village, they mused, the people were good, quiet, sensible, fearing God,
and Elena Ivanovna, too, was quiet, kind, and gentle; it made one sad to
look at her, but why had they not got on together? Why had they parted
like enemies? How was it that some mist had shrouded from their eyes
what mattered most, and had let them see nothing but damage done by
cattle, bridles, pincers, and all those trivial things which now, as
they remembered them, seemed so nonsensical? How was it that with the
new owner they lived in peace, and yet had been on bad terms with the
engineer?
And not knowing what answer to make to these questions they were all
silent except Volodka, who muttered something.
"What is it?" Rodion asked.
"We lived without a bridge..." said Volodka gloomily. "We lived without
a bridge, and did not ask for one... and we don't want it...."
No one answered him and they walked on in silence with drooping heads.
DREAMS
Two peasant constables--one a stubby, black-bearded individual with such
exceptionally short legs that if you looked at him from behind it seemed
as though his legs began much lower down than in other people; the
other, long, thin, and straight as a stick, with a scanty beard of dark
reddish colour--were escorting to the district town a tramp who refused
to remember his name. The first waddled along, looking from side to
side, chewing now a straw, now his own sleeve, slapping himself on the
haunches and humming, and altogether had a careless and frivolous air;
the other, in spite of his lean face and narrow shoulders, looked solid,
grave, and substantial; in the lines and expression of his whole figure
he was like the priests among the Old Believers, or the warriors who are
painted on old-fashioned ikons. "For his wisdom God had added to his
forehead"--that is, he was bald--which increased the resemblance referred
to. The first was called Andrey Ptaha, the second Nikandr Sapozhnikov.
The man they were escorting did not in the least correspond with the
conception everyone has of a tramp. He was a frail little man, weak and
sickly-looking, with small, colourless, and extremely indefinite
features. His eyebrows were scanty, his expression mild and submissive;
he had scarcely a trace of a moustache, though he was over thirty. He
walked along timidly, bent forward, with his hands thrust into his
sleeves. The collar of his shabby cloth overcoat, which did not look
like a peasant's, was turned up to the very brim of his cap, so that
only his little red nose ventured to peep out into the light of day. He
spoke in an ingratiating tenor, continually coughing. It was very, very
difficult to believe that he was a tramp concealing his surname. He was
more like an unsuccessful priest's son, stricken by God and reduced to
beggary; a clerk discharged for drunkenness; a merchant's son or nephew
who had tried his feeble powers in a theatrical career, and was now
going home to play the last act in the parable of the prodigal son;
perhaps, judging by the dull patience with which he struggled with the
hopeless autumn mud, he might have been a fanatical monk, wandering from
one Russian monastery to another, continually seeking "a peaceful life,
free from sin," and not finding it....
The travellers had been a long while on their way, but they seemed to be
always on the same small patch of ground. In front of them there
stretched thirty feet of muddy black-brown mud, behind them the same,
and wherever one looked further, an impenetrable wall of white fog. They
went on and on, but the ground remained the same, the wall was no
nearer, and the patch on which they walked seemed still the same patch.
They got a glimpse of a white, clumsy-looking stone, a small ravine, or
a bundle of hay dropped by a passer-by, the brief glimmer of a great
muddy puddle, or, suddenly, a shadow with vague outlines would come into
view ahead of them; the nearer they got to it the smaller and darker it
became; nearer still, and there stood up before the wayfarers a slanting
milestone with the number rubbed off, or a wretched birch-tree drenched
and bare like a wayside beggar. The birch-tree would whisper something
with what remained of its yellow leaves, one leaf would break off and
float lazily to the ground.... And then again fog, mud, the brown grass
at the edges of the road. On the grass hung dingy, unfriendly tears.
They were not the tears of soft joy such as the earth weeps at welcoming
the summer sun and parting from it, and such as she gives to drink at
dawn to the corncrakes, quails, and graceful, long-beaked crested
snipes. The travellers' feet stuck in the heavy, clinging mud. Every
step cost an effort.
Andrey Ptaha was somewhat excited. He kept looking round at the tramp
and trying to understand how a live, sober man could fail to remember
his name.
"You are an orthodox Christian, aren't you?" he asked.
"Yes," the tramp answered mildly.
"H'm... then you've been christened?"
"Why, to be sure! I'm not a Turk. I go to church and to the sacrament,
and do not eat meat when it is forbidden. And I observe my religious
duties punctually...."
"Well, what are you called, then?"
"Call me what you like, good man."
Ptaha shrugged his shoulders and slapped himself on the haunches in
extreme perplexity. The other constable, Nikandr Sapozhnikov, maintained
a staid silence. He was not so naive as Ptaha, and apparently knew very
well the reasons which might induce an orthodox Christian to conceal his
name from other people. His expressive face was cold and stern. He
walked apart and did not condescend to idle chatter with his companions,
but, as it were, tried to show everyone, even the fog, his sedateness
and discretion.
"God knows what to make of you," Ptaha persisted in addressing the
tramp. "Peasant you are not, and gentleman you are not, but some sort of
a thing between.... The other day I was washing a sieve in the pond and
caught a reptile--see, as long as a finger, with gills and a tail. The
first minute I thought it was a fish, then I looked--and, blow it! if it
hadn't paws. It was not a fish, it was a viper, and the deuce only knows
what it was.... So that's like you.... What's your calling?"
"I am a peasant and of peasant family," sighed the tramp. "My mamma was
a house serf. I don't look like a peasant, that's true, for such has
been my lot, good man. My mamma was a nurse with the gentry, and had
every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and blood, I lived with her in
the master's house. She petted and spoiled me, and did her best to take
me out of my humble class and make a gentleman of me. I slept in a bed,
every day I ate a real dinner, I wore breeches and shoes like a
gentleman's child. What my mamma ate I was fed on, too; they gave her
stuffs as a present, and she dressed me up in them.... We lived well! I
ate so many sweets and cakes in my childish years that if they could be
sold now it would be enough to buy a good horse. Mamma taught me to read
and write, she instilled the fear of God in me from my earliest years,
and she so trained me that now I can't bring myself to utter an
unrefined peasant word. And I don't drink vodka, my lad, and am neat in
my dress, and know how to behave with decorum in good society. If she is
still living, God give her health; and if she is dead, then, O Lord,
give her soul peace in Thy Kingdom, wherein the just are at rest."
The tramp bared his head with the scanty hair standing up like a brush
on it, turned his eyes upward and crossed himself twice.
"Grant her, O Lord, a verdant and peaceful resting-place," he said in a
drawling voice, more like an old woman's than a man's. "Teach Thy
servant Xenia Thy justifications, O Lord! If it had not been for my
beloved mamma I should have been a peasant with no sort of
understanding! Now, young man, ask me about anything and I understand it
all: the holy Scriptures and profane writings, and every prayer and
catechism. I live according to the Scriptures.... I don't injure anyone,
I keep my flesh in purity and continence, I observe the fasts, I eat at
fitting times. Another man will take no pleasure in anything but vodka
and lewd talk, but when I have time I sit in a corner and read a book. I
read and I weep and weep."
"What do you weep for?"
"They write so pathetically! For some books one gives but a five-kopeck
piece, and yet one weeps and sighs exceedingly over it."
"Is your father dead?" asked Ptaha.
"I don't know, good man. I don't know my parent; it is no use concealing
it. I judge that I was mamma's illegitimate son. My mamma lived all her
life with the gentry, and did not want to marry a simple peasant...."
"And so she fell into the master's hands," laughed Ptaha.
"She did transgress, that's true. She was pious, God-fearing, but she
did not keep her maiden purity. It is a sin, of course, a great sin,
there's no doubt about it, but to make up for it there is, maybe, noble
blood in me. Maybe I am only a peasant by class, but in nature a noble
gentleman."
The "noble gentleman" uttered all this in a soft, sugary tenor,
wrinkling up his narrow forehead and emitting creaking sounds from his
red, frozen little nose. Ptaha listened and looked askance at him in
wonder, continually shrugging his shoulders.
After going nearly five miles the constables and the tramp sat down on a
mound to rest.
"Even a dog knows his name," Ptaha muttered. "My name is Andryushka, his
is Nikandr; every man has his holy name, and it can't be forgotten.
Nohow."
"Who has any need to know my name?" sighed the tramp, leaning his cheek
on his fist. "And what advantage would it be to me if they did know it?
If I were allowed to go where I would--but it would only make things
worse. I know the law, Christian brothers. Now I am a tramp who doesn't
remember his name, and it's the very most if they send me to Eastern
Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if I were to tell them
my real name and description they would send me back to hard labour, I
know!"
"Why, have you been a convict?"
"I have, dear friend. For four years I went about with my head shaved
and fetters on my legs."
"What for?"
"For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so, my
mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into my
master's glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the storeroom, numbers
of them; it was easy to make a mistake over them."
The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:
"She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man's soul is a
slumbering forest! It may have been an accident, or maybe she could not
endure the affront of seeing the master prefer another servant....
Perhaps she put it in on purpose, God knows! I was young then, and did
not understand it all... now I remember that our master had taken
another mistress and mamma was greatly disturbed. Our trial lasted
nearly two years.... Mamma was condemned to penal servitude for twenty
years, and I, on account of my youth, only to seven."
"And why were you sentenced?"
"As an accomplice. I handed the glass to the master. That was always the
custom. Mamma prepared the soda and I handed it to him. Only I tell you
all this as a Christian, brothers, as I would say it before God. Don't
you tell anybody...."
"Oh, nobody's going to ask us," said Ptaha. "So you've run away from
prison, have you?"
"I have, dear friend. Fourteen of us ran away. Some folks, God bless
them! ran away and took me with them. Now you tell me, on your
conscience, good man, what reason have I to disclose my name? They will
send me back to penal servitude, you know! And I am not fit for penal
servitude! I am a refined man in delicate health. I like to sleep and
eat in cleanliness. When I pray to God I like to light a little lamp or
a candle, and not to have a noise around me. When I bow down to the
ground I like the floor not to be dirty or spat upon. And I bow down
forty times every morning and evening, praying for mamma."
The tramp took off his cap and crossed himself.
"And let them send me to Eastern Siberia," he said; "I am not afraid of
that."
"Surely that's no better?"
"It is quite a different thing. In penal servitude you are like a crab
in a basket: crowding, crushing, jostling, there's no room to breathe;
it's downright hell--such hell, may the Queen of Heaven keep us from it!
You are a robber and treated like a robber--worse than any dog. You can't
sleep, you can't eat or even say your prayers. But it's not like that in
a settlement. In a settlement I shall be a member of a commune like
other people. The authorities are bound by law to give me my share...
ye-es! They say the land costs nothing, no more than snow; you can take
what you like! They will give me corn land and building land and
garden.... I shall plough my fields like other people, sow seed. I shall
have cattle and stock of all sorts, bees, sheep, and dogs.... A Siberian
cat, that rats and mice may not devour my goods.... I will put up a
house, I shall buy ikons.... Please God, I'll get married, I shall have
children...."
The tramp muttered and looked, not at his listeners, but away into the
distance. Naive as his dreams were, they were uttered in such a genuine
and heartfelt tone that it was difficult not to believe in them. The
tramp's little mouth was screwed up in a smile. His eyes and little nose
and his whole face were fixed and blank with blissful anticipation of
happiness in the distant future. The constables listened and looked at
him gravely, not without sympathy. They, too, believed in his dreams.
"I am not afraid of Siberia," the tramp went on muttering. "Siberia is
just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as here. They are just
as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only there is more freedom there
and people are better off. Everything is better there. Take the rivers
there, for instance; they are far better than those here. There's no end
of fish; and all sorts of wild fowl. And my greatest pleasure, brothers,
is fishing. Give me no bread to eat, but let me sit with a fishhook.
Yes, indeed! I fish with a hook and with a wire line, and set creels,
and when the ice comes I catch with a net. I am not strong to draw up
the net, so I shall hire a man for five kopecks. And, Lord, what a
pleasure it is! You catch an eel-pout or a roach of some sort and are as
pleased as though you had met your own brother. And would you believe
it, there's a special art for every fish: you catch one with a live
bait, you catch another with a grub, the third with a frog or a
grasshopper. One has to understand all that, of course! For example,
take the eel-pout. It is not a delicate fish--it will take a perch; and a
pike loves a gudgeon, the shilishper likes a butterfly. If you fish for
a roach in a rapid stream there is no greater pleasure. You throw the
line of seventy feet without lead, with a butterfly or a beetle, so that
the bait floats on the surface; you stand in the water without your
trousers and let it go with the current, and tug! the roach pulls at it!
Only you have got to be artful that he doesn't carry off the bait, the
damned rascal. As soon as he tugs at your line you must whip it up; it's
no good waiting. It's wonderful what a lot of fish I've caught in my
time. When we were running away the other convicts would sleep in the
forest; I could not sleep, but I was off to the river. The rivers there
are wide and rapid, the banks are steep--awfully! It's all slumbering
forests on the bank. The trees are so tall that if you look to the top
it makes you dizzy. Every pine would be worth ten roubles by the prices
here."
In the overwhelming rush of his fancies, of artistic images of the past
and sweet presentiments of happiness in the future, the poor wretch sank
into silence, merely moving his lips as though whispering to himself.
The vacant, blissful smile never left his lips. The constables were
silent. They were pondering with bent heads. In the autumn stillness,
when the cold, sullen mist that rises from the earth lies like a weight
on the heart, when it stands like a prison wall before the eyes, and
reminds man of the limitation of his freedom, it is sweet to think of
the broad, rapid rivers, with steep banks wild and luxuriant, of the
impenetrable forests, of the boundless steppes. Slowly and quietly the
fancy pictures how early in the morning, before the flush of dawn has
left the sky, a man makes his way along the steep deserted bank like a
tiny speck: the ancient, mast-like pines rise up in terraces on both
sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur
menacingly; rocks, huge stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is
strong in body and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees,
nor stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which
repeats the sound of every footstep that he takes.
The peasants called up a picture of a free life such as they had never
lived; whether they vaguely recalled the images of stories heard long
ago or whether notions of a free life had been handed down to them with
their flesh and blood from far-off free ancestors, God knows!
The first to break the silence was Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who had not till
then let fall a single word. Whether he envied the tramp's transparent
happiness, or whether he felt in his heart that dreams of happiness were
out of keeping with the grey fog and the dirty brown mud--anyway, he
looked sternly at the tramp and said:
"It's all very well, to be sure, only you won't reach those plenteous
regions, brother. How could you? Before you'd gone two hundred miles
you'd give up your soul to God. Just look what a weakling you are! Here
you've hardly gone five miles and you can't get your breath."
The tramp turned slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile vanished
from his face. He looked with a scared and guilty air at the peasant's
staid face, apparently remembered something, and bent his head. A
silence followed again.... All three were pondering. The peasants were
racking their brains in the effort to grasp in their imagination what
can be grasped by none but God--that is, the vast expanse dividing them
from the land of freedom. Into the tramp's mind thronged clear and
distinct pictures more terrible than that expanse. Before him rose
vividly the picture of the long legal delays and procrastinations, the
temporary and permanent prisons, the convict boats, the wearisome
stoppages on the way, the frozen winters, illnesses, deaths of
companions....
The tramp blinked guiltily, wiped the tiny drops of sweat from his
forehead with his sleeve, drew a deep breath as though he had just leapt
out of a very hot bath, then wiped his forehead with the other sleeve
and looked round fearfully.
"That's true; you won't get there!" Ptaha agreed. "You are not much of a
walker! Look at you--nothing but skin and bone! You'll die, brother!"
"Of course he'll die! What could he do?" said Nikandr. "He's fit for the
hospital now.... For sure!"
The man who had forgotten his name looked at the stern, unconcerned
faces of his sinister companions, and without taking off his cap,
hurriedly crossed himself, staring with wide-open eyes.... He trembled,
his head shook, and he began twitching all over, like a caterpillar when
it is stepped upon....
"Well, it's time to go," said Nikandr, getting up; "we've had a rest."
A minute later they were stepping along the muddy road. The tramp was
more bent than ever, and he thrust his hands further up his sleeves.
Ptaha was silent.
THE PIPE
MELITON SHISHKIN, a bailiff from the Dementyev farm, exhausted by the
sultry heat of the fir-wood and covered with spiders' webs and pine-
needles, made his way with his gun to the edge of the wood. His Damka--a
mongrel between a yard dog and a setter--an extremely thin bitch heavy
with young, trailed after her master with her wet tail between her legs,
doing all she could to avoid pricking her nose. It was a dull, overcast
morning. Big drops dripped from the bracken and from the trees that were
wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell of decay from the
dampness of the wood.
There were birch-trees ahead of him where the wood ended, and between
their stems and branches he could see the misty distance. Beyond the
birch-trees someone was playing on a shepherd's rustic pipe. The player
produced no more than five or six notes, dragged them out languidly with
no attempt at forming a tune, and yet there was something harsh and
extremely dreary in the sound of the piping.
As the copse became sparser, and the pines were interspersed with young
birch-trees, Meliton saw a herd. Hobbled horses, cows, and sheep were
wandering among the bushes and, snapping the dry branches, sniffed at
the herbage of the copse. A lean old shepherd, bareheaded, in a torn
grey smock, stood leaning against the wet trunk of a birch-tree. He
stared at the ground, pondering something, and played his pipe, it
seemed, mechanically.
"Good-day, grandfather! God help you!" Meliton greeted him in a thin,
husky voice which seemed incongruous with his huge stature and big,
fleshy face. "How cleverly you are playing your pipe! Whose herd are you
minding?"
"The Artamonovs'," the shepherd answered reluctantly, and he thrust the
pipe into his bosom.
"So I suppose the wood is the Artamonovs' too?" Meliton inquired,
looking about him. "Yes, it is the Artamonovs'; only fancy... I had
completely lost myself. I got my face scratched all over in the
thicket."
He sat down on the wet earth and began rolling up a bit of newspaper
into a cigarette.
Like his voice, everything about the man was small and out of keeping
with his height, his breadth, and his fleshy face: his smiles, his eyes,
his buttons, his tiny cap, which would hardly keep on his big, closely-
cropped head. When he talked and smiled there was something womanish,
timid, and meek about his puffy, shaven face and his whole figure.
"What weather! God help us!" he said, and he turned his head from side
to side. "Folk have not carried the oats yet, and the rain seems as
though it had been taken on for good, God bless it."
The shepherd looked at the sky, from which a drizzling rain was falling,
at the wood, at the bailif's wet clothes, pondered, and said nothing.
"The whole summer has been the same," sighed Meliton. "A bad business
for the peasants and no pleasure for the gentry."
The shepherd looked at the sky again, thought a moment, and said
deliberately, as though chewing each word:
"It's all going the same way.... There is nothing good to be looked
for."
"How are things with you here?" Meliton inquired, lighting his
cigarette. "Haven't you seen any coveys of grouse in the Artamonovs'
clearing?"
The shepherd did not answer at once. He looked again at the sky and to
right and left, thought a little, blinked.... Apparently he attached no
little significance to his words, and to increase their value tried to
pronounce them with deliberation and a certain solemnity. The expression
of his face had the sharpness and staidness of old age, and the fact
that his nose had a saddle-shaped depression across the middle and his
nostrils turned upwards gave him a sly and sarcastic look.
"No, I believe I haven't," he said. "Our huntsman Eryomka was saying
that on Elijah's Day he started one covey near Pustoshye, but I dare say
he was lying. There are very few birds."
"Yes, brother, very few.... Very few everywhere! The shooting here, if
one is to look at it with common sense, is good for nothing and not
worth having. There is no game at all, and what there is is not worth
dirtying your hands over--it is not full-grown. It is such poor stuff
that one is ashamed to look at it."
Meliton gave a laugh and waved his hands.
"Things happen so queerly in this world that it is simply laughable and
nothing else. Birds nowadays have become so unaccountable: they sit late
on their eggs, and there are some, I declare, that have not hatched them
by St. Peter's Day!"
"It's all going the same," said the shepherd, turning his face upwards.
"There was little game last year, this year there are fewer birds still,
and in another five years, mark my words, there will be none at all. As
far as I can see there will soon be not only no game, but no birds at
all."
"Yes," Meliton assented, after a moment's thought. "That's true."
The shepherd gave a bitter smile and shook his head.