I went to the station at ten o’clock in the morning. There was no frost,
but snow was falling in big wet flakes and an unpleasant damp wind was
blowing.
We passed a pond and then a birch copse, and then began going uphill
along the road which I could see from my window. I turned round to take
a last look at my house, but I could see nothing for the snow. Soon
afterwards dark huts came into sight ahead of us as in a fog. It was
Pestrovo.
“If I ever go out of my mind, Pestrovo will be the cause of it,” I
thought. “It persecutes me.”
We came out into the village street. All the roofs were intact, not one
of them had been pulled to pieces; so my bailiff had told a lie. A boy
was pulling along a little girl and a baby in a sledge. Another boy of
three, with his head wrapped up like a peasant woman’s and with huge
mufflers on his hands, was trying to catch the flying snowflakes on his
tongue, and laughing. Then a wagon loaded with fagots came toward us and
a peasant walking beside it, and there was no telling whether his
beard was white or whether it was covered with snow. He recognized my
coachman, smiled at him and said something, and mechanically took off
his hat to me. The dogs ran out of the yards and looked inquisitively at
my horses. Everything was quiet, ordinary, as usual. The emigrants had
returned, there was no bread; in the huts “some were laughing, some were
delirious”; but it all looked so ordinary that one could not believe
it really was so. There were no distracted faces, no voices whining for
help, no weeping, nor abuse, but all around was stillness, order, life,
children, sledges, dogs with dishevelled tails. Neither the children nor
the peasant we met were troubled; why was I so troubled?
Looking at the smiling peasant, at the boy with the huge mufflers, at
the huts, remembering my wife, I realized there was no calamity that
could daunt this people; I felt as though there were already a breath
of victory in the air. I felt proud and felt ready to cry out that I
was with them too; but the horses were carrying us away from the village
into the open country, the snow was whirling, the wind was howling, and
I was left alone with my thoughts. Of the million people working for the
peasantry, life itself had cast me out as a useless, incompetent,
bad man. I was a hindrance, a part of the people’s calamity; I was
vanquished, cast out, and I was hurrying to the station to go away and
hide myself in Petersburg in a hotel in Bolshaya Morskaya.
An hour later we reached the station. The coachman and a porter with a
disc on his breast carried my trunks into the ladies’ room. My coachman
Nikanor, wearing high felt boots and the skirt of his coat tucked up
through his belt, all wet with the snow and glad I was going away, gave
me a friendly smile and said:
“A fortunate journey, your Excellency. God give you luck.”
Every one, by the way, calls me “your Excellency,” though I am only a
collegiate councillor and a kammer-junker. The porter told me the train
had not yet left the next station; I had to wait. I went outside, and
with my head heavy from my sleepless night, and so exhausted I could
hardly move my legs, I walked aimlessly towards the pump. There was not
a soul anywhere near.
“Why am I going?” I kept asking myself. “What is there awaiting me
there? The acquaintances from whom I have come away, loneliness,
restaurant dinners, noise, the electric light, which makes my eyes ache.
Where am I going, and what am I going for? What am I going for?”
And it seemed somehow strange to go away without speaking to my wife. I
felt that I was leaving her in uncertainty. Going away, I ought to have
told that she was right, that I really was a bad man.
When I turned away from the pump, I saw in the doorway the
station-master, of whom I had twice made complaints to his superiors,
turning up the collar of his coat, shrinking from the wind and the snow.
He came up to me, and putting two fingers to the peak of his cap, told
me with an expression of helpless confusion, strained respectfulness,
and hatred on his face, that the train was twenty minutes late, and
asked me would I not like to wait in the warm?
“Thank you,” I answered, “but I am probably not going. Send word to my
coachman to wait; I have not made up my mind.”
I walked to and fro on the platform and thought, should I go away or
not? When the train came in I decided not to go. At home I had to expect
my wife’s amazement and perhaps her mockery, the dismal upper storey and
my uneasiness; but, still, at my age that was easier and as it were
more homelike than travelling for two days and nights with strangers to
Petersburg, where I should be conscious every minute that my life was of
no use to any one or to anything, and that it was approaching its end.
No, better at home whatever awaited me there.... I went out of the
station. It was awkward by daylight to return home, where every one was
so glad at my going. I might spend the rest of the day till evening at
some neighbour’s, but with whom? With some of them I was on strained
relations, others I did not know at all. I considered and thought of
Ivan Ivanitch.
“We are going to Bragino!” I said to the coachman, getting into the
sledge.
“It’s a long way,” sighed Nikanor; “it will be twenty miles, or maybe
twenty-five.”
“Oh, please, my dear fellow,” I said in a tone as though Nikanor had the
right to refuse. “Please let us go!”
Nikanor shook his head doubtfully and said slowly that we really ought
to have put in the shafts, not Circassian, but Peasant or Siskin; and
uncertainly, as though expecting I should change my mind, took the reins
in his gloves, stood up, thought a moment, and then raised his whip.
“A whole series of inconsistent actions...” I thought, screening my face
from the snow. “I must have gone out of my mind. Well, I don’t care....”
In one place, on a very high and steep slope, Nikanor carefully held
the horses in to the middle of the descent, but in the middle the horses
suddenly bolted and dashed downhill at a fearful rate; he raised his
elbows and shouted in a wild, frantic voice such as I had never heard
from him before:
“Hey! Let’s give the general a drive! If you come to grief he’ll buy new
ones, my darlings! Hey! look out! We’ll run you down!”
Only now, when the extraordinary pace we were going at took my breath
away, I noticed that he was very drunk. He must have been drinking at
the station. At the bottom of the descent there was the crash of ice; a
piece of dirty frozen snow thrown up from the road hit me a painful blow
in the face.
The runaway horses ran up the hill as rapidly as they had downhill, and
before I had time to shout to Nikanor my sledge was flying along on
the level in an old pine forest, and the tall pines were stretching out
their shaggy white paws to me from all directions.
“I have gone out of my mind, and the coachman’s drunk,” I thought.
“Good!”
I found Ivan Ivanitch at home. He laughed till he coughed, laid his head
on my breast, and said what he always did say on meeting me:
“You grow younger and younger. I don’t know what dye you use for your
hair and your beard; you might give me some of it.”
“I’ve come to return your call, Ivan Ivanitch,” I said untruthfully.
“Don’t be hard on me; I’m a townsman, conventional; I do keep count of
calls.”
“I am delighted, my dear fellow. I am an old man; I like respect....
Yes.”
From his voice and his blissfully smiling face, I could see that he was
greatly flattered by my visit. Two peasant women helped me off with my
coat in the entry, and a peasant in a red shirt hung it on a hook, and
when Ivan Ivanitch and I went into his little study, two barefooted
little girls were sitting on the floor looking at a picture-book; when
they saw us they jumped up and ran away, and a tall, thin old woman
in spectacles came in at once, bowed gravely to me, and picking up a
pillow from the sofa and a picture-book from the floor, went away. From
the adjoining rooms we heard incessant whispering and the patter of bare
feet.
“I am expecting the doctor to dinner,” said Ivan Ivanitch. “He promised
to come from the relief centre. Yes. He dines with me every Wednesday,
God bless him.” He craned towards me and kissed me on the neck.
“You have come, my dear fellow, so you are not vexed,” he whispered,
sniffing. “Don’t be vexed, my dear creature. Yes. Perhaps it is
annoying, but don’t be cross. My only prayer to God before I die is to
live in peace and harmony with all in the true way. Yes.”
“Forgive me, Ivan Ivanitch, I will put my feet on a chair,” I said,
feeling that I was so exhausted I could not be myself; I sat further
back on the sofa and put up my feet on an arm-chair. My face was burning
from the snow and the wind, and I felt as though my whole body were
basking in the warmth and growing weaker from it.
“It’s very nice here,” I went on--“warm, soft, snug... and goose-feather
pens,” I laughed, looking at the writing-table; “sand instead of
blotting-paper.”
“Eh? Yes... yes.... The writing-table and the mahogany cupboard here
were made for my father by a self-taught cabinet-maker--Glyeb Butyga, a
serf of General Zhukov’s. Yes... a great artist in his own way.”
Listlessly and in the tone of a man dropping asleep, he began telling me
about cabinet-maker Butyga. I listened. Then Ivan Ivanitch went into the
next room to show me a polisander wood chest of drawers remarkable for
its beauty and cheapness. He tapped the chest with his fingers, then
called my attention to a stove of patterned tiles, such as one never
sees now. He tapped the stove, too, with his fingers. There was an
atmosphere of good-natured simplicity and well-fed abundance about
the chest of drawers, the tiled stove, the low chairs, the pictures
embroidered in wool and silk on canvas in solid, ugly frames. When one
remembers that all those objects were standing in the same places and
precisely in the same order when I was a little child, and used to come
here to name-day parties with my mother, it is simply unbelievable that
they could ever cease to exist.
I thought what a fearful difference between Butyga and me! Butyga who
made things, above all, solidly and substantially, and seeing in that
his chief object, gave to length of life peculiar significance, had no
thought of death, and probably hardly believed in its possibility; I,
when I built my bridges of iron and stone which would last a thousand
years, could not keep from me the thought, “It’s not for long....it’s no
use.” If in time Butyga’s cupboard and my bridge should come under the
notice of some sensible historian of art, he would say: “These were two
men remarkable in their own way: Butyga loved his fellow-creatures and
would not admit the thought that they might die and be annihilated, and
so when he made his furniture he had the immortal man in his mind. The
engineer Asorin did not love life or his fellow-creatures; even in
the happy moments of creation, thoughts of death, of finiteness and
dissolution, were not alien to him, and we see how insignificant and
finite, how timid and poor, are these lines of his....”
“I only heat these rooms,” muttered Ivan Ivanitch, showing me his rooms.
“Ever since my wife died and my son was killed in the war, I have kept
the best rooms shut up. Yes... see...”
He opened a door, and I saw a big room with four columns, an old piano,
and a heap of peas on the floor; it smelt cold and damp.
“The garden seats are in the next room...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch.
“There’s no one to dance the mazurka now.... I’ve shut them up.”
We heard a noise. It was Dr. Sobol arriving. While he was rubbing his
cold hands and stroking his wet beard, I had time to notice in the
first place that he had a very dull life, and so was pleased to see Ivan
Ivanitch and me; and, secondly, that he was a naive and simple-hearted
man. He looked at me as though I were very glad to see him and very much
interested in him.
“I have not slept for two nights,” he said, looking at me naively and
stroking his beard. “One night with a confinement, and the next I stayed
at a peasant’s with the bugs biting me all night. I am as sleepy as
Satan, do you know.”
With an expression on his face as though it could not afford me anything
but pleasure, he took me by the arm and led me to the dining-room. His
naive eyes, his crumpled coat, his cheap tie and the smell of iodoform
made an unpleasant impression upon me; I felt as though I were in vulgar
company. When we sat down to table he filled my glass with vodka, and,
smiling helplessly, I drank it; he put a piece of ham on my plate and I
ate it submissively.
“_Repetitia est mater studiorum_,” said Sobol, hastening to drink off
another wineglassful. “Would you believe it, the joy of seeing good
people has driven away my sleepiness? I have turned into a peasant, a
savage in the wilds; I’ve grown coarse, but I am still an educated man,
and I tell you in good earnest, it’s tedious without company.”
They served first for a cold course white sucking-pig with horse-radish
cream, then a rich and very hot cabbage soup with pork on it, with
boiled buckwheat, from which rose a column of steam. The doctor went on
talking, and I was soon convinced that he was a weak, unfortunate man,
disorderly in external life. Three glasses of vodka made him drunk; he
grew unnaturally lively, ate a great deal, kept clearing his throat and
smacking his lips, and already addressed me in Italian, “Eccellenza.”
Looking naively at me as though he were convinced that I was very glad
to see and hear him, he informed me that he had long been separated from
his wife and gave her three-quarters of his salary; that she lived in
the town with his children, a boy and a girl, whom he adored; that
he loved another woman, a widow, well educated, with an estate in the
country, but was rarely able to see her, as he was busy with his work
from morning till night and had not a free moment.
“The whole day long, first at the hospital, then on my rounds,” he told
us; “and I assure you, Eccellenza, I have not time to read a book, let
alone going to see the woman I love. I’ve read nothing for ten years!
For ten years, Eccellenza. As for the financial side of the question,
ask Ivan Ivanitch: I have often no money to buy tobacco.”
“On the other hand, you have the moral satisfaction of your work,” I
said.
“What?” he asked, and he winked. “No,” he said, “better let us drink.”
I listened to the doctor, and, after my invariable habit, tried to take
his measure by my usual classification--materialist, idealist, filthy
lucre, gregarious instincts, and so on; but no classification fitted
him even approximately; and strange to say, while I simply listened and
looked at him, he seemed perfectly clear to me as a person, but as soon
as I began trying to classify him he became an exceptionally complex,
intricate, and incomprehensible character in spite of all his candour
and simplicity. “Is that man,” I asked myself, “capable of wasting other
people’s money, abusing their confidence, being disposed to sponge on
them?” And now this question, which had once seemed to me grave and
important, struck me as crude, petty, and coarse.
Pie was served; then, I remember, with long intervals between, during
which we drank home-made liquors, they gave us a stew of pigeons,
some dish of giblets, roast sucking-pig, partridges, cauliflower, curd
dumplings, curd cheese and milk, jelly, and finally pancakes and jam.
At first I ate with great relish, especially the cabbage soup and the
buckwheat, but afterwards I munched and swallowed mechanically, smiling
helplessly and unconscious of the taste of anything. My face was burning
from the hot cabbage soup and the heat of the room. Ivan Ivanitch and
Sobol, too, were crimson.
“To the health of your wife,” said Sobol. “She likes me. Tell her her
doctor sends her his respects.”
“She’s fortunate, upon my word,” sighed Ivan Ivanitch. “Though she takes
no trouble, does not fuss or worry herself, she has become the most
important person in the whole district. Almost the whole business is
in her hands, and they all gather round her, the doctor, the District
Captains, and the ladies. With people of the right sort that happens
of itself. Yes.... The apple-tree need take no thought for the apple to
grow on it; it will grow of itself.”
“It’s only people who don’t care who take no thought,” said I.
“Eh? Yes...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch, not catching what I said, “that’s
true.... One must not worry oneself. Just so, just so.... Only do your
duty towards God and your neighbour, and then never mind what happens.”
“Eccellenza,” said Sobol solemnly, “just look at nature about us: if
you poke your nose or your ear out of your fur collar it will be
frost-bitten; stay in the fields for one hour, you’ll be buried in the
snow; while the village is just the same as in the days of Rurik,
the same Petchenyegs and Polovtsi. It’s nothing but being burnt down,
starving, and struggling against nature in every way. What was I saying?
Yes! If one thinks about it, you know, looks into it and analyses all
this hotchpotch, if you will allow me to call it so, it’s not life but
more like a fire in a theatre! Any one who falls down or screams with
terror, or rushes about, is the worst enemy of good order; one must
stand up and look sharp, and not stir a hair! There’s no time for
whimpering and busying oneself with trifles. When you have to deal with
elemental forces you must put out force against them, be firm and as
unyielding as a stone. Isn’t that right, grandfather?” He turned to Ivan
Ivanitch and laughed. “I am no better than a woman myself; I am a limp
rag, a flabby creature, so I hate flabbiness. I can’t endure petty
feelings! One mopes, another is frightened, a third will come straight
in here and say: ‘Fie on you! Here you’ve guzzled a dozen courses and
you talk about the starving!’ That’s petty and stupid! A fourth will
reproach you, Eccellenza, for being rich. Excuse me, Eccellenza,” he
went on in a loud voice, laying his hand on his heart, “but your
having set our magistrate the task of hunting day and night for your
thieves--excuse me, that’s also petty on your part. I am a little drunk,
so that’s why I say this now, but you know, it is petty!”
“Who’s asking him to worry himself? I don’t understand!” I said, getting
up.
I suddenly felt unbearably ashamed and mortified, and I walked round the
table.
“Who asks him to worry himself? I didn’t ask him to.... Damn him!”
“They have arrested three men and let them go again. They turned out not
to be the right ones, and now they are looking for a fresh lot,” said
Sobol, laughing. “It’s too bad!”
“I did not ask him to worry himself,” said I, almost crying with
excitement. “What’s it all for? What’s it all for? Well, supposing I was
wrong, supposing I have done wrong, why do they try to put me more in
the wrong?”
“Come, come, come, come!” said Sobol, trying to soothe me. “Come! I
have had a drop, that is why I said it. My tongue is my enemy. Come,” he
sighed, “we have eaten and drunk wine, and now for a nap.”
He got up from the table, kissed Ivan Ivanitch on the head, and
staggering from repletion, went out of the dining-room. Ivan Ivanitch
and I smoked in silence.
“I don’t sleep after dinner, my dear,” said Ivan Ivanitch, “but you have
a rest in the lounge-room.”
I agreed. In the half-dark and warmly heated room they called the
lounge-room, there stood against the walls long, wide sofas, solid and
heavy, the work of Butyga the cabinet maker; on them lay high, soft,
white beds, probably made by the old woman in spectacles. On one of them
Sobol, without his coat and boots, already lay asleep with his face to
the back of the sofa; another bed was awaiting me. I took off my coat
and boots, and, overcome by fatigue, by the spirit of Butyga which
hovered over the quiet lounge-room, and by the light, caressing snore of
Sobol, I lay down submissively.
And at once I began dreaming of my wife, of her room, of the
station-master with his face full of hatred, the heaps of snow, a fire
in the theatre. I dreamed of the peasants who had stolen twenty sacks of
rye out of my barn.
“Anyway, it’s a good thing the magistrate let them go,” I said.
I woke up at the sound of my own voice, looked for a moment in
perplexity at Sobol’s broad back, at the buckles of his waistcoat, at
his thick heels, then lay down again and fell asleep.
When I woke up the second time it was quite dark. Sobol was asleep.
There was peace in my heart, and I longed to make haste home. I dressed
and went out of the lounge-room. Ivan Ivanitch was sitting in a big
arm-chair in his study, absolutely motionless, staring at a fixed point,
and it was evident that he had been in the same state of petrifaction
all the while I had been asleep.
“Good!” I said, yawning. “I feel as though I had woken up after breaking
the fast at Easter. I shall often come and see you now. Tell me, did my
wife ever dine here?”
“So-ome-ti-mes... sometimes,”’ muttered Ivan Ivanitch, making an effort
to stir. “She dined here last Saturday. Yes.... She likes me.”
After a silence I said:
“Do you remember, Ivan Ivanitch, you told me I had a disagreeable
character and that it was difficult to get on with me? But what am I to
do to make my character different?”
“I don’t know, my dear boy.... I’m a feeble old man, I can’t advise
you.... Yes.... But I said that to you at the time because I am fond
of you and fond of your wife, and I was fond of your father.... Yes. I
shall soon die, and what need have I to conceal things from you or to
tell you lies? So I tell you: I am very fond of you, but I don’t respect
you. No, I don’t respect you.”
He turned towards me and said in a breathless whisper:
“It’s impossible to respect you, my dear fellow. You look like a
real man. You have the figure and deportment of the French President
Carnot--I saw a portrait of him the other day in an illustrated paper...
yes.... You use lofty language, and you are clever, and you are high up
in the service beyond all reach, but haven’t real soul, my dear boy...
there’s no strength in it.”
“A Scythian, in fact,” I laughed. “But what about my wife? Tell me
something about my wife; you know her better.”