PART TWO
ALMOST all his life long Kuzma had dreamed of writing, of obtaining an education. Verses did not count. He had dallied with verses as a mere child. He longed to narrate how he had come to naught; to depict, with unprecedented ruthlessness, his poverty and that dreadful factor in his commonplace life which had crippled him, made of him a barren fig-tree.
When he reviewed his life in his own mind he both condemned and acquitted himself. Yes, he was an indigent petty townsman who, almost up to the age of fifteen, had been able to read only by spelling out every word. But his history was the history of all self-taught Russians. He had been born in a country which had more than a hundred million illiterate inhabitants. He had grown up in the Black Suburb, where down to the present day men fight to the death with their fists. In his childhood he had seen dirt and drunkenness, laziness and boredom. His childhood had furnished only one poetical impression: there had been the dark cemetery grove, and the pasture on the hill behind the Suburb, and beyond that—space, the hot mirage of the steppe, a white cottage beneath a poplar-tree in the far distance. Buthe had been taught to look upon even this cottage with scorn: Little Russians dwelt there, and, of course, they were so stupid that in reply to the question, “Little Russians, where are your kettles?”[14]they said: “Do you need to be told that they are under the wagons?” He and Tikhon had been taught the alphabet and figures by a neighbour named Byelkin, whose trade was to make rubber overshoes in moulds; but he had taught them because he never had any work—for what demand was there in the Suburb for overshoes?—and because it was always agreeable to pull some one’s hair, and because a man cannot sit for ever on the earth wall alongside his hut absolutely idle, with his frowsy head bent and exposed to the sun, doing nothing but spit in the dust between his bare feet.
In Matorin’s shop the brothers had speedily attained to writing and reading, and Kuzma had begun to be attracted by the little books which the accordeon-player, old Balashkin, the eccentric free-thinker of the bazaar, gave him. But what chance for reading was there in the shop? Matorin very often shouted: “I’ll box your ears for those books of yours, you abominable little devil!”
That was an old story; but Kuzma wished to recall, also, the morals of the bazaar. In the bazaar he had picked up much that was opprobrious. There he and his brother had been taught to sneer at thepoverty of their mother, at her having taken to drink, abandoned as she was by her adolescent sons. There they once played the following prank: Every day, on his way from the library, the son of the tailor Vitebsky passed the door of the shop—a Jew aged sixteen, with a pallid greyish face; a terribly lean, big-eared fellow who wore spectacles and industriously read as he walked, his book held close up to his eyes. So they threw some bricks and rubbish on the sidewalk—and the Jew (“that learned man!”) stumbled so successfully that he bruised his knees, elbows, and teeth to the point of bleeding. Then Kuzma started to write. He began a story about a merchant who, driving by night in a fearful thunderstorm through the Murom forests, came upon an encampment of bandits and got his throat cut. Kuzma fervently set forth his remarks and thoughts on the brink of death, his grief over his iniquitous life, “so prematurely cut short.” But the bazaar mercilessly threw cold water on it.
“Well, you are a queer one, Lord forgive us!” it pronounced, merrily and insolently, through Tikhon’s mouth. “‘Prematurely’! That pot-bellied devil ought to have been done for long before! Well, and how did you know what he was thinking about? They cut his throat, didn’t they?”
Then Kuzma wrote, in the style of Koltzoff, a ballad about an extremely ancient knight who bequeathed to his son a faithful steed. “He carried me in my youth!” exclaimed the hero in the ballad. But Tikhon merely shook his head over that.
“Really!” said he, “how old was that horse? Akh, Kuzma! Kuzma! You’d better compose something practical—well, about the war, for example.”
And Kuzma, catering to the taste of the market-place, began with great zeal to write about what the bazaar was discussing at the moment—the Russo-Turkish war: about how—
“In the year of seventy-sevenThe Turk set out to fight;He advanced with his hordesAnd tried to capture Russia”
“In the year of seventy-sevenThe Turk set out to fight;He advanced with his hordesAnd tried to capture Russia”
“In the year of seventy-seven
The Turk set out to fight;
He advanced with his hordes
And tried to capture Russia”
and how those hordes
In uncouth nightcapsCrept stealthily to the Tsar-Cannon.[15]
In uncouth nightcapsCrept stealthily to the Tsar-Cannon.[15]
In uncouth nightcaps
Crept stealthily to the Tsar-Cannon.[15]
Later on it pained him to realize how much stupidity and ignorance this doggerel contained, the servile quality of its language, and its Russian scorn for foreign headgear. With pain he recalled much else. For example, Zadonsk. One day there he was overcome by a passionate longing for repentance, a terror lest his mother, who had died, practically, of starvation, had bitterly reported in heaven her sorrowful life; and he set forth on foot to the abode of a holy man. Once there, he did nothing whatever except to read to assembled admirers, with malicious joy, a “sheet” which had made a special impression on him: how a certain village scribe had taken it into his head toreject the authorities and the Church, and God had waxed so wroth that “this aristocrat was laid low on his bed of death,” his malady such that “he devoured more than a pig, and shrieked that that was not enough, and withered away until he was unrecognizable.” And Kuzma’s entire youth was spent in just such affairs! He thought and professed one thing—and said and did something entirely different. Aspiring to write and reckoning up the sum-total of his life, Kuzma shook his head mournfully: “A genuine Russian trait, sir! The sowing was half peas, half thistles.”
It seemed as if he had been merry in his youth, kind, tender, quick to understand, eager to learn. But was it really so? He was not Tikhon, of course. But why had he, equally with Tikhon, assimilated so promptly the savagery of those who surrounded him? Why had he, kind and tender as he was, so mercilessly neglected his mother? Why had the bazaar so long reigned supreme over his heart, which was toiling so ardently over books? Why, why was he—a barren fig-tree?
Tikhon had been in the habit of keeping most of his earnings in one common money-box: they had decided to set up in business for themselves. Kuzma surrendered his money with a full, hearty confidence which Tikhon never possessed. But his mother, his mother! He groaned as he recalled how, poverty-stricken as she was, she had bestowed her blessing on him, had given him her sole treasure, a relic of her better days, which had been preserved at the bottom ofher chest—a small silver-mounted holy picture. And the fact that he had groaned was good, also; but all the same his money had gone to Tikhon.
ABANDONING the shop counter, and having sold off what their mother had left, they had begun to trade—had gone out among the Little Russians, and to Voronezh. They were frequently in their native town, and Kuzma kept up his friendship with Balashkin as of yore, and read avidly the books which Balashkin gave him or recommended to him. This was not at all like Tikhon. Tikhon, when there was nothing to do, was fond of reading, also; a year might pass without his taking a book in his hand, but if he did begin one, he read swiftly to the very last line and, once he had finished that, instantly severed all connection with the book; on one occasion he had read through an entire volume of the “Contemporary” in one night, had not understood much, had pronounced what he had read extremely interesting—and then had forgotten the “Contemporary” for ever. Neither did Kuzma understand much of what he read—even in the writings of Byelinsky, Gogol, and Pushkin. But his comprehension increased, not by days but by hours: he was able to grasp the gist of the matter and rivet it in his heart to a positively amazing degree. Why, then, when he comprehended thewords of Dobroliuboff, did he disfigure his speech in the bazaar and say “khvakt” instead of “fact”? Why, when conversing with Balashkin about Schiller, did he passionately long to borrow his “ekordeon”? Waxing enthusiastic over Turgenieff’s “Smoke,” he maintained nevertheless that “he who is intelligent but not educated, has much knowledge even without education.” On visiting the grave of Koltzoff, in rapture he wrote upon the gravestone an illiterate epitaph: “Binith this munament is intered the boady of citazen alesei vasilevitch Kaltzoff campoaser and poet of Voronezh riworded by the munarch’s greciousnesa lerningles man enlitend by natur.”
Balashkin explained the meaning of things to him and impressed on Kuzma’s soul a profound stamp of himself. Old, gigantic, lean, garbed summer and winter alike in a peasant overcoat which had turned green with age and a winter-weight peaked cap, huge-faced, clean-shaven, and wry-mouthed, Balashkin was almost terrifying with his malicious speeches, his deep, senile bass voice, the prickly, silvery bristles on his grey cheeks and lips, and his green left eye, bulging, flashing, and squinting in the direction in which his mouth was drawn awry. And he fairly took to barking one day at Kuzma’s remark about “enlightenment without education.” That eye of his blazed as he hurled aside his cigarette, which he had filled with the cheap tobacco on top of a tin which had contained pilchards. “Jaw of an ass! What’s that you’re jabbering? Have you ever considered what our ‘enlightenmentwithout education’ signifies? The death of Zhadovskaya—that’s its devilish symbol!”
“But what about the death of Zhadovskaya?” inquired Kuzma.
And Balashkin yelled in a rage: “You have forgotten? The poetess, a wealthy woman, a noblewoman—but she drowned herself. You have forgotten?” And again he seized his cigarette and began to roar dully: “Merciful God! They killed Pushkin, they killed Lermontoff, they drowned Pisareff. They strangled Rylyeeff, they condemned Polezhaeff to the ranks as a soldier, they walled up Shevtchenko as a prisoner for ten years, they dragged Dostoevsky out to be shot, Gogol went mad—and how about Koltzoff, Nikitin, Ryeshetnikoff? Okh, and is there any other such country in the world, any other such nation? thrice accursed may they be!”
Excitedly twisting the buttons of his long-tailed coat, now buttoning, again unbuttoning them, frowning and grimacing, Kuzma, perturbed, said in reply: “Such a nation! ’Tis the greatest of nations, and not ‘such’ a nation, permit me to remark to you!”
“Don’t you presume to confer prizes!” Balaskhin shouted.
“Yes, sir, I will presume! For those writers were children of that same nation!”
“Yes, curse you, they were—but George Sand was no worse than your Zhadovskaya, and she did not drown herself!”
“Platon Karataeff—there’s an acknowledged type of that nation!”
“And why not Yeroshka, why not Lukashka? My good man, if I take a notion to shake up literature I’ll find boots to fit all the gods! Why Karataeff and not Ruzuvaeff and Kolupaeff? why not a bloodsucker spider, an extortioner priest, a venal deacon? some Saltytchikha or other? Why not Karamazoff and Oblomoff, Khlestyakoff and Nozdreff? or, not to go too far afield, why not your good-for-nothing, nasty brother, Tishka Krasoff?”
“Platon Karataeff—”
“The lice have eaten your Karataeff! I don’t see that he’s an ideal!”
“But the Russian martyrs, saints, holy men, the fools-for-Christ’s-sake, the Old Ritualists?”
“Wha-at’s that? Well, how about the Coliseum, the crusades, the religious wars, the countless sects? And Luther, to wind up? No, nonsense! You can’t beat me down with one blow, like that!”
“Then what, in your opinion, ought to be done?” shouted Kuzma. “Blindfold our eyes and rush to the ends of the world?”
But at this point Balashkin suddenly became extinguished. He closed his eyes, and his huge grey face portrayed advanced, painful old age. For a long time with drooping head he turned over something in his mind, and at last muttered: “What ought to be done? I don’t know: we are ruined. Our last asset was ‘Memoirs of the Fatherland,’ and that has been knocked in the head! And yet, you fool, you think the only thing that is necessary is to educate oneself.”
Yes, one thing was necessary—to acquire an education.But when? And how? Five whole years he had spent in peddling—and they were the best period of his life! Even the arrival in a town seemed an immense happiness. Rest, acquaintances, the odour of bake-shops and iron roofs, the pavement on Trading Street, fresh white rolls and the Persian March on the mechanical organ of the “Kars” eating-house. The floors in the shops watered from a teapot, the wood-notes of a famous quail in front of Rudakoff’s door, the smell of the fish shops in the bazaar, of fennel and coarse tobacco. The kindly and terrible smile of Balashkin at the sight of Kuzma approaching. Then—thunders and curses on the Slavophils, Byelinsky and vile abuse, incoherent and passionate interchange of opprobrious names between the two, quotations. And, to wind up, the most desperately absurd deductions. “Well, now we’ve got to the end of our rope—and we’re dashing back to Asia at full speed!” the old man rumbled, and, abruptly lowering his voice, he cast a glance around him: “Have you heard? They say that Saltykoff is dying. He’s the last. ’Tis said he was poisoned.” And in the morning—again the springless cart, the steppe, sultry heat or mud, strained and painful reading to the accompaniment of jolts from the swiftly revolving wheels. Protracted contemplation of the steppe’s vast spaces, the sweetly melancholy melody of verses within, interrupted by thoughts about grains or of squabbles with Tikhon. The perturbing odour of the road—of dust and tar. The odour of gingerbread, flavoured with mint, and the suffocating stench of cat hides, of dirty fleeces, of boots greased withtrain-oil. Those years had, in truth, been a drain on his strength—the fatigue of not changing his shirt for a fortnight, of food eaten without the relief of any liquid, of lameness caused by heels bruised to the point of bleeding, of nights passed in strange villages, in strange cottages and sheds!
KUZMA crossed himself with a grand flourish when, at last, he escaped from that slavery. But he was already nearly thirty years of age; his hair was noticeably grey; he had become more sober, more serious; he had abandoned his verses, had abandoned reading; he had become accustomed to eating-houses, to drinking-bouts. He served for a year less a week with a drover near Eletz, went to Moscow on his employer’s business—and left his service. Long before that time he had begun a love affair in Voronezh, with a married woman, and he longed to go thither. So he knocked about in Voronezh for nearly ten years, busying himself with the purchase of grain, horse-trading, and writing articles about the grain trade for the newspapers, bewildering—or, to speak more correctly, poisoning—his mind with the articles of Tolstoy and the satires of Saltykoff. And, all the while, he was overwhelmed with the conviction that he was wasting—had wasted—his life.
“There, now,” he said, as he recalled those years,“that’s what it signifies—that knowledge without education!”
In the early ’nineties Balashkin died of hernia, and Kuzma saw him, for the last time, not long before his death. And what an interview it was!
“I must write,” complained one, gloomily and angrily. “One withers away like a burdock in the field.”
“Yes, yes,” boomed the other. The squint of his dying eye was already drowsy, and his jaws moved with difficulty, and the coarse tobacco did not fall as it should have done on his cigarette paper. “As the saying runs: learn every hour, think every hour, look about you at all our poverty and wretchedness—” Then, with a shame-faced grin, he laid aside his cigarette and thrust his hand into the breast of his coat. “Here,” he mumbled, rummaging in a package of tattered papers and clippings from newspapers. “Here, my friend, is a pile of stuff of some value. There was a great famine, curse it. And I read everything about it, and wrote it all down. When I die, ’twill be of some use to you, this devil’s material. Nothing but scurvy and typhus, typhus and scurvy. In one county all the small children died; in another all the dogs were eaten up. God is my witness that I am telling no lie! Here, wait a minute, I’ll find it for you immediately—”
But he rummaged and rummaged and did not find it, hunted for his spectacles, began in alarm to search through his pockets, to look under the counter, got tired, and gave it up. And, as soon as he gave up thesearch, he began to drowse and waggle his head.
“But no, no—don’t you dare to touch on that yet. You are still uneducated, a weak-minded fellow. Cut a tree to suit your powers. Have you written anything on that subject I suggested to you—about Sukhonosy? Not yet? Well, so you are an ass’s jaw, as I said, after all. What a subject that was!”
“I ought to write about the village, about the populace,” said Kuzma. “For you yourself are always saying: ‘Russia, Russia—’”
“Well, and isn’t Sukhonosy the populace? isn’t it Russia?All Russia is nothing but a village: get that firmly fixed in your noddle!Look about you: is this a town, in your opinion? The flocks jam the streets every evening—they kick up such a dust that you can’t see your next-door neighbour. But you call it a ‘town’! Ugh, you dull clodhopper—’tis plain that one might drive a stake into your head, and still you would never write anything.”
And Kuzma understood clearly and conclusively that Balashkin had spoken the sacred truth: he was not destined to write. There was Sukhonosy. For many years that repulsive old man of the Suburb had never been out of his mind—an old man whose sole property consisted of a mattress infested with bugs and a woman’s moth-eaten cloak which he had inherited from his wife. He begged, fell ill, starved, roosted for fifty kopeks a month in one corner of a cottage occupied by a woman trader in the “gluttons’ row,” and, in her opinion, might very well set his affairs straight by selling his inheritance. But he prized itas the apple of his eye—and, of course, not in the least because of tender feelings toward the late lamented: it afforded him the consciousness that he owned incomparably more property than other folks. It seemed to him that it was worth a devilishly high price: “Nowadays such cloaks are not to be had at all!” He was not disinclined, not in the least disinclined, to sell it. But he asked such an outrageous price that would-be purchasers were dazed. And Kuzma understood this tragedy of the Suburb perfectly. But when he began to consider how it should be expressed, he began to live through the whole complicated life of the Suburb, through recollections of his childhood, of his youth—and he became confused, drowned Sukhonosy in the abundance of the pictures which besieged his memory, and dropped his hands in despair, crushed by the necessity of expressing his own soul, of setting forth everything which had crippled his own life. And the most terrible thing about that life was the fact that it was a simple, everyday life, which broke up into petty details with incomprehensible rapidity. Yes, and what was more, he did not know how to write: he did not even know how to think regularly or long; he suffered like a puppy in a bed of straw when he took up a pen. And Balashkin’s death-bed prophecy brought him to his senses; ’twas not for him to write stories! So the first thought which flashed through his mind was, to write “The Sum-Total,” a stern, harsh epitaph on himself and—on Russia.
BUT since that time twelve more barren years had elapsed. He had plied the trade of horse-dealer in Voronezh; then, when the woman with whom he had been living died of puerperal fever, he had carried on the same trade in Eletz, had worked in a candle shop in Lipetzk, had been a clerk on Kasatkin’s farm. And his life had flowed on smoothly, engrossed in work, in everyday tasks—until his habit of tippling had rather abruptly turned into hard drinking. He had become a passionate follower of Tolstoy: for about a year he did not smoke, never took a drop of vodka, ate no meat, never parted with “My Confession” and “The Gospels,” wanted to emigrate to the Caucasus and join the Dukhobortzy.[16]But he was sent to Kieff on a business matter. And as he set forth, he felt something akin to a sickly joy, as if he had suddenly been released, after prolonged imprisonment, into complete freedom. It was clear weather at the end of September, and everything seemed easy, very beautiful—the pure air, the comfortable sun, and the cadence of the train, the open windows, and the flowering forests which flashed past them. All at once, when the train halted at Nyezhin, Kuzma saw a largecrowd surrounding the door of the station. The crowd was gathered round some one, and was shouting and quarrelling in great agitation. Kuzma’s heart began to beat violently, and he ran toward the crowd. Rapidly elbowing his way through it, he caught sight of the red cap of the station-master, the white, pyramidal cap of a cook, resembling that of a Kazak Hetman, and the grey overcoat of a sturdy gendarme, engaged in roundly berating three Little Russians, who were standing meekly erect in front of him, clad in short, thick coats, indestructible boots, and caps of snuff-coloured lambskin. These caps hung precariously on some dreadful objects that proved to be round heads bandaged with coarse muslin, stiff with dried serous fluid, above swollen eyes and faces puffy and glassy with greenish-yellow bruises, bearing wounds on which the blood had coagulated and turned black. The men had been bitten by a mad wolf, had been despatched to the hospital in Kieff, and had been held up for days at a stretch at almost every large station, without a morsel of bread or a kopek of money. And, on learning that they were not to be taken aboard now, because the train was called an express train, Kuzma suddenly flew into a rage and, to the accompaniment of approving yells from the Jews in the throng, began to bawl and stamp his feet at the gendarme. He was arrested, an official report was drawn up, and, while awaiting the next train, Kuzma, for the first time in his life, got dead drunk.
The Little Russians were from the TchernigoffGovernment. This he had always thought of as a far-away region with a sky of dim, gloomy blue above the forests. These men, who had gone through a hand-to-hand encounter with the mad wolf, reminded him of the days of Vladimir, the life of long ago, of ancient peasant life in the pine forests. And as he proceeded to get drunk, pouring out glass after glass of liquor with hands shaking after the row, Kuzma became transported with delight: “Akh, that was a great epoch!” He was choking with wrath at the gendarme, and at those meek cattle in their long-tailed coats. Stupid, savage, curse them! But—Russia, ancient Russia! And tears of drunken joy and fervour, which distorted every picture to supernatural dimensions, obscured Kuzma’s vision. “But how about non-resistance?” recurred to his mind at intervals, and he shook his head with a grin. A trim young officer was eating his dinner, with his back to him, at the general table; and Kuzma gazed in an amicably insolent manner at his white linen uniform blouse, so short, so high-waisted, that he wanted to step up to him and pull it down. “And I will do that!” thought Kuzma. “But he would jump up and shout—and slap my face! There’s non-resistance for you!” Then he journeyed on to Kieff and, completely abandoning his business, spent three days roaming about the city and on the bluffs above the Dnyepr, in the joyous excitement induced by his intoxication.
In the Cathedral of St. Sophia, at the Liturgy, many persons stared in amazement at the thin, broad-shoulderedkatzap[17]who stood in front of Yaroslaff’s[18]tomb. He was neatly dressed, held in his hand a new peaked cap, stood with decorum; but there was something queer in his general appearance. The service came to an end: the congregation departed, and the doors were opened; the verger extinguished the candles. Through the upper windows, athwart the blue smoke, filtered golden streaks of the hot noonday sun; but he, with set teeth, his sparse greying beard drooping on his breast and his deeply sunken eyes closed in a sort of happy pain, remained there listening to the pealing of the bells, carolling and dully booming above the cathedral—that ancient peal which had, in days of yore, accompanied the campaigns against the Petchenyegi.[19]And, toward evening, Kuzma was seen at the Lavra.[20]He was sitting opposite its gate beneath a withered acacia, alongside a crippled lad, gazing with a troubled, melancholy smile at its white walls and enclosures, at the gold of its little cupolas shining against the pure autumnal sky. The lad had no cap, a sack of coarse linen hung over his shoulder, and on his body hung dirty, ragged old garments; in one hand he helda wooden cup, with a kopek in the bottom, while with the other he incessantly changed the position of his deformed leg—which was bare to the knee, withered and unnaturally thin, burned black by the sun, and covered with a thick growth of golden-hued hair—as if it did not belong to him, as if it were a mere object. There was no one in their vicinity; but the lad, with his close-cropped head thrown back, stiff from the effects of the sun and the dust, displaying his thin, childish collar-bones, and paying no heed to the flies which settled on the excretions of his nostrils, drawled drowsily, painfully, and without ceasing:
“Take a look, ye mammas,See how unhappy, how miserable we are!Akh, God grant you, mammas,Never to suffer so!”
“Take a look, ye mammas,See how unhappy, how miserable we are!Akh, God grant you, mammas,Never to suffer so!”
“Take a look, ye mammas,
See how unhappy, how miserable we are!
Akh, God grant you, mammas,
Never to suffer so!”
And Kuzma confirmed him: “That’s so, that’s right!”
When he had conquered his intoxication and come to his senses, Kuzma felt that he was already an old man. Since that trip to Kieff three years had elapsed. And, during that space of time, something extremely important had indubitably been effected within him. How it had been effected, he himself did not even attempt to define. Life during those three years had been too abnormal—his own life and the life of the community. Of course, he had understood while still in Kieff that he would not remain long with Kasatkin, and that ahead of him lay poverty, the loss of even the semblance of manhood. And so it came to pass.He managed to scrape along through two more jobs, but under very humiliating and oppressive conditions: eternally half-drunk, slovenly, with voice turned hoarse, permeated through and through with the reek of cheap, strong tobacco, making herculean efforts to conceal his unfitness for business. Then he fell lower still; he returned to his native town, and ran through his last kopeks; he spent his nights all winter long in the general room of the lodging-house of Khodoff, whiled away the days in Avdyeef’s eating-house in the Women’s Bazaar. Out of these last kopeks many went for a stupid caprice, the publication of a little volume of verses—after which he had to stroll about among the patrons of Avdyeef’s establishment and force his booklet on them at half-price.
But even that was not all: he came near turning into a buffoon! Once, on a frosty, sunny morning, he was standing in the bazaar near the flour shops and gazing at a barefoot beggar cutting up antics before Mozzhukin the merchant, who had come out on his threshold. Mozzhukin, drowsily derisive, with a face resembling the reflection in a samovar, was chiefly interested in a cat which was licking his polished boot. But the beggar did not stop. He thumped his breast with his fists and, humping his shoulders, began in a hoarse voice to declaim:
“He who drinks when he is already drunk,Plays the part of a wise man....”
“He who drinks when he is already drunk,Plays the part of a wise man....”
“He who drinks when he is already drunk,
Plays the part of a wise man....”
And Kuzma, his swollen eyes beaming, suddenly cut in:
“Then long live jollity,Long life to good liquor!”
“Then long live jollity,Long life to good liquor!”
“Then long live jollity,
Long life to good liquor!”
And an old woman of the petty burgher class, who was passing by—she had a face like that of an aged lioness—halted, cast a sidelong glance at him, and, elevating her crutch, remarked distinctly and maliciously: “’Tis likely you don’t know your prayers as well as that!”
Lower than that there was no place to fall. But precisely that was what saved him. He survived several attacks of heart disease—and immediately stopped getting drunk, firmly resolving to undertake the simplest, most laborious sort of life; to hire, for example, an orchard, a vegetable-garden; to purchase, somewhere in his native county, a bee-farm. Fortunately, he still had a hundred and fifty rubles left.
At first this idea delighted him. “Yes, that’s capital,” he said to himself with that mournful ironical smile which he had acquired so long ago. “’Tis time to go home!” And, of a truth, he needed a rest. It was not very long since that vast agitation had begun, both within him and round about him. But it had already done its work. He had become something very different from what he had been previously. His beard had turned completely grey; his hair, which he wore parted in the middle, and which curled at the ends, had grown thin and acquired a rusty hue; his broad face, with its high cheek-bones, had grown darker and leaner than ever. His observing, sceptical mind had grown more keen. His soul had been purified,had become more unhealthily sensitive, although he was able to conceal the fact behind the serious and, at times, even severe look of the little eyes under brows which almost met across his nose. He had completely pulled himself together, and had begun to think less of himself, more of those round about him. Nevertheless, he longed to go “home” and rest: he craved work to his liking.
IN the spring, several months before the reconciliation with Tikhon, Kuzma heard that a garden in the village of Kazakoff, in his native district, was to be leased, and he hastened thither. It was a remote spot, with black loam soil, not far from the place where the Krasoffs had first taken root.
It was the beginning of May; cold weather and rain had returned after a hot spell; gloomy autumnal storm-clouds sailed over the town. Kuzma, in an old overcoat and without goloshes over his broken calfskin boots, was trudging to the railway station beyond the Cannon-makers’ Suburb, and, shaking his head and screwing up his face from the effects of the cigarette held in his teeth, with hands clasped behind his back under his overcoat, he was smiling to himself. A dirty little barefoot boy ran up to him with a pile of newspapers and, as he ran, shouted briskly the customary phrase: “Giniral strike!”
“You’re behind the times, my lad,” said Kuzma. “Isn’t there anything newer?”
The small boy came to a halt, with flashing eyes.
“The policeman has carried the news off to the station,” he replied.
“All hail to the constitution!” said Kuzma caustically, and pursued his course, skipping along through the mud, past fences darkened by the rain, past the branches of dripping gardens and the windows of lop-sided hovels which were sliding down hill, to the end of the town street. “Wonders will never cease!” he said to himself as he went leaping along. “In former days, with such weather, people would have been yawning, hardly exchanging a word, in all the shops and eating-houses. But now, all over the town, they do nothing but discuss the Duma, riots and conflagrations, and how ‘Murontzeff[21]has given the prime-minister a sound rating.’ Well, a frog does not keep its tail very long!” The fireman’s band was already playing in the town park. A whole company of kazaks had been sent. And the day before yesterday, on Trading Street, one of them, when drunk, went up to the window of the public library and made an insulting gesture to the young lady librarian. An elderly cabman, who was standing near by, began to reprove him, but the kazak jerked out his sabre from its scabbard, slashed the cabman’s shoulder, and, cursing violently, rushed down the street in pursuit of the people who were walking and driving past, and, crazedwith fear, were flying to the first shelter which presented itself.
“The catskin man, the catskin man,He fell down beneath a fence!”[22]
“The catskin man, the catskin man,He fell down beneath a fence!”[22]
“The catskin man, the catskin man,
He fell down beneath a fence!”[22]
piped up some naughty little girls, in their thin voices, after Kuzma, as they hopped from stone to stone, across the shallow stream of the Suburb.
“When he skins cats, he gets the paws!”
“Ugh, you little wretches!” a railway conductor growled at them. In an overcoat that was dreadfully heavy even to look at, he was walking in front of Kuzma, and he shook a small iron box at them. “Why don’t you pick on some one of your own age?”
But one could judge from his voice that he was restraining his laughter. The conductor’s old, deep goloshes were crusted with dried mud; the belt of his coat hung by a single button. The small bridge of planks along which he was walking lay askew. Further on, alongside the ditches flooded by the spring freshets, grew stunted bushes. And Kuzma gazed cheerlessly at them, and at the straw-thatched roofs on the hill of the Suburb; at the smoky and bluish clouds which hung over them, and at the reddish-yellow cur which was gnawing a bone in the ditch. In the bottom of the ditch, his legs straddled farapart, sat a petty burgher, in a waistcoat over a cotton-print Russian shirt. His widely opened eyes looked white in his face, which, scarlet with effort, stared upward in an awkward, stupid grin. When Kuzma came opposite him, he said, out of sheer clumsiness: “Is it you our little girls are taunting? Why, those little imps learn effrontery in their infancy!”
“’Tis you yourselves who teach them,” replied Kuzma, with a frown. “Yes, yes,” he said to himself, as he ascended the hill, “a frog does not keep his tail long!” On reaching the crest of the hill, inhaling the damp wind from the plain and catching sight of the red buildings of the railway station in the midst of the empty green fields, he again began to smile faintly. Parliament, deputies! Last night he had returned from the public park, where, in honour of a holiday, there had been an illumination, rockets had soared aloft, and the firemen had played “Le Toreador” and “Beside the brook, beside the bridge,” “The Maxixe” and “The Troika,” shouting in the middle of the galop, “Hey, de-ear one!” He had returned home and had started to pull the bell at the gate of his lodging-house. He had pulled and pulled the rattling wire—not a soul. Not a soul anywhere around, either—only silence, darkness, the cold greenish sky in the West, beyond the square at the end of the street, and, overhead, storm-clouds. At last, some one crawled forward behind the gate, clearing his throat. He rattled his keys and grumbled: “I’m lame in my underpinning—”
“What’s the cause of it?”
“A horse kicked me,” replied the man; and, as he unlocked and opened the gate, he added: “Well, now there are still two left.”
“The men from the court, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“But don’t you know why the judge came?”
“To try the deputy. They say he tried to poison the river.”
“What, the deputy? You fool, do deputies meddle with such things?”
“The devil only knows what they’ll do.”
On the outskirts of the Suburb, beside the threshold of a clay hut, stood a tall old man wearing leg-cloths.[23]In the old man’s hand was a long staff of walnut wood. On catching sight of a passer-by, he made haste to pretend that he was much older than he really was. He grasped the staff in both hands, hunched up his shoulders, and imparted to his countenance a weary, melancholy expression. The damp, cold wind which was blowing from the fields agitated the shaggy locks of his grey hair. And Kuzma recalled his own father, his own childhood.
“Russia, Russia! Whither art thou dashing?” Gogol’s exclamation recurred to his mind. “Russia, Russia! Akh, vain babblers, you stick at nothing! That’s the best answer you can make: ‘The deputytried to poison the river.’ Yes, but who is responsible? First of all, the unhappy populace—and unhappy they are!” And tears welled up in Kuzma’s little green eyes—welled up suddenly, as had often happened with him of late. Not long ago he had strolled into Avdyeeff’s eating-house, in the Woman’s Bazaar. He had entered the courtyard, ankle deep in mud, and from the courtyard ascended to the first storey—“the Gentry’s Department”—by a wooden staircase so stinking, so rotten through and through, that it turned even his stomach—the stomach of a man who had seen sights in his day. With difficulty he had opened the heavy, greasy door, covered with scraps of felt and tattered rags in place of a proper casing, and provided with a pulley-weight fashioned from a brick and a bit of rope. He was fairly blinded by the charcoal vapour, the smoke, the glare of the tin reflectors behind the little wall-lamps, and deafened by the crash of the dishes on the counter; by the talking, the clatter of the waiters running about in all directions, and the repulsive uproar of the gramophone. Then he passed on to the most distant room, where there were fewer people, ate at a small table, ordered a bottle of mead. Underfoot, on a floor soiled with the trampling of feet and with spittle, lay slices of lemon, eggshells, butts of cigarettes. And near the wall opposite sat a long-limbed peasant in bast-slippers, smiling beatifically, shaking his frowsy head, and listening to the shrieking gramophone. On his small table were a small measure of vodka, a small glass, and cracknels. Butthe peasant was not drinking: only wagging his head and staring at his bast-shoes.
All of a sudden, becoming conscious of Kuzma’s gaze riveted upon him, he opened his eyes wide with joy, raised his wonderfully kind face with its waving reddish beard. “Well, so you’ve flown in!” he exclaimed, in delight and surprise. And he hastened to add, by way of justifying himself: “Sir, I have a brother who serves here—my own brother.”
Blinking away his tears, Kuzma clenched his teeth. Ugh, damn it, to what a point had the people been trampled upon, beaten down! “You’ve flown in!” That in connection with Avdyeeff’s establishment! And that was not all: when Kuzma rose to his feet and said: “Well, goodbye!” the peasant hurriedly rose to his feet also, and out of the fulness of a happy heart, with profound gratitude for the light and luxury of the surroundings, and because he had been addressed in a human manner, quickly answered: “No offence meant!”
IN former days conversation in the railway carriages had turned exclusively on the rain and the drought, on the fact that “God fixes the price for grain.” Now, the sheets of newspapers rustled in the hands of many passengers, and discussion busied itselfwith the Duma, the rights of the people, the expropriation of the land. No one even noticed the pouring rain which pattered on the roof, although the travellers belonged to the class which was always greedy for spring rains—grain dealers, peasants, petty burghers from the farms. A young soldier who had lost his leg passed along: he was suffering from jaundice, his black eyes were mournful, he hobbled and clattered his wooden leg as he doffed his tall Mandzhurian fur cap and, like a beggar, made the sign of the cross every time he received an alms. A noisy, angry discussion started up on the subject of the Government, the Minister Durnovo, and some governmental oats. They referred, jeeringly, to that which formerly had evoked their naif enthusiasm: how “Vitya,”[24]with the object of frightening the Japanese at Portsmouth, had ordered his trunks to be packed.
A young man, with his hair cut close like beaver fur, who sat opposite Kuzma, reddened, grew embarrassed, and made haste to interpose: “Excuse me, gentlemen! You are talking about liberty. I serve in the office of the tax inspector, and I write articles for the city newspapers. Do you think that is any business of his? He asserts that he, too, believes in liberty, but when he found out that I had written about the abnormal condition of our fire department, he sent for me and said: ‘Damn you, if you write any more pieces like that I’ll wring your neck!’ Permit me: if my views are more on the left than his—”
“Views?” suddenly shouted the alto voice of a dwarf, the young man’s neighbour, a fat skopetz[25]in bottle-shaped boots—miller Tchernyaeff, who had been casting sidelong glances at him all the while from his pig-like little eyes. And, without giving him a chance to reply, he roared: “Views? You mean to say you have views? And you’re more of a Left? Why, I’ve known you ever since you were running around without breeches in your childhood! And you were perishing with hunger, along with your father—you mendicants! You ought to be washing the inspector’s feet and drinking the dirty water!”
“The Con-sti-tu-u-tion,” interjected Kuzma in a shrill tone, interrupting the eunuch; and rising from his seat and jostling the knees of the sitting passengers, he went down the carriage to the door.
The eunuch’s feet were small, plump, and repulsive, like those of some aged housekeeper; his face, also, was feminine, large, yellow, solid, like gutta-percha; his lips were thin. And Polozoff was another nice one—the teacher at the pro-gymnasium, the man who had been nodding his head so amiably, and leaning on his stick, as he listened to the eunuch; a squat, well-nourished man of thirty, in high shoes with the tops tucked under grey trousers, a grey hat, and a grey coat with sleeve-flaps; a clear-eyed fellow with a round nose and a luxuriant sandy beard spreading all over his chest. A teacher, but he wore a heavy gold seal ring on his forefinger. And he already owned a small house—the dowry he had acquired along with theArchpriest’s daughter.[26]His feet also were small, his hands were short, his fingers mere stumps; he was neat, groomed to a surprising nicety, and he took a bath every day. He was said to be an execrable man; the Lord forbid! Yes, decidedly peasants and petty citizens were not fit for such as he. Kuzma, as he opened the door to the platform, inhaled a deep breath of the cold and fragrant rain-drenched air. The rain droned dully on the roof over the platform, poured off it in streams, and spurts of it spattered over Kuzma. After the town the air of the fields, mingled with the exciting odour of the smoke from the locomotive, intoxicated him. The carriages, as they swayed, rattled louder than the noise of the rain; rising and falling as they approached, the telegraph wires floated past; on both sides ran the dense vividly-green borders of a hazel copse. A motley-hued gang of small boys suddenly sprang out from under the foot of the embankment and shouted something or other shrilly in chorus. Kuzma burst out laughing from sheer pleasure, and his whole face was covered with tiny wrinkles. But when he raised his eyes, he saw on the opposite platform a pilgrim; a kindly, jaded peasant face, a grey beard, a broad-brimmed hat, a cloth coat girt with a rope, a pouch and a tin tea-kettle hanging on his back, and, on his skinny feet,bast-shoes. The pilgrim was smiling, too. And Kuzma shouted to him, athwart the rumbling and the noise: “What’s your name, grandfather?”
“Anton. Anton Bezpalykh,” replied the old man with amiable readiness, in a thin voice.
“Just back from a pilgrimage?”
“From Voronezh.”
“Are they burning out the landed proprietors there?”
“Yes, they are....”
“Well, that’s fine!”
“What’s that you say?”
“I say ’tis fine!” shouted Kuzma. And, turning aside and blinking away the welling tears, he began with trembling hands to roll himself a cigarette. But his thoughts had already grown confused. “The pilgrim is one of the people, but do not the eunuch and the teacher belong to the people? ’Tis only forty-five years since serfdom was abolished—so what can be expected of the people? Yes, but who is to blame for it? The people themselves. Russia under the Russian yoke; the Little Brothers[27]of divers sorts under the Turkish; the Galicians under the Austrians—and ’tis useless to say anything about the Poles. Hey there, thou great Slavonic family!” And Kuzma’s face once more lightened. Darting oblique glances about him on all sides, he began to twiddle his fingers, wring them, and crack their joints.
HE alighted at the fourth station and hired a conveyance. At first the peasant drivers demanded seven rubles—it was twelve versts to Kazakovo—then they came down to five and a half. At last one of them said: “Give me a three-ruble note and I’ll drive you; otherwise, ’tis not worth wagging your tongue about. Times nowadays are not what they used to be.” But he was unable to maintain that tone, and added the customary phrase: “And, besides, fodder is dear.” And he drove, after all, for a ruble and a half. The mud was fathomless, impassable, the cart was tiny, the wretched little nag, barely alive, was as long-eared as an ass and extremely weak. When they had slowly emerged from the courtyard of the station, the peasant, seated on the side-rail, began to get impatient and jerked the rope reins as if he longed with his whole being to aid the horse. At the station he had bragged “She can’t be held back,” and now he evidently felt ashamed. But the worst part of it all was—the man himself. Young, huge of build, fairly plump, he was clad in bast-shoes and white leg-wrappers, a short kazak coat girt with a strip of cloth, and an old peaked cap on his straight yellow hair. He emitted the smoky odour out of a chimneyless hut and of hemp—a regular husbandman of olden times, with a white beardless face, a swollen throat and a hoarse voice.
“What’s your name?” inquired Kuzma.
“I’m called Akhvanasiy.”
“Akhvanasiy!” said Kuzma angrily to himself. “And what else?”
“Menshoff.—Ho, get up there, antichrist!”
“Is it the evil malady?” And Kuzma indicated his throat with a nod.
“Well, yes, it is,” mumbled Menshoff, turning his eyes aside. “I’ve been drinking cold kvas.”
“Does it hurt you to swallow?”
“To swallow?—no, it doesn’t hurt—”
“Well, anyway, don’t talk unnecessarily,” said Kuzma sternly. “You’d better go to the hospital as soon as you can. Married, I suppose?”
“Yes, I’m married....”
“Well, there, now, you see. You’ll have children, and you’ll be making them all a famous present!”
“Just as sure as giving them a drink,” assented Menshoff. And, waxing impatient, he began to jerk the reins again. “Ho, get up there. You’re an unmanageable brute, antichrist!” At last he abandoned this futile effort and calmed down. For a long time he maintained silence, then suddenly inquired: “Have they assembled that Duma yet, merchant?”
“Yes.”
“And they do say that Makaroff is still alive, only they don’t want it known.”
Kuzma merely shrugged his shoulders: the devil only knew what these steppe men had in their heads! “But what wealth is here!” he said to himself, as he sat miserably on a tuft of straw, his knees drawn up onthe bare floor of the springless cart, covered with a coarse cloth used for wrapping grain. He surveyed the road. The weather had grown still colder; still more gloomily the storm-clouds from the northwest came sailing over this black loam region, saturated with rains. The mud on the roads was bluish, greasy; the green of the trees, of the grass, of the vegetable gardens was dark and dense; and over everything lay that bluish tint of the black loam and the storm-clouds. But the cottages were of clay, tiny, with roofs of manure. Alongside them stood dried-up water casks. Of course, the water in them contained tadpoles.
Here was a well-to-do farmstead. In the vegetable garden, behind old bushes, an apiary, and a tiny orchard of three or four wild apple-trees, rose an old, dark-hued grain rick. The stable, the gate, and the cottage were all under one roof, thatched with hackled straw. The cottage was of brick, in two sections, the dividing line marked out with chalk: on one side was a pole surmounted by a forked branch, a fir-tree; on the other was something resembling a cock. The small windows were also rimmed with chalk in a toothed pattern. “There’s creative genius for you!” grinned Kuzma. “The stone age, God forgive me—the times of the cave men!” On the doors of the detached sheds were crosses sketched in charcoal; by the porch stood a large tombstone, obviously prepared in anticipation of death by grandfather or grandmother. Yes, truly, a well-to-do farmstead. But the mud round about was knee deep; a pig was reclining on the porch, and on top of him, balancing itself and flapping its wings,a yellow chicken was parading. The windows were tiny, and in the part of the cottage appropriated to human occupation, darkness and eternally cramped conditions must inevitably reign—the sleeping shelf on top of the oven, the loom for weaving, a good-sized oven, a trough filled with slops. And the family would be large, with many children, and in winter time there would be lambs and calves as well. And the dampness and the charcoal fumes would be such that a green vapour must hang over all. The children would whimper and howl when slapped on the nape of the neck; the sisters-in-law would revile one another (“May the lightning smite you, you roving, homeless cur!”) and each express the hope that the other might “choke on a bite on the Great Day”;[28]the aged mother-in-law would be incessantly hurling something—the oven-fork, the bowls—and rushing at her daughters-in-law, her sleeves tucked up on her dark, sinewy arms, and wearing herself out with shrill scolding, besprinkling now one of them, now another with saliva and curses. The old man, ugly-tempered and ailing, would wear them all to exhaustion with his exhortations, would drag his married sons by the hair; and sometimes they would weep, in the repulsive peasant way.
“Whose farm is this?” asked Kuzma. “The Krasnoffs’,” answered Menshoff, adding, “All of them are sick with it, too.”
Beyond the Krasnoff farm they drove out on to the pasturage. The village was large, and so was thecommon for pasture. The annual Fair was being arranged on it. The framework of booths already rose aloft here and there, and there were piles of wheels and pottery; a hastily constructed oven was smoking, and a smell of fritters hung in the air; the travelling caravan-wagon of some gypsies loomed grey on the plain, and close to its wheels sat sheep-dogs, fastened to them by chains. On the left, peasant cottages were visible; on the right lay a lumber-yard, two town shops, and a bakery. Farther away, alongside the governmental dram-shop, stood a dense cluster of young girls and peasant men, from which shouts rang out.
“The people are making holiday,” remarked Menshoff thoughtfully.
“What’s the cause of their joy?” inquired Kuzma.
“They are hoping for—”
“For what?”
“Everybody knows for what. The house-sprite!”
And it was true. On that bare pasture-common, that overcast, chilly day, those squeals of delight and the sounds of two accordions played in perfect unison seemed pitiful, were swallowed in an atmosphere of commonplaceness, of boredom and age. The people were experiencing something new, were celebrating something, but did they believe in their festival? “Oh, hardly!” said Kuzma to himself, as he drove close and surveyed the white, pink, and green petticoats of the girls, the indifferent, coarsely painted faces, the orange-coloured, golden-hued, and crimson kerchiefs. The cart drove up to the crowd and halted.Menshoff stared boldly at the throng and broke into a grin. At that close range the sounds no longer seemed pitiful—the accordions eagerly played up to each other, and in harmony with them, amid the approving hubbub of the drunken men, quaint adages flew briskly about.
“Ho-o,” some one shouted, to an accompaniment of dull but lusty stamping of feet: