay at home."
"I am dull at home, grandfather. I don't like staying at home."
Beside old Semyon he looked graceful and vigorous, but yet in his walk
there was something just perceptible which betrayed in him a being
already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin. And all at once
there was a whiff of spirits in the wood. Marya Vassilyevna was filled
with dread and pity for this man going to his ruin for no visible cause
or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or
sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin.
His wife! Life was so ordered that here he was living in his great house
alone, and she was living in a God-forsaken village alone, and yet for
some reason the mere thought that he and she might be close to one
another and equals seemed impossible and absurd. In reality, life was
arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all
understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's
heart sank.
"And it is beyond all understanding," she thought, "why God gives
beauty, this graciousness, and sad, sweet eyes to weak, unlucky, useless
people--why they are so charming."
"Here we must turn off to the right," said Hanov, getting into his
carriage. "Good-by! I wish you all things good!"
And again she thought of her pupils, of the examination, of the
watchman, of the School Council; and when the wind brought the sound of
the retreating carriage these thoughts were mingled with others. She
longed to think of beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness which would
never be....
His wife? It was cold in the morning, there was no one to heat the
stove, the watchman disappeared; the children came in as soon as it was
light, bringing in snow and mud and making a noise: it was all so
inconvenient, so comfortless. Her abode consisted of one little room and
the kitchen close by. Her head ached every day after her work, and after
dinner she had heart-burn. She had to collect money from the school-
children for wood and for the watchman, and to give it to the school
guardian, and then to entreat him--that overfed, insolent peasant--for
God's sake to send her wood. And at night she dreamed of examinations,
peasants, snowdrifts. And this life was making her grow old and coarse,
making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she were made of lead.
She was always afraid, and she would get up from her seat and not
venture to sit down in the presence of a member of the Zemstvo or the
school guardian. And she used formal, deferential expressions when she
spoke of any one of them. And no one thought her attractive, and life
was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy,
without interesting acquaintances. How awful it would have been in her
position if she had fallen in love!
"Hold on, Vassilyevna!"
Again a sharp ascent uphill....
She had become a schoolmistress from necessity, without feeling any
vocation for it; and she had never thought of a vocation, of serving the
cause of enlightenment; and it always seemed to her that what was most
important in her work was not the children, nor enlightenment, but the
examinations. And what time had she for thinking of vocation, of serving
the cause of enlightenment? Teachers, badly paid doctors, and their
assistants, with their terribly hard work, have not even the comfort of
thinking that they are serving an idea or the people, as their heads are
always stuffed with thoughts of their daily bread, of wood for the fire,
of bad roads, of illnesses. It is a hard-working, an uninteresting life,
and only silent, patient cart-horses like Mary Vassilyevna could put up
with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked
about vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up
the work.
Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a meadow,
then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place the peasants
would not let them pass, in another it was the priest's land and they
could not cross it, in another Ivan Ionov had bought a plot from the
landowner and had dug a ditch round it. They kept having to turn back.
They reached Nizhneye Gorodistche. Near the tavern on the dung-strewn
earth, where the snow was still lying, there stood wagons that had
brought great bottles of crude sulphuric acid. There were a great many
people in the tavern, all drivers, and there was a smell of vodka,
tobacco, and sheepskins. There was a loud noise of conversation and the
banging of the swing-door. Through the wall, without ceasing for a
moment, came the sound of a concertina being played in the shop. Marya
Vassilyevna sat down and drank some tea, while at the next table
peasants were drinking vodka and beer, perspiring from the tea they had
just swallowed and the stifling fumes of the tavern.
"I say, Kuzma!" voices kept shouting in confusion. "What there!" "The
Lord bless us!" "Ivan Dementyitch, I can tell you that!" "Look out, old
man!"
A little pock-marked man with a black beard, who was quite drunk, was
suddenly surprised by something and began using bad language.
"What are you swearing at, you there?" Semyon, who was sitting some way
off, responded angrily. "Don't you see the young lady?"
"The young lady!" someone mimicked in another corner.
"Swinish crow!"
"We meant nothing..." said the little man in confusion. "I beg your
pardon. We pay with our money and the young lady with hers. Good-
morning!"
"Good-morning," answered the schoolmistress.
"And we thank you most feelingly."
Marya Vassilyevna drank her tea with satisfaction, and she, too, began
turning red like the peasants, and fell to thinking again about
firewood, about the watchman....
"Stay, old man," she heard from the next table, "it's the schoolmistress
from Vyazovye.... We know her; she's a good young lady."
"She's all right!"
The swing-door was continually banging, some coming in, others going
out. Marya Vassilyevna sat on, thinking all the time of the same things,
while the concertina went on playing and playing. The patches of
sunshine had been on the floor, then they passed to the counter, to the
wall, and disappeared altogether; so by the sun it was past midday. The
peasants at the next table were getting ready to go. The little man,
somewhat unsteadily, went up to Marya Vassilyevna and held out his hand
to her; following his example, the others shook hands, too, at parting,
and went out one after another, and the swing-door squeaked and slammed
nine times.
"Vassilyevna, get ready," Semyon called to her.
They set off. And again they went at a walking pace.
"A little while back they were building a school here in their Nizhneye
Gorodistche," said Semyon, turning round. "It was a wicked thing that
was done!"
"Why, what?"
"They say the president put a thousand in his pocket, and the school
guardian another thousand in his, and the teacher five hundred."
"The whole school only cost a thousand. It's wrong to slander people,
grandfather. That's all nonsense."
"I don't know,... I only tell you what folks say."
But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The
peasants did not believe her. They always thought she received too large
a salary, twenty-one roubles a month (five would have been enough), and
that of the money that she collected from the children for the firewood
and the watchman the greater part she kept for herself. The guardian
thought the same as the peasants, and he himself made a profit off the
firewood and received payments from the peasants for being a
guardian--without the knowledge of the authorities.
The forest, thank God! was behind them, and now it would be flat, open
ground all the way to Vyazovye, and there was not far to go now. They
had to cross the river and then the railway line, and then Vyazovye was
in sight.
"Where are you driving?" Marya Vassilyevna asked Semyon. "Take the road
to the right to the bridge."
"Why, we can go this way as well. It's not deep enough to matter."
"Mind you don't drown the horse."
"What?"
"Look, Hanov is driving to the bridge," said Marya Vassilyevna, seeing
the four horses far away to the right. "It is he, I think."
"It is. So he didn't find Bakvist at home. What a pig-headed fellow he
is. Lord have mercy upon us! He's driven over there, and what for? It's
fully two miles nearer this way."
They reached the river. In the summer it was a little stream easily
crossed by wading. It usually dried up in August, but now, after the
spring floods, it was a river forty feet in breadth, rapid, muddy, and
cold; on the bank and right up to the water there were fresh tracks of
wheels, so it had been crossed here.
"Go on!" shouted Semyon angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the
reins and jerking his elbows as a bird does its wings. "Go on!"
The horse went on into the water up to his belly and stopped, but at
once went on again with an effort, and Marya Vassilyevna was aware of a
keen chilliness in her feet.
"Go on!" she, too, shouted, getting up. "Go on!"
They got out on the bank.
"Nice mess it is, Lord have mercy upon us!" muttered Semyon, setting
straight the harness. "It's a perfect plague with this Zemstvo...."
Her shoes and goloshes were full of water, the lower part of her dress
and of her coat and one sleeve were wet and dripping: the sugar and
flour had got wet, and that was worst of all, and Marya Vassilyevna
could only clasp her hands in despair and say:
"Oh, Semyon, Semyon! How tiresome you are really!..."
The barrier was down at the railway crossing. A train was coming out of
the station. Marya Vassilyevna stood at the crossing waiting till it
should pass, and shivering all over with cold. Vyazovye was in sight
now, and the school with the green roof, and the church with its crosses
flashing in the evening sun: and the station windows flashed too, and a
pink smoke rose from the engine... and it seemed to her that everything
was trembling with cold.
Here was the train; the windows reflected the gleaming light like the
crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. On the
little platform between two first-class carriages a lady was standing,
and Marya Vassilyevna glanced at her as she passed. Her mother! What a
resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a
brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first
time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture
of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the
aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard
the sound of the piano, her father's voice; she felt as she had been
then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her
own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she
pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstacy, and called softly,
beseechingly:
"Mother!"
And she began crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov
drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined
happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an
equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her
triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on
the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a
schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had
awakened....
"Vassilyevna, get in!"
And at once it all vanished. The barrier was slowly raised. Marya
Vassilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart. The
carriage with the four horses crossed the railway line; Semyon followed
it. The signalman took off his cap.
"And here is Vyazovye. Here we are."
A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
A MEDICAL student called Mayer, and a pupil of the Moscow School of
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture called Rybnikov, went one evening
to see their friend Vassilyev, a law student, and suggested that he
should go with them to S. Street. For a long time Vassilyev would not
consent to go, but in the end he put on his greatcoat and went with
them.
He knew nothing of fallen women except by hearsay and from books, and he
had never in his life been in the houses in which they live. He knew
that there are immoral women who, under the pressure of fatal
circumstances--environment, bad education, poverty, and so on--are forced
to sell their honor for money. They know nothing of pure love, have no
children, have no civil rights; their mothers and sisters weep over them
as though they were dead, science treats of them as an evil, men address
them with contemptuous familiarity. But in spite of all that, they do
not lose the semblance and image of God. They all acknowledge their sin
and hope for salvation. Of the means that lead to salvation they can
avail themselves to the fullest extent. Society, it is true, will not
forgive people their past, but in the sight of God St. Mary of Egypt is
no lower than the other saints. When it had happened to Vassilyev in the
street to recognize a fallen woman as such, by her dress or her manners,
or to see a picture of one in a comic paper, he always remembered a
story he had once read: a young man, pure and self-sacrificing, loves a
fallen woman and urges her to become his wife; she, considering herself
unworthy of such happiness, takes poison.
Vassilyev lived in one of the side streets turning out of Tverskoy
Boulevard. When he came out of the house with his two friends it was
about eleven o'clock. The first snow had not long fallen, and all nature
was under the spell of the fresh snow. There was the smell of snow in
the air, the snow crunched softly under the feet; the earth, the roofs,
the trees, the seats on the boulevard, everything was soft, white,
young, and this made the houses look quite different from the day
before; the street lamps burned more brightly, the air was more
transparent, the carriages rumbled with a deeper note, and with the
fresh, light, frosty air a feeling stirred in the soul akin to the
white, youthful, feathery snow. "Against my will an unknown force,"
hummed the medical student in his agreeable tenor, "has led me to these
mournful shores."
"Behold the mill..." the artist seconded him, "in ruins now...."
"Behold the mill... in ruins now," the medical student repeated, raising
his eyebrows and shaking his head mournfully.
He paused, rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the words, and then
sang aloud, so well that passers-by looked round:
"Here in old days when I was free, Love, free, unfettered, greeted me."
The three of them went into a restaurant and, without taking off their
greatcoats, drank a couple of glasses of vodka each. Before drinking the
second glass, Vassilyev noticed a bit of cork in his vodka, raised the
glass to his eyes, and gazed into it for a long time, screwing up his
shortsighted eyes. The medical student did not understand his
expression, and said:
"Come, why look at it? No philosophizing, please. Vodka is given us to
be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked
upon. For one evening anyway live like a human being!"
"But I haven't said anything..." said Vassilyev, laughing. "Am I
refusing to?"
There was a warmth inside him from the vodka. He looked with softened
feelings at his friends, admired them and envied them. In these strong,
healthy, cheerful people how wonderfully balanced everything is, how
finished and smooth is everything in their minds and souls! They sing,
and have a passion for the theatre, and draw, and talk a great deal, and
drink, and they don't have headaches the day after; they are both
poetical and debauched, both soft and hard; they can work, too, and be
indignant, and laugh without reason, and talk nonsense; they are warm,
honest, self-sacrificing, and as men are in no way inferior to himself,
Vassilyev, who watched over every step he took and every word he
uttered, who was fastidious and cautious, and ready to raise every
trifle to the level of a problem. And he longed for one evening to live
as his friends did, to open out, to let himself loose from his own
control. If vodka had to be drunk, he would drink it, though his head
would be splitting next morning. If he were taken to the women he would
go. He would laugh, play the fool, gaily respond to the passing advances
of strangers in the street....
He went out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends--one in a
crushed broad-brimmed hat, with an affectation of artistic untidiness;
the other in a sealskin cap, a man not poor, though he affected to
belong to the Bohemia of learning. He liked the snow, the pale street
lamps, the sharp black tracks left in the first snow by the feet of the
passers-by. He liked the air, and especially that limpid, tender, naive,
as it were virginal tone, which can be seen in nature only twice in the
year--when everything is covered with snow, and in spring on bright days
and moonlight evenings when the ice breaks on the river.
"Against my will an unknown force, Has led me to these mournful shores,"
he hummed in an undertone.
And the tune for some reason haunted him and his friends all the way,
and all three of them hummed it mechanically, not in time with one
another.
Vassilyev's imagination was picturing how, in another ten minutes, he
and his friends would knock at a door; how by little dark passages and
dark rooms they would steal in to the women; how, taking advantage of
the darkness, he would strike a match, would light up and see the face
of a martyr and a guilty smile. The unknown, fair or dark, would
certainly have her hair down and be wearing a white dressing-jacket; she
would be panic-stricken by the light, would be fearfully confused, and
would say: "For God's sake, what are you doing! Put it out!" It would
all be dreadful, but interesting and new.
The friends turned out of Trubnoy Square into Gratchevka, and soon
reached the side street which Vassilyev only knew by reputation. Seeing
two rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide-open doors,
and hearing gay strains of pianos and violins, sounds which floated out
from every door and mingled in a strange chaos, as though an unseen
orchestra were tuning up in the darkness above the roofs, Vassilyev was
surprised and said:
"What a lot of houses!"
"That's nothing," said the medical student. "In London there are ten
times as many. There are about a hundred thousand such women there."
The cabmen were sitting on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as in
any other side street; the same passers-by were walking along the
pavement as in other streets. No one was hurrying, no one was hiding his
face in his coat-collar, no one shook his head reproachfully.... And in
this indifference to the noisy chaos of pianos and violins, to the
bright windows and wide-open doors, there was a feeling of something
very open, insolent, reckless, and devil-may-care. Probably it was as
gay and noisy at the slave-markets in their day, and people's faces and
movements showed the same indifference.
"Let us begin from the beginning," said the artist.
The friends went into a narrow passage lighted by a lamp with a
reflector. When they opened the door a man in a black coat, with an
unshaven face like a flunkey's, and sleepy-looking eyes, got up lazily
from a yellow sofa in the hall. The place smelt like a laundry with an
odor of vinegar in addition. A door from the hall led into a brightly
lighted room. The medical student and the artist stopped at this door
and, craning their necks, peeped into the room.
"Buona sera, signori, rigolleto--hugenotti--traviata!" began the artist,
with a theatrical bow.
"Havanna--tarakano--pistoleto!" said the medical student, pressing his cap
to his breast and bowing low.
Vassilyev was standing behind them. He would have liked to make a
theatrical bow and say something silly, too, but he only smiled, felt an
awkwardness that was like shame, and waited impatiently for what would
happen next.
A little fair girl of seventeen or eighteen, with short hair, in a short
light-blue frock with a bunch of white ribbon on her bosom, appeared in
the doorway.
"Why do you stand at the door?" she said. "Take off your coats and come
into the drawing-room."
The medical student and the artist, still talking Italian, went into the
drawing-room. Vassilyev followed them irresolutely.
"Gentlemen, take off your coats!" the flunkey said sternly; "you can't
go in like that."
In the drawing-room there was, besides the girl, another woman, very
stout and tall, with a foreign face and bare arms. She was sitting near
the piano, laying out a game of patience on her lap. She took no notice
whatever of the visitors.
"Where are the other young ladies?" asked the medical student.
"They are having their tea," said the fair girl. "Stepan," she called,
"go and tell the young ladies some students have come!"
A little later a third young lady came into the room. She was wearing a
bright red dress with blue stripes. Her face was painted thickly and
unskillfully, her brow was hidden under her hair, and there was an
unblinking, frightened stare in her eyes. As she came in, she began at
once singing some song in a coarse, powerful contralto. After her a
fourth appeared, and after her a fifth....
In all this Vassilyev saw nothing new or interesting. It seemed to him
that that room, the piano, the looking-glass in its cheap gilt frame,
the bunch of white ribbon, the dress with the blue stripes, and the
blank indifferent faces, he had seen before and more than once. Of the
darkness, the silence, the secrecy, the guilty smile, of all that he had
expected to meet here and had dreaded, he saw no trace.
Everything was ordinary, prosaic, and uninteresting. Only one thing
faintly stirred his curiosity--the terrible, as it were intentionally
designed, bad taste which was visible in the cornices, in the absurd
pictures, in the dresses, in the bunch of ribbons. There was something
characteristic and peculiar in this bad taste.
"How poor and stupid it all is!" thought Vassilyev. "What is there in
all this trumpery I see now that can tempt a normal man and excite him
to commit the horrible sin of buying a human being for a rouble? I
understand any sin for the sake of splendor, beauty, grace, passion,
taste; but what is there here? What is there here worth sinning for?
But... one mustn't think!"
"Beardy, treat me to some porter!" said the fair girl, addressing him.
Vassilyev was at once overcome with confusion.
"With pleasure," he said, bowing politely. "Only excuse me, madam, I....
I won't drink with you. I don't drink."
Five minutes later the friends went off into another house.
"Why did you ask for porter?" said the medical student angrily. "What a
millionaire! You have thrown away six roubles for no reason
whatever--simply waste!"
"If she wants it, why not let her have the pleasure?" said Vassilyev,
justifying himself.
"You did not give pleasure to her, but to the 'Madam.' They are told to
ask the visitors to stand them treat because it is a profit to the
keeper."
"Behold the mill..." hummed the artist, "in ruins now...."