Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

I

‘IT’S for you to say, ma’am! Only it would be a pity if it’s the Dútlovs. They’re all good men and one of them must go if we don’t send at least one of the house-serfs,’ said the steward. ‘As it is, everyone is hinting at them.… But it’s just as you please, ma’am!’

And he placed his right hand over his left in front of him, inclined his head towards his right shoulder, drew in his thin lips almost with a smack, turned up his eyes, and said no more, evidently intending to keep silent for a long time and to listen without reply to all the nonsense his mistress was sure to utter.

The steward – clean-shaven and dressed in a long coat of a peculiar steward-like cut – who had come to report to his proprietress that autumn evening, was by birth a domestic serf.

The report from the lady’s point of view meant listening to a statement of the business done on her estate and giving instructions for further business. From Egór Mikháylovich’s (the steward’s) point of view, ‘reporting’ was a ceremony of standing straight on both feet with out-turned toes in a corner facing the sofa, and listening to all sorts of irrelevant chatter, and by various ways and means getting the mistress into a state of mind in which she would quickly and impatiently say, ‘All right, all right!’ to all that Egór Mikháylovich proposed.

The business under consideration was the conscription. The Pokróvsk estate had to supply three recruits at the Feast of Pokróv.¹ Fate itself seemed to have selected two of them by a coincidence of domestic, moral, and economic circumstances. As far as they were concerned there could be no hesitation or dispute either on the part of the mistress, the Commune, or of public opinion. But who the third was to be was a debatable point. The steward was anxious to save the Dútlovs (in which family there were three men of military age), and to send Polikúshka, a married house-serf with a very bad reputation, who had been caught more than once stealing sacks, harness, and hay; but the mistress, who had often petted Polikúshka’s ragged children and improved his morals by exhortations from the Bible, did not wish to give him up. At the same time she did not wish to injure the Dútlovs, whom she did not know and had never even seen. But for some reason she did not seem able to grasp the fact, and the steward could not make up his mind to tell her straight out, that if Polikúshka did not go one of the Dútlovs would have to. ‘But I don’t wish the Dútlovs any ill!’ she said feelingly. ‘If you don’t – then pay three hundred rubles for a substitute,’ should have been the steward’s reply; but that would have been bad policy.

So Egór Mikháylovich took up a comfortable position, and even leaned imperceptibly against the door-post, while keeping a servile expression on his face and watching the movements of the lady’s lips and the flutter of the frills of her cap and their shadow on the wall beneath a picture. But he did not consider it at all necessary to attend to the meaning of her words. The lady spoke long and said much. A desire to yawn gave him cramp behind his ears, but he adroitly turned the spasm into a cough, and holding his hand to his mouth gave a croak. Not long ago I saw Lord Palmerston sitting with his hat over his face while a member of the Opposition was storming at the Ministry, and then suddenly rise and in a three hours’ speech answer his opponent point by point. I saw it without surprise, because I had seen the same kind of thing going on between Egór Mikháylovich and his mistress a thousand times. At last – perhaps he was afraid of falling asleep or thought she was letting herself go too far – he changed the weight of his body from his left to his right foot and began, as he always did, with an unctuous preface:

‘Just as you please to order, ma’am.… Only there is a gathering of the Commune now being held in front of my office window and we must come to some decision. The order says that the recruits are to be in town before the Feast of Pokróv. Among the peasants the Dútlovs are being suggested, and no one else. The mir² does not trouble about your interests. What does it care if we ruin the Dútlovs? I know what a hard time they’ve been having! Ever since I first had the stewardship they have been living in want. The old man’s youngest nephew has scarcely had time to grow up to be a help, and now they’re to be ruined again! And I, as you well know, am as careful of your property as of my own.… It’s a pity, ma’am, whatever you’re pleased to think! … After all they’re neither kith nor kin to me, and I’ve had nothing from them.…’

‘Why, Egór, as if I ever thought of such a thing!’ interrupted the lady, and at once suspected him of having been bribed by the Dútlovs.

‘… Only theirs is the best-kept homestead in the whole of Pokróvsk. They’re God-fearing, hard-working peasants. The old man has been church Elder for thirty years; he doesn’t drink or swear, and he goes to church’ (the steward well knew with what to bait the hook). ‘… But the chief thing that I would like to report to you is that he has only two sons – the others are nephews adopted out of charity – and so they ought to cast lots only with the two-men families. Many families have split up because of their own improvidence and their sons have separated from them, and so they are safe now – while these will have to suffer just because they have been charitable.’

Here the lady could not follow at all. She did not understand what he meant by ‘two-men families’ or ‘charitableness’. She only heard sounds and observed the nankeen buttons on the steward’s coat. The top one, which he probably did not button up so often, was firmly fixed on, the middle one was hanging loose and ought long ago to have been sewn on again. But it is a well-known fact that in a conversation, especially a business conversation, it is not at all necessary to understand what is being said, but only to remember what you yourself want to say. The lady acted accordingly.

‘How is it you won’t understand, Egór Mikháylovich?’ she said. ‘I have not the least desire that a Dútlov should go as a soldier. One would think that knowing me as you do you might credit me with the wish to do everything in my power to help my serfs, and that I don’t want any harm to come to them, and would sacrifice all I possess to escape from this sad necessity and to send neither Dútlov nor Polikúshka.’ (I don’t know whether it occurred to the steward that to escape the sad necessity there was no need to sacrifice everything – that, in fact, three hundred rubles would suffice; but this thought might well have crossed his mind.)

‘I will only tell you this: that I will not give up Polikúshka on any account. When he confessed to me of his own accord after that affair with the clock, and wept, and gave his word to amend, I talked to him for a long time and saw that he was touched and sincerely penitent.’ (‘There! She’s off now!’ thought Egór Mikháylovich, and began to scrutinize the syrup she had in a glass of water: ‘Is it orange or lemon? Slightly bitter, I expect,’ thought he.) ‘That is seven months ago now, and he has not once been tipsy, and has behaved splendidly. His wife tells me he is a different man. How can you wish me to punish him now that he has reformed? Besides it would be inhuman to make a soldier of a man who has five children, and only he to keep them.… No, you’d better not say any more about it, Egór!’

And the lady took a sip from her glass.

Egór Mikháylovich watched the motion of her throat as the liquid passed down it and then replied shortly and dryly:

‘Then Dútlov’s decided on?’

The lady clasped her hands together.

‘How is it you don’t understand? Do I wish Dútlov ill? Have I anything against him? God is my witness I am prepared to do anything for them.…’ (She glanced at a picture in the corner, but remembered it was not an icon. ‘Well, never mind … that’s not to the point,’ she thought. And again, strange to say, the idea of the three hundred rubles did not occur to her.…) ‘Well, what can I do? What do I know about it? It’s impossible for me to know. Well then, I rely on you – you know my wishes.… Act so as to satisfy everybody and according to the law.… What’s to be done? They are not the only ones: everyone has times of trouble. Only Polikúshka can’t be sent. You must understand that it would be dreadful of me to do such a thing.…’

She was roused and would have continued to speak for a long time had not one of her maidservants entered the room at that moment.

‘What is it, Dunyásha?’

‘A peasant has come to ask Egór Mikháylovich if the meeting is to wait for him,’ said Dunyásha, and glanced angrily at Egór Mikháylovich. (‘Oh, that steward!’ she thought; ‘he’s upset the mistress. Now she won’t let me get a wink of sleep till two in the morning!’)

‘Well then, Egór, go and do the best you can.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He did not say anything more about Dútlov. ‘And who is to go to the market-gardener to fetch the money?’

‘Has not Peter returned from town?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Could not Nicholas go?’

‘Father is down with backache,’ remarked Dunyásha.

‘Shall I go myself to-morrow, ma’am?’ asked the steward.

‘No, Egór, you are wanted here.’ The lady pondered. ‘How much is it?’

‘Four hundred and sixty-two rubles.’

‘Send Polikúshka,’ said the lady, with a determined glance at Egór Mikháylovich’s face.

Egór Mikháylovich stretched his lips into the semblance of a smile but without parting his teeth, and the expression on his face did not change.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Send him to me.’

‘Yes, ma’am’; and Egór Mikháylovich went to the counting-house.

II

POLIKÉY (or Polikúshka, as he was usually contemptuously called), as a man of little importance, of tarnished reputation, and not a native of the village, had no influence either with the housekeeper, the butler, the steward, or the lady’s-maid. His corner was the very worst, though there were seven in his family. The late proprietor had had these corners built in the following manner: in the middle of a brick building, about twenty-three feet square, there was a large brick baking-oven surrounded by a passage, and the four corners of the building were separated from this ‘colidor’ (as the domestic serfs called it) by wooden partitions. So there was not much room in these corners, especially in Polikéy’s, which was nearest to the door. The conjugal couch, with a print quilt and pillowcases, a cradle with a baby in it, and a small three-legged table (on which the cooking and washing were done and all sorts of domestic articles placed, and at which Polikéy – who was a horse-doctor – worked), tubs, clothing, some chickens, a calf, and the seven members of the family, filled the whole corner— and could not have stirred in it had it not been for their quarter of the brick stove (on which both people and things could lie) and for the possibility of going out onto the steps. That, however, was hardly possible, for it is cold in October and the seven of them only possessed one sheepskin cloak between them; but on the other hand the children could keep warm by running about and the grown-ups by working, and both the one and the other could climb on the top of the stove where the temperature rose as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. It may seem dreadful to live in such conditions, but they did not mind – it was quite possible to live. Akulína washed and sewed her husband’s and her children’s clothes, spun, wove, and bleached her linen, cooked and baked in the common oven, and quarrelled and gossiped with her neighbours. The monthly rations sufficed not only for the children, but for an addition to the cow’s food. Firewood was free, and so was fodder for the cattle, and a little hay from the stables sometimes came their way. They had a strip of kitchen garden. Their cow had calved, and they had their own fowls. Polikéy was employed in the stables to look after two stallions; he bled horses and cattle, cleaned their hoofs, lanced their sores, administered ointments of his own invention, and for this was paid in money and in kind. Also some of the proprietress’s oats used to find their way into his possession, and for two measures of it a peasant in the village gave twenty pounds of mutton regularly every month. Life would have been quite bearable had there been no trouble at heart. But the family had a great trouble. Polikéy in his youth had lived at a stud-farm in another village. The groom into whose hands he happened to fall was the greatest thief in the whole district, and got exiled to Siberia. Under this man Polikéy served his apprenticeship, and in his youth became so used to ‘these trifles’ that in later life, though he would willingly have left off, he could not rid himself of the habit. He was a young man and weak; he had neither father nor mother nor anyone else to teach him. Polikéy liked drink, and did not like to see anything lying about loose. Whether it was a strap, a piece of harness, a padlock, a bolt, or a thing of greater value, Polikéy found some use for everything. There were people everywhere who would take these things and pay for them in drink or in money, by agreement. Such earnings, so people say, are the easiest to get: no apprenticeship is required, no labour or anything, and he who has once tried that kind of work does not care for any other. It has only one drawback: although you get things cheap and easily and live pleasantly, yet all of a sudden – through somebody’s malice – things go all wrong, the trade fails, everything has to be accounted for at once, and you rue the day you were born.

And so it happened to Polikéy. Polikéy had married and God had given him good luck. His wife, the herdsman’s daughter, turned out to be a healthy, intelligent, hard-working woman, who bore him one fine baby after another. And though Polikéy still stuck to his trade all went well till one fine day his luck forsook him and he was caught. And it was all about a trifle: he had hidden away some leather reins of a peasant’s. They were found, he was beaten, the mistress was told of it, and he was watched. He was caught a second and a third time. People began to taunt him, the steward threatened to have him conscripted, the mistress gave him a scolding, and his wife wept and was broken-hearted. Everything went wrong. He was a good-natured man; not bad, but only weak. He was fond of drink and so in the habit of it that he could not leave it alone. Sometimes his wife would scold him and even beat him when he came home drunk, and he would weep, saying: ‘Unfortunate man that I am, what shall I do? Blast my eyes, I’ll give it up! Never again!’ A month would go by, he would leave home, get drunk, and not be seen for a couple of days. And his neighbours would say: ‘He must get the money somewhere to go on the spree with!’ His latest trouble had been with the office clock. There was an old wall-clock there that had not been in working order for a long time. He happened to go in at the open door by himself and the clock tempted him. He took it and got rid of it in the town. As ill luck would have it the shopman to whom he sold the clock was related to one of the house-serfs, and coming to see her one holiday he spoke about the clock. People began making inquiries – especially the steward, who disliked Polikéy —just as if it was anybody else’s concern! It was all found out and reported to the mistress, and she sent for Polikéy. He fell at her feet at once and pathetically confessed everything, just as his wife had told him to do. He carried out her instructions very well. The mistress began admonishing him; she talked and talked and maundered on about God and virtue and the future life and about wife and children, and at last moved him to tears. Then she said:

‘I forgive you; only you must promise me never to do it again!’

‘Never in all my life. May I go to perdition! May my bowels gush out!’ said Polikéy, and wept touchingly.

Polikéy went home and for the rest of the day lay on the stove blubbering like a calf. Since then nothing more had been traced to him. But his life was no longer pleasant; he was looked on as a thief, and when the time of the conscription drew near everybody hinted at him.

As already mentioned, Polikéy was a horse-doctor. How he had suddenly become one nobody knew, himself least of all. At the stud-farm, when he worked under the head-keeper who got exiled, his only duties were to clean out the dung from the stables, sometimes to groom the horses, and to carry water. He could not have learned it there. Then he became a weaver: after that he worked in a garden, weeding the paths; then he was condemned to break bricks for some offence; then he took a place as yard-porter with a merchant, paying a yearly sum to his mistress for leave to do so. So evidently he could not have had any experience as a veterinary there either; yet somehow during his last stay at home his reputation as a wonderfully and even a rather supernaturally clever horse-doctor began gradually to spread. He bled a horse once or twice, then threw it down and prodded about in its thigh, and then demanded that it should be placed in a trave, where he began cutting its frog till it bled, though the horse struggled and even whined, and he said this meant ‘letting off the sub-hoof blood’! Then he explained to a peasant that it was absolutely necessary to let the blood from both veins, ‘for greater ease’, and began to strike the dull lancet with a mallet; then he bandaged the innkeeper’s horse under its belly with a selvedge torn from his wife’s shawl, and finally he began to sprinkle all sorts of sores with vitriol, to drench them with something out of a bottle, and sometimes to give internally whatever came into his head. And the more horses he tormented and did to death, the more he was believed in and the more of them were brought to him.

I feel that for us educated people it is hardly the thing to laugh at Polikéy. The methods he employed to inspire confidence are the same that influenced our fathers, that influence us, and will influence our children. The peasant lying prone on the head of his only mare (which not only constitutes his whole wealth but is almost one of his family) and gazing with faith and horror at Polikéy’s frowning look of importance and thin arms with upturned sleeves, as, with the healing rag or a bottle of vitriol between his teeth, he presses upon the very spot that is sore and boldly cuts into the living flesh (with the secret thought, ‘The bow-legged brute will be sure to get over it!’), at the same time pretending to know where is blood and where pus, which is a tendon and which a vein – that peasant cannot conceive that Polikéy could lift his hand to cut without knowing where to do it. He himself could not do so. And once the thing is done he will not reproach himself with having given permission to cut unnecessarily. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I have gone through the same experience with a doctor who, at my request, was tormenting those dear to me. The lancet, the whitish bottle of sublimate, and the words, ‘the staggers – glanders – to let blood, or matter’, and so on, do they not come to the same thing as ‘neurosis, rheumatism, organisms’, and so forth? Wage du zu irren und zu träumen³ refers not so much to poets as to doctors and veterinary surgeons.

III

ON the evening when the village meeting, in the cold darkness of an October night, was choosing the recruits and vociferating in front of the office, Polikéy sat on the edge of his bed pounding some horse medicine on the table with a bottle – but what it was he himself did not know. He had there corrosive sublimate, sulphur, Glauber’s salts, and some kind of herb which he had gathered, having suddenly imagined it to be good for broken wind and then considered it not amiss for other disorders. The children were already lying down – two on the stove, two on the bed, and one in the cradle beside which Akulína sat spinning. The candle-end – one of the proprietress’s candles which had not been put away carefully enough – was burning in a wooden candlestick on the window-sill and Akulína every now and then got up to snuff it with her fingers, so that her husband should not have to break off his important occupation. There were some free-thinkers who regarded Polikéy as a worthless veterinary and a worthless man. Others, the majority, considered him a worthless man but a great master of his art; but Akulína, though she often scolded and even beat her husband, thought him undoubtedly the first of horse-doctors and the best of men. Polikéy sprinkled some kind of simple on the palm of his hand (he never used scales, and spoke ironically of the Germans who use them: ‘This,’ he used to say, ‘is not an apothecary’s!’). Polikéy weighed the simple on his hand and tossed it up, but there did not seem enough of it and he poured in ten times more. ‘I’ll put in the lot,’ he said to himself. ‘It will pick ’em up better.’ Akulína quickly turned round at the sound of her lord and master’s voice, expecting some command; but seeing that the business did not concern her she shrugged her shoulders. ‘What knowledge! … Where does he get it?’ she thought, and went on spinning. The paper which had held the simple fell to the floor. Akulína did not overlook this.

‘Annie,’ she cried, ‘look! Father has dropped something. Pick it up!’

Annie put out her thin little bare legs from under the cloak with which she was covered, slid down under the table like a kitten, and got the paper.

‘Here, daddy,’ she said, and darted back into bed with her chilled little feet.

‘Don’t puth!’ squeaked her lisping younger sister sleepily.

‘I’ll give it you!’ muttered Akulína, and both heads disappeared again under the cloak.

‘He’ll give me three rubles,’ said Polikéy, corking up the bottle. ‘I’ll cure the horse. It’s even too cheap,’ he added, ‘brain-splitting work! … Akulína, go and ask Nikíta for a little ‘baccy. I’ll pay him back to-morrow.’

Polikéy took out of his trouser-pocket a lime-wood pipe-stem, which had once been painted, with a sealing-wax mouthpiece, and began fixing it onto the bowl.

Akulína left her spindle and went out, managing to steer clear of everything – though this was not easy. Polikéy opened the cupboard and put away the medicine, then tilted a vodka bottle into his mouth, but it was empty and he made a grimace. But when his wife brought the tobacco he sat down on the edge of the bed, after filling and lighting his pipe, and his face beamed with the content and pride of a man who has completed his day’s task. Whether he was thinking how on the morrow he would catch hold of the horse’s tongue and pour his wonderful mixture down its throat, or reflecting that a useful person never gets a refusal – ‘There, now! Hadn’t Nikíta sent him the tobacco?’ – anyhow he felt happy. Suddenly the door, which hung on one hinge, was thrown open and a maidservant from up there – not the second maid but the third, the little one that was kept to run errands – entered their corner. (Up there, as everyone knows, means the master’s house, even if it stands on lower ground.) Aksyútka – that was the girl’s name – always flew like a bullet, and did it without bending her arms, which keeping time with the speed of her flight swung like pendulums, not at her sides but in front of her. Her cheeks were always redder than her pink dress, and her tongue moved as fast as her legs. She flew into the room, and for some reason catching hold of the stove, began to sway to and fro; then as if intent on not emitting more than two or three words at once, she suddenly addressed Akulína breathlessly as follows:

‘The mistress … has given orders … that Polikéy should come this minute … orders to come up.…’

She stopped, drawing breath with difficulty.

‘Egór Mikháylovich has been with the mistress … they talked about rickruits … they mentioned Polikéy … Avdótya Nikoláevna … has ordered him to come this minute … Avdótya Nikoláevna has ordered …’ again a sigh, ‘to come this minute.…’

For half a minute Aksyútka looked round at Polikéy and at Akulína and the children – who had put out their heads from under their coverlets – picked up a nutshell that lay on the stove and threw it at little Annie. Then she repeated: ‘To come this minute!…’ and rushed out of the room like a whirlwind, the pendulums swinging as usual across her line of flight.

Akulína again rose and got her husband his boots – abominable soldier’s boots with holes in them – and took down his coat from the stove and handed it to him without looking at him.

‘Won’t you change your shirt, Polikéy?’

‘No,’ he answered.

Akulína never once looked at his face while he put on his boots and coat, and she did well not to look. Polikéy’s face was pale, his nether jaw twitched, and in his eyes there was that tearful, meek, and deeply mournful look one only sees in the eyes of kindly, weak, and guilty people. – He combed his hair and was going out; but his wife stopped him, tucked in the string of his shirt that hung down from under his coat, and put his cap on for him.

‘What’s that, Polikéy? Has the mistress sent for you?’ came the voice of the carpenter’s wife from behind the partition.

Only that very morning the carpenter’s wife had had high words with Akulína about her pot of lye⁴ that Polikéy’s children had upset in her corner, and at first she was pleased to hear Polikéy being summoned to the mistress – most likely for no good. She was a subtle, diplomatic lady, with a biting tongue. Nobody knew better than she how to cut one with a word: so at least she imagined.

‘I expect you’ll be sent to town to buy things,’ she continued. ‘I suppose a trusty person is wanted for that job so she is sending you! You might buy me a quarter of a pound of tea there, Polikéy.’

Akulína forced back her tears, and an angry expression distorted her lips. She felt as if she could have clutched ‘that vixen, the joiner’s wife, by her mangy hair’. But as she looked at her children and thought that they would be left fatherless and she herself be a soldier’s wife and as good as widowed, she forgot the sharp-tongued carpenter’s wife, hid her face in her hands, sat down on the bed, and let her head sink in the pillows.

‘Mammy, you’re cwushing me!’ lisped the little girl, pulling the cloak with which she was covered from under her mother’s elbow.

‘If only you’d die, all of you! I’ve brought you into the world for nothing but sorrow!’ cried Akulína, and sobbed aloud, to the delight of the carpenter’s wife who had not yet forgotten the lye spilt that morning.

IV

HALF an hour passed. The baby began to cry. Akulína got up and gave it the breast. Weeping no longer, but resting her thin though still handsome face on her hand and fixing her eyes on the last flickerings of the candle, she sat thinking why she had married, wondering why so many soldiers were needed, and also how she could pay out the carpenter’s wife.

She heard her husband’s footsteps and, wiping her tears, got up to let him pass. Polikéy entered like a conqueror, threw his cap on the bed, puffed, and undid his girdle.

‘Well, what did she want you for?’

‘H’m! Of course! Polikúshka is the least of men … but when there’s business to be done, who’s wanted? Why, Polikúshka.…’

‘What business?’

Polikéy was in no hurry to reply. He lit his pipe and spat.

‘To go and fetch money from a merchant.’

‘To fetch money?’ Akulína asked.

Polikéy chuckled and wagged his head.

‘Ah! Ain’t she clever at words?… “You have been regarded,” she says, “as an untrustworthy man, but I trust you more than another” ’ (Polikéy spoke loud that the neighbours might hear). ‘ “You promised me you’d reform; here”, she says, “is the first proof that I believe you. Go”, she says, “to the merchant, fetch the money he owes, and bring it back to me.” And I say: “We are all your serfs, ma’am,” I say, “and must serve you as we serve God; so I feel that I can do anything for your honour and cannot refuse any kind of work; whatever you order I will do, because I am your slave.” ’ (He again smiled that peculiar, weak, kindly, guilty smile.) ‘ “Well, then,” she says, “you will do it faithfully?… You understand,” she says, “that your fate depends on it?” – “How could I fail to understand that I can do it all? If they have told tales about me – well, anyone can tell tales about another … but I never in any way, I believe, have even had a thought against your honour …” In a word, I buttered her up till my lady was quite softened.… “I shall think highly of you,” she says.’ (He kept silent a minute, then the smile again appeared on his face.) ‘I know very well how to talk to the likes of them! Formerly, when I used to go out to work on my own, at times someone would come down hard on me; but only let me get in a word or two and I’d butter him up till he’d be as smooth as silk!’

‘Is it much money?’

‘Fifteen hundred rubles,’ carelessly replied Polikéy.

She shook her head.

‘When are you to go?’

‘ “To-morrow,” she says. “Take any horse you like,” she says, “call at the office, and then start and God be with you!” ’

‘The Lord be praised!’ said Akulína, rising and crossing herself. ‘May God help you, Polikéy,’ she added in a whisper, so that she might not be heard beyond the partition and holding him by his shirt-sleeve. ‘Polikéy, listen to me! I beseech you in the name of Christ our God: kiss the cross when you start, and promise that not a drop shall pass your lips.’

‘A likely thing!’ he ejaculated; ‘drink when carrying all that money! … Ah! how somebody was playing the piano up there! Fine!…’ he said, after a pause, and smiled. ‘I suppose it was the young lady. I was standing like this in front of the mistress, beside the whatnot, and the young lady was rattling away behind the door. She rattled and rattled on, fitting it together so pat! O my! Wouldn’t I like to play a tune! I’d soon master it, I would. I’m awfully good at that sort of thing.… Let me have a clean shirt to-morrow!’

And they went to bed happy.

V

MEANWHILE the meeting in front of the office had been noisy. The business before them was no trifle. Almost all the peasants were present. While the steward was with the mistress they kept their caps on, more voices were heard, and they talked more loudly. The hum of deep voices, interrupted at rare intervals by breathless, husky, and shrill tones, filled the air and, entering through the windows of the mistress’s house, sounded like the noise of a distant sea, making her feel a nervous agitation like that produced by a heavy thunderstorm – a sensation between fear and discomfort. She felt as if the voices might at any moment grow yet louder and faster and then something would happen. ‘As if it could not all be done quietly, peaceably, without disputing and shouting,’ she thought, ‘according to the Christian law of brotherly love and meekness!’

Many voices were speaking at once, but Theodore Rezún, the carpenter, shouted loudest. There were two grown-up young men in his family and he was attacking the Dútlovs. Old Dútlov was defending himself: he stepped forward from the crowd behind which he had at first been standing. Now spreading out his arms, now clutching his little beard, he sputtered and snuffled in such a way that it would have been hard for him to understand what he himself was saying. His sons and nephews – splendid fellows all of them – stood huddled behind him, and the old man resembled the mother-hen in the game of Hawk and Chickens. The hawk was Rezún; and not only Rezún, but all the men who had two grown lads in family, and the fathers of only sons, and almost the whole meeting, were attacking Dútlov. The point was that Dútlov’s brother had been recruited thirty years before, and that Dútlov wished therefore to be excused from taking his turn with the families in which there were three eligible young men, and wanted his brother’s service in the army to be reckoned to the credit of his family, so that it should be given the same chance as those in which there were only two young men; and that these families should all draw lots equally and the third recruit be chosen from among all of them. Besides Dútlov’s family there were four others in which there were three young men, but one was the village Elder’s family and the mistress had exempted him. From the second a recruit had been taken the year before, and from each of the remaining families a recruit was now being taken. One of them had not even come to this meeting, but his wife stood sorrowfully behind all the others, vaguely hoping that the wheel of fortune might somehow turn her way. The red-haired Román, the father of the other recruit, in a tattered coat – though he was not poor – hung his head and silently leaned against the porch, only now and then looking up attentively at anyone who raised his voice, and then hanging his head again. Misery seemed to breathe from his whole figure. Old Semën Dútlov was a man to whose keeping anyone who knew anything of him would have trusted hundreds and thousands of rubles. He was a steady, God-fearing, reliable man, and was the church Elder. Therefore the excitement he was now in was all the more striking.

Rezún the carpenter, a tall dark man, was, on the contrary, a riotous drunkard, very smart in a dispute and in arguing with workmen, tradespeople, peasants, or gentlefolk, at meetings and fairs. Now he was self-possessed and sarcastic, and from his superior height was crushing down the spluttering church Elder with the whole strength of his ringing voice and oratorical talent. The church Elder was exasperated out of his usual sober groove. Besides these, the youngish, round-faced, square-headed, curly-bearded, thick-set Garáska Kopýlov, one of the speakers of the younger generation, followed Rezún and took part in the dispute. He had already gained some weight at village meetings, having distinguished himself by his trenchant speeches. Then there was Theodore Mélnichny, a tall, thin, yellow-faced, round-shouldered man, also young, with a scanty beard and small eyes, always embittered and gloomy, seeing the dark side of everything and often bewildering the meeting by unexpected and abrupt questions and remarks. Both these speakers sided with Rezún. Besides these there were two babblers who now and then joined in: one, called Khrapkóv, with a most good-humoured face and flowing brown beard, who kept repeating the words, ‘Oh, my dearest friend!’ the other, Zhidkóv, a little fellow with a birdlike face who also kept remarking at every opportunity, ‘That’s how it is, brothers mine!’ addressing himself to everybody and speaking fluently but never to the point. Both of these sided first with one and then with the other party, but no one listened to them. There were others like them, but these two, who kept moving through the crowd and shouting louder than anybody and frightening the mistress, were listened to less than anyone else. Intoxicated by the noise and shouting, they gave themselves up entirely to the pleasure of letting their tongues wag. There were many other characters among the members of the commune, stern, respectable, indifferent, or depressed; and there were women standing behind the men with sticks in their hands, but, God willing, I’ll speak of them some other time. The greater part of the crowd, however, consisted of peasants who stood as if they were in church, whispering behind each other’s backs about home affairs, or of when to cut faggots in the wood, or silently awaiting the end of the jabber. There were also rich peasants whose well-being the meeting could not add to nor diminish. Such was Ermíl, with his broad shiny face, whom the peasants called the ‘big-bellied’, because he was rich. Such too was Stárostin, whose face showed a self-satisfied expression of power that seemed to say, ‘You may talk away, but no one will touch me! I have four sons, but not one of them will have to go.’ Now and then these two were attacked by some independent thinker such as Kopýlov and Rezún, but they replied quietly and firmly and with a consciousness of their own inviolability. If Dútlov was like the mother-hen in the game of Hawk and Chickens, his lads did not much resemble the chickens. They did not flutter about and squeak, but stood quietly behind him. His eldest son, Ignát, was already thirty; the second, Vasíli, also was already a married man and moreover not fit for a recruit; the third, his nephew Elijah, who had just got married – a fair, rosy young man in a smart sheepskin coat (he was a post-chaise driver) – stood looking at the crowd, sometimes scratching his head under his hat, as if the whole matter was no concern of his, though it was just on him that the hawks wished to swoop down.

‘If it comes to that, my grandfather was a soldier,’ said one, ‘and so I might refuse to draw lots in just the same way! … There’s no such law, friend. Last recruiting, Mikhéchev was taken though his uncle had not even returned from service then.’

‘Neither your father nor your uncle ever served the Tsar,’ Dútlov was saying at the same time. ‘Why, you don’t even serve the mistress or the commune, but spend all your time in the pub. Your sons have separated from you because it’s impossible to live with you, so you go suggesting other people’s sons for recruits! But I have done police duty for ten years, and served as Elder. Twice I have been burnt out, and no one helped me over it; and now, because things are peaceable and decent in my home, am I to be ruined?… Give me back my brother, then! He has died in service for sure.… Judge honestly according to God’s law, Christian commune, and don’t listen to a drunkard’s drivel.’

And at the same time Geráska was saying to Dútlov:

‘You are making your brother an excuse; but he was not sent by the commune. He was sent by the master because of his evil ways, so he’s no excuse for you.’

Geráska had not finished when the lank yellow-faced Theodore Mélnichny stepped forward and began dismally:

‘Yes, that’s the way! The masters send whom they please, and then the commune has to get the muddle straight. The commune has fixed on your lad, and if you don’t like it, go and ask the lady. Perhaps she will order me, the one man of our family, to leave my children and go! … There’s law for you!’ he said bitterly, and waving his hand he went back to his former place.

Red-haired Román, whose son had been chosen as a recruit, raised his head and muttered: ‘That’s it, that’s it!’ and even sat down on the step in vexation.

But these were not the only ones who were speaking at once. Besides those at the back who were talking about their own affairs, the babblers did not forget to do their part.

‘And so it is, faithful commune,’ said little Zhidkóv, supporting Dútlov. ‘One must judge in a Christian way.… Like Christians I mean, brothers, we must judge.’

‘One must judge according to one’s conscience, my dear friend,’ spoke the good-humoured Khrapkóv, repeating Garáska Kopýlov’s words and pulling Dútlov by his sheepskin coat. ‘It was the master’s will and not the commune’s decision.’

‘That’s right! So it was!’ said others.

‘What drunkard is drivelling there?’ Rezún retorted to Dútlov. ‘Did you stand me any drinks? Or is your son, whom they pick up by the roadside, going to reproach me for drinking?… Friends, we must decide! If you want to spare the Dútlovs, choose not only out of families with two men, but even an only son, and he will have the laugh of us!’

‘A Dútlov will have to go! What’s the good of talking?’

‘Of course the three-men families must be the first to draw lots,’ began different voices.

‘We must first see what the mistress will say. Egór Mikháylovich was saying that they wished to send a house-serf,’ put in a voice.

This remark checked the dispute for a while, but soon it flared up anew and again came to personalities.

Ignát, whom Rezún had accused of being picked up drunk by the roadside, began to make out that Rezún had stolen a saw from some travelling carpenters, and that he had almost beaten his wife to death when he was drunk.

Rezún replied that he beat his wife drunk or sober, and still it was not enough, and this set everybody laughing. But about the saw he became suddenly indignant, stepped closer to Ignát and asked:

‘Who stole? …’

‘You did,’ replied the sturdy Ignát, drawing still closer.

‘Who stole?… Wasn’t it you?’ shouted Rezún.

‘No, it was you,’ said Ignát.

From the saw they went on to the theft of a horse, a sack of oats, some strip of communal kitchen-garden, and to a certain dead body, and the two peasants said such terrible things of one another that if a hundredth part of them had been true they would by law at the very least have deserved exile to Siberia.

In the meantime old Dútlov had chosen another way of defending himself. He did not like his son’s shouting, and tried to stop him, saying: ‘It’s a sin.… Leave off I tell you!’ At the same time he argued that not only those who had three young men at home were three-men families, but also those whose sons had separated from them, and he also pointed to Stárostin.

Stárostin smiled slightly, cleared his throat, and stroking his beard with the air of a well-to-do peasant, answered that it all depended on the mistress, and that evidently his sons had deserved well, since the order was for them to be exempt.

Garáska smashed Dútlov’s arguments about the families that had broken up, by the remark that they ought not to have been allowed to break up, as was the rule during the lifetime of the late master; but that no one went raspberry-picking when summer was over, and that one could not now conscript the only man left in a household.

‘Did they break up their households for fun? Why should they now be quite ruined?’ came the voices of the men whose families had separated; and the babblers joined in too.

‘You’d better buy a substitute if you’re not satisfied. You can afford it!’ said Rezún to Dútlov.

Dútlov wrapped his coat round him with a despairing gesture and stepped back behind the others.

‘It seems you’ve counted my money!’ he muttered angrily. ‘We shall see what Egór Mikháylovich will say when he comes from the mistress.’

VI

AT that very moment Egór Mikháylovich came out of the house. One cap after another was lifted, and as the steward approached all the heads – grey, grizzled, red, brown, fair, or bald in front or on top – were uncovered, and the voices were gradually silenced till at last all was quiet. Egór Mikháylovich stepped onto the porch, evidently intending to speak. In his long coat, his hands awkwardly thrust into the front pockets, his town-made cap pulled over his forehead, he stood firmly, with feet apart, in this elevated position, towering above all these heads – mostly old, bearded, and handsome – that were turned towards him. He was now a different man from what he had been when he stood before his mistress. He was majestic.

‘This is the mistress’s decision, men! It is not her pleasure to give up any of the house-serfs, but from among you – whom you yourselves decide on shall go. Three are wanted this time. By rights only two and a half are wanted, but the half will be taken into account next time. It comes to the same thing: if not to-day it would have to be to-morrow.’

‘Of course, that’s quite right!’ some voices said.

‘In my opinion,’ continued Egór Mikháylovich, ‘Kharyúshkin and Váska Mityúkhin must go, that is evidently God’s will.’

‘Yes, that’s quite right!’ said the voices.

‘… The third will have to be one of the Dútlovs, or one out of a two-men family.… What do you say?’

‘Dútlov!’ cried the voices. ‘There are three of them of the right age!’

And again, little by little, the shouting increased, and somehow the question of the strip of kitchen-garden and certain sacks stolen from the mistress’s yard came up again. Egór Mikháylovich had been managing the estate for the last twenty years and was a shrewd and experienced man. He stood and listened for about a quarter of an hour, then he ordered all to be silent, and the three younger Dútlovs to draw lots to see which of them was to go. The lots were prepared, shaken up in a hat, and Khrapkóv drew one out. It was Elijah’s. All became silent.

‘Is it mine? Let me see it!’ said Elijah in a faltering voice.

All remained silent. Egór Mikháylovich ordered that everybody should bring the recruit money – seven kopéks from each household – next day, and saying that all was over, dismissed the meeting. The crowd moved off, the men covered their heads as they turned the corner, and their voices and the sound of their footsteps mingled into a hum. The steward stood on the porch watching the departing crowd, and when the young Dútlovs were round the corner he beckoned old Dútlov, who had stopped of his own accord, and they went into the office.

‘I am sorry for you, old man,’ said Egór Mikháylovich, sitting down in an arm-chair before the table. ‘It was your turn though. Will you buy a recruit to take your nephew’s place, or not?’

The old man, without speaking, gave Egór Mikháylovich a significant look.

‘There’s no getting out of it,’ said Egór Mikháylovich in answer to that look.

‘We’d be glad enough to buy a substitute, Egór Mikháylovich, but we haven’t the means. Two horses went to the knacker’s this summer, and there was my nephew’s wedding.… Evidently it’s our fate … for living honestly. It’s very well for him to talk!’ (He was thinking of Rezún.)

Egór Mikháylovich rubbed his face with his hand and yawned. He was evidently tired of the business and was ready for his tea.

‘Eh, old fellow, don’t be mean!’ said he. ‘Have a hunt under your floor, I dare say you’ll turn up some four hundred old ruble notes, and I’ll get you a substitute – a regular wonder! … The other day a fellow came offering himself.’

‘In the government?’ asked Dútlov, meaning the town.

‘Well, will you buy him?’

‘I’d be glad enough, God is my witness! … but …’

Egór Mikháylovich interrupted him sternly.

‘Well then, listen to me, old man! See that Elijah does himself no mischief,⁵ and as soon as I send word – whether to-day or to-morrow – he is to be taken to town at once. You will take him and you will be answerable for him, but if anything should happen to him – which God forbid! – I’ll send your eldest son instead! Do you hear?’

‘But could not one be sent from a two-man family?… Egór Mikháylovich, this is not fair!’ he said. Then after a pause he went on, almost with tears: ‘When my brother has died a soldier, now they are taking my son! How have I deserved such a blow?’ and he was ready to fall on his knees.

‘Well, well, go away!’ said Egór Mikháylovich. ‘Nothing can be done. It’s the law. Keep an eye on Elijah: you’ll have to answer for him!’

Dútlov went home, thoughtfully tapping the ruts with his linden stick as he walked.

VII

EARLY next morning a big-boned bay gelding (for some reason called Drum) harnessed to a small cart (the steward himself used to drive in that cart), stood at the porch of the house-serfs’ quarters. Annie, Polikéy’s eldest daughter, barefoot in spite of the falling sleet and the cold wind, and evidently frightened, stood at the horse’s head holding the bridle at arm’s length, and with her other hand held a faded yellowy-green jacket that was thrown over her head, and which served the family as blanket, cloak, hood, carpet, overcoat for Polikéy, and many other things besides. Polikéy’s corner was all in a bustle. The dim light of a rainy morning was just glimmering in at the window, which was broken here and there and mended with paper. Akulína had left her cooking in the oven, and left her children – of whom the younger were still in bed – shivering, because the jacket that served them as blanket had been taken away to serve as a garment and only replaced by the shawl off their mother’s head. Akulína was busy getting her husband ready for his journey. His shirt was clean, but his boots, which as the saying is were ‘begging for porridge’, gave her much trouble. She had taken off her thick worsted stockings (her only pair) and given them to her husband, and had managed to cut out a pair of inner soles from a saddle-cloth (which had been carelessly left about in the stable and had been brought home by Polikéy two days before) in such a way as to stop up the holes in his boots and keep his feet dry. Polikéy sat, feet and all, on the bed, untwisting his girdle so that it should not look like a dirty cord. The cross, lisping little girl, wrapped in the sheepskin (which though it covered her head was trailing round her feet), had been dispatched to ask Nikíta to lend them a cap. The bustle was increased by house-serfs coming in to ask Polikéy to get different things for them in town. One wanted needles, another tea, a third some tobacco, and another some olive oil. The carpenter’s wife – who to conciliate Polikéy had already found time to make her samovar boil and bring him a mug full of liquid which she called tea – wanted some sugar. Though Nikíta refused to lend a cap and they had to mend his own – that is, to push in the protruding bits of wadding and sew them up with a veterinary needle; though at first the boots with the saddle-cloth soles would not go on his feet; though Annie, chilled through, nearly let Drum get out of hand, and Mary in the long sheepskin had to take her place, and then Mary had to take off the sheepskin and Akulína had to hold the horse herself – it all ended by Polikéy successfully getting all the warm family garments on himself, leaving only the jacket and a pair of slippers behind. When ready, he got into the little cart, wrapped the sheepskin round him, shook up the bag of hay at the bottom of the cart, again wrapped himself up, took the reins, wrapped the coat still closer round him as very important people do, and started.

His little boy Míshka, running out onto the steps, begged to have a ride; the lisping Mary also begged that she might ‘have a lide’, and was ‘not cold even without the theepthkin’; so Polikéy stopped Drum and smiled his weak smile while Akulína put the children into the cart and, bending towards him, begged him in a whisper to remember his oath and not drink anything on the way. Polikéy took the children through the village as far as the smithy, put them down, wrapped himself up and put his cap straight again, and drove off at a slow, sedate trot, his cheeks quivering at every jolt and his feet knocking against the bark sides of the cart. Mary and Míshka, barefoot, rushed down the slippery hill to the house at such a rate and yelling so loudly that a stray dog from the village looked up at them and scurried home with its tail between its legs, which made Polikéy’s heirs yell ten times louder.

It was abominable weather: the wind was cutting, and something between rain and snow, and now and then fine hail, beat on Polikéy’s face and on his bare hands which held the reins – and over which he kept drawing the sleeves of his coat – and on the leather of the horse-collar, and on the head of old Drum, who set back his ears and half closed his eyes.

Then suddenly the rain stopped and it brightened up in a moment. The bluish snow clouds stood out clear and the sun began to come out, but uncertainly and cheerlessly like Polikéy’s own smile. Notwithstanding all this, Polikéy was deep in pleasant thoughts. He whom they threatened to exile and conscript, whom only those who were too lazy did not scold and beat, who was always shoved into the worst places, he was driving now to fetch a sum of money, and a large sum too, and his mistress trusted him, and he was driving in the steward’s cart behind Drum – with whom the lady herself sometimes drove out – just as if he were some proprietor with leather collar-strap and reins instead of ropes. And Polikéy sat up straighter, pushed in the bits of wadding hanging out of his cap, and again wrapped his coat closer.

If Polikéy, however, imagined that he looked just like a wealthy peasant proprietor he deluded himself. It is true, as everyone knows, that tradesmen worth ten thousand rubles drive in carts with leather harness, only this was not quite the same thing. A bearded man in a blue or black coat drives past sitting alone in a cart, driving a well-fed horse, and you just glance to see if the horse is sleek and he himself well fed, and at the way he sits, at the horse’s harness, and the tyres on the cartwheels, and at his girdle, and you know at once whether the man does business in hundreds or in thousands of rubles. Every experienced person looking closer at Polikéy, at his hands, his face, his newly-grown beard, his girdle, at the hay carelessly thrown into the cart, at lean Drum, at the worn tyres, would know at once that it was only a serf driving past, and not a merchant or a cattle-dealer or even a peasant proprietor, and that he did not deal in thousands or hundreds, or even tens of rubles. But Polikéy did not think so: he deceived himself, and deceived himself agreeably. He is going to carry home fifteen hundred rubles in the bosom of his coat. If he liked, he might turn Drum’s head towards Odessa instead of homewards, and drive off where Fate might take him. But he will not do such a thing; he will bring the lady her money all in order, and will talk about having had larger sums than that on him. When they came to an inn Drum began pulling at the left rein, turning towards the inn and stopping; but Polikéy, though he had the money given him to do the shopping with, gave Drum the whip and drove on. The same thing happened at the next inn, and about noon he got out of the cart, and opening the gate of the inn-keeper’s house where all his mistress’s people put up, he led the horse and cart into the yard. There he unharnessed, gave the horse some hay, dined with the inn-keeper’s men, not omitting to mention what important business he had come on, and then went out with the market-gardener’s bill in the crown of his cap.

The market-gardener (who knew and evidently mistrusted Polikéy) having read the letter questioned him as to whether he had really been sent for the money. Polikéy tried to seem offended, but could not manage it, and only smiled his peculiar smile. The market-gardener read the letter over once more and handed him the money. Having received the money, Polikéy put it into his bosom and went back to the inn. Neither the beer-shop nor the tavern nor anything tempted him. He felt a pleasant agitation through his whole being, and stopped more than once in front of shops that showed tempting wares: boots, coats, caps, chintz, and foodstuffs, and went on with the pleasant feeling: ‘I could buy it all, but there now, I won’t do it!’ He went to the bazaar for the things he had been asked to buy, got them all, and started bargaining for a lined sheepskin coat, for which he was asked twenty-five rubles. For some reason the dealer, after looking at Polikéy, seemed to doubt his ability to buy it. But Polikéy pointed to his bosom, saying that he could buy the whole shop if he liked, and insisted on trying the coat on; felt it, patted it, blew into the wool till he became permeated with the smell of it, and then took it off with a sigh. ‘The price does not suit me. If you’ll let it go for fifteen rubles, now!’ he said. The dealer angrily threw the coat across the table, and Polikéy went out and cheerfully returned to his inn. After supper, having watered Drum and given him some oats, he climbed up on the stove, took out the envelope with the money and examined it for a long time, and then asked a porter who knew how to read to read him the address and the inscription: ‘With enclosure of one thousand six hundred and seventeen assignation rubles.’⁶ The envelope was made of common paper and sealed with brown sealing-wax with the impression of an anchor. There was one large seal in the middle, four at the corners, and there were some drops of sealing-wax near the edge. Polikéy examined all this, and studied it. He even felt the sharp edges of the notes. It gave him a kind of childish pleasure to know that he had such a sum in his hands. He thrust the envelope into a hole in the lining of his cap, and lay down with the cap under his head; but even in the night he kept waking and feeling the envelope. And each time he found it in its place he experienced the pleasant feeling that here was he, the disgraced, the down-trodden Polikéy, carrying such a sum and delivering it up more accurately than even the steward could have done.

VIII

ABOUT midnight the inn-keeper’s men and Polikéy were awakened by a knocking at the gate and the shouting of peasants. It was the party of recruits from Pokróvsk. There were about ten people: Khoryúshkin, Mityúkin, and Elijah (Dútlov’s nephew), two substitutes in case of need, the village Elder, old Dútlov, and the men who had driven them. A night-light was burning in the room, and the cook was sleeping on a bench under the icons. She jumped up and began lighting a candle. Polikéy also awoke, and leaning over from the top of the stove looked at the peasants as they came in. They came in crossing themselves, and sat down on the benches round the room. They all seemed perfectly calm, so that one could not tell which of them were the conscripts and which their escorts. They were greeting the people of the inn, talking loudly, and asking for food. It is true that some were silent and sad; but on the other hand others were unusually merry, evidently drunk. Among these was Elijah, who had never had too much to drink before.

‘Well, lads, shall we go to sleep or have some supper?’ asked the Elder.

‘Supper!’ said Elijah, throwing open his coat and setting himself on a bench. ‘Send for some vodka.’

‘Enough of your vodka!’ answered the Elder shortly, and turning to the others he said: ‘You just cut yourselves a bit of bread, lads! Why wake people up?’

‘Give me vodka!’ Elijah repeated, without looking at anybody, and in a voice that showed that he would not soon stop.

The peasants took the Elder’s advice, fetched some bread out of their carts, ate it, asked for a little kvas, and lay down, some on the floor and some on the stove.

Elijah kept repeating at intervals: ‘Let me have some vodka, I say, let me have some.’ Then, noticing Polikéy: ‘Polikéy! Hi, Polikéy! You here, dear friend? Why, I am going for a soldier.… Have said good-bye to my mother and my missus.… How she howled! They’ve bundled me off for a soldier.… Stand me some vodka!’

‘I haven’t got any money,’ answered Polikéy, and to comfort him added: ‘Who knows? By God’s aid you may be rejected!…’

‘No, friend. I’m as sound as a young birch. I’ve never had an illness. There’s no rejecting for me! What better soldier can the Tsar want?’

Polikéy began telling him how a peasant gave a doctor a five-ruble note and got rejected.

Elijah drew nearer the oven, and they talked more freely.

‘No, Polikéy, it’s all up now! I don’t want to stay now myself. Uncle has done for me. As if he couldn’t have bought a substitute! … No, he grudged his son, and grudges the money, so they send me. No! I don’t myself want to stay.’ (He spoke gently, confidingly, under the influence of quiet sorrow.) ‘One thing only – I am sorry for mother, dear heart! … How she grieved! And the wife, too! … They’ve ruined the woman just for nothing; now she’ll perish – in a word, she’ll be a soldier’s wife! Better not to have married. What did they marry me for?… They’re coming here to-morrow.’

‘But why have they brought you so soon?’ asked Polikéy; ‘nothing was heard about it, and then, all of a sudden …’

‘Why, they’re afraid I shall do myself some mischief,’ answered Elijah, smiling. ‘No fear! I’ll do nothing of the kind. I shall not be lost even as a soldier; only I’m sorry for mother.… Why did they get me married?’ he said gently and sadly.

The door opened and shut with a loud slam as old Dútlov came in, shaking the wet off his cap, and as usual in bast shoes so big that they looked like boats.

‘Afanásy,’ he said to the porter, when he had crossed himself, ‘isn’t there a lantern to get some oats by?’

And without looking at Elijah he began slowly lighting a bit of candle. His mittens and whip were stuck into the girdle tied neatly round his coat, and his toil-worn face appeared as usual, simple, quiet, and full of business cares, as if he had just arrived with a train of loaded carts.

Elijah became silent when he saw his uncle, and looked dismally down at the bench again. Then, addressing the Elder, he muttered:

‘Vodka, Ermíl! I want some drink!’ His voice sounded wrathful and dejected.

‘Drink, at this time?’ answered the Elder, who was eating something out of a bowl. ‘Don’t you see the others have had a bite and lain down? Why are you making a row?’

The word ‘row’ evidently suggested to Elijah the idea of violence.

‘Elder, I’ll do some mischief if you don’t give me vodka!’

‘Couldn’t you bring him to reason?’ the Elder said, turning to Dútlov, who had lit the lantern, but had stopped, evidently to see what would happen, and was looking pityingly at his nephew out of the corner of his eyes, as if surprised at his childishness.

Elijah, looking down, again muttered:

‘Vodka! Give … do mischief!’

‘Leave off, Elijah!’ said the Elder mildly. ‘Really, now, leave off! You’d better!’

But before the words were out Elijah had jumped up and hit a window-pane with his fist, and shouting at the top of his voice: ‘You would not listen to me, so there you have it!’ rushed to the other window to break that too.

Polikéy in the twinkling of an eye rolled over twice and hid in the farthest corner of the top of the stove, so quickly that he scared all the cockroaches there. The Elder threw down his spoon and rushed towards Elijah. Dútlov slowly put down his lantern, untied his girdle, and shaking his head and making a clicking noise with his tongue, went up to Elijah, who was already struggling with the Elder and the inn-keeper’s man, who were keeping him away from the window. They had caught his arms and seemed to be holding him fast; but the moment he saw his uncle with the girdle his strength increased tenfold and he tore himself away, and with rolling eyes and clenched fists stepped up to Dútlov.

‘I’ll kill you! Keep away, you brute! … You have ruined me, you and your brigands of sons, you’ve ruined me! … Why did they get me married?… Keep away! I’ll kill you!…’

Elijah was terrible. His face was purple, his eyes rolled, the whole of his healthy young body trembled as in a fever. He seemed to wish and to be able to kill all the three men who were facing him.

‘You’re drinking your brother’s blood, you blood-sucker!’

Something flashed across Dútlov’s ever-serene face. He took a step forward.

‘You won’t take it peaceably!’ said he suddenly. The wonder was where he got the energy; for with a quick motion he caught hold of his nephew, rolled to the ground with him, and with the aid of the Elder began binding his hands with the girdle. They struggled for about five minutes. At last with the help of the peasants Dútlov rose, pulling his coat out of Elijah’s clutch. Then he raised Elijah, whose hands were tied behind his back, and made him sit down on a bench in a corner.

‘I told you it would be the worse for you,’ he said, still out of breath with the struggle, and pulling straight the narrow girdle tied over his shirt. ‘Why sin? We shall all have to die! … Fold a coat for a pillow for him,’ he said, turning to the inn-keeper’s men, ‘or the blood will go to his head.’ And he tied the cord round his waist over his sheepskin and, taking up the lantern, went to see after the horses.

Elijah, pale, dishevelled, his shirt pulled out of place, was gazing round the room as though trying to remember where he was. The inn-keeper’s men picked up the broken bits of glass and stuffed a coat into the hole in the window to keep the draught out. The Elder sat down again to his bowl.

‘Ah, Elijah, Elijah! I’m sorry for you, really! What’s to be done? There’s Khoryúshkin … he, too, is married. Seems it can’t be helped!’

‘It’s all on account of that fiend, my uncle, that I’m being ruined!’ Elijah repeated, dryly and bitterly. ‘He was chary of his own son! … Mother says the steward told him to buy me off. He won’t: he says he can’t afford it. As if what my brother and I have brought into his house were a trifle! … He is a fiend!’

Dútlov returned to the room, said a prayer in front of the icons, took off his outdoor things, and sat down beside the Elder. The cook brought more kvas and another spoon. Elijah grew silent, and closing his eyes lay down on the folded coat. The Elder pointed to him and shook his head silently. Dútlov waved his hand.

‘As if one was not sorry! … My own brother’s son! … And as if things were not bad enough it seems they also made me out a villain to him.… Whether it’s his wife – she’s a cunning little woman for all she’s so young – that has put it into his head that we could afford to buy a substitute! … Anyhow, he’s reproaching me. But one does pity the lad!…’

‘Ah! he’s a fine lad,’ said the Elder.

‘But I’m at the end of my tether with him! To-morrow I shall let Ignát come, and his wife wanted to come too.’

‘All right – let them come,’ said the Elder, rising and climbing onto the stove. ‘What is money? Money is dross!’

‘If one had the money, who would grudge it?’ muttered one of the inn-keeper’s men, lifting his head.

‘Ah, money, money! It causes much sin,’ replied Dútlov. ‘Nothing in the world causes so much sin, and the Scriptures say so too.’

‘Everything is said there,’ the workman agreed. ‘There was a man told me how a merchant had stored up a heap of money and did not want to leave any behind; he loved it so that he took it with him to the grave. As he was dying he asked to have a small pillow buried with him. No one suspected anything, and so it was done. Then his sons began looking for his money and nothing was to be found. At last one of them guessed that probably the notes were all in the pillow. The matter went to the Tsar, and he allowed the grave to be opened. And what do you think? They opened the coffin. There was nothing in the pillow, but the coffin was full of small snakes, and so it was buried again.… You see what money does!’

‘It’s a fact, it brings much sin,’ said Dútlov, and he got up and began saying his prayers.

When he had finished he looked at his nephew. The lad was asleep. Dútlov came up to him, untied the girdle with which he was bound, and then lay down. Another peasant went out to sleep with the horses.

IX

As soon as all was quiet Polikéy climbed down softly, like a guilty man, and began to get ready. For some reason he felt uneasy at the thought of spending the night there among the recruits. The cocks were already crowing to one another more often. Drum had eaten all his oats and was straining towards the drinking-trough. Polikéy harnessed him and led him out past the peasants’ carts. His cap with its contents was safe, and the wheels of the cart were soon rattling along the frosty road to Pokróvsk. Polikéy felt more at ease only when he had left the town behind. Till then he kept imagining that at any moment he might hear himself being pursued, that he would be stopped, and they would tie up his arms instead of Elijah’s, and he would be taken to the recruiting station next morning. It might have been the frost, or it might have been fear, but something made cold shivers run down his back, and again and again he touched Drum up. The first person he met was a priest in a tall fur cap, accompanied by a one-eyed labourer. Taking this for an evil omen Polikéy grew still more alarmed, but outside the town this fear gradually passed. Drum went on at a walking pace and the road in front became more visible. Polikéy took off his cap and felt the notes. ‘Shall I hide it in my bosom?’ he thought. ‘No; I should have to undo my girdle.… Wait a bit! When I get to the foot of the hill I’ll get down and put myself to rights.… The cap is sewn up tight at the top, and it can’t fall through the lining. After all, I’d better not take the cap off till I get home.’ When he had reached the foot of the incline Drum of his own accord galloped up the next hill and Polikéy, who was as eager as Drum to get home, did not check him. All was well – at any rate so Polikéy imagined, and he gave himself up to dreams of his mistress’s gratitude, of the five rubles she would give him, and of the joy of his family. He took off his cap, felt for the envelope, and, smiling, put the cap tighter on his head. The velveteen crown of the cap was very rotten, and just because Akulína had carefully sewn up the rents in one place, it burst open in another; and the very movement by which Polikéy in the dusk had thought to push the envelope with the money deeper under the wadding, tore the cap farther and pushed out a corner of the envelope through the velveteen crown.

The dawn was appearing, and Polikéy, who had not slept all night, began to drowse. Pulling his cap lower down and thereby pushing the envelope still farther out, Polikéy in his drowsiness let his head knock against the front of the cart. He woke up near home and was about to catch hold of his cap, but feeling that it sat firmly on his head he did not take it off, convinced that the envelope was inside. He gave Drum a touch, arranged the hay in the cart again, assumed once more the appearance of a well-to-do peasant, and proudly looking about him rattled homewards.

There was the kitchen, there the house-serfs’ quarters. There was the carpenter’s wife carrying some linen; there was the office, and there the mistress’s house where in a few moments Polikéy would show that he was a trustworthy and honest man. ‘One can say anything about anybody,’ he would say; and the lady would reply, ‘Well, thank you, Polikéy! Here are three (or perhaps five, perhaps even ten) rubles,’ and she would tell them to give him some tea, or even some vodka. It would not be amiss, after being out in the cold! ‘With ten rubles we would have a treat for the holiday, and buy boots, and return Nikíta his four and a half rubles (it can’t be helped! … He has begun bothering)….’ When he was about a hundred paces from the house, Polikéy wrapped his coat round him, pulled his girdle straight and his collar, took off his cap, smoothed his hair, and without haste thrust his hand under the lining. The hand began to fumble faster and faster inside the lining, then the other hand went in too, while his face grew paler and paler. One of the hands went right through the cap. Polikéy fell on his knees, stopped the horse, and began searching in the cart among the hay and the things he had bought, feeling inside his coat and in his trousers. The money was nowhere to be found.

‘Heavens! What does it mean?… What will happen? He began to roar, clutching at his hair.

But recollecting that he might be seen, he turned the horse round, pulled the cap on, and drove the surprised and disgusted Drum back along the road.

‘I can’t bear going out with Polikéy,’ Drum must have thought. ‘For once in his life he has fed and watered me properly, and then only to deceive me so unpleasantly! How hard I tried, running home! I am tired, and hardly have we got within smell of our hay than he starts driving me back!’

‘Now then, you devil’s jade!’ shouted Polikéy through his tears, standing up in the cart, pulling at Drum’s mouth, and beating him with the whip.

X

ALL that day no one saw Polikéy in Pokróvsk. The mistress asked for him several times after dinner, and Aksyútka flew down to Akulína; but Akulína said he had not yet returned, and that evidently the market-gardener had detained him or something had happened to the horse. ‘If only it has not gone lame!’ she said. ‘Last time, when Maxim went, he was on the road a whole day – had to walk back all the way.’

And Aksyútka turned her pendulums back to the house again, while Akulína, trying to calm her own fears, invented reasons to account for her husband’s absence, but in vain! Her heart was heavy and she could not work with a will at any of the preparations for the morrow’s holiday. She suffered all the more because the carpenter’s wife assured her that she herself had seen ‘a man just like Polikéy drive up to the avenue and then turn back again’. The children, too, were anxiously and impatiently expecting ‘Daddy’, but for another reason. Annie and Mary, being left without the sheepskin and the coat which made it possible to take turns out of doors, could only run out in their indoor dresses with increasing rapidity in a small circle round the house. This was not a little inconvenient to all the dwellers in the serfs’ quarters who wanted to go in or out. Once Mary ran against the legs of the carpenter’s wife who was carrying water, and though she began to howl in anticipation as soon as she knocked against the woman’s knees, she got her curls cuffed all the same, and cried still louder. When she did not knock against anyone, she flew in at the door, and immediately climbing up by means of a tub, got onto the top of the oven. Only the mistress and Akulína were really anxious about Polikéy; the children were concerned only about what he had on.

Egór Mikháylovich reporting to his mistress, in answer to her questions, ‘Hasn’t Polikéy come back yet?’ and ‘Where can he be?’ answered: ‘I can’t say,’ and seemed pleased that his expectations were being fulfilled. ‘He ought to have been back by noon,’ he added significantly.

All that day no one heard anything of Polikéy; only later on it was known that some neighbouring peasants had seen him running about on the road bareheaded, and asking everyone whether they hadn’t found a letter. Another man had seen him asleep by the roadside beside a tied-up horse and cart. ‘I thought he was tipsy,’ the man said, ‘and the horse looked as if it had not been watered or fed for two days, its sides were so fallen in.’ Akulína did not sleep all night and kept listening, but Polikéy did not return. Had she been alone, or had she kept a cook or a maid, she would have felt still more unhappy; but as soon as the cocks crowed and the carpenter’s wife got up, Akulína was obliged to rise and light the fire. It was a holiday. The bread had to come out of the oven before daybreak, kvas had to be made, cakes baked, the cow milked, frocks and shirts ironed, the children washed, water fetched, and her neighbour prevented from taking up the whole oven. So Akulína, still listening, set to work. It had grown light and the church bells were ringing, the children were up, but still Polikéy had not returned. There had been a first frost the day before, a little snow had fallen and lay in patches on the fields, on the road, and on the roofs; and now, as if in honour of the holiday, the day was fine, sunny, and frosty, so that one could see and hear a long way. But Akulína, standing by the brick oven, her head thrust into the opening, was so busy with her cakes that she did not hear Polikéy drive up, and only knew from the children’s cries that her husband had returned.

Annie, as the eldest, had greased her hair and dressed herself without help. She wore a new but crumpled print dress – a present from the mistress. It stuck out as stiff as if it were made of bast, and was an object of envy to the neighbours; her hair glistened; she had smeared half an inch of tallow candle onto it. Her shoes, though not new, were thin ones. Mary was still wrapped in the old jacket and was covered with mud, and Annie would not let her come near her for fear of getting soiled. Mary was outside. She saw her father drive up with a sack. ‘Daddy has come!’ she shrieked, and rushed headlong through the door past Annie, dirtying her. Annie, no longer fearing to be soiled, went for her at once and hit her. Akulína could not leave her work, and only shouted at the children: ‘Now, then … I’ll whip you all!’ and looked round at the door. Polikéy came in with a sack, and at once made his way to his own corner. It seemed to Akulína that he was pale, and his face looked as if he were either smiling or crying, but she had no time to find out which it was.

‘Well, Polikéy, is it all right?’ she called to him from the oven.

Polikéy muttered something that she did not understand.

‘Eh?’ she cried. ‘Have you been to the mistress?’

Polikéy sat down on the bed in his corner looking wildly round him and smiling his guilty, intensely miserable smile. He did not answer for a long time.

‘Eh, Polikéy? Why have you been so long?’ came Akulína’s voice.

‘Yes, Akulína, I have handed the lady her money. How she thanked me!’ he said suddenly, and began looking round and smiling still more uneasily. Two things attracted his feverishly staring eyes: the baby, and the cords attached to the hanging cradle. He went up to where the cradle hung, and began hastily undoing the knot of the rope with his thin fingers. Then his eyes fixed themselves on the baby; but just then Akulína entered, carrying a board of cakes, and Polikéy quickly hid the rope in his bosom and sat down on the bed.

‘What is it, Polikéy? You are not like yourself,’ said Akulína.

‘Haven’t slept,’ he answered.

Suddenly something flitted past the window, and in a moment Aksyútka, the maid from ‘up there’, darted in like an arrow.

‘The mistress orders Polikéy to come this minute,’ she said – ‘this minute, Avdótya Nikoláevna’s orders are … this minute!’

Polikéy looked at Akulína, then at the girl.

‘I’m coming. What can she want?’ he said, so simply that Akulína grew quieter. ‘Perhaps she wants to reward me. Tell her I’m coming.’

He rose and went out. Akulína took the washing-trough, put it on a bench, filled it with water from the pails which stood by the door and from the cauldron in the oven, rolled up her sleeves, and tried the water.

‘Come, Mary, I’ll wash you.’

The cross, lisping little girl began howling.

‘Come, you brat! I’ll give you a clean smock. Now then, don’t make a fuss. Come along.… I’ve still got your brother to wash.’

Meanwhile Polikéy had not followed the maid from ‘up there’, but had gone to quite a different place. In the passage by the wall was a ladder leading to the loft. Polikéy, when he came out, looked round, and seeing no one, bent down and climbed that ladder almost at a run, nimbly and hurriedly.

‘Why ever doesn’t Polikéy come?’ asked the mistress impatiently of Dunyásha, who was dressing her hair. ‘Where is Polikéy? Why hasn’t he come?’

Aksyútka again flew to the serfs’ quarters, and again rushed into the entry, calling Polikéy to her mistress.

‘Why, he went long ago,’ answered Akulína, who, having washed Mary, had just put her suckling baby-boy into the wash-trough and was moistening his thin short hair, regardless of his cries. The boy screamed, puckered his face, and tried to clutch something with his helpless little hands. Akulína supported his soft, plump, dimpled little back with one large hand, while she washed him with the other.

‘See if he has not fallen asleep somewhere,’ said she, looking round anxiously.

Just then the carpenter’s wife, unkempt and with her dress unfastened and holding up her skirts, went up into the loft to get some things she had hung there to dry. Suddenly a shriek of horror filled the loft, and the carpenter’s wife, like one demented, with her eyes closed, came down the steps on all fours, backwards, sliding rather than running.

‘Polikéy!’ she screamed.

Akulina let go the baby.

‘Has hung himself!’ roared the carpenter’s wife.

Akulína rushed out into the passage, paying no heed to the baby, who rolled over like a ball and fell backwards with his little legs in the air and his head under water.

‘On a rafter … hanging!’ the carpenter’s wife ejaculated, but stopped when she saw Akulína.

Akulína darted up the ladder, and before anyone could stop her she was at the top, but from there with a terrible scream she fell back like a corpse, and would have been killed if the people who had come running from every corner had not been in time to catch her.

XI

FOR several minutes nothing could be made out amidst the general uproar. A crowd of people had collected, everyone was shouting and talking, and the children and old women were crying. Akulína lay unconscious. At last the men, the carpenter and the steward who had run to the place, went up the ladder, and the carpenter’s wife began telling for the twentieth time how she, ‘suspecting nothing, went to fetch a dress, and just looked round like this – and saw … a man; and I looked again, and a cap is lying inside out, close by. I look … his legs are dangling. I went cold all over! Is it pleasant?… To think of a man hanging himself, and that I should be the one to see him! … How I came clattering down I myself don’t remember … it’s a miracle how God preserved me! Truly, the Lord has had mercy on me! … Is it a trifle?… so steep and from such a height. Why, I might have been killed!’

The men who had gone up had the same tale to tell. Polikéy, in his shirt and trousers, was hanging from a rafter by the cord he had taken from the cradle. His cap, turned inside out, lay beside him, his coat and sheepskin were neatly folded and lay close by. His feet touched the ground, but he no longer showed signs of life. Akulína regained consciousness, and again made for the ladder, but was held back.

‘Mamma, Sëmka is dwownded!’ the lisping little girl suddenly cried from their corner. Akulína tore herself away and ran to the corner. The baby lay on his back in the trough and did not stir, and his little legs were not moving. Akulína snatched him out, but he did not breathe or move. She threw him on the bed, and with arms akimbo burst into such loud, piercing, terrible laughter that Mary, who at first laughed too, covered her ears with her hands, and ran out into the passage crying. The neighbours thronged into the corner, wailing and weeping. They carried out the little body and began rubbing it, but in vain. Akulína tossed about on the bed and laughed – laughed so that all who heard her were horror-stricken. Only now, seeing this motley crowd of men and women, old people and children, did one realize what a number of people and what sort of people lived in the serfs’ quarters. All were bustling and talking, many wept, but nobody did anything. The carpenter’s wife still found people who had not heard her tale of how her sensitive feelings were shocked by the unexpected sight, and how God had preserved her from falling down the ladder. An old man who had been a footman, with a woman’s jacket thrown over his shoulders, was telling how in the days of the old master a woman had drowned herself in the pond. The steward sent messengers to the priest and to the constable, and appointed men to keep guard. Aksyútka, the maid from ‘up there’, kept gazing with staring eyes at the opening that led to the loft, and though she could not see anything was unable to tear herself away and go back to her mistress. Agatha Mikháylovna, who had been lady’s-maid to the former proprietress, was weeping and asking for some tea to soothe her nerves. Anna the midwife was laying out the little body on the table, with her plump practised hands moistened with olive oil. Other women stood round Akulína, silently looking at her. The children, huddled together in the corner, peeped at their mother and burst into howls; and then subsiding for a moment, peeped again, and huddled still closer. Boys and men thronged round the porch, looking in at the door and the windows with frightened faces unable to see or understand anything, and asking one another what was the matter. One said the carpenter had chopped off his wife’s foot with an axe. Another said that the laundress had been brought to bed of triplets; a third that the cook’s cat had gone mad and bitten several people. But the truth gradually spread, and at last it reached the mistress; and it seems no one understood how to break it to her. That rough Egór blurted the facts straight out to her, and so upset the lady’s nerves that it was a long time before she could recover. The crowd had already begun to quiet down, the carpenter’s wife set the samovar to boil and made tea, and the outsiders, not being invited, thought it improper to stay longer. Boys had begun fighting outside the porch. Everybody now knew what had happened, and crossing themselves they began to disperse, when suddenly the cry was raised: ‘The mistress! The mistress!’ and everybody crowded and pressed together to make way for her, but at the same time everybody wanted to see what she was going to do. The lady, with pale and tear-stained face, entered the passage, crossed the threshold, and went into Akulína’s corner. Dozens of heads squeezed together and gazed in at the door. One pregnant woman was squeezed so that she gave a squeal, but took advantage of that very circumstance to secure a front place for herself. And how could one help wishing to see the lady in Akulína’s corner? For the house-serfs it was just what the coloured lights are at the end of a show. It’s sure to be great when they burn the coloured fires; and it must be an important occasion when the lady in her silks and lace enters Akulína’s corner. The lady went up and took Akulína’s hand, but Akulína snatched it away. The old house-serfs shook their heads reprovingly.

‘Akulina!’ said the lady. ‘You have your children – so take care of yourself!’

Akulína burst out laughing and got up.

‘My children are all silver, all silver! I don’t keep paper money,’ she muttered very rapidly. ‘I told Polikéy, “Take no notes,” and there now, they’ve smeared him, smeared him with tar – tar and soap, madam! Any scabbiness you may have it will get rid of at once …’ and she laughed still louder.

The mistress turned away, and gave orders that the doctor’s assistant should come with mustard poultices. ‘Bring some cold water!’ she said, and began looking for it herself; but seeing the dead baby with Granny Anna the midwife beside it, the lady turned away, and everybody saw how she hid her face in her handkerchief and burst into tears; while Granny Anna (it was a pity the lady did not see it – she would have appreciated it, and it was all done for her benefit) covered the baby with a piece of linen, straightened his arms with her plump, deft hands, shook her head, pouted, drooped her eyelids, and sighed with so much feeling that everybody could see how excellent a heart she had. But the lady did not see it, she could not see anything. She burst out sobbing and went into hysterics. Holding her up under the arms they led her out into the porch and took her home. ‘That’s all there was to be seen of her!’ thought many, and again began to disperse. Akulína went on laughing and talking nonsense. She was taken into another room and bled, and plastered over with mustard poultices, and ice was put on her head. Yet she did not come to her senses, and did not weep, but laughed, and kept doing and saying such things that the kind people who were looking after her could not help laughing themselves.

XII

THE holiday was not a cheerful one at Pokróvsk. Though the day was beautiful the people did not go out to amuse themselves: no girls sang songs in the street, the factory hands who had come home from town for the day did not play on their concertinas and balaláykas and did not play with the girls. Everybody sat about in corners, and if they spoke did so as softly as if an evil one were there who could hear them. It was not quite so bad in the daytime, but when the twilight fell and the dogs began to howl, and when, to make matters worse, a wind sprang up and whistled down the chimneys, such fear seized all the people of the place that those who had tapers lit them before their icons. Anyone who happened to be alone in his corner went to ask the neighbours’ permission to stay the night with them, to be less lonely, and anyone whose business should have taken him into one of the out-houses did not go, but pitilessly left the cattle without fodder that night. And the holy water, of which everyone kept a little bottle to charm away anything evil, was all used up during the night. Many even heard something walking about with heavy steps up in the loft, and the blacksmith saw a serpent fly straight towards it. In Polikéy’s corner there was no one; the children and the mad woman had been taken elsewhere. Only the little dead body lay there, and two old women sat and watched it, while a third, a pilgrim woman, was reading the psalms, actuated by her own zeal, not for the sake of the baby but in a vague way because of the whole calamity. The mistress had willed it so. The pilgrim woman and these old women themselves heard how, as soon as they finished reading a passage of the Psalter, the rafters above would tremble and someone would groan. Then they would say, ‘Let God arise,’ and all would be quiet again. The carpenter’s wife invited a friend and, not sleeping all night, with her aid drank up all the tea she had laid in for the whole week. They, too, heard how the rafters creaked overhead, and a noise as if sacks were tumbling down. The presence of the peasant watchmen kept up the courage of the house-serfs somewhat, or they would have died of fear that night. The peasants lay on some hay in the passage, and afterwards declared that they too had heard wonderful things up in the loft, though at the time they were conversing very calmly together about the conscription, munching crusts of bread, scratching themselves, and above all so filling the passage with the peculiar odour characteristic of peasants that the carpenter’s wife, happening to pass by, spat and called them ‘peasant-brood’. However that might be, the dead man was still dangling in the loft, and it seemed as if the evil one himself had overshadowed the serfs’ quarters with his huge wings that night, showing his power and coming closer to these people than he had ever done before. So at least they all felt. I do not know if they were right; I even think they were quite mistaken. I think that if some bold fellow had taken a candle or lantern that terrible night, and crossing himself, or even without crossing himself, had gone up into the loft – slowly dispelling before him the horror of the night with the candle, lighting up the rafters, the sand, the cobweb-covered flue-pipe, and the tippets left behind by the carpenter’s wife – till he came to Polikéy, and, conquering his fears, had raised the lantern to the level of the face, he would have beheld the familiar spare figure: the feet touching the ground (the cord had stretched), the body bending lifelessly to one side, no cross visible under the open shirt, the head drooping on the breast, the good-natured face with open sightless eyes, and the meek, guilty smile, and a solemn calmness and silence over all. Really the carpenter’s wife, crouching in a corner of her bed with dishevelled hair and frightened eyes and telling how she heard the sacks falling, was far more terrible and frightful than Polikéy, though his cross was off and lay on a rafter.

‘Up there’, that is, in the mistress’s house, reigned the same horror as in the serfs’ quarters. Her bedroom smelt of eau-de-cologne and medicine. Dunyásha was melting yellow wax and making a plaster. What the plaster was for I don’t know, but it was always made when the lady was unwell. And now she was so upset that she was quite ill. To keep Dunyásha’s courage up her aunt had come to stay the night, so there were four of them, including the girl, sitting in the maid’s room, and talking in low voices.

‘Who will go to get some oil?’ asked Dunyásha.

‘Nothing will induce me to go, Avdótya Pávlovna!’ the second maid said decidedly.

‘Nonsense! You and Aksyútka go together.’

‘I’ll run across alone. I’m not afraid of anything!’ said Aksyútka, and at once became frightened.

‘Well then, go, dear; ask Granny Anna to give you some in a tumbler and bring it here; don’t spill any,’ said Dunyásha.

Aksyútka lifted her skirt with one hand, and being thereby prevented from swinging both arms, swung one of them twice as violently across the line of her progression, and darted away. She was afraid, and felt that if she should see or hear anything, even her own living mother, she would perish with fright. She flew, with her eyes shut, along the familiar pathway.

XIII

‘IS the mistress asleep or not?’ suddenly asked a deep peasant-voice close to Aksyútka. She opened her eyes, which she had kept shut, and saw a figure that seemed to her taller than the house. She screeched, and flew back so fast that her skirts floated behind her. With one bound she was on the porch and with another in the maid’s room, where she threw herself on her bed with a wild yell. Dunyásha, her aunt, and the second maid almost died of terror, and before they had time to recover they heard heavy, slow, hesitating steps in the passage and at their door. Dunyásha rushed to her mistress, spilling the melted wax. The second maid hid herself behind the skirts that hung on the wall; the aunt, a more determined character, was about to hold the door to the passage closed, but it opened and a peasant entered the room. It was Dútlov, with his boat-like shoes. Paying no heed to the maids’ fears, he looked round for an icon, and not seeing the tiny one in the left-hand corner of the room, he crossed himself in front of a cupboard in which teacups were kept, laid his cap on the window-sill, and thrusting his arm deep into the bosom of his coat as if he were going to scratch himself under his other arm, he pulled out the letter with the five brown seals stamped with an anchor. Dunyásha’s aunt held her hands to her heart and with difficulty brought out the words:

‘Well, you did give me a fright, Naúmych! I can’t utter a wo … ord! I thought my last moment had come!’

‘Is that the way to behave?’ said the second maid, appearing from under the skirts.

‘The mistress herself is upset,’ said Dunyásha, coming out of her mistress’s door. ‘What do you mean, shoving yourself in through the maids’ entrance without leave?… Just like a peasant lout!’

Dútlov, without excusing himself, explained that he wanted to see the lady.

‘She is not well,’ said Dunyásha.

At this moment Aksyútka burst into such loud and unseemly laughter that she was obliged to hide her face in the pillow on the bed, from which for a whole hour, in spite of Dunyásha’s and the aunt’s threats, she could not for long lift it without going off again as if something were bursting in her pink print bosom and rosy cheeks. It seemed to her so funny that everybody should have been so scared, that she again hid her head in the pillows and scraped the floor with her shoe and jerked her whole body as if in convulsions.

Dútlov stopped and looked at her attentively, as if to ascertain what was happening to her, but turned away again without having discovered what it was all about, and continued:

‘You see, it’s just this – it’s a very important matter,’ he said. ‘You just go and say that a peasant has found the letter with the money.’

‘What money?’

Dunyásha, before going to report, read the address and questioned Dútlov as to when and how he had found this money which Polikéy was to have brought back from town. Having heard all the details and pushed the little errand-girl, who was still convulsed with laughter, out into the vestibule, Dunyásha went to her mistress; but to Dútlov’s surprise the mistress would not see him and did not say anything intelligible to Dunyásha.

‘I know nothing about it and don’t want to know anything!’ the lady said. ‘What peasant? What money?… I can’t and won’t see anyone! He must leave me in peace.’

‘What am I to do?’ said Dútlov, turning the envelope over; ‘it’s not a small sum. What is written on it?’ he asked Dunyásha, who again read the address to him.

Dútlov seemed in doubt. He was still hoping that perhaps the money was not the mistress’s and that the address had not been read to him right, but Dunyásha confirmed it, and he put the envelope back into his bosom with a sigh, and was about to go.

‘I suppose I shall have to hand it over to the police-constable,’ he said.

‘Wait a bit! I’ll try again,’ said Dunyásha, stopping him, after attentively following the disappearance of the envelope into the bosom of the peasant’s coat. ‘Let me have the letter.’

Dútlov took it out again, but did not at once put it into Dunyásha’s outstretched hand.

‘Say that Semën Dútlov found it on the road.…’

‘Well, let me have it!’

‘I did think it was just nothing – only a letter; but a soldier read out to me that there was money inside.…’

‘Well then, let me have it.’

‘I dared not even go home first to …’ Dútlov continued, still not parting with the precious envelope. ‘Tell the lady so.’

Dunyásha took it from him and went again to her mistress.

‘O my God, Dunyásha, don’t speak to me of that money!’ said the lady in a reproachful tone. ‘Only to think of that little baby …’

‘The peasant does not know to whom you wish it to be given, madam,’ Dunyásha again said.

The lady opened the envelope, shuddering at the sight of the money, and pondered.

‘Dreadful money! How much evil it does!’ she said.

‘It is Dútlov, madam. Do you order him to go, or will you please come out and see him – and is the money all safe?’ asked Dunyásha.

‘I don’t want this money. It is terrible money! What it has done! Tell him to take it himself if he likes,’ said the lady suddenly, feeling for Dunyásha’s hand. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ she repeated to the astonished Dunyásha; ‘let him take it altogether and do what he likes with it.’

‘Fifteen hundred rubles,’ remarked Dunyásha, smiling as if at a child.

‘Let him take it all!’ the lady repeated impatiently. ‘How is it you don’t understand me? It is unlucky money. Never speak of it to me again! Let the peasant who found it take it. Go, go along!’

Dunyásha went out into the maids’ room.

‘Is it all there?’ asked Dútlov.

‘You’d better count it yourself,’ said Dunyásha, handing him the envelope. ‘My orders are to give it to you.’

Dútlov put his cap under his arm, and, bending forward, began to count the money.

‘Have you got a counting-frame?’⁷

Dútlov had an idea that the lady was stupid and could not count, and that that was why she ordered him to do so.

‘You can count it at home – the money is yours …!’ Dunyásha said crossly. ‘ “I don’t want to see it,” she says; “give it to the man who brought it.” ’

Dútlov, without unbending his back, stared at Dunyásha.

Dunyásha’s aunt flung up her hands.

‘O holy Mother! What luck the Lord has sent him! O holy Mother!’

The second maid would not believe it.

‘You don’t mean it, Avdótya Pávlovna; you’re joking!’

‘Joking, indeed! She told me to give it to the peasant.… There, take your money and go!’ said Dunyásha, without hiding her vexation. ‘One man’s sorrow is another man’s luck!’

‘It’s not a joke … fifteen hundred rubles!’ said the aunt.

‘It’s even more,’ stated Dunyásha. ‘Well, you’ll have to give a ten-kopek candle to St Nicholas,’ she added sarcastically. ‘Why don’t you come to your senses? If it had come to a poor man, now! … But this man has plenty of his own.’

Dútlov at last grasped that it was not a joke, and began gathering together the notes he had spread out to count and putting them back into the envelope. But his hands trembled, and he kept glancing at the maids to assure himself that it was not a joke.

‘See! He can’t come to his senses he’s so pleased,’ said Dunyásha, implying that she despised both the peasant and the money. ‘Come, I’ll put it up for you.’

She was going to take the notes, but Dútlov would not let her. He crumpled them together, pushed them in deeper, and took his cap.

‘Are you glad?’

‘I hardly know what to say! It’s really …’

He did not finish, but waved his hand, smiled, and went out almost crying.

The mistress rang.

‘Well, have you given it to him?’

‘I have.’

‘Well, was he very glad?’

‘He was just like a madman.’

‘Ah! call him back. I want to ask him how he found it. Call him in here; I can’t come out.’

Dunyásha ran out and found the peasant in the entry. He was still bareheaded, but had drawn out his purse and was stooping, untying its strings, while he held the money between his teeth. Perhaps he imagined that as long as the money was not in his purse it was not his. When Dunyásha called him he grew frightened.

‘What is it, Avdótya … Avdótya Pávlovna? Does she want to take it back? Couldn’t you say a word for me?… Now really, and I’d bring you some nice honey.’

‘Indeed! Much you ever brought!’

Again the door was opened, and the peasant was brought in to the lady. He felt anything but cheerful. ‘Oh dear, she’ll want it back!’ he thought on his way through the rooms, lifting his feet for some reason as if he were walking through high grass, and trying not to stamp with his bast shoes. He could make nothing of his surroundings. Passing by a mirror he saw flowers of some sort and a peasant in bast shoes lifting his feet high, a gentleman with an eyeglass painted on the wall, some kind of green tub, and something white.… There, now! The something white began to speak. It was his mistress. He did not understand anything but only stared. He did not know where he was, and everything appeared as in a fog.

‘Is that you, Dútlov?’

‘Yes, lady.… Just as it was, so I left it …’ he said. ‘I was not glad so help me God! How I’ve tired out my horse!…’

‘Well, it’s your luck!’ she remarked contemptuously, though with a kindly smile. ‘Take it, take it for yourself.’

He only rolled his eyes.

‘I am glad that you got it. God grant that it may be of use. Well, are you glad?’

‘How could I help being glad? I’m so glad, ma’am, so glad! I will pray for you always! … So glad that, thank Heaven, our lady is alive! It was not my fault.’

‘How did you find it?’

‘Well, I mean, we can always do our best for our lady, quite honourably, and not anyhow …’

‘He is in a regular muddle, madam,’ said Dunyásha.

‘I had taken my nephew, the conscript, and as I was driving back along the road I found it. Polikéy must have dropped it.’

‘Well, then, go – go, my good man! I am glad you found it!’

‘I am so glad, lady!’ said the peasant.

Then he remembered that he had not thanked her properly, and did not know how to behave. The lady and Dunyásha smiled, and then he again began stepping as if he were walking in very high grass, and could hardly refrain from running so afraid was he that he might be stopped and the money taken from him.

XIV

WHEN he got out into the fresh air Dútlov stepped aside from the road to the lindens, even undoing his belt to get at his purse more easily, and began putting away the money. His lips were twitching, stretching and drawing together again, though he uttered no sound. Having put away his money and fastened his belt, he crossed himself and went staggering along the road as though he were drunk, so full was he of the thoughts that came rushing to his mind. Suddenly he saw the figure of a man coming towards him. He called out; it was Efím, with a cudgel in his hand, on watch at the serfs’ quarters.

‘Ah, Daddy Semën!’ said Efím cheerfully, drawing nearer (Efím felt it uncanny to be alone). ‘Have you got the conscripts off, daddy?’

‘We have. What are you after?’

‘Why, I’ve been put here to watch over Polikéy who’s hanged himself.’

‘And where is he?’

‘Up there, hanging in the loft, so they say,’ answered Efím, pointing with his cudgel through the darkness to the roof of the serfs’ quarters.

Dútlov looked in the direction of the arm, and though he could see nothing he puckered his brows, screwed up his eyes, and shook his head.

‘The police-constable has come,’ said Efím, ‘so the coachman said. He’ll be taken down at once. Isn’t it horrible at night, daddy? Nothing would make me go up at night even if they ordered me to. If Egór Mikháylovich were to kill me outright I wouldn’t go …’

‘What a sin, oh, what a sin!’ Dútlov kept repeating, evidently for propriety’s sake and not even thinking what he was saying. He was about to go on his way, but the voice of Egór Mikháylovich stopped him.

‘Hi! watchman! Come here!’ shouted Egór Mikháylovich from the porch of the office.

Efím replied to him.

‘Who was that other peasant standing with you?’

‘Dútlov.’

‘Ah! and you too, Semën! Come here!’

Having drawn near, Dútlov, by the light of a lantern the coachman was carrying, recognized Egór Mikháylovich and a short man with a cockade on his cap, dressed in a long uniform overcoat. This was the police-constable.

‘Here, this old man will come with us too,’ said Egór Mikháylovich on seeing him.

The old man felt a bit uncomfortable, but there was no getting out of it.

‘And you, Efím – you’re a bold lad! Run up into the loft where he’s hanged himself, and set the ladder straight for his honour to mount.’

Efím, who had declared that he would not go near the loft for anything in the world, now ran towards it, clattering with his bast shoes as if they were logs.

The police-officer struck a light and lit a pipe. He lived about a mile and a half off, and having just been severely reprimanded for drunkenness by his superior, was in a zealous mood. Having arrived at ten o’clock at night, he wished to view the corpse at once. Egór Mikháylovich asked Dútlov how he came to be there. On the way Dútlov told the steward about the money he had found and what the lady had done, and said he was coming to ask Egór Mikháylovich’s sanction. To Dútlov’s horror the steward asked for the envelope and examined it. The police-constable even took the envelope in his hand and briefly and dryly asked the details.

‘Oh dear, the money is gone!’ thought Dútlov, and began justifying himself. But the police-constable handed him back the money.

‘What a piece of luck for the clodhopper!’ he said.

‘It comes handy for him,’ said Egór Mikháylovich. ‘He’s just been taking his nephew to be conscripted, and now he’ll buy him out.’

‘Ah!’ said the policeman, and went on in front.

‘Will you buy him off – Elijah, I mean?’ asked Egór Mikháylovich.

‘How am I to buy him off? Will there be money enough? And perhaps it’s too late …’

‘Well, you know best,’ said the steward, and they both followed the police-constable.

They approached the serfs’ house, where the ill-smelling watchmen stood waiting in the passage with a lantern. Dútlov followed them. The watchmen looked guilty, perhaps because of the smell they were spreading, for they had done nothing wrong. All were silent.

‘Where is he?’ asked the police-constable.

‘Here,’ said Egór Mikháylovich in a whisper. ‘Efím,’ he added, ‘you’re a bold lad, go on in front with the lantern.’

Efím had already put a plank straight at the top of the ladder, and seemed to have lost all fear. Taking two or three steps at a time, he clambered up with a cheerful look, only turning round to light the way for the police-constable. The constable was followed by Egór Mikháylovich. When they had disappeared above, Dútlov, with one foot on the bottom step, sighed and stopped. Two or three minutes passed. The footsteps in the loft were no longer heard; they had no doubt reached the body.

‘Daddy, they want you,’ Efím called down through the opening.

Dútlov began going up. The light of the lantern showed only the upper part of the bodies of the police-constable and of Egór Mikháylovich beyond the rafters. Beyond them again someone else was standing with his back turned. It was Polikéy. Dútlov climbed over a rafter and stopped, crossing himself.

‘Turn him round, lads!’ said the police-constable.

No one stirred.

‘Efím, you’re a bold lad,’ said Egór Mikháylovich.

The ‘bold lad’ stepped across a rafter, turned Polikéy round, and stood beside him, looking with a most cheerful face now at Polikéy now at the constable, as a showman exhibiting an albino or Julia Pastrana⁸ looks now at the public and now at what he is exhibiting, ready to do anything the spectators may wish.

‘Turn him round again.’

Polikéy was turned round, his arms slightly swaying and his feet dragging in the sand on the floor.

‘Catch hold, and take him down.’

‘Shall we cut the rope through, your honour?’ asked Egór Mikháylovich. ‘Hand us an axe, lads!’

The watchmen and Dútlov had to be told twice before they set to, but the ‘bold lad’ handled Polikéy as he would have handled a sheep’s carcass. At last the rope was cut through and the body taken down and covered up. The police-constable said that the doctor would come next day, and dismissed them all.

XV

DÚTLOV went homeward, still moving his lips. At first he had an uncanny feeling, but it passed as he drew nearer home, and a feeling of gladness gradually penetrated his heart. In the village he heard songs and drunken voices. Dútlov never drank, and this time too he went straight home. It was late when he entered his hut. His old wife was asleep. His eldest son and grandsons were asleep on the stove, and his second son in the store-room. Elijah’s wife alone was awake, and sat on the bench bare-headed, in a dirty, working-day smock, wailing. She did not come out to meet her uncle, but only sobbed louder, lamenting her fate, when he entered. According to the old woman, she ‘lamented’ very fluently and well, taking into consideration the fact that at her age she could not have had much practice.

The old woman rose and got supper for her husband. Dútlov turned Elijah’s wife away from the table, saying: ‘That’s enough, that’s enough!’ Aksínya went away, and lying down on a bench continued to lament. The old woman put the supper on the table and afterwards silently cleared it away again. The old man did not speak either. When he had said grace he hiccuped, washed his hands, took the counting-frame from a nail in the wall, and went into the store-room. There he and the old woman spoke in whispers for a little while, and then, after she had gone away, he began counting on the frame, making the beads click. Finally he banged the lid of the chest standing there, and clambered into the space under the floor. For a long time he went on bustling about in the room and in the space below. When he came back to the living-room it was dark in the hut. The wooden splint that served for a candle had gone out. His old woman, quiet and silent in the daytime, had rolled herself up on the sleeping-bunk and filled the hut with her snoring. Elijah’s noisy young wife was also asleep, breathing quietly. She lay on the bench dressed just as she had been, and with nothing under her head for a pillow. Dútlov began to pray, then looked at Elijah’s wife, shook his head, put out the light, hiccuped again, and climbed up on the stove, where he lay down beside his little grandson. He threw down his plaited bast shoes from the stove in the dark, and lay on his back looking up at the rafter which was hardly discernible just over his head above the stove, and listening to the sounds of the cockroaches swarming along the walls, and to the sighs, the snoring, the rubbing of one foot against another, and the noise made by the cattle outside. It was a long time before he could sleep. The moon rose. It grew lighter in the hut. He could see Aksínya in her corner and something he could not make out: was it a coat his son had forgotten, or a tub the women had put there, or a man standing there? Perhaps he was drowsing, perhaps not: anyhow he began to peer into the darkness. Evidently that evil spirit who had led Polikéy to commit his awful deed and whose presence was felt that night by all the house-serfs, had stretched out his wing and reached across the village to the house in which lay the money that he had used to ruin Polikéy. At least, Dútlov felt his presence and was ill at ease. He could neither sleep nor get up. After noticing the something he could not make out, he remembered Elijah with his arms bound, and Aksínya’s face and her eloquent lamentations; and he recalled Polikéy with his swaying hands. Suddenly it seemed to the old man that someone passed by the window. ‘Who was that? Could it be the village elder coming so early with a notice?’ thought he. ‘How did he open the door?’ thought the old man, hearing a step in the passage. ‘Had the old woman not put up the bar when she went out into the passage?’ The dog began to howl in the yard and he came stepping along the passage, so the old man related afterwards, as though he were trying to find the door, then passed on and began groping along the wall, stumbled over a tub and made it clatter, and again began groping as if feeling for the latch. Now he had hold of the latch. A shiver ran down the old man’s body. Now he pulled the latch and entered in the shape of a man. Dútlov knew it was he. He wished to cross himself, but could not. He went up to the table which was covered with a cloth, and, pulling it off, threw it on the floor and began climbing onto the stove. The old man knew that he had taken the shape of Polikéy. He was showing his teeth and his hands were swinging about. He climbed up, fell on the old man’s chest, and began to strangle him.

‘The money’s mine!’ muttered Polikéy.

‘Let me go! I won’t do it!’ Semën tried to say, but could not.

Polikéy was pressing down on him with the weight of a mountain of stone. Dútlov knew that if he said a prayer he would let him go, and he knew which prayer he ought to recite, but could not utter it. His grandson sleeping beside him uttered a shrill scream and began to cry. His grandfather had pressed him against the wall. The child’s cry loosened the old man’s lips. ‘Let God arise!…’ he said. He pressed less hard. ‘And let his enemies be scattered …’ spluttered Dútlov. He got off the stove. Dútlov heard his two feet strike the floor. Dútlov went on repeating in turn all the prayers he knew. He went towards the door, passed the table, and slammed the door so that the whole hut shook. Everybody but the grandfather and grandson continued to sleep however. The grandfather, trembling all over, muttered prayers, while the grandson was crying himself to sleep and pressing close to his grandfather. All became quiet once more. The old man lay still. A cock crowed behind the wall close to Dútlov’s ear. He heard the hens stirring, and a cockerel unsuccessfully trying to crow in answer to the old cock. Something moved over the old man’s legs. It was the cat; she jumped on her soft pads from the stove to the floor, and stood mewing by the door. The old man got up and opened the window. It was dark and muddy in the street. The front of the cart was standing there close to the window. Crossing himself he went out barefoot into the yard to the horses. One could see that he had been there too. The mare, standing under the lean- to beside a tub of chaff, had got her foot into the cord of her halter and had spilt the chaff, and now, lifting her foot, turned her head and waited for her master. Her foal had tumbled over a heap of manure. The old man raised him to his feet, disentangled the mare’s foot and fed her, and went back to the hut. The old woman got up and lit the splint. ‘Wake the lads, I’m going to the town!’ And taking a wax taper from before the icon Dútlov lit it and went down with it into the opening under the floor. When he came up again lights were burning not only in his hut but in all the neighbouring houses. The young fellows were up and preparing to start. The women were coming in and out with pails of milk. Ignát was harnessing the horse to one cart and the second son was greasing the wheels of another. The young wife was no longer wailing. She had made herself neat and had bound a shawl over her head, and now sat waiting till it would be time to go to town to say good-bye to her husband.

The old man seemed particularly stern. He did not say a word to anyone, put on his best coat, tied his belt round him, and with all Polikéy’s money in the bosom of his coat, went to Egór Mikháylovich.

‘Don’t dawdle,’ he called to his son, who was turning the wheels round on the raised and newly greased axle. ‘I’ll be back in a minute; see that everything is ready.’

The steward had only just got up and was drinking tea. He himself was preparing to go to town to deliver up the recruits.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Egór Mikháylovich, I want to buy the lad off. Do be so good! You said t’other day that you knew one in the town that was willing.… Explain to me how to do it; we are ignorant people.’

‘Why, have you reconsidered it?’

‘I have, Egór Mikháylovich. I’m sorry for him. My brother’s child after all, whatever he may be. I’m sorry for him! It’s the cause of much sin, money is. Do be good enough to explain it to me!’ he said, bowing to his waist.

Egór Mikháylovich, as was his wont on such occasions, stood for a long time thoughtfully smacking his lips. Then, having considered the matter, he wrote two notes and told him what to do in town and how to do it.

When Dútlov got home, the young wife had already set off with Ignát. The fat roan mare stood ready harnessed at the gate. Dútlov broke a stick out of the hedge and, lapping his coat over, got into the cart and whipped up the horse. He made the mare run so fast that her fat sides quickly shrank, and Dútlov did not look at her so as not to feel sorry for her. He was tormented by the thought that he might come too late for the recruiting, that Elijah would go as a soldier and the devil’s money would be left on his hands.

I will not describe all Dútlov’s proceedings that morning. I will only say that he was specially lucky. The man to whom Egór Mikháylovich had given him a note had a volunteer quite ready who was already twenty-three silver rubles in debt and had been passed by the recruiting-board. His master wanted four hundred silver rubles for him and a buyer in the town had for the last three weeks been offering him three hundred. Dútlov settled the matter in a couple of words. ‘Will you take three twenty-five?’ he said, holding out his hand, but with a look that showed that he was prepared to give more. The master held back his hand and went on asking four hundred. ‘You won’t take three and a quarter?’ Dútlov said, catching hold with his left hand of the man’s right and preparing to slap his own right hand down on it. ‘You won’t take it? Well, God be with you!’ he said suddenly, smacking the master’s hand with the full swing of his other hand and turning away with his whole body. ‘It seems it has to be so … take three and a half hundred! Get out the discharge and bring the fellow along. And now here are two ten-ruble notes on account. Is it enough?’

And Dútlov unfastened his girdle and got out the money.

The man, though he did not withdraw his hand, yet did not seem quite to agree and, not accepting the deposit money, went on stipulating that Dútlov should wet the bargain and stand treat to the volunteer.

‘Don’t commit a sin,’ Dútlov kept repeating as he held out the money. ‘We shall all have to die some day,’ he went on, in such a mild, persuasive and assured tone that the master said:

‘So be it, then!’ and again clapped Dútlov’s hand and began praying for God’s blessing. ‘God grant you luck,’ he said.

They woke the volunteer, who was still sleeping after yesterday’s carouse, examined him for some reason, and went with him to the offices of the Administration. The recruit was merry. He demanded rum as a refresher, for which Dútlov gave him some money, and only when they came into the vestibule of the recruiting-board did his courage fail him. For a long time they stood in the entrance-hall, the old master in his full blue cloak and the recruit in a short sheepskin, his eyebrows raised and his eyes staring. For a long time they whispered, tried to get somewhere, looked for somebody, and for some reason took off their caps and bowed to every copying-clerk they met, and meditatively listened to the decision which a scribe whom the master knew brought out to them. All hope of getting the business done that day began to vanish, and the recruit was growing more cheerful and unconstrained again, when Dútlov saw Egór Mikháylovich, seized on him at once, and began to beg and bow to him. Egór Mikháylovich helped him so efficiently that by about three o’clock the recruit, to his great dissatisfaction and surprise, was taken into the hall and placed for examination, and amid general merriment (in which for some reason everybody joined, from the watchmen to the President), he was undressed, dressed again, shaved, and led out at the door; and five minutes later Dútlov counted out the money, received the discharge and, having taken leave of the volunteer and his master, went to the lodging-house where the Pokróvsk recruits were staying. Elijah and his young wife were sitting in a corner of the kitchen, and as soon as the old man came in they stopped talking and looked at him with a resigned expression, but not with goodwill. As was his wont the old man said a prayer, and he then unfastened his belt, got out a paper, and called into the room his eldest son Ignát and Elijah’s mother, who were in the yard.

‘Don’t sin, Elijah,’ he said, coming up to his nephew. ‘Last night you said a word to me.… Don’t I pity you? I remember how my brother left you to me. If it had been in my power would I have let you go? God has sent me luck, and I am not grudging it you. Here it is, the paper’; and he put the discharge on the table and carefully smoothed it out with his stiff, unbending fingers.

All the Pokróvsk peasants, the inn-keeper’s men, and even some outsiders, came in from the yard. All guessed what was happening, but no one interrupted the old man’s solemn discourse.

‘Here it is, the paper! Four hundred silver rubles I’ve given for it. Don’t reproach your uncle.’

Elijah rose, but remained silent not knowing what to say. His lips quivered with emotion. His old mother came up and would have thrown herself sobbing on his neck; but the old man motioned her away slowly and authoritatively and continued speaking.

‘You said a word to me yesterday,’ the old man again repeated. ‘You stabbed me to the heart with that word as with a knife! Your dying father left you to me and you have been as my own son to me, and if I have wronged you in any way, well, we all live in sin! Is it not so, good Christian folk?’ he said, turning to the peasants who stood round. ‘Here is your own mother and your young wife, and here is the discharge for you. I don’t regret the money, but forgive me for Christ’s sake!’

And, turning up the skirts of his coat, he deliberately sank to his knees and bowed down to the ground before Elijah and his wife. The young people tried in vain to restrain him, but not till his forehead had touched the floor did he get up. Then, after giving his skirts a shake, he sat down on a bench. Elijah’s mother and wife howled with joy, and words of approval were heard among the crowd. ‘That is just, that’s the godly way,’ said one. ‘What’s money? You can’t buy a fellow for money,’ said another. ‘What happiness!’ said a third; ‘no two ways about it, he’s a just man!’ Only the peasants who were to go as recruits said nothing, and went quietly out into the yard.

Two hours later Dútlov’s two carts were driving through the outskirts of the town. In the first, to which was harnessed the roan mare, her sides fallen in and her neck moist with sweat, sat the old man and Ignát. Behind them jerked strings of ring-shaped fancy-bread. In the second cart, in which nobody held the reins, the young wife and her mother-in-law, with shawls over their heads, were sitting, sedate and happy. The former held a bottle of vodka under her apron. Elijah, very red in the face, sat all in a heap with his back to the horse, jolting against the front of the cart, biting into a roll and talking incessantly. The voices, the rumbling of the cart-wheels on the stony road, and the snorting of the horses, blent into one note of merriment. The horses, swishing their tails, increased their speed more and more, feeling themselves on the homeward road. The passers-by, whether driving or on foot, involuntarily turned round to look at the happy family party.

Just as they left the town the Dútlovs overtook a party of recruits. A group of them were standing in a ring outside a tavern. One of the recruits, with that unnatural expression on his face which comes of having the front of the head shaved,⁹ his grey cap pushed back, was vigorously strumming a balaláyka; another, bareheaded and with a bottle of vodka in his hand, was dancing in the middle of the ring. Ignát stopped his horse and got down to tighten the traces. All the Dútlovs looked with curiosity, approval, and amusement at the dancer. The recruit seemed not to see anyone, but felt that the public admiring him had grown larger, and this added to his strength and agility. He danced briskly. His brows were knitted, his flushed face was set, and his lips were fixed in a grin that had long since lost all meaning. It seemed as if all the strength of his soul was concentrated on placing one foot as quickly as possible after the other, now on the heel and now on the toe. Sometimes he stopped suddenly and winked to the balaláyka-player, who began playing still more briskly, strumming on all the strings and even striking the case with his knuckles. The recruit would stop, but even when he stood still he still seemed to be dancing all over. Then he began slowly jerking his shoulders, and suddenly twirling round, leaped in the air with a wild cry, and descending, crouched down, throwing out first one leg and then the other. The little boys laughed, the women shook their heads, the men smiled approvingly. An old sergeant stood quietly by, with a look that seemed to say: ‘You think it wonderful, but we have long been familiar with it.’ The balaláyka-player seemed tired; he looked lazily round, struck a false chord, and suddenly knocked on the case with his knuckles, and the dance came to an end.

‘Eh, Alëkha,’ he said to the dancer, pointing at Dútlov, ‘there’s your sponsor!’

‘Where? You, my dearest friend!’ shouted Alëkha, the very recruit whom Dútlov had bought; and staggering forward on his weary legs and holding the bottle of vodka above his head he moved towards the cart. ‘Míshka, a glass!’ he cried to the player. ‘Master! My dearest friend! What a pleasure, really!’ he shouted, drooping his tipsy head over the cart, and he began to treat the men and women to vodka. The men drank, but the women refused. ‘My dear friends, what can I offer you?’ exclaimed Alëkha, embracing the old women.

A woman selling eatables was standing among the crowd. Alëkha noticed her, seized her tray, and poured its contents into the cart.

‘I’ll pay, no fear, you devil!’ he howled tearfully, pulling a purse from his pocket and throwing it to Míshka.

He stood leaning with his elbows on the cart and looking with moist eyes at those who sat in it.

‘Which is the mother … you?’ he asked. ‘I must treat you too.’

He stood thinking for a moment, then he put his hand in his pocket and drew out a new folded handkerchief, hurriedly took off a sash which was tied round his waist under his coat, and also a red scarf he was wearing round his neck, and, crumpling them all together, thrust them into the old woman’s lap.

‘There! I’m sacrificing them for you,’ he said in a voice that was growing more and more subdued.

‘What for? Thank you, sonny! Just see what a simple lad it is!’ said the old woman, addressing Dútlov, who had come up to their cart.

Alëkha was now quite quiet, quite stupefied, and looked as if he were falling asleep. He drooped his head lower and lower.

‘It’s for you I am going, for you I am perishing!’ he muttered; ‘that’s why I am giving you gifts.’

‘I dare say he, too, has a mother,’ said someone in the crowd. ‘What a simple fellow! What a pity!’

Alëkha lifted his head.

‘I have a mother,’ said he; ‘I have a father too. All have given me up. Listen to me, old woman,’ he went on, taking Elijah’s mother by the hand. ‘I have given you presents. Listen to me for Christ’s sake! Go to Vódnoe village, ask for the old woman Nikónovna – she’s my own mother, see? Say to this same old woman, Nikónovna, the third hut from the end, by the new well. Tell her that Alëkha – her son, you see.… Eh! musician! strike up!’ he shouted.

And muttering something he immediately began dancing again, and hurled the bottle with the remaining vodka to the ground.

Ignát got into the cart and was about to start.

‘Good-bye! May God bless you!’ said the old woman, wrapping her cloak closer round her.

Alëkha suddenly stopped.

‘Go to the devil!’ he shouted, clenching his fists threateningly. ‘May your mother be …’

‘O Lord!’ exclaimed Elijah’s mother, crossing herself.

Ignát touched the reins, and the carts rattled on again. Alëkha, the recruit, stood in the middle of the road with clenched fists and with a look of fury on his face, and abused the peasants with all his might.

‘What are you stopping for? Go on, devils! cannibals!’ he cried. ‘You won’t escape me! … Devil’s clodhoppers!’

At these words his voice broke, and he fell full length to the ground just where he stood.

Soon the Dútlovs reached the open fields, and looking back could no longer see the crowd of recruits. Having gone some four miles at a walking pace Ignát got down from his father’s cart, in which the old man lay asleep, and walked beside Elijah’s cart.

Between them they emptied the bottle they had brought from town. After a while Elijah began a song, the women joined in, and Ignát shouted merrily in time with the song. A post-chaise drove merrily towards them. The driver called lustily to his horses as he passed the two festive carts, and the post-boy turned round and winked at the men and women who with flushed faces sat jolting inside singing their jovial song.

¹ The Intercession of the Virgin, the ist of October old style.

² The Village Commune.

³ ‘Dare to err and dream.’

⁴ Made by scalding wood-ash taken from the stove, and used for washing clothes.

⁵ It sometimes happened that to escape service men mutilated themselves, for instance by cutting off the finger needed to pull the trigger.

⁶ Equal to 462 ‘silver rubles’, at 3 1/2 assignations for one silver ruble.

⁷ The abacus, with wires and beads to count on, was much used in Russia.

⁸ Julia Pastrana was exhibited as being half-woman half-monkey, and created a considerable sensation.

⁹ On being conscripted a man’s head was partially shaved to make desertion more difficult.