Having stumbled back to the sledge Vasili Andreevich caught hold of it
and for a long time stood motionless, trying to calm himself and recover
his breath. Nikita was not in his former place, but something, already
covered with snow, was lying in the sledge and Vasili Andreevich
concluded that this was Nikita. His terror had now quite left him, and
if he felt any fear it was lest the dreadful terror should return that
he had experienced when on the horse and especially when he was left
alone in the snow-drift. At any cost he had to avoid that terror, and
to keep it away he must do something--occupy himself with something. And
the first thing he did was to turn his back to the wind and open his fur
coat. Then, as soon as he recovered his breath a little, he shook the
snow out of his boots and out of his left-hand glove (the right-hand
glove was hopelessly lost and by this time probably lying somewhere
under a dozen inches of snow); then as was his custom when going out of
his shop to buy grain from the peasants, he pulled his girdle low down
and tightened it and prepared for action. The first thing that occurred
to him was to free Mukhorty’s leg from the rein. Having done that, and
tethered him to the iron cramp at the front of the sledge where he
had been before, he was going round the horse’s quarters to put the
breechband and pad straight and cover him with the cloth, but at that
moment he noticed that something was moving in the sledge and Nikita’s
head rose up out of the snow that covered it. Nikita, who was half
frozen, rose with great difficulty and sat up, moving his hand before
his nose in a strange manner just as if he were driving away flies. He
waved his hand and said something, and seemed to Vasili Andreevich to be
calling him. Vasili Andreevich left the cloth unadjusted and went up to
the sledge.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m dy... ing, that’s what,’ said Nikita brokenly and with
difficulty. ‘Give what is owing to me to my lad, or to my wife, no
matter.’
‘Why, are you really frozen?’ asked Vasili Andreevich.
‘I feel it’s my death. Forgive me for Christ’s sake...’ said Nikita
in a tearful voice, continuing to wave his hand before his face as if
driving away flies.
Vasili Andreevich stood silent and motionless for half a minute. Then
suddenly, with the same resolution with which he used to strike hands
when making a good purchase, he took a step back and turning up his
sleeves began raking the snow off Nikita and out of the sledge. Having
done this he hurriedly undid his girdle, opened out his fur coat, and
having pushed Nikita down, lay down on top of him, covering him not
only with his fur coat but with the whole of his body, which glowed
with warmth. After pushing the skirts of his coat between Nikita and
the sides of the sledge, and holding down its hem with his knees, Vasili
Andreevich lay like that face down, with his head pressed against the
front of the sledge. Here he no longer heard the horse’s movements or
the whistling of the wind, but only Nikita’s breathing. At first and for
a long time Nikita lay motionless, then he sighed deeply and moved.
‘There, and you say you are dying! Lie still and get warm, that’s our
way...’ began Vasili Andreevich.
But to his great surprise he could say no more, for tears came to his
eyes and his lower jaw began to quiver rapidly. He stopped speaking
and only gulped down the risings in his throat. ‘Seems I was badly
frightened and have gone quite weak,’ he thought. But this weakness was
not only unpleasant, but gave him a peculiar joy such as he had never
felt before.
‘That’s our way!’ he said to himself, experiencing a strange and solemn
tenderness. He lay like that for a long time, wiping his eyes on the fur
of his coat and tucking under his knee the right skirt, which the wind
kept turning up.
But he longed so passionately to tell somebody of his joyful condition
that he said: ‘Nikita!’
‘It’s comfortable, warm!’ came a voice from beneath.
‘There, you see, friend, I was going to perish. And you would have been
frozen, and I should have...’
But again his jaws began to quiver and his eyes to fill with tears, and
he could say no more.
‘Well, never mind,’ he thought. ‘I know about myself what I know.’
He remained silent and lay like that for a long time.
Nikita kept him warm from below and his fur coats from above. Only his
hands, with which he kept his coat-skirts down round Nikita’s sides, and
his legs which the wind kept uncovering, began to freeze, especially his
right hand which had no glove. But he did not think of his legs or of
his hands but only of how to warm the peasant who was lying under him.
He looked out several times at Mukhorty and could see that his back was
uncovered and the drugget and breeching lying on the snow, and that he
ought to get up and cover him, but he could not bring himself to leave
Nikita and disturb even for a moment the joyous condition he was in. He
no longer felt any kind of terror.
‘No fear, we shan’t lose him this time!’ he said to himself, referring
to his getting the peasant warm with the same boastfulness with which he
spoke of his buying and selling.
Vasili Andreevich lay in that way for one hour, another, and a third,
but he was unconscious of the passage of time. At first impressions
of the snow-storm, the sledge-shafts, and the horse with the shaft-bow
shaking before his eyes, kept passing through his mind, then he
remembered Nikita lying under him, then recollections of the festival,
his wife, the police-officer, and the box of candles, began to mingle
with these; then again Nikita, this time lying under that box, then the
peasants, customers and traders, and the white walls of his house with
its iron roof with Nikita lying underneath, presented themselves to
his imagination. Afterwards all these impressions blended into one
nothingness. As the colours of the rainbow unite into one white light,
so all these different impressions mingled into one, and he fell asleep.
For a long time he slept without dreaming, but just before dawn the
visions recommenced. It seemed to him that he was standing by the box of
tapers and that Tikhon’s wife was asking for a five kopek taper for the
Church fete. He wished to take one out and give it to her, but his hands
would not lift, being held tight in his pockets. He wanted to walk round
the box but his feet would not move and his new clean goloshes had grown
to the stone floor, and he could neither lift them nor get his feet out
of the goloshes. Then the taper-box was no longer a box but a bed, and
suddenly Vasili Andreevich saw himself lying in his bed at home. He was
lying in his bed and could not get up. Yet it was necessary for him to
get up because Ivan Matveich, the police-officer, would soon call for
him and he had to go with him--either to bargain for the forest or to
put Mukhorty’s breeching straight.
He asked his wife: ‘Nikolaevna, hasn’t he come yet?’ ‘No, he hasn’t,’
she replied. He heard someone drive up to the front steps. ‘It must be
him.’ ‘No, he’s gone past.’ ‘Nikolaevna! I say, Nikolaevna, isn’t he
here yet?’ ‘No.’ He was still lying on his bed and could not get up, but
was always waiting. And this waiting was uncanny and yet joyful. Then
suddenly his joy was completed. He whom he was expecting came; not Ivan
Matveich the police-officer, but someone else--yet it was he whom he had
been waiting for. He came and called him; and it was he who had called
him and told him to lie down on Nikita. And Vasili Andreevich was glad
that that one had come for him.
‘I’m coming!’ he cried joyfully, and that cry awoke him, but woke him up
not at all the same person he had been when he fell asleep. He tried to
get up but could not, tried to move his arm and could not, to move his
leg and also could not, to turn his head and could not. He was surprised
but not at all disturbed by this. He understood that this was death, and
was not at all disturbed by that either.
He remembered that Nikita was lying under him and that he had got warm
and was alive, and it seemed to him that he was Nikita and Nikita was
he, and that his life was not in himself but in Nikita. He strained his
ears and heard Nikita breathing and even slightly snoring. ‘Nikita is
alive, so I too am alive!’ he said to himself triumphantly.
And he remembered his money, his shop, his house, the buying and
selling, and Mironov’s millions, and it was hard for him to understand
why that man, called Vasili Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all
those things with which he had been troubled.
‘Well, it was because he did not know what the real thing was,’ he
thought, concerning that Vasili Brekhunov. ‘He did not know, but now I
know and know for sure. Now I know!’ And again he heard the voice of
the one who had called him before. ‘I’m coming! Coming!’ he responded
gladly, and his whole being was filled with joyful emotion. He felt
himself free and that nothing could hold him back any longer.
After that Vasili Andreevich neither saw, heard, nor felt anything more
in this world.
All around the snow still eddied. The same whirlwinds of snow circled
about, covering the dead Vasili Andreevich’s fur coat, the shivering
Mukhorty, the sledge, now scarcely to be seen, and Nikita lying at the
bottom of it, kept warm beneath his dead master.
X
Nikita awoke before daybreak. He was aroused by the cold that had begun
to creep down his back. He had dreamt that he was coming from the mill
with a load of his master’s flour and when crossing the stream had
missed the bridge and let the cart get stuck. And he saw that he had
crawled under the cart and was trying to lift it by arching his back.
But strange to say the cart did not move, it stuck to his back and he
could neither lift it nor get out from under it. It was crushing the
whole of his loins. And how cold it felt! Evidently he must crawl out.
‘Have done!’ he exclaimed to whoever was pressing the cart down on him.
‘Take out the sacks!’ But the cart pressed down colder and colder,
and then he heard a strange knocking, awoke completely, and remembered
everything. The cold cart was his dead and frozen master lying upon him.
And the knock was produced by Mukhorty, who had twice struck the sledge
with his hoof.
‘Andreevich! Eh, Andreevich!’ Nikita called cautiously, beginning to
realize the truth, and straightening his back. But Vasili Andreevich did
not answer and his stomach and legs were stiff and cold and heavy like
iron weights.
‘He must have died! May the Kingdom of Heaven be his!’ thought Nikita.
He turned his head, dug with his hand through the snow about him and
opened his eyes. It was daylight; the wind was whistling as before
between the shafts, and the snow was falling in the same way, except
that it was no longer driving against the frame of the sledge but
silently covered both sledge and horse deeper and deeper, and neither
the horse’s movements nor his breathing were any longer to be heard.
‘He must have frozen too,’ thought Nikita of Mukhorty, and indeed those
hoof knocks against the sledge, which had awakened Nikita, were the last
efforts the already numbed Mukhorty had made to keep on his feet before
dying.
‘O Lord God, it seems Thou art calling me too!’ said Nikita. ‘Thy Holy
Will be done. But it’s uncanny.... Still, a man can’t die twice and
must die once. If only it would come soon!’
And he again drew in his head, closed his eyes, and became unconscious,
fully convinced that now he was certainly and finally dying.
It was not till noon that day that peasants dug Vasili Andreevich and
Nikita out of the snow with their shovels, not more than seventy yards
from the road and less than half a mile from the village.
The snow had hidden the sledge, but the shafts and the kerchief tied to
them were still visible. Mukhorty, buried up to his belly in snow, with
the breeching and drugget hanging down, stood all white, his dead head
pressed against his frozen throat: icicles hung from his nostrils, his
eyes were covered with hoar-frost as though filled with tears, and he
had grown so thin in that one night that he was nothing but skin and
bone.
Vasili Andreevich was stiff as a frozen carcass, and when they rolled
him off Nikita his legs remained apart and his arms stretched out as
they had been. His bulging hawk eyes were frozen, and his open mouth
under his clipped moustache was full of snow. But Nikita though chilled
through was still alive. When he had been brought to, he felt sure
that he was already dead and that what was taking place with him was
no longer happening in this world but in the next. When he heard the
peasants shouting as they dug him out and rolled the frozen body of
Vasili Andreevich from off him, he was at first surprised that in the
other world peasants should be shouting in the same old way and had the
same kind of body, and then when he realized that he was still in this
world he was sorry rather than glad, especially when he found that the
toes on both his feet were frozen.
Nikita lay in hospital for two months. They cut off three of his toes,
but the others recovered so that he was still able to work and went on
living for another twenty years, first as a farm-labourer, then in his
old age as a watchman. He died at home as he had wished, only this year,
under the icons with a lighted taper in his hands. Before he died he
asked his wife’s forgiveness and forgave her for the cooper. He also
took leave of his son and grandchildren, and died sincerely glad that
he was relieving his son and daughter-in-law of the burden of having to
feed him, and that he was now really passing from this life of which
he was weary into that other life which every year and every hour grew
clearer and more desirable to him. Whether he is better or worse off
there where he awoke after his death, whether he was disappointed or
found there what he expected, we shall all soon learn.