and there on the window-frames sap was oozing out of the wood from the
heat; red ladybirds were huddling together in the streaks of shadow
under the steps and under the shutters. The sun was baking me on my
head, on my chest, and on my back, but I did not notice it, and was
conscious only of the thud of bare feet on the uneven floor in the
passage and in the rooms behind me. After clearing away the tea-things,
Masha ran down the steps, fluttering the air as she passed, and like a
bird flew into a little grimy outhouse--I suppose the kitchen--from which
came the smell of roast mutton and the sound of angry talk in Armenian.
She vanished into the dark doorway, and in her place there appeared on
the threshold an old bent, red-faced Armenian woman wearing green
trousers. The old woman was angry and was scolding someone. Soon
afterwards Masha appeared in the doorway, flushed with the heat of the
kitchen and carrying a big black loaf on her shoulder; swaying
gracefully under the weight of the bread, she ran across the yard to the
threshing-floor, darted over the hurdle, and, wrapt in a cloud of golden
chaff, vanished behind the carts. The Little Russian who was driving the
horses lowered his whip, sank into silence, and gazed for a minute in
the direction of the carts. Then when the Armenian girl darted again by
the horses and leaped over the hurdle, he followed her with his eyes,
and shouted to the horses in a tone as though he were greatly
disappointed:
"Plague take you, unclean devils!"
And all the while I was unceasingly hearing her bare feet, and seeing
how she walked across the yard with a grave, preoccupied face. She ran
now down the steps, swishing the air about me, now into the kitchen, now
to the threshing-floor, now through the gate, and I could hardly turn my
head quickly enough to watch her.
And the oftener she fluttered by me with her beauty, the more acute
became my sadness. I felt sorry both for her and for myself and for the
Little Russian, who mournfully watched her every time she ran through
the cloud of chaff to the carts. Whether it was envy of her beauty, or
that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be, or
that I was a stranger to her; or whether I vaguely felt that her rare
beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and, like everything on earth, of
short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar
feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real beauty, God
only knows.
The three hours of waiting passed unnoticed. It seemed to me that I had
not had time to look properly at Masha when Karpo drove up to the river,
bathed the horse, and began to put it in the shafts. The wet horse
snorted with pleasure and kicked his hoofs against the shafts. Karpo
shouted to it: "Ba--ack!" My grandfather woke up. Masha opened the
creaking gates for us, we got into the chaise and drove out of the yard.
We drove in silence as though we were angry with one another.
When, two or three hours later, Rostov and Nahitchevan appeared in the
distance, Karpo, who had been silent the whole time, looked round
quickly, and said:
"A fine wench, that at the Armenian's."
And he lashed his horses.
II
Another time, after I had become a student, I was traveling by rail to
the south. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe it was between
Byelgorod and Harkov, I got out of the tram to walk about the platform.
The shades of evening were already lying on the station garden, on the
platform, and on the fields; the station screened off the sunset, but on
the topmost clouds of smoke from the engine, which were tinged with rosy
light, one could see the sun had not yet quite vanished.
As I walked up and down the platform I noticed that the greater number
of the passengers were standing or walking near a second-class
compartment, and that they looked as though some celebrated person were
in that compartment. Among the curious whom I met near this compartment
I saw, however, an artillery officer who had been my fellow-traveler, an
intelligent, cordial, and sympathetic fellow--as people mostly are whom
we meet on our travels by chance and with whom we are not long
acquainted.
"What are you looking at there?" I asked.
He made no answer, but only indicated with his eyes a feminine figure.
It was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, wearing a Russian dress,
with her head bare and a little shawl flung carelessly on one shoulder;
not a passenger, but I suppose a sister or daughter of the station-
master. She was standing near the carriage window, talking to an elderly
woman who was in the train. Before I had time to realize what I was
seeing, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling I had once experienced
in the Armenian village.
The girl was remarkably beautiful, and that was unmistakable to me and
to those who were looking at her as I was.
If one is to describe her appearance feature by feature, as the practice
is, the only really lovely thing was her thick wavy fair hair, which
hung loose with a black ribbon tied round her head; all the other
features were either irregular or very ordinary. Either from a peculiar
form of coquettishness, or from short-sightedness, her eyes were screwed
up, her nose had an undecided tilt, her mouth was small, her profile was
feebly and insipidly drawn, her shoulders were narrow and undeveloped
for her age--and yet the girl made the impression of being really
beautiful, and looking at her, I was able to feel convinced that the
Russian face does not need strict regularity in order to be lovely; what
is more, that if instead of her turn-up nose the girl had been given a
different one, correct and plastically irreproachable like the Armenian
girl's, I fancy her face would have lost all its charm from the change.
Standing at the window talking, the girl, shrugging at the evening damp,
continually looking round at us, at one moment put her arms akimbo, at
the next raised her hands to her head to straighten her hair, talked,
laughed, while her face at one moment wore an expression of wonder, the
next of horror, and I don't remember a moment when her face and body
were at rest. The whole secret and magic of her beauty lay just in these
tiny, infinitely elegant movements, in her smile, in the play of her
face, in her rapid glances at us, in the combination of the subtle grace
of her movements with her youth, her freshness, the purity of her soul
that sounded in her laugh and voice, and with the weakness we love so
much in children, in birds, in fawns, and in young trees.
It was that butterfly's beauty so in keeping with waltzing, darting
about the garden, laughter and gaiety, and incongruous with serious
thought, grief, and repose; and it seemed as though a gust of wind
blowing over the platform, or a fall of rain, would be enough to wither
the fragile body and scatter the capricious beauty like the pollen of a
flower.
"So--o!..." the officer muttered with a sigh when, after the second bell,
we went back to our compartment.
And what that "So--o" meant I will not undertake to decide.
Perhaps he was sad, and did not want to go away from the beauty and the
spring evening into the stuffy train; or perhaps he, like me, was
unaccountably sorry for the beauty, for himself, and for me, and for all
the passengers, who were listlessly and reluctantly sauntering back to
their compartments. As we passed the station window, at which a pale,
red-haired telegraphist with upstanding curls and a faded, broad-cheeked
face was sitting beside his apparatus, the officer heaved a sigh and
said:
"I bet that telegraphist is in love with that pretty girl. To live out
in the wilds under one roof with that ethereal creature and not fall in
love is beyond the power of man. And what a calamity, my friend! what an
ironical fate, to be stooping, unkempt, gray, a decent fellow and not a
fool, and to be in love with that pretty, stupid little girl who would
never take a scrap of notice of you! Or worse still: imagine that
telegraphist is in love, and at the same time married, and that his wife
is as stooping, as unkempt, and as decent a person as himself."
On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was standing
with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of the
beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face,
exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look
of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw
happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though
he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not
his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and
his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as
far away as heaven....
The third bell rang, the whistles sounded, and the train slowly moved
off. First the guard, the station-master, then the garden, the beautiful
girl with her exquisitely sly smile, passed before our windows....
Putting my head out and looking back, I saw how, looking after the
train, she walked along the platform by the window where the telegraph
clerk was sitting, smoothed her hair, and ran into the garden. The
station no longer screened off the sunset, the plain lay open before us,
but the sun had already set and the smoke lay in black clouds over the
green, velvety young corn. It was melancholy in the spring air, and in
the darkening sky, and in the railway carriage.
The familiar figure of the guard came into the carriage, and he began
lighting the candles.
THE SHOEMAKER AND THE DEVIL
IT was Christmas Eve. Marya had long been snoring on the stove; all the
paraffin in the little lamp had burnt out, but Fyodor Nilov still sat at
work. He would long ago have flung aside his work and gone out into the
street, but a customer from Kolokolny Lane, who had a fortnight before
ordered some boots, had been in the previous day, had abused him
roundly, and had ordered him to finish the boots at once before the
morning service.
"It's a convict's life!" Fyodor grumbled as he worked. "Some people have
been asleep long ago, others are enjoying themselves, while you sit here
like some Cain and sew for the devil knows whom...."
To save himself from accidentally falling asleep, he kept taking a
bottle from under the table and drinking out of it, and after every pull
at it he twisted his head and said aloud:
"What is the reason, kindly tell me, that customers enjoy themselves
while I am forced to sit and work for them? Because they have money and
I am a beggar?"
He hated all his customers, especially the one who lived in Kolokolny
Lane. He was a gentleman of gloomy appearance, with long hair, a yellow
face, blue spectacles, and a husky voice. He had a German name which one
could not pronounce. It was impossible to tell what was his calling and
what he did. When, a fortnight before, Fyodor had gone to take his
measure, he, the customer, was sitting on the floor pounding something
in a mortar. Before Fyodor had time to say good-morning the contents of
the mortar suddenly flared up and burned with a bright red flame; there
was a stink of sulphur and burnt feathers, and the room was filled with
a thick pink smoke, so that Fyodor sneezed five times; and as he
returned home afterwards, he thought: "Anyone who feared God would not
have anything to do with things like that."
When there was nothing left in the bottle Fyodor put the boots on the
table and sank into thought. He leaned his heavy head on his fist and
began thinking of his poverty, of his hard life with no glimmer of light
in it. Then he thought of the rich, of their big houses and their
carriages, of their hundred-rouble notes.... How nice it would be if the
houses of these rich men--the devil flay them!--were smashed, if their
horses died, if their fur coats and sable caps got shabby! How splendid
it would be if the rich, little by little, changed into beggars having
nothing, and he, a poor shoemaker, were to become rich, and were to lord
it over some other poor shoemaker on Christmas Eve.
Dreaming like this, Fyodor suddenly thought of his work, and opened his
eyes.
"Here's a go," he thought, looking at the boots. "The job has been
finished ever so long ago, and I go on sitting here. I must take the
boots to the gentleman."
He wrapped up the work in a red handkerchief, put on his things, and
went out into the street. A fine hard snow was falling, pricking the
face as though with needles. It was cold, slippery, dark, the gas-lamps
burned dimly, and for some reason there was a smell of paraffin in the
street, so that Fyodor coughed and cleared his throat. Rich men were
driving to and fro on the road, and every rich man had a ham and a
bottle of vodka in his hands. Rich young ladies peeped at Fyodor out of
the carriages and sledges, put out their tongues and shouted, laughing:
"Beggar! Beggar!"
Students, officers, and merchants walked behind Fyodor, jeering at him
and crying:
"Drunkard! Drunkard! Infidel cobbler! Soul of a boot-leg! Beggar!"
All this was insulting, but Fyodor held his tongue and only spat in
disgust. But when Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw, a master-bootmaker, met
him and said: "I've married a rich woman and I have men working under
me, while you are a beggar and have nothing to eat," Fyodor could not
refrain from running after him. He pursued him till he found himself in
Kolokolny Lane. His customer lived in the fourth house from the corner
on the very top floor. To reach him one had to go through a long, dark
courtyard, and then to climb up a very high slippery stair-case which
tottered under one's feet. When Fyodor went in to him he was sitting on
the floor pounding something in a mortar, just as he had been the
fortnight before.
"Your honor, I have brought your boots," said Fyodor sullenly.
The customer got up and began trying on the boots in silence. Desiring
to help him, Fyodor went down on one knee and pulled off his old, boot,
but at once jumped up and staggered towards the door in horror. The
customer had not a foot, but a hoof like a horse's.
"Aha!" thought Fyodor; "here's a go!"
The first thing should have been to cross himself, then to leave
everything and run downstairs; but he immediately reflected that he was
meeting a devil for the first and probably the last time, and not to
take advantage of his services would be foolish. He controlled himself
and determined to try his luck. Clasping his hands behind him to avoid
making the sign of the cross, he coughed respectfully and began:
"They say that there is nothing on earth more evil and impure than the
devil, but I am of the opinion, your honor, that the devil is highly
educated. He has--excuse my saying it--hoofs and a tail behind, but he has
more brains than many a student."
"I like you for what you say," said the devil, flattered. "Thank you,
shoemaker! What do you want?"
And without loss of time the shoemaker began complaining of his lot. He
began by saying that from his childhood up he had envied the rich. He
had always resented it that all people did not live alike in big houses
and drive with good horses. Why, he asked, was he poor? How was he worse
than Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw, who had his own house, and whose wife
wore a hat? He had the same sort of nose, the same hands, feet, head,
and back, as the rich, and so why was he forced to work when others were
enjoying themselves? Why was he married to Marya and not to a lady
smelling of scent? He had often seen beautiful young ladies in the
houses of rich customers, but they either took no notice of him
whatever, or else sometimes laughed and whispered to each other: "What a
red nose that shoemaker has!" It was true that Marya was a good, kind,
hard-working woman, but she was not educated; her hand was heavy and hit
hard, and if one had occasion to speak of politics or anything
intellectual before her, she would put her spoke in and talk the most
awful nonsense.
"What do you want, then?" his customer interrupted him.
"I beg you, your honor Satan Ivanitch, to be graciously pleased to make
me a rich man."
"Certainly. Only for that you must give me up your soul! Before the
cocks crow, go and sign on this paper here that you give me up your
soul."
"Your honor," said Fyodor politely, "when you ordered a pair of boots
from me I did not ask for the money in advance. One has first to carry
out the order and then ask for payment."
"Oh, very well!" the customer assented.
A bright flame suddenly flared up in the mortar, a pink thick smoke came
puffing out, and there was a smell of burnt feathers and sulphur. When
the smoke had subsided, Fyodor rubbed his eyes and saw that he was no
longer Fyodor, no longer a shoemaker, but quite a different man, wearing
a waistcoat and a watch-chain, in a new pair of trousers, and that he
was sitting in an armchair at a big table. Two foot men were handing him
dishes, bowing low and saying:
"Kindly eat, your honor, and may it do you good!"
What wealth! The footmen handed him a big piece of roast mutton and a
dish of cucumbers, and then brought in a frying-pan a roast goose, and a
little afterwards boiled pork with horse-radish cream. And how
dignified, how genteel it all was! Fyodor ate, and before each dish
drank a big glass of excellent vodka, like some general or some count.
After the pork he was handed some boiled grain moistened with goose fat,
then an omelette with bacon fat, then fried liver, and he went on eating
and was delighted. What more? They served, too, a pie with onion and
steamed turnip with kvass.
"How is it the gentry don't burst with such meals?" he thought.
In conclusion they handed him a big pot of honey. After dinner the devil
appeared in blue spectacles and asked with a low bow:
"Are you satisfied with your dinner, Fyodor Pantelyeitch?"
But Fyodor could not answer one word, he was so stuffed after his
dinner. The feeling of repletion was unpleasant, oppressive, and to
distract his thoughts he looked at the boot on his left foot.
"For a boot like that I used not to take less than seven and a half
roubles. What shoemaker made it?" he asked.
"Kuzma Lebyodkin," answered the footman.
"Send for him, the fool!"
Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw soon made his appearance. He stopped in a
respectful attitude at the door and asked:
"What are your orders, your honor?"
"Hold your tongue!" cried Fyodor, and stamped his foot. "Don't dare to
argue; remember your place as a cobbler! Blockhead! You don't know how
to make boots! I'll beat your ugly phiz to a jelly! Why have you come?"
"For money."
"What money? Be off! Come on Saturday! Boy, give him a cuff!"
But he at once recalled what a life the customers used to lead him, too,
and he felt heavy at heart, and to distract his attention he took a fat
pocketbook out of his pocket and began counting his money. There was a
great deal of money, but Fyodor wanted more still. The devil in the blue
spectacles brought him another notebook fatter still, but he wanted even
more; and the more he counted it, the more discontented he became.
In the evening the evil one brought him a full-bosomed lady in a red
dress, and said that this was his new wife. He spent the whole evening
kissing her and eating gingerbreads, and at night he went to bed on a
soft, downy feather-bed, turned from side to side, and could not go to
sleep. He felt uncanny.
"We have a great deal of money," he said to his wife; "we must look out
or thieves will be breaking in. You had better go and look with a
candle."
He did not sleep all night, and kept getting up to see if his box was
all right. In the morning he had to go to church to matins. In church
the same honor is done to rich and poor alike. When Fyodor was poor he
used to pray in church like this: "God, forgive me, a sinner!" He said
the same thing now though he had become rich. What difference was there?
And after death Fyodor rich would not be buried in gold, not in
diamonds, but in the same black earth as the poorest beggar. Fyodor
would burn in the same fire as cobblers. Fyodor resented all this, and,
too, he felt weighed down all over by his dinner, and instead of prayer
he had all sorts of thoughts in his head about his box of money, about
thieves, about his bartered, ruined soul.
He came out of church in a bad temper. To drive away his unpleasant
thoughts as he had often done before, he struck up a song at the top of
his voice. But as soon as he began a policeman ran up and said, with his
fingers to the peak of his cap:
"Your honor, gentlefolk must not sing in the street! You are not a
shoemaker!"
Fyodor leaned his back against a fence and fell to thinking: what could
he do to amuse himself?
"Your honor," a porter shouted to him, "don't lean against the fence,
you will spoil your fur coat!"
Fyodor went into a shop and bought himself the very best concertina,
then went out into the street playing it. Everybody pointed at him and
laughed.
"And a gentleman, too," the cabmen jeered at him; "like some
cobbler...."
"Is it the proper thing for gentlefolk to be disorderly in the street?"
a policeman said to him. "You had better go into a tavern!"
"Your honor, give us a trifle, for Christ's sake," the beggars wailed,
surrounding Fyodor on all sides.
In earlier days when he was a shoemaker the beggars took no notice of
him, now they wouldn't let him pass.
And at home his new wife, the lady, was waiting for him, dressed in a
green blouse and a red skirt. He meant to be attentive to her, and had
just lifted his arm to give her a good clout on the back, but she said
angrily:
"Peasant! Ignorant lout! You don't know how to behave with ladies! If
you love me you will kiss my hand; I don't allow you to beat me."
"This is a blasted existence!" thought Fyodor. "People do lead a life!
You mustn't sing, you mustn't play the concertina, you mustn't have a
lark with a lady.... Pfoo!"
He had no sooner sat down to tea with the lady when the evil spirit in
the blue spectacles appeared and said:
"Come, Fyodor Pantelyeitch, I have performed my part of the bargain. Now
sign your paper and come along with me!"
And he dragged Fyodor to hell, straight to the furnace, and devils flew
up from all directions and shouted:
"Fool! Blockhead! Ass!"
There was a fearful smell of paraffin in hell, enough to suffocate one.
And suddenly it all vanished. Fyodor opened his eyes and saw his table,
the boots, and the tin lamp. The lamp-glass was black, and from the
faint light on the wick came clouds of stinking smoke as from a chimney.
Near the table stood the customer in the blue spectacles, shouting
angrily:
"Fool! Blockhead! Ass! I'll give you a lesson, you scoundrel! You took
the order a fortnight ago and the boots aren't ready yet! Do you suppose
I want to come trapesing round here half a dozen times a day for my
boots? You wretch! you brute!"
Fyodor shook his head and set to work on the boots. The customer went on
swearing and threatening him for a long time. At last when he subsided,
Fyodor asked sullenly:
"And what is your occupation, sir?"
"I make Bengal lights and fireworks. I am a pyrotechnician."
They began ringing for matins. Fyodor gave the customer the boots, took
the money for them, and went to church.
Carriages and sledges with bearskin rugs were dashing to and fro in the
street; merchants, ladies, officers were walking along the pavement
together with the humbler folk.... But Fyodor did not envy them nor
repine at his lot. It seemed to him now that rich and poor were equally
badly off. Some were able to drive in a carriage, and others to sing
songs at the top of their voice and to play the concertina, but one and
the same thing, the same grave, was awaiting all alike, and there was
nothing in life for which one would give the devil even a tiny scrap of
one's soul.
The Wife and Other Stories
THE WIFE I
I RECEIVED the following letter:
"DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREITCH!
"Not far from you--that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo--very
distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which I feel it my
duty to write to you. All the peasants of that village sold their
cottages and all their belongings, and set off for the province of
Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there, and have come back. Here,
of course, they have nothing now; everything belongs to other people.
They have settled three or four families in a hut, so that there are no
less than fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the
young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing to
eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of hunger, or
spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The doctor's assistant
says one goes into a cottage and what does one see? Every one is sick,
every one delirious, some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy;
there is no one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and
nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor)
and his lady assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need
bread which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them,
on the ground that their names have been taken off the register of this
district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and,
besides, the Zemstvo has no money.
"Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg you not
to refuse immediate help.
"Your well-wisher."
Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal name* or
his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants go on for years
growing more and more convinced every day that they can do nothing, and
yet continue to receive their salaries from people who are living upon
frozen potatoes, and consider they have a right to judge whether I am
humane or not.
*Sobol in Russian means "sable-marten."--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.