or simply that a window with the inscription "Telegraph!" on it catches
his eye, he goes to the window and expresses a desire to send off a
telegram. Taking up a pen, he thinks for a moment, and writes on a blue
form: "Urgent. Traffic Manager. Eight vans of live stock. Delayed at
every station. Kindly send an express number. Reply paid. Malahin."
Having sent off the telegram, he goes back to the station-master's room.
There he finds, sitting on a sofa covered with gray cloth, a benevolent-
looking gentleman in spectacles and a cap of raccoon fur; he is wearing
a peculiar overcoat very much like a lady's, edged with fur, with frogs
and slashed sleeves. Another gentleman, dried-up and sinewy, wearing the
uniform of a railway inspector, stands facing him.
"Just think of it," says the inspector, addressing the gentleman in the
queer overcoat. "I'll tell you an incident that really is A1! The Z.
railway line in the coolest possible way stole three hundred trucks from
the N. line. It's a fact, sir! I swear it! They carried them off,
repainted them, put their letters on them, and that's all about it. The
N. line sends its agents everywhere, they hunt and hunt. And then--can
you imagine it?--the Company happen to come upon a broken-down carriage
of the Z. line. They repair it at their depot, and all at once, bless my
soul! see their own mark on the wheels What do you say to that? Eh? If I
did it they would send me to Siberia, but the railway companies simply
snap their fingers at it!"
It is pleasant to Malahin to talk to educated, cultured people. He
strokes his beard and joins in the conversation with dignity.
"Take this case, gentlemen, for instance," he says. "I am transporting
cattle to X. Eight vanloads. Very good.... Now let us say they charge me
for each vanload as a weight of ten tons; eight bullocks don't weigh ten
tons, but much less, yet they don't take any notice of that...."
At that instant Yasha walks into the room looking for his father. He
listens and is about to sit down on a chair, but probably thinking of
his weight goes and sits on the window-sill.
"They don't take any notice of that," Malahin goes on, "and charge me
and my son the third-class fare, too, forty-two roubles, for going in
the van with the bullocks. This is my son Yakov. I have two more at
home, but they have gone in for study. Well and apart from that it is my
opinion that the railways have ruined the cattle trade. In old days when
they drove them in herds it was better."
The old man's talk is lengthy and drawn out. After every sentence he
looks at Yasha as though he would say: "See how I am talking to clever
people."
"Upon my word!" the inspector interrupts him. "No one is indignant, no
one criticizes. And why? It is very simple. An abomination strikes the
eye and arouses indignation only when it is exceptional, when the
established order is broken by it. Here, where, saving your presence, it
constitutes the long-established program and forms and enters into the
basis of the order itself, where every sleeper on the line bears the
trace of it and stinks of it, one too easily grows accustomed to it!
Yes, sir!"
The second bell rings, the gentlemen in the queer overcoat gets up. The
inspector takes him by the arm and, still talking with heat, goes off
with him to the platform. After the third bell the station-master runs
into his room, and sits down at his table.
"Listen, with what number am I to go?" asks Malahin.
The station-master looks at a form and says indignantly:
"Are you Malahin, eight vanloads? You must pay a rouble a van and six
roubles and twenty kopecks for stamps. You have no stamps. Total,
fourteen roubles, twenty kopecks."
Receiving the money, he writes something down, dries it with sand, and,
hurriedly snatching up a bundle of forms, goes quickly out of the room.
At ten o'clock in the evening Malahin gets an answer from the traffic
manager: "Give precedence."
Reading the telegram through, the old man winks significantly and, very
well pleased with himself, puts it in his pocket.
"Here," he says to Yasha, "look and learn."
At midnight his train goes on. The night is dark and cold like the
previous one; the waits at the stations are long. Yasha sits on the cape
and imperturbably strums on the accordion, while the old man is still
more eager to exert himself. At one of the stations he is overtaken by a
desire to lodge a complaint. At his request a gendarme sits down and
writes:
"November 10, 188-.--I, non-commissioned officer of the Z. section of the
N. police department of railways, Ilya Tchered, in accordance with
article II of the statute of May 19, 1871, have drawn up this protocol
at the station of X. as herewith follows.... "
"What am I to write next?" asks the gendarme.
Malahin lays out before him forms, postal and telegraph receipts,
accounts.... He does not know himself definitely what he wants of the
gendarme; he wants to describe in the protocol not any separate episode
but his whole journey, with all his losses and conversations with
station-masters--to describe it lengthily and vindictively.
"At the station of Z.," he says, "write that the station-master
unlinked my vans from the troop train because he did not like my
countenance."
And he wants the gendarme to be sure to mention his countenance. The
latter listens wearily, and goes on writing without hearing him to the
end. He ends his protocol thus:
"The above deposition I, non-commissioned officer Tchered, have written
down in this protocol with a view to present it to the head of the Z.
section, and have handed a copy thereof to Gavril Malahin."
The old man takes the copy, adds it to the papers with which his side
pocket is stuffed, and, much pleased, goes back to his van.
In the morning Malahin wakes up again in a bad humor, but his wrath
vents itself not on Yasha but the cattle.
"The cattle are done for!" he grumbles. "They are done for! They are at
the last gasp! God be my judge! they will all die. Tfoo!"
The bullocks, who have had nothing to drink for many days, tortured by
thirst, are licking the hoar frost on the walls, and when Malachin goes
up to them they begin licking his cold fur jacket. From their clear,
tearful eyes it can be seen that they are exhausted by thirst and the
jolting of the train, that they are hungry and miserable.
"It's a nice job taking you by rail, you wretched brutes!" mutters
Malahin. "I could wish you were dead to get it over! It makes me sick to
look at you!"
At midday the train stops at a big station where, according to the
regulations, there was drinking water provided for cattle.
Water is given to the cattle, but the bullocks will not drink it: the
water is too cold....
Two more days and nights pass, and at last in the distance in the murky
fog the city comes into sight. The journey is over. The train comes to a
standstill before reaching the town, near a goods' station. The
bullocks, released from the van, stagger and stumble as though they were
walking on slippery ice.
Having got through the unloading and veterinary inspection, Malahin and
Yasha take up their quarters in a dirty, cheap hotel in the outskirts of
the town, in the square in which the cattle-market is held. Their
lodgings are filthy and their food is disgusting, unlike what they ever
have at home; they sleep to the harsh strains of a wretched steam hurdy-
gurdy which plays day and night in the restaurant under their lodging.
The old man spends his time from morning till night going about looking
for purchasers, and Yasha sits for days in the hotel room, or goes out
into the street to look at the town. He sees the filthy square heaped up
with dung, the signboards of restaurants, the turreted walls of a
monastery in the fog. Sometimes he runs across the street and looks into
the grocer's shop, admires the jars of cakes of different colors, yawns,
and lazily saunters back to his room. The city does not interest him.
At last the bullocks are sold to a dealer. Malahin hires drovers. The
cattle are divided into herds, ten in each, and driven to the other end
of the town. The bullocks, exhausted, go with drooping heads through the
noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and
last time in their lives. The tattered drovers walk after them, their
heads drooping too. They are bored.... Now and then some drover starts
out of his brooding, remembers that there are cattle in front of him
intrusted to his charge, and to show that he is doing his duty brings a
stick down full swing on a bullock's back. The bullock staggers with the
pain, runs forward a dozen paces, and looks about him as though he were
ashamed at being beaten before people.
After selling the bullocks and buying for his family presents such as
they could perfectly well have bought at home, Malahin and Yasha get
ready for their journey back. Three hours before the train goes the old
man, who has already had a drop too much with the purchaser and so is
fussy, goes down with Yasha to the restaurant and sits down to drink
tea. Like all provincials, he cannot eat and drink alone: he must have
company as fussy and as fond of sedate conversation as himself.
"Call the host!" he says to the waiter; "tell him I should like to
entertain him."
The hotel-keeper, a well-fed man, absolutely indifferent to his lodgers,
comes and sits down to the table.
"Well, we have sold our stock," Malahin says, laughing. "I have swapped
my goat for a hawk. Why, when we set off the price of meat was three
roubles ninety kopecks, but when we arrived it had dropped to three
roubles twenty-five. They tell us we are too late, we should have been
here three days earlier, for now there is not the same demand for meat,
St. Philip's fast has come.... Eh? It's a nice how-do-you-do! It meant a
loss of fourteen roubles on each bullock. Yes. But only think what it
costs to bring the stock! Fifteen roubles carriage, and you must put
down six roubles for each bullock, tips, bribes, drinks, and one thing
and another...."
The hotel-keeper listens out of politeness and reluctantly drinks tea.
Malahin sighs and groans, gesticulates, jests about his ill-luck, but
everything shows that the loss he has sustained does not trouble him
much. He doesn't mind whether he has lost or gained as long as he has
listeners, has something to make a fuss about, and is not late for his
train.
An hour later Malahin and Yasha, laden with bags and boxes, go
downstairs from the hotel room to the front door to get into a sledge
and drive to the station. They are seen off by the hotel-keeper, the
waiter, and various women. The old man is touched. He thrusts ten-kopeck
pieces in all directions, and says in a sing-song voice:
"Good by, good health to you! God grant that all may be well with you.
Please God if we are alive and well we shall come again in Lent. Good-
by. Thank you. God bless you!"
Getting into the sledge, the old man spends a long time crossing himself
in the direction in which the monastery walls make a patch of darkness
in the fog. Yasha sits beside him on the very edge of the seat with his
legs hanging over the side. His face as before shows no sign of emotion
and expresses neither boredom nor desire. He is not glad that he is
going home, nor sorry that he has not had time to see the sights of the
city.
"Drive on!"
The cabman whips up the horse and, turning round, begins swearing at the
heavy and cumbersome luggage.
* On many railway lines, in order to avoid accidents, it is against the
regulations to carry hay on the trains, and so live stock are without
fodder on the journey.--Author's Note.
**The train destined especially for the transport of troops is called
the troop train; when there are no troops it takes goods, and goes more
rapidly than ordinary goods train. --Author's Note.
SORROW
THE turner, Grigory Petrov, who had been known for years past as a
splendid craftsman, and at the same time as the most senseless peasant
in the Galtchinskoy district, was taking his old woman to the hospital.
He had to drive over twenty miles, and it was an awful road. A
government post driver could hardly have coped with it, much less an
incompetent sluggard like Grigory. A cutting cold wind was blowing
straight in his face. Clouds of snowflakes were whirling round and round
in all directions, so that one could not tell whether the snow was
falling from the sky or rising from the earth. The fields, the telegraph
posts, and the forest could not be seen for the fog of snow. And when a
particularly violent gust of wind swooped down on Grigory, even the yoke
above the horse's head could not be seen. The wretched, feeble little
nag crawled slowly along. It took all its strength to drag its legs out
of the snow and to tug with its head. The turner was in a hurry. He kept
restlessly hopping up and down on the front seat and lashing the horse's
back.
"Don't cry, Matryona,..." he muttered. "Have a little patience. Please
God we shall reach the hospital, and in a trice it will be the right
thing for you.... Pavel Ivanitch will give you some little drops, or
tell them to bleed you; or maybe his honor will be pleased to rub you
with some sort of spirit--it'll... draw it out of your side. Pavel
Ivanitch will do his best. He will shout and stamp about, but he will do
his best.... He is a nice gentleman, affable, God give him health! As
soon as we get there he will dart out of his room and will begin calling
me names. 'How? Why so?' he will cry. 'Why did you not come at the right
time? I am not a dog to be hanging about waiting on you devils all day.
Why did you not come in the morning? Go away! Get out of my sight. Come
again to-morrow.' And I shall say: 'Mr. Doctor! Pavel Ivanitch! Your
honor!' Get on, do! plague take you, you devil! Get on!"
The turner lashed his nag, and without looking at the old woman went on
muttering to himself:
"'Your honor! It's true as before God.... Here's the Cross for you, I
set off almost before it was light. How could I be here in time if the
Lord.... The Mother of God... is wroth, and has sent such a snowstorm?
Kindly look for yourself.... Even a first-rate horse could not do it,
while mine--you can see for yourself--is not a horse but a disgrace.' And
Pavel Ivanitch will frown and shout: 'We know you! You always find some
excuse! Especially you, Grishka; I know you of old! I'll be bound you
have stopped at half a dozen taverns!' And I shall say: 'Your honor! am
I a criminal or a heathen? My old woman is giving up her soul to God,
she is dying, and am I going to run from tavern to tavern! What an idea,
upon my word! Plague take them, the taverns!' Then Pavel Ivanitch will
order you to be taken into the hospital, and I shall fall at his
feet.... 'Pavel Ivanitch! Your honor, we thank you most humbly! Forgive
us fools and anathemas, don't be hard on us peasants! We deserve a good
kicking, while you graciously put yourself out and mess your feet in the
snow!' And Pavel Ivanitch will give me a look as though he would like to
hit me, and will say: 'You'd much better not be swilling vodka, you
fool, but taking pity on your old woman instead of falling at my feet.
You want a thrashing!' 'You are right there--a thrashing, Pavel Ivanitch,
strike me God! But how can we help bowing down at your feet if you are
our benefactor, and a real father to us? Your honor! I give you my
word,... here as before God,... you may spit in my face if I deceive
you: as soon as my Matryona, this same here, is well again and restored
to her natural condition, I'll make anything for your honor that you
would like to order! A cigarette-case, if you like, of the best
birchwood,... balls for croquet, skittles of the most foreign pattern I
can turn.... I will make anything for you! I won't take a farthing from
you. In Moscow they would charge you four roubles for such a cigarette-
case, but I won't take a farthing.' The doctor will laugh and say: 'Oh,
all right, all right.... I see! But it's a pity you are a drunkard....'
I know how to manage the gentry, old girl. There isn't a gentleman I
couldn't talk to. Only God grant we don't get off the road. Oh, how it
is blowing! One's eyes are full of snow."
And the turner went on muttering endlessly. He prattled on mechanically
to get a little relief from his depressing feelings. He had plenty of
words on his tongue, but the thoughts and questions in his brain were
even more numerous. Sorrow had come upon the turner unawares, unlooked-
for, and unexpected, and now he could not get over it, could not recover
himself. He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though in drunken
half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he was
suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler and
drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man,
weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even struggling with nature.
The turner remembered that his trouble had begun the evening before.
When he had come home yesterday evening, a little drunk as usual, and
from long-established habit had begun swearing and shaking his fists,
his old woman had looked at her rowdy spouse as she had never looked at
him before. Usually, the expression in her aged eyes was that of a
martyr, meek like that of a dog frequently beaten and badly fed; this
time she had looked at him sternly and immovably, as saints in the holy
pictures or dying people look. From that strange, evil look in her eyes
the trouble had begun. The turner, stupefied with amazement, borrowed a
horse from a neighbor, and now was taking his old woman to the hospital
in the hope that, by means of powders and ointments, Pavel Ivanitch
would bring back his old woman's habitual expression.
"I say, Matryona,..." the turner muttered, "if Pavel Ivanitch asks you
whether I beat you, say, 'Never!' and I never will beat you again. I
swear it. And did I ever beat you out of spite? I just beat you without
thinking. I am sorry for you. Some men wouldn't trouble, but here I am
taking you.... I am doing my best. And the way it snows, the way it
snows! Thy Will be done, O Lord! God grant we don't get off the road....
Does your side ache, Matryona, that you don't speak? I ask you, does
your side ache?"
It struck him as strange that the snow on his old woman's face was not
melting; it was queer that the face itself looked somehow drawn, and had
turned a pale gray, dingy waxen hue and had grown grave and solemn.
"You are a fool!" muttered the turner.... "I tell you on my conscience,
before God,... and you go and... Well, you are a fool! I have a good
mind not to take you to Pavel Ivanitch!"
The turner let the reins go and began thinking. He could not bring
himself to look round at his old woman: he was frightened. He was
afraid, too, of asking her a question and not getting an answer. At
last, to make an end of uncertainty, without looking round he felt his
old woman's cold hand. The lifted hand fell like a log.
"She is dead, then! What a business!"
And the turner cried. He was not so much sorry as annoyed. He thought
how quickly everything passes in this world! His trouble had hardly
begun when the final catastrophe had happened. He had not had time to
live with his old woman, to show her he was sorry for her before she
died. He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had
passed by as it were in a fog. What with drunkenness, quarreling, and
poverty, there had been no feeling of life. And, as though to spite him,
his old woman died at the very time when he felt he was sorry for her,
that he could not live without her, and that he had behaved dreadfully
badly to her.
"Why, she used to go the round of the village," he remembered. "I sent
her out myself to beg for bread. What a business! She ought to have
lived another ten years, the silly thing; as it is I'll be bound she
thinks I really was that sort of man.... Holy Mother! but where the
devil am I driving? There's no need for a doctor now, but a burial. Turn
back!"
Grigory turned back and lashed the horse with all his might. The road
grew worse and worse every hour. Now he could not see the yoke at all.
Now and then the sledge ran into a young fir tree, a dark object
scratched the turner's hands and flashed before his eyes, and the field
of vision was white and whirling again.
"To live over again," thought the turner.
He remembered that forty years ago Matryona had been young, handsome,
merry, that she had come of a well-to-do family. They had married her to
him because they had been attracted by his handicraft. All the
essentials for a happy life had been there, but the trouble was that,
just as he had got drunk after the wedding and lay sprawling on the
stove, so he had gone on without waking up till now. His wedding he
remembered, but of what happened after the wedding--for the life of him
he could remember nothing, except perhaps that he had drunk, lain on the
stove, and quarreled. Forty years had been wasted like that.
The white clouds of snow were beginning little by little to turn gray.
It was getting dusk.
"Where am I going?" the turner suddenly bethought him with a start. "I
ought to be thinking of the burial, and I am on the way to the
hospital.... It as is though I had gone crazy."
Grigory turned round again, and again lashed his horse. The little nag
strained its utmost and, with a snort, fell into a little trot. The
turner lashed it on the back time after time.... A knocking was audible
behind him, and though he did not look round, he knew it was the dead
woman's head knocking against the sledge. And the snow kept turning
darker and darker, the wind grew colder and more cutting....
"To live over again!" thought the turner. "I should get a new lathe,
take orders,... give the money to my old woman...."
And then he dropped the reins. He looked for them, tried to pick them
up, but could not--his hands would not work....
"It does not matter," he thought, "the horse will go of itself, it knows
the way. I might have a little sleep now.... Before the funeral or the
requiem it would be as well to get a little rest...."
The turner closed his eyes and dozed. A little later he heard the horse
stop; he opened his eyes and saw before him something dark like a hut or
a haystack....
He would have got out of the sledge and found out what it was, but he
felt overcome by such inertia that it seemed better to freeze than move,
and he sank into a peaceful sleep.
He woke up in a big room with painted walls. Bright sunlight was
streaming in at the windows. The turner saw people facing him, and his
first feeling was a desire to show himself a respectable man who knew
how things should be done.
"A requiem, brothers, for my old woman," he said. "The priest should be
told...."
"Oh, all right, all right; lie down," a voice cut him short.
"Pavel Ivanitch!" the turner cried in surprise, seeing the doctor before
him. "Your honor, benefactor!"
He wanted to leap up and fall on his knees before the doctor, but felt
that his arms and legs would not obey him.
"Your honor, where are my legs, where are my arms!"
"Say good-by to your arms and legs.... They've been frozen off. Come,
come!... What are you crying for? You've lived your life, and thank God
for it! I suppose you have had sixty years of it--that's enough for
you!..."
"I am grieving.... Graciously forgive me! If I could have another five
or six years!..."
"What for?"
"The horse isn't mine, I must give it back.... I must bury my old
woman.... How quickly it is all ended in this world! Your honor, Pavel
Ivanitch! A cigarette-case of birchwood of the best! I'll turn you
croquet balls...."
The doctor went out of the ward with a wave of his hand. It was all over
with the turner.
ON OFFICIAL DUTY
THE deputy examining magistrate and the district doctor were going to an
inquest in the village of Syrnya. On the road they were overtaken by a
snowstorm; they spent a long time going round and round, and arrived,
not at midday, as they had intended, but in the evening when it was
dark. They put up for the night at the Zemstvo hut. It so happened that
it was in this hut that the dead body was lying--the corpse of the
Zemstvo insurance agent, Lesnitsky, who had arrived in Syrnya three days
before and, ordering the samovar in the hut, had shot himself, to the
great surprise of everyone; and the fact that he had ended his life so
strangely, after unpacking his eatables and laying them out on the
table, and with the samovar before him, led many people to suspect that
it was a case of murder; an inquest was necessary.
In the outer room the doctor and the examining magistrate shook the snow
off themselves and knocked it off their boots. And meanwhile the old
village constable, Ilya Loshadin, stood by, holding a little tin lamp.
There was a strong smell of paraffin.
"Who are you?" asked the doctor.
"Conshtable,..." answered the constable.