big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in
silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in arm-chairs; and
Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was walking about the drawing-
room, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry
clothes, and light shoes; and when lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly
on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray--only then
Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story, and it seemed as though not only
Burkin and Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and old,
and the officers who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from their
gold frames.
"There are two of us brothers," he began--"I, Ivan Ivanovitch, and my
brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years younger. I went in for a learned
profession and became a veterinary surgeon, while Nikolay sat in a
government office from the time he was nineteen. Our father, Tchimsha-
Himalaisky, was a kantonist, but he rose to be an officer and left us a
little estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the little
estate went in debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had spent our
childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children, we passed
our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after horses,
stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on.... And, you know,
whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the migrating of
the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks over the
village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and will
have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother was
miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on
sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking
of one and the same thing--how to get into the country. And this yearning
by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself
a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake.
"He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I
never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of
his life in a little farm of his own. It's the correct thing to say that
a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a
corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our
intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm,
it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of
earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life,
to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm--it's not life, it's egoism,
laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good
works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole
globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.
"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he
would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a
savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit
for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the
forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were his
delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading
newspapers, too, but the only things he read in them were the
advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for
sale. And his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit,
starling cotes, the carp in the pond, and all that sort of thing, you
know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds according to the
advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every one of
them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a
homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.
"'Country life has its conveniences,' he would sometimes say. 'You sit
on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond,
there is a delicious smell everywhere, and... and the gooseberries are
growing.'
"He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were the
same things--(a) house for the family, (b) servants' quarters, (c)
kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived parsimoniously, was
frugal in food and drink, his clothes were beyond description; he looked
like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. He grew
fearfully avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give
him something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he
used to save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no
doing anything with him.
"Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was over
forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and
saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of
buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an elderly and ugly
widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had filthy
lucre. He went on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short
of food, while he put her money in the bank in his name.
"Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was
accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second husband
she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine away with this
sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God. And I
need hardly say that my brother never for one moment imagined that he
was responsible for her death. Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In
our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of
honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so
that no one might get the benefit of it. While I was inspecting cattle
at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had his
leg cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was
flowing--it was a horrible thing--and he kept asking them to look for his
leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty roubles in the
boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would be
lost."
"That's a story from a different opera," said Burkin.
"After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for
half a minute, "my brother began looking out for an estate for himself.
Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a
mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed
of. My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate of
three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family, with
servants' quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no gooseberry-
bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the
colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a
brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay
Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes,
planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.
"Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what
it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate 'Tchumbaroklov
Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached 'alias Himalaiskoe' in the
afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges,
fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the
yard, where to put one's horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a
fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too
lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and
she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after
dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a
quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks,
his nose, and his mouth all stuck out--he looked as though he might begin
grunting into the quilt at any moment.
"We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the
thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and
near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to show me the estate.
"'Well, how are you getting on here?' I asked.
"'Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.'
"He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a gentleman.
He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked it. He
ate a great deal, went to the bath-house, was growing stout, was already
at law with the village commune and both factories, and was very much
offended when the peasants did not call him 'Your Honour.' And he
concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial,
gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with
an air of consequence. And what deeds of charity! He treated the
peasants for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his
name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the village, and
then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka--he thought that was the
thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka! One day the fat
landowner hauls the peasants up before the district captain for
trespass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to a gallon
of vodka, and they drink and shout 'Hurrah!' and when they are drunk bow
down to his feet. A change of life for the better, and being well-fed
and idle develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay
Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid to have
any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth,
and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister. 'Education is
essential, but for the peasants it is premature.' 'Corporal punishment
is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is
nothing to take its place.'
"'I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,' he would say.
'The peasants like me. I need only to hold up my little finger and the
peasants will do anything I like.'
"And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He
repeated twenty times over 'We noblemen,' 'I as a noble'; obviously he
did not remember that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father a
soldier. Even our surname Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so
incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and very
agreeable.
"But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell you about
the change that took place in me during the brief hours I spent at his
country place. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put
on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, but his
own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were
planted. Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence
at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for
excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with
the triumph of a child who has at last received his favourite toy, and
said:
"'How delicious!'
"And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, 'Ah, how delicious! Do
taste them!'
"They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:
"'Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts Than hosts of baser truths.'
"I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously fulfilled, who
had attained his object in life, who had gained what he wanted, who was
satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason,
an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and,
on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an
oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly
oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my
brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept
getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I
reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a
suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of
the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible
poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness,
hypocrisy, lying.... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in
the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one
who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see
the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by
night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old,
serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we
do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on
somewhere behind the scenes.... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and
nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their
minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from
malnutrition.... And this order of things is evidently necessary;
evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear
their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be
impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind
the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer
continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that
however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later,
trouble will come for him--disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see
or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no
man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily
cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree--and all goes
well.
"That night I realized that I, too, was happy and contented," Ivan
Ivanovitch went on, getting up. "I, too, at dinner and at the hunt liked
to lay down the law on life and religion, and the way to manage the
peasantry. I, too, used to say that science was light, that culture was
essential, but for the simple people reading and writing was enough for
the time. Freedom is a blessing, I used to say; we can no more do
without it than without air, but we must wait a little. Yes, I used to
talk like that, and now I ask, 'For what reason are we to wait?'" asked
Ivan Ivanovitch, looking angrily at Burkin. "Why wait, I ask you? What
grounds have we for waiting? I shall be told, it can't be done all at
once; every idea takes shape in life gradually, in its due time. But who
is it says that? Where is the proof that it's right? You will fall back
upon the natural order of things, the uniformity of phenomena; but is
there order and uniformity in the fact that I, a living, thinking man,
stand over a chasm and wait for it to close of itself, or to fill up
with mud at the very time when perhaps I might leap over it or build a
bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till
there's no strength to live? And meanwhile one must live, and one wants
to live!
"I went away from my brother's early in the morning, and ever since then
it has been unbearable for me to be in town. I am oppressed by its peace
and quiet; I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is no spectacle
more painful to me now than the sight of a happy family sitting round
the table drinking tea. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am
not even capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated
and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas, and I
cannot sleep.... Ah, if I were young!"
Ivan Ivanovitch walked backwards and forwards in excitement, and
repeated: "If I were young!"
He suddenly went up to Alehin and began pressing first one of his hands
and then the other.
"Pavel Konstantinovitch," he said in an imploring voice, "don't be calm
and contented, don't let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young,
strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing! There is no happiness,
and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in
life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something
greater and more rational. Do good!"
And all this Ivan Ivanovitch said with a pitiful, imploring smile, as
though he were asking him a personal favour.
Then all three sat in arm-chairs at different ends of the drawing-room
and were silent. Ivan Ivanovitch's story had not satisfied either Burkin
or Alehin. When the generals and ladies gazed down from their gilt
frames, looking in the dusk as though they were alive, it was dreary to
listen to the story of the poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt
inclined, for some reason, to talk about elegant people, about women.
And their sitting in the drawing-room where everything--the chandeliers
in their covers, the arm-chairs, and the carpet under their
feet--reminded them that those very people who were now looking down from
their frames had once moved about, sat, drunk tea in this room, and the
fact that lovely Pelagea was moving noiselessly about was better than
any story.
Alehin was fearfully sleepy; he had got up early, before three o'clock
in the morning, to look after his work, and now his eyes were closing;
but he was afraid his visitors might tell some interesting story after
he had gone, and he lingered on. He did not go into the question whether
what Ivan Ivanovitch had just said was right and true. His visitors did
not talk of groats, nor of hay, nor of tar, but of something that had no
direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.
"It's bed-time, though," said Burkin, getting up. "Allow me to wish you
good-night."
Alehin said good-night and went downstairs to his own domain, while the
visitors remained upstairs. They were both taken for the night to a big
room where there stood two old wooden beds decorated with carvings, and
in the corner was an ivory crucifix. The big cool beds, which had been
made by the lovely Pelagea, smelt agreeably of clean linen.
Ivan Ivanovitch undressed in silence and got into bed.
"Lord forgive us sinners!" he said, and put his head under the quilt.
His pipe lying on the table smelt strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin
could not sleep for a long while, and kept wondering where the
oppressive smell came from.
The rain was pattering on the window-panes all night.
ABOUT LOVE
AT lunch next day there were very nice pies, crayfish, and mutton
cutlets; and while we were eating, Nikanor, the cook, came up to ask
what the visitors would like for dinner. He was a man of medium height,
with a puffy face and little eyes; he was close-shaven, and it looked as
though his moustaches had not been shaved, but had been pulled out by
the roots. Alehin told us that the beautiful Pelagea was in love with
this cook. As he drank and was of a violent character, she did not want
to marry him, but was willing to live with him without. He was very
devout, and his religious convictions would not allow him to "live in
sin"; he insisted on her marrying him, and would consent to nothing
else, and when he was drunk he used to abuse her and even beat her.
Whenever he got drunk she used to hide upstairs and sob, and on such
occasions Alehin and the servants stayed in the house to be ready to
defend her in case of necessity.
We began talking about love.
"How love is born," said Alehin, "why Pelagea does not love somebody
more like herself in her spiritual and external qualities, and why she
fell in love with Nikanor, that ugly snout--we all call him 'The
Snout'--how far questions of personal happiness are of consequence in
love--all that is known; one can take what view one likes of it. So far
only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: 'This is a
great mystery.' Everything else that has been written or said about love
is not a conclusion, but only a statement of questions which have
remained unanswered. The explanation which would seem to fit one case
does not apply in a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind,
would be to explain every case individually without attempting to
generalize. We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each case."
"Perfectly true," Burkin assented.
"We Russians of the educated class have a partiality for these questions
that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized, decorated with
roses, nightingales; we Russians decorate our loves with these momentous
questions, and select the most uninteresting of them, too. In Moscow,
when I was a student, I had a friend who shared my life, a charming
lady, and every time I took her in my arms she was thinking what I would
allow her a month for housekeeping and what was the price of beef a
pound. In the same way, when we are in love we are never tired of asking
ourselves questions: whether it is honourable or dishonourable, sensible
or stupid, what this love is leading up to, and so on. Whether it is a
good thing or not I don't know, but that it is in the way,
unsatisfactory, and irritating, I do know."
It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who lead a
solitary existence always have something in their hearts which they are
eager to talk about. In town bachelors visit the baths and the
restaurants on purpose to talk, and sometimes tell the most interesting
things to bath attendants and waiters; in the country, as a rule, they
unbosom themselves to their guests. Now from the window we could see a
grey sky, trees drenched in the rain; in such weather we could go
nowhere, and there was nothing for us to do but to tell stories and to
listen.
"I have lived at Sofino and been farming for a long time," Alehin began,
"ever since I left the University. I am an idle gentleman by education,
a studious person by disposition; but there was a big debt owing on the
estate when I came here, and as my father was in debt partly because he
had spent so much on my education, I resolved not to go away, but to
work till I paid off the debt. I made up my mind to this and set to
work, not, I must confess, without some repugnance. The land here does
not yield much, and if one is not to farm at a loss one must employ serf
labour or hired labourers, which is almost the same thing, or put it on
a peasant footing--that is, work the fields oneself and with one's
family. There is no middle path. But in those days I did not go into
such subtleties. I did not leave a clod of earth unturned; I gathered
together all the peasants, men and women, from the neighbouring
villages; the work went on at a tremendous pace. I myself ploughed and
sowed and reaped, and was bored doing it, and frowned with disgust, like
a village cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen-garden.
My body ached, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I
could easily reconcile this life of toil with my cultured habits; to do
so, I thought, all that is necessary is to maintain a certain external
order in life. I established myself upstairs here in the best rooms, and
ordered them to bring me there coffee and liquor after lunch and dinner,
and when I went to bed I read every night the Yyesnik Evropi. But one
day our priest, Father Ivan, came and drank up all my liquor at one
sitting; and the Yyesnik Evropi went to the priest's daughters; as in
the summer, especially at the haymaking, I did not succeed in getting to
my bed at all, and slept in the sledge in the barn, or somewhere in the
forester's lodge, what chance was there of reading? Little by little I
moved downstairs, began dining in the servants' kitchen, and of my
former luxury nothing is left but the servants who were in my father's
service, and whom it would be painful to turn away.
"In the first years I was elected here an honourary justice of the
peace. I used to have to go to the town and take part in the sessions of
the congress and of the circuit court, and this was a pleasant change
for me. When you live here for two or three months without a break,
especially in the winter, you begin at last to pine for a black coat.
And in the circuit court there were frock-coats, and uniforms, and
dress-coats, too, all lawyers, men who have received a general
education; I had some one to talk to. After sleeping in the sledge and
dining in the kitchen, to sit in an arm-chair in clean linen, in thin
boots, with a chain on one's waistcoat, is such luxury!
"I received a warm welcome in the town. I made friends eagerly. And of
all my acquaintanceships the most intimate and, to tell the truth, the
most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with Luganovitch, the vice-
president of the circuit court. You both know him: a most charming
personality. It all happened just after a celebrated case of
incendiarism; the preliminary investigation lasted two days; we were
exhausted. Luganovitch looked at me and said:
"'Look here, come round to dinner with me.'