Peasants and Other Stories

“Come, go along, my dear, and speak to him,” she said, when she heard my father’s cough. “Go along, speak to him; bow down, your head won’t drop off.”

I went in. My father was sitting at the table sketching a plan of a summer villa, with Gothic windows, and with a fat turret like a fireman’s watchtower—something peculiarly stiff and tasteless. Going into the study I stood still where I could see his drawing. I did not know why I had gone in to my father, but I remember that when I saw his lean face, his red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw myself on his neck, and as Axinya had told me, bow down at his feet; but the sight of the summer villa with the Gothic windows, and the fat turret, restrained me.

“Good evening,” I said.

He glanced at me and at once dropped his eyes to his drawing.

“What do you want?” he asked, after waiting a little.

“I have come to tell you my sister’s very ill. She can’t live very long,” I added in a hollow voice.

“Well,” sighed my father, taking off his spectacles and laying them on the table. “What thou sowest that shalt thou reap. What thou sowest,” he repeated, getting up from the table, “that shalt thou reap. I ask you to remember how you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I begged you, I besought you to give up your errors; I reminded you of your duty, of your honor, of what you owed to your forefathers whose traditions we ought to preserve as sacred. Did you obey me? You scorned my counsels and obstinately persisted in clinging to your false ideals; worse still you drew your sister into the path of error with you and led her to lose her moral principles and sense of shame. Now you are both in a bad way. Well, as thou sowest, so shalt thou reap!”

As he said this he walked up and down the room. He probably imagined that I had come to him to confess my wrong doings, and he probably expected that I should begin begging him to forgive my sister and me. I was cold, I was shivering as though I were in a fever and spoke with difficulty in a husky voice.

“And I beg you, too, to remember,” I said, “on this very spot I besought you to understand me, to reflect, to decide with me how and for what we should live, and in answer you began talking about our forefathers, about my grandfather who wrote poems. One tells you now that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, and you go on again about your forefathers, your traditions. . . . And such frivolity in your old age, when death is close at hand, and you haven’t more than five or ten years left!”

“What have you come here for?” my father asked sternly, evidently offended at my reproaching him for his frivolity.

“I don’t know. I love you, I am unutterably sorry that we are so far apart—so you see I have come. I love you still, but my sister has broken with you completely. She does not forgive you and will never forgive you now. Your very name arouses her aversion for the past, for life.”

“And who is to blame for it?” cried my father. “It’s your fault, you scoundrel!”

“Well, suppose it is my fault,” I said. “I admit I have been to blame in many things, but why is it that this life of yours, which you think binding upon us, too—why is it so dreary, so barren? How is it that in not one of these houses you have been building for the last thirty years has there been anyone from whom I might have learned how to live, so as not to be to blame? There is not one honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are nests of damnation, where mothers and daughters are made away with, where children are tortured. . . . My poor mother!” I went on in despair. “My poor sister! One has to stupefy oneself with vodka, with cards, with scandal; one must become a scoundrel, a hypocrite, or go on drawing plans for years and years, so as not to notice all the horrors that lie hidden in these houses. Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and all that time it has not produced one man of service to our country—not one. You have stifled in the germ everything in the least living and bright. It’s a town of shopkeepers, publicans, countinghouse clerks, canting hypocrites; it’s a useless, unnecessary town, which not one soul would regret if it suddenly sank through the earth.”

“I don’t want to listen to you, you scoundrel!” said my father, and he took up his ruler from the table. “You are drunk. Don’t dare come and see your father in such a state! I tell you for the last time, and you can repeat it to your depraved sister, that you’ll get nothing from me, either of you. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer for their disobedience and obstinacy I do not pity them. You can go whence you came. It has pleased God to chastise me with you, but I will bear the trial with resignation, and, like Job, I will find consolation in my sufferings and in unremitting labor. You must not cross my threshold till you have mended your ways. I am a just man, all I tell you is for your benefit, and if you desire your own good you ought to remember all your life what I say and have said to you. . . .”

I waved my hand in despair and went away. I don’t remember what happened afterwards, that night and next day.

I am told that I walked about the streets bareheaded, staggering, and singing aloud, while a crowd of boys ran after me, shouting:

“Better-than-nothing!”

20.

If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: “Nothing passes away.” I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.

What I have been through has not been for nothing. My great troubles, my patience, have touched people’s hearts, and now they don’t call me “Better-than-nothing,” they don’t laugh at me, and when I walk by the shops they don’t throw water over me. They have grown used to my being a workman, and see nothing strange in my carrying a pail of paint and putting in windows, though I am of noble rank; on the contrary, people are glad to give me orders, and I am now considered a first-rate workman, and the best foreman after Radish, who, though he has regained his health, and though, as before, he paints the cupola on the belfry without scaffolding, has no longer the force to control the workmen; instead of him I now run about the town looking for work, I engage the workmen and pay them, borrow money at a high rate of interest, and now that I myself am a contractor, I understand how it is that one may have to waste three days racing about the town in search of tilers on account of some twopenny-halfpenny job. People are civil to me, they address me politely, and in the houses where I work they offer me tea and send to inquire whether I wouldn’t like dinner. Children and young girls often come and look at me with curiosity and compassion.

One day I was working in the governor’s garden, painting an arbor there to look like marble. The governor, walking in the garden, came up to the arbor and, having nothing to do, entered into conversation with me, and I reminded him how he had once summoned me to an interview with him. He looked into my face intently for a minute, then made his mouth like a round “O,” flung up his hands, and said: “I don’t remember!”

I have grown older, have become silent, stern, and austere; I rarely laugh, and I am told that I have grown like Radish, and that like him I bore the workmen by my useless exhortations.

Marya Viktorovna, my former wife, is living now abroad, while her father is constructing a railway somewhere in the eastern provinces, and is buying estates there. Dr. Blagovo is also abroad. Dubechnya has passed again into the possession of Madam Cheprakov, who has bought it after forcing the engineer to knock the price down twenty percent. Moisei goes about now in a bowler hat; he often drives into the town in a racing droshky on business of some sort and stops near the bank. They say he has already bought up a mortgaged estate and is constantly making inquiries at the bank about Dubechnya, which he means to buy too. Poor Ivan Cheprakov was for a long while out of work, staggering about the town and drinking. I tried to get him into our work, and for a time he painted roofs and put in windowpanes in our company, and even got to like it, and stole oil, asked for tips, and drank like a regular painter. But he soon got sick of the work and went back to Dubechnya, and afterwards the workmen confessed to me that he had tried to persuade them to join him one night and murder Moisei and rob Madam Cheprakov.

My father has greatly aged; he is very bent, and in the evenings walks up and down near his house. I never go to see him.

During an epidemic of cholera Prokofy doctored some of the shopkeepers with pepper cordial and pitch, and took money for doing so, and, as I learned from the newspapers, was flogged for abusing the doctors as he sat in his shop. His shop-boy Nikolka died of cholera. Karpovna is still alive and, as always, she loves and fears her Prokofy. When she sees me, she always shakes her head mournfully, and says with a sigh: “Your life is ruined.”

On working days I am busy from morning till night. On holidays, in fine weather, I take my tiny niece (my sister reckoned on a boy, but the child is a girl) and walk in a leisurely way to the cemetery. There I stand or sit down, and stay a long time gazing at the grave that is so dear to me, and tell the child that her mother lies here.

Sometimes, by the graveside, I find Anyuta Blagovo. We greet each other and stand in silence, or talk of Kleopatra, of her child, of how sad life is in this world; then, going out of the cemetery, we walk along in silence and she slackens her pace on purpose to walk beside me a little longer. The little girl, joyous and happy, pulls at her hand, laughing and screwing up her eyes in the bright sunlight, and we stand still and join in caressing the dear child.

When we reach the town, Anyuta Blagovo, agitated and flushing crimson, says good-bye to me and walks on alone, austere and respectable. . . . And no one who met her could, looking at her, imagine that she had just been walking beside me and even caressing the child.