1849
Not seven, but fully twelve years had passed by, and I was in my
thirty-second year. My grandmother had long been dead; I was living in
Petersburg, with a post in the Department of Home Affairs. Tarhov I had
lost sight of; he had gone into the army, and lived almost always in the
provinces. We had met twice, as old friends, glad to see each other; but
we had not touched on the past in our talk. At the time of our last
meeting he was, if I remember right, already a married man.
One sultry summer day I was sauntering along Gorohov Street, cursing
my official duties for keeping me in Petersburg, and the heat and
stench and dust of the city. A funeral barred my way. It consisted of
a solitary car, that is, to be accurate, of a decrepit hearse, on
which a poor-looking wooden coffin, half-covered with a threadbare
black cloth, was shaking up and down as it was jolted violently over
the uneven pavement. An old man with a white head was walking alone
after the hearse.
I looked at him.... His face seemed familiar.... He too turned his eyes
upon me.... Merciful heavens! it was Baburin! I took off my hat, went up
to him, mentioned my name, and walked along beside him.
‘Whom are you burying?’ I asked.
‘Nikander Vavilitch Punin,’ he answered.
I felt, I knew beforehand, that he would utter that name, and yet it set
my heart aching. I felt melancholy, and yet I was glad that chance had
enabled me to pay my last respects to my old friend....
‘May I go with you, Paramon Semyonitch?’
‘You may.... I was following him alone; now there’ll be two of us.’
Our walk lasted more than an hour. My companion moved forward, without
lifting his eyes or opening his lips. He had become quite an old man
since I had seen him last; his deeply furrowed, copper-coloured face
stood out sharply against his white hair. Signs of a life of toil and
suffering, of continual struggle, could be seen in Baburin’s whole
figure; want and poverty had worked cruel havoc with him. When
everything was over, when what was Punin had disappeared for ever in the
damp ... yes, undoubtedly damp earth of the Smolensky cemetery, Baburin,
after standing a couple of minutes with bowed, uncovered head before the
newly risen mound of sandy clay, turned to me his emaciated, as it were
embittered, face, his dry, sunken eyes, thanked me grimly, and was about
to move away; but I detained him.
‘Where do you live, Paramon Semyonitch? Let me come and see you. I had
no idea you were living in Petersburg. We could recall old days, and
talk of our dead friend.’
Baburin did not answer me at once.
‘It’s two years since I found my way to Petersburg,’ he observed at
last; ‘I live at the very end of the town. However, if you really care
to visit me, come.’ He gave me his address. ‘Come in the evening; in the
evening we are always at home ... both of us.’
‘Both of you?’
‘I am married. My wife is not very well to-day, and that’s why she
did not come too. Though, indeed, it’s quite enough for one person to
go through this empty formality, this ceremony. As if anybody
believed in it all!’
I was a little surprised at Baburin’s last words, but I said nothing,
called a cab, and proposed to Baburin to take him home; but he refused.
* * * * *
The same day I went in the evening to see him. All the way there I was
thinking of Punin. I recalled how I had met him the first time, and how
ecstatic and amusing he was in those days; and afterwards in Moscow how
subdued he had grown--especially the last time I saw him; and now he had
made his last reckoning with life;--life is in grim earnest, it seems!
Baburin was living in the Viborgsky quarter, in a little house which
reminded me of the Moscow ‘nest’: the Petersburg abode was almost
shabbier in appearance. When I went into his room he was sitting on a
chair in a corner with his hands on his knees; a tallow candle, burning
low, dimly lighted up his bowed, white head. He heard the sound of my
footsteps, started up, and welcomed me more warmly than I had expected.
A few moments later his wife came in; I recognised her at once as
Musa--and only then understood why Baburin had invited me to come; he
wanted to show me that he had after all come by his own.
Musa was greatly changed--in face, in voice, and in manners; but her
eyes were changed most of all. In old times they had darted about like
live creatures, those malicious, beautiful eyes; they had gleamed
stealthily, but brilliantly; their glance had pierced, like a
pin-prick.... Now they looked at one directly, calmly, steadily; their
black centres had lost their lustre. ‘I am broken in, I am tame, I am
good,’ her soft and dull gaze seemed to say. Her continued, submissive
smile told the same story. And her dress, too, was subdued; brown, with
little spots on it. She came up to me, asked me whether I knew her. She
obviously felt no embarrassment, and not because she had lost a sense of
shame or memory of the past, but simply because all petty
self-consciousness had left her.
Musa talked a great deal about Punin, talked in an even voice, which too
had lost its fire. I learned that of late years he had become very
feeble, had almost sunk into childishness, so much so that he was
miserable if he had not toys to play with; they persuaded him, it is
true, that he made them out of waste stuff for sale ... but he really
played with them himself. His passion for poetry, however, never died
out, and he kept his memory for nothing but verses; a few days before
his death he recited a passage from the _Rossiad_; but Pushkin he
feared, as children fear bogies. His devotion to Baburin had also
remained undiminished; he worshipped him as much as ever, and even at
the last, wrapped about by the chill and dark of the end, he had
faltered with halting tongue, ‘benefactor!’ I learned also from Musa
that soon after the Moscow episode, it had been Baburin’s fate once more
to wander all over Russia, continually tossed from one private situation
to another; that in Petersburg, too, he had been again in a situation,
in a private business, which situation he had, however, been obliged to
leave a few days before, owing to some unpleasantness with his employer:
Baburin had ventured to stand up for the workpeople.... The invariable
smile, with which Musa accompanied her words, set me musing mournfully;
it put the finishing touch to the impression made on me by her husband’s
appearance. They had hard work, the two of them, to make a bare
living--there was no doubt of it. He took very little part in our
conversation; he seemed more preoccupied than grieved.... Something was
worrying him.
‘Paramon Semyonitch, come here,’ said the cook, suddenly appearing in
the doorway.
‘What is it? what’s wanted?’ he asked in alarm.
‘Come here,’ the cook repeated insistently and meaningly. Baburin
buttoned up his coat and went out.
When I was left alone with Musa, she looked at me with a somewhat
changed glance, and observed in a voice which was also changed, and with
no smile: ‘I don’t know, Piotr Petrovitch, what you think of me now, but
I dare say you remember what I used to be.... I was self-confident,
light-hearted ... and not good; I wanted to live for my own pleasure.
But I want to tell you this: when I was abandoned, and was like one
lost, and was only waiting for God to take me, or to pluck up spirit to
make an end of myself,--once more, just as in Voronezh, I met with
Paramon Semyonitch--and he saved me once again.... Not a word that could
wound me did I hear from him, not a word of reproach; he asked nothing
of me--I was not worthy of that; but he loved me ... and I became his
wife. What was I to do? I had failed of dying; and I could not live
either after my own choice....What was I to do with myself? Even so--it
was a mercy to be thankful for. That is all.’
She ceased, turned away for an instant ... the same submissive smile
came back to her lips. ‘Whether life’s easy for me, you needn’t ask,’
was the meaning I fancied now in that smile.
The conversation passed to ordinary subjects. Musa told me that Punin
had left a cat that he had been very fond of, and that ever since his
death she had gone up to the attic and stayed there, mewing
incessantly, as though she were calling some one ... the neighbours
were very much scared, and fancied that it was Punin’s soul that had
passed into the cat.
‘Paramon Semyonitch is worried about something,’ I said at last.
‘Oh, you noticed it?’--Musa sighed. ‘He cannot help being worried. I
need hardly tell you that Paramon Semyonitch has remained faithful to
his principles.... The present condition of affairs can but strengthen
them.’ (Musa expressed herself quite differently now from in the old
days in Moscow; there was a literary, bookish flavour in her phrases.)
‘I don’t know, though, whether I can rely upon you, and how you will
receive ...’
‘Why should you imagine you cannot rely upon me?’
‘Well, you are in the government service--you are an official.’
‘Well, what of that?’
‘You are, consequently, loyal to the government.’
I marvelled inwardly ... at Musa’s innocence. ‘As to my attitude to the
government, which is not even aware of my existence, I won’t enlarge
upon that,’ I observed; ‘but you may set your mind at rest. I will make
no bad use of your confidence. I sympathise with your husband’s
ideas ... more than you suppose.’
Musa shook her head.
‘Yes; that’s all so,’ she began, not without hesitation; ‘but you see
it’s like this. Paramon Semyonitch’s ideas will shortly, it may be, find
expression in action. They can no longer be hidden under a bushel. There
are comrades whom we cannot now abandon ...’
Musa suddenly ceased speaking, as though she had bitten her tongue. Her
last words had amazed and a little alarmed me. Most likely my face
showed what I was feeling--and Musa noticed it.
As I have said already, our interview took place in the year 1849. Many
people still remember what a disturbed and difficult time that was, and
by what incidents it was signalised in St. Petersburg. I had been struck
myself by certain peculiarities in Baburin’s behaviour, in his whole
demeanour. Twice he had referred to governmental action, to personages
in high authority, with such intense bitterness and hatred, with such
loathing, that I had been dumbfoundered....
‘Well?’ he asked me suddenly: ‘did you set your peasants free?’