The Steam-Chicken.

(A Story fit to be printed only in the Christmas holidays.)[42]ByGLYEB USPÈNSKY.

(A Story fit to be printed only in the Christmas holidays.)[42]

ByGLYEB USPÈNSKY.

Although I cannot protest against the above observation, which very truly characterises this little sketch, I am bound to remark that the title—“A Story”—given to this production by the editor in question, is entirely out of character with both the subject under discussion and the manner in which that subject is treated. The sketch contains no coherent story at all, nor is it founded upon any story in real life. A group of people were simply discussing “the soul,” and one of the disputants, a poultry-farmer on a journey, delivered a kind of lecture upon the subject, bringing forward some very interesting facts concerning gallinaceous psychology. That is all.

This is how it happened:—

I got tired of waiting for my train in the stuffy little general waiting-hole of the most microscopic station on the whole N—— Railway, so I went out to sit and smoke on the platform. It was getting on for eleven o’clock on a warm, dark autumn night. The only light on the platformcame from three small paraffin lamps, placed at long distances from one another, and giving so little light that I was quite unable to see clearly the group of dark human silhouettes collected on the platform close to me, and, like myself, waiting for the train. I could see several black shadows, but it was impossible to form an idea what sort of people they were. The conversation that they were carrying on together was, however, distinctly audible in the motionless silence of the dusky, sultry night.

Unfortunately, this conversation was of a most gloomy character. It referred to an unusual misfortune which had happened early that morning at a neighbouring station, and had been a subject of general conversation along the whole line. A certain publichouse keeper, well known to every one connected with the railway, had thrown himself in front of the train. He had been a confirmed drunkard for some years, and had arrived at absolute beggary.

“You see, mates, towards the last he went off his head altogether,” said one of the black silhouettes, whom, from the glittering of his badge when he moved, one could guess to be the railway watchman. “He tried to do it five times before ... but he always got frightened. He’d run up to the train and then begin to yell.... The train would come thundering along, and he’d just scream with terror, and yet he’d run on, throwing up his hands. ‘Ah!—ah!—ah!—ah!’ and yet he’d run at it.... He was mortally scared, and yet he couldn’t let it alone!... God always saved him; the good Christian people didn’t want to let him die; ... they’d catch him and take him home by force; ... they put him in the hospital.... Well, it seems this time he was too sharp for them.”...

“Did he call out? Did any one hear?”

“They said afterwards that somebody yelled like a wild thing. They say they heard something crying and screaming.... But, you see, it was night-time; it was quite darkthat’s plain!”...

“The devil’s will, you mean. In such business as that, it’s the devil that’s lord and master, not God!” said a voice from the group of silhouettes.

“True! true!” muttered several voices; and a short silence followed.

The conversation was an unpleasant one; the subject under discussion was gloomy and fearful, and the people seemed ill at ease in talking of it. But maybe for that very reason they were unable to free themselves from the haunting idea, and enter into the ordinary small talk of chance-met passengers. Unpleasant as it was to think and talk of a suicide, the conversation about it started afresh.

“They do say it was all his wife’s doing that he got like that; he took to drinking because of her.”

“Did the silly fellow care more for his wife than his soul?”

“Ah! but then, you know, ... she ran away from him—and he got lonely without her—and so——”

“Ran away! Why, the devil take her, let her run away as far as she likes; there are plenty of women to be got!”

“Plenty of women, but only one soul!”

“He’ll have to answer for his soul to God in the next world!”...

“Ah! the soul! the soul!”... said the watchman, with a sigh; and the conversation would probably have broken off if the young assistant-stationmaster had not suddenly appeared beside the group. No one had heard him come up on account of his indiarubber galoshes.

He was a very cheerful young man; he had just got his situation, just got married, just put on his new uniform, and naturally felt that now he was “decently set up.” He stopped, as he was sauntering past, to smoke a cigarettewith the group, and, for want of anything to do, cheerfully threw in a word.

“What’s the talk about? What soul?”

He had accidentally caught, in passing, the word “soul”; his thoughts were altogether at the other end of the earth from any stray conversations; he was going merrily home to his young wife and his boiling samovar, and was altogether thoroughly contented with himself.

“Why, we were just talking about the misfortune that happened to-day ... about the publican.”...

“Well, what about him?”

He struck a match on his coat-sleeve, hardly listening to what was said.

“We were just talking, sir; that’s all.... You see, the poor fellow’s lost his immortal soul.”

“What soul?”

The cigarette lighted suddenly, and scattered little sparks all round.

“What soul? What nonsense are you talking?”

“Why! your honour! his soul!”

“The man was simply a drunkard! It’s all nonsense!”

“But what about the next world?”

“What’s the use of talking rubbish? Don’t get drunk, and you won’t be run over.... The deuce knows what they’ll say next—a soul!”

His young wife and his boiling new samovar occupied his thoughts so completely that they made his whole conversation merry, and gave it a tone of “all fiddle-sticks!” Having uttered his few remarks in a cheerful manner, he walked away, also in a cheerful manner, along the platform, and flung back at the group of silhouettes one last word—

“Twaddle!”

He then disappeared in the darkness, humming “Strièlochka.”

“No, it isn’t twaddle!” rather decidedly remarked one of the silhouettes; and his dark figure moved forwards, hiding all the other silhouettes. “It’s anything but twaddle—a soul is!”

The appearance of the cheerful stationmaster had somehow driven away the gloomy thoughts of the group, and, not finding at the moment any pleasant theme for conversation, they did not support the unknown orator by any positive announcement at all. But their silence in no way put him out of countenance, and he continued, in an impressive tone of voice—

“Twaddle! It’s easy for him to talk!... The man simply doesn’t believe in God—he’s a Nihilist, that’s what he is!... If he believed in God he wouldn’t dare to talk like that.... I used to be no better than a dead log myself until I got conviction.... What can any of us understand? We know how to say our prayers; we know how to put candles before the altar; but what do we know about the wisdom of the Lord?... And yet, if the Lord God should call me now to the lot, first of a fish and then of a hen, and should give me a talent and allow me to enter into it, I tell you, mates, I understand all about it now!... Yes! There is a soul, mates! there is indeed!... That’s what I say—it’s true; it’s not twaddle!”

The audience had at first some difficulty in understanding what this poultry-farmer was talking about. The most incompatible images and ideas had got so mixed up together in his speech—God, the soul, a fish’s lot, a hen’s lot—all this was too hard for the silhouettes to digest at once. Somebody tried how it would do to make one of the stock remarks of the Russian citizen in difficulties: “Of course it is!”—one of those phrases which will serve for an answer at a pinch, but have no meaning in particular (though they are constantly used in commerce); but he said it in a timid whisper, and relapsed into silence.

The silence was, however, of short duration. A pleasanter topic had been started, and the conversation grew lively.

“I don’t quite understand—allow me to ask, do hens have souls?” slowly and deliberately inquired one of the silhouettes, with the evident intention of starting a long discussion. “Kindly explain to me on what you base that opinion. A soul is bound to be Christian; and there is surely nothing said in the Holy Scriptures about hens’ and fishes’ souls.”...

“I grant you there is really nothing about it in the Scriptures; but I, you see me, Selivèrstov, poultry-farmer—Itell you—yes! You can believe me or not, as you like, but I assure you that when I get to really understand the affairs of fishes, and especially of poultry, then I began to believe in the Almighty Creator. Up till then I was just a dead log! You can think what you like. Yes!...”

There was great animation in the tone of the poultry-farmer’s voice, but it was evident that the immensity of the theme which so deeply interested him rendered his position embarrassing and perplexed him in speaking.

“Yes,” he continued, repeating the words he had already said, “it was through the poultry that I grew to recognise the wisdom of God. You must make what you can of that.”

There was a short silence.

“And do poultry have souls?” inquired one of the silhouettes, in a tone of evident irony. The poultry-farmer hesitated a moment, then, as it were, gave himself a little shake, plucked up his courage, and growled, in a deep bass—

“They do!”

“What! Hens have souls?”

“Yes, sir.”

This answer was evidently given in blind recklessness,and the poultry-farmer, seeing that he could no longer draw back, continued loudly and rapidly—

“I tell you, positively, I would swear it before the Lord Himself—fowls do have souls, may I die to-night if they don’t! There!”

Silence.

“They do!” cried the poultry-farmer again.

Once more there was silence.

“Yes! They do, indeed they do!”

“There! there! friend.... It strikes me, my man, that you ... you know....”

“Not, ‘you know,’ at all! What’s the use of ‘you know’? It’s the truth I’m telling you; not ‘you know.’ ... Now I’ll just catechise you, and you see if you can answer me.”

“Why shouldn’t I be able to answer you? If you talk like a human being, I’ll answer you like a human being.”

“You didn’t suppose I was going to bark at you?”

“Well, if you don’t bark, I won’t cry: ‘cock-a-doodle-doo!’... Fire away!”

“Very well, then; if you can answer me, I’ll put questions to you.... First of all: we were just talking about the destroying of souls.... Now, tell me, why did the publican throw himself under the train?”

“’Twas the devil’s doing, and nothing else,” again interposed the decided voice from the group of silhouettes, before the person addressed had time to answer.

“Of course it’s the devil’s doing, I know that,” said the poultry-farmer; “but what I want to know is, on what pretence this same devil got him to go under the wheels; that’s what I want to know!”

“Why, you heard what was said—that he got cut up about his wife,” answered the other speaker. “Got upset about a woman, took to drinking, and of course any sort of thing can come of the drink....”

“So that, if you look into the matter, it appears like as if the first cause was trouble?”

“I s’pose so....”

“Very well, then; now you explain. What part of him did the wheel go over?”

“I don’t know; you’d better ask him.... I say! Mikhàilych! where did the wheel go over the publican?”

“It cut him right across the body,” answered the watchman—“like this.”

“And of course it went over his back and all?” demanded the poultry-farmer, like a regular expert.

“Of course it smashed every bit of him that came under it....”

“That’s all right! Now, allow me to ask you, When you say that it happened ‘from trouble,’ tell me whereabouts in him was the trouble—was it in his back, or his body, or anywhere in his bones?”

This question appeared to the audience so amazingly incongruous, that, after a short silence, several persons went off into fits of laughing; and the interlocutor of the poultry-farmer, evidently not wishing to continue such an idle conversation, remarked—

“Eh! friend! if one wants to talk with you, one must hang a cloth tongue in one’s mouth; one’s own would soon get wagged off.... Your head’s so empty, that one can hear the wind whistle through it, even on a close night like this!... The trouble was in his inside.”

“Do you mean the trouble about his wife was in his inside?”

“There! shut up with your foolery!” exclaimed the other, irritably; “I never heard a fellow rattle off such stuff!...”

“All that is because you haven’t got any gift of reflection.”

“Reflection be hanged!”

“Supposing a soldier’s foot is cut off, that means it was his foot that was bad, not his back or his inside. Supposing my hand is cut off, it must have been my hand that was bad, and not my ear or my nose.... Very well, then; if a man goes and breaks his back under a railway train from grief, I should like to know where was his grief—in his back, or in his inside?”

Silence.

“Now, you see, that’s just the whole point.... The trouble was in his conscience, in his soul—not in his bones or his ribs.... That’s why you should say: ‘He’s lost his soul,’ instead of saying ‘Twaddle,’ as that grand gentleman said.... It was his soul that was ill; and it was his soul that went to pieces under the train....”

“It’s the devil’s work, and nothing else,” obstinately growled the unseen bass in the group of silhouettes.

“The devil’s work? Of course it’s the devil’s work! Only, the devil doesn’t pull you under the train by your leg, but by your conscience, by your soul. That’s just the whole thing. No, no, mates! There is a soul, there is indeed!...”

“And what about the hen’s soul?” began again the man who had just broken off his conversation with the poultry-farmer.

“Hens have souls too.... It was a hen’s soul that brought me to my senses.... You see my hamper of chickens over there?”

The hamper was probably standing somewhere on the platform, though it could not be seen in the darkness.

“Well, what about it?”

“Very well, then; I thought I’d take our women in once more with a steam-chicken; but they were too sharp for me. I thought I’d trick them, you see, and pay them for their eggs with a steam-chicken, but I had tried it once too often—they would not take it.”

“WELL, I LOOKED, AND I THOUGHT TO MYSELF, ‘HOW DID ALL THAT FIRE GET INTO THAT LITTLE GLASS GLOBE.’”

“Why?”

“Because the steam-chicken has no soul! He has no soul at all, and so he doesn’t breed. That’s just the whole thing. I work on a steam-chicken farm. Well, you see, at one time we used to exchange steam-chickens for eggs. We’d give a woman a cock and hen—for that matter, it was quite worth our while to give a cock and two hens for a dozen or a dozen and a half eggs.... We could always raise ten or fifteen out of two or three dozen; so we made our profit. At first the women took them and it was all right—and of course it was better for us than paying in money. But after a bit we couldn’t get anybody to take them; all the women came and made a row about it: ‘Your machine-hens won’t lay!’ And there you are! It’s no use, whatever you do; theywon’tlay! And it’s just the same with fish. All those machine-raised fish—you know, you can rear them artificially now—but they won’t breed.... Now, just you think of that—the wisdom of it! The temperature’s there—’cause, you know, it’s done with hot water and steam—but there’s no soul!”

“But it can run about, your machine-chicken—can’t it? and eat?”

“It runs about and it eats, but it hasn’t any reason.... It doesn’t know how to think about life....”

“Strikes me, my man, you’re gone off the hooks!...”

“Off the hooks or not, there’s not much sense in your talk either.... Runs about! What’s running to do with it? There’s your steam-engine runs, better than any horse; but just you go and tell it: ‘Turn to the left,’ ‘Stop at the publichouse,’—d’ye think it’ll turn?... Runs! ’Tis all the same thing as the ’lectric light. I’ve got a neighbour that’s lamplighter in a theatre, and he said to me, ‘Just look, this is the new fire they’ve invented!’ Well, I looked, and I thought to myself: ‘How did all that fire get in that little glass globe (’twasmade just like a flower) and not break it?’ So I said to him, ‘Why doesn’t the glass crack with all that fire?’ and my neighbour just burst out laughing. ‘It’s a very dreadful sort of fire, that is,’ said he; ‘just you spit at it and see how it will hiss.’ Well, I spat at that tulip-flower, and it never hissed at all. ‘How’s that?’ says I. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘that fire’s just a made-up fire; it’s a heathen fire; it’s as cold as ice.... Just take hold of the tulip.’ I took it, and it really was like ice. But it’s fire all the same.... Now, how’s a man to know after that what’s God and what’s Mumbo Jumbo?... It’s just the same with the machine-fish and the steam-chicken—they’ve got a temperature, but they haven’t got a conscience! There you see; it was the same with the publican: it was his conscience that ached; and if he went and broke his back, it wasn’t his back that felt bad because his wife ran away—it was his soul.”

“You put the cart before the horse again, my man! Why doesn’t the steam-hen lay?”

“She doesn’t lay because she’s a machine invention, a creature of temperature, not a creature of God. A steam-hen has nothing but temperature; but a real hen has a conscience. That’s why she lays. She lays because she’s capable of mental reflections and considerations. There aren’t any mental reflections in temperatures, but there are in souls!...”

“Are there?”

“Of course there are!”

“And were you ever in a madhouse?”

“Never, thanks be to God!”

“Glad to hear it! I was just thinking, perhaps they hadn’t looked after you properly and kept the door locked....”

“No one can talk sense to a fellow like you, without being taken for a madman.... What do you know about souls?”

“As much as you know about hens’ consciences, I dare say!”

“I know all about them!”

“Do you?”

“I tell you, yes! I understand the whole soul of a hen! What’s the use of your cackling? Just you answer me one thing: Do you know how to make a hen sit?”

“No, I don’t; and it’s not my business; I’m a wood merchant.”

“TO THE ARCADIA AND MASKED BALLS.”

“Then, if it’s not your business, hold your tongue and listen.... The hen, my man, is none too fond of sitting.... All she cares for is just to lay her egg, and then go off again to the café-restaurant to lark about with the cocks, and sing songs, and make love.... Why, you may have a hen so frivolous that if you keep her three days on the eggs with a coop over her, you can’t make her sit on them; she just wriggles away to one side; she thinks to herself, like any fine lady, ‘If I take care of the children myself, I may spoil the shape of my bust, and no one will love me!’... And she wriggles away into a corner; and there the poor eggs lie, out in the cold.... Well, then, when you take off the coop,—up she jumps and off she runs, and clucks and cackles for all the farmyard to hear; and complains of how she was shut up and ill-treated; and the cock comes running up at her bidding to take her part; he’s sorry for her, you see! And off they go into the bushes, to the Islands,[43]to the Arcadia, and masked balls. Why, some hens are so larky that one doesn’t know how to manage them! So this is what the women do with a gay hen of that kind: they make little balls of bread, and dip them in spirits and give them to her.... The gay young hen eats them and gets tipsy; then they stick her on the eggs and put a coop over her.... Of course while she’s asleep she doesn’t think about dancing and masked balls; and by the time she wakes up, she’s got familiar like with the eggs.... Then, you know, the eggs get warm from her, and she feels the warmth of the eggs.... And when you take the coop off she can’t get up! She knows as well as any one that it would be fun to go off on the spree; she hears the cock calling her, and singing romances; she knows he’s going off to the Islands; and yet she can’t get up, her conscience won’t let her! She’s learned to pity her little ones; her soul has waked up.... And there she’ll sit, till she sits all the feathers off her body, and the flesh gets raw; she’ll sit till she aches all over! And why? Because of her conscience!... Her conscience puts all kind of thoughts into her head. She thinks about how she lived before she was married (she has so long to sit, you know, she has plenty of time to think), and how she went off on the spree, and what she saw, and how the cock came up to her (she’ll remember every feather on his body a hundred times over), and how it all happened, and then how she fell ill, and then how her baby was born, and how she cried when it was born—she’ll think over all that while she’s sitting.... Now, you see, all these thoughts go out of her soul into the chicken’s soul, like; and the chicken begins to think and feel as she does.... He gets all his soul from the hen, while he’s the least bit of a thing,—and ideas, and everything.... They’re just like little seeds, no bigger than a pin’s head, just stuck about here and there in him; and then of course they grow with him; and by the time he’s a grown-up fowl, they’re grown-up thoughts.... No, no, mates! it isn’t a temperature of fifty degrees, or whatever it is, that does it; it’s a soul speaking to a soul!... It’s all the same with people. If a woman with child gets frightened at a fire, and beats her head with her two hands, her child is born with marks on its head—it’s just the same thing here. The hen thinks itover, and sighs, and remembers all her youth, and everything that happened afterwards; and all that enters into the chicken’s soul.... Why are so many cocks hatched? Because the hen thinks so much about the cock, of course; she remembers all his feathers.... Everybody knows that if a peasant goes to the priest, or thestarshinà,[44]or the village clerk, he always take a cock for a present. The hens think a great deal about cocks. So, you see, all these thoughts and cares pass from the hen’s soul into the chicken’s; and the chicken gets to understand that it will have to be young and unmarried, and then that cocks will come, and it will have to lay eggs.... All that passes into its soul while it’s in the egg.... But there is nothing of all that in hot water; there’s nothing but temperature in it.... Do you suppose temperature thinks about a hen’s life? Do you suppose temperature thinks about cocks?—about how tired it is of sitting, but how it must keep on for the baby’s sake? It doesn’t think about anything at all! And that’s why the chicken comes out without any soul, or mind, or conscience, and doesn’t care for anything.... It’s just like with the ’lectric light—it can’t make the grass grow.... That’s what God is!... It isn’t twaddle, mates; don’t you believe it! A soul’s one thing, and a make-up’s another. No, no, it isn’t twaddle; it’s a thing that takes a lot of understanding!”

“I don’t know,” remarked the other man, indifferently; “it’s a bit too learned for me.... Seems to me like as if there aren’t any other souls except Christian souls.... And as for a hen’s conscience, I don’t know about that ... don’t see it at all!”

“That’s just what I say: you don’t know.”

The discussion was evidently finished. But as the train had not yet come, and no one had anything to do, the companywould have found it a little awkward to let the conversation drop at the conclusion of the poultry-farmers speech. Every one felt (as is the case at the meetings of learned societies) the need ofsomekind of answer or continuation. After a moment’s silence, therefore, one of the silhouettes (I think, from his voice, it was the one who had laid the suicide of the publican to the devil’s account) suddenly remarked—

“You talk about inventions—you’re right there; there’s no end to what they’ve invented nowadays! One day, when I was in Petersburg, I was going along the Isàkievskaya Square, and there was a grand sledge driving past, with a beautiful horse; it must have cost thousands, for harness and everything was splendid; and the driver was just like a figure in a picture. And what do you think, mates! they’d got stuck on to that driver, just here like—it’s as true as I live ... just in this place....”

“Where?”

“Here, I tell you!... It’s the truth. What do you think he’d got stuck on?... A watch!...”

“Stuck on to him there?”

“A great watch, half as big as my hand.... That’s so the gentleman in the sledge can always see it. I should have felt ashamed, if I’d been the driver.”

“I suppose the gentleman was so grand he couldn’t take the trouble to unbutton his coat.”

“I s’pose he wanted to know, to a second, how long he was driving; his time must have been precious! I dare say he had a lot of business.”

“Well!” interposed the poultry-farmer, contemptuously; “if that’s what you call an invention! There are inventions of quite another sort nowadays, my friend! People are getting too clever to live with their inventions.”

The tone in which these words were uttered plainlyshowed that the poultry-farmer was an ordinary hard-up peasant who found a difficulty in paying taxes.

“When I lived, as a merchant’s driver, in Moscow, my master used to pay me two roubles to go from Nikòlsk to Nìzhegorod.... ‘Only make haste,’ he would say; ‘I want to know if the goods have come in.’... But nowadays he can just mumble something into a pipe, and it goes along a wire, and there you are.... You can talk on a wire to people in Nìzhegorod, or Smolensk, or anywhere you like; and as for us poor drivers!”...

“That’s what they call a telephone,” remarked the poultry-farmer.

“Agafòn, or Falalèï, or anything you like ... all their inventions only make it worse for us poor peasants. Wherever we go, there are always inventions in the way, taking the bread out of our mouths! But it’s all one to the tax-gatherer.”

All the gloomy images called up by the tragedy of the morning, and all the fantastic ideas suggested by the lecture on souls, were put out of everybody’s head by this peasant’s comment. His remark had brought back the thoughts of all the group to the realities of life; and thus put an end to this conversation of chance-met strangers, in the right and proper manner—the manner in which, in our days, all kinds of discussions end, no matter how they begin.

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