as her habit was, looking intently into my face. "This is terrible! Your
sister is in a condition. . . . She is with child. Take her away, I
implore you. . . ."
She was breathless with agitation, while on one side stood her three
daughters, exactly like her, thin and flat, huddling together in a
scared way. They were alarmed, overwhelmed, as though a convict had been
caught in their house. What a disgrace, how dreadful! And yet this
estimable family had spent its life waging war on superstition;
evidently they imagined that all the superstition and error of humanity
was limited to the three candles, the thirteenth of the month, and to
the unluckiness of Monday!
"I beg you. . . I beg," repeated Madame Azhogin, pursing up her lips in
the shape of a heart on the syllable "you." "I beg you to take her
home." XVIII
A little later my sister and I were walking along the street. I covered
her with the skirts of my coat; we hastened, choosing back streets where
there were no street lamps, avoiding passers-by; it was as though we
were running away. She was no longer crying, but looked at me with dry
eyes. To Karpovna's, where I took her, it was only twenty minutes' walk,
and, strange to say, in that short time we succeeded in thinking of our
whole life; we talked over everything, considered our position,
reflected. . . .
We decided we could not go on living in this town, and that when I had
earned a little money we would move to some other place. In some houses
everyone was asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these
houses; we were afraid of them. We talked of the fanaticism, the
coarseness of feeling, the insignificance of these respectable families,
these amateurs of dramatic art whom we had so alarmed, and I kept asking
in what way these stupid, cruel, lazy, and dishonest people were
superior to the drunken and superstitious peasants of Kurilovka, or in
what way they were better than animals, who in the same way are thrown
into a panic when some incident disturbs the monotony of their life
limited by their instincts. What would have happened to my sister now if
she had been left to live at home?
What moral agonies would she have experienced, talking with my father,
meeting every day with acquaintances? I imagined this to myself, and at
once there came into my mind people, all people I knew, who had been
slowly done to death by their nearest relations. I remembered the
tortured dogs, driven mad, the live sparrows plucked naked by boys and
flung into the water, and a long, long series of obscure lingering
miseries which I had looked on continually from early childhood in that
town; and I could not understand what these sixty thousand people lived
for, what they read the gospel for, why they prayed, why they read books
and magazines. What good had they gained from all that had been said and
written hitherto if they were still possessed by the same spiritual
darkness and hatred of liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred
years ago? A master carpenter spends his whole life building houses in
the town, and always, to the day of his death, calls a "gallery" a
"galdery." So these sixty thousand people have been reading and hearing
of truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet from
morning till night, till the day of their death, they are lying, and
tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate it as a deadly
foe.
"And so my fate is decided," said my sister, as we arrived home. "After
what has happened I cannot go back there. Heavens, how good that is! My
heart feels lighter."
She went to bed at once. Tears were glittering on her eyelashes, but her
expression was happy; she fell into a sound sweet sleep, and one could
see that her heart was lighter and that she was resting. It was a long,
long time since she had slept like that.
And so we began our life together. She was always singing and saying
that her life was very happy, and the books I brought her from the
public library I took back unread, as now she could not read; she wanted
to do nothing but dream and talk of the future, mending my linen, or
helping Karpovna near the stove; she was always singing, or talking of
her Vladimir, of his cleverness, of his charming manners, of his
kindness, of his extraordinary learning, and I assented to all she said,
though by now I disliked her doctor. She wanted to work, to lead an
independent life on her own account, and she used to say that she would
become a school-teacher or a doctor's assistant as soon as her health
would permit her, and would herself do the scrubbing and the washing.
Already she was passionately devoted to her child; he was not yet born,
but she knew already the colour of his eyes, what his hands would be
like, and how he would laugh. She was fond of talking about education,
and as her Vladimir was the best man in the world, all her discussion of
education could be summed up in the question how to make the boy as
fascinating as his father. There was no end to her talk, and everything
she said made her intensely joyful. Sometimes I was delighted, too,
though I could not have said why.
I suppose her dreaminess infected me. I, too, gave up reading, and did
nothing but dream. In the evenings, in spite of my fatigue, I walked up
and down the room, with my hands in my pockets, talking of Masha.
"What do you think?" I would ask of my sister. "When will she come back?
I think she'll come back at Christmas, not later; what has she to do
there?"
"As she doesn't write to you, it's evident she will come back very
soon."
"That's true," I assented, though I knew perfectly well that Masha would
not return to our town.
I missed her fearfully, and could no longer deceive myself, and tried to
get other people to deceive me. My sister was expecting her doctor, and
I-Masha; and both of us talked incessantly, laughed, and did not notice
that we were preventing Karpovna from sleeping. She lay on the stove and
kept muttering:
"The samovar hummed this morning, it did hum! Oh, it bodes no good, my
dears, it bodes no good!"
No one ever came to see us but the postman, who brought my sister
letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who sometimes came in to see us in
the evening, and after looking at my sister without speaking went away,
and when he was in the kitchen said:
"Every class ought to remember its rules, and anyone, who is so proud
that he won't understand that, will find it a vale of tears."
He was very fond of the phrase "a vale of tears." One day-it was in
Christmas week, when I was walking by the bazaar-he called me into the
butcher's shop, and not shaking hands with me, announced that he had to
speak to me about something very important. His face was red from the
frost and vodka; near him, behind the counter, stood Nikolka, with the
expression of a brigand, holding a bloodstained knife in his hand.
"I desire to express my word to you," Prokofy began. "This incident
cannot continue, because, as you understand yourself that for such a
vale, people will say nothing good of you or of us. Mamma, through pity,
cannot say something unpleasant to you, that your sister should move
into another lodging on account of her condition, but I won't have it
any more, because I can't approve of her behaviour."
I understood him, and I went out of the shop. The same day my sister and
I moved to Radish's. We had no money for a cab, and we walked on foot; I
carried a parcel of our belongings on my back; my sister had nothing in
her hands, but she gasped for breath and coughed, and kept asking
whether we should get there soon. XIX
At last a letter came from Masha.
"Dear, good M. A." (she wrote), "our kind, gentle 'angel' as the old
painter calls you, farewell; I am going with my father to America for
the exhibition. In a few days I shall see the ocean-so far from
Dubetchnya, it's dreadful to think! It's far and unfathomable as the
sky, and I long to be there in freedom. I am triumphant, I am mad, and
you see how incoherent my letter is. Dear, good one, give me my freedom,
make haste to break the thread, which still holds, binding you and me
together. My meeting and knowing you was a ray from heaven that lighted
up my existence; but my becoming your wife was a mistake, you understand
that, and I am oppressed now by the consciousness of the mistake, and I
beseech you, on my knees, my generous friend, quickly, quickly, before I
start for the ocean, telegraph that you consent to correct our common
mistake, to remove the solitary stone from my wings, and my father, who
will undertake all the arrangements, promised me not to burden you too
much with formalities. And so I am free to fly whither I will? Yes?
"Be happy, and God bless you; forgive me, a sinner.
"I am well, I am wasting money, doing all sorts of silly things, and I
thank God every minute that such a bad woman as I has no children. I
sing and have success, but it's not an infatuation; no, it's my haven,
my cell to which I go for peace. King David had a ring with an
inscription on it: 'All things pass.' When one is sad those words make
one cheerful, and when one is cheerful it makes one sad. I have got
myself a ring like that with Hebrew letters on it, and this talisman
keeps me from infatuations. All things pass, life will pass, one wants
nothing. Or at least one wants nothing but the sense of freedom, for
when anyone is free, he wants nothing, nothing, nothing. Break the
thread. A warm hug to you and your sister. Forgive and forget your M."
My sister used to lie down in one room, and Radish, who had been ill
again and was now better, in another. Just at the moment when I received
this letter my sister went softly into the painter's room, sat down
beside him and began reading aloud. She read to him every day, Ostrovsky
or Gogol, and he listened, staring at one point, not laughing, but
shaking his head and muttering to himself from time to time:
"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"
If anything ugly or unseemly were depicted in the play he would say as
though vindictively, thrusting his finger into the book:
"There it is, lying! That's what it does, lying does."
The plays fascinated him, both from their subjects and their moral, and
from their skilful, complex construction, and he marvelled at "him,"
never calling the author by his name. How neatly he has put it all
together.
This time my sister read softly only one page, and could read no more:
her voice would not last out. Radish took her hand and, moving his
parched lips, said, hardly audibly, in a husky voice:
"The soul of a righteous man is white and smooth as chalk, but the soul
of a sinful man is like pumice stone. The soul of a righteous man is
like clear oil, but the soul of a sinful man is gas tar. We must labour,
we must sorrow, we must suffer sickness," he went on, "and he who does
not labour and sorrow will not gain the Kingdom of Heaven. Woe, woe to
them that are well fed, woe to the mighty, woe to the rich, woe to the
moneylenders! Not for them is the Kingdom of Heaven. Lice eat grass,
rust eats iron. . ."
"And lying the soul," my sister added laughing. I read the letter
through once more. At that moment there walked into the kitchen a
soldier who had been bringing us twice a week parcels of tea, French
bread and game, which smelt of scent, from some unknown giver. I had no
work. I had had to sit at home idle for whole days together, and
probably whoever sent us the French bread knew that we were in want.
I heard my sister talking to the soldier and laughing gaily. Then, lying
down, she ate some French bread and said to me:
"When you wouldn't go into the service, but became a house painter,
Anyuta Blagovo and I knew from the beginning that you were right, but we
were frightened to say so aloud. Tell me what force is it that hinders
us from saying what one thinks? Take Anyuta Blagovo now, for instance.
She loves you, she adores you, she knows you are right, she loves me
too, like a sister, and knows that I am right, and I daresay in her soul
envies me, but some force prevents her from coming to see us, she shuns
us, she is afraid."
My sister crossed her arms over her breast, and said passionately:
"How she loves you, if only you knew! She has confessed her love to no
one but me, and then very secretly in the dark. She led me into a dark
avenue in the garden, and began whispering how precious you were to her.
You will see, she'll never marry, because she loves you. Are you sorry
for her?"
"Yes."
"It's she who has sent the bread. She is absurd really, what is the use
of being so secret? I used to be absurd and foolish, but now I have got
away from that and am afraid of nobody. I think and say aloud what I
like, and am happy. When I lived at home I hadn't a conception of
happiness, and now I wouldn't change with a queen."
Dr. Blagovo arrived. He had taken his doctor's degree, and was now
staying in our town with his father; he was taking a rest, and said that
he would soon go back to Petersburg again. He wanted to study anti-
toxins against typhus, and, I believe, cholera; he wanted to go abroad
to perfect his training, and then to be appointed a professor. He had
already left the army service, and wore a roomy serge reefer jacket,
very full trousers, and magnificent neckties. My sister was in ecstasies
over his scarfpin, his studs, and the red silk handkerchief which he
wore, I suppose from foppishness, sticking out of the breast pocket of
his jacket. One day, having nothing to do, she and I counted up all the
suits we remembered him wearing, and came to the conclusion that he had
at least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister as before, but
he never once even in jest spoke of taking her with him to Petersburg or
abroad, and I could not picture to myself clearly what would become of
her if she remained alive and what would become of her child. She did
nothing but dream endlessly, and never thought seriously of the future;
she said he might go where he liked, and might abandon her even, so long
as he was happy himself; that what had been was enough for her.
As a rule he used to sound her very carefully on his arrival, and used
to insist on her taking milk and drops in his presence. It was the same
on this occasion. He sounded her and made her drink a glass of milk, and
there was a smell of creosote in our room afterwards.
"That's a good girl," he said, taking the glass from her. "You mustn't
talk too much now; you've taken to chattering like a magpie of late.
Please hold your tongue."
She laughed. Then he came into Radish's room where I was sitting and
affectionately slapped me on the shoulder.
"Well, how goes it, old man?" he said, bending down to the invalid.
"Your honour," said Radish, moving his lips slowly, "your honour, I
venture to submit. . . . We all walk in the fear of God, we all have to
die. . . . Permit me to tell you the truth. . . . Your honour, the
Kingdom of Heaven will not be for you!"
"There's no help for it," the doctor said jestingly; "there must be
somebody in hell, you know."
And all at once something happened with my consciousness; as though I
were in a dream, as though I were standing on a winter night in the
slaughterhouse yard, and Prokofy beside me, smelling of pepper cordial;
I made an effort to control myself, and rubbed my eyes, and at once it
seemed to me that I was going along the road to the interview with the
Governor. Nothing of the sort had happened to me before, or has happened
to me since, and these strange memories that were like dreams, I
ascribed to overexhaustion of my nerves. I lived through the scene at
the slaughterhouse, and the interview with the Governor, and at the same
time was dimly aware that it was not real.
When I came to myself I saw that I was no longer in the house, but in
the street, and was standing with the doctor near a lamp-post.
"It's sad, it's sad," he was saying, and tears were trickling down his
cheeks. "She is in good spirits, she's always laughing and hopeful, but
her position's hopeless, dear boy. Your Radish hates me, and is always
trying to make me feel that I have treated her badly. He is right from
his standpoint, but I have my point of view too; and I shall never
regret all that has happened. One must love; we ought all to love-
oughtn't we? There would be no life without love; anyone who fears and
avoids love is not free."
Little by little he passed to other subjects, began talking of science,
of his dissertation which had been liked in Petersburg. He was carried
away by his subject, and no longer thought of my sister, nor of his
grief, nor of me. Life was of absorbing interest to him. She has America
and her ring with the inscription on it, I thought, while this fellow
has his doctor's degree and a professor's chair to look forward to, and
only my sister and I are left with the old things.
When I said good-bye to him, I went up to the lamp-post and read the
letter once more. And I remembered, I remembered vividly how that spring
morning she had come to me at the mill, lain down and covered herself
with her jacket-she wanted to be like a simple peasant woman. And how,
another time-it was in the morning also-we drew the net out of the
water, and heavy drops of rain fell upon us from the riverside willows,
and we laughed.
It was dark in our house in Great Dvoryansky Street. I got over the
fence and, as I used to do in the old days, went by the back way to the
kitchen to borrow a lantern. There was no one in the kitchen. The
samovar hissed near the stove, waiting for my father. "Who pours out my
father's tea now?" I thought. Taking the lantern I went out to the shed,
built myself up a bed of old newspapers and lay down. The hooks on the
walls looked forbidding, as they used to of old, and their shadows
flickered. It was cold. I felt that my sister would come in in a minute,
and bring me supper, but at once I remembered that she was ill and was
lying at Radish's, and it seemed to me strange that I should have
climbed over the fence and be lying here in this unheated shed. My mind
was in a maze, and I saw all sorts of absurd things.
There was a ring. A ring familiar from childhood: first the wire rustled
against the wall, then a short plaintive ring in the kitchen. It was my
father come back from the club. I got up and went into the kitchen.
Axinya the cook clasped her hands on seeing me, and for some reason
burst into tears.
"My own!" she said softly. "My precious! O Lord!"
And she began crumpling up her apron in her agitation. In the window
there were standing jars of berries in vodka. I poured myself out a
teacupful and greedily drank it off, for I was intensely thirsty. Axinya
had quite recently scrubbed the table and benches, and there was that
smell in the kitchen which is found in bright, snug kitchens kept by
tidy cooks. And that smell and the chirp of the cricket used to lure us
as children into the kitchen, and put us in the mood for hearing fairy
tales and playing at "Kings" . . .
"Where's Kleopatra?" Axinya asked softly, in a fluster, holding her
breath; "and where is your cap, my dear? Your wife, you say, has gone to
Petersburg?"
She had been our servant in our mother's time, and used once to give
Kleopatra and me our baths, and to her we were still children who had to
be talked to for their good. For a quarter of an hour or so she laid
before me all the reflections which she had with the sagacity of an old
servant been accumulating in the stillness of that kitchen, all the time
since we had seen each other. She said that the doctor could be forced
to marry Kleopatra; he only needed to be thoroughly frightened; and that
if an appeal were promptly written the bishop would annul the first
marriage; that it would be a good thing for me to sell Dubetchnya
without my wife's knowledge, and put the money in the bank in my own
name; that if my sister and I were to bow down at my father's feet and
ask him properly, he might perhaps forgive us; that we ought to have a
service sung to the Queen of Heaven. . . .
"Come, go along, my dear, and speak to him," she said, when she heard my
father's cough. "Go along, speak to him; bow down, your head won't drop
off."
I went in. My father was sitting at the table sketching a plan of a
summer villa, with Gothic windows, and with a fat turret like a
fireman's watch tower-something peculiarly stiff and tasteless. Going
into the study I stood still where I could see this drawing. I did not
know why I had gone in to my father, but I remember that when I saw his
lean face, his red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw
myself on his neck, and as Axinya had told me, bow down at his feet; but
the sight of the summer villa with the Gothic windows, and the fat
turret, restrained me.
"Good evening," I said.
He glanced at me, and at once dropped his eyes on his drawing.
"What do you want?" he asked, after waiting a little.
"I have come to tell you my sister's very ill. She can't live very
long," I added in a hollow voice.
"Well," sighed my father, taking off his spectacles, and laying them on
the table. "What thou sowest that shalt thou reap. What thou sowest," he
repeated, getting up from the table, "that shalt thou reap. I ask you to
remember how you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I
begged you, I besought you to give up your errors; I reminded you of
your duty, of your honour, of what you owed to your forefathers whose
traditions we ought to preserve as sacred. Did you obey me? You scorned
my counsels, and obstinately persisted in clinging to your false ideals;
worse still you drew your sister into the path of error with you, and
led her to lose her moral principles and sense of shame. Now you are
both in a bad way. Well, as thou sowest, so shalt thou reap!"
As he said this he walked up and down the room. He probably imagined
that I had come to him to confess my wrong doings, and he probably
expected that I should begin begging him to forgive my sister and me. I
was cold, I was shivering as though I were in a fever, and spoke with
difficulty in a husky voice.
"And I beg you, too, to remember," I said, "on this very spot I besought
you to understand me, to reflect, to decide with me how and for what we
should live, and in answer you began talking about our forefathers,
about my grandfather who wrote poems. One tells you now that your only
daughter is hopelessly ill, and you go on again about your forefathers,
your traditions. . . . And such frivolity in your old age, when death is
close at hand, and you haven't more than five or ten years left!"
"What have you come here for?" my father asked sternly, evidently
offended at my reproaching him for his frivolity.
"I don't know. I love you, I am unutterably sorry that we are so far
apart-so you see I have come. I love you still, but my sister has broken
with you completely. She does not forgive you, and will never forgive
you now. Your very name arouses her aversion for the past, for life."
"And who is to blame for it?" cried my father. "It's your fault, you
scoundrel!"
"Well, suppose it is my fault?" I said. "I admit I have been to blame in
many things, but why is it that this life of yours, which you think
binding upon us, too-why is it so dreary, so barren? How is it that in
not one of these houses you have been building for the last thirty years
has there been anyone from whom I might have learnt how to live, so as
not to be to blame? There is not one honest man in the whole town! These
houses of yours are nests of damnation, where mothers and daughters are
made away with, where children are tortured. . . . My poor mother!" I
went on in despair. "My poor sister! One has to stupefy oneself with
vodka, with cards, with scandal; one must become a scoundrel, a
hypocrite, or go on drawing plans for years and years, so as not to
notice all the horrors that lie hidden in these houses. Our town has
existed for hundreds of years, and all that time it has not produced one
man of service to our country-not one. You have stifled in the germ
everything in the least living and bright. It's a town of shopkeepers,
publicans, counting-house clerks, canting hypocrites; it's a useless,
unnecessary town, which not one soul would regret if it suddenly sank
through the earth."