Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS

The acting coroner and the district doctor were driving to the village of Syrnya for an autopsy On the way they were caught in a blizzard, wandered in circles for a long time, and reached the place not at noon, as they had wanted, but only towards evening, when it was already dark. They put up for the night in the zemstvo¹cottage. And right there in the zemstvo cottage, as it happened, also lay the corpse, the corpse of the zemstvo insurance agent Lesnitsky, who had come to Syrnya three days earlier and, having settled in the zemstvo cottage and ordered a samovar, had shot himself, quite unexpectedly for everyone; and the circumstance that he had put an end to his life somehow strangely, over the samovar, with food laid out on the table, gave many the occasion to suspect murder; an autopsy became necessary.

The doctor and the coroner stamped their feet in the front hall, shaking off the snow, and the beadle Ilya Loshadin, an old man, stood beside them holding a tin lamp and lighted the place for them. There was a strong smell of kerosene.

“Who are you?” asked the doctor.

“The biddle …” answered the beadle.

He also signed it that way at the post office: the biddle.

“And where are the witnesses?”

“Must’ve gone to have tea, Your Honor.”

To the right was the clean room, the “visiting” or master’s room, to the left the black room, with a big stove and a stove bench. The doctor and the coroner, followed by the beadle holding the lamp above his head, went into the clean room. There on the floor, by the legs of the table, the long body lay motionless, covered with a white sheet. Besides the white sheet, a pair of new rubber galoshes was clearly visible in the weak light of the lamp, and everything there was disturbing, eerie: the dark walls, and the silence, and the galoshes, and the immobility of the dead body. On the table was a samovar, long cold, and around it were some packets, probably of food.

“To shoot oneself in a zemstvo cottage—how tactless!” said the doctor. “If you’re so eager to put a bullet in your head, shoot yourself at home, somewhere in the barn.”

Just as he was, in his hat, fur coat, and felt boots, he lowered himself onto the bench; his companion, the coroner, sat down facing him.

“These hysterical and neurasthenic types are great egoists,” the doctor went on bitterly. “When a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he makes a scene with his wife, not embarrassed by your presence; and when he decides to shoot himself, he goes and shoots himself in some village, in a zemstvo cottage, to cause more trouble for everybody. In all circumstances of life, these gentlemen think only of themselves. Only of themselves! That’s why the old folks dislike this ‘nervous age’ of ours so much.”

“The old folks dislike all sorts of things,” said the coroner, yawning. “Go and point out to these old folk the difference between former and present-day suicides. The former so-called respectable man shot himself because he’d embezzled government funds, the present-day one because he’s sick of life, in anguish … Which is better?”

“Sick of life, in anguish, but you must agree, he might have shot himself somewhere else than in a zemstvo cottage.”

“Such a dire thing,” the beadle began to say, “a dire thing—sheer punishment. Folks are very upset, Your Honor, it’s the third night they haven’t slept. The kids are crying. The cows need milking, but the women won’t go to the barn, they’re afraid … lest the master appear to them in the dark. Sure, they’re foolish women, but even some of the men are afraid. Once night comes, they won’t go past the cottage singly, but always in a bunch. And the witnesses, too …”

Dr. Starchenko, a middle-aged man with a dark beard and spectacles, and the coroner Lyzhin, blond, still young, who had finished his studies only two years before and looked more like a student than an official, sat silently, pondering. They were vexed at being late. They now had to wait till morning, stay there overnight, though it was not yet six, and they were faced with a long evening, then the long, dark night, boredom, uncomfortable beds, cockroaches, the morning cold; and, listening to the blizzard howling in the chimney and in the loft, they both thought how all this was unlike the life they would have wished for themselves and had once dreamed of, and how far they both were from their peers, who were now walking the well-lit city streets, heedless of the bad weather, or were about to go to the theater, or were sitting in their studies over a book. Oh, how dearly they would have paid now just to stroll down Nevsky Prospect, or Petrovka Street in Moscow, to hear some decent singing, to sit for an hour or two in a restaurant…

“Hoo-o-o!” sang the blizzard in the loft, and something outside slammed spitefully, probably the signboard on the zemstvo cottage. “Hoo-o-o!”

“Do as you like, but I have no wish to stay here,” Starchenko said, getting up. “It’s not six yet, too early for bed, I’ll go somewhere. Von Taunitz lives nearby, only a couple of miles from Syrnya. I’ll go to his place and spend the evening. Beadle, go and tell the coachman not to unharness. What about you?” he asked Lyzhin.

“I don’t know. I’ll go to bed, most likely.”

The doctor wrapped his coat around him and went out. One could hear him talking to the coachman and the little bells jingling on the chilled horses. He drove off.

“It’s not right for you to spend the night here, sir,” said the beadle. “Go to the other side. It’s not clean there, but for one night it won’t matter. I’ll fetch a samovar from the peasants and get it going, and after that I’ll pile up some hay for you, and you can sleep, Your Honor, with God’s help.”

A short time later the coroner was sitting in the black side, at a table, drinking tea, while the beadle Loshadin stood by the door and talked. He was an old man, over sixty, not tall, very thin, bent over, white-haired, a naïve smile on his face, his eyes tearful, his lips constantly smacking as if he were sucking candy. He wore a short coat and felt boots, and never let the stick out of his hands. The coroner’s youth evidently aroused pity in him, and that may have been why he addressed him familiarly

“The headman, Fyodor Makarych, told me to report to him as soon as the police officer or coroner came,” he said. “So, in that case, I’ll have to go now … It’s three miles to town, there’s a blizzard, a terrible lot of snow has piled up, I may not make it before midnight. Listen to that howling.”

“I don’t need the headman,” said Lyzhin. “There’s nothing for him to do here.”

He gave the old man a curious glance and asked:

“Tell me, grandpa, how many years have you been going around as a beadle?”

“How many? Thirty years now. I started about five years after the freeing,² so you can count it up. Since then I’ve gone around every day. People have holidays, and I go around. It’s Easter, the bells are ringing, Christ is risen, and I’m there with my bag. To the treasury, to the post office, to the police chief’s house, to a zemstvo member, to the tax inspector, to the council, to the gentry, to the peasants, to all Orthodox Christians. I carry packages, summonses, writs, letters, various forms, reports, and nowadays, my good sir, Your Honor, they’ve started having these forms for putting down numbers—yellow, white, red—and every landowner, or priest, or rich peasant has to report without fail some ten times a year on how much he sowed and reaped, how many bushels or sacks of rye, how much oats and hay, and what the weather was like, and what kinds of bugs there were. They can write whatever they want, of course, it’s just a formality, but I have to go and hand out the papers, and then go again and collect them. There’s no point, for instance, in gutting this gentleman here, you know yourself it’s useless, you’re just getting your hands dirty, but you took the trouble and came, Your Honor, because it’s a formality; there’s no help for it. For thirty years I’ve been going around on formalities. In summer it’s all right, warm, dry, but in winter or autumn it’s no good. I’ve drowned, frozen—everything’s happened. And bad people took my bag from me in the woods, and beat me up, and I was put on trial …”

“For what?”

“Swindling.”

“What kind of swindling?”

“The clerk Khrisanf Grigoryev sold somebody else’s lumber to a contractor—cheated him, that is. I was there when the deal was made, they sent me to the tavern for vodka; well, the clerk didn’t share with me, didn’t even offer me a glass, but since, poor as I am, I was seen as an unreliable, worthless man, we both went to trial; he was put in jail, but I, thank God, was justified in all my rights. They read some paper in court. And they were all in uniforms. There in the court. I’ll tell you what, Your Honor, for a man who’s not used to it, this work is a sheer disaster—God forbid—but for me it’s all right. My legs even hurt when I don’t walk. And it’s worse for me to stay home. In the office in my village it’s nothing but light the clerk’s fire, fetch the clerk’s water, polish the clerk’s boots.”

“And how much are you paid?” asked Lyzhin.

“Eighty-four roubles a year.”

“You probably make a little something on the side, don’t you?”

“What little something? Gentlemen rarely give tips nowadays. Gentlemen are strict these days, they keep getting offended. You bring him a paper—he gets offended. You take your hat off before him—he gets offended. ‘You came in by the wrong entrance,’ he says, ‘you’re a drunkard,’ he says, ‘you stink of onions, you’re a blockhead, a son of a bitch.’ Some are kind, of course, but you can’t expect anything from them, they just make fun of you with all sorts of nicknames. Mr. Altukhin, for instance. He’s kind and sober, and sensible enough, but when he sees me he shouts, and doesn’t know what himself. He’s given me this nickname. Hey, he says, you …”

The beadle mumbled some word, but so softly that it was impossible to make it out.

“How’s that?” asked Lyzhin. “Repeat it.”

“Administration!” the beadle repeated loudly. “He’s been calling me that for a long time, some six years. Greetings, administration! But let him, I don’t mind, God bless him. Some lady may happen to send me out a glass of vodka and a piece of pie, so then I drink to her health. It’s mostly peasants that tip me; peasants have heart, they’re more god-fearing; they give me bread, or cabbage soup, or sometimes even a drink. The elders treat me to tea in the tavern. Right now the witnesses have gone for tea. ‘Loshadin,’ they said, ‘you stay here and watch for us,’ and they gave me a kopeck each. They’re scared because they’re not used to it. And yesterday they gave me fifteen kopecks and treated me to a little glass.”

“And you’re not afraid?”

“I am, sir, but it’s part of the work—the job, there’s no getting away from it. In the summer I was taking a prisoner to town, and he starts hitting me—whack! whack! whack! All fields and forest around—nowhere to run to. It’s the same here. I remember Mr. Lesnitsky when he was just so high, and I knew his father and mother. I’m from the village of Nedoshchotovo, and the Lesnitsky family is no more than half a mile from us, maybe less, we have a common boundary. And old Mr. Lesnitsky had a maiden sister, a god-fearing and merciful lady. Remember, O Lord, the soul of your servant Yulia, of eternal memory. She never got married, and before she died, she divided up all her property; she left two hundred and fifty acres to the monastery and five hundred to us, the peasant community of the village of Nedoshchotovo, for the memory of her soul. But her brother, the squire, hid the paper, burned it in the stove, they say, and took all the land for himself. Meaning he hoped to profit from it, but—no, hold on, brother, you can’t live by injustice in the world. The squire didn’t go to confession for some twenty years after that, he kept away from church, meaning he died without confession, just popped. He was fat as could be. Just popped open. After that the young squire—Seryozha, that is—had it all taken from him for debts, all there was. Well, he didn’t get far in his studies, couldn’t do anything, so his uncle, the chairman of the zemstvo council, thought, ‘Why don’t I take Seryozha to work for me as an agent, he can insure people, it’s not complicated.’ But the young squire was a proud man, he would have liked a broader life, fancier, with more freedom, he resented having to drive around the area in a little cart and talk to peasants; he always went about looking at the ground, looking and saying nothing; you’d shout, ‘Sergei Sergeich!’ right by his ear, and he’d turn and say, ‘Eh?’ and look at the ground again. And now, see, he’s laid hands on himself. It makes no sense, Your Honor, it’s not right. Merciful God, you can’t tell what’s happening in the world. Say your father was rich and you’re poor—that’s too bad, of course, but you have to get used to it. I, too, had a good life, Your Honor, I had two horses, three cows, some twenty head of sheep, but the time came when I was left with nothing but a little bag, and it’s not mine at that, it comes with the job, and now, in our Nedoshchotovo, my house is the worst of all, truth to tell. Four lackeys had Moky, now Moky’s a lackey. Four workers had Burkin, now Burkin’s a worker.”

“What made you so poor?” asked the coroner.

“My sons are hard drinkers. They drink so hard, so hard, I can’t tell you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

Lyzhin listened and thought that while he, Lyzhin, would sooner or later go back to Moscow, this old man would stay here forever and keep on walking and walking; and how many of these old men he would meet in his life, tattered, disheveled, “worthless,” in whose hearts a fifteen-kopeck piece, a glass of vodka, and the profound belief that you cannot live by injustice in this world were somehow welded fast together. Then he became bored with listening and ordered some hay brought for his bed. There was an iron bed with a pillow and blanket in the visitors’ side, and it could have been brought over, but the deceased had been lying next to it for almost three days (had, perhaps, sat on it before he died), and now it would be unpleasant to sleep on it …

“It’s only seven-thirty,” thought Lyzhin, glancing at his watch. “How terrible!”

He did not want to sleep, but having nothing to do and needing to pass the time somehow, he lay down and covered himself with a plaid. Loshadin, as he cleared the dishes away, came in and out several times, smacking his lips and sighing, kept shuffling about by the table, finally took his lamp and left; and, looking at his long gray hair and bent body from behind, Lyzhin thought: “Just like a sorcerer in the opera.”

It grew dark. There must have been a moon behind the clouds, because the windows and the snow on the window frames were clearly visible.

“Hoo-o-o!” sang the blizzard. “Hoo-o-o!”

“Oh, Lo-o-ord!” a woman howled in the loft, or so it seemed. “Oh, my Lo-o-ord!”

“Bang!” Something hit the wall outside. “Crash!”

The coroner listened: there was no woman, it was the wind howling. He was chilly and covered himself with his coat as well, on top of the plaid. While he was making himself warm, he thought of how all this—the blizzard, and the cottage, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room—how all this was far from the life he wanted for himself, and how foreign it all was to him, how petty and uninteresting. If this man had killed himself in Moscow or somewhere near Moscow, and he were conducting the investigation there, it would be interesting, important, and perhaps even frightening to sleep next to the corpse; but here, a thousand miles from Moscow, all this seemed to appear in a different light, all this was not life, not people, but something that existed only “on formality,” as Loshadin had said, all this would leave not the slightest trace in his memory and would be forgotten as soon as he, Lyzhin, left Syrnya. The motherland, the true Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg, and this was a province, a colony; when you dream of playing a role, of being popular, of being, for instance, an investigator in cases of special importance or a prosecutor for the district court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. To live means to live in Moscow, whereas here you wanted nothing, easily became reconciled with your inconspicuous role, and hoped for only one thing from life—to leave, to leave soon. And Lyzhin mentally raced about the Moscow streets, entered familiar houses, saw his family, his friends, and his heart was wrung sweetly at the thought that he was now twenty-six years old, and if he escaped from here and got to Moscow in five or ten years, even then it would not be too late and there would still be a whole life ahead of him. And as he fell into oblivion, when his thoughts were already becoming confused, he imagined the long corridors of the Moscow court, himself giving a speech, his sisters, an orchestra which for some reason kept howling:

“Hoo-o-o! Hoo-o-o!”

“Bang! Crash!” came again. “Bang!”

And he suddenly remembered how once in the zemstvo office, when he was talking with an accountant, a gentleman came over to the desk, dark-eyed, dark-haired, thin, pale; he had an unpleasant look in his eyes, as people do when they have taken a long after-dinner nap, and it spoiled his fine, intelligent profile; and the high boots he wore were unbecoming and seemed crude on him. The accountant introduced him: “This is our zemstvo agent.”

“So that was Lesnitsky … this same one …” Lyzhin now realized.

He remembered Lesnitsky’s soft voice, pictured his way of walking, and it seemed to him that someone was now walking around him, walking in the same way as Lesnitsky.

He suddenly became frightened, his head felt cold.

“Who’s there?” he asked in alarm.

“The biddle.”

“What do you want here?”

“To ask your permission, Your Honor. Earlier you said there was no need for the headman, but I’m afraid he may get angry He told me to come. So maybe I’ll go.”

“Ah, you! I’m sick of it…” Lyzhin said in vexation and covered himself up again.

“He may get angry … I’ll go, Your Honor, you have a good stay.”

And Loshadin left. There was coughing and half-whispered talk in the front hall. The witnesses must have come back.

“Tomorrow we’ll let the poor fellows go home earlier …” thought the coroner. “We’ll start the autopsy as soon as it’s light.”

He was beginning to doze off when suddenly there came someone’s steps again, not timid this time, but quick, loud. The slamming of a door, voices, the scrape of a match …

“Are you asleep? Are you asleep?” Dr. Starchenko asked hurriedly and angrily, lighting one match after another; he was all covered with snow, and gave off cold. “Are you asleep? Get up, let’s go to von Taunitz. He’s sent horses to fetch you. Let’s go, you’ll at least get supper there, and sleep like a human being. You see, I came for you myself. The horses are excellent, we’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“And what time is it now?”

“A quarter past ten.”

Sleepy and displeased, Lyzhin put on his boots, fur coat, hat, and hood, and went outside with the doctor. It was not too freezing, but a strong, piercing wind was blowing, driving billows of snow down the street, which looked as if they were fleeing in terror; high drifts were already piled up by the fence and near the porches. The doctor and the coroner got into the sleigh, and the white driver leaned over them to button up the flap. They both felt hot.

“Drive!”

They went through the village. “Turning up fluffy furrows …”³the coroner thought listlessly, watching the outrunner working his legs. There were lights in all the cottages, as on the eve of a great feast: the peasants had not gone to bed for fear of the dead man. The driver was glumly silent; he must have grown bored standing by the zemstvo cottage, and now was also thinking of the dead man.

“When they learned at Taunitz’s that you were spending the night in the cottage,” said Starchenko, “they all fell on me for not bringing you along.”

As they drove out of the village, at a bend, the driver suddenly shouted at the top of his lungs:

“Clear the way!”

Some man flashed by; he had stepped off the road and was standing knee-deep in the snow, looking at the troika; the coroner saw the crook-topped stick, the beard, the bag at his side, and it seemed to him that it was Loshadin, and it even seemed to him that he was smiling. He flashed by and disappeared.

The road first ran along the edge of the forest, then down the wide forest cutting; old pines flashed by, and young birches, and tall, young gnarled oaks, standing solitarily in the recently cleared openings, but soon everything in the air became confused in the billows of snow; the driver claimed he could see the forest, but the coroner could see nothing but the outrunner. The wind blew in their backs.

Suddenly the horses stopped.

“Well, what now?” Starchenko asked crossly.

The driver silently got down from the box and began running around the sleigh, stepping on his heels; he made wider and wider circles, moving further and further from the sleigh, and it looked as if he were dancing; finally he came back and began turning to the right.

“Have you lost the way, or what?” asked Starchenko.

“Never mi-i-ind …”

Here was some little village with not a single light. Again the forest, the fields, again they lost the way, and the driver got down from the box and danced. The troika raced down a dark avenue, raced quickly, and the excited outrunner kicked the front of the sleigh. Here the trees made a hollow, frightening noise, it was pitch-dark, as if they were racing into some sort of abyss, and suddenly their eyes were dazzled by the bright light of a front entrance and windows, they heard loud, good-natured barking, voices … They had arrived.

While they were taking off their coats and boots downstairs, someone upstairs was playing Un petit verre de Cliquot⁴ on the piano, and the stamping of children’s feet could be heard. The visitors were immediately enveloped in warmth, the smell of an old manor house, where, whatever the weather outside, life is so warm, clean, comfortable.

“That’s splendid,” said von Taunitz, a fat man with an incredibly thick neck and side-whiskers, shaking the coroner’s hand. “That’s splendid. Welcome to my house, I’m very glad to meet you. You and I are almost colleagues. I was once the assistant prosecutor, but not for long, only two years; I came here to look after the estate and I’ve grown old on the place. An old coot, in short. Welcome,” he went on, obviously controlling his voice so as not to speak loudly; he and the guests were going upstairs. “I have no wife, she died, but here, let me introduce my daughters.” And turning around, he shouted downstairs in a thunderous voice: “Tell Ignat there to have the horses ready by eight o’clock!”

In the reception room were his four daughters, young, pretty girls, all in gray dresses and with their hair done in the same way, and their cousin with children, also a young and interesting woman. Starchenko, who was acquainted with them, immediately started asking them to sing something, and two of the girls spent a long time assuring him that they could not sing and that they had no music, then the cousin sat down at the piano and in trembling voices they sang a duet from The Queen of Spades.⁵Un petit verre de Cliquot was played again, and the children started hopping, stamping their feet in time with the music. Starchenko started hopping, too. Everybody laughed.

Then the children said good-night before going to bed. The coroner laughed, danced a quadrille, courted the girls, and thought to himself: was all that not a dream? The black side of the zemstvo cottage, the pile of hay in the corner, the rustling of cockroaches, the revolting, beggarly furnishings, the voices of the witnesses, the wind, the blizzard, the danger of losing the way, and suddenly these magnificent, bright rooms, the sounds of the piano, beautiful girls, curly-headed children, merry, happy laughter—it seemed to him like a fairy-tale transformation; and it was incredible that such transformations could take place in the space of some two miles, in one hour. And dull thoughts spoiled his merriment, and he kept thinking that this was not life around him, but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, it was impossible to draw any conclusions; and he even felt sorry for these girls who lived and would end their lives here in this backwoods, in the provinces, far from any cultivated milieu where nothing was accidental, everything made sense, was right, and where every suicide, for example, could be understood and one could explain why and what its significance was in the general course of life. He supposed that if the life hereabouts, in this backwater, was incomprehensible to him and if he did not see it, that meant that it was not there at all.

Over dinner the conversation turned to Lesnitsky.

“He left a wife and child,” said Starchenko. “I would forbid neurasthenics and generally people whose nervous system is in disorder to get married; I would deprive them of the right and opportunity to breed more of their kind. To bring children with nervous ailments into the world is a crime.”

“An unfortunate young man,” said von Taunitz, quietly sighing and shaking his head. “How much one must think and suffer before finally taking one’s own life … a young life. Such misfortunes can happen in any family, and that is terrible. It’s hard to endure it, unbearable …”

And all the girls listened silently, with serious faces, looking at their father. Lyzhin felt that, for his part, he also ought to say something, but he could not think of anything, and said only:

“Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon.”

He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed, covered by a fine, fresh sheet and a blanket, but for some reason he did not feel comfortable; perhaps it was because the doctor and von Taunitz spent a long time talking in the neighboring room, and above the ceiling and in the stove the blizzard made the same noise as in the zemstvo cottage, and howled just as pitifully:

“Hoo-o-o!”

Taunitz’s wife had died two years ago, and he was still not reconciled to it, and whatever the talk was about, he always came back to his wife; and there was nothing of the prosecutor left in him.

“Can it be that I, too, will reach such a state some day?” thought Lyzhin as he was falling asleep, hearing the man’s restrained, as if orphaned, voice through the wall.

The coroner slept restlessly. It was hot, uncomfortable, and it seemed to him in his sleep that he was not in Taunitz’s house and not in a soft, clean bed, but still in the zemstvo cottage, on hay, hearing the witnesses talking in half-whispers; it seemed to him that Lesnitsky was nearby, fifteen steps away. Again in his sleep he remembered the zemstvo agent, dark-haired, pale, in tall, dusty boots, coming up to the accountant’s desk. “This is our zemstvo agent …” Then he imagined Lesnitsky and the beadle Loshadin walking over the snow in the fields, side by side, holding each other up; the blizzard whirled above them, the wind blew in their backs, and they walked on and sang:

“We walk, walk, walk.”

The old man looked like a sorcerer in the opera, and they were both indeed singing, as if in the theater:

“We walk, walk, walk… You live in warmth, in brightness, in softness, and we walk through the freezing cold, through the blizzard, over the deep snow … We know no rest, we know no joy … We bear the whole burden of this life, both ours and yours, on ourselves … Hoo-o-o! We walk, walk, walk …”

Lyzhin awoke and sat up in bed. What a disturbing, unpleasant dream! And why were the agent and the beadle together in his dream? What nonsense! And now, when Lyzhin’s heart was pounding hard, and he sat in bed holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him this insurance agent and the beadle really had something in common in life. Had they not gone side by side in life, too, holding on to each other? Some invisible but significant and necessary connection existed between the two men, even between them and Taunitz, and between everyone, everyone; in this life, even in the most desolate backwater, nothing was accidental, everything was filled with one common thought, everything had one soul, one purpose, and to understand it, it was not enough to think, not enough to reason, one probably had to have the gift of penetrating into life, a gift which apparently was not given to everyone. And the unfortunate, overstrained “neurasthenic,” as the doctor called him, who had killed himself, and the old peasant, who every day of his life had been going from one man to another, were accidents, scraps of life, for someone who considered his own existence accidental, but were parts of one wonderful and reasonable organism for someone who considered his own life, too, a part of this common thing and was aware of it. So thought Lyzhin, and this had long been his secret thought, and only now did it unfold broadly and clearly in his mind.

He lay down and began to fall asleep; and suddenly they were walking together and singing again:

“We walk, walk, walk … We take what’s hardest and bitterest from life, and leave you what’s easy and joyful, and you, sitting over your supper, can reason coolly and soberly about why we suffer and perish, and why we’re not as healthy and contented as you.”

What they sang had occurred to him before, but this thought had somehow sat behind other thoughts in his head and flashed timidly, like a distant lantern in misty weather. And he felt that this suicide and the peasant’s grievances lay on his conscience, too; to be reconciled with the fact that these people, submissive to their lot, heaped on themselves what was heaviest and darkest in life—how terrible it was! To be reconciled with that, and to wish for oneself a bright, boisterous life among happy, contented people, and to dream constantly of such a life, meant to dream of new suicides by overworked, careworn people, or by weak, neglected people, whom one sometimes talked about with vexation or mockery over dinner, but whom one did not go to help … And again:

“We walk, walk, walk …”

As if someone were beating on his temples with a hammer.

In the morning he woke up early, with a headache, roused by noise; in the neighboring room von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:

“You can’t go now. Look what it’s doing outside. Don’t argue, just ask the driver: he won’t take you in such weather even for a million roubles.”

“But it’s only two miles,” the doctor said in a pleading voice.

“Even if it was half a mile. When you can’t, you can’t. The moment you go out the gate, it will be sheer hell, you’ll instantly lose your way. Say what you like, I won’t let you go for anything.”

“It’s sure to quiet down towards evening,” said the peasant who was lighting the stove.

And the doctor in the neighboring room started talking about the influence of the harshness of nature on the Russian character, about the long winters which, by restricting freedom of movement, hampered people’s mental growth, and Lyzhin listened vexedly to these arguments, looked out the windows at the snowdrifts heaped up by the fence, looked at the white dust that filled all visible space, at the trees bending desperately to the right, then to the left, listened to the howling and banging, and thought gloomily:

“Well, what sort of moral can be drawn here? It’s a blizzard, that’s all …”

At noon they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house, going up to the windows.

“And Lesnitsky’s lying there,” thought Lyzhin, gazing at the whirls of snow spinning furiously over the drifts. “Lesnitsky’s lying there, the witnesses are waiting …”

They talked of the weather, saying that a blizzard usually lasts two days, rarely longer. At six o’clock they had dinner, then played cards, sang, danced, ended with supper. The day was over, they went to bed.

Between night and morning everything quieted down. When they got up and looked out the windows, the bare willows with their weakly hanging branches stood perfectly motionless, it was gray, still, as if nature were now ashamed of her rioting, of the insane nights and the free rein she had given to her passions. The horses, harnessed in a line, had been waiting by the porch since five o’clock in the morning. When it was fully light, the doctor and the coroner put on their coats and boots, and, after taking leave of their host, went out.

At the porch, beside the driver, stood their acquaintance, the biddle Ilya Loshadin, hatless, with an old leather bag over his shoulder, all covered with snow; and his face was red, wet with sweat. The servant who came out to help the guests into the sleigh and cover their legs gave him a stern look and said:

“What are you standing here for, you old devil? Away with you!”

“Your Honor, folks are worried…” Loshadin began, with a naïve smile all over his face, obviously pleased to see the ones he had been waiting for so long. “Folks are very worried, the kids are crying … We thought you’d gone back to town, Your Honor. For God’s sake, take pity on us, dear benefactors …”

The doctor and the coroner said nothing, got into the sleigh, and drove to Syrnya.

JANUARY 1899