the lodge with us, and to keep us company ate five curd fritters and the
wing of a duck. He ate and looked at us. He was touched and delighted by
us all. Whatever silly nonsense my precious tutor talked, and whatever
Tatyana Ivanovna did, he thought charming and delightful. When after
supper Tatyana Ivanovna sat quietly down and took up her knitting, he
kept his eyes fixed on her fingers and chatted away without ceasing.
"Make all the haste you can to live, my friends..." he said. "God forbid
you should sacrifice the present for the future! There is youth, health,
fire in the present; the future is smoke and deception! As soon as you
are twenty begin to live."
Tatyana Ivanovna dropped a knitting-needle. My uncle jumped up, picked
up the needle, and handed it to Tatyana Ivanovna with a bow, and for the
first time in my life I learnt that there were people in the world more
refined than Pobyedimsky.
"Yes..." my uncle went on, "love, marry, do silly things. Foolishness is
a great deal more living and healthy than our straining and striving
after rational life."
My uncle talked a great deal, so much that he bored us; I sat on a box
listening to him and dropping to sleep. It distressed me that he did not
once all the evening pay attention to me. He left the lodge at two
o'clock, when, overcome with drowsiness, I was sound asleep.
From that time forth my uncle took to coming to the lodge every evening.
He sang with us, had supper with us, and always stayed on till two
o'clock in the morning, chatting incessantly, always about the same
subject. His evening and night work was given up, and by the end of
June, when the privy councillor had learned to eat mother's turkey and
compote, his work by day was abandoned too. My uncle tore himself away
from his table and plunged into "life." In the daytime he walked up and
down the garden, he whistled to the workmen and hindered them from
working, making them tell him their various histories. When his eye fell
on Tatyana Ivanovna he ran up to her, and, if she were carrying
anything, offered his assistance, which embarrassed her dreadfully.
As the summer advanced my uncle grew more and more frivolous, volatile,
and careless. Pobyedimsky was completely disillusioned in regard to him.
"He is too one-sided," he said. "There is nothing to show that he is in
the very foremost ranks of the service. And he doesn't even know how to
talk. At every word it's 'upon my soul.' No, I don't like him!"
From the time that my uncle began visiting the lodge there was a
noticeable change both in Fyodor and my tutor. Fyodor gave up going out
shooting, came home early, sat more taciturn than ever, and stared with
particular ill-humour at his wife. In my uncle's presence my tutor gave
up talking about epizootics, frowned, and even laughed sarcastically.
"Here comes our little bantam cock!" he growled on one occasion when my
uncle was coming into the lodge.
I put down this change in them both to their being offended with my
uncle. My absent-minded uncle mixed up their names, and to the very day
of his departure failed to distinguish which was my tutor and which was
Tatyana Ivanovna's husband. Tatyana Ivanovna herself he sometimes called
Nastasya, sometimes Pelagea, and sometimes Yevdokia. Touched and
delighted by us, he laughed and behaved exactly as though in the company
of small children.... All this, of course, might well offend young men.
It was not a case of offended pride, however, but, as I realize now,
subtler feelings.
I remember one evening I was sitting on the box struggling with sleep.
My eyelids felt glued together and my body, tired out by running about
all day, drooped sideways. But I struggled against sleep and tried to
look on. It was about midnight. Tatyana Ivanovna, rosy and unassuming as
always, was sitting at a little table sewing at her husband's shirt.
Fyodor, sullen and gloomy, was staring at her from one corner, and in
the other sat Pobyedimsky, snorting angrily and retreating into the high
collar of his shirt. My uncle was walking up and down the room thinking.
Silence reigned; nothing was to be heard but the rustling of the linen
in Tatyana Ivanovna's hands. Suddenly my uncle stood still before
Tatyana Ivanovna, and said:
"You are all so young, so fresh, so nice, you live so peacefully in this
quiet place, that I envy you. I have become attached to your way of life
here; my heart aches when I remember I have to go away.... You may
believe in my sincerity!"
Sleep closed my eyes and I lost myself. When some sound waked me, my
uncle was standing before Tatyana Ivanovna, looking at her with a
softened expression. His cheeks were flushed.
"My life has been wasted," he said. "I have not lived! Your young face
makes me think of my own lost youth, and I should be ready to sit here
watching you to the day of my death. It would be a pleasure to me to
take you with me to Petersburg."
"What for?" Fyodor asked in a husky voice.
"I should put her under a glass case on my work-table. I should admire
her and show her to other people. You know, Pelagea Ivanovna, we have no
women like you there. Among us there is wealth, distinction, sometimes
beauty, but we have not this true sort of life, this healthy
serenity...."
My uncle sat down facing Tatyana Ivanovna and took her by the hand.
"So you won't come with me to Petersburg?" he laughed. "In that case
give me your little hand.... A charming little hand!... You won't give
it? Come, you miser! let me kiss it, anyway...."
At that moment there was the scrape of a chair. Fyodor jumped up, and
with heavy, measured steps went up to his wife. His face was pale, grey,
and quivering. He brought his fist down on the table with a bang, and
said in a hollow voice:
"I won't allow it!"
At the same moment Pobyedimsky jumped up from his chair. He, too, pale
and angry, went up to Tatyana Ivanovna, and he, too, struck the table
with his fist.
"I... I won't allow it!" he said.
"What, what's the matter?" asked my uncle in surprise.
"I won't allow it!" repeated Fyodor, banging on the table.
My uncle jumped up and blinked nervously. He tried to speak, but in his
amazement and alarm could not utter a word; with an embarrassed smile,
he shuffled out of the lodge with the hurried step of an old man,
leaving his hat behind. When, a little later, my mother ran into the
lodge, Fyodor and Pobyedimsky were still hammering on the table like
blacksmiths and repeating, "I won't allow it!"
"What has happened here?" asked mother. "Why has my brother been taken
ill? What's the matter?"
Looking at Tatyana's pale, frightened face and at her infuriated
husband, mother probably guessed what was the matter. She sighed and
shook her head.
"Come! give over banging on the table!" she said. "Leave off, Fyodor!
And why are you thumping, Yegor Alexyevitch? What have you got to do
with it?"
Pobyedimsky was startled and confused. Fyodor looked intently at him,
then at his wife, and began walking about the room. When mother had gone
out of the lodge, I saw what for long afterwards I looked upon as a
dream. I saw Fyodor seize my tutor, lift him up in the air, and thrust
him out of the door.
When I woke up in the morning my tutor's bed was empty. To my question
where he was nurse told me in a whisper that he had been taken off early
in the morning to the hospital, as his arm was broken. Distressed at
this intelligence and remembering the scene of the previous evening, I
went out of doors. It was a grey day. The sky was covered with storm-
clouds and there was a wind blowing dust, bits of paper, and feathers
along the ground.... It felt as though rain were coming. There was a
look of boredom in the servants and in the animals. When I went into the
house I was told not to make such a noise with my feet, as mother was
ill and in bed with a migraine. What was I to do? I went outside the
gate, sat down on the little bench there, and fell to trying to discover
the meaning of what I had seen and heard the day before. From our gate
there was a road which, passing the forge and the pool which never dried
up, ran into the main road. I looked at the telegraph-posts, about which
clouds of dust were whirling, and at the sleepy birds sitting on the
wires, and I suddenly felt so dreary that I began to cry.
A dusty wagonette crammed full of townspeople, probably going to visit
the shrine, drove by along the main road. The wagonette was hardly out
of sight when a light chaise with a pair of horses came into view. In it
was Akim Nikititch, the police inspector, standing up and holding on to
the coachman's belt. To my great surprise, the chaise turned into our
road and flew by me in at the gate. While I was puzzling why the police
inspector had come to see us, I heard a noise, and a carriage with three
horses came into sight on the road. In the carriage stood the police
captain, directing his coachman towards our gate.
"And why is he coming?" I thought, looking at the dusty police captain.
"Most probably Pobyedimsky has complained of Fyodor to him, and they
have come to take him to prison."
But the mystery was not so easily solved. The police inspector and the
police captain were only the first instalment, for five minutes had
scarcely passed when a coach drove in at our gate. It dashed by me so
swiftly that I could only get a glimpse of a red beard.
Lost in conjecture and full of misgivings, I ran to the house. In the
passage first of all I saw mother; she was pale and looking with horror
towards the door, from which came the sounds of men's voices. The
visitors had taken her by surprise in the very throes of migraine.
"Who has come, mother?" I asked.
"Sister," I heard my uncle's voice, "will you send in something to eat
for the governor and me?"
"It is easy to say 'something to eat,'" whispered my mother, numb with
horror. "What have I time to get ready now? I am put to shame in my old
age!"
Mother clutched at her head and ran into the kitchen. The governor's
sudden visit stirred and overwhelmed the whole household. A ferocious
slaughter followed. A dozen fowls, five turkeys, eight ducks, were
killed, and in the fluster the old gander, the progenitor of our whole
flock of geese and a great favourite of mother's, was beheaded. The
coachmen and the cook seemed frenzied, and slaughtered birds at random,
without distinction of age or breed. For the sake of some wretched sauce
a pair of valuable pigeons, as dear to me as the gander was to mother,
were sacrificed. It was a long while before I could forgive the governor
their death.
In the evening, when the governor and his suite, after a sumptuous
dinner, had got into their carriages and driven away, I went into the
house to look at the remains of the feast. Glancing into the drawing-
room from the passage, I saw my uncle and my mother. My uncle, with his
hands behind his back, was walking nervously up and down close to the
wall, shrugging his shoulders. Mother, exhausted and looking much
thinner, was sitting on the sofa and watching his movements with heavy
eyes.
"Excuse me, sister, but this won't do at all," my uncle grumbled,
wrinkling up his face. "I introduced the governor to you, and you didn't
offer to shake hands. You covered him with confusion, poor fellow! No,
that won't do.... Simplicity is a very good thing, but there must be
limits to it.... Upon my soul! And then that dinner! How can one give
people such things? What was that mess, for instance, that they served
for the fourth course?"
"That was duck with sweet sauce..." mother answered softly.
"Duck! Forgive me, sister, but... but here I've got heartburn! I am
ill!"
My uncle made a sour, tearful face, and went on:
"It was the devil sent that governor! As though I wanted his visit!
Pff!... heartburn! I can't work or sleep... I am completely out of
sorts.... And I can't understand how you can live here without anything
to do... in this boredom! Here I've got a pain coming under my shoulder-
blade!..."
My uncle frowned, and walked about more rapidly than ever.
"Brother," my mother inquired softly, "what would it cost to go abroad?"
"At least three thousand..." my uncle answered in a tearful voice. "I
would go, but where am I to get it? I haven't a farthing. Pff!...
heartburn!"
My uncle stopped to look dejectedly at the grey, overcast prospect from
the window, and began pacing to and fro again.
A silence followed.... Mother looked a long while at the ikon, pondering
something, then she began crying, and said:
"I'll give you the three thousand, brother...."
Three days later the majestic boxes went off to the station, and the
privy councillor drove off after them. As he said good-bye to mother he
shed tears, and it was a long time before he took his lips from her
hands, but when he got into his carriage his face beamed with childlike
pleasure.... Radiant and happy, he settled himself comfortably, kissed
his hand to my mother, who was crying, and all at once his eye was
caught by me. A look of the utmost astonishment came into his face.
"What boy is this?" he asked.
My mother, who had declared my uncle's coming was a piece of luck for
which I must thank God, was bitterly mortified at this question. I was
in no mood for questions. I looked at my uncle's happy face, and for
some reason I felt fearfully sorry for him. I could not resist jumping
up to the carriage and hugging that frivolous man, weak as all men are.
Looking into his face and wanting to say something pleasant, I asked:
"Uncle, have you ever been in a battle?"
"Ah, the dear boy..." laughed my uncle, kissing me. "A charming boy,
upon my soul! How natural, how living it all is, upon my soul!..."
The carriage set off.... I looked after him, and long afterwards that
farewell "upon my soul" was ringing in my ears.
THE MAN IN A CASE
AT the furthest end of the village of Mironositskoe some belated
sportsmen lodged for the night in the elder Prokofy's barn. There were
two of them, the veterinary surgeon Ivan Ivanovitch and the schoolmaster
Burkin. Ivan Ivanovitch had a rather strange double-barrelled
surname--Tchimsha-Himalaisky--which did not suit him at all, and he was
called simply Ivan Ivanovitch all over the province. He lived at a stud-
farm near the town, and had come out shooting now to get a breath of
fresh air. Burkin, the high-school teacher, stayed every summer at Count
P---'s, and had been thoroughly at home in this district for years.
They did not sleep. Ivan Ivanovitch, a tall, lean old fellow with long
moustaches, was sitting outside the door, smoking a pipe in the
moonlight. Burkin was lying within on the hay, and could not be seen in
the darkness.
They were telling each other all sorts of stories. Among other things,
they spoke of the fact that the elder's wife, Mavra, a healthy and by no
means stupid woman, had never been beyond her native village, had never
seen a town nor a railway in her life, and had spent the last ten years
sitting behind the stove, and only at night going out into the street.
"What is there wonderful in that!" said Burkin. "There are plenty of
people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to retreat into
their shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps it is an instance of
atavism, a return to the period when the ancestor of man was not yet a
social animal and lived alone in his den, or perhaps it is only one of
the diversities of human character--who knows? I am not a natural science
man, and it is not my business to settle such questions; I only mean to
say that people like Mavra are not uncommon. There is no need to look
far; two months ago a man called Byelikov, a colleague of mine, the
Greek master, died in our town. You have heard of him, no doubt. He was
remarkable for always wearing goloshes and a warm wadded coat, and
carrying an umbrella even in the very finest weather. And his umbrella
was in a case, and his watch was in a case made of grey chamois leather,
and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, his penknife,
too, was in a little case; and his face seemed to be in a case too,
because he always hid it in his turned-up collar. He wore dark
spectacles and flannel vests, stuffed up his ears with cotton-wool, and
when he got into a cab always told the driver to put up the hood. In
short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap
himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would
isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated
him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to
justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the
past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which
he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he
sheltered himself from real life.
"'Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful is the Greek language!' he would say,
with a sugary expression; and as though to prove his words he would
screw up his eyes and, raising his finger, would pronounce 'Anthropos!'
"And Byelikov tried to hide his thoughts also in a case. The only things
that were clear to his mind were government circulars and newspaper
articles in which something was forbidden. When some proclamation
prohibited the boys from going out in the streets after nine o'clock in
the evening, or some article declared carnal love unlawful, it was to
his mind clear and definite; it was forbidden, and that was enough. For
him there was always a doubtful element, something vague and not fully
expressed, in any sanction or permission. When a dramatic club or a
reading-room or a tea-shop was licensed in the town, he would shake his
head and say softly:
"It is all right, of course; it is all very nice, but I hope it won't
lead to anything!"
"Every sort of breach of order, deviation or departure from rule,
depressed him, though one would have thought it was no business of his.
If one of his colleagues was late for church or if rumours reached him
of some prank of the high-school boys, or one of the mistresses was seen
late in the evening in the company of an officer, he was much disturbed,
and said he hoped that nothing would come of it. At the teachers'
meetings he simply oppressed us with his caution, his circumspection,
and his characteristic reflection on the ill-behaviour of the young
people in both male and female high-schools, the uproar in the classes.
"Oh, he hoped it would not reach the ears of the authorities; oh, he
hoped nothing would come of it; and he thought it would be a very good
thing if Petrov were expelled from the second class and Yegorov from the
fourth. And, do you know, by his sighs, his despondency, his black
spectacles on his pale little face, a little face like a pole-cat's, you
know, he crushed us all, and we gave way, reduced Petrov's and Yegorov's
marks for conduct, kept them in, and in the end expelled them both. He
had a strange habit of visiting our lodgings. He would come to a
teacher's, would sit down, and remain silent, as though he were
carefully inspecting something. He would sit like this in silence for an
hour or two and then go away. This he called 'maintaining good relations
with his colleagues'; and it was obvious that coming to see us and
sitting there was tiresome to him, and that he came to see us simply
because he considered it his duty as our colleague. We teachers were
afraid of him. And even the headmaster was afraid of him. Would you
believe it, our teachers were all intellectual, right-minded people,
brought up on Turgenev and Shtchedrin, yet this little chap, who always
went about with goloshes and an umbrella, had the whole high-school
under his thumb for fifteen long years! High-school, indeed--he had the
whole town under his thumb! Our ladies did not get up private
theatricals on Saturdays for fear he should hear of it, and the clergy
dared not eat meat or play cards in his presence. Under the influence of
people like Byelikov we have got into the way of being afraid of
everything in our town for the last ten or fifteen years. They are
afraid to speak aloud, afraid to send letters, afraid to make
acquaintances, afraid to read books, afraid to help the poor, to teach
people to read and write...."
Ivan Ivanovitch cleared his throat, meaning to say something, but first
lighted his pipe, gazed at the moon, and then said, with pauses:
"Yes, intellectual, right minded people read Shtchedrin and Turgenev,
Buckle, and all the rest of them, yet they knocked under and put up with
it... that's just how it is."
"Byelikov lived in the same house as I did," Burkin went on, "on the
same storey, his door facing mine; we often saw each other, and I knew
how he lived when he was at home. And at home it was the same story:
dressing-gown, nightcap, blinds, bolts, a perfect succession of
prohibitions and restrictions of all sorts, and--'Oh, I hope nothing will
come of it!' Lenten fare was bad for him, yet he could not eat meat, as
people might perhaps say Byelikov did not keep the fasts, and he ate
freshwater fish with butter--not a Lenten dish, yet one could not say
that it was meat. He did not keep a female servant for fear people might
think evil of him, but had as cook an old man of sixty, called Afanasy,
half-witted and given to tippling, who had once been an officer's
servant and could cook after a fashion. This Afanasy was usually
standing at the door with his arms folded; with a deep sigh, he would
mutter always the same thing:
"'There are plenty of them about nowadays!'
"Byelikov had a little bedroom like a box; his bed had curtains. When he
went to bed he covered his head over; it was hot and stuffy; the wind
battered on the closed doors; there was a droning noise in the stove and
a sound of sighs from the kitchen--ominous sighs.... And he felt
frightened under the bed-clothes. He was afraid that something might
happen, that Afanasy might murder him, that thieves might break in, and
so he had troubled dreams all night, and in the morning, when we went
together to the high-school, he was depressed and pale, and it was
evident that the high-school full of people excited dread and aversion
in his whole being, and that to walk beside me was irksome to a man of
his solitary temperament.
"'They make a great noise in our classes,' he used to say, as though
trying to find an explanation for his depression. 'It's beyond
anything.'
"And the Greek master, this man in a case--would you believe it?--almost
got married."
Ivan Ivanovitch glanced quickly into the barn, and said:
"You are joking!"
"Yes, strange as it seems, he almost got married. A new teacher of
history and geography, Milhail Savvitch Kovalenko, a Little Russian, was
appointed. He came, not alone, but with his sister Varinka. He was a
tall, dark young man with huge hands, and one could see from his face
that he had a bass voice, and, in fact, he had a voice that seemed to
come out of a barrel--'boom, boom, boom!' And she was not so young, about
thirty, but she, too, was tall, well-made, with black eyebrows and red
cheeks--in fact, she was a regular sugar-plum, and so sprightly, so
noisy; she was always singing Little Russian songs and laughing. For the
least thing she would go off into a ringing laugh--'Ha-ha-ha!' We made
our first thorough acquaintance with the Kovalenkos at the headmaster's
name-day party. Among the glum and intensely bored teachers who came
even to the name-day party as a duty we suddenly saw a new Aphrodite
risen from the waves; she walked with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang,
danced.... She sang with feeling 'The Winds do Blow,' then another song,
and another, and she fascinated us all--all, even Byelikov. He sat down
by her and said with a honeyed smile:
"'The Little Russian reminds one of the ancient Greek in its softness
and agreeable resonance.'
"That flattered her, and she began telling him with feeling and
earnestness that they had a farm in the Gadyatchsky district, and that
her mamma lived at the farm, and that they had such pears, such melons,
such kabaks! The Little Russians call pumpkins kabaks (i.e., pothouses),
while their pothouses they call shinki, and they make a beetroot soup
with tomatoes and aubergines in it, 'which was so nice--awfully nice!'
"We listened and listened, and suddenly the same idea dawned upon us
all:
"'It would be a good thing to make a match of it,' the headmaster's wife
said to me softly.